March 19, 2024 • 26 mins
When Denise Woodard found out her daughter Vivi had severe food allergies, she went into super mom mode. She looked for food that was nutritious and fun but what she found at the store was disappointing at best. So she took to the kitchen and started making her own snacks for Vivi, laying the foundation for Partake Foods, a Black-owned, female-led company offering allergy-friendly foods. As her snacks started to gain traction, Denise realized she needed more capital—and fast—if she wanted Partake to succeed.
Join Ben and Tanya as they chat with Denise about Partakes-humble beginnings and near failure to launch. Discover her commitment to funding Partake, pawning her engagement ring and emptying her savings in the process, and a chance meeting in a trade show bathroom that unlocked new doors for the company. These are The Unshakeables.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
For Denise Woodard, her journey into entrepreneurship started with every
parent's worst nightmare.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was on a conference call.
Our nanny, Martha, gave Vivi the snack with just two ingredients.
As soon as she started to eat it, her lips
started to swell up, her tongue started to swell up.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
She started to.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Turn blue in our living room. I hear Martha scream
from my home office and I immediately run out and
I see she's like swelling up like a balloon right
in front of my eyes and clearly couldn't breathe. I
thought my daughter was going to die.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
This is the Unshakables and I'm Ben Walter, CEO of
Chase for Business, and.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I'm Tanya Nepo, a lawyer and consultant for business owners.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
On the Unshakables, we're sharing the daring stories of small
business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories
of how they got through it. Hi, Tanya, Hey Ben Tanya.
This episode is a one especially for anyone interested in
raising some serious capital for the company. Today, we have
the story of Denise Woodard, who, after receiving eighty six
(01:09):
knows from investors has raised over twenty three million dollars in.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Capital twenty three million. Huh. I can't wait to hear
this one.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
On today's episode Partake Foods out of Los Angeles, California.
So many small businesses are family businesses, and for Denise Woodard,
founder and CEO of Partake Foods, her family, specifically her
daughter Vivi, was the whole reason she started a company
(01:38):
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
When Vivi was around eight months old, her first Thanksgiving,
she had a dish that had baked egg in it,
and she ended up throwing up like fourteen times over
five hours, and we ended up rushing her to the
emergency room. We learned that she had several food allergies.
One of the things that she wasn't allergic to was peanuts,
and so the recommendation of our owne ellogist was introduced
(02:01):
peanuts as soon as possible, and so shortly after her
first birthday, she had a really simple snack with two ingredients,
just peanuts and corn, and she had an anaphylactic response immediately.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Wow, that must have been terrifying.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
It was the scariest five minutes of my life.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Viv was given two EpiPens and rushed to the emergency room. Thankfully,
she was fine, but they were clearly living in a
new reality.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
I felt like inspector Gadget. I felt like a detective
who had to dig and dig and dig. While the
ingredients may have looked safe, then there could be the
concern of it's made on the same equipment with tree nuts.
And so I found myself calling food manufacturers and trying
to join all these communities online with other food allergy
parents to learn what was safe for their kids. And
(02:44):
so I went into like overdrive in terms of trying
to always be prepared to make sure that she was safe.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Of course, Denise was worried about Viv's health, but she
was also worried about the social stress the allergies would
create for her daughter.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I started to think about the emotional impact that having
food allergies would have on her, how she wouldn't be
able to safely or confidently participate in playdates and celebrations
and birthday parties and all the things that involve food.
And dreamed of like a brand that was cool enough
that people without food allergies would also willingly choose to
eat it, And I couldn't find it.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
With nowhere else to turn, she decided to take matters
into her own hands.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I was so frustrated with the lack of options that
I could find. I immediately went to all the natural
food stores in our neighborhood, trying to find safe things
that she could eat. But all the fun stuff that
kids want to eat and share became off limits, and
I wanted to do something about that.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Denise founded Partake Foods with a simple goal in mind,
make food better so anyone could partake. Though she faced
a dwindling list of acceptable ingredients, Denise had to find
a way to make something that would work, so she
started by experimenting in the kitchen with her nanny, Martha.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I remember standing in my kitchen covered in flour with
cookies that looked like dog food, and I quickly realized
that I was not the person to commercialize this product.
So it was very clear that we needed the help
of a professional now.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Fortunately, Denise did have experience in commercial food and beverage.
In fact, she'd been at Coca Cola for a decade
working in sales, but manufacturing food that wasn't her specialty,
So she got in touch with a food scientist on
LinkedIn who helped bring the first few products of Partake
Foods to life.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Our first product was three flavors of crunchy cookies. We
had sprouted grain, chocolate chip, sweet potato, millet, and carrot oat.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Denise finally quit her job and started demoing at natural
food stores.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I'd show up to the store and I'd have this
little folding table and a five dollars tablecloth, and I'd
show up in my Partake T shirt and I'd share
about the story. I'd try to convince them to try
the product and kind of rinse and repeat every day
for several months.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Now, Denise received unanimous feedback about her product names, as in,
they didn't se so good. I mean, imagine seeing a
package on the shelf, one for a chocolate chip cookie
and then one for a sprouted grain cookie. Now which
would you choose.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
I quickly got that feedback of these products taste great,
but if I saw this on the shelf and it
was called carrot oat, I would never want to eat it.
So then those flavor names changed to be much more indulgent,
like chocolate Deliciousness or whatever, chocolate chip and ginger snap
and oat meal and like very like traditional indulgent cookie
flavor names, and we also updated the packaging to match that.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Now, she'd been working in sales for a long time,
so she knew how to get products on the shelf,
but getting those products sold and into people's homes that
was a whole nother story.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
What I quickly saw was that there was a high
barrier to entry with the food allergy consumer, and so
while they liked the idea in theory, we hadn't really
built any trust or brand equity with that consumer.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Hey, Ben, can we pause for a second. This one
really hits.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Home for me. Why Tony, you tell me I have
a younger.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Brother who had severe, severe food allergies. I'm talking nuts, fish, dairy,
all the stuff we like, right, And when he was
a child, there were a few life or death situations
that still to this day make me emotional when I
think about them. And so with my brother, not only
did we have to be very mindful of the ingredients
listed on the back of any food packaging, but also
(06:21):
we had to be very mindful of where the products
were manufactured. Could there possibly have been some cross contamination
with nuts or some other thing that he's allergic to.
We were looking at all these things and constantly had
to do so in order to feel confident about the
food that we were giving him. I mean, when it's
literally life or death, which it was, you have to
pay very close attention to these things. So this really
(06:44):
matters to me.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, I can only imagine. You know, if you're scared
for the safety of your child, good enough isn't good enough? Right,
there's only implicit trust or nothing.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
That's so true. So then what happened next.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Denise didn't have brand equity yet, and she knew it
would take time to build, but there was a bright spot.
The demand was much broader than she thought. Her food
wasn't just for people like Vivi who were restricted by allergies.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Our products appealed to much broader consumer groups. Folks who
were looking for health conscious products because they were looking
to eat gluten free or plant based out of personal preference,
parents who needed school safe snacks even if their child
didn't have food allergies, or people who wanted to support
a woman or minority owned business, and then fell in
love with the products.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And by the end of her first year, Denise had
her product on the shelf. In fifty stores.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
That gave me the confidence to take things to what
I perceived to be the next level, which for me
was trying to get into Whole Foods and getting into
a regional grocery account.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
She went back to her tried and true method cold
calling and perseverance. In fact, she reached out to every
single category manager at Whole Foods.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
There was an employee in a Boulder, Colorado store who
I think took pity on me or saw something interesting
in my email and passed on to the appropriate contact.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
And finally, after months and months of outreach, Denise got
a yes.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I remember getting the email and my mom was visiting
and my husband was home, and I just remember screaming
and running through the apartment, like we got in, we
got in, we got in, We're going into Whole Foods.
This is it. Literally, Like the next week we got
a yes from Wegman's as well, which was actually going
to kind of triple the store account that we were in,
and so I was just super super excited. Quickly that
(08:32):
turned into Okay, now the work begins.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
The job to be done was to fill the demand
for all these new orders. It was a lot of work.
It also required more money.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I never said, okay, let's empty the savings account and
put everything into partake. It would be like, oh, I
thought the distributor would pay me this week, and I
have to buy one thousand dollars worth of sugar. Let
me pull one thousand dollars out of the savings account.
And it was that continuous drain. As I started to
see dwindling down, I started to think, oh shit.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
But then she had an idea.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
I remember reading an article about the founder of Tascha
Beauty and she talked about making the tough decision to
sell her engagement ring. And I remember being like, WOI la.
And I called my husband over and I was like,
what do you think about this? And oddly, I guess
he and I were both super supportive of it. And
I sent him to the Diamond District in New York
and he came home with several thousand dollars and that
(09:30):
continued to keep the business afloat.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Ben I got to jump in here. I know we
give a lot of sound advice on this show, but
I think tip number one, should we get a partner
who doesn't bet an eye when you suggest you sell
your engagement ring? To buy more sugar for cookies.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Right, I'll call my wife right now and let her know.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
I gotta say, Denise has my favorite type of small
business crisis.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
What crisis getting big too fast?
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Precisely the moment when you start to consider or in
Denise's cases, have no other choice but to consider mentor capital.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
All right, and I think you're cheating. I think you
know what happens next.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Yeah, let's hear it.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Denise knew it was time to get serious about fundraising.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
I think it was at the moment where I was like, Okay,
if I'm selling my engagement ring, clearly we need to
find some investors. I knew nothing about venture capital when
I started to raise money for Partake, and I think
that was the scariest part. It felt like people were
speaking a completely different language. I'd watched Shark Tank religiously,
(10:27):
but I still didn't fully understand it. So what I
immediately did was started reaching out to other founders who'd
raised capital to try to understand more about what they
would recommend in terms of like what types of capital,
what types of investors. And I realized quickly that it's
very much, for lack of better words, an old boys Club.
I feel like some of the language isn't that complicated.
(10:50):
It's almost like it's constructed to keep people out.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
But that didn't stop Denise.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
I literally was just like cold emailing people on LinkedIn.
A lot of those folks were allies. They were white
men who had done it before, who were willing to
explain the code to me and to give me confidence
to go into a room with the same like swagger
that they would and share why I deserved to get
this funding.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
She worked with her attorney to decide how to structure
her fundraise. Denise didn't know what her company was worth,
so she didn't want to put a price on the
shares just yet, so she decided to use a convertible
note for her fundraising. Denise needed to raise six hundred
thousand dollars, and she needed to do it fast.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
At that point, we were personally all tapped out. When
we started. We'd had a really nice savings cushion in
four oh one k's and my husband had a fantastic job.
In late twenty eighteen, he lost his job, and so
I started to feel the financial pressure like crushing me.
I was really worried. I was really anxious I was
really scared, and for me to continue to keep the
(11:54):
business going, I was going to need to raise more
capital and I was going to need to be able
to do it quickly.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
For a brief moment, Denise considered going back to her
corporate job to make more money, but she really didn't
want to do that. She knew if she could crack
the investor code, well, then they could really go for it.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
The angel investor circuit was going horribly for us. I
was not able to raise any additional capital, and it
was really demoralizing. I was getting no for a lot
of different reasons. Sometimes I would get a no because
this is a too niche of a category, or some
people would say, oh, this is too crowded, or there
would be a well come back when you get to
(12:34):
a million dollars in sales, and I would think, well,
I can't get to a million dollars in sales if
I don't have any more money. And so it was
really really frustrating, felt like this horrible, exhausting cycle that
wasn't going anywhere.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
She kept pitching, kept getting turned down. Then Denise remembered
an article she read about jay z Yes that Jay
z He was starting a venture fund.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
One of our dearest friends, who's also so an investor
in our business, works in the music industry. And I
remember saying, do you know jay Z? And he's like, no, no,
I don't. But he happened to know one of his
business partners and they were willing to take the call.
And I was like, you know, I'm going to be
in La soon. I'd love to get together, just hoping
they would agree to take a meeting, and they did so.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
She met with jay Z's partner and right from the
beginning this conversation it felt totally different.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
It was so different than the Angel pitches in that,
like all of the Angel chats typically started with what's
your gross margin, what's the tam And this conversation was like,
tell me about where you're from, tell me about why
you're building this business. And I walked away so excited
and so hopeful. And then in March of twenty nineteen,
we got a term sheet that Marcy Venture Partners was
(13:51):
interested in leading a seed round of funding for us.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
That conversation it changed everything for Denise.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
A lot of the groups that had said no, the
announcement that we'd closed the seed round came out. A
lot of those folks came back and they were like,
you know, it wasn't a good time when you pitched before,
but if you have room now, we'd love to invest.
And I realized, like, maybe there wasn't something wrong with
me in the business, and they said no. For another reason,
it gave me some confidence because of that, but practically
(14:19):
it also gave me the capital we needed to begin
to scale the business and to begin to hire people.
And we raise one million dollars.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
And soon she received a massive order from a retailed
giant Target.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
I read the email and I reread the email, and
I just like, stand up and sit down, and stand
up and sit down. I don't know what to do
with myself. And we had one other full time employee
in the business, so I immediately call her and I tell
her what's happened, and like, can we afford this? Can
we do this? Can we make this many cookies? And
she's like, I think so. And we needed to make
a decision that week, and we went for it.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
In May of twenty twenty, George Floyd was tragically murdered.
Tell us how that impacted your family and the business.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
For my family, you know, I think my husband living
as a black man in America and as a black family, like,
we felt so angered and saddened and wanted to channel
those feelings into something positive and into positive change. And
so there was some developments in the business. We launched
an HBCU fellowship program aimed at increasing diversity in the
(15:25):
food industry, and a lot of that came through kind
of our feelings about George Floyd's murder.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
And then on the.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Business front, we received an amount of inbound from potential investors,
potential retailers, influencers, press, unlike anything I could have ever imagined.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Surprisingly, twenty twenty was Partake Food's biggest year yet. They
started the year in three hundred and fifty stores and
ended in five thousand and got serious interest from investors.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
It's like a total one eighty from when I was
raising the seed round of funding, where I was like
begging for scraps, and I feel like I get to
be selective about who I want to partner with.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Since then, Denise has raised over twenty three million dollars
in capital for Partake Foods.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
When I think back about why I started the company,
it wasn't nutritional. It wasn't taste, it was the emotions.
Like so much of your childhood experience, so much of
your life experience is built in this, like emotions and
the camaraderie and the celebration that comes with enjoying food together.
And when I hear notes from our customers about how
they could have s'mores for the first time, or bacup
(16:32):
pie crust, or enjoy cookies at a birthday party, that's
the reason I started the business.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Today, Partake Foods has over ten products in their line
and is available in thirteen thousand stores across the country.
You can find them on multiple airlines and even in
Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Then she made some major strides, she really did. There's
so many parents and caretakers going through that it has
become a major concern for folks. So this is a
very real solution that she's provided.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
I think when there are challenges with food, trust becomes everything.
Because there are a lot of things you do once
a week, once a month, maybe even once a year.
Food's not like that. Foods multiple times a day. It's
always in our minds. It's a big part of our
lives physically, but it's also a big part of our
lives socially, So if you can't trust in the food
brands that you're buying and that you're consuming, it's a
(17:28):
real issue for consumers. And so you know, she had
a pretty big trust barrier she had to get up
over because that's a community that always has trust front
and center in their minds.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, as I said earlier, my younger brother has severe
food allergies and still does to this day. I mean
even as an adult, he has to be very, very
particular about what he eats. So I love that Denise
brought these products to the market and that they're products
that people can trust.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
I think there were some good lessons in there in
terms of how she brought her product to the market,
how she earned that trust over time, how she stepstoned
into it. And I think with something like this, you
can imagine a big food brand goes in and they
launch a big marketing blitz and it says this is safety,
and they have that brand equity already and they're able
to build that. She didn't have any of that, so
she had to earn that trust along the way, and
that's not an easy thing to do, but she sort
(18:12):
of scratched away at it until she got there. And
I think the authenticity of her story and where she
was coming from and how the product evolved gave her
the credibility to do that over time.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
And I like the term scratched away because that's really
how it felt like. She had to make little strides,
be open, and of course pivot. I thought that was
a really great part of her story, the fact that
she was able to make adjustments and she learned about
who her target market was and was open to her
business becoming something other than what she initially thought it
(18:41):
was going to be. I liked her openness and her flexibility.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
That's a really hard balance to get right, you know.
On the one hand, I hear people say, stay true
to what you originally set out to do, and be
true to your original product and your original audience, and
she kind of couldn't do that because it wasn't a
big enough market. Right. What she realized of her time
is she could be true to that while also catering
to a larger market. So she managed to throw that
needle really well because what she didn't do was compromise
(19:05):
on her original audience. She stayed with it. She kept
her products completely allagen free and stayed true to that,
but in a way that appealed to a broader audience
that grew her dressable market without compromising on the core
value proposition.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
And I think that the openness and her willingness to
learn and getting out there and listening to what people
were saying about her product, her seeing who was finding
the product to be interesting, I thought that was a
really great entrepreneurial move on her part.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
I think it was. The other thing I give her
a ton of credit for is capital pee patients. You know,
you can imagine when you start a business. Rather than
just quitting her job and running out there and having
to make it all go in a short period of
time and running to market, she took her time in
a couple of ways. She took her time by keeping
a job on the side for a while, which helped
her earn some money and helped her build the business
(19:53):
more methodically. She took her time getting her product right
before she went big and launched it and tried to
sell it beyond its capabilities, beyond her manufacturing capabilities. She
took her time from an equity perspective, which helped her
preserve her equity in the business. She didn't just go
out and raise a bunch of money that deluted her
down right away. So you know, as fast as she moved,
and she did move pretty fast, I think she found
(20:14):
a good balance between pace and patience, and I think
her patience has really paid off.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
It just makes me think about myself as a business
owner and other business owners and just how we learn
to strike that balance, how we learn to make the
appropriate adjustments, consider timing. There's so many things to think
about when you are as you're trying to grow. How
have you seen people strike that balance?
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I think the way that people are successful in that
is they find ways to prove product market fit. So
they find ways to prove that their product resonates with
the right kinds of customers in the right way, number one,
and to prove to themselves that they can meet the
supply side of the equation. You know, you have to
have both supply and demand to run a business, and
you have to have confidence in both before you press
(20:56):
the gas pedal. The people I've seen do it really well,
generally don't have it perfectly right the first time. That's
more luck than skill, and so they find ways to
d risk as they go. And I think that's a
guiding principle that small business owners can have, which is,
what can I do to de risk what I'm trying
to do while I learn? And the more you can
do to take risk out of the business while you
(21:16):
learn those lessons, the better off you're going to be
ultimately from the perspective of how much equity you have,
from the perspective of how much market credibility you have,
from the perspective of how much goodwill you have with
your partners. The more that you can de risk while
you learn those lessons, the more runway you're going to
have once you've learned them to go do things the
way you've learned is right.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
That is one way that Denise did that right with
having her job and holding on to her job. But
what I like about how she did this because a
lot of entrepreneurs do that. But what she did was
she was very consistent about it. She was diligent. Though
she had the security of her existing position, she still
was running this company and growing it steadily and learning
her market and taking major steps. So I like that, Yes,
(21:56):
she had reduced the risk, but she didn't do what
a lot of other people do and they're just starting out,
which is not take it as seriously as they should
as if they didn't have the security of the position,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, she took it seriously, there's no question. And look, ultimately,
if it's not your passion, you shouldn't quit your job
and do it because it's going to be all consuming
and it's going to be your life. So I think
the other place that her patient's paid off was in
her fundraising. You know, we've talked to a lot of
different companies about how they raise money, and some go
sort of alternative routes, some friends and families, some use
their own money, some use partners money. She went more
(22:28):
of a sort of classic outside investor route, and like
many people who go that route, it wasn't easy, right,
So she describes pitching twenty thirty, forty fifty times and
getting a whole bunch of no's before she gets to
a yes. I always tell people, if you're fundraising and
you're not walking out with feedback, you're not getting smarter
and your next pitch is not going to be any
better than your current pitch. And there's a few things
(22:48):
she tipped us off for that, I think are good
things to keep in mind always, you know, number one,
always be able to articulate how you're going to use
the money. You know, saying I need to raise money
for this company without being able to specifically articulate how
you're going to use that money and what kind of
return you expect probably isn't gonna win very many fans.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, she definitely was taking a long term approach, not
just seeking money right from wherever she could get it.
She was very intentional, and I liked that she was
very committed to her education, and she recognized that she
was entering an arena that was very unusual or different
for her, and she stressed that she had to learn
what to say, she had to learn the language, and
(23:26):
in addition to being patient, she took that part very
seriously as well.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
I'm not so sure about that. I think if you
listened in the early days, she just wanted the money.
And I can't really blame her for that, because she's
trying to get going and she's looking for funds, and
so if you listen to how she talks about it
at the end, she clearly had a much more evolved
way of thinking about partnering with someone from a fundraising
capability than she did in the early days. I think
she realized that the fundraising process was about finding the
right long term partner.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
But it worked out well for Denise. I mean, listaid
there are advantages to the nose. In addition to getting
substantive feedback from investors on your pitch, there's also the
men fit of time time to learn more about what
to do differently and not just what to change in
your pitch. So the nos were really a great opportunity
for her to learn.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Right. If you're not learning from your nose, then you're
not growing, Tanya, I want to share one last piece
of the interview with you. Denise had some advice for
current and aspiring small business owners that I really think
will resonate.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Well, let's hear it. It's okay to start small.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
I remember being at those local demos and trade shows
and I would have a five dollars tablecloth and a
stand that I made at home myself, and I would
be embarrassed. I would see other businesses that were much larger,
with much flashier signs, and think something's wrong with my business.
I felt the same when we weren't able to hire
early on. But I think it was that financial scarcity
(24:46):
that made me have to be much more scrappy. It
made me a stronger and better business person. And at
the time I kind of wished it away, but I
think the starting small was really important for my business.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Okay, and I have to ask, what is your daughter's
favorite part take prop.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
She takes the crunchy chocolate chip snack packs for lunch
every single day and I try to switch it up
for her sometimes and she's like, no, I want the
cookies every day.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Ben.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
I think her daughter is onto something. These crunchy chocolate
chip snack packs are delicious.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I can go for some right now.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And there's ice cream too. Where's ice cream? Where's ice cream?
I want to try it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It sounds like Partake Foods has a really exciting road
ahead of it, but a lot more to do.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Yes, so much more to do, so many more snacks
for Vivi to try and the rest of us too.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Thanks so much for listening to The Unshakables. If you
like this episode, please rate and review it. It'll help
our show find more listeners. On the next episode, after
a near death experience left him with no one to trust.
Real estate investor and developer Fukwan Bilal pivoted to reinvent
his business and his mindset. I'm Ben Walter and this
(25:54):
is the Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio
from iHeartMedia.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
The Unshakables is a pretty action of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
And we'll have
For Denise Woodard, her journey into entrepreneurship started with every
parent's worst nightmare.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was on a conference call.
Our nanny, Martha, gave Vivi the snack with just two ingredients.
As soon as she started to eat it, her lips
started to swell up, her tongue started to swell up.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
She started to.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Turn blue in our living room. I hear Martha scream
from my home office and I immediately run out and
I see she's like swelling up like a balloon right
in front of my eyes and clearly couldn't breathe. I
thought my daughter was going to die.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
This is the Unshakables and I'm Ben Walter, CEO of
Chase for Business, and.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I'm Tanya Nepo, a lawyer and consultant for business owners.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
On the Unshakables, we're sharing the daring stories of small
business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories
of how they got through it. Hi, Tanya, Hey Ben Tanya.
This episode is a one especially for anyone interested in
raising some serious capital for the company. Today, we have
the story of Denise Woodard, who, after receiving eighty six
(01:09):
knows from investors has raised over twenty three million dollars in.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Capital twenty three million. Huh. I can't wait to hear
this one.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
On today's episode Partake Foods out of Los Angeles, California.
So many small businesses are family businesses, and for Denise Woodard,
founder and CEO of Partake Foods, her family, specifically her
daughter Vivi, was the whole reason she started a company
(01:38):
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
When Vivi was around eight months old, her first Thanksgiving,
she had a dish that had baked egg in it,
and she ended up throwing up like fourteen times over
five hours, and we ended up rushing her to the
emergency room. We learned that she had several food allergies.
One of the things that she wasn't allergic to was peanuts,
and so the recommendation of our owne ellogist was introduced
(02:01):
peanuts as soon as possible, and so shortly after her
first birthday, she had a really simple snack with two ingredients,
just peanuts and corn, and she had an anaphylactic response immediately.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Wow, that must have been terrifying.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
It was the scariest five minutes of my life.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Viv was given two EpiPens and rushed to the emergency room. Thankfully,
she was fine, but they were clearly living in a
new reality.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
I felt like inspector Gadget. I felt like a detective
who had to dig and dig and dig. While the
ingredients may have looked safe, then there could be the
concern of it's made on the same equipment with tree nuts.
And so I found myself calling food manufacturers and trying
to join all these communities online with other food allergy
parents to learn what was safe for their kids. And
(02:44):
so I went into like overdrive in terms of trying
to always be prepared to make sure that she was safe.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Of course, Denise was worried about Viv's health, but she
was also worried about the social stress the allergies would
create for her daughter.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I started to think about the emotional impact that having
food allergies would have on her, how she wouldn't be
able to safely or confidently participate in playdates and celebrations
and birthday parties and all the things that involve food.
And dreamed of like a brand that was cool enough
that people without food allergies would also willingly choose to
eat it, And I couldn't find it.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
With nowhere else to turn, she decided to take matters
into her own hands.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I was so frustrated with the lack of options that
I could find. I immediately went to all the natural
food stores in our neighborhood, trying to find safe things
that she could eat. But all the fun stuff that
kids want to eat and share became off limits, and
I wanted to do something about that.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Denise founded Partake Foods with a simple goal in mind,
make food better so anyone could partake. Though she faced
a dwindling list of acceptable ingredients, Denise had to find
a way to make something that would work, so she
started by experimenting in the kitchen with her nanny, Martha.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I remember standing in my kitchen covered in flour with
cookies that looked like dog food, and I quickly realized
that I was not the person to commercialize this product.
So it was very clear that we needed the help
of a professional now.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Fortunately, Denise did have experience in commercial food and beverage.
In fact, she'd been at Coca Cola for a decade
working in sales, but manufacturing food that wasn't her specialty,
So she got in touch with a food scientist on
LinkedIn who helped bring the first few products of Partake
Foods to life.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Our first product was three flavors of crunchy cookies. We
had sprouted grain, chocolate chip, sweet potato, millet, and carrot oat.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Denise finally quit her job and started demoing at natural
food stores.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I'd show up to the store and I'd have this
little folding table and a five dollars tablecloth, and I'd
show up in my Partake T shirt and I'd share
about the story. I'd try to convince them to try
the product and kind of rinse and repeat every day
for several months.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Now, Denise received unanimous feedback about her product names, as in,
they didn't se so good. I mean, imagine seeing a
package on the shelf, one for a chocolate chip cookie
and then one for a sprouted grain cookie. Now which
would you choose.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
I quickly got that feedback of these products taste great,
but if I saw this on the shelf and it
was called carrot oat, I would never want to eat it.
So then those flavor names changed to be much more indulgent,
like chocolate Deliciousness or whatever, chocolate chip and ginger snap
and oat meal and like very like traditional indulgent cookie
flavor names, and we also updated the packaging to match that.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Now, she'd been working in sales for a long time,
so she knew how to get products on the shelf,
but getting those products sold and into people's homes that
was a whole nother story.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
What I quickly saw was that there was a high
barrier to entry with the food allergy consumer, and so
while they liked the idea in theory, we hadn't really
built any trust or brand equity with that consumer.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Hey, Ben, can we pause for a second. This one
really hits.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Home for me. Why Tony, you tell me I have
a younger.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Brother who had severe, severe food allergies. I'm talking nuts, fish, dairy,
all the stuff we like, right, And when he was
a child, there were a few life or death situations
that still to this day make me emotional when I
think about them. And so with my brother, not only
did we have to be very mindful of the ingredients
listed on the back of any food packaging, but also
(06:21):
we had to be very mindful of where the products
were manufactured. Could there possibly have been some cross contamination
with nuts or some other thing that he's allergic to.
We were looking at all these things and constantly had
to do so in order to feel confident about the
food that we were giving him. I mean, when it's
literally life or death, which it was, you have to
pay very close attention to these things. So this really
(06:44):
matters to me.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, I can only imagine. You know, if you're scared
for the safety of your child, good enough isn't good enough? Right,
there's only implicit trust or nothing.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
That's so true. So then what happened next.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Denise didn't have brand equity yet, and she knew it
would take time to build, but there was a bright spot.
The demand was much broader than she thought. Her food
wasn't just for people like Vivi who were restricted by allergies.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Our products appealed to much broader consumer groups. Folks who
were looking for health conscious products because they were looking
to eat gluten free or plant based out of personal preference,
parents who needed school safe snacks even if their child
didn't have food allergies, or people who wanted to support
a woman or minority owned business, and then fell in
love with the products.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And by the end of her first year, Denise had
her product on the shelf. In fifty stores.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
That gave me the confidence to take things to what
I perceived to be the next level, which for me
was trying to get into Whole Foods and getting into
a regional grocery account.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
She went back to her tried and true method cold
calling and perseverance. In fact, she reached out to every
single category manager at Whole Foods.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
There was an employee in a Boulder, Colorado store who
I think took pity on me or saw something interesting
in my email and passed on to the appropriate contact.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
And finally, after months and months of outreach, Denise got
a yes.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I remember getting the email and my mom was visiting
and my husband was home, and I just remember screaming
and running through the apartment, like we got in, we
got in, we got in, We're going into Whole Foods.
This is it. Literally, Like the next week we got
a yes from Wegman's as well, which was actually going
to kind of triple the store account that we were in,
and so I was just super super excited. Quickly that
(08:32):
turned into Okay, now the work begins.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
The job to be done was to fill the demand
for all these new orders. It was a lot of work.
It also required more money.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I never said, okay, let's empty the savings account and
put everything into partake. It would be like, oh, I
thought the distributor would pay me this week, and I
have to buy one thousand dollars worth of sugar. Let
me pull one thousand dollars out of the savings account.
And it was that continuous drain. As I started to
see dwindling down, I started to think, oh shit.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
But then she had an idea.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
I remember reading an article about the founder of Tascha
Beauty and she talked about making the tough decision to
sell her engagement ring. And I remember being like, WOI la.
And I called my husband over and I was like,
what do you think about this? And oddly, I guess
he and I were both super supportive of it. And
I sent him to the Diamond District in New York
and he came home with several thousand dollars and that
(09:30):
continued to keep the business afloat.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Ben I got to jump in here. I know we
give a lot of sound advice on this show, but
I think tip number one, should we get a partner
who doesn't bet an eye when you suggest you sell
your engagement ring? To buy more sugar for cookies.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Right, I'll call my wife right now and let her know.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
I gotta say, Denise has my favorite type of small
business crisis.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
What crisis getting big too fast?
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Precisely the moment when you start to consider or in
Denise's cases, have no other choice but to consider mentor capital.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
All right, and I think you're cheating. I think you
know what happens next.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Yeah, let's hear it.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Denise knew it was time to get serious about fundraising.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
I think it was at the moment where I was like, Okay,
if I'm selling my engagement ring, clearly we need to
find some investors. I knew nothing about venture capital when
I started to raise money for Partake, and I think
that was the scariest part. It felt like people were
speaking a completely different language. I'd watched Shark Tank religiously,
(10:27):
but I still didn't fully understand it. So what I
immediately did was started reaching out to other founders who'd
raised capital to try to understand more about what they
would recommend in terms of like what types of capital,
what types of investors. And I realized quickly that it's
very much, for lack of better words, an old boys Club.
I feel like some of the language isn't that complicated.
(10:50):
It's almost like it's constructed to keep people out.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
But that didn't stop Denise.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
I literally was just like cold emailing people on LinkedIn.
A lot of those folks were allies. They were white
men who had done it before, who were willing to
explain the code to me and to give me confidence
to go into a room with the same like swagger
that they would and share why I deserved to get
this funding.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
She worked with her attorney to decide how to structure
her fundraise. Denise didn't know what her company was worth,
so she didn't want to put a price on the
shares just yet, so she decided to use a convertible
note for her fundraising. Denise needed to raise six hundred
thousand dollars, and she needed to do it fast.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
At that point, we were personally all tapped out. When
we started. We'd had a really nice savings cushion in
four oh one k's and my husband had a fantastic job.
In late twenty eighteen, he lost his job, and so
I started to feel the financial pressure like crushing me.
I was really worried. I was really anxious I was
really scared, and for me to continue to keep the
(11:54):
business going, I was going to need to raise more
capital and I was going to need to be able
to do it quickly.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
For a brief moment, Denise considered going back to her
corporate job to make more money, but she really didn't
want to do that. She knew if she could crack
the investor code, well, then they could really go for it.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
The angel investor circuit was going horribly for us. I
was not able to raise any additional capital, and it
was really demoralizing. I was getting no for a lot
of different reasons. Sometimes I would get a no because
this is a too niche of a category, or some
people would say, oh, this is too crowded, or there
would be a well come back when you get to
(12:34):
a million dollars in sales, and I would think, well,
I can't get to a million dollars in sales if
I don't have any more money. And so it was
really really frustrating, felt like this horrible, exhausting cycle that
wasn't going anywhere.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
She kept pitching, kept getting turned down. Then Denise remembered
an article she read about jay z Yes that Jay
z He was starting a venture fund.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
One of our dearest friends, who's also so an investor
in our business, works in the music industry. And I
remember saying, do you know jay Z? And he's like, no, no,
I don't. But he happened to know one of his
business partners and they were willing to take the call.
And I was like, you know, I'm going to be
in La soon. I'd love to get together, just hoping
they would agree to take a meeting, and they did so.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
She met with jay Z's partner and right from the
beginning this conversation it felt totally different.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
It was so different than the Angel pitches in that,
like all of the Angel chats typically started with what's
your gross margin, what's the tam And this conversation was like,
tell me about where you're from, tell me about why
you're building this business. And I walked away so excited
and so hopeful. And then in March of twenty nineteen,
we got a term sheet that Marcy Venture Partners was
(13:51):
interested in leading a seed round of funding for us.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
That conversation it changed everything for Denise.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
A lot of the groups that had said no, the
announcement that we'd closed the seed round came out. A
lot of those folks came back and they were like,
you know, it wasn't a good time when you pitched before,
but if you have room now, we'd love to invest.
And I realized, like, maybe there wasn't something wrong with
me in the business, and they said no. For another reason,
it gave me some confidence because of that, but practically
(14:19):
it also gave me the capital we needed to begin
to scale the business and to begin to hire people.
And we raise one million dollars.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
And soon she received a massive order from a retailed
giant Target.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
I read the email and I reread the email, and
I just like, stand up and sit down, and stand
up and sit down. I don't know what to do
with myself. And we had one other full time employee
in the business, so I immediately call her and I tell
her what's happened, and like, can we afford this? Can
we do this? Can we make this many cookies? And
she's like, I think so. And we needed to make
a decision that week, and we went for it.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
In May of twenty twenty, George Floyd was tragically murdered.
Tell us how that impacted your family and the business.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
For my family, you know, I think my husband living
as a black man in America and as a black family, like,
we felt so angered and saddened and wanted to channel
those feelings into something positive and into positive change. And
so there was some developments in the business. We launched
an HBCU fellowship program aimed at increasing diversity in the
(15:25):
food industry, and a lot of that came through kind
of our feelings about George Floyd's murder.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
And then on the.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Business front, we received an amount of inbound from potential investors,
potential retailers, influencers, press, unlike anything I could have ever imagined.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Surprisingly, twenty twenty was Partake Food's biggest year yet. They
started the year in three hundred and fifty stores and
ended in five thousand and got serious interest from investors.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
It's like a total one eighty from when I was
raising the seed round of funding, where I was like
begging for scraps, and I feel like I get to
be selective about who I want to partner with.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Since then, Denise has raised over twenty three million dollars
in capital for Partake Foods.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
When I think back about why I started the company,
it wasn't nutritional. It wasn't taste, it was the emotions.
Like so much of your childhood experience, so much of
your life experience is built in this, like emotions and
the camaraderie and the celebration that comes with enjoying food together.
And when I hear notes from our customers about how
they could have s'mores for the first time, or bacup
(16:32):
pie crust, or enjoy cookies at a birthday party, that's
the reason I started the business.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Today, Partake Foods has over ten products in their line
and is available in thirteen thousand stores across the country.
You can find them on multiple airlines and even in
Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Then she made some major strides, she really did. There's
so many parents and caretakers going through that it has
become a major concern for folks. So this is a
very real solution that she's provided.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
I think when there are challenges with food, trust becomes everything.
Because there are a lot of things you do once
a week, once a month, maybe even once a year.
Food's not like that. Foods multiple times a day. It's
always in our minds. It's a big part of our
lives physically, but it's also a big part of our
lives socially, So if you can't trust in the food
brands that you're buying and that you're consuming, it's a
(17:28):
real issue for consumers. And so you know, she had
a pretty big trust barrier she had to get up
over because that's a community that always has trust front
and center in their minds.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, as I said earlier, my younger brother has severe
food allergies and still does to this day. I mean
even as an adult, he has to be very, very
particular about what he eats. So I love that Denise
brought these products to the market and that they're products
that people can trust.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
I think there were some good lessons in there in
terms of how she brought her product to the market,
how she earned that trust over time, how she stepstoned
into it. And I think with something like this, you
can imagine a big food brand goes in and they
launch a big marketing blitz and it says this is safety,
and they have that brand equity already and they're able
to build that. She didn't have any of that, so
she had to earn that trust along the way, and
that's not an easy thing to do, but she sort
(18:12):
of scratched away at it until she got there. And
I think the authenticity of her story and where she
was coming from and how the product evolved gave her
the credibility to do that over time.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
And I like the term scratched away because that's really
how it felt like. She had to make little strides,
be open, and of course pivot. I thought that was
a really great part of her story, the fact that
she was able to make adjustments and she learned about
who her target market was and was open to her
business becoming something other than what she initially thought it
(18:41):
was going to be. I liked her openness and her flexibility.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
That's a really hard balance to get right, you know.
On the one hand, I hear people say, stay true
to what you originally set out to do, and be
true to your original product and your original audience, and
she kind of couldn't do that because it wasn't a
big enough market. Right. What she realized of her time
is she could be true to that while also catering
to a larger market. So she managed to throw that
needle really well because what she didn't do was compromise
(19:05):
on her original audience. She stayed with it. She kept
her products completely allagen free and stayed true to that,
but in a way that appealed to a broader audience
that grew her dressable market without compromising on the core
value proposition.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
And I think that the openness and her willingness to
learn and getting out there and listening to what people
were saying about her product, her seeing who was finding
the product to be interesting, I thought that was a
really great entrepreneurial move on her part.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
I think it was. The other thing I give her
a ton of credit for is capital pee patients. You know,
you can imagine when you start a business. Rather than
just quitting her job and running out there and having
to make it all go in a short period of
time and running to market, she took her time in
a couple of ways. She took her time by keeping
a job on the side for a while, which helped
her earn some money and helped her build the business
(19:53):
more methodically. She took her time getting her product right
before she went big and launched it and tried to
sell it beyond its capabilities, beyond her manufacturing capabilities. She
took her time from an equity perspective, which helped her
preserve her equity in the business. She didn't just go
out and raise a bunch of money that deluted her
down right away. So you know, as fast as she moved,
and she did move pretty fast, I think she found
(20:14):
a good balance between pace and patience, and I think
her patience has really paid off.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
It just makes me think about myself as a business
owner and other business owners and just how we learn
to strike that balance, how we learn to make the
appropriate adjustments, consider timing. There's so many things to think
about when you are as you're trying to grow. How
have you seen people strike that balance?
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I think the way that people are successful in that
is they find ways to prove product market fit. So
they find ways to prove that their product resonates with
the right kinds of customers in the right way, number one,
and to prove to themselves that they can meet the
supply side of the equation. You know, you have to
have both supply and demand to run a business, and
you have to have confidence in both before you press
(20:56):
the gas pedal. The people I've seen do it really well,
generally don't have it perfectly right the first time. That's
more luck than skill, and so they find ways to
d risk as they go. And I think that's a
guiding principle that small business owners can have, which is,
what can I do to de risk what I'm trying
to do while I learn? And the more you can
do to take risk out of the business while you
(21:16):
learn those lessons, the better off you're going to be
ultimately from the perspective of how much equity you have,
from the perspective of how much market credibility you have,
from the perspective of how much goodwill you have with
your partners. The more that you can de risk while
you learn those lessons, the more runway you're going to
have once you've learned them to go do things the
way you've learned is right.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
That is one way that Denise did that right with
having her job and holding on to her job. But
what I like about how she did this because a
lot of entrepreneurs do that. But what she did was
she was very consistent about it. She was diligent. Though
she had the security of her existing position, she still
was running this company and growing it steadily and learning
her market and taking major steps. So I like that, Yes,
(21:56):
she had reduced the risk, but she didn't do what
a lot of other people do and they're just starting out,
which is not take it as seriously as they should
as if they didn't have the security of the position,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, she took it seriously, there's no question. And look, ultimately,
if it's not your passion, you shouldn't quit your job
and do it because it's going to be all consuming
and it's going to be your life. So I think
the other place that her patient's paid off was in
her fundraising. You know, we've talked to a lot of
different companies about how they raise money, and some go
sort of alternative routes, some friends and families, some use
their own money, some use partners money. She went more
(22:28):
of a sort of classic outside investor route, and like
many people who go that route, it wasn't easy, right,
So she describes pitching twenty thirty, forty fifty times and
getting a whole bunch of no's before she gets to
a yes. I always tell people, if you're fundraising and
you're not walking out with feedback, you're not getting smarter
and your next pitch is not going to be any
better than your current pitch. And there's a few things
(22:48):
she tipped us off for that, I think are good
things to keep in mind always, you know, number one,
always be able to articulate how you're going to use
the money. You know, saying I need to raise money
for this company without being able to specifically articulate how
you're going to use that money and what kind of
return you expect probably isn't gonna win very many fans.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, she definitely was taking a long term approach, not
just seeking money right from wherever she could get it.
She was very intentional, and I liked that she was
very committed to her education, and she recognized that she
was entering an arena that was very unusual or different
for her, and she stressed that she had to learn
what to say, she had to learn the language, and
(23:26):
in addition to being patient, she took that part very
seriously as well.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
I'm not so sure about that. I think if you
listened in the early days, she just wanted the money.
And I can't really blame her for that, because she's
trying to get going and she's looking for funds, and
so if you listen to how she talks about it
at the end, she clearly had a much more evolved
way of thinking about partnering with someone from a fundraising
capability than she did in the early days. I think
she realized that the fundraising process was about finding the
right long term partner.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
But it worked out well for Denise. I mean, listaid
there are advantages to the nose. In addition to getting
substantive feedback from investors on your pitch, there's also the
men fit of time time to learn more about what
to do differently and not just what to change in
your pitch. So the nos were really a great opportunity
for her to learn.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Right. If you're not learning from your nose, then you're
not growing, Tanya, I want to share one last piece
of the interview with you. Denise had some advice for
current and aspiring small business owners that I really think
will resonate.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Well, let's hear it. It's okay to start small.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
I remember being at those local demos and trade shows
and I would have a five dollars tablecloth and a
stand that I made at home myself, and I would
be embarrassed. I would see other businesses that were much larger,
with much flashier signs, and think something's wrong with my business.
I felt the same when we weren't able to hire
early on. But I think it was that financial scarcity
(24:46):
that made me have to be much more scrappy. It
made me a stronger and better business person. And at
the time I kind of wished it away, but I
think the starting small was really important for my business.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Okay, and I have to ask, what is your daughter's
favorite part take prop.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
She takes the crunchy chocolate chip snack packs for lunch
every single day and I try to switch it up
for her sometimes and she's like, no, I want the
cookies every day.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Ben.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
I think her daughter is onto something. These crunchy chocolate
chip snack packs are delicious.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I can go for some right now.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And there's ice cream too. Where's ice cream? Where's ice cream?
I want to try it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It sounds like Partake Foods has a really exciting road
ahead of it, but a lot more to do.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Yes, so much more to do, so many more snacks
for Vivi to try and the rest of us too.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Thanks so much for listening to The Unshakables. If you
like this episode, please rate and review it. It'll help
our show find more listeners. On the next episode, after
a near death experience left him with no one to trust.
Real estate investor and developer Fukwan Bilal pivoted to reinvent
his business and his mindset. I'm Ben Walter and this
(25:54):
is the Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio
from iHeartMedia.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
The Unshakables is a pretty action of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
And we'll have
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