What does it actually look like to lose everything — and rebuild from the truth of who you are? Kelly Schexnaildre built Murph's Condiments from a backyard garden in Denver into a company distributing to over 700 restaurants across the West. Then COVID hit. 85% of her revenue disappeared overnight, input costs tripled, and years of attempted pivots couldn't stop the inevitable. She closed the business, filed for bankruptcy, went through a divorce, and left her city of eleven years — all within the same year. In this raw and deeply honest conversation, Kelly and Bri unpack what it truly means to fail, grieve, and rebuild — not from hustle, but from identity. In this episode, you'll learn:
Be sure to subscribe to get every episode of Big Goal Energy delivered straight to your device, and please leave a rating and review. If you have any questions you'd like covered on a future episode, you can email us info@briseeley.com.
- Why the grief after business closure cannot be skipped — and what honoring it actually looks like
- The identity crisis that hits when your business is your identity — and how to find yourself on the other side
- The real story behind bankruptcy: what it is, why the stigma is disproportionate, and why filing was Kelly's best decision
- How to know when it's definitively time to close — and why uncertainty usually means it isn't
- The concept of "unique ability" and why asking who am I? before what can I sell? changes everything
- Why the rags-to-riches narrative is a faulty model — and what a more honest story of success actually looks like
Be sure to subscribe to get every episode of Big Goal Energy delivered straight to your device, and please leave a rating and review. If you have any questions you'd like covered on a future episode, you can email us info@briseeley.com.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
You were never meant for a small life. You have
bold ideas, audacious dreams and visions that keep you up
at night. But the truth is, big goals don't come
with step by step instructions, and success doesn't come from
doing more. It comes from becoming more. Welcome to Big
Goal Energy, a podcast for high achieving women who are
done shrinking, striving, and second guessing and are ready to
(00:24):
defy reality in pursuit of the life they actually want.
I'm your hostess, free sealy, goal architect, subconscious strategist, and
your permission slip to want what you want.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Join me as we go beyond the.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Service level success to explore the mindset, identity, and inner
work required to bring your biggest, most delulu goals to life.
This is your space to be seen, to be expanded,
and to remember that you are not alone on this journey.
Let's get into.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
It, Big Goal Energy.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I have a huge gift for you today. Snyder and
I met because if you've been in my world for
any period of time, Annie p Ruggles and Anni p
Ruggles connected with Kelly on LinkedIn and then I was
in New Orleans and I was like, I must meet
this hot sus concierge that you keep telling me about,
and so Annie introduced me to Kelly. We had an
(01:18):
incredible conversation when I was there in October. We've stayed connected,
We've had multiple other masterminds and conversations. We've been going
through kind of similar things in twenty twenty five, and
I wanted to bring her story to you, which is
rare because I don't often do one on one interviews
on this platform. But she and I had just such
potent conversations about things like failure and things like bankruptcy
(01:40):
and how do you reignite yourself after a massive ending enclosure?
And I just couldn't not have this conversation. So Kelly,
you welcome to Big Goal Energy right out.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Very thank you for having me. I can't believe we
met in October, Like in some ways feels like it's
been so long, and in some ways feels like, oh
my god, I met you yesterday, so well, the fact
that it was almost three months ago is insane.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I know so much has happened in the last ninety days,
but I want to back up.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
You launched a business.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Will you tell us the story of your business up
until March of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I want to stop there, and then we're going to
reframe a little bit. Absolutely. So I started a hot
sauce company called Murph's Condiments when I was twenty six
in January of twenty fourteen. I was young and working
at restaurants, and I had a bachelor's degree in communications
and really didn't know what I wanted to do for
(02:36):
the rest of my life. I just mystified about that
for a long time. But I knew in my heart
of hearts that I didn't want to work for anybody else.
My dad's an entrepreneur. He has a consulting business where
he's the acting CFO of more than like forty companies.
I watched him build that business from my living room table,
from the ground up, and him and I are pretty
(02:57):
darn similar. And I just knew that who I don't
really like authority. I want to own all of my
own time. I'm very self driven. It's easy to get
me to do think. I'm discipline, and so I knew
that I needed a business that was going to be
totally and completely mine, and I stumbled upon Kraft Hot
Sauce because I had a huge garden in my backyard
(03:18):
in Denver. So I was living in Downer in this
cute little rent house. I had a huge backyard, and
I was growing all sorts of vegetables lettuces, peppers, tomatoes,
egg plants, squash, et cetera. And what do you do
when you have a ton of extra produce in your garden.
You make condiments, right, You cann of bunches stuff. So
for a few years there, I was just doing a
ridiculous amount of canning, just spending hours and hours of
(03:40):
time in my kitchen at the end of the summer,
make it all sorts of things. And I started making
hot sauce. I had a buddy give me a half
a bushel of peaches, because most people don't know the
Colorado seafruit is the peach, because we grow a ton
of peaches on the Western slopes. I got some peach
it is, and I didn't want to make preserves or
pie or any sort of other sweet treats, and so
(04:01):
I made a peach hobbanero hot sauce. That sort of
recipe creation dovetailed with me selling really grumpy about the
available hot sauce on the market. So at the time
in twenty fourteen, really we had chilulo. We had top
of teo, we had tabasco, and we had the traditional
serracha that everybody loves. I just thought, oh my god,
hot sauce can be way better than this. I was bored.
(04:24):
Nothing was spicy enough. A lot of it was made
with sugar or powdered chilis, and I just wasn't really
let into it. So I wrote the peachabbanero hot sauce
recipe and started eating that and giving it away as
Christmas gifts, and I mean it just steamrolled from there.
It was like a one recipe people couldn't get enough.
And that was in summer of twenty twelve. So I
started the business in twenty fourteen, and I just loved food.
(04:46):
I just knew that I had a knack for making
all sorts of condiments. And hot sauce is one of
two condiments that are on tables at restaurants where you
got ketchu up and hot sauce. And I thought I'm
gonna do hot sauce because I had a body at
the time who had dis launched a ketchup bus. I
started selling that the Farmer's work it and after that,
I said I'm going to do some cold cast sale.
That's a key to my future. So on Tuesdays, I
(05:08):
would pick like a neighborhood in Denver, and I would
identify six to ten restaurants in my target market. But
there are a couple of cases of hot sauce on
my core and I would go around and I would say, Hey,
my name is Kelly, I'm a Consols. I want to
talk to the general manager or the head chef and
we would have some samples, and then on Wednesdays I
would do all the follow ups for real the week before.
So I was religious about cold called sales for two
(05:30):
and a half three years. I still believe today that
it's the best way to grow a business. Is that
really getting out there and talking to people, and no
matter what you're doing, services, products, or otherwise, getting out
and talking to people, meeting them, letting them know what
you're about. In the first three years, I went from
no wholesale accounts to working at farmers markets to one
hundred and fifty wholesale house most of those beating restaurants,
(05:50):
and worked myself into a distribution problem, with accounting problem
or production problem. I was working one hundred hours a
week and not getting it all done, crying in materials,
and now we're out of day off plus working my
restaurant jobs. Right because I was making money with Merphs,
but I wasn't at a spot where I could really
fully transition to be in full time. So I'm making
my cash at the restaurants and I'm doing Murphs at
(06:11):
every other available opportunity. I just grew in and grid.
I used those restaurants as hiring fifty restaurants to get
into share Rock Foods Distribution, which is a big regional
food distributor. I also leverage those partnerships to get into Cisco,
which we're all familiar Cisco Foods. From partnerships with those
two large distributors, I was able to grow and end
(06:32):
up having my products distributed at more than seven hundred
restaurants across like the regional West. So we were selling
a lot of hot sauce and just having a good time.
I had my own manufacturing facility, I had a full staff.
I was fully self employed by age thirty, which was
my dream to be fully self employed working for myself
age thirty, nobody else telling me what to do. I
(06:53):
was just living the dream in Denver, there's like little
mini hot sauce celebrity and just having the time of
my life. And really I just took a lot of resilience,
a lot of tenacity, a lot of persistence, a lot
of hard work. It was fun. I had a good time.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Obviously, we all know what March twenty twenty was, and
if you were paying attention, you just heard Kelly say
that majority of her business.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Was seven hundred restaurants, and Denver.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Was definitely one of those areas, very similarly to New
York that locked down and things were closed.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Talk to us about what happened to your business. I
think it was March sixteenth or seventeenth, Colorado said all
food tourists and related related establishments have to close, right
with no pending reopening day. And eighty five percent of
my revenue disappeared overnight. There was nothing I could do.
(07:47):
I was bottles on tables at restaurants was how I
made most of my money, and so my revenue disappeared overnight, right,
So catastrophic loss of revenue. At the same time, as
we all know, food prices and input prices, supply chain disruptions,
all of my inputs, ingredients, packaging, shipping everything that you
use to make, sell, produce, and ship hot sauce triple.
(08:10):
My profit margin completely dried up. Right, All my inputs tripled,
and I had a catastrophic loss of revenue. And I
think what was interesting about being a restaurant adjacent business
or a restaurant supply business is that even though the
restaurants came back online ten weeks or twelve weeks later,
we weren't allowed to put bottles on tables at restaurants.
(08:30):
I still wasn't getting any orders because nobody was allowed
to touch bottles cross contamination. And so a lot of
the restaurants I was working with we're reordering, and the
ones that we're reordering, I had to update all of
my prices. So I went from selling products at twenty
seven bucks a case to my distributor, landed to the
customer between thirty six and forty two dollars per twelve
(08:51):
pack case of hot sauce, which is super reasonable for
free giveaway that's on the table for the customer to enjoy.
So I'm going to sell into my distributors at four
two dollars a case, right, so landed to the customer
where now it's sixty bucks a case, five bucks a
bottle for a free giveaway. And it's just in an
industry that got completely cripple, catastrophic loss of revenue, having
(09:14):
to close, no idea what to do. They weren't going
to be able to pay this higher amount for this
craft pot sauce. Adding on to that that all of
their prices were.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Then also going up to think already this kind of
like line item that they're having to pay for, and
now their margins have shrunk, and so having that extra
line item within their margins now becomes just untenable.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Versus before it was like a nice to have a
nice benefit, nice ad, and now it's just not even
an option. Yeah. Absolutely. The selling point for Merphs was
I was a local, craft, affordable quality product. Most of
our chili peppers were grown on forms in the state
of Colorado. We used fresh whole ingredients, which is what
set our hot sauce apart. And the cool thing was
(10:00):
is pre COVID, I was able to go into restaurants
and go, hey, guess what, you can have a local
quality product for less a case than you're currently purchasing
Tabasco the national breed, right, my product was positioned less
expensive than Tabasco delivered to the cost word, and so
it was a no grainer for people to switch. And
as soon as it became cost prohibited and the whole
(10:23):
industry got up ended, it's no longer about serving that
local quality product. It's about, oh my god, my business
is about to fail. I had to go back to
serve in chilula because people will eat it, and it's
the cheapest option on the markets. The combination of those
two things just crippled my business. I did everything I
could to try to save it, but ultimately even selling it,
(10:45):
increasing my prices selling into sheer Rock in Cisco forty
two dollars a case, I went from making forty five
percent gross profit to making about twenty five percent gross profit,
and my insurance had also tripled, and my rent had tripled,
and all of these overhead costs that was getting paid
by that forty five percent is not getting paid by
(11:06):
twenty five.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Through all of that, when did the idea that you
may have to close?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
When did that come up? And what was your first
initial reaction to that?
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And then walk me through how you made that decision
to say it's time.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Man, that's a good question. I don't remember the first time,
if auto I'm going to have to close this, I
think that I was so committed to saving it because
it was just it was my baby. I'd started to
our twenty six I worked whole It's time to get
it off the grilld and money was fallen from the
literal sky December twenty nineteen January of twenty twenty. February
of twenty twenty, I doubled my revenue from the previous February,
(11:43):
one of the lowest months to go from this high,
we had our best year. Yet things just could not
have been better. To an instantaneous fall down the side
of Mount Everest. It was just hard to swallow. And
I just for a long time, probably a couple of years,
I couldn't accept, Oh my god, this was be over.
I thought, oh, I've got enough customers that love my brand.
(12:03):
The restaurants are going to come back in a big way, right,
all the supply chain stuff's going to ease up. I
really allowed myself to believe that things were maybe gonna change.
I was living in a little bit of denial or hope,
whichever you want to call it. For I don't know
probably two or three years, but the financials told the truth, right,
We just kept recording loss for loss, and I think
(12:26):
at the end of twenty twenty three, I knew like
I was running out of money and ability to play
the game, and frankly any emotional capacity ended. Twenty twenty three,
I thought, I don't think this business is gonna survive.
Got the emotion to that to work so hard for something,
to have really made such a success of myself, to
have busted onto the Denver food scene right as it
(12:49):
was just riding the way to the top, and Denver
was getting bigger bat or boulder, and everybody just could
hang onto those cotails and sell to the top. It
was a cool time to be in Denver and to
be a young entrepreneur. And oh, I was devastated. When
I think of it now, I still even though I
believe everything happens exactly as it's supposed to, it's itill
(13:09):
hurts my feeling so bad, and I think, oh my god,
what would my life be like if I hadn't lost
my business through COVID. Some days it's easier to swallow
than others. It feels like such a tragedy, and look
I was deeply and darkly depressed for years. I feel
like in a lot of ways, twenty twenty four was
run I really started to come out of that hole.
(13:33):
It took me a long time to feel emotionally right
after something so catastrophic. It was just devastating.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I get a lot of questions from people that are like,
how do you know that it's time?
Speaker 2 (13:44):
I always tell.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
People, if you're still questioning it, probably not time yet.
I know that if I'm like, is this versus all
three times I've.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Closed businesses, it's been like this is it?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
It was more of a definitive statement rather than a
question from numbers. Was there something that let you know
that it was definitively time where you stopped questioning it.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Running out of money was the definitive it's time to close.
But that coincided with a decision internally that I just
knew that I couldn't take it anymore. I had tried
everything in my power, resources ideas, leverage, my community, I
try to restrategy under the sun to save it, and
I knew that I just didn't have anything left in
(14:28):
the tank. So I think that the running out of
money concided was just that I'm done the ceiling of
I just can't keep pushing this boulder at Hill. It
was like I was the captain of a ship with
a hole in the hole that was so big that
there was just nothing I could do to ever patch it.
It was like I would stop one lake in one
area and something else would open up, or something would
(14:49):
get more expensive, And so it was about being emotionally done.
I think about I got sober in twenty thirteen when
I think about how we talk a lot about a recovery,
how you have to hit bottom. I have to really
just go, oh my god, there's nothing else I can do,
and I have to try a new way, and I
have to start over. And I really I hit bottom
with Merphs. I hit bottom emotionally with Merphs, and I
(15:10):
just knew that at some point there was just gonna
be nothing I could do to save it. I hit
bottom probably end of twenty twenty three. Spent a lot
of twenty twenty four just wrapping things up, transitioning the business,
running out of inventory, and just slowly letting it die.
I couldn't really make a decision on definitively I'm going
to close the doors I had a lot of inventory,
(15:31):
I had a lot of other things to take care of.
But yeah, I think it's I think it's a personal
decision to close a business. And I think that when
something changes in your heart, you go I can't do
this anymore.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
One of the things that Kelly and I first connected
on when we first sat down and had this delicious
Mediterranean New Orleans. It was amazing, I still think act.
And the weather was perfect. We sat outside.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
It was like this whole cacophony of brilliance that day.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
But one of the things that I haven't talked about
too publicly yet is that last year I was deeply
considering filing for bankruptcy.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
To anyone that's ever faced that, you.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Probably know there's a lot of shame involved in that
decision or even like.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Saying the words, which is why I haven't said the
words on a forum like this until now.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
When I met with Kelly, she was like, oh, I
did it, the best decision I've ever made.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
File the paperwork next week. Now.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
My particular circumstances was not necessary. Actually then was ineligible
for it, like all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
But talk to me about this because.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
What I learned through just doing my research and kind
of figuring out what my options were. Bankruptcy is actually
a strategy that rich people use on purpose.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yet people that are at our level are thought like, oh.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
It's so shameful and it's this black mark that will
follow you around forever and you'll be branded as a
terrible failure for the rest of your life. So talk
to me about your decision making to get to that
point and why you say it's one of.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
The best things that done. This is my first time
really talking about it super publicly too, because there is
such shame and stigma attash shit. You tellpically you followed
for bankruptcy, and it's a little bit like you've got leprosy.
The reality is that in order to survive the COVID
nineteen pandemic, because I thought it was gonna be survivable,
I took out a really sizable economic injury disaster lung
(17:22):
from the SPA. And so one of the cool things
about the SBA is that they do when economic disasters happen,
roll out huge chunks of cash at three point seventy
five percent interest rates, so that businesses can borrow cash
to survive whatever economic disruption. There's been these for hurricanes,
things like COVID, pandemics, etc. If I leveraged the SBA
(17:45):
as a resource because I thought, oh, if I borrow
some cash in the short term, I can use that
cash to pay my operating expenses. I keep the lights
on and gets mendatory produced and ride out this store.
I borrowed the cash on the false assumption that the
world was somehow gonna go back to normal post COVID,
and I borrowed quite a bit of money that required
(18:07):
me to sign personal guarantees, say, and the look of
the business defaulted that Kelly Check's letter was the personally
responsible paybacks. In addition to that SBA Loane, I borrowed
a couple of other I had a line of credit
and a couple of other sources, And it was all
stuff that I was using really to maintain my own
economic stability, but also just the fun worse condiments through
(18:28):
the years of just this catastrophic revenue lot, that's the
drying up of our profits. To try what I used
the bulk of the money for was to try to
pivot into the grocery industry. Right, so I hired brokers.
I had a whole digital marketing strategy to really rido
my e commerce. I did a lot of social media.
Most of it was spent in broker free these digital
(18:48):
marketing social media, I mean, anything to pivot my revenue streams.
Right then, I signed personal guarantees for all of it,
and it was debt that was solely the responsibility of
the business to pay back, and so bankruptcy was one
of those things where I had to do it, Otherwise
I was gonna be on the hooks for hundreds of
thousands of dollars in loan repayment for something that I
(19:10):
ultimately believe was not my fault. One of the things
that I am fond of saying, and then I want
to go on records saying here, is that I can
find it really interesting that the government robbed me of
all the economic opportunity that I had created for myself
and then turned me into a paid customer by loaning
me money at an interest rate. And I just think
that it's frankly predatory. The whole thing that happened with
(19:33):
spa economic indor disaster lawns of predatory. There's just no
scenarios where government should be allowed to rob me of
my economic opportunity, and it turned me into o paying customer.
Under no circumstances was I going to personally take the
fall for that or no fault of my own. My
business got completely and utterly destroyed and ripped out from
under me, and bankruptcy was the way out of that.
(19:56):
It has had some pretty interesting personal consequences. Really interesting
to live a life where you can have a credit card.
Not that I was using credit cards in any meaningful way,
but they're useful for a lot of things that I
didn't really know until I was like, Oh, I can't
fucking have a credit card. It also forced me to
liquidate my personal savings right, all this emergency cash that
(20:16):
I had saved up over the years from sayings other
than urfs, just to ensure that if anything happened to
me that I wouldn't be pulist or starving or some
other such thing. And so I had to spend all
of that money, and I got this stain on my
record for the next seven years that be instant. As
soon as I filed for bankruptcy, I felt an enormous release.
(20:38):
I'd been carrying around this lucky on my back for
a long time with this business debt that I couldn't
pay back, and look, in a perfect world, I would
have been able to pay it back ten times over,
because that would have meant my business would have survived
and that something would have shook out that would have
meant some really big success. But it set me free.
I filed for bankruptcy, set me free, and I'm grateful
(20:59):
that it's resource. I was feeling really shamed about it initially,
but I think that once I started reading about pretty
much every entrepreneur's bible bankruptcy at least twice or three times,
it was like, blankruptcy exists for a reason, and you're
right that the rich heuse all sorts of economic and
financial tools at their disposal, and that the rest of us,
I think should really follow soup. So it's been alright. Look,
(21:22):
I didn't have any personal then. I had an eight
to ten credit score when I filed for bankruptcy, so
I really hurt. I feel look for quenty peropsy, but
but this is what it is. So I'm forced into
an impossible positions.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Well, and just to reflect back, what I heard you
say was that you didn't just take this money squander
it and then be like not my problem. You took
this money, you did what entrepreneurs do. You attempted to pivot,
you tried new revenue streams. You were very forward thinking
in terms of like how do I make this work.
I had to have a call with one of my
credit card companies to get on a payment plan last
(21:56):
year and the guy said the most offense. I'm not
easily offended. And this guy was like, maybe you should
just work on your profit and loss and I was like, dude,
the fuck do you think I've spent this year doing
When your revenue goes down eighty percent, where do you
think my energy and attention has gone all day every day?
(22:17):
And I love that you took this resource and tried
to make lemonade out of lemon and ultimately it didn't work.
Which could we all have tried harder?
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Maybe?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
But I got to the point last year too. You
and I met the day that two different people told
me to take a sabbatical because they were like, you
can't keep going like you are on well, so could
we have tried harder?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Maybe? But also could we have tried harder? Maybe not.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
There's so much that gets wrapped up into all of this,
and then we make all these things that have happened
mean things about us as well. It just becomes this
huge cacophony. So touched on it briefly, and if you
feel like you've answered it, I don't have to re
answer it. But how do you feel like you navigated
some of those feelings and beliefs about closing your business
(23:08):
quote unquote failing filing for bankruptcy.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
The limiting beliefs that I was really struggling with March
twenty twenty onward were oh my god, I did all
this work and it was free. Nothing that was one.
I had just been just working my nuts and it
hadn't meant anything. It could just be righted away for me.
Number two, after a few years of trying anything I
could think of that I thought would make a difference
(23:33):
in pivoting or increasing revenue, I threw some spaghetti at
the wall about it, right, because I was desperate and
I was really interested ultimately in the survival of this
business I had created, and I did. I felt like
a failure. I felt, oh my god, all of my
best ideas didn't get me anywhere, didn't move the needle,
which really isn't true. Right, If I go back and
(23:54):
look at the success I had in some of the
strategies I implemented. There were a few things that ultimately can
attributed to them not working. It had nothing to do
with me being a personal failure or not having good ideas.
It was like that the hot sauce market was super saturated,
that Amazon takes a lot of cash and a lot
of knowledge to be able to play in that space
and play well. Same thing in digital marketing, Facebook ads
(24:16):
and all this other stuff. The biggest thing I had
was more of a question, less of a limiting belief.
If I'm not the hot sauce boss, who am I.
I've had this whole identity. I was young. I didn't
know my ass for my elbow. When I started merchs,
I was twenty six, and so I didn't know who
I was really And then I thought, I own this
hot sauce company. I don't even know what I'm good
(24:37):
at anymore. When my identity came into question, so did
all of the things that I was good at. And
so the limiting beliefs was like, oh my god, I'm
never going to be anybody ever again. I've hit my
peak and I'm never gonna achieve this kind of success again,
A lot of my identity got shotter, a lot of
just generally my ego, my bride just really got damaged.
I was somebody in the world at somebodies, and then
(24:58):
all of a sudden I could not figure out how
to achieve that again or be there. And then this
third piece of what the hell am I going to do? Now?
What did I do? Really? I'm an avid fan of journaling,
I meditate, doing a lot of breath work, somatically moving
a lot of things through my system. What I really
realize is that in addition to losing my business, I
got divorced in the same year, and I left Colorado
(25:19):
right after having lived there for eleven years. So I
left my community, I got divorced, and I lost my business,
all within eight months of each other. It was so devastating.
I'mootly on so many different levels, but I suck to
my recovery. I stayed sober, I leveraged my spiritual elders,
but kept talking on the phone to my friends and
staying connected in community, journaling, meditation, exercise, communing with spirit,
(25:43):
and just no matter what, waking up every day and
go on. I'm going to live another day, and I
want to see what I can do to make the
best of it. I think that there was just a
lot of this isn't the end. It's not okay, and
it isn't the end. And I'm going to wake up
every day and see if i can make something new.
And I think just in the grieving process, some of
it is just waking up every day and putting one
(26:03):
foot in front of the other. Sometimes there's just not
a whole lot you can do. And I'm not going
to meditate myself out of grief, and I'm not going
to breath and work my way out of grief. Sometimes
really the work is can I integrate this into my being?
Can I sit with it? Can I hold the heaviness
of it? Can I just cry in my cheerios for
half the morning and just release? I mean, I could
(26:24):
cry now thinking about how devastated I was for all
that time. There's just something to be said for feeling
your feelings that a lot of the times that the
only way out is through that once you come through
to the other side, you'll be really glad that you
leaned in, that you didn't drink it away or relationship
it away, or eat it away or gamble it away,
or whatever it is that your favorite escape mechanism may
(26:47):
be that sometimes life's just about being present with what is.
It's always about being present with what is. I wanted
to use these years of immense reorganization in my life
to where I was like a phoenix from the ashes,
even though that's a cliche, but I wanted to. I
just wanted to feel it. I have a long time
in recovery and a long time knowing that feel and
(27:09):
taming killed me yet and they're not gonna thank you
for sharing all of that. How I know that you
are like opening up new things.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
You're reigniting your spark, You're finding your creativity again. How
are you approaching this next chapter differently than you did
with merps.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Hot Sauce was something I could do. I love to cook.
I was born racing Louisiana. I've been cooking since I
was a tiny child. It was something very physical that
I could have my hands on. Right. Selling products is
a thing, though business requires a lot of personal growth.
When you're selling a product, you get to distance yourself
from the selling of a thing. I wasn't selling, Kellie.
(27:50):
I'm selling this talent that I had in producing hot
sauce that enabled me to really hide in a lot
of ways. I could just the products speak for itself.
But I didn't necessarily have to be anybody special. I
didn't have to really know myself really well in order
to sell hot sauce. And I was listening to a
podcast a few years ago when I was in the
(28:13):
funk of Merphs and I'm failing as an entrepreneur and
I don't know what's from down and I came across
this guy named Dan Sullivan's strategic coach, and he started
talking to me. I listened to a podcast. He was
talking about unique ability. Oh what the hell is unique ability?
And I really like this idea. I think that I
had always had it in the back of my mind
intuitively knew it that each of us possesses within us
(28:35):
a specific combination of personality, characteristics, traits, ways of thinking
and doing things that if we follow those things, we
feel like a million dollars when we're doing them, but
we can use them to help people. It's something that
people have come to us for over time to solve
their problem, and that if we really lean into those things,
(28:55):
into our twenty percent unique ability that we can then
go out and live the story productive lives, tapping into
our best qualities. Merphs for me over time became like,
oh my god, I'm so tired of product sales. Oh
my god, I don't care about hot sauce, oh herd.
If I'd never eat hustles again, I would not be
stout about it. I hated the working in the food industry.
It needs so much reform, and it's profit hungry and
(29:17):
problematic and predatory and poisonous. What I'm doing differently now?
The first question is not what can I sell? It's
who am I? Now that I know who I am,
my communications degree makes a lot more sense. So I thought, oh,
I'm gonna get a liberal Arts degree in communication. That
doesn't mad sent when you examine astrology. I'm a Gemini rising.
I'm literally here to be a messenger, to connect people
to new ideas, people them to transform their lives. So
(29:40):
what are at so much fun of my liberal arts degree? Right?
And love to rate? Right? I love to write things.
I love to public speak. I love to speak on
micro levels and groups and other things. And so the
first question is who am I? And what are the
skills and talents that I possessed the inherently when I'm
engaging with them, I feel like a million dollars. And
then I think that the second thing is okay, if
(30:00):
I want to do things that I feel like a
million dollars when I'm doing them, then what are the
things in being the messenger right and the connector of
ideas that help people change their lives? How can I
monetize that? What are people coming to me for? Most commonly,
I really realized when I was looking back at the
last fifteen years of my life, especially after MRFs is
people come to me for business advice all the time,
(30:22):
even when I was brand new, and it's not because
I necessarily knew anything in the initial stages about business,
but that I'm a really great thought partner. And when
I feel like the million dollars, I'm talking to somebody
about their business, about their personal life, their spiritual journey,
some sort of growth, they're going through a transition period
and able to just really work and connect with people
(30:43):
in a way that enables them to go out and
change their lives in some capacity from a professional perspective.
And one of my best friends asked me when I
was visiting Colorado in February. Hey, dude, I need to
make forty thousand dollars before I leave for my six
month trip to Europe on June the first. She has
a photography business. It's well established, and I said, yeah, dude,
(31:04):
can you put together a list of all of the
income you make and break it down by photography type
in a spreadsheet. Let's have a two hour meeting. You
literally signed down and looked at this spreadsheet and I said,
here's the way of revenue in this model that you
wrote out for me. Here's how let you're making from events,
Here's how to let you're making from portraits, Here's how
let you're makeing fromt theater, photography and your nonprofit work.
(31:27):
I was like, this is your money maker. This is
where you're making the most amount of money doing the
fewest amount of edits. If you prioritize this and let
a couple of these fall to the wayside, delegate this activity,
and schedule this many things over the next three months,
you'll make forty great. And she did it, and she
made forty great. And so that's the kind of stuff
I want to do, is helping people optimize and it
(31:49):
doesn't have to be business. It can be really anything right.
It can be recovery, it can be trauma, it can
be spiritual, but just an opportunity to work with people.
My favorite part of MERS is when I was going
around selling hot sauce, not because I was selling hot sauce,
but because I got to talk to individual people about
their lives and businesses. We're going to hang out with
business owners and find out what they were struggling with,
(32:11):
and an opportunity just to brace some joy, just to
brace some transformation, some new ideas. First up, who am I?
That's an inspiration for the new future is doing things
I'm really good at as opposed to selling products.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Love that and I'm a huge proponent of identity work
first because I've worked with so many entrepreneurs over the
last ten years who come in and they're like, Oh,
I have this great business idea and I'm like, cool,
Let's run it through your values. Let's run it through
what do you want to be doing every day, Let's
run it through your strengths, Let's run it through.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Ideas are like asholes. Everyone has them. What's that quote?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
You can have ten great ideas before breakfast or whatever.
It's like an Alison Run of the Land quote or something, Yeah,
that's not it. But without that foundation of who am
I underneath the good idea, the good idea is not
grounded and rooted, it's not going to be sustainable because
then you're constantly going to be outside of yourself, looking, searching,
(33:07):
trying to grasp like you're always going to be operating
from a place of lack and scarcity, and it's just
not sustainable. That's a very similar journey that I went
through when I closed my fashion business. Was I had
said forever, oh, I'm a fashion designer. I'm a fashion designer.
I'm a fashion designer, and then all of a sudden,
when you don't have a fashion business and you're not
that anymore, then it's like lock, who am I?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Like?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Even hearkening back to start with why, it's like we
all start with what we do rather than who we are,
and we make that our identity and when that falls away,
I said, after I close my fashion business, I was like, whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
I do next, which happened to be coaching.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
If the universe tells me to shut it down, I
will fucking do it because.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
I don't need to be attached to a job title
in order to have value in the world. It was
a little.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Easier on try to of business go walk away from
being a coach first of all, never really identified with
the title, but also because it didn't define me. It
was something that I happened to do in the world,
but it wasn't who I was.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Distinction because I think it's one that is not necessarily
being made by all of the entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
In the world. Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
I knew that it was going to be really unique,
and I'm just really grateful for your willingness to.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Share the shit.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I think the rags to riches story is just it's
a faulty model, right because it what it says is
that by the time you get to the top of
that peak, that's the end of your story.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
And I think it's so important that.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
More of a share, Like twenty twenty four was my
biggest year in business yet and twenty twenty five I
was down eighty percent in my revenue, right, and that
doesn't make me a failure either. I wanted to thank
you for the nuance of all of this and the
breaking it down, because it's a really potent conversation, especially
(35:06):
as our world continues to change and evolve, more and
more people are going to be facing these questions and
these hard conversations with them themselves. I really appreciate your
willingness to be bold and go first.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, thank you for asking me. I think it's honestly
just a relief, so I don't know how to share
it out loud when I just say, yeah, so what
I started accompany at twenty six that's incredible in its
own right, and then I had this sort of castrophic
thing happen, and here I am rebuilding myself bigger and better. Ultimately,
huntswust is never what I wanted to do. It was
low hanging fruit at the time, and it was the
skill I was good at. And now that I get
(35:40):
the opportunity to let be myself and tap into those
things that make me feel like a million dollars and
do those all day every day, I honestly can't believe
I ever spent that much time doing ouslows. I'm just
really grateful to be here. I'm so grateful that you
and I met. I think it was just incredibly kids
met for us to have that launch, that random launch
through LinkedIn and yeah, I'm just so excited to be
on here with you and excited to see what you're
(36:01):
twenty twenty six is well, same, same.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
If anyone wants to connect with you after this or
continue following your journey, where is the best place to
find you?
Speaker 2 (36:08):
And you can follow me on Instagram at Kelly Shacks
or anyone can email me Kelly at Kelly Shucks dot com.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Perfect, so it's scche X and it'll be in the
show notes and everything too. All right, thank you everyone
for joining us for this really special episode. Go have
a Big Goal Energy day, and remember failures never permanent.
It oftentimes means nothing about you, and more than not,
it's probably just a redirection into something that's more aligned
(36:38):
your unique abilities. If this episode lit something up in you,
share it, text it to a friend, post it to
your stories, or leave a review.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Because Big Goal.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Energy is meant to be felt far and wide, and
if you're ready to go deeper, explore the tools, hypnosis,
sessions and support.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Because your vision deserves.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
More than hustle, join us on the Big Goal Energy
app by visiting your app store and typing in Big
Goal Energy, your vision, your goals, deserve alignment, ease, and
your fullest self behind them. Until next time, trust yourself,
dream bigger, and never forget you are here for greatness.
You were never meant for a small life. You have
bold ideas, audacious dreams and visions that keep you up
at night. But the truth is, big goals don't come
with step by step instructions, and success doesn't come from
doing more. It comes from becoming more. Welcome to Big
Goal Energy, a podcast for high achieving women who are
done shrinking, striving, and second guessing and are ready to
(00:24):
defy reality in pursuit of the life they actually want.
I'm your hostess, free sealy, goal architect, subconscious strategist, and
your permission slip to want what you want.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Join me as we go beyond the.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Service level success to explore the mindset, identity, and inner
work required to bring your biggest, most delulu goals to life.
This is your space to be seen, to be expanded,
and to remember that you are not alone on this journey.
Let's get into.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
It, Big Goal Energy.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I have a huge gift for you today. Snyder and
I met because if you've been in my world for
any period of time, Annie p Ruggles and Anni p
Ruggles connected with Kelly on LinkedIn and then I was
in New Orleans and I was like, I must meet
this hot sus concierge that you keep telling me about,
and so Annie introduced me to Kelly. We had an
(01:18):
incredible conversation when I was there in October. We've stayed connected,
We've had multiple other masterminds and conversations. We've been going
through kind of similar things in twenty twenty five, and
I wanted to bring her story to you, which is
rare because I don't often do one on one interviews
on this platform. But she and I had just such
potent conversations about things like failure and things like bankruptcy
(01:40):
and how do you reignite yourself after a massive ending enclosure?
And I just couldn't not have this conversation. So Kelly,
you welcome to Big Goal Energy right out.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Very thank you for having me. I can't believe we
met in October, Like in some ways feels like it's
been so long, and in some ways feels like, oh
my god, I met you yesterday, so well, the fact
that it was almost three months ago is insane.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I know so much has happened in the last ninety days,
but I want to back up.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
You launched a business.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Will you tell us the story of your business up
until March of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I want to stop there, and then we're going to
reframe a little bit. Absolutely. So I started a hot
sauce company called Murph's Condiments when I was twenty six
in January of twenty fourteen. I was young and working
at restaurants, and I had a bachelor's degree in communications
and really didn't know what I wanted to do for
(02:36):
the rest of my life. I just mystified about that
for a long time. But I knew in my heart
of hearts that I didn't want to work for anybody else.
My dad's an entrepreneur. He has a consulting business where
he's the acting CFO of more than like forty companies.
I watched him build that business from my living room table,
from the ground up, and him and I are pretty
(02:57):
darn similar. And I just knew that who I don't
really like authority. I want to own all of my
own time. I'm very self driven. It's easy to get
me to do think. I'm discipline, and so I knew
that I needed a business that was going to be
totally and completely mine, and I stumbled upon Kraft Hot
Sauce because I had a huge garden in my backyard
(03:18):
in Denver. So I was living in Downer in this
cute little rent house. I had a huge backyard, and
I was growing all sorts of vegetables lettuces, peppers, tomatoes,
egg plants, squash, et cetera. And what do you do
when you have a ton of extra produce in your garden.
You make condiments, right, You cann of bunches stuff. So
for a few years there, I was just doing a
ridiculous amount of canning, just spending hours and hours of
(03:40):
time in my kitchen at the end of the summer,
make it all sorts of things. And I started making
hot sauce. I had a buddy give me a half
a bushel of peaches, because most people don't know the
Colorado seafruit is the peach, because we grow a ton
of peaches on the Western slopes. I got some peach
it is, and I didn't want to make preserves or
pie or any sort of other sweet treats, and so
(04:01):
I made a peach hobbanero hot sauce. That sort of
recipe creation dovetailed with me selling really grumpy about the
available hot sauce on the market. So at the time
in twenty fourteen, really we had chilulo. We had top
of teo, we had tabasco, and we had the traditional
serracha that everybody loves. I just thought, oh my god,
hot sauce can be way better than this. I was bored.
(04:24):
Nothing was spicy enough. A lot of it was made
with sugar or powdered chilis, and I just wasn't really
let into it. So I wrote the peachabbanero hot sauce
recipe and started eating that and giving it away as
Christmas gifts, and I mean it just steamrolled from there.
It was like a one recipe people couldn't get enough.
And that was in summer of twenty twelve. So I
started the business in twenty fourteen, and I just loved food.
(04:46):
I just knew that I had a knack for making
all sorts of condiments. And hot sauce is one of
two condiments that are on tables at restaurants where you
got ketchu up and hot sauce. And I thought I'm
gonna do hot sauce because I had a body at
the time who had dis launched a ketchup bus. I
started selling that the Farmer's work it and after that,
I said I'm going to do some cold cast sale.
That's a key to my future. So on Tuesdays, I
(05:08):
would pick like a neighborhood in Denver, and I would
identify six to ten restaurants in my target market. But
there are a couple of cases of hot sauce on
my core and I would go around and I would say, Hey,
my name is Kelly, I'm a Consols. I want to
talk to the general manager or the head chef and
we would have some samples, and then on Wednesdays I
would do all the follow ups for real the week before.
So I was religious about cold called sales for two
(05:30):
and a half three years. I still believe today that
it's the best way to grow a business. Is that
really getting out there and talking to people, and no
matter what you're doing, services, products, or otherwise, getting out
and talking to people, meeting them, letting them know what
you're about. In the first three years, I went from
no wholesale accounts to working at farmers markets to one
hundred and fifty wholesale house most of those beating restaurants,
(05:50):
and worked myself into a distribution problem, with accounting problem
or production problem. I was working one hundred hours a
week and not getting it all done, crying in materials,
and now we're out of day off plus working my
restaurant jobs. Right because I was making money with Merphs,
but I wasn't at a spot where I could really
fully transition to be in full time. So I'm making
my cash at the restaurants and I'm doing Murphs at
(06:11):
every other available opportunity. I just grew in and grid.
I used those restaurants as hiring fifty restaurants to get
into share Rock Foods Distribution, which is a big regional
food distributor. I also leverage those partnerships to get into Cisco,
which we're all familiar Cisco Foods. From partnerships with those
two large distributors, I was able to grow and end
(06:32):
up having my products distributed at more than seven hundred
restaurants across like the regional West. So we were selling
a lot of hot sauce and just having a good time.
I had my own manufacturing facility, I had a full staff.
I was fully self employed by age thirty, which was
my dream to be fully self employed working for myself
age thirty, nobody else telling me what to do. I
(06:53):
was just living the dream in Denver, there's like little
mini hot sauce celebrity and just having the time of
my life. And really I just took a lot of resilience,
a lot of tenacity, a lot of persistence, a lot
of hard work. It was fun. I had a good time.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Obviously, we all know what March twenty twenty was, and
if you were paying attention, you just heard Kelly say
that majority of her business.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Was seven hundred restaurants, and Denver.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Was definitely one of those areas, very similarly to New
York that locked down and things were closed.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Talk to us about what happened to your business. I
think it was March sixteenth or seventeenth, Colorado said all
food tourists and related related establishments have to close, right
with no pending reopening day. And eighty five percent of
my revenue disappeared overnight. There was nothing I could do.
(07:47):
I was bottles on tables at restaurants was how I
made most of my money, and so my revenue disappeared overnight, right,
So catastrophic loss of revenue. At the same time, as
we all know, food prices and input prices, supply chain disruptions,
all of my inputs, ingredients, packaging, shipping everything that you
use to make, sell, produce, and ship hot sauce triple.
(08:10):
My profit margin completely dried up. Right, All my inputs tripled,
and I had a catastrophic loss of revenue. And I
think what was interesting about being a restaurant adjacent business
or a restaurant supply business is that even though the
restaurants came back online ten weeks or twelve weeks later,
we weren't allowed to put bottles on tables at restaurants.
(08:30):
I still wasn't getting any orders because nobody was allowed
to touch bottles cross contamination. And so a lot of
the restaurants I was working with we're reordering, and the
ones that we're reordering, I had to update all of
my prices. So I went from selling products at twenty
seven bucks a case to my distributor, landed to the
customer between thirty six and forty two dollars per twelve
(08:51):
pack case of hot sauce, which is super reasonable for
free giveaway that's on the table for the customer to enjoy.
So I'm going to sell into my distributors at four
two dollars a case, right, so landed to the customer
where now it's sixty bucks a case, five bucks a
bottle for a free giveaway. And it's just in an
industry that got completely cripple, catastrophic loss of revenue, having
(09:14):
to close, no idea what to do. They weren't going
to be able to pay this higher amount for this
craft pot sauce. Adding on to that that all of
their prices were.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Then also going up to think already this kind of
like line item that they're having to pay for, and
now their margins have shrunk, and so having that extra
line item within their margins now becomes just untenable.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Versus before it was like a nice to have a
nice benefit, nice ad, and now it's just not even
an option. Yeah. Absolutely. The selling point for Merphs was
I was a local, craft, affordable quality product. Most of
our chili peppers were grown on forms in the state
of Colorado. We used fresh whole ingredients, which is what
set our hot sauce apart. And the cool thing was
(10:00):
is pre COVID, I was able to go into restaurants
and go, hey, guess what, you can have a local
quality product for less a case than you're currently purchasing
Tabasco the national breed, right, my product was positioned less
expensive than Tabasco delivered to the cost word, and so
it was a no grainer for people to switch. And
as soon as it became cost prohibited and the whole
(10:23):
industry got up ended, it's no longer about serving that
local quality product. It's about, oh my god, my business
is about to fail. I had to go back to
serve in chilula because people will eat it, and it's
the cheapest option on the markets. The combination of those
two things just crippled my business. I did everything I
could to try to save it, but ultimately even selling it,
(10:45):
increasing my prices selling into sheer Rock in Cisco forty
two dollars a case, I went from making forty five
percent gross profit to making about twenty five percent gross profit,
and my insurance had also tripled, and my rent had tripled,
and all of these overhead costs that was getting paid
by that forty five percent is not getting paid by
(11:06):
twenty five.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Through all of that, when did the idea that you
may have to close?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
When did that come up? And what was your first
initial reaction to that?
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And then walk me through how you made that decision
to say it's time.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Man, that's a good question. I don't remember the first time,
if auto I'm going to have to close this, I
think that I was so committed to saving it because
it was just it was my baby. I'd started to
our twenty six I worked whole It's time to get
it off the grilld and money was fallen from the
literal sky December twenty nineteen January of twenty twenty. February
of twenty twenty, I doubled my revenue from the previous February,
(11:43):
one of the lowest months to go from this high,
we had our best year. Yet things just could not
have been better. To an instantaneous fall down the side
of Mount Everest. It was just hard to swallow. And
I just for a long time, probably a couple of years,
I couldn't accept, Oh my god, this was be over.
I thought, oh, I've got enough customers that love my brand.
(12:03):
The restaurants are going to come back in a big way, right,
all the supply chain stuff's going to ease up. I
really allowed myself to believe that things were maybe gonna change.
I was living in a little bit of denial or hope,
whichever you want to call it. For I don't know
probably two or three years, but the financials told the truth, right,
We just kept recording loss for loss, and I think
(12:26):
at the end of twenty twenty three, I knew like
I was running out of money and ability to play
the game, and frankly any emotional capacity ended. Twenty twenty three,
I thought, I don't think this business is gonna survive.
Got the emotion to that to work so hard for something,
to have really made such a success of myself, to
have busted onto the Denver food scene right as it
(12:49):
was just riding the way to the top, and Denver
was getting bigger bat or boulder, and everybody just could
hang onto those cotails and sell to the top. It
was a cool time to be in Denver and to
be a young entrepreneur. And oh, I was devastated. When
I think of it now, I still even though I
believe everything happens exactly as it's supposed to, it's itill
(13:09):
hurts my feeling so bad, and I think, oh my god,
what would my life be like if I hadn't lost
my business through COVID. Some days it's easier to swallow
than others. It feels like such a tragedy, and look
I was deeply and darkly depressed for years. I feel
like in a lot of ways, twenty twenty four was
run I really started to come out of that hole.
(13:33):
It took me a long time to feel emotionally right
after something so catastrophic. It was just devastating.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I get a lot of questions from people that are like,
how do you know that it's time?
Speaker 2 (13:44):
I always tell.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
People, if you're still questioning it, probably not time yet.
I know that if I'm like, is this versus all
three times I've.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Closed businesses, it's been like this is it?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
It was more of a definitive statement rather than a
question from numbers. Was there something that let you know
that it was definitively time where you stopped questioning it.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Running out of money was the definitive it's time to close.
But that coincided with a decision internally that I just
knew that I couldn't take it anymore. I had tried
everything in my power, resources ideas, leverage, my community, I
try to restrategy under the sun to save it, and
I knew that I just didn't have anything left in
(14:28):
the tank. So I think that the running out of
money concided was just that I'm done the ceiling of
I just can't keep pushing this boulder at Hill. It
was like I was the captain of a ship with
a hole in the hole that was so big that
there was just nothing I could do to ever patch it.
It was like I would stop one lake in one
area and something else would open up, or something would
(14:49):
get more expensive, And so it was about being emotionally done.
I think about I got sober in twenty thirteen when
I think about how we talk a lot about a recovery,
how you have to hit bottom. I have to really
just go, oh my god, there's nothing else I can do,
and I have to try a new way, and I
have to start over. And I really I hit bottom
with Merphs. I hit bottom emotionally with Merphs, and I
(15:10):
just knew that at some point there was just gonna
be nothing I could do to save it. I hit
bottom probably end of twenty twenty three. Spent a lot
of twenty twenty four just wrapping things up, transitioning the business,
running out of inventory, and just slowly letting it die.
I couldn't really make a decision on definitively I'm going
to close the doors I had a lot of inventory,
(15:31):
I had a lot of other things to take care of.
But yeah, I think it's I think it's a personal
decision to close a business. And I think that when
something changes in your heart, you go I can't do
this anymore.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
One of the things that Kelly and I first connected
on when we first sat down and had this delicious
Mediterranean New Orleans. It was amazing, I still think act.
And the weather was perfect. We sat outside.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
It was like this whole cacophony of brilliance that day.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
But one of the things that I haven't talked about
too publicly yet is that last year I was deeply
considering filing for bankruptcy.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
To anyone that's ever faced that, you.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Probably know there's a lot of shame involved in that
decision or even like.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Saying the words, which is why I haven't said the
words on a forum like this until now.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
When I met with Kelly, she was like, oh, I
did it, the best decision I've ever made.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
File the paperwork next week. Now.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
My particular circumstances was not necessary. Actually then was ineligible
for it, like all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
But talk to me about this because.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
What I learned through just doing my research and kind
of figuring out what my options were. Bankruptcy is actually
a strategy that rich people use on purpose.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yet people that are at our level are thought like, oh.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
It's so shameful and it's this black mark that will
follow you around forever and you'll be branded as a
terrible failure for the rest of your life. So talk
to me about your decision making to get to that
point and why you say it's one of.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
The best things that done. This is my first time
really talking about it super publicly too, because there is
such shame and stigma attash shit. You tellpically you followed
for bankruptcy, and it's a little bit like you've got leprosy.
The reality is that in order to survive the COVID
nineteen pandemic, because I thought it was gonna be survivable,
I took out a really sizable economic injury disaster lung
(17:22):
from the SPA. And so one of the cool things
about the SBA is that they do when economic disasters happen,
roll out huge chunks of cash at three point seventy
five percent interest rates, so that businesses can borrow cash
to survive whatever economic disruption. There's been these for hurricanes,
things like COVID, pandemics, etc. If I leveraged the SBA
(17:45):
as a resource because I thought, oh, if I borrow
some cash in the short term, I can use that
cash to pay my operating expenses. I keep the lights
on and gets mendatory produced and ride out this store.
I borrowed the cash on the false assumption that the
world was somehow gonna go back to normal post COVID,
and I borrowed quite a bit of money that required
(18:07):
me to sign personal guarantees, say, and the look of
the business defaulted that Kelly Check's letter was the personally
responsible paybacks. In addition to that SBA Loane, I borrowed
a couple of other I had a line of credit
and a couple of other sources, And it was all
stuff that I was using really to maintain my own
economic stability, but also just the fun worse condiments through
(18:28):
the years of just this catastrophic revenue lot, that's the
drying up of our profits. To try what I used
the bulk of the money for was to try to
pivot into the grocery industry. Right, so I hired brokers.
I had a whole digital marketing strategy to really rido
my e commerce. I did a lot of social media.
Most of it was spent in broker free these digital
(18:48):
marketing social media, I mean, anything to pivot my revenue streams.
Right then, I signed personal guarantees for all of it,
and it was debt that was solely the responsibility of
the business to pay back, and so bankruptcy was one
of those things where I had to do it, Otherwise
I was gonna be on the hooks for hundreds of
thousands of dollars in loan repayment for something that I
(19:10):
ultimately believe was not my fault. One of the things
that I am fond of saying, and then I want
to go on records saying here, is that I can
find it really interesting that the government robbed me of
all the economic opportunity that I had created for myself
and then turned me into a paid customer by loaning
me money at an interest rate. And I just think
that it's frankly predatory. The whole thing that happened with
(19:33):
spa economic indor disaster lawns of predatory. There's just no
scenarios where government should be allowed to rob me of
my economic opportunity, and it turned me into o paying customer.
Under no circumstances was I going to personally take the
fall for that or no fault of my own. My
business got completely and utterly destroyed and ripped out from
under me, and bankruptcy was the way out of that.
(19:56):
It has had some pretty interesting personal consequences. Really interesting
to live a life where you can have a credit card.
Not that I was using credit cards in any meaningful way,
but they're useful for a lot of things that I
didn't really know until I was like, Oh, I can't
fucking have a credit card. It also forced me to
liquidate my personal savings right, all this emergency cash that
(20:16):
I had saved up over the years from sayings other
than urfs, just to ensure that if anything happened to
me that I wouldn't be pulist or starving or some
other such thing. And so I had to spend all
of that money, and I got this stain on my
record for the next seven years that be instant. As
soon as I filed for bankruptcy, I felt an enormous release.
(20:38):
I'd been carrying around this lucky on my back for
a long time with this business debt that I couldn't
pay back, and look, in a perfect world, I would
have been able to pay it back ten times over,
because that would have meant my business would have survived
and that something would have shook out that would have
meant some really big success. But it set me free.
I filed for bankruptcy, set me free, and I'm grateful
(20:59):
that it's resource. I was feeling really shamed about it initially,
but I think that once I started reading about pretty
much every entrepreneur's bible bankruptcy at least twice or three times,
it was like, blankruptcy exists for a reason, and you're
right that the rich heuse all sorts of economic and
financial tools at their disposal, and that the rest of us,
I think should really follow soup. So it's been alright. Look,
(21:22):
I didn't have any personal then. I had an eight
to ten credit score when I filed for bankruptcy, so
I really hurt. I feel look for quenty peropsy, but
but this is what it is. So I'm forced into
an impossible positions.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Well, and just to reflect back, what I heard you
say was that you didn't just take this money squander
it and then be like not my problem. You took
this money, you did what entrepreneurs do. You attempted to pivot,
you tried new revenue streams. You were very forward thinking
in terms of like how do I make this work.
I had to have a call with one of my
credit card companies to get on a payment plan last
(21:56):
year and the guy said the most offense. I'm not
easily offended. And this guy was like, maybe you should
just work on your profit and loss and I was like, dude,
the fuck do you think I've spent this year doing
When your revenue goes down eighty percent, where do you
think my energy and attention has gone all day every day?
(22:17):
And I love that you took this resource and tried
to make lemonade out of lemon and ultimately it didn't work.
Which could we all have tried harder?
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Maybe?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
But I got to the point last year too. You
and I met the day that two different people told
me to take a sabbatical because they were like, you
can't keep going like you are on well, so could
we have tried harder?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Maybe? But also could we have tried harder? Maybe not.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
There's so much that gets wrapped up into all of this,
and then we make all these things that have happened
mean things about us as well. It just becomes this
huge cacophony. So touched on it briefly, and if you
feel like you've answered it, I don't have to re
answer it. But how do you feel like you navigated
some of those feelings and beliefs about closing your business
(23:08):
quote unquote failing filing for bankruptcy.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
The limiting beliefs that I was really struggling with March
twenty twenty onward were oh my god, I did all
this work and it was free. Nothing that was one.
I had just been just working my nuts and it
hadn't meant anything. It could just be righted away for me.
Number two, after a few years of trying anything I
could think of that I thought would make a difference
(23:33):
in pivoting or increasing revenue, I threw some spaghetti at
the wall about it, right, because I was desperate and
I was really interested ultimately in the survival of this
business I had created, and I did. I felt like
a failure. I felt, oh my god, all of my
best ideas didn't get me anywhere, didn't move the needle,
which really isn't true. Right, If I go back and
(23:54):
look at the success I had in some of the
strategies I implemented. There were a few things that ultimately can
attributed to them not working. It had nothing to do
with me being a personal failure or not having good ideas.
It was like that the hot sauce market was super saturated,
that Amazon takes a lot of cash and a lot
of knowledge to be able to play in that space
and play well. Same thing in digital marketing, Facebook ads
(24:16):
and all this other stuff. The biggest thing I had
was more of a question, less of a limiting belief.
If I'm not the hot sauce boss, who am I.
I've had this whole identity. I was young. I didn't
know my ass for my elbow. When I started merchs,
I was twenty six, and so I didn't know who
I was really And then I thought, I own this
hot sauce company. I don't even know what I'm good
(24:37):
at anymore. When my identity came into question, so did
all of the things that I was good at. And
so the limiting beliefs was like, oh my god, I'm
never going to be anybody ever again. I've hit my
peak and I'm never gonna achieve this kind of success again,
A lot of my identity got shotter, a lot of
just generally my ego, my bride just really got damaged.
I was somebody in the world at somebodies, and then
(24:58):
all of a sudden I could not figure out how
to achieve that again or be there. And then this
third piece of what the hell am I going to do? Now?
What did I do? Really? I'm an avid fan of journaling,
I meditate, doing a lot of breath work, somatically moving
a lot of things through my system. What I really
realize is that in addition to losing my business, I
got divorced in the same year, and I left Colorado
(25:19):
right after having lived there for eleven years. So I
left my community, I got divorced, and I lost my business,
all within eight months of each other. It was so devastating.
I'mootly on so many different levels, but I suck to
my recovery. I stayed sober, I leveraged my spiritual elders,
but kept talking on the phone to my friends and
staying connected in community, journaling, meditation, exercise, communing with spirit,
(25:43):
and just no matter what, waking up every day and
go on. I'm going to live another day, and I
want to see what I can do to make the
best of it. I think that there was just a
lot of this isn't the end. It's not okay, and
it isn't the end. And I'm going to wake up
every day and see if i can make something new.
And I think just in the grieving process, some of
it is just waking up every day and putting one
(26:03):
foot in front of the other. Sometimes there's just not
a whole lot you can do. And I'm not going
to meditate myself out of grief, and I'm not going
to breath and work my way out of grief. Sometimes
really the work is can I integrate this into my being?
Can I sit with it? Can I hold the heaviness
of it? Can I just cry in my cheerios for
half the morning and just release? I mean, I could
(26:24):
cry now thinking about how devastated I was for all
that time. There's just something to be said for feeling
your feelings that a lot of the times that the
only way out is through that once you come through
to the other side, you'll be really glad that you
leaned in, that you didn't drink it away or relationship
it away, or eat it away or gamble it away,
or whatever it is that your favorite escape mechanism may
(26:47):
be that sometimes life's just about being present with what is.
It's always about being present with what is. I wanted
to use these years of immense reorganization in my life
to where I was like a phoenix from the ashes,
even though that's a cliche, but I wanted to. I
just wanted to feel it. I have a long time
in recovery and a long time knowing that feel and
(27:09):
taming killed me yet and they're not gonna thank you
for sharing all of that. How I know that you
are like opening up new things.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
You're reigniting your spark, You're finding your creativity again. How
are you approaching this next chapter differently than you did
with merps.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Hot Sauce was something I could do. I love to cook.
I was born racing Louisiana. I've been cooking since I
was a tiny child. It was something very physical that
I could have my hands on. Right. Selling products is
a thing, though business requires a lot of personal growth.
When you're selling a product, you get to distance yourself
from the selling of a thing. I wasn't selling, Kellie.
(27:50):
I'm selling this talent that I had in producing hot
sauce that enabled me to really hide in a lot
of ways. I could just the products speak for itself.
But I didn't necessarily have to be anybody special. I
didn't have to really know myself really well in order
to sell hot sauce. And I was listening to a
podcast a few years ago when I was in the
(28:13):
funk of Merphs and I'm failing as an entrepreneur and
I don't know what's from down and I came across
this guy named Dan Sullivan's strategic coach, and he started
talking to me. I listened to a podcast. He was
talking about unique ability. Oh what the hell is unique ability?
And I really like this idea. I think that I
had always had it in the back of my mind
intuitively knew it that each of us possesses within us
(28:35):
a specific combination of personality, characteristics, traits, ways of thinking
and doing things that if we follow those things, we
feel like a million dollars when we're doing them, but
we can use them to help people. It's something that
people have come to us for over time to solve
their problem, and that if we really lean into those things,
(28:55):
into our twenty percent unique ability that we can then
go out and live the story productive lives, tapping into
our best qualities. Merphs for me over time became like,
oh my god, I'm so tired of product sales. Oh
my god, I don't care about hot sauce, oh herd.
If I'd never eat hustles again, I would not be
stout about it. I hated the working in the food industry.
It needs so much reform, and it's profit hungry and
(29:17):
problematic and predatory and poisonous. What I'm doing differently now?
The first question is not what can I sell? It's
who am I? Now that I know who I am,
my communications degree makes a lot more sense. So I thought, oh,
I'm gonna get a liberal Arts degree in communication. That
doesn't mad sent when you examine astrology. I'm a Gemini rising.
I'm literally here to be a messenger, to connect people
to new ideas, people them to transform their lives. So
(29:40):
what are at so much fun of my liberal arts degree? Right?
And love to rate? Right? I love to write things.
I love to public speak. I love to speak on
micro levels and groups and other things. And so the
first question is who am I? And what are the
skills and talents that I possessed the inherently when I'm
engaging with them, I feel like a million dollars. And
then I think that the second thing is okay, if
(30:00):
I want to do things that I feel like a
million dollars when I'm doing them, then what are the
things in being the messenger right and the connector of
ideas that help people change their lives? How can I
monetize that? What are people coming to me for? Most commonly,
I really realized when I was looking back at the
last fifteen years of my life, especially after MRFs is
people come to me for business advice all the time,
(30:22):
even when I was brand new, and it's not because
I necessarily knew anything in the initial stages about business,
but that I'm a really great thought partner. And when
I feel like the million dollars, I'm talking to somebody
about their business, about their personal life, their spiritual journey,
some sort of growth, they're going through a transition period
and able to just really work and connect with people
(30:43):
in a way that enables them to go out and
change their lives in some capacity from a professional perspective.
And one of my best friends asked me when I
was visiting Colorado in February. Hey, dude, I need to
make forty thousand dollars before I leave for my six
month trip to Europe on June the first. She has
a photography business. It's well established, and I said, yeah, dude,
(31:04):
can you put together a list of all of the
income you make and break it down by photography type
in a spreadsheet. Let's have a two hour meeting. You
literally signed down and looked at this spreadsheet and I said,
here's the way of revenue in this model that you
wrote out for me. Here's how let you're making from events,
Here's how to let you're making from portraits, Here's how
let you're makeing fromt theater, photography and your nonprofit work.
(31:27):
I was like, this is your money maker. This is
where you're making the most amount of money doing the
fewest amount of edits. If you prioritize this and let
a couple of these fall to the wayside, delegate this activity,
and schedule this many things over the next three months,
you'll make forty great. And she did it, and she
made forty great. And so that's the kind of stuff
I want to do, is helping people optimize and it
(31:49):
doesn't have to be business. It can be really anything right.
It can be recovery, it can be trauma, it can
be spiritual, but just an opportunity to work with people.
My favorite part of MERS is when I was going
around selling hot sauce, not because I was selling hot sauce,
but because I got to talk to individual people about
their lives and businesses. We're going to hang out with
business owners and find out what they were struggling with,
(32:11):
and an opportunity just to brace some joy, just to
brace some transformation, some new ideas. First up, who am I?
That's an inspiration for the new future is doing things
I'm really good at as opposed to selling products.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Love that and I'm a huge proponent of identity work
first because I've worked with so many entrepreneurs over the
last ten years who come in and they're like, Oh,
I have this great business idea and I'm like, cool,
Let's run it through your values. Let's run it through
what do you want to be doing every day, Let's
run it through your strengths, Let's run it through.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Ideas are like asholes. Everyone has them. What's that quote?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
You can have ten great ideas before breakfast or whatever.
It's like an Alison Run of the Land quote or something, Yeah,
that's not it. But without that foundation of who am
I underneath the good idea, the good idea is not
grounded and rooted, it's not going to be sustainable because
then you're constantly going to be outside of yourself, looking, searching,
(33:07):
trying to grasp like you're always going to be operating
from a place of lack and scarcity, and it's just
not sustainable. That's a very similar journey that I went
through when I closed my fashion business. Was I had
said forever, oh, I'm a fashion designer. I'm a fashion designer.
I'm a fashion designer, and then all of a sudden,
when you don't have a fashion business and you're not
that anymore, then it's like lock, who am I?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Like?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Even hearkening back to start with why, it's like we
all start with what we do rather than who we are,
and we make that our identity and when that falls away,
I said, after I close my fashion business, I was like, whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
I do next, which happened to be coaching.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
If the universe tells me to shut it down, I
will fucking do it because.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
I don't need to be attached to a job title
in order to have value in the world. It was
a little.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Easier on try to of business go walk away from
being a coach first of all, never really identified with
the title, but also because it didn't define me. It
was something that I happened to do in the world,
but it wasn't who I was.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Distinction because I think it's one that is not necessarily
being made by all of the entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
In the world. Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
I knew that it was going to be really unique,
and I'm just really grateful for your willingness to.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Share the shit.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I think the rags to riches story is just it's
a faulty model, right because it what it says is
that by the time you get to the top of
that peak, that's the end of your story.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
And I think it's so important that.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
More of a share, Like twenty twenty four was my
biggest year in business yet and twenty twenty five I
was down eighty percent in my revenue, right, and that
doesn't make me a failure either. I wanted to thank
you for the nuance of all of this and the
breaking it down, because it's a really potent conversation, especially
(35:06):
as our world continues to change and evolve, more and
more people are going to be facing these questions and
these hard conversations with them themselves. I really appreciate your
willingness to be bold and go first.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, thank you for asking me. I think it's honestly
just a relief, so I don't know how to share
it out loud when I just say, yeah, so what
I started accompany at twenty six that's incredible in its
own right, and then I had this sort of castrophic
thing happen, and here I am rebuilding myself bigger and better. Ultimately,
huntswust is never what I wanted to do. It was
low hanging fruit at the time, and it was the
skill I was good at. And now that I get
(35:40):
the opportunity to let be myself and tap into those
things that make me feel like a million dollars and
do those all day every day, I honestly can't believe
I ever spent that much time doing ouslows. I'm just
really grateful to be here. I'm so grateful that you
and I met. I think it was just incredibly kids
met for us to have that launch, that random launch
through LinkedIn and yeah, I'm just so excited to be
on here with you and excited to see what you're
(36:01):
twenty twenty six is well, same, same.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
If anyone wants to connect with you after this or
continue following your journey, where is the best place to
find you?
Speaker 2 (36:08):
And you can follow me on Instagram at Kelly Shacks
or anyone can email me Kelly at Kelly Shucks dot com.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Perfect, so it's scche X and it'll be in the
show notes and everything too. All right, thank you everyone
for joining us for this really special episode. Go have
a Big Goal Energy day, and remember failures never permanent.
It oftentimes means nothing about you, and more than not,
it's probably just a redirection into something that's more aligned
(36:38):
your unique abilities. If this episode lit something up in you,
share it, text it to a friend, post it to
your stories, or leave a review.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Because Big Goal.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Energy is meant to be felt far and wide, and
if you're ready to go deeper, explore the tools, hypnosis,
sessions and support.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Because your vision deserves.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
More than hustle, join us on the Big Goal Energy
app by visiting your app store and typing in Big
Goal Energy, your vision, your goals, deserve alignment, ease, and
your fullest self behind them. Until next time, trust yourself,
dream bigger, and never forget you are here for greatness.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!