Revenue Is Loud But Regret Is Quiet and Only One of Them Shows Up on Your P and L
There is a number on your profit and loss statement that you can point to. You can screenshot it. You can say it out loud at dinner and watch people lean in. It is measurable, it is public, and it feels like proof.
There is no line item for the birthday you watched through a text message.
That gap is the whole problem, and it is the thing Cody Branham has spent the last two years trying to close. Cody is a third party logistics founder who went from academic probation at 19 to a business that has more than quadrupled two years running. He is also a guy who spent one holiday season working from five in the morning until one the next morning, going home only to sleep and shower.
His line for it is the sharpest thing said on this podcast so far.
“Revenue is loud, but regret is quiet. It doesn’t show up on a P and L.”
Why the Loud Number Wins by Default
Here is the uncomfortable mechanic underneath that quote. Revenue does not just get measured. It gets celebrated. Somebody asks how the business is going, you give them a number, and the room reacts. That reaction is a reward, and rewarded behavior repeats.
Regret has no such feedback loop. Nobody congratulates you on the daycare event you attended. Nobody notices the weekend you did not work. The absence of a cost is invisible, so the cost of avoiding it never registers.
Cody described exactly this moment. People were telling him what he had built was impressive, and while they were saying it, he was running his own private tally. His wife was not as happy as she could be. His health had slipped. He was leaving her, in his words, high and dry to go keep scaling.
Two ledgers. Only one of them gets audited.
The Chase Does Not End When You Win It
The instinct is to assume this resolves itself once you hit the number. It does not.
Cody’s chase started as something almost noble. He did not have a degree. He was outperforming people who did. The chip on his shoulder was fuel, and it worked. It carried him through injection molding logistics in Anderson, distribution center operations at Whirlpool covering Maine to Virginia, and a supply chain leadership role at a snack brand on a hockey stick trajectory.
Then he hit a million dollars in revenue in his first year on his own. A kid from Pendleton who grew up eating free lunches. By his own framing, that was not supposed to happen.
And then the next year was four and a half to five times that. And this year will be roughly double again.
The chase did not resolve. It relocated. That is the part most business owners get wrong: they treat the number as a finish line, when in practice it is a treadmill that only changes speed.
The Cost You Actually Pay Is Time
Cody’s reframe is worth stealing wholesale. The cost of growth is rarely money. It is time, and time is always taken from a person.
That is not an abstraction. Every hour that goes into the warehouse comes out of a specific relationship with a specific name attached to it. Maggie. Jameson. His own body.
This is the entire premise of this show, arriving from a completely different direction than a financial plan usually does. You cannot make more time. You can only decide who gets it. Cody’s version of the same idea, learned while he was running a full time job and a startup simultaneously, was this: every day you have one hundred percent to give, and you have to choose how to allocate it.
Most business owners never make that allocation consciously. They let urgency make it for them, and urgency always votes for the business.
The Trinity Test
When Cody rebuilt his definition of winning after a divorce and a move back to Indiana, he landed on three things he called the trinity. Faith. A healthy family. Financial security for that family.
Notice what is missing. There is no revenue target in there. Security is on the list, and security is a floor, not a ceiling. Once you have cleared the floor, every additional dollar has to justify itself against the other two categories, and most of them cannot.
That is a genuinely useful filter, and it is a hard one. It means the next big client is not automatically a yes. It means a good quarter does not automatically earn a bigger target. It means the question stops being how much can I make and starts being what is this dollar for.
Most business owners have never actually written the floor number down. Which is why every additional dollar gets treated as self evidently good, and why there is never a natural moment to stop.
The Password Trick
The most practical thing in this entire conversation is also the smallest.
Cody’s son Jameson was born on November 22nd, right before the single busiest shipping day of the year for a fulfillment operation. That timing could easily have been a source of resentment. Instead, Cody made his son’s birthday the basis of his passwords.
Which means several times a day, in the middle of the busiest stretch of his professional year, he types a reminder that his actual busiest day has nothing to do with the warehouse.
That is a systems answer to a values problem, and it is the kind of thing you would expect from a logistics guy. He did not rely on remembering. He built the reminder into the workflow.
This matters more than it sounds. Every intention you have about your family currently depends on you recalling it at the exact moment you are least likely to, which is when you are busiest and most under pressure. Willpower is the worst possible mechanism for that job.
His phrasing of what the reminder tells him is the part worth writing down. Your busiest day of the year has nothing to do with the warehouse.
The Mistake Hiding Inside All of This
Here is the trap, and Cody named it himself. He is a relentlessly efficient person. Black and white. Everything is inputs and outputs. He admitted his wife gets frustrated with it, and that he sometimes has to catch himself sounding like a machine mid conversation.
So the obvious move would be to optimize his family life the same way he optimizes a distribution network.
That does not work, and therapy is where he learned why. The concept was radical acceptance. Sometimes life is just hard and the correct response is to sit in it, not to re engineer it. He spent most of his life avoiding uncomfortable feelings by daydreaming about better ones, which meant he never actually processed anything.
If you are the kind of operator who solves problems for a living, this is the version of the lesson that will actually cost you something to learn.
What to Do With This
Three moves, in order of difficulty.
Run the quiet ledger. For one week, write down what the business took from you that no report captures. Not hours. Specific missed moments, with names.
Define your floor. What is the number where security is genuinely handled? Write it down. Everything above it now has to compete on merit.
Build one reminder into a system you cannot avoid. A password. A recurring calendar block that is not negotiable. Something that interrupts you without requiring you to remember.
Cody is roughly thirty years old, has a business that has scaled beyond anything he planned for, and will tell you flatly that he is at maybe ten percent of where he wants to be on balance. That honesty is the point. Nobody arrives at this. You just keep choosing.
Revenue will keep announcing itself. Regret will not say a word until you take inventory.
If any of this landed and you want a real conversation about what your money is actually buying you, the Performance Financial team is here for it. Link is in the show notes.
Transcript:
Cody: There’s one Elon Musk, right? Like, I don’t want to be Elon Musk. That sounds like a tortured life to me. I missed out on too many milestones. I saw too many cool things happen with my son from a text message from my wife. I just can’t continue to do things this way.
I get this phone call and I answer it. About to board a flight home, this guy identifies himself as an agent from whatever agency and says, we have a problem.
I always come back to that saying of, revenue is loud, but regret’s quiet. It doesn’t show up on a P and L.
Sean: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Invest Your Time Wisely podcast. I’m Sean Kirby, and today I’m joined by one of my longtime old school baseball buddies. I went and I tracked this down. So I’m joined today by Cody Branham.
Cody and I have known each other literally since we were boys. And then when the first episode of the Invest Your Time Wisely podcast came out a couple of weeks ago, Cody actually reached out to me, said, hey, I love it. We went, we grabbed beers in the middle of the day, we caught up, and I got to hear more about his story.
After hearing about how he has really grown both personally and professionally, I wanted to hear more about how he is trying to invest his time wisely as he’s growing his family. And I think you guys can learn a lot from that.
So Cody, appreciate you, brother. It’s bright and early.
Cody: It is. I appreciate you doing this on a Monday. We’ve got young ones. We’re used to it.
Sean: Yeah. I don’t like to leave my house before nine o’clock if I don’t have to most of the time. I know my wife wouldn’t mind it.
All right. So I want to set the stage. Obviously you no longer look like this little boy that I took off my dad’s wall before I came in today. And I do have to take this back, otherwise he will ream me, because I think this was the only part of my life he really enjoyed. That and his grandkids now.
But let’s go ahead. Let’s look back at kind of where you grew up, all that sort of stuff. And then how did we get here today?
Growing Up in Pendleton
Cody: Yeah. Growing up, like Sean alluded to, we both grew up in Pendleton. Played baseball together. Sports was a huge part of my life. I think that’s what fueled a lot of my competitive drive. Now I live it out a lot differently. It’s more in a business setting.
Backing things up, I kind of lived my life how I thought I was supposed to. You graduate high school, you go to college, supposed to do all four years, get out, get a job in some corporate environment, try to climb that ladder, and then just live a comfortable life. Hopefully accumulate wealth along the way. That’s kind of what we’re taught. But that is not how things worked out for me at all.
So I went to college, went to IUPUI, downtown Indy, partied my butt off. I could not handle the freedom. It was so bad. I think back to it pretty often, especially when I talk to some youngsters that I have working for me now that are currently in college and they’re stressed, they don’t know what they want to do. They don’t have a plan. I just tell them, guys, I don’t know what I want to do still. And I’m okay. You’re going to be okay, just because it has to be.
But I partied my butt off at IUPUI, came home after that first year. I think I was on academic probation, and I literally couldn’t go back that next semester. Felt super lost, felt super broken, just as a guy.
Sean: At this point, what, 19, after your freshman year of college?
Cody: Not welcome back on campus. Had the time of my life, but also knew I royally screwed up in the process.
Sean: I’ve been there too.
Embrace the Suck
Cody: Yeah. I did a ton of reflecting of, all right, this isn’t going to work. I’ve just got to find a way. So what does that look like? So I went to Ivy Tech, I believe for like a year or two. I didn’t graduate from there, just got as many credits as I needed to get back in. Started working full time. I worked a bunch of random jobs.
One of them was, I sold ironically like Kirby vacuums, door to door. Miserable. I learned that I did not like that experience, but it’s part of the journey. I think that one just kind of taught me that in order to get where you want to go, or in order to get into a better spot, you have to make sacrifices. A lot of times people get hung up on just being uncomfortable and they can’t move past that. And that was a lot of why I was stuck at home.
Whenever I got home from college, knew I couldn’t go back that next semester, I wasn’t going to be with my now best friends, because I just lived with them for a year and had the time of my life. So I just felt super, super stuck. Like, what am I going to do?
So I think I just had a moment of realization. I think there’s a military quote, embrace the suck. I had to just embrace the suck. So I’m like, I can choose what’s hard. I can either find a way to weasel my way back onto campus and then inevitably party more and mess up more. But I was like, why don’t I take a hard route that’s going to benefit me later on?
These aren’t things I was thinking consciously at the time. It was more, when I’m feeling stuck, I’ve got to do something to make myself proud later on. And I think that’s something that I’ve now kept with me over the course of my life.
Learning Supply Chain by Fire
Cody: I came home super stuck, worked some odds and ends jobs. I ended up getting a job at a company called Keter. It’s actually in Anderson. I think it might be the North American headquarters still. It’s a plastics manufacturer, injection molding. So I started in logistics customer service there. I think I was maybe 20. It would have been around the time of my sophomore year of college. I got offered a full time job. Initially I think I just hired on as a temp because they needed help.
I’m a very intellectually curious person. So I’ve since learned to channel that. I just ask a lot of questions out of genuine curiosity. So I started asking, why do things work this way? That allowed me to drive a lot of results for them and make things more efficient at a young age.
I knew nothing about logistics or supply chain at the time, but just kind of figured that out. Got offered another role there, grew into that, where I was essentially forecasting all of the different distribution models within the US. They had sales channels of direct to consumer, so selling through their website, Amazon, a bunch of retail outlets like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, Target.
So we’re selling in all these places. How much product do we need to bring in? How much do we have? What are the lead times? So that’s how I learned supply chain, by fire, literally just being in it. And the reason I was trusted with that role is I just learned Excel, something that I think I was supposed to learn in one of those classes that I never went to.
The Degree, the Chip, and the Negotiation Lesson
Cody: And then from there, I really leaned on my dad and having conversations with him about, how do I climb this? I don’t have a college degree. The number one thing all these people are looking for in any job that’s going to provide me financial comfort and stability is a degree. Still actively working toward it. I was going to school full time online while working full time. So that was the suck part.
A lot of my friends, you’re turning 21, you guys might go away for a weekend, get hammered, have a really good time. I didn’t have that luxury. I had a job and I had classes I had to take. So that remained the same for a period of probably three or four years until I finished.
But even then, I still had fun in there. It was more just learning a new normal and a new identity. Because I think my identity growing up was, I’m just going to do what I’m told. I’m going to do what’s normal. What’s comfortable to me is what I’ve been taught. But I failed at that. And I had to accept that. And that was the hardest thing for me. I just felt super, super stuck and lonely in that moment. And I was like, all right, I’ve got to find a way to crawl out of this.
Sean: That’s a tough place to be, especially as a young person. So I got started in dad’s business, similar. Went to Iowa, didn’t finish Iowa. You can assume the reasons why. You were in a harder environment than I was. Number two party school in the nation. Went out there with no friends, but I came out with some lifelongs. Obviously I didn’t go back. Went to Ivy Tech, started working dad’s business. Same idea, right?
But the thing that I wish we both would have known is that we were both doing the exact same thing at the same time. Just so we would have had another guy. It’s something you don’t talk about.
Cody: You’re going to suffer in silence.
Sean: One hundred percent.
Cody: Yeah. Me saying that to that camera is uncomfortable, but I know that in conversations I’ve had with other people and others in my personal life, it’s something that a lot of people go through. Whether it’s, I think the big one is that high school to college transition and trying to figure it out. You hear people say college is not for everyone, but it’s not.
Sean: It’s a lot more in the last 10 years, I think very different, where the world’s gone. So tell me a little bit after that. How did you end up at Chomps? Because you and I eventually reconnected in like 22, so we’ve got to bridge the gap somewhere.
What Is Your Market Value
Cody: So in those conversations I was having with my dad of, what do I do? Where do I go from here? It’s, hey, just keep your nose down, keep working and getting that degree, that piece of paper that everyone says you need.
I guess it was a chip on my shoulder that I didn’t have it, because I knew there were a lot of people that I’d worked with at this point in time that had degrees in supply chain that I was outperforming in their own field. And it’s something I’d never studied a minute of. I was literally learning it as it went on. Reading about it, more macroeconomic events. There’s a recession, how is that going to impact the business? So I’m not learning that in a classroom, I’m learning it in real time.
But in that, my dad is a professor at IU. Negotiation is something that he teaches at Indiana, and I knew that. So I’d kind of been asking him, what do I do? How do I go to my employer and say I want more money?
And he taught me, and this is for anyone listening, if you want more money at a job, that’s ultimately a goal most of the time. You never want to go to your boss and say, I need to make more money. Because the rebuttal is, okay, what more are you going to do for me? You signed a contract or an employee agreement to do a certain job at this rate. There might be cost of living increases or something like that, but if you want a real needle mover at home, you’ve got to figure out what you can do to provide more value for them, to create more value for yourself.
My dad grew up with parents that worked at GM in the Anderson area, when Anderson was popping, which has been a minute. So during that time, I think he grew up under the period of loyalty and working for the same company for a super long time, and they’re going to take care of you with a pension. Those times are mostly gone.
So my dad being able to zoom out and give me that insight was super helpful. Because again, by this point, I’m still operating under the assumption of, this is what I’m supposed to do. So he was like, what is your market value? What do you need to do?
Whirlpool and the Bureaucracy Problem
Cody: From that, it’s me going around looking at jobs that I’m doing right now. They all say that they need a degree. But something in me just said, apply anyway.
So I did. I started putting in applications at other larger companies. For some reason I still thought big corporations were the way to go. If you have a Fortune 100 name on your resume, that means something, and it does in a lot of situations.
So I landed at Whirlpool, which caused me to have to relocate, which I thought was super sick. The concept of someone’s going to pay to move me to another state just sounded awesome. And it had a bit of a personal tie too. My mom’s parents, a lot of my best memories growing up were at their house, and they lived in Southwest Michigan, right on the lakes. We could go to the beach and all that kind of stuff. Whirlpool happens to be headquartered in a town adjacent to where they grew up in. So I knew the area really well. I think both grandparents were still alive at that point.
So I took the job, relocated to Michigan. Started working at Whirlpool. I was the only one on this team that didn’t have a degree. Still kind of felt a chip on my shoulder. This goes back to the baseball days when we were nine. I still have that competitive fire in me where it’s like, I’m going to outperform every single one of these, even though on paper you guys should beat me 10 times out of 10.
So at Whirlpool, what I was doing was managing the operations of local distribution centers. You buy a new washer and dryer, someone’s got to come out and install that. So you’re managing the labor, forecasting the day for the drivers, because there’s DOT regulations of how long each driver can be out on the road. So each new job I take, I’m learning something new about supply chain until I’ve eventually hit all facets.
At Whirlpool, I was managing that local distribution center operation on the East Coast from, I think it was Maine to Virginia. I think I had 12 or 13 facilities. Got to travel a lot for that one. It was a lot of fun. Just a huge learning experience.
I also learned pretty quickly I didn’t love big corporate culture. There was a lot of bureaucracy. If you looked on paper at how the facilities were running and how they were performing of what I was managing, they were beating my teammates by quite a bit. But the degree thing kept coming up, which I did eventually get while I was there. I think I graduated two or three years into that journey. Still, I couldn’t get a promotion, because then there’s more bureaucracy that comes into play. It just didn’t ring well with me.
So it’s like, if I’m going to put in all of literal blood, sweat and tears at times to growing myself and doing well for a company, I want to be directly rewarded for that. So I just didn’t think a massive culture with other motives is going to be the best place to do it.
You Work for Your Boss, Not the Company
Cody: So I started looking again, just taking what my dad had taught me of the concepts of negotiation, that negotiation is leverage in any business setting, or even employer and employee setting.
You would hope there’s a dynamic of personal relationship involved, which there is. Anyone listening, if you’re going to take a job, in my experience I’ve learned that you’re more working for your boss, not the company, on the day to day. So you really want to work with someone that you feel comfortable with, that’s interested in your personal interest and in your growth trajectory.
The Phone Call at the San Francisco Airport
Cody: So I ended up finding Chomps, which is a beef, no, we skipped one. So I went to a company called Blueground.
Sean: Oh, okay.
Cody: Which was enticing to me in that it was the polar opposite of a large corporation. They had raised a lot of funding. Silicon Valley Bank, I think, was one of their huge backers. It was just like a long term Airbnb type of company. So they would lease an entire apartment building, furnish it with all items that they produce on their own in Turkey, China, and so on. Bring them into the US, have crews go out and set up these apartments, then sublease them out to people.
It was whenever COVID was really big, the nomadic lifestyle got really big in the US. So I kind of wanted to be part of something that was new and trendy and not big corporate. So that seemed like a perfect fit for me.
So when I was there, it was a lot bigger of a jump as terms of breadth of responsibility. So I was responsible for all supply chain operations in the US. I think we had 10 or 12 markets when I first started, then it grew to like 20. I was on the road all the time at that job. Most days, still living in Michigan, I would drive from my home to O’Hare Airport, which was like a two hour drive on a Sunday, fly out somewhere, be there for three or four days, fly home, do my laundry, rinse and repeat. That was taxing in its own right. Also a lot of fun, because I’m probably like 23, 24, something like that.
Sean: Yeah, good time age.
Cody: Yeah, it was a good experience. Got hit with a moral dilemma along the way where, I don’t necessarily want to get into the nitty gritty details, but it was a situation where a federal regulatory agency called me when I was in the San Francisco airport. I’ll never forget this, the guy’s name. I get this phone call and I answer it, about to board a flight home. This guy identifies himself as an agent from whatever agency and says, we have a problem.
These documents had my name on them, because I would be the importer of record on everything coming into the US. It was drinkware going into apartments, and they had worked with a known supplier, which I have no control of this part of the supply chain. I’m merely receiving goods. They’re in different markets in the US. Then I have to make sure they get into an apartment so that the time from leasing the building to getting it filled is as short as possible, to shorten that cash cycle for the business.
Well, I guess the supplier was notorious for using lead paint.
Sean: Oh, no.
Cody: Yeah. And I had no idea. So I’m like, okay, I’m not going to fly home. I rebook. I was staying in the apartments in that market, and that’s where, ironically, the issue was at, in San Francisco. So I stay out there for a few weeks, figure that out, obviously raise the issue and escalate it internally. Like, what the heck is going on?
I was just given directions from the people I reported to that I was morally opposed to. It was, give them product that you know is good, like they came from another supplier. And I was like, absolutely not. I’m already uncomfortable. I’m already having to stay out here multiple weeks.
So yeah, I was quickly looking for jobs whenever that happened. Found one, resigned immediately. And that’s what got me to Chomps.
Chomps and the Next Low
Cody: When I was at Chomps, my job was leading all logistics and fulfillment operations. When I started at Chomps, they were a lot smaller along their journey. They’re now kind of the unicorn of the snacking and meat protein snacking space.
Sean: That’s great. We have a huge, yeah. Still eat them every day. Incredibly expensive.
Cody: Yeah. I have to pay for them now, which is real. They’re super good.
Sean: Great product.
Cody: So I took the job at Chomps, still living in Southwest Michigan at the time. It’s essentially combining all the plethora of experience that I’ve gotten. I would say I learn at hyper speed. That’s something I’ve learned about myself. I ask a lot of questions. I’ve learned to really focus on what I don’t know, and then find someone that knows that, ask them questions, understand how to apply it to what’s relevant for me.
Through that experience I just grew a lot when I was at Chomps. I had to lead a lot of people for the first time. In the hiring process, I got to learn a lot about what they do very well, which I’ve now applied to my business today.
At Chomps is when I underwent my next low, if you want to call it, in life. So when I was working at Chomps, I’d gotten married at that time. Wasn’t working out for a plethora of reasons. I’ll never disparage another person, but I just wasn’t happy. Was grinding, absolutely. And I know that had a big part in it, right? So I just wasn’t happy. Tried to work things out, talk through things. It just was not working. So we get divorced. I feel pretty down and lonely at that point.
Revenue Is Loud, Regret Is Quiet
Cody: It allowed me to take a step back and understand that you can always chase something bigger, something better. You’re never going to be the best at what you do at a macro scale. There’s one Elon Musk, right? We don’t want to be. I don’t want to be Elon Musk. I’ve learned that. That sounds like a tortured life to me.
And I think that’s what I learned. That’s what I was chasing. I had this chip on my shoulder of, what can you do without a degree, or how much money can you make without a degree?
It gets to a point where you can afford a comfortable life that you once would have dreamed of. And I had to start really taking a step back and thinking, what am I going to be proud of later on? I have this saying I go by now, that revenue is loud, but regret is quiet. And that’s what I was chasing my whole career. Before I was ever generating revenue, I was just chasing a larger and larger salary.
When you talk to people about it, if you share numbers and whatnot, I don’t know, I still feel weird to this day doing that. To me, that’s not what makes me the most proud now.
I realize that I wanted to have kind of like the trinity. You’ve got a healthy family, you’ve got faith, and you’ve got security for your family. And that’s what I’ve learned is most important to me.
So when I’m at this new low of, what am I going to do? I’m alone now. I live in another state that I’m happy living in. I had friends there, still good friends to this day. But how the heck do I crawl out of this? I’ve worked my way out of this hole of being the stuck kid out of college that had no idea what his plan was, didn’t make a goal or think what my plan was. I just kind of figured it out along the way, achieved that. But now I feel even lonelier than I did at that time.
So I was like, man, I’ve got to dig deep again. And I just thought back to hard moments growing up, people that I’ve talked to that have gone through hard moments. And I’m like, I’ve kind of got two choices. I can sit here and sulk and continue on this trajectory and make an income that sounds really cool and can afford me things. But if I don’t have anyone to do things with, for what? What’s the point of grinding that hard?
Build a Personal Brand
Cody: So I stayed at Chomps. I was pretty open with them about what was going on. Luckily, super supportive people. If you guys don’t eat Chomps, you should try it. Shameless plug. It really is a good product.
When I was there, the founders of Chomps were really intentional about setting time aside and talking to people. I’d gotten to build a decent relationship with both the co-founders, and they had told me something that was uncomfortable to me, which is, hey, one day obviously Chomps might not exist in what it is today, whether they went public on the stock market or some PE firm bought them or some other larger snacking conglomerate bought them. You should focus on building a personal brand. We know you’re very good at what you do, because it’s netted us good results, but you’ve got to show other people that you can do that same thing while you’re still here.
I’ve always been the guy that I show up to work, I work really hard, and I don’t talk about what I’m doing, because it’s weird. I’m just doing my job. What am I supposed to talk about?
So there was a woman that worked at Chomps, Zoe is her name. She was an influencer, completely agnostic of the work that she did. I think it had to do with gaming or something like that, but she had a really large following. So I was like, hey, the co-founders just told me I should focus on this. What do I do? And she’s like, just hop on Twitter and tweet about common sense things in supply chain to you. Obviously don’t share anything confidential, but share what you’re working on and why.
So I did that. Felt super weird. I have the same Twitter account to this day. I think that was like four years ago today. So I must have been like 26 at the time. I’m 30 now.
The Tweet That Got Two Likes
Cody: Probably like my third or fourth tweet ever. I had worked on this project that I thought was pretty cool. This was pre AI, so now anybody can do this in like eight seconds. But back then it was a cool feature. I built a heat map. So it was essentially, hey, here’s where all of our orders are going for all different channels. And then I weighted it out by the size of the order, how many units you’re moving there.
The reason I wanted to build that is just to visualize where is all this stuff going. The company had scaled probably like 8 to 10x by this point.
Sean: Wow.
Cody: From me being there until this point, which was only a few years. It was on a just massive hockey stick trajectory growth.
So I tweeted it out, and I removed any pertinent information. But hey, I’m doing this analysis. It’s for the purpose of completely redesigning the supply chain network. Just having a true understanding of where all of our product is coming in from, where it’s going out, and how much we’re paying in transportation costs per unit to each of these locations. And then doing a weighted analysis on what actually makes sense and what’s sustainable from an operational perspective.
So I tweet this out. I got like two likes on it. It was not a viral tweet by any means. But this guy DMs me, hey, can I buy some of your time to run this for my company? I kind of got the light bulb turning of, yeah, I think I can do that.
Just Google It
Cody: So again, I call my dad. My dad’s the person I always call on whenever there’s something new, especially in a professional setting. My dad had had a couple entrepreneurial endeavors. I wouldn’t, my dad wouldn’t consider himself an entrepreneur, but he had at least dipped his toes into that space. Also had a long career at the IRS. So I knew he understood the tax implications of doing this kind of thing, which is what I was most afraid of.
So my dad’s like, yeah, just start an LLC. I’m like, okay, how do I do that? And he’s like, just Google it. So I Google it, figure it out, applied for the LLC the next day. I was probably fully set up and running within a week.
So now I’m like, okay, I can legally accept payment as not just being a 1099 of this guy’s company. Because the light bulb that went off in my head was, if I have 20 followers or whatever I have on Twitter now and someone’s willing to pay me for my time, if I just stay consistent with content, then I think more will probably trickle in if I do a good job.
So I thought of content, and still do, as digital real estate. It’s always there. The most helpful videos that I ever find are the ones that have 200 views from six years ago. It’s some guy that’s sitting in his office or in his truck and he’s taking an iPhone video, just talking about his actual lived experience. I get way more from those than the super high quality production videos that have millions of views.
Sean: Like the one we’re on right now.
Cody: Yeah, without the views, I guess.
Sean: Those will come. Those will come.
Cody: Yeah. I just got to stay consistent. So I talked to this guy. He’s saying he’s willing to pay me what I felt like was an absurd amount of money for a very short amount of my time. I do the project, stay in close contact with them, net them a lot of savings that’s directly back into their pockets. And he was like, this is insane. How do you know how to do all this? I’m like, well, it’s literally my job. That’s all I’ve known.
So then he sent out some kind of testimonial tweet, I think, and I got a lot more inbound leads from that. So I’m like, okay, now we’re kind of onto something.
Right before this, or shortly before it, probably about a year before this, was again when I’m at that new low and feeling super stuck. So now I’m starting to build momentum. I don’t have some five or 10 year goal in mind. I’m not acting with confidence every day to crawl myself out of this hole. Every day in that year, I felt stuck. I felt buried. I felt like I had no idea what to do. But something in my head just kept telling me, do something that you’re going to be proud of later on. Do something that if you have kids one day, they’re going to be proud of. Just make that one simple decision today. That’s all I focused on.
Becoming the Warehouse
Cody: It ended up working out. Did a lot more of those projects. They eventually came back to me, all these consulting engagements, and a couple of them said, hey, would you be willing to be my warehouse, be my 3PL? Those are the relationships that I’d always owned.
And I guess for people watching, a 3PL means third party logistics. So let’s say Sean manufactures Bibles.
Sean: Let’s go, Cuffs.
Cody: No, go with it. Number one selling book in the world. So Sean’s printing these Bibles, literally and figuratively, and he doesn’t want to deal with storing all of this in a warehouse and making sure they go where they need to go, making sure that they’re boxed correctly to go to Amazon, making sure they’re labeled correctly to go into Target and all these different places. So Sean hires a 3PL to store his product, because Sean doesn’t have to build a new pole barn on his property to store all this, get relationships with carriers and have to deal with truck drivers all day. So that’s what we do.
So I started one. I was talking to my wife and I’m like, hey, this. I’m a really risk averse person, so I’ll also put that out there. I don’t want anyone to think that I had mountains of cash or anything like that saved. I did not. When I say I was at rock bottom new low, I was at rock bottom new low. I was not in a financial position to go secure a lease on a warehouse or anything like that.
So I’m talking to my wife about the opportunity and what I think it will take. Thankfully, she was super supportive. And she just said, yeah, if you think this is something that you can do, go after it. At this point, we have no children.
Sean: This is after you moved back to Indiana.
Cody: Yeah, we skipped that. So at this point, yeah, I’d moved back to Indiana just in that low point. I realized I’ve got people around here that are friends. I don’t have family around me. And I rediscovered that family is more important to me than anything else.
So again, trying to build that trinity, or whatever you want to say, of trying to take the walk in faith, trying to build closer relationships with family. I was trying to be more present in that area while also continuing to build stability and comfort.
This opportunity presents itself. I talked to my wife. Her best friend’s dad from college owned a business that was selling medical devices. He had a warehouse in Indianapolis. So when we go to lunch with her one day, I’m like, this is super weird, but can I have your dad’s number? And she’s like, yeah, why? So I kind of explained it, and I talked to her dad, go visit the space. Long story short, I subleased space from him for what I was comfortable paying at the time, which was not much. So very grateful to have had those stars aligned.
Take that on. First truck comes in. And I’m like, man, I’ve seen thousands of these unloaded in my life, but I’ve never unloaded one of these.
Sean: You physically unloaded it.
Cody: Yeah, some of them in the beginning. And then he had a couple of guys working for him that are now working for me. They would unload them. I’m learning things from them all the time, still to this day.
And I think that’s the number one thing I learned during that journey. You have to always be learning, and you have to be humble and know what you don’t know. I don’t know everything about running the business that I run today. It’s probably statistically done very well and been successful by most people’s measures, but I don’t know everything there is to know, and I never will. So I’ve got to surround myself with people that can fill in the gaps. Learning that early on just helped me be able to scale it.
The Leap
Sean: Wow. So again, you and I reconnected in 22, I believe, when you were moving back. And at the time, Casey and I were running our little rental totes company. And you go, hey, I’m moving back. Would you mind moving me into my apartment? I go, I haven’t seen you forever. I’d love to catch up.
So to be honest with you, I had no idea that was a low moment. I knew you were with your now wife, and you guys were so nice and offered me Chomps. And I was like, Casey, thanks, y’all. Cody, we haven’t talked in forever. In this whole backstory, this whole piece that nobody else knew that was going on. I’m so proud of you.
Cody: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Sean: I was proud of you in 2022 working a job. I’m so proud of you taking that step. So now, as we’ve gone through this story, you finally broke out. You were dual career at the time, so you were doing both things.
Cody: Yeah, there was a period of probably four months. And also it’s kind of weird, right? You have a job. That’s the only security I’ve ever known, is a W-2 income. So the whole concept of, I have to now do something I’ve never done before, which is be a salesman and acquire new clients to build financial security, is a very daunting and scary thing for a guy that’s pretty anti social like me. I’m not an entertainer that’s taking people out and showing them a great time all the time. I do that now because I have to, and it is a fun part of the job.
But back then I was terrified. I held on to the W-2 job, still gave Chomps everything I could give. Admittedly, that’s where I really learned the concept of, every day you have 100 percent to give, and you’ve got to choose how to allocate that.
As more clients started to come on board and as order volume picked up for the clients that I had, it meant that my wife Maggie and I couldn’t walk in there at nighttime and on the weekends and pack all these orders ourselves. There was too much work to do that.
The business naturally, with growth, started to become more financially healthy. So I’m like, all right, we’ve got to hire people and do this the right way. And I’ve just got to take a bet on myself. I think this is the point where that was probably the first time I felt the confidence to take a leap like that. Because literally my whole life until that point, I was not confident. I still struggle with confidence. To this day, it’s a real thing.
And Maggie, my wife, really instilled in me, yeah, you can do it. You’re a smart guy. I’ve seen you work harder than anyone else. You can figure this out.
So with her belief and blessing, I quit my job at Chomps. I told them thank you, and I still have a good relationship with all of them. But yeah, I took the leap to do this full time. Because I was literally taking meetings out of the conference room. I think they started to notice something was up because my background changed. I wasn’t at home, because I usually worked remotely, and I wasn’t visiting warehouses a lot. I was in a conference room with a blank white wall. And they’re like, what are you doing? Where are you? But I was literally packing orders in between phone calls, because it got to that point where something had to be done every day.
Sean: Wow. Lots of lows along the way.
Cody: Yeah, no, for sure.
Sean: Hockey stick now, right?
Cody: We hope so. We hope so.
Sean: You quit your job at what, were 23?
Cody: 24. 2024. I think it was 24. Yeah.
Sean: Because whenever you moved me into that apartment, which we had.
Cody: I had moved in with Maggie, my wife, in one of her apartments. We were upsizing into a bigger one. So you gave us those totes because we had to get everything from the ground floor or third floor up to the next one. So I think that would have been probably 2023 ish whenever we did that, 2022, 2023. I was at Chomps. So after that point, I’d still worked there and just had a normal full time job for like a year, and then started it somewhere in the middle.
The Chase Comes Back
Sean: And you’ve scaled a lot since then, just in the two and a half, three years.
Cody: Yeah, the business has gone crazy. There’s a lot more zeros involved than I ever thought I would see. But again, I’ve learned through that, I kind of got caught back in the trap and caught myself of the chase. Because can I generate a million dollars in revenue? A kid coming from Pendleton that grew up eating free lunches, that’s not supposed to happen. That’s insane.
So that happened in the first year, and then four and a half, five x the next year, and then this year will be a little more than double again. So it’s been super crazy, and more than anything, just a really humbling experience. Because I think I’ve learned a lot about what I don’t know. You think you’ve got a lot more things figured out than you really do.
And I think I’ve really learned the most, again coming back to that trinity. I got caught in that chase. So with the business now, I’m seeing more zeros, I’m doing well, and I’m feeling proud of myself.
The Dad Gang Hat
Cody: All those moments kind of come to a halt and you figure out what really matters. Because my wife comes to me one morning and tells me to meet her for coffee. And I’m in the warehouse, admittedly feeling not annoyed, but just like, hey, I’m busy, what are we doing? So I go and meet her for coffee and she gives me a Dad Gang hat, which is now one of my favorite brands in the world.
So I find out I’m having a baby. In that moment, I literally couldn’t think about anything else other than, I’m going to be a dad. This is awesome. I was so happy. And I think that taught me, my true pride in life is going to come from anything related to parenting and anything related to family. Because at this point I’ve already done things several times that I wasn’t supposed to do on the professional side, but none of that matters if I don’t have a family to build around and build for and enjoy things with in life. So that gave me a whole new perspective.
Sitting With It
Cody: Got caught in the trap again, because I’m getting more clients. I’ve learned that when you’re in your low points, you’re dreaming about high points. You’re either doing that to keep yourself going throughout the day, to just stay distracted, of where do I want to go, what could life look like. And it feels like just daydreaming. Or you can sulk and continue to feel low and sad, and that’s okay. There’s a time for that, where you have to just feel what you feel.
And admittedly I’ve been awful about that my whole life. When I feel sad and whatnot, it feels super uncomfortable, so I would try to avoid it by just daydreaming or something like that. And because of that, I’m never actually feeling those feelings. I never got out of it. All I ever was doing my whole life was daydreaming.
So I learned, if I can just sit with these feelings and be uncomfortable in this way for a little bit, it’s going to allow me to be in a mental space to be uncomfortable again for the sake of growth.
November 22nd
Cody: I get caught in the trap of growing the business and going out and getting new clients, keeping them happy. Busiest time of the year for us is Black Friday and Christmas, so November and December. Ironically, it aligns with the busiest family time of the year. You’ve got family coming in from out of town. Everyone wants to get together, have the kids together. That’s taxing for anyone. If you’re unemployed and you’re traveling with little children, that’s a hard thing to do.
Our child is born in the busiest time of the year, November 22nd, which is right before the single busiest shipping day of the year. I can’t be there. And I’m kind of scared, because every year it’s our biggest one. So really relying on the team at the warehouse. I tried my very best to just be super present in that moment, share all those moments with Maggie and with Jameson, our son.
And his birthday, every year for the rest of his life, is going to be during dad’s busiest season of the year. But he doesn’t know that and doesn’t care. He is, is dad here for my birthday? Does dad get me a cool gift? Do we have a fun experience together? Those are the things that he cares about.
So I think for me, it’s a pretty humbling perspective. Even though it’s the busiest time of the year, I might have the most people relying on me than I’ve ever had, from a customer perspective and an employee wellbeing perspective. But all of my passwords, and no one hacked me, contain his birthday. And for me, it really serves as a daily reminder of, hey, this is your busiest day of the year. Your busiest day of the year doesn’t have anything to do with the warehouse. It has nothing to do with business. It has everything to do with what’s most important at home and with family.
If You Feel Stuck
Cody: That’s been a journey that I really haven’t hyper focused on until this year, where I think you saw a Facebook post I made. And again, genuinely, for anyone listening, I don’t have it all figured out. I will be the first to tell you that. I’ve gotten out of a lot of low points in life. I’ll come to a lot more low points in life, and I’ll find a way out of those too.
But if anyone does feel stuck in any kind of way, whether it’s a career or not knowing how to get started, I’m sure my Facebook page or something will be linked to this, but you can reach out to me and I’ll help you get unstuck. Just from a pure, if you need a person to talk to, you need motivation, that kind of thing.
But yeah, I’d made a post essentially offering up the same thing. And in that, the numbers that I’m seeing are a lot larger than anything I ever thought I would personally be responsible for or have been a part of. But the most important thing to me is family.
So I really made a commitment to myself this year that this is the year that I dial that in. And the business is still growing. So my demands from a company perspective are a lot more now than they ever have been, and hopefully, God willing, it’ll continue to grow that way. But it’s made me be a lot more efficient at work, so that the amount of time that I’m working is a lot less than it was previously.
The Cost Is Not Always Money
Cody: There was a period of time during that busy season, where it’s my son’s birthday, it’s Thanksgiving, it’s Christmas time, where I was home maybe three to four hours a day, literally, to sleep and shower and then leave. And saying this now, I just feel awful. Just vulnerable, I guess. Not a good thing.
I was after that chase of, I’ve got to make this happen at all costs. But the cost isn’t always money. For me now, what I’ve learned is my time is demanded in a lot of places, and the biggest cost that I have to give up is time. So it’s time spent with someone else.
I’m in the warehouse at this point from like 5 a.m. until 1 a.m. a lot of days, like the following day, literally working, doing physical work. Thankfully, somehow I have employees that are willing to do the same thing or similar things.
But I can’t do that again. That’s not, I missed out on too many milestones. I saw too many cool things happen with my son from a text message from my wife. I was like, man, I just can’t continue to do things this way. So it’s been a huge focus for me. I feel more in balance now than I ever have, and I’m at like 10 percent of where I want to be. I’m trying my absolute best.
I’m a guy that hates weekend plans, because I grind so hard during the weeks. I truly want to relax. But again, you can’t think about that. I’ve got to think about my password of my kid’s birthday. I want to be there with my son getting new experiences, going and doing fun things with my wife and I, or with her parents or with our parents. So I’ve just had to learn that that can be fun for me too. And it is. It always is fun. But it’s more along the lines of, I’m going to feel burnt out. But yeah, just now trying to find that new balance.
Hitting the Reset Button
Sean: Yeah. And it’s so hard to turn it off too. When you get home, I’ve always been one of those, and I’m sure you’re the same way, especially if you’re working hours, you are as the reset button. The splash water in the face. How do I reset as I walk in the door?
Cody: I think of it as, have you ever had, your internet goes out and you have to reset the router, reboot, and it’s that tiny little button that’s like two inches deep inside of a device. And you’re like, how do I press this? So you have to go find a paperclip. Even that in and of itself is hard, to hit the reset button. But yeah, it feels nearly impossible at times.
Sean: It’s a good thing you’re in logistics if you’re looking for how to get better about efficiency. You know a thing or two about efficiencies.
Cody: Yeah, it’s also a double edged sword. My wife probably gets frustrated because I am very logical and efficiency focused. Everything for me is pretty black and white. So even when we have conversations, I have to take a step back and be like, okay, you sound like a psychopath right now. Because I’m like, hey, you’re saying this is wrong. We have to figure out a way to make it better. They’re happy, we have to change some inputs. That’s literally how my entire brain is wired.
Sean: Well, as a guy who’s married with four kids, I will tell you that you’ll never get that right. I think if you say that sucks, or I’m sorry, it solves 90 percent of it. Right, Darren?
Radical Acceptance
Cody: Yeah. There’s a concept I learned, also during these low points, I always turned to therapy. So I’ve done a lot of mental health therapy. Growing up, I think social media culture, it’s kind of viewed as weak, especially as a man. And it’s not. I think it’s the most empowering, strong, bold thing someone can do. If I don’t have the tools myself to look in the mirror and figure out where I’m going wrong, I’ve got to have someone help me do that. I’ve turned to that a lot.
It taught me a concept that you just alluded to, of radical acceptance. Sometimes stuff is just hard. Life’s just hard, and it sucks. You have to learn to just accept that and be okay with that, and rewrite the new normal, or whatever it is that you want. But sometimes that’s all you can do. Because if I try to make everything in my life more efficient, I will be, and I have tried to do that, it’s not a good path to go down.
I’m like the Rob Dyrdek stuff. I’m not sure if you’ve seen him in the last couple of years, but he plans out his life to every four minutes. And he believes in that. That’s how there’s so much ridiculousness of TV shows, because he gets paid per TV show, so he tries to make as many as possible.
Sean: He is never not playing on MTV, because they don’t have music anymore. It’s tough.
At What Cost
Sean: And God bless you for having the awareness, mentally, physically, at work. Think about your people. You talked about how big you are on servant leadership. Taking the time to take care of yourself is important. And as dads, I think it’s usually the last thing we put on the list, because it’s so easy to put everybody else on your shoulders.
Cody: Yeah. I think that’s what I learned. I’d met up with a couple people and they were asking me how the business was going. And I’m always reluctant to share numbers, because I never want to come across as if I’m bragging or something like that. I’m truly not. I’m still very well aware that I’m a small fish, and I will always be a small fish no matter how big this gets. I have no desire to have it be massive.
But in talking to them, they’re impressed, or saying that’s really cool. And I’m kind of looking down at myself and at what cost. My wife is not as happy as she could be. I’m leaving her high and dry most of the time to go build this business and continue scaling it. My body looks awful. I feel awful every day. That’s kind of the creep that happens. It just creeps up on you. You lose sense of what’s most important to you, truly, whenever you get something shiny and flashy in front of you.
That’s where I always come back to that saying of, revenue is loud, but regret’s quiet. It shows up. It doesn’t show up on a P and L, regret. Revenue is always going to be there. It’s glaring. It’s something to brag about. It’s something that people will always listen to or turn their head at.
But the missed calls piling up from my family members, or, hey, I’m going to stay back home this weekend so I can work while you go visit your family, to my wife. Or missing events at my son’s daycare. That’s the kind of stuff that regret is. It’s quiet and it creeps up on you. And then you kind of take inventory one day of all those things that you’ve missed, and why you’re feeling a certain way, and why your body doesn’t feel the way that you want it to feel, and you just don’t feel that healthy. And then that’s when I really realized, I’ve got to do something about this.
Wrap Up
Sean: I think you’re doing great. For the hundreds of thousands of people that just watched this episode, I think that they can walk away and say, it is amazing what you’ve done. And at your age, the greatest opportunity is still ahead of you. You’ve got as much time with your family as you can to spend with them. And for feeling good, looking good, you look the same as you do in that little picture when you’re nine years old. Just a lot taller.
I’ve learned a lot from watching you. And I think you’re doing better. And I think part of that is the fact that you’ve been down the path of places you don’t want to go, and you don’t want to go back. I think it’s the active pursuit of, where do you want to be next. I think your family’s going to be super grateful. They are now. They love you. Just as you.
Cody: And I love you too.
Sean: I love you too, brother. So this was fun.
So Cody, why don’t you, because I think what we’ll end up putting out there is your Twitter. Why don’t you tell everybody your Twitter, and then we’ll let you get down and get back to the grind.
Cody: Yeah. If you guys are super bored and want to learn about supply chain, you can follow me on Twitter. It’s just at Ship Smarter, like S H I P Smarter. That’s where you can find me.
My personal Facebook page is out there. Like I said, just look up my name, Cody Branham. If you’re feeling stuck and don’t know how to get out of it, and you feel like you’re in a rut, but you’re truly ready to put in the work and have the hard conversations, just call me. I stand nothing to gain from it other than helping someone and being the person that I wish I had when I was in the lows.
Sean: Brother, God bless you. Thank you very much.
Cody: Thanks, guys.