 The challenges you face in chasing your dreams are the ones that will carry you through the rest of your years. 85% of us work at jobs we hate, but there are daring individuals who break the mold to shape their own careers. I haven't really ever been driven by money. Ultimately for me it's about happiness. Sharing our passion is really important. I think that if you have the ability to make it a career then why not? You know where you want to go? You have to think of some of the details along the way but not get overwhelmed by them. Go forth follows the lives of three inspiring entrepreneurs that dare to live life differently and prove that you can turn your passion into a business inspired by adventure. This season will join their journey as they each attempt to accomplish a major business goal and a personal athletic challenge. Anything that goes wrong, it doesn't matter who's fault it is, it's on me. Along the adventure we'll learn from go forth expert Tony Hawk. What gives these entrepreneurs the edge to push their businesses forward and rethink the way we think about work? No one wants to repeat the same thing every single day for the rest of their life. Even if it's not the most financially stable or successful thing that you can do, you live in the dream because you love your work. Lizzie founded She Moves Mountains, a rock climbing guide service run by women for women. She's on a mission to change the face of the outdoor industry from the ground up. The mission of She Moves Mountains is to confront the lack of female presence in the guiding world and to provide opportunities for women to learn from women. If you're creating a brand just to make money that is a disservice because if you really have a passion you can also make that a purpose. There are a lot of misconceptions about what a climber looks like. Being strong and tough and almost manly to succeed in this sport. And we started She Moves Mountains to create opportunities for women to learn from women that you don't have to conform to what has been to participate in the outdoors. Lizzie, she wants to empower women and be more inclusive and break barriers. That's the perfect example. My goals this year are to essentially double our revenue and that looks like doing two times the amount of retreats that we did the year before and raising prices about 15%. I've had to invest a lot more up front. We had to book the house we want to stay in, which cost me thousands of dollars. We have to book this huge retreat center that we're going to use for our opening weekend. I booked out the Tower Theater and completed a lot of money to a lot of guides to admit their time to me. I am responsible for paying my side of things regardless of how many people sign up. It's really risky for me, but the rewards of it, if it actually works, are incredibly high. It's kind of like gambling in some ways. At the finish line, out of nowhere, a gentleman starts running down the chute. Nobody had any idea who this guy was, wearing number 87, which is a race number that was given After the actual event has started, Jesse Thomas out of Stanford. Jesse is one of the world's premier triathletes. When he's not training or winning Iron Man, he's hustling to grow his startup energy food brand, Picky Bars, in Bend, Oregon. When I started my professional triathlon career, I had a whole bunch of stomach problems. My stomach problems were the result of me eating a whole bunch of processed food in and around my exercise. Picky Bars creates food products for athletes, including energy bars, oatmeal, and granola. So balance for performance made with real food ingredients, so the best of like a power bar and the best of a Lara bar. And we sell them primarily through our website and through a subscription service called the Picky Club. If you're just in the market making products that are similar to other products, how are you going to be unique? Well, just like Jesse with Picky Bars, he had a niche because it's something that he wanted. When I started Birdhouse, the skate industry was all full of a lot of infighting, and everyone was grappling for a very small market. I didn't want to be part of that war. I just wanted to stand out because we had good products and good skaters. And that is what I chose to focus on. And as simple as that seems, that was our niche. You got to be recognizable above the noise. So we've got a few big goals for 2020. We're going to look at taking on investment for the first time ever. We've done it all ourselves, and this would be a huge decision for us to make. Second would be we're launching a brand new product that's completely different than any of the products that we have right now. And we'll be launching it in a different way than we've ever done. There may or may not be seven other things that pop up at the same time. Matthias Giraud is a professional skier and base jumper. He has turned his passion into a persona called Super Franchi and puts out some of the wildest adventure content for brands all over the world. Ski base jumping is really the most drastic evolution you could have as a skier. And all of a sudden you can look at mounts completely differently and turn them into an actual playground. I don't know what the meaning to my existence is. It's just being a mountain guy and ski base jumping is literally the most hardcore materialization of that. If you can find something you absolutely love doing and is your meaning for a living and you can turn that into a business, that's it. That's the top of the dreams right there. It was so crazy! I'm super excited. I'm definitely on a high right now, you know, watching the U.S. premiere of my movie. But you don't want the high to last too long. You kind of want to get your head in the game again. I got some big, ambitious goals coming up. When you're a professional ski base jumper, you're the CEO, the CFO and the product all at once. Right now I'm about to have a conference call with the curators of Tedx Berkeley. I'm at a very crucial point right now in my career that I'm established. But I'm also in the process of looking to diversify a little more and solidify the speaking side of things and that will eventually over time lead towards more consulting. First of all, I enjoy it. It's very rewarding, but it's also a way to diversify my economy. Well, no matter how far you get or how successful you are, it's always good to think about other avenues of incomes because you never know what's going to happen. I mean, especially in our world, you can get hurt and it's over the next day. I'm trying to chisel away at the cliche of the adrenaline junkie kind of thing, you know? It's really cool because it feels like my craft is perceived in a positive way and I feel like it could be empowering and helping people. I think it'd be great to, you know, just go through the whole talk. When I got that email, I was like, oh God, here we go. I have to give the biggest speech of my life at Tedx Berkeley. I definitely want to solidify the speaking side of my business. But all my speaking engagements have been from, you know, a crowd of 10 company executives to 350 people and speaking in front of a crowd of 2,000 people is incredibly nerve-wracking. I think especially when you're an outdoor entrepreneur, it's incredibly important to keep a balance between your work life and the sport that you do because for me, the reason I got into any of this was because of my love for rock climbing. If you're not participating in the thing that you were passionate about in the first place, you'll lose yourself and you'll lose your focus. So what are we training for? I'm going to try Moonlight Butchers in Zion. Moonlight Butchers is a huge climb in Zion National Park. There's no single pitch that is graded harder than something that I've done but it is going to ask me to do the hardest thing I've ever done six times in a row. Lizzie has reached out to her friend and rock climbing coach Brady for help. Moonlight Butchers is a very difficult route especially when you're talking about the endurance it takes. No one at average level of climbing could do that. Two. Can you get one more? All right. Two. Sweet. We got a lot to work with there. I need to be stronger. I'm not physically fit enough right now to go climb 512 like one after another. I'm just not physically fit enough. I feel that the assessment kind of went how I thought it would. So I'm excited to have identified like these things and to get better in those areas. I can't make you stronger. I'll give you the workouts. If you follow them and give 100% you will get stronger. My broken foot allowed me to bike. I thought, you know what? Maybe this was a sign. Maybe I'm supposed to turn into a cyclist. Maybe cycling is better for me. I rode my bike 15 to 30 hours a week. I was climbing the ranks fast. I thought I might be in the Tour de France. Just a day before a massive race. I was riding through a parking lot with a buddy of mine. Went over the handlebars and landed on my head and broke my neck in five places. I took my broken neck and my broken body to my first startup. This was the first time in my life where I was forced to think of myself as not an athlete. I literally could not be an athlete. I couldn't move. I could barely do anything. Started a company. We raised $3 million. I spent 70 to 100 hours a week in an office for three and a half years with four of my buddies. Thinking this was going to be our big break. We got within a week of a major acquisition, but we had this little bug in our prototype that set things back and never happened. Fail. Good morning. How's it going? Good. I've broken 17 bones over the course of my life. I had a sciatic injury. I had shoulder injuries, knee injuries, and other foot injuries that were not broken bones. I'm super familiar with being injured and working through it, but this time period feels just a little bit worse and that it's really keeping me from doing stuff that I'm trying to do. The deterioration in the cartilage, the chondrophysia, isn't anything that you can reverse. You can only move forward. I want you to be able to have your activity life as much as you can, but ending activity, you shouldn't be feeling like swelling or discomfort for days after. But what I'm thinking is, the more you get this, the better this is naturally going to feel anyways. Okay. Athletically, my goal is to kind of transition from my world class professional Iron Man career to doing some really fun, challenging adventure racing. And one race that I've had on my bucket list for a couple years is this Mount Taylor Quadrathlon in New Mexico, and I'm really excited to try to take crack at that one. Go right back in for 10 in a row on both sides. Okay? If you have a big goal in business or athletics, be ready to put in the hours. If you're ready to work for it and train for it, I always tell people, if you're going to try something, if you're going to get into business, or you're going to try a new sport or new activity, learn all aspects of it. Ski-based jumping is the combination of skiing and ice jumping. So you put a parachute on your back, you click on your skis, you ride down the full mountain, and at the end there's five or six hundred foot cliff. You just jump off, fly through the air, open your parachute, and then softly on the snow, all James Bond style. After Teddick's Berkeley, I got to go to the Alps. This is going to get all the images that are worth for the exposure for the rest of the year. That's yeah, when they're for two weeks, get a four million views in two weeks, finish the movie. It's kind of like these two or three-week time period where I'm putting it all on the line and that's what's going to determine my offices. It's officially launched day at Picky Bars, and Jesse and his team are making the big announcement with a nut butter called Picky Drizzle. You know, like everybody says, you have one chance to make a first impression. Valentine's Day is a great day to launch this, so we're just going to go over the top with the copy and the imagery. We created a whole bunch of innuendo and puns around, like, a luxurious mouth party, food's favorite spoon buddy, stuff like that. But we do have a clip that I hope we never use that's just pouring it straight into my mouth. It's a different type of product than anything we've had before, and we're launching it in a really different way with the making it available just as a one-time purchase to the subscriber group. The cool thing about our distribution strategy, like the direct-to-consumer with the subscription, is if it fails, we haven't bought, you know, 100,000 units to fill into distribution. We haven't paid brokers to go. When you're the sole owner of your business and you're funding it with your own cash, and you have a massive $300,000 hit, it doesn't get any worse than that. We were brought on by Trader Joe's nationally in 2016, placed a massive P.O. that, like, doubled our sales, and then they placed another massive P.O., and then, like, three months later, they just turned us off. Had bills to pay, I had over-hired people, and it was basically, like, this massive wave that almost took us out. We had to front that bill between bank loans that are personally tied to our homes, and then basically all the cash that we had to put into the business to keep it going. What investment could mean for us is diversifying some of that financial risk, and then also hopefully scale the business quite a bit faster. I would feel a lot of personal fulfillment from growing picky bars to $10 to $15 million e-commerce company that then is also in a position where our house isn't on the line anymore. That would be a massive success for me. Wait, are we going to launch it right now? Just did. All right, there we go. We just made Picky Drizzle available on the Picky Bars website, so it's officially out in the world. We just let about 60,000 people know. I think I'd be pretty psyched with about a thousand sold over the first four to six weeks, so we'll see how it goes. Matias and Lizzie are just arriving at Outdoor Retailer in Denver, Colorado, one of the outdoor industry's leading trade shows. This is where athletes meet with sponsors, retailers meet with brands, see the product for next year, the media is there, it's like a big mayhem. The bus is coming! Lizzie is here to find funding for her mentorship program that promotes women's leadership in rock climbing. And Matias is here to land a new sponsor to help fund his future ski based missions. This is a really crucial time, in the last 18 months I lost two major sponsors. So I'm going to meet with Sweet Protection, I've been using their products, I love it, and I'm trying to set up an official relationship with them. How are you? Good to see you. What's up? You don't have to be an elite athlete to secure sponsorships. It's more about your good at storytelling and that you can convey the story of your brand to people. It's like Matias, yes he is an elite athlete but that is not necessarily what is most interesting about him. It's that he's really good at storytelling and that he can convey these messages to a broader audience. I'm mixing alpinism with deep skiing and base jumping all at once. You guys want to make the best protective gear super light and I want to work with you guys. Exactly. The product fits exactly what I want to do. Most importantly we we're on par as far as personalities and how we work, how we do business. It's not guaranteed but I have a really good feeling about it so it's cool. Upto Retailer is one of the most chaotic and wild environments I have ever been in. You got it? It's number booth 44005 4400 this way. I also just realized that I've never actually pitched in person and if I fail I don't just let myself down, I'm letting a bunch of people down. It is insanely intimidating to go up to a company and tell them why I deserve their support. I almost cry before every pitch because I just I think I really have a hard time believing that something that I could create is worth other people's attention and money. I love my company and I love working with the North Face so I'd love to share about that with you. Well it takes a lot of guts to pitch your ideas and it takes a lot of confidence. If you can present an idea or a product and you are convincing that it's going to work, that's when they take note. Coming up on Go Forth, Lizzy finds out if the North Face will fund her mentorship program and sets out to take on the moonlight buttress. Matias tries to leave OR with a sweet new sponsor and steps on stage at TEDx Berkeley. And Jesse faces some big challenges training for the Mount Taylor Quad.