What was I thinking?

I’m sure it’s happened to you.

You start something, and there’s the thrill and excitement of a new adventure. You wonder why it took you so long and you can’t even fathom the rush of adrenaline you feel every day. You bounce out of bed, ready to tackle the world.

If you are fortunate, that lasts for a bit. Because all too soon comes an inevitable crash of reality, often described as the “trough of disillusionment.” Suddenly things aren’t going so. well, now nothing seems to break your way, and you have started to dread getting out of bed. For all but a few fortunate souls, this happens to every entrepreneur, and it’s where most call it quits.

For the foolhardy, they keep slogging on and if they are lucky, things start to tick up. A little bit of progress leads to a little bit more and before you know it, you are on more stable ground. That “kind of” happened with Dorothy’s Power Foods. I started my food company at the beginning of the pandemic, and honestly the first year we exceeded our goals. But in 2022, a combination of supply chain disruption and large entities buying up most of the packaging supply, ridiculous price increases, and then the icing on the cake was the killer food inflation that happened in late 2022. We had been relatively stable until mid-2022 then everything went off the rails as customers cut back on non-necessary food purchases. As a bootstrapped (self-funded) company, I just didn’t have the ability to support that for a long period of time.

Something that happened as I build and ran the company was a unique perspective I developed about the food industry. In my previous career, I studied the food system and understood the basic flow of food through our country. As a small food maker, I developed an even greater understanding of how it worked and the tremendous advantage the industrial food system had. I saw small food company after small food company close for the same reasons, and these reasons were systemic.

Now, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the same old thing I had before this. This, and other significant life changes, led me to dedicate myself toward serving others the rest of my life. One way I can do that is serving other small food makers, and that’s what KC Foodways is all about. As we proceed, I’ll be explaining more about our business model and how we’re going to do this.

Will it succeed? Heck, I don’t know. But I’m going to die trying. 😉