Thanks, Kendall. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for taking the time here to listen to our story today. Before I talk about Simply Better, I just want to wander down the road a little bit of our background, and we'll get into the slide presentation here. Forward-looking statements is, you're all, I'm sure, very accustomed to. A little bit about me and our firm, VRG Capital, first. VRG Capital is a group of family offices investing in the four verticals that you see here on the slide. We've been active for over 40 years, especially in the CPG healthcare sector. The two lead families, the Ward family and Cochran family, we are out there bringing the deals forward. We've got four family offices that are regular partners with us, and we have other family offices and institutions that will follow us into our transactions.
I just want to bring your attention to some notable transactions that we've been involved in and restructurings, which we had to do with Simply Better. I'll just bring your attention here to a company called Dominion Lending. About four years ago, we had to get involved in restructuring this business. This is a fair-sized business for Canada. It's Canada's largest mortgage broker. We have over 8,000 brokers in our world, over $60 billion in funded activity. This was a troubled business, but we dug in, restructured it, and today, you know, it's at about an $8 stock price, up from $0.80 and heading to $10. DCM, again, a troubled story. About three years ago, four years ago, we had to get involved, and we changed the CEO.
We've had some success recently, a little bit of a bumpy ride, but a decent-sized business for Canada, about $500,000,000 of revenue. Healwell is a crazy healthcare story. The founders of this business got the business into a lot of trouble and heading for bankruptcy when we had to get really active. We led a turnaround initiative here, saved the company from bankruptcy, brought a billion-dollar partner to the table, and the business is doing really, really well. We just closed a $100,000,000 transaction and looking forward to continued success there. How did we get involved in Simply Better Brands? On that slide deck, one of our assets is a small boutique investment bank in Toronto called Claris Securities, and I'm the chairman there.
Some of the colleagues brought this company to our attention in January 2023, and we thought, "Hey, it looked pretty good." The company was on trajectory to $100 million of revenue. I asked one of my colleagues to join me on the board, and things looked really good for the first quarter or two, and then the wheel started to come off the bus. The woman in charge, Kathy Casey, was overspending in the marketing department, and literally we had the company on a trajectory to bankruptcy. We had to change her out, and in February of last year, I became the Chairman and CEO of the business, and we've had some success since then. The first thing we had to do was major restructuring.
We closed 14 of 17 operating divisions, and we did this all in about 60-70 days, saved the company from bankruptcy, and allowed our energy and focus to be turned to an unbelievable brand called TrueBar, which we're really here to talk about today. We have a small cosmetics business in a couple of million in sales. We'll probably sell that sometime this year. Executed this plan, and it's all about TrueBar. TrueBar is our hero brand. You see our current product offering here. We're playing in the global snack industry. We're playing in the plant-based sector, which has got a very positive CAGR. We're delivering a nutritious, clean ingredient, delicious alternative to the protein bar sector of this category. It's being extremely well received, and we're looking forward to continued success in 2025.
You see our revenue profile here over the last four years, up from $1 million to $10 million to $25 million. We'll come in around the bottom end of our guidance, around $45 million for this year. We continue to move the company forward at a significant growth rate. We are undergoing four major activities: A, B, C, and D here as your slide. We'll talk more about those in a minute. First is the team build. This business has been built by Erica Grousman, our Founder and CEO. Erica started this business in 2019 and had very, very little resources behind her. The former CEO was paying no attention to her, and she just continued to plow ahead and had built this brand with very, very little help until I took over and gave her the proper support she needed.
We've put these five key individuals in place. You'll notice the Mars reference here to a couple of them. This entire ecosystem has actually been—we're very, very fortunate to have a former C-Suite Mars executive on our board. We'll talk about him in a minute. This ecosystem has really come from his world, and we're thrilled to have these folks in place now to take the company to the next level and really allow Erica to get out and market. Not that she hasn't been trying, but we really—she's dynamic and effervescent, and we just want to make sure she's out on the sales and marketing front. Distribution expansion. We moved from 9,500 stores to 15,000. We're going to hopefully double that this year, get it up to about 30,000 stores.
You know, traditional national retailers, we're heavily invested in Costco right now, but we are trying to move that, that reliance on the Costco world significantly down in 2025. Significant efforts in Walmart, CVS, a few other big, big players are coming to the table. We've got the regional expansion and some international. The international is not a key focus. Costco just wanted to take us into these regions. When Costco asks, you say yes. The other area of growth is online. The direct-to-consumer expansion has been very significant over the course of the year. You look at the early part of this slide, and it's back to when Erica had no resources and no advice around the table, and we were doing some very modest numbers online. Here you see the trajectory, and you know, it's very, very significant.
We passed the million-dollar-a-month mark in March, up about 30% over February. Year-over-year growth in the quarter is literally 1,500%. Very excited about that. We hope we'll do something like $15 million-plus in revenue here in the direct-to-consumer category this year. The marketing plan for 2025 is significantly expanded from our 2024 efforts. We spent about a couple of million dollars in 2024 supporting the brand. We're taking that up to $8 million this year, and we're striving for profitable growth, but this is a significant improvement in the marketing budget. As I said, we're going to get Erica out in front of a whole bunch of folks and telling our story. The innovation pipeline, folks, is very simple. We just give the big retailers what they ask for.
What you see on this slide is the innovation activity that we've led in 2024, more to come in 2025. This is simply just what Walmart, Costco, Whole Foods have asked for. We just, you know, give it to them, and it's been well received. All these products are now moving with significant volume. We're super happy about that and looking for more innovation to come on stream in 2025. Our business model is asset-light. We use co-manufacturers to produce the product. We have two co-mans in existence today, and we're onboarding a third in 2025. Actually, probably around the third quarter, I think we'll have the third co-man in place. There's no limit to the amount of product that we can make, so our growth is not hampered by production at all. We use a broker sales network to support our small sales staff.
We only have six sales folks, but the broker network is key. The 3PLs we use for the distribution, so there's no heavy investment there. We can beat up our suppliers now because of our volume, so we'll take advantage of that. Our board of directors, so I bored you with my story. Our board of directors, we're very, very fortunate to have some CPG expertise around the table. This fellow, Paul Norman, is the former president of Kellogg's North America, and he actually led the acquisition of our X-Bar for $600 million for Kellogg's, so knows the category, knows the protein bar category very, very well. Has been very, very helpful in providing stewardship to the brand. The next fellow I mentioned earlier, the Mars fellow, Richard Kellum, is a former C-Suite executive in the Mars operation globally.
He was there for about 20 years and has built a massive ecosystem of folks that we continue to tap on and bring into our world. He was stewarding these iconic bars, the Snickers, M&Ms, the Mars bars. He wasn't there when they bought the KIND bar. However, he knows all the folks that were involved and tremendous, tremendous knowledge that he brings to the table. Part of his network is the next director, Sinjin Walsh, is how you pronounce the name. Mr. Walsh is the former CEO of BBDO, a $3 billion division of Omnicom. He retired last year. Richard and he are good friends for 20 years, and he reached out, and we're very, very fortunate to have Mr. Walsh on our board helping us with the marketing and advertising initiatives. Erica, as I mentioned, our dynamic entrepreneur. Mr.
Bundy is my partner of over 25 years, a corporate governance guru and a banking guy. He is filling that role. Mr. Galero is a small-cap finance fellow from in Toronto. What those key three individuals are telling us is, "Look, stick to our knitting, build this brand, get it to $100 million of revenue." What is most likely to happen is one of these big players, a Mars, a Mondelez, a Kellogg's, is going to knock on our door and say, "Hey, look, we'd like to talk to you about an acquisition." You see the multiples that are attached to a $100 million-ish story. Very, very significant multiples are being paid for these brands. You know, that's what we're going to work towards over the next year or two, is build this thing to $100 million plus.
Hopefully, we'll have, you know, some interest from one of the majors. We'll engage an investment bank to help us run a robust auction. We've done that many, many times over the years. This is what we hope to have happen in the future. What's the road ahead for SBBC as a public company? Pretty simple, folks. We did some homework, and the better-for-you market trends are incredible. The CAGR in the space is very significant. The trading multiples awarded to public companies that stick to this area are significant. What are we going to do? We are going to look for the next TrueBar. We're going to focus on the better-for-you protein-enhanced snack and beverage category. We've already got a list of over 200 small companies that we're going to continue to track, and we'll see where this goes.
We're going to be very, very careful about any acquisitions and, you know, take our time. We're going to look for brands that are at least $20 million of revenue, so they're past the incubation stage. We are not going to be an incubator. We are going to be an accelerator like we've done with TRUBAR. We're looking primarily in North America, maybe in Europe as well. Where did we come up with this simple strategy of staying in this better-for-you protein-enhanced snack and beverage category? Pretty simple. These are some, if not most, of the public companies in the space. Top of the list here is a company that most of you probably have never heard of called BellRing Brands. BellRing has a $10 billion market cap on $2 billion of sales. What do they sell? Protein shakes, protein powder, and some protein bars.
They've built this business at an incredible pace, and they're awarded this fantastic multiple, almost five times. We just said, "Hey, look, why don't we just try and mimic this model, become a mini BellRing Brands, and keep driving the business forward?" That's our simple game plan. Current market cap picture is as follows. We are listed on the TSX Venture, and we have about 120 million shares outstanding, fully diluted. We trade around $1, and so we got about CAD 120 million market cap. Our ownership, I'm the largest shareholder. I have about 10% of the business. Erica, the founder of TRUBAR, has another 5%. Families that have known us for many, many years own another probably 30% of the business. Very close hands, about half of the shares outstanding are in our world. The rest is public float.
We showed you the stock chart earlier. We've had some success, a little wind in our sails. The financing highlights that, you know, I want to bring to your attention. We've raised $11 million, mainly led by us over the last two years, I guess. That's equity. Through our restructuring initiative, we managed to take $13 million off our balance sheet in debt. Very significant for this little business. We've also onboarded traditional lines. We have a long-term relationship with Bank of Montreal up in Toronto. They've given us a $10 million line to start, and we're looking forward to working with them. We took out our factoring. The former management team were factoring in order to fund the growth. Not a very attractive way to go about that, so that's changed.
Along the way, we also tossed in about $3 million to help on the working capital with a promissory note. That is our story. Happy to, you know, answer any questions, folks. Again, thank you for being here and listening to our little story. Any questions? No questions, folks? Yes, sir.
At what point do you guys generate a net income, or is that irrelevant to this business?
Good question. Just to repeat that, when are we going to be really cash flow positive? The answer is, the business is already, TRUBAR itself is already cash flow positive. Our motto is profitable growth. That is the plan for 2025. We do have a significant burden of public company costs associated with the business.
At the end of the day, we're still going to maintain a positive EBITDA when we combine, you know, consolidate the Pubco and the operating business. TrueBar, very, very healthy entity, and we're looking forward to a significant bottom line in 2025.
At your $100 million sale level, theoretically, you're a profitable company?
Yes, sir. Absolutely. Yep. Our goal is to be around 6-8% on the bottom line. We're very, very fortunate with the business model that we're executing on. You know, there's zero CapEx. We simply can look to pour more. If we continue this growth, we can pour more dollars into the marketing category just to accelerate the growth.
Where are the bars made?
Bars are made here in the United States. Very limited impact due to this whole tariff nightmare. We do have some product that's, or some ingredients that are sourced out of China, but overall, we think it's going to be a very minimal impact. We have, as I say, two co-mans about to onboard a third. Nice geographic distribution for those manufacturers. Thank you for your questions. Anybody else? No? Oh. Yeah, great question. Look, the question is, any plans to uplist? We certainly have been approached by a few investment banks wanting to, you know, bring us to the U.S. markets. We trade on the OTC exchange now, as well as the Toronto Stock Exchange Venture. I would say 2025, that's not part of our plan, but, you know, certainly could consider it in 2026. You know, there's a number of banks that already have talked to us about helping us along the way. Any more questions, folks?
Thank you so much.
Fantastic. Thank you all.