Alicia McKenzie(00:00.11)

If you have this new business idea, but you're like, somebody's already doing it, the market will accept five of the same thing. Just go look at your makeup drawer. You have like 50 lipsticks and they're all one shade off of a different red, but you buy them all.

If you're in a market and you're the only one there, then there isn't a market.

Welcome to Married to the Startup. I'm Alicia McKenzie, a wellness entrepreneur and digital creator. Alongside me is my amazing husband, George, the CEO who's always ready for a new challenge. We've been navigating marriage and running startups for over a decade, and we're here to share the real, unfiltered journey with you. Join us for insights and candid conversations about integrating love, family, and entrepreneurship. This is Married to the Startup, where every day is a new adventure.

George McKenzie (00:53.102)

Feels like I never left.

George McKenzie (00:57.224)

I'm talking to my own soundtrack in my head.

All right then. Okay. We are going to start with... Ooh, where do we want to go? Okay, you know what? Let's just jump right into it. Because I had to turn down an interview yesterday and this interview was secured on Friday of last week. And I want to say maybe I got the info at like 4 p.m. No, not a job interview, a publicity interview. Publicity.

journey.

George McKenzie (01:23.928)

So not a job interview.

Alicia McKenzie(01:29.832)

And, no, it was probably before four p.m., but I was on my way to a tennis retreat. So I did not have the time nor desire to fully vet who I was going to be interviewed with. I did not do that until Monday morning. Day of. Day of. Upon vetting said person, I went to their social media and one of the first posts on their page was, do we owe respect?

to the hateful dead. And it had a photo of President Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and then a bunch of other writing laid over top of it. And that right there, I saw that, I screenshot it, I sent it to my team and I'm like, I am not doing this interview. And it has nothing to do with my political beliefs. It has nothing to do with how I felt about Charlie Kirk or anything. It had everything to do with the fact that

we're questioning whether or not a person deserves respect.

And I guess he was trying to make a a pun on Grateful Dead, is that right?

I don't even know. I don't care. But what really, really bothers me is that we have gotten to a place where we can no longer disagree without fear of retaliation.

George McKenzie (02:51.047)

Or you can't disagree with someone's beliefs without making it a tax on their person.

But it's only online, and I think that's what really, really bothers me, right? I am friends with people of all different political and religious and socioeconomic beliefs, and we can be friends and not agree. And that's not to say that if you are a hardcore... Whatever, that I'm gonna completely, like...

glaze over it. no, we're going to have hard, uncomfortable conversations. And if I make you uncomfortable, that's not my fault. That's yours.

Yeah. Well, I just think it's the devolution of society and social media has played a huge part in that and the online, know, fear of retaliation. think Elon Musk went to bat saying, hey, you know, that X slash Twitter or whatever is the town hall square where you can say whatever you want. It's the freedom of speech. Well, that's kind of bullshit because his analogy is wrong because yes, it's a freedom of speech, but it's not a freedom of no repercussions.

Right? So when you, when you say something, you know, you can expect retort, but when you're online, you can say whatever you want, you can be as hateful as you want. And there's no fear of what's going to come from that. You know, in the past where his analogy kind of falls apart is if you were in the town hall and you were a crazy person or you were screaming obscenities about somebody or someone's wife or someone's husband, then, you know, your repercussion could be you got slapped in the face or punched in the face or

Alicia McKenzie(04:27.402)

or shit thrown at you.

Yeah, or you're going to be have to deal with that person face to face and all that is gone. So now it's, you know, it's taking freedom of speech kind of out of context that now I have freedom of speech without any sort of repercussions or retaliation because I can just put it out into the ether over the internet and I can create a fake persona, fake profiles, and no one really knows it's me and I can say whatever I want because no one's ever going to touch me. Yeah. There's no fear of what's going to happen after I say that.

In a prime example of this, I was on TikTok the other day and I hate that I just said that, but I was on TikTok and it's this kid, he was like maybe in his 20s and he was in the bathroom of his job and he posted this super obnoxious like this little bitch ass boss like fuck this dude, da da da da da da da. And naturally it went viral and his HR saw it. Of course. And he got fired.

Tick tock tock.

George McKenzie (05:24.966)

Thanks, what should happen?

Right? So, yes, it's social media and you have freedom to say whatever you want, but there are consequences that do not include taking somebody's life. I don't know why we have to say this.

Yes. And there's consequences to, it should be consequences to every action, right? Good or bad. And, you know, kind of social media has taken some of the consequence away when you have anonymity.

But that's not where I wanted to go with this whole story. I wanted to go to the fact that it's okay to decline opportunities because they don't align with your personal belief.

Yes, I think that's a great point of this conversation as well as, know, in a professional career, you got to be careful as to what you post online because that will definitely live forever until you delete it. then, you know, Google always has history or there will be history of it. Someone will have screenshot it or it'll be in somebody's archives. Yeah. And because your next job, your next whatever, that stuff is going to follow you forever.

Alicia McKenzie(06:22.496)

Raise his hand, I screenshot it.

George McKenzie (06:31.874)

So if you go to interview for your next job and you're politicizing or making comments online that are inflammatory, maybe you're just click baiting and trying to get views, but that's going to follow you forever.

And maybe it's like it's the mom in me. I don't want my children to fall down the rabbit hole of going along with things because the opportunity is so good or they have so much to gain from it. Right? Like your morals and your ethics are not worth any opportunity.

think it's a lost trait in our society is integrity and living with integrity. That, you know, if that's not something you believe in, don't go along to get along. Just don't do it. And don't participate or contribute to things you don't align with. And that's back to, you know, understanding who you are as a person. Have your core values set and your direction set and you live by it versus chasing the almighty dollar or fear of, you know, this opportunity may pass and then I will have lost.

fame, exposure, money, whatever.

But is that really worth it? It's not. It's not. the end of my day, it is not worth it. Maybe at the end of your day it is, but we're different people and we can have different beliefs.

George McKenzie (07:48.014)

And it's all about, you know, I live, you know, I try to have core values that I live by and, you know, money is not a value, right? It's a placeholder value sometimes, but it's not something that I like money. Yeah, we all like, I like what money can give me, the experiences it can give me. But most of the things you buy are short-term happiness. It's just a dopamine hit when you buy it and then it goes away.

I don't know, every time I put on those boots, these boots are so sexy. They are. Okay, moving on.

Of course.

Yeah, and they're made for walking.

George McKenzie (08:21.868)

That's a hard one to keep your kids aligned to. I know. Because as teenagers, it's really hard to stay on your ground as to what you believe in and have integrity.

but also as a female, it's really hard.

I know we had this conversation at length for a couple weeks and it's you how do we teach our daughters that you know just accepting comments because I've always had I've always you men have always hit on me or men have always said this to me and it's just you know I just ignore it like no you shouldn't we shouldn't ignore it we should address it and move on.

My first job, and I remember it, I think I was 16 years old, I worked at a foot walker in the mall and I was sexually harassed by one of my bosses. He would take one of the sticks that you used to put up, jerseys or whatever, and he would constantly poke me with it and stick it between my legs.

It got to a point one day where I was like, I'm fucking done with this. And I turned him in, they escorted him off, they put me at a different store. Like it was a whole thing. And it took me like two weeks to get to the point where I'm like, okay, this is not fucking okay.

George McKenzie (09:32.942)

Yeah, and how do we move that left for our children that, you know, happens once, address it right then, happens again, you're done.

Yeah, yeah, but I was young and

No, it's really hard. mean, it's hard, especially when someone's in a position of power above you or older than you. You're like, oh, you know, maybe this is accepted. And it's how do we teach our kids that that's not accepted? On both the boys too, like, you know, catcalling. I don't know if that's ever worked in the history of man. So I don't know why they do it, but teaching them how to talk to a woman and yeah. And how do you flirt with a little bit of, you know, dignity versus, you know.

Definitely. On both sides too.

Alicia McKenzie(10:05.774)

Out of respect.

George McKenzie (10:12.27)

just being over the top. I think it's, I don't know. I would say it's cultural, but I don't know. Like I've never personally done any of that in my life, but I've seen plenty of times that happen. So I don't know. It's weird.

Indeed, dating is hard. I've talked to a few people about dating.

It's not just dating, it's more about raising your kids. How do you create the next generation to be better? Especially now that you combine those two things. it's like, crass comments and then now anonymity. So now you probably amplify that online. Like I'm sure you see it a lot. I don't have a social media presence, so I don't. And I don't think men kind of suffer from the same predatory kind of behavior. But I'm sure when you post things online, you get messages all the time about inappropriate messages. Because somehow guys think...

That's that cat call on 11.

Well, that's the reason I stopped posting our children online, because of inappropriate comments about my kids. It goes multiple ways. A, there's pedophiles. B, there's creepy people. And C, there's anonymity.

George McKenzie (11:12.322)

Yeah. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

I think it's just a cesspool. It is. There's some nice pockets of social media. I will say I've met some amazing people, but for the most part, it's just too much and it's the downfall of society. All right, moving on to something that we can control.

Agreed.

George McKenzie (11:32.12)

which is what can I control?

Look at your biceps. Boom. Yum. You're looking awfully juicy over there, Mr. McKenzie. All right. So we actually, when did we start our peptide cycle? November of last year?

no, I, no, I think I, I didn't start it until I think what February and March of this year. I did one cycle and then the summer we kind of took off and then now I'm on my second cycle.

Okay, so we.

Alicia McKenzie(12:01.422)

George just went and got his blood test and like all of his blood work and his body fat results and everything. since you've run your second cycle of test morelin, you have, let me see, gained six pounds of skeletal muscle mass and you have lost almost two pounds of fat. Oh, 2%. No, you've lost 1 % of your body weight.

Started it. Yeah

George McKenzie (12:26.838)

Yeah, 1 % of my body fat.

So you've gone from like 14 % body fat down to 13, but then your muscle mass has gone from 85 pounds of muscle mass to 91. That's a pretty good little increase. It is. OK, so what exactly have you been doing?

I allowed chat GPT to create a workout regiment for me for men 48 and older 48 Yeah, told him I am 48. I'm one test more than I'm trying to gain muscle mass and Create a 12-week program and I can only commit to working out two days a week But give me a third day as an option pump pump session. Okay, so I do That was the prompt I used

48 and

George McKenzie (13:13.902)

Yep, and it created a 12 week program for me. Okay. So I've been doing that program. I've been doing the Tessamerelin. I've been trying to ingest my body weight and protein every day, which is extremely hard. Okay. But I'm, you know, I'm super regimented. So like I eat the same breakfast every day and I'll eat the same lunch every day.

Cooks your breakfast everyday. do baby.

So getting my calories under control is pretty easy because I just find one meal that gives me 40, almost 40 grams of protein in the morning and then my lunch meal is probably another 60. And I kind of eat the exact same thing every day. And then I'm on a stack of vitamins. So taurine for energy. I can't say it, ashwagandha, is that right? Yay for my anxiety. with, I haven't done the patch in a couple of weeks, but I should do that again.

and then vitamin D drops and a couple other vitamins that promote testosterone growth.

Yeah. And your blood work came back and everything is doing what it's supposed to be doing.

George McKenzie (14:17.002)

Everything was great.

Yeah, my IGF-1 is at the high, higher end of the range from my age group. My testosterone improved, my free testosterone improved, and all of my other metrics are within normal range.

Yeah.

Alicia McKenzie(14:34.658)

Yep. Good job, babe. Yeah. So you set a goal.

And I've been measuring it and I said I wanted to put on five pounds of muscle mass and I have.

That's pretty cool though. It is. I think that's really cool.

I'd at 48 to still be able to build muscle mass. That's great. Without killing myself, I'm only working out twice a week.

Yeah, definitely.

Alicia McKenzie(14:52.546)

But without killing yourself, but also you started a peptide, but you also had to do the other work around it, right? It's not like you can just inject this shit in you and then automatically put on muscle.

Alright, yeah, so I do two days a week of an hour and 15 workouts and three days a week when I can get it in if not, you know, my cardio is pickleball.

Yeah, but I think that's plenty.

Yeah, yeah, and I generally feel good. Don't have any joint pains. The only joint pain is my... It's not really a joint, it's just heel pain.

I think that's from pickle mo.

George McKenzie (15:25.678)

But everything else feels good.

I just thought it was really cool to give a little bit of an update. And I have the opposite, right? I'm coming off of peptides. I'm going to take probably a 12-week break off of them, only because the ones I was on, my nurse practitioner, Dr. Nikki, she told me that it's better to cycle off and on in three-month chunks, which, so I'm going to listen to her. I'm going to take the next three months off.

Yeah, I think we've been doing that, like maybe not prescriptively. Like the summer, we just lost peptides and yeah, like physically lost them. then, then we tried to get replacements and then just stick into it while we were on vacation and while we were at the beach house was tough. So it kind of became meh. I think most of the summer was not really doing it.

Like physically.

Alicia McKenzie(16:12.886)

No, and I paid for it, right? When I came back from the summer break, my blood work was absolute shit. My iron was freakishly low. Just all sorts of things were off. And the number one predictor of how healthy you are is the frequency and the consistency of your menstrual cycle. So my cycle went from being super consistent, super perfect to like, maybe it'll show up on day 36. maybe it'll show up on day 20. Who knows? Which is not good.

but now we're like right back on it. So. Yeah.

Yay. But yeah, I think it's being in charge of your own health plan and understanding your body and knowing your metrics, know what your blood type, blood work is and your body fat and your weight and kind of just measuring it not every day, but at least once a quarter. And if you want to try something new, create a plan, create a, what are the measurements of success? All right. What are the things that I'm going to measure to know if I'm on track on pace and how do I

gauge success versus, hey, do I look better in the mirror? Or does the scale say a different number or the number I wanted to say? Yeah. There's a lot of other lead indicators and things you need to do to really know that you...

You're just setting KPIs for your body. Exactly.

George McKenzie (17:29.038)

Yeah, just like running a business be the CEO of your own body

Okay, so perfect segue into our next topic, which is I saw this headline come through on my email and I was like, yes, so good. How do you deal with idea creep?

idea creep is that like scope creep.

Kind of. Okay. Right. you're late on me. You're CEO, you're the head of this company, you set strategic vision, you have people that work with you and for you, and they come to you with this amazing idea. Like I've got an idea that is so impactful and novel and it's great. And you're like, hmm, I'm sure your idea is fantastic, but right now is not the time.

Yeah, I have personally experienced this several times.

Alicia McKenzie(18:12.046)

That's what I mean. How do you do it? And what I've seen, like, ideas thrown around that you have monthly innovation meetings. You... So tell me, tell me.

I think that's a great point, whoever wrote that article, and I'd love to read it. It's probably one of the lead indicators of whether a company is successful or not, is if you can, as a CEO, set a strategy and stay focused and execute against that strategy. Not that that strategy is going to be set in stone for five years, but you've got to have a guiding light and a pathway in which you're trying to go. And if you have those KPIs and lead indicators, you're measuring success of that, and you pivot when the metrics tell you so.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs fall victim to is that new idea syndrome. Like what you're saying is I get there's this new product, there's this new idea, there's this new customer demand, there's this new thing that I could do. And you, before you know it, either you're no longer executing on the strategy and the vision and where all of your spend is going and you're doing other things, or you become a company that does a million things, but nothing well.

and there's no differentiation in the marketplace and then you can't support what you've built because you've got, it's like an octopus, you've got all these tentacles of service offerings or products or whatever and you can't focus to actually do any of them well. And what I did in the past is, I'll give you a concrete example. So at Defense point, we had this issue a lot where we had a lot of smart cybersecurity engineers and they would love to build their own shit, right? And then why would I use this product?

when I can build my own. Why would I do X, or Z when I can just find the time to invent it myself? I mean, from a vision perspective, we had a set of strategic partners in which we were going to go to market with those technology sets. And we were going to be the best in the world at those things. But our folks internally would be like, well, Elastic is the new Splunk, or this is the new that. And they wanted to test and play with that. So we created what we had called Fellows. We created the Fellows program.

George McKenzie (20:13.91)

And in there, it was, they met once a month and they would talk about creative ideas and test out things and build things as projects. And then we had elected someone that was the king of the fellows, but he would just ran the program, right? And that he was in charge of R and D and he ran the program. And then at our quarterly business reviews, he would brief us out on what they're doing.

And he would say, hey, we are evaluating this new blah, blah, blah, blah. And we think it could be a service offering in the future. And that's something that we would look at. We'd stress test. We'd create a business plan around and say, okay, what's the investment required to bring this to market? Can we support it? Is there enough demand? What's the addressable market that this new service offering can consume? And then we'd make a decision. And that's kind of how we selected annually. what are the...

Let's say at the beginning we were doing McAfee and Splunk and I don't remember the third, but we had the tenable, let's just say. So we were doing those three technology sets as go to market and we were becoming experts on those things. We were certified on those things and that's who we wanted to be the best in the world at. And then over time, like in year two, year three, we decided, hey, McAfee is not best of breed anymore. That's not where we want to be. We're going to go CrowdStrike or we're going to go whatever.

And that group is what led us there. that's kind of how we did it. But we had to create a program around it because I thought it was. Yeah, it was.

dropping into your Slack channel, emails and like stop you in the hallway.

George McKenzie (21:49.262)

Why aren't we doing Elastic? A Splunk is so yesterday. Why are we doing this? And it's just, yeah, you get inundated with

Yeah, so that was the cadence that this woman posited, right? It's every year you set the vision, every quarter you align the OKRs or the KPIs, and then every month you run a tactical experimentation meeting to see who has new ideas. Shocker.

How about that? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's that's kind of what we did a defense point and s2 we did very very similar

Right. if you're in a startup and you don't hear these things or know these things, you've got ideas flying at you constantly and you're like, that's a great idea. Pivot. no, no, no. another great idea. Pivot.

And I think it's the same with like marketing and sales strategies. Like if you don't create a quarterly sales strategy and run it, because if there's always going to be, what if we did this email campaign? Well, email campaigns aren't really working. Let's do a social media campaign. Well, that social didn't work. Let's revamp our website. well, let's go to trade shows. well, let's sponsor talks. let's do podcasts. Let's do webinars. Let's do, right? And you end up with a thousand points of light and you just don't know.

George McKenzie (22:54.218)

if anything succeeded or really failed because you didn't really put any effort into any of it. You just kept trying things. I'm not saying you shouldn't experiment, especially when you're small, but you got to have, you got to know what success looks like. Like is it working or is it not? And how do I measure it?

to be a clear channel.

George McKenzie (23:11.65)

That's a great article, you should share that.

Yeah, my struggle right now is like, and I'm pretty sure this article is behind a paywall, of which I pay for. But it's also just like a level of transparency, right, with the person coming to you with the idea, right? It's not a no, but it's just not right now.

Yeah, or you give them homework, right? Hey, that's a great idea. Why don't you build a business case around that? what is the market opportunity for that look like? you know, posit it back to them so that they can continue to work and flush the idea out. Maybe they come to the conclusion themselves that, there's not a market for this, or it's not a market fit. Or they come back to you and they've done the legwork and it is something you should really

But you don't want to disincentivize innovation. Yes. Right. So it's figuring out how to positively encourage people to continue on. You've got a great idea. Maybe explore it. Or you have a great idea. How about we submit it through Airtable and then...

air table. I don't know what that is.

Alicia McKenzie(24:14.754)

It's actually something that my publisher uses. It's just another platform where you can hold ideas or events or PR hits or anything related to the book. It's got budgeting and everything in there. Just another platform.

What is it?

George McKenzie (24:29.902)

There's a SaaS app for everything.

There's a sass out for everything.

I miss knowing there's 12 SaaS apps for everything. They all do 80 % of what the other one does.

my gosh.

That's such an important thing to keep in mind though. Like if you have this new business idea, but you're like, somebody's already doing it, the market will accept five of the same thing. Just go look at your makeup drawer. You have like 50 lipsticks and they're all one shade off of a different red, but you buy them all.

George McKenzie (24:59.534)

If you're in a market and you're the only one there, then there isn't a market.

Yeah, that's also a sad fact. So it's okay. Your idea doesn't have to be novel and unique.

No, not every idea needs to be brought to fruition.

It's like I'm currently drinking an Izzy right now, but I have Poppy in my fridge. It's like basically the same thing, but Poppy just sold for what 500 million or I thought it was a billion. I feel like maybe a billion. That seemed like a ridiculous number to say though for soda.

Soda is incredibly lucrative because the cost of goods sold for each one of those cans is like pennies.

Alicia McKenzie(25:37.846)

unless you're Arizona tea and you just keep your prices the same forever because you want to it.

But even his cogs are low. His biggest cost driver is the aluminum can.

If he wasn't making money, he wouldn't be doing it.

Exactly. He's just not making the same margin he was making before. For sure. But yeah, the cost of the liquid in there is nothing.

Okay, anything else? No. Are we done?

George McKenzie (26:01.262)

I don't think so. don't know how long have we talked? 28 minutes? That doesn't seem very long. Nah, it's plenty. Who wants to listen to me talk for 25 minutes? I am offended.

Really? I think it's.

Not I.

All right, we'll be back.

Alicia McKenzie(26:19.49)

Thank you for tuning in to Mary to the startup. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please take a moment to like rate and subscribe to our podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and keeps the conversation going. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, drop me a message. I love hearing from you guys until next time.

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