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

Laurel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you take vacations? How do you keep things going – any advice for entrepreneurs who feel like they can’t step away from their business for a short vacation?

I do take vacations. Even though I am literally a one-woman show, I find that time away from my business is essential. Not only is it good for my mental and physical health, but it also provides opportunity to find inspiration in new places and experiences. A few weeks before a planned vacation I always send emails to my regular wholesale customers letting them know that I am taking a vacation and giving them a timeline for placing orders if they will need product prior to or during my vacation. Two weeks prior to my vacation, I send a similar email to my individual customer list and do a social media post containing similar information. The day my vacation starts, I set up a standard “out of office” auto-reply for my email, and I adjust my automated order confirmation message to state that I am on vacation and that all orders will be fulfilled upon my return in the order they were received. I do state that I am happy to offer a refund if the wait is unacceptable, but I have never had anyone take me up on that. Indeed, everyone from my wholesale customers to followers on social media have always been, without exception, completely supportive of my taking time off. Granted, I make spice blends and gourmet foods, so it’s not like the world stops spinning if I’m away, but it’s still nice to hear encouragement from customers.

Laurel, 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?

I took a decidedly winding path to where I am today. A dozen years ago, I was a litigator at a well-respected law firm in West LA. I was a Senior Associate and was getting pressure from the Firm leadership to take steps toward partnership, a prospect about which I was less than excited. I simply did not enjoy what I was doing on a daily basis. I liked my Firm and the people I worked with, but I did not like being part of a system that seemed to exist mostly to ensure that lawyers like me got paid lots of money.

A couple of years prior to this, I had started a food and wine blog as a kind of creative outlet and, through that, had started hosting and catering small dinner parties on the weekends. I absolutely loved being part of the joy in people’s lives rather than part of their conflicts. So when a case I was on that was supposed to go to trial suddenly settled, I took advantage of the fact that I had no cases on my desk and gave my notice to the Firm. I took a couple of months off and then started culinary school, where I learned some new skills but mostly found confidence in the skills I had already developed on my own.

I worked several jobs in restaurants and catering during culinary school, and then an opportunity arose to open a new restaurant in the San Pedro terminal for Catalina Express, the ferry company that transports people to and from Catalina Island. The owner of the company wanted to improve the quality of the land-based food and beverage options, and I had all kinds of ideas. After a successful first year in San Pedro, I took over the restaurants in the Long Beach terminal as well, and I remained with the company, managing four restaurants in two locations, for 8 years, until Covid shutdowns forced us to shutter the restaurants in March 2020. By July 2020 it was clear that Catalina Express would not be reopening its land-based food operations any time soon, so my part of the Food & Beverage department was eliminated, and my staff of over 30 people and I were let go.

Suddenly unemployed but unwilling to try to find other restaurant work at the time in light of Covid, I decided to start my own business out of my home kitchen. I had been making spice blends for myself for years, and this was something I could get licensed to do as a Cottage Food Operator, so it was perfect. I started out selling at my local farmers market and then popping up with other local makers and artisans around San Pedro. I quickly realized, however, that my status as a Cottage Food Operation was limiting my ability to grow, both geographically and in the types of products I could make, so switched to manufacturing my products in a shared commercial kitchen facility. Doing so allowed me to drastically expand my reach, and I now have wholesale customers all over the continental United States.

While I enjoyed my time working in restaurants, starting this little business has really brought me back to what made me want to go to culinary school in the first place – bringing joy to people through food. Now, instead of sweating my way through a shift in a hot restaurant kitchen cooking for others, I create products that allow my customers to make their own food more delicious. I create recipes and post photos and videos on social media to help give my customers ideas for ways to use my products, but my absolute favorite moments are when customers send me messages or post photos or video of meals they’ve made with my products and have used them in ways I never would have thought of myself. I have had countless customers tell me that they finally enjoy cooking for their families or that their kids want to help make dinner now or that they can’t wait to try the latest recipe I posted because it uses their favorite A Bite of Good spice blend. I truly feel like I am finally contributing to the joy in people’s lives, and that makes me so incredibly happy.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

I sell my products direct to consumer on my website, which is also where visitors (whether or not they are customers) can find recipes on my Blog and learn more about me and my company. I use Wix and have found it to be pretty easy to manage. I make my products in small batches, so I prefer to have direct control over my inventory. I chose not to go with Etsy based on conversations I’ve had with other makers, and I felt that my products would get lost in the enormity of Amazon.

I do have a business account with Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and a few months ago they started forcing businesses like mine to allow in-app purchasing, which I find incredibly frustrating because their Commerce management tools are…. let’s just say awful. I encourage people who follow me on those platforms to make purchases directly on my website, where they can find extra options that are not available if they purchase within the Facebook or Instagram apps, like free customer pickup, local delivery, and free shipping on larger orders.

Finally, I recently starting selling my products on Faire, which is a wholesale marketplace for artisan goods, and it has actually been great. There is currently no way to integrate Faire with my inventory on Wix, so I have to do that manually, but Wix has been pretty great about adding features, so I anticipate that will be something that will happen down the road.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media has been one of the hardest parts of starting a small business for me. There’s all this advice out there about how to grow your accounts and what kind of things to post and how often, and at the same time the algorithms are constantly changing, so all that advice is almost immediately irrelevant anyway. I tried for a while to keep up with the advice and focus on growing, but not only was it not working, it was feeling like a full-time job. And one that I hated to boot.

So now, I focus on a few things that feel manageable to me:
1) I do one main post six days per week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are for Reels. Tuesday and Thursday are for Carousels. Saturday is for a single photo. Sunday is a day off. If I get busy and post nothing else on a given day, at least I’ve done the one post.
2) Whenever possible, I post at the same time every day. The algorithms supposedly like consistency, but I certainly do. I use the “Schedule” feature in Instagram.
3) Anything I post to my Feed is about my business/life only. I want people scrolling through my Profile page to know what my business is. Things I want to share that are not about my business go into my Stories.
4) While I do not particularly enjoy being on camera, I am trying to be better about it. People like seeing the face behind the business. I definitely get more engagement on posts where I am in the images/video.
5) I’m less concerned with growing my Follower count and more concerned with providing value in my posts. The Followers will come.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.abiteofgood.com
• Instagram: @abiteofgood
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abiteofgood/
• Faire: www.faire.com/brand/b_3gvub6ee9s