Pick and Shovel Work

So then what advice would you have for those who are letting little voices of fear and doubt creep in?

I think looking at your wins and really thinking about what you've accomplished is super super important. Because especially being an entrepreneur, I think in any industry is tough and you have to really want to do it. Especially if you're really disrupting a category as we did. I think there will be many people who -- look, if it was easy to disrupt a category than there wouldn't be you know...

There wouldn't be a lot of people doing it.

There wouldn't be a lot of people doing it right, and so I think that that's really the key thing that you just have to, you have to look back on the things that you accomplished, and let those negative voices, meet the positive voices that are saying that you've actually you know actually been able to do stuff. I remember a friend of mine early on, that a sort of a new friend introduced me to... he had developed a or actually his father had developed the first organic whole flour company. And so a friend introduced me to him and he wasn't there in the early stages, he was actually working with his father. But I was talking to him about the growth and sort of what we had done and talking to him about how do I get my product into Safeway. And he said, "You'll get it into Safeway eventually but what you really have to think about when you are building this company is the pick and shovel work." And I was writing down "pick and shovel work."

What does that mean?

I was like, "What do you mean, pick and shovel work?" and he said, "You just have to keep talking your axe and picking away at it and you're going to shovel a bunch of stuff up along the way but eventually you'll stop and you'll say, "Wow I've actually made progress along the way." but it doesn't look like you've made progress and you know while you're actually doing it but then you're like, "Wow I've really accomplished something along the way." And he said, "And then you just have to keep going because you can't sit there for very long and celebrate." He said, "Celebrate that you actually took a foot off of the wall but then actually look at, "How do I continue to grow?"