Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Part 3: Dividing the imaginary pie: How I found my business partner and split the business

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Part 3: Dividing the imaginary pie: How I found my business partner and split the business · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Howdy, it's Dune, your host and hype girl. On today's agenda, I am talking about how I found my business partner when I wasn't looking for one and when I certainly had no intention of getting another one besides PA, of course, and how we split the company.
• 0:17
  And also why you just need to talk to as many people as possible from the very, very beginning of your journey. Sharing your ideas and talking about what you're doing gets you connected to other people, which connects you to other people. And that's the charm of networking and going with the flow. But let's jump into this episode. This is me for Female Startup Club.
• 0:41
  Hi, I am back for another solo episode today, talking all things dividing a business at the very beginning and how we approached it. But also a little story of just how we found our business partner in general when we weren't actually looking for one and we had no intention of bringing a third person into the mix for the founding team.
• 1:03
  But before I jump into that, I want to start these episodes with some biz wins and some biz fails coming directly from Hype Club. And I actually think that the fails are far more interesting because this is what we can learn from and hopefully avoid them. And, you know, what keeps us feeling like we're not in this alone? I think, you know, for a lot of us, we're seeing a lot of highlights and that comes from
• 1:29
  success stories on podcasts. It comes from social media, all this kind of stuff. But there are so many downs and there are so many things that go wrong. And I'm really seeing this from what's going on in our private network now. And gosh, I'm just so grateful. So let me read you a few fails.
• 1:51
  One of the women in our network has this really cool brand called Adash. It's a cold brew coffee company and they basically add adaptogens and it's better for you, it's lower caffeine, all that kind of good stuff. It's founded by two sisters and they place a huge importance on their health and wellness as they came from a lifelong journey of being competitive athletes. So,
• 2:17
  Megan's win was in the first month since they launched into retail, they've expanded into nine other retailers already. And of those, they landed their holy grail retailers. So super, super exciting. But then on the flip side for Megan, there are actually some real shockers. So really important to talk about this.
• 2:38
  As I said, it's not really communicated a lot, especially in brand marketing and that kind of thing. You don't get to hear about that bad stuff. And obviously it happens to everyone. So this is a real eye opener for me. I'm really grateful I get to witness this and learn from these brilliant women who are joining our community and sharing so, so deeply and so openly. Another cool thing that I'm seeing in the group is that so many people are reaching out to help each other. And...
• 3:06
  Yeah, I just feel so much gratitude for what we're building at Female Startup Club and within Hype Club overall. But anyway, I love to ramble. So let me get into it. Instead of me trying to explain this in my own words, I'm just going to read it out because it was kind of long. And there's some stuff that I didn't actually know what it meant. So, you know, also learning.
• 3:27
  Megan says, every part of our second production run has been a fail. First, we only received three of five pallets from production due to an issue when our co-packer double batched. That's the bit I didn't know what that meant, double batched.
• 3:43
  She goes on. While we got a credit for the ingredients, it meant that we needed to reorder ingredients to run the additional two pallets as we were going to be just a bit short on our ashwagandha and coffee extract. But with the MOQs, it meant that the credit only covered a small portion of the ingredients that actually needed to be purchased earlier than forecasted.
• 4:03
  Then the remaining two pallets arrived, one being severely damaged. So we had to file an insurance claim for 42% loss on that pallet, which again means cash flow issues as even when we get the covered amount, we'll be losing out on the revenue from that pallet that we can't make up since we have a minimum run of five pallets. Then we went through and QA'd all of the stock. QA means quality assurance.
• 4:29
  And we were short 14.75% of what we paid for, which is above our contracted 10% production loss rate. So now we're having to sort that out with our co-packer. Again, we're losing out on projected revenue, all of which was needed to cover costs for the next run. We will get there, but it just feels super challenging at the moment as cash flow is a big issue for us. How wild is that? Yeah.
• 4:54
  For me, this also just says and shows how important it is to support your local brands and founders who are aligned to your own mission and values in life and shopping from them rather than the big guys. And that goes for everything, right? Like your local indie grocer versus a big chain supermarket, for example.
• 5:16
  Your spending power really has so much weight. And gosh, this kind of stuff just makes me be like, oh, I want to run out and buy a million things from you and support and share that. So I really wanted to give a shout out to Megan for sharing and being part of our hype club.
• 5:34
  And for all the cool work that she's doing with her brand, it looks amazing. And I'm excited for the day that it launches into the UK. I'm definitely going to be one of the first buyers because I'm getting into this space where I'm super interested in all this kind of stuff in my life at the moment. And anyway, I'm rambling again. So let's move on to another fail from the group, which was from Fatima. She's the founder of a company. It's a vegan beauty brand, actually, called Shimmer Me Gorgeous. Yeah.
• 6:03
  So she received an order of 6,000 units that were missing a super important label. And to make matters worse, the said labels also didn't arrive. So she's having to print them herself and she's roped in her family to get it sorted before the two-week deadline. How is that for Hustle? It's just so incredible. Yeah.
• 6:24
  Biz win for me this week, this past week, was receiving a new batch of samples that were really promising. We're finding that the R&D process is super slow, like super slow. And COVID on top of that makes everything a lot more difficult. But we're chipping away and keeping our heads up.
• 6:45
  We also had a win from Jenna, who is the founder of The Curist, and she was sharing that she was officially trademarked. So a really cool win for her. That's it for the biz wins and the biz fails from this past week. Let me know if you love that section. But let's get into what I want to talk about today and the topic of today. And that's the story of how we met our business partner when we weren't looking for one and how we split the company.
• 7:13
  I don't know if this stuff is interesting to you. So if it is, please do go ahead, leave me a review, share it on social media or shout really loudly about it to the women in your life who you think would benefit from these episodes. All of this stuff helps me so much and it might not seem like a big deal, but it signals to me that I'm on the right track, but it also signals to the algorithm gods that we're on the right track and yeah,
• 7:42
  Yeah, it really means a lot. And I'm really grateful for every time someone leaves us a review or posts about us on social media or slides into my inbox to tell me how it impacted you. So thanks to everyone who's doing that stuff already. I'm just so grateful. And also, by the way, if you have specific things in mind that you want to learn more about, obviously just slide into my DMs.
• 8:05
  On Instagram or Twitter, I'm at Doon Roisin, which is D-O-O-N-E-R-O-I-S-I-N. The kinds of topics that people are telling me they're really interested in is things like the community building side of things, the manufacturing side of things, and obviously the money and how we're going to fund it.
• 8:24
  Because we're going to try and do these either weekly or fortnightly, these quick episodes, I'm going to keep them quite separate. So for example, today I'm not going to talk about manufacturing at all when it kind of bleeds into the story, but I'm going to save that for an entirely different episode. But if you've got some other ideas, I am all ears and also happy to dig in deeper if you want to chat more about something in particular that you think I've missed.
• 8:50
  Okay, so to recap, it's January. We've had this idea. We're in that super-duper excited zone where we're dreaming and whirling through a zillion ideas of what this could be, why it's needed in the world, you know, what the future could look like, all the amazing partnerships that we could do. Yeah.
• 9:12
  And you know that feeling when everything just feels like you've really hit the nail on the head of why you want to do this thing and why you're uniquely positioned to bring it to the world. We're in that zone. And now because it's early days for all of us, I just want to caveat by saying that at this time, I'm not going to reveal the name of our business partner until it's more public knowledge and we're further along in the journey. So he's working full time. He's got no plans to stop.
• 9:41
  We're going to call him Viv. So in an ode to our first name that we cannot have due to trademark reasons throughout the coming episodes, you're going to hear me refer to our business partner as Viv. And I'm really happy about that.
• 10:01
  I also just want to make a note that this is just my experience. I don't know if this stuff is right or wrong or industry standard. And I guess at some point we'll find out. But this is just my experience. It's what I'm going through. And I think that by sharing and being transparent, it might help other people going through it too. It might help you. So...
• 10:22
  Because these are the things that I was wanting to know and I was wanting to understand and I would have loved to hear more about. I'm just kind of going to share what my experience has been and the way that I approach things with the hope that it might help someone else. So let me start by giving you a step-by-step recount of how we met our business partner, who we'll call Viv, how they got on board and how we divided the company.
• 10:48
  From the very, very get-go, like in the real beginning and just in life for me, my goal is always to connect with as many people as possible to figure out how to do things. And that's super obvious. Like when you hit the podcast, that was the goal, to understand different industries, to understand the space, to understand how people make things work. But also just like...
• 11:09
  Aside from that, I'm always asking people if they can connect me to another person or if they know someone who might be really useful for me to talk to, to learn about. And when we started this project, we really thought to ourselves...
• 11:22
  let's ask everyone we know for advice or let's ask everyone we know if they know someone else who can help us. So we were texting our friends who were in the wine world being like, hey, do you know anyone who might be useful for us to talk to? Here's our idea, et cetera, et cetera. And I text one of my friend's brothers who I knew was in the wine world. I knew had a lot of information and I knew was quite well connected. And I asked if he thought there was anyone that I just
• 11:52
  speak to. The first person that he connected me to was someone that was a winemaker working for a really big company in the UK and was just able to give me some really great advice and what he thought and, you know, his kind of understanding of the non-alc space and what he was seeing.
• 12:11
  And then after that, at some point, I really wanted to start talking to sommeliers. So sommeliers are obviously experts in wine. They know a lot. And, you know, I thought for me, like, this makes sense that I connect with a French sommelier because I don't know about wine in that capacity. And even though P.A. is a wine lover and he knows a lot about a lot about a lot, we still wanted to speak to someone else.
• 12:38
  who was a professional and an expert. So text my friend's brother. He is like, yep, I know this guy. You should talk to him. Here's his number. So I literally just cold text this guy and say, hey, I'm Dune. I have this project that I'm working on in the non-alc wine space. I was recommended to reach out to you. Could you get on a call? Yeah.
• 13:03
  And he wrote back straight away, literally saying, any friend of Will's is a friend of mine. Let's get on a call. Are you free in 30 minutes? And I was like, wow, great. Let's get on a call. How cool.
• 13:16
  So we get on this call, me and PA, and we're talking to Viv. And it's really interesting. We don't know nothing about this guy. So we're telling him who we are as people, what our project is, what our vision is, and that we're looking for people who are in the industry, who might be able to help consult with us and kind of point us in the right direction or introduce us to people who might be able to help us. And he's really interested. He's really
• 13:44
  you know, he's basically just like, this is so cool. I am, you know, privy to a lot of different projects. I get introduced to a lot of different projects all the time and I am never really that excited. And this really excites me. I love what you're doing. I love your energy. I love your vision. And I think you guys are in a really good position to bring this to market.
• 14:06
  So we're kind of like, oh, that's great. Like, you know, this kind of stuff is flattering to hear. It makes you feel even more excited. It makes you feel even more confident in what you're doing when you have, you know, the support, even just verbal from someone who is an expert in the wine world. So...
• 14:24
  I was really, really pumped. I got off this call and I was like, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Who is this guy? Like we should look him up. And I'd never like thought to look him up before we got on the call. I just kind of like hopped on really quickly. But I Google him and what I find is that he's actually a master sommelier. And so he's
• 14:46
  If you've seen the Netflix documentary called Master Somme, you'll know what a master sommelier is. But if not, you should totally watch it. It's amazing. But it's like the highest, most prestigious like training or whatever that you can get in the wine world. There's less than 200 in the world. It
• 15:09
  Basically, all you need to know is it's super, super, super legit. And so we were kind of like, oh, wow, that guy's like a really big deal. It'd be kind of cool to have him involved more and like learn from him. And just on like a personal note, P.A. was so excited because he obviously loves wine and he's really got such a fascination and love for it that he was very excited, safe to say.
• 15:37
  So from there, we kind of like hop on a few calls, we get chatting, he's getting to know about our project, he's getting to know us more, we start meeting up and basically we're all getting excited about what's possible and very early on we hire him as a consultant. So...
• 15:55
  He was hired to help us connect with different producers in the space. He was hired to help us connect with people who were doing dealkalization, but also to help us really with the formula. So the brief of what we wanted our wine to be like. So basically figuring out what our benchmark and our goalposts were and writing that
• 16:18
  let's call it like a recipe, I guess, or I don't know what you'd call it, but a brief, let's call it a brief and putting that together and then working after the non-alk is de-alkalized to reformulate. So I don't know if I've said this before, but when you de-alkalize wine, you lose a lot of the taste and the aroma and the structure, which is all the things that makes
• 16:41
  wine's so special. So you have to then reformulate and add back to it to build up those things that are now missing.
• 16:49
  So he's hired to help us with all of this. And at some point in the mix, we do a wine tasting with him. And that's to determine, you know, the benchmark wine and what we're going to do. And this was just so cool, like so cool for PA. But also I really loved it too, seeing someone really in action in their mojo, like smelling all these wines and tasting the wines and talking us through it. And so we landed on something really cool. Yeah.
• 17:19
  that we thought this was our benchmark, this is what we're going to aim for. And yeah, we start just kind of catching up here and there, which I think is how we slowly started building that relationship. And at some point we realized it's all well and good having him as a consultant, but it's really clear that having him as a business partner would be like a million times better.
• 17:47
  Not just because he knows so much about the product side of things that we're trying to build, but also because he's a pretty well-connected guy. He is someone who works in the industry. He knows a lot about a lot. He knows a lot of people. And it's really clear from the beginning. And he, even though he's being paid as a consultant, I think like we realized really quickly, he's so over-delivering and like really...
• 18:14
  excited about what we're doing. So,
• 18:18
  we kind of think to ourselves, yeah, we should bring him in as a business partner. Like we're not attached to this idea of it just being the two of us. We want to create something that is big and is global and is around for a really long time and is very much a leader in the non-alc wine space. And to do that, we know that we need partners. So,
• 18:47
  Basically, we have this conversation about what it looks like to bring on a third business partner, you know, between us. Like, what does that look like in terms of equity? What does that look like in terms of commitment? You know, what are we willing to give away of this imaginary pie that's essentially, you know, just an idea or in concept phase at this point? And would he even be interested? Like, is this an interesting thing for him to switch from being paid as a consultant to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know,
• 19:16
  Granted, we weren't paying him like a crazy amount, just by the way. And I'll talk about that more when we do a money episode, but...
• 19:24
  The plan was to pay him more as we as we really got going. So was he interested in kind of scrapping the payments out of things and truly believing in this and going like really into it with the idea that it could be something big? So the way that we looked at it was we have 50 percent of this company each to start with. So as in PA and I, we have 50 each.
• 19:47
  We are funding the business and we're going to be working on it full time. But, you know, we're not attached to the idea of splitting it evenly should Viv want to join us full time and add his own capital into the mix. So what I'm saying basically is everything at this point was on the table. We weren't kind of thinking, oh, you know, we're only willing to give away a minimal amount. I think we were approaching it more in the way of, you know,
• 20:15
  we want this to be huge and we see the value that he can bring. And I think you've got to like, you've got to be generous to get people to be interested in what you're doing when it's such early days. So yeah,
• 20:30
  We saw the value in bringing him into the business and he could help us achieve what we wanted to achieve much faster than if we were going alone. And that's especially obvious when it comes to things like, you know, our dealings so far with the manufacturer, our, you know, the formulation process, like his knowledge is just like, it would have just taken us a really long time, I think, to get to where we are and where we're going without him. Yeah.
• 20:59
  So yeah, and I might add like...
• 21:02
  All of this was so chill and easy. Talking about it, I feel like I've got to add more to the story, but it was really this simple, non-weird, non-stressful thing. But we organized a conversation. We went into the conversation super open-minded to discuss what he had in mind and how much he wanted to contribute, and based on that, together, find a number that we were all comfortable with, based on the vision that we had.
• 21:30
  And so he was really up there with the vision that we had in terms of building something truly incredible with the vision to exit it in, say, three to five years.
• 21:43
  I say three years, but I feel like three is actually really bloody soon. So five years plus. Let's say five years plus. So we have this conversation. We catch up. We're chatting for a bit. And, you know, we realize Viv doesn't want to be an equal third partner because he wants to keep his job, all that kind of thing. But he did want to deploy everything he could to make this happen.
• 22:05
  totally awesome with that idea in mind that one day it's going to be like super worth it when we exit. So all that to say we settled on 20%, meaning PA and I have 40% of the company each and Viv has 20. And, you know, if and when we look at funding, that obviously dilutes across the board and equity will also be on the table for certain partners too. But for now, that's the split.
• 22:34
  And I guess that's like the really, you know,
• 22:38
  easy journey of finding a business partner that we didn't really realize we wanted or needed. And I think the key learning here, and I say this all the time, but this is just all through the power of your network. You know, our goal was to reach out to as many people as possible to chat and learn and understand. And this led us to working with Viv as a consultant. And then this
• 23:08
  Honestly, it's just so wild to me. So, so wild. It really blows my mind that we are where we are because six months ago, who knew? Literally, who knew? So that's a quick recap. These mini episodes are short and sweet.
• 23:24
  By the way, very exciting news. This week we were in the top 20 Apple podcast charts for entrepreneurship. Love that for us. Obviously, it's all because you guys keep tuning in and putting me into your ears three times a week and shouting about us and saying.
• 23:44
  gosh, I really just can't tell you how much it means to me. So thank you so, so much. And if you didn't know this, by the way, I also just wanted to quickly drop that we have a weekly newsletter around women in e-commerce that's going out every Monday. It's totally free. It's totally cool. I obviously recommend it. It's got some insights from the show. It's got jobs by female founded companies. It's got some e-commerce news around female founders. And
• 24:12
  Yeah, just basically a weekly recap of everything that's going on in the e-com space for women. So we'd love to see you there. You can go to femalesartupclub.com to subscribe. Okay, that's all for today. Let me know what you think and see you next time. Bye.
• 24:49
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 25:13
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 25:36
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.