When it comes to starting up your own business, you have to learn from your mistakes. If an investor or shareholder tells you no, then find out why it was a no. These are lessons that you can learn from so that, as a founder, you can propel your business forward. In today’s episode, Elliot Begoun brings on Matthew Parry, the CEO and Co-founder of The Good Crisp Company. Matt talks about his career journey, from self-funding Good Crisp to finding investors. Learn some of the things he could’ve done better and how he learned from his mistakes – from marketing to finding the right flavors, to boards, etc.

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Listen to the podcast here

Learning From Your Mistakes: Life And Business Lessons With Matt Parry

It’s a cool show now because I get to have a friend on who I’ve witnessed and watched throughout his entire journey here in the US. It’s been a fun ride and it’s nowhere near over. If I were to put this in the chronology of a human being, we’re in early adolescence as a business with a lot of growing left to do and to learn.

There have been a lot of lessons that have been amassed along the way. What I would do here is I’m joined by Matt Parry, the Founder and CEO of The Good Crisp Company. It’s a talk about some of those lessons and some of the things that he wished he had known when he first started that he knows now, a little bit about what he’s learned along the way in terms of investments, working with investors, boards, big customers and sharing some of the things that he’s had to learn by scraping and scrapping and doing whatever.

The cool thing about this is having been a part of this journey. I can share my insights and view as the observer who’s been alongside for the time. Before I go any further, I’m going to do a founder shout out to the four TIG brands who pitched at the Hertzberg Entrepreneurship Institute. There were ten brands pitching for them were TIG brands and we kicked their ass. The four TIG brands all did a fabulous job and that’s Brock Shot, Tia Lupita, Spinster Sisters and Mother Kombucha.

You guys all knocked it out of the park, quality pitches. I know you impressed the investor cohort, and it goes to show that if you put the work into clarifying your message and building a compelling investor narrative, that when given the opportunity to deliver that, you can with confidence and efficacy. Awesome job. Matt, tell us a little bit about you and how this all started and we’ll get the scene going. Thanks for doing this with me.

I am originally from Adelaide, Australia. I moved here to the US a few years ago with my family. I originally had part of a company in Australia where we imported brands and promoted only out of Southeast Asia, and we sold them into grocery stores, food service and things like that in Australia. I’ve always worked in the CPG space, but I knew that I wanted rather to launch other people’s brands, get around to launching my own brands.

Part of that is I helped launch some canister chips into the Australian market and got a deep dive on that industry and that category, I thought there’s got to be an opportunity here to reduce a canister chip that I would eat that would go as clean, healthier, and I would feel good giving to my kids but also tasted good. I would use my contacts and we launched that in Australia a couple of years ago.

Several years ago, we came across to the US and NLA. You’re a big part of helping us do that. We launched into twenty Whole Foods stores. They were our first customer. It continued to grow so much. I’ve now moved here to Boulder, Colorado. I’m continuing to grow and to expand our business here in the US.

When we first rolled into those Nor Cal stores of Whole Foods to where we are now, approximately how many stores?

That’s 14,000 grocery stores now.

Where does the brand fall in the category overall in the natural space?

In the natural space, we were in natural with Whole Foods and almost natural grocery stores there. As we started, we moved into more conventional. We’re now into the canister set chip section of the store. We play pretty much there. Other than Walmart, we’re national with Walmart and there were in there better for you gluten-free set of their stores there.

When this first started, one of the things that you had in your initial mindset was to try for as long as you could to self-fund the business. Bringing on outside capital was something that you were reluctant to do in the early stages. First of all, has that changed? If you were to do it again, would you do it any differently?

If it was this exact same business, no. This is the right way that we went. It came to a decision where we could continue to bootstrap, but our growth would be small and measured. It would probably take us ten years to get to where we are now as opposed to five. It became that decision of is that the path we want to go, or have we proven this out enough that we need to capitalize on this opportunity and speed to market, move quickly and grow distribution nationally as soon as possible.

That answer is different for every business. I’d have to try and answer that for whatever I did next, but if it was the same thing again, we made the right choice and decided to accelerate our growth to push national distribution as quickly as possible and support that and get up there, which we couldn’t do without additional funding.

As you’ve gone through that process of positioning yourself to raise money, share with the readers the process of what it’s been like, the good, the bad, the ugly.

It’s been all of those and we’ve done a couple of rounds now. We’re about to close around at the moment. We’ve been living through the last couple of years. In reality, it’s very time consuming as a founder. It takes a lot of time and it is distracting from other jobs that you have to do and somewhat consuming.

Even time-wise, it’s consuming but emotionally as well. I find it consuming. It is a lot of highs and lows. In one minute, you think you’re going to pull in tens of millions of dollars, and then a few days later, you worry that you do not get any money, it’s up and down and people were saying yes and no. That has been the tricky part of funding. I find it emotionally and time consuming.

Equally, when you get it done, get the positives and get people that say, “I’m going to invest my money that I’ve been commissioned to look after. We think we’re going to bet against you when we believe in what you’re doing and of all the companies out there that we could, we’re going to put our money behind you.” That’s a validating and exciting part of this as well.

Do you feel the pressure of that too though?

Yes. To be completely frank, I feel less so more. The very first money or check you take, that’s significant. Now, I feel a little more comfortable with my business, probably more so, and I know I can deliver on it, but it never truly goes away when the feeling of someone else’s money that they’ve committed to us. We need custodians of that and then we need to return that. I feel a bit more confident that we can do that now.

Jenny asks what your process has been for choosing the right investor or at least thinking that through in terms of what’s the right kind of investor and fund to work with for this stage of growth.

We’ve focused on angels and experienced people than when we look at our cap table, which is relatively short. It’s more based on individuals rather than VC funds. I found that beneficial in our growth. We haven’t had the pressure that can sometimes come with big VCs that write big checks, and we’ve been able to spread that out.

Certainly, we do have a VC fund in circle up, and they’ve been a great supporter from us from day one. I’m not totally anti them, but I have found that there’s a lot of more patient money out there that we’ve been able to take in as well as experience money. That’s been helpful is the people that understand the business, they’re not necessarily crunching all the numbers and doing the Excel sheet and looking at it from IRR number, but more about, “We understand this category. We know that you can do it, we’re going to back you and we think we’ve got it.” I found that in a good working relationship. That’s what we’ve been doing,

Ryan was happy asking if you’re comfortable sharing. Can Matt share what kind of annual revenue does 14,000 grocery stores produced, and are you able to share average velocities per SKU per store per week?

We’ll have it $10 million now this 2021 in what we’re doing. Velocities from that, it varies but we play in numerous places. Whole Foods for example, we’ll do over twenty units per store, per SKU or a week there in Whole Foods, but that’s a good store for us. I’ll run down tens in other ones, and then someone like Walmart where we’re in a gluten-free set in a Walmart store. We’ll do three units per store per week around there, that average to give an idea of how that goes.

Talk about the growth of the range itself, where you are now, where you were when you started and the new product development or product pipeline that you see going forward, as generally or as specifically as you choose.

There are a couple of things we’ve done. It’s taken us a little while to get our product range, particularly packaging and branding. For the first three years, here we had 2 or 3 SKUs. We had three SKUs, original sour cream and barbecue and other barbecues that were underperforming. We didn’t get the flavors right. When I first arrived in 2019 at the big project that I wanted to undertake. What we did with Alex in our marketing was we looked at all of our packaging, at our customers and understand that.

When I first started, I was obsessed with how people are going to know that we’re different from Pringles. They need to promote this healthy, better for you image. We went too far that way. We forgot that snacks are about taste, fun, excitement and treats. We needed to try and find that balance again. That re-launch happened in 2020, and it was one of the best things we ever did. Secondly to that is we improved our barbecue flavor. We launched that and then an aged white cheddar, sea salt and vinegar. Those extra flavors also gave us a full shelf in store and more presence than 1 or 2 SKUs.

That has significantly helped out velocities being able to notice in store. That’s what we’ve done. How we came up with those flavors is we looked at flavor ranking in snacks and particularly canisters, but overall snacks like whole foods. What are the winners here? We didn’t try and be too clever about it. We’ve got a different form from others, so let’s pick what are the best flavors and put them into our canister form and bring that to the market.

We wanted to launch with the top five flavors, which we’ve done. In the middle of 2021, we wanted to look at where else we could extend this brand. Now that we’ve got 5 or 6 SKUs into retailers, are there other opportunities that we could do? We launched our cheese balls, which is an extruded cheese flavor, cheeseball in a canister, sit in our same set. That’s been successful. It’s a different form, but not too far out from where we are. That’s what we focus on.

A question here was, how do you decide when is the right time to add SKUs? What’s the process there?

It’s something where we’re thinking through at the moment. We had a lot of people worked on a lot of R&D and NPD over the last couple of years and we’ve got a long pipeline. The question is, when is the right time to start bringing those in? We have no shortage of strong products, but we want to be strategic about it. Initially, we were too late.

We should have rather than having two flavors out in the market and we should have done five earlier, but you need to have at least 3 to 4 SKUs out there that you have enough shelf presence. It’s hard to win with 1 or 2 SKUs depending on some categories, but you need to at least aim for half to a full shelf of product. That’s an important point to get to, then it becomes, “When the next flavors are and what are the next SKUs from there?” For us, we look at our ICV. We don’t want to be our brokers or our sales team to be distracted from selling this flavor over here and here.

When we look at it, we’ve got ten flavors, but very low ACV spread across everything. We look at it within different channels, but can we be 50% ICV or something like that before we start putting in new flavors is one point on the cheese balls. It was also with a different form. A lot of customers now have got 4 or 5 flavors. They don’t want to put any more flavors in but they plan on putting something in with a different form, so that led us to launch the cheeseballs there.

I want to go back and revisit something you said about the first money that you took in. You felt a lot of pressure. With the subsequent money, you felt more comfortable or confident in the business and in your ability to run the business, you knew it better and so forth. In a more general form, what was the scary stuff about the business in the early days, and what do you worry about now?

The scariest thing that I’m sure a lot of founders can relate to this seriously to me is cashflow. There’s nothing quite like the fear of not being able to pay your employees or people that have committed to you and to have enough money in the bank to feel comfortable about that. That’s a different level for everyone. For me, that’s a unique, terrifying fear in itself. I still struggle with that to this day around that being the biggest fear and what led us to raise money and things like that. We don’t have to continue to have that hand-to-mouth fear all the time.

Everyone’s supply chain is top of mind a lot and ensuring that we’ve got no issues around demand and product market. Can we supply that properly? It is always a very topical thing at the moment. I think about strategic decisions. We’re making some pretty big calls around to your point around financing partners, strategic partners, where are we going to retail, where we don’t play, who we partner with and what do we do with some of our supply chains, worrying that the decisions we’re making now will come back and bite me in 2 or 3 years’ time. You can’t work out every scenario and you can gameplan things and all that, but there’s a lot of unknowns out there. That’s something you got to work through and think through for sure.

That’s an interesting follow-up, because as you journey, and this is true for anyone that meets with success, but I’ve been able to watch it with you. You started purely as an entrepreneur, but now you’re an entrepreneur who’s also an executive of a sizable business. You’re a CEO. You’re making very big strategic decisions on a regular basis. How has that evolution worked for you going from being scrappy in the trenches? I’m going to take stock and build displays, whatever it takes to be the CEO of a business that’s in excess of $10 million or more?

It’s a big change and it’s something I feel and we’re employing more people. I have a team of over ten people, certain things like that. I’m okay. I know how to sell chips. I know how to build brand and products. I didn’t know how to run teams. I don’t know how to run companies and things like that. It’s very much some degree back to the early days of making it up as you go along and trying to work through that.

That’s still an ongoing process, but I feel now that becomes not more important than the previous stuff, because we have people now that can work on NPD, on operations and on sales. They’re very capable people. I need to step back and what then is my specific role in this, and it is about team, culture, strategic decisions and being mindful of that. That has been a shift and it’s more of a shift in 2022 as we start to do that, to understand what do I need to be executing well in that role and it is different to what it has been previously.

As you do that and evolve, some of the other changes are when you first started this, it was you and you had your Aussie cofounders who were there to help, but now you find yourself with a growing team and board of directors. How do you leverage, manage and learn to be effective in that new role?

I’m still going through that process. Suppose in a few years, I’ll look back and see how well I’ve done, but it is consciously being mindful of it. That is my new role now. I was still very involved in the other park, but this is a new element to my role that isn’t naturally what I’ve been doing. We had our team meeting, being honest and saying, “This is my first time doing this. I’m working on it. Feel free to call me out and help me in this journey. If I’m not doing a good job, let me know. I’m not going to take offense.” I need to know and learn these things and be transparent to some degree. All of us are doing some of these things for the first time and being patient with each other as we go through.

In this world now where a lot of people managing cashflow, being conservative, especially in the early days, we have this world war, a lot of things are fractional or you’re hiring agencies. You made a decision early on to take on a pretty sizeable responsibility to making too very early key hires, your VP of sales and VP of marketing and they’ve grown into their positions. Why that decision? Do you think it is a decision that others should contemplate versus the alternative? I’ll throw one else in there. You went right off the bat with a national broker. You bet big from day one.

Steve and Alex are a big part of our secret sauce. We’re very glad to have it as with even our latest new team members. I would do it again with those guys. A little unique with us was for two of those years, I was running the US from Australia. I found I needed people on the ground to be able to do that. It was a new market for me.

I’d been in CPG, but I didn’t know the US market. You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s a big part of why we relied very heavily on ULE and your expertise. We also wanted to bring experienced people in that at that VP role rather than a little lower, so they had that experience to help us avoid some of those rakes and then those pitfalls.

We even continue to look at how do we find that balance between experiences but also hunger and excitement with our employees that fit our culture. We’ll continue to do that for quite some time. We have been happy and it’s turned out equally as well. It could have gone horribly wrong. We could have gone and got someone as usual wage, and it could have gone horribly wrong. We’ve been thankful that both Steve and Alex have been amazing assets to our company and helped build that foundation.

Full disclosure for those who were reading so that we don’t create any confusion. I’m the Chair of the Board. The level of understanding I have of where The Good Crisp Company is pretty significant. I want to put that out there, so there aren’t any questions later. I got back from the team meeting and being able to be a part of that and witnessed sitting in a room in an Airbnb full of bright and excited people who are part of this journey. It’s awesome to see.

You and I had a discussion that evening. You’ve got to start thinking, because you’re making more hires now, once you close this next round, the team is going to continue to grow. Culture has to be a top of mind and strategic decision. Share a little bit about your thoughts there. What defines in your mind a good culture and how are you approaching building that?

For us, it’s become the most important thing now. We were very lucky and thankful that the people had the right culture, even though we were looking for that, but it was almost subconsciously, I was always looking for experience, help or the person that could get the job done the best. We were very conscious to say that a culture is the number one thing the people that we can work and get along with, and think the same way that we think is the culture is shorthand for me.

That becomes what they’re the people that I want and we can try or bring that experience or whatever that can help. Finding the right people that fit into what we’re doing is important. How do we do that? That’s talking about it a lot and not assuming that it’s going to be there. Let’s codify that and work out what does that mean.

Having an event like we had with the team meeting, bringing people together and that people start to see what that feel, would they know what it means to be in a team that works well, that all thinks alike, that has very similar values, that’s all on the same path? You start to see that in real life, but then they lived when we get together and spend time together. After this, I’ve realized how important that is to be able to be a part of that and talk about it and constantly reiterating it, rather than assuming that the people understand what that is. It’s going to be part of that.

I hope I’m not disclosing too much, but you’ve made the decision to stand up a physical office and bring people together and so forth. What was behind that decision?

Like a lot of people, we went through the last couple of years working out what is best for us. We did have an office originally and got shut down. We went remote, a couple of our employees live out of state and some here in the state. We’ve got a mixture of that. We’ve made the decision now that we do want to have an office. We do want to try and hire locally where we can and help foster exactly what we’re talking about that culture, creativity and coming together. It’s more of a flexible place.

You come in when you want to. It’s there if people need it. It’s there for a space to be a help rather than a hindrance, because of building this thing of you have to be in the office 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM, and everyone’s waiting for the boss to leave before they can leave and all that stuff is the downside of the office and not at all what we want it to be. We’ve learned a few things and try and bring the good stuff and put that into a physical environment to provide an opportunity for those that want it, and a space there that we build together.

In my opinion, and being able to be an observer, from day one hiring Steve and Alex, first of all, you hired good people who were passionate about what they were doing, but you also got out of their way to some degree. You let them do what they could do and let them fumble around a little bit as they learn, just like you were fumbling around learning. Everybody was willing to be vulnerable. One of the things that you said to me in the car, which is very representative of the culture in general, is that we were talking specifically about your sales team while we were driving together.

They’re very collaborative. There isn’t ego there. They want to see each other succeed. They help each other. That’s not common, but it starts with getting out of people’s way as a leader and giving them the room and the latitude to make mistakes and fumble around while you do the same. Everybody owning up to the fact that we’re trying to figure this all out, we’re going to screw up and going to have a few hiccups. That’s good.

It’s a big part of it. You treat people like adults, you treat them like they want the best and going to work the best. You get out of the way and let them do that. It’s how the managers that I had back in my original Australian company taught me and passed on a lot of those values to me. I’m very happy to try and build that in my new company as well.

Ryan had a question around the role. Steve, you brought on as a VP of Sales, Alex, the VP of Marketing. From a sales perspective, one of the first things Steve recommended and you did was the bringing on of a national broker in presence. Steve and presence had been the core of the sales efforts and yourself.

You’ve added Bobby, who’s terrific, and you continue to use presence and you have brokers for other specific accounts, but you’re not building a huge team. Talk a little bit about how you balance that staying agile and nimble, and yet still having a team big enough to be effective, and how that team’s going to grow over time.

Having a presence and good brokers have been a big part of that. It allowed us to stay nimble and to get out there to help. It’s been more than managing them and making sure that you have the resources and the enthusiasm to support us, which we’ve been very pleased with our brokers. That’s been a big part of allowing us to do it. With them in the middle to some degree, our next step is how we go the next layer down.

We’re now going to start to build out our boots on the ground and build out fuel teams once we’ve tested and learn and start to roll that out, rather than bringing in regional directors and going there, we’re almost going to skip that layer. Our presence and our brokers do a job of that, so how do we then go down the next level and start to execute at store level and be awesome at store level is important to us as a snack brand. That’s our focus as far as a sales team will build from there. That also stops adding different layers and things that we can avoid, and then start to build it up from there as we need it from the bottom.

Another question that’s coming in and I’m going to reshape it because he’s asking here about marketing budget and split. I want to be careful for anyone reading around drawing inferences from somebody like the percentage of revenue spent on marketing or anything along those lines. Let me say why. Much of that has to do with how much heavy lifting you need your marketing to do for you at the shelf. What I mean there specifically is either to drive trial and discovery, because it’s crowded and your form factor is similar or so forth, or you have a high educational threshold. You’ve got to teach people about the benefits or the science behind your product and so forth.

In this industry, by category, by product type, there’s such variation that I don’t want anyone to lull themselves either into a sense of comfort that, “I’m only spending 10%, 8% or 15%. I feel good.” It has nothing to do with the percentage or the dollars. It has to do with the efficacy. The Good Crisp’s situation, they have a huge benefit in that they have a form factor that people understand. That’s one of the beauties of it. Everyone understands what a canister chip is, so they don’t have to spend a whole lot of time or dollars marketing and doing education on the form factor or on the feature benefits.

It’s pretty easy to put it on the shelf and most consumers understand what it is. It’s better for you version of something that exists in the marketplace. It’s interesting to talk a little bit about how you and the team look to allocate the split between trade, digital ads, eComm, brick and mortar and so forth. If you could share a little bit about that, that would be great.

To give some context to that, our eComm business is about 10% to 15% of our brick and mortar business. It’s there, but it’s not a huge part of it. We’ve gone back and forth and we’ll continue to build that most to drive to our Shopify site. We turned off all of our Facebook advertising and Instagram avatars, we don’t do any of that sort of stuff. We drive it with influencers, product seeding and ends of strong emails, supporters, influencers and affiliates that do that. That’s saved us a ton, not having to spend anything on Facebook, and it’s going to have businesses still growing there digitally.

On influencers there, you’re working more with micro-influencers and nano-influencers.

We go across the board there. Previously, we’ve done mainly around nano. We still do that, but we are now starting to get not to the Kim Kardashians of the world, but people that 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 up a bit higher than the people that have 10,000, 20,000 or whatever. We are starting to do more up and try it up there.

We’ll probably continue to keep pushing that up higher this 2021. We also work on not just Instagram influencers, but people that have companies that have very large email databases or things like that. We tap into people like that as well that we consider them influencers, companies that have large databases that we can tap into there.

For those reading, Alex Hanifin, who’s their VP of Marketing, has been a guest before. Some of her insights in that episode work fantastic. One of the things that I know that you’re working on from a marketing perspective and had some significant return on is email marketing and working to build your email list. A little share there would be helpful.

Anyone that’s done it knows. You push the button, send an email and you end up with $10,000 worth of sales or something like that. It’s a hugely, within 24 hours, efficient tool. That is a big part of it. Like chasing followers on Instagram, you can’t build it for the same. You need quality into finding people that we can run promotions with, that can help build our email list tying with other people that have strong email lists that we can tap into, competitions and things like that.

It is a strong area for us and we want to continue to focus on 2022. That’s a big part of it. To your point, we do also spend a lot at store level. That involves having a very strong promotional program and making sure that we’re promoting heavily that is a salty snack thing. That might not be relevant for all categories.

Certainly, we make sure that we’re not under promoting or over promoting, but we are consistent in a category there with TPR and things like that and if we can offer locations, because every time we promote, we see a 10% increase in our baseline sales, so we know that right time promotions with off locations bring additional value to us. That’s a big part of what we do on our marketing spend at store level. We look at whether that’s doing something that we did different promotions around a holiday theme product or other types of things that create buzz around our products.

I want to touch on something you said there that is so important. A lot of times, we look at promotions as something we have to do because it’s what our retailers expect and it’s how we’re going to get found. To some degree, that’s true. There is a bit of pay to play reality, but beyond that basic, the point that you made that I want to elevate is a good promotional strategy is one that post promotion, you can see an incremental lift in the base business.

If you were to graph your promotions, they should not look like a rollercoaster with big peaks and then big dips. It should look more like a series of plateaus, a big rise and then it settles a little higher. You see, if you were to plot a trend line against that business, you’d see a consistent, elevated trend line in your velocities and total sales.

That’s what you should be getting out of an effective promotional strategy. It does vary by category. That’s how you should be measuring it building our base business. That’s been a very effective part of our strategy that you being the team to implement where our promotions have driven significant increases in base velocity.

We almost look at it now, almost like a mass sampling topics size. We’re getting new users to try the product and pick it up. When they try it, we know that they’ll come back and keep buying. It’s a very efficient way to get canisters into people’s carts.

Another thing I want to talk about is going from being an entrepreneur with a couple of distant cofounders, distant meaning geographically distant cofounders to now having a board and having to present to a board and the more formal aspects of business. One question is, what’s that change been like, and two, what learnings have you had that you can share with those readers about how to do that effectively?

We’ve found a good balance with our board and our stakeholders in the sense that there is a more formal element to it, but it’s not too formal that it’s suffocating or takes away from the value of the board. That’s been a good balance that it’s allowed it to be more beneficial than in a hindrance. It’s fantastic that we have to prepare monthly documents, P&L and stay on top of those things, keeping a closer eye on the business and also accountability from my perspective.

There are things and people that I need to be accountable for, tasks that I’ve been asked to do or things that we’re working on that I know I need to come back and present that I’m going to get asked on that. That accountability has been beneficial. There could be negatives if it goes too far. It could be overbearing, too formal or too process-driven and that it’s not without, which is beneficial, that’s important to build in a board is they’re there for a reason and that they have value to bring.

Our board meetings aren’t necessarily spending a lot of time on what’s happened. We do go through all that and look at that, but it’s more, “Here are the 4 or 5 things that we want to talk and share about, get advice and coaching on, then go away and do those things and go in that direction.” From that perspective, it’s been beneficial.

The other thing important from an education standpoint is the structure of the board and what you agree to with your investors as you begin to structure it. You’re fortunate in the fact that the board is for the most part, very much all aligned, completely rowing the boat in the same direction and so forth. If that were to change, the board structure that you’ve worked through still gives you the ability to do what you feel is right for the business.

It may not be as fun because you’d have some people rubbing up against you and pushing, but it’s important to think through that structure to understand that you want and every brand that evolves, grows and has significant outside investment is going to wind up with a fiduciary board. The structuring of that board needs to be a part of the overall investment decision process to make sure that you’re structuring a board in a way that it’s positive, helpful and not restrictive.

You can leverage as CEO, as thinking partners and as resources when you’re trying to make tough decisions. Instead of having to defend it to the board, you can reach out to the board and say, “Can you think this through with me? Can I run this by you?” That seems to be much more the relationship you have with the board.

There are a couple of parts of that structured around purely board, board control, board seats and voting rights is important. As founders, we can sometimes get a bit caught up on percentages of ownership and all of that. They are a dilution and they are connected to some degree, but it’s the decisions of the company are based at the board level. It’s important not to neglect that and how that’s structured.

Formerly that’s true, but then also you can have all the right seats, but if you don’t have the right people in those seats, that’s also an issue. The other part of the board structure is getting the right people on your board that are aligned and not all going to do what you say and still challenges you, but fundamentally aligned to what you’re thinking. Maybe there are two elements to that, and they are extremely important than something that gets not talked about as much as dilution and percentages and things like that.

Dilution is probably the thing that I hear the most from founders. It is important, but my personal belief is having the room to make the decisions that you feel are necessary to build the business in the way that’s best for the business, because ultimately that’s best for the shareholders. It’s also about you can have a larger share of a smaller pie or a smaller share of a much bigger pie, but the latter is much better than the former.

As the saying, no one banks the percentages and it’s true. It’s relevant to tie into board control and company control, but ultimately bringing the right people in and having the resources to do it is in my personal thing that everyone has to go through that and work out where they fit in all of that. It’s not as important.

Secondly, we’re talking about an average dilution and fundraising is I’ll look at it as what’s not best for me as the founder, but what’s best for the brand that I’m building, bringing the right partners in and having the resources to do it. It’s going to dilute me. I’m carving off part of my company and I’m selling it to somebody, but it gives me the resources to be able to do what’s best for the brand. That’s what makes things successful.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the whole fundraising process. Here in the states, the entrepreneur and fundraising are inextricably linked. Most people who start the entrepreneurial journey started with raising and raising from VCs and getting on that hamster wheel. That wasn’t the case for you, because that wasn’t the fabric of entrepreneurship in Australia.

This concept of getting in, raising a fair amount of capital and stepping on the accelerator was foreign to you. Now, you recognize it for what it is, which is an important tool in the life cycle of being able to grow this brand truly. To share with those readers, what have been some of the things that you’ve learned in this crazy process of setting yourself up to be investment ready and then going out and dancing for the dollars?

It has been a steep learning curve. It’s something we didn’t consider or have had to get to a point which path we are going to take. It’s a tough decision because it is two paths. Once you take venture money, you roadmap that pathway. You have people to report to, people that want returns on their money, there are varying degrees of patience and all of that within that, but that doesn’t matter. You’re still on that path of having to at some point a liquidity event, whichever way that is, or return value to the people that put money in your company. That becomes a change.

You as a CEO have to take that very seriously, not just the responsibility of making money, but that’s what comes with the money. There’s a commitment there that you’re going to return value. That’s been an interesting change in what I’ve had to do as a founder. It’s not so much about how do I sell chips. At some degree, it’s also what my responsibility to my shareholders is. There’s a lot of jargon, lawyer words, pages and documents that I’ve had to become familiar with. I’m very fortunate to have Chuck help me through. He promised he would give me a discount if I mentioned his name.

They’re very happy to have him helping me there. It’s a huge amount. That’s part of it. You need a partner or a lawyer that you can trust that can walk you through all of that because you don’t know what some of these things mean. Some of these things look scary, but in reality, it’s not that bad. Other things are you would read over it and wouldn’t even think twice, but it’s more meaningful. Having a partner that knows and can help through those elements. We’ve done a couple of raises now, and I was going through our due diligence and we’d been out.

It was relatively easy this time because we knew everything that people were after. We’d build out our data room. We had it there ready beforehand. We know what’s expected of us. We can get in and start to build it. It was a steep learning curve the first couple of times about how much you have to present and show and get in and all of your contracts and everything you’ve ever signed or things like that. Once you get into a habit of that and keeping that in the right places, it does get a bit easier moving forward.

This is an intended compliment and it’s a true one. You’ve been a fabulous student of it, because you did not have familiarity with it. It was something that was truly not in your consciousness as you were building this brand. You went from being ignorant to it to being one of the more articulate or confident in being able to lead that conversation and have that conversation with current investors, new investors, attorneys and so forth.

That does not come easily. That comes from being committed to learning and asking questions when you don’t know. That knowledge you’ve built and that vulnerability that allowed you to build that knowledge is an important lesson for those reading here, this is as big a strategic part of what you’re going to need to do as a founder and an entrepreneur to build your brand.

If you don’t start learning about this and becoming a student of this aspect of the business, it’s probably the least exciting or the thing that was lowest on your reasons for why you want to be an entrepreneur list. Having that knowledge and ability to be an equal participant in that conversation levels that playing field and changes the ability. You said it’s gotten easier, but it hasn’t gotten easier. You’ve just gotten more proficient, experienced and informed.

I agree 100% with what you’re saying. As I said before, it’s not a distraction because a genuine and legitimate part of CEO and founder’s role is to understand and to use it to their best advantage. By degree, you have to learn and become positioned in it because it’s a big part of what you’re going to be doing.

The other thing I want to call out is that you mentioned about current raise. There have been moments where you’re jumping up and down high-fiving, and then other moments, your head’s in your hands and you’re weeping uncontrollably, even in this round and with all of the things that you’ve accomplished as a brand you and the team have been able to do in terms of growing ACV, building velocity, expanding the brand and all of that. You still heard a lot of noes.

You still heard from a lot of investors that they weren’t interested, that they found some worth or something that they saw the business that they wouldn’t do. It’s important to know that even at this stage of the business or as much success that you’ve had, you’re not going to be right for everybody. Let’s talk about that in terms of managing that rejection.

It’s an absolute fact that you’ll hear more noes than yes. How do you work through it? Your business is your identity. Rightly or wrongly, it is. When people say, “You take that very personally.” It’s having to practice to be able to sitting up for a minute or two and then move on, understanding that it isn’t you. They’re not saying you for that reason. It’s to your point not the right time for them or not the right business for them. There’s something else they’re looking for. There are a million reasons why people say no, and more often than not, it’s nothing to do with you and divorcing that from those too.

For a moment you do, it is a kick in the gut and you do have to sit with it for a little while and there’s no way around that, but not letting it get you down and getting back up and continuing to focus on. Often, the noes bring you to roadblocks, and you have to reanalyze what you’re doing. Who we’ve ended up now is not who we originally thought, or we had a few different options and where we let the market tell us which way we wanted to go? Part of it is you have to get the noes to know what works best for you and who’s going to work best for you. It does sting. There’s no way around it. It always will, but trying to divorce yourself a little bit after a while from that taking it too personally.

A lot of the noes are not clear noes. They’re not yet. In a lot of those, there is a nugget of truth there somewhere. There’s something there to search for that nugget. Sometimes, that nugget is wrapped in a ton of bullshit and a ton of wrong thinking. Other times, it’s a pretty clear nugget, looking for that nugget and utilizing it.

The other thing that I love about your perspective was there had been a few investors who have said no to you, a few of them that have said no to you a few times. What you’ve done with those rejections is you’ve put them into the fuel tank to rally and fuel up your perseverance and doggedness because they’re the ones that you can’t wait to be able to walk back and then be able to show them what a mistake they made by not investing. That’s okay too. Use it. Use all of that stuff to fill you.

It’s a mental thing. I would never go and do that afterward, but it’s there. I know in myself that I proved that wrong and I can tick that box. It’s part of that mental game. I want to get back to a point about the nuggets. It’s true with the noes. If we’re going through something and we keep getting a no for a particular reason, sometimes it’s not on them, it’s on us.

Maybe I haven’t presented that information properly, so next time I go and speak to people, I know how to show that data properly and answer that no. The noes are also part of that learning process. They are with all sales when we’re selling to retailers, customers or things like that. That is an important point that you make.

You’re right, using that to refine and so forth, but still, even if you do everything right and everything’s perfect, I wish I could get people to understand. I see about 700 deals for every one investment I make. Of those 699 that I don’t do, most of it has nothing to do with the brand, the founder or anything. It could be I have other things in that space, or I don’t feel like I can help or whatever. It’s subjective. It has nothing to do with them. I can only make a very few investments, even the larger funds make only a few investments in a year. It is about the math.

Matt, this brings us to the top of the hour. I’m going to say one thing in closing, then I’ll let you share anything you want as your closing message. I’m going to say this, and it’s going at the risk of it sounding parental. I am so proud of what you and the entire team have been able to accomplish, and it is truly a team. I know you go out of your way to make that known.

It’s very evident that it is a team and you have a great one around you. What you and the team have been able to accomplish, where you are or where you’re going, it is exactly the entrepreneurial journey that so many lust for and want. The other thing that I know from you is that you’re always willing to jump on the phone, take time to share what you’ve learned or given people any kind of support. I appreciate that and I’m sure you’ll make that offer now.

I appreciate on your return the love to what you’ve done and helping us to bring it. You are the first person that we worked with that helped set us up and brought us here. We’ll admit we’d had no idea we would be here 4 or 5 years later where we are, and still with a lot of work ahead, but I’ve also achieved a lot, and that’s amazing. To read out what you said, I’m only also here because of all the people that helped out and were generous to me, particularly coming into this industry and into this country. I’m conscious of making sure I return that and I’m happy to chat through it to anyone and continue to talk to people.

It’s also been a fantastic thing you’ve done for your family by bringing them here and giving them this experience. What you’re doing is not only teaching them how to be adaptable and exposed to a new culture, but also they get to witness you and entrepreneurialism. It’s very cool. Thanks for joining. Thanks everyone for being a part of this. I can’t wait to have you back to hear how the journey continues and have you share more. We’ll see you all next time. Take care.

Important Links

• The Good Crisp Company

• Alex Hanifin – Previous episode

About Matt Parry

I created The Good Crisp Company to help everyday people feel Good about their snacking choices.
The Good Crisp Company brand represents 3 core elements
1. Good Taste
2. Good Ingredients
3. Good vibes
The right balance of these fundamentals is essential for our healthier snack foods.
Canister snacks that taste good and you feel good buying for your family – that is what I am all about.

www.thegoodcrispcompany.com

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