Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health and wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Jakob Davis, owner of The Nutrition Store LLC., located in Boiling Springs, SC, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
The Nutrition Store LLC is a vitamin and supplement retailer that goes against the grain of the traditional supplement store experience. With my background in physiology and nutritional science and having wasted hundreds of dollars in my youth going to big chain stores like GNC, I knew years ago, when I embarked on my journey of starting TNS, that we could do things entirely differently.
Fast forward to today, we have two beautiful locations in the upstate of South Carolina and are proud to help not only the local community improve their health, but we also formulate and manufacture products that over 30 retail stores in the US currently carry. Thanks to social media outlets like Instagram and TickTock, our customer base has expanded far beyond the local upstate of South Carolina into many countries across the world. I'm beyond grateful for the immense amount of support that we receive locally as well as online.
At the nutrition store, our goal is to dissect your goals and steer you towards a path of developing a healthy lifestyle, rather than just selling you a supplement and generating revenue. We take into account individual vitamin and mineral deficiencies, specific goals, and desired outcomes, as well as provide honest feedback to those who most likely don't need a supplement; they just need to improve their lifestyle.
Initially, our customers are the average Joe who wants to go buy a supplement to help them further their progress. Most are shocked when they come into a TNS for the first time, and we steer them directly out the door without selling a thing! We want to see what our customers are currently doing in regards to their dietary choices, exercise schedule, and overall lifestyle before we make any blanket recommendations on which supplements will best suit them. We request that they go home, create a 72-hour diet log of everything they've consumed and then come back to chat with us about it! Whether it's the goal of improving body composition or an NCAA collegiate athlete who wants to optimize their performance, we make it our job to be individualized and specifically help anybody who's willing to trust our insights.
Tell us about yourself
I started working out at the age of 14 years old when my dad got me a pull-up bar for Christmas one year. It might not seem like much, but that was the inspiration and motivation I needed to embark on a lifestyle change. I was the chubby kid out of my friend group, and I was tired of feeling the way I did about myself at a young age. Throughout high school, I was "that "kid who carried around a gallon jug and multiple Tupperware containers filled with my meals for the day. Bodybuilding consumed my life, so much so that I began researching and studying nutritional science and fell in love with it.
Upon graduating high school, I attended Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Initially, I began my college journey as a major in dietetics. However, the dietetics program was focused on sending students on a straight path to work in a hospital setting. This wasn't what I wanted to do, as I knew that I wanted to help normal people who desire to improve their lifestyles on a day-to-day basis. I switched my degree to physiology; however, at the same time began studying under numerous PhD's in nutritional science outside of the classroom. During my senior year, I was working as a full-time personal trainer but decided to take a part-time job at a small supplement store called Rock Hill Nutrition.
Open till this point, I had a distaste for supplements. Having spent a large majority of my mediocre income as a teenager on the pointless supplements and knowing that the FDA does not regulate these products, I was a skeptic of their efficacy! But the owner of Rock Hill Nutrition, Steve Wayman, changed my views entirely. Unlike most supplement stores that I have been in, he was entirely honest with every customer that walked through the door! He made sure to explain why ingredients were effective and how they could benefit people on a level that they could understand. He refused to carry many products that did not have a scientific basis of support and made sure to explain why he didn't want to carry these products.
During this time, I fell in love with helping people and addressing their goals on a nutritional basis. I began building my business plan for The Nutrition Store immediately. Fast forward to today, TNS has become a much larger entity than I ever could've imagined four years ago, working in that small retail store in rock Hill. My motivation stems from knowing that there are thousands of stores across the country that generate revenue unethically by selling products that are not scientifically back, efficaciously dosed, and making promises to customers that are simply not honest. My goal is to create a community through TNS and dispel the myths that the supplement industry has permeated into the minds of everyone who begins their fitness journey. That's what motivates me!
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Man, that's a tough one. It's often hard to sit back and reflect on what all has been accomplished when your constant driving force is to keep doing more. I could sit here and ramble about TNS being the highest revenue-generating independently owned supplement store in the Southeast or that we're proud of the products we currently manufacture and offer the 2000s of people, but honestly, that's not what I'm most proud of. I say the largest accomplishment that I've made as a business owner is successfully creating a community and a mission worth following.
Through the content that I've relentlessly made seven days a week for YouTube, Instagram, and all social media outlets, we've successfully built a following of thousands of like-minded people who believe that there is change coming for the supplement industry. These people genuinely believe in what I've done and continue to do. And for that, I'm not only thankful, but I'm proud to know that my initial goal is still continuing to be pursued.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
The hardest thing that I've experienced by far is maintaining a work-life balance. Hell, what even does that mean? Most people, whether it's my customers or friends from an earlier place in life, don't quite understand that when you create a business that you truly believe in, it's almost impossible to 'turn it off,' so to speak. I crave waking up every single day and working towards the goals that I've set in front of me. As cliché as it sounds, and with every entrepreneur on the Internet spewing similar words, I'd have to agree that workaholism is something that is a daily challenge for me. Those around me never seem to understand why I can't just take the weekend off to sit around and be lazy. Even my current relationship, in which I'm extremely happy, is a challenge daily to prioritize and make sure that I am doing what I should be as a romantic partner.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Don't start a business with the goal of making money. Sure, you can go in and build an e-commerce website and generate a ton of money if you do things the right way. But is that truly fulfilling? Are you leaving an impact on the world around you or changing the narrative to better people's lives in some way, shape, or form? Probably not if the goal is money only. You need to be passion-driven and truly have a goal that you want to accomplish outside of dollar bills.
- Don't hire; acquire your team. My team at TNS is among the best in the world at consulting, communicating, and pursuing the mission that I've set out for my Business. Why? Because I acquired them through a genuine desire to improve the industry and the community here in the upstate. None of them have traditional backgrounds in nutrition or physiology like myself, but I would consider them even more educated and better suited to explain supplement science than myself, all because they have a common belief in what we're trying to accomplish. That might be easier said than done for some business models, but if you've created a business around my advice and step one, those who belong in your Business and on your team will manifest themselves to you naturally.
- Systemize! Look, there's no doubt that you have an exquisite set of skills. There's no doubt that you can do things and communicate with your customers in a way that most can't. But guess what? There are so many other variables that go into running and scaling a business other than the day-to-day operations at the ground level (i.e., sales, customer service, accounting). Your job as the entrepreneur should be to systemize your daily operations in a way that can be replicated for your team to follow. The number one thing that I've done to scale both horizontally and vertically is documenting every action step I take to receive an outcome (thanks to one of my right-hand men). By developing a system for how you do things, and the way things should be done, you mitigate the risk of depreciating your quality and service as a business. You also provide a map for new employees and seasoned employees to follow and check in on to make sure that the business is running the way you initially set out for it too.
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
If there's anything else I'd like to share, I'd have to ask that anybody reading this check us out on Instagram! Go scroll through our video content, and you will quickly realize why we're so different than a typical retail store. We've created well over 1000 videos that are either educational, informative, or comedic! We truly want people to follow our page not because they need to buy protein but because they want to learn something.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://thenutritionstores.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thenutritionstoreSC/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenutritionstorellc/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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