Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverage but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Kelly Van Arsdale, co-founder, and CEO of Spinnaker Chocolate, located in Seattle, WA, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
We're bean to bar chocolate makers! We believe that better ingredients make better food — and that better cocoa beans make better chocolate. So we spent years figuring out how to make chocolate with only the best cocoa beans.
Tell us about yourself
Watching other chocolate makers inspired us to start making chocolate of our own. Pretty soon, we were able to adapt the standard chocolate-making process to create what we thought were more flavorful bars. Chocolate is made from fermented cacao beans, and often the fermentation process is not perfect.
Several years of tinkering later, we've come up with three different ways to remove cacao beans that might not be well fermented. We've even built a few pieces of our own equipment to help us identify and discard low-quality beans.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
We launched in the middle of a pandemic we've been able to not only survive but even grow in the midst of it all. It's hard enough to create a new food product – it's even tougher to do so when in-person activities are limited.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
Time management and prioritization. Time is the most valuable asset. There are so many cool and exciting opportunities for us to go after as a business, but we don't have enough time. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done! Because of this, it's really important for us to prioritize all of our tasks and decide what's the biggest opportunity of the day, week, month, etc.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Automate as much as you possibly can. It's incredibly helpful to have processes run in the background and free your time to work on other things.
- Don't be afraid to outsource like bookkeeping, for example. It's great to have a fundamental understanding of bookkeeping and accounting so you can see the health of your business, but paying someone else to take on that task is both more efficient and cost-effective if you can use that time to grow your business.
- Don't just listen to your customers – take action on their feedback. Adapting to what's working and not working is so incredibly important. Always be looking for ways to improve every aspect of your customer experience.
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
Sometimes my to-do list is pretty daunting to look at. When I get overwhelmed, I just look around our factory space and remember that this didn't come together in 5 minutes. It takes time to grow, and if you can focus on getting one thing done after another, pretty soon you'll have a fully functioning chocolate factory :)
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.spinnakerchocolate.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spinnakerchocolate/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spinnakerchocolate/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
Feel inspired to start, run or grow your own subscription business? Check out subkit.com and learn how you can turn "one day" into day one.