GOAT Wisdom, with Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell – Episode 494 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell, a.k.a. the “Fabulous Beekman Boys”, co-founders of Beekman 1802 skincare, recount settling in with Farmer John and his goats and packing 52,000 bars of soap, and chat about making neighbors, not customers, making hay while the sun shines, NOT Shark Tank-ing every business, making kindness part of the business model, working with your partner, reframing work-life balance, and finding contentment without sacrificing ambition.

About Brent and Josh:

Beekman 1802 was born when founders Josh and Dr. Brent moved to the historic Beekman 1802 farm in rural Sharon Springs, NY. There they found a tightknit community and 100 goats looking for a home. Next thing you know, they were making goat milk soap at the kitchen table. They shared with Neighbors, and before long, stories started pouring in about the soap’s incredible effects. Upstate winters are hard, particularly on skin, but the soap cleared up one Neighbor’s eczema and another’s rosacea. Folks with sensitive skin raved. Intrigued, Josh and Dr. Brent honed in on the clinical science of Goat Milk and Kindness and discovered how they could be used as powerfully effective ingredients to strengthen the skin barrier and balance the skin’s microbiome. Neighbor by Neighbor, word spread—from soap to science and more skincare products. Beekman 1802 is the world’s biggest goat-milk based skincare company, with millions of Beekman Neighbors who now have healthier, happier skin.

Brent is a physician, co-founder of Beekman 1802, and television personality. He was formerly the Vice President of Healthy Living for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. He also built a distinguished medical career as a specialist in geriatric medicine, completing a fellowship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and joining the faculty there as an assistant professor. He founded the Martha Stewart Center for Living at the Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the world’s leading geriatric centers.

Josh is a writer, co-founder of Beekman 1802, and television personality. He’s known for his New York Times and National bestselling memoirs; The Bucolic Plague and I Am Not Myself These Days. Prior to founding Beekman 1802, Josh was an award-winning creative director at several top New York City advertising agencies, serving clients including Delta Air Lines, Absolut Vodka, Target, Nestlé, and Unilever.

Learn more at Beekman1802.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas
I have to ask, Are y’all like both sitting at the kitchen table just across from each other?

Brent Ridge
He’s upstairs and I’m downstairs.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, okay, so let’s just back up for a second. Y’all have such unique backgrounds. Walk us through the story.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
I’ll do it as quickly as possible, the condensed version. So we were two New York City guys. Brent was a physician, and he worked for Martha Stewart. He started our health and wellness division. I worked in advertising and was a writer, and we in 2006 we’ve been together for several years. We we were driving in upstate New York on a weekend getaway, and we found a farm and a little town that we fell in love with. We bought this farm, just going to be like a weekend place. And then in 2008 the big recession hit, and we lost our jobs, and we had to start over. Now, right after we bought the farm, we got had a letter in our mailbox from a neighbor named Farmer John, who was losing his farm. He had 80 goats. He had nowhere to bring them, and he asked if he could use our barn and if he could live on the property in another tiny little house that was there. And we said, Yes, you know, come on in. We say that was the first act of kindness that started the company taking in that neighbor. Because when we lost our jobs, we had to, we googled, what can we make with goat milk? And the first thing that came up was, was soap. And that’s how we started our company, with goat milk soap, and these 80 goats that we had taken in.

Brent Ridge
So we started making the bars of soap. And it was our neighbors who were helping us wrap the bars of soap. And we’re working with soap maker Deb, who is a local soap maker. We call everybody by what they do in their first name, if we don’t notice. So your podcaster, Stephanie, so we were like, Okay, how are we going to sell these bars of soap? Josh, very quickly learned how to code and coded our first website, and we first started selling the bars of soap on our website. So we say we were probably one of the very first DTC beauty companies in the world. So we said, Okay, what? What assets do we have, other than the goat milk and our ability to make this soap? And so we said, Okay, well, we had spent more than a decade in New York City. We understand retail, luxury retail, we understand marketing. Where can we take this product, this very artisanal, natural product, and put it in a place where it stands out? And so I took the product into New York City, and I cold called on every luxury department store in New York City literally showed up with my product and said, I need to speak to the beauty buyer, please. But the one that said yes was this department store called Henry Bendel.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Yeah, Brent went down, drove down three and a half hours every morning with a truck full of soap, sold it on the floor, came drove three and a half hours back at night to reload the truck, got two hours of sleep and did it all over and over again. And through the course of that, not only did he learn how to really sell our products or storytelling,

Brent Ridge
Because I was a physician, I didn’t know how to sell a product. You know, you know, as a physician, you’re an observer, and so I just observed. How did they interact with the customer? What was the thing that they said that made the customer go from interest to purchase, and one of the most valuable things they taught me was don’t talk at the product. Have them looking and feeling and touching the product, smelling the product while you’re talking about it, because once you’ve got it in their hand, a huge barrier has been crossed. It’s so much easier for them to put it in their basket once they already have it in their hand. And the reason this was so powerful was because there was a buyer for this little store called anthropology. And, you know, she didn’t have a label on that said, I’m a buyer for Anthropology. She was just another person walking through the store. She came by, and I said, Oh, at the time we we all of our fragrances were based on months of the year on the farm. So we had 12 different fragrances based on what was in bloom are growing on the farm during that month. And so as people would walk by, I would say, oh, what month were you born in? And you know, they would say, oh, May. And I’m like, May is the scent of Sweet Pea here. Smell it. And so, this buyer for Anthropology came by. I got the bar of soap in her hand, and she said, I love this. She said, Would you ever consider selling anthropology? And I said, of course. And so they became our first big national retail account. Their first big order was 52,000 bars of soap, and it was all because I had taken an opportunity when it existed, and I observed and learned and applied it right there. So I took all the information, the opportunity around me, converted it into wisdom, and that’s what changed the course of our success.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Yeah, and make hay while the sun shines. We’ve all heard that a million times. We’ve probably even said it, you know, once or twice. But do we really know what that means and to us? And how does that apply to business? We applied it to business, and what we learned early on is, when you get that yes, you have to put everything you have behind that. Yes, you can’t just say, Okay, we got a stroke of good luck. Wasn’t that great, you know, let’s, you know, keep going and try to find another good stroke of good luck. No, when you get the yes, when you get the good luck, when you when the sun is shining, you have to make as much hay as you can.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, so talk to me just quickly about scaling.

Brent Ridge
Yes. So at that point, we knew that we needed national distribution in order to get exposure, because we weren’t going to have a Super Bowl ad, right? So we needed the placement on the shelf to get exposure for the brand. And so we basically gave them the sofa cost, because we didn’t want to give them any hesitancy, because obviously, they’re seeing lots of brands, right? They could bring in whatever into their store. We didn’t want to give them any anything that can make them say, Oh, we’re going to choose this brand over your brand. So I think we were making about a nickel per bar of soap. And so, you know, we had no money to hire extra people or, you know, anything. And so we got down to about a month out from when we were supposed to ship this order, and we were in the stage where we were wrapping the bars of soap, and I had said, Okay, I am going to wrap all these bars of soap, and because we couldn’t afford to hire anybody. Well, we finally got to about two weeks out, and Josh stood in the other room, in the kitchen, right off the dining room, and timed me. How long did it take me to wrap each bar soap? And it took me about seven seconds to wrap each bar. Now, I had started at like, 30 seconds, but over the weeks, I gone down to seven seconds.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
And then what I did was I actually calculated how many days were left before this order was due, and I showed Brent the data. I said you could wrap 24/7 you’re not gonna you’re not gonna hit that data. Yeah, you’re just not gonna get there. And so what we did then was we knew the local post mistress in town, and she sees everybody. It’s very small town, 500 people, and we knew that having orders and getting our the faster we grew the post office, which was slated to close because it didn’t have enough volume, we might be able to keep it open. So it called Maria. Said, anybody you know who can help? She said, I know everybody in town. And she started a phone tree. She called people. They came over to rap, soak route our dining room table. None of them wanted to get paid. They were coming because they were retirees, or they remembered the community, how it used to be, how people used to come together to work on things. And so they all sat around our dining room, table wrap, so for days and days and days, had a great time. You know, we fed them pie and all kinds of but they didn’t want to get paid. And that taught us that business lesson, that every transaction is not financial. We learned the value of community so much so that we still call all of our customers neighbors. We have a neighbor services department. We don’t have a customer services department, but it taught us that not all business things are are financial, business transaction financial, and that your community, your customers, are far more than just people buying things from them.

Brent Ridge
And going back to your original question about scale, you know, I think people think about scale these days as how quickly can I go from point A to point B? We think in long term, like you can build a good business or a very lucrative business in a very short amount of time. It happens all the time. But if you want to build a greatest of all time business, a goat business, you need to think more long term. And you know, when we talk about the idea of scaling at Beekman 1802, you know, we’ve been in business now for 16 years. We say that our business grew neighbor by neighbor by neighbor, and still, to this day, grows neighbor by neighbor by neighbor. And when someone comes into our neighborhood, we still fight hard for them. We don’t think of them as just a purchase or another number, you know, we think of them as a neighbor, and we’re fighting to make them happy every single day, and our entire team fights to make that neighbor happy.

Stephanie Maas
So where does that come from? You’re New York City guys. Did you grow up in farms and then move to the city?

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
So we actually both did grow up in rural areas. I grew up in rural Wisconsin. Brent grew up in Randleman, North Carolina. And so we knew the power of community. We also had a big drive growing up that we were going to leave those rural areas and go to Best in Class careers, and so we got our business training in the city. But it wasn’t until we moved back to the country when our life training came into play and what we learned growing up so we could apply all the skills we learned in business, but there were a lot of things we we learned bad in our corporate lives that we still see businesses failing today by just being corporate, but returning to our roots in in starting our company in a rural area, really helped reconnect us to what makes people tick, what makes our neighbors tick and what builds a long term successful, greatest of all time business.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, so let’s zip ahead a little bit. Today, the company, I think research says worth about $100 million. Not too shabby, 16 years later. Tell us about the book.

Brent Ridge
Well, we started thinking about this book about two years ago, when our when someone approached us about writing a book on entrepreneurship, we were slightly hesitant. We’re like we’ve got so much to do. Do we want to spend time writing a book right now? Because in the world, two years ago and even today, the only measures of success that you saw, the only stories that you saw the headlines the social media posts were about billionaires or billionaire billion dollar exits for you know, influencers flying around on a private jet at a great resort. And we’re like, you know what? You can be successful in ways other than that. Yes, those are ways. Those are success, maybe. But you can be successful, financially and personally successful by starting a small business on the main street in your town.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Yeah, and all of the information, and you see this every day, all the information we saw out there in the media world, about entrepreneurialism, about starting your own business, everything was the secret method that you don’t know about. You know, the new technology that can bring you non figures in two days, all of these, you know, sort of fly by night. Faddish trends were that. That’s what entrepreneurs were hearing. And if Brent and I had listened to any of that, we wouldn’t have lasted three days. We wanted to put this book together with these age old maxims and proverbs that people know and then are hard. They know they work. They’ve been around for millions of years, but they don’t know how to apply them to business today, because the business world is really topsy turvy. We call it the shark tankification of American business. Now we love Shark Tank. There’s a lot of great advice you could get on there. It’s fun to watch. But if your idea of starting a business is step one, go out and raise $5 million you’re not starting a business. You’re starting a fundraising business. All of this kind of advice that’s out there today. For today’s entrepreneurs, we want to say no step back. Look at the advice that’s lasted for centuries, and relearn how to apply that to the business world. And that’s what we did to build Beekman 1802.

Stephanie Maas
And then with that is this kindness…

Brent Ridge
We try to take an approach to kindness that is very scientific. And I think this goes back to my, you know, medical background and well, and always trying to figure out why something is happening. And there’s, there’s a whole host of research about how kindness, giving and receiving kindness is both impactful. Can actually change your body on a cellular level, and this is the easiest, because we are in the beauty industry, this is the easiest thing for most of our customers to understand. You know, if you give your if you give an act of kindness, or you are the recipient of a random act of kindness, you know that kind of glowy feeling that you get when, when that happens, or you You bestow that on someone that’s not just something random, that is a surge of certain chemicals in your body, serotonin is increasing, oxytocin is increasing, dopamine is increasing, and that surge of neurochemicals is what’s causing that glowy feeling. And guess what, all of those neurochemicals are having impact on the cells of your body, on the microbiome of the skin. So when I talk about kindness, I see it as completely relevant as the diet that you’re eating, as getting the right exercise, kindness is a preventative health measure equally as important as those other things, and now we have the proof that it actually changes your body on a cellular level. And so that’s really how we try to approach it. Yes, it is very nice to say, be kind, or do this, or have a little plaque that says you know something about kindness, but what we’re saying is, no, we want to change people’s perspective on what kindness is and how powerful kindness is from a health a health modality on a cellular level, and just like choosing to. Eat a salad instead of a donut or choosing to get on your bicycle your treadmill is an effort. Being kind is an effort too, but there is a reward for being kind, and it’s the health of your body, the health of your mind and the health of your community.

Stephanie Maas
And I love, I was on your website earlier, and I loved the way that you market. And there’s genius in this, but there’s also a significant amount of authenticity. It’s about kindness to your skin and your body, and that’s so lovely, how that’s and I go, I know it’s intentional. I’m not stupid.

Brent Ridge
Well, here’s the thing, Stephanie. Josh always had a problem historically with us being in the beauty industry, because he worked in advertising, he understood how advertising and marketing messaging worked, and he felt that so much of the beauty industry was generated by making people feel bad about themselves. And so what I ultimately convinced him of, and what he realized himself, is that people like to have rituals. They like to feel like they are doing something kind for themselves. And for so many of these customers, they see it as moments of self kindness. And when you start every day with a bit of self kindness, and I think this is important, because some people who are using product, makeup, product or whatnot. They look in the mirror and they look for the flaw, and they say, Oh, I’m going to cover this up. So they are starting the day feeling bad about who they are. We say, no, what you’re using with Beekman is a moment of self kindness. So when you’re looking in the mirror, we want you to say, I am doing something kind for myself. And then by virtue of that, that kindness is going to ripple when you walk out the door. That’s the messaging that we try to put out into the world. That’s why you will never hear us talk about anti aging. We will say, Oh, no, we’re going to help you age in a better way through kindness, by treating yourself and others in your skin in a better way. But we start with that mindset of being kind to yourself.

Stephanie Maas
Oh, I love that. I’ve got a 10 year old daughter, and just seeing the obsession her peer group already has, I want different for her. That’s a very, very powerful change of perspective. Okay, so here’s what’s next. When we are often talking to entrepreneurs, it is a family business so often. So how long have you all been a couple?

Brent Ridge
25 Yeah, almost 26…

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
25 and a half, yeah.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, someone better get that right. 25 and a half. But who’s counting? So you’ve been a couple. You had your own careers. You came together. Now you have a career together. You know, what were some of the things that you learned quickly made it easier? What were some of the pitfalls that you learned from just share with us a little bit of that if you could.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Okay, I’m gonna give people just the answer to partnerships like this. Is how you deal with partnerships in business and really, truly in life. So when we started as a couple. You know, of course, we had all the natural pitfalls that normal couples do, but it wasn’t until we started a business together that that thing that you really learn how to partner with somebody. And most of the advice you read on partnerships say, divvy up your responsibilities based on your skills what you’re good at. I’m here to say that’s wrong. That is not the way to approach a partnership. Brent and I have, first of all, no two people are exact opposite. Nobody has, you know, 100% one skill and 0% of another skill. So Brent and I both are very creative people. We’re not great with finance. So there we couldn’t split up our duties with our business. So what we developed was something we call the 51% rule. That means we’re both good at a lot of things, but when a challenge or decision comes up that needs to be made, the person with the most passion, not the best skill set, but the most passion for the issue, gets 51% they don’t get 100% they don’t get 99% they get 51% so the person who doesn’t have the most passion still has that 49% that they have challenge, debate, argue, to make, you know, to make the decision sharper and smarter. But the person with the 51% wins, not just because they have the the you know, they feel stronger about it, but because of that passion, they are most motivated to make it succeed. So whoever has the most passion to do something gets that extra 1% because we know that they’re going to work even harder to make sure it works. So don’t divvy up any partnership in life or in business based on skillset. Do it based on the passion. So far it worked. It still leads to a lot of arguing and debate and complications.

Brent Ridge
Which you want. And I think that is really essential, because if you break that down even further, it’s about listening, it’s about listening without judgment. So all the way up to that 49% you need to listen to every single argument that’s being made. Right? And it’s about knowing when to step back and acquiescing, you know, and when to give. Because if you’re that 49% you need to know, okay, I’ve reached, I’ve reached the limit of my 49% and now I’m granting you your your choice.

Stephanie Maas
And let’s face it, if you’re the 51% you’re gonna, yeah, you’re gonna do more to put into the argument. You’re gonna do more than research. You’re gonna dive into it. So that’s it sounds like there’s an underlining, also of trust, anything from a practicality standpoint, like, hey, after seven o’clock at night, we don’t talk about work.

Brent Ridge
Yes, I think you know if you are, particularly if you are a couple that is involved romantically and in a business, that you do have to have some boundaries, but those boundaries may not happen at the beginning of the business. You know, we, you know so so much lately has been about work life balance. But if you are craving work life balance, the entrepreneur lifestyle is probably not for you.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Or you need to reframe the way you look at work life balance. Work life balance, most of us think of that as day to day, like I’m only going to work eight hours and I’m going to relax eight hours and save eight hours. If you’re an entrepreneur, just accept the fact that your work life balance is measured in years. You are going to work almost, you know, almost 24 hours a day for a set amount of years in order to have the life balance later on that you’re you want to achieve. So really reframe your your idea of work life balance. That’s not to say, you know, if you have a daily work life balance, that’s fine, but it might not work in a real entrepreneurial situation.

Brent Ridge
And I’m going to give you something really practical that we just started doing just a couple of years ago, because it became to the point that we would sit down for dinner and it would still be talking about work, you know, because it’s just that’s what’s consuming our life. And so I bought one of those packs of conversation cards every Friday night. We are going to do these conversation cards throughout the course of dinner, and it was just a complete reset of the week. And what was fascinating, even after your 20 some years together, we still learned things about each other that we had never learned, had never discussed minutia of our inner thinking of and so I think that’s something that everybody should do, even if you’re not romantic. I think it’s a great thing for business partners to do, get us, you get yourself a set of these conversation cards and devote an hour a week or a lunchtime one lunch period a week, where you’re going to go through some of these cards, and you’ll be amazed at the amount of connection you can make with your partner or your teams.

Stephanie Maas
I love that. I love that. So do you still live on the farm?

Brent Ridge
We are on the farm in Sharon Springs, New York. Farmer John is still here too.

Stephanie Maas
That’s fantastic. Okay, so what is next for this dynamic duo?

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Well, we always felt like we wouldn’t have built a successful brand as long as it defended depended on founders. I think that’s a mistake a lot of founders make. Is that the brand, they think the brand is them. So our goal has always been to build a company that will outlast us. I always tell our team I want to be Betty Crocker, you know, just put me on the box. Nobody really knows who she is, but like, that’s good enough. And so we have built a really amazing team now. And and it is. It runs the business. Runs very well with our with our input, but we don’t have to be there all the time. So our main goal now is truly spreading kindness, and researching kindness and figuring out how we can convince the world that kindness is actually a competitive strategy for business in life. It’s not just a nice, soft, weak thing, it’s actually a strength and a winning strategy. So spreading kindness is our goal now.

Brent Ridge
And even with the book, we see mentorship as an act of kindness. And if we can inspire a different type of way to think about business, particularly in the next generation of entrepreneurs, then you know the way that will ripple forward is incredible.

Stephanie Maas
What an incredible legacy. What I’m hoping and hearing, I think I’m hearing, is because of that reframed mentality, you have this incredible business, and now you’re able to enjoy some of the balance. And I’m going to ask a super cheesy question. Everybody’s probably already knows the answer, but I want to hear the authenticity from y’all on this answer, was it worth it?

Brent Ridge
Yes, it was worth it 100% and I think that this is another lesson, a bit of wisdom, that we hope to impart on entrepreneurs, is when you start on that journey, know deep down what your metric of success is going to be and work toward that metric of success, it’s completely legitimate. If your metric of success is, I want to be a billionaire. That’s legitimate. If your metric of success could be, I want work life balance so I can raise a family and spend a lot of time with my children when they’re young. That’s a great that’s a great one. But know deep down, what is that metric of success for you? And use that to drive your thinking and your mindset, and, you know, reframe how you reach that goal of success. And here’s what’s also important, once you reach that goal, don’t change the goal post, because the ultimate thing in life is to be content and to be happy, and if you keep moving your goalpost, you’re never going to reach contentment. And then what is the purpose of life if you have not reached contentment? And so that’s what we encourage every entrepreneur to do, is really think long and hard, why you’re doing it, and what is your metric of success? You know, Josh says this all the time. We’re always conditioned to think about the next chapter. Or, you know, you reach retirement and like, what are you going to do next? Can’t wait see what you’re gonna do next.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Absolute pet peeve of mine, you know, we’re reaching the age where our colleagues and things are retiring are, and whenever somebody announces a retirement, the first thing people post on their post is, Oh, can’t wait for, you know, Joe, 2.0 or the next your next chapter, or whatever I said, You know what? Maybe they’ve reached, what they’ve done. We all need to learn to love the life we led and not always be striving for the life we aren’t leading yet. So I think that, you know, Brent and I had a pretty modest entrepreneur goal. We wanted to pay off the mortgage on the farm, and we had, we did have $1 amount that we would feel comfortable, and we hit that mount and we’ve surpassed it, but once we hit that mount amount, we were content. Sorry to use that word, but you can be ambitious and content at the same time.

Stephanie Maas
That takes a tremendous amount of self awareness, self discipline. So many of us, especially entrepreneurs, are wired in that way. And as someone who spent a minute or two in therapy, that’s that’s very dangerous. It’s an avoidance tactic. Y’all, this has been so awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, highlight of my day. So thank you.

Brent Ridge
Oh, thanks. Stephanie, great job.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Great fun. Thank you. And thank you for letting giving us a platform to spread kindness. So we appreciate that most of all.