Jacob Willis: Running Lean, Giving Big, and Trusting God With the Rest

When Jacob Willis first came on The Entrepreneurs Blueprint, he and his wife Christin were running We Heart Nutrition with a skeleton crew. Just the two of them and a marketing agency. It was scrappy by design, but it was also reaching its limits.

Jacob is back for episode 56, and the business has evolved. The team is still lean, but the infrastructure around it has grown considerably. More importantly, Jacob has gotten clearer on something that most founders resist for far too long: what should actually be on his plate.

Building a Team Around What You Are Not Good At

Jacob’s framework for hiring is blunt and worth repeating. He is not asking, “What do I not like doing?” He is asking, “What am I not thriving in, and where would my time be better spent?”

That distinction matters. A lot of founders offload tasks they find boring. Jacob offloads tasks where his involvement is the bottleneck or where someone else would simply do it better.

His current structure includes a customer service rep handling about 80% of inquiries, a creative designer based in Argentina who is their first international hire, a lifecycle marketing agency managing email flows and the customer journey, a subscription agency focused on retention and churn, a creative agency that comes in quarterly for full-day shoots with Christin, and a dedicated ads management agency.

He is also eyeing the next agency addition for the following four to six months. The growth is planned, not reactive.

One of the more interesting hires is a friend who started as a general assistant for Christin and has since grown into a dedicated affiliate manager. Jacob’s take on hiring friends: be careful, but it can work if the role has clear expectations and there is no ambiguity about what success looks like. The person needs to have the heart for what you are building first. The skills can come.

When Customer Service Becomes a Supply Chain Problem

About six months before the recording, Jacob was considering hiring another customer service rep to handle volume. Before he did, he stopped to ask why the volume was so high in the first place.

What he found were two root causes. First, their manufacturer could not keep up with demand. We Heart Nutrition had months of 30% month-over-month growth, and the manufacturer was simply not built for that capacity. Jacob described spending time that felt like a part-time job managing production sequences and working through problems that were not his to solve.

Second, their 3PL was located in Missouri. Missouri is a common fulfillment hub, but USPS in that area was overwhelmed. Packages would get picked up on a Monday and not scan into the system until Thursday. Customers were watching tracking show “label created” for days and reaching out assuming something was wrong, because it was.

The fix required moving both. They found a new manufacturer with significantly more capacity. They moved their 3PL to California, which sounds counterintuitive for a national customer base but proved to be faster because the carrier scans on the same day it picks up and flies packages to the East Coast rather than trucking them through hub centers. Florida orders that previously took four to seven days now arrive in three to four.

Jacob’s point: fixing the operations upstream reduced customer service volume by about 30% before he ever hired anyone new. That is the kind of problem-solving that does not show up in a job posting.

Superhuman, Whisper Flow, and the Tooling Worth Talking About

Two tools Jacob mentioned that are worth noting for any founder managing a lot of communication.

Superhuman is his email platform of choice. The feature he gets the most value from is snippets, which are pre-written responses triggered by a short command. A lost package email that would have taken five minutes to write now takes ten seconds. He also uses the reminder feature to follow up on supplier purchase orders without letting anything fall through the cracks. If a supplier does not reply in two days, Superhuman flags it.

Whisper Flow is a voice-to-text tool he was two weeks into at the time of recording. He and Courtney both agreed: use it on a computer and your efficiency in handling email goes through the roof.

For subscriptions, they use Skio, which was recently acquired by Recharge. They moved to Skio after outgrowing Recharge’s customer support at their previous volume. Combined with Klaviyo automations that remind customers three days before a charge goes out, it creates the experience Courtney described as best-in-class from her own customer perspective.

Managing Agencies Without Getting Buried in Slack

Jacob is direct about the reality of managing multiple agencies: you become a manager whether you want to or not. Every agency has a Slack channel. Every channel has things they need from you. If you are not careful, you spend your whole day responding to agencies instead of running your business.

His approach is to equip them to work more independently over time, limit exploratory calls that do not have a clear purpose, and protect the oversight role he and Kristen are not willing to let go of, which is creative direction. They are not interested in AI-generated images or email blasts optimized purely for open rates. They want to send content they would actually want to receive. Agencies push back on this because they have data showing certain tactics perform. Jacob’s response is to take the feedback internally, discuss it, and decide whether it is actually the right fit for their brand. Often it is not.

His summary of the agency model: he is probably paying for two hours a week of actual ads management work, but those are two hours he does not have the time or expertise to do himself. The cost is worth it when framed that way.

Christin’s World: Creative Direction in Three to Four Hours a Day

Christin Willis is the creative engine of We Heart Nutrition. She writes video scripts, directs the quarterly shoot days with their creative agency, and is still deeply involved in approving content. But she is also a mother with three to four hours a day to allocate to work.

The last thing she expected to let go of was posting on Instagram. It became obvious she had to. Getting on the platform at a specific time on a specific day to post was not sustainable for their family. So they handed it off while keeping her voice and face central to the content itself.

The tension Jacob described is real. An email might not go out on schedule because something higher priority demanded Christin’s time. That email might have generated several thousand dollars. But if she had instead finished building a new ad creative or a welcome offer, that missed email looks small by comparison. The prioritization is constant, and something always falls through the cracks. The goal is to make sure what falls is the least costly thing.

The Nonprofit and the Long Game on Giving

We Heart Nutrition donates 10% of sales to pregnancy care centers. As that number has grown, Jacob started to think differently about how the giving should work.

A one-time donation creates dependency risk. A center that receives a large lump sum and uses it to hire staff has bet on future funding they do not have guaranteed. Jacob saw this as an unstable model and started building toward something different.

The nonprofit they are launching will allocate donations over a five-year period. Each month they select one center to support, but instead of one large check, the center receives a commitment they can plan around. One nurse hired. One new building lease signed. One executive director brought on. All of it funded by something the center can count on for the next five years rather than hope for next year.

They have also hired an executive director for the nonprofit, a former CPA auditor of nonprofits, who is already taking over the relationship management side so Jacob and Kristen are not the sole point of contact for every center they support.

The longer vision is to get to a point where the nonprofit can create a grant-funded prenatal vitamin specifically for pregnancy care centers, reaching 50,000 to 75,000 women who need them. Jacob grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where a small center serves about 300 women a year. A lump sum donation would nearly equal their annual budget. A five-year commitment gives them permission to grow.

On Letting God Bring the Growth

Jacob was asked what he and Christin are talking to God about in this season of the business. His answer was not about a specific decision. It was about posture.

There is constant pressure in e-commerce to chase what is working for other brands. To change a conversion element because someone else’s numbers went up. To follow the playbook even when it does not feel true to who you are. Jacob’s faith practice in business is to let go of that pressure and trust that the labor belongs to him but the growth belongs to God.

He also described the manufacturer search as something that only resolved the way it did because of that posture. He interviewed five or six manufacturers. Nothing came together. He considered buying his own equipment. Then the right one appeared, onboarded quickly, and has the capacity to triple his current volume. He called it an evident blessing. He had done the research, done the work, and then trusted the outcome.

That same combination, rigorous effort followed by released control, shows up across every part of how he runs the business.

Find Jacob and We Heart Nutrition at weheartnutrition.com. Connect with Courtney and Monarch COO at monarchcoo.com or on Instagram at @monarch_coo.