Full Transcript

Sari
The end of the year is quickly approaching and I want to invite you to get the end of year checklist that I created for Fuel members and Master Your Business students. You can get this exact same checklist for free at foodbizsuccess.com/endofyear, all one word. And I am also offering a limited number of deep dive 90 minute or three hour sessions. If you're local in the Denver area, we can do it in person, or we do it on Zoom. Imagine walking away with decisions made clarity about your goal, what it's going to cost you as far as your time and your resources, making decisions and having an action plan. You are feeling confident heading into 2024 If you would like to get one of these deep dive sessions, go to foodbizsuccess.com/deepdive. 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 are actually in, and food founder journey 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. So glad you're with me today. Just as an update for anybody I know a lot of you been asking, I am doing much better. The stitches are annoying on top of my head, but the cut has healed for the most part. And now the most challenging part of all of this is finding an appointment to get the dang stitches out. Like I was able to get them in Okay. All right, pretty fairly quickly, reasonably through Kaiser. But now it's like six weeks for an appointment. So I may have to resort to some alternative measures, we'll see. In any case, yes, I am doing much better. And it made me really remember how important our brain is and that I need to slow down and protect this baby at all costs, because I definitely had a little minor concussion on Friday and was so out of it. So anyway, yes, doing much better. Thank you for your concern and your kind words and some very funny words too. I know I need to create a better story than just a lamp light fixture heavy thing fell on my head. And some of you offered me some very good alternatives. So thank you for that. So I was at the gym this morning and I had a completely different topic I was going to do a podcast on and the gym is always a good place for me to think you know, I kind of have my routine down now. And so there's times I do weightlifting. So there's time in between to kind of my brain wanders and somehow it got on this idea because I've been thinking about a couple of calls with either clients or discovery calls people thinking about, you know, wanting to learn about coaching with me.There's been kind of a theme that I've noticed lately and so this may turn into a bit of a rant. We'll see I'm going to try to temper myself but be forewarned, rant may be in your future. Okay, here's what came to me. Your time is not free. I cannot tell you how many people I work with in all of my programs, in Food Business Success, in Fuel, in Master Your Business, in one on one coaching that I'm hearing and constantly reminding people that their time is not free. When you are running a business, we need to remember this. We need to account for it. We need to make decisions and start setting up a smarter business because your time is not free. You have other things you could be doing with your time and I get so tired. So it hurts my heart, especially women, you guys, I hear it mostly from women and a lot of you moms out there, and you guys have the most on your plate. And yet you discount your time that you spend in your business. And you end up just spinning your wheels doing all of the doing. And it's exhausting, of course. And you're not really creating, you are not I will say that emphatically, you are not creating a sustainable, long lasting business. And many of you come to me with big goals. So what really like prompted this is I was talking with a potential client yesterday, mom of three kids. She has a a baked good product, and it looks amazing, and all these things. And she was telling me about she did a summer a couple years ago at a farmers market. And she was very proud of herself that she was like, hey, this, you know, I think I profited about 50% and that's pretty good, right? And I kept track of all my records and created a spreadsheet. And you know, at the end of the day, I netted 50%. And I said, okay, great, that's awesome, your first summer out. Did you factor in any of your time in preparing the product, in running your farmers market booth and all of the prep work, all of the marketing, social media, all of the wrap up work? She's like, no. If we factor in your time, you are probably making minimum wage or less. And you're definitely not netting 50% profit. I cannot tell you how many people do not at the very least do not want to put their time into their product. And one of the things in one of the very first modules, module three, in Food Business Success. And if you want to do a deep dive session, I give you this video and the tools as part of that package. But you need to factor in your time for making and packaging the product that is part of your cost of goods sold. So at the very least, I want you to be measuring how much time this takes. And of course, I also want you to be tracking your hours like what amount of time are you spending on this business? Let me ask you this. What is the most valuable currency in the world? Just think about it and answer it to the best of your ability. The most valuable currency in the entire world. Most people will answer the US dollar, the euro, the yen something like that. No, it is your time. And yet you all give it away at so low cost. You devalue your time, and you're just giving it away. Like yep, I will give it away to whoever asked me, I will give it freely to my business. And we need to be working smarter in our businesses. I teach in Master Your Business, the Turn Key business model, something that someone else would buy, because it makes money, because it makes money without you there. That is what a turnkey business is. And yet so many of you, your businesses don't make any money, unless you are there making the product unless you are selling the product unless you're doing all of the social media, and let alone all of the backend stuff like your financials and tracking and taxes, all of that, right. And I know you're saying to me, I don't have the money to go pay somebody to do my bookkeeping, to go pay somebody to do my social media, to pay somebody to make my product. I totally get that. At the beginning. Yeah, you're probably going to have to put in a lot more time, free time. But I want you to look at it like an investment. I want you to look at what are the opportunity costs of doing this business?. And you're going to be making a financial investment and a time investment. And you have to think about what else could I be doing with my time? And it's not just about making money. It's not just trading dollars for hours, like well, I could go work at this business. I could go shop for Instacart. I could go drive Uber and I trade my time for dollars. That's the like laypersons dilemma, right? There we're always up against. An entrepreneur thinks differently. It is not about trading dollars for time. It's a different dynamic, there's a different paradigm that happens. And what I really want to do in my life, in my mission, is to help entrepreneurs make the shift from just trading dollars for minutes, and shift into an entrepreneur mindset, where we are exponentially growing the amount of money that's coming in, and actually not increasing the amount of time but decreasing the time that you're spending on your business. And at the very least, decreasing the time and the stuff you are no good at. And delegating that to others so that you can go do the things that shine, that you are the best at. The things that only you can do. In addition to looking at opportunity costs of where you could be making money, I also want you to think about the opportunity costs of, hey, this is going to take time away from my family, like what is that worth for me? It could take time away from my health goals, what is that worth? And we have to just be really intentional and acknowledge it upfront. So many of you start businesses and you don't understand what the true costs are. And that is what gets you in so much trouble is that it's kind of like you're stepping into the lukewarm water, that slowly turns up to a boil right, my dad used to always tell me about the frog and the lukewarm water. And then you turn up the heat. And it slowly boils, right? Versus if you were jumping into a hot boiling water, we jump right out. But we don't even notice the toll that it ends up taking. And so many entrepreneurs, so many founders, and I definitely am working with people and I've seen people who are like I'm out. This took such a toll on my health, it took a toll on my relationships. It took took a toll on my relationship with myself, with my kids. It took a toll on my bank account because they didn't go in with eyes wide open making an intentional investment and with an entrepreneur mindset. So I want to tell you what I believe that means. There is a shift of not trading dollars for minutes and hours, it is how can I create systems where I go in and I perfect, right? I go and I figure out. I invest my time to figure out what the packaging is and what the product is and how to scale it up. And I create a system that can be duplicated, I am pushing decisions down to the lowest level in the hierarchy possible. Because I want you to be thinking like a CEO. Listen, a CEO can take out the trash. Of course. A CEO can shovel the walk. Right? But they don't as a regular course of their day. They have the ability and sometimes they do. The best CEOs will get in there and be in the trenches. But it's doing it on purpose, not doing all the hats. They are intentionally saying, we are going to hire out some of those things. We're going to push decisions down to the lowest person, the lowest roll in the org chart, and make this repeatable, make these non screwupable. That's not a word. But you get my drift, right? Like, you do not need to be in the kitchen making your product. Yes, you created the recipe, you created the formula, you created all the magic, but you over and over and over again making the product is not going to be sustainable, because you will never be able to find the time to grow, to take it to the next level. And there is very little profit. I mean, yes, you can be profitable at a farmers market. But I just want you to remember like, we can't repeat you. You have a certain amount of time and a certain amount of bandwidth. And that is why your time is the most precious thing. What you pay attention to is so valuable. Because what we want to be doing is perfecting the system of production, perfecting the farmers market, perfecting the system's the backend operating systems around your cash flow, around your forecast, around your activities and priorities and all of that so that you can hand it off to someone. It is vital for the health of your business. Because sorry, I didn't close the loop on that, at a farmers market. Let's say you're going to a farmers market and you're like, cool. I even factored in my time and I still made some profit. Amazing, right? That's so cool. But let's say you make a profit of $200. Okay? Is that enough for you to really live on, right?

Sari
Like, multiply that over time, that's $200 a week, if you're lucky. Okay, that's was that $10,000, like, you probably cannot live on that. And that's probably nowhere near what your goal is. Now. If it is, I am all in. Right? If you're like vacation money for the family, a 100%. I am with you, we will make that as successful as possible. But many of you are coming to me with huge goals, you're like, I want to be making a salary of 60k, 100k, 200k. I am all in but you cannot scale yourself. You do not have enough hours in the day to do all the stuff that you are doing right now. And we get stuck in this comfort zone of like, I know how to do this. And going out and doing the next thing that my business requires is going to be scary. It's going to be unknown. It's stuff I don't know how to do. Yeah, it is. And I just want you to question like, am I retreating? Am I staying small by trying to do it all? And what is the value of my time? Here's how I want it to look. And Patrick with Denver Bone Broth is such a great example. So I want to highlight him, shout out! So he and I are working together one on one. And he started in farmers markets, got traction, got momentum. And in the first year, he and his wife worked all of them. And they did a couple of farmers market, maybe they just started out with one, but then they grew the next year. And they're like, we can't be at all of these farmers markets. And we still want a life and his wife works full time and like, they're like, yeah, we don't want this lifestyle for us. But we still want to continue the farmers market. So they perfected their system, they created processes, that then they could go out and find other people who are passionate about the product to work at their booth for them. And so that's exactly what they've done. Now they're in, I don't know, three to five. Sorry, Patrick, I should know this. In any case, they're in a bunch of farmers markets, they have great people working for them, they're super passionate about the product, it is possible to find great help at a farmers market, I promise you. And then the next thing was he had to let go of production. It's scary. It's really scary to hire somebody to bring in somebody whether it's contract or as an employee, and there's kind of, you know, legal areas and things that you need to consider before doing either one of those. But he's like, I know, I need to let go of this, I cannot go to the next level of the business if I am the one making the product. So he then found somebody as a kitchen manager, created processes and systems so that he doesn't have to be there. Now we're working on is that 10x goal that he has to really create the business that he wants, the lifestyle and the finances that are coming into his life from this business. Now, those of you who think you're going to be making 100k salary in the first year, I have news for you. Please let that go. It is a three to five, even seven year journey for you to be creating that kind of salary. Unless you have some big money backing, you are ready that you can go in and like make a bigger splash upfront. Most of the people I work with are kind of bootstrapping and taking this a little bit slower. I just want to put that out there as like reality check for you. I can't tell you how many brands, and I work with and talk with a lot of big brands that they're like yeah, you're five still not paying myself. So let's just get a little reality check. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just is going to take more time than you think. And here's the thing and Rob's podcast with MOR Kombucha is a really good one to listen to. Because he has invested in who's and the same is true for Patrick. He is investing in who's and I've done a podcast on who's and being willing it's really scary. I get it. It's scary to make the investment in people and systems and service providers, contractors, coaches, things like that. But what we need to be constantly be thinking about as an entrepreneur is, how do I leverage my time? How do I put some of the work in up front, which is exactly what I give you in the end of your checklist, and then doing a deep dive with me, I'm doing a limited number of deep dive sessions, there's a 90 minute block, or even better a three hour block. I cannot tell you how impactful this three hours can be for your business to really set you up. I've done them with a number of clients already this fall, and every one of them walks away with like, oh, my gosh, I have a plan, I've made decisions, I feel so much more clear. And I know exactly what to be focused on and what to put in the parking lot. And that is one of the best investments you can make in your business. Because if you don't know it, you're spinning your wheels. And next thing, you know, it's a year later, and you're not that much further along. And a lot of effort, a lot of your time gets wasted and spent. And that's when people are like, eff it, I'm out. This is too hard, I'm spending too much energy, I'm feeling burned out, I can't keep doing this versus let's make some decisions. Let's get a plan. Let's have clarity. Let's make sure it's all aligned to your big 10x goal, what you really want out of this business, the lifestyle that you got into it. Remember, you probably got into it for fun and freedom and sharing your product with the world. You didn't get into it to work 80 hour a week, or 50 a hour week, or whatever that is. You know slaving away over a stove or hot farmers markets and things like that. So what I want you to do is be willing as an entrepreneur, yeah, it's scary, it's risky, things are probably not going to turn out. They won't, a 100% of the time. But some of them will. And if you do it right, which is exactly what I teach in Master Your Business is how to delegate well to set up a system for success with processes. And not just delegating through abdication, which is what a lot of people try to do, they just get so overwhelmed with the amount of time that they're spending in their business, that they just find the first warm body. And they're like, I don't know, you go figure it out. I know, I just can't take on one more thing. And that's, I think, where we don't make the best investments of our money. And we don't set people up for success. And then we get really frustrated, and we take it all back. And then you're really stuck because now you're like, I don't trust anybody else. I have to do it all myself though like control freak. As an entrepreneur, like we already have a pretty strong need to control everything. And then once you've been burned, because you don't delegate well, you delegate through abdication, and then the business starts falling apart because you didn't set them up for success and let them know what was in your brain. They can't read your mind unless you write it down. So you don't let them know what you expect and you just hope they'll figure it out. And then everything kind of starts to fall apart again, you take everything back. Now you're really stuck. So I'm like pausing. Wow, that was a lot.

Sari
So I told you this was not the most like well thought out podcast. But I think that there's so much here to take away and hopefully it wasn't too ranty. But I think if there's any takeaways that I want you to be mulling over, to be marinating on is, am I valuing my time? Am I seeing my time as something that I need to give very intentionally, and make an investment in my business and set parameters and boundaries ahead of time? What am I willing to give? And what do I want to outsource? Doing it well, like setting up systems for success is so important. And most people don't know how to delegate because we've never done it before. And you have probably been the one that has been delegated to and now you need to be the boss. And most of us are terrible bosses. In Chapter Nine of Key Ingredients, I talk about the boss employee relationship, and how we're terrible bosses to ourselves and also terrible employees. And then let alone if you bring on additional labor, additional support. If you don't get that relationship right with yourself first, it's kind of a disaster when you try to bring in additional people because now you don't just have a production problem or Farmers Market problem, you have a people problem, you have to deal with other people. And so definitely getting all of that set up ahead of time and really creating a good boss CEO relationship with yourself and then with others, and then really thinking about your business as an entrepreneur, not just a maker. Not just the one who is doing all the things, but how can you leverage your time, use other who's, use people like myself, use graphic designers, use people off of Fiverr, use people to come work at your farmers market, help you with production, all of that, like paying them less, you know. Now, I'm not talking about like, stuffing people or making people work for, you know, less than minimum wage or anything like that. It's paying people what the task is worth, right? And pushing the decisions down to the lowest level of the org chart. You are a CEO. CEOs get paid well. And right now, you may not be getting a lot back from your business, if anything, but you are investing stock, you are a shareholder in your business. And eventually that business does need to pay you back, or it's just not going to be a business anymore. All right. I know, like I said, I know that was a lot, I hope that was helpful. I would love for you to consider a deep dive, can be so powerful. I have been doing these for a number of clients. I have kind of a methodology now that I use and it's super helpful a framework. And it'll also be tailored to wherever you are whether you have not launched yet. And we'll come up with a plan to get you launched. Or if you are already launched and you want to go to the next level, like setting you up for an amazing 2024. And doing it now, in the fall, in November in December. Before the first of the year. So many people want to wait until January and that's not how we do it, as if we're the real CEO of a business. We don't wait till January, we do it now. So you can get the end of your checklist at foodbizsuccess.com/endofyear. And that's a really good place to start to see like here's all the things I need to do to wrap up the year and also the things I need to be thinking about as a CEO to come out really strong and 24. And then as a follow up, I would highly suggest getting a deep dive scheduled. And that's at foodbizsuccess.com/DeepDive. And I'll put all the links in the show notes. There's a limited number of slots, because I can only my time is valuable, and I only have so much of it. But I would love to support you in this way. All right, your time is really valuable. Go make the most of it. Thank you for spending it on this podcast with me today. And until next time, have an amazing week. The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with 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. Just a reminder that you can come work with me inside Fuel for just $57 a month. You get to ask me questions on our group calls. And we have our community feed that you can get support from me and the community. Stop sitting around in confusion and doubt and slowing yourself down. Fuel is the fastest way to light things up and get some momentum in your business. It's the best way if you aren't sure if this is for you to come and ask me your questions to get the answers and stop spinning out in overwhelm and anxiety to get those questions answered by me and then once you are launching or have your product, then you have community, then you have additional support. The learning never ends. It's not like you launch your business and then you have no other questions. You just have new questions you have new problems to go solve. So come join me in Fuel, 57 bucks a month. What are you waiting for? Foodbizsuccess.com/Fuel