We recently connected with Beth Quinn and have shared our conversation below.

Beth, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

The roots of our business is our family, and I think that although family run businesses can present unique challenges they also draw everyone together to reach a common goal and the experience is, of course, very personal. There is this added connection that takes place between members of a family when you are working alongside each other. I think all of that translates to the product and generally the consumer responds favorably to it. It is definitely getting harder in some ways to compete with larger corporate entities in our business especially with supply chain issues and the general cost of business expenses going up, but I think that the sacrifices a family makes together on behalf of the business is, in the long run, outweighed by the benefits each family member derives from the experience.

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

Q’s Nuts is a family owned and operated vegan nut roasting company that creates an extensive line of roasted nuts, seeds, and granola. We started Q’s Nuts over 20 years ago, not even thinking that we would turn it into a large food production business with any sort of market share in the specialty food industry. Our goal was simply to earn a little bit of extra income for our family while my husband and I each worked our own jobs. More important to us though was that it included our children working alongside us, our daughter was 15 at the time and our son was 7. We really wanted to instill in them the value of hard work and a respect not only for how hard it is to earn money but also being mindful when spending it. Of course, at that age, our son couldn’t work the hours we had to put in to start our enterprise, but he did help with little things and certainly absorbed what the rest of the family was doing surrounding the business. He still works at Q’s today, and is the driving force behind expanding our reach, especially digitally, and is positioned to take over the company eventually. Both kids grew up around the growth of Q’s and they are both hard working, creative problem solvers and well-rounded workers. I feel proud that we took a small investment and created, literally, every aspect of the business with the kids. We hand built our first roasting cart, designed the logo, marketed the product, and of course roasted every batch. Today we have two stores, sell to hundreds of accounts across the country in many different markets, and the tradition of doing all of the production continues to this day. Q’s has the personal feel of a family business and a product that is hand crafted with a lot of love.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We started with $1500, and hand built our first roasting cart out of a stainless-steel table and a camping stove. We began by event roasting and threw as much profit as we could back into the business. In building the business over the years, we have tried to do everything ourselves including cooking, packaging, designing, and marketing, photography, bookkeeping, sales, etc. to save our profit and we still do almost everything in house. We also never took on any financial investors as we really wanted to freedom to make directional decisions on our own. Eventually we ended up getting bank loans to grow, but that was many years down the road before we took on that kind of debt and this has allowed us to weather the downturns that are inevitable in a business cycle.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience has been consistent throughout our journey, and I think all business owners need to learn to pivot and find new ways to forge ahead in challenging times to survive. The past few years have tested our strength as a company, first with Covid and having to shut down both stores to the public, but also about a year ago when my husband was involved in a very serious motorcycle accident. The focus, of course, shifted to the seriousness of his injuries and ultimate rehabilitation all while trying to maintain the business. Definitely one of the most stressful times in our history as a family and as a company. A year later, I am proud to say his resilience, and ours, has gotten him through, and he has almost fully recovered and is back working alongside us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.qsnuts.com
• Instagram: instagram/qsnuts
• Facebook: facebook/qsnuts
• Linkedin: qsnuts
• Twitter: twitter/qsnuts