The PGS Blog

January 22, 2021

The Most Important Question To Ask About Your Fans

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 key 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 as a big mosh pit of disconnected individuals. In

Top 3 Sources of Early Funding for Your Brand
January 20, 2021

Top 3 Sources of Early Funding for Your Brand

Where should I go for additional funds after my family? I get asked this question routinely, so I’d like to share the answer I recently gave on my PGS Live show.  And it includes a counter-intuitive response you’re probably not expecting.  #1 – Seed - Virtually all consumer brand founders begin with some kind of seed capital, whether from their

Make-2021-the-Year-You-Become-a-B2C-Business
January 18, 2021

Make 2021 the Year You Become a B2C Business

The vast majority of CPG startups in what I call the Death Funnel (trailing annual revenues below $500,000 wholesale) operate as B2B businesses. Their founders don't interact with their consumers face-to-face. They manage distributor orders, distributor relationships, and case numbers. They drink words from their brokers' mouths. As long as case volumes grow, these founders are happy. As long as their wholesale price can float operations

January 15, 2021

Scenario Planning for 2021

I talk a lot about planning your experiment as you Ride the Ramp. And measuring. And iterating. I did not discuss what to do when you encounter historically disruptive events, like a global pandemic. And what I recommend you do is usually reserved for large, multinational

January 13, 2021

Top Two Mistakes Founders Make With Buyers

There is nothing worse for a high potential, emerging CPG brand than to enter the right retailer the wrong way and thereby to squander inventory (potentially lots of it) that could be moving faster elsewhere. It's essential to seek partnership with high-potential retail chains, i.e., a

January 8, 2021

1-Page. It’s All You Need. Planners Win This Game.

I launched my current business in 2017 with a series of LinkedIn videos, including why you need a strategic plan. Keeping you and your team accountable is the most important reason to write a straightforward plan consisting of three things: your revenue targets for 2-3 years maxyour

January 6, 2021

Mind the Gap Between Aspiration and Behavior

If you don’t know the behavior driving velocities off the shelf, you can’t really optimize marketing, promotions, channel strategy or much of your 4P playbook. As I write in Ramping Your Brand, most of your revenue as a CPG brand, especially as an early-stage one is

January 4, 2021

Is Advertising the Cost of Being Boring?

Many Skate Ramp consumer brands have scaled with very little (or any) paid marketing activities out-of-store. Instead, they relied on other, labor-intensive field techniques I write about in my book. But, had they done advertising and done it well, would they have scaled faster? It's a

December 28, 2020

What Those Trend Lists Keep Missing

Here they come. 2021 Trend lists in food, beverage yadda, yadda. Nothing will stop them. Not a freight train. But curb your enthusiasm for these curations of the weird. Rare with potential to scale is what you want as a founder, not just any kind