As it turns out, starting a new business can take a while, even when you’re not starting from scratch.
It’s been a month since we got this website online, and started setting up shop in our newly rented warehouse space in San Francisco.
What’s happened since then?
Well, we got a new mixer. It’s basically a food-grade version of your typical cement mixer, and the only thing you can get for less than $1000 when it comes to commercial dry-mixing equipment.
It finally arrived late last week and we finished putting it together yesterday. Actually, mostly Richard put it together while I took pictures of it with my less-than-excellent phone camera. :p
Seems like it will do the job. If demand ramps up in a few months, we may have to invest in some really heavy-duty machinery, but no need to get ahead of ourselves. There’s plenty of other stuff to worry about, in the meantime.
For example, ingredients. You need stuff to put in the mixer, that you want to mix.
As it turns out, trying to buy supplement-grade nutritional ingredients from reputable suppliers as a small, fledgling business is a lot different than buying a little bag of potassium citrate for your DIY on Amazon with free, two-day shipping. This industry works at a different timescale. And at a different volume scale too.
If you’re not buying hundreds or thousands of kilograms of each ingredient per month, you’re tiny. And no one particularly cares about your business, nor will they go out of their way to attract new customers.
If you do manage to get a hold of them, “six weeks” is generally the kind of timeline you can expect to hear for any request. And that’s not counting the weeks it takes for them to bother to reply to you in the first place.
I’m not bitter. Just impatient on behalf of you all, my beloved and loyal customers. ;)
Ah, man. Well, we’re working on it.
Also, turns out that the California Department of Public Health has a lot of ideas about how one should go about doing things in this industry, and ironically they are even less interested in responding to inquiries than the big ingredient suppliers. If they are as apathetic in their enforcement of the rules as they are in the communication and clarification of said rules, then perhaps this would not be such a problem. But I’m not going to bet my business on that.
And it’s great to follow the rules. And the guidelines. And the recommended practices. It just takes a frustratingly long time, and a lot of detective work, to attempt to do so.
So with any luck, we’ll be up and running – for real – sometime in July.
On the bright side, this means I can finally take some much-needed time off without slowing anything down! I’ll be flying to Seattle next week to visit my family, for the first time in a while. Richard will be handling things while I’m out, though I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stop myself from answering support emails for the whole week. I’ll do my best though. ;)
Hopefully I’ll return with a fresh perspective and a lot more energy for the journey to come. We’re just getting started, after all…
