The Exchanges

Q Okay, so it makes sense. Alright, so you're now working full-time at the family business, the, the Newark Nut Company, and, and what, were you, like, making suggestions on how to change the business? Like, what, what were you doing?

A Yeah, so I just rolled up my sleeves and, and, and dug in and just looked at, like, let's just study this business, try to see where the opportunities are. So some would be simple as, hey, we sell raw cashews in the store and roasted cashews. I know what we pay for raw cashews. We're buying from our friend the roasted cashews because he was a roaster. That spread is pretty big. Well, why don't we just send him the raw cashews, pay him just to toll it, just to roast it. And that suddenly saved us 10,000 dollars. That's like mana from heaven, right? So A, I start winning proof points with my dad and uncle because that's like, you know, real money for a business that's not making any money. Um, and then the other thing I did was, well, there's a couple of things. One thing I did was I visited our wholesale customers and just said, what more can we do for you? Mind you, I'm a shy kid. I don't like selling at all. And I didn't love that we were selling sometimes commodities in a 25 pound box. Right. It wasn't a point of differentiation there. So we had, for example, the specialty supermarket said, I really want you to package the product for us. My dad and my uncle said, no, too much labor. I showed them the math. And then I became the laborer.

AI assessment note: “I just rolled up my sleeves and, and, and dug in”

Q the time, again, very hard to do. There's no Squarespace. There's no Shopify. Like, you need somebody who knows how to do this. And it's going to cost them money. And then you need, there's no logistics. There's no, there's no third party logistics operators in the same way. There's no drop shipping. Like, none of that infrastructure that's so easy now. So how are you going to do this?

A Uh, one of my friends who was a year older happened to have had a roommate, uh, who was building websites. So it's one of these as simple as that. If not for that, I have no idea because it was harder and it would have been a lot more money. So that's also why I built it for like 3000 dollars or so. Um, but we would get a few orders trickling here or there. Could it be one a day, one every two days, but for my data mug was the most exciting thing in the world. My dad would scream out, we had this little office above the store, and he would scream out, we got an order! He would be so excited, and then we had this little thing I made as a boy, with like a clothespin type thing, and he would lower the string down out of the office window, he would still use that to drop the order down. Um, so, but then they would, we had a credit card machine, nothing was automated then, so you have to type in the credit card number, so we get the number, nothing's encrypted, right? You see the number passes across, you type it into the credit card machine, Where I remember as we got going a few years later, like, I could do that really fast, so I would do that for a holiday. I would type my fingers really fast.

AI assessment note: “one of my friends who was a year older happened to have had a roommate”

Q Um, what is, what do they make of, of this? I mean, just the transition or the transformation of the business from what it was to what it is now?

A Yeah. I mean, for them, I mean, they're just amazed. They wish Poppy Saul were still alive. He wouldn't understand because he would say, where's the cash? You know, he doesn't see the register and so on. Um, but for them, look, this worked and it worked really early on, right? We never took on investors. We grew, we figured out the model. We grew Very quickly and profitably. And look, even before the true financial success, they got a second lease on life. I told the story earlier about, uh, Saturdays where we're making two dollars a day. I did the math. I said, guys, this is not about me shying from work. This is a waste of time. No one's coming to the retail store. So this is like, I don't know if it's 2003 that the latest 2004, I said, we're closing on Saturdays. My dad and I said, oh, poppy salt would never allow this, right? You just work, you know, and my uncle says, well, can we just try it out and let's just do a half a day. I said, no, this is a joke, right? Doesn't make any sense for us. We closed and like, I made the decision on a Monday and we closed on that Saturday and my uncle on that Monday says, oh my God, that's the best decision of our life. And they got a second lease on their life where they could be involved in the community. And go to temple and, and just do stuff that most other people get to do.

AI assessment note: “I mean, for them, I mean, they're just amazed.”

Q in college that's interesting to me. I mean, this is, this is the late nineties when it just started to become easier to register domain names. This is, this is why I own GuyRoz.com because it was around then that I registered that, although I don't think there was a big clamoring for that at the time. You registered nutsonline.com. Tell me about, about that. Why did you do that?

A I was, because of just my stock investing in high school, I was just very attuned to what was going on in that world. I mean, most people knew about the internet thing, but like I'm the kid who based on Peter Lynch's philosophy, I bought AOL stock maybe in 1995 before everyone thought it was gonna go bankrupt. And I was like, no way. So I was like more, I was closer to this than most seeing what was happening. And to be clear, then anyone could make money picking stocks in that go-go era of the internet. Um, so You know, I just looked at our little store. And I see this new thing called the internet taking off. I was like, well, like maybe the whole country could be our, you know, we could sell to the whole country. We had my dad and my uncle because of his was struggling so much. They did try, you know, when I was in high school to do some type of catalog, but it didn't bring that much in. So like I was already thinking of, I already had some exposure, just the seed of, of other, other channels and ways to go to market. But for me, I was like, wow, the internet's taking off. Let's try it. Let's go sell nuts online.

AI assessment note: “I see this new thing called the internet taking off... Let's go sell nuts online.”

Q Copper's. Copper's. And so where were you sourcing almonds come from California, right? Peanuts. Peanuts are also U.S. But where are you getting your stuff from?

A Yeah. So a lot of stuff is grown domestically. And look, this is one thing that's unique, even though I came into a small business and, but because also we had a little bigger aperture than just a retail store, because we had this little wholesale business, you know, we had direct relationships with farmers and growers, and it's like a nice thing. For example, where we buy walnuts in California. Last time I actually visited the farm, the owner of that company, he's a farmer and processor. So like he processes for other people too. He's like, Jeff, you're our longest standing customer. Like, his father did business with my grandfather. So if it's still domestic, we're going to go as direct as we can. When it comes to stuff overseas, it depends. Like, you know, today when I think about tariffs and our exposure, I would say direct and indirect exposure to tariffs is like, 50% of our products.

AI assessment note: “a lot of stuff is grown domestically... we had direct relationships with farmers and growers”

Q And at an average, average price of what? 20, 25 bucks an order?

A Maybe a little more than that. And we used to charge shipping then. I don't remember what it was back then, but it could be a little bit more. I don't remember, to be honest, back then. So, um, you know, bottom line is I said, hey, I don't like this wholesale bulk stuff, this concession supply stuff. I don't like selling. I like more building and engineering and being behind the scenes. Um, let's go all in. Let's Take advantage of this early mover advantage and just run faster than this is stodgy industry industry. Let's move faster than anyone else in our, in our space. You know, we, we probably had, you know, let's say call a 150 or so products. I started adding some more products at the time, but nothing aggressive. Um, and let's really utilize the power of Google AdWords.

AI assessment note: “Maybe a little more than that. And we used to charge shipping then.”