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

Janine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Starting and growing a business requires these micro pockets of massive energy burn. Our experiences create thoughts that cultivate into ideas that explode into execution when they are strategically acted upon. Every risky decision comes with a moment in time that requires the decision maker to launch. The decisions are relative to the moment. Do I spend $100 on Amazon to research something? Do I spend $45,000 on this custom printed inventory item? Do I buy and rehab an $800,000 building? In order to scale you have to be willing and able to make thousands of decisions daily, weekly and monthly that have tangible outcomes. Do I skip a happy hour to make two more phone calls to prospective customers? In order to scale we have to spend resources. I define resources as falling into four large buckets. 1. Money – I’ve been willing and able to invest the money necessary to scale. Having the ability understand calculated risks and ROI is important.
2. Time – I’ve been willing to invest the time it takes to scale. Investing your time in the right things is important. Don’t flit away time doing anything that isn’t scaling your business. Focus on income producing activities, not simple tasks that anyone can do for you. (See investing money above)
3. Fear – I’ve been willing to do the things I”m afraid to do. Asking for a meeting with a person or company that intimidates you. We spent a lot of money going to trade shows that we were afraid we were in over our head. We did it anyway
4. Fact – I’ve been willing to do the things that have to be done as a fact of the business needs. Especially when they don’t feel good and I don’t want to do them.

Money and Time as a resource are easy to understand. Fear and Fact are defined or masked differently for different people and businesses, but ultimately they are ever present. It’s a huge energy resource to do things we’re afraid to do or things we don’t want to do. Successful business people do them anyway.

Janine, 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?

Crackerology is an experiential gourmet appetizer company. We make delicious appetizer and dessert kits that take something ordinary and make it extraordinary. The vision for our company started with 3 friends that love to gather together and play cards, drink wine and eat snacks. We loved making small bites, canapes, treats for each other. Charcuterie is all the rage, but the gourmet cheese section can be very intimidating for many. We set out to create an easy to assemble delicious treat that is Instagram brag worthy.

Our second focus for our customers, after deliciousness, was convenience. We’ve chosen to stick with a shelf stable product that does not require refrigeration. Wineries and distilleries all over the country love our kits because they have an acceptable 6+ month shelf life and don’t require precious refrigeration space. People love to keep a little stash of our kits on hand as hostess gifts or thank you gifts.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Managing a team is easy when you are willing to communicate often, succinctly and honestly. The greatest morale booster you can give a team is including them in the business conversations. Share the goals, celebrate the wins, discuss and learn from the losses together. Another morale booster is ensuring your team has adequate resources to be successful. Do they have enough money, time and ability to achieve their given goals? It is your responsibility to ensure they have these resources. Recognize and celebrate regularly. From small potlucks to large recognition ceremonies, encourage team engagement throughout your business.

When someone does something you don’t like, tell them. Too many people fret and waste energy over giving necessary polite and kind direction and communication. It’s a wasted resource to fail to communicate your expectation to your team. The fact that you don’t want the confrontation is hurting your business and it’s unfair to the team. People cannot read your mind. The next time you find yourself talking about someone, be sure you have talked to them. Talking about them does nothing to help your business.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Our very first 50 kits we produced were 25 of our Red Wine and Rosemary flavor and 25 of our White Wine and Basil. My family had a small car trip vacation planned across the state and my goal was to stop at 3 wineries along the trip and leave sample kits for them to consider stocking our product for their customers. I bought some little gift bags and my business partner produced a wholesale flyer for me. The first winery we stopped was welcoming of the samples and we enjoyed tasting a wine flight. (We were there already, right?) The 2nd Winery had an amazing gift shop and the 3rd winery had an amazing view. By that evening, the 2nd winery had emailed me and placed our very first order. It was so validating to see our proof of concept in action in such a short amount of time. I delivered the kits a few days later. We were off and running! While we market and sell in many different ways today, we still drop off samples all the time. Our team is encouraged to tell us about an adorable little small town shop they love and we send them with a sample bag to drop off.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.crackerology.com
• Instagram: @crackerology
• Facebook: @crackerology
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/crackerology/
• Youtube: @crackerology

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