Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / How Farmgirl Flowers founder Christina Stembel bootstrapped her business from a $49k investment into 60+ million in annual revenue

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How Farmgirl Flowers founder Christina Stembel bootstrapped her business from a $49k investment into 60+ million in annual revenue · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Christina Stembell for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. I'm your host, Doon Roshin, and on today's episode, I'm joined by Christina Stemble, the founder of Farm Girl Flowers. Farm Girl Flowers reimagined the way people shop for flowers, plants, and non-perishable gifts by offering fewer, better options and a best-in-class unboxing and customer experience.
• 0:37
  Christina started this business in 2010 and is the only sole female founder and CEO of a large-scale e-commerce floral company who bootstrapped the business into $60-plus million in annual revenue.
• 0:50
  In this episode, we're covering how Christina went in pursuit of disrupting an industry she had experienced a problem in, how she bootstrapped her brand from a $49,000 investment into a business that will do more than $60 million in revenue this year, the strategies that she used to acquire customers without a marketing budget, and why this year has been her biggest year of growth.
• 1:12
  I so enjoyed this episode and I came away feeling really invigorated in my own pursuit to build Female Startup Club, and I hope you feel that same energy too. As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the podcast if you're loving these founder stories so you can help other ears find us. This is Christina for Female Startup Club. Christina, hi and welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here and talk to you today.
• 1:40
  Me too. I feel like you have so much to share and so many learnings that I'm excited to dig into. But for those who might not be in the loop with you just yet, could you introduce yourself and what your business is?
• 1:53
  Yeah, absolutely. So I am the founder and CEO of e-commerce flower company called Farm Girl Flowers. We are similar to what you think of when you think of online flowers, but better we like to think than the traditional guys. So we do all of our business online and we do it a little different. So instead of having hundreds of options like our competitors do, we have fewer better options.
• 2:21
  And this is very commonplace now, but back when I started it in 2010, that was not the case. Also, something that makes us really special and different is that we're bootstrapped. So we've never taken any outside capital. We're the only large scale e-commerce company in the United States that can say that. Yeah.
• 2:37
  We've just built it kind of the old school way of reinvesting the little amounts of profit we have and spending less than we make, which is just a very novel concept, it seems like, anymore. And we've grown it to about 250 people. We are located in two countries now and a revenue of about $64 million this year.
• 2:59
  Oh my goodness. What an achievement. Holy moly. That's incredible. I want to go back to life before you started Farm Girl Flowers to find out what you were up to and why you were thinking about starting a business in the first place. What was getting you interested in entrepreneurship?
• 3:17
  Yeah, so I've been interested in entrepreneurship for at least a decade before I actually started Farm Girl. I was that person that would carry a notebook around with them 100% of the time. And I would put in so many ideas. I still do. I still have probably two to three new ideas a week.
• 3:34
  which is down from probably 10 to 20 that I had before. But I guess, you know, my goal wasn't to start, you know, like, you know, I think as women, I get really passionate about this, this part of the discussion too. I think anytime that a woman goes into a creative business, there's this natural assumption, which I think is just years and years of conditioning, where we think that that must have been her passion in life. And like, you know, I must have grown up frolicking in my
• 4:00
  flowers and wearing flower crowns, you know, and flowy flower dresses. And that was not the case at all. I just wanted to start a business that would take off a few boxes. And this was the first idea I had in the first industry I found that didn't have any recent disruption.
• 4:15
  in it and the boxes I wanted to check off or I wanted to do something really different. I didn't want to just take somebody else's idea, tweak it 1% and then basically copy it. I wanted to actually disrupt an entire category. And so a lot of the ideas I had weren't able to be big enough to do that. Even if I could only get a small amount of market share, I wanted to be able to grow really big.
• 4:37
  And, you know, flowers was an industry that I found that was a huge industry. And the most recent innovation was years ago in the mid 90s. And it wasn't great innovation actually made it a more generic industry. And so, you know, in I live in Silicon Valley. And so I was seeing everybody around me like disrupting everything like toothbrushes to potato chips and everything in between. And I was like,
• 4:59
  Well, if they can do that with toothbrushes, I can do this with flowers and I can make a better mousetrap, basically. And then I wanted to be able to do something good in the world and, you know, being able to build it. I think you could do this in anything. If you're selling toilet paper, if you're selling anything, you can do good in the world. You can, I mean, toilet paper definitely right now in the pandemic, but, you know, you can...
• 5:17
  Just building a really good company is what my mission is now, one that I would want to buy from and sell to and work at. And so that's something I could have done in any industry. I didn't know it at the time, though. But looking back, that was not a big checkbox that was hard to do.
• 5:32
  And then, you know, the last thing was I knew it was going to need to be bootstrapped. I don't have a pedigree like most people, especially where I live. Everybody, you know, that's starting businesses, most people that are getting investment capital, you know, they went to one of the Ivy League schools or very significant school. I didn't go to college at all. You know, they worked at one of the big tech companies. I definitely didn't do that.
• 5:57
  I just knew that it wasn't going to be possible. And a lot of my ideas were like software based or something where I was going to need millions of dollars of investment capital. So to go back to your original question, sorry, I go off on tangents, but you know,
• 6:10
  I usually can remember to loop it around. So thank you for helping me on that. But I, you know, I just wanted to start a business and I wanted to tick these boxes. And flowers allowed me to do that. And I just think that's really important because, you know, everything in entrepreneurship has a female before it.
• 6:29
  but it doesn't have a male before it, you know? And so like, you know, nobody calls them male entrepreneurs, but I get called a female entrepreneur all the time. And so, you know, and nobody's questioning whether, you know, all of our competitive set are all 100% owned by men, mostly tech guys that stop working at a tech company and then start a company that looks strikingly similar to us. They all are able to go get investment capital pre-revenue before they've even sold a single bouquet. And I've gotten 104 no's, not been able to raise capital at all.
• 6:57
  Um, and the storyline with them, if they say, Oh, I started a flower company. Isn't, Oh, that's cute. You started a flower shop, which was always the narrative with me. And that's not the case, which is why I'm really adamant about making that point. We need to stop. We need to actually just check ourselves and understand that it's coming from conditioning. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just, we've seen all these images. We've heard them for so long, but we need to start a new narrative now, I think.
• 7:21
  Yeah, that's so true. Goodness. So I'm wondering about the light bulb moment that you actually stumbled along flowers. Like what was it that got you interested in that particular category? Yeah.
• 7:32
  I mean, aside from the fact that there hadn't been the innovation, but were you like going through a list being like, all right, pens, cups, flowers? That's a great question. That would have been really smart if I did do that. So if you're out there wanting to do business, make a list because I actually have a really good idea. No, I worked at a university actually, which is really ironic that I didn't go to university, but I worked at Stanford University. And one of the departments that I oversaw did the events for the law school.
• 7:59
  And during the economic downturn, about 8, 07, 08, 09, everybody's budgets were cut. And so I was taking a deep dive into our P&L and saw how much money we were spending on flowers. And why in the world are we spending between $100 and $200 per centerpiece for these events where we're having 50 tables? And just like, why do they cost that much? And it doesn't seem like a good use of money. And then...
• 8:21
  That quickly, I started researching the event space in the floral industry. And I quickly moved to e-commerce because all of my research showed, number one, that's where all the money is. There were three companies that made up three quarters of the entire $3 billion market. Just in... Those companies all did almost a billion dollars a year. It was almost $4 billion at that time, just in e-commerce. And all of them I had used before. When I would send my mom flowers in Indiana, where I grew up, there's not a flower shop nearby. And I was like,
• 8:50
  And I hated the whole experience. And so when I was researching, I found that like every other young consumer hated the experience too. They'd like created, you know, hashtag flower fail and stuff like that for it. And I was like, yeah, I was getting really like worked up. I'm like, that happens to me. I like, you know, spend an hour going through 200 options to find the least ugly option. I check out, I think it's going to be $50. It ends up being a hundred dollars, but I'm like, okay, my mom's worth it. She's worth more than that. And then it, you know,
• 9:16
  gets delivered to her. And before there weren't, you know, nobody had like phones that had cameras on them. But now everybody does, including my mom who still signs all of her text messages, love mom. So she doesn't quite get the hang of it. But she does have the hang of it enough to take a picture of what I sent her and send it to me. And I would always get really upset because I'd be like,
• 9:34
  That looks nothing like what I thought I was sending. True story. The last thing I sent her was supposed to be an all white bouquet. And I sent her dyed Kelly green daisies. And I'm like, that's not even close to an all white bouquet. And I spent $100. I felt ripped off. And so I thought, if I feel that way, and I was 31 or 32 at the time, 31 when I started the research on it, I was like, every other consumer that's relatively my age probably feels that same way.
• 9:58
  because we're smarter than, you know, or more like tech savvy than previous generations. We believe that, you know, if we're going to put our money into something, it's not the thought that counts. You want it to actually have, you know, that $100 of worth for what you just spent. So it's not just like, because I could have sent a card or picked up the phone and had the thought that counts, you know?
• 10:16
  So I just thought, you know, let me just test it out and try it. Let's see if young consumers feel the same way. I did one focus group before I started the company where I just asked friends to bring their friends. And even I asked one of my like frenemies that I didn't even like to bring some friends because I figured I didn't want to be in a bubble and only...
• 10:32
  get my friends that might just think like me. And I found out that in that focus group, 86% of people there, you know, had the same experience as me. And when they were shown a prettier bouquet for the same amount of money, they all went for that bouquet, of course. And so I thought, let's try it. So I quit my job when everybody thought I was crazy. In early 2010, the economy hadn't rebounded yet here. And to start, you know, what everybody coined a flower shop, but even though I would just
• 11:01
  flower company. You know, it's not a flower shop. Not if there's anything wrong with the flower shop, but they do on average $350,000 a year in revenue. I was trying to build a billion dollar company. And when you quit your job, so you were bootstrapping it, you were like, hey, I haven't gone to college. I don't have any training in flowers. What happens next? How do you actually start the flower company?
• 11:24
  Yeah, you learn everything yourself. So, you know, what I was building had never been done before. So it wasn't like I could just go, you know, there was, there's one public traded flower company, large scale e-commerce flower company. So I could go through their, you know, reports, quarterly reports, earnings reports and things like that, that were public.
• 11:41
  But, you know, they don't give you a lot of detail. They don't show you how to make a flower arrangement. They don't, you know, I had to like, figure out, okay, where am I going to get flowers? And how am I going to make a bouquet? And what do I want it to look like? And, you know, then I would read some flower arranging books, and it'd be like, you process the flowers. And I'm like, process the flowers? Is this like a machine I put it through? Like, what is that? You know, and so then I'm like, googling what is processing flowers. So, you know, I like to say now, um,
• 12:04
  You know, there's no excuse not to be able to learn anything because you don't even have to go to the library. You don't have to like go look at, you know, books that were written 20 years ago. You just go to Google and it's the best research tool out there. So I spent hours and hours and hours on Google and then just practicing. I'd go to the flower mart. I'd get flowers. I'd come home. I'd practice. And I very quickly threw out all those flower books because I realized I'm trying to build something different and better. Why am I like copying someone else's designs that I don't even like? So I just like threw them all away and said, okay, what would I want to receive? And started building a bouquet that looked like that.
• 12:33
  Um, and when I started, there was a lot of hate in the industry. There's still a lot of, you know, um, armchair quarterbacks and, you know, when you're doing something different, you know, there's, you know, taxi cab companies don't love Uber and Lyft. You know, I had to think of it that way. So in the industry we're not well liked and that's okay. It's totally okay. But at the beginning it really got to me because.
• 12:54
  You know, I, there are all kinds of, you know, people in the industry talking about how, you know, I didn't study this and I didn't go to school and I didn't get certified. There's like certification programs for floral design and stuff. And I'm like, that is ridiculous. I'm not cutting someone's school open and doing surgery on them. I don't need to like go to school, you know, to learn how to like take greenery off the stem of a flower. You know, I can do that myself from Google.
• 13:24
  But I recently tried to do the plumbing and electrical in my house myself. And I've learned that you cannot learn everything from YouTube and Google. Leave some things to the professionals. So I don't say that anymore. But flower arranging, you can learn everything online that you need to. Oh, my gosh. Next minute, you're like representing yourself in the code of law being like, I Googled how to be a lawyer and I'm here to represent myself. Exactly. I wouldn't have asked me. Lol. Oh, my goodness. Okay.
• 13:53
  I read that you launched the business with $49,000 in savings. What did you use that money towards building the company?
• 14:03
  You're asking really good questions. Some of the best that I've had. Yeah, no, it's great. So yeah, when I started, I had saved $49,000, which I thought was a ton of money back then. You know, I have always worked before Stanford, I worked in hospitality, but then I've worked at a lot of like coffee shops and restaurants and a lot of like wage level jobs all at the same time. So $49,000 was a lot for me. I don't come from money. I grew up on a
• 14:27
  I've never had that kind of money. And so I was, I'm just saying that because like, you know, I hear people are like, I don't have enough money to start it. And so it's like, 49,000 isn't a lot. And it goes very quickly. But if you're really scrappy and frugal, you can make it go like that was for me to live on for two years, too. So I gave myself a two year window. I did a little spreadsheet, really embarrassing to look at now, because it's like seven lines long, you know, and I was like, food, rent, you know, like, and I literally had like,
• 14:54
  I remember when we started getting pressed, my publicist was like, can you go buy some clothes that don't have holes in them? Because literally, I was so frugal. All of my clothes had holes in it. I was eating ramen. I switched from coffee to tea because it was cheaper via tea bags. It was super frugal. But that money goes really quick, and I made some mistakes with it. So if I'm giving advice here, what I would say is everyone told me early on,
• 15:20
  Go get a lawyer. So don't represent yourself. But I did think to your point, like I was like, I can Google that and figure out what I need to do. You can't. You don't have the expertise. And if you have any IP at all, anything that will protect what you're doing, you need to get a lawyer early on because there are people that will copy what you're doing in about a microsecond.
• 15:42
  And then you'll have nothing that will defend it. And so I didn't because that would have probably taken half of my $49,000. And I was like, I'm not going to go spend that kind of money. I should have probably went and tried to get a small loan to see if I could do that. Because, you know, we didn't have much, but we had the burlap wrap that I created. And now you see that worldwide. You probably see where you're at. Everybody is using burlap wrap around the flowers. That was my invention. I came up with 14 different ideas. I, you know...
• 16:11
  tested them all. I sent them pictures to all my friends to see which one they liked the best. And it really became a brand trademark. It became like our swoosh, our Nike swoosh. And that was important because I really wanted people, especially as social media started to take off even more. I wanted people without being able to see the tag to note with ours. So it gives a lot of brand equity and that's worth a lot of money. And so I should have gone and done that. I didn't. If I could go back, I would spend $25,000 probably of that 49,000.
• 16:39
  on legal fees. Um, but I didn't. And instead I used it on for practicing the flowers and, you know, taking flowers that, you know, I still think you have to do all that, um, building a website, um, you know, doing all of those things and living, you know, paying my rent every month as well. And, uh, it just, it goes quick, but I probably would have made some different choices. Um, had I known then what I know now.
• 17:02
  Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, like when it's your own money, not money that you've had, you know, from an investor or friends and family around or that kind of thing, you are much more personally attached to that money and how it's being spent and how long it can last for. I want to talk about still in that early time, the launch strategy and how you actually started finding people who were going to pay for your flowers and getting the word out there about your business.
• 17:31
  Yes. So I always worked in operations before starting Farm Girl. I never worked on the sales side of an organization. And I literally thought they were fluffy and nice to have, but not need to have people. They would go out for fancy lunches in the middle of the day. And I'm like, we're here working. What are you doing? And I'm like, oh, they're working too now.
• 17:52
  My first financial model, that seven line spreadsheet that I said I did, I think for marketing, I had 24 cents per unit allocated for marketing, which is not enough. If I'm giving some advice here, not enough.
• 18:08
  Ridiculous. The first two years I didn't have a single dime to spend on marketing. So what I did, which, you know, people sometimes laugh at, I want to make sure everyone knows that this is like the real way to do it. In my opinion, I, I literally took my product. I took a flower arrangement and I put it out at coffee shops all across the city in different neighborhoods. And I made little marketing cards myself that looked a little janky, but oh well, you know,
• 18:31
  They got the message. Got to start somewhere. And these 99 cent little card holders. And I would, you know, make friends with the baristas who then would give me free coffee too. So I didn't have to just drink tea, which was amazing. And I would get them to let me put it on the bar. The place that was really important, not like behind the scenes, but like on the bar where everybody's waiting for their coffee. And Starbucks was a great partner for us. They got a new district manager a couple of years in, which she cut the issue.
• 18:59
  Did not allow me to do it, unfortunately. But I like to give Starbucks a good shout out because for two years, some of the busiest Starbucks in San Francisco would let me put flower arrangements out. And I would go back every week and I would count how many cards were taken. And if there were, you know, 40 or 50 cards taken, I was like, yes, that's worth another $20 it costs to put another arrangement out.
• 19:18
  But if there's only like 10 or 20 cards taken, I was like, I might need to find another coffee shop. Maybe this one's not, doesn't have enough traffic, which now it's crazy because for $20, if I got 20 cards taken, a dollar per card, that'd be great customer acquisition cost, even if half of them bought or 20% of them bought. But back then I was like, don't think it's worth it. So I did that at around 10, like 10 to 12 coffee shops around the city. And a hundred percent of our growth was due to that. I did nothing else. I mean, sometimes I would go and paper people's cards around.
• 19:45
  Valentine's Day and stuff, which is totally illegal to go put like fires on people's windshields and stuff like that. I did all kinds of things like that, but I just hit the pavement basically. And I didn't spend any money on any kind of traditional marketing at all. And we went from...
• 20:01
  I was telling you earlier, I can give all numbers because I have no board to report to. So I'll just dive in. The first year, I did $56,000 in sales the entire year, which is hilarious looking back on. And I went the next year to $276,000, which I thought was amazing because it's 5x growth. And then that next year, I went from...
• 20:21
  from 276 to 920. I almost hit a million. And literally until we got almost to 920, we did no marketing. So we did almost a million dollars in sales just from word of mouth, from putting beautiful, putting your product, if you have something, so that's the thing like, we'll never have to spend in marketing, even today. I mean, this year is not a good example because we literally turned off marketing for eight months and still had 100% growth year over year. That's not normal.
• 20:45
  But even, you know, last year, like we've never spent more than $10 on customer acquisition costs, which our competitors are spending like 80 to 90 to give you some, some context and even like 30 to 40. So, you know, we're, we're never going to have to spend as much as them on marketing because we have a better product in my opinion.
• 21:03
  and a better customer experience. So if you have a great product, put it in front of people, and then they'll tell their friends, especially if you're in an industry like ours, where 80% of the consumers are women, women will tell other women. Totally. Yeah, they'll want to support you with their dollars. And so, you know, just being real and like, you know, putting your product in front of them and telling them you need help. Sometimes I've gone, you know, on social now, just been like, Hey, we need some help here. Like we're,
• 21:27
  with COVID. Like that's literally what helped us this year. Like, and they will rally around you and vote with their dollars. And as mean as women can be to other women, there's a whole nother set of them that can be really lovely and wonderful as well.
• 21:40
  Ain't that the truth? So true. I'm wondering, like, in those times when you were going from, you know, the 270 up to the 920, I've forgotten the specific numbers, but, you know, those big jumps, what do you think the step change was there? Like, obviously it was word of mouth, but something really shifted. Yeah.
• 21:59
  Yeah, really the only thing was word of mouth. That was also the year we moved out of my apartment, not by choice, but I had a corporate attorney landlord that found out I was running a business illegally from the apartment, which turns out a garage startup is not actually legal. Yeah.
• 22:15
  So I got a pink slip and in San Francisco where it's so expensive to live, you know, you don't want to get kicked out of your apartment. So I had two weeks to get it out of the apartment. And I actually was super scared because I wasn't even making profit at that point. And I was like, now I have to add rent and utilities to that. And that was just, it was just a defining moment for me where it was another cliff I had to jump off. But that helped because that visibility of like getting out of your apartment and also just having that fire like of...
• 22:44
  I'm going to run out of money in about four weeks. I've got about four weeks ahead of me. Like that's it. Um, what do I do? And so it made me hit the pavement even harder. I would go to networking events every night and I would take flower arrangements to those networking events and pretend that they had ordered them and put them on the tables with little like flags and then set farm roll flowers or little cards around them to farm roll flowers. And I just doubled down. Literally, I just doubled down. I was like, okay, if I had four weeks before I got a business and I
• 23:10
  Um, that year at one point I just doubled down and I would go find every, you know, on event bright and meetup and all of those sites, I would go and find any kind of business networking type thing that was going on. I would sneak in to a lot of them. If they required a fee, I would not pay a fee. And I would take flowers and pretend that, you know, if you're going to a reception table and be like, Oh, here's the flowers, you know, and you put them down and people be like, Oh great. Those are beautiful. And, you know, so just doing things like that, um,
• 23:36
  Just being really scrappy. And I would just attribute that to just doubling down. The next year, we were able to add a little bit of marketing dollars. We went from $920 to $1.9 million that year. And I didn't realize it at the time what a feat that was because I learned the fact afterwards that only 2% of female-owned companies ever make it to $1 million in revenue. Yeah.
• 23:59
  And it like sucker punched to the gut. When I heard that, I'd already surpassed that. But I'm like, that is not okay when it's four and a half times larger for a mail-in company. It's just not okay. And that's why I'm very outspoken about that now. But that was by, the next year was really pivotal for us because we had more than 24 cents. I think we were spending like $1.50 though per order on marketing. And I rarely use the word luck, but we were really lucky that year.
• 24:28
  in the truest sense, because it was, it was back when Facebook marketing was just taking off. And the large companies like Nordstrom and all like the big companies that are all vying for the 25 to 44 year old female, like we were, um, hadn't yet transitioned from their marketing spend from traditional channels to social and digital channels. So we lucked out because we were acquiring customers for 98 cents in the early days. Uh, you can't do that. Wow. Yeah.
• 24:56
  And so there's been obviously a lot of years in the middle there, and we reached this year where you've done $64 million, I think you said, or you're on track to do $64 million. How does that evolve your marketing, and how do you get from $1.9 to $64 million?
• 25:12
  Yeah, a lot of work. I don't want to minimize how much work it is, especially bootstrapped. It's too much work for most people. And so I think that's the thing that really sets me apart and my team apart is that, you know, Will Smith said it best. So I'm just going to kind of quote him and mess it up, I'm sure. But
• 25:30
  When I read what he said, it just like summed up my entire entrepreneurial journey. He said that he's never going to be the smartest person or the best looking person, you know, for acting roles. He's never going to be better than everybody else around him. But the thing he will do is he'll outwork anyone. If he gets on a treadmill, he's not getting off till the person next to him has already like fallen off. And so that's me. I will work harder. And I get a lot of flack and you might get some flack for if this makes it into the podcast.
• 25:56
  A lot of people like to criticize and say, you need to work smart, not hard and all of these things. And you need to work smart and hard. If you're going to bootstrap, there's no way around it. You can't work smart enough to not work hard when you're bootstrapping a company and you're trying to get to hundreds of millions and then eventually a billion dollars. There's just no way around it.
• 26:13
  It's the hardest thing I've ever done to not run out of money. You know, there have been so many nights that I haven't slept because I'm worried about payroll the next day. And had, you know, I'm still the CFO of the company for a reason, because I know where every dollar goes, every single dollar goes. I don't have an internal accounting team at all. I'm, you know, me and my assistant do all of that, because I need to know where every dollar is going. So I can make sure that I know when we're in trouble.
• 26:38
  I've heard so many on the FailCon network and all the companies that have failed that I don't know why we're glamorizing it, but about when they'll say, I didn't even know that our burn rate was a million dollars in July, the slowest month of the year for flowers. I'm like, how did you not know that you had a million dollars burn? I would know that day one of being in trouble, of spending more than I'm making. And so that's really important. But that's another diatribe, another like...
• 27:04
  So I'll go back to your question. How we got there originally was by adding geographic regions. So to be very just tactical and let you know exactly how we did it, we were only in San Francisco for five and a half years. I thought when I started Farm Girl, I was going to be able to get national shipping going at a very early time. I thought like two years, I'll get national shipping going. Yeah.
• 27:26
  Well, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. I found out there's a very large barrier to entry in e-commerce, and that's called shipping rates. And we still subsidize over a million dollars this year. It'll probably be about a million and a half this year. We subsidized over $3 million last year on shipping. So we are paying the shipping carriers, our partners, way more than we are charging our customer. And we have a $25 shipping rate even.
• 27:48
  So we're the highest shipping rate of any e-commerce company I know. And we have to, though, because we'll go out of business if we don't. And so every year, though, after 2015, I was adding area. So we at first added just in the Bay Area some different... We went further out. So instead of just being in San Francisco, this little seven-mile-by-seven-mile radius, then we added the North Bay, East Bay, South Bay Peninsula onto that and did that for a year. And then we added California shipping.
• 28:17
  And then we added national shipping. And so it was always like making sure my numbers worked. So this is another thing. You can't just say like, I want to be a national company and launch national shipping. You need to make sure that you're not going to run out of money. And there were, even when we launched national shipping, I could only do 50 orders a day because our subsidies were almost $40 per order. So if I did more than 50 a day, I knew I was going to run out of money. I knew exactly how many days of money I had in front of me.
• 28:45
  to keep my team safe. At that point, I think we were like 19 team members. And I'm like, I have 19 people who their rent and their bills are dependent on me being able to pay them on time. And I'm one of the most proudest things that I'm most proud of, um, is that I've never paid anybody late ever. Like we are, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs will, will put their teams means after the business and we will never do that, but it's, it's been hard to do that. And so,
• 29:15
  I hear a lot of, especially females say, I'm just not good at math. I don't really like numbers. I hate numbers. It's the worst part about my job. I'm usually doing them at two in the morning. I'm doing all the accounting and finance because I hate it. And I've procrastinated and worked on the fun stuff like product development and stuff during the day that I should have been doing accounting. But it's that important. You need, it doesn't have to be fancy. Like if I showed a CFO, my financial model, I have in the past. They literally are very nice about it. But I know on the inside, they're laughing their ass off. They're like, this is nothing.
• 29:43
  It doesn't matter because I can read it and it works for me. So don't be intimidated by making it look super fancy or anything like that. Just know, if you have a product, a sweater, how much does it cost you to make that sweater? And then how much does it cost you to transport that sweater?
• 29:58
  How much does it cost you to market that sweater? You have to know every number. You can't just say like, well, it's $10 to make it. No, it's actually $50 to make it because you have to put all those things into it. And if you don't, you're going to run out of money. And so I did that and I just added geographic areas. Then after I added geographic areas, then I added the amount that we could take every day. So it went from 50 to 100 orders that we could do a day and then to 200 orders a day. Like Mother's Day, that first year of national shipping, we sold out in four minutes.
• 30:25
  of our national because we could only do 200 orders. That's it. Shipped. We could do more locally. But for the shipping program, we didn't even announce it on social or anything for a long time because it was selling out so quick. We didn't want people to be mad. We just let people go and then check to see if their zip code would work. And then when it would, they could put the order in because we just didn't want to like kind of troll our customers and make them mad at us for it. So yeah.
• 30:49
  That was the strategy, adding geographic areas. It's still a strategy I have. We're looking to try to add Canada next year, which would help us a lot, adding another geographic area where you already have customers. So what that does is, you know, when we added national shipping, we didn't have to spend any more on marketing. We spent way less. Our cost per order on marketing went way down, actually, because...
• 31:10
  those people were already out there waiting for us. They'd already heard of us. There's already low hanging fruit that have heard of you. So in Canada, there's already a lot of people that have been asking us to come to Canada. So I don't need to go spend a bunch of money marketing in Canada. I'll just get the low hanging fruit, have them tell their friends, ask them to tell their friends about it. And for the first year, not spend a dime more in marketing. And then we can use what we sell in Canada to help us be able to afford marketing for the next year. And so that's what bootstrapping is. You can't, you can't,
• 31:39
  go spend a ton of money before you have it. Like you can, if you're funded. Um, but it makes you a much healthier company long-term. Oh yeah, for sure. Do you think your superpower is outworking or that you've nailed the numbers? Oh man, everybody should take a lesson from you on questions because these are really the best questions I have. Um,
• 32:01
  You know, I would have always said it without working. But I think it's also knowing the numbers. I think you're absolutely right because I just hear that all the time and that people don't know their numbers. There's a really great article in Inc. I think it was last month where Ty Haney, the founder of Outdoor Voices, who I have a ton of respect for, was just really vulnerable and honest about how she just thought that if she raised enough venture capital, everything would be okay.
• 32:25
  And that I think it, it creates a false safety net when you have a bunch of money in the bank. Um, and when you have these pretty smart people, I won't say they're the smartest people. Cause that's something I've learned that these, these are not always the smartest people in the room. Um, but you have these people that have done this before kind of guiding you. And so you just think you have the safety net. And when you don't have that, you're really critical of everything. You
• 32:50
  can't get away with not knowing things. And so I think I would never come out and say like, I just thought I had enough money and I wouldn't run out of money. Like, no, I like always think I'm going to run out of money. Always. I always think, how am I going to make the next payroll? You know, this is the first year I haven't been like that because the way we've changed the company, our distribution model, we completely changed this year after COVID has put us in a
• 33:13
  buffer for the first time. And I'm not exaggerating last year, because you said you like, like hearing numbers last year, we did 32.7 million in revenue. And we did $34,000 in profit.
• 33:28
  So we've never had any buffer. Like that's like way closer. And that's not even real profit. We were actually a million dollars in debt. That's just what the government says we didn't profit because of what tax code is written to make sure we pay some money. But we were as close to zero and have always run as close to zero as humanly possible in order to be able to grow the company financially.
• 33:48
  You know, you can't have 50 to 100% growth year over a year and have money in the bank. You just can't. You have to spend it to make it and you have to be able to reinvest it. And that's it's definitely a juggling act to make sure you don't run out of money and you're not overspending, but you're not underspending. And then you could have grown more that year.
• 34:07
  That's so interesting. Does that mean you're working towards, you know, super profitability now, or is the strategy more just keep growing as much as possible and potentially exit? Or how does the planning for the future work in that sense? Yeah, it changes a lot. It depends when you talk to me on what my is or if I have one. I mean, I always have many, many plans for it, but, um, you know, I would say, so
• 34:33
  just to be really honest, last year on our nine year anniversary, I kind of had to like come to Jesus with myself. I was like, I am working way too hard to not make any money. I paid myself, I didn't pay myself for five and a half years. And then when I did, I paid myself 60,000 a year. So I just like to be really clear with that because a lot of people will be like, oh, she's just pocketing millions of dollars every year. That's not the case at all. Executive compensation was less than our basic managers made. And,
• 35:02
  So it was definitely a moment where I was like, I can't do this for another 10 years. I'm coming up on my 10-year anniversary, which just, I probably put too much stock in. But I think it's because every financial model I ever did, every planning I did for the company was 10 years. So I'm like, okay, I'm at the end of the 10 years now.
• 35:20
  So now what? And do I want to do another 10 years of making $60,000 a year, which is, you know, so much less than I made before my last job even, and to work 120 hours a week, to not sleep before payroll, to constantly, you know, have...
• 35:37
  So many team members upset with like, you know, that you're not giving enough and not paying enough. And you're like, I'm literally trying to just make it, you know. And so I kind of made myself a deal year nine, where I was like, I have to get by year 10, I have to have a path to real profitability to 10% profitability is what net profit or I'm going to sell.
• 36:00
  Um, that was my inner dialogue and dialogue that I actually wrote down even on my goal list. I was like, this is, this is it. I'm not going to do another 10 years. I, well, on the outside, everybody thinks this is hugely successful and we are growing it really well, but I just got my 104th no last year on raising capital. I truly, as much as I believe in myself, I did not believe that I could get this company to a billion dollars without outside capital.
• 36:26
  No one's ever done that. Nobody's done that in perishability period. Um, the only company I can think with any product is like Patagonia that's done that to hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, and so you can't be what you can't see. Right. So I had, I couldn't find anyone that had done this. And I'm like, I am not better than all these people. Like we'll say that I'm not, I'm not better than all these people. And there's only 24 hours in a day for me to work. So, you know, I, if, if nobody has done this, there's a reason and I need to get out. Um, yeah,
• 36:54
  But then the most miraculously weird, weirdly miraculous thing happened, COVID happened. And COVID sucked, right? For all of us, it just sucked. And I gave, like, we had to shut down our San Francisco facility in 12 and a half hours is all we were given by the city. And I had to furlough and then lay off 191 people out of 197 in a day. And it was horrible. And I came home.
• 37:19
  And after laying off all those people and trying to figure out what I was going to do to stay in business, and I bawled my eyes out because I was like, oh my gosh, I just worked 10 years. And I didn't pay myself anything even. I have nothing to show for this. And personally, I'm going through a divorce at the same time where literally the only thing I kept was my company.
• 37:39
  the only thing I was able to keep in a community property state was my company. And so I was like, I just gave up everything, my house, everything, and I have nothing. And I, what am I gonna do? And so what it did was this amazing thing where I only gave myself, gave the company, like I'm a numbers person, like I hate numbers, but I've always liked to know my numbers, right? So I was like, okay, I give us a 10% shot of making it through this. So if I only have a 10% shot,
• 38:08
  What am I going to do? And we're an escort. So personally, I'm tied to this. So I'm going to clear bankruptcy as well if we go out of business. So what do I do? Well, you just go for it. You just do everything. I just decided at that moment that I'm not going out without a fight. I'm going to do every possible thing I can to try to save this company. And if I still go out of business, the great part about that is no one's going to blame me because it's COVID. So like,
• 38:32
  Um, it also like took that level of fear of like the perception of failure around you off the table because so many people are going to go under this year. So I'm in good company. So I, all those things on that spreadsheet that I went and pitched to 104 investors saying, this is the path to profitability. All the things I did on our ninth birthday, um, where I came up with my plan for how I was going to get to profitability over a span. I'd done that over five years to get to the 10%, you know, um, with what it was going to take me. I was
• 39:01
  We're going to do it in one year. We're just going to go do all these things. Because the reason that I haven't done these things yet is because I don't have a million dollars in the bank. And I'm scared that I'm going to run out of money and not protect my team's jobs. Well, I already lost all my team's jobs. So what am I going to do? I'm just going to go for it. And so that's what we did. And I brought back...
• 39:17
  team members as I could very quickly. Some of the best ones. And we just went for it. And we opened four distribution centers in five weeks. I had planned to do one a year and thought I needed a million dollars per. Nope. We just did it. We got in our cars, drove to Miami, like, you know, literally like
• 39:34
  Did it just as scrappy as it comes, opened in Ecuador via WhatsApp, a second distribution center, and just went for it and got really transparent and vulnerable with our customers as well, telling them what was going on. Because we also needed to ask for their help in still supporting us with their dollars and also waiting for their bouquets because we had to move everything to Ecuador when we got shut down here. And it took longer to get them their bouquets and things like that.
• 40:01
  And what I saw is, you know, everybody rallied around us, our amazing customers as well. My team rallied so hard working right alongside with me and we did it and we got the company like where I thought we would be in year five we're at now. And so, um, all that's a loop back to your question is now I'm at the place where I don't want to sell.
• 40:22
  I am so excited about the future of Farm Girl. And I'm also really excited that I own 100% of the company or 99.86% of the company. And I can take care of my customers. I can do what's right for the company. I can work on benefits for my team that makes sense for them, even if it doesn't look good on the bottom line, like on-site childcare that we're working on right now. We have matching 401ks. We do all the things. And I can do that because we don't have investors.
• 40:49
  And I'm super excited about the future now where at year nine, I wasn't, you know, because literally it was just always a struggle, such a struggle. And it's still a struggle. It's, you know, but now, you know, this year we're going to probably do 10% net profit in one year as opposed to taking us five to get there. It's a pretty big silver lining for 2020. Yeah.
• 41:14
  Zip it, zip it. Don't complain. It's been hard. It's been the hardest year of my life, but I like to coin my years. And this year is the best worst year ever. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. It also kind of sounds like you got that renewed energy that you had in your first year where you were really hustling, hitting the pavement, just doing all those things. And you've like brought that back and you've just done the same thing. You've you've repeated that in but in different movements with different plays kind of thing.
• 41:44
  Absolutely. That's a really good, yeah, that's exactly what I did. It was in what my team did. We all like started a new company within the company, basically. Love that for you. I also love that it sounds like your community really strengthened and it's, you know, built something really, really special. I'm sure it was special before, but people rallying, you know, for you, I saw that photo where, you know,
• 42:08
  You know, you had to throw out $150,000 worth of flowers, which obviously would have been a really tough day. But all the comments of people just being like, I just bought from you. I've just ordered. I'm here to support, you know, all those kind of things. I guess that's what keeps you showing up every day and being like, well, they're there. People love us still.
• 42:29
  Absolutely. On the hard days, actually just last night, I was reading some of the comments on for our 10 year anniversary. I shared some memories over 10 days, like the top 10 memories. And the comments were the most loving comments, which I know sounds weird to say about business, but just so loving. And
• 42:47
  When I have hard days, I just look at those and I'm like, oh my gosh, people love us. And that is, I think, a testament to my team and what we've all worked so hard to build. And you can't fake that. And so really, that was the equity we had put into the company for the nine years before COVID.
• 43:06
  every day, just plugging it out. And like, you know, my customer service team, I just can't see enough amazing things about they have the hardest job in the world. Like, especially right now, like you and some days, 30 or 40% of our orders aren't delivered on time, because everybody's shipping everything and they're dead when they arrive in because it's perishability. So, you know, they are just so amazing and make sure that they take care of every single customer. And then nine years of that coming back to us, we got to see it firsthand this year. I'm like,
• 43:36
  I don't know. Everybody likes to use the word authenticity, which I love the word and hate it. I love the real, you know, real definition of the word authenticity, but we really are authentic. We're, you know, we admit it when we make mistakes. We, you know, take ownership for it. We talk to our customers like they're our friends because they are. Anybody who's like, you know, when we, I pulled a top 50 list of the top customers that have bought from us since March, some people, there's somebody that bought $26,000 worth of flowers since March from us.
• 44:04
  Yes. Like, you know, my first reaction was, is that fraud? Because we have a lot of credit card frauds. I'm like, is that a fraud? I go and look at me, nope, it's a real person and it's not fraud. And just like, that's amazing. That is absolutely amazing. And, you know, I am so grateful and I'm so grateful for our customers and so grateful for my team because that's nine years of them, like really building that for us. So that way, when we need it the most, we got it, you know, we got the support back.
• 44:34
  Oh, gosh, that's amazing. What do you think is the biggest learning you've had throughout this year and what 2020 has been?
• 44:44
  Yeah, so much learning. I think I always used to say like, you know, we've even, we have pins that say grit and wall hangings that say grit. And like, that was our, our, our secret was that we're just gritty. We're like a gritty company. And, you know, I would always talk about resilience and grit being those being my super powers basically. And I don't think I knew what that was until this year at all. Like, I think I thought I knew what it was, but I had no idea
• 45:15
  It sounds really elementary to say this, but the biggest learning that I've had is that you just have to get back up. Like you literally just have to get back up. You know, I used to say that, but I didn't know what that meant. Like, you know, in order to make it, that's the only thing that's going to separate you from someone else is that you're willing to get back up and try again. And whether that means like you fail at the company, you start something else, or whether it means that you just literally have to like go back to eating ramen for a while, it's...
• 45:42
  Or, you know, you have to work 22 hours out of 24 and not sleep at all. And you just have to get back up. And there's no other...
• 45:53
  there's no other thing. There's no other thing that's going to like, you know, nobody plans for a national pandemic. There's no way you can. And what I think this year taught all of us is that you can't always plan things. You, there are always going to be things out of your control, um, which every entrepreneur I know is like a type a personality where they like, want to be, have control of things. And it's really just, um,
• 46:18
  being able to get back up. And that's what we did this year. And that's what we've done for the last 10 years. But this year it was, it felt like daily being like daily. There'd be, you know, even right now, you know, I'm not sleeping a whole lot because I'm so worried we're going to be shut down again here in California. Um, with all the height every day, there's new restrictions and, um,
• 46:35
  You know, unfortunately, our government doesn't see the value in giving notice to business owners, unfortunately. And, you know, I'm even thinking later on, I might go into politics, but I've been so disheartened by the way things have happened with this, where, you know, we need to keep jobs, like we can't kill the whole economy, and we need to keep people healthy. And so there are better ways that we could have done this. But I'm worried all the time that we're gonna be shut down. And I now have spreadsheets that show scenario one, scenario two, scenario three, if that happens. Yeah.
• 47:05
  But then I also know something else is going to happen. And I'm going to be like, wait, we're going with scenario two. And then it's going to be like, nope, not going with scenario two. Now we're going three. Nope. Now we've got to go back to the drawing board and try it again. And so I think that's the learning this year. Just getting back up time and time again. Relentless perseverance, it sounds like. Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 47:28
  I'm conscious of time, but there's two other things I want to ask you before our six quick questions. I read a nifty thing about a thing you called the cashback strategy, and I just wanted to get you to tell us what that was and how it helped you because it sounded really great. And I'm sure a lot of people could benefit from hearing about it.
• 47:47
  Yes. So we are on a Capital One commercial here even. And it's not, you know, it's funny because it's not a lie. Like I am the biggest cash back freak there is. I know every credit card and what, like, you know, in January, I use this credit card because up to $50,000, you get $5 back for one. And then once you surpass that $50,000, I switch to this credit card. But the one that
• 48:14
  has worked the best for me is just finding the highest cash back card you can, which here it is Capital One, Spark Small Business. It's an amazing credit card. And it's funny because I am not somebody, I didn't even have a credit card until I was 30. I hate debt. I just, you know, my husband at the time, he was like, you need to get a,
• 48:35
  cash back credit card. And I was like, Oh, what? So I can get like $10 back a year. That was hilarious. This year, we're probably getting back like six to $700,000, I would say back in cash back. So yeah, so the strategy is, you find the card that has the most cash back on everything, which is that one. So you get 2% on everything. And you put everything through credit cards. Now, any CFO or accounting person listening is like,
• 48:58
  screaming at the top of their lungs because they love to be like, oh, you need to float and you need to do all this stuff. And I'm like, floating is not going to get me $600,000 or $700,000 this year. Floating might like, I can postpone paying people, but what does that really do? Come on. You know, it's not like the interest that I'm going to make in waiting 30 days to pay is going to surpass $600,000 or $700,000. So you can do the math yourself on that one. So I put everything through credit cards, everything. And then I save that money for a rainy day.
• 49:25
  So, um, either you can pay yourself with it. So I give that advice to people. It's also tax free. Um, that will probably change in the next couple of years, especially as vocal as I've been about it. I'm sure the government's working on that right now, but they can't tax you on that as income. And so even if you, you know, I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, especially once it happened to be female and there's like, how do you pay yourself? And I'm like,
• 49:47
  Yeah, you can't like you can't know how do you eat? And I'm like, yeah, it's interesting. It's a dilemma So this is a way that you can eat so, you know, even if it's like twenty thousand dollars a year that you that's that's like this essentially thirty to forty If you're paying taxes on it, um, and you can pay yourself at that or you can it is like saved my butt so many times and farm girls um, but so many times because you know, we'll have an unplanned expense, which is my least favorite term ever
• 50:16
  But every year there's about a million dollars in unplanned expenses. Right. So, and you know, you're supposed to budget it and you do kind of, but then you take from that bucket to like, you know, cause it's not a real bucket where it's like sitting there in a bucket, you know? So, you know, so there's always like something that comes up like a tax audit where they've passed a new sales tax thing, but they haven't let any of the business owners know because, you know, according to them, you're supposed to have tax accountants on, um,
• 50:40
  your staff, which every small business I know has that, right? You know, so, and they'll pass a new thing that's like, oh, you were supposed to charge sales tax on local deliveries. If you...
• 50:51
  if your bike couriers are actually employees, but if they were independent contractors, you wouldn't have to. So you owe us $400,000 for that. And that would be enough to put us out of business if I didn't have that slush fund. And so put it away. Don't touch it. Don't use it for anything else. That is literally a bucket. And even a lot of times I'll leave it in there. Like I, the last time I cashed it out last month, it was at a hundred and what, 185,000, I think sitting in there, you know, so like leave it there. Yeah.
• 51:20
  Because if you put it back in your account, you're going to spend it and leave it there and then use it for whatever unplanned expense comes up. That's going to bail you out. And then if you don't, you can pay yourself with it if you don't use it at the end of the year. So you will probably end up using it. That was always the thing I believe. I'll make it to like November and be like, I'm actually going to get a paycheck this year. And then I'm like, oh no, now there's a lawsuit. Oh, great. So, um, but I, it's literally saved me every single year.
• 51:48
  Gosh, that is such a great tip. I'm going to look into that from the UK. Love that for us. What advice do you have for women who have a big idea and want to launch their own business?
• 52:01
  the biggest advice I think and the best advice is to just do it. So I spent 10 years with that idea notebook. And while I'm grateful for that 10 years of learning that I had at the job I was at previously that I was at for seven and a half years, I did learn a lot, especially about people management and things like that. I also don't know if all the, the things hadn't aligned up perfectly. I don't know if I ever would have started a company. And so I think,
• 52:31
  I heard something recently that I just thought was so profound. When people say, you know, that entrepreneurs are, you know, not scared of failing and that they're just a different breed because they're not like everybody else that they're so scared of failing. And this person was saying, no, that's, that's not actually the case. We're just more scared of regret. And I find that to be so true. Like I, you know, I'm, I fail every single day at things here, every single day. And I,
• 53:00
  I'm not scared of that at all. And when I'm even like, if I think about failure at all, it's never because I'm worried about how I'm going to feel about myself. It's always about like the perception of what other people are going to think about me, which is just stupid anyway. Um,
• 53:14
  But, you know, I'm really scared of regret. And I'm really scared of, you know, being at that rocking chair moment, I like to call it, like when, you know, I'm at 80 years old, sitting on my rocking chair on my front porch overlooking the ocean, hopefully. And, you know, I'm looking back at my life and I'm like, you know, we only have one life. You know, at least that's my belief system. A lot of people think differently. But like, if we only have one life,
• 53:36
  do I really want to waste it by not doing what I really want to do? And so I would just say, if you're thinking about starting a business, first of all, make sure it's viable. So I would say like, do a focus group or something like that. Just give yourself a little bit of like, just making sure it's not in your head is a great idea. I had many of those iron on pockets for your suits. I had all kinds of stuff that I like, I thought was brilliant. But you know, when I asked my friends, they're like, yeah,
• 53:57
  Take it or leave it, you know, so, you know, maybe do a focus group or so with your friends, but then just do it. Just do it. And don't be scared about failing because literally you're probably just scared about what people are going to think about you. And one of the other my biggest learnings that took me until I was 40 to figure out in life was that I need to care about people that not care about what they think of me.
• 54:19
  So, you know, don't become that jaded person. That's like, I hate people. They're horrible, which I sometimes can get like that when I get all the hate now. But, you know, care about them as people, but really don't give them any weight to what they think of you because they're probably sitting there dissatisfied with their life thinking, I wish I had gone for something more and I didn't. And so I'm going to project that onto you instead and then just do it. And if it fails, big deal. You'll learn a lot from it and you'll go do something else, but just do it.
• 54:47
  Absolutely, for sure. Love that. All righty. Question number one. What's your why? My why is kind of what I just said. My why is not wanting to regret not going for things in my life. And so I'm always going to be willing to do the hard things. So that way later on, I'm not sitting there thinking, why didn't I?
• 55:17
  Totally. Absolutely. Question number two is what do you think's been the biggest marketing moment that made your business pop?
• 55:26
  Ooh, good one. I don't know if I can say just one. The earliest one though, was an article in the New York times that really just, so, you know, PR I used to think was also fluffy and like, I'm going to spend how much a month on PR. And it was, it's still one of the best investments we make. Um, we have an amazing PR team that I love dearly. I love them as people. Um, they're amazing, amazing people. Um, it's called Jennifer Beck communications. If anybody's looking for one,
• 55:56
  And, you know, they've helped put us on the map in ways. There's just something about the credibility you get when people see you in print or when they see you on TV. And, you know, even my own parents, I think, didn't fully understand what I did. You know, I think they thought it was just a little flower shop. And then when they saw the second one, I would say would be the Capital One commercial.
• 56:18
  when people saw us on a commercial, they're like, oh, this is legit. It's not just a little flower shop. And I'm like, how many times have I been telling you that? But there's credibility in that. And so I would say don't underestimate the power of PR and to budget for it. It'll seem like, what? I'm going to spend 10%.
• 56:37
  you know, starting out 5,000 a month, it seemed like a ton of money and then 10 and then 20, like, I'm really going to spend that, but it's, it's immeasurable really, because you can't really tell how many people come from it, but it's a lot. And it just lends credibility to your company. Yep. Totally. Question number three is where do you hang out to get smarter? What are you reading, listening to, where are you subscribed to?
• 57:00
  Yeah. So I wish I had a better answer for this last year. I used to listen to audiobooks constantly, like at least one every other week. Sometimes one a week. I'm also at the commute. I've listened to so many podcasts, but now that I'm home all the time or a lot of the time, I don't nearly as much as I used to. And this year, I literally have had zero minutes free at all.
• 57:24
  So I would say this year that the place I go to get smarter is my network of other entrepreneurs. I'm in a couple groups. The one that has been really helpful is one called YPO, Young Presidents Organization. And...
• 57:39
  being with other entrepreneurs that are facing the same things and having a network that I can call and be like, this is going on, you know, like the Wayfair bill, what the heck is that? You know, like, and how do we navigate this? And, you know, or we had a data breach years ago and things like that. And so that's where I go to get smarter because there are people that have, you know, there's people that I also just didn't like gobsmacked in like, you know, in a fan girl way that are in these groups that I'm like,
• 58:08
  Oh my gosh, like, do you know what that is? You know, and stuff. And so I can call them and be like, you know, they're already at a hundred million or 200 million or 300 million and where I'm going to hopefully. And so I can be what I can see then because I have them in my life. And so I would say that's where I go to get smarter. I also am a, I read a lot of articles about,
• 58:30
  that's the amount of time I have now instead of books. And so I read a lot. But starting out, I will say like, you know, being someone who didn't go to college, I read every business book I could get my hands on. Everything from, you know, I found the lean startup to be amazing and figuring out how to do it in a scrappy way and not being afraid to get a minimum viable product out there. You know, I literally read everything. The hard thing about hard things, like everything that I could get my hands on. And so I highly recommend that. And then one thing that I listened to,
• 59:00
  Every probably I listen to all of Brene Brown's books every year, again, at least once and sometimes twice for the ones that I like, you know, that I really, really need to hear. So if I'm going through something hard, I pull out and I love her podcast. So I can't recommend Brene Brown enough. I definitely am her biggest fan. And when I'm having a hard time, I just listen to her audio book yet again. I should have them memorized by now. And it helps me.
• 59:26
  Yeah, I need to listen to her audio book. I haven't heard it yet. I'm going to get onto that after this episode. Love her. Question number four, and I'm interested about this one, given that you work 120 hours a week. How do you win the day? What are you doing to keep happy, fulfilled, productive, motivated to keep showing up?
• 59:48
  Yeah, I love that question. I used to not believe in like, I hate the word self-care. It's like, it's like nails on a, on a chalkboard to me. And it's probably because I grew up on a farm in Indiana. And so like self-care was just, and it was also very much like an evangelical background where it was like, you, you do things for other people. And so self-care was, is really hard for me. And I still will probably never use that word in a non-facetious way.
• 1:00:12
  But I do believe in doing things for yourself and putting yourself, you know, caring about yourself, which is the same thing as self-care, but I just can't call it that. And it's also self-care is usually used in a way where we're basically chastising or judging someone else.
• 1:00:28
  for their choices. And so there was an article that came out about me last year. And of course, you know, everybody wants clickbait. And so the title was, you know, this CEO only sleeps four hours a night. And the hate I got from that was like huge. It was huge. People be like, you should not be recommending this. And if they'd read the article, I was saying,
• 1:00:46
  I love it when I get seven or eight hours of sleep, but I just can't right now. But I know that I'm healthier when I do sleep more. But right now I'm at a three to four hour because that's just what necessitate what this year is necessitating for me. And so like, you know, if you read it, I don't believe in that. But that's just how it was how it was said. But.
• 1:01:04
  All that to say, the thing I do for myself right now is I work out. And I have a Peloton and a Reformer, which you can see behind me right now because I've no other place in my little one bedroom apartment than it. But I have found that I'm happier when I'm healthier. And that is something that I can do for myself, even just 30 minutes a day, that really makes me feel better. And then the other thing I do, which is not a super healthy habit, is I online shop.
• 1:01:35
  So if I have... Truths are being told here. Totally. It's so bad. The RealReal is an obsession of mine. And so, and I love Julie Wainwright as well as a founder. So I'm also like, I'm supporting one of my idols and entrepreneur idols.
• 1:01:54
  but I don't need to support her that much. She's fine. Um, so I usually reward myself being like, okay, you're going to finish the six hour project, even if it's three o'clock in the morning, and then you're going to give yourself 20 minutes and X amount of dollars and you're going to buy whatever you want to reward yourself. So I have rewarded myself way too much this year. Um, and need to like dial that back and work out more. Love that for you though. Good for you.
• 1:02:17
  I'm into that. Question number five is if you only had $1,000 left in your business bank account, where would you spend it?
• 1:02:27
  So that has happened many times to me where I've had less than $1,000 in my bank account. And my answer would be I wouldn't spend it. So the first thing I did when COVID, when we found out about shutting down San Francisco, was I turned off all the credit cards. So nobody could use a credit card. I turned off all auto pays on our bank account. I basically did everything I could to protect every dollar because that's what's going to get you to it. So you don't spend it. You do everything you possibly can to not spend that $1,000. Yeah.
• 1:02:57
  Great. Love that. Clever. And last question, which I think we've also covered a little bit, but how do you deal with failure? Yeah. I allow myself to wallow a bit if needed. I let myself cry in the shower when I need to. I go for walks on the beach a lot. I live at the
• 1:03:23
  And then I get over it. You know, I give myself time to feel those feelings and to, you know, that day and, you know, March 16th that I will never forget exactly how I felt, where I was sitting, what I was wearing. And just the deep sense of grief that I felt just having furloughed 191 people and not thinking that I was going to make it through it. And, you know, I just...
• 1:03:52
  allowed myself to feel those things and didn't beat myself up for it. Cause it's a very natural reaction, right? Like you're going to feel things when you fail. And that felt like a very acute failure to me. Not that I could have done anything about the pandemic, but I could have done things to set myself up better. And I felt a sense of failure to myself that I had just worked so hard for so long without paying myself. So now I'm a big proponent of telling people, don't do that. Don't be the martyr. Don't be, you know, like,
• 1:04:22
  figure out a way to pay yourself, get the credit card cash back and pay yourself. So you're not sitting there thinking, wow, I would have made six times more money or eight times more money
• 1:04:33
  you know, personal revenue. If I had stayed at Stanford university, working a middle management job than what I just did in the last 10 years. And so just let, I let myself feel it. And then I give myself an end date to like, okay, I'm going to give myself till midnight tonight. And I'm going to go for a walk on the beach and I'm going to eat ice cream. And I'm going to not spend a dollar because I need every dollar right now, but, um, I'm going to do
• 1:04:59
  I'm going to let myself do that. And then I'm going to get over it. And I'm going to realize how lucky I am and how fortunate I am and how blessed I am in life to have a roof over my head and food to eat for now. And, you know, I really, really focus on gratitude. That's the next step. The after grief is just really feeling like, oh my gosh, even on my walks. And I think the reason I love to walk on the ocean is like, I, how many people go their whole lives without even seeing the ocean? Yeah.
• 1:05:26
  And I get to see it every single day and get to live here next to it. Like that's, that's enough to make me feel really grateful. And so then I just try to focus on all the things that I do have and the, um, you know, and then get over, get over it. Move on, move on sister. I hear you. Okay.
• 1:05:46
  Wow. I have so enjoyed this so, so, so much. Thank you so much for sharing so candidly and so much of the real side of your story. I'm so thankful and really grateful that I got to meet you and hear it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And I wasn't joking. You had some of the best questions I've ever been asked and it just shows how in tune you are with this. And just thank you for having me. I'm really, really grateful.
• 1:06:15
  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.
• 1:06:39
  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.
• 1:07:02
  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.
• 1:07:19
  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.
• 1:07:43
  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.
• 1:08:06
  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.