What's Gary Thinking About Now?

Food’NBev Connect is now going into its 3^rd quarter of existence, and as a start-up initiative, I have to say it’s been a truly rewarding experience. We have found 15 growing companies that have embraced our virtual format, we have brought together almost two dozen advisors and fostered great brand-advisor relationships that have added value and we have gained some important recognition from around the region and nationally.

Our involvement and attendance at NoshLive and BevNetLive in NYC in May further validated that we have a number of nationally (even internationally) competitive brands that are infusing innovation into the market and that distributors and larger manufacturers and retailers want to work with. All this, topped with an expanding top line growth for virtually all of our companies in excess of 35% bodes well for our future path and continued operation. I am humbled to have the opportunity to work with the entire community every day.

This doesn’t mean that we have figured it all out…we have introduced some solid classroom and workshop training, and with Bryan Mattimore’s efforts will host our 3^rd workshop in September. But more focused subject matter training with linked advising is needed, particularly in the areas of packaging (design, materials and sustainability), digital community building and on-line distribution (how to build your own community while also mastering various on-line distribution and fulfillment options, and competing in an Amazon world). We need to add advisors in these areas and link with more strategic partners who can help us all get stronger.

In addition, financing remains a challenge for our seed and post-seed financed companies. They need more access to funders who are willing to come in earlier and help companies traverse the path from a few hundred thousand in run rate sales to the $ 2 – $ 4 million level. It’s a risky part of the investment spectrum, but the reward opportunity of helping companies up to these next levels will show that selectively, we can make a number of new impact growth firms with higher exit values. And helping create that stream of 2 – 4 brands per year will provide needed funding to our on-going operations.

Sustainable growth

This is the area that I am most focused on at this point of our summer. The state, through a renewed second year grant from CTNext, is helping us sustain minimal operations for our second year, but it just isn’t enough. We have three sources of income to help run the accelerator – state funding, sponsor contributions and membership fees. Together, like many of our brands, this created a seed investment to get us started, but we are now challenged to find more money to help us grow and improve our impact. We need more established players in the food and beverage space to get involved and help fund our operations, and we need investors to band together to form a focused fund for investment in these earlier rounds to make it easier and attractive to build, grow and stay in CT.

Together, this will sustain us and allow expansion in three areas:

Let us support more growth brands – we are at capacity at this point…without expanding my time and personal investment, we have peaked at 15 – 16 brands, yet we know that we can easily expand to 20 – 25 if we had some more staff working with me that could help expand curriculum and work directly forging advisor involvement against identified need, as I continue outreach and market new brands, investors and strategics.
We need a new base of operations – a clubhouse of sorts, where can have hosted meetings, bring together our brands more frequently and gain recognition beyond being housed here at The Business Council.
Once we have dedicated space, we can also look to open a small incubator program for brands just starting and create our own “farm team” and can co-locate these start-up teams together with us so we can provide the intensive on-going daily assistance they need to come to market faster. We will also need to start thinking about providing a test kitchen space to help our brands improve formulations and get initial production started to support consumer validation and production planning assessments.

There is much to do as we think about moving into our second year and this is no time to rest. We believe we can create a $ 1.5 – $ 2 billion economic cluster opportunity here for Connecticut, as has happened in Boulder and Austin, by sustaining a focus on food and beverage fresh market brands and everyone should be excited by that proposition in a state that hasn’t had strong new sector growth.

I can’t thank our early primary sponsors enough – Robinson Cole, Bank of America, Martin DeCruze. But we will need more fire power if we are to realize our full potential and I am excited to begin reaching out with a plan to drive this growth in the Fall.

In the meantime, hit the beach and spend some time with the family . . . lots to do once things kick off in early September . . . all the best and call me if you have ideas how to help!