The COVID-19 pandemic posed some challenges many have never heard of before or even foresee coming. No matter how prepared we have been for a crisis in the past few years, this situation has us all taken aback in one way or another. However, the thing with entrepreneurs is how they are made to deal with uncertainty, innovate, and persevere. In this special episode, Elliot Begoun gathered a bunch of founders who have been riding the waves of business in the COVID world. They talk about what is going on, what has changed since the day Expo West was canceled, and how they are dealing with all of this—be it personally or professionally. He has over Gregory Struck, the CEO of Noops; Tonya Butts, the founder of Sweet Apricity; Taryn Segal, CEO of Double Rainbow Ice Creams; and Hector Saldivar, CEO of Tia Lupita Foods. Join them in this dynamic conversation about navigating change, persevering as a leader, and coming out of the other side of this pandemic stronger than ever.

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Listen to the podcast here

Wisdom From Founders About Navigating The COVID-19 Pandemic With Gregory Struck, Hector Saldivar, Tonya Butts, And Taryn Segal 

What I decided to do was to grab a bunch of founders who have been riding the waves of business in the COVID world and have a conversation about what’s going on and what’s changed since that day that we were all notified that Expo West was canceled. All of the business upheaval that has happened and also, a bit how they’re dealing with all of this personally and so forth. As always, we welcome your questions. My hope for this episode is that you see a bit of yourself in this and you recognize that all of this craziness and all the crap that’s been rattling around in your brain is not exclusively yours.

About every entrepreneur and every founder in this period of uncertainty are living the same dream. The last thing I’ll comment on before introducing the panel is I’m of the belief that there’s no better constituency prepared for uncertainty than entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs were made to deal with uncertainty and that’s why many of you have risen to this challenge and have been creative, innovative, and persevering. I wanted to celebrate that a little bit in this episode, too. Without further ado, I’ll ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves starting with Tonya.

I’m Tonya Butts. I am the Owner and Founder of Sweet Apricity. We make Paleo caramels and marshmallows, caramel sauce, and Paleo caramel corn. Apricity is an ancient derived word that means the warmth of the sun in winter. It’s an impossible name, but it’s what our products strive to deliver. Thank you for having me, Elliot.

Thanks for being here. Gregory?

Elliot, thank you for having me. I want to take a step back and thank you for all you do for this community. It’s awesome that we get to be together and have this type of platform to converse amongst one another and make the collective stronger. I appreciate everything that you’re doing for us. It’s awesome to be a part of TIG and continue marching forward. I am Gregory Struck. I’m the CEO and Founder of Noops. Noops reimagines everyday snacks in a better for you plant-based format. I’m looking forward to chatting more.

Thanks for the kind words. Taryn?

I’ll echo everything Gregory and Tonya already said. It’s a blessing to be able to be ushered into groups like this with somebody as talented and forthcoming as Elliot. My name is Taryn Segal. I am the CEO of Double Rainbow Ice Creams and we are based here in the Bay Area. We’ve been around for many years trying to make great tasting ice creams and non-dairy frozen desserts. Plant-based has been a big boom in the market, so we’re seeing good traction there. I’m excited to open up a good dialogue with my fellow peers.

Thank you, Taryn. Hector?

My name is Hector Saldivar and I’m the founder and CEO of Tia Lupita Foods. Tia Lupita is a better for you healthy Mexican food brand. We use simple, clean ingredients in all of our products. We’re the first brand to introduce cactus napellus as an alternative functional ingredient here to the US market. Also echoing my fellow panelists here, I love this community and I love this tribe. I need this. This is my therapy. If I wouldn’t have you, God knows where I would be. Some ditch somewhere in Mexico, halfway from here to Monterey.

First of all, I’m glad this is going to be an episode so no one could see me blush. Thank you for the kind words but truthfully, it’s such an honor. It’s the coolest thing in the world when you wake up and you realize that your profession is to simply serve and support the people that are innovative, creative, and are standing for the things that should be stood for in this country, so it’s my pleasure. Enough of this love session here. I want to go right into the meat and potatoes. I’m going to start with Taryn. Taryn, on your way down to Expo West, knowing that your booth was down there, and then you get the word it’s not happening. What goes through your mind about that, your business, and what it’s going to mean to you both professionally and personally?

I would say that not unlike many other people that we spoke with during the hullabaloo of the noise. How long was this going to last? What is this going to look like? Is it short-term or long-term? How do you react to that? How do you mentally digest that? I tend to switch into a tactical mode as it related to what were the immediate action items when you start thinking about your booth, how do you deploy and reallocate your team, redirect them, and give them good guidance. I tactically said, “We have to handle the situation as it presents itself with stopping shipment.” We have frozen goods so that’s a whole other ball of wax in terms of turning around a truck that’s already en route, which won’t happen but you absorb it and you deal with it, and then we figured out what the next solution would be.

Mentally, from a sales tactic or business strategy standpoint, I didn’t think that my customer base was going to stay the same. It was just going to be how do I get the people I want to get in a respectful, approachable timeframe and way. That was the only cloudy part of that transition in that week, but upon returning home, you have to mentally digest and say, “That didn’t happen. What are we doing now?” The same mission is, “My approach is going to be different, but the person or the team that I want to talk to is the same. Let me recraft how we’re going to navigate that road.”

A few of us had planned to have a founder’s dinner on the Tuesday night before Expo was started. When all of it was canceled, we found out that we couldn’t pull the plug on the party, and then also recognized that there were quite a few founders, ourselves, investors, and friends in the industry still down there with no plans. Since the event was scheduled to be on the rooftop, and every apocalyptic movie ever made in Los Angeles was on the rooftop, we decided to have a pre-apocalyptic pity party on the rooftop in Anaheim. I remember vividly having a conversation with many of the folks there thinking like, “The next eight weeks are going to be weird, but then we should get back to normal.”

Here we are almost towards the end of the year and there’s no finish line in sight. Nobody was ready or expecting the duration that we’re seeing. Gregory, for you, it’s an interesting thing because you were just building and about to launch your business when this all happened. Noops was finishing its prototype runs when we met and had a conversation. How is this affecting all of that and where’s your head in terms of where should begin to launch in this crazy new world that we’ve reimagined for ourselves?

I would say we were going through an interesting period when we stumbled into March 2020. Number one, we’re in the middle of the capital raise and we were at the beginning of our sales cycle. Immediately off the bat, we recognized that we would have to shift our selling cycle for March a quarter ahead. I then immediately thought, “If you take a salesman’s ability to move into a store, shake someone’s hand, and have them try the product, we don’t know how long that’s going to last. What can we do to use that time wisely?”

We use that three-month period to go back and reformulate to conduct one more plant trial. It buttoned us up where we wouldn’t have had a chance to do that if COVID hadn’t hit. The mentality is a quick one of resilience. I know that’s medically what we keep touching on but when you have limited resources and you have a start date, and that start date gets blown out of the water by a cause that you have no control over, you quickly think about what is in service of the highest and best use of the organization.

For us, it was to go back, not panic, and spend that time making an even better product. In terms of a capital raise, we were into our second tranche of funding and we closed about 30% of the round. Immediately, the feedback from investors was they would have to be a slight recalibration of the cap that we were asking for, and completely had an honest conversation about that. That raised plus for about 1.5 months. We resumed and closed that round I would say in the middle of May so that’s two months after COVID hit hard.

It was a tumultuous, strange time but what happens is it will continue to happen. As an entrepreneur, we continuously go into battle doing the best we can to formulate some line of sight to what is a plan of action and mitigate risk on the table, but there’s going to be micro failures all around us. Those moments of failures, which I love and I embrace is the day in and day out. What do you do with them? How do you adapt? How do you become more resilient? We continuously see that every day.

That’s what I told my investors. There’ll never be a period from now until the company’s sold that’ll be smooth sailing and everything’s perfect. There’s always going to be the unknown. If anything, COVID exacerbated that. There was a keen sense of awareness now. What you think you know, you don’t know. What you don’t know, you can’t plan for but you have to be comfortable with that ambiguity. It makes you stronger at the end of the day, so it certainly is an interesting time.

For me personally, the biggest I want to say proverbial knife in my back had nothing to do with COVID. It was the unseen of going to market, formulating a product, having multiple plan trials and everything working great and running smoothly and six months of shelf-life studies. Bringing a product out to the market and realizing that there was sporadic feedback and there was a failure happening somewhere in the product. That’s a lesson that you can plan and plan and be completely meticulous and be surrounded by an all-star team. You can be in the middle of the pandemic. You can raise capital and launch into a pandemic, and the silent killer had nothing to do with the pandemic, so we just march on.

You’ve been educationally transparent about that and that’s helpful because there are for sure two constants that every entrepreneur has to recognize. You’re always going to have whirling fans and you’re always going to have shit. Every once in awhile the shit is going to hit that fan and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just going to happen. Tonya, like Taryn, do some of your own manufacturing and this happened to you. If you were beginning to think about how to take the next big step for the brand, what have you seen and felt and dealt with since this all went down?

It started for us with Expo West because we had just started working with somebody who builds empires. That’s what she does and she was super excited about our brand. We had twelve investor meetings lined up that she was going to be representing at Expo West. When that all unraveled, that was disappointing indeed but she went and was speaking to other influencers. She unraveled the weight of the situation and she’s like, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” I’m like, “I completely understand.” It started as a hobby and we’ve consistently grown.

We’ve done a lot of stuff in the house and have switched to a co-packer so we had that handled except for one product. When COVID hit, everybody on my team, which is a team of two, got laid off, and then I ended up doing everything from shipping to packaging. Our co-manufacturer was also having some hiccups where they weren’t always fully staffed. They were great because they’re right in Portland, so they’re near me and they said, “You can come in and make it yourself.” Parts of that were cool because it’s been a few years since I’ve made the product myself, but I’ve never made it at that scale. I ruined the first batch of marshmallows that I tried making myself.

What’s great for me was being reconnected with the product, which I haven’t done in years. We’re nimble and we’ve always been online. Our online sales did increase and our Amazon sales also increased. We’re back at that stage of like, “How do we grow to the next level?” Honestly, there are parts of this that have been good for me. The relinquishment of expectation but moving forward with high expectancy. That’s a gift whenever that happens. I want to throw in the beginning of disappointing expectations, but that’s how we were affected. We’re still okay and we’re still here.

Hector, specific question for you, and I have a few to come back with but I’ll start with this one. When you were leaning into 2020 and heading towards Expo West the mindset was, “We have the hot sauces. We’re introducing our line of chips and tortillas. It’s going to be retail-focused.” Direct-to-consumer, that part of your business was a small portion but that’s changed, hasn’t it? What’s happened with your channel strategy and your business specifically as it relates to your D2C and your online presence?

I remember that March vividly and the text back and forth with you. I was like, “Is this happening or is this not happening?” You’re like, “I’m driving down there. It’s happening.” I’m seeing LinkedIn all these founders, “We’re bowing out.” I was like, “Why is nobody telling me?” It was just you. I remember those couple of days before Expo West and the anxiety and the frustration because we had prepared all this material and all these new items that we were going to present. The flavors of the tortilla chips and the tortillas.

All this excitement that we have been building since Fancy Food Show was going to finally release to the buyers. We were meeting with investors as well. We lamented for a couple of days, and then immediately, we went back to the drawing board and said, “What does this do to our plan?” We’ve invested in all this R&D and invested in all this innovation, and now we can’t present it to buyers. The category reviews start falling off the calendars. We’re shutting down our category reviews. No new item acceptances and no new item reviews, where the system is business broken and we’re trying to manage with what we have.

We had to shift and we had to pivot. Our online business the year before for Tia Lupita represented at 1%. We had our website and we had our shop there. We had a WordPress website that’s beautiful with a lot of images and it’s informative. I told the story great but not intuitive in shopping, and then it produces data. I personally had set up a couple of items at Amazon. If anyone from Amazon is reading, it’s the least intuitive setup form. It took me two days. I felt like I was 80 years old and that I couldn’t work a computer.

Somehow, I managed to upload two items at Amazon. All that represented less than 1% of my business that year before. Everything that I had allocated for retail distribution, wholesale distribution, slotting, new item promotion, item activation, and all that, I said, “I’m going to redirect those funds online.” We migrated from WordPress to Shopify. We hired an Amazon marketing agency that could help us navigate the Amazon world, algorithm, setup, keywords, and advertising. Our growth month over month since March online has been exponential and constant.

To the point, our direct-to-consumer business represents around 25% of Tia Lupita. I’m happy and I’m glad that COVID directed me to this, but I’m also kicking myself that I didn’t do this before. The product had taken so well on retail that I couldn’t focus online. I was like, “I need online.” You said it or someone in the panel said it’s a new normal now. This has accelerated the way consumers and shoppers are going to buy or discover new items moving forward.

That’s going to lead to a question further on. Hector, I’m sure that lamentation that you went through involves some tequila knowing you.

A couple of bottles a day.

I’m going to ask each of you the same two questions here. I’m going to guess that the first of the two questions is going to be the easier of the two. I’m going to start with Taryn. The first question is looking back, knowing what you know now in the position that the industry, the world finds itself in, what’s your biggest regret? What do you wish you had done sooner or done at all that you didn’t do?

We have a diversified business model. I sell into retail. We also have a wholesale division of our business. Like Hector, too, I had dabbled in the online space before in a frozen item that poses a whole other set of costs and logistics. We’re still in this new world. What we did early was lean into our community. I serviced a lot of restaurants and wholesalers, and that whole market bottomed out. My immediate gut had our team being available to support all of our customers in whatever capacity that could be. I had some ideas and channels that were even strategies prior to COVID that I probably kicked myself a little bit for not having trusted my gut on those ideas earlier in the game. I could have been further along in those during this upheaval.

It certainly pushed me to make them happen faster but I had to do it while juggling the navigation of, how do I handle my foodservice customers? How do I handle that side of the business that has taken a huge hit because restaurants are closed? I’m hitting a stride, but if you look at the time span that we’ve spent in this space and under this cloud, I can’t believe it’s been as many months as it had. Time flies. It was more direct-to-consumer but in a different way, not via online. Ideas to go to where the consumer may be and what their habits were, are they dining out? How are they getting their food? It’s trusting yourself to push yourself.

Same question to you, Hector. With the benefit of hindsight, as you think back, what do you wish you had done or wish you had done sooner or wish maybe that you hadn’t done?

I would love to have been able to raise money before COVID. For me, one of the most challenging parts of the pandemic has been raising money. We knew that we needed to raise and we waited too long. We should have started earlier. Maybe we would have gone through the same situation as Gregory. We would have been a percentage in and then we would have had to reshuffle and offer the COVID premium that Elliott likes to say. For me, it has been one of the hardest things to do. I’ve been verbal and vocal about it. I sometimes post my frustration socially and maybe take it to the next level.

That’s why we’re doing this town hall, Elliot, for other entrepreneurs or founders or people that are thinking that and to feel that they’re not alone. You call it uncertainties, I call it doubt demons. The doubt demons are there and then they start flying around my head because you don’t see any traction. In this case, for example, in the fundraising, it’s just a matter of pushing through and having people in the community to keep pushing you forward, especially if you’re an insecure person. For me, that’s the case. I would have wanted this process to be simpler and easier.

It’s never easy, that’s for sure. The investors, like so much to the world, took a deep breath for the first few months. First, they wanted to make sure what capital they had available to their existing portfolio, and then they wanted to wait until the ground stopped shifting rapidly and all of those things. A great lesson for everyone on this is that this goes back to the old adage that you’ve got to go to the well before you need the water. Now is when you should be cultivating relationships with that next round with the next round after that. Not just investment, but across all aspects of your business.

What’s been great in many ways with the advent of technology and embracing the use of these virtual meetings is that it’s still difficult in certain types of business transactions to win them when you’ve not had a physical meeting. One of the biggest ways that is proving true is that it’s hard to get somebody to write you a check when they’ve never had a chance to look you eye-to-eye in person, shake your hand, and do all of those things.

Or try your products. You’re usually having a conversation with the investor and the investor is trying the product while you’re presenting. You’re talking first and then they have to wait a week to receive the product and in that week’s time period, they forgot the interview you had with them.

What we’re seeing across the board is that the process is taking longer and it’s requiring more meetings, and yet, you get to a certain tipping point. They’re like dominoes. Once it finally starts to tip and fall, it starts to speed back up. Tonya, looking back in hindsight, what do you wish you had done or had not done? What are you contemplating about yourself as an entrepreneur during this timeframe?

That’s a tough one for me to answer. I’ve said this way too many times. I’m accidentally here. When I started the company, I started it as a hobby, so I was hand wrapping them in a kitchen. I assumed that when it was time to grow, it would be because I was selling, therefore, I would have the money to grow. Looking back on it, had I known then what I know now, I never would have started. I wouldn’t have continued because I was naive about what this process looks like.

As years went on and I was doing less of the physical, creating of the products, sometimes, I would feel like I wasn’t doing enough. I’ve mentioned I’m a North Dakota farmer’s daughter. I would feel like I wasn’t working hard enough or I wasn’t doing enough. During COVID, what became clear is that my role is to not give up. That is my job and that is a hard job but I do it well. My concern is that I am still moving forward and I am aware that there’s so much I still don’t know.

If I put knowledge on a continuum between lack thereof and complete knowledge, and I marked my intersect on that continuum, it would still be way towards the lack thereof. That’s okay. The not knowing is fine. The important thing is recognizing the not knowing. Gregory, how about for you? Looking back, putting on the goggles of hindsight, what did you miss? What do you wish you had done? What do you wish that you had not done?

Before I answer that, Elliot, I want to say, Hector, I was upstairs in my kitchen messing with your Habanero Sauce and you have a phenomenal product. If I had to venture to guess that all the investors say you’re in a crowded market with bigger players and there’s no difference, at the end of the day, they’re backing the jockey and your product is first class. I’ve bought it multiple times and I love it. My taco Tuesdays are not complete without your products. You should be proud of and carry that pride into meetings.

Thank you. I’ll send you a check after the show.

My pleasure. You have a phenomenal product, and be proud of it because that’s what’s going to set you apart. In terms of pre-COVID to post-COVID, I’m going to take a little bit of a contrarian view. In my view, I’m not going to be one of those people that are like, “I should have been on D2C. COVID has exacerbated it for me.” In any event, what I can say is what I’ve lacked in the past is at the end of the day, if you’re in this game and you’re serious about it and you love what you do, you shouldn’t need an event to make you come out of your shell and recognize that your fundamentals should be solid. That your product should be fantastic and the pricing architecture should be intact.

For me, we’re ground zero. I everyday look at my business fundamentals on a spectrum saying, “No matter what happens, these things are in check. If they’re not in check, I’m learning about it and I’m going to get them in check.” What 2019 has taught me is you can prepare for no matter what it is and you can still be blindsided by something that comes out of nowhere, and that’s what we sign up for. I would say that if your business is your craft and you want to get good at it, number one, and this is not a plug for Elliot, his course is phenomenal.

I’m a student of his course and you should jump into it because then he’ll kick your ass to show you how much you don’t know and that can prepare you to be resilient and to learn. If you have that, then it’s not going to take a pandemic to change your thought. You’ll have a clear line of sight to what your company is, what product you’re pedaling, and what your path to profitability looks like. That’s my contrarian perspective. I don’t regret anything. I’m completely surrounded by micro failure every day. It makes me stronger and makes me more resilient, and we’ll continue to do it that way.

I told my investors the one thing I did when this started and I said, “What are the first few things we do? We check out the logistics chain, supply chain, manufacturing, raw materials, and everything to make sure that there are no major interruptions.” At the end of the day, that’s one thing and one thing only. Everyone can high five and be all happy and lovey when things are going well. When things are going sideways, you need leaders to persevere and understand that they can weather the storm. That’s what this is. It’s a small shake.

To us, entrepreneurs, that are fighting every day for that shelf space and that front-facing to get this retailer with that, this should be like, “We’re resilient. This is just the dance that we sign up for.” We’re lucky we’re not in an industry that was adversely affected. That’s the blessing. I have friends in hospitality, travel, tourism, and restaurants that have been completely like the death star. I’m grateful. We talk about empathy. I don’t regret anything and I’m blessed that I can still put food on my table, I get up every day, and I love what I do. Until I can’t do that anymore, that’s how I’m going to be.

One of the things I learned, too, is that every entrepreneur needs a five-minute motivational moment with Gregory because it’s awesome. I promised you that the second question was going to be harder. Here’s why this question is going to be harder. You all exact a hell of a toll on yourself. You’re driven, entrepreneurial, and your own worst critic. That question is, what are you most proud of that you’ve done in your reaction to this craziness that befell all of us post-COVID? What have you done that you’re most proud of?

The reason I say that is because you’re all here and you all have vibrant businesses. You’re doing well, in a time that the odds were stacked against you. You should be reflective and think about what it is that you did and did well because I’ve been able to bear witness to it and it’s been cool. I’m going to start with Hector this time. Hector, what do you feel good about that you did as an entrepreneur and as a leader in this space?

That’s a harder question than the first one. Aside from being able to pivot, short and focus our attention on direct-to-consumer or online business, it’s also like my introvertness. Believe it or not, I’m officially an introvert. My bucket does get drained when I’m with a lot of people and my bucket gets filled up when I’m by myself. What I’m proud of is how I’ve been able to set aside any possibilities of rank or of breaking the chain of command with certain customers or distributors. I’ve been able to man up, tear my shirt off, and be like, “I’m going to send them an email to fix this. I’m going to pick up the phone.”

Whereas before, I would be like, “Let’s handle this with some diplomacy or following protocol.” This is a Mad Max time. There are a couple of cases with one of the nation’s largest natural distributors where we’ve been having issues. By being resourceful, we found out and we understood the email of the CEO and emailed him directly and told him, “This is what’s happening and it’s affecting our business.” We got a reaction. We pulled up the string of the highest bell and it rang, and then the problem started to get fixed.

Same with another retailer where I somehow grew some courage instead of saying, “How you handle innovative brand new startups is poor handedly. You should be able to consider brands our size without a brokership. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a broker. You should hear us out.” In retrospect, that’s what I’ve been proud of the most. At the end of the day, I want to be humble but I’m proud of that because you’re going to call it leadership that has polished through.

Taryn, how about you?

I would say two things, and this one was not hard for me to answer. Immediately, my gut said, “Reach right into the community.” We have a touchpoint with our customers and we have a couple of our own trucks. We do talk to them on a daily and weekly basis. My gut said, “We deploy those assets to more customers in our backyard.” We saw that it was a matter of taking control of what you can control and own that space because we can’t figure out what some of the other distributors in our space we’re going to do. We had similar experiences.

Approaching it from a solution-minded and recognizing that people out there, we’re also trying to navigate this. How could we be helpful in solutions for them and take something off their plate? As it related to independent retailers or neighborhood markets and watching where the public was feeling safe going on a regular basis. I’m leading into that community, reaching out to people in a safe way, and taking control. We opened up a whole new market for ourselves. We grabbed a piece of the market that we now 100% control and don’t have to depend on anybody else.

As Elliott knows, I’ve been stepping in. I would dance between knowing that there was something wrong going on in the CPG space. There was something broken for us and it would frustrate me to no end. I was able to say enough of that. We’re not going to play in all of those spaces because we don’t have to, and we don’t want to. The team feels good about it. Your people feel good when they can feel purposeful in a time when it’s still questionable.

We’re giving them the tools to put themselves to work in a positive way. We sell ice cream, but people need simple sweet things and the stores need it. They had gaps. Their distributors were not servicing them. We saw it and I said, “They shouldn’t be losing revenue just because they’re independent and the big guy chose not to drop off at them. They need this business as much as anybody else.” That was a tactical plan and I was happy that we could activate as quickly as we did.

Gregory, how about you? What do you feel like you’ve done well as an entrepreneur during this time?

When you’re a pre-revenue company in a disaster strike, there’s not a lot of expectation on you from everyone around. They brush you off to the side. I’m proud of how proactive we were in getting ahead of this, reaching out to everyone in our ecosystem, and having constant weekly communication with our investors, partners, suppliers, logistics, 3PL, and manufacturing. We consistently had week-over-week communication with our investors letting them know that even though we are pre-revenue, there’s much unknown in the future. For this point in time and at this moment, everything that we are touching, we will take control of and we will own. That’s the big one.

The second one is reaching out to the community. In this pandemic, we were putting to hospital systems in California in New York to frontline workers. A resource-strapped startup, that’s what you talk about empathy and being selfless. For us, we use the opportunity to recognize. To what Taryn said, everyone likes a little sweet indulgence once in a while and you can put a smile on people’s faces. Why not do that? Go ahead. Beauty lies in what you can’t control. Those are the two things. Proactiveness around being in the eye of the storm, and then getting involved in sending warm wishes to somebody who’s been working an 18 to 19-hour shift and giving them a little bit of sweetness. I was proud of that.

Tonya, what are you proud of?

I’m proud that I didn’t give up. Even though it was me working that eighteen-hour a day for four months, we were still able to be of service to our client base, which grew as people have become more afraid of their own health. I’m shocked that I didn’t give up.

I’m not at all. I’m going to ask a few questions here and I’ll pick a couple of you to answer the same question, but I won’t make you all answer the same one. This first question, I’ll throw it to Hector first. What do you see now that you think is going to last in the way the business or consumer behavior or transactional or interactivity? What’s changed since this is all gone down that you see staying changed?

Online shopping was already there but it has accelerated to almost maturity. I don’t want to say it’s fully matured now. It has become a fully grown human. If it was in a child, the stage is now a teenager, almost a full adult. That is definitely one of the things that I see permanently changed. Sampling is one of the things that people are still going to be a little bit worried about doing and it’s going to be a challenge going forward. We need to come up with a creative way for consumers sampling your product.

On behavior, people are looking more for healthier stuff, products, and food that can improve your immune system. This is not going to be the only virus or hopefully, this is going to be the last pandemic that we see in our lifetime, but we do see that this is cyclical and there are outbreaks here and there. Foods, products, and ingredients that can help us improve our immune system as well. Finally, we start realizing that there are climate change and global warming, and the world is being stressed with what we’re doing.

It’s going to sound a little hippie or whatever, but I do feel that this pandemic was the world telling us, “You’re stressing too much. You’re constraining me either with supply, food chain, industry, etc. Let’s do something about it.” I saw 60 Minutes and they interviewed scientists. I’m derailing, but I have to say it. They interviewed NASA scientists that did a model that predicted exactly what was happening now that 4% of California has burned. Not only they forecasted accurately what’s happening, but it is at an accelerated growth and it’s happening faster. Anyway, I vented that one.

That’s good. I like it when you get to be it. I’m going to throw this one to Gregory because this seems to be in his wheelhouse of positivity. Gregory, what excites you about 2021 and what’s to come not only for Noops and for you but for the industry?

You have to go through to get through. There are a lot of brands that are coming out of this if you’re lucky enough to survive this with a feeling of gratitude. A feeling that they’ve emerged from something and they were able to withstand it they’re sharper, smarter, and well-oiled, and it’s given pause to recognize that above anything, we are humans. We’ll go through things and our companies will go through things, but we can come out on the other side. It may give you gratitude for being thankful and grateful for having what you have and doing what you do.

The fun doesn’t happen when everything’s good and everyone’s high fiving and making money. It’s in times of destruction in parallel when you’re tested and you build that thick skin that you come out. You look back and you’re like, “I thought I was tough a year ago. Look at me now.” It will reshift people giving them an attitude of gratitude being grateful for surviving and positioning to thrive. If you thought that you were smart before, what are you now?

If you’ve had these levers that you never had an opportunity to pull and you needed to get smacked upside the head with the virus in order to stop the BS and start running your company like an entrepreneur. Something that we preach in the program, tardigrade brand, is if that’s what you needed, then you come out of this and you’re like, “This is awesome. That was the slap I needed. That was the push out the door I needed. It’s a pity it took a worldwide pandemic to give me that push but I’m here now. I’m grateful and I’m resilient and I’m ready to go.”

A pro-business piece of advice, you need to put motivational slogans under the lids of your puddings. When you open it up, it’s like, “Here’s a little kick in the ass from Gregory.” Taryn, this question is for you. This is a peer-to-peer town hall. Those reading are similar to all of you, they’re fellow founders and entrepreneurs and that’s product brand. What would you want to share with them? What would you want to say to your peers as you look back and look forward?

I would say I have been super grateful to have found a group of peers, cohorts, like-minded, challenged entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders. This whole pandemic allowed everybody to let down their guard and put themselves out there. I certainly witness a lot more patients out there in terms of personal habits. The sheer fact that you have to stand in line for certain things has taught everybody that we can’t have absolutely everything at the moment that we need. Our society was struggling with that. At the same time, we’re taking advantage of the other ways we can get our products.

I would say as a working parent, this is but a whole other spin on life. As a woman leading a business and you read the stats about where women are falling out of the workplace tremendously, that was something I was super fearful of. Working women out there and working leaders keep reaching out to all kinds of peers because the playing field has been totally leveled. Encourage people to ask the questions that they want and if you need to check yourself, know somebody will help you do that, “My gut says this. What do you think of my on and off?” Being carefree to fire off those emails. They don’t have to be long and elaborate. They can be quick ideas.

Tonya, the last question to you. Do you feel better about the future of your business today than you did before, the same, or less?

I feel better about it and I can’t even pinpoint exactly why.

I’m going to close it up and say, first of all, I thank all of you. Not just for joining this and for sharing openly what’s going on, but thank you for being entrepreneurs. Thank you for showing everybody what resilience, nimbleness, perseverance looks like and the power of remaining positive and looking at what’s next. There’s a lot that has changed, some for the good, some for the bad. Brands are going to have to rethink where discovery takes place. They’re going to have to recognize that consumers are going to expect more from you in terms of being connected and standing for something. Also, it’s exciting because we’re in this period where maybe for the United States, machines off and the veneer of it.

We’re talking about things we should have been talking about for a long time or looking at things and addressing things or having that creative abrasion, and that’s where positive change occurs. As Gary Hirschberg would say, I’m a pathological optimist when it comes to things like this. The greatest periods of disruption come with the greatest changes and we are embarking on a period of great change. It’s leaders like each of you that are carrying the torch forward, so I appreciate it. I appreciate you taking the time to come to this show with me. That’s it, everybody. Thanks. Have a great day.

Thank you, Elliot.

Important Links

• Sweet Apricity

• Noops

• Double Rainbow Ice Creams

• Tia Lupita Foods

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