Full Transcript

Sari 0:04
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 in.

Sari 0:38
Hey there, welcome back to the podcast. This episode is going to be one that you need to come back to over and over again. So just bookmark it and know that this is going to be something that's really going to help you in your business. And I want to give you that last reminder that today is the last day to sign up to become a member of Food Business Success to solve the problem of your time, to master your calendar in our bootcamp that is starting next week. And if you are like most of the people I work with, you have a time problem, you have a dream, you have something that you're trying to achieve with your food business, and you probably don't have enough time. And you don't know how to get more of it back. I want to remind you that today is the last day you can sign up as a member inside Food Business Success to get full access to the Master Your Time Bootcamp to create more time so that you can actually get the work done to achieve your goal, to launch that food business dream, or to grow it to the next level. We all have 24 hours in a day, we all have a certain amount of minutes, a certain amount of seconds in our day, are you making the most of it? This bootcamp is going to help you create more time to be more productive, to show up as the CEO of your business. And finally make this happen. All you have to do is join Food Business Success as a regular member. And this is the bonus, the summer bonus inside the program. And there's a three month money back guarantee so you have zero risk. What if this really does solve your problem? That you actually can create that small amount of time that is necessary in your weeks to be able to move your business forward. Plus, you get all the perks of membership and you get to start working with me one-on-one in our group membership calls. So all you have to do is go to foodbizsuccess.com, click on "I have an idea". And then fill out the application. And you can be on our calls live for our bootcamp, four calls. As well as all of the other perks inside Food Business Success. If you've been waiting, if you've been on the fence, today is your last day. And if you're listening to this after June 14th, it's not a problem, you can still join, you're just going to get access to those recordings. But this is the key to, I can give you all to hows, I can give you exactly what to do. But if we don't create more time in your calendar first, it's never going to happen. So I'm trying to solve the problem before the problem. And that is what we do inside Food Business Success. I would love for you to join me.

Sari 3:53
Listen, problems are forever. If you are alive, you have problems, right? This should not be news to us. And yet, so many of us are fighting against the reality of problems, that they exist. We think that there should not be problems in our life. And I like to say, your number one problem, your only problem really is that you think there should not be problems. You think your life should just go about swimmingly. You think when you start a business that should just be a straight line trajectory going upwards and everything is amazing and smooth. But that's just not how life works. And frankly, we really wouldn't want life to be that way. Imagine you just started your business and it all just like oh one thing after another like there were zero problems. You start the business, you find the kitchen easy. You get everything ready, you go to a Farmers Market, you make a ton of sales, you just keep moving along, you get into stores, whatever that goal is for you. And there's zero problems. It might sound nice on the outside, you're like, yeah, I'll take that, that sound amazing. But here's the thing is that you're not going to grow as a person, and you're actually not going to find a lot of reward, and happiness from that kind of situation. It's going to be too easy. You're going to be like, whatever, like it's not fulfilling. There needs to be a little bit of challenge, a little bit of grit, a little bit of overcoming obstacles, and showing yourself that you can get through anything. That you can solve any problem. And you know, that episode about happiness is really about making progress, right? And when we have an end result, that big goal, it's really about making progress towards that goal. And a lot of that progress is about solving problems. Big and small, right? How much do I charge? What do I name the product? What packaging should I put it in? Those are all just problems that need to be solved. And so I want to offer you this episode as giving you some tools to how to solve problems more effectively and just become a problem solving machine. I guess, just the family I was born into, I was, my dad was an engineer. My brother's very like an engineer as well. We just grew up in this household where like, we just tinkered and we looked at things with more of a scientific mind and like curiosity, and try not to look at things as like, oh, it's a big problem. But like, hmm, I wonder how we could solve that. And just get curious. So I feel like I do a lot of this naturally. And I recognize that I'm very grateful for that, like this is a skill that many of you don't have. It's not something you were raised with, it's not something that the school necessarily teaches you very well, at least very explicitly. And as entrepreneurs, if we just recognize that there will always be 10 problems in our business always, all the time. And all we have to do is just get better at solving problems. Just get back, get down to business and get to solving problems quicker and open our mind to looking for solutions, and then just start trying things, right? And I think, again, so much of your suffering comes from thinking that there should not be problems, that it should be easy. Let's question those shoulds. It should not be easy. In fact, why should it be easy? That's ridiculous. The most amazing entrepreneurs that you look up to, the people who do great things in history are because they solved amazing problems. And oftentimes, it is in the solving of the problem that new solutions come about, right? Think about all the amazing things in our world, all of these tangible things. They were created, they were invented to solve problems. The most amazing things in our world come about as a way of solving problems.

Sari 8:42
And here's one of the problems is that, one of the problems with your problems, is that many of you make problems personal. You think it's something happening to you, whether it's from another person, right? That person said this about me or didn't respond. Why is that co packer not responding? Well, why? You know, why is this employee doing this? Like we we make it about us, we make it mean something personal about us. And I will tell you that some of my biggest relief, because I'm very good at solving problems a hundred percent, I'm all in on that. But what I was not good at is that I would also make the problems mean something about me personally. And so I would get all up in my drama about that, right? And so it was creating a lot of drama before I actually got to solving the problem. And the more we can just drop the personal stuff and just not make any of this mean anything about you? That this is just life and there's outside circumtances that happened to us. And then we have thoughts about it. And this goes back to the model the think, feel, act cycle. But when you have an outside circumstance, right, it doesn't matter what it is, it's something happening. Then we have a thought. And sometimes that thought is, the universe hates me, this person hates me, why are they doing this to me, I cannot believe they're doing this. I cannot believe this is happening. What's wrong with me? Why can't I figure this out? I'm never going to be successful. So we make a simple problem. It's just a problem. It's just something that needs to be solved. And we make it mean all these terrible things about us. So the better we can get at just, yep, okay. And I'm not perfect at this, but I have gotten so much better. And it has given me so much more happiness and calmness and peace in my business. So let's say somebody emails you, your co packer or your kitchen emails you about a delay or something's holding up your production. Instead of going to all the negative freakout thoughts about how all this is personally happening to you. What I try to do is step back and say, these are words on a screen, right? Somebody was typing words on a screen. And let's just look at the facts of it, okay?We're not going to read into any interpretation of what we think it means about us, we're going to depersonalize it. And the more we can do this, the more we can take out that big drama explosion, the faster we just get to solving the problem. And then it's out of our life, right, we can move on to the next problem. So copacker or kitchen says XYZ is going to slow down your production. Don't take it personal, look at the facts and say, okay, what are the words on this paper? All right, this date, this is what's happening, right? We want to identify what the actual problem is. And when we can stay out of it personally and just look at it as a more neutral circumstance, this is something happening in the world, here are the facts, then our brain can actually get to work on solving the problem creatively. Didn't say that well. Be more creative, right? When our emotions are high, our logic and our thinking is going to be really low. It's just the way that our brain is wired, we have these two parts of our brains, right? Our primitive brain that when we go into freak out, we want to just tell everybody about how horrible this is and can you believe this, and we get all up in our own drama, and we make it mean something about us. Our problem solving skills get really, really low. So you just want to think about this as like, this is a skill. This is a tool. The most successful entrepreneurs are just very good at solving problems and they don't take it personally.

Sari 13:39
And this is true because we know that the exact same thing can happen to one entrepreneur and another one and they will respond completely differently. One will just decide, oh, okay. My copacker is rescheduling my date. All right. Let's look and see how that affects other things. And let's make those phone calls. And we're not going to make it mean anything and we're just going to move forward. Versus somebody else who completely falls apart and it's all these terrible things. Can you just see like visually the timeline? And if you just imagine, and this is probably the reality, like we are making 1000s of decisions every day. You made a decision whether to listen to this podcast or not, right? And what if your success as a business? What if I just told you, you will have 10,000 problems to solve in your business this year to reach the goal that you want? That could be, I'm not getting enough sales, or my packaging has a mistake on it, or my ingredient costs went up, or it could be on and on and on. Okay. There's no problem here, I'm not going to make it a problem about me. Well, these are just the things that are happening and if I just get faster and better at solving problems, I'm going to achieve my goal that much faster. If you just know like, oh, great, this is one of those 10,000 problems that I need to solve, let's just get to the work of solving the problem. So that's really one of the biggest tools I can give you is just taking out the personal stuff, taking out the personal, mental, emotional drama. It usually never is about you. We like to think that we are the center of all the universe, we are the center of our own. But we are not the center of anybody else's. But there is a lot of bias. And it's just the way we are wired to think that everybody is doing this to us. And we're the center of their universe. And it's just not true.

Sari 16:05
All right, the next thing I want to talk about when we're talking about solving problems, to give you some strategies, I like to look at problems as, is this just a one time problem that just needs to get solved and then moved off? Like done, check, get move on? Or is this like a long term like bigger problem that either keeps coming back as an issue? Or it's just like, it's kind of that big problem? Like how do I create more sales in my business, we're not making enough money, right? We're not making enough profit, our profit margins aren't high enough, or we need more stores, right? Those kinds of just big, bigger level problems that are a little bit more vague, right? So we just look at, let's look at just those one time problems, like, oh, just gotta, you know, gotta fix that one thing. So I love to use a couple of frameworks. So this comes from one of my coach friends, Jill Wright. She loves to say we can solve any problem with money, time, or mindset. And I think this is true for really every problem, I have yet to kind of figure out one thing that this doesn't work for. All right, so let's take an example.

Sari 17:30
Let's say you go to a farmers market and you have a staff member, and that staff member calls you the day before and says I'm really sick or who knows why, right? They're just like I'm calling out. So they're not going to be at the farmers market, you have an immediate problem, a short term problem that needs solving. Now, it may turn into a longer term problem as well. But let's, first we got to solve like, what is the real problem here. So using that framework, we can solve it through money, where we can reach out and we can find somebody else. And we might have to pay them more than we normally would. But we can use all of our networks and we can find somebody else to come and work that particular market, right? We can put money towards the problem. We can put our own time. So now we're gonna go and work the farmers market. Or you could decide it's just not a problem and we're just not gonna go to the farmers market this time, right? It's just not a problem, okay, you can't come, I don't want to put my time in. I don't want to pay somebody else. And you might go through that. And you might try the money thing and maybe that won't work. You can't find that person. But it could work if you found an available person. So sometimes we're forced to decide it's not a problem. But I like choosing it ahead of time. All right, let's try one more example. Let's say that you want to post more on social media, everybody tells you you need to be doing five posts a week. And so this is a problem because you are not posting. So we can solve this problem through money. We can hire somebody else to create our content for us, to post for us, to manage all of that. So we can solve this problem with money. We can solve this problem with time. We can devote more time, right? Our own personal time to posting more, to creating content. Or we can solve it with mindset. And specifically we can decide that it's not a problem. So there's actually a lot of problems that you guys all think are problems that if you stood back and you were like, is this really a problem? What if I decided it wasn't a problem? So you could just say, everybody tells me I should post more on social media, I'm only posting once or I'm posting zero. And I'm just gonna decide it's not a problem. I'm not gonna put any money towards it and not gonna put any time towards it, I'm just not going to post or I'm going to post one time a week, or whatever. You know, you can just decide. Who says! This is kind of a personal example I've used with a client of mine, she was like, I just can't work until my office is clean. And like, I just feel like I'm just surrounded by clutter, and I just can't get to work, right? I just, I feel so you know, I don't just overwhelmed, right, when I look around. But she wasn't actually doing the work to clean the office, right? It's like, okay, well, if that's really true, if that's a real problem then put some time on your calendar, it's probably only gonna take you 30 minutes, right? The sum of the productivity pieces, right, around procrastination, like, is this really just procrastination because you don't want to do the harder stuff? Okay, well, then let's solve the problem of the office and put 30 minutes on the calendar, add constraint, and then we're just gonna get the office clean. So that's one way to do it, you could hire somebody to come clean your office, your house, you put the time into it, or, like I do, I just decide it's not a problem. I don't have to have a spotless, well manicured office for me to get a lot of work done. And I know that this is true because you guys can't see it when you see me on Zoom calls or on the YouTube channel because I have a beautiful curated backdrop, right? I have all these amazing products that I've worked with. But over to my right, is kind of a disaster zone. And I do clean it up from time to time, like on a weekend, I'll be like, hey, I'm gonna set a timer and let's just go through all this paperwork, or whatever. But I have samples, and ingredients, and boxes.

Sari 22:27
Like I just don't have a ton of storage in my place. So there's just a pile. And I have a stack of papers that have piled up over the last couple of months. And I probably will go through those. But I just can decide it's not a problem. It doesn't prevent me from getting to work and getting a ton done. So there's a lot of things that we are making problems that we can just decide they're not a problem. So I love that one. So especially with those one time things, just say, can I solve this with money, time, or just decide it's not a problem? Like, again, take the personal piece out of it and just get to work, solving it one of those three ways. I do want to offer a little caveat here that deciding something is not a problem is not the same as ignoring the problem, living in denial of the problem, we are fully acknowledging, we are defining the problem. And then we are making a powerful decision not to act or not to make it a problem. So if you get a letter from the state saying you owe sales tax, yes, you can decide that's not a problem. But you're going to understand that there may be consequences that come from that. So we're acknowledging the problem versus, oh, I got this letter, I'm going to just hide this in the pile of papers that around me, I'm just going to hide this and forget about it and pretend like it doesn't exist. That is very different. There, we are actually creating potentially more problems, bigger problems for ourselves down the line. So we do want to make sure that we are not just ignoring or living in denial but we are actually facing the problem and then deciding how we want to solve it. I also love the strategy and this ties in a little bit to the money strategy, but who not how, and I want to do a whole podcast on this concept. But instead of saying, I just have to figure it all out, right? But oftentimes, we don't know everything that we need. We don't have all of the knowledge or the tools, the experience to actually solve the problem. But I love to just pause and say, who else can help me with this? Who would know about X, Y, Z? And I use a lot, I've gotten to a point in my life where, for my business, right, it makes zero sense for me to run errands on behalf of my clients. So, because my time is worth so much more than what I can pay somebody to go and run errands for me, but sometimes I get into a little bit of a jam or like my go to person can't do it. And so I'm always searching around for like, who else can help me? So we had for Colorado Food Works, we did this strategy session last night. And we were bringing in dinner, and it was just not working. Like I had a plan. I thought this would all work. We were gonna go with this one restaurant. Well, turns out, you can't preorder. You can't pre-schedule. They don't even open until five o'clock. And we needed dinner there at 5:30. That was the plan. And I had everybody's orders, right, like, so I'm trying to figure out, okay, this is a problem. Okay, why is this a problem? Because we need food here. We know, I said that there would be dinner. So one thing I could do is just decide it's not a problem and be like, we're just not going to do dinner. Like, I'll just go pick up a bunch of snacks. It's only 4 to 7pm. Like, maybe we don't do dinner. But I decided no, I really wanted to do that. So I started looking at other options. And I was like, then I gotta go get new orders and have them place their orders. And like, there's gonna be new problems that come with this. And I was like, no, I really like my selection. I like this choice. So I just said, who else can help me? I can't be in two places at once, I can be at the meeting and picking up dinner. And so I reached out to the restaurant and I had a conversation with the manager and said, here's what I need, I need your help to be able to do this. And then I decided rather than relying on like Uber to Uber Eats to go and get the delivery. I reached out to one of the people I used to help me run errands and I said, hey, can you go and pick this up and double check the order and make sure that the person with his allergy is cool. And like that they did all of that at the restaurant, and then bring it to us. And so, I found myself kind of getting into like, oh, like this, this is hard. This is way harder than it needs to be. And I just kept saying, who can help me? Who can help me? Who else can help me? And I could have reached out to somebody on my board, right? Other I was like, reaching out to my VA, like can you place this order? Just like how can I minimize the amount of time on my schedule and the stress? And so it didn't go perfectly, I will tell you, and in the moment, a lot of times we just in the moment of things we have to bear forced to just decide that it's not a problem. So the meal unfortunately was not ready when the restaurant said it would be ready. There was terrible traffic. And it's fine. Like, we're in the middle of the meeting. And I'm like, yeah, dinnner was gonna be at 5:30 looks like it's gonna be more like 6:30, right? And I just, it's just like, it's just not a problem. Okay, there's zero I can do about it at that point. So I thought that was a good example of like, I can use the money strategy, who not how like, who else can I pay to help me with this? Who can help me? Let's call the restaurant, right? Let's be proactive, like let's get in front of this and try to make it work as well as possible. And then sometimes things still don't quite work out, right? You make a plan and then you throw away the plan. And then I just have to decide it's not a problem.

Sari 29:02
All right, so now you have some strategies and some tools that can help you solve those immediate, gotta solve these little problems these day to day, week to week, just the normal living of life and you can do this for your business, and of course your personal life, right? This is just what we do as human beings and the better we can get at just not taking it personally. And then using money, time, or our mind to decide it's not a problem and get out of worry and anxiety and overthinking and all of the mind drama that we layer on top of the neutral circumstance of whatever is presenting itself in our life, then the better off we are at moving our life and our business forward and really getting what we want. That's what this is all about. I want you to achieve your goals, to get what you want in your life. So this is gonna sound a little meta, but I was recording this podcast and I was like, I have a problem. I have a problem and that I haven't quite formulated the full outline of the rest of this podcast. And I have a deadline, a self imposed deadline of getting this podcast finished and recorded by Sunday, a week prior, because I am going to be on a vacation with my best friend in Sonoma. And so what I've decided in the moment, as I'm using my own tools here, is that I've decided I'm going to stop the podcast here for today, leave it here with just this one piece of problem solving. And so we're going to call this Part One. And then Part Two next week, I'm going to share with you more about strategies for dealing with those kind of longer term lingering problems, those big things, the how do we make us a profitable packaged food business? Or how do I get out of this constant worry about my copacker or supply chain, or hiring or those kind of, you know, those much larger, bigger business "problems", I'm going to put in quotes, because honestly, they're not problems so much as they're just the work of being in business, right? There's not a problem, per se, it's just, we're gonna be constantly building the airplane in the air. But I have some other strategies beyond what I talked about today that I think will be really helpful as we just get better at solving more problems, more quickly. And just getting to the work of 10,000 problems that we have to solve in our business as entrepreneurs to get to the next level of success. And remember, if time is one of those problems that you have, come join me inside Food Business Success, we're going to solve those with the create more time bootcamp foodbizsuccess.com. And then click on "just an idea", and the week you're hearing this I will just be returning from my vacation, which will be fantastic. And be sure to check out Instagram I'm sure I'll post some things there. So until next time, have an amazing week!

Sari 32:38
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 foodpreneurs. 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.