Hello Toads!!!
Did you miss me?
I admit, it’s been a little while, and I’m sorry if I’ve left you wanting. We are into the full swing of farmer’s markets and shows, and we blew up another dehydrator this week. We’ve now run four separate machines to their untimely demise. The fifth is on its way now and we’ve done a bit more research into this one, and purchased an extended warranty.
I’m working seven days a week now. I’ll admit, it isn’t ideal, but I am learning to enjoy and embrace it. It’s a lot of hours, but I spend almost all of them with my beautiful wife (who is due 10/4/24!) who I very much enjoy spending time with. When your hands prune from washing so many cups, trays, knives, sheets, mats, etc. and you get a little cramp in your thumb, it’s easier to keep going when you can show your wrinkly fingers to the person you love and go “Ew!” Even this blog, as much as I enjoy it, is now being crunched in between creating marketing and attending a local two-day economic conference. Why so much? Why stack your schedule so full?
I’ve thought about this too. My reasoning? The only thing that can create value or meaning, is work. When you make a cup of tea in the morning for your wife, technically this is labor. A labor of love, but still labor. The payout is that I get to see my wife take a sip of a well brewed cup and smile. Priceless, but worth the effort.
When we created ToadStone Dried Goods we thought long and hard about how to operate our business so that it aligns with our values. Fortunately we have many many many examples of bad businesses. We don’t measure growth as if it were the only meaningful metric. We don’t intentionally make our product worse so that customers need to buy more. We don’t look for the cheapest materials, and we make sure that if you are paying for our product, that there is actual value in your product. Remember how I was mildly complaining about working seven days a week? It’s only mild because we understand that without labor, there is no value. Our tea is more expensive than lipton because we don’t cut corners and we actually invest our time into the production, packaging, distribution, and management of the company.
Modern business practices make me a bit red in the face. If a company takes a loss year after year, but is able to show growth to shareholders, then they will get new investment. Any economics majors here? This strategy seems textbook to modern finance. It’s a way to not deliver on your product and not fail! Genius! Brilliant!....assholes.
Remember when things used to work right out of the package? Remember when people could actually afford basic needs? Well, sorry folks, big brained venture capitalists are too busy pretending to be economic geniuses to care that they are destroying the middle class, pricing the average person out of their neighborhoods, and forcing them into a $800/month car payment (that’s the national average folks) just to ensure that money trickles up to the top 1%.
I digress. If you want to hear me rant about modern business practices, leave a comment! Until then, I’ll get to the point.
Labor, and labor, and labor. There is no way around doing the work folks. We source ingredients unprocessed from local farms and businesses. Then we do the work of processing, drying, and packaging these materials. When you purchase a bag of ‘Teaches of Peaches’ you are getting limes that have had their rind and pith meticulously removed by hand, whole ginger root broken down and dried, as well as peaches that came from a local orchard at peak ripeness that we’ve dried in our kitchen. This is actual work and our labor is what separates us from your other tea people that order their blends already mixed, or rip-off other companies' recipes then produce an inferior product at a lower cost to remove the competition.
We are just toads selling tea, but our tea is special because we have invested the only resource we cannot get back–time. A large portion of our lives go to creating new blends, processing ingredients, packaging, selling, and talking with customers. I can always make more money, but I cannot gain any more time than what I have already been dealt. That is not a sentiment to dread, but rather an assurance to our customers that we aren’t a couple of fat cats resting on our laurels while a staff is underpaid and overworked. We have drank so much bad tea just to ensure that what we have in our packages is worth the money you have so graciously given. We believe in commerce, not capital, so that when we do eventually grow, everyone will grow with us, not for us.
That’s it for today, toads. I’d like to give you a date for when you may expect another blog, but I can’t see that far ahead yet. So, until next time, stay bumpy my friends.