We recently connected with Ezekiel Cortez and have shared our conversation below.

Ezekiel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

Yes, overall I’m a much happier person. Being in business for yourself can get awfully difficult at times, to the point where you want to quite several times throughout the week. I definitely think to myself “what if I just go back to work and actually make a living?” But that plan is always there and available when I want. The times I think about going back to a normal job is whenever there is chaos happening in the business.. For example, food shortages and increased costs of food, increase costs of containers, chemicals, labor etc. Something major breaks down or an employee gets in a wreck while delivering food, or something major and personal happens. Financially, you just want to quit because you know there is no easy way out, it’s only going to come back one step at a time. There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel but the tunnel seems like forever. After being in business for almost 7 years, I have come to realize that the problems will never cease to exist, I will simply get better at solving them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Back in Highschool, a buddy of mine and myself had a conversation about wanting to go culinary school when we finished Highschool. He ended up going to the military and I took a year off from everything and stuck myself in the party scene. Nothing good came out of it and I found myself struggling, with no direction, or idea of what I wanted.

One random day I thought about my idea of going to culinary school and I Googled the top culinary schools in the country. Scottsdale Culinary Institute was ranked #2 at the time and the #1 culinary school was in New York. I figured New York was a far ways away, so I settled and called SCI to inquire about it.

One thing led to another and I committed to going down to Arizona for culinary school. At this point, I was still in party mode but I stayed committed to going to culinary school. I finished school and came back to Colorado, and once again entered the party scene.. The promises made by the school did not come to fruition and I found myself at the bottom of the totem pole working in the prep area of a restaurant. With the understanding that it was going to take me a long time to acquire the income I wanted, I looked for other opportunities. At the time I had a girlfriend which would eventually become the mother of my first born, we decided to move to Denver and see if the world would give us a better opportunity. We lived in Denver for about a year and welcomed my first child but soon decided to move back. After experiencing low pay and a lot of hours, I needed better pay with another mouth to feed.

When we got back to Northern Colorado, an opportunity came to sell cars at the local Ford dealership. This portion of my career came naturally to me and I was instantly making more money than I ever have before. I fell in love with the process of solving peoples problems and in turn, making good money.

My career came full circle when my girlfriend and I split, and I became a single house dad. After months of scrambling for time to spend with my 2 year old son, I started to feel guilty and began brainstorming ways that I could save time during the week so I could dedicate more time with my child. This is the brainstorming that birthed my next baby, Super-Natural Eats.

Super-Natural Eats started as a fully organic convenience dinner delivery service. We had a simple menu, and we delivered all over Northern Colorado, kind of like how door dash works now. Eventually, it evolved to being a healthy meal preparation service that delivers all over Northern Colorado and the Denver area. Our community here local and even nationwide are in dire need of healthy convenient food service company that has their interests in mind, and that is the burden we undermine. Being a healthy human goes so much farther than it used to and I believe people are finally understanding this concept of a better life starts with what you put in your body.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

This is a common misconception about business. Everybody thinks you need money to start a business and you don’t, you need courage. All the money in the world won’t solve your problems in business, although it will help. Getting funding first, in a lot of circumstances, is putting the cart before the horse.

The reason you want to start with as little money as possible is because money removes your ability to be creative. For small businesses, utilizing creativity and resources helps solve problems for the long term and produces the skill of critical thinking. If you always solve a problem with “start up capital,” then you remove the ability to solve a real problem in real time and under a real timeline. Which means you don’t build that critical thinking skill, you simply write a check.

What I did was start the business and gradually purchase as I needed. I utilized my own money with as little capital as possible ($500) and then started getting orders. Once I got orders I then purchased products and things I needed.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

A time we had to pivot was during the pandemic. We started to offer meal kits and prepared holiday dishes as opposed to the standard single portion healthy meals. For example, we created a menu for both Thanksgiving and Christmas that was entirely prepared and ready to heat.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.supernaturaleats.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/supernaturaleats/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/supernaturaleats
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/super-natural-eats-llc
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT2fF1vYXgdSbhZkr4E-tqQ

Image Credits
Estus Digital