25 Years in Business: 5 Tips from Bramble Berry CEO

By CEO and Founder, Anne-Marie

It's Bramble Berry's 25th anniversary. Wow and yay! I've spent more of my years on this earth with Bramble Berry than without Bramble Berry. When I started Bramble Berry, I was a demoralized correctional officer looking for a break to make money before starting my next 'real job.' I am thrilled to make soap twenty-five years later and be immersed in a creative field with entrepreneurs worldwide. 

Twenty-five years ago, I had been making and selling soap on and off since I was about 12 years old, so soap and teaching soapmaking was an obvious transition for me when my chosen profession (correctional officer) was not a good fit. Starting a business with little business acumen at a young age is a great way to start: you don't know what you don't know, and if you did, you'd never start. Luck and timing are significant in Bramble Berry's growth journey and success. 

The rest of Bramble Berry's longevity is due to an incredible team joining me early on in our exploration of all things creativity, easy access to credit (or credit cards), and an unstoppable desire to work coupled with an overdeveloped fear of failure.

I have learned some lessons along the way. In no particular order, they are:

Pay attention to the taxman. 
The fundamentals are the fundamentals. The IRS only cares if you have cash to pay your taxes. You owe them. Remember to save for your state, local, and federal taxes. The truism of 'The IRS got Capone' is legit; judiciously save for taxes. It can feel daunting to try to figure this out. The good news is that the government really wants your money so it’s pretty easy to stay on top of it: download forms from your city website for the city taxes, and for the federal IRS taxes, I always plan on saving 1/3rd of all profits (profit being the number you have after paying your raw materials, your rent, your insurance, any employees you have and other expenses). If you’re a small business, Quickbooks has a tax preparation option in the online software that makes it easy and accessible to any small business. 

Be profitable.
There's a romantic notion of Private Equity or Venture Capital or Family and Friends as a funding source for your business, as if somehow having someone else's cash in your wallet makes business any different. It does not; if you're not profitable and making money with your own money, having someone else's money doesn't fundamentally change that. Hundreds (if not thousands) of failed PE/VC/Angel-funded businesses are out there for every PayPal / Uber / Ebay success story. Start by being profitable from SoapBar1 and rely on yourself to fund and grow your business. Price appropriately to put food on your table and pay your rent. Your products are worth it!

Hire what you can pay to hire as soon as possible.
 I'm not good at scheduling. I'm not great at bookkeeping. I'm extra not good at legal stuff. I cannot run a warehouse well. Those were the first things I hired out when I finally could afford to. I'm terrific at a lot of random things. I'm good at teaching. I'm solid at product formulation. I love to create products. I can write exceedingly well. And I'm miserable when I'm entering bills into Quickbooks or trying to schedule an entire warehouse, so I happily pay others to do those things. Then I can focus on what I’m good at and the company needs from me. Can I schedule a warehouse if required? Of course. Absolutely. There is no job at Bramble Berry I will not do. But am I the best at it? Everyone at Bramble Berry is thankful that I spend my days writing, creating, and making and not trying to help make the warehouse run or give legal opinions.

Manage your psychology. 
Running a business is exhilarating and can be downright awful, terrible, no good, very bad, challenging, and scary. The only way to get through those times is to talk yourself through them by doing the work, one foot in front of the other, all the time. And the only way you can do that? By managing your own psychology. In 'The Hard Thing about the Hard Things,' Ben Horowitz says that the CEO's job is to manage their own psychology. He's right; watering and feeding yourself is a good start, but it's things like sleep, what you're putting inside your brain with your reading and watching habits, who you're hanging out with, and if you have a health and wellness practice that is going to keep you going for the long run. Your mental health is an area that can get neglected when trying to run a small business as a side hustle. I love the HabitTracker App as a way to keep streaks around sleep, drinking water, and moving 20 minutes a day, adding up so well-being practices become a habit and something I pay attention to when things get busy.

Create goals. 
They are SO dull, and no one likes to do it, but if you don't plan, you're planning to fail - literally, figuratively, and every other way. My favorite goal-setting book remains the classic, ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People.’ I do personal goal setting and family goal setting (the kids participate to varying degrees based on their moods and how much they feel like drinking my enthusiastic Kool-Aid), and, Bramble Berry does goal setting. It's not magic bean-type stuff; it's efficient nuts and bolts goals like "Research a new mobile-first website; get quotes for the transition; sign a quote; save the money to pay for it; implement" (an actual goal for this year). This way, everyone knows what success looks like at the end of the year and daily.

 

I have many more lessons I've learned (you can read all of them in the book I wrote about this subject: Live Your Best Day Ever: 35 Strategies For Daily Success). I'm grateful beyond words or expression for the opportunity to work in an industry that supports women-owned businesses in such a big way, expands creativity beyond the bounds of what seemed possible, and provides little doses of happiness every day for millions of people around the world as my customers' customers pick up those gorgeous bars of handmade soap and smile at the scent, the color, the design and the feeling using handmade evokes.