The Hunt for the How
Season 1 Episode 5: Transformative beginnings with Deborah Benton
From climate change, DEI and social justice, to economic inequality, worker safety and related issues, leaders are looking for guidance in addressing key questions as they lead their businesses into a future propelled by change and opportunity. In conversation with notable business leaders, Michael Dix, CEO of Intentional Futures hunts for the how.
Edited for length and clarity
Michael
I’m excited for our guest today, Deborah Benton. Deborah is an experienced operator and investor. She’s also the Founder and Managing Partner for Willow Growth Partners, which is an early-stage consumer fund focused on investing in values driven entrepreneurs. Deborah, welcome to the show.
Deborah
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Michael
Let’s dive into just establishing a little bit about you and your background, the path you took to founding Willow Growth Partners.
Deborah
It’s a little bit of a circuitous route, for sure. I started my career in management consulting, a typical route coming out of business school, it’s either investment banking, or management consulting, and I chose the consulting path, a great early path just to develop a skill set and a toolbox. I joined a firm that was very data driven. And those skills have stayed with me since the very beginning. I quickly learned that I had much more of an appetite and interest in the operations and being on the ground and joining a company. I followed one of my clients to a company called E Toys, which in the very early internet days was, you know, part of the 1.0 of E Commerce. It was a fantastic experience, fantastic. Some of the smartest people that I’ve ever worked with, and it was a ton of fun. But it was this crazy situation that I couldn’t really understand, we were raising a ton of money from some of the top Silicon Valley VCs. And yet, we were losing so much money. And even more crazy, we took the company public, when we were still losing a lot of money. And everything coming out of kind of a very naive MBA grad like, this just doesn’t make sense to me. But it was my foray and into an introduction to raising outside capital, how these investors were thinking, what their expectations were. And so it was, it was great, you know, these kinds of companies, this was right at the very beginning of e-commerce that these companies could not have launched and scaled without external capital.
That company, after we took public March of 2000 unfortunately saw its demise. The unit economics, which was a term that we never even used back then clearly didn’t make sense. I was kind of hooked. But after March of 2000, the early-stage venture capital in Los Angeles kind of dried up. I ended up joining another company here in LA on their executive team, and ran $100 million P&L, and it was wonderful, it was great to get exposure to a healthy, profitable business. You know, it was really the other side of the spectrum. I did that for several years and kind of honed my general management skills and was able to really dig into a business and have it you know, once it’s mature, how do you make kind of these micro improvements.
But I really missed the early stage. I found myself after about four or five years yearning to get back into the early-stage world. And I ended up over the course of the next probably six or seven years joining early-stage consumer brands. This was 2008–2009, the onset of what I’d call the second wave of E Commerce. We’d learned a lot even though not very much time had gone by. We learned the technology had changed the availability of variably priced services such as AWS, which really changed the cost structure of launching and scaling these businesses. The emergence of social media was integral to this kind of new cohort of businesses. I did that for a number of years, and really enjoyed it and scaled very fast growing companies.
I was the CEO at Shoedazzle. With just an incredible entrepreneur, Brian Lee, serial entrepreneur, just a brilliant entrepreneurial mind. That company was co-founded by Kim Kardashian. It was the early use of social media, Kim was kind of coming into her own at a time building her own brand. And we were able to leverage that as we scaled that business. Then I joined a company called NastyGal as the president. That was an online women’s fashion destination. Again, a beautiful brand scaled very quickly. And in both cases, we raised a lot of venture capital money. Hindsight is 2020. The last thing I want to do is be an armchair critic, because frankly, I was part of what I saw as the problem. I just didn’t know it at the time.
This is looking back. I was developing a thesis around, what is the appropriate amount of capital that’s really required to scale these businesses? And why are these businesses unprofitable for so long? And are we focusing on the right metrics? These are not SaaS businesses; these are not software businesses. The competitive environment was changing very quickly. And frankly, what we knew as operators and investors about really what are the key metrics that we should be focusing on was evolving.
So I left operating in 2014, with a very sour opinion of the industry, both by my operating experience, but also what I was seeing around me, these beautiful brands, many were not coming to fruition, they were blowing up, they couldn’t raise capital, they had raised it too high evaluations, they had raised too much capital, mostly from technology VC oriented funds, whose playbook was to get a billion dollar exit to make their model work for their investors. And frankly, in this world while billion-dollar exits are possible, we will continue to see them.
There are probably more exceptions than the norm. Many of these businesses, the successful brands can be scaled and have exits in the $300-$400 million range, which if capitalized correctly, and scaled appropriately and focusing on the right metrics can be a hugely successful win for both the founding team, the employees and the investors.
So, I left in 2014, specifically to start thinking about investing from this kind of perspective, there were no institutional funds that were really thinking about brands in this way. It was neither VC, which I saw much more as a kind of a tech orientation. Nor was it private equity, which I probably had a stronger affinity to in terms of how they thought about their investment thesis, but really didn’t know the seed stage. Frankly, we’re still coming up to speed on this whole new digital world. They were much more than a traditional retail world. I just started investing off my own balance sheet. I invested in Angel checks, I often took board seats, advisory board seats, to help these companies scale, help them fundraise that first round and get them thinking about what they should be focusing on.
I did that for six years, successfully. I did 15 investments, I’ve had three exits, and I’ll probably have a few more in the next 12 to 18 months. That experience was really the genesis of Willow. I saw that there was a dearth of available institutional capital for this category of business and this type of investment thesis. And, you know, there were very, very few women fund managers, particularly ones that raised their own fund. And so, both my professional passion and my personal passion kind of came together. And I decided to launch Willow and I have a wonderful partner who joined me in the endeavor as well.
Michael
Great, and we met through your friend Fran Dunaway, who has been on the show and was raving about how supportive you and your group have been as an investor in really understanding them and how different that was from others. I thought it’d be really interesting to talk to you to get the other side of that story. And maybe we could start there just with your involvement with Tomboy X. And through that maybe talk about how you go beyond the check in your relationships, what you look for in entrepreneurs and how you support them.
Deborah
Let me first say to all the founders out there, raising capital is incredibly hard. It’s incredibly difficult. And so when I say this, I’m not making light of that endeavor, it is incredibly hard, no matter who you are to raise capital. Capital is only one of the ingredients, I think that there is a tremendous amount of responsibility, particularly at the early stage for investors to come to the table with more than capital. My goal, even when I was investing as an angel, was to, yes, I’ll put a check in and I’m going to help you round up the rest of the capital. But really, what I want to truly help you with, is to not make all the mistakes that I made as an operator, and I made all of them, literally all of them. And so being able to give that benefit to the founders.
I don’t have all the answers. And even my experience is a little bit dated now — things change so much. But it’s a data point. And I can certainly approach things from an operator perspective. And so being able to have the conversation and really understanding how incredibly hard it is what they’re doing. Scaling a business is unbelievably hard. And it can be unbelievably lonely. And so it’s both supporting the founders coming to where they are, and supporting them. But it’s also providing empathy. And it’s also providing emotional support for an incredibly difficult time that they’re going through. The highs and lows of entrepreneurship are extraordinarily destabilizing for most.
That’s what we will aim to provide, we want to be your first call. Yes, we’re an investor. But it’s not a bad word. We’re really in the boat with you where we’re helping you however we can. And we truly do understand how difficult it is. And we’re here as a team to help guide where we can, and sometimes just to listen, because sometimes these founders just need to be listened to.
In terms of Fran and Naomi, just an extraordinary founding team, some of the loveliest kindest, smartest, most wonderful people that I’ve met and had the pleasure of being able to invest in and sit on their advisory board and sit on their board of directors. So we met, I think it was 2015. I had found them in a huge group of applications for an organization that I belong to called the Women Founders Network. We have kind of a Shark Tank-like event for very early-stage businesses founded by women every year, and I was going through 100 plus applications, and I came across them. Everything about it just resonated. And keep in mind, this was a company that looked very, very different than what it did today. I loved the name, I loved what they wanted to do.
You know, they were still in very early stages of executing, but I just cold reached out and said, listen, this is who I am. I’d love to hear your story. And that’s how it started. And they’ve built an extraordinary company. And right from the beginning, I understood their desire, what they wanted to build, I understood why they were building it, I saw that there was a huge unmet demand in the market. And I knew this company needed to exist.
Michael
In my conversation with Fran we talked about values quite a bit and how those have informed business decisions and the development of culture and drove a lot of success in the way they think about engaging with their stakeholders, and empowering them in the decision making process. I wonder what your perspective is, on the role of values in establishing startups that are built to last.
Deborah
I believe that consumer brands today must be built on core sets of values. I truly do. I think if you think about brands and how their relationship with the consumer has changed over the years, it’s dramatic and moving from a brick-and-mortar kind of paradigm, a retail paradigm that many of us were raised on, before specialty retail came into the market. Many of us may have just grown up going to the local department store. Nobody really thought about brands, but when you compare that to what it is today, the difference is profound.
I think consumers are building what DTC has afforded all of us as a direct relationship with the brand. And it’s allowed the consumer to hop on a website and learn so much more and immerse themselves in not just the products, not just the assortment, but the values and the aesthetic, and the messaging. And what’s important. And I think today’s consumer more than ever wants to shop with brands and wants to buy with brands, whose values reflect their own, I think that’s more important than ever. As a founder, you are thrown 1000 decisions a day, you’re trying to create something out of nothing, you were trying to put into this world, something that literally didn’t exist the day before, to have a to have a matrix of values, that provides a lens through which to look through when making decisions, I think is really important.
And when you can provide that to your entire employee base, it is a shared sense of values. And it allows you to put the onus of decision making much more on equipping them with a lens through which they can look through. And I think it’s for all levels. This is not just senior management; I think people working in customer support have an incredibly important role because they’re talking to your customers. And when you provide them with guiding principles and guiding values, you really empower them to make decisions that reflect your own values. So from our perspective, we only invest in brands that lead with their values. I’m agnostic, it can be whatever is important to you, I don’t want to dictate. Really, there’s so many ways to improve this world. And there’s so many ways to build beautiful brands. Some examples could be around sustainability, could be around diversity and inclusion, could be around clean ingredients and formulations. It could be around supply chain transparency. In a lot of these areas, the bar is quite low.
Michael
How do you suss that out? So you must get presented with opportunities to invest every single day. And you’re going after just a small minority of these, I would imagine how do you figure out whether they have foundational values that matter that are driving their decision versus lip service words on the wall?
Deborah
We will both lead deals, and, in some cases, we will participate. All that means is when we leave deals, we set the terms, we put the term sheet down and we take the board seat, when we pretend it’s a bigger check. We are participating in a round, where we did not set the terms. And so we make sure we’re really aligned with the lead investor. In that case, we try to lead on the brand side, we really do like to lead because we want to be in the trenches with the founder and we want to help however we possibly can.
We spend quite a bit of time before we will put down a term sheet. And that means it’s been a little more challenging in the times of COVID with no travel. But there’s not a single lead deal where we did not meet the founders in person. And I do think that’s important. I think it’s important to have tough conversations. And through many conversations and asking a lot of probing questions you can identify what’s important to them, and why are they doing it and what’s the origin story. We can get comfortable as to how genuine the values are you can see the decisions that they’ve made to that point. We don’t invest pre-revenue and pre-launch, we invest in companies that have already launched, generally these companies have around a year or more of operations.
I think we can see values reflected through the team that they’ve hired. The feedback from the team, when we meet team members, the decisions that they’ve made to date, in multiple conversations, these things come through, and we get into difficult conversations. We get into, what does success mean to you? And how are you thinking about the trajectory of this business? You know, is this a business that you want to scale and leave to your children, which is wonderful, but maybe that maybe taking external capitalism is not the right route for you. I think those tough conversations are not enough. I believe that the onus is on the investor to ask them, because often you’re dealing with entrepreneurs that have not gone through this, this may be the first experience that they’ve had in fundraising.
That’s probably first and foremost, the greatest tool that we have is just literally spending time and building a relationship and having difficult conversations. We are very, very transparent as a firm and there’s two general partners, we are incredibly candid, and transparent. I never want to play games; I want to be as helpful as I can. Sometimes it’s hard to give feedback to founders, but I would rather be truthful in the hopes that it will help them. And sometimes there’s just not a chemistry fit. And that’s okay. That’s okay. There’s lots of reasons why this opportunity may not be good. One of those reasons is it’s not great chemistry wise. And it’s not great from a values perspective. I think those should be taken into consideration.
Michael
I want to hear more about the boardroom. So when you’re on any boards that you’re sitting in those rooms, I’m curious what sorts of conversations happen that are rooted in values when you’re wrestling with really difficult decisions, challenges the company is facing, how the values show up and inform you that they’re not magical algorithms that give you the answer. And they’re very open to interpretation. But can you talk a little bit about how that comes into play?
Deborah
Healthy boards are rooted in values of mutual respect, open communication and dialogue, comfort with conflict, open debate, transparency, candor, like rigorous candor. And that leads to healthy dialogue and better decision making. I’d say everything about that boardroom should be grounded in values, and it starts with the team, it starts with the folks around the table, and talking about the importance of that.
Michael
Are you saying that those are the values you listed, which all sound very healthy and productive to me? Are those the common values that every board, boardroom or company as a baseline should have? Are those just examples that you’ve seen?
Deborah
Those are my values that I hope to bring to every board and every board meeting that we have. And then beyond that, if you have a board that is grounded in those values, and of course there’s ways to improve it spending time breaking bread together. Understanding it, really getting to know people that certainly helps for sure. Which is why we almost always try to have a meal at some point either the night before that or the night of the board meeting. I think that really helps.
When we set the ground rules, I think setting ground rules of what’s important and letting everybody talk and then coming to a consensus around this is how we’re going to treat each other, and this is how we want to move forward. That helps and once you find that and once everybody role models that as you approach difficult crossroads in the business which you inevitably will. That really helps. That is again, a lens that you look through. And so if it is, how do we deal with this situation, we really fell down on the way that we were dealing with customer service, we’ve got a huge backlog of shipments or orders, grounded in this is that we are consumer centric, we are customer centric, that helps us all kind of make decisions. I’d say values drive all of this. It really does. And being open about it and talking about it. And being proud of these values really helps to have a healthy dialogue at the board level.
Michael
Yeah, it sounds like values and relationships, honest human relationships.
Deborah
Yes, yeah. And just not being fearful or defensive of differences for conflict. It really can be super helpful, healthy. As I think about this larger world of stakeholder capitalism, and the shift towards empowering and listening to an understanding of a wider web of constituents that may have very different points of view, very different needs. And there may be lots of perceived conflict in them.
Michael
But what you’re talking about is not being afraid of that conflict, not being afraid of hearing something that may challenge your worldview that you’re claiming? Absolutely, it is essential in order to start operationalizing these ideas, right?
Deborah
Imagine that every single one of us hasn’t been through this situation where we’ve entered a situation, there’s some disagreement, maybe some conflict. And the story that we create in our head, especially over time, if there’s not transparent communication gets to be bad, right? People tend to ruminate, they think about the worst. They’re looking for adversarial behavior. I don’t know, if as humans, maybe we are innately programmed to look for that. You finally have an open dialogue and a conversation, and it’s nothing what you think, right? It’s nothing what you think it’s just simply, if you take the time to walk in the shoes of that other person and understand their fears, and their motivation, and what’s important to them, and the problem that they’re trying to solve, that’s when you can come together, that’s when you get clarity. It’s not, you against me, it’s, listen, we have different motivations. And this is our different respective understandings of the situation.
How do we come together? Now this sound may sound a little bit pollyannish. And does every situation get resolved? No, sometimes it’s hard, you know, you really do have competing factors at play. But again, if it’s grounded in mutual respect, you must make sure you have the right players around the table and right players on the team. And that’s why we look for alignment so much. So because our belief is yes, it’s going to be hard. But together, working together, and having alignment around what’s important, and values we will get through. And together, we’ll come up with a better solution than any individual party.
Michael
Great, I want to hear your perspective on metrics and measurement and timeframes. I think they’re all very connected. And I know you have a point of view on the role that investors can play and the positive and negative influence they can have in those things. How do you think about that? What are the right things to measure? What is that range? What are the timeframes you contemplate? And how do you get alignment with the measurement system timeframes and expectations from all parties?
Deborah
The first thing that we really look for is a very strong product margin profile. So this is your direct cost of goods sold against the revenue that you’re generating from selling this item. I know that because of the other somewhat hidden costs in a digital business, namely, shipping and returns are probably two of the biggest ones that a physical retailer doesn’t have, in order to support a healthy business at some level of scale, you must have a very strong product margin. So we look at the entire product margin, knowing that the business is at the stage that we look at our sub scale. And so there will be improvement, they will be able to leverage their volume as they scale to get their costs down. And we should see improvement in that.
We look at product margin, we look at gross margin, and we look at contribution margin before acquisition, contribution margin after acquisition, and we will model out generally, you know, five years where we can get to breakeven. And again, things happen. Nothing is ever as lovely as a model. But at least it gives us a guidepost, at least we must believe that we can do this to get to breakeven profitability, because the next round of investors, which is a Series A investor, I know that that will be first and foremost important to them. Again, these businesses don’t necessarily have to be profitable when they do their Series A, but that series, a investor, which is generally a strategic or lower middle market, private equity fund, they are going to want to look for break even profitability, certainly within the next 12 to 18 months, maybe 24 months.
Michael
I know you’ve also thought about generating value in other ways. These are purpose driven businesses, often with strong value systems who want to generate some utility beyond money for society. So how does that factor over on the pure foundational values of a business? What are they? What do they stand for?
Deborah
How is this business thinking about itself, over and above just bringing more products into the world? And that usually is generated by the founder, and if he or she or they do a good job of espousing it and living it on a day-to-day basis, that becomes part of the DNA or the culture, and much easier, again, to build this lens through which to look. Those core values that we invest behind, they play into, again, almost every single aspect of the business, certainly, assortment and category launches, how are we thinking about the next product? And does that fit in with our model around using sustainable material supply chain transparency? Is this better for the world? How is it bringing joy to the consumers? And how are they thinking about in general, improving society? And that sounds like a very broad term.
It’s not hard to do, right? We have some egregious practices still going on. Whether it’s toxic formulations, or the fashion industry is kind of a scourge on the climate and the environment. Some of these things I’m sure people would be shocked about are still occurring today. And again, we’re quite agnostic, we just want to invest behind founders and businesses that certainly want to make money. And by the way, I don’t think making money and doing good or orthogonal concepts at all. For me, I think they’re highly correlated. So it’s a joy to be able to do what I can do, because it very much satisfies my personal goals. And the financial returns that I’ve promised to my investors. So you know, the ongoing aspects of the values come into play all the time, products, how are we treating our employees? Who are we hiring? Right? What’s important to us from a diversity and inclusion perspective? Who are we hiring, even doing rounds?
Willow is part of an organization that’s committed to getting diverse fund managers on the cap table. We have, you know, certain clauses in our term sheet that addresses board composition, diversity and inclusion on board composition and hiring practices. I’d say, there are not only different ways, it comes into play almost always, it really does. I think that that’s important. And I think that’s how you reinforce the values of an organization, when you live it every single day. And you talk about these things. And you model these things to the organization.
Michael
Can you think of examples where your organization offered relief on the strict economic achievements in service of or to enable progress on, say, sustainability?
Deborah
Yeah, absolutely. If you go to the product margin, the costs of some of these things, sustainable materials, or non-toxic formulations and ingredients, they are more expensive. I’m hoping as they become more mainstream, and as the consumers are demanding this, it will hopefully bring into the world more competition, more demand along the supply chain for this, which should hopefully bring the costs down. I’m hoping that we’ll start to see that and businesses committed to democratizing access.
Now the younger generation, if you’re 17, you’re not, for the most part going and spending $75 on a moisturizer, you can’t afford that. And probably your parents, your kids are like mine, and are paying for that. And they’re probably not going to spend $75 on a moisturizer for a teenager. And this brand Bubble, the founder, was really committed to the highest quality formulations and ingredients, and figuring out a way to produce it at a price that was accessible to this younger generation. So everything’s under $20 — unheard of in the market. That might be compromising to your product margin a little bit, some of those discussions might be around there to stay core to who you’re servicing, and what’s really important to you. And for this brand, democratizing access to top quality, clean ingredients, clean formulations, and non-toxic formulations is very important.
Michael
I’m keeping two things in my head as I’m listening to you. One is their connection to what Jon Iwata, who was one of our guests. In our first episode he was talking about peculiar constraints, where you might have multiple high bars that redefine the problem you’re trying to solve, but drive innovation. And so you’re not sacrificing on any of these fronts, but you’re actually coming up with better novel solutions for that.
Deborah
But it also makes me think that there are instances, maybe the time frame, so it’s like our challenge demands that it’s going to, we’re going to build this market over seven years or nine years at that $20 price point. And margins may be thin for now, but we will make it up in volume or be able to increase margins over time as the cost of goods goes down. I think it’s imperative that these brands have two or three guiding North stars that are non-negotiable. And it does mean making sometimes some financial compromises, particularly in the short term, maybe over the long term, once you start to really scale, you have better leverage, and you can get your margin profile back in place. Maybe not, maybe you can build a business with a lower margin profile, to stay true to what you’re doing.
Michael
Adapting your perspective from the boardroom, or boardrooms that you sit in, what are you seeing in terms of empowering and enriching stakeholders in novel ways?
Deborah
There are increasing examples I’m seeing even when it was during an IPO, carving out some equity for supply chain partners, or top customers, giving employees and partners actual committee seats that are more than a token spot. So you can say you actually did that in the press release, they actually have voice and influence, certainly access to IPOs. I’m seeing that probably more than ever, which I think is really interesting. You and I talked about this before. I’m quite disgruntled with how elitist I find the whole financial industry and access to capital. And so and part of that is the ability for an everyday person, giving them the opportunity to create wealth for themselves, because for the most part, those opportunities are completed, they don’t even hear about them.
Unless you’re in that world, you really don’t even care about them. And if you do hear about them, generally, those IPO allocations go to big institutions. So I like that for sure. I’d say in the early days, the whole notion of giving every employee some equity was a wonderful step in the right direction, giving everybody a sense of ownership to what they’re building and being able to create value for themselves.
I’m a huge believer in that. It doesn’t matter what role you play in the organization. I really like to see everybody having some level of ownership. There are far more discussions at the board level, certainly over the last few years around culture, and what’s important. Actually having measurements of culture, whether it’s employee surveys, we look at turnover. You know, those conversations are relatively new. I tried to have that level of conversation not only at every board meeting, but at every update meeting with the founder or the or the key team, without a team and without a happy, productive aligned team, it’s very difficult to create a successful business.
So those kinds of conversations are certainly happening, I’d say benefits that are more aligned with the workforce these days. So an evolution in what are the types of benefits that’s important, we’ve just gone through a really interesting 18 months, where the whole notion of remote work has certainly become prevalent. And as we think about the continuing evolution, do we go back? Does an office play a role? Or are we productive? Does it depend on the organization? Is it a hybrid solution? I think women were overly hit with the responsibility, it was very difficult for women, particularly women with children, everybody was at home, they may not have had childcare, trying to deal with at home schooling. Helping employees become the best, most productive that they can be, by supporting them where they are and what they need. I think that that’s an extraordinary conversation to have. Some people need the social interaction of an office, and they want that, and that’s fantastic.
And I think the onus is on the companies to ensure that that’s happening, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a nine to five job in a cubicle. It could be having social events, it could be having two afternoons a week together, there’s different ways to do this. I’m really encouraged by how progressive some organizations have become in thinking about, how do we create an environment that is most conducive for a happy, productive employee, meeting them where they are? Because if you think about it, everybody has different lives. Everybody has different priorities, you know, why should I care if somebody wants to go to a Pilates class at 10 o’clock every morning, I don’t care, that’s wonderful, go do it. I don’t want to think about managing people’s time, we need to move to much more of a goal orientation. Now, again, that sounds all very nice. And sometimes there’s just some constraints. And sometimes we really do need to be together. And so there is a little bit of compromise on both sides.
But I’m very encouraged with how much more progressive we are thinking about creating productive environments for people at an individual level. So it sounds like the conversation is shifting. And some of the decisions that were being made in service many years ago were base, maybe some equity, maybe a bonus structure, maybe a 401k. And if you were lucky, maybe the company offset your gym membership, that was super progressive, right? Why are we forced fitting, you know, elements of an attractive compensation package, compensation being a broad term of many benefits. On to everybody is like a one solution. That doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense. So again, I’m a big believer, you can create a happy, productive, values aligned organization, your turnover will be very low, you’re going to have people that are espouse your values, you’re going to be able to empower them because they live your values, so they’ll be able to make decisions, you’re not going to have to micromanage them. That’s my goal for our portfolio companies.
Michael
Alright, so in closing, maybe you could offer some practical advice for entrepreneurs interested in building purpose driven companies if they could do one thing.
Deborah
I think entrepreneurs must go through a pretty rigorous process to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s going to be a very hard journey. The failure rate is relatively high. They have to they have to get to a point of a lot of introspection, a lot of questioning themselves as to why they’re doing it, the more strongly they believe in the values aspect of what they’re doing, the easier it will be to overcome all the obstacles, the challenges, the pain, the loneliness, the ambiguity, which they will those elements will all be prevalent. There’s no question. But if you feel so strongly about putting this business into the world because you truly know that your consumers will be happier, the broader world will be happier, this business should exist. That’s where I see a lot of success.
Michael
As an entrepreneur, having experienced all of the problems, you called out that resonates very strongly with me and gave me some chills. So thank you for coming on.
Deborah
This has been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking the time.
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