Here are the 9 steps we created

Here are the 9 steps we created to turn our dream into a business scaling to 100 million annual revenue. One, go to therapy. From day one, my partner and I committed to seeing an executive therapist. This made us unstoppable when it comes to having hard convous amongst ourselves and the team. Two, don't sacrifice on your quality or vision. We had a specific idea for an excellent product at a fair price. When we couldn't find a contract manufacturer that believed in our vision, we decided to build our own chocolate factory and take control of our destiny. Three. think locally to go national. With limited resources, we had to be strategic. We would work region by region instead of trying to conquer all of North America at the same time. This increased the odds that a customer would bump into each other and talk about the brand creating the impression that we were much bigger than we actually were. Four, tell great stories. We show everything on our TikTok and Instagram which attract a deeply invested community rather than just customers who want to buy our product. Five, have a chief maker as a partner. We have a partner who 's only job is to build relationships with people. That's literally all he does and it creates such an abundance of opportunities for us. Six, build your price infrastructure first. When we started, the price to make our bars were vastly higher than what we were selling them for. But we wanted to build traction from day one and show potential investors how this thing could actually work at scale. Seven, look to other industries for marketing inspiration. The MDS playbook is fully stolen from the music industry. But instead of selling records, we sell chocolate and instead of performing music on stage, we do speaking gigs. 8. Control is worth more than valuation. We've always opted to take lower valuations in all of our fund raisers so that we can keep voting control and board control. We also fund raise using our own termsheets, not to waste time and align with investors that share our vision. Nine. See entrepreneurship through the lens of playing a game. The faster you figure out that this is just a game that you're playing, the faster you find out how to optimize it. This is a road map that we use. Yours is going to look a little different, but Take these principles and I promise you you will stand out from every other brand around you.