Mike Salguero is a serial entrepreneur. His newest venture is Butcher Box – delivering meat from the farm straight to your door. He got his start in the business space selling t-shirts in high school and continued making t-shirts throughout college. He credits his t-shirt businesses to teaching him how to market and grow a brand from the ground up. Mike’s first large scale business was a company that helped carpenters market and sell their custom furniture. The company was called CustomMade. Mike and his business partner bought the URL for $150,000, revamped the website, raised $30 million of venture capital and at it’s peak employed 60 people. By the time Mike left the company they were down to 6 employees. His partner stayed with it and has turned the company around, but most investors lost everything. He learned a lot from CustomMade – the paramount lesson being how to market a product. Butcher Box was started a few years after stepping away from CustomMade. Mike and his wife wanted to eat cleaner and healthier. He found a farmer whom he was able to buy grass fed, humanely raised, hormone free meat from. After about a year of buying the meat for himself and his friends he started learning how he could turn buying grass fed meat into a business. Mike started the company with $10,000 of his own money and did a Kickstarter campaign that raised $215,000. Today, they are north of 30,000 subscribers with three distribution facilities. Butcher Box sells beef, chicken, and pork from hundreds of different farms across America. What is their #1 goal? To replace the butcher. Michael ends the podcast asking Mike, “What is the one thing I didn’t ask you in this conversation that you want the audience to know?” Mike drives home the point that if you want create a successful business you have to have extreme discipline focused on seeing how you are going to get to the next day, week, quarter and beyond. Most think they need to raise lots of money. That focus needs to shift to building a great company, with a great business model, that you are able to personally manage without outside investors. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Benefits of eating grass fed meat Marketing a product Commodity meat vs. grass fed Raising capital (or the importance of not raising capital) Entrepreneurism Starting a business