Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lisa Steinkamp. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Lisa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder. What it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?
I’ve always wanted the freedom to create something on my own. I spent a long career in marketing before finally deciding to take the leap and start my own business, but I thought about it for many years before that. I worked for some pretty great brands and liked what I did, but spent probably the last 5 years of that marketing career thinking about what kind of business I was going to start someday. I guess it was sort of a creative itch.
I’m sure every entrepreneur would agree, launching and growing a business is most definitely an around-the-clock gig. I love the flexibility of it because in many ways its easier to juggle kids and family. I don’t have to check in with anyone to ask if I can leave early for something at my son’s school. I just schedule my work around it. But I’m still at farmer’s markets on the weekend, picking up ingredients or labeling bags on Sunday, and thinking about things I need to follow up on that day when I first wake up. At several points throughout this journey, I’ve found myself wondering if I should just throw in the towel and go back to a nice marketing job in an office, where I don’t have to stand for hours on end at a market or sampling event, clean and mop floors after a messy production run, or constantly load and unload my car with boxes and 50 lb. bags of oats! But then I pretty easily turn it around and remind myself that I’m doing it! The bags sitting on the shelf in Lucky’s Market or getting shipped out to Maine, California, or Florida are a constant reminder that I’m on the path that I wanted to be on all those years ago sitting at my nice marketing desk job, yearning to do something on my own.
The interesting part is that as I’m growing, I have more help making and packaging the granola, and am gradually able to focus more on the business side of things, including the marketing. It feels like all of my experience working for brands like Baskin-Robbins, Disney, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are coming full circle and I’m starting to have more of a balance between making something I love, and also utilizing my skillset in marketing and branding. It feels really rewarding.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was really getting antsy to launch my own business and after moving to Boulder from Los Angeles for my husband’s job, I immediately started to zero in on natural food as a focus. The environment here is all about healthy food and lifestyle, something that has always been a personal interest of mine. I decided to start with the local farmer’s markets and test some of my baked goods, including granola. Funny, my focus was on making really great clean-ingredient cookies, and someday that might circle back, but it was the granola that quickly took off. I could also package it and start selling it in grocery more easily, so that’s what I did about 6 months after my first farmer’s market.
It was my husband’s love of granola that really started me on that path. He eats it every day and (for years) I spent a lot of time searching for the best ones without great luck. They were all pretty much sugar and oats. So I started making my own, with less sugar and more nuts and seeds for better nutrition. Then I started getting creative with flavors, adding spices like fresh lemon zest or clove and ultimately realized that I wanted a fresher product than what you usually find on grocery shelves. We “short-bake” our granola so that it isn’t completely dehydrated. It’s lightly crisp, but you can really taste all of the ingredients and it’s perfect for snacking on. Our customers repeatedly tell us it’s the best granola they’ve ever had. I get emails every week from people who have tried it at the Boulder Farmer’s Market and want to know where they can buy it in their state. For now, we are branching out of the Boulder area in grocery and we sell it from our website and ship to every state.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
I just started working with a manufacturer 3 weeks ago! It has been a long time coming, but it’s going really well and I honestly can’t believe I’m finally at this point. Up until now it has been me and one or two other people to help me at the share kitchen where we bake. It’s a lot of work just to make a few hundred bags in that environment and I’ve been looking for the right manufacturing partner for over a year, knowing that I can’t keep up with demand on my own.
I also considered just getting a larger kitchen space of my own, but realized the investment needed to get all of the equipment up and running would be too much for now. For me, working with a manufacturer is best because I want to put my focus into product development and marketing. I don’t want to be bogged down in the operations side of the business, and the manufacturer I’m working with is so well-versed on the category of products I’m in. They are also a gluten-free and non-GMO facility, and that’s a certification I’m looking to get for my products, so it just clicked.
On our first production run, I was so nervous something big would go wring. I’m used to just figuring things out at a smaller scale, but now that we’re making thousands of bags at a time, I really had to trust. Just having to convert my recipes to larger batches was pretty tedious. I was terrified I had mis-measured or weighed an ingredient and we would ruin an entire batch. But once I started working with the group of bakers there, they put my mind at ease right away. They had done this before! I was floored by all the granola we were able to make in one day. One of the best Spark + Honey moments so far!
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Hands down, the Boulder Farmer’s Market. A lot of people reading this might be surprised by that, but the Boulder market is not an average farmer’s market. Quite a few major natural food brands started there because the network of growers, farmers, restaurant owners, and natural food manufacturers is so strong here. There are a lot of resources for start up food businesses, and I’ve made so many friends and gotten invaluable expertise from other entrepreneurs here.
There are about 3,000 people that pass through the Boulder Saturday market every week from April through November. That’s a lot of granola samples! I attribute my online business (and a lot of local also) to the market. There are so many tourists that visit the market, try our granola, then go home and order a subscription. It’s also such a great way to test new flavors, get feedback, and learn what your customers are looking for and what’s important to them.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.spark-honey.com
- Instagram: @sparkandhoney