Trusting Your Gut | Building the Good Ranchers Brand with CEO Ben Spell

 You're listening to The Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast.
 If it's radical, we cover it.
 Here's your host, Ryan Alford.
 Hey guys, what's up?
 Welcome to the latest edition of The Radcast.
 It's radical.
 We cover it.
 You know it.
 I'm Ryan off of your host.
 And sometimes we talk about things I love.
 I think we talk about things that I'm sort of passionate about.
 And sometimes we talk about steak and meat, my two favorite things in the world.
 We're here with Ben Spell, founder and CEO of Good Ranchers, a good friend, a good partner.
 And someone I've grown to a lot.
 What's up, Ben?
 What's up, Ryan?
 Thanks for having me out today.
 Yeah, man.
 I'm pumped.
 Talking steak.
 We're talking meat.
 Let's go.
 I was like, I was like, girl in this weekend, I'm like, man, I had some good ranchers New
 York strips on.
 People get there.
 It's not a promo, people.
 Ben's a friend.
 I wanted them on the show, but I'm just telling you when I'm grilling, I'm going to talk
 about good ranchers because it's the best meat in America.
 We'll get down to that.
 But Ben, man, I want people to know you.
 It's great they like me.
 People want to have the good stuff.
 They want stuff delivered to their door.
 But I want to talk about Ben today.
 I want to talk about your story and you know what got you into the industry and some
 of those passionate points that we both have.
 And let's get to know Ben.
 Sure.
 Yeah, man.
 Thanks.
 I think for having me on, super excited to discuss with you today.
 Yeah.
 My story is the basic entrepreneurial story of I had absolutely no experience of being
 an entrepreneur, no plan on being an entrepreneur and no experience in the industry in which
 I started a business and just dove in head first.
 That's a typical story, right?
 Oh, yeah.
 I got those bounce scores myself, baby.
 You look around sometimes, I think sometimes watching Shark Tank over the years and you're
 like, man, if that guy can do it, it's easy, right?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 No offense to anyone who's been on Shark Tank, but yeah, no, I was actually, I was a full
 time in ministry.
 I was a worship pastor.
 I was the guy playing the guitar and singing, leading worship at a mega church here in Houston,
 Texas.
 And it was like my plan, my path.
 That's what I just was, that's what I was set to do for the rest of my life.
 Or so I thought, been doing it since I was a teenager as far as doing music on like
 a local church level.
 And right after I got turned around 30, I started having this internal struggle of wanting
 more, like wanting more things, like wanting better for my life, I get on a monetary
 from a monetary point, but not wanting the church to have to pay that salary, like not
 wanting tithe payers.
 Like there was just an internal struggle for me.
 I have no problem with anybody getting paid.
 I got paid by a church for a lot of years.
 And it is, people think that if you work at a church, you only work on Sundays, but
 I promise you, I was putting in, it was very regular to do 50, 60 hour weeks, sometimes
 even more, especially on, because I was on the production side.
 Yeah, that music doesn't sound good.
 Just practicing like before the service on Sunday morning and organising everyone and
 getting the picking songs and production.
 Yeah.
 I've watched all that go down and I'm like, it gave me hives a little bit about how it
 is involved.
 Yes.
 I know.
 And we were at a, I was at a very large church, like I said, to both thousands of people,
 hundreds of volunteers that I was coordinating and running and it would always, it was always
 hilarious to me, because almost every Sunday, I would meet someone new and they would say,
 so what do you do during the week, or what do you do, what do you actually do?
 And I'm like, and so that could have been a thing, too, because maybe I never felt validated.
 I'm going to, I'm going to go, yeah, let's get the psychology of it.
 Yeah, maybe I just never felt like that was enough.
 I might need to talk to someone else about that.
 Yeah, you do.
 I could get my couch out over here, my virtual couch and we can lay on it.
 Yeah, but no, but for, but honestly, it was one day I was leaving, I was leaving the
 church and I was getting to, and to my car, which was a pretty, pretty nice car.
 It was a BMW 6 series and it was used, but the car parked next to me was this, was this
 older gentleman and it was not nice at all.
 And I mean, he looked at me and he said, man, he said, man, I really like that car.
 And just the way he, I didn't like the way that made me feel, honestly, and that knowing
 that his tithe was paying my salary to afford to meet that car, I just didn't like it personally.
 And so I started, I started praying and just asking God to open up some ideas and what else
 could I do on the side?
 I never thought I would quit ministry or ministry at the church, I should say.
 So just asking God to open something up and I took a sabbatical in 2014 and went and
 sold meat out of the back of a truck for a friend of a friend doing it for this company
 and it allowed me to travel the country and kind of thing and I thought, you know what,
 let me just try something new.
 And so I did that for a few months and absolutely hated it and every single thing about it.
 And I was like, I do not want this, put me back at the church and I did that for a few
 months.
 I didn't like anything to do with it like I said.
 And then over the course of a few years I kept having the thought of, man, somebody should
 start a meat company doing what they're doing but actually doing it ethically and sourcing
 in these things.
 Because I did it long enough to realize that, and this was the shady, I'm not embarrassed
 to say this because I didn't know it getting into it and that's why I quit so short of time
 into it.
 It was very misleading of telling people the quality is better than it is.
 If anybody's ever had people come to your door and try to sell you meat or set up in a
 parking lot, selling X amount of rib eyes or T-bones or something for a very low price.
 Thirty-seven rib eyes for $40 or something like that.
 Yeah, that's what it was and coming into it, they told me they were like, oh, we're
 the same quality as Omaha steaks, we're this and I didn't know, not, I just believed
 what they said.
 It didn't take very long to figure out that was just complete BS.
 So I stopped doing that and so went back into ministry working for the church and but
 over maybe the next year and a half, two years or so, I kept thinking, man, somebody could
 do this, somebody should do this, somebody could take that and actually build a brand if
 they just would do.
 And I kept having all these business ideas and again, I had never been an entrepreneur
 and never done anything like that before and every two or three months I would have these
 thoughts on this meat business, but it was never me being the one to do it.
 It was always going to be somebody else and then I'd even talked to my wife about it
 periodically and then one morning toward the end of 2017, I was in my bathroom, I was
 getting ready and and I started having those thoughts again, thinking, man, like this
 would be fantastic if somebody would do it.
 And I heard God's voice and I don't say that lightly, but I truly, I heard God's voice
 say, you do it and it was loud and it was clear and I was like, oh, and I so I walk
 out of the bathroom and I went to my wife and I said, hey, God just told me to start a
 meat company and she looked at me and it was hindsight, it was the best thing, it was
 the safest thing she could have said, but I thought she was going to give me some pushback,
 but she looked at me, she said, if you heard God, then I trust you and which was amazing
 and so we basically sold everything we owned, maxed out all of our credit cards and put
 it all on the line to get the company started for lack of better words.
 We went all in because I didn't know any other way.
 So we had just had our first son and he was just a few months old, he was probably three
 months old when we decided to start and that was in the beginning of 2018 when we pulled
 the plug on starting and all I knew was to sell meat out of the back of trucks because
 I did it for just a few months and I thought, okay, that's all I knew.
 I found I got some meat parked the truck in Waco, Texas and again, didn't know anything
 about anything but just started learning it along the way and fortunately, I truly believe
 that sometimes entrepreneurs are able to do great things out of ignorance because they're
 like for me, I will tell you, my case was I was too ignorant about all of it and I just
 got really lucky or early on, really blessed early on with some decisions that I didn't
 know were bad decisions and they just happened to work and what I mean by that is, I think
 you know what I mean by that.
 I know what you mean because sometimes you don't, there's two sides of the, and I've learned
 the hard way too.
 I've made some of those decisions myself that didn't work out personally, but I do know
 and recognize that sometimes, and I started my ad agency this way, I knew there was
 a better different way to do it and I was going to be ignorant about what it took but
 it took that ignorance to a degree to think about it different and once that happened, some
 things fell in place.
 I think there's two sides of the coin while you don't know what you don't know, but sometimes
 when you're blinded by that, you might find the other side that no one else would have
 ever found.
 That's exactly right.
 Yeah, exactly right.
 And I think it, I'm a marketer at heart, I really am like if you are, I've seen that
 first day.
 It's funny because even in my early 20s work, again, I'm a musician, I play several different
 instruments and I like to write songs and stuff, but I would always find myself like writing
 jingles for companies and or just, I'd see a billboard and I always thought if I didn't
 work for the church, if I wasn't in ministry, I would, I wanted to work for a marketing agency
 and then starting good ranchers, we basically built our own because we've run everything
 in house.
 But I said that to say there's a difference and this is what I learned really early
 on is there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path and there's
 so many marketing agencies and this is not a knock on anybody, but there's so many people
 out there that want to tell you, this is what you have to do and say, oh, you have to
 do this to this, but if it was just as, if it was just that easy of doing this and this,
 then everyone would be doing it, everyone would be creating a product, building a product
 and selling a product.
 It's a whole lot easier to tell someone how to do something versus actually being in
 the shoes and having to do it yourself.
 Oh yeah.
 All these gurus become gurus and they don't own companies.
 Yeah.
 I actually own four companies and the ad agency and so it's a little better than others,
 but it's just a whole lot different and that's why they become professors.
 I teach others, but if I had to go do it myself, it's so true, it's very wise, a lot
 of wisdom in that it's not just as easy as the textbooks like to make it out to me.
 Yeah.
 And this is, I learned this along the way too, there just, there is no plan.
 Like there's some best practices maybe, but man, there's no book that tells you how to
 start a, how to start a business from scratch and for it to become successful.
 You just got to, it really is a leap of faith and you got to trust your gut and sink or
 swim.
 I don't, for me personally, I don't think there's an in between, especially on, I think
 you can make some, if you can make some calculated decisions, I don't, you know, I am not a proponent
 of being an idiot.
 I like to, I'm an office fan and Dwight Shrute said something very wise one time.
 He said, I think of what an idiot would do and I try not to do that.
 Yes.
 Sound it.
 That's going to make the highlight clips, sage advice from Dwight Shrute and Ben Spel.
 Yeah.
 Anyway, but I, like I said, my wife and I, we went all in.
 We definitely had a lot of moments early on of, oh crap, what did we do?
 What's going to happen here?
 But I never saw like a clear vision, but I just, it's like, how do you eat an elephant?
 One bite at a time and we, where we are today is not where we started and today, like I
 said, we started.
 It was me in the back of a truck in a parking lot in Waco, Texas just five years ago with
 my wife at home trying to running social media.
 I was on Facebook trying to learn how to run Facebook ads and stuff like that.
 But fast forward, now we've, we're completely online.
 We're the, we made the Eek 5000 list last year.
 I'm positive we'll make it again this year because our sale, our, our growth is even
 more than it was the year before.
 We're, we're catching up to our competitors.
 There's not a lot of competitors in this space, which is why we started, which is why back
 in 2017, when I really started, I, I heard God's voice, like you should do it, but then
 I did start, okay, let me plan as much as I can and I did start looking at some things.
 And really what I noticed then was, man, Omaha stakes owns this market, especially in 2017.
 There's a lot since COVID, it's been a lot more competition and a lot more people
 in this space.
 But back then, Omaha stakes was really the only people delivering meat.
 And it was, it's not very good.
 They don't disclose the grading and they actually sued us last year for writing a blog about
 that.
 It was fine.
 I don't know if the truth hurts, right?
 We said they don't sell grade at meat and the, they don't disclose their grading.
 So they don't tell you what grade it is, but in the technicality, they do sell grade
 at meat.
 They just don't tell you what grade it is.
 They have their own grading scale system and we got it all worked out.
 Hey, I like the buzz, but anyway, but what was the small moment, Ben, like the five years
 ago, what, what flipped the switch from, and I know you're like me, you never go, all
 we made it.
 Absolutely.
 I never like to say those words.
 I don't know.
 Don't tell me that because I don't know, I don't want to, if I start acting that way,
 it just doesn't go well.
 But what was the, it was there a similar moment or a decision or something that turned
 the corner from, I don't know if we're going to make it.
 I don't know if we're going to make it.
 We're doing our best.
 We're all in, but we're somewhat around the corner or something.
 Yeah.
 So I don't know, I don't know that there's ever, we made it moment, but I think there's,
 we have our ebbs and flows of, I can take a breath right now, and there's some moments
 where, oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, and this, if we can just get to this, and then you get
 there, for us, that's how it, that's how it was where we had some, yeah, hills and valleys,
 but to keep climbing and, but for us, it was 2020.
 It was when the world fell apart.
 That 2019 was really hard.
 2018, we launched again.
 It was me under a tent, and I have six brothers, and I started, I knew we weren't online.
 We were just selling meat out of the back of a truck, and I was smart enough to know
 that, okay, if one truck can make X amount, then two trucks can make more, and there's
 my business school for you.
 Scale.
 Yeah.
 The only way we had to scale was more trucks, and so I got my brothers and some childhood
 friends and different people that I knew, and 2019 was, 2018 was, like I said, dumb luck,
 and I was like, oh man, it's pretty good.
 We did about five million in sales in 2018, our first year, which is nothing to shake
 a stick at for just jumping in and doing it, and then, and then I thought, oh man, I
 made it.
 Got this.
 And then 2019 was, was, was really hard, was not profitable, lost money the whole year,
 just like thinking, do the same thing, just rinsing repeat from last year, didn't work,
 and so then went into 2020, going, okay, this is, we're going to have to be a volume business.
 So we need, we need more trucks to, to really be able to pay for the amount of marketing
 and advertising and stuff, because we were going into metro cities and buying, like, all
 the syndicator radio, go to the country station, the rock station, and that's not cheap,
 and so we said, okay, for this to really make money at this, we've got to have more.
 And honestly, thankfully, because of COVID, we were very profitable in 2020, and if it wouldn't
 have been for COVID, we probably would have went out of business.
 So when you just talk about this right place, right time, because we went into the year
 just super stretched with, with the ability to have 15 to 20 trucks on the road at any time,
 because like I said, I thought, the only way we can scale is to have more trucks.
 If we wouldn't have had just this huge spike in increase of demand for meat, because the grocery
 stores ran out, the restaurant shut down, it would have probably been a bad decision, but
 thankfully, again, we were on the right side of just an entrepreneurial decision that felt
 right with our gut. And that was the aha moment, because that allowed us to have enough.
 We've never raised money, we're self-funded and self-owned. That really gave us the capital
 to be able to invest in getting online, and because online, the barrier to entry on perishable
 goods is really difficult. So we're able to actually put some money in the bank in 2020,
 and start being able to one figure out how to sell online, shipping and packaging and all that
 stuff. And so we, by the end of 2020, we were selling online, and then, and then we were
 seeing this still doing the trucks and still selling meat and trying to sell meat online.
 And then about mid 2021, in the summer of 2021, I made another gutsy decision of what
 were the two businesses are cannibalizing each other. If we're going to grow online, we got to
 kill the trucks, but the trucks were the only thing that were profitable. And my brother, and
 who works for us at the time, doing operations, and it still works for us now, doing operations,
 and then my best friend, who's now our CEO, I looked at them and told him, hey, we got to shut,
 we're shutting down the trucks, we're going fully online, because that's where we need to be.
 And I got a little pushback, and rightfully, like we had to, we needed to talk about it,
 but like an avalanche falling on top of it, that got a pushback. Yeah, but we made that decision,
 and we haven't looked back. 2022 was our first year solely online, which was last year,
 and we saw exponential growth from the year before. And so 2020 was definitely,
 it was a milestone for us because we were able to put some capital to actually build the business
 and the bank to build the online part of our business. But it was also another milestone for us,
 because that's really when we changed up all of our sourcing to be American only. And early on,
 we didn't know, again, I didn't know anything about meat. In 2018, 2019, we were just buying from
 brokers, because we didn't have enough buying power to buy from anyone else. And did not know,
 but we were a lot of what we were selling was coming from Mexico, a lot of what was coming from
 South America was just coming because there's no country of origin labeling law in the US. But as
 soon as we found out out, and then with getting some buying power in 2020, we were able to start
 going direct to the source, be able to cut out those middlemen and be able to actually verify
 what we're buying again. And so 2020 was like the pivotal point for us, not only
 shifting business from the trucks to being our cell online, but being able to deliver the quality
 that we have today, which is first and foremost the most important thing. I read this in a book,
 Creativity Inc. I can't think of the guy's name. He was the guy that started Pixar. Yeah, maybe John
 Lasseter, something like that. I feel like I'm not doing no service. But he says this in the
 beginning of the book, quality quality is our business plan. And that just always stuck with me,
 especially selling food. I thought if we're going to build a business that's going to scale,
 if we're going to build a business that people, if we're going to sell a product, especially meat,
 that people, we want people to buy more than once our quality has to be there, where others would
 have sacrificed quality to make more money, especially in all of our early days, we kept
 increasing quality and making less money because we were trying to play a long game of
 building a product that people would want. Because it's easy to get somebody to buy something
 one time, but it's to get them to get them to buy it over and over again, you have to provide
 something of quality of things, ding, ding, ding, right there. There's lesson number one for
 the Ben Spell Playbook quality matters. And it's one thing, if you snow someone over for one deal,
 right? No matter what it is. But you aren't, that's not sustainable. That's what I tell people
 all the time. Sales is great, but you got to get repeat sales. Like it's, you can't just
 be in a constant acquisition of new, you got to have that cycle of repeat purchases and the only
 do that is to provide quality and people get at least what they thought they paid for if not more.
 That's right. Yeah, because take this to the bank, your customer acquisition cost is only going
 to rise the longer you're in business. Yes, because it's going to keep getting more expensive.
 Yeah, it's going to reach broader and different audiences, right? Yeah, so you better hang on to
 the ones that you that you paid for. Yeah, exactly. That's, I have two books in the works.
 One's called Raising a Brand, which is of all about NIL and thus, like that, the other one's called
 Lifetime Loss. They talk about lifetime value, lifetime value of customer lifetime loss. Because
 what happens? What happens when you focus on acquisition only and you forget about customer
 relationship management? That is the title of the book and it's so true because referrals,
 people don't understand the cost of acquisition. Plus, when you lose a customer, you lose referrals,
 you lose goodwill, you lose social proof, it's so important. I'm stealing that word from you.
 I will give you credit. No, you're good, please. Yes. Yeah, no, I'm taking, I,
 not lifetime value is lifetime loss, loving it. I'm not a half class, empty kind of guy,
 I'm a half class full, but losing a customer, you need to think about it as a half class. That's
 right. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And we tell, and so we do, for that reason, we do all of our
 customer service in-house. We don't outsource any of that because again, we pay a lot of money to
 get these customers and it's not about, we're not in the business, like our space, the direct
 consumer, food space, the margins are, like we're not selling, like this, the Amazon stuff,
 like we're selling premium quality meat. So our margins are much, much smaller than most businesses.
 So we can't afford to not hang on to customers. And truthfully, anybody trying to be able to
 successful business shouldn't look at it, like the customer has to matter. You have to care
 about the one that you already got. And so all of our customer service, we do it in-house
 for that reason because I want them hearing what our marketing team's talking about. I want them
 knowing what's going on. I want them hearing what our operations teams are talking about. That
 way when someone calls, they know what to tell them. They're not just, it's not this blanket FAQ
 page that somebody's reading from. It's actual people in the office that hearing us run the
 business and hearing me every week talking about the importance of what we do and the importance
 of our customers. And we tell, every new customer service person on the first day, we tell them
 and then we remind them over and over. We start with a yes. We start with a yes when someone calls
 and they have a problem, we start with a yes. Because why, like, why not? Again, lifetime value,
 if we've already paid to get them, let's just keep them.
 They can go. Some here and a few things and a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs or people
 thinking about it or side hustles and all that. Some hearing, a few things from the beginning,
 trust your gut or trust God. One or the other there, both. But you trust a God to make the decision
 that you trust your gut in some very key decisions. Quality that it matters. Say yes first,
 talk about customer experience and all those things. Is there other things been talking about
 building good ranchers and what you've been through and you are a natural marketer. But
 are there other things that you counsel people that are starting businesses or they're doing that
 have been like just decision-making and maybe you're scaling and those kind of things that have
 that come to mind? Yeah, yeah. I'll say to anybody wanting to start a business, make sure you're
 starting a business and not a job for yourself. Make sure you have, if you're going to take the time
 because both of them take just as much work and if you're going to take the time to and the risk
 and the money to start a business, make sure you're, make sure you have, like you never know
 all the things but at least have some sort of a plan of at some point this can scale and this
 can be bigger than me. I can take myself out of it and and I got that from the book Rich Dad
 Poor Dad years ago and that's that's one of the lines that really stuck out to me where he says
 that most people think they're starting a business but they really just create a job for themselves
 and I talk to people pretty regularly that say hey I have this idea I want to do this and this
 and and a lot of times it's a lot of times it falls into the category of hey if you just want to
 be your own boss go for it but if you really really starting a business is building something
 that can run without you or at least eventually can like you're going to work a lot any but either
 way you either way you cut it you're going to work a lot but I would challenge people just make
 sure that you're you are building something that can scale and and don't be afraid to turn over
 to delegate and to turn over as soon as you can afford to hire someone to do something you have
 to do it because if it's truly a business that's can scale then you got to get it to scale and for
 that to happen you have to get yourself out of doing all the things otherwise you're just
 created a job for yourself said and it's like you said you're going to do the same amount of work
 one way or another so you need to be building a foundation for something bigger than just a job
 Ben I do we've talked a lot about the entrepreneur journey your stuff but I know there's some
 passion points around the meat and you've talked about that a little bit but let's give good
 ranchers a little bit of love it's I look it's delicious meat delivered to your door I never thought
 that I could get meat delivered to my door that was as good as it is so I'm going to give you both
 credible and real love here because it is it once you have the New York strips you won't go back
 I'll just say that but talk about it with the tenants the good ranchers what people can expect
 yeah so most of the beat you buy online especially all of our competitors won't name any names
 but yeah all the meat you're buying online is being a lot of it the majority of it is being sourced
 from overseas being sourced from South America is being sourced from these places that just don't
 have the standards that the United States has if you go to a steakhouse in in the US not outback but
 like a actual steakhouse yeah yeah you're gonna they're sourcing Angus beef from American farms
 their sourcing upper choice and prime Angus beef from American farms and ranches and the grocery
 stores not most of your grocery stores aren't selling that not I'm not here to get into oh yeah
 my store does maybe but Costco's not selling it people all the time they're like oh I can get
 prime at Costco what you're getting is dairy cattle at Costco they because you're not getting
 angus you're getting whole steam which is not great all the males all the dairy cattle 50% of them
 are males and can produce milk so those just get fattened up and and that's what your grocery
 stores most are them are buying and and there's just a there's a big difference between Angus
 and Holstein and the breed of cattle so steakhouses and so what we looked at we were like okay hurt
 what are the steakhouses selling and how do we sell that and how do we bring that directly to
 chickens consumers and so we take a we take a chef's approach a steakhouse approach when we source
 and not just our beef our chicken our seafood everything we take that approach not a retail
 approach all of our competition they're taking a retail approach where because the grocery store
 they want to they use meat to get you in the store to hoping you'll buy a bunch of other a bunch
 of other stuff and so they want to get as cheap as possible from wherever they get it that's
 right and they're not going to age it because they got to get it out they got to get it off the
 shelves and they got to get it through as fast as possible and so we we started looking we
 actually met some chefs met some different suppliers that all they do is supply to high-end steak
 houses and so we take that approach we we raise we source and we raise the right way and we partner
 with ranches that like what the cattle eat how they're raised is very important but the next step
 is how it's finished how it's processed and how it's butchered and so we took the steakhouse
 approach not the grocery store approach and that's what makes that just makes all the difference in
 the world I would I would compare any I would have I like a lot of times I think if people go
 oh I'ma send something to maybe a celebrity or to somebody who I want to impress so tell
 somebody to go hand pick everything yeah we never hand pick anything to send to anyone whatever
 if that's matter who we're sending something to and we we're just going to they're going to get
 whatever comes off our line because that's how much we believe in our quality of what we do
 I can tell you it's quality yeah my kids are even going it's a good ranchers tonight dad when
 there's stuff on the I'm just saying because I speak it a lot the burgers coming out and then
 they're fighting if I get a burger in that New York strip like it used to be they want there's
 stake no matter what but now I don't even have that argument anymore because the wiku burgers are
 tasty yeah it's so good you know what I love about you man we're coming down to time we'll do a
 version to this with Ben Spell but you talked about a little bit your wife is involved your
 brother's involved it's a family business and yeah your family guy and that's why I love you
 and I love what good rancher stands for but we talk about that family dynamic as we close out a
 little bit yeah for sure I will say this I have had some family that I've had to fire which is not
 it's not fun and it honestly it really sucks but I also have a family and friends that have
 been working for us for since the beginning and are still here and have moved up and or helping
 me run this thing and if you are going to bring family in just know that you could lose the
 relationship just put that out there and I absolutely hate that I have lost some family
 relationships but the business has to come first because there's a lot of people that aren't
 family that also work for good ranchers there's a lot of jobs that are on the line of people and the
 business has to be able to you have to business has to make the right decisions not even me like
 the business has to make the right decisions for it to stay profitable and to keep growing and
 you have to take family out of that now that said I love family I love my family and I have
 there's still very close very close friends that work for us and multiple family members as well
 and my wife and I have four kids and we we preach this throughout our staff we your family comes
 first every person that we hire doesn't matter where they sit whether in customer service operations
 on our development team marketing doesn't matter we tell every single person hey your job doesn't
 come first your family comes first because I put my family before this company and and we try to
 practice what we preach I think when you treat your when you treat your employees when you allow your
 employees to have to know that their family is important you get such better results the community
 that we have the culture that we have like people will go above and beyond for for us like we have
 just a fantastic thing happening and it's because we put family first we do it in our own life
 and we and again we practice what we preach which I'll everyone hey put your family first if you
 I'm not watching the clock go and like where soons like what matters is the job getting done
 that's really what matters and and then another thing that we're trying we're really trying to
 implement in our own life as we're growing and figuring this whole thing out is not using the
 term work life balance but using the term work life integration because like I'm traveling a lot
 more now as the business is growing and as we're doing some of these sponsorship some of the
 indie car sponsorship that I told you and yeah this weekend I was in Indianapolis but I was I brought
 my five year old my four year old my two boys and they were there the whole weekend and so yeah
 I'm there working but I'm also I was also able to bring my wife and two of my kids and they're
 making memories that they'll never forget and so that's the difference between work life balance
 and work life integration and as a business owner you have the ability to integrate your life
 versus just balance your time yeah and that's forward thinking because that's the way especially
 if you allow that as it makes sense for your team those kinds of things to where they feel
 comfortable doing those things that's a win win all the way around very progressive yeah
 I love it Ben I want to be conscientious of your time you got a big company to run and a family
 to keep up with we'll do a part two and catch up on some of the latest things some of the things
 coming down the line for good ranchers and yourself Ben and more on the indie car sponsorships
 we have a lot to talk about there that's a big deal yeah had a lot of work and a whole other
 episode probably in and of itself but Ben tell everybody where they can keep up with you and good
 ranchers yeah good ranchers.com is where you can order meat which is pretty important yes
 and you can follow us at good ranchers and you can follow me at Ben underscore spell
 on any of the platforms hey guys I hope everybody got a sense of Ben very humble but very successful
 and a great market on top of that you'll see that when you go to the website very very creative
 and on their social media so go get them some love at good ranchers.com you know where to find us
 the radcast.com search for Ben Spell you'll find all the episode highlight clips from today or
 just look at that sponsor good ranchers and good ranchers.com best meeting America delivered
 right to your door hey I'm at Ryan Alfred you'll find me very proud on all the platforms before
 you could buy it we'll see you next time all the radcast. To listen or watch full episodes visit us
 on the web at the radcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account v.rad.cast
 or at Ryan Alfred stay radical morning the following zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear
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