Marc Lafleur from truLOCAL

Sam: Marc, welcome to Beyond the Inbox. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Marc: I'm excited to be here. I was listening to a couple of your previous episodes, so I'm happy to contribute.

Sam: That's great to hear. I want to start by asking you about your background and how a job as a door-to-door meat salesman in 2016 led you to co-found truLOCAL.

Marc: Yeah, I think, like a good chunk of founders that I know, I have a similar story where their business sort of fell on their lap. Like it wasn't anything they were really planning for. So when I went to the University of Waterloo for health to get a health degree, I didn't really see door-to-door meat sales in my future. But what ended up happening is that the University of Waterloo is a really entrepreneurial school. So a lot of it is focused on co-op. They have tons of resources for startups and founders.

And I started kind of entering that world when my buddy came home, he was my roommate. And he's like, you know what? You talk really fast. Why don't you give sales a shot? And I had never done any sort of real job. I always did sort of little summer jobs working for the city mowing lawns. And factory work. So this was like this really big exciting opportunity for me. And I did that part-time in university just to kind of help pay for student loans and residence. And I did that for about two years.

And then once I graduated, I had the opportunity to go and open my own branch with this company. So I did that. And we just killed it. I was one of the only young people there and being fresh out of university. This was in 2015. So they didn't even have a Facebook page. They didn't have logos, they didn't have branding. And I had just finished doing this student brand manager program with Red Bull and Red Bull being the marketing juggernaut that it is. I think a lot of that washed off.

So it was pretty easy to come into this random door-to-door meat sale company and say, hey, look, there are a couple really easy things that you can do to just modernize. And that's going to help with a lot of credibility when you're knocking on people's doors saying, hey, do you want a free sample of meat, right? So it was an awesome job to have, I think, as a student because I always say you should do factory work and you should do a sales job when you're young because those are the two jobs that I've built some skills that will kind of carry you through your life.

So I essentially did that for four years in total. And it got to a point where I saw what was happening with ecommerce. I saw what was happening with DTC. You had these sort of fairy tale stories coming out of the meal kit industry out of the U.S.—obviously, this sort of rise and fall story of Blue Apron, but there were Canadian companies doing the same thing. And we figured, okay, that's a proven business model.

Why don't we take the fact that we have this really unique knowledge base and skill set in meat and just apply best practices of ecommerce and direct-to-consumer into that and see if we can make a run at it. And that's essentially when truLOCAL was born. And I'll never forget, our company sort of laughed us out of the room when we suggested this. So of course, as the tale would go, a month later we quit, did it ourselves, and within four years became their biggest competitor. So that's pretty much how door-to-door meat sales led me to truLOCAL.

Sam: I have so many follow-up questions. I think I want to go in the direction of how you scaled the business. I'm curious, what are some of the key strategies you use to build the brand in the beginning and grow the customer base?

Marc: Yeah, I think, of course, everybody wants to know what the silver bullet was. And I think people get really disappointed when they hear how boring it is. And that the answer is there is no silver bullet. The reality is that we just did a really good job of iterating through different channels and ideas and figuring out what would stick, doubling down on that, and then whenever that got saturated because that's the thing people don't really realize that much is that every single channel is going to become obsolete. If you get six months out of a channel, like where it's really this growth lever for you, then that's amazing.

But very often, you get kind of, one or two bullets in the chamber and then you've got to move on to the next thing. But if you stagnate on the one thing that's working, you're very quickly going to get beat by the competitors that are moving through all the different channels and opportunities. So for us, I kind of looked at the four years that we were building truLOCAL aggressively. And it started off just with a typical ground and pound. It was just me and my co-founder. We had no money. We just put the money that we had into the business.

So we didn't have money to invest in ads. So we would do things like just go to trade shows. We would go to gyms. Gyms were a really big opportunity for us. And we didn't know it was going to be that way. My co-founder and I worked out. And the gym community, especially around CrossFit, was obviously pretty fanatical about any of the things that they were involved in. So us being able to get into that market was sort of like the year-one type thing. And what ended up happening there was that we would literally just do pop-up shops. So we would show up at 5 p.m.

And they'd have maybe four gym classes into the evening. And we'd bring this little banner, which we spent all of our money on—this little banner thing—and we would just stand there between the classes and just hand out samples and ask people if they wanted to subscribe. And that worked out really well because we would get like five or six sales a night by doing that. But what ends up happening with these channels is that as your business grows, you get to a point where your business outgrows whatever acquisition channel you're using.

So you got to a point where five or six sales a night just wasn't cutting it for us anymore. But the good thing about moving on from there is that by growing the business that way, we were now at a size where we could start to invest in paid advertising. So the year after that, I would say it's kind of like the year of Facebook for us. So maybe 2016. And that's the first time we started actually looking to scale Facebook ads. And of course, we went through the entire spectrum of, all these paid advertising channels.

We did Facebook, we did Instagram, we did Google, we did Amazon, we did Pinterest, we did all of these different things. And you start to realize, every marketer's biggest enemy is multi-channel attribution, right? So just understanding, okay. Well, Google ads are actually significantly cheaper for us to acquire customers. Let's just pour all of our money into Google and take it away from Facebook. Uh-oh, well guess what? Now our search volume has decreased because people are not seeing us at the top of the funnel through our Facebook ads. So it was this beautiful art of trying to manage the levers of paid advertising.

So that was sort of year-two for us moving on from there. We ended up going really deep into partnerships. Oh, sorry, actually. No, this would have been the year that we did affiliate marketing. So paid advertising was getting a little bit saturated. We started seeing the CPAs rising on Facebook, but it was still a core fundamental part of the business. So as we were transitioning through all of these different channels, so let's say gyms, trade shows, the sort of core in-person marketing, just because it wasn't cutting it from a growth perspective, didn't mean we just dropped it.

We would just incorporate it as a smaller part of the business and the marketing strategy, but it was still there. Similarly, with Facebook, we did about a year or two of that being the number one focus, but what ended up happening is once that started to taper off a little bit, we moved over to affiliates because that was starting to rise up and people wanted a marketing channel that would give you the same reach as Facebook and paid advertising, but had a little bit more of a referral-style stickiness to the customers that were coming on, sort of like that peer-to-peer recommendation.

But that didn't mean that we dropped Facebook completely. Once again, it became more of a support and a backbone of the marketing program. So affiliates, we actually did that really hard for a while. So at our peak, we were onboarding, between 80 and 100 micro-influencers every month. And then on the alternating month, we bring on maybe three to five sort of big-time, large influencers. And essentially the idea was to just test to see what made more sense: micro-influencers that are 20,000 and below or the sort of mega influencers who have more than 500,000 followers across whatever channel.

So we did that for a while. Great experience. What we got out of it was essentially what everybody gets out of it, which is 20 percent of your influencers or affiliates are going to be responsible for 80 percent of your volume. And you can never predict who it's going to be. You can go ahead and be, for us, truLOCAL, obviously, we did locally raised meat products.

You can go ahead and find the biggest celebrity chef out there who is exclusively on the carnivore diet and have them bring in, 20 sales, but you could find, the mommy blogger down the road with 10,000 followers who makes one post and you end up with 100 sales and they've done an SEO-optimized blog and it's just this sort of just thing that you got to test. So that was the year of our affiliates and then the last year essentially we moved on.

And that was one that we actually kind of cut a little bit more cold turkey when we realized that only 20 percent of our affiliates and influencers were adding any value. So what we did was keep the ones that were doing well, cut the ones that weren't and then moving on from there, we did partnerships. So partnerships became a huge thing for us. We got this deal with WW, formerly Weight Watchers. And that was just a whole year's worth of growth that came from there. So there's no silver bullet. It was just the sort of iterative, stepping through all of these different channels.

And those are the ones that worked just to be clear. Those are the ones that worked well. We tried 100 that just failed, that didn't work, that didn't make sense. And through that, these are the ones that sort of shone through.

Sam: I think this is such a fascinating topic because you are right. So many marketers are looking for the silver bullet, the step-by-step process. When I was researching for this episode, I was thinking about how I could ask you about some of these strategies. And I think what stood out for me was you tried so much and I'm curious, how did you inform the type of marketing that you did? Did you look at what your competitors were doing and do the opposite? Were you reading books? Were you listening to podcasts? I'm so curious how you were able to try so many different strategies and more importantly inform how you were going to approach them.

Marc: Yeah, it was podcasts and LinkedIn, to be honest. That really was the inspiration for a lot of our marketing. Of course, I started off as the original marketer, and it's always funny because I, of course, didn't know business, right? When I got into truLOCAL, we had no experience. My degree was in health. We just thought that we were going to start this little thing, and if we made it to a million dollars, we were going to be rock stars. And my background wasn't marketing. So I was always like, I'd never understood the concept of bringing on a marketing team. I didn't even know what a business would look like past 10 team members, right?

I'll never forget we actually had our freelance email marketer that just absolutely was absolutely blowing things away for us. She was amazing, a supermom, her name is Courtney Jang. She ended up being our chief marketing officer and was instrumental in the growth of truLOCAL. But it's funny because eventually the thing that sold me on bringing her in full-time was that she understood the voice of truLOCAL. And that to me when we're in an incredibly competitive, commoditized space where every meal kit looks the same, every food delivery company looks the same. All of these look the same. It was really important that we stand out from the branding perspective.

So to say that, you know, it was just me reading these articles and doing that, that's just not true. By year four, I was fortunate that she was pushing a lot of these initiatives forward because I had completely pretty much handed off marketing. But it was really nice because, of course, I would just be scrolling on LinkedIn or hear a podcast and hear some interesting strategy and then I would meet with her and we would kind of brainstorm these different ideas and then she would dish it out to the team to go ahead and execute. So I can't stress it enough when it comes to marketing.

Do what feels right for the business in my opinion, like do things that are intuitive to the founder or to a team member that has a very deep understanding. So if you think there are customers in a certain vertical, try it, go after it, but eventually that will run out. You're going to run out of ideas, just the way it is, but start with those ones that feel good, that feel like they're on brand, that feel like they're in your industry and your market.

But then from there, yeah, reading and listening to podcasts—it's just like an artist going out and trying to find inspiration and they go out in the woods, just to see something or feel something, they're discovering different ways to express their art. I think that is very similar with marketing. We just don't talk about it that way. So when I see a company doing something, and I know you had John Roman from BattlBox on here recently, we're actually good friends. But even in the later years of truLOCAL, watching him execute some of his marketing strategies—things that I never would have thought of.

But they make absolute sense and then it's easy for me to kind of distill that to the team to quickly see and test if that's going to work for our business and our customer base

Sam: That's interesting. It's funny that you mentioned John. We actually published his episode today. Funny how that works out sometimes. It's such a difficult balance to strike because you want people on your team that are interested in marketing and want to read those articles and want to listen to those podcasts. At the same time, you can't really force that. And it is interesting. A lot of the founders that I speak to, some of the best people on their team were customers or friends—and, like you say,, people that really understood the voice of the brand. I think that's a really fascinating takeaway.

Marc: Yeah, I think I learned that oftentimes the best person for the role might not actually be someone with a ton of experience. I learned that during the door-to-door meat sales side of it. So we had to hire a ton of sales reps and I hated hiring sales reps, because you hire these guys and they come in with their egos. They think they understand how to do things just because they did sales at a different company. The best people to hire for sales for the company at the time were waiters and waitresses.

Because these are the type of people that know how to have a conversation, they know how to build a relationship. We can teach them the ins and outs of the things that they're selling, but we can't teach personality. And I find that it's really important, at least in our company, you know, we built a company up to 60 people, but the first 10 employees were all friends. We were literally just a ragtag group of people that got together to think that we could do something.

But what ended up happening was that we had a very flat organization. Eventually, we got to a point where we had leadership, management, and team members. But early on, we made it very, very clear that all ideas were welcome. And some of our best ideas came from our fulfillment staff, or from our customer experience team. And being able to crowdsource ideas from 60 people. is far better and you're going to have a greater chance of success and stumbling upon that next big channel, than only curating and cultivating ideas from your six person marketing team.

So just because people aren't executing on the marketing, doesn't mean they don't have great insights that might come from elsewhere. And just as another example, and this is a small scale version of it, but it's just it compounds. When we were doing our affiliate marketing, most of the time it was our team members that would reach out to say, hey, this person is an influencer or an affiliate in this space, I love them. I follow them, you should check them out. Because we weren't limiting it to food, right? You saturate that pretty quick.

We're onboarding 80 to 100 influencers a month, and we're in Canada, so we don't have the same population as in the US. So eventually you start to run out. But what we found was that it was fairly industry agnostic when it came to working with these influencers and affiliates. If they just had a big following or a deep connection, they would be successful for us because at the end of the day, if you eat meat, then truLOCAL can be for you. And we would find these individuals through some of our fulfillment staff who were big-time fans of an up-and-coming music artist that we wanted to reach out to.

Or someone that was a sports fan, and they were like, look at this athlete, he's up-and-coming, she's up-and-coming, check it out. So I think it's really important. And to your point, I don't know, the idea that you can't really force that. And I'm like, I don't know, can't you? I would absolutely say there's a world where it's kind of, like, if you wanted to, we did a book club. It was never mandatory, but it was like, semi-mandatory. It was like, you don't have to be there, but be there.

So I think it's important to do that because I think that as a startup, when you're overworking and underpaying people, which is just the reality. People don't like to talk about that anymore. But the truth is if you're a bootstrapped startup or if you have low funding, there is the probability that you're going to have to ask people who work for you that normally could get paid more somewhere else. And there's a good chance that you're going to be reaching out to them at nine or 10 o'clock a night when there are issues. So I think that to encourage those people and have those people stay excited and engaged.

They have to be part of more than just their role. And people love to be part of marketing because marketing's sort of the tip of the spear. So if someone can feel empowered by just shooting an idea out from a department that never touches marketing, and have us execute it, and by executing at least we'll test it out, then not only are we getting great ideas from across the organization, we're setting that culture of anybody can put their ideas forward. And in addition, it makes these individuals feel empowered, which, once again, is something you need to provide people if you're in a startup.

Sam: I have so many follow-up questions, but I want to switch gears a little bit because I am mindful of time. A lot of my questions about the brand have been in the past tense and that's because you sold truLOCAL in 2020 for 16.8 million, almost five years to the day if I'm not mistaken. And I was thinking about how to ask you about this. And I didn't want to simply ask you what it was like, but I was listening to another interview with you and you were talking about the power of purpose. So what I want to ask you is, did you feel like when that acquisition happened, your purpose was fulfilled?

As someone that had worked so hard for so many years in entrepreneurship, what was it like?

Marc: Yeah, absolutely. The only thing I lived for for five years was to build truLOCAL and have it acquired. And I have my own thoughts, my own theories on purpose. I wrote a book actually with Forbes Books called True Founder, a little bit of a play on truLOCAL. Essentially, there are two things in my life that I've ever wanted that I wanted more than anything in this world. I couldn't articulate why or explain why. It was just something that I woke up every single day wanting to chase. And that was playing university football.

And the reason this was important to me was that I was pretty much failing at school in grades nine and 10. I had zero interest in anything I was being taught, and a lot of people thought that I just wasn't able to learn. Like a lot of people thought that I was dumb or just wasn't capable of doing anything. And it was frustrating because I knew better. I knew that I could do these things. I just wasn't motivated or inspired to do it. So I wasn't applying myself.

And I of course, as a high school kid, you don't have any discipline to realize the pros of applying yourself over the long term. But when I fell in love with football and found out that in Canada, you can't play football after high school unless you go to university. Well, my goal and my life's purpose at that time was to play football. It's all I cared about. So ironically, I worked backwards from there. And I didn't know this at the time, but I loved football so much that it pretty much motivated me to do all of the things necessary to put more football in my life.

And that started with getting good grades in school, making sure I got into university. And it just was this really amazing experience of wow, I completely turned my life around because I had this purpose that I cared about more than anything else. And my whole view on purpose is that if you're fortunate enough to know your life's purpose at a young age, that's the biggest blessing you can have in life. Because then you can optimize and dedicate every single thing that you do in your life towards that purpose.

And you see this with legendary athletes, LeBron James, like that man at a very young age knew what his purpose was and everything was catered towards that. The reason a lot of people don't get to that level is because they're balancing a million different things, right? The norms of society—the sort of get a job, go to school, have a relationship, have friends, all of these things and you should have these in a healthy balance. But once again, all of that is a distraction compared with focusing on one thing.

The problem for most of us is that we don't know what we want that one thing to be, which is absolutely okay. It's unrealistic to ask a 25-year-old what their life's purpose is. How can you ask a 25-year-old whose brain has barely developed, whose main focus is chasing girls, chasing boys, relationships, they want to go to the bar, they want to have fun, they're just figuring out life. How can you ask them what they want to do for the rest of their life? I'm just saying that it is such a blessing for the people that are fortunate enough to have found that early on.

So for the rest of us who haven't found our life's purpose early on, I'm very supportive of just finding a five-year purpose. Find something that isn't your whole life or what you identify with over the long term, it's not going to be the thing that you look at on your deathbed saying this is everything that I was, but while you're figuring out what that is, have a five-year purpose that you can dedicate everything towards, and that's what football was for me. And I didn't have a time frame for it. It just was the thing that I cared about the most.

And as soon as I made the football team, it was kind of like, oh, okay. All right, well, what's the next thing? You know? And then it became this idea of, I wanted to sell my first company before the age of 30. And that stemmed from, I just realized that, you know, it's not about the money or the power, but there are way too many amazing things that I want to do in this world, and I have no interest in being limited financially and not being able to do those things.

I also realized that business was where I fit best because I was a bad employee, I was a bad student and if I ever had to work and live in someone else's world, it was just going to make my life miserable. So I wanted to have the power and the skills to create my own world and being an entrepreneur was pretty much the number one way to do that. So for five years it was the only thing I cared about. It was everything to me. It was what I lived for. I sacrificed relationships for that. I missed birthdays and holidays.

And I was a bad son or a bad boyfriend or just a bad friend in general, all in pursuit of this thing that I considered my purpose. And I always say that when it happens, you look back and you try to make amends for all those things. But at the same time, I think that if you achieve that goal, there is a certain understanding that people have where it's, wow, like he did that thing. Like, damn, it wasn't one of those things where... like he was chasing this useless dream or this useless purpose and whatever. It's like, wow, they made it happen.

So So, to answer the question of what it was like when the company sold, it's exactly what you just said. But it's weird because people always say like, you must have been screaming and losing your mind and so excited. And to be honest, part of it was like that. But a lot of it wasn't that because I had envisioned that moment so many times. Like from the moment that we started truLOCAL to the moment that it sold, probably at least once a day, I envisioned what my life would be like after selling my first company.

So when it finally happened, it was less of this surprising explosion of excitement and more of like this relief of, like, we expected this. We're there, finally. Like we did it, you know what I mean? It was never this like, oh, it wasn't going to happen. And thank God it happened. It was more just like, you can now cap this off. So I've been very vocal in saying that since then, now my job is to reestablish my purpose. I'm financially set. You know, now what matters most of my life moving forward is it building a bigger business? Is it spending time with friends and family? Is it traveling?

These are all the things that I just want to explore and expose myself to because the more things I expose myself to, the closer I'm going to move towards finding what that next purpose is. And of course I would love that next purpose to be my life's purpose, but there's a chance that it probably won't. And it'll probably be this next sort of short-term, maybe five-year purpose that I'm willing to chase after again.

Sam: Well, there's so much to unpack there. I'm mindful of the time, and I want to ask you about the book True Founder. After listening to you talk about purpose, I'm curious if that is part of your next purpose and more importantly, to the point, who is the book for and what is the problem that the book is solving?

Marc: Yeah, it's a great question. So the book is for me when I was getting started at truLOCAL. And the whole idea is that this book is exclusively for first-time founders. Now, I've got to be clear here. What a first-time founder is, in my opinion, isn't someone just starting their business. It's any founder. They could be just getting started, or they could be five years into their company in the trenches, but they just haven't had that big win yet. So if their goal is to have an acquisition or IPO, you're still a first-time founder until you reach that goal.

So this book is there, first of all, to dispel a lot of the, I think, horrible stereotypes around being able to have work-life balance as a first-time founder. Everybody wants to be comfortable nowadays. Everybody wants to avoid the idea of pushing, working, performing, and finding success. It's like this taboo. You can't even talk about it. If you tell someone nowadays that, hey, I started a business because I want to make money, you're considered some kind of capitalist crony. And to me, that's ridiculous.

And I think that when you look at founders, if you look at any other industry or professional pursuit, like sports, nobody bats an eye when they sacrifice all of the time that they could spend with their friends and family to be on the court doing free throws. When you look at a Billboard artist who sacrifices paying rent because they want to get one more hour in the studio because it might give them the opportunity to make it big. When you look at a Navy SEAL who sacrifices being a civilian to pursue their passion and their purpose, we applaud and congratulate them.

But when a founder does the same thing and sacrifices everything else in their lives to follow their dream and their purpose, we say, oh, you work too much, or you need to take a break. And this book is 16 chapters of what I like to think is tangible, actionable advice that we used to build the company from zero to $20 million in five years, but also just a lot of trying to make people understand that it is okay to commit 100 percent of yourself to business. So that's the book. That's who it's for. You can actually get it at TrueFounderBook.com or just my website, which is MarcLafleur.com.

But it was a great experience. I was on contract for two years after the company sold to help transition. So I couldn't really start my next business. So writing a book in the meantime was just a nice way to stay sharp and just a nice way to just unpack everything that had happened over the past few years, and create something that could hopefully have value to others on their journeys.

Sam: I have a quote here from the book that I love: "Being a first-time founder is a fancy way of saying that, from here on out, your sole reason for existence is to become the best in the world at solving problems." I love that. I think that's a great place to bookend this conversation, Marc. Usually, I would ask where listeners can go to learn more about truLOCAL, but where can listeners go to learn more about you? You mentioned the book. Is there anywhere else they can go to find out what you're doing?

Marc: Yeah, actually. So we just kind of launched our next project. So if people are interested in what we're doing, they can go to DB8.com/pulse. And we're pretty much keeping people up to date on what's going on in the news, but we're doing it in an interesting way. So this is kind of the next big thing that I'm interested in. I think human communication is broken. And I actually think that that's the biggest threat that we currently have to society is the fact that now we cannot converse with one another without everything becoming extremely polarized. Essentially, we've lost our ability to debate. So we want to tackle that and try to take it on.

And we want to throw our hat in the ring with DB8. So DB8.com/pulse is how we're doing that. So if you guys want to stay in touch with what we're doing, that's the business side of things. On the personal side, you guys can check out my book at the website I just said before. And yeah, I love connecting with people. So if anybody is a founder or anybody who resonated with anything that was said here, please hit me up on LinkedIn, hit me up on Instagram. It's @darkmarc_, D-A-R-K-M-A-R-C underscore. I'd be happy to have a conversation.

A lot of people lent their time to support us when they didn't have to. I'd love to pay it forward.

Sam: Perfect. Well, we'll put all those links in the show notes. And Marc, I want to say it's been an absolute joy talking to you today and researching and hearing about your story. And I want to wish you all the best in the future with everything.

Marc: Awesome. I really appreciate being here, and I'm looking forward to the episode coming out.