From $700K in Debt to $100 Million | MaryRuth Ghiyam's Empire

listen every company is always going to mess up there's so many things we can't control but but i think it's like at least giving people the space to communicate make something right i think if anyone called our customer service they would see that people are just trying we're just trying to help hey founder fam welcome back to another episode today we're speaking with mary ruth guillaume and she's the co-founder of mary ruth organics and she's taken this business in the past eight years from 700k in debt to over a hundred million dollars a year in annual revenue this is an incredible business an amazing story you do not want to miss this so mary ruth thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today the first question we ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today um first of all thank you so much for having me on the podcast and i started my brand eight years ago um really in 2013 but we didn't have products until 2014 but in 2013 i had in new york city on 47th and 3rd a private practice with nutrition clients that was just one-on-one and i was sharing with them a concept called liquids to lunch which is just it was kind of before its time a lot of people have heard of this kind of thing by now but liquid cilantro is just having a smoothie or green juice or vegetable broth until lunch time and everyone would say all of our clients and they were very busy career-driven professionals in new york city oh i love doing liquids to lunch but every time i take a vitamin capsule while doing liquids to lunch i'm so nauseous and that actually gave me the idea to start our product line and make our very first product which was the liquid morning raspberry multivitamin which today we have over 130 products but it's still our number one best-selling product which is special because it wasn't an idea that i had it was actually an idea that i got from taking care of people and i haven't taken care of people my entire life so um that that was really the seed level of what is today mary ruth organics and um and there's so much to go into even just building that product line from an i was in a tremendous amount of debt but that's really where it started yeah wow so look um when uh your team reached out to us they said yeah you went from seven hundred thousand dollars in debt to creating over a hundred million dollar wellness empire um so can you tell us a little bit more about like yeah what like how did that how what happened yes so um and and i it's so amazing you have such an amazing podcast with so many people listening who i know are are doing very much the same thing maybe starting from zero starting from a deficit and something important for everyone to know about that seven hundred thousand dollars in debt is that was the most painful type of debt possible which is that was money and i'll explain where it came from that i owed to my friends and to my family and credit card debt um and i was able it took me seven years to get out of debt but i was able to pay each of those people back with about eight or nine percent interest and i was in a debt management program for credit cards but where that money came from was i grew up very spoiled um my dad and my seven-year-old brother daniel passed away suddenly and then my mom who's so amazing she's she was actually the cfo of our company for eight years but um we just hired a new cfo in november um she it was so amazing that she took over my dad's business but there were some things that weren't in alignment meaning she was running this business at the time it was a lumber business that had 300 employees 89 million dollars in revenue in six locations and then the housing market crashed so lehman brothers crashed and that whole thing kind of let left us in after she had to shut down that business and sell those locations um left us in personal debt of seven hundred thousand dollars so just my mom and i and a couple years went by and i started this new business which i have today um and what's important to know is that before we had product line i had to pay about sixty thousand forty thousand dollars it was it was anywhere each month was anywhere between forty thousand and sixty thousand dollars to pay for my apartment my mom's apartment in new york city my office apartment which was regis which is very similar to weworks yes um just so to pay two apartments an office building and all of my debt management program plus the money that i had to pay monthly payments to each person that i owed money to um and i was able to make about forty thousand dollars a month through signing up people one-on-one for my private 12 sessions of nutrition so i still remember nathan the the magic number was uh 12 sessions 12 session package for 2 800 and 60 a month and i would sign up like 20 people a month and i would keep going and i had this business model that is not truly sustainable when you're in that kind of debt where and i and i was making it work i got married in 2013 that's the year that i launched that private practice and i really was making it work um and i was paying off all of that debt but it was i mean i didn't really see how i could get any leverage and so it was kind of like the perfect storm my husband said to me and and maybe later on i'll tell you the story that i think that a lot of founders would like about a choice i had to make whether i was going to marry my husband or not that had a lot to do with a financial decision but um i said okay i'm going to make a product and this product is going to be the liquid morning multivitamin and for six months i called all the manufacturers and no one is gonna take a run for a custom blend product for 90 bottles no one right if you're gonna do a custom blend with a manufacturer you've got to have at least like twenty thousand dollars yeah because like moq's like a few thousand right at least yes at least at the very least and i told this one manufacturer so i'm in new york and she's in california i said i promise if you make this liquid morning raspberry multivitamin remember the first product now we have 130 products but that's still our best seller i said i promise you someday will be your biggest account and someday we became so big that we had to leave them but we obviously parted on good terms um but but the point is that she shipped those 90 bottles to my 580 square foot apartment in new york city and i took i think 60 of those bottles to my office and my husband had made the label on his laptop and printed it out and sent it to the to the manufacturing um facility and i shipped like 20 of them to amazon and that was before amazon was cool nathan so that was way before i mean we were on an airplane once and my husband said some guy was like oh what do you do i'm like oh we sell vitamins on amazon and my husband elbowed me and said shh don't tell people you sell products on amazon um because at the time it was furniture and books and a few other things and um and so what happened was my private clients reviewed the product like 20 people without me even asking and it went into the algorithm of amazon it went to the first page and there was no sugar in this vitamin that's what made it different than the other liquid vitamins it's just glycerin makes it sweet the raspberry uh flavors and we started selling i remember crying the first saturday we sold like 250 worth of vitamins and i i honestly could see a path of like getting to do what i love getting to help people deliver this amazing product and i saw that i would not be the only one digging us out of this 700 000 in debt and honestly there's so much to unpack here i i i can't wait to share with you um how much we grew each year but we grew it to over 100 million in revenue with zero outside funding and we were profitable from day one and i'm sure as you know it usually takes companies about two years to turn a profit and there were things that we did that were extremely strategic that i believe in very much and we did them by ourselves my mom and i and then eventually my husband started to help us as well yeah that's amazing well let's uh let's dive into to the products and and that journey so like um i'm curious first of all before we get into some of the strategic things that you did you said that um you had to make a choice what was that choice what was the one decision that you had control over right because in business everything happens every day that we have really no control over but there was one choice so i'm 37 years old there was one choice along the way that allows me to be here on the podcast with you today and it was am i going to marry someone i love very much who has no money or am i going to marry someone else who is very interested in me at the time who has about 20 million in the bank and i had to make a decision and i married david and were born on the same day same year february 11 1984 and he's born three hours before me and we were very much in love but also we've gotten to grow this amazing business together but at that time when we're living in new york city and i'm in all of that debt you know seven hundred 000 is is it's overwhelming um and knowing that this other person in our group of friends that i could i could go you know be with this person but he's not the person that i love so much um was was one of the most important decisions i ever made because if i if i had married him i i would not have this company at all and my whole team we have 110 employees and we're honestly so close and and so i think that that's important for people have to make all kinds of decisions and i knew i grew up with very loving parents and so i think i've always had a lot of self-esteem even maybe delusional self-esteem where i knew like i can get myself out of this problem i don't know how but i don't need anyone external to help me and so i was able to just make the decision to marry david and and to go forward seriously by myself um trying to to put the business together and and i think that that's important for anyone listening that i do believe if you are dedicated enough and you manage your time correctly that you can be the cause of your life and not the effects that's the that's the best feeling yeah wow um thank you for sharing and you know just around all this and the journey did you ever feel like giving up um because seven years is a long time to recover from debt like how did you stay optimistic i think sometimes with any challenge in any problem you this is just my personal belief you don't have to know the answer but you have to manage your time correctly and so another big thing is that i've done time blocking for the last 15 years of my life i actually calculated that i've done time blocking for over 130 000 hours and time blocking really allowed me to never lose momentum or motivation um and connect like small micro actions to a macro dream or viewpoint i mean honestly throughout throughout from 2013 i got out of debt a couple weeks now a couple months before i gave birth to my first child so also um i'm the ceo of our company not just the founder um so i'm i'm in a lot of obviously operational meetings all day long and i also had four children in the last four years so that can get a little messy i have a four-year-old a three-year-old and and two twins that are 15 months old um but i used like the time blocking um to always push me forward even if i felt like i was just treading water it was something that i go back to every single day within a 24 hour period and it gives me inspiration to keep going even if you feel like i'm about to lose a motivation um after 15 years of time blocking i mean i mean i have it right in front of me here um oh what is that what is that can you show us so i actually made these time blocking journals um for my 110 employees so you see this yeah so every day it says the day of the week you write down what you're going to do and then you you have to do it the day before you slayed out exactly what's going to happen yes um i was in customer care and eos leadership managing director meetings all day and i knew i had this podcast and it was on that time blocking sheet and i also use these scissors and they're not even here for the podcast they're just here because that's generally what i do at my desk all day long and as i go like i cut along and what's most important is that so many challenges come up and you don't get to do everything that you set out to do every day at all um already accepting that people are going to interrupt you all day long is actually a great way to move forward and so you just keep shifting all the priorities to the next time blocking sheet and again i have done this every single day for 15 years and you even put in fun things you want to do um like go for a walk outside and it just keeps you going and and if it were not for time blocking i promise you nathan i absolutely a hundred percent would have lost motivation along the way it's just such a micro thing that i attached to macro um and it helps me be a part of my children's life and a part of all of my employees lives and we teach it at our company every quarter we have a time blocking worksheet workshop every once a month we have a book club that's kind of related to this and a fun lunch we do every single week uh every single month so yeah wow very interesting so with the time blocking you're basically accounting for every hour of the day every day do you ever have time where it is not blocked and it's just kind of free time so many people who love to time block absolutely have time free time where they're not time blocking um but as a mother of four very young children it doesn't really look like that for me but but there's nice things like uh at 7 pm it'll say measure jacob's foot and order sneakers so you know the real life thing or um you know change the car seat to a booster seat whatever it is but it's someone's birthday you're going to go to dinner with someone it's all there but also there's something about the paper the see there's so much digital stuff it's easy to be like well i'll just work on the budget the annual budget review next time with my cfo you know it keeps you more um in order yeah love it well thank you for sharing so as you've scaled mary ruth organics like has have you ensured that the vision remains protected this is such an amazing question um because this is mostly i like to do everything in chronological order and so i'm very very involved operationally sometimes we have obviously an org chart at our company but i still like to insert myself in meetings that maybe traditionally a ceo would not be in um in order to really gauge like what's what is the collective consensus of how our employees are feeling so we have a very high employee retention rate i would say i mean we have a hundred for the first four years we didn't hire any employees that's actually how we were profitable we would take any profit and make new products instead our instead of hiring new employees then in the last four years we hired we went from like 10 employees 20 employees to in 2020 we hired 55 employees and then in 2021 we went over 110 and we've maybe lost like six or seven employees along the way and it was more just for things like they had autoimmune disease and they needed to take time off so one we have a high employee retention rate and i think it has to do with communication so there's a couple things that i've put into the structure of our company that allow for i would say non-traditional communication which is uh i meet with one employee a day for 10 minutes a couple times a week so that means i know everyone on our team meaning just having that 10 minutes um it's it's it's life-changing like if anyone is listening even if you have a team of 20 if you take you could do two people a week 10 minutes in person or on zoom and it's not even like anything about the company it's just like i just want to hear something about your life if you'd like to share and i just did one two days ago and one of the customer care representatives was saying that they both their children just went back to school and they're growing herbs in their garden and they're going to donate the herbs to an a you know a special location and we also have a company culture meeting once a month where we invite 10 people a month until we hit over 110 so and i'm in that meeting for 45 minutes and there's a whole agenda and i get to hear from 10 people plus human resources we have a confidential suggestion box that i personally read and my mom personally reads every friday night so hr i'll send it and i get to read the feedback we have anonymous surveys so we do a couple anonymous surveys and we did one last year in march it was 54 questions everything from diversity equity and inclusion to how do you feel about your supervisor do you feel like there's room to grow compensation and benefits and every question was rated on a scale of one to five and i asked human resources if we could divide it into everyone who's been at my company over one year and everyone has been at the company under one year so everyone ought new getting onboarded because i was very confident that everyone has been with me longer will actually score higher than the new hires and in that anonymous survey 54 questions on a scale of one to five everyone who's been here for over one year was scored in every category above a four and then everyone who's been here under one year in every single category we scored above a four except for compensation and benefits we scored a 3.88 which is not a bad thing because they're brand new and and as as they grow we do a lot of raises and um just a few more things we at the end of every year we give a bonus to every single person in the company based off of how long they've been here and a couple other sliding scales um so that's also like a big big happy day like every managing director gives it to the direct reports it's very inspiring and then this year we rolled out a long-term incentive plan um for every single employee domestic and international so everyone's kind of part of that lti and and then like i mentioned before every single month we have book club which is my book liquids to lunch where everyone just shares and then the time blocking workshop and then the company the fun lunches which i go to all i go to all this i'm teaching the book club and i'm teaching the time blocking and fun lunch yesterday 45 minutes we did name that tune so we divide into teams name natun then we do karaoke trivia scavenger hunts just kind of there's like many things like this but i think that the more you invest in it personally a lot of times like you're the founder or the ceos pulled out which is important in certain areas but i think they should also if their personality is inclined i think by injecting yourself more um you can build the strongest team and and together you're gonna get through all the obstacles and all the challenges yeah amazing thank you for sharing and i'd love to talk about uh staying bootstrapped so um has that always been your plan um and have you ever considered uh outside capital so we actually took our very first investment deal in august a couple months ago so august of 2021 so um in the beginning we were we really didn't think much about it and so we would grow each year and then we could i think we could have kept going for 18 more months without doing a minority investment deal um but our goal is to take our company public on the stock market in early 2025 so we thought like now is a good time to take out a minority partnership due due diligence right so to make it through your first round of funding due diligence took us 10 months it was so intense um was such an amazing stake in the ground for us because when you i mean i'm sure as you know when you can pass due diligence it's really saying to the world like who you say your company is internally is external internal and external are really matching so that was like an amazing moment for us um for my mom and i um as as female founders i think you know only three percent of funding out you know outside funding goes to women every single year and only .64 goes to minority women so that was a big deal for us and i think i definitely wanted to give up a few times along the way and we took on an investment deal from an amazing private equity fund named butterfly who their whole portfolio is either certified b corp or about to be b corp so we're in the middle of becoming certified b corp so um yes but along the way what allowed us to kind of bootstrap and do it ourselves was this understanding of cash flow and financial freedom and most importantly our negative cash flow conversion cycle um which allowed us to for those of you who are listening just ask our manufacturers to deliver products and allow us to pay them like three months out always creating allowing us to sell the product and take that cash flow and create a negative cash flow conversion cycle like walmart's has um and that's why walmart is able to grow and scale interesting so what are some of the other things that you guys did strategically to get to over 100 million in annual revenue before taking on outside capital one of the most important takeaways i think for anyone who's listening is that it's so important to go slow and to be patient i i'm slowing down so that people will really think about what i'm saying um there's a quote everyone overestimates what they can do in one year and underestimates what they can do in 10 years so if i'm 37 if you go back 10 years i'm 27 um i didn't even have a business then and to go from such debt to a healthy company um was done one day at a time in a very patient way so for example in the beginning we i i literally i'm not even joking when i said that i was on qvc last night last night was the first time in my eight-year career that i had a photographer come for 200 to take some professional photo shoot i did not take any professional photos for eight years because i was always very busy trying to run our business and it wasn't about like the right landing page or taking my photos or my business card or any of those things i'm not putting down anyone who has taken professional photos but i'm just trying to share that the most important thing to us was like how we grew against all odds was like we have really delicious products like they're very delicious so people enjoy it and then look forward to taking the delicious high quality product we take compliance and quality assurance very seriously and then we really focused on customer care like if we take care of one person we do a good job they're going to tell their friend so for years we didn't have marketing spends so we weren't just like everyone thinks actually actually it was on one podcast and they said sometimes what happens is if you take an investment early on it gives you a false sense of uh like being invincible like now we have all this cash let's just uh run a billboard campaign and and pay it in influence or half a million by the way and i'm not knocking anyone at all my comments are more for people who are feeling like the underdog or like oh my goodness is is is my business ever going to go anywhere um i'm here to say that i think through time blocking and a lot of patience and not spending any money you don't have like no spending no money zero money that you don't have so that's really what we did we said like okay we got seven hundred thousand dollars in debt we bought ninety bottles of vitamins we're gonna sell some in my office we're gonna sell some on amazon we're gonna get a little check we're gonna buy a little more inventory and we're gonna keep going and then the key i actually was at a dinner nathan recently with some very big founders you would know all of these these companies but we all started about the same time and two of the founders i i kind of just they're my close friends i kind of just want to say who they are but we found out something the three of us did in common was that we all didn't hire any employees for the first four years and that's so powerful trust me like think of two of the biggest collagen brands or smoothie brands that you can think of right now that's two of the guys literally we were all sitting at avra in beverly hills and literally they said i said when did you hire first employee we all said four years in and that was so key because patience right like we're not gonna get an assistant that costs fifty or sixty 000 instead we're going to take the 50 or 60 000 and make another product that we want to sell to help people's lives and so um those little things like that's what allowed us to kind of just have free will because financial stability financial freedom is free will a lot of times like that's where it gets sticky in business like if if you're not watching the cash flow and the balance sheet carefully you might have to take on more rounds of funding and more rounds of funding and then all of a sudden oh my gosh you you're forced to go public because there's no other no other funding is going to work and and so for those who are brand new and listening i think the better way is instead of rushing it i actually said no to a lot of investment deals and i think that that's what allowed us to kind of get to this place where we were more in control yeah amazing and also um one thing that you guys have done really really well is showing behind the scenes of your life on social media why is this important to you i think it just goes back to what i was sharing earlier in the podcast like i genuinely enjoy being at the fun lunch with my team and teaching book club and hearing about their lives and i answer quite a lot of direct messages on my own still through voice memos so i'll read like 20 or 30 of them after my children are sleeping and i'll reply with a voice memo and i the strategy in the beginning was not to have like certain branding or certain marketing spend it was more just like it was literally the message was just like i am here my whole team is here we want to answer all your questions we want to help you and and for me that works i hope we're going to get a blue check soon like two weeks ago on instagram i filled out the uh forum where you can send in like six or seven pieces of media um yeah so um i hope the blue check is coming but the truth is just that i just i just felt like this this is my life and and i showed all my pregnancies and i really share everything there but it's just because i just want people to know like this is really me and my mom and my husband and my family and our whole team yeah amazing thank you for sharing and you guys have over a hundred thousand five star reviews uh like you have an army of really loyal customers what's your philosophy on like building these relationships at scale with your customers because that is something that is very enviable i have this favorite saying i used it today um in in one of the management meetings for customer care i i say it all the time though it's just called no stone left unturned so i once read something about how if you ignore someone um it releases something a chemical in their brain that's the same as like a bodily injury meaning like ignoring someone is is very bad um and so kind of the theme of like internal matches external like at our company we're definitely like over communicators we love the app called slack if anyone's listening and you're not on slack um i highly recommend this app um for team building and so even in our company i get back to everyone um because i think it's so important i know it's not always scalable but i think if you have certain chain of commands certain things can be scalable and the same thing with our customers we try our very best we have 40 people we have customer care 24 7. so a lot of times it's like 8 a.m to 5 30 only on eastern standard time like we have customer service 24 7 36 365 except this year we did give christmas a break but that was the first time in eight years and so we try to be like through phone calls through chat listen every company is always gonna mess up there's so many things we can't control um like 59 of complaints are our shipping problems right that's not really always our fault you know so um but we just try to be there for people and we're not trying to say that we're we're so great and we mess up all the time um but but i think it's like at least giving people the space to communicate make something right and i think like the hundred thousand five star reviews comes from delicious products all our products are vegan all our products are non-gmo um 57 of them are certified usca certified organic with 18 more almost certified organic on the way i think just i think if anyone called our customer service they would see that people are just trying we're just trying to help yeah awesome and look uh really conscious of your time we have to work towards wrapping up but this has been an amazing conversation you've been so open honest giving very clear you know your stuff you know your numbers like to to the latter it's impressive um so what's the the long-term vision here for you know mary ruth organics 10 years from now you said in the next what three years you guys are looking to ipo but yeah what does 10 years from now look like what's the long-term vision so a couple things that were really important for me personally is a lot of the people that we hired um i'm so excited for and we want to go ipo in 2025 early 2025 and i think that that's also amazing for a lot of the people on my team um to have financial empowerment through through all the years that they've been working on the business it's it's also uh very it's very meaningful for me i think 80 is i think about 80 of our company is women and um so just like from an internal perspective i feel like that is going to be i mean it's three years out and we all talk about all the all the time in the monthly reporting and our board meetings in growing our company we want to build the the vision of what we're trying to do is we want to be one of like the top five companies in the world to work for and one of the top companies in the world to purchase something from so these are kind of shared common goals with with our whole team and and i think that that goes along with the internal external theme like to work for us to be a good company to work for and a good company to purchase something from is really closing the loop it's very exciting i want to truly um also lead my company as the ceo i read you probably already know this but in the last like 100 years there's only been 22 companies that were female founded um and that not just founded but also the person the woman was the ceo at the time the company went public so it's only 22 um so that's also meaningful for us there weren't a lot of cpg companies there was a lot of digital tech companies and i i admire everyone who's done this i'm hoping that that will that will be achievable for us um and i want to be a part of my company for like the next like 60 years i i i think if i couldn't wake up every morning and do this it would feel like uh i had a lot of energy and and know where to use that energy and i hope that we can help so many people just go to their next level i'll say this as a closing remark when i made the first product that i spoke about the liquid morning multivitamin and raspberry we also made one it was a nighttime multi-mineral so they were made at the same time and sold at the same time and it's what really put us on the map because it created a little routine for everyone so in the morning they take the raspberry morning multi and at night before they go to bed they take the magnesium nighttime one for sleep so it's like putting these two little anchors in people's routine within a 24-hour period it's like i take my shot in the morning i take my shot before bed and that's kind of why it spread was it's part of a routine and like i had mentioned before i had overcome like a lot of loss and death in my life and other challenges and i always moved forward because i had this routine and for me the time blocking was like a huge part of that routine and i hope that my company can bring time blocking to the world help everyone create a routine within a 24-hour period that allows them to live a healthier life we actually have a billboard campaign we want to do in the fall which is like half time blocking sheets on a billboard and it'll be like a four-year-old and he'll be smiling and he'll say like at 7 a.m he takes his multi-vitamin gummy um so that's really what we're here i mean that's that's honestly the truth of what we say at my company in our internal meetings that we're going to bring time blocking to the world help people create a routine help them go to their next level it's very exciting and i honestly appreciate the opportunity to come on your podcast oh you're welcome well look uh we'll move to the rapid fire questions um we've got three questions 60 second answers um so what's the one trait you need to be successful perseverance what's the secret to having almost no staff turnover the secret is if you have at least under 200 employees please get to know every single person's name get to know what seat they're in and if you're using slack on the first day they get onboarded it's nice to make them a slack voice memo that just says like hi i'm so excited to have a second person in the it department we're so excited that you're here if you ever need anything please slack me awesome and uh last one if you could have dinner with any entrepreneur dead or alive who would it be and why okay so this is phenomenal question um oh my goodness i i'm gonna say martha stewart um only because i i i love she had over 100 cookbooks i think what she has done and did um is unique i i didn't know about her for a long time or really understand um i think what she did um but i hope no one is going to judge my answer on the podcast um and if we're talking about inspiring movies i loved king richard and i loved the michael jordan last dance so those are two like really inspiring films oh awesome thank you for sharing no no judgment here um well awesome look conscious of your time but uh yeah thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us uh yeah it was an amazing interview really appreciate your time and congratulations on all your success thus far really inspiring journey thank you so much nathan hey guys hope you're loving our videos and you're getting heaps of value from them if you are make sure to hit the like button and make sure to subscribe to join the founder fam if you did enjoy this video and want to 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Channel: Foundr Stories

Views: 13,131

Keywords: ecommerce empire, maryruth, mary ruth, mary ruth's liquid multivitamin, successful women in business, women ceo, gretta van riel, selling products online, shopify, maryruth products, debt recovery, success stories, evan carmichael, goalcast, inspirational video

Id: 47WNY6D1IHU

Length: 42min 32sec (2552 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022