Do Cool Sh*t (14 page)

The next day I sent him the slideshow presentation, and he got back to me to say he was very interested. We met up a couple more times over a few meals, lots of laughter, and the beginning of what is now an eight-year friendship
.
And I raised a sizable investment from him.

He actually called money “energy” and said, “I am giving you energy to grow your business.” I loved this way of looking at it, and I couldn’t have agreed more. This money would give me some of the energy and movement I needed to get started in my business
.

I continued meeting and connecting with people, and I ended up raising the $250,000 I needed to get my business up and running.

Do Cool Shit Tip

In order to collect the checks from angel investors, you need to set up an LLC (go to your bank, they can set it up for you) and create a simple term sheet with an operating agreement for the investors to sign. (You can find a sample term sheet and standard operating agreement on docoolshit.org.)

At this point, I had just turned twenty-six years old and was ready to get the doors open to my new venture and let the next chapter of my adventure unfold. Raising money had been my biggest challenge thus far, but I knew it was just the beginning. The odds were stacked high against me, but I was ready to prove them wrong.

Do Cool Shit Tip

An exciting new alternative to recruiting angel investors is crowd funding.
Wikipedia
describes crowd funding as “the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.” Using platforms like kickstarter.com, indiegogo.com, catapult.org, you do not need to give any equity away. You will simply receive “preorders” or donations. You can also apply for seed funding at places like goldenseeds.com and startups.co.

9

GET SHIT DONE FAST

How to Get Your Business Open Without Wasting Time

Creativity starts with a little touch of insanity and culminates with the highest trust on its beauty, but throughout it maintains the hands of originality and humanity.

—A
NUJ
S
OMANY

S
ixty-five thousand dollars!? It would cost that much to create the branding package for my new business? Are you kidding me!?

That was more than a quarter of my entire budget, and I hadn’t even built anything yet, let alone put a down payment on a location. We were like newborns just out of the womb with the umbilical cord still attached. We hadn’t even taken our first breath. That $65,000 proposal from the branding company was simply not an option, but I desperately needed a clear branding vision. What was I going to do?

It had taken me
about seven months to finally raise $250,000 from angel investors (i.e., friends, friends of friends, former colleagues, and random angels I met in New York over a couple of years). I now had the general concept of my business mapped out from the brainstorming sessions I held and I was ready for the next step.

With the help of my architect we calculated that I would need at the barest of bare bones $180,000 to build out a small location—and this fee included calling on every favor I could. It wasn’t exactly clear what I would be spending on a space because I didn’t have a location picked out, but I was assuming I’d have a space that was smaller than five hundred square feet, and according to my architect, $180,000 was about how much it might cost. (When I look back at it now, I see that was a dangerous approach, because it’s always best to estimate costs
after
you find a space.)

Rich Wolf told me that I would need to put down three months’ rent on a space, plus first month’s rent in advance (standard practice for commercial spaces in NYC apparently). I knew my budget wouldn’t support a dollar more than $6,000 per month. Anything cheaper than that wouldn’t be in a good location, according to my real estate broker friend, so it meant that I would need to put down $24,000 just to get the keys to a space. Man, New York ain’t cheap!

That left me with $46,000 to do things like get my business fully branded, purchase initial food inventory, and have funds for initial staff training over a couple of weeks. This also had to include having some working capital left over—which was the important financial breathing room I needed to let the business grow into itself and gain traction without worrying about money and paying bills with revenues right off the bat. Businesses need time to ramp up.

My dad had always drilled into my head that most businesses failed if they didn’t have enough runway to properly take off. (Pops has always been a fan of a good aeronautical pun.)

To clarify what I needed
,
I wrote down the steps I had to take before even beginning the search for the $6,000-per-month storefront in Manhattan:

• Create overall brand design.
  
• Design a website.
  
• Finalize the menu design.
  
• Set up social media.
  

First order of business: get my business branded. Once I was branded, I would have the finalized name, logo, mission statement, color schemes, fonts, restaurant look and feel, talking points, public identity, and the general aesthetic of the restaurant created in one nice, neat package. I had figured out some of this at the brainstorming sessions but not the fully detailed brand concept.

I started calling several branding agencies and met with a few of them. I explained to them that it was my first small business, I wanted to get it right, and I had budgeted $5,000 to brand my business, which seemed like a generous amount of money.

I practically spit my soy chai tea all over my computer screen when the proposals started coming back: $65,000 from one branding firm and $15,000 from another—they ran the gamut, but they were nowhere in the range I could afford. Seriously? Just to pick some fonts and colors? Good grief! (At the time, I had no idea how important this step was for a small business that had big dreams to grow, and how much creativity and time goes into making a successful brand, but still, I didn’t have that kind of money.)

I decided to try a different route.

I called my good friend Richard, who was a branding expert, and told him that I would pay him in equity if he could help brand my business for free. He was the same friend who helped put my investor presentation together and had given my presentation at one of my fundraising dinner parties. He attended my main brainstorming session and finalized the name of my business and my logo. We had met many times to talk about my business and so he was already very familiar with what I was trying to do.

At this point, he was working at a branding firm and I knew he had been thinking of breaking off on his own. This could be a good trial run for him to see if he could brand something by himself as a freelancer. (Notice the old MB scenario.) He graciously accepted.

My friend Ian, an architect, had been working for a firm and was also at a place where he wanted to branch off and start something on his own, so he agreed to design my place for free in exchange for a piece of the pizza pie, so to speak.

My best friend from college, Zach (who ended up also investing in my business), had a childhood friend who was a talented interior designer. Coincidentally, she was also working for an interior design company and was ready to start branching out to start her own firm. It would be a great opportunity to add a real business to her personal portfolio, and when I offered to give her a percentage of my business in exchange, she agreed as well.

Richard and his team designed a brilliant first menu for us (go to docoolshit.org to see it). It was a twenty-page booklet that had our menu on the first and last page and the rest of it was a bunch of funny and silly images with text. It helped garner a lot of attention during our launch. He also helped us create our first website.

Other friends helped out in various ways whenever they could, and some simply did it for the fun of it and to be part of something new and exciting. It was MB all around!

Do Cool Shit Takeaway

If you’re ever starting a new business, it is important to itemize all the tasks and elements that you’ll need to create, and to run the list by someone who has started a similar business previously, to make sure you have all your items on the list and that they’re in the correct order. Once you’ve identified everything you need to create, think about your network of friends and colleagues and see who does work in that sector or field. Oftentimes, people are looking for freelance work or they are looking for opportunities to “go out on their own.” Collaborating in this way is an effective and inspiring method to get important parts of your business completed, for cheap . . . and possibly even build a strategic partnership in the process.

To help keep track of all of the moving pieces and stay connected with the overall strategy, a great free online task manager is available to make your life much easier. It’s called Asana (asana.com).

In the end, we came up with lots of creative ideas together. Was it perfect? Not entirely. But it stood out, it was free, and it got me started! I knew I’d pull it all together down the road (when I had real money to spend on branding). If you don’t have friends who can help you get started, places like Crowdspring.com or 99designs.com are great for inexpensive branding. The biggest difference between these sites and hiring someone to brand your business is that these sites are generally a much cheaper option. You also get a lot more branding directions and options than if you were to go with a person, who will probably give you a maximum of three directions.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON BRANDING

Branding is tough! One of my very smart friends, Sam (the Intrigue Expert) (check out intrigueagency.com to see Sam’s work), and her son, Andrew (visit gatsbysmile.com for examples of Andrew’s work), break down branding into two parts—words and visuals:

Words

This is the language you use to tell and sell people on your business. It includes:

• Mission statement
  
• Pitch
  
• Copy within the marketing materials and press kit
  

Visuals

This is the part of your business that people can see and feel, and it provides the housing for your words. Visuals include:

• Website
  
• Social media pages
  
• Marketing materials
  
• Packaging
  
• Physical store
  

If you know how to talk about your business convincingly and your aesthetics are attractive, you’ll be much more likely to attract customers, partners, and financing if you need it.

Do Cool Shit Branding Exercise

Here’s an exercise that you can do to help you clarify and create your brand. Answer these questions (
WILD
answers have been given below as examples), and once you do this, you will be well on your way to branding success!

WORDS

• Mission statement: The key to this question is not what you do, it is
  why
  do you do it?
      
  WILD
  ’s mission statement: “Wild honors nature; the source of our uniqueness, our well-being, our future. It is a promise to choose ingredients that have been harvested with respect to their primitive state. It comes to us as it has come from the earth: already perfect. Please feast with confidence.”
  

WHAT? HOW? WHY?

• What: What do you want to achieve or provide?
      
  WILD
  aims to provide farm-to-table pizza and local foods with a conscience to the locals.
  

• How: How do you achieve your goal?
      From the beginning, we focused on working with good local vendors: local farms, local breweries, local vineyards, local packaging companies, local furniture designers, and fair-trade coffee and tea companies. And now our messaging is evolving to put that message front and center. (We also made the bold move to serve exclusively gluten-free crust. We are confident in our crust as we spent a very long time perfecting it and tweaking it to what it is today.)
  

• Why: Why do you want to do this? Why is it important to you (or the world)?
      We aim to make America’s favorite comfort food good for you and guilt-free, and we want to support local farms and suppliers at the same time and offer this favorite comfort food to everyone, even those with food sensitivities.