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In this episode of the Startup CPG podcast, Daniel Scharff sits down with Jamie Valenti-Jordan, CEO of Catapult Commercialization Services, to tackle the five biggest mistakes brands make in operations—and how to avoid them. Jamie shares why "planning for the unexpected" isn’t just a saying, it’s a survival tactic, and explains how treating your co-manufacturer like a real partner can save you from production headaches.
They also dive into the messy world of ramping up new equipment, keeping quality in check after launch, and knowing when to call in a consultant to save time, money, and sanity.
If you’re navigating the wild world of CPG production, don’t miss Jamie’s top tips for keeping operations on track. Tune in and subscribe for more essential insights!
Reach out to the Catapult team: https://bit.ly/catapultcpg
Listen in as they share about:
- Preparing for inevitable delays
- Building a productive co-manufacturer relationship
- Managing production ramp-up and quality control
- Smart strategies for using consultants
- Community and Resource Sharing
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- Episode music by Super Fantastics
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The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Commands are, in fact your business partners. Commands are not vending machines that you stick money into and get product out of. That is just not how this works. Anyone who wants to debate that with me, I'm happy to do it in a public forum if you'd like. But they are partners in our business because not only do they generate the quality that we claim to our consumers by making the product, they also generate the volume that we represent to our buyers and they're instrumental in the margin that we claim to our investors. So at the end of the day, these are really the people that are bringing our products to life.
00:45
Daniel Scharff
Jamie Valenti Jordan back in the house. The Slack Ops mvp. We are just trying to absolutely milk him of all of the knowledge he's worked so hard to gain over a few decades in operations working with hundreds of startups. Jamie's the food Brand program manager for the Food Finance Institute and he's also the CEO of Catapult Commercialization Services. I'd asked him, what are the top five things brands are getting wrong on ops when they start up so that you can learn from that and avoid those mistakes. We're going to talk through that today. Jamie's done it all. He's been at big CPG Campbell's. He's worked with hundreds of baby startups. He goes high level. He can design a manufacturing plant. He can also go very deep on specific topics.
01:24
Daniel Scharff
Don't tempt him to nerd out about water activity and how that affect your product quality. Or do I actually think it's very interesting. If you want to talk to Jamie and the team at Catapult, click the link in the show notes. They can help you with almost anything related to operations, whether you're trying to find a command to help you make it or find ingredients or scale up or problem solve something going wrong on your manufacturing plant. The link to contact them is in the show notes. Enjoy. All right, Jamie, here we are once again. You might remember Jamie from such epic episodes as Ops Nightmares and How to make and Scale a CPG product. Jamie, we're just back in it. I know.
02:01
Daniel Scharff
Every time I talk to you on a Friday afternoon, as we're doing today, you've had some crazy week being all over, doing all sorts of stuff. What is it this time? What'd you get into this week?
02:10
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Oh, let's see here. This week I went out to the East Coast. I had to drop in. I had done a previously a drawing for a new facility that somebody took and then they took that drawing and went and raised about $10 million. And so now they've got the money to build out the facility. So I got to bring all the people on board, start to build out the timelines, all that stuff. We started talking about drains and H vac systems and how we're going to receive trucks, as well as where the equipment goes, who's going to work on it, and how we're going to find ourselves a plant manager. So that I did in. Oh, that was like a 24 hour turnaround. So, you know, never a dull moment.
02:47
Daniel Scharff
Jamie, do you think you feel an equivalent amount of pride as, like, an architect who designs a beautiful house that one day gets built when you are designing a plant like that?
02:59
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Oh, I like to think of it as. Well, I don't know what an architect feels like, but I know what I feel like. So at the end of the day, what my designs do actually lay out not only how people are going to make food effectively and keep their business running, but they're actually hiring people to do these jobs. This is literally job creating on top of laying something out that gets built out in that sense of pride. Just in seeing it in real life. Yeah, no, it's multiple levels of rewarding.
03:27
Daniel Scharff
That's awesome. And I bet it's even more rewarding when you actually get to go there and see it happening and all of the people being there, being productive, you know, putting your design into play.
03:38
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
They do like to tell me all the things I got wrong, so I'm not perfect, but. Oh, I don't like how this pipe is hanging here. Okay. Absolutely. I can see why you wouldn't like that. It hits you in the head every time you walk by. Yep.
03:54
Daniel Scharff
Makes sense. So I stopped putting trip pipes at the entrance. All right, so, Jamie, let's just get into it. Man, you have so much experience in this world of ops. I love geeking out with you and going just way into topics, but I also just want to squeeze all of the good knowledge out of you for the benefit of all of our listeners. So what I asked Jamie to do today was just, man, hit us with the top five things that brands get wrong on ops. And he has worked with hundreds of brands on all of these starter and more advanced OP stages. So this is based off some serious war stories type stuff. Jamie, anything before we get into it or let's just roll.
04:35
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
No, let's hit it. Let's do this.
04:37
Daniel Scharff
Do it. Number one.
04:39
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
All right, let's see here. So, number one, always plan for the unexpected. What I mean by that is really, you have to plan extra time into your scaling process. It's not easy. The more time you put in your timeline and just call it contingency, the better off you'll be. So you don't know what it's going to be used for because frankly, the universe has, frankly, too many variables out there to be able to plan and prep for everything. So we plan for things to go wrong that we don't expect. So let me give you a quick example. The other day, Texas froze over and there was this whole dust up around a pandemic or something like that. All of these things will screw up your timelines. And you'd love to say, okay, well those are acts of God.
05:23
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
You can actually build some of the time necessary to compensate for that into your own timeline. Maybe not the pandemic, but still, you know, somebody stabs a pallet in the side with a forklift and now you don't have, you know, the right amount of product you need to plan for compensating for that by ordering extra, by building extra time in your timeline, etc. If you don't, you will actually miss your start ships, you'll have failed launches, things like that. How do I know? I've seen it. I had a ranch dressing client one time that tried to get a CO man up and running in three months. And technically that's enough time to get up and running if everything goes absolutely perfect.
06:01
Daniel Scharff
But it never does.
06:02
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
It never does. It never does. In this case, they actually had to increase the amount of emulsifier that they use because of the physics of the equipment, but they didn't actually plan ahead. So it actually went out of stock and they had no backups already identified. So they ended up having to like cut back on their actual production and call up all of their buyers and say, well, how do you feel about 80% fulfillment instead of 100? Anyway, it ended up causing them to miss out with Whole Foods. They eventually got that account back, but it took them like two years. So. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of.
06:35
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, that's a rough one. But I like how you say it, which is the only thing that you can know with certainty is that it will not all go perfectly and build in some kind of contingency. I actually remember when I had worked with you on a previous project. You know, I think like we had a lot of pressure to get things going very quickly. And so I remember coming to you like, hey, can, let's put together a project plan for this starting from Absolute scratch. Getting this thing out into the market, certifications, all of that stuff. And you know, we put this thing together like, and then it was on this tight timeline and it met this thing that were asking for. And I'm like, is this reasonable?
07:12
Daniel Scharff
And you're like, yeah, these steps are all reasonable in that, like, yeah, that could happen. But you're always very transparent of like, you know, this is a plan and things happen along the way. And yes, you've built all of these dependencies correctly in your plan and we can push a little faster here. That's great. But you just stuff is going to go wrong and like, in that instance, it could be a coman. Just, you know, not scheduling you at the right time or not getting the certification that you need. It could also be one tiny ingredient not arriving when you need it to, or the packaging not coming when you need it to or not get it. You know, there's so many dependencies. Right. That it's just like something's going to go wrong. Just plan for it.
07:56
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
You know, right now what I see a lot of people doing is, you know, the critical one person that they need just to like send an email or forward something or whatnot, they get Covid. And they only get Covid the day before they need to do that and they're out for two weeks and your whole timeline's blown up.
08:14
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. Or they just don't do it. Which I mean, I think especially when you talk about like co mans and especially smaller ones, sometimes I think they just sign on for too much and you can see them then prioritizing their bigger clients and they're like, yep, I'll get to that email. I back at you. And then the next week they're like, oh, yeah, no, it's on my to do list. And then it just, it's two weeks. And that actually has a huge ripple effect.
08:37
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right, exactly. And speaking of commands, that kind of brings me to my next thing here. Second point is commands. They are our business partners. They are not vending machines. We don't stick money into them, get product out. That's not our relationship. Our relationship is in fact that we are business partners, which means they make the quality of the products that we claim to our consumers. They make the volume that we claim to our buyers, they make the margin that we claim to our investors, their business partners. I want to get that across. They don't have the same mission as us. In fact, what their model looks like is they want to run your product where they want to run it all day long.
09:14
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
They want to make it exactly the way you want it, and then they want to shut down, clean up, reset, and run somebody else's product. That's their goal. That's how they make money. So we can't treat them as an extension of our own business. They're in fact, business partners that have different goals. That's operable, that's functional, that's useful. We can use that. So at the end of the day, what you want to look for is wins that allow you to, you know, focus on solving problems together rather than trying to oppose each other. When we're trying to have these problems that come up and we have to deal with, right. These same things that we dealt with in the last bullet point, these contingency issues, they come up in production as well.
09:55
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
The downside is if you treat them like a black box, they're not going to engage with the level of support that you need in order to make your product the way that you want. Documentation sharing, shelf life, testing, you know, making recommendations about how to run your product more efficiently, which benefits them. Because if you're more successful as a business partner, then they will be more successful as well. This is why they're business partners and not black boxes.
10:19
Daniel Scharff
So this, for me, this is especially true. I also, I've been at companies where people really wanted to like, go hard at the coman for some small point. And I'm like, guys, you don't understand. We're about to owe them a ton of money because we're gonna have to delay a production. Like, that's the thing that we need their help with. We need a good relationship with them so that they're nice to us and they're our partners and they let us do that. Not like a few hundred bucks on this one, you know, shipment that we want them to pay for or something like that. So it really, man, the overall relationship is just so important with them.
10:50
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Absolutely. It's. It's important because at the end of the day, you know, they are going to be functional. So an example of where this went wrong, because everyone always wants to know what happens when this goes wrong, right? So I often get called into this when clients have already soured the relationship to the point that nobody wants to work on anymore. But this one time I had a client that had a $400,000 machine that they had actually gone ahead and ordered. They called up some commands, they found the right co man, it was great. They were chatting for like three months and then all of a Sudden they went to go start setting up the deal and they're like, oh, yeah, we have to pull our dad in. Your dad? Why are we pulling your dad in? Oh, he actually owns the company.
11:29
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
He walked into the room, said, yeah, we're never going to do this. If we want to do this, we have to expand the facility. It's going to be an extra million dollars. We've been working with their engineers for two months. But they walked in and said, yeah, actually, you haven't even been talking to the right people this whole time. It's going to cost you an extra million dollars. On top of the $400,000 piece of equipment, the client actually turned around and walked out the door and left the piece of equipment that he'd already paid 250,000 for down payments and whatnot, and just left it, walked away.
11:59
Daniel Scharff
Wow.
12:00
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yep.
12:01
Daniel Scharff
That's. I mean, and that's with like a piece of equipment. I know other people who have just assumed that their co man is going to get something done and hired like teams to already start their performance marketing and build all the other stuff. And then they just have the headcount sitting there waiting for it to come and you're just like, oh my God, that's a lot of assumptions to make. Right. The other thing I was going to ask you is how do co mans come to be? I know one co man where it was a couple cool guys, like, very entrepreneurial.
12:27
Daniel Scharff
You know, they had some really good experience in manufacturing from very large companies and then just got really excited about doing their own brand and then realized the part that they liked the best and that was the biggest opportunity for them was actually in the manufacturing side of that kind of product. And their product might not become a 50% market share type product, but they were really good at making that kind of product. And then they wanted to expand on that and they were gunners. Like, they wanted to grow this thing the same way I would maybe want to grow a snack brand, something like that. Is that really typical or like, what is the profile of someone who creates a facility and starts going out to market with for brands?
13:06
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Sure. There's usually two or three ways that people go about this. Sometimes it's a maintenance manager that splits off from a larger facility that just happens to know how to run everything, goes and buys a bunch of equipment with a loan from the bank and finds folks to come in and operate inside there. But more frequently I think today is people overbuild their facilities and while they're bringing up their sales numbers to Match where they built their facility to go. They've got excess capacity and they don't want to have to only have operators paid like twice a week or for two days a week, for example. Right. And so they'd like to fill up the rest of the facility with other people's products. So they're really just trying to share the love over time.
13:47
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
This is how you hear people say, oh, my CO man kicked me out. Well, yeah, Their own brand grew to fulfill the need that they had to run their own facility. They needed to prioritize their own brand over somebody else's.
13:59
Daniel Scharff
And you'll know when it's that kind of a CO man.
14:01
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right.
14:01
Daniel Scharff
Because probably the name of the CO man is the name of the brand in a lot of instances.
14:05
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Oh, yeah. Well, and honestly, 95% of them will tell you upfront, hey, yeah, this is our facility. This is, you know, what we're doing. We only have, you know, some extra capacity. We're just trying to fill it up. You know, we're planning on getting to full in like two years. Okay, great. Can I hang my hat on that for the next 18 months so that we can kind of grow together. And then I'll go find a new command because I'll have volume enough to justify going to a larger command.
14:32
Daniel Scharff
That's so interesting. And I mean, what a sophisticated business to actually be able to make that kind of a decision. Unless it was just, hey, they thought they were going to grow faster than they did, which does happen to a lot of startups. Right? Like, no, then we're going to grow and build the thing. And if you build it, they will come. But they didn't come. And now we've got to find other people to come. All right, cool. Jamie, point number three.
14:55
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Number three. All right, this one's a little nuanced, but follow me on this one. Equipment doesn't work the first time at 100% efficiency. You need to plan a ramp up curve. So this is especially important for our brands that own their own facilities. Or the CO man is bringing on a new piece of equipment and they're starting it up again. I mentioned physics has way too many variables for us to count on. More importantly, you need to think about how you work with, let's say, a brand new tool. Right. You've never worked with a chainsaw before. You're going to go and use a chainsaw to cut down a tree. The first time you cut down a tree, it doesn't go so well. Right. The same thing happens with production Lines you learn the more you do it.
15:39
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So the operators don't have the experience with the equipment, they don't have procedures built, things like that. The downside here is if you don't build in a percentage multiplier of what you expect to come out, and you use that to decrease your expected amount, then what you end up doing is you actually end up shortfalling on your production volumes that you intended to produce or cost overruns with overtime. Right. You'll have to run three or four times as long in order to make up your volume.
16:08
Daniel Scharff
Right. Okay, so I think I've heard the term wastage, right. Which I think that can have to do with. I mean, I don't know if it's just finished product you're talking about or if it's like wastage and ingredients along the way.
16:17
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right.
16:18
Daniel Scharff
But I think I've heard like, hey, what's an appropriate amount of wastage to expect from a coman in general? But then also it sounds like, hey, when equipment's getting up and running, there might be more of just your overall batch. Because maybe there's just, you know, entire batch stuff. Like, you know, if the equipment is new sealer or something like that, it's the whole product that can get messed up when they have waste there.
16:40
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right, Exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're not creating complete seals on your cups, for example, then you will not have sellable product. Right? So there's time to dial that in. But then there's also time for the machine and the operators to get used to and everything dialed in so that it cannot run five cups a minute, but closer to the 50 cups a minute like you anticipated. So they'll start it at five cups. And as they get more experience, by the end of the day, they'll be at 12 to 13 cups a minute. The next time they come in, they'll start it at 15, they'll grow to 25. So it'll be multiple shifts before you actually get to that 50 cups a minute.
17:17
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Now, a good co man will always know that this is happening and build your expectations and things like that. But if it's your own facility, you need to make sure that you're not hinging your entire production launch or whatnot on 100% right off the bat.
17:30
Daniel Scharff
Okay. So when I've worked with co mans, the way this worked is once they said, hey, this is our equipment now. We are actually planning for a much bigger capacity line to come in nine months. And at that point, your Costs are going to go down and our volume is going to go up. But, you know, obviously there was this kind of adjustment period when that actually happened another time we wanted to run something that they didn't have the equipment for, and so we had to work with them to get that equipment. And I think we had some kind of arrangement around the financing and payback of it. They kind of wanted to have it. We wanted them to have it for sure so we didn't have to go work with another CO man.
18:06
Daniel Scharff
When it comes to new equipment, is that like, you know, what is the most common thing? Is it usually the CO man instigating new equipment to run faster, or do you find, like with emerging brands, it's usually them thinking to go ask the CO man for it or it comes up because they're just having a disagreement about what the cost could be?
18:23
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Sure. And this will actually, my answer goes back to the model of how commands work. Right. They make the most amount of money running efficiently, making first quality product and making it as quickly as they can shut down and go again. It should be in their business model to grow the capacity of their own facility. That's how they make even more money. Right. Because it's in their business model to do so. They're setting aside funds for capital expansion. That is literally what they call it, capital expansion or capital redeployment or whatever you want to call it. But in an ideal world, and I'll say this because that's about 99% of the time, a new brand has no business buying equipment for a contract manufacturer.
19:09
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
There are a few cases where something is extremely novel and maybe the equipment and the process is even novel, that it obviously makes sense to do so. But there should not be a situation where a CO man is willing to take you on in earnest if they do not have the equipment to make your product. Because they're going to have to guess on their own labor costs and depreciation costs and everything else associated with a contract manufacturer's operating model because they have to guess they're putting themselves on the line for risk? I get that they're getting the equipment for free or whatever, but that all that really does is that becomes the baby that everyone argues over when it's time to exit. So think of, you know, as we talk about co man relationships being business, partnerships being marriages.
20:00
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
You know, there is a baby that you fight over when you break up, right? And that's that capital piece of equipment because you can't split it in half. And so neither group necessarily has the funds to buy the other group outright. So assign ownership before you even get started, because it's not going to be something that you're going to maintain. Right. They're going to maintain it. They're going to raise that kid for you. So now I'm getting into politics, but let's get away from that. Drop the metaphor. We're done. You don't want to fight over who gets the piece of equipment, because at the end of the day, you're not going to move it to another command. The next command you go to is going to have that piece of equipment. And if they don't, then that's not the right command for you either.
20:42
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right. Go find a command that has it. There's very rarely a new piece of equipment that somebody doesn't have out there.
20:48
Daniel Scharff
All right, all right, Jamie, it's time for point number four.
20:53
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Number four. All right. The launch is only the beginning. So I know that we as brands struggle. We fight tooth and nail to get everything in place to actually launch our product, and we're so proud of ourselves when we do. I will tell you, the struggles have only just begun, because quality doesn't come cheap. It's constant. You have to test, you have to run things, you have to find out what's going wrong, and then you have to go figure out how to fix it. So this is like root cause analysis and everything like that. You'll find out that your warehouse has somehow miraculously knocked over a pallet. And in so doing, 15 other pallets are also now tilted. Well, I don't think that happened randomly. They were all tilted to begin with. Just one finally fell over. Right.
21:42
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
There's a root cause associated with that, where they slam them into the walls when they park them. Right?
21:47
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. And the interesting thing is you can have a problem with quality, and there is no single smoking gun. Right. You can go back and they're like, well, actually, here are 30 things we checked out that we probably need to improve process on, and you need to do all of those things. No.
22:00
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
No.
22:01
Daniel Scharff
One of them can be for sure the cause of what it is that we had happen. But you just need to address all of these. Does that happen a lot?
22:08
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
And not only does it happen a lot, it becomes the contentious point between supplier of the can, the manufacturer that is putting the product in the container, and the brand. They all like to fight over things, and if you've got a corrugate supplier involved, they also like to get in the middle and not be at fault for everything. So you'll find yourself constantly doing this. Going around in circles is what it feels like, but it's really getting to the root cause. But anyway, these things are caused by a variety of issues. First and foremost is people are not machines. They screw up and that's okay.
22:40
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But you have to learn how to plan and build a process that's robust enough to deal with screw ups and identify when those screw ups happen so that you know how to fix them and who's at fault so it doesn't happen again. If you don't put this sort of model in there where scrap happens, then your cogs will end up being higher, your margin will end up being a few percent lower than you anticipated, and it'll be hard for you to build a budget that actually absorbs all of these things. Right. So this is about building robustness. This is the word that investors love to use. Right. Your plan needs to be robust, which means that there are things that kick in and fix problems when they happen, even though the problems can't be fully anticipated today. This is about planning for the future.
23:26
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so, Jamie, in your life of helping brands with ops, have you ever had a brand sufficiently plan in this robust way for all of the things and the buffers and the timelines that can go wrong and just be super chill throughout the whole thing when all the things were going wrong?
23:43
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
You know, I actually have. It's weird because what they did, I.
23:49
Daniel Scharff
Know that wasn't me.
23:51
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Correct. It was not. You had some weird problems. But I still do. Well, and the fun thing is that you and the team were not so much chill enough, but you knew that the team that you had put together were going to solve the problem. Right. And that normal operations, whatever we call that, would resume. Right. We would get to the problem and find it and move on. It wasn't a showstopper because you had built into your system well enough to know, hey, we don't know what's going to happen, but these two months are going to be absorbed with something. So we're going to plan for our launch after those two months. Right. And stuff did happen and that's okay, and we got through it.
24:43
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But, you know, there have been brands that are, you know, they've got access to the extra capital that they needed to address the issue. They've had. You know, they listened when people said, hey, order twice as much. And they said, why do I need to order twice as much? Because something's going to go wrong and you're going to need to make a second batch. Sure enough, stuff happened. People stabbed one of the bags with a. With a forklift, and all of a sudden, that second batch was fully needed.
25:15
Daniel Scharff
So, Jamie, I don't know why I always feel the need to relate your experience and advice to parenting, but does this make you even better at parent? Do you feel like all of these lessons translate to, like, yes, it's going to be. Stuff's going to go wrong, it's going to be okay. Does it make you a more understanding parent?
25:34
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
That is a question that is impossible to answer. But I will say I have my days. I have my days when I am not fully hinged as a parent. And I struggle sometimes, too. So for all the parents out there, it happens to everyone.
25:49
Daniel Scharff
Because I feel like just because of all the stuff that I come to you with, I feel like you just live in the chaos. And so whatever happens at home, I feel like, must not be quite as bad for other people, because all the stuff that happens for you at work for a lot of people would just be full panic mode all the time, and you just live in that. So when smaller stuff may be.
26:07
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
It's like being a homeowner. Right? So we had a. We had a bad storm the other day, and a branch went down in the yard, and frankly, the family just kind of looked at each other and said, all right, let's get going. And so we got out the clippers, we got out the chainsaw, and we started cutting things up. No big deal. But the first time that happened years ago, that was a much bigger problem. People running around, they were, you know, hyperventilating a little bit. Did it hit the house? And blah, blah. The answer is, the damage is already done. Let's go clean it up. Right. So dealing with chaos really just comes from experience.
26:45
Daniel Scharff
The exact same is true for ops, right?
26:49
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah. The more you see, the more I.
26:50
Daniel Scharff
See what you did there.
26:51
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah. Yeah. That actually gets me to my final point in this point. Number five. Number five. Number five. All right. Consultants are cheaper than problems. And I know that's a little pithy, and I know that people instinctively say, okay, sure, yeah, but consultants are still expensive. They are. Nobody's made of money if you are, by the way, call me. It's catapult, you know, but if you. You can't have consultants do everything. But you can tap into their experience and expertise. Right. They know what the path looks like ahead of you, even though you can't see it. Right. So they can tell you what to plan for. They can tell you, hey, this is going to sneak up on you really fast.
27:36
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
You need to have some time set aside to deal with this or some money is set aside to deal with this or else you are going to have problems. Those problems are fires that burn that you shovel money into to deal with because it's either that or go out of business. Right. So paying for your problems to be known and dealt with ahead of time is an investment that you make into your own brand.
28:00
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. And I think there's a good overall point here too about just knowing how and when to use consultants. Like, correct. Yeah. Good example for me is you don't have the expertise here. You haven't done this kind of a thing before. You don't want to be 100% relying on the CO man to tell you everything you might not know. Maybe get a consultant who works on these kind of products all the time to just tell you some of the stuff they know is probably going to go wrong and help safeguard you against that. Right. Like it's just like a really high payout insurance policy of just having one person who can call some of that stuff out for you.
28:31
Daniel Scharff
Whereas bad uses of consultants I've seen is like you have an expensive consultant you are paying to do some very remedial work that it's like their expertise, but it's really not the best use of their time for me, like you can go get an intern who can churn on a bunch of stuff and help that consultant so that they're not doing a bunch of low value stuff that they probably don't want to be doing anyways. So, you know, if you're trying to be scrappy, great, you should always do that. But just know where you don't know stuff and get some help there.
29:01
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So a good rule of thumb actually is as you build something and you're rather proud of it, whether that be a pitch deck, whether that be your formulation, whatever that may be, it's really easy to put it in front of an expert for half an hour that they probably won't even bother charging you for to review it and say, hey, can you have a look at this? I know that I don't have a relationship with you yet or anything like that, but I'm just looking for some general guidance. And most consultants out there are happy to do this. Not all. Some are like, this is a paywall. You got to absolutely pay me if you want anything. Okay, Go find another consultant. There's a ton of us out there, right? But ask somebody, hey, can you just review what I've already done.
29:40
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
And if they say, yeah, what you did was great, except you really didn't tackle the actual problem you were supposed to solve, this is what you're missing, this is what you're going to need. Great. Now you've got your instructions of what to go do next. Right.
29:55
Daniel Scharff
You can definitely get creative asking for help because people like to do it. I've seen people post their label on the startup CPG Slack and then it's like everyone's playing photo hunt at the same time, which is fun. Everyone's like, oh, you're going to get sued for that. No, you're going to, oh, you got to change that thing. That's not the right way. You have to do it. Like, I bet if somebody just drops that something like one of their projects on the Slack or on LinkedIn is just like, hey, what are the big watch outs here? Everybody loves to share the learnings that they came by in probably a pretty hard way and just share that with you for free.
30:27
Daniel Scharff
And yeah, I mean, I know good people like you, Jamie, are happy to take a look at stuff and share some extremely valuable advice in a very short amount of time. And I know you actually enjoy doing it as well.
30:38
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yes, absolutely. I mean, if it's going to be a quick half hour type of engagement, no big deal. If I got to spend four and a half hours to go do something to build out and lay out a facility for you, we're going to have a different discussion because you're going to want to own that and so you're going to want to pay the consultant for the time and necessarily the IP that gets generated. Right. So that's, I mean, that's the, where the threshold is. It's not a big deal to ask somebody for help. So use consultants, even use free advice. Right?
31:07
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. I have a friend who has a coaching business and I just like how he does it the most. And this is kind of how you do it. He's like, it's an expensive business. And he's like, yeah, if you, if we think there's a good chance we want to work together, then let's just try it out and bring your actual problems to this first session and let's just see what it's like to work together for an hour and you'll see what you get out of it. You'll see if it makes sense for us to work together because you're going to feel what it's like and the kind of approach that I have And I love that because it's just, you know, it's probably better for everybody as well just to kind of have a rolling start that way.
31:38
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah. And over the years I think we've done a lot of stuff with folks from startup cpg. I've, you know, done a crash course. I've done, you know, a full day set aside to deal with problems, things like that. And as people call in, like sometimes we'll get about five, 10 minutes in and I'm like, your problem's easy to solve. Can we spend the next 15 minutes just solving it instead of talking about it? Because all you really need is guidance on where to go next and then you're good, right? You've got more time than money right now, right? Yeah. Okay, well then let me direct your time so that you're building value into your brand so that you can go and make money and then you'll come back and hire me. Right.
32:15
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
That's the reality of like most people who are in this space that are good hearted, they want to help. And so because the helping leads to your success, which eventually leads to payment. Right. Like, there is a self serving element to this, but we'd also just like to help too.
32:29
Daniel Scharff
Jamie, you just gave me a great idea for our next series of content. Have you ever listened to the show Car Talk?
32:35
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yes.
32:36
Daniel Scharff
Okay. I love Car Talk. I always used to listen to it with my dad in the car. And it's basically a bunch of super experts talking about how you fix cars and they have people call in, but it's so interesting. So, Jamie, I think we should do that on ops. So we'll put out a call to brands in the channel, like call in and bring your OPS question and we'll do some of those live on the air because it is actually really interesting to hear you solve those kind of things the way that you do in those 15 minutes with the brand. So I think we'll get that scheduled after this. After this episode.
33:05
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Absolutely. I'm in for it. I do that for FFI today, so. For the Food Finance Institute.
33:11
Daniel Scharff
All right. I can't wait for it. Okay, cool. So Jamie, these are your five top things that brands often get wrong on ops. They all just got it here for free. I really enjoyed listening to it. Thank you very much. And we will definitely let everybody know about the next episode or if you want to be one of those brands to call in and problem solve with Jamie live on air, just keep an eye on our Slack channel, specifically the OPS one, which is where we'll announce it.
33:40
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Awesome. Looking forward to it. Thank you so much for this time, Daniel. I appreciate it.
33:44
Daniel Scharff
Thank you man. These are golden nuggets. All right, see you everybody.
33:47
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Take care.
33:50
Daniel Scharff
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