From Eswatini to the World | Building a Challenger Food Brand with Purpose

What do you do when events beyond your control hit sales in your fastest-growing market? How should you react when an expert tells you your brand looks safe? Why would you launch a chilli brand in countries where apparently no one eats chilli? I'm joined by Claudia Castellanos, the founder of Black Mamba Foods. Originally from Colombia, she worked in Italy, then went to Eswatini for 4 months of volunteering, 16 years ago and never went home. She now runs a global hot sauce brand from one of the smallest countries on earth, and she talks candidly about what her real point of difference is, why she refuses to put an elephant on her labels, and how she decides whether she should launch a new product. I'm Karen Green, and this is the Friday Accelerator.

Claudia, welcome to Friday Accelerator podcast. I guess the first thing for our audience is what's the elevator pitch for Black Mamba Foods?

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Karen. Black Mamba is a purpose-driven brand from Southern Africa in Eswatini that creates and distributes hot condiments and hot sauces that are good for you, good for the planet, and good for the communities we work with.

That's a nice, a nice elevator pitch. And what made you start it? Because you're not obviously South African or Southern African or Eswatini. So tell me the story.

So very quickly, like you rightly point out, I'm Colombian. I studied in Europe. I did a stint of corporate life in Italy after my master's. And when I was there, I got some sort of a crisis of consciousness and started looking for something slightly more rich for me that would give me some purpose. And that brought me to apply for volunteering in Africa. And I was given a very good opportunity in a social business in Eswatini. which is back then was used to be called Swaziland. So I didn't think it twice. I arrived here where I live now in Eswatini to do volunteering with a social business. It was supposed to be 4 months and it's been now 16 years that I live here. It all started looking for purpose. When I arrived here, I realized very quickly that I didn't wanna leave, that there was a lot of opportunity to work with women. That was something that has always been very close to my heart and also for rural development. So Black Mamba just started because I wanted to just sort of like move the business model that I had seen working with handcraft businesses, where you work with rural communities, where you have a value chain composed of grassroots producers, and move that, that I've seen on handcrafts into the food part. So just that we could work with farmers, and that's the beginning of Black Mamba.

Chile is an important part of Aswatini Swazi food culture?

I would say it is, it's probably not seen as something incredibly important in the sense that it's so inherent to everything that they do every day that people just kind of like, they're used to it, but they were never used to different type of chilies. You know, when you talk chilies here or in other countries in Southern Africa, it's almost like something that spice your food, you know? And usually it's just mashed up or cut chilies with a little bit of oil and salt, and that's it. So they were always been part of it. And what we realized is, and why we decided to go with chilies, it was also a crop that would grow very easily and very well in Eswatini, but also is what you call a high-value crop. So when you work with smallholder farmers, you need to make sure that they get a very good price or a decent income out of growing little. And if you have good prices, it works more, much better. So that was one of the decisions of why we decided to do something with chilies.

No, it's, it's interesting because I know another part I've worked in with, with people from Western Africa and hot sauce is really part of the culture, but it's definitely not as much as in other parts of Africa where people would literally drink a bottle of our hottest chili sauce without any issue.

It doesn't happen in Southern Africa, but they do like spice in their food. Most of the people, most of the time.

I think Canada are the worst where it comes to chili, chili levels.

But you build endurance. You know what I've noticed? And as I always jokingly said, that we have a captive market because we do. Once you try food with chilies, there's no way back.

Yeah.

And you start building endurance and you start always wanting to do something spicier. And that's the thing that you notice in the world market. The condiment, hot condiment sector and the chili and the hot sauce sector is expected to grow constantly at 6 or 7% per year, no matter what.

And I used to have Being very British, Heinz tomato ketchup with my breakfast, with like scrambled eggs. Now I have Sriracha. I should have Black Mamba, but I can't get it here. Can I get it here?

No, in France, south of France?

Yeah. Not yet. And let's be completely honest, the French do not like heat in their food.

They don't, but there is growing as well, you know? So it's like what I'm saying, usually when you start with a country that is very small and you are there first, you have the possibility to grow your brand like we did with Norway. Nobody would expect Norwegian people to eat chilies, but we are actually growing very healthily there. So France would be another thing to look into for sure.

So where are you in your business? What stage is Black Mambra at?

So basically I would say if you actually look in proper stages for business, we would be in the scaling stage where you have set up already a decent foundation. You've done things organically. And at some point we were very lucky in 2020, we attracted capital. We had our first seed capital investment from an American VC, and that just literally pushed us to start thinking beyond what we had done until then, which was mostly fair trade markets. The type of business that we have would be actually very suited for that. So, we started with that, and then we started thinking, let's just move towards more organized retail. And then scaling means obviously scaling your production. So, how do you actually improve your volumes, your processes, also your markets? So for us, it went from going from fair trade to retail. And we do from the beginning, we had from the beginning exported to several countries. So I think the strategy has changed a little bit from trying to just keep on accumulating countries and rather trying to deepen the presence in the countries where we're working really well. So that is where Black Mamba is now. It's not easy.

And a very tiny team. I know, I know, I completely understand.

Here we are.

And, and so what are your key countries? Yeah, I know you're here in the UK.

Yeah.

UK is one that we are very willing to keep on growing. So we have certain presence, mostly online that has been very, it's been very good, but not growing at the speed that we would like it. We, I think we're going to focus more this year with hopefully more listings in brick and mortar. Supermarkets. South Africa continues to be a very good market for us. We have, I guess, obviously proximity helps a lot. So we are listed in quite a few supermarket chains. We've actually tackled as well also other retail spaces that are not necessarily food related, which has been really cool because it's a very competitive space. We've noticed not only in South Africa, also in the UK. And the third country that is growing really nicely for us that was completely unexpected as a market for the type of business that we are is the UAE. And I think the UAE is just because we found a really good distributor and partner, and also because the UAE market is always very open to innovation and to new products. So it was surprisingly easy. And I don't wanna say that because I don't wanna jinx it, but it's been a market that has been growing very nicely for us.

And how has it been since, since the war? Because certainly I've worked with a couple of, or talked to a couple of businesses who are really struggling because Dubai is He's not, and I know UAE isn't just Dubai, but how are you finding it?

We spoke a lot to my distributor at the beginning and the first week after the war started, I just asked him, how are you first? And how are the sales? And he said, down by 45% immediately. And I was like, uh, but the reality is that he has noticed that most of the people that really just went out of Dubai as soon as the war started have been coming back, you know, like the schools reopened, the many expats that were a big part of our market, to be honest. I mean, I guess when you are selling at Dubai, you're not selling mostly to Emiratis, you are literally selling to everyone else from the world that is living in Dubai. So what we've realized is that they have stabilized. He invests a lot in terms of marketing and brand presence. So we've got to the level where we were pre-war. So now obviously the big sort of next milestone is like, okay, we're pre-war. Now let's just go higher than what we were.

Well, I mean, that's quite a growth path though, isn't it? Refinding that 45%.

Exactly. We have, we have a secret weapon there, but let's see. I mean, it's not really secret, you know, we rebranded recently, but we haven't relaunched the rebrand in other countries other than South Africa. So, a big thing for us to kind of like push the brand further is launch the rebranded brand in the UAE and also in the UK, for instance. So, we're planning that to be done probably around October, just because of the timeline to just finalize all the product that my distributors have of the current branding. So, we don't— there will be, of course, a certain overlap, but what we want is that that will give a new sort of like breath of fresh air for the brand and a big push with sales as well.

And what was, what was the purpose behind the rebranding?

First of all, it was sort of a wake-up call at one of our trade shows when I was talking to a buyer that we really wanted, and she was very candid and very direct. And she said, would you be willing to make your brand look more African? And I was just almost kind of like when they slap you in the face, it's like, what are you talking about? I mean, everything of it says Africa and it's in Africa and it supports Africans. But then we realized, Oh, you know, it's that sort of thing that you're so used to your brand that you haven't really seen that point of view. And then I realized it doesn't say Africa anywhere besides saying Black Mamba, that is obviously an African snake. And on the same trade show, I had someone else. I just started being very doubtful and I asked a brand expert that just happened to pass in front of our stand. And I said, give me honestly what you think about our brand. And he said, it looks safe. And then I was just like another knife through the heart. And then that started—

That's someone saying your baby's not attractive or clever.

Exactly. It looks safe. It's like, what sort of comment is that? It's just like, it's just so blah. So I started really thinking about it. And then that's when you start doing the introspection of like, let's just look at how the branding of products have evolved on shelf. And what I realized is most of the challenger brands are very playful. You know, there's lots of color, there's like fun names, brands, fonts. And then I was like, okay, so now everything looks like toy store for adults. And that was the first point. It's like, we need to actually add a little bit of color. Like the brand, the way I saw it, I thought it was very cool. And when we launched that sort of like black background, no food whatsoever was doing that. So when we launched in 2016, that look and feel, we felt we were really modern, but obviously 10 years down the line, It might not be as modern as it was before. So touch of color, so very pop colors, a font that was very modern, and we needed to bring the African side without falling into the clichés. So I was just like, and I refuse to do an elephant on my label or an African sunset because we want to go beyond the clichés. So we decided on a shweshwe, is a fabric that is used a lot in Southern Africa that is very beautiful, very bright, nice. patterns. This still looks quite modern, I think. So we did that element. We changed the font. We kept the logo as is because I didn't want to create confusion on our current customers, but I wanted to attract new customers. It was a very big process of iteration, of tweaking. It took us over 8 months basically to finalize because it was, it was tough, you know, for me, as like you say, with your baby, you know, everybody's asking you, you need to change your baby. It's like, but my baby's perfect. So it was, the good thing is that we started showing it to people we really trusted in terms of customers, big buyers, people that have known the brand for many years, and it was very positive. So that was what prompted us. We needed to bring in more the African aspect, knowing that we, we mostly sell to overseas markets. And we also needed to refresh a little bit of look and feel that looked a little bit safe.

And how's it been received in, in home country?

Amazing. In South Africa, which is the first market that we launched, we realized it's catching a lot of attention. So for the customers that were already there, they feel it's a great opportunity to push the brand, which is good. You know, every sort of like good news that you have that pushes the brand. For new customers, it's like, yeah, this looks really good. Like we've always said, same soul, new skin, related to the snakes. So it's like, we stay the same, great flavors, natural ingredients. supporting communities, but we look even more attractive and appealing. So, that has brought a lot of attention. We've been putting a lot of effort as well into more our online commerce because South Africa might not be yet as evolved as our other markets, but we've realized there's a big push for online and that has helped us a lot in catching attention to that part of the market that we were not really pushing before. So, so far so good.

Right now, you can grab a free copy of my book, Birology, at my website, birology.co.uk.

So that's the kind of the packaging side of the product. What about the actual products themselves, the condiments, the sauces? What's, what makes your products different? How do you create that USP in this massive sea of different sauces?

Absolutely. We know, we realize, and it was funny because I was thinking about that question earlier and I was like, what should I say there? Because to be honest, making chili sauces and hot condiments is not rocket science. Like, anyone can put stuff in a pan and cook stuff, and there you go, you have a sauce. So, I think when I started really thinking deeply about it, I think it all boils down to what we call our own good food manifesto, which is sort of the values we live for, which is that for us, good food needs to be intended at good, at food that is good for you as a consumer. So, in that case, for instance, our point of difference is the fact that we work with organically grown ingredients and what we call no added nonsense, which is basically the fact that we don't use any weird preservatives, colorants, et cetera. So, that base gives us a very flavorful product that I believe is one of the things, the more I think about it, when people come back to us and the word that they use the most about Black Mamba is that it tastes amazing. So, that's the first pillar of our good food manifesto. The second one is good for the planet. So, it's very important for us that whatever we do treads lightly on the planet. So, we use packaging that is either highly recyclable or upcyclable. So we've kept our bottles as glass bottles, our condiments always in glass. We use tape that is made out of paper. We work with regenerative agriculture. The small farmers that we work with are taught regenerative agriculture. So we know it's something that is good for the planet, doesn't have any weird pesticides on the food that we, that we work with. And the third pillar is that it's good for the people that grow or manufacture your product. So for us, it's important that we pay fair wages to our employees. Like 94% of our team is women, which is something that is very important in a country like Eswatini that is highly patriarchal and women have still a lower status than men. And also we work with smallholder farmers, you know, so we make sure that to pay fair wages and to pay fair prices for the produce that we get from them. So for us, that embodies the the point of difference of what Black Mamba is. But commercially, which is quite funny because we've discussed this in the past, you and me, is like, it's so nice to have that aspect of the business that is sustainable, but that doesn't necessarily is the main aspect of why the product sells. And I think this was very difficult for me to understand because definitely I embody what you call, what we call in Black Mamba, an ethical foodie. We love food, but we need to make sure that the food is well produced, but not everybody's an ethical foodie. You might be a foodie, you love food, So we've, I think one of the main selling points of Black Mamba, and this again, coming back to what people say about it, is the flavor. I mean, it's a great presentation and fun and a great name. You know, we're very lucky to have trademarked that name early, but also the fact that it has great flavor.

So you're clear on who you are. What about your audience? Because that's always the second bit that we find interesting because there is, again, such a broad brush. Who, who buys Black Mamba? Obviously they're going to be interested in sustainability, but what, what else? How, who, who is that little avatar?

It's funny, but part of other things that we were thinking about, it was a very good set of questions, Karen, by the way, because it makes you really think and be introspective. It's like, huh. So the funny thing is when we started Black Mamba, we didn't really think too much about the audience, which is a big sort of mistake. I mean, my background is marketing. That's what I studied. That's what I love doing. Uh, so we sort of like love a bunch of hot sauce because my sort of audience for me was my husband, Joe. He loves hot sauce. He puts hot sauce in everything. So, it's like, we'll do hot sauce because that's what he likes. So, he embodies what we call, we have 3 little avatars. The one that we call is a chili head. So, it's a person that needs to have chili on everything. So, that was the first sort of pillar that we have and the person that we developed product for. But then we realized that's a very small universe and it's a very sort of niche universe because The chili heads tend to go for heat more than flavor. And that just kind of like, we've never been heat more than flavor. I am a foodie and I love heat, but I love it to be flavorful. I would never go for a chili sauce that just burns me and makes me cry. So we do have a portion that is still chili head related for sure. And our chili sauces still represent probably 60% of all overall sales. But then I started focusing more on what we call the ethical foodies. So, like you say, it's the person that they're not necessarily looking that is, that has the 3 pillars for our Good Food Manifesto, but at least that they are looking for clean ingredients and good flavors. So, we bring that through. And then, on top of that, what we realize is that people say the products taste great and also they support rural communities and also they work with women. So, all of these things are caught up afterwards, but part of our audience are people that are genuinely interested in good food and that they like to support as well because it's a company that does good in the world, if that makes sense. And our third one, which we discover, which is growing and is very interesting, is what we call the African admirers. So those are the people, because most of our market is outside of Africa, those are the diaspora, you know, is the African people that immigrated. And now all of a sudden it's like, wow, we don't see a lot of African people or like products around. We want to go into it. We do, for instance, one of the very big clients that we have in the UK is a South African shop called The Savannah, which have stores in a lot of like the tube stations in London. And it literally only sells Southern African products because there's so many South Africans living in the UK. So we realized that's a market and that's something to tap into the African-ness of the brand because people will Buy it because it reminds them of home, because of what evokes, and also because of the flavors, you know, that are close to what they used to. So African admirers is something that we also target to very actively.

Do they want different products?

That is a very big question that I actually ask myself all the time, because you cannot really necessarily create different products from different avatars, and it creates very complicated things. It's like you need to promote certain products and certain things of the brand to these guys, to these guys, to these guys. So, what we've realized is we've divided our communications and our messages depending on who do we want to target, if that makes sense. So, we could do certain recipes that are very foodie related, you know, like teaching people how to use more products that they not be, they might not know how to use. Like we launched Olisheesa, which is a tomato African relish. So, where, what do you put it with? So, that's more like the foodie side. But then we do the posts that are on Friday. I usually tend to do a meme about like what chili heads think about, because we are a very special community, you know, like probably snubs down a little bit the person that doesn't put hot sauce on their food, or when they go to a restaurant and they ask for hot sauce and the only thing they have is Tabasco. So you do all this fun stuff that when people feel identified, it's like, hey, this brand understands me. We haven't changed anything in terms of the products, but they do have chili sauces and they have hot sauces that I can deal with. And for the African aspect, we tend to always remind people that it's an African brand that is made in Africa, that everything that just kind of like puts the appeal towards the African side. We celebrate things like the Africa Day. We celebrate things like the Nelson Mandela Day because it's our origin that we're proud of. So I think through the messaging, we are able to tackle on the things that actually talk to each one of the avatars. But we know for a fact, you know, like Chili Heads probably won't even look into our I don't know. I was thinking of spicy jams, but they actually do. They really like this innovation and a chili head usually wants to try new stuff. So now I'm thinking, okay, I said spicy jams, but no, they do actually. But maybe they would be a little bit less in the pesto side, you know, because our pestos are quite mild. But an ethical foodie would be very interested in knowing, oh, pestos made with macadamias and made with, you know, organically grown basil. So, It sort of like allowed us to tap into each one of the markets just by tweaking the communication more than creating products specifically for each one of them, if that makes sense.

It makes a lot of sense. I think it's, it's, it's getting those 3 segments out there. So we've talked product, we've talked audience. Commercial is always a challenge. You've been going now for 10 years. Is that right?

That's correct.

So do you make a profit?

At the moment we're breaking even.

Okay. That's good. What have you learned about pricing your products over the years? Because it's such a, it's such a, you've got, you know, South Africa, you've got UK, you've got UAE, different markets, 3 different avatars. How do you price?

I, I just, the first answer is like, I, I hope I'm doing something like remotely correct, but I still feel that is one of the most difficult things to do and Only recently, funny enough that you mentioned about the gross profit, because I had a very good friend that's CFO of a very big multinational company. And one thing that he told me, and I think a lot of founders, especially on food, we have this thing like we wanna launch innovation. It's important. It's important to innovate and launch new products, but we tend not to look at the profitability of a product and just develop it and just launch it and see what happens. and hope that at some point it becomes profitable. So what my friend told me was, get yourself a target of GP and be brutal, even if it hurts, because again, you fall in love with your brand, like with your label, and you fall in love with a product that is a great product, but again, it's just not profitable enough. So my own milestone is the gross profit cannot go under 40%, and that is the real gross profit. So that takes into consideration For a business like Black Mamba, not only the cost of sales, but also the shipping to the country and to the end customer. Because for us, it's a big thing, you know, like it's not the same. And we do mostly FOB. So it's our customers that pay for that, but we need to make sure that whatever happens, and I had to do a proper sort of spreadsheet across all my products and across all my customers, because every customer has a different way of paying the product. But my rule of thumb now is if the GP is not at least, the real GP is not at least 40%, that product is not even going to be launched. And the second thing is that I had to, and I think that's something more on the marketing side. Like, funny enough, I studied finance instead of, and then I did a master's in business administration. So I should know better, which I don't in finance. But one thing that I've learned as well is very important for us to keep in mind. the pricing points that we have for similar products in the market? Like Black Mamba has always been slightly more expensive, which we can justify, you know, like for instance, in, in maybe in the, in the UK, you can justify £1 more for a product that has organically grown ingredients that supports communities, et cetera, but not £10 more. So where do you draw the sweet spot between, yes, we need to actually be profitable at 40%, But we need to have a price that makes that 40%, but at the same time needs to be competitive with whatever is on the market. So, it's still, I think, a, a game of tweaking, but I, I think I'm very clear on internally what commercials need to be in terms of our margins. I know how much you can push to increase the price when you need to really increase the price because everything else has increased. Like, for instance, now with the war, the cost of petrol, shipping, everything has increased. And, and how to work it out, I think, at some point you need to be very comfortable with your numbers and looking at them every day. And that's something that I do, even though my, I don't love it. I really don't like it actually. It's every day looking at your margins and looking at your turnover and see where you are and how you can tweak things to help your distributors. Like a German distributor told us the other day, you need to help us because our products are too expensive here. And I went to look and he was completely right. It was like, what am I doing by him agreeing to pay the price that I'm telling him if that what he's going to do is kill the market in Germany? So you always need to go back and start looking into everything. I still think it's very difficult though.

So we got profitable products. We got products people want. We know the customers, marketing's fab. What's your biggest execution challenge? What's, what's been tough?

I think the fact that we are in a very small country. We are still a very small business, even though we have a little bit of footprint in different countries. And also building a team that can execute. I think the main thing that they teach you when you do any sort of like business leadership courses, or you, and I think we all know that you need to hire people that are better for you than you, sorry, to do certain things. There's no point of trying to hire people that are not able to do what they're supposed to be doing. Usually in the environment where we are, those people are either nonexistent within the local sort of ecosystem, or they're incredibly expensive. So it's 2 things that we keep on like dealing with in terms of execution, finding the right people for the right things to do. Black Mamba has tackled that by becoming an organization that does a lot of training. You know, we grow people from the bottom up. It takes a lot of time. It's maybe a little bit more frustrated. I would love to have somebody that I said, just go and do and, and, and amaze me and teach me. And most of the time it's like, come here and let me teach you what I know, which is not perfect, and let you grow with everything else. So we've done a lot of that. I think every business that started with Challenger Brand, it starts with being very strong on what the founder is strong. at. So I know that my strength is mostly the marketing and anything related to the storytelling, portraying the brand. That's, that's always something that Black Mambas is very strong at, but I suck at operations. I'm really bad at it. And we're a manufacturing business. You know, a lot of businesses, I realize in time, in other countries, they don't do the manufacturing. They just sort of outsource that to a food co-packer, and then they just do all the branding and distribution, which is what I'm good at. So, if I had the opportunity to have done from the beginning, that would've been great. But at the same time, that defeats the whole purpose of Black Mamba supporting communities. So, it's all one of those things that you have in your head is like, oh, that's so much easier. I wanna do that. But it's like, hold on. But then, no, no, we can't do that because then we're not doing what we're born to be doing, which is supporting communities. So, I think in the execution, there's a lot of room for improvement for us in processes, especially on the operations. part of Black Mamba.

You raised some really important points there because as a founder, you, and when we first start out, you've, you've got to be everything. You've got to be the accountant. You've got to be the operations. You've got to be the marketeer. And as you grow, then your personality will take you in one direction and your personality takes you in the marketing, in the product development, understand the customer. And the mentality needed for operations in most cases is much, is much more different because it's, it's repetitive. The thing you need to be doing is every day turning out the same bottles of sauce.

And organized and a structure, which I'm none of.

To people like you and me, it's a bit boring, to be honest. So you need someone who's absolutely loving, loving that and really, really enjoying it. So you've got your own factory, you've got children as well, I believe you have Mom, factory, how do you keep it all going without losing the plot when it gets chaotic?

God, that was one of the questions. I don't know if we want the sincere answer or not. You don't necessarily keep it together. I think you're always trading off, you know? So I think the main thing, and I, I think one thing that I have in my favor is that personality-wise, I'm a very positive person. I'm optimistic at heart. I'm very, naive, if that makes sense. You know, I think you need a healthy dose of ingenuity when you're a founder, knowing and hoping that things are gonna go well no matter what. So that is what goes through the chaos. And I think, and lately for me, it's been also having a very, very strong sort of milestone of objective that you wanna get because you understand that whatever you're working is working towards that specific milestone. And then other thing for me is just breathing. You know, like I, it sounds very silly, but sometimes when everything is chaos, you just need to have your little quiet space and breathe and understand. And that's something that I tell myself all the time. And I used to tell my COO because she's a very anxious person. It's like, first of all, we're not doing open heart surgery here. There might be delays in your hot sauce and people might be disappointed, but nobody's going to die. Then the second thing that I told her is, or that I tell myself as well, is these too shall pass. There's nothing, even when your kids are, you know, like you said, you have kids. My kids are still young, but they're not like waking up 10 times during the night that when you're like really running your business and having babies is so tough. But what I kept on telling myself is like, this is not going to be forever. In 2 weeks down the line, whatever crisis we're in now is going to be something else. So let's just always keep things at the level and at the sort of dimension that they need to be. Because when you start being very, very anxious about things, it's just very complicated. So it's, I think it's a combination of these things basically for me.

Okay. Let's do a few quick round questions. So if sales suddenly stalled, so like, I don't know, you were suddenly told you couldn't export to the UK anymore because of some ridiculous trade stuff, what would you do?

I would probably cry a little bit in my corner first. You breathe and breathe and then just kind of compose myself and say, okay, let's just find something else. So in our case, I guess we have the privilege of exporting to several markets. So we don't have all our eggs in the same basket and we don't have any customer, thank God, that is more than 50% of our total turnover. So whatever happens, we can go through it. I mean, recently one of our biggest Dutch customers that was an incredible customer went bankrupt. Like, yeah, like we learned that 2 months ago and they still owed us quite a bit of money. So it's a big downfall for a small business. Same story, try to figure out if you can recover it somehow. If you can just kind of like, you know, go forward and keep on saying, forget about that money. Let's just move on and trying to figure out how to just complement that. And if it's an overall sort of decline of the company, because I had the time to think a little bit about it and Something that I do also that I generally think is good for founders is to be very curious and don't take things as they've been told. The sales are not going and you're like, oh, well, what can we do? But it's like, why? Tell me why. Why is exactly what is not working? Is it a specific product? Is it something? And then having these sort of honest conversations with your, with your main customers or distributors, it just brings you so much feedback on what is not working and what could be working and how you can just turn the situation around. So, I think Being very in tune again with your markets, being, having very good relationships with the people that are managing your baby out of your sphere, you know, because I have Black Mama that is my first baby. And then I have somebody in the UAE, which is far from here, taking care of my baby there. So let's just talk all the time about how do we educate this thing, how that we, which school is it going to go to, which friends is it going to have, you know, the same thing that you do, you do with your brand. So I think that's That's the first probably thing that I would do and I would continue doing, just constant communication with anyone involved in Black Mamba.

Let's come right down to, we're called the Friday Accelerator because we're interested to know what people do on Fridays because Friday can be a wind-down day or it can be let's plan for next week. What do you do at the end of a Friday?

To be honest, I close my laptop and I go and meet my girlfriends and then we drink 1 or 2 glasses of Prosecco.

That's my best thing of Friday.

And it's funny because one of your questions I remember was like, give me the word that defines for you Friday. And to be completely honest with you, the word that I just came with is relieved. It's Friday. We made it through another week. So it's always a fun aspect, you know, because for me, Friday meant, okay, I sort of pretty much closed everything that I could do this week. We do have a sort of final meeting with my team, but in the morning, 'cause I don't want them to be just like thinking, God, afternoon, I have to still think about it. I just wanna think about the weekend and, and Claudia still wants to meet and, and talk about things that are worrying. And then just making sure that I don't do a lot of like, like heavy stuff on Friday, you know, especially Friday afternoon. I wanna spend some time with my kids. I wanna go and see my friends. So relieved is a word because every week as a founder of a small business in a tiny corner in Africa is not easy and it's quite chaotic.

What's your favorite productivity hack thing that you do? You've talked about breathing, but is there anything else that, that you have that you would recommend and say, this works?

I've been, I've been doing in the past, which is very interesting. There's 2 guys called Steven Kotler and Ryan Dorris that work a lot about what you call getting into flow. It's a productivity hack where you have a certain amount of time, maybe it's 90 minutes where you work so concentrated that you get to achieve a lot more than what you do in a regular 90 minutes because you get distracted constantly. And the life itself gives you enough distractions when your phone is ringing, when you have notifications going, when you have to attend to a thousand things in the business. So, what I've tried to do is learn how to get into flow. And for people like me that have ADD, it's We get constantly distracted, but then I realized that probably 40% of people that are entrepreneurs have a certain level of ADD because otherwise you can't work with through everything that life throws you. So getting into flow is very difficult, but I do realize that when I get into flow, I get to work really fast on things. So one thing that I get is I completely disable notifications on my phone. So I don't get to see the thing going because I know myself and I'm just going to go and look into what's happening. That I have those blocks when I even tell my team, unless somebody's dying, don't contact me. If somebody's dying, okay, contact me, but otherwise don't. And you get those flows. And then the type of music, they call it binaural music that works very well with your brainwaves to get you into flow. It's a state. I remember one day my husband tapped me in the shoulder and I was so concentrated on what I was doing that I almost had a heart attack. He scared me so badly. So then I knew that I was really into flow. So that's one thing that I'm trying to master because I think it makes a big difference. And the third one, I have to say what we're all using, AI, because it allows you to work faster and to write emails faster and to reply. I'm a very bad typer. I type very slowly and I realized that I used to procrastinate on sending long emails that I, that needed that level of detail just because I couldn't fathom having to sit and write that email. So I found this really cool AI called WhisperFlow. That's—

yeah, I've used it.

It's so cool, Karen. It just makes my life so easier. Like people are all of a sudden, you're replying to emails a lot faster. And I was like, yes, because I'm not typing them. The only thing that was making me procrastinate is the fact that it would take me so long to do it. And I just like, I don't have time, but that helps obviously replying to emails in a better way. So AI sort of like little gimmicks have been actually very good for productivity for me as well.

What about, um, books, podcasts, anything that you, uh, do you have time to read?

I love reading. I've always been sort of a, like a, in Spanish you call it a library mouse. Like I really like the feeling of a book.

Bookworm, we say.

A bookworm. Yes, you're right. A library mouse in Spanish.

Library mouse. I like that. That's really cute.

So you live in the library and you just, you know, go through books. But I have to say I'm much more into like a fiction reader. I love reading novels and stuff like that when It's my own free time of doing what I want. In terms of books and stuff, I am ashamed to say that I don't read a lot in terms of business, in terms of books, but one that I really like is Traction because it's very practical, you know? I just, I don't like when it's business, I don't like the fluff. I like practicality. So, like very specific things that you can do to generate that traction. So, I thought that that was very good for me. And then, I really love what Sara Dusek, which is my investor, wrote. She wrote a book called Thinking Bigger. Which sort of tackles into the fact that women in general, or women entrepreneurs in general, don't dream big enough. And if you don't dream big enough, you're very scared of taking the steps to take you to that dream. So, it's very good, I think, for women entrepreneurs because it really makes you think, why am I so risk-averse? It's very much gender-based, which is quite interesting, and how to actually tackle the risk that it takes to actually do something bigger. So, I really liked that one and I love LinkedIn in terms of reading. I follow specific founders that I found very interesting and compelling, like Amelia from Volpiine. I love Jason, what's his surname now? The guy from Primal that is an American brand that does jerky, but I just love the fact that he's very upfront and going. I love the founders that don't only show the fancy part of being a founder, but they just kind of like show themselves as being very relatable because it is tough. And sometimes when you look only at the good thing about the founders, you feel like you feel completely inadequate. So it's very nice when some people kind of like tell you, oh, okay, so you also experienced that. Thank God. You know, it's like, I'm not the only one and, and I feel inadequate and then the business has issues and stuff like that. I really do enjoy everything that you've done in terms of, uh, your Retail Ready courses. I think that was incredible for me to understand the UK market. The podcast that you're doing with founders, I think it has a lot of value for other founders because it's entertaining, but it also brings a couple of things that you might relate to. And so I'm more of a fishing person like that in terms of the, the knowledge that I get for, for business.

So thank you so much. Where can people find Black Mamba?

We have our regular sort of like global places, blackmambachili.com and Chilli with double L. like it should be done, not the American way with one L. And in the UK is blackmambachili.co.uk. So they can find all the information about Black Mamba, where we retail our products, buy them online, and find more about what we do, basically.

Perfect. Thank you.

Awesome. And thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure. See you soon.

Thanks again to Claudia for sharing her experience And insights. You can hear from more founders in the previous episodes of the Friday Accelerator. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review or a rating. Every little helps. If you want to explore the fundamentals of your food business to unlock faster, smarter growth, get in touch at birology.co.uk or follow me on LinkedIn.