How large Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov is expanding the marketplace for grills

This is our 4th of July episode, so today, I’m talking with Dan Gertsacov. He’s the CEO of large Green Egg, the company that makes the celebrated large Green Egg grill. Talking with grill CEOs during the summertime has become a little tradition on Decoder, and it’s always fascinating how many of the same themes we talk about on Decoder with tech executives come up in the context of cooking in the backyard.

I mean, virtually “cooking food with fire” is 1 of the oldest innovations in human history, and you’ll hear Dan talk a lot about what a meaningful tradition that is to both him and the company. But Dan is besides a erstwhile Google executive who led expansion into abroad markets, and he has a deep past in both media and food service, so you’ll hear him immediately start talking about any very modern business issues: client acquisition, recurring gross streams, strategy pivots, and organization.

Dan has truly strong opinions about protecting the long-term relation people have with large Green Egg and what kinds of growth are acceptable to the brand. You’ll hear him talk a lot about the grill itself lasting a life — literally, he keeps track of erstwhile large Green Egg comes up in obituaries. That kind of reasoning means his approach to decision-making is beautiful different than what we usually hear about — and part of that is that large Green Egg’s future involves a very different kind of corporate structure.

Big Green Egg is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Dan is only the 3rd CEO the company has always had, and he’s only been in the function for a fewer months. The founder, Ed Fisher, ran the company for many, many years and is inactive around, in his 90s, as its owner, keeping an eye on how everything is going. Fisher’s plan is to take the company to what’s called a foundation model, which means it might not always feel the short-term pressures of a average company. That’s a complex process, and Dan and I got into it toward the end of the episode.

I’m telling you, these grilling episodes frequently have the most going on in them, and Dan and large Green Egg are no “eggception.” Happy 4th of July.

Okay, Dan Gertsacov, CEO of large Green Egg. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.

Dan Gertsacov, you are the CEO of large Green Egg. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you very much, Nilay. I appreciate the invitation.

I am very excited you’re here. It is remarkable how all company has the same problems, even erstwhile the product is grills — in your case, very large, very dense grills. You’ve had rather a journey yourself. You’re the fresh CEO of large Green Egg — you were the president before; you’re the fresh CEO now. You were at Google. You were at MTV. You were at 1 of the largest McDonald’s franchise operators that exists.

On top of all of that, large Green Egg is 50 years old this year. That’s rather a lot. I have a million questions here, but let’s just start at the very beginning: what is large Green Egg?

Big Green Egg is simply a ceramic grill, oven, and smoker. We usage all those terms due to the fact that it does all of those things. It’s a kamado cooker, which comes from Japan, originally. It started in the 1600s as a rice cooker and was traditionally made out of clay. In the 1970s, erstwhile our founder started importing any products from Japan, specifically, you’d gotta go way back in time to the pachinko machine, which is simply a nipponese pinball machine. He was importing these to the United States, and they loaded any of these clay rice cookers onto his burden coming from Japan, and he put 1 out front to effort to drive people into his store.

What is old is fresh again, so request generation, as we like to talk about it, driving ft traffic. That was 50 years ago, too, and they utilized food to do it. So, he said, “I want people to come in for the pinball machine. I’ll put any chicken wings out front on this clay cooker.” We talk about the request for startups to pivot — well, what he saw was people starting to say, “Hey, I like the pinball machines, but what about this strange-named cooker? How do I get 1 of those?”

And he pivoted. He said, “Well, look, I think the chance is truly in the kamado cooker.” A fewer years after that, he shifted the company from what was called the Pachinko home to become large Green Egg. And as all of us love to do marketplace investigation and hire all these firms and do all these things, the name large Green Egg came from doing any advertising. The paper guys said, “Hey, people don’t realize what ‘kamado cooker’ is. What should we call it?” And his full marketplace investigation was, “Well, it’s big. I like the colour green, and it looks like an egg. Let’s call it the large Green Egg.”

That’s 50 years of past in a fast soundbite, but it’s become a cult favorite, cult community over those past 50 years.

You’ve got it all right there. You’ve got client acquisition costs. You’ve got a recurring gross origin and the pinball machine. You’ve got a large strategy pivot. You have product marketplace fit. All right at the beginning.

The thing that strikes me about the company right now is that it seems like the product is the same. You are selling large Green Eggs to people. Have there been any meaningful major changes to that approach in the past 50 years?

There have been. I think it’s truly emerged as a lifestyle brand. That’s besides kind of a word du jour, but it’s truly actual in this regard. I’ll give you an example.

A couple of months ago, we got approached by Miller Lite. They said, “We want to do a large summertime push. We like to do stuff with barbecue. We kind of came up with this big green keg and could we adapt a large Green Egg to home a 4th keg of Miller Lite?” They did this as a one-off. They sold it. You could buy it. They put it up for sale reasoning they’ll sale 100 of them. We’ve had thousands of people effort to get one. And what that tells you about the brand is that it’s more than just a ceramic cooker. People want it as an asset to their backyards but besides as an asset to surviving outdoors and experiencing and hospitality and hosting.

That’s what this company’s truly about. If you look at it and all tech company — again, we’ll see all the analogies here: “Oh, we’re not in the taxi business. We’re in the ‘give you what you want’ business” and all those small spins on the mission — this is the case of this company. This company is about gathering friends, family, and neighbors to cook over live fire. That has been going on in human past for [more than] 400,000 years. We’re not changing anything. Gathering around a fire hasn’t been invented by large Green Egg. We created a product to be able to do that on, but humans have been doing that throughout history. We’ve just created an experience out of it. I think what’s changed is simply a lifestyle.

Roughly half of our business is the product itself, but the another half of the business is the accessories to the product. That’s the furniture it sits in. That’s the cookbooks and the spices and the rubs and all the auxiliary, which becomes recurring revenue, as you made mention to. Another part of that business that’s kind of its own small part is the charcoal. That’s the razors and razor blades. This company, large Green Egg — and you can go ask, in this case, Royal Oak or Kingsford, the folks that are the leaders of the charcoal [industry] — started with large Green Egg bringing in lump charcoal, which was a thing but truly not an industry.

The ceramics don’t let you to put lighter fluid on your charcoal; you do not want that in the ceramics. So, there is no lighter fluid. We don’t want any briquettes that have chemicals in them. It’s all natural lump charcoal. Lump charcoal is just virtually carbonized wood. It’s firewood that’s been almost burnt, and they halt the burning process, and it makes it easier not only to light but to keep for long periods of time. That full manufacture was truly created with the request for the large Green Egg. Now if you go into your grocery store or you look on Amazon anywhere, you can see a full manufacture around lump charcoal that truly started with this company 50 years ago.

I watched as the Royal Oak bags section in my local stores got bigger and bigger and bigger as the pandemic kind of went on, and now they stay the same size; they’ve not gotten smaller. You’re saying that’s all due to the fact that people started buying these kinds of cookers, and they wanted that? Or is it that the manufacture started, and people realized that was a superior product to the briquette?

I think both. Lump charcoal allows you to go both slow… and there’s a full section of population that wants to cook for — and myself included — overnight ribs and brisket and pork butts and that full industry, which is slow and then hot and fast, where I want to do a steak and I want to get it done real quick. What lump charcoal allows you to do is both of those things, and a large Green Egg or a kamado cooker allows you to do both those things. You can go from 200 degrees to do low and slow up to 1,000 degrees to do a pizza. That 60-second Napolitano pizza will come out of large Green Egg just like it would come out of your local Italian pizzeria. The diversity of the products that can come off the Egg is besides a reason why the product’s been so successful.

While there are specialist products and companies — and this didn’t be 10 years ago — now you go into any, go online, go into a large box, go into an ACE hardware or any of those folks, and what you’ll see is 4 pizza ovens and 3 smokers and 4 pellet grills. That didn’t be 10 years ago. It was a gas grill, a inexpensive charcoal grill, and a large Green Egg, which is simply a premium product. We have a life guarantee. That means your product should not break, and we believe so much that if it does break, we’ll replace it over the life of that product. And that’s 1 of the things that’s remained constant. So, to answer your first question about what’s changed, I think the lifestyle nature of it, the accessories that you can do with it. And look, we have an accessory where you can look at it on your app and control it and so forth.

We purposely don’t put that in the core product. I think that there is both an art and a discipline to this experience. 1 of the folks that I follow, like many others, [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman, and 1 of his comments recently, they asked not what are the jobs that are going to go distant with AI, but what are the jobs that are going to be created with AI? 1 of his responses was a curator of experiences. And I think large Green Egg is simply a curator of experiences outdoors for cooking for others. And I think the full life is already — and will be more so — connected. You’re going to want a space to disconnect so that you can reconnect with what’s important, and that’s your friends, your family, and your neighbors.

That’s food as a centerpiece of your memories of your childhood. That’s what this company is all about, and that’s what attracted me. And as you mentioned, I’ve had an eccentric career from tech into restaurants, nonprofit earlier in my career. I’ve been a social entrepreneur. I’ve done quite a few different things. What attracted me to this company is precisely that purpose, and that’s the legacy that I want to leave behind in my kids and their kids — doing work that is meaningful.

I do like the thought that Sam Altman is going to put us all out of work so we can spend more time reasoning about brisket. He should close that loop. I think quite a few people would change their minds. But anyway: you mentioned the product. The product is now ceramic; it started as clay in the pachinko days. You’ve changed that. I think that change happened early on. How much money does the company spend reasoning about the core product? Do you have ceramics engineers? Is that settled? Are you reasoning about finishes? Where does that investment go?

The communicative of the ceramics: what was happening is, as clay cookers were coming over from Japan, something like 20, 30 percent of them were breaking on wrap. It’s a long journey on a boat and so forth. And so the founder, Ed Fisher, based here in Atlanta, went to Georgia Tech — large engineering program — and started asking about another products or another things that we could be able to make this out of. And their consequence was, “Hey, the ceramic is not only a large product, but there’s quite a few ceramics production happening out of Mexico.” So he went down to Mexico in the early ’80s and started knocking on doors to find individual that could make a product that was superior to the way that it was being made with clay, have any of the same retention, heat retention practices, but be sturdier as a result.

That’s where we started our partnership in Mexico. So, while that started earlier on, 1 of the things in me coming on and having a product background, 1 of the projects I worked on at Google initially was Google’s launch into conventional tv advertising way back in the day erstwhile they just bought YouTube. Then, I moved on beginning up offices in Latin America and the global expansion of digital in kind of the early mid- to late-2000s, the focus on product I’ve tried to bring here. 1 of the first things I did as president and now CEO was reinvest in that product team. I did a survey to all of our loyal customers, Eggheads. I have over 5,000 responses to a question of: what would you do if you were president of the company? And what I heard from them was: double down on the resources you’re putting in product, not only for the core to grow but besides to give us more accessories at that same quality.

I’ve hired a guy — I was able to draw him out of California and decision him to Atlanta. He’s a life product designer. While he’s done any grill work, he’s besides worked on Microsoft Surface, and he has worked on golf clubs and worked on biotech, wearables, so a very broad thinker, which is precisely what this company needs. We do have ceramics, accessories and charcoal, so the product squad is our first investment.

We’re, right now, trying to hire a mechanical engineer that would be able to aid us think through all of these concepts. I’m hiring a behavioral scientist onto the team. If you’d say what would a behavioral scientist do for a grill company? That is precisely why we are hiring them. We’re trying to play chess while our competitors are playing checkers — and behavioral discipline and how you entertain and what you’re willing to pay for certain experiences, how crucial it is for you to be able to put… how to manage anxiety that comes from not knowing if it’s ready.

These are all leverage points, and that was stuff I got exposed to at Google. I sat down with Robert Cialdini, the prof. on influence erstwhile I was at Google. I became a student of his virtually and then brought him to McDonald’s, and I’ve since brought him to large Green Egg. So, these principles of applying from outside of our core manufacture is what I’m here to do in modernizing, if you will, this part of the industry. And it’s a core component of experience.

We have been active as a company in disputes in people’s wills of who’s going to get the Egg. We’ve been active in divorce proceedings. And clearly, it’s not about the money — we can go buy another one. It’s about the experiences that people relate to that product. It’s core to their childhoods, it’s core to their relationships, and that is simply a privileged place to be. That’s erstwhile brands transcend products and become part of people’s lives. It sounds trite to say, but this company has achieved it. A quirky name with a quirky product and a quirky egg look has become an essential part of the way that people relate to each another in their homes.

Well, 2 things. One, I want you to be careful due to the fact that the anxiety of, “Will I get this pork butt done in time for dinner?” I think is simply a core part of the human experience, and you don’t want to take that distant from besides many people.

That’s right. You put your finger on it, and you said 2 things I just want to choice up on. 1 is that I think there’s a mistake to make things almost besides easy. Now on the flip side, this Goldilocks moment, right? Not besides hot, not besides cold. It can’t be a pain in the butt. It’s got to be accessible. It can’t be that thing. And I do think that we have an chance there. I think quite a few people look at charcoal and be like, “I can’t start a fire. I’m not a core cooker. I don’t know how to do that.” I think we can make it easier. I don’t think we request to flip a button. I think that there is value in starting a fire. And so we’re working on being able to fulfill a brand promise that in 15 minutes, you can have this without getting your hands dirty.

It’s not in 5 minutes, it’s in 15. And if you’ve got a problem with waiting 15, let’s talk about your another problem. There’s points in your life that have got to slow down. It besides shouldn’t take an hour, right? On the flip side of this, it’s got to be… That’s why I think people get so vested in the gaming manufacture due to the fact that they go through all of this work to build themselves up, and that’s what brings them core into being part of a community of Minecraft or any of these games that you play out. And I think that happens in cooking.

I would like to make it more accessible, not only generationally but besides in gender. I don’t accept that men dominate the outside and women then cook in the inside. That’s complete BS. This thing can cook, roast, do grill, bake any kind of cooking you want to do, and women do that just as well as men do that. Or, that this is simply a 50-plus product due to the fact that that’s erstwhile you’ve got time to do it.

I want to bring it so on a Tuesday night… And this is simply a reformed restaurant guy who utilized to drive people. I was the guy that helped, at least in Latin America, order on your app, skip the line, pay convenience for restaurants. I don’t think it’s a good experience for people to be sitting in a drive-through line on a Tuesday night due to the fact that I think it’s besides hard to cook for their household at home. The home kitchen needs to evolve so that it’s better, cheaper, and healthier to cook for your friends and household and not accept that it’s got to be harder or more costly or more of a hassle to do that. I think besides many… and I did the deal with Latin American Uber Eats — I’ve been on that side of the equation. I think besides many people are ordering food for takeout and delivery. besides many people are in drive-throughs.

There is simply a minute for restaurants. You’re not going to meet a bigger foodie than I am. I love restaurants, but there are quite a few occasions where that should be at the home. I reject the thought that you should always order in the vacation dinner. That is simply a concept that we utilized to marketplace toward. We utilized to say, “Hey, choice up your Thanksgiving platter due to the fact that it’s a hassle to do it at home.” I reject that concept, and if you don’t believe what I believe, that’s fine. You just wouldn’t be part of this large Green Egg community. The large Green Egg community has a set of values, and 1 of them is entertaining for your friends and household and the work that goes into entertaining and hosting.

The another thing I was going to say, next to, “Don’t take distant besides much of the anxiety,” is: There are only 2 ways to make this simpler, right? You can control the air or you can control the fire. The fuel. And your competitors have different approaches to that. Traeger has an auger; they control the fuel. I have a smoker — it’s much cheaper due to the fact that I didn’t know how long we would live in a home that could support a smoker on the deck — but I have a Thermoworks billows, which is fundamentally a computer fan that goes into the bottom, and it just controls the air. Those are your choices, I think, to make the thing more stable, more convenient, simpler, more Tuesday-night-compatible.

Which 1 do you think is the appropriate 1 for large Green Egg? Are you going to sale a product like that that makes it more convenient? Which way do you think you would go?

I can add on a small bit more complexity. The space itself, core ceramics hold heat differently than metal. So there’s the vessel, there’s oxygen which you’ve been putting your finger on, both on the access to oxygen as well as the fan. There’s the charcoal that you usage — how you start the fire and how you accelerate the fire. Those are the components that you can play with to make a fire. We already have a product in the marketplace called the Egg Genius that is that fan that you described, and you can control that with your telephone and be able to turn it on. I want it at 250, add more oxygen if I request it, keep the oxygen if I don’t, and keep me at 250 for 18 hours.

I don’t want to gotta get up in the mediate of the night to check on it. We have an accessory like that. I think that those products are an accessory, so that you are not required to plug in your device, your core cooker unless you want to, request to. And that’s where I think I love… Jeremy [Andrus, Trager CEO] is simply a friend. I think Traeger is incredible for what they’ve done for the industry, but their product doesn’t work unless you plug it in, and that is not the way we’ve been cooking over live fire for 4,000 years. I don’t reject it, there’s a place for it, but I think you’re missing any of the core experience of lighting fire and creating real-life fire. I think carbonized wood is different than compressed sawdust, and I think you get a different flavor from it. I think the charcoal component adds flavor.

I have 11 grills, smokers, and pizza ovens at home. I’ve been studying… literally, this is what qualified me for the job. For 25 years, I’ve been studying how people put fire to food, virtually buying out-of-print books. I’ve gone to 43 places around the planet to learn how they do this art of putting fire to food. In that process, about 10 years ago, I got my Egg to complete part of my collection, and I have a place for all those different kinds of cookers. The only 1 I don’t have, and I may offend any of the audience or any of our partners out there, the only 1 I don’t have is simply a gas grill. I don’t think that there’s a function for gas. I don’t think it adds any flavor and the convenience that it brings to be able to press a button.

I would alternatively light a fire utilizing propane than light my food utilizing propane, and that’s what I think is simply a individual choice. I think that there’s a function for all of these spaces. This is simply a $25 billion manufacture globally, and there’s mediocre manufacture dynamics or metrics in this industry, but I’m going to take any data that McKinsey published. It’s a $25 billion industry. This should be a $250 billion industry, and the reason why is due to the fact that there are besides many occasions that are going to QSR, or fast casual, that should be happening in the home and should be happening outdoors. And so, I don’t think we’re going to divided up the pastry a small bit more with Traeger or Weber or Blackstone and be happy with that. We’ve got to grow the pastry and take occasions distant from places that they shouldn’t be. It’s yet this thought of a small bit of technology coming back into the kitchen in a affirmative way that doesn’t distract from the experience.

And I’m not just talking about cooking — I’m talking about curating what am I going to eat, how do I get the ingredients? How do I prep? I was an investor in this space erstwhile I left my last corporate gig, and I made about 10 or 15 investments in food tech. And so I’ve been around the hoop on the companies that are out there, and I believe that this is the next shift in how technology is going to make it a better human experience, but not make it easier faster so that food is fuel and I can forget about the experience. Most of your parties, not only in advanced school, college and now, they end in the kitchen for a reason. Your memories from childhood are about the meals that you had and the fight from your uncle who fell asleep at dinner and this another thing that happened and my grandmother’s recipes.

Food has been the anchor of civilization for hundreds of thousands of years, and I think in our angst to be able to focus on work and focus on another things, we’re losing that space for families, friends, and neighbors. And I usage that “neighbor” very intentionally. I’m happy to talk more about that due to the fact that there’s a loneliness epidemic that I think we could be… we may not be curing cancer, but I think we can aid cure loneliness.

You’re a fresh CEO. You’ve been there a minute as president. What’s your org illustration right now? How’s the company structured, and how do you want to change it now that you’re the CEO?

Our go-to marketplace is besides unique in the industry. We are the only major brand in the manufacture that has not decided to sale to large box [stores] or sale on Amazon or sale in the Costcos of the world. We have, over the last 50 years, worked with local distributors and local dealers. We have a partnership with Ace Hardware, but those are all local franchisees, and they’re local into your community. We believe a individual pulling out their telephone and saying, “This is what I cooked last weekend,” makes it a better client experience where in any of those another venues, you can throw a stone and not hit a salesperson, just by the nature of the way that they’ve designed their go-to market. So that’s number one. We don’t sale the product directly. Even if you buy it online, which we do, you can go buy a large Green Egg, we then send that order to a local dealer to fulfill.

I was a elder advisor at McKinsey on the future of food and restaurants. The first thing any of those large consultants will say is, “Oh, I know what to do. You cancel that guy, you take his margin, you reinvest it.” But we are then detrimental to the client experience due to the fact that this thing also… you want individual to come and tell you how to usage it and how to open it and get it out in your backyard. That’s what this experience is about.

But just to answer your question on how we’re designed, it’s first direction of the bus, then seats on the bus, then people in the seats. Direction of the bus is that we do not sale the product, and we don’t manufacture the product. We have partners for all 3 of those line segments that I mentioned: ceramics, accessories, and charcoal.

What we do do, and this is how I’ve designed the team, we do 3 things primarily. We plan the product, and I have a product team. They study to me directly. It’s core to what we do. We marketplace the product, and we are that community-driven brand, and it’s not just B2B companies that make communities of folks that love being part of this community. It’s besides B2C communities. That marketing has besides been revamped and reports to me. We have a 3rd group in the accountability section of working with our maker and working with our distributors and dealers. And I brought on the number 2 in command. That full squad reports to him. And so we’ve organized the company to truly focus on those 3 things, and we have finance and accounting and the typical back office functions that support the overall team. But we are a much bigger brand than we are a team.

We are very light and agile due to the fact that we have also, in a way, outsourced any of that work to manufacturing and the work to distributors and dealers — and we will proceed to evolve. The thing that’s most crucial — I think tech companies didn’t invent it, but they’ve definitely popularized it — is bringing the client into the center of that tripod. If I talk about the distributor, the dealer, the manufacturer, or the brand surrounding it, what I had to insert was, yeah, but we’re all revolving around the client due to the fact that now they do have more options, and they do… So we’re making changes. Before, from a client service standpoint, 1 of the things that… Believing in our own team, we’d say, look on the weekends, our team’s home resting. Well, the reality is on the weekends you may request aid with your cook. So we’re going to now extend off hours where we’ve got another squad that can take your telephone calls and emails on the weekends. So there’s any of these things that I think that tech companies can learn from more conventional companies and quite a few things that more conventional companies can teach tech companies.

You said it’s a tiny company. How many people is it?

We’re just coming up on 50 people.

And what is the gross that those 50 people generate?

It’s a privately held company, it’s been that way for 50 years. Our owner is 90 years old and inactive owns it, so I can’t talk specifics, but we have little than 1 percent share being the 3rd most recognized brand in the industry. I’ve been around quite a few fragmented industries, and that’s why I’m so, so optimistic about the growth ahead of the company. We are a well-known, loved brand. I wouldn’t be able to leave this episode without sharing with you 1 of the things that I have on my Google alerts is large Green Egg referenced in people’s obituaries. I track this for ourselves and any of our competitors. We are the only brand that you get 300 words to talk about Aunt Jane, and 3 of those words are that she loved to cook for her household and friends on the large Green Egg. That is rarefied air. People might love their Yeti, or they love Nike or Coca-Cola. They don’t mention it in their obituary. They don’t mention their Viking scope in their obituary. They don’t mention any of our competitors in their obituary. They mention large Green Egg due to the fact that we’ve kind of transcended that spot.

Now on the flip side, while we celebrate that, I besides request to make the shelter bigger to include a demographic, more folks that are a bit the younger side. I don’t want all of our core customers aging out or passing away, so we’ve got to make the shelter bigger. I think that first-time homeowner is going from an flat to their first home in their early 30s or whenever it may be. I think that’s where we want to be, in there. And we don’t get into that consideration set unless we’re in their heads erstwhile they’re in their 20s, and we’re an aspirational brand in that context.

So, to answer the broader question specifically, we are much smaller. Could I take a shortcut and skip over our distributors and dealers and show up on those shortcuts that any of our competitors have done or any of our competitors show up in both places, in this hybrid? We would, but then we would be ignoring the individual or the teams that brought us here. If the client demands us to grow and evolve, we will, but I’d alternatively give them that client experience that they value, that makes it a better experience of having a local individual they can go ask and engage individual from their community, from their neighborhood. That’s why we’ve defined this go-to market, and we’re going to stick with it.

You mentioned you’re 1 percent of the industry, which you said McKinsey is pegging it a $25 billion industry. Why not effort to get to 5 percent alternatively of set your goal at 10x the full industry?

I am referencing a longer-term goal. I do think, in the short term, we have an chance to grow our share with the products that we’ve got. But I don’t think this is, as I was describing, kind of a Coke-Pepsi battle, to be able to specify it. I think that we can grow our share by just being top of head with our core customers.

When I came on, I started asking a question about the women. We have any large female [members] of our influencer community, and we have large fans and not only people that are utilizing it, but people are making the decision, especially around all the large holidays, where Christmas or Father’s Day or any of those large holidays drive gifting, and there’s quite a few women active in that decision as well as cooking on those decisions.

But erstwhile I looked at the gloves, we had these high-heat gloves that you can usage so you don’t burn yourself. And the gloves were designed for bigger hands. They weren’t considered from a product plan that a female with smaller hands would usage it or a man with smaller hands would usage it. So I think that these are things that, from a product plan view, we request to incorporate into our set. And that’s why reinforcement and taking down any of those stereotypes… now I’m a man. I enjoy cooking outdoors. I’ve been active in food for my full life. That’s what drew me to this opportunity. We don’t gotta exclude men in order to include women. We don’t gotta exclude 55-plus to include 30-plus.

A brand model example I’ve utilized internally is Harley-Davidson. They figured out a way that both Hells Angels and football moms fit under the same umbrella due to the fact that they both believe in the open road. They can live different lives, but they believe in the open road, and we believe in gathering friends, family, and neighbors to cook over live fire.

You can be of any age, any demographic. We’re in 50 countries, so you can be in quite a few different places around the planet and share those same beliefs. That’s what we’re going to marketplace with on our why, the “why, how, what” conversation. This is truly the “why” of our brand. If we compete on the what or the how, it’s a race to the bottom. We can truly occupy rarefied air on that why, that aspirational brand value that the company’s been known for. That’s why people choose to include it in the obituary erstwhile they’re talking about a loved one.

I feel like the CEO of Weber is going to read this and send the most insane KPI email to his squad after this: “Increase obituary mentions.” I hope that happens, and if it does, delight let me know.

You’ve talked about this rather a bit in kind of different ways, your various frameworks I think about things, but I’ll ask you directly. It’s the Decoder question. You’ve had quite a few jobs. You’ve had quite a few roles. You’ve talked about quite a few experiences. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

My framework is both bottom-up and tops-down. And I’ll include a third, which I call the game of chess. Let me explain each one.

From bottom-up, it is listening. The first thing I did erstwhile I took on the president role, I interviewed 86 individuals all across the organization, from the guy lifting the forklift to the owner of the company and everybody in between, and I asked everyone the same 5 questions. I had a prof. in business school that virtually wrote the book, The First 90 Days. I asked the same 5 questions to all 86. That was a strategy decision-making piece. I do the same erstwhile we go into a meeting. So it’s a bottoms-up to hear and perceive from all those different perspectives and thus the importance of having diversity in all of its different forms in the room.

The tops-down comes from, nobody told Steve Jobs that the Walkman wasn’t working out and he needed to invest. There should be a imagination that, from my unique experiences in life, I can bring to the table and then make a decision. Now that’s the bottoms-up, tops-down is that first perceive and then decide among the alternatives. And the biggest question erstwhile I’m trying to make a decision is if the squad and I can both identify and mitigate the risks. There are risks and downsides to all decision. You can’t anticipate them all, but if you anticipate 2 or 3 of the biggest ones and then come up with a couple of plans to mitigate them, you can get yourself comfortable erstwhile you have incomplete information.

Let me talk about the chess game, which is simply a different analogy. erstwhile we’re onboarding, in finalist interviews — I’ve got interviews Friday, I request individual to support me in an admin role. I sent them yesterday an exercise that says, “Hey, I have this idea. How would you execute it? And secondly, here’s the good, bad, and ugly of working with Dan. Here’s what I’ve learned about myself. Here’s so forth. Tell me about what it’s like to work with you.” 1 of the things that I put in my good, bad, and the ugly or the way that I like to work is that I want them to be playing their game of chess and moving me around their chess board alternatively than them being my pawn and I’m playing the game due to the fact that I’m sitting up high.

If you are leading CRM on our team, CRM is owned by you, and if you request me to do something to remove an obstacle out of your way, push me to do it. And you don’t request to be leading CRM. You could be the analyst on CRM to be able to own that and feel like you’re playing. And that’s what I’ve done in my full career. I was reasoning through what I thought was my game of chess even though I was clearly not in the most visible position of leadership in the company. So, I effort to make that environment. I’m upfront with all individual in the organization that you’re playing a game of chess and you’re moving around folks, getting influence and leverage on your relation so you can get aid from the client service squad or the product squad or marketing so that you can accomplish your goals, which go up to the company goals, and I like that. I like that active, ambitious kind of growth.

Something I learned at McDonald’s, and this is working for a guy that’s got 2,400; he’s the largest franchisee in the planet of McDonald’s. He was a mentor of mine from erstwhile I started my nonprofit in Latin America right out of college, and then we developed a relation over the years, and he yet said, “Hey, I request any aid reasoning through digital for our couple 1000 McDonald’s in 20 countries.” His advice was: Occupy the space. We are a company that if it’s not defined who’s going to do it, you should put yourself in and occupy that space. Not run distant with it and leave everyone else behind, but occupy that space, and erstwhile management and leadership give you that permission, good things start to happen.

That’s how a franchisee of McDonald’s gets to 2,500 restaurants — due to the fact that he’s reasoning through scale and growth and bringing people on, who’ve been there for 25 years. It was an incredible experience. I didn’t think McDonald’s would have specified a shift on my way of reasoning as it did. I went from Google to being a FinTech CEO, venture-backed, 1 of the first ones at Silicon Valley invested in Latin America. And then I went to McDonald’s reasoning that this was an old-school company and I would be there for a year or 2 at the max. I ended up staying for 5 years and continually learned and reinvented myself and realized that the food manufacture is where my future would be, and I think I yet found my place to leave a legacy here at large Green Egg.

I want to talk about that Google experience and the McDonald’s experience together in kind of the next part of the puzzle here, which is Google is an advertising company. You led any aspects of Google’s advertising and tv and its growth in another markets. What it does is it goes and finds people with interests and targets them relentlessly until they convert into a purchase.

Big Green Egg markets itself at the advanced end. It’s 1 of the more luxury products in this market. People know it; you have this tremendous head share for the brand. It’s hard to convert, right? For the reasons you’ve said, you send people to local distributors, you have this highly hands-on approach to selling the product and supporting the product.

One of the biggest decisions I imagine you’re facing is that the McKinseys and the private equity companies of the planet are showing up at your door and saying, “Let’s just blow this out. Let’s just make all of the money.” How do you defy that pressure?

This is simply a tribute to the prior 2 CEOs who were in my seat, due to the fact that they got multiple calls a week to be able to do precisely that. And the company held out not for the fast buck or for the… even if you would say euphemistically, they could have all that capital to grow. They took the slower way to growth due to the fact that they believe the core values. This would be a pump and dump. We’ll grow, and virtually by the definition of private equity, they have LPs that request to get out over a period of time, and they only get out with liquidity. You could say in a strategical acquisition you’ll be around doing the same thing. They always say that in the courting period, very fewer times does that happen in fruition, and this company did not want to be 1 of those another companies, roadkill by the side.

And so they took a slower way to growth. They took a slower path. It’s been organic. There’s never been any external investors, truly very small debt on the business. This has been very much a business that’s truly grown out of people’s backyards. I wanted to make a connection to say, “How does Google’s business have anything to do with how Google converts and makes money to how large Green Egg does?” There is simply a minute at Google, erstwhile they turn information into advertising is how they make money. You’re searching for something, and the right information pops up, and due to the fact that it looks like information, you click on it and get a good experience, and that ad quality score and all that stuff, all SEM / SEO guy knows it’s great. What happens in our experience is that people are over for a Thanksgiving meal — they’re over in their backyard or their neighbour and they effort the food and they say, “That was incredible.”

This is the biggest word of mouth advertiser or brand a client acquisition that I’ve always seen. It’s always been. A couple of our competitors, as you’ve mentioned, are public, so we see how much they spend on advertising. We are virtually outspent 50:1, and yet, the same kind of affinity for the brand doesn’t be due to the fact that it is the people that are proselytizing the brand. My occupation in our marketing orientation right now, the playbook that we’re running, is to convene that cult, admit and reward them. I do not want to turn it into a transaction and affiliate codes and “how do I make an extra buck?” Customers see right through that.

This is what I’m asking about. The comparison for me to Google and McDonald’s and everything else is that Google makes it very easy to buy something, right? It determines your interest, it tracks you, it shows you an ad for a thing you’re curious in. The click-to-purchase is right there. It is almost all modern commerce. It’s just very easy. McDonald’s is famously very convenient and easy. You can ask Siri to order you McDonald’s at this point.

Big Green Egg is hard. Almost at all step, there’s another set of decisions you gotta make. Even, “I’m going to light a fire and wait 15 minutes” is another decision that you’re setting yourself up for. It’s more costly than a $200 Weber kettle or whatever. How do you defy the force to grow by compromising on the difficulty of the product? due to the fact that that, to me, is the most interesting part of the puzzle here.

The answer to your question is that we have a set of core values. If you look at any of this stuff — [Jim] Collins and [Jerry] Porras from Built to Last to Good to Great — the definition of core values is, something you’re willing to… it may be the reason why you neglect and yet most frequently it’s the reason why you succeed.

But if I look at your competitors and peculiarly the newer competitors that have exploded in popularity — I’ll choice Traeger and Blackstone just due to the fact that they were on the show. But there’s Ooni, right? You mentioned pizza respective times. Although Ooni is very difficult; my sister gets mad at her Ooni all the time.

But what they are selling is, you just gotta turn it on. You gotta plug in your Traeger, the Auger will spin, the pellets will go, and this thing is going to make a brisket perfect all time. With Blackstone, you can make a Smashburger at home. You’re not truly worried about a griddle. You just clean up, and you’re done. Ooni, again, they promise you a pizza; whether or not that’s easy — different story. But they are selling a peculiar kind of transaction. You pay money, you get convenience. You might get a viral TikTok or 2 out of it.

That isn’t rather where large Green Egg is. Do you see the force on that? Do you feel that pressure? Do you say that’s just not for us at all? Or is that: “Hey, we’ve got to marketplace to younger people. We have a fresh head of product. We request to make something that’s a small bit easier, a small bit little expensive, to grow that younger audience and bring them up the chain toward the more costly 1 erstwhile they get older”?

I mentioned that Goldilocks moment. I’m not besides hot, not besides cold. This is an example of it. I think our accessories are in a place to make it easier and make it more consistent and make it even more predictable and so forth. We have a function to play in that, and it exists, and we’re getting better at it. Now, on the flip side, if you look at this — it’s happening in the restaurant industry, it’s happening in retail, it’s happening in entertainment, and it’s happening in the grill manufacture — there’s a bifurcation between experience and convenience, and getting caught in the mediate is where quite a few the chains that are getting killed in restaurant manufacture or retailers are getting killed. It’s truly not that large of an experience, and it’s truly not that convenient. So, you get caught in the middle.

We are going to be on the side. If that’s a 1 in a 10, we are on the side of experience. And I will forego gross or that fast buck due to the fact that we are going to be the best experience and the best memory creator. That’s been our legacy to get from zero to 50 years, and it’ll be our legacy and my occupation to take it from 50 to 70 to 100 years to go forward. So while I don’t think we’re going to be a 1 where it’s like, “go start a fire in your backyard with a bunch of wood, we have accessories to make it easier,” I think we’re going to be on the side of experience with any accessories. So, erstwhile you choose, “You know what, it’s a Tuesday night, I got to get dinner on the table in 20 minutes,” you can get dinner on the table in 20 minutes.

Now if you say you request to do it in 5 minutes, we’re most likely not the best solution for that. And that’s something we’ve got to… you can’t have core values and be everything to everybody. So, our core values… and I don’t want it to be an hour. I don’t want it to be 30 minutes. I think that’s where most people jump. “Oh, that’s so much of a hassle.” I think we have a marketing communicative to tell that it’s actually not that large of a hassle. It’s not that large of a deal. We can proceed to evolve it, but it’s an experience, and I think people yearn for those experiences. Coming back to the Sam Altman comment, I think it’s going to become more crucial going forward.

One example, I looked at this erstwhile I was at McKinsey. If you look at major innovations in the kitchen industry, if you want to effort to find a product that’s gone over 80 or 90 percent adoption in the kitchen, the only product you can find looking back over the last 100 years is the microwave oven. The latest one, the last 100 years. And people say, “No, no, no. I love my air fryer, and I love my Vitamix, and I love…” all those are large products. no of them have gotten over 70, 80 percent. And the reason that the microwave oven was able to do that… In 1962, it launched. In 1982, it only had 10 percent household penetration. By 1992, it had 90 percent. And the way that it did it was hot dogs in 30 seconds. It went the convenience way to get penetration. Now what’s happened, and you’ve seen this from David Chang and any another folks say, “Wow, the microwave is actually a more sophisticated cooking device than people give it credit for.”

And due to the fact that they’ve never been able to… but people won’t… I met the executive cook for Ferrari North America, he’s an Italian. Right from Italy, a famed chef, he cooks for Ferrari; he makes his pasta in the microwave. And people think, “Oh my God, it’s pasta.”

You just got the executive cook of Ferrari excommunicated.

He does this at their corporate event. He tastes his pasta, and it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic! So, I think quite a few companies made quite a few money, proceed to make money for microwaves, but they’ve kind of painted themselves into a corner by taking a low margin, we’re going to make it easy and simple. There’s nobody talking about how much they love their microwave. That doesn’t show up in their obituary. This doesn’t exist.

And so I think part of that work that’s required, I think we can make it easier. I’m not saying that we gotta make you run a gauntlet to be able to cook for your friends and family. I think we can bring it down and make it easier, and that’s what our product squad is for. But there is going to be any time invested, and I think people are yearning for it. I think you are looking for a place to disconnect so that you can reconnect.

When you think about that increasing marketplace — it’s millennials, it’s women, it’s people who are just coming into homeownership. They might not have all the money for your high-end products. Are you thinking, “Okay, we’ve got to make fresh products for them that are simpler and easier”? Are you talking about expansion of the product line, or is it that accessory line that kind of uses tech to make the core experience simpler?

This is what we learned from McDonald’s in Latin America. McDonald’s in Latin America is an aspirational brand. Latin America has 1 of the highest street stall indexes in the world. Even surpassing, as a region, Asia, so like informal street food throughout Latin America is hugely… So, McDonald’s goes to a competitor with a guy or a female and their household beginning up the trunk of their car selling incredible food, and they don’t pay rent, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t pay anything. That full segment. So, what McDonald’s does do is make it an experience that’s large value for the money, and that’s different than making it cheap. I hear this 1 all the time; but the Weber co… I’m sorry, by name… lower, the charcoal kettle grill costs 200, 300 bucks. I can buy it at the grocery store. That’s right. And within 2 or 3 years, you’re going to be buying another one.

And due to the fact that it’s going to rust out, it’s not going to be protected from the elements, you are buying erstwhile you’re stepping up. This equivalent product for a large Green Egg could be 1,000 bucks or 1,200 bucks, but you’re buying 1 that you’re going to pass down to your kids. And so that is simply a decision that I think it’s up to marketing to tell those stories and to engage in that and to be able to create… Like I said, this is creating an inclusive brand tent, but it’s not for everybody. If you think it is simply a hassle to host friends and household and neighbors, there’s another products. Nobody cooks on a large Green Egg for themselves.

But erstwhile you look at the section of — let’s just choice millennials. They’re coming into homeownership at higher and higher rates now. It is the biggest generation that is coming into that kind of ownership. Famously, millennials destruct everything in their wake, right? There was communicative after communicative 10, 15 years ago erstwhile millennials were coming into the workforce.

Now they’re coming into homeownership, and they’re mostly choosing cities, or they’re choosing more walkable places to live. They’re not choosing large suburban houses, necessarily. Okay, well now you’ve got to sale a product for a deck on an apartment. Is that a different product than the large Green Egg you have today?

I think over a period of time, it will be. We could grow under the large Green Egg umbrella, things that are not an Egg. I think all of the things will be related to live fire, so you’ll inactive gotta contend with the smoke. I think there is technology that would be able to draft out the smoke or figure out a way of dispersing that and turning it vape or whatever you may do. So I think there’s an chance not only to grow in the outdoor marketplace but to yet go indoors. But what’s crucial is having that relation and trust with the client so that you can grow and that, erstwhile you talk about quality, 1 of our core values is to never settle on quality, and that is quality of our relationships, whether it’s our go-to market, quality of our products, quality of our communications. And if we’ve fallen down, it’s due to the fact that we didn’t hold ourselves to that bar and we brought ourselves back up to that core value.

I think millennials catch besides much… There’s quite a few positive… they’re values-driven. They want to believe in the why of the company. They want to have an impact. They’re asking questions about “Is this the life cycle of the product?” All of those things we can talk about. I think about our capital structure and the way that the future of our company will be the only 1 in our manufacture to kind of follow a Patagonia model of being able to be owned by a foundation for the future and preserve these core values as a consequence and the profits being reinvested on our purpose. What it allows us to do is have regenerative capital — capital that goes back into the business versus extractionary capital. That’s what I think, and — I’ve been part of it. I went to Harvard Business School. My classmates are in private equity and hedge funds. It’s all about extraction. And we’ve condoned that, and I think we request to be talking about regeneration.

I wrote my thesis in college on enlightened capitalism 25 years ago and that there’s a model of capitalism where you can do well by doing good. I feel I’m in a position 25 years later to execute on that plan and walk the talk. And that is not about being perfect. It’s about getting better. That’s on our environmental footprint, that’s on how we treat our employees. That’s how we treat our shareholders, all the different stakeholders. I do not profess we are or always will be perfect, but I can tell you we will have a plan to get better in our relationships with all those stakeholders.

Big Green Egg is interesting as a company. It’s privately held. There’s a foundation that will let it to keep going without the force of the public markets. How does that work?

Our founder turned 90 years old as the company turned 50 years old. Another communicative of starting a business erstwhile he was 40 years old and being a mid-career entrepreneur. And he inactive owns it; it’s inactive privately held. The plan for his property and his legacy is that his shares would pass to this foundation. There are quite a few different models and, luckily, quite a few different companies that we are looking to for inspiration. 1 of them is Newman’s Own, and Newman’s Own actually changed the taxation code to let for a foundation to own 100 percent of a company. Another model, which is simply a variant of it, is Patagonia, where they have both a trust and a foundation that the trust benefits.

Luckily, [Ed Fisher] is in large health. We are going to transition this in his life so that he can see the benefit of his legacy live on. And so the benefit of the profits, erstwhile you are supporting large Green Egg and the large Green Egg community, you’re supporting a intent that goes beyond a product. And that’s the legacy that we want to leave behind. So that’s how we’re going to be structured.

Currently, it’s the model we’re moving toward, and we’ve got all the intentions of being around for the next 50 years and 100 years beyond that due to the fact that people believe in what we believe: cooking for their friends, family, neighbors over live fire.

What’s the timeline on getting to the foundation model?

It’s not years nor weeks. We’re just right now in that process. This is the kind of thing you want to measurement twice and cut once. We are virtually talking to the folks that designed it at Patagonia and designed it at Newman’s Own and trying to learn the pros and cons of each model. If we were going to sale for the fast buck, that would’ve already happened. This is simply a situation where Ed Fisher and his foundation, The Ed Fisher Foundation, truly are mission-driven around making certain large Green Egg holds on to its unique way of doing business for generations to come.

When you think about how products are marketed online today, it’s fandom-based, it’s community-based, Reddit and TikTok and people talking about it. You’ve talked a lot about your customers evangelizing your own product or people just eating the food and thinking, “Okay, I’ve got to get 1 of these.”

Is that your channel? Are you reasoning about the communities that have formed around the product and how you request to service them directly? I’ll give you 1 example. Roger [Dahle] from Blackstone was on the show, and I asked him the same question. I was like, “Look: in the pandemic, I saw a million TikToks about Blackstones. I’m assuming this is your biggest channel.” And he was like, “No, no, it’s inactive tv ads.”

There’s a divided there between kind of what is perceived online and then the actual things that work. Do you have the same kind of split, or is it that online fandom, that community that’s inactive driving it?

The minute of fact where people do investigation and effort the food, then they look online, then they see it in a store, and so forth. I think most of our decisions and interest in the Egg happen before they go into the store, and then people want to go to talk to individual who’s an expert. And that’s why we’ve created this authentic experience in a local independent [seller] in your neighborhood. To get to the question around how we think about marketing, you asked me how I designed the broader team. Let me talk to you about how I designed the marketing team. The playbook here is: direction of the bus, seats of the bus, and people on the seats. This is simply a “seats on the bus” conversation.

First, you decide what you’re going to do in home and what you’re going to do outside the building. What are you going to turn to agencies for? What are you going to turn to tech tools for? Where do you buy, build, or partner? So, that’s the first filter on that. The second is the plan of the squad itself. Specifically on the marketing team, we call it our brand pyramid where we look at our different constituents, and each function that we’ve remapped is to manage 1 of those constituents.

As an example, a close friend of mine from… I just saw her 2 weeks ago, at my 20-year reunion, and we sat on a panel together, she’s the COO of Reddit. We have an enormously engaged Reddit community. And in a good way, we have not participated due to the fact that it’s organic and it’s not commercial. And in a bad way, we have not participated. We have not been learning and listening from that community and incorporating.

We just remapped a function that’s going to be liable for those social media channels. And they’re going to not be like, “Can I come up with a quippy thing to say on Twitter — or, sorry, X — but can I engage in this community? Can I curate this community?” This is simply a playbook out of B2B. That’s how quite a few B2B companies are set up. Like, who is the individual managing whatever accounting software, and how do I make communities of those people that manage accounting software? We’re doing that within, so there’s a community manager if you will, around any of our social channels. We have a community manager around our Egghead community, which is these millions of fans and being able to communicate straight with them. So, independent of how you bought it through a distributor or a dealer, you’d be able to have a direct communication with the brand.

I have a different community. Those trained salespeople that I referenced, we have 15,000 of them around the United States; 15,000 people have gone through training, participate, possibly have an Egg at home. They’re part of this community. We’re now communicating straight with them, so we’re not only getting from them, but we’re giving to them or pushing, but we’re pulling. That’s where I’m going to get quite a few the insights. They’re a lot closer to the customer. We have virtually designed our full squad around these communities of folks.

I think we are 1 of the first and inactive 1 of the most authentic cult-like brands that exist. And we needed to figure out a way to curate, if you will, that cult and be able to communicate and admit that cult. I don’t think that cult wants a discount. That cult wants recognition. They want to be part of something exclusive. They want to feel special. That’s why we’re hiring a behavioral scientist. Those are not transactional CPA acronyms. Those are things that are bigger and more crucial than what conventional marketers would do.

It sounds like that’s a truly large opportunity. You’ve got this devoted base of fans who usage the product in ways that possibly surprise you, that have feelings that possibly you can survey with a fresh behavioral scientist and you can truly spin that flywheel faster.

Another way of looking at it is that you have what I always think of as the Microsoft Excel problem, which is you have power users who anticipate the product to work precisely the way it’s going to work and to grow or to attract fresh users or to make it more accessible, you’re going to gotta piss them off somehow. You can see even a newer, simpler usage large Green Egg might piss off the power users.

Do you think about that challenge that your community right now looks and acts 1 way? It is mostly older, it’s mostly male, and you want to grow into younger people, and you want to get more women utilizing the product, and you might gotta make any concessions that irritate them.

It’s a real issue. It exists. I besides think that there is simply a presumption that there’s kind of mention to this case, back to [Jim] Collins on the tyranny of the “or” — that it’s got to be 1 or the other. I think there are examples where people make an “and” — they’re able to reenforce the core customer, and they’re able to grow the usage.

I think if you put it around a “what,” you’re always going to come back to: Does it have an auger? Does it not? How does the fan work? That’s the what. If you focus on the why and the beliefs… if what 32-year-old female who’s buying her first home has in common with the 58-year-old male that they both believe in entertaining their household and friends, they come together, and they can use… possibly the 58-year-old wants or doesn’t want the technology. possibly that 32-year-old wants or doesn’t want the accessory, but the core is around that belief.

I’ve gotten quite a few feedback saying, “Yeah, but you’re increasing the manufacture for another people in ceramic cookers, or you’re increasing the manufacture for another people that are in this.” And this is where the 10x of the manufacture versus the 5x of our share. I’m fine with doing that. I think that there are more people that gotta realize and truly discover this isn’t a teaching, but we as a species have acted like this for thousands of years. We’ve only acted the way that we think is average for 2 or 3 generations, so let’s not get lost in the sands of time that everything is take out and easy and convenience and millennials only care about this. That’s the easy luck cookie summary of what’s going on.

There’s a broader thing. Look, erstwhile the radio came out, people said, “Oh my god, it’s the end of newspapers.” And erstwhile the tv came out… and look, all those things have shifted in media, clearly, but they inactive all exist. And that’s only entertainment! Sorry, I get a small nerdy here, but the Maslow pyramid — at the base of it is being able to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack all day or your life. You can only do it in 2 places. You either do it inside the home, prepare food inside, or prepare food outside. That’s it. You get to choose. In the United States, 60 percent of the occasions are inside the home, and it’s 40 percent of your budget. And then 40 percent and 60 percent for outside the home. I think that we can make it easier, healthier, and better to inside and outdoors of the home but inside the home environment to make that experience better.

That’s my set of beliefs. Now I’m the first individual to go to a restaurant for that peculiar occasion or I’m in a city or I’m traveling. Clearly, there are occasions and restaurants will proceed to dominate, but there are certain occasions that the outdoor kitchen needs to claim due to the fact that food does taste better outside, I’ll tell you that. And the home itself needs to evolve and adapt to make it easier for people to feed their friends, family, and neighbors.

A lot of the companies who come on the show, that I think of as hardware companies, I ask them about their investment in software. And they say something along the lines of, “It’s dwarfing our investment in the hardware.”

You have a Wi-Fi product, right? The fan for the egg. It has Wi-Fi. You most likely gotta call any developers to make that thing. You’ve talked about another kinds of tech that you might develop. Is that a tension there? Do you see yourself saying, “Oh boy, we’re going to gotta start maintaining the software for our temperature controller over time,” and that will just be an endless cost with no gross associated with it?

Now here comes back to the typical build, buy, or partner. And we go, and the decisions we’ve made to date — and I think they’re the right ones — is to partner. We have a third-party developer who’s liable for that Wi-Fi app. We have a 3rd organization for that digital thermometer, that wireless thermometer. I think that those things are changing so quickly. We will request to proceed to analyse it as it… build, buy, or partner. What is the best way—

But even that’s a cost, right? So you’ve got an app.

iOS 18 just came out, and now there’s a bunch of AI in the iPhone, and you request to update the app intents of your app, so you can just talk to Siri and tell it to control… individual has to go do that work and you got to pay for it, whether that individual works for you or works for individual else. Is that a cost that you’re reasoning about recouping in terms of subscription fees? Is that just built into the business? How are you organizing that?

I think that there is simply a model where people… look, what people are willing to pay for and the most scalable of these recurring revenues is content, access. I think that there is simply a model down the road. I don’t think we’re there in the short term. Down the road where there’s access to content that you would be able to… where software bridges into the hardware and you make it easier. any of the investments I made in my food tech investment career were along those lines. I think that those are going to happen in commercial instances first before they happen in residential. I think we’re 5 or 10 years distant from that in a residential, so the answer is I am not betting on that in the short word for the company.

We made mention to the size of the company. You go down this route, your call center on a shift may be bigger than our full company, so this is where you gotta make tradeoffs. I was talking about the seats on the bus — what you’re willing to outsource or what you want to do in-house. I believe that we request to own the design, the marketing. Our purpose-driven efforts, which is what I was describing, makes us different, and we request to own that accountability of the channel, both backward to our manufacturers and forward to distributors and dealers.

To vertically integrate more than that, we don’t request to tip over the apple cart in order to grow. I do think that this is simply a 50-year playbook. Literally, you don’t get enough. due to equity structures, you’re not allowed to think over a longer period of time. I can tell you this thought of being owned by a foundation and then a regenerative capital, that is something quite a few our competitors are willing to do. quite a few the things to copy us, very fewer will follow us down that path, and that is something that makes us not only unique but is core to the value strategy of the company.

I think having a longer-term view to be able to make decisions that are in the best interest of the community of folks that believe what we believe is our core competitive advantage. To answer your question, technology is an enabler of the experience but is not the experience. You have quite a few another places in your life — you searching on Google and figuring out, send me that book that I ordered, or whatever it may be — where convenience and technology trump. This is the place in your life you’re going to want to go to be around fire again, to be around an experience. It takes a small bit more. We can’t overstep it, but it takes a small bit more time. And for the folks that are like, “I don’t want to do that; that’s besides much work,” you are not going to be part of this community.

I have area on the bus for everybody, but you’ve got to decide to come on the bus. And if you don’t, we’re not the brand for you. You want to replace your product all 2 years? Go buy that product. We are not that product. Yeah, we’re more expensive. You’re making a life investment. We’ll stand by that for a lifetime, but we are not going to go to the lowest common denominator due to the fact that we have an investor group that needs to get out the LPs. We have a quarterly earnings call, and we’re down. We have a strategical acquirer that this is no longer their priority. We don’t gotta make those short-term decisions. And I respect all the folks in our industry. I’m in it as a passionate lover of the space. I survey this as my hobby, but we do not… I think quite a few them have been forced to make short-term decisions that are putting the long-term client experience at risk.

You mentioned recurring revenue. We’ve talked about it a bunch of times, Traeger sells pellets, Blackstone, I think Roger told me they sale quite a few accessories like spatulas and stuff, due to the fact that you can buy all fresh stuff for a griddle like that. Weber, you just got to buy a fresh 1 all 3 years. What’s your recurring revenue? Is your growth plan, “We’re going to sale more grills to more people,” or, “We’re going to sale more stuff to existing grill owners?”

Both. We do have space to grow on the Eggs because, given the nature of folks that feel like, “It’s quite a few work, I can’t do it,” I think we can… like I said, we can recoup quite a few that group. I don’t think we’ll get everybody, but there’s quite a few that group that we can get back. And so I think there is an chance to grow in the ceramics. From a recurring gross standpoint, we believe in fuel and accessories. So you’re not buying fresh furniture, but we have a mod strategy where you add on where you home it, and then you add on another table, and you add on another. We do have quite a few folks that buy a larger grill, and then they want to buy a smaller one. We have 7 sizes.

This would be absolutely the mistake that I would make.

I got stopped in the airport. I put this up on my LinkedIn. The stewardess on the plane, she’s got 4 Eggs at home. And the full flight from South Africa to Atlanta was about what she likes to cook and pictures of what she did for her family. This is an experience that you don’t get from any other… even a rabid fan base, you don’t get the same. To answer your question, our recurring revenue, there are spices and rubs and the spatula piece. There is charcoal, which is simply a large piece. Our charcoal is at a quality that’s consistent with the quality of our ceramics. And I think that is an chance to grow.

I think that the bigger chance is to put more people under the umbrella, be a more inclusive brand, be able to get distant from this tyranny of the “or,” of either it’s hard and old-school or it’s easy and new. I think that that’s a tradeoff that I’m unwilling to accept, and I think that is what’s going to make us — either I’ll be out of a occupation in a couple years, or we’ll be truly successful, but I’m going to stick with that plan.

You’re never going to lock in DRM charcoal. I see this from another companies, where they’re like, “We have a proprietary fuel that only works in ours.” We had Keurig famously DRM the pods, right? You don’t see that coming?

Not in our plan. I think we should have a quality of product, and it can be a large client experience akin to… But you could put firewood on a large Green Egg. You could put charcoal on a large Green Egg. You can put natural briquettes on a large Green Egg. They’re just going to make more ash, but that’s the nature of briquettes. But you’re not going to put artificial briquettes on a large Green Egg. You’re not going to put lighter fluid on a large Green Egg. All you’re going to do is harm your Egg, and you’re going to harm your food. Who wants that in their food?

There’s a large quote from Danny Meyer, the eternal restaurateur I got to know a small bit over the years. Danny says, “The customers aren’t always right — they just request to feel heard.” So, we are proceeding they may not be right. “Oh, I just want charcoal and light a fire. That’s what I want.” We hear you, but this isn’t the place for it. I don’t think we request to lower the standard to let more people in. I think we’ve got to make it more aspirational to be part of the standard that we’re at.

Dan, thank you so much for giving us all this time. Happy 4th of July.

Happy 4th of July to you as well! I hope you’re all cooking on whatever apparatus you have in your backyard, but I really hope it’s a large Green Egg.