From Hot Dog Cart to Acquisition with Stacy Madison

Because as adults, we look at children and we expect them to walk into a room with people on the soccer team and they don't know anyone. We expect them to do, you know, all this shit outside their comfort zone. Well, I don't know why we forget to do that when we're adults.

Good afternoon, everybody. I am Jeff Duden and we are on the Homefront. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action and transform their lives, all the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the Homefront where it counts. If this sounds like you, check us out at Homefront Brands and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the Homefront. I will be looking for you here. And now we have an incredible opportunity to talk to Stacy Madison. Welcome, Stacy.

Thank you so much, Jeff. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, this is going to be so great. I've consumed so much of, of what you've got out there and I'm so excited about your story and it's just a, just another example of persistence and, you know, resolve and overcoming. I've been accused of being too stupid to fail. That was my situation. I'm not saying, you know, but like, just, I don't care how many consultants tell me this isn't going to work. We're doing this and we're going to push through. You know, success is through, it's not around, and it's certainly not going backwards. So. Stacy Madison is an entre American entrepreneur who gained recognition for creating Stacy's pita chips and Be Bold bars. Born and raised in Massachusetts and then moved to California to get a master's degree in social work, she and her boyfriend Mark were selling pita sandwiches from a converted hot dog cart in Boston and decided to solve the problem. What are we going to do with all this bread that we didn't sell today? So they decided to bake the leftovers into pita chips, adding a dash of parmesan or cinnamon. And at first they handed them out for free, but soon discovered people were happy to pay for them. And that was the kernel of an idea that led to an exit and a business that was worth the Pepsi Corporation $250 million. So that is just an incredible story and we're so excited to hear it. There's so much to unpack here. Maybe kick it off to you. Talk a little bit about early. What makes you you. You said that your father and your sister had influence on you. I know as you went through business life, have other people around your table and experiences that shaped you. But like going back to help some of our entrepreneurs that are maybe thinking about doing something for the first time and, or they're young in their careers and they're like, do I jump now? You know, speak to that if you don't mind.

One of the things is, you know, I went to school, I got my licsw. I was a clinical social worker. I, I really was. Did that for a while and I was one of those career changes people because everybody's like, oh well if you start out young and then you know that's the best time to do it cause you don't have anything to lose. But you have to also look at flip side. For all the people who have been working that are afraid to make that jump, you also have something to fall back on. So I kind of looked at it that way where hey, if I try something else, then at least I know A, I tried B, I wouldn't have any regrets about not doing it and not ever knowing if I could do something different. And see, I was like, hey, you know, what the hell, if I do fail, I could always go back to being a social worker. So, so get your education and study hard, get good grades.

Yeah. I mean so much of college is about learning how to learn.

Yeah.

And then, you know, so many people don't even do what they did in college, but they, they learned how to learn and kind of maybe where resources are, maybe made some connections and that kind of stuff. So you graduated and then what happened?

So, you know, I graduated from school, I went to work for my dad as a, as a clinical social worker because he had a private practice. For a while I was down in D.C. and I worked for organization, a group home that worked with pregnant, homeless, drug addicted women. And I loved that. But I only made like $22,000 a year. Now I'm dating myself. It was a long time ago. I worked for an organization and that shows just how know grossly underpaid. And that's why I went to work for my dad. Because you know, I could go into private practice and I could make a, a decent salary. But the problem was, although I loved the job in D.C. with those women, when I went into private practice and did marriage and family counseling and things like that, I made good money. But I was also working primarily in the evening and I had zero. Like, I'd go, I'd unlock my door, I'd see the patients I'd come home and I'd locked the door and I was just like, felt very isolated in that sense. So, you know, you gotta have that balance, which I did not have.

So you jumped from there and what did you jump into?

Into what? Did I jump? I kind of jumped into Bev and Mark. Can I say that or no?

I think you just did. And it's, it's all good.

Mark and I started seeing each other and he was doing his psychology. He was working at the VA hospital out in Hawaii. And then I was like, well, you know what, I should go live in Hawaii for a year. My dad was not thrilled, but I moved out to Hawaii with Mark and we lived in this like, real shithole. Yeah, it was so terrible. There were like massive cockroaches and we didn't have a kitchen, so we had a plug in walk that we washed in the showers periodically. When you showered, there'd be like rice in the drain and terrible.

So no sink in this place?

Well, the wok wouldn't fit in the sink.

Oh, I see.

It was just this little thing, so you had to wash it in the tub. It all contributes to who you are today.

That's the important thing. You didn't end up where you are by mistake. And you know, there's entrepreneurs like you have a different view of risk. If you start with little, then everything you have. And I bet you, I bet you're big on gratitude because I know that you're very generous. If you start with little, everything is a bonus. And everything in life, it just feels like, man, I can't believe that this happened to me, but you made it happen to you. So you're here, you take a flyer, you go out to Hawaii, which is great, I believe, and I encourage my kids. Everybody needs an adventure in life and you need to take it when you can. And if there's not a good reason to say no, you say yes and you just roll with it and you go. And so you're out in Hawaii, you're stepping in rice in the drain and you get involved with a startup in the food business.

I was working for this company who actually is probably kicking themselves right now because they fired me.

Well, you're probably, you're unemployable.

So I, so I was working for this, this restaurant and I kind of worked my way up from, you know, waitress to head waitress to assistant manager. And then they were opening up from this restaurant. They were opening up a tiny surf theme place and they asked if I wanted to go there. And I was like, yeah, it sounds like way more fun than the, you know, the restaurant. And this is. So we worked on it from the ground up. And in Hawaii, you really have to work two jobs to, you know, you need two paychecks to afford to just live in a place where you have rice in the drain of your shower.

Yeah.

And so we opened this place. We did the grand opening. They said, listen, you. You know, we're working crazy hours. If it gets open and it's successful, then we're going to give you a bonus. And so it was. We were bringing in money, like cash. We were stuffing it in beer boxes and sticking it down because we couldn't fit it all in the register. It was crazy. We had all these surfers there, and they're signing their surfboards, we're hanging them on the walls. The radio stations are there. It was real. It was great. Then afterward, I met with the manager, the gm, and I'm like, well, you know, let's talk about the bonus. How do you feel about the opening? You feel it went well? He said, let me talk to the owners. Let me talk to the owners. And after a couple of these meetings, we sit down and he says, I'm going to have to let you go. I bust out crying. I don't know what else to tell you. I don't know. I mean, you want to keep your. Your emotions intact, and you want to be like, okay, it's okay. You know, oh, I'm going to handle this professionally. And I was like, I'm going to start b. I was like, I'd never been fired. I had never. I had never worked so hard. I could not believe it. I went home. I told Mark. Mark was like, we're going to kill him. And, you know, because we really wanted to be a part of it. And honestly, I learned at the moment, you can't see what you learned. You can look back on it later when you're out of the soup, and you can look back at it and you can say, I learned how to open a place from startup. I learned how to be a good boss. Like, if they had just been honest with me and said, you know, we need you for eight months to a year, I would have said, that's perfect. Then I'll go back home, and that'll be my one year in Hawaii. You know, I learned a lot from that experience. And most of all, I learned that if I could work so hard and if I could do it for somebody else, then, yes, I can do it for myself.

Fantastic lesson. So you're, you're unemployed and you were there. How long after that did you guys leave Hawaii and head back to Boston?

Well, then I was like, oh, well, we can do it for ourselves here. So we started cooking in our apartment and we lived in this hot. Well from this time we moved out of the shithole and we moved into this high rise apartment and we had this deal where we could get discounted rent if we cooked for our roommate. And then we were like, well, why don't we just cook for the whole building? And so we kind of started this thing called condo cuisine. And we would hang up a flyer, put it in the lobby, and we would tell people to just fax us, fax us if you'd like your dinner delivered to the building. Right. We could do it in this building. There's five other buildings. Then we could expand and, you know, you start playing the calculator game and we could really make a career of this. So we started doing this and then we very quickly got shut down because we were just making it in the apartment and we didn't have a commercial kitchen and blah, blah, blah. One day we got a, not a fax, but a phone call that said, hi, where are you working at? That was the end of it. But again, you know, it started to take off and we were onto something. And so we said, well, why don't we take the same concept and do something like this in Boston or why don't we open up a place in downtown Boston? And without the money to do it, we had no, no nothing to start with. And so we ended up just buying a food cart. We converted the food cart into, you know, kind of like a deli counter and we put fresh tomatoes and the front plexiglass and made it all look fresh and healthy and, and we made healthy roll up sandwiches. And at the end of the, you know, we always had all this fresh bread. We always had to keep extra fresh bread because we had to have excess inventory because if you run out of bread, you can't make your roll up. And so that's what we did. We made the pita chips with the excess inventory of bread every day. So. And then we started handing them out for free to people standing in line and, you know, you know the rest of the story.

Yeah, absolutely. So you're in the financial district in Boston at this point in time.

Yes.

Okay. So you're working in there, people are lining up. You're starting to get a name as a hallmark of a great. Because you Know if you read like scaling up like business is leadership, marketing and cash, they say, you know, so you went to pitched Macy's at this point and you said, let's do Stacy's at Macy's, Stacy's at Macy's. And you pitched that, I'm good at.

This, I'm good at that kind of stuff.

And you pitch that. And then two, you know, when you had done your commercial, when you've done your condo cuisine business too, you'd started doing simple math. I love simple businesses that have simple math. All right, this is what we make on a sandwich. If we can sell this many, we can make this and we can make that. And so now you've, you know, you've built a business plan whether you knew it or not. Mm. You've had success now twice in building businesses, and now you're, you're thinking bigger. So you're starting to, like, see, like, if you look backwards behind your success, which, by the way, like, it was, it was basically Stacy's was a ten year run. Right? I mean, you, that's amazingly fast.

It's amazingly fast.

It is amazingly fast to accomplish what you accomplished. So how did it, you know, how did your thinking change at that point and said, I'm, we're making a living. And we set out to make a living and to pay our rent and to live and have fun. When did you just start to say, wait a minute, I see a vision here that can be bigger than that?

Maybe some of the people around me saw, but I did not see it getting to the size that it. Like, if somebody said to me, oh, you're going to be running a company that sells $60 million in snack food a year, I'd be like, that's not me.

No.

So that piece of it I did not see. And I was always one of those people that had great admiration for people who could think that way, for people who are like, okay, this is what I want to do. This is the plan. This is how we lay it out. And it's just not the way that I roll. Everybody was like, well, what about selling? What about an exit strategy? What about, we didn't have it? Like you said, we built the company because we loved what we were doing and wanted to make a living doing what we love to do. But eventually, you know, it comes to a point where, like, toward the end, the company was more dictating what we wanted to do than us dictating it to the company.

When you decided to kind of go for it and start Producing greater volume of products. You went and got an SBA loan.

Mm. We borrowed $30,000 from friends and family, and we use that as collateral to get a loan.

And then what'd you use that for? Do you rent a building and put a production line together? I mean, I'm just interested to know how you figured. Figured that stuff out.

Yeah, I mean, we literally piecemealed our manufacturing together. We went from baking chips by hand and bagging them by hand and cutting them by hand. Mark's bicep was like, great bicep. This is massive. Everybody's like, well, well, how do you figure out how to manufacture and build this whole production? Well, look, if you got a bicep that's 4 inches bigger on your right arm than on your left, then you want. Then you know, well, I need something to cut this. Right. And you go out and you. You tore other chip plants, and you're like, oh, this is how they cut it. Oh, this is how they cut that. Oh, this is how they cut carrots for Campbell's Soup.

Yeah.

And. Well, maybe we can cut our bread like that. Yeah, and that's actually what we did was we ended up with a. One of those cutters, and we respaced the blades. So instead of cutting that tiny little carrot in the soup, it cut the.

Bread, and then you started distributing to, like, a whole food, like a Trader Joe's. I think Trader Joe's was a big.

Oh, it was Bread and Circus at the time.

Okay.

And then Bread and Circus was bought by Whole Foods. We were part of the growth of the natural food industry at the same time, because the product was just innately natural. I mean, we owe. We didn't use. It's not like we went out to seek this ingredient or that ingredient. You know, it was. It was pita bread, a little bit of healthy oil, and, like, the cinnamon sugar was naturally milled cane sugar. We used imported parmesan cheese or we used stuff. Like, we just use great stuff, and it aligned with. With what they were doing at the same time. And in. And in the beginning, we didn't start there. We started in kind of more gourmet food stores, and we ended up transitioning to do more in the natural food arena.

Yeah, so you started in 96 with the truck, and then you're moving kind of into the 2000s for the audience, which would be kind of where a lot of the healthy food market was really starting to form and trying to. Trying to have healthy options. So you're moving into that. You Got this great business going on and you had some setbacks. There was a storm that kind of blew up your factory a little bit.

A micro burst.

Yeah.

Who the hell, what the hell is that? It looked like a torpedo came and struck the warehouse. At this point, we were in about almost a 300,000 square foot facility.

Wow.

And it knocked out a good 20% of the building. It was terrible. That's what being an entrepreneur is kind of about, is that, you know, you just out of left field, something happens that you can't control.

Every day something goes wrong.

Every day. Yeah. And I think it's just like a test of your skill set, your problem solving, crisis intervention type skillset. It's those like, it's those big things. But you know, how do you get so big so fast and do it so well? What it comes down to is the tiny little decisions that you're making every day that kind of add up to that.

Right.

So yes, everybody has, has that roller coaster and the stuff thrown at them not to ignore the day to day things, work decisions that you had to make every single day. But you know, how do you handle those situations? Your relationships, your. When your factory blows up, your inventory goes bye bye. You know, you better have a good relationship with the Trader Joe's, the Costco's, the whole Foods of the world, or they're just going to be like, okay, we'll take somebody else.

Yeah. And decisions are so cumulative. The compound effect of bad decisions has an impact on the velocity and I mean the quality of your life, the velocity of your business. And then also the other way, I mean, if you're, if you get on a good run of making good decisions that work out, confidence, if you have investors, confidence by your partners, confidence by your staff, the whole thing, right? It's. You have to be so, so objective, man, and so pure when you're, when you're at the head of something like that. And they have to, they have to know that you're making decisions with confidence. And the fact that you were able to navigate that business to the size that it was so quickly, that's real game. Like real, like that is game right there.

So you say that so much more eloquently than I did.

I have an advantage. I wrote a book called Discernment, which is the business athlete's regimen for a great life through better decisions. So we've got a copy on the way to you.

There we go.

The reason I'm so big about decisions is because I've made so many bad Ones, I mean, like, I mean, when I look back at the failures, it's like, well, that was avoidable, jackass. Like, you could have easily seen that coming if you would have just taken a second. And I mean, we carry the weight of our decisions like on our back for our whole life. A lot of our listeners are in the franchise industry. They own franchise brands. We've got a lot of M and A activity in our space. So even at the franchisee level, people are buying boxes. Franchising, you know, we think is one of the greatest wealth creation business models ever invented. There's so much is franchised in this country. And this concept of an exit, you're tap dancing on rice in a shower in a shithole apartment. And then the next thing you know, I mean, relatively short. You're going through this whirlwind. You're probably bootstrapping along the way, because I don't think you took a lot of capital if you couldn't afford it, you did without it, or you found another way to get it done. And then all of a sudden, I assume it's an inbound offer. I don't know if you ran a process, but Pepsi Cola comes and says, you know, here's here for you, your partner, and anybody that you care to include is $250 million.

So it was when we were approached by multiple conglomerates at once. That is when we had to sit down and take a hard look at what we were doing. What we're the, you know, the kind of the state of the business at that point and the state of each of us in our personal lives. I mean, Mark and I were married, you know, we were friends, business partners, married, divorced. I went off and had kids on my own. We've maintained being business partners. And I had two toddlers and you know, and he, you know, was. Was hoping to do more travel and, you know, so we kind of take a look at all of that and say, you know, and at that point decide, like, should we still be holding on to this? And is this company, you know, still what I love to do every day, is it allowing me to do the things that I want to do with myself, with my children or, you know, with Mark, with his friends or whoever, whatever, you know. Yeah. So that's when we decided, well, maybe if this company and that company are interested, maybe there'd be other companies interested. Maybe we should put together a team. So we put together a team of accountants and investment banker and we started interviewing all the lawyers chose who would, who we related to the best. Honestly, who was a believer. Right. And that's when we went out and we put the company for sale. It was. It was such an easy choice for us with the investment bank team because we had this no ties allowed kind of thing. We had it posted on the front door. And, you know, some. Some of the guys would come and they would be like, oh, in their suits and be looking at each other like, what do we do? What do we do now? Okay, take your time. Okay. Stuffing it in their bags. And then another one walked in and who had been in probably, you know, 45 massive bakeries all across the country and knew, like, the equipment and the machines and oh, and kind of spoke our language and was really willing to put themselves out there and said, okay, well, we think we can get you this much money and this is what we charge and this is our commission. And then we said, well, oh, and if it is above that, maybe you should get double the commission. If you get like an extra 20 or 15 million more, then hell, we'll pay way more, that kind of thing. And so we kind of just spoke that language. That's how we moved forward. And you know what? We didn't take the highest offer. The highest offer had earnouts and had some clauses in there that we were just like, well, taking a step back. That doesn't get us to where we take the money aside, like, where do we want our life to be? So that's why it was. And we did feel like that being the leader of Fritos health and wellness initiative was a good place for the company to be.

Yeah. So you said so many really wise things there. So, number one, don't sell your company yourself. Get it. Get a prop, get an investment banker. Get proper representation. Run a process, make them compete for it. Right. You'll never. You can't hold somebody in the seat, you know, negotiating a deal yourself. These people are experts. They're going to. They're going to hurt you. And then the other thing is, which you don't hear people talking about enough, is it's probably more about the terms than it is about the absolute price. I see people get really enamored when they have their company and they get this really big price. But like, there's this earn out and then there's a, you know, on the. On the next sale, there's a preference and all of these types of things where actually, like, you got to stand on one foot and, you know, spin two basketballs to get the money that you're looking for. Other than, you know, get the certain money now and because you went back and worked for the company for a little bit after close. How did you find that?

Yeah. And you know, when you, when like you said, you have to spend 2. Do a lot of all of that at once. I mean, selling the company is a full time job. It is more so. I mean, you look at how hard those investment bank people and lawyers and accountants and everybody on that team look at how hard everybody is working. Imagine, you know, you can't do that yourself and run a company.

You know, it's very difficult for founders to go into corporate. I mean, it's just the decision criteria is different. It's a change. Right. I am unemployable. I. When I sold my business, we had an executive team and all that. And they wanted. That was the last day I ever talked to those people. Was on the phone when the wires, where everybody was signing off, which is a great day. Right. You're on this phone. I had my kids and my wife around the table and 27 people sign off on this deal. And then the phone goes dead. And they looked at me, they didn't ask me a word. I didn't even. I just like, I said nothing. And they're like, is it done? And I'm like, I don't know. I, I guess that's it. You know, everybody said yes. It was New Year's Day. They all got up on New Year's Day to do the deal.

Yeah. And you know what? It comes through as a wire. They don't show up at your door with one of those big, giant checks.

Big checks. Yeah. No, it just silently slides into your account.

Goes into your account. Okay. I guess that's it.

All right. So now it's in your account. Right. You realize now that you can do anything you want in the world. And for a lot of people, for me as well, it's a very uncomfortable, untethered. You're kind of walking on your, your light on your feet because you're like, holy crap, man. I can like, I can go buy that. I can go buy this. I can get like. Yeah, but like, what do you do? How, how did that, how did that land for you?

Yeah, it's like that. What do I do now? You know, and, and it, and it didn't hit me right away because I still was with Stacy's for a little while.

Yeah.

I really was only contracted for 20 hours a year. I ended up going in every day. Going in every day. I thought I was helping with the transition. And honestly, I think I was probably just getting in the way. And it puts you in a very powerless position because, you know, people would, like customers or employees or, you know, anybody who came to me thinking that I could just make those, like, decisions, then I was not in a position to do that anymore because it was a different type of process. And so this whole situation was really hard. So then I said, you know what? Well, I'm all, I only need to be here 20, 20 days a year. If they need me, I can fly back from anywhere. So I took my kids, I went to Europe for five months. I rented places, I opened the doors and I said, hey, anybody who wants to go to Europe and visit, this is where we're going to be. And so people came and visited and, you know, it was really nice. And I was on the phone, you know, there was something going back and forth. They tried to renegotiate my salary at some point because they had had movement in the top of Pepsi and people looking at stuff and why are we doing this or that. And then. So you tried to renegade, renegotiate salary. And then I said, I was on the phone at like 3am with my lawyer, and Mike was like, why are you doing this? Yeah, you can just walk away. And why are you sitting here? Why are you talking to me at three o' clock in the morning? Why? You know, and so I ended up basically terminating my agreement at that point, you know, after the first year. And then again, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And it seems like every time I ask myself that question, I travel.

Oh, okay.

And it really does help me, you know, after I had had. I had breast cancer. I had double mastectomies. It was right before I opened the juice bar. I upped my kids and we went for, you know, another five or six months. Went to Southeast Asia. I homeschooled them from there.

Oh, wow.

And we went all around. Nine countries, basically, you know, backpacks, guest houses, ended up coming home, putting my house on the market the next day, moving to a neighborhood that was much more neighborhoody for my kids. And then again, my kids just left for college. And what's the first thing I did was I sold everything I bought when I sold the company and I moved into an apartment.

Did you.

It's not like I have, you know, I mean. Oh, please. I didn't move back to the shithole with the rice and the.

Yeah, yeah, you might have a doorman.

I'm in a very. I'm in a very nice brownstone in Boston and I have a place in New York and Miami. And so it's, you know, it's very nice, but it's more, you know, where I want to be now. It's the same thing. It's what am I going to do when I start the company? What am I going to do when I sell the company? What am I going to do when my kids leave for school? It's like everybody has this, everybody goes through it, everybody has their coping mechanism with how they handle it. And I think for mine it's just traveling and spending, spending time in other places and, and if I can, taking my kids to poverty stricken nations because it's the best thing for them.

One of the big things for me is what kind of example do I want to set for my kids? Well, your girls are freshmen in college now. So in 2006, they were what, three, four years old when you sold the business.

Yeah. And then they were 9 or 10 when we went to Asia.

Yeah. So what a great opportunity. Like they're not tied up in sports or whatever. They chose to do one thing. You have, when you have money, you have some options. Right. The world is, is full of options. What's another interesting thing here? So I'm going to say one thing about the exit. I shared this with you previously, but not on the, not on the show here. But my investment bank told me after I sold the business, nobody gives their employees this much of an exit. And they said, you know, you're going to regret doing this. Nobody does this. And I had nine people that have been with me 20 years and I had a call center and you know, we, we gave something to everybod, to the, to the last person standing. Even some contractors that have been with us 1099 that have been with us for a while, just because I felt it, it was the right thing to do. And I mean, you were younger than I when you sold, but I was 50. And I'm like, I'm going to go again. And I need a good reputation. And I want people to say, if you do something with this guy, it's worth doing because he's not going to tell you one thing and do something else at the end of the day, which I think is a lot of times people do it because greed jumps up and it's like, wow, that's a lot of money to give away. I could, you know, I could do something with that. And I heard that. I mean, you did the same thing. You had 300 employees.

Yeah. And a lot of those. Most of those were subcontracted through an agency. So, you know, we gave away a huge chunk of money. I do not regret any one penny that any person got.

That was my question. That was my question. Do you regret any of it?

Never. And honestly, I. Now I'm in. I'm. I started a company again. I started b. Bold Bars.

Yes.

And even companies I've been involved in before then the people I worked with at the Pita Chip company have come with me.

Yeah.

And some of them did well, and some of them did not do well. And. And I was like, I feel so bad. I feel so bad. And I'm mad you quit your job. And I. And they're like, look, I did it because I did it myself. I made my own decisions. You don't have to be that. Feel responsible in that sense. But then I started to be bold, and I asked again, and guess what? Those same people are by your side.

That's exactly right.

And we love working together.

Yeah.

And we love working together. And even though it's hard, we're like, we're going to make this fucking work. I don't care that we don't. We don't care that there's a damn pandemic. It's just like having another fire or another microburst. Right. Let's just get through it. And how. What are we going to do? And when are we going to pivot? What are we going to. You know, But I don't regret giving away any of the money. And we even. We went and found people and handed them wads of cash because that's what. That's all that they could take. And so we went into, like, neighborhoods and found them, because the money that we were giving to one particular dirt bag that they worked for, we knew would never get to the them.

That's right. Well, it's. It's rare to do. But also, you know, we. We go through our whole life trying to find that small group of people that we can truly trust. And I know you found that in mar. You know, you got married, you went through a divorce, but I still. I'll roll with you.

Through all that we went through, there was never a moment that I doubted. You know, I mean, when we decided to leave the business, we left. Right. But there was like, we were, for the most part, in the life or the growth of the company, especially during the hockey stick phase, we were equally committed. That was our first born. You're not going to leave your kid. Right. So that was our firstborn with. And, you know, we didn't have kids, and that was. So that was for us.

Yeah, for sure. So now the kids are off, and I don't know exactly when you started Be Bold, but these are awesome.

Thank you.

And I love the name because one of the. One of my things that I do talks about is speaking a bold and powerful future into existence. So the word bold is a big part of what I do. So I. I want to know, like, I'd love to know when you chose to brand this, like, why did you do B bold?

If you were to ask me, like, what's my bold? You know, what does it stand for? B O L D. Right. For me, it's be yourself outside of your comfort zone. Little by little, do it again.

Oh, man.

And I get that honestly, from my children because as adults, we look at children and we expect them to walk into a room with people on the soccer team and they don't know anyone. We expect. Expect them to do, you know, all this shit outside their comfort zone. Well, I don't know why we forget to do that when we're adults. So be yourself outside your comfort zone, which is really, you're pushing yourself little by little, and then just keep doing that again. And so for me, that's bold. You had asked, if I had one sentence to make an impact on someone's life, what would that be? And it's a great question because I'm like, first of all, you have to accept the fact that maybe you did have an impact on someone, people's lives in a positive way. So I. I would say believe in your vision and take action with boldness.

Believe in your vision and take action with boldness. 100%. That's wonderful. So do you have the same trajectory with this new brand? Or where are you with the Be Bold bars?

So we are selling 100% online now.

Okay.

You know, you can go to beboldbars.com use code Stacy. We pivoted out of the grocery stores during COVID because of the pandemic. We really took a hard hit. We had launched a month before, purchased all this inventory. We got into all these stores, we delivered all the product, we manufactured enough so that we had enough to restock, and then all the stores shut down. So we had three years of trying to figure out what we're going to do, and now we decided, you know, we're going to take the same money that we were investing in the grocery and we're going to put it into online. We're going to see how, how we can do with this. It's very different concept. I'm not used to. I don't have very many followers.

Really?

Well, should that be my Identity?

Yeah.

I'm 58 years old with like, if I'm talking to my niece about followers, I'm like, gee, how do you get so many?

My. One of my most commonly used phrases is, how do I post this? I don't know how to use these things.

You know, you got to surround yourself with a bunch of really young people.

You do, you do. But they're out there. Like, there's creatives and they love this stuff and they live in it. So, yeah, you know, you just, you be the star and you let, you let them press the buttons and I think you're going to be just fine.

Oh. So can I tell you? Be bold. Started in the juice bar and there were all of these. We were selling all of the bars, all the different types of bars, and everybody always asks, which one tastes the best? Which one tastes the best? And you're kind of hard pressed to answer that about the bar category. And so went into the. Back in the kitchen and we mixed together nuts, nut butters, chia, little bit of wildflower honey. And we mixed it, we pressed it, we packed it, and we chilled it. And that is how they were born.

Wow.

So that's kind of where it started. It wasn't any, you know, oh, we're going to go launch a product, we're going to make a bar. We're going to. So. So we had the product then. And then we had to go and figure out how to make it just like the pizza chips.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, it starts with the, the flavor. And I'm not just saying this because you're on. That's probably the best tasting bar I've ever had. And I didn't intend to eat two. I meant to eat one. It went too fast. I said, I got to have another one.

It's great. You all, you had, you had, not you. And you had some nut butter, you had some nuts, you had like all these things that you wouldn't have gone to your cabinet and said, I'm hungry. I'm going to pull out this, these five or six ingredients.

No. And it's funny thing is, it's like I read the ingredients. I'm like, I love, I love that, I love that, I love that, I love that. And I'm like, this is going to be fantastic. And it was, you know, we've both lived without money, and now we've lived with money. All things being equal, I prefer the latter. But building a company with resources, you've got resources now. You gotta be careful with what you do. You gotta look at it objectively and say, all right, yeah, I can fund this, but should I fund it? And that kind of thing. Are you making different decisions about be bold than you had to make, or can you. Can you find that you can accelerate faster or date what does Damon John says? The power of broke, Right? I mean, sometimes you. You don't make the best decision. You can get sloppy if you're overfunded and just be like, well, let's try that with that hundred thousand, or, let's try that with that, and if it doesn't work out, it's not going to kill you. But that's a. That's a trap to fall into. How are you. How are you, like, making decisions? Are you that. Are you disciplined around that kind of stuff?

Yeah, you just lose more like, I'm in the business with my brother. We said, okay, we're going to put in this much money. And then Covid hit, and then we had to either close or go revisit that decision. We looked at Covid, we said, okay, well, this, the pandemic, we can't count that. And so we took what we invested as a loss for that period, and we decided to just basically start again, and hopefully someday we'll make back that money. But right now, it's very hard, you know, not to, oh, I'm just going to do this. I'm just going to, you know, so you have to make your decision in the beginning of how much you're going to go in with. And we habitually make. Ask ourselves the question with every decision that we make. Is it going to turn into a sale? Jeff asks stacy, will you do my podcast? And I'm like, well, is it going to get me more exposure? Is more exposure going to help sell product? Sure.

We have dozens of listeners.

Yes, dozens. There we go. So you have to ask yourself, no matter how much money you have in or not, you know, you have to kind of always look toward, is this decision the best decision that you're making for the company? Is it going to turn into the sale? Is it part of the. Part of the program?

So I promise you that this will be heavily promoted. We'll put dollars behind this. And yes, yes, this will turn into at least one sale.

You're going to buy some to Cornimal, North Carolina.

So the answer is yes. But this has been such a fun hour. I was so much looking forward to this and was not disappointed in the least in the time that we got to spend. You're just an incredible inspiration. And your story, it can inform so many people in their journeys. And I really, I encourage everyone to be bold and inside of what they choose to do. Stacy, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Jeff. Take care.

All right, see you.

Bye. Bye.