Episode 128 – One Industry Pro Please

October 15, 2024

Look, if I thought being smart and scrappy was enough to scale a consumer brand, hell, I’d probably be doing it. I certainly see a dozen or so fertile spots in the grocery store worth the attempt. In the last episode, though, I explained why I’m “out,” personally. It’s the seed money issue. I don’t have $250,000 to throw away…I don’t have the stress absorption muscle to suck fumes, chase short term loans, and run up credit card debt either just to survive. And I doubt I ever will…

Beyond seed money for a well-launched CPG business, there is another enormous, elderly elephant in the room. And it’s what I want to talk to you about today. The collective, shocking inexperience of your average solo founder. 

I don’t care if you worked on four early-stage Ramp up tales of glory so far. You did it in just one business function. That’s what you know. Be honest. You are NOT a generalist.

But, now, as a founder, your responsibility is for every business function. Gulp. Including the ones that quietly annoyed you or featured the personage of your deepest nemesis on some former leadership team. 

Can you, the solo founder, really acquire professional competency in all major business functions fast enough to survive into Phase 3, when your cash flow can finally pay for professionals to join you?

Yes, you may have one strength, but…why put yourself into the professional development equivalent of Navy Seals training…when…when…

You could actually find a cofounder (or use equity to hire) who compliments you well? I say this because there is more of this kind of spare talent available NOW than ever before in the industry’s history. Some of these folks have banked income and savings and are hungry to take a risk. 

I have worked with a few truly bootstrapped founders who made it into the eight figures with no prior CPG experience…but almost never a solo founder who has pulled this off. I have enormous respect for the rare few who have pulled this off, but you are exceptions I can’t turn into a rule, let alone advice. 

If all of us recognize that it takes a cross-functional team, however inexperienced, to scale a CPG company, then why would most of you not spend extra time finding the right cofounder to complement them? 

My favorite example of doing this is Bill Shufelt who cofounded Athletic Brewing with a master brewer, John Walker. This business was seeded with enough money to pay John well enough, I imagine, but the real incentive lies in the future. 

Without John, I doubt that Athletic Brewing would have scaled as quickly or at all. And vice versa.  A master brewer who can’t raise seed funds or be the face of the business is also likely to get nowhere. 

They are a good pair with complementary strengths. So many underestimate this kind of synergy when planning their solo venture. If you want to be the sole owner, fine, but you should plan to hire complementary professional soon.

So, who?

Well, I recommend founders find someone with 10-15 years of complementary functional experience with early-stage companies to bring on your team. Less than that won’t actually help you much. More than that risks bringing in someone who is no longer in growth mindset mode. Obviously, it’s just a heuristic. If you find an clear exception, ignore.

10-15 years of functional experience in early-stage brand building could deliver scrappy expertise: marketing/PR, supply chain ops, sales, or R&D. Your offering and its competitive positioning will tell you which of these functional strengths you want on board right away vs. later. 

You can’t hire a full C-suite, so you have to think about what expertise you need now vs. later.

If you are the visionary/marketer or finance or sales genius, then you should be finding a cofounder who is great at operations. You see how this works. What you do NOT need is a clone of yourself. Ever. You do not want to work with anyone who would prefer to work with a clone of themselves either. 

If your offering is not very complicated technically, and has less competitive insulation from copycats, then you may need to focus on hiring a marketing expert to help build memorability really fast. Like really fast.

That’s just one scenario. The idea is to think about your competitive positioning so that you understand better what functions you need pro help with earlier. 

Generally, I have found that most solo founders are visionaries without deep functional expertise in CPG. Their lack of a professional CPG network is largely why they are doing it alone to begin with. In that case, hiring a great supply chain/ops person is critical, so that you can focus on growth activities while they ensure supply is flowing. 

Yet, solo founders often get so lost in ops, that only removing sleep would allow them to do anything related to growth in the early phases. If you toss in a poorly conceived national retail spray, you can generate a solo disaster, almost every time that a founder does not magically have that unicorn product that crushes its original test launch, like SkinnyPop, Caulipower, Sandwich Brothers, or TruFru.

OK, a bunch of you’ve been biting your lip listening to this, because you’re dying to scream – “we can’t afford anyone like that, James!”

OK. Look. This episode is meant to motivate you to do something unusual for your own long-term benefit. I didn’t say it would be easy to pull off. But, it’s long past time for solo founders with an idea to accept innovating the original team is just as important as raising seed money and developing a high -uality product. 

Having one 10-year+ functional expert gives you an enormous functional advantage over someone who’s doing something very similar and can NOT bring in this help. 

You want to find someone who has the following characteristics and financial motives:

• • Auto-didacts
  • Humble about what they do not know
  • Curious
  • Fail well
  • Not status-oriented 
  • Prone to experiment, not contemplate
  • Not perfect managers or leaders

For more on these traits, please listen to Episode 100! 

Finally, by bringing in this kind of professional, understand the added benefit – they are going to be social proof that you, the amateur, actually are cut above. You will now seem more professional yourself to all sorts of stakeholders.  I cannot emphasize enough the importance of seeming more together and professional than you actually are.

If everything I’m recommending means delaying your launch to find the right professional cofounder, then do it. 

Launching is more expensive and competitive than ever before. Lots of talented pros are in the early-stage world now. It’s imperative that folks not launch brands as goofily as they did in the 1990s. Please. 

If you can take product development and seed funding seriously, then take forming the initial team just as seriously.