Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Heath Kizzier. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Heath, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
The easiest way is to paste the about us page. Fun story….. (We have a human product now as well, but this is the Origin story. )………
The Four Oaks Farm Story
LEARN HOW FOUR OAKS FARM SPORT HORSE REHABILITATION AND RECONDITIONING CENTER IN SIMI VALLEY, CA BECAME THE BIRTHPLACE OF FOUR OAKS PRODUCTS, WHICH ARE SOLD WORLDWIDE.
Rest assured that Four Oaks Farm products will do what we say they will do. “Why?” you ask. Here is our story.
Our Four Oaks Farm facility hosts between 60-70 sport horses on any given day. Each day horses come and go. The new ones arrive with every possible injury. Working side by side with the top vets on the west coast, it is our job to rehab the injury, slowly move the horse into a reconditioning program, and finally, when they leave us, they are ready to get back to full training.
When you care for so many injuries, of course, you have a tack room brimming with every conceivable animal health product. We have tried them all. Many work great. Unfortunately, often there is that horse that just NOTHING works. All horse owners can relate.
This is when the owner, Kathleen Busfield, goes to work. She already knows what doesn’t work on the horse, so she starts from scratch, creating and tinkering like a mad scientist. Seriously. It’s something to watch her work. She hunkers down for hundreds of hours of research. Then suddenly, stacks of boxes begin arriving containing potential ingredients. So focused is she that she barely sleeps or eats.
And then the “putting together” phase begins.
When she is in her zone, everyone at the barn knows NEVER to take anything from her fridge because while a bottle may say “Welch’s Grape Juice,” it is far more likely one of her test concoctions. [ Yep, some of them are not very tasty.] Finally, when her creation is complete and the original horse has benefited from its use, she expands her testing throughout the barn. (Not testing a few horses for a few weeks, but testing many hundreds of horses over 1-2 years. We often have to plead with Kathleen to let us begin marketing her creation. She refuses to let her baby out of her sight until she absolutely knows it is exactly how she wants it – and most importantly, when she looks somebody in the eye and says it works – it will work.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
This is also from the About Us Story. ….
Heath’s Story
At the Farm, Heath is otherwise known as “Kathleen’s husband.” He is the guy that floats around on the weekends lugging toolboxes, skill saw, sprinkler fittings, and plumbing implements – fixing this and that and trying to stay out of the boss-lady’s way. Heath grew up in the Colorado mountains, living the rural life. He worked with horses from an early age. A big kid for his age, Heath spent the summer between 6th and 7th grade on a logging crew high up in the San Juan Mountains. His job was to section the felled logs into 8 ft lengths, and then run a team of gigantic draft horses to drag the logs out of the deep forest. He nicknamed the drafts Heckle and Jeckle due to their often caustic sense of humor.
At age 13, he spent the summer working at a Colorado dude ranch, wrangling horses (and people). He learned how to drink coffee during those 4:30 am mornings. Herding 30 horses out of a 100-acre pasture every morning required caffeine and patience. Heath moved to South Dakota at age 14. With his mom’s help, he started his first business. He purchased 4 two-year-old colts, broke and trained them, and then sold them. The company was a bust, however, because he lost a quarter of his profits after falling in love and keeping “Good ol’ Sackett” (who was a not a so “good” Arabian roan) Sackett was a runner. If you gave him his head, he would bolt, ears back, eyes white and manic. Heath truly had to cowboy up to get him under control. Quickly he devised a plan to only let Sackett “run” when he was headed uphill. It had to be a big hill, though, because if Sackett wasn’t blown by the time he reached the top – the downhill white-eyed run was terrifying.
Heath left home at 17 and moved to Aspen, Colorado. There he met a photographer while busing tables. The woman asked him to sit for some fashion photos. They weren’t very good, but the experience began a new twisting trail in Heath’s life. He moved to Los Angeles, did some modeling while also training horses in Malibu for a Hollywood film mogul, and within a few months, he was invited to model in Paris. He stayed in Europe for a year. (Where, incidentally, he was struck by lightning during a solo camping trek up Mont Blanc, but that’s another story.)
Back in LA, Heath quickly moved from modeling to acting. He worked with top celebrities and directors in the industry with stints in Wyatt Earp, Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman, and eventually as a series regular on The Young And the Restless. After 20 years, he transitioned again, from acting to writing, penning two novels and a memoir, and countless film and television scripts.
Finally, he met Kathleen. Except for the western movies he performed in, Heath had been away from his equine roots for most of his time in Hollywood, and he could not believe his luck when he found a “horsewoman” in the middle of LA!
In 2010, as he watched Kathleen working on her first variations of No Thrush powder and then saw how her colleagues kept begging her to make some more of her “Thrush Stuff,” Heath finally suggested,
“This is clearly something that works, and people seem to want it. We should make a big batch and see if it will sell.”
That was the beginning. The husband and wife team worked in the garage into the late hours making powder and working out the logistics. There was a lot to learn! Internet sales went crazy right away, and they were up until midnight every night packing boxes. Soon No Thrush was in the local stores and then spreading outward in a ripple effect. Within a year, the product was sold nationally and had jumped the pond into the EU, Japan, AU, NZ, etc.
Heath now runs the Four Oaks Products production facility. Just as he does on the weekends at the farm, he wears many hats and carries many toolboxes.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
When we started selling Kathleen’s first product back in 2010, neither of us had any experience whatsoever running this type of company. Back then, the internet wasn’t the best source of information. Here is a good example of what we didn’t know: : How does pricing work? We knew what we wanted the product to be priced at at the store, but what amount do you sell it to a store? What margins do stores expect? There were no answers, namely because every industry is different. A clothing store, grocery stores, and Farm Stores, etc all expect different margins.
Meanwhile other business owners are territorial about that kind of information, so we received no help there. We finally decided to mistakenly trust the internet, which told us to go with “Keystone” pricing. In other words, we were told that if the retail price was $30 then we’d sell it to the store for $15). This made the retail stores very happy because, of course, this was WAY more margin than they would normally expect.!
Well, I need to amend that. The stores were happy for…a while.. Soon, though, the product took off and we found ourselves in a dilemma … Suddenly, regional and national distributors wanted to carry our products. This is great, right? We sell to the distributors, they sell to the Stores, and the stores sell to the consumer. Yay!! What’s the problem you ask? Well we gave away all our margin to the stores! There was nothing left to give the distributors.
Ultimately this was a hard newbie lesson. We had to go to every store that carried our Four Oaks Products and tell them that we had to significantly raise their cost. I had to call hundreds of store mangers plead my ignorance and beg forgiveness. We supplied them all with extra free product as an apology, etc, etc. Those were some hard (and expensive) calls to make. We finally got it squared away, but this was just one of the hard-learned lessons of a newbie business owner. By the way, 15 years later, pricing is still tough, especially now since we have a human product and are entering into other distribution sectors. Each sector still has different costing structures, and there is still no good handbook online. Still today, if you run the question on the internet, Ai still gives you 100 different answers. Ugh.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
Since Kathleen, (my wife and The Four Oaks CEO,) runs our Internationally known Four Oaks Farm Sport Horse Recovery Centre, my job has always been to run the products company. I do a bit of everything (all small business owners do) but I would mostly characterize my main job as Marketing.
As part of the Marketing realm I have been traveling at least a week every month to tradeshows around the country. At the end of 2019, after being essentially on the road for 10 years, Kathleen and I sat down at dinner one night and had to make a hard, and potentially scary decision…..
We had a problem. A vast majority of these tradeshows I was attending were “Distributor Tradeshows.” This means that the “customer” at the shows are not consumers, but rather they are Store owners and managers coming out to learn about new products and place orders for the upcoming season. I’m pretty good at a tradeshow so when folks showed up at my booth I could detail the heck out of our stuff. As a rule, we are never hard-sell, Why? Because neither Kathleen nor I can stand being “sold.” Our style is all about honesty and education. And our personal motto is: If somebody can’t explain something to me, and make me fully, 100%, understand it, than I am not engaging/buying, (We have all encountered those people who are GREAT talkers, but you realize that when you leave the conversation, you have absolutely no idea what they were talking about. It’s maddening! If you can’t understand it, don’t buy it. Period.
PS on that point: . We used to think we were the dim ones and it was our fault that we couldn’t understand some guy’s pitch. But nope. As we have aged up… no. We know were aren’t stupid. If you can’t explain it succinctly, I’m out. But I digress, sorry.
Anyway, as I said, I do well at the shows and the store owners would bring our products into their stores. That’s great. The problem was that we were spending all our budget on the tradeshow booth fees, air travel, hotels, and car rentals to get me to the shows. The result of that is that we didn’t have any money left to advertise and support the products. So while I had now placed the products inside stores, the average consumers didn’t have any idea what the products were and what they did! Instead they would buy the old tried-and-true products that they had always bought in the past.
(Here is another important side note that was a hard-earned lesson. Remember I said how well I had detailed the product to the store owners? I expected, of course, that they would head back to the store the next day and fully pass along all my wonderful information to their staff. Nope. That’s not how it generally works. The owner is in the back room doing owner stuff. And even if they did pass along the info to their staff, the staff turnover rate is high. Therefore new staff members who don’t know anything about the product are not about to recommend it to customers..
We were now in backward, lose, lose position. Our sales became stagnant, we had no money to advertise educate the consumer, and now the stores are getting frustrated with us because sales of our products are slow.
Three years in a row we had no overall increase in sales. We needed to make a change.
Here was our big decision: At the end of 2019 we decided to take me off the road. No more tradeshow expenses. Instead, we committed to get “Back to the consumer..” We decided to funnel all that tradeshow money 100% into social media. I took some training for Facebook/Instagram, learned quite a lot in a couple weeks, and we dove in feet first. Scary!!! We had been on a single path for a lot of years, and this was a complete deviation from the norm.
Within a month, sales increased, even during the first months of Covid, when all our peers were seeing huge declines. Within six months we went from 10 web orders a week to 25 orders a day.
Within a year, sales growth increased 25% and has continued to do so year-over-year.
Summing Up:
Our message on Social media is the same as when I was doing the tradeshows. EDUCATION. Yes, sure, I post the typical flashy blah-blah-blah posts now and again just to stay in front of consumers, but the posts and ads that do the best – and which are completely NOT advised by the so-called-pros – are long form educational videos. People want to know what they are looking at. They want to understand exactly what they are about to spend money on. They don’t want hard-sell. My 3-4 minute videos are pro-tips and success stories They provide firsthand direction on exactly what protocols to use, and most important, I think, I have put myself as the face of the company. This differentiates Four Oaks from all the other faceless corporations out there. What this means is that I am in the line of fire. I personally respond to every comment on our posts. Half my day is spent doing this, I respond to everyone, even the internet negative-Nellies, whose late night drunken posts cast dispersions (even though they have never used the products). I respond to anyone who says, “It didn’t work” and provide education and protips to help them get through their issue.
This social media move was by far the best decision we have made as a company.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://fouroaksproducts.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fouroaksproducts/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NoThrush
- Youtube: @Heathkizzier
