Edward Sweet-Williams

thoughts on single service olive oil? 🫒

Luke Hitler 😭😭

CPG founders: Dominating your local market first is critically important. You will always be strongest in your local market. You know all the best stores to approach first. When you are visualizing your plan, you can see it play out in the local market, you know it so well. You also know a lot of people who can have some influence and help you get your product in stores. Your friends and family will support you, buy your product, tell other people about it. You will receive promotional opportunities through contacts that others would never know about. And you are in the market. You naturally walk in and out of stores in everyday life. You have your finger on the pulse and can move quickly if anything changes. You can over-service your customers. Your friends, your mom, your friends' moms will do things like ask stores why they don't have your product or straighten up your product on shelf when they see it on the weekend. All these little 1% increments add up. So if you can't dominate your local market, you're not ready to go anywhere else. Shooting for national distribution too early can be both a vanity achievement and a death sentence for a young business. Perhaps pushed by the need to tell investors a compelling story. But you could spread yourself too thin. And under-service your product. You will not even know that despite being on the planogram and theoretically being ranged, the product hasn't made it out of the storeroom in that store in Minnesota, or the one in Iowa, or North Carolina. You will discover that the merchandizing field team that you rely on, isn't that reliable. What they tell you is happening in store isn't truly the case when you turn up unannounced. No shoppers will know what your product is in a new market because it might be in Target but they've never seen it anywhere else like the local mom and pop grocer or convenience store. Before you know it, your units per store per week sales numbers are not meeting benchmarks. And you are called in for a meeting with the buyer. Or worse, you just get the dreaded email. And you're out after six or twelve months. So stay focused and disciplined. Dominate your local market first. Then use what you have learned to start a new market. Then once you have succeeded in a new market, make that your new market playbook that you keep iterating. It will take longer than you think. But then you are ready to expand.

The first person ever to run the entire length of Africa. Mission complete🫡