How can we transform adversity into purpose?

Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.

Mike Yewdell is one of the founders of BEAM (which stands for “Be Amazing”). BEAM makes its own “farm to shaker” direct-to-consumer nutrition supplements for fitness enthusiasts.

There’s a heck of a story behind the brand. In the summer of 2017, at 27 years old (while he was in the trenches of spinning up a company called Campus Protein), Mike developed a cough. He was “the healthiest [he had] ever been” and “in the best shape of [his] life, but I had a dry cough.” So, as an entrepreneur working hard on building his businesses, he overlooked it. After a while, it became impossible to ignore. He ended up in the emergency room as three tumors were discovered in his chest. He was diagnosed with rare cancer, in chemo within a week after that, and fighting for his life.

The battle ended up being 18 months long, with three failed chemos, two failed clinical trials, and then a stem cell transplant. The acronym for the chemotherapy that ended up putting Mike in remission was BEAM — so that’s where the name “BEAM” comes from.

“I was trying to keep my quality of life as high as possible,” he says, “and so I was taking extremely clean supplements and still trying to go to the gym when I felt good enough. That’s the DNA in the brand BEAM.”

Catch the full episode in the player below, or on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… pretty much wherever you like to listen.

Key Takeaways

Think Outside Yourself

“I believe you are given talents or skills so you can overcome challenges — because, otherwise, what’s the point?,” Mike muses. “I was always an incredibly positive person, but I didn’t realize my impact on others. When I realized that being positive through this battle and being the type of person that I was, actually made me want to do it more. I was feeding off of other people’s reactions to me and interactions with me to make me the person that I was.

I think it is really important to be positive for yourself, but when you are battling, what people don’t talk about is you’re pinned in a corner. It is flight or fight. You’re worried more about your loved ones and your friends, so being positive for them and showing them that you’re okay, actually allows you to be a little bit stronger and a little bit more focused on getting through to that end goal: surviving, and getting into remission.”

Get The Direction of the Employee Value Equation Right

“When you’re an entrepreneur, you want to have your hand in everything,” Mike says. “Delegation and trust in your product, whatever your product may be or even if it is a service, it is really tough to give up — but I gave it up.

I learned a lot of lessons. It wasn’t executed perfectly, but it actually made me a better manager. The trust that I have with my employees now is incredible, because I’m now a firm believer in letting your employees add value and not the other way around.

It is really important to me that everything that I have been through made me better: on a business front, on a personal front, and on a philanthropic front.

Life doesn’t happen to you. It happens to you. It is really important for me to remember that.”

Approach Influencers Efficiently

Influencers drive a lot of the cowboy-style supplement industry. How does BEAM set itself up for success in this weird, wild market? At one point, BEAM had reached out to influencers that had been successful on one platform and tried to “copy-paste” that success elsewhere.

“I thought if somebody is good on TikTok, they would be good on Instagram, and vice versa,” Mike laughs. “They could sell. But the key is you have to understand what makes somebody good at TikTok. Will another kind of follower listen to them? Are they just churning out content creation or is it educational? TikTok is one of our highest-grossing channels now. But for the first six months, we lost so much money on TikTok influencers.”

The other factor: is true buy-in.

“I don’t want anybody in my ecosystem to just do it for the money,” Mike says. “The first thing that we do with everything with BEAM is make sure they have tried the product. We don’t start a conversation until they say they absolutely love the product and will use it every day. Only then do we ask what they want in a partnership? We hear what they want. We hear whether it is compensation, whether it is support, or help building a brand. The influencer relationship is a partnership. It’s not a one-way street.

Once we hear what they want — the compensation number, whether it’s just commission, commission plus salary, free product, who knows — we then put together a budget or a plan. With influencer marketing, there are so many terms. The term “budge” really just refers to how much we want to spend, and we put that together for each influencer individually.

I can say that a lot of conversations start but not a lot of conversations end with them signing because it’s a complicated process, and it’s a long-term deal that’s really important to us and to them. Building a strong influencer program is a brick-by-brick process. It is definitely not short-term, quick money.”