Weekly Update May 23rd

You don't have to be a $100 Million Brand

May 23, 2022

Hey , 

Happy Monday. Today I want to talk about the impact you want to make with your business and charting your own path.

PS. If you were forwarded this newsletter, please 

. 

What impact do you want to create? 

These days it seems like the public only values founders who want to impact the world. This is great, but I also want to celebrate founders who:

Impact their families

Impact their neighborhood

Impact their community

Impact their city

Impact their region

Impact their country

  You Don't Have to be a $100 million Brand

Imagine running a successful and profitable business, growing wealth for yourself and your family, and creating a product that people love. You can achieve this without being a $100 million brand. If you're a CPG brand, you can usually become a profitable business as early as $250,000, but most around $1 million. That means paying yourself a good salary and taking home money from the business. 

I'm a big advocate for Profit before Growth

Step 1: Financial Security

Before you can impact anything, you have to take of yourself. I don't know about you, but as a founder, I can't make a difference in anyone's life if I'm constantly worried about my own financial situation. So many founders are running businesses that create financial, emotional, and mental strain because they are losing money or constantly require outside investor financing. If your business is built on a VC-backed model and you're hitting your metrics, great! Hopefully, you can reduce your financial burden. 

  Step 2: Creating a Personal Mission Statement

We all know about creating a company mission statement, but have you created a personal mission statement? My wife introduced me to this concept when we first met, and I was surprised that I never come across it before. Ask yourself, "what's your driving focus and what overall goal would you like to achieve?"My personal mission is to create products that enrich people’s lives while mentoring others to do the same.Foodbevy.com is a manifestation of my personal mission, and through my work I get to live it out every day. Do you have a personal mission statement? Shoot me an e-mail and I'd love to hear it!

Jordan Buckner

Foodbevy

WORKSHOP: HOW TO GET YOUR FINANCIAL DUCKS IN A ROW

Many early-stage founders, especially eCommerce founders, struggle with getting their finances ready for fundraising.

Alice Zhang, founder of myPocketCFO, will share tips on getting your financial ducks in a row for fundraising. Topics will cover accrual-based accounting, cash/working capital, forecasting, debt financing and equity raising, and other critical financial elements an investor will be looking at.

CPG Founders Ashley Nickelsen and Regina Trillo will join to share their founder perspective.

CREATIVE HAVEN PODCAST

My friend Mitchel over at The Creative Haven has an awesome podcast where he interviews industry experts. Check them out!

WEBINAR REPLAY: EXPANDING WITH DISTRIBUTORS

As a CPG Brand, distributors are crucial to your expansion, but building strong relationships isn’t always easy. Chargebacks, missed shipments, and delayed payments are all challenges to growth. Join me for a panel with founders discussing how to best navigate growing with regional and national distributors.

  PANELISTS

Jim DeCicco, Super Coffee

Renee Dunn, Amazi FoodsTrent Moffat, Gotham Brands

Free D2C Design Brand Review

The first 10 founders can get an expert review of your CPG brand website, ads, and emails to see how to increase your D2C sales and design a roadmap for growth with the awesome Benson Sung. 

offers unlimited design and development for CPG brands for less than the cost of an agency. Perfect for emerging brand founders. 

LOOKING FOR NEW INGREDIENTS?

Have supply chain disruptions left your team scrambling for alternative suppliers just to make your next production run? 

ShelfLife launched it's free-to-use ingredients marketplace to alleviate the stress of sourcing the right ingredients. With ShelfLife, you can search and discover thousands of specialty ingredients, connect and communicate with suppliers, and organize their entire purchasing workflow all-in-one place. ShelfLife saves operations teams hours each week spent tracking down suppliers, sending out purchase orders, and sourcing new products. 

is completely free for brands! You can sign-up for an account

or reach out to

directly to discuss your sourcing needs.

AUTO-APPLY THE SMALLEST DISCOUNT THAT GETS EACH CUSTOMER TO BUY MORE

I'm personally using this great new tool to create personalized discounts for each of my Good Food Brands customers and products and you should too.As a brand, it's incredibly important to make sure that you’re profiting as much as possible from each sale and not overspending on discounts with universal promo codes, email pop-ups and point loyalty programs.You may not know it, but you are likely losing money by offering too much discount on products to shoppers that don’t actually need it to checkout.Why offer a 20% off SUMMER promo code or email signup pop-up when the same shopper would still purchase with only a 9% discount?Veeper is a Shopify app that auto-applies the smallest discount that gets each customer to buy more - increasing average order value by net 14%.Test Veeper on my own Good Food Brands site and request an intro

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: 43. The Ultimate Launch Plan with Damien Law, Effin Good Snacks

Damien learned that building his company in public allows people to become personally invested in him and the brand. He created a TikTok account in December 2021 and his first video went viral, getting him a waitlist of 6,000 people. From that waitlist, Damien sold 1,000 units and he was off to the races. Join me to learn how Damien created the ultimate launch plan for bootstrapped founders.

DISCOUNTS

- Mindful Goods 

is an awesome Amazon expert that can quickly get you started or optimize your pages for strong ROI. 

 use code FOODBEVY.

- Maverick Lab 

allows you to create individually personalized videos (with a customer's name) welcoming them to your community. Foodbevy members save 40%. Reply to this e-mail for an introduction.

- Chop 

is a

that allows you to drive in-store trial, collect customer shopping data, and build customer profiles to further drive your business. Foodbevy members save 20% off. E-mail me for the discount.

- Stripe 

is now providing $20,000 in fee-free processing for new and EXISTING customers.

The Accountrepreneur 

is your go-to outsourced CPA and CFO firm for the food and beverage industry. Receive

- Airtable

 can store information in a spreadsheet that's visually appealing and easy-to-use, but it's also powerful enough to act as a database that businesses can use for customer-relationship management (CRM), task management, project planning, and tracking inventory. 

With your help we're building an amazing community of Food and Bev entrepreneurs helping each other!

Jordan

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