It is often said that being at the top is lonely, and that is what many start-up founders deal with, especially when it comes to the uncertainties of their business strategies. While this feeling of loss can result in many backing out from their endeavors, it can be addressed by effective collaboration. Elliot Begoun interviews Jenny Cawthon, the Founder of Greenjoy, to discuss how to reinvent yourself by getting professional advice from the people ahead of you and joining communities to gain valuable lessons and support from your fellow founders. They also discuss how this relationship-building approach can also be utilized when connecting with retailers, brokers, and investors, which are the three key players in establishing a brand.

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Listen to the podcast here

Jenny Cawthon On The Power Of Effective Collaboration In Improving Business Management

This super cool. I get to introduce to the whole world our newest team member, Jen. I’ve known Jenny for a long time. She’s a bad-ass Founder. She knows this industry well, enjoyed its highs and its lows, and has fought in the trenches, like all of you. When we started talking about Jenny coming on board, many compelling reasons why I thought she would be such a great fit for this team. One of the keys was that she has walked a mile in your shoes. She dealt with everything from deductions that were unexpected to brokers that have let them down and retailers to not deliver and all of those kinds of things.

From day one, she’s passionate about sharing her knowledge, her wisdom, and holding others up as she has been on this journey. To me, one of the coolest things about this industry is why we’re grasping for the next rung of the ladder up. It seems to me that most of us are reaching down to lend a hand with a person behind us. I think Jenny has been emblematic of that analogy. Please welcome Jenny who’s also running our brand success efforts here. We’ll talk a lot about what that means. Jenny, introduce yourself and we’ll dive in.

Thank you for that. I’m Jenny Cawthon, the Founder of Greenjoy. We were on shelves for many years. We experienced some major successes. We also had high and low points but it was such a transforming experience for me and has set me on a path to be doing what I’m doing now, which is being able to help other brands and mostly, founders. Everybody on the brand team needs support, but there is something about being a founder that’s can be isolating among other things. I’m super happy to be able to provide some outlet and assistance as I can to a lot of these new founders of emerging brands who I feel are changing the world. Food and ag are doing so much for the planet. It’s all interconnected. I’m super happy to be part of the TIG team and thanks for having me here.

Thanks for joining, trusting, and being a part of this journey with us. We say that all the time and we work here trying to do right by people, the planet, and profits. There’s nothing wrong about being a dirty capitalist. Everybody should be completely comfortable wearing that cloak and thinking about making money, but when harnessed for good, there’s nothing like the power of commerce. There’s nothing like the power of business to do good. It certainly can be corrupted. We’ve all seen that, but it’s a powerful tool. Hopefully, it’s going to be fun. It’s hard enough if it’s not fun, then there at least are those moments and then that’s hard to get out of bed and run into a wall every day.

I don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time going back. I don’t think we need to describe for the readers what it’s like to be a founder because most of them are founders or recovering founders or investors and founders. I want to talk more about how do we support founders and maybe calling back on some of your experience about as a founder in different stages of the life cycle, what you felt maybe you were missing in terms of support, and call on that empathy to bring it forward. You mentioned one thing that is so true and we’re not talking enough about it is isolation. Isolation is super real. It seems counterintuitive because maybe you’re surrounded by lots of people, but you can’t always confide in those people what’s going on in your head, and in your heart because they’re stakeholders.

I don’t think they understand. It’s hard for friends to get it fully. It can be hard for partners or spouses to get it. Until the last couple of years, a lot of founders weren’t even talking amongst themselves as much. That’s important. For me, thinking back, I felt like I was doing things wrong the whole time because there are many roadblocks. I was traveling, catching up on my podcasts and I heard Zak Normandin and Sheryl O’Loughlin back to back. They were both very upfront, honest, and forthcoming with the challenges. Sheryl mentioned how ADHD and anxiety were skyrocketing among founders and all those things that put it in perspective for me and made me realize that it’s part of the up and down of what we do.

It was the first time I’d heard anybody speak to that. Being able to talk about it, talk to other founders that are experiencing the same things gives you a sense of place. It helps with the doubt that creeps in. there’s one other founder that mentioned to me that she couldn’t watch the news. It was like, “Finally, somebody else,” because I couldn’t watch the news because my brain was already clustered enough that I couldn’t handle that there was a war overseas somewhere and seeing those images. I was maintaining my stress level. It’s super important to have conversations like these and then make sure that we’re talking about that with emerging brands and their founders.

It’s hard for friends to understand. It’s hard to have that conversation with a partner or spouse. It’s also hard to have that conversation with people who work on your team because you have to command and exude that sense of confidence and belief. You can’t go to your team and regularly say, “We’re going to crash and burn.” That’s not going to get your people going, “We’re going to kill it.” You certainly struggled to go to investors with the same, although I will tell you that more investors are doing a great job of recognizing this reality in their founders and trying to support it.

That’s one thing that you and I have talked about that we want to do a better job of outing and also building support mechanisms around, not in the form of being able to administer any type of mental health, that’s not our role. Our role is to create a psychologically safe space to talk about these things. I always say that every founder I’ve ever met has two companions, one on each shoulder, and one is doubt and the other is work. They’re all same all the time. If we can help flack those guys and knock them off their shoulders for a while so that they’re not sitting there whispering in their ear, that’s a victory.

You do that so well. I’ve heard you do that many numbers of times, and normalizing what the founders are going through, making them understand that this is part of that journey and that it’s not them specifically that are suffering at the hands of distributors or they’re getting noes, “Let’s check the presentation and let’s see.” Maybe it’s situational, but putting some context behind it and normalizing it goes a long way. It started pre-COVID, but COVID accelerated it. It is the democratization of industry information, industry contacts, and then also people coming together and putting together cross-promotion and things like that among the smaller brands like that sense of comradery is also escalating, if there’s something that we can do to help with that.

Collaborations and let’s call them working wikis where you’re sharing information is cool. Before we dive into that, let me ask this question. Thinking again, looking back along the various life stages of your many-year founder journey, knowing what you know now, what do you wish you knew back at one of those levels, or who do you wish you had helped you, or what support do you wish you had that you didn’t?

When I started the eTardigrade Program, we’re the initial test group. I wish where has this been all my life. I wish I had asked for help or maybe knew who to ask for help. I had a lot of great contacts, and a lot of support that way, but it’s also challenging or it can be when you have people that you talk to once a month and oftentimes, you’ve had twenty fire drills in between. It doesn’t work to recount all of those, but someone that was a weekly go-to that knew. I’m more on the emergency brand side, as opposed to on the larger CPG side, it’s about vulnerability.

If you can start out with the vulnerability to be able to say, “I’m struggling with this. I keep getting noes. What am I doing wrong?” It would have been helpful and normalizing it. I started in this business many years ago. As a founder, I remember in the early stages, “This is too much for one person,” but having the right person to be able to ask those small questions too would have been helpful. The lesson here would be, find a mentor, find somebody that’s even another founder that’s a little bit ahead or has a different experience than you, that would have been helpful to have somebody like that I could ping back and forth.

The one thing that I want to call out, and this is going to sound self-serving, but hopefully, those reading this regularly know that’s not my jam. It’s not how I am. I’ll share it directly from me, and that is you have to be willing to invest in what you don’t know and get help. Advisors and mentors are wonderful, but they have full-time gigs. They’re not always accessible. When I started this many years ago, I had a long career in CPG by then, over twenty years, but I didn’t necessarily know how to craft and build a business. I paid for and hired a business coach to work alongside me and to do exactly what he said. Here it is many years later and ironically, as we take the start of our annual mastermind retreat because I still work with that person to this day.

It also forces me to lift my head up and go from being involved in relentless pontification of my theories and thoughts to everybody else to accepting the relentless pontification from somebody else about their theories, thoughts, and think differently about their business. That’s an important thing. The other thing that I feel like as a business, and I’m sharing again transparently, that we could do better. This is one of those things that keep me up at night, worrying about, “Are we doing all that we can in the service to our founders?” One of those is this concept of being a force multiplier. Things are hard. It’s not easy. You said noes and normalizing noes. Noes are going to be the most constant form of feedback you get. You get a lot more noes than you get yeses in this business but if you get the right yeses, then the noes don’t mean anything.

You also have to be willing to give the noes, to say no.

The discipline to say noes. Know your noes. What’s so hard is that when you’re an emerging brand, smaller brand, you’re like a chihuahua nipping at the ankles of retailers, brokers, distributors, of all the people you’re trying to influence. You’re this little chihuahua nipping at the ankle and half the time we going to get pushed and kicked to the side. If you can get a pack of chihuahuas nipping at your ankles, you got to deal with it. You can’t dismiss it. How do we get that pack of chihuahuas nipping at the ankles? That’s one of the things that you and I have been talking about and building on concepts of things like collaboration circles.

Bringing people interested in collaborating around marketing or sales or finance or operations to learn from each other best practices to find ways to share resources, to do things or to increase voice and also, to retailers. How do we have a bigger voice? How do we put together a more complete package for a retailer or support our brands in the distributors? You were thinking about this independently of me. You and I had a conversation, as you were thinking about what’s next. Very much along this line, how do we do this? Share a little bit about that.

I was going to change by one model radically. I think that the collaboration circles that you mentioned, I agree with you so much because it’s a way for founders to get their head out of the weeds. I don’t mean get your head out of this thing, that sounds a little harsh, but it’s a way that you get to pick your head up and you have other people peppering you with ideas and you get to add and you get to make it your own. I think that’s pivotal. One of the things that impacted our business in 2020 was we had a day-lose of hits from co-packers and from distributors all at the same time. My thought was, “This is brutal.”

I had many founders that I talked to that were talking about the distribution model and not only did it not work for them, but they felt in a way that they were kind of being stolen from, and that was the business model they were dealing with. There are no real numbers behind the math. I thought, “There’s a solution. There has to be a solution. There’s always a solution. How can we put together something that would be a way that brands could benefit from working together and using that collective to be able to navigate things like distribution and co-packing? How can we empower brands to be able to do that so that the emerging brands don’t feel like a chihuahua, but it feels like you’re getting stepped on left and right, and nobody wants to give you a hand to lift you up?” It feels like that quite a bit.

You hear, “You’re too small for us,” from co-packers from investors all the time. It’s how we can empower founders to feel like their vote and voice matter. Especially when big pieces of your business, that take a lot of time and mental energy, like dealing with distributors and deductions, and all the horror that is. One of the things that were part of that was putting together a community. I wanted to do that as the first piece. That was before I had looked at your TIG community and then I was like, “Elliot’s already done this. He’s got this going.” Kudos to you for being able to pull it off and put that together.

Thanks, but it was a combination of listening and reacting. That’s so much of what this is and needs to be. I’m going to switch slightly with topics that I want to make sure we work this in too because it was another part that was important to what’s next for you. That was the support and promotion of women founders. We, as a company and personally, it’s important that we’re supporters and champions of the JEDI collaborative that our industry, its founders, and our boards look like the communities that we serve. They don’t now. They look like a bunch of white dudes still, but that is going to change. Talk a little bit about that and your thoughts around supporting other women who are trying to fight the good fight and are still in male-dominated place.

In hindsight, I think that was a big factor in the early days and the journey of the brand. Looking back, a bunch of the noes were potentially a part of that but it didn’t occur to me that it was because I was a woman. I’ve always been a fighter. I’m quiet. You can hear in the comments and in the way, somebody says, “This girl and that girl,” which is offensive. You can hear it in somebody’s vernacular, how they are viewing things. Now that word is out there, the awareness is increasing. It’s a great way for brands to realize if that’s somebody they want to work with, whether it’s a co-packer distributor investor. One of the things that in looking at that it was important to me to lift up some of these other founders was looking at women founders and seeing what brands were getting, you would see stories about brands getting huge funding, and how did that fit with demographics.

I put together a group called Founders Unite. It’s a small group of women founders, varying in size of the business greatly. We meet once a month and it’s a way for us to come together, everybody takes a breath and you can almost see people do this on the calls. It’s so lovely because, in the end, people were like, “Thank you so much for doing this.” It’s a way that these women founders can be vulnerable and they can voice the challenges and ask for help and not feel like they have to put up that shield or that guard or that wall that we’re tough as rocks and tough as nails. It’s a matter of lifting each other up. It’s a tribe of vulnerability and freedom of thought. It’s been great for me hearing and chatting with these women. We also toss around ideas for marketing and things like that too, but it’s, it’s a safe space to be able to let the air out for a minute.

Here’s a question that gets sent to me here. “What’s going to be like working for me?” I want to change that question because I hate the word for it. I believe it’s working with. “What’s it going to be like working with each other?” What do you think?

When we first started talking about this, we had several conversations. I’ll tell you how I started out thinking about it and now how that may have changed.

Waven’s is clarifying, he’s disavowing that it was his question.

In the beginning, this is like Gandhi coming to you and saying, “Will you be my apprentice?” These are all the things I love to do. It’s all the things that you do so well. I have so much respect for you and you’re not any fun to talk to. I was hoping we could get past that, you don’t have any sense of humor. Every time I had talked to you and then did full disclosure, being a friend, Elliot was also an advisor, there was a sense of place and I felt lifted up every time I talked to you. I was like, “This is so exciting. This is so cool to be able to work with somebody that you view in this way.” After a few days of working with you full-on, I am realizing that I don’t know how you do what you do, that you work 24 hours a day. You have to and I am running to keep up. I love working with these brands and seeing these founders. Sometimes I can see on their faces emotions that I know all too well. I also see such enthusiasm, excitement, and it’s energizing. It’s great so far.

I am workaholic, but that’s not something I’m proud of and it’s not something I recommend. It’s something that I work hard to try to do a better job of, because I don’t think it’s not the behavior I want anyone modeling. There’s better behavior than that. Let me turn this around and tell you what excites me. One, to have another brilliant mind in addition to Waven’s, Charity, and Juliet, that excites me. Also, it makes us instantly a better company and better able to serve our founders, which is super important, but you also bring critical perspectives that I can. The first is having a many-year journey as a CPG founder, fighting this body, directly, intimately is so valuable.

The second is having done being a female founder. Having those two lenses in addition to the rest of our team, looking at brands and the thing that we’re trying to solve for, and then the shepherding that we try to do, it gives us a whole new field of view and a whole different perspective. We make sure that we don’t have blind spots because you don’t want to have blind spots in this business. One of the things from our first-ever conversation over tequila in New York City with some other reprobates is you lean forward with empathy. For those who read this too often know that’s something I feel is an absolute superpower in this industry is being able to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes or look through their eyes, it’s impactful.

Back at you, I want to talk about what we’re going to do next together. These things that we want to build on. I’ll tee them up and talk about my thinking, and then you add any of your thinking to it. One of the first is to build more strategic relationships with retailers, brands have a tough time, especially emerging brands, in a lot of ways with retailers, getting in front of them being able to build a program that the retailer can get excited about and the brand can afford. They have a tough time being seen or getting heard. I think that if we can build some strategic relationships with the retailers who want to embrace emerging brands, who want to give to their consumers what they want with $18 billion of market share, moving from the top 25 CPG to emerging brands, it is what consumers want.

At least 50 million consumers who are in the natural product space. Our community of brands represents a fantastic crosssection of those. My vision, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort. It’s going to be a process of cultivation. Is to build relationships with those retailers who want to embrace that and collaboratively with them work on programs, processes, and ways for them to bolster that innovation that’s coming from these types of brands and give our brands a bigger opportunity within that space.

How great for the retailers that something like this makes their job easier? If you could offer them a collective with marketing setup and all of these other things that they don’t have to navigate individually with each of these brands that they know that they can trust, it’s going to be taken care of, and they know it’s being taken care of by somebody with the know-how to do it. You talk a lot about when you’re pitching somebody and you’re selling something, you need to come from a place of, “What do they need and how can I make their life better?” Something like this is great too because it lifts the brands up, but it’s the sales pitch to the retailers is, “We can make your life easier by doing something like this,” whether it’s convenience which I’m excited to talk about with you a little bit. I think it’s a win-win.

When I say retail, I mean, all kinds of outlets, whether that’s Compass Foodbuy or Whole Foods. The other one is distributors. One of the bigger challenges for founders is their relationship with their distributors, especially the broad liners like UNFI and KeHE have challenges themselves. The economics of their business is difficult, and there’s a lot of bandwidth pushing. It falls on the shoulders of founders, but you know this intimately that when the shit hits the fan with the distributor, it’s hard to get traction.

It’s hard to get what you need to be done, whether that’s a deduction issue or a lost PO or convincing SRM to add that SKU or to get things coded. I think building a strategic relationship where we can have a two-way conversation with these distributors about what each other needs and how we can better work and better support. At least this has the ability to pick up the phone and take it up to levels when we need to get things done, is important. You’ve had that experience, you’ve worked your way up the chain and distributors. I’ve watched you do that. What are your thoughts around that?

It’s intimidating for founders because working with the big distributors, you can’t even get an answer sometimes to know what your next steps are, to know why deduction happened or what, and a lot of times, what you end up finding is that the person you’re talking to doesn’t know. They are told to be a gatekeeper. I agree 1,000% that’s one of the major hurdles for emerging brands and the best way to help them mitigate that is working from a group approach. In Math, you have much more weight to throw around, and especially getting the retailers behind that, which I think is a big part of it too is looping them in. A lot of times the individual buyers don’t even know the pressure points and the pain that the emerging brands go through and working with the distributors. It’s so needed. It’s important.

Let’s move on to brokers, often maligned, often misunderstood brokers, and also include fractionals sales executives and sales agencies in that. The same kind of thing here. It’s hard for brokers to take on a lot of emerging brands. They’ll charge a retainer, but for many, the retainer is cost coverage, it isn’t profit, and so much is predicated on being able to get there. Often they find themselves in the role of being the trainer, the teacher, to these brands about what they need to have to get to be effective and what tools as a broker they need in their arsenal in order to transact and make things happen. A thought is working to develop a collaborative broker boot camp where we bring the best brokers forward, our brands are well-trained, well-positioned, and well-prepared to be ready for those brokers and those brokers know that by being a brand that we’ve coached that they’re ready and we can hit the ground running faster, be more effective, get to positive commission dollars in profitability for both faster. You’ve had an experience. What are your thoughts there?

That could be powerful. When you’re an emerging brand and there’s a number of different brokers and you’re talking to them and they’re all telling you, some with retainers, but some without. The ones that have retainers, if you had some level of a full understanding of the way that these brokers work, if you knew that your money was going to get you X or Y or Z without a doubt, then it’s much easier. It’s a safer bet so to speak, but one of the things I said all the time was there are many people out there that will be happy to take $1,500 or $2,000 a month from you.

You can very easily go broke doling that out if you’re not careful about who it is that you’re aligning with in that way. Having a group that can vouch for the brokers and the collective where the brands are learning how to manage brokers. There are two schools. There’s one school that they think that the brokers are going to take care of everything and that they can be hands-off, which you get out of something in what you put in and you have to foster that. Also, if you don’t know the answers, there’s no real accountability. You don’t know if what they’re telling you is accurate. Setting up something like that, where there’s that bridge is a super powerful tool for emerging brands. I’m excited to see that one together.

For whatever reason, there’s a confusion of what a broker is, and yet it’s inherent in their name. They’re brokers. They broker relationships, they connect vendors with retailers and that’s important. I say this because these things that I’m talking about aren’t new to us. We’ve been doing them on waving vendor, the spectrum around brand activation, building relationships and partnerships with service providers. Bringing them together, and knowing that both parties are ready for each other, almost automatically ensure the start of a better relationship and a better partnership. So much in the broker, a brand relationship is misunderstanding, miscommunication and misalignment of accountability where it lies.

The other thing about brokers that’s interesting is there’s so much after the fact. You’ve got the yes, and you’re getting on shelves. With some of the bigger, more traditional CPG, it’s nice to have somebody to help you navigate some of the things that come after that, whether it’s looking at promotions or knowing what specifically works best in this retailer and pulling from their experience. We’ve had times when we had already got the yes, we were already on shelves and we were bringing in a broker to help with the in-store presence or knowing which promos to run and getting those things pushed through. There’s a lot more to brokers than opening the door, depending on the broker.

The last of these functional relationships are investors. The fuel that every brand need is capital. The most common source of it for the early stage is going to be Angel investors, seed funds, VCs, family offices, etc. The best time to be raising money is when you don’t need it. You always want to go to the well before you need the water. If you look statistically, brands raised from investors, they know relationships need to develop over time. It’s very rare that an unknown brand finds an unknown investor and transacts quickly. It starts with building a relationship and building a level of reciprocal confidence that’s going to go there. Even with all of that, it’s still a 95% no rate just because most investors are making a few investments a year.

I think there’s a great opportunity to foster some good conversation, a good relationship between investors and brands. Cultivating Angels and these things, getting to know one another, getting to know what their thesis is, what they’re looking for, what fits them, and being able to do the same with brands and encouraging conversation. All of those kinds of things, and helping brands be better prepared because we’re getting feedback and hearing from investors and being able to share broadly what’s going on. Those investors who may or may not be interested who may be interested are aware of our brand’s journeys. We need more of them out there. We’re never going to solicit, that’s not our place, that’s not what we do, it doesn’t work that way, but we’re proud of what brands are achieving. Most investors want to be aware of what’s going on and brands need to be aware of what investors are looking for and wants. Thoughts there on that relationship.

That vetting process from both sides is valuable because the investors know that you’re not wasting their time. They know this is a brand that you’ve worked with, that we’ve cultivated, that we’ve gotten to the point where they’re ready to pitch. From a brand’s perspective, they know they’re not wasting their time, but an investor that’s either not ready, not able, or willing to invest. That part of the process is important in this regard. There are many more Angels that are launching into CPG and there’s a danger there, but there’s also a major opportunity. There are angels that either don’t quite have as good of a handle on CPG specifics and emerging brands. It’s important going back to the vetting process to make sure you do your homework and know who you’re getting in bed with.

We hear all the time that it’s easier to get divorced than it is to break up with an investor. That’s true because it’s sticky. You never know who you’re talking to when you’re talking about your business. You always have to be open or be of the mindset that anybody could connect you with the next person. I have a funny story about that. I was standing in line at Disney with my kids and in the process of going MacGyver on my daughter’s pants because it was hot and she wore long pants to school in the morning. I’ve taken my other daughter’s earing and I’m turning her pants into shorts. We started talking to the guy behind us, who ends up being a VC guy and an investor. We ended up going all the way down the road with this guy that I met in standing in line at Disney. That was a one-off because I don’t recommend that.

You don’t suggest to Francis when Disney is back, you go hang out by the castle and Goofy and hope that you find your next investor.

We started out talking about football and it led to a company and investing. This is cool because it’s challenging to know when and how to bring on investment. That’s the question that we hear a lot. We’d love the TIG brands as you have been cultivating these brands and make these introductions. They’ve been taught and vetted. That’s appreciated by investors because they see so many decks and they have a face to put with a name and have like a quick little video where they know that they’re talking to somebody that has a real product, has their stuff together. It betters the relationship and deepens the trust for sure.

All these things excite me. It’s a tall order for you. For the readers, give Jenny some time to get all things together. I want to talk a little bit about the collaboration circles, but I also want to leave a time for Rapid-fire get to know Jenny, which I didn’t even warn her about. I can’t wait to do this part. Collaboration circles, let me explain this process. The brands that work with us, not only the founders but the extended teams in the functional areas, in my mind a great opportunity to share, to collaborate, to join forces. This sharing could be knowledge and information, “I’ve got your back,” to “Let’s put programs together. Let’s do things together on social media. Let’s share our email lists and plug each other’s brands. Let’s support each other on LinkedIn and talk about one another, and make sure that everybody knows each other that they post that we comment on the post or same with any other social media.”

I talked about the one earlier around marketing and the one earlier about sales, where you might share who are good buyers to work with or let’s put programs together. Two other collaboration circles that I like. One is operation and finance. These are two areas of the business that a lot of founders feel uncomfortable about. Co-man relationships or digging in to understand what their financial reporting is telling them or what they should be looking at better or having a conversation around that, being able to create financial literacy and improve that. The other one is around investing and governance.

There’s a lot to the investment side of the business from understanding terms and all the details and becoming an educated consumer, an educated participant in that process changes the balance of power in those negotiations. The thing that is often not talked about is that board formulation, formal governance, fiduciary, or even advisory, but making sure that you’re sharing and working in collaborating and how do we build the right team coalesces. There are a lot of opportunities to create a vessel and get the hell out of the way and let the magic happen between these founders with more pinpointed, more focused topical things for collaboration. That’s one of the charges I’ve asked you to dream up and begin to think, but not putting you on the spot for details, but high-level thoughts.

I’ve been a part of many of these and there’s such value there. From the outside, you would maybe think that the young brands learn from the bigger older brands, but I would challenge that because I think it’s definitely a two-way street. Some of the young brands that are more agile in marketing or have more time and space to be able to have their ear to the ground, this is where grand ideas are generated. It’s a collective of minds. When you’re narrowing it down to one specific task or one specific part of the business, there’s a focus there. There had been many collaborations that we put together from these calls with brands that I wouldn’t have been able to get to otherwise.

You have that relationship for the smaller brands, but as you get the relationship with these bigger companies, then you get their network. It’s a way of making the six degrees of separation two degrees of separation, which is valuable. I’m looking forward to that. What’s important for that is that it’s not just founders, that there may be looping in the marketing person to the marketing one. It’s pivotal to help balance out the team a little bit. Balance is not my word, but helps brings the team in on that and once they leave the calls, there can be more brainstorming and turn away.

Before we switched to the get to know Jenny better segment of this show, I want to say that this has been somewhat of a strange structure to do a show because we’re talking a lot about us and a lot about TIG, but it’s important because it’s a restatement of what we’re hearing from founders. There are many more founders than we have in our program and many more that could benefit from a more holistic level of support. Readers, even if you aren’t engaged with us, or you are with others, please, this is open source, share these ideas, share with us better ideas, but we have to build this sense of holistic support underneath the change agents of our industry to see them succeed. It’s still maddening to me, the 80% to 90% of the CPG businesses that start are gone in two years. We can do better than that, but it’s not because of you as founders, it’s because of the industry and the support, tutelage, and the force multipliers that you need to succeed. We’re going to try to do our part to help them.

That an important level, the playing field a little bit.

Let’s start. Where were you born and raised?

In Georgia. It’s a small town, about 45 minutes outside of Athens, on an organic farm before that was a thing.

Tell us about your family.

I am the youngest of four. We spread across fifteen years.

How about now? Are you married and with kids?

I’m married. I have three kids. I’m all in-home/virtual school and ranging in age from 4.5 to 11.

As a father of two girls and a boy, it’s a funny story when Juliet said that’s 1 of the 3rd, by then, I was comfortable with two. We were getting out of diaper bags. Things were cool. She’s like, “I want one more and I want it to be a boy.” I’m like, “No. I know what I’m doing with girls now. I love daddy’s girls.” This was all prepubescent. All I know is one of my all-time favorite stories about my son is I came home one day from work. We were living in Phoenix at the time. It was the middle of summer. It was hot as blazes. I opened the garage door. He’s standing in the garage with a baseball mitt. He’s six years old and he’s throwing a ball up and catch it. I’m like, “What are you doing out here? It’s like 190 degrees in this garage.” He goes, “Dad, it is not a happy hormone day.” I opened the door to the house that I could hear all the girls yelling at them. I looked at him and he’s like, “Do you want to play catch?” I’m like, “I’m in.” I learned from him. Where do you live now?

I’m not quite there yet, but when I get there, you’ll find me on the couch. I’m in South Carolina in the low country.

Tell the readers what the low country is.

We’re about 30 minutes from Hilton Head, 25 minutes from Savannah, Georgia. It’s peaceful and quiet and they call it this low country, but I’ve gotten used to that and I think it’s amazing. My kids are outside playing with the two dogs. Everybody’s quiet. Tons of nature. We love it.

We live in California’s version of that. The last couple of questions, hobbies. What do you do for fun outside of working with founders?

I love to read and run. That’s my mental recoup time and then I love to play soccer with the kids. I was a college soccer player. With COVID, my oldest isn’t playing, so we’ve got somebody coming to do training one-on-one with her that’s a friend of mine. That’s always fun. I don’t know what else I’d love to do. Anything outside, I love to go for bike rides. I have to be outside a little bit each day. It’s such a mood lifter and a little bit of sunshine.

The very last question, if there was one thing people would be surprised to know about, what would that be?

I’m super flexible. Maybe that’s TMI. Maybe I should retract that and say something more vanilla.

It’s the complete antithesis of me. I had the flexibility of rebar. It’s long noted in our house.

I’m usually in the kitchen quite a bit too, hence CPG.

That’s a thread that runs through almost everybody in this industry is everyone’s a foodie in one way or another, cook it themselves, or you’ve got wine knows for sure. Those are the replicated questions of this business. Thanks for doing this with me. I know it was uncomfortable, not what you plan to do, but more importantly, thanks for being part of this journey with us. Thanks for being part of the team. I’m excited because I know it instantly makes us better. That’s what matters most to me. Thanks, everyone for reading, for joining us, and for your support. Please welcome, Jenny. Let her know how thrilled you are to have her as part, whether you are in our community as one of our brands or in our broader community as a supporter and champion of this industry.

Thanks so much. Thanks so much for the messages and texts and emails I’ve already gotten. You guys are awesome.

Important Links

• Greenjoy

About Jenny Cawthon

I’m Jenny Cawthon, the founder of Greenjoy. I grew up in a health-food household and learned at an early age that eating healthy, good-for-you food can and should be delicious.

My mom was organic and green before organic and green were even cool. She taught us about the relationship between good, wholesome food and our bodies and how food directly affects our health.

Today, I feed my kids the same way my mom fed us: intuitively and with nourishing ingredients. This food philosophy is the foundation of Greenjoy, and why I started this company.

Through our innovative products, foodie flavors, and pure ingredients, we’re helping more people to love, eat & crave vegetables every day. Welcome to our community of foodies…eating clean one bite at a time. Love & Veggies, Jenny Cawthon

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