Success Leaves Clues: Ep295 - Building a Legacy Beyond the Exit with Nicholas Reichenbach, founder of Flow Water

Narrator: Welcome to the Success Leaves Clues podcast with Robin Bailey and Al MacDonald. Have you ever wondered what makes someone successful? What are they doing that's different? How do they achieve greatness? We believe that Success Leaves Clues. In this series, we are interviewing very successful people from different walks of life to hear their stories. We like to remind our listeners that the views expressed in this podcast are those of our guests and not necessarily those shared by our hosts. Today's episode is sponsored by Life and Legacy Advisory Group. Discover our commitment to our clients at Life and Legacy. Building wealth, securing your family's future, giving back and creating a lasting legacy are not just values, but a way of life. Let us guide you toward a future aligned with what matters most to you. We're also brought to you by ARIA Benefits. If you're a business leader challenged with talent attraction, employee engagement, or supporting mental health, we can help use your benefits package as the key to unlock your workforce. Now, here's your hosts, Robin Bailey and Al MacDonald.

Host: Welcome back to the Success Leaves Clues podcast. I'm your host, Robin Bailey, back at it again with my business partner and CO host, Al MacDonald. Al, what are you saying these days? Busy week for us. It seems like it's event season in Toronto.

Al MacDonald: Event season. That is true. I, uh, had a great opportunity on Wednesday to attend the Tech Talent north, and that was a great day. But I also wanted to talk about what our podcast today is about. You know, everyone knows that I love cycling, and of course, one of the key things to cycling is staying hydrated. So I thought that was a great segue into our guest today and the importance of, you know, keeping hydrated at all times. So I'll let you make the introduction.

Host: All right. And Al, uh, you know, as I've said on the podcast many times, we get so many great introductions and thank you to our audience for continuing to do that because this is what we love to do. Have awesome conversations with awesome people. And, uh, today is no exception. But Al, I was reading through this bio as I was preparing for this episode and prepare to feel unaccomplished once I'm done. And, you know, we meet these people

Al MacDonald: and sometimes that's not hard, though, with us.

Host: Sometimes I feel good on certain days. And then after, you know, talking to people like this, I'm m like, uh, oh, I got to step my game up. So here we go. So joining us today is Nicholas Reichenbach. He is a serial entrepreneur, private equity investor and founder, recognized for building and scaling purpose driven consumer and wellness brands across three decades. He describes himself As a conscious capitalist, an investor and operator who deploys capital exclusively in alignment with ESG principles, Nicholas founded Flow Water in 2014, launching its first products in 2015. Inspired by witnessing a mountain of new discarded plastic bottles at burning man in 2013. And I know everyone listening, you've all seen the bottles. They're white, it says Flow and blue. We saw them at Metro on the weekend. My wife was so excited that I was going to be having this conversation. Continuing with your bio Nicholas. Over the next decade, he built Flow into one of North America's most sustainable premium spring water brands. The global leader in carton packaged water distributed across 46 stores in North America. Backed by 20 million regular customers and certified as the highest scoring B corporation in the water industry. The company went public on the Toronto stock exchange in 2021 through a reverse takeover that raised close to $100 million, part of more than $250 million in capital raised over the company's lifetime with celebrity investors including Shawn Mendes and endorsers including Gwyneth Paltrow. After stepping away From Flow in 2025, Nicholas led the acquisition and relaunch of Formosa springs, reviving a 155-year-old Canadian artisan spring rooted in his own family's history and now positioning the brand for national on premise and retail rollout and US expansion. Beyond Flow, Nicholas has invested and helped scale multiple consumer brands. He was an early investor and board member of Wellness Natural Inc. Owner of Simply Protein, a plant based nutrition brand. Reflecting his expertise in brand building, market disruption and capital strategy. His entre entrepreneurial journey is driven by a deep commitment to creating purpose driven businesses that generate both financial success and positive social impact. As the founder of Evolver Ventures, a ah, private equity and venture capital platform, Nicholas is focused on investing in high growth companies at the intersection of wellness, consumer goods and sustainability. As a sought after speaker, he shares insights on entrepreneurship, private equity and scaling conscious brands, inspiring the next generation of founders and investors to build with purposes and impact. That's a pretty awesome bio. Does it ever feel kind of weird hearing all those accomplishments? Nicholas, it's all good.

Nicholas Reichenbach: Oh no, it doesn't feel great.

Al MacDonald: I love it. Keep going.

Nicholas Reichenbach: More of everything great, you know.

Host: Okay, well we're going to dive into it all here today. But I did want to start with, you know, you've now built companies across completely different industries, right? Like from mobile tech, wellness hospitality, uh, when you're looking back, are there patterns or instincts that you kind of identify now that consistently guided your decision making even in those industries? Themselves that were changing.

Nicholas Reichenbach: There's one common denominator between most of the, I'd say 90% of the companies I've, uh, invested in or found it or bought. And it's all consumer, consumer entertainment products and consumer packaged goods. And so when I put the lens on of what I look for, it's about building a brand. Building a brand with an amazing product that makes people healthy and happy. Right. So that pretty much sums up everything that I've done since I was 18 years old when I started my first concert promotion business. And then all the way through to having record labels and music publishing companies, music licensing companies, mobile video game companies, console video game companies, video chat companies, and all the way through to flow consumer packaged goods and water and beverages. And then now to, uh, Formosa. But Formosa is a little more near and dear to my heart and my passion and purpose in life. And you know how I want to leave the world with a beautiful expression of a, uh, brand and product that is very close to my family's history and legacy.

Host: Well, let's start there. I mean, there's so many angles we could take on this conversation because going back to seeing all those wasted water bottles and creating flow. But now with your new venture, I'd love to dive into that, especially with the family history. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because when you're talking about it, I don't know if it's coming out, uh, through the listeners, but I'm hearing it pretty clearly because I can see you as well. There's a passion there. So let's talk about it a little bit deeper.

Nicholas Reichenbach: Yeah. So water has been in my family's history for generations, probably five or six generations. And coincidentally or not, my name Reichenbach in German and Swiss, German means strong flowing stream or a, uh, strong abundance, uh, of water. Yeah, you can't make that up. And so at an early age, I've been drinking spring water mainly from two different sources. The flow source, which has been with my family for, uh, multi generations, and Formosa springs, which is about five miles away from where I grew up in the town right next to us, which is called Formosa, Ontario. And Formosa has been selling mineral water and promoting mineral water in the town and also across the entire country since 1870. So it's 155 years old. And they have three artesian springs, which means the water comes out naturally. And you can go down there and fill up your jugs and drink beautiful artesian mineral water springs still to this day. And The Formosa valley is about 200 meters below the sea level in a valley that's the tail end of the Niagara Escarpment. And so it's a very unique geological area in South Bruce County. And we've, you know, as a proud member of the community, we've had amazing mineral water throughout the century. And everybody drinks the high quality mineral water from Formosa, from Mildmay, where I grew up, and from the Flo spring. The, uh, flow spring was never commercially available until I did Flo in 2014. But I grew up drinking almost exclusively spring water because our town tapped right into the aquifer. And in the 80s, I'm aging myself, uh, in the 70s and 80s we didn't chlorinate water, we didn't put any fluoride or anything in it. So it was just beautiful artesian spring water coming right into our taps. And then we would fill up jugs too with that, uh, in the late 80s and then in 1981 my father partnered with the original family members of Formosa Springs Brewery. They were selling mineral water and making beer from mineral water, which makes a phenomenal beverage because of its smoothness from the calcium and magnesium in the water and its high alkalinity with a ph of 8.1. And so they sold beer successfully all the way through to 1981. And in the 70s, because of Molson and Labatte consolidating the entire beer industry, they were struggling to make money selling Formosa Springs beer coast to coast. And they came to my father, who was their lawyer because he's a corporate lawyer in Bruce county and grew up there his entire life. And my grandfather and great grandfather, great grandfather 200 years and said, would you partner with us and get the permits to abstract mineral water for drinking purposes and bottling purposes? Because at the time the Ministry of the Environment didn't even have a permit for people to drink water out of a bottle. So at that time everyone was just drinking tap water. But two international companies started selling mineral water in Canada, Avion and Perrier. And Perrier was the most popular one, Sparkling and still. And they came in a little stubby 330ml bottle. So they came up with a, uh, design and a bottle to compete using for the first time in the history of North America, using a domestically sourced mineral water from Formosa Springs. And they put out the mineral water in 1981 and it went very well around the launch. But consumers at that time were like, why are we buying water? Oh, sparkling, I get it. We can buy Sparkling water. And they really, they launched it coast to coast. And then in 1988, Algonquin Breweries made them an offer and they purchased the property. Ten acres, the two springs that my father got the first permits, they're called PTTWs, to abstract bottled water. And they, uh, converted it back into a beer factory that still remains there today. So in 1981, I was 6 years old, or, uh, I think 6 or 7, and then all the way up to 13 years old. Those are the most informative years of anybody's life, right? And every Sunday all the partners would come to our house for a dinner and all the wives and all their cars would come up and it was just a party every Sunday.

Narrator: And.

Nicholas Reichenbach: And we were always drinking Formosa Springs mineral water. And so I drank as a child, you know, high quality mineral water, still and sparkling. And, uh, yeah, I got addicted to it. Yeah. Absolutely passionate about it and really proud of what my father and his partners created with the mineral water source and then also having the flow source where we used to actually go fishing and swimming in it. And, uh, literally you just bathe in it because it's a cold water spring that is on a small lake that is exclusively on the property that's about half a square mile along. And it looks like Lake Louise, a beautiful turquoise color because of the limestone in it. And that's when I became, you know, I was really engraved in my DNA about being in the water business and being in the premium water business, selling exclusively mineral water as the higher end product. That's. The sources are very rare. There's only five sources of mineral water in all of North America. I happen to grow up on three of them. So, you know, and then I bought one in Virginia, so. And then there's only another one that's in Carlsbad, California, that doesn't have a permit that allows them to ship outside of the state of California because they don't have enough abstraction rights. And so that was rare. I didn't realize that clearly when I was younger, but growing up after that, I remember, like, even in my concert promotion office, I had printed out and framed all of the great lakes of fresh water across our, uh, great nation of Canada. And there was a lot of them because we have 25% of the fresh water in the entire world in this country. So I always wanted to be in the water business. And then I approached my father to abstract the water from the flow spring. And I didn't get a favorable response, let's put it that way. It's like, over my dead body you're going to take this beautiful artesian spring. And then he had already had the experience of launching Formosa Springs mineral water, and he didn't want to go through the permitting rights and he didn't want to build another factory on top of a beautiful property. So that didn't go well. That's. I think I was like 25 years old. And then I moved, you know, sold that company, got into tech and started developing entertainment products, digital entertainment products. So ringtones, music games and later console games and other, you know, mobile videos and all the great stuff of, and engaging with celebrities and movie studios. I made like Iron man and all the Marvel titles amongst a lot of other stuff like Indiana Jones. And so during that time I was in Europe, living in Sweden, and I went over to this country, Norway, and I found this beautiful cylinder, a glass cylinder called Voss, with, uh, Norwegian spring water in it. And I said, oh, that's a really good idea. So I went, brought the bottle back to my father and said, hey, I think we can put our beautiful mineral water in a glass container and launch, uh, all the restaurants and hotels and I don't have to build a factory, I can get it made in Toronto in the gta. And he basically said, I'm going to be dead soon. You, uh, can do whatever you want when I'm past. He said, but until then, don't bug me. Because he's the conservationist, big conservationists. We work with Ducks Unlimited on many hundreds and hundreds of acres of conservation land in our community in Bruce county, in Grey County. So he never wanted to develop that property. And so as the story goes, I didn't give up because clearly water was in my DNA and I wanted to share this with the rest of the world, our beautiful township and our beautiful water that came from Formosa. Uh, so then I went off and started doing my tech startups and led me to New York where I had several tech startups ending in a video chat software similar to this that allowed for multiple people chatting. And I exited that and went to Burning man because I didn't really know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. That's when I got inspired to create flow and put it into a socially and environmentally responsible package. And living in Sweden, I grew around tetra packs, right? And so they're made from paper and that was kind of the birth of flow and carrying on the legacy of our, uh, water in the area and in the township and sharing it with the world. But I Always had an eye on Formosa Springs and I tried to buy it off of brick breweries before I started floating because it had a permit on it and it had a factory on it. And anyways, they had invested a lot of money, like over $20 million in the brewery capacity and the infrastructure of it. So they turned me down and I didn't have enough money for them to even be interested in that. So I went on and built factories in the GTA and uh, got my father convinced to help change the world and make it a positive place by leaving one of our legacies, water, mineral water. And there's something very special about water. It's a bit of a magical substance. We don't know a lot about it, but the genesis of water is that it's actually stardust. No one knows that. Stardust, that's how H2O is created, when stars, uh, go supernova. And sharing that with the world definitely ignited my passion for the product. But also when I hear people after they drink the water from Bruce county and how it makes them feel inside it, not only does it hydrate you, but it also gives you essential, uh, minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium and zinc with a very smooth taste that allows for a very refreshing consumption. But you also consume more of it because it's actually a refreshing drink that hydrates you five times faster because of the minerals inside that allows the water molecule to absorb in your system. And so the best part of being a steward of mineral water is how it keeps people happy and hydrates them at the core and leaving that positive effect that the brands can have on that and sharing it with the world just became my mission. So having the opportunity after flow to go back and offer the current owners to do an all asset deal and purchase the land, the springs, the water rights, the manufacturing facility and uh, leaving them with the beer and allowing them to continue to produce the beer because it's amazing beer. And reignite the brand Formosa Springs since 1870 and carry that 155 year legacy into the future of the next 155 years became my new mission. And allowing me to like release a beautiful glass bottle that's currently in production or I'd have it with me and release it to the world with the most incredible mineral water that has all the essence of stardust in it. And this vision becomes a little bigger than my previous visions of where I think I can take this because now it becomes about legacy, it becomes about longevity and building things that last not for me, for my family. And My nephew and my daughter. Carrying on the Richenbach name and legacy around Formosa Springs has now become my life mission. And actually sharing the highest quality, domestically sourced and responsibly packaged, because glass and aluminum are infinitely recyclable, and they're highly recyclable. And sharing that with the world, and mainly with North America, but then also with the world against, ah, very few competitors that have the quality of the water. We have almost zero competitors in North America, but very little competitors that have taken a brand nationally and both domestically as well as in the United States. There's only a handful of Canadian brands that have done that in the history of Canada, you know, like Lululemon, Canada Goose, just to name a few. But most of the other brands, like even Tim Hortons, didn't make it out of Canada yet. Right. And so I think that looking at where it can go, I think that Formosa Springs can be in every country in the world against, you know, San Pellegrino and Perrier and Avion, which are all hundreds of years old. And they're all built around legacy and heritage. And the quality of the water, which is stuff I deeply am passionate about. The taste of the water is super important to me. Doing all natural filtration so that you don't have any industrial processing and keeping the water happy and then sharing that with the world creates a lot of prosperity and a positive impact on the planet around us. And getting rid of the plastic has always been a mission number one. But also just being able to share this such a premium, beautiful product with the world has now become my legacy. Boom.

Al MacDonald: Boom. That is an amazing story that you just shared, and I'm really glad that you shared the family legacy, because that's really important. You can tell it's really obviously very passionate about it and important to you. Can we jump into a little bit about one of the things you said at the very beginning was that everything that you've done has really focused on the consumer. So I kind of want to swing back to that a little bit and talk about flow, because I'm sure that that's a category that many people probably thought was already saturated.

Nicholas Reichenbach: Yep.

Al MacDonald: What was it about your understanding about consumer behavior and identity culture that made you realize that there was still some space here to build something really meaningful?

Nicholas Reichenbach: You want the formula, you want the caramel secret, don't you?

Al MacDonald: Well, if you want to share the formula, if you want to share the secret. But if you just want to, you know, gloss over it and make sure that you keep some Things to your.

Host: That's fine too. How do they get the caramel in there? If you're going to tell us, please do. I've been wondering.

Nicholas Reichenbach: Yeah, right. The formula, in my analysis to do any venture, consumer focused business venture, is really about matching consumer intent to purchase with a product that is uniquely differentiated from the rest of the competitors and crossing that white space. There's always like a white space that's created when you have early adopters, consumers that are looking for products and they can't find the product that they're looking for that creates the innovation cycle, right? They're like, oh, well, I can't find it, but I'm looking for it. And you get clues to this success. The clues are very obvious because they're holding products that they don't want to hold in plastic in the flo's case, but yet they're still drinking the premium water from Fiji, from Avion, from Perrier, from France, Italy, all that, but they don't like it. So that was really like the trigger point that I said, there's gotta be a better way. And if I look back on all the companies that I've done, it's when I had consumer intent to purchase, but they were purchasing other products because there was nothing that existed that filled their kind of value system, right? And in this case the value system was the family. The household, mainly driven by the female head of the family, were going non plastic. They didn't want plastic in their drinks, they didn't want plastic in their bags, they didn't want plastic in their house. And that kind of triggered into like, oh yeah, someone's got to do a beautiful glass bottle. This was before aluminum canned water. So I never thought of aluminum canned water until like the last five years or so. But what I did know is that, uh, there was a package out there that was unique to coconut water, the Tetra Prisma. And I knew Tetra Pak because it has a household penetration of 97% in Europe. And I lived there for six years. So I was very familiar with that format. I was like, wait a minute, if I can come up with a compostable renewable resource package that's good for the water and good for the consumer and good for the planet, We've got a bullseye. And if I had started flow five years before that, it wouldn't have worked. And if I had started flow five years after that, it would have been already done. So it was at the right time where we did lots of consumer insight before we did that. Ah, to Find out who this consumer was, the wellness woman, and how to position. Because they wanted environmentally better packaging. They wanted high quality natural products, which is natural mineral water, and they wanted it in their wellness regime, right. For health purposes. So that kind of allowed us to create the product innovation with the packaging. And I worked with Tetra Pak directly out of, uh, the U.S. and Europe to be able to create this package, change it to sugarcane from plastic. That was a big innovation that they supported and become the first non plastic vessel to carry high quality mineral water. We even created the liner inside to match the beautiful mineral water. And the liner was made from corn. Right. So we really spent a lot of time with product innovation. I'm a product geek at heart. Like all my tech companies before were all built around consumer product, right. And so I spend a lot of time obsessing about product and making sure that it's exactly what the consumer wants and what I want and that it's not only that it's good for the planet and it's a positive impact on the people, society around us as well as the Mother Earth, which is our largest shareholder. Right. So that's the window. It's identifying consumer intent to purchase, knowing that there's no product out there, innovating a product that matched the intent to purchase with a beautiful product expression, and then launching it to market using those seed consumers and growing with them from early adoption all the way through to late. And that's the formula.

Al MacDonald: Nicholas, you said something in there that intrigued me a little bit. And you said, if I was five years earlier, it wouldn't have worked. If I was five years later, someone else would have already done it. It almost sounds like, hey, we just got lucky on the timing. But I don't really believe that. I don't think it was just a question of luck. Like, how did you recognize that here's the opportunity right at this moment.

Nicholas Reichenbach: The realization came at, uh, Burning man, where it's a zero trace festival in the Nevada desert, Blackrock, Nevada. And 70,000 people show up there for a week every year. And it's a beautiful art expression. And the most influential people in the world, billionaires, tech entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, all gather there for what would be almost like a, uh, spiritual gathering. Right? But the spiritual part about it is less about religion and more about the universe and how it all works. And a, uh, part of that, they really put a lot of focus on Zero Trace. So when they leave the Nevada desert, there's not even cigarette butts on the ground. Everyone cleans up everything they recycle everything. And that DNA really inspired me to know that the biggest thing that people had to do is drink water, portable water, too. So when I went there after the week, they have one area where the cell phone tower is where they put all of the plastic bottles for recycling. And then a truck comes and picks them up and gets them into the blue bin. And it was a gigantic mountain of plastic. And that was the eureka moment where I was like, whoa, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way. And then also, I was drinking a brand out of plastic water. And a day in the desert with plastic water, it tastes horrible. You can tell that there's microplastics in it just because of the taste. And then I was like, wow, this doesn't probably not good for my body either. But this was before the term microplastics even existed. In 2014, we just started caring about the environment. About two or three years before that, 2010, no one really cared about plastic bottles. There was no backlash from consumers. But then during that 2010-2014, it became very apparent that the natural grocery industry exploded, with Whole Foods leading the charge of, like, better for you packaging, better for you products, Natural organic certified. And that really inspired me to say, look, I think not only can I deliver it in a better for you package and keep the integrity of the mineral water inside. No industrial processing, beautiful taste profile, organic certified. And I was the first person to get organic certification for flavored water, but I also could do it and become the most socially responsible beverage water company in the world. So I immediately said, sustainability has to be at the forefront of what we're doing, on top of delivering an amazing product that people want to drink. And that really kind of set the tone to having that DNA. And I'm very proud to say we're not only the leading ESG beverage company in North America, but we're one of the top five in the world for all categories. Right? That's a really big fee. We've avoided billions of carbon emissions, billions of carbon emissions just from one small company doing one small thing. Imagine if all the big companies decided to do it. What would the world look like? It would be a much better place to live, and we'd be promoting happy and healthy, not only for us, but for the planet as well. So that DNA is still with me today. And Formosa will be one of the leading companies in esg, uh, on responsible manufacturing, from our facility all the way through to the packaging and promoting the recycling of it, but also keeping the product integrity in place with our beautiful glass bottles, cobalt blue gemstone bottles, which is also a rare Canadian gemstone that's, uh, found up north in the Northwest Territories in Univik, all the way through to the ingredients that we put in flavors, organic, certified, all the way through to our programs on social responsibility. Right. Promoting amazing events and sponsoring major events and happenings in my county, where I grew up, Bruce county and South Bruce county is going to be at the forefront of how we give back and give back to the community locally, but also domestically across Canada as well into the United States. Our neighbors.

Host: Nicholas, I have a feeling, and if you're up for it, we're going to have to book an episode of two and potentially episode three, because there's so much we want to get to. And, you know, I could easily do a three hour podcast with you, easily. So I think we'll have to break it down, though. You've talked about so many interesting things here. And again, this is where, honestly, I feel very blessed because the people that we get to meet introduce us to other great people. You know, Mark McLeod was on the podcast not that long ago, and we had asked them to say, hey, who else do you know that might be a great fit? And of course, that's how we met. And I'm just listening to this conversation and knowing that we're going to have future conversations, maybe some of them recorded, maybe some of them over lunch. And I'm just really excited. And I think, you know, we've got Al's signature question coming up, and I think you've kind of answered this already, but it's always interesting when Al, we're having a conversation and I think I know the answer, and then I'll ask the signature question and it's something, you know, in addition to or a different path. So, Al, I'll let you take it away.

Al MacDonald: I would love to. Now, before I do, did you notice that Nicholas, he subtly put in a little plug for our, uh, podcast here. So he didn't say success leaves clues. He said, clues that lead to success.

Host: Yes, I like that. That was very good.

Nicholas Reichenbach: Yeah, you like that one, huh?

Al MacDonald: So, you know, I just, I was very thankful to him that he maybe just reworded a little bit, but certainly the message was there. So I thank you for that. So, yes, I would love to get your answer on this, Nicholas. The question is, as society grows great, when old persons plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. And yes, I agree with Robin that you've already shared a number of things that are planting those trees and will lead to that future shade. But I am curious if there's anything else that you want to share with us. And sometimes, you know, people do make the switch and move from their business into community or family or something else that they're passionate about. But I'm just curious as to what proverbial trees you might be planting.

Nicholas Reichenbach: This is a deep question. Mark McLeod is on my board of Formosa. I gotta keep him close. He's a very special individual and I've been working with him and his limitless CEO platform and all the other entrepreneurs that get his guidance and coaching. And one of the things. And uh, it was a perfect moment to meet Mark. I've known him for a long time and we've shared other board seats and other companies together in tech. But this time around, with only like a week after I signed the binding term sheet for Formosa, Mark uh, re engaged with me and invited me to come down and speak at uh, his limitless CEO Unconferenced, which he was launching. His platform, his moda operandis. The birth of a new type of leader. A leader that is much more conscious about their energy and their purpose and their mission. A leader that is much more focused on the longevity of a company versus the exit of that company. A leader that's more focused on their health and their well being and their staff and the people's well being around them versus a capitalistic endeavor. And that unlocked for me around the same time that I uh, acquired the heritage brand. 155 years old and my family's legacy became a conscious thought to me like, oh, how am I going to lead this company better With a new framework. One that's built around the world values and the beliefs that I have both, you know, internally, but also through my family and what our values are. And to be able to create something that I can leave for my family and their children that they're proud of and that they can carry on their legacy and our values together. It is the single most important thing that a creator must do. And those values are not really what we're operating on anymore as a modern day entrepreneur. We're into some other framework. It was created in the late 80s and 90s and really, really catapulted in the dot com era in the Internet. But it all just became around like how fast can you build it? How fast can you sell it? Right? Uh, there was no building something to last. There was no taking care of your Staff and people with like, retirement packages that kind of phased out in the old kind of industrial framework that we're operating on for about, I, uh, don't know, 50, 60 years where you could actually rely on a company to take care of you when you're old because you gave them your service for your career. And so bringing that back in Formosa and building something to last for my people, my management team, my shareholders, the founding shareholders, my family, and carrying it through with a plan that's not about an exit, it's about a, uh, legacy. It's about building things to last and build them right. Invest in long term projects with long term roi. So what's the first thing we did? We bought the real estate, we bought the springs, we bought the building. We are investing in our manufacturing excellence and capacity right now. But we're not making an investment for three years here, we're making an investment for 25, 30 years. And everything that I do now, I always do it with the value system that I created around my family's values as well as the values of Formosa and the brand values of that. So heritage, legacy, hospitality are at the forefront of what we're doing. And so that value system now is guiding the next generation of entrepreneurs, at least in my mind. Like, it's going to start small, but it'll grow to be a very large one. And we're able to rewrite the os, rewrite the operating systems that we, you know, we're not going to die at the hustle anymore, we're going to survive at the muscle. Right? So that's the new OS is about building these companies to last a long time and, uh, carry that energy, because it's all about energy. Carry that energy through to generational wealth, generational prosperity, society prosperity. And I think that not just because I'm old, you know, getting older, I'm 51 and fun, but it's at a time where I think that we can contribute and we're realizing entrepreneurs can contribute to society in a much more meaningful way, like Elon Musk and other great entrepreneurs. And I think that that's the mission ahead of us. That's the moda operandis.

Al MacDonald: It's all about the energy, you said, and you definitely brought the energy today to this podcast. And I think we're both very appreciative of that. Your passion for your work and your legacy and what you've created has really shone through. So thank you for that.

Nicholas Reichenbach: Thank you guys for having me.

Host: Yeah, that passion and energy is contagious in such a good way, Nicholas. So I'm looking forward to carrying on the conversation with for listeners who are interested in learning more about what you're doing in this beautiful glass bottle. I can't wait to see it. And by the way, I have some flow downstairs that I'm going to be jumping in after this. What's the best way for them to reach out?

Nicholas Reichenbach: I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Instagram, my full name at Nicholas richenbach and then formosasprings.com and we have an early sign up a founders list that the founding members of our delivery service and the GTA as well as our Canadian retail partners and founding members of the restaurants and hotels can all sign up there and become a part of this mission. You know, which is something that everyone can be proud of putting at their table.

Narrator: Awesome.

Host: Uh, well, that does it for today's episode. We hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. If you have any questions for Al or myself, please feel free to give us a call or a joining the conversation on LinkedIn. Success leaves clues, my friends. We saw it here today. We'll see you next time.