We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brian Selden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Brian thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

After spending the previous eight years helping others launch brands online, building the infrastructure of a business with four walls, heavy equipment, and a million moving parts was one of the more complicated businesses I’ve launched to date. Those who have never started or run a successful business usually think entrepreneurship is sexy and glamorous but those who have actually done the work know that it’s anything but glamorous in the beginning. Not everyone has what it takes to meet the demands of getting a business off the ground and a few of our own original team members were not capable of traversing the challenging early days of our infancy. I had to wear many hats to do the work of what should have been several people until I was able to grow the business to a point where I could start promoting our employees to help me carry the load. It may not be the typical founder’s journey, but that is how we survived until we thrived.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

As a veteran business consultant and strategist with nearly a decade of experience launching healthy brands for other companies,
I was fortunate to be equipped with the experience, tools, and mindset needed to develop and launch a product.

Several years ago, while working to improve my health and level of fitness and performance, I had a realization that the most important thing we put into our body every day is also the most underestimated, least recognized, and least understood.

Knowing how rare it is for these elements to coexist, I began taking note of the signals the universe was sending me about where to invest my focus. I invested a great deal of time obsessively studying the market and the processes and products available to the everyday consumer and learned that there was a lot of room for improvement. The more I researched, the more I realized that the general public deserved something better.

I continued to follow the cues I was being presented and set out on the quest to create a company that would provide the most important element of life and do it in a way that was better than what any of the major companies were doing. The high-quality product that I wanted didn’t exist on the market, so I set out to create it myself.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

I knew what an exceptional product needed to have and not have so I reverse engineered it from there. I didn’t have experience in manufacturing but I had an extensive knowledge of the science and magic of water and I was fairly mechanically inclined so that translated well into a production environment. I studied day and night to get ahead of the curve and I deferred to professionals with experience whenever possible. A couple talented experts consulted on the project and together we developed a system to create a product unlike anything else on the market at the scale our community needed.

What we set out to do was unique because most water companies don’t actually bottle themselves. Rather, they purchase water from a large bottler and slap their label on it and pretend it’s special or unique. With the vast majority of water companies bottling their product at the same places using the same processes, there is nothing unique about what most companies sell. At Conscious Water Company, we have full ownership and control of the quality of our product and bottling practices.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In a market where all the other players are taking every shortcut imaginable, doing things differently can be a long and challenging uphill battle.

Maintaining superior standards of quality while increasing output can be challenging. For me, doing anything that would compromise the integrity of our brand promise was out of the question regardless of the price we had to pay to uphold that promise.

After countless hours of research, meetings with experts, and conceptualizing what the ideal standard was, I charted a path to provide the purest water with the highest quality mineral content in a bottle that is both healthy and environmentally sustainable.

Our commitment to excellence is apparent in every bottle and that is something I am very proud of.

Contact Info:

• Website: drinkconscious.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/drinkconscious