How We Did $8 Million in Sales with Zero Employees or Investors

We did two specific things well, driving this early outcome and our ultimate acquisition with just four employees.

In 2013 I embarked on an adventure with my cousin, Matt Campbell, to start a consumer product company. It was based on an idea he had while choking down a warm beer from a red party cup on a hot summer day. That idea, BottleKeeper, became a company that grew to generate over $8 million in its third year, without employees, investors, or debt.

In hindsight, there are two things we did extremely well that drove these results, as well as BottleKeeper’s subsequent growth into tens of millions in revenue. Ultimately, these results also landed an 8-figure acquisition with just four employees.

#1: We had strict guardrails

My prior experience was in the medical device world, in a company of 80 people in multiple states, with delivery vehicles and warehouses full of equipment. It was hard to manage and almost impossible to get away from. In 2013, I sold my position in a technology company we spun off from the medical device company, and promptly vowed to never create a heavy company again.

As a result, I was adamant that we build BottleKeeper in a way that could scale without needing employees. This was a strict guardrail and it set the foundation for the entire life of the company.

We approached it like this: If something came up in the business that we could only do or solve by hiring someone, we didn’t do it. There was no argument or real discussion, we just said no and kept moving.

For example: We had a lot of early interest from retail distribution partners, but we couldn’t figure out how to automate the process, so we politely said no. Actually, we said, “join our wait list.”

What this meant for the business is that we were able to focus on doing one thing well: selling direct-to-consumer on our own website, instead of succumbing to shiny object syndrome by saying yes to too much.

Think of it like this: The amount of time and focus you have is like a pie. The maximum available amount is 100 percent. If you divide that pie into four slices, you can only allocate 25 percent of your time and bandwidth to each individual slice. The result is that you’re unlikely to do any of them very well.

#2: We knew how to be profitable

Based on our “no employees” guardrail, I had to learn how to effectively operate every consumer-facing position in the company. This included building and managing the website, writing all the copy, taking the product photos and shooting the videos, managing paid media, email, and customer acquisition channels, and literally everything else you can think of outside of manufacturing and finances, which Matt was responsible for.

The result of having to do this, while also wearing the CEO hat, is that I was able to see how the parts interacted with each other. I knew the information and data required to answer important customer acquisition and advertising questions. But that’s only half of the equation.

Fortunately, we also had a deep understanding of the company’s operational finances due to Matt’s MBA and our combined prior business experiences. This is the other half of the equation.

An early problem we focused on was that we didn’t know the bottom-line performance results until we received our profit and loss (P&L) statement sometime the following month. This didn’t work. So we used math and spreadsheets to create internal systems that provided a real-time view into how the business was performing, allowing us to answer important ad spend, revenue, and net profitability questions as they were happening. This allowed us to plan and project with significantly greater accuracy, as well as course correct as things were unfolding.

Having no employees also meant that the company wasn’t weighed down with payroll, which is one of the biggest mistakes made by early-stage businesses. Instead, the combination of real-time profitability data, which forms the basis of my newest adventure into SaaS, Pentane, and low fixed costs meant that the company was highly profitable.

Operating profitably allowed us to reinvest heavily into BottleKeeper to grow and build value within the company and for our customers. This ultimately led to the company’s private equity acquisition in 2021 as an 8-figure revenue business with a portfolio of more than 40 patents, just four employees, and zero investors.

This article was originally featured at Inc.com and written by me.