Karin Samelson: [0:46]

Welcome to the Umai Social Circle, where we taught consumer goods tips to help business owners and marketers grow. We’re Karin and Alison co-founders of Umai Marketing, and we’re being joined by April King, founder of Better Than Provisions and also a member of our Consumer Goods Growth Course. Thanks for joining us, April.

 

April King: [1:06]

Aw, thanks for having me guys. It’s good to be here.

 

Karin Samelson: [1:09]

We’re so excited. We’ve had the opportunity to talk to April off and on for the past few months, and it’s always a pleasure. So to start with our listeners, can you give a little bit of a background of yourself?

 

April King: [1:23]

Absolutely. I won’t tell the whole long story, but I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version, but yes, I am the co-founder of Better Than Provisions and we are a packaged food company dedicated to making nutrient packed, delicious snacks that people can enjoy guilt free, no matter what their dietary lifestyle. We make three fun and unique flavors of a five nut grain free granola that is keto friendly, vegan friendly, low carb, gluten free and made without added sugar.

 

And we got our start because of my history in wellness, and it really started with personal health challenges that I had. And I’ve had definitely some hurdles I’ve had to get through. And as a path for healing, I chose the holistic wellness scene and natural health. And through that I realized I was super passionate about it. It was something that really held my attention and the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.

 

So I went on to become a health coach and then eventually a holistic nutritionist. And I was at a point where I was in one of my healing, I don’t want to say crisises, one of my healing processes. And in that process I was looking for, I was traveling, which is really hard to be sick and traveling. And I was looking for a better than snack that fit all my dietary limitations at the time. And that I knew was going to be good for me. And that was portable.

 

And I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t made with a bunch of extra crap like added sugar or filler ingredients. And so I decided to create one and I found a base recipe from a friend, and then I just built on that and started sharing it with friends and family and getting a lot of really positive feedback, realized that a lot of people struggled with the same thing that I was going through, that a lot of folks were having a hard time finding things that fit their dietary style that were healthy, but that also tasted good.

 

And so that was when it dawned on me like, “Oh, I could help people with what I’ve made here.” And Earl and I, Earl my husband, in 2018, that’s when we started Better Than Provisions. And literally started in our kitchen at home and sold at one farmer’s market. And now we are in… We’re still in the farmer’s market scene. We still love our direct to consumer relationships and selling direct in our local community here in Tucson, but we’ve expanded to wholesale, moreso specialty stores, a lot of them are in Arizona on several throughout the country. And then we added a website. So we sell via e-commerce on our website. And then we recently launched on Amazon.

 

So that’s our biggest, new thing, new exciting thing. That’s just a little bit about us. We’re still a very small team. We’re a team of three right now looking to add one more person to help in the kitchen soon.

 

Alison Smith: [4:57]

But I love your story. And especially how it’s a pain point that you were personally dealing with. So you were just trying to soothe yourself and then quickly realize you had something great and other people were also dealing with the same thing.

 

So I would kind of love for you to expand more about how you and Earl really made that leap of faith like, “Okay, this is no longer a hobby or something we make for ourselves. We need to take this to the masses?”

 

April King: [5:35]

I wish he was here to help me tell this part of the story because it’s very cute the way he tells it. So Earl is the financial mind. He’s the financial genius behind all of this. And by the point we launched our business, I had been making it for two years. So we had been making it for ourselves. Just the base, the cinnamon vanilla flavor was our flagship product. It was the original recipe. We call it the OG. And that was all I had been making up until the point we started the business, but there was two years in there and I was like, I loved it so much. I loved gifting it. So I would make it and I would give it to my coworkers around the holidays and birthdays and I would make it for my family.

 

And I was saying, yeah, well, I mean, we were getting a lot of really great feedback and everybody was telling us, “Oh yeah, you guys could sell this product.” And I said that to Earl. I’m like, “Do you think we should try to sell it?” And he’s like, “Well,” and then what I had said before is he was like, “How much is it costing us to make it and keep giving it away?”

 

So basically what happened is he ran the numbers and realized, he went and did all this research, walked the aisles of the stores, looking at other people’s products and comparing prices, and then adding up what we were paying for our ingredients. And he came to me one day and he’s like, “April, I think we could try this.”

 

So we literally talked to a friend of ours at the farmer’s market who had a booth and she said, “Yep, you can come share my space and I’ll give you enough to put a table in with your product.” So we’re like, “Okay, well, let’s try to figure this out.” So we have the cottage food law here in Arizona. So you can actually make a product, a baked product like ours, that doesn’t contain anything like dairy or egg or anything like that you can do from home and actually sell it within the state. 

 

So we got that sorted out and we went on Amazon and bought these craft bags. And Earl went on Avery and designed a label and we printed some labels and slapped them on some bags and filled them up and went to the farmer’s market to test or validate our theory. And people loved it.

 

And within a month, we had our own space at this one farmer’s market. And then that was September, late September, of 2018. And by, I think it was by the following January or February, we launched a website and we were super DIY. It was just like, “Let’s just go try this thing.” We knew nothing about… Well, not true. I worked for natural grocers and I worked for Wheatsville when I lived in Austin. So I had some grocery background. I knew the ins and outs of some of it, but not a lot of it. But if you’d asked me as a nutritionist five years before that, or even two years before that, if I would’ve been developing and making a product, I would’ve been, “Oh, I’m not that great at cooking. Baking, isn’t my thing.” And turns out it is.

 

And we were able to sell the original flavor. And then by the end of October, we had developed the pumpkin spice flavor. And then I think early the following year is when we launched the cacao cayenne flavor. But yeah, it was all, we just jumped in. We knew nothing.

 

Karin Samelson: [9:23]

I love that within a month you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to sell at the farmer’s market. We’re going to share booth.” And then within a month you’re like, “Oh, this is working. Let’s scale. Let’s have our own booth.”

 

April King: [9:35]

Yeah.

 

Karin Samelson: [9:36]

Super exciting. And it’s always nice to know that something you’ve been working on for so long other people like it, not just your friends and family who have to tell you they like it.

 

April King: [9:49]

Right. To get the outside validation was really helpful. And I think it’s really good for brands to be able to do that in some way. I think a farmer’s market is a great platform for that. To really start to get feedback from the public on whether or not your idea or your product has got some validity, will people buy it? And people were buying it at $15 a bag in a craft bag with a handmade label. And we were like, “Wow, this is really cool.”

 

And we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And I’m going to be honest. It was probably a good thing we didn’t know what we didn’t know because as we started to grow and expand that, it’s funny because there’s sometimes I say, If anybody ever calls my business cute again, that’s it.” Do not call it cute.

 

But now that I think back to where we were, it was so cute. It was so cute. And my family too, it took them a while to really get on board and believe that what we were doing was something real. And I think that’s maybe a question in the mind of many people going down this path, what are people going to think? Is this really a legitimate thing? To date, seeing where we came from to where we are now, I would say, yeah, it always has been, it just looks different now.

 

Karin Samelson: [11:29]

From craft bag to that beautiful bag behind you. If anybody can’t see this, you have to go to YouTube or our website to see the actual video. But the branding is so beautiful and a true testament of growth.

 

But we talked about all these amazing things happening and we love to hear it, but to get really real, what’s one of the biggest challenges that you guys have come up against?

 

April King: [11:58]

Yeah. In thinking about that particular question, I would say that I kind of slotted money funding as one of those areas. We are completely… Until last year when we ran a campaign through Kiva, a fundraising campaign through Kiva, we were completely and totally self-funded. So we had put in only our own money. And then we did this crowdfunding thing with Kiva and we borrowed essentially $10,000.

 

But outside of that, we haven’t taken any money from any outside investors or we or grants or anything. We’re in the process now of applying for some grants and the pitch competition, but it’s always money or time really. It’s like where we’re doing all of the work too, but yeah, just being self-funded although, and it made things move slower. I don’t think it was a bad thing. I just think it was a challenge in the way that we didn’t scale as fast as some other brands who have backing might.

 

And I think that either way is totally valid. You could go either direction and create a successful business. We just took the slower path and the more sort of grassroots path. And that’s been… And we also, it’s my husband and I, we’re partners in life, we’re partners in business. And they say one of the things that can destroy you are money conversations in a couple, for example. And so we’re having personal money conversations, we’re having business money conversations, and it’s all our money.

 

So I think that’s a big challenge. And I think the other one that stands out to me is perfectionism. I really like things to be just so. I have a fine eye for detail, and it’s both a blessing and a curse, especially with the project, with the packaging, recreating the brand and designing the packaging. It took a while to get to what you see now as our brand. And when we were about to send that first order for packaging into the printer, it was like, “Oh, can you just move this up a millimeter?”

 

Alison Smith: [14:39]

Were they like, “No?”

 

April King: [14:42]

Our designer was amazing.

 

Alison Smith: [14:44]

Oh, good.

 

April King: [14:46]

So Christopher McLaughlin of Tenfold, he is a dream he’s so patient and so kind and so talented. The design that we have now was one of three options he gave us and they were all so good. It was really hard to decide, but we knew we really wanted to stand away from the rest. We wanted to have a different look and feel. We wanted it to be fun and comfortable yet still premium. And we didn’t want to look like health food. So that’s how we ended up there.

 

But yeah, we work with Sari Kimble, you guys know Sari, we’ve been working with her for two years and she was the one who started us down the path of the rebranding and connecting us with the right resources to learn about how to get on Amazon. And she is amazing. And one of the things I love about her is that she always talks about doing B- work.

 

It’s better to do the B- work and get it out in the world and then fix it and tweak it as you go, which is kind of what we did in the beginning. In the beginning, we were like, “Oh, so excited. We just need to get this out in the world.” And then as you start to get more serious about it, then you start to think, “Oh, well maybe if we just change this one thing or tweak this,” and I’m sure you guys see it all the time with clients that you work with, in terms of creating content or visuals. Or it’s just like, “That might not be the way that, but it’s good enough. Let’s get it out there.”

 

And I think too in the role of social media, it’s there and gone. Somebody sees it and then the next day, the next minute, the next second they’re onto something else. So is it really that big of a deal? So I think there are areas though with the packaging, it was worth spending the extra time and having that critical eye. But then there are other areas where it’s just like, “No, just get it done.” We’re about to go to an event next week. And I’m like, “What’s the table going to look like?” And I’m like, “Why am I asking myself that question?” We set up a beautiful table five times a week at a farmer’s market, so shouldn’t be that hard, but here I am overthinking it and wasting my precious energy, trying to make it just so.

 

And one of the things that I learned a long time ago in coaching and in approaching people in regard to having them just want to work with you is you really can’t say the wrong thing to the right person. And so I’ve always kind of kept that in the back of my mind. We can’t look the wrong way to the right person. We can’t taste the wrong way to the right person there. Our people are out there. And so I think I try to keep that in my mind when it comes to making everything perfect.

 

Alison Smith: [17:48]

I’ve never heard that before. I like that. Yeah. That’s very good. Exactly, like you said, it is really this balance of when to focus on… Obviously, you want things to be quality, but also get things out. And that kind of reminded me of a conversation that we had all had on a call before about taking your time to build your brand and how you were seeing a competitor scale and build really, really quickly. And you’re comparing yourself to them, but you continued at your own pace and you’re still here to this day.

 

April King: [18:35]

And they’re not.

 

Alison Smith: [18:36]

Right. I didn’t want to say that part unless you did.

 

April King: [18:38]

No, and they’re not, that’s the thing. We were looking at them thinking, “Oh, wow. They’re just getting themselves out. They must be doing great to keep releasing all these new flavors and showing up at all these events and building their own manufacturing facility and hiring all these people. Wow, they must be doing great.”

 

And then I got the email that said, “By the way, guys, as of next month, we’re going to have to discontinue our business.” And I felt really sad for them, but it was also a learning opportunity for us. Holy cow, we could move faster, but the risk could then be greater and we’d rather create something sustainable even if we’re not the first one to do it.

 

Because back six years ago, when I was first making this recipe, there was nothing like it. Now there’s grain free granolas all over. There was nothing like it in the market. And I thought to myself, “Wow, if we could really get this out there, if we could be on Amazon tomorrow, we’d be the first ones. And wouldn’t that be great?”

 

Now I look back and I think, “Wow. Well, all the people that did go before us, even some of the bigger companies, they really just set the stage.” They created the opportunity for us to get out there and have people recognize what the heck we were from the get go.

 

Karin Samelson: [20:13]

I think that’s always a good note and someone that we follow on Instagram, who sells a course, she always says she gets feedback from people that are like, “Oh, there’s already courses that teach this.” And she’s like, “Well, then there’s even more of a reason for you to do it because people want it. That obviously means that people need it and want it.” And it’s just because there might be a product out that kind of has similarities as yours, it doesn’t mean that yours isn’t different in its own way.

 

And you can sell it as with those differentiators and those people that purchase their product will probably purchase yours too. So it’s a good reminder. You don’t have to be completely individualistic or original with everything that you create and just to do it, if you’re passionate about it.

 

April King: [21:10]

So true. In fact, we get a lot of feedback. There is a brand that is probably what we would consider our largest competitor and they hold a lot of the market share. And we get people that come to us at the market and say, “I buy the one at,” and I won’t name the store, “and it’s affordable, but it doesn’t taste like this.” And we’ve had that happen too with Amazon. People have come up and said, “I bought five different kinds of grain free granola on Amazon. And when I found yours, it was night and day.” And so to get that kind of feedback is really cool. And now we’re out there. We’re playing in that space.

 

Karin Samelson: [22:05]

A taste differentiator is ideal. It’s like, “Heck yeah. Ours tastes better.”

 

April King: [22:12]

We believe that, but most brands would believe that about their own product. So everybody thinks there’s is the best and it tastes the best and that’s going to make the difference for them. And I think that that’s a starting point. I think it’s expected, you should have a really great tasting product to be in the CPG food space.

 

But I think for us, one of our main differentiators is my background in nutrition and our story. And that that’s something I’m becoming more and more comfortable telling. We tell it on our website and I share it with people, but it’s really, I didn’t realize probably until more recently, just how important and powerful that was.

 

So it’s kind of a trifecta. You’ve got the good tasting product, you’ve got the beautiful brand, and then you’ve got the relatable or authentic brand story. And that for us, I think we’re full circle with all of that. Now we’re just focused on how do we get better at telling our story? How do we get better at reaching our people? And how do we compete with a smaller budget than a lot of these other folks have?

 

Alison Smith: [23:46]

Yeah. It’s so hard to tell your own story, isn’t it? I’m sure your consumers at farmer’s markets and on reviews give you praise for sharing it, but it’s so hard to talk about yourself and your journey and your why for some reason but it is a huge differentiator instead of going to Walmart and buying whatever granola that there is.

 

It just feels better to relate and appreciate a founder and their reason for making this beautiful product. It’s just such a better experience.

 

April King: [24:31]

It is. And we’re getting more comfortable with it being out there, because it’s interesting. You guys will appreciate this as we put out content. What we’re seeing is that the folks that… The stuff that gets the most play is where I’m talking about something or I’m sharing a story or my face, or it’s a picture of an Earl and I together that gets the most engagement over these really beautiful pictures that we paid a butt load of money to have someone take of the product. And I guess we know it needs to be a mix, but the stuff that it feels like it’s really getting the most connection is the stuff that’s about us.

 

Alison Smith: [25:24]

It’s absolutely about that connection. And these people are learning to trust you guys as well. Which leads me to my next question, April. What inspires you? Who inspires you? What brands inspire you? How do you keep going every single day?

 

April King: [25:44]

Well, I think it helps that I have this passion for nutrition. It’s still a fire in my belly. I started on my own personal journey 25 years ago. And that was literally picking up magazines, health magazines, because I was really suffering. I was in a lot of pain. I had a lot of chronic fatigue. It wasn’t pretty. And I was starting to lose things. I was starting to had to get scale back in my job. And eventually I ended up mostly, I had to quit everything and I was in bed.

And I’m like, “Well, this is no way to live. I need to figure this out.” So I started just picking up this and that and reading this book and that book. And I’m like, “Oh, I’ll try that or this modality or this vitamin or this food.” And started just piecing it together and then helped myself get well.

 

And after that I realized that even though I was well, I still wanted to know more. I still wanted to understand the body better and know more about food and know more about all of it, anything that was related to holistic wellness. So then that’s when I enrolled in school to become a health coach. And then I got through that and I health coached for a while and I’m like, “Well, I still don’t know enough. I need to know physiology and biochemistry too.”

 

So I think, honestly, it’s the fire that I have for nutrition in general keeps me interested in our product and telling people about our product. And then as far as other brands, there’s a lot of really cool brands doing fun stuff. And I think it’s the really fun ones that inspire me. I think that OLIPOP is probably one of my favorite brands out there just because there’s so they’re fun and light and they have a health message, but it’s not all heavy and technical.

 

Alison Smith: [27:56]

Yeah. So true.

 

April King: [27:57]

So that brand, and then of course, when I worked for Wheatsville in Austin, that was back in the day when Siete was a teeny tiny baby company and they sold one little package of almond flour tortillas with a little twist tie. And every week they would deliver a dozen of them. And it was the only store they sold them in and now look at them. They’re everywhere.

 

I think they just launched a new product. They have little mini bags. They sell now at Sam’s Club. They have a box of little mini bags that you can buy. And I saw that and I see. And then now they got taco mix and I’m just looking at everything they’ve done in a relatively short amount of time. We’re talking 2015 ish to now. And they’re in Costco, they’re in Walmart, they’re in Sam’s Club.

They’re in.. I don’t know necessarily if that’s where we are seeking to go, personally, as a company, but boy is that inspiring. Seeing that family, and it’s a family, go from having this one product to building essentially what is an empire. And I don’t know, I think the family still runs it. I don’t know if they’ll ever sell it or not. My guess is that at some point they might. I’m sure they’ve already had offers.

 

But yeah, we saw that happen with Epic Provisions too, when they had one or two meat bars and now they’re everywhere and they actually sold their business off. So watching other brands grow. And I think that’s really important to say is that I feel like it’s okay. You should be rooting for the other people, even your competition. I think that that’s just good energy. And so when I see some of the things that our competition is doing, in fact there was one competitor who just did something really cool, released a new product. And I was like, “Yeah, way to go.”

 

It’s really funny though, because they were at this food show we went to in February and the owner and the founder was there and I walked by and I’m like, “No, I don’t want to talk to her.” And I chickened out, I don’t know why. I think it was because I was just intimidated maybe, or maybe I was protective of our baby.? I don’t want her to yet know who we are, but yeah, it’s really cool to see other businesses, even our competitors, succeeding.

 

Karin Samelson: [30:30]

That’s such a nice message for everyone, anywhere with anything, rooting for other people, is just such a healthy thing to do. And it’s just a perk when the people who own Siete and Epic, they’re good people too. It’s good people doing good stuff who can’t root for that?

 

But yeah, it’s really exciting all of this stuff that’s going on with you guys, where you started with your craft bags to now. But what’s next? What are you excited about in the future?

 

April King: [31:06]

Oh man, what am I excited about? I think I’m really excited about hiring someone to help me in the kitchen. We think about it. Right now I’m the only person who knows how to make this product. So good thing I work really hard at keeping myself healthy and well because we haven’t had any significant interruptions. I’m really excited about that. We’re very excited about Amazon. Amazon’s a long game though. We know it’s not an overnight success kind of thing. We’re doing okay, but we really don’t know yet. It was really hard to tell. We ran a promotion with our list.

 

So a lot of what we’ve seen for sales has come based on people that we told that are already buying from us. But I think that is probably the most exciting. And I don’t know, getting better at telling the brand story and sharing it with more people. I’m hanging with you guys in the Umai Growth Course because I really want to get better at connecting with our community.

 

So the connection with the community, the Amazon project, it’s a lot to learn. That thing is a world of its own. It’s its own ecosystem. And it takes a lot to educate yourself on all the moving parts within their system. But we feel strongly that we’re going to be able to make it work. It’s just going to take some time.

 

Karin Samelson: [32:47]

Do you have a consultant for Amazon or are you guys doing it completely on your own?

 

April King: [32:52]

Okay, so we did make some choices there. We worked with a coach for a couple sessions and we went through a marketplace sellers course, his name is Shannon Roddy. He now works with Avenue7. Avenue7 is a consulting agency that does strictly, they don’t just do strictly Amazon, but they are experts at Amazon and everything Amazon. And they just bought him out and he went to work for them. But I think his course is still available.

 

So we took his course, the marketplace sellers course, which walked us through how to set up the seller central and the listings. And then from there, he referred us to Mindful Goods and Mindful Goods is the company that we enlisted to write our listings, create our graphics, do our keyword research. So I think that’s an important message too, just to know when to bring someone else in, because we could have done all of that ourselves, again, very DIY, but what we learned from being DIY and then having to do it over was if you have the resources to put the right people in place from the beginning is going to move you along a little bit faster.

 

And we wanted to really show up on Amazon when we launched, we wanted to show up as a legit professional brand. So we wanted everything just so and so we worked hand to hand with these guys. So we did a lot of that. Now we’re kind of on our own. Now I’m doing a lot of webinars and trainings on advertising. I’m having to learn the advertising piece because whether we’d like it or not as a brand it’s pay to play. So you have to advertise in order for it to work for you, if you want to grow and actually make money.

 

So right now it’s just in the hands of Earl and I, and then we know that we can get with Shannon from time to time. We can book an hour of his time if we have some things we don’t understand.

 

Alison Smith: [35:04]

I just love how you and Earl, you are a part of so many communities. And you do understand you need support. And you’re still doing it all, but you’re putting in that investment, I guess, into yourself. And that’s really exciting about Amazon. But yeah, you mentioned the growth course. So April has been in our growth course for about a year now, almost coming up on a year, I believe. So we would love to hear what your favorite thing about the course is?

 

April King: [35:47]

Well, I love, like I’ve told you before, I love you guys. I just adore you so much and I love your energy for one. I think you guys are really calm. You’re knowledgeable. You are very real. And you also share information in a way that is digestible to the average person. It’s technical where it needs to be, but then it’s also easy to follow. Your instruction is easy to follow. You’ve given me so many little tips through the course and I’m just finishing up the organic social. I haven’t even been into some of the other stuff.

 

That was the other thing that I liked is like, “Okay, I can do this when I need it.” And right now I’m working on this Amazon thing. So my attention is diverted over there. And when I’m ready, now that we’re going to be working with the university here on a social media project, I now will get back into the paid social because it’s the right time because I’m going to be giving them a budget. So I want to make sure that what they’re doing with my money.

 

Alison Smith: [37:03]

Oh, they are spending your money?

 

April King: [37:05]

They will be able to spend some of our money. Yeah.

 

Alison Smith: [37:08]

Oh, wow.

 

April King: [37:10]

Well, they’re going to make some suggestions, so if they’re going to suggest, “Okay, we think that this piece of content is relevant and needs to be part of your plan. And I think this is where you should spend some of your money.” Or they may create an ad or something like that. And we get to decide, do we want to push it through? Or do we want to just say, “Oh thanks.”

 

But yeah, I think that. Now is the time for me to educate myself more on the paid part because we haven’t really been doing a lot of that. Once in a while we throw a few dollars behind a giveaway or something really fun. But I think that now it would be the time to get into more of the content. So it’s nice to have it there.

 

And I love it that you make it accessible to connect with you guys in other places. It’s like I’m now part of the Umai family and I love it. I really do. I love it. And I hope that other people can appreciate it as much as I do. Ideally, what I’d love to do is just hand you my social media program and be like, “All right, girls, have at it.” And I will get to that point. And when we get to that point, you guys will be the agency of choice for sure.

 

Karin Samelson: [38:33]

Oh, that’s so nice, April. We love having you a part of our community and our family too, for sure. And what you said just then reminds me of one of the best traits of a really good leader that we have found as well, scrappy ones in particular, not ones that have deep pockets and huge investments coming in is they’re savvy enough with what needs to get done, to know when their team is thriving or needs improvement.

 

If you just know the basics of say social advertising, an agency or an individual, it’s not as easy for them to just mess around because you’re a little dangerous with a little bit of knowledge that you have. And so while a lot of founders, they might not be running their social advertising, their social media forever. It’s nice to have that baseline knowledge so that you can make sure that everything is moving in the right direction.

 

April King: [39:38]

Well, and then we can collaborate. So that’s how it went. When we worked with Mindful Goods for Amazon, it was a lot of back and forth. It was like, “Okay, here’s our brand standards guideline,” because we did do a brand standards. And we gave that to them. We gave them access to a lot of our materials and then we went, it was a lot of back and forth. We don’t really like how that looks or we don’t like how that sounds. And their job was really to make sure that the keyword stuff got in there.

 

So something I didn’t like how it sounded, but they needed it to have the keyword. Then between the two of us, we came up with something great. And I also want to have my hands in all the jobs because eventually we’re going to have to hire people to work and we value the idea that we are creating something that people can come into and feel really good about.

 

I want people to come and work with us that feel like they’re part of a family and that they are taken care of and that their gifts are utilized and appreciated. And so if I don’t know about these parts, how am I going to know if they’re doing a good job? Do you know what I mean? And then I want to tell them you’re doing a great job, but how do I know? I never did it. So yeah, we’re very excited. I think that’s probably another thing we’re really excited about is building a team and being able to influence or impact people’s lives and their livelihoods with opportunities, whether that’s baking granola or writing standard operating procedures. I don’t know.

 

Karin Samelson: [41:26]

We love those SOPs.

 

Alison Smith: [41:28]

I love doing those.

 

April King: [41:29]

Oh my goodness. Yes, no.

 

Karin Samelson: [41:34]

That’s exciting, April. Well, it sounds like that’s just around the corner with someone getting hired to help you in the kitchen and then more to come. No doubt about it. But it’s been so lovely having you on and actually getting to have you on the podcast. Do you want to leave our audience with any call to action or final statement?

 

April King: [41:55]

Yeah. Well, I think one of the things I wanted to say just about being, from one founder to another, is to just recognize that it’s a journey and a process and it’s going to be a lot of ups and downs and there’s going to be problems. If there are people out there that are just starting out, there’s going to be problems. And I remember I used to react so hard to the problems I used to get so upset. And it was so personal that this thing was not working out or falling apart or it meant something bad about me. And it’s just the nature of the game.

 

You being a problem solver and doing your best to not be too hard on yourself and just really enjoy the journey. I can’t wait. We’re coming up on our fourth anniversary and we’re going to do a little montage of what the packages looked like from the beginning, because they evolved. It wasn’t just the one package then going to the printed package. There were versions of it. And so I really am excited about celebrating how far we’ve come. And have fun while you’re doing it and just enjoy the journey. And then as far as where people could find us, we have our website betterthanprovisions.com. You can find us at Better Than Provisions on both Facebook and Instagram. And then I did put together a coupon code. I don’t know if that’s okay to share here?

 

Alison Smith: [43:45]

That is awesome. And I love it.

 

April King: [43:47]

Yeah. If what we’ve talked about our product interests you or you’re curious to try it. You can always obviously go to Amazon. That’s a great place to buy it, but on our website, if you go there and use the code, umai20, you would get a 20% discount off your whole order.

 

Karin Samelson: [43:54]

That is so nice. Thank you.

 

Alison Smith: [43:56]

It is so good, y’all. So good. Well, April, thank you so much for spending the past hour with us. Lots of great stuff here. So thank you.

 

April King: [44:09]

Thanks for having me. I love talking with you guys. So this was just a lot of fun.