Podcast: How To Bootstrap a DTC Brand from Zero to Scale

Written By Sherilee Maxcy

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Free to Grow CFO podcast, Jon Blair interviews Sean Busch, founder of DadMode and former founder of Puracy. They discuss Sean's entrepreneurial journey, the challenges and successes of scaling bootstrapped brands, and the importance of customer engagement and financial reporting. Sean shares insights on driving repeat purchases, building strong relationships with customers, and the operational challenges faced when scaling a brand. The conversation also touches on the birth of DadMode, a brand focused on household cleaning products for dads, and the value of creating relatable content for their audience.

Key Takeaways

  • Creating uncomfortably close relationships with customers can turn buyers into loyal brand evangelists.

  • Valuable customer insights often come from doing the unscalable.

  • Scaling a business without outside capital requires strategic supplier partnerships.

Meet Sean Busch

Sean Busch is a serial entrepreneur who launched his first business at 16—a high-end car detailing company built entirely on word-of-mouth. After stints in pharmaceutical and surgical sales at Novartis and Johnson & Johnson, he joined a fast-growing CPG e-commerce company in Austin, where he led acquisitions and strategy, helping scale it into a category leader.

In 2013, he co-founded Puracy, a line of natural cleaning and personal care products inspired by fatherhood and built with scientific rigor. With no outside capital, he scaled the brand to over $30MM in annual sales and national retail expansion before selling to BRANDED in 2021—their largest acquisition to date. Today, after a brief sabbatical, Sean is back with DadMode, a bold new brand making premium cleaning products for dads who show up at home. It’s equal parts performance, purpose, and humor—built to make cleaning a badge of honor, not a burden.

Transcript

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00:00 Introduction

01:16 Sean's Early Entrepreneurial Influences

04:40 Scaling PureCity: Key Factors for Success

10:08 Customer-Centric Strategies for Repeat Purchases

13:31 Leveraging Amazon for Brand Growth

17:41 Building Uncomfortably Close Customer Relationships

23:18 The Soul of Business and Its Impact

25:04 Optimizing Product Packaging and Manufacturing Costs

29:19 The Birth of Dad Mode: A New Brand for Dads

33:57 Creating Engaging Content for Dads

37:14 The Importance of Financial Discipline in Scaling

41:04 Personal Insights and Future Directions



Jon Blair (00:01)

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Free to Grow CFO podcast where we dive deep into conversations about scaling a profit-focused DTC brand. I'm your host, Jon Blair, founder of Free to Grow CFO. We're the go-to outsource finance and accounting firm for eight nine-figure DTC brands. And today I'm here with Sean Bush, founder of DadMode, a household cleaning products brand for dads. Sean, what's happening, man?

Sean Busch (00:25)

Hey Jon, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jon Blair (00:28)

Yeah, I appreciate you being here. For those of you who are watching this on YouTube, you can see I strategically have my best dad ever mug here. Yeah, man, I'm super excited to chat today because you have a really interesting background. You founded a couple of brands and one of them ⁓ you scaled to, you know, tens of millions in revenue, effectively bootstrapped, you know, and as a fractional CFO firm that works exclusively with bootstrapped, fast growing eCom brands, I think your experience is gonna be right in the strike zone of the audience who listens to the show. So I'm really excited. So before we dive in, I'd love to get kind of the high level background. If you could just walk through the audience, your high level entrepreneurial journey that ultimately led you to founding DadMode.

Sean Busch (01:16)

Sure. So I was born to two entrepreneurs. My parents were both small business owners, very small businesses, and more on the labor side of things, and grew up in eastern Long Island. And just learned from them the ups and downs of entrepreneurialism, and how you could have good years and bad years, and a lot of the things that you saw were when people say, oh wow, look how great they're doing. Those were snippets of the life cycle of a business. Most of them were gritty and grinding and getting up at 5 a.m. and just doing really hard things or things that just weren't fun. And they kind of instilled in me this notion that if you want to do something on your own, you've got to have that mentality, but also you've got to find something that you like doing.

And so I started my first company when I was 16. It was a car detailing company. I was in mobile. I went to everybody's house. And then I built that over a number of years. I started doing testing and development for the chemical manufacturers in that space when I was a teenager in high school. Built that business into something decent sized. And I kept it going through college. It helped leverage me into a couple of my first professional careers in medical sales.

And then it ended up giving me down to Austin from New York because one of my clients claimed that he couldn't find a good detailer, flew my wife and I down to first class and I thought it was the coolest thing ever but then by the end I was like, yeah, come work for me. So I started in the internet landscape at that time and worked for his company, running biz dev for a CPG e-commerce company that was 100 % self-funded. And so I learned about small business, I learned about customer-centric methodologies. learned about the beauty of the internet and how you can sell products when people are sleeping and you get all this amazing data on what people do when they get on their computer or their smartphones. And then I leveraged that into starting Puracy. I kind of got bored after a couple years and wanted to start something on my own and I started something with my neighbor in South Austin. We were both about in the sort of family planning stages. He just found out, him and his wife were pregnant, we were trying to get pregnant, evaluate all the products in your household. Hey, what's toxic, what's not? And then we realized there was this big gaping hole that was not really filled. There were some natural products in the household cleaning space at the time, but everything was going to stores and buying them. And kind of said, I looked at them, said, look, I think we go to Amazon. This was back in 2012 when we started talking about this.

And so, know, FBA was brand new. Nobody was really doing much in our space. And we launched at the end of 2013 that brand and the brand called Puracy focused on pure ingredients and household cleaning products. And that ended up building into a brand that sold baby care products, personal care products, and then at the end, even pet care products. But we bootstrapped that company and moved into Target and Walmart stores around 2019. And then we sold it a couple years ago.

Jon Blair (04:40)

Awesome journey man. So a couple things that I want to draw out of there. One, I was on the founding team of an eCom brand called Guardian Bikes that's still around to this day and we launched on Amazon Seller Central in 2015 and I was the guy on there like trying to figure out how to label shipments right to get them to FBA and get them accepted and dealing with like that super annoying queue of like products that just get lost in the FBA system and like so

Yeah, 10 years ago, FBA was like, what's funny is a couple years before that we launched our site, our DTC business on Magento, which is like, takes me back. And Shopify was brand new and we were having issues with Magento and we had to do this quick pivot before our Shark Tank episode aired. ⁓ Because like, our Magento developers were not available on the weekend, so we literally like stood up a Shopify store like, over the weekend ourselves and like it's those kinds of things like I love meeting people who have been in the game as long as you have because I was in those early days as well and it was like we're just like figuring stuff out right like not really knowing what the heck we're doing and just trying these effectively nascent platforms right and so anyways I love that the other thing you mentioned that I that I just want to draw it is like you're talking about at the beginning of your journey ⁓ you know

seeing your parents as, you know, kind of entrepreneurs that you looked up to and going like, I want to be an entrepreneur and doing things that, grinding through things that you don't necessarily enjoy. And it just made me think of like, I'm a big Robert Kiyosaki fan and he talks about in investing, which if when you start a business, you're just investing in your own business, right? And you may be operating as well, but any amount, any type of investing, he says, listen, pick an asset class you enjoy because it's the enjoyment of it that allows you to grind through the hard times, right? And so like, ⁓ anyways, all that being said, I wanna dive into the journey of scaling, Puracy first, ⁓ bootstrapped. When you think about the one or two key factors that allowed you to scale bootstrapped, what are the first things that come to mind?

Sean Busch (07:06)

Got to know your margins. So as a consumer products business, while it's built on consumables and repeat business, that's obviously not guaranteed. So you still have to think about it from the outset of what we try to do is we solve for a break even or small profit on the first item. And then once you acquired that customer, the goal was to get them to subscribe to the product. But you needed to know Hey, if I'm purchasing this now as a small business, as a small brand at 3000 units, what does it look like at 10, 25, 50, 100 and so on? And where do the price breaks come in and where do you have to go and then go to different vendors at that point? You know, is your manufacturing partner good enough to scale with you? Right? So you're sort of having to ask all of these questions in upfront conversations. And like you said, that was my first real startup. And so you're sort of, my co-founder had no background in CPG or anything. so we're sort of figuring it out as you go. And you make a lot of small missteps, but I think the thing about an early stage business is you're doing these minor pivots sometimes more than once a day.

Jon Blair (08:29)

Yeah, continuously, right? Just like continuous minor pivots. The number of times we pivoted at Guardian Bikes and probably still are to this day. ⁓ That's part of being entrepreneurial. And honestly, man, like in the e-comm world, like you just have to be nimble. Things change still to this day. They change constantly, right? And ⁓ you're operating a lot from an acquisition standpoint. You're operating a lot on like what I call rented land. you know, when you're, when you're, your things are working on meta that that's rented. That's, that's a rented channel, right? The algorithm, I've seen the algorithm change on brands so many times in the last decade. And they're like, shoot, what the heck, you know, and they eventually figure it out. But like, you know, it can, it can up end the brand. Like overnight, I've definitely seen that happen. ⁓ There's a couple of things you pointed out that I see time and time again that are key factors in being able to scale.

Bootstrapped right the first the first factor is like you have to be profitable That's just a necessity when you're scaling bootstrapped and you mentioned think two core tenants that I see time and time again either lead to the success of profitability or lack thereof is Margins and repeat purchase and there's actually like a really tight connection between the two of those you mentioned Turning a small profit or at least breaking even on a first order and then really making up your profitability on repeat purchase. What were some of the repeat purchase retention tactics that you guys used that you saw that were successful?

Sean Busch (10:08)

We were so dialed into what our customers wanted from a product experience standpoint to where we really leveraged the review database of Amazon early on and started to, now there's all these tools and things that you can get in use for, but we did it all manually and part of reason I love doing manually is that I had my hands in it all the time. And so you start to pick up these little snippets and when you think about it from a more, formalized methodology around quantitative and qualitative consumer research. You start to see, okay, this is what people write about it, but what do they really want? What are they really trying to solve for here? And that's really the sort of path we were trying to figure out. And so I did a ton of focus groups and you just start to find out that, hey, I wish the hand soap rinsed off better. I wish my hand soap feels slimy after that.

And so like these little things that most consumers can't articulate and they don't understand why they like it. They just expect it. You know, go through that element and then you go through things like foam height on, hey, when people wash their hands, they want it to foam up real fast. It's called flash foam. So we started to analyze all these little tiny nuances of it. And then I'd solve for them with our chemists. And then you start to talk about, you know, ingredient safety and quality.

So it was really about just listening and observing people in their natural habitat. And for Puracy the brand was targeted at young moms or soon-to-be moms. So there's a heightened level of emotion, there's a heightened level of hormones, which the hormone thing was interesting because one of our early findings was that, hey, I like Mrs. Meyers because they have all these great scents, but when I'm pregnant, I actually have to find a different cleaning product because the scents are so strong, makes me nauseous. And we started to that over and over again. And that became boom. Like that's our, that's our end spot right there. It's like create good scents, but have them be just sort of refreshing and complimentary to what you're doing, but not overpowering. And that's really where we landed on that particular side of things. So I think highlighting all of these little nuanced things, because again, as much as I wanted to be better, better, better, it was about being different. It was about finding that angle in the market to where you can comment and people recognize you for. So that was the pure ingredients that was not overpowering. So it just became a brand that was very approachable and ⁓ yielded a great experience through and through. Nothing was offensive about the brand or just in your face. And I love that because that's what people came to expect from the Puracy brand.

Jon Blair (12:37)

Yeah.

So I see a lot of DDC brands who also have Amazon as a channel that struggle with driving repeat purchase specifically on Amazon as a channel. Besides like mining the review data and kind of having focus groups and whatnot, are there any other specific tactics on Amazon specifically that helped you drive repeat purchase?

Sean Busch (13:31)

Yeah, you know, it's tough. Amazon, even on the early days, now everybody knows that you're just sort of conditioned to one quick buy everything and have one day shipping. But at that time, yeah, like I'd say early on, we had to pump up a lot of our inventory levels to kind of be able to allow the entire United States to have quick shipping. So that was one. You also, it was way before subscribe and save. So it became this thing where we try to time our follow-ups and you were still limited to two follow-ups. We tried to time our email follow-ups on Amazon to where, that was a tough one. That was again, a moving target. You don't even think about it, but people buy stuff and typically they're not going to, at least in household cleaning products, they're not going to use it the second they get it. People don't usually run out. They just buy and say, all right, I have like two weeks left of it. So we had to time it so that it didn't feel like.

Hey, why are you emailing me? Like literally the box just got to my door, I haven't even opened it yet. So I think a lot of it came down to how well could we analyze our customers' habits of purchasing and then usage. And then those follow-up emails started to help with repeat purchase rates because if there was a question or there was a concern, for the first four years of the company, every single thing came to me.

And I made sure to sign all of the emails, all the responses, all of the customer reviews that were critical online. I signed all of them, Sean, founder of Puracy because I wanted people to know that, yeah, like the owner of the business is the one chiming in here, not somebody who's reading off the script somewhere. And that started to turn the dial for us because you started to take a look at, again, I'll give you an example, Mrs. Meyers giant organization or giant brand within a massive organization, S.E. Johnson. And yeah, you're not getting Mrs. Meyers responding to you. And that for a lot of people, especially for moms, right? You've to think about the mindset and the state of mind that they're in as they're pregnant or they just have a newborn. They want to be talking to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. That's why there's such a high touch point with doctors and things at that time period.

Jon Blair (15:29)

Yeah.

Totally, totally.

Sean Busch (15:54)

I, yeah, again, I just hyper-focused on those elements.

Jon Blair (15:57)

So I wanna draw something out here that I have, I talk about a lot on this show and I talk about it a lot with our Free to Grow clients. E-commerce channels, in this context we'll talk specifically about Amazon and your DTC .com store. Those should be part of your strategy. Now that might sound like, of course, obviously Jon, but what I'm saying is I see too many brands that are just like, we're gonna start selling DTC. ⁓

or Amazon because it's just an easy channel to start selling on. But they're not thinking about what is strategic about these e-commerce channels. So like at Guardian Bikes, the reason why we launch a direct to consumer kids bike line is because we had a brake that prevents you from flipping over the handlebars. We were selling it brick and mortar at the beginning and we were like, you can't tell the story of why this is safer, right? You go to a Walmart aisle, the Walmart kids bike aisle and there's just stuff everywhere. There's zero differentiation. We did it out of strategic necessity to explain why this bike is safer. And secondarily, but this actually became more important, is to build a direct customer relationship, right? And so the point I'm making is that what I hear you saying here is that, like, you're not just leveraging Amazon and DTC as sales channels for just outlets to get transactions recorded.

You're actually strategically leveraging them to build a relationship that you couldn't have otherwise if you had started in brick and mortar, right? So, when we were prepping for this episode, you mentioned something about uncomfortably close relationships with your customers. Can you dive into that a little bit more and how that was, how you engaged in those relationships and then any more that comes to mind about how you leverage those for your success?

Sean Busch (17:30)

Yeah. And Jon, you're a hundred percent right. Like as much as we wanted to be more DTC focused because look, you cut out Amazon stuff. People are just conditioned to Amazon, especially with consumable products. So you had to do the best you could with your product presentation on Amazon, which was a differentiated factor for us in the beginning because even the big brands we competed against just didn't have good descriptions. But yes, when you went to our website, it became this treasure trove of information.

We found what happened was our website never really had great conversion rate because people would go to the site, research us, they'd research our team, they'd research our chemists, they'd research all of the research that we did on all the ingredients we put in our products and the ones that we refused to put in our products. And what it does is it builds trust. And I think that's really, really important when it comes to a brand that has touchpoint with moms and kids. So I think that when you start to kind of build out a repeat purchase rate and like what makes an uncomfortable ⁓ relationship with customers, uncomfortably close. It's a couple elements. So I think one is when you convince somebody to buy your products and we knew that we had one shot with, especially when we came out with our baby care line, like baby shampoo, baby lotion. Those products were such a binary purchasing experience.

And thankfully we tested them so rigorously in labs and with friends and obviously our families that they were very well received. But you have this response from people when they go ahead and they're like, hey, my child has eczema. I've tried this, this, and this, and it doesn't work, your stuff is the only thing that's worked. And all of a sudden you have cheerleaders and you have people that are back about your products. And that is what we tried to build is we tried to build cheerleaders and then you have situations where somebody says, hey, I like this, but like the lavender is a little bit too strong in the scent. And then you get a couple more of those comments and then the next production line, we fix it and we dial it down a little bit. And then I go back to all those people who had, you know, what are Amazon reviews and you try to match them.

Or they wrote us letters or direct messages on social or emails. And I go back to every single one of them and I said, hey, we heard you, we fixed this. Please send me your address, I'm gonna send you a bottle for free, no charge, would love to hear your thoughts on the newest formula. And they go to you like, wait, you listened? And you made a change to the product? And all of sudden it's like boom. So it's the situation where, yeah, it's very manual, but you have a customer base that will sing it from the rooftops when you have pleased them because once you build that trust, you're sort of on the inside at that point, you're a trusted brand.

And so we did a tremendous job of trying to keep a squeaky clean reputation across the board because we wanted to be seen as a really trusted brand. So I think when, you know, you, also have these conversations or longer conversations with customers and reach out and they know that hey I can reach out I'm going to talk to a person I'm going to talk to a person that's actually at this company and not at some hired firm and then I'm going to get results from it and that starts to kind of reach itself out into You know mom discussion groups on Facebook and then know your grassroots style of Exposure through like hey, I have a mommy group locally that I you know, there's ten different moms in it. We're all talking about what's going on about being a parent, hey, all of a sudden this starts to come up as a brand that's trusted. that is, it's an amazing thing. I still get letters to this day, honestly, from customers that are like, you your products have changed our lives and changed our household.

Jon Blair (21:57)

Yeah, it's interesting because when you're scaling a brand, right, ⁓ there are things that you should do that are not scalable, right? Both internally and externally. Like, I'm a big fan of doing things that are not scalable with how we treat our team internally and how we manage our team. Doing things that are not scalable with how we work with our clients. I write a handwritten card to every client when we start working with them and I kind of have this list of people I send cards to on a monthly basis, just things that come up that I'm aware of that are going on in their business or in their life and it's super, it's very much not scalable and I always feel like I'm behind on it if I'm honest with you but you know, it's meaningful, right? ⁓ And actually interestingly enough,

I was so passionate about that when I started Free to Grow three years ago. Like our purpose is to build a profitable business that truly cares for people. That's our purpose statement. And it's important because we do it through e-commerce finance. That's how we care for brand founders. But having that as our purpose reminds me that like how are we caring for people by making this decision, by taking this action. And I'm just like a big believer in the fact that when you build an organization that actually has that soul in one way, shape or form, it just performs better, people are happier and it makes a true difference in the world. And at the end of the day, that's the beautiful thing about business is that ⁓ it's something, yes, it can create financial wealth, it can create financially positive results for everybody involved, right? But.

Sean Busch (23:23)

Yes. ⁓

Jon Blair (23:46)

it can actually make the world a better place above and beyond that in terms of how it changes the world from a product and service perspective, how it changes your employees' lives, and I just think that's really cool. ⁓ One thing I was thinking about as you were talking, and I was thinking about scaling a brand, some of the things that I've seen at Guardian Bikes and that I see our clients who are scaling, dealing with all the time is like, you're seeing success on the marketing side, you're acquiring new customers, you're getting repeat customers your ⁓ sales are going through the roof and inevitably there's operational bottlenecks or potential operational bottlenecks because now all of sudden supply has to keep up, right? And then furthermore when you're trying to scale from a bootstrapped perspective, ⁓ that means you don't have deep outside equity investor pockets to go to when inventory purchases start, you know, start, ⁓ you know, tying up more cash on the balance sheet.

So two things, the first one is negotiating with and partnering with your suppliers. How did you work with them on both pricing and I would say equally as important payment terms so that you could finance the increasing purchases you're having to make to keep up?

Sean Busch (24:49)

Yeah, I love that question because it's so important to the growth of the business. so a couple of points on that. So one, you know, like with DadMode we use the same bottle size. Obviously it's pre-printed, it's custom. But with Puracy we use plastic bottles that were labeled and we ended up sharing a lot of bottles across the product

So we had a lot of shared components across multiple products, which was helpful because you can purchase at larger quantities and you weren't overloading on inventory of bottles. didn't have 12 different bottles, you had like three or four. So that was one. The second one, which then you look down the list of where are your largest expenses? And obviously that's contract manufacturing. So we went into our contract manufacturer, which was our second one, because the first one we outgrew quite quickly. And we had to give them some runway first. We had to start moving some product over. And obviously, you keep that close to the vest because, for a host of reasons really. ⁓ But then, once you get a couple of POs on your belt, they see that you're paying on time. They see that your POs are getting larger. It gives you an opportunity to kind of go in and say, just tell your story. And so we did.

Literally went out there physically, met with them, saw their facility, saw our products getting run, and then sat down with ownership and said, look, here's who we are. We chose you guys because you have a history of taking smaller brands and making them big. So Babyganics was like their big claim to fame that they helped scale them to exit. And I said, you need to kind of work with us from the standpoint of we are...bootstrapped, we don't intend to raise money. We want to continue to grow profit. What what can we do from this right at the time we were in at 30 and What the situation started at which was a leverage point was hey, we're gonna run larger production lines, but we need the first half of it or whatever we spend to Amazon Let's say we'll pay you net 30 on those because we know we're gonna sell them fast, but the other half we need to one store them at your facility and two, pay net 60 on And so, you we had some back and forth on it and credit checks and this and that, and they ended up saying, okay, you know, we'll work with it here. And then as we grew beyond that, we got into the position where, yeah, the numbers got bigger. And again, I think it was critical that we stayed current all the time on our payments.

Jon Blair (27:46)

Yeah.

Sean Busch (27:47)

You obviously have to have your forecasting down and kind of really know your business. And we ended up moving to net 60 on the whole account. And that was a real critical juncture for the brand to be able to cash flow things because you could turn that product and could pay it off in a timely basis because of how, as you know, Amazon is net two or three and they pay fast. So that was a really important part I think to allowing us to go ahead and scale.

Jon Blair (28:20)

Yeah, the super key, like for everyone listening, your partnership with your key suppliers is like, it is one of the most important relationships that you have to maintain as you're scaling a bootstrapped brand. Because things change, things change for them, things change for you, and open communication lines are key. I'm even seeing, ⁓ you know, with the tariffs that recently went in place, like the first move that we're advising everyone to do is sit down with your suppliers.

Talk about how we can get through the next 30 60 90 days together, right? Because it's in everyone's best interest to keep the relationship right and and you're real they're an extension of you and so ⁓ That's a great story and really great advice on on you know how to maintain How to think about partnering with your factory as you continue to scale to make sure that payment terms are working for your bootstrapped brand I want to go now to DadMode

So walk me through kind of ⁓ the birth of DadMode and what you guys are all about.

Sean Busch (29:26)

So when we sold Puracy, I remained on for effectively 30 months afterwards to run the brand. ⁓ were a number of incentives sort of tied to me staying there. it made sense. And frankly, I wanted to. I didn't think that my job was done there. was just more a situation where we had the ability to join a much larger company with a lot more resources. That's something that I never had before.

It also gave me the time to open up my mind because I had been so dialed into Puracy for so long that I hadn't thought about any other businesses. you know, over the course of a few months post-acquisition, I came up with 40 or so business ideas that I jotted down. And I honed in on this one for a couple of reasons. Again, it goes back to like, know what you know, know what you don't know. You'll find something you're good at and make money with it. But I think it intersected an interesting point in the market where COVID had happened, hybrid work environment was at full ⁓ speed at that point. And what you saw was like this accelerated shift of dads contributing more around the household. were just naturally, it's like a dad has taken Zoom calls from the bedroom, dad's gonna chip in with dishes or laundry or taking the kids to school. And that set off a light bulb. And so I did some consumer research with dads in that demo and you just start to go through the whole thing and you start to kind of draw these parallels like, hey, remember what men's grooming was like 10, 15 years ago? It was nothing. And now it's enormous. There's brands everywhere. There's two aisles of Target, two aisles of Walmart. And so you start to go down this path and then you realize there's these hot buttons for dads where, you know, being a superhero in your kid's mind was like a 10 out of 10 for every single dad. Being a great father in your spouse's mind was like a 10 out of 10. Every single dad.

And so what we realized was dads are willing to chip in more around the house. Things have changed fast. Even though now lot of dads are back in the office. And there were no brands that were speaking to them. like, yeah, I'm Mrs. Meyers' lemon verbena, or I'm using 7th generation citrus. And it's like, okay, I'll do it. And that's fine. But yeah, it would be a lot nicer if I could use something that was catered towards me. And then there was the element around scent, you know, there's an element around, these products have to work extremely well. And then this whole, you know, sort of cherry on top, there are two cherries on top, one was around this growing concern around microplastics. And really the fact that all plastic that we use, most of it's not recycled. Overwhelmed majority is not recycled. It, you know, goes into landfills and it leeches into our water systems and then it ends up in our drinking supply. And so I saw this opportunity for, you know, metal aluminum to become the savior there. And then the top one was really, how do we sort of portray this? How do we get men to give a shit about this? And there was this growing body of data around men who do more chores around the house get laid more. And so became this thing where like, well, all right, men are animals again. And like they want to have a better relationship with their kids and their wife. And like, this is sort of the catalyst.

They're already doing it. We're not asking them. We're certainly not trying to tell them to do like an hour more per day at work. So we these products as easy to use and as easy to be as effective in the shortest amount of time possible. And then also layering on this nice masculine scent to kind of show that dad did the work. So that's really how the brand idea was born. There's a lot of other sort of nuances around it, but I saw this and I kind of said, hey, I'm living this right now.

Jon Blair (32:59)

Hahaha

Sean Busch (33:21)

feel like I could be a great spokesperson because I understand the target demographic really well.

Jon Blair (33:27)

So ⁓ I'm curious, ⁓ one thing that you mentioned in prepping for chatting today is valuable content that resonates with your audience. So when you think about DadMode and you've gone through the process of finding content that really connects with your audience, walk me through high level your process and what you found.

Sean Busch (33:57)

It's a lot of fun, honestly. That was like one of the things that stuck out because the Puracy brand built a really clinical brand ⁓ through a lot of product reviews and extra testimonials from doctors. We had a couple of doctors on our staff that would answer questions and write blogs. And that was all fine and dandy, we had no social presence. And the world has shifted a lot since I started that brand. And what I saw was like people were just yearning for humorous education, like edutainment type of content. They want real, they want raw, they want honest. They don't want this sort of polished Instagram lifestyle. And I think that's why TikTok has exploded. It's because people just want this genuine connection. They want to look on the other side of camera and see like, okay, that's a normal person, right? They don't even use filters and they're not using all this makeup and special scenes.

And that's what we saw was like, if we can create this as an example, chore play, right? Dad's just clean mode, get laid more. You know, have this sort of suggestive humor that makes dads laugh when they kind of view our content. If we can have stuff that's like really dumbed down to kind of show, hey, you can spend five minutes a week pre-treating your laundry and like your wife is gonna love you because they don't pull out your son's shirt and there's like a giant stain in the middle. And it's literally a simple as going through the entire laundry pile spraying the stain and then cleaning it whenever you get around to it. There's no special formula that you have to do with scrubbing and it's just wait, let the product do its job. teaching them how to do that, really kind of dumbing it down because a lot of dads just don't know. And then, yeah, all the other humor and I think what we're trying to build into is this resonance about...

you know, how to be a better dad, how to spend more quality time with your kids and just different examples of doing that. And that's really the underlying theme that we're trying to build here on the larger movement scale is really trying to get dads to be more engaged. And again, I think we're the leading generation to do this because our dads weren't that involved, ⁓ most of them generally speaking. And now the dads kind of have access to a lot more resources around, this is what it looks like. We kind of want to be out there talking about it just a little bit.

Jon Blair (36:27)

I love it, that vision and purpose is near and dear to my heart as a dad of a six, four and two year old who's building a business working from home. ⁓ So I truly love that. I'm curious, now having scaled more than one brand and exited one successfully and having the rigor around profitability because of bootstrapping from your perspective, imagine yourself sitting across the table from a first time e-comm brand founder who doesn't necessarily know the difference. To you, how valuable is clean financial reporting and a CFO or CFO level advice as you're scaling a bootstrapped brand?

Sean Busch (37:14)

I'll put it this way. ⁓ In some other interviews I've done, people ask me like, hey, what's the biggest regret we had with Puracy? And my number one answer, unequivocally every time, not hiring a CFO student. When we moved into retail, that was phase one of it getting pretty sticky, because we had to reduce our retails. And then when I say reduce our retails, that was reduce our retails for retail and online and our cash conversion cycles went to hell because retail is a joke. And then you have to home a lot more inventory and then COVID hit and then trying to buy components in the early parts of COVID. And then, you know, as I mentioned before, we shared bottles, for instance, we shared sprayers and closures. So you might over it for one product and then you get bumped back in line. And then all of sudden you now have five products out of stock.

Jon Blair (37:49)

Totally.

Sean Busch (38:13)

because you can't buy other bottles. And so, and then once you say, okay, we're gonna buy more, you know, we're triple our order, we're gonna just sit on a ton of inventory, then your marketing team's like, where'd my budget go? You're like, well, a bootstrap, I have it. So that's always been my number one ⁓ call out was a CFO has to be there. And then when I look at it from DadMode we, you know, just so happens because I trust him and what he did towards the end of that business to help us get to exit was big. We brought on our former Puracy CFO to be a to be a formal advisor to the company because him and I worked so well together. He knows the landscape. He's worked in CPG almost his entire career and paramount. And then we also hired a accountant/controller on a fractional basis.

And when we went out and we did our friends and family seed raise, people were like, whoa, you guys are really buttoned up. And I said, you can't not be. You absolutely have to be. Especially now where you don't have these, like you said, back in 2015, 2014 with Amazon, it was kind of awesome, right? You kind of put stuff on there and you get some reviews and things sold. And now it's, you know, it's like 15 ads on every page. So everything is very expensive. And now you have all the big players have woken up think you have to be extremely disciplined in that fashion from a financial standpoint. And you might have push and pull, you should frankly. The CFO is, I have a friend who's a CFO who says he is the king of unpopular opinions. That is how it kind of titles his role. But it is for a reason. And you have to respect them for what they're doing for your organization. You know their job is to go ahead and money. That is their job.

Jon Blair (40:04)

For sure. Well, and actually if you think about it, like one way to describe what is the role of a CFO, they're the chief capital allocator in your business. And if you are bootstrapped, that means inherently by saying we're bootstrapped, there's a finite amount of capital to allocate. So there's a trade-off to every dollar you allocate to one area of the business, that means it can't be allocated to another, right? And so it's of the utmost importance and obviously that's why we do what we do at Free to Grow CFO. ⁓ Not having that advice makes running a brand which is already stressful, way more stressful. And we're here to help remove some of that stress by giving guidance ⁓ and solutions to capital allocation constraints and trade-offs. unfortunately we gotta land the plane here, but before we do, I'm curious, I always like to ask a personal question on the show. And I'm curious for you, what's a little known fact about Sean that people might find shocking or surprising?

Sean Busch (41:13)

goodness. ⁓

So I think...

Look, I'm very passionate about great, safe cleaning products, products that are good for the environment. I'm passionate about the sort of plastic movement or anti-plastic movement, and that's why we created aluminum bottles and single-use refill pouches that weigh almost nothing. But...

love cars and I love gas powered cars. I always think about that. There's a line that I will be the last holdout for an electric vehicle. ⁓ I get them, I understand them. I think they're great to the people that care about them, but there's something about the roar of a V8 that ⁓ just gets my blood going. And I know they're not great for the environment. I work from home so I don't put lot of miles on it but I used to have a diesel truck, same thing. So that's like one of the things that as passionate as I am, ⁓ there are limits.

Jon Blair (42:23)

can't be perfect man, we all have our things and as the founder of a brand called DadMode I feel like you're, it's okay that you like gas powered vehicles. Well Sean, this was amazing. For all of you out there listening, you might want to listen to this one a couple times. This is chocked full of really awesome advice about how to scale not just one but two, you know, bootstrap brands. Before we do, break here though, where can people find more information about you and about your brand DadMode?

Sean Busch (42:59)

Yeah, so for me, obviously this podcast and LinkedIn for DadMode, it's godadmode.com. We also sell on Amazon and we also sell on TikTok shops. So those are the three areas you can find us. We should be moving into retail stores next spring. And that's going to be an exciting position for us to be in. That's really why we built the brand. The way we did was to launch online, get a ton of data and use that to help craft our content and acquisition strategy as we head into a retail.

So I think that sort of covers it. But yeah, we built out our website to be pretty detailed and rigorous and should cover everything. But again, it's one of those things where we are always keeping our ear to the ground. And if you want to learn something new about our products and it's not out there, then we'll make content on it. If you want to see it used in a certain way, we'll make content on it. And for now, for foreseeable future, I will be the one talking to you on the other side.

So, don't be a stranger.

Jon Blair (44:07)

love it man. Definitely check out DadMode. I'm probably gonna have to check it out by virtue of running a business from home. There's this joke actually. ⁓ I'll sweep the whole house when I'm on a call that I don't have to be on video. I'm on my phone and Andrea, my wife, will come home and go, were you on some calls today? Because the house is all swept. I'm probably, I'm your target market man. I'm gonna check it out for sure. So appreciate you coming on and look everyone.

Don't forget if you want more helpful tips on scaling a profit-focused DTC brand, consider following me, Jon Blair, on LinkedIn. And if you're interested in learning more about how Free to Grow's DTC accountants and fractional CFOs can help your brand increase profit and cash flow as you scale, check us out at FreeToGrowCFO.com. And until next time, scale on. Thanks, Sean.

Sean Busch (44:54)

Thank you, Jon.

Sherilee Maxcy
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