I often find myself reflecting on the many interviews I had with startups throughout the course of my career. CEOs would often say to me, we’d love to have you be a part of the team, but you aren’t ready, or you don’t have start up experience. This pushback often left me wondering how hard could it really be or I’d think, I can do it, it’s no big deal. The end result was the same, I’d take their pushback as a rejection.
Now as CEO of my own start up, I have daily thoughts from “I can’t believe this is my job!!!!” to “What the f*** was I thinking”. Many of you may say, it’s impossible to have these conflicting mindsets at the same time; that these two feelings are completely opposite. However, I now believe that almost all entrepreneurs will tell you that these two feelings can live within the same moment multiple times a day.
The saying “we are building it, while we fly it” has never been a truer statement. After all these months of preparation, thinking, and many sleepless nights (which are still happening), we are now about to take U4EA Farms into full fly mode. The experience has been surreal; a complete whirlwind to say the least, full of ups and downs to get us to a place where we can sell our product and become self-sustaining.
The first step toward full operations was to find some really great people to join us on this journey. Now that they are onboarded, things are starting to come together, and it is coming together fast. These past few weeks have had big things happening.
At U4EA Farms we had our final inspection, which went very well. We had our first job fair, two new employees started and we got six cubicles for new staff joining this month. We started trimming our product and the team defined our first ever product strategy and product roadmap. We sent our product out for testing, which came back STELLAR! We celebrated two birthdays and within four days of our sales leader starting we had 2 orders! Also, this month, I learned how to make my cousin’s amazing apple pie (which I must make soon in order to remember the steps)
We also took a major step at U4EA Farms by making a commitment to never remediate our flower and obtained certification of remediation free, which is very important to our principles of having quality and safe products for our consumers.
