 Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Wall. Well, welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast outlet for SiliconANGLE TV, where we extract the signal from the noise. Here in San Jose, live, along with Jeff Frick, my colleague here, I'm John Walls and we are at QuickBooks Connect 2016. We need a cup of coffee, not just any cup of coffee, you need a serious cup of coffee, and that's what Deathwish Coffee is all about. We've got Mike Brown with us, who's the owner of Deathwish Coffee. Mike, glad to have you with us here. And Andrew Berg, who's the managing partner of Berg Partners, an accounting firm, and why the two of you are together we'll get to in just a moment. First though, let's tell the Deathwish Coffee story. You were the winner of the small business big game competition here last year that QuickBooks put on, and because you were the winner of that, you received a Super Bowl commercial for Deathwish Coffee. So pick it up from there. You went through this long criteria, you checked all the boxes, they announced that Deathwish Coffee is the winner of a Super Bowl ad. How'd you feel? I cried, it was a dream come true, it was something that I couldn't even imagine happening, and then it just all hit me out at once, and it was something that my team and I, we worked really hard for during the whole competition. Actually, last year, one year ago, I think today they announced the top three businesses on stage here at QuickBooks Connect, and just making the top three was such an honor, because America came and they voted for who they wanted to represent small business in the Super Bowl. So how big of an operation were you at the time, and where are you? So at that time, we had 11 employees, and since then, in just a year, we've hired six more, and we're looking to hire another three more before the end of the year, so from the just personnel standpoint, we've pretty much doubled in size. And how much coffee were you selling before? A lot. A lot. So you did, I mean, but here you are, you're an 11 employee company in upstate New York, we're Saratoga Springs. And a Super Bowl ad, come on, Mike. We're 11 people. It doesn't happen. It's a lot of orders coming in all of a sudden. It is a lot of orders. February 4th or whatever the day was afterwards. Yeah, I believe we had about almost a quarter million dollars in sales that day. I shouldn't even say that day, that evening, because the Super Bowl didn't go off until, I think, kind of, east coast time, so, yeah. At what point of the game did you're at it? The third quarter. Third quarter? Right. All right, so all of a sudden, now you're front page news, and you're getting all these orders in. You guys freak out at all, or how well-prepared were you to handle the onslaught? Yeah, we were actually very well-prepared. We found out that we won about a month before, about a month, I'm sorry, about two months before the actual Super Bowl, so we couldn't tell anyone. It was kind of all under wraps. We had to, if we had to tell, like when we talked to our suppliers, we had to have them sign NDAs, so they didn't like spill the beans to everyone. So does he. But, yeah, we mapped out the worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, probable scenarios for every part of my business that I thought would be affected, and I set different people on my team to take control of those tasks. So we had to plan A, plan B, plan C. Luckily, it went off real smooth, smoother than we could ever expected. So you won, and then this guy walks up to you on the stage. He says, hi, I'm Andrew Burke, and I'm at a camp. And you won. So Andrew, you take it up from there. What prompted you to go up to say hi to Mike and introduce yourself and start the conversation? We didn't know we wanted Super Bowl commercial. We were here for QuickBooks Connect. I was here to get some education and learn more about what's going on in the accounting and small business world. We were watching the event where it was narrowed down to the top three, and I was with my partner, and we both looked and said, wow, that has got to be the brand that's got to win. It seems to be such a natural fit for a Super Bowl commercial to go big time. People love coffee. And so we're just always open and friendly type people. We just went up to him at the concert that was being provided by QuickBooks, by Intuit, across the street, and just said, hi, why was having a beer? And I asked a couple of key questions, and I think it was clear that he was overwhelmed, and he kind of knew, wow, something big's about to happen. And it was clear to us pretty early on that he was being underserved. So he said, you know, why don't we get on a video call next week? He said, but by the way, you got to sign this NDA before you're on a video call. I'm like, sign this NDA for what? And then that's what he kind of told me after I signed it, of course, what was going on. And I kind of went back to my team and said, oh my God, this is go time for us too, because he needs to be ready to be able to manage his business for what's about to occur. And it was our job to take away a lot of responsibilities off his plate and kind of leave his brain fresh to take care of what he needed to do. This was going to be a huge change for his business. So it was pretty amazing. I never would have expected it to be as amazing a trip as it's been so far for the last 12 months. So we talk about Super Bowl ads all the time, talking about cloud-based computing and Amazon and you know, spin up a bunch of servers because you're going to run a Super Bowl ad, et cetera. Usually for big companies, like a Pepsi commercial or promo or Coca-Cola, what were some of the things that you put in place in anticipation of this event? Thinking proactively. And then what kind of turned out as expected? And then what turned out in the way that you had no idea? There must have been a couple of things that just like, whoa, we didn't see that one coming. So as far as the website goes, we run on the Shopify network. So we called up Shopify and we're like, listen guys, we can't have any hiccups here. Stand up some servers. Yeah, get these servers going. They actually put together a 12 person team on their end to watch our website as it went off. And it went off without a hitch. It was actually really smooth. They told me they put me on the Kanye plan. And I'm like, what's the Kanye plan? And they're like, oh, Kanye released his last album on our servers and it went off fine. Millions of people. So it was like, all right, I felt a little better about that since it was on the Kanye plan. So yeah, that went well. We had to reach out to third party help for our production. That went kind of smooth. It could have went better. I think the only hiccup, we had one vendor who underperformed and couldn't do what they said they were going to do. So you preload a bunch of inventory? Did you obviously stock up significantly before? Stocked up. We had to hire some customer service reps. We do all of our customer service in-house. So we had to get them ready. We actually brought in some new technology to help with the customer service requests and do some auto replies. Just stuff to handle the extra traffic. We rearranged our website and made it very, very easy for our customers to purchase. It was basically, they got to our website, they could just do a one click, one click buy. They didn't have to search around for the product. And we thought, you know, there was a lot of brainstorming, a lot of team meetings. And I think we handled it well. There was no problems that were above and beyond what we could handle. And how much was Intuit and QuickBooks involved in that process, you know, beyond just giving you the commercial? I mean, they've been great. They've been so supportive throughout the entire process. I've actually been out to into its headquarters a handful of times since the commercial went off. They work with Andrew a lot. Andrew's actually on their accountant's counsel. Accountant's counsel. So if I have any problems, I can go to Andrew and Andrew can go directly to them and put it in accounting terms for them, you know? So they understand. So then what did you do? What was your kind of bunker up? Get ready. You never know what you're going to get involved with when you get a new client. So sometimes the client doesn't know exactly what they need and don't need. So asking the question is doesn't really get to the answers. Look at what I said. Especially it's a Super Bowl ad, right? I said send me your books and I looked at it and it was clear it was completely underserved. I mean, Mike had no access to his own bookkeeping at all. It was being held on his bookkeeper's server and he wasn't allowed to look at it and they would send reports and the reports didn't have any meaning. And I said to Mike, look, we need to make changes immediately. So in December, we immediately moved to QuickBooks Online. So we had visibility of his bookkeeping, started to restructure it so that the records made sense and then we started to remove some administrative responsibilities that Mike was taking once so he could focus on other things. So we went to bill.com immediately, had him go to hire a new person in his office who was going to handle the administration of paperwork, getting where it needed to, take that bill, paying responsibility off of Mike despite the fact that Mike still wanted to have control over authorization so he does have that. That was really very, very early on probably within the first 30 to 60 days we installed all of that knowing we needed to be ready. Mike also, we failed to mention that we talked that you were working with a third party facilitator too who had to be brought up to speed so he third party facilitator had to be notified to provide more rack space and by the way, there's all these orders going to be coming in. So there was a lot that went into it and you should probably mention real quickly what happened with the week before when the commercial was first announced and you were on TV in the morning. We kind of got a preview of what was going to happen because a week before the Super Bowl the commercial actually went out. Yeah, the commercial aired on CBS this morning with Gal King, I believe her name is. And it aired in the morning and it was just from that publicity in the morning we saw a giant spike in sales. So it was kind of like a, I guess a warm up. Shot over the bow, if you will, in the commercial. Curious, this really is not relevant to the discussion but what kind of traffic do you get from a Super Bowl ad? Like website traffic, what kind of numbers you got? Yeah, so I mean I was watching it. I was in my palm of my hand on my cell phone. I'm watching the traffic go up and within the first 10 minutes we had over 150,000 people on our site at one time and it stayed up. I assume that's a bit of an increase from what you usually have. Yeah, usually we'll have. I mean on our email release day where we send out a newsletter we can get up to 1,000 at one time about 150,000, that's almost unheard of. You know, Andrew, some of the things you're talking about here, I mean I know a Super Bowl ad was the motivation here, right, that's what drove it. But I get the feeling that just in general when it comes to accounting some of this hygiene you're talking about should be standard practice. That you should have full transparency. You should have full access. You should have this and that and the other. And there are probably a lot of small businesses that don't know what they're missing or what they don't have because they don't know what they don't know. Absolutely, you know, one of the reasons I've structured my practice the way it is is because I want to help small businesses focus their attention on what they do best. Why did they open that business? They opened the business to do whatever they love to do. They didn't open it so that they can learn bookkeeping. They didn't do it so they can start doing bill pay. They didn't do it because they want to deal with HR issues. So I looked at it and said, you know, I want to design a firm that takes those responsibilities easily away from the business owner so he can go ahead and grow his business. The fact that he had a Super Bowl commercial was going to be a catalyst to be able to kind of proof of concept for us and we've been doing this for a lot of years and it's really a passion of mine to say we really want small businesses to succeed and that's why I think I fit in really well with Intuit's concept and Quick Book's concept of what's going on here at this conference because we are all on board with trying to alleviate the fears that all small business owners seem to have and help them focus their attention on why they went into business and help them be successful. So just a quick tidbit story. So Mike was in San Francisco when the whole Super Bowl thing was going down with Intuit and I actually was lucky enough to be at the Super Bowl in Intuit's box watching at the same time. It's a pretty nice perk by the way. It was unrelated, completely unrelated, believe it or not. It was a completely unrelated reason to be there but I was there and I had my phone and I'm kind of looking at what Mike's looking. I'm texting him like, oh my God, you see what's going on and everybody in the box is cheering and like, oh my God, oh my God. And it was just an unbelievable night. I just, as Mike said, the numbers were astronomical and it was hard to sleep that night. Now that night's gone. We're still only a few miles from Levi's Stadium. Hopefully you went by and touched your wall again. It was a great night. So where are you now? Kind of what was the bump that you got? Obviously you got a huge bump but you hope that the dip is a little higher than the new baseline. So how has it really kind of changed your business? And as you look forward now and also now with the pro behind you, how are you transforming your business? What's next for Death Wish Coffee? Yeah, I mean, of course, with the books, it's totally transformed. Now I have, working with Andrew, I have a clear picture of where my business was a year ago and where it is now and all the months in between, I have like a story, a pattern, I have a budget that I follow. So my books are solid, which is great. It feels good. I can forecast what's going to happen in a couple months and make decisions based on all these numbers I have in front of me. In terms of growth from the Super Bowl, the big challenge coming out of it was, yeah, this customer retention. We didn't want people to try our product once and be done with it. So we worked on some marketing techniques where we can get more repeat customers. We have subscription service we offer. We ask people to join our mailing list, so we're able to capture a lot of those customers' information and with their permission, we've remarketed them monthly. That's been very powerful. But after the peak, yeah, we peaked and we leveled off at a really decent number. Our revenue has quadrupled this year. Quadrupled, nice. Quadrupled in one year. It's been a good year. It's been a good year. So if we can keep that going, which I think we do, fourth quarter is usually our strongest quarter. We do about 40% of our revenue this quarter. So we're watching numbers closely. We have a lot of, I have new staff that have brought on to help me with the demand. We're moving into a new facility. We purchased new equipment so we can start pulling back from our third-party producers that have been helping us out. So we heard from Andrew about, he thought you were being underserved and some things that he could change. If you were looking into the camera here and talking to a small business owner at home who's not here at the show, and you give them some advice in terms of the relationship you want with your accountant, what they should be looking for, and maybe some things they're not seeing, what would that be? I'd say, when we talk, raise the camera here. Yeah, sure. Right ahead of you, what? Small business owners at home. If you're only talking to your accountant at tax time or when you have a problem, that's a problem. You should be talking to your accountant on regular time intervals. I talk with Andrew once a week. We have a video call. If your accountant's not up with technology and what's going to make your job easier, maybe you should have a talk with them about that, what tools are out there that they can use. And get those budgets together. I'm a forecast with you. You could probably chime in too, Andrew. Yeah, I'll tell you what. It's not just about what I do. It's about the owner being willing to listen as well. Mike has been so great at saying, kind of tell me what we can do to be more efficient. And I say, I have this great idea and he's like, all right, let's test it and see what how it works out. And we've been able to install new technologies. One of the things that I had mentioned to Mike way early on when I first went up there, so we drove, I'm outside Philadelphia, and they're outside of Albany, New York, so that's a five hour, six hour drive. We drove up there and the first day I met up there with him, I kind of drew out a flow chart on a loose leaf piece of paper and said, this is what I think's going on in your business. Let's sit down and talk and tell me whether I'm right or wrong. Here's where our goods come in, raw materials, here's how it's manufactured, here's how you get paid. And we literally tried to use that to install a system, not only for him to use from a production perspective, but I can use to kind of develop the books. And one of the things early on we talked about was margins. And we said, Mike, how much does it cost to make a pound of coffee? He knows how much he sells it for, but I said, how much does it cost? You know, it's easy to know the cost when you pay a third party producer because they send an invoice. But what does it cost if you do it inside? That's hard. And small business owners don't normally spend the time because it's so hard to calculate those hours and those minutes that a person spends to produce something and all those materials. So we actually spent the time and realized, wow, there's a huge savings here. So Mike, over the last pretty much 12 months, maybe eight months, has said, we got to start to think about moving to a new facility, bringing production. And because that number is such a huge number in pennies per bag, but multiplied by lots of bags is a lot of money, you can say. Well, I would say if there's one more piece of advice that I could throw in, sit down with your accountant over a cup of coffee. That would be death wish coffee, right? Mike Andrew, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Good to see the partnerships working out so well. Thank you very much. Back with more from San Jose here. TheCube continues our coverage live in just a moment.