Going to the store and buying a protein bar is common these days, but it wasn’t more than 10 years ago, when Tom Bilyeu, Mike Osborn and Ron Penna decided to get into the kitchen and create an alternative for people to have a snack. high protein content and good flavor.
This is how Quest Nutrition, producer of the famous protein bars and powders, was born in 2010. Under Tom’s leadership, the company saw exponential growth of 57,000% during the first three years. In 2022, the company was acquired by Simply Good Foods.
Following the success of Quest Nutrition, Bilyeu co-founded Impact Theory with his wife Lisa five years ago. It is a platform whose purpose is to take people out of the “matrix” at scale, giving them an empowering mindset through educational and entertaining content.
A change of perspective
But Tom Bilyeu was not always a successful entrepreneur. Before founding Quest he had co-founded a technology company that did not turn out as he had thought. But instead of regretting it, he decided to learn from the situation and train himself in what he was not so good at and bet on what he had always cared about.
And his family had faced many problems with morbid obesity, so he wanted to create something that could help people who suffered from it.
Why was it important to start a business from that perspective, instead of thinking about profits first? Tom warns that when starting a business, “success cannot be guaranteed, but difficulties can. That’s why you have to make sure you’re fighting for something that really matters to you.”
Within the framework of his visit to Mexico, as part of his tour prior to the EXMA Heroes & Doers event, which will be held at the National Auditorium on October 24 and 25, we spoke with Tom Bilyeu about entrepreneurial activity and how to create a hero mentality.
Entrepreneur (EM) Do you feel that there is a dramatic change in the approach to entrepreneurial activity from the time you started to today?
Tom Bilyeu (TB): Yes. People often ask me, what did you do to make Quest grow so fast? My answer is always the same: I can tell you, but it won’t work. Things usually only work once, when they capture people’s attention and they do it because they are novel and because you are at the right time. For me, the moment was the rise of social media. Before companies thought about using them we really understood how powerful they could be. And, on the product side, 13 years ago no one was talking about sugar.
We made a bar that was sugar-free and when people started talking about it, the two things together were very useful. Therefore, if you try to follow the same manual, you will not get very far. Things are always changing; When you learn something from someone who is a little ahead of you, chances are it won’t work for you. So you have to understand the general principles and then be able to make them your own.
EM: When you started Quest you did not focus on finding what would make you profitable, but on what was aligned with your values. What advice would you give on how to find that why and make it a business?
TB: The reason I want people to think less about what is going to be profitable and more about how you are trying to serve other people is that building a business is going to be very difficult, so you have to make sure you strive for what that you really care.
However, it’s good to talk about passion and service, but if you don’t have product-market fit, if you don’t understand how to grow a business profitably, then you won’t have a business.
One of the things that made Quest work was that it was a marriage of three people who had spent a lot of time in the corporate world learning the basics of business. And then, it was something that we were very passionate about, that we really believed in. You need both, if you only have half of the equation, you are going to fail.
EM: How do you define value in business terms?
TB: The value is very different for each company. But we can explain it like this: there is a problem that someone has and they don’t know how to solve, or it is too expensive for them to solve on an individual level. You add value to someone’s life when you encounter that problem and provide a solution. So that person prefers to have that solution at a price, than to have his money. People won’t just give you their money because you did something they think is cool, but because they realize they have a problem that you solved.
EM: You have said that you must create value, but not only for your clients, but for the world. How do you do that?
TB: We all want meaning and purpose; feel like we spend our time here on Earth in a way that matters. A business is the primary place, outside of the family, where people gain meaning and purpose. For them to find that there, you really have to help people, more than just meeting an immediate need.
EM: What do you think of the new generations and their approach to companies?
TB: Speaking from an American perspective, one thing I see is that people definitely feel very quickly that a company is predatory. They say “they want my time, they want me to go to the office, they want me to work hard,” as if that is a bad thing. But the reality is that you have to “overcome the caregiver,” which is the tendency of a body that is resting to stay resting or of a body in motion to stay the same. Making something great that truly impacts the world is ridiculously difficult.
If you don’t go in saying, okay, I picked a company to work for, I think it’s doing something that really matters, and now I’m going to give my time, my energy, my enthusiasm, and my intelligence to help make this work, it’s not going to happen. For that company to be successful and able to pay you, make the world a better place, and add value you are going to have to work very hard as an individual.
So the key for me is: don’t work for a company that you think is full of crap, that you think makes no sense. Work for someone who cares about what they are doing and then give it your all. That is my recipe for fulfillment and what every human being should do, whether through work, family, charity or unpaid work. If you try to eliminate hard work from the equation, you will feel a deep sense of emotional illness.
Tom Bilyeu and his unbreakable mentality
EM: How did you develop your mindset that every obstacle can be overcome?
TB: It’s a long journey that started with the movie Star Wars and specifically with The Empire Strikes Back and the little green character named Yoda, who spouts this whole philosophy that I would later learn is actually very similar to Taoism.
When I was 15 or 16, I was introduced to a book called Dao De Jing, which literally sounded like Yoda, but on hundreds of pages. Philosophy is really about not looking to the outside world for the cause of your problems, but rather looking and understanding internally that the problem is your perception of the world. No human being can see the world objectively, that is simply not how we are designed as a species.
When I was in my early 20s, I was in a very dark place in my life, I didn’t feel good about who I was, I feared I would never be successful, and I felt like a complete loser. I also felt like I wasn’t smart enough to do the things I wanted to do in life and I started thinking about Taoism and Yoda and what all of that was trying to teach me.
It was the late 1990s and back then there was a lot of research into what is now known as brain plasticity. The question was whether someone can improve at something by practicing. The scientists weren’t sure. Some said yes, you can change at any age. And other people said no.
So I thought, well, if perception is my problem, I’ll choose to believe I can get better at something and act that way. So, I started a company, I started learning about marketing, and I just said, I’m going to pretend that even if I make a mistake, I can improve. Then I realized very quickly that I could. The more time and energy you put in, if you’re willing to be honest with yourself about where you are, you can improve very quickly. That changed my life.
EM: What does your 25-point belief system consist of and how do you transmit it to all your collaborators?
TB: It is our corporate culture system that we preach with all collaborators. It is in a document available to anyone on the internet. These are the 25 things that are closest to the way the human mind works. So if you use those beliefs and make them the core of your distortion, you are simply building your distorted lens.
But, it’s not that I think it’s the only way to live or that you can move forward in life. What I have tried to do is identify which are those 25 behaviors that inevitably lead to success, what I call the physics of progress, where you enter this cycle of personal improvement. And I don’t try to make people memorize it, they are simply the things I do every day because they are what lead me to act in a very productive way.
EM: You founded Impact Theory with Lisa, your wife. When you create a business with your partner, what points should you make clear so as not to affect the relationship?
TB: Despite all my success. Nothing has given me more joy and a deep sense of security than my marriage. So we are very clear that our marriage is the top priority. Now, that doesn’t mean my marriage gets the most time, I definitely spend more in the business. But since we are building it together, it is a shared activity.
To function well, when running a business together, you must understand what each is good at and complement each other, rather than compete. I believe a company should be a strict meritocracy. So the correct answer should always win and not trying to convince that one or the other is right.
If you both have credibility on something, you need a way for you to agree beforehand how you are going to resolve those disputes. If you don’t do that, you will start to have conflicts in the marriage because you will feel like you are not being respected or listened to. And that becomes a problem.
EM: At Exma Heroes & Doers you will give a lecture on how we can become heroes in real life. How do we do it?
TB: I want to be remembered for what I call the only belief that matters. If you want to become a superhero, you just have to accept that you are an average human being. And there is a reason why the average human being has become the most dominant animal the world has ever seen; We do it through a really deceptive and simple strategy. And we don’t have everything we will ever need to know and be able to do. Instead, we come programmed with a little, but we have the ability to learn anything new we want. Then, we can dedicate time and energy to improving. That is the only belief that matters.
If you believe that, you realize that it’s okay if you’re not good enough to achieve this big, crazy goal, as long as you say, “I’m not good enough yet and I have the only belief that matters.”
Learn something new every day and apply that knowledge in real-world settings where it matters, so you can really improve your skills. As long as they target something very specific, you will look back in a year, three, five or 10 years and be unrecognizable to yourself. And look, probably none of us will ever be the best of all time at anything. But we can all improve 100 times at anything. So figure out what matters to you about what you love and then get 100x better at it.
Don’t miss Tom Bilyeu and more than 30 speakers on the same stage talking about leadership, strategy, entrepreneurship, marketing and more at the Heroes & Doers event at the National Auditorium on October 24 and 25.
Marisol García Fuentes Editorial Director Emprende and Emprendedor.com. I am motivated by stories of tenacity and innovation.