She talked with Garrett about doing home deliveries all throughout the state to help offset the fact that their biggest customers – restaurants and bottle shops – were closed and not buying or selling any UpDog Kombucha.
Fast forward over a year later and Garrett is sitting down with Olivia again to get updates on everything, and a lot changed.
Through home deliveries and the creation of UpDog Kombucha merch, Olivia and her business partner Lauren were able to keep the business afloat, though not without hardship. They went without pay to ensure they could continue to pay their two full-time employees.
But once restaurants and bottle shops began opening again and they felt they were mostly out of the woods, Olivia and Lauren had realized something big: they maybe weren’t the best people to run the business and take it to the next level.
“When you’re at a good place you don’t feel motivated to look at the messy stuff underneath because you’ll deal with it later,” she says. “Once all the money is stripped away you have to look at the ugly underbelly of the business and untangle a lot of knots.”
As she and Lauren untangled the knots they found, Olivia says they were faced with two options in order to ensure their business remained successful: find investors and do fundraising, or find a buyer who could better manage UpDog Kombucha.
Obviously, this was no easy decision. On the latest Zero to Ten episode, she shared the entire journey with us and gave us an update on her new role with UpDog Kombucha. You can listen to the full conversation below, or find Zero to Ten wherever you typically listen to your podcasts.
