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Sari 0:00
Maybe you like sitting around in confusion and overwhelm and doubt, but I sure don't. I want to skip the line and experience. I want to get inside a community with an expert who knows how to help me and understands my problems and gets me answers fast so that I can make decisions and keep moving forward. I also want someone to hold me accountable and keep me focused on my business and moving it forward and limit the life distractions that happen for all of us. And I want to be surrounded by a community of other entrepreneurs who understand what it's like. It helps me to not feel so alone and so overwhelmed in what I need to do to put myself out there and possibly be judged or rejected or laughed at, and all the crazy stories that our brain makes up when we start to do something uncomfortable, when we get out of our comfort zone. That is why I am for a limited time opening up the Fuel membership as a standalone product. So you can go and just get the Fuel membership. People ask me all the time, I've already have a business, I'm already launched, how can I work with you? How can I get information and feedback and community? Well, now is your chance. It starts at $57 a month and you can cancel at any time. So come and take a small risk that has potential for huge payouts to skip the line and get yourself into action and get yourself results so much faster than just spinning out on your own. I see the difference that it makes in entrepreneurs who come to the calls, who get coaching, who connect with community. We have members in there that are constantly reporting, I tried this, I did this I got this advice, and I am increasing my sales. It is working, I'm going faster than I ever thought possible. And studies show that you are 95% more likely to actually achieve your goals when you get accountability and support. Don't put this off, go to foodbizsuccess.com/fuel and get inside. I look forward to meeting you in Fuel and we are going to add some rocket fuel to your business.

Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host Sari Kimbell, I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach and it's got to be fun. In this podcast I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you're actually in, and food founder journeys so you can learn what worked and didn't work and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now let's jump in!

Welcome back to the podcast and welcome to episode 155! Which means that we are one episode away from three years of podcasting, which is just wild to me. I just had no idea this would just keep going. I didn't really know what was going to happen with it. But here we are and I'm so glad that you have been on this journey with me. If you are enjoying this podcast, I would love for you to take one minute or less to go to Spotify or Apple podcasts and leave a review. It really helps the podcast to be found by others. And to let them know it's a worthy listen to if you are starting a package product business. So I spent a little bit more time really thinking about what I wanted these two podcasts to be you know, today and then the actual three year podcast. And without putting too much pressure on it, of course, because contrary to popular belief, pressure does not usually actually create our best work. It just creates something which for some of us is better than nothing. But in any case, I wanted to think about what would be the most impactful, what would be the most helpful as we're hitting this milestone? So I'm going to do two different episodes on what I believe are the keys for success. The one thing, well it's really two things. Those things, if you can master these two things, you are going to leapfrog in your business, you are going to have such an edge over people who have not learn this, who don't get it and aren't embodying it. I've been thinking a lot about the people I have worked with over the years, and the ones that are still in business, that are still going after it, and have seen success after success after success. Chanel was a recent one. And you guys know, she's been on a couple podcasts. But she started with me, way back not that far, actually 2021, couple years ago, and decided to finally make this dream a reality. And we started working together inside Food Business Success and we had some calls together. This was before I started running Fuel, the membership. And we got her business launched. She launched GoodLove Foods that next spring, summer. And then a year later, I am presenting her with a check for winning the Colorado Collision Pitch Competition. I went with her to Expo West and supported her, cheered her on during your pitch competition there. She is crushing it, getting into new accounts, doing wholesale, expanding or direct to consumer. And then I get those texts this weekend from Ryan of Pup And The Pepper. And he's at the Weekend Of Fire at Jungle Jims in Cincinnati. And apparently, there's all these people that come from all over the country, including some of my other clients, which was so fun, he was talking to other people. And they won, they won first place for all the vendors votes and the people's votes for their hot sauces, which is just so incredible. And he's starting to make moves to open his own facility, and really growing the business. And so there's just so many stories like that, or like Amber posting in our Fuel community and she's like, I took this advice from Sari, got some coaching on how to make my Farmers Market booth better. And I did this sign and it's working like more people are coming into the booth, I'm starting to see more sales, more engagement. And so there's just so many wins. So many places I can point to of like, yes, like people I'm working with are being successful because if you're not successful, I'm not successful, right? I'm only here because of other people's success, which I love. It's so fun. I get to do the work in the world that I am most passionate about, but also brings me so much purpose. And that is the first key to your success, the key ingredients, right? That's what the name of my book is called. And I really believe this when I see founders transform this way that we go from passion to purpose, that everything changes in their business. And we do this in Master Your Business as well. This is one of our first things that we do. There's an energy shift that happens when people get clear about their purpose and everybody calms down, our businesses get more grounded. And we're able to take bigger risks and seize bigger opportunities. So let me explain this a little bit more and really help you understand the difference between passion and purpose. And give you some ideas on how you can start creating more of your purpose and living in that because that is a key to your success. So this will probably sound very familiar to many of you. But you have like a normal day to day job. You know, you're maybe you're I've worked with a lot of doctors and scientists and lawyers. But whatever you're doing, right, it's just like, you have your daily thing and then you make something amazing in your home kitchen. And you're making your cookies and your coffee and your kombucha and your salsa and hot sauce, or your body care, your lotions and potions, right? And it starts with a curiosity, right? There's this like, oh, let me learn about this. Like, it's something totally new. And you're like, this is fun, right? You get this boost of creativity or learning more about it, you are going in depth. And you're really having a lot of fun, right? So this curiosity, and then people start telling you, you should really start a business. Or you're kind of thinking yourself, what if I could start a business? What if this is a thing? What if I want to become an entrepreneur? Could I do this, right? And so we step from curiosity where we're just kind of playing around, we get a little bit more serious and now it's becoming a passion. And we're so passionate about our product. Like it just has to be exactly right and we spend all this time really going deep, we're going to learn about the way that sourdough and water and certain humidities affect our bread. We're going to talk about it all the time and people are going to start to know us by this thing that we're so into, right? And so we go from curiosity like to passion, we're really into it. And that's where businesses start most of the time, which is great. That's no problem. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard that story, it probably sounds familiar to you. But that's usually where people are at when I meet them. They're just talking to me so much about the product and how passionate they are about it. And maybe there's a little bit of a sense of like, and because it brings people together, and I love seeing smiles on people's faces. But really, let's be honest, we're really into the passion part of the business. And just as a side note here, what I often don't see is the same curiosity or passion for actually being an entrepreneur, for actually wanting to learn how to run a business. It's kinda like, that's just like, yeah, yeah, I got to figure that out. But I just really want to like focus on my cookies and my salsa. And so I think you need to have both before you actually start a business. My hope is that you will, at least are getting curious about how do I actually start a successful business? How do I become a really great entrepreneur? Like, what do I need to learn. And that's exactly what Food Business Success is about and who it's for, to help you start learning how to run a business, and then Master Your Business, we really solidify that and build the foundations of your business. But I do hope that there is if you're going to start a business, that there is at least a curiosity, if not a passion, because imagine if you had both a passion for your product, and a passion for learning how to run a business, and let's not beat ourselves up for not knowing how right from the start, you've never done this before. Most of the people I work with have never started a business before, you've been a nine to five, or you've had a regular job, you have people telling you what to do. And that's why the whole last chapter of the book is all about this mindset piece and becoming a successful entrepreneur. Anyway, a little tangent, but hopefully you have a passion for both learning how to start a business, you're not going to know how to do it yet. But you're curious, and you're interested and you're learning more, which is hopefully why you're listening to this podcast, right? It's part of indulging your passion for business and for your product. So while it's great that passion is what kicks us into gear, and gets us to start taking action and overcoming the motivational triad, which tells us to seek pleasure to avoid any kind of pain, especially mental, emotional pain, and to exert the least amount of energy, right? So passion is what's going to kick you out of that and over it and be like, okay, I'm going to start doing some things that are hard. I'm going to, you know, not seek pleasure, because starting a business is usually not that pleasurable. And it certainly does take a lot of energy. So you're in it, right, and you're doing it. And this is where people come to me and they get this is the stuck point. And this is where they can't get over themselves. There's some obstacle and usually it's them. I like to say the biggest problem in your business is you. Because we can have the best product in the world, we can have all the money we can have all the time. But if we can't get over ourselves and figure out why we are sabotaging ourselves, why we're procrastinating, why we keep getting stuck, then your business is dead in the water, right? It's never going to happen. So this is where we have to layer in the next piece and that is purpose. Purpose is what grounds us. It is what allows us to get outside of ourselves and take bigger risks, risk rejection, risk failure, put ourselves out there to be judged and fail, right? You are going to fail a lot. The road to success is paved with failures, and you're not entitled to an easy business. You're not entitled to a successful business. And when we only live in the passion, it's like that flame that goes out, right? It's like really powerful. It's got a lot of fuel behind it, but it just it's going to light up and then it's going to go out pretty quickly. And I'm sure you can probably think about projects in the past where if you only stay in the passion, you probably lose interest, right? It's not something you're going to keep doing especially if it involves money and turning it into a business because that's really hard. And so I just want you to think about when you're passionate about a person, right, like, you're falling in love, and you're so passionate about this person, we're not seeing so clearly, right? There's a lot of intensity there. And we may be aren't our most logical, rational selves, right? If you think about passion, things you've been passionate about, it's all consuming. I think about artists, right? When they're really passionate, and then they're just in it, and it's all about them. It's all about their work. And they're pretty unaware sometimes. I just think of like historical painters, right, that are so passionate, and they kind of don't care about other people outside of them. It's all about the work and the passion, we like to say, like, there's that phrase, that passion is all consuming. And so you're going to get kind of burned up by this passion. And then the first time you get criticized, the first time you fail, you're going to be like, I'm out. Or you're just not going to be making very rational logical decisions. And this is where when people have an expensive hobby, it's because they're living in the passion. And they're not actually going into purpose, and really creating a foundational business that actually works, that they're not doing the work of being a CEO in their business. If you're building a business on passion alone, it's going to be really shaky ground. And so what I want you to do is actually get outside of yourself, and really think about how is this business, how is my product going to make a difference in the world? As humans, one of our big drivers is to contribute, is to give back is to make a difference. And so we need to tap into that. So the first thing if you're like, I don't really have a purpose, or I'm not totally sure, maybe I kind of do. Tell me, Sari, do I have a purpose that's strong enough, that's going to be a solid foundation? What I want you to do is brainstorm, I don't know, 5 to 10 ways that you would love to change the world. If you could do anything right wave your magic wand, you could end hunger, you could end poverty, you could end sex trafficking, or abuse to animals, or you could change the way working mothers have to go and exist in the world with their kids as well, right? Like, you could change anything, just wave your magic wand. So write down 5 to 10 of these things. And then look at your passion. What are you really passionate about this product? And how could you create some intersections there? How could this product, this passion, actually go to serve and change the world to make a difference? And I'm going to give you some examples from some of my clients because they don't have to be giant, huge things. But you'll know when you start saying it aloud and you start you know, you circle those things that are most important to you. You'll know pretty quickly like yes, that really resonates with me. So let me give you some examples. So Sarah with 3rd Bird Komucha, her purpose is, it's kombucha, right? But she wants to change the way that work happens in the world, especially for women. So she has this bigger purpose of this working collective. And Kombucha's at the foundation of it but it's not the only thing and Moire Chocolate that she has a purpose for creating more transparency in the chocolate, the cacao growing industry and lifting growers out of poverty. Pup And The Pepper, Ryan has a purpose around helping animals, right, and they give a lot of money back to rescue centers and things like that. And then Brian with Magic Chunk to have more magic in the world and create more inclusivity through ice cream because I love what he says when I was up there. And he was doing his, he was so good at sales.

And he said because ice cream is a right not a privilege. I love that. And Chanel of GoodLove Foods has a similar purpose as well to create more inclusivity so that we can all enjoy the foods that we love and be together as community without, you know, excluding some people. I was recently coaching someone and she was saying she just can't get over herself like she wants she knows that she needs to be posting on LinkedIn and asking for support. She just relaunched her product. And she knows that she needs to be tapping into her network and asking for help. And she was telling me how she was just so stuck. And she was terrified. And she did not want to post this, but she knew she had to, and she just could not get over herself. And so I started asking her questions about her purpose, why this product? Why are you doing this business? And as she talked, it was all about the product at first. Well, this product is this and this is that and I said, no, I want bigger. Why did you start this in the first place? And as she finally started getting out of just the product itself, it started to be about other people. And that's when you know you're in your purpose is it serves other people outside of yourself? Because passion is very inclusive, it's very inward, right? It's all about me, me, me, me, my product, my stuff, my business, my thing, my money, all that, right? It's all about me, my posts, my marketing. And our purpose forces us to look outward. And it's time for us like in a bad way. It's just like, oh, it shifts it, right? Now, it's not just about my product, which is delicious, of course, it's amazing. But it's about how am I making a difference in the world? How am I serving? How am I helping others? And so what I told her is I want you to picture one of your clients, one of your customers, and imagine her is she is eating your product, and that you are just talking directly to her. She's the one who needs that. She's the one who needs to see this post. And who cares if 99 out of 100 people are like, oh, why is she posting that, which they probably wouldn't. But even if they had a judgement about it, if you could just reach one person, that would make it all worth it. And so it gets you out of your own head and gets you out of your own way where you are so worried about other people and their judgment and rejection of you. You're like, no, my purpose is bigger. I have to do this work in the world. I have to serve and I have to get this message out. How can I reach just one person? I definitely want to record these podcasts, right? I have a bigger purpose in the world. I believe everybody should try entrepreneurship because I think it helps you grow and become a better human in the world. And so I think about that one person that if I could just say one thing that helps one person then I am doing my work in the world, it is 100% worth it. And I'm willing to let other people think that I'm crazy, or that I'm willing to fail. And so purpose is what gets us out of our own stuff. It takes us from feeling it's all about me and look at me, it flips the spotlight around, I got to show up, I got to take action because people are counting on me. People need this. I am changing the world, right? Ryan is saving animals and helping animals thrive because he's doing his hot sauce. And that's going to help him get up every day, even when it's hard, even when there's no's, even when there's failures, right? And when you win, it's that much sweeter. And as an additional bonus, when we tap into our purpose, and we get out of the fiery all about us passion. We tap into purpose that neurobiologically it calms our brain down. It actually reduces anxiety, depression, it reduces our emotional reactivity, right? When we're passionate about stuff or just like, super emotionally reactive and purpose calms all of that down. It creates more well being for you. And when you are more centered, when you are feeling more calm, you are going to make better decisions, you're going to be more creative, you're going to like see opportunities that you would have been so closed off to before. And a huge benefit of having more purpose. A purpose driven business is that you are more intrinsically motivated to keep going, right? It really helps with that motivation factor because it's not just about you, you, you, and whether you feel like it today. It's people are waiting for me. And so it really does help spike your motivation and kind of keep you on a steady motivation cycle rather than the big highs that are just out of passion. And then you kind of stop and stall out, right? I'm sure you can relate to that. I know I sure can. So if you want to have a more successful business, if you want to stand the test of time, if you want to have a long lasting sustainable business, you have to go beyond passion, and create your purpose. So your mission should you choose to accept it is to jot down 5 to 10 ways that you would love to change the world, make it a better place, and then see if you can align with one or two of those in your actual product business. And then notice how do you feel in your body? Does it get you out of the me, me, me stuff, and get you focused on other people? Are you feeling more motivated to keep going? To do one tiny action instead of one giant leap that fizzles out quickly? So that's what I have for you today. That is your first key to success and then next week, I will bring you the second one as I celebrate three years and 156th episodes. Until next time, go and find your purpose. Tap into that and have an amazing week. The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with the how to speed up your journey and help you skip the line. When you are ready for more support and accountability to finally get this thing done. You can work with me in two ways. Get me all to yourself with one on one business coaching, or join Food Business Success which includes membership inside Fuel, our community of food business founders that includes monthly live group coaching calls and so much more. It's one of my favorite places to hang out and I would love to see you there. Go to foodbizsuccess.com to start your journey towards your own Food Business Success. Hey there, you're still here. How fun is that? If you want more, go and grab the book off of Amazon Key Ingredients: How To Turn Your Passion Product Into A Profitable Business. This is an actionable guide with step by step instruction on how to start or scale your product business. I also give you a special link so that you can access some book only resources. So what are you waiting for? Head over to Amazon or go to keyingredientsbook.com for more information.