We recently connected with Justin Gardner and have shared our conversation below.

Justin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

We sell a natural skin and wound care product online. Not exactly the sexiest product but we had found some traction with mom and natural product influencers and decided to put more money into influencer marketing. We had been in discussion with an influencer who was going to charge $40,000 to post but had a few flops that drained our marketing budget so I decided not to move forward. The manager wrote back to me saying that she would be willing to post for 1X revenue, with other recent influencers not evening breaking .05X I decided that the brand awareness would be worth it. She posted on a Saturday morning and by Saturday afternoon she had sold more than $200,000 dollars of product and by Sunday when her coupon code expired she had sold more than $500,000. The rollercoaster of emotions was intense, regret for not going with the $40k option but beyond happy we just sold $500,000 of product. Now more than 2 years later we can quantify that this was a huge success adding thousands of new and loyal customers to our database.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Previous to my current company BLDG Active I owned a medical marketing agency that helped launch products into the hospital system. While running that agency I helped launch a molecule called HOCl into surgical and wound care centers. Amazed with the efficacy and safety of the molecule I worked with the supplier to license the technology for over-the-counter use. We launched our product line Active Skin Repair in 2017 focusing on moms looking for an alternative to toxic first aid products like Neosporin. With many pivots and near scares we now have a robust DTC business with over 1,000,000 products sold.

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

I have sold two businesses. My first was a marketing agency I sold to a publicly traded holding company and the second was a CPG health product I sold to a family run business. Both provided drastically different experiences. If you’re just selling a business to make money and exit then you can simply focus on the financial terms of the sell but if you’re selling a business where you plan to continue working then you need to do a lot more due diligence. You need to understand the culture of the company, ownership, expectations, budgets, long term financial incentives, etc. When I sold my first business my agency was merged into another agency and for the first time in awhile I had a boss again. I really lost the entrepreneurial drive that was core to my success and also my identity. Needless to say I didn’t last long. On the second sell we set my business up as a stand alone business under the parent company allowing me my own P&L and autonomy to continue to run the business as if it was still my own. 4 years later I am still working for the parent company and happy than ever with a thriving business.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We sell a product called Active Skin Repair which is a natural product that helps heal and repair damaged skin. For about 3 years we were slowly plugging along selling on Amazon and in speciality retail to primarily athletes. The business had built a core customer base but we wanted to scale and grow and knew that moms were the ideal customer to grow the business. We started by identifying instagram influencers who were moms, valued healthy / natural products and had developed a trust with their followers specifically around product recommendations. We reached out to these influencers with a very simple one pager on our product and what made it different and why we thought it was relevant to their followers. After we got interest we sent product for them to try on themselves and family. If they came back with enthusiasm for the product we then would talk about rates and commissions for a post. This was the foundation to building a multi-million dollar new channel through instagram. Some keys for our success was to approach the influencers organically and authentically, as CEO and Founder I would always offer my time to jump on a call and explain more about the product or answer questions. Second was to make sure they believed in the product and had real life use cases to use on instagrams. Third was to not script their post, we always provided creative freedom to the influencer because we knew they knew their audience best and wanted the post to be authentic.

Contact Info:

• Website: bldgactive.com
• Instagram: instagram/bldactive.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/justinsgardner