Sometimes, we’ll have a guest on the #WeGotGoals podcast who doesn’t actually like or set goals (I’m looking at you, Dawn Jackson Blatner and Josh Katt). For whatever reason, they don’t connect to the term, or they’ve employed a different paradigm to accomplish great things.

Which is fantastic—one of the best things about the show, in our humble opinions, is the glimpse at the wide variety of paths high achievers have taken to reach success.

But this week’s guest, Nicole Bernard Dawes, has the opposite perspective. Goals drive nearly everything the founder and CEO does. She aims to set both ambitious aspirations—say, starting an organic snack company, Late July Snacks, that hit $100 million in sales this year—and small mini-targets, including what she wants to get out of each business meeting. And she’s not afraid to lay them all on the line.

“If you don’t even know what you want, you’re definitely not going to get it,” she says. “And I think clearly articulating what you want helps people.

Setting goals helped Dawes recover from an incredibly difficult year in 2009. First there was the recession. Then her father Steve Bernard—her co-founder (and, before that, the founder of Cape Cod Potato Chips)—passed away from pancreatic cancer. When he died, the bank called the loan, leaving Dawes and her husband/business partner Peter scrambling to raise cash.

“Through that, it forced my husband and I to take a hard look at kind of who we were at Late July and what we wanted this company to really become,” Dawes says. What did they decide and how did they pull through? In our interview, Dawes shares seven lessons that kept her moving forward.

1. 
   
2. Find the right people …
   

One of the most critical changes Late July made the following year was to the hiring process. Being qualified to work at the company, they decided, meant more than just having the right education and experience. Dawes began looking for people who’d make a positive addition to the environment, and spent a significant amount of time having multiple team members interview each candidate. In some cases, that meant positions went unfilled for years, a stressor in a fast-growing company. However, the result was worth it: “I truly believe today that we have the most wonderful team in our industry,” she says. “We have a group of people that wakes up every day ready to support each other and believes in the company and believes in the products.”

2. 
   
3. … and a purpose you’re passionate about.
   

Dawes made another big decision in the wake of her father’s passing: to leave cookies behind and enter the tortilla chip market. That was no small shift—cookies made up $2 million of the company’s $9 million in sales at the time. However, Dawes felt strongly she wanted to steer the company in a healthier direction. Of course, she wasn’t satisfied with just any crunchy nibble. She aimed to create the number-one tortilla chip in the natural-food business. “Singular focus on being number one requires all your effort, and all your team’s effort,” she says. “No matter what our team was doing, we always kept that goal in the back of our mind.

3. 
   
4. Start new things small and build.
   

It took a year to perfect and introduce the tortilla chips, and they got off to a rocky start. “That was a little bit scary because we had just bet our entire company's future on this launch,” Dawes says. That taught her Late July needed to build brand awareness in this new space. So, they spent the next year concentrating on a few key accounts, securing a foothold there before spreading their wings to the larger marketplace. That focus helped them course correct quickly. “I think we might have become the number three in the first year,” Dawes says.

4. 
   
5. Deliver quality.
   

That rapid rise was built on superior flavor. As the daughter of a potato-chip mogul father and a mother who owned a health food store in Cape Cod, Dawes prioritizes making food that’s both nutritious and delicious. “I’ve always believed that as a natural products brand, we have an obligation for the entire industry to make our products taste great,” she says. “When a consumer has a bad experience with one natural product, they make an assumption about everything.” And to succeed in the highly competitive salty snack realm requires repeat business: “No consumer is ever going to buy a snack twice if they don't like the way it tastes.”

5. 
   
6. Stay open to feedback.
   

How, exactly, does Late July makes its chips so scrumptious? Besides constant comparison to competitors and making sure the whole team is eating—and loving—them, Dawes says they stay alert for constructive criticism. She applies this philosophy to all areas of her life and business; it’s a key component of her overall positive outlook. “We’re all just kind of learning and growing, and none of us are perfect. The more receptive you are to hearing things that could be done better, the more likely you are to improve faster,” she says.

6. 
   
7. Set goals outside the boardroom, too.
   

Looking to the future, Dawes is aiming for Late July to dominate the salsa category too (they’re in the midst of launching that line, and popcorn, right now). However, she also gives her personal life high priority by setting goals there, too. Her big goal is to be available to her two sons, now ages 16 and almost 12. She puts it in practice by working from home more and eating family dinner together four or five nights a week. And, she encourages her employees to take similar steps. “We all have lives, and when you’re a high-achieving person, you have to not hide that,” she says. “It’s OK—it doesn’t make you less of a productive person to prioritize your private life.”

7. 
   
8. Sweat it out. “I manage stress, I think, weirdly well,” Dawes says. Some of that may come naturally, but she also finds a solid fitness routine enables her to perform her best (a sentiment that makes us smile here at aSweatLife). A couple of years ago, Dawes got a Peloton bike—and thinks they should be standard issue for any entrepreneur. Now, she has no excuse not to knock out a 20-minute ride, even on her busiest days.
   

Listen to Nicole Benard Dawes’ full episode anywhere you get your podcasts—including, now, on Spotify! If you like what you hear, please help us spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to cindy@asweatlife.com.)

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Begin transcript:

Jeana: Welcome to #WeGotGoals a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high-achievers about their goals. I’m Jeana Anderson Cohen. With me I have Cindy Kuzma and Maggie Umberger.

Maggie: Morning Jeana!

Cindy: Good morning Jeana!

Jeana: Good Morning! And Cindy, this week you to Nicole.

Cindy: I did! I interviewed Nicole Bernard Dawes who is the founder and CEO of Late July, an organic snack food company. We have some people on the podcast who are actually not a big fan of goals. Nicole loves goals! She thinks you should set them in every part of your life. And so it was a joy to talk to her for this podcast.

Jeana: And her goals are shifting, I know she had big goals built around business but her future goals are built more around her family life. Right?

Cindy: Right, and I think she still has a lot of big business goals too. But I was really struck by the way she talked about her intentionality with her family. Her kids are actually a little bit older. Her boys are teenagers now and she’s realizing that they kind of require a different level of energy. Like when kids are little, you have to be around them, you have to take them places, you’re coordinating logistics. But when they get to like the age that which they’re they’re kind of becoming self-sufficient people, they have deep questions about the world. She was realizing that she needs to preserve her energy. She wants to be there for them as they kind of navigate the world and answer those questions for them and be a person who’s present in their life. And she realizes that just like you have to set a goal to reach a dollar amount in sales for your business. If you want that, if it’s a priority for you, you have to set that goal. And then you have to figure out how to make the rest of your life work with that. So she’s done things like work from home more often or structure her day in different ways so that she can make sure that she’s there for them in enough quantity and quality of time to be the kind of mother that she wants to be.

Jeana: And as she’s managing all of these areas of her life and continuing to grow this already fast growing company, she’s under a lot of stress as is easy to imagine. But she is pretty good at managing that stress. And one of her key tools to going after her big accomplishments and continuing to manage her stress is buying a Peloton bike, right?

Cindy: Yeah, this makes all of our hearts happy at a Sweat Life to hear her talk about how important fitness has been in achieving her goals and maintaining a balance to her lifestyle. Well I say balance, she doesn’t believe in that word balance which is something I think we can all relate to a little bit. Because she doesn’t feel like the person who goes into the office is a different person then the person who sits down at the dinner table with her family. That said, she did notice that when things got really busy, one thing that kind of slipped by the wasteside was her fitness routine. And she started to realize that was affecting her productivity, her mood, her state of mind and eventually would affect her health which would be extra bad for someone who runs essentially a health food company. So she was trying to figure out how to make that work again. She set that goal and worked backward to figure out how to achieve it. And realized that having a bike in her home where she had no excuse to not do a 20 minute ride any day of the week was really important to her. So it was kind of a treat to hear that. In fact, she said she thinks a Peloton bike should be given to every entrepreneur. It should just be like standard equipment when you start your own business. So that was great to hear.

Jeana: I’ll take one of those please. What a delight to hear from such a great entrepreneur about her goals and how they’ve shifted over the years. Here is Cindy with Nicole. And stick around, at the end of the episode we’re hearing from you, listeners!

Cindy: This is Cindy Kuzma and I’m here on the #WeGotGoals podcast with Nicole Bernard Dawes who’s the founder and CEO of Late July. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us today.

Nicole: Oh Cindy, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited about this podcast.

Cindy: Well, I’m glad to hear it! We’re excited too. So most of our listeners are people who are conscious about what they eat and who love a good snack so they probably already know your brand. But just in case, can you tell us just a little bit about Late July and the products you sell?

Nicole: Sure, Late July organic snacks is a predominately a tortilla chip company. Right now we make several varieties of organic tortilla chips and range from our most healthy which is a multigrain tortilla chip that has all sorts of wonderful grains and seeds in it. To our more seasoned jalapeno lime tortilla chips which are one of my personal favorites and my kids personal favorites. They’re super delicious and they are a great snack any time. We also make a line of crackers and sandwich crackers.

Cindy: And that’s kind of how it all started, right? Way back in 2001 because you couldn’t find a way to fulfill your pregnancy cravings with organic real ingredients. Am I getting that right?

Nicole: That is correct. I was pregnant, I actually started this company when I was pregnant with my first son which is one of those things that at the time seemed like a really good idea because you haven’t had a child yet. But I grew up in sort of a unique situation. My mom had a health food store and my dad owned a potato chip company. So I think that I’m the natural product of when those two people have a child, you’re bound to have somebody who could create a natural product that is a little bit more delicious. And that was my experience with my mom’s health food store in the 1970s was that all of the products, you know had the right idea but they really tasted bad. I mean, it was a pretty sad shelf full of crackers that I had in my childhood. But because my father was really into food and he loved to cook and he also started a potato chip company, K Pop Potato Chips. You know, food and health food, in particular, because of my mom was a big focus of my life. But even back then I knew that health food stores could do better. So when I was pregnant with my first son, I was actually living in New York City at the time. And I really desperately wanted a saltine cracker. It was early in my pregnancy. Because I was highly determined to find one, I went to like six natural food stores. And I couldn’t find anything. I mean, all of the crackers were very similar to what my mom had back in the 70s. I mean, that part of the health food store hadn’t evolved at all. I think it’s like people stereotype natural foods, you know they taste like the cardboard box that they’re packed in. That was very true of what I was finding when I was walking around those New York City health food stores back in 2002. So it dawned on me that even though other parts of the health food store had evolved since my mom’s. That part of the store was very much stuck in the 70s and I knew that I had to do something about it.

Cindy: So, you’ve come a long way since then. I know you have something like 30 employees and the number one tortilla chip in that natural and organic aisle where you were looking for it before. And a chance to hit $100 million in sales for the year. And that's just professionally. Personally, I know you have the family, the sons that you mentioned and a husband who's your business partner. So I presume that you have a lot of accomplishments to choose from. But as we always do on #WeGotGoals, we’re going to ask you to narrow it down today. We ask everyone two big questions and the first one is the one I’m going to pose right now. Nicole, what’s a big goal you’ve achieved, why was it important to you and how did you get there?

Nicole: I just want to mention one thing, we did already pass $100 million in sales.

Cindy: Oh, wonderful.

Nicole: You know, I love goal-setting. I think it’s a really important part of achieving. And understanding really what you’re trying to achieve is very, very important I think how we got where we are today. And you know those goals have changed so much since I first started the company and I'm kind of constantly checking and updating those goals. You know there's so many that have been a part of getting us to where we are. But you know just narrowing down a couple that I particularly think helped us. One is way back I mean I'm going to stay back in 2010, my husband and I we run the company together and we set a goal for our team. We discovered that one of the things that we love the most about our company was kind of the way our team work together. But we had a couple of people that we really felt weren't as positive members of the team. So we decided that we were going to revamp the entire way that we did hiring and set a goal to have our entire company be the kind of people that we really wanted to be around. That was supportive of each other just to make our company one of the best places to work that we possibly could. What made that goal a little bit harder back in 2010 is we didn't have as much money back then to pay what you needed to pay. There was a lot of challenges to kind of reaching that goal. But ultimately it also meant that would have to leave positions unfilled potentially until we kind of found that perfect fit. And so what we decided to do was instead of just hiring for a position, we started hiring for cultural fit. And completely changed the way that we interviewed people so instead of just posting a position, looking for a set of criteria, having one or two people interview that person and then hiring the most qualified candidate we decided that the term qualified had a lot of other meanings. And you know that stretched far beyond just hitting the the check boxes of right school major, right past experience and for some of the positions it required us leaving them open for a couple of years actually. And I would say that, I can officially say we met this goal about 4 years after we set it. It took that long to finally get all the open positions filled the way that we wanted to fill them. And I truly believe today that we have the most wonderful team in our industry. I mean everybody thoroughly enjoys working together, we have a group of people that that wakes up everyday ready to support each other and believes in the company and believes in the products.

Cindy: That's so interesting because so often people think of goals and really hard, tangible, data-driven terms and that's such an interesting one to set. How did you sort of check, you talked about kind of checking for a progress against those things. How did it, I mean other than just filling those positions. Like what are some ways that you sort of really gauged how successful that effort was?

Nicole: I think just employee morale and job satisfaction. Just seeing how our team worked together and also it mean really it's it a tangible filling open positions. I mean at the time when we set it we had the open positions that we needed to fill and under our like new new approach. So once those positions were filled and you know all future positions were done that way. It just became our way of life.

Cindy: I’d imagine that was a bit of a struggle at first with your existing employees trying to communicate that message and explain to them why it might take a little bit longer to get the help that you needed. But ultimately I'm sure they could come to understand to how important this was for the health of the whole team how did you kind of navigate that transitional period.

Nicole: It is, it actually is very hard. I mean still because it typically took us longer to fill positions than we did in the past and when you’re growing fast that can be a huge problem. But I think what everyone came to realize very quickly was it was much better to have a team that we all enjoyed being around and you know really truly supported each other, than just filling a position. And you know, people became believers in the process. Because they were all part of it too. You know, when somebody joined the company they were typically interviewed by five or six people versus just one or two. Anybody that they might potentially be working with and even a few people they wouldn’t be working with on a day to day process. So everyone kind of bought into it and plus they saw the results.

Cindy: And when you think about how that affects your day to day business any can you think of some examples where the team has worked together in a way that you think they might not have been able to before

Nicole: Yeah. One of the things that I think is really interesting is when I look at I mean our sales team. We, our sales team works very differently than most sales teams. We have a team that completely doesn't compete against each other. Which I think makes us ultimately more powerful. Our sales team isn't kind of bonused individually. We really look at it as we're all in this together. And what that has meant for some members of that team is they might have something come up like a family emergency, for example. And they can’t go to, this is a true life story, it actually happened. They can’t go to like the most important meeting for their most important customer of the year. And so one of their peers will step in and go to that meeting. Now, in a typical company that might be a threat because if that person performs and does well and then there's a chance that that could kind of come back to impact. Particularly in sales where people tend to be a little bit possessive of their customers. And in our case, the way that we work that’s just one co-worker helping another.

Cindy: How do you sort of structure things, so that requires both kind of a different attitude and also like a really different incentive system as you say, right? How are some of the, what are some of the ways that plays out in the way that you kind of actually structure the company?

Nicole: Well I think it, one of ways that plays out is you know we encourage a lot of cross functionality. People to kind of understand not just their role but how their role impacts the rest of the company. And particularly team members that they work with all the time but even team members that they just sort of brush up against [...] with like the various things that they’re working on. Because I think when you understand your role in greater context you understand how your choices and your decisions affect the people that you're working with versus when you are very siloed you really don't understand and you don't have a lot of concern for how your choices impact the people that you work with.

Cindy: So where do you think all of these ideas came from for you? I mean when you talk about it now it it strikes me that some of this must have come out of the very difficult year that that you had in 2009. Which I mean first of all I'm very sorry for the loss of your father, I know that that was a tough time. And that you went through some learnings in terms of getting comfortable with areas of the business that you didn't know much about before that you weren't as involved in before. Is that something that kind of informed the way you've set up this newer hiring structure?

Nicole: I mean it is, I mean really as you mentioned 2009 was just an incredibly difficult year. I mean personally, professionally, really in every way. It was the death of my father somebody who you know, hero, mentor, somebody who I kind of looked up to and felt I really needed. To his death resulting in our bank triggering a death of a member clause in our loan agreement. And forcing us in the height of the recession to replace debt and the significant amount of debt for the company. And ultimately kind of through that it forced my husband I to take a hard look at who we were at Late July and what we wanted this company to really become. And a couple of interesting things happened. One, we decided life is short you just don't, you really as an entrepreneur I have an incredibly positive outlook and usually my brain can't even compute failure. I mean it just doesn’t go there and I actually, I manage stress I think kind of weirdly well but kind of even given all that we just took a hard look at who we wanted to be and how we wanted to feel and how we wanted our team members to feel. And out of that we just really needed late July to be a place that. People were passionate about our mission already. But just that people were passionate about the work experience they were having. And I think bigger than that even for Peter and I was deciding who Late July wanted to be as a company. And part of kind of our early days in the cracker side of our business was something that I think was really important to building our foundation and discovering what we cared about from a mission standpoint. But the products were I think, they tasted great but I just I didn't have the passion that I needed to for where our company was headed and we made a lot of difficult decisions that year in addition to revamping the personality side of our company and the culture side of our company. We decided that as a brand we wanted to stand for something a little bit more in terms of health. And we actually decided to get out of cookies which was a significant amount of our business at that time. We were doing probably $9 million in sales and cookies were $2 million of them. So it was a big deal. And go into tortilla chips which was something both my husband and I really really were passionate about. I tried to get my father to launch them at K Pop Potato Chips but he felt pretty strongly that they were a potato chip company and that was sort of out of their area of expertise. But I felt really strongly about them and so did my husband. And this kind of comes to our next goal which I think is really probably a crazier one. But as a cracker company, we decided we wanted to become the number one tortilla chip in the natural business, in the natural aisle. And coming out of this incredibly difficult year, that was what we had decided to become. And in 2010, we started working on tortilla chips. And taking our company in this completely new direction.

Cindy: Once you had finally decided this. What were some of the steps along the way that took you from okay we're going to go this whole new way to achieving that success? To being the number one tortilla chip in this aisle?

Nicole: Well step one was just launching the tortilla chips, which took us almost the full year. And they officially hit shelves in December of 2010. And they were not off to the greatest start. You know, which I think was a little bit scary because we had just bet our entire company’s future on this launch. You know, and I think that was kind of the first big learning for us. Was okay, we’re going into this new category, it’s much more competitive. You know, you have to sell a lot more tortilla chips to succeed than you do crackers. So you know we kind of dug in to really understand what was causing that and we realized that because we were kind of new to this category we needed to build our brand awareness. So we just picked a couple of accounts, really built up our brand in those before kind of spreading our wings into a broader amount of stores. So we spent that full year just succeeding in the couple of accounts that we were in. And in relatively short order, I think when you kind of put your mind to it like that, we were. I think we might have become the number 3 or something in the first year. So we right away, in the accounts we were in got a high degree of success. And I attribute that to the taste of our products. It’s one thing you really need the repeat consumers and I’ve always believed that as a natural products brand, we have an obligation for the entire industry to make our products taste great. Because when the consumer has a bad experience with one natural product they make an assumption about everything. And in addition to the obligation to the greater industry, no consumer is ever going to buy a snack twice if they don’t like the way it tastes.

Cindy: Right, right. So how do you go about making sure that they do taste great?

Nicole: You know, I think in addition to constantly testing our products versus our competitors and making sure that everyone in our company's eating them and loving them. It's being really ready to hear criticisms and understand how to make things better. Until you're 100% satisfied never launch a product. So many people launch just to meet deadlines or they need a new item. We've never done that at Late July. Until something is 100% ready it will not be for sale. No matter what.

Cindy: That’s interesting to hear you say. And also its interesting to kind of hear you say how you set about launching the tortilla chips. That you really did go deep into a couple markets because one of the things that I was wondering was. You know you haven't necessarily launched a new line since then until now or a major new product anyway. And that seems like different from the way many food companies operate. It seems like for you it’s been kind of an intentional strategy to go slow and to focus more on taste and perfection. Than on just chasing the next new thing. Would you say that’s been part of your success?

Nicole: Absolutely, I mean you know the tortilla market is huge and for us there was really no need to expand past that. You know, particularly for the early days of our launch. Singular focus on kind of becoming the number one requires all of your effort and your team's effort. When we felt like spreading ourselves too thin would just kind of deal reaching that goal.

Cindy: Are there kind of practical ways as you as went along this route that you kind of reinforce that focus within your team and to your employees?

Nicole: I mean, I think it's interesting is that the name of this podcast as #WeGotGoals. And you know I think every meeting should have a goal. And, you know, no matter what our team was doing, we always kept that goal in the back of our mind. In particular, when it came to the tortilla chips. I think that understanding how you’re tracking versus your goal too. So you know in an account or in a retailer, where do you rank? And how are you doing? And making sure that every time you're meeting with someone, you're understanding what you're hoping to get out of that meeting. That sounds very simple but it's also very very important.

Cindy: Right, I remember reading an example of one of your early sales calls where someone asked you what is there anything else you want to talk about. And you said yeah I actually just what your answer. It’s so simple but as you say really effective, right? That you just knew what you wanted and you put it on the line and and then you ended up getting what you needed out of that meeting, right?

Nicole: Yeah, I mean that’s an excellent example. A lot of that came from just sheer desperation in that meeting. But if you don't even know what you want your definitely not going to get it. And I think clearly articulating what you want helps people. It helps. We’re all in this together, in our industry. And certainly within the company and understanding kind of what your objectives are and how that other person can help you achieve them is really a great step in actually achieving them.

Cindy: Right, and it seems like that kind of mindset shift can also help with what you were just talking about in terms of responding to criticism too, right? That if you keep in mind that your ultimate goal, what you really want, is to improve your product. Then you can sort of start to see people who are giving you that feedback even if it's somewhat negative as people who are helping you along the way versus people who are sort of out to get you, right? It seems like that would be a much more optimistic way to look at that.

Nicole: Well I think that’s absolutely true and I mean I think that's true for everything. We're all just kind of learning and growing and none of us are perfect. So you know the more receptive you are too kind of hearing things that could be done better, the more likely you are to improve faster.

Cindy: So now you are in the middle of launching two new product lines - salsa and popcorn. Why did you decide that now was the time to do that and why these particular products?

Nicole: Well the salsa I think is an obvious choice for a tortilla chip company. We're constantly being asked to partner with salsas and plus they're just like right next to the tortilla chips in the store. And I love making salsa at home but it’s not always practical. Sometimes you just need a shelf-stable salsa that you can take with you wherever you’re going. And this is again something that we worked on for many, many years because I was very reluctant to get into salsa because fresh salsa just tastes so much better than jar salsa. But ultimately we determine that there was enough of a need for having a shelf-stable salsa that you can just take with you anywhere that didn't require refrigeration and we were able to come up with one that we were proud of. So we felt it was time to launch it. And I think also with the salsa it’s interesting, not a lot of people are doing certified organic in salsa. And sometimes we feel that that’s our role in a category too. To kind of push people towards certified organic, certainly in tortilla chips. Us coming in as a certified organic tortilla chip has really shifted the category. We’re seeing more and more people experimenting with organic particularly now that we are the number one tortilla in both the natural aisle and the natural aisle of grocery stores. We’re number one in both. People are realizing that the number one can be organic. There are enough consumers out there that do want that, that do care about that. As long as it tastes great, I think in salsa that’s something that people weren’t really pushing that envelope. The majority of salsa out there isn’t certified organic.

Cindy: So, this may or may not lead to the next question but it is about the future. What is a big goal that you have for the future and how do you plan to achieve that whether that's salsa related or are completely different?

Nicole: I think it’s interesting, I also feel like as an entrepreneur it's important to have goals outside of work as well. And you know as I look to my future, my kids are getting older. I have an almost 16 year old, an almost 12 year old. I feel like kind of stepping back a little bit and looking at my family for personal inspiration for my goals. Is how can I balance a little bit better kind of my two worlds. And the whole idea of work-life balance I feel like is a little bit of a sham. Particularly for entrepreneurs. I never unplug or turn off. Even on vacation but I do feel like it’s interesting. You know you think when your kids get older, it requires a little bit less for parents. But I’m finding the opposite is actually true. That you really do need to be more to available and more present for them as they’re getting into their teenage years. So trying to kind of figure out how to balance everything. And I almost hate to use the word balance just because it’s kind of an unreachable goal. But that’s something that I’ve been personally working on as far as future. And I know that’s not work related but I think it’s very important for entrepreneurs. To kind of have personal goals too. And some of the things I’ve been experimenting with are working from home some days. We have the company set up so that it allows flexibility so that other people can do that too. Making sure that we’re eating dinner as a family if not five, at least four nights out of the week. Kind of mini goals I’ve set along the way for us and with the ultimate goal of making sure that I am present and available as my kids kind of enter this next phase of their life.

Cindy: I'm actually really glad to hear you say that. Something that does strike me. I actually don't have kids but when I think about kids growing from small children where they have a lot of physical needs and then when they need to be driven places at cetera to now. Where maybe they have as you're saying like sort of higher-level needs that take more of your brain power to, to serve. Even if they don't always take as much actual time in terms of transit or cooking or or whatever those physical needs are. So I think it's really interesting the way you're thinking about how to make all of this this fit.

Nicole: You know, I think it's interesting that even for our employees that don't have kids. I think it's just kind of learning too. That is okay, doesn't make you less successful of a person to kind of prioritize your private life. And that not to make that a conversation that should be hidden away. I know that when we have people who join Late July that come from much, much larger companies,, it’s a conversation people are reluctant to have. People don’t want to say we’ll I’m not available then because I have to go to my kids school or I’m not available because I have to help like an elderly parent. Or I have to take my dog to the vet. Whatever it is, we all have lives and when you’re a high achieving person you have to not hide that. I think we all have to be okay with putting that out front and having open conversations about it. Because the reality is everybody has obligations outside of work and you know it’s not something to be ashamed of. I think it’s something that as long as you’re achieving and getting your job done and it’s not impacting co-workers negatively, we should learn how to accommodate each other in a healthy way.

Cindy: And you have sort of some different factors in your particular situation too because, you know, you started this as a family business. An