Are you an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to make profits while also making a difference? Then, perhaps you should consider starting your own B-Corp business. In this episode, Gene Marks and Jasmine Crowe-Houston, CEO and founder of Goodr, discuss her journey as a small business owner and how she leveraged both technology and venture capital funding to fight hunger on a larger scale.

Podcast Key Highlights

  • What Can I Learn From Goodr About Setting Up a B-Corp Small Business?
    • If you’re unsure whether you want to start a nonprofit or for-profit business, consider how much time and effort you want to spend just getting donations and building up the business; for-profits are a better option for individuals who want to start making an impact immediately.
    • Once you’ve decided to start a public benefit corporation, you’ll need to approach investors in order to raise venture capital funding.
    • You have to figure out a profitable revenue model. For instance, Goodr has a volume-based fee for service; they charge customers based on service frequency and waste volume, along with a subscription fee for their technology.
    • Keep in mind that if there’s a technological component to your small business, you’ll need additional capital not only to build the initial platform, but also to pay the developers who will be maintaining it.
  • What Are the Challenges of Running a Public Benefit Corporation?
    • It’s a struggle just to get people to be open to doing good things and trying to change the world.
    • Trying to explain and prove to customers why this model could work or why they should be open to new ways of solving old problems can also be difficult.
  • How Does Goodr Build Its Client Base?
    • Since a lot of businesses are already paying a waste management company to take away their waste, Goodr shows them how their services are basically a lateral cost move. In many cases, their clients end up seeing at least a 4 to 5X ROI on their investment with them.
    • Goodr also makes it a point to address any concerns about potential lawsuits by explaining all the protective measures that have been built into their system, from food handling to liability insurance.
    • Lastly, Goodr promotes the advantages of its simple-to-use platform, which helps customers save money, manage their inventory, and easily integrates into their existing platform.
  • What Does Goodr’s Software Platform Do?
    • Inventories Everything the Business Sells
    • Calculates the Approximate Tax Value of Those Items at the Time of Donation
    • Calculates the Approximate Weight of Those Items
    • Figures Out which Vehicle Goodr Needs to Send to Pick Up Those Items Based on Volume
    • Matches Donated Items with the Nonprofits that Are Open and Available to Accept that Particular Food at that Time
    • Generates a Donation Letter into the Client’s Portal
    • Tracks Everything that the Clients are Donating on a Consistent Basis
  • What Do Small Business Owners Need to Know About Building Their Own Platforms?
    • Remember that building technology is a costly and time-consuming process that requires frequent adjustments and upgrades.
    • For budgeting purposes, it’s best if your tech team is composed of both in-house developers and contractors.
    • When it comes to developers, you need to “hire and fire fast” if they aren’t executing quality work in a reasonable amount of time.
    • Have a clear vision for your platform design, but be open to additional input from your developers.
  • What Advice Does Jasmine Have for Small Business Owners?
    • Have patience; just because it doesn’t come tomorrow doesn’t mean that it can’t still happen.
    • Think through the timing and what you can do with the smaller amount of resources that you have.

Links

Transcript

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are for informational purposes only, and solely those of the podcast participants, contributors, and guests, and do not constitute an endorsement by or necessarily represent the views of The Hartford or its affiliates.

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Gene: Hey, everybody. It’s Gene Marks and welcome back to another episode of The Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. Today’s guest is Jasmine Crowe-Houston. She’s the CEO and founder of Goodr. Jasmine, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

Jasmine: Thanks for having me.

Gene: Where are you speaking to us from?

Jasmine: Atlanta, Georgia.

Gene: Very warm in Atlanta, Georgia. Whenever I meet people from Atlanta, I always get nervous, because I’m a big fan of The Walking Dead.

Jasmine: Wow. It was filmed here for sure.

Gene: I think there always could be a potential there, but I’m happy that you are joining us today. We’re recording this in the summertime, so it’s very hot outside, I know, and hot down in Georgia. Hopefully, you’re keeping cool. You are the CEO and founder of Goodr. Tell us a little bit about the company and what you guys do.

Jasmine: Goodr is a food waste and hunger solutions management company. We’re headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, but we’re operating across the country and we have a mission to feed more, waste less. On one side of our business, we work with large-scale venues that typically have a lot of excess food that often ends up in landfill. We help them divert that if it’s edible to people in need via our nonprofit network.

Jasmine: If it’s non-edible, we’re helping them recycle it, making our environment a better place as it relates to hunger. We work with a lot of municipalities and brands and really help them rethink their hunger and food access strategy, really leading with dignity first.

Jasmine: We do a lot of interesting things. We have grocery stores that we operate inside of Title 1 schools. We have a mobile grocery store on wheels that can go and deliver a grocery shopping experience to up to 150 families at a time. We are really solutions-oriented in trying to end hunger and food waste.

Gene: Your story reminds me a lot… I just heard an episode of a Planet Money podcast where they were featuring this guy who took unused soaps from hotels. You ever wonder when you don’t use your bar of soap in a hotel, what happens to it?

Jasmine: If they just throw it away?

Gene: Yeah. And it turns out the hotels were throwing out all this soap. 10, 15 years ago, he started a kind of similar thing, where they took the soap and they re-manufactured it or whatever. And then, they were distributing it out.

Gene: Particularly, to countries and places that needed soaps for hygiene and all that. It’s really an awesome thing, but you’re doing the same thing on a relative basis with food. How did you get the idea and how long ago did you start this company?

Jasmine: I got the idea really organically. Before I started Goodr, I was feeding people that were experiencing homelessness, mostly living on the streets of downtown Atlanta. A video from one of my pop-up restaurants actually went viral on Facebook and I woke up one morning to millions of views and friend requests and all these comments.

Jasmine: One of the reoccurring questions that people kept asking me was, “Who donated the food? Where did it come from?” The truth was nobody. I was couponing, price matching, cooking all this food myself. I did a Google search, “What happens to extra food at the end of the night,” and learned that it all was ending up in landfill and was just blown away by that and decided that I wanted to solve it.

Jasmine: I think that’s really that initial impetus. Researching and learning about food waste and just being blown away by how much of it goes to waste.

Gene: That’s amazing. When you first started this up… I hope you don’t mind me asking this. Did you have a job at that time? Was this a side gig?

Jasmine: No, this is a full-time job for me. I started working on it in 2017. I had a consultancy. I’ve been an entrepreneur for now well over a decade. So I had a consultancy where I was helping people manage their philanthropic giving. Mainly, celebrities.

Jasmine: It was very busy around certain parts of the year. Mainly, back to school, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. And so, I really learned to just manage my money and live for a year off of these really busy times. I had essentially some free time to be able to do this, but I then started working on it full-time within that year.

Gene: Tell me a little bit about… We’re going back to the very beginning. First of all, how long ago was this when you first started?

Jasmine: 2017.

Gene: 2017. Was it self-funded? Or did you get donors or other people to contribute?

Jasmine: No, it was totally bootstrapped. I raised venture capital funding in the later part of 2018, but really, for the first year-and-a-half, it was literally just me.

Gene: Wow. When you say venture capital funding… My understanding of venture capital funding is that those people invest in for-profit companies to make lots of money, not in a nonprofit company that’s doing good for the world.

Jasmine: We’re for-profit. That’s a big misconception. We do good and we’re doing well, but we are not a nonprofit. We are a for-profit business.

Gene: Got it.

Jasmine: We are a registered B Corp, which means we’re a public benefit corporation. No different than Warby Parker or Ben and Jerry’s. We exist for people and for planet. We have a really strong business model around what we do and how we do it. Really, centered on the fact that if people were not using our services to divert their food from the landfill, they’re paying a way service to throw it away in landfill.

Jasmine: That was one of the big things that I saw, and ultimately was able to build a strong business case for how this could exist, so we are not a nonprofit.

Gene: First of all, I love that answer. I guess that had to be some bit of a discussion with yourself in your mind about, “Should I start this business as a nonprofit? Or should it be a for-profit?” Were you always intending on making this a for-profit venture? Or did you ever consider it to be a nonprofit?

Jasmine: I never considered it to be a nonprofit. My background was in the nonprofit space and I realized that I’d spent so much time and effort just getting donations and trying to build up the business when I could immediately start making impact. So I really knew early on that I was not going to be a nonprofit.

Gene: Good for you. That’s great. What’s your revenue model? Where does the funds come from?

Jasmine: It’s a volume-based fee for service. We charge customers based on how often we’re coming out, how much waste we’re recovering, and then a subscription fee to our technology.

Gene: When you’re talking about going out and connecting to your customers and taking away their waste… For them, they were paying a waste management company to take away the waste anyway. I’m assuming that your costs were just replacing that cost? Or was it any…

Jasmine: Yes. It’s usually a lateral cost move. In many cases, because we’re helping to donate the food on their behalf to a network of nonprofits, they’re usually seeing at least a 4 to 5X ROI on their investment with us, which is something they wouldn’t typically see when it’s going to landfill.

Gene: How long did it take to… Actually, before I even ask you how long it took. Right now, how big an organization is this that you’re running? How many employees? Just to give us an idea.

Jasmine: Across our whole spectrum, we’re almost up to 100 now.

Gene: Great. Are you focused mostly in the Atlanta area still? Or now have you spread out across the country?

Jasmine: We’re headquartered in Atlanta, but we’re operating everywhere. Just last weekend, we were in Chicago. We have customers in Washington D.C. We have customers in New York. We have customers in Texas. We have customers in California. We have customers really all over the country. We’re just headquartered in Atlanta.

Gene: What’s your biggest headache, Jasmine?

Jasmine: I think it’s just a struggle to get people to be open to doing good things and trying to change the world. I think we’re really caught up in the old guard. Sometimes it’s a headache constantly trying to explain and prove why this model could work and why we should be open to new ways to solve old problems.

Jasmine: We’ve done it in other ways. Dating. A lot of that is online now. Why can’t we use technology to solve hunger and food waste? Why do those systems have to remain the same?

Gene: Got it. Actually, before I get to the technology, which I want to dig into a little bit with you… You just said about convincing people to do good things as it is. But if I’m a restaurant owner and you came to me and said, “Hey. Listen. Instead of paying the waste management company a dollar, you’re going to pay us a dollar and we’re going to take your waste off of your hands.”

There doesn’t have to be any altruism involved. It’s a business decision to decide to do that. Is that still a challenge convincing people to do that? They just don’t want to change?

Jasmine: Yeah. Especially, on the donation part. Because I think a lot of people have sometimes thought like, “If someone gets sick from the food, I can get sued.” There’s been some concern there. What we’ve really built into our system is really protection for that around our clients.

Jasmine: We provide the packaging materials. We provide the labels. We provide the liability insurance. We provide the logistics. We’ve really thought that through. It’s a habit change. You always are used to putting it in a trash can. Now, we’re asking you to put it in a pan, so that we can donate it and get it to families in a presentable manner.

Gene: It’s an unbelievable model. When I say, “unbelievable,” like a fantastic model, because there’s really unlimited supply it seems of excess wasted food in this country alone. Clearly, an unlimited supply of people need that food, and there’s been very few people in the middle to make that connection. It’s just funny.

Gene: I keep going back to it now, but the fact that you’re operating this as a for-profit business makes such sense to me. Because you have the motive and you can raise the capital to actually scale up an organization to do this. Whereas, a nonprofit doesn’t have that type of incentive. Does that make sense?

Jasmine: Yeah.

Gene: I had a feeling. Okay. Let’s talk about the technology. All we’ve been talking about, I’m picturing you going to a restaurant, you walking off with boxes and crates and bags of unused food.

Gene: Obviously, this is not the case… And then, taking it to some charity that could actually use the food. But clearly, there’s a technology platform and a logistics platform involved in the middle of all this. Talk to me about that.

Jasmine: Essentially, what it is we inventory everything a business sells. If you look at our mobile app or our web portal, it’s almost as if you were ordering from Uber Eats. Except for ours, it’s typically ingredients. Someone goes on, they log in and they say, “I’ve got 10 pizzas and 20 pans of chicken,” and they request a pick-up.

Jasmine: Our platform is calculating the approximate tax value of those items at the time of donation, the approximate weight of those items, and also figuring out what vehicle we need to send to pick up those items based off of how much it is. And then, our platform matches those items with the nonprofit that’s open and available to accept that food at that time. We get that food picked up, and then we get it donated to the nonprofit.

Jasmine: They sign for it almost like they would a UPS package. It generates a donation letter into our client’s portal, but it also tracks everything it is that those clients are donating on a consistent basis, so that they could eventually reduce food waste at the source. If they see that on a consistent basis, “We’re wasting blueberry bagels,” maybe they’re not that popular and they don’t need to continue to make them. That’s what our technology helps them think through.

Gene: The technology itself, this is a platform that you had to build over a period of time? This was part of the investment that you made?

Jasmine: I feel like anyone who tells you that they’re not constantly building and updating technology is not truly in a tech business.

Gene: They’re lying.

Jasmine: It’s been built over time. We’re deploying another version on Friday that we’ve been working on for some months. It’s a constant build.

Gene: It’s a logistics cloud platform. It’s funny. I know that you’re using it for one specific use, but it sounds like the kind of platform that can be used for multiple different types of uses outside of what you’re doing. Have you had any plans to license this technology out to other companies?

Jasmine: I haven’t thought about it yet. I think we’ve just really been focusing on growing, so I haven’t really been thinking about the licensing aspect of it as of lately.

Gene: Was this always your plan from the very beginning to build this platform? Or was this something that you were operating the business for a while and you were like, “This is going to be impossible, unless we get this done.”

Jasmine: No. I think it was always about technology. From the very beginning, I was inspired at the emergence of technology as it related to everything else. As I mentioned, ordering food, dating people. I figured that there had to be a way to use technology to address really big problems. I think even at the onset of this idea, I always envisioned technology would be the way that would lead us there.

Gene: Also, it gets me back to the fact that you just said that the platform itself… If I’m using it and I’m a restaurant, and I’m putting in whatever excess food that I have to get rid of, and after a while, I start realizing that I’m always putting in blueberry muffins. Clearly, I’m making too many blueberry muffins.

Gene: That seems to be another big benefit for me to use your service. Not only just to use you as a waste management to take the stuff away, but also you’re basically telling me and helping me manage my inventory and my supply. I’m assuming that’s got to be a big selling feature of this platform.

Jasmine: It’s a huge selling feature of it.

Gene: I believe it. What’s the biggest pushback that you get from your customers? Let me take a step away. Who are your customers? Are your customers the restaurants that you’re going to? Or is it the people that you’re delivering the food to?

Jasmine: Great question. It is the restaurants that we’re going to. We are selling… I wouldn’t say restaurants. Remember, we focus on large-scale venues.

Gene: Sure.

Jasmine: Our customers are airports, convention centers, colleges and universities, enterprise corporate cafeterias. Those are the customers.

Gene: Do you have a problem with supply or a problem with finding the destination of that supply? Do you follow what I mean?

Jasmine: I don’t think that we have a problem. I think we want to scale. We know that there’s more food to get. Sadly, the need is there. So I don’t think the problem is trying to find people that need the food, it’s trying to get more and convincing more people to be part of the process of donating their food.

Gene: A lot of times, the platforms that I’ve dealt with, the companies that are trying to implement platforms, in the end, it does require humans to input data into the platform. Your customers, again, colleges, food halls, cafeterias, restaurants, whatever. Somebody there has got to be inputting this stuff in. Whatever excess inventory they have that’s available for you to be picking up.

Gene: I’m wondering. Number one, does your platform integrate with any of their systems or point of sale systems? Or do you offer any services to do that? Number two is, if not, how do you convince… It’s a cost to your customer to provide somebody to be keying that stuff in. How do you deal with that concern?

Jasmine: We’re very quick. I think that’s the biggest piece of it. This is not something that’s taking people 20, 30 minutes. I think that was the biggest thing that we needed to make sure of when we first were building, is that we weren’t doing so much of a habit changing. I think we focus really heavily on that.

Jasmine: Ultimately, for us, we really think about making it quick, making it easy, so that they could do things and be really efficient. That’s why we inventory everything it is that they do on the front end. We have all that information already and we don’t have to worry about making them feel like they have to rethink or retrain people. I think we really focus on that.

Gene: That’s great. A lot of companies are trying to solve their supply chain issues and their logistics issues, and the approach that they’re taking is exactly the approach that you have taken. In other words, if you can get both the buyers and the sellers using the same platform itself, they’re talking to each other that much more closely. They can better align what their needs are as opposed to having some a middleman.

Gene: A lot of companies are embarking in building their own systems. And that’s what you did. I’m assuming you built this from scratch. First of all, in your prior life as a consultant, are you a developer?

Jasmine: I wish.

Gene: Right. I’m sure you do wish. Now that you know something about development.

Jasmine: I definitely wish I did, because it’s definitely expensive and something I would’ve loved to have known. For sure. I spent a lot of time essentially raising capital to be able to get this built. I think that was my biggest focus is, “Hey. I need to raise the capital in order to be able to hire somebody to do the technology and build it for me.” That was really my focus.

Jasmine: And then, I did learn at least how to read code and make sure that people were… Ultimately, if they said they were building something, they were pushing code and I was able to receive that. There were things that I made sure of as I was building as well.

Gene: We have such a limited amount of time together, and I have a million questions for you, but I want to stay focused on the platform itself. We are talking about using technology and logistics.

Gene: Our audience are business owners. Many of the people that listen to us and watch us, they’re either buying or they are developing solutions for themselves. They want to build their own custom platforms. They want to do similar things to what you’re doing for their own uses.

Gene: What have you learned about building your own software platform? What mistakes have you made? If you could go back to 2017, what would you tell yourself not to do?

Jasmine: Well, I want to be honest and say I didn’t build my own platform. I think that’s really important. I hired and built team members to help me build this platform, and I just really laid out my vision for that.

Gene: Let me stop you there. Let me stop you there. But it is your platform. It’s your company’s platform. Like you said, you learned to read the code. In the end, the buck stops with you. So it is your platform.

Gene: I wasn’t inferring that you were sitting there writing code all day, but you had to put together a team to do this. That’s just a nightmare to me, because you’re dealing with a whole bunch of different personalities and stuff. Let me go back to the question.

Jasmine: It’s definitely a hard thing. I think I’ve learned that you have to work hard, and then no one is going to work as hard as you or care as much you as it relates to your business. That’s just the reality of it. I think sometimes those are hard things for people to hear and understand, but it’s important to know.

Jasmine: This is your vision. Your job as a CEO is to get people to buy in and be with you on it, but it’s very important that you also realize that it’s your dream and your vision. And that’s one of the things that you want to always keep in mind and keep in the forefront of how you build.

Jasmine: I think I’ve learned that it’s not cheap and it’s not quick. Building technology is not, “Hey. You’ll have this done next week.” It could take months. It could take years to actually get it to what you really want it to be.

Gene: And it’s never finished, like you just said.

Jasmine: It’s never finished. You’re constantly fixing bugs. You’re listening to customers. You’re trying to fix the things that they’re coming up with and the issues that they see. It is never done, but you’re going to feel really good about it.

Gene: Where did you find your developers?

Jasmine: Well, now I have them all in-house. I’ve had a local dev team that I worked with in the beginning. I’ve had offshore dev teams that I’ve worked with in other countries. A little bit of everywhere. We’ve had several versions and continue to build.

Gene: The fact that you say that you’ve got it in-house now makes me think that you learned some lessons from dealing with outside dev teams and teams overseas and decided to bring this in-house. Am I wrong in saying that?

Jasmine: I think it’s just eventually… We still have in-house devs and we still have offshore devs that our in-house devs manage, because you’re going to want to have a mix. You’re going to know your budget and what you can spend. If you don’t have six figures and high six figures to be able to get a team of engineers, you’re competing with the Microsofts and the Googles of this world.

Jasmine: You’re going to have a mix of some people in-house, some offshore devs. You could work with coding bootcamps. You could work with students. There’s a lot of different things you could do to be able to get your business to scale. But in the beginning, I tried everything because I didn’t have a lot of money.

Jasmine: That’s the biggest piece of it. Even when I raised capital, I only raised a million dollars. It wasn’t like I raised thousands of dollars and I had all this money. It was very much like, “Hey. This is what I’ve got. This is what I’m trying to build.” I had to take baby steps, if you will.

Gene: I’m sure you will. That’s great. That’s also great advice about taking baby steps. As somebody who is not a developer yourself, how do you hire developers? How did you figure out who knew what they were doing and who didn’t?

Jasmine: I think you’ve got to hire and fire fast and have a repository where things are getting entered. And if it’s not working, if you don’t see stuff being entered into the system, if people aren’t coding fast enough, if you set deadlines and then they’re not being met… Then, those are when you start having some really strong conversations like, “Is this working?” And if it doesn’t work, then you make those changes. I think that’s important is learning that you’ve got to make them fast.

Gene: That’s also great advice is cutting the cord. Basically, staying on that. Were most of the developers that you hired as you were building this system… I’m assuming they were independent contractors? They were not necessarily employees, so it would make it easier to make changes if you had to.

Jasmine: Exactly. We hired contractors. We have employees as well. We’ve had a mixture. For sure. But we had a lot of contractors in the beginning.

Gene: When it came time to design your system… I hope you’re good with these questions, because you’re answering them great. It’s fascinating for all of us who want to do stuff like this.

Gene: Tell me a little bit about the design process of your system as well. In other words, did that all come from you? Or was it a team effort? Or was it your vision on how it should be done? How long did it take you to do?

Jasmine: I think the design process is just like the coding process. It’s always ongoing as you’re continuing to build things. Originally, when I first started building, I wrote it down on a piece of paper.

Jasmine: Literally, just drew little square boxes, “Hey. This is what I want the first screen to look like. This is what I envision the second screen looking like.”

Jasmine: I don’t think it was a huge design element of it. For sure. I then hired a UX/UI person that came in and helped me really think through the designs, really made them technical. But at first, it was really just me and thinking through it.

Gene: That is amazing. How about the platform itself that you’re hosting it on? Is it AWS or Google Cloud or Azure? Or what did you…

Jasmine: It’s on Azure.

Gene: It’s on Azure. How did you make that decision?

Jasmine: In the beginning, they gave us a lot of cloud storage and credits and things for free. That’s always how they do it. And then, once you’re on, you kind of get stuck there. I think that’s how that happened.

Gene: Got it. Your organization now has grown about 100 employees. There’s a lot of logistics that are being involved in what you’re doing. How many of those 100 employees or what percentage of them are on the development side?

Jasmine: Not a lot. We have a whole offshore team that we work with, but I would say we have about five people that are working in the dev realm. And then, we have a team of about 12 that we manage offshore.

Gene: Got it. Is the platform itself simple enough that you don’t have any significant support issues? I’m envisioning a platform itself for your customers. They have a few screens. They can enter in what they’ve got available, and then I can make that matching. But it’s not a full-blown ERP or CRM system, where there could be major downtime.

Jasmine: Not yet. Not yet. I think we’ll get there, but we are not there yet.

Gene: Only a couple of more questions and I’ll let you go, because you’re awesome and this has been great. Let’s look towards the future. You want to scale. You need more automation. You’re going to be leveraging whatever it is that can help you do this better. Are you thinking about AI? And if you are, what are you thinking about? How would you use it in this situation?

Jasmine: We’re thinking about it. I really don’t spend a ton of time on it. For me, I’m more so thinking about growing and having the business survive in this current market. I know me and my team have had some conversations when I’ve met with our head of tech. They’re looking at it from a language, looking at it to be able to write code. Can it check code?

Jasmine: But I can tell you that they have told me, when they’ve tested some things, they’ve still found some issues. I know from our marketing department, they’ve been able to use it for some copy. There are instances of that level, but I wouldn’t say that we’re using it as of now in our technology.

Gene: Fair enough. My only unsolicited advice is where I’ve seen the best use of AI in your company is just as a tool to help your developers do things that much quicker. If it can generate code that they can then review and hone, that’s great.

Jasmine: For sure.

Gene: From a customer facing aspect, I’m not sure if it has that big of an impact for you right now. That’s good.

Jasmine: We’re definitely going to be paying a lot of attention to it.

Gene: I believe you will be and you should be. Every business should be doing that as well. And I’m sure you’ll be keeping up to date as more developments come up. Keep an eye on Google Bard and Google Duet, and of course, Microsoft’s Copilot. There’s a lot of great stuff that’s coming that I think is going to really benefit your business.

Jasmine: I feel like my tech team is all on it. They’re more ahead of that stuff than I am. For sure.

Gene: All right. That’s great. So Jasmine, this whole conversation really for the most part has been about implementing a platform for your business. Really, it’s a custom application is what you’ve written, and you’ve shared some great advice and experiences as to how that went.

Gene: Believe me, I’d love to have you come on back and talk a little bit more about the business itself and some of the other issues that you’re dealing with. I want to know where you’re finding people. I want to know how you’re dealing with your customers back and forth, how you’re finding customers, a whole bunch of stuff.

Gene: But just on the technology side, because that’s what I wanted to focus on this time… Is there anything else that you’ve learned from building this platform that you think is important for our audience to know? Or business owners who are thinking of doing their own own thing. Again, you’ve shared so much great information. I’m just wondering if I’ve left anything out.

Jasmine: Not that I can think of. Again, I would say patience. And if you believe in it, if it doesn’t come tomorrow, that’s not the end of the world. It still can happen. But definitely, be patient. Think through the timing and what you can do with the smaller amount of resources that you have is also really important. Just think through that.

Jasmine: If you don’t have a million dollars today, what are the opportunities? What are the things that you could do right now with what you do have? I think that is something that if more businesses built that way and thought that way, you wouldn’t feel like you don’t have it all together. You’ve just got to do what you can with what you have and know that it will come.

Gene: That’s great. That is great. Jasmine Crowe-Houston is the CEO and founder of Goodr. Jasmine, what’s your website? If you can share that with us, please?

Jasmine: Yes. It’s Goodr.co. G-O-O-D-R.C-O.

Gene: Fantastic. Jasmine, thank you so much. Again, we’d love to have you back in the future. You’re awesome and your company is doing great stuff. I’ve learned a lot from this conversation, and I’m sure our audience will as well. Thank you for spending the time.

Jasmine: Thanks so much, guys. Have a good one.

Gene: You too. Everyone, you’ve been watching this Small Biz Ahead podcast from The Hartford. Thank you so much for joining us. If you need any tips or advice or help in running your business, please visit us at SmallBizAhead.com or sba.thehartford.com. My name is Gene Marks. Again, thanks for joining. We will see you again soon. Take care.

Gene: Thanks so much for joining us on this week’s episode of The Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. If you like what you hear, please give us a shout-out on your favorite podcast platform. Your ratings, reviews, and your comments really help us formulate our topics and help us grow this podcast. Thank you so much. It’s been great spending time with you. We’ll see you again soon.

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