Jordan DeCicco: Founder & COO of Super Coffee

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 so excited to have my next guest here another beverage entrepreneur, fellow beverage entrepreneur, I should say. So Jordan DeCicco, who is the founder and chief operating officer of super coffee, and if you have not tasted super coffee you definitely need to Jordan founded super coffee in 2016 while attending Philadelphia University where he was also a college athlete, tired of unhealthy bottled energy drinks and different coffees that were sweetened with all kinds of stuff. he craved something better. So in his dorm room blender, not in his kitchen, of course, you have to go back to the dorm room of college days, he started mixing organic coffee with some protein MCT oil and a bit of zero calorie sweeteners. And it wasn’t long before Jordan was selling his super coffee in quotes to his teammates, classmates and friends. And then, of course, came his episode on Shark Tank, which many of us have seen, which was just super awesome. I loved it. And the rest is history. So Jordan, along with his two brothers still operate the company today, based in Austin, Texas. And super coffee is the number one zero sugar bottled coffee brand in the US. It is number three total brand behind Starbucks and Duncan and Jordan has taken an idea that he’s super passionate about and decided, let’s go and let’s try and get this out there for everybody to enjoy. So I love, love, love the energy and everything about it. I cannot even wait to hear more from Jordan on this. So thank you so much for coming on Jordan.

Jordan DeCicco 2:34
Thank you, Kara. Appreciate that amazing intro and very, very grateful to be on the show. I’m looking forward to it.

Kara Goldin 2:40
Totally. So before we get into hearing about Super coffee, I’d love to hear your journey building it. I would love to hear more about the early years did you always think that you’d be a coffee entrepreneur?

Jordan DeCicco 2:56
I definitely didn’t think I’d be a coffee entrepreneur kind of starting to get an itch for entrepreneurship in high school. Always just doing odd jobs and trying to create my own jobs versus going to work for somebody else. So I think it was a natural part of my personality. But then, sure enough, my freshman year of college, I had 5am Basketball practices 8am class, and there was no healthy energy options. I loved coffee, but the only option was Starbucks, frappuccinos 290 calories and 40 grams of sugar. And I just wouldn’t put that into my body. So I started blending protein. In coffee in my dorm room blender that we got from our strength coach, my teammates started asking for it, classmates started asking for it. So it just kind of happened naturally just solving a problem for myself. And then later my freshman year I decided, hey, this might actually be a company. Let’s let’s explore that. So that’s how the early days kind of led to the creation of the company.

Kara Goldin 3:49
So you’re in your dorm room, you’re putting a bunch of things together. You have a roommate and you’re in your dorm room.

Jordan DeCicco 3:57
I did, I did. He thought I was crazy. He was a teammate. The whole my whole basketball team thought I was insane at the time, they’d laugh at me. Because literally I would just have you know, stacks of bottles and protein and zero sugar sweeteners that nobody’s ever heard that right, stevia and monk fruit at the time were like that nobody knew what they were cold brew coffee was just emerging in 2015. So it was very early on, but it was a lot of fun. And so I was just tinkering, right? It was just for me, like I just wanted something that was much healthier. That gave me the energy I needed without the crash. And that tasted good. So that was the goal my freshman year. And I was studying business. So I was doing some case studies at the time. Another brand that popped up in my research was hint. So I learned a little bit about your story at that time in my dorm room, which gave me some inspiration, the story of Honest Tea, Seth Goldman as well gave me some inspiration. So some of these brands that came before us from founders like yourself, really gave me the inspiration that I needed to say, wait a minute, this. This isn’t just a solution for myself. This could be a bigger solution for more people.

Kara Goldin 5:00
That’s wild. So how would you describe super coffee to people? It’s changed a bit since the dorm room experiments. But how would you describe it to people for those who have never had it, it’s more than just coffee.

Jordan DeCicco 5:15
Totally. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a healthy, delicious enhanced coffee like in the simplest form. And what that means when you look at it, it’s the only zero sugar all natural, bottled coffee, so ready to drink, it’s got 10 grams of protein in it, instead of half and half or cream or anything like that. There’s nothing artificial, there’s amazing flavors, it’s less than 100 calories. And it gives you a great boost of energy without the crash, we use healthy fats from MCT oil as well to help carry the caffeine and suppress appetite. But it’s really just a delicious, affordable, convenient boost of energy, that you don’t have to worry about what’s in what’s in the product like you do with so many products out there. And even today, I mean, Starbucks, and Dunkin all of their products are loaded with sugar, carbs and artificial ingredients. So why put that into your body when you can have a super coffee for the same price tastes great. And again, much better for you.

Kara Goldin 6:04
So as you were thinking about putting this in the market, I mean, you had not worked at Coke or Pepsi, I hadn’t either. Right? You know, you you just had no idea what you didn’t know I share with people all the time, if I would have actually known, I probably wouldn’t have started the company, right, like way too hard. And you know, sometimes if you think too much about the end, you’ll never get past the beginning. Right? Like it’s totally. So what gave you the the courage? I guess, you know, the stupidity to actually go? Effort?

Jordan DeCicco 6:42
Yeah, for sure. Well, there’s definitely a lot of just naivete, right as a 19 year old in college, just thinking that I could that I could do it. So having that, then, you know, we were raised very competitively. I have two older brothers, Jimmy and J cooperate with me, and I definitely needed them on the team. And that’s how we were thinking about it is, if I could get them to help and be my co founders, then we’re going to be in a much better chance of winning. And because we’re going to do whatever it takes, right? We’re going to bet on ourselves, we’re going to run through walls, we’re going to outwork people, we’re going to solve solve problems for people in terms of the product value proposition. That was really how we approach the business every single day. And again, I think the naiveness, not understanding not knowing how hard is actually going to be really helped, right? Because we didn’t know, all we were doing was going fast, solving problems, working hard. And each day was a new challenge. And we were excited about it. Whereas to your point, if we would have had a formal brand management experience when we went to business school and had brand management experience at Coke, Pepsi, etc, we wouldn’t we would have never tried to tackle the problem, right? They would have looked at it. And analytically, he said, Oh, you know, it’s such a small opportunity. And it’s going to be very difficult to convince consumers and expensive and, and all those things were true. But we were actually just solving those problems on the fly versus worrying about those problems. And having those problems prevent us from starting.

Kara Goldin 7:58
Yeah, no, it’s it’s so true. It’s like I think you you can easily get into analysis paralysis, if you’ve worked inside of a large company, and then you try and go start a company. It’s fascinating. I’d be so curious to hear what you would say to this. But when I first started, you know, everybody was like, you have no experience in the beverage industry. And, you know, I’m sure you got that as well. But the other thing that people said to me was like, oh, you can’t do this, you can’t do it this way. And I kept asking why? And, you know, asking why is actually such a key thing because it sort of wakes people up, you know, your, your bottlers, your, your co packers, right. And they’re like, I don’t know, you just can’t do it that way. And, and so if you have that naive newness to you, and you don’t have that resume behind you, you know, you’re gonna get a lot of people who are probably going to, like, tell you to get out of their plant or whatever. But you’re also going to find some people who are like, I don’t I don’t know, I guess we can try it and see what happens. And I’m sure that was sort of your story.

Jordan DeCicco 9:11
Yeah. 100%. So we were actually the I mean, again, early on, it definitely worked against us. A lot of people kind of wrote us off, like, teachers, right. And we had, you know, entrepreneurship programs. And they, they worked against us for sure, in terms of, you know, telling us what we couldn’t do, everybody was fast to tell us what we could not do and what we were not able to achieve, but we did not listen to those people. But then once we started to get going, and that’s when some of the magic started to happen. People actually gave us the benefit of the doubt and said, Hey, I like what these kids are doing. I want to help them and we reach out for help and we ask people for help. And you can’t be afraid you have to be vulnerable and say hey, we don’t know what we’re doing in these situations. We want to go seek the experts right find find your your board members, your investors, who have experience who can help you and then to your point, ask the Questions like don’t, my first time dealing, I didn’t even know what a contract manufacturer was right? Or what they did, I didn’t know where to source coffee farm or protein from when we needed 1000s and 1000s of pounds right when the business started growing. So you just learn by asking you learn by doing. Obviously, you make mistakes, you can’t make the big ones, you have to avoid the big ones. And that’s where the experts, you know, people with experience can help. But you cannot be afraid, right? Because then you’re never gonna get into it. So we learned a lot, we asked a lot of questions. And that definitely helped us.

Kara Goldin 10:29
One of the interviews that you did, I heard you or your brothers talking about one of your mentors, Seth Goldman. I mean, you touched on him a few minutes ago, who’s the founder of Honest Tea and he, he taught you and your brothers the strategy of inch wide mile deep? Can you describe that for people who are listening to this?

Jordan DeCicco 10:50
Yeah, so when we started, I think we were like, again, most you know, young, ambitious, you know, entrepreneur, first time entrepreneurs where we wanted to put the product everywhere. Immediately, right? We want to be nationwide and internationally, etc. So Seth, founded on his T very successful, he had just sold it to Coca Cola at the time to which was awesome to see, again, great, just very inspiring to us. We reached out to him and said, like, we want to go everywhere. And he was like, Whoa, boys, like know, what you should really actually try to do is just focus on being the best selling bottled coffee in your backyard. So meaning the stores, the retailers that are closest to you, and service those stores really well. And we didn’t understand all the pros and cons, it made sense logically at the time. But when you look back, it’s even more important to start to start that way and still have that focus. But it was so so right, because we were literally able to show up in those stores, we had claimed to 1520 stores, we went store by store, we started that whole foods and and expanded from there, and just say we are going to be the best selling bottled coffee, but we had no idea how. And it comes down to those little nuances within the grocery store every day. And that’s where we learned, right, that’s where we cut our teeth in those first 1015 20 stores, we knew where we needed to be on the shelf, we knew who our competitors were, we knew why consumers liked us, we knew what what consumers didn’t like about the brand do and how to improve. So we got all of those lessons in the first, you know, year just in 20 3040 accounts, right within a 30 mile radius of where we’re producing and living at the time, which was in, in the Washington DC area. So we, if we would have went everywhere too far too wide out of the gate, we would have never got those lessons, we probably would have went out of business in the first year. But because we stayed close to home, we built a really good base. And then we expanded slowly, smartly from there over the next two years and kind of went market by market. Every market we entered, we said we’re gonna want to go really deep in, populate it with the best accounts, have great support, great service for those accounts become the best selling bottled coffee, and we’re not going to move on until we are the best selling bottled coffee. And that discipline really helped us in the early years.

Kara Goldin 12:50
So you are starting, you’re launching a new product, starting a new company, and you’re starting a category, right? I mean, no one was doing this. And I have described this to people over the years, like I had no idea that I was launching a new category again, if I would have known that we were launching an entirely new category called unsweetened flavored water, I probably wouldn’t have done it right. Like that’s just super hard. Like, you know, wouldn’t have done that. But you know, the problem with that. And I’m sure you had the same that nobody knew where to fit you on the shelf. Right, like, and can you describe that for people sort of those early days?

Jordan DeCicco 13:32
Yeah, so many challenges early on. And that was one of them. We didn’t even know where we wanted to be on the shelf. Obviously, we had to get really clear about that. But we learned from our poor consumers what they wanted. And they just wanted a healthier bottled coffee. So we first learned that we need to be next to the other bottled coffees and clearly stand out as the healthy option and own that zero sugar all natural, healthier bottled coffee. At first we were we were concerned if we were to be in the protein section or the nutrition section. So there was some confusion there. And then I mean, you are breaking not only consumer behavior, but to your point, the retailer’s behavior and what they’re used to. And then your distributor who’s bringing the product to the store their behavior to because it’s a new segment, a new category for them. So all these lessons, all these learnings, we realized our job needed to be simplify and make things extremely clear, give great guardrails and direction to all of our partners to our employees of what is super Bobby, why is it different? Where do we exist? How do we fit in? And then what does success actually look like for the brand? We learned after two years, if we wanted to scale nationally and become the brand that we could be? It was gonna be hard because we’re again, we’re changing behavior for people. So we need to be as clear as possible. And again, it’s still not perfect. I don’t think it’ll ever be a perfect solution. But now super coffee has carved itself out almost as Super Coffee has become a category of its own right. So not just a brand, but the category of its own. And we’re not seeing a lot of competitors coming into it because consumers recognize super coffee as that healthy option. Now we’re Still think we’re in the very early days, even though we’re seven years in and doing well, very, very early days of consumer adoption, but we see in another 1015 years, consumers are only going to be wanting to drink, the better for you options, right? So now they’re kind of, we’re still at the forefront 10 more years from now, hopefully, Starbucks and all these other brands are playing catch up on the better for you options.

Kara Goldin 15:21
So what have you learned about brand building? Like, since you’ve started? I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, I think, so many CMOs are sort of, you know, established CMOS for large companies don’t really know how to build a brand from scratch. I mean, it sounds cool. But it’s really hard. Like when no one’s heard your name, they don’t know what to expect from your brand, like, who you want to be? Who’s your target all of those things you have to think about? So what have you learned about brand building?

Jordan DeCicco 15:57
Yeah. And we learned, you know, the hard way, we made a lot of mistakes, for sure, we definitely didn’t get it, right. But you got to be really clear about your purpose, your mission, your values, as a brand, as a company, and then how you communicate those to your core audience, you have to be also very clear about who your core audience is, right? Because you can’t be everything for everyone. And that was part of the issue with our brand early on, is we, we did say super coffee can be for everyone. And that actually made it really hard for us to connect with anyone. Right? So we weren’t really clear about who we’re talking to, why we exist, why they should care? And then how do we actually connect with them? You know, on a personal level, because that’s what great brands do where they make you feel a certain type of way. It’s not just a product value proposition that people are buying. That’s a part of it. But it’s also how do they connect with the brand? What are their your distinctive assets that actually make you stand out in different what makes you relevant for your consumer. So a lot of things do go into it. But it’s more about being very clear, solving a problem connecting with a specific audience, and then staying disciplined and focus to that brand. And once you create that feeling, and you have that magic, and it’s working, stay there, invest in it, scale, et cetera. We also made the mistake of going too far too wide after we did have initial success with expanding products too quickly. And then we kind of confuse consumers with like, what the supercar we actually mean was it actually stand for, so we went into, we did K cups in bags. And our consumer didn’t recognize super coffee for a K cup brand. They wanted the Super Coffee with 10 grams of protein, zero sugar that tasted great, that they knew exactly where to get it from. So we learned, you know, again, a hard way in that in that regard. But when you’re brand building, you want to keep it simple. Keep it clear, make sure consumers know obviously, what the product is, but why the brand exists, and what’s special and different and relevant about your brand.

Kara Goldin 17:45
So there’s always this like, sweet spot for people who are you know, your your big consumers that are drinking multiple? Who is that for you guys? Is that like, if you were to say, what’s that demographic? Obviously, I feel like you spill into multiple demographics. But would you say it’s, it’s a

Jordan DeCicco 18:06
right now? Yeah, I mean, our business really built on the 30 to 35 year old female and, and a mom who’s active with young kids, or maybe not just a professional, who might be single, but earning a little bit more income, and in need super coffee throughout her day to get her, you know, whatever it may be to work to go to the gym, etc. taking the kids to school. And then obviously, to your point, you know, we have a much broader audience. But that’s the core consumer that is really purchasing through probably the most. And that was a surprise to us. Because when we launched this three college student, athletes, males, that’s what we thought the brand was for three, college student athletes, males, mainly, and we couldn’t have been more wrong. And we learned that, you know, relatively quickly. And now we obviously can cater to that and cater to that consumer law. So reaching a broader audience, right, we still do have a lot of males, we’re about 60%, female now. 40% male, but, again, that core consumer was so critical. And I think any brand needs to understand like, the faster you can understand who the consumer is, it’s actually purchasing and loving the product, the faster you can build a better business.

Kara Goldin 19:15
Yeah, that’s awesome. Do you have a significant percent of your business that is direct to consumer as well, either through Amazon as well as your own site? But I’m just curious, is that really where you started to understand who your consumer was?

Jordan DeCicco 19:29
Yeah, exactly. That’s what we started to understand. I think, more more precisely, for sure. I mean, we could obviously see some of the trends in retail, but not as clearly when we’re getting that data, right and then actually speaking to our consumers, so we would go and see the loyalist, right, who was purchasing the most super coffee online, and then we’d reach out reach out to them and see the demographics but then also understand the psychographics and the reasons why they’re they’re purchasing the product and, and then how we could, you know, further improve or make changes to the product, too. better serve them, right? Because there were, even with your loyalist when you talk to them, they’ll say, Yeah, I mean, I drink super coffee every day. And there’s still things that I wish that it was better at, right? So whether it be flavor or sweetener, maybe that’s how we launched our plant baseline, we initially only had dairy options. And we went into plant based because of that. So you learn a lot from your consumers. But again, there’s an 8020 rule, you should be focusing on, you know, the 20% of your consumers that are driving 80% of your business, how do you optimize for them, because if you lose them, that’s where when you can run into a lot of trouble.

Kara Goldin 20:33
Definitely. So every startup makes mistakes, we certainly did at hand. Along the way, it’s about getting back up, as I always tell people that that’s the key to, you know, any successful entrepreneurial journey. So can you share a story about a time when you had a pretty big blunder in the company that you’re like, you know, I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to get out of this. But you did, obviously, and what lessons did you learn?

Jordan DeCicco 21:03
Yeah, I mean, we, we’ve made so many mistakes here. I mean, like, it’s just been seven years of mistakes, I feel like honestly, our first time and to your point, it’s just how, one making sure they’re not big enough to knock you out of the game, and to make sure you learn from them and just keep going and getting better. I think some of the biggest mistakes early on were, were one not being tight on the back end of the business in terms of we were so focused on hyper growth, right, and we were growing in sales was at the forefront, but could have always done a much better job on the on the inventory, and ops side and financial side and planning side. But we were just optimizing for growth. So I would say any business that gets started, it’s great that you can sell product, it’s great that you might find early growth, not a lot of brands do, that’s critical, you need that. But at the same time, each function in the business needs to be really strong, and you can’t be you just because you’re growing, you know, 100% or 200% doesn’t mean that you can, you know, not take care of your finances the way they tell you that you should. So we were we were probably spending more than we should have, in the early days for growth, we probably could have been a little bit more reasonable with our growth expectations, and probably just ran a better business and not grown as quickly. And again, that probably sounds contrary to a lot of young entrepreneurs is like, you know, everybody wants to be a part of that rocket ship. And it’s like, at what, at what cost, though, right. So I think that was probably just one of the larger ones, and then going through COVID, I think we expanded skews way too quickly. Again, we’ve got into different segments, different categories, were very reactive during COVID, trying to figure out what happens, you know, with COVID, if people are at home, Warren, trying to anticipate things not talking to our consumers, really what we should have done is is took a step back and actually just simplified things and focused on the core and why people loved us. So we almost went the opposite direction. And it took us two years. I mean, like, here we are 2023 Still learning and still getting better. We’re still optimizing our portfolio, reducing the total amount of skews that we have making some drastic changes and transformations. Mainly because the business continues to grow and requires different different disciplines. But also because we just made mistakes that we have to correct and keep learning from.

Kara Goldin 23:06
Definitely. So I’ve heard you talk about disruption. I thought this was super interesting. You know, people always talk about disruptive brands, but you talked about how it can be good and bad, right to be disruptive. And so can you share a little bit more about what you mean by this?

Jordan DeCicco 23:24
Yeah, I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re wired in a way and not all from Georgia, obviously. But there’s you know, generally speaking, especially young entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs very ambitious, you want to move fast, right? You want to break things you want to grow, you want to scale you want to disrupt, and there’s a balancing act to that, right? It doesn’t mean that you can do it, it’s not growth at all cost, right? You need to be very, most people focus on the top line and the profit and loss statement of just sales, you need to focus on the bottom half of the p&l, right? And how do you clean up your cost structure to drive profitable, enduring business. And for us, it took a few years to understand what that really meant, and a lot of mistakes, costly mistakes, do things that we could have avoided if we were just spending more time. So I think for us, it was earlier on, if we could go back in time, building out a finance team, and an operations team with more experience than we had, who was willing to challenge us and say, We need to slow down, we don’t need to grow 200% Every year, right. And that’s how you can balance those things. And then put the systems in place the tools in place to support finance in the back end of the business ops, just as much as you’re supporting the sales function, because the end, you’re not gonna be able to grow your top line if your finances aren’t in order if your supply chain isn’t in order, etc. So I think it’s easy to overlook some of those harder administrative functions, but they’re as important as selling product. So those are probably the biggest things when you’re out there disrupting when you have a new killer product. Make sure the gross margins on that product are good, right? Don’t just give it away. Right. So there’s there’s a lot of those types of lessons that we learned early on and again, lessons that we’re still cleaning up in the business. But again, it is not growth by all costs. And I think we saw that a lot too, when interest rates started to change, a lot of investors started to say, We don’t care about growth anymore. We care more about profitability. And that’s a huge change. You know, for first time founders going from, we want to see you grow and take market share to we want to see you start actually producing cash flow.

Kara Goldin 25:18
Yeah. And how do you shift like that quickly, especially when you’ve been in growth, growth growth mode, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, whoa, like, market change? Let’s let’s go and go in this direction? Because it’s hard, right? Like, I’ve talked to a ton of founders. I was just having lunch with somebody yesterday that, you know, she’s it’s a tough situation. I mean, Larry, tough. Right. And I don’t know what the answer is to that. But I think it’s, I’d be curious to hear what you would say.

Jordan DeCicco 25:50
Yeah, I think I think the answer is probably different for any business, depending on where they are and what the challenges are that they face. For us. It was simplify, right skew reductions, discontinue a lot of skews, which is really hard right to do. There’s a lot of change management that goes into that, here’s reduction in team size. So having to reduce the size of your team sometimes is what you need, and just focusing on your core and what you do best. And then if you do have a gross margin issue, you really have to be smart about how do you get improve your gross margins? Is it reducing your trade spend? Or is it having to go out and source you know, ingredients at a better cost or finding a new contract manufacturing partner at a better cost. So those are the big things for us. But they do not happen quickly, right? These these things take years. I mean, if you’re going from five years of hyper growth, like us to all of a sudden thinking, you can just flip a switch to become very keen on on driving profitable growth. You know, for the next five years, it’s going to take two to three years of good change management, and really hard decisions. But again, for us, it was more about simplifying, reducing skews, reducing the size of the team, and really focusing on all of the details that go into managing a good p&l and having balance and still having some growth can’t, you know, cut growth out of the equation? Obviously, you need it, but at the same time really putting an emphasis on sound like operational excellence and financial excellence?

Kara Goldin 27:10
Yeah, no, definitely, I think it’s, I’ve always felt like, even during times when people have said, throw the gas on and grow, grow, grow as close as you can be to profitability, so that you can kind of, you know, shape shift a little bit when needed. I think it’s really, really critical. And this has just been a wake up call and a reminder, for I think so many that it’s, it’s really, really critical. So, so, best advice you’ve gotten along the way and your journey.

Jordan DeCicco 27:45
I mean, we’ve talked about some of it, but I think like, just the idea early on, I think of just not being afraid of going for it and dreaming big. And again, that’s kind of cliche, but it’s so true, because you’re gonna learn so much, there’s so many great lessons that we can share, but like strategic and tactical and nuanced, but like big picture, stuff does matter. And just having the courage, like getting the courage from parents, friends, family, to just go for it, and hang in there. And, you know, have resilience has been so critical to our journey. Because again, like, even once you start doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful, because you’re going to deal with so many issues. And to your point, it’s how you deal with those issues, right? So you push forward. And it’s how you keep going. And so you keep evolving and changing and getting better every year. I mean, that’s probably the biggest lesson is like, don’t be afraid, you’re gonna make mistakes, you’re gonna fail, just keep getting better keep learning, not only is the business going to get better, but you personally will grow so much. And I’ve grown so much from this process of just seven years of trying, failing, improving doing it again, right, and it’s a constant cycle. And then what you start to realize is, you know, you run into the same problems, and they become a little bit easier to deal with, you know, the next time. So just go for it, right, go for it, learn, take the risks, and then get better from it. And then just remind yourself with great people to to try to help mitigate the big ones.

Kara Goldin 29:03
Yeah, definitely, I think I’ll add to yours, it seems like you’ve done really a great job of doing this, you’ve, you haven’t been afraid to reach out to people and whether they’re advisors or board members or investors and bring them into your idea, right. And I think that the more you can network and do that, the better off you’re going to be because when you bring in people and get their advice, people that have been in the trenches before and have built and have seen things. They’re, they’re different. Maybe they’re not in the coffee industry, but they’re in the beverage industry, or their founders right where they’ve seen different cycles, right? I think that that gives you lots of ideas on how you can actually do something big as well and confident is that it’s gonna be okay. So that’s just so so key when you don’t have those voices around you, I think that it just becomes really hard. If somebody’s been in a large company and they’ve never grown anything from zero. They just don’t have the background. Right that that you have. And so I think you’ve done a great job that I think so many people should look at. So, yeah, no, I really, really think that that’s such a huge thing. So well, everyone needs to definitely grab a super coffee and get to know Jordan and his brothers. I wish we had more time. But I’m so excited to have you on and finally, hear the story directly from you and wish you all the best. But

Jordan DeCicco 30:52
thank you so much. Now, this is great. Thanks for giving me the platform. Again. You’ve been a great inspiration for us. And your story is amazing. But to get have this platform and to give back in a way and allow us to share our stories so much better. So

Kara Goldin 31:05
well, we’ll have all the info in the show notes as well. So thanks again, Jordan, 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. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my book on daunted which I share my journey, including founding and building hence, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week, and 2023 and good bye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening