INTERVIEW | Make Money by Building Billion-Dollar Brands from Scratch

Summary

Travis Makes Money – Episode Summary

Episode Title: INTERVIEW | Make Money by Building Billion-Dollar Brands from Scratch
Host: Travis Chappell
Air Date: July 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

This compilation episode highlights Travis' favorite conversations from the first half of 2026, featuring three accomplished entrepreneurs who have built massive brands in diverse industries: Mesh Gelman (Cumulus – nitro cold brew at-home appliances), Sean Nelson (LoveSac – modular sofas and iconic beanbags), and David Royce (Aptiv – door-to-door pest control empire). The episode dives into their stories, lessons learned, and the practical mindset shifts required to build enduring, billion-dollar businesses from the ground up.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mesh Gelman – Founder of Cumulus (03:37–13:15)

The Starbucks Years & Lessons from Howard Schultz

• Mesh describes how he began his career at Starbucks, initially brought on by Howard Schultz as a “curiosity consultant” to explore new ideas.

• Key Leadership Lesson from Howard Schultz

  "Remember, the world will be fine tomorrow without Starbucks... But we need to go out there and earn our business every single day. And the way we do that is by being true to who we are, what we stand for, and why people trust us, rely on us, and want to engage with us."
  — Mesh Gelman, recalling Howard Schultz (05:20)

  Mesh explains the vital tension between “art and commerce," emphasizing the need for constant innovation and humility in business.

The Origin and Evolution of Cumulus

• Mesh noticed the operational challenges in scaling cold brew and nitro cold brew in Starbucks stores, leading him to develop an at-home solution.

• Industry Insight:
  Cold brew consumption has soared from 35% to nearly 80% of all Starbucks drinks over Mesh’s career, highlighting a massive cultural shift in consumer preferences (08:15).

• The R&D process for Cumulus took over four years, focusing on both design and engineering challenges. Mesh describes the journey as milestone-based rather than a single eureka moment.

  "It was more a journey of like, let's get to the next step versus, like, this won't [work]... Until that point, everything was developed in house, self-funded."
  — Mesh Gelman (12:13)

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2. Sean Nelson – Founder of LoveSac (14:01–22:58)

The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Building LoveSac from a Side Hustle

• Sean started LoveSac in college, sewing beanbags himself while supporting himself with other jobs. Success came gradually:

  "Even in the first few years of LoveSac... it just kind of took all my money... years ultimately before I actually made a profit."
  — Sean Nelson (14:06)

• A pivotal moment: faced with shutting down, friends and early customers insisted he continue, leading to a crucial trade show and the company’s first large order (16:03).

• His mother's down-to-earth question as he cuts vinyl in the basement captures early founder doubt:

  "She just looked at me and said, is this what you want to do?... I just said, I don't know. I said, but I feel like I should keep going."
  — Sean Nelson (16:26)

Enduring Uncertainty & Commitment

• Sean describes the constant vulnerability of entrepreneurship, from the first $70,000 in sales up to hundreds of millions:

  "At what point do you make it... $70,000, $7 million, $700 million, still feeling vulnerable."
  — Sean Nelson (17:31)

• Commitment as liberation:

  "When I made the decision more recently to just like, I will go as long as it takes... it then kind of freed me."
  — Sean Nelson (18:16)

• Going through bankruptcy and painful restructuring with early venture capitalists was a turning point that led to invaluable learnings in contracts, resilience, and adaptability.
• Takeaway: Success is dynamic, and entrepreneurship is “learn or die, evolve or die, adapt or die.”

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3. David Royce – Serial Entrepreneur in Pest Control & Solar (24:21–33:28)

From Door-to-Door Sales to Industry Dominance

• Built and sold four pest control companies (and a solar company), mostly to Terminix, often executing “asset deals” to retain his key growth teams for his next business:

  "We're not going to sell you the growth engine... we're going to keep the golden goose."
  — David Royce (27:03)

• This repeatable model funded each larger endeavor and allowed him to scale sales teams and company culture with each iteration.
• Innovated company culture with “tech-like” headquarters, extravagant retreats, and a strong, performance-oriented sales engine.

Sales & Marketing Evolution

• While door-to-door was the engine, digital channels (Google, Meta) now account for about 20% of sales—growing every year (31:48).
• Inside sales are entirely separated from door-to-door reps.

Perspectives on Opportunity and Business Models

• Royce credits much of his scaling to transparent, data-driven sales programs and a willingness to “play a different game” than large established companies.

• The willingness of big public companies to pay for customer bases and not the growth engine creates unique entrepreneurial opportunity:

  "Some people are so busy playing their game of business that they don't realize there are other games... their goals are so wildly different."
  — Podcast Host, reflecting on Royce’s model (28:41)

• Door-to-door sales, long thought “dead,” remains a massive revenue driver—thanks to persistent training and systematization:

  "I didn't invent it, but I was able to really develop it into really great training and, you know, systematize it."
  — David Royce (33:28)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On remaining grounded:
  "The world will be fine tomorrow without Starbucks... We have to go out there and earn our business every single day."
  — Howard Schultz via Mesh Gelman (05:20)

• On entrepreneurial vulnerability:
  "At what point do you make it...? Still feeling vulnerable, still feeling, you know, nervous and afraid... just different scales."
  — Sean Nelson (17:31)

• On freedom in commitment:
  "There’s ironically freedom in commitment. Commitment seems like shackles, but ultimately it also is the thing that takes options off the table."
  — Podcast Interviewer (19:37)

• On exit strategies:
  "You could be killing it and dying at the same time."
  — David Royce (29:37)

• On finding entrepreneurial opportunity:
  "Some people are so busy playing their game of business that they don't realize there are other games..."
  — Travis (Podcast Host) (28:41)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Guest & Topic | Timestamp | |--------------------------------------------|-------------------------------|-------------| | Introduction of Guests & Episode Theme | Travis Chappell | 00:44–03:37 | | Lessons from Starbucks & Cumulus R&D | Mesh Gelman | 03:37–13:15 | | LoveSac's Early Years & Roadblocks | Sean Nelson | 14:01–18:16 | | Commitment & Bankruptcy/Rebuilding | Sean Nelson | 18:16–22:58 | | Royce’s Pest Control & Serial Exits | David Royce | 24:21–29:37 | | Business Model Insights & Door-to-Door | David Royce | 29:37–33:28 |

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Episode Takeaways

• Every billion-dollar brand starts with a relentless founder who’s willing to learn, adapt, and face countless setbacks.
• Industry innovation may emerge from operational pain points—Mesh's R&D at Starbucks became Cumulus.
• Sticking it out—Sean Nelson embodied persistence over decades, proving commitment creates freedom.
• Business models matter—Royce systematized exits and growth, using larger companies’ incentives to his advantage.
• Direct sales channels are not dead; innovation and training can revive even “old-school” approaches.

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For Listeners Seeking Entrepreneurial Inspiration

This episode is a masterclass in the real stories behind billion-dollar brands: Not overnight success, but years of testing, adaptation, setbacks, and personal risk. Each founder’s willingness to “keep going,” their lessons in humility and commitment, and their strategic thinking offer actionable wisdom for listeners at any stage of their own money-making journey.

Transcript

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[Travis (Podcast Host)]

You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis

[Podcast Interviewer]

what's going on everybody?

[Travis (Podcast Host)]

Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money on this episode of the show. We are continuing with our compilation series here, highlighting some of my favorite conversations from the first half of 2026 here on the show. Lots of amazing people to choose from. So it was really diffic difficult to come up with these lists, but I've compiled a few of them into this episode that's really all about building massive brands from nothing. And there's a mixture of different types of companies. So I'm excited about this one. First we have Mesh Gelman, who started a company called Cumulus. It is a cold brew at home coffee maker. So he's a former Starbucks executive that realized that the technology that was required to put in their like nitro cold brew taps across all the Starbucks in the country the world really was, was really difficult undertaking. And so he eventually branched off and started multiple years of R and D before they came up with this product which he shipped me. And I have to say it's amazing. I have a couple cold brew, especially in the summertime in Vegas. It's perfect because I drink black coffee, so I don't like putting a bunch of extra stuff in there and I don't like that the ice tends to,

[Podcast Interviewer]

you know, make the coffee less strong.

[Travis (Podcast Host)]

So nitro cold brew from my kitchen every morning has been a game changer and it takes, literally takes nitrogen from the air and infuses it into the coffee. It's wild how it works, but it's amazing taste. Got a really thick foam head on the top of the, on the top of the cold brew. Fantastic product. And I'm fascinated with Mesh and his story of working his way up in Starbucks and working with Howard Schultz, one of the best business leaders of our time. So, great episode with Mesh. And then we have Sean Nelson, who's the founder of LoveSac. These, I remember these so much as a kid because they were like revolutionary. These massive adult size like X XXL beanbag chairs. And come to find out he hand sewed the first few products from his college dorm room and was really solving a personal problem. And then other people started to ask him to make them for them. And then it scaled into this massive retail brand and now they have the, what they've called the Sactionals, which is like a couch that they've, that they've made now, but now it's a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue every single year. And so he, Sean's done an amazing job leading that company here for the last couple of decades now, which is crazy. So Lovesac and that story. Fantastic, fantastic entrepreneur. And then lastly on this episode we have David Royce. David sort of took the opposite approach of these other guys. He didn't invent anything new. He just did something really well, which is pest control. He did door to door pest control and has built multiple companies in that space. With the most recent acquisition being a company he built called Aptiv, which was, became one of the largest pest control companies in the entire country. Sold for over half a billion dollars. And so, yeah, savage entrepreneurs all on this one single episode. So please enjoy my conversations with David Roy, Sean Nelson and Mesh Gilman.

[Podcast Interviewer]

So tell me, tell me the conversation. Did you, did you initiate this conversation? Did Howard Schultz initiate the conversation? How did that end up playing out?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

We were discussing kind of like the state of coffee. I remember it was actually coffee at home we were talking about. And you know, and there was this ability and idea that Starbucks had this amazing platform with all the stores that they had and millions of people a week coming through it. And we were like tossing over like, what do you do with all that? Like, there's so much equity there, there's so much visibility. How do we create something that's like entrepreneurial, sticky and exciting to do with it? And we didn't really have the answer. So we said, so Howard was like, you know what, why don't you come to the company first for a few months and kind of like go on a listening tour and explore and let's see what we see and what we learn and what could happen from there. And that's actually how it started. I started out as a, like, almost like a consultant without a real project.

[Travis (Podcast Host)]

Wow.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

It was just to like listen and a Curiosity consultant.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Yeah, I like that. I never thought of that.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. In fact, that seems like a pretty good career path. If anybody's hiring curiosity consultants, shoot me an email. That sounds like a lot of fun.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Any answers? We just have questions.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah, exactly. That's my kind of gig. Match. That's my kind of gig. Okay, so. So tell me. Tell me practically what you took away from that experience working for one of the most globally recognized brands in the world from one of the, you know, best visionaries on the planet, probably.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

I could sum up everything I learned in Starbucks from a very raw moment when Howard had the senior leadership together. And literally, in a very small, intimate setting, with his eyes watering up, he said the following to us. He goes, remember, the world will be fine tomorrow without Starbucks. The as. And we have to let that sink in. The world will go on perfectly fine without Starbucks. But we need to go out there and earn our business every single day. And the way we do that is by being true to who we are, what we stand for, and why people trust us, rely on us, and want to engage with us. And, like, that lesson, those words, I was remember just looking at him, right? And his eyes were, like, watery. And then you saw it, and he was, like, scared. He was like, yes. I'm like, you know, like, kind of like everybody talks about, like, entrepreneurs are always scared like that. Like, and it was, like, so impactful about that fragile balance between art and commerce and that tension that needs to be created because if you give up on either one, you fail. And that, to me, is the kind of, like, the highest order of lesson that I walk away from that company.

[Podcast Interviewer]

And what an amazing lesson, too, just from a leader like that who's willing to drop the. The perception of the God complex of, like, well, everybody listen to me, because I have built this wonderful business that everybody knows, and we've changed the way that people get coffee, and we've introduced new coffee drinkers who thought they hated coffee their whole lives, and now they love it. And, like, he could have easily been one of those just egotistical type of people, but it also speaks to the fact that now Starbucks is on every corner and the opposite corner, you know, like, it still. It blows my mind, dude. Like, I'll go to. I'll go to a Starbucks that's right here, and then I'll, like, walk out walking down the street with my coffee, and in, like, a block down the street, there's another one that's also full of people, you know, and it probably speaks to that though, that, that he never, he never, you know, lost his way and, and, and stuck his head in the sand and pretended like he had already made it. He was always trying to innovate and learn new things and, and ultimately serve the customer. Which I assume has to have helped you now with going into your own venture. So tell me a little bit about the, the inception of Cumulus. Where did, were you still at Starbucks? Is this something that you were kind of incubating there along with Howard? Like what. Why split off and take this new risk on a brand new venture?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

So Cumulus? Well, I think to take a step back. In 2014, Starbucks introduced cold brew to the world at mass, right? There was of course, like a little bit more artisanal before that. But access for most was started when, you know, Starbucks started in 2014, 2015, they introduced Nitro cold brew. And you know, and what I found, you know, essentially what cold brew is different. Like, I think there's a lot of confusion in the market between a iced coffee and cold brew. Cold brew is, it starts way before the moment you drink it, meaning that you take the beans, you grind them up, you soak them in cold water for an extended period of time and the flavor comes out gently and softly. And that's why it's like easier on the stomach, it's more balanced, and it has like, it's just a whole different flavor than just like a hot extracted coffee. Very different behind it. And in 2014, when, you know, the company had launched it, this process that I just described to you is really manual and very prone to error. Like, you put in the ratios different, you let it rest for 16 hours, 18 hours, 20 hours. It tastes a little different each time. You know, there's so many different variables that can happen when you press a button on an espresso machine or you put in a basket of grinds into a bun to, you know, take out the hot coffee. It's very precise, it's very instant, and you have it right away. Cold done right is really complex, right? Nitro, you have all these tanks and wires and tubes and they're breaking. It's like just crazy. And what was interesting was that in a way, the challenges of being able to do this properly was requiring a company as great as Starbucks to kind of retrofit everything to accommodate for coal. And it wasn't necessarily an insight that I had at that time, but I just was operationally aware of all the challenges. Like, why can't we scale nitro quicker? Well, like, well, we gotta. We need three feet of counter space, and we need underneath space. We have to get those big metal cans delivered and all that, you know, the nitrogen gas and everything. And it's like. And they're always breaking, and it's like new, as you could imagine, you know, not an easy thing to do. And like I would say at the same time, what was happening to me, what was happening to culture, is that somewhere along this line, I switched from being a hot drinker to a cold drinker. I don't remember when it happened. I don't know how it happened, but all I know is that, you know, years later, I only drank cold when I started drinking hot. So, you know, it was just something that I gravitated more. And it wasn't just me. When I joined Starbucks, 35% of all drinks were coming out on ice. Today, it's almost 80%. You think about, like, that drastic inference. So, yeah, it's quite. It's quite fascinating how the world has changed to drinking, you know, ice lattes and cold brews and things like that.

[Podcast Interviewer]

So how long in R and D before you launched version one of the product?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Ooh, three and a half years. Four. No, what am I saying? Four and a half years. Four and a half years, yeah. R D. Wow.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Was there any point along that R D journey that you were like, maybe this isn't gonna work. Like, we've been working on this for quite some time now.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

You know, it. There wasn't this moment of maybe it wasn't gonna work, but it was more a journey in the R and D is that. Let me prove to myself that it can work. It was actually kind of like I was flipped on the head. It was like, what if it started off this? What if for. Yeah, actually, we.

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We.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

We started it. Not like, kind of like from an R and D perspective. We started it by, like, kind of like design. First we wanted something really beautiful, and then we were like, okay, now we came up with this idea of what we want. So, like, we sketched it out, and now we have to engineer something to actually do that, that we could scale, that could be food safe, that could be commercial, that, you know, won't cost a million dollars to make each machine, you know, so it was like. It was more like. It was like milestones. Can we do that now? How do we solve for that? How do we. That. So it was more a journey of like, let's get to the next step versus, like, this won't. And then once we got to a certain point, we're like, okay, this can work, right? So until that point, everything was kind of like developed in house and, you know, self funded. And it was at that point where I was like, okay, this can work. Now let's go out to the market. And the company went and raised a bunch of money to be able to really get to, from, you know, like, can I, you know, from a, from a concept to a product.

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[Podcast Interviewer]

did this derail any sort of career plans that you had? Like, what were you going to school for?

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

Well, truth is, even in the first few years of Lovesack, because this was like my side hustle in college. I was slinging cell phones, making money to pay my way through school. I became a waiter to actually make money because the little company just kind of took all my money. You know, you gotta fix the van, fix the shredder, buy more fabric. And as I was graduating university, I had job offers. I had, you know, I was taking interviews even as I was kind of building this factory to complete a large order that we got for LoveSac right at the end of college from a trade show we attended. And so you just kind of gotta go where it takes you. And I share all of that in the book. It's such a Saga, you know, LoveSac. The subtitle is Mistakes, Miracles and Lessons from the Lovesack Story. And I try to be really candid about, you know, all the mistakes I made because they were everywhere and the lessons I learned from that.

[Podcast Interviewer]

So you eventually just didn't take any of those jobs and kept pushing lovesac?

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

Yeah, there kind. There came that point where I was like, do I take this job that's full time, suit wearing, you know, real deal, or do I stick around this beanbag factory and complete this order? And anyway, I had to abandon that job route and go for it. And, you know, it would be years ultimately before I actually made a profit, made money. We just Kind of broke even for a long time, barely paid the bills. It was when we opened the first store three years later that it finally started to go. And so, you know, every kind of up and down and challenge and, you know, tough decision along the way.

[Podcast Interviewer]

What were the people in your life

[Travis (Podcast Host)]

saying at this point?

[Podcast Interviewer]

Was it a lot of, what are you doing, man? You have this job, do the job.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

You know, it was a mix. You know, at one point, I did choose to go the other way, and I told everyone, you know, hey, I gotta shut lovesack down. It's not making any money. This is right at the end of school. And everyone who had one was like, no way, man. You can't close a love sack. I love my lovesack, my neighbor. Like, everyone wants a love. What are you doing? And this is just local, right?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Yeah.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

So that's where we gave it one last try. Went to that trade show and got that big order. Meanwhile, you know, my mom would come downstairs, I was living in the basement, and she caught me cutting out fabric, and I was sitting on my butt with scissors in my hands cutting out 10 yards of vinyl. She knows, like, I'm graduating with a degree in business. I speak Mandarin Chinese. That's a whole other story. I'm an honor student. She's like. And she wasn't being judgmental. She just looked at me and said, is this what you want to do? As I'm sitting there on the floor with scissors in my hand, and I remember, you know, I thought about it for a second, and I just said, I don't know. I said, but I feel like I should keep going. And I would say to you, here I am, you know, 27 years in, we're doing hundreds of millions annually. It still feels the same way. Like, there's always, you know, tariffs. I paid more in tariffs last year than our net profits in the company, you know, that we didn't plan on.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Wow.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just painful. Like the meteorites that are hucked at you by the world in growing a business. So it's like you could. You could think you've made. Like, at what point do you make it? Like, I remember moments at, you know, $70,000, $7 million, $70,700,000,000, still feeling vulnerable, still feeling, you know, nervous and afraid, and in all the. All of the things that, you know, just different scales, and somehow I feel like I should keep going. And so we do that.

[Podcast Interviewer]

It seems. It seems to me that it is a journey worth taking or else you probably would have hung it up a while ago then.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

100% and in fact, for me. And look, this isn't advice for everyone because everyone's in a different situation, different timing, different, you know, industries, everything. But when more recently, like in the last number of years, when I made the decision to like, first, first, I know what my ambition is. Like, our ambition for lovesac is to build it into a Nike, to build it into a brand that's here for a hundred years. And we've got a lot of ways that we think we can do that. And I know that sounds ridiculous coming from a company that makes like two products, but we have a lot of love out there for this brand and for this company. We've done a lot of things well. And when I made the decision more recently to just like, I will go as long as it takes. Like, I'm not interested in retirement, I'm not interested in a big financial sellout. You know, we're already a public company. So when I made that mental decision, it then kind of like freed me to just like, okay, so a fourth year of tariffs and rough go for the home category post Covid. Well, I'll go five, I'll go six, I'll go seven. Who cares? You know, and I don't mean to sound flippant, it's just that it really frees you when, when you, you know, you take the time bound aspect off of it.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Yeah.

[Podcast Interviewer]

When there's, there's ironically freedom in commitment. It's like commitment seems like shackles, but ultimately it also is the thing that basically it takes options off the table. You know, if you're just like, I'm fully committed to doing this thing for an extended period of time, regardless of what comes, then it doesn't matter when an obstacle comes in your way. It's. It's just, okay, well, what do we do about this? It's not. Maybe we should hang it up. Maybe we, maybe I should quit. Maybe I should retire, maybe I should sell. Maybe we should take it private again. Like, it's just like we're gonna keep sailing this ship regardless of which storms come across the waters, you know?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

Yeah.

[Podcast Interviewer]

What, what, what were some of the, the, I guess, failures or, or big obstacles that you felt that you felt were turning points for you in the business where you decided to double down and just say, we're, we're, we're keeping this going, even though a lot of people might have been like, nah, I

[Travis (Podcast Host)]

think I'll just sell this thing.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

I mean, so many I mean, the most dramatic, of course, look, I. We had to take. Well, we raised private equity very early. Sorry, venture capital. We raised venture capital very early. And this was in the early days of consumer focused venture capital investments. Like it wasn't always a thing. It was in tech, but not in consumer. And so in the early 2000s, we took money and their first move was to look at our menagerie of 40 stores at the time, spread out across the western United States, mostly franchises, and say, look, we think we need to start over. You know, you guys made a lot of good decisions and bad decisions as 20 somethings. Let's bankrupt the company, take it through chapter 11, hopefully survive that and emerge with just a dozen stores and start over. That's, you know, terrifying. Not something that I would have chosen myself. There's different ways we could have operated, but that was kind of thrust upon us and humiliating. You know, go through that at the same time. You know, over time it did work out. We were able to reorganize the company and start over and kind of rebuild it. So, you know, we've made every mistake in the book. I've tried to be really transparent about that in the book. And it's. But it's from those mistakes that you really learn. Like, you, like you really want to see how contracts work out. You know, all these clauses that we skip over or read or whatever, you know, take your company through a complete reorganization. Every contract, every lease, every invoice, every debtor, it all comes to bear and you get to see it play out. So now my knowledge as to what those things actually mean, how these things actually stack up, what the risk actually is, is far greater than had. I never lived through something like that as an example. Right. So there are. That's one of the coolest things about business. There's a thousand lessons, there's 10,000 lessons to learn. And I don't know that you could have so many opportunities to learn, grow. And it's dynamic. Like it's very different today in 2026 than it was in 2006.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

When we lived through that. And so you're just constantly. It's like, learn or die, evolve or die, adapt or die. The competition will eat you. It's like living in the land of dinosaurs. Everything's out to kind of kill you, whether it's the federal government, things you don't predict, like tariffs and whatnot, or whether it's competition. So you have. It's just a cool medium.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Yeah.

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[Podcast Interviewer]

So those first few companies, was this all in the pest control space before you started active?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah, so I had four companies that I did in pest control and then I actually had a fifth too that I did in solar.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Oh really?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah.

[Podcast Interviewer]

No way.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

How'd you like that? We, we got in a little bit late to be honest. So we, we grew up for about three plus years. We got up to about 80 million in revenue and then Trump did the big beautiful bill, just, you know, ripped all that out and then, you know, interest rates had gone up, you know, previous year and a half and just immediately 80 million.

[Podcast Interviewer]

David. Yeah, what, what a failure.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

We, we, we sold, we sold that one for about 37, $38 million and we were really happy just to be down with it.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah. What year did you get into Solar?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Probably 20, 22, 2023 somewhere there.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, that's again one of my, well, I, I, I use the word regret lightly because I just don't fully believe in regretting things that much because there's not much you can do about it. But when I started knocking for Solar, it was 2011, 2012 I think.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Wow.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah, it's early but I was so commission minded, I was just, I was just a sales guy, you know, I did not think about it at all from the potential opportunity of being an entrepreneur and I didn't know how much money I on the table by moving into a different field at that time because the commissions were so tight at that time. Like the deal cycle was like six weeks and then you get paid half on contract, you get paid half on install and then, oh, there's a problem with permitting, that's going to kick back the timeline and then permit falls through, customer changes their mind, somebody else snipes the deal and now I get a charge back on the first half of my commission and I'm only getting paid like 1100 bucks for this deal anyway, not realizing that, like, the total contract value that the company was making was like 8, $500 and they were paying me 1100 bucks of it, you know what I mean? So I wish, I wish I would have thought a little bit more entrepreneurially at that time and just started my own solar company and worked out my own, you know, distribution deal. But, yeah, it is what it is. You live and learn, but pest control has been pretty good to you. What was the difference? Was there a difference in mindset when you started Aptiv versus when you started these other companies that, that. That had you, like, have a different vision in mind, this goal that obviously, I mean, you can't go anywhere without seeing active trucks, man, they're all over the place. And you guys, obviously, you know, third largest residential pest control company in all of North America is nothing to bat an eye about. So was there, was there a difference in vision, a difference in culture?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

What.

[Podcast Interviewer]

What do you, what do you attribute the. The massive difference in sales revenue to?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah, the secret was that I would build companies and about every four years I would sell them to Terminix, was that company that ultimately bought them from us.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Okay.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

And so hire for all of them? Well, for the first three, and then the fourth one, we ended up selling in private equity.

[Travis (Podcast Host)]

Wow.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

But Terminix, what they like to do is they just like to buy a booking business. So it would be. We call that an asset deal. So we would just sell off. We go to them. So we have, you know, our customers and we have the technicians that are servicing these customers, and we will sell you this, but we're not going to sell you the growth engine, which is, you know, the salesforce. Yeah, the executive team, you know, a key operator in each location. We're going to keep the golden goose. But if you guys want to buy this, you can buy it from us for a certain price. And what's nice about that is the larger companies like Terminix and Orchid, they grow by probably at 50% to 2/3 of their growth is M and A. And so they need to buy customers to keep growing. They kind of maxed out their marketing and everything else across the country, and so we were able to sell to them. And then I wanted to take all that money and throw it into the next company. We just literally put a different logo on it, same training manuals, same, you know, people.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Sales team.

[American Express Business Platinum Announcer]

Yeah.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

You basically swapped out the polo.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

And so although it's, you know, we were in business for eight years or whatever. With Aptif really it was like a almost 20 year play where, you know, same organization, same people growing it. But yeah, and it's funny too because you look back and you think, gosh, Terminx, like why did you do that?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Right?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

You just built the third biggest, best mutual company. You're one of your biggest competitors. But I think a lot of public companies, they do things, you know, for the short term, you know, hit certain quarterly needs, you know, to satisfy the markets. And it's just funny, it's not a long term strategy. Yeah, but they want a good, they

[Podcast Interviewer]

want a good story to tell their shareholders in their next meeting basically.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Exactly.

[Sean Nelson (Founder of LoveSac)]

Yeah.

[Podcast Interviewer]

But I mean good on you for like taking advantage of that and see, you know, because I, I think, I think some people are so busy playing their game of business that they don't realize that there are other games that other people are playing. And especially when you get up into these upper echelons of business where these billion dollar companies and multi billion dollar private equity funds, their goals are so wildly different and they take and they can make moves that are, are on a surface level seem ridiculous where it's like, why would you pay me this money to do this? That doesn't make any sense. And they just, so they just assume that it's something that's never going to be done rather than going like, well, I wonder how we could be a part of that to some degree. I wonder, I wonder how that could potentially work for us. So, so there, it wasn't necessarily like a change in any, you know, direction or anything like this one you just held on to for a longer period of time. Which evaluation higher.

[Ollie Wellness Announcer]

Yeah.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

And we didn't need as much money at that point. So the first One, I have NDAs, but Forbes said I sold the first one for 13 million, next one for 30 million, one after that for 135 million. And so we just had more and more money. It was really the growth engine. The first year I almost bankrupt the company because we're growing too fast and I didn't have the cash flow right. You're paying out a certain amount of money, a bigger commission than you're actually making upfront because you're paying it on the course of the year. But you know, the customer might stick with it for say five years. And so there's a little bit of a cash flow issue there. And I didn't have enough saved up so I realized, you know, you could be killing it and dying at the same time. And so I thought, okay, well we better start saving up cash. And how can I get access to cash? I thought, well, if we sell, yeah, we gotta change the company name.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

But if we can keep all the

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

key, you know, if we keep the growth engine, great. But, you know, we learned things. Every time we sold then we had a lot more money to invest into the company. So, like, by the time we got to our third company, you know, we, I started studying Google and Meta and looking at all these different company headquarters, Zappos and thinking, okay, what are all the cool things we could bring back? So we, you know, put an NCAA basketball court and, you know, golf simulator and movie room, ping pong, foosball, all that kind of stuff. We had like headquarters and people walked in, they thought it was like a tech company, you know, and it was more just. I think it's really great. It helps you stand out, it gets people in the door. It's not necessarily the, the meat or the protein, you know, the. Sure, it's more like perks. Perks are sugar for the most part. But the thing that was really great about the company is our sales engine, the sales program, our sales reps. If somebody came and sold for us, they sold 70% more than the previous pest control company that they'd worked at. And so it was, it was really like, hey, we really have the data and the proof. Like, we're very transparent about what our numbers are. And yeah, we're always trying new things. We did like really crazy company retreats. We started out going to Hawaii. You were doing skydiving and diving down with sharks and cliff jumping and all this stuff. Yeah, because you get a lot of college kids. Sure. It was just, just sort of fun. It's really about creating a fun culture and memories and then celebrating our success.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Was your marketing and sales channel always and exclusively door to door and sales reps or did you play with other things like D2C or ads or Google or some of these other platforms?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah, we experiment with everything from direct mail to, you know, just referrals to clover leaving where technicians would leave, you know, flyers in the doors of the nearest four people to a customer. But digital marketing was like our, our key door to door. Yeah. About 20% of our sales were through digital and, and that's growing every year, getting bigger.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Is that digital, Google Meta or something else I'm not thinking about?

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Google Meta. Yeah.

[Podcast Interviewer]

When you, when you. So from a, from a organizational perspective, when you're getting these leads in the door, are there, are there different sales reps that are Assigned to take leads versus door to door crews who are going out and generating business. Is it like how do you sew?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah, it's totally separate. We had like an inside sales group and that was totally different from our door to door program. Got it.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Okay. But the majority of revenue is from

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

door to door crews.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

Yeah, it was initially, it was like pretty much all of it. And then little by little, we've just gotten better. Better at diversifying that portfolio.

[Podcast Interviewer]

David, didn't anybody tell you that door to door is dead?

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

You know, it is.

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

It's very old school.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

You know what's, what's funny is that the original founder of Orkin started out door to door. And so pest control originally started. You go back a hundred years ago, that's how they originally marketed it. And then it's just. It kind of went away for a long time. By the time I got into it, there's very. There's only like maybe three companies that were really doing it, but they. And they've been around for maybe 10 years or so doing the door to door thing. But maybe there's 500 people total in the end in the door to door side of it. And today there's tens of thousands of

[Mesh Gelman (Founder of Cumulus)]

people doing door to door.

[Podcast Interviewer]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Royce (Entrepreneur in Pest Control and Solar)]

So I was lucky in the sense that that side of pest control was still early on and I didn't invent it, but I was able to really develop it into really great training and, you know, systematize it.

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