From Local Burger Joint to National Demand: Bill E’s Word-of-Mouth Growth Playbook | Ep. 179

Bill-E: 00:00:00

My business model doesn't have trucks and drivers and all of that. I use a backhaul system. But I also depend on distributors to be my sales force and my distribution.

Intro/Outro: 00:00:13

But I am the world's biggest super fan. You're like a super fan. Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast.

We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially. Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.

This is the Business Super Fans podcast with your host, Freddy D. Freddy.

Bill-E: 00:00:39

Freddy.

Freddy D: 00:00:53

Hey, super fans. Superstar Freddy.

Freddy D: 00:00:56

Here.

Freddy D: 00:00:56

In this episode 179, we're joined by Billy Stitt, the founder of Billy's Small Batch Bacon, a nationally recognized music infused brand that began as a teenage hobby and grew into a beloved southern staple. With decades of experience in hospitality and a true gift of storytelling, Billy brings heart, soul and bold flavor to everything he touches.

Get ready to hear how passion, authenticity, and a whole lot of bacon turn one man's vision into a national success.

Freddy D: 00:01:30

Welcome, Billy, to Business Superfans, a service provider's edge podcast. So let's continue our conversation here on the show.

Bill-E: 00:01:38

Happy to be here.

Freddy D: 00:01:40

So am I. I'm interested in the whole backstory of how did you start coming up with making your own bacon and really ending up in a lot of Michelin style restaurants throughout the country and growing from there. So what got you started in that whole food industry business?

Bill-E: 00:01:58

You know, I grew up in a little Mississippi Delta town and my father sold packaging, empty bags and boxes.

He would throw my brother and I in the car and we would wake up in Memphis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, wherever, Michigan, and he was selling. We never went on family vacations. We went on business trips. And no complaints. It was wonderful. It was a great childhood.

Throughout those journeys, we would call on all these wonderful food manufacturers, from Wrigley's to Hershey's, Gilster's Best Flower. And companies were like small farmers that would package their feed and seed that they grew on warehouses.

So dad sold Val packers, he sold the packaging, but he also sold the equipment, the supplies to go with it and the service. And so he was a manufacturer's rep. And my brother knew he wanted to be a doctor at an early age. He's a doctor. He delivers babies.

Dad and I were coming back From, I think St. Louis, just the two of us, and I was a teenager and he said, your brother knows what he wants to do and it's a good time to start thinking about what you want to do, and it can change. I'm not trying to stick you into a category, but tell me something you're thinking about. I was like, I won't, dad.

We're always taking people to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We're visiting all these cool food manufacturing facilities, and I really want to do something in the food industry. He goes, okay, that's good.

So a couple of weeks went by, and he said, I got a man I want to introduce you to. And he wants to see if you want to work with him. So he introduced me to this man out in the county that was a butcher.

And this gentleman taught me how to break down all the animals and how to make bacon. And he said, I want to teach you how to make bacon the way our ancestors did. So I learned how to do that as a teenager.

And then I went on to be a chef in a little independent restaurant at ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. And then when I left that company, I went to work for Ruby Tuesday's, a great corporate restaurant. I got to do a lot of really fun things for them.

It was an awesome career.

Freddy D: 00:04:15

Yeah.

Bill-E: 00:04:15

And. But every year along the way, I would make a few batches of bacon for myself or for my friends, and I just kept the history going.

After 20 years, I. I retired from Ruby's and decided to open my own little restaurants. Opened a burger joint here in Fairhope, Alabama, was about 13 years ago.

And I had live music, and I had a little prep kitchen in the back, and I would work on my recipe, do catering out of there. And then I started making the bacon for my own restaurant. And then people started showing up, wanting to buy it. That was going good.

Then restaurants and chefs started calling me, and I was like, man, I'm gonna have to get my USDA license. So I did that. So now we've got this little company. So there's two companies on the property.

There's the restaurant company and the small batch bacon company. And they both feed off each other and market for each other.

So the bacon company makes an ingredient that it sells to the restaurant company, and the restaurant has the courtyard with the live music and the story where the bacon is being serenaded by the songwriters. So there's a lot of cool mystique behind it, and it's just a great, great product.

Freddy D: 00:05:26

No, no, that's a great. That's a great backstory. It give a synopsis and a view into the history of how did this all come about. Because you're creating a unique brand.

You've created super Fans because of the fact that people who came into your restaurant got your burgers and bacon and all of a sudden they says, this thing is pretty good. How do I get more of this stuff? And then they started telling other people, that's what I call super fan.

Because the super fan is going to be promoting you because they like you, they like what you're doing and they want to help you.

Bill-E: 00:06:00

The chefs that were buying it were just phenomenal. And the ones that really got it were the ones that were like, you know what, for you to grow, you've got to be with a distributor.

And then the ones some of them didn't get along with, no, you got to deliver direct and yada, yada, yada. And that just doesn't. My business model doesn't have trucks and drivers and all of that. I use a backhaul system.

But I also depend on distributors to be my sales force and my distribution region.

When the chef at the Grand Hotel down here said, billy, we want to get your bacon, but we want to get it through US Foods, lights started going on and bells are ringing. And it happened. And then all of a sudden I Semi trucks pulling in the parking lot to leave me my ingredients from our restaurant.

But then they're leaving with my product. And then that's when it really clicked. And then a couple other distributors came online. Benny Keith Peroni and Sons out of New Orleans.

I still haven't used a broker. I've brokered it all myself. I'm just. I'm kind of in that. I want to scale this thing, but I want to do it right.

And I know I'm going to need a partner to do it. And I just got to figure that out.

Freddy D: 00:07:11

Sure.

But you know what you said there is really important because you got people that came to you because of the word of mouth marketing that took place, which is what I call a superfan. When I managed distributors around the world. I'm going to share a tip for you as well as the listeners. I did something different.

I actually not only recognized a distributorship, but I actually recognized the sales team that was marketing the most of my product. Because at the end of the day, that was the front line to the customer. So the distributorship, the owners and the managers, they need to get it.

But it's whoever it is that's marketing your product and that's who you need to recognize because that's the one that's talking about it.

Bill-E: 00:08:02

Right? You're exactly right.

Freddy D: 00:08:04

And so that's how you build momentum, because that's how I built momentum in a distributorships because all of a sudden these guys had what I call 12 watches, but 12 different software products. How did I get mind share from somebody thousands of miles away?

Well, I communicated with the sales team and then I keep the owners abreast of what was going on.

Freddy D: 00:08:24

But that was my team.

Freddy D: 00:08:26

And that's what you're starting to go through right now because that's just going to continue that momentum going because other people are going to see that you're recognizing and appreciating all those people. They're going to, hey, I want in on that. And that's how you get momentum rolling.

Bill-E: 00:08:43

That's where we are right now. And I really love giving shout outs to these distributors that have helped me and their sales teams. So we're kind of in the southeastern area.

We ship all over the country via online orders. But I'm ready to move to further warehouses.

I'm like, for example, I'm in a couple of warehouses in the U.S. foods area down here, but I'm ready to be north, east and west in a big way. About as south as you can go down here on the mobile bay. I am ready to really scale this thing up and get more product out there.

I'm wanting to add some more lines of products following my recipe and my process. So that's where we are right now. One day I'm in a hurry, but in the other sense it's got to be right.

We're a small batch company, things are done by hand and the mystique of it, where it's made and how it's made is pretty amazing. I don't ever want to lose that.

So it's going to take somebody that gets the meat manufacturing industry, but also understands the restaurant hospitality industry and really, really gets the relationships between the two. I'm a big fan of suppliers and my vendors.

Freddy D: 00:10:00

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Freddy D: 00:11:25

Those are great opportunities to turn them into superfans and being your sales team. And there's a lot of little things that you can do to recognizing for example, a supplier that's providing you with stuff.

I always tell people is send them a birthday card to your main guy supplier. Just send them an old fashioned birthday card through the mail, not a text message or an email.

Bill-E: 00:11:47

I'm writing that now.

Freddy D: 00:11:49

And that because that's probably going to be the only card they're going to get and they're going to, it's going to be sitting on their desk and people's gonna go into their office and go, oh, who sent you that birthday card? Ah, my buddy Billy. And that's what it'll be. It'll be my buddy Billy. That's how that dynamic changes.

And I worked with a pot pie company years ago, it was in Michigan and she was just starting in her kitchen and I helped with some digital marketing stuff and then we did some business strategies and I worked there for a period of 10 years and today she's into grocery stores and everything else and it all started from her kitchen.

But what she did, and I want to share this for you in the audience, is if someone spent over $100 worth of pot pies, she one of their girls came up with the idea they would do a chicken dance and they videotaped it and they put it up on Instagram and social media and it was just stupid. But stupid sometimes is funny. And so you know, it what it was was it was recognizing if someone spent a hundred dollars.

So it was a way of showing appreciation for that.

But they turned it into a funny aspect and then they posted that and that took off and got more people coming in and more people wanted to see the chicken dance and was just something corny. But it worked, it got traction.

So you might think of some stuff that may end up and posting it on some of the social media sites and that may help spread the word of what you guys are doing.

Bill-E: 00:13:28

This is helpful.

Freddy D: 00:13:30

Yeah, Just some fun stuff because you've.

Freddy D: 00:13:32

Got the restaurant and the bacon facility. So you can really, like you said, you're leveraging the two, take it up to another notch and maybe have a contest.

Have a contest who can eat the most bacon or whatever. And they get a prize or just some crazy off the cuff stuff.

Bill-E: 00:13:50

Usually bacon eaters out there, that's for sure.

Freddy D: 00:13:53

Yeah, I love bacon, so I stay away from it because I love it too much.

Freddy D: 00:14:02

So let's go into a bit, Billy.

Freddy D: 00:14:05

Of what makes it so unique. I mean, you said a little bit in the entry, but what makes yours so different than anybody else's?

Bill-E: 00:14:14

That's a great question. Everything starts from the ingredients we choose. We're just extremely picky about the bellies that we get.

We want to make sure that there are no hormones, no growth antibiotics. We want to make sure that the pigs were raised properly, meaning they weren't hemmed up in a 12 by 12 crate for eight months.

We want to know that they could go outside and play in the clover and go inside and get out of the rain, meaning that they were happy, not stressed. And then our ingredients, brown sugar, real molasses, heavy salt. And then we cure these bellies under refrigeration for eight days.

Not seven, not nine, but eight, because that's our magic number.

We're not like a lot of these other companies where we have somebody in a yellow hazmat suit spraying the meat down with liquid smoke or injecting the product with a quick cure. Ours is done with a slow time process, which means that eats up a lot of my cash for a long period of time.

It takes a good eight days to cure and then to smoke and then to chill the slice and package. This is a 10 to 12 day process to make bacon. So there's always a lot of poundage in rotation. The team that we have is just incredible.

They're hand wrapping these packages. They're, they're slicing everything very consistently. When I say my bacon's great, it is. When I say it's consistent, it is.

It's consistent in taste, flavor and quality. Will every slice look identical? No, sir. Because I don't take these bellies and put them in a bacon press.

You know when you go to a grocery store and you buy a lot of mass produced bacon, you can take a strip and you can hold it like this and just go on for days and it just stretches, stretches out. Mine will do that. So mine's a thick sliced. You can get it sliced or unsliced. And unsliced. You can cut it in cubes or slices however you like.

So you get that feeling when you open. Well, first of all, when you open a package of Billy Small batch bacon, the aroma just crushes you. It's just like, bam. What is going on?

How does it smell so good? That's the first thing. And then the next thing is when you cook it, it blows your mind.

So whether you do it in a skillet or in an oven on a tray, it renders, but it doesn't shrink because it's not. There's no crud in. It's just really.

Freddy D: 00:16:38

That's really the bottom line.

Bill-E: 00:16:39

Yeah. And then when you look at the render, it'll be brown, of course, but it's clear. And it's really hard to explain.

You get this clear, lovely render, but it doesn't shrink to nothing. And then the flavor hits you. You just like. And this reminds me, none of my parents, but my grandparents. This is a celebratory bacon.

It's something special. It's expensive. It's a high end protein. You know, it's something that I want people to say, you know what, we got to get bacon.

We're going down to the condo for the weekend at the beach. Let's buy a few packs of the standard bacon and get the kids, let them eat that, send them down to the beach.

Then let's break out Billy's adult bacon. Let's have a good time. It's hard to explain, but once you order it, they order again and again. The repeat orders are just wonderful.

Freddy D: 00:17:23

Yeah, that's. You're building super fans from that perspective because they'll keep coming back and they keep telling everybody. So that's the aspect.

And you mentioned your team because the team is really important. On a show earlier today, it's four of us, we call the show business lunatics. And we just pick a topic and we go.

And today we were talking about culture and team and everything else. And one of the things I brought up in the conversation is that leaders say they work with the team. Bad leaders say that they work for me.

And the reality is no, because number one, they're selling their time to you. That's the reality. And two, if you have the mindset that they're working with you now, it's a team. It's a team mindset.

You just happen to be the leader of the team. But now the team is all empowered versus the mindset. Oh, they work for me. Well, not really. They work for themselves.

Bill-E: 00:18:23

Selling you time yeah, we're a family here. Whether it's the bacon team or the restaurant team, they all look out for each other.

We want to know what's going on with their kids and their families and them to coming to work to be pleasurable. And we want them to be here for a long time. And when they leave, we want them to be considered graduating.

We don't ever like to lose somebody on a weird issue or for them to just fall off the planet or disappear. We want everyone to come here and have a great experience.

So whatever they go on to do in their life and look back and say, my time at Billy's making bacon or running the fryer or running the grill or serving tables or bartending, I learned a lot. I learned how to deal with other people. I learned how to sell. I learned how to make things properly and to work clean and neat.

That's the kind of stuff we want people to earn and to walk away with when they leave my job.

Freddy D: 00:19:14

years ago,: 1980

That him and I started on the same day, and we didn't know anybody, so we figured, well, we'll just hang around together. And 45 years later, we're still friends. We had camaraderie within the office because it was like six of us tech guys in the beginning.

It grew to over 30 people in the office. But we would do stuff together. We would go camping together, we would go to sports games together.

We'd go to the restaurants, happy hour together, we'd go boating together.

And that when you have that collaboration and that environment, I look back, we were all pretty much seven years at the company till I got bought and things changed. But for seven years, we just had a blast as a team.

Bill-E: 00:20:10

Greg.

Freddy D: 00:20:12

And it sounds like what you're doing with your team is they're doing things together besides helping grow the business. But at the same time, they've got collaboration between them and they've got synergy going on within the organization.

Bill-E: 00:20:28

Definitely what we're trying to build, and we get there. It's a struggle at times, and these last few years have thrown a lot of curve balls at us, but we're still playing along in a good way. So what else?

Freddy D: 00:20:42

Let's talk a little bit about how does it get to the restaurants and stuff like that? How did that all kind of take place?

Bill-E: 00:20:52

Well, the whole thing with The Food Network in the last 20, 25 years has really turned a lot of people into foodies. Whereas in the past corporate restaurants were considered a joy, a pleasure to go to.

I worked for one for 20 years and had a great experience as people became foodies and they would watch Food Network, for example, or they would watch all these culinary shows and these ingredient shows. It changed the culture of the foodie to where corporate restaurant became a bad word and everything was mom and pop and independent.

I've done both, so I get it and both are wonderful. But what he did was it crushed the corporate restaurant industry. Any good operator owner today would jump at the chance to hire a Ruby Tuesday.

Applebee's, Chili's, O Charlie's, Cracker Barrel. I'm just using those as examples.

There's many more trained team members, from dishwasher to general manager to director to server, bartender, cook, because they have systems. They're going to come, they understand processes. They get that you have to have a recipe to be successful.

But the whole hospitality industry really took a big hit. And what people forget is these corporate restaurants at one time were a one door place.

They were a mom and pop shop that got to be a corporate place and created these environments where people can have a job and support their family. Things got lopsided and I've been really watching the industry. I want to see that stabilize.

And the independent single operator, mom and pops and the corporate restaurants all need to flourish because hospitality industry is by far the largest industry out there. I mean, from fat food to fine dining to hotels to resorts and convention centers, grocery stores. I mean, the hospitality industry is huge.

Every family's touched by, whether by having someone working in it or they're trading in it daily.

Freddy D: 00:23:02

But you brought up a great point there, Billy, is I think that we're starting to see more of little restaurants popping up where somebody was in corporate and it said, you know what, corporate's great, but I want to do my own thing. And then they pop up.

And usually those are the places that my wife and I really enjoy going to because that's the guy that's there cooking it and comes out and talks to you at the table and everything else.

And that reminds me, when I've traveled around different countries throughout the world, that's one of the things that I realize is in other countries it's not so much as multi chain places. It's much more of the independence. And that's their livelihood, that's their store.

So when you go in there, the service is off the top off the charts. The food is off the charts because that's their business. They have ownership into it. I get it. You need both, and I agree with you 100%.

They need to be both elevated so that the playing field is fair for both independent as well as large multi chain locations. But I think we're starting to see more going to independent restaurants starting to pop up.

Bill-E: 00:24:22

There's a bunch of them. And it's a really hard time in our industry just from the cost of doing business.

And the ingredients, supplies, paper, chemicals, all that stuff is just nuts. It is so expensive right now that your typical historical P and L is. It's a lot different than the way I was trained and when I grew up on it.

It's brutal.

Freddy D: 00:24:45

Yeah. Right now you have no idea what's coming. So it makes it much harder to plan as a business owner, regardless of the industry you're in.

It's difficult to plan a year, two years ahead because predictability isn't predictable anymore.

Bill-E: 00:25:03

Correctly. Right. It's always good to have your data and your numbers to study your trends.

Freddy D: 00:25:08

It's dynamic now minutes. And it's different.

Bill-E: 00:25:11

Right. This Covid situation.

And down here we get hurricanes and you know, we've been lucky this year to not have one, but in the years past, we've had two at a time. You just get, you know, like last year we had a snowstorm in south Alabama on the beach. And I mean, it didn't just.

It didn't just dump a few inches of snow for a little bit and melt the next day. It stuck around for a week. Yeah. We're down here on the beach and people were breaking out their snow skis and I was one of them. It was amazing.

Freddy D: 00:25:42

Yeah. That's funny because here in Arizona a couple years ago, we had snow in the northern part of the valley.

We call it the valley here, Phoenix metro area. And I went out and took photos of it just to show snow on desert cactus and stuff like that.

People, they were coming back with snowmen on top of the hoods of their cars. They made little snow, stuff like that. It's like they had never seen snow in their life. It was kind of funny.

So I can imagine down in Alabama on the beach, of all places, is you've got 6 inches or 4 inches or 2 inches, whatever of snow. It would be like, what the heck is this stuff?

Bill-E: 00:26:21

It was pretty wild.

Freddy D: 00:26:22

So let's talk a little bit about.

Freddy D: 00:26:24

The restaurant here real quickly. What makes the restaurant unique? What's the things that it Does. I know. It's using your own bacon, and it's kind of. They're both helping one another.

But let's talk a little bit about the restaurant as well. Yeah.

Bill-E: 00:26:35

So we're. We're a burger joint. I've always wanted to have a burger joint.

I've done every kind of cooking you can imagine, from fine dining to casual dining to a little bit of fast food. Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I got to see all these just incredibly. Mississippi, Memphis or Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.

Good lord. All that was just, like, right in my backyard.

And you would pull up to these places where the building was, like, leaning this way, and you would walk in and duck your head down and get in, and you'd go sit at a table that looked like it had been there for a hundred years and have the best meal in the world. Ask where the bathroom was, and you might have to go outside and find it.

I mean, it was just these crazy little joints with phenomenal food and wonderful people where you were just like, you know what? I had the best experience ever. You're not bothered by the setting or what's going on. You're just like, man, this is cool. So I.

Freddy D: 00:27:34

That makes it cool in a sense.

Bill-E: 00:27:37

Yeah. So my place is a hodgepodge. It's 80% of it is stuff that people gave up on or was laying on the side of the road or reclaimed wood or whatnot.

So we've got some inside dining, a whole lot of outside dining, a bar and a live music stage and some tent. We've got a private party room. We've got a venue, but we're a burger joint. You can come in and order the Billy's burger with bacon and cheese on it.

You'll get the best bacon cheeseburger you ever had. You can also get a great salad with our crumbled bacon on top of it with blue cheese on a grilled wedge.

So that's kind of highfalutin for a burger joint. Sure. And we've got great pickup appetizers. Salted caramel brownie desserts.

Killer named sandwiches like our comeback chicken or our comeback shrimp sandwich are so good they make you want to come back. Then we've got some of the heavier entrees, like our country fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon. Great gravy.

Got a little bit of everything. So it's super casual, but it's a burger joint. Great hot dogs.

We're gonna serve it all beef, all natural casing hot dog that'll just knock Your socks off.

Freddy D: 00:28:53

Yeah, it's been a while since I've had a burger. My wife loves my turkey burgers because I kick them up a notch. So I put some hot sauce in there and some other ingredients.

So it's got a little bit of.

Freddy D: 00:29:05

A punch to it.

Freddy D: 00:29:07

So it's because turkey in itself is kind of. But. But I dial it up a couple notches. And so when you're eating it, you're getting flavor. So. But that's my specialty.

I can cook the burgers, the meat burgers, but I really enjoy doing the turkey burgers because then I can go crazy and do fun stuff with it.

Bill-E: 00:29:28

Like the sound of that. We even sell a veggie burger here, and it's delicious.

And one of my jokes with the guests is it's pretty good once you put a chicken breast on top of it.

Freddy D: 00:29:38

There you go.

Bill-E: 00:29:39

The veggie burger we serve. We'll serve quite a few of them every week. It's delicious, It's a great product. A little bit of everything.

But we're a burger joint that makes its own bacon.

Freddy D: 00:29:50

It's cool. That's very cool. And more importantly, the bacon is being eaten in high end restaurants as well as other places.

Are you getting it into any stores anytime soon?

Bill-E: 00:30:02

We're in quite a few grocery stores, wonderful restaurants, meat shops all across the country order from us. But the other thing that the bacon company and the restaurant promotes is our town. We're in a little community called Fairhope, Alabama.

And if you haven't heard of it, it's on the radar. It's this little bay community that's just booming and active.

You're close to some big cities, but you're in this little waterfront community on the eastern shore of the Mobile Bay. I hear it every day. I'll have somebody send me a message on social media or they email me or call me and they'll say, fairhope, Alabama.

Let me tell you who I know from Pharaoh. So when I send out my bacon, it's fun to tell them it's from Fairhope, Alabama. The community is another big part of our super fans.

We want to be fair Hope. We want to be a big part of Pharaoh. And anything that Faro has going on, we want to be involved.

Freddy D: 00:30:55

Yeah, because now you're leveraging the town as well from a marketing perspective as for your bacon in your restaurant. So you're really associating yourself with that, which elevates your whole visibility. So it's a brilliant marketing strategy.

Bill-E: 00:31:12

We're in a lot of Piggly Wigglies. Okay. We're in some rope grocery stores over in New Orleans. A place called Apple Market in Pensacola which the guy has.

His place is very similar to my restaurant. You walk in there, it's the tight aisles and everything looks like it's been there for a hundred years. But it's clean and neat and awesome.

And he sells my bacon like crazy. And then right down the road we're in a high end restaurant called Jackson's Steakhouse on Palafox in downtown Pensacola.

And those guys put my bacon underneath their oysters and they treat it like it's the greatest. And it's a platform for their oysters or their scallops. And so it's kind of unique that we've got it, you know, roadside produce stand.

But we're also in the high end five star restaurant. And then we're also in resorts and high end fishing and hunting camps, some ski lodges, hotels, convention centers.

Those are, that's my target market right now. Those are the people. I want to be everywhere, but I want to be in the right places, everywhere.

It's an interesting product when you hold the wrapper and you open it up and I told you, my dad was in packaging his whole life.

Freddy D: 00:32:23

So a thing or two about packaging.

Bill-E: 00:32:25

And this box right here is so much more than a piece of cardboard emotional for me. My dad sold corrugated boxes forever and when I finally got my own box, it was like, man, this, it's full circle, full circle.

Freddy D: 00:32:40

We gotta get the bacon out here in Arizona. I never heard of it out here.

Bill-E: 00:32:43

You send me an email, it'll come running. Yeah, I double bacon guy that can get you.

Freddy D: 00:32:48

Yeah, I think I might know that same guy that's.

Bill-E: 00:32:51

I got a fraternity brother that lives out in Phoenix and he orders it a lot. And we ship to every state, most every week.

Freddy D: 00:32:57

Well, as we wrap up here, Billy.

Freddy D: 00:32:59

How can people find you? Give us some information how they can order some of that bacon.

Bill-E: 00:33:04

Www.b I l l e s bacon.com billysbacon.com when you go to the site, read the fun stories, check out the history behind it, but click on shop and it'll take you to a gold belly page. They help me promote my product and they send me the every day, shipping's included. You can order a few pounds, you can order a bunch.

We love those orders of a bunch. It's just, that's the easy way to get it. You can also send me a direct email to Billy, Billy's bacon dot com.

You can call me Anytime when you call a number on the website, it goes to my cell phone. Those are the funnest phone calls ever. I get one at 10 o' clock at night.

Hey, this is Larry and I'm in New Mexico and I just cook some of your bacon and I gotta know, how do you make it? It just, or this just arrived. What do I do with it? I'm like, man, we just started having the best conversations.

So the relationships with my customers are great for easy to find on every social media channel you can imagine. Good night. I have a Pinterest page. My daughter helped me set that up.

So every social media, the website, of course, we have a new YouTube channel called Billy's Bacon Burgers and Bikes. Because I like bacon, I like burgers and I like bikes. So that's a fun thing to kind of tune into.

You can see the bacon stories, the restaurant catering stories, motorcycle adventures and you know what I'm up to, my hobbies and stuff.

Freddy D: 00:34:36

Well, make sure that that's in the show notes. Great insights for our listeners and definitely would love to have you back on the show down the road.

Bill-E: 00:34:45

This has been a lot of fun for me.

Freddy D: 00:34:47

All right, thank you for your time, Billy.

Bill-E: 00:34:49

Thanks, Freddie.

Freddy D: 00:34:51

What a powerful reminder from today's conversation with Billy that superfans aren't created by shortcuts or scale to earn through craftsmanship, consistency and genuine care.

From learning old school techniques as a teenager to building a small batch bacon brand trusted by top chefs and loyal customers alike, Bill has showed us something every service based business owner needs to hear. When you obsess over quality and relationships.

Freddy D: 00:35:19

Word of mouth does the heavy lifting for you.

Freddy D: 00:35:22

That's how superfans are born. Customers, partners and even distributors who don't just buy from you, but advocate for you.

And that's exactly what creates sustainable growth without losing your soul as you scale. Join the Entrepreneur Prosperity hub on school.

Freddy D: 00:35:40

It's free to join and get your.

Freddy D: 00:35:42

Free service provider prosperity playbook at school.

S K-O-O-L.com eprosperityhub Inside are tools, weekly growth plays and live virtual events that help you connect, collaborate and build a business that runs smoothly predictably and profitably. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm grateful you're part of the business superfans movement.

Every listen and every action brings you closer to building your own superfans. Be sure to subscribe to the show. We've got another great guest coming up focused on what really moves the needle for service based entrepreneurs.

I'll talk with you in the next episode. Remember, one action, one stakeholder, one super fan closer to lasting prosperity.

Intro/Outro: 00:36:33

We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Super Fans Podcast. Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.