Full Transcript

Sari
Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host, Sari Kimbel. I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach, and it's got to be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in, and food founder journeys so you can learn what worked and didn't work and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now, let's jump in.

Sari
All right. Welcome back, everybody to the podcast this month, I'm so excited, really excited, to welcome an amazing guest. I feel like, who needs no introduction, but we will, I will introduce her. So Allie Ball is with us today. And Allie is the creator of Retail Ready and the founder of Food Biz Whiz, and she was on the podcast. We were just looking it up, podcast number eight, way, way back when. And I'm so excited to have you back on the podcast. Welcome Allie!

Allie
Thank you. I'm excited to be here years later. Wow. Congrats on 250 plus episodes.

Sari
Thank you. And you as well. You had a podcast for almost five years, 250 episodes.

Allie
Thank you. It's, it's a lot, and it's related to what we're talking about today.

Sari
It is. It's a great, yeah, it's a great segue, for sure. So, but really quick, I'd love for you to, in case people don't people literally, I'm like, you've never heard of Allie Ball. How are you in CPG, this name has not come into your life, but in case somebody has no idea who you are, can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Allie
And I'll say, I meet people every day in my DMs who have no idea who I am, so I'm always grateful for the opportunity to meet new people, and it certainly happens. So I'm Allie. I'm a former grocery buyer turned wholesale strategist, and like you said, the founder of Food Biz Quiz and the creator of the Retail Ready program. So we are the longest running online sales training in CPG, we've had over 3500 food, beverage, health and beauty, pet brands go through our sales training, and it's all about how to get your products in wholesale accounts and how to increase sales once there. So I bring my background as a grocery buyer, that lens of what the buyer truly wants from brands, how to speak the language of that wholesale buyer, into everything that I do. I'm also a certified coach, leadership coach, so we do a lot of coaching with brands and with founders. And what else do I want to say about myself? I'm an enthusiast of rest. I'm all about entrepreneurship, but, like, my big passion is, is rest.

Sari
Yeah, it's really fun. I mean, you and I connected when I started. You started about a year earlier than me and then, but we kind of have similar backgrounds, both buyers in grocery and we connected in 2019, and you know, have been in each other's world since then, in connection. And it's so interesting to even look over those six years and you've been in business seven years, but like, how much you and I have both evolved and changed, and our businesses have changed and we've both quit a lot of things.

Allie
Yes, absolutely. And you know what's wild is, I started Food Biz Wiz 12 years ago. It'll be 12 years, you know, in 2026 but we didn't launch Retail Ready until yeah, about five years into my business. Seven years ago or so, and when I was prepping for this episode and thinking about all the things that I've quit along the way, one of the big ones was that evolution of Food Biz Wiz that allowed for retail ready to come in. So I don't know. It's just so wild. It's so wild to have this opportunity to reflect on quitting and saying no to things and the evolution. So I'm really one, I'm just grateful for the opportunity to reflect on that. And I'm really excited to talk about this topic with you.

Sari
Yeah. So Allie and I were chatting a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about the need to quit things and why that's so hard and why that's so scary. And you and I both coach founders as well as ourselves, and we see it in our own lives, but if we think about our audience listening, you know our CPG founders and that it's so hard to quit things, and I'm sure, from the outside, when we're coaching, we can see it so clearly, but it's so hard when you're in it. And I'm curious, just to start out like, why do you think it's so hard as humans for us to quit things?

Allie
Yeah, I think there are few reasons. But if we look at it from this entrepreneurial lens, I think that this is, this is one of the biggest misunderstandings in entrepreneurship, right? We glamorize the beginnings, the launches, the new offers, the new strategies, like all of that shows externally and internally. I would say that we're doing something. We're being productive. We're getting it done exactly. We're getting gold stars as entrepreneurs. We're probably also like all high achievers and people who really like functioning at a high level and the quitting, the ending of something, unless we tell ourselves the real story about it can feel like the opposite of that, right? If we're all about celebrating output and the beginnings, then the ending of something can carry a lot of weight with it. We can feel like it's a sign of failure, even though you know you and I both know that's not true,.

Sari
The story, the meaning that we give it, and let's face it like, especially in the US, in a culture like we're inundated with, like, just, you know, go, go, go, say yes, yes, yes, hang in there, no matter what, grit, you know.

Allie
Yeah, more more, yeah. And, you know, again, I think I'm glad we're talking about it through this lens of entrepreneurship, because I know that's both of our audiences, that we are trained for output. We are rewarded for output. So naturally it feels, I don't know it can feel really hard, icky, shameful, embarrassing to quit things. Yeah, it's not true though.

Sari
It's not. And as I was thinking about this episode, I was also thinking about, you know, we also, in human nature, we have something called the loss aversion bias, right? Where, like, we hate to lose things. You know, you could be something that's in your house that you're just like, man, whatever. But like, if it were to break or get lost or something, you know, we feel this deep loss for things much more than gaining even. And then there's also, like, the sunk cost fallacy, where, like, we're in it. We put so much time, we put energy, we put money into things. And like, I just got to stay on this path. I got to grind and push and hustle.

Allie
Totally I, actually, I went to a lecture a couple weeks ago that was all about the sunk cost fallacy, and it was by Berkeley professor and researcher. And, you know, gosh, I should, I should pull this up, and maybe we can link his study in your show notes. But he talked about how, you know, they did all these controlled tests and put people essentially in like a labyrinth of sorts, where and they were testing like how quickly they got out, how quickly they made it to the exit, and even when the participants knew that the shorter route was to double back on their path and they could get out faster. People refused to do it, even when they knew that they would, you know, win the maze. Win the labyrinth. If they doubled back. They refused to do it because there's something in our brain that doesn't want us to retrace our steps, move backwards. Have this story about, you know, loss of momentum and so much so that people will literally, like, take the longer route, just so they don't have to do the doubling back. It was wild.

Sari
Oh my gosh. I can totally see myself in that, like, I would probably be like, like, really hard for me to do it.

Allie
Yeah, well, and what was also interesting is, you know, there was then the perception that people thought that they could that, even though they knew, hey, if I go back, I'll get out faster. They were like, oh, but if I just, like, run in the labyrinth, like, I can beat that time, or like, oh, but I'm different. I'll go faster. I'll like, now that I know this path, I can, like, choose this other one, and I can still win. And it doesn't happen. Yeah, it's wild to me.

Sari
Oh my gosh. I love that. I love that science is like helping us to understand our wild human brains and I think the benefit of that is when you understand like, oh, you can see it for what it is, then we can start to be more intentional about quitting and reframing it. And I love the quote I mentioned you by Seth Golden, winners quit all the time. They just quit the right things at the right time. So I'm so curious, how do you, as you're coaching all of your founders and retail ready and your one on one clients, what's the process? Or how do you help people through when it kind of you, maybe you start to see, ooh, there might be something worth ending here.

Allie
It's a big question, right? And I'll say, ideally, with a longer term coaching client, we have a foundation of understanding what's important to them in the first place. When I start with a coaching client, I take very few one on one coaching clients, but when I do typically, we start with an exploration of who they are, what are their values, what lights them up, what's in their drudgery zone? You know, what makes them passionate about life? Usually, we're coaching through the lens of their business, but not always. And so it really is this examination of what does that well rounded, fulfilling life look like to them. And so typically, the red flags start to appear when folks are, you know, it's all those classic signs, exhaustion, burnout, resentment, lot of resentment. Like, that's a big red flag, obligation, doing things out of obligation that, like, deep down they know they don't want to do. So my job as a coach is to listen for those things. Oftentimes they come with, you know, words like should or have to. And so as a coach, you know, if we're listening for these signs, you know this too, right? So we're trained to listen for things like that. And so I would say the first part of the process, one is just having that baseline, really understanding my client, you know, or helping the client, the founder, understand themselves, right? They gain that awareness about themselves, about what do they value? What is that fulfilling life for them? And then listening and watching for those signs of, you know, burnout and obligation. Does that make sense? Like that's where we started. It's just like the scanning of the horizon, like looking for those signs.

Sari
Yeah, 100%. So when you're like hearing those things and they're coming up in conversation, I'm just, you know, for people listening, if maybe they're noticing, I've been saying these words a lot like, I have no choice, and I have to, and I should, and your energy and your enthusiasm is dipping. Or, you know when I know those days when it's just like everything feels so hard. It's like, one day here and another day here, but like when you start stringing together multiple days of hard I think that's a point to.

Allie
Yeah, and I'm really glad you said that, because I want to be clear that running a business is not all, you know. Find your passion. And work in your zone of genius, you know, like, get in, get in your flow, and it'll all just feel smooth and easy. That's not true, right? We all have things that are challenging for us in the business, when we're learning new skills, when we're at our growth edge, that can be really uncomfortable, right? It's not, it's not going to feel easy every day. And so I don't want, I really want to make sure that our listeners aren't conflating this idea of it's hard, so I shouldn't do it, or it's hard, so that must mean I'm no longer passionate about it. That's not true. So, yeah, you know, I think there's once we start, like hearing those, those words, once we start, you know, noticing the body language, noticing the general malaise that comes into the coaching sessions, we can start to assess whether something is coming to its completion, whether we should stop doing something, or shift doing something, or if really, we're just in a challenging part of the business. And there's a couple steps that we that I like to take someone through, and I'm happy to talk a little bit about if we want to dive in. Yeah. Okay, so first, first, I always do a bit of a check in around the why behind the discomfort, right? And I just alluded to this. But is it difficult? Is there discomfort here? Because I'm in a growth period, learning a new skill, trying something new at the edge of my ability, right? Of what I know, and that just requires discomfort, right? Like, I'm sure you've learned a new skill. Oh, I mean, gosh, over the past seven years, you've learned lots of new skills, I'm sure you understand that that feeling of discomfort just because you're in at a growth edge, right? And that's very different than being out of alignment, right? So we want to discern, is it difficult because I'm growing, or is it difficult because it fundamentally isn't in alignment with who I am as a person, what I value in my day to day, what where the business is going, and what our focus is this season, like, which one is it? And you know, again, that takes, like, some powerful questions. It takes a little bit of self discovery and vulnerability to be able to assess that, but first, we really just check in with the why around the discomfort, like what's the root of this?

Sari
And one thing I've really appreciated, and I've learned from you, is businesses are boring, like a lot of it is boring. And every time I, like, just sometimes I'm in things and I'm like, gosh, the boring I'm like, oh, Allie.

Allie
Yep, oh my gosh.

Sari
You're not supposed to be like, This is awesome and so fun. Or even like, I'm at my edge, and it's like, like, sometimes business is just about like, doing boring things and consistency in order to get what you want.

Allie
And I would say, actually, that that is, I'm thinking of a coaching client I have right now, actually. And one of the things that we have been talking a lot about, is it uncomfortable because she's bored, and that's basically what it is. So she's, you know, been running her business for, I don't know, probably six years or so, and she was talking about saying the same thing over and over and over again on her social media. She's like, how many times I'll make up an example, but how many times can I talk about muffins on social media? I know, right. But she's like, I have to talk about my muffins over and over and over again, and it's really freaking boring to her. I would say, okay, good job. Your growth edge now is being able to sit in this discomfort of boredom, and, you know, maybe, sure enough, we'll fast forward and we'll figure out that, you know, she never wants to talk about muffins again, and then like that. That could be, you know, the next step for us there. But yeah, it's really important to discern if you are over it, like fundamentally out of alignment, or if you're just bored in your business.

Sari
Right, or uncomfortable.

Allie
Yeah. So we really check in that first step is checking in with a why behind that discomfort. From there, we move to the numbers. So I think oftentimes people think about coaching as being really like, woo, woo, and just checking in with the feelings and like, that's it. But business coaching and leadership coaching, I find the style that I do really blends both. So we looked at the discomfort here, or like the, you know, the boredom or the frustration, or whatever it is, through this lens of the numbers and the energy, right? So the numbers are giving you one story about what's happening in your business, and then your energy is giving you this other story about what's happening in the business. So we really evaluate both the data and our desire telling us that this is complete, and if so, you know, if the numbers are down, if the energy feels like a drag, we can feel pretty good knowing that the word mirroring completion on something, the numbers, the data and the desire around it.

Sari
Our brains will make up stuff all the time, and you're like, but let's actually verify that.

Allie
Totally so we have a phrase that we say inside of retail ready, that's data over drama. And you know, this comes up a lot like, I think I should be having higher sales that buyer like, I should be getting more responses to my emails. I should have gotten on the shelf faster than this, right? And then I'm like, okay, well, let's look at the numbers. You know, you sell on average six units a week in your local Whole Foods, and the average velocity in your category is four units a week, so you're actually doing just great. So yeah, you should be selling more, but, or, you know, you think you should be selling more, but the numbers don't say that. So let's work on the mindset behind it, right? So we I really look at it through that lens of, like, both the numbers and the energy. And, you know, certainly sometimes, like, the numbers look good and the founder still doesn't want to do something. And that's okay, right? Like, we don't have to wait until the numbers are, you know, in the ditch before we give ourselves permission to end something. So then, so we okay. So we talk about the why, we look at the numbers and the desire, the emotions behind it, and then we look at the opportunity cost. And this is the phase where, you know, it really drives home, or illuminates for the founder, for the client, what they're missing by holding on to this thing. Or actually, on the other hand, I'll also say, you know, what potentially they're keeping by holding on to it, right? So really asking ourselves, like, what is continuing this costing me? Is it time? Is it margin? Is it momentum? Is it my creativity? Is it my ability to be there for friends and family, like, what? What's the opportunity cost? And then, you know, connecting to that, one of the questions I really like to explore is what could grow if I was freed up in this capacity, what would be available to me if I no longer had this thing on my plate? And usually that's where you can see, like someone, you know, if the energy is really there, you know, their eyes can become wide. You can see them. The wheels start to turn again and say, oh, like, you know, I could join a skee ball league. I could, you know, start doing this. I could stop doing this farmers market. I could do this thing like I, you know, whatever it is, but really thinking about what's available when you have this time and space back when you have this creative feedback.

Sari
Hey there, Sari here. Quick pause in the program. Is 2026, a make or break year? If you know you can't afford another year like this one has been. And let's face it, it's been brutal for many CPG brands. If you're tired of playing small, if you're tired of feeling afraid and in protection mode, because you know that setting these realistic goals is actually keeping you stuck. I have something for you. Applications are now open for make or break power groups. They are small groups, six to eight CPG founders and we are committed to setting impossible goals, doing the identity work and transforming together over the entire year. But first I want you to start with my free future self visualization. You can go grab it at foodbizsuccess.com/futureself. It's the first step to making your future bigger and brighter than your past. Then if you're ready to go all in on your impossible goal, to transform your identity, to have support around your mindset and business tools, and you are ready to be held accountable for this. So it is inevitable that 2026 is an incredible year for you. Then you can apply for the power group. The future is coming, and it can be different, but only if you are.

Sari
That's the power of coaching. Because asking like stopping and asking those questions or being asked those questions, because oftentimes we're just in such go, go, go, right? We're just hustle, hustle, hustle. We keep taking on new things. We say yes, we say yes, we say yes, and then we're burning out. We're losing momentum, passion, all of that and resources of money and time, and so it's so important to have someone, I think, to like, help reflect those questions to you, not every day, but certainly, like, once a year or quarterly. Like, kind of checking in with yourself and your business and saying, what? What are those opportunity costs like? And it could be that we're talking about shut, you know, quitting your entire business. But oftentimes it's probably more a strategy or a shift in how you're executing.

Allie
Totally right. Like, you know, I actually did a lot of coaching with founders around this, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, you know, really coaching folks through, is it worth it? Do I want to do this? And, you know, so I think there is that we're looking at this through the lens of stopping something or saying but I also think that this works in saying no to something, right? We're like, we did this campaign last year. Do we want to do it again? And so there's this, you're right? It doesn't these. This framework doesn't have to be used for enormous things, right? Like, I want to burn it all down and move to, you know, Hawaii. It can be, do I want to run a Black Friday campaign? And so then that last step there is, once we run through all of that, we assess, you know, once we make the decision, we assess, what did we learn from this decision? And, like, what were the indicators that told us it was time to make this decision, and we do this in a process so that ideally, we can look out for those red flags, those feelings, those bumps, faster next time, and either prevent ourselves from getting all the way to burnout or shutting down, or be able to make the decision to shut it down even faster, and not just, like, stay in that, tense zone of what should I do? Like, should I change? Should I quit? Should I keep going? Should I hustle harder? Like, how do we shorten that like, anxiety time, next time for whatever business decision or life decision we're making, right?

Sari
Because there's so much. I mean, there can be some great learnings, but man, if you can get through that time where you're just like, in agony of, like, should I? Shouldn't I?

Allie
Totally, and, you know, to be clear, it's, it's wild. So I have seen, I don't know, hundreds of people quit things over the past decade. You know, this was the nature of entrepreneurship. And, you know, I could talk about all the things that I've quit myself, but it is really interesting for me to watch people's like, messy middle process around that, and people have all different ways of navigating that and getting through it. For some people, it truly is just time, like they need time to sit with a decision, they need time to, like, really feel, I don't know, I don't want to say, like, bad about where they are, but they really need to, like, feel the pain or the impact of the decision and sitting in it. And other people are just like, you know, okay, like, I have crossed the threshold. I have made up my mind, there's no going back. It's like a gut reaction here, and it's so wild just to see that everyone has their own process for being in that messy middle. And sometimes in coaching, you're like, I like to see transformation in my clients, of course, like, that's why we coach. We coach to help someone have a transformation. And it becomes really dangerous as a coach when I try to rush that transformation for people, because I know where we're going, like, 9 times out of 10, like, I know where we're going. And the it's really important for people to take their own path to get there.