Jeremy Parker - Founder of Swag.com, Dad, Award Winning Filmmaker

Jason and Jeremy dive deep into the fascinating journey of Jeremy Parker , the co-founder and former CEO of Swag.com, and now the founder of Swagspace. Jeremy shares his incredible story, from winning a prestigious film festival to pivoting into entrepreneurship, and eventually building a multimillion-dollar business in the promotional products industry. Jeremy shared how he knew it was time to give up the CEO title as the company grew and what his true passion in business is.

 “Sometimes, the right move is to step aside and let someone else lead. ” 

Jeremy Parker is an accomplished entrepreneur with a diverse and dynamic career, marked by innovative ventures and significant promotional product industry achievements.

Jeremy graduated from Boston University in 2007 with a major in film production, and his passion for storytelling was evident early on. As a junior in college, his feature-length documentary won the Audience Award at the 2006 Vail Film Festival, showcasing his ability to captivate audiences with compelling narratives.

After college, Jeremy transitioned into business, starting a creative Promotional Product Division under MV Sport. This experience laid the foundation for his future entrepreneurial endeavors.

Jeremy's next venture was a collaboration with his brother David and Jesse Itzler, co-founder of Marquis Jet, investor and partner in Zico Coconut Water, and owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Together, they developed an e-commerce platform that distributed unique promotion codes through social media influencers' Facebook and Twitter posts. This innovative approach caught the attention of a publicly-traded company, which subsequently acquired the platform.

In his most notable venture, Jeremy co-founded and served as CEO of Swag.com, a company that revolutionized the promotional products industry. Under his leadership, Swag.com became the go-to platform for companies seeking high-quality swag that people want to keep. The company boasts a client list of over 10,000 companies, including tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. This success earned Jeremy a spot on Crain's New York Business 40 Under 40 list in 2020.

Swag.com's rapid growth was recognized nationally, ranking #218 on the Inc 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in 2020 and #368 in 2021. The company's impressive trajectory culminated in its acquisition by Custom Ink in November 2021.

Jeremy is incubating Swag Space under Custom Ink, continuing his tradition of innovation in the promotional products industry. Swag Space aims to be the Universal Swag Platform, providing a front-end e-commerce platform to facilitate sales and handling all aspects of production and fulfillment.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyianparker/

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Transcript

Jason Frazell: 0:12

Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I am here with the amazing Jeremy Parker. He is the co founder and former CEO of swag. com. Currently the founder of Swagspace. We're going to talk a lot about what that means. And Jeremy, so glad we're on today. Great to see you. How are you doing? Doing great. Thank you so much for

Jeremy Parker: 0:32

having me

Jason Frazell: 0:32

on. Yes. Very welcome.

Jeremy Parker: 0:34

Where are you joining us from today? I'm calling from Bell Harbor in Miami. So that's a nice spot. It's it's paradise. Honestly.

Jason Frazell: 0:42

Yeah. We were just, we were just, Jeremy and I were just catching up before we pressed record. Former Manhattanite, just like myself, and I don't know if you and the fam ever lived in Brooklyn, but we, we, at the time we moved to Brooklyn and called it The Suburbs. We lived, like, literally south of the Brooklyn Bridge, and now we both relocated me a couple hundred miles away, and you I guess a couple thousand miles away, maybe something like that. Yeah.

Jeremy Parker: 1:06

You're in the middle of 2021 and

Jason Frazell: 1:09

it's pretty easy, easy living here. Easy living. Yes. Look very nice looking at the beach. Well, we're going to talk a lot today, Jeremy, about your business journey, moving from founder to CEO and then back to founder again, and what, what that, what that meant to you from both what that means technically, but also from a mental perspective, we were talking about your journey before we do that, Jeremy, just like to have you share with the audience, anything like you'd like to share with us about you or anything you'd like us to know about you. Sure thing. So

Jeremy Parker: 1:38

personally, I'm a I'm a husband and a father of two young kids. So as you all can imagine, it's, it's exciting. It's it's crazy. It's a lot of learning. It's patience. It's, it's everything. And as you're doing the startup, you have the kids. It's, it's really cool. So that's, I guess. And on the business side, and I have a very unique background because I used to be a documentary filmmaker. That was my passion. And I went to college for that. And when I was about 18 years old, I was the winner of the Vail Film Festival. It is a feature length documentary. And wow. Yes, I was doing that. And then I realized. Maybe that's not the right thing for me. It wasn't my, my necessarily passion at the time. I didn't think I was fairly that good at it. Even though I came off of win, I was like, maybe I'm not the best at it. All the other films in the festival were just better than mine, even though we won the audience award. And I gave it up. It was like the weirdest thing. Like I, at the festival next day, I pretty much mentally said, This is not for me. I'm going to try to do something else. Graduated college, did various different startups from starting a t shirt company, my first job out of college under a company called MV sport, they were in the promotional product space. So I got kind of an insight into the promo space early on when I was about 21, 22 started the business with my brother. And Jesse Itzler, who's a, you know, world famous entrepreneur. Marty Jett, private jet company, Zco. And we started a product placement company for YouTube videos and celebrities, where we would help them get brands, like big name brands, into the YouTube videos. That was sold to a publicly traded company when I was 25 years old. I then had like a three year stint doing a startup that, that failed, that ultimately didn't work out called Vouch, it was a social networking app based on what you truly vouch for, what you truly love. And I think the idea is a great idea and I think it probably could work now even better, but I don't think we built the right product, the right solution, you know, there's many stories of why I think that failed and what I took from that. And then when started Swag. com. And swag. com became the fastest growing company in the promotional product space. So we work with over 15, 000 companies from Amazon and Google and all the big companies that you can imagine. And we help them with their corporate merch, their corporate swag. In 2021, we were acquired by a larger company called custom Inc. And I was the CEO of swag. com under custom Inc up until. Past December, where I left to start a new startup underneath customing called Swagspace. And I'm excited to talk to you about it, Jason.

Jason Frazell: 4:07

Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Jeremy. Lot there. What am I curious about first? Have you always been an entrepreneur? Like as a, like a grown up?

Jeremy Parker: 4:20

No, no. Honestly, I didn't even know what entrepreneur was. Until after college, I was a filmmaker. I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was younger and I was passionate about filmmaking and telling stories. But I had this like weird realization that I mentioned that I was at the veil film festival. And after the award, there was this quote unquote celebrity brunch is the next morning. And I walk into this room and half the room where these major actors, everyone's heard of. And half the room were more struggling artists. And I had to do like a real internal gut check to myself, like. Is this my life? Is this going to be my career? Like which side of the room am I going to fall out on? And, and I had to really internalize it and say, do I think I'm that good? Honestly, like I love it. I love telling stories. I love the process of making movies, but. Am I, am I that good to break through the noise? It's such a hard industry. And I, I,

Jason Frazell: 5:07

I

Jeremy Parker: 5:08

answered it for myself and I said, no, I don't think I am that good. I think there's a lot of people better than me. There's a lot of people who care more about it or more passionate. I loved it, but more passionate about it. You have to be in filmmaking. And I got back to college. I was at Boston university. I was a senior at the time and I had no other experience in my life except for filmmaking. So just put in perspective. So I graduated college. I didn't know anything. So I figured, let me just start a t shirt company. Cause that was the first thing I could think of. I thought it sounded relatively easy, even though I was wrong, but I thought it would teach me all the aspects of building a business and I would figure out what I was good at. So like a t shirt company, you figure out how to manufacture t shirts and this is pre Shopify. So you had to like actually hire programmers to develop a website. I had to learn how to make sales. To boutiques, I had to learn how to do PR and branding and all these different things. And I became kind of an entrepreneur. And I just, I look back and filmmaking and entrepreneurship is so similar. It's like, it's just storytelling and it's building something out of nothing. So that's how I think of an entrepreneur is like, you're really taking an idea and you're creating something out of nothing. It didn't exist one day. And then a month later, a year later, two years later, it's something now exists. You invent the future. And it's very similar to filmmaking and building a business. So I've started to really fall in love with it. And I haven't stopped. I've been an entrepreneur

Jason Frazell: 6:26

ever since. Yeah, man. Thanks, man. I'm a little, my mind is a little blown thinking about you at a festival, winning an award, walking in and like the trajectory you were on was more likely to be, I think by winning an award, you automatically you're getting some credit, like some, some cachet in the industry. The more likely you could end up on that side of the more famous folks famous and make a good living at it. And my, like from all, from everything you've shared so far, you seem like a very intuitive person. Like you seem like you're very based on like what feels right to you, because that wasn't probably the logical decision that a lot of people would have made that most people who are like thinking about it would have made. And, and I'm just fascinated by that. And then I want to, I want to hone in on the, I just decided to start a t shirt company. Was that When you did this at the time, was that an industry that was known to like, Hey, you can go in and make good profit margin. It's like kind of easy to set up. Or did you just like happen to either talk to somebody or have an idea of like, Oh, tight t shirt company?

Jeremy Parker: 7:32

Well, the first thing with the film, yes, it was a very weird thing for everyone around me. My decision to leave filmmaking. Yeah. Imagine I'm at Boston university film school. There wasn't that many award winning filmmakers. At who are currently at college. It wasn't a thing like you go to school so that you could ultimately leave school, make a movie that wins it. And I'm, and I'm, I'm this kid who's winning it in school. So it was like this weird kind of thing where it's like, everyone's like congratulating me. Amazing. This is it. And I, in my head was like, I'm here for seven more months to finish school and I'm done. I'm out of film. I don't know. It was just like, you have a gut feeling, but I was, I was a filmmaker in the festival, but I was also watching the other films cause I'm a true lover of film and there was better films there. Sure. I was talking to people and there was people who really, I saw the passion in their eyes. Like this is their life. They're never going to do anything else. And I loved it, but I didn't have that same fire in me for film. So I was like, It was just like this smack in the face that even though we were winning, I have my award right here. I still am proud to, I'm still proud to have it. Yeah, let's see it. Well, it looks like a nice apartment. I it wasn't I don't know. It wasn't the right thing. And with t shirts, no, I had no experience. I'm not fashionable. I didn't know anything about manufacturing. I didn't know anything about anything. And that was the thing. I just thought, people wear t shirts, people buy t shirts. I don't know. People buy t

Jason Frazell: 8:54

shirts.

Jeremy Parker: 8:55

Yeah, I don't know. I didn't know anything about profit. I didn't know anything about anything. I know business experience. I didn't know what margin was. I didn't know what EBITDA. I didn't even know these terms existed, but I did know that I was, I loved telling stories and I felt like an entrepreneur who could tell a story. I can maybe tell a nice story around a t shirt, whatever the product is I was going to sell. And I started to really dive being an entrepreneur and I started reading, All the blogs online about how to be an entrepreneur. And I was following Mark Cuban's blog, blog Maverick, which is a big, you know, inspiration for me when I was starting and I was just becoming a sponge. Cause it was like, I was starting from the beginning, I was starting over in some ways.

Jason Frazell: 9:34

Yeah. Looking back at where you've, you've come to today, sitting here today and thinking about your, sorry, were you 20, 21 or 22? When you started the first t shirt company?

Jeremy Parker: 9:45

Yeah. I was like right at, so whenever you, yeah, 21, 22 after, after college.

Jason Frazell: 9:50

Yeah. So looking back at that time now. What do you, what do you know now that you maybe, maybe don't, and I hate the term wish you would have known then because the experience matters, but what do you know now that like, you just had no clue about when you started this business 20 and when you first started out of college?

Jeremy Parker: 10:08

Yeah, I would say entrepreneurship is a lifetime sport. I would say that's like one of the big things I've realized. You know, we, we made swag. com into this big success and it gets acquired by a much larger company and everyone's like, wow, you just started swag. com five and a half years later, you sell it for all this money. And I'm thinking to myself, well, how many ups and downs I have to go on for the 10 plus years to get me into the place where I was able to start a swag. com and be successful. So it's just immense amounts of learning. Over the course of my career and I made so many mistakes, but the good thing is I learned from them. Like, I'll tell you an example. I I started this company called Vouch. It was a social networking app that, that ultimately didn't work out. And we had everything in place for it to work out. I just came off of selling my company to a private, to a publicly traded company. I was sitting on some money. I had major celebrity partners. I was able to easily raise funding because we came 25 years old. And we failed. Why did we fail? So, and I, I take pretty much the blame for it. I mean, who knows it's, it's, it's, it's learning, but I was so obsessed with the details of the site and I thought, and I had some sort of ego. I don't, I didn't realize at the time, but now looking back, I did that. I thought I knew the right solution to build for the club, for the customers. And I want to build the social network. It was about what you vouch for, what your favorite things, and they're just a high level of the idea. We saw Facebook and Facebook took, you know, had the like button and the status update and all these different sites that became popular from Instagram or from Snapchat or from Twitter, they all took different pieces of Facebook and made a dedicated experience around a certain experience, right? Instagram took the pictures, Twitter took the status update. We wanted to take the like button because the like button is the most valuable, monetizable option on Facebook. So I built this session that we're And I spent over a year designing it and thinking about every little detail. What happens when somebody moves their thumb this way or presses this button? What's the animation? What's, I was obsessed with the details. I frankly lost sleep over the details. And then what happened is we launched the company about 15 months after we started. And all the things that I gave a shit about that I thought were going to be the biggest mover needles, like needle movers, no one cared about. It was like all the things that I didn't even think that those were the things that they wanted. And I realized I wasted a year and a half of my life building the wrong thing. And that was like the smack in the face of like As an entrepreneur, sometimes you have to remove ego and you have to build what people actually want. And you have to, so when I started swag and that ultimately failed because we weren't able to pivot enough and move enough and learn enough because we wasted so much time and so much energy and so much money building the wrong thing for people who didn't really want it. So when I started swag from day one, my thing was, I'm not going to build anything yet. I'm going to start making sales from day one. I'm going to have a coming soon landing page and I'm going to start making sales because totally everything. And also you're going to learn by talking to customers what the right thing to build is. So I started, I was in New York city. I was at my co founders. He had like a pool table room in his building. You know, there's a, we had no office, we had no money for anything. And we were working at this room and every, you know, hour, somebody would come into play pool. We would have to move our stuff off of the pool table. Cause that's the only desk in the

Jason Frazell: 13:16

room.

Jeremy Parker: 13:16

And I'm spending most of my days going at, at WeWorks up and down the hallways, knocking on doors, talking to people and trying to sell. I was like a traveling salesman and it was good, but it was really to learn like why people buy certain things or what they're buying or how they're buying it or what other, who's our competitors and why they like them versus this, what they don't like. And we learned so much in the early days that when we start to actually build the site, That automates everything and streamlines everything. We, we had so much confidence that we were building the exact right thing because we knew it. And we knew exactly the audience where it was. Now, I'll take one, one, one quick thing before. Yeah. Initially, flag. com, I thought our customer was the marketing teams. That was my big idea. Marketing teams, they have the biggest budget, they're buying for trade shows, for events. You know, you 10 person company, but you could be spying tens of thousands of dollars worth of swag because you're sending it to your best customers. Sure. But after speaking with actual marketing managers, I realized that everyone has the same idea. There's 23, 000 promo distributors. Everyone's going after the marketing manager. How is me, swag. com, a coming soon landing page, going to break through the noise? So what I realized, it's really the office manager that we should be going after the office manager. No one's going after them. They are buying for much smaller orders and they have 10 employees that they're buying for the 10 people. If they have a hundred employees are buying for a hundred people, but they're the Trojan horse into the company. If the office manager buys a hundred t shirts and they're giving it out to the marketing team and their sales team, and they're this office in that office, they're basically doing the work for us. They're introducing us to everyone who has decision making ability and no one's going there. So we pivoted our entire focused, we became the swag platform for office managers. Now swag. com, we have 15, 000 customers. We're doing, you know, 40 million a year in sales. We're a much bigger company. We're going after all departments. But if we didn't see that key insight, break through the noise, who knows where we'd be right now. So I think for entrepreneurs who are wanting to start, get out of your own way. Don't have such ego try to be open minded to everything be okay that your opinion could change because it's important You don't have to have the right idea. It doesn't really matter then it's about getting it's getting the right idea It doesn't have to be your idea.

Jason Frazell: 15:24

Yeah, Jeremy. That's so brilliant I'm thinking about in my my corporate career how risk the other place you receive swag a lot Depending on the company is when you get hired You get like, you might get like a t shirt or a sweatshirt or something that demonstrates that my guess in a small company, that would be the office manager or HR who buys that not marketing is my guess.

Jeremy Parker: 15:44

That's exactly right. So

Jason Frazell: 15:45

just having that, man, that's so, that's so brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. That's brilliant. That's very cool. So I think what I want to ask you about next here is, do you remember, do you remember You knew that swag was going to be a success. I don't know if that was a financial target or an EBITDA target or what it was, but when you go, Oh my God, we're actually onto something here. Do you remember that moment?

Jeremy Parker: 16:13

Yeah, I remember. I remember very clearly it was 2017. So we started the business in January, 2016. When we started it, my mindset was, I don't want, I don't need to be a millionaire. That was not the mindset that I was in, in 2016. I was a 30 year old guy, I was single, I was living in New York City, I didn't have much money. I wanted to just own my life. I wanted to make a salary, 100, 000, 200, 000, in that range, every year, and control my time. That was my initial thing. And I felt like I could do that in the swag industry.

Jason Frazell: 16:44

I felt

Jeremy Parker: 16:44

like there was a way to do that. A lot of people were doing it and I felt like it was a good industry, but the more I was selling, the more I was learning of the problems in the industry and how I can make a better process. So it wasn't until probably mid 2016 where I started to actually think all these challenges that people having, I could actually automate it. I could streamline it. I can simplify it. I can make a much better experience for customers. So when we started to build the first version, we had one developer at the time. Building our MVP to launch it in January 2017 and that was like, it wasn't like immediate. It wasn't like the floodgates open the platform, frankly, wasn't very good in the early days, but we started to see people that something that used to take me maybe hours, like literally weeks to create a presentation deck or to do price quotes or go back and forth with clients. And it was streamlined. Like I still have to help them. I still have to guide the customer through the process, but it was removing 80 percent of the workload. And I realized, wow, like we did 350, 000 our first year of sales and I was pushed to the max. And I had all this like wasted. If I had 80 percent of my time back, I could probably get to 700, 000, a million. I could probably get to that point. And that would get me to the ideal salary that I wanted in my second year. It was like this realization, like, Oh, this could, this is actually going to work. Now we got to 1. 1 million the second year, we jumped up 7 million to 15 million to 30 million. I didn't expect it to be a hundred percent growth up to 30 million. By the time we got acquired, the company was doing over 30 percent sale. I didn't expect that, but I knew I at least had something there that, you know, that was going to work.

Jason Frazell: 18:22

Yeah. Did you, did you have to take any investment as you grew?

Jeremy Parker: 18:26

We did, but not, but frankly, we were very lucky with that. We took very little. We raised. Less than 4 million, 3. 8 million all in, and we only raised when we had an idea to accelerate growth. We were never this I'll tell you, I'll tell you the big challenge of being an entrepreneur, and I don't think people really ever say it. This is the challenge. It's a very lonely sport to be an entrepreneur, and everyone thinks they're a failure until you're not. So what I mean by that is this. If you're a a doctor. And you become a doctor. There's people are celebrating you throughout your life, right? There's your family is impressed by you, your girlfriend, your wife, your friend was impressed. You become a lawyer. You get a good job at a high paying firm. You're able to see that money coming in. You're able to become a partner. Just even in a normal career, there's, there's raises. You become an executive, you become on the C suite entrepreneurship, being a founder, you don't get that you starting at the top, but that top is such a small little, nothing. Does it like, unless it sells, you're not, No one celebrates you. There's no outside validation. And you often get internally, you know, not depressed, but like down on yourself. Things are not working. You're throwing yourself against the wall and nothing's sticking. It's like, it's constant challenges until it's not a challenge. So this is what I'm getting at. A lot of entrepreneurs, what they do, and they don't really, I don't, I've internalized this only recently. People try to get outside press, Right. So you always see like entrepreneurs trying to get written up in tech crime, business insider, that's one thing. And they try to raise money. Okay. Cause what are those two things? If you really think about it, it's out validation. It allows people on the outside, your family, friends to say, Oh, wow. I saw you in the press. You must be doing great. Oh my God, this big VC invested in you. You must be doing great. There's very, in my mind, there's, there's. It's smart to raise VC if your business is VC fundable. If it's a business that is going to scale to a hundred million dollars, if that's your goal and you need the money, or it's a big high tech kind of comp, you know, they actually need money to build, raise VC. That's unbelievable, right? Like the innovation in this world would not exist. The big innovation, the chat GPT is the open AI's would not exist without VC. Well, for 95 plus percent of entrepreneurs, you don't really need VC money. It's really the ego. It's, it's a way for you to validate yourself. You don't really need press to be in business insider. Is that really going to move the, no, you just want to get a nice photo with your, with your face on it and you want to feel good about yourself. So I started to realize that and I realized I don't necessarily need to raise money for this. I'm making money. It's a profitable business. Swag. com was so good where basically you get paid up front. Right. Amazon, Google comes to my website. Front. Sure. And we don't owe the vendors. We don't owe the suppliers that we work with for net 60. So we collect the cash and we don't owe the cash for 60 days. It's an unbelievable business model. And so everything that we made, That's great. We just reinvested it back into the platform, back into the site, made the tech better, made the site better, built the team. So I just think, I think oftentimes as entrepreneurs, if you can remove your ego, You'll make way better decisions for yourself and you'll most likely keep way more of the company when it is that time to have an exit.

Jason Frazell: 21:29

Yeah. I'd say as an entrepreneur, definitely. I would say as a human, that's a good thing to do too. Is as a husband, as a wife, as a parent, as no matter what you're doing, we can remove our ego or, you know, like think about where our ego is making us right about something is what I heard you talk about. With vouch. com is you are right in your mind. You're right that this is what it is. That's your ego, Jeremy, before we talk about kind of like the next, you know, like selling swag and then your transition, I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience with hiring from when you first start out to growing a team, because I, you know, I know a lot of founders, they said it's very difficult for them because you start, you got you, your co founder. Likely you're a co founder because you get along or maybe you have disagreements, but there, you know how to get along and suddenly go, Oh, we need some other people to help us that one don't have equity in this company. So they don't care as much as we do. And two, they may not be as closely aligned. So they're just like a staff employee. What was your experience when you started making hires? And what did you look for in your first few employees? And then the second part of the question is, by the time you wrapped this part of it and sold to Custom Inc, I think you said you had about 140 employees. What changed for in your philosophy of hiring? Because you're at that point, we're hiring C Suite and things like that. Yeah, totally.

Jeremy Parker: 22:44

I would say I got very lucky with my co founder. I co founded this company with a college buddy of mine Josh. And we went into business and we were actually smart about it. A lot of entrepreneurs And founders, co founders don't really do this. We had such different skill sets. So what I was good at, Josh was not good at. And when Josh was good at, I was not good at it. So I took, I, we always like to say, I took the front of the house. So I was, you know, the website, the brand, the user experience, the vision, more of the vision, the, I was the CEO, more of the vision of what people see. And Josh was in charge of all the operations. So once an order came in, he was the one managing the suppliers and the three PLS and the warehousing and the FedEx rates and UPS rates, he was all the nitty gritty stuff that no one actually saw, but actually made the business work. And it was so good because we were never stepping on each other's toes. Like I would do something, he would never question me and he would do something. I would never question him because we had this, this, this confidence in each other that we owned our respective things. That was really lucky. And we had just the two of us for the first. Year and a half of the business that we were running. So we were doing 350, 000 first year. We got up to close to 1 1. 1 the second year, but middle of the year, we hired our first person, Alyssa, who joined to help down the operation side. Alyssa was just really smart. Like I, we didn't know anything. Like we were so early to the hiring people. We just wanted to hire smart people. And some of those people ended up working out. And some of those people didn't work

Jason Frazell: 24:02

out,

Jeremy Parker: 24:03

you know, early on. There was a point in business, we had about 10 people. where we had to like literally let go of four of them. There was a period in like a month period we let go of four people because we hired the wrong type of people. And I know obviously that my next business, as I said, you learn from every startup, my next business, I wouldn't go through this pain as a startup. Every single time you hire people, it's different life cycles in the business. So the early on, you want to hire people who can roll up their sleeves, who are complete team players, who are willing to go the extra mile, who see the vision, who have some options in the company and really believe in it. And you tell them to do one thing and then the next day they do something else. They're okay changing and adapting to their work because that's just who they are. The early people we ended up hiring were more corporate. They were more like names, like brand names. They came from top startups. They were VC backed startups. They didn't have that. ability to roll up their sleeves. They were like number 50 to 70 employees typically, which is early when the company becomes a thousand employees. It does seem early, but they really weren't early. It's a different mindset. When they joined, they had a manager already. They were probably three or four people on the team already. They had a structure already. And in the early days, in the first 10 people, there is no structure. There is no managers. There is no process. You're creating it all. So I think early days, you got to find the right type of people for that thing. And as you scale, it does become easier to make the hires, because if you have a boss, if you hire an executive that you believe in, they're going to be the ones to set that person who they're hiring up for success. You have to really believe in the executives that you're hiring and then, you know, hope that they're going to be a great leader to, to manage the people beneath them. And so we've been very lucky and obviously not every employee works out, but for the last five years, we've had a very good track record, way better track record than our first couple of years. First couple of years, we made so many mistakes. I would also say internally early days when you become a founder. By definition, when you're a founder, you're the CEO or you're, you're the, you're the head of market and you're head of sales, you're head intern. You're literally do every single thing as a founder in the early days, and you become, I don't know the best at everything, but you become fairly good at every little thing and you start to, you know, have your own way of doing things. So when you hire somebody, you have to repeat yourself. The whole point of hiring is to say. This person's going to do what I'm going to do, and I'm not going to do it. I'm going to focus on this, right? Cause they're, but the problem is said than done, easier said than done. So I found myself in the first two years being the ultimate micromanager, which is not a good place to be. And it's just hard not to do. You see people doing things and in your mind, it's the wrong way. Like, don't do that. Don't you like, and you want to jump in, but sometimes you kind of, even though you want to jump in and you probably would solve it and make things better. You sometimes have to sit back and be like. It's okay. They're going to learn. They're going to mess up, but they're going to learn. And they're going to, that's going to be the experience that they're going to need to get better. And they always say, you know, like you're going to replace yourself with somebody and you know, just if they're 80 percent as good as you, hopefully they're even better than you, but if they're 80%, that's good enough. It doesn't need to be perfect. With executives, it does need to be very good. You need to feel really confident team that you can let them go so much so that Gita, who I hired as our chief. customer officer about two and a half years ago. I, I passed her the seat, the, the basically we call her general manager, the general manager role of swag. com when I stepped away to do swag. So you have to really, for me, she was bad. She was a better operator than me. Like she was, she is a better quote unquote CEO than I am. And when you realize that you kind of have to ask yourself like, well, if if my value is not this, And my value is something better, or like I enjoy doing something different. Maybe I should be focusing what I'm better at and what I enjoy doing and let somebody who's actually really great give her that, that, that shine and that ability to really take it to the next level. So that was kind of my thing. And my boss, you know, the CEO of custom Inc. And I told him, I said, I'm at the company. I want to help the company in any way I can. I think the best way for me to do that is to start something new and invent something new. And I think. Gida can actually run swag. com way better than me. So I think this is actually a perfect fit.

Jason Frazell: 28:11

Oh, and I'm, I'm curious, what was the, what was the initial feedback from your boss at the time? He was

Jeremy Parker: 28:17

very uncertain in the beginning. Not that he didn't, yeah, he didn't really know Gita, I mean Right. It's a big company, you know, custom Ink, thousands of employees, you know, it's right. He doesn't know. He know everybody at that point, and I, and I. I pushed for it and I said, I, I try, I feel so confident that when you get to know her and you see her in action, you see her work, you're going to be so blown away by it. And he was like, I, I, I got them in conversations. I brought Gita to more of these executive meetings. She's unbelievable. It's so obvious to anyone who's like, and he felt a lot more confident after a couple of months, took a while to get us there. Right. Cause it's like, he bought my company, he knew me, he bought, and now I'm saying, I actually don't want to be the CEO or I don't think I'm the right person to be CEO. So for him, it was like, what's going on here? But he totally agreed. He's like, makes total sense. And so, you know, it's sometimes it's the, the, the, it's not always easy, the right thing to do, but you still have to do it.

Jason Frazell: 29:12

Yeah. So Jeremy, thanks for sharing all that. I, you already have a hit on what I wanted to talk about with your journey next is, and I 140 employees of swag. com when you're acquired, you were still running that business. Consider I guess you would have been a general manager of the business inside of custom Inc. Yeah, exactly. And then you decided, Hey, it's time for me to. Give this to Gita and go back and do, and found something new all over again, this side, inside the customing family. I want to talk about both the tactical part of that, but also your mindset there. Because we talked about ego. Yeah. There are so many people like, Oh, I want to build a big company. Like, you're like, I have a staff of 139 folks and I'm going back to, in some ways, that pool table. Like that pool table with a couple other people doing the thing. So do you remember, like, like, was that an easy trip? Was that an easy thought process for you? Were you, were you really, or were you like twisted on it? You know, so I talked to your wife about it. Was it like a, like, how did you know that that was the next move for you? Cause that seems like. That's such a shift, especially for entrepreneurs are like, I want to become a founder and then a CEO, and I want to grow and I want to make it big and sell it, and then I want to do this thing. It's like, Oh, you're doing the, the, the new thing again, when you already had. Yeah,

Jeremy Parker: 30:26

yeah. It was a I don't want to say it was a hard thing. I, I instinctively felt it was the right thing. So when you sometimes feel something in your gut, that's the right thing. It makes decisions easier. I don't know. I, the big thing for me is I've been known for the last eight years as the swag guy, right? Like forget business, right? Like every interaction, like I go, I meet with new friends. My friends say, Oh, you got to talk to Jeremy swag. com. Like that becomes your identity, especially for every entrepreneur, their startup becomes their identity, but even more so, they actually gets acquired that, you know, has, That actually works to some degree and it's on some scale, like that becomes your identity. So going, moving away from that identity to now starting something completely new is a weird feeling. It's totally a weird feeling, but it's the right, it's the right thing. You know, I felt like it was the right thing for me. I looked at the business of swag and I said, what is my skillset? What makes me different and what do I, what truly gives me energy and being a CEO, didn't do any of those things. I never really wanted to be the CEO. I mean, I wanted to found something. I wanted to build something. I want to have free time, you know, my own time and control my destiny. I like that. I like having just my filmmaking. I like having an idea and then making it come to life. So like taking something from zero to one is what I really loved. The CEO role is not what I loved. It's just by nature of what happens, right? Like you start something, it starts to work. You're not going to hire somebody to be a CEO in the second year of the business. It doesn't really work. So you become the CEO, you start learning and then you start doing financial modeling, then you have people, a hundred people, you're, you're managing people and there's board meetings and there's raising money and you're trying to get all into this stuff you never even wanted to do. It was just part of what, yeah. You have to do and then I kind of after doing this and being this like Wheel for eight years, I realized I stopped myself. I said, number one, is this even what I want to do anymore? And the answer was no. And number two, am I the right guy to continue this wheel, to get us from whatever we're doing to a hundred million a year in sales, 200 million. And I felt like maybe I could do it, but am I the best person to do it? And I had somebody literally right next to me who I felt like was better than me. I felt like she could lead the team. You know, she's just better at being a CEO in my, in my mind. And that's the interesting thing. It's like, even she says, she's like, it's so rare for a founder to be so forthcoming and say that she's like, I've never seen that. Like most founders who are CEOs, they have this huge ego and they're like, even if they're not the right person, they pretend like the right person and they think the right person. And she's like, it's, it's rare for, for you to have this feeling, but I don't know. I just, that's how I feel. And I felt like. I had this opportunity to build something that is unique to me. I'll tell you about Swagspace very quickly. But yeah, I love to hear about Swagspace. Yeah, Swagspace. I've had this idea for eight years. I've had this idea at the same time that I was starting swag. com because they're very similar. They're so cool. And they're different. So with Swag. com, in our first year before we built technology, I was doing everything manually. Like, the whole industry is fragmented. It's back and forth emails, it's presentation decks, it's phone calls to closed sales, the customer wants a three color logo versus a two color. You have to do the calculation again for printing. It's very complicated. Then when you actually get the order in, You have to create the invoice manually. All these things, all of these things take time. You send the invoice over, you collect the money, you collect the sales tax, you remit the sales tax, and that's where the real work begins. Then you have to start placing the orders at the, the vendor level. So I have to buy blank t shirts from this place and send it to a screen printer. I have to buy this stuff from this place and to an embroiderer. I have to buy, You know, notebooks here and water bottles here and this here and that here. Like it's, it's like you're literally spending so much time to get the orders over the finish line. Then if you ever want to do kidded boxing for onboarding new hires, you have to get a 3PL or a warehouse to consolidate. Oh,

Jason Frazell: 34:18

sure.

Jeremy Parker: 34:18

So much manual effort. And I found myself in the first year of the business spending about 20 percent of my time on selling, right, which is actually what I wanted to do. And 80 percent of my time on the bullshit. Like I was just spending so much time on bullshit, wasting time, it was a nightmare. And I realized at that moment, what if we could streamline the 80 percent and give people back 80 percent of their life so they could focus 100 percent of their life on selling. That was my, just an idea. And so I started building swag. com. We started automating everything and started to really, really work. And then I started thinking after we got acquired by custom Inc. Custom Ink does 600, 700 million dollars a year in revenue, right? Right. They're doing a lot of buying power. And I have this amazing technology platform that I spent the last 8 years building at Swipe. com. What if I white labeled this technology and I gave it for free to anybody who wants to easily sell Swipe? Ah. Imagine you're a promo distributor. There's 20, 000 other guys who are like me in 2016 who are doing everything manually. For free upload their logos, their brand colors, press a button instantaneously have the best e commerce experience in the industry. Okay. We handle everything. They can send the link to their clients. Their clients can go through the checkout flow, buy stuff. Now, when they buy stuff all automated, it hits the customing back end and we become the de facto supplier for everything. So we just removed all the 80 percent and we give the seller a large chunk of the order. Then they got us thinking, well, they're screen printers. They also want to sell hard goods. They only sell tarot now, why don't they do it? There's event party planners. They sell swag, they have clients who want swag, but they can't offer it because they don't know how to do it. It's too complicated, but now they can. They got a whole new industry. Designers, imagine you're a branding agency and you're a designer who creates a logo for somebody. That client takes the logo and swag. Right? Why don't they buy it from the designer? Why doesn't the designer have their own swag platform where their clients, once they create the logo, their clients can just check out the designers work and they make a whole new revenue stream without doing anything. So, Swagspace is trying to become the universal swag platform for anyone who wants to sell swag and we just made it Literally a click of a button, and for free, frictionless, to have not only the front facing technology like a Shopify, but also the back end supply system, and it's completely connected. So that's kind of the big idea. Very cool. Like, I'm such a unique position that to do this, because I was an old school promo distributor. I saw the pain that everyone was currently in. I had that insight, I built swag. com, the technology, and I know the tech is really great. And we have the buying power of custom ink. So if this was ever going to happen, like if anyone ever had this idea to streamline the entire industry, it's a 24 billion industry, if you could ever streamline it, I think I'm honestly the right person to do it. So I felt like this is the right shot to my boss and he was all for it.

Jason Frazell: 37:06

Yeah, brilliant. That's so cool. Jeremy. I worked at a I worked at an e commerce startup in New York City for a while. So I understand a little bit about the space. They were actually acquired by Shopify. And I know that Shopify has, that's Shopify's whole thing, right? Just become like not the back end part of it, but just like become the de facto thing that just works and that you can obviously white label, do all the custom branding. Brilliant. I love that idea so much. Where are you all at in the cycle of having that, of having that as a real life product offering?

Jeremy Parker: 37:37

Yeah. So we just 15th. So we're two and a half months into it and it's a learning process. You know, it's, we have, we don't want to grow too fast. We don't have too many people because as I said in the early days, I want to learn what the right thing to build is like over the last two months of speaking to our beta users, I realized things that we need to build, like we need to make it even more white labeled. Like our URL is like Jenny promo dot swag dot space. Right? Because the name is Swagspace. Swag. space. For many people, that's fine because it looks like a subdomain, right? No one realizes they're leaving their site when they click on shop swag, gennypromo. com. It takes you to gennypromo. swag. space. But some people don't want that. So we're now launching at the end of this month. a white label website. So it's fully white labeled. We found people like custom domain. Yeah. Custom domain. We found that people in our industry and screen printers, they might even have a website. So they don't want to just have like a catalog that people go to. They want to have like a homepage, but they don't have any technical ability. To build the site or go to the Wix or do this. And that was a blocker. So we're building a templateable their own homepage, their own domain name, their own site. Like we're figuring out what is preventing people from doing it or what the challenges are. We found that we have some users who have like a hundred sales agents. And right now it's built for one login. It's like everyone has to use the same login, but that's not really ideal. For, for multiple users, you want to get everybody having their own login where they can keep track of their, of their sales and they can get commission payouts. So we're building a multi user login. Like when you launch something, you don't want to, you don't, you. You can't have everything that you would envision. Like we have a lot of ideas. You can't have everything because it takes too much time and you never launch anything. It's my issue with vouch. I just spend too much time building what I thought before getting feedback. So we launched probably 60 percent of where the vision is. And over the last few months, we've been trying to bridge that gap. And by the end of next month, we'll have like 80%. We have a lot more features, but. It's honestly working. We're getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sales already in the first two months. People are using it. It's easy. It's free. And the big vision, I mean, who knows if we'll get here. I mean, it's a lot of learning and it's going to, well, we'll see what happens. But if you get a thousand of the 23, 000 promo distributors, right, just a thousand of them. And they do an average of a million dollars in sales a year. So you just get a thousand of them doing it through, it's a billion dollars of revenue. So you don't need that many users. You get a hundred of them, it's 500 million. That's not even including getting designers and screen printers and party planners and entrepreneurs. Literally anybody who wants to start a business. Any of your listeners who are like in between things, who want to start a business. Literally anybody in seconds and for free could create the best swag site in the market. That's the beauty of it. One of our beta users has, I'm a friend of his, he, we were having coffee, we were talking about it. I was telling him this back in December about what I'm doing and I'm about to launch this new thing. And he's like, Hey Jeremy, I'm like in between jobs. Do you mind if I become a user? He's like, I've never sold swag. I've never, I'm not an event planner. I had a job. I was just an employee at a company. I said, yeah, why not? This actually be a great kind of case study. He's our number one seller in the first three months. He's done almost 80, 000 of sales in two months. He made 30, 000 for himself in profit. Without doing yeah, it's anybody. It could be the local mom. It could be the stay at home dad. It could be anybody. Imagine you want to sell to a local charity, your kid's school. Does that have to be your main career? You sell 20, 000 to your kid's school and your charity and local restaurants. You're making 30 percent on top line. I mean, that's, that adds a lot of extra money to people. So literally anyone could do it.

Jason Frazell: 41:07

Yeah, brilliant. Yeah. I'm just, I'm thinking for both for my business and some of the other folks that I know, nonprofits and such, where that makes sense where instead of going to, I'm just thinking about a nonprofit I'm involved with where they, they do things like sweatshirts and t shirts and they have like fundraising competition contest where. You know, certain levels, you get certain things. Why not just buy it from themselves is what I hear you could do. It's almost like buying it from yourself. You could. There is, there is, so

Jeremy Parker: 41:36

there is a caveat to it. We do have an application process that we don't approve everyone. So we want to make this really for people who are selling it. We don't want it, because otherwise, anyone can buy it from them. But it's, it's theoretically you can do it, and if you were going to sell it to that charity, you could give them a great deal. You could give them 30

Jason Frazell: 41:53

percent to make new money. What? Yeah, but a lot of non profits also people want their swag, like, oh, I like your logo. I'm, I'm at, Hey, like I win, I see this cool sweatshirt that I win because I raised a thousand dollars. But what if I wanted that for my kid and I didn't raise a thousand dollars and go, amazing, Jeremy, that's so, that's brilliant, brilliant. I'm, you've got me thinking over here. You could probably see me for the people listening. We could see me. I'm, I'm like, actually, like, I'm like, oh, how can I, I don't want to be a seller, but I do need to buy some things from my business. I'm like, Oh, dad, this, this makes so much sense. What a Jeremy, I just want to tell you as we wrap up here, what a cool journey. I'm really, I'm really amazed by I'm amazed by all of it. I think I'm most amazed by what you said, the fact that you're willing to give up the CEO role. That is not something that a lot of folks do that, at least that I know it happens. But the fact that you're willing to say there's somebody better than me really had to like, that's an ego check for sure. I know that would be a hard thing for me to say it many times. And I want to wrap with a question, you know, a more personal question for you. About your growth was like to learn, like people like you, what's next for you and like your executive leadership and what's next for you in terms of the skills you're working on as you've had a successful, you've had a successful, what I, it sounds like a very successful exit. You're now doing something again, that's really aligned to you, but like. I know that it's common for people to get so heads down in business that they, they forget to do the development for themselves. Like what's the, what's the big skill that you're working on right now?

Jeremy Parker: 43:28

Yeah. Well, it's not even a business skill because business skills, I find myself learning in the business often. I'm trying to get super healthy. Like just insane discipline. I found myself, I found myself, there was a during my entrepreneur, you know, being in the business and grinding so hard, I found myself, I got a little heavier over the years. and I found myself being like 210 pounds. Easy to do. Too too nappy. Easy to

Jason Frazell: 43:52

do!

Jeremy Parker: 43:53

So easy. And about two years ago, I started this like complete health kick, and really trying to get fit, and I lost nearly 30 pounds over the last two years. Congrats!

Jason Frazell: 44:01

That's awesome. And I

Jeremy Parker: 44:02

think just the mentality of waking up, And treating your health just like people treat your business is an important thing. Like, yeah, you're, if you're good at business and you're going every day and you're working really hard, you have, you have it in you to be also really fit. And a lot of people lose sight of that or they don't necessarily, they don't think they care. And you, you will care when you get older and you start feeling, you know, it's tired and you have young kids, you're going to feel it. And then people say, Oh, it's too hard. I don't have time. You can make time if you're a business owner, you're able to navigate time and schedule meetings and change things and prioritize. And for me, health has become like something I will never, like I will never not focus on. Like I'm always going to focus on health. Yeah, life.

Jason Frazell: 44:44

That's, that's so cool. Makes you a better leader. Totally. You're feeling more

Jeremy Parker: 44:49

energy, makes you better husband and father, everything. It just changes overall, makes you feel better.

Jason Frazell: 44:56

Yeah, picking up those picking up those young kids and you go, Oh, my back doesn't hurt when I do that. Yeah. Or like get on the floor with them. You're like, Oh, that's my my knees aren't popping. Not that I've ever had that happen, but it has happened to me as well. Yeah, that's so cool. Jeremy, I want to thank you so much for being on. This is an awesome conversation. Congrats on the success. I'm going to go check. I'm going to go. I am going to go snoop around and find your documentary. I'm not going to have you said it to me. I'm just going to go find it. I'm a big film guy as well. Cool. Congratulations on everything. Really excited to see what you do at Swagspace. That sounds like a great idea. And we'll have you back on again soon, catch up and hear what's up with you in the future. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks.

45:33

Thanks for listening to another episode of Talking to Cool People with Jason Frizzell. If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell your friends, follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and give us a shout out, or take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. If something from today's episode piqued your interest and you'd like to connect, email us at podcast at jasonfrizzell. com. We love hearing from our listeners because you're cool people too.