151: Adi Arezzini on Building A National Brand Of Digestive Solutions Through Influencer Marketing

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Many successful business owners often take the cue from their experiences to create an entirely different product that offers solutions no one has yet produced. Adi Arezzini, the Co-Founder and CEO of Teami Blends, has quite an origin story that eventually took her to build a national brand with her products. After suffering from devastating digestive issues that the medical community could not help solve, Adi discovered the perfect recipe for powerful digestive solutions and started growing her business from there on. She shares her story and offers great insights about what it takes to start and grow your own business, particularly one that centers on influencer marketing strategy using Instagram. Offering some health advice, Adi talks about gut health and the underrated power of loose leaf tea.

Adi Arezzini on Building A National Brand Of Digestive Solutions Through Influencer Marketing

My guest is a business expert who has suffered from devastating digestive issues after she returned from active duty in the Israeli Defense Army. The medical community offered no help at all and after searching far and wide for a solution, she’s about to give up. Almost by accident, she discovered a combination of natural ingredients that solved her health issue completely. After some experimenting with friends and family, she perfected the recipe and has built a national brand with her products in major retailers all over the country. She offers solutions for fatigue, depleted immune system, stress and insomnia along with her powerful digestive solutions. Her growth is phenomenal. Her story’s incredible. Let’s hear it from the creator herself. Welcome, Adi Arezzini. It’s great to have you on the show. I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m so excited to be here.

I want to say how proud I am of you for assisting the military in Israel. I am thrilled on what you did and I want to express that because it’s important. I’m glad that you did that. Tell us all about how you got started, how your business got started and how you became who you are now.

It is quite a journey over the last few years. The journey started when I was nine years old. I grew up in a very low-income family where at the age of nine, I started working so that I could have money in my pocket and do things. I started working at a very young age babysitting and doing whatever I could to earn money. When I graduated in high school, it was not even a question of like, “Where did you want to go to college?” For me it was like, I need to go out there and work 40 hours a week, work hard and make a living. I was living on my own already at the age of seventeen. I worked on all kinds of things. I worked at a postcard company. I worked at a real estate firm. I was paying my own bills, rent, insurance, gas, water and everything that goes into paying bills. I felt like I was nineteen going on 40. I’m burnt out and I’m nineteen because I was making money to survive. It was very tough then.

A lot of our readers probably can identify with you. I’m wondering, why was your family in that situation? I know that there are many families in Israel that are like that, but why in particular was your family in that situation where you had to do that?

My father was not a good example of a father. He wasn’t very giving. It was pretty much like me and my mom against my father. If we did have money, I wouldn’t have known of it because we were taught to know that we were poor and that we couldn’t afford anything. That might have been true and it might have been not true, but I ended up cutting communication with my father at the age of seventeen. I haven’t spoken to him since. It’s not that he’s a terrible person, he just did not do a great job into what I expect as the standards of a caring and loving father. My mom, on the other hand, did an excellent job of supporting me and giving me all of the love and foundation that I needed to be a good person. I started making money because I didn’t want to ask my father for money because he would not give it to me. It was more like, “I need new jeans.” He was like, “No.” I was like, “I’m going to go out and make money on my own and I’m going to take care of my mom and me.” That’s what I ended up doing.

It’s very common, particularly with successful entrepreneurs, to have experienced that level of strife in the family. I had a very similar situation to your own in that my dad was not very loving at all. He was a very quiet man. He didn’t interact with us kids much at all. It was my mom who supported the family. With men, they bond with mom and women tend to get their self-esteem from their dad. In your case, it seems as if you had to make it yourself because you couldn’t get it from your dad and that makes you strong. That tells the story about who you are in some ways. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate that. Continuing to your story, here you are, you’re nineteen years old and you’re burnt out. What’s the next step?

I had visited Israel with my mom for two weeks when I was nineteen. I had not been there that much before. I was born there but I moved to Florida when I was six. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t read or write and I felt no connection to living in Israel or being Israeli at all. I was completely Americanized. I came back to my life in America. Israel has a very different culture. After high school, kids go to the Army and they have more time to figure out what their purpose is. I feel like I jumped straight into the workforce like many Americans do because I had no other choice.

I found a program online that helped people outside of Israel joined the army. A lot of people when they first hear that I was in the military, they think, “She’s so responsible,” but it was the opposite. I am so burnt out on the life that I need to go and be taken care of by the military so that they can house me and take care of me. Only after being in the military for at least two months, I was like, “This is an amazing purpose.” It gave me a purpose. I was working at a postcard company that I was never going to get moved up in the company. I was like, “I needed a purpose.” I found my purpose in the military when I became a fitness instructor for combat soldiers.

This is telling. It’s incredible that you actually wanted to get away from life and join the military. I’ve heard that before. I know people who have done that as well but in your case, it was because of how dramatic it was living at home it sounds like.

I was like, “This isn’t right.” I was nineteen and I feel like I’m 40. What do nineteen years old do? They hang out with their friends. They pursue their passion. They’re interested in life. They’re maybe going to college. The weight and the burden I had on my shoulders was how am I going to pay rent? I had this very overwhelming feeling of how do I get myself to have an abundance of income and take care of my mother because she is such a good person. At the age of 45 or 50, she had to recreate herself and start from scratch. She had no savings and no security. I felt, for whatever reason, responsible for her. I said, “I need to go out there. I need to do something.” I have no idea what but I need to break this cycle of not having money and being in lack of money all the time to having an abundance of money mainly so that I could take care of my mom.

You’re very responsible. You felt that responsibility right away and combined with wanting to change your life. It turned out to be a perfect opportunity for you to do so. It’s a great combination. You ended up with exactly what you needed even though you didn’t know that was exactly what you needed.

Instagram is becoming what Facebook used to be. It is definitely a marketing and selling tool for individuals and for businesses. Click To Tweet

I think so. I do credit my decision to join the military to pretty much everything in my life because if I hadn’t joined the military, I would not have learned Hebrew. I met my business partner because he’s also Israeli. That opportunity would have never come to be if I didn’t speak Hebrew. I also never would have searched for digestive health solutions if I had not contracted that problem in the Army in the first place.

Did you start your company in Israel or did you start it in the United States?

It started in Florida in 2013.

After the Army, did you then come back to Florida where you live?

My headquarters for my business is in Tampa, Florida but my husband lives in Portland, Oregon. We have a home here. I spend half my time in Portland and half of my time in Florida.

I live in Florida too. I’m in Lantana, Florida, which is south of where you are. Once you decided that you needed to search for a solution to your own problem, where did you start and how did you find what ended up becoming your company’s greatest product?

FTC 151 | Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing: Most Americans have five to twentypounds of excess waste in their bodies.

 

In the beginning, the digestive problems were happening in Israel where the food in the army was made for the masses. They’re making food for thousands and thousands of people. As you can imagine, it’s not organic or fresh or farm to table. It’s how can we make this type of meat for 3,000 people. The oils, the processing and the food didn’t work with my body. I was going to the bathroom one time a week which was disgusting. People always laugh when I talk about it on air but it’s the truth of what happened. My stomach looked like I was five months pregnant and I was a fitness instructor. I’m supposed to be the image of health and wellness. I am having these health issues. I started drinking more water, exercising more, changing my diet and nothing was working.

I even went and had a colonic in order to get all these toxins out of my body. For anyone reading that doesn’t know what that is, it’s a treatment that they can flush water up your body to get rid of the backed-up waste that your body has been accumulating. It’s not like going to the spa. It’s not enjoyable. That was the first eye-opener. They flushed out all of this waste. Where is this waste coming from? People are very unaware of their internal organs. People more like to see the outside of their body. I was not aware that my colon or my gut accumulated toxins over time. That was the first eye-opener when I saw all these toxins come out of my body. I was like, “How did they get there? What are these things?” That’s when I started reading books from doctors, nutritionists, chiropractors on colon health and gut health.

What did you discover that you didn’t understand after you started doing the research?

I didn’t know beforehand that most Americans have five to twenty pounds of excess waste in their bodies, not even necessarily from what they’re feeding their bodies now, but from the past growing up eating McDonald’s, drinking soda and heavily processed foods. You don’t feel it when you’re eating it, but then you turned 30 or turned 35 and your whole body changes. People say that after 30, your metabolism slows down, which is not necessarily true. There’s no study out there that says you turn 30 and then your metabolism slows down. It’s just that you’ve been accumulating toxins for 30 years instead of twenty years, for example.

This concept hit home for me and these doctors were saying in their books that a successful natural way to detoxify the body is through tea. I was like, “Great.” I went to my local Whole Foods and I bought every tea that was on the shelf that said liver cleanse, kidney cleanse, a gut cleanse and colon detox. All of these teas that you can find in the tea section. These teas were between $5 to $8. I took them home and I drank all of them on different days and none of them worked for me. None of them provided me with any type of change in my health or in my digestive wellness.

That’s when I started researching. If tea is supposed to help with these particular ingredients, why is it not working? I started diving deep into this whole tea world that not all tea is created equal. The tea that you get from a tea bag that’s full of powder unless it’s powdered like Matcha powder, for example, it’s the leftovers of the actual tea leaves that you get from loose leaf tea. You’re not ingesting the entire tea leaf which has the majority of the benefits. I did not understand why these teas were not working for me. That’s when I started researching loose leaf tea and started ordering ingredients online to blend my own detox and it worked.

Companies can go bankrupt on influencer marketing. Click To Tweet

I went through this process randomly by fate. I ended up meeting my business partner who asked me what I did. I was a personal trainer at this time. The Army not only helped me with this whole digestive thing but it also gave me a love for fitness that is the core of who I am. When I came back to America, my job was a personal trainer. I told him I was a personal trainer. He told me that he manufactures tea and coffee. I was like, “Are you serious?” I started asking him all these questions about tea and we decided to start our business together. He’s not in the health background at all and I am. He comes from the tea and the coffee space and the manufacturing of products. It was like a perfect marriage, then we started creating these products.

You couldn’t have advertised to find that individual. The universe had to make that happen. I’m always amazed by what the universe brings us. In this case, it’s a perfect example of setting an intention, being determined to make it happen, and allowing the universe to bring exactly what you need to you in order to do so. That’s a great story.

I must give credit to my business partner, Yogev, because what I put out into the universe was that I wanted to be something. I wanted to make an impact and I want it to be successful. Even when I was ordering these teas online, not once that I think about making a business out of it. This is the truth. It was his intention into the universe. He had come to live in Miami and he came with the intention. He was like, “I need to find a woman in the health industry to start a tea company with me.” I’m not kidding. I’m not joking. It was both of our intentions into the universe, but he’s a little bit more particular and specific than mine. I want to get out there and I want to be successful so that I can take care of my mom. The combination of everything together definitely was fate.

It was your combined determination that brought you together, whether you realize it or not. Look at what you created, which is absolutely amazing. The name of the show is Your First Thousand Clients. What I liked to do, particularly when you are talking about starting a company from scratch, is talk a lot about client acquisition. How did you go about finding clients for your products in the beginning?

We started making these products after we formulated them. We ordered 100 of each tea blend. We had five tea blends and they were in my bedroom in blue boxes that I had gotten from Walmart. I had a thermal label printer and I had all of these packing materials because that was our fulfillment space, my bedroom. We didn’t have any money for advertising. Yogev knew a little bit about Google ads and stuff, but I didn’t go to college. I didn’t know anything about marketing. We knew that we needed to take the avenue of eCommerce because if I went into Whole Foods, even if my product was beautiful, I couldn’t fulfill to Whole Foods. I didn’t have any sales or figures to show them why they should pick up my product.

We can’t go to retail because no one’s going to take us seriously. Doing Farmer’s Markets was too much of a labor-intensive game for me. That’s not going to be smart. This was many years ago where shopping online is not as popular as it is now. Instagram back then was not what it is now. Instagram is becoming what Facebook used to be. It is definitely a marketing tool and a selling tool for individuals and businesses. Back then, it didn’t have the capabilities it has now. No one was using it that way. There were some companies but not a lot. I started posting on Instagram and meeting my clients in private messaging or the direct messaging aspects of Instagram. I was completely obsessed with the fact that I could talk to someone far away by messaging them. It felt like all the opportunity had opened for me.

FTC 151 | Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing: People don’t buy things based off of admiration.

 

I started posting on Instagram making our own branded Instagram page. It looks way different than it looks now. If you look at it, it’s beautiful and there are a lot of great photos and videos there. Back then, I was taking pictures on my iPhone and posting them. I’m direct messaging people that were interested in my products. That only took me so far. I quickly got onto this whole influencer game where I knew that I didn’t have credibility because no one knew who I was. I was like, “I’m going to hop on board with everybody else’s credibility because they have their own audiences of people that listen to them. If they listen to them, maybe they’ll buy my product.” I started reaching out to these influencers via email or via direct message. I created this Excel sheets of all these different influencers that I was working with and the free products I had sent them.

I was out of control on the follow-up. I’m a follow-up maniac. I would follow-up with everyone. I make sure that they were going to tell their audiences about the product that I had sent them because that was the agreement and they would do that. From doing this over and over again and tracking coupon codes, I started seeing a common denominator between influencers that drove conversions and influencers that did not. That’s where I came up with my influencer strategy, which is still the core marketing of what we do. That’s how people find out about us through influencers and through Instagram. The job that I did of finding influencers, contacting them, making an agreement, sending them products and negotiating whatever the agreement is. We now have fifteen people in-house that do that full time.

We are talking to Adi Arezzini. She is the CEO of Teami Blends and we are talking about how she has built her business using Instagram and influencers to create an empire that has over 60 people working there. Adi, you discovered influencer marketing on your own. It’s a big deal now. Influencers can make millions of dollars by being an influencer and by trying products and then writing about it. Back then, did you have to pay a lot of money to get influencers to do this?

Back in the day, I wasn’t paying any money. I was only working with smaller influencers that people like to call micro-influencers, people who have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. Now, we have two teams. We have an influencer team that works with paid people and an influencer team that works with non-paid influencers. The goal of them is very different. Working with micro-influencers is more about guerrilla marketing and getting the product out there within the community, which is very important. The paid influencers are supposed to get a ton of customers for the price that you pay. What I’ve learned is that’s not very true. You can pay someone a ton of money and get zero ROI, which is why we track everything insanely on our end.

We track it so that we learn from our mistakes. I tell people this all the time when they ask me about influencer marketing is that companies can go bankrupt on influencer marketing. How are you going to judge if an influencer is going to bring ROI? There’s no way to objectively judge it before you agree with someone. You can only do it based on your intuition. We have metrics in our database that show us this person’s going to be a good collaboration and this one is not. Back to your original question, that is how I got my first thousand customers, through Instagram and through influencer marketing leading them to my website.

When we started doing radio, we had to do the same thing. They say that half of your advertising works, the only problem is you don’t know which half. The only way to truly understand what’s working is to have a cookie trail back to what it was that started that particular sale that person is purchasing. What we did is we had six different radio ads on six different radio station and six different 800 numbers. By knowing when a person calls an 800 number exactly at what time, we would be able to then know the radio station and the exact copy or the exact creative that they heard that they are now calling to buy. It became convoluted and complicated, but we had to figure it out or you’d be going bankrupt trying to get advertising to work. It is surprising that the paid influencers create so little of an effect. Otherwise, if people knew that they wouldn’t be paying them as much as they are. Why do you think that is? Why do you think people pay them? Is it because they don’t test or because they don’t have good metrics to understand where their money is going and how it’s working?

The only way to truly understand what's working is to have a cookie trail back to what it was that started a particular sale. Click To Tweet

You can only do it based on perception. If a person has a million followers, you might think that that person is going to bring a ton of sales for you. Some of our micro-influencers bring in more income and more profit than our paid people. It’s a risk that you have to take. We do it probably better than a lot of companies out there because what we do is we look at common denominators like this influencer brought in a lot of money, why? What was it about their audience? What I look on it is that what is the definition of influencer or the word influence? It’s that the person has a very strong connection with their audience because they’re helping them in some way. They’re building that trust with their customer.

I’ll give you an example. In the beginning, I was testing all kinds of different Instagram influencer accounts to see what worked. I worked with a bunch of food Instagram accounts because I was like, “People that like healthy food might need my healthy products.” There would be these Instagram feeds of all these great recipes and they had tons of comments and I was like, “Great.” People that were posting a lot of our products that were food accounts didn’t make sense because the people that were going to their accounts weren’t looking for health advice. They were looking for beautiful recipes. Also, some of it is to be inspired and to be like, “That’s pretty.” We also worked with fashion bloggers. These girls that would have these beautiful photographs, these beautiful feeds and they would be holding one of our products. That’s zero sales. It did not move the needle. You don’t know how much money I’ve lost by doing this on a monthly basis. We’re testing different things until we find something that works, but that is what we did.

When you say I have no idea how much money you lost. What I will say is the fact that we’re talking tells me that you’re as a savvy shopper when it comes to your ad spend. You have perfected a way of telling which influencers work and which don’t. Would you share that with the audience? How do you know whether an influencer is working or not?

What you want to do before you decide on the influencer is you want to look at the type of content that they are posting. Is it helpful to their audience? Are they helping them in some way? You have to look through the comments that their followers are leaving and we call it two different things. There’s one thing known as admiration where someone might post like, “You look so pretty in that outfit.” That’s admiration for that influencer. There is the influence which somebody is asking a question, “Where did you get that bag? I want to go buy one.” That’s how you know that that follower wants to make an action based off of this influencer’s advice or their influence. If we don’t find any questions in people’s feeds and it’s not very prominent, we know that that account is full of admiration. People don’t buy things based off of admiration.

I’ll give you a great example. If you take a supermodel like Victoria’s Secret supermodel, every girl wants to be her. She has a ton of admiration but she has no influence over her following. If you take Oprah Winfrey, she has influence over her following because she’s helping people with her advice, with her communication, with her talk show and with everything that she has done. We are looking to partner with people that have done something to help others. It has to be obvious that they’re doing something, they’re teaching something and they are providing some values which make the person follow them. A ton of people back in the day many years ago, people selling wellness products, we’re partnering up with bikini models because they’re like, “It makes sense because girls want to look like these bikini models, let’s have them promote our products.” I did the opposite. I was like, “That makes me upset because I’m never going to look like that bikini model no matter what.” I wanted to partner with people that had influence. That’s why we’ve been able to be profitable in this business model instead of going bankrupt.

For our audience, you have received a master’s degree in influencer marketing. If you don’t believe me then you go down the same route as Adi has, spend all that money and figure it out for yourself. What you dropped was the most incredible value bomb for anybody who is truly trying to make Instagram marketing work. We talked about the psychological profile of people as influencers. What about the practical aspect of simply using coupon codes, URLs and specialized naming? Why aren’t you able to track your customers that way without having to dive into their psyche and understand all of their followers to get a real idea of how this could possibly work for you?

FTC 151 | Influencer Marketing
The Invisible Organization: How Ingenious CEOs Are Creating Thriving, Virtual Companies

Yes, but you can’t track a code that doesn’t exist yet. Let’s say you want to work with an influencer. You can’t track any code with them until you start working with them. You have to do your assessment beforehand, then you start working with them, then they promote your product with the code. You see how many sales came in from that code. We have certain metrics and we built our own internal software to track all of this because we work with so many influencers that we needed to look at which ones are working and which ones are not. When you find something that works, you need to go out and do it big with other people that are like that person. If I know that women that have curly hair are promoting my product and are making insane conversions, I’m going to go and find out more accounts of women that have curly hair. That’s where we took advantage of the opportunity. It’s fairly easy on Instagram to find similar accounts to an account. If we find a niche that works, then we’re going to go out and find people similar to that.

If you were to say to your influencer, “We’re thinking of working with you. Can I speak to some of the other clients that you’ve had in the last year that are in similar markets to ours?”

Some people have media kits, but they’re not showing any sales. The influencers always get back to you and say, “The brand never shared that with me.” They could have a media kit or a deck of all of the different brands that they’ve worked with and all the different beautiful photographs that they’ve made, but I don’t care about your photographs. I care about if you move the needle for your partners. Influencers do not ever share that information, which is why it’s difficult not to go bankrupt using influencer marketing.

You are going to see a list of their clients so you could have called the client and say, “We’re thinking of working with Jonie over there. We’d like to find out a little bit about your experience with her. Did it work out? Did she move product for you or was it simply a branding thing?”

I’ve done that before with very high-level influencers. We’re working with a talent agency who is working with tons of different celebrities for tons of different brands. They’ll try to push one celebrity on us or another because their job is to create deals between a brand and a celebrity. If I asked them like, “How do they do for this other brand that they worked with?” They’re not going to give me exact sales figures and they are going to tell me pretty much what I want to hear. That’s why we have to observe and make our own judgment calls.

That makes a lot of sense. This is such great information. For our audience, I hope you use this because I know that everybody is now attempting to use Instagram profitably and we’ve gotten a great education. Let’s go a little bit deeper into the company itself. As you’re starting to scale and you’re going to eventually move out of the bedroom, where did some of the rough patches happen? For me, when I built my company, I’ve built it in a room over my garage. We had to move to professional space. We ended up wasting a lot of money because we had to change the space three times in eighteen months. We were growing so fast but at the same time, we were trying to conserve money so we never bought systems that would scale along with us because that would have cost more at the time. How did you handle scaling from a little one-room shop to a facility with 60 people?

Integrity goes a long way in sticking to something that you believe in instead of changing who you are to fit the mold. Click To Tweet

I can have empathy with what you’re saying about the systems because we were now adding more and more expensive systems that we can afford now. I understand that. After moving out of my bedroom, we moved into a sub-leased space. It was one office and we had five people in that one office. I hired someone to help do our fulfillment and send out our packages because before then I had my neighbor’s sixteen-year-old kid helping me fulfill packages every day. This was a few years ago. I was like, “Influencer marketing works. All I have to do is train more people to do what I do.” I was hiring people to do what I do. In the beginning, they were all contractors. None of them were employees. Some of them would work remotely. After a year of doing this, I was like, “If people aren’t in office and part of the team, they’re not getting the same knowledge on how to do this job and they’re not as effective on it.”

You may not know this but I wrote a book in 2015 called The Invisible Organization, which is a blueprint on how to take a company virtual, which you would not enjoy.

It’s just that there’s so much gray space in influencer marketing that it’s very hard to make decisions. If you’re part of a team and you’re doing it all day every day in-house, it’s easier to control, have managers, etc. I started teaching people and the training has changed so much over the last few years. I had to start hiring customer service people to answer customer service emails because I was doing it at that time. When we were around two and a half years old, we moved into our own office and warehouse space, which is where we are now. In the beginning, it was 10,000 square feet, then we added another 3,000 to it. Then now, we have another warehouse space. It’s maybe 5,000 square feet of office and the rest are warehouses.

We started adding employees for the different areas that we needed it. I’ve also done the opposite, which is to hire too many people and had to fire a bunch of people. I’ve done that too. We go through that constantly where we’re like, “How can we put in systems so that we can be more efficient? It’s not because I want not to hire people, but it’s because I want to pay the people that I have more money instead of hiring more people at less wage. This is something I’m still learning. We could probably do what we’re doing now with a lot less employees than 60. I’m constantly looking at what can we be doing better or how can we be more efficient?

What changed and where were the plateaus for you? When I built my first software company, when we hit about $2.5 million in sales, I realized that my current management team would never get me to $10 million. I made a very hard decision because these people were like family to me, but I had to fire them. I had to replace that team and I did it. We made it to $10 million. Sometimes CEOs have to make very hard decisions. I’m wondering where those decisions were in your plan, in your past, in your progress or your history. Tell us about those pivot points for you.

We plateaued around year three and four and I had panic attacks every single day. In our first year, we made $400,000, just me and my partner working from my bedroom. In the second year, we made $5 million but we didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know why we made $5 million and we were like throwing poop at the wall and being like, “This is working,” then Instagram changed their algorithm, and then our sales completely plateaued. The third year we made $6 million and I was pissed because I’m like, “Where’s our growth? We have way more employees now and we’re paying rent. What are we doing?” In year four, which was 2017, we made $7 million. I was also very unhappy with that. I felt like we were grinding. In 2018, we ended up growing 40%. That year was our first year since the beginning of having massive growth. We’ve experienced plateaus multiple times and we’re experiencing one right now too. How I’ve dealt with those is to look at what I’m doing wrong and to change what I’m doing. Sometimes it takes three months to figure out why we are plateauing and what we’re going to do about it.

If you could figure it out in three months, you’re doing very well.

Three months or six months, but I can give you an answer to your question. In 2017, the statistics were there would be a month that they would be up, and a month that they would be down. It wasn’t predictable and it wasn’t growing. Numbers are supposed to compound off of each other and it wasn’t doing that. I got with my number two girl in my company. She’s 24 years old and an amazing human. I said to her, “What are we going to do about this influencer marketing strategy? Is this going to work?” The influencer marketing was not scaling. What we did is we had a team of ten girls. All the girls were working with micro-influencers and paid influencers. We ended up separating into two teams. One is working with micro-influencers and the other one is working with paid. That organizational change increased our numbers drastically because each person could focus and be an expert in that one thing. With paid influencers, you have to negotiate prices. With micro-influencers, you have to build relationships and to see what product it is that they want to promote.

By switching our operating basis and by splitting this up, we didn’t change our tactic in what we were doing. We’re still doing influencer marketing, but we were doing it in a more organized fashion. All of 2018, we saw incredible growth. That was a pivot that we made. Even though we made that change last year, this year, we saw a plateau as well. We found another bug. Three hours of the influencer manager that works for Teami, three hours of their day were spent looking for new influencers to work with. We found a system, a program that costs a lot of money that will help us source accounts faster. We put a manager over the sourcing of accounts. All that they are in charge of doing is closing and creating relationships. We’re hoping that that will even be able to utilize our employees time even better because we hit the same thing. We were like, “What’s going on? Influencer marketing is going pretty slow right now, how can we increase it?” I hope that answered your question.

It did and I think it’s instructive to hear how a business owner deals with rapid growth from $400,000 to $5 million in one year. That’s remarkable. The fact that you’re able to fulfill all that product is a real credit to your ability to organize and get things going. Your journey is fascinating because we all take that journey as we build companies. Thank you very much for sharing that. I’d love to go deeper into some of the things you said, but we need to stick to the script here. Thank you for sharing so much of that with us, but it’s time to go a little bit deeper into who you are. We do that with a single question. I find it fascinating that the answer to this question always makes me understand my guest a whole lot better. I’m about to ask you a very important question. Who, in all of space and time, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?

I would probably like to speak with Jason Mraz, who is a singer. I admire his integrity in his music. Integrity goes a long way in sticking to something that you believe in instead of changing who you are to fit the mold. It’s probably him. He’s very spiritual and he’s very positive about life. When I’m having a rough day, which as a business owner can happen every other day, I like to listen to his music that uplifts me.

That’s a great answer. When you admire somebody, you admire them completely, you admire their good qualities, you admire their lifestyle and you admire their values. Jason sounds like someone that you do admire and I think it’s a great answer. Here is the grand finale. The change-the-world question. What is it that you are doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?

I think that bringing more awareness to gut health is going to change America because gut health and our detox program is something that every American can do no matter what gender, age, fitness level, or nutrition level. Americans are raised on processed foods and these foods have dramatic effects on the body long-term. Sometimes you catch it when you’re 30 and the damage has been done. Our detox program can get rid of toxins in the gut, which makes your digestion better. It can make your mood better. You can have more natural energy. If we make gut health a more talked about topic and what I’ve done with my business with Teami is to make it cool or to make it simple for people to do. I believe that I could help the world drastically with this.

I think you can too and I love what you’re doing. In fact, to our audience, if you would like to give this a try for yourself, Adi has set up a discount code. You can pick out any products you like and get a 20% discount code. Adi, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. Thanks for helping everybody understand something that I don’t think anyone could unless they’ve actually done it and you certainly have.

I’m very happy to share all of my information with you.

Adi, you are amazing. I cannot wait until we get a chance to talk again.

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