Ep #208 A Beautiful Business

I have spent much of the last 18 months working through a concept to create I like to call a "beautiful business". First, for myself in my business and then in the Master Your Business program with Fuel members.  This is a business that doesn't meet some outside standard of success, but one that energizes and serves both your life and your customers' lives.

I challenge you to move beyond the chaos and stress of early entrepreneurship which is necessary, but will lead to burnout and resentment if left unchecked for too long. Instead I want you to build a business that aligns with your personal values and goals and this takes you stepping into the role of CEO to build a solid foundation to scale.

I am so proud of the 207 episodes over the last four years and I couldn't think of a better conversation than this one for the 208th 🎉!

It's time for us to focus more on creating a more fulfilling, balanced approach to business that truly supports your life and gives you the time and money freedom you wanted when you started this business.

Get the CEO checklist at https://www.foodbizsuccess.com/ceo and know exactly what to do when you put on the CEO hat 🎩 in your business.

If you would like help to create this foundation to create your own beautiful business, Master Your Business is now open for applications. We will officially start in January, but you don't want to miss the Q4 bonus classes to get your business ready!

Food Business Success is my signature program that helps you launch your delicious idea and grow it to $100K. Includes step-by-step videos, tools and 5 months inside the Fuel membership for coaching + community. And it's guaranteed to make your program fee back or I'll refund your money. Learn more at https://www.foodbizsuccess.com/program

Pick up your copy of "Key Ingredients" on Amazon here.

Check out my YouTube channel at www.foodbiz.tube for how to videos to start and grow a packaged food business.

Transcript

Sari  
Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the package food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host Sari Kimbell. I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach, and it's got to be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in and food founder journey so you can learn what worked and didn't work and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now let's jump in!

Sari  
Queue to confetti! I am celebrating. We are celebrating a huge milestone today. Today is the four year anniversary of the podcast. This is the 208 episode, which is just completely mind blowing to me that I started this podcast four years ago during covid, in my home, locked in my home office, and my coach at the time, even though I had a YouTube channel, and somehow that felt comfortable enough. But he was like, you got to start a podcast. And I was like, but what if I don't have anything to say? What if I run out of things to talk about? And here we are, four years later, a new podcast nearly every week, and a podcast that has come out consistently every Tuesday, and I have not run out of things to say. In fact, I would say I just keep evolving, and I have more to talk about. I have more insights, more connections, more amazing people, more ways to help you become the CEO of your business, more ways for you to launch faster and do it with less pain and less wasting tons of money. And so I am just patting myself on the back here giving myself a high five, and I am really freaking proud of these last four years. And I just want to also say thank you. Many of you have been listening since the beginning, and if you just found the podcast, welcome! You have many episodes to fill your brain and provide you with lots of great inspiration and ideas, and thanks for coming on this ride with me. It's pretty amazing when we look back at what we can do over the course of a long period of time. And I'm just really proud of myself for showing up each week and just keep evolving, keep doing this. And I will make one request of you, if you have enjoyed the podcast, whether this is your very first podcast or your 208th podcast, I would love for you to leave a review. If you have not yet, go to Apple podcasts and leave a review there. You could also leave a Facebook review. You could leave a Google Business Review. All of them are under Food Business Success. When you guys leave a review, it really helps other people to find this work. And I'm on a mission to help you all do your businesses better. Do them faster, have more fun, create something that has more impact in the world. So thank you for doing that. You could pause it right now and just take one minute or less and do that. I really appreciate it. 

Sari  
Okay, so then the question is what am I going to talk about on the four year anniversary, 208th episode? And of course, I get in my head a little bit of like, it's got to be amazing. And, you know, should it be a big guest? Or what am I going to talk about? And I am so excited to bring this concept to you. It's something that I have been working on for myself for, I would say, almost two years, and it's something that I just keep working out and massaging and needing and evolving. And I'm really excited to share this concept of creating a beautiful business. I love this terminology. I love it more than creating a successful business or a winning business, or, you know, any other kind of achievement based thing. And I love reframing the businesses that we're creating. Like, let's create a beautiful business, and what does that mean? We're going to talk about it, but it's something that I just keep coming back to. And it helps me to make decisions for my own business, and it helps folks that I'm working with in Master Your Business and the 10x Mastermind to keep coming back to that idea of like, what is a beautiful business for you? And I think there's such a big difference the way it feels in my body, right? A successful business, a certain low, a 10 million business, $100 million business, a $10,000 business, like that kind of gets me a little agitated and like expectations and achievement and go, go, go, versus a beautiful business, kind of helps me to step back and really focus on what matters. It's not going to be some outside extrinsic level of success. It's an intrinsic, it's individual. It's unique for each person. That said, I think that there are some commonalities of what a beautiful business is and what it's not. And sometimes, when we're defining, I've had a hard time, I've done a lot of writing on this for you guys, as I've thought about what is a beautiful business for a CPG brand is what you are. And I think sometimes the easiest way to explain a little more vague esoteric concepts like this, is to actually define what it's not first. So let's start there. A beautiful business is not everything's in your head, and nothing is repeatable, and you are the only one who knows how to do anything. It is not you constantly saying or thinking, I'll just do it myself. I'm the only one who knows how to do this right, and it's just easier if I do it. We get out of doing that. That does not happen anymore in a beautiful business. It is not you putting your head in the sand around your financials or other things that you need to measure. It is not ignoring taxes. It is not ignoring inventory and social media and your website. It is not ignoring any part of your business. It does not mean that everything is just easy peasy, sit back and relax and that there are no challenges in your business. There are always going to be challenges. There are always going to be problems to solve, but we're not solving the same low level problems anymore. We are solving the bigger challenges. That's what's so fun about business. There's always a new challenge, always something new to go after, but we're doing it from a place of, this is part of the journey. This is part of the fun. Let's go after the next thing, and it's not you in the weeds of your business solving the stupid little things that somebody else could do. They have either been automated, they've been outsourced, or we have just solved it one time, and now it's off of our plate. So it is not just sitting back and just watching cash come in without you doing anything. If anybody wants to sell that to you as like to help you set up that kind of business, I would run away. I'm just saying that there aren't, maybe some business models that are more like that. But a packaged food business is not that. A beautiful business is not just you always putting out giant fires, one after the other, after the other. It is, I want to go to what it is, but we're not going to go there yet. It is not that though. It is not you having no time for your personal self care, for your well being, for your time spent with others. It is not you just waking up with paralyzing anxiety and worry and overwhelm about your business. It is none of those things. And I could go on and on, because I see it. I hear it as a life coach, people tell me a lot of things, and it is not that, right? It is not comparing yourself to every brand that looks like on Instagram that they are doing so much better than you. It's not comparing yourself to somebody who you've been following a long time, who got on the store shelves at Whole Foods, or is on Amazon or won an award. It is none of that. It is not you laying awake at night wondering how you're going to pay the bills. It is not you in the kitchen at 2am. It is not you up at 3am for a farmer's market. It is not you working overnights and 80 hour weeks and stressed out. It is not you hiring people who take advantage of you, who don't meet expectations. And it is not you taking it all back because you tried to delegate and then you didn't set good success models what success looks like. And so yet take it all back because you're super frustrated, and then you start saying things like, I just have to do it on myself, because nobody else can do it for me. All right. I think we get a good idea of what it's not. So hopefully you're like, yeah, maybe you resonate with one or many of those pain points. Now, I know that none of you are like, let me sign up for that. I'm sure none of you are thinking that, and yet, when we sort of trip and fall into entrepreneurship, which is what most of us do, including myself, and there's nothing wrong with that, but we do not know. Most of us don't know how to set up a self managing company. That's what Dan Sullivan with Strategic Coach said. It could be more of like a turnkey business. Might be another phrase you hear. I think those are all very similar, and we don't know how to do that. Most people are not taught. And if you are new to entrepreneurship, there is no way that you understand how to create a beautiful business, and I don't even know that it's possible from day one. I think it's something you do have to go through a little bit of suffering, but what I want to help you avoid is the long term, drawn out angst and suffering and wondering if you should just shut this whole thing down, and all of the mental energy that goes into kind of slogging it out right, there is a certain amount of inertia that you have to get over when you start a business. I was explaining this to somebody the other day, and I thought of it more in terms, I like using the analogy of like a baby, right? Because in entrepreneurship, many people say, like my business feels like another baby, and it is, in a way, and if you think about it like a baby, it is completely helpless at first. It needs you for everything, right? It can't hold its head up. It can't feed itself. It can't clean itself. Like your business needs you all the time, and we got to drop our expectations that our business should be performing for us. You know, day one out of the gate. We need to nurture it. We need to parent. We need to be there for our businesses. And then we kind of go through this phase where it's just messy, it's ugly. It's like, we don't know how to stop being in our businesses, right? A hundred percent full time, all of it, it's all up in our head. It's all this anxiety. It's like we are just consumed by our businesses. And so I really think that the beautiful business phase, when you learn the tools, when you learn how to create that for yourself and your business, that it's almost like the senior in high school when you do the work of the teenage muse, like the teenage angst years, right, where there's like, it's kind of miserable, it's up and down, and lots of chaos and drama, all these things. And if you do it right, and you set up the foundations that we do inside Master Your Business to help you create a beautiful business. When you do this, then it's like you have a senior in high school who's on the right track who is now pretty independent. Doesn't mean that they're completely on their own, but they're getting ready for the next like, more independent phase of their life. And of course, none of this means that, like chronologically, our businesses need to take this long. We can actually go through these phases fairly quickly if you're willing to be coachable, if you're willing to learn, if you're open to, you know, letting go of your imposter syndrome and the things you tell yourself, like, I'm not good with numbers, I'm not good with spreadsheets. I don't know how to talk about my product. I don't like selling. I don't like social media. If we are willing to drop those pieces of our identity, we're willing to learn new things then it's possible to go through this quickly. I have worked with people who have done this work even pre launch. I don't usually recommend it, but certain people it makes sense, and they set this up pre launch, and so it gets you there so much faster. So this is definitely not chronological, but it might help you to kind of understand, like, oh, imagine, like my niece, I would say, is this, she has just had such a beautiful, supportive, loving environment as she's gone through all the teenage angst and, like, set up with some really great foundations that, as she just graduated high school, she's like moving into the world as a more independent adult with the tools and the foundations for her to really thrive, and that's exactly what we want to do in our businesses. Okay, so what is a beautiful business? Like I said, this is something that I have been working on a lot in Fall of 2022 and I want to give full credit, I actually started listening to a podcast that was originally called A Beautiful Business, and it was about coaching, but a gentleman named Mark Butler, and he really offered some new ideas for me that I really needed at the time, I was under so much pressure to have a certain level of business and to have a certain number of clients, and pressure from the outside, but pressure internally as well. And this concept, he presented, this concept of a beautiful business, and I think I probably just sobbed, because I was like, I wake up every day and I hate my life. I hate my business. I'm resenting it. It's just miserable. I'm not having fun. And I really stepped back in that Winter of 22 and I was like, what is a beautiful business? What does it mean for me? What it actually looks like, like your sales channels, and the amount of revenue and number of people in your business, and all of that is going to vary greatly based on you, based on your dreams, based on your personality, your skill set, all of that. But I think in general, we can say that a beautiful business, it fills you up. It energizes you. You are serving others. You're creating impact, and the business is serving you as much as you are serving it, right? It balances out the give and take of your business feeling like, I was telling somebody, it feels like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, right? It's like, feed me. Seymour, feed me. We often feel like our business is just like feed me, feed me, feed me. But your business actually fills you up. A beautiful business means that you are not a victim of the business, that you are the one driving the bus, that you are making decisions, you have clear vision of what is that 10x goal? What is that 10x vision for your life and for your business? Because the two are intertwined, right? We can't get away. We can't just, like, compartmentalize. It's only my business that matters. I think it a beautiful business means that the personal and the business co exist, and it's a more holistic approach. 

Sari  
And so when you have a beautiful business, when when you're in it, when you're creating it, it feels more fun, it feels more satisfying. It is like I said, it fills you up. A beautiful business is that you have more freedom. I know none of you sign up to start a food business where you're like, I'm going to have zero time, zero money, zero resources, be exhausted all the time. Change my business never be able to take a day off. I know you're actually starting it because you want freedom of your time. You want freedom to be able to decide I want to spend my time here, or I want to be able to take time with my family and be present, the people I love, or I want to take a vacation and be present there, right? So a beautiful business does create more freedom, and it's by you taking ownership and being the CEO in your business, and really setting the course, setting the vision, being more decisive, having more constraint on what you say yes to, and more importantly, what you say no to. A beautiful business means you embrace challenges. You have dealt with all the piddly little things, and every time a new challenge comes up, you create systems and processes around it so that it doesn't keep coming back and biting you in the butt, like you deal with it head on. You like, how do we solve this problem once and for all? Or create systems that will manage it and then, and then you're like, excited for the next challenge, like what else we got? And you make your problems bigger. I know that sounds like counterintuitive, like why would I want to make my problems bigger? But when you make your problems bigger, you have to be more creative. And the little problems don't matter as much, because you're like, I'm solving for big problems over here. I don't care about this little stuff anymore. And I think that's a real trick of entrepreneurship, is go make your problems bigger, and you will actually get a lot more clarity and get a lot further along faster. You will wake up feeling more calm and I should say you will go to bed feeling proud and competent and successful and building up confidence, because you're like, you're celebrating the wins, you're making progress, and you're not making your business mean anything about you as a human, personally, and so there's a level of it's definitely building up a level of stoicism, which I'm a huge fan of. It's like, did I manage the things? Did I take ownership and responsibility of the things that I can control today?If so, then I go to bed with my head held high, right? No matter what's going on, there's always a new day. I'm not going to be able to solve all the problems in one day, right? And there's always meant to be new challenges. So going to bed with more peace, more confidence, more calm, so that you can actually wake up that way. And when we get out of the anxiety, you know the anxiety flywheel, where more anxiety creates more anxiety creates more anxiety, then when you're waking up and you're more excited to get to work, you're not avoiding your business, you're excited, like, let's go. What do we got today? I'm excited for my work week.

Sari  
That the anxiety calms down and you're actually able to be more creative and to solve problems. I think a beautiful business is managing expectations and not living in fantasy land. Many of us have fantasies, and they really are fantasies about how fast this is going to happen for you, whatever it success is. And I think a beautiful business is about being more in it and present like there's no achieving it. It just is, and you can create a beautiful business right now just by shifting some of your thought patterns and how you think of your business. But yes, a beautiful business is one where we we manage our expectations around the timeline, and we're not in such a rush, we slow it down. We find alternative ways to feel safe and secure financially in the short term, so that we can give our all and not be in full panic mode about our finances. We really need to create runway elsewhere, and that'll give us more calm, more peace, to go and work the business, because it really is so hard when you are splitting your energy between worrying about money and getting the business done right. So I really would encourage you to to look into that of like, how can you find outside resources financially, because we put so much expectation on our business to perform immediately, and that's where we really kill a lot of the joy out of this period of time where we are evolving as entrepreneurs and as human beings. This is just part of your life journey, right? This is podcast for year four. Like it has been a journey, and I've loved most of it, and when I didn't love it, I changed courses. A beautiful business is one where the chaos when you first start begins to level out, and there's a little more rhythm and predictability and certainty as we start to get a little bit more established. But this is very important. It's not just about time. It's that you are creating systems and processes and that you are following through with the things that you start. Right, right? We a beautiful business is not having 10 things that you're only able to do a little bit. It's like, you go deep and you finish strategies and tactics that you started, and then there's like, that flywheel that's going and there's an automation in place. And so this starts to level things out financially and also in just kind of the rhythm of your days. And it's a beautiful thing, and that happens, and part of the reason why the startup chaos minimizes in a beautiful business is because we outsource to other people, and to systems, to technology that create more breathing room so that we can do our zone of genius, so that we can do what Dan Sullivan calls our unique ability, the things that you probably wanted to do at the beginning in your business. But the reality is we got to also get really good at being a business owner, at being the CEO of our businesses. That comes first. And when you do this work, and I'm not saying it's easy, I do not want to sugar coat it, this is hard work, but it is so worth it, because on the other side is where you have breathing room to do the things that you are best at, and you have breathing room to take time away, to go on a vacation, to do more self care, to have more freedom of time. A beautiful business understands that there is no perfect solution, that it's always about trade offs and acknowledging them and accepting them as part of being in business, as part of being a human. We don't get everything that we want. We make decisions, we make trade offs, and we just accept that and move forward solving those what we've decided we're going to solve. And so I think that there's a real piece that comes when we let go of needing to do everything. And in fact, we really want to focus on doing the right things for our business. A beautiful business lets go of the comparison with other brands, with other founders, and let it fall on our own timeline. A beautiful business creates connection and opportunity because we're just more at peace, we're more relaxed, and we are attracting new things to us without us having to work so hard for them. And finally, I'll just wrap it up here to say I believe a beautiful business is about enoughness. It is letting go of the achievement treadmill of like, more, more, more, more. And I know those of you who have already started business, you probably thought at one point, when I make $10,000 I'll be happy, then I'll be a success. Oh, wait, I got to 10,000 actually, that number is 60,000 and then it's 100,000 and then it's 200,000 and then it's 500,000 like it's about deciding ahead of time, what does a business that feels like it's enough look like? And this is exactly the work that we do in master your business. And so if this is resonating, I really would encourage you to go and apply. You just go to mastery biz.co, and this is the work that we do. And most of us need support. We need accountability. We need tools that we just don't have. You're not born with this. Most people are not taught this. But there is this beautiful place of getting to a business where you're like, This is enough. This is paying for my regular, like, well being my living expenses. This is giving me the time that I want with friends and family and for myself. This is the right kind of challenges and the right kind of fun. For me, you get to define that based on you, your needs, your wants, your desires, the impact that you want to have. Not everybody should have $100 million business, even though plenty of people out there say that's the only measure of success. And then those people say, Well, you need a $200 million business. So who are we kidding? Right? There's a there's a feeling that I get when I say, I know what enough is. And that doesn't mean that you stay small. Doesn't mean that you don't have big goals, but there's a sufficient. Efficiency there, that you're not just going after external validation, that you are validated from the inside, and you're like, I know what it is, and I'm getting there. I have a plan. I know the vision, I know the strategies, I know the tactics and activities that I'm going to employ, and I'm doing them very intentionally for this result. Then the irony is, when you come from a place of sufficiency and enoughness, then the world opens up, and that's where you can hit the gas. But the foundations of your business are set up. You have processes, you have systems. You have a team, you have people who support you, whether it's an internal team or you're being supported through, you know, outsourced people and automations and technology. I am not against running a solo hobby business, but go into that, eyes wide open, and saying, I'm choosing that, and that might be a beautiful business for you. I am all for that, but just recognize that if you're going to create a bigger business, if you want a certain level of salary, if you want a certain level of impact in the world, because many of you are not just doing this for financial gain, you're doing it to make a difference in the world. So if that is you, then you need to go through this work. You need to become the CEO and decide, I am going to create a beautiful business. All right, are you in with me? How does that resonate with you? I just want you to feel it in your body. When you say, I want a beautiful business,