Bennett Maxwell: Founder & Chairman of Dirty Dough
Episode 520
In this episode, Bennett Maxwell, Founder and Chairman of Dirty Dough, shares what it takes to build a successful business in the cookie space. Cookies that are engineered from the inside out, with every cookie featuring some combination of layers, mix-ins, or filling within the dough – Dirty Dough is not your ordinary cookie company. We discuss franchising, including mobile franchising, and how it has helped Dirty Dough to achieve rapid success. Bennett also talks about the lawsuit the company faced and how that situation turned into an opportunity for positive brand exposure. So much inspiration and wisdom to keep you thinking. Now on this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow.
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https://www.dirtydough.com
Transcript
Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down but just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. It’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I’m super excited to have my next guest. Here we have Bennett Maxwell, who is the founder and chairman of Dirty Dough. And come on, everyone has had a Dirty Dough cookie, they have over 70 stores and growing throughout the US but I’m super excited to hear all about his story. While he’s the founder. He didn’t actually come up with the original, but definitely reengineered the company a bit. And so we’re gonna give them for sure that founder title because it’s a very, very different company than it was in the beginning. But basically, the cookies are a combination of layers and mixins filling within the dough. They are super, super yummy. It’s a brand that stands for creativity and indulgence and a dash of rebellion. I love that description, lots of different flavors, and he’s built a company that is as impactful as it is delicious. The other super interesting thing about his company that I’m dying to get Bennett to talk about is really his giveback strategy and what meaning it has for him because I think along his journey, it’s sort of an interesting one where he’s a serial entrepreneur and he’s seen a few things in his in his journey of being an entrepreneur that I think is there’s lots of learnings there. So without further ado, I’m going to stop talking and welcome Bennett
Bennett Maxwell 2:12
Hara Thank you. I’m super excited to be a guest. Appreciate it.
Kara Goldin 2:16
Very excited. So you weren’t always a cookie executive. What were you doing before starting Dirty Dough? I
Bennett Maxwell 2:24
was doing solar cells out of San Diego. So a little bit different but pretty, you know, no, yeah, very different industry. I had a solar company that we were doing maybe half online half door to door that I’d started with my brother. So that was a pretty big pivot.
Kara Goldin 2:39
We talked a little bit in the intro about the early days of Dirty Dough. But can you share that story about how you ended up becoming involved in the company? Yeah, so
Bennett Maxwell 2:51
I grew up in Utah, and there’s a lot of cookie companies out of Utah. The big one that’s blown up recently is crumble. Everybody in Utah is definitely aware of that. A guy that I went to high school with moved to Arizona to go to school, and he wanted to be the first one serving these large gourmet cookies or fresh hot to your door out of Arizona. So he started Dirty Dough at the end of 2018 Just out of his apartment, just delivery only. And he posts on Facebook saying hey, I sell out of cookies almost every night. I would like you know money to go build a storefront. So I invested in 2019 first storefront opened up in 2020, march 2020. And of all the months at the end of that year, I was in San Diego doing my solar company I saw actually it was a crumble that was just crushing it in the San Diego area. I was like dude, this is a great market. Let’s franchise that I’m gonna be your first franchisee kind of long story short, he’s like, I don’t want to be involved in this anymore. Like it’s, it’s just a lot of work being a baker, right? Because that’s, that’s what the whole model was. Order all your raw ingredients, a bunch of teenagers and college kids mix everything in small mixers, you know, weigh it by hand portion of by hand. So I ended up purchasing it from them at the beginning of 2021. And then yeah, that first year redoing everything other than name, the model, the concept, you know, the meaning the purpose, the colors, the branding logo, and all of the recipes. And the goal was to make it as simple as possible. So rather than requiring every single store to make all their cookies from scratch, we sourced that all for them and then now we ship out pre portioned cookie dough balls, you know, stuffed cookies, multicolored cookies to the franchisees and all they have to do is put it in the oven and press start. So really going for simplicity it was definitely a little bit more work on our end as the corporate side but it makes the franchises a lot easier to open a lot lower costs, you know, labor and all of that. So yeah, it’s it’s been a wild ride so far. Still still figuring it out as I go.
Kara Goldin 4:52
So you jumped in and suggested this franchise model. And so you were the first free MSI Z. That’s
Bennett Maxwell 5:01
what I’m suggesting. But rather than him franchising it, and me buying a franchise, I ended up buying the, the company everything I bought him out. And then it took me about a year to work on the franchise documents come up with the model and all of that. And then now I’m the franchisor, we’ve been selling franchises for just over two years, we have 60, some odd stores open. We have another we do brick and mortar, I started we do mobile franchises like food trucks. So we have another 13 of those. So yeah, all in all, we’re about 75 franchises that we’ve opened, we have another 40, something under construction, and we’ve sold just over 450. So it’ll take us a little bit to open them. You know, if somebody buys five franchises, we’ll give them five years to open them one per year. But that’s yeah, it’s it’s been a lot of work. Last February, February of 2023, we had seven stores open. So we went from seven to 70 in 13 months, which has been a little crazy. Wow.
Kara Goldin 5:57
That’s wild. So we’ve had a lot of people on here who have done franchising, but most of them have created the brand. And that’s what I really kind of hear in your story that I mean, how many brands are out there, right, that, that maybe you think are really great that, you know, maybe the founders thinking about shutting it down? Maybe they can’t get it financed? Or whatever? And could could it actually be a great franchise? And that’s, that’s the thing that I think you naturally, it sounds like, jumped into and just decided, let me go and be the franchisor. And and start to bring this in? How difficult is it to start a franchise company like you have? Yeah,
Bennett Maxwell 6:42
I don’t think it’s super difficult. It’s really getting an attorney and paying them 20 to 30,000. For your franchise disclosure documents, what’s a lot harder is selling the franchises supporting them, opening them up coming up with all the processes, especially when you’re, you know, opening up a store week, that’s a little bit a little bit harder than actually just you know, setting it up and becoming an illegal franchise, anybody can go, you know, again, you’ll find an attorney, pay him 20 to 30 grand in one to three months your franchise, but that doesn’t mean anything until you actually sell franchises and start opening up stores and supporting you.
Kara Goldin 7:18
Right? And are there? Do you only allow like one in every city? Or how do you sell franchises? Is it is it by city is that
Bennett Maxwell 7:27
you have to typically do zip code. So you know, some cities can handle more than one store, where other cities can even handle one store. So we give them an area, but it’s more based off of population, as well as drive time. For DoorDash, UberEATS, all of that it’s a good 20 to 30% of the business. So are they can you know, will they drive five miles? Will they drive 15 miles? And what’s the population there? So there’s a little bit of dependency based on the density of population. But it’s yes, typically we’ll get a zip code or handful of zip codes targeting a certain drive radius, as well as population.
Kara Goldin 8:10
Do you try and be around colleges? I hate to say that all college students eat a lot of cookies. But I would happen to I actually think that’s probably true, even maybe right when they get to campus, if they see a cookie store. Have you seen that there’s certain locations that are better for you and cities than others? Yeah,
Bennett Maxwell 8:31
I mean, the Tempe location, which is our first store, Tempe, Arizona, ASU is one of the you know, the largest schools, and it was primarily college kids. And that was kind of the model like, oh, let’s go to college towns. There’s another cookie company that does that. And they do it really well called Insomnia Cookies, and they’ll open up till two, three o’clock in the morning on the weekends. As we open up more stores, as well as looking at the demographics of competitors. We actually found out that yes, college kids are buying them, but it’s typically families so like a mom 25 to 50 years old with a few kids. That’s more of the target demographic, as you know, we’ve expanded from one store to 70 But yeah, definitely college kids are still buying a lot of cookies, lots of
Kara Goldin 9:11
cookies. So brick and mortar is difficult to scale in an expedited manner especially trying in certain cities trying to get labor to come and and build what what has been kind of the the biggest, I guess, hurdle to build in brick and mortar but also how have you been able to open so many stores in such a short period of time and through these franchises, but I would think like that would be sort of a gatekeeper for a lot of your franchisees that
Bennett Maxwell 9:43
the whole model that we’re creating and have created is all based on simplicity. So if I can ship you a cookie dough ball that’s already pre portioned, every cookie is formulated to cook for the same time, temperature and fan speed and ovens are programmed. It is as simple as you know put Going on a cookie sheet, putting it in the oven or start. So that simplifies it quite a bit, you don’t need to store raw ingredients, you don’t need to have your own mixers, you don’t need to order all your raw ingredients or deal with the waste. So starting with just simplifying the model has definitely allowed us to go quicker the bottleneck and opening up storefronts is finding the actual locations, especially when, you know we can operate out of 600 700 square feet. But there’s not that many retail pads in good areas that are six or 700 square feet. So a lot of you know, franchisees will sign on a lease that’s 1000 or 1100 square feet, which is so small, but it is a little bit you know more than necessary. So finding the least locations is definitely the bottleneck. But once you find one, the build out is very simple. Again, if you’re building out 600 square feet with 200 of that being lobby space, you know, it’s there’s not much to it a few floor drains and things like that, but really building out really good processes. And from the beginning, because we sold so many franchises right off the bat, it was we always had the mindset of we’re not going to implement something unless that works for hundreds of stores or 1000s. So right from the get go, we built out a custom admin portal and you have this what we call as our build out checklist. And I think we’re at like 107 steps, just as detailed and dummy proof on this is how you find your realtor and how you vet them and the documents for permits. And you can download them here and then upload them here and get everything approved. So really simplifying that. And I think that that came from really hiring a CEO, right? When we franchised who has been doing this for 40 years, she did a company called Maou. Always things like coffee. So I was very lucky that I got to pick up piggyback on everything that she’s learned. And she opened up 650 Plus franchises before selling. So really getting her we got some good advisory board members as well. And just knowing that I don’t know anything, because I was a sales background, right? This is all very new to me. So just bringing in the people who have been there, done that and leaning on that expertise.
Kara Goldin 12:05
I love it. So out of the gates as a startup, you faced lots of adversity with the cookie Wars series of lawsuits. Can you talk a little bit about that period of horribleness? And what it ultimately shaped your business out to be?
Bennett Maxwell 12:21
Yes, it was May of 2022 right before we opened up our first franchise location. So we had one corporate store and that was it and we get, you know, I get an email, like, Hey, here’s a lawsuit from crumble. And I was just like heart sinks, you know, like crap. How am I supposed to like these guys are already doing, they just put up billboards saying they do a million cookies a day, you can reverse engineer the math and like, this is a billion dollar company. And they’re suing us and we don’t we have one store open, you know, but once I actually read through the lawsuit, I’m like, Oh, this is silly. Like there’s literally pictures of cookies with sprinkles side by side cookies with caramel on it. And I’m just like, an vanilla ice cream. I’m like, come on guys, this is this is very silly. But whatever. It’s, you know, it’s a tactic that a lot of businesses use to slow down competitors when you have more money and you can, you know, get tied up in a lawsuit. About six weeks went by and a local news station picked it up, you know, crumbles suing these competitors. And when that happened, I was like, Okay, well, if it’s out, I’m gonna at least get my side of the story. And I might be biased, but I think I’m right. I think this is total BS. And kind of the first thing was really actually are billboards. We put up some billboards, I said coming soon. In May, then they sued us. And in June, they put up a bajillion billboards, like, a lot like every other billboard as far as a criminal billboard. And then July when it was made public. We threw up some kind of fun, playful, built billboards, one of them said, you know, let your tastebuds be the judge. And another one is cookie so good. We’re being sued. Lots of different kinds of fun sayings. And I’m sure a lot of people drove by that and saw it, but I posted on social media, and I had crumbled. I said, I love your billboards. Do you love my? Or what do you think about minor stuff like that? And that got, you know, well over a million views. And then a lot of local news, started picking it up. And then some national news picked it up. And it just gave us literally millions and millions of eyes on our brand, which we were very small. But I think it was apparent that we had a more simplified model which flooded us with franchising cores, and then we sold a ton of franchises. And then now we’re fulfilling on all everything that we’ve sold. Trying to keep up with that and opening up as quickly as as we can. Yeah,
Kara Goldin 14:41
it’s a little bit different than some other lawsuits that that I’ve heard about, but it’s it’s surprisingly easy to actually file. So it’s, it’s it’s amazing. And as somebody said to me a few years ago as you start getting bigger I mean, it just kind of becomes normal, right for brands and over something, you know, and it’s, it’s definitely something that every founder, but the first one, you get an especially when it’s somebody that has a lot more money than you it’s, it’s a very scary feeling for sure. So, so mental health is at the heart of Dirty Dough. And why has this been baked into the business’s DNA since you’ve been involved and champing the company,
Bennett Maxwell 15:29
there’s about a six month overlap from when I bought Dirty Dough till I exited the solar company. And that six months, I was trying to do both and I have a wife, I have three young kids AM, which, you know, I tell myself, they’re the highest priority, but that’s not what my life actions were showing. I was just always working nights, weekends, whatever, I disregarded those relationships, family relationships, my health, I got up to 310 pounds, and I was just work, work, work, work work, because one day, I’m gonna have enough to then go do what I want to do, you know, spend more time with my family? Well, when I sold the solar company, I achieved some of those financial goals. So this was just under three years ago. And I felt it felt great. You know, I was 28. And I’m like, man, you know, I got some money in the bank, I have some rental properties, all of that. And I feel amazing. But that didn’t last right, you quickly go back to your base levels of happiness. That’s just how our brains are wired. And I immediately within I mean, when I say maybe like, within a few days, maybe a week, I set the next goal. And then I started sacrificing help relationships and all that again, and I’m like, Okay, I need to stop this. Well, it’s it’s going to go on forever. I’m going to hit a goal, and then just do the next goal. Next goal. Next goal. So I told myself that I was working hard to get more money and because more money means more time off, which means more vacation time, which means more time with my family, and more time with my family means I’m happier. And then I thought, why can I just be with my family every day? Like, like, I don’t need to do all of that. So I kind of went through my midlife crisis at age 28. What am i What’s my purpose? And I started seeing a therapist. I read some books, I texted a bunch of friends and family what are what do you see as my core values, I put it in spreadsheets, organize it all, wrote my own obituary, and I narrowed it down to what I feel I want and I’m what I’m after is all about joy and fulfillment. And that through and despite life’s dirtiness, so don’t wait for life to be perfect in order to be, you know, have more joy and fulfillment, focus on yourself first and focus on you know, helping as many people as possible. So with that, how do you build that in or bake that into the brand? Well, we were already doing these large gourmet cookies. And as opposed to the competitors that spent a lot of time decorating the top of the cookies with a lot of frosting, we were focusing on the inside of the cookie. And I kind of do that correlation like, Oh, that’s a really good correlation. Like, we’re going to focus on the inside because the inside is what matters. And that developed a tagline, which is in all our stores, you know, the inside matters most. So these cookies represent life in that they’re dirty, messy, imperfect on the outside, but their shirts held delicious. And I started running with that, because that’s something that, you know, I’m super passionate about. If we’re to have more joy, fulfillment, how do you get that it comes down to your mindset or your mental health. So that’s where the messaging is baked in there. You know, we care about your feelings, life gets messy, and that’s okay. Perfectly Imperfect, all of these different messages that are on our packaging and in our stores. And then we went and created a nonprofit called Life A suite to build a Mental Health Wellness Center in a K through 12. store nearby, sorry, a K through 12 school nearby one of our stores so you can get back to the community while educating kids on mental health, identifying emotions and different science based methods on how to regulate those, you know, breathing exercises, meditation, things like that. So it was, you know, going back, it would be great and I’m 1,000% So long, like, you have to have a bigger purpose and you have to have a give back built in. Because that’s what drives us it’s not finances. So really having that inside and helping me drive all of my decisions and developing that mission statement has been super crucial for me. Yeah,
Kara Goldin 19:17
definitely. I love that. So So you’re a serial entrepreneur, when did you know that this company was successful? So you get hit with you know, a lawsuit you’re in a you’re you see all these competitors out there that are building I always think that you as a founder you you worry about those competitors to some extent but you always think that they have a ways your than than you do right and and how did you I guess it’s part one is kind of courage right to keep going but when when do you know you’re successful? Like what are the The network’s where you really feel like, okay, we’re gonna make it. Yeah, it’s great. Man,
Bennett Maxwell 20:06
I’ve no idea because I still, like it’s, I tell myself this, and I’ve been telling myself this maybe six times over the last three years, in six months, it’s all gonna change. Whenever we come a franchise, it’s all gonna change. When we opened our first store, we opened our first dozen stores, and you saw so many problems each time you hit those milestones, but it just creates other challenges that you have to solve as well. So I think it’s definitely a moving target. I feel like, you know, the first, like, Okay, I think we’re going to make it I think this is going to become successful is when we started selling a ton of franchises like, Okay, if I got 100 People that are believing in me, and the model and the brand, and the messaging and the purpose, enough to give me a, you know, an upfront 30,000 or $50,000, franchise fee, and invest another, you know, to 250,000 and opening up a storefront, I felt like that was a good validation, like, Hey, we’re going somewhere. And we’ve also raised capital raised about 5 million. So every time you get a check from an investor, you know, that it’s also like, okay, you know, more traction, the brand is being built, you know, more people know, you. And then I guess the third thing is, I go into franchise conferences, most people know about our brand, which were, you know, our first store opened up 20 months ago, so, and a lot of people have heard of us know what we’re doing. So I guess those three things are a little bit of a mixture, but I’m still, you know, still figuring it out.
Kara Goldin 21:30
Yeah, definitely. So when you look at the on building community, I mean, community is such an important like, people are getting to know your brand. Obviously, you have you have the physical stores that are being built by these franchisees, but also the online a fact social media, of course, where do you think you’ve been able to kind of get the most the most marketing or or building of your brand? I mean, where do you feel like that’s, that’s been the word out? I mean, you touched on it a little bit about consumers talking about it. And obviously, franchisees are sharing that they’re opening and things like that, but what like, where do you? How do you do that when you’re a brand new brand, that is that is looking to kind of build a brand?
Bennett Maxwell 22:29
Yeah, I mean, social media, for sure. Doing little, you do a tick tock video, that’s four seconds with some weird saying in the background that’s popular, and you just open up a cookie. But these are three layer cookies, you know, a peanut butter cookie on the outside with the chocolate dough in the middle with Hot Fudge, and you get a million views, you’re like, that’s pretty cool. Let’s keep doing those. So I think leveraging social media from the business standpoint was really big. The lawsuit was definitely big, because it gave us that national exposure. And that wasn’t the lawsuit, they gave us the national national exposure, it was our reaction to it. And really, I guess, boldness like we do a billboard, we also paid professional actors to make commercials making fun of the lawsuit, which also got millions of views. And people are like, Who’s this cookie brand that’s like trying to stand up to you know, big company, but we’re doing it in a light hearted, you know, fun way. And then I would say the third thing is my personal social media. Two years ago, I didn’t have a LinkedIn account, it wasn’t really posting on anything. And I started, I just got the advice I, you need to build a personal brand. Because you’re not going to be with Dirty Dough forever, you need to build a personal brand. And once I started posting daily, you know, podcast clips, or whatever, I feel like that built quite a bit of momentum. And most of the franchises that we’ve sold have actually come from my personal social media. And it’s not like I’m just talking about franchises, I talk about mental health lot, and fitness, and family life and all of that. But I guess be more vulnerable and getting myself out there and the things that I like people relate to that. And then if they like it, you know, they’re applying for franchises. But a mixture of those three things, I think it really hyped up the brand and got us to be in a you know, a national brand pretty quick. Yeah,
Kara Goldin 24:15
definitely. And I think it’s, I always kind of hesitate or cringe about the word personal brand, because I think that some people hear that and think like, you know, there’s a lot of ego involved in it. But I really do believe that I mean, as many people have said, hint would not be the brand that it is today, which is you know, a couple 100 million and net sales if it if they weren’t kind of borrowing equity from my founding story of why I did it. And so that has been, you know, a major piece of of growing the brand. So I think you’re 100% right, that it’s a responsibility of of, you know, Have founders CEOs to be on on and also, when there’s problems, I mean, I’m able to see people know that I’m visible on on social media. And so, you know, if they can’t get an answer, they’ll come and talk to me about it. And I’ve been able to spot issues along the way, as well just, you know, if there’s more than a couple that come in, over a couple of days, kind of about the same thing, like your website is doing this or whatever, you know, that kind of stuff is really, really critical. So and we’re all human so far, right. And and so we’re, you know, capable of missing some things along the way. So, definitely agree with you on that, for sure. So what’s your favorite skew in the Dirty Dough lineup, anything
Bennett Maxwell 25:49
with the cream cheese. So what the last time I had the cinnamon roll on and stuffed with some cream cheese stuff. Other than that, just the classic chocolate chip, I get that a lot with my kids. There’s a Dirty Dough, just like right in front of my house. So it’s, for whatever reason, hearing my three year old son say Dirty Dough is just, it just gets me I’m like you say Dirty Dough, we’re gonna get to cookies, because it’s so freakin cute. But anyways, yeah, I think those two are really good. If you add ice cream, I think that’s our best product, though. We call it the dirty scoop. So you get warm cookie, there’s some ice cream, throw some toppings on it, which was really just a way that I made up to get rid of, or to reduce waste. So rather than throwing away the cookies, at the end of the night, we keep them and then we sell them into a cookie shake, or that dirty scoop product, which I think is our, our two best products. And there are two highest margin items as well. So I like him as a consumer, but also as a business owner. I love them. That’s great.
Kara Goldin 26:49
So any stories along the way that have have really helped you to know that you’re on the right track? And, and maybe there’s, I always say that consumer stories are really the ones that help founders help leaders and companies kind of keep going right that, you know, you’re hearing these stories where, you know, happiness was created, where, you know, maybe somebody was able to send their kids the cookies that they couldn’t be there for I don’t know, but I’d love to hear if you’ve heard any stories like that.
Bennett Maxwell 27:26
Yeah, and really, we have two customers, we have the customer that’s buying or cookies. And then we have the customer that I view as more my direct customer which is the franchisee and I do franchisee interviews, like weekly, just one on one, seeing what’s going good and what’s not, which is very good on both standpoints. Like where are we lacking support? Because we are lacking support? Right? We’re always lacking support. So what’s the feedback? How can we improve? And then what are you doing well, and what’s working well, and, and then sharing that with other franchisees, but it’s great to see people, especially the ones that are really involved in their communities. And like somebody just sent me a picture, I think it was the Sarasota Florida. And it’s it’s a little league baseball uniform with the Dirty Dough, you know, logo on the back. And I’m like, that’s so cool. That’s awesome. They’re sponsoring that. So I love seeing that from the franchisees and the customers, just reading the reviews. And I get the emails every day, any any reviews, like total amount of reviews, and then anything with three stars or less, I like to read over to see what it is, but balancing out like okay, we got 500 reviews in the last few days. And you know, the average is a 4.8 or 4.9. And then scrolling through those as is very satisfying, just to see how much people love the product as well as the brand and the messaging that go along with it.
Kara Goldin 28:47
So what are the goals coming up for you, as you are? Obviously, opening some new franchises? Do you want to talk about anything around that that you’re really looking to do?
Bennett Maxwell 28:59
Yes. 1000 things we’re looking to do, right. Most recently, we brought on a new CEO who’s the former CEO of jimmie johnson, he owns a management group. Um, it’s been about three months, and they’re making a lot of much needed changes and improvements. And a lot of that is to product the product offerings, we’re adding ice cream sandwiches and edible cookie dough. And what I referred to like dirty sodas, which are sodas with different types of mix ins, which is based out of Utah. Oddly enough, yesterday, I was watching Hulu and Sonic has a commercial and now they’re doing dirty sodas and calling up dirty sodas. It’s not starting to you know kind of become a thing but really adding those different product lines. So you know, we have I mean whatever we can do to increase sales for franchisees while providing more delicious products to the customer is definitely a pro. And then we have 40 Some stores under construction right now. So we’re always you know, signing more leases and opening and opening up those doors. Every store that we open up, you know, your economies of scale get better and better, you get to purchase more flour you get to, and all your costs goes down. So the goal is to be at 1000 units. I guess what are we at three and a half years left to go four years left to go from the time we opened up our first one. So we’ve, you know, sold 450 of them. We’re coming up on it. But yeah, that’s that’s the goal. 1000 units with 1000 Wellness Centers built out in these local schools. And that’s where I think it’s really cool. Like, okay, if we really had 1000 Wellness Centers, and K through 12 schools, and each one of them had 10 people going through it a day, like, we’re educating 10,000 kids a day on mental health and identifying emotions, like, that’s what gives me the chills and like, man, that’s, that’s a cool goal to go after. Especially knowing that my daughter, she’s seven years old, in elementary, and her elementary has one of these wellness rooms that she could pop in, identify her emotions, identify, you know, from a scale from one to 10, what she’s feeling, and then choose different activities, and then identify the emotion going out after 10 minutes, so she can see what helps her feel better. And what doesn’t, which I think is just really cool to start focusing on emotions at that young of an age.
Kara Goldin 31:12
Yeah, definitely. So for your mobile franchises, how does that work? Do so your franchising? Like if somebody orders from you from your website, do you own? You guys own that? Is that a separate company? Kind of? I guess, is that how you view it. So
Bennett Maxwell 31:32
the the nationwide shipping is done by corporate, which we don’t push it all we want people to buy for the local franchisees and people are going to, you know, go pay 20 bucks for shipping to have cookies arrive in two days when they have a store down the street, right? So we just don’t want to compete with our franchisees at all, you know, on that level on the mobile franchise side, it’s event based. So let’s say you own a franchise, and there’s an event center down the street, a football game or baseball game, or whatever, a mobile franchisee could bring a food truck or food trailer and sell their cookies there for that day God or for two days or the weekend. But so so it’s really good brand awareness for whoever has the brick and mortar store. Because where does all the repeat business go? Well, that trailer is gone in two days, right? So it has to go to that brick and mortar. So they they really feed, you know, hand in hand, as far as you know, promoting the brand, getting more people to try the product. And typically those events, you know, you’re selling your cookies for like six bucks. So the margins on them are pretty good as well.
Kara Goldin 32:29
That’s interesting. Are those growing pretty fast those mobile, they seem like they’d be pretty easy to set up. Yeah,
Bennett Maxwell 32:35
it’s a lot lower of a barrier to entry. So kind of going back to the mission statement of joy and fulfillment, despite like dirtiness, the two pillars that I’m really focusing in to achieve that is one the mental health. And there’s two parts of that the messaging and then the nonprofit. And then the second one is empowering people through entrepreneurship, because that’s just something that’s brought me a lot of joy and fulfillment. So what does it take to be an entrepreneur? You know, you need time, money, expertise? How do we simplify that so more people could kind of take that leap of faith into entrepreneurship. And centralizing the production allows a storefront to be built for, you know, half to a third of the cost, when compared to the competition. You also asked about labor and hiring a little bit earlier. You don’t you know, you could run a store with one employee if you need to. So it just simplifies everything. And then the trailer goes even further. And then it’s like half the cost of a brick and mortar again, you know, so you could buy one trailer to maybe six, or sorry, you could pay by six cookie trailers, or mobile franchises compared to like one franchise of a competitor. So it’s really just again, trying to lower that barrier of entry to entrepreneurship.
Kara Goldin 33:44
That’s awesome. So Bennett, Maxwell founder and chairman of dirty Dow, we’ll have all the info in the show notes as well. But thank you so much for coming on. And good luck with everything. I’m super excited for you. And if you have not tried Dirty Dough, you need to find one local to you or go online and check it out for sure. But thank you so much. And thanks, everyone for listening. Thanks, Kara. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and good bye for now.
