Episode Description
In this episode of the Profit on Purpose podcast, host Nate Littlewood speaks with Joey Cofone, founder of Baron Fig and author on creativity. They explore the essence of creativity, emphasizing that it is a process rather than a magical gift. Joey shares his journey of writing a book on creativity, the challenges entrepreneurs face, and the importance of iteration in business. They discuss the founding story of Baron Fig, the evolution of the brand, and the significance of partnerships. Joey also reflects on the role of financials in business and offers valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Key Takeaways
- Creativity is essential for bringing ideas to life.
- Creativity can be cultivated through intentional practice.
- Iteration is key to overcoming challenges in entrepreneurship.
- The founding story of Baron Fig highlights the importance of understanding customer needs.
- Partnerships can enhance brand credibility but come with risks.
- Financial literacy is crucial for entrepreneurs to make informed decisions.
- A clear vision is necessary for guiding a business's direction.
- Spreadsheets can help visualize business scenarios and outcomes.
- Being adaptable and willing to experiment is vital for success.
- Staying true to your brand values is important for long-term sustainability.
See More from Joey
Listen to the full episode to discover how Joey's experiences can inspire and guide you on your entrepreneurial journey. Don't forget to subscribe for more insightful conversations!
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Transcript
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00:00 Introduction to Creativity and Entrepreneurship
02:28 The Journey of Creativity: From Childhood to Professional Life
04:00 Demystifying Creativity: A Process, Not Magic
06:41 The Importance of Action in Creativity
11:43 Overcoming Perfectionism in Entrepreneurship
16:38 The Founding Story of Baron Fig
20:09 Navigating Challenges and Iterations in Business
27:53 Reflections on Success and Longevity in Business
29:35 Navigating Risk and Experimentation
33:23 The Value of Time and Learning
38:30 Balancing Leadership and Creativity
43:46 Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations
50:31 Understanding Financials and Business Health
53:49 Final Thoughts and Advice for Entrepreneurs
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Nate (00:06)
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the episode of the Profits on Purpose podcast where we explore the stories of the entrepreneurs and innovators who are brave enough to not only challenge the status quo, but they're out there having a go at fixing it as well. Guys, I'm your host. My name is Nate Littlewood. Thank you for tuning in today. In today's episode, I'm going to be speaking with an award-winning designer, author,
creativity expert and founder named Joey Cofone. Joey and his business Baron Fig, they sell tools for enhancing your productivity and creativity. So think pens, notebooks, and journals, including a habit journal collaboration with a guy named James Clear, who you might recognize as the author of Atomic Habits.
So Joey and I first met back in 2024 via a mutual friend and actually another fellow fractional CFO like myself, a guy named John Blair. He works or runs a firm called Free to Grow CFO. Anyway, Joey and I have kept in touch since then and I was absolutely thrilled when he agreed to join me as a guest on the podcast today for what became a really, really fascinating conversation about his entrepreneurial journey
the process of creativity, his work on in the field of creativity, and frankly, all of the lessons that he has learned through his 20 plus years experience in basically bringing ideas to life. So Joey, it's an absolute honor to have you on the podcast today. I thought that a good place for us to start would be to talk about how you came to be writing a book all about creativity. Could you maybe fill us in on the backstory there?
Joey Cofone (01:58)
Yes, creativity, Nate. Thanks for having me, man. Um, that's a good question. So creativity is kind of like the fuel for, uh, building any fire to me in terms of creating, uh, bringing anything into the world. Right. It's like, when you talk about the body, you talk about athletics. And I think when you talk about the mind, you kind of talk about your creativity, right? It's like the expression of your mind as opposed to the body. Um, and so when I was seven years old, I was in first grade.
And I had an epiphany. I had to go to the bathroom really goddamn bad. And I raised my hand to teacher wouldn't call me. And I'm like, my god, what do I do? So I took a sticky note I wrote I have to pee and I slept on my forehead. And then I like stared at the teacher intently. And she obviously read the paper and was like, Go, go, go. And I was like, Okay, well, call me next time. And that stuck in my head though, as like I didn't get in trouble.
I got the problem done. did something I'd never seen before. And from that day forward, I was like, how often can I do this? And so when you're seven, fast forward two, three decades, right? It just built upon it and built upon it to the point in which, by the time I entered the professional world as a designer, I had just had years of kind of that type of thinking. And so to answer the question explicitly,
Why? How did I get to the book? I had been keeping notes for about a decade in my pocket. β just things I had observed other folks doing or failing to do when creating. And when the pandemic hit, was like, now's the time to do it. And so I wrote the book, the whole thing in, β 10 months because like, you know, what else was there to do when you're stuck inside? And it felt like the, like the culmination of everything,
Nate (03:47)
Yeah. Yeah.
Joey Cofone (03:55)
experienced when I was seven, just like multiplied by a hundred.
Nate (04:00)
Awesome. That's really cool. So one of the things that I have gathered from doing a little reading and research on you is that you're a strong proponent of the idea that creativity is not a magical process. Like it's not something that people are necessarily just born with and have some innate talent for. β But it's actually a process that you can design and be intentional about and set yourself up for.
Creativity is obviously a pretty important skill for a lot of entrepreneurs. Can you talk about how the creativity process could kind of be channeled or, you know, kickstarted from an entrepreneurial perspective?
Joey Cofone (04:45)
Yeah, I think the first point to really drive home is how you started in which that it's something that is not magic. I think a lot of creatives quote unquote, try to, they describe their creativity as magic. It just came to me kind of sh*t. And I think it does a huge disservice to β people who don't see themselves as creative.
Joey Cofone (05:15)
Mainly because if you describe something as magic, then it's like, either you're Harry Potter or you're not, right? You're either born with it or you're not born with it. It's sort of like, I'm a muggle. Sh*t. That's just the way things are. And that's absolutely not true. And the couple of things I point to to illustrate this are number one is if it were magic and it were, maybe it'll happen today. Maybe it won't. How then do so many creative show up every day and perform?
You know, designers, writers, illustrators, right? Or they just, hope I, I hope something happens today. No, of course not. They've learned the process, right? and it is extremely reliable. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is kind of like reshaping your expectations of what it actually is, which is like, it's not, it's not the end point. It's the process, right? You're not saying like, Hey, I,
unfortunately, a lot of folks will say, I wish I was an author, which basically means I wish I had a book written by me. And the actual thing that you want to focus on is, Hey, I wish I woke up every day and wrote for 45 minutes before I started. Right? So it's, it's about focusing on the reality of the case and then, β the process. And so for folks who are like, Hey, I want to start a business or I'm in my business and I either I'm just getting
you know, going or I'm burnt out. I think as much as as mundane as it sounds, the answer to that is to do anything and then assess. Right. It's like if, you know, Michael Jordan was like, I need to improve my jump shot. He doesn't sit on the couch and he's like, okay, like how would I do that? He goes to the gym and he shoots a bunch of sh*tty shots and he's like, okay, what did I do wrong? And so, you know, as again, you're going to, I think we might see this
comparison between, you know, the mind and the body quite a bit because there is so much, there's so much in parallel there. β and a lot of it tends to be, you know, not exciting, which makes it really hard to write a book about creativity because how do get people excited about something that seems obvious when you say it and magic when you know, you don't.
Nate (07:33)
Okay. Okay. So a point of clarification here, I what I heard is that, you know, you just need to go out and do the thing or practice the thing. I'm thinking back on, you know, around 2017 ish when I first started my e-comm business. And, know, when you go out and tell your family and friends that you're launching a company and there's some mission or purpose behind it, everyone wants to help you.
Right? Like it's like, Hey, have you seen this Instagram ad? Hey, I should connect you with my friend who works at a digital marketing agency. And like, was just getting so many shiny objects thrown into my lap. And, you know, as, as founders and entrepreneurs, like we love learning new things. I eventually recognized that I was getting, I think maybe even became a little addicted to the, the dopamine created from all this learning. β So I would argue that.
You know, I was out there doing, I was, you know, doing the thing I was exploring. I was turning over stones, but I realized after a while that I wasn't really being that productive because I was just jumping around between so many different things and not, and not sticking to them. So in a situation like that, and, β you know, a paradigm like the one I described, like, should an entrepreneur do differently to cover, uncover, know, become more creative.
Joey Cofone (08:58)
Yeah, yeah. There's so many, there's so many ways to bastardize a good thing. In that particular scenario, if I were sitting with you then, and you were saying, Hey man, I did all of these things. I learned all this stuff. I don't feel like I'm progressing. You know, you've, you're essentially getting high on the illusion of progress, like motion mistaken for forward motion. would say, Hey man, why don't we sit down and write down goals? Like, what are you actually trying to achieve?
Again, I'm always reticent to talk about this stuff because so often it feels so obvious. And this is another one of those cases where like, dude, what are you trying to achieve? Like when I sat down with you before this podcast and I said, what are you trying to achieve with this show? It's to understand the direction that our actions should take. And you said, know, Hey, an entrepreneurial experience with a financial bent, essentially.
And so I would say to you, like, Hey, what do you want to do? Do you want to earn money as a solo predator? Do you want to start a business? What's your expertise? How can we essentially create a sort of curriculum of experiences and experiments that you can go on and do that can not necessarily give you an immediate answer, but bring you closer to an unknown, which is
what creativity really is about is psychologically handling the mental management of the unknown. Right. so understanding that, um, you know, when I designed something, for example, like if I designed a new limited edition about, I don't know, uh, nature, I know that that's my end goal. I know that, um, I can do it.
But I don't know when I'll be able to like, can't tell you, Hey, this will take me a week or this will take me six weeks. It's, it's about making sure that what I'm doing every day contributed contributes towards either learning about something that can help me solve it or cracking a small problem that will help me solve it. Does that make sense?
Nate (11:17)
Yeah, it does. get it. get it. And, you know, looking forward, assuming we can get this ball rolling and we can build up some momentum. Another problem that a lot of entrepreneurs encounter, and I personally have struggled with this in numerous different shapes and forms over the years, is perfectionism and, β you know, making sure that
It's every I is dotted and T is crossed. And when you're an entrepreneur and you're bringing into the world of product or a thing, and you know, it's going to be very public and it's going to be out there and there's going to be people reviewing it and giving feedback on it. There's this temptation to just keep polishing it, you know, and keep going and going and going. What's your kind of view on that? And how do you know when we've gone far enough?
Joey Cofone (12:12)
Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of thoughts there. I should take notes here. So first of all, you have to accept that whatever you do is going to be sh*t in the beginning. And it might look pretty good, but no matter what, when you look back in a year, you'll be like, wow, I've come a long way. And so the better mode of thought is, Hey, how do I just get anything out there and start learning and experimenting and iterating in public? Which
is very similar to something my professor in design used to tell me, which he said, you need to recognize the point at which you're not making it better. You're just making it different. know, if you're messing with the fonts or you're messing with your deck or your website or your pitch, and it's sort of like you come back and you have, have an idea today. I'll do this differently. Well, you don't really know at some point if it's better because there's diminishing returns.
Can I compare this to Zeno's Paradox? You familiar with it?
Nate (13:14)
Remind me.
Joey Cofone (13:17)
Zeno's paradox is this from the philosopher Zeno like back in the day where he basically said, if you go, if you have a distance towards something and you cut it in half every step, you will make incredible progress, but never reach it. So if you think about like, if you're going from, you know, zero being you have nothing and 100 meaning it's perfect. If you, if anything you do to start your business, you will go from zero all the way to 50.
It's a huge leap. You've gone from nothing to something. Then you go from 50 to 75 because you're cutting it in half again. And then now I suck at math and you go from 50 to, I don't know, whatever the f*ck half. 87.5, right? And as you go, everything you do starts to make a smaller and smaller impact on the thing you've made until the point where you're the only one that recognizes the changes. That's the definite point. You need to stop f*cking around,
Nate (13:58)
I do 7-plane.
Joey Cofone (14:16)
and take what you've made and put it in public. Because now you're just wasting time.
Nate (14:21)
Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I actually, faced something like that a little earlier this year. When I was launching my first, online course as a CFO and I was like, okay, this is the first version of this. Like, I don't want to look like an idiot. I don't want to say something dumb. I want to make sure all the contents in there. And I was dragging it on for so long and eventually I'm part of this like accountability, you know, mentoring group and
had a chat with the guys about it and eventually β realized that I needed to completely change the perspective in that the goal was not to make sure that this product was going to be awesome and it made loads of money. It was going to suck the first iteration of it. was almost definitely going to suck, but the goal was just to get feedback and learn and iterate and collect information. And when I changed that perspective, it just became so much easier.
Joey Cofone (15:16)
How did you change it? Was it just a matter of someone pointing that out to you?
Nate (15:22)
Yeah, someone pointing it out to me. The other thing that, that honestly really helped is that, this is a group of four or five people. I actually said to them at one point, you know what? This is ridiculous. I've been dragging this out so long. Since you guys are all here, I hereby commit to giving each of you $100. If I don't have this thing live by X date and
I was sitting there like a few weeks out, imagining our next meeting, getting together and then having to go around and ask everyone for their Venmo details. I was like, no, God, I don't have to do that because then, you I'm just going to feel like such an idiot. So that was actually a huge motivator for me as well. And yeah, I 500 bucks.
Joey Cofone (16:06)
Dude the the games the psychological games we play on ourselves sometimes could be so powerful like that's I mean you were you basically put yourself in a corner you that you didn't have to and it worked great
Nate (16:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. Anyway, in terms of progress, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about Baron Fig. Just to clarify though, which idea came first? Was it Baron Fig or the book?
Joey Cofone (16:38)
Baron Fig. Baron Fig, I launched in 2013. The book I started in like 2020.
Nate (16:45)
Okay, okay, but the ideas collection for the book was decades earlier, but...
Joey Cofone (16:50)
The ideas collection started in 2013 actually. So I, I started Baron Fig and I had a co-founder Adam and I immediately was like, “you hey dude, I'd love to write this book." And so he gave me the idea, “Hey, just collect ideas. Basically. Like ongoing. Yeah. Don't worry about when you're to write the book, just prepare yourself.” And I was like, that's great. And so I had, I want to say like a good
hundred entries into this thing of like substance so that when I sat down in 2020 to write the book, I basically organized all those notes into the table of contents and it built itself in a couple of days. And that table of contents became the final pretty much. Yeah. So that method worked great.
Nate (17:38)
Okay. Well, tell, tell me a little bit about Baron Fig then, what was the founding story behind that? And you know, how, how, and why did you decide that was what you wanted to do?
Joey Cofone (17:52)
Yeah, I was in design school and I noticed that my fellow designers were using two tools, a notebook and a laptop. And the laptops are all the same. They're all Macbooks and the notebooks are all different sizes, brands, colors, paper types, everything. And I thought, wow, this is really interesting. You know, why is there ubiquity in one and not in the other? Clearly this consumer wants to just buy the best thing for the job, but they're not doing it with the notebook.
So I was really, β peaked by that. And when I got the opportunity shortly after, basically went hard on this and I emailed over 400, what I call thinkers, around the world, basically designer, writer, illustrator, architect, anyone who uses their brain to do their job. And I said like cold emails, man. And I was like, Hey, you know, “I'm Joey from New York city, making this thing. Just one question. What do you like in a sketchbook or notebook?” Right.
And I sent 400 thinking I would have like 10 % response rate, right? Like 40 good emails. I had an 80 % response rate. Sorry, was 500 and I had 400 conversations with people. Outrageous, right? I mean, just like.
Nate (19:08)
Who would have guessed that notebooks could be such a controversial topic?
Joey Cofone (19:12)
And so it turned out that at the time there was no brand that was speaking to the users in any meaningful way. And this is, you know, what are we looking at? 12 years ago? So this is a totally different world almost. Pre-influencer, pre a ton of sh*t, pre Shopify making e-commerce easy. I mean, there was not a lot of options back
And so we put it on Kickstarter. Know, I worked for five months. I designed everything, took the feedback, put it on Kickstarter, asking for 15,000 bucks and we made $168,000 in 30 days. And then, you know, the rest is history.
Nate (19:49)
Nice.
Okay. So aside from, I, okay. So you identified a need for a, a, a ubiquitous brand in, this category. Do you feel like you've achieved that?
Joey Cofone (20:09)
Absolutely not. So it was to add color to that. was more like...
There wasn't a Starbucks of notebooks where like, goes to Starbucks praising the coffee beans. Like nobody knows what they're drinking. It's the kind of the ritual that Starbucks said, Hey, no one else is recognizing this on a big level. we're going to, right? So that was what I recognized with notebooks. And so I did that. And I'll say that I, to answer your question, I think I've strayed from that over the years.
We had such a powerful launch. had such a powerful first seven years when the pandemic hit, it changed so much. The world changed so much, digital tool adoption accelerated. And we tried to adjust to accommodate those changes. And I think we're actually left worse than when we start.
You know, so if you talk about creativity in business, this would be a failure. This is a failure of me to iterate the business or decide if it needed to be iterated, which maybe in retrospect, it did not. But the brand kind of melted away as we focused on A-B testing,
which initially was extremely fruitful because AB tests, hey, this made us more money. Cool. Let's make that change. But you add those changes up over time and it can turn your brand into, you know, β white bread, right? Just like so plain because you've pulled out some of the personality that even though it didn't make the most money, kept the consumer the longest.
And so over time we sort of had this increasing revenue as we A-B test, A-B test. But then if you look at a long time horizon, we actually started decreasing. And after a lot of research and a lot of conversations with customers and poking around, I've realized that we and me, I made these calls to change the brand in a way in which actually lost some of the life of it. That's what we're working through now.
Nate (22:18)
Yeah.
There's so much to unpack there. That's really, really fascinating and interesting. Firstly, the AB AB test stuff, if I could just, you know, paraphrase that to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, you're essentially saying that AB testing over time kind of leads you down the path of whatever's going to appeal to the most number of people. So you're going to kind of mean revert and,
You know, personality just gets kind of nullified. Like anything that you were originally doing to be edgy and confrontational and maybe near the fences gets brought back into the middle. Whatever appeals to the most people, it will be the A or the B that wins, right? That's a really interesting perspective on testing. But have I got that right?
Joey Cofone (23:27)
Yes. And it's not like a hard and fast rule. It's, it's a complex subject, but yes, generally you can accidentally A-B test into a type of sterility that then on a broad time horizon decreases revenue.
Nate (23:45)
Okay. Interesting. And the comment you made about, I guess, you know, losing your way somewhat for lack of a better word and finding that you guys had kind of drifted a bit off track. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how you came to that realization. Like what were you looking at? Was it a gradual thing? Did it slap you in the face? Were you looking at numbers? Were you listening to customer feedback? Like, how did you realize that that had happened?
Joey Cofone (24:15)
Yeah. a couple key indicators, number one, and the biggest and most obvious being numbers, over time, right? Revenue increasing or decreasing, and when and how much, and then number two, which is a lot, this is like an acute change. I noticed that a lot of our pen collectors stopped collecting.
And then I found some had listed their pens for sale.
Nate (24:49)
Wow, okay.
Joey Cofone (24:50)
Right.
And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. Why the change when they had so avidly collected dozens of our pens. And that sent me on a journey of reflection and investigation in which I sort of came to this conclusion. It was not immediate, but I played over every big decision I made for a good five years. Thankfully, we have great
you know, history of stuff like that, and really did a lot of deep thinking. And it took about six months for me to come out of the other side and say, wow, I think this is what we did. And also I have snapshots of the website every 12 months and like you compare one to the other and see even inside my gut reaction to the 2019 one versus the 2021 versus 2021. Like, I was just less and less excited as I'm watching looking at these. And so I had to put it all together. Yeah.
Tough story.
Nate (25:50)
So would you say that it sounds like you're at the end of that process now and you have a lot more clarity on what the future looks like? Am I hearing you correctly?
Joey Cofone (26:01)
That's correct. Yeah. I'm sort of six months out from the six months, six month process of realizing that. And I've set up a plan. We've spoken with the team, sort of set our milestones and we've created, I want to say a 12-month plan that may expand to 18 months to sort of bring the spirit back in the way that we had it. And now we're just moving and we've seen
improvements in the right ways. You know, and we've have a lot, it's sort of an accelerating attack as in like the first three months, we're just planning and then the next three months started getting all this stuff together. And now you're just starting to see things hit the website and things change actually starting this month.
Nate (26:52)
Okay. And are you releasing all of these, these updates gradually or we likely to see them go live in, you know, big hit at some point soon.
Joey Cofone (27:02)
They're gradual, they're gradual. know, we, still have to A-B test to make sure, we still at the end of the day need to make money. And so I do have to A-B test and make sure I don't demolish our sales because I have done that before. Anyone who's been in e-commerce long enough has made a change on their website in which they've cut their sales in half overnight. And so you always have to A-B test and say, okay, even if this change that I really like, you know,
It decreased my revenue by 5%. Is that okay? but something that goes down 20 or 30% is something that needs to be rethought.
Nate (27:43)
Yeah, probably not okay. Interesting. What would you say you're most proud of in relation to Baron Fig?
Joey Cofone (27:45)
Yeah.
I mean, I know you asked this question in a doc you shared with me beforehand. I don't even remember what I wrote, but I know what I feel right now, which is that I'm just proud the business is still alive. Business is not easy, as you know. β And we are an actual independent company. don't have funding that like
allows us to not be profitable and still exist. Right? We must be profitable. We must make decisions or take risks that, you know, may or may not wipe us off the face of the earth. And I'm just like excited that, and proud that we're alive after 12 years. Cause I think I have seen so many companies come and go in that time and founders come and go. So yeah, that's, that's my
know, proudest accomplishment. Not dying.
Nate (28:56)
And it's a huge one. What would you attribute it to?
Joey Cofone (29:04)
And more, but more correct decisions than incorrect decisions would be the, the, fundamental answer there. enough risk tolerance to still try new things and not be scared. I'm always thinking about how I could change the brand and what it could be next. You know, even when we were killing it and we were, you know, doubling revenue year over year, I was still like, how can we
change it? Does it need to be what it is now? Never kind of accepting it? So yeah, I don't know if that's a good enough answer, to be honest.
That's what I have to think about.
Nate (29:49)
Yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky. The, the risk and experimentation topic, find a really interesting one. I'll share an anecdote with you about my experience with UrbanLeaf and I'd love to hear your perspective on this. So UrbanLeaf was also bootstrapped. We also launched Vyra Kickstarter and never had the luxury of,
millions of dollars in the bank. I don't think we ever even had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. At best, it was like tens of thousands of dollars. I think because of that, one of the byproducts that I didn't really appreciate going into it, but I can see now very, very acutely is that it really, really influenced our approach to risk in that we
really couldn't afford to do experiments that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and have them fail. But had we had funding and if there had been investors and there had been millions of dollars of cash sitting around, maybe we could have. And I think one of the byproducts of that is that we had to be a lot smaller, a lot safer and a lot more incremental in our approach to taking risk and experimenting and iterating, which I'll be honest was often felt kind of tedious
and frustrating and restraining. And there were a lot of times when I can remember, I just want to be able to move faster than I am, but like I have to be so damn conservative. And it's just, it was, it would really, really, you know, grounded me at times. What, was your experience with that? And do you have anything to add?
Joey Cofone (31:29)
Yeah, sure. That was all well said. And I am 100% with you in understanding that experience. We have thankfully over time been able to transcend a little bit of that, you know, bank account problem. But that still comes and goes, knock on wood there. I will say that I've always had the extremely clear understanding
of the fleeting nature of life. Okay? I'm gonna be able to work for, let's say 40 years, or want to work for 40 years, right? 20 to 60, let's say, if I'm lucky
which means in my eyes, I'm either trying interesting and risky sh*t and succeeding or just blowing up the business and moving on. Because I found that the worst case scenario was to be in a tedious pattern for an extended period for me. That was my personal nightmare. I would rather destroy the business.
I can't tell you how many times I was in a meeting and people are like, what if it fails and we blow up and I'll say, then we f*cking go do something else. Like, you know, I mean, obviously this economy right now is, it's a little more challenging to just go do something else. But generally speaking, like that is a viable approach, you know, in general. So yeah, that was my experience with risk was I just like, I just need to try something. I can't, I can't do this.
And as the years go on, that only becomes stronger. Hmm. Yeah. I'm 12 years deep in this.
Nate (33:23)
makes a lot of sense. So a lot of what I heard there was a perspective on time and the scarcity of time and the fact that every year you're doing this, you're burning another year of time that is never going to be replaced. I want to ask about time and time management decisions. So one of the things that I understand over the course of
12 plus years running this business, you've taught yourself web design, you've taught yourself or gotten a lot better at product. Obviously you've taught yourself about finance, you've taught yourself about 3D modeling, you've taught yourself about materials. Like all this stuff that you've had to learn. Going back to my comment earlier about us, know, founders and entrepreneurs getting a bit of a rush from learning all these things. did you, or let me start again. How did.
Talk to me about like shiny objects. How do you think about the temptation to pick up and learn and try and do all these things yourself versus just putting it down, delegating and outsourcing it to someone else who already knows how to do it?
Joey Cofone (34:32)
Great question. My founder, co-founder, Adam Kornfield said early on after a particularly poor experience with an agency, he said, you know, man, I think until we do something ourselves and learn it, it'll never really go well for us because someone could easily take advantage or do a sh*t job and we wouldn't know. So we didn't have any like experience.
And so we started, kind of built a foundation of learning. Now, of course that's time consuming and distracting. But oftentimes it was just out of necessity. It's like we've both said that we didn't have, don't have bank accounts that are, now, flush in a way in which we can hire someone who is the best at what they do. And so you end up being able to hire
you know, an agency that is okay at this thing. And then you're putting your money at risk and the business at risk. And ironically, we just talked about that being exciting or a viable option, but sometimes the best choice, like I don't make stoop, I don't take stupid risks. And if I think there's someone who can't perform, then I'd rather just learn it myself because then I can always do it.
And so over time, when you look at, I could pay 50,000 bucks for this person to come in and maybe, or maybe not succeed, or I could take, you know, six weeks and bust my ass on overtime to learn it and be able to maybe make half the progress I need and then speak intelligently to someone who can do the rest. It's, it's a pretty viable approach. If you've got the energy, the time and the interest
for the thing, but that's not always the case. know, have you ever had to learn something you didn't want to learn?
Nate (36:37)
I have, I would put, a lot of, you know, tax stuff in that category, a lot of legal stuff in corporation, like, where do we need to be filing this and that might sound a little bit strange, but as, even as a finance guy, there's a lot of parts of bookkeeping and accounting that I don't particularly enjoy. Right. So yeah, I, I don't think I've ever really had
too much of a problem with, you know, wasting time on stuff that I didn't want to do. The thing that I was guilty of on numerous occasions is just like avoiding stuff for too long, right? There's a problem there. know it needed a solution. I didn't want to be that solution. I didn't have anyone on the team who could be that solution. And I just, you know, drew stuff out like a lot longer than it probably should have on a lot of occasions because I just didn't want to deal with it.
I made that mistake on more than one occasion for sure.
Joey Cofone (37:41)
Sure. Yeah. I think, I think I have as well. Yeah. I've prioritized becoming such a key ability. You know, if you're the leader and you're kind of dictating, that's something that I learned through, you know, a lot of pain. I'm sure.
Nate (37:45)
Yeah.
Well, what are the best lessons I learned through pain? out. It tends to be particularly memorable lessons that way. of teams and roles, one really interesting thing about you is that you're both the entrepreneur founder, but also the creator. And they're often, you know, two very different hats.
Joey Cofone (38:10)
Yeah.
Nate (38:30)
Commonly, you know, even different seats or people within an organization. How do you balance the two, the time that you spend in each of them? And can you talk to me about the process of how you kind of switch between them? mean, I'm imagining that like you need to be, you can't do all of one or all of the other, like probably on a given week or even a given day, like you need to be switching back and forth. Is there a process you go through, a ritual or?
You know, like how, how do you switch back and forth like that?
Joey Cofone (39:02)
Yeah, I think, it's not as hard as it sounds or it may seem. Once you're good at something, you're just doing one thing versus the other. But I will say I was not good at being, what's the right word? I was good at being a leader as in people will listen to me when I talk, you know, maybe just being a tall person probably contributes tall, confident dude.
But I was a creative person first and had to learn to be a, to use the other half of the brain, let's say. And I specifically learned that I got lucky in that when I started the company, I had my co-founder and then our two first hires were friends that I had known for years who were not afraid to tell me, yo dude, I don't know what the f*ck you're talking about or what you want us to do,
but I'm willing to do it, but you need to be really goddamn clear. And they forced me to communicate my vision, organize it better, distribute responsibilities the right way. And through that first experience with them for about three or four years, I had the beautiful benefit of like unfiltered
feedback on my ability to be the CEO or the leader. And so nowadays, it's been so long, it's like designing or decision making, right? It's just, just two tasks to me at this point. And I think it's like, if you play basketball and then you play, you know, football, just, whatever field you're on, you just sort of pick up the ball and you start playing and you're not, you only need to switch. just kind of like context is the switch.
You know, so if I open InDesign and I start designing, I'm designing. And if I open a video call and there's a problem and someone prepares a presentation and tells me what's going on, then I think about it and make a call. And they are both natural now. Does that answer your question?
Nate (41:20)
Yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess it does. It seems like it is very context driven, I guess. And you've had a lot of practice at it now and you can go back and forth. Do you think it comes natural to everyone? Or do think it took practice?
Joey Cofone (41:37)
It definitely takes practice. I think you're one or the other. think you're either kind of like, left, left brain, right brain leader, follower, that sort of thing. And not so used to switching. Like I love to be the follower. I love when a team member is like, I know what to do and I need your help to do this. Like piece of it. And I'm like, cool, just tell me what you need. Great. I love that you made a decision. I'm happy to be your tool to execution.
No problem. And then other times, you know, it's reverse where I'm like, Hey, everybody, need you to do this, you know, X, Y, and Z. It needs to be done by this date. And that is the call.
Nate (42:14)
Yeah.
Joey Cofone (42:16)
And it is just practice. Which do you feel more comfortable with?
Nate (42:22)
It's an interesting question. I think I am more comfortable being creative than I am being the leader of a team. I think I was an okay founder slash CEO, but I certainly wouldn't give myself a 10 out of 10 rating. I
Joey Cofone (42:23)
Hmm.
Nate (42:47)
was good at the vision and the ideas and like, you know, the, big picture dreamy sort of stuff. But, when it came to kind of managing the day to day and the people and the check-ins and so forth, like I, I just don't, didn't really feel like it was an environment in which I was excelling. And, you know, upon reflection, having been in that seat for six or seven years and now moved into a fractional CFO sort of role, I think I'm
much, much better suited to what I'm doing now. I like being the, you know, wingman to the founder. I like being their sounding board. like being the guy that they can talk to numbers, talk to about, you know, their numbers and data. And I'm much, much more in my element here than I think I was in the founder seat. having been in the founder seat, like I think it was really helpful because like I can, you know, like I understand the decisions they make and you know, the challenges and problems they run into. it.
Certainly helps from an empathy perspective, I think. Yeah. Well, something else that I think is really notable about your business is that you have brokered some really interesting partnerships and collaborations. I'm not sure how much detail you're able or willing to share on some of these things.
Joey Cofone (43:50)
I got you.
Nate (44:11)
I do recall you and I have talked about some of this stuff in other contexts, but one of them is obviously James Clear, who's the author of Atomic Habits and you have some Atomic Habits branded products, including a journal. How have these partnerships come about and what's your kind of honest review on them
for other founders who might be looking to do or scale their businesses through similar strategies?
Joey Cofone (44:43)
Yeah, they're challenging. I came up with this idea like pre pre influencer really, right? Like I started this concept pretty early and I based it around the idea that Nike, especially back in the day had Nike athletes, right? Michael Jordan's Nike athlete, you know, I don't know. I'm no sports that well enough to name a bunch of them, but you get the drip. And so I thought, cool, well, I'll do for the
mind what they do for the body and I'll create Baron Fig thinkers. so James Clear is a Baron Fig thinker. And I had a couple of others, Lauren Hom, Jeff Govea. And then I had an NFL player, Roxane Gay, which is a New York Times number one bestselling author. All sorts of cool stuff. And I think there's so much to this man because they add a lot of credibility. They're really fun. You're working with other high achievers, which is just,
the best. I like to be the best and I like to work with the best and that's a great opportunity to do so. When you're selling a physical product and you are small business like mine, there is a danger of putting too much capital towards something that you don't have a lot of control over. So what do I mean by that? I spend let's say, you know, $30,000 on a collaboration with someone and then they don't
promoted in the way that β we agreed upon. You're not really, there's not really much you can do at that point because
You sort of bring to the, least in our instance, we bring the expertise of product design and production. They bring the audience. If they stop bringing the audience, the sales go down. We're sort of left with, you know, left holding the bag. And so that's, that's been a challenge that I've seen over the years that has maybe institutes a bit more strict policy around these agreements with these folks that.
When I first started felt like a
some of the things felt obvious and some of them felt like a betrayal of trust. And I've since thrown all that out the window and I've said, f*ck it, we're putting all this, everything down, even the obvious sh*t and the minutia and you need to put your name on it because otherwise you're left with sh*t on the shelf that you can't sell. So it's really cool, fun, challenging to land a big fish, but also there's high risk, high reward in the revenue department.
Nate (47:37)
How would you say it stacks up compared to other marketing slash growth initiatives on a ROI basis when you look at the time and cost involved to broker something like this?
Joey Cofone (47:50)
I mean, I, it's so wildly, um, case by case basis because we've had some where I, I spent, you know, three to six months making a product for the moderate amount of my time, 20% amount of my time during that time. And I don't know, 30 grand in development costs. And now we're still selling it years later and we don't have to do anything. If the person moves it.
And then I've done the same and the product hasn't moved. And there was a lot of internal chatter here around, how do we get the right person? And so we kind of tried to quantify what that meant. We've learned what would sell a product. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you what that is with the caveat being this is for our business and our products
in our particular approach being e-comm. So we've learned that you could have 20 million social media followers. You won't sell as much stuff as someone who has a hundred thousand email followers. So we put together a formula, which I don't have in front of me, but I remember the gist being to partner with us in this way, you need at least 200,000 email followers.
You need an open rate of at least 30%. If you do have social media followers, I think the numbers like we need you to have like 20 million, which nobody has in our, the people we're interested in don't. So that's kind of irrelevant to us. and we've sort of moved on those and then we've set requirements for, what you do with email basically. And we've made some exceptions.
There's, I won't name products, like there was a product that I just wanted to make and this person didn't have that kind of thing. And I was like, like, we're going to skip that. And that's sort of a passion project. But if you want to make reliable returns, that's what we have found currently is needed.
Nate (50:01)
Got it. Got it. Interesting. And talk to me about how the role of financials and numbers in your business and your relationship with financials as a, you know, as a non-finance guy coming into the world of business and finance. I'd love to hear about like the evolution of that relationship and how it's kind of changed over time and anything that you perhaps appreciate about that world that maybe you didn't 12 years ago.
Joey Cofone (50:34)
Yeah, I will say I am in a reluctant finance, non-enthusiast. So, I had the great benefit of starting the company with a finance guy who did all the finances. Yep. I was the creative marketing leadership dude. He was the finance and operations dude. And I didn't have to learn it. I mean, I didn't have the desire. Number one,
I did have the time. were two guys doing everything for a year. Like there was no, man, you want to learn this sh*t? was like every day was packed seven days a week of working back then when I was 26. Over time as he moved on in like this was really my project and he kind of was just helping and he moved on. And then I got someone else who wasn't a founder but was interested in finance. And so I would start to ask questions, but I never really
took the time is, and this is, if I were the type to get embarrassed, I would say this is embarrassing, but I'm not. I never really took the time to say, is a P and L, what is a balance sheet? Like what is cash flow? Right. Because I had the luxury of not needing to between this guy doing it and so much sales coming in at the time we were growing, we didn't selling out constantly.
I was, I enjoyed the naivety. But eventually the pandemic hit things changed. Like I said, our branding suffered at my hands. That guy is no longer here. I then took that over and kind of had to do a crash course on what the heck does this all mean? And what am I looking for? What are the signs when you and I first met?
Was probably just really getting my hands dirty with finances and understanding it like at the beginning. And I learned so much and I do wish that I had done it much earlier combined with having someone who was truly very good at it to augment my understanding. So a CFO I did not have until 2024, maybe 20, no, 2023, maybe.
And it helped so much, tremendously. And so now today I have a strong understanding of what the numbers look. I start pointing things out and I'm like, Hey, we should think about this or this, or this looks like something dangerous. And things are in a much better place because of it. But I'm still no pro. I mean, CFO is an error.
Nate (53:20)
Always be learning. Okay.
Well, this has been really interesting, Joey. I appreciate all the stories you've shared. Are there any final words that you'd like to share with folks? Any advice or recommendations for other entrepreneurs who are maybe looking to follow in your path?
Joey Cofone (53:49)
Yeah, I think the one thing that we mentioned in our notes that we don't think we may have explicitly discussed is the importance of a spreadsheet to test your hypothesis for your business. So anyone who's listening out there who wants to start a business or is in the early stages and still trying to kind of understand, you know, what their business could look like or how it could improve. I always force folks to
create a scenario in a spreadsheet of what the business key items operate like. I don't even know the lingo to say this, but if you've ever played lemonade stand when you were a kid, it's sort of like, hey man, do the lemonade stand thing in a spreadsheet with your business. How many sales are you going to get? What is the average order value? What does that cost? What do you, know, how much to expenses, how much to income? What are you left with? Multiply that by, you know,
a thousand, ten thousand, what does it look like? Is that a business you want to run or not? Would you be happy with those numbers? A lot of the times people who have run this exercise through with will enter the existing data from their business and look at that and go, holy crap, I had no idea. Like I'm this sucks or like this is so weak. And β then we've been able to sit there and talk about it. I basically do business therapy for people where it's not
really finance, but that one element is how I always start it. And it's fascinating to see how many folks don't do that. So yeah, my final thought for folks on a finance front, especially, is to run a scenario and a spreadsheet of your business and make sure you know where it can end up before you even really try.
Nate (55:38)
I imagine it's a whole lot easier to build a business in a spreadsheet compared to real life.
Joey Cofone (55:42)
Hell yeah, man. But if it doesn't work in the spreadsheet, it is not going to work in real life.
Nate (55:47)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Especially once you, I mean, I think back to the hundreds, if not thousands of spreadsheets I built for my own business and the difference between the scenario that you put in the spreadsheet and the version of reality that ultimately transpires is usually a small fraction of that. Founders are notoriously optimistic and something I've battled with a lot over the years.
There was actually a thing I do now with my retainer clients where I actually, every time we do an update of the models, I'll essentially copy the entire P&L balance sheet and cash flow statement into a separate sheet and date it. Which means that like every month we have like an archived forecast for inventory, an archived forecast for EBITDA, an archived forecast for cash flow and everything.
And then I can kind of put together these charts that kind of show the evolution of our forecast over time. So it can rewind and say, okay, this was our revenue forecast back then. And then this is how it went, you know, a month later and so, and so you can kind of see, you know, almost like a forward curve, if you're familiar with that concept, that kind of shows how your forecasts have evolved over time. And I actually first came up with that for my own business because I recognized that I was just chronically
overoptimistic and I was always, you know, way too bullish. And I thought this is really going to me into trouble because when you forecast that too high, you forecast inventory too high. You've got too many people, too much over here, blah, blah, blah. Like everything else is bloated. And I thought I'm going to blow myself up if I don't fix this. And so I basically started using this method as like a self-correction tool to, you know, try to normalize my own forecast.
Joey Cofone (57:41)
That's cool. You did that with us briefly where you made a forecast and then later on you came back and you're like, Hey, here's the actual compared to the forecast. And it was very, very accurate. Well done. Even you were like, man, I've, you know, don't expect me to do this every time, but it was within like 1%. I was that was amazing.
Nate (57:59)
Yeah, that was honestly a bit of a fluke, I don't want you to think I actually do that regularly.
Joey Cofone (58:05)
That was powerful. Anyway, finance is clutch.
Nate (58:11)
Good, good. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. Well, where can, where can people find you online? I'm going to include a few show notes below. If you want me to include some specific links in their social stuff, ordering pages, anything else you'd like people to know about, I can include below.
Joey Cofone (58:28)
Yeah, if you want to check out Baron Fig, we've been talking about that quite a bit. Just go to baronfig.com. And if you want to learn more about the things I do, go to joeycofone.com. Check out the show notes for the correct spelling.
Nate (58:41)
Okay, with an E at the end I understand.
Cool, man. Okay. Well, I appreciate the time again, Joey. Thank you so much for joining us and I guess we'll see you around. Thanks for coming on the show.
Joey Cofone (58:56)
Thanks for the chat, man. That was good.
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