top 3 things that keep me up at night as an entrepreneur
entrepreneurship. i love it, but i won’t say it’s not stressful. there’s always something to worry about, literally. if you’re starting your own company, i’m sure you can relate. or if you’ve got an idea, get ready to think non-stop about:
1. the product: behind the bags of quinoa clusters are real people with a passion for creating healthy food that people will love. we obsess over the quality of our product and the ingredients, continuously tweaking it to make it better and better. some improvements that are hitting the shelves soon, if not already, are that the product is now non-gmo (we'll be non-gmo "verified" soon!), vegan, and 70% organic! the clusters also still have that crunch that everyone loves, but they’re slightly easier to bite into. but getting the changes rolled out wasn’t easy, and of course, because we’re perfectionists, we always think we can do better!
2. working capital: we use money to buy ingredients, often pallets or container loads at a time. then we make the product and it lives in our warehouse, before ships to distributor who doesn’t pay for us at least 30, sometimes 60 days. the whole cycle takes a long time, and as we grow, the bills just keep getting bigger. it’s like a bad dream.
3. building a brand: we aspire to be the quinoa brand, to continue to be able to provide healthy and accessible food options to people in an era of increasingly processed food with poor nutritional content. but we can only do this if people continue to buy our products week after week. i lie awake thinking about how to turn our little company that could into a brand that people know, trust, and heart.
- sarah (photo by ravi)