Lenny & Larry’s Protein Snacks: Barry Turner

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/cb6b616f8a0dffed


Lynhoffin was a retired baker from Entamont's bakery.
And the first thing he said he goes, Stop calling these recipes.
He goes, these are formulas. And I was like, okay, he goes, this is scientific now, boys. So we get Lynn to start helping us with these products that we're working on.
And we're also starting to do some

Pretty large.
Coffee chain here in Southern California.
And they're like, Well hey, I wonder what else these guys do. So they ask us about doing some scones.
And we told'em we made the best scones in the city. Which was not a total lie.
Which is not true, just completely make scones.
The guy we didn't even know what the hell a scone was.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.

Guy Raz and on the show today
How a former American gladiator found his true calling.
Watch it?
And then
Found it again.
by building a top selling protein cookie brand
Lenny and Larry's.
If you follow food trends, protein right now is an exploding category. Just to put it in perspective, in 2024, the global market size for protein fortified foods was around$7 billion. But by the end of this decade,
It's expected to reach close to fifty billion dollars. Just take a look at the aisles of Whole Foods or even Costco. You will start to notice more and more products that tout their protein content, whether it's
crackers or nut butter or even ice cream. But back in the days when protein was kind of out of fashion in the 90s, two former bodybuilders entered the space with a pretty revolutionary product.
It was a protein packed muffin.
This was in 1993, when Barry Turner and his friend Benny Graham were out of work and struggling to make it in Hollywood.
A few months earlier, Barry finally caught a lucky break when he was cast on the TV show American Gladiators.
But just a few episodes in
He got injured and
That was the end of his TV career as an American gladiator.

So one afternoon
Barry and Benny were talking about how boring their bodybuilding diets were.
Mainly chicken breasts and egg whites.
And they wondered.
Could you take protein powder and just mix it into things that are more interesting?
Like
Muffins or brownies.
A few days later, they started to experiment, literally dumping protein powder into muffin mixes.
And eventually they found a recipe that worked.
They decided to start a small business selling their muffins to local coffee shops around Los Angeles.
The muffins
Did pretty well, but the business never really took off. So
In two thousand one.
They sold Lenny and Larry's for a small amount of money.
and moved on.
But Barry Turner would come to regret that decision almost immediately.
And it would take him six years to buy most of the business back.
And that's when he started to turn Lenny and Larry's into a national brand of cookies, brownies, and other protein-packed treats.
Today, you'll find Lenny and Larry snacks at thousands of locations across the country. The brand was really a pioneer in protein-fortified food. And Barry's path to building that brand was a windy one.
He grew up in the nineteen sixties and seventies in Hickory, North Carolina.
He was a pretty talented baseball player, but an injury on the field left him deaf in one year. So when he started college in Georgia,
He set his sights.
Wrestling.
I was living in a little town called Cartersville, Georgia, and uh
My mom had seen a a guy had a wrestling ring in his backyard.
And she told me about it. So
I kept going to his house.
every day for two straight weeks, leaving notes, knocking on his door.
I kept saying.
I want you to train me. I want you to train me.
And he doesn't respond. So finally he calls me one time and he just said
He goes, Look, dude, I've I've been traveling, I've been on the road wrestling. You know, all I kept saying was, Just see me. I swear, just see me, and maybe you'd want to train me.
So I show up and he sees me, goes, You know, I think I could probably help you.
So we train for two weeks nonstop, seven days a week, we're just training.
And uh I learned I learned everything I can about
professional wrestling, you're like how to fall, how to you know
how to do a sunset flip, how to come off the you know, the top rope, flight elbows, everything.
And it was so much fun.
And so within two weeks, uh he gets me a match. And you became a character, or or were you were you Barry Turner and No, well when I showed up I was Barry Turner, but when the uh promoter saw me
He goes, this guy's too pretty, we gotta put a mask on him.
'Cause I can't look better than the actual guy who's gonna beat me.
And the coolest thing about that is man when they put a mask on you, you just become someone else.
Yeah.
So they put a mask on me, they call me Mr. Olympia.
And they give me a manager. I got a
Guy's name's Diamond Dave, he's wearing a red tuxedo with a red top hat up. It was it was full on like a a major production.
Hm.
I uh
I was getting picked up by a a a bigger group. They were gonna send me on the road like immediately. And this was like NWA, W C W type wrestling at the time. And that's that's where I was heading and that's where I really thought my career was gonna be. I was gonna become a professional wrestler and be very successful at it.
So what happened?
Uh my girlfriend at the time thought wrestling was beneath me.
Thought I could be I could do better.
So I chose a girlfriend and uh
Didn't work out.
did take her advice not to be a pro wrestler, right? And I I guess instead you
You decide to go back to school to to Georgia State University.
Um where you
Wound up meeting this guy, Benny Graham.
Who would of course factor into this story. Who so who who was Benny?
What Biddy was, I actually met him at a gym.
And he said, Hey, I heard you
you you're doing your you're doing a little bit of pro wrestling, would you want to consider it again,'cause I really want to get into it. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. So he and I start training together and it we just became instant friends. We were just kinda goofballs and having fun.
And he was a personal trainer too at the time.
And so he said, I I'm training this lady and she's has this movie script written for two guys that would be you and I.
And she'll move us to California.
She'll pay for everything.
Do you wanna go? And I go, Sure, let me finish my schooling so I can get my degree. He goes, We gotta go next month.
And I was like, hmm.
Let's go for it.
And so we packed up and we went to California.
Wait, it w let's just unclear.
Yeah, she had a m this lady, she was uh she had a little bit of money, so when people find people with money at that time, everybody's pitching a movie script around the country. You know that guy.
What was the premise of the movie?
It was similar to the movie Warrior.

Tom Hardy and um Edgerton Guy, uh
Back then it was about like
That was like UFC type fighting for that movie. And uh so it's kinda similar to that. It was like, you know, two guys where we're gonna be wrestling. And so the idea was that you and and Benny might mm star in it, like you might be the warriors. Yeah, we might be the guys, maybe the main characters and kicking some ass. Kicking some ass, and we're big we're big guys.
We're growing our hair really long. So we just we had a we had a look. So yeah, it was just it was just one of those things where you just go, you know what, it's it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to California. I never in my heart believed a movie would ever get made, but I'd ever start into this movie.
I just had an opportunity to go to California.
And you were
a semester away from graduating from getting your degree. Yeah. Oh,'cause the at that time I was like it was one of those things. I'm still kinda young, I'm like twenty nine or something at that time.
Yeah. I can I can finish later.
Alright, so you get to LA nineteen ninety one.
Yeah.
uh the hopes and dreams of being in this
Film.
W what happens?
Well, obviously the film never gets made, so
where literally Benny and I are just being paid by this person.
Two
Just work out.
We worked out twice a day, we ate, that's all we did was just get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Wow. Yeah, seriously.
Like can you give me a sense of how big um like w what's your height and and what was your weight at the time?
Well, six feet, the biggest I ever got weight wise was two fifty, two hundred and fifty pounds. Wow.
Yeah.
Insane. I mean I mean, can I ask you this is not a very polite question. No, it's okay. I'm I'm honest. Were you using steroids to get that big? At that to get yes. Yes. You have to. You can't. You can't eat food and protein powder without my natural body my natural body I could get to. I got to about two seventeen, I think was the biggest I got to naturally.
And still a lot. It's still big.
And most people will t will not tell you the truth when you ask questions like that. But I I just believe in being honest about everything. And by the way
Does it have long term consequences?
I think it does for people who use it for a long time.
I didn't like it.
It would
Mood swings, galore. I mean you could be
You could be happy one day and you could just be, you know, throwing stuff at a wall the next. It just uh yeah, it's not it's like if especially if you're a pretty um high strung person anyway, or just uh very aggressive. Volatile. Volatile.
Yeah.
So you but you that was your job is to get really jacked for this for this movie. How long how long did it did that last before it became clear that this movie was never gonna pan out?
I got paid for about a year.
Wow. Yeah.
It's a pretty good deal.
Not bad.

Okay, so once you kinda find out this is not gonna happen, um, you're already in LA.
Yeah.
This Jack dude and you have long hair. Tell me about your hair.
Yeah, I kept growing my hair to the point where it got down to my waist.
Who was that guy? Fabio?
Fabio. Fabio, yeah. Were you like Fabio? Yeah, he had he had cool hair. His hair was hair wasn't as wavy.
That's mine. He was like massive with long hair. Yeah. Uh so you had this really long hair and that was your look.
Yeah, I've said it.
And meantime, Benny was also doing this, right? He was and and you and you guys were sort of on this parallel path of of
You're in LA, so you might as well keep auditioning for parts, right?
That's exactly right. One thing I'll tell is I'm not an actor.
uh and I never I I I did I didn't want to become an actor. I just had I had a look. I was big with long hair. You could you could put me in in things. So
I could audition for parts. I read that you were on uh uh Doogie Hauser
I was a guy in a pool with a girl on my shoulders, man. Benny and I both were
And on Duke Hauser we did uh we did the the bodyguard with Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston. You were in the bodyguard, what'd you play?
We were uh
kinda uh nightclub kinda bouncers, uh there's a scene where they're coming in.
uh from the limousine come into the Mayan Theater downtown LA and we're kinda holding back the crowd'cause they're trying to get to them, whatever, and then in the scene when she's performing, we're we're right there at the stage. Keep it yeah.
So how many seconds do you get on screen during the bodyguard? Honestly it's maybe
Three, four seconds, five seconds back. Yeah.
Uh I was in another movie too called Death Becomes Her. And I still get residuals for that. Isn't that with Meryl Streep? Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis. Yeah, it's like uh Bruce Willis, Barry Turner, Meryl Streep. We were uh we were all featured actors.
But uh
If you had a look.
They could uh they could use you.
So it's funny and death becomes her.
Our titles were Beefy Guy.
Not kidding you.
So
I was beefy. I think I was beefy guy number eight.
And we got it was it was such we had so much fun'cause the other beefy guys in the movie we were all just uh
just big hams on the set and we didn't have to work that much. We it was a lot of hurry up and wait.
And we just we hung out. That's all we did. We hung out. We ate.
And we just messed around. It was uh it was a lot of fun. All right, so this is also the era of and and those of you under the age of forty will have a harder time remembering this, but
American gladiators.
This is a show on television.
Where you had a uh a bunch of like really strong

And then you have contestants who'd have to battle them out in different um scenarios, like trying to get a touchdown or trying to win a wrestling match or a jousting match. This is a huge, massive show. You find out about
An open casting call in nineteen ninety two.
Yep. And and and and when you found out about it, what did you think?
Well the first thing I thought was I'm gonna go become
An American gladiator.
Prior to that
I auditioned for a show called Knights and Warriors.
It was like a it was like a a knock off show. Yeah, knockoff show medieval setting. It it did last one it lasted one year.
And Benny and I both go in audition.
for for nice and warriors. Yeah.
And they wanted both of us.
And I said, No, thank you.
I said, I'm gonna go become an American gladiator.
Huh.
So what was it was it a one day audition and they were gonna make a decision at the end of the day, or was it a multi day thing? Well in it turned out to be a multi day and multi month process.
And we do all the events. We're we're doing powerball, we're doing jousting. We ran f uh two forty yard dashes in front of these executives. Okay. But it wasn't but Gladius wasn't like boxing and stuff. No, it was no it was more violent. It was like jousting with like padded jousts and wrestling. But guy, that that is violence.
Yeah. And it it's doesn't matter if it's padded, it's like when you're hitting it at that speed. Very violent show.
And so that day we went through all these different events and I could do'em all. And so they narrowed it down to ten people that day and I was one of the ten people. And then we all kinda come back and do some things and they narrow it down to three people.
I expected to be in that top ten, but now when you get to like your got a thirty three percent chance of being on this show, your heart's racing a little bit and you're saying like holy cow, dude, I'm I'm a Hickory North Carolina guy, just uh you know, just this guy from the south. And I'm just thinking like I'm about to be on the at that time, the hottest show on TV.
I'm looking at a photo of you at the time. You were selected. I think people are m gonna make that assumption now. And you became you become cyclone. That's your character. They they call they called me cyclone. That's they thought I was very f I was big and I was very fast, and that's just a name they came up with. You were like thirty-one. About thirty-one, thirty-two, yeah. Giant. You were just a
giant like your your bicep is like the size of an adult head. I have some big arms. I still have big arms guy. Um all right, so you get the job. Yeah you're on this massive show and you've got a serious career ahead of you.
That's exactly what I thought. I was like, this is it, this is the pinnacle of my sports career. I didn't make it baseball, football, whatever, but this this was my pro sports. Everything had led me to that moment, right? I felt like if anyone had earned it, it was me. Yeah. And uh but then
God has a way of saying Let me uh
Let me deal you another blow.
What
What happened?
On my I did eight shows.
And on the day that they call it they said, This is your coming out party cyclone. They were gonna they're gonna make me a
Known. I mean I was gonna become a felt I was gonna become a star.
And so they said you're in every event today. That means they're gonna they're putting you out there. But the best event was Powerball. People love Powerball. So that's basically the guys that contestants are sticking a ball into these little cylinders and there's three of us trying to tackle two of them.
And so
I die, if there's two guys, they come together, I die between them. I s I extend my arms and I wrap them up.
And if that and my bicep popped.
When I did that.
Yeah.
And my bicep was just gone. It had rolled up.
And my arm. Complete d complete complete detachment. Sorry to be gory, but it's what I'm it's it's what happened.
And I wanted to hide it from the
from the producers. It was like hanging meat off your air. Well it just guy, what it does is it rolls up like a like a shade. It just goes up into your up into your body, towards your towards your shoulder. Weird. Yeah. Just complete it it it attaches at your forearm.
And painful.
Up to that point, one of the the most painful thing I'd ever gone through. I was it was just like burnt like somebody taking a match and they're they're lighting your arm on fire for twenty four hours a day I couldn't understand. But I would not
I would not stop. I kept r I kept taping it and trying to shut off the pain. I didn't take pain pills or anything, but
I was doing it.
You understand.
This was my moment.
Yeah.
There's nothing that would ever cut me off except a liability issue with the actual producers of the show. They said, You gotta go. You gotta go to the hospital.
Well. Yeah. So they ended that into my career.
As a gladiator.
So you were done. That was it. You were done, yeah. I was done. Which must have been crushing'cause you worked so hard to get that job.
Yeah. If there's ever a
If there's ever a time in my life being depressed
That was it.
So here you are, thirty one.
Yeah.
You kind of
Taste this
This moment of like
Start'em.
Like just the beginning of it and and you know, you're probably thinking, Okay
Here we go, and then it's over.
Yeah.
So what did you
I mean obviously to rehabilitate your arm, that was priority. Yep.
Um and when you say you are feeling like down, like what does that
What did that mean? Feeling like a feeling like a failure.
I worked my
my whole life, I feel like from the time you know, being a kid, being an athlete, to picking up the weights, you know, going through becoming a bouncer in nightclubs and wrestling, just everything it was just like leading towards there was something, there was a pinnacle somewhere.
And Americators was my pinnacle.
Yeah. You could have cast me in a in a movie with Arnold Schortener, I wouldn't have taken that over being an American gladiator.
And I it just yeah, I I
Just depression is like uh not even uh it's funny I'm talking about. I've never really I've never really shared this uh with anyone. But uh
When you're a a proud person from the south, you don't talk about your feelings, uh you just you just swallow it.
And you go on with life and you pick yourself back up, but man, behind the scenes.
I just I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was like how how do I
How do I top that?
Yeah.

You know, being a success again.
Alright, so you're
You're going through this.
And
Trying to figure out the next step, I guess. Yeah.
And
Benny.
Mm. He he was on Knights and Warriors, that sort of
Low budget spin off of American Gladiators also had a
an injury like a s something that kept him from right. Yeah, Torus shoulder uh labrum or something. And you you can't make this up.
We're we're sitting we're literally two guys.
On these
Two opposite shows.
We both get injuries.
And it's just that you I'm like, You are you serious? How does this happen?
Yeah.
So you guys are
You and Benny are not sitting around trying to brainstorm ideas of hey, what should we do together? You're just
You're too
Jack guys trying to h re recover recover from your injuries and still eating
Probably insane amounts of protein and
Right, egg whites and chicken and rice and whatever you can just stuff in your body. That's it.
Um and I guess
One afternoon.
You're just kinda
Eating all this food and

Yeah, just having a conversation to um Coffee Roaster Cafe.
And Marina Del Rey.
It's our favorite little spot.
And eating chicken breast and egg whites.
And our thing was we always like to like before we'd work out, we'd always like
You'd have like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a cup of coffee, a muffin with a cup of coffee, something sweet with the coffee, just
That was just our thing.
So we had a muffin sitting on the table.
And we were going to split that muffin.
And have a cup of coffee.
It's just a regular muffin, just a regular muffin. Yeah, just kinda kind of a natural type muffin, nothing nothing in it.
And I'm eating chicken breast and egg whites and I
Point.
to the chicken breast and egg white and I said, Why can't we put that protein and that muffin?
And I looked up and it's it's like Benny it saw a ghost.
He just goes.
Oh my God, because he's we're doing this. And I was like, you damn right we are
And that's all we needed. That was it.
Okay.
This is the light bulb moment and and and you're like, why can't we put that into that?
And now this is nineteen ninety three. Mm-hmm.
There were some I mean, protein powders existed, way powder existed at the time. Yeah, those m metrics was big.
Metrics was kinda doing their thing. But it's funny though there was protein powder and there was protein bars, but there was nothing else.
Metric is Met R X, right? Met R X, correct. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um G N C existed. So you get protein powders, yep.
But
There was no one putting
protein in anything other than a other than a protein bar. You didn't have to. You just if you want protein, you ate tuna.
You ate chicken, you ate steak, you eat eggs.
Which is a
Pretty great way to get protein, let's be honest.
Take a stake on the go with you.
Just munch on it while you're driving. Hang on, I got a steak in my pocket. I need to eat it. Yeah, so
Uh but there, then and there
Yeah.
This is it.
And it's funny you said light bulb moment. I always look back on it and I go, This was a giant halo. It was like
This is not your moment where you can maybe go make a little bit of money.
This I think is something bigger than that. I liter I thought that from that very day.
This is like a Renaissance painting. This is like Fra Angelico's ascension. It is. The halo right there on the angel.
That's it. It was it was it was our it was our moment.
Two podunk guys from the south.
gonna go change the world.
When we come back in just a moment.
Barry and Benny build a business, but
Not a brand and
Barry makes a deal that he regrets.
Almost as soon
As he signs it.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.
So
It's 1993, and Barry and his friend Benny are sitting at a cafe in LA, where they've just come up with the idea to start a business.
selling protein muffins.
There was no turning back guy, it was just

gonna do this, we didn't know how we're gonna do this.
No consumer product good.
experience, there's no marketing experience, there's no business experience, nothing. And we just
We knew that day.
Yeah, yeah.
And so we didn't leave that table until we drew out what we thought the logo was gonna look like.

And we left there.
and went straight to a little natural food store, Rainbow Acres.
And
Picked up some.
Protein powder, we bought some muffin mix.
Went back to my kitchen and started baking these muffins within two hours.
We opened up a bank account that day with fourteen hundred dollars. I don't know why it was fourteen hundred, maybe that's all we had.
And we did a DBA doing business as. So this all happened the very first day.
And the business is gonna be called what?
Lenny and Larry's.
You decided it r right then and there, you're gonna call Lenny and Larry's Right then. Yep. We always called each other something different. It was again something goofy. We just
our names would change every day. It was just something stupid we did.
And so we wanted to create these characters.
And we said Benny and Barry sound like real people.
Linny and Larry sounds like two characters.
And
That was it.
I think people overthink things now that I look back on this. I think people overthink trying to get the perfect name or the you know, with the perfect design or whatever, rather than just
Doing it.
Alright, so it's gonna be Lenny and Larry's.
Yeah.
W
When you guys were talking about this in that initial
Did you say a snack food brand or did you say
Let's just make
baked goods or what did what do you remember? Yeah we we were we were thinking we're gonna put protein in.
Everything. Just protein powder, like whey powder. Yeah, whey powder is gonna go in. Cookies, muffins, brownies, we're we we start
crazy ideas of
Popcorns and granolas. We're just we're thinking of everything we can put this
Put protein in.
Wha what did you guys do? Just got like muffin mix and like from the grocery store? That's that's all we did. Apple cinnamon muffin mix and some whey protein.
Seems like a
Seems simple enough. Seems simple. You just you take out some of the flour and you replace it with protein, and it's gotta work, right?
Of course. Yeah. And uh it did not. They the muffins actually baked, but they were hard as a rock.
And and we weren't discouraged. We go
we can find somebody that can do this. That's what we kept saying.
We knew it was it wasn't out there, but we said we can we can do this. Yeah.
So
We find a bakery in Santa Monica called Montana Bakery, small little bakery, and said, Hey, here's what we're gonna do.
Can you guys help us? We said we just need help uh putting these recipes together. Did you know the the owners of the bakery or we didn't we just we met them and they were it was just two brothers. So we just struck up a friendship and they uh they started
Baking muffins for us.
So they agree to uh help you figure this out.
And what
You said to them, Look, we won what did you say to them?
Yeah.
Well, we just said we're trying to get a certain amount of protein in these muffins. We didn't want to really use um refined sugars. We wanted to use something healthier. We're now already thinking about how healthy these things can be.
Yeah. So we're we're thinking we wanna use like a fruit juice concentrate in place of sugar. So we're just yeah, we're thinking even further down the road than just making protein muffins.
And by the way, in those early days, w what were you using for protein in the muffins?
We started with whey and that was our that was our protein source initially.
And what happened, the muffins tasted great. They just wouldn't have a a crazy good shelf life and they started to bind up. They started to get a little harder over like just too soon. But we did we did actually we launched with uh whey protein muffins.
Okay, so this bakery did make they came up with a formulation. Yep.
And the plan was you guys bake these muffins for us and then we're gonna take'em off your hands and do what with them.
We're gonna go sell them. We had no idea who we were gonna sell them to, but we we knew we we knew we could sell these.
And our our first it's funny, our first account was the coffee shop we dreamed up the idea.
That kind of just happened right now, right? Yeah, yeah. She said uh Joni and uh Joni goes, uh she goes, Yeah I'll I'll give you a shot. And I can remember Guy
Our first invoice we were selling these muffins for like a dollar and twenty cent a piece, and our first invoice for our business was thirteen dollars and twenty cents. That was the first invoice we ever issued.
And so they would just sell'em like uh uh in their display case. Yeah, they put or either put'right by the register. We were big I don't know why we were always big about hey, if we'll
If you could put these by the register, that'd be great.
And how many
And and then
Presumably also going to some other coffee places or
Did you try gyms? We did. We did Rainbow Acres, Natural Food Store here locally, and we did Gold's Gem in Venice.
And we did uh a local uh health food store called Mrs. Gooch's before which was eventually bought by uh Whole Foods. Mm-hmm.
And so how long d was the shelf life for the muffins?
Probably like four days or something like that.
And it wasn't sold it wasn't packaged, was it packaged? Yeah, we it was packaged. We we had like a plastic wrapper and then we had a sticker. We had a label like a label sticker put on top of it.
So you would hand package them yourself. We would hand package them ourselves, correct. We had a machine. Muffins from the bakery. Muffins from the baker. We would sit there at night with our little crimping thing and we would crimp them.
the package into the crimping machine crimped, it would seal it and then you'd slap a sticker on it. Slap a sticker on it. Yep.
And how and and what was the flavour of the muffin?
We did apple cinnamon, we did blueberry, and we did a lemon raspberry. Those are our three flavors. And how much protein in each muffin? I think back then around fifteen grams.
Well.
Yeah.
This is
early nineties, this is like really before the protein revolution, which is we're gonna get to it'cause it's okay. I would argue just starting now.
And only now are you really seeing an explosion in protein, protein, protein everywhere. At the time
Who did you think was gonna buy these? I'm assuming you thought it was gonna be like bodybuilder types.
We did, but to be honest with you, we
We really were developing these we said for the
average consumer. We thought if we could make a
We coined a term later called better bad.
But but at that time we thought if we could get them to stop eating, you know, little Debbie's or chips ahoy
and and come to this because we've e we thought bodybuilders would enjoy it as like a little cheat treat.
But we were really targeting the average consumer.
So the idea that you were trying you were thinking was, Hey
Maybe we could we could
If we pitch this as a healthier for you muffin.
Mm-hmm.'Cause there's protein and but there still was sugar in it. There was still carbs in it. But people didn't care about it that much as the same time. But you thought, okay, if we can get people to think okay, protein.
Fiber. Was fiber something? It was. Yeah, we started it. We had we had added fiber already to that product, yeah.
And they tasted
And taste tasted fantastic. People talk about to this day, they go, That's still the best product you guys ever made was your uh was your protein muffin.
Well.
Yeah.
All right, but now this is a this is a small business. I mean this is like a tiny business. You're going I mean we're selling that
fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty dollars worth of muffins at at at this coffee shop and that coffee shop and try to collect and I mean that's a tough business. We were listen, we weren't even small. We would we'd have taken small. We were smaller than small. We we we just it was just a
crazy little idea that we were so determined.
to make it successful.
Mm.
So tell me a little bit about w what a typical day was like. Was the okay, you were not baking the muffins, you had this bakery make baking the muffins initially. Yep. So
I I had to bring in some money, so I was doing some personal training.
I gold gym and Venice I clients.
My wife was a personal trainer. I met her at Gold's Gym in Venice.
Okay, you were married. This is your this is my second wife and one I've been with now for over thirty years. Cheryl Sandy.
She was a personal trainer, I was a personal trainer, and we had just had one son at a time.
And uh we would just trade off. Like she'd go to the gym, I'd watch my son, she'd come home.
We'd swap up, I'd run to the gym and they go to the bakery and
you know, package muffins or or whatever had to be done.
And were you
Presumably driving the muffins to every little location that we sell.
Absolutely. We delivered we'd get up at three or four o'clock in the morning, go deliver'em around town just so I could be back to the gym by seven, maybe to train a client.
I mean it was it was crazy. It was just like it was like
I don't know, I never you're driving around a car at four o'clock in the morning in LA or even down sometimes down to Anaheim.
just to deliver a bunch of muffins.
And and it was just you and Benny. Just me and Benny.
So I would think in like
That first year
Maybe you do$10,000,$15,000.
Maybe.
But it's exciting.
It's it felt exciting.
Yes. To know that we're you're spending
X amount of dollars you're bringing in Y amount of dollars at the end of the day you're like, Hey, we've got
money left over every freaking week. This is incredible. We're making money.
Okay.
But the formulation still is a challenge, right? Because
Yeah. You're you're not getting a lot of shelf life. And I guess I guess this starts to change when you meet a guy
Who is a retired baker, a guy named Len Hoffman. Who's Len Hoffman? Len Hoffman was a retired baker from Entamants Bakery. And our business had started growing. We started so we we outgrew the little bakery of Montana and we ended up baking
Uh at a bakery in the valley, uh Green's Bakery, it was a little bit bigger.
And Green Connect. San Ferrando Valley. Correct.
But Lynn Hoffman was friends with the owner of that and we told Lyn what we were doing and the first thing he said, he goes, Stop calling these recipes.
Mm. He goes, these are formulas. And I was like, Okay, he goes, This is scientific now, boys. Sure, Okay
So we get Lynn to start helping us with these products that we're working on.
And we're also starting to do some
private label for a
pretty large coffee chain here in Southern California.

as their protein muffins. Yep. They uh it's called the coffee bean and tea leaf. Sure.
And how many coffee bean and tea leaves?
Were there?
At that time there were over a hundred.
Wow, and you were servicing all of them? All of them. Through their d through their distribution center.
So you got a contract with them.
Correct. We were selling our products to some of their independent stores and they're like, Well, hey, I wonder what else these guys do. So they asked us about doing some scones.
And we told'em we made the best guns in the city.
Which was not a total lie. Which was not true. He did not even make scones. Guy we didn't even know what the hell a scone was. Or a scone if you're in certain parts of the world. So somebody said, Hey, listen, for you two rednecks, that's a biscuit with fruit in it. And we said, Okay, we can we can make that and so that was one of the first products that Len Hoffman actually helped us with.
It was reduced fat. I don't know why at that time they were doing these reduced fat scones.
But that's what they wanted.
Not protein scones. Not protein, just reduced fat reduced fat. Okay.
So we saw an opportunity.
And we made these amazing scones and it quickly became their number one selling product.
Wow.
Yeah, because they
The scones were such a success at Coffee Bean, they what do you think they said? What else do you guys do?
Yes. And you said, What do you need?
'Cause now we saw opportunity there. We're like, okay, we can if we get this private label business going, we can use that money and help to grow our brand.
So they wanted some new cheesecakes.
Hm.
So we start doing that for them.
And then they
They ask us about if we could do it.
Things like butt cakes.
And we're and the answer was always yes, we can do this. We can do this. But again, not protein. These are not protein products. Th these aren't protein products for them.
But then when we started like showing them protein products like high protein cinnamon rolls.
They were they were like, Okay, this is interesting. So we started selling them some of our our newest protein inventions.
This is not Lenny and Larry's. This is this is their product. This was this was a chance to actually we're actually making money now.
And it got to the point where we ended up we were delivering
pallets, a product to their distribution center.
So much the business was booming so much on the private label side, we had to go buy a big truck.
to deliver it seven days a week we are dropping off.
Product.
Wow, so this was you guys were bringing in. Uh, like four hundred, five hundred thousand a year now starting to make some good money.
But you're not building your brand. Not building our brand. Still still still working it behind the scenes. And don't get me wrong, we did not give up on it. Our day was spent like
We just kept opening up more and more accounts locally. Uh started getting some uh independent seven eleven that could actually take product without the approval of the corporate office. Just the muffins though. Just the just the muffins, yeah. Yeah. And then we started developing more products. We started we came up with a a brownie, high protein brownie at the time, we came up with a high protein cookie.
And we still know we're on to something.
Then things uh
Things change one afternoon.
So
Which was
Uh Benny was delivering product uh to Coffee Bean.
And I got a call
uh he got rushed to the hospital.
He had a deviated septum, so he had a surgery done and they had lance an artery, didn't know it at the time. So he was bent over, was picking up something, and blood just starts gushing.
Oh sh
So
He gets rushed to hospital, almost dies.
He uh realizes he wants to
leave California and go back to Georgia and be around his family.
So we tried to
manages we'll call it as an east coast, west coast business, but nine nine percent of our business was on the West Coast.
Let me just pause for a second,'cause I know I know that uh I guess this is around two thousand when he moves.
But
I think
Y you know, most of your business, probably ninety five percent of your business was coffee, bean and tea leaf, right? Yeah.
Yeah.
Benny.
has this kind of life changing experience. He decides he wants to go to Georgia and you w he're gonna run the business.
By coastal, but
That's hard, especially in the sort of the pre internet pre Zoom era.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um you know the the
You know.
Billing and collection and all that stuff.
And he probably wasn't able to do that much that way.
No, at that time we were b it wasn't big enough to do east coast, west coast. So basically doing nine ninety nine percent of the work for
Half the money.
Yeah.
And it does take anyone long to figure that out. That's not that's not a good model.
And so you want to change. So what do you do? You say
Either
I buy you out.
Or we sell the business.
So we put the business up for sale.
In two thousand one. Two thousand and one.
And
Who was the buyer?
Don Crouch and Jim Felder. They were two friends. Who were they? They were two friends. They were just two local guys uh lived in the valley.
And they saw potential in this business as a white label.
As a white label yeah. Yeah, they they like they like the brand, but they really they thought the white label business would could they could
Turn it into something.
Yeah.
And what roughly what is what do they pay for it?
They paid uh
Four hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
So not not ideal. Not not yeah, not not bad. At least at least we created so we made money along the way. We created something that had value.
And uh it was kinda cool to uh
could sell a business for, you know, almost a half a million dollars that you created from just an idea.
Yeah.
And they got those accounts though. They were good they knew. They got everything.
Yeah, they get everything.
How'd you feel about about that? Was it w did it feel like a relief, you know, Benny's gone and
No, it's just a again re regret um that I should have just bought him out.
And then Don and I were sent in the parking lot.
Talking after we had

And Don said, You and I should have just partnered on this. I said, I a hundred percent agree.
And uh so
Don and I remained friends, uh, as he as he owned the business. They actually paid me to really kind of manage
the coffee bean account because they knew how valuable it was and I had a great relationship with coffee bean.
Do you remember feeling similarly to how you felt when you were out of American Gladiator?
When you injured yourself.
Yeah, like yeah, yeah, like it like something ended that you just didn't want it want it to end.
I still had the passion for my brand.
And it was like um

Giving it away.
and never watching it, never giving it a chance to grow up.
It was six and a half years.
Six and half years.
Yeah.
Somebody asked me one time, what did you
What did that six and a half years cost you? I said it just cost me time.
Because
It came down to
being very scattered.
and not having what I call a hero product.
We had all these products that we could make.
But none of them were w the one where you just went to, yeah, this is this is our calling card. This is what we're gonna be known for.
You never focused on like this is the thing that only we make and only we can make it great. Yeah, we we made too much stuff to bring focus on one that could be a winner. Now we still had our brand, but like I said, it was the majority of our business was coffee beaten.
And nobody knew your
Nobody knew the brand. No. Locally you did. Like we would you would have.
Magic Johnson was a big fan of our brand back in the day when he was still playing with the Lakers and he would see our product, you know, and he'd always buy the gold's gym and somebody'd say, Hey Magic, that's that's Lenny Larry and he'd always he'd stop and say, Oh man, I really love your product. So we had those types of things where we had we had people that knew us in LA, but nowhere else.
Yeah.
So when that ends.
You're forty.
Yeah, two thousand and one. Yeah.
And ki one kid or two.
Yeah, two from our previous marriage, uh two daughters and then my two sons. So I had four kids at that time. Right.
So there's
A lot on your plate, I mean that's no joke. Yeah. True.
So all right, so you you
You are out of Lenny and Larry's. Yeah. And then I guess over the the next few years you you do
bunch of different things. Like you you go to real estate, I think you even made some money, right? I mean you got out before the bust.
Yeah, it did did well, actually.
Yeah.
Um
And then and and and then I read that like you you
Well that's the interesting story there.
So one of my good friends, Michael Venny
He was working with these
guys in the software business and they wanted to meet me.
I meet these guys and they've got this

And uh it's kinda computer monitoring software.
And so
They asked me one day if I would like to join them and I was like it well in what capacity, what do I know about software, right?
And they said, We don't know. We said, We just think that you could
Maybe you'll run our company one day.
And I was like, Okay, so I hung out with these guys. I call it hanging out with them. They were paying me to hang out with them and it's just you know
I'm learning I'm learning about the software business, but I'm also learning how to market online.
Direct consumer.
And so after a year of being there, they said we'd like to make you
Yeah, president of our company lets you run our company.
And so I'm running the software.
Company called
Awareness technologies.
And we're selling computer monitoring software. Now, this is at the height of like the MBC showed Catch a Predator. So we're working with, you know, law enforcement agencies, schools.
and you know, parents, et cetera. Because the software
Captured.
Everything, every keystroke, every email, every website visited.
And we were doing great. I mean, it was this thing was
Catching fire.
But I was looking at this, I'm just like, Well if I could do this with
Software.
Imagine what I could do with if I have my old company back.
Okay.
I can sell direct consumer
Snacks.
And it was just, you know, kinda putting it out there in the universe. And that's when Don Krouch reached out to me and said
I need help.
I'm about to shut this thing down.
He calls you, says, I'm gonna shut this thing down that I bought from the head'cause he has he said I don't I don't know what I can do.
with this. I don't know. I don't know where I can go with this anyway. Was he still supplying coffee bean? Still supplying coffee bean and and he had a little bit of other like private label stuff. He may have he was doing locally and um
He said, I'm about to shut this thing down.
Would you ever consider coming back?

So we did like some quick negotiations and I said
Yeah, I'd just throw caution at the way in here. I'm in.
Let's uh He said we wanna come back. You wanna come back, be a fifty fifty partner with me.
Fifty fifty partner. Yep.
And did you have to buy buy some of it back? Yeah, it was very it was very cheap. Low. It was a low back. So you were able to
Buy fifty percent of the company back.
Mm-hmm. And basically be the partner again.
Yep.
What was ex I mean, I'm just it's gonna sound like a ca sort of a dumb question, but teeing you up for it. But I'm curious in your mind, what was exciting about that prospect? I mean you would he left six years earlier. You've not been involved for six years. Yeah.
What was exciting about coming back to this thing?
Now I got to do what I wanted to do from the very beginning, which was build this brand.
Money didn't excite me.
Building my brand excited me.
I wasn't scared.
At all.
I
I got my baby back.
Let me come back in just a moment.
Barry has the second worst day of his life.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.
So it's 2007, and Barry's bought back half of Lenny and Larry's from its current owner, Don Crouch.
I wasn't scared.
At all.
I
Love going back into the unknown, but I was so confident.
that I could turn this into
what I originally thought Lenin Larry could be, which was a brand.
And
Uh funny story, I walked in the office the first day we had a small little office on its uh in Encino on a Ventura Boulevard.
And
Jokingly to m to Don, I just said, Okay, I said
Sit down, shut up, and watch what I'm about to do.
And we had a big laugh about that, right? But I coming from my experience working in the software company and working with these guys who were
Very brilliant guys, by the way, in terms of marketing.
I felt like I could launch the first direct consumer
snack food company that was uh, you know
kind of a protein, fiber, all natural.
I felt I feel like that's what I was gonna do.
Yeah.
And so the first product I want to launch.
was a high protein brownie because everyone was doing protein bars at the time and no one had done a brownie.
Let's talk about building the brand. First of all
You didn't have a you needed a logo.
Yeah. Packaging, you needed to just you needed to get it into shops. I mean you had the muffins and some
So let's talk about first first of all the logo. Okay.
'Ca i I don't know if everybody knows what this looks like, but today
It looks like two
crazy dudes with like clown hair on this that's the logo. Yeah, that's the logo. Lenny and Larry's.
Yeah. And our ri our original logo was
mine and Benny's actual f faces or hair that was original. It was like a real photo. But when I came back, the first thing I said I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a caricature.
It can't it can't be a photo anymore. So we so so we create a character of the logo. It's basically a giant afro with two heads what it became stuck in it. Two heads and now we say one head of hair.
And one head of hair. Yeah.
And uh
You're gonna come out with your own product.
Lenny and Larry's in shops and it's going to be a
Brownie.
And so we
Find I find someone to manufacture the brownie.
We uh
Designed the film.
Everything we
Ordered.
Seventy-two thousand brownies, thirty six thousand of two flavors, had those shipped to a warehouse that we were that we rented.
And we're sitting there with seventy two thousand brownies and said, now we have to go sell these.
You do not have
Any not a single.
Not a single commitment.
And how long would these brownies last they would last yeah, fifteen months easily. Yeah, these have a really good shelf life, yeah. So how did you sell them?
First thing we walked into the uh Whole Foods office in um Sherman Oaks.
Did you have a connection there? Uh I well, we did. I didn't know who was working there. We just showed up at the office one day and see one of the uh one of my former buyers.
She walks in and she goes, I remember you. And I said, I remember you. And she said, What do you have?
And I showed her, she goes, I love this, let's put it in.
Why is it?
How by the way, how much protein in each brownie? Twenty. Twenty grams.
Twenty grams.
And to be clear.
You did not sugar was not an issue. You weren't worried about sugar and carbs, right?
Nope.
I felt like again I'm still c I still catering to the to the masses.
and not the uh bodybuilder fitness people. Yeah. I always said if I could be in two retailers at a time, it would be seven eleven at Walmart. That's the only groups I want to sell to.
And not to minimize the what this product was and how innovative it was, but basically it was a sweet sugary brownie but with a lot of protein. Correct. It was basically a protein bar, but uh tastes like a brownie in the shape of a like a kind of a square, so it had to be different there, too. Alright, but
Two thousand eight, I mean, this is super innovative. Nobody's making a protein brownie. Nobody's making a protein brownie. Uh so you get into a few whole foods in the LA area.
Yeah, actually uh yeah, the LA area and then it just snowballed from there. GNC accepted it, Bodyma Shop accepted it, then we think okay, now we're on to something. And all the while though we had it we had a little product. I don't wanna jump
uh ahead, but there was a little product. It was a cookie. It had a had a label on it and it had a little like a a sheet in the back that you could print our nutritionals on. And we sold that locally to 7 Elevens and a lot of
uh office buildings stuff like that. But it's a protein cookie. Correct, but but it did it didn't have a didn't have a great shelf life. And if it had a clear package you could see the pri the package and light, oxygen can destroy it, but it you know had a couple weeks shelf life.
And we remember a call we had with Vitamin Shop.
And vitamins shop said.
If you could get a shelf life on your cookie.
We would take that also.
Now where?
Okay.
And that was because of the packaging? Yeah,'cause of the packaging. Yeah,'cause of the packaging.
And so
I had the light bulb moment again, it's like I gotta I gotta design a film.
for that cookie.
And uh we did.
Then uh I will say the rest is history, but the uh the cookie just became
just became an absolute monster.
I wanted like again, I was trading I wasn't creating a a low sugar
You have low carb.
Product. Yeah.
A freaky cookie.
Everything four hundred calories, it became popular with college kids.
Construction workers.
Teachers.
People that could say for a buck ninety nine I get this giant cookie, it's very filling. I can grab I'll grab my red bowl and I'll grab your Lany Larry's cookie.
I mean one cookie I'm looking at today, I think it's probably similar ten grams of fiber.
Yeah.
sixteen grams of protein, but you know, twenty six grams of sugar. Yeah. But but I guess
You just were like maybe people can choose this, it's marginally better than a
An Oreo or a that was a Twinky. That was that was it. That was that was everything. I want to create a better bad. I want people to make a better choice.
And nobody's gonna go from eating
A
you know, a a little Debbie to
Eating some sort of
protein bar. It just there's there's not there has to be something has to be a stop in the middle. Yeah. What did the cookie retail for?
We told from anywhere from a like a dollar ninety nine to two forty nine, that range.
And how much did it cost to make?
Less than fifty cents.
Around for about forty cents.
That's like a L V M H bag. Yeah. It's like making a Gucci bag. It cost them like a hundred and sixty bucks. They sell for like three thousand. Yeah, we weren't we weren't shy about making uh making a profit.
What we liked about it is like we were we never had to we never had to raise money, we never had investors, never had debt.
So okay, so by twenty fourtine.
Are you still primarily in California?
Only? No, we're uh we're everywhere at that time. We're really we're really starting to take off. Twenty fourteen, we're about
Doing about eleven million in revenue?
So you hit eleven million dollars in sales by twenty fourteen. Yeah.
Purely
or mainly on the strength of the cookies, not the muscle brownies. No, the muscle brownie was still there.
But the uh the cookie is the one that just it just literally caught fire.
Why why do you think that is? I mean I I I think the answer is just'cause cookies are much bigger.
more popular snack than brownies.
It's not something you would eat every day. You'd eat a you'd eat a cookie every day.
Even though like nutritionally they're pretty similar. Yes, exactly. But it's funny, guy, when we talk about like we talk about sugar and carbs and all the all this nutrition and stuff
You and I are in
Still in the minority of that.
Yes.
Rest of the country.
is still trying to make a better choice.
But they're not gonna make an extreme choice.
So people still want to have their
Nope.
Yeah, K can eat it too. They'll sacrifice
something in order to eat a something that's just a little bit
Less bad.
that had some nutrition benefits to them.
I completely agree with that. I think that's exactly right. I think that just as a tiny number of people care about sugar and carbs. I think most people, you're right. If they see protein, fiber, they're good. They're not worried about the carbs or the other sugar. Um
Okay, so you're just growing like hockey stick. Hockey sticking. So all right.
I guess around twenty fifteen.
You are at
A trade show. Yep.
And you guys are
Ha ha ticket there, right?
Hot. Yep.
We just finished, I think it's 2014 at 11 million, and we're gonna have we're gonna grow probably to you know 18 million or something the next year, whatever 2015. But
I got introduced to
Uh a gentleman named Nick Giannuzzi.
And Nick is uh

CPG brand that's been sold, he's always represented them.
Next.
Pull me aside.
And just said, I love your brand.
He goes jokingly, he just said, Stop Fing around and start doubling.
your revenue.
and you're gonna get noticed. And I was like, okay, it inspired me to want to really turbocharge my cells.
So
We went from eleven to twenty seven million in one year.
by opening up accounts and actually managing, servicing the accounts we already had.
How many employees do you have?
Uh twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, we may have had seven.
God with twenty seven million coming in? Yeah. That's an efficient business. Wait, and and and that's the only way we knew how to t knew how to do it. I never ble and I I never believed in hiring when you didn't have to hire. I believe in paying paying your people more money that are there.
Yeah. And we had a great um we had a great small little ragtag team.
And
From there, twenty seven million turned into ninety four million in revenue the next year.
But twenty sixteen.
And what percentage of of that do you think was the cookies?
Uh pr probably probably ninety percent.
Were you worried at all that, you know, this was not gonna last, that you would have competitors coming in? I mean, that in other words, did you think like we better really make a bunch of snacks because otherwise we're just gonna get
General Mills or whoever Nabisco is gonna come in and do this. I'll I'll be a hundred percent honest with you. I have never in my life worried about a competitor, a so called competitor. And that's not that's not being cocky. It's just like if I'm worried about what someone else is doing.
then I'm not worried about what I'm doing. So I didn't care what you were doing. I was building a brand. But uh
Yeah, I I fought a bunch of uh other things along along that journey.
They could have uh
Destroyed my business.
Like what?
Well, one was a uh an issue with one of our manufacturers.
got a call from one of our retailers in Florida said, Hey, we're starting to see these little
Who can do them.
Bugs
And a cookie, no kidding. Like a like a like a little sm and and they're they're called meal moths.
So they get in flour, like flower's been sitting for a long time, whatever. Oh yes, I've seen that. I've had that.
Okay. So
So have that happen with a uh like a
A retailer.
For and now now social media's out there and the first thing people do is they want to start posting. You're just oh yeah, yeah. And uh
I had to take that one on myself. I literally
post I was doing our own social media at the time and I actually posted my own phone number and just said anyone who gets I said I'll
trust me, I said I'm I'm gonna handle this. I'm gonna you know, I apologize to everyone, whatever. And it was real quick, we were able to isolate it real quick because it was one flavor and we knew the actual group that actually made it. So we were able to isolate and pull all that product.
But anything to damage your reputation, it just makes you you
You don't sleep at night.
Yeah, for sure.
Um I mean but but still, I mean even with all that, like a as as you mentioned, I think by twenty sixteen, I mean you guys are doing like
Almost a hundred million dollars in revenue. Um and then I think that same year
you decide you're gonna find you're gonna sell it. You're gonna sell the brand again. Yeah, well it's only because people start that's when people start coming for you.
And you're just you're feeling call after call after call. A lot of um
The general not general mills, but general mills type companies will say big companies, yeah. Big companies are coming for you and they're asking about you, they're they want to buy your company.
And we had twenty eight interested parties right out of the gate.
And then I'm like, shit.
Pardon my French, but the uh
We had just moved in this beautiful warehouse office. I was just just just starting to enjoy this. I didn't really want to sell.
And then you're starting to
Ford like some
Big offers for your business.
And you accept an offer from a group called Lion Capital.
Correct. First of all, I'm curious, was there an option to go to get acquired by a big food brand?
There were a couple at the table.
And have made offers.
And uh I'm just being honest with you, if I was gonna sell it, I was gonna sell it for to the highest bid. Highest bidder. Highest bidder. That's it.
Alright, so they had they were the highest bidder, and they acquired you
for I think it was a mixture of cash and equity, right?
Yeah, they so they bought end up buying seventy five percent of the business.
And uh we at the time now you understand this is seven years ago.
So if you're equating it to the value of today. So at the time we were valued at two hundred and fifty million dollars.
Not bad.
And uh so we sell seventy five percent of the business.
And it was just'cause how how our business was structured, we were an S Corp, it had some had some value to them. And so Nick Giannuzi, who I mentioned earlier, uh he represented us, he was our attorney, and he told us point blank, he said
Don't expect get the second bite of the apple.
He means they were gonna just hold on to it forever. Exactly what they've done.
Alright, so this begins a period of which you are still in today.
And and they're not on this in the in this interview, so I wanna be careful and mindful and respectful of them. So I'm gonna play the part of defending them a little bit here. But but you are still in a situation where you own uh still a chunk of the business.
Correct. Um and technically you're on the board, right? I'm on the board. Yeah. Okay. But when you left or when when they bought you out, um they replaced you with a new CEO, right? Correct.
I r you said
that the first time you sold it, two thousand one was the worst day of your life. Terrible. When you sold it for the second time, you say it was the second worst day of my life. Yep, I still live by that.
I miss my people more than more than anything.
These were my team members. These are people that ha helped me grow this business.
So uh
Yeah, I I to this day I wish I never would have sold my company.
Okay, so while you're the company okay, they take it over, that they're they're you're out as the CEO, but you're still an advisor ostensibly. Yep.
But
Uh and look, I see Lenny and Larry's everywhere. Every time I go to Whole Foods, I see it everywhere. It's a
That logo just pops. I see those that
That Afro so I'm under the impression that things are s are swimming, are are great, going great.
You have a different uh uh view here. You are not happy.
with how it how it shook out. You're not happy with the current owners of the brand.
Not at all. Uh I have no problem saying that. We're just we're not each other's cup of tea. And um
It's just bad decision after bad decision, bad higher after bad hire.
They hired um this is no lie, within six months of selling the company to them, we went from seventeen employees to fifty nine employees.
Mm. The business sent trouble.
They only grow the business about six to eight percent a year, if that.
They destroyed profitability. I felt like I handed them a a Ferrari and they turned it into a Ford Taurus.
But what would the adv I mean, listen, I'm looking at their portfolio. This is clearly a sophisticated group. I mean they own kettle chips, that's just in food, but they own beverage and hospitality and jewelry and licensing, personal care. I mean they're clearly
they've made a bunch of cash in different um in different places. Like there's no question in my own. I think you're I think you're being nice by saying sophisticated. Okay. Uh there's they would never have had me stayed in that chair because they they used a term one time. It always rubbed me the wrong way.
After they bought the company, they said, we need to professionalize the management in this company.
And that means we weren't professional enough in their advice. Then you fast forward about f you know, four or five years later.
They go, we gotta go back to being an entrepreneurial brand.
Well that's what we were. That's what we always were was an entrepreneurial brand.
And they never really embraced it because they had to come in, they had to show.
We know what we're doing. And and they just don't.
Okay, now here's the thing.
Because again,
You know, we don't do this not a documentary show. We only have you on here, so
I've gotta be respectful of line capital and I'm I I there's you know, there's emotional.
It's like a house, it's like a business. It's like anything that somebody creates. We're I'm emotionally attached to how I built this. Yeah. Right? The the reality is that
You
Can
Just let it go if you want to.
And just say, You know what, I'm just gonna let it go and I
Whatever. It is what it is. Oh I and I and I have
I don't know. That's healthy. That's healthy. Oh yeah.
Ever.
Uh I do a bo do a board call every now and then, whatever, but I don't I don't even
I don't comment on the call. I go on the screen. I'm just on mute and I'm listening.
But um
Yeah, then there's always two sides to every story.
And uh I I hundred percent agree with that.
Here's the thing, right, and this is like a fear that I think a lot of people have
Okay.
Especially as they get into their fifties, which is
You've had some success in your professional life.
whether it's a business or you're working uh for a company or whatever
And for a variety of reasons that ends.
And uh you can live for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
Like right, you can be you can live off what you made and live a good life.
But you lose that purpose.
That sense of purpose, which is really scary. And no one you're never gonna understand it unless you've lived it.
Yeah.
But uh
I uh I did. I did.
Care about my brand a lot.
When you look back on this whole journey and you think about where you got to.'Cause you did really did really well. You did you know?
Here I am. How much of where you got to do due tribute to the the work you put in the grind and how much you think has to do with getting lucky.
I think a hundred percent to the work and the grind. I don't
I know a lot of people out there
Have gotten lucky. Yeah.
I don't use words like hope, luck, wish, and try.
Yeah. I I d I just don't like the the word luck. I uh my
My thing was always said.
Luck wins you the lottery.
I created my own lottery.
That's Barry Turner.
Co founder
Of Lenny and Larry's.
By the way, I I think there's something you're not telling me that you I think you're concealing from me here, which is I'm looking at the cast of that
Uh uh.
Fabio was in that movie.
You know what? You are hot you are right. You did not tell me that forgot about Fabio was your co star. You and Fabio were in a movie together. Yeah.
Fabio.
I wonder what he's doing these days.
He seems like a nice guy. I think he's done some like self parody stuff. Yeah, that's my that's my buddy.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And please sign up for my newsletter at guyRaz.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by JC Howard with music composed by Rumpin Erablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and James Keeley.
Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Carla Esteves, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Chris Massini, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella.
And Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening.
how I built this.