Joining us today is Sam Kressler with Stir Consulting. Sam has spent the last decade in the culinary and natural food world working for early-stage culinary and CPG startups to Fortune 1000 companies. Tune in to learn the three questions every food startup should be asking itself and the true key to networking.

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“You learn a lot from your successes. You learn even more from your failures. I was part of what some people on the team who had been in the industry for 20-25 years, said was the worst project they had ever been on. And these are people who had seen a lot of stuff. So I felt in some ways privileged to be on such a train wreck.”

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Evan Faber
Hello, I’m Evan Faber and this is Brands with Moxie Sozo. Joining us today is Sam Kressler with Stir Consulting. Sam has spent the last decade in the culinary and natural food world working for early-stage culinary and CPG startups to Fortune 1000 companies. Sam, it’s amazing to have you on the show.

Sam Kressler
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me.

Evan Faber
So today’s conversation is going to be all about innovation. You focus a lot in the food space, and what an incredible career to get into. Can you tell us a little bit about how you became an innovation specialist?

Sam Kressler
I got into food as a finance casualty. I was working at a hedge fund in 2008. And later in the year in 2008, were magically no longer at a hedge fund. The market collapsed. We had called it, and we were on the right side. It was pretty fascinating to watch the entire economy implode in real time. But I realized that finance was not where I wanted to be. And so I picked food. I love food, I want to be in food. I went to culinary school and got my masters in sustainable food systems and wound up cooking, and basically started as a development chef, developing recipes. I realized that I didn’t really love the hours or the pay of the culinary world, and wanted to be in CPG and in the natural product space, so I got a job at a company called Boulder Brands. For the people out there who don’t know who they were, they owned Evol, Glutino, Udi’s, Earth Balance, and then later on Gardein. They got acquired by a company called Pinnacle Foods, which was a big, traditional CPG company, who owned brands like Vlasic pickles, and Bird’s Eye and Duncan Hines, and Aunt Jemima, and stuff like that. I was overseeing the commercialization projects for Evol, Udi’s and Glutino. So really project management, commercialization management, but I was brought initially, because of my culinary background. Eventually, I wound up leaving Pinnacle and starting Stir. As I had gone through Pinnacle, my job went from being very broad and very creative to really, really narrow and uncreative. And so as I was looking for work, people said, well, we don’t have full time work, but we have consulting work. Are you interested in that? And, you know, my family still needed to eat, so I said, yeah, sure that sounds great. And eventually, at a certain point, I realized that there is a business there. So I kind of fell into it. But it’s been pretty steady, really, since I kind of took that first step.

Evan Faber
Outstanding. Tell us a little bit more about what you do at Stir Consulting, some of your types of clients you work with?

Sam Kressler
Stir does innovation, product development and commercialization consulting. So innovation, for people out there, the idea is everything from a first idea to how do you think about what you want to do as a company, or if you’re an existing company, how do you expand on your existing product line in a way that makes sense and isn’t just a one-off. Well, we did chocolates, and now we’ll do vanilla, right? It’s a bit more of, well, we’re doing ice cream. Okay, so now let’s do popsicles. Where it’s really more about expanding into new platforms and figuring out how to think that through so that it makes sense within your business long-term strategy and then thinking of the actual products to develop with a focus. Can we make it, can we make money at it, and do people want it? Product development is a bit more straightforward, and that’s really just saying, okay, now we have an idea, let’s make the recipe. Let’s make a formula that we can make one of, or we can make one million of, and know that each time we make it, it’s going to turnout exactly the way it needs to be, and it’s going to be uniform and consistent, regardless of how big or small we are. Commercialization is the actual process of taking that product, taking that recipe, and bringing it to scale so that it can be sold in a grocery store or direct-to-consumer online or whatever it is. So that’s what Stir does in a nutshell.

Evan Faber
Of course, absolutely, it did. And we’re gonna get into one of your passions here in a minute, which I know you love to help clients with, which is flavor exploration and making food delicious. But before we do, I want to get a little more insight into the types of clients you work with. What percentage would you say are clients that are just coming to market looking to release a product versus clients that have an established suite of products that they’re looking to add to their platform?

Sam Kressler
Good question. Maybe a third of my clients are companies that are brand new, they haven’t launched anything yet. They don’t actually even know how to launch, they don’t necessarily know what they don’t know. And it’s helping them and shepherding them through the process. Another third is the companies that have been around for a little while, and they maybe need a line extension, or they want to take something in a different direction, or refine an existing product. And then the last third is bigger companies that have been around for a while and are trying to shift into a new space, maybe haven’t thought about innovation for a while, because they’ve been chugging along, and they’re making money and selling products and they suddenly realize they want to make sure that they’re not getting stale to a consumer out there or existing consumers, and then also bringing in new consumers.

Evan Faber
Awesome. You’ve mentioned a couple pillars that you have that guide your practice. One of them is helping companies be more sustainably focused. One of them is a culinary driven approach. Could you elaborate on those two pieces?

Sam Kressler
It goes back to why I got into the industry. The first was my master’s in food systems. So the shorthand is that, I have a master’s in the Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s looking at food as the intersection of the healthcare, energy and environmental crisis facing the planet. And how do you fix those problems using food as a major tool since we all have to eat. The second is my culinary background. I love food. And food should be delicious, right? Deliciousness is at the core of all of this. There are a lot of food scientists out there who are exceptionally good at understanding the technology behind food, at scaling things up, at making things cost what they’re supposed to cost. But their food doesn’t taste very good. There are a lot of companies out there trying to optimize for cost and make their products cost less. The first thing they do is look at how do we cut the ingredient costs, which ultimately cuts quality costs, and that’s the thing that your consumer is engaging with, right? If the food doesn’t taste good, people aren’t going to buy it. I had a chef that referred to it as the law of incremental crappiness, which I think is a great term. And it’s this idea that if you have 10 steps to a recipe, you cut a corner between step one and two, and nothing else, you’re not really going to notice it. But if you cut a corner between step one and two and two to three, and then another corner between three and four all the way down the line, the product that you have at the end is vastly inferior to the product that you would have had if you started with. There’s this famous example in the industry of DiGiorno Pizza, that some Nestle food scientist decided to make the original recipe after years and years of DiGiorno being in the market, and they were astounded at how terrible the current product was versus what was originally launched. It’s that idea, but really going back to how I look at that, it’s finding ways to make food that tastes delicious, that looks beautiful, that people want, that people want to talk about, that people get excited about, and that’s also food that’s really made with whole ingredients, that’s made with real ingredients.

The term is clean label, which doesn’t really have a definition, but generally speaking, the shorthand is no X’s and Z’s in the label, you want to know everything that’s in it. Grandmother’s pantry is another way of saying it, not that my grandmother had Nori in her pantry, but someone’s grandmother did. So looking at looking at it from from that perspective. And then on the sustainability side, it comes down to food is a necessity. And the idea that everyone has a right to food is a whole other conversation, but because it is a necessity, it has an outsized impact on our planet. If I have an opportunity to help my clients be more thoughtful about how they source, then I think it’s incumbent upon me to do so. I had a potential client that I was talking with, and it was a product that involved chocolate, cocoa. And they said, I want to be able to create a product that mimics product X. And I said, okay, but why wouldn’t we make it better than product X? And not just taste wise, let’s do that, that one’s easy, but I said, do you know anything about the cocoa industry? And she said, no. I said, well, chances are, that company is using cocoa that is sourced using either child and/or slave labor. I said, my sense is that you’re probably against both of those things. Oh, yes, she said. It’s pretty easy to be against slavery. If you are a brand owner, if you’re a business owner, why don’t you make a decision that says, okay, I’m not going to support slavery because it’s going to get me a slightly better cost on the on the goods that I have to purchase. When working with companies, existing or new, and it’s arguably easier with new companies, because they don’t have the track record…but they’re really working with all companies, saying, hey, how do we incorporate better-sourced ingredients, which can become a selling point, and you can use that for your marketing. And you can use it as a point of differentiation. But also, it’s the right thing to do, given the fact that we live on a finite planet with finite resources.

Evan Faber
Well said, innovation is advocacy. And we’re really seeing advocacy woven into the fabric of what people expect from brands and businesses these days. And it begins right at the inception of the product itself, and so wonderful to hear about your approach and it’s a tall order, Sam, you’ve got sustainability pulls on one side, you’ve got flavor pulls on the other. It has to be delicious. You’ve got nutritious pulls on the other side, certainly not every nutritious food is always delicious and always sustainable. So how do you have these conversations with your clients to help them prioritize their needs? Or how do you advise them on sustainability, flavor, and nutrition in terms of the development process?

Sam Kressler
It’s a good question. And it’s obviously unique to every every client. Sometimes it comes down to, okay, we have to make some trade offs. But can we have one key ingredient that’s organic or fairtrade on it? You get a common refrain: we’ll start conventional. And then as soon as we’re making a bit more money and we’re more financially stable, then we’ll switch to organic. And my response is always, okay, so you’re telling me that after you have investors money, you’re going to tell your investors don’t worry, we’re going to make this more expensive and lower our margin, but we’ll be fine. I don’t think any investor is really going to go for that. I mean, it will be the rare investor that’ll go for it. So I think especially with early stage, start where you can. I have found that a compelling argument for a lot of clients, especially startup clients (and I’ve been fortunate, I should say, with my existing established companies that I’ve worked with) they’ve all been pretty well aligned with a need for sustainability, whether it’s in their packaging, or their supply chain, or both. So those conversations haven’t actually been too challenging with the larger clients, which has been great, actually. And it’s one of the reasons that I like doing what I’m doing. It’s easy to preach the choir. But with with a startup, a lot of the startups that I’ve spoken to, they come at product development as, I’m doing something because I want to make the world better.
I want to make this healthy product for people, right? And I want to make the best product I can. And you say, okay, well, if you want to make the product as healthy as you can, should it just be healthy for people? Or should it be healthy for the planet? And if it should just be healthy for people…well, are consuming pesticide residues and insecticide residues and other petrochemicals, is that the healthiest for your consumer? Is that healthiest for people? And the answer is obviously no, that’s not healthiest for people. And sometimes it doesn’t work. Generally, it gets people thinking. And ultimately the idea is that you as a business owner have an immense amount of power, because you get to see, you’re the one who’s making the product, right? You’re the one who’s making the difference. There’s an organization called Slow Money that focuses on investing in local food and farm businesses. And there are chapters all around the country, and probably all around the world at this point. But ultimately, there’s this idea that everyone is an investor in food. We are an investor in food, because as soon as you choose to spend your money at the grocery store, you’re investing in the entire supply chain of that final product. So if you are someone who’s making food, you have even more control, right? Because you get to choose what that product is, and how you’re supporting farmers, how you’re supporting the planet, how you’re feeding and nourishing your end consumer. And how you want to tell that story so that people can feel good about buying what you’re selling.

Evan Faber
I want to then take that point of and pivot in a slightly different direction. Because I would imagine this is one of the early stages of answering all those questions, somebody comes to you with an idea whether it’s a new company or an established company, and before the question of how can we make this, they probably need to answer should we make this? What role do you play in helping them evaluate the answer to that question? Sort of criteria might you advise them to look at?

Sam Kressler
Again, it depends. It depends on the stage of the company, right? If it’s a brand new startup, someone that says, I have a cookie recipe or my grandmother’s cheesecake recipe, or a chip that I want to make (or whatever it is), the question first comes down to so, with early stages, can you make it? And can you make money at it? You generally can’t look in too much. Most early-stage companies don’t have the resources to answer, “do people want it?” So let’s just look at those first two. A lot of times that cookie recipe, or that cheesecake recipe should stay in the kitchen. You are going to have trouble scaling it, right? You’re gonna have trouble finding a way. It might be great if you’re selling 100 units a week. But let’s say people love it. Is it reasonable to sell 10,000? Or a million units a week? How big can the business go? How big do you want it to go? And what do see as the business? It might be more reasonable for you to set up a bakery, and set up a storefront. Or use a commissary kitchen and do special orders and stuff like that. If it’s an idea for a bar or a beverage or some snack or some frozen meal or whatever it is. Then it’s okay, well, great, what is the supply chain around it?
I guess it goes back to can you make it? And can you make money at it? And if the answer to both of those is yes, then it comes down to, do people want it? And that’s where it becomes pretty fun. How do you want to approach this? I generally advise clients that there’s two ways to think about innovation. One way is, I have a totally novel product. No one’s ever seen it before. I think of a company like Scramblers, which is a shelf-stable egg bar, and I know that they’ve worked with with Moxie Sozo. It’s a snack bar made completely of an egg. But it’s shelf-stable. That’s a pretty new concept, and one that’s hard to grasp. So that’s hard to grasp in and of itself. So you say, okay, what are my flavor choices? Well, I’m not going to do jicama massala or zaatar or who knows what, right? You’re going to do bacon, egg and cheese, sausage, egg and cheese, veggie. Right? So you have accessible flavors in a new format. The other side is you have something quotidian, something normal, boring that you want to say, how do we differentiate? And I think, you know, Evol’s mac and cheese is my favorite example for this right? Macaroni and cheese is a very, it’s a staple. It’s comfort food. What they did was they said, okay, we’ll do truffle parm, mac and cheese. We’ll do buffalo chicken, mac and cheese. And they were doing that a decade ago. But they took something that was very staid and conservative in a lot of ways and made it out there.
And so it’s a question of, do you have something that’s totally new, that people need to feel some level of safety with? Or do you have something that’s totally safe, that people want to feel some level of novelty around. With larger companies and the more established companies, it’s a little bit more nuanced. And you say, let’s talk about ice cream, for example. Well, we have a line of ice cream, okay, we know that we purchase X-thousands of pounds of milk. But if we can get ourselves to the next tier of purchasing, for example, then we get a substantial price break. Okay, cool. So how do we do that? So we want to save costs on one side over here. And, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best example or not, but it just came off the top of my head. So you say, okay, great, we make ice cream. So we could make yogurt. We could make smoothies. We could make ice cream bars. Or we could make dairy-based pet treats. All of those could be good ideas and you might be able to make money at all of them, but where do you have the right to play? If you’re an ice cream company, are people going to look for you in the pet food aisle? Are people going to look for you in the drink section? What makes the most sense, given your existing contract manufacturing relationships or your existing supply chain. And if you want to build out that supply chain, where can find economies of scale and overlap between what you’re already doing? Even across the line. If you’re going to launch three ice cream bars that are coated in some sort of candy coating, are you going to do a chocolate, a vanilla or a strawberry? Are you just going to say, well, a strawberry coating probably isn’t gonna sell as well as a chocolate coating. But we’ll save a lot more money and get something that more people want if we just do a chocolate coating and then we put whatever kind of ice cream on the inside, right, so it’s helping people just think through the logical steps of what’s the best place to exist? Where is there whitespace? Whitespace is the spot on the shelf that is filled with nothing. Where can we go that no one else has gone before?

Evan Faber
Yeah. FIrst of all, quotidian, that was a good use of that word. It’s quotidian itself is a word that’s not, well, quotidian. I wanted to touch upon a point you brought up, which was where’s your right to win. And that’s where the intersection of brand and innovation come into play as well. The famous example of Blue Ribbon sports trying to innovate their way to scale their business through developing new kinds of shoes and just trying to innovate and innovate their way to scale. Working with an advertising agency, they step back, they define their essence of why they’re creating, what they’re creating. Instead of positioning themselves as a shoe company anymore, they positioned themselves around the idea that if you have a body, you are an athlete, and they changed their name to Nike. And that positioning, that essence, gave them permission to play in many different categories, in many different spaces. You walk a line, because it didn’t go so well for Harley Davidson’s foray into into golf carts, because it had implications on the brand. So you want to make sure that the brand is giving you that permission to play. Would love to hear examples of the keys to success of a positive innovation project. And then let’s look at some of the pitfalls of where innovation can take a bad turn.

Sam Kressler
You learn a lot from your successes. You learn even more from your failures. I was part of what some people on the team who had been in the industry for 20-25 years, said was the worst project they had ever been on. And these are people who had seen a lot of stuff. So I felt in some ways privileged to be on such a train wreck. It started with a very common pitfall, which is, you know, within any organization, the left hand needs know what the right hand is doing. What I mean, in this case, is sales and marketing need to know what R&D and Operations are doing. Sales people sell, that’s their job. Marketing people market, that’s their job. Developers develop, that’s their job. But oftentimes, sales people will get a meeting with a customer, a vendor, a store, and the store will say, so we know you’re doing X, can you do Y for us? And the salesperson will say, of course we can. Their job is to drive sales. And the marketing person will say, okay, great. So we have this commitment. Let me feed you some ideas to go back to the customer about, and the salesperson says cool. And they say, okay, customer, here’s what we can do. We can do this, we can do this, and we can do this and we can do this. And the customer says, all those things sound amazing. I want them all. Great. Now make it happen in three months. Okay. Super.
So then they go back to the the developer and they say okay, so we promised Walmart, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. They said, we can’t do that. Well, we already promised them. So we need to figure out how to do it. And we have three months, the clock is ticking. Okay. So basically what happened was there is a promise to a very substantial vendor, or a very substantial customer that we could make a cookie, like a milano-type cookie, a gluten free milano cookie. And things is, it had never been done before. Never, ever, ever. And so this goes back to, can you make it? Can you make money at it? Do people want it? Well, the data said that people wanted it. Okay. So people want it, and clearly the customer wants it. So how do you make it, and how do you make money at it? In the middle of all this, Boulder Brands was sold to a new company. So there was huge shifts in management. There was huge changes in process. And it was a new contract manufacturer. Ultimately, the contract manufacturer said, yes, we can do this thing. We can make it for you, we know how to make money for it, blah, blah, blah. All the while we said, okay, great, we’re committed. We have to do this, we have to do this quickly. Where’s the contract? Where’s the contract? We’ll get you the contract, don’t worry, we’ll get you the contract. We need the contract. Okay, we’re developing this, we’re running trials, we’re looking at it. Finally we get the contract. So first off, they knew they had us over a barrel. They said, here are the terms. By the way, we thought that it was going to cost us X to make this. Really, we’re losing $100,000 every time we run this thing. So we can’t make this the way we said we’re gonna make it.
So now you have a major vendor that says where’s our thing, a contract manufacturer that says we’re actually just not going to make this for you at this point because it’s not gonna be feasible for us. And you have a team at the company that bent over backwards, did everything they could to make this a successful product. It actually was able to get on the shelves and sold out within a week, all around the country. Everyone was saying we want this, we love this. Where’s more? Oh, by the way, here comes Pepperidge Farm with a cease and desist order. The lawyers vetted that this stuff was far enough away from looking like a milano to be a milano. But apparently Pepperidge Farm felt differently. And so you had this perfect storm, right? Where it was over-promised, under-delivered. There were legal issues with the manufacturer, legal issues with licensing infringement. And it was an amazing product. But it just would never see the light of day. And ultimately it came down to this thing, this widget, was sold before anyone knew if it could be made or made money.

Evan Faber
As you were talking, I think I heard the heartbreak of thousands of gluten free eaters who would have loved that. Unbelievable. An incredible story, and oh my gosh, what a train wreck at every single level. Super difficult. You prefaced it by saying that the right hand needs to know what the left hand is doing. Businesses, as we look forward, are best served when integration is more embedded in their model versus silos. Collaboration, integration. These are going to be some of businesses most prized assets and abilities to solve the complex challenges of a dynamic market and the bigger challenges facing the world right now. I want to talk briefly as we’re winding down here on one more topic, which you’re passionate about and have a lot of wisdom to share on. And I know we talked about stepping stones versus giant leaps. So we’re going to make a giant leap in the conversation. And that’s talking about networking. Networking is important if you’re a consultant, it’s important if you are a brand owner, it’s even important just how to socialize ideas and such internally in an organization. But growing a network is a crucial skill to have, and you have some wisdom on this front. So we’d love to hear your thoughts on how you approach this.

Sam Kressler
The best piece of advice I ever received was make friends, don’t network, make friends. And I’m gonna go a little macro right now. And then I’ll bring it back down to networking. I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. You talk to someone, hey how are you doing? Um, I’m okay, I’m doing fine. Like, if you just listen, anywhere beneath that voice, just slightly, no one’s really fine right now. We’re all struggling, we’re living in a highly chaotic world, in a unique time. I think, ultimately, whether it’s people protesting for Black Lives, or against wearing masks (or anything in between), and I’m certainly not equating those in terms of seriousness or matter of importance. But just in terms of sentiment. Also when people are looking to be seen, to be heard, to be validated. I think right now, especially since we’re so distant, physically, from each other, figuring out how to connect in a meaningful way is more important than it’s ever been. Certainly in my relatively brief lifetime. So what I see with networking, it’s leading with a certain level of vulnerability and allowing ourselves to be human. Understanding that we’re living in unprecedented times, understanding that we can be caring and compassionate with each other. And also understanding that, to bring it back down a little bit more, I always try and offer help. If you can make networking less about the transaction, more about the interaction, and also how it can be beneficial to the other person involved, what I find is consistently, people are a lot more willing to open up their Rolodex. I mean, I know that’s not really a thing anymore.

Evan Faber
A contact list on their smartphones?

Sam Kressler
Sure, right. It doesn’t have quite a ring to it, but yeah, like, open up their contacts, and make those connections. I also find that for entrepreneurs or for anyone who’s trying to build their business network, it’s less about when you’re trying to accomplish a certain task, whether it’s business development, or finding a capital partner, or what have you, or finding a specific vendor, it’s often more useful to find the vector, to find the intersecting point. So to find the people who have lots of connections to help. So if you’re a service provider, like me, talking to people who are running industry groups or talking to people at funds, talking to investors who have a number of portfolio companies to get out there, because they’re going to be the ones who can say, oh, yeah, I might have some business for you. Oh, yeah, I might have an idea for you of something specific.
Again, keep in mind, I talk to those people because in my perspective, I care about what’s going on in the industry. And that’s also a great way for me to learn at a grassroots level beyond just reading trade articles and stuff like that. But again, ultimately, I think a lot of networking calls can also just come down to, hey, let’s have a conversation. I don’t actually need anything right now. I just want to, I just want to hear what you do. I want to hear what you’re up to, I want to hear how I can help you. And understand that a first conversation is just that. It’s a first conversation. And that, hopefully, that first conversation leads to years of continual conversations that may lead to someplace or they may not. If you can approach people as people, if you can approach people in and of themselves, as an end in and of itself, right, as opposed to a means to an end, I know that I’m happier, at the very least, because I do it that way. I’ve met a lot more cool people. I mean, listen, that’s how I met you, man, right? There was no particular agenda. I heard that you were a smart, interesting guy that I should talk to. And we had some good conversations. And it led to this this conversation. But it was not what can what can Evan or Moxie Sozo do for me. It’s, who is this? Who is this person who I want to get to know better?

Evan Faber
Fantastic. And likewise, and I’m so glad that we have gotten to know each other because you provide everything with such soul and such depth, and such intelligence. So really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today. And I want to end with a bold question that we ask (it’s different for everybody). For you, how can you apply the way that brands innovate, to the way that you can innovate for the self? So what might be some lessons in how to approach self innovation?

Sam Kressler
I like to think about innovating for myself from a point of weakness. Believe it or not, it’s what don’t I know, that I think would make me a better person. How can I cultivate empathy, or a perspective that I generally wouldn’t have access to? And cultivate that innately within within me? Or what is something that I think is kind of fun, that I feel like I know nothing about and how do I dive into that? One of my heroes is my grandmother, and she died a few years ago. Lived to be 98. She was a physician. And she was a practicing physician in the 1940s as a woman, as a Jewish woman, right, which was even more rare. She wasn’t just practicing physician. She became a physician because she said, I don’t know, I didn’t want to be a nurse. I didn’t want to be a teacher. So I just decided to be a physician. Okay, there you go. But she was also a concert pianist and an accomplished artist who did medical drawings to pay her way through medical school. And she did her own plumbing work and her own electrical work around the house. And she would say, I figured someone had to build this lamp. Like, if I break it, I like, I’ll put it back together. And if I can’t put it back together again, then I’ll ask someone to do it for me, and I’ll, you know, get them to do it. And it’s just that idea of like, Well, you know, I might as well just try and do this thing and there’s this tongue in cheek line from the sage words of Homer Simpson, which is “trying is the first step towards failing.” But you can use that as a sense of apathy. But it’s also this idea of like, we’re gonna fail, and it’s an opportunity to fail and an opportunity to learn. And I think that that’s innovation, right? It’s trying and hopefully not failing too many times. But it’s failing, and it’s learning and it’s iterative. Everyone says Vitamin Water was an overnight success. Well, it was an overnight success that took 15 years. It takes time to learn and to grow. And it’s challenging, and it’s messy. And it’s pretty much always worth it.

Evan Faber
Well said, beautiful. Innovation is the uncovering of an opportunity. And that opportunity can come from a strength, that opportunity can come from a weakness, an opportunity should always be vetted to make sure it’s a good and positive contribution, and not just an innovation for innovation sake, but you spoke to that beautifully. The last piece, which we do is a shameless plug to thank you for being on here, Sam. So you have a little bit of time here to plug Stir Consulting, and where people can find you and all of that good stuff.

Sam Kressler
Absolutely. The best way to find me and find out what we do is our website. So it’s Stir-consulting.com. You can reach me at Sam@stir-consulting.com. My phone number is on the page as well. And it just comes down to making delicious food.

Evan Faber
Awesome. I know that’s going to be one of my takeaways. But I think one of my biggest takeaways is make sure in interactions with people that I make sure that they’re seen, make sure that they’re heard and make sure that they get a sense of validation and what great words of wisdom beyond everything else you shared with us, Sam. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Sam Kressler
Yeah, thank you, Evan. This is great.