We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dosh Hyde a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dosh thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

When trying to develop a new business, creativity and execution is key to success. When developing our online platform to help create awareness for local products, we went all in on the online e-commerce delivery route sharing not only the products but also how to utilize these products when creating meals. This was a fantastic success, yet did take some time to materialize into sales.

This is where the creativity comes into play, being our partnership with apartment complexes. While living at an apartment in mid 2020, I saw that they provided welcome gifts to ALL new residents that were moving in. These usually consisted of branded or other random big box products that could be utilized within the first few months of their new living space. Now these were very thoughtful, not disparaging their efforts at all, but could these more more unique and linked to the community. This is where the lightbulb when off and I though… what if we create a box utilizing the local products sold on our site. This would not only provide a very warm and relevant gift for people moving into the area, but also positively impact these business that are a part of the community.

The rest is history, as the apartment complexes loved the concept which has lead to additional partnerships within the industry!

Dosh, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

It has been a long journey through multiple corporate roles, various industries, and influential role models that has led to the creation of Local Flavoring. I graduated from Ohio University in 2016 with a BBA in Sports Management and was able to start working with the Dayton Dragons Professional Baseball team in 2019 after gaining outside experience through industries. Everything was going great, and the role I was involved in was very rewarding on many levels. As many have experienced throughout the last year, the COVID Pandemic left the sports industry in a rough place and a vast number of us were left without jobs.

Even though this was, on paper, a huge hit to the normalcy of daily life, I have always been a person that wants to continue pushing forward to help support myself, my community, and most importantly my family. This led to me to utilize my skills and gain business development contacts with 2 local Ohio companies. Through the year or so of building up the brand recognition and customer basis for these businesses, I started to understand many of these small local businesses were struggling themselves as they did not have the number of people coming into their shop as before. This led me to ask a business owner named Rob Hammann (Hammann’s Deli, Butcher &Catering), “Hey Rob, so do you list all these local products that you sell in store online”, the response was no, as he did not have the time or experience to navigate the online selling landscape. This is an answer I heard time and time again, after asking the same questions to other business owners of small farm stores to other family-owned businesses with their own local products. A light bulb went off, and I thought “What a great thing it would be to create a business around supporting local businesses, and fantastic small batch products”! Not only has market trends been moving this way, more importantly, the value of helping people was right there”.

This led to the 6-month journey of developing, implementing, and executing the construction of a platform where we could spread the word and help increase awareness for the local businesses, we help support. We are now currently months into the launch of our Local Flavoring site and continue to add features (Business Profiles, Recipe Videos, Combo Boxes, and fantastic local gift baskets) to elevate the site into the community environment for all to enjoy! The goal is not to end there, but continue to grow and bring other local businesses into our family to assist in sharing the value of these local business products.

We now support a 3-member creative and business team to help innovation, have a vendor’s booth at The Morrow Farmers Market, JCC Market, and various other vendor events where we will hopefully continue to grow into a business that makes purchasing products and helping local business a staple in Ohio and beyond!

The website is launched, yet the journey has just begun in continuing our growth and recognition which enables our further support of local businesses and their amazing products.

Have you ever had to pivot?

As always happens in life, you have to be adaptable! The pandemic has shown this too many individuals and businesses through the disruption caused by the unprecedented situations this caused within the world. This is exactly what caused me to shift from corporate America into the small-business sector. Not only to help them all I could, but to be involved with an industry that affected families and businesses directly within my area. This started with doing small business consulting for a few local businesses, where I assisted in creating business relationships to get these local products on business shelves. The beauty of this was helping to grow these businesses, but also making fantastic connections with local producers and small-batch producers around the midwest. Intern, Local Flavoring was born!

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Funding is always a tough part of starting a business, as you have to convince another party that your business is worth the risk. Belief on you end, unfortunately, is not enough.

The funding for Local Flavoring initially came directly out of my pocket. This was a risk, yet as I believed in the idea and myself, the risk was worth the reward of further knowledge and the possibility of building a business from the ground up that could help my community.

As eventually capital is needed to expand, our team and I was able to provide a value pitch to an Individual investor that saw the possibilities and uniqueness within our business. This has very much helped us expand and be more creative in developing concepts to roll out now and further down the road!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://localflavoring.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/localflavoring/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/localflavoring
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hydedosh101
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFwSNs_qw4I