Starting or growing your packaged food business is hard! You need a compelling reason that is strong enough to overcome your doubt and desire to quit. It doesn't have to be noble, but it has to be true for you. 

In this episode, I give you some examples from my own life my clients' and why you need a hard why to push past the obstacles and when you want to quit. Quitting only slows you down on your journey to make your dream a reality. 

If you want help on your journey and some external accountability apply for Food Business Success today!

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I'm Sari Kimbell and I've done just about everything in the food industry. I have helped hundreds of packaged food business entrepreneurs. And now I want to help you make your delicious dream a reality. Whether you want to be successful at farmer's markets, online, or wholesale on the store shelves, Food Business Success is your secret ingredient. I will show you how to avoid an expensive hobby, and instead run a profitable food business. Now let's jump.

Hey there, how are you guys? It is fun to be back recording this podcast. It was not my intention to record today. But I've just had some things on my mind that I feel like really need to be said they you guys need to hear this. And it is such an important concept. I knew I wanted to do a podcast about it, about this topic around commitment, and what is going to keep you going when things get hard. But it was just time. And honestly, this is gonna be a little more of a stream of consciousness because I didn't actually like plan it all out with notes. But that's okay, it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be exactly what you need to hear at this time.

So I had a number of clients, a lot of my clients and students in Food Business Success are women, probably 75%. But all that to say that I've been thinking about several clients, women, who are going through some tough times right now. And they've come to me, I mean, these are people I've worked with probably over the last year on and off. And it's been really interesting to kind of watch this pattern of starts and stops and starts and stops and kind of a re- they get re energized and they really want to do it. And then they take a break, and they come back. So they kind of keep coming back into my life. And that's fine. I have no problem with that. I understand that life happens. Pandemics happen. Kids happen, right, all the things. But I was talking with one of my clients last night. And man, you know, if I were to say like, if there's anybody in the world who should give up, should pause, it would be her. And you know, she's she's a single mom, she's not working right now because of the pandemic. She has kids who are staying at home, they just had a re the state that she lives in put back into play shelter at home. There are just a lot of reasons that she should quit, right. And she's trying to, she has a lot of commitments, people who want her product, but you guys know and a product based business, you know, you have to put the cash out front, and she doesn't have a safety net, she doesn't have a well of money to draw from or friends and family to ask for a loan. So she's really kind of on her own and really struggling and yet, she just keeps going forward. She keeps wanting to figure it out. And I I know that our conversations, the coaching, the help that I provide for her is to help help her manage her overwhelm when she does get overwhelmed, and to give her priorities and focus and things that she needs to really focus on because often when, I see this all the time, when we get you know when we commit to something and then we have all these thoughts and all the things and all the drama and the things that we need to worry about six months from now, but we put it all on the plate right and so the last episode or a couple episodes ago, I talked about your obstacle thoughts and getting it all out on paper, and how important that is to to really put pen to paper and get it out of your brain and that definitely can help reduce overwhelm as well. But in any case,

and I and then I'm thinking about a couple of other women I work with who same thing, right, like starts and stops, and even though they may have a little bit more resources, you know, they're worried about the future, and kids being at home and their time is limited. And, you know, they finally maybe got them out of the house with school, and now they're back. So I guess as I was thinking about all of these, these amazing people in my life, trying to build their dream and, and create their business, I was thinking about, what is it about some people that they stick with it no matter what, and then others that kind of keep popping back in? But you know, are they really going to do this, right? And, you know, two years from now, are we going to still be in the same place? Will they have given up come all together? And there's nothing wrong with that. I don't mean to, this is not a shaming thing or guilt thing. Like, if you hear yourself in this and you decide that it's not for you, it's not the right time. Nothing wrong with that. But decide that for yourself, make that decision purposefully would be my, my recommendation. And I have had clients, and then you know, one in California who came to me and, you know, wanted to reinvigorate her business. And then as things kind of progressed over the next couple months, and she saw everything she needed to do and the commitment and the money and the investment and the time that she would have to put on the line. She actually I you know, I asked her to go back and really write down like, What is her reason? Why is she doing this? Why is it worth it? And ultimately, she came back and said, No, it's it's not for me, it's not the most important thing. It's not where I want to put my time and energy. And so she decided to shut it down. And I have a ton of respect for that.

But I guess that leads me into the concept that I want to talk about, that was kind of a long lead in, but that's what's been on my my brain. For the last couple days, I've been, you know, speaking with these different clients, is really about what is going to keep you going in your commitment and in your business to actually achieve that? So one way to think about it, that I've heard and I really love this concept is what is your hard why? Like what is that reason that you just have to do this? Like it is in your bones, it is in your you know, your very fiber of who you are like, you cannot not make this food for people. You cannot not get this out into the world. And it doesn't have to be a noble reason, like I'm feeding the, you know, the hungry, changing the world, like, there's just gonna be something there has to be something big enough that is going to compel you to keep going when things get hard. Like I it may just be that you love seeing the faces of people who try your product. It might be because you have this amazing product that has allowed you to eat, you know, a product that you love that is now gluten free. I know one of my clients, she had a beverage that had some functional benefits to it. And she you know, like her husband's knee was basically healed. And she saw tremendous results in her life with her gut. And she just had to bring this out into the world she wanted to, you know, share this with people and give them the same benefits that she experienced. So what is your hard why? What is your compelling

reason that will keep you going? When there's a pandemic and when bills come up? And when people question what you're doing. And when you just get scared when you feel the fear and the overwhelm what is going to help you push through all of that? There has to be something big and again, it doesn't have to be noble, but it has to be strong enough to propel you forward to help you keep taking action. I know I mentioned this before, but Grant Cardone says that you need to 10 times your goal. I really believe that that can help you create a bigger, compelling reason. So I want to share with you two, two stories from my own life, one where I did not have a compelling reason, I did not have that hard why that would keep me going. So I get asked a lot of times if I have a food business myself or had one, like, how did I get into this? And really, my experience mainly comes from Whole Foods Market, as well as selling wholesale into retail and restaurants. But yes, I did actually try my hand at starting a packaged food business, so to speak. A friend of mine, a good friend of mine, she and I were going to we wanted to start a black garlic business. And there were a lot of reasons to do this. Black garlic is a whole head of garlic that when you open it up, it's like it's not quite it's not fermented. That's actually not what is the term, you know, technical term. But it's, you're actually transforming just regular white garlic into black garlic through a process that's basically breaking down the sugars. And then it turns black and soft. And it's almost spreadable. And it's kind of a culinary ingredient that a lot of restaurants use. So some of our reasons for doing this were she owned a online garlic business where she was selling, like brokering, buying wholesale garlic from farmers and then set reselling it to customers. So we had a great supply of amazing garlic that was very high quality. And, you know, we had great prices, with her relationships with wholesale. So that was one reason. We knew that on her website, black garlic was the the highest, you know, search term that had no result on her website. So that we knew that there was a demand for it. And we knew that we could make money like good money on this. The pricing is like $40 per pound. So we you know, we looked at our inputs, and we had a really good margin. And we knew that there was demand for this, both from a consumer standpoint, as well as like, going into wholesale and restaurants and, and even in in grocery right packaging it up. And we knew we could create or we knew we had to high quality ingredients. So we were able to make amazing black garlic using a home machine. But then our trick Oh, and I also was managing a commissary kitchen at the time. And so I had access to the kitchen at no cost. So that was another huge reason. Like, yes, like this seemed like a really good idea. All signs pointed to go, right? You'll you'll laugh at this, but I actually don't love garlic. I actually do like black garlic. But I do have kind of a strong aversion to like raw garlic or powdered garlic. So it was a little funny that I was going into a garlic business. But in any case, we started and we had a great idea to how to scale this up. We put some money we bought a bread proofer and she had a boyfriend who was very, you know, great at like tinkering at things and scientific and engineer. And he was like yeah, I think I know I can do this and this to the machine and we can, you know,

kind of rig this machine to do what we need it to do. Basically it's like a two week process that it needs heat and humidity at certain temperatures for a certain period of time. We do all that we buy this proofer. I just remember as like putting it in her stepdads truck and driving it back about an hour and we got it all set up. We're very excited. You know her boyfriend kind of did the modifications. And we here's the lesson learned we put in like all those garlic like we were confident that this is definitely gonna work and and then you know we should not have done that large of a test batch by any means because we end up wasting all this garlic but in any case we we thought it would do this certain thing while we were monitoring through we got like a Bluetooth kind of monitor and the machine kept shutting off. And we could see that it wasn't doing what it you know, the humidity wasn't where it needed to be. And so we just kept trying and trying, and we, you know, we couldn't use these home machines because they weren't commercial. And even if we could, I mean, it wouldn't ever, it's like, you know, we could only do eight bulbs at a time or, and so we were just really hit, you know, beating our heads against the wall, and trying all these things, and re rigging the machine and buying new parts. I mean, we definitely invested some money, I would say, we probably put in $1,000, in this testing phase. So we started, you know, I really am a true believer, and this is what I do with my clients is like, we can figure anything out. And I really believe that, you know, Marie Forleo has a great book, everything is figure-out-able. And, and I live by that. But you know, when things got hard, and I was like, I do not want to go back to that kitchen, I have to go check this, it's not working, we've wasted this garlic. We tried it again, and again, we got smart and did smaller test batch. But it just wasn't coming together. And, you know, we did some research and really, like, the only option was, you know, to keep, we could hire maybe somebody to make a machine for us or see if we could find somebody else who could really, you know, rig up this proofer and maybe or maybe find, you know, look at some other lower cost option. But it would still take an investment. Or we could buy basically a $5,000 machine that was pretty big, we would need a lot of room for it. And it was in China, right? Like, so they would be shipping it over. And like that felt pretty sketchy. Like that was a big investment. And like, would it work? And do we even have the space for it? I mean, that's a big commitment.

So ultimately, I just kind of came to a place where I was like, Huh, no, my heart's not in this. It was kind of fun. There was definitely like, Oh, let's see if we can do this, right. And it's fun to do some with your friend. And, but ultimately, I said, you know, I'm not into this, like, this, just I didn't have a compelling reason, right? I didn't have enough of a hard why. And even though there were a lot of potential benefits and opportunities, and we may, you know, if we could have figured it out, we maybe could be like, having a huge black garlic business. But, um, that, you know, I didn't have the the compelling why and so ultimately, we like sold the proofer, you know, for half of what we paid for it and

just kind of cut our losses, and it was fine. It was no big deal. But I learned a lot from that. And I'm really grateful that I had that experience. I mean, I learned a lot about what you guys go through. And when you're, you know, in a, in a kitchen, you're trying to figure out your formulas and how to make things more consistent and, and speed up your time and all of that stuff. But so that's my experience with my own food business. And then, um, and then I want to share kind of the opposite example of starting my own business and ultimately starting Food Business Success. So when I I started my consulting business about almost five years ago. And, you know, that was actually when I was in doing the commissary kitchen, I was doing a lot of things to kind of figure out where I wanted to be in this food space, and actually had a different name. My business name was something else. And yeah, for reasons I will share in just a minute, that's why I can't say it but I was going along pretty well. And I had gotten a couple of big organization clients. I had a nonprofit and then I had a another big client and things were starting to really like yeah, okay, I can do this, like I can be an entrepreneur. And I did get my very first one on one client that year.

So this is two years ago. And you know, really I committed that I did want to do help package food businesses and had like one maybe I even had a couple of clients by by the summer. And I'm so grateful for those people who trusted me to to do work with them and help them and great relationships, but in any case that year, my two large clients, my big organizations, both folded within maybe six months of each other. They decided to, to shut down. And I was also consulting with the Small Business Development Center at the time and really growing my skills and resource banks, for people wanting to start a packaged food business. So I knew that's where my heart was at. But in case, you know, these two big clients shut down. And I, I was like, on the floor would panic, I had some some panic attacks and, and really was overwhelmed and freaking out about what have I gotten myself into? It's time to get a real job. I actually did start applying for jobs and I got a job that would have been basically what I was wanting to do. But it paid terrible. And, and then I got a cease and desist letter from, from an attorney and a very official, you know, FedEx envelope, and basically the name that I had been using for the past three years I could no longer use and, you know, of course, I tried to fight it and figure out if I could, if I could fight it, and all of that.

And ultimately, so I found myself in a place where, you know, I was up against a wall, like, could I you know, should I even be doing this? Like, all signs pointed to find a real job. This was fun, great idea, but time to, you know, time to pack that in. And I really, man, that was a rough, rough September. So it's interesting that it's September now. And I've been thinking a lot about it, that, you know, what was, I'm so grateful now for that time. But thinking a lot about that time. And, and wow, like that was hard, really, really hard. And ultimately, I did some real deep soul searching, and, you know, working through my, my drama, and I

really discovered that I did have a really strong compelling why, I had a hard why. And that is because I love helping you. I love it is it fills my soul when we create a product together, and I see that product come into physical form. And I am there when you get that, you know, that small account and you get on Amazon and you start your e commerce business. And you you know, come back to me and we celebrate those wins and you know, those first sales and then and then we get the next bigger, you know, we get a bigger account and a bigger account. There is just no better feeling in the world for me. And that really is my compelling why. I mean I am in my zone of genius. I when I am doing this work, I love creating resources and helping people through this the space when they do get stuck. And I you know, I really am like i said i believe in that everything is figure-out-able. And I will help figure those things out for my clients. So there's just no better feeling for me. So that is my my hard why. My, you know, my compelling reason. So I dug deep and in I guess maybe late well, I think I had to change the name by end of October. And so I relaunched. I decided Yes, I want to keep doing this I'm declining the job offer even though it is basically doing what I'm doing now and love it, but it was not going to pay the bills. And I decided to like shut down all the job alerts I decided to recommit, go all in on my business and decided to start that's when I decided start Food Business Success. And then I also relaunched my consulting company as Sari Kimble Consulting. I tried, speaking of that, I just, I remember like trying to come up with another creative name, and having all these options and you know, buying a whole bunch of domain names, URLs, and ultimately, you know, someone was like, why don't you just use your name? And I really thought, Well, I don't have anything better I can always change it again and now I'm so glad that it is my name anyway, but so I I dug deep my hard why said, Yes, I'm going to double down on this, I am going to figure this out no matter what I'm going all in. And that's when I really created food business success as a way to help entrepreneurs, people, just like you who have an idea who want to grow their business and don't know how, because you've never been in the food industry. Why would you know how? And I wanted to help those people who had more time than money through Food Business Success. And then I do work with clients one on one. And I like to say, you know, those are the people who have more money than time, so there's something for everyone.

So I want you to think about, that's kind of my my story and how I have used that compelling reason to keep me going in my business. And there certainly have been a lot of other setbacks. It's also helped me to take on new challenges, to take risks, to launch the YouTube channel, to launch the podcast to, you know, asking people for help, to just, you know, hiring people to help me like all of those risks, and feeling all of that discomfort has really helped me to, to keep going and to take bigger risks and to grow my business. So one thing I would I want you to really think about what your compelling reason is, and if it's strong enough to help you move through the challenges, the obstacles, and to take some risks, and invest in yourself, and do what's going to absolutely be uncomfortable. I find that as soon as people do commit to themselves, like, yes, I'm going to do this, immediately there's probably something that will come up in your life like bills, or a pandemic, or kid challenges or parent, you know, get sick or something, there will be something that will challenge your commitment. And that is why you need that compelling reason that hard why.

So one thing I found really helpful, and I've seen it in my own life, as well as in my clients lives is when they actually like they've had that hard why, they're really clear on that. But they still need a little extra push. And so one thing I find is committing ahead of time. When you put down some money, when you put down an investment, that is going to really help you stick with your commitment, because you're like, Oh, I have I have put some things on the line, I have to show up even when things get hard. And I've done this in my own business, I have invested in coaches, and put a lot of money down like money that was uncomfortable. I mean, it wasn't impossible, but it was not comfortable. So I highly recommend that you look for something that you can commit to ahead of time that you have kind of locked yourself in almost to to this goal. And it should feel uncomfortable it like it shouldn't be like Yes, I'm so fun to pay somebody money to help me right. But it will help you to push through those uncomfortable times when you know that I'm there, you know every month asking you about your progress, getting your questions answered, helping you to prioritize and really focus in on your next things that you need to do and providing accountability. That is huge for keeping your commitment going. But you have to have that compelling reason. And all of those setbacks and obstacles. You know, I think back I want to kind of loop back around to these these clients. I mean, ultimately your setbacks can help you quit. To say, No, this isn't what I want. It's too hard. It's not worth it for me, or they are going to build your resilience because there will always be setbacks, there will always be problems in your business. I talked in an earlier podcast, so there's always going to be 10 problems that you need to solve. The problems just change or they get bigger as your business gets bigger.

So can you use those setbacks to strengthen your resolve to strengthen your hard why and to keep coming back to that and saying, I am never giving up on this dream? No matter what I'm all in. I am digging deep for some courage to keep going to take the next steps. I'm going to commit ahead of time By making some investments that I can't just, you know, get out of, or I would have some, some thoughts about just walking away from. And then, and then show it to yourself, like, make yourself proud go all in and find that reason, keep going use those setbacks for your resilience to build that that muscle. And last, you know, go check out those last couple podcasts about doing hard things and obstacles, obstacle thoughts basically create turning your obstacles into solutions and next steps and really using your obstacles to to make strategies for your next steps. Any case, I think, like I said, I, I didn't write this one down, as well as maybe I have in the past. But I wanted to really share what was on my heart. And just thinking about all of you who I really want to do this, and you keep coming back and you check out my videos. And you know, actually, I just had somebody sign up for Food Business Success, who I spoke with, almost exactly six weeks ago. And she was like, yeah, you know, let me see how far I can get on my own. And then six weeks later, she reached out to me and said, You know, I just had this realization that I am no farther along, I have gotten nothing else done. I can't seem to figure some of these key things out, and I need help. And and so she committed, right? She she locked herself in to Yes, I want this bad enough that I'm willing to put some money on the line. And to that my reason is strong enough. So I hope that helps if you're struggling with should you keep going when you face obstacles.

I would love to help you in your journey. But there are so many resources as well. But go find people to help you. Build a community, create a community, find people to support you. It is really really hard to do this alone, for sure. I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I can't wait to talk with you soon.

Are you ready to start that delicious idea that you make in your home kitchen, or grow your existing packaged food business and take it to the next level? The most successful food business entrepreneurs have support, guidance, focus and accountability to help them make it happen quickly without wasting time or money. Plus, I think starting your packaged food business should actually be fun. Food Business Success is your secret ingredient to creating your food business dream. Please don't go this alone. Check out the private free Food Business Success Facebook group to connect with other foodprenuers. Get your questions answered quickly, share your wins and receive special training and tools I only share inside the private community. Just search for Food Business Success on Facebook, or get the link in the show notes. Curious about how Food Business Success can help you? Head over to FoodBizSuccess.com and fill out the application to see if you're a great fit for the program. Together let's make your food business dream a reality.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai