Entrepreneurship is a process and a passion. You must genuinely care for your team and the customers you’re serving. Listen to your host Elliot Begoun as he talks with Danny Walsh about building a sustainable revenue engine to make a difference in the world. Danny is the founder of Peak State Coffee. In this episode, he shares valuable insights on the importance of positive energy and motivation for your entrepreneurial spirit. He also explains his company and how his products boost good health with the highest quality they could offer. Tune in to learn how to make things happen, improve processes, and change people’s lives for the better.

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Building A Sustainable Revenue Engine With Danny Walsh Of Peak State Coffee

My guest is Danny with Peak State Coffee, and we are going to be talking about coffee, shrooms, life, entrepreneurship, outdoors, being outdoors, and all the fun stuff. Before I turn it over to Danny to introduce himself and the brand, a couple of updates and things that I want to call out to everyone’s attention.

One is the TIG Ventures community is up and going. If you are a former founder, service provider, or investor, whether you are an angel or part of a fund, and you want to be a part of our mission, which is to help support these tardigrades, to help build a finance model that works for the return of LPs. It also proves that you can build a business and a fund based on singles and doubles, not on home runs.

Reach out and let us know. We’d love to have you come aboard. That’s the cool part of doing this as a rolling fund. We can bring in our own community and come around and coalesce around brands like Peak State Coffee and others and help them bridge the gap so that they have that optionality in terms of what route is best for them.

The other thing is that the TIG Collective is up and going. If you are a seasoned veteran in this space wanting to take the next steps, learn about becoming a board member, and acquire those skills and experience. If you are a brand in our community or interested in becoming a brand in our community, the TIG Collective is a great opportunity where advisors and entrepreneurs come together to focus on how to move businesses forward. Unlike the typical advisor relation where you have to pick an advisor and that advisor alongside you, you get to pick 40 advisors and reach out to the ones that are most needed at that moment in time.

The way it works is simply you sign the brand. The entrepreneur signs in an agreement, an advisor standard and advisor agreement with the collective and issues their advisor shares. The collective has a reciprocal agreement with its advisors and shares in what’s called equity equivalent units with those advisors, so they share in the aggregate upside of all the advisory shares put in the collective.

At the end of the day, what we have is an incredible bench of amazing advisors who are also leading masterclasses and helping provide them with more information and access. Simultaneously entrepreneurs are learning how to work with advisers and getting the advice and support they need to accelerate their business. If you are interested in learning more about the TIG Collective, please reach out to Jenny at Jenny@TIGBrands.com.

That’s it. We are getting closer to Expo East. I hope to see many of you there. We’ll be there and I would love to meet with you if you are as well. Danny, why don’t you start us off by telling your story? How you arrived, how you came up with the solution of Peak State? What makes Peak State Coffee different? I’m a huge fan. I love his coffee. I loved the product and Danny. I will let you tell the story because no one will tell it better than you.

Sure, and thanks for having me on. Peak State, we have introduced coffee with health benefits, and a lot of people might forget a morning vitamin or supplement. If they are a coffee drinker, which the overwhelming majority of people in this country are, they will never forget their morning coffee. My journey began as a health journey for me.

Coming out of college, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition where I needed to manage my stress. At that moment, I abandoned my previous trajectory to become an engineer and started managing my stress. Doing that in a bunch of different ways, but it involved spending time in nature, making sure that I was connecting with my breath. It had to do with my food, exercise, and supplementation.

I started incorporating a lot of different supplements into my diet. All of a sudden, only months after a doctor told me I was going to have a lifelong condition, all of my symptoms went into remission. I kept supplementing, and a lot of what I was supplementing with was adaptogens and functional mushrooms.

For some of them, I was foraging on my own. While working a conservation job doing trail work, I started incorporating these supplements into my daily routine. I recognized throughout my own habits that if they were already in my coffee, I would make sure that I’m taking them every single day. When I looked to see what was out there, I like good coffee and couldn’t find a product on the shelf that was keeping the integrity of the coffee part of it of any wellness or functional coffee out there.

I worked with one of my best friends and a food scientist, and we formulated a process for fortifying coffee after it’s roasted, so that it is also nutrient-rich and helps you to supplement every day. We have one for brain health, one for immunity support, and one that features more adaptogens for stress balance. We have been getting our brand out there for the last years. Our main mission with Peak State is to put health in people’s hands and to get great coffee out there and to use business for environmental good.

Where’s the business now? Tell us how it’s evolved and where it stands.

We have been growing our business in a very different way than a lot of the peers that I see in this industry. What I mean by that is we have focused on grassroots and physical events going only direct-to-consumer so that we can get a lot of feedback on our products and use it as almost like an R&D lab, as well as a cashflow engine.

When everybody goes for grocery retail, we went left and we went to farmer’s markets across the state of Colorado and some even out of state. We have focused on our dot-com. We focused on a little bit of detail, but not much retail to date. That helped us learn and iterate over and over. We are still a very new brand, but it’s been a lot of fun building a brand where we can connect directly with our customers and build a relationship from there that we take online. We hope that they become a monthly subscriber to our coffee after that.

As you explore channels, as you look at things, how did you decide to stay away or why did you decide to stay away from retail?

That was probably one of the most surprising things for me as I entered this industry completely green to it was how much margin you need to be able to give away in the conventional grocery, in retail channel, and then also the trade spent on top of that. I realized I wanted to get as far as possible to grow naturally and organically. I’m not trying to make puns there, even though I like puns. I wanted to build a business that would grow based on market demand, and because of that, we haven’t raised capital and I realized that I need to make decisions that are capital efficient.

I thought about every channel that we could sell in, and then I looked at how much margin I needed to give away for each channel. I have been focusing first on knocking over the dominoes that have the least amount of margin that we give away. Farmer’s markets and direct events have almost nothing we need to give away.

Until we have maximized all of those opportunities, then I will go to the next thing, which is some eTail channels, some alternative channels that aren’t that conventional or mainstream retail. I have approached it from a capital efficiency perspective. How far can I go on what I have? To date, we have made it this far without any outside capital at all.

That’s an amazing lesson. I do and I applaud you for it. Correct me if I’m wrong. Your intention wasn’t necessarily to do things disruptively or differently. You did things that you could do and wanted that made sense to do, and that’s it. Often, you run the same playbook or people feel they have to go right to retail or they have to go right to leaning heavily in the D2C, but you don’t.

As you mentioned, you learn a lot. You’ve gotten a lot of feedback. What are some of the things you’ve been in front of your customers, in front of your shoppers, at farmer’s markets in direct events that have helped shape the way you think about the brand, talk about the brand, or even think about the products?

It’s been amazing from having that close customer feedback loop has helped us do everything from messaging to product development. From the marketing perspective, I used to have a chalkboard and before every farmer’s market, I would write something different on the chalkboard like a big billboard, and then I would see what made everybody walk over and want to learn more information.

Having that close relationship with the customer right there helped us figure out our tagline, so I would get a trademark on the ones that performed the best for us at that point of sale. Right after somebody purchases, I would ask them, “What was the main reason you wanted to buy this?” You don’t get that opportunity on an eCommerce or retail channel. That’s been an amazing way to take what we learned there and bring that to scalable marketing, bring that to product development, and be able to figure out why exactly people are doing what they are doing.

All of that is fantastic, but the flip side, of course, is that it is labor-intensive. It’s taken a lot of your time. It’s a lot of you loading up the car, loading up whatever is necessary, being there, and spending your weekends. How have you juggled all that?

A lot of coffee. I was joking. You might as well start a coffee business because when you are getting, at least you can keep going. I developed a process. I build this custom. I have my own retail display in the farmer’s market channel where I have built certain shelving and I have a playbook that I have written out that I basically share with my team and I say, “This is how we do it here. This is what works. I have tried a bunch of things and this is what works for me. I’m not telling you how to sell stuff, but here’s what I do and here’s what gets great results.” Then I bring people on to it to help scale this.

It’s not me running everywhere. I’m grateful this 2022. 2021 was bananas, but this year I am able to have a 10,000-foot view and check in with my team and say, “Is there anything else you need to better succeed to sell more? Anything you’d like to see us do next?” I’m able to float around and manage the sales team rather than be the one in the trenches fully every single day. That was a big ten X leap for me this year.

What do you see for the future of Peak State? Do you stay continuing to build out these channels? You and I have talked about it a bit and being a specialty product, being different from coffee. It’s very difficult to explain that differentiation on shelf when consumers are making instantaneous decisions and you are obviously going to be at a significantly different price point. What’s your thinking about when’s the right time to explore that, or are you staying open to those conversations, but knowing your no, so to speak?

My main aim behind what I’m doing is this idea that we can use business to make the change we want to see in the world. It’s hard to be an individual activist. It’s hard to even make change through the nonprofit world. Having a sustainable revenue engine to make an impact is what motivates me. I’m very hesitant to think that I can have enough profit to even make an impact if I choose the channels that tried to take all of that away. The moment that we would enter the retail channel would need to be a moment that we raised some outside capital. I have a lot of hesitations about doing that.

I think that we are going to continue staying in the lanes that we have chosen. People don’t talk about capital fit very often, but like for us, the way that we are propelling ourselves forward through our own cash, we have to stay here for now. If there’s a moment where retail is loving our brand, and they are demanding that they take us on into their shelves, that is the time. We can then have a little more leverage to talk about what we can do that wouldn’t threaten the future of our business with how much we need to give away to sell on that channel.

I will wait until they ask for Peak State to come onto their shelves when I will be ready for that. In the meantime, we are going to stay on our direct-to-consumer lanes and we’ll be looking at about two X growth every year and I’m perfectly okay with that. There are so many businesses that get pumped with capital, and then they grow almost artificially. They don’t develop sustainable systems; they capitalize on a fad, and then they maybe get their exit.

Then after that exit, there’s a new fad and they can’t continue to listen to the customer and stay relevant because they were artificially pumped up and dumped. They are like if we are building in a way that we have systems in place where we are always listening to the customer and always not selling products, but providing solutions to systemic problems through our products, through doing good with an impact, then we are going to be able to be around them for a long time. I’m this contrarian, reluctant capitalist in this industry trying to figure out how to be great instead of big.

I couldn’t agree more with the fact that true entrepreneurship and commerce harnessed for good is one of the great change agents. It is. I’m a believer in the fact that a lot of the issues that we have, from social issues, to climate issues and to human health issues, aren’t likely to be solved through regulation, legislation, or even through nonprofits.

They are going to be solved by capitalists. They are going to be solved by entrepreneurs, and they are going to be solved by building businesses that have good economic models. For whatever reason, a lot of those people who are doing that work and who have that mind mindset almost seemed to me, at least when they communicate with me like you did, apologize for being a capitalist. Apologize for the potential of profiting from that.

I see it differently. I see it as something that is the inherent right of the risk, vision, willingness, angst, drive, and all those things come with it. As for the people like yourself who are doing this work, it isn’t likely going to fill your coffers and go to consumerism. It’s unlikely that you have all the success and finally buy a Lamborghini. You’d likely take that money and then put it to use to do more good in the world. I encourage folks to be okay with being a dirty capitalist. It’s what you do with that. If you can build an economic engine that solves problems, that’s great. It’s a big part of what motivates me every day, and I struggled with that too.

I have three grown kids and we have talked about money before. I have shared with them that I feel that acquiring money and personal wealth is for a few things. Number one, it’s for security. Like I say to my kids, I always want to be able to provide for them. I never want them to have to provide for mom or dad. That’s number one. You get security taken care of.

Number two is to do good in the world. To use that to do something, to make a difference, to contribute, and to help. The third is for experiences. To create experiences in life, to travel, to see the world, and to do things. That’s it. That’s all it’s there for. If in your entrepreneurial journey, by building something that has a good economic engine, you see that money and you realize that money, as long as you recognize that you are going to put it to use in one of those three buckets define there, I’d feel pretty good about that. It’s made me more comfortable with being a capitalist as well.

I completely agree with all that

Good answer. What’s been some of the hard pain points? I know you’ve had a few. You’ve had moments of doubt about this and this journey. Let’s out a couple of those.

We always talk about pathological optimist. Credit to Gary for that. I felt like, “I could do that,” and then I ended up putting so much on my plate as an entrepreneur wearing all or most of the hats. That put too much burden on my neck, and then I could not straight up and can’t do it anymore. Having those points of almost burnout has been my biggest issue, more so than one catastrophic mistake or misstep.

For me, it’s been too much work, not enough time, things happening slower than you expect, and things being harder than you expect. I will say self-care, doing that, thinking about self-care, forcing myself to do it, or scheduling it with myself. It has been such an important thing to keep coming back to. It’s not like I implement it once. It’s like, I have to remind myself this almost weekly.

I don’t know if you feel the same way, but for me, it’s something you can rationalize to forego when things get busy and you need more time. The key, in my estimation, is almost considering that self-care time. Not almost. Consider that self-care time as sacred time, that you don’t deviate or give it up. That’s hard because you get a lot of things pulling at you and yanking at you. You think, “I could skip it and use that extra hour and a half right now to dig into this issue and take care of it, but I don’t think that’s what’s typically best.”

Let’s talk about fundraising a bit. You are starting to contemplate it. You are starting to think about when is the right time to raise funds. What does that feel like to you? We’ve done a few pitch events now. You are starting to get the name out there. What are your thoughts around your long-term capital play?

To be fully honest, I have enjoyed participating in a lot of these events as a brand building, marketing, and benefit. I think that I’m getting clarity. I think I’m totally unique and contrarian in this space where I don’t know that I’m looking to raise the capital unless the right fit person was so interested and they were pursuing me at this point.

I have pitched with hopes that I would find. An aligned investor who cares about truly doing something sustainable, but as I get more clarity, it’s fair to the investors. For investors to put their money into a business like Peak State, it needs to be a better option than any other asset class and any other startup they could be considering.

As I’m over here making decisions like choosing to have compostable packaging, which takes away a couple of margin points, choosing to source regenerative farmed ingredients, which also is more expensive, and to be organic, I’m competing with every single margin point that they want to grow their money.

To be honest, as I get more and more clarity, I realize I want to try to do this without outside investment, and I only would have known that having embodied the idea of thinking about taking on that capital. Every time I get a chance to pitch my brand, get feedback on it, it helps me grow. It helps me be better. It helps me better explain what I’m doing, and I’m always grateful to that. I will also say that when I was in the mindset of thinking I wanted to raise some capital because I have gone back and forth on this. It’s a demoralizing process. It will beat you up.

It will. I have worked with many founders, and a few are in the process right now. Even after you get that first yes, the distance in that first yes, going through due diligence to actual money coming in, sometimes could be the most emotional. It’s a deplete of process. There’s no question about it. It’s important to contemplate. It’s important to me.

You said something that is very prophetic. You said you need to be fair, understand an investor’s needs, and be ready to commit to what they need in you as an investment in terms of speed of growth, exit, and so forth. You labeled yourself somewhat a contrarian, and that’s probably to some degree apropos, but it’s not that you are necessarily contrary in this effect that you are not feeling it necessary to follow the well-worn path but to figure out what’s best for you in the business. Have you explored other ways to capitalize the business, such as grants, debt financing, SBA, asset-based lending, venture debt, and all of those things?

A growing business needs capital, for sure. Outside of equity, we have been looking at a lot of other things. We do Kickstarters, we are about to do our third, and so those have been a great way to have a great cash conversion cycle because money comes in before you spend it on inventory. We are looking at creating terms with our suppliers and collecting early pay late, those types of good small business practices have been invaluable to us as a way to defer needing to raise outside capital. We are looking at SBA types of loans that would bridge us through different inventory purchases and marketing tests. We are also interested in things like Kickfurther that can help with inventory financing. All of this non-traditional crowdfunding and debt options are interesting to me.

One of the things that I would encourage all those reading and specifically you, Danny, too, is to be an innovator in this process too. In other words, the innovators that are out there, things like Kickfurther and all of in equity crowdfunding and rewards-based crowdfunding. That’s great. With the help of a good CPA and an attorney, there’s nothing to say that you couldn’t create your own structure to take to potential investors that works for them and works for you, and it could be a form of debt and equity. It could be debt.

It doesn’t have to be a venture. We have had some success where we have worked in put together a short-term bridge financing for an opportunity for a big rollout where a brand was rolling out to a new eTailer, production, and all of that. They needed some help with that working capital. Rather than sell off equity or try to get that done or goes through that process, let’s put together something that might be attractive and reach out to interested parties and see if we get any bites.

That’s one of the things I would encourage anyone reading. You are entrepreneurs. You innovate, break things, and look at things through different lenses. Much like Danny is describing as he looks to his go-to-market strategy is trying to find the path less traveled when it comes to financing and trying to capitalize your business. Don’t that you have to be constrained to what exists or what is known.

Don’t feel like, “I have got to do the equity route. I have got to go raise my first convertible note.” There are other ways you can do it and getting somebody alongside you who can think creatively and who can problem solve in that space and come up with some creative elements could be valuable. Let’s talk about the future of the business. Let’s say you and I are hanging out on a show five years from now, which means that I will be old. What do you foresee? If you could script out Peak State’s trajectory and growth what’s happened in five years?

Everything that we are doing funnels into, growing our monthly subscriptions, seeing that to be probably about a hundred X where it is now, would be where I’d hope to be in five years. Being one of those top coffees that you can buy through some of the most popular eTail channels like Amazon. Continuing to be a grassroots brand that connects and builds relationships with people in person, and then where I am excited as the amount of what we do 1% for the planet and how much money that we are able to be giving for environmental regeneration and supporting sustainable initiatives through this business. For me, that is my aim.

One of the coolest things for me was as I looked at what we did with our 1% sales that we donated to a local nonprofit working in environmental conservation. This was far bigger than anything I have ever contributed in my life. I have already done something much bigger than I have ever done as an individual by starting Peak State, and that was a big moment for me.

Continuing to be a grassroots gorilla brand that is focusing on quality and being a sustainable and minimizing harm to the environment as much as we can as we continue to grow so that we can be a model for other businesses that might be interested in thinking about the ecological implications of their business, rather than the economic implications of their business.

I will give you an amen to all of that. The only coaching I would give you there, though on to anyone, I wrote an article about this a few years ago, and that is there’s a balance. In order to save the world, you first have to make sure your business is sustainable, and so always asking. Sometimes, being the kind-hearted, mission-driven, and passion person that you are, you want to do everything you can to have as big an impact and a positive impact through Peak State as possible. Sometimes at the expense potentially of the business itself. In fact, oftentimes, it is almost better to say, “I’m not going to have that big of an impact because I’m going to focus on building the business. Once the business is sustainable and bigger, then I can have a much bigger impact.”

It’s okay at times, I believe, with giving yourself permission to say, “Not yet.” I want to do some of these things, but not yet. Put it on a not yet list when you come to that board, but I love the perspective. I love the mindset. You are everything that embodies what we think is what a tardigrade brand is. Brands that are nimble capital, efficient, and resilient. Brands that are committed to doing right by the people, planet and profit are brands that are building community and that growth hack, and try new things.

That’s exactly what you are attempting to do. I think that’s going to serve you well. I do think that you will be a model or at least a case study for other entrepreneurs to emulate who don’t want to necessarily get on the hamster wheel of raising capital. Recognize that their brand isn’t likely to be that $100 million or $200 million brand that you need to be to, or at least need a path to be, to be a truly venture-backed brand.

It’s not going to be easy, and you are going to have lots of continued headwinds, brick walls, and moments of doubt. With the mindset that you have and with the commitment and passion that you have, you are going to do it. I do. It’s good for you, the brand, and our environment, but it’s also good for our industry.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to be that next $100 million or $200 million brand like there’s nothing wrong with building a brand that is very focused on the impact that it’s making and is very niche and choosing alternative routes. What I think is wrong is when we as an industry conspire to elevate and celebrate only the one, not the other. Our industry will benefit the most from allowing entrepreneurs the option to choose the path that works best for them.

Part of that is understanding not only what that path is, but understanding then what fuels that path. You wouldn’t put rocket fuel in a Ford Fiesta. You wouldn’t put basic unleaded diesel in a solid booster rocket you are sending the orbit the Earth. That’s where there’s so much confusion when brands who don’t have that chance or don’t want to be that crazy ten X multiple, go ahead and get capital from the equivalent of the rocket fuel supplier, and then they are putting it more in a car engine.

I couldn’t agree with that more. The realization to me that we get to play our own game here. If you are measuring yourself by somebody else’s game, you are going to feel horrible about yourself and that’s not even the right thing to do. It’s like that Albert Einstein quote like, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb the tree and to live its whole life thinking that it’s stupid.” Knowing what your own KPIs are and playing your own games is so important.

How are you finding this message? Are you talking to other entrepreneurs who are thinking similarly? Are you building a network of like-minded people so that you are not alone on an island? Through our community, you’ve had a lot of conversations. What’s the reception been like amongst other entrepreneurs?

The source of all this for me is a lot of the books that I read. I have a hypothesis that it is possible to do this and to grow naturally in this world. I’m in a few communities. The tardigrade program has been incredible for me to connect with other people. I’m right here in Boulder. The Boulder community has been an amazing place to chat with fellow founders.

What’s so cool about this industry, regardless of which way you are growing and what your aim is, is everybody seems to have that common denominator of caring about something greater than their own products even. They care about health or they care about sustainability or they care about changing the status quo. Feeling that sense of mission by participating in this industry has been contagious and positive energy. I do talk with a lot of other brands and I often feel still even talking to them like I’m over here thinking my own way and I’m okay with that.

That’s somewhat true, but I also think that they could benefit from hearing your message as well. I have had the privilege and opportunity to watch this evolution with you. I don’t think that you’ve wavered in many ways, but what I have noticed, and again, please call bullshit on this if you disagree. What I have noticed tremendously that’s changed is that you see much more peace with being the contrarian or playing by an alternative playbook. I don’t think your playbook or that mindset has changed, but you are not struggling with the FOMO of not participating under the more common rules of engagement. Would that be fair?

I would think that’s fair to say for sure. There are a lot of struggles in wavering that happen in the entrepreneurial journey, at least for me. I think about my own vision, where I want to be what I want to get out of this. That gives me that clarity to relax into what I have chosen, how I see success, and how I want that to look. I have been grateful for getting that clarity.

If you could share a message to the people in the industry retailers, distributors, eTailers, and so forth about your approach and encourage them maybe to think differently about supporting brands that are taking your approach. Is there a message? Is there something that you’d want them to know or understand?

The message is, to get out of some of these huge systemic problems we have created for ourselves, it’s not going to be as profitable as it was to get here. That means that you need to give up a few points to take on a brand that is trying to do good in every way in such that it will be displacing some other brand that is causing a lot more harm to the environment or to people’s health, with a product filled with pesticides. It might be a couple of dollars cheaper. It might make you a couple more dollars, but you are supporting a system.

Think about the fact that we will all need to make some economic compromises to get ourselves out of some of these big problems we have created. That would be my message and something to ponder. I might be shut down. Too bad it’s about making money, but that is the reality we all face to get out of this mess. We will have to compromise on a bit of convenience and a bit of profitability to choose things that will create a system that gets us out of here.

Don’t you also think, though, that consumers are going to demand that more, and if outlets don’t offer products that are walking that walk and doing that, consumers will find those products elsewhere?

If you look at Millennials, Gen Z, and even newer generations, they are all demanding sustainability. They are more likely to turn the package over, read the mission, make sure you check the ingredients, make sure that it’s clean, and make sure that it has an important mission. It’s no longer about looking at the price, that trend is only going to become more true. That’s one of those things and facts that makes me feel comfortable about this path that I have chosen. I know that as we head into the future, we will continue to be even more relevant to those consumers who are demanding that.

One of the things that I would say very much so is that we look at generation alpha, the youngest generation, which many are beginning to label as Generation Activist. They recognize that. There is an existential threat to them and it’s changing. I think why you may find yourself the anomaly or the outlier to our earlier conversation about where you’ll be in five years. I don’t think that outwardly you’ll look to folks that you are. You’ll be much more of a mainstream approach by then. I think that’s how rapid things are changing. Flipping the script a little bit, changing things up. When did you realize you were an entrepreneur? You say you are reluctant in this, but when did you wake up, look yourself in a mirror, and say, “I’m an entrepreneur.”

To clarify. My reluctance pertains to the way that we do business in this country and by convention. I’m reluctant to participate in that. Entrepreneurially, I feel like entrepreneurship is more of a personality type or a characteristic than it is a career. I have always been somebody who wants to make things happen, improve things, change things, and sometimes, for example, I remember being a little kid. I want to sell things to my neighbors or wanting to buy things from Costco and sell them at lunch at school. I started a bartending business on the side in college. I have always had this desire to think outside the box and do my own thing, so that would be my thought on entrepreneurship.

You recognize that early on in yourself. Entrepreneurship, another way to describe it, is chronically unemployable. You don’t work well within the confines of an organization because you are trying to break things and look at things differently and do things differently. We talked a little bit about self-care, but how do you absorb that inherent stress of entrepreneurialism that comes with the not knowing, risk-taking, and the lack of certainty?

I have had to invest in a lot of different practices. Some of them have to do with meditating, and for me, that’s breathwork. I have hired a coach to help me realize. It’s important to realize things like we need to act from a place of having already received what we are seeking and what we are building. You can combat that uncertainty by giving yourself a vision of yourself with certainty of having already achieved what you are setting out to do, and coming back from that place. Do have that type of mentality. That’s been a very important way to talk back to self-doubt.

I love the fact that you are investing in you. We talk about that often that for all of you reading as entrepreneurs, you are the most important and most valuable asset in your business. If you are not investing in yourself, self-care, education, and skill development, things that are going to make you more resilient, then you are doing your business a disservice. Things like coaching, physical training, and all of those things are critically important.

I will say community has been very important. Often like flipping the script. For example, “I can’t take this vacation because of my business.” When, in fact, you can flip that and say, “I need to take this vacation for myself and for my business so that my business will have the best me showing up with the right energy.”

That’s super hard. I struggle with that, as you all know, I talk about the fact that what I find best for me there is to take workcations where I extend the vacation timeframe but spend time during the vacation working because that helps me mitigate the stress. One of the things that most entrepreneurs learn along the journey is that even when we believe prior to starting the journey that things seem grounded or predicted that they weren’t, that was a false narrative that we told ourselves. As entrepreneurs, things aren’t any less grounded or predicted. We see it for what it is, and in fact, we can exert more control over it than we could before. Let’s talk a little bit about what you could use in this community of readers. Is there any way that the people here in the audience can help you?

We are still on our journey. Anybody who is willing to try out our products, email me. I can give you a discount link and offer some feedback. What would make them even more excited about, the products that we have been building? I want Peak State to be able to own the morning wellness routine, two birds, one stone, whatever you are drinking in the morning, we want to make it healthier for you and serve you with something that will prime you for your day.

We will make you feel like you are your best self as you show up to your day’s challenges. That’s what our brand is here to do. Any feedback you can offer on our products or packaging, we would be so grateful to learn from all of you because the collective wisdom of this community has been continuing to blow my mind.

The other thing that I would encourage all of you is that if Danny’s off-the-beaten path approach resonates with you, you should reach out to him and you should talk about, “Are there ways to collaborate?” For those of you who want to veer off the super highway and take the path less traveled. Doing it together, doing it with others, support, sharing resources, and looking and exploring ways to collaborate like-minded people can be incredibly valuable, especially to those that are trying to buck the trend or buck the system. What’s the best way for people to reach you, Danny?

Shoot me an email. Danny@PeakStateCoffee.com, or you could find that on our website. If you submit a question, I will be the one answering it. Instagram, I will be the one to reply to a direct message. You can find us through a Google search. They should be pretty easy.

I will take the last little bit for myself here and it’s at the risk of sounding parental and not the intention at all, but I’m proud of you. I’m proud of the fact that you have the confidence in yourself and in what you are doing to be willing to veer to the left when everyone is going to the right. It’ll serve you well. I think that more entrepreneurs need your courage and I for one will do and continue to do anything I can to support you in your efforts. What I want to see our industry celebrate and support is that optionality. Every product and every brand is different. Everyone’s route to what is “success” can be different and one is not better than the other.

We need to have the structure both from getting to the customer to support an alternative path as well as funding that path. That’s one of the things that we are trying to explore, quite frankly, internally with things like the TIG Ventures community is. What are the alternatives? As I mentioned, to build and support singles and doubles. Not needing Peak State to be a ten X, but to build a profitable business. Maybe it’s a business that pays a nice dividend over time. Lots to learn for all of us as we explore alternative ways to build brands, and that’s why I was so thankful to get some of your time, Danny. Thanks for joining us on this episode. Thank you, everybody, for reading to my dulcet tones, drone on one last favor.

I hope that by speaking with founders trying to do things differently and having this open dialogue, we are elevating this conversation within this industry. One role in one way that all of you can help us do is by simply taking two minutes to go wherever you get this show, Spotify, Apple, etc. and give us a review because the algorithm simply works that way. The more five-star reviews, the more visible it becomes, the more readers read this message, and the more people begin to realize that you don’t have to be a unicorn. You can be a tardigrade. Everyone, thanks for joining. Danny, we’ll see you soon. Take care.

Thank you, Elliot.

Important Links

• Peak State Coffee

• TIG Ventures

• TIG Collective

• Jenny@TIGBrands.com

• Danny@PeakStateCoffee.com

• Instagram – Peak State Coffee

• Apple – TIG Talks

• Spotify – TIG Talks

About Danny Walsh

An entrepreneurial spirit, I bring an engineers methodical approach to innovation and product commercialization. What drives me is a passion for the outdoors, active living, and environmentalism.

Since a kid, I’ve been ceaselessly curious. This helped me discover a passion for problem-solving and bringing order to large, complex systems. As a result, I work best in roles at the intersection of innovation and execution, including operations, product, and business development, both intrapreneurially and in early stage startups.

I pursued my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University with a minor in Biomechanics. After three years in the medical device industry as an engineer, I catapulted into the world of startups. I got accepted into the Watson Institute incubator to work on a mobility related prosthetic device. My humbling time deep in startups inspired an MBA concentrating in Entrepreneurship.

Engineering and startup experience have given me an uncommon, process-oriented approach to business. I accepted a role as Managing Director at Spark Boulder, a business incubator in Boulder, CO. I then moved into Product Management in the rock climbing equipment industry. I’m now back in the startup trenches, running product at Peak State.

The ‘yang’ to my career pursuits is time outdoors. And I enjoy hard, physical work and learning to work with my hands. I have worked on the AMC’s Professional Trail Crew in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and on the Appalachian Trail and I volunteer for Volunteers for the Outdoors of Colorado, Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, Front Range Climbing Stewards, and the City of Boulder OSMP.

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