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Hey everyone, I'm Austin Hankwitz and I'm Jnise Torres.
Welcome to Mine the Business. Small Business Success Stories, a podcast brought to you by iHeartRadio and Into It QuickBooks. In each episode, Austin and I chat with small business owners as they share their stories about the ups and downs of owning a small business. Plus we'll learn from their experience about how you can help fortify and strengthen your own business.
Now, Jennie's I'm really excited about today's guest, but before we jump into that, I really want to understand the early days of running your business right. I know the VC world. Pretty well. I made some mistakes early with my money. I'll happily admit that, but I want to learn more about your journey. So what was your journey like setting up the financial infrastructure of your business for the very first time.
I'm so glad you brought this up, Austin, because as someone who teaches folks how to start the small business, I teach them from a place of I made all the mistakes, so don't do any of this. And mistake number one was me not having any idea what was happening financially in my business until tax time and then getting a huge tax bill because I didn't know anything about quarterly estimated payments. I didn't know what my cash
flow situation was looking like. I didn't know where my expenses were, and so every year it was like the moment of dread when my accountant would tell me, oh, by the way, you owe nine thousand dollars in taxes because you didn't plan for this. And the biggest problem was that I wasn't using a robust accounting system like QuickBooks. So QuickBooks, I always say, saved my sanity and my accountant when I hired her, she said, if you don't
use QuickBooks. We can work together because they're the gold standard for accounting software. Plus they have so many other features like business accounts, invoicing, payroll, et cetera. She's like, we're not going to do this unless you're on board with this system. And I totally get it because it's just a robust software that's tracking everything that's happening in your business. I'm curious what your experience was like, Austin.
Yeah, right there with you. I think the tracking everything in your business is special because I was the person that in the beginning was like, oh, the smallest expense, the smallest subscription anything I can think of, Oh, that's a business expense. That's a business expense. And soon enough I started having subscriptions to every newsletter you can imagine. I had subscriptions to so many different softwares that I
thought were going to help me build my business. And it took me a little bit of looking at what I was spending because obviously, inside of quick Books you get to see the cash flow out every month, and so I'm like, dang, I really spent that much more this month than I did, you know two months ago. What's going on? And for me, that was reconcilling those expenses,
seeing do I really need this? So I think, like in the beginning, one of the biggest money mistakes I made was just over indulging on what I thought could be a business expense or what should help me build my business. And then the second thing to kind of piggyback off your taxes here the payroll stuff. I did not set myself up for payroll as soon as I should have. It was really hard for me to understand that, you know, I'm not just the entrepreneur co founder of
this business. I am also an employee, which means I need to be taking a payroll, I need to be paying taxes, I need to be setting side money for my four to one k and my health insurance and things of that nature, right, And so it was just
such an eye opening moment. Once my accountant, who also used this quick books, sat me down, I was like, all right, Austin, you guys are at this point where and I have a co founder's name's Christian and he's like, you guys are at this point where you'll definitely should not just be doing this whle ten ninety nine and stuff anymore, Like why if you guys not set up payroll and it's like, cause I don't know.
One thing that I also love about the platform is that you have an option to work with an expert, and a lot of small business owners try to di why their way to success and at some point we realize we're in over our heads, and things like recommending making the election for es Corps so that you do start paying yourself, those are all things that an expert
can work with you on. So it's definitely good always to think about where are you maybe just not sufficiently educated in a specific area when it comes to business finances, and then finding the people that can support you on your journey. But enough about us, let's go ahead and introduce our guest.
Jessica Spalding grew up in an anti sugar home, but there was one exception to this rule. Chocolate, not just any chocolate. Her mother knew the higher the quality, the lower the sugar, and the better the flavor. They would attend every chocolate show and learn about chocolate from around the world, but can never find anything that reflected her culture. So she tempered her first batch of chocolate at ten
years old and dreamed devoting her own shop. One day that dream would manifest itself into the Harlem Chocolate Factory. Although being a chocolatear wasn't a supported career path, she never gave up on her dream. Merging her passion for chocolate with her love of Harlem, she created a unique experience she wants to share with everyone.
Jessica, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me.
So excited to have you here. First and foremost, how did you come up with the idea for Harlem Chocolate Factory?
Ooh, I think the idea for the company came up with me. You know, you've already said it. Like, I've been going to chocolate show since I was a little kid, and I was immersed in this thing I have been looking forward to for like the entire year. But as you start to get older and go to them, I'm experiencing cultures and understanding what cultural experiences are and never seeing anything that reflected what I felt like my culture was as a black woman, an African American woman in
this country. And as you get older and you find out seventy eighty percent of the chocolate on this earth is from countries in Africa, you start to like wonder why there's not more cultural representation.
Man.
That's literally how I I came up with the concept.
So as it relates to Harlem Chocolate Factory, walk me through sort of step by step as to one, how you got fifteen thousand dollars and then two, once you got the money, what were you doing with it?
Right?
How did you decide the first couple of things to spend the money on.
Yeah, So that was a part of the New York Public Libraries business plan competition, which we won. I wanted to find a way to let people know about Harlem Chocolate Factory, but then also to set myself up to
have something sustainable. So as a part of the business plan competition that there were like little things you were doing to legitimize that you were going to actually do in the use of funds, Right, Like, I'm going to spend twenty five hundred on this, and that's going to be an equipment and supplies, and twenty five hundred is going to be on marketing. So I think by the time we were all set and done, like fifty percent of it went to just setting us up to produce.
Probably twenty five percent went to setting up the business so like getting our website to be an actual website, Like I had kind of coded something, but we needed now a payment system, and we needed stuff for people to be able to order and filing the actual LLC and going through that part, I got a lot of subsidized help because I had turned to a lot of nonprofits to just help me and receiving like free accounting, free legal and I wanted to keep like five thousand
in reserve, and it wound up coming in handy very quickly because by the end of that first year, we got an order for like two hundred and fifty six count boxes that were going to Sam Adams for their media kits, and so we needed a whole bunch of money to like get that order done and processed.
That's how like the money got split up.
And I hope you don't mind, but I kind of want to rewind for a second, because you were talking about these nonprofits that you kind of leaned into that really helped you pull together the accounting, the legal things of that nature. And I'm sure there's some people listening right now that might be in your shoes as you were when you were still kind of figuring it all out. How did you find those nonprofits?
Right?
How were you so resourceful and what were you pulling on to find these different resources to help you move forward in your business?
One percent the library. There were a group of women at the library that I was going to. They kind of rallied around me, and they had so many different resources and so many different like reference points. So like all of my initial marketing analysis was done at the library. I can't afford a five thousand dollars research report or you know, like those reports caused money, and a lot of times they're available for free through your local library.
And the only resourcefulness was like getting out of my own comfort zone to be able to really lean on them and ask for help. The only way to do it is with the assistance of other people.
Okay, so back to sort of the discussion here, right, You got the money, you're spending it here and there, you're trying to figure out what's going on, what maybe software tools resources were you using to help make sure that you didn't overspend, that you were analyzing the data that you are figuring out this money coming out, this money coming in.
When I started in the business plan competition, they had given us like a whole bunch of access to spreadsheets right where you were supposed to like manage your cost of goods, manage all these things and the stress. So when I went to this nonprofit called Start Small, Thin Big, they offered free legal help and free accounting, and I got an accountant that used to work for the IRS, and she set me up on quick books and explain
to me reporting. She broke down like the chart of accounts and set me up in such a good way that we didn't hire accountants until this year. Not to say we didn't need it, but we couldn't afford it. And QuickBooks kind of worked as our adjunct CFO during this time because I was able to really understand, like, Okay, when we buy from this vendor, it's packaging, but it's not necessarily packaging.
That's a part of our cost of goods.
It's a part of our operations, right, like where do you put shopping bags? And those are the things that people don't start to understand about how to set themselves up financially to be able to get an accurate identification about how profitable you are, and do you need to scale in terms of volume or do you need to cut your costs in terms of operation, and while we weren't profitable that year, the next year we definitely were, and we've maintained profitability throughout our time.
Having that data is so important, So I'm curious did it play into your decision in twenty eighteen to open your flagship location. How did you make the decision financially that it was the right time for a brick and.
Mortar man, I did the cardinal sin of what you should never do, and I'm going to be like completely transparent here. I let a sale dictate to me what my next move was going to be, and then I let a market that was a little inhospitable to me scaling dictate which step was next.
So I'll break that down very plainly to you.
We had went to the fancy food show and got in the list of the top ten things, and.
I was like, oh my god, it's gonna be our big break.
And we got this like six figure order and we were trying to find space to fulfill the order and just genuinely, honestly couldn't find it. We were supposed to get space, and that deal fell through after very lengthy stringing along, which was another mistake I made. I allowed myself to move forward without paperwork on a deal and
do not ever do that. Yes, there are good faith handshakes and everything, but the day before we were supposed to sign the lease, they kind of told me that they weren't going to give me the space.
No kidding, Oh my gosh.
Yeah. So I was devastated. But then there wasn't a lot of time for devastation because I had equipment on the way from Italy, which can happen to a lot of entrepreneurs, So that pushed me toward finding this space because after I had such a short amount of time between when that equipment was coming and when we were supposed to have the order ready. But it was like it took us over a year to build out because we weren't necessarily ready for a change in business model.
I had put having a store in a space after building a production facility. But I will say having an analysis of what was working is what kept us open right Like it was a struggle, a dramatic and drastic struggle because now this space required my full attention, so I wasn't able to work anymore. So I was constantly watching my cost of goods and my operating expenses, but it didn't make it any less difficult.
So, as someone who went through the ups and downs of trying to find a retail space for you to produce this large sale, what's like the actual way it's supposed to happen?
I can't say in terms of normal because business is like children, you know what I'm saying, Like every child is different, But we.
Can say ideal.
If I had any piece of advice for someone looking for a space, it would be think about what you actually need to make your sale. Everyone immediately assumes retail. You may not necessarily need that because people drastically undercount how expensive and also difficult and time consuming dealing with direct to consumer is. And now like retailing to stores has its own difficulties because now you have to create
a marketing machine. You're just choosing your heart, but you got to understand the financial ramifications of taking on that cost for yourself. If you want to get into target and you're like, well, we're not ready for that, so we're going to open our own store, take that from your brain. There's no way you're gonna tell me that you're not ready for targets. So I'm gonna open my own retail shop.
If you are not ready.
For that, I urge you to reconsider how ready you may specifically be to own your own retail shop. What wound up happening with us because we were so ill prepared for a specific retail scenario. We were consumed with our consumers. The power of a dollar walking into your face is very hard to deny and unless you go in with the this retail space is just here to be here, and our actual goal is scaling our production.
That is very, very different than just like now we're going to open a retail space in addition to this other thing we're trying to do at the same time, because of how time consuming and thoughtful you have to be about your brand with that at the same time, it's not impossible.
You just have to be intentional.
Coming up on Mind the Business Small Business success Stories, we.
Want to have these polethero options because we feel like we are offering our customers something different. The reality is is you're just cannibalizing your sales.
We'll be right back after the break.
Welcome back to Mind the Business Small Business Success Stories, brought to you by iHeartRadio and into it quick books.
So I imagine you as a retail business owner. You're confronted by the pandemic and that requires some pivoting. So how did the pandemic actually affect your business operations and what did you change about your strategy?
It was the ultimate gut punch, but it also made me recognize where we were going terribly wrong. Our customers dictated what we had previously. When we were working out of the incubator. For clarification, we only had like three products. But in the store is a little different. People are coming in and they now have the things that they like. I love y'all, but I want turtles. Y'all got something with Karen mil y'all got something with DUTs, y'all got something with this.
Y'all got something with that.
And now that we are relying on those people coming back, we have to fill that. And when the pandemic shut us down, we had gone from those three skews to upwards.
I would say of like forty five. Yeah, that's quite a leap, wow.
Because everybody and their mother coming in about the things that they specifically want.
So just want to jump in here for a second for the person listening right now, who's thinking about starting their business that don't yet know what a skew is. What is a skew, Jessica.
It is just an individual product that you make, right, So it's that specific color, size, and quantity of whatever item that you are ordering.
It's that unique item number. According to Google, it's stock keeping unit.
There you go.
I did not know that either, Professor Goo strikes again.
Yeah, right, so we're going to come back to my homegirl quick books. So we were always doing analysis around our costs. We were not doing analysis around our sales. We were looking at the sections right like this is how much we're doing in corporate, this is how much we're doing in retail, but not per item. So we're sitting down. We ain't got nothing to do, right because
it was supposed to be two weeks. And then we started looking because we're like, all right, if we're going to open back up, there's no way that now, not having any staff, not having any you know, it being a little bit dicey to bring people in to help me.
It was a lot.
We got to do. How much stuff we're making, and I mean everything we have sells out. So there's a mental kind of thing where you feel like, all right, we always selling out, so we are clearly making money from it. And we started analyzing, we have this one skew that sells out all the time. I mean literally in minutes when we had them online, they were selling out all the time.
Don't be shy, what's the skew? Let me hear what I need to start making from a chocolate perspective.
Let me tell you something, but it ain't don't ask me for it because I ain't got it.
You're going to wait until we scale up. It is our chocolate turtles.
Mmmm.
Okay, boom, that's what it is. I mean, you know what I'm saying.
But it was almost a two to maybe three day production process, and the yield was around one hundred and twenty turtles at a time, and they could sell out in the day. And over the course of the three years that we had those turtles, we made fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in turtle sales. Now for some entrepreneurs that oh, okay, that's great for one Okay, let's break that down. Fifteen twenty thousand over the course of honestly maybe two years, so that's ten thousand dollars a year.
We're gonna put it all the way up to the top two years, ten thousand dollars a year.
Per month eight hundred.
Yeah, we're talking about less than one thousand dollars a month.
And is that factoring in like labor and all that stuff, like the money you're paying folks to make those things.
Right, And so once we take out the margin, we are talking about maybe five hundred dollars a month. Yeah, five hundred dollars for a month for an item that takes three days of the production schedule. If we have seven days to work with thirty percent of our time to make five hundred.
Dollars, that is such you've been up in gems, Jessica. I mean truly, this whole conversation has been amazing, but that I think is so important for the entrepreneurs listening right now who's trying to scale that business. You've sort of realized, like from a scaling perspective, this part isn't
helping me scale the top line. I mean, I'm you know, thirty percent of my time is going into making I don't know how much money you do, but call it ten thousand dollars a year, I would imagine Harlem Chocolate factory is doing much more than ten thousand dollars a year. But for the person listening right now, what was the big realization that was like, okay, wait, so thirty percent of my time's going here. How does that now affect
what you're doing? Did you change anything? Are you not focusing on different skills?
Absolutely?
It don't take long for me to tell myself I'm doing some stupid all right. Yes, entrepreneurship is difficult, But there was a level of hardness to like what was going on that I felt like, Okay, maybe we're hitting our heads against the wall. And so it's how I develop those equations. How much time do I have? How much time am I spending on a certain product? And how much does that product make? And we realize ninety five to ninety six percent of our money was made
between two product lines. It was chocolate bars and truffles and bomb bonds. Everything else went.
That reminds me here, Jessica, of that eighty twenty rule. Right, eighty percent of your money comes from twenty percent of your products.
Yeah, And the thing is, I think that small business owners wait too long to think about scaling. You need to have a timeline on identifying what your hero product is. You cannot keep throwing things out the wall and saying like, Okay, well this didn't pop, and that didn't pop, and that. You know, as soon as something doesn't necessarily sell and scale till millions and millions and millions, people are just
stuck in that creative rut. I tell entrepreneurs all the time that creativity is the enemy of entrepreneurship at times. Don't just keep all your creativity on product development. It may need to be your sales and your marketing plan that needs that creativity. But we get up on the product and developing all these different kinds of products and like, Okay, that one product didn't sell, so we're gonna move on and make another product.
No, take a time. If it's a year, if it's six months.
Which one of those five products that you make up, which one of those moved the furthest all right, boom, two of them did. I don't care if it was a thousand dollars and more sales than the other two. Stick on those. But we want to have this polethoral options because we feel like we are offering our customers something different. The reality is is you're just cannibalizing your sales.
That part right there.
Yeah, that's it. That's the generrate there.
You know, next time, Jessica, just at me, okay, because you're literally describing the first like seven years of my journey as an entrepreneur, y'all.
I literally did that all the time. We used to do pop ups. This was another thing, y'all.
Pop ups.
This helped us with deciding that we were gonna go into retail. It felt cheap because I didn't have to pay staff, right it was me. There was somebody that loved me. They're working for the day. But the table rental, getting to the pop up, the time that it took to create the products for the pop up, I was paying for absolutely every single thing. The pop up profitability was at honestly, like less than twenty percent. So I'm like, the products got seventy percent margins and I'm only making
twenty percent and some zero at the end. All in to rent all those tables and do all those pop ups and get to all those pop ups and get the products for all those pop ups, we were literally spending probably around forty five hundred dollars a month. So I'm like Okay, that's how I knew I was able to afford the shop.
Yeah, Jessica, this conversation has been so full of gems. I know folks are gonna get so much value added information here. I wanted you to tell us what's next for Hard Chocolate Factory and where we can find you.
Definitely follow us on all the social media signups for our newsletter. Our goal is to just grow right. We are now finally looking for a real life production space and you can find us at Harlem Chocolate Factory dot com. You'll see us in stores very soon and maybe in places where you take flights.
So that's that's not violating it, because that's not violating it.
You know.
I'm just saying, like maybe if you was going to go get on a flight and you was at a place that has.
Planes, might start with an A of some It might.
It just might, It just might. I don't know.
You're awesome, such a great episode.
Yeah, thank you, thank you, thanks for being here.
That was such an incredible come with Jessica. Jennie's tell me what's stuck out with you the most about that conversation.
Well, first and foremost, I definitely need the truffles in my life, and I need to make my way to Harlem to go and get some of those because I am starving now after this conversation. But for me, I think Jessica was just so transparent in the fact that entrepreneurship is messy, it's ugly. You're gonna make mistakes, especially if you're doing this for the first time you don't have a circle of people around you. So how about you, Elsin what did you take away?
I think for me it was like understanding and I'm sort of going through this myself, right, so it really resonates with me. Is it takes one side of you as a business owner to start a business, but then it takes a completely different side of you to scale that business. Right, you can get that fifteen thousand dollars check, you can win the contest, you can buy the equipment, you can get your first couple of customers, but it's a completely different game plan now to say, wait, what
skews are actually working for me? Right? How do I double down on what's working? Are these pop up shops really worth it? Right? Everything that she was talking about as it really is to scaling her business, Like those are so so so important.
Absolutely.
I really loved the idea that as you grow, you have to let go, which is one thing that she really emphasized on when she said, you know, all of these SKUs were in demand, bright customers, but were they actually a good use of my time as a business owner? And you kind of got to get ruthless. You got to take your feelings out of Oh well, I invested so much time and energy and money into launching this product and maybe it's just not serving you.
And that's okay.
Entrepreneurship is really about not just making good decisions, but making sustainable decisions as a business owner that are going to help you in the long run. And sometimes that means doing less, not more.
And I think I just want to call this out too, is she did that handshake deal right with the storefront owner and turned out to be a bad deal and it didn't work in her favor. And so contracts, get it written, get it written, get it signed, get it figured out. You know, I'm not here to say that there are people out there to cheat you or lie ar still from you, but man, that piece of paper sure feels a lot better than someone's you know, handshake, Absolutely well.
That's it for today's episode. You can find me on social media at jokierro Den Neto Podcast.
And you can find me at Austin Hankwitz. You can follow Into It QuickBooks on all social media at QuickBooks. To get the tools you need to start, run, and grow your business, head to QuickBooks dot com today. Join us for the next episode on Thursday, May eleventh, We're talking with Emily Doyle and May Qualk about their company Dooon Suncare and how they manage to make their burgeoning brand into a successful business in under three years.
You won't want to miss that one, so don't forget to follow, rate, and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts so you can stay up to date on our future episodes, and.
Check out our show notes for more info from this episode about money management and a.
Huge thank you to our guest Jessica Spaulding.
This podcast is a production of iHeartRadio and Into It QuickBooks.
Our executive producer is Molly Sosha, Our supervising producer is Nikia Swinton, and our writer is Tyree Rush.
Our head of post production is James Foster.
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