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Episode 27.
Are your customers part of a community? Do you actively educate your customer base to make them more informed consumers?
Joe Stout is the President of Mt. Capra Products, a family-owned, sustainably-managed goat dairy located in Centralia, WA. After receiving a Masters of Science in Clinical Human Nutrition and a Bachelors of Science degree in Human Nutrition and Food Science from Washington State University, Joe found himself in a position to take the lead of the family business.
In our conversation, we discuss how (even as an infant), Joe has had a unique perspective regarding the nutritional qualities of goat milk products. We also delve into how such a simple commodity like goats milk, can spin-off into many different consumer realms and business opportunities.
Are you seeing all the customer groups for your core product or service? Are you creating systems in your business so that it doesn’t require YOU to make it function?
Joe’s story will stretch your thinking and inspire you. You may even walk away with a new belief in how you can truly effect people with your business.
Not only that, the end has a surprise testimonial by Brian’s wife Kate Pombo regarding their son Lucas and Mt. Capra’s Goat Milk Formula ingredients.
Listen Now!
- Find out more about Joe Stout and Mt. Capra: https://mtcapra.com/
Beat out your competition – EVEN if it’s Amazon.com: https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook
Full Transcript
Brian: Let’s say a year from now, we brought you back on the show and just kind of looked over the past 12 months and look back on that.
What would have happened from now till then for you to feel happy with the progress concerning your business?
Joe: Understanding the customers needs, maybe even before they understand what their need is, and having the information that they’re going to request available to them and even automatically given to them before they even request it.
Really, really good for customer service because the customer then is like wow, yeah, how they know I needed that that’s exactly what I needed?
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: All right, with us today is Joe Stout president of Mt. Capra.
Joe received a Masters of Science and clinical human nutrition from the University of Bridgeport and Bachelors of Science in Human Nutrition and Food Science from Washington State University.
Along with running the farm, he is engaged in graduate studies of sustainable food systems at Green Mountain College and is certified in permaculture design.
Joe and his wonderful bride, Elizabeth had been married for 11 years and have been blessed with seven beautiful children.
Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe: Brian, thanks for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure to be here and congrats to you on the new addition to your family.
Brian: Oh, thanks. Thank you very much.
Yeah, we just…I was telling Joe, we were going to be meeting sooner but what ended up happening is we ended up with an arrival of our third child in my family. So that was that was cool.
Joe: Super exciting. Yeah, you get any sleep?
Brian: Just barely, lol!
Joe: Just barely yeah, I feel it.
Brian: Get it where I can, you know.
Joe: Right.
Brian: So why don’t you let everyone know what you do, Joe?
Joe: Yeah, great.
So we’re based up here in Washington State actually, we have a goat dairy. It’s actually the largest goat dairy in Washington state, we run about 500 head of goat.
What we do with those goats is we take the milk that we get, we have a processing facility that we process that milk into different nutritional components of things like goat milk protein.
Will extract the minerals, the lactose will also extract some of the cream and turn turn it into ghee, which is clarified butter.
We do a lot of things with goat milk ingredients and things that surround kind of the alternative nutritional world.
Brian: That’s a great way of describing it….the alternative nutritional world.
I can see that kind of goes back to your background in nutrition.
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you got started in this whole thing.
Joe: One of the things that we’re pretty proud of in terms of our company story, we’ve been continuously family run now for over 90 years. Actually 91 years this year.
Back in 1928, a father and son team known as the Eggers family, they began goat dairy, and we’re creating cheese from the goat milk.
One of the leftover products that you have when you make cheese is something called Whey.
Whey has a little bit of protein in it, but it has a lot of minerals and electrolytes in it. And so they were concentrating that way down into something that they called Wex for whey extract.
So there was no cheese and about 25 years before the health food supplement market even began, they were selling a an extract of way they had a bunch of different ailments and whatnot that they really prescribed it for.
And so in 1985, a year after I was born, my dad met with Son of the Father Son team, they decided that they were going to pass on the business on to him because he was a young up and coming aspiring farmer.
He was a city kid that wanted to work on a farm also at the time.
I was one years old and I was very allergic to cow’s milk.
He was working on a cow milk dairy at the time.
And so he saw it as something that not only would diversify away from the commodity market that cow milk is, so he would develop a niche line of products. But also being that one of his kids was even allergic cow milk anyways, that it really made sense.
So I grew up with the business, I grew up on the farm.
When I went off to college, I originally was going off to college with the idea that I would become a veterinarian, just because I enjoyed working with animals. As I experienced some of the initial course work for veterinarian and work.
I really found myself being drawn to two things.
Number one is the human sciences and human nutrition.
And also, I loved the work that my family had been doing with this business.
I wanted to make it my career as well.
So that’s why I ended up getting two degrees in nutrition and in 2012 my dad who was 62 at the time, decided he was going to go back to school and become a doctor and become a naturopathic doctor.
And so he asked me and my wife come back to the farm.
We were living in Spokane at the time. To come back to the farm and run the farm, run the business.
Basically handed me the keys to the whole thing and said, I’ll see you later I’ve got work to do.
So I’ve been running things since 2012. And it’s been going really really well. A lot of things that I’ve learned along the way that’s kind of the story up until this point.
Brian: Yeah, well that’s fabulous.
It’s always interesting to me how people involved in the goat milk industry oftentimes get pulled in by some type of personal nutrition issue.
Joe: Yeah.
Brian: And it’s just funny. Your whole family got it.
Joe: Exactly.
Brian: It’s very, very interesting. Really shows you that the amazing properties that goat milk has over anything else out there and you guys are definitely going to town with that.
I mean, if you guys go to MtCapra.com, you can see they’ve got all these protein products related including powders, and so forth.
They’ve got the Ghee, as you mentioned. You guys have goat milk soaps and supplements, including probiotics and electrolytes, which most people don’t necessarily relate back to, especially goat milk.
So that out of all these products that you have going on right now and on your website, what would you say is the top selling one?
Joe: Because we are a niche company.
One of the things about a niche company is that you have to define what your niche is going to be, or your niche depending on how you say that word.
When you decide what your niche is going to be. Part of that is deciding what your target markets going to be.
With Mt. Capra, our niche is goat milk, and it’s less the target market. Our target market can vary throughout the whole lifecycle of nutrition.
From little bitty babies to use our ingredients to make goat milk formula recipe, all the way up into the elderly, who use our goat whey protein to really help keep weight on when it’s so hard to keep weight on when you’re in those older, older periods of life, and then everybody in between.
And so in terms of what product would be that would be best selling for us. The product that we start, we’ve been selling for the longest as a product known as Capra Mineral Whey.
It’s in a red bottle. It’s right there on the front page of our website.
It’s a product that has the word whey in it, but it’s really not a protein supplement.
What it is, is it’s that minerals, those minerals and electrolytes that have been concentrated down from goat milk. And that’s been a product that for a lot of people is one of the best all around use products just for good health.
Minerals in our diet are something that have been steadily declining as we practice something called industrial agriculture.
Industrial agriculture is very bad for the environment from the standpoint of improving the mineral concentration of soils.
And so we farm a lot of… not Mt. Capra, but as a culture we farm using chemical salts, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus because those are the only three minerals that you need to grow a plant.
You end up getting a plant that’s grown. But all of those other trace minerals that normally would be present in that plant, they end up not showing up anymore because you’ve just used nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to grow this plant.
I think if you look at what the mineral content was of, say, a head of cabbage in 1950, when the USC actually set the mineral content for that, I think you have to eat like 16 heads of cabbage now to get the same mineral content.
Brian: Wow!
Joe: Because our soils are becoming so depleted of minerals.
The difference about Mt. Capra though is that we don’t practice what’s known as tillage agriculture, we grow grass.
Now grass is pretty much useless to humans because we can’t digest it. But grass is amazing at pulling minerals from the soil, because the grass and the soil have this symbiotic relationship where they can break down all of the spectrum of minerals found in the soil, and they can make it bioavailable not to humans but to goats.
Goats, cows, dear, sheep, those are ruminants they can actually take something worthless like grass, to us nutritionally and they can turn it into a product that’s extraordinarily nutrient dense for us.
And so things like the mineral content of our soils gets passed into the grass.
The ruminant, the goat takes the mineral content in that grass, it makes it bioavailable for us.
And so that Capra Mineral Whey has just a really amazing ability of delivering trace electrolytes and minerals to our diet that you otherwise wouldn’t be getting from a product.
So that’s been certainly the product that…the Capra Mineral Whey has been a product that we have been selling for the longest time. We’ve made that available for almost a century now.
Probably the one people are most familiar with when they come to for nutrition is protein products. And so we have a lot of, quite a variety of different protein powders.
From like chocolate protein powders that are balances of both casein and whey protein, two products that are just whey concentrate exclusively. So probably those two products would be our most popular ones.
Brian: Very cool. So who’s your ideal customer, you sell a lot of things on your website described them their mindset and so forth?
Joe: Sure, the ideal customer for us are a lot of times what it ends up being in the term we use here internally, as we call them, end of rope customers. They’re at the end of their rope because they’ve tried everything else.
And they’re just super sensitive to all kinds of ingredients.
Now, dairy products are very, very nutrient dense, meaning that they have a lot of nutrition packed in a very small amount of space.
But the problem is for cow milk, cow milk ingredients, is that a lot of people are allergic to them. Very, very sensitive to them.
And so our ideal customer generally is that person that’s looking for a product that is going to be real optimal digestion and absorption of a product. And it might be because they’re really sensitive to other ingredients, or because they just see the benefit in finding a product that is going to be more nutritionally complete in its digestion and absorption.
Brian: Well, how are you finding that those ideal people that are in the search for something different to be able to help their nutrition?
Joe: There is certainly no silver bullet that we found.
Word of mouth is definitely a huge one for us.
We’re a small company. And it’s just a small family farm here.
But we’re, we kind of are doing big things in terms of the products that we’re able to offer to our customer base. So we really, a lot of it has to do with kind of wowing our customers with our service, and then they go tell their friends, hey, come check this out.
But also, you know, we found a lot of success in accessing different marketplaces.
And so a big one was, of course Amazon. We got into that three years ago.
And we got in that primarily because we weren’t really that familiar with selling on Amazon, but we noticed a lot of customers. A lot of wholesale customers were just reselling our stuff on Amazon, but we’re not providing that level of customer care that we wanted to see.
And so we jumped in and have had really good success with it and have been basically have gotten access to a customer base that otherwise would probably just ignore us because they want the convenience of Amazon.
Brian: Yeah.
Joe: So and then, you know, we do a lot with making sure that we’re available through our social media channels, probably less prospecting and more, you know, real customer service.
A big part of what we do, as a company is provide ingredients that parents can go make a goat milk formula, using a recipe so we don’t produce a goat milk formula.
But we produce ingredients that people use to make the formula.
Well, it’s a very education intensive prospect doing that. We found a lot of good success in just making sure that we’re available to the customer to answer questions whenever needed, you know, whenever they need those questions answered.
And so we have a registered nurse that’s actually full time with us that pretty much all she does all day is taking care of our customers that are using the ingredients for the goat milk formula. You know, she troubleshoots with them and he will even dialogue and interface with their doctors to make sure that the kiddos are getting the nutrition that they need.
Brian: Wow, that’s fabulous.
That’s really, really interesting. Especially…so what you’re saying is you’re using social media more for after you’ve already brought a customer on board.
Joe: Yes.
Brian: And that ongoing support, ongoing community that you kind of built up there.
Joe: Yeah, exactly.
We as a company really value education a lot in because we value education. We want our customers educated, as well as we’re educated.
One of the things that there’s a actually just north you a little wise is an organization called the Nutritional Therapy Association. It’s called the MTA organization.
And they produce a nine month education course. And they produce something called NTP’s or Nutritional Therapy Practitioners.
Everybody that’s interfacing directly with our customers. They all go through that training.
And so they have a very, very good understanding of the nutritional requirements of the human condition as well as they understand what we value and why we value it and how we can give that to our customer base as well.
And so really, and then, you know, of course, I have a couple of degrees in nutrition and my dad at 62 went back to become a naturopathic doctor at the most prestigious school, best university up in Seattle.
To say all that, to say that even though we are goat farmers, we’re goat farmers who really value education and value not just an educated staff or educated team members, but educated customers as well.
Commercial Break: We’re going to take a quick break from this conversation.
You know when people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a business growth strategist and they say, well, what the heck is that?
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If there is competition out there, it’s going to be standing in your way and there’s no competitive force out there that I see as common as you ubiquitous as Amazon.com.
Amazon.com has become the devil to most e-commerce based businesses for sure, and it’s certainly putting the squeeze on offline businesses.
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This book is not out as of this recording, but if you want to find out when it’s available and how you can get your very own free copy, I want you to go to BrianJPombo.com/AmazonBook.
If you leave me your information, I will let you know as soon as that’s available.
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For example, how you can get a hard copy of this book, how you can get the audio version of this book, how you can take part in workshops related with the concepts within this book.
Brian: If you’re talking about the industry and your business as a whole, you’ve been president since What, 2012?
Joe: Yeah, correct.
Brian: From your experience so far, what do you like best about your business and the industry as a whole?
Joe: Yeah. I love working with customers that care, customers that are very well informed and customers that really seem to understand and respect a company that cares about the things that they care about.
I really like that a lot.
I’ve never felt like I don’t understand the language that people are talking to me, you know, so if I was to say, I don’t know, take over a garage or some you know, like a mechanic shop, I would be in over my head because I don’t I’m not a mechanic.
And so I love being well versed in what my customers care about.
But I also like, how things are constantly changing and there’s constantly you know, nutrition is such a baby science, that it’s just, we’re still in just the infancy of nutrition.
That’s why it’s kind of frustrating.
But things seem to change so much in the official recommendations and being on the bleeding edge of that education means that, you know, you can start offering your customers information, and you can start offering your customers knowledge that the public health officials will be giving to them 30 years from now.
But, because the public health officials, they’re always 15, 20, 25 years behind the times, they still think things like saturated fat is bad.
And yeah, you make your whole diet based off of whole grains.
But you know, 20 years from now, they’ll have adjusted that. But we’re able to give that information to our customers now.
And I’m able to learn a lot of that stuff, as a lot of things have changed even since the 10 years ago that I was in school. And so I love the progressive nature of that landscape.
Brian: Oh, that’s fabulous.
So what’s your biggest gripes about your business in your industry?
Joe: It goes along with one of the things I like the best, is that there’s so much misinformation. People are our told so many different things.
And you know, being in the industry having some education, it’s pretty, it’s somewhat straightforward to, you know, synthesize the different information and come up with a logical conclusion.
If I was mechanic, I would understand all the things about mechanics. But most of my customers wouldn’t you know, people bring their car into a shop, they don’t know anything.
That’s why they brought it to you.
And so I would think a lot of the misinformation that our customers get is frustrating because there’s so much misinformation that’s out there.
Brian: Absolutely. If we were to talk, let’s say a year from now, we brought you back on the show, and just kind of looked over the past 12 months and look back on that, what would have happened from now till then, for you to feel happy with the progress concerning your business?
Joe: One of the things that we’re really looking to improve as a company is understanding the customer’s needs, maybe even before they understand what their need is, and having the information that they’re going to request available to them and even automatically given to them before they even request it.
Not only is that really, really good for customer service, because the customer then it’s like, wow, yeah, how’d they know I needed that, it’s exactly what I needed?
But it also frees us up for more time developing more content and developing more information that they need.
And so we’re really trying to increase the way in which we personalize our automation with our customers through our email marketing platforms.
We’re seeing some good feedback on that some better interaction all the time.
Then one thing is we create more and more content for our customer base and give them that you know, content is king. So give them that stuff that’s very valuable and premium, maybe even moving into a model where you have paid content to where they actually have maybe some customers are good with just you telling them hey, just do it this way.
That’s all they need to know.
Or maybe some customers want to go way deeper having the resources the financial resources to justify go making them goes deeper.
They want may come with a con maybe 12 months from now, if you were having me back on the show, we will have more of the model where we can have that as an option to our customers.
Brian: That’s excellent.
You could see that your website is heading in that direction. You guys have a lot of great information there.
Joe: Sure.
Brian: But the one thing I hear you going back to over and over again, is the idea of educating the customers and giving them the information that they need, right?
So have….thinking about that ahead of time and make it a big part of of your process. That’s going to be really great to see, I can’t wait to see how you guys doing that.
What are the obstacles you see standing in your way of getting there?
Joe: I’ll tell you exactly what the obstacles are.
Everyday, there’s, you know, 10,000 things that need to get done.
And so it’s prioritizing things enough that you carve out space for that big thinking creative moving forward.
Not just the reaction times because you know, a big part of running a business, of course, is reacting to the problems and the needs and the things that are in front of you right now.
But one of the things that oftentimes gets overlooked then, is the actual future of the business. So I’ve hired on some more people to work on our office team. And it’s been really good.
And it’s almost like the more help I get, the more projects that come up. It’s kind of like the more some of that future thinking stuff kind of goes away.
Brian: Absolutely.
Joe: Definitely balancing those two things, dealing with the day to day stuff that has to be dealt with, but dealing with it in a way that systematized and that’s systematic enough that you’re not only doing that 100% of the time.
Brian: Yeah, got it.
So you think a lot of it has to do with how you personally handle these things is affecting how the company is, is moving along. And if you can get that under control, you can see the whole process moving faster.
Joe: Yep, yep, absolutely.
Brian: So that’s really insightful. And I think the other people listening to this are going to get a lot out of that and really relate back with you on that because that seems to be a common issue of anybody.
Joe: Exactly.
Brian: Especially one that is on the smaller end of tight you know, you got a tight family run goat farm and you’re growing out internationally.
I mean, you could imagine that these things are the things that pop up along the way.
So really, kudos to you for moving forward with that. And really having….looks like your focus is really in the right place on that end.
What advice would you have for other business owners and executives who might be listening in that, especially ones in other industries?
Do you have any blanket advice that you’d be able to give them something that you’ve learned a little piece along the way?
Joe: Working on ways that the system can work without you is really key.
If the system only works because you’re there making it work, kudos, because you’re very important.
But really, what you want as a business is you don’t want a ball and chain. You want a business that’s going to work if you are there or not.
That’s not to say that it’s a business that doesn’t ever need you.
But it’s a business that the nuts and bolts of it can work whether you’re there or not.
And so to do that requires a lot of systematizing of the business and I’ve got far more growth to do with our own business on that than I have done. I say that only as a junior traveler on that path towards systematizing.
I know it’s important. And now it’s just a matter of actually getting out there and doing it and making sure it happens.
Brian: Right on, fabulous.
Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you think that’s important to bring up regarding Mt. Capra, or regarding yourself?
Joe: Those are good. I mean, when you’re talking about, especially with your audience want to know the nuts and bolts of how businesses are successful and what things make them successful. I think we’ve touched on a lot of those things that have kind of been the the secret sauce for Mt. Capra, which is, you know, define your niche and figure out who your customers going to be and figure out how to wow them.
There’s a lot of other things that are included in that but as the overarching goals, that’s really key.
Brian: That’s a great synopsis.
So what could a listener who may be listening and interested in find out more about you guys?
How could they find out more about your products and services?
What’s the best direction to send them?
Joe: Yeah, sure. I mean, come on over to the website MtCapra.com.
That’s M as in Mary, T as in Tom, Capra, or a check out the website, give us a call.
If you want to hear more, we houst all of our own in house customer service. And so everybody that when you call down there, you’re going to get a very, very educated staff person answering the phone, and we’ll be more than happy to walk you through any of the products if you want more information than what’s already on the website.
Brian: This was a fabulous conversation.
Joe, I really appreciate you spending time with me.
Definitely go check out MtCapra.com. Thanks a lot, Joe. Hope to see you again sometime.
Joe: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on Brian. Good to talk with you.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Okay, so after I had the interview with Joe from Mt. Capra, I went home and told my wife because the one thing I did not mention is that our son had been having trouble in the eating department is about two months or so.
And we had been having issues, the fact that Kate (Brian’s wife) had difficulty breastfeeding him he was eating mostly formula was not gaining very quickly.
And we were looking for alternatives because we knew the ingredients in normal formula was not that hot. So I went to Kate and told her about all the stuff that Joe had been discussing about goat’s milk formula.
And why don’t you tell them what you thought.
Kate Pombo’s Testimonial: When my son was born, I was determined to breastfeed him, but unfortunately, it wasn’t in the cards. So fast forward a couple of months, we’ve struggled with giving our son regular formula he wasn’t liking it wasn’t drinking enough.
He was barely 1% for his weight.
And when a baby is in the first percentile for weight, that means in comparison to an average baby who would be 50th percentile. My baby was only in the first and it really stressed me out as a mom because it’s my job to make sure the baby eats and thrives.
And initially when I heard about goat milk formula, it blew me away because I had no idea that you can make your own. And it was so unbelievable to me.
I spent probably about five hours on their website reading their blog and comments and all the research that they have available. I’ve read it all, we thought we would give it a try.
So we purchase the kit.
And there’s been a few times where we tried it and weren’t consistent enough with it. But guess what, at about three and a half months, our son was still in the first percentile for weight, after only three weeks of him drinking this formula and liking it and drinking more than he’s ever drank before….he clocked in at seventh percentile.
So you can imagine how happy we were as parents to see him, be so healthy and finally put on a little bit of cheeks and thighs and just grow finally and have a little bit more weight on him.
I feel that it’s been a miracle and that we were led to try this formula.
I’m not one to get carried away with anything out of the ordinary, that is not mainstream, I don’t get carried away with things that are unusual.
So it was difficult for me to change my mindset and give this a try because I don’t experiment with things, I stick to what’s true and proven and known.
And this was really a big change for me big paradigm shift.
I’m glad I did it because it really has worked very well for us. So I would definitely recommend anybody who’s looking for the best formula for their baby to give Mt. Capra’s goat milk formula a try.
Brian: So that’s my wife Kate, and so you understand how personal this episode has become for us.
Also on the business end of things if you re listen to this, you will hear many business concepts being promoted by Joe that you can take and add directly into your business.
Look at how they’ve been able to create a community over what are very simple products, very straightforward products.
And yet by focusing on one market or another, they’ve been able to create a large amount of community.
They’ve been able to plug into communities that are already out there.
In the end, all business comes back to the who.
Who are you going after?
Who were you talking to?
Who are you putting this in front of?
What do they want most out of your product or service?
Fabulous episode. I can’t wait to have Joe on in the future and be able to talk to him more about where Mt. Capra is going from here.
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.
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I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.