Conscious Capitalism: Being Helpful and Doing Good with Colin McIntosh

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Our pre-show conversation got a little dark there, but I think that's why the importance of putting good into the world and what we're doing here in these conversations. Welcome to the show everyone, where we explore how empathy, connection, and purpose transform business from the inside out. I'm Stephen Sakach, along with the co-host, Mike Liwski. Today's conversation is about redefining capitalism through humor, heart, and sustainability. Here's a couple of stats for you. A report by Deloitte found that purpose-driven companies grow three times faster than their competitors. Another study by Cone Communications revealed that 63% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that reflect their value. Our guest is someone who's proven that doing good and doing business can be one. The same, Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:11)
Absolutely, Stephen. Super excited to. With that intro, I can't wait to jump into our conversation. We're excited to welcome Colin McIntosh. He's the founder and CEO of not just one company, but two impactful brands, Sheets & Giggles and sheetsresume.com. Now, Sheets & Giggles is a fast-growing Denver-based betting company known for its sustainable eucalyptus sheets, zero plastic packaging and commitment to giving back, having actually donated over a quarter of a million dollars to charity. Colin grew Sheets & Giggles from a zero to one million dollar company in monthly revenues within just two years. Incredibly remarkable. But that's not all. When it comes to Colin, he also founded sheetsresume.com, and that's an AI-powered resume builder that has helped millions of people to create resumes, which we know are a critical right in these days to help the workforce. And recently, he's even made it free for all laid-off or threatened government workers to help them transition to the private sector. So, Colin, well done. Welcome to the show. We are super excited to have you.

**Colin McIntosh** (2:32)
Thanks a lot. And I appreciate the very warm intro. It's been really a gift to have the spare time for the resume builder, and I've helped so many people out with just a few hours here on nights and weekends. So it's been really a gift.

**Mike Liwski** (2:46)
Yeah.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:47)
Yeah, Colin, so we've got these two different ideas, Sheets & Giggles, Sheets Resumes. I think they're very different. You do have that same sort of witty branding, I think, a little bit in both of those.

**Colin McIntosh** (3:00)
I'm the Sheets guy. I'm the MyPillow guy if he wasn't clinically insane. Well, that's maybe overly generous. If he wasn't evil, maybe is a better way to put it. So I'm the Sheets guy.
And so people on the Internet call me the Sheets guy. And so I just stick with it. I'll for the rest of my podcast is called Sheet Talk. You know what I mean? Like that's going to be the rest of my life.

**Mike Liwski** (3:22)
Amazing.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:25)
Can you share how the ideas for these two companies came about? And maybe what motivated you to start them?

**Colin McIntosh** (3:30)
Well, Sheets & Giggles was seven and a half years ago. Almost eight now, actually, because I was watching. This is such a dumb... I have a really dumb founder story. Every other founder in the world has a super cool personal problem, something they were trying to solve. For me, I was watching War Dogs with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill. And Miles Teller's character is selling sheets out of the back of a pickup truck. He has to burn all the inventory because he can't sell them to anybody. And I got so mad with this fictional character that I paused the movie, which my ex-girlfriend was really upset about, and I wrote a business plan for a betting company that night. And whenever I write a business plan, I always think, what's a funny name for that? And then I buy a URL. And Sheets & Giggles just hit me like a punch in the face. And fun fact, I just bought for a plumbing company, johnsjohns.com. I bought that last week. That's a great URL, johnsjohns.com, right? How good is that? Anyway, so I own like 100 domains, obviously. And I don't start most of the companies, although I will start draftcraft.com one day. And, you know, Sheets & Giggles, I thought about it for like three or four months. And then I got laid off from my last job at 1 p.m. on Monday in September 2017, and didn't get last week's pay, didn't get... I had to pay for my laptop, lost my health care. That was like the third time that I had been unceremoniously fired or let go in my career. And I was 27 I had this really crazy, zany idea about this bedding company called Sheets & Giggles. I got super drunk with my coworkers after we all got laid off, which is what you do after you get laid off. And I'm telling them, I'm going to start this bedding company, Sheets & Giggles. Like then they're like, okay, dude. They probably thought I was wasted, which to be fair, I was. And three weeks after we got laid off, I incorporated the company, and six months later, we did a $300,000 crowdfunding campaign. And we shipped our first box October 2018 And as you alluded to, two years later in November 2020, we had our first million dollar month. So it was pretty meteoric there at the beginning, and it's been a wild ride over the last better part of a decade.