[00:00:05] Melissa Traverse: Hello, and thank you for joining. I am Melissa Traverse, Director of Community at BevNET Anosh, and I'm excited to welcome you to the Nambase podcast. Be sure to visit nambase.com. It is BevNET's platform for the CPG community. You can find episodes of this podcast there, our CPG education learning platform, and much more. In CPG, growth moments often get the spotlight. Launching a product, retail placement, seeing momentum build, and that's all important, but they're often just the beginning. It's the operational work after that that decides whether a brand can actually scale. Today, we are focusing on that side of the journey with Daniel Berlin, founder of Dirty Gut, and Jesse Barruch, co-founder of Whims. Both Daniel and Jesse are building chocolate brands, and together we are breaking down what founders should expect when operations start to matter more, and how to build systems that support long-term growth. So Daniel is bringing the questions from being in the middle of his journey with Dirty Gut, and Jesse is bringing perspective from being a few years ahead at WIMS, close enough to remember the challenges clearly, and far enough along to know it really made a difference. So I just want to thank you both so much for joining me here in this conversation. It's a pleasure to have you. Let's start off with a couple of introductions so our audience can get to know you a little bit. Daniel, I think something that is very interesting and inspiring about you is that you are a college student at Babson College. Is that right?
[00:01:39] Daniel Berlin: I am indeed. I'm a senior, so I'm almost done, but I've had a blast there. It's a great school.
[00:01:45] Melissa Traverse: So before we dive into all of the operations talk, can you give us a quick overview of Dirty Gut? So, you know, what's the product, who is it for, and what problem are you setting out to solve?
[00:01:57] Daniel Berlin: Well, first off, thank you, Melissa, for having me. And thank you, Jesse, for doing this. I love talking about this stuff. And it's even more meaningful given that it's with a brand that I have looked up to greatly since I started my journey in CPG. So thank you. So Dirty Gut, we're a line of healthy, better-for-you chocolate. It has more fiber, less sugar, and then live probiotics in every single piece. So the best way I can describe it is we're almost like the Ollipop. but for chocolate. A lot of people who buy Dirty Gut or enjoy Dirty Gut, they look at us because it makes them feel better. It gives them permission to eat chocolate, much as WIMS has been able to do the past few years. We're really trying to turn chocolate from this thing that people look at as a junk food into a permissible indulgence and really a daily ritual that you can feel good about incorporating into your life. We launched earlier this year in April, and we're coming out with our complete full product line of three very delicious flavors in January. And a lot of operations problems have come with that. And so I'm very, very, very excited to learn from Jesse today.
[00:03:07] Melissa Traverse: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Daniel. Jesse, for anyone who might be new to WIMS in our audience, can you walk us through the brand? What do you make? How does it fit into the market? And how has the business evolved over time?
[00:03:21] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, amazing. Thank you. Thanks for having us here. And I'm excited to do this. It was like not too long ago, I was on the other side of this conversation and love that one. So whims is a, you know, confectionary for the modern consumer. So we have reimagined America's best selling confectionery items that, you know, were made 120 years ago, and done so for the modern consumer, our products only have one gram of sugar, They're gluten-free, dairy-free. We don't use any palm oil in our chocolate and we don't use any sugar alcohol. So, vital clean label and delicious taste. This month actually closes out three years of business. And in those three years, we built out a retail distribution network and a food service channel primarily. I think in the intro, you said the memories of the early days of operations not being too far away. We're living them today. Right before this, I was on our weekly ops and production call going through Just a rigorous amount of detail around operations. So everything's very fresh. I'm excited to be able to share.
[00:04:22] Melissa Traverse: This is perfect timing. And I'm so glad to have you on the other side of the table for this episode of the non-base podcast. All right, Daniel. Yeah, I know you have a bunch of operational questions that you're wrestling with. I'm going to hand the mic over to you so you can ask Jesse everything you're thinking about and working through today.
[00:04:43] Daniel Berlin: Awesome. Well, thank you. I think before I ask you all the questions that I have prepared, it'd be kind of helpful to understand where you're coming from. So I'd love just starting off, you could talk about what were some of the operational challenges that you had when you started WIMS and going back, if you were to do it all over again, what changes would you made to the operations when you were starting?
[00:05:07] Jesse Barruch: I think the second half of that question, really going back, what would we change knowing what we know now? And honestly, nothing. Every step in the operations program, there's a lot that falls under that umbrella. But I think we're probably going to spend some time talking about elements related to production and supply chain and manufacturing. And so on that side, you know, not having come from a food manufacturing background, every step we took on the journey was progressive to where we are today in terms of everything from recipe development, through commercialization, through quality control, through volumes, you know, every element was a necessary step in the building block to build a holistic program that today is, you know, a lot more robust, obviously, than when we started. And it's, you know, it's appropriate for the size we are today, and we'll continue to evolve it and grow it. And so I think one of the themes we've had in the back half of this year is we've done a lot of work around production and manufacturing and supply chain in general is really maturing the systems and processes appropriate for not only where we are today, but where we want to be in the next couple of years. And so I think it's, um, you know, the journey of finding your way through this, I think is unique for every Brad Avery producer, every manufacturer. And so you've got to kind of get into it. And, um, I, I, I'm still looking for the shortcuts for learning and I haven't found them yet.
[00:06:39] Daniel Berlin: It's interesting you say that because obviously I'm still very early on, but in retrospect, a lot of the decisions I made, I'm like, oh, I wish I did it that way or I wish I did it this way. But I realized after the fact that because I did it a certain way, I learned about what not to do or what to do, which I may not have otherwise figured out. Something that I've struggled with or wrestled with a lot lately is production. So I'm glad you kind of segued into that when you were just talking. I've been trying to figure out how much inventory to produce, how big of a purchase order to put in, and all these different things when I have very, very little data to actually figure this out. I imagine for you in the stage that you're at now, you have a bit more of a predictable production cadence. But at the beginning, you have very little data to actually figure out what to do. So what would you do if you were in my situation? How would you figure out how much you need to produce? How much ingredients to order?
[00:07:42] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, you know, the short answer probably is the MOQ. And we're going through a manufacturing change today with one of our products that's been in market now two years. And we're taking that same approach. I'd rather do more frequent productions with smaller volumes to allow us the learnings both from a finished good perspective and a component manufacturing perspective and an assembly perspective. And so you can't go too small because you're giving yourself an opportunity to learn as you go. So it's, you know, you'll do your first, how many productions have you completed or have you yet?
[00:08:25] Daniel Berlin: We've been through four so far, but the one we have coming up in January with our brand new flavors is bigger than all those other four combined. We're taking a pretty big jump.
[00:08:37] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, I think it's about measuring and mitigating risk. You don't want to be stuck with a lot of product you're not happy with. And so scaling down for those early production runs and convincing your co-packers this is good for you and them, because it'll allow you to mitigate the impact of any mistakes that are made, whether they're formulation mistakes, production mistakes, packaging mistakes. You've got to be able to execute your full operations program such that no mistake is fatal. As someone once said to me early on, you've got to be able to define success in the early days as surviving your mistakes. And almost never does everything go perfect in the production process. And so just, you know, taking as small of a risk as you can with those production runs and volumes, and given that you're not, I don't know what your distribution footprint looks like, but imagine you're building it. You want to have enough on hand to be able to meet your demand. If you can break up those early productions into smaller runs to be able to mitigate the risk of anything going wrong in there, that's a good hedge to do in the early days. Every time we produce we're constantly iterating on our formulation from the first production to the second to the third, each one provides an opportunity to learn. And so if you do one big run, and you don't have to do one again for four or five, six months, not only are you tying up your cash and inventory, that's going to take you a while to convert back into cash, but you're also increasing the risk of if something goes wrong, how you're going to feel about having, you know, pallets and pallets of products that you're not happy with, and you know, is not your best foot forward.
[00:10:22] Melissa Traverse: Actually, Daniel, Jesse brings up a great point. Could you share with us what your distribution looks like right now and, you know, if there's anything you're expecting in the new year? And I think that might help folks in the audience get a better picture of how close they are maybe to you in size.
[00:10:39] Daniel Berlin: Yeah, so right now we're in about 60 stores, mainly in Boston and then also over in California. Going into next year, the biggest channel for us will be e-commerce. I really love e-commerce and so I'll be investing a lot of time and money into e-commerce heading into 2026. From what we have planned and what we kind of have secured on the retail side, we're looking at being in around 200 to 300 doors throughout the first half of 2026. That's cool.
[00:11:12] Jesse Barruch: Great context. Daniel, how much time have you spent mapping out dipping chocolate in the summer?
[00:11:19] Daniel Berlin: Actually, so it's funny you say that one of my advisors that I was fortunate enough to meet early is also an advisor to this company who specializes in shipping out. temperature-sensitive shipments such as chocolate. They ship chocolate for one of the biggest chocolate brands in the United States for all their e-commerce orders. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to work with them and how that could work, but one of the difficult things is it's also very expensive. Even if they can do it, it's very expensive both from their costs, what they're charging me, and then also we're shipping heavier, bigger boxes in the summer. And so it's honestly still something that I have to figure out. I'm curious, what have you done to mitigate shipping chocolate in the summer?
[00:12:11] Jesse Barruch: We turn our website off.
[00:12:14] Daniel Berlin: Really? Why is that?
[00:12:18] Jesse Barruch: For all the reasons that you pointed to that you've yet to really get into. So we have a multi-node 3PL structure where we have 94% coverage of the U.S. with two-day shipping. It's prohibitively expensive to ship next-day air, even if you have three nodes. It's prohibitively expensive to ship two-day even, but we've located our 3PLs so that we can get to more than 90% of the country via ground. There's nothing I can do that if I ship you product in two days and you're in Texas and it's August, and that product gets delivered on your doorstep at 10 a.m. and you don't get home from work till five, it wouldn't matter how much ice I put in there, how thick the insulation was, you're gonna show up and you're gonna have chocolate sauce on your porch. So that's, you know, one of the things in terms of channel mix for us, lifetime volume of revenue on any sort of a.com, whether it's Amazon, where you can only be in their warehouse as a multiple product between October and April, whether it's TikTok shop or.com, that's a seasonal business for us, simply because the economics go way upside down. And, you know, even if your reship rate is, you know, mid single digits, But your shipping costs are $25, $30, and your AOV is $40, and your customer acquisition cost is $40, you know, you will lose money on our first many shipments and if I have to reship, it puts us further and further behind. I think if you look at some of the other chocolate companies, they do the same. I resisted this for years, the first two years. I'm like, we're going to figure this out. We're just going to do it. This year was the first summer we just shut the website off in July and August and through most of September.
[00:14:17] Daniel Berlin: Do you imagine you'll continue to do that as you grow? Or is it something you think you might come back to in a few years and be like, I'm going to try and figure this out now for good?
[00:14:26] Jesse Barruch: I think about our category. When you meet a D2C brand who has built a big business in D2C, they tend to be just a handful of categories. They're not beverage. They're not chocolate. They're not always pantry staples. And look, by the way, this is just a point of view. This is not the truth, right? So for all the listeners, it's just my point of view. I'm sure there'll be outliers to these. You know, the brands that I see do really well on D to C tend to involve products that have a little bit more stickiness than a chocolate, which is ultimately, you know, if you pay attention to the supermarket, you'll see a lot of the chocolates by the register. And that's because often chocolates and impulse type purchase. So, you know, when you think about high consumer intent, purchase a chocolate or a, you know, a treat, and the amount that they're going to purchase during that moment of intent. And you look at the parameters with dot com, cost of customer acquisition, cost of shipping, ability to get subscribers, you know, I think like an electrolyte or a protein powder, or a beauty product, or pet food tends to lend itself a little bit better to a high subscriber count. Whereas a treat may not have those same types of attributes and stickiness. So when you think about those operational challenges and how it impacts that channel, I'd encourage you to just spreadsheet the whole thing out, talk to this 3PL that specializes in temp control. Okay, you've got a solution, what's it going to cost me? Give me all the numbers, give me the pick pack, give me the components, a box, a cooler box, ice packs, how many ice packs? And then give them five addresses with some proximity to their location and look up the shipping costs, two day ship, next day air, ground shipping, time on ground. ChatGPT is great for just throwing all this into and asking it to break it down for you.
[00:16:35] Daniel Berlin: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I love Chachi BT. That's like my, my personal assistant and about everything. At the moment. I'm kind of curious is going off the chocolate and melting and all that. From a retail standpoint, or even just from an overall logistics standpoint, when you're shipping chocolate, whether it's, you know, like on a truck, right, like LTL, or you're sending a full truckload of chocolate somewhere. What does that setup look like for you in the summer? Are you going on a reefer? Are you buying, you know, are you just putting all of your chocolate in one truck? Reefer, everything. Reefer? Yeah, you got to kind of control the whole chain. Are you doing that throughout the year? Or just during the summertime?
[00:17:17] Jesse Barruch: You know, last month, LA was in the low 80s. So in November, there were temperature spikes in LA that caused us to do temp control shipping in November. So, you know, I'm watching week by week, we certainly in the shoulder months, week by week, we look at the weather forecast and make determinations on dry versus reefer for our shipments. And some of our manufacturers will make us sign a waiver if we ship dry. dry versus reefer where they recommend we go reefer. As you'll learn or you already know, your cost for shipping reefer versus dry is a little more than double.
[00:17:58] Daniel Berlin: Yeah, it gets very expensive. When I launched Dirty Gut earlier this year, it was in April, so we were just about getting into the warm season or right about in the middle. And so I had to figure out how to ship the chocolate. And actually, our very first shipment, I just shipped normally. It wasn't in a reefer. And fortunately, it was okay, but I went back and forth with that decision just because of cost and I wanted to save money about what I should do to ship that.
[00:18:24] Melissa Traverse: Founders have to be so many different things. You have to be a salesperson. You have to be an ops person. You have to be able to talk to investors. I didn't realize that you also had to be a meteorologist as well. So kudos to all of you people who have temperature-sensitive products.
[00:18:41] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, we joke around here that our next products will not be meltable.
[00:18:45] Daniel Berlin: A lot of the mass market junk chocolate brands, they don't have to deal with it as much because they have all these synthetic things in them that prevent the chocolate from melting.
[00:18:55] Jesse Barruch: They have much higher melting points for sure. You know, but to not to step over your question about, you know, how do we think about long term DTC, there'll be, there'll be a time where the decision to invest in DTC for a brand building exercise, or a, you know, brand awareness to drive trial, there'll be times where we can decide to pull that lever, but do so knowing that we might be, you know, it might be upside down, it might be a marketing cost, actually doing calm and doing a big push. But in those early days, and it all depends on how your business is capitalized, you know, do you have a pile of money at the start that you can set aside to drive trial? Or are there other ways, other channels that you can get your product in front of consumers and have them try it beyond just being on the shelf of a retailer?
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[00:20:36] Daniel Berlin: You know, I think that's a really interesting way to frame it is looking at DTC and e-commerce is almost more of a marketing channel to drive trial and get people to purchase it in the stores versus like a profitable channel on its own. That's definitely going to be something to think about. I kind of want to shift gears a little bit on the manufacturing side. So it sounds like you work with multiple different manufacturing partners right now, or you have worked with multiple different manufacturing partners. What do you look for when you're going out and looking for a co-man or someone to help you make this into a product? What are the qualities you're looking for and how do you approach those conversations with co-mans?
[00:21:16] Jesse Barruch: Generally speaking, you've got to pay attention to every step of the process. How companies or how someone does something is how they do everything. So if you're chasing them, they tell you they're going to do something and they don't, they make a commitment, something changes last minute, you know, all of those clues are going to show you what it's going to be like when you're in business with them. If they're treating a prospective customer one way, before they've even won your business. And that way, you know, doesn't align from a values perspective or meet your business needs, how are they going to be once you're a customer, they're likely, you know, you're going to see that same behavior show up, we certainly have. And I think one of the disciplines to one of the muscles to build is you know, not stepping over any of that, because out of desperation for we need this product made, and we, you know, we've certainly done that, where you step over things, red flags, signs signals that this is not the right partner. And six months later, you're confronted with that fact, and you have to make a change anyway. So really paying attention to everything during the process, because that's going to give you a sense of what it's like to work together. And, you know, I think of it like this, my experience with co-packers has been, there are two types. And I think about it in terms of their commitment to excellence within their own business. You have some co-packers who are committed to excellence across everything they do. They tend to build very large, very successful co-packers. And they tend to also not be all that interested in smaller brands, because in order for them to hit their numbers, they've got to do certain volumes and new brands tend to not be able to hit those volumes out of the gate. And then you have the other group who's not as committed to excellence, therefore their business is, you know, they hack it together. They're not running a bad business, but they just don't have that same attention to detail and rigor in the ops in their own internal processes. When you select a co-packer, For all intents and purposes, like that's an extension of your business. So the things that you need out of them and from them and in that partnership, you know, if they're not doing it for themselves, they're likely not going to be able to do it for you. And so the thing in the early days is sometimes you end up having to make compromises to go with somebody who might be more expensive, might be a little slower. You know, I'd say in the early days, we kind of took what we got and have since, you know, like our peanut butter cup is in our fifth partner in three years.
[00:23:53] Daniel Berlin: Really? Wow. So you switched almost twice each year. What told you it was time to switch? So how did you know like, all right, it's time, I need to go find a new one. Like this just isn't going to work out or they're not the right partner to scale with me.
[00:24:09] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, all different things. I think we've never stopped talking to manufacturers. Right. And so as you learn more, your ability to evaluate gets better. And as your business grows and evolves, your level of tolerance for things that aren't working decreases. And, you know, their business you could start a conversation with a co-packer, and it takes you 15 months before you onboard with them. And in that 15 months, before you do your first production, in that 15 months, their business has totally changed. They just signed three big, you know, private label deals. And now their capacity went from they had, you know, 80% capacity to fill to now they've got 10. And so, you know, there are so many reasons why, but each time you'll just know.
[00:25:01] Daniel Berlin: It's interesting because I kind of made that mistake the first time around and I kind of just took what I could get. And I think part of it was just from a lack of knowledge. Like I remember the first co-man conversations I had, I was just like, can you make this? How much is it going to cost? And that was about it. I didn't really know what else to ask. And I've kind of learned over the past year, I still have a lot left to learn, but I've learned a lot more about how to actually approach these conversations. And then in retrospect, I probably could have seen that this manufacturer or this first one would not have been a good fit. Were there any points working with current manufacturers where maybe they were the right fit, but you weren't able to produce enough with them, or there was some other operational challenge going on where you're like, maybe I need to add a second co-packer, or have you always just gone from one co-packer to the next, to the next, to the next, or have you been running multiple at the same time?
[00:25:58] Jesse Barruch: There's been transition periods where we've had two, but generally speaking, from an efficiency perspective, consistency, you know, having one code pack or certainly in our world has made the most sense. We've gotten better about creating transitionary windows between the two. We've done it where we pulled up and cut shop before we were fully embedded with the new one and almost hit out of stocks because of it. We've had situations where our current manufacturers couldn't keep up with our production volumes. So we hit it out of stocks because of it. And so, you know, all manner of things emerge in a relationship and in the partnership that you'll know, you know, just aren't working anymore for you and your business.
[00:26:37] Daniel Berlin: Were there any sort of metrics that you tracked or you track now that you think are particularly important or helpful in your operations and demand planning, forecasting, production, et cetera?
[00:26:51] Jesse Barruch: You want to build the right size of structure for the right stage of your business. You don't want to overbuild and burden yourself with process that's not moving the needle or creating value for your business. You'll likely underbuild because you won't know what to build for yet until it becomes a problem. When it does, you'll wrap it in a process so it doesn't happen again. For us, anyways, we've made the same mistake more than once thinking we had something fixed and it crept up. Generally, for us, it's the small mistakes along the way that teach us the lessons that tell us what we need to measure, whether it's waste within the manufacturing process, whether it's waste of packaging, having a rigorous process and discipline to whether it's what we thought we would sell, what we actually sold, what we built in our demand plan, what we actually ended up pulling, our depletion levels from our 3PLs, you know, creating those trackers and visibility into all of the things that happen in your business. Just in the early days, you know, I think you said earlier on, you know, in the early days, you don't have the data. The early days is about collecting the data. You won't know what it means yet. You won't know how to analyze it or use it as richly as you will. But when you start measuring it, you know, the patterns start to emerge and you start to see, man, my target is two months on hand. How do I have six months on hand inventory in this one SKU and I'm coming up on a production that I now don't need? So it's really paying attention to as many of the details as you can as you go along, tracking them, recording them, measuring them, and just repeating that process with some cadence appropriate to the size and complexity of your business, of course.
[00:28:35] Melissa Traverse: Daniel, I really liked that question so much. Jesse, I wonder, are there any data points that you've started collecting that might be surprising or interesting or data points that somebody may not think to keep track of but do really help you with forecasting?
[00:28:53] Jesse Barruch: Yes, certainly. I mean, I think depletion reports from your 3PL. whatever your, or your own, you know, for the first six months we were filling orders from our dining room table. We were the 3PL. So tracking depletion numbers by SKU, by week, by channel, your average time to fill a PO, whether it's an order from a D to C or one of your retailers, and really plugging into those retailers. It's a rich environment to look at your retailers, what their ordering cadence is, what their average order size is. getting incentive programs for them to potentially take more product, you know, in those early days with the smaller format stores, sometimes getting them to take more product causes them to build out a bigger display causes your visibility in store, secondary placement, velocity increase. So it's like paying attention to all those details, tracking it, and just being what picture is the data painting for you in terms of Russia's store orders four cases every four weeks, they're selling a case a month. And then talking to that retailer, hey, you know, can you're getting four cases every four weeks, can we load you up with eight this month and run a sale and see what that does to your velocity. So, you know, for us, I think paying close attention to not only sell in but sell through gives you that insight you need to truly get a sense of what your baseline business looks like. And for us, we had a target in the early days as we were building our doors ourselves for the first 17 months before we had any distributors. It was setting a goal of how many doors we wanted to add each month, a percentage of our products set to send out for samples. And so our forecast was like, okay, we month one had our base business. If we add 20 doors a month with the average order value with the average order cadence, what does that look like in terms of a sales forecast? And just roll that out for the year and every month check how close were we and what we thought was going to happen and adjust accordingly. So I think, you know, in the early days, it's not about necessarily knowing what to measure specifically, I think it's really about measuring everything. And, you know, every business is different, every channel is going to perform and behave differently. And so the more data that you can just start to track, the more that you'll start to see patterns in that data, and that'll help guide you in your decision making process.
[00:31:24] Daniel Berlin: That makes a lot of sense. I think looking at it as more of a data collection period versus trying to get everything right. It also takes a bit of a pressure off of like, I need to figure this out now. And when you were talking about that, and specifically when you're talking about sales, it kind of made me think about what Melissa said earlier about how, especially in the early stage, and even now probably, you're wearing many hats. And at the early stage, you're wearing every hat in the business. What were some of the things when you were starting out that you did yourself or that you delegated or maybe wish you delegated earlier? Obviously, you were focusing on operations, but then there's also the sales side. Was that something you were delegating? Was that something you were doing yourself? How are you managing all these different aspects of the business?
[00:32:13] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, we started, you know, it was Leanne and I, we had our header product, Leslie, we quickly brought in someone to manage, sort of do a blended accounting and ops function. And even where we had help, ensuring that we were close enough to the details, so we knew everything that was happening, and we played a role in the decisions that were being made, whether it was our decision explicitly, Whether we went outside to a mentor or someone further along, I was relentless at speaking with every founder I could, who was two years ahead of me, just to get a sense of how they thought through problems. But, you know, truly at the end of the day, whether you have somebody performing a job or not, ultimately you're responsible for the outcomes. And so we didn't make the decision to go to a 3PL until I felt I was spending too much time fulfilling orders. And that if I took that same amount of time and I had to outsource that function, could I generate more? It's just a simple equation for me is if our time in the business has a value, and that value has to create enterprise value for our company, am I spending my time doing the highest value items that can, you know, really create value for the business? Or am I spending my time, and I see a lot of founders hanging on to the stuff that is not creating value for the business, but really is like process or procedural. I talked to one founder a couple of weeks ago, who's spending four to five hours a day, pick packing and shipping orders. And I was like, well, if you had a extra four or five hours every day, and you focus that on sales, could you grow the business to a level that would offset the cost savings that you're recovering by not having a partner do this? So I think doing that, exercise every day or every month or just having some awareness of there's going to be activities in your business that are high value and there's going to be activities that are low value in terms of the impact on the business and I think really trying your hardest to stay focused on the things that are going to make a difference and finding solutions for things that are procedural or like pickpack ship is really necessary for the business and important thing to do. But if you're not doing other things, because you're spending time on that, just as an example, then for me, it's an easy decision to find a partner to do that work.
[00:34:34] Daniel Berlin: On a day-to-day basis, how are you planning your own schedule and figuring out what exactly to spend the day on? Because something I've struggled with is I can try and think of overarching higher leverage activities, but then once you get into the day, you might have three big things you want to get done, but then you have people emailing you about 30 different things that you also need to get done that don't necessarily move the business forward, but you kind of have to get them done at the same time. Then you get in this state where you're not really getting anything done at all from what you had planned. What does your day look like now? How are you setting your day up so you know that it's going to be a successful, productive day?
[00:35:19] Jesse Barruch: Yeah, again, when we started, so it was, there's two of us as founders, we happen to gravitate to different areas of the business. I'm more finance and ops. Leanne is more sales and marketing. And so we have a natural sort of split of how we do the work. It doesn't mean we're not in each other's worlds often, but we've got the benefit of having two of us, which is super helpful to have. You know, there are lots of little things that need to get done during the day, but you have a, you know, you have a responsibility. You know, something that's helpful is if you had a boss, would your boss want you spending your time in the business and focusing on those things the exclusion of everything else. And then finding ways to get the everything else done, points to is it offshore support? Is it a system? Is it a fractional? Is it a consultant? Is it a 3PL partner? Is it all this stuff has to get done? And if you're not going to do it, how is it going to get done? And so that's where you have to start to think about building an organization and, you know, appropriate to your size scale and, and capital, because what you need to do is something only you can do. For us, it was, it's always sales. You know, nobody can, that's not something we can totally outsource. So for us, it's like, if we're doing things that are getting in the way of growing the business, how do we get those things done if we can't do it?
[00:36:53] Daniel Berlin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think like really sitting down and trying to figure out what are all the things I'm doing right now, and what can I outsource what is not necessarily high leverage, and then just being relentlessly focused on like a few core things that would move the business forward.
[00:37:10] Jesse Barruch: Even before you do that exercise, I think getting super clear about what your vision is for the business and for your life. I don't know enough about you to know what outcome you want here with this company. You may want to build just an excellent business that you sort of run and get. It's a great, you know, could be a, they sometimes call it like a lifestyle business or some people who start companies want a job, but they want to work for themselves. So they stay a certain size. Founders are super clear on having a massive exit and want to build a really big business. So before you start to think about all those tasks, I think aligning that to your vision. what you're committed to with this business is going to make those decisions that you have to make a lot easier. It really comes down to like, what's your vision for this business? What are you building toward, and then looking at everything through that lens. So I think really getting clear first on what is your vision for the business, and then taking a look at the business and structuring it according to what that vision is.
[00:38:20] Daniel Berlin: Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned that too, because it kind of segues into the last thing I wanted to ask you, which is like, how are you planning out your year? Like, what are you doing right now to set yourself up for a really successful year in 2026, both from a sales standpoint and growing your business, but also from an operations standpoint, and planning and mitigating a lot of the problems that you'll probably face?
[00:38:46] Jesse Barruch: We've spent 2025 overhauling our operations and every element of the supply chain to set us up for a big growth year. We also brought on a national broker in the back half of this year, where a lot of the category reviews are happening in Q1, Q2. So, a lot of the work we did this year, we knew was really an investment in the business that would really start to show up in terms of the results in 2026. you know, particularly with our focus on retail distribution as our core channel and food service. In order to create all that efficiency, we had to do some work this year on our products, on our manufacturing we did. That stuff, as you'll know, just takes so long from your first conversation to your go live. And so really setting up the operations in a way where you have a high level of confidence that if you go out and hit the gas on building distribution, that you'll be able to deliver. And so it's really for us 2025 was really about taking on some more complexity and distribution and trying that on and learning what that looks like to partner with some of the big distributors. Putting in place our first real trade marketing programs that started in the back half of this year and we'll have a full year ahead of us to run those, measure them. And then it's putting in place, you know, solid manufacturing that we know we can rely on to hit the volumes that we're going after and then finding the right sales partner to where we didn't have to pioneer relationships with retailers, where we knew now we had somebody who had existing relationships that we could leverage. And then, you know, developing that broker partnership, that broker scorecard, getting clear about what our goals are with them and that work and onboarding with them, 250 employees. So learning how their system works and how we can work within their environment. 2025 has been all about getting those pieces in place to, you know, have our biggest year yet in 26.
[00:40:55] Daniel Berlin: I'm looking forward to it. It's cool because I've seen, I saw whims before I even got into the food and beverage world. So it's been awesome to see your growth the past year as I've started to look way more into the industry. And now just for everything you've laid out, I'm really excited to see what you're going to do in 2026 and beyond.
[00:41:14] Jesse Barruch: Thank you so much. That's super cool.
[00:41:16] Daniel Berlin: If you'd be open to it, I'd love to pick your brain a bit more on some of these other things.
[00:41:21] Jesse Barruch: Of course. Only if you drop out of school and give this thing a real go.
[00:41:25] Melissa Traverse: Well, Daniel Berlin, thank you so much for joining us from Dirty Gut. Really just impressed with what you've accomplished so far. And those were some excellent questions that I'm sure you'll get some good mileage out of and hopefully our audience will as well. Jesse Barruch from WIMS, thank you so much for joining us again and hopping on the other side of the table to share with Daniel everything that you've learned so far. For everybody in our audience, thank you so much for tuning in to the NAMBES podcast and we will see you next time. That concludes another episode of the Nambase podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and follow us on your listening platform of choice. You can also watch and listen to past episodes on nambase.com and don't forget to join our Nambase Slack at slack.bebnett.com for company updates, industry networking and community discussions. See you next time.
