The successes of entrepreneurs are easy to see: the whopping big sales, their names on buildings and billboards, and the confident smiles they display when they’re proudly pitching their businesses. But what happens beyond that face of confidence? How do entrepreneurs deal with fear and doubt? Today, Alan Cohen shares his experience as an entrepreneur and the valuable insights he has picked up along the way. Alan is the Co-founder and CEO of Kokomio, an experienced project director in real estate, and skilled in management, leadership, marketing, project management, and strategic planning. But more than his credentials, Alan is a passionate innovator that loves to challenge the supply chains and how things are done. Join us and discover how the idea of Kokomio was made, and learn how entrepreneurs overcome their deepest worries in business.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Story Of Kokomio: Learning And Dealing With The Bumps In An Entrepreneur’s Journey With Alan Cohen

I am excited about this conversation because Alan Cohen happens to be one of my favorite human beings. He’s emblematic of everything right about this industry in many ways. I’m proud not only to have him be part of the community but also to claim him as a dear friend. I know this conversation is going to be one that’s filled with a lot of love and learning. I hope that everybody enjoys it as much as I’m sure I will in having it.

Before I start, I’ll do my normal two commercials, but they’re not self-serving commercials. They’re aimed at trying to be of service. I know that sounds woo-woo, but it falls in line with what we talk about often. That is our deep-seated belief about the importance of Karmic Boomerangs, the giving without expectation of reciprocity and allowing the universe to show its reciprocity and its infinite wisdom.

The first commercial is around the TIG Collective. It is something that is a heart project for all of us. In this industry, one of our challenges is that our boards are filled with a lot of people who look somewhat like me, middle-aged White guys, and yet our consumers and shoppers are incredibly diverse. Brands need diversity of thought and lived experience, and diversity sitting in their boardrooms, helping them see things that they may miss. We need to do a better job of building that next generation of board members.

Additionally, our entrepreneurs need to know how to extract value from their advisors and boards, and how to bring people alongside them who can be force multipliers, and help them navigate these difficult churning waters. The TIG Collective is aimed at doing both sides. Brands that are interested in the TIG Collective join our community, and then can access the TIG Collective by simply signing a Standard Advisor Agreement, except instead of it being with a single advisor, it’s with the collective.

Instead of issuing their advisor shares to a single advisor, they issue them to the collective. On the reciprocal side, the advisors are signing Advisory Agreements with a collective, and then they’re getting issued a portion of the aggregate upside of all the shares deposited or all the options deposited in the collective. The goal is that those advisors are motivated, passionate and remunerated by the success of the brands that they’re supporting.

We’re also then doing master classes for both entrepreneurs and advisors. The advisors are going to learn things about fiduciary responsibility, governance, and navigating conversations around M&A and fundraising. It’s the intricacies of being an effective advisor and growing into a prepared board member.

On the entrepreneur side, they’re going to learn how to present and articulate actionable business cases so that they can get the kind of advice that they need from advisors, how to hold themselves and advisors accountable, how to agendize, and all of the things that they need so that they’re extracting the most value from them. If you’re interested in learning more about the TIG Collective, please reach out. If you’re part of our community, there’s no cost other than the normal advisor shares you would offer to any advisor.

The other commercial is for our TIG Venture Community. I wrote an article. It’s on our website. I urge you to read it. It’s called Funding Frustration. Where I outline the reality in this industry is I see that we are stepping over many good businesses in pursuit of that unicorn that can rocket to $100 million plus. There are many great brands and good businesses that are likely going to be EBITDA positive and cashflow positive, and can achieve that with not a whole lot of money or investment. There’s a way or a path that I believe to fund these entrepreneurs, not only to do good but to do well by doing so because there’s a mechanism for return. It takes innovation and creativity, but that’s our jam. That’s what we do.

If you’re an investor in this space, an Angel, even you are an industry luminary or somebody who spent time here and been a beneficiary of the industry, if you’re interested in investing in brands that are going to be capital efficient where you’re not going to get highly diluted, where you’re going to see a good return, we’re going to be funding the singles and doubles, not the walk-off grand slams, please reach out to me. Let us tell you more about the TIG Venture Community. It is a very unique approach to raising funds for entrepreneurs investing in a way that is extraordinarily beneficial to both entrepreneur and investor. TIG Venture Community, learn more there.

Alan, I’m done with my commercial and I’m ready to turn it over to you. I would love for you to introduce yourself. My guess is that in turning that mantle to you, you’re going to do it in such a humble way that I’m going to have to come back in and edit the large gaps of brilliance that you’ve left out. I’ll let you start. Share a little bit about yourself, your journey, and why you’re doing what you’re doing with Kokomio.

Thank you so much for the introduction. I am from Mexico City. I’m an architect. I studied Architecture. I built a lot of things here in Mexico with private investment and commercial real estate. How does an architect run into these kinds of business with the CPG and food and beverage? I’m an innovator. I always love to innovate things in architecture and whatever things that I am seeing. I always like to challenge and question all of the things out there. We started a restaurant with my brother. He has down syndrome. We supported him to get him included in society and work.

My father, my family, and myself all helped to build a restaurant for him where he’s the baker. It was a healthy food restaurant because they were all my mom’s and my sister’s recipes. We started doing cold-pressed juices over there. By then one thing turned into another. I love being healthy as well. That’s the values that my mom teach me when I was young. We started to do cold-pressed t juices. We developed a manufacturing plant in Mexico City where we develop our own brand because we also found out that in Mexico, there’s a lot of obesity and not a lot of healthy products. We wanted to bring something to help on that end.

We manufacture for other brands and food services as well. In doing that, I remembered my young times when I was in Acapulco. I love coconut on my hands, drinking it, cracking it open, and eating that white meat, even with lime. In Mexico, we love spicy sauce, so with spicy sauce as well. I love that experience of being at the beach and on the sand with the breeze. It was everything to me. When I went back to the city, it was hard to replicate that experience. Have you tried opening a coconut yourself? It’s pretty tough. With no ambient around it, it’s even harder.

At the manufacturing plant, we started to develop this formulation where we get the coconut water and press the white meat. We create coconut juice from Mexican coconuts. I also traveled a lot to the US. I saw none of the other beverages out there. Coconut water satisfied this experience for me. The taste was completely different. I started to find out its differences from Asian coconuts. Basically, 90% of the market in the US uses Asian coconuts. They’re very high in sugar.

Our coconuts in Mexico are 1/3 of that natural sugar. I love this difference and taste. I saw that there was an opportunity to bring the product to the US market, but also as we were working throughout this project, this is my passion and what excites me because I’m an innovator and I love to challenge the supply chains and how things are done.

First, we had to reach out and see where we are getting our coconuts from, which is from Guerrero. That is the state where Acapulco is in. We started building a relationship with growers. The funny thing here is that when you purchase coconuts at farms in Mexico, the growers grow their coconuts. They tell you, “If you want to purchase coconut, you have to take them out yourselves.” First, what we did is we started looking at it through a broker. He went around town and gather a team of harvesters who get paid by the day. They gather all these coconuts and sell them to me.

That was a challenge for us because of the yields of the coconuts. you can see that coconut can have 300 or 400 milliliters of water, and it’s the same price. We couldn’t balance out our production lines. What we did is we took out the broker and said, “Why don’t we help these people? Let’s hire a team of harvesters that are on a wage. Let’s give them technology and tools so they can weigh our coconuts, check their levels, and hand-pick the coconuts that we want for our beverage.” It was a win-win. Amazingly, when you do these kinds of things, I started learning the energy flows. When you’re doing good, you’re getting good in return. That’s karma in a way.

it’s also what Ben Franklin used to say, “Do well by doing good.”

It’s amazing. I realized that we’re getting better yields and they are earning a wage with benefits. In that part of town in Mexico, they never dream about this. We started to see how their families get better. When they have a base or a wage, they started to get even better. That excited us. If we get better yields, we give them a bonus. It’s a win-win. That excited me a lot. I thought to myself, “We can sell this product in the US market where people would appreciate this product and will help our people in Mexico.” Not a lot of Mexicans want to go to the US. There are a lot of challenges to going there because of differences, class and payments.

It brings instability to the homes in Mexico. People go out to the US to search for opportunities because here in Mexico, there’s a lack of opportunities. I thought, “Let’s create opportunities in Mexico to serve the market to the US.” That’s how we started with Kokomio. This excited me. I wanted to start building the company so that for every decision that we make, we have to take care of this. Let’s do good to get good. That’s what it was basically.

First of all, your father had a very successful business. You went off and studied Architecture for a while in Australia. You came back. Dad decides to put his efforts into you becoming a real estate developer so that he can see your talent manifest itself fully. Your brother who has downs is an amazing human being. He loves to bake. Your family builds him a restaurant so that he can share his craft and passion and feel like a contributing member. Your mom who loves juicing starts making cold-pressed juices. As a family, you build a manufacturing facility that’s HP and now SQF certified.

You decide to go out and start doing this coconut with Kokomio product, but you work with the growers in Guerrero to totally change the whole supply chain in a way that not only yields the best coconuts for you but also provides a significant improvement to their quality of life, then, you realize, “While we’re doing this, we have a waste product, the husk of a coconut. What are we going to do there? I don’t like a waste.” What did you do there?

When COVID happened, we were launching and everything got closed. We started to look into eCom. I started to see how challenging it is to ship perishable. It’s challenging and costly. You have to have liners, gel pads, and two-day shipping. You cannot make money out of it. I’ve done the numbers a lot of times. The only thing is to use styrofoam, which is horrible for the environment. My values are always taking care of the environment.

I was on lockdown and I thought to myself, “If the coconuts can bear this heat and all this rain, you crack it open and the water that is inside is still fresh, it means that the husk is a natural insulation system. It takes care of the water. We started developing into that. We develop our own insulation system using all of our coconut husk waste. It helps the environment because it’s compostable and recyclable. It serves more than 2 days or 60 hours of refrigeration with outside temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius. It was pretty amazing.

I said, “Let’s ship these boxes where you get the whole coconut. You’re getting the husk waste into an insulation system. You’re getting the water. You can compose and recycle it.” That gets me another excitement because we pay the truck to take out the waste. Using the waste for another purpose lowers the cost significantly for eCom. We’re helping ourselves and the environment as well. It’s the same value and core as what we’re doing.

I set that up kind of somewhat tongue-in-cheek because it is a remarkable story. You’re emblematic. You represent hope. I had this conversation with a friend of mine. We were going for a walk. He was talking about how all the things that we’re seeing, reading and hearing in society are overwhelming. Sometimes it’s hard to stay positive. He asks me how I stay positive. I said, “I spend my days working with entrepreneurs and with people who don’t see anything other than challenges to overcome, things to change and fix. That’s a remarkable way to think of things.

Have you always been that way? Knowing what I know about your family, your family is a history of entrepreneurship. When you go to study Architecture and forth, you’re not using that entrepreneurial side of your brain that much at that moment. When did you recognize that you were both an architect and an entrepreneur?

As an architect, since I was young. As an entrepreneur, I owe that to my father. It’s a funny story, but when I was young, my dad put a chair aside at his office desk. He told me to sit there and shut up. There were no iPhones or iPads. I couldn’t distract myself, and I hated it. I was fourteen years old and I hated going. He told me, “This is what you need. Listen and you will learn more than you’ll ever imagine.” When I started to work with him because he started this real estate agency when I was fourteen years old, I started to learn a lot of things. Sometimes we are going into stupid discussions about how much would the front of our retail space should be and those kinds of things.

When I was at college learning Architecture, I would challenge the teachers because a lot of the teachers were about a lot of design. They didn’t know how much that cost, why you cannot build a project like that, and why you have to see what you are doing. I learned all of this by listening to my father. I had some bad relationships at college because of challenging the teachers. When I was challenging them, I started to see that I think differently. That’s what did it.

It’s an interesting thing when you realize that you think differently. At least for me, I was the same way. I remember when I was in grad school, I was notorious for challenging teachers. The difference is when we first go to college, most of us don’t have real-world experience. You’re more likely to accept the knowledge that’s being given. I had been in the business world for a few years. I went back to grad school, and now I had at least a little bit of practical experience and things to apply. I would challenge the teachers.

I remember in a Finance course, I was challenging one of my teachers and he finally had enough of me, shockingly. It’s almost like a grade school thing. He made the class get up and put their chairs in the circle. He stuck himself in me facing each other in the middle of the circle and said, “Let’s go.” It was a debate. I recognized that I thought differently, but I still went to the corporate route because I didn’t know how to think differently and still turn that into entrepreneurship. I was afraid to do it.

What I wound up doing is trying to climb the corporate ladder and having some relative success in doing it, but always as an outsider and a pariah because I thought differently. I wanted to break things and challenge the norms. That wasn’t the way big companies wanted their young executives to think. They wanted them to toe the line. That’s what fascinates me. It took me 25 years before I took that step off the plank. You did it much earlier in your career. Do you think that was because of your dad and family? It was ingrained in you that it gave you the confidence that it was a path that was completely normal and open to you.

That’s all my parents but most of all my father. My relationship with him is close. I am the youngest of three. I have an older sister and the oldest one. My relationship with my dad was always there. My dad also was a frustrated architect. He wanted to study architecture, but he went into textiles because that was the business back then. His mind is always like that. You can see my dad, if we’re on vacation, counting the floor of the building. His mind works differently. Being close to him, I was getting all that energy from him and learning. That’s a natural process for me to jump into the entrepreneur part of it. I never thought of being on corporate.

What about your kids? What are you going to do? Are you going to put a chair next to your desk for each of them, have them sit there, and take away their iPhones and iPads? What do you want them to see as you go through this?

For me and my kids, I see it as a way to support them in whatever thing they want to do because there’s nothing wrong with being in corporate or being an entrepreneur. It’s something that is contagious. My oldest one is only thinking about business. The other day when I was at Expo, there are a lot of houses with a garden and a colony there. My wife is telling me that my kid is now doing a babysitter business. She went and takes care of babies and she got paid She’s nine years old. She’s the same thing as what I experienced with my father.

Not that my dad wasn’t close with me when I was growing up, but he never comes out for lunch. He always comes home late. Now, I’m very close with the kids. It’s more contagious at an earlier stage. I think that’s because they are talking with me all the time, and I talk that way. I always tell them like, “What if you do this or that?” I’m starting to exercise their mind.

One of the cool few positives that came out of this pandemic was that suddenly many kids started watching and witnessing their parents work. Oftentimes, when you’re a kid, your parents go to work. You know they go to work, but you don’t know what work is like for them. Whether it’s entrepreneurship or corporate, there was that benefit of kids seeing their parents do their work in many cases.

I want to change topics. I want to talk about CPG. Here you are, an entrepreneur doing all of this, and now you’re tackling not only CPG in the States but natural beverage, probably the most competitive, brutal category within it. What are you finding? What’s been surprising to you? What’s been particularly challenging? Share your experience a bit.

I didn’t know anyone. I felt lost when I started looking into it. Networking, being with you, meeting you, your help in the community, and also how I started to build my network with other entrepreneurs started to give me a little bit more hope and information. I could start learning from it because I’m new to the States and it was challenging. What I’ve learned is if the core values of your company are right, you have ways to go. That’s maybe 50% of the road. For the other 50% of the road, there are a lot of things to work on.

I learned that the most challenging part of it is sales. I was in Mexico because I have to attend the real estate business, which is our core business. I wasn’t able to go out there to go to the stores and build that relationship with the buyers or the people at the stores. They travel often. Getting a team on board with us for sales was challenging at first. We learned and we are doing some other study now that is going well. The sales part was a huge deal. What I’ve learned is you don’t only need a sales team for sales. There are a lot of things that you need to do as well from PR at that industry level. You have to get your product out there to be known.

When I started to learn all of this, it was also because of my experiences with my father. A funny story. My dad started his baby clothing company when he was young. There are these big billboards in Mexico. He put his logo with a phrase. Nobody knew what it was, but he got maybe 50 billboards all over the city. When he started to contact these stores to sell them baby clothes, they were already waiting for him. They were like, “You are from the billboard. You’re this guy.”

That’s the ultimate “Fake it until you make it” type of thing. He put it up there and everyone was like, “This is a huge brand.” The stores were like, “I got to carry it.”

We started doing PR. When we started to go into retail, we went with a DSD distributor, which was challenging, but then we did PR.

Why was that challenging?

This DSD distributor had not a lot of stores that were the kind of store that we wanted to but was the only one that wanted to take us in. I’m grateful to the distributor because he opened the door a bit. It was challenging to work because I couldn’t grow and some of the stores weren’t for me. There were many small stores and it wasn’t worth it to continue to work with him. Also, the doors started to open at that time

We did some PR talking about our sustainability, peace, our company, and what it is about. I appreciate that. I got an email from Jimbo’s buyer at that time. He told me, “I’m excited about your product. Please send me samples. Send it over. I read the article.” I started building that relationship with him. We didn’t have distribution. It’s just by the DSD distributor. He opened up the doors with UNFI to get into distribution with them. We started launching with them. I appreciate that with him.

You have to do the PR, the marketing, sales and promos. I’m learning how the system works. At the same time, it’s the same way of thinking as I thought throughout the whole supply chain because the whole supply chain doesn’t end until the consumer is bringing your product and putting them into their bodies.

How do you challenge that system, free fields or slotting? How do you change that into other things that might even help better both the retailer and you because it’s the same field? It’s the thing right there, a win-win situation. That’s what I’ve been learning. Those are the challenges that I’ve been focusing on. The most challenge that we have is shelf life. Being a refrigerated product, the logistics on that is a huge deal, but once you start learning it, you start pulling through.

I admire what you’ve done with that as well, which is you started with a first iteration of the product, recognizing some of the challenges of being HP, having a shorter shelf life, being creative and figuring out how to go from frozen to refrigerated, and doing all of that. As the recognition became clearer that to scale Kokomio, you were going to have to figure out how to get the product into a true long shelf life product that could sit in broad line distribution and find its way to store shelves with plenty of coat.

A typical response of an entrepreneur is, “Life is over. This didn’t work. This is another interesting problem to solve. This is another interesting thing to go investigate and find a solution.” You went all in on that. That’s the part of the lesson that I feel is important that entrepreneurs should know. If you had started by doing what many beverage brands do, which was going broad quickly, and then realize that even some of the solutions you’ve done to minimize the impact of the perishability and the shorter shelf life weren’t going to work, the ability to walk that back, recover from it, think it through, and find a solution becomes more limiting.

You don’t want to fail in the accounts you’re in. It’s too expensive and all those kinds of things. You started with that growth hack mindset, “Let’s find the right stores, a couple of 100 stores. Let’s go all in.” As you unearthed the challenges, you built enough resilience in your business. You kept those growth hack experiments small enough that you’ve been able to go out and work on the solution, solve the problem, and do all that stuff.

It’s hard as hell because of two reasons. One is it requires patience. That’s a trait that both serves you well and doesn’t at the same time. We jokingly say, “You have to learn in this industry to be patiently impatient.” You have to have that sense of everything should be happening in urgency, moving things forward and going. At the same time, in the back of your head, you have to accept that things don’t go the way you want them, and they don’t happen as fast. You have to mute that while you’re in the moment, but when you pass the moment, let it surface.

It’s a great lesson because you have done this in iterative steps. If many entrepreneurs were to look at this right now and they are going, “I’d be losing my mind.” I know there have been moments where you have. When you write the Kokomio book, 5 or 10 years in, this iterative stretch is going to be formative and important, but it’s relatively going to be an insignificant dot on the timeline.

I’m going to use an analogy that I think you would get very well. That is you’ve been spending a lot of time making sure you are building the very best foundation because you can’t build up from there if that footing underneath isn’t as solid and is well constructed as possible. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to do that work.

That’s true. This is how I see it. You can see it on trees or buildings. The foundation is the most important part. If it’s not as strong enough, the building or the tree will fall. I love challenges because when every problem arises and the solution is there and you think about it, it excites you. It’s like, “I moved a step forward.” You have to have those wins. I also think and appreciate that from all my team because in Kokomio isn’t only myself as an employee. I have the team with you, our marketing team, operation, and people that help.

Also in Mexico, in our manufacturing plant, we have our math scientists and people on logistics and operations. There are always challenges in every department and everything. To have that kind of people where you can discuss and figure out a way how to solve that issue, I love that part. It’s having those conversations with people. There’s a saying as well that one mind thinks less. One person thinks less than one brain or one brain thinks less, and two people think more than two brains. That’s how I feel.

I’m also here because I’m a learner. I always hire people that can teach me. That’s hugely important because sometimes as an entrepreneur, you feel like you know everything. You feel like, “We have to do it this way because this is the model.” It’s nice to take steps back, “It’s not bad. It’s better.” We’ve been taking steps back throughout our whole journey, but for every step back that we take, there are 2 or 3 steps that we move forward very fast. That’s how I see it.

It’s hard to see that sometimes. Two things come to mind in that. One is the learner, curiosity and lifelong student mentality serve all of us so well. That’s still one of the biggest motivators for me. Although I’ve amassed a reasonable amount of wisdom over my many years of doing this, I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface. I spend way more of my day learning than I do teaching. I like the exchange of both. I’m happy to give my wisdom in exchange for new knowledge. I’m always curious and willing to take what was the wisdom of the past and let it change and morph with new data and new insight to become knowledge of the future. It’s okay.

There are things that I recommended and did ten years ago and even six weeks ago or six months ago that no longer are applicable because there have been changes. It keeps you in the game and on top of things to be curious, challenge your thinking, and take that student mindset. I’m a big believer in what the old Zen Master Shunryū Suzuki said. He said that in the expert’s mind, the opportunities are few, and you bring that beginner’s mind there.

The other thing that you mentioned is slowing down enough to see the progress. That’s one of the hardest things for all of you entrepreneurs. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur about this. Sometimes when you are so headed down, you’re pushing through, and your score sheet is your revenue or your ACV or those kinds of things, you’re not seeing that “hockey stick, you’re not seeing that big growth arc or so forth, you start questioning, “Am I making progress? Things aren’t happening. Things aren’t doing it.”

My comparison was being a parent of young kids. When you’re a parent of young kids and you’re with them every day, they don’t seem to be growing that quickly. They don’t seem to be changing that quickly. When you’re a visitor coming over and having not seen them for 3 months, 6 months or 1 year, it’s mind-blowing how far they’ve come physically. That’s the important part of being able to try to step back and see progress differently.

One of the things that I encourage everyone to do if you’re an entrepreneur is to journal. It is one of the great vehicles for those moments when you’re like, “I haven’t accomplished anything.” If you have a journal that you’ve been keeping for a while, 1 or 2 years, all you do is thumb back to the earlier pages and read a few entries. You read what you were thinking about, what you were doing and where you are, and you realize how small those issues were and how long ago they seem. Almost inevitably, you feel that sense of significant progress and achievement.

If you don’t create those touch points and weigh points that you can go back to and remind yourself of, sometimes you lose sight of it. That’s when things feel dark, slow, aggravating and so forth. There are enough real reasons to feel that way, but oftentimes progress isn’t one of them. You’re not just stepping back to see it.

Another thing that I do is I always ask this question to some of my friends or people that come and ask me for advice on their company. I always ask them, “How much time do you dedicate to analyzing your company?” Their first answer is always, “All the hours.” I said, “Understand the question. It is about your company, not your operations and not doing the day-to-day. How much time do you sit down and see the X-ray of your company and see how things are moving? What are your strategies? How do you shift? Sit to do that.”

Sometimes as entrepreneurs, because we want to do this, go to the store, and talk to this guy, you lose that sense of it. I always dedicate two hours a week where I don’t answer phones, emails or anything. I focus on all of what I’m doing. Even with my life, my family and my kids, it’s important to invest in yourself.

I admonish all of us and I do it, including myself as well. The most important asset in our business is us. If you don’t invest that head time and that introspective time, then that’s an element that you’re missing, which leads me to a question about focus for you. You do arguably have an immense amount of balls in the air family, your development business, architecture, the manufacturing facility, and Kokomio. How do you compartmentalize and make sure that you are able to allocate the attention and focus that each of them needs without being completely depleted, and sucking all of your energy and life out of you?

Before the pandemic, I worked a lot early in the morning. I came late at night and had a lot of work to do. I didn’t have even the same amount of work that I do now. My head is always working like office hours and stuff. I work from 9:00 to 3:50 or 4:00 PM. I might take a call or so later on if it’s necessary. I use that time to come to be with the kids, go to karate class or a dance class with the kids, and spend some time with the family. I am even more productive than I was before. That’s because of how I’ve been focusing my time.

The first answer is you need a good team in whatever area you’re going to have that can execute and be held accountable. As I’ve learned throughout my time, there are two kinds of people. There are those that want to get there, cover the hours, get their check, and they are done. There are people that want to get there, grow the company, get excited with you about doing this, and challenge everything. It’s important to have a good team.

What I do is focus my time. For example, on Fridays, my time is all spent on the manufacturing plant. I’ll go there, have my meetings, talk to each one, figure out the challenges, and then trust them. For a week, they have my phone. If something arises or happens, they call me. I’m in contact. I’m always in touch with them, but I don’t have to be there executing and doing all this stuff. It’s the same for everything.

Do you go back later at night though and answer emails or are you done?

When I go, I’m not done. If I’m at a karate class and I’m watching my kid, then maybe I get a WhatsApp, I might say, “I’ll call you in five minutes,” or something like that. I’m always there. My mind is always there, but I spent some time with the family. My kid was happy that I went there and saw his karate class. Those things for me are very valuable because there’s not only the entrepreneur part, making money, and building a good company or whatever exit but it’s also that part. Sometimes, as entrepreneurs, we’re so busy that our kids grow this fast, then we turn around and you missed it. I don’t want to miss it.

I love that lesson. My kids are grown. Especially because most of their growing up years, I was in the corporate world, I can say with pride that there were times when maybe I was sacrificing the speed of my career growth or the arc of my career growth because I wasn’t willing to put the crushing hours in at certain times. I would get out of the office early to go to soccer practice or whatever. As my kids are adults and the relationship I have with them and the relationship they have with us, both Juliet and myself, there’s no regret of that time. I don’t know of anybody that I’ve ever talked to that said, “I wish I worked more when my kids were young.”

It is important and it’s hard. This is one of those things where it’s like, “Do as I say, not as I do,” although I’ve gotten better at it. The challenge is we confuse activity with results. We feel like if we spend more time, get more emails done, do these kinds of things, respond to everything and do all of that, that guarantees results. It has no correlation to it. What has a lot more correlation is that the time that you do show up at work, you show up at your best, locked in, passionate, engaged, motivated, inspired and all of those kinds of things. I would trade 4 of those hours every day for 12 of gutting it or knocking out an activity.

When we get nervous, stressed or we want to see that progress, we think that the way to get there is to outwork it or grind it out, and it’s not. In the heat of the moment, it’s hard to recognize that. I was jokingly talking in our workshop that I don’t know what has gotten into all of our founders in the last few days, but for whatever reason, they’ve all fallen in love with long meaty emails again. It’s been like a fricking avalanche of emails. For the first 3, 4 or 5 days, I felt totally stressed by it and overwhelmed because I like to be super responsive. I want all of our entrepreneurs to know I’ve got their backs and I’m going to get it done.

I took a deep breath and said, “F it,” because if I keep grinding it out, my answers aren’t going to be worth anything and I’ll get to them. I’ll try to do them, but if I’m trying to do them while I’m on Zoom with somebody else, then that’s not fair to them. I’m not giving them the time. It is a challenge for all of us as entrepreneurs, but to whatever degree, you can catch yourself in the moment, it’s a practice. I’ve been doing this forever and I still somewhat suck at it.

At the moment, if you can catch yourself and ask yourself this question, “At this moment, am I confusing activity with results?” I find that helpful. I ask myself that numerous times a day. If the answer is yes, then I stop and slow down. Maybe I get up and go for a walk, go get a cup of tea, take a deep breath, or close the computer and go read a book for ten minutes. Whatever it is, it’s important. For the last question for the audience and those interested, how do they reach you and learn more? What can you use from this community in the way of help?

They can contact me by email at [email protected]. I’m happy to respond by email and connect to them by phone. I don’t care how I connect with people. On the community, your question was what can I receive from the community?

What help can you get? By community, I mean the broader one, the investors, retailers or your fellow founders.

I would love to have learned a lot of things that I tried and tested, and things that I think are the right path, but some things that could be avoided. Having that constant communication with a community, being comfortable that you can send someone or an advisor an email or a message, and knowing that they’re going to answer and they’re going to help you. You feel way more comfortable. That is something because sometimes in our lives, we build a little bit of a wall. It feels challenging to contact these kinds of people or even other entrepreneurs. Having this access to doing that will be stupid not to do.

A lot of us put on what I call this veneer that covers our vulnerability. We put this mask on that’s almost impenetrable that we don’t show what’s underneath it. We’re filled with fear and doubt. We’re scared shitless. We don’t have all the answers. When you can rip that off and you can tear away that veneer and be vulnerable with other entrepreneurs, it’s a 1,000% life-affirming not only for you the receiver but for the giver.

Suddenly they’re like, “He is feeling the same thing I am. He’s going through the same thing.” That’s one of the things that I love so much about watching and bearing witness to the entrepreneurs in our community. We may be the vessel that holds it, but they’ve created this psychological safety amongst each other, where there is that willingness to not show up with that veneer, where you are willing to show up and allow the vulnerability to percolate through. It makes everyone stronger.

Thank you much for sharing part of your story and for being the good human that you are, and loving. You’re amazing. All of the entrepreneurs that I come in contact with and that we work with here all inspire me. It blows me away what you’re doing, what you’re willing to do, and the belief that you have in yourself, and in your missions. That’s why I desperately want to see you all succeed. Thanks for joining. We’ll catch everyone next time on the show. We’ll see you soon.

Thank you.

 Important Links

• Alan Cohen

• Karmic Boomerangs

• TIG Collective

• TIG Venture Community

• Funding Frustration

• [email protected]

About Alan Cohen

Experienced Project Director in Real Estate, with a demonstrated history of working in the food & beverages industry. Skilled in Management, Leadership, Marketing, Project Management, and Strategic Planning.