B (2:18)

And was the deal a good deal for that first sale? Small deal. Good deal.

C (2:21)

It was a very small deal. Small but profitable. And more than anything, I learned a lot.

B (2:27)

And it gave you the capital to Start doublegood.

C (2:29)

I don't know if it gave me that much. No. DoubleGood was started on sweat equity and not a whole lot of capital. Yeah.

B (2:37)

Well, for folks who may be unfamiliar with the company, tell us what doublegood is and who you serve, who your client base is and what those early days were like.

C (2:45)

DoubleGood is a consumer tech company, and more specifically, a fundraising company. And so we allow youth organizations, sports teams, schools, nonprofits. They come on our platform and they sell our really, really good popcorn, and they raise a lot of money with very little effort. And what makes us unique is that we have. We do the manufacturing and the distribution and the technology. And so we're really looking to control every aspect of the customer experience so that they can have this really incredible experience.

B (3:19)

And so this is sort of like a modern take on Girl Scout cookies or a modern take on Newman's Own. How did you come up with it? How did you get interested in this notion of, like, let's help groups raise funds?

A (3:29)

Yeah.

C (3:29)

Yeah. So doublegood is really an evolution and with many, many key points. And I think that in the very early days, it was just trying to figure out how to grow a business. And we tried a lot of different things. I mean, we were doing corporate gifting was the first thing we did. And then it was late 90s, E commerce was turned. We did E Commerce, started to do what we called wholesale business and sell. I went on qvc and I did that for many years. And the last thing that we started was fundraising. And it was the first thing that wasn't so hard. And it was only about 10% of our business. I mean, the wholesale stuff was over 50%. And the really pivotal moment was I was getting frustrated with this because we were about creating joy and we weren't really doing it. The whole going through distribution channels and sitting on shelves, it wasn't. Our product wasn't the same if we made it and shipped it directly. And so was getting frustrated. And I had this call from a buyer at Costco, and she was pretty frustrated with me and deservedly so. And I was frustrated, too. And I got off the phone and there's a stack of mail on my desk and there's a letter, and it had, like, different colored writing. And I picked it up, and it was once something like, Dear Mr. Heitman, thank you for having your. We were called Popcorn palace at the time. Popcorn palace fundraising program. And I was able to raise $300 and go from Seattle, Washington, Washington, dance DC for my band competition. Thank you so much. I love Popcorn Palace. And P.S. can you send my 5th grade class free popcorn? And I sat there and I laughed. And I was thinking, all right, these buyers and all this frustration and not really doing what the purpose of the company is, and then helping kids do what they love to do. And it was just, we're going all in on this. And in the next few days, had decided we were going to exit all that wholesale business and we were going to go into this. We didn't do it right away. It took five years and slowly started letting them go. As we grew up the fundraising channel and I got in, I started to understand the industry and started to understand the customer and realized there was very little innovation there and thought it was not only a great fit for our product, but a great opportunity to innovate and bring value to the customers.

B (5:52)

Can you talk about the sort of sense of joy and how that came from one of the kids who was selling your product and raising funds that way? Also, the product itself is sort of a fun, playful. You've got lots of interesting branding. Can you talk about that for a moment?

C (6:08)

So about Was this, maybe 2016, we went from having all these channels to really being. Our culture was about fundraising. And so made a decision that we were not just going to offer 50% to our fundraising program, we were going to offer 50% to all of our channels.

B (6:27)

Did you doubt yourself? Did your team doubt you or not you? But the vision?

C (6:30)

No. I think that speaking for myself, yeah, I remember thinking, oh, my God, what did we just do? I thought that I could write a book on how to ruin a company in three months.

B (6:42)

What was the first sign that, okay, we're through the painful period and we're beginning to see not just traction with this idea, but in fact, it's a new engine of growth.

C (6:53)

You know, there's a lot of things coming together there. There was the business model, there was the change in the name and all the branding, and if you look at the packaging, all these flavor names and packaging, they're all trademarked and IP for us, and all the designs are unique. So there's all that, and then there's the technology. And I think that we started building the technology in 2014.

B (7:21)

So you're a snack company with a technology platform underneath it, and that becomes more and more important, right?

C (7:26)

Yeah. Before 2014, we had no technical people in the organization. I was the most technical person in the organization, which isn't saying a lot. But then realized that if we were going to solve these big problems in the Marketplace that I saw, which was the handling of money, the handling of paperwork and handling a product. This was going to be an iterative approach. It wasn't something we could outsource. So we needed to create a core competency of building and creating technology. That business at the time was about a $20 million business at the time, it was growing every year and we were building the technology for many years. But I think the time that it really shifted was, you know, we went into Covid and like a lot of people, we had a big drop to our business. The in person fundraising dried up. You know, we were down 50% in the first couple months, but then we had been building this technology for five years and it was an inflection point where you couldn't fundraise in person. And we had this digital platform that we were building and we were iterating on and we really understood the marketplace and we started referring to it as virtual fundraising. And it picked up just at the end of June in 2020, and it never stopped. You spend your whole, you know, 15 years trying to figure out 20 years trying to figure out how to grow a business, and now it's coming in so fast you can't handle it. Managing that, managing slowing down growth without killing the momentum in the brand while you're scaling up the business was the biggest challenge and we needed everyone together to help to figure that out. That was the big challeng.

B (9:03)

So, you know, it's 20, 21, you're on the list maybe for 14, 15 times. Fast forward, you've now made the list 18 times and you have jumped from 125 million up to 283 million. Sounds like closing in on 300 million. You've doubled and then some. What has changed at the company in these last four years?

C (9:23)

Yeah, so probably the biggest thing that's changed is, you know, when you grow that fast and you don't have the infrastructure to help grow people, you outgrow your people really quickly. And that's been one of the unfortunate things. I've had to re up our leadership team a couple of times during that time period. And I think the biggest thing that's changed is we got a really incredible executive leadership team.

B (9:48)

Do you think about your legacy?

C (9:50)

Yeah, yeah, I do, I do. I think about, you know, it comes to legacy, I don't look at myself first as a founder or owner. I look at myself as a steward for the business because I want the business to last a long time. I want it to outlast me. I want to outlast everyone in the company and last over 100 years. And, you know, why is that important? It's important because doublegood runs on impact. And success to us is impact. It's not an exit. And. And the longer we last, the more impact we'll make.

B (10:24)

Well, Tim Heitman, founder and CEO of Double Good, congratulations on being the recipient of this year's Glen Fiddick Legacy Award at the Inc. 5000.

C (10:33)

Thank you.

A (10:33)

Mike.

C (10:44)

Panoply.