Amy Lacey: How To Scale and Sell Your Business (Without Selling Your Soul) Artwork

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The Takeover with Tim and Cindy

Amy Lacey: How To Scale and Sell Your Business (Without Selling Your Soul)

June 13, 2024 • Tim and Cindy Dodd • Episode 51

Ever thought about exiting your company?

As entrepreneurs we spend most of our days thinking about growing and scaling our business, but one thing most entrepreneurs fail to realize is you also have to plan your exit strategy. Planning for an eventual exit from your business is essential to maximize its value, ensure strategic growth, and manage risks.

In this episode of The Takeover podcast, we are joined by Amy Lacey, a serial entrepreneur, innovator, best-selling author, and business mentor who successfully exited her company for 8 figures.

Amy shares her full story from her first business ventures to her very successful Cali’flour Foods business, her exit, and getting the ball rolling on her latest company—Soursop Nutrition. We also dive into business mistakes (so you can avoid them!)

Amy doesn’t hold back on giving away valuable nuggets one after another! Listen in on this jam-packed conversation and make sure to take notes on how you can come up with a solid exit strategy for your business.

04:29: Amy's Story
10:23: How Cali'flour started
20:05: Riding your momentum to keep going
22:11: How Cali'flour built a massive momentum
26:03: Why you NEED to know your numbers
31:53: Ideal qualities to look for when building your team
33:49: Why Amy exited Cali'flour
40:14: How valuable is your email list?
49:02: Things you need to do right when exiting your business
52:27: Lessons on winning and success

A special treat to our listeners! Get 20% off on all Soursop Nutritions items by using the code Takeover20. No minimum purchase required! Just head on to https://www.soursopnutrition.com/ or click here to get the automatic discount upon check-out.

Tag us on social media! @timandcindydodd

Connect with Amy!
Instagram: @heyamylacey
Soursop Nutrition: https://soursopnutrition.com/

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About The Hosts:

Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

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PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

If you can sign clients over video calls and need sales meetings, we'll set you up with the same ad-free outreach strategy that we use to get an extra 100 meetings a month and a loan has contributed multiple seven figures to our revenue. Look, I can't promise you that you'll get those exact same results. There's a lot of over-promise, over-hypey guarantees out on the internet today that rarely work and always have a catch. But the reality is ladies and gents, how you operate your business, your market environment, your offer, and how well you implement the strategy may be different from ours. What I can say is that if you need sales meetings, this will work. You'll be able to use this to get meetings month over month, and you'll know exactly what to do to scale up your volume of meetings as needed. This is not a fly by night strategy. We've been using ad free outreach for the last five plus years. So if you're looking for something that is proven, reliable, and has stood the test of time, this is it. If you want to see how this can work for you, click the link in the show notes. You can learn more about this ad free outreach strategy. And if it makes sense, book a call with our team. I thought to myself, this product isn't for Walmart. Nobody that drops at Walmart is going to buy a cauliflower pizza. No. Walmart ended up being a $6 million grocery account for us. What I see you do in everything you do is you don't want to just get a piece of the thing. You want to dominate it. As entrepreneurs, we face more challenges than we do successes. As you mentioned, that speed to getting back up on your feet is what actually creates momentum. You have to be scrappy, and you cannot let the nose destroy you. All the nose I got, pretty soon, I had people knocking at my door, asking me for meetings when the doors were slammed in my face before. Welcome to The Takeover with Tim. and Cindy, where we show you how to dominate every area of life and business. Let's get winning. Welcome back to the takeover with Tim and Cindy. Ladies and gents, if it is a goal of yours to one day exit your company, or maybe you've never even thought of exiting, I promise you after this episode, it is going to be a thought on your mind because we have a guest who has not only successfully exited her company, she has all the lessons learned to share with us and. Tim and I are a little bit selfish. We just, we want to know this information. So I think the listeners get an inside peek into our conversation, but I'm excited to welcome Amy Lacey, who is a cereal entrepreneur, bestselling author, and the visionary behind Callie Flower Foods. Welcome Amy. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's such an honor to be here with the two of you. Awesome. We're excited. And Tim. When you first met Amy, we met you at the event, as you were talking about. The first thing that Tim said to me when he met you, Amy, is like, we have to meet with Amy. We wanna learn all about how do you exit a company. So I know that we're selfish and we wanna chat to you about it. Yeah, I think too, it's like when I met you, Amy, you were just such a genuine person. I think that's really stuck out of me. You were so genuine. You wanted to share everything and you're like, I wanna tell people how to exit in that. I don't know if very many people are interested in them. Like tell, give me all the information. How can people not be interested in, hey, I want to build a company that at least is exitable. And then when we have, there were some big players at this venue was like Les Brown and like some other, just some big players in the room. And what I was surprised with is there was actually not a lot of people that raised their hand and said, hey, I want to learn how to exit my company. which I think very, very strongly that any business owner should have a goal, whether they exit or not, to have a business that's exitable, because it means that it's a company that can run and that somebody would be willing to buy from you because it can run without you. So I'm like super excited to talk to you about this. And I know a little bit about your story, but I think our audience, I'd say a lot of people that are listening to this, they want to be able to exit. They want to build a company that can run and doesn't require them to work on it you know, in their old age. And so, yeah, let's go ahead and kick it off. Maybe just tell a little bit about your story and how you got where you're at. Yeah, so first of all, I'm a serial entrepreneur, so I've had other businesses. So I had an online children's store selling children's clothing. I actually imported it from Canada and New Zealand. The dollar was really strong, the US dollar back then. And then we were in the off season. So like in New Zealand, when it was winter, it was summer here. So I got these great deals and ended up owning kiwikids.com. I sold that for a very small amount, but I have to say when I look back on it, I definitely think, and I'm just gonna call this out on myself for all my businesses, I'm a genius finding the white space, like the need and then figuring out a way to put it out there. I'm not the greatest on the exit end. So I've made it my mission to be... a genius in that for my next and current business. I've learned a lot of lessons, and I'd say the main ones I've learned about exiting is definitely through CaliFlower Foods. And that would be the biggest one, which has actually put me in the top 4% of women to get a venture capital deal and an eight-figure deal. So I never knew that. Somebody brought that up to me, and I was like, oh, wow, OK. I didn't realize that. And I'm... hoping to empower other women to get those exits because we should be able to get them. We should not be devalued just because we're a woman. When you say white space, I wanna make sure people listening, because I know what that means I've talked to you. What do you, when you say white space, what do you mean by that? For me, it means, I mean, I've always, Rory Vaden says this all the time, serve the person you once were. So all of my businesses filled my personal need and- For CaliFlower, it wasn't even going to be a business. It was literally to help me during a time, and I'll tell that story, and then I took it to farmer's market, and then it went viral, and it became a massive business. But the businesses previous to that always filled a need. And if it served me or a family member, and it didn't exist out there, I call that wait space. And I figure out a way to make it a business. And so... This first business I did, the clothing, the shoes, the little leather shoes, and you guys don't have kids yet, but someday, little leather shoes with cute little designs on them for toddlers. They didn't exist in the United States yet, they do now. And I was importing them and selling them like hotcakes. So it's just like finding a need. I wanted my kids to look cute. It wasn't some major medical need like some of my other businesses. The second business after that, I did medical lasers. that were invented in Northern California in my hometown by a man named John Streisauer. So I didn't invent the laser, but what I saw when I went over to New Zealand, because my husband's family's from New Zealand, I saw a need there because everybody had onychomycosis. Do you know what onychomycosis is? I do not. It's disgusting. It's toenail fungus. So I didn't have toenail fungus, but I saw a lot of people in New Zealand. They're very outgoing, very outdoorsy. And... John had created these lasers. I went to John and said, can I have the country of Australia and New Zealand and put these lasers in there? And he said, I'll start with New Zealand with you and see how you do. And I literally, this is where like scrappiness and entrepreneur, like if you wanna be a really successful one, you've got to get strappy and really think inside the box. So I knew that they had nothing like that over in New Zealand. It was just starting out in the United States. The alternative is a horrific medication with horrific side effects that half the people can't take. So they're living with on-income mycosis, which spreads very easily. And it's embarrassing. It's a toenail fungus is embarrassing. I've personally never had it, but I have family members that have. So it was tricky to get the lasers into the country. That was a whole mess in itself. But more importantly, it was like, how am I gonna partner with somebody? when I live in the United States. So I cold called at three o'clock in the morning in the United States to New Zealand because of the time difference. I cold called every podiatrist in New Zealand. It's a country of 4 million people. I finally found a really cool partner. His name was John Miller. He owned 10 foot mechanics, which are 10 clinics. And he said, yes, I'll try it. We're gonna split the commission. I said, the service is cosmetic, so insurance doesn't cover it. at this time. It's a cosmetic procedure. I will bring somebody, a podiatrist, to train your podiatrist from the United States. We'll bring them over to New Zealand. And then I'll also do 80,000 is what I agreed to do for marketing to educate New Zealanders, Kiwis, about the procedure. And back then we didn't have social media. So that went billboards, newspapers, and magazines. And did it. It was wildly successful. but then I got really sick with lupus. And so I ended up selling that business to my husband's cousin and she took it over because she lived in New Zealand. So she took it over, but at the end, we were in multiple clinics, podiatry clinics. That particular one I cold called, he had 10, but then we had several other podiatrists that were putting the lasers in their clinics. So I never made it to Australia. Because I got sick, but New Zealand is thriving and they have less onychomycosis. And I just saw a need and we made it happen. And it was, it was a crazy time, but that procedure was about a thousand dollars a procedure. And so the money was pretty good, but more importantly, we were giving somebody a chance to get rid of that fungus without these horrific side effects because medication really can destroy your liver. So I was. very proud of that business. And then when I got sick, I was heartbroken that I had to sell it. But you know what? I've realizing God changes things for you and there's always a reason. And I would have never ever in a million years thought that I would have created the cauliflower category. So I'm sick and I have three kids and we are used to having family Friday fun night which is pizza and games or pizza and movies. And I'm waking up on Saturday morning, just really sick. because the gluten, and I didn't realize I was gluten intolerant, was just attacking my body. Inflammation was attacking my body. So fast forward of nine months of being on steroids after being diagnosed, Plaquenil, which is the drug that everybody talked about during COVID, Coumanin because I got blood clots, antidepressants because I was depressed that I couldn't be the active mom and wife I once was. I went looking for an alternative pizza so we could have that family fun night again, because it went like we weren't doing it for about nine months while I was really sick. Wow. I tried the cauliflower pizza crust online, Rachel Ray tried it. It was an epic failure multiple times. I had been juicing to get healthier. And my daughter said, "'Mom, try juicing the cauliflower to get the liquid out. "'And I think the pizza crust will hold.' And it did, it worked. And today, that business still uses these giant juicers. I mean, we use our home juicer. But- Does she ever remind you of that? Like, hang on. Oh yeah, okay, baby girl. She is an entrepreneur herself now. She's 20 years old and she's amazing to me. But it's near and dear to my heart for her to say to me, you are my mentor, I look up to you, you are my inspiration. And I'll get there and we are going to get to the part of selling this business very quickly. No, no rush. This is powerful. This is great. You keep on with the story. I just want to point out there is not a lack of ideas because that is one of your superpowers is ideas. But I think if anybody listening don't miss when she says scrappy, she saw the opportunity speed to activity getting on the call. When you're going out there, you're getting scrappy. You're getting rejected a lot. Just, if you could say just one second there, like how important that is to be able to go out and just ring freaking doorbells, as it were. I say this all the time. No, it's just next opportunity, literally. You can't let the nos break you and destroy you. You'll never make it in entrepreneurship because you get more nos than you get yeses. I can't tell you, I wish, honestly, I cannot tell you how many phone calls I made. I know it was a lot. There were a lot of nights where I woke up at three o'clock in the morning, I made it my mission once we did a business plan. And by the way, my business plan for the laser business was about 600 pages. Such a waste of time. I don't advise that, but I definitely advise having a business plan. And I love a good SWOT analysis where every decision you make in your business, you use the strength, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities to decide if it's a good move or not. But so that children's business I sold to my one employee, she took it over, and my mom. The laser business I ended up selling to a family member. So these are important because when you want to exit your company, if you can treat it like your retirement and work backwards, like what do you actually want and then work backwards. So we'll talk more about that in a minute. But yes, you have to be scrappy and you cannot let the no's destroy you. You just have to persevere through them. And I will tell you, when I get into the cauliflower story more, all the news I got, pretty soon, I had people knocking at my door asking me for meetings and grocery stores, Walmart coming to me when the doors were slammed in my face before. So, so cauliflower, I find this pizza crust, I perfect it. I ended up taking it to farmers market just as a way. Like by now, I'm getting off my medications because I'm eating gluten free, grain free. I'm getting a lot of sleep, I'm meditating, I'm doing things I'd never done before. And the inflammation is starting to not attack my body anymore, and I'm slowly getting off all these meds. But I decided to take my kids to Farmer's Market and take the pizza crust to Farmer's Market because I thought it would be a fun way to teach them how to work. And we go to Farmer's Market and a couple people are loving it. And I'm starting to get orders in advance, then two grocery stores locally owned take it in, they start selling it. And I think back to, OK, I know how to sell online. I did it with the children's clothing. This product is fully baked. I start looking at online bakeries, and I realize nobody is selling a pizza crust. We've got Boboli and Mama Mary's, right? They're selling them. They're shelf stable. But nobody has this alternative crust anywhere online. So I go to sell it online. And. Here's another really important thing that happened to me and we used it in the laser business. It was very strategic in that business. This is what went viral for Califlower and what really started on our path from being negative because when I took it to farmer's market, it was a negative, it was not a profitable business. The margins were extremely high. I was not getting, the commodities were terrible. I could not get them in bulk because I wasn't making bulk pizzas at this time. So. The margins were horrible. So it was more of like, hey, this is helping me. I know it can help you. Philanthropy, teaching my kids how to work kind of thing, and knowing that I'm spending some money to do this. So when I took it online, I was like, OK, I've got to get the margins down. So I hired a co-packer to help me. And that way, I could produce it at a little bit higher level. And he had buying power. Right? He could buy cauliflower and cheese, primarily cheese and eggs were really expensive. Really important to look at your margins. If you have a product-based business, and even if you have a service-based business, you've got to look at your margins. The margins got to work. So then, yeah, I had to think about shipping. I had to think about packaging. I made my own packaging. Oh, if you look back on the packaging, it's just a hot mess, but it worked and we started selling it online. But what I did was during farmers market time, there was a mom that reached out to me, a single mom. And I grew up with a single mom. I had a pretty rough childhood, which I think is why I'm scrappy. Now I have so much gratitude for my childhood. You know, for a while I was in foster care and then I landed on a farm. My dad was an alcoholic drug addict, so I have no relationship with him. My mom was a single mom. She left him. I'm so grateful she did that, but she was scared and you know, we were really poor. So I think that created some scrappiness in me. Do you think that created an emotional resilience? Because a lot of what I'm hearing is call, failure, knocking on doors, failure, now dealing with it. There's so many pieces. I don't know if anybody listening, there's a lot that you are juggling all at once. And I think it's a lot of emotional resilience to be able to do that. I've been in some rooms. I was part of the hundred mil mastermind and I remember the very first meeting we ever had, I was at a table. all men, I was one of like four women because you had to be a seven or eight figure earner to be in that mastermind. And that mastermind was very expensive. I went into that mastermind for various reasons. I won't talk about them because it'll take up too much time. But the point that I want to make is everybody at my table had this very rough childhood or they had a rough life experience. I had one gentleman who's a very famous coach. him and his family, his mom, his dad died. He had 11 brothers and sisters. They lived on a farm for a while. They lived in a chicken coop. I had another guy that was sitting right next to me who went to prison for stealing cars. And in prison, he found God. He turned his life around. He learned how to code. When he got out of prison, he has sold his coding business. These are people, I bet you, you know, sold his business for millions of dollars. started a program where he taught people how to sell online, and now he's retired and he has like four kids. And he's like, I don't know, in his 30s, but he's doing all kinds of other businesses. I mean, he's still an entrepreneur, but people, it's like when you, for me, and I've had to really dissect this, I think I had rejection from family members, parents, that are supposed to love and nurture you. I think about me as a parent and my husband, we've been married 26 years, I think about Gemini as parents. And I think I never had that. I never had somebody read a story to me. So when you feel rejected by your own parents, then a podiatrist that I call up and say, Hey, you should take these medical lasers and he hangs up on me. Oh, you feel that bother me because I've already been through it. You know what I mean? The resilience, the resilience is there. But for people that had great lives, like my kids who have grown up with two parents that love them and give them a lots of support and encouragement, you still have to be scrappy. It's a lesson I've taught my daughter. You have to go there. Don't let those knows. You're gonna get a ton of knows. Just be prepared for it. You almost have to seek out the pain to increase your tolerance. Because I had great parents growing up and I constantly had to seek like uncomfortable situations. That's wow, that, oh my gosh, I'm like in chills thinking about your story. And I've heard you tell it before. It's just so powerful. Incredible. If you have a failure or a no, and I don't even consider no as a failure, by the way, but if you get a no or a failure or something doesn't work out, the best thing you can do is get right back into it right away. Like, it's gonna give you the strength to keep going. And when you get a win, it's like you feel Wonder Woman, like, or Superman. Like you cannot stop. It just feeds you. But sometimes failures will feed me. And John Maxwell says this, you learn in the failures, you don't learn in the success. So failures as a learning lesson that's only gonna prepare me to be even better. And I think even as entrepreneurs, we probably face more failures and challenges than we do successes on a day to day, right? And it's, as you mentioned, that speed to getting back up on your feet. is what actually creates momentum. Because if you're waiting and you're still dwelling in that loss, quote unquote, it's gonna take you a lot longer to get that momentum back up. So I love that you mentioned that. And I love that you use the word momentum because in order for you to exit, you've got to have massive momentum and you want to be strategic in how you're gonna do that momentum. And then you gotta go hard on the momentum. Whoever wrote that book, whatever the four hour week or whatever it was. Yeah, there's a lot I agree in that book, but there's some that I disagree if you're going to exit. You've got to, like I said, plan your retirement, work backwards, plan your exit. What does that look like? Work backwards and you see massive momentum. So with CaliFlower, how we ended up getting massive momentum is we use StoryBrand. You heard Wes talk about StoryBrand. I actually worked with Donald Miller. who wrote the book Story Brand. And I learned Story Brand and I had done his course during this time that I was in the farmer's market. I just did it just to do it, like the less expensive course. Later on, I took my whole team to Nashville and we worked one-on-one with them. I believe Story Brand can build massive momentum. For Callie Blower, I had this single mom of four kids. So near and dear to my heart, right? Cause I had a single mom. She reached out to me, she said her youngest daughter, Kenzie, non-verbal, autistic, the doctor put her on a low carb diet. And she said, could you send us some pizza crust? Because Kenzie loves pizza, and I think she'll eat your crust, and she's on this low carb diet. No problem, we sent her a bunch of pizza crust for like seven months. And this is during the farmer's market and a couple grocery stores local picking us up. Jessie is her name and she calls me and she says, you've got to come visit me. And this is about seven months later. I said, sure. I drove up, I visited her. She opened the door and I about fell over. Jessie had lost 90 pounds. Wow. And Kenzie was talking. The low carb diet and wasn't just our pizza crust, but I can tell you based on the amount that we were sending her, she was eating it twice a day. So Kenzie wouldn't eat unless Jessie sat down and ate with her. And so that's how Jessie lost weight because she went on this low carb diet. Wow. It was amazing. And I told my one employee, I said, we've got to use Jessie's Story as story brand and share it on Facebook. Let's take this shelf stable product and put it online and let's use Jessie's Story. And we had already put it online. I knew it was shelf stable, but we were doing, maybe between eight and $12,000 a month. in sales, it wasn't that much. And my margins were horrible. So I mean, money going back into the business, I was putting it back in, but I wasn't paying myself and I just had the one employee. So I get on my hands and knees one night because I have gone through our savings account and I'm like, okay, I've gone through some of our investment accounts and the business is negative. All of 2016, it's negative. Again, the margins, the commodities, just not good. So I pray to God and I'm like, and I'm a new Christian. I just accepted Jesus in 2015. This is January of 2017. And I just said, God, you know, either make this business go or shut it down. I'm stuck. Like, I don't know where to go for the money. Like, nobody believes in it except for the people that are eating it. And that's really what was keeping me going, the Jessys, the stories. And I went to sleep and I had like a dream that was share Jessie's story. You story brand, you know, story brand use share Jessie's story. And I woke up and I called Jimmy, my one employee female spelled like Jimmy Hendrix and I said, I think we're supposed to share Jessie's story. And she said, I think you better call Jessie and ask her. And Jessie was really excited. She's like, I'll be the Jessie of cauliflower foods, like the Jared of Subway. without the perversion. He was all excited about that. And I was really grateful. So we put that story out on Facebook, and it immediately got shut down because Facebook didn't allow you to do before and after weight loss stories. So I said, look, let's share Kenzie's story. Her story about being nonverbal, now she's verbal. She gets to go to public school with an aide. And we have pictures because I drove up there. We got pictures of me and Kenzie and Jessie. And then Jessie has pictures of her and Kenzie before eating, going on low carb. So people can see the 90 pounds difference without even saying it's a weight loss product. That story went viral very quickly. And in January, we did more than we had done in the entire year of 2016. And I'm off to the races trying to figure out, because by the end of 2017, we had done. millions of dollars in pizza, 5.3 to be honest with you. And that is the first year I had EBITDA. So now lesson number one, you've got to have EBITDA on the books before you even think about exiting. You remember Clubhouse? I know it still exists. Yes. Yeah, of course. So I was on Clubhouse and I got to be like a shark on Clubhouse for a few different times. Even one time was on there with Grant Cardone. The thing that frustrated me so much and I ended up coaching on it to help people, People didn't know their numbers. You have to know your numbers inside now, and you've got to have some evidence on the books. And nobody, unless it's a hostile takeover, a family, a friend, a coworker, a partner that's gonna take the business over, if you're looking like I was looking, like venture capital, maybe even PE, like. anything like that, you have to have EBITDA and you have to have your books set up. You have to know your numbers. If you go to a meeting with a venture cap, with a VC, if you even get the meeting and you don't know your numbers, they're going to actually yell at you and say you've wasted their time. So we're wasting our time. Yeah, we're wasting our time. Like you get yourself together. You probably won't even get the meeting without them seeing your deck. So you need to have a deck also, which I'll go into. So in 2018, We ended up selling a pizza crust every three seconds online. We beat out Bobo Lee, Mama Mary's. We were number one on Amazon for 16 months straight. We started getting mass amounts of competition. Let me say for a business tip here, a mistake I made. I filed my trademark, but I did not file the word mark or the logo. And I had the cauliflower in the O and I had the name on the logo, right? My competitor. Polypower came in, she took the cauliflower, put it in her O. Cauliflower, polypower, massive confusion. Logo looks very similar. I didn't have a leg to stand on because I didn't file it correctly. She did. So my lesson, don't hire a cheap lawyer. I did, I had no money when I first started. I hired a very cheap lawyer when I filed the trademark. Get a good one, do your research, know what you're filing. File your logo, obviously buy your domain names. And the trick that I did do is I bought all of her domain names. Like I own her domain names. So we, during the height of our business, and I owned other cauliflower, you know, I owned cauliflower crackers, cauliflower pasta, cauliflower pizza crust. You bought up, it was like Monopoly. You were buying up all the properties that had to do with your name. That's smart. And you drive them to your website. You drive them to your website. So if somebody types- I've done that stuff a lot before. So I love hearing that. I love hearing that. My accountant looked at my GoDaddy account and he's like, Amy, like seriously? And I'm not joking. I own like $30,000, probably more now, but back then about $30,000 worth of domain names. And I said, Bryce, let me tell you what I'm doing with some of these. Yeah. I bought a ton of Clubhouse domain names thinking that was gonna be like the next Facebook. You know, you win some you don't. But with the cauliflower and the cauliflower and just everything in cauliflower that I knew we had the potential to do, I would go in and buy. We had a recipe for cauliflower cookies. I bought that. So go buy your domains, but buy what you think your competitors are. And more importantly, go into Google trends and Google search, type in, let's say your business is, I don't know, I'll use the current business that I have, Soursop, it's a fruit. or Soursop Nutrition. I don't really care for the name Soursop, but I knew nobody really knew what Soursop was, so it had to be the first thing because people are gonna wanna learn what Soursop is. So when you type in Soursop, you're gonna eventually get to us, but I own a lot of Soursop names and I'm anticipating other names that competitors will have when they start coming in. And I'm, so far, I'm doing pretty well with it. So what we do is we drive those names to our website. You just set it up so it drives to your website. So that's a great tip and you can usually get the domains for very inexpensive and it's just another way to drive more traffic to your site. So especially- I think something on that, I just, I see a theme and that is domination. You know, and that's part of our, you know, the takeover with Tim and Cindy is how to dominate in every area of life and business. And What I see you do in everything you do is you don't want to just get a piece of the thing. You want to dominate it. Like you're stacking it. How can I get all the real estate for these domains? I love the term stacking. Listen, when you're creating a category, you've got to be scrappy. Again, you got to think outside the box. You got to think of ways to get traffic to your site because people don't know what this is. A cauliflower pizza crust in 2017, nobody knew what it was. People were like, are you kidding? It's the last veggie standing on a veggie tray. Nobody wants cauliflower. Nobody's going to buy a cauliflower pizza because they don't even eat the vegetable. So I mean, that's the kind of things we were getting. So yeah, you got to think, okay, this is going to be successful because I know what it can do for you and I know what it tastes like and it's good. And I have a very picky. older kid that didn't like vegetables and he would eat the cauliflower pizza crust. And I knew I was getting vegetables in him. So if nothing else, I knew we could do a pizza that snuck vegetables in for those picky eaters. And I knew it was gluten-free, grain-free, and I knew it was friendly for diabetics. There was an audience there and you really tag into that audience, but getting the domain names. Yeah, it just makes you more powerful. It's another way to drive traffic. So those are some tips that I think are really important. So The cauliflower went viral. It was very big. And then I wasn't planning to exit, right? I was doing really well. We had this great team. We were like this family. By the way, I think you need to hire people that are hungry, humble, with strong emotional intelligence, because you can go and hire, let's just say I hired somebody with a ton of experience with an excellent college degree from like Harvard. And I experienced tremendous amount of drama with that person. and very like they weren't scrappy, they were entitled. And I'm not gonna say who it is or anything, but they didn't last very long. And the hungry, humble, strong emotional intelligence, those people, and a lot of them were my friends because I couldn't afford in the very beginning. And they're with me now today in the new company. Like they have stuck with us, we know how we work, we have no time for drama. So I learned that from Patrick Lee and Nancy. I'm having a hard time seeing some people's last name. Lencioni. Is it Patrick Lencioni? Yes. So good. Thank you. It's the advantage. That book is so good. It is. And I remember reading that and I'm like, okay, that's the characteristics I'm going to look for. I'm not going to look for the experience. I'm not going to look for, I mean, if they have it, great, but they've got to have these qualities first. And that has served me so well. And I'm so glad I have the same team back with me. So in 2018. And this is really important. If you are going to exit your company, you better have a plan for emergencies that happen. So if you get sick, if a family member dies, if a partner dies, if there's a divorce and the business is in both your names, you mean this is like in the sale process or when you're prepping for sale and you're prepping your business, you need to know what those look like. Because when you go to exit, if you have any of those situations that are unresolved, it's an issue and you'll get a door slammed in your face. You will not be able to exit. So pre-plan for those situations. So I wasn't planning to exit Califlower, but I had an emergency happen that altered the whole course of my business. And that was in 2018, November of 2018, Northern California caught on fire and a little town of paradise burned to the ground. And that's where my extended family, my mom who since had remarried, my stepdad. My aunt who had no kids all lived in paradise. Now their homes didn't burn, but they couldn't live in them because there was no running water, no electricity. I mean, that town burned to the ground. So I was actually in LA at an Irwin McManus Mosaic Conference. I had taken my team down there as kind of a reward. And I got the call that the town was on fire and they were evacuating and going to my house when I lived about 20 minutes away. So I landed. got on a plane, flew home, landed in Sacramento. As I'm driving home, it's pitch black. That's how big the fire was. And it's two o'clock in the afternoon. And as I get closer to my house, I can smell the smoke and everything. I get into my house and my husband gives me these like wide-eyed looks, because everyone's there with their pets. And I have three kids and my husband. And so I'm sleeping on the couch and my mom and stepdad have our bed and Jim sleeping in one of the kids' rooms anyways. My aunt's dog keeps falling in the pool, this little toy poodle falling in the pool and Jim's having to go in the winter digging out the poodle. And I had been, people had been grooming me or reaching out to me and saying, hey, are you interested in selling your business? And I was like, no, well, why would I? We have this great family. I mean, we were asked to go to the Teen Choice Awards, ESPYs, Emmys, we were working with the cast of Hamilton. We had all these fun things happening and we were growing. And I had... money in my pocket. So I was like, why, why would I sell the business? But when this happened, I come from a very poor family. Their houses didn't burn down. They didn't get the insurance. They don't have any money to buy a new house or invest in a house to move out of my house, but they can't go back to live in their house. So I was like, okay, this is a sign from God that I need to think about selling the business or at least a portion of it, get some money and move everybody out of Northern California. And so I went, to the people that had been reaching out to me over the last year. Nestle was one of them. The venture capitalists that ended up buying a portion of it, they were another one. There was about 10. And right away I got a lot of nos. And the reason why is because I didn't have a deck. I didn't know my numbers like in the way that a venture capitalist wants to know or a Nestle. And Nestle, this is how silly it is. If Nestle called me today, they would have everything they needed. Nestle had me come out. talk to their team, their US team about customer service. Because that was another thing that we did so well with CaliFlower was the customer experience and customer service. That's another tip I would say. If a lot of people say, focus on your customers that love your product, right? Really highlight them, testimonials, all of that. That is story brand. And I believe that, that fits with story brand. That's what we did, but we also did something else. I hired more customer service reps. then I did sales reps. And what I did was I took a disgruntled customer and I handheld them through our team, turned them around to be a happy customer. They are the quickest people to become affiliates for your company. Because they've had a bad experience and you've made it right, but you haven't just made it right, you've gone above and beyond. And I mean, like I've hired Ubers to go deliver special packages like air fryers with our pizza crust. sorry your pizza fell apart in your oven, try the air fryer and call the air fryer company and say, hey, we wanna give away air fryers, can we get it at cost if we do videos with you showing how we cook the cauliflower pizza crust or we make tacos in the air fryer and highlight you? Yeah, no problem, we'll actually give them to you free. And then you go and give them to a disgruntled customer because one of the main complaints we had was... People didn't read the instructions and they put the cauliflower pizza crust like they do a frozen pizza crust directly on their oven. Can't do that. It melts and falls through and your oven's a hot mess and the pizza's ruined. So we were delivering air fryers and saying, try it this way with new crust. And you take a disgruntled customer and you give them an amazing experience, you will have an affiliate. I can tell you almost all my disgruntled customers became affiliates. And the... people that are unhappy will scream about how horrible your product is. But people that are unhappy that are screaming that you make really happy beyond their wildest dreams. Cause who's gonna, like what company is hiring Uber to deliver a beer? Nobody does that. Yeah, I mean nobody. I've never heard anybody doing this. And it's, it almost sounds to me cause I've never heard this strategy before. I'm a big believer in our goof, your gain, meaning if as a company we messed up, you always want to make it be an advantage to them. But I've never heard somebody say that. So it's almost like that emotional like, oh, I'm sorry. I hate you guys. My Elvin's ruined. When you fix it, it's almost like that same emotional power and vigor is now put into being an evangelist for your product. And I've just I've never heard somebody talk about it like this before. Subscribing is the easiest way to support the podcast. Plus, you'll never miss an episode. Hit that subscribe button on iTunes, Spotify, Google, or wherever you're listening so that you don't miss a beat. I went out, Nestle groomed me, I got the door slammed in my face because I had nothing. I remember Steve Presley, who is the president at the time, now he's US president, he was president of Nestle. He was on a yacht with me. They took me on a yacht in Miami. And he and I hung out. We talked about red fishing and different things like that. And I remember him saying, you know, for you to go with a product like this and get it to over 20 million, you know, this is very valuable. but you've got to show the value. You've got to have something all set up to show the story, tell the story. You've got to have an amazing deck that shows these stories. Now, another story I had, and what I want to say about that story is when you think your business shouldn't go one route, really, really test it out and make sure that you're right on that. Because I could have, I would have bet my life on it that Walmart was not a good fit for us. It ended up being a $6 million grocery account for us, which by the way, the other thing that was a $6 million account for us was our email list. And I always talk about this, have an email list. It's so important. When you go to exit, most companies want to see an email list and they want to buy it. Funny thing, my venture capitalists that ended up buying a part of my business didn't see the value of the email list. It wasn't one of the things they were interested in. But I know through Sour Soap Nutrition, the email list and the community is extremely important to somebody that's gonna buy your company right now. So make sure that you, and the great thing about email, as you both know, you'll never lose that list. Like nobody gets that away from you. Your social media can be shut down, but nobody's gonna take your email once you own that. And a powerful, strong email list, which you can show sales, I undervalued my company. If Sour Stop ends up doing $6 million a year on my email list, that is gonna be valued at probably 40 million at least. Because the potential there, it's there. You know, you can keep eating that email list. And you own that. Facebook ads, your social media, they can change the algorithm in one moment and just take you out. When you're able to do, you know, we're really big on outreach app and when you're able to do outreach outbound cold call dial, like you said, have that list, have your own email list. It's like you're the one that's in control. That is gold. I feel like we covered so many areas of, I mean, from being scrappy to getting it going, to understanding your margins, to email. There's so many different pieces and I guess there's so much value and I just want to let you know, I just respect you so much for hearing your story. And just for what you've done and what you've built in, you're just, I think, Cindy and I, one thing we love about you, when we met you, you were just like, you're just so genuine. And I think you're just giving out so much value. There's not, I don't feel like you're trying to guard your secrets right now. And I feel like you're literally like, here's how to do it. Like literally, here's how I did it. Take whatever you want and go with it. I know it comes back to you tenfold. And let me just say this about that, because I'm one of these people now, but back in the day when I wasn't, This is really important, I think. And this is something that people are really scared to do. And I'm glad I got over my fear and did it because it had helped me tremendously. And I don't think I would have had an eight figure venture capitalist exit had I not had this person in my life. I went to this food show that was recommended. I met this guy named Bob Burke. He's very well known in the food industry. He starts asking me questions. I don't know the answers, but I'm too afraid to tell him I don't know the answers. So I say to him, I have to use the restroom and I walk away and I go hide in the bathroom. Big mistake. I later learned that he thought I was stuck up because I wouldn't talk to him. I wouldn't talk to him because I was too embarrassed to ask him what the acronyms were that he was throwing out there that I thought I should know, but I didn't know. Fast forward about a year. I'm at a food show. I'm now more confident. We are selling like crazy. Bob comes up to me again. We start talking. I said, you know, Bob, I think it's funny. Now I know a lot about the food industry. Now I said, I didn't know what you were talking about that day, so I hid in the bathroom. I was scared. And I said, I really respect you. You are so knowledgeable. Is there any way you might think about helping me and being an advisor on my company? And he's like, I would be honored. And he ended up, at the end, he ended up being a board member. But my advice to you is get into rooms with people that have done it bigger and better than you and just follow every word they have to say and learn from them. and you got to put yourself in those rooms. And sometimes it costs money to join those masterminds or to join those coaching programs. It costs money, but you need a mentor that's done it bigger and better than you. And don't be afraid to ask for help because people love to help other people. I mean, people love to be teachers even when they're not teachers. And Bob was one of those people. And I was so afraid of him because he was like up here in the food industry. And he turned out to be a board member. He turned out to be a friend. There were times where I called him crying and he was talking me off the ledge. I mean, there were some things, crazy things that happened, but again, I had a lot of mentors, but I had to ask and people were like, yes, I'll help you. I think that that's, that's been the biggest, our biggest growth points is we just call it getting in the room, getting in the room. And a lot of times you gotta pay money for that. And a lot of times. depending on where you're at, there's been plenty of times we've made those investments in it, was there wasn't a lot of money in the bank account to make some of those investments. We got uncomfortable. Yeah, and I think too, we just see a common theme with a lot of successful individuals and entrepreneurs that we have on our show. It's a common theme. They all mention, every single one of the entrepreneurs that are successful that have been on our show, they all mention, get in the room, get a mentor, bypass a lot of the pitfalls by learning from someone that's already done it. So I want to highlight that it's a common theme and you're saying it here on the show and you of course you've exited your company yet for such a such a massive amount and it's incredible but that's such a key part of it. It is key and I will tell you because I know we're coming down to the end but yes I sold off a big chunk but I also put a lot of that money back into the business and it was a very painful experience because I lost control of the business right they took over control. yet I had put a lot of money back into it. And so you have to think about that. Like, what does your exit look like? Because a lot of companies want you to stay on for a few years and you've got it. And I just had this meeting with somebody that's selling their business. I said, be prepared because they're gonna run it and they're gonna run it like, you're gonna think they're running it wrong, like I did. And there's a way to have emotional intelligence around it and truth be told, I didn't. Imagine the email list. I was fighting with them. I'm like, what are you doing? You know, and they put me on sabbatical just to get me away from them. And I often think of them. I have so much gratitude for them now, so much gratitude, but there was a time where I was really angry with them. So you got to think about what does it look like for you at the end? Another mistake I made was I wasn't paying myself enough. They looked at what I valued myself at and they immediately were like, well, we need to replace you with a CEO. And I was. but I didn't pay myself enough for them to think that I even valued my position. If you research exiting, you'll see that it says, make sure you pay yourself a significant amount. The standard industry standard for your industry, for your CEO position, or whatever position you are in that company as a founder, if you hold a position, make sure you're paying yourself a significant amount because they look at that, at how you value yourself. They also look at your team. your company's more valuable if you have a strong team that you can just plop right in. And some people will not want to have anything to do with your business. And other people want your team out of there. They're going to fire them like they did with mine. And they're going to bring in their own team and take it over. And that happens too. But you need to have those conversations and know what they're going to do before they do it. I didn't know any better. I literally followed the money. Like they offered me this deal. I was taking this amount of money off the table and I followed the money. And I just say, don't follow the money, get all the information. Because for the next three years, while I still had a piece of that business, I went through tremendous depression again. And I mean, that's how I learned about Soursop. I was trying to heal myself again, but I lost control and I was angry. And when you're angry, that's usually fear and lack of control. And that's what I had for the business. because they just came in and took it over. And that's what they do. That's what they do. And so you have to have those hard conversations before you pick the person that's gonna buy your business and know, are they gonna keep you around? Are they gonna keep your team around? What is their expectations? Those are questions you really need to ask. Which is so interesting because I think a lot of times people think, oh, the exit is this big party, but if you're not doing it right, it's not like, okay, so off in the distance, you said, I mean, you went into a depression And I love your self-awareness that, you know, anger is fear and lack of control, the feeling of not having control. What is the two big things you're gonna make sure you do right on your next exit? So I mentioned this and I think it's so important. I am treating this next exit like my retirement plan. Like I have a date of when I wanna exit. I have a date range so I don't fail. I've got a couple year range. I have already researched 10 people, 10 companies, actually a couple are individuals of who I think my product and my portfolio, because I know what we're gonna launch, the innovation we have, I know we're coming out with these other products, I know it's a good fit for them. So when the numbers are at a certain, we have a certain number of sales and we're at a pretty good profitable number, we've got some EBITDA, I'm gonna actually fly out to them. One of them's in San Francisco. I'm going to sit down. I'm going to say, I know this product, this product line and our innovation coming down the pipeline. After they sign an NDA, by the way, that's very important to make sure everybody signs an NDA. But anyways, I am going to go to them and I'm going to say, what do you need from me? Because I believe you're the best person to take over this company. And I'm here for the long haul. If you want me in it, I'm here to be in it. My team's here to be in it. But what is it going to take? Because these products are the best for what you're doing. And what do you need from me to buy this company at this valuation? That is my lesson number two. It is April 30th, 2019. The venture capitalists want to close the deal by midnight on the West Coast. My attorneys are on the East Coast, though they're up at three o'clock in the morning and we're negotiating. They dropped my valuation. My valuation should have been a nine figure valuation. They dropped it to an eight figure valuation the very last hour at the last minute. The lawyers and the financial investor that was helping me with the deck and stuff said, walk away. But then I got my husband on the phone going, take it. I've got my right-hand person saying who was gonna make some money, take it. They got, don't take it, it's a bad deal. They're devaluing you. You know what I learned? The percentage of people that do that to men. I'm sorry, I'm not a feminist at all. I love men, but this is a boardroom full of men and one woman. They will devalue a woman owned, women run company much greater than they will a man. And we owned, we actually had that certificate, women owned, women run. It's a very hard certificate to get. And I didn't realize the value I had in my hands. I didn't realize that I could have pushed back on that and I should have. So know your valuation. I would definitely have a third party. So not a total third party person. So. Right? My investor person that was helping me with the deck, they were getting 4% of my deal. So you need to hire somebody that's not part of your exit deal and have a third party valuation done on your company. And if it's not at the valuation you want, then maybe you push back the exit time and do the things and necessary things to make that valuation stronger. Or maybe you're okay with the valuation they give you. But for me to drop from a 9 to an 8, I wish if I could go back, I wouldn't have accepted that. There's no way I'll accept it for this new company. So that's something I learned the hard way. Oh, my gosh. There's so many golden nuggets. And we have one last question for you, Amy. So the takeover with Tim and Cindy, it's all about winning in all areas of life and business. So, Amy, what does winning mean to you? So winning to me, I don't believe in balance. I believe sometimes you've got to run hard and other times you get to take a little break. But the one lesson I learned when I was running super hard. is all of a sudden my business was number one and God was somewhere way down the list. My family was way down the list. So I'm grinding right now, but God is number one. My family is number two and my business is number three. I'm in grind mode. I'm getting off this podcast, heading to the airport, flying to go talk on that stage tomorrow. I'm in grind mode, but I have made it a priority that I've had my time. My faith, and even if you're not faith based, what does that mean to you? Some time to take care of yourself, some time for spiritual healing, meditation, whatever it is. It's gonna help you in the long run. And then don't compromise your family. Yes, there's sacrifices to be made. You're not gonna always get to go to every game when you're in grind mode, but make it a point, make them a priority, because I learned the hard way that when you don't and you win, you really lose because you've lost. a lot to win. And you can still win and make what's really important a priority. And you can still grind and you can still win. So that was a big lesson that I had to learn. And I actually had to go to therapy over it because, you know, I was disconnected with my children for a while because I was gone so much. And then I definitely was disconnected in my faith. And I saw my business suffer because of that. Thank you so much for being so vulnerable and so open. As Tim has mentioned, you just shared and you opened yourself up to us and to our audience. And we're so, so thankful. There's so much that I want to go back and unpack because I'm just taking all of it in. But Amy, you are. We could do another session. We can do a part two. Go in deeper. We need to do a part two. There's like five parts. We'll go like deep into the email list, deep into each section. So good. Yeah. It's so much value to share. But Amy, where can people find you? Where can they contact you? Where can they get in touch? Yes, so we're doing our new product, sour Go to that. Oh yeah, me by the way. It's so, it's doing some wonderful things. I found it for a chronic disease that was happening, a deadly disease that occurred in one of my family members. And I started doing some research and I found it. And then I tried it and I was like, this is great. It helps with inflammation, it helps with gut health. It was helping with the anxiety of one of my kids. It was helping us sleep better. It was amazing. My mom was on ozempic because she's a type two diabetic. They pulled her off of it. It was controlling her blood sugar levels. It was even helping my son's allergies. So I was like, this is a super fruit. The problem is the fruit isn't grown readily in the United States. It's in the Caribbean. I found it in Seychelles off of South Africa. Seychelles is an amazing place. Anyways, I wanted to take the fruit, which is $30 a piece of fruit, and convert it in the most healthiest way. So we sourced all of our ingredients from Brazil, make it very healthy. We put it with other superfoods. Our shakes have echinacea, it has turmeric. They have all these superfoods that we combine along with the soursop, along with Irish sea moss. And it's like a superfood boost that you can use to make soups or shakes or what have you. And then we have the America's first soursop gummies. And they have been absolutely amazing. And they're just easy and they taste good. And I'm so thrilled. It's definitely a goldmine product. It just far beats out the cauliflower. So I can't wait to see what happens in the next five years with this product and how many lives can be changed by taking it. But for me personally on Instagram, hey, Amy Lacey, H E Y A M Y L A C E Y. I answer all my DMs. So anybody that DMS me from your list, I would love to send them some free samples of Soursop. We also have a coupon for you guys. If you want to use it. My team will get it for you for any of your listeners that want to just dive right in and buy the product. Otherwise, I'm happy to send free samples and I answer all my own DMs. Nobody's managing my Instagram, which is why it looks like a hot mess. But hey, I'm okay. I love that. Well, again, we appreciate you so much, Amy. Thank you so much for joining us on The Takeover. Make sure that ladies and gents, you go and follow Amy on Instagram. Not only are you going to learn so much. you can get in touch with her and see all the amazing things that she's doing as well. This is Tim and Cindy with the Take Over, bye guys!