Funding money-losing businesses is never easy. This is generally something only your closest friends and family would ever do (and, of course, you and your cofounders). Food and beverage startups tend to lose money for years, especially if they develop much of their early volume
A week from Friday, my alter ego – James, the relentless anthropologist - releases his new book! You may want to read it to understand how we got to a society where - Snacks continue to be a huge growth sector How youth-oriented recreation (and event marketing)
Foxtrot’s sudden, disorderly shutdown shocked many in the world of premium consumer brands. Dozens of brands had much of their P&L pegged to this small chain and its growth plans. Really. Bad. Idea. There is a vast difference between growing your brand with a stable growth
In talking with B-school professors and founders, I realized that my courses hit a gap in DIY founder training. The gap is in professional brand management with an early-stage twist. Once you get into Phase 2, this is when these skills will give you an
“The most frustrating archetype of a founder out there is the finance founder. I am talking about a social orientation to work in which the most valuable thing is money, and solutions to business problems are assumed to be financial in nature. When there's a financial
You might think saying 'no' is simply a luxury of an established business who has the privilege to turn down an opportunity that isn't absolutely dead on perfect. But you'd be wrong. Saying 'no' is one of the fundamental business skills never taught in school,
Mission-driven brands were starting every hour, it seemed, back in the 2010s. Wall Street and PE threw billions at these businesses, especially plant-based meat and dairy. The pattern across most of them was a morally strident founder trying to ‘change the world’ by scaling their
Nothing is more disappointing than paying way too much for a celebrity influencer to pump up your brand, briefly, and then leave you without a proven marketing mix to continue growth. This has happened many times to brands with more cash than experience in brand-building. Unless
The primary reasons to exit early (early being Phase 2 or Phase 3) is that a) you are sick of operating the business and cannot find a suitable person to step in (or quickly enough OR b) you want an ‘entity’ to finance its growth
In 2020, as Covid up-ended our lives, I fielded lots of inquiries about how to make use of Direct-to-Consumer sales. If you remember, e-commerce sales had just exploded overall at the time. Americans received multiple stimulus checks and payroll protection and could not spend money at