From Swag to Smoke: Scaling Two Businesses with Russell Bird

[00:07] Jeff McLarty
What does it actually take to build a business that lasts? Welcome to Owner’s Roundtable, where business leaders and industry experts pull up a chair, talk about all the ins and outs and ups and downs of running a business, and share their experience in entrepreneurship. Whether you’re just starting out, five years in, or scaling something bigger, you’ll find real insights you can use in your business. There’s always another problem to solve, and chances are someone at this table has lived it or built their career fixing it.

So if you’re looking for insight, inspiration, or entrepreneurial entertainment, there’s a chair at the Owner’s Roundtable waiting for you. Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m Jeff McClarty, Business Trainer and Management Advisor, and this is the Owner’s Roundtable. Real stories, real expertise, real insight.

[00:58] Jeff McLarty
Hello and welcome to Owner’s Roundtable. Today at the table we’ll be visiting with Russell Bird, the owner of The Promo Addict and You Need a BBQ. We’ll hear some great stories about chasing your inspiration, building brand visibility, and managing the cash flow scramble in a fast growing business. So pull up a seat and join Russell and I here at the Owner’s Roundtable.

[01:16] Jeff McLarty
Welcome Russell, great to have you on the show.

[01:18] Russell Bird
Hey, thanks for having me, Jeff. I’m really excited.

[01:21] Jeff McLarty
I’m really excited too. I got to do a bit of preparation for this. You have a very rich and diverse history online to talk about and I’m not sure we’re gonna fit it all in today. But before we get into that, do you wanna give us a little bit of a backstory, how you ended up being a business owner, where you started, and how you got here?

[01:39] Russell Bird
Absolutely. So I attended the University of Alberta, and when I went there, I thought I wanted to be a police officer. And so after I graduated I moved to Vancouver, I joined the Vancouver City Police and was pursuing a career in policing.

I figured out after a couple of years that it it really wasn’t for me. Living shift work, wearing body armor to work wasn’t as fun and as exciting as I thought it would be. I got a lot of respect for what the police do, but it’s a hard job.

And I realized early on that I had a – quite an entrepreneurial and sales-minded spirit within me. And so I decided to pursue a career path more along that line. My first business was a swag business. I have a promotional manufacturing business where we make custom logo products for businesses. And you know, it’s a – it’s a fun, creative, sexy marketing style sales.

That’s really, really great for me. No one’s ever been sad when they’re buying swag. And so having the opportunity to do that as a career was something that I’ve chased down. I’ve been doing it now for about sixteen years and it’s a lot of fun every day. So that’s sort of my origin story, was wanting to have a fun, passionate career where I could be creative and engaging, and you know, swag has really led me down that path where I get to be creative every day.

[02:53] Jeff McLarty
So tell me about how you got started. Like you woke up one day and you’re like, I’m just gonna start selling people swag or how – how exactly did the entrepreneurial idea come about?

[03:04] Russell Bird
When living in Vancouver, you know, there’s a lot of challenges around like the economics of who can afford to live in a house and who can afford to live in an apartment. And when you’re changing career paths, you’re definitely, you know, starting again at the bottom. And so my wife and I decided to move to Edmonton where we could afford to have, you know, a house with a backyard. We wanted to get a dog and start a family. And so moving to Edmonton, I was willing to start at the bottom. And so I got a job selling swag. You know, for an entry level almost minimum wage with a small commission. And I – I really took a bet on myself to see where I could go with my career.

You know, after doing that for a little while, I was able to build up a fairly loyal clientele, some really good people, some really creative opportunities. And I used that to bootstrap my first business. So I started in my basement with nothing more than a laptop and a printer and a very forgiving and willing wife, and a small line of credit. And was able to – to figure it out. And so in that first year in business we did about four hundred thousand dollars in sales, and I did that with nothing more than a ten thousand dollar line of credit. It helps to have, you know, good customers early on that pay their bills on time. You know, that can make the world go round.

[04:20] Jeff McLarty
I think you had one of the most important assets in starting a new business, the understanding and supportive wife.

[04:26] Russell Bird
Yes.

[04:27] Jeff McLarty
I think it’s hard to overstate how important that can be when you’re in the early frustrating stages of building out a business.

[04:34] Russell Bird
Who also happened to be a graphic designer and knew how to work QuickBooks, right? So as much as I say it was me that started it, I didn’t know how to work QuickBooks and I had no design skills. And so having Jocelyn there at my side was – was critically important in the early days.

[04:47] Jeff McLarty
So do you continue to work in the business together or?

[04:50] Russell Bird
Yeah, yeah. I work as CEO and she’s the COO of all of our businesses.

[04:55] Jeff McLarty
It’s always an interesting dynamic, like being married and working together. My wife and I also went through that. Did you have to have ground rules that keep everything in order?

[05:03] Russell Bird
Yeah, we don’t talk about business in the hot tub.

[05:06] Jeff McLarty
Hahaha. That’s a great rule.

[05:08] Russell Bird
You know, when you get home from work it’s important that you turn off the business talk, or at least if you need to say something, say it. Hey, I got something I need to talk about with business, and then let’s move on. And then at work it’s the same thing. If I’m at work, I’m working and if I’m at home, I’m homing. Trying to blur those lines can make it extremely complex and sometimes you can lean into always talking about home or always talking about work, but having that division is important.

[05:32] Jeff McLarty
No, I a hundred percent agree with that. And that’s – I mean, what do most people do? You go to work all day and then you wanna go home and complain about your coworkers, to your spouse. But it sounds like you guys have been working together for a long time and built a good company together and more than one company.

So one question I have to ask you is how did you get your first big account? Working in a basement, how did you get from there to having your first big client?

[05:59] Russell Bird
So the interesting thing is that, you know, the story of my first big account, was – it dates way back to before I had the business. I used to run in a charity event called the Easter Seals 24 Hour Relay. And we were a top team spirit team and a top fundraising team for many years. We went to it because we believed in the organization, we believed in the cause.

And it was something that we very much enjoyed doing as a group of friends. And when we would go there, every year I would run into, you know, the other teams who were also very friendly, and you know, we became friends with them over the years. And there was a guy who would be at the event every year cooking the pancake breakfast every morning, and his name was Frank Santiago. And Frank was a really cool guy. We’re still friends to this day. It’s been twenty-six years since I met Frank. And a couple years after I’d met him, I was at the movie theater and I ran into him and he said to me, ‘Hey Russ, are you still running that promotional business? Would you mind helping out – my wife has this company and they’re looking for some swag for their executive conference. I should introduce you to her and you can go help her out with this swag opportunity’ and I said, Yeah, I’m happy to help out your wife. So he shot me an email and he CC’d his wife who had this little potato company. And I went to her little factory and it turns out it wasn’t little. It was The Little Potato Company. It was one of those things where like, you know, I treated Frank as a human, as a friend, right? I wasn’t treating him as a cash cow or someone that could launch my business. We were friends first.

So I would say, you know, treat everyone kind, with respect. Give them the time that they deserve, regardless of any business potential. Because, you know, I did that with Frank and not even knowing that there was potential there. And it’s paid off in dividends, right? Little Potato’s been one of our biggest customers since the day we started. And, you know, I’ll always be friends with Frank and Angela. You know, their whole marketing team are amazing to me, and we treat them with the same kindness. But it all came from, you know, having pancakes and shaking Frank’s hand and saying, Hey, thanks for coming out and supporting this same charity event that we support. But you’d never know at the time that that was where it was gonna go to.

[08:16] Jeff McLarty
I love that. That’s a great story. And it’s amazing if you just treat people well, you never know what’ll come out of it, right?

[08:21] Russell Bird
Mm-hmm.

[08:23] Jeff McLarty
So you started with a promo company. How do you get from promo to barbecue? Draw that line for me.

[08:30] Russell Bird
Well, the line kinda intersects and crosses a few times. But the origin story there is back in 2013, I got invited to participate in a cook-off called the Atco Blue Flame Kitchen Championships.

It was a local cook-off at the Taste of Edmonton Festival, and I was fortunate enough to win that. And so I turned my win of that competition into another win the next year. So I was the two time Atco Blue Flame Kitchen Cooking Champion. And from that in the third year of that cook off they changed it to be an event called the Canadian Food Championships.

And when we went down to the Canadian Food Championships, our expectations were quite low because we were competing against professional chefs from across the country. And this was just a hobby, not a business. And we ended up taking home third place our first year in the Canadian Food Championships, which was pretty exciting. We ended up winning a chance to go to the World Championships in Celebration Florida, which is right outside Disneyland in Orlando.

And we got thirteenth place in the World Championships, which was an amazing result for a home cook. We were super excited. After we were eliminated, we took the opportunity to go walk around at the World Barbecue Championships, which was happening sort of down and around the block from where we were competing.

And we met a lot of really cool barbecue competitors and they were hanging out, they were listening to music, they were drinking bourbon, smoking meat, having a good time. And I looked at it and I said, you know, those guys are having more fun than we are at the kitchen stadium. I think I should do that. And so the next year I started a barbecue team with my father-in-law, and we started traveling around Alberta and Saskatchewan and doing barbecue cook-offs.

It took us about three years of competing in barbecue cook-offs before we were named to represent Canada at the World Championships. and we were fortunate enough to win second place in the world. And so having that experience, going into like 2018, was really awesome. It was a fun hobby. It was a great way to spend my weekends, like cooking and competing in barbecue cook-offs. We were able to make a little bit of money doing it.

But then when the pandemic hit, this is the interesting story, was that people stopped buying swag. You know, we had the swag business, it was about five years old. We started it in 2015, and in 2020 we were doing about a million and a half in sales, and people just stopped. There was no swag to be had. There was no trade shows. There was no events. There was no opportunity to be creative with your marketing. It was all about like sourcing masks and hand sanitizer. And you know, it’s a time that a lot of people now want to kind of forget. But it was drilled into my mind as like trying to survive. Not from a medical standpoint, but from a business standpoint. Because there was no opportunity to give somebody a pen or a coffee mug or a new jacket. People thought if you handed them a pen, they could get a disease from it.

And so when that happened, in the first three months, we lost about seven hundred thousand dollars in sales. We had people canceling their orders because they didn’t have an event to give it away at. And so come June of 2020, every weekend people were texting me saying, like, hey, I want to buy a barbecue, what barbecue should I get? Hey, I want to cook some pork ribs, how should I cook them? And as a world barbecue champion who had access to barbecues and the resources to know how to cook them, I thought to myself, this would be a great way to drive some additional revenues for our business. So I reached out to Pitboss Grills and I said we should have some grills in my shop so I can sell them to friends and family. If I buy six or seven grills, sell them before the end of the year, I’ll make an extra five or ten grand. So I brought in seven grills from Pit Boss thinking I would sell them over the course of the summer. And I sold them over the course of a weekend. So we bought more. And then we sold those and we bought more. And we ended up selling about eight hundred grills our first year.

[12:17] Jeff McLarty
Holy wow.

[12:18] Russell Bird
So it was a wild opportunity, which made up for all of the losses from the promo side. And then fast forward to, you know, 2021, 2022, and beyond. You know, the promo industry came back and came back with a vengeance. Twice as many events, lots of people attending them. People had upgraded swag budgets, they wanted more creative things, they wanted to get back to feeling normal again.

And at the same time, the barbecue business scaled as well. So we went all in. We invested quite heavily in building out a space that could support both businesses. And it’s been awesome for us. We’ve been here now for three and a half years, and so yeah, that’s sort of the origin story of how – how You Need a BBQ came to be.

[13:00] Jeff McLarty
So that sounds like it might have been a bit of a wild ride scaling up that fast. Were there any hiccups or bumps you hit along the way or?

[13:06] Russell Bird
The four pillars of business as I see them are execution, strategy, cash and people. And you know, cash I would say is the – the hardest one. You know, when we started the barbecue store, we started it with nothing more than – we sold my competition barbecues on Facebook Marketplace and we made about six or seven thousand bucks and we used that to buy the first inventory for the business. And then, you know, fast forward six months and the business needed a thirty thousand dollar cash injection to support the inventory levels that we needed in order to expand our space. And we just put that in personally.

Outside of that, it was all bootstrapping. We did it all ourselves. A lot of people forget that, on the promo side of the business, if you want to do a million dollars in sales, you’ve got to finance a million dollars in purchases. If you wanna have a barbecue store that does two million dollars a year in sales, you have to have four hundred thousand dollars in inventory to support it. People don’t wanna buy a barbecue and then you take their money to go send the wholesaler to buy the barbecue to ship in. You have to have it here. And so as our businesses have scaled, most of the profits have been rolled back into the stores. You know, increased inventory, increased staffing, increased rent, increased operational efficiencies. We bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of printing equipment. Because we’re continuing to scale. We want to build out what we can do, so that we can be a better business because of it. So I would say cash was definitely one of the – the hardest hiccups to learn coming from a business-to-business sales company. We learned a lot about the difference between the purchasing rhythms of a B2B company versus retail. That was a that was a big challenge for us.

[14:47] Jeff McLarty
So tell me more about that. Like what did you learn the difference between the two?

[14:50] Russell Bird
I think the hardest challenge for me was learning that there’s this thing called COGS – cost of goods sold. And so when you buy items for inventory, you can’t just write them off. You can’t write them off until you’ve sold them. Which is a really weird thing from a business owner’s perspective, that came from a B2B sales environment.

We only buy things from our promotional division when we sell them. So someone calls me and they say, Hey, I want to order a thousand coffee mugs, I then arrange a P.O. to buy the coffee mugs, decorate the coffee mugs and then deliver them to the customer. Well it’s an immediate write-off. The write-off people pay for it, right?

Whereas on the barbecue side, you know, at the end of our first year, when I did my taxes, I went to my accountant and I said, like, hey, make sure you write that $200,000 inventory off against our profits so that we made – we made nothing. we won’t owe any tax. And he said, No, no, no, you don’t get to write off that inventory until you sell it. I’m like, well, what if it doesn’t sell? Right? Like, how can I pay the tax if all of my cash is tied up in inventory?

And so it became this cycle of constantly paying last year’s taxes with this year’s income. And that was a steep learning curve for me. It made me question like how do people start retail businesses if they’re expected to, you know, make sure the government gets their piece of the pie before they’ve even made anything? it’s a tough way to change the way you think. But now that we’ve been doing this for, you know, six years, I think we’re getting better at it. You know, we’ve got a CFO now, we’ve got a controller, we’ve got a bookkeeper. We’ve got much stricter financial protocols in place. And you know, that takes time and it takes investment. It’s the chicken before the egg thing, right? You gotta figure out how to grow the business and how to scale it and in what order do you put these people in place. But it takes time.

[16:37] Jeff McLarty
A hundred percent right. And I think a lot of people get caught in that growing broke thing. ‘Cause there’s nothing that eats cash faster than a fast growing business, right? Just like you said, the inventory and it’s so easy to get caught in. And I think a lot of people do get caught in that trap. And when you have to pay the tax man on top of that, it’s hard for a lot of people. But you got through that and – so where to from here? What’s the big vision going forward?

[17:00] Russell Bird
Well, when we went all in on getting this retail space, that was four years ago. We had some significant tenant improvements that we paid for, which we put on a five year payment plan and we said, no growth for five years, we wanna pay that off. and now we’re at a point where we think that in a year we wanna look at maybe going all in one more time. You know, I’m forty-three, I’m not gonna live forever. You know, eventually I have to earn some profit and I gotta put some money in a retirement fund.

But at the same time we made a plan when we first got this space and we said, let’s do 15 years. Fifteen years of going all in, betting on ourselves, working hard, figuring it out, and growing the businesses. And then, you know, a lot of people when they get towards the twilight of their career, one day they say, hey, I want to get out of my business, I should sell it and move on tomorrow. That’s not really how it works. It can take years to, you know, really effectively offboard yourself from a business and scale out of it. And so I look at, you know, the ages of my kids, right? My kids right now are eleven, twelve, and fourteen. So these are all impactful things on how we wanna transition the business, with the key driver being fifteen years of hard work to figure out what the next phase is going to look like. And we’re four and a half years into that plan right now.

[18:21] Jeff McLarty
sounds like you’ve got a really well thought out long term plan and I think that’s something that a lot of people would like to get to. And one of the things I’ve wanted to ask you about is I know you’ve been heavily involved with business peer groups like EO and I just wanted to ask you about how has that impacted you in your development as a business person/business owner?

[18:41] Russell Bird
Yeah, so EO, which is Entrepreneurs’ Organization, is a global nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs achieve their full potential. And so when I originally started the Promo Addict, I joined EO right away. And so I joined what’s called their accelerator program. The accelerator is a business incubator that helps businesses reach their first million dollars in sales.

You get support from a coach. You get peer mentorship and guidance from other businesses who are attempting to scale. You get a business growth system called Scaling Up. And you can use that to grow your business sustainably. So I did that program for about three years before I hit my first million dollars in sales.

And then I joined EO. So in order to join EO you have to do a million dollars in sales. And since then it’s been great having, you know, a network of peers, be around me to answer questions, challenge me, push me to become the best version of myself, to build the best versions of my businesses.

And so, you know, EO has got things like a mentorship program. So I’ve been very fortunate to have some very impactful mentors over the years, people who I have learned to know, like, and trust to help me when I’m in a challenging situation.

And then I’ve got my peer group, which we call a forum, who – we go on trips together, we get to know each other at a deep personal level, and we help each other grow our businesses. And not by buying from each other, but by getting to know each other and being a sounding board for when you’re going through a challenging time. Someone else might have been through something similar before where they can do an experience share on what they’ve been through. So you can use that to adapt how you react to challenging situations. So it’s – it’s definitely been a key driver in in my success and where I’ve gotten to now.

[20:24] Jeff McLarty
I appreciate you sharing that. I think groups like EO and just having the opportunity to connect with other entrepreneurs is so important because when you run a business you think differently than other people and it can sometimes be really lonely for a lot of people. And I think being a part of that allows you not to have to learn every painful lesson on your own. You know, sometimes you want to figure it out on your own, but learning from other people – it’s obvious that it’s had a great impact on your business. You’ve grown really quickly and it sounds like you’re taken to some pretty amazing places.

[20:55] Russell Bird
Yeah, and one of my goals, you know, through my EO journey and my entrepreneurial journey is to become a better leader, right? Someone who’s more patient, more thoughtful, more understanding. These are all things I think that are the biggest takeaways from my peer group in EO.

[21:11] Jeff McLarty
That leadership transition from when it was you running the business doing the work to taking a step back from the business and working on more strategy, what was that transition like for you? How did you work your way through that piece?

[21:23] Russell Bird
I think that’s something I’m still working on. You know, being able to step back completely to work on the business is a huge opportunity. But I do find that especially running multiple businesses, I’m often sort of thrust into different things within the businesses to navigate them or help the team navigate them. And so that is something that we’re – we’re working on.

We wanna build out a leadership team that can be, you know, highly accountable and high achieving. We do have a leadership team now and we would like to build it out further. But you know, of course with that there’s time commitments and cost commitments and you know we’ll continue to set goals and try to achieve them every year. Because it’s all about incremental growth, right? The biggest businesses were built with that first step.

[22:06] Jeff McLarty
A hundred percent right. And the one question I have to ask you before I let you go – we all spend money on promotional items, golf shirts, pens, and things like that. What – what do you think makes good promo and a good part of a marketing program versus you know the stuff that stays in the back drawer or isn’t really effective when you do hang it out?

[22:26] Russell Bird
So I think that when you’re making swag, it’s important that you represent your company where your customers are when they’re thinking about buying your products. Let’s say you’re a food manufacturer, right? You grow potatoes or carrots or you are a beef farmer, right? I want to be in someone’s kitchen if that’s me. ‘Cause when they’re in the kitchen and they’re making dinner or they’re ordering their skip the dishes and they’re like, I wish I had fresh food in my fridge. I wanna be on the fridge or in the fridge. I wanna be in the pantry. So that could be a kitchen dish towel, it could be a bottle of hot sauce, it could be a magnet on the fridge, it could be a chip clip, it could be, you know, there’s a – there’s a lot of ways to exist with your brand in someone’s kitchen.

The same could be true of like, let’s say you’re a hair and aesthetics company and you want to be, you know, in someone’s bathroom when they’re brushing their hair and they’re thinking of you. It could be as simple as a hairbrush or a hair straightener or a curling iron or a makeup brush, whatever it is, right? Like there’s promotional branding opportunities in every room of the house. If it’s a desktop item, because you’re a financial advisor or a business associate.

Whatever it is to get you into a space where your customers are thinking about you when they need you. You wanna give something to their kids, right? If they’re a financial advisor that wants to sell, you know, RESPs. Then you want to be rewarding their kids, right? Give them a – a squishy or a fidget toy. You know, get the kid to carry that thing around and embrace it. So that when the parents dealing with their kids and they’re dealing with your little fidget spinner, they’re thinking about you when they’re thinking about – I can’t wait till little Johnny or Timmy grows up to go to university. So I would say, yeah, being present where people are thinking about ordering your services.

[24:14] Jeff McLarty
One of my favorite examples that I actually use from you when I’m teaching value propositions is – you gave me a dish rag that has your spice brand on it, which I – we didn’t talk about. You have your own brand of spices. And every time I wipe down a kitchen counter with it, it’s right there.

[24:31] Russell Bird
It’s a perfect example of what I was talking about. You know, when you’re in your kitchen cleaning up from dinner and you’re thinking, man, that food was really good because it had You Need A’s on it. Now you’re using a dish rag with You Need A’s on it and you’re thinking about us. And so it’s critical, right? Like that way the next time you go to the grocery store, you’re gonna be buying some You Need A’s right? And like we do grocery bags as well, so that when you’re in the grocery store and you got your You Need A’s bag and you put a bottle of You Need A’s into it, you think to yourself, ah, cool.

[24:57] Jeff McLarty
I brought the perfect bag for this.

[24:58] Russell Bird
Exactly.

[25:00] Jeff McLarty
I think one of the things that I always talk about with that is – when you understand how your customer goes through life, that’s when you can come up with good marketing opportunities.

[25:09] Russell Bird
Yeah. Yeah, part of our five year vision that we recently came up with was – we like to say that we make brands look amazing when it matters. And when we say when it matters, that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different companies. For us it means when your employees hit a milestone, when your customers hit a milestone, when you’re having an outdoor event, when you’re attending a trade show. When it matters for you is when it matters for your people, your customers, your stakeholders. And so it can be a lot of different times and events, but we like to make companies look amazing at those times.

[25:44] Jeff McLarty
I love that. So if somebody needs some good promo, where should they find you?

[25:49] Russell Bird
So we are called the Promo Addict, like we’re addicted to great swag. And we’ve got a website, we are www.thepromoaddict.com. And then on social media we’re everywhere. We are @promoyeg which is the airport code for Edmonton.

[26:06] Jeff McLarty
Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to spend time with us and share a little bit of your journey. If you could give one piece of advice to the aspiring entrepreneur in their basement right now, what piece of advice would you give them getting started?

[26:20] Russell Bird
I would say go for it. You know, there’s never a good time to start a business. There’s a lot of different bad times to start businesses. It’s like having a baby, right? There’s no good time to have a baby, and it it also takes ten months to have a baby. So get started before you think you’re ready and you’ll figure it out. You know, they say the best entrepreneurs are the ones that jump off the cliff and then build the plane on the way down. When you’ve got no choice but to make that sucker fly, you’ll find a way to make it fly.

[26:48] Jeff McLarty
Absolutely. I like that analogy. Awesome. Well thanks for joining us here on the Owners Roundtable. Appreciate the time.

[26:54] Russell Bird
My pleasure. Thanks, Jeff.

[26:59] Jeff McLarty
That’s all for us here at the Owner’s Roundtable. If you’re looking for more support for your business, or on your own ownership journey, you can contact us at focalpointedmonton.com. Thanks for pulling up a chair and don’t forget to like and subscribe, so you don’t miss out on more great conversations and great ideas from real business owners and industry experts.