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

Hi Ian, thanks for joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

As cliché as it may sound, the key to scaling up for us was our customers, since at the end of the day we are only as successful as the value we are able to provide to others. In terms of strategy and tactics we followed the playbook of most companies, just listen to your customers and put in the work. Obviously we began with a basic value proposition: Sell Blue Oyster mushrooms at a fair price, hand out business cards and let them know where they can get more. Now we have expanded our product offering substantially. This is because we did not fully appreciate starting out the insights into what products people were looking for with regular face to face exposure at the farmer’s markets.

The first product we got feedback on were grow kits and Lion’s Mane. So many people were asking for Lion’s Mane that we began cultivating that as well. This meant we needed more shelves to colonize the blocks, more sterilized substrate to grow them on and more room to fruit them. This really meant a lot of hard work and engineering from us and again, putting in the work to make it happen. Let me give you a few examples of what this looks like.

In order to grow mushrooms you need to colonize the mycelium onto a mostly sterile growing medium like sawdust. This medium is contained in 5lb plastic bags that we put through a pressure cooker that runs in 2 hours cycles at hundreds of degrees. Now imagine doing that for hundreds of 5lb blocks. Well we now have a drum sterilizer that does the same job in 18 hours while we’re sleeping for over 400lbs of substrate.

There were also crunch times when we needed to pick up a truck shipment of grain at a freight terminal but the friend with the truck wasn’t available and the order also ended up getting lost by the carrier. Well, then it’s up to me to track down the shipment, talk my way into the freight terminal during a torrential downpour, load 1000 pounds of grain into my Kia Soul and drive through flood waters to the farm; all while not even getting paid. Yeah, the whole “getting paid” part often comes second to the “making it work” part.

Then there’s the time the air conditioning went out during that stretch of 105 degree days here in Houston and the fruiting chambers turned into the climate of a rainforest for a month or so. All this time, we made sure our customers were getting good product and we kept showing up to the markets, no excuses. There’s a lot more stories in there, but the lesson here is to be persistent. One of my favorite books that had a huge impact on me is “Mastery” by Robert Green. In it he has a chapter about how the most successful individuals are not usually the most talented ones. Rather, it’s the ones who are persistent and never give up that end up setting records and making a difference. Just keep showing up and doing the reps and you’ll be successful.

Ian, 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?

My bread and butter has always been in IT, but I’ve always been involved in a side hustle of some type. I’ve done landscaping, house flipping, Amazon private labeling and retail arbitrage. Though, my passion has also been fitness, health, nature and movement, the things that make us human. This holds mostly true for everyone that works with Mush Love Supply, in that we are passionate about health.

What really got us all into the mushroom business is the myriad of health benefits and the problems they can solve. For instance, Lion’s Mane has neurogenerative benefits, PSK is a cancer treatment derived from Turkey Tail mushrooms approved for use in Japan and Texas passed a bill in 2021 which legalizes the study of psychedelic mushrooms for treating PTSD for military veterans.

To go a little further, being involved in some of the environmental cleanup for hurricane Harvey and Maria gave me an appreciation for just how much petrochemical pollution is out there. I’ve also been learning about microplastics and endocrine disruptors causing hormone imbalances in men and women. Some mushroom mycelium is used for literally “digesting” pollution, which I just see a tremendous opportunity for in not only business but in curating a world for my future children.

As idealistic as that is, however, the goal we always keep in mind is that we have to do good business to make that happen. One way to do that is to create outsized value for our customers at a discount. For instance, our powdered Lion’s Mane uses only mushroom fruiting bodies from mushrooms we grow ourselves. We package it in glass, not plastic. Our customers can talk to us, message us, get a replacement no questions asked. We’ve made a way to make that happen for a $29 dollar cost to consumer. Our ethos is to keep adding value to that offer completely unprompted, while continuing to invest in more labor saving devices and offering more for our customers.

The big problem we are solving for our customers here is better cognitive health, gut health, correcting mineral deficiencies such as magnesium, learning more about our fungal world and building interest in that. What I get out of it is something more than money, I’ll put it that way. The connections I’ve made with real local farmers making real raw milk, grass fed beef, artisan products with no seed oils, loving and stewarding our planet…it’s beautiful, you can’t pay money for that.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I’ve had to unlearn was the fallacy of the mountain of ignorance in the dunning kreuger effect. When you see massive gains in understanding or proficiency like you just launched your Amazon product or you bought that first house, you think that’s it, you learned the game. This is just before you pass through the valley of despair and realize just how much you don’t know that you don’t know.

If I could give advice to my younger self it would be to walk before you run and build geometrically. Do what everyone else is doing at first then build something unique on that. The worst thing you can do in business is try to learn how to drive then realize nobody wants to ride in a car. That time will come, sure, but you have to still be in business for when it happens.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

The biggest return on investment I’ve had for growing clientele is local farmers markets and business cards. Most of the sales I’ve made are through word of mouth. You can make a career out of copywriting and PPC ads. I can’t do that right now to build presence so I optimize the resources I have available until we can bootstrap ourselves into growing clientele through entirely different channels.

Building better products that generate interest is where we’re at. Next step in our business is to get more eyes on our brand, but I can’t say exactly what it looks like to implement that strategy right now.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mushlovesupply.com
• Instagram: @mushlovetexas
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MushLoveSupply
• Twitter: @MushLoveTX
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mushlovesupply

Image Credits
Myself.