The First Domino Is Smaller Than You Think
Cody Brahnam had zero followers when he hit send.
He was sitting on his couch, probably watching a football game, thumb hovering over a tweet about supply chain margins. His bosses at Chomps had told him to build a personal brand, and a coworker told him to hop on Twitter. So he did. Do I press send? This is always going to be out there.
He pressed it. One person replied and asked, “Can I buy some of your time?” That single reply became a consulting engagement, then a client who asked him to become their 3PL, then a borrowed warehouse, then one of the fastest growing fulfillment companies in Indianapolis.
I sat down with Cody on the Create Your Art Podcast, and what struck me most wasn’t the growth curve. It was how small his first step was. Most of us are waiting for a big, brave, career-defining leap. Cody’s story says the leap usually starts with something almost embarrassingly ordinary.
In this post, I’ll walk you through what Cody learned about the first domino, why the voices in your head don’t go away (and why that’s okay), and how to find the one small step sitting in front of you right now.
This post is inspired by our latest episode of the Create Your Art Podcast. Watch the full conversation with Cody here.
The Permission Slip Nobody Is Going to Hand You
Here’s what I love about Cody’s story. He took on customers bigger than his own company. He hired people before he knew how to manage them. He signed up for warehouse space before he felt comfortable. Nobody told him he was ready. He gave himself permission.
And he did it without the advantages we assume founders have. No family members who’d run a business. No mentor he could call and ask, “Grandpa, how did you do this?” In his words, he had the same YouTube videos and Twitter threads everyone else has.
He also didn’t consider himself a salesperson. He’s an ops guy. He likes being in the weeds solving problems, and the idea of selling felt, as he put it, “yucky.” The voices in his head were loud: You’re not cut out for this. You’ve never sold anything. It’s not your personality type.
Sound familiar? That’s the conversation happening in the head of nearly every expert who hasn’t built their platform yet. The question isn’t whether you’ll hear those voices. It’s what you do while they’re talking.
What Changed When He Stopped Waiting
Cody didn’t silence the doubt. He outmaneuvered it. Here’s how.
1. He redefined the thing that scared him. Cody learned a concept in therapy called cognitive reframing. Selling intimidated him, so he asked a better question: What am I actually good at? The answer was solving problems. So he stopped trying to “sell” and started offering to spend a week or two inside a company to understand its problems. His sales process today, at eight to 10 times the size of year one, is the same as it was on day one.
2. He made helping the whole point. When Cody started tweeting, his only intention was to help one person per post. That’s it. No funnel, no monetization plan. That posture is what made the first reply possible, and it’s what kept clients coming back. He even taught his first consulting clients so thoroughly that they wouldn’t need him again. They came back anyway, because of trust.
3. He treated content as digital real estate. After that first tweet, Cody wondered if he’d ever post a second one. No likes, no engagement, just talking into a void. What kept him going was a simple idea: anything you put on the internet stays there. Some of the most helpful things he’s ever read were years old with a couple hundred views, written by “some guy uncomfortable on his couch.”
“If you feel compelled to say it, or you feel compelled to give the advice or post the tweet, whatever it is, just do it. The worst thing that can happen is that nobody sees it.” Cody Brahnam
4. He accepted that growth is just uncomfortable. Posting the tweet was uncomfortable. Packing the first order was uncomfortable. Asking strangers how to work a tape gun after cutting his hand open (four or five times) was uncomfortable. Cody’s conclusion: seeking out discomfort, with the goal of helping more people, is where the growth comes from.
Finding Your First Domino This Week
A past guest of ours, Brian Neil, talks about hitting the first domino. Cody’s story is a perfect picture of it. Here’s how to apply it.
- Name the thing you keep circling. The post you’ve drafted three times. The offer you haven’t announced. The podcast you keep “researching.” Write it down in one sentence.
- Shrink it until it feels almost trivial. Not “launch my platform.” Think “publish one post that helps one person.” Cody’s first domino was a tweet. Yours can be that small.
- Reframe the fear around what you’re good at. If “promoting yourself” makes you cringe, make it about solving a problem you already know how to solve. That isn’t self-promotion. It’s stewardship.
- Push it before you feel ready. Cody’s honest admission: with a mortgage, two car payments and a toddler, the voices would have won. There will never be a season without a reason to wait.
- Say yes to the logical next step. Don’t plan the whole chain. When the reply comes, answer it. When someone mentions a warehouse at Sunday lunch, ask for the number.
The Lies That Keep Experts Invisible
“I need to feel confident first.” Cody is 30, leads people twice his age and still battles insecurity about his youth. Confidence came from the steps, not before them. As he put it, he got the confidence through it the first time, did it the second time, and kept saying yes.
“It only counts if a lot of people see it.” Cody still has fewer than a thousand followers on that original account. He’s not chasing an audience. One follower who trusted him was enough to start a company. Reach is a lagging indicator. Helpfulness is the leading one.
“The people who win are the ones with better data.” Cody competes against operators with Ivy League degrees and polished dashboards, and during a hard economy he’s out-growing them 20 to 50X. His explanation is simple: keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is helping people. Trust beats sophistication.
Use Your Voice, Even If It Shakes
Near the end of our conversation, Cody shared a saying his wife kept on a button on her car’s sun visor: Use your voice, even if it shakes. Then he said something I haven’t stopped thinking about. You don’t need to be the CEO of Nike for people to be helped by you. You’ll help a lot of people just by being yourself and sharing your experience honestly.
That’s the whole idea behind this show. You were made for this. The world is waiting. And the thing standing between you and the people who need you is probably smaller than you think. A post. A reply. A phone call.
Push the first domino. You don’t have to see where the chain ends. You just have to start it.
Watch the full episode with Cody Brahnam, and if it moved you, send it to one person who needs to hear it. Subscribe to the Create Your Art Podcast wherever you listen.
Create your art.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Cold Open
Cody: These are guys that have Ivy League degrees and they’ve got really sexy dashboards, and they can tell you every statistic about their company. But when it comes to growth during that period, I’m beating these people 20 to 50X. It’s not close.
Cody: So I asked ChatGPT what handle I should put. So now my whole company name that’s on contracts, and it’s physically on a building now, came from ChatGPT.
Cody: I’ve cut my hand on a tape gun probably four or five times and should have gotten stitches because I did not know how to operate the dang thing.
Cody: If you feel compelled to say it, or you feel compelled to give the advice or to post the tweet, whatever it is, just do it. The worst thing that can happen is that nobody sees it.
Cody: There’s something uncomfortable that’s stopping them from taking that first step. I’m not a sales guy, but I’ve sold a lot of millions of dollars of services at this point. It’s because I just took that first step.
Introduction
Darren: Today I get to sit down with Cody Brahnam of Ship Smarter. And what I love about Cody’s story is that he took on customers bigger than his own company. He hired people long before he knew how to manage them. And ultimately, he signed up for warehouse space before he felt comfortable. Nobody told him he wasn’t ready. He gave himself permission.
So if you’re out there waiting for that permission slip to do the thing that you know is inside of you, then today’s conversation is for you. I think it’s going to inspire you and equip you to go to the next level. So let’s get into it.
Cody, thanks for joining me today, man.
Cody: Thanks for having me. I do appreciate it.
Darren: We’ve just gotten to know each other through a good mutual friend of ours, Sean, and it’s cool to sit down and have this conversation today.
Cody: Likewise, man. I’m excited.
The Real Cost of Growth
Darren: Here’s where I want to start. You’ve built one of the fastest growing fulfillment companies in Indianapolis, which is super cool. But you’ve also done it in just a handful of years. So from where you sit today, what do most people get wrong about building a company that grows?
Cody: I think the biggest thing people get wrong is the cost of it. Most people associate the word cost with a dollar figure. I’ve found that my biggest cost in growing this, starting this, everything else, is time. It’s not money. I mean, yeah, it’s expensive. There are things you plan for and things you don’t plan for that just randomly come up. But for every dollar that’s been put into this, there are a lot more minutes, a lot more hours, that go into it.
And whenever you start pulling time away from something else in your life and allocating it to the business, something else is suffering. So I’d say the biggest thing people don’t consider is literally just time, and what that means for their lives. Everyone’s got the same 24 hours in a day. How are you going to spend it? I had been living my life a certain way for 26 or 27 years at that point. Now it looks a lot different than it did then.
Darren: They always say that when you’re doing something, you either have time or you have money. If you don’t have money, you have time. So when you started, were you just working all of the time? Did you have a family at that point? What did that look like?
Cody: At that point in my life, I was engaged, not quite married yet, to my now wife, Maggie. We lived in an apartment in Noblesville. We didn’t have any kids or anything on the way. We were planning what the wedding looked like. I had a full-time job at a company called Chomps, the beef jerky brand, leading all logistics and fulfillment operations over there.
Through that and a lot of other experiences in my career path, I’d walked the floor of a lot of different 3PLs, which is what we do. For anyone that doesn’t know, you’re effectively storing product for brands that you don’t own, and then you’re picking, packing and shipping those orders out. I’ve probably been in 500 or 550 of these across the U.S.
I was getting irritated every time I had to run an RFP because it was so transactional. I’m thinking, can we not just be friends? If I know you genuinely have our best interest at heart, the relationship’s going to work a lot better. And I never saw that, out of all 550. So I’m thinking, what can I do to build the 3PL that I ultimately want?
That was kind of a pipe dream for me. It’s something I knew I wanted to do one day, but I never had the guts to even start thinking about it. At that point in my life I’m trying to figure things out. I like the job I have. I’m making a good living. Life’s on easy street. But I’ve got super bad ADHD, so I have to have some kind of chaos. I’ve got to be chasing something.
The Tweet That Changed Everything
Cody: I was talking to the founders of Chomps one day. They’re still the unicorn in the better-for-you snacking space. And they said, “Hey, you need to work on building a personal brand.” I’m like, okay, this is awkward. I show up to work, I do a good job every day and I leave. Now they’re telling me I need to talk about it.
So I talked to another lady on our team who was an influencer on social media, the only place I knew to go. She said, “Just hop on Twitter and tweet about random supply chain things.” So I did that.
A couple of tweets catch fire with zero followers. I essentially posted an analysis saying, if you run a brand, you need to be looking at this, this and this to squeeze more margin out. Here’s why, and here’s what I just did. A guy replied to it. I got my first follower, and he says, “Hey, can I buy some of your time?” Sure. That’s weird.
So I spin up an LLC and within a week I sign a consulting engagement. I still have my job at this point, still in the apartment. So literally at nighttime, for probably three to four weeks, I was digging through this guy’s data. I said, “I think I can save you this amount of money,” which was an absurd amount of money, by doing nothing different other than diverting your product to different places and utilizing these shipping methods. He puts it into action, it comes to fruition, and he says, “All right, you’re legit.” Then he tweets about it: “You really need to talk to this guy.”
Darren: You got one follower, and your one follower tweets about you.
Cody: Yes, and now things are moving. I get a lot more followers off that. I say a lot. I still have probably 880 or something.
Darren: So you’re still sub a thousand.
Cody: Yeah, but I’m not chasing followers. I have no desire to be an influencer. I genuinely just want to help people. I got to help a lot more people through that experience, and then they ultimately came back to me and said, “Would you be my 3PL?”
What a 3PL Actually Does
Darren: Just to get the language, a 3PL is third party logistics.
Cody: Third party logistics. So you could manufacture something like books that you’re going to sell, store them in your garage and ship them out. But if you don’t want to deal with all the operations that come with that, like trucks coming to drop things off at your house or warehouse, fixing order-related problems, making sure the customer put in the right shipping address so it actually gets to them, rate shopping for the cheapest method among all the parcel carriers, waiting on truck drivers to show up. If you don’t want to deal with all of that, that’s why you’d use one of us.
Darren: I’d call that the unsexy side of the business. Obviously we know we need logistics. But why do you think that side is so important when it comes to growing and building something sustainable?
Cody: I think a lot of people try to do too much. There’s that old adage, keep the main thing the main thing. I find that to be very true in this space. My whole goal whenever I talk to a prospective client or an existing one is: what are your goals? What do you want to do? What do you need to focus on to get there? Then let me take care of everything else so you don’t have to worry about it. Our scope has grown over time because of that, which is fine, but now that’s part of our main thing. We have different silos in the business that people are accountable for and lead.
That’s how it becomes successful. If you have a goal of doubling or tripling revenue as a brand, say you sell hats, like a Create Your Art hat, you need to make new ads. You need to pump out new ads and buy different kinds of media. Focus all your time on that, and let me and our team do what we do. You don’t have to think about anything else that goes into the operations side of the business.
Why Logistics Is His Art
Darren: What is it about that side of things that excites you? Because I’m sitting here thinking I would literally pull my hair out if I had to figure all that out. But for you, it is that art. You see it. What is it you like tinkering with?
Cody: I think it’s that I’ll never be the best at it. I’ll never be the best at any one of the silos within the business. And there’s a new challenge literally every day. Something can always be optimized. Or a customer creates a new product, they didn’t consult with us first, and now their shipping costs have doubled because it’s a huge product and they’re mad about it. Little things like that. Every day there’s a problem to be solved and there’s no right answer. It’s just, what’s the best solution I can come up with, and how do we align that with your strategic goals? That’s what I like doing.
Darren: I think I’ve heard you say before that if you see something happen once or twice or three times, you need to dig into it.
Cody: Root causation is my favorite thing. It’s probably cynical and weird to say, but I love it. If someone comes to me with a problem, it’s genuinely exciting, because I’m like, I can solve this.
Darren: From a business standpoint, that’s so good, because business is helping other people solve problems. That’s probably why you’ve got that entrepreneur, let’s-build-something wiring. Not only the ADHD, but also, “I want to figure out how to solve this.” And once you solve it, you say, “Do you want me to help? Because I figured it out.” And people say, “Yes, more of that.”
The Create Your Art Hat Story
Darren: I would be the first to raise my hand and say I might create the Create Your Art hat, but there’s no way I would get it out the door. Somebody would order it and I’d be like, “Oh man, I’ve got to get a box.”
So here’s the funny story, a total side note. Create Your Art is a hashtag I started using years ago and people started catching on. Somebody said, “Dude, put it on a hat.” So I made them. To make them, you have to order 25 or more. So I ordered 25, got them shipped to my house, and thought, this will be great. I’ll wear one, I’ll start selling them, I’ll make my money back.
Dude, no joke. I posted online, “Guys, look, cool hats.” Multiple people said, “I’ll take one. I’ll take one. I’ll take one.” And I literally did not know what box to buy to ship them. So I haven’t sold anything. I’m just keeping the hats, and when one gets dirty, I put a new one on. I basically bought myself a 25-hat supply.
Cody: If you’re anything like me, just keep those hats.
Darren: But it speaks to how needed what you do is, because the very first problem I hit was, what box do I even put it in?
Cody: Imagine you didn’t have to think about that, and your focus could just be on making the next rendition of the hat that’s cooler and selling more of them, and people just get them whenever they press order. That’s what we do.
Darren: You’re a magician is what you are.
The Voices That Say You Can’t
Darren: I want to dig into something. You started telling the story and I cut you off. You’re working at Chomps, some random follower on Twitter says, “Can I buy some of your time?” You say sure, you start figuring things out, and then there comes a point where you say, “I’ve got to make this leap.” The more business owners, entrepreneurs and artists I talk to, the more I hear that they get to a point of decision, and there are a lot of voices in the back of your head saying, “You can’t do that. The other guy did it, but can you really do it?”
Talk to me about what was going on in your brain. What were the voices telling you? What were the insecurities? And how did you eventually say, “I’m doing this thing”?
Cody: I think those voices are still present some days. I get a new client that’s huge, and it’s like, you’ve now entered a scale you’ve never been at before. How do I operate this? I don’t have family members who have run medium or larger businesses that I can call on, or any business. “Hey, Grandpa, how did you do this?” I have none of that to call on. I have the same YouTube videos and Twitter threads that everyone else has access to.
In the beginning, a lot of it was imposter syndrome. I’m not a sales guy. As you can tell, I’m an ops guy. I like to be in the weeds. I like to solve problems. I didn’t know how to sell something. For me it’s a big turnoff. My wife just bought a car this last weekend. When you go there, everyone’s all chipper and wants to entertain you. “Cody, how are you, man?” But we know at the end of the day the goal is a transaction. That just feels yucky to me. And I didn’t know that I could get over that. Those voices in my head were saying, “You’re not cut out for that. You’ve never sold anything.” But if I’m going to do this, I have to sell. I have to figure this out.
Darren: That’s one that goes on in the back of my brain too. I kind of sell. And selling a service, at the end of the day, is helping solve problems. At its core, that’s what selling is. You need help. “I don’t know how to ship these hats, Cody. Please, for the love of God, help me.” You help me, and that’s the sale. But how did you overcome that?
Cody: This will sound crazy, but the truth is I’ve done a lot of therapy work over the years, just for different trials and tribulations of life. And I learned a concept in therapy called cognitive reframing.
The core need I had, if I was going to start this business and make it successful, was to sell. The concept of selling as I knew it was intimidating, and I had voices telling me I wasn’t cut out for it. It’s not your personality type, et cetera. So I had to reframe it. What am I good at? And why do I even want to start this? I wanted to start this because I like to solve problems, and based on all the data I have, I’m very good at solving problems.
Still to this day, and the business will be roughly eight to 10X by the end of this year what it was at the end of the first year, so it’s grown a lot, the sales cycle is the same as day one. If I can just focus on solving problems for people. Don’t bring up numbers. Don’t bring up a contract. Let me be in your company for a week or two. Let me really understand your problems, and I’ll build you a path to solving them. Then it’s on me to execute.
All I’m doing is solving problems for people. They’re talking to me because they have a problem. Either they don’t want to deal with finding the right box to ship the hat, or they don’t want a garage full of product because they need to park their cars in there. I know I can solve that problem. If I keep the conversation and the relationship centered on “let me help you keep your main thing the main thing and reach your goals,” that’s all I think about. That’s what got me over the hump.
I also felt confident enough that if I left my job, started the company and it didn’t work, I could get another job and figure it out. I’m engaged. I don’t have kids yet. So that voice in my head was actually encouraging me: if you’re ever going to do it, you have to try it right now. That was the push.
Darren: There’s no time like the present on the risk side of things. Once you start adding kids and other things, there’s just more pressure.
Cody: If I had my life situation right now, owning a home, two car payments, a young kid, I would not have started it. That voice in my head would have prevailed. I never would have started.
From Wantrepreneur to the First Domino
Darren: So it happened to be a good time in life to step into it.
Cody: I’d thought about being an entrepreneur. What do they call it, a wantrepreneur? When you don’t actually do it, but you think about it every day. That was me for a lot of years. I’m not a big networker by nature. I’m not a big talker by nature. I’m not a big entertainer. That’s why I had you on the podcast.
Darren: No, no.
Cody: I had that in my head for a really long time. Then I think the stars aligned enough that an opportunity landed in my lap. This person is ready to go if you say go. So I said, all right, let’s go.
Darren: The opportunity was in your lap. But you took the first step. You pulled out your phone and posted this thing on Twitter with currently zero people on your follower list. Super awkward, but it’s out there. And that was the step.
I had a buddy of mine, Brian Neil, on the podcast a few months back, and he talks about the first domino. You’ve got to hit that first domino. And it’s not “I’ve got to get my first client.” It’s hitting send on that tweet to get it out there in the world. Just doing the thing.
Cody: I feel like everyone has a goal in mind, for the most part, or something they want to try doing. But there’s something uncomfortable that’s stopping them from taking that first step. Like I said, I’m not a sales guy, but I’ve sold a lot of millions of dollars of services at this point. And it’s because I just took that first step.
I never thought that posting that tweet would lead anywhere. I was posting that tweet to do what my bosses at the time said I should do.
Darren: Your bosses told you you had to.
Cody: Right. So I’ll just post the tweet. And it opened doors I never thought would be in front of me. It just takes a little ounce of courage to do the first thing, and it’s something as trivial as tweeting. I’m probably sitting on the couch watching a football game thinking, “Do I press send? This is always going to be out there.” But I just did it, and it worked out.
Darren: I think that speaks to a lot of us. The whole point of these conversations is to speak to the people who know they have something inside of them and need to take the leap. They’ve been sitting on the couch for multiple nights hovering over the send button. Your story is a testament to just showing up and doing the thing, even if it was just to please your boss at the time. There’s still something powerful in that. You never know what’s on the other side. One thing leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing.
What Hitting Send Felt Like
Darren: The leap is tough. So let’s talk about what it actually felt like, maybe more of the cost and the fear. You hit send. What did that feel like once it was out in the world?
Cody: I felt a lot of imposter syndrome. When you’re on Twitter, whatever micro community you’re in, you’re seeing the best of the best and the elite of the elite. Everyone encourages you to stay away from social media because you’re comparing your life to a scenario that’s not very attainable. It’s always a measuring contest. I felt a lot of that. Who am I to tweet this out?
But I’ve since learned it was impactful for a lot of people. Every client I’ve helped has employees, and those employees have families. So I’ve indirectly touched the lives of a lot of people. That end impact definitely was not top of mind at the time.
When I pressed send, I remember thinking, am I ever going to post a second tweet? Do I need some kind of dopamine hit off this first one, a like or some engagement? With how algorithms work, you’re probably not going to get that on your first ones. But something told me to just stay consistent.
This is the ADHD kicking in. I get hyper-fixated on a topic, and now the topic is content. If I’m going to tweet, I’m not doing it once or twice. I’m a zero or 100 person. So I start watching a lot of videos, and the biggest thing I saw from any creator who’d made it, in terms of engagement and followers, was just be consistent. Keep doing it.
Then I came up with this concept in my head that it’s like real estate. Whenever you put something out on the internet, it’s digital real estate. It’s always going to be there. And I’ve found that to be true. Some of the most helpful pieces of content I’ve ever consumed are old. They have 100 or 200 views. They’re 12 years old. It’s not something millions of people have watched. It’s some guy, uncomfortable on his couch, who tweeted a thread that rang very true to me. So I said, I’m just going to keep doing it and see if I can help someone.
At that point I had nothing in mind about starting this business or getting any money from it. I was just putting it out there because my boss said I should. So I had a lot of imposter syndrome. I had a lot of needing validation. Validation on social media typically comes through likes or other forms of engagement, and when you’re not getting that, it’s weird. You’re talking to a void. I felt like I was in my car at a traffic light, just talking straight ahead.
Helping Is the Foundation
Darren: I want to touch on a mindset you maybe didn’t realize you had. When you set out to do that first one, what I hear underneath it is, “I want to be helpful.” That’s what undergirded everything. Yes, you want likes and comments, but ultimately, this information is to help. Was that natural for you, or something you had to work on?
Cody: I think it was very natural. I didn’t have people reporting to me yet, but I’d been a leader on sports teams and things like that growing up. So I was big on the concept of servant leadership without being able to articulate what servant leadership was. I didn’t have the language yet.
So if I’m going to do this tweeting thing, I’m going to do it intentionally. What’s the intention? My only intention is to help people. My thought was, there are a lot of people at really large orgs who haven’t run these kinds of analyses yet, or people in a one-man shop who don’t know what they’re doing. If I can help one person off of every tweet, that’s good by me.
Darren: How have you sustained that stance as you continue to grow?
Cody: That’s hard. That’s a really good question. I think a lot of people get caught in the thick of things as a business scales. I’d phrase it like this: if you solve one problem, you then get the privilege of solving one that’s 10 times greater and has 10 times more pressure. With success comes pressure, and pressure is a privilege. I’ve heard our football coach say that a lot.
Darren: He knows a thing or two.
Cody: Whatever Sig says, I listen to.
Darren: Exactly. We’re in.
Cody: I’ve really bought into that. For me, the hardest part is staying true to those values. If I’m doing eight to 10X the business I was doing a year or two ago, the amount of busy work that goes into it is more than 10X. It’s not a linear curve. A lot of new challenges. My time is demanded in a lot of different areas. I’ve got to build teams out. I can’t play hero ball and be the guy who figures it all out anymore. It’s not possible in 24 hours, even with AI.
I really think I have to zoom out pretty often. There are still a lot of days where those voices are in the back of my head, and I have to say, “Dude, take a second and take a breath. You’re helping people. That’s all you’re doing.”
Every time I get on a sales call, I have a mental checklist. It’s not, “How much business can this guy bring me?” There’s that in the back of your mind too. You don’t want to take on something that doesn’t make sense. But it’s got to be a win-win. What are these problems? What am I solving for this guy? That’s the whole direction of the conversation. It’s in my DNA at this point. It’s the company’s DNA.
Who You’re Becoming
Darren: Do you feel that who you’re becoming as an entrepreneur is almost greater than the business you’re building?
Cody: A hundred percent. I realize a lot more now that there are a lot more people involved, and it’s way bigger than myself. There’s the concept of a solopreneur, a one-man or one-woman shop where you run everything. It can’t be that anymore. It’s scaled beyond that point. I knew that after a month or two. So I had to let go of that pretty early on, and there’s been a really big ego detachment.
I’m not measuring success by dollar figures. That sounds cool and that’s what gets everyone’s attention. But for me, success is: am I helping my clients? Am I helping my employees have a better life? Are they learning things? Are they positioned to do bigger things than they could before they got here? Is my family better off in every way? Are they better off with the amount of time I’m able to spend with them? Am I getting good memories and time with my son? Is my wife happy? That’s how I measure success.
Darren: It’s tough to do when you’re trying to build something. But I’ve found time and time again that I brush up against issues, and those allow me to become the person I need to be. Yes, to solve those issues, but also to show up in life in a different way. I wish there weren’t so many problems in entrepreneurship. I wish it was easy. But every time I struggle, wrestle, question my existence because of the choices I’ve made, I get to the other side of it and say, “Man, I’m a better person because of it.”
Cody: A hundred percent. Parenting has taught me a lot of lessons I’ve applied to business, and business has taught me a lot of lessons I’ve applied to my marriage and being a dad. There are a lot of trials and tribulations that come with business, and then it can be something as simple as, right now my son has a cold, so he’s not sleeping well.
The natural inclination, when your time is demanded in a lot of places, is to feel frustrated when you can’t get good sleep. But my son is about to turn two in November. He doesn’t care that I’ve got a lot going on at work. He doesn’t know I have a lot going on at work. He knows he doesn’t feel well, he can’t sleep, and he wants Mama or Dad. My job in that moment is to show up and be the best dad I can be. It’s taught me a lot about staying grounded. I’ve heard Sean say this a lot: be where your feet are. It’s very true. If your mind is always racing about everything else that’s going on, you’re not going to do anything well.
Darren: I can speak to that directly, because I have four kids at home, and I have a really hard time being where my feet are. You’re dealing with an issue at work, you go to finish an email right at the five o’clock hour, and then you have to stop to deal with something or start cooking dinner. Your head is still in the task, in the list that didn’t get done. I always tell my wife I need a better way of disconnecting, because I don’t drive to an office and then back home again. So many times I just need a minute to disconnect. But it sounds like I’m not alone in the entrepreneurial world.
Cody: I think everyone goes through it, but it’s not talked about a lot. I think that’s the hardest part, shutting it off. It’s really hard. It’s impossible a lot of days. Those are the days I question most whether it’s worth it. That’s when that voice creeps back in. I know I’m building this cool thing that’s doing things that are statistically very challenging and rare, and that’s all great. But I know my core values as a human. I want to be a good dad. I want to be a good husband. And I want to provide for my family. I’m wrestling with that a lot, and I know I’m not alone in it.
Darren: You’re not alone. So many times I think, I want to build something sustainable for my family, so they’re not worried about cash or where things are coming from. With four kids, if they’re all in sports, that’s like a whole mortgage payment. I want to make sure they have those opportunities. So I’m working hard, working hard, working hard, and the whole time you miss what’s happening over here. Then they’re in those activities and you have to drive them to all of them, be there, be supportive and talk to them about it afterward.
Cody: That’s where the whole cost of time comes into play. It’s exponential.
Darren: It is. And shout out to our good friend Sean, who’s doing Invest Your Time Wisely. That’s the whole point of what he’s talking about. Well, I’m glad to know I’m not alone. Thank you for the therapy session today.
Cody: I’ll send you the invoice.
Darren: Please do.
Sponsor Break
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All right, now let’s get back to the conversation.
Under the Hood of Ship Smarter
Darren: I want to talk about how you built what you built, because I think there’s something we can all learn from it. Ship Smarter is this logistics company, you’re handling all these clients. Take me under the hood a little bit. Walk us through how you built it.
Cody: A lot of it is staying true to that core value of helping people and getting that into everyone’s DNA at the company. As challenges arise, I’m delegating more onto other people’s plates. Their workload is increasing. Now they’re having to delegate, and they may never have had to do that in a job before. So I’m teaching them that skill, and again, everything we’re doing is to help people. I’ve got other people at my company who are client facing now. It’s not just me being the face of it. For most of our clients at this point, their main point of contact is not me. It’s about building that trust.
I’d say the biggest thing on the how is understanding that I had to build a team around me that cared about it as much, or pretty close to as much, as I do. And you’ve got to incentivize people to do that. Financially, and by putting opportunities in front of them to grow and to be challenged.
My dream scenario is that all of my employees get so good at their jobs and grow so much that one day they come to me and say, “Hey man, I got presented with this opportunity. What do I do? I want to keep working for you, but this is a huge opportunity.” That means I did my job very well. That’s the kind of impact I want to have.
I talked to a lot of different 3PLs over the years, and like I said, it was very transactional. It was like a ticketing system. You go into the BMV, you get your ticket and you wait. That’s how you feel as a client. So I got it through to everyone that it can’t feel that way. It has to be, “You’re my ops guy. You’re my shipping guy. I can text you or call you anytime. If it’s after work hours I might not get a response right away, but it’s going to be handled first thing in the morning.” Our clients know we’ve got their back. I’ve got that buy-in, and it’s worked really well.
We’ve also had to think outside the box. With your hats, for example, we have a very specific silo. We’re storing your inventory, keeping it safe and shipping the correct product in a timely fashion to the customers who buy your hats. But we’re touching your hat every single day. What can we do to help you make it better? How can we extend our service beyond this little niche?
A lot of it has been consultative. We’ll fly out to a customer and help them work through challenges I faced in my career before I founded this company. Sometimes it’s making content for them. I’ve got your hats in my warehouse and 30 or 40 people in there who’d be willing to put the hat on and pack one of your orders while wearing it and talking about it.
Radical Accountability
Cody: Then there’s a customer service aspect. I’m really big on radical accountability. That’s another big part of the how. When you’re shipping orders over a million times a year, a couple million times a year, there are going to be errors, and there are going to be multiple of them. We pride ourselves on a really low error rate, but with scale, that’s still a lot of errors.
For us, radical accountability looks like reaching out to the end customer, who did no business with us. They purchased from our client. And we say, “Hey, we messed up. Don’t let this be a bad image for the brand. We own it. We’re going to overnight you the right product. If you want to send the old one back, here’s a label.” We make sure they know we’re owning that piece of the experience.
Our clients appreciate that a lot, because with advertising costing so much more than it did three years ago, you need repeat customers. It’s really about helping all of our brands keep the lifetime value of their customers as high as possible.
Under the hood, there are more layers to the business now. I lived in corporate America, worked those jobs and hated it. A lot of what you did felt like having a meeting to check off a box and say you had one. So I’m grappling with avoiding becoming that, and keeping a relaxed atmosphere where we’re all friends. We hang out outside of work. We talk to each other about life challenges. But when we’re inside the four walls, we know it’s go time.
Unloading the Container
Cody: You’ve got a lot of new people coming into the mix. How do you show up excited enough, after living this culture every day for three years, to pass it along and explain why it matters? There’s a lot of sharing our DNA. The servant leadership aspect has been huge.
Literally yesterday, a container hit our dock. Whenever a customer buys bulk product, it’s typically from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, somewhere in Asia. They load the containers with heavy boxes. These were T-shirts, 50 per box. It was a small container, probably 700 boxes at 30 or 40 pounds each. Everyone’s busy. And I need these guys to know that even though the business is eight to 10 times bigger than it was the first year, I’ve still got it in me. So I go out there, sweat through my shirt, sweat through my sweatshirt and unload this container, just to make the point: I’m going to be right here with you no matter how much business is in here. I’m not going to sit in the office where you never see me. I’m always going to be involved.
That’s been huge for maintaining everyone’s buy-in. I’m the guy who started this and the guy bringing in more business, but I’m also the guy who’s going to be out here figuring it out with them.
The other big piece is I make it a point to go to every workstation and ask people, what’s challenging? What would make this more sustainable for you? I’ll watch them work. Would it be better if, when people loaded totes onto the conveyor for you, they faced the other way so you don’t have to flip them around every time? Little things like that, to win seconds back and also to win their trust.
Darren: What I heard in all of that is servant leadership. You wake up every day and ask, how do I serve my clients? How do I serve my team? And how do I even serve the clients of my clients? That servant mentality is how you built this over the last handful of years. I’m going to solve problems and I’m going to serve people. That’s really beautiful, and it’s probably why it’s grown the way it has.
Even with the mishap example, you’re taking it on, maybe even to the detriment of your bottom line, to make sure the client’s customer is satisfied and knows it’s not the brand’s problem. That serves both of them extremely well. And I don’t hear you saying you’re doing that only because it’ll get you more business. It sounds like it’s just part of who you are. Where did that come from in your life?
Small Town Roots
Cody: I honestly think it’s because I’m from Pendleton, Indiana. Small town, rural area. I found that the best people in my life growing up were the ones who would always show up just to help you.
Now, as I’m walking a faith journey, I think a lot of it is about how you serve other people and how you help other people. Someone may not be open to a walk in faith, but I can still come to them and be a sounding board or a listening ear, and that’s helpful. I think if everyone went about their days with the intention of just helping other people, the world would be a much better place. And I’ve learned that kind of activity is generally rewarded, both monetarily and otherwise.
It really comes from small town values. I just want to help people. I had help along the way. There were a lot of times I wish I’d had help, but now I’ve got the experience to help the next person who needs it. All I need is somebody to ask.
Darren: That’s really good. From everything you’ve shared, from posting on social media to how you approach building your business, it’s the servant side of things, the helping-people side of things. That’s how you sell. That’s how you grow a business. And we often overcomplicate it.
Fundamentals Beat Dashboards
Cody: I was at a conference in Las Vegas last week for the software we run everything on, and I got asked a lot, “How did you build this in the time period you did?” Industry-wide it’s been pretty challenging. Whenever there’s economic pressure, it’s really challenging to grow a service business. If you own a company that makes something and people don’t have a lot of disposable income, your margin matters more than ever, because you’re not going to have the volume of sales bringing cash in. You’ve got to keep as much cash out of every sale as possible. That squeezes the pockets of the people who serve those companies, like us.
So my prevailing thought to everyone is: I just help people. I’m not focused on deep-dive analytics like a lot of people are. These are guys who have Ivy League degrees and really sexy dashboards, and they can tell you every statistic about their company. But when it comes to growth during that period, I’m beating these people 20 to 50X. It’s not close. And it’s not a bragging point. I just keep the fundamentals really simple.
Think about high functioning sports teams. They don’t beat themselves. I’m not beating myself, and our company isn’t beating itself by overcomplicating things. We keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is helping people. If you’re out there to help people, you’re going to gain trust. Anytime you’re in a service industry, the only way you win a client is trust, price or a combination of the two. That’s what it’s all about.
Darren: I love the idea of sports teams going back to the basics. In basketball it’s the layups. In football it’s blocking and tackling. And the basics here are, how do I help people and how do I serve them well? Sure, you can have sexy dashboards, but if the foundation of the service isn’t there, it’s not going to work.
Cody: And if the major selling point that makes someone sign the contract is a sexy dashboard, that’s not someone I’m going to enjoy working with anyway. I want a normal, authentic human being who’s trying their best to grow a business just like I am, and I’m going to help them achieve that goal.
Darren: A little bit of that small town mentality in them too. We’re here, we’re building this thing, we’re putting it on our shoulders and making it happen.
Day One in the Living Room
Darren: I want to go back to the early stages. Was it you sitting in your living room building this thing? What did day one look like, even to the point where you stopped your full-time gig and were 100 percent on this?
Cody: It was me. That’s all it was. Even before printing labels and shipping, it started with consulting. I’m working a full-time job, I get done with the workday, and now I’ve got these projects and people to help that I’ve never met. Ironically, all of them lived in Europe, so I didn’t think I’d ever meet them. I’m sitting there at night, probably watching football with my wife, with my computer in front of me, crunching numbers and giving advice. This is how you need to use these people. If you move this over here, you’ll save some dollars. This is how you’ll smooth out your flow.
This is probably naive of me. I had never owned a business. All I did was post a tweet, a couple of them at this point. So I’m going to help these people. And a big thing to me is empowering them to be self-sufficient. If you ever run into another supply chain challenge, I want you to feel like you have a bachelor’s degree in supply chain by the time you’re done working with me.
That’s probably dumb from a business perspective. If I’d left a little of that out and just solved the one problem I was hired to solve, they could have come back to me for others. But I didn’t want that. I literally just wanted to help people. And they ultimately came back more because there was trust.
The first consulting client did come back and ask if I’d be their 3PL, and that’s where the light bulbs started turning. If I’m going to do it, the time is right now. But it takes a lot of capital and a lot of time. There are things I don’t even know about yet. There’s a forklift. I’ve got to source racking, have it installed, get permits to install it. Plumbing issues are going to come up, and that’s a lot more expensive in a commercial building than a residential one. The AC is going to go out. All of these thoughts start creeping in, and now that’s the voice in the back of my head.
I’m a very data-driven guy, so I’m doing a lot of research on what this is actually going to take. First step: find a space.
The Warehouse at Sunday Lunch
Cody: I’m looking at a lot of different options, and I’m at lunch on a Sunday with my wife and one of her college roommates. She alludes to her dad having a warehouse. I’m like, hang on. This is going to be weird, but can I have his number? She gives it to me. I text him, and he tells me to come in.
I can’t even explain the vision to him, because I don’t have one defined. I don’t have an ICP. I don’t even know what ICP means, ideal customer profile. My core need is that I just need space so I can try this out. At the time, one of the people who agreed to say yes made habanero jelly in different flavors. So I’ve got 10 pallets of this coming in. Can I store it here? We worked out an agreement.
And yes, it was all me. I procured software to intake the orders, total overkill at that point. “Look at my software, though, it’s awesome. I’ve got three orders to show for it.” I’m working out of the conference room there. I’m literally on meetings for my full-time job, which I still have, and in between meetings I’ve got enough time to go pack an order. I print the label, go out to the floor, get the items, prep them, box them up, put the label on and get it to the area where the carrier picks it up.
It looked like that until it was a couple hundred orders a day, and I’m like, this isn’t sustainable. But crunching the numbers, I’m not going to replace my income yet. My wife starts coming in to help me at night. A couple of guys who work for my wife’s friend’s dad start pitching in, and I start paying them. They’re seeing a lot more product coming in, and we start talking: do you want to partner on this, or do something different to make it more scalable? That’s how we got to the next phase.
So to answer your question: in the beginning it was me in my living room, then me in a conference room, and then me out there on the floor.
The Tape Gun
Darren: So you were consulting, and that consulting turned into, “Will you be our 3PL?” Did I say that right?
Cody: You did. Another light bulb. I thought, I could probably do that. I’ve worked with hundreds of them. I’ve seen this a million times. I’ve just never packed an order. But I’ve seen countless people do it. How hard can it be?
Darren: And then you figure out how much respect you should have had for the people doing it.
Cody: This is brutal. How does this box go together? And the tape gun. I didn’t know how to work a tape gun. I’ve cut my hand on a tape gun probably four or five times and should have gotten stitches, because I did not know how to operate the dang thing. But you just figure stuff like that out.
Darren: How to build a company fast: learn how to run a tape gun. So it starts to grow, and it sounds like you bring in some partners to scale it up. Are you full time at this point?
Quitting the W-2
Cody: I quit my job right then, probably three months into it, which was a leap. It was scary. It was a pay cut. I felt so much pressure. But I kept coming back to that saying, pressure is a privilege, because my back’s against the wall now. When you have a job and you’re working for someone else, your back’s always against the wall too, just in a different way. And the analyst in me thought, I have a 100 percent success rate of making it work for other people. I’m sure I can figure this out too. It’s just uncomfortable.
So I really leaned into the mantra that growth is just uncomfortable. Posting that first tweet was uncomfortable. Packing that first order was uncomfortable. Asking guys I didn’t know at the time, who are now some of my closest friends and work very closely with me, “How do I work this tape gun? There’s blood. I need to figure this out.” It’s uncomfortable, but you have to do it to grow. And I’ve learned along the way that seeking out that discomfort, being uncomfortable with the goal of helping more people, is where the growth comes from.
Darren: I love that, because so many times you get scared. You put the tweet out, somebody reaches out, you’re consulting, somebody says, “Will you be my 3PL?” and you say yes. It’s the logical next step. It’s a little scary. You don’t know where the warehouse is coming from. You hear the word “warehouse” at lunch and say, “Can I make that call?” Every time, it’s one step into the next thing that gets you to the next place.
The Domino Effect
Cody: And each one of those steps was scary. Posting the tweet. Getting some kind of validation back from someone saying, “Can I buy some of your time?” That’s scary. I don’t know this person. But I’m betting on myself that whatever I tweeted about, which to me was common sense, holds value for them. Let me just give this a shot.
To your buddy’s point about the first domino, it really is a domino effect. I know a lot of people out there, myself included, still have some domino they’re waiting to flick over. I didn’t know that posting that tweet would lead to a consulting engagement. I didn’t know that being scared to take on the responsibility of making a company more profitable would work and then lead to the dream business I wanted to start. And I didn’t know that leaving my full-time job, the only security I’d ever known, a W-2 income, would lead to what it’s led to now.
I would just encourage everyone: if you flick over that first domino, it might not be the chain reaction I’ve had, but other doors are going to open. Think about it. Is this something that could benefit me? Then flick over that domino. I think it was a confidence thing. I got the confidence through it the first time, did it the second time, and said, I’m going to keep saying yes. Until you can’t anymore and realize that saying yes to everything is detrimental. But that’s a whole other podcast topic.
Darren: So true. So many times the fear and the insecurities and the voices telling you that you can’t are so loud that you almost forget you’re capable of doing the thing you’re capable of doing.
Youth as an Insecurity
Cody: I still get it to this day. I’m now a voice that other people who own businesses like mine in my niche will listen to. But I’m 30 years old. My biggest insecurity over the course of my career has been youth. A lot of the people I led when I was working for companies were twice my age, a lot more seasoned, with fancier degrees. I had a lot of that to overcome, and it’s still present to this day.
Darren: That reminds me of so many conversations I’ve had recently. “I can’t do this. I can’t do that.” And this week I walked out of a meeting thinking, I know what I’m talking about. We listen so much to these voices that we lose sight of what we can actually bring to the world and how we can serve people well. That’s what this whole conversation has been about. Sometimes it’s stop listening to those voices, step out into the scary thing and push the domino over. It might not land where yours landed, but it’s going to land somewhere. When you bet on yourself, you’re always going to figure it out.
Use Your Voice, Even If It Shakes
Cody: My wife had a button on the visor flap in her car, the thing that blocks the sun. I think it was attributed to RBG or someone like that. Her saying is, “Use your voice, even if it shakes.” You might not have the confidence to go out there and speak publicly on a topic. But if you feel compelled to say it, or you feel compelled to give the advice or post the tweet, whatever it is, just do it. The worst thing that can happen is nobody sees it.
That’s what I had to start overcoming. I don’t need to be the CEO of Nike for people to be helped by me. I’m going to help a lot of people just by being myself and sharing my experiences authentically.
Darren: That’s what you call a bar in this industry. That is a bar.
Where to Find Cody
Darren: Cody, as we land here, tell people how they can get in contact with you. Twitter, X, whatever you call it now, LinkedIn. Where can they find more of you?
Cody: If anyone wants to reach out to me for advice, to talk shop or just to become a friend, seriously, feel free. You can hit me up on LinkedIn if you search my name, Cody Brahnam. You’ll see a picture of me with this logo on my shirt. That’s our company logo. And if you want to see the origin story, hop on Twitter. It’s just @shipsmarter.
Funny story: when I was creating that Twitter account to put out common sense stuff about supply chain, I asked ChatGPT what handle I should use, and it said that. So now my whole company name, on contracts and physically on a building, came from ChatGPT.
Darren: That’s so rad. I can’t help but think of the old commercial, and I’m much older than you, so you might not remember it, but it’s made a comeback. “I shipped my pants.”
Cody: I’ve heard of it.
Darren: It was a Kmart commercial, which isn’t even around anymore. So now every time I think of Ship Smarter, I’m going to think of “I shipped my pants.” It’s going to be great.
Talk to me about who does business with you. Your ICP. If someone randomly came across this podcast, who would say, “I need Cody”?
Cody: Any company that’s selling a physical product online, direct to consumer orders. People are typically using a Shopify storefront or another e-commerce storefront. TikTok Shop has become a big thing. If you owned a clothing line, we’d be the people storing your product, picking and packing the orders exactly how you tell us a perfect order looks and getting it where it’s supposed to go.
The things we do very well are cosmetics, which we have a lot of in the building right now: soaps, deodorant, shampoo, things like that. And apparel is another niche we’ve fallen into really well.
Darren: Do you do videos with the soaps and deodorant? Putting it on as it is?
Cody: We do content for a lot of our brands. Every one of our customers is always trying to test new ad angles. I’ve seen a lot of requests come in, for hats for example: “Can you wear our hats and post a video of you doing this? Here’s a script.” Yeah, we’ll do it. We’re not content guys, but the ads we’ve produced for them have done very well. We’re good at following instructions. We even have a backyard golf game where we film content, playing the game in the warehouse and doing crazy trick shots. It’s fun for the team. We just love doing anything to help, literally.
Closing
Darren: Cody, it’s an inspiring story. Like you said, small town Indiana. Somebody who says, there are probably people in this industry with more degrees than I have, but we’re going to make this happen. You step out, you knock the dominoes over and you build the thing literally from your living room to what it is today.
Thank you for sharing your story and your perspective. The one big takeaway I’m walking away with, and I hope you take it too, is that you just have to take the logical next step. Even when the voices are loud, you do the thing. It’s so inspiring, man. I appreciate your story and the art that you are creating. Thanks for being here today.
Cody: I appreciate the opportunity.
Darren: And as I always say, I want you to remember that you are an artist and that your voice is needed in this world. So go out and create your art, and we’ll see you here next time on the Create Your Art Podcast. Peace.