We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Teal Cooper. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Teal below.

Teal, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?

I want to share this story because of how life changing this lesson I learned has been for me. This is the lesson of detachment.

Like many business owners, the pandemic totally wrecked me. Since our clients consist of corporate offices, colleges and hospitals our revenue dropped 95%.

After the feeling of being in denial for the first month wore off I started to hit this rock bottom moment of just feeling so extremely low. Like many others can relate, I felt so incredibly helpless, frustrated, angry and discouraged. The business my brother and I have put our blood sweat and tears into for the last 5 years was crumbling before my eyes.

I eventually hit a point where I experienced a massive shift. I decided to surrender and focus all of my energy on finding joy and doing things that lit me up and made me happy instead of feeling consumed by devastation. I became in love with TikTok, had the time of my life learning dances and laughing to pranks with friends. I took online courses on how to build shopify websites, how to dropship. and took an online program on EFT and Brain reprogramming. My brother and I started working on developing our own D2C coffee line of products and rebuilt our website on Shopify. Once we started having fun with this creative process a marine at Camp Pendleton messaged VendiBean on Facebook. He said “I can get you guys on Camp Pendleton’s marine base.” I didn’t believe him for one second but took a leap of faith and had a meeting with him. Fast forward 3 months, he got us a meeting with the procurement director and we signed our first military contract installing 20 machines on Camp Pendleton. This opened doors to where we are now working with military bases nationwide including the Army. It allowed us to scale into three new markets with an industry that does not shut down due to a pandemic. This along with the government loans saved our business.

Covid taught me that I revolved my entire self-worth around my business. I didn’t know who I was or what I was passionate in without my business. I essentially experienced an ego death which was required for me to experience this lesson of detachment.

When we want something soooo badly and we prioritize it over ourselves, we are living in this state of “want” which is telling the universe that we need this thing to happen in order to be happy. Being in the state of wanting is the state of “needing” which comes from a place of lack.

Detaching releases the need of control and actually allows things to fall into place with ease. Sometimes in entrepreneurship we think we know exactly what the solution is or what the business model should be and it can feel like we’re forcing a square into a circle with so much resistance. Instead of pivoting and trying out new models or solutions until we find one that flows because we are too attached to the first outcome. We need to get to the point of detaching to where we feel okay if whatever it is that we desire were to explode tomorrow.

When we let go and detach we stop suffocating our goals and let them breathe. We let them grow into whatever form they will thrive the strongest. And when we detach, our energy shifts from being lack and need to exuding confidence, certainty, flow, trust and surrender.

Everything in this universe is made up of energy. In order to attract what we desire in life we must meet the energetic vibration of whatever it is we are desiring. I now practice detachment from all things in my life and I experience 10x more success doing 10x less work. I go into this more on my podcast Real with Teal, feel free to check it out if this resonates with you! (Found on Apple podcasts or Spotify).

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

VendiBean is disrupting the office coffee and coffee vending industry with the first Barista @ the touch of a button. We are revolutionizing the concept of a coffee vending machine with our innovative, sleek machines that grind our craft blend of beans to cup & whipping up 15 different barista quality selections like a coconut milk mocha, cortado, dirty chai latte and more.

We currently have 190 machines placed across Southern California, North Carolina, Dallas and soon launching in Seattle.

The majority of our clientele are culture focused clients who value their team’s morale and prioritize office culture like Buzzfeed, Puma, HP, Wing Stop and many more. Office coffee doesn’t need to be crappy, watered down and depressing. When employees love the coffee in the office they feel more motivated, productive, inspired and more excited to be in the office. Not only that but VendiBean also acts as the new age water cooler bringing teams together over a beloved cup of joe.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

That entrepreneurship doesn’t need to be hard.

Society has programmed us to glorify the hustle and the struggle with quotes like “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.” All of the How I Built this podcast episodes showed me that if I didn’t encounter massive obstacles and struggle then I basically don’t deserve a seat at the table.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe being an entrepreneur takes an immense amount of grit, resilience, and hard work but let us redefine what hard work looks like. If your work is your passion then you should love the work and feel fired up by it.

Sometimes we make our journey harder on ourselves than it needs to be all because of our beliefs that we have around entrepreneurship and success. Our beliefs literally create our reality. Once I reprogrammed my beliefs around entrepreneurship from needing to be hard with resistance and struggle to expecting miracles with opportunities flowing to me with ease I started hitting my monthly goals for the first time ever.
(If this interests you, feel free to check out episode 11 of my podcast Real with Teal where I go deeper into this.)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.vendibean.com
• Instagram: @vendibean @teal.cooper
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teal-cooper-5947b074/

Image Credits
I have permission to share these images My friend took them- Sarah Masters