Latest / Found-HER with Kimberley Hiebert / Cancer, COVID, and a Pet Food Store: My Messy Middle Business Story

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Cancer, COVID, and a Pet Food Store: My Messy Middle Business Story · Found-HER with Kimberley Hiebert

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Found Her, the podcast for women who build empires, break barriers, and blaze trails all while fighting themselves.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: These are bestie level conversations from behind the scenes, the real work, the messy middle, and the wins that last.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Kimberly Hebert, founder, franchise builder, wife, mom, and Grammy, and a woman who has done the inner work while building the outer winds.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Here we talk business, identity relationships, and the kind of growth that cracks you open, then puts you back together.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Stronger, better.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is your space to rise as a founder and as your truest self.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dive in.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Have you had a failed business?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I've really talked a lot about our failed franchise.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I used to have not the franchise uh franchisee in my current system, like indoor gurus, but my husband and I were franchisees of a particular of a different industry, a different brand, and that business failed.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we talk a lot, or we I don't we don't really talk a lot about it, but like people say, oh, you know, I've had a couple of businesses or think that I'm successful.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I never really uh talk much about the failure.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And when I and the last little while I've been working on a keynote that kind of goes through some real critical doors, if you will, closing and opening over the last five, well, 10 years, over the last 10 years.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um, one of those was a failed business, a failed franchise.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, I don't really talk much about it.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that I have anything to hide, but we, you know, the world doesn't really like to talk much about failures.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And um, well, there is a financial loss that comes with it.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that's that feels like the failure part is the financial piece that we didn't gain, that we lost money, which would make the business a failure.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: The whole experience was not a failure.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: The experience was the lesson, if you will, or the masterclass in um really understanding a scaled franchise model.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that ended up leading us to, of course, with along with a few other uh things going on, to building our own mobile franchise because we were able to lean on the pain points of this, you know, so-called failed franchise that we had.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just thought maybe it's worth a little discussion, a little share about what does that look like.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a brick and mortar model, it was in an in in an industry that most people would think was uh high demand, was in the pet health food industry, and not like uh mainstream pet food, but like, you know, the little bit bougier kind, the kind where the people that want their pets to survive, not just thrive.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that like, you know, maybe maybe it's the uh the people that buy organic food for themselves and then want really high standard of food for their pets.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is sounding really judgy for people what they purchase for their pets in general, but it was like a high-end pet health boutique, put it that way.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm trying to say.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Blah, blah, blah.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, and so, you know, we all know dogs and cats are like people's kids, and we spend a lot of money, myself included, on the care and well-being of these animals in our care, and the industry itself feels like it's a it's a boom.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's tons of, and it is, it's a bit a big industry.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: But we went into franchise in a location.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, location is important because you know you're wanting to capture a community of people that are maybe living in the area, walking in the area, accessing services in the area, all that kind of stuff.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So location and it's a brick and mortar, it's a retail location.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So this was pre-COVID.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yes, we had the business during COVID.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like interesting when I look at the time frame of when we had that business.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: We had that business over some critical times in our lives.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: One was when I had cancer.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: The business was up and running for about a year with my daughters running it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, maybe it was just over a year.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was just over a year.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So my daughters were learning business.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So they were young moms, new in business, learning a new industry, and also learning the things that go along with having a high inventory business, perishables, um, learning the actual industry itself, running tech, computers, you know, all that kind of stuff, which is why we built we went into franchising because we were very busy and we thought this was the greatest way to support our daughters in their business learning, as well as, you know, removing a little bit of the load from us.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: But ended up this the time that we had this business.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we went from I had cancer, so that removed me from the business and really changed the operating.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not that I was the success of that, but it put a lot of pressure and a lot of um responsibility on my kids at a time when they're, of course, also dealing with the emotional pressure of having their mom going through cancer and you just don't know what that road's gonna look like or where that's gonna take you.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I look at that, so that then I get through that, we get through that getting our feedback on the ground, you know, in terms of like, okay, I'm still gonna, I'm still gonna be here, I'm still gonna live.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yay, you start to kind of celebrate a little bit.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then COVID came.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we all know what happened with the majority of businesses in COVID.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: We were fortunate enough that our business was considered an essential one, so we didn't have to shut down completely, but definitely sales plummeted uh and then started to come back up a little bit, but we had to let go of everybody but one person.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of always laugh and say nepotism is a thing because I did have to make a decision between a staff, a non-family member, and a family member.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I chose my family member for a couple of reasons.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, she'd also already run the business for a whole year, year and a half in my absence while getting treatment.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so she she was the one that had the most bandwidth to support the business.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then I joined in on help and helping her.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we went through those two things and what that and and so you got these added pressures.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say at this time, during that time, I didn't really look at the impact of those two things of me having cancer and COVID, and how that sucked the life out of my daughter who was running it, and the energy that it would take to keep the business going because it was a 10-year business.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was the plan.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: 10 years, the girls were gonna run it for 10 years.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: One of my daughters uh changed her mind and decided she wanted to grow her family and work behind the scenes.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So she did that, working on social media and things like that.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then my other daughter, she was the front runner.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: She was the worked there, you know, 35, 40 hours a week, managed the staff, the inventory, the cash, the whole business with my support.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, sometimes I worked on the floor, sometimes I didn't until COVID.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then I came into support and it was her and I running it and then kind of bringing it back to life after COVID.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: But at that point, too, there were some things going on in my life that was were bringing me to a different understanding and awareness because of my journey with cancer.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my husband and I both decided, like, oh, maybe it's time for us to retire and start selling things and liquidating and spending more time in that kind of recreationally retired zone.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so we started having these conversations out loud, and we decided, you know, we're gonna sell this business.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that created some stress unbeknownst to us in my daughter, because this is her job, and you know, how's it going to impact her?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So she had her own process to go through.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: But at while all of that stuff is going on, the actual numbers in the business are like dropping.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we were just talking about this yesterday.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: In that particular model, we needed to at that point, so this is years ago now, we needed to generate a minimum of$64,000 a month in order to break even from the operational expenses.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we have been doing that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: We we actually had done really, really well into the first two to three years.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But then just before COVID, again, the I think it was the crossing of cancer and COVID, two C's for me, the sales started to come down, they started to slip down.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the shifts in the market got some bigger players showing up in the local market that really, really tested and put pressure on us as a small little boutique.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And um, the franchise or never really provided any extra support.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: They never really like rallied and kind of they didn't, what do I want to say?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't launch a big, big campaign to help, uh, to help support as everybody's numbers start dwindling.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so you got these like these inventory costs going up, you've got the sales going down, couple of thousand dollars a month.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is it doesn't take long for that to slip.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then we have the emotional, mental load that's going on, not even about the numbers at that point, because I understand that sometimes business has a flow and sometimes you are on the bottom end of it, but it was the emotional toll all of that had taken on I think my daughter and us.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the business just crumbled.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: My daughter decided she she decided to take matters into her own hands.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: She had her own calling and her own desire.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so she went and found herself a job uh and left, gave us two weeks' notice.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about this time, I talk about when she moved on and how horrible, horribly, horrible immature I handled it.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was very upset because ultimately I didn't want that business either.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be trapped 60 hours a week slepping dog food behind and behind a counter.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I handled it poorly at first and took some time to recover from that.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but suddenly my husband and I found ourselves holding holding the, what do you call it, holding the bag, holding the door of this uh failing franchise.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we were, we, we were just like, we gotta sell it.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was actively looking for a buyer, had taken a few buyers through the process, which is very, very vulnerable and exposing, especially when it's a business that's not doing well.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's definitely opportunity in buying a business that's not doing well.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to really fully believe in yourself and be fully convicted that you can turn it around.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, this model, brick and mortar, high inventory.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're spending$100,000 a month on inventory.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, probably wasn't that much, actually.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's let's not be so exact.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, yeah, probably.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you're spending all that kind of money on inventory.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Your, you know, your rent is$8,000, you got royalties, you got all these fixed operational costs.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had a commercial freezer.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think my utility bill alone was$2,000.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's pretty high operational costs.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, my husband and I found ourselves, like him and I working, we had one or two part-time people.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we were able to sell it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we found a buyer, took him through.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: He saw all the numbers, knew what was going.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: There was no hiding, no track, no um, no bait and switch model for us.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's not how I operate.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we were just like, oh, thank God that period of our life is over.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: It but here's the thing on the sale of the business, I lost even more money because I didn't pay attention to details.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So in the grand scheme of things, that business provided it, it provided a great platform for us to learn.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was, I didn't go into it with that mindset.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't be like, hey, let's do this and learn so much through failure and challenge and obstacle.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was, it was literally the messy middle moment uh business of minds.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the relationship got messy with my daughter, myself for a while, the finances were messy, the exit was messy, like all of it.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I just can't believe it.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But in all of that, it was actually the catalyst to the franchise system that my husband and I have been building for the last three years.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what's wild is like, how does like a brick and mortar pet health business transfer into a door guru's franchise model?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And here's how it here's here's the messy middle moment that it was actually the silver lining.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: So because we had to spend so much time at the store, you know, there's long, slow times.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: It forced my husband to get creative and he started reading the emyth.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I had already read it and loved it, but he started reading it and he started while he was reading it, he was like, Oh, I can see how I can see the value in systems and operations in a way he couldn't before.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so he was having his own aha moments about that, about systems, operations, that kind of stuff.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not about franchising.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was not his thing, that was mine.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you see, we're also in the inside of a franchise system that was failing.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I, my business, my business, that one, was not the only one in the system that was struggling.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the other thing to note is that um it wasn't just me.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: There was a number of units across different regions that were really, really struggling and shutting down and still continue to do so to this day.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: There was is really something skewed with that model.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's a brick and mortar model in general, but anyway, I digress.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens is as we got to, you know, spending all this time, you start noticing, okay, this franchise system, although this one in particular lacked franchise or support.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's what that lacked.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: It lacked flexibility.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It did not, when I looked over the economic cycles that it went through, it was not flexible for an ever-changing economy.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: With that, the model the way it was, there was only really one or two ways to deliver services or to deliver products.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that provided no pivotability, if you will, no flexibility.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, and and I think as a small business, you need to be able to do that.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be able to have a flex in the market as the market flexes, at least that's the experience.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: So those things, and then it was high cash because of the inventory you had to buy ahead of time.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this was perishable industry or perishable inventory as well as non-perishables.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that money, other than the stuff you sell at the regular price, most of the inventory in an inventory-laden business that you're gonna sell, you're gonna buy it for a dollar and you're gonna sell it for under a dollar.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: You never, ever, ever make your dollar for dollar back.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a terrible, terrible model.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it sucks the cash because now you have to really pay attention to cash flow as well because you're buying more inventory.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so, anyway, so these are like pain points, and then of course, a constant rotation of staff.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so, as Darren's reading, learning the magic and the beauty of systems and operations, I'm like kind of like looking at franchising, like this is really wild.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how else could someone do this business in a way that just doesn't that doesn't get you so like stuck?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I had been listening to a podcast from 1-800 Got Junk from Brian Scootamore, who owns that.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he was talking about the mobile model.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this was my first introduction to a mobile model, and this is when I connected the mobile model of franchising to what Darren had been doing since he sold his business, which was fixing uh residential property doors.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he had this great little business going on that was just printing cash.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And these things kind of all collided, you know, together.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was the silver lining that really was the catalyst, the time frame when Dorguru's franchise system really started to take uh life and take form and be like like actual, like, hey, we could do this.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um, this is literally a thing.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: We have this whole, you know, niche category that nobody operates in.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's high in demand.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need to own all this.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is the other thing I learned.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to own every aspect of the business in order to incorporate it into your business.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: The brick and mortar model that I was that I had owned, they had a software system, but it wasn't their own.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was something that we paid monthly for from a systems person that had opera built the POS system.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was like, wait a sec.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then they were selling products that weren't theirs.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, they had some of their own branded products, but the majority of the products were not theirs.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when you start to pull apart our experience and how when we started to build our own franchise, these became really personal pain points that we were like, hey, when we build this model, these are the things that sunk us, and we don't want to do that to somebody else.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so, out of all that pain, discomfort, the unforeseen, I would say the unforeseen messy middle that that business was for our life, because this is the thing, you don't know what the future holds.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know what the next thing is.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: You think the thing that you're doing now is the forever thing for the most part, or it's, you know, you don't really think, well, like for us, I didn't really think that business was going to be our messy middle business and we were gonna go on to building something even like more epic than you know, we were already in our 50s.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: We had already built and already had a career.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: My husband had already built a business.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: We kind of thought we were at the towards the end of that.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as it turns out, that failed franchise ended up being my messy middle and business.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the I guess the point of the story is, you know, don't be afraid of quote unquote quote failure.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of looking at it as failures, like what are the lessons?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, there was a financial loss.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is that failure?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really think financial loss is failure.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a loss.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I would structure that.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: I would say, yes, that was a loss.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we still feel that today because it was not just a small loss, it was a fairly substantial one.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: But overall, the quote unquote failed business story, you can always, always, this is what I love about hindsight is you can stop and take a look back.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the further away you get from it and the more mature you get and the older you get, the better you are at recognizing patterns.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that is your key to understanding where where things went wrong, if you've if you've made the seen the same pattern repeat over and over, or wait, this was just a piece of the bigger picture that I didn't see then.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be my moral of the story for you.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: The takeaway is if you're in a time where it feels like you're in a failed business or failing business or flattling, things aren't working out the way you thought they were, you know, try to pull yourself out a bit and try to get a bigger, like bird's eye view.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the word I'm looking for, of what's happening.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what are some of the external things that happened three, four, five years before that that may be creating some impact on what you're experiencing now?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: The point, don't give up hope.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Don't quit.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Found Her podcast.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you've enjoyed it, please, please, please leave me a review, subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes, and more importantly, please share with your business bestie.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can join our newsletter, find me on Instagram, all the places.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to hear your feedback and connect with you during your journey of building your legacy.