5 entrepreneurial lessons from Justin’s journey to nut butter success
May 26, 2016
![5 entrepreneurial lessons from Justin’s journey to nut butter success 5 entrepreneurial lessons from Justin’s journey to nut butter success](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt09e5e63517a16184/blt0255b4e985da3f43/64e8f22a7cbe9580769b901e/JustinGold1_0a.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Gold didn’t major in business or have any prior experience running a company, so when the idea for Justin’s came about, he had no idea how to go about doing it. In this Naturally Boulder presentation, he explains how he started asking questions. He researched at Colorado University’s Business Library. He went to stores and asked, “How do I submit a product?” He called companies to find an FDA certified manufacturing facility. “It’s curiosity that gets you to the next level,” he says. “It’s questioning everything.” Watch ‘Just get started’ and other entrepreurial tips from Jusin Gold.
“When you start a new company, you’re thinking that the sky’s the limit and you’re just going to shoot for everything,” Gold says. That's what happened when he came up with the idea for single-serve squeeze pack nut butters, which he thought was applicable to so many different channels, from the outdoors industry to airlines to natural food stores. “When I started, I went into all of them and tried to … learn about the selling systems into all channels, when I realized I was failing at all of them," he says. So he started small with natural products stores, then went to grocery, and then expanded outward. Watch 1 major mistake to avoid.
In the earliest stages of your company, it’s critical to be involved in every aspect of the business to understand how it works—“to know how your product is made, to know all the sales and distribution channels, to meet in-person with your buyers, to understand the finances and be able to read a P&L,” Gold says in this webinar. “As the company grows, clearly you need to surround yourself with smarter people, but early on, it’s really fundamental to understand all the parts of your business and be a really holistic entrepreneur.” Watch CEO Brown Bag Lunch Series: Justin Gold, founder of Justin’s nut butter.
You can start with individual mentors, but eventually you’ll want to create an advisory board—not only to give you advice, but to provide help if (and when) you have an emergency. Experienced advisors can also help establish credibility within the industry, which can really help when you’re looking for investment. Watch Why you want to work with an advisory board.
“When we first started, it was all about developing one-on-one relationships with customers—we’d find any store that wanted to carry us and we’d UPS it to them,” Gold says in this video interview from 2013. But eventually it got to the point where that process was taking too much time. "Now what we do is we find distributors and we leverage all our energy through distribution channels,” he explains. Watch Justin’s journey up the distribution ladder.
“When we first started, it was all about developing one-on-one relationships with customers—we’d find any store that wanted to carry us and we’d UPS it to them,” Gold says in this video interview from 2013. But eventually it got to the point where that process was taking too much time. "Now what we do is we find distributors and we leverage all our energy through distribution channels,” he explains. Watch Justin’s journey up the distribution ladder.
Fresh off an acquisition, Justin Gold, the founder of Justin's, is the entrepreneur to watch.
His is a classic natural products success story: An entrepreneurial thinker solves a challenge in his own diet, receives encouragement from family and friends to turn it into a business, gains followers at the local farmers market, eventually finds his way into Whole Foods and later major conventional retailers, and develops new products that disrupt the market.
How did he do it? Here, we’ve collected some nuggets of wisdom Gold has shared with New Hope throughout the years.
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