Latest / Big Talk About Small Business / Ep. 33 - The Flavorful Journey of Risk and Reward in Business with Trent Brock

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Ep. 33 - The Flavorful Journey of Risk and Reward in Business with Trent Brock · Big Talk About Small Business

• 0:04
  Mark Zweig: All right, everybody.
• 0:05
  Mark Zweig: Uh, this is Mark Swig and we're back with another episode of big talk about small business.
• 0:14
  Mark Zweig: I don't have my co-host with me today, eric Howerton.
• 0:18
  Mark Zweig: He's decided he had to go somewhere.
• 0:20
  Mark Zweig: Um, I don't know where he is right now, but the guy's a busy guy.
• 0:24
  Mark Zweig: But I do have in the studio today a very special guest and that is Trent Brock.
• 0:31
  Mark Zweig: Thank you, pleasure to be here.
• 0:33
  Mark Zweig: Uh, I just met Trent a few weeks ago at the cancer challenge lunch where he was one of our featured speakers, and Trent's got a great story to tell about both personal survival there's some of that, there's a little bit of that, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that and business, um, the guy is is one impressive guy who has overcome a lot of challenges and still keeps a great attitude, and that's what we need more about there in the entrepreneurship and small business world.
• 1:08
  Trent Brock: Well, um, on the outside, on the outside, yeah.
• 1:11
  Mark Zweig: On the outside.
• 1:11
  Trent Brock: You do a job.
• 1:12
  Trent Brock: Hey, fake it till you make it.
• 1:13
  Trent Brock: That was always our philosophy.
• 1:17
  Trent Brock: Hey, that's right, I learned.
• 1:19
  Trent Brock: I learned that from a valuable, valuable business partner, did you?
• 1:22
  Trent Brock: Yeah, it worked a lot.
• 1:23
  Trent Brock: It worked well for a long time.
• 1:25
  Trent Brock: Still working.
• 1:26
  Mark Zweig: Well, we'll come back to that.
• 1:27
  Mark Zweig: Um so, Trent, um, just for the purpose of our guests, or our our listeners rather out there, tell us a little bit about yourself, Where'd you grow up and and what's your story Gosh.
• 1:41
  Trent Brock: Um, well, I'm originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, and, uh, you know that's just a regular city in the South, I wouldn't say anything special about it.
• 1:49
  Trent Brock: Um, you know, has the comforts of life and all the normal things.
• 1:53
  Trent Brock: Went to, uh, Louisiana Tech University graduate.
• 1:57
  Trent Brock: Well, I got a, got a degree in biology and chemistry.
• 2:00
  Trent Brock: I wanted to do the doctor thing.
• 2:01
  Trent Brock: Oh, so you were going to go to med school.
• 2:03
  Trent Brock: I thought I was Okay and uh, I couldn't.
• 2:06
  Trent Brock: I couldn't pass the MCAT.
• 2:07
  Trent Brock: Yeah, yeah, Bombed it twice First time.
• 2:12
  Trent Brock: First time I took it.
• 2:13
  Mark Zweig: Yeah.
• 2:14
  Trent Brock: I, you know I took it to to just try it out Second time.
• 2:18
  Trent Brock: I studied all summer, took the big course, did all the thing, thought I nailed it, got the results same score.
• 2:27
  Mark Zweig: Well, you weren't meant to be a doctor.
• 2:29
  Mark Zweig: No, I wasn't.
• 2:29
  Mark Zweig: No, I wasn't.
• 2:30
  Mark Zweig: But you were sort of, in a way, kind of prophetic about your own health situation, right.
• 2:36
  Trent Brock: I guess, I guess, yeah, it's come back around, that that's for sure.
• 2:40
  Mark Zweig: So, so, anyway.
• 2:41
  Mark Zweig: So you didn't go to med school, obviously, yeah.
• 2:43
  Mark Zweig: So then what happened?
• 2:44
  Trent Brock: Well, something really cool happened.
• 2:45
  Trent Brock: I was.
• 2:46
  Trent Brock: I didn't know what I was going to do, right, so I'm kind of struggling.
• 2:49
  Trent Brock: How am I going to get a job with a biology and chemistry degree?
• 2:52
  Trent Brock: So I was talking to my flatmate and he said look, man, go talk to this business professor.
• 2:57
  Trent Brock: He's a he's a good guy.
• 2:59
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I just went in and talked to him one day.
• 3:01
  Trent Brock: By the end of the conversation I was his graduate assistant.
• 3:03
  Trent Brock: I was going to MBA school, that and I did that for two, two and a half years, did you?
• 3:08
  Trent Brock: That's what happened.
• 3:08
  Trent Brock: So I got my MBA and and and did the IT thing with it, which was the hot thing at the point.
• 3:14
  Trent Brock: And then and off we went so.
• 3:17
  Mark Zweig: so what was the IT thing for you?
• 3:19
  Mark Zweig: It?
• 3:20
  Trent Brock: was just the IT emphasis with an MBA and you know that was a really catchy deal.
• 3:24
  Trent Brock: So it's kind of my minor.
• 3:26
  Trent Brock: So you got you got that out of the way.
• 3:28
  Trent Brock: Then what happened Then you know, what I wanted to do is I wanted to travel.
• 3:32
  Trent Brock: I wanted to, I wanted to make good money and I wanted to travel and I wanted to do it on someone else's money and so I joined Accenture, which used to be Anderson Consultants.
• 3:44
  Mark Zweig: Sure yeah, that was the biggie.
• 3:45
  Mark Zweig: I mean, they were number one and and awesome.
• 3:48
  Trent Brock: Yeah, Awesome, I don't, I don't.
• 3:50
  Trent Brock: I've lost touch with all that now.
• 3:51
  Trent Brock: You know cause.
• 3:52
  Trent Brock: I've been, you know, the popcorn man for 14 years.
• 3:55
  Trent Brock: Yeah, but, um, man, it was a good gig.
• 3:57
  Trent Brock: I really enjoyed it.
• 3:58
  Trent Brock: I traveled, I learned.
• 4:00
  Trent Brock: You know, I traveled on their nickel and, um, you know, I saw the country on their money.
• 4:06
  Mark Zweig: I know the guy who changed Anderson Consulting into Accenture.
• 4:10
  Trent Brock: Really.
• 4:11
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, seriously, he's a marketing guy in Chicago, michael Krauss.
• 4:14
  Mark Zweig: Okay, Okay but uh, yeah, fortunately they did that before the Anderson, uh, arthur Anderson, accounting meltdown.
• 4:23
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 4:24
  Mark Zweig: So it was very lucky.
• 4:26
  Mark Zweig: I think, that they had sort of disassociated themselves from the name before that whole thing imploded over the uh, yeah, over over the uh.
• 4:35
  Mark Zweig: What was it?
• 4:36
  Mark Zweig: The um, oh, the, you know the company that um uh, enron, enron, yeah, enron, enron and Dynagy, that's right.
• 4:45
  Trent Brock: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I own some Dynagy stock, did you?
• 4:48
  Mark Zweig: I don't know anything about Dynagy.
• 4:49
  Mark Zweig: I one of my friends brother was that one of my films was a partner at Arthur Anderson, though, and I and I lost his job in the course of all that.
• 4:59
  Trent Brock: Uh, I wouldn't be surprised A lot of people did yeah, I lost my rear end on some stock.
• 5:03
  Mark Zweig: I bet you did so.
• 5:06
  Mark Zweig: Anyway, you did Anderson consulting.
• 5:07
  Mark Zweig: And where did you travel with them?
• 5:08
  Mark Zweig: Or, excuse me, accenture?
• 5:10
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, I was.
• 5:10
  Mark Zweig: I was all over the.
• 5:10
  Trent Brock: States, really, and the thing that was really cool was, um, you know, we had a budget to travel back to, to our home base every every week, and if we booked a ticket, or, or, or had expenses that were lower than what that would cost, it was a win for the company.
• 5:29
  Trent Brock: Sure, so you know, me and and all my you know um, coworkers, you know, young people in their mid twenties, early thirties, kind of thing, we would, we would, you know, do something for the weekend.
• 5:40
  Trent Brock: We would go fly somewhere, or we would go to Key West, or you know.
• 5:44
  Trent Brock: So we traveled and did that a lot, cause most of us, you know, you're in an in between life.
• 5:49
  Trent Brock: Sure, You've got a few days, you got a few days during the week and you're at home, and then you got a few days you're away, and it's really kind of hard to to cultivate.
• 5:57
  Trent Brock: So people that are in that lifestyle normally migrate together.
• 6:01
  Mark Zweig: I did that, yeah, family, um, so it was hard.
• 6:04
  Mark Zweig: I was hard.
• 6:04
  Mark Zweig: I mean I would go home every weekend, but I traveled during the week and I know what that's all about.
• 6:09
  Mark Zweig: So that reentry and and getting back into the home life was always stressful, you know, especially if you didn't have more than a couple of days to do it, yeah, yeah, and then have to head out again.
• 6:21
  Mark Zweig: That's right, so you weren't married or anything at that time.
• 6:23
  Mark Zweig: No, no, that's good, not at all.
• 6:25
  Trent Brock: Not at all.
• 6:26
  Trent Brock: I mean, you know, I'll, I'll, you know, had a significant other you know, along along the way but never got serious.
• 6:31
  Mark Zweig: Right yeah, never got married.
• 6:33
  Mark Zweig: So you, um, did that.
• 6:35
  Trent Brock: For how many years I did that for about five, six years, okay, and then I got burned out, yeah, and I took a break, yeah, and, uh, I took a sabbatical.
• 6:43
  Trent Brock: That was the whole thing to do.
• 6:45
  Trent Brock: Then I take a year off.
• 6:46
  Trent Brock: Hope you can do it.
• 6:47
  Trent Brock: Yeah, more power to you.
• 6:48
  Mark Zweig: That was the plan I I so were you about 30 then, or what?
• 6:51
  Trent Brock: no-transcript.
• 6:56
  Trent Brock: Yeah.
• 6:56
  Trent Brock: And you know, I'd built up a few kind of personal goals over the years.
• 6:59
  Trent Brock: I wanted to try to.
• 7:00
  Trent Brock: I thought, potentially, you know, do I want to maybe be a professor or a teacher of some sort?
• 7:06
  Trent Brock: I didn't want to teach kids, but I thought, you know like, why not?
• 7:09
  Trent Brock: You know like, if you want to come to class, come to class.
• 7:11
  Trent Brock: The kids would come to class for the ones that want to learn.
• 7:13
  Trent Brock: If you don't want to come, go do whatever.
• 7:15
  Trent Brock: Right, you know, I don't want to fight that.
• 7:17
  Trent Brock: So I thought maybe I'd do that, yeah.
• 7:19
  Trent Brock: And then I wanted to try to learn Spanish.
• 7:21
  Trent Brock: Okay, and then, and then I kind of started doing my research and I thought, well, Spain's the place to go, Because that's where.
• 7:29
  Mark Zweig: Spanish started.
• 7:29
  Mark Zweig: Right, that is.
• 7:30
  Mark Zweig: That's a Spanish speaking country.
• 7:32
  Mark Zweig: Well, they're out, and then you get Europe with it, you get.
• 7:34
  Mark Zweig: Europe and they got good weather there.
• 7:36
  Trent Brock: Not too bad.
• 7:37
  Mark Zweig: Not too bad, yeah, depending on where you are, I guess.
• 7:39
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I was in Madrid.
• 7:40
  Trent Brock: Okay, it would be pretty hot.
• 7:41
  Trent Brock: It'd be pretty hot, didn't snow a lot, but gosh, you'd get hot, you know.
• 7:45
  Trent Brock: Yeah, but I'm used to that being from.
• 7:46
  Mark Zweig: Louisiana.
• 7:47
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, you are, you got that in the humidity Land of the swampy people.
• 7:51
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, so so, anyway, so you go to Madrid.
• 7:56
  Mark Zweig: What did you do there?
• 7:57
  Trent Brock: So I got my English teaching certificate and I taught English.
• 8:00
  Trent Brock: Okay, so I had this cool niche where, you know, I had this graduate, you know I was an MBA and I had business experience.
• 8:06
  Trent Brock: So I was teaching some business people Okay, you know, business English and stuff like that and then some people for proficiency what is that?
• 8:13
  Mark Zweig: business English, where you use a lot of buzzwords and like say, at the end of the day, and I'm gonna lean into that, and then we pivot, or what?
• 8:20
  Mark Zweig: Oh my gosh.
• 8:22
  Trent Brock: Those kind of things.
• 8:23
  Trent Brock: These guys were just trying to learn English, okay, okay, really, it was just a catchy thing for a niche to say I've got some business experience and I can talk with these people, all right yeah.
• 8:34
  Mark Zweig: Well, that's.
• 8:34
  Mark Zweig: Good to hear.
• 8:35
  Trent Brock: Yeah, so you taught English for a while, yeah, and I tried to learn Spanish.
• 8:39
  Trent Brock: Disaster, absolute disaster.
• 8:42
  Trent Brock: That's the second hardest thing I ever tried to do in my life.
• 8:45
  Trent Brock: That's cool.
• 8:47
  Trent Brock: And then learning Spanish, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know.
• 8:50
  Trent Brock: Big goals, big goals, yeah, yeah.
• 8:53
  Trent Brock: So the Spanish thing I didn't know a lick of Spanish, really.
• 8:57
  Trent Brock: I had taken a couple of classes right In college.
• 8:59
  Trent Brock: Sure, the professors like, amen, you could really excel at this.
• 9:03
  Trent Brock: And they thought, well, what do you do?
• 9:05
  Trent Brock: You?
• 9:05
  Trent Brock: Immerse yourself.
• 9:06
  Trent Brock: That's what everyone's doing.
• 9:07
  Trent Brock: No way, it doesn't work like that.
• 9:10
  Trent Brock: Okay, I got over there the first day I was there.
• 9:13
  Trent Brock: Okay, I'm in the airport.
• 9:15
  Trent Brock: They've lost my luggage.
• 9:16
  Trent Brock: They can't even speak English in the airport.
• 9:19
  Trent Brock: Oh, no, okay, I was in the colors, pointing at bags, pointing at sizes, and I thought to myself I have done it, I have done it.
• 9:27
  Trent Brock: So I did.
• 9:29
  Trent Brock: I got a gig.
• 9:30
  Trent Brock: I did get a gig where I was teaching English, teaching English, and then they had associated Spanish classes, so they were teaching a lot of languages in the school.
• 9:38
  Trent Brock: So I had a thing where I could teach some English, and then I got my Spanish classes for free.
• 9:42
  Trent Brock: So I was taking Spanish every day.
• 9:44
  Trent Brock: Well, I got better.
• 9:45
  Trent Brock: Yeah, what was it like living over there, like where did you, where did you live?
• 9:48
  Trent Brock: I lived in Madrid and man it's European, man it's laid back.
• 9:53
  Trent Brock: Is it your apartment?
• 9:54
  Trent Brock: I just I flat it man.
• 9:56
  Trent Brock: Okay, yeah, I mean.
• 9:57
  Trent Brock: What does flat it mean?
• 9:58
  Trent Brock: It means you roomed up with, you roomed with people.
• 10:02
  Mark Zweig: I see yeah.
• 10:02
  Trent Brock: Okay, yeah, you know, in the US it's a roommate.
• 10:07
  Trent Brock: A roommate in another country is literally a roommate in your room.
• 10:12
  Trent Brock: A flatmate is someone that you share a flat with.
• 10:15
  Mark Zweig: I see, so you have your own room.
• 10:16
  Mark Zweig: But then you got some comments, yeah.
• 10:19
  Trent Brock: Man, we're not gonna get into everything, because I mean, this is the whole story, because I lived with three Bulgarian guys, okay, okay, one of them spoke Spanish, one of them spoke English and the other one couldn't speak anything.
• 10:30
  Trent Brock: So then you can imagine us all trying to sit around and talk.
• 10:34
  Trent Brock: But these guys were awesome, man, they were like my brothers, they protected me.
• 10:38
  Trent Brock: You know, we hung around together and you know, you learn to communicate with people when you can't even talk to them.
• 10:42
  Trent Brock: Sure, you know, and you pick up on the vibe of people and who they are and how they are.
• 10:47
  Trent Brock: And you know these guys were rough, they were tough, they were construction guys.
• 10:52
  Trent Brock: But you know what?
• 10:53
  Trent Brock: We were friends.
• 10:53
  Trent Brock: That's good and it worked.
• 10:55
  Trent Brock: It worked, you know, and so you know the weirdest thing ever you moved to Spain and you lived with Bulgarians.
• 11:00
  Mark Zweig: Three Bulgarian construction guys.
• 11:02
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, man.
• 11:02
  Mark Zweig: Well, what happened after that?
• 11:05
  Trent Brock: So, you know, I did a year of that and that was kind of that.
• 11:08
  Trent Brock: And so, you know, I was pretty much broke and I was like, well, I'm going back into IT, but I'm gonna do something international.
• 11:16
  Trent Brock: That's what I wanted to do.
• 11:17
  Trent Brock: I kept wanting to go on an international project with Accenture and they just kept you know, it was all US based, which was fine, you know.
• 11:24
  Trent Brock: And so I was like, you know, I've got the skills and I'm gonna be a contractor, I'm going for the big money, you know.
• 11:30
  Trent Brock: And so that's what I did.
• 11:33
  Trent Brock: I started out and I started going worldwide and I got on some projects and I worked in New Zealand for most of the time and then I got on some projects in like Australia and Indonesia and Little Thing in England and all that.
• 11:47
  Trent Brock: And then I kept ending up back in New Zealand.
• 11:50
  Trent Brock: Okay, well, one week I was in the boxing gym.
• 11:54
  Trent Brock: I used to do, you know, be in the boxing and kick boxing and stuff like that Training, not fighting.
• 11:59
  Trent Brock: Okay, I don't want anybody to hit this face, not at all.
• 12:02
  Trent Brock: So I met these American guys that they'd come in and they were there for several weeks getting ready for matches.
• 12:09
  Trent Brock: I met their manager.
• 12:12
  Trent Brock: This guy's a serial entrepreneur man, I mean all sorts of stuff, has his hands in all sorts of small business and one of the things was they were from the home state of Washington and he did kettle corn, you know, during the spring and the summer and he's like it's a great business, do they have it here?
• 12:29
  Trent Brock: We got to know each other, you know, over the several weeks that they were there and we would take training together and then we'd go eat dinner together and we decided we're starting a weekend business.
• 12:38
  Trent Brock: Okay.
• 12:39
  Trent Brock: So we got some money together.
• 12:40
  Trent Brock: We had some primitive popcorn makers made and got some tents and started going out to local market.
• 12:48
  Trent Brock: So I was doing IT during the week and then I was doing the popcorn on the weekends.
• 12:53
  Trent Brock: I would say about eight months the money was good enough.
• 12:56
  Trent Brock: I quit the IT.
• 12:57
  Trent Brock: I wanted out.
• 12:58
  Trent Brock: I got tired of sitting behind a desk.
• 13:00
  Trent Brock: I wanted to do my own thing.
• 13:01
  Trent Brock: Back then the definition of success was you'll never be what you want to be unless you do your own thing.
• 13:08
  Trent Brock: Sure, so you know, that's what I went.
• 13:11
  Trent Brock: Popcorn was popping and the thing was it wasn't in New Zealand.
• 13:14
  Trent Brock: They didn't have it.
• 13:15
  Trent Brock: They didn't know what it was.
• 13:16
  Trent Brock: All they had was like butter popcorn and caramel popcorn.
• 13:19
  Trent Brock: They didn't have the middle.
• 13:21
  Trent Brock: And I just knew, you know, you know, when you have those feelings, sure, just know that you know, yeah, and you know, and I knew that this thing was gonna work.
• 13:29
  Trent Brock: Now, how good it was gonna work I didn't know, but it worked good enough for me to quit my job in eight months.
• 13:35
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, that's impressive.
• 13:36
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, on what happened.
• 13:39
  Trent Brock: Well, so then we were doing the markets, right.
• 13:41
  Trent Brock: So we started out and the way things were, we had two setups made, so we were doing one and I had my buddy going out to the market with me on the weekend and I mean, just crazy stuff was happening.
• 13:51
  Trent Brock: Like you know, I had this old box truck and all our gear was in it.
• 13:56
  Trent Brock: And you know, I mean it's your ragged kind of riches, so to speak, story.
• 14:00
  Trent Brock: I moved in with these guys and I said, look, the deal is I'm not taking the room unless I can have the garage.
• 14:07
  Trent Brock: So I put half of my junk in the garage.
• 14:09
  Trent Brock: I had an old box truck that we had all the gear in, and I started going out with my buddy.
• 14:15
  Trent Brock: And on the weekend, one weekend, man, I go inside to grab him.
• 14:22
  Trent Brock: You know it's five o'clock in the morning, right, so I go in to grab him on a Saturday morning I come out the fricking truck's on fire Underneath, yeah, so I get a rag, I get the fire out and he's like we're not going.
• 14:37
  Trent Brock: I'm like, yeah, we're going, we took the truck anyways, man, we went and you know it was just those kind of things that would happen, and we got to where we started with two setups, then we went to four and we were like you could pop in these trucks and stuff.
• 14:51
  Trent Brock: Wonderful.
• 14:52
  Trent Brock: What we did is we would take the setups and then we would have a tent.
• 14:54
  Trent Brock: You know.
• 14:55
  Trent Brock: So it's like where you go to a typical farmer's market, right?
• 14:58
  Trent Brock: You know you set up a tent, you get all your gear out, you know an hour or two before everybody shows up and you know you start popping that popcorn man.
• 15:04
  Trent Brock: Oh, so you made it right there.
• 15:06
  Mark Zweig: Oh yeah the smell.
• 15:07
  Mark Zweig: Oh yeah, it drags people over to you.
• 15:10
  Trent Brock: You're right, kettle crack, I'm telling you.
• 15:13
  Trent Brock: Telling you it was money for jam, you know, and it was a great cash business.
• 15:20
  Trent Brock: You know we made really good money doing that and that was kind of the plan.
• 15:24
  Trent Brock: You know, that was kind of the plan, you know it was.
• 15:26
  Trent Brock: My weeks were kind of backwards.
• 15:28
  Trent Brock: It was like, you know, friday to Sunday and then during the week I was getting ready and trying to find markets and man, I'm just man, I'm a dog, you know, I'd go for anything.
• 15:36
  Trent Brock: So, just to give you an idea, we would run like four setups and man, I would do anything and everything I get my hands on.
• 15:43
  Trent Brock: So we got contracts, like with the rugby stadium, you know, we would do weddings or nonprofits or school gallows, and we did the weekly markets.
• 15:50
  Trent Brock: We did about six or seven weekly markets a week, in the morning, that night, all the time, you know, and in seven years we did over 2,500 market events, holy cow that's a lot, all right.
• 16:03
  Mark Zweig: I mean, that's more than one a day on average.
• 16:06
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, of every single day.
• 16:08
  Trent Brock: Right, yeah, oh yeah, man, I mean that's just.
• 16:11
  Trent Brock: I mean that's, I was like well, we, you know, and the thing that happened and that was your entire distribution.
• 16:16
  Trent Brock: That was the start.
• 16:18
  Trent Brock: That was the start.
• 16:19
  Trent Brock: That was the start.
• 16:19
  Trent Brock: That was the start.
• 16:20
  Trent Brock: Yeah, that was the little brother thing.
• 16:23
  Mark Zweig: Got it Okay, then what happened?
• 16:25
  Trent Brock: Then.
• 16:25
  Trent Brock: Then we were at a market and the lady from one of the cinemas tried our popcorn and she said we want this.
• 16:32
  Trent Brock: We can't make this sweet popcorn in our machines.
• 16:35
  Trent Brock: We want your popcorn.
• 16:36
  Trent Brock: So that moved us.
• 16:37
  Trent Brock: That's the start of the manufacturing.
• 16:40
  Trent Brock: The retail Got it All the stuff.
• 16:42
  Trent Brock: So you know it was just we started out, so you know we're making everything by hand.
• 16:49
  Trent Brock: And then so these guys we don't want.
• 16:53
  Trent Brock: You know we can't have this in a plastic bag.
• 16:56
  Trent Brock: We need this in a real potato chip retail looking bag Right Like this.
• 17:02
  Trent Brock: Okay, that right Something like that Yup.
• 17:06
  Trent Brock: And so that's where everything started.
• 17:08
  Trent Brock: You know, learn about packaging and distribution.
• 17:10
  Trent Brock: And we would use the.
• 17:12
  Trent Brock: We would pop by hand with our popcorn makers, we would dump it out, we would sift it by hand, then we would take the popcorn right, and we would take the scoop and we would have a bag.
• 17:22
  Trent Brock: We didn't have all the machine.
• 17:23
  Trent Brock: We had a little scale, you know like a little foot scale, yeah, and we had a little hand sealer thing.
• 17:29
  Trent Brock: And that's how we started.
• 17:30
  Trent Brock: And the first day we had like four or five people who worked like eight or nine hours, man, and we made like 400 bags of popcorn.
• 17:39
  Trent Brock: It's like this ain't gonna work, right.
• 17:40
  Trent Brock: Well, we launched and we launched into about six cinemas with about three or four boxes in each one, and we went out and sold out.
• 17:49
  Trent Brock: Yeah, man, it went crazy.
• 17:50
  Trent Brock: We started we would send people out, we would send our see, our, our weekend.
• 17:54
  Trent Brock: People wanted something to do, right.
• 17:55
  Trent Brock: So I had a few people that were annual with Sure, they wanted something to do.
• 17:58
  Trent Brock: We send them to the, to the cinema, to do samples.
• 18:01
  Trent Brock: We're selling out, we're selling better than their stuff.
• 18:04
  Trent Brock: They're like you know what?
• 18:05
  Trent Brock: The profit margin isn't where we want to be, I mean, if you know how movie theaters operate, yeah, sure they don't call their money on concessions.
• 18:12
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, period, exactly.
• 18:14
  Trent Brock: Yeah, they kicked us out and said you know, we aren't making the money.
• 18:17
  Trent Brock: We need to on you guys, and you guys are showing us up, we're done.
• 18:20
  Trent Brock: So we kind of had to, you know, rejig the plan and it was like you know what?
• 18:25
  Trent Brock: This is a supermarket product, this isn't a cinema product, and so that's what we did.
• 18:30
  Trent Brock: So we started going out pitching to distributors and we got one, and that's where it all began.
• 18:36
  Trent Brock: You know, we started with the, with the sweet and salty popcorn, and you know, over the years, the things you know with, for example, let's see, just to kind of give you an idea on size, so we started in a one car garage Right, then a two car garage, then about 2000 square feet, and then, and then like, and then like six to 8,000.
• 18:58
  Trent Brock: And then like 15,000.
• 18:59
  Trent Brock: I mean, it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, right.
• 19:02
  Trent Brock: And we got to the point where, you know, each time we would do this, we would upgrade as well with the machinery.
• 19:08
  Trent Brock: So we'd take out a manual step, sure, and we would add in something that would Automation, yeah, and we would add in a human part, sure, human element was the thing.
• 19:15
  Trent Brock: And so, you know, over time we got to that point and we got to where we were serving.
• 19:20
  Trent Brock: You know, we had, we had several hundred supermarkets in New Zealand.
• 19:24
  Trent Brock: We're still kind of doing this by hand halfway.
• 19:26
  Trent Brock: So we went for it, man, we got to.
• 19:28
  Trent Brock: You know You're funding all this internally.
• 19:31
  Trent Brock: Most of it was funded internally, okay.
• 19:33
  Trent Brock: Okay, because we were using the money from the weekends, yeah, to buy the stuff Right, to buy our manufacturing, and that's the big boy Right.
• 19:40
  Trent Brock: So, to give you an idea, it towards the end what would happen was we would go out all weekend, right, and I was working, you know, 12 days on the weekend Friday, saturday, sunday, whatever In one day, making popcorn is what we would make in all 12 of those days.
• 19:54
  Trent Brock: And I was just like you know what I'm sick of killing myself.
• 19:57
  Trent Brock: This is silly.
• 19:58
  Trent Brock: So we just kind of stopped doing the markets and I eventually sold that off to a mom and pop deal and that was cool, you know.
• 20:03
  Trent Brock: So they still had advertising still out there, still getting our brand and everything for us and all that.
• 20:08
  Trent Brock: That's good.
• 20:08
  Trent Brock: But we moved to the manufacturing.
• 20:10
  Trent Brock: So, you know, and at that point in time, you know we weren't making a lot of money.
• 20:15
  Trent Brock: We were making some money.
• 20:16
  Trent Brock: We borrowed some money as well, you know privately, and it's like well, are we gonna?
• 20:21
  Trent Brock: Are we gonna buy one piece?
• 20:24
  Trent Brock: We need about 12 pieces of machinery, you know cookers, conveyors, sifters, weirs, baggers, all these checkwares, all this stuff.
• 20:30
  Trent Brock: Right, what are you gonna do?
• 20:32
  Trent Brock: You're gonna buy one piece of the machinery from the US for a half million dollars or are you gonna buy the whole thing from China for 200?
• 20:40
  Trent Brock: Everything?
• 20:41
  Trent Brock: So we found this guy that had been recommended by, you know, a fellow that had been our engineer and kind of with us the whole way, and he said look, I'm retiring, I'm getting old, but I'm handing this guy to my business, handing it over.
• 20:52
  Trent Brock: And why don't you go for the?
• 20:54
  Trent Brock: You know, try it with this guy.
• 20:55
  Trent Brock: It'll be his first import, you know, his first big deal.
• 20:57
  Trent Brock: So you know, we went for it, man.
• 20:59
  Trent Brock: So we got the whole line.
• 21:00
  Trent Brock: We got the whole line of kicking caboodle and you know we didn't need something like a Frito-Lay.
• 21:05
  Trent Brock: Sure, I mean, we're running 24, seven lights out every day, 500 bags a minute or something crazy.
• 21:11
  Trent Brock: Yeah, we're just eight hours a day, more, five days a week.
• 21:15
  Trent Brock: You know 15, 20 bags a minute.
• 21:17
  Trent Brock: You know we're making money, we're good.
• 21:19
  Trent Brock: So you know, and you know, eventually the plan has had been the whole time.
• 21:23
  Trent Brock: We would upgrade as we went.
• 21:25
  Mark Zweig: And that's what most manufacturing businesses though I had limited experience, but some just seems like, no matter what you do, you're trying to push to get your volume up and then, as soon as you do, you got to invest money and more equipment.
• 21:40
  Mark Zweig: It's a you know, it's a never ending cycle of investing Yep, and it's hard to get on top of that.
• 21:48
  Mark Zweig: That takes a lot of capital.
• 21:49
  Trent Brock: It does.
• 21:50
  Trent Brock: You know, there was never a balance.
• 21:52
  Trent Brock: I was always in an unbalanced state.
• 21:54
  Trent Brock: It was either we had, you know, we had more machinery and we wanted to run it more, or more demand than you could yeah, exactly.
• 22:01
  Trent Brock: More, you know, not enough staff or too much staff, sure, you know that it was always one of those kind of things, just trying to always find that sweet spot, right.
• 22:10
  Trent Brock: Well, hey, it is what it is, right, sure.
• 22:11
  Trent Brock: And so then you know, we got from one line that we could just do kind of one size on, and then we're out on another line where we could do little bags, and then we're about another line where we could do multi-packs and we started expanding our sizes, yep, and then they're wanting, then they want flavors.
• 22:26
  Trent Brock: So every year or every six months, when you go in to see the buyer, they want the new thing, they want a new flavor, they want a new size, they want a new product, they want product development, they just want new, new, new, right, you know, like- Gotta keep the market interested All the time.
• 22:39
  Trent Brock: New is what it takes All the time, man, you know, and I'm a little guy, you know, I'm just a little guy selling a couple bags of popcorn, where you know, and you got these potato chip guys, you know, coming in with different seasonal flavors and blah, blah, blah, and so I'm trying to, you know, keep up with these guys and do that kind of stuff.
• 22:56
  Trent Brock: And so we got into it.
• 22:57
  Trent Brock: You know where it was like.
• 22:58
  Trent Brock: Once we had a meeting and we saved that skew for the year.
• 23:01
  Trent Brock: We still had it, we had our numbers.
• 23:03
  Trent Brock: It was like what are we gonna do next year?
• 23:04
  Trent Brock: You start on something already.
• 23:06
  Trent Brock: So that would start.
• 23:07
  Trent Brock: Man, I was starting the kitchen.
• 23:08
  Trent Brock: Yeah, just experimenting.
• 23:10
  Trent Brock: You got it, uh-huh, yep.
• 23:12
  Trent Brock: And then you know, we do taste test with all our friends and then we do it, you know, then we do it out somewhere public and so, and then we take it in and we hang it all out and say, well, making a zillion of these right.
• 23:24
  Trent Brock: Yeah we looked at the numbers, we looked at everything.
• 23:26
  Trent Brock: What do you think?
• 23:27
  Trent Brock: So you know, a couple of them didn't work, a couple of them didn't work along the ways and a couple sizes didn't work along the way, and that hurts.
• 23:35
  Trent Brock: That hurts a lot.
• 23:36
  Trent Brock: Yeah, put a lot of money into it, put a lot of you know research and you know R&D and you know marketing behind it, and then it flops Mm-hmm.
• 23:45
  Trent Brock: And it could flop for many reasons that you have no control.
• 23:48
  Trent Brock: And so we had a few of those, you know.
• 23:51
  Trent Brock: Like, we had a sour cream and chives.
• 23:53
  Trent Brock: Sour cream and chives is the second most popular potato chip flavor.
• 23:57
  Mark Zweig: Right, but didn't translate to popcorn.
• 23:59
  Trent Brock: I think it would.
• 24:00
  Trent Brock: I think it would in America, but with the New Zealand culture, they are not into variety, they are not into, you know, adventure and experience.
• 24:11
  Trent Brock: They just like what they like and this is what we like and this is what we're gonna buy.
• 24:14
  Trent Brock: It's the British influence Absolutely is.
• 24:17
  Mark Zweig: You know it's boring.
• 24:18
  Trent Brock: It's boring man and I was like.
• 24:19
  Mark Zweig: I used to carry on salt and pepper and Tabasco with it what living in England you mean Living living in New Zealand man.
• 24:26
  Trent Brock: Everything was just different now, sure, yeah, yeah, man, back in the day.
• 24:31
  Trent Brock: You know, it's like three options of food, uh-huh you know that's funny, yeah, so then what?
• 24:36
  Trent Brock: happened Gosh.
• 24:37
  Trent Brock: So we kept growing and we got bigger and bigger.
• 24:41
  Trent Brock: And then it was like, well, we've kind of thought of like we've tried kind of all the flavors we could do, We've kind of done all the sizes we could do.
• 24:47
  Trent Brock: We're starting to get saturated in the market and that's one of the things in a small country, you know, in New Zealand New Zealand is small, yeah.
• 24:54
  Mark Zweig: A million man.
• 24:54
  Mark Zweig: It's a state.
• 24:55
  Trent Brock: It was state.
• 24:55
  Trent Brock: Sure you know it's like Not even a big state.
• 24:57
  Trent Brock: Yeah, exactly.
• 24:59
  Trent Brock: So it was good from a marketing perspective and a, you know, a popularity perspective, because you know we could saturate the whole country, you know, with minimal marketing dollars, but you know you only have so many supermarkets, sure, and so then we had to start going international Right, so Australia would be obviously the next logical.
• 25:17
  Trent Brock: That was the next logical?
• 25:18
  Trent Brock: I would think it was the next logical.
• 25:20
  Trent Brock: But you know what meant.
• 25:21
  Trent Brock: They're tough, they're mean over there, their percentages are higher, their requirements are meaner and you know we had a couple of opportunities and even with the exchange rate and everything never worked out.
• 25:32
  Trent Brock: So we figured out we're gonna go where people want us instead of where we gotta try to fight, sure.
• 25:38
  Trent Brock: So I did a show in Singapore.
• 25:42
  Trent Brock: That's really the gateway to Asia.
• 25:43
  Trent Brock: Like a lot of the stuff comes in there and whatever the trends are, they kind of blow out to a lot of the other places.
• 25:48
  Trent Brock: And I did a lot of, you know, r&d and work with it's that fluent.
• 25:52
  Trent Brock: They won, yeah, yeah, sure.
• 25:53
  Trent Brock: Multicultural Interest Pad community you know that deal, sure, and they're very wide open to try all sorts of different things.
• 26:01
  Trent Brock: And so I went to a show there and we got our popcorn in a couple of stores there and then we kind of started, you know, growing and we started going to.
• 26:08
  Trent Brock: You know we got into Taiwan and Hong Kong and Malaysia and some things like that, and then eventually the Middle East.
• 26:14
  Trent Brock: But it was still this pressure, still this pressure.
• 26:16
  Trent Brock: What's next?
• 26:17
  Trent Brock: What's next?
• 26:17
  Trent Brock: So then we started a microwave popcorn company and so, yep, this thing really took off.
• 26:23
  Trent Brock: It's crazy, man, it's crazy, I mean.
• 26:25
  Trent Brock: You know from.
• 26:26
  Trent Brock: I mean, and you know when we did the markets, you know, not only were we doing popcorn, but then the cotton candy guy got tired of his business, so I bought that.
• 26:35
  Trent Brock: And then there was a side thing to do toffee apples or caramel apples.
• 26:41
  Mark Zweig: So we started that.
• 26:41
  Mark Zweig: You are what I would call an opportunistic entrepreneur, not somebody that sits there and does a lot of research and goes.
• 26:48
  Mark Zweig: The next step in my plan is to bring a toffee apple company in.
• 26:52
  Mark Zweig: Instead, you just responded to opportunities that came your way right, never had a business plan.
• 26:58
  Trent Brock: My business partner flies by the seat of his pants.
• 27:00
  Trent Brock: It's not kind of, it's not really my style, but you know, I learned.
• 27:05
  Trent Brock: I learned to live in that environment and do it.
• 27:07
  Trent Brock: So you did have a partner through this whole.
• 27:09
  Trent Brock: Oh, yeah, yeah, I had a business partner.
• 27:10
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I had a business partner through the whole thing.
• 27:12
  Trent Brock: You know, he was kind of the brains behind the whole, like I know the black magic to make the popcorn and he, you know, he'd run several businesses.
• 27:19
  Trent Brock: So were you equal owners?
• 27:21
  Trent Brock: Yeah, we were equal owners, yeah, yeah.
• 27:23
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I was on the ground, I was kind of on the ground guy and he would do a lot of the back end stuff.
• 27:28
  Trent Brock: Yeah, your front end, sales and marketing, yeah, and on the ground, operations and all that kind of stuff.
• 27:34
  Trent Brock: And he'd do a lot of the stuff on the back end where, you know, somebody wasn't present, you know, like the invoicing and the accounting and the collections and all the stuff I, you know, didn't have time to worry about, right, so it worked well.
• 27:46
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, it worked well.
• 27:46
  Mark Zweig: Sure, different skill sets usually is a good requirement.
• 27:50
  Mark Zweig: You're not treading in each other's territory.
• 27:52
  Mark Zweig: That's it.
• 27:53
  Mark Zweig: That's it, Yep.
• 27:55
  Trent Brock: So now we got the microwave popcorn, so we got the microwave thing.
• 27:58
  Trent Brock: And you know about our popcorn.
• 28:00
  Trent Brock: The reason we're different is I'm going sales on you here.
• 28:03
  Trent Brock: All right, that's fine, I can handle it.
• 28:06
  Trent Brock: We had to have a.
• 28:07
  Trent Brock: You know, if you, if you want to do something in the market, you got to have something that's different.
• 28:11
  Trent Brock: You got to do something better, different, Sure.
• 28:13
  Trent Brock: And then the other guy, right, Right, and so New Zealand is very green, they're very environmental, they're very, they're very all natural, they.
• 28:21
  Trent Brock: You know there's a big push for that.
• 28:23
  Trent Brock: They have a lot of that high origination.
• 28:25
  Mark Zweig: I can't just keep expanding their bounds.
• 28:28
  Mark Zweig: Right, that's right, that's right.
• 28:30
  Trent Brock: Limited resources Correct, yeah.
• 28:32
  Trent Brock: And so we had the vegan vegetarian thing.
• 28:36
  Trent Brock: You know there's a lot of Indian people that live there, okay.
• 28:39
  Trent Brock: And then on top of that, just you know people that you know are concerned about their diet and holistic or whatever, sure, and so you know we had the vegan and vegetarian thing going on for us.
• 28:48
  Trent Brock: And then we had the allergy free deal.
• 28:50
  Trent Brock: There's a lot of allergies in New Zealand.
• 28:51
  Trent Brock: People all one out of one in four people have something Corn allergies are fairly common too, aren't they?
• 28:57
  Trent Brock: Yeah, well, not corn, not corn.
• 28:59
  Trent Brock: Okay, gluten, dairy, soy, peanut nut, those are all common.
• 29:04
  Trent Brock: But note, the corn thing isn't very much and it's not anything that like if somebody has a reaction they're not gonna kill them, sure, you know.
• 29:13
  Trent Brock: So I think peanut allergies are common.
• 29:15
  Trent Brock: Oh, yeah, I mean, that's you know.
• 29:16
  Trent Brock: Deal with that.
• 29:17
  Trent Brock: Sure, we got a great deal, cause we serve the schools as well.
• 29:20
  Trent Brock: We got into doing school lunches and we would serve.
• 29:23
  Trent Brock: We got into a government contract and we were serving the schools and things like that.
• 29:26
  Trent Brock: And man, I'm telling you, like you know, something happened to one of the kids and it was your product.
• 29:30
  Trent Brock: Not good, yeah, not good.
• 29:32
  Trent Brock: So you know, I mean, we were true.
• 29:34
  Trent Brock: You know we were true to what we had and what our claims were.
• 29:38
  Trent Brock: And instead of your market you were serving yeah, absolutely, and you know the whole all natural thing.
• 29:44
  Trent Brock: And then it's New Zealand made.
• 29:45
  Trent Brock: And you know, one of the things that I knew living there was the New Zealanders.
• 29:49
  Trent Brock: They are very proud of what they have and what they have.
• 29:54
  Trent Brock: So, like their rugby team, yeah, and they have a couple of food dishes that they've said that they've invented, or you know some of the things along the way that they've done, sure, and so we named this thing New Zealand Kettle Corn.
• 30:04
  Trent Brock: Yeah, like they owned it and they loved it and they supported it.
• 30:08
  Trent Brock: It was a New Zealand made product.
• 30:10
  Trent Brock: Sure, and they love supporting New Zealand made stuff.
• 30:12
  Trent Brock: Yeah, so you know we had all those things I mean.
• 30:15
  Trent Brock: New Zealand made is.
• 30:16
  Trent Brock: You know, we're all sick, man, we're in the back.
• 30:20
  Trent Brock: So you know that was kind of our whole marketing plan and we were more expensive.
• 30:23
  Trent Brock: You know we were handmade, but I'll tell you what, man.
• 30:25
  Trent Brock: You know I'm a bit partial, but it's the best popcorn on the planet.
• 30:30
  Trent Brock: You know it's made by hand.
• 30:31
  Trent Brock: Sure, it's all made with that blood, sweat and tears deal.
• 30:34
  Trent Brock: And you know, you just can't beat it, man.
• 30:37
  Trent Brock: You can't beat it putting it in that market, in that kettle and making it from scratch the old fashioned way, you know, were you gonna eat grandma's cookies, or mom, or the ones from the supermarket?
• 30:47
  Trent Brock: Right, what do you like about it?
• 30:48
  Trent Brock: Yeah, grandma.
• 30:48
  Trent Brock: And so I win.
• 30:49
  Trent Brock: I win every time, you know.
• 30:50
  Trent Brock: So that was kind of our thing.
• 30:53
  Trent Brock: And we grew, we grew from, you know what we were, to the number two manufacturer in the country, and then we had to start expanding out.
• 30:59
  Trent Brock: You know like we kind of talked about internationally.
• 31:01
  Trent Brock: So then what happened?
• 31:02
  Trent Brock: Well, in the middle of working on the neck and kernel thing yeah, the microwave popcorn I got hip bone cancer.
• 31:13
  Trent Brock: How did you find out you had that?
• 31:15
  Trent Brock: Oh man, what a story, yeah this.
• 31:17
  Trent Brock: So I started limping around the factory.
• 31:20
  Trent Brock: You know, I'm very active.
• 31:21
  Trent Brock: I leave from the front, show my guys how to do things.
• 31:23
  Trent Brock: You're a new kickboxer.
• 31:25
  Trent Brock: Well, I just, you know, I mean, I knew how to do everything, cause I started from the ground up.
• 31:29
  Trent Brock: Sure, so you know, when we were a small business, we didn't have the money to hire an engineer to pay somebody to do this.
• 31:34
  Trent Brock: So, you know, I did everything.
• 31:37
  Trent Brock: And I'm limping around the factory and I go to a couple of doctors and they say, man, you've torn your butt, you've torn a butt muscle.
• 31:43
  Trent Brock: I'm like, okay, and I, eventually I had to go into the hospital for some blood work and the hematologist said Trent, something's wrong.
• 31:50
  Trent Brock: You're getting an X-ray.
• 31:52
  Trent Brock: Okay, whatever, I get an X-ray.
• 31:55
  Trent Brock: A week later, that call, get that call, that one that changes your life, and it was that you have hip bone cancer.
• 32:02
  Trent Brock: It's extensive, it's aggressive.
• 32:04
  Trent Brock: You have a quarter inch of bone holding your leg on and every step that you take you could break your leg.
• 32:09
  Trent Brock: We're surprised you haven't broken it already.
• 32:11
  Trent Brock: If you break your leg, we're taking it off.
• 32:14
  Trent Brock: Come to the hospital right now.
• 32:15
  Trent Brock: Oh my God, yeah.
• 32:19
  Trent Brock: So I went straight to the hospital and checked in.
• 32:22
  Trent Brock: And it's public there, man, it's a public deal.
• 32:25
  Trent Brock: So we know that anything you deal with the public, nothing happens quickly, and that includes healthcare.
• 32:31
  Trent Brock: So I check in for the weekend and they start running tests on me.
• 32:34
  Trent Brock: You know it's an anomaly, man, this thing is not normal.
• 32:37
  Trent Brock: What happened?
• 32:38
  Trent Brock: And so you know I stayed over the weekend and I'm like you know what I'm out of here.
• 32:42
  Trent Brock: I'm running a business.
• 32:42
  Trent Brock: You guys call me when you need me to do a test, I'll be here.
• 32:45
  Trent Brock: Oh geez, yep.
• 32:46
  Trent Brock: So I checked out.
• 32:47
  Trent Brock: I checked out and I said, look, I'll be here for anything, but I'm not laying here in the hospital bed.
• 32:51
  Trent Brock: I got business to run, I got things to do, and so back and forth in and out of the hospital for six months.
• 32:58
  Trent Brock: What they would do is they would do the x-rays, they do the scans, they would create the implant.
• 33:02
  Trent Brock: By the time they were ready to do the implant, the cancer progressed and the implant wouldn't fit.
• 33:08
  Mark Zweig: Oh my God, Are they giving you any kind of cancer treatment?
• 33:10
  Mark Zweig: Not at this point.
• 33:12
  Mark Zweig: They're just gonna cut it all out.
• 33:13
  Trent Brock: No chemo no radiation, no nothing, we're just cutting it out.
• 33:16
  Trent Brock: We're cutting it out, we're putting in an implant, oh my God.
• 33:19
  Trent Brock: And you know, like back then, you know, I mean we're five years from that now.
• 33:24
  Trent Brock: So I know the things now, but I've never had a health issue, man.
• 33:28
  Trent Brock: I've broken ankle a couple of times.
• 33:30
  Mark Zweig: Right, yeah.
• 33:30
  Trent Brock: I get it.
• 33:31
  Trent Brock: So I mean, you know, I'm just doing everybody's business, that's an equipship for this kind of a deal right?
• 33:35
  Trent Brock: Oh my God, no way.
• 33:36
  Trent Brock: I mean goodness gracious.
• 33:38
  Trent Brock: So third time through, the doc came in and said look, it's progressed too far, we're cutting your leg off.
• 33:46
  Trent Brock: Oh my God.
• 33:46
  Trent Brock: And you know, after six months of everything of in and out of the hospital and in and out of a dementia nursing home, that they put me in for a while and they thought I had dementia and all this craziness and you know, the nut farm and all that stuff.
• 33:59
  Trent Brock: I just lost it, you know.
• 34:01
  Trent Brock: And my parents, my parents, would be on the phone with me at that time.
• 34:04
  Trent Brock: Finally, my folks would get on the phone with me and they'd say, you know, I had them as my support group.
• 34:08
  Trent Brock: Sure, because what happens a lot of times with these kind of things, but you're kind of the globe, it's hard.
• 34:12
  Mark Zweig: Exactly.
• 34:13
  Trent Brock: But at least they're the sanity on the phone.
• 34:14
  Trent Brock: Because what happens is you're like I'm gonna talk to the doctor about this and he comes in and he says something and you blank out, you talk for 30 minutes, right you?
• 34:21
  Mark Zweig: need to have somebody else there to process it and remember what they're saying to you.
• 34:27
  Mark Zweig: That's exactly right.
• 34:28
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, no one would like that.
• 34:29
  Mark Zweig: No one would like that.
• 34:29
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, my wife has me go with her sometimes.
• 34:32
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, If it's something big Sure.
• 34:33
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, just so I can listen.
• 34:36
  Mark Zweig: That's it.
• 34:37
  Mark Zweig: That's it man.
• 34:38
  Trent Brock: So God, so.
• 34:39
  Trent Brock: So my dad stepped in and said you're not cutting this guy's leg off.
• 34:42
  Trent Brock: You're not doing that.
• 34:43
  Trent Brock: He's a fighter.
• 34:44
  Trent Brock: He's not a quitter.
• 34:45
  Trent Brock: He's never quit on anything.
• 34:46
  Trent Brock: If anybody can make this leg work, he'll make it work.
• 34:49
  Trent Brock: And he said well, his life will be better and easier if we cut it off.
• 34:51
  Trent Brock: My dad said leave it.
• 34:52
  Trent Brock: He said if you don't leave it, I'm flying him home tomorrow.
• 34:55
  Trent Brock: So the doctor left it.
• 34:57
  Trent Brock: And so just to give you an idea, I don't, you know, just to give you an idea.
• 35:02
  Trent Brock: So they removed.
• 35:05
  Trent Brock: You know, I don't know if we can, if we can see that.
• 35:07
  Trent Brock: You see that, yeah, sure, that's how much, that's how much, that's a lot.
• 35:11
  Trent Brock: They took out, they took out all that.
• 35:13
  Mark Zweig: Right, okay, they're getting awful near your spine there.
• 35:17
  Trent Brock: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
• 35:17
  Trent Brock: And so to give you an idea, this is what my spine looks like.
• 35:21
  Trent Brock: So this is a regular pelvis, this is the regular side.
• 35:23
  Trent Brock: So anything from this side over gone, yeah, okay, and well, that eventually, you know, I made me handicap.
• 35:30
  Trent Brock: My leg was shorter than the other several inches Right.
• 35:32
  Trent Brock: And then on the next scan, you know, I thought we were done, you know, you know, got out four months in the hospital, all the thing back at work.
• 35:39
  Trent Brock: The next scan lung and pancreas.
• 35:42
  Trent Brock: Lung and pancreas cancer.
• 35:44
  Trent Brock: I couldn't believe it.
• 35:45
  Trent Brock: So the pancreas was the next big deal and obviously that's like less than a 5% chance.
• 35:50
  Trent Brock: Okay, so I've survived all your surgeries, correct?
• 35:54
  Trent Brock: Yes, that's some five.
• 35:54
  Trent Brock: Yeah, oh my God yeah.
• 35:58
  Trent Brock: So on that deal, we had the surgery, covid hit.
• 36:01
  Trent Brock: Everybody's locked down.
• 36:02
  Trent Brock: You know it's so lonely, you're all by yourself, no one's in the hospital with you, it's all that kind of thing.
• 36:07
  Trent Brock: Had the surgery went fine, got the debrief report misdiagnosis Cut out half my pancreas and spleen.
• 36:13
  Trent Brock: It was ended up being a mistaken blood clot.
• 36:16
  Trent Brock: Oh my God, yep.
• 36:21
  Mark Zweig: It gets better.
• 36:21
  Mark Zweig: How can you lie?
• 36:22
  Mark Zweig: It gets better, Mark, I mean it gets me going.
• 36:24
  Trent Brock: It gets me going absolutely.
• 36:25
  Trent Brock: I like therapy, man line of therapy.
• 36:27
  Trent Brock: Oh my God.
• 36:28
  Trent Brock: Yeah, that was tough.
• 36:29
  Trent Brock: You know it's bittersweet, right.
• 36:31
  Trent Brock: The thing is, the thing is I was like, well, I dodged the cancer.
• 36:35
  Trent Brock: But you know, now you know you got health issues Right For the rest of your life.
• 36:39
  Trent Brock: Sure, because you don't have part of the stuff that you're supposed to have Right, and you know you can't do anything about it because it's public.
• 36:46
  Trent Brock: You can fill out a complaint form when they throw it in the rubbish, right?
• 36:49
  Trent Brock: Okay, fine, let's get past that.
• 36:51
  Trent Brock: So then we had the lung thing, had the lung thing, had the lung cancer.
• 36:54
  Trent Brock: That's okay, that got infected.
• 36:56
  Trent Brock: Oh yeah, by the way, the hip was infected from the start, since the very first you know, removal yeah.
• 37:03
  Trent Brock: So that was infected for a while.
• 37:05
  Trent Brock: Doctor decided we're gonna go in, we're gonna take out this little wire that we've put in to kind of help hold the leg.
• 37:10
  Trent Brock: That's the reason the infection Botched up.
• 37:12
  Trent Brock: The surgery messed me up, gave me a surgical hernia, bladder issues, and removed the wire and what it caused was where the hip began to come upwards.
• 37:25
  Trent Brock: Okay, so it had nothing to hold it here.
• 37:27
  Trent Brock: Here you have a little.
• 37:29
  Trent Brock: You had this little wire thing, yeah, okay.
• 37:31
  Trent Brock: So then the wire was gone.
• 37:32
  Trent Brock: So then over time it just continues to go up.
• 37:34
  Trent Brock: It's like Jell-O Leg is just shorter and shorter.
• 37:36
  Trent Brock: Yeah, yeah, nothing to yeah yeah, so this is the kind of shoe that I ended up having to wear.
• 37:41
  Trent Brock: Well, so, four and a quarter inch lift, man.
• 37:44
  Trent Brock: Okay, told me I'd never walk again, I'd be on crutches and a wheelchair for the rest of my life, be handicapped that would be my life.
• 37:50
  Trent Brock: Yeah, still, man, still.
• 37:52
  Trent Brock: You know what I'm running my business.
• 37:54
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, still running my business.
• 37:55
  Mark Zweig: How the heck were you doing at all?
• 37:56
  Trent Brock: You know what I've had a lot of people ask me that and you know what it just I was really worried in the beginning.
• 38:04
  Trent Brock: That's why I kept checking myself out of the hospital.
• 38:06
  Trent Brock: These guys can't do it on their own.
• 38:08
  Trent Brock: Eventually, you know what, I got to the point where I couldn't Sure, and so you know what.
• 38:14
  Trent Brock: It was good for me from the standpoint of I had something to focus on, had something to work on, had something to deal with besides laying there looking at the wall waiting until the doctor come talk to me every day.
• 38:23
  Trent Brock: Yeah, because I was in the hospital nine months, over two years, dude.
• 38:27
  Trent Brock: But I ran my business, man, you know, I put the laptop up on the on the Little table yeah, on the table, man.
• 38:34
  Trent Brock: And you know my suppliers would come in and meet me.
• 38:37
  Trent Brock: I wouldn't even get, I couldn't even get out of bed, yeah, I couldn't even roll over, right, I couldn't even meet me.
• 38:41
  Trent Brock: My staff were coming in, we're having meetings, we're doing our thing, we're still working.
• 38:45
  Trent Brock: So, a couple hours a day, man, I'd get away from it, you know, and I think it kind of saved me, to agree, saved my sanity to a bit.
• 38:51
  Trent Brock: And you know, my team got to where I couldn't do everything.
• 38:56
  Trent Brock: It couldn't depend on me to show them how to do everything.
• 38:58
  Trent Brock: They had to go learn how to do it and say, look, I'll tell you how to do it.
• 39:01
  Trent Brock: I'll never leave you, always be here, but you have to go do it yourself now, yeah, and if you make a mistake, come back, we'll fix it.
• 39:06
  Trent Brock: Yeah, fix it together, you know.
• 39:08
  Trent Brock: And so I had some guys that you know they stepped up, they grew, they became unbelievable.
• 39:13
  Trent Brock: You know, some of them moved on since then, but you know, they just they wanted to.
• 39:17
  Trent Brock: You know, I mean, I'm a good boss man.
• 39:20
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I'm a good guy to work with.
• 39:22
  Trent Brock: You know I treat my staff like family.
• 39:24
  Trent Brock: Sure, you know I've done all sorts of things.
• 39:27
  Trent Brock: I've done all sorts of things, man.
• 39:28
  Trent Brock: You know, have their car fixed, give them money on the weekend by their Christmas presents.
• 39:32
  Trent Brock: You know, do whatever man.
• 39:34
  Mark Zweig: Yeah.
• 39:34
  Trent Brock: And so they wanted to keep their job.
• 39:35
  Mark Zweig: That's good you know.
• 39:37
  Mark Zweig: So.
• 39:37
  Mark Zweig: So that got you through that.
• 39:38
  Mark Zweig: But then what?
• 39:39
  Mark Zweig: Now you got lung cancer.
• 39:40
  Mark Zweig: Yeah.
• 39:40
  Trent Brock: So that's not good.
• 39:41
  Trent Brock: So I had the lung surgery.
• 39:42
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I had the lung surgery and that got infected.
• 39:45
  Trent Brock: And then they came in no-transcript there's the hip thing again when I was just totally out of my mind with, you know, being on drugs from the lungs.
• 39:52
  Trent Brock: So they just kind of told me they were doing it.
• 39:53
  Trent Brock: I was all alone, no one to, no one to, and I was kind of like, okay, so they did that and so then that really messed the leg up Right and it didn't fix the infection either.
• 40:03
  Trent Brock: So I still had the infection.
• 40:05
  Trent Brock: Okay, man, two and a half months in the hospital two supposed to be a couple of weeks turned into two and a half months.
• 40:10
  Trent Brock: Get out all over again, just trying to get back to life and do my thing and work.
• 40:14
  Trent Brock: Next scan no, you do have pancreas cancer.
• 40:17
  Trent Brock: For real, this is for real.
• 40:18
  Trent Brock: For real.
• 40:19
  Trent Brock: I'm like, well, you wouldn't do a biopsy last time, let's do a biopsy this time.
• 40:23
  Trent Brock: So a couple of months and me arguing back and forth with the pancreatic surgeon when they found the cancer.
• 40:29
  Trent Brock: It was the size of a couple of nickels.
• 40:35
  Trent Brock: Okay, that's how big it was.
• 40:37
  Trent Brock: After four months arguing with the doctor, getting a biopsy and everything.
• 40:40
  Trent Brock: It was the size of a tennis ball.
• 40:42
  Trent Brock: Okay, poor guy Was growing into my stomach lining.
• 40:46
  Trent Brock: I had a scan, went into a private radiologist because these guys were dragging their feet and I figured out what was going on.
• 40:53
  Trent Brock: Later they were just waiting me out.
• 40:54
  Trent Brock: They were waiting me out.
• 40:55
  Trent Brock: I mean, it's public, it's a business.
• 40:57
  Trent Brock: They're like I can do anything for me.
• 40:59
  Trent Brock: And so I went to a private guy and I had a serious talk with him.
• 41:03
  Trent Brock: He said look, it's too far, we won't do anything for you.
• 41:06
  Trent Brock: You know, we won't do surgery, it's too risky.
• 41:09
  Trent Brock: We won't do radiation, that's too risky.
• 41:11
  Trent Brock: So you can go home.
• 41:12
  Trent Brock: And I'm like and wait to die.
• 41:16
  Trent Brock: And he's like well, you can go home.
• 41:18
  Trent Brock: And I'm like man, I know the stats.
• 41:20
  Trent Brock: With treatment, it's less than 5%.
• 41:22
  Trent Brock: You're telling me to go home With no drug treatment.
• 41:25
  Trent Brock: And so you know, there was this thing the whole time I was like am I gonna come home and be with my parents or am I gonna run my business?
• 41:30
  Trent Brock: So I've got free healthcare here.
• 41:32
  Trent Brock: I don't have it in the States.
• 41:34
  Trent Brock: What am I gonna do?
• 41:35
  Trent Brock: You know, I haven't lived here 15 years or whatever.
• 41:38
  Trent Brock: Sure, well, my dad and I started talking.
• 41:41
  Trent Brock: He's like you know, the healthcare rules have changed.
• 41:42
  Trent Brock: You know you ought to check into it and see if you can still get something with preexisting conditions, if it's affordable, cause I wasn't gonna come home Right and die on my parents and bankrupt them Right, bankrupt the whole family, and die.
• 41:54
  Trent Brock: I'd rather just die and be sad.
• 41:57
  Trent Brock: You know, like that's practical, okay, approach this thing like a business Uh-huh, like just nothing but facts and practicality.
• 42:03
  Trent Brock: And that's how I think I got through it.
• 42:05
  Trent Brock: You know, I just these are the facts, this is what's gonna happen.
• 42:08
  Trent Brock: Try to take your emotions out of it.
• 42:10
  Trent Brock: Even though Just accepted your fate, I mean, you know I'd go to the hospital, you know, and they tell me I was dying and I'd go back to the factory an hour later and I didn't have to work for seven or eight hours until I got home at night, mm-hmm, you know.
• 42:20
  Trent Brock: And then you kind of just fall apart when you get home by yourself.
• 42:23
  Trent Brock: But you know, that's what I did.
• 42:24
  Trent Brock: You know that's what I did, man.
• 42:25
  Trent Brock: And so I decided I was coming home.
• 42:29
  Trent Brock: I decided I was coming home.
• 42:30
  Trent Brock: They'd given me a year.
• 42:32
  Trent Brock: They said you got a year to live.
• 42:34
  Mark Zweig: Coming home here to Arkansas.
• 42:35
  Mark Zweig: We're talking about Correct To be with my folks Right For the final year, and they lived here.
• 42:39
  Mark Zweig: Then they moved from Louisiana, right, yeah.
• 42:43
  Trent Brock: My dad was a supplier to Walmart for a long time Got it and so Okay, yeah.
• 42:50
  Trent Brock: So I came home and I decided you know what, I've drug them everywhere.
• 42:53
  Trent Brock: They've been all over the world with me with this stuff.
• 42:56
  Trent Brock: You know, down in New Zealand it was hard on us all, very hard being away from home.
• 42:59
  Trent Brock: I'm just starting at the local clinic.
• 43:00
  Trent Brock: I'm not going to MD Anderson, I'm not doing all this big stuff, let's just start local.
• 43:05
  Mark Zweig: So we fortunately have a pretty good cancer clinic.
• 43:08
  Mark Zweig: You have a lot of those doctors or personal friends of mine over there.
• 43:12
  Mark Zweig: Excellent yeah.
• 43:13
  Mark Zweig: It's a great place to be, so yeah, I mean Chardo Smith is one of them, brooke Brander I don't know if you know either of them.
• 43:20
  Trent Brock: I don't know all those guys yeah.
• 43:20
  Mark Zweig: But yeah, brooke's a woman, but yeah, okay, okay.
• 43:23
  Mark Zweig: And Hershey Garner, I know you Hershey.
• 43:25
  Mark Zweig: I mean, I don't know Hershey well.
• 43:27
  Mark Zweig: I know his wife better than and I don't really know her that well either, but Denise, my wife certainly knows him.
• 43:35
  Trent Brock: Hershey saved my life.
• 43:36
  Trent Brock: Hershey and his team literally saved my life.
• 43:41
  Trent Brock: Obviously, you're here and you live here, I'm here, man, I'm here.
• 43:44
  Trent Brock: I'm a less than 5% here and clear, that's right.
• 43:47
  Trent Brock: Yeah.
• 43:48
  Trent Brock: So then, by the time you know, we decided the day I got off the plane.
• 43:51
  Trent Brock: I know it's a big story, isn't it?
• 43:53
  Trent Brock: Yeah, it's tough, it's got a good ending, yes.
• 43:57
  Mark Zweig: Yeah.
• 43:57
  Trent Brock: We're still here, man.
• 43:58
  Mark Zweig: Exactly God love you.
• 44:00
  Trent Brock: Yeah, you know this bulldog man, bulldog baby, and that's all I can say is, you know, it's never quit on anything, uh-huh, and by that time it's a good quality in business and in life, right.
• 44:10
  Trent Brock: It is, it is.
• 44:10
  Trent Brock: So we're one softball less in this world, because I had a softball zapped out of me.
• 44:15
  Trent Brock: Man, oh my God, that's the size the sucker was when Hershey got it, uh-huh.
• 44:19
  Trent Brock: And so then, you know, I had to scan it.
• 44:23
  Trent Brock: We're clear, it's amazing, it's a miracle, really it is a miracle.
• 44:26
  Trent Brock: And then Were you doing things like change your?
• 44:28
  Mark Zweig: diet all through this.
• 44:30
  Trent Brock: You know I had an epiphany moment.
• 44:32
  Mark Zweig: Because you know my dad was a cancer survivor, ok, ok, in 1969, he had really bad colon cancer Right and um 20, let's see, 17 of his lymph nodes were affected.
• 44:44
  Mark Zweig: I mean, I got five physicians in my family.
• 44:46
  Mark Zweig: Basically, my brother told them he got one to five years to live, yep, and he used to get his chemo.
• 44:53
  Mark Zweig: He'd get on a clinical trial and he'd get chemo and then he would work out for hours after that.
• 44:59
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, of course he was exhausted.
• 45:01
  Mark Zweig: You know which it takes, but I think that worked it through his body, yep, he lived to be 96.
• 45:07
  Mark Zweig: Unbelievable Cancer-free after that.
• 45:08
  Mark Zweig: I love it, I love it, man, I love it.
• 45:11
  Mark Zweig: But he did watch his diet and his exercise was extreme.
• 45:15
  Mark Zweig: I did all that.
• 45:16
  Trent Brock: I did all that stuff, yeah.
• 45:17
  Mark Zweig: And Matt Waller at the U of A also had a similar.
• 45:20
  Mark Zweig: You know experience with cancer.
• 45:23
  Mark Zweig: And.
• 45:23
  Mark Zweig: I know he really worked out and watched his diet and got himself in good shape.
• 45:30
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I think you have to, and the biggest thing really is your mindset.
• 45:34
  Mark Zweig: Yeah.
• 45:35
  Trent Brock: That's what you really got to change.
• 45:36
  Trent Brock: That's what I really had to work on was.
• 45:37
  Trent Brock: You know, I've got this practical mind.
• 45:38
  Trent Brock: I've got four or five physicians telling me you're going to die.
• 45:41
  Trent Brock: I got a report, but I'm going to beat this.
• 45:43
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I'm going to beat this, and so you know that's what I did.
• 45:46
  Trent Brock: I changed all those things I really did, yeah.
• 45:50
  Mark Zweig: And sure it was helpful to have your mom and dad here and all.
• 45:53
  Trent Brock: Yeah, wouldn't be here without them.
• 45:54
  Trent Brock: Yeah, you know it was a team deal.
• 45:55
  Trent Brock: Right, you know we're all together.
• 45:57
  Trent Brock: You know I'm definitely aging them a bit with all this stuff, you know, but they got to be proud of you though.
• 46:03
  Mark Zweig: Yeah To see.
• 46:04
  Mark Zweig: So you got through it all.
• 46:06
  Mark Zweig: You're here Now.
• 46:07
  Mark Zweig: What the heck happened to the popcorn?
• 46:08
  Trent Brock: business.
• 46:09
  Trent Brock: Well, yeah, and so then I had the.
• 46:11
  Trent Brock: So then you know I have this hip thing.
• 46:12
  Trent Brock: Let me tell you about that real quick.
• 46:13
  Trent Brock: So I have this hip thing, right, right.
• 46:15
  Trent Brock: And I was told I'd never walk again.
• 46:16
  Trent Brock: So I had that.
• 46:17
  Trent Brock: I had the infection, had an ID doc, local guy here.
• 46:20
  Trent Brock: Ok, we worked together.
• 46:21
  Trent Brock: We beat the hip infection that I had for two years Couldn't get rid of, wow.
• 46:25
  Trent Brock: So we beat that.
• 46:26
  Trent Brock: Had to beat the infection, to work on a hip implant.
• 46:28
  Trent Brock: Found this who was that?
• 46:30
  Trent Brock: By chance here, that was Dan Young.
• 46:32
  Trent Brock: Ok, dan Young, yep, yep.
• 46:34
  Trent Brock: Infectious disease of Northwest Arkansas.
• 46:36
  Trent Brock: Got an awesome man.
• 46:37
  Trent Brock: Man, he's a bulldog too.
• 46:39
  Trent Brock: Man, he's like first day I went in there he's like we're going to get this, we're going to get it, we're going to get it and I'm going to give you a chance to get that leg, yep.
• 46:45
  Trent Brock: And so, because you know, what I want to do is I want to be off the crutches.
• 46:48
  Trent Brock: Sure, you know it's like beat the cancer, beat the infections, off the crutches, yep.
• 46:52
  Trent Brock: So I have a orthopedic advisor guy, dr Montgomery, down in Arkansas, down in a little rock, and you know, I catch up with him and I said, man, I want to walk again.
• 47:03
  Trent Brock: And I said I've been going to everybody all over the country.
• 47:05
  Trent Brock: No one will do anything to this leg.
• 47:06
  Trent Brock: Uh-huh, I said you know, they told me there's not enough real estate left to do anything, right?
• 47:12
  Trent Brock: And he said look, I got a guy that worked under me.
• 47:15
  Trent Brock: He's at Mayo.
• 47:16
  Trent Brock: I said I've been to Mayo.
• 47:17
  Trent Brock: He say I'm into this guy, he does these things.
• 47:20
  Trent Brock: So we're in the middle of the largest, most complex hip implant ever done in the world, with proprietary procedures that have never been done, and I don't think any pig.
• 47:31
  Trent Brock: And so this is what this thing looks like right now, man.
• 47:35
  Trent Brock: So just to give people an idea, like this is kind of what a normal hip implant would look like.
• 47:39
  Trent Brock: Right, yep, yep, and this is what the largest, most complex infant plant in the whole world looks like.
• 47:46
  Trent Brock: Wow, seven or eight screws, three rods in my spine, all the way to the other side, all over the place.
• 47:53
  Trent Brock: But, hey, man, structural integrity, baby, that's hey.
• 47:56
  Trent Brock: All this is.
• 47:56
  Trent Brock: It's a construction project On a human.
• 47:59
  Trent Brock: That's all this.
• 48:00
  Trent Brock: Is they just a big project?
• 48:01
  Mark Zweig: You're a totally bionic man.
• 48:03
  Mark Zweig: I'm going to try, I'm going to try, man, I'm going to try.
• 48:06
  Trent Brock: So when are they going to do this for you?
• 48:08
  Trent Brock: So that's in right now.
• 48:09
  Trent Brock: Ok, so that didn't give me the whole length, that's in.
• 48:13
  Trent Brock: So, and you saw, man, I came in on one crutch today.
• 48:16
  Trent Brock: So I'm getting closer, closer, closer to walking.
• 48:19
  Trent Brock: And then down the road, we can do what they call bone lengthening procedure.
• 48:22
  Trent Brock: I know what that is.
• 48:23
  Trent Brock: Sure, yeah, so that would be pretty gnarly.
• 48:25
  Trent Brock: So that's an option down the road.
• 48:27
  Trent Brock: Let's just get through this first Right, and in the middle of this, you know.
• 48:32
  Mark Zweig: Getting through that.
• 48:33
  Mark Zweig: I mean that's the hard part, right there, I'm sure.
• 48:35
  Mark Zweig: Oh, yeah, right, I mean that's the trickiest part going near your spine and everything with all that.
• 48:40
  Trent Brock: Well, that's when no one want to touch me.
• 48:42
  Trent Brock: They're like, man, if you this infection and you get to start getting into everywhere else, you just die and die in a minute.
• 48:48
  Trent Brock: You know, I'm like well, I've had two pulmonary embolisms, I've had cancer three times, I've had like 15 surgeries.
• 48:54
  Trent Brock: Just I mean over and over and over man.
• 48:57
  Trent Brock: It's like the, you know, a camp of nine lives man, but so you're going to.
• 49:00
  Mark Zweig: I mean, you're obviously on your way to getting yourself completely back to functionality here.
• 49:05
  Mark Zweig: That's what I'm working on.
• 49:06
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I you know I'm not going to run a marathon, but I just want to have my hands back.
• 49:10
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, yeah, I get it.
• 49:11
  Mark Zweig: That's it, great attitude.
• 49:13
  Mark Zweig: So what happened with the popcorn?
• 49:15
  Trent Brock: business.
• 49:15
  Trent Brock: So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so the whole time, you know.
• 49:18
  Trent Brock: So that was a whole challenge in itself, right?
• 49:20
  Trent Brock: Yeah, moving back here and having to run it remotely I've done that for three years.
• 49:24
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I don't know how.
• 49:24
  Trent Brock: They have no idea.
• 49:26
  Mark Zweig: It's a long way away for sure, no idea.
• 49:28
  Mark Zweig: You know a different time zone.
• 49:29
  Mark Zweig: You're completely out of sync.
• 49:31
  Trent Brock: Scheduled backwards, mm-hmm.
• 49:32
  Trent Brock: You know my week starts on Sunday midday afternoon, yeah, and you know it just is what it is, you know.
• 49:39
  Trent Brock: So I made it work.
• 49:40
  Trent Brock: Whole different set of challenges, had cameras, had good staff.
• 49:43
  Trent Brock: You know, we paid the bills, we made the orders, we did our stuff.
• 49:49
  Trent Brock: But you know, I knew, I knew it was, it wasn't going to be a long term deal for me to go back.
• 49:54
  Trent Brock: Sure, and so my business partner, I'd agree that we were going to get rid of it, and so you know it took us about a year and a half year and a half, two years to do that, but we successfully completed the transaction over Super Bowl weekend.
• 50:05
  Trent Brock: And who'd you sell it?
• 50:07
  Trent Brock: To A Kiwi guy.
• 50:09
  Trent Brock: Ok, yeah, a Kiwi guy that had been in the food business.
• 50:11
  Trent Brock: He had been in, he had, he had worked as a account manager nationally and within the chicken industry, so he knew the supermarkets, he knew the food.
• 50:20
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I know he wanted to do his own thing, and so it was a good transition.
• 50:22
  Trent Brock: Good.
• 50:23
  Trent Brock: It was a good move over to him and you know you just want to see your baby, you know, see that thing, just carry on.
• 50:27
  Trent Brock: And so your partner, he got out at the same time.
• 50:31
  Trent Brock: Yeah, we got out together.
• 50:32
  Trent Brock: We got out together and he's got several other things that he does and this was my primary focus.
• 50:36
  Mark Zweig: So just out of curiosity, did you have to finance it to the buyer?
• 50:40
  Mark Zweig: Is that part of your deal?
• 50:42
  Trent Brock: Oh no, no, no, we didn't.
• 50:43
  Trent Brock: No, he bought it outright.
• 50:45
  Trent Brock: That's good.
• 50:46
  Trent Brock: Yeah, he bought it outright.
• 50:46
  Trent Brock: So I don't know what he did on his end.
• 50:48
  Trent Brock: But you know, we got all the money at once, good, which was kind of part of the deal.
• 50:52
  Trent Brock: You know, I didn't want to have to deal with that.
• 50:54
  Trent Brock: Sure, you know, because I'm ready.
• 50:57
  Trent Brock: You know, it's like it's been a chapter in my life.
• 50:59
  Trent Brock: It's time to move on to the new thing.
• 51:01
  Mark Zweig: As they say, whether you're buying or selling, the price is only one consideration.
• 51:05
  Mark Zweig: The terms may be more critical.
• 51:07
  Trent Brock: Very true, you know very true, very true, that's exactly right.
• 51:11
  Mark Zweig: So yeah, very true, very true.
• 51:13
  Mark Zweig: Well, good, so you're out of that.
• 51:14
  Mark Zweig: Now, what are you going to do, trent?
• 51:16
  Trent Brock: You know, gosh you know I am looking for something to do.
• 51:19
  Trent Brock: Ok, I really am, and you know what I've done in the last year or so is, you know, kind of fell on me that you know people would ask me oh well, weigh on crutches, and I kind of shortly, you know in a 36-minute tell my story and they're like that's amazing.
• 51:33
  Trent Brock: So they're like you really should write a book or you shouldn't be on podcast or something Sure.
• 51:38
  Trent Brock: So I started doing podcast and so now I'm kind of moving into the public speaking thing a bit and I'm looking at kind of Sure, well, you're inspirational.
• 51:47
  Mark Zweig: Well.
• 51:47
  Trent Brock: I'm trying to be, I'm trying to be man.
• 51:49
  Trent Brock: You know, it's like you know the story is you can do it, yeah, you can do it.
• 51:54
  Trent Brock: Just never quit, just never quit, you never quit, you never fail.
• 51:57
  Trent Brock: It's so true, isn't?
• 51:59
  Mark Zweig: it.
• 51:59
  Mark Zweig: It really is.
• 51:59
  Mark Zweig: I hate failure.
• 52:01
  Mark Zweig: You know this whole idea that you'll see a lot of it in sort of the pop business mediates Fail early, fail often, fail forward.
• 52:10
  Mark Zweig: I'm like avoid failure if you can.
• 52:13
  Mark Zweig: If it happens, learn from it.
• 52:16
  Mark Zweig: I don't like it.
• 52:17
  Mark Zweig: It's hard to get out of the hole.
• 52:18
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, but there's a difference in total failure and failing at an experiment.
• 52:24
  Mark Zweig: I love experiments.
• 52:26
  Mark Zweig: We are fail experiments, like you said, some of your flavors or sizes.
• 52:29
  Mark Zweig: They don't work, okay.
• 52:31
  Mark Zweig: But the key is, if it fails, then you move on to the next thing.
• 52:34
  Mark Zweig: It's not like you go oh it failed, my whole business is crap, I'm done.
• 52:39
  Mark Zweig: You know it's that experiment failed, but we'll try something else now.
• 52:44
  Mark Zweig: That's it.
• 52:44
  Mark Zweig: That's it, you know.
• 52:46
  Mark Zweig: And it sounds like you know it's the same thing with your healthcare.
• 52:49
  Mark Zweig: It's like well, you get the wrong answer from somebody, I'll try something else.
• 52:54
  Trent Brock: That's what we do.
• 52:55
  Trent Brock: You know, I figured out, that's what I figured out.
• 52:57
  Trent Brock: It's like I'm the quarterback Entrepreneurship applied to your health.
• 53:00
  Trent Brock: You got it.
• 53:01
  Trent Brock: Yeah, you know, that's really kind of I got a thing, was a business tried to apply it in a business setting.
• 53:06
  Trent Brock: Just think of yeah, it's so hard though, oh, I mean you're, you know.
• 53:09
  Mark Zweig: I mean, when your survival is on the line, it's hard to maintain your setting.
• 53:13
  Mark Zweig: I'm sure, oh, it was, but you've done an amazing job.
• 53:16
  Trent Brock: I don't know.
• 53:17
  Trent Brock: Man's been some long days.
• 53:18
  Trent Brock: I've been some.
• 53:19
  Trent Brock: You know loneliness.
• 53:20
  Trent Brock: You know it's very lonely during COVID.
• 53:23
  Trent Brock: Oh, I'm sure I'm dealing with all this all by myself.
• 53:25
  Trent Brock: My past, this couldn't come.
• 53:26
  Trent Brock: No one could come in the country.
• 53:27
  Trent Brock: Yeah, you couldn't go anywhere Right To do anything.
• 53:30
  Trent Brock: I mean Sounds horrible.
• 53:31
  Trent Brock: It was rough.
• 53:32
  Trent Brock: It was rough.
• 53:32
  Trent Brock: It was like hell on earth it was.
• 53:34
  Trent Brock: And you know, you appreciate just the simple things in life, like walking around, yeah, I believe it.
• 53:38
  Trent Brock: Yeah, in the sunshine, yeah, I mean really, you know, yeah, you know everything's.
• 53:43
  Trent Brock: You know we're so gratified now and everything's so instant.
• 53:46
  Trent Brock: You know it's just.
• 53:47
  Trent Brock: You know a married human beings, you know they, just they do that we don't appreciate stuff until we don't have it.
• 53:54
  Mark Zweig: That's exactly what's, and we're so spoiled in this country with so many good things that we have and I.
• 53:59
  Mark Zweig: It is distressing, you know.
• 54:03
  Trent Brock: I've been to a lot of countries, I've lived in a lot of countries and I'm telling you this is the best place.
• 54:06
  Trent Brock: I believe it, it is hands down I this is the best opportunity, it's the best place to live.
• 54:11
  Trent Brock: Nothing in the world's perfect, but you know, there ain't nothing better.
• 54:15
  Trent Brock: Yeah, you know, and so I'm back.
• 54:17
  Trent Brock: Yeah, I'm here now.
• 54:19
  Mark Zweig: Well, I hope you do well with your speaking and inspiring people and and you know, my guess is, knowing guys like you, it'll be a little while you'll be starting something else.
• 54:30
  Mark Zweig: Okay, it happens all the time.
• 54:33
  Trent Brock: I've already worked like 30 hours this week, I've already put in like 30 hours this week and I don't even have a job right now.
• 54:39
  Trent Brock: But that's hey, man, I've done it a lot.
• 54:41
  Trent Brock: I need some time.
• 54:42
  Mark Zweig: I know, yeah Well, I'm glad you can, I'm glad you're in a position where you can take that, but I but I also know that once you get your head in the game, it's hard to stop doing it.
• 54:55
  Mark Zweig: You like to build, you like to create good jobs for people.
• 54:59
  Mark Zweig: You know these are the things that business ownership does for you.
• 55:02
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, you want to do something better than what's out there.
• 55:05
  Mark Zweig: That's right.
• 55:06
  Mark Zweig: That's right and it's just.
• 55:08
  Mark Zweig: It's a basic need and it's when it works.
• 55:11
  Mark Zweig: It's very gratifying.
• 55:12
  Trent Brock: Yeah, it is.
• 55:13
  Trent Brock: It is.
• 55:13
  Trent Brock: That was one of my stipulations with it.
• 55:16
  Trent Brock: With the new owner is like you're taking everybody.
• 55:18
  Trent Brock: You know I've supported these guys who've been with me, you know, and you know they got families and mouths to feed and things like that, and so you know you need to offer everyone on my contract or we can't make the deal happen.
• 55:30
  Trent Brock: So everyone on you know we're still there.
• 55:33
  Mark Zweig: That's awesome, you know.
• 55:33
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, well, it's been great having you here today and I look forward to having you come speak to my students as we discuss.
• 55:42
  Mark Zweig: That's gonna be awesome.
• 55:43
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, they'll.
• 55:45
  Mark Zweig: They'll appreciate your story, for sure.
• 55:47
  Trent Brock: Yeah.
• 55:49
  Mark Zweig: I love bringing in people who've been successful Pretty soon.
• 55:52
  Mark Zweig: And you've been successful, yeah, not just in business, but in life.
• 55:57
  Trent Brock: Well, you know, I just you know it's.
• 56:00
  Trent Brock: I just hope you know somebody that hears it says you know what man, you know, if that guy, if that guy went through all that, I can get through what I'm going through, absolutely you know, yeah, so Well, we like to keep this, this podcast, on a happy note.
• 56:14
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, and, and this has definitely been one of those good stories that hopefully will make people feel good.
• 56:20
  Mark Zweig: I hope so too.
• 56:21
  Mark Zweig: No, do you have any jokes for us though?
• 56:23
  Mark Zweig: Oh my God, jokes.
• 56:25
  Trent Brock: That's a, that's a random one.
• 56:27
  Trent Brock: No, no, I don't really have any.
• 56:29
  Trent Brock: I don't have really any good jokes for you.
• 56:31
  Trent Brock: No, Shoot.
• 56:32
  Trent Brock: Well, yeah, Lee, you know I shouldn't have like a popcorn joke.
• 56:35
  Trent Brock: You know I should have a couple of those, but I'm just gonna blank at the moment.
• 56:40
  Trent Brock: Next, time.
• 56:41
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, okay, next time you better bring a popcorn joke along with you, all right?
• 56:45
  Mark Zweig: Well, listen, trent.
• 56:47
  Mark Zweig: We appreciate you being here with us today.
• 56:49
  Trent Brock: Yeah, thanks for letting me share my story.
• 56:51
  Trent Brock: I appreciate it, yeah.
• 56:51
  Mark Zweig: No, it's great.
• 56:52
  Mark Zweig: It's a great story and meanwhile, if any of you have any questions for either Eric Howerton or myself, please feel free to get on our website, big talk about smallbusinesscom, and send them in.
• 57:09
  Mark Zweig: If you have any suggestions for who should be on the show, we've got an extensive list of future guests coming up, but we're always interested to hear about people who've been successful, people who had struggles and overcame them, and people who are doing great things right now.
• 57:29
  Mark Zweig: We love to hear from you and otherwise this has been another episode of you.
• 57:36
  Mark Zweig: Got to say it along with me now, since Eric's not here Big talk about small business.
• 57:42
  Mark Zweig: Thanks, everybody, awesome.
• 57:52
  Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of big talk about small business.
• 57:55
  Narrator: If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming shows, be sure to head over to our website, wwwbigtalkaboutsmallbusinesscom and click on the ask the host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show.
• 58:09
  Narrator: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn at big talk about small business and be sure to head over to our website to read articles, browse episodes and ask questions about upcoming shows.