David Heacock Transcript
Clint Betts
David, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the CEO and founder of Filterbuy. A really, really interesting thing that you've done here. Explain how you got to become the CEO and founder of Filterbuy.
David Heacock
Well, I'm from Talladega, Alabama, originally, where I grew up in a family business that was largely in the textile industry and industrial supply business, calling on the textile industry that I saw decimated in the nineties. That was kind of, I guess, my formative period in my childhood. I ultimately went on to work at Goldman Sachs, where I ultimately ran the emerging market options trading business. In 2012, my family was going through the sale of this industrial supply business because they didn't want to continue to run it, they wanted to retire. I ultimately ended up buying it, having no idea what I was going to do with it, and pretty quickly realized that I was going to have to do something pretty different if I wanted to sustain it. Ultimately, I started an air filter manufacturing company that sold directly online under the Filterbuy brand and have been building it ever since.
Clint Betts
What did you bring to the table here? It does seem like if you can buy these types of companies, they have strong customers, they already have revenue, all of that type of stuff, and add technology and add convenience to it, that it could actually really benefit these types of industries, right?
David Heacock
Well, I mean, I think that's true, but that wasn't my experience. I bought an industrial supply business that had nothing to do with air filters whatsoever. Basically, we were a reseller of industrial supplies at the time to the wood products industry with an average salesperson 60 years old or so that was thriving off of established relationships. In that world, I realized that there was no way we were going to be able to be sustainable against the Graingers and the Amazons of the world. That's why I had to pivot into something different. It was important to me to have a product that I could manufacture competitively in Talladega and sell directly to the end user. I ultimately settled on air filters because they're so logistically complex relative to other products. I do think that there's value in taking maybe legacy businesses and bringing them along and modernizing them, whatever you might say, but that wasn't actually my experience.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's super interesting as well. You still did take an industry where it's air filters, it's these filters and you're trying to figure out how to make it a great experience for your customers and how do you sell them in a way that stands apart from anyone else? What did you think about that? It is kind of like something everybody needs, right, so why do they choose Filterbuy, I guess, is the question?
David Heacock
Yeah, a good question. The original insight that I had was that hundreds of sizes of filters are needed in practice. A lot of times, a house might have three different sizes of air filters, and there are lots of older houses that have non-standard air ducts and whatnot, which means that there are all of these sizes that there is demand for in reality, but no Walmart or retail chain could possibly stock all the sizes that you need in order to have an air filter business, so to speak. Because of that, they're a great online product in the same way that Amazon started in books because Jeff Bezos had the insight that there was more long tail in books than there was any other product. That's famously why they started in books. Air filters have some of the same characteristics, and I also knew I could manufacture them competitively in the US because every time you ship or move them, that increases the cost so much that just importing them, say, from China, did not make sense. The combination of those two insights is ultimately what led to the business.
Clint Betts
Yeah. How has AI changed things for you? Has that made your business more efficient? Have you implemented it yet? Anything like that?
David Heacock
Well, I mean, we've built our own ERP system from the beginning, and because of that, we have a pretty robust development team that we've built the back end of our business with, and we're constantly looking at AI and AI tools to making ourselves more efficient. We've actually seen it firsthand, and our existing team is a lot more efficient. When we're going through the budgeting for next year, we're maybe not adding resources to that team in the same way we may be to other teams, even though we're growing. We're able to do a lot more with our resources, and that's kind of our lived experience in the AI world.
I think that if you were a legacy business that had very big data analytics teams and huge accounting teams and huge engineering teams, it would be more impactful. Because we've been bootstrapped from the beginning and kind of always technology first from the beginning and don't have these big legacy teams built, that for us it's more of allowing us to be more efficient as we grow rather than kind of displacing something that already exists.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What does a typical day look like for you?
David Heacock
There is no typical day. It just depends. Actually, next week, we're putting out a POV episode where I'm doing seven days of my life. You can kind of see it. There is no typical day. I travel a lot because we have operations and customers all over the US. I travel two to three days every week, and that just varies from week to week. Last week, I went to Bentonville, Arkansas, to meet with Walmart. I went to our operations in Talladega, Alabama, to deal with an operational issue, and I went to New Kensington, Pennsylvania, to be with our operations teams there. Then, on Monday and Friday, I did my internal meetings and meetings like this, whereas I generally stacked my Monday and Friday to be able to do my meetings and the kind of personal blocks of time that I say for myself. That's generally how I structure a week, but there is no typical week or a typical day in reality.
Clint Betts
How have you managed the whole supply chain? Has there been issues over the past few years? I know that's a big deal for a lot of folks who are manufacturing products. How did you manage that? How did you figure all that out?
David Heacock
Well, trial and error and kind of using first principles thinking, I guess. During COVID, we definitely had supply chain issues, as a lot of people did. We were largely able to mitigate them by being crafty. We were lucky to have come into COVID with a decent amount of raw material inventory, which was so important. In the last couple of years, we've seen supply chain issues not be so dramatic. I mean, we don't import any product from overseas. We don't have any raw materials from overseas. Everything we have is domestically made, and we're completely vertically integrated. We're basically taking five raw materials and converting them into our finished product of all different shapes and sizes. Thankfully, the supply chain has not been a huge problem for us in the way that it has been for others. I mean, I do think that the upcoming tariffs and stuff are going to really impact a lot of companies and a lot of people in some pretty major ways that we don't fully know what they are yet, but luckily for us, it's not largely going to be a problem for us.
Clint Betts
What do you read, and what reading recommendations do you have for us?
David Heacock
Well, I read a lot. I like biographies as well as philosophical things. If I were going to put out a recommendation for something I actually come back to regularly this time of year, and I was reading it last week, but the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, I believe. Really just talking about how we all, or my takeaway, I guess I should say from it, there's lots of nuance to it, but we all have this kind of friction that comes up in life or the things that we have to overcome. Generally, the creative mind has to overcome these blocks over and over again. I think finding your muse and your why and your reason for pushing through the hard things, particularly from a creative perspective, is very important. I view business and entrepreneurship as a creative endeavor at the end of the day. I think that his kind of framework for thinking about it is always very impactful. It's something I come back to basically every year.
Clint Betts
How have you developed your leadership style as CEO? I mean, you went from Goldman Sachs to owning this business to transforming into Filterbuy. How has your leadership style changed?
David Heacock
Well, it's definitely evolved. When we started, I maybe had 15 employees or so in the company that I bought, and now we have over a thousand. It definitely has to shift as you go. I think that early on, really for the first decade, it was about leading by example. There's not a job within my business that I have not done. Because of that, it gives me a lot of insight into how things need to be structured and how things work the best way. For me, it really was that evolution early on. In the last couple of years, I've really been working on leveling up our management team and how we're attacking bigger ideas and accomplishing bigger things.
That was really a mindset shift that I had to work through in order to be able to do that. It's not something that came naturally to me. I actually started working with a performance coach named Dr. Julie Gurner, who was really helpful for me in that process and did a lot of reading around kind of operating systems for businesses like Traction or the Rockefeller Habits and things like that to decide what was my style going to be and how was I going to structure this larger business that I still intended to grow. I've come up with my own version of that internally, but now I have a pretty well-established management team that has been assembled over the last couple of years that is really running the day-to-day operations of the business and allowing me to expand our horizons and our mission and ultimately our impact. I've really worked up to that and have slowly been letting the operational pieces of the business go.
I think as an entrepreneur, the thing you have to remember is that your job is to develop the systems that get the desired outcome that can be repeatable over and over and over again. That's kind of what a business is at the end of the day. I feel like I largely created that. Now, I have a team that is helping me to hone those, improve them, and grow them in ways that I'm not necessarily suited to do. Finding the people to help me has been a huge unlock for us.
Clint Betts
It's funny you mentioned Dr. Gurner, I actually recently started following her on X I believe, two or three months ago, and I love her insights. What are some of the things that you've learned from her?
David Heacock
Well, I mean, it's all sorts of things. She and I speak every week, and on Monday, we actually spoke this morning. It is really when I'm working through problems or trying to think through how to solve or approach something; having somebody to talk that through is just extremely important for me. I mean, you have to realize that I'm a bootstrapped entrepreneur, we have no investors, and because of that, I've got no board of directors. I'm really only accountable to myself at the end of the day. That sounds great, and there are a lot of advantages to that. I can move way quicker than anybody else. The bigger we get, the more impactful that can be.
At the same time, that means that I really don't have embedded accountability. I realized I was missing that, and she provides that for me because I know that if I have to articulate to her why I'm doing something, she's going to probe it and she's going to make sure that I'm being honest with myself at the end of the day. I think about things and really having a thought partner that has been really important to me and she's been great at that.
Clint Betts
How do you stay grounded?
David Heacock
How do I stay grounded? Well, I don't know what grounded means. I tell people I don't know the right way, I only know my way of life. It's a data set of one. I've got a great family, and I am very fortunate for that with a wife that I married in high school, not married in high school, met in high school, and have three young kids, and they have a tendency to keep you pretty grounded. I mean, that's been important for me.
The reality is that I've been able to build my unique vision over the last 11 or so years that I've been doing this. For me, it's very empowering to wake up every day and realize that I'm taking the agency to build my own life and the lives of the people around me. I find a real purpose in that. It's a big reason why I've recently gone so public about my mission of building the world's leading indoor air quality company and kind of documenting that journey and taking people along for the ride, showing people that it is possible to go out and kind of build something big and do it in a way that's unique to you, in this case, unique to me. I think that that's really the thing that I find most empowering, and that fuels me. My family, my employees, and the people I interact with hold me accountable for that and force me to stay grounded.
Clint Betts
Tell us about your YouTube channel. You kind of explained a little bit about why you're doing it. What are you hoping to achieve there? How's it going so far? Does it feel like a new entrepreneurial journey you're setting on?
David Heacock
Oh, absolutely. It's a new entrepreneurial journey. I'll tell you, they get me on video saying this often, but it's way more work than I ever could have imagined trying to break into the social media world. I'm basically committed to documenting my journey of building the world's leading indoor air quality company. I know if I tell the world that and tell you that, that I'm going to go out and wake up every day and make that happen. It's me burning the boats and forcing that accountability. I'm a big fan of accountability, and with Dr. Gurner and the personal trainer I work with, and then the YouTube channel of telling the world what I'm doing and telling my employees what I'm doing and holding me and holding everyone accountable is a big reason for it.
Also, it's just the recognition that in order to build something big, I'm not going to be able to do it alone. I'm going to have to have the right partners, employees, customers, and stakeholders, all of whom are so important in building a big vision. The only way I'm going to be able to accomplish that, in my opinion, is by being very vocal about what I'm doing and doing it in a big way. That's really the motivation for me to build this channel. I think that ultimately, the right people who are attracted to my mission and want to be along for that will ultimately find me and hopefully want to partner to make big things happen. That's generally the motivation behind it. It's a lot of work. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy, probably a little bit more than I originally thought, but I'm extremely committed to seeing it through.
Clint Betts
There was a lot of uncertainty this year in 2024 for a variety of reasons. It does seem like there's a little bit more certainty as far as the markets are concerned as to where 2025 is going to go. How are you thinking about the difference between this year and preparing for 2025?
David Heacock
My mind just doesn't work that way. Honestly, I have a long-term vision, and I have short-term plans that I'm constantly working towards, but setbacks happen, things happen, and I own the micro, and I don't sweat it too much. I mean, I cannot control what the external environment or the political environment is or whatever the case might be. I can't control that, but I can control the actions that I take every day. I'm setting up on this mission of building the world's leading indoor air quality company, which is a likely multi-decade journey for me, and I'm prepared for that. We have a plan for next year, just as we did this year, that we think is realistic, and we have targets that we're setting and acting against, and I feel confident in, but we may hit them all, or we may miss a couple. Either way, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but it's the process and the consistency of waking up every day and moving towards a bigger vision.
That's what I prefer to focus on. I can't control what the economy is going to do in 2025, what interest rates are going to be, or whatever the case may be. I have to set myself up to be able to navigate any of those environments, which we do. For me, it's about the consistent focus, and how quickly we get there in any given year is somewhat beyond my control, but I can control the process and my thinking regarding how I approach it.
Clint Betts
That's probably the right approach. That sounds right. That sounds like a healthy way to approach it as well. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
David Heacock
Who gave me a chance to get me where I am today? It's a good question. I would have to say it was the people who hired me at Goldman Sachs out of college, to be honest with you. I did not go to an Ivy League school. I went to George Washington University, where I was a very good student and was really interested in economics. I ultimately got hired in the economics research group within Goldman, but I was not the traditional hire that you would expect in such a situation. They saw potential in me and took a chance on a non-traditional hire, I suppose. That was definitely a big confidence boost for me that ultimately gave me a lot of experience that I think led me to be able to build what I am today. I think that would have to be my answer.
Clint Betts
That's cool. Hey David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on everything you're doing. Tell everybody about your YouTube channel so that we can promote it.
David Heacock
Yeah. I'm Davidfilterbuy everywhere. Davidfilterbuy, one word on YouTube is my handle, but on any social platform, Davidfilterbuy is where you'll find me.
Clint Betts
Perfect. David, thank you so much. Appreciate it, man.
David Heacock
Thank you for having me.
Edited for readability.