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Episode 007.
Who is your tribe? Which customers represent your products perfectly? Do you show appreciation for them? Do you try to duplicate their success?
Jake Daly is the CEO of Tiny Life Supply, and they treat their best customers like royalty. They are not stopping there.
Jake is out to find every person who is interested in the scaled-down, minimalist lifestyle and offer them products that can build and transform their homes.
With only three years behind him, Jake has learned a ton about business management and not sweating the small stuff. Well worth a listen!
To find out more about Tiny Life Supply’s fine products:
United States: https://tinylifesupply.com
Canada: https://tinylifesupply.ca/
Find out how you can transform your successful company into your Dream Business:
http://brianjpombo.com/dreambiz/
Full Transcript
Jake: We’d get all these calls from broke hippies saying like, you know, I’m working on this crazy thing.
Can you give me a free toilet?
Can you give me a free stove?
Can you give me a free this?
Can I how much of a discount can I get on this?
And I looked at Axel and I’m like, why have we made a business where our target market is broke Hippies?
Like we should, we should open a jewelry store. You know, let’s sell diamonds to people.
But then not long after that, it kind of struck me. I was looking in the mirror and the face looking back at me. It’s a broke hippie. I am a broke hippie.
Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.
You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.
This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.
Brian: Jake Daily is the director of marketing and founding partner at Tiny Life Supply, which is an online store and information hub that supplies everything necessary to build a maintain your own tiny dream home.
He lives and works in his hometown of Smithers, British Columbia.
Oversees all aspects of marketing, brand management and business development for Tiny Life Supply.
In 2017, Jake co-founded Canadian tech startup proximity app. Prior to his work in tech, Jake founded and manage equilibrium contracting and has also contributed to business growth in a variety of managerial roles.
Companies such as Backwoods Contracting, Caldera House, and Canadian National Railway.
As a volunteer, Jake recently co-founded Mountains Of Relief, an NGO dedicated to earthquake relief efforts in affected areas of rural Nepal.
After building a strong foundation in business development management, web design, and HR, Jake was looking for an opportunity to utilize his unique skillset to contribute to positive change.
After numerous brainstorming sessions with his childhood friend, Axel Whalen, Jake joined tiny life supply in 2016.
And with that I’d like to welcome Jake Daily to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast. Hi Jake.
Jake: Hey Brian, right on. Well thanks a lot for having me. Excited to get to spend some time chatting here.
Brian: We’re happy to have you here.
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what it is that you do.
Jake: Yeah, well our main mantra, we didn’t start Tiny Life Supply with a, you know, a grand master plan.
We didn’t know where we were going to be today and we still don’t really know where we’re going to be in a few years, but both Axel and myself, our main philosophy has been have the best of intentions and go with the flow in terms of the business side of things.
But how this all started was Axel and I grew up together as I mentioned there. Good childhood friends and he’s the kind of buddy where, um, when we link up we’re always yacking about ideas or inventions or ways that we’d like to make an impact on the world.
We worked together a few times over the years and tree planted together and then we worked on the railway together, but always touching base, trying to find a way that we could work together, start a business and do something positive and try and grow something.
When we were working on the railway, I was out in the Rockies at Jasper, Alberta and Axel was back here in Smithers with our hometown.
Axel started just as a hobby building these two micro homes, the red home and the blue homes have since been named and they’re beautiful little cabins and he was doing that maybe with the intention of having some rental cabins down the road.
He ended up living in one for awhile, but also he was just fascinated in architecture and in green building. You know, either of us didn’t really know about the tiny house movement.
It wasn’t really a quite a big thing three years ago as it is today.
He had this idea that you wanted to experiment with how small of a space could you build and still enjoy living in it?
Make it a comfortable place to live and do everything that you need to do, have the necessities, make it feel good, but also have it costs a little less, have a lighter hand on the land, blah, blah, blah.
So he started building these houses. I came home, checked it out, we were talking about the process.
He was telling me, I’m trying to build these things, but I just can’t find any information about it. I can’t find anyone that knows what size solar system to stick on it. I don’t know what the best sources are for it.
I don’t know how to do my wiring or my plumbing or all these things that DIY builders ended up facing as they go down the journey.
At the same time, I was in Jasper helping a friend of mine and start Mountains of Relief as you mentioned there in the awesome intro.
I was getting my feet wet in web development and when we were chatting here we found this hole where like there is no resource hub, there is no spot where the best products are curated and tested by a community of actual tiny house builders.
Let’s be it, let’s do it.
Actually put together the bones of the website, connected with me a couple of weeks later and it was like check it out, you know I made it, you know, I looked, I was like, okay, right on.
Then we add joined forces and that’s how it started and like I said, we’re just kind of going with the flow. When something works or when we feel momentum building or when we feel like something is providing a lot of value to people, then we focus on that.
It’s meant essentially focusing on providing the gear, providing the supplies as opposed to building the houses.
So that’s what we’re doing with Tiny Life Supply today.
Brian: Awesome. That sounds great.
As marketing director, what’s your average day look like?
You personally?
Jake: We’ve given ourselves fancy titles. You know where the CEO or the director of marketing or the, you know, whatever.
But like any small business, you also clean toilets and run grab Subway for lunch kind of thing. So we do all kinds of stuff.
In an ideal world with just my marketing hat on, maybe I’ll have a film project or someone that I get to meet during the day and you know, showcase.
Then I’ll spend some time in the afternoon, either editing a video or putting together a post to deploy through our different channels.
And then also trying to take on other projects.
We’ve got a pretty standardized marketing plan that we try and all five of our different approaches in an equal capacity. But I’ll take on something else that’s fun and mixes things up.
For example, doing a podcast with you or maybe collaborating with some van lifers that want to write a blog for us.
The neatest thing about starting this business is essentially we built a website, introduced ourselves to the world through the website and put a phone number on there and the phone rings.
People find us, they call us and it’s incredible who phones.
So we’ve had opportunities to link up and collaborate. You can’t collaborate with everyone. There’s only so much resources and time and whatever.
But we try and link up with as many people as we can that are doing innovative, inspiring green building projects or things in the name of science, minimalism, the environment, et cetera and take it on project-by-project.
Couple of examples, we got to team up with the Wyoming Stargazing Society last year.
We powered their dark sky pavilion, which is this huge inflatable dome that they use during the solar eclipse and use for all kinds of things. Stargazing events and student science trips and parties and whatever.
Also have gotten to collaborate with lots of tiny home builders and lifers. People putting up yurts.
One of the coolest ones we’ve got to work with is a young girl.
When we met her, she was 12….11 or 12 and her name is Ocean and her parents are really in depth, permaculture and sustainability and efficient systems.
She reached out to us basically, you know, Hey I’m Ocean, don’t write me off because I’m 11 but I’m really serious about building a tiny house on wheels and looking for some help.
Once this thing is done, I want to drag it around to different high schools in my area and beyond. And I want to teach other kids about tiny houses and permaculture and sustainability.
So we’ve linked up with her and have gotten to help her just through sourcing gear and making other connections.
It’s things like that that are by far the most rewarding, exciting things and the reason that we’re still enthusiastically showing up every day.
Brian: Oh, that’s really great.
And you had mentioned all the different types of homes that you guys have worked with and I saw on your website you also got just about anything you can think of in terms of energy solutions, heating options, appliances, a lot of construction products, trailers and framing kits.
Out of all those things, what’s your top selling product or service?
What’s the thing you see the most of you guys going through?
Jake: Yeah, good question.
Our biggest product category is wood stoves and sort of accessories, heating products.
People put their space together and then they’re like, okay, how are we going to heat this thing?
Especially if it’s off grid.
Usually they come to write off electrical options because that’s a huge draw on a solar system or any kind of power that they decided to do. So they end up looking at either wood or propane.
We’ve partnered with a handful really innovative stove manufacturers here in North America and also in Europe.
Same with propane heater manufacturers and propane appliance manufacturers. So that’s kind of a main source of actual sales. Then interactions.
That being said, you know, tiny houses, they’re really cool.
They look neat, they make a great subject for a TV show. The characters that are in them are interesting too, right?
So you’ve got this sort of spring of interest in all of these wacky characters in these crazy builds.
Are most people going to live in little funky tiny house on wheels?
Probably not, but are more and more people looking at their footprint and their energy consumption and their co2 emissions and being like, you know, I can make changes to my lifestyle and I’d like to and I want to and I believe in this stuff.
We’re actually a large part of our market. We have people phoning in to me and like, Hey, I live in an apartment in New York, but like what can I do?
And then maybe the first step for them is putting in led lights or you know, maybe in a larger home people are just looking for different framing options or different installation options or they just, they want to discuss different methods that, they’ve seen through our ambassadors or through the tiny house community.
That’s what I think is so neat about the tiny house movement is not the actual tiny houses though they’re really cool and clearly it’s our niche and what we’re into.
It’s the conversation that they’re starting or the conversation that they’re contributing to and it feels like it’s now or never. More and more people you talk to making the little changes in their life to be more conscious about their impact on the planet.
It’s not just a conversation for dinner parties anymore.
It’s a real thing that we should have done yesterday and that people are really prioritizing, so it’s really invigorating and it really makes you optimistic.
Talking to all the people that we get to talk to and hearing about all the projects and getting to collaborate in some of them. There’s a real movement here and it’s just exciting.
Brian: That’s great.
I love your direction and talking about the mindset of the people that are coming to you and finding you online, and then the fact that just about everything you’ve brought up, it all comes back to the conversation that you’re having with people, to the community that you guys have built, the actual individuals.
There’s something to be said about that. And let me just ask, if you could define, and you’ve done a good job up till now, but if you could define even further, who would you say is your ideal customer?
Jake: There’s two things.
The easy answer is what I’ve been giving till now is like, we just don’t have enough staff. You know, we’re just getting started.
It’s hard to tell what the first few thousand customers, what our profile is, what kind of people are interested here.
But now that we’re having more people and we’ve been around for awhile and I’m still seeing like insane diversity in the characters that find us online or find us in person or call us.
It’s really a cross of ages, genders, demographics.
I guess what I could say is that maybe it’s transitioning a bit, like any conversation or any innovation has people that show up early. When the first iPhone comes out, the first new iPhone and there’s that one guy waiting outside just like needs to have it first and maybe the majority of people are waiting to see like how does it work out for that guy?
Are there glitches, like what’s going on?
But once you know a few more people get the newest technology, a few more people adopt. And then everyone else was like, no, you know what? This is looking good. Let’s give it a shot.
And then you see different types of peoples coming onto the new technology.
And that’s really what we’ve seen with green building supplies and the tiny lifestyle and these energy efficient building supplies and appliances is it started with this kind of group of almost crazy people.
We’ve coined them, the tiny life renegades.
We’ve made an ambassador program around it.
But more and more, I think of all of the people that are getting involved at this early stage in the game as these tiny life renegades where they aren’t afraid to be the first one to try something different.
Their neighbors might be looking at them like what?
You’re going to live in that thing, but they feel passionately about the environment. They feel passionately about financial freedom. They feel passionately about minimalism for whatever reason.
They’re drawn to this movement and they’re not afraid to lead the charge.
So that’s been our main customer so far is these kind of renegades.
I heard an interesting quote earlier today that once you start to look at things differently, things start to look different. The more we talk to people that have come up with some insane idea, it just starts to not seem as insane anymore.
Now, the phone rings a lot from people, like I said, who are living in an urban area or they’re living in a larger house but want to make these steps.
The profile’s changing and I guess I kind of in a political sort of way avoided your answer, but all types of people are phoning us, senior citizens that are retiring, people that found themselves saddled with tons of debt and you know they need to turn things around.
People that are just starting out trying to buy their first house.
The thought of getting a two car garage, make a mansion and just sort of, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel right.
Brian: I love that, tiny life renegades. That really says a lot because you went through and you’ve described the mindset of a person and that’s something that’s very specific.
It’s like you said, it goes across ages or genders or traditional demographics, but the mindset is what you’re really looking for this early on in the technology and that trend is hot and so it’s really cool to see how you’ve defined that for your company.
Jake: Yeah, it’s exciting meeting these people too. You never know.
Like people are designing their own solar systems. They’re building their own batteries.
They’re coming up with their own inventions to make their house absorb the energy from the sun and hold onto the heat.
Like there are people literally inventing more efficient ways of living.
It’s just so neat to get to be a part of it.
Brian: Are your products changing because of these conversations?
Are you seeing things that you wouldn’t have thought would have been popular or weren’t have thought would have been needed and you guys have gone more in that direction?
Has that changed at all for you?
Jake: Yeah, 100%.
The products thing is interesting. First it was just us doing all the research and trying different products and being like, yeah, this works, this doesn’t work.
Starting from there.
As we partnered with these brands, it was literally phoning up the 1-800 number we’d find on the website and being like, Hey, you guys ever heard of tiny houses?
Well that’s what we’re building and your product would be great for it.
The conversations would often go nowhere, but if it was a product we really believed in, we keep knocking on the door until the no became a maybe.
So we made our original partnerships, but now we’ve had a chance to, through our ambassador group, and through our customers, we’ve had a chance to really test out a lot of new products and some of them aren’t up to snuff and sometimes there’s new innovations coming out.
We get a lot of calls from other manufacturers too.
Like, Hey, check it out.
I see you guys carry this stuff. We’ve got this product that has this kind of innovation, give it a shot.
And they’ll send it over and we’ll check it out.
We’ve got a kind of a crazy task at hand. We’re doing a deep dive into our selection this year and we really want to hone down on the products that we strongly believe in and feel are the highest quality and the most efficient and the most environmentally friendly.
Because you know the Internet’s a big place and if you want a million options you can go on Amazon or you can just Google it.
What we want to do is sharing the knowledge and the expertise and curating a smaller selection of products where we can just say we’ve tested them all out. This is our recommendation and why.
If you found something else that you think we’re missing, let us know.
That’s actually been a cool thing too, like we’ve just recently partnered with Swedish wood stove manufacturer called Yosef Davidson.
One of our tiny life renegades, Leo Horn down in Whistler, British Columbia got ahold of us and was like, you’ve got to check this out. The quality of these stoves is amazing.
They do wood burning oven that you can cook with and heat your house with and their compact is just incredible.
So we dug into it a bit, started the conversation and a year later we’ve partnered with them as their North American launching pad to bring products over here and we’re going to be rolling that out in the next few months.
Things like that are really exciting.
Brian: That’s really great.
Where do you find new customers at?
Jake: Ecommerce is a game in itself that neither Axel or I had any experience in, but there’s thousands of people out there.
I mean I think on Shopify alone have half a million vendors selling this, that and the other thing.
A large part of it is just playing the game with Google rankings and what they call search engine optimization so that if you know Brian Pombo, Google’s hot water heater will show up first, regardless of whether we’re best for him or not.
One side of our marketing is not the fun, make videos and do tiny house tours side. It’s make sure we’re complying with all of the best practices and guidelines, blah, blah blah.
So that people that are out there are looking for a specific product or a specific solution to their challenges they’re facing with their project. Make sure that we’re in the running as an option for them.
That aside, lots of word of mouth because most of our products are expensive.
A lot of the people that are taking on these tiny living projects have financial restraints. So the way I was thinking about it, as people are going to splurge on that stove, or that range oven, or the solar system that’s going to be kind of the showpiece for their home and we probably won’t see them again or talk to them again.
But it hasn’t really been the case.
People would get ahold of us when they’re just planning. You don’t know if they’re serious or not, but they’re like, Oh I really liked this tiny house thing. Okay cool.
I think you yak it through with them and they tell you their story a bit about like why, what’s the, why, what are they up to?
And everyone’s got a pretty cool story and in a unique set of needs and requirements.
You can find yourself getting pretty involved in the planning process. And I feel a little bit weird calling people customers because you really do build friendships with them.
We went and met a lot of our customers in person and even swung hammers on their work sites because you get that excited about it and you really do build up a relationship.
Yeah, they ended up coming back and if you’re able to solve their woodstove situation and provide some good advice in the support, then they sometimes will be back to ask questions about the kitchen and so on.
Like we were talking about earlier, it takes one person in a community to really be the Renegade, be the first person to do something alternative. And that person undoubtedly has dozens and then hundreds and thousands people knocking on their door.
I mean like, why do you do this?
How’d you do this?
What’s going on in here?
You know, we get a lot of people who phone and say, my neighbor George built a tiny house and says, you guys can help. It’s a mixed bag.
We often get off the call from a new customer that’s dreaming up some like crazy project and they’ll look at each other and kind of laugh like, Holy smokes, like wild. How cool is it that they called us at all?
Brian: Absolutely.
What you’re saying really resonates and it’s what I would figure with everything else that you’re saying in terms of it being word of mouth.
These types of communities really does grow like that, especially in the early days, but it’s also important what you were saying about staying on top of SEO and everything.
These are the ways that you’re going to be able to be there when people are actually looking and they don’t know about you yet.
Jake: Yeah.
Brian: I saw that you guys are also doing or had done advertising on Facebook and Instagram and so forth. How is social media both the paid and the organic side, has that had a positive effect on your business or is it just something you’re testing out right now?
Jake: Yeah, good question.
To be honest with you Brian, everything we do, we’re testing out right now this summer.
The website will have been going for three years, so everything very new.
I would say that in regards to social media, it’s been really cool. The neatest thing about the time we’re living in right now is that we can communicate with anybody in the world.
You know, if you want to get a message out bad enough, you can send a message to David Bacco or the queen or whoever, any single person in the world, you can from your parents’ basement, your cell phone, wherever you are, you can send a message to them.
We’ve stumbled onto this project, Tiny Life Supply that we feel really passionately about and it feels like a way that we can really leverage our efforts to make a meaningful impact where social media has been really helpful for us just to tell people what we’re up to, share the stories of our renegades, build some connections and get some relationships started.
Whether it leads to actual projects or just word of mouth stuff or if it just sort of is entertainment for someone that you know, starts a conversation with them at a dinner sometime down the road.
It’s been a fun platform to communicate and it’s also driven sales as well.
I have a strange kind of contradiction. I really love what we’re doing and I really believe in it, but at the same time, if you don’t run the business well, the business won’t succeed and then you can’t do it anymore.
You can’t do the positive things.
So sometimes I feel a little bit weird talking business because I don’t want it to come off as, I just found this marketplace and I’m trying to sell stuff to people.
It’s not the case. The marketing side is definitely interesting.
Social media is always changing. You’ve got to constantly be reading, constantly be changing.
The way that you advertise on the platforms change week-to-week.
For anyone that’s been building a business in part using Facebook advertising will be aware that the algorithm hasn’t been super great for businesses over the last year.
That’s just how it is, right?
You move on, you find your people and in the end there’s all these ways that you can try and sell stuff online or you can try and optimize your search results or whatever.
But the more I learn about it and the deeper I kind of get into the technical sides of it, the more I realize who cares?
Just relax, do good things, put out valuable content, be good people, have good information, have good products, and just keep doing what you’re doing.
So far that’s been working for us and it’s what I want to keep doing right on.
Brian: That’s fabulous advice. And I think what you’re saying is pretty common throughout a lot of the other people we’ve been talking to and having conversations with.
They come from a similar background where they fell in love with the area first, they fell in love with, we call them industry, but really, yeah, fall in love with an industry you fell in love with the idea of tiny houses and so on and so forth.
And then you’ve created a business out of that, out of necessity to continue doing what you love doing and you’re making money, but it’s not to the end of making money.
You’re not pulling a profit just to pull a profit, your profits so you can keep helping people because it’s necessary to be able to grow and keep going.
That’s really great to hear and I think that’s why you’re resonating with the market so well.
Jake: Yeah, thanks Brian.
Brian: Even in terms of referring to people as friends versus customers. I think that’s a really good turning point to have and be able to make those distinctions when you’re speaking with people.
Jake: Yeah, totally.
I had a funny moment when we first started this thing, you know, kind of like looking at it as a business.
We get these phone calls all the time from people. I was like, jokingly calling them broke hippies.
We’d get up, we’d get all these calls from broke hippies saying, you know, I’m working on this crazy thing.
Can you give me a free toilet?
Can you give me a free stove?
Can you give me a free of this?
How much of a discount can I get on this?
And I looked at Axel and I’m like, why have we made a business where our target market is brok hippies?
Like we should open a jewelry store, you know, let’s sell diamonds to people.
But then not long after that, it kind of struck me. I was looking in the mirror and the face looking back at me.
It’s a broke hippie. I am a broke hippie.
So we are, you know, we’re broke hippies.
The funny thing, it’s like it’s our people. This is our world. It’s what we care about and it’s what we like to do.
It’s meant a lot of things, some kind of feel like your grind while you’re in them, building the business up.
But the coolest thing about it is every day you wake up, you don’t have to pretend that you love this like weird car that you have to sell or you don’t have to like pretend that you love stocks or whatever.
I wake up and I love the people that I get to work with and I’m excited about the innovations around the products that we get to sell and the brands we get to partner with. I’m excited when the phone rings.
It’s neat to find a way to at least try and carve out a living in is space that you authentically feel you aligned.
Brian: Yeah, that’s great.
And it’s a great segue to my next question, which is what would you say that you like best about your business and your industry?
Jake: The business and the industry. I guess the industry, I like that we’re leading maybe conversations that are going to grow and be adopted by more people in the future. That’s exciting for me.
It feels like every little project we work on now it’s going to scale.
It’s easy these days as you hear a lot of people talk about like, well, I’m doing this to inspire others and it’s a cool thought.
If you actually do something innovative and beautiful and valuable, like building a really awesome tiny living space that is an achievement and it’s a body of work that is going to get people talking and like we’re talking about the age of being able to communicate and talk with anyone.
That project is going to be shared and other people are going to pick up elements of that project. Before you know it, if you have a cool idea, it’s going to grow to something bigger and it’s this big shared collective of innovation.
That’s my favorite part of the industry.
My favorite part of the business is being able to have more meaningful conversations with more meaningful people.
You know, there’s so much going on in the world and everyone’s busy. Once you build some momentum, whatever you’re doing right, whether it’s podcasting or whether you’re making ice cream or maybe you’re a dog Walker, once you have some momentum behind what you’re doing, you have some credibility.
And next thing you know, I’m working on a video series right now and I reached out to our local mayor and our MP in federal government ask if they want to get involved.
They both said, yeah, I’d love to. I’d love to get involved with what you guys are doing.
I was almost shocked, but it’s really neat to feel that the more work you put into something and the more momentum you snowballs and it grows.
You’re able to attract different collaborators and different team members and get involved with different projects that just wouldn’t have the skills or the network to be able to participate in if you hadn’t have started in the first place.
Brian: What are your biggest gripes with your business and or industry?
Jake: Biggest gripes?
I take pride in not really being a griper.
I think all is well, like everything’s as it should be.
I guess sometimes I feel we are partnered with these brands and we’re communicating with these builders and connecting good products with good project managers and trying to provide the customer service and the premium products.
But often I kind of find myself thinking, Oh, I’d like to innovate on some products.
Or you get new ideas, whether it’s building your own better mouse trap or taking on a different project, like a construction school for people that wouldn’t have access to it or solar panel, green energy shift initiatives, this kind of thing.
And I guess the one, not gripe, but element of the business that feels sometimes hard is you need to focus, you know, you need to focus on what you’re doing and you have to be patient and you kind of get distracted sometimes.
I wish we could grow faster than than we are, but all in all, I just feel very fortunate to get to do this and get to work with the people we get to work with.
And yeah, it’s just, it’s exciting, man. I feel great about it.
Brian: Great. You’re really taking it as it comes along.
Like you had mentioned before, you’re not sure quite where you’re going to be in the next few years and so forth.
You’ve only been in business for the past three years, but if we were to take a guess, let’s say I had you back on the show in a year and we looked back over the last 12 months, what would you say would have had to have happened for you to feel that you’ve really had progress with your business?
Jake: That’s a cool question and something that I definitely think about all the time.
Like I said before, you know, you can’t make the impact that you want to make unless you know you have a healthy project. And in our case that’s a healthy business.
As two guys that started with building project on the side and now find ourselves operating this business, there are a lot of things that we were just winging it.
Now, you know, with employees and the realities of doing business in society, there’s things that you need to tighten up. You can’t wing it forever.
I’ve got some big sort of business goals for the next year.
Continued growth. We’ve been growing steadily every quarter by, 30 to 40% since we started. And I’d like to continue that.
I’d like to feel as though there’s lots of processes in place that will let this thing live on as a healthy, impactful business. Even if something happened to me or anyone left or whatever it was, I’d like it to be its own self-propelling thing.
The other thing too that we’ve committed to right off the bat was vehicles to make change and give back and make impact into our business model.
We’ll build it into the marketing, we’ll build it into the fabric of the so that as business grows, our impact will grow as well.
And so we’ve partnered with 1% for the planet.
So 1% of gross sales gets donated to various causes of what you can sort of pick and choose your favorite.
That’s neat as you’ve been getting going and that’s not too meaningful, but as you grow a larger company, that’ll be exciting to see what we can contribute there.
I’d like to tell, so continue with our renegades program where we’re taking people that are doing really innovative projects but need a hand, you know, getting to put a little bit of our weight behind them in terms of sourcing products and connecting them with the right people.
I wouldn’t mind taking on a cool project, something bigger, whether that be our own products or whether it be something more of a social project closer to home.
There’s a lot of buzz around tiny homes in British Columbia right now for use as affordable housing solutions.
We’re getting a lot of conversations started and a lot of people are calling us to chat about their different ideas and I’d like to commit to helping with something in that space over the next year or two. If all those things could happen, I’d feel great about it.
Brian: Excellent. What would you say are the obstacles that are standing in your way from getting there, from continuing this growth, getting to do these larger projects?
Jake: Um, it’s sunny out. It’s really sunny out.
We just want to go biking and, but like I’m kind of kidding, but at the same time like staying focused on something for three years is something, but staying focused on it for five years or longer. Yeah. Maybe we’re the biggest obstacle.
Commercial Break: We’re going to stop Jake right there to kind of make a point. He says we’re the biggest obstacle.
That’s very insightful.
In fact, if you listen to enough of our podcasts, you’ll hear that theme running over and over again. The one that comes to mind is episode number three with Mark Robinson from walkinpets.com.
He goes into depth about how he’s his greatest obstacle. If you feel similarly, if you could relate with Jake having a difficult time staying focused, imagine if you could have free time knowing that while you’re away and your business is running properly and that you’re doing everything necessary to make it hit the goals that you wanted to hit.
That’s really the dream business lifestyle, isn’t it?
To be able to do what you want to do while at the same time knowing that your business is insecure hands and that really comes down to systemizing your business.
If you’d like some help, I’m offering a free conversation for self-reliance companies.
Go to dreambizchat.com if you’re either a business owner or an executive and consider yourself a decision maker, I’d be happy to talk about what it’s going to take to move your business from where it is to where you want it to be and really your definition of an ideal dream business.
So go to dreambizchat.com sign up on the application and if you qualify you’ll be getting a call back.
You do have to be patient. There is a waiting list, but if you’re really interested in doing this, go to dreambizchat.com and now back to the conversation with Jake.
Jake: Other obstacles, you know, like I said before, we have just been going with the flow since we started and I really believe that that’s the way to go. Maybe the flow is going to change.
Maybe momentum is going to get pulled in a different way.
I’m not sure yet, but I’m ready for it and I’m excited for it and that’s where I want to go.
With that in mind, I don’t see obstacles. I just see kind of corners that we’re going to get to be informed by and grow over top of or around or with.
Yeah, I don’t know if I answered your question, but.
Brian: That’s great. That’s very insightful.
What advice would you have for other business owners that might be listening or people with the projects of their own that they’re looking to grow that may be in a similar market as yours?
Jake: I guess number one, I would say make sure you’re getting into business in a space that you align with, that you authentically believe in.
People throw around the word passion, so why don’t I do that to you?
Something that you do feel passionate about or at the very least that you like you’re interested in, you know, you talk to the most successful people and like how did you get here?
How are you the CEO of you know this ski brand?
Well, I liked skiing. I started working at a ski shop and I cleaned toilets for awhile and then I got to work the till for awhile and then I moved up and up and up.
But the whole time that they were building, whether it’s on their own company or working for someone else, they’re in a space that’s exciting.
They’re working with products that they are excited about and I couldn’t imagine not doing that.
Actually I can, I’ve worked other jobs and I’m saying if you’re starting from scratch, try and find something that you like, that you believe in and that you can be authentic about.
Brian: Awesome.
If we have any listeners that want to find out more about tiny life supply, what would you suggest they do Jake?
Jake: Yeah, well we’re online tinylifesupply.com down in the states and tinylifesupply.ca up in Canada where you reached me today.
We’re also on social media, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, all @TinyLifeSupply.
If you have any projects that you’re working on or got an idea that you’re not sure is a, you know, an actual seed that will go to something or maybe just something that you want to yak about.
We love making the new connections and hearing about what people are up to, whether you’re someone in the industry or you’re just trying to do things different.
Maybe working on a social initiative in your community.
Love to hear from you.
Reach out to us on Instagram or Facebook, have visited us at tinylifesupply.com, check out what we’re doing and our emails are on the site there and I welcome all in any messages.
I’d love feedback and love to connect with some of your podcast listeners.
Brian: Fabulous. Jake Daley. Thank you so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Jake: Thanks a lot Brian, I really appreciate you inviting me.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: I really enjoyed the conversation with Jake.
He has such a nice laid back attitude. It’s kind of refreshing and I know if you’ve listened to it once, you may have missed a lot of the little gold nuggets in because he has such a pleasant laid back attitude.
But I’m gonna point out some of the things that I got out of it.
First off, the question is, are you your customer?
They started out just wanting to build a tiny house. Axel started out talking with Jake about the process and he was his customer before he even had a business, so there’s a passion already built in.
There’s an affinity for his customer already because he is his customer.
That’s really important. I remember when I first started talking to people in the self-reliance field, I spoke to a gentleman that owned a website that was selling emergency preparedness materials and I’d mentioned his name, but I’m not sure if his website is even still functioning.
He had set up the site to basically make money. He had some interest in our emergency preparedness, but not really. In fact, in most cases, he actually despised his clientele.
He called them nuts.
He said they’re a little kooky and yeah, we all have that in our customer basis.
At some point you’re going to have people that you don’t get along with, but he didn’t seem to like most of the people that he did business with.
It was not tough to see why he had a tough time getting his business to thrive in an era when emergency preparedness was having a little bit of difficulty in the marketplace. That’s important.
It’s really important that you know your customer and you like them and a sign of that is back to Jake, that they have this tiny life renegades ambassador program. This is really interesting.
If you go to their website, tinylifesupply.com and you add in slash, renegades, it will take you to the page with a handful of the people in their ambassador program. You click on any of the pictures.
It will take you to a little bio, of these people.
All these people have their own social media, their own groups.
If you have a customer base that in turn also have followings, it’s just smart business to get them involved, giving you better ideas. They in turn are gonna recommend you to their people.
Very well done and it’s a great way to get to know your customers and to be able to reward the ones that are using your products in the most unique matter.
One theme that came off over and over again was Jake’s fearlessness and he’s very subtle about it, but he talks about the fact that you can communicate with anyone in the world.
That’s a very solid statement and it’s something that I think scares a lot of business owners. The idea that you can actually reach out and get ahold of anybody if you have the guts to do it.
He talks about calling suppliers for the first time and letting them know what they do.
Calling back over and over again. Not taking no for an answer.
There’s a fearlessness that’s necessary to really survive in business and you’ve got to make sure if you don’t have that you have somebody on your team that does and they’re out there working hard for you.
I think the most important thing that he said in this conversation is that discussing business items feels weird and it’s something that most people don’t ever put into words, but I think most owners and executives in the self-reliance field fall into this category at some point.
No one is born a natural business person. You grow into these type of things.
You learn the process as you go along and especially if you’re passionate about the subject matter. It’s real easy to feel weird about referring to people as customers or discussing marketing.
If you grew up in a home that had any type of negative talk regarding business or business, people are making money. It can be quite a strange growth process.
Everybody has to go through a growth period when becoming a business person and some of the best discoveries I’ve found are serendipities that happen along the way.
They’re the things you stumble upon that are actually quite brilliant.
The Tiny Life Renegades thing is one of those.
Another thing that they do is having a cause and it’s because their heart is in it. They’re passionate about the program, but they have a cause that they’re donating to and looking to donate to over the long run.
If you don’t have a cause connecting with your business, I’m going to highly recommend that you find something if it’s not already built into the business structure. As we heard with Brad James from Beepods back in episode four, you really do need a cause.
If you have a cause, it makes your business so much bigger than just the profit end of things.
It makes it appear so much greater. It can sometimes be that one little piece that allows a person to take that first step to purchasing a product or service from you.
All in all, this was a great conversation. Really looking forward to how Jake and Tiny Life Supply do in the future. It’s a great concept and definitely like a hot one right now.
Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.
That’s BrianJPombo.com. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.
Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor. Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell.
Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.
I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.