E537: How Going Into Retail Killed John Terry's Business

John Terry joins Mike in today's episode as a follow up from his Under the Hood Episode 417 where he talks about how COVID & the political climate affected his business, and how going into retail ultimately killed his consumer packaged goods (CPG) business.   Today's episode is one that left me absolutely speechless during recording.    It's a hard topic to talk about when listing down a bunch of mistakes, but it's infinitely more difficult to talk about when the list of mistakes eventually lead to the death of your business.    Nevertheless, I commend John for coming on today to talk about how his business ended up this way, the "trap" of going into retail, and advice for those looking to expand into selling in any big box retailer.    Here's some timestamps to help you along:  0:00 - Introduction  2:47 - Podcast Start  3:03 - Under the Hood Overview 4:31 - Meeting with Walmart 7:16 - The Second Mistake  7:48 - Kroger Reaching Out  9:13 - Ordering Inventory for Retail  11:34 - Kroger Privacy Around Logistics 12:35 - Kroger's Costs  13:41 - Backing out from Kroger 14:42 - First Warning  15:10 - Skyrocketing costs 18:27 - Poor performance in Walmart 20:24 - The goal moving forward 21:36 - Buying back inventory from Walmart  22:25 - Why the product failed in retail 25:39 - Where to go from here 28:00 - Mike's advice 32:02 - John's advice to entrepreneurs  37:21 - John's public adjusting business    John, I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast and sharing all of the painful things you went through. I hope that someone listens to the episode and knows not to get into retail for the prestige of it.    We hope today’s episode was useful to you. If you want to get in touch with John, you can find him at Linkedin or you can check out his company, Crossroads Insurance Recovery. If you want to check out John's previous episode, click here.   If you have any questions or any topics you’d like us to discuss on the podcast, you can now email us directly at [email protected]! Also, we would really appreciate it if you would leave us a review on iTunes.    Thanks for listening!