Pandemic Pivot to Nationwide Success- Boarderie Founders Talk Shark Tank and Beyond (Episode 36)

In Episode 36 of the Success in South Florida Podcast, hosted by Adam Rossen and sponsored by Rossen Law Firm, dive into an inspiring conversation with Aaron Menitoff and Rachel Solomon, the dynamic founders of Boarderie. Discover how they turned a catering company crisis during the pandemic into a thriving business that has been featured on Oprah's Favorite Things, Shark Tank, and the Guinness Book of World Records.

Join Adam Rossen as Aaron and Rachel share their entrepreneurial journey, from the challenges of the catering industry to the creation of the first-ever shippable cheese and charcuterie board. 

Learn about their innovative approach, the importance of relationships in business, and how they navigated through the most challenging times to achieve incredible success.

Episode Highlights:
- Aaron and Rachel discuss how their love for culinary arts and a deep understanding of market trends led them to create Boarderie.
-The importance of local community support in their journey and how it helped them scale their business.
- Insights into managing rapid growth while maintaining product quality and customer satisfaction.
- Rachel shares her experience learning and implementing direct-to-consumer marketing strategies that drove significant sales growth.
Aaron talks about the unique assembly-line production process that allows them to produce high-quality charcuterie boards at scale.
- Both founders reflect on the skepticism they faced from potential investors and how they overcame it.
- The duo emphasizes the need for persistence and resilience when facing challenges.
- Aaron and Rachel explain how their complementary skills and personalities contribute to their successful partnership.
- Sneak peek into their upcoming product lines, including dessert boards and plans for expanding their production facilities.
- Aaron and Rachel offer valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, focusing on passion, persistence, and community involvement.

Learn more about Adam & the Rossen Law Firm at https://www.criminal-defense-dui.lawyer/ and if you need legal defense, schedule a free consultation here: https://www.criminal-defense-dui.lawyer/contact.cfm

Transcript

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The success in South Florida Podcast is brought to you by the team at Rossen Law Firm. If you need DUI or criminal defense representation, call the Rossen Law Firm at 7 5 4 2 0 6 6200, or check the description of today's episode for more contact information. The Rossen Law Firm helping good people when bad things happen so they can achieve their best futures. Alright, and welcome back to another episode of the Success in South Florida podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rosson, and on today's episode, I'm so excited to have Aaron Minoff and Rachel Solomon from Border on Aaron and Rachel. They are entrepreneurs they own well. Aaron owns a few different companies with his catering company and especially Boardy. What Boardy is is another amazing business that came out of the pandemic. It is a custom-made charcuterie board that they can ship nationwide. Really cool stuff. You guys have been featured on Oprah's favorite thing, shark Tank G. Its Book of World Records. And so I'm so excited to have you guys here, especially since you are from South Florida, and we can really just get into all the great details about you guys personally and the company. So welcome both of you guys to the show. Awesome. Thanks for having us. Yeah, yeah, of course. Alright, well let's start off, Aaron, I'll start off with you. Okay. Talk to us a little bit about your journey through the catering industry. I know a little bit about your history, but share that with the guests so they can kind of get an idea of who you are and where you came from. Okay. So my wife and I had a catering company for the past 15 years in South Florida. And we had a great business. We had tons of long-term employees that have been with us really since the beginning. And we kept just growing it and growing it and growing it. And we had an amazing clientele. We were based out of Wellington, Florida, and I don't know how much you know about Wellington, but it's the winner equestrian capital of the world for four months out of the year. So you've kind of got a great clientele that's there for that period of time. So we had people like Prince Harry and Bill Gates and Bruce Springsteen. So we started this program at the International Polo Club called Sunday Brunch and Polo, where we started it with a handful of people coming out every Sunday. And it turned into about 700 people sold out every single week that would come out for 80 items on the buffets and six different unique action stations. And we had amazing sponsors that we built all these fun hospitality areas with KO and the Hard Rock Casino and a lot of different companies. So it was great and everything was fantastic until the pandemic hit, everything canceled indefinitely in terms of events. So at that point we were really in a panic. I mean, we had a big overhead, we had a lot of staff that were dependent on us for their livelihood and we were just committed to figuring something out. So we leaned into e-commerce at that point. We figured that if everybody was going to be at home and they were going to be quarantining, that they were going to be ordering things online. And so we looked into our own menus and realized that cheese and charcuterie was on almost every single menu that we produced. And within the broader culinary space, cheese and charcuterie was one of the fastest growing trends. And so that's when we kind of had that aha moment and decided to create the first ever shippable cheese and charcuterie board. And so Aaron, so that's amazing. And I want to, in a minute or two, I really want to go into some of the hard decisions you guys had to make during Covid because for me at my firm, we had some similar things. But before we do, Rachel, I want to move to you and talk not just how you joined up, but growing up or maybe before you guys started Boardy, what were you doing in your entrepreneurial journey and So I met Erin during Covid and it was kind of the perfect situation. It was such, I had been working in New York City at a bank and I absolutely hated what I was doing. And I came down to Florida to quarantine with my family, and I was introduced to Aaron and he had this crazy idea to ship. She's in charcuterie boards and I don't know if he tells this story a lot, but so many people told him that it was absolutely insane that it would never work, that you're going to ship it and it's going to look like a salad. And so we met through a very close mutual family friend who is also an investor in the business, and we really believed in the concept. And so we teamed up and in 2021 we launched Cordy. Right. And so Rachel, so you were one of those covid New York transplants that came down and never left. So welcome, I hope now South Florida. Thank. You. I'm actually originally from there. So I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, and then I'm still back and forth between New York and Florida, which is I guess the best of both worlds. Yes, it is. It definitely is. Okay, so then you were born and raised here, moved and then came back. Well, I'm glad you don't hate your job anymore. I love my job and we're actually building our growth team here in New York, so it's a great hybrid. Oh, nice. Very amazing stuff. So let's go back for both of you guys to Covid. I can tell you for me and some of our journey at the Rosson Law firm, we had grown and look, we're criminal defense law firm. So most criminal defense firms in the country, it's a solo lawyer. It's not really a firm, it's not suit, it's not power in New York City, it's more of a cowboy, cowboy law. But we had grown to six people and I was terrified because if people aren't going out partying, drinking, having a good time, and if the police aren't investigating crimes or shutting everything down, then we were pretty much out of business. And I made some pivots and smart decisions, but I felt the weight of the world of my employees on my shoulders. So Aaron, I know you were kind of talking about this a little bit before, but that must have been pretty tough for you in March and April of 2020. Yeah, I mean it was a pretty stressful time I think for everybody. And we kind of went all in. And that's kind of been my philosophy on life through every single business venture that I've been involved in or any personal decision is I figure if you have enough confidence in what you're doing and your success and the people that you're working with, then you say yes and you figure it out later. And I feel like most people from the outside looking that's doing something that's a first or that's very innovative, they think that they figured everything out before they jumped in with both feet. And I don't think that's the truth. I think most people that are doing something really unique and really innovative, they kind of figure it out as they go and they have enough confidence and themselves and their team that they make it happen. And we went in with, we went all in. I mean, my wife and I lived on a farm and we took out a home equity loan and took all of that money and put it in this, we took out a number of other loans, maxed out our credit cards and really, really believed in the concept. And it could have gone anyway. And it ended up as we are here, one of the fastest growing edible gifting companies in America. So it was worth the roll of the dice. I mean, that's amazing. And the lessons that can be gleaned from that. So that resonates with me because play all In is core value number four at the Austin Law Firm. That's the thing I tell people, I go, look, I'm jumping in the deep end of the pool cannonball style. I'm not dipping my toes in. I think that's one thing that we've seen with successful entrepreneurs and business owners is you have to be fully committed. It's just so important. Alright, so you're coming up with this idea. We still in the, I quickly forget even what 2021 was like, right? We were still in it. Obviously South Florida opened up very quickly, but we're still masking. It's still very stressful. And you're coming up with this e-commerce idea. And how did the movement really go from the two of you just coming up with this idea and maybe vibing off one another, dreaming about it, fantasizing about a cool new business adventure to actually saying, push the button. Let's go. So Aaron had actually developed the product already when I met him. So he had an initial product that was, it's not the product we're selling now, but he had figured out how to ship a charcuterie board pretty well. So Aaron, I don't know if you want to tell the rest of that story, but I think the real pivot for us came in the way that we pursued different channels to actually get the product to market and evolve the product over time. But Aaron, I think you can speak to the early days of really coming up with the concept and testing all the ways that we did. Yeah, I mean we did a lot of testing together and the initial product is nothing the way that it looks today. I mean, we've gone through so many different iterations to make it what it is today, but in the beginning we were, and I think this message is really important, is that we were extremely scrappy. We had X amount of money to be able to build this company and we did whatever we needed to, meaning we were in front of the computer emailing every writer that we could find that wrote gift guides. And we got in the Forbes gift guide the first time we hounded people at every single online platform until we got our first contract with a company called GoldBelly and convinced them that this is it product. And it was genuine belief in that we did have the next, this is it product, because we signed up with them and shipped our first board with GoldBelly in October of 2020. And two and a half months later, we received the largest check they'd ever issued a vendor since their inception out of over a thousand vendors. And that was really our proof of concept that was like, you know what? It's not just us that think this is great, everyone else does too. And it was a real shot in the arm. And one of the next things that we did is pursuing this business to business strategy is Rachel and I would go to these conferences saying we didn't really have the trade show set up and the funds that we wanted to put into that. We went to the trade shows and we would literally find the people with the badges of the companies like William Sonoma and Costco and Neiman Marcus, and we would corner them with our PitchBook. We would stalk them. Stalk them, and they would like, oh my God, I didn't even know this existed. I was like, well, we emailed you 70 times and you never got back to us. And we had this deck that we had a little suitcase of these decks that we would bring with us. And looking back, I mean they were probably so juvenile. It's so interesting when you start a business how you think it's so incredible. You're like, oh my gosh, it all looks so amazing. It's so perfect. And then you look back a year later and you're like, oh my God, we thought that looked good. We thought that was a great product. The product has just gotten so much better over time. And I think every aspect of what we did in the beginning was so necessary to get us there. We were hounding people to sell the product. And a lot of people who completely brushed us off, right, companies that now are kind of begging for our business totally brushed us off. And I think we remember that it when people rejected us in the beginning or didn't work with. Us, I always think it's good for that scrappy startup new company to have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. Now, are you guys natural extroverts or people that are going to go up to somebody at a trade show and be unafraid to fail? Or did you have to psych yourself up to do that? Because there's a lot of people that have those ideas and dip their toe in, but for whatever reason, fear of rejection or just nervousness and they come up with stories that they'll tell themselves and reasons why it's not going to work or they can't do it, or ways to justify being unsuccessful or taking that next step. So for each of you, what did you guys do to really push forward and just say, I'm going to go up to William Sonoma. I don't care what they say to me. I mean, what do you have to lose? I think both of us are super extroverted in that way. I would say, Erin, you're more extroverted as a personality. I'm more intense and I'm like, we're going to get this done. So whatever I have to do to get it done, I'm going to do right. It doesn't matter if it's like, I'm not afraid of rejection. I don't think you are either in any way, Aaron. Yeah, I don't think so. And I think we were so confident in what we're doing that it's not like we're selling a bill of goods. We're selling something that we know is an unbelievable product that nobody else is doing. And we already had validation along the way from third parties like the Forbes Holiday gift Guide and Oprah and Success on every channel we've ever been in. So it all kind of builds up when you're like, this isn't just us saying that. This is great. This is truly great. Right. Yeah. And so Rachel, I definitely, I think I skew a little bit more to you as far as the intensity and just doing it. I'll do whatever it takes to achieve a goal. Sometimes I want to talk to people, sometimes I don't. I'm the same way. Sometimes I want to be social, sometimes I don't, but I will be social if it is towards the goal of achieving what we want to achieve. Yeah. Exactly. That's me through and through. I'm the guy when I'm on a plane, I'm in work mode and I go with my wife and next thing we've made three friends, I'm just sitting there going, why are you making friends with everybody? I just want to be in my own space. I just wanted to get my stuff done. But actually what I've realized, and I think Aaron is a testament to this too, is relationships are the most important thing and they get you the farthest, and sometimes you just have to go out of your way and maybe that friend that you met on the plane is actually going to be your next business partner. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And it's about genuine relationships too, about really building those and not having it just be like a this for that. And that's one thing that I've learned at the firm. We build real relationships with our clients, and I think that's been one of the major keys to our success, probably yours as well, when you have the repeat, whether it's relationships with your customers or brands that can help facilitate your orders. And I think that's actually been a good segue into what shifted and pivoted, bordering. And we started with this model where we were going to these huge D two C brands and saying, please sell our product. It's the best we promise. Everybody's going to love it. And so for the first year, we got onboarded onto Williams Sonoma, Neiman Marcus GoldBelly, we were on Harry and David, we've been on costco.com. I mean, we did everything we could to get on every major channel. And we quickly realized that that was great and the business was going to grow, but it was never going to give us the scalability and those relationships with our customers that are so valuable for a direct to consumer brand. At that point, we were really just a producer and not a brand. And so launching our website took it to a completely new level, and that's where those relationships with the customers have. They have exponentially grown our business. Well. So Rachel, it's great that you bring that up because I watched you guys on Shark Tank, and I know that was a big foundation of what you said to the Sharks about coming and why you needed the investment is to really build that direct to consumer brand so you can remarket to them and build the real direct relationships and of course, have that data. Right. I mean, it was funny, 10, 15 years ago when I figured it out, why Facebook and the social media companies were so and the advertising and marketing. And I remember back then I was like, well, who cares about this from maybe an investor or Wall Street standpoint, I'm like, ah, now I know why. So with the help of the Sharks or with Lori and everything, walk me through what you've been able to do on that direct to consumer side and build those relationships with your people. I mean, one thing that I think's important to point out that's valuable too is in terms of just figuring things out is Rachel really took it upon herself when we weren't scaling quickly in the B2B model. She literally learned how to market D two C and would just started one day by rolling the dice and saying, let's put $3,000 into the ads. And she filmed herself in the production room around some cheese boards, and that was kind of the beginning of it. And then everything she does, she's so analytical and just dove into the data and just started figuring out what are all the companies doing and what are the best practices here? And built a monumental marketing team that just can pretty much achieve whatever we want in terms of sales, just based on one year ago, picking up the phone and figuring it out. Thank you. Yeah, no, it was definitely a process and an effort, and I think everything happens for a reason. We focus so heavily on our production process in this incredible model that Aaron and our COO angel had built, which is it's an assembly line production process. We can produce 5,000 boards per day out of one production kitchen, which is really what makes this business so valuable and so scalable. But the product still has an exceptional artisan quality. And so we focus so heavily on being a producer for the first year that once we came to being a marketer, we had the operations figured out. And that was a real blessing in the beginning. We didn't have the contracts with FedEx and UPS to be able to get competitive overnight shipping rates that would allow us to make the margins make sense for us to sell the product ourselves. We couldn't compete with the overnight shipping rates that Costco was getting, right? So we had to sell through them. We had to prove the concept of the product, and that allowed us to take the sales that we were doing through third parties and go to UPS and FedEx and say, look, this is what we're selling through third parties. We are going to do this ourselves. We're going to put X amount of money behind it. And in the beginning, we had to hit a certain sales number in order to get those rates, which at the time we did not know was possible. But we took a leap of faith and we hired a freelance web developer online, popped up boardy.com in the late summer of 2022, and within a couple months it was 80% of our sales. So I think taking that risk was really a pivotal moment for us. We learned very quickly that nobody can market your product like you can, and the way that you position and talk about a brand and a product is everything. Especially when it's something you are passionate about and truly believe in. Yeah, I don't think anybody can market a product. I don't think any top tier agency can market a product the way that somebody who's really passionate about it can. Right? We're at a point where we can sell more than we're producing, but we're so focused on quality that every single board that we make is handmade. We don't have a machine process. It's like an online restaurant where you can order the night before and it's going to be we're make it fresh the next day by hand, ship it out that same day and it's going to arrive on your doorstep the very next day. And all our competition that's out there are people that are selling pick and pack items that are already pre-made that are sitting on shelves. There are chunks of cheese and chunks of meat that you have to cut up and you have to arrange yourself. And so far, nobody's been crazy enough to be able to try to do what we're doing, but we're so focused on those two things, quality and growth, that we're walking that fine line right now we're in the process of building our second production facility so we can maintain that obsession with quality but still continue to scale rapidly. And so you guys are talking my language here. I think the best businesses are founded on a little bit of crazy, and especially with the way our firm's grown at about 25 employees now, and again compared to some of the mega law firms, that's nothing. But when we're talking about a law firm that's only criminal defense, we've had that conversation with our leadership team many times of, well, how much do we scale and grow versus make sure that we have the artisanal quality of the craftsmanship in criminal defense in lawyering with our client? Because there's firms that are maybe ticket firms or high volume low fee firms. And I've always said, I don't want to ever do that. Money is very important, but there's helping people building a law firm or a company that's sustainable, that has the relationships and building it the right way has always been more important to me than just a dollar here and a dollar there because the latter our way is sustainable. So we've always had that same thing of, well, we grow to this level, are we ready? Are our production facilities and operations ready for So you guys are totally speaking my language, and I think that's the way to do it because other than that, if you're truly passionate about it, you feel like a sellout. You feel like, okay, well we got some money, we grew a little, but now the quality is dipping and we're just selling out for more money. And I think. It's a pride thing too, I think, right? When it's a product that you've put your heart into and it's a brand that you've put your heart into, you want it to be something you're proud of, you want the product to feel, you want the people you love to receive it and feel amazing about it. So there's definitely a pride element involved in it. And then I think to some extent that's why when people sell their brands to larger companies that are looking for profit and want to make things more efficient, they end up losing that special touch that made it successful in the first place. Right? Absolutely. Now, I want to go back to one thing that you were saying, Rachel, about negotiating the deals with UPS and FedEx. Right? So my mind immediately goes to, that's amazing. How did you do that? Who do you call? You don't call the 800 number. Did you fly to Memphis, Tennessee and knock on the door? No. So actually everybody has a wrap. And I think this is an important thing for small business owners or people that want to start a shipping business to understand is it's not as scary as it seems. They're not going to give you the rates unless you can have a compelling case and you're going to take the risk to hit the numbers. But everybody has a local FedEx or UPS rep in their area that's going to work with them to help small businesses. It's something that they've done with us. They're actually, FedEx has gone above and beyond to help our business with efficiency, bringing in additional planes into our location, letting us, I mean, the list goes on and on, Aaron, I don't know if you want to get into that, but they really want to help small businesses. And so in the beginning, we essentially just negotiated with them. We played hardball a little bit, we puffed our chest out and showed the sales and the projections that at the time we didn't really know we're going to have or not. And then we under promised and over delivered. And there's so many factors that go into it as well. When we are choosing the partner for shipping, obviously such an integral part of our business, we can't have our product without them. So we have, with FedEx, we actually, we know all the local FedEx people from the person that runs the ramp at the airport to the local distribution centers. We're talking to them multiple times a day every morning to coordinate. They drop off reefer container reefer trucks, 40 foot reefer trucks multiple times a day. We fill them up with pallets, they take 'em directly to the airport. We're actually now the largest overnight shipper out of Palm Beach County, out of PBI airport, and they're in the holidays. They bring in extra planes just to accommodate border packages. So that's really exciting and it's really going above and beyond to the partner. And that's why FedEx has been an amazing partner for us. But that's another example. They very. Involved in the logistics of our new facility as well, just from a trucking standpoint. There are so many logistics to getting that many packages out and they're big heavy packages. So yeah, it is really a collaborative partnership and they're a huge part of our business. And that's another example of building relationships among mega corporations, but it's a one-to-one relationship with the people, right? No matter even B2B, it's still you're building relationships with people, the people who own and operate and run the businesses. So when you have those things, it's no surprise that you guys are having that major success. And again, having a win-win for you and FedEx and those companies. I mean, they've done things like they have programs just for medical companies where things have to get there by a certain time, so they have an extra level of customer service and tracking. And so they used us as the first nonmedical company model. And it's been very successful for us in terms of communicating quickly and accurately with our customers. So I want to move a little bit into the Shark Tank story. So you guys get on Shark Tank. I want to hear the very quick version of how you got on. And then from there, I want to talk about Lori and just what she's been able to do with you guys since Shark Tank. I mean, I can say I think this is another thing where everything happens for a reason because we applied the first year and did not get accepted. And I think it was way too early in the business. I think we weren't ready for it. I don't think we would've had the ability to even fulfill or capture the demand that happened after Shark Tank if we had gone on a year earlier. So we actually got accepted the second time we applied, and it was a really exciting process. I think Erin from day one was like, we need to be on Shark Tank. I think we had a strong feeling that one day it would happen because the product is so unique and nobody's doing it. Cheese and charcuterie is the most fun, interesting topical thing. It's one of the biggest trends on social media. And nobody had done anything like it. So we knew that at some point there was a strong chance we applied. We went through the whole process really quickly. And honestly, it was, I would say it happened like that. It was like a snap. And they aired our episode really quickly after we went on. I don't know if you want to talk about any aspect of it, Erin, with the leading up to it, we practiced months and months on. It was like, I was going to ask about that because we've all seen episodes where people fumble their words, getting really nervous. You guys look fantastic, you were ready to go. I mean, for us, we practiced for months and months leading up to it. And we must have done that skit 2000 times before we did it. On, we had different panels of our teams that work here. They would come into the room and they would just grill us, and then we would have friends come in and just grill us like that. At one time, we went to, some of our friends are part of 1909, I don't know if you know, it's that incubator in West Palm Beach for entrepreneurs. And so we went there and they all grilled us. So we got grilled a lot. So we were ready for it. And we were so fortunate that when we went out on the show, we were ready to get just the hard questions. And because the combination of how well we were doing up until that point, how prepared we were, we ended up getting offers from four out of the five sharks. And the only shark that didn't was because he just didn't do stuff in the food space. And a funny thing that Rachel always says is as soon as we got off, she was like, I want to go back. That was so much fun. It was really fun. It was really fun. We were super nervous leading into it. I think once we got there, we were totally fine. It is exactly like you see on tv, right? You walk out, you pitch, there's no double takes, no. If you stutter, you get to do it again. And I think the nerves wear off pretty quickly. It is a conversation and more about your business than they do. And we were so it just felt good to know we had an answer for everything. And the one part that everybody sees with the doors opening, that's the real thing. You stand in front of the doors and then they're like, okay, when it opens walk forward, there's going to be an X on the ground, and that's where to stand while we take care of the audio video calibration and just stand there and stare at the sharks for a minute. And that 60 seconds feels like 10 minutes. You can't smile, you can't talk. You have to just stare at them and they're staring at you, and then you go right into the zone and they only air at about 10 minutes. But we were up there for an hour going back and forth with questions and answers. That's what I was going to ask. How long was it actually? So you said it was about an hour. You guys are really, they're grilling you and they just pick out the best 10 minutes. Yeah, exactly. And so when we saw it, we were like, wait, it just felt like so much of it wasn't there, but of course they can only air eight minutes of it. And yet I don't tell you what they're going to air. So the same time that we saw it for the very first time, we had about 250 of our friends at our factory with a big screen up watching it for the first time. And we were happy with how it came out, for sure. We were, yeah. And then I think to speak to both of our personalities, Aaron was the king of socializing that entire event, and he put the entire event together, and I was so stressed about the website crashing that back in the kitchen offices on my computer freaking out about basically the website. I mean, the volume that drove was unbelievable. Well, that's a real thing. Well, we went into there on the show, we said we went into the show with 1.7 million in sales and we said we would do 4 million by the end of the year, and that was kind of a little bit of a stretch. And we ended up after that aired because it aired at the perfect time in November, rolling right into the holidays and we're a gifting company. So that automatically triggered 5 million of sales over the next five weeks, and we ended the year with 7 million, which is at that time was very significant for us. Now we're on track to do about 60 million this year. So just to kind of put it in perspective. But those milestones you never forget and you should never forget them. It's kind of like me and the firm when we had our revenue targets from 2018 and 2019 and 2020 pale in comparison now, but it's the feeling at that moment of the major accomplishment. So that's fantastic that you guys had that. Again, it's just certain things line up the right way and look. But also to your credit, so if the website wasn't strong at the time, which we've all seen shows or companies that go on Shark Tank and their sites do crash or they can't fulfill the orders. So did you guys specifically ramp up production and hire in some temp workers. That Yeah, we did everything we had to do and we made sure we had a website that wasn't going to crash. But these moments like this, all the ones from the Guinness Book of World Records to Shark Tank to Oprah, these are all great comradery and team building events that happen within our company. And we've built such a culture built on celebrating not only the company, but celebrating everybody that's in the company. I mean, we have 90 staff and we celebrate everybody's birthdays, for example. So. 90 Days out of the year there's a party, which is everybody's gaining a lot of weight. Yeah. Exactly. It's a good thing. At least you guys have the goods for celebrations and parties. Yeah, exactly. And I think to that point too, you have these big milestones that you hit and then you just spend, you want to chase that feeling. It's something where the goal gets bigger and bigger. At least for me, I feel like we've achieved these things and I just want, you're looking for the next big hit. And I think that's what drives us every day. We're just so excited for those big wins. And our entire team has this incredible comradery towards the growth that we have. We have an unbelievable culture, and I think a very, very unique culture driven a lot by our local community. I think Aaron has created an amazing culture in our production kitchen, and it really makes a huge difference when you have those big seasonal moments because we're relying on people sometimes to work 18 hour days during the holidays, especially this week during Mother's Day. It's another example of asking people to go above and beyond to make it happen and maintain the quality. We have people that are so essential to our production process that if they're not there for that full 18 hours, it can't operate. We rely heavily on our core team. You guys bring up an amazing point that we've had as well is the duality of being hard, charging ultra competitive, want nothing but the best. The goalposts only get moved backwards, not forwards, right? I'm sure once you hit 60, you'll, you'll take a day or two, deep breath, celebrate, smile, be with your loved ones, and then go, all right, now it's a hundred. Right? And that's exactly the way that I am in our. I'm like a step before that. Honestly. I'm the worst of the worst. Aaron is the one who calms me down, but I think I'm the pessimist. You're the optimist, Erin. And it's a really good combo because we balance each other out where I'm like, it's not good enough. And Erin's like, Rachel, it's good enough and we're going to do it and we're going to move forward with it, right? Yeah. But then balancing that among the two of you, but also with 90 staff, that's 90 personalities, that's 90 families, that's 90 personal issues. And having a culture where you guys are a company that is built on celebrations and gatherings. So to be able to have the hard charging with your team, but also say, guys, we're going to celebrate everybody's birthday. We're going to have a culture of hard work, but yet fun. So how do you guys do that? Because that's something that we're still getting better at. But when you have that duality, I'm just so fascinated by it. I. Think it's culture fit too of the people on the team. But Erin, I'll let. You, I mean, I think two of the things that are important are, one is it is very family oriented. And in fact, we do have a number of people here who have several family members that work for us. The other thing is that we kind of put our money where our mouth is. Every single person here that's in a management position started doing just an entry level job, and we promote from within. And not only does that come with title, but it also comes with financial rewards, responsibility, status. And everybody else around sees that and knows that that's something that they can aspire to in their own career path with us. And I think we have very different teams that we're all managing. So there's the production team, there's the team in the office like the SQF for food safety, which falls under our COO Angel and the customer service team, which falls under Julie. And then I'm running our growth team, and I think every team has a bit of a different culture, but something that we, to Aaron's point is making sure that everybody understands this holistic vision of we are going to grow profitably and we want everybody to benefit from that. We have never pursued an unprofitable growth strategy. I do not believe in growth at all costs. I think there is a cost to growth at all costs. I think that when things take a downturn, it really is a huge way, it's a huge risk to run a business that way. And so we've always pursued a profitable strategy, and the business has been profitable since we started. And at the end of the year, we want to make sure that all of our employees benefit from that. So the people that have been instrumental in our growth, we compensate them for it, and we make sure that they feel really a part of the team and they're making a huge impact. No, I mean that's fascinating to me and that's fantastic. I'm here talking to you guys and I'm learning and already writing down notes, thinking about things that I'm going to bring back to my team because I'm so in line with the way you guys are running your business, and I can learn a lot from you as well. So this has been fantastic. Now, so where's the company going? Not just from, we talked revenue, how it's been trending, but what else? Are there any new initiatives, new products? I know you're talking about the new assembly line or the new production facility. So where is this business going? What's your maybe three to five year goal? I mean, right in front of us immediately is we took on a project to expand our skews. So right now we have cheese and charcuterie, and then we have our baked cheese products, and now we're launching dessert boards. And so we started this process at the end of December and we thought, oh, by March we'll be ready to go. But we're so focused on wanting to have the best possible ingredients in there that we keep tweaking recipes and working with food scientists, and so we can have as many different unique, incredible ingredients that we can possibly have in the boards. Nobody's doing that right now, by the way. You can get cupcakes of a variety of cupcakes or you can get some chocolate covered pretzels, or you can get a gift basket with some shelf stable items. But we're doing a whole lineup, an array of fresh items. They're going to be built a grazing board, just kind of like our cheese and charcuterie boards the food portion of it, making sure it's like every bite is a wow, but also the packaging. So that arrives perfectly. Where you open it up in the unboxing is beautiful, and that also doesn't come to you crushed. So our goal is to have that launched by Q4. Yeah, and I think we have, our vision for the brand is so much bigger than just cheese and charcuterie. We have focused on making a name for ourselves in cheese and charcuterie. Nobody owns that space and we're not diverging from that. But I think increasing our product mix is going to be what allows us to scale to the level we want to. There is no edible gifting company in the country that is doing anything interesting or unique anymore in our opinion. And so we want to be that brand. We named it boardy because the initial name was actually cheese border. And then part of the reason that we decided to go with Boardy was because we envisioned something much bigger than just cheese and charcuterie boards. And I think everybody's going to be really excited when we launched dessert. Yeah. No, I mean that's really smart. I'm excited now. I can't wait. We were talking about before we started filming, this is something that I think for me and for just corporate gifting, I'm so excited to start using your guys' product and sending it to our friends family, our referral partners, corporate gifts and everything. And it's something that I think you guys are spot on. It's totally needed. And what are you saying now to the people who said, oh, well, it's going to ship looking like a salad. We had countless people that have said that. I mean, I remember the first person that I ever pitched this to the business to be able to invest said, are you kidding me during the pandemic, who's going to order platters of anything during the pandemic? So there's been many of those naysayers that it just feels good that we're having the level of success that we are and we stuck with it. Yep. Great. Fantastic. So as we're going to wrap this up, I have a question that I ask most people. I don't ask everybody this, but I think for you guys, this is really important and I want to ask each of you individually and more important than the answer to me is why do you pick this answer? Okay, so think about this for a second. Do you love to win or do you hate to lose? And why? So which one of those evokes more of the passion and the feelings? That's an interesting question. I mean, I guess I don't think about losing as an option if I'm going to go into something like that. I think that's almost like a preconceived idea of failing doesn't resonate with me. I feel like if I believe in something enough to put my time and my effort and my money into doing it, then it's going to win. On the winning side. I love everything that comes with winning. I like the euphoria that you get with it. I like the celebrations. I like the feelings of teamwork and of comradery and celebrating wins with each other and even going through the trenches on your way there and dealing with the pains of the stresses that you have to go to and you have to go through in order to get to the win. So I love everything about it. I think Erin and. Rachel. I think Erin loves to win. I love to win, but I really hate to lose. I think if I really had to skew in one direction, it would be hate to lose because I have this just complete and our COL wants to kill me because I continue to under project because this thing within me cannot over project and under deliver. To me, that's a loss, right? It feels like I'm losing if we don't beat our projections. And so he's always like, well, Rachel, I need to order the food for us to be able to produce it, so you have to give me over projection. So he actually has started inflating my projections every time I give them to him. But I think that's probably a testament to the fact that I hate to lose. Yeah, Rachel, I think you're a better version of me because for me, the hating to lose is just evokes the stronger response. I was a high school basketball coach for 10 years. I won a state championship. And when I played high school basketball at age 14, I wanted to be a state champion. But I finally won it with my team about 10 years ago. And it was amazing. It was 20 years in the making and that team, we were together for three years, but when we finally won it, I was just like, wow, that's amazing. That's great. Okay, what am I going to do next? And anytime we lost the year before when we lost in the state championship game, it was obsessing over the loss and overcoming it. And I don't know, I just think that's the way my brain is wired. Aaron, I think I would love to be like you, but I think that's probably the better way. But it's just something inside me that's just wired that way of, and it's not necessarily a fear of losing, it's just the absolute disdain for it is what is a much stronger motivator for me than the actual euphoria, which I do have of winning and having success. But to me, that just laughed a lot. It just lasts a lot shorter. And then in a way, like you were saying earlier, agents kind of like that euphoria, you're chasing it again, kind of like a drug in a different way. Exactly. And the bar gets higher and higher. But I do think it's important to, I mean, everybody's going to have losses. You're not going to win them all. And I do think it's important to move on quickly and focus on the wins. I think that's something I've learned is if you gave it your all, you can't be hard on yourself if it didn't go your way. Absolutely. Yep. You're right. I've been learning those things as well. It's kind of having that be a hard charger and still have that self-love and appreciate and just kind of understand maybe where it went wrong and then just move forward, have that short memory. So there's a balance to everything. Alright, guys. So any final words or maybe words of advice or things that you've long learned along the journey for our audience that we want to share before we wrap it up? Well, there's a few things that are not so hardcore businesslike, but we've, as a company, even though we're very young, we've tried to grow and be a part of the community as we do it and try to be socially responsible and try to be a leader to inspire other companies to do the same. And by that I mean we have many different initiatives from our packaging being almost a hundred percent sustainable from ice packs that are drain safe to curbside recyclable boxes that are made out of recyclable material and recyclable insulated liners. And we try to do as many initiatives like that as possible. So we have that. We also are involved in, because we're a food company and involved in feeding people, so we have a lot of food trim, which isn't necessarily bad for us. It's trim. We cut out numbers for people's birthdays out of cheese. So if you cut a two out of a square, you're going to have a lot of cheese leftover. So we have 500 to 800 pounds of great cheese that every Wednesday our van goes around to three different nonprofit organizations and delivers that. And they make it into meals that they feed all types of people with food insecurities. We also hire adults with developmental disabilities from the arc of Palm Beach County to do tasks just that need to get done, like folding boxes and sorting brochures and things like that. To be able to give people a population that doesn't necessarily have opportunity to have the opportunity to feel like they're part of a team and feel useful and make a paycheck that they can use then in turn to buy an iPhone or do things in their own life. Yeah, that's so important. It's all about community. Businesses aren't sustainable without having that community feel internally, internal community with your team and external with where you live, where you work, the vendors that you guys are using. The community couldn't agree more. And that's why when I started the podcast, I said, this is a community piece, this success in South Florida. We're not talking about people in other parts of the country. It's all about the community here and the amazing things that people down here are doing. So great. Rachel, any other parting words or advice for our listeners that you'd have? I think it's just you really never know what can happen in such a short period of time and to just go for it. And it may seem like a lot of other companies have it all figured out, or they're so much bigger or they're so much more sophisticated, but nobody has it figured out. They're just going along the way and figuring it out as they go. And I think the people that are the most passionate and the most determined to figure it out are always going to do it better than the fanciest agency or team in the world. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And so people can go to boardy.com, right? Is that the best way for somebody to order from you guys? Yes. boardy.com. Okay. All right. Fantastic. I know I'm going to be going on there real soon and I'll be getting in touch for the corporate partnership that you guys have. So Aaron and Rachel, thank you guys so much for being here. I had a blast. I learned a ton, and hopefully you guys had some fun as well. Awesome. Thanks for having us. Of course. Thanks. So. When something bad happens, who do you turn to In South Florida, the answer is the Rossen law firm, criminal and DUI defense for when bad things happen to good people. The Rossen Law Firm is a team of eight criminal defense attorneys, including two board certified criminal trial experts. They also have federal and white collar divisions in the practice. To learn more about the team and how they can help you connect on Facebook and Instagram at Rossen Law Firm, you'll also find helpful and entertaining videos on Rossen Law Firm YouTube channel. Just check this episode's description for