John SmallMtn (01:09)

Welcome to another episode of Founders Growth. My name is John Hill, aka Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth, and today on the show, we have Nicholas Kirchner. Nicholas is the founder of two companies. One of them is Hydra, which is a consulting firm that works with companies in the B2B space, and he’s also the founder of Howl, which is a portable propane fire pit company.

One business is difficult, and running multiple businesses and putting the right amount of focus and effort into those things is something that trips up a lot of founders, myself included. So I’m going to be diving into his path and his history, and how he juggles both of these things and keeps them moving forward. So, Nicholas, before we kind of hop in here, can you take a second and talk about who Hydra works with specifically on the consulting side?

Nicholas Kirchner (01:51)

Yeah, no doubt. Well, first off, thanks for having me. Very excited to be here, excited to chat with you. Yeah, on the Hydra side, we’re about four years old, and throughout our time, we’ve basically positioned ourselves to just working with agencies. Some B2B businesses, your accounting firms, things like that, but primarily agencies.

Largely due to the fact that that’s my background, owning and operating ad agencies or digital marketing agencies. Same with my partner. So we kind of came together and decided to package what we knew into a market that needs it.

John SmallMtn (02:30)

Interesting. So let’s just dive into this, right? Because I love agencies. I think that they’re very, very cool. I know there’s about a bajillion different levels of functionality and ability to deliver results. So when you’re working with an agency, what’s their most common friction point or struggle point?

Nicholas Kirchner (02:56)

Yeah, most agencies that we work with and that I see, getting clients is always the biggest issue in everyone’s head, right? How do I position myself and attract people that actually want to work with me? More often than not, that might not be the constraint, but it’s everyone’s perceived constraint as to why they can’t grow. So I would say client acquisition, and then second to that would be scaling their team.

John SmallMtn (03:06)

Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Kirchner (03:25)

Who do I need? When do I need them? How do I as the founder actually get out of doing the work and into leading and growing a business?

John SmallMtn (03:36)

That’s such a perfect setup for my next question, because we did the pre-call and you brought up two very interesting points. One of the things you talked about was having 42 people under you.

When you’re working with people now, what did you learn from having a team that big, and how does it relate to how you coach agencies and help them grow their teams now?

Nicholas Kirchner (03:56)

Yeah, I think now I always start with where do we want to be 12, 24, 36 months out from now, because your team structure and the company you build is ultimately, and should be, a reflection of what you want out of your business, right? My perspective has probably changed on this as a founder over time, and it’s less about serving the business versus building a business that serves you and what you actually want for your life. Because a lot of people think, “I want a huge team, I want big revenue numbers,” mostly for the optics that gives you in the marketplace, right? But if you really peel it back and say, “Do I actually want any of that, or do I just want a business that spits off a good amount of cash and I can have good time freedom and that kind of thing?”

Those are two very different paths, and I help founders do both of those things. I have agencies I work with that are 50-person, 75-person, going on a hundred people. And I have agencies that are three to four people using AI super heavily and saying, “Hey, we’re going to be a small shop and super high margins, and we want to live a cool life. We want to go play golf in the middle of the week.” That’s their version of success. So it really comes down to what you individually want and building around that.

John SmallMtn (05:01)

Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (05:23)

I like how you talked about that people are doing it for the optics of it, because there’s so much on this path of being a founder that we can do for the wrong reasons. How does someone know if—I don’t know how to ask this question the right way without leading the witness—how does someone know that drive to build a big team isn’t just for optics, isn’t just for status, but is really aligned with the business and how they should be building it?

Nicholas Kirchner (05:58)

Yeah. So let’s take an example of someone who might want to build a big team, right? If I want to sell an agency for a hundred million dollars someday, I’m going to need to get to a certain size of team to support a hundred million dollars in revenue, which lends itself to hundreds of people. And so if I know in the beginning, “Hey, I have an acquisition target or an exit number that I want to get to,” the only way I’m going to be able to get there is a function of really talented people and a lot of them. That is kind of how I look at it, versus, “I just want to have a big team because I want to be able to lead a bunch of people and have the idea that we got something big going on.” It’s mostly because there’s no other way to get to the dollar outcome that you’re looking for, in my opinion.

John SmallMtn (06:09)

Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (06:35)

Mm-hmm. Okay. That’s awesome. I love that. But it’s still kind of one of those things, and I think you and I can look at this maybe differently than a new founder does. Because once you have been doing this for a while and you go through some stuff, you learn interesting things along the way. So the thinking is based around the end goal.

Nicholas Kirchner (07:16)

Yeah, exactly. Because on the flip side, if someone just wants a business that nets me a million dollars in profit per year, well, you could arguably with AI now do that yourself on the extreme case, or that might only be three to five people. So it really, once again, comes back to what you want, and then that determines the mechanics and the needs of how we get there.

John SmallMtn (07:17)

Okay, interesting. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

When you’re consulting on the agency side specifically, is the standard advice to pick a lane and go super deep? Is it try to be full service so that way you can help more people? Where do people kind of get mixed up on that path? Because I see people talking about different lanes, right? I hear a lot of people talking about wanting to niche down and be very specific. But then I also think that there’s some value in starting as more of a generalist and then kind of finding your way just by doing. How do you think about that and talk about that with your clients, especially after going through it yourself?

Nicholas Kirchner (08:30)

Yeah. So the path that I took initially is that $0 to $20K a month range—validating that we can actually start something and get it off the ground. I was more of that generalist type, and a lot of agencies that I start talking to around that point are in a similar lane.

Establishing positioning early on is a key focus, right? Because it really determines everything else that we do, from getting new clients, to how we’re going to price our work, to what our offer is, to standardizing delivery, what hires we need to make, what experience they need to have. So I’m a fan of experimenting in the beginning. Figure out who you like working with and who you don’t like working with, because there’s a wide range of client types out there, business sizes, verticals that you like, things that interest you, things that are really boring to you.

And I think that matters, right? Because that ultimately determines how hard you want to work on something. And for a lot of people, getting them to want to work on the thing is just as important as what they are working on, from my experience, especially with early-stage entrepreneurs, right? Because you have less of that muscle built of, “If I do this thing that I might not necessarily like, that’s going to get me the outcome I want.” That willpower isn’t always established in the beginning.

John SmallMtn (09:42)

Interesting. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Kirchner (09:54)

Whereas if you’ve done it a few times, you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to get through this season, but I know it’s going to end up being what I want.” But anyway, to bring it full circle back to your question, I like agencies that are positioned toward one vertical or one industry, because the efficiency you gain from that is pretty remarkable. From client acquisition: you talk to one avatar with one set of problems, and I know the solution to those problems, and it makes client acquisition much easier. On the flip side, it makes fulfillment much easier because I’m taking someone from A to B and I’ve productized how to get from A to B. So there’s no variability. There’s no one-off situations that I have to tell the team about. It’s, “We have a new client, standard process gets executed.”

John SmallMtn (10:30)

Mm-hmm. That makes sense. One of the things we were talking about on the pre-call was growing the team, right? And specifically, you talked about this thing that I just find fascinating: when you’re the doer, and you’re just used to doing—lots of founders start out scrappy and are doing everything—and the difficulty of really delegating well.

What have you learned on your path as a founder about being a better delegator, not holding on to work, and not gatekeeping work? How have you improved in that lane?

Nicholas Kirchner (11:24)

Yeah, I think this comes down to almost as much an identity thing as it does a practice of actually delegating something. What I mean by that is early on, you derive a lot of the value and a lot of the initial growth of your business off the back of what you know and what you do, right? You’re the one hearing from clients, having them edify your work. You’re the one in the marketplace with the reputation, and you kind of get attached to feeling smart and building this thing.

John SmallMtn (11:30)

Ooh.

Nicholas Kirchner (11:54)

And so in those early stages, that feels good. At a certain point—I find this is around maybe half a million dollars a year at the absolute maximum—you really can’t do anything more yourself. You have to bring other people into the fold. To me, the way that I delegate is in order of leverage within the business, right?

My admin tasks might be some of the first things that I delegate, because that’s the lowest dollar-per-hour work that I could possibly be doing. All the way on the other end of the spectrum, it’s dealmaking, potential acquisitions of businesses, sales, marketing, right? It’s the actual growth of the business. So there’s kind of this scale that you walk through of what you’re going to delegate first.

And the best way that I can tell someone how to do this is simply record yourself doing every single thing you do throughout your day in a Loom video. And then—it’s gotten so much easier to do this over the last 12 months—just feed it to Claude, for example, or whenever you’re watching this, whatever the premier LLM is, because it changes weekly.

John SmallMtn (13:07)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Kirchner (13:17)

Feed it to that and say, “Build me an SOP. Build me the quality assurance checklist to do exactly what I did in this video perfectly every time.”

At the most foundational layer, that’s the easiest way to do it. Then you can make the decision of, “Do I need a person to do it, or nowadays, do I need an agent that can do it?” But it all starts with documenting that process. Once you’re able to do that and you actually have a repeatable way of getting a result or doing the thing, you’ve got to let go of the identity in saying, “This no longer serves the business for me to hang on to this task, because there’s something or someone better than me that can do it more efficiently and is going to have more focus on it.” Then you have to go find the new thing that’s going to allow you to drive value for the business. And that’s constantly changing as you progress through different revenue thresholds.

John SmallMtn (13:28)

Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (14:14)

Mm-hmm.

Because you run two businesses—and we were talking about this before we turned on record—every founder I know, myself included, has done the thing where it’s going okay, and then we get shiny object syndrome, or maybe someone comes along and it’s just too cool of a partnership thing. And then it’s like, “Well, I’m smart. I can run multiple things at the same time.” What have you struggled with by running both these businesses at the same time? What have you figured out about how you allocate time and effort, and are they different enough that it’s easy to think about them as separate? Is there a lot of overlap in how you think about the businesses? This is a big, huge multi-question question, but when should someone be open to the idea of launching something else, and do you have any other tips or tricks about how to manage multiple things at the same time?

Nicholas Kirchner (15:15)

Yeah. So I think for me—and that’s really all I can answer for—once you understand what you’re good at and what role you play in a business, you can decide and allocate your time much more efficiently. What am I good at? I’m good at selling things to people on the internet, whatever that thing is. So I know my lane extremely well. Now, do I have my hands in things across both businesses, across every department? To some degree, yes, right? Because I have input there as a founder and as an entrepreneur. But as far as your day-to-day goes, you have to know where you drive value and then just relentlessly focus on the constraints within that area.

And the second piece of this is good partners, okay? I could not do what I do and have two businesses if I didn’t have exceptional partners on both sides that were really good at other lanes of the business. I think where founders get things wrong is they want to start all these things, and they want to be at the center and control everything of every entity that they have their hands in. It’s really just not possible. Please hit me up if you found a way, but to me, it’s really not possible to do that well and own the entirety of multiple companies.

If you look at the extreme example of this—Elon Musk, who runs all these different businesses at insanely high levels—what you’ll notice about him and how he spends his time is he just goes and attacks the main constraint that’s holding the business back. If it’s manufacturing, “Okay, great. I’m a manufacturing expert this month.” If it’s sales and marketing, “Great. I’m a sales and marketing expert this month.” And you’ll notice incredibly talented people around him—partners, C-suite, whatever—that own those lanes. But I’m just playing the role that I need to play. That would be my main tip for anybody: understanding what you’re good at and how you add value is paramount to ever doing multiple things at the same time.

John SmallMtn (15:28)

Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (15:51)

Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (16:31)

Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (17:33)

I love this, because this is one of those things where we get to dive in maybe a little bit deeper. How does someone know that they’re actually good at something, and not just holding on to it because they’re a control freak or too well-meaning for their own good?

Nicholas Kirchner (17:52)

Sure. I think it comes down to your results, right? If you’re going to say, “Hey, I’m good at marketing,” but you have no clients, no customers, and you’re not where you want to be with your revenue, then you probably have some room to run on marketing, right? You probably have some room to learn. If you think you’re incredible at fulfilling the work or delivering the product, okay, who’s telling you that? What data do you have to support it? Do you have NPS scores that tell you, “This is the best thing I’ve ever used”? Do you get an insane amount of referrals from the work that you do? Are you always meeting or exceeding whatever production targets correlate to your projections for the year?

I’m a big proponent of validating whatever thoughts and feelings you have with actual data. I think sometimes it’s a painful reconciliation to do, because you don’t want to think that you’re not as good as you think you are at something, right? That cognitive dissonance hurts and it sucks, and as humans, we don’t like that. So if you can look at that and match your thoughts and feelings toward what you think you’re good at, that probably is the best clue I could give somebody.

John SmallMtn (17:56)

Okay. Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (18:47)

Mm. Mm-hmm.

John SmallMtn (18:56)

Interesting.

Changing gear just a little bit: one of the things you talked about that I would like to dive into is you said selecting the right opportunities is something that you struggled with earlier on your path, but you’re better at it now. You said specifically to not just want the thing, but to want the right thing—whether that’s the right business or the right partner.

How have you gotten better at selecting the right opportunities and avoiding the time-wasters?

Nicholas Kirchner (19:42)

For sure. Going back to partners first, if an opportunity is brought to you, is this someone that you can see yourself working with long-term? Do they align with you from a value standpoint? I think that’s highly underrated. Do they align with you from an outcome perspective, what you both want? Does it align with involvement expectations—how much time, energy, investment, or capital you’re going to be putting into this thing? That’s very important.

Number two, is this an industry or an opportunity that is growing, or is this something that is kind of going away or not yet validated? I think if you’re a first-time entrepreneur, it is so much better to select an opportunity that has worked and go out, execute, and outwork the current players in the space. In my opinion, there is no reason to go try some crazy new idea as your first business, because it’s incredibly hard to do versus modeling some existing form of success.

John SmallMtn (20:38)

Yeah.

That’s a huge tip. For a long time, I had this weird association that you weren’t really an entrepreneur unless you were building something software-driven, like Mark Zuckerberg, and that everyone else was not really a real entrepreneur. So that was a very limiting perspective on it, right? Because no one really is excited to be the first guinea pig. So if you go off too far and launch something new, people don’t even have the proper education to make the right decision. There might not be line items if you’re going more of a corporate B2B route with it and stuff like that.

It’s super easy to put yourself under that kind of pressure of, “Well, we’ve got to go do something completely new because…” And you hit the nail on the head: if your identity is around wanting to be some sort of visionary entrepreneur, it can be super easy to go ranging off in the realm of, “Let’s go find something that no one’s ever done before so we can actually feel new.”

I love the idea of starting with something that already exists and trying to just make an improvement off of what’s there.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:21:51)

If you look at most major businesses, it’s never really the first player of anything that ends up with the market share. They have their initial spike and hype, and then they fall off. Then competitors come in and improve on the mistakes of the first. Honestly, I’m happy to be number two, three, four, five, 10—maybe not a hundred—but I like markets where there’s validation.

Honestly, it’s a good proof point if you have a good amount of competitors coming in, because that proves that there’s demand for what you are actually doing. There’s product-market fit there. In some ways, I think it’s the smarter path. It’s less sexy, but your odds of success increase, in my opinion.

John SmallMtn (00:22:37)

Interesting. Being on both sides of this—being on the marketing side through the consulting group, but then also having the brand—does that create any cool opportunities to work on the skillset as a marketer still?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:23:06)

It definitely does. I’ll give you both perspectives. From the brand side, I’m attending a lot of conferences that are marketing-driven. Who is there? Agencies are there. What are they sharing? All the things that are working across their clients. Even in my individual consulting sessions, I get a behind-the-curtain view of all the tactics and strategies that are growing other direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, because I work with a lot of D2C agencies.

Not only can I apply that over to the D2C brand side, which is immensely valuable, but from the agency or the consulting side, I also am the ideal client for a lot of these people. So I can tell you what they care about and what they look at. What’s the internal dialogue at a brand and what are we concerned about? What are the angles that would appeal to someone like me to hire you to do my marketing or to assist with a piece of the puzzle?

There’s a lot of cool synergy in that way where I get to see both sides of the coin, and there’s definitely a lot of crossover.

John SmallMtn (00:24:23)

One of the things that I think is really interesting is sometimes you can see things on LinkedIn where someone shows up with a hot take about how to run their marketing. Sometimes, at least for me, I’m reading it and thinking, “I know you’re an outside consultant because there’s no way if you were actually in a brand you would want to run with this idea.”

I’m curious: what is the biggest shift you have had in marketing and how you think about it and go about it that you’ve been able to glean from actually running a brand, and not just being on the outside as a consultant or agency?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:25:05)

There are some things that you’re only going to understand when you are operating. Agencies tend to look at things from, “How do I sell the most amount of stuff in the shortest amount of time to show the best result?” Sometimes there are things internally at a brand that are less controllable or will bottleneck that, like inventory in our case. That is a big constraint on our side because we manufacture everything in-house.

Sometimes selling more of something actually does more harm than good to our P&L. Over time, of course, we want to sell as much product as possible, but understanding the seasons and how that impacts your cash flow, and understanding when is the right moment to capitalize on an opportunity versus gas pedal all the way down all the time no matter what—that is an interesting distinction.

The second thing is blanket recommendations. I’m big on this when it comes to consulting, agencies telling companies what to do, or that more thought leadership side. I think there’s somewhat of an epidemic with business advice of blindly applying things you hear to your company. The reality is there is an infinite number of variables that are not similar to whoever is talking.

Even as I’m with you on this podcast, I’m trying to give very broad strokes and principles that maybe you can apply, but you have to vet out whether that’s actually the right thing for you or not. Not every channel is going to work for you based on the business, based on your price point, or based on your avatar. You really have to do your own diligence and your own testing to figure out if this is signal or if this is noise.

Oftentimes, most businesses are better off doing what they already do and what’s already working, and doing ten times more of it and absolutely maxing that out before experimenting with anything new. For an entrepreneur, that’s really boring, but boring typically, from my experience, has the best end outcome. Because there’s a big difference between being an 8 out of 10 at something and a 10 out of 10. That last 2 out of 10 might take 10 years to master and figure out, but the gap there cannot be understated.

John SmallMtn (00:27:37)

The difference between being okay at something and being great at something is much bigger than I think most people are thinking about. I love that point you made about it not being fun for most entrepreneurs, because eventually we become these idea engines. That’s a big part of this: having ideas, testing them out, and everything. I think there’s a season for that, and then I start to get tired of having ideas. I get into a “I don’t even want to come up with another business idea” mode, because I just know how easy it is for me to pull my focus away from these things.

I tell everybody that a business is just a set of activities done consistently where we know what the output is going to be more often than not. That’s just the job. Don’t build a business that you hate because you think it’s going to be someone else’s problem. You’re still going to have to play a part in this thing.

Going back to that idea of taking advice that is right for you: how does someone know if the people that they’re following are giving them good advice or not? What’s your vetting process, if you have one, to figure out, “Okay, what this person is saying in their content makes sense, let me go try it,” versus “Okay, this makes sense for them, but I’m not running that kind of business”? How can someone get better at that?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:29:26)

When it comes down to taking advice, it’s: do they already have what you want in this area where you’re taking advice? This could be life advice, relationship advice, business advice, or whatever. Do they have the outcome that you actually want? That’s number one.

Number two: have they done it in a similar business to what I’m doing? Are they speaking in the context of my business, or is it a different business type entirely? The highest signal is where they’ve done the exact thing that I want to do, they’ve achieved the end outcome, and they’re still doing it. Things change quickly, so if they’ve done something in the past, but they’re not actively doing it now, that might be outdated or out-of-context advice. They really have to pass those filters for me to take it seriously. That’s not to say I won’t listen to someone and see if there is a nugget I can apply, but overall, that criteria needs to be true for me to say, “Maybe I’m off on this and I should try it their way instead.”

You also have to decipher that everyone making content is trying to get attention and sound smart. With that, their incentive is to say things that are going to get the most reaction or be a very polarizing idea. A stronger indicator for me is watching what people do. A lot of people who give advice give advice in opposition to what you actually see them practice. I’m much more in the camp of, “Let me watch what this person actually does and how they execute, versus what they’re saying to execute.” Oftentimes, you’ll find that to be very different.

John SmallMtn (00:31:28)

Interesting. Okay. Switching gears, because I’m fascinated by people that make hard products and widgets. My business is very consultant-driven; it’s lots of ideas and frameworks. How did you get into portable propane fire pits? Was it just that you like being outdoors, or did you see a market opportunity? Talk to me about how you decided to go in that direction.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:31:58)

When I moved out to Denver, my partner—my partner in Howl was actually a prior client of mine in the agency days—and I decided to come together and try our hand at doing a private equity fund. Long story short, that didn’t end up playing out as we wanted it to. So we said, “Hey, what are we actually good at?”

He’s really good at product design and product vision. He’s a very avid outdoors guy, into off-road racing and that kind of thing, and he saw a gap in the marketplace. I’m definitely keen on the outdoors and I like that kind of stuff too, but he really lives and breathes it and understands all the nuances of what makes a good product versus an inferior product.

Once again, playing my role, I understand customer acquisition, the marketing side, and the growth side. We came together and founded Howl along with two other partners. We all play our role, and that’s how we got into it originally. It was mostly having an inferior experience with products in the marketplace and challenging what needs to be different for this thing to be world-class, better, and fundamentally different than what’s already here. That’s the idea that we started with.

Also, regarding the opportunity in propane fire pits specifically: out west, we have a lot of burn bans due to wildfires, so you can’t actually use a wood fire. The problem that presents is you have to sacrifice one of the most fundamental pieces of the camping or outdoor experience, which is a fire. How do you make a no-compromise product where it’s as good as the thing that you’re missing, but we can fill that gap and you can use it when there’s other circumstances like a burn ban in place?

When you look at all of these trends, circumstances, and competitors, you find your position and find what needs to happen with a high likelihood that it’s going to work out. Full transparency: in the first two years of developing the product, we had no idea whether it was going to work out. A lot of times you’re not going to have 100% certainty. That’s the long story of how we got here.

John SmallMtn (00:34:27)

This is such a cool thing. My questions have questions, because you said that you guys manufacture them yourselves. How did you go about the process of coming up with the idea? You said that one of the partners is really good at product and he’s the outdoorsy guy anyway. Were these drawings that he had, or did you guys have the basic idea and then go find people that were good at early stage? How did you go through that process from idea to something built that you can sell? I’m so fascinated by this idea.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:35:10)

It was a very crude and intensive process. I remember at our old office, we literally had a cardboard box that we cut up and said, “Okay, this is roughly how big the thing is going to be, roughly how we should be able to carry it, the size, the weight, and how we want it to look.” Then you go find an engineer who can help you with this, because none of us are engineers.

It was a lot of very crude sketching and saying, “Here’s how we think we’re going to get there,” and then taking that to an engineer and asking, “How can we make this real?” That process took us two years. I don’t remember the exact number of prototypes, but we came close to probably 10 prototypes, figuring out the functionality, the design, and the physics of it, which is a whole different beast to figure out.

It’s iterative, for sure. Similar to figuring out what works on a marketing campaign and breaking it into its individual parts—what’s the constraint in the funnel—you look at what’s the constraint in this product and why we can’t make it work how we want it to work.

John SmallMtn (00:36:17)

That is so cool. What was it like when you guys got the first prototype?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:36:33)

It was cool. It wasn’t anything close to what ended up being the final form. It looked like we went to Home Depot and welded a bunch of individual pipes, parts, and plates of steel together. She wasn’t pretty, but it proved that it was a real thing.

We went out and tested that and said, “Wow, we think this thing actually has legs. Now we have to figure out how to build it at any sort of meaningful scale and actually make money.” That’s the ridiculously hard part.

John SmallMtn (00:37:10)

Have you guys had to make any changes to the design or the process based around productizing and making it easier to produce? Do you have any interesting examples top of mind of something you had to shift just for ease of production?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:37:31)

Many times, yeah. Everything down to materials, like what’s the raw material we’re using for this thing to make it a lighter weight, or is this cheaper to source?

Because we build everything here in the USA, things are extremely expensive—sometimes 5 to 10 times the cost of offshore manufacturing. You really have to scrutinize every piece and ask, “Is this required, or is this the right thing?” That sometimes impacts your product design choices too. If there’s a super expensive component, to be able to get to any reasonable margin on this thing and make it a sustainable product that we can support people with, certain things need to be true.

Many times we’ve done that. We still do that all the time. We have engineers on staff whose whole job is Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and understanding, “Hey, this thing is cool, but can we actually make it?” Because those are two different things: making something cool versus something that you can make thousands of.

John SmallMtn (00:38:51)

I have a question. The only propane tanks that I know of are the big ones for propane grills. Does your stove hook up to one of those, or are there other styles and smaller sizes of propane tanks that I’m just not aware of?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:39:09)

Yeah. What you’re talking about is your standard 20-pound propane tank. We absolutely use those and actually sell those. But a lot of people also run smaller tanks, like 10-pound tanks, which are more conducive to units that don’t use as much propane. That really comes down to burn time and how long you want to be able to stay out there with a single tank. 10 pounds is obviously a lot easier to carry and transport, and takes up less space, but you’re not getting the whole burn time. You’re not going to sit there with it for 8 to 10 hours like you would a 20-pound tank. Everyone kind of has their own trade-offs in the off-road community regarding what they want to carry and what their setup looks like.

John SmallMtn (00:39:55)

Going into the conversation about manufacturing: you said that you guys are manufacturing everything here locally. Was that important to you guys? Did you come together as a team and say, “We really want to build and manufacture here in the United States”? Was it just easier to do because you didn’t have to travel? How did you guys come to that decision?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:40:16)

Manufacturing here in the U.S. is really important. That’s a lot of what made us great over the last century—we actually built stuff here, it was quality, and it lasted forever. The main things we wanted to make sure of were that, A, we’re creating meaningful jobs here in the U.S., and B, that we’re producing products that you’d actually be happy to hand down to your kids, something that actually lasts.

A lot of the design influence and how durable we wanted to make things was centered around: can this thing last decades? It can have that cool patina to it, like, “Hey, this was my father’s or my grandfather’s.” We built them to be absolutely bombproof, and it’s really cool. There is a certain satisfaction in doing things here versus just being a sales and marketing business, essentially, and sourcing everything overseas. Is it infinitely harder? Yes.

John SmallMtn (00:41:18)

First of all, I’m a big fan of “buy it for life” and “buy once, cry once” kind of thinking. I love whenever anybody is trying to make something that will last. I think that’s really cool.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:41:41)

It’s something that our customers have come to know and love as well, along with the storytelling around actually doing that. It is difficult, and people are willing to pay more—not infinitely more, but more—for something that they know is well built and will last.

John SmallMtn (00:41:59)

Especially in the outdoor community, right? Those folks just need gear that is going to work. They’re always really big into stuff that’s going to last forever.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:42:19)

Yeah, and it’s funny—”buy once, cry once” is something that our customers say a lot on social media, et cetera. They’ll say, “Wow, that’s expensive, but there’s a reason that it’s expensive.” Once the customer really experiences what that is, they’re like, “Makes sense.”

John SmallMtn (00:42:43)

That is awesome. I love that. You said, “Is it harder to do here? Absolutely.” Other than cost, what else comes to mind as a particular difficulty about trying to manufacture in the U.S. versus offshoring it?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:42:58)

It doesn’t help when none of the team starting this thing, myself included, knew anything about manufacturing. It’s also a talent and expertise thing, because you have to find people who actually know what they’re doing in that category and bring them on as an early-stage company. That’s a risk in and of itself. Staffing for that and building a facility for that is very capital-intensive.

Compare that to telling a manufacturer, “I want a thousand units of this and put my logo on it, and I’ll reorder when I need you,” without having to touch any of that. You’re involved in every single piece of getting raw material to turning it into the end thing. The amount of variables, delays, and issues that can come along with that is not to be understated. When you have a premium product, everything has to be to the right standard. There have been so many times where we’ve gotten parts in from a supplier that might not be up to our quality standard, and you have to send them back. Are they going to cover the costs, or are you going to cover the cost? Then you’re paying to expedite stuff to meet your promises to your customers. Those are some examples. I could go on forever, but there’s a lot to it.

John SmallMtn (00:44:36)

Zooming out just a little bit: since you have the agency business and you’ve got this other business, how does your mindset shift when you’re working on one business versus the other? Do you focus on different KPIs? Do you have to shift any perspectives or thinking when you’re working on one business versus the other?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:45:12)

Business can be boiled down, in my opinion, to getting customers, keeping them longer, and making them worth more. When I look at things through those lenses, it’s very easy to think about what set of activities I need to do across both companies for that outcome to be true. How do I get customers more efficiently? How can I make them worth more? That guides a lot of your work.

Yes, there are KPIs that back all of those things, and focus might shift based on where the constraint is, but that’s how I’m able to go in and make maximum impact—really just clarity on what you’re working on and why. Most people, when they sit down at their desk to start work, have no idea what they should be doing. They’re just doing what might feel productive or what they’ve heard that they should be doing, like checking social media throughout the day and consuming content. If you can clearly understand what it is you should do, you will be more productive than you’ve ever felt in your life. The principles that I use are: what do I actually need to get done to move this thing forward? I just relentlessly focus on that. Everything else doesn’t really matter to a big degree.

John SmallMtn (00:46:38)

So if you’re focused on the right levers, they don’t really change a whole lot between the two businesses.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:46:44)

No. Once again, it comes down to being experienced enough to know exactly what the levers are. So it’s: how do I do more of it, and how do I do what I’m already doing better? Going back to doing the same thing at 10 times the volume is often what you need to do. At a certain level of scale that breaks and you can’t do any more of what you’ve already done—you need to add something new—but it usually becomes pretty obvious in your data when that actually is true.

John SmallMtn (00:47:16)

Nicholas, this is a cool conversation, my friend. I respect your time, and I probably could talk to you for the next week and a half around just the campfire business. That is just really cool. But we’re going to move into the backside of this thing, and I’m going to ask you some of my repeating questions just to get your take on these ideas.

If someone’s going to start an agency, what is your number one piece of advice for someone who thinks that that’s the lane they want to go down?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:47:43)

Get really good at understanding how to get clients, and hire really good practitioners and let them do their thing.

John SmallMtn (00:47:48)

Okay. Now on the product side, what’s your piece of advice to someone who wants to go explore that realm?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:48:03)

Understand why someone would pick your product over anything else, and make sure that it has a defensible moat. What I mean by that is, with AI now, and with marketing and distribution, everyone can run ads to a good degree, everyone can do email marketing to a good degree, and everyone can put out social content to a good degree. So what’s really left that people can’t touch? It’s really product and offer.

It can’t just be a little bit different. There needs to be some sort of an innovation, in my opinion, or you have to have some advantage on distribution that others don’t. It’s why you see so many influencer-led brands do so well. What do they have? An ability to get their customer acquisition costs extremely low, because they already have the distribution in a world where that product might not even survive if it wasn’t attached to that name, because it might even be an inferior product. You have to know why it’s going to win and why you’re going to bet on it, and have something defensible, in my opinion.

John SmallMtn (00:49:15)

I love that. I know you’re big on LinkedIn. What is the business mantra, line, or old folksy wisdom that you can appreciate now, but you had to learn it the hard way?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:49:36)

It’s always the most boring one. Everyone says it, but I’m going to be a broken record because it’s true: people are the only real leverage in a business. Everyone talks about hiring smart people and getting out of their way because it works and because it’s true. But everyone treats recruiting or getting the right people on the bus as almost an afterthought. We often think, “Well, I could just learn how to do it.” Why not just go pay for someone who’s already spent 20 years of their life figuring out the best way to do it and hire them? That’s how the best companies scale the fastest. That’s why you see Meta offering $100 million compensation packages to AI engineers to come work with them. We’re talking the top thousandth of a percent of talent, but that’s why they do that—because they know that’s where the leverage is. Across anything, if you want to go faster, get the right people on the bus and find a way to make it interesting for them.

John SmallMtn (00:50:48)

Zooming into that just a little bit: I know that everyone starts off with no SLAs, processes, or documentation. I think everybody has that season of thinking, “Well, if I just create really great instructions, I don’t have to go hire really great people. I can hire just anybody to go do this thing.” It sounds like what you’re saying is that it makes sense to pay the premium.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:51:20)

Yeah, and it’s business-dependent on what you can afford, who you can attract, and what you’re willing to give up, because you’re not going to get exceptional people for nothing. But I always relate the level of systemization you need to scale your business as dependent on the level of talent that you have. Nothing against anyone working service or fast food, but I want you to think about something for a second: someone who goes to work at McDonald’s or Starbucks—every menu item has a playbook on how to make it and how to deliver it. Why? Because typically the people who hold those jobs do not have subject matter expertise in any given thing. I need to be able to pull somebody pretty much off the street and get them to produce a consistent end product. So my systems have to be dialed perfectly—no room for error.

On the flip side, if I have someone I’m paying $300,000 or $500,000 a year to, they’re probably going to look at my process and say, “This sucks. I know how to do it 10 times better than you, and it’s wrong here, here, and here.” I might not even have a process for them. I’m delegating an outcome that I want. I’m saying, “Hey, here’s the KPI we need to hit. Find a way to go do it.” That’s where senior talent and the best talent really shines, because they’re able to look at an objective and see the path even if you don’t know what it is. That’s why you pay a premium.

They’re on opposite ends of the spectrum. The lower-paid, lower-skilled labor you have, the more processes you need. The more exceptional your talent, the fewer processes you need, because all of those things are already built into how they operate.

John SmallMtn (00:53:13)

I love this idea. I can see a lot of people making the mistake of saying, “Well, I’ve got great people, so I probably don’t need processes,” and continuing to thrive in limbo or languish. Do you have any tips or ideas for not trying to sell yourself that your team is at a higher level than they actually are?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:53:45)

If you have truly great people… this is my favorite litmus test of whether someone should stay or go, by the way: if I had the option to rehire them knowing what I know today, would I do it? A lot of times the answer is going to be no, and they should probably be replaced. But most people keep people too long because it’s uncomfortable. So that’s one piece of the equation.

The second thing is data. Once again, I’m big on this. If I say I have exceptional people, but we’re losing half the business that we bring in every six months, well, they’re probably not that good. In fact, I can tell you conclusively they’re not good. Over time, you develop benchmarks on what good looks like. For example, I know if an agency is churning more than 7% to 10% of their revenue monthly at a maximum, we have fulfillment problems. We have issues with clients not getting the end result that they came in for in the time they thought it was going to take. So I can pretty conclusively say that that’s the constraint and that it’s our people that we need to look at. Any problem in your business is always a people problem or a process problem—one of the two.

John SmallMtn (00:55:03)

I can’t think of a problem that would fall into any bucket outside of those two.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:55:10)

Yeah, because if you have the right process, you can plug any person in to do it.

John SmallMtn (00:55:16)

I’m with you on that one. You’ve been in this space for a while, Nicholas, and things are shifting rapidly. Whichever week this comes out, there’ll be a new AI tool that everyone will be talking about, and everything is moving so much faster, it feels like. What is your piece of advice or word of warning for any founder, regardless of whether they’re going agency, product, brand, or anything else? What’s your overriding advice for anybody who wants to go down the path of founding a company and going off on their own?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:55:51)

There are a few angles on this. Once again, coming back to what you want and what you’re building: if you’re building a real-world experience, which I think is going to pop pretty hard because everyone’s going to be really fatigued by all this AI and tech—I already feel it, and I know tons of people who feel it, where the unplugging side is already a trend—maybe you don’t need to lean into it. Maybe being more analog and more old school is your best friend.

But if you’re building a business that is reliant on technology or is currently being disrupted by it, you have to lean in or decide to go play a different game, in my opinion. Obviously, I’m in the camp of, “I need to learn as much as I possibly can, use it as much as I can, and experiment with it so I understand.” I’m leading a lot of clients through this transition right now of how to use it most effectively, and what the future of agencies looks like in a post-AI world. You have to know what game you’re playing, and then really figure out what AI skills you need to learn to survive and thrive.

John SmallMtn (00:56:55)

I think that’s really well said, because it’s super easy to get a little “get off my lawn,” especially on the agency side of things. A lot of people were maybe overvaluing their skillset, and it’s leading toward not even using AI at all and being very resistant to it. I don’t think it’s going away.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:57:37)

No. The thing I’ve always said is: this is as bad as it’s ever going to be, and it already feels like magic. When you really think about it, how much better is this thing going to be in a few years? It comes back to knowing what’s worth working on. When AI can do all of this stuff, if you’re working on an important enough problem, providing a solution that AI can’t, or you have some edge, advantage, or data that it doesn’t have access to, then you can really build anything you need to support that idea. It’s almost like the idea and the business concept become the most important thing, because the execution is assumed: “Okay, we can execute this path because we have this leverage in this tool supporting us.”

John SmallMtn (00:58:36)

Interesting. Nicholas, thank you so much for coming on, man. I really do appreciate it. If people want to keep up with you, come hang out with you, learn more about what you’re doing, or take a look at your content, where’s the best place for them to go?

Nicholas Kirchner (00:58:47)

LinkedIn is probably where I’m the most active. So find me on LinkedIn: Nicholas Kirchner, I believe it’s @Kirchner1. On Instagram, you can find me @ScaleYourAgency. Those are the two places that I would recommend. If you’re interested in either side of the businesses, it’s workwithhydra.com or howlcampfires.com.

John SmallMtn (00:59:12)

Awesome. Nicholas, I really think that this will help some people not get too far over their skis in the form of firing up seven additional businesses when they should be putting their focus on one. I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your path. I think it’s going to help some people out. You’re welcome, my friend. Enjoy the rest of your day. Cheers.

Nicholas Kirchner (00:59:27)

Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, you as well.