63. David McKean, CEO of Sherpa Chai

63. David McKean, CEO of Sherpa Chai Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the LA business podcast, a forum for business owners and senior executives to share the experiences about the elements that drive their success. Your host is Robert Brill, CEO of Brill media.co an Inc 500 company delivering the power of hyper-local advertising. Robert writes for Forbes, Inc, and AB trade publications.  Our goal is to bring you the stories about successes. The failures of people who are making big things happen in marketing, entrepreneurship, and management. 

Robert Brill: [00:00:36] Everyone. Welcome to yeah. Another episode of the Ellie business podcast today, our guest is Dave McKean, CEO of Sherpa chai. Sherpa. Kai is out of Boulder, Colorado, and the maker of specialty chai concentrates. Thanks for being with us today

David McKean: [00:00:53] it’s great to be here. Thank you. 

Robert Brill: [00:00:54] So this is an interesting story. So tell us a little bit about, about your, your child and, and where you get it from and you have a great story. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a part of the reason why I got involved with this, to be honest with you, is is that story?

David McKean: [00:01:10] So the founder of originally of Sherpa chai is Pemba Sherpa. And Pemba has a restaurant here in Boulder that he’s operated for about the last 20 years called Sherpa’s adventure restaurant. It’s a Nepalese restaurant, but also specializes to a large degree in, in Sherpa recipes and so forth along with Nepalese stuff. And he had for the last 20 years been serving the tea, the chai. Which he grew up on in his little village in the combo, which is the Valley. That is wherever it is. And this is a recipe that it’s generations old. I mean, he said his mom made it, his grandma made it, his great-grandma made it, it goes back for beyond. He can remember, and everybody kept telling him, this is amazing chai. You should follow this. You should bottle it. So about four years ago, he started bottling it and now. You know, Sherpa Chi is is distributed mostly in Colorado, but also to the States border in Colorado, as well as now in Pacific Northwest and Oregon and Washington, a little bit in Idaho, Montana, Alaska, et cetera in grocery stores. But but the the Sherpa Chai has now grown to be. Even on the national rankings in the category that we occupy, which is a as a shell stable, concentrated T category for grocery store chains. We’re now number six in the nation, even though we’re only distributed in a pretty small number of places.  So it’s, it’s been growing great. And and that’s a Testament to. PEMDAS mother’s mother’s mother’s recipe or whatever it is. So but then there’s the story behind Pemba is also a really kind of an exciting and interesting tale. 

Robert Brill: [00:02:57] So you’ve been with the business since 2019. What was your charge when you, when you came on, when you came on to sharper chai?

David McKean: [00:03:06] Yeah, well, that’s actually kind of a funny story. So I had a software business this years ago, which I I sold and then moved to Colorado. Cause I had lived down, I got to school out here as a student in university years and we always felt like one day would move back. And so after selling the other software business, it was like time go. So I had a, I had a little office I. I was basically retired. I was all across coach for my sons and now they’re off in college, so I didn’t have anything to do. So I had a little office nearby here and the guy who owned the building actually has a small ownership in Sherpa Chi and he kept talking about it and telling me how great it was. And I, I actually personally don’t drink a lot of tea or coffee or I didn’t, so I would take the bottles home and give them to my family. And my wife and daughters would drink this and And they were drinking it like it was going out of style. And and so finally Todd had given me a bottle of the newest flavor back a couple of years ago in February 64 ounce bottle of tea. I brought it home one 30 in the afternoon. The next morning I’m getting ready to leave. And my daughter turns around at the refrigerator. He goes. Dad, can you get another bottle of this? I’m like 64 ounces gone in less than 12 hours. I was like, all right, I gotta, I gotta meet Pemba. So I met Pemba and heard the story and I was like, you know what? This is such a cool tale. I just want to be involved. So I invested a little bit of money in the company just to be part of it. And and then shortly, a couple of months later, we had a kind of a shareholders meeting and the other shareholders asked if I wanted to be CEO. And my response was no. And then they said, how about if you could just kind of do a little bit of an acting CEO for awhile because we need some help. And I was like, all right. And I fell in love with it. And immediately after I got involved, I said, all right, Penn Bay, if I’m going to do this, I got to go to Nepal. So I went to Nepal with Pemba. We went trekking in Anaperna. We went to the village, he grew up in, I have met countless Sherpas now, and I have Fall in love with not only the product, but also the mission. And the mission is is really to give back to the people in, in, in Nepal and, and the Sherpa community, but also in the Nepalese community, in the tea community where our tea is grown, which is just below the, kind of the mountains of the Himalayas. And and I’ve met just the most amazing and outstanding people. And and. So I think that’s, that’s part of it. That that is that’s the driving thing. For me. You’re not being a cultural ambassador for, for the Nepalese people, whether you like it or not at the end of the day, if, if you, if you know what a Sherpa is you’re automatically going to be consuming just a little bit a part of the culture through, through the food, through the drink. Yeah. It’s so true. And the culture is, is an amazing culture. I mean You know, for many years in, in later life, my wife and I were vacationing and spending time in Italy before Sherpa. And and I was thinking I would end up maybe actually getting a place in Italy and spending half the year there after the kids are all gone. Right. And and I’ve, I went to. A school in England for two and a half years for grad school. I lived in Germany for four years. I mean, I’ve, I’ve traveled a lot and lived in other places, but Italy was the place that we were going back to all the time and my wife and I loved it. And all my friends are like, why Italy? And they’d be like, well, it’s the history, it’s the culture, it’s the food. And now that’s all BS. That’s not it at all. It was the people. That’s why we’d go back to Italy all the time. And when I came back from the first trip to Nepal, I turned to my wife and I said the Nepalese are Italians on steroids. They are the most friendly people I have ever met in my life. I have never been more welcomed anywhere I have ever been. And and so that that’s a big driving force. So what, what, what were you w when you came on, what’s your mission here with the company? What do they, what do they want you to do? Well, obviously I think we’ve got a great brand. We’ve got a great story and we’ve got an amazing product and now I’ve done countless blind taste tests against all the competitors out there. So I know there’s no question that we’ve got the best product on the market. Taste-wise and and I’ve heard that from. Countless people, but even people who are pretty influential in our space. So for example, the number one chai tea company in North America is Oregon chai. It was started by a woman named Heather who is actually now on our board of advisors. She sold the company in Oh four and has gone on now to start another tea company, a Thai kind of tea company. And in one of my early conversations with her, we were talking about flavor profiles and this and this, and she’s like, Oh, you don’t have to say it. I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Heather. She goes, don’t make me say it. I was like, I really didn’t know which was this. She goes, we all know Sherpa. Chuy’s a far better product than Oregon chai. And so the number one chai tea companies, Bounder is calling our products, taste, profile the number one. And I’m like, I agree with her, of course. And so I think there’s, there’s a lot of validity in, in the product. And that comes from the ingredients, the care that is going on in the warehouse behind me here today, where all of the guys work in back, there are Sherpa. And they are brewing the tea as authentic as it comes. The T is an authentic Nepalese black tea blend that is actually grown on a plantation in Nepal for us specifically. And and so, yeah, I think that all plays into the product quality and that delivers the best tasting chai that we can.  

Robert Brill: [00:08:31] And so tell us about, about the types of growth and marketing that you’re doing to to achieve that growth. Like, you know, the, the key thing that we want to learn on this podcast is how do companies grow and scale? And so are you primarily selling through e-commerce through retail or restaurants? Like how do you, what’s your distributed questions? Let’s predicate all of these answers with the fact that I’m a complete novice to the CPG world, the consumer packaged good industry.

David McKean: [00:09:02] And I have been, you know, really in truly drinking from a fire hose for a year and a half as I learned so much new stuff. But I will say that, you know, when we began, when I got involved, we had our two main revenue streams were the, the grocery distribution chain. And the coffee shops almost all exclusively in the Colorado area.  And coffee shops represented about 45% of our revenues last year, of course, with COVID that went from 45% to less than 10%. And, and so we have made a very concerted effort to work with our, our grocery store distributors and also to expand our, our grocery store distribution through sales efforts. To, to add to that, to pick up on the, the loss revenue.  In addition to that, we began when it became apparent that this was not going to end in the spring I began implementing a bigger e-commerce effort for us. And to that end, we in the early let’s say this time last year, we were probably doing seven to $800 a month in e-commerce. And so what we did is we first of all built a new website redid our, our, our store. We did our pricing work to configure pricing that included our freight. We found in the early, like when I started looking at this in the spring that we were having tons and tons of abandoned carts from our online store and that we felt was probably due to the fact that the the shipping costs were too much.  So we, what we did is we kind of baked a lot of that into our pricing to make that a lot more palatable to the online customer. And the net result is that we have grown our online sales to call it $1,500 a month type of thing. I also then brought in a, a gal who’s working as our social media specialist expanding our social media platforms to include LinkedIn tick tock, Twitter.  Prior to this, we were just basically a little bit of Facebook and a little bit of Instagram but also to really step up our Instagram and Facebook efforts and, and make our ads a lot more kind of pertinent to our customers. And so after doing a lot of analysis they came back and it had the plan that we were going to put a big push behind, for example, the black Friday cyber Monday week.  And so we did it a little bit of promo to that and created all kinds of tracking codes. And then we did email blasts on Friday, Wednesday and cyber Monday. And and our our team did a great job. I mean, they, they managed to generate almost $15,000 in online sales during that one week, which is.  Yeah, that’s, that’s a more than a 10X, monthly revenue return for us. So we’re going to be doing a lot more of that in the new year. In addition to that, we also have now begun redoing our Amazon profile and, and we have a consultant to help with Amazon so that we can grow our sales there. So so there’s a lot of e-commerce effort going into the future.  And then additionally, it’s a lot of effort continuing on the grocery store front. We’ve also hired some salespeople to hit the coffee shops, even though they’re not open, they’ve been kind of in and out open and some of them are open for just window service. So, so we’ve actually added a bunch of you know, we’ve been managing to add 10 to 15 new coffee shops a month. Now with the sales guys that we have, and they’re also talking, targeting a lot of their, kind of the small grocery store chains that would be outside of our usual distribution channels. So a lot of those efforts are. Net result is, is that sales are up overall liked to have seen them up a lot more, but still up overall.

Robert Brill: [00:12:40] So that’s good. What on, I’m on your website right now? What is the flavor? What is your most popular flavor? 

David McKean: [00:12:47] The spicy, the traditional and spicy are, are by far the, the two most popular flavors for us. 

Robert Brill: [00:12:57] Okay. Traditional and spicy. Okay. Interesting. Okay. 

David McKean: [00:13:01] Got it, decaf spicy, Trevor, the vanilla, which is actually made with a local honey. That’s grown here in Boulder by a local bee grower. And and then we have tumeric ginger which is a little bit different. And and that is the newest flavor and it has been growing pretty steadily. So very happy about that too. 

Robert Brill: [00:13:24] And so during COVID you you pivoted away from retail?  Well, the world pivoted away, right? 

David McKean: [00:13:31] We didn’t pivot. They forced us. Yeah. 

Robert Brill: [00:13:35] If I buy online, will you ship anywhere in the country or are there specific areas where you will ship? 

David McKean: [00:13:41] We will ship anywhere in the lower 48. 

Robert Brill: [00:13:44] Got it. Amazing. 

David McKean: [00:13:46] So right now we have the cost to ship to cause we’re shipping lytic, liquid. I mean, it’s expensive. It’s shipped to Hawaii and Alaska is, you know, it makes it very difficult for the consumer because it’s, it costs more to ship it than it does to buy the bottle. 

Robert Brill: [00:14:03] Tell us, tell us about some, some interesting learning curve that you experienced or something that you learned as you came on into, into CPG that you find you find worth. You certainly mentioned that. You know, cyber black, Friday, cyber Monday, you 10 X, your sales that’s fantastic. Was the learning there, for example, that a much more concerted marketing effort going, going full force. 

David McKean: [00:14:30] I would say a CPG CPGs are really interesting. You know, the distribution channels are, are complicated and certainly hard to navigate. I am very grateful that I have I have Suzanne who is a consultant I’ve found who knows this and has been, you know, 30 years in this industry. So she’s. Done a great deal to educate me and continues to on a daily basis. You know, understanding the different channels, whether it’s mouloua mass, natural grocer.  And then of course, you know You know, you have so many different types of retail, distribution channels, and the distributors all have different kinds of, you know, things that they require from you. Different kinds of pricing breaks, you know, MCB scan backs, TPRS all these barriers. I mean, it goes on and on and And everybody keeps telling us we need brokers to do this. And I am resistant on the broker right now because a, it costs a lot of money. And I think, what do you do with a broker is you’re basically, you know substituting that for your own Salesforce. And I don’t know that they necessarily have. Sure the child’s best interest when they go to meet with a grocery store, as opposed to, but it is sometimes challenging to get meetings with these people. And, but I think our guys have done a really good job of forging relationships in, in the, especially in the, the natural chain grocers. And and so then that’s, you know, that’s a big deal, you know, right now.

Robert Brill: [00:15:58] I imagine direct to consumer. You could, you know, there’s so many brands in the marketplace right now who don’t have that don’t have retail distribution that are doing really well.  Like I think, I think, you know, with a concerted Facebook effort and an Amazon effort, now you can go direct to consumer and not have to deal with all the intermediaries. 

David McKean: [00:16:18] I agree with you. And I think that’s a, that’s gotta be a big push for us, and that’s why we’re, we’re making this effort that I just described to get there. 

Robert Brill: [00:16:26] Yeah. I’m looking at your Facebook ads right now. It looks like you’re supporting local whole, whole foods and sprouts and natural choices. Natural grocers, natural grocers. Yeah. I’m not familiar with them, but I’m familiar with the other two. And I imagine they’ve asked you to support their distribution with advertising.

David McKean: [00:16:45] Yeah, well, you know what, here’s the good thing about being as small as we are at this point. They don’t, they actually impose when you get to a certain level, they impose required advertising. And we haven’t gotten to that level yet, which is good because it’s, it’s not inexpensive. Right. But, but we have been doing a lot more that on our own effort.  And that drives brand awareness in the grocery store is there. So for example our distributors came to us. In early in the summer, June, and they had the, they were looking at the same data that I had been looking at the sales data that are collected. There’s a couple of different companies that we buy data from, and the data was outstanding for our product. And so they had been seeing the same data. So they actually came to us and said, we want to carry your product to the grocery stores, to the Fred Meyer grocery stores in Pacific Northwest. Which they launched beginning of September. So it took a few months to get it all into the pipeline and get it up there and get it distributed. The biggest fear I have in that area is then these people, they don’t find our product at their local coffee shop. Like most of the people in Colorado would, so they’re not familiar with this. So why would they know to buy it on the shelf? I did pleasantly surprised they’ve been, they’ve been buying it  gangbusters, but we have done quite a lot of, of, of geo-fence targeting on our ads, our Facebook ads and our Instagram to those specific areas around those, those specific grocery stores so that we can hopefully drive some brand awareness. So people will see it on the shelf and go, I know what that is.

Robert Brill: [00:18:13] That’s a great tactic. You know, one of the things that. We do a lot of is that hyper-local geo-fencing and I’m always interested to understand how to, how do marketers, how do, how to companies learn about that? Like, did you, is the consultant that you’re working with, someone who kind of like clued you in or did you just innately know that?  Like how, how did that come about in a conversation? 

David McKean: [00:18:37] No, I have been reading a lot of books on social media marketing. 

Robert Brill: [00:18:41] Okay. So do you, do you listen to any like news personalities, like I think for someone who is, who has the wherewithal, like you can listen to someone like Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, and then just implement exactly what he say.  Like, do you, do you pay attention to any of that? 

David McKean: [00:18:58] I Have started recently following some folks on different types of podcasts. But to be honest with you, I have always, I fall back on the, you know, I’m, I’m reading books every single day and, and always looking for new books and new recommendations. And, and so you know, there has been a little bit of that. And then on top of that you know, I did talk to some marketing people over the last six months, a whole bunch actually. And we talked about various different ways to do this. And, and the geo-fencing was always part of the campaigns that the, the marketing companies that I spoke to wanted to utilize the unfortunate thing for us is it. We got to do this on the cheap, because we just don’t have the budgets for these. I mean, a lot of these marketing companies want, you know, retainers of 10,000, $12,000 and, and expect to get paid $60,000 a year. And that’s just not in the budget for Sherpa Chai at this point. So we’re, we’re kind of figuring out how to do this as best we can on the cheap to carry us until we can afford to, to hire some better consultants, if we need to.

Robert Brill: [00:20:00] We should talk after that because one of the things that after this show, cause one of the things that we do is really, really the thesis has helped fortune 500 brands, advertise, help brands advertise like the fortune 500 without actually spending a fortune. I love that idea that there’s, that there’s, that, that opportunity that in that delta because you know, like, t hese tools are so incredibly powerful and they’re not incredibly difficult to use. And for a person like you, who clearly knows what’s going on, it’s like there’s a whole world of opportunity in these tools. Okay. So COVID. Retail kind of like shrunk dramatically. E-commerce built up dramatically. Marketing is working, which is always a great sign. Retail is growing. What does, what do you, what are your key initiatives for 2021? 

David McKean: [00:20:59] Well, I think right now, you know, we kind of all are. Waiting to see what happens. Right? I mean, I, I have every competence that is a, the vaccines will, will help to kind of alleviate everybody’s, you know, overall concern. And, and hopefully that means coffee shops can open up again and we can actually get our salespeople in front of people that are you know, gonna carry the product to the customer on a, on a, you know, that kind of relationship. And then You know, in light of that, of what we did with our social net, social media stuff over black Friday, cyber Monday week I have had the team put together a plan for a campaign once a week. I’m sorry, once a month for a week. And we’re going to create those campaigns around various days. So the first one we’re going to kick off is it’s not 2020. Explanation point, you know you know, 20, 20, and hopefully this is it, you know, and then we’re gonna put an email blast around that and some discount codes and, and push and see what we can get. Then we’re going to do a Valentine’s day and then we’ve got an Easter thing and we’ve got a mother’s day father’s day, then there’s national chai day. Didn’t you know, this national chai day, there is a June. Yeah. So, so we got a whole bunch of stuff laid out every month for the next 12 months. And and I’m hoping that through the the extra revenue lifts from the e-commerce, as well as our continued growth in the distribution channels and grocery stores, that, that that’ll carry us until. So we can get some coffee shops back in business and we can actually send our sales guys to Seattle and Portland and sign up coffee shops there. So that that’s, that’s our hope and plan for the future. Do you, do you have any consideration for brand building as you think about your business? Because I think in many ways, building brand is, is the key differentiator between a good, a good, a good company and a great company. You have a. I, I definitely need to, I mean, brand building is certainly very important to me. And we also have been working on a couple of other charitable campaigns. We’ve been in talks and we’re trying, although it’s very hard with COVID to know if we can make this happen, but there’s a, a, there’s a Sherpa, a name coming Rita. He is a summited Everest 24 times, he holds the world’s record. He has said that he wants to submit a 25th time. And when we talked about it and it was, why do you want to do that? It was for the sharp of people from my community, the Sherpa people and Nepal. And so what I have created is a scholarship fund for the Sherpa people that will allow for You know, basically for the kids of Sherpas to go to secondary school, which is the differentiator for them, right. If they can go to school in Katmandu for high school, for example, they’re very likely to end up being able to go to university in Kathmandu that changes their lives in dramatic ways. And I know this personally from all the connections through friends and friends and their children that we’ve seen. And then we’re also working So by sponsoring Comey, Rita, we’re going to raise even more awareness. We hope and get a big press campaign behind and then raise more money to do this kind of charitable work. And and we also have another plan. There’s a a community center and urgent care center that we’re looking to build. In a place called Buddha body, which is our head brewer. Dealey comes from this little village and this is, this has been a dream of his life. And he’s, he said, when I retire, I’m going to go back and build a community center. And I, I was looking at him six months ago and I’m like, why do we have to wait till you retire? Let’s get on this now. So we’re, we’re working to get something like that done too. And I think all of those kinds of things are, are good for our brand. And and you know, in Pemba takes a lead on all that kind of stuff as well. So and it’s a lot of fun to do, to be honest with you. 

Robert Brill: [00:24:53] So, well, whenever you can pack with people, right? Like, like we’re, I think that the best, the best companies, the best organizations really have people at the, at the heart and soul of that, of the organization. If you’re helping people and you’re making a difference in the world, like people tend to, like, you. 

David McKean: [00:25:13] Well, you know what I mean? In all honesty, it gives more meaning to what you do, right? I mean, I know, I mean, I was talking about this ages ago with my with a good friend. Who’s a built companies and he’s super smart guy and, and you know, his, his comment was something to the effect of you know, you want to save turtles. That’s fine. That’s not me. And I’m like, I, I think that is me. I mean, not save turtles, but I think building a, you know, helping these kinds of people, you know, and now I’ve spent, I’ve met so many of them have been there and gotten to know them and it’s personal now. And, you know, in a lot of ways. And I really, I I see how it can change lives. I mean, truly change lives. So, I mean, Dealey adopted a girl when he, this, this is. Almost 20 years ago, he adopted it and this is kind of, they all do this. I mean, last summer Pemba adopted another family because the dad has stage four cancer and is not likely to last a few more months. And so he adopted these three young girls, got them an apartment in Katmandu, got them into secondary schools, got them to, you know, the uniforms to go to school and supply them with their food and a staple so that they can live and, and and. My wife is like, I want to do that. I want to adopt it. You know, some, some kids. So we’re thinking about doing the same thing, but, but Dealy adopted this girl who came from a cast that would never allow her to go to school. And and so he adopted her 20 years ago and today she’s, you know, graduated university.  She went to nursing school and she’s a nurse at the hospital in Katmandu, married with a little girl of her own. And that’s, life-changing, you know, That’s amazing. Yeah. I love that. Are, are any new flavors coming through over the next over the next year? Or are you going to stick with the current? I think I want to stick with the current for now. I get a lot of pressure and a lot of pushback, especially from the sales guys. They’re always like, can’t we do a unsweetened spicy and can’t we do a, you know, and it’s like, at some point you, you got to fall back on, on the old adage of what Henry Ford said, right. If they asked my customers what they wanted, I would have, they would have told me they wanted faster horses. Right. You know, I mean, right now, I think we’ve got enough different kind of flavor profiles at least to, to wait until after COVID, before we can start thinking about doing additional ones at this point, just, we gotta. To some degree, a little bit of hunker down and make sure that we are doing everything we can to sell. What is our core business? I’ve, I’ve been looking at a lot of other companies in our space who did things like try to get into RTDs, ready to drinks and. Didn’t have a lot of success with it. And it’s, it may end up being the undoing of the company because it’s a lot of capital to go into creating new flavors or canning product, et cetera. These are all things we’ve looked at and things we want to do, but not, not in this day and age with the way things are with COVID. I think we need to stay focused. Do what we know we do best make that work, grow that business, then we can expand. 

Robert Brill: [00:28:13] Well, I’ve seen other, I’ve seen other companies do that as well. And I can tell you from our own experiences, like it’s, it’s really tough to like, everything takes three times as long as you’d want it to take. That’s the first challenge. And then secondly, with, within the world of COVID you have supply chain challenges. Restaurants are the, my particular experience has been like restaurants. I love they’ve, they’re changing their menu to, to, to call down the plates that just aren’t selling as much. And they stick to the basics like w you know, who needs five variations of red shirts. At Target when you can have two and so equally as many, or almost as many, like it, you got to get back to basics a little bit. I think, you know, I have a, have a YouTube channel called the playlist is called The Great Reset. Cause I think there’s such an opportunity to re to change and adapt and iterate for the better, the way we do business, the way we live our lives. It’s great to see that you’re like sticking to what works.

David McKean: [00:29:17] Right. Well, I mean, at this point that’s kind of got to do that, right? I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s, what’s gonna create the most revenue to keep this whole thing afloat and keep it working while we you know, we have in the year that I year and half that I’ve been here, we’ve added a lot of staff and we’ve added a brand new warehouse facility. And you know, all of this is actually now. Frankly, we’re outgrowing it. So I got to look for another one, which is good, but you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a little, it’s a little risky and you know, when cash flows are there as they are because of because of the issues that we run into with the COVID stuff. So yeah, I think we we just make due for a lot of, a lot of this until we can, you know, we can, things loosen up and we can actually begin to really grow our revenues substantially. 

Robert Brill: [00:30:04] So Dave is there anything else you want to shout out? I have the URL as Sherpachai.com. If people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

David McKean: [00:30:15] I would say shoot me an email at [email protected] and I welcome any questions or inquiries and any other. You know, folks that have a similar business who have have questions or have any ideas. I, you know, I think we, we live and breathe by doing things like this, by talking to other business people, by learning from them, by hearing what worked for them, you know you, you just can’t do this in a vacuum. You need, you need a lot of good people around you and you need a lot of good people giving you good feedback. 

Robert Brill: [00:30:46] Absolutely. Dave McKean CEO at Sherpa Chai. Thanks for being with us today, Dave. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate your time. 

Outro: [00:30:55] Thank you for listening to this episode of the LA Business Podcast. If you like what we’re doing on this podcast, please consider subscribing on Apple or Google Play, leaving a five star review and sharing with your friends. If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for a guest you’d like to hear on this podcast, please email me [email protected]. Thank you have a fantastic day.