The year 2022 is just beginning. Have you made your plans for this year? In this episode, Elliot Begoun talks about the four secret ingredients for growth and success. Set aside the past year full of challenges that have been physically and emotionally draining for all of us. Tune in to this episode to start setting the direction you clearly want to go to spark that light within you, get back your motivation, and help you achieve your goals.     

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The 4 Secret Ingredients For Growth And Success

We are doing things differently to start the year off. This is our show of 2022, and we are going to talk. Next episode, we will have Chuck Cotter with Holland & Hart on. He will be joining us to talk about all things around M&A, fundraising, and also to have a little fun. That will be a feature that we have monthly going forward.

Before I start, I usually do a founder shout-out but I want to do a much more important one. That’s in the broader community affected by the fires in Boulder County. It’s an unimaginable tragedy. There has been a GoFundMe campaign that Luke Vernon of Ridgeline and his wife, Brie, has set up. They have raised over $400,000, which is fantastic. If you were affected and there’s any way to be of any help, please reach out.

I wanted to talk about some things that came to the surface and have been at the forefront for me as I sat through the holidays. These are things that are critical that we talk about going into 2022. The first is the mission, which I wrote an article about but I want to talk a little bit more about it on a personal side. The 2nd is empathy, the 3rd is persistence, and the 4th is resilience. Those are my four topics.

Mission

This will be one of those monologue-type episodes with the exception of my wingman and partner in crime, Waven. He is known for the appropriate addition of some deep wisdom here and there. I will ask him to interject as he sees fit in this conversation. Let me start with the first topic, and it is the mission. We all know about corporate, company or brand mission. For those of you who are early in your business, it’s very important to establish a mission.

Culture sometimes creates itself if you don’t control its creation, and it starts early. Also, it’s important as you bring people around your project, whether that’s team members, fractionals or service providers. Having a galvanizing rallying call or reason for being a clear understanding of, “Why the hell we are doing this and fighting this fight?” is hugely important. Being clear and thinking about your brand or company mission is great but that’s not the point I want to focus on. We can make that the topic for our future show.

What I want to talk to you about is your personal mission, your why, your motivator, and whatever we want to discuss. We had a great conversation in our workshop about this, and it warranted further exploration to the broader audience. This started in two ways. First of all, Waven, Jenny, the whole team and I sit alongside a lot of entrepreneurs. As we have watched 2021 tick down, we started to see more of the depleting effects of it.

People are tired and worn. It frayed people emotionally and from the ability to withstand the forces against them. It left people drained. When I was writing it, the word that kept coming up was that 2021 had this vampiric effect. It was sucking the blood and lifeforce out of us. I realized that I wasn’t immune to it. Waven, you felt the same way. You felt the tug in 2021. As I thought it through, the commitment I wanted to make to myself, and encourage anyone reading is, how do we ensure that this doesn’t become a job?

If this becomes a job, it is worth it. There are way too many struggles in this path of entrepreneurship and building CPG brands for it to be simply a job. It has to have a deeper purpose, a higher calling and a mission. For a long time, everything I did revolve around feeling I wanted to provide for my family. I wanted them to be all in, secure and comfortable. I wanted them to be proud of what I did and all of those things.

That chapter in my life was somewhat closed, and it wasn’t enough to get me up every day or push through. I started thinking about, “What is it that on the days where I don’t let the headwinds overwhelm me or the forces that are against us become daunting? What is it that I see through? What is it that bolsters me?” It’s clear to me. I have this amazing opportunity and responsibility to empower entrepreneurs and to make sure that these entrepreneurs have all the resources, tools, guidance, access, community, and everything that they need to be the agents of change fighting on the front lines of human health, climate action, justice, equity and diversity inclusion. That is a cool thing.

When I thought about and realized that then it was, “How do I bring this to mind? How do I keep it at the forefront so that when I have those days and moments, I don’t get swept away in the minutiae or challenges of it?” I have clarified it enough to be able to articulate it to you. I have written it down and included it in my morning gratitude practice. It’s something that I am reminding myself of with regularity. It’s on the computer, and it pops up.

I know at times, I even surprised myself by getting a little bit woo-woo. It’s critical that you answer that question for yourself, articulate it, have it close by, and have it in your pocket that you can pull out and remind yourself of why you are fighting this fight. Also, why you are doing this, why when you hear no from a retailer or an investor, you have a crap month.

You are on the precipice of not having any cash or any of the other challenges that this journey is filled with, the reminder of why you are pushing through it, why you are doing it, and what you can do to push through. I wanted to get that out there. I want to encourage you all to put pen to paper, take the time to do it and make sure that you incorporate it in some way every day so that you are reminding yourself.

Empathy 

Let’s hope that by doing that, 2022 doesn’t have the same deplete of effects that 2021 did because I’m both an optimist and simultaneously a realist. 2022 is going to be a tough year, too. We are going to need every arrow in our quiver to sustain ourselves through that year. That’s topic number one, mission. Let me jump to the second topic.

Topic number two is empathy. We are in this universal shared experience where the only constant is flux or change. We are all in our own respective areas, dealing with an incredible amount of unknowns. Empathy is a superpower in moments like this. I want to talk about how you can leverage empathy to move your business forward. You can’t fake or feign it. It can’t be insincere. It has to be real but it still can be leveraged and used.

Often, we start an interaction with an investor, category manager, service provider, team member, etc., with what we want to extract from that interaction. That’s human nature but it’s also the transactional nature of trying to get shit done. I’m not saying there’s any harm or anything wrong with that.

Oftentimes, what happens is when we don’t get that result or don’t extract what we want, we are aggravated or disappointed about it. We are approaching it in the wrong manner. Empathy is the center point of human-centered design. It allows you to think or look past that. If the question you asked before you start in interaction, write an email, put a pitch deck together for an investor, put a presentation together for a category manager, have a team meeting or any of those things is, “What are they facing now? What are they dealing with now? What’s important to them now? What do they need now?”

Start to think that perspective from behind their lens. It’s such a huge opportunity to show up in a different way than everybody else. This is especially true when it comes to category managers. Think about what they are dealing with. They are dealing with massive supply chain challenges, vendors that are not able to ship, and shelves that are empty. They are dealing with store issues where there isn’t the labor they need available in the stores to get the product on the shelf. They are dealing with the vendors that are complaining that the products are not on the shelf and with their distributors not being able to get their loads to them.

They are dealing with numbers filled with all kinds of anomalistic results because shit has been weird and all of those things. They are trying to make decisions that they are being held accountable for and that their bosses expect them to be good decisions. When we reach out simply to talk about our product, our category or why we should be on the shelves, we are missing the opportunity to see things from their perspective and how we might be helpful or a solution for them.

For example, if you are in a situation where you’ve got plenty of inventory, your supply chain is solid, and so forth, approaching from that perspective, “You’ve got a big supply chain. I want to let you know that here’s where we are at. We are confident. We are comfortable. We can serve your needs.” Even if you are an existing brand, let your category managers know it. It could be that it’s around category growth or being creative to the category and all of those things.

Think about it from their perspective, what they need and how you can be offering them a solution to one of the challenges they face. If you can go from being simply somebody trying to transact to somebody offering a solution because you have enough empathic understanding of what they are doing, you are going to be looked at and viewed very differently than the person trying to transact.

The same holds true with any interaction if you look at an investor standpoint. Think about what investors are facing themselves. Most of them are also raising money like you. They are always thinking about their next fund and what they are going to do. What do you offer them? What do you do? What are they facing? What are they looking at? Team members, what are they dealing with? What are they facing? Service providers, use and lean into empathy.

We talked about this a lot in terms of brand building with empathy, trying to think about the consumer themselves as they walk the store about what’s going on, what they are facing, what they are thinking, and what speaks to them. It’s such a superpower. I would encourage you all to lean into it, think about how you can structure everything you do, and show up in a way that it’s an empathy first perspective.

There are two things I want to touch base on the mission and say something about empathy to footnote what you said. On the mission, one of the things that are an interesting perspective to have, is a lot of people that are doing this with these brands come from either a corporate background or whatever the case. Many feel like what they are putting into the marketplace is a calling for them to do this. This is something that they are on a mission to do, compelled to do, and left their corporate job doing whatever to go out and venture into this challenging world of entrepreneurship.

I would remind them to think back to that origination time and keep in perspective that they are in service to that brand that they think they own and are working on behalf of that brand whatever that product or services to bring it to this marketplace that’s a better alternative for food or beverage. Also, realize that they may not have all the resources they had once back in the corporate world but there is this calling, passion, and connection to take that initial courageous step and refresh that memory and they work on behalf of that brand. They don’t own it per se.

On empathy, it’s not just for potentially the consumer but the whole ecosystem in this business, from the people you might work with legally, to the brokers, buyers, and everything. Think about the whole ecosystem of what’s going on here, all the supply chain, and those folks that are trying to collaborate and align in how you help and assist with that alignment.

What you are doing and offering could have the least amount of friction possible to get in front of the right consumers that are going to buy, appreciate, consume and make your product a part of their life. Even in a habit way where you become part of your customer’s life if you have a food or beverage. That is true on the molecular level. They are consuming your product. That becomes the raw material that they are cells rejuvenate from.

It’s personal care, skincare, and all of that.

It’s a sacred calling. That’s a blessing. This mission that these entrepreneurs are on, you become the consumers that purchase and consume you. It’s pretty profound.

Waven is always going to drop your metaphysical mind melt for you. One of the points to follow up on is that you think about some of the folks you are bringing in, engaged transactionally or from a service provider standpoint. I hear from so many of them, whether it’s the attorneys, brokers or so forth, that they too have been overwhelmed and are feeling the pressure.

Starting conversations like that and accepting this mutually shared experience, what you are going to wind up getting from people that way is you are going to get them wanting to be helpful and be a part of the solution or the positive outcome instead of being defensive or feeling like you are not understanding them. We all want it in return. If we strip things down to the basic human wants, that is, to be heard, cared for, valued and respected. That’s what we all want. If we show up and operate that way in this space, we are going to get that in return and get better results. Empathy is good business.

Persistence

The next topic is persistence. This is a little bit of a tough-love topic because I have been hearing this more and more. I want to motivate you all to be a little bit more persistent and aggressive. We are living in this world where from a retail perspective, where we’ve got what I’m calling the drive-by submission, “Give me one page or send me samples. I will let you know in nine months if you are going on the shelf,” that type of thing.

When you have investors reach out, you get a lot of, “Not now. You are too early.” We are not persistent enough in our communication. We are not engaging enough to stay top of mind. That is such a miss for all of you. We add our own self-narrative half the time, “I don’t want to be a past. I don’t want to be a nuisance. I don’t want to seem pushy.” That’s us telling ourselves that story. If you get an email that you don’t respond to fairly quickly, it gets pushed down into your inbox until lost and gone.

If the person hasn’t emailed you back and you are waiting days and weeks to do it because you don’t want to seem pushy, you are missing the opportunity or if you are not keeping yourself top of mind. One of the hardest things to do is to time need and want, where you have a need, and they have a want or vice versa at the exact right moment.

If you have a mechanism for maintaining top-of-mind awareness and staying in their consciousness, you are creating many more opportunities for that intersection of need and want to happen. That’s the difference between getting things done and not. It’s a shame. Too many of you are so aggressive in some aspects of your business but on this particular aspect, you are timid.

You don’t want to do it. You don’t like reaching out. Robert Preston wrote about the concept of resistance. It’s this force that creates resistance in what we want to do, and when we face resistance, we often find ways to avoid it. We know sending that email, follow-up or reaching out is uncomfortable for us. We might say, “I’m going to sit down and pound out all these investor reach outs and all this stuff.” You find 9,000 other things to distract yourself with, thinking that you are busy but what you are doing is falling prey to that resistance.

You can’t allow that resistance to when you need to find some hacks around it. If you want to move things forward, outperform, and need to get the results you want to be able to get, and quite frankly need to get, it’s going to come a lot through persistence. There’s a big difference between persistence and being pushy, persistence and being sleazy, annoying or any of those things. It means that you are not allowing yourself to be outside of the consciousness of the people you are trying to build a relationship with or make things happen. How do you do this? There are some simple ways. It doesn’t have to be difficult, long-winded or anything along those lines.

What I would recommend everybody to look into is the concept of building ongoing regular sequenced emails. I’m not talking about Klaviyo Flows or Mailchimp. I’m talking about emails that come out of your inbox and are personal in nature but are being done in some form of automation without your direct interaction. An email sequence, for example, maybe that you have, which is somebody you want to stay engaged, stay top of mind with and so forth. You set up a sequence of 10 to 15 emails that go out automated every 10 to 12 days, and it may say, “It’s Elliot. I’m thinking of you. I love to chat when time permits. Reply when you’ve got a moment.”

If Waven doesn’t respond 10 or 12 days later, another one generates, “It’s Elliot. I’m circling back. I hope all is well.” Twelve days later, “It’s Elliot. I’m circling back. I hope everything is going great. I love to chat with you.” That’s all it has to be. If you want to include other things like links, you could do all that stuff but it should be 50 words or less and simple. All you are trying to do is create top-of-mind awareness.

If you do that, then that intersection of need and want is more likely to happen. You are timing or guessing right with your initial conversation. The same holds true if there are people like, “I have a nurture sequence.” These are people that I want to make sure I’m nurturing a relationship with to invite them and reach out to me if I can be of assistance.

It’s not just about getting something from them but it’s making sure that I’m building that reciprocal relationship, at the same time, making sure that I’m nurturing a relationship so that if I reach out and ask them for help, connection or so forth, it doesn’t feel like such a hard ask for me because I have nurtured the relationship.

A nurture sequence would be, “It’s Elliot. I’m checking in. Anything I can do to help, shoot me an email.” Those types of things. That frequency might be every three weeks or something along those lines. Three months later, I have to reach out to Waven and say, “Can you do me a favor? I’m trying to find somebody who does some good performance marketing. Can you make a recommendation of a couple of people?”

It doesn’t feel awkward to do that because I have stayed in contact and relationship with them and have offered that opportunity. If I were left to my own accord to do that, if it were simply me having to remember to count out that email, send it to them and take the time to do it, it wouldn’t happen. Resistance is going to be there, so using a tool like a sequenced email system is great.

The third one, and probably the one that we all struggle with the most, is the follow-up sequence. That is when we reach out to an investor or a retailer. We sit by our computers and watch our emails going, “I hope they respond. When should I respond back? When does it not seem too desperate or pushy? When do I feel like I’m appropriately able to reach back, seem comfortable and confident?”

We create this bullshit narrative in our heads around the whole thing. What happens is we wind up waiting too long. We don’t do it. What we are doing is restarting the conversation each time because enough time has gone past, and we have missed opportunities. Most of us feel uncomfortable doing things like that.

If you have a follow-up sequence an investor or category manager follow-up, as soon as you are done with that conversation, you go in and start that sequence. It could be, “I recommend every 36 to 48 hours,” that type of cadence and following up, “Waven, I’m circling back. Thanks for the conversation. I love to continue it on and keep going.” The benefit of a sequence is that all of those background emails happen without your interaction but if Waven responds to it or sends an email, the sequence stops because now you’ve got permission to take the next step in the conversation.

What I’m recommending here is a hack towards persistence. You can do this manually if you’ve got the discipline and time but I know that most of you don’t have the time, and few of us have the discipline to push past our self-narrative and resistance. If you do these things, you are routine in them, committed to them and so forth, you will outperform those that don’t. I hear this all the time. You reached out to investors, “You are too early. Not yet.” Until you get a restraining order out against you, it’s not a no from an investor or a retailer.

You’ve got to be willing to push past that resistance and make it happen. You also have to make sure that you are leaning into empathy and showing up in a way that matters. Also, don’t check innovation at your product or branch. Try to be innovative in every one of your approaches. Have you got to submit a one-pager? Embed a video on that one page so that you get to explain things. Be creative and innovative but be persistent. Waven, any thoughts there you want to share?

That’s the natural state. This can tie into empathy too along the lines of persistence. It doesn’t have to be the email where like, “I haven’t heard from you.” Think from an empathy perspective. Think proactively about what you could share that would add value to the conversation or relationship. That’s across the ecosystem.

Let’s say you are in the business of putting out there a better for you chip like The Good Crisp Company. There’s an article that comes across about the history of chips or potato chips. This is an actual example I’m using. You could share that thing, “I saw this interesting thing,” with the people in your ecosystem. Provide something that they might not have seen, put it as a PDF in the document with a link if they instantly want to look at it or the link is broken when they go to it. Think about how to construct that.

That could be simple in the subject line, “I saw this great article. I thought you would be interested.” In essence, you are saying, “I’m thinking about you.” It’s tied to your product, not necessarily directly in a heavy-handed sales way but it’s another way to raise your brand in their consciousness to a different level of the top of mind.

Look at those places where you can add value to the relationship and conversation because all these people have no time, etc. When you construct those emails, make them as easy and quick to digest as possible, which is another thing that they will appreciate, knowing they are not going to look at a huge email, have to put it away and get back to it or not.

That’s a superpower of yours. I wish I were as good as you are. It means you file in your mental file cabinet what everybody’s interests are and send it out. I have heard from lots of people that they appreciate that. Think about the way you receive emails. I’m guilty of this. If you want me to respond to an email and you send me an email with more than three paragraphs, you have diminished the odds that you are going to get a meaningful response from me by tenfold. It’s not out of lack of desire. It’s just I have to triage emails as everyone else does.

We tend to triage the ones that are long and push them somewhere to come back to. If we don’t have the time to come back, we get swept away with other things we don’t. A fantastic thing to do in emails is to think about that 50-word limit and how you convey what you need to do in about 50 words or less and get more responses. Also, use the subject line to convey the most important point in your email or to let people know that you need a response from them.

The last thing on that. It’s less a superpower. It’s something called Google Alerts. You can put it in your brand or category, and instantly, Google will do the magic for you. In addition to sharing this with the ecosystem in your business environment, it’s perfect content fodder for your social media channels. People are always about, “What do I post?” There’s one in this magazine about a little ice cream brand that I sent to one of our clients in the ice cream business. Little things of delight like that go a long way to keeping you top of mind and showing them that you have the empathy factor we talked about.

I have to disagree. I use Google Alerts a lot as well but there’s a pretty big jumping point from collecting the information in Google Alerts to taking the time to write the email and send it. That’s the hard part of doing that. Be real about what you can do and what you can afford but make persistence, reach out, and nurture something that you excel at, and the results will pay itself.

Resilience 

The last topic of this verbal diarrhea of an episode here is resilience. I want to talk about this in two forms, business resilience, and personal resilience. From a business resilience point, I’ve got off a meeting with an entrepreneur who was showing me their plans for 2022, their projected revenue, and all of that stuff. My question to them was, “What if you don’t achieve it? What if you are 20%, 30% or 40% shy of that number? Can you survive? What does that look like? What does that do to cashflow? What things do you not do? How do you back those things off?”

A lot of us don’t think that because we are optimists and trying to be as focused that way as possible, yet it’s critical that we do it and ask ourselves that hard question because we want to build resilience. “I believe we are going to hit these numbers. We are going to do this. The cash is going to come in when I think it is. The investment is going to happen. If it doesn’t, how do I build the appropriate resilience for it? How do I build in what’s necessary to make it happen?”

That’s where we miss out so often. We don’t have that focus and willingness to ask the question, “Can we survive this? Can we do it?” I would ask everyone here to push and challenge themselves in that way, “What if I’m 20% shy of my revenue target? What if my expenses are 20% higher? With the supply chain, what if I have to sit on more inventory? What if I don’t have inventory?” Ask yourself, answer those questions, and build in that resilience because this is where so many entrepreneurs find themselves trapped.

They didn’t do this. They don’t ask the questions. They don’t focus on this, and then they find themselves with their toes dangling off the edge of a cliff, and they have to make decisions about their business. That’s where bad decisions are made. Things like that can destroy the long-term viability of a business because your options are so limited at that moment of peril. If you think pre-think, plan, and build in basic resilience to your business, then you are able to make these choices when optionality exists, when you can think things with more clear-headedness, less desperation, and so forth.

It’s not a fun exercise. It’s not something that anyone is going to relish. When the shit hits the fan, are you prepared? If it does, you are prepared. If it doesn’t, no problem but make sure you build that in. Simultaneously to doing that, I want to talk about personal resilience. This ties all the way back to the very front end of this conversation around mission. What are you doing to make sure that you are taking care of yourself and able to fight this fight day after day? That means handling rejection and the stress on you, your relationships, and your family. That means the ability to stay physically and mentally well.

That resilience is vital. You, as an entrepreneur, founder, cofounder, or even a key team member, are the most important asset in your business. If you are not treating and investing in yourself as such, you are doing not only yourself but your business a massive disservice. It’s hard because it feels counterintuitive. I struggle with it.

To be able to say, “I’ve got to shut down. I’ve got to make time to exercise, relax, read, take a vacation or commit to shutting down at a particular time at night. I’ve got to create some barriers and space.” If you feel like, “I’ve got to push through. I’ve got to keep going, making things happen and work harder than everybody else,” that isn’t the recipe for success.

The recipe for success is, “Am I nurturing myself from the food I eat and the way I’m treating my body physically and spiritually? Do I have a strong social network? Am I engaging with people outside of the day-to-day business? Am I investing the time, energy, and love in the family?” If you are not and you are trying to outwork the next person and grind through, you are going to be seeing diminishing returns. You risk bigger things like your health, relationships, and all of those things.

In some ways, I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth because I talked about the importance of persistence but there’s a difference between being persistent and being ridiculous. Here’s my challenge. What are you going to do to make sure that you build in both resilience for your business and yourself? Make sure you are making that happen. Those are the topics I want to cover. Waven, any thoughts on what I added there?

In the sense of resilience, if the entrepreneurs see that strategically as a force multiplier, that’s a context to hold it in. It’s an activity that if you are going to do that it’s going to make 1 plus 1 equal 5. It’s a catalyst and an alchemy process, whether that’s swimming for me or the walks you take with JUNO in The Orchards. Whatever it is, that thing that revives, regenerates, and gives you that spark and creative juice to go back at it again, is a force multiplier.

It’s that 20% that can activate the 80% in a whole different way and give you a creative view on problem-solving rather than just grinding it. With the continued issues of the pandemic, as we have experienced, if you put your head to the grindstone, that’s what’s going to happen. You are going to end up depleted and coming up with knee-jerk reactions, responses and solutions. I’m seeing this taking care of yourself and rejuvenating yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually is the force multiplier for success.

You started in a concise way. That’s our solo show with my metaphysical mind melt partner alongside me. I hope you enjoy this episode. We may do a few more of these as the year goes on because it allows us to take the things that are most salient or top of mind that we are hearing and bring them to you right then and there. We will see you in the next episode with Chuck Cotter with Holland & Hart. Happy 2022.

Let’s hope that this is the year that we begin to see this pandemic in the rearview mirror and be able to focus on the cool things we are doing in this industry, which is fighting for human health, climate action, justice, diversity, equity and inclusion, and all the other cool shit that everyone is trying to do. Waven, thanks for being my wingman. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. We will see you next time.

Important Links

• Holland & Hart

• Ridgeline

• GoFundMe

• Article – How a solid personal mission can keep your business afloat in 2022

• The Good Crisp Company

• Google Alerts

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