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It all started with a school teacher wanting to help educate students and show people online how to have healthier beauty and wellness options.
Join us as Sam Friedman takes you on a fun journey from his mother Ida’s beginning, to his involvement soon after, all the way up to today as a thriving ecommerce based, natural and organic body care products company.
Be sure to checkout Chagrin Valley Soap & Salve’s quality organic products today – https://www.chagrinvalleysoapandsalve.com/
Transcription
Brian: Sam Friedman has taken a long and interesting journey on his road to operating an organic bath and body care company. His first passion being music and theater, Sam co-founded and was artistic director of the actual reality Theater Company in Columbus and Cleveland from 1997 to 2001.
From 2001 to 2004, he took the position of technology director at the Agnon School in Beachwood, Ohio, where he taught second to eighth grade technology and media and was also the family retreat director from 2002 to 2004.
In 2004, Sam then moved to Madrid, Spain, where he worked with the Spanish government as an English language specialist to diplomatic liaisons.
In 2007, at the request of his mother, Sam moved back to the US to try and help turn the hobby and small local market business she had started into something bigger.
Today, Sam is the managing and brand director of Chagrin Valley Soap & Salve. A USDA organic brand that hand-makes over 350 bath skin and hair care products. And he helps lead the natural body care industry as educator spokesman and brand ambassador for one of the globe’s finest brands of natural personal care.
Sam Friedman, welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Sam: Thank you. Thank you for having me Brian.
Brian: Yeah, so that’s a nice recap of your life up until this point, why don’t you let us know a little bit about what you do right now.
Sam: So right now Chagrin Valley Soap & Salve is a company that makes about 350 organic certified products. We currently have a staff of 19 individuals. We’re selling our products through our own website, ecommerce, and in some stores, both small mom and pops and a few larger shops in all 50 states in the US and over 120 some countries across the globe.
Mostly all small parcels, small packages, mostly direct to people’s homes. Of course A few business clients that buy and resell themselves. We make every type of product under the gamut that you could imagine having to do with body care, skin care, taking sort of care of the outside of the body.
And, you know, at this point, just looking at where we’ve come from where we’ve been, it’s been a really great journey from the kitchen to a really robust business.
Brian: What led your mother to go into this business?
Sam: Well, my mother’s background is in science and human biology, because her first job she was a nurse, so she actually went to nursing school for several years and got medical training and then spent a decade working in local hospitals.
Then after leaving the hospitals, a lot of the reason that happened was because of her not agreeing with some of the standard pharmaceutical care that’s out there and the things that are being provided for people as far as the diagnosis and the remedy for what your issue might be.
That really started spinning in her head because of my stepfather’s eczema.
Eczema is a pretty annoying condition that a lot of folks have, especially here in the US. And it’s dry and flaky and itchy and red. It could be in patches in certain areas in the body can start with your baby, it can start when you’re older.
It’s just something a lot of people deal with. And so my stepdad had some pretty bad eczema on his elbows and arms. He was going to the doctors, the dermatologists and getting the steroid creams, and they’re expensive, and they’re filled with questionable chemicals.
You know, while they would make the issue go away for a few moments, it was always coming back and always worse. One day, I think she had had enough of that and she said, you know, I’ve got 20 some years of understanding medical knowledge and biology training, I do think that there could be another solution.
You know, the fact that she had studied nursing and had that medical training, and when she left, she went back into biology and got a master’s degree. She ended up having so much knowledge about the human body, and about plants that she knew that there was no way that chemical tube of steroids was a good solution for a skin problem like eczema.
So she said, yeah, let me see what I can do.
And that’s where the whole thing came from.
She sat down, she did an awful lot of research.
In her kitchen, she whipped up a soap bar and a salve, an ointment.
She made my stepdad use those and stop using whatever else he had around the house, the steroid creams, the lotion, the soaps. After just a couple of weeks of using these two things she’d made in the kitchen with very simple ingredients. For the first time, his eczema started to clear up.
So it was kind of her, you know, mark and seal that her idea was not just a random thought it was probably right on the mark. There was maybe a path here now to follow that not only would help him more, enough for her family become healthier, but she could probably then help an awful lot of people.
And she said, Well, what else should I do? What else should I make?
It’s how the journey started.
Sadly, the journey had a big bump just a couple years later when she was diagnosed for the first time with breast cancer. And so that made her very, very afraid of the products she was using.
Specifically things like deodorant, sunscreen, you know, things we know bug spray that have toxins in them. That really pushed her even further down this path of, it’s got to be clean, it’s got to be organic, it’s got to be natural.
We ended up today with 350 some products starting to fill a need of eczema in the family and now filling huge amounts of need around the globe for everyone’s skin and hair issues.
Brian: Wow, that’s fabulous. That’s something else.
So then you came into the picture and got brought into the business. Tell us a little bit about your transition from your very background into this whole world.
Sam: The idea like a lot of things and if you think about it like a restaurant, you’ve got a chef and the chef is phenomenal in the kitchen. But a lot of restaurants struggle because that chef doesn’t understand or know about growing a business doesn’t have the time to do that.
They spend their day slaving in the kitchen making great food that has people lining up.
You know, mom has the science background and the human biology in the plant botany background that allowed her to start doing more R&D, creating and creating. That’s really where her wizardry and genius lies.
But after doing it even just a few years, and a business accidentally starting to really grow up around her, she didn’t know next what to do, you know, what are the steps you take?
It then becomes an entrepreneurial conversation, and none of us were trained in business.
I’m an artist, and she was a scientist, we didn’t have that knowledge. There was a real panic, you know, when she called and said, well, things are going well. But all the emails and all the phone calls, you know, all the orders. She’s like, what’s the next step?
Do I open a store?
How do I sell these things?
I don’t know much about sales. I don’t know much about customer service.
All the things that come along with the business that aren’t just the thing you actually have passion for, is anyone who’s ever done a business knows, most of it ends up being not what you really love doing but the other thing, and so that’s where she called me.
I was in Spain at the time and I did have to remind her that that’s not my skill set either. Director, yeah, I’d had a director position at the school, a director position at my theater company.
I’m directorial managerial, but not business oriented, mostly gaps in my knowledge.
I said, I’m not sure if I have the answers and the things you would need. But after she asked a few times, and I said, no, eventually you have to help your mom when she asks for help.
When she calls on the phone, I did come back and I told her I would be here in Cleveland, about six months to a year. And then I’m going to go back to Madrid because my life there was fantastic.
I certainly had no intention of running a small business or making soap. I had any idea about either.
When I came back, what was remarkable was, obviously I had used some of the bars of soap I came home to say hi, and Jud gives them to me to take back to Madrid and use and, it’s great soap!
When I came back, I was immediately sat down at the computer to do things like answering emails, because that’s not her forte. Just seeing what people were writing just blew my mind. To hear stories from people whose, of course, they were happy with something, they got a nice whipped body mousse and they’re talking about how it smelled like chocolate and it felt great on this their skin, you know, those things are nice to hear.
But when you have a mother whose daughter has like cystic acne on her back, and it’s really awful looking, and she’s 13, and so she won’t take her shirt off, she won’t go to the pool. She has a note from the doctor permanently excusing her from gym class because she just want to get made fun of. And so she goes and sits in the library while the rest of the class goes to gym. They’ve tried shots, and they tried creams and they tried steroids.
Most things make her worse and they’re uncomfortable.
Then they buy a natural bar from us for $7 or $8. She used it for a week and stuff cleared up, used it for a second week and she was able to go back to gym class.
They took a picture of her in the swimming pool and it makes you want to tear up being like wow I really changed someone’s life for the positive. You know, when I saw that was what was happening. It wasn’t just a lady making cupcakes in the kitchen and wanted to start a business.
There was genuine science here and the potential to improve people’s lives in some way.
Plus when I saw what and how she was making it in the kitchen, and that the products themselves we’re pretty different than what else was out there. I thought, wow, is there potential to actually do what she’s doing on a much larger scale, but not change the process or the concept, because that’s what business is about. It’s scaling up.
I wondered, could we not do that?
Could we get bigger but not use any of the normal mechanisms of scaling up a business?
Because one, we don’t know them.
And two, I think they rub against the grain of who we are as people.
We were on a mission to basically do what she did, and keep doing what you did and let it just take its natural course of growth.
We’ve been very lucky over now 17 years, it grows organically every single year. We don’t do a lot to push that growth. We still don’t understand sales or know about that kind of thing. Luckily, we don’t worry about that kind of thing.
Advertisement and sales is sort of off our table for the most part and we worry about production and customer interaction. Like a good restaurant, you’re serving up great food, you’re gonna have people lined up to eat it. That’s what we try to focus on very much because that’s what we get.
I get the people aspects, she gets the science and product aspect and stuff together, we’re really able to do that. And I think over this time our customers and anyone who engages in our website or us, they get that pretty quickly.
Brian: In the beginning, taking it back a bit, where did you find her first original customers at?
Sam: That’s a wild story, to be honest, because we’re so unique in that regard. And I think this could be potentially a little more common now. But you know, for us, it was off the wall because business meant you set up a mom and pop shop. That’s what people knew.
And I said, immediately when I came back, I said the one thing I am absolutely not doing is to open a store. I’ve seen a few friends do it. I’ve helped a friend’s mom or two do it. They all just go down in flames three years after a year of, this is incredible, look at us we’re succeeding!
The next year it’s all right, you know, we can hold on to this and then a year of losing most things, and then they close.
I said, I just don’t think that that’s the model anymore.
It has been for a century but I’m not sure in…..and this was 2007. I said, I don’t think that that’s going to work. You don’t have people streaming in and out to buy a bar of soap.
It’s not that kind of a commodity. I didn’t see it. And what she was doing was all she knew, which was take a small plastic folding table to the little square right by her house in the cute little town and just sell it on Sunday, the market thing next to the Amish guy with cucumbers.
So I did that all in one summer and went well, this is ridiculous.
Here we are getting up at 5, 6 am, I’m loading the car, takes three hours to get there to set everything up. And then you spend five hours in the heat to make $150. Then you pack it all up again, go home and I said, we can’t survive like that. You’re not going to earn enough for all the work you’re doing. We don’t grow cucumbers, these things are very expensive to make.
What happened was she made a website not to sell product because ecommerce, I don’t even know if that term existed in 2004.
But she made a website because she was still a teacher.
This was still very much a hobby before, you know, about a year before I came home, it was still just totally a hobby and she was teaching. So she made a website for her students because she’s a science teacher.
She thought, well, this would be great. I could teach the kids all about the science of soap making. There’s chemistry in the soap making, there’s biology and how it all works and what it does.
She took a class, she’s actually never taken any courses or anything on soapmaking for manufacturing, she did take a class on Microsoft front page, and how you use that to make a basic website.
In 2004, she made a pretty robust website of about 50 to 60 pages that had charts and graphs on how you make soap, pictures of the things she was making.
How to make a wooden mold to pour soap into and then tons of science on you know, here’s why all the oil is good for the skin. Here’s what neem leaves are and here’s why their oils beneficial if you have psoriasis, all of this stuff because that’s who she is.
She’s a scientist, and she researches and she puts out information.
And so this little informational website that was meant for her students, as anybody knows when something goes on the internet, there it is. It’s discoverable by anybody.
She got some emails and some calls saying, you know, I’m reading about this solid shampoo bar.
I’m reading about this deodorant you’re making with baking soda and coconut oil.
Where can I get that?
Her answer was, you know, nowhere, really, unless you’re here in my little town, but maybe if you want to send me a check in the mail, I’ll put it in a box and I’ll send it to you.
Literally as altruistic as a business could start, the first couple people that heard about us had literally been googling for things that they weren’t finding.
I think those things were solid shampoo bar, organic deodorant, you know, even organic soap, handcrafted truly organic from raw plants.
People were plugging into or even a certain ingredient neem is a good example tea tree.
Type those terms in Google and there wasn’t a lot coming up. Now, you know, everybody and everyone, you can buy it at the gas station, but in 2004, no.
Her website came up for people and what’s fascinating is those people aren’t the people walking down the street, who happened to see your shop, those people could be anywhere on Earth.
They’re typing into a computer for first customers, besides the people that came to her little table, they were nowhere near us. They were in California and New York, Australia, the Netherlands.
That’s a kind of a shocking thing to think that some of your original customers came from China in the Netherlands, because the lady was looking for something she wasn’t finding and then all of a sudden you came up. And I remember some of the first emails with people they were a little confused, or they were so excited and all capital letters, and they were like, where can I, what can I, how can I?
What happened was back before there was social media, there were chat rooms, message boards, if we remember those things, and they’re all based on topics and communities.
So even something like this, off the grid, it would have been a chat group, people would have talked about it and different things they did. They had things they had this shared knowledge.
There were a whole bunch of message boards or chat groups for people related to things that would intersect with our business. A couple main ones had to do with haircare. There was a group out of Germany called, The Long Hair Network. I won’t say it to you in German. That group had many, many, many English speakers because Germans speak English.
Well, one woman in The Long Hair Network group found our website, bought a couple shampoo bars, took some pictures and went, oh my gosh, look at my hair. And look what I found what we’ve been looking for.
That was that, and there were people all over the globe in that Long Hair Network.
There were a few groups like that.
There was one with people with hair down to their ground. And there was one for people with psoriasis, you know, in a few of these groups, found a few of our things and started telling people and so those initial orders, and those first people that I was interacting with in 2007, they were all over the globe.
It’s certainly all over the US, which was fascinating. Not normally where your first customers would come from.
Brian: Absolutely. Yeah.
Take us from there to where you are now, where most of your customers coming from right now?
Sam: Now it’s exactly the same.
Our customers are now in every state of the US all 50, over 130 or 140 countries, most of the countries in the world have ordered from us. We have a map up in our shop, we put little pins in. It was very exciting at first and I would say there aren’t too many pins to put left in strange places that we’ll probably never hear from.
So it’s really fascinating because when you’re an ecommerce business like us, you really are a store in everybody’s neighborhood. When you’re a store like ours, you’re a mom and pop shop. Here we are, you know, we’re a mom and son shop. Here we are, you know, this small family business, but we can be in everyone’s neighborhood because we’re on the internet.
It’s great because our customers are literally everywhere. And what we noticed by looking at a map is that our customers are clearly in places where one, there is a little bit more affluence, a little bit more money to be able to buy a little bit better products.
Places where they value, a few things, environment, sustainability, how much waste maybe they’re producing, be where and how they live or a certain belief they have, you know, in that.
The outdoors community, hiking, camping, fishing, that type of community, that sort of the rugged and outdoors, people who have to rely on having small amounts of items and things that are safe and easy to travel with and carry and don’t leave a mess behind.
So we know there’s certain sectors and we see the map. We look at those kinds of populations.
We go, well, where are they?
It’s pretty obvious, you see the huge swaths of where a lot of our customers are. California has huge customer base for us. New York City is a big customer base for us. Outside the US, very clear that Scandinavia and Northern Europe is our largest customer base, the amount of customers that we have from Northern Germany, the Netherlands, and then Sweden in Norway is, I couldn’t tell you it’s shocking.
The Netherlands is one of our largest places that we send our product.
And it’s because they speak English. You know, they’re one of the second language, they have to learn it.
So they can peruse our website easy enough, they value the environment, and they have a little bit more disposable income to buy these products. And so they’re like, sure, yep, give it to me.
And in that, we’ve seen the patterns where the large shopping for what’s great about us, you know, you look on YouTube and type in our name for people that have….because everyone loves to make little videos, look what I bought, and look what I use and all that.
You don’t see any one thing. You don’t see any one kind of person.
Obviously, you see mostly females as far as who’s excited about the purchases and showing them because who mostly buys skincare things in home, mostly females, but the nice thing is obviously everyone uses it, everyone showers, you know, everyone has to take care of their skin or their hair in some way.
So it’s not like we make a product just for women, we know the product we make is being used by everyone in the house, it’s just usually bought often by the female who makes those kinds of purchases when it comes to skin and hair purchases.
But it’s amazing when you look at the cross section of who our customer is.
And you go, wow, that’s incredible!
You know, as far as you’re concerned, we only exist because we don’t sell plastic. As far as you’re concerned, you know, we only exist because we make this shampoo bar that really works for ethnic textured hair. As far as you’re concerned, we only exist because you know, you have tons of kids and we make bug products, insect repellents that are actually safe to spray all over your kids all summer long.
Whoever you are, you got this great notion that we’re there because we make these things. And so we have every kind of customer, which is really great.
Brian: That’s fabulous. What a cool story and amazing how you’ve been able to keep building on that same ethos.
Sam: That’s funny people have mission statements and you never know what that means. And we don’t either necessarily, but we’ve put down on paper, some things we care about.
And what it does say is that we don’t engage in normative sales.
It means I’m not calling you, and I’m not knocking on your door, we’re not going to bother you to come by my product.
And maybe some people need to do that, because they don’t have business rolling in. So we’re lucky for that we’ve got great customers.
But we also think it’s annoying. I don’t like when people bother me and I don’t want to bother them.
It says that we don’t pay for normative advertising. And we don’t, we’re not gonna pay somebody to stick our name somewhere.
I don’t even know what that does. I don’t think it’s valuable.
But again, I’m not gonna wave stuff in front of your face.
It says that we will always do things exactly the way we did them in the kitchen with Mom, you know, the things that are important. When you come and see our quote unquote, factory now, which it’s not a factory, people are shocked.
They don’t think a company of our size, making 350 some products and selling in 150 countries can have three women with hair nets on and spatulas making these products with a mixer in a bowl.
We don’t use machines and we don’t mechanize we don’t have a large workforce.
We’re family and friends and we make everything by hand exactly the way Mom always had. We’re lucky, we’ve kept our ethos, we’ve kept our process, we’ve kept our people.
And over the years, we’ve just grow it to be bigger and more each year.
Brian: That’s awesome. That’s really great to hear.
So, with all the products that you have available, what is the most popular or best selling one?
Sam: That’s easy, probably make about 370 items. And I think we sell maybe 20 or so more, 30 more.
So we’ve got about 400 items.
And there’s about 398 that sell to one degree.
And then there’s two others.
Those two are the rocket ships that soar above all the rest.
One of them is a bar that we make. What’s funny is when my mother first made that bar on the second day that it was finished and she cut into it. She literally said to herself, well, no one’s gonna buy this because it looks ugly, and it smells very strange.
Now some people say they like it.
Some people say they don’t care for it and describe it in hysterical ways. I’ve heard everything from a skunk, to burnt garlic, to the dirt from my mom’s backyard you know, I don’t know what, but what you’re actually only smelling is two things.
It’s tea tree oil, which some people are familiar with, and neem leaf oil, which most people are not in the bar is called, Neem and Tea Tree.
Mom made it because of the medicinal properties of those two things combined.
What they are is they’re very stringent, but they’re not drying, very good for people with acne like issues.
And it’s very good for people with psoriasis, which could also be psoriasis on your skin or like dermatitis of your scalp. True dandruff.
Many people think they have dandruff and they don’t. They just have flaky, itchy dry scalp.
But dandruff is a really bad condition of the scalp.
People that have dandruff or psoriasis or acne. Acne is very common. You’re supposed to have it when you’re a teen but you’re not when you’re adult.
So people dealing with these things struggle with solutions.
Most things that you use are very drying and they’re unpleasant and they’ve got chemicals.
The bar is wonderful because it’s gently moisturizing and very medicinal with a few simple ingredients.
She started selling it and within a week people were coming back.
That was the bar I was actually referencing with the girl in the pool too, the comments we got were astounding. And so the way this bar sells today, in stores and on our website, we have people tell us every week, it’s a miracle thing for them.
It’s great, while we make beautiful lavender smelling things that are soiled with purple, you know, we also make things like this.
The lavender thing couldn’t possibly sell like this does. Because as much as people buy things they want, you have to buy things you need. It helps people that need it.
And then the other one, much less medicinal, much more, you know, fo product as we say, called our Whipped Squalane Face and Eye Cream. And it’s just a face moisturizer.
But you know, putting on face lotion is a very, very common thing almost every woman moisturizes their face, and a lot of men moisturize their face especially as they get older.
It’s hard to do because putting greasy things on your face isn’t pleasant.
Putting white gooey lotion, it doesn’t always come out too well. And so finding a good face product isn’t easy.
This one is, I think it’s three ingredients maybe.
But the main one is something called squalane and squalane exists in only a few places on earth.
The main one and the one you hear about badly in the news in oil that comes from the inner blubber in lining of shark skin, and that is used a lot in vaccinations and things in the pharmaceutical industry.
I don’t even know why.
What we’re using comes from olives, there’s certain green Mediterranean olives that have squalene fat in there, olive oil. And so we’re just using cold pressed olive fat, the squalane fat and we just take it and whip it by hand into a little mousse and put it in a little jar.
The cool thing is that the third place on earth it’s found is your face.
The oil that your face makes is called sebum. And the main fat in that sebum is squalane. And so the thing that actually makes your face all plump and soft and juicy and looking good is squealing.
The reason you get wrinkles as you get older is because every day after a certain age, your body makes a little less and a little less squalane.
Your face and your skin cells aren’t plump or juicy, they just wrinkle up. If you can put actual squealing onto your skin and let it just gently absorb from a not too old age.
It’s not a miracle, so once you have wrinkles, it won’t make them go away.
But it can make them not come for a long time. It pushes them off.
It makes you look young and healthy and great. And we sell it for $12 or $13.
It’s organic. It’s in a little jar. I guess that’s something I haven’t even mentioned really is our price points.
Everything I’ve said probably makes us sound like the fanciest boutique company and it’s the opposite. You know, we are markedly priced below most everything in our industry.
When people see our bars and our product. Sometimes we get calls and emails asking us how or what they’re missing.
Because when you compare it to what else is out there, our prices are very low.
Part of that’s an accident, because mom knew nothing about commerce when she started selling these things at a table so they were all priced way too low to begin with.
And then once you have a nice following after three years, you can’t just double your prices.
It’s been a 17 year game of slowly, incrementally putting them up just a little, just a little, because we’re just way behind. And to a point, we’re okay with it.
If we’re making enough profit to grow our business, we don’t need more, all that more is coming out of the pocket of the person trying to buy it. And what we want is for everyone to have access to it.
Making it more expensive doesn’t help anybody but us. We certainly didn’t start the company for us.
So you know, making it so that a mom in Kansas with four kids who wants to buy organic bugs spray doesn’t have to look at it and be like, man, I wish I could buy that for my family.
That would be awful.
We don’t want that. Everything is priced as low as it can be for us to make sense out of it to still make it sell it, make our profit and just move on. In that, you know, we’re also very, very lucky because the amount of people that can have access to our product is a lot and something like that squalane face cream.
Whereas L’Oreal starts their first cream at $50 and goes up. It’s a $12 cream, you can buy it if you want it.
You don’t have to say no to yourself, I can’t afford that. It’s a great product. And so the squalene face and eye cream and the Neem tea tree bar are stellar hits for us.
Brian: Fabulous. That’s really cool.
What do you like best about your business and or your industry as a whole?
Sam: Oh, my industry is a double edged sword.
It’s the ying and the yang, the small portion, sadly of my industry, that is on my train. I absolutely love.
We don’t mind bragging or being a little, you know, it’s not egotistical, but we’ll take a bold stance to say that we are on a good train and we’re one of the leaders of it globally.
And we don’t ever see a reason if a woman like my mom and a guy like me do it right the way we’re doing it.
There’s absolutely no reason anyone needs to be doing it wrong. And wrong means lying to the public using the ideas have healthy or green or sustainable organic as a selling term, but still putting credit in your product and selling it at Target, you know that doesn’t help the public.
That’s not what they want.
They’re buying it because they’re looking for something certain. And when all you’re doing is tricking them through corporate nonsense and commercialism with your product, it’s really sad.
We are sadly, in an industry where that is a huge thing.
The subset of the population that’s doing it totally honestly, is small. And the amount of the population in the green industry, the organic industry, the natural industry, that’s doing it the way McDonald’s does, it is huge. There’s a lot of them.
It’s very hard to stand out amongst the noise.
It’s very hard to be in an industry where you’re doing it right and many are doing it wrong and making untold sums, and tricking the public and the public’s then getting stuff that isn’t what they really want.
We wish it wasn’t that way. No one actually wants that except the owners of those few companies.
We wish that didn’t happen. And so it’s hard to get our message across.
It’s hard to make people understand how important organic is when everything out there is organic, this organic and that and it’s not the case and it makes it seem very diluted and not important.
But it’s a very specific thing. And it is important and it’s not that difficult.
So that’s hard about our industry. What’s wonderful is when you’re on our train, it’s so great to be part of something where the intersection of American free commerce and doing some good in the world could come together.
You know, a lot of people think of corporate America and how terrible it is because they don’t make good choices for everyone. Often their choices made simply for money.
Well, here’s the business like ours that is monetarily successful, grows every year from two people to five people to eight people that you know, we have 20 staff people all well employed in a very big and nice building and customers all around the globe.
And we are able to be profitable and consistent growth at a percentage that would make most companies go haywire if they had our kind of percentage growth and we’re able to do it sticking to conscious ethos, and making choices in the business that we think help the people and help the planet.
Don’t think that’s difficult, but we don’t think it’s the nature of most business.
We love that in what our industry is not just organic soaps, it’s many things that are sort of ancillary and sort of all go around us in our industry. There’s so many folks who are on that train, to say, well look at me, I mean, people love what I’m doing.
I’m making money, I’m growing a business, and I’m helping people or I’m helping the world, or at least I’m not making it worse in any way. I’ve done everything I can to keep it all good. That’s great.
It’s so, it’s so awesome, right?
We know that for a century, America grew commerce without something like that in mind. A lot of folks didn’t know or understand our health. We didn’t understand medicine, science the way we do now.
Certainly the environment. We didn’t get these things.
We didn’t know pumping black smoke out of the factory was bad.
It was good. It made jobs and it gave us things we needed.
Now we have an understanding, and so we can do it better.
It’s great to see that there are businesses and industry like mine that are just kicking ass and making people healthy and happy and helping the earth.
And like I said, if not at least not harming, not creating terrible problems for anyone.
Brian: Absolutely.
So in terms of your business itself, what’s one thing that you would like to change about it?
Sam: For me, I can say what’s genuinely hard, you know, is knowing what’s the next thing to do?
What’s that next decision to make?
Nobody’s giving you a map. And it’s very hard, being entrepreneurial and doing it on your own.
I think that’s part of the premise of some of what we’re talking about today. Having the ability to be self reliant, and having the desire to kind of go it on your own and take that chance and take the gamble and when it’s working, it can be great, but it’s not usually working because you have to grandest plan.
You know, every day I don’t wake up with a schematic. Don’t have anyone being able to tell me what is next, as freeing as that can be a good topic.
It’s very hard, because you want to make great decisions for that business. You want to say, well, if I knew if someone told me the absolute thing I should do tomorrow, I would do it.
You don’t have a clue what that thing is. And so you’re reaching here, there and everywhere.
Sometimes you’re doing things you should. And sometimes you’re opening doors you should never have.
In other times, if you’ve done the exact right thing, maybe it’s because you put some thought in and maybe it was an accident.
So I wish I had that entrepreneurial crystal ball. Maybe a little more of a roadmap as to this is what you should do. And this is what you should do it instead of having to invent it and guess it and make it up as I go along. That I would change.
Brian: That’s a really interesting point. I think it’s common.
Have you found other kindred spirits out there? Who are running companies in the same way?
Sam: Yeah, they tend to call themselves entrepreneurs.
You know, it’s a weird word and you don’t know what it means?
A lot of people think of it as this unbelievable person who, yeah, wow, it’s great. They have a brilliant light bulb idea and they can put on a suit, they create a business. That’s usually not what it is.
Their hands are usually very dirty, and they’re failing a lot.
There are some really cool groups, some of them, I just know of, and a couple I’m a part of, one specifically is called EO, entrepreneurial organization. The EO group is great, because you’re sitting around with people who are exactly in your position, and they’re not at all doing what you’re doing is good.
I don’t need to talk to another soap maker, you know, I need to talk to somebody else who’s trying to run a business, maybe somebody who’s dealing with international customers.
Maybe someone who’s trying to run it with their mother and brother in law and wife and the complications that come in there, being able to soundboard off the people that you know, kind of understand and also have their own problems and that you can kind of talk it through with.
So, yeah, it’s great here in Cleveland, we’re a small big town. So we’re not a teeny town. You know, we’re a real city, but it’s a smaller real city.
We do know each other, a lot of us and it’s a great community here. Part of chambers of commerce, and a part of this whatever alliance, or this group, or that group, and we work together, you know, and so you hear each other’s problems, you help each other out.
I think the most beneficial thing is to talk with the other people in your shoes.
It’s really hard to go to seminars and hear from huge corporate CEOs that have a podium because nothing they’re saying has anything to do with me, it doesn’t relate.
I don’t understand that.
But when I can talk to other small business owners, I can get more talking out of a guy who has an ice cream shop or a local farmer, there’s a lot to be said for the shared knowledge of all the stripes, successes and failures that we all kind of go through.
Brian: Absolutely.
Sam: And I’m happy to help others just as much as I always need help from somebody.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely.
If you and I were to talk again, like let’s say a year from now, and we would look back over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happened for you to feel happy with your progress concerned in your life and business?
Sam: To me, my goal is the same thing every year.
I want to add three things to my business. more customers, more products and more employees.
And every single year for 17 years, we’ve done that sometimes exponentially.
So you know, yet again this year, we’ve gotten some new people in.
Even during the troubled times with this pandemic, it’s been very hard and we didn’t lose the employees and disappear for good. But we lost a lot of employees temporarily.
They all had to go off and do their things to be safe and this and that. And so it was a hard year, you know, the staff, but we were able to keep everyone paid. As usual, every year we bring on some extra people as we go into the summer to believe it or not prepare for the holidays.
We start getting now ready now for our sales business so big and we need the extra hands. So we’ve brought on a couple people again, which is great.
We’re about to yet again unveil two new lines of products in the next two months, organic hand sanitizer, and some essential oils, just beautiful smelling oils that people are always asking us for.
And then the customers we’ve gained already again this year, simply because People couldn’t shop in person. And so they had to go online and people needed soap and we make it. And so we’ve added a lot of customers again this year who will consistently be coming back with us.
As long as I can say that next year, we’ve got some more employees and more customers and some new products. I’ll feel very successful.
And a year we’re not doing that and we’re kind of stagnant, you know, so we just got to keep at it.
Brian: Yeah.
Sam: I can’t really, I can’t get the customers. As long as we keep making those good products that customers come in. We need more employees to make them and we focus on our products and everything seems to be good.
Brian: Well, that’s a great way to simplify that whole concept. That’s great. You mentioned the COVID situation and everything and for those of you listening, we’re recording this in late July of 2020.
Sam: I dated us yeah.
Brian: Well, no, that’s fine.
Looking back, what other obstacles Have you come up against with this whole situation to this year?
Sam: It’s been fascinating because many businesses have really had to shut down I mean, actually been forced to shut down and then reopen or some of them have lost their business and the people or what they’re doing hasn’t become benign.
For example, a good a good friend who built a great business over the last few years in New York, distributing draft systems for nitrogen drafts that people could were using either for cold brew coffee, or for beer, coffee shops or closed bars aren’t don’t have anyone in them. Nobody needs these things.
It’s been months and months and months in the business fizzles away.
Very lucky that when we were online into we were being a hygiene and soap company, we were asked to stay open. During that shutdown, when almost everyone else had to close, we were considered extremely essential because we make cleaning products.
In that regard. We were lucky. However, what happened was our business started going up. It got up to almost 70% more than our typical business.
And our staff went down from 18 people down to six for almost two months. We had third of the staff 75% extra business. It was very challenging. I worked 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
Leaving it 4 and coming home eating a quick dinner and going back at seven work until two or 3am every day doing it. Which was interesting that long that far into the business to have not actually ever really worked like that.
Now I’ve been here 12 years and all of a sudden out of nowhere, I’m unfortunately the guy who just started a business yesterday. It was a wild time.
But you know, there’s that virtuous circle and it has a name that is escaping me right now. It’s one of those things someone had brought up, but it has to do with the virtuous circle of leadership.
And it basically says, if you are an owner of the business, if you have one sole goal is to take care of your employees. If you take care of your employees, they will make phenomenal product and treat your business properly. If your business is treated properly, then the customer is very happy. And then when you have all those customers guess who’s treating you is the customer.
Everyone really wants to focus on a product or on the customer. That’s not how it works.
You have to focus on the core of the business and the core of the business is, whatever the people they’re actually doing.
If I want my customer to love me, the customer has to be very happy with the business and business is going to be great. It’s because of all the people that work there. It quickly became apparent to me as this all started that my focus in this was to ensure that my staff was cared for that they were fully paid, that they were able to do what they needed to do in the time they needed to go do it, whatever it was, wherever it was that what they had to do at that time.
And I couldn’t be that obstacle. I could never put my business before them because they are my business.
Anything that I thought that I needed to do that came before them would have been a terrible mistake, nothing comes before them. Now even the product because there is no product without can’t do it on our own. At this point. It’s long gone.
That was my job as the leader, take care of my staff and let my staff take care of the company and then let the company be good for the customers. And then of all the customers we did that we did a great job.
We let everyone go and do their thing. We kept everyone fully paid the whole time and let everyone come back as they needed. And now we have people come who work at night, who stagger to come in Whatever works for them, we’ve made this so that you tell me what you need. And that’s what will make it be and then you just do keep doing your thing for us. And we’ll do it for you.
We’re very proud of that, that we were able to do that for everybody. Daily meetings, making sure everyone’s comfortable knowing what people had whatever they needed. We’re very proud of all of that. And I know they are to and they’re happy with it, and it’s gonna keep making our business successful. Is that kind of action?
Brian: Absolutely.
So you’ve been able to take care of the staff, you’ve been able to handle the explosion in demand. Has there been any issues with suppliers or anything like that? Or have they been able to keep on top of things?
Sam: They’re have been. Yeah, thankfully, not as much as I think there could have been but there still are.
We lost a couple you know, great opportunities because of silly things like we couldn’t get a sprayer top for bugs in a big account came through and wanted to buy all these bug sprays and send them out in a monthly subscription box and you’re ripping through and we couldn’t get the things we needed.
You know, we could make the bug spray all we want but if you don’t have the labels, you don’t have the container, you don’t have the sprayer top, you don’t have a bug spray. Been going through those things for months now.
Mainly one of the things is that my wife who’s in charge of the shipping pulls her hair out now because all of those things have gone awry.
All shipping has either slow down, or is going poorly. And we are a shipping company.
We are online. So everything we do we send out in the box every day.
We use the Postal Service a lot for most of our normal American deliveries. We use UPS for large shipments to stores. We use FedEx for overseas stuff, and every one of them is really struggling.
And so when they’re struggling, it’s sad because we’ve worked hard. We’ve put our product together, we’ve gotten into a box and we’ve spit it out the door to the customer that’s paid for it. And then things go wrong.
Then the customer is not happy and the money gets lost. Yeah. So the whole shipping thing and what’s happening with COVID because of that is very frustrating for ecommerce, but the whole world is then moved to ecommerce. I think that’s put an extra burden on it all. There’s ups and downs.
We’re lucky we’re online their struggles because we’re online, but I think the biggest challenge in all of it has just been the safety.
We had a downtown store here in Cleveland, a small little shop, it was our only retail store. We still do own it. But it’s been closed since March 15. And we don’t think it is going to reopen.
We’re very nervous about that.
Here’s something I put three or four years worth of work into making a really nice little shop, and it made no money the first year and then broke even the second year and then made money the third year now this year, it was really gonna be great. We do think it might be over because it’s in real downtown. And people go to that downtown every day for four reasons, sports arenas and events that are closed. We have the third largest theater district in America here in Cleveland, closed. Concerts, we have rock and roll capital here in Cleveland, and it’s all closed.
And then we have amazing dining district down there walkable pedestrian streets with all these restaurants and famous chefs and it’s all closed.
That downtown of Cleveland has become a ghost town. It’s very sad and store like mine that needs daily footraffic walking by to buy soap hasn’t had anyone there for months and months. That is very hard.
And I feel very bad for those people who for them that their sole business that that’s their whole operation. For us we have a very robust online business and that was like a little arm of it was our only retail store.
So it’s the only place people could go and we will certainly help one another. But things like this pandemic have really messed up a downtown like Cleveland for probably several years. That’s hard, very hard to see.
Brian: That make sense. Makes sense.
What blanket advice would you have to other small business owners out there in a similar situation to yours?
Sam: Huh, that’s tough. There are a couple professors who knew me they sent a few students from an MBA program a business program from a local college community college to ask me some questions and interview me solely because they thought they knew that the things I said we’re so off the wall and different from everything that they are taught there, but they thought it was a phenomenal example to show something very successful, completely different than everything you’re told to do.
So it’s very hard for me to want to give advice because how do I look at someone trying to start a business and say, don’t ever advertise, don’t do sales.
You know, don’t worry about getting a machine that might make the labor an awful lot easier.
We can crank out a whole bunch more product quicker. Everything someone would do, I would tell them not to, you know, and all I would tell them to do is make sure you’re not starting a business to start a business.
A business is hollow, when the capital is its goal.
When you have a passion, you start a business that America is about, you’ve got a passion, you’ve got an idea you can offer something, people will pay you for what you can offer. So if you’ve got a passion, you stick to your guns.
Don’t pretend to be a businessman.
Find a couple business people and surround yourself with them. Just be passionate about what you do, and stick to your guns.
You will find all the people then who agree and who love what you’re up to and they will support you. If you are one of those people who does what you do so well and you stick to it, that’s where all the success and the admiration comes from.
You can’t create it, you can’t make it happen, you know, so that that’s a very important thing. Most of the things then people would say after that about taking a loan or doing the best, I’m not going to talk to you about those, I probably don’t agree. We don’t do them.
Brian: Wouldn’t you say and you tell me if I’m wrong here, but it seems like one of the biggest lessons you can pass on to people is to just trust their own intuition and be open.
And just be aware of the situation that they’re in and what changes they have to make and not just go along with what they’re told on what to do. It seems to me that that’s what you’ve done.
Sam: Yeah, transparency and honesty in general is important. And that goes both ways.
It has to be to the public and all of your customers. And it has to be to yourself.
Brian: Mm hmm.
Sam: You have to be fully honest and open with yourself and totally transparent, you know, do what you’re doing so that you can do it right. But you also have to do that for the public. That’s all they’re really asking for. That comes back to you sticking to your guns and being passionate about you.
Because then the people love it doesn’t matter what you do.
If you make pickles, or you make candles or you lead, you know, treks through the mountains, whatever you are, whatever you do, if you’re passionate about it, you’re pretty good about it and you do it well, people will follow it doesn’t mean you can make a lot of money, you might need to understand some business mechanisms that don’t have much to do with you.
And so that’s when it’s best to surround yourself with one or two other people.
Maybe find somebody who you trust, who’s your kind of person who does things like a marketing, don’t go hire a firm and don’t find anyone who wants money and profit out of the thing.
Find someone who believes in what you do, who understands marketing, and be like, hey, how can we spread the word about what I do?
How can we help grow my business?
All of my marketing is done by my sister and my brother in law. They’re in our family. They believe in what we do. They’re not trying to do it to earn the capital. They want to shout out and yell about what we do.
My brother in law has it skills and things like, you know, photography skills.
My sister, he was a social media person work at an embassy, you know, and so you take skills they have you make them, they’re passionate about what you do, and you use those skills towards the passion of what you’re doing.
We would never do something like hire a marketing firm, that kind of thing makes no sense. It is about being who you are. It’s about being open with yourself and with the public and transparent and all of that.
Brian: That’s great advice. That’s really good.
So what did I not ask you? That is something that you’d like to answer?
Sam: Well I only think of things I don’t like to talk about?
Brian: Laughs.
Sam: Three things that popped into my head that I could talk about very briefly.
One is the things we used ingredients and all this stuff we make, you know, what is all this stuff?
Where is it come from?
We’ve sourced hundreds of ingredients from all around the globe, that are fascinating. I just think that that’s a great thing. You know, for a lot of us, we try to reduce some carbon footprint, we also try to support local, but we also have to go to the ends of the earth sometimes to find things that we need and so we just use so many cool ingredients.
I have a partnership program.
I’ve started here that I call local symbiosis, I made that random term up.
It’s not the greatest one, but it means what it means, which is that you’ve got some local people and they can benefit from each other.
We do things like work with a local brewery, where they have beers that they don’t fill all the way to the top, accidentally through the machine, or beers that whatever it is that they can’t really sell, but they’re still drinkable.
Those go to certain bakeries in town, maybe you make a bread out of it, or a chef making something.
But the beers they have that are one day past the expiration date, that was have to get pulled off the shelves at the store, and they just go back to their warehouse and they get dumped, which is very sad.
We’re able to take that beer. And then we just replace the water for beer in one of our soap recipes. And now we have a beer soap.
And we make a beer shampoo which is really good for the hair. And so we’re taking waste products that the brewery would have to dump and get rid of. And we’re repurposing it.
Then they’re able to sell it in their gift shop branded with their name in our name, we’ve got a cool beer soap to sell, they’ve got a cool beer soap to sell, we didn’t have to go buy ingredients, they don’t have to dump their stuff. And you know, everybody kind of wins.
We do that with all kinds of stuff that makes us happy. And we use local things like that.
Then we go to local Amish farms to get grains from them and coffee roasters and stuff.
So that’s a really cool piece of what we do.
Another thing I think it’s fascinating to talk about is the dynamics of a true family business, you know, that the complications and the pleasures that come from something like that.
Many people are very happy each day that they go to one job and their wife goes to another. That part of that separation is important because then you’re happy to come home to somebody.
And what it’s like sometimes when that doesn’t ever happen, you know, when you work together all day, every day, or when you’re trying to run a company with your mother.
What that’s like as a son and a mother. Do nothing but butt heads with each other. You know, there’s such fascinating dynamics that cause us real problems, and bring those great successes.
As a family unit and a family business that’s able to do these things together. Most of the people that aren’t our family in the business, or our friends along have some time.
So we’re a real crew of people, and we’ve got some strangers and and that’s even weirder, because you’ve hired some random person off the street, and here they are with your family and your friends, and they have to deal with your crap.
So there’s some real interesting dynamics to having a family business and the successes and failures that come along with that. That’s one of those things I wish I had more people to talk about with, it’s not as common to have a whole group of family running a company like that.
That’s a real interesting and interesting thing.
There’s so many different facets and pieces of the business that I think are interesting or like to talk about, but I could go on and on and on about it almost any subject.
Brian: Well, you’re a pleasure to listen to and this has been a great conversation. Thank you. I’d love to have you back on the show another time.
What’s a great way for all those listeners that are looking to find out more about Chagrin Valley Soap and Salve?
Sam: Oh sure. I’m realizing I said there were three things and I only mentioned two and that the third, I do think it’s fascinating all the places that you see and find our product or some of them you’d expect and some of you might not.
So the best place to find us of course is our website, chagrinvalleysoap.com.
CHAGRIN VALLEY SOAP dot com.
And that’s where you’re going to find 400 some pages of product and over 400 some pages of information. It’s an eight 900 page website.
You could spend weeks and weeks and weeks on it, learning and reading. It’s just so full of stuff.
I mean, it’s why we come up number one in Google for many, many searches. We are chock full of information that is useful to the reader. But what’s cool is that you can find our stuff all around in places.
One of the only real corporate places we work with is Whole Foods.
We started very local, our store right here in town wanted to carry the product, which we thought was really great. And then from then it was another store opened in town. And then it was well, we’d like to put you in, you know, the stores here in the state of Ohio.
Then it was the state of Ohio’s in this region of six states.
So we’d like to put you in also and so that’s been great. Now our product is in every wholefoods store and in seven states, which is really great, right off and all around us, of course.
And then there’s so many small shops and mom and pop and different types of stores. Tthey’re every kind you could imagine which speaks to how interesting our product is.
You can go to the south of Florida to a dog grooming salon and find our whole care of pet line products.
You can go to a teeny canoe and kayak shop up in northern Michigan and find a bunch of our stuff because it’s sustainable and then all of our camping and insect repellents go to a spa in one of the casinos in Vegas and get massage treatment with our coffee and chocolate scrubs, you know, so it’s just unbelievable.
A friend of mine in upstate New York sends a picture about a month ago, he walked into a teeny trailer, someone had an old Airstream that they’d turned into a little shop outside a farm. And there was a whole bunch of my products and this little Airstream.
You’ll never know where you’re gonna find them. But they’re in all kinds of stores, from outdoors, places, to organic places to hair care places, kids places and pet places and every other thing and so where you’d find it, not everywhere, but it’s all over the place.
And it’s that same way in Europe and other stuff. We’ve got great people who buy it and resell it.
So I encourage people to you know, check out if they’re in our state’s area and you have a local Whole Foods. Go buy it. You know, if you’re in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, it’ll be in a store. Otherwise, go visit our website.
Brian: Awesome. So great. Sam Friedman, Chagrin Valley Soap & Salve. Thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Sam: It was my pleasure. These were great questions.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Sam is one of those people that was really a lot of fun to talk with.
He brought up so many issues that I can’t even cover them all right here. We could probably have an entire conversation just about the conversation we just had. But we don’t have the time for that.
I’m just going to cover a couple of the basics.
First off, is the idea of independence that he puts out there.
It’s all about having an identity behind your company, and who the people are. So who him and his mother, the rest of his family working with him and the people they have working with them, what they’re about.
He has an understanding of what that is, what they are and what they’re not.
He’s willing to let that independence radiate throughout the company. Everything they do gives off a feeling it gives off a style to it.
And that’s important because that’s how you attract your crowd and detract or put off the people who are not your crowd, which is okay, if you’re looking for a particular type of person, this is how you go about bringing them to you.
You’d be very loud and proud about who you are.
And that folds right into what Sam does personally. He’s a very active CEO, I guess you could say person that’s running the company and he is actively out there, putting himself out there.
He’s not just sitting behind a desk or standing out at the factory. He is putting himself out there and he’s allowing himself to be a billboard for the company, in a sense, without being salesy without being anything, he’s just out there, spreading the message that they have, which is a really cool thing.
And on top of all that, it’s part of a an overall structure of what I’d call non-traditional marketing.
So he doesn’t call it marketing, because it’s not for the purpose of having marketing, but by them going out and putting their ideas out there and putting their ethos out there, like we were discussing earlier.
By doing that he’s creating in a sense marketing for people, he’s giving them a reason to come and look a little bit more to maybe do a Google search to maybe look a little deeper into their website or to pick up one of their products at the store. That’s important.
That’s not a simple thing to be able to do. You certainly can’t do it overnight. Him and his mother have built this up through the years, but he stuck true to his principles.
And if you do that, you’ll never feel bad about what you’re doing while at the same time, you’re going to automatically attract the people that you’re looking to have as customers.
There’s more and more and more that Sam talked about that I’d love to be able to go deeper into but we’re gonna have to leave that for another episode.
We’ll have to have Sam back. He’s a great conversationalist and very interesting to listen to.