How bootstrapping cost Carbone Fine Food CEO $3.2 Million

Give me something that was a commercial, commercially or visibly successful, but was financially a disaster.

So, look, I talked to my team yesterday. I did my team meeting yesterday and I talked about the success of this brand.

Right. And in order to be successful with a brand, you need three things. You need a brand, right? And it's got to have a brand. And and sometimes a brand starts at a as a product and becomes a brand because of what you do to market it.

Right.

Here we had a brand, right? The second thing you need, which I think in many cases is more important, is team.

You need a team.

Right? and I had both of those with the iced tea company. Third thing you need is money. And me being as smart as I was, you know, kind of 10, 10 years experience in the business and being as entrepreneurial as I am, I was going to bootstrap it.

And I'm going to do this and I don't care what anybody else says. Yeah, it was a big mistake because I put on um 137 distributors in 37 states. Biggest single market distributor in the world at the time was Manhattan beer here in New York and that was my distributor for New Leaf iced tea. And they tried to help me save it. But when 08 came, getting money after that, 2009, 2010, you know, here I am, I've got the distribution. I got it built. Manhattan beer does a couple hundred thousand cases their first year, right? Like this is a product for them. To I mean, to try to save me, they put in a year's worth of orders and paid me in 10 days.

Like to try and help you.

To try to help me get the cash to can pay, you know, give me enough cash to go out and raise more to kind of get it. But I I built the product before I raised the cash and I wasn't doing it kind of simultaneously because I just, you know, doing a lot of it myself, which is to be an opportunity for me.

Is that an addiction? Is that an addiction? Like and I don't mean this in a bad way, but like getting used to bootstrapping things.

And already, I sold, I sold it to a public company to save. I lost 3.2 million personally. I mean, that's like, and I didn't have 3.2 million. So like as a friend of mine said to me after I told her the story, she said, no wonder you've been ripping eyeballs out since I've met you.

Yeah, exactly.

You know what I mean? Like I learned. It wasn't going to ever happen again.