How brave are you to start realizing your dream? In this episode, Elliot Begoun is joined by Tonya Donati who shares how persistently chasing her dreams gave birth to the brewing company Mother Kombucha. She talks about how it slowly reached success, changed the lives of many customers, and opened her eyes to her destiny as an entrepreneur. Full of rollercoaster moments, honest realizations, and golden business nuggets, this episode will make you understand how your dream is always worth investing in and change your life for the better! 

—

Listen to the podcast here

Mother Kombucha’s Story: How Investing In Your Dream Can Change Your Life With Tonya Donati

I am looking forward to this conversation with Tonya Donati but before I turn it over to her to share a little bit about herself and Mother Kombucha, I’ve got to do my two commercials. The first is to talk a bit about the TIG Collective. It is something that started as a passion project from our team with a dual purpose. The first is to help founders extract more value from their advisors and surround them with the people that can help them shape and make better decisions and avoid the pitfalls that rife throughout the industry.

The second is to begin to cultivate the next generation of board members. Board members that are more representative of the communities we serve and that will change the complexion of the boards by seeing more women in BIPOC and LGBTQ+. Also, more diversity of thought and lived experience and so forth. To make sure that those folks have an opportunity to share their wisdom and guide companies because the companies in our industry will be all the better for it.

The TIG Collective allows entrepreneurs to sign an advisory agreement with the Collective and issue their advisor shares to the Collective. The advisors sign a reciprocal agreement with the Collective and they participate in all the aggregate upside of those shares and therefore have a vested interest in seeing these founders succeed. If you’re interested in learning more about the TIG Collective, reach out to any of us here at TIG Brands or ping us on LinkedIn.

The second commercial is about our TIG Venture Community. I’m talking more and more to folks about this, both on the brand side and more so on the investor side. The reality is there’s a big miss here. We’re stepping over singles and doubles in pursuit of grand slams. Good businesses and opportunities are being missed in getting the funding they need to take the next step.

A lot of it has to do with the way people truly look at venture and venture is that. It’s the bet on the moonshot but there’s a lot between the moonshot and driving down the highway and a lot of opportunity to make money as an investor from brands that may never be $200 million brands that are selling for 3X or 4X trailing 12 to a strategic but have other past to profitability.

If you’re interested in investing in brands that are focused on unit economics, becoming EBITDA-positive and working towards cashflow positivity and building to $10 million, $20 million or $30 million brands that have choices, whether they jump into the venture by platforming market or look for private equity money. Come talk to us. The TIG Venture community is a very unique structure. It’s a rolling fund that allows LPs to subscribe and determine how much capital they’re going to put into the fund on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

The money’s deployed within the brands of our community that we’re actively involved in so, therefore, actively involved in de-risking and guiding. It’s a way to build smart businesses as well as great brands. To learn more, reach out to any of us here at TIG Brands or ping us on LinkedIn. Now, I get to turn it over to you. Tonya, why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience? Tell them a little bit about your background and share your mission at Mother Kombucha and what you’re trying to do and then we’ll dig into the conversation.

First of all, thanks for having me, Elliot. I have been following the show for a long time so it’s pretty fun to be in the seat and get to have one of the conversations that we share with the rest of the group as well. I am the Cofounder and CEO of Mother Kombucha. We’re a craft kombucha brand based in St. Petersburg, Florida. I was destined to be an entrepreneur because I wasn’t good at working with other people and working in the corporate structure. I love rules that make sense but I can’t stand rules that don’t seem to have a purpose.

My background is my parents both own their businesses. My grandfather owned his own business. It was always in my DNA to do that. I spent the first fifteen years of my adult career life as an occupational therapist working in healthcare. I owned my businesses in healthcare as well and then decided that I needed to move that desire for helping people in their wellness journey into a different channel. I was home with two small children. I like to say, I don’t know if I found kombucha or kombucha found me but I was drinking it. It made me feel amazing and I didn’t like the way it tasted so I started making it taste better.

It became a passion project that turned into a business opportunity when I realized there was not a regional kombucha brand and that we could turn kombucha into something more than a health beverage. It could also be delicious and paired well with food. It was packaged in a way that was to be used as a celebration rather than a medicinal purpose and that’s how we got started.

When you decided to start, there’s a trigger point where something germinates from idea to, “I’ve got a business. I’m going to do this.” Do you remember when that was and the conversation that came around, like, “It’s crazy but I think we should do this?”

I remember it. It seems weird but it was when I was home with a newborn and people are saying you’re crazy to start a business with a newborn and a three-year-old. I was in a very creative mode at that time and open to possibilities. I was fortunate. My husband Vic, who’s a partner, he’s our Creative Director and a Cofounder in the business was also open to entrepreneurship and taking risks. It started with making kombucha for a friend who had a juice bar locally.

As I started, I thought I was just going to make up to her as a token, as a favor and to have fun doing it. I started digging into it and realized what the whole industry was. I had no background in CPG with anyone that I even knew. We’d done business plans before. We had a boutique dive watch company. We knew about business planning and I said, “What if I take this idea and model it out? What does it look like? Where are the opportunities?” That’s where we started and it started to go from, “This is a thing.”

An interesting thing is we see a lot where a spouse starts a business and either the other spouse participates or doesn’t but I’ve also witnessed many times where one has the entrepreneurial mindset and the other, much more, you get a job and earn a paycheck. You said that Vic was on board from day one. He was in for the risk and all of that. Have you ever thought about what if he wasn’t? Do you think you’d still be doing this if he was more like, “I don’t know if I want to take this kind of risk?”

He’s more cautious than I am, which is good. He grounds me a lot of times and it’s a good balance. I pull him out of his comfort zone but he had left the corporate world and working in big advertising to being a freelancer and having his own business because we wanted to be there to take our kids to school and pick them up. We wanted to have time as a family and flexibility beyond the two weeks of paid daytime off. We had that. If it was going to be marital strife, I probably wouldn’t have done it to that extent. There’s enough of that owning a business. If you’re in a relationship, everybody has to be on board to some extent. I can’t imagine trying to pull somebody along against their will.

Changing gears a little bit. One of the things that you’ve built not only is the business but this has become much bigger than your product, at least in my observation. It’s also a way for you to live life with generosity. The people you’re choosing to bring into the organization and the mindset. For those who aren’t part of our audience, above Tonya’s head are a bunch of sticky notes that stay favorite things and it’s all the employees of the company who put their favorite things up there. When it’s somebody’s birthday, they grab that off the board and people know what to get them and so forth. It’s become a bigger mission for you to be B corp certified. When did you realize, “I can not only make a good product but I affect change in other ways?

It just happened over time, because as we started the business, we also have a third Founder, Josh. Josh and I were primarily doing the grunt work of the innovation lab that was starting something from scratch. When we started it, we were brewing in 20-gallon batches and we were doing it as you would at home in a little tiny kitchen space. We operated it as if it was our home. We recycled and composted everything.

Josh has a gorgeous urban garden. His whole yard is fruit and vegetables. We composted everything in his garden and made sure it was low-sugar because we didn’t want to drink it or give it to our kids if it wasn’t low-sugar. We did everything selfishly based on how we operated ourselves. As we grew, everything was organic because we wanted it to be organic. We wanted fair trade.

It was a naturally built-in part of our business but we always knew that we were so community-based. When you start small, as we did, we were delivering the kegs out of the back of our cars and working directly. Automatically somebody from the community wants a product for their fundraiser. A nonprofit that you like and support in any way asks you to get involved. It naturally grew that way where we wanted to operate. It would’ve never struck me to operate the business any differently than we do.

It became interesting as we started to grow to see that those things multiply along the way. There’s a ripple effect that gets bigger and that’s what’s great about getting a B corp certification. You get all the other certifications and that’s the end of the process. As long as you keep buying organic ingredients and your document and trace it, you’re organic. That’s it. The end goal is to be organic. With the B corp, it’s the very beginning and you’re constantly challenging your business saying, “How do we do better? What else can we do that as we grow, that ripple effect gets bigger and bigger?

What I’m hearing is that at the beginning, the business showed up in the world the way you showed up in the world. You started to recognize, “This is a platform.” With that, we can extend the reach that we would’ve had. As individuals, we can amplify that reach. Would that be a fair assessment?

Yes. When you think about going from being the sole employee of your company to bringing people in, to me it’s an honor that somebody wants to spend their time and days with us. Your life is precious. We get to spend time with these people more than they spend with their families and friends. You want to create an environment that is positive and adds to their lives and doesn’t take away from them. It’s like taking what you want and what you think is right and then continuing to figure out how to build on that.

The business has grown and it continues to grow. You found yourself at that precipice. You were getting tugged. Maybe before I ask this question, you have your Mother Kombucha, your core legacy brand that’s regional but then you’ve also introduced Agua Bucha. Can you explain to those reading what Agua Bucha is?

Agua Bucha is a kombucha-powered sparkling water and we created that from the direct feedback of our consumers. That was that there were some things keeping people from either limiting consumption or out of the category. That was the sugar content and the fermented flavor of kombucha, both of which those things we try to have low in our core product but it’s still there. The third was the price point. From a business standpoint, the cold chain was an issue. We thought if we could make something that answers all of those needs, we had an opportunity to incrementally grow and bring kombucha to a whole new audience. That’s what Agua Bucha is. It is that opportunity.

You have that opportunity and then you’re getting tugged because this industry does that. It takes you and starts trying to pull you and entice you. Encourage you and force you or whatever words we want to use to start looking at rapid expansion, distribution and so forth. You’re thinking through that and what’s the right way to grow this business.

How fast, because in beverage, as we all know, it’s very competitive but it’s easy to spend a shitload of money trying to build a beverage brand across multiple geographies and expand. Plus, you’re dealing with an inherently heavy product and therefore not inexpensive to ship. As you think about the future of this business, how is that thinking evolved and changed?

For one, it’s how we got to know each other and how Mother Kombucha fit so nicely with TIG. Capital efficiency was something that not only was a necessity. We didn’t have bottomless pockets and a lot of startup money. We were capital-efficient from the beginning because we had to be but I also have never fully felt comfortable with the model of taking on $5 million to get to $2 million and then continuing that.

It seems like a dangerous game to play and I don’t have the appetite for it. We have a plan and a model that we started to put together that required us to think about capital efficiency. We were able to get to the point in 2021 of being EBITDA positive in beverage and still growing 40% in the middle of a pandemic and launching a new brand.

Everything has to go into the plan and if it models out and it’s going to cost so much more where we can see that we can stay over and not get over our skis so to speak, then we have to plan it in that way and the model will tell you. As you and I know, you look at the model. We did start looking at the West Coast because of the number of kombucha brands and its being a place for discovery. It’s sexy.

Every innovative brand loves the West Coast.

I lived out on the West Coast for years. Even when we started doing work, I got into some distribution through UNFI out there. It was always viewed as a test. “Does this tell us anything about the product? Does launching it someplace where they’re used to? Do we get the feedback that we need?” The real test was that in the last few years, everything has gotten exponentially more expensive. It doesn’t work for the model. We have limited time and resources. Why wouldn’t we be putting all that time and money into growing it here in our backyard where we get the most bang for our buck?

It’s been an interesting exploration together because it is somewhat of a contrarian thing. It’s certainly contrarian and unique to be a beverage innovator in the space and be EBITDA-positive or on the cusp of continued EBITDA positivity. That’s unheard of. The common refrain if you talk to an investor, they’ll tell you, “Beverage is so expensive,” and it is. Partly, the way it is is because the common way to go to market is to grow in as many geographies as you can and expand distribution as quickly as you can. Trade spending and shipping are expensive. In a team, it’s expensive, marketing and so forth.

You and I sat back and said, “What if we looked at this differently? What if we recognized?” One of the reasons Agua Bucha came in and your thinking is to disconnect the growth of the brand and the business from the requirement of a cold chain. Immediately as you think about that, you start thinking about geographic expansion but it doesn’t necessarily require geographic expansion to leverage that benefit of decoupling. Also, the decoupling of the cold chain is only one of the attributes or benefits of Agua Bucha.

The others are slightly different profiles. It’s a different drinking occasion and price point. It’s something that the non-kombucha drinker can use to get close to kombucha or the kombucha drinker can augment and have it more frequently as they would water. As we started to investigate, we started to realize all the things you mentioned early on. You built this business by being involved in the community and building a strong regional brand.

It’s in Florida alone but if we look at the Southeast as a whole, that population base and density of population are greater than many European nations and other countries. What if we focused on building an omnichannel approach dominating that area? When we started putting those numbers together, it made so much more sense than trying to figure out how to support being in Erewhon, Lassens and Bristol on the West Coast and being in MOM’s on the East Coast. That took some courage from you to buck the trend so to speak. As you’ve articulated it to others in the industry and investors, what are you hearing from them?

We’re starting to have that conversation. People hear regional and they hear small. There’s this idea that if you’re a regional brand, you’re only going to grow to be a certain size. We’re by no means saying that regional is the life of the brand necessarily but there’s so much opportunity. You can have a long-term vision and we have plenty of that but the reality is what keeps this business afloat and successful is what happens this year and next year and the following year. We love California. It’ll be there waiting for us. The opportunity’s not going to disappear. To me, if it’s not one thing, it doesn’t mean that you don’t potentially have the others. When do you pull what levers if you want to be a profitable business?

We think of it as a binary decision between that and not. This is a big thing that we try to encourage in conversation and I think more so now than ever before because as you know very well, it is a bitch to raise capital. It is a bitch to a multiple of ten in this market. It’s hard and it’s harder when you are in the $1 million to $5 million range business. That’s the hardest.

If you think about, “If we can dominate regionally, strengthen and speed the trajectory to where we’re generating reasonable returns and EBITDA and so forth,” it’s not that we’re foregoing nationals. It’s not that you said, “I don’t want to be a national brand. I want to get to self-determination.” If I can build the business to the size that you think and I agree with that you can build it regionally, at that point then, you’re not so dependent on an investor community validating or subscribing to your growth hypothesis.

There are going to be alternative ways for you to grow that business. It can be venture capital but it could potentially be commercial banking or private equity. You create more self-determination. It takes patience. It’s hard to have the patience and discipline to do it. It takes some courage to buck the trend and go against the trend. What I admire amongst many things that I admire about you is that you don’t get sucked into the story. You’re comfortable in your own skin. You know your lane, where your risk tolerance is and the way you want to grow this business and you’re cool with it.

You have to know what you’re comfortable with and what your end goal is. You have to be flexible and be able to change your mindset about things. You can’t have a fixed mindset. Who would’ve told us what was going to happen over the last several years and everything that’s come to pass since then? It’s about having that flexibility and believing in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The other adjustments are only numbers and plans but it all boils down to having a product, a mission and a plan, going from there and then making those changes.

What you pointed out is this model that we’ve changed around a bit would not have been possible if we were based in Kansas as a kombucha brewery. No offense to Kansas. We’d have to keep reaching to get to a population density and the right group of people. We have so much opportunity right here where we are and there aren’t a ton of brands here. There’s not an overwhelming amount so we’re not being washed out by the noise here. Why wouldn’t we invest all of our efforts and time into our community and then let it expand from there? It seems logical and clear to me.

It does. My question that I was thinking of as you were saying is when you talk about it like this and you articulate it, it’s almost like you’re reaffirming to yourself, “This makes sense,” but then you go out and talk to others about it. With our time together, I know that you’ve had plenty of investor conversations. Do you ever walk away? I know you do but how do you stay resolute when people challenge this?

It is interesting. We’ve had a few investors applaud us or encourage the regional approach, which would’ve been unthinkable from any investor a year ago. The vast majority of them are still saying, “When you get to $10 million and beverage is so expensive.” Do you ever bang your head against the wall in frustration? The thing about this focus is that you still need money to grow the business. You don’t need crazy money but you still need growth capital to invest in the team and marketing and do the things you need to do to expand the region. How do you not lose faith in the fact that others will eventually come on board?

I don’t have the belief that if we were to make this glorious plan that said we were going to be $100 million in 3 years, investors are going to believe that either. We have to have a plan that we believe in, stand by and find the partners for that. If they don’t believe in it and they don’t get it, then we aren’t a good fit to be partners.

An investor is not just money but they’re your partners in your business. You’re inviting people into your table to spend time with you for who knows how many years and the good, the bad and everything that goes along with it. If they don’t buy into it, then it’s not a fix. The frustrating thing is finding the right people but I don’t get upset when somebody says it’s not for me because I don’t believe in it. If they don’t believe in it, then it’s not a fit.

You don’t want an investor who doesn’t believe in the growth hypothesis and the way it’s growing. I said this in the opening commercial. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Mother Kombucha represents a single or a double but this is what I mean when I say we step over good businesses in the pursuit of something almost mythical.

I don’t know the preciseness of this number but I’m going to go with it because it illustrates the point. If you look at all the aggregate portfolios of all the funds in our space, 6% of the companies represent 90% of the return because we’re betting on these amazing moonshot-type opportunities but to get to those, we’re missing all of these sound and potentially good investments in businesses that are taking a different approach, a more metered or restrained growth approach but can return.

I would encourage any of you who are investors or anyone who is going to be speaking with investors to shake them a little bit. Wake up to this opportunity and the concept of managing a portfolio. It’s okay if you have a few home runs that you’re betting on but sprinkle in a bunch of good brands and businesses that are likely to show a return. Maybe not a crazy 10X or 15X return but a return that’s going to be meaningful nonetheless.

Changing gears slightly, how much does self-manufacturing lend to your confidence in choosing a regional strategy or being able to choose your strategy? You’re self -manufacturing for the Mother Kombucha line and Agua Bucha, you’re doing the Coke model where you’re making the base. How big of a sense of additional autonomy does that give you?

For the core kombucha line, kombucha is not a typically co-packaged item a lot yet anyway so it would be tough to do but having that ownership of the process and level of control is important to us. There are many times in the early years I thought how easy it would be to have somebody else do this for me and not have the staffing issues, always try to source a new piece of equipment and all the things that go with self-manufacturing.

When it comes down to it, now that I co-package something, it’s not as bad as it seems because I do at least get to be the master of our destiny as opposed to being at the whim of someone else. We do have a good co-packer for our product and they’re close by, which is fantastic. I can’t imagine if they were six states away because I or someone from my team is there for every packaging run. We can taste it and try it. We can go do that. We can communicate back and forth when there are problems. We’re welcome to stop in at any given time but to do a larger co-packing with something like what we’re doing, especially when you have a young product and you might want to make tweaks and changes, I can’t set it.

It’s not what I thought it was. It’s not all cracked up to be. When you’re a mission-driven company too, it’s nice to have employees and a team to be working within your community. Our employees and team are the connection with us and the community in a lot of different ways. I had no idea but I guess I was meant to run a factory. I just didn’t realize that when I got into this. I was imagining this artisan farmer’s market thing where you do this little thing. I didn’t think of myself as getting excited about centrifugal pumps and bottles per minute.

One of the things we’ve danced around a bit in this conversation and a big part of what you’ve been doing and focused on as well is culture. We’re building something special around the team. A mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make early on is they dismiss the importance of shaping culture as something they can do when they get bigger. Suddenly, they realize that the culture has shaped itself and you can’t put that horse back in the barn. Share your thoughts about how you’ve been intentionally shaping culture and when you made a decision to make that something front and center.

It’s everything to us. It is not only the empathic way to do it. It is like being a B corp. It’s good for business. I learned this from watching my father operate a business. He’s a veterinarian with a private practice. He’s just retired but I saw how he treated his employees and he would tell me time and time again. “If you invest in them and find the right people, the things that they will do for you when you need them to is almost unimaginable.”

I can’t believe the things that people on my team will do and the love and care they put into their jobs and each other. I never refer to our team as a family because family is not always a good reference for some people and you’re stuck together. We’re a team by choice. We all choose to be here and spend this time that we spend together but it is everything. I’m never regretted investing in our team and giving them everything that I can give them. It’s always paid back. You talk about your karmic boomerangs. It pays in dividends better than anything else.

Did you know that or learn that? Was it something intuitive as you built the business? When did you make that connection?

I wasn’t 25 when I started this business. I don’t want to talk about age but I wasn’t a child. I had worked for companies that didn’t care if I showed up or not or if you were there to generate income, bill, insurance for a certain amount and things along those lines. I wanted to build a place where I wanted to come to work every day. I don’t like to have strife and animosity in my life. I like to keep things running smoothly and calmly. That’s the team that we’ve tried to build. We joke about it. We’re like an octopus with all these different arms and everybody’s picking things up and doing what needs to be done. When somebody asks what a role is, it’s not always clearly defined and it shifts but we’re all doing it together in real time.

That has got to make the good days feel better and the bad days feel not so bad when you know you’re not doing it alone and everybody is truly hand in hand to try to get the results that you want.

I can’t tell you how many days. More days than not. Oftentimes, a typical conversation when we see somebody for the first time a day is, “Are you okay? How are you doing? Is everything all right?” It’s because we know what’s going on in each other’s lives, both at work and outside of work. When someone is having a rough day, can you help them out? When we have a weekly meeting, we call it our muddle because it can get a little bit messy but at the Monday muddle, we say, “Put it out in the air. This person is underwater. Let’s all make an effort to help. It doesn’t matter.” Our sales manager will jump on the bottling line if she has to.

That’s the cool way because everybody has their ebbs and flows. What about the kids? What do you hope they’re learning watching mom and dad do this together? What’s their take that you hope they’re gaining from the insanity?

I sometimes wonder if they realize that we work because they don’t come up here that often and so much of the work that they see me doing is on my computer and Vic on his computer. As they get older, we bring them into understanding it and they hear little bits and pieces. I hope that their takeaway is to value finding a pursuit whether you call it a career, a job or your life’s work. Whatever it is, find something that you are driven to do and want to do. Even on the worst day, I want to come to work every day. I want to be here.

If you don’t have that, I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for people that have to drag them. I was that person where you have to fight down the anxiety, push your way into your day and make it happen because it’s the position that you’ve chosen or been put in or got or gotten to at that point. It’s a little long-winded there.

You referenced the lesson around culture and treating people that you glean from watching your dad work. Kids are amazingly perceptive. I guarantee you they’re more aware than you think they even care about what you guys are doing and the impact you’re making. I would encourage you for shits and giggles to have that conversation with them but I think that watching parents be entrepreneurs is one of the great lessons for kids. When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s very difficult to fall into victimhood and a routine.

You’re constantly solving problems and thinking things through and doing things differently, finding ways to persevere and push forward. Those are fantastic life lessons. You can do it. I do feel sorry for people who get up every day with a sense of dread about going to the office. I couldn’t imagine and I imagine that I did it for twenty-plus years. It’s very hard to get out of that trap for me.

I remember vividly I was sitting at the kitchen table getting ready for work cinching my tie up about to head out the door. My wife Juliet looked at me and said, “If you think you’re faking it, you’re wrong. I know you’re miserable. You hate it. Why don’t you go do something different?” That recognition and also the license to do it is what eventually gave me the courage to do it. I look back and I’m like, “How did I spend so many years so unhappy? It doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is easy and it’s all wonderful but it’s a whole lot easier to have a hard crappy day when it’s your hard and crappy day. It’s not somebody else’s.”

You never know when that thing is right there around the corner that one little moment that triggers an entire change.

For me, it was like, “I got permission.” I went to the office that day. I had a board meeting and the board was awful. I’m like, “I’m done.” It was that quick. I came back and told my wife. She then looked at me like, “This was a suggestion that you could think about over the next couple of years and work out a plan. We have two kids in college and one in high school. What the hell?” She was the opposite. I used to joke when I did make that decision. We did have 2 in college and 1 in high school at that time. I was filled with doubt and so fearful. I was trying to run all the worst-case scenarios.

Juliet went around about her day like nothing was different. There was no change in it. I finally pulled her aside and said, “Would you do me a favor? Would you have some doubt for me so that I’m not the only one?” She’s like, “I don’t have any,” and she was right. It’s an interesting thing. I was curious about this one because I wonder about this a lot. Do you think entrepreneurialism is taught or nurtured versus nature or is innate? Are you an entrepreneur by birth or is it something that is learned?

It was somewhat innate for me based on my personality traits of aforementioned not liking to take guidance from other people sometimes or just not liking rules that don’t make sense but everybody has the potential to be a creator if the right opportunity was presented to them.

I used to think that way and think less that way. Entrepreneurial is a craft that you do have to work like any craft but like people who have innate athletic ability, I could spend every waking moment shooting baskets and I will never be Michael Jordan. There are certain people whose minds think differently. I get this question a lot, “How do you work with all these entrepreneurs? They’re risk-takers.”

it’s not true. It’s not that an entrepreneur by nature is any more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They’re on the same spectrum from high-risk entrepreneurs to low-risk entrepreneur entrepreneurs. The inherent difference is a true entrepreneur sees the risk in inaction versus everybody else sees the risk in inaction. They see a problem or an opportunity in front of them and they have to solve and fix it. They have to meet it. All the other components of it are teachable but that’s where I landed on.

I would go back to what I said. Anybody that’s a creative thinker has the potential to be an entrepreneur. It takes a certain way of how you approach problems in general, the way you think about things and naturally looking to fix and change things. There are some people out there who are very closed off and maybe closed-minded and have a certain way of going about the world that wouldn’t be able to but entrepreneurs see this vastness of possibilities that some people don’t see.

It’s the difference. An old Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’s quote was, “In the expert’s mind, the opportunities are few. In the beginner’s mind, many.” Entrepreneurs tend to meet things with more of a beginner’s versus an expert’s mind. That’s different. It’s not better or worse. I look back on my career in the corporate world and on paper, I would be what you would call successful.

I climbed my way up to the corporate ladder into the C-Suite and all of that kind of stuff but I was always a pariah. That’s not shocking to anybody who knows me but I was a pariah because I wanted to break things and fix them. I wanted to challenge the status quo and do it differently. That’s not the way that bigger companies and systems work. Systems work keeping those processes in place and you plug in and become a cog within those systems.

Entrepreneurs want to take a stick to the piñata, knock it and put it back together. I always find it fascinating to spend my day and every day working with other entrepreneurs. It’s interesting too. For a long time, I work with entrepreneurs but I wouldn’t describe myself as one. It took a while for me to realize, “That’s wrong. I am an entrepreneur and a creator as well.”

I am one of those crazy bastards but it’s cool. When you get entrepreneurs together and they collaborate, that’s when the real magic happens because then you’ve got all these people who look at things differently than most humans do and cool solutions and ideas come. One of my great joys in fostering this sense of this community is to witness that and have that vessel that holds that opportunity. When you think about the future of the business and the strategy in front of you where we’re regional first, what is it? What is that future state that you envision for you and the business?

That five-year plan drives me crazy because it always feels like you’re making things up at that point in time but, honestly, it’s more of the same, just bigger and better. It’s building on our mission, being profitable and enjoying what we’re doing every day. There’s a point where I don’t see myself running this company forever and handing it down to my children.

People say, “What do you want with your brand?” I say, “I want more of what we have, which is these passionate consumers who say, ‘I bought your kombucha to do a toast at our wedding.’” They share pictures of it. It sounds so hokey. It sounds like a commercial for Coca-Cola from the ’80s or something but it’s being welcomed into more people’s homes and what an honor it is that people continue to care about what we’re doing and what the next product is.

We’ve got a million ideas. I don’t think about that in terms of concreteness. It’s more about what we talk about on the less sexy side is profitable, making money for everybody because we’ve all busted our asses for so long but I am money-driven more for everybody else that’s involved, our investors and my family than I am for me. I like the challenge of success more than the dollars that come out of it. That’s proof that what you did was the right choice.

That’s such a healthy perspective. Let’s not discount it. It’s okay to be a dirty capitalist to make money but the majority of the entrepreneurs that I know and work with are motivated to create success for the others around them as well. They’re motivated to see their investors, their team and their employees make money. They’re that and they continue the difference.

The thing you said about the hokey ’80s Coke commercial, we lose sight of that. It is such an honor and a trusted thing to be invited into somebody’s home, to wind up in somebody’s refrigerator, on somebody’s dining room table or something like that. That is a privilege and an honor. It is the coolest thing in the world.

We lose sight of that in all the crap we deal with and the busyness but the fact that you could step back and think about how many thousands of homes, cars, offices and so forth are spending their day and trusting the brand and the product that you’ve built to be next to them is a cool thing. It’s hard to take stock of that stuff when you get buried in the cacophony of all the stuff that is bouncing around when you’re trying to run a business.

It’s why I still get emails from our website. I make sure they get sent to me so that I can get that little fix when people send you that feedback and you know that. You hear it and then I get to share it with my team.

One of the questions I always like to ask in these shows is knowing what you know now, if you could go back to some point in this journey, it could be even before you made the decision to do and give yourself a piece of advice and tell yourself something that you would’ve been so grateful to have known then that you know now, what would that be?

That’s pretty easy. I would tell that prior self that everything takes time. I know it’s clichéd whenever it takes more time than you think it’s going to take but see that as a bigger picture. Instead of telling yourself, it’s not okay that didn’t happen when you wanted to do it. Vic and I have always said for years about his business and this business with our kids that we’re planting seeds. You’re always planting seeds.

Sometimes those seeds grow fast and you reap the benefits. Sometimes they don’t grow at all. Sometimes it takes years. We’re about to go into a major account that we’ve been working on for four years. We’re about to get venture debt funding for someone we’ve been working with for four years. What you’ve talked about before with meeting with investors, frustration and everything, I’ve come after this time to also learn that those seeds that you’re planting are going to be reaped. You don’t know when they’re going to be reaped so you have to be patient about it and not get caught up in what didn’t sprout when you wanted it to sprout because it’s going to happen when it’s going to happen.

That is such fantastic advice and it’s so true. To continue with that analogy, it’s not only the seeding of the ground but it’s the continued cultivation of it. You can’t simply drop the seeds. You also have to continue to cultivate the relationships and do the work, not necessarily with the expectation of results right away but with the knowledge and the confidence that if you do that work those things will come. You just may not know when and they may come much later than you had originally thought they would but they will come.

However, too often what we do is that we stop that cultivation. We may have dropped the seed but we don’t do that cultivation and then we’re not positioning ourselves for that to ever come to fruition. We only have a couple of minutes left so one last question. I was thinking as you mentioned Vic’s name again. One of the hard things for couples that are also working in the business together is how do you turn that off. How do you separate from that and be husband, wife and family and not talk business all the time?

You have to make a point to do it because it won’t happen naturally. You will constantly talk about it. We have had our kids say, “Can we not talk about Mother Kombucha now?” “Let’s talk about something else.” When one of us is being long-winded or overwhelmed, one of us says, “Can we finish this and be done with the work for now?” We’ll do that when it’s the woe is me, the worries and working through the things but when it’s something exciting, we both get excited about certain aspects of the business.

Guiding the direction of it and the creative aspects of it. When that happens, we let it happen and we jump into it and take advantage of it. Usually on day three of a vacation, when you’re fully relaxed and you lay there on the beach or wherever you are and you start talking about these great ideas that you couldn’t have because you were so in the weeds at home. You don’t remember why you’re doing it in the first place.

Those moments when you get to lift your head from working in the business and work on it are cool. If people want to learn more, offer help or invest, what’s the best way to reach you and learn more about what you’re doing?

You can reach out to me through email at Tonya@MotherKombucha.com or LinkedIn. I’m always happy to help other entrepreneurs along the way when I can. For any potentially interested investors, we do have a very lovely round open with something pretty amazing. You and I both agree as unique and that we have an impact venture investor who is matching our investment from the outside for our convertible notes. Even small investments double their impact. Reach out and I’d be happy to discuss that further.

Thanks for doing this with me. It was exactly what I hoped it would be. It was a cool conversation and I mean this in all sincerity. I so admire what you are doing and the way you approach the whole process and lead because I see you as an absolute leader. I am convinced that you’re going to continue to have success. The level of success is going to grow substantially over the next few years. You can mark that down in my Swami’s prediction. Thanks for taking the time and being a part of this. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Elliot.

 Important links

• Mother Kombucha

• LinkedIn – Elliot Begoun

• Agua Bucha

• Tonya@MotherKombucha.com

• LinkedIn – Tonya Donati

About Tonya Donati

On a mission to create delicious products that nurture a better world. Mother of two small humans and countless batches of booch. Cohort 2018 BBVA Momentum social entrepreneur accelerator, 2019 7 Eleven Brands With Heart and 2019 Florida Companies to Watch Honoree, 2020 Sustainy Foundation, 2022 & 2022 Mindful Awards kombucha category.