Sorry for the clickbait. This is not about current events or about 2024. This is an evergreen sermon on why you have to have a concise, crisp strategic plan, even as a Phase 1 consumer brand. You may have heard the phrase “strategic plan” before, even though
It’s not uncommon for math-driven founders to agree as a team to pivot their business without spending enough time considering their emotional readiness as a team. What might this emotional readiness consist of? Have you and your co-founders sat down to deeply share your fears about pivoting
The experience of approaching co-mans for your CPG business is when most founders realize the meaning of ‘zero leverage’ business conversations. Ouch. Co-mans are notorious for ‘using’ startups to plug small holes in their production capacity without caring about the end product quality. You are
Startups are supposed to be scrappy, opportunistic, and always hustling. Their agility is their superpower, right? Who has time for planning anything more than the supply chain? Why bother setting a comprehensive strategy as long as we're growing? As long as customers keep pouring in?
Here’s a free preview of content from my upcoming Nov. 8 paid training: Pivoting is a sexy Silicon Valley term pushed by venture capitalists who don’t want their ‘kids’ to languish too long in failure before making relatively cheap pivots to new audiences, features, etc. But pivoting
If Gooder Foods has developed an innovation with scale potential, it will have to grow the category known as “dried dinner mixes” in a way that no one, not even Annie’s, has ever managed to achieve. Taking on Kraft-Heinz (or Annie’s) directly would be difficult
Most CPG innovators and founders are geeks of some sort. It doesn't matter if the geekiness was professional or amateurish or a committee of both. The point is that you isolated a problem, a gap in your category, and you filled it. Or
Although I caution against chasing unicorns, this is not meant to validate any brand's growth rate in the single digits YoY. This slow growth rate may be in line with the premium CPG sector overall, and it may be much faster than commodity brands in most
Understanding why your fans love your brand is essential to creating a quality playbook for exponential growth. Understanding who they are is less important but critical to critical aspects of execution. Founders new to consumer-packaged goods often focus only on who loves them and assume they understand why they do. In CPG strategy, who is like the soil in your garden. Don’t think of who is like a giant mosh pit of disconnected individuals.
Premium CPG founders face serious headwinds trying to scale. Most never do. The ones who do scale take 7-10 years on average, though we all get distracted by a tiny group that does it in 2-3 years. This is why I always recommend that founders