“What do you miss about the early days?”
“What do you miss about the early days?” My teammate Ana and I were in the kitchen this past week – deep in the pepper pulp – when she threw out this question. We’d been reflecting on the past year of growth: Just looking around our kitchen, it’s so different from last year, when we worked on a single prep table pushed up against the wall, when I shipped orders from my bedroom, and schlepped to-and-from a storage unit outside the city whenever we needed inventory for markets, deliveries, or production (–a lot).
A year later, we have twice as much space available to us, on-site inventory, the dish-drying rack of my dreams, room for pallet deliveries, and much more. Our team has grown, with not just more team members but more clearly defined roles. We’ve standardized our batch sizes, honed our skills, and unlocked greater efficiencies. As we’ve continued to hit the pavement at farmers markets and craft fairs across Philadelphia and neighboring counties, our products have popped up on ever more shelves.
So when Ana asked me, “What do you miss about the early days,” it caught me off-guard.
I was surprised to admit – I don’t miss much. It was exciting, to be sure, but in retrospect those days were lonely and tough, and I had no idea what it took to run a food business. I was building the ship as I sailed it, with someone else’s copy of, ‘Ship Building for Dummies’ in-hand. The adrenaline of embarking on my own adventure fueled me, but I was fumbling through.
When we launched (-and I use that term loosely) I was still working a full-time office job. Production happened on nights and weekends, with many evenings spent squirreled away in our corner of the kitchen, hunched over a bubbling pot of hot sauce and humming showtunes under my breath – alone. The night I made the first prototypes of our Spice Flights (-now our best-selling item), I was up against a hard deadline: getting ready to leave on a three-week work trip the next morning. I stayed up at the kitchen until 3am bottling, labeling, and packaging the first five of what would eventually become hundreds of gift sets – before powering through the rest of the night to pack.
I took the plunge that September to go in on Goodlands full-time, leaving behind my secure job with benefits. The adjustment came with some whip-lash: Without the steady income, I started saying no to just about anything that cost extra money: happy hours, dinners out, date nights, coffee shops, takeout, concerts, doctor’s appointments, any non-essential car travel that required me to top up my gas tank. Vacations? Hilariously out of the question. I worked (-work) side gigs to make ends meet – and thank goodness for that.
There was a span of a year and some change when I didn’t have health- or dental insurance, and lived every coffee-fueled day in guilt for what my blessed hygienist, Melissa, would say when I finally got back for a cleaning. (I remember, actually: She took one look and cackled. “I see it!”)
I wouldn’t return to those frantic days, if given a choice. But they did teach me one crucial, unforgettable lesson: This work is not meant to be done alone. When I started out, I had no idea what it would take to operate and scale this business, and I naively (and selfishly) thought that I could do it on my own. Not only did that mean I was working with limited people power, but Goodlands was operating without anyone else’s perspective or expertise. I’d make the same mistakes over and over again, as anyone (or anything) is prone to do without outside influence.
As soon as the Goodlands team grew, though, we began to improve. Pete joined in the fall of 2022 – about 10 months after our launch – and Ana and Miden came onboard a year later. They each brought their own energy and awareness to Goodlands. They noticed things I had not. They asked questions I hadn’t considered. Their presence pushed our team to become consistent, to communicate more openly, to make one another’s jobs easier. They also each just made the work so much more fun.
What do I miss from the early days? Not much – but not because the early days themselves were so bad. It was a grind, to be sure, but that forced me to deprioritize other parts of my life so that Goodlands could come first. And despite how tough it felt, I have always held a strong, deeply embedded conviction that I wanted to keep doing this work, and that it would get smoother – maybe not easier, but with less friction. So far, that’s born out.
More than the grittiness of our first year, though, the other reason I don’t miss the early days is so simple: I enjoy this job more the longer I get to do it. We get better, collectively, the longer we work together, the more we connect with our customers, the closer we listen. Goodlands is on an upward trajectory, and most days, we get to see the results of that firsthand. It’s intoxicating and infectious. No, I don’t miss the early days. I’m looking ahead, and I’m excited for what’s to come.
