SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 366: Her Cheese Shop Does $1m+ Annually, EBITDA Low, Why?
25 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Kendall Antonelli to start a cheese shop?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Rick Siegmund. Rick Siegmund. He is stuck brick and mortar business.
Chapter 2: How did Kendall and her husband determine their roles in the business?
That is his focus. So congratulations, Rick. If you guys want to win $100 every Monday on the show, in order to enter, simply subscribe to the show on iTunes now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444. Again, text the word NATHAN to 33444. Top Tribe, you know I don't have a lot of time to waste. That's why I use FreshBooks to send out invoices and make sure I'm collecting my money.
To get your free month, go to nathanlatka.com forward slash FreshBooks and enter the top in the How Did You Hear About Us section. This is episode 366. Coming up bright and early tomorrow morning, you'll hear from George Arison. He's raised 94 million bucks with a car marketplace and has over 207 employees.
Chapter 3: What unique business model does Antonelli's Cheese Shop use?
Welcome back to another episode of The Top. We are here with Kendall, who, she runs her own cheese shop. We're gonna talk about that in a second, but first, Kendall, are you ready to take us to the top?
I'm ready to tango, let's do it.
So, you get married, it's 2010. You and John are on your honeymoon and he goes, honey, I wanna quit my job and get into cheese. What do you say?
OK, first of all, you've got to set the scene right. It's 2007. Oh, 2007.
Chapter 4: How does storytelling contribute to their cheese shop's success?
OK, good. And we're in the Caribbean, in Grenada, just above Trinidad and Tobago. And we're on this private, secluded beach, which we got in an auction. So we showed up, and we didn't know if it was during monsoon season or whatever.
It was super discounted?
Yes, so we didn't know. We got a $10,000 package for $1,500. We didn't know if we were going to show up and it was going to be like, oh, honeymoon or adventure. So we get there and we're on this private beach and the sun is hot and we're sweating and you can feel this beautiful white sand underneath our toes. And my husband, who is a cheese ball, ba-dum-bum, but...
Chapter 5: What challenges do they face in managing perishable inventory?
A cheese ball by nature says, wow, we just had the perfect wedding and I have the perfect wife and we have the perfect dogs and the perfect home. I just don't have the perfect job. And that's where I joke that he had had one too many perfect pina coladas because he was feeling the moment. And he said, I want to quit my job. And I said, what do you want to do? And he said something cheese.
And we have no professional culinary background besides we like to eat a lot. I mean, he was raised on Velveeta. And for the note, we're not snobs. We still eat Velveeta.
Chapter 6: How do they balance personal and professional life as entrepreneurs?
We just don't call it cheese anymore. So in that regard, we say- Because Velveeta won't be sponsoring the show anytime soon.
there's a place for everything and nothing makes queso like a velveta all right there's the hedge there's the hedge um and so uh plus everybody needs storm shelter cheese there you go um so we said what are we gonna do or he said something in cheese um and i think he said give me two years i can either go get my mba and put a lot of debt into getting that and come out with a business plan or actually think that i can write my own business plan and put the debt straight into a business
And so he waited. He's a CPA by trade. He finished out that season. He didn't want to leave his employers in the busy season, so he finished it out. And then he started looking into what his personal adventure would look like. And at the time, I left my job.
I was a Board of Immigration Appeals accredited rep running a program for immigrant survivors of abuse, like human trafficking and domestic violence.
Chapter 7: What financial strategies have they implemented for growth?
And I loved the job, but it also was coming to a point where I thought, well, I'm going to have to go back and get a second grad degree in social work, or I need some other tools in my arsenal to assist the people that I'm helping and to help myself get through it.
And along those lines, we ran a grilled cheese club out of our house, because this was before there was only one other grilled cheese restaurant in the nation. Clearly, that's a big market now. It's a market, yeah. But I'm actually glad we are one of the many who are doing that. So we ran a grilled cheese club out of our house. John went and trained in France.
And through the course of doing all this, it was still his adventure.
This was still 08, 09?
Chapter 8: What advice does Kendall have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Yeah, so 08. We were about six months into that, into his foray, into looking into it, and we knew that we always wanted to work together. We can't stand to be apart. If we take two different cars, we're just like, to work for that five seconds. We know it's disgusting. We're made fun of it all the time. My mother is super embarrassed that I'll say that, but we really like to be together.
And so we wanted to work together, and to be honest, I always thought it would be in my nonprofit. One day. Yes, one day. But instead, we fell in love with the story of cheese and with the cheese makers and the people producing it and this labor of love. And I actually grew up on a farm and a ranch and with an agricultural background. And I got away from it as quickly as I could.
And we both met at school in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown University. But in a way, I started realizing that romantics are the story of this could be how I could speak to that labor of love. And that we say that we don't craft cheese, we craft stories. And so John and I sat down and really looked, hey, is this our opportunity to do something together?
And we assessed our strengths and we determined that we're good at talking, for better or for worse. We're good at eating. for better or for worse. We are our best version of ourselves and we're together. And we wanted to do something that would allow for future traveling and work could be incorporated into that and to start a family.
So what was the name of the business and what year did it officially launch?
It's Antonelli's Cheese Shop.
Antonelli's Cheese Shop, okay.
Or it's Antonelli's Cheese LLC. In it, we opened our doors February 11th of 2010, two years and five days after he said that, but made that proclamation after me.
I was going to say, 08, 09, or 10, not a great time to be quitting your job and going into anything.
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