Aug. 15, 2023
Ep 2 - Boss Talks: Shutting It Down with Heather Thomason of Primal Supply Meats / Part 1
Part 1 of Kate's conversation with Heather Thomason, founder of Primal Supply Meats, the Philadelphia based butchery she closed in May of this year after seven years in business. This is Heather's first public conversation since the closure.
Heather and Kate talk about the past few years of pandemic turmoil, the toll leading the business took on her, and how she got to the point of realizing she couldn't do it anymore.
Show Notes:
- Enough is Enough, a Summer of Failure on Kate's Substack
- The Truth About Going Mega-Viral by Emily McDowell
- about Wanderwell
To learn more about Whiskey Fridays and read further essays by Kate on the topics we discuss go to katetyson.substack.com
Transcript
Part 1
===
Heather: [00:00:00] And no one's going to like it, and I have to do it anyway.
And that's, that's kind of it. It's like, once I kind of said that out loud to someone and I really started to kind of like embody that and remind myself all the time, like it is my business. Like I made it and I can end it. This is my choice.
Kate: hey there,
Kate Tyson here from Whiskey Fridays. Today I'm here with part one of my conversation with Heather Thomason, founder of Primal Supply Meats, the Philadelphia based butchery she closed in May of this year after seven years in business. This is Heather's first public conversation since the closure, and, well, we had a lot to talk about, so this will be a two parter.
In part one, we talk about the wild ride of the past few years, the toll leading the business was taking on her physically, emotionally. [00:01:00] all of the things, and how she got to the point of realizing she couldn't do it anymore. In part two, we talk through the very complicated and actually somewhat drawn out process of deciding to finally end it, and then how that all went down.
Before we get into it, I also wanted to give you a bit of context about the business, because it's not a model you see every day.
Businesses exist to serve all sorts of different purposes. Yes, to make money, but often because of interests, passions, or skills of the owner, to meet a gap in the market, Or, you know, all sorts of different reasons. But then there are the rare businesses that start to shake things up at a truly systemic level.
Primal Supply Meats was one of those. I met Heather early in Primal's story. She was a client when she started the business in 2016, and we continued to work together at various inflection points over the years. Heather left a successful [00:02:00] career in graphic design in order to pursue the trade of whole animal butchery and a passion for supporting local sustainable food systems.
Primal launched with a vision for a new ethical supply chain based on relationships with local farmers raising sustainably farmed animals. Primal's team processed these whole animals in house and sold their products to customers through Primal's retail shops, CSA program, and via restaurants and local groceries throughout the area. For the business nerds out there counting, that's at least two or three different revenue streams. Creating a supply chain with such an uncompromising vision for transparency and ethics, from scratch, is a very intense feat to undertake. And to call this an operationally complex business model is to put it very mildly.
And it's also a very labor dependent model. As Heather says in our conversation, skilled butchers do not grow on trees. [00:03:00] This is also not how most meat gets to most meat eaters. Perhaps you're familiar with the huge environmental toll of commodity and conventionally raised meat. You may not be aware that much of what props up cheap cuts in your local big supermarket is a whole slew of government subsidies and externalized environmental costs.
Primal was not infrequently on the receiving end of sticker shock comments from the public. And really that's because we're so used to our artificially cheap and mass farmed beef. So, a vision for a relationship based, environmentally conscious butchery with the highest quality product, that is a radical proposition.
And one, as you'll hear, Heather fought really hard to build. Now I should confess before we go any further, that I've been a vegetarian since I was a young teenager. I have no personal experience of Primal's products, [00:04:00] but that doesn't mean I don't have serious respect for what Heather created.
And honestly, if folks are going to eat meat, this is the kind of quality and ethics I hope it comes with. So, with that, let's dive in.
Heather: I'm only a little bit nervous. I haven't talked about the business closing on the record at all. it wasn't intentional. It was just like, I didn't want to talk to anybody when I was going through the closing because I felt like it just would take too much emotional energy when I needed to actually focus on taking care of the business and everyone that was still part of it.
And then as soon as it was done, I was, I thought, Oh, I'll want to talk, I'll be ready to talk about this next month. And then as soon as it was done,
Kate: Yeah.
Heather: kind of, I don't care slash like I need to disconnect. So I can't care. Um, but yeah, it's all I thought about for so long and then I really intentionally stopped thinking about it.
So it like hasn't been on my mind. It's not [00:05:00] again, like we'll see. See what happens.
Kate: Great. We're gonna, we're gonna resurrect the, uh,
the corpse for
a little
Heather: I'm ready. I'm pretty, pretty relaxed. You know, I already
exercised
today.
Everything's good.
Kate: Well, Heather, I'm very excited to have you here. And I'm also honored to be your first public conversation about, the closure of Primal and how you're doing So thanks for, thanks for being here to talk to me.
Heather: Thanks for asking.
Kate: So, I actually wanted to start. You sent me a text this morning of a post that a woman named Emily McDowell wrote about her experience with growing her stationery business and the very, very intense toll that that took on her. And one of the things she got into was the, gap between the like super public rosy girl boss image that sold and presented the public and she was talking about like being [00:06:00] on NBC and Good Morning America and like all these, you know, very national.
And I don't know that you identify with the girlboss thing. I definitely
don't, but
but, you know, that, that kind of image of success will have it all girlboss. Contrasted with the... wreck that she was behind the scenes as she built this thing.
And I kind of wanted to start with that. Cause you, you know, you texted me this for a reason, obviously, and connected it to the fact that we were talking today. but I wanted to start with this perception between outside and inside. because especially with so much Instagram and content and like, social media out there is that we don't really know what's happening behind the scenes most of the time, like we don't know what it really looks like.
and you were very good at getting yourself out there as the face of the company. And, you still have and had a really radical vision for a different.
sort of meat [00:07:00] industry and supply chain. Like you weren't just selling cuts of meat in a shop. you were building something much bigger than that. So it made sense that you were like out in the world proselytizing about this vision. Um, and I know that after you closed, you told me that all sorts of people reached out sort of like, but you were so successful, what happened?
And you were like, well. Uh, yes, but, um, so like, I don't want to start with your experience of, of like that, external face and perception and what's actually happening behind the scenes and like how you, how, how do you respond to those? But you were so successful kind of comments.
Heather: it's funny. They caught me off guard. Um, but yeah, but you know that I sent that to you because it really resonated with me. And there's kind of two, two parts that are really the same thing. It's like, I guess the duality of things and there's a couple of things that she touches on. And one is like, [00:08:00] The, your own idea of like what the business is supposed to be or what it will be like, um, and then what it actually is.
And, the girl boss thing isn't something that I, that I bought into, but the idea of being a boss, you know, and, and what that's like. I never envisioned primal growing to be something to be, to be what it was.
It's like, it happened kind of rapidly, you know, that idea of like, you know, perpetual growth and kind of driving revenue that you're encouraged to do. And over the course of the seven years, like, It grew so quickly that there was a point where it's like, I realized that the reality of the business was not something that I had ever even imagined years before when suddenly I was in it.
Um, I got to the point where I had over 20 employees and in order to do that, there needed to be like levels of management and that was not something that I had like experience or expertise to do. I was just sort of like learning that as I went. that was probably the thing that I was, Unintentionally like fake it till I [00:09:00] make it the most within the business.
Um, was that, was the leadership component? so, so things like that, like this idea that you imagine that you'll create these roles and you'll have this team and you kind of like envision a structure. And if you could just find those people, it would all fall into place and you'll have. A team that's collaborative and cooperative and everyone will want to have like, you know, a whiskey Friday, happy hour and, you know, drink the mission Kool Aid.
And that's not the reality of what happens, you know, especially in the, the business for me scaled to this point where I had this really big team as we entered the pandemic. So I had like all these people to care for, and I had this role of leader, um, and I had the role of leader in a couple of different ways that I felt like a lot of them, I kind of fell backwards into,
Kate: can you talk about what those were? Cause I think that helps give some shape to what. all the many tentacles that were
Heather: Primal.
Yeah, um, you know, so there's like the, the actual leader of the business, like me being Heather, the boss at [00:10:00] primal, um, and the leader of the team that I, you know, hired and built. But then there was like the leadership in the Philadelphia food community of me being, you know, sort of, there was a moment like.
Two weeks before I announced the public closure of the business when I knew that I was going to be closing the business and another small food vendor, someone who is who is making kombucha that we were selling at the butcher shop stopped in to make a delivery. And I happen to be at the counter and keep in mind, I'm at the counter because I had sort of stopped hiring because ethically, I felt like I shouldn't keep.
Bringing people in with a commitment of future work, knowing that I was going to close the business. So like myself and my husband are filling. basic roles at this point. So, you know, to the, to the person who knows, like, if you see me sitting at the counter, something's really wrong. Um, but customers are walking to be like, Oh, what a treat.
You know, a driver calls out and I'm driving a truck and making home deliveries. And people are like, what an honor the owner is delivering to me. And I'm just [00:11:00] like, this is not supposed to happen.
Kate: You're like, no, this, this is a problem.
Heather: So, so this person, um, this, this other owner of a small food business walks in to make this delivery and drops it off and does a double take.
And it's like, wait, you're Heather. Right. And I'm just like, yeah, I am. Um, I love your product. It's been so great to sell it. you know, we kind of caught up for a second. And then as he's walking out the door, he said something to me, he's like, I can't wait till my business is as big and successful as yours is, and that like, you're a model for so many of us in the food community.
And it was like, it felt like someone stuck a dagger in my stomach. I was just like, I don't want to be a leader in that sense. It's like, One of the things I really grappled with in the last six months when I knew it was time for the business to close, but that was me making a responsible proactive decision to close the business.
it's not like we were failing or hemorrhaging. Like we were actually at this kind of stasis. I just felt like if I was going to be realistic and holistic about sustainability, not just the part we talk about with food, but like the [00:12:00] sustainability of a business, the idea that what it's doing does perpetuate it being there tomorrow and 10 years from now, I just knew that wasn't happening anymore.
Like the, the energy that it was taking and where we're at to, to run this, like break even ship was not something that I could do anymore.
It doesn't feel responsible to keep doing this. And more importantly, it's like from a public perspective, I know that all these people are looking at me, like I'm this model of like small business, sustainable food success. And I did not feel successful. And yet everybody was looking at me that way. And then there also was, so that was like in our, in our kind of local community where the business was known and it was, had been around for seven years and other people looked at it and, and thought it was successful and wanted to replicate it.
And then there was like. The female owner, female entrepreneur piece, that was this other thing where I'd become this kind of accidental role model for other women. Um, it wasn't something that I knew I was doing until it already happened, when I started getting asked for, you know, [00:13:00] interviews or to sort of be a part of Organizations or conferences or something that, you know, to, to speak to other women as, as a role model and a leader of what it was to be one, an entrepreneur and to a woman working in a male dominated industry.
I did come to understand pretty quickly that the fact that I was doing that for people was important and it was valuable. So I didn't really mind that. Um, in fact, I kind of took it seriously. I didn't, I didn't like seek out those opportunities, but when they came to me, I was like, you know, I would do that.
I would kind of stand up and be the leader and say like, yes, you could do this. But yeah, over the course of seven years, over the last year or two, it just started to really weigh heavy on me.
Kate: like that disjuncture between how people perceive you and how you're feeling. Like, is that what you mean with
Heather: exactly. Like that it was that this, um, the pressure and stress of the business ownership and the leadership was really running me down. Um, it wasn't really fulfilling me anymore. And yet I was supposed to kind of stand up and encourage other women to [00:14:00] do it.
I just couldn't after the pandemic rocked it. Like I never really got it back on track to the point where I felt like this is a replicable model or this is something that other people should be looking at. Um, and yet they were, uh, so that felt sort of, um, there was this like kind of sort of fraudulent duality that I felt about that.
Kate: we keep, we keep using this word success. And sometimes I get hang on because I was like, what does that mean? you start this business and you, you were trying to solve a certain kind of problem in the food chain and like really had this.
As I said, like, radical vision for how you were going to do that and what, you know, this business was to solve that mission. and, you know, we don't create these, like, linear, perfect little business plans and then just, blithely... Execute them and it all works out
perfectly. Like that's
just not how it.
works.
Heather: Well, in our dreams we do.
Kate: Yeah.
In our dreams and, you know, and then there's like a pandemic that [00:15:00] comes along and that was planned to too, but, As the business owner, like our success goal posts are always kind of fuzzy and moving.
And there's certainly like markers, like John and I were talking about this of like certain things that if they don't happen, really wear people down and that stuff like not paying yourself, working overwork, your entire rest of your life has been eaten up by the business and those kinds of things, like, if you can't right size that, that'll certainly wear you down.
But I don't know that, I know a lot of people have a super defined sense of like, when you've reached that point of success, and then there's like this perception of how the public thinks about that and some of that's just about visibility.
Heather: And, and
Primal was
extremely visible.
Kate: you were very visible and out in the world and you were doing this really cool thing and your product was fucking awesome.
So from a customer interaction perspective, like I kind of get it. Like, I get [00:16:00] why that all lined up, but then you're measuring things completely
Heather: Yeah, totally. And, so my closure was really public as you know, and that just kind of felt like the right thing to do. The business always was transparent, like that was sort of a part of the mission that our supply chain itself and the work we did would be transparent, but then it always made sense to me that if people were going to believe me and buy into that and trust Primal and trust me, that had to kind of carry through to everything.
Kate: So I actually want to, Heather, back up a little bit and go back to what was happening in the sort of earlier parts of the pandemic. you had to shut down, pivot your model, and then You know, that wasn't the end of it. I'd love for you to kind of talk us through what was happening, in the lead up to starting to think about closing the business, because there's a lot, uh, there's a lot going on in the economy.
Heather: Yeah, [00:17:00] um, About a year and a half before I closed the business, like, so 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic, which is a year and a half before I closed the business, because we made it about three years.
Um, the sort of volatility of everything that happened, like the, the pandemic boom, as I like to call it, which is like what helped all of these food businesses have like, you know, just unexpected and extreme. Um, extremely like, uh, what is the word for it? Um, the, the sales that we saw
Kate: like a sales
Heather: yeah, like the, it's just, it was, it caught us all off guard and it happened to everybody in food and it happened for like four to six months
Kate: Right. Cause everybody was at home and we're like, cool, I'm going to cook a
nice
steak for
Heather: Well, also, you know, the. The industrial supply chains broke down and the smaller ones didn't. So everybody who was working in small food, who was sort of small enough to flex and wasn't dependent on these kind of the larger industry and the greater like national industrial supply chains, we were all able to keep going when nobody else [00:18:00] did.
So we became essential workers and we became these saviors and we saw the. Business and the revenue from it. I mean, I, we were breaking records that I never even imagined we could hit in terms of sales with the same amount of product and the same amount of cost of a staff. Sorry. Um, during those few months and then it settled down and then it's like, you know, but we didn't return to previous, but the model I flipped the business into wasn't really relevant anymore.
And in 2021, all of that volatility and the fact that I had thrown a business plan out the window and launched a new one And then we were in constant triage mode. So when the like period of great resignation happened where everybody got vaccinated and suddenly my team started leaving that was just kind of the nail in the coffin for us where like my model and operationally just really started to break.
And really quickly for the first time in five years of business, um, we started losing money faster than I could project or manage or control had never happened before like this, that, that hemorrhage and the business almost went under and you knew when this happened and, um, I really quickly had to act [00:19:00] to,
to pull in some help and some advisement and I was able to, with, with a lot of support to sort of downsize, right size the business. And, and when I didn't let it go under and I did that, I kind of promised myself that I would give some time commitment, um, to, to follow through on, on what I had just pulled off because I did also take a loan at that point and some other things.
So it's like, I had a, I had a moment where I could have let it go. I wasn't ready to let it go. It didn't feel right. Um, it would have, like, ethically, I would have, um, been sort of leaving some farmers unpaid and stuff like that. So I, I dug in so, so hard to save the business. And like I said, I downsized it, right sized it.
I went down to having like 15 employees instead of 22 and two locations instead of three and felt like I could keep going. And over the next year, so getting back to your point of success, like, For me, success and this metric that I set for myself was getting Primal back to a point where we, um, where like our P& L was just, was just positive, you know, like where there was actually, [00:20:00] where we weren't losing money anymore.
All I wanted to see was a month of profitability. Like, I knew that some months we would lose money and the holidays would make a lot and it would all average out, but it's like, I just needed to see some proof of concept that the remodeling and the operational changes I had made and the, You know, the cautious, the caution that I was taking in terms of managing our, our capital, um, was working.
And like, I just could barely see it. Like I would feel like looking around and my gut sense and everything felt like it was working. And then I'd sit down and I'd close out the month and I'd look at the books and I'd hold my breath and I'd scroll down to the bottom of the PNL. And like, we, we didn't hit the mark and it was just like crushing, you know, it would kind of, I would just sink every time.
And then I'd managed to get up and do it again. And like for a year, I went through this, like every month, this cycle being
so close.
Kate: I, this is something I wanted to ask you about actually. Cause like, I think, you know, I've been in the trenches with you at various
moments. And I think that moment that [00:21:00] you were just referencing of, like, kind of a year ish ago, where you could have called it, and we had conversations around that, and, you know, I know you pulled in a lot of advisors and, like, a team to talk to, and...
You know, you didn't, but there's all these moments where it's really hard, you know, the personal toll that continuing to keep going is taking. And I'm hearing something in there, like, and I know this, cause we talked about it too, at that point, like part of the reason you didn't close is because you felt.
you felt an obligation to the farm partners and like not leaving them in the balance because you know, animals don't grow on trees Like, they have life cycles, they have to be born as babies and then you grow them into full size pigs, and then the pigs, are slaughtered and they, you know, and then you sell them so there's like a long lead time like you can't just order a peg Transcribed And have it delivered the next [00:22:00] day in the model that you're working in.
So there is some like longer cycle considerations about how you time this. but anyway, that moment when you finally start, when you finally decide to call it, because like the reality is there's not ever some clear. Moment usually I mean every some some people get that but most Circumstances, it's not like you look up at the sky and like all of a sudden there's like a message
written there That's like hey Heather. Just just throw in the towel. You're done. It's good and so, you know like as leaders we have to decide to keep rallying and going and like find that gumption in And like, especially in insurmountable circumstances, and like, you did this through the pandemic, you did this through everybody quitting, and we're kind of, like, very, very high level narrating sort of the ups and downs in the last three years, but, can you talk about that, your [00:23:00] decision to finally call it, like, how did that come about?
I know it wasn't a,
like, you woke up one morning and we're done,
Heather: no, no, no. you know, it's like, I kind of couldn't help but look at things in a calendar year and We do have cycles in what we do, you know, I had brought this up to you before that there's this moment every spring where I commit to the turkeys that my farmer's going to raise for me for the fall.
And from that, from April, you know, it's like, there is no choice that we need to be here in November. We need to sell those turkeys. So, I spent like the second half of 2021 saving Primal, and when I entered into 2022, it's like, okay, here we go. I am going to, I've sort of stabilized us, I'm going to work through this, and I'm going to do what I can do.
Like I taught my staff how to break whole beef so that we could, um, reduce the cost and dependency on our third party processor. And that was actually like. What it did for staff training, for engagement, um, and retention. And also financially it made this huge improvement. So six months later, like the spring of 2022, from the outside perspective, primal is fine and stable as far as the customers are [00:24:00] concerned.
And even within the business, if you asked anybody that worked for me at that point, that went through the kind of scary times a year before and the, and the turnaround. they would say it's so much better right now. Like we're so organized, like we've improved our systems. Like everything makes sense.
Like the business is smaller, it's more manageable. You're doing better. And it's like, yeah, sure guys. I'd smile and say that, but privately financially, like I couldn't hit that success benchmark. So that success thing is like by every other standards, we were killing it. But financially I just couldn't get there.
Kate: There was a point, correct me if I'm wrong, where the success metric was the team feeling good, running well, and, then you finally sitting in the right role, yes?
Heather: Yeah, yeah, but I couldn't I couldn't see it because I had taken over basically that CFO role. And for me, it's like if the money couldn't work, nothing worked. So the business was successful by previous metrics that we had set of like, let's achieve this operational stability. But I was so focused on the finances that [00:25:00] it was just mentally and emotionally wearing me down that I couldn't hit this mark that I knew was the thing that really needed to happen for it to have a long term future.
And so That whole year, I really did have this kind of month by month cycle of like, I feel like we're there. I feel like we're there. Hold my breath. Damn. We didn't hit the mark again. Like we're still falling short. And the holidays came and I had no choice but to dig in and to get through them because that's a time when I know we can be profitable.
And when I got through the actual calendar year and I could kind of like, Back up and take a bigger view and look at the whole year. Not like the month by month granular finances. The irony is that like I had been in such a forest through the trees that when I backed up in January and I looked at 2022 financially, I actually did do what I set out to do.
I just, it was a, it took longer and it wasn't that apparent to me. So as I was ready to be like. Fuck it, I am done. Like, I am so tired. I am so burnt out. That holiday season I had to dig deeper when I was already burnt out to get through it and, you know, [00:26:00] physically, emotionally, like, my health was really rapidly deteriorating.
Um, I just wasn't enjoying my work anymore. Like, it was not good. But then, suddenly, I look at this benchmark that I've set for myself and it's like, oh shit, I did hit it. We actually were profitable last year, and I've gained like 10 gross margin points in my model, and this thing will work. So just when I was ready to kind of give in, I saw the things that I needed to see, and I was like, you know what, maybe I'm not supposed to give up.
Maybe I'm supposed to keep going.
And during, and like I had said, operationally, It fixed all this stuff. And then suddenly that started to fall apart. Like it was just, you know, at the end of the day, I have a labor based model and I'm dependent on people and I had made the business smaller so that it was something that I, it's like, I knew we couldn't stay in that place forever, but I made it as small as I could handle it.
Kate: Which makes total sense for getting to a more stable place, but then that's not really a place you can actually hang out in forever, based on your [00:27:00] model, which requires a certain amount of overhead just to operate.
So I'm guessing you would need to grow again pretty soon.
Heather: Yeah, the business was a size I could manage, but because of my infrastructure investments and other things that we had grown to do, like it wasn't really big enough. Um, and I knew that, and I knew I had to scale again, you know, this growth thing, but some key employees who, um, you know, had just gone through everything that I had gone through in the last three years.
And I don't mean the business part. I mean, the personal stuff, like the pandemic catching up to them, this weird timing of like, The new calendar year prompting the like, what do I want to do with my life? And then people starting to clock like we're about to hit three years since the pandemic happened.
And like, nothing is better yet. I could see it running everybody down and they're all human beings. And so slowly, like my staff started to kind of implode for reasons that as a human being, I could completely empathize with. But as a boss, it was like, It was killing me. Like, it's just like, wait, I don't have any [00:28:00] reserves.
Like we're kind of a small staff. I need everybody to show up to do this. And we started experiencing turnover again, both in sort of the lower hourly roles and some of the management roles. So I found myself in this place where it's like shit. Okay, I fixed the finances and it just took me a year and a half to do that.
And here I am, like I've met my goal, I'm quote unquote successful. And then operationally, the, all the work that I did is slowly unraveling. And now we're not successful operationally. And it was just like, that was kind of this reality check at that moment. That was, um, Yeah, just this, this kind of revelation of like, I can't do it all you know, I focus on one thing and the other one falls apart.
And now if I focus on operations, which I did, then I'm not focused on driving revenue and suddenly like we're missing the financial marks again. And it just, um, it really was personal to be totally honest. Um, looking around and realizing that like, no one's going to save me. There's no, [00:29:00] however great.
Thank you. Employees might be, they're always going to have their personal needs, which they honestly should put first, and I can't depend on them long term to be in it and be in it the way that I need to be, and um, I don't know, I just like had this moment of kind of loneliness, I guess, of realizing that like, I've done so much work to it.
Protect and and improve my personal health and I did so much work to try to protect and improve the business's financial health but that took everything I had and now the people are suffering and I don't have any more to give
like I had probably said it more than once over the past year and I had For about six months, honestly, I've been having private conversations with a couple people I could confide in, like my husband and some advisors.
And the thing that I was saying out loud to them, and it really was for me, but I, you know, you kind of need other people to hear it and give it back to you. Like, I was waiting for someone to agree with me. That I would be like, I am one person under all of this and it is just too fucking heavy. Like, it is just too hard.
Like, I can't do it all. Like, [00:30:00] I feel like a failure and I knew I wasn't failing to get back to that success thing. But it's like, something is failing. Like, every day I'm waking up and I'm not, I don't feel like I'm working to succeed. I feel like I'm working to not fail and that is not, that doesn't give back to me.
I felt drained mentally. I felt drained physically. I felt drained financially. I'm like a well that we just keep trying to dig deeper and we've been out of water for a while. and, and yeah, so, for all the right reasons, everybody that I confided in.
Was doing what they were supposed to do for me, which is they were encouraging me to keep going. Like I would confide at how about how low I felt or howlost I felt or how frustrated. And their response was like, I hear you, but you can do this. You've done this before. We'll figure it out.
all I was really waiting for was someone to be like, yeah, maybe you should shut this down. But nobody was ever going to say that to me.
Kate: Yeah, and I've had this conversation with clients and John and I have talked about this where, like, [00:31:00] as an advisor, you can't call it for someone else. And certainly like, I do a lot of mirroring of what people are saying to me, but there's also this really clear boundary where it's just professionally, I can't tell somebody to close their business for them. And I think what you're pointing to is something that's so impossible.
Because you, you need support to call it, but you also need to be the one to
make that
decision.
Heather: yeah, one of the things that was always hard for me was that I never had a partner. And I know that partnership has its own complexities. but I have always been the sole owner operator. And in those moments of heavy decision, Over the years, there was many times where I would say to my husband, like, I just wish I had a partner right now.
I just wish I had somebody who was in it as much as I was in it. That like, we had to come to an agreement about this, that it wasn't all on me to make this call and all on me to deal with like what, what happens on the other side of it and making the call when it impacted so many other [00:32:00] people, like. I knew that the business was killing me.
I mean, I was dealing with all sorts of like health issues that were coming out of chronic stress and, you know, physically, um, the work was kind of breaking me I knew it wasn't good. And yet, like I kept going because I just couldn't call it because I knew how it would impact. My farmer partners and I knew how it impacts some of the employees like They're whole animal butchers that came to primal and I trained them and there are these incredible skilled dedicated people And I knew there wasn't somewhere else to go with those skills unless they wanted to move out of philadelphia They don't want to do that.
Um, so it's like i'm taking away these career opportunities. I'm taking away the the being the buyer and the sales opportunity for my farmers that we have these long term commitments where they're family owned farm operations were scaling with us. And then the customers like looking around and I had built up this great market, this educated, committed market for sustainable meat in Philadelphia.
And no one else was doing it still seven years later, no one else was doing it. So like knowing that I would flip to the customer side upon closing [00:33:00] primal and have no resources. I knew that everybody else was that too. So like, you know, call it the. guilt, maybe the idea that I knew that no one would agree with me, that no one would really get it, um, that they would rightfully be upset about how it impacted them.
I just kept putting all of that in front. It was so much and it was so many people and it's like, yes, I'm one person being crushed under this business, but I'm like, One person that also can provide for all of these people. So I had felt like I had to keep trying. Um, and yeah, I mean, really it was probably a year of my life that I, I knew in my heart that I, this wasn't working and I couldn't keep doing it, but I just.
No one was ever going to agree with me. Not even the closest people to me who knew it was not succeeding in the ways that it needed, like you know, capitalist success and who knew what it was doing to me, they still just kept trying to help me by encouraging me to keep going
I think I said to my husband one day who just really didn't want it to end like for me for everything he saw [00:34:00] put put into it for how much he loved the business as much as I did. I was like, you know, if I hired a new consultant today and they came into this and said, like, sit me down and walk me through this and I walked them through like the financials of where we are, they would shake me and be like, what the hell are you doing?
And, you know, so I started having these kind of, I started to have a more rational view at a certain point. which was helping. It was helping getting me closer to the decision, but still things would happen like that would kind of buoy my optimism again, you know, um, we'd have like just, uh, I don't know.
I'd like start to see the revenue and like the number of customers who are engaged starting to grow again, or my team would really click with like a new hire and suddenly the operationally we seemed really stable again. And then it's like every time that happened, it kept me from pulling the plug because it felt possible again.
it probably took me like three months of a lot of private rationalization about the reality of the business and the future of the business that one day I said out loud that I was like, [00:35:00] This is my choice to make, and I need to make it.
And I, I don't know why it took me so long to think about it that way, but that was it. no one's going to agree with me. I have to become comfortable with that. Like, I have to get comfortable with the idea that this is my choice, and I need to make it for my own well being and, like, the future of my, like, health and life.
And no one's going to like it, and I have to do it anyway.
And that's, that's kind of it. It's like, once I kind of said that out loud to someone and I really started to kind of like embody that and remind myself all the time, like it is my business. Like I made it and I can end it. This is my choice. Like, I just felt like there was a point where it's like, it's time to take control of this before it goes out of my control again,
And in those six months, as I started to have those conversations with myself and take, you know, sort of really look more black and white and realize that it's my choice to make. And I just had to sort of work up, I don't know, the nerve and the conviction to do it, to accept the fallout.
I closed the business [00:36:00] in, uh, at the end of May.
And announce that publicly at the beginning of May.
Kate: Thanks for listening to this Boss Talks edition of the Whiskey Fridays podcast. Stay tuned for part two of Heather and My Conversation. up next.
Heather: I was like floating. and I don't mean from like happiness. the fact that I had put down the weight, like I had set down the burden of the business, like I had, I'd given it up was I was like physically and mentally almost like levitating from the lightness of it. Like the relief was flooding into me every day I felt less and less burdened
Kate: To receive updates on new episodes and my writing exploring new possibilities in business and economics, visit katetyson.
substack. com. Whiskey Fridays is a collaboration between myself, Kate Tyson, of Wanderwell Consulting, and my friend and [00:37:00] colleague, John Gerber, of Unlawyer. This episode was edited by me, with much hand holding and indispensable wisdom from Sean McMullen of Yellow House Media.
===
Heather: [00:00:00] And no one's going to like it, and I have to do it anyway.
And that's, that's kind of it. It's like, once I kind of said that out loud to someone and I really started to kind of like embody that and remind myself all the time, like it is my business. Like I made it and I can end it. This is my choice.
Kate: hey there,
Kate Tyson here from Whiskey Fridays. Today I'm here with part one of my conversation with Heather Thomason, founder of Primal Supply Meats, the Philadelphia based butchery she closed in May of this year after seven years in business. This is Heather's first public conversation since the closure, and, well, we had a lot to talk about, so this will be a two parter.
In part one, we talk about the wild ride of the past few years, the toll leading the business was taking on her physically, emotionally. [00:01:00] all of the things, and how she got to the point of realizing she couldn't do it anymore. In part two, we talk through the very complicated and actually somewhat drawn out process of deciding to finally end it, and then how that all went down.
Before we get into it, I also wanted to give you a bit of context about the business, because it's not a model you see every day.
Businesses exist to serve all sorts of different purposes. Yes, to make money, but often because of interests, passions, or skills of the owner, to meet a gap in the market, Or, you know, all sorts of different reasons. But then there are the rare businesses that start to shake things up at a truly systemic level.
Primal Supply Meats was one of those. I met Heather early in Primal's story. She was a client when she started the business in 2016, and we continued to work together at various inflection points over the years. Heather left a successful [00:02:00] career in graphic design in order to pursue the trade of whole animal butchery and a passion for supporting local sustainable food systems.
Primal launched with a vision for a new ethical supply chain based on relationships with local farmers raising sustainably farmed animals. Primal's team processed these whole animals in house and sold their products to customers through Primal's retail shops, CSA program, and via restaurants and local groceries throughout the area. For the business nerds out there counting, that's at least two or three different revenue streams. Creating a supply chain with such an uncompromising vision for transparency and ethics, from scratch, is a very intense feat to undertake. And to call this an operationally complex business model is to put it very mildly.
And it's also a very labor dependent model. As Heather says in our conversation, skilled butchers do not grow on trees. [00:03:00] This is also not how most meat gets to most meat eaters. Perhaps you're familiar with the huge environmental toll of commodity and conventionally raised meat. You may not be aware that much of what props up cheap cuts in your local big supermarket is a whole slew of government subsidies and externalized environmental costs.
Primal was not infrequently on the receiving end of sticker shock comments from the public. And really that's because we're so used to our artificially cheap and mass farmed beef. So, a vision for a relationship based, environmentally conscious butchery with the highest quality product, that is a radical proposition.
And one, as you'll hear, Heather fought really hard to build. Now I should confess before we go any further, that I've been a vegetarian since I was a young teenager. I have no personal experience of Primal's products, [00:04:00] but that doesn't mean I don't have serious respect for what Heather created.
And honestly, if folks are going to eat meat, this is the kind of quality and ethics I hope it comes with. So, with that, let's dive in.
Heather: I'm only a little bit nervous. I haven't talked about the business closing on the record at all. it wasn't intentional. It was just like, I didn't want to talk to anybody when I was going through the closing because I felt like it just would take too much emotional energy when I needed to actually focus on taking care of the business and everyone that was still part of it.
And then as soon as it was done, I was, I thought, Oh, I'll want to talk, I'll be ready to talk about this next month. And then as soon as it was done,
Kate: Yeah.
Heather: kind of, I don't care slash like I need to disconnect. So I can't care. Um, but yeah, it's all I thought about for so long and then I really intentionally stopped thinking about it.
So it like hasn't been on my mind. It's not [00:05:00] again, like we'll see. See what happens.
Kate: Great. We're gonna, we're gonna resurrect the, uh,
the corpse for
a little
Heather: I'm ready. I'm pretty, pretty relaxed. You know, I already
exercised
today.
Everything's good.
Kate: Well, Heather, I'm very excited to have you here. And I'm also honored to be your first public conversation about, the closure of Primal and how you're doing So thanks for, thanks for being here to talk to me.
Heather: Thanks for asking.
Kate: So, I actually wanted to start. You sent me a text this morning of a post that a woman named Emily McDowell wrote about her experience with growing her stationery business and the very, very intense toll that that took on her. And one of the things she got into was the, gap between the like super public rosy girl boss image that sold and presented the public and she was talking about like being [00:06:00] on NBC and Good Morning America and like all these, you know, very national.
And I don't know that you identify with the girlboss thing. I definitely
don't, but
but, you know, that, that kind of image of success will have it all girlboss. Contrasted with the... wreck that she was behind the scenes as she built this thing.
And I kind of wanted to start with that. Cause you, you know, you texted me this for a reason, obviously, and connected it to the fact that we were talking today. but I wanted to start with this perception between outside and inside. because especially with so much Instagram and content and like, social media out there is that we don't really know what's happening behind the scenes most of the time, like we don't know what it really looks like.
and you were very good at getting yourself out there as the face of the company. And, you still have and had a really radical vision for a different.
sort of meat [00:07:00] industry and supply chain. Like you weren't just selling cuts of meat in a shop. you were building something much bigger than that. So it made sense that you were like out in the world proselytizing about this vision. Um, and I know that after you closed, you told me that all sorts of people reached out sort of like, but you were so successful, what happened?
And you were like, well. Uh, yes, but, um, so like, I don't want to start with your experience of, of like that, external face and perception and what's actually happening behind the scenes and like how you, how, how do you respond to those? But you were so successful kind of comments.
Heather: it's funny. They caught me off guard. Um, but yeah, but you know that I sent that to you because it really resonated with me. And there's kind of two, two parts that are really the same thing. It's like, I guess the duality of things and there's a couple of things that she touches on. And one is like, [00:08:00] The, your own idea of like what the business is supposed to be or what it will be like, um, and then what it actually is.
And, the girl boss thing isn't something that I, that I bought into, but the idea of being a boss, you know, and, and what that's like. I never envisioned primal growing to be something to be, to be what it was.
It's like, it happened kind of rapidly, you know, that idea of like, you know, perpetual growth and kind of driving revenue that you're encouraged to do. And over the course of the seven years, like, It grew so quickly that there was a point where it's like, I realized that the reality of the business was not something that I had ever even imagined years before when suddenly I was in it.
Um, I got to the point where I had over 20 employees and in order to do that, there needed to be like levels of management and that was not something that I had like experience or expertise to do. I was just sort of like learning that as I went. that was probably the thing that I was, Unintentionally like fake it till I [00:09:00] make it the most within the business.
Um, was that, was the leadership component? so, so things like that, like this idea that you imagine that you'll create these roles and you'll have this team and you kind of like envision a structure. And if you could just find those people, it would all fall into place and you'll have. A team that's collaborative and cooperative and everyone will want to have like, you know, a whiskey Friday, happy hour and, you know, drink the mission Kool Aid.
And that's not the reality of what happens, you know, especially in the, the business for me scaled to this point where I had this really big team as we entered the pandemic. So I had like all these people to care for, and I had this role of leader, um, and I had the role of leader in a couple of different ways that I felt like a lot of them, I kind of fell backwards into,
Kate: can you talk about what those were? Cause I think that helps give some shape to what. all the many tentacles that were
Heather: Primal.
Yeah, um, you know, so there's like the, the actual leader of the business, like me being Heather, the boss at [00:10:00] primal, um, and the leader of the team that I, you know, hired and built. But then there was like the leadership in the Philadelphia food community of me being, you know, sort of, there was a moment like.
Two weeks before I announced the public closure of the business when I knew that I was going to be closing the business and another small food vendor, someone who is who is making kombucha that we were selling at the butcher shop stopped in to make a delivery. And I happen to be at the counter and keep in mind, I'm at the counter because I had sort of stopped hiring because ethically, I felt like I shouldn't keep.
Bringing people in with a commitment of future work, knowing that I was going to close the business. So like myself and my husband are filling. basic roles at this point. So, you know, to the, to the person who knows, like, if you see me sitting at the counter, something's really wrong. Um, but customers are walking to be like, Oh, what a treat.
You know, a driver calls out and I'm driving a truck and making home deliveries. And people are like, what an honor the owner is delivering to me. And I'm just [00:11:00] like, this is not supposed to happen.
Kate: You're like, no, this, this is a problem.
Heather: So, so this person, um, this, this other owner of a small food business walks in to make this delivery and drops it off and does a double take.
And it's like, wait, you're Heather. Right. And I'm just like, yeah, I am. Um, I love your product. It's been so great to sell it. you know, we kind of caught up for a second. And then as he's walking out the door, he said something to me, he's like, I can't wait till my business is as big and successful as yours is, and that like, you're a model for so many of us in the food community.
And it was like, it felt like someone stuck a dagger in my stomach. I was just like, I don't want to be a leader in that sense. It's like, One of the things I really grappled with in the last six months when I knew it was time for the business to close, but that was me making a responsible proactive decision to close the business.
it's not like we were failing or hemorrhaging. Like we were actually at this kind of stasis. I just felt like if I was going to be realistic and holistic about sustainability, not just the part we talk about with food, but like the [00:12:00] sustainability of a business, the idea that what it's doing does perpetuate it being there tomorrow and 10 years from now, I just knew that wasn't happening anymore.
Like the, the energy that it was taking and where we're at to, to run this, like break even ship was not something that I could do anymore.
It doesn't feel responsible to keep doing this. And more importantly, it's like from a public perspective, I know that all these people are looking at me, like I'm this model of like small business, sustainable food success. And I did not feel successful. And yet everybody was looking at me that way. And then there also was, so that was like in our, in our kind of local community where the business was known and it was, had been around for seven years and other people looked at it and, and thought it was successful and wanted to replicate it.
And then there was like. The female owner, female entrepreneur piece, that was this other thing where I'd become this kind of accidental role model for other women. Um, it wasn't something that I knew I was doing until it already happened, when I started getting asked for, you know, [00:13:00] interviews or to sort of be a part of Organizations or conferences or something that, you know, to, to speak to other women as, as a role model and a leader of what it was to be one, an entrepreneur and to a woman working in a male dominated industry.
I did come to understand pretty quickly that the fact that I was doing that for people was important and it was valuable. So I didn't really mind that. Um, in fact, I kind of took it seriously. I didn't, I didn't like seek out those opportunities, but when they came to me, I was like, you know, I would do that.
I would kind of stand up and be the leader and say like, yes, you could do this. But yeah, over the course of seven years, over the last year or two, it just started to really weigh heavy on me.
Kate: like that disjuncture between how people perceive you and how you're feeling. Like, is that what you mean with
Heather: exactly. Like that it was that this, um, the pressure and stress of the business ownership and the leadership was really running me down. Um, it wasn't really fulfilling me anymore. And yet I was supposed to kind of stand up and encourage other women to [00:14:00] do it.
I just couldn't after the pandemic rocked it. Like I never really got it back on track to the point where I felt like this is a replicable model or this is something that other people should be looking at. Um, and yet they were, uh, so that felt sort of, um, there was this like kind of sort of fraudulent duality that I felt about that.
Kate: we keep, we keep using this word success. And sometimes I get hang on because I was like, what does that mean? you start this business and you, you were trying to solve a certain kind of problem in the food chain and like really had this.
As I said, like, radical vision for how you were going to do that and what, you know, this business was to solve that mission. and, you know, we don't create these, like, linear, perfect little business plans and then just, blithely... Execute them and it all works out
perfectly. Like that's
just not how it.
works.
Heather: Well, in our dreams we do.
Kate: Yeah.
In our dreams and, you know, and then there's like a pandemic that [00:15:00] comes along and that was planned to too, but, As the business owner, like our success goal posts are always kind of fuzzy and moving.
And there's certainly like markers, like John and I were talking about this of like certain things that if they don't happen, really wear people down and that stuff like not paying yourself, working overwork, your entire rest of your life has been eaten up by the business and those kinds of things, like, if you can't right size that, that'll certainly wear you down.
But I don't know that, I know a lot of people have a super defined sense of like, when you've reached that point of success, and then there's like this perception of how the public thinks about that and some of that's just about visibility.
Heather: And, and
Primal was
extremely visible.
Kate: you were very visible and out in the world and you were doing this really cool thing and your product was fucking awesome.
So from a customer interaction perspective, like I kind of get it. Like, I get [00:16:00] why that all lined up, but then you're measuring things completely
Heather: Yeah, totally. And, so my closure was really public as you know, and that just kind of felt like the right thing to do. The business always was transparent, like that was sort of a part of the mission that our supply chain itself and the work we did would be transparent, but then it always made sense to me that if people were going to believe me and buy into that and trust Primal and trust me, that had to kind of carry through to everything.
Kate: So I actually want to, Heather, back up a little bit and go back to what was happening in the sort of earlier parts of the pandemic. you had to shut down, pivot your model, and then You know, that wasn't the end of it. I'd love for you to kind of talk us through what was happening, in the lead up to starting to think about closing the business, because there's a lot, uh, there's a lot going on in the economy.
Heather: Yeah, [00:17:00] um, About a year and a half before I closed the business, like, so 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic, which is a year and a half before I closed the business, because we made it about three years.
Um, the sort of volatility of everything that happened, like the, the pandemic boom, as I like to call it, which is like what helped all of these food businesses have like, you know, just unexpected and extreme. Um, extremely like, uh, what is the word for it? Um, the, the sales that we saw
Kate: like a sales
Heather: yeah, like the, it's just, it was, it caught us all off guard and it happened to everybody in food and it happened for like four to six months
Kate: Right. Cause everybody was at home and we're like, cool, I'm going to cook a
nice
steak for
Heather: Well, also, you know, the. The industrial supply chains broke down and the smaller ones didn't. So everybody who was working in small food, who was sort of small enough to flex and wasn't dependent on these kind of the larger industry and the greater like national industrial supply chains, we were all able to keep going when nobody else [00:18:00] did.
So we became essential workers and we became these saviors and we saw the. Business and the revenue from it. I mean, I, we were breaking records that I never even imagined we could hit in terms of sales with the same amount of product and the same amount of cost of a staff. Sorry. Um, during those few months and then it settled down and then it's like, you know, but we didn't return to previous, but the model I flipped the business into wasn't really relevant anymore.
And in 2021, all of that volatility and the fact that I had thrown a business plan out the window and launched a new one And then we were in constant triage mode. So when the like period of great resignation happened where everybody got vaccinated and suddenly my team started leaving that was just kind of the nail in the coffin for us where like my model and operationally just really started to break.
And really quickly for the first time in five years of business, um, we started losing money faster than I could project or manage or control had never happened before like this, that, that hemorrhage and the business almost went under and you knew when this happened and, um, I really quickly had to act [00:19:00] to,
to pull in some help and some advisement and I was able to, with, with a lot of support to sort of downsize, right size the business. And, and when I didn't let it go under and I did that, I kind of promised myself that I would give some time commitment, um, to, to follow through on, on what I had just pulled off because I did also take a loan at that point and some other things.
So it's like, I had a, I had a moment where I could have let it go. I wasn't ready to let it go. It didn't feel right. Um, it would have, like, ethically, I would have, um, been sort of leaving some farmers unpaid and stuff like that. So I, I dug in so, so hard to save the business. And like I said, I downsized it, right sized it.
I went down to having like 15 employees instead of 22 and two locations instead of three and felt like I could keep going. And over the next year, so getting back to your point of success, like, For me, success and this metric that I set for myself was getting Primal back to a point where we, um, where like our P& L was just, was just positive, you know, like where there was actually, [00:20:00] where we weren't losing money anymore.
All I wanted to see was a month of profitability. Like, I knew that some months we would lose money and the holidays would make a lot and it would all average out, but it's like, I just needed to see some proof of concept that the remodeling and the operational changes I had made and the, You know, the cautious, the caution that I was taking in terms of managing our, our capital, um, was working.
And like, I just could barely see it. Like I would feel like looking around and my gut sense and everything felt like it was working. And then I'd sit down and I'd close out the month and I'd look at the books and I'd hold my breath and I'd scroll down to the bottom of the PNL. And like, we, we didn't hit the mark and it was just like crushing, you know, it would kind of, I would just sink every time.
And then I'd managed to get up and do it again. And like for a year, I went through this, like every month, this cycle being
so close.
Kate: I, this is something I wanted to ask you about actually. Cause like, I think, you know, I've been in the trenches with you at various
moments. And I think that moment that [00:21:00] you were just referencing of, like, kind of a year ish ago, where you could have called it, and we had conversations around that, and, you know, I know you pulled in a lot of advisors and, like, a team to talk to, and...
You know, you didn't, but there's all these moments where it's really hard, you know, the personal toll that continuing to keep going is taking. And I'm hearing something in there, like, and I know this, cause we talked about it too, at that point, like part of the reason you didn't close is because you felt.
you felt an obligation to the farm partners and like not leaving them in the balance because you know, animals don't grow on trees Like, they have life cycles, they have to be born as babies and then you grow them into full size pigs, and then the pigs, are slaughtered and they, you know, and then you sell them so there's like a long lead time like you can't just order a peg Transcribed And have it delivered the next [00:22:00] day in the model that you're working in.
So there is some like longer cycle considerations about how you time this. but anyway, that moment when you finally start, when you finally decide to call it, because like the reality is there's not ever some clear. Moment usually I mean every some some people get that but most Circumstances, it's not like you look up at the sky and like all of a sudden there's like a message
written there That's like hey Heather. Just just throw in the towel. You're done. It's good and so, you know like as leaders we have to decide to keep rallying and going and like find that gumption in And like, especially in insurmountable circumstances, and like, you did this through the pandemic, you did this through everybody quitting, and we're kind of, like, very, very high level narrating sort of the ups and downs in the last three years, but, can you talk about that, your [00:23:00] decision to finally call it, like, how did that come about?
I know it wasn't a,
like, you woke up one morning and we're done,
Heather: no, no, no. you know, it's like, I kind of couldn't help but look at things in a calendar year and We do have cycles in what we do, you know, I had brought this up to you before that there's this moment every spring where I commit to the turkeys that my farmer's going to raise for me for the fall.
And from that, from April, you know, it's like, there is no choice that we need to be here in November. We need to sell those turkeys. So, I spent like the second half of 2021 saving Primal, and when I entered into 2022, it's like, okay, here we go. I am going to, I've sort of stabilized us, I'm going to work through this, and I'm going to do what I can do.
Like I taught my staff how to break whole beef so that we could, um, reduce the cost and dependency on our third party processor. And that was actually like. What it did for staff training, for engagement, um, and retention. And also financially it made this huge improvement. So six months later, like the spring of 2022, from the outside perspective, primal is fine and stable as far as the customers are [00:24:00] concerned.
And even within the business, if you asked anybody that worked for me at that point, that went through the kind of scary times a year before and the, and the turnaround. they would say it's so much better right now. Like we're so organized, like we've improved our systems. Like everything makes sense.
Like the business is smaller, it's more manageable. You're doing better. And it's like, yeah, sure guys. I'd smile and say that, but privately financially, like I couldn't hit that success benchmark. So that success thing is like by every other standards, we were killing it. But financially I just couldn't get there.
Kate: There was a point, correct me if I'm wrong, where the success metric was the team feeling good, running well, and, then you finally sitting in the right role, yes?
Heather: Yeah, yeah, but I couldn't I couldn't see it because I had taken over basically that CFO role. And for me, it's like if the money couldn't work, nothing worked. So the business was successful by previous metrics that we had set of like, let's achieve this operational stability. But I was so focused on the finances that [00:25:00] it was just mentally and emotionally wearing me down that I couldn't hit this mark that I knew was the thing that really needed to happen for it to have a long term future.
And so That whole year, I really did have this kind of month by month cycle of like, I feel like we're there. I feel like we're there. Hold my breath. Damn. We didn't hit the mark again. Like we're still falling short. And the holidays came and I had no choice but to dig in and to get through them because that's a time when I know we can be profitable.
And when I got through the actual calendar year and I could kind of like, Back up and take a bigger view and look at the whole year. Not like the month by month granular finances. The irony is that like I had been in such a forest through the trees that when I backed up in January and I looked at 2022 financially, I actually did do what I set out to do.
I just, it was a, it took longer and it wasn't that apparent to me. So as I was ready to be like. Fuck it, I am done. Like, I am so tired. I am so burnt out. That holiday season I had to dig deeper when I was already burnt out to get through it and, you know, [00:26:00] physically, emotionally, like, my health was really rapidly deteriorating.
Um, I just wasn't enjoying my work anymore. Like, it was not good. But then, suddenly, I look at this benchmark that I've set for myself and it's like, oh shit, I did hit it. We actually were profitable last year, and I've gained like 10 gross margin points in my model, and this thing will work. So just when I was ready to kind of give in, I saw the things that I needed to see, and I was like, you know what, maybe I'm not supposed to give up.
Maybe I'm supposed to keep going.
And during, and like I had said, operationally, It fixed all this stuff. And then suddenly that started to fall apart. Like it was just, you know, at the end of the day, I have a labor based model and I'm dependent on people and I had made the business smaller so that it was something that I, it's like, I knew we couldn't stay in that place forever, but I made it as small as I could handle it.
Kate: Which makes total sense for getting to a more stable place, but then that's not really a place you can actually hang out in forever, based on your [00:27:00] model, which requires a certain amount of overhead just to operate.
So I'm guessing you would need to grow again pretty soon.
Heather: Yeah, the business was a size I could manage, but because of my infrastructure investments and other things that we had grown to do, like it wasn't really big enough. Um, and I knew that, and I knew I had to scale again, you know, this growth thing, but some key employees who, um, you know, had just gone through everything that I had gone through in the last three years.
And I don't mean the business part. I mean, the personal stuff, like the pandemic catching up to them, this weird timing of like, The new calendar year prompting the like, what do I want to do with my life? And then people starting to clock like we're about to hit three years since the pandemic happened.
And like, nothing is better yet. I could see it running everybody down and they're all human beings. And so slowly, like my staff started to kind of implode for reasons that as a human being, I could completely empathize with. But as a boss, it was like, It was killing me. Like, it's just like, wait, I don't have any [00:28:00] reserves.
Like we're kind of a small staff. I need everybody to show up to do this. And we started experiencing turnover again, both in sort of the lower hourly roles and some of the management roles. So I found myself in this place where it's like shit. Okay, I fixed the finances and it just took me a year and a half to do that.
And here I am, like I've met my goal, I'm quote unquote successful. And then operationally, the, all the work that I did is slowly unraveling. And now we're not successful operationally. And it was just like, that was kind of this reality check at that moment. That was, um, Yeah, just this, this kind of revelation of like, I can't do it all you know, I focus on one thing and the other one falls apart.
And now if I focus on operations, which I did, then I'm not focused on driving revenue and suddenly like we're missing the financial marks again. And it just, um, it really was personal to be totally honest. Um, looking around and realizing that like, no one's going to save me. There's no, [00:29:00] however great.
Thank you. Employees might be, they're always going to have their personal needs, which they honestly should put first, and I can't depend on them long term to be in it and be in it the way that I need to be, and um, I don't know, I just like had this moment of kind of loneliness, I guess, of realizing that like, I've done so much work to it.
Protect and and improve my personal health and I did so much work to try to protect and improve the business's financial health but that took everything I had and now the people are suffering and I don't have any more to give
like I had probably said it more than once over the past year and I had For about six months, honestly, I've been having private conversations with a couple people I could confide in, like my husband and some advisors.
And the thing that I was saying out loud to them, and it really was for me, but I, you know, you kind of need other people to hear it and give it back to you. Like, I was waiting for someone to agree with me. That I would be like, I am one person under all of this and it is just too fucking heavy. Like, it is just too hard.
Like, I can't do it all. Like, [00:30:00] I feel like a failure and I knew I wasn't failing to get back to that success thing. But it's like, something is failing. Like, every day I'm waking up and I'm not, I don't feel like I'm working to succeed. I feel like I'm working to not fail and that is not, that doesn't give back to me.
I felt drained mentally. I felt drained physically. I felt drained financially. I'm like a well that we just keep trying to dig deeper and we've been out of water for a while. and, and yeah, so, for all the right reasons, everybody that I confided in.
Was doing what they were supposed to do for me, which is they were encouraging me to keep going. Like I would confide at how about how low I felt or howlost I felt or how frustrated. And their response was like, I hear you, but you can do this. You've done this before. We'll figure it out.
all I was really waiting for was someone to be like, yeah, maybe you should shut this down. But nobody was ever going to say that to me.
Kate: Yeah, and I've had this conversation with clients and John and I have talked about this where, like, [00:31:00] as an advisor, you can't call it for someone else. And certainly like, I do a lot of mirroring of what people are saying to me, but there's also this really clear boundary where it's just professionally, I can't tell somebody to close their business for them. And I think what you're pointing to is something that's so impossible.
Because you, you need support to call it, but you also need to be the one to
make that
decision.
Heather: yeah, one of the things that was always hard for me was that I never had a partner. And I know that partnership has its own complexities. but I have always been the sole owner operator. And in those moments of heavy decision, Over the years, there was many times where I would say to my husband, like, I just wish I had a partner right now.
I just wish I had somebody who was in it as much as I was in it. That like, we had to come to an agreement about this, that it wasn't all on me to make this call and all on me to deal with like what, what happens on the other side of it and making the call when it impacted so many other [00:32:00] people, like. I knew that the business was killing me.
I mean, I was dealing with all sorts of like health issues that were coming out of chronic stress and, you know, physically, um, the work was kind of breaking me I knew it wasn't good. And yet, like I kept going because I just couldn't call it because I knew how it would impact. My farmer partners and I knew how it impacts some of the employees like They're whole animal butchers that came to primal and I trained them and there are these incredible skilled dedicated people And I knew there wasn't somewhere else to go with those skills unless they wanted to move out of philadelphia They don't want to do that.
Um, so it's like i'm taking away these career opportunities. I'm taking away the the being the buyer and the sales opportunity for my farmers that we have these long term commitments where they're family owned farm operations were scaling with us. And then the customers like looking around and I had built up this great market, this educated, committed market for sustainable meat in Philadelphia.
And no one else was doing it still seven years later, no one else was doing it. So like knowing that I would flip to the customer side upon closing [00:33:00] primal and have no resources. I knew that everybody else was that too. So like, you know, call it the. guilt, maybe the idea that I knew that no one would agree with me, that no one would really get it, um, that they would rightfully be upset about how it impacted them.
I just kept putting all of that in front. It was so much and it was so many people and it's like, yes, I'm one person being crushed under this business, but I'm like, One person that also can provide for all of these people. So I had felt like I had to keep trying. Um, and yeah, I mean, really it was probably a year of my life that I, I knew in my heart that I, this wasn't working and I couldn't keep doing it, but I just.
No one was ever going to agree with me. Not even the closest people to me who knew it was not succeeding in the ways that it needed, like you know, capitalist success and who knew what it was doing to me, they still just kept trying to help me by encouraging me to keep going
I think I said to my husband one day who just really didn't want it to end like for me for everything he saw [00:34:00] put put into it for how much he loved the business as much as I did. I was like, you know, if I hired a new consultant today and they came into this and said, like, sit me down and walk me through this and I walked them through like the financials of where we are, they would shake me and be like, what the hell are you doing?
And, you know, so I started having these kind of, I started to have a more rational view at a certain point. which was helping. It was helping getting me closer to the decision, but still things would happen like that would kind of buoy my optimism again, you know, um, we'd have like just, uh, I don't know.
I'd like start to see the revenue and like the number of customers who are engaged starting to grow again, or my team would really click with like a new hire and suddenly the operationally we seemed really stable again. And then it's like every time that happened, it kept me from pulling the plug because it felt possible again.
it probably took me like three months of a lot of private rationalization about the reality of the business and the future of the business that one day I said out loud that I was like, [00:35:00] This is my choice to make, and I need to make it.
And I, I don't know why it took me so long to think about it that way, but that was it. no one's going to agree with me. I have to become comfortable with that. Like, I have to get comfortable with the idea that this is my choice, and I need to make it for my own well being and, like, the future of my, like, health and life.
And no one's going to like it, and I have to do it anyway.
And that's, that's kind of it. It's like, once I kind of said that out loud to someone and I really started to kind of like embody that and remind myself all the time, like it is my business. Like I made it and I can end it. This is my choice. Like, I just felt like there was a point where it's like, it's time to take control of this before it goes out of my control again,
And in those six months, as I started to have those conversations with myself and take, you know, sort of really look more black and white and realize that it's my choice to make. And I just had to sort of work up, I don't know, the nerve and the conviction to do it, to accept the fallout.
I closed the business [00:36:00] in, uh, at the end of May.
And announce that publicly at the beginning of May.
Kate: Thanks for listening to this Boss Talks edition of the Whiskey Fridays podcast. Stay tuned for part two of Heather and My Conversation. up next.
Heather: I was like floating. and I don't mean from like happiness. the fact that I had put down the weight, like I had set down the burden of the business, like I had, I'd given it up was I was like physically and mentally almost like levitating from the lightness of it. Like the relief was flooding into me every day I felt less and less burdened
Kate: To receive updates on new episodes and my writing exploring new possibilities in business and economics, visit katetyson.
substack. com. Whiskey Fridays is a collaboration between myself, Kate Tyson, of Wanderwell Consulting, and my friend and [00:37:00] colleague, John Gerber, of Unlawyer. This episode was edited by me, with much hand holding and indispensable wisdom from Sean McMullen of Yellow House Media.
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