Full Transcript – Cam MacKugler – Wild Business Growth Podcast #222

This is the full transcript for Episode #222 of the Wild Business Growth Podcast featuring Cam MacKugler – Cross-Country Gardener, Founder of Seedsheet. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Cam MacKugler 0:00
I’m blaming kindergarten limericks for April showers bring May flowers

Max Branstetter 0:03
Oh, hey, hey, welcome back. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth Podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder & Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 111222 shoutout #DanaGottMax and today’s guest is Cam MacKugler. He is the Founder of Seedsheet which in addition to having some spectacular alliteration is a thrilling company which helps make gardening easier you might have seen him on the Tank of the Shark variety. And in this episode, we talk everything from where the seeds sheet story came about. It does involve maybe some crayons, maybe some cocktail napkins how to get a big big big first customer and figure out the back end side of things that you can actually meet demand for that pick pick pick customer and loads and loads of nostalgia from growing up skiing on Stratton Mountain and beyond. It is Cam the man Cam. Enjoyyyyyyyy the shoooooooow!

Aaaaaaaaalrightyyyyy we are here with Cam MacKugler who have a mental block with that name. Cam. My buddy Cam, Founder of Seedsheet. Really, really cool story and background and everything in the entrepreneurial space and beyond. So excited to speak to you today. Thanks so much for coming on. How you doing today Cam?

Cam MacKugler 2:12
doing awesome Max. Thanks so much for having me on. Been a listener for a while and stoked to help out some folks that are listening potentially.

Max Branstetter 2:22
Awesome. I think definitely not potentially. But thank you. Thank you for tuning in and being here. It means a lot and the first question is more of just a statement. MacKugler. but second question, no. So in looking up your background, I saw that you have a big backer and obviously you know, born and raised live in Vermont. And you know that you used to be a professional ski racer at Stratton Mountain. And at the time of this recording. My wife Dana and I literally just got back from skiing Stratton last weekend. And her Grandma Phyllis shoutout Phyllis lives up in Manchester, Vermont. So super, super small world. Dana and her family literally like grew up skiing. Skiing. Stratton is a tongue twister, every single winter and so tons of nostalgia there but special place in her heart and now my heart is well. How in the world did you like what’s the background of you getting interested in skiing and like finding a home and strength and kind of all that spot?

Cam MacKugler 3:26
There’s not a lot that happens in Vermont. It’s a state of 650,000 people second least populated behind Wyoming. And you can really ski or that’s about it or raise dairy cows. That’s kind of what the state’s known for. We have Ben & Jerry’s and Burton Snowboards. So if it’s winter sports related or milk and cheese, that’s kind of what you do. And so actually, my background in ski racing was more so the fact that our town was so small, we didn’t have a local high school. And the town actually paid a portion of your tuition to either go to the local school and Manchester Burr & Burton Academy. Or you could go to this ski Academy up at Stratton that didn’t start school until 1pm. And you ski every morning. So it was not a really difficult decision to make. And I found myself going down the athletic career to become a Nordic skier, eventually made it onto the US Ski Team traveled all over Europe and skied and eventually got recruited to go to Middlebury College and Middlebury, Vermont. So I’m born and raised Vermonter that took me a while to get out of the state.

Max Branstetter 4:40
Well, the state is a ton of fun and I think there’s something special about it. I mean, I was thinking recently that you know, I’ve passed several years have lived in New York City area and in love it but like every now and then you just need that escape to like a totally different place. And I think one of my favorite parts of going to Vermont is it really does feel like a totally different place. So I mean, it’s beautiful. As you mentioned, there’s way less people there. Although on pick holiday skiing weekends, it’s pretty busy at Stratton. But like, it’s I think it’s just like good for the soul to be up there and Dana’s grandparents, Phyllis and see for the longest time, like just absolutely loved up there. How you mentioned Nordic skiing is that the same as that cross-country skiing

Cam MacKugler 5:20
Yeah, it’s cross country skiing. So we are the guys that didn’t get the memo that chairlift take it to the top. So we actually ski uphill as well to it’s the the most physically demanding sport out there. So it kind of historically, they measure athletic kind of prowess by VO2 Max testing the volume of oxygen that you can breathe, and work through your system effort. And I think Lance Armstrong has like a 96. And it’s out of the 100. And Njorn Daehlie, who is this world famous cross-country skier, he is like 98. So the most fit people of all time have been cross-country skier. So shoutout to that sport.

Max Branstetter 5:57
Yeah, I’m exhausted thinking about it. I was thinking this past time skiing, you know, we hadn’t skied in a few years. And I’m like, I’ve been skiing like five times in my life now. So like, I know how to like go down the mountain, but like, I’m not by any means. Like, I’m not doing like the double blacks. And like, I still have a long way to go. But like, I’m fine. Like, I don’t fall off anymore. But like, just getting back on skis for the first time after not doing it a few years, like just moving on like horizontal ground or uphill a little bit to actually get to like the chairlift was by far the hardest part. So I have massive respect for you and everybody that does cross country skiing, because that it does like it’s exhausting just hearing about it. What possessed you to go that route as opposed to the route that’s, like friendlier because gravity is pulling you down?

Cam MacKugler 6:46
Well, the other ironic part too, is I’m 6’5″, 250 Now back in the ski racing days, I was 230 and I was the largest cross-country skier on the US Circuit that

Max Branstetter 6:58
I’m getting some Buddy the Elf vibes.

Cam MacKugler 7:02
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Mostly the fact that I was kind of rebelling against my parents. My parents both worked at Bromley ski area as he instructors. And I was on the mountain every day with my Alpine gear going downhill and just wanted something new and different and Nordic skiing was super appealing. There was a really large community of cross country skiers in the small town of Londonderry, Vermont. And actually, if you look at like the past four or five Olympics that are more Vermonters than any other state represented on the US Ski Team for cross country, and of that about half of them are from the one and dairy Stratton Vermont area.

Max Branstetter 7:42
Oh my god. This this is like extra small world. So like so my wife Dana and her cousins and parents and Uncle they would so Bromley is where they would go like in the summer to do like the Alpine slide and like you know, almost like carnival ride things like that. activities. And then do you happen to know the name got dinner? Either Steve Gottdiener, or Dana Gottdiener. Phyllis Gottdiener. It’s okay. If you don’t it sounds familiar. Her grandpa’s divas passed away and like he volunteered on Stretton for a while like when he’s retired. And he was the he was the guy that gave out marshmallows for the kids that were you know, making s’mores at the fire. So they called him Mr. Marshmallow. But anyway, he like literally like his retirement job was like working on Stratton Mountain.

Cam MacKugler 8:29
So that’s, that’s amazing. That’s literally my grandfather was the same way I brought my

Max Branstetter 8:34
Oh, that’s awesome. And Dana and her brother Adam. They were when they were kids, they were like ski slalom racers. And they were like, top range, like really, really good with that. So like, I feel like I’m interviewing my wife. You bet. You’ve never heard that one before?

Cam MacKugler 8:52
No, I’ve only ever been interviewed by my wife.

Max Branstetter 8:59
Well, we could talk skiing in Vermont, and Vermont craft beer as well, all day. But we’d love to talk the Seedsheet story. So you have an amazing entrepreneurial story here. How did you get this idea for Seedsheet in the first place?

Cam MacKugler 9:18
Yeah. So the story in the origin of Seedsheet came about as honestly as you know, startup, aha moments come. So in college, I was ski racing. And in the summers, I would work for my grandfather in Southern Vermont and build houses. He had a little building development company. And I kind of fell in love with construction. And part of it was I really enjoyed building houses work with my hands. The other half was my grandfather tried to give me the most physically taxing jobs possible so that I would get strong and tough so I can be a better ski racer, and I graduated Middlebury College and 2009 which was obviously not a very great economic market, especially in new home construction. So, my background in architecture kind of, that’s what I majored in, in college, it kind of took a backseat. It was also a workup to an Olympic year in 2010, which was the Vancouver Olympics. So I graduated college, I actually went back down to Stratton to see on their kind of pro team that they had then and try to make the 2010 Olympics. And in December leading up to it, where Olympic Trials took place, I blew up my name a week before Olympic trials. And that was just the end of that road, which ultimately was very good, because it pushed me back into architecture. And so I found a job in Middlebury working on Bread Loaf architecture. And as a design build firm, we did a lot of sustainable designs. And it’s kind of like merging of art and environmental, which were my other two minors at Middlebury. And so I really got my Leadership and Energy and Environmental Design accreditations that LEED. And that kind of pushed me down this path of really looking at ways to incorporate nature into buildings. So we did a lot of designs with vegetated growing walls and living roofs. And that kind of became the niche that I got really passionate about. And one summer I was house sitting for a co worker. And he because it was Vermont, his house is a fully functioning 80 acre dairy farm with this just gigantic backyard garden and I spend my evenings after work. I’d be at work all day drafting blueprints and AutoCAD and then come home and harvest kale out of the garden for dinner. And one evening when I was picking kale, I just saw like the garden had all these like very meticulously organized rows. And then my mind I saw a blueprint and wondered like, why isn’t there a blueprint for plants? And it was just like that innocent it wasn’t like I wanted to have an idea to change the gardening industry. It was just like, I think this would be cool as this you know, amalgamation of my backgrounds that made a lot of sense and got me really interested. So I honestly grabbed my co-worker’s kid’s crayons sketched out the first iteration of CG, and that became the impetus that develop a product and eventually start a company.

Max Branstetter 12:17
Oh, my god. Well, first of all, when I interviewed my dad back in 2018, our first ever like Thanksgiving family special interview, and he said, then that like, you feel really creative when you’re drawing with crayons, like more people should draw with crayons. So that’s so cool. That your that your first business sketch came out of that on the knee injury, what knee injury was it? It was ACL, man? Yeah. Common one, unfortunately. Yeah, that’s, that’s that’s a huge bummer. But obviously, from the business standpoint, it really helped you out. But when you did go through that knee injury, what’s like, what what advice do you have for anybody that has like a devastating, you know, injury blow like that? Especially, I mean, you had even extreme circumstances with like, you know, trying to make the Olympics but yeah, that’s, that’s a huge hit.

Cam MacKugler 13:08
Yeah, well, I think that the hardest part for me, and it’s a good reminder for me, even right now is that the majority of my personality was wrapped up around skiing. Like that was my background. That was my passions, that was kind of a singular track focused. And it’s kind of the same thing right now is Seedsheet, honestly, is it’s like, I am Mr. Seedsheet, it’s really important to remember to want to be diversified. You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket, which is, you know, honestly, one of the reasons that I went to a really good college, like Middlebury I had, you know, offers to go ski at any college in the country, because I was on the ski team, my senior year in high school. And I was between Dartmouth and Middlebury. And mostly just because of the Vermont roots, I wanted to stay stay home and stay close to home. And, you know, go to a school where I was able to not only ski race at a super high level, but build up passion, they’ll get some degrees that would ultimately, theoretically help me off later in life. And instead, I’m doing an entrepreneurship, which is devoid of any sort of accreditation.

Max Branstetter 14:16
Hey, you’re doing, you’re doing some good things. We’ll give it to you. But seed sheets, so it’s super cool and unique idea for anybody who’s not familiar. What’s the biggest difference between seed sheets and you know, traditional like gardening gardening, if you think about it that way, if you could pronounce it, if I could pronounce it.

Cam MacKugler 14:36
Yeah, so what the seed sheet is to kind of provide a little bit more context there. It’s a it’s a garden and a sheet. It’s essentially a rollout garden. If you have planted historically, conventionally in the past, the process is usually you get your packet of seeds. You go to your garden, you poke the holes in the soil with your finger, you place your seeds into that hole, you cover it up the soil, and then you do that on repeat for all the plants that you want your garden Not only is that a time and labor intensive process, but there’s a lot of education that goes with it too what plants to put next to each other, how far apart do you plant them? What plants are going to be ready for harvest at different times so that you can have succession planting and always keep your garden growing. And for the bulk of first timers, that’s too much of a barrier. And so it seemed cheap, it’s a starts off with a weed blocking fabric that’s roughly four foot by eight feet the size of most raised bed container gardens. And then within that weed blocking fabric, we take dissolvable pods that are very similar to a laundry pod. But instead of soap, obviously, ours have organic seeds and a little buffer of soil. So we’ve basically replicated that process of poking holes in the soil with your finger putting in the seed with a sheet that can be laid out just like you’re making your bed in the morning. So all of our seed sheets come with different varieties of seeds. So you can either customize them on our website, pick and choose your favorite plants, our software helps our customers choose varieties that will work well together. Or you can choose pre designed gardens, ones that have different recipe themes like salad garden or salsa garden or different mixture of gardens. And we’re basically ship a farm to your door. You roll it over your garden, add water, the pauses, all of your plants come up through the aligned openings and the weed blocking fabric and you get this perfectly designed in space organic, we have this garden, that it’s not set it forget it because we want our customers to learn as well. So it’s a huge departure from traditional gardening in the sense that we make it really, really easy. And then we also guide our customers through the whole journey, all of our products have QR codes on each row of plants. So at any point of time, you can scan your garden and learn what you need to do next, to maximize your success. So we’d like to say we’re not just growing gardens, we’re growing gardeners, and we’re on our way to growing millions of them.

Max Branstetter 17:00
When you start listing off the predesign gardens you have I thought you’re gonna say you offer Olive Gardens as well, I think there’s a there’s a brand partnership there, Red Lobster garden,

Cam MacKugler 17:10
there’s a lawsuit there

Max Branstetter 17:13
you go, you got you got your legal hat on. And this has been a good interview. But now it’s canceled. No, but I love how there’s options there if you’re a customer, because I imagine there’s a subset of customers that just want kind of the seeds and roots and all these things picked out. And then there’s also people that are really, really interested in just choosing their own. And over the past several years, like so many businesses are meeting those customer needs of personalization, which is almost as tough to say as your last name, and customization. And so it’s like you can choose your own, which is really cool. Or you can pick pre design ones of the pre designed garden bed sets, or I’ll just call them seats. What are some of the best sellers so far?

Cam MacKugler 18:02
For the most part, people associate gardening with tomatoes, right? So for whatever reason, like you go to a farmers market, the first one that you want to get there is a ripe tomato. So we sell a ton of tomatoes and our different tomato focus predesigned kids, we have an easy breezy, breezy, which I’m sure the Italians are shaking in their boots and my pronunciation of that.

Max Branstetter 18:27
But but but those who love rhymes and corniness are, you know, applauding you for that so nicely? Oh, absolutely.

Cam MacKugler 18:33
We pride ourselves on our gardening puns at Seedsheet.

Max Branstetter 18:37
Perfect. Yeah, but the tomato tomatoes. Yeah, I could see that tomato is definitely one of the first things that come to mind from a gardening standpoint. How do you in team go about deciding what these you know, pre design models look like?

Cam MacKugler 18:51
A lot of it’s based off the consumer feedback because we offer customizable products at the same time, we have really good insight as to what people are interested in. And beyond that, beyond a national level, geographically speaking so we can do you know, there’s 13 different climate zones in the country that the USDA puts out. So Vermont has a different growing season than Florida. And so there’s a ton of specificity that we can offer on our site to make sure that customers in South Florida are going to be growing crops that are compatible with their environment versus Fairbanks, Alaska say, we definitely listen to what our customers are buying, ask them to generate different recipe ideas to there’s a lot of user feedback that goes into our product development. And that’s something that we’re really, really proud of because not only we have an interesting consumer mix 50% of our customers are 4951 49% are millennials that have never garden before and the other 50% of our veteran gardeners that have grown a ton of gardens and really are familiar with the amount of work and effort that goes into it and are looking for a way that they can, you know you’d maybe even grow more plant more gardens because we reduce a lot of those pain points. It’s really intriguing that we get a nice mix of customers entering the top of the gardening funnel that we can nurture for life and become customers for life, as well as people that really have familiarity around a lot of the varieties that we offer, and can provide pretty unique insights of what works well for their area that they’ve been growing for 30 years.

Max Branstetter 20:26
How do you navigate that seasonality, which is pretty unique to the gardening and spring/summertime activities?

Cam MacKugler 20:34
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I blame kindergarten limericks for April showers bring May flowers. It’s like 70% of our business comes between April and July. So it definitely has complications there not only from you know, just cash flow perspective, but also operations, manufacturing, we build all of these in our factory in Middlebury, Vermont, inventing the product was a fun challenge. But inventing the machines to build it at scale was the really unique challenge for us. So the more we can do to flatten seasonality is huge. So in the short term, we’re just really focused on Geo targeted ads, making sure that we are reaching out to people in Florida that have a September gardening season, versus people and New York that have a May gardening season. And so there’s a big education component that comes from it. But there’s definitely a part of the country that can grow anytime of the year. And in the long term, we’re going to go international and go south of the equator where the seasons are opposite of ours. And that allows you to really kill any seasonality.

Max Branstetter 21:41
Yeah, that expands your when you think of that other half of the world. It’s like, well, I don’t know if this is actually true, but they say that, you know, like Australia, South America, the toilet, you know, wines different way the toilet water goes different ways. But yeah, the seasons are can be opposite to. So that makes sense. That kind of does solve the seasonality aspect to it. You mentioned that you’re not just inventing these products, you are inventing the machines that are tied to it, which is like, my mind has exploded because that’s a whole other level of you know, ingenuity there. What did that process look like to figure out to either make or find machines that would do what they do for you?

Cam MacKugler 22:24
Yeah, it was definitely a little redneck engineering.

Max Branstetter 22:29
The best kind of engineering!

Cam MacKugler 22:31
Absolutely, absolutely. We definitely applauded our initial team’s capabilities and flexibility and thinking outside the box. And honestly, like a big part of it came from my ski racing background where you put wax on your skis, right. So every ski racer, every skier for the most part has a waxing iron. And that’s a you know, variable temperature iron that you can adjust very precisely because different waxes need to be applied heat at different levels. And I was just messing around with different films, different dissolvable films and found out that I could heat seal them together using my waxy iron. And I could build the pods. And then we started to extrapolate that and find machines at scale that would be able to do not one pot at a time, but several 100 of the time.

Max Branstetter 23:21
Oh my god, that’s so cool. It all goes back to skiing. And you’re trying to get away now. But no, but the wax comes in handy. When you think about getting the word out about the product, what have been some of the some of the biggest challenges or obstacles in terms of you know, finding that momentum somewhere with your brand.

Cam MacKugler 23:41
Yeah, it’s definitely a unique challenge for us being in Vermont with such a small state where you know, word of mouth can only get you so far when there’s only 600,000 people in the whole state. So from the get go, one of my goals was to widen that network, broaden, broaden the audience as much as possible. You know, I grew up with very low to middle income family. And so I didn’t have cash reserves to start a company and self funded. So we’ve been basically cashflow funded from the get go launched initially on Kickstarter. And that was a really, really rough draft early iteration of the product. But it succeeded in the $30,000 goal, which was enough to get us a couple months of rent move into a factory and start figuring out how we were going to build it at scale. And then on the heels of that, we got really great press because of the Kickstarter, which did lead some kind of local angel investors to have interest in us. And that provided the capital for our first year to get up and running. And based off of the traction that we got from Kickstarter, we were able to go from a Kickstarter success into small number but into Home Depot stores within six months. And by virtue of that quick trajectory from napkin sketch to Kickstarter to Home Depot stores, we were able to get the attention from Shark Tank producers. And that was really when we kick things into overdrive was when we got on the Shark Tank.

Max Branstetter 25:17
That’s when you your garden, do your way to the top. Let’s talk Home Depot first, what was your instant reaction when you heard that Home Depot would be trying you guys out

Cam MacKugler 25:29
exhilaration and panic at the same time. At the point where we were talking with Home Depot buyers, and they’re expressing interest, we didn’t even have packaging, we had the ability, we had some products that we were building we could do. Now it took us four months to build the 350 Something Kickstarter orders. And we were about to get a purchase order on the magnitude of 1000s. And we knew that we had a product that we could build, but we didn’t know how the heck we’re going to be able to scale to be able to meet that initial surge of demand. And we were packaging them essentially, in trash bags. It was black poly mailers that looked like a hefty bag, it was not ready for primetime. It was helpful because again, momentum begets momentum. So the fact that we went from a Kickstarter success into Home Depot definitely helped opens the doors for us get to work at you know, pretty compelling rates with different packaging companies. And you know, we were able to assemble a pretty quick team to get us to be retail ready. So it was really exciting. But at the same time, you know, if it goes poorly, that’s a big hit on your capital stack to go big with a big box store. Literally our first client was Home Depot. So that was shooting for the moon.

Max Branstetter 26:52
So yeah, yeah, not not stressful whatsoever. But that’s a pretty well known first client. So that’s that’s pretty good place to start. How about Shark Tank? You mentioned that it really kick things to another gear, keeping a perspective, like what what was the actual impact you saw to your business from that?

Cam MacKugler 27:09
Yeah, I mean, financially, it was huge. The year that I’m trying to remember back to the pitch, because we pitched it in 2016 and aired in 2017.

Max Branstetter 27:17
I want like a word for word recital, like in Spanish. Now.

Cam MacKugler 27:23
I can basically do it, though it’s embedded in the brain for sure. But in the year that we pitched it on Shark Tank, I think I had $160,000 worth of sales. And that was the Home Depot launch. The day that we aired on Shark Tank, we did a quarter million of sales that night that we aired. And then it kept on going after that because people record it and then it becomes available on Hulu. And even now several years later, it re airs about twice a quarter. And you don’t know when it’s going to air CNBC might aired at three in the morning on a Thursday night. But we’ll continue to see these giant spikes in traffic go to the site and oh, we must have repaired again. So it’s great from that perspective, where it’s like an infomercial that that lives on even though I was probably five years younger and 20 pounds lighter back then.

Max Branstetter 28:17
Well, I’ll let you know when it repairs because we’ll we’ll see this spike for this episode and downloads as well for sure. So we’ll keep an eye out for you keep an ear out for you as well. One way to keep an ear out for when the latest Wild Business Growth Podcast episode has dropped is of course to Subscribe on all your favorite platforms or Follow as the kids say, on your favorite platforms. But you can also get the latest and greatest and also some behind the scenes details by signing up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter that is at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. I got incredibly creative with the landing page there. But it is a clever name for newsletter if I may say so myself. Thank you, Dana. In addition to learning about the latest Wild Business Growth Podcast guest and insights from the episode and beyond, you will see hot off the press podcasting tips ranging from podcast hosting to podcast production to podcast editing, interviewing tips as well. And if there’s any specific topics you want, let me know but the key bottom line is Podcasting to the Max newsletter, you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. Now let’s get from ski gear to switching gears for the course of the interview. See what I do there. So let’s switch gears a little bit let’s get to inspiration and creativity. So kind of you on the personal side. What you do to outside of work to stay creative and I know you’re busy busy with the family and you know the business and everything there but do you still ski

Cam MacKugler 29:59
yeah absolutely I actually ended up marrying a Alpine racer who went to Dartmouth. So

Max Branstetter 30:06
you have the fastest skiing family I’ve ever heard.

Cam MacKugler 30:11
We joke that our kids are going to be in like the 2050 Olympics. But

Max Branstetter 30:14
hey, it might happen. Yeah. At the

Cam MacKugler 30:17
same time, we’re both of the mindset that we’ve done enough ski races. So we’re trying to push our kids to like beach volleyball or surfing some someplace that you can spectate. In a warmer climate.

Max Branstetter 30:29
Besides skiing, what do you do in your free time that just helps you kind of unwind a bit or are on unplanned onset, I’m trying to think of a good gardening needs need some tools here.

Cam MacKugler 30:42
I’ve always had, you know, big passions in the outdoor space. And that’s kind of what made a lot of sense for me to go into gardening as a whole is just like, always been an outdoors guy grew up in a small town next to a dairy farm, I took the tractor, the school, I grew up hunting and fishing, fishing is kind of my sweet spot now where backcountry skiing is great in the winter, but tying some flies going fly fishing is kind of my relaxing, get mental clarity, as my mental health day is when I get to go out to the river and person flies around.

Max Branstetter 31:17
Are there any activities or times in the day in particular, where you tend to get some ideas pop into your head that you can apply back to the business?

Cam MacKugler 31:27
Absolutely, I’ve definitely found that, you know, my hack, and I wish I had found this when I was actually still an athlete. But books on tape and podcasts while going for runs has been just like gold for me. Where I mean, I never even had headphones. When I was training back in the day, we would just like go on long workouts together and just talk as a team. And starting with headphones. And you know, I lived in New York for a while. So go for runs around Central Park, listen to books and podcasts on tape, you know, and then now I’m living out in the Bay Area. And there’s literally a ridgeline, two minutes from my house that I can go for a 10 mile run. And it’s the ultimate hack because you’ve put it on intriguing book or podcast and like you don’t want to stop you get to that junction and the trail. It’s like I can go left to go home or I can listen to the next Dan Brown chapter. And it’s like I’m taking the long way home. And so I’ve definitely listened to a ton of great books, a ton of you know, super inspirational founder stories, and I think, you know, Shoe Dog has to be my favorite, the Phil Knight Nike story, and that one is just provided so much inspiration and just relevance. You know, it’s like companies like Nike have gone through the grinder just like the rest of us. And just having that tenacity and just knowing that, you know, hey, they went through it too. Everyone goes through the dishes to get up to the mountaintop. So running and podcasts and books on tape. And then definitely my source of inspiration and creativity.

Max Branstetter 33:05
I appreciate it. There’s a good spaces to be and I was I was dying to ask you your favorite book to listen to on tape and you answered it for me. So you’re hosting the interview as well. I appreciate it.

Cam MacKugler 33:18
Yeah, probably read that one now or listen to the 10 or 15 times that one and The Boys in the Boat are my two favorites.

Max Branstetter 33:29
Alright, let’s wrap up with some Rapid-Fire Q&A. You ready for it? Fire away. All right, firing away. What is the longest distance you’ve ever traversed on skis?

Cam MacKugler 33:41
Ooh, skis. We’ve done some like we always went by mileage or by hours instead of mileage. Because like we’re training you’re gonna have to increase your hours year over year. So the longest one we did was like an eight hour skate ski into West Yellowstone. We’re in West Yellowstone for Fall training camp measure skied into Yellowstone itself and it’s awesome time of the year super snowy snowmobile trails everywhere, no traffic anywhere. You can really only ski there and on the way back a buffalo came into the trail in front of us and we literally skied behind the Buffalo and kind of chased it, which probably not super kosher but we skied with a buffalo for about two miles.

Max Branstetter 34:22
Oh my god, that is so cool. The buffalo ever notice you?

Cam MacKugler 34:26
Yeah, I mean after a while. It’s not like we can say it got boring. But like after a while at last. That’s kind of initial like oh my gosh, you’re skiing with the buffalo. Like my friend made like a cow noise because we’re monitors we don’t know a buffalo sound like but apparently it was similar enough that the thing stopped on its tracks and like turned at us and we all threw on the brakes and like, oh gosh, we’re gonna get charged, but then it shuffled off into the snow on the side and they had a nice calm, relaxing ski back.

Max Branstetter 34:57
Oh my god. I’m pretty sure buffaloes sound exactly like Josh I think that’s how it works. I heard that you once did a investor pitch on a chairlift. Can you share the background behind that?

Cam MacKugler 35:14
vermaat is, like I’ve said a couple times on this call very, very small. That entrepreneurial network in Vermont, it’s pretty tiny. It’s growing, which is great. But it’s still really small. The VC space in Vermont is one, it used to be two. Now there’s one, there’s one VC in the whole state. And to their credit, they’ve done an awesome, awesome job of creating like uniquely Vermont pitch events. And so that one was called Peak Pitch. And it was at a ski area in Central Vermont. And you actually wrote up, they divided the lift line up into two different lines. One was for founders and one was for investors, the seas, angel investors, etc. And so you would actually go up the lift with an investor and it’s kind of Vermont’s version of an elevator pitch. So you know, by extension of that Shark Tank was pretty normal, and that you’re pitching to a bunch of people wearing suits sitting in comfy chairs and not trying to get your pitch out behind the balaclava with snow guns blaring.

Max Branstetter 36:17
Oh, God, that that hits way too close to home. We were. We did. I’m assuming you’re you’re familiar with a lot of the trails on Stratton, right. Oh, absolutely. Okay, so we did, because I’m a beginner, we did. You know, this past weekend, at the time of the recording, we did it a couple times. Mike’s Way, you know, like the long trail that goes around the side of the mountain, which is fun, like it’s like, really, really enjoy that one, especially like just getting back in the habit of skiing, but they were blowing snow. And it was just a total wiped out. Like we’d get to a certain part and then Dana & I we looked each other be like, we can’t see more than like five feet in front of us, like what direction do we go? And then, by the time we’re at the bottom of the mountain, she would look at me and just from head to toe, I was completely covered in snow. So it was like, it was not ideal conditions, but it made a fun extra little wrinkle to it. Yeah,

Cam MacKugler 37:11
imagine doing a podcast with that sound in the background or an investment. That sound in the background. It’s

Max Branstetter 37:16
exactly not ideal. Got it? Gotta use the Noise Reduction feature haven’t worked. It’s magic. But what is your overall favorite trail on Stratton Mountain?

Cam MacKugler 37:27
That’s a tough one. There’s actually a trail and I don’t even know what it’s called, that we helped cut one summer, which there’s the local legend is Bill Koch Bill Koch was a 1980 Olympic medalist 80 or 82. I don’t remember silver medalist up until the last Olympics. Actually two Olympics ago, he was the only medalist for cross country skiing in the US ever. And he lives in Peru, Vermont. And Stratton basically contracted him to like come and cut a trail in the woods for kind of Nordic skiers to go on if they wanted to, or for people to just jump around in the backcountry. And so it was a super fun tourney single track, kind of like a mountain bike trail that went through the woods. And I think we probably broke 10 or 20 pairs of skis testing that

Max Branstetter 38:18
Oh, my God, that’s so much like I’m still exhausted hearing about it. But that’s really cool. I can I never knew about how you you break in trails like that, like, how much time does it take to until a trail is like usable by you know, like civilians?

Cam MacKugler 38:34
Well, I mean, a typical trail you’re clearing with a whole team with chainsaws and leveling out and everything. This was more of like, rustic. You know, he took our whole ski team up there was only like, 20 of us and everyone had their little, you know, pruning shears and some chainsaws and it was only about four feet wide. It wasn’t like a real trail. It’s probably some derivative of Bill Koch’s name. But it’s it’s super fun trail. Basically took us a summer of just like helping him out and clear. And then once the snowflake I was like, Oh, this is fun.

Max Branstetter 39:07
That’s that’s so cool. Well, Kim, thank you so much. This has been just awesome. I mean, everything with your business and this. I’m making a prediction. You’re listening now, Dana, this show this is one of my wife Dana’s favorite episodes of all time, just because all the Stratton nostalgia, so appreciate you sharing your side of that story, your side of the mountain as well. But where’s the best place? If people want to connect with you personally, or online as well as if they want to, you know, get a seed sheet themselves?

Cam MacKugler 39:38
Yeah, definitely. So, Seedsheets.com is our website. That’s where you can pick and choose your own plants and we’ll ship you have garden. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Cameron MacKugler on that platform. And another really cool thing that we’re doing right now is that we’re currently fundraising on WeFunder. So we are getting the momentum from Shark Tank and now letting anybody invest like a Shark and join us on our cap table. That’s been a really awesome way for our customers to show how much they love our products and our company and actually become owners too. So if any of your listeners have any interest in backing a Shark Tank company, you can do that at WeFunder.com/Seedsheet

Max Branstetter 40:21
Perfect, awesome. I love it. And you’re a man of the people when it comes to gardening. Thanks so much again for coming on. And last thing, final thoughts. It could be a quote, another random skiing story, whatever you want words to live by, send us home here.

Cam MacKugler 40:39
Oh, Words To Live By. Oh, man, it’s so hard. One of my favorite quotes, I’ll just throw this one out there. David Ortiz 2006, maybe right after they won the World Series. He said When life gives you lemons, you smash them with a bat. So that’s kind of words that I’ve lived by. whenever things get tough, just grind through it. And there’s really no better quote for entrepreneurship than that one.

Max Branstetter 41:08
That is certainly an entertaining way to deal with lemons, which just might change your life. Thank you so much, Cam, for coming on the podcast, sharing the Seedsheet story, skiing story. I just blown away. And thank you, Wild Listeners, for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to follow the Wild Business Growth Podcast on your favorite app and tell a friend about the podcast and maybe go skiing with them and then talk about all your favorite episodes, including this one with him and then hit Cam up. He’ll appreciate that. You can also find us on Goodpods where there are really really good. Really, really good podcast recommendations and people. And for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That is at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. Until next time, let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!