YouSaid · the spoken record

Katlin Smith

lines on the record: 85
first: 2021-02-15
most recent: 2021-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And then we used a combination of powdered sugar and monk fruit to sweeten it. So we use probably we use a lot less sugar than you would ordinarily need I mean, we look at frosting as something that people don't consume every day.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to have both. I don't think we'd be anywhere near where we are without luck. I mean, we've talked about a number of things that I did wrong. But you also have to work crazy hard. So I think it takes both.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh lovely, yeah, great use. You know what you can also use? Well, I don't mean to sell this as a selling point, but I also love using our crackers for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, people are baking and cooking a lot more, which is something that's really exciting if you think about it. Like McCormick, I think they said that the number one phone call that they've gotten during this time is what is a teaspoon? A lot of people learning to cook for the first time. So we have seen, I mean, at times this year, we've seen our baking mix up 50% over prior year numbers. And this is probably the most established of all of our product lines. Yeah”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like, when you see natural vanilla extract, the one thing you can be sure of is that is not vanilla. It is typically chemical extractives. And we have actually our sourcing manager used to work at a flavorhouse. And that's part of where we develop that perspective is we just know how they're made and we don't agree with it and we don't want it in our products”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, they absolutely could. It really doesn't have me lose sleep at night, though, because I don't think that they'd execute it in the same way that we would. We make a lot of decisions that large food companies wouldn't. Like you take, for example, natural flavors. Like we don't use natural flavors and it kills our margins in places. That's a decision that it's hard to make for a large food company because they don't see the ROI in that decision.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They certainly could in the very early days of our business. Funny enough, the Betty Cracker kitchens actually placed in order for our product. I got a kick out of that.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I paid them half of it back. They wanted to keep some in the business, so they continue to be equity holders in the company. Yeah, they actually wish that I would have let them keep the whole thing in the business, but I couldn't have slept at night if I did that.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had really fortunately hired a leadership coach and it was really because I found that she was really smart with the people stuff, I'll call it. And I realized that I wasn't really smart with the people stuff. And so I thought I needed her help. And so I had her working with me and also with our key leaders. And so I think she started to hear some of the sprinklings of this. both worked with those leaders to figure out how to have the crucial conversation with me, but also set the groundwork in me to be able to hear that conversation. And so that was, it was, I believe it was our head of marketing who's still with us today, who sat down with me and like basically told me like, you got to trust me on these things. You got to let me run these things. Like, this is what I'm good at. I've got 20 years of experience here. Let me use it.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hand over the decision making reins. It's one of many leadership lessons that I've learned over the years. I think every year the business teaches me a different aspect of leadership.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's this fallacy out there that people are natural born leaders. And I hate that we tell people that because it makes people feel really inadequate when they're not good at it. Leadership skills are something it's learned and usually learn through a lot of pain too. For me, I think one of the first places where I really saw this was after I had started hiring some more senior leaders, as I got that team on board, I pretty much immediately started demotivating them. I had been running this business and I had set ideas about the way that things operate. And so I would get in their shorts, tell them the way that things needed to be done when really they were the experts in a lot of these places. And so one of the big things I had to learn early on was how to defer to them and where to defer to them.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, and Denver. It was those three regions that were our first Whole Foods regions.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're not selling in store by store, so you're not calling in a local store, you're trying to reach the person who's in charge of like 40 Whole Food stores. And so they never answer your email. And so I had to figure out a way to get through to them. So I came up with this plan where we would go to every Whole Foods region and we would email them the day before and say, I'm going to be in your regional office. I'm going to bring you baked muffins. Please, please, please meet with me for five minutes. I can do anytime during the day. And I would. I'd go out there whether or not they would answer my email and I would show up in their office with baked muffins. And to do this, even though we've raised money, I'm staying in these hostels that had like, I remember this crazy water stain on the ceiling and I was on the top bunk. I'm taking public transportation everywhere. And most of the buyers still wouldn't meet with us.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was focusing on more and more retail, but the natural food store is the next thing we needed to do was expand more nationally into Whole Foods. So that was tough because all of those regions get so many emails for new products every day.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back when they first invested in us, we hadn't built out a longer term pipeline. So we didn't know where we were going to go from there. I knew that I always wanted to get into things that were more convenient because that makes it easier for people to eat better, but I didn't know where we were going to go yet. And so we were like thinking about all these different categories. We thought about cereal, but we ended up going into crackers actually after I took our cake mix home. And for whatever reason decided to make crackers out of it and put it in my oven. And I brought him in the next day, and all of us sat around and said, hmm, that's really good. Maybe we should go into crackers. And so, with that, we went into crackers.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since I started the company, I did always see expanding into other areas, but the investment thesis was largely based around being the next Betty Cracker.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, who to keep on the team? Who to cut loose? And how to do it in a graceful way is also not the easiest thing because at the point where you've hired the wrong person, that sucks for both you and them. Yeah.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I also just inherently believe that people are good. I just kind of assume that people are going to be great at what they say they're great at. Which in interviewing is not the best place to believe that. So I became a lot better at hiring over time. But I had to make some tough people decisions that first year.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a hard year. I mean, you're just trying to figure things out. You're still operating in a very, very lean environment. I remember I would get to work before it was light outside and I would leave work when it was dark outside. So it was working really long hours and it was a lot of just trying really hard to get into stores. While simultaneously running a very junior team. And honestly, I wasn't great at hiring. Hiring is really difficult and it takes a long time to perfect that skill.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Logistics, right, everything supply chain. Logistics, supply chain. He actually developed our frosting. Yeah, I mean, at a small company, you can do anything.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's someone who works for a consulting firm but gets sponsored by the consulting firm to leave for six months And so it's a really affordable way to get great talent.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, after we raised our first round, we got like a 700 square foot office and hired five people. So Jesse, who'd been working with me on the new venture challenge, took over our finance role. I hired a extern, a Bain extern, to oversee our operations.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I started in the fall of 2013. We won the new venture challenge the spring of 2014. And I mean, the investors want to know, are you really going to continue business school? Yeah. Want you running this business full time and they weren't wrong. I mean, I knew what was coming. I dropped out after the first year of business school and went on to focus exclusively on the business.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really neat. They teach you how to fundraise. And so you develop fundraising decks. And at the end of it, there's like this big competition with probably 200 investors that are based in Chicago. And so we did end up co-winning that year. So we won $35,000. But the biggest deal was that a Chicago-based investor group got to know us through the new venture challenge. And so maybe a month or two later is when we closed our first round of funding”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it came down to the clarity of what comes first. I watch a lot of other students who try to start companies while they're in business school not succeed. And I think part of it is they try to do everything well. And you just kind of have to choose at some point and say, this is going to be my number one. And it's perfectly fine to say my number one is I want to build social relationships with people during business school or I want to become really good at finance. But for me, it was I want my business to succeed. And so anytime there was a conflict between a course or a social function and the business, the business one. I mean, I didn't even date. Like, I did nothing”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. We had his little card table. And so, yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, like it was hard to stand out. But you do the little things that you can. And so we had come up with this idea that in hindsight is terrible, that we would give away water at our booth, that everyone is thirsty at trade shows. So we put simple mills labels on the water and put gluten-free on there”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so almond flour was one of their best selling items. And so he saw a lot of potential in the product. I mean, going back to the small disciplines point, I mailed that package in the middle of a polar vortex. Like I walked down to the USPS, the middle of a polar vortex. And so there's like these little tiny decisions. You make on a daily basis where you're like, that's really inconvenient, but I'm gonna do it anyways.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the next ones we got into were Earth Fair and Wegmans. And Wegmans we got into because I figured out who the buyer was and I just shipped him a package of our product. I hadn't even written him an email yet. The largest trade show of the year, which is Natural Products Expo West, was coming up in a few weeks. And so I wanted to ask him for a meeting at the show. And so I had preemptively sent him a sample. And before I could email him, he emailed me and said, hey, I want to meet you at the show.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, one of the classes that I took while I was in business school was called Entrepreneurial Selling. So part of the assignment was actually doing even more cold calling than I already was. So on a weekly basis, I would devote Wednesdays to cold calling. I had this quote that I hung above my desk that said the difference between success and failure is a few small disciplines practiced every day. And I had to read that every Wednesday to remind myself that the discipline that I needed to practice was cold calling, which I hated.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was most focused on which classes were going to, this sounds bad, but involve the least amount of work with me spending the most amount of time working on my company. So I took classes like Cases in Entrepreneurship or honestly accounting was great. Because I could sit there in class. I was doing all of our QuickBooks at the time, right? So, I would raise my hand and say, let's say theoretically you have a transaction like XYZ. How exactly would you recognize said transaction? And so I got very real world experience there.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this point, I had the contract manufacturers I was working with, and I had one woman, Jenna, in Atlanta, who was helping me with demos and running deliveries to the stores. And then another woman, Jessie, who was at Booth with me, who was helping me build the business at the time And it was pretty soon into after I started at Booth that we became the best-selling Muffin mixes on Amazon. And around that time just kind of realized I was really onto something. And it was taking off and I needed to focus on it really full time. And so I made the decision to take courses that let me work on the business while earning course credit. So that way I could stay in school”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost exclusively, the product itself. I wasn't spending money on marketing. I wasn't spending money on team. Most certainly no one was earning any money from this business. It was just on keeping the product in stock.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he wanted to renegotiate, and so I came home to my parents, and I told them what had happened. And I was really upset. I was in tears. I was really frustrated. But I was backed into a corner because I needed the money. And my parents mortgaged the house to give me that money. They pulled $200,000. And they're not wealthy. They don't come from wealthy families. And this was so far from proven at the time. Like, I just think back on how risky that was for them to do that.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I mean, if we had done that deal, I wouldn't know in the business today. It was very fortunate that it fell through.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the theory. It was pretty naive. And so I worked out a deal with a family friend to give us $200,000. And the day that we're supposed to close, he emails me and wants to renegotiate our deal. And we met earlier that week and I'd kind of told him how well the business was doing. And so he was excited.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so around this point, I had totally underestimated the impacts of working capital. I kept needing to make more product. We kept selling more than we made in the run before. A lot of times when you're working with grocery stores, it's like 30 or 60 days after you sell the product to them that you actually get paid. And really like the second that I get paid from Whole Foods, I would immediately call up the contract manufacturer and say, we got to make more product and I would immediately place an order for more ingredients. But it was just like this constant nail biting cycle of we need more product and I don't have money in my bank account. So I had put in all that I possibly could, and I had modeled out my little Excel model that we needed probably 200,000 dollars as a business to fund the business. Period, ever into sentence.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct, yeah. I didn't know if we were going to succeed. Back when I applied for business school, I don't think we even had a name yet.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is Yats, a chain of probably 70-ish stores. So we would sell into them store by store as well. And there aren't that many grocery stores that let you sell in store by store. Other chains, like if you think about like Walmart or Target or Kroger, you're selling into large numbers of stores at one time.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the next place was natural groceries by Vitamin Cottage, which also you can sell into store by store, like Whole Foods”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a lot of cold calling, so I'd call them up one by one and say, hey, you want to try this almond flour baking mix? I'll send you a sample. And I had a couple entrepreneur friends by that point, and we would share the names of the grocery buyers. So we had like these little spreadsheets that we'd pass around. But it was also partly you just call them up and ask and say, hey, who is the buyer? And you'd write down their name. And so then the next time you call back, you ask for Susie or whomever. Right.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was heartbreaking. I mean, I just remember thinking in my head, I'm trying. I'm trying so hard. But, you know, in retrospect, she was right. I had a lot to learn in general about brand management, which like packaging, what have you. But one of the things that I did need to learn too, though, is that every single interaction with the brand matters and every one of those impressions matter. I shouldn't be bringing burn muffins to a demo.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did have so you're making so many samples, right? So sometimes I would burn some of the batches of muffins, but you're just so far behind on the number of batches that you need to make. And you're like, I don't want to lose 30 minutes. And so I brought some burned muffins to a demo. And I still recall this older woman coming up and trying it. She tries it and she looks at me and just kind of smacks her lips. I didn't care for that.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At everyone I knew what I was doing. But I mean, I think the part that did make me nervous about demos was, first of all, I'm an introvert. Like I don't love talking to people that I don't know. And so it was overall just something that I was not the most comfortable with. And I was always terrified that someone would tell me that they didn't like the product. I mean, that's just like heartbreaking”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, almond flour is not scary to people. People like almond flour because it sounds like it's going to taste good too. And so focusing on the things that really differentiate the product without scaring people off.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was more focused on the gluten free grain free, paleo friendly, which I later realized that that wasn't serving us as well because part of my mission with this is to change what people are eating, right? And when you talk about all those things, it scares people off. Like, people think it's not going to taste good.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steal them off the table. Like, you're not supposed to give them to a child who's unsupervised, but sometimes the child ticks it and runs.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shavers, and so my rule of thumb was if it was a three hour demo I needed to bake for three hours in order to make enough muffins for the demo.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the weekends where I wasn't going to production, I was doing demos in the stores. There's like that old adage that it's easier to get the product on the shelf than it is to get the product off the shelf. And it's getting the product off the shelf that's really important. And so I would do demos every weekend, and each demo is supposed to be about three hours, but I could fit in one. They were like two hours and 45 minutes to allow for time for me to transit between stores. But because this is a baked product, I actually had to bake all of these thousands of mini muffins ahead of time. People eat a lot of samples at those demo stations.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for Amazon, I actually had them store the inventory and they would fulfill both Amazon and our website's sales. But for Whole Foods, I'd actually drive to the stores and give them the product myself, or I would ship it using USPS if I couldn't drive to the store. But most of the time I was driving to the store to save the money.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a rental car, but I do recall packing those boxes as it's about to thunderstorm outside. And so I'm throwing all of the cases into the U-Haul boxes in the parking lot of the residents in. Yeah, as somebody”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT