The Startup CPG Podcast

Karl Franz Williams
Foreign. If you're raising growth capital and then using that capital to invest inventory, then you never have enough growth capital. You only paying for your inventory. Right? You know, even if your margins are great, you're never going to be able to win that cycle. So you literally have to fundraise along two pathways. Building credit, which is extremely hard for early stage brands, and raising growth capital and having both at the same time.

00:35
Hannah Dittman
Hey everyone, I'm Hannah Dittman, operations and finance, host of the startup CPG podcast. And today I'm really excited to be bringing a special founder fundraising fireside episode joined by Carl Franz Williams. Carl's the founder of Uncle Waifley's the small batch real ingredient Caribbean inspired ginger beer. Redefining what a classic mixer can be. Uncle Waithley's isn't just another ginger beer. It's a celebration of island culture, real ingredients and Caribbean craftsmanship brought to the masses with intention. In this episode, Karl gets real about the founder journey. Early capital needs scrappy fundraising, navigating friends and family rounds and crowdsourcing and how to leverage grant programs. We break down what's needed to drive and sustain velocity on shelf where founders can easily make mistakes, managing capital, what traction actually looks like and how to juggle it all. Carl shares the hard won lessons from.

01:25
Speaker 3
Someone who's lived both big cpg.

01:27
Hannah Dittman
Corporate beverage and artisanal craft and is now channeling his roots, his background, his creativity and his entrepreneurial muscle into building something truly unique. Enjoy.

01:43
Speaker 3
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Hannah and today I am.

01:48
Hannah Dittman
Here with Karl Franz Williams, the founder of Uncle Waithley's. Carl, welcome to the show.

01:53
Karl Franz Williams
Hey, thanks for having me.

01:54
Speaker 3
We're super excited to have you today. This is a new type of episode we're trying out hearing the fundraising perspective from the founder lens. Now I think this is going to be such an interesting conversation today and thank you so much for joining us. I'd love to start out with getting a brief background of your own personal experience and journey and the path that led you to founding Uncle Waithleaf.

02:15
Karl Franz Williams
I didn't know it when I started that it was going to go this right way, but pretty much my entire career has been in beverage in some way. So I went to Yale, got a degree in electrical engineering. I know you're saying nothing to do with beverage, but I started my screens beverage. Right? Exactly, said no one. But I ended up starting my career with Procter and Gamble in working in manufacturing. So I was using my degree but I was working in a plant that made Sunny Delight in a Hawaiian Punch. And then with P and G, I moved into brand, and I worked on, say, D on the brand side. And then they put me on GAIN Laundry to charge it, which I always say is the reason I left that company.

02:54
Speaker 3
You were like, I'm beverage only.

02:56
Karl Franz Williams
I'm beverage. Gain is cool. I still use gain. It was just that I was in my early 20s, and I didn't want to hear about laundry anymore. So anyway, I ended up leaving P and G and I went to work for Pepsi. So I was at Pepsi and did some work, and I was on Mountain Dew. Ran that for a while, and then went into innovation. Did some new product development work for Pepsi, and then had this crazy idea. I say crazy now. In retrospect. At the time, it seemed, like, brilliant. But then I was gonna leave and start opening bars and restaurants. Yeah. Yeah. I did that. And I've done that for the last several years, and I guess I've done pretty well with it.

03:38
Karl Franz Williams
One of our bars, 67 Orange street, was top 27 bars in America on Esquire, and were top 50 in New York every year in Timeout, but really sort of leaned into the mixology side of things, and I got to be really good at it to the point that today I teach the premier bar program in the industry. It's called Bar 5 Day. I lecture all the time on spirits and cocktails, so it's definitely a space. But during the pandemic, the hospitality world shut down, and Arlisa largely did. And at one of the bars, the rum bar, I was looking for the right, perfect ginger beer. Like, I needed a ginger beer to complement the program were developing. And I couldn't find anything that had the nuance and flavor that I grew up knowing. And so my family's from the Caribbean, from St. Vincent.

04:27
Karl Franz Williams
So I grew up knowing a certain. We made ginger beer growing up, and it was like, this doesn't taste like that at all. So we created one. We're mixologists. So we kind of added some twists to it to make it extra special. But it was kind of really rooted in that. That sort of cultural flavor. And so during the pandemic, that bar was closed, but I was still selling this ginger beer, like, in a bottle of to go kind of thing from one of my other bars. And people loved it. And I was like, I don't know if this restaurant thing, this bar thing, is the future. Maybe I need to take this journey full circle.

04:58
Speaker 3
Full circle, yeah. Back to where you started.

05:01
Karl Franz Williams
Back to where I started.

05:02
Speaker 3
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, Carla, you're so cool. We should be friends. But that. That's awesome that every kind of experience in your life has really. You've almost had this, like, guiding North Star, even in circumstances where it wouldn't seem like it would lead you that way, that's kind of led you to where you are today. I think that's just cool that your passion has driven you in a way that's worked out so well, and now you're right in the thick of it, pulling from so many different experiences and your own culture and background. And what an awesome way to be focused on entrepreneurship. And you're the right person for the job, clearly.

05:37
Karl Franz Williams
Thank you. You know what hits, though, you just said or anything? I mean, besides, we can be friends. We can definitely be friends. You're in New York, let's do. But no, like, what hits is that you picked up on this other. The authenticity piece, the cultural piece, the idea that, like, that stuff has always mattered to me. So my family, I mentioned from the Caribbean, but I grew up here. And so while there were Caribbean communities around, a lot was about a lot of the experience or the connection to the culture I had to seek out, in a sense. Right. And so do I seek it out. I've. She brought it into what I do. And family is also extremely important. So the name of the brand is Uncle Waithi. Uncle Waithi was my grandfather. He was a farmer.

06:17
Karl Franz Williams
I remember growing up, like, out in the banana fields and the like, and he grew ginger. He was passionate about health. He lived to be a hundred years old, so obviously he got something right.

06:28
Speaker 3
Oh, Uncle.

06:29
Karl Franz Williams
Yeah. My dad is also named Waithley. And to this day, my dad is. Goes back and forth to St. Vincent. He lives in New York, but he goes back and forth to St. Vincent, and he makes beverages that he sells on the island. And so he's always coming to me like, hey, I got this new recipe that would this work proper way. It's cool because sometimes it's almost like there's a little bit of competition between us. Now my dad is 81, right? So, like, I'm like, dad, you won on. On jump. But this is definitely something that has roots in both cultural experience, flavor profiles, but also in working across the years in terms of understanding what matters and what are motivating factors and what people want.

07:10
Karl Franz Williams
So being actually in the space, being in a bar, I get to hear from people all the time. Being a bartender, I get to understand how bartenders think. And work. And I think if I just had the Pepsi experience and the Proctor experience, I'd be a good beverage manager, a good gm. I could create and innovate and build and grow a brand and. Right. But this is real lived experience of the end user, of the person who's going to be experiencing and working with our product. And I think that gives us a very unique perspective. So all these flavors are Caribbean flavors. They're not just for Caribbean people. They're for a broad range of people. And we know they hit because I've seen them do that.

07:48
Karl Franz Williams
And then the other side of it is like Caribbean culture is just on fire right now, starting with the culinary. So Caribbean food has been around for like, top restaurant in New York City right now. Caribbean flavors number four. So, you know, you have Tatiana number one. Number four is Kabawa. You have huge restaurants just. And chefs just crushing it using these Caribbean flavors in ways that hadn't been innovated before. And it started spilling over onto just like recognition of the neighborhood. So, like Timeout picked Flatbush, which is like a Caribbean neighborhood, as like the coolest neighborhood in the world. Not just in the country, in the world. Right. So there's a lens on Caribbean culture. And I think for a brand like this, it's the time. And you can't find these flavors anywhere else. They're not on the shelf yet.

08:34
Karl Franz Williams
So it really positions us to really do something pretty amazing with this brand.

08:38
Speaker 3
Yeah, the. I see the vision and so much to unpack there. First of all, your family is probably not just proud of you, but proud of this whole concept and brand. It seems like really a generational representation of a lot of important love and passion and respect for all the people in your life that have contributed to who you are. What a better way to pay tribute than something living and breathing like this. You mentioned earlier, before we got on the episode, that you have kids and cool for them too, so mad props for that. And then, yeah, I think the movement for sure. I think there's been so much development on global awareness and culture and different things. Even with music. I mean, there's so much going on in so many different scenes. I see what you're saying.

09:23
Speaker 3
And then from a more tactical product perspective as well. I'm just thinking of myself like ginger beer is like a staple entry level item. Like when you get out of college and you're like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna be an adult now and start making actual drinks. Like one of the first go tos, you're gonna go to is a Moscow Mule because it's just like such an easy entry point. And when you go to the grocery store, it's like there's the one option in the small portion and there's like the 14 pack of ginger beers that you're going to buy from whatever Canada Dry that you're going to replace it with. There's some crazy thing. So yeah, I think it's definitely something that people drink a lot. Maybe don't even think about all the time, but definitely drink a lot.

10:04
Speaker 3
And it's not like some huge artisanal representation or deep effort has been put into the mainstream on these items. So I think there's a huge opportunity. I can see where your mind's at and I agree. You definitely have the background and the knowledge of the right people using it in the culinary and the mixology space. So exciting chat.

10:25
Karl Franz Williams
I'll say that. The other part of it is I think ginger beer, it's an entry point, it has a reason. So the other thing that's happening is people are just drinking less, right? They're drinking less alcohol and they're looking for options. And so the numbers are crazy. Like that segment. So the alcohol replacement segment is up 27% year over year. It's over 800 million right now. A few years ago was. It was barely an existing marketplace. We're seeing a lot of numbers around millennials, Gen Z and younger just not drinking the way that older generations drank. And so options become important. Now a lot of bars have ginger beer because just what you said, it's a great mixer, but they're just pouring it as a mixer.

11:05
Karl Franz Williams
And when someone's like, oh, maybe they don't have a mocktail menu or something like that, they're getting a ginger beer. So as good of an experience. But it's already there is the point. There's already a reason to be there. And so one of the things that I'm seeing is the entry point for a lot of the emerging NA brands is difficult. They're trying to figure out how to get into the on premise space. But for the bartenders and consumers in that space, there's not an easy set. Like they're a bartender, I want to create my own. A lot of them sort of, they're essentially RTDs, right? I mean the NA spirits and they've begun to find a place. But a lot of them are RTDs.

11:40
Karl Franz Williams
And if it's an RTD, especially in a craft bar, you're not bringing in an RTD because you're Going to make your own. You're going to. That's what bartend to do. We bartend, right? We create.

11:49
Speaker 3
Yeah, for sure. You're like, let me just crack this can for you real quick.

11:53
Karl Franz Williams
Right, right.

11:54
Speaker 3
That's not.

11:54
Karl Franz Williams
That's not what you do. So what it does is it gives us a reason to be there. And once we're there in those places, like, we actually can substitute in either place. So there's three flavors of product. There's the original flavor, which perfect Moscow Millennium, whatever ginger beer was going to go, you can use this. We also have sorrel, which is a Caribbean drink made with hibiscus and various spices. We have a smoked pineapple with anise, star anise and thyme. And you're like, thyme. Okay, right. Because were thinking about that. We were thinking about how do we put those flavors in so it becomes super easy for that bartender, you just pour Spirit Uncle Waithley's and you're done. Or just Uncle Waithley's. A lot of our bars and restaurants have it on the shelf.

12:37
Karl Franz Williams
So our business is uniquely positioned to win both on and off premise. Uncle Waithy's. One of our first customer outside of our own bars was Whole Foods, and that relationship has grown tremendously there. We're in over 200 of their stores today, about 225 of their stores all the way up down the east coast from Boston to Florida. They invested in the brand, and so they're on our cap table. And so if you needed a validation from one of the most discerning buyers in the industry that this is something that's more than just real thing, has real legs like that, I think that's a great example of that. So I'm bullish on this. I'm passionate about it. It is something that I enjoy both making and marketing and putting out there because of all the layers that we just talked about.

13:23
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think there's so much exciting, interesting opportunity and traction that's already happened for you guys. It's really cool. And I think a space that maybe someone especially you get a lot of kind of like MBA business ideas where someone was in business school and they had to come up with a concept and they. They think through it and they're like, oh, I'm going to launch that. You know, a brand like this will never be created in that way because there's so much more nuance and passion and things going on. I think those are the coolest brands that end up succeeding. It's like Ones that you don't really recognize what a big market there is or how much use cases there are or how important having a better option might be. So I'm super excited to jump in the rest of the chat.

14:07
Speaker 3
I think this is amazing context to kind of lay the land to get in some more fundraising conversation. I'd love to kick it off with just what has the capitalization and fundraising process and journey for your company from inception to now been like? Obviously you're mentioning Whole Foods being on your cap table, but yeah, would love to hear kind of just the story through that lens.

14:30
Karl Franz Williams
Yeah. Fundraising is always sort of a. I mean it's interesting topic for me because I've experienced what it's like to work on a brand where money is no option. We were launching a product and I was at Pepsi and I got a 5 to $10 million budget to go launch this brand. And then I know that there's like another 30 of those millions available should I need it. Right. Unlimited resources on product development, testing. I have all of the data I want about how it's performing in the market. I can do complex segmentations, work with huge agencies on figuring out positioning. Yeah, that's not the world of being a startup entrepreneur at all.

15:13
Speaker 3
I've had those experiences too. It's a hard pivot when you're. It's just you is so different. Dining table, it's so different.

15:21
Karl Franz Williams
I would say that the other side of it is like I think this perspective is resonates because like when I moved into sort of the hospitality space and started opening bars and restaurants, I was doing that with my own money. And so that's a whole nother world where all of a sudden you're resource constrained and you're trying to figure out how to do this, but you don't have the money to do it. And I think the way that this journey is sort of like it's been a learning experience because you kind of come into this and the way that you talk about what you're trying to do, the way you position it so that is on the exit potential. It's on where is it going. You're not building like restaurants and bars are cash flow businesses.

15:59
Karl Franz Williams
They operate in such a way that no one's looking at when you open a unit or even five units, they're not thinking necessarily about the exit value on that. It's like what are we doing on a day to day. Whereas if you're building a company like UNCLE Way Fees, you're thinking about exit and thinking about where you're scaling to and how that sort of plays out. And then the other side of it is because of that and just because of the economics of building a beverage brand, there's these huge entrenched competitors, right? There is. It's a crowded space, there's constantly new entrants. You have to invest quite a bit to be able to create scale.

16:37
Karl Franz Williams
And so just the perspective that you're coming from as a beverage entrepreneur, the other side is sort of the separation in terms of the, sort of the paths of fundraising. If you're raising growth capital and then using that capital to invest inventory, then you never have enough growth capital. You only paying for your inventory, right? Even if your margins are great, you're never going to be able to win that cycle. So you literally have to fundraise along two pathways. Building credit, which is extremely hard for early stage brands, and raising growth capital and having both at the same time. The other thing that I've sort of learned along this is kind of like this idea that you can't really. Capital coming in drips is also. Can also be very difficult for these businesses like this.

17:22
Karl Franz Williams
You kind of need large sums so you can plan things out and build a calendar and forecast.

17:31
Karl Franz Williams
I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, just in terms of my interaction with folks coming into this space, a lot of it starts with hey, I got this product that I love or I see this opportunity in the market and I want to fill it. And then there's almost this kind of hesitancy about do I want to actually go out and give up some of my company for money? Do I want to raise, do I want to take like how much do I really need to do this? And I think it's really easy to get sort of maybe slowed down to lose. I've seen entrepreneurs lose the opportunity just in that initial stage because they don't raise enough to kind of get through the initial hurdles that you need to even get the critical mass to get to the next place.

18:15
Karl Franz Williams
And you can talk and raise cycles and seed and pre seed and all that, but washing all that away, just thinking of it in terms of like if you're raising capital in this space, you're raising enough to be able to create the traction that you need. And that means in terms of both on shelf and what it takes to do that well. And so you find entrepreneurs catching up on that part, right? It's like, okay, now I'm in retail, let me learn how to do retail. But I didn't know how to do retail, so I haven't budgeted for all of my TPRs and promos and merchandising and sales folks and slotting fees and blah, blah, you know.

18:51
Karl Franz Williams
And all of a sudden that budget is gone and you're in the five stores that you're in are you're trying to figure out how to scale those stores to get to the next level to make sure the velocity is there. I almost wish that there were more resources in the early stages of building brands for folks. Perhaps there are just in terms of what it takes to actually do this, like what are the amounts you need and how you do that.

19:12
Speaker 3
I've had that same thought before. I think that part from a high level investors definitely know it takes capital to start a brand, but I don't think a lot of people and this is category dependent on how complex what you're doing is and all these things. But I really don't think a lot of people know how much it takes and what it's like in the 0 to 1 capital needs space even before you have your product final. There's like traction milestones that you have to show in each gateway of your growth journey. Getting into retail is very rarely just concept to retail. You've already had to go 0 to 1, then you're going 1 to 2, then you're in retail and maybe from the part of two to three is where most investors are seeing brands even on the very early side.

20:05
Speaker 3
So it takes a lot. I mean like you're saying, especially if you, even if you are in CPG and you come from that background and you're working for a big company or you've had good experience, like you don't realize if you want to do any flavor development, anything that's going to be required to make an early scrappy brand stand out. Because you can't just put a whatever stock product out there with no budget, no marketing and expect that to soar. You're going to have to put a lot of investment in the product development side and getting that right to even have a chance at getting to that next gateway. And that takes extra time because you don't have the agencies, you don't have the resources, you don't have the things that money buys efficiency a lot of times too. And you don't have that.

20:49
Speaker 3
It's all on you. Yeah, it's complex. What was kind of the journey like for you from getting to that? You said you started bars and restaurants with your Own money. What was the journey of getting from your like day one I'm working on Uncle Waithley's to getting any sort of capital in the business and being able to kind of start to grow in that way.

21:08
Karl Franz Williams
I came into this initially assuming that I could build it the way that I had built the restaurants, which was invest some capital, add some sort of loans or debt to that and then scale up to a point and then you're okay. And you quickly realize that model doesn't work. So we initially started, I made an initial capital investment and then we raised money through a few CDFIs and so we got some initial loans there and that kind of got me out the gate, got the product developed and on the shelf. But again like just on the shelf doesn't mean anything, right? Like there's no velocity there. Now you got a demo. Now people don't know what the product is. You gotta talk about it. And I quickly realized that we needed a lot more than that sort of initial capital.

21:56
Karl Franz Williams
Even as simple as production on beverage, there are very few co packers who will do small runs for beverage. There's better options in can and glass, but in glass in particular, you're just not getting. They want to see. We were seeing the number we heard a lot of was we want to see a 5,000 case run to start. That's $100,000 or more. Like what are we talking about?

22:19
Speaker 3
Yeah, right. Like no, same boat and personal care for custom too. I mean, same boat, right.

22:25
Karl Franz Williams
And so it's like, okay, and if I do well and I sell through that and that meant that I had to invest in marketing and brand. So saying again what we said initially, which is just having the right amount and this is something. Access to capital then becomes a question, right? Like so where do I get this capital? And it's extremely rare that just on the strength of your pitch deck and your background, a VC is going to say, yes, I'm getting institutional money from day one. Right. Like that's very hard. It does happen. It's very rare. There's a small percentage of folks that are going to do that. It's friends and family. That's where you want to be. And also gives you the greatest flexibility to sort of control the direction that you want to go.

23:05
Karl Franz Williams
So there's benefits beyond the fact of it's almost impossible to get venture or institutional. You also are able to build in a more controlled way. And so we initially started with how can we do that with some scale? And so crowdfunding was the first step that we took. We looked, we did a raise on StartEngine and the thinking was I'm doing two things there. I'm creating a group of free marketers, free influencers who are going to go around the country and talk about my product. Right. Because they're invested in both meanings of the word and what and the success of the brand. And secondly the valuation is up to me. Right. Like obviously with anything, pricing is pricing, right? There's supply and demand. And ultimately what the demand is for, what you're doing is going to determine whether your price actually works.

23:56
Karl Franz Williams
And so you got to price it right. But that decision is up to me. And there was, there's no one who's going to tell me what my price should be except me at the end of the day. And so that gave us the flexibility to really build a. Now it has to be rationale based. You gotta, there's a reason for that price. And the better you are at having a strong reason and then being able to communicate that, the more likely that people you're able to create the demand for that price. And so it's very difficult to do if you're not leading in with something like that. So we started with crowdfunding. We also started looking at accelerators and competitions. I've heard this from ironically from other. This is one of the things from other sort of black entrepreneurs.

24:39
Karl Franz Williams
And being a black entrepreneur presents a different challenge. Friends and family is this place where you get the most money. But There is a 10x gap in average family wealth. So that if you look at household wealth in this country, there's a 10x gap there. So there's not much wealth to kind of tap into. And then VC, I think the last number I saw was 0.1% of VC. I think in 2024 went into black brands. So there was black controlled, our own operated brands. And so there's often much harder access to get into that sort of institutional capital space. And so a lot of the other entrepreneurs of color have said to me, when they got to VC it was because they were over accelerated.

25:22
Karl Franz Williams
What they mean by that was it's much easier to end up in an accelerator or something like that says hey, we're going to teach you how to do this and then give you something possibly.

25:32
Speaker 3
I see, yeah.

25:33
Karl Franz Williams
And so they've all been in probably more accelerators than any other similarly situated entrepreneur. So we started looking at accelerators and programs and we ended up being a top finalist for the Black Ambition Prize from Pharrell Williams got a hundred thousand out of that. So that was like our first year break. Yeah.

25:53
Speaker 3
Oh, my God. Good for you. And there's so much to say about the funding gaps. And to your point on the accelerator programs, obviously, as a founder, I've looked at those myself, grants and accelerator programs, and I think you're spot on. It's like initiatives anchored at trying to close those gaps, but it's not necessarily from the parties where the gap exists. It's not like investors closing the gap. It's ancillary groups trying to close the gap. So I think important to shed light on, and I'm glad that you were able to find success in that path. But it is much more challenging and people are hearing a lot of these things that we're saying. Crowdsourcing, friends and family. Do you know how much work you have to do relative to the amount of money that you're getting out of that while you're running a business?

26:41
Speaker 3
It is not easy. Like, I think investors also know those things exist. It is not easy. Those programs can be like 12 weeks long. Like, they're intense. You have to. It's like participation based. You have to be in meetings, you have to be pitching and pitching. You have to do all the things, the homework assignments, go through all the interview rounds. Like, it's like fundraising for years with not the reward of the 3 million check at the end of it. So, yeah, it keeps you alive. But the hustle journey versus someone else who could tap into like a very sizable friends and family dynamic and then have enough momentum to go straight to a VC profile.

27:23
Speaker 3
It is a very different journey and just want to take a second to highlight that and also give your props for being able to navigate that route up to this point. Because personally, I know that's a challenge and it's not always the funnest way. And it's stressful, too.

27:38
Karl Franz Williams
Yeah. And again to another factor there, which is sort of age and responsibility. That's a much easier path if you don't have a family, if you don't have a lot of responsibility, because you can dedicate your entire life in a way to doing this. I think one of the advantages of experience is just that. Right. There's a lot that you learn along the way. And I think that experience helps you avoid a lot of the pitfalls and allows you to make better decisions as an entrepreneur. I think there's a sweet spot there where your experience makes you a better entrepreneur without making you jaded. Or to the point where you're not hearing, you're not available to bring in new information. And so there is a sweet spot in there.

28:17
Karl Franz Williams
But when you're doing these sort of programs to your point, like the amount of energy that you have to invest in there, that's a ton of energy. If you have a life outside of that, it becomes almost impossible. And just in terms of the amount of time that you can invest into growing your business, a big part of success at retail or success in the field is presence. And particularly early on, people want to hear from and see a founder. Yes, you can have salespeople out there join, but they want to hear from and see a founder. The founder's presence matters. And I've tried to comb myself. They got some new technology nowadays. But you know. The irony of it.

28:56
Speaker 3
Is your AI strategies.

28:58
Karl Franz Williams
AI exactly right.

28:59
Speaker 3
Like a little quarrel bot.

29:02
Karl Franz Williams
It hasn't worked to clone. And trust me, I'm doing AI up and down. I have AI in email, I got writing stuff for me. It's recording videos, doing the whole thing.

29:12
Speaker 3
Yeah, AI is on the payroll.

29:14
Karl Franz Williams
AI is definitely on the payroll. But it, that's a whole nother conversation about using AI the right way. But. But it does it at the end of the day. Like even with the most savvy execution of resource options when you have to invest. Every founder will say this when they're raising. I can't wait to get to my raised point so I can get back to running my business now. Take on top of that and add these other layers. And so the whole idea of being able to run your business when you actually get back to that. So I am proud of what we've been able to do with these hurdles and we've been able to build our business to create opportunity.

29:54
Karl Franz Williams
And so where I prioritized programs and the like was do they create opportunities that go beyond a check, that go beyond a just learning, having an experience and do they create things that are sustainable for us? So I think examples are the up Next program with UNFI basically gives you a two year Runway where the fees are less. So that and then a lot of support around getting your brand in UNFI and out to the retailers that buy from unfi great type of program in terms of creating capacity and again bringing down costs. So we sort of get back into that resource constraint idea. The whole Foods Leap program is another one that I think is fantastic. So I prioritized looking for opportunities that aligned with that sort of thinking. They're not just giving me Knowledge. They're not just, maybe I get a check.

30:50
Karl Franz Williams
They're like, if nothing else, I know that I'm coming out of that program with additional opportunity or capacity for growth.

30:59
Speaker 3
Great mindset and I think very strategic and hard and well earned, I'm sure, to acquire all the knowledge on. On the path that you've been on. And yeah, just what a testament to how scrappy the founder days really are. I think a lot of founders who have made it or who have gotten investment, they've kind of been worried to socialize any part of their journey in a negative way or in a way that might be perceived a certain way. And then when everyone's a big success, they kind of downplay what the early years were actually like or wash it away as like, oh, they were hard. But it's so important to talk about what the actual intricacies and nuances of these things are because all founders are going through the same thing.

31:42
Speaker 3
And there's really not a lot of sports spotlight on what it is actually like on this journey in the early phase and pre institutional funding phases. I don't think it's very well understood by anyone other than someone in the founder club.

31:59
Karl Franz Williams
And if you think about it like, you hear like one of the things that's often gets spoken of as a source of, I mean as a point of pride of, as a nod to the potential is you'll see like 3x founder or previous founder or someone who. Right. And what they're really saying is they've been through this process, they have developed the emotional and strategic. So I think both mental and strategic way, like tools to be able to navigate through that experience. They have contacts, they have resources, they have people that they can tap into. They have a playbook that they've written and they're not afraid of hard work and how to get things done. And I think that one of the unique things about what I've been saying here is, and particularly in our case, there's a lot of lived experience here.

32:52
Karl Franz Williams
I've opened four restaurants and built those into successful businesses. And so like, there's an experience that goes into that I think makes what I'm doing here and my ability to be able to do it unique. It also is a sort of like, I feel like an insider, outsider because when I walk into rooms a lot of the time in sort of the CPG world, you don't find many people who've done. Who worked at Procter and Pepsi and then went to do this. There are some who I Met. But that perspective with the other side of it, I think makes for a powerful combination big time.

33:27
Speaker 3
As soon as you said your background, I was like, oh yeah, I totally see where that is.

33:32
Karl Franz Williams
Yeah, yeah. And so I was excited about this because I love the idea of being able to share some of this. Like, I think that there are our brand and what we're building. Caribbean flavor is a bigger idea than just Uncle Waitley's and just beverage. I think there's a lot that our company can and will do as we scale with this idea of Caribbean flavors and beverage. Like, wow, right? There's like. And then from the lens of authenticity and culture and mixology, there's just a fantastic world there. But I also think there's a great opportunity to kind of shine a light on a direction for entrepreneurs, for a lot of ideas out there who want to be able to do these things, but are just trying to figure out how to get past all those first hurdles I talked about.

34:17
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think such great perspective and great knowledge that you've had. Thinking a little bit more about the forward looking fundraising process and potentially speaking to investors down the road. What lessons have you learned through your journey so far that you're planning to apply to the go forward or that you think others could learn from on if they're just starting out on their journey and maybe get a little bit of a bunny hop on some things?

34:42
Karl Franz Williams
Yeah, I mean, forecasting and budgeting is extremely hard for a lot of the reasons we talked about so far. But the better you are at doing it, understanding your burn and your run rate and how much capital you actually need to hit. Some of these benchmarks I think is something that is critical to success. I, you know, I hear a lot of brands that don't make it, their story being we did great, we got out, we raised a bunch of money at first and we ran out of money and we couldn't raise anymore. But we had a good product or we had velocity but we couldn't raise anymore. And I always see when I hear those stories, I'm sort of dissecting them. Okay, so why, if the product was selling and it was a good product, there was velocity.

35:28
Karl Franz Williams
Why couldn't you raise any money? It has to get into how you're using capital allocation, use of resources and how you're and your plan for growth. And if that plan for growth gets you to a place that is investable, you're going to be able to raise money, but you also have to be able to use the capital that you Bring in to get there and in between is a great forecast in a budget. And so this doesn't sound like rocket science. Right. But it gets news.

35:56
Speaker 3
It does. And I think it's oftentimes missed because people just haven't had that as a part of their professional experience and routine maybe until they are a founder. And so not understanding the importance of focusing on that or honestly, I mean, I'm in the same boat. I get it. Like you've got so many other things going on to like sit down and think. Like on top of the 5 million to DOS, I'm also going to check this one docket and update this. And there's also the tactical execution of it. I get that. But yeah, it is important. And it is important for investors too, for sure.

36:31
Hannah Dittman
Yeah.

36:31
Karl Franz Williams
It's kind of knowing what to put on there too. So what am I investing in? What am I using the dollars for? What are the right levers that are going to make my business grow? And there's an entire industry, a huge industry. In fact, it's probably a bigger industry that I'm sure it's probably bigger than CPG of, which is the advisor industry. People who are going to show up and offer you advice on how you should spend your money for a fee, which is oftentimes too high of a fee. We've done a lot of the shows at every fancy foods expo west and east and we've done a lot of these shows. And a good 50% of the people who come stop by the booth are offering services to help you understand how to do that part of it. Right.

37:13
Karl Franz Williams
And I think for the early stage entrepreneur, that becomes a whole nother thing. How do you take all of this and shift it down to this? And these are the things that I actually need to do where I should be spending my money to create that velocity path. Obviously it was easy. If there was a clear answer then that industry would be gone. It's not. But I do think that's where things get lost. And so I do feel that one of the ways that our company has approached that is to build out in sort of an idea of like building density and depth in terms of as opposed to breadth. You can scale out. And without a well developed and finance strategy to drive velocity at scale, your business will collapse and it will shrink.

37:58
Karl Franz Williams
That sort of shrinking is not makes you less investable. You want to see a curve going like this, not going like this. Right?

38:04
Speaker 3
Yeah. You want to be looking up and to the right where you can.

38:06
Karl Franz Williams
Right, Right. So I Think that just sort of, we've gone at this in terms of let's focus on depth, let's build out a playbook, let's build out, let's create retail traction, let's create a velocity story that we can then replicate. And in getting to that story, where we've learned what we believe are the right levers to scale for our brand. Right. Every brand is different. The levers are the most important for our brand. And so when we think about our growth, we look at it as, hey, we've had steady growth. The opportunity to be able to have that sort of the hockey stick that everyone wants now becomes a question of dollars versus a question of I have the dollars, but what do I do?

38:49
Karl Franz Williams
We're in a space of we know what to do because we've learned as we've steadily grown what to do now we want to scale that and if we do that same thing, which we know works, we can get that. So that's where our company's at today.

39:01
Speaker 3
I love the way you think. I think brick by brick is so important in cpg. There is no overnight CPG success. Things take a long time to get right, to figure out, to tweak. And I don't just mean product. I mean as a founder, every time you enter a new channel, a new phase of growth, a new part of your company, you're essentially starting a brand new job and you're re getting up some learning curve to some extent with how it relates to your brand. And that takes time to get proficient at and to do well and to socialize the right way and build in a way that you have control and success with.

39:36
Speaker 3
So I think you're spot on and I feel like, I hope this is the beginning of a super awesome fundraising journey for you, because I, I think your head's totally in the right space and I'm a big believer in your brand. I'd love to take a second to pivot into a case study question. As you know, startup CPG has the largest slack community in the industry with now over 30,000 members. I'd love to pull a question directly from our channel and have you answer it as a case study for any founders with a similar question. The question I wanted to ask you today is how do I go about getting a warm intro?

40:08
Karl Franz Williams
So the question is, how would I go about getting a warm intro? I got this feedback from someone before which was take every conversation and what it meant was that you could quickly decide whether or not that conversation is Going anywhere. But networking is about being open to talk and to have conversations and knowing how to understand what the opportunity is both for you to be useful or meaningful. Like I've often heard the question is like you're thinking about, well, what can I do for that person that I'm supposed to be able to do something for them? It's a little more nuanced than that. It's not like the right person to invest in your company is sitting there thinking about like, well, is this person going to help me figure out this problem that I like?

40:52
Karl Franz Williams
That's not necessarily it, but it is just like finding a point of connection. Finding something that you can and then understanding what it is that you want, I think is the other side of it. So if you know what you want and you can identify a point of connection with somebody, it becomes much easier to ask. To ask the question, do you know, is there someone? Oftentimes that flows naturally in the conversation. Oh, that's what you're working. I know somebody who. And that's a great way to do that. I think LinkedIn is a fantastic platform, obviously, for networking and connections. I think interest groups, startup, cpg, go to the meetings, go to the meetups, go to the.

41:32
Speaker 3
Yeah, plug us. Plug us.

41:35
Karl Franz Williams
No, absolutely. You know, I think the organization is fantastic. Included is another one. Right. So, like being in. In the right places and being willing to have conversations, I think it's missed, is that it's easy to talk to people who you assume are like, you are going to think, like you're going to look like you maybe are going to have your perspective. We're going to. But your network never grows if it's the same people, because the same people know the same people, if the same. Right. So how do you get outside of that? Is being willing to try something to talk to the person, or to look in spaces that are not necessarily the ones that are the most obvious. And I think those can often need another space.

42:15
Karl Franz Williams
So a warm intro at the end of the day means that somebody has a little bit of trust in you or they believe what you're saying, which, again, there's some trust there and they want to be able to do that. And so it's finding a way to connect, it's looking outside your comfort zone, and it's knowing what you want.

42:34
Speaker 3
Great advice. And I think so much of the fundraising journey in any path you take it is about networking and learning. First, sponge it up. Like even the Whole Foods program that you're talking about, maybe you talk to someone else who had done that program before and you get a little insight into what that's like so you're prepared and then you can kind of meet people through the grapevine. I think whether you're going for institutional investors who are very warm, intro focused, or whether you're going for alternate funding or opportunity routes, I think learning from as many people as you can in the game of capital and other things, but particularly in the game of capital, is a huge piece of the puzzle in the early initial days of it.

43:16
Speaker 3
So sage advice before we wrap up, I want to take a second to make sure our audience can have an actionable next step to apply all this amazing knowledge to. Carl, you've been so fun to chat with and also such a breath of fresh air. You have a great business mindset and a super passionate vision for your company. I'm super excited to be following along on your journey. What's the best way for founders or investors to reach out to you and to follow along on your journey?

43:42
Karl Franz Williams
You can follow me on social so LinkedIn Karl Franz Williams IG Mr. Carl Franz we are going into a race, I was saying earlier, before we started, where we have a campaign that's going live on We Funder and in about a week or so, and so Uncle Waithi's beverage company on We Funder will have, at least for the next several months, we'll have a ton of information about us and about our campaign. And so you know, those are some of the best ways to do that. Stay in touch.

44:14
Hannah Dittman
Awesome.

44:15
Speaker 3
Well, thank you so much for your time today, Carl. It's been such a pleasure and I'm excited to see you next month in New York. And thanks again for joining us today with we really were glad to have you here. Thanks so much for tuning in everyone.

44:28
Hannah Dittman
If you like this episode, show us some love with a five star review at ratethispodcast.com startup cpg I'm Hannah Ditman, Podcast host and Correspondent here at Startup cpg.

44:38
Speaker 3
I hope you'll join me again as.

44:40
Hannah Dittman
We dig into more juicy topics like ops, finance and all the real talk founders actually need. Come say hi on LinkedIn or ping me on Slack. I'm always eager to hear your questions or brainstorm future episode ideas. If you're a potential sponsor and want.

44:52
Speaker 3
To get in on the fun and appear on the podcast, shoot us an.

44:55
Hannah Dittman
Email@Partnershipstartupcpg.Com and last but not least, if you haven't already, don't miss out on our free Slack community for emerging brands and CPG lovers alike. Join us at startupcpg.com we'd love to have you.

45:09
Speaker 3
See you next time. Sa.