Ep 40: Interview with Joel Primus, Author of Getting Naked

Introduction

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Dawn McGruer:

As ever we have a very exciting guest. Who’s going to share some tips, insights, and also the real life challenges and perhaps some funny stories about their journey as an entrepreneur. So I am really, really pleased to welcome Joel Primus with us today and his new book getting naked. So if that didn’t grab your attention, I’m not sure what will and I think the thing is, is there’s so much I could say about Joel, but I will give you a brief little insight into Joel’s journey. So the entrepreneur, obviously founder and creative, visionary behind naked underwear, you helped to raise over 17 million to establish the retail distribution to some pretty major places such as Bloomingdale’s, Hudson’s Bay, Nordstrom and then there was a merger with the Australian powerhouse. So you exited in 2018, but he didn’t stop there. He carried on and founded Cosa and a travel clothing company, which launched one of the most successful Kickstarter apparel products of all time reaching nearly a million in sales in just 30 days. Now that’s pretty Epic. Also if that wasn’t enough, you were cited as the top 30, under 30 entrepreneurs, obviously in addition to releasing the new book, a filmmaker. So you live in Vancouver, so you are starting your day with me as I finish mine. But tell us what are you are to at the moment? Tell us what your journey is involving today.

Joel Primus

Well, first, thanks for having me on the show. It’s a real pleasure to be here and, yeah, well, I’m, I’m saying same as you. We, um, we’re into our first good stretch of weather. So all my wife and I can think about is getting our vegetable garden planted. That’s sort of my closet therapy and one of the I guess the benefits of being an entrepreneur is I sometimes get to sneak out in the middle of a work day in and ground myself a little bit. But, from a project standpoint, I’m actually, so the Cosan, the travel company that we talked about there, well, there was this little thing called COVID-19, that banned all travel. So we had a tough year, you know, we went from sky high, a million dollars in sales in 30 days to no sales at all, period. We had to pause, we had to pivot, we had to sort of think about the business, which we can dive more into later Dawn. But the point is I’m actually in the process of, that company is being acquired and restarted simultaneously inside a new organization. So that’s taking up a good chunk of time. Yeah.

Joel’s schedule for success

Dawn McGruer

So in terms of, obviously you are an entrepreneur, and I like the fact that, you touched on the most entrepreneurs or speak to the, the motivation is behind the freedom and the flexibility. So, I noticed that you are a long distance runner as well, and you enjoy training and meditation as well as obviously a vegetable garden. So tell me what your day looks like, because I think one of the things that we always like, we want to see inside the entrepreneur’s life, what is your schedule for success?

Joel Primus

Yeah, I mean, it’s very different now than it used to be, and that’s sort of part of the journey that’s baked into the title of the book getting naked. So it’s a double entendre, the name of the book. And hopefully I don’t forget your initial question as I did, but so the getting naked was about getting this company, my first company to the place that I was able to get it to. Which was selling it and, and kind of going through all the motions of a startup journey, which are the same for all of us entrepreneurs, regardless of it’s underwear or tech or whatever you’re doing. But the other part of it was getting back to who I was in it, because sort of that knowing part of my heart that said, this is who you are, Joel, and how you should live, not what I was doing.

And what I mean by that is by the end of naked, I was, the company, I was depressed. I was deeply depressed. I was incredibly anxiety ridden and my marriage was on the rocks. I’d barely seen my daughter in a couple of years because I was traveling so much. I was traveling 200 plus days a year on business doing sales calls. And I was so sick by the end of it. Like I was literally physically sick and in hospital that I wasn’t listening to the science, you know, here, there’s this great story, and I might get it a little bit wrong, but it’s where there’s a man trapped on a roof and there’s a flood and he’s praying to God for help. And he’s like God, please, you know, send me a sign, help me, help me get off this roof. I’m going to die otherwise.

Next thing you know, this, this guy kind of kayaks or canoes over whatever it is and says, hop in. We can get you off this roof. And he says, no, no, no, I’m, I’m praying to God. God’s gonna save me. And then something else comes by, maybe it’s a rowboat and then, or a speed boat. And he says, no, you know, I don’t need to get in. I’m praying to God, God’s gonna save me. And then finally a bloody helicopter comes by and is like throws down the ladder. And he’s like, no, I don’t need it. God’s going to save me. And so he ignores these three things and sure enough, he drowns and in heaven he has a chance to reconcile this situation with God himself and says, what the heck? Like, I prayed dude. He’s like, and God’s like, no, what the heck I sent you a boat. I sent you a helicopter. You didn’t listen to the signs. You know, and that was what was happening in me. My marriage is falling apart. I’m sick. I’m not listening to the signs and the signs wasn’t, I shouldn’t be doing naked. It was, how do I live my life better inside this company?

Dawn McGruer:

We have this ethic, don’t we? And, you know, I noticed when COVID struck one of the best things it’s done for people to slow us down and make us think about who we are and who we want to be, and be our authentic selves and kind of drill down into the purpose. But we have this ethic, don’t we, that we feel like we just have to be busy and we’re plowing and pushing and, you know, really we don’t live once we’re living every day. And I think this is one of the things that you’re saying when I was reading your book earlier, I liked the fact that you call it a personal roadmap to business and personal success. Because when you’re talking through all the things that you need to be doing, there was one bit that struck me, which was when you talk about getting the funding, you know, the investing side of things, and you say that, you know, banks aren’t quite as warm and fluffy as, as you perceive them to be, what sort of journey was it getting to that point? Because obviously you’ve got to the point where, you know, your accident in 2018, you realize that you needed to do some change. What was it like in that early stages?

Hiding behind your business

Joel Primus:

Yeah and we have to, you know, I’m not saying we don’t dive into the point businesses where we do burn the candle at both ends. That’s part of, that’s part of it. It’s a question of where you learn to turn it off. And if you can never turn it off, then I’ve come to believe that it has nothing to do with the business. It has to do with things inside of yourself that you’re maybe hiding from avoiding, and you’re just burying yourself in this company or this project or this philanthropy, whatever it is. It becomes a mask for inner work that needs to be done. But much like when I was a runner and as an athlete, you have, what’s called periodization. So you periodise your year into blocks of very hard training, blocks of rest, blocks of performance where you’re competing at your best so lighter training. And if you don’t do that, you don’t peak at the right time. You don’t recover, you don’t improve. The improvements we make as athletes happen in the recovery, when the muscles regenerate stronger as a result of being broken down, but in business and in life in general, somewhere along the line and it’s, it’s fairly recently in our history, we lost the off button. It just kind of disappeared, right.

It did, and we never redefined hard work. Hard work is absolutely a beautiful and important quality in life, as well as in business. I think that many of us are inherently feel good about working hard, whether that’s in our gardens, we talked about, or whether it’s in our businesses, but we need to learn how to rest. That comes to people like you and I, and to the bosses out there who are setting the tone and the precedent and the principles that our companies operate by and allowing our teams, our people to feel that rest, to you know, so that they can be their best for us and for themselves. Right. So I guess that’s the long way back to the initial question of what does my life look like now? It’s far more balanced than it’s ever been. And that balance looks like, you know, I was talking to somebody last night at my brother’s wedding. I said, yeah, at least one night a work week, I worked till 1:00 AM, at least because at least one day a week, there’s something that’s just there.

Dawn McGruer:

Yeah. And you’re in it, you’re in the moment

Joel Primus:

You’re in it and you got to stick with it. But I said, at least once a week, I’m going to go off in the middle of the afternoon and ride my motorcycle for three hours, or I’m going to go into the garden early. So I’m going to find that balance inside my own structure. It’s not nine to five. It’s not, it’s not a eight to six or whatever. Seven to seven and some days are 14 hours and some days are five or six, four, you know? So I just balance it that way. I find my moments and the only things that I really try and be consistent with are a 20 minute morning meditation and a one-hour workout. And I’ll either do that in the morning or the evening, not in the morning when I’m hung over like I am today for my brother’s wedding, but for those listening, it was our first night of real freedom in a long time. So I took it.

Getting the balance right

Dawn McGruer:

Exactly but you see this is it it’s about balance. Isn’t it? One of the biggest activities I did is I looked at my calendar and I just kind of took everything out and I just made everything as blank as it could be so that I could redefine what my year looked like. Then I worked it through to what my months would look like, and then what my weeks and my days. And do you know what, just chunking things so I can, like July and August. I have nothing in diary because that’s when I have my creative time and I step back because I think the thing is, if we’re too immersed in all business, we’re not good at the bigger picture, the strategic view are we, you know, we’re just kind of on that carousel. I felt it before COVID-19 that I just was working all the time. And I think it’s now about kind of having that flexibility and remembering why we’re entrepreneurs in the first place that we wanted, the freedom, we wanted other things in our lives and enrichment, I guess, and having experiences. What do you think that as an entrepreneur, you know, has been your sort of biggest hardship in terms of something that’s still, you feel, you know, not necessarily an Epic fail or a challenge or something that you just remember still and is maybe a bit raw or will always be,

Learning From Mistakes

Joel Primus:

Yeah. I mean, there’s the mistakes. There’s the mistakes of where, you know, there’s this story I share in the book where we got an order from one of the biggest stores in Canada and it was really my very first order. And so how on earth? That was the biggest, my very first order was the biggest store in Canada and all that happened, but it happened and they ordered a thousand pairs of underwear. And I was like, Oh my gosh, we’ve made it. It’s it’s happening. And so I go to my business partner and we have to place the order to make these, this product. And I said, we’re going to make 20,000 pairs. And he says, what? We have a thousand unit order. Why are we making 20,000 pairs? I said, because we’re going to be huge, right?

We’re going to be huge. This is going to fly off the shelves. And it is pre-digital, you know, your wheelhouse of data and using that data to make inform decisions. This is just, you know, an individual in a boardroom saying, I’m going to buy some of your product and no idea how, you know, how to predict the sell through. And so, anyway, because I’m the chief of the company, I guess I get to make the call. So we do 20,000 pairs. And I want to say, you know, a few weeks after it launches, I get a call and it’s from an investor. And he says, who’s never worn the product. And he says, I now don’t like it. I said, why is that? Because the underwear falls off when you wear it. I said, what? And all my size, largest and extra larges. And even some of my mediums, they would, because of this new design, I kind of not fully thought through – shot off.

Like it literally like you put it on. And it just like using the elastic and like the fabric. And so I had to recall or take, to take away 18,000 pairs of that underwear and, you know, effectively burn it. And it nearly bankrupted my company. The point of that is yes, those mistakes always hurt along the way. And I think, you know, in hindsight that mistake cost me millions of dollars in the long run, but the bigger mistake was that that was an ego-driven. It wasn’t a data driven decision. It was an ego-driven decision. And all along the way, when I look at where I veered wrong in my company, where companies it’s, when I’m operating from insecurity, it’s when I’m operating from ego. It’s when I’m not thinking about either, you know, thinking with my heart or thinking with what’s practical, not, you know, what I feel about it. And those are the ones that suck cause sometimes relationships crumble as a result of a bad decision. And, and you have to go through that that’s life. We, you know, and you do better the next time when you know, better. But those are the ones

Dawn McGruer:

I think it’s a learning curve, isn’t it? I mean, we’ve all made massive mistakes as entrepreneurs and that’s half of it because you can never really sort of feel the elation and unless you’ve actually had the hardship too, and as you set businesses up, you’re so right. When you talk about making decisions, because if someone’s in a place of desperation, they’re never going to be operating in the most rational way. I think also the pace of decisions, one of the things that I learned, whereas the, if it feels instantly not right than generally rule of thumb, it’s not right. So I kind of, I would like to know if there was somebody along the way that has been a help or a hindrance that you can share a story that would help us, entrepreneurs be inspired because you’ve achieved some pretty Epic things along the way.

Joel Primus

Oh, somebody, you know, it’s the one thing that I find really interesting about mentorship, which is, you know, just as a little aside to the point you’re making, I do think that as you, to your listeners who are in sort of that mentorship role or that investor role, or that board of director role inside a company, your job is to help that entrepreneur not be in a place of desperation. Right. And I’ve had situations, both where the board is just as exasperated about what’s happening as the entrepreneur. But when you have someone who has that common cool and can bring that into the business, it makes all the difference, right? Our first decisions, our first ideas as in their raw, as former rarely our best one, right? And these things take massaging to get to a place where we’re making the best decisions we can with the information we have.

And so all of them, my career,  thus far, I’ve had many mentors because I believe that, well, one, I believe that some people are sort of sent to us at the right time. And even if a friendship remains forever out of that, the piece as it relates to maybe your business or project, there’s a moment in time for that. And they come and go,  as your business evolves and changes. And so as my first business and into my second business evolve, there was many people who came in and I always feel that these people are kind of mirrors for me. They, it’s not so much that they’re espousing what, I don’t know, it’s that they’re reinforcing what I’m having a hard time deciding in myself, they’re being that sort of true mirror of authenticity and truth and harsh truth sometimes. And helping you get to the point where you get comfortable making clear, tough decisions for better or worse.

You know, sometimes a tough decision is, is saying no to money, is dissolving a company, these types of things, those are really hard to do. And so I had so many mentors along the way. And, and I’m trying to think of a funny story though, is just to answer that part of your question where, well, you know, one of the most surprising stories maybe was when going back to that 20,000 pair of underwear debacle and my business partner at the time who we touched on with a beer after, you know, the whole thing, the dust had settled, the product was, was burning somewhere, you know, on the other side of the world. And I said, well, I’m never going to do that again. I’m never going to. And what I meant was I’m never going to fail again, ignorantly and genuinely believing my own BS that I’m never going to fail again. And my business partner said is it’s, it’s okay to fail. I want you to fail. I want us to fail together, but I want us to fail as the, you know, as the quote goes, I wants to fail faster. I want us to fail forward. I want us to fail smarter. I want us to fail not because we operated from our emotions in our, decision-making really created the shift for me and being okay with failure, because I don’t know, about you Dawn, but I’ve always felt the need to be perfect. That that was what I did.

Dawn McGruer:

I think it’s an entrepreneur trait. Do you know what, I meet a lot of people that we want to. I mean, I remember when we started creating products and services and things like that, and we worked with clients and there was this need to just get everything perfect. But actually half the learning curve was to get it readyish, and then float it out and evolve and optimizes run. And it was very difficult for me to kind of get into that, that sort of thought process. Where do you go for your sort of resources? I mean, do you constantly like learning? Do you read what, what’s your go-to? I mean, I’m a big

Where Joel gets his knowledge from

Joel Primus:

I’m a Book person. I have your book here. I almost solely read paperback, or, hardcover, but paper because my whole life is so engrossed in a screen that it’s one of my, you know, my reprieves to just pick up a book and read it. And it also forces me because there’s this thing of like, well, how can I maximize my learning? If I, we all have the same hours in the day, how can I maximize those hours, etcetera, etcetera. I do believe that that’s a great skill and way of approaching life and just being the best versions of ourselves that we can be. But I’m also over the time. Cause, you know, for years it was like every minute I was listening to a podcast, I was listening to an audio book.

I was all these different things. And I started to try and you use this word chunk, think that you’re with the time in your calendar, I started to try and say, well, you know, I want to go back more a mono-tasking where I can do one thing and just in it and find the time to do it versus saying, I don’t have the time. So I’m going to figure out a way to like blend all these things together. So paperback is just sort of a way of forcing myself to be in something for one hour without having to be doing three things at one time. And I used to be an insane self-help junkie. You know, we’ve probably all been there or are still are there. And I just used to ingest and ingest and ingest. And so I’m doing a lot less of that these days. Um, I’m actually trying to, you know, this sounds maybe corny to some like the garden, being with my wife, being more of a teacher than a book for me right now, just as some time.

Dawn McGruer:

We’re living more in experiences and actions rather than just see, this is one of the things I always find interesting because I definitely, I mean, I’ve read and read, read, listen to podcasts, etcetera. But I think maybe the fact that, you know, we are digitally focused that to detach from these. I mean, I literally give my mobile phone up from when I finish work through to when I start working in the morning and it’s been the most cathartic thing I’ve ever done because I think it breeds a bit of anxiety, this constant switch on and, yeah, doing different things, going out and realizing that, you know, no one’s going to die, the business isn’t going to fail if you take time out and you can be a better leader because of it. So do you think then going forward that you’re going to adopt some new strategies as the lockdown eases, do you think it will stay some of these changes you’ve made?

How clarity helps with performance

Joel Primus:

Absolutely. Again, there’ll be seasonality to it, but you know one of the other things I added was, more rewelding, which was sort of where I go, usually with my cousins completely off grid, into the Northern Canadian wilderness about 10 or 11, no, actually, yeah. 12, 13 hours North of Vancouver, nearly nobody said grizzly bears and the point is, and again, like I will be a lifelong learner and I believe in lifelong learning, but there’s, for me individually, I noticed that when I was ingesting too much, I was cloudier in my mind and stillness, cultivating stillness, not intentional, you know, sometimes when we meditate, we also make it about achieving something. So law of attraction, right? Like great, great, wonderful practice. But if every one of our meditation’s about just focusing on the thing that we want, it misses the mark on what I have come to find as a truly therapeutic version of meditation for me, which is just being with my breath or being quiet. And what I found over time, we go back to this point about, we talked about very early on, about taking that reprieve that you take in July and August. Even if that repeat reprieve can only four days in the wilderness or, you know, a weekend or, you know, every weekend in your garden, etcetera, when you find that stillness, there’s this sort of wisdom inside of us from all the things that we’ve read from all the, that we know in our emotional being in our, in our, in our intellectual, being that when the mind quiets, it rises as a clear thought helps us make in my view, better decisions.

And yes, we should take that when it, when it comes and we should bounce it off our mentors, or we should do some research that describes, you know, or to, support it. And I’m not, I’m not talking about like market research here for picking whether your product has product market fit. And as scalability I’m talking about, you know, that stuff has to, you have to dive into the work. Your book talks a lot about that, right? That’s a very different thing than talking about just getting clear on is this, is this the company I should be, should I make running? Is this the move I should make in the company? Is this person that I’m working with? What do you know, is it the right thing to be working with them, these types of sort of macro decisions. So I found that that finding that clarity has helped me perform better. And when I don’t have it, I make way worse decisions and  there will always be an ebb and flow because I’ll always get like pulled back into that chaos.

Dawn McGruer:

Yeah. We, we never have equal balance all the time. You know, weekly, we operate in, in, our sort of genius zones and then we get caught up in activity and then we kind of revert back. But I think a lot about what you’re saying involves like contentment, what actually makes this content. And I think the pandemic has given us a lot of that, you know, just sometimes sitting, having a cup of coffee is kind of one of the nicest things to be doing and having your own rituals that you like doing. And they don’t have to be extreme experiences. They can be quite simple. And I think we got simple quite quickly during the pandemic. We all started making bread and doing all sorts of different things, but I don’t think we are as connected with those things as maybe we were, when life was less digital. What would you give advice for? You know, if anyone’s looking to buy your amazing book, what takeaway or a piece of advice do you think would entice someone to getting a copy?

Joe Primus:

I see that there’s two ways to look at the book. It, so one, it is literally. So when I started naked, I learned everything the hard way at, in other words, I made every mistake from inception, which is what I call inception of an idea is not when you start your business, it’s when the idea lens in your heart or in your mind. And you have that moment where it’s like, Oh, this would be a good business. Or this would be a good idea. And then there’s this, there’s this sort of this like birthing period where that idea you’re, you’re deciding whether or not, and this growing period, but that idea where you’re deciding whether or not you’re going to put it in the world. Right. And that’s really the first step is and then once you’ve made that clear decision, because so many of us was what is, Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx say, she said that like everybody in their life has had a multimillionaire dollar idea.

Right. But then doing it, most of us don’t do anything with it. So how do we make that choice? So I start there, I start with, how do we make that choice? And I take you literally every step of the way to raising money, to building teams, to building brands, to selling product, to finding product market fit, to scaling, to building boards, to selling your company. It is literally a how to guide from start to finish. And, and so I think for first and second time entrepreneurs, it’s just a great reference point. I describe it as the better questions we ask, the better answers we get. And that’s, I believe that’s a Tim Ferriss quote, but, um,

Dawn McGruer:

Yeah, cause you can say here it’s, part memoir part entrepreneurial startup manual. And there is, because what I like is that you’re telling us something, but you’re also kind of sharing your story along with it. So we feel a little bit more connected to the journey because I think sometimes if we’re honest, when I read out a bio of somebody who’s raised 17 million, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there who are in their earlier stages in their journey or who are very successful, but will not ever want to be changing up their business or scaling it to that level. So I think it’s, one of those books that I don’t think it matters really way you in your journey or the size of the business. I think there’s so much you can take from it. And it is it’s, it’s a great, it’s a great book and with some great steps. So before we love you and leave you doll, tell me and our listeners where we can connect with you. I know you’re on LinkedIn, but where’s the best place that people can connect and find out more.

Joe Primus:

Definitely my my website, which is just joelprimus.com and you can find the book, forward slash book or forward slash Instagram. I know you’re like in the top 1% of LinkedIn and I am in the bottom 99%

Dawn McGruer:

But give it a few weeks that you’ll be there.

Joe Primus:

So yeah, I usually hang out in, in one of those two places.

Dawn McGruer:

Perfect. Well, do you know what we could chat all day, but I’m going to release you from the podcasts to,  carry on with your day. As you start your day, we finish ours. But if you are listening to this and you have any queries, you can go to Joel’s website or off the seat, find him on LinkedIn and don’t forget to get copy of getting naked. There we go. This is available online, so you can buy it from anywhere. And, yeah. So any final parting sayings or anything you’d like to say to our listeners,

Joe Primus:

Do, what do I want to say? You know, I’ll say that as we climb our way out of COVID-19 to your listeners in the UK, you guys are, you know, just literally being released, you know, whereas other parts of the world have been a little looser for a little longer, you know, I read it, I read a stat this morning that said 200,000 businesses went under in the United States, but that isn’t even anywhere near, the carnage because they don’t know, they haven’t, you know, the serving of tight, etcetera. And most of those businesses were five employees and under. So, you know, the mom and pop stuff that we’re all we all start there. And the thing that, that I learned and had to reconnect with in COVID was as an entrepreneur, all I control is my attitude and my effort. I don’t control the outcome of my business. And so I guess I can give you that, is that just to remind yourself that the result is not in your control, how, how you feel about it.

Dawn McGruer

I think we need to hear this now because there are so many people who, you know, just coming out and locked down and is only half the battle for them because they’ve got businesses that maybe haven’t come through. They’ve had to pivot in such a way that it’s taken investment, but also some of the people who’ve done exceptionally well are not certain about what the future holds. And I think this is it. We can only be in control of what we can and the rest of it is not something we need to beat ourselves up for, but we should celebrate the fact that community and collaboration, you know, lean on others. And hopefully from today from Joe’s advice and some of his tips. So, you know, that pushes us through. So I appreciate you taking the time out at Joel and spending this time with us. And I, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book and finding out more. So thank you so much and take care and yeah, we’ll see you on next week’s episode of Dawn of a New Era, everyone. So have a lovely day and let us know if there’s anything we can have.

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