Female Founders: Kim Hehir and Sue Delegan of Brutus Broth On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
People Buy Stories — That rings true with consumers, buyers, and investors. Nowadays people seek out brands and products that have some deeper backstory than just being thought up in a boardroom. Defining how you want to position your brand and developing your story will help in the long run.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kim Hehir and Sue Delegan of Brutus Broth.
Sue Delegan serves as Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Brutus Broth, Inc. A graduate of St. Lawrence University, Sue has over 20 years of impressive business and marketing experience launching innovative national brands and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a number of non-profit organizations.
Kim Hehir serves as the Co-Founder and President of Brutus Broth, Inc. A graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, Kim has decades of success helping both big businesses and small non-profits with strategy, marketing, finance and more.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Our story began on Thanksgiving Day 2016 when a family member asked to what we attribute Brutus’ longevity. The answer: “Love and Grandma’s Bone Broth.” As a pup that led a very active life, he had a number of health issues most senior dogs face.
We found that adding Bone Broth to his diet not only provided him with a tastier meal but gave him added nutritional benefits. Not only that, he loved the taste and adding the broth to his dry food made it more easily digestible. The challenge was finding a way to share these benefits with other dogs.
Kim and Sue spent thousands of hours researching the pet market, speaking to experts in the industry, testing and tweaking recipes, designing packaging prototypes, working with ingredient suppliers and manufacturers, amongst other things, to assemble the best possible team to help bring Brutus’ Bone Broth to the market.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
We’ve had so many crazy things happen to us in the three years we’ve been in business. Some were really serious — like dual double mastectomies in the first year of business alone. Some were less dire like packaging snafus. For example, the first run of our packaging was printed wrong. We did not have the time or money to reprint our packaging because Wegmans was waiting for our first order. We decided we could print labels to cover the mistake. The labels arrived at our warehouse and were affixed to the packages and sent on to Wegmans in record time. Meanwhile, we were in the hospital so could not make a trip to the warehouse to check the labels but trusted they were done correctly. You can imagine how annoyed and frustrated we were when we got a call from Wegmans letting us know the labels were transparent!
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
In the beginning we were so inexperienced when it came to the whole manufacturing process that we did things that others thought were funny that we were oblivious to. For example, we visited our co-packer for the first time wearing stilettos and jewelry and had to check everything at the reception desk. We also are always on a tight budget as a start-up. Our first trip to Minneapolis to meet with Target ended up being a crazy adventure that included a missing rental car and a haunted, mold infested AirBNB that we unintentionally traded for a hotel that ended up being a heroin den. We epitomize the saying “ignorance is bliss” and in so many cases that approach has worked out for us — like when we once asked a buyer when we will be put on the shelf, as opposed to the standard protocol of asking when we will hear back from them.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
We will always say that our dad is not only our advisor, but also our biggest cheerleader. He was an entrepreneur and inspired us to follow in his footsteps and never give up. He currently serves as our Chairman.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
Struggling with work / life balance. Aside from just giving birth to our children, including Kim’s eldest, who was born while on a work trip, organizing each kid’s activities and managing the overall household responsibilities often falls on the mom. We think that the worry about struggling to do it all often deters and/or prevents a lot of women from taking the plunge of entrepreneurship because of the time and focus it takes.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
We think that things are going in the right direction and shedding a light on equity, diversity and inclusion. There are more discussions today than in the past around equal pay and equal opportunities so we are heading in the right direction.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
Women are expert multi-taskers and we have high emotional quotients, which comes in handy when creating a brand and managing teams. We also have much higher thresholds for pain. The start-up world is not always fun!
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
That every company founder is a millionaire.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Not everyone is cut out to be a founder. Founders are usually people who are willing to take risks, albeit calculated ones. Founders have to be flexible, persistent, multi-taskers and problem solvers. People who don’t like to venture out of their comfort-zone and need routines to thrive should probably not be in an entrepreneurial role.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Time Management/Multi-Tasking — It’s not easy to balance work, family, friends, kids, managing a household, and all the other million things we all do. Our cars double as mobile offices to help us get things done on the go.
- Persistence/Problem Solving — We never take NO as an answer. We like to think of it as a NOT YET. When we first approached Target, they gave us a “no.” Instead of just moving on, we stayed persistent and tried other avenues to get their attention. Within six months of the first ”no” we launched with them nationally. We always say that, “if the front door slams in your face, go to the back door. If it’s locked, find a window!”
- Do your Homework & Follow up — Knowing your audience, their hot buttons and decision drivers is so important. So many people walk into sales meetings and just “do their pitch.” We take time to learn about the retailers we are pitching and the buyers themselves. Are the retailers family-owned? Is sustainability a big deal to them? What are they doing within their communities? What other products do they carry in their set and how are they different and how are we better? What is the buyer’s background and his, hers or their interests? The most important (and often overlooked) part of the sales process is the basic follow up. It’s amazing how many people just don’t follow up in this world!
- Networking / Relationship Building — Relationships are really important to us. We spend most of our days working. So, aside from having a “No Jerk” policy, we know how important it is to cultivate relationships with the people we spend so much time with. That makes networking a really important part of our business. We always try to find some common connection to the people we are trying to sell to and always stay in constant contact within our network to uncover random opportunities. We were able to get a meeting with one East Coast retailer because the son of a family member that owned a grocery chain was in a fantasy football league with one of Kim’s college friend’s husband!
- People Buy Stories — That rings true with consumers, buyers, and investors. Nowadays people seek out brands and products that have some deeper backstory than just being thought up in a boardroom. Defining how you want to position your brand and developing your story will help in the long run.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We give back to animal shelters and pet related organizations throughout the country. This year alone we’ve donated somewhere close to 1,500 servings of Brutus Bone Broth and over 600 bags of Brutus Bone Broth biscuits.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
We started our Kids Committee because we strongly believe in the need for mentoring future generations. We were just announced as Tory Burch Foundation Fellows and would love to bring that same energy and type of forum to produce opportunities for inspiring entrepreneurs of all ages, like Tory has for so many women founders. There are so many people that have great ideas, but don’t get that extra push or support that helps bring them to life. We’d love to be able to mentor entrepreneurs and offer guidance (and someday seed money) to help.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Sara Blakely — the founder of Spanx.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Kim Hehir and Sue Delegan of Brutus Broth On The Five Things You Need To Thrive… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.