tinyB Chocolate Friday Fail: Tempering the Impact of a Bad Personnel Decision
In this season 3 episode of Back of the Napkin, Renata and Andrei Stoica from tinyB Chocolate in San Francisco, CA, share how a single personnel decision changed how they operate their boutique chocolate and team-building experience company. Read More.
Dusty Weis:
Greetings innovators. And welcome to Back of the Napkin, where we explore big journeys in the world of small business, with the personalities who make it happen. And welcome back to another one of these bonus segments that we like to call Friday Fails. I'm Dusty Weis.
Karen Stoychoff:
And I'm Karen Stoychoff. Dusty, Renata and Andrei Stoica from tinyB chocolate in San Francisco, started a business based on a Brazilian confection called brigadeiro's, a sweet treat similar in size to a truffle, but tastes much different. And they found a way to leverage the experience of making and enjoying them as a virtual team building exercise. Thirty-one-thousand orders and 52 countries later, tinyB chocolate has found a sweet spot in the competitive boutique chocolate marketplace. However, the company has also traveled a rocky road.
Dusty:
But before we get to Renata and Andre's Friday Fail, let's get reacquainted with them in a little thing that we like to call The Fast Five. These are five quick questions to learn more about our small business owner guests. So kicking off the lightning round here will be Renata.
Renata, what is your favorite brigadeiro's flavor?
Renata Stoica:
Milk chocolate.
Karen:
Andrei, what about you? What's your favorite brigadeiro's flavor?
Andrei Stoica:
Dark chocolate with coconut.
Dusty:
Renata, what brings you the most joy about sharing something so meaningful to you with other people?
Renata:
Seeing the happy face of my customers after they buy the brigadeiro.
Karen:
And Andrei, what do the tech industry and boutique chocolate making have in common?
Andrei:
Not much.
Dusty:
Good answer there.
Renata, what is the best tip that you have for people who have hot hands in the kitchen like Karen?
Renata:
Eat brigadeiro with a spoon.
Dusty:
Yeah. Don't waste time. Shaping it into a thing. Just eat …
Renata:
Yeah.
Dusty:
... eat it in whatever form you're able to get it into your mouth.
Renata:
Yes. If you get a jar, just sit in front of the TV, get a spoon and eat it.
Dusty:
We're talking with Renata and Andrei Stoica from tinyB chocolate in San Francisco and Andrei, the boutique chocolate business, it's a competitive category as we mentioned in the last episode. You admitted that you faced challenges you didn't understand in the beginning, what were they?
Andrei:
My background was in industries where a solution was almost kind of self-explanatory. Here, I was stepping into a business which was in a very crowded category where you had to differentiate. Differentiation in marketing was a much bigger parts of the business. And I wasn't as prepared for it as I should have been.
Dusty:
In other words, in the tech sector, success and failure essentially comes down to, well, if you plug the code in and it works, that's a success. If it's buggy, that's a failure. But when it comes to making chocolate confections, there's really a lot more gray area that separates success and failure. So, was it difficult for you moving from one to the other?
Andrei:
It was a learning process. It took me a while to understand what was going on and why we didn't have the initial response that we were hoping for. And so until we found a niche where we had a very good product market fit, it took a little while.
Dusty:
I imagine that there were some pretty tough conversations where the two of you sat down at the kitchen table and just discussed why things weren't taking off the way that you had expected them to. And I think that that's a process that a lot of small business owners go through, but was it hard to keep your spirits up in those early days?
Andrei:
Yeah, sometimes it was.
Renata:
Well, one thing that Andrei said about challenges and I want to just complement, is that it's so different from tech because in the beginning I developed five flavors of chocolate and he wanted to keep only these flavors in the menu. “Please don't add anything, because that's how it was working before.” That's how technology works. If you have that product, let's sell that product. Chocolate's different, you have to be more creative and bring more different experiences for the customers. So, I think that was a big challenge for Andrei, a big change in his way of seeing things.
Karen:
It sounds like the two of you have found a way that works for you to negotiate differing visions. In the beginning Renata, you thought that tinyB would be a little storefront and Andrei thought maybe corporate gift giving or business-to-business was the route. How have you figured out to negotiate and work through when you have such different ideas at times in the growth trajectory of this company?
Renata:
So, at first we decided to attend some events for like, wedding events and try to go after some cafes, local here in San Francisco. And I could see that we're not going too far. And I just decided to trust him, because he was an experienced entrepreneur and I was just starting, and I'm like, "Okay, let's do your way. And I trust you, I'm on your side and I would do everything I can to make this successful."
And he was right, because I don't think if he had a storefront during the pandemic, we would have survived. And I'm really grateful that we followed that path. We were able to pivot the business because we had a relationship, a solid relationship with all the companies here in Silicon Valley. So they trusted us to deliver something as good as we were before. We got out of our comfort zone and we created something even bigger and I think even more fun that we had before.
Dusty:
You know, guys, as we talked about in the last episode, the company's been growing a lot and you've been on kind of a hiring spree here recently, but I also understand that you've learned some tough lessons about making sure to hire the right people. How did you learn that kind of tough lesson?
Andrei:
We were in the position of needing a head of production and we kind of grabbed somebody who was already working with us, who seemed to have a lot of potential. We promoted her and trained her and then trusted her. And keep in mind, this was during a period where the pandemic was coming in. We had a tremendous amount of... each one of us has literally four full-time jobs that we are trying to juggle.
Renata:
And this was right before the holiday season. We had to have a head of production right before the holiday season, before the pandemic.
Andrei:
And then just as when that holiday season passed and the pandemic hit. And so it was a very turbulent time and we were trying to do so many things, as well. So we didn't really pay as close attention to what was happening and the product that was being produced. That was coming out of the kitchen, out of the production facility. Low and behold time goes by, probably four months after the pandemic, three months after the pandemic, we really started to piece together a lot of the indications we had that things were not all hunky-dory in production. And the more we looked, the uglier things got until at one point we let this person go and then I've never seen anything like it, I've been in several companies, but every I'd say week or two, after that, for a period of three or four months, we would find some other catastrophic mess-up that this person had done.
Andrei:
It was so difficult to identify this because this person was actively toxic. Just misrepresenting what was going on, bullying employees to keep them from speaking to Renata directly. It was very intense. And I'm very grateful that we went through that. It could have been much worse than it ended up being. But it taught us a lot about what's the right level of being hands on? What does it mean to trust and what does it mean to verify? What does it mean to manage and what does it mean to give people leeway, to do their own thing? And now we're a very different organization. We're very proud of the team that we have as well as, pretty much everybody else in the company to be honest. We feel we have A-players everywhere and it's a joy to come into work because we're surrounded by such awesome people. But that was a learning experience.
Renata:
I think what I learned from this is, I have to be more on, constantly on top of everything that's happening because it's my product, it's my company and I don't trust a hundred percent people anymore after this experience.
Andrei:
One thing we all share, regardless of which industry we're in. One thing we all share as entrepreneurs is that we wear many hats and we are divided in many ways at all times. And one of the toughest things to do is identify what's the most important priority and follow up on it and make sure it's okay. And putting in mechanisms inside the company, as you go to really keep tabs of the absolutely critical items. And when you see that one of those metrics or quality control points, isn't up to par, investigate immediately, put out the fire immediately.
Dusty:
A company is not a set it-and-forget it kind of thing. There's certainly important lessons to take away about not micromanaging, but on the flip side, if there are rumblings or indications that there's a problem, you need to crack the hood and take a look under there and see what's going on before the problem gets worse and metastasizes. And it's a hard lesson to learn, but it sounds like you guys are, have come through stronger for it. So we appreciate you sharing that story. And there are great lessons in there for all small business owners to take away. So Renata and Andrei Stoica from tinyB chocolate in San Francisco. Thank you for joining us and sharing this Friday Fail with us here on Back of the Napkin.
Karen:
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Dusty:
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Karen:
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Dusty:
Where we provide branded podcast production services for businesses. Our editor and producer is Larry Kilgore III. So thanks for tuning in to Back of the Napkin. I'm Dusty Weis.
Karen:
And I'm Karen Stoychoff.
