How to beef up your business, with ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero

**Jeff Berman** (0:01)
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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I'm thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale Summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reid Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad and more will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great or you want to build something great, we want you there with us too. Join us at mastersofscale.com/apply26.
That's mastersofscale.com/apply26.

**Mike Salguero** (1:31)
Startups are like hacking through a jungle with a machete. At the very beginning, what you need are people who are willing to hack aimlessly because you don't know where you're going, but just work night and day and just keep hacking until we find a path. And then you're just like, okay, here's a path, let's take the path. And then you start needing some people with a little bit more experience. Maybe they know how to use a compass. And then eventually you get to a road.
When you get on a road, you kind of need people who know how to drive cars. If you just go for the car drivers, then you lose the hacking culture. Like you're willing to do whatever it takes to get this thing off the ground.

**Jeff Berman** (2:08)
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Mike Salguero. Mike Salguero is the founder and CEO of ButcherBox, which he has bootstrapped into a $600 million revenue business. Do I have that right?

**Mike Salguero** (2:29)
Yeah, we're hoping to do 650 this year.

**Jeff Berman** (2:31)
Okay, 650 has been D2C and is now in Target stores nationwide. Mike, welcome to Masters of Scale.

**Mike Salguero** (2:37)
Thank you. Long time listener, thrilled to be here.

**Jeff Berman** (2:39)
We're thrilled to have you. Let's start at the beginning.
Where did your entrepreneurial journey begin, Mike?

**Mike Salguero** (2:45)
Well, I had a paper route when I was 10 years old, which wasn't quite entrepreneurial. But-

**Jeff Berman** (2:50)
Should we explain what paper routes are to the younger people?

**Mike Salguero** (2:53)
Paper routes are where you pick up a stack of newspapers, 35 of them, and deliver them every day, six days a week, rain or shine.

**Jeff Berman** (3:01)
So you had the bug early, you were out hustling.

**Mike Salguero** (3:03)
Out hustling early. I went to school in Boston and I did a bunch of sales jobs. I got out of school and started doing real estate rentals, which was a very entrepreneurial sales-focused thing.
And on the side, I started a little t-shirt company. And my first t-shirt was a Shamrock and it said Boston on it, and sold it during St. Patrick's Day. And I had like 100 shirts that I paid $5 a shirt for, and I sold them for $10 and made $500 the fastest I'd ever made money.

**Jeff Berman** (3:36)
Well, you knew your market pretty well. Yeah.

**Mike Salguero** (3:39)
As Bostonians love St. Patrick's Day.
And then I did another t-shirt. This was in 2004 during the George Bush, John Kerry election. The t-shirt said Buckfush on it. And we sold 17,000 t-shirts over the course of like a two-month period.

**Jeff Berman** (3:58)
Wow. And so, I mean, this is still pretty early days of e-commerce. So were you selling this through Amazon, through your own website?

**Mike Salguero** (4:05)
Mostly like at festivals, door to door, set up a booth.
I had salespeople. I was in a few stores and had sold all these t-shirts, but I didn't have, I didn't have any money. I was like, where did all the money go? What happened here?

**Jeff Berman** (4:20)
Where'd all the money go?

**Mike Salguero** (4:21)
I think it went to like, we'd go out at night with backpacks full of t-shirts and go to the bar and sell them, or, you know, and then use that money to buy drinks. And that's where the money went. And so I ended up like having this realization that I didn't know what I was doing, and I wanted to go get a real job. So I worked as a real estate developer for three years, got my MBA at night at Babson, which is known for entrepreneurship, and then left that and started my first company.