From Seed to Startup: Guest Contributor, Sam Rose
#TheGroundFloor is thrilled to welcome guest contributor, Sam Rose, for this week’s edition. Sam is the Founder of Rosebud Ice Cream & is based in Denver, Colorado.
I am very excited to welcome Sam to #TheGroundFloor as he shares his story where he took an idea and turned it into a reality!
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My name is Sam Rose, I’m the Founder and Cream Executive Officer of RoseBud Ice Cream. After growing up in the suburbs outside Chicago I attended DePaul University. While in school, I met Andrew’s fiancee, Kari, which is ultimately how I got connected with Andrew.
After a few years of “figuring it out” I decided to start a marijuana company following a trip to Colorado. Junior and senior year I spent countless hours creating a business plan for a dispensary and eventually I pitched the plan to an investor who laughed me out of the meeting. Afterwards, I met up with my friend to smoke away my sorrows. My friend jokingly suggested I move to Colorado to start a THC ice cream company. Before he could finish laughing from his joke I was already putting together a business plan. After years of ups and downs, more downs than ups but who’s counting, I now run my own CBD ice cream company. How did I get here, you ask? Well that’s why I’m writing this, so don’t worry it’ll be explained, I promise.
Aside from running an ice cream business, I’m also a boxer (is it ironic? I don’t know but people frequently tell me that it is). Boxing is a passion, bordering on obsession, of mine and has been part of my life for over 11 years now. There’s a lot to love about the sweet science, but what I appreciate most is how tangible results come from hard work. Boxing helped me discover and incorporate two of my core beliefs for both business and life. The first being that it’s critical to learn to thrive in discomfort. The better you are at handling the pressure of someone trying to knock you out, the better you’ll perform. The second supports the first belief in that planning and preparing will always make it easier to find comfort in the most uncomfortable situations.
As someone with an anxiety disorder it can be tough for me to go out of my way to introduce myself to strangers or, God forbid, try to be outgoing around them. That’s part of the reason why I found cold calling to be such a traumatic experience when I was younger. It took my fears of having to be outgoing with strangers and amplified them by trying to get those strangers to buy something from me. Selling knives door-to-door gave me enough experience to eventually get a job selling phones door-to-door and later selling solar panels. to homeowners. Being uncomfortable over and over again helped me to identify what it was I didn’t like about cold calling. Not knowing what to say made me speak poorly, which made it a lot easier for people to tell me to f*** off. After realizing what was making me nervous when I would cold call, I began committing a script to memory. This made dealing with people easier from the start of the interaction. The confidence boost it gave was apparent and it helped me relax when trying to sell. One of the big elements that hindered my cold calling was that I didn’t believe in what I was selling. Even after I became confident in creating curiosity, interest, and a need for what I was selling--I still felt uncomfortable trying to close the sale. What I realized is that I didn’t believe in what I was selling, which made it harder to close. These days cold calling is one of my favorite parts of what I do. Repeated bad experiences taught me how to identify pain points and prepare to conquer them. When I make calls these days, I have a script memorized. I’ve done it enough times where I can improvise because I’ve dealt with my personal worst case scenarios more times than I can count. Now that I’m selling the best ice cream in the country there’s no longer doubt about asking a stranger for money for what I’m selling.
Getting what you deserve seems like an odd thing to cause discomfort, but it has put me in quite a few jams over the years. The main reason is because what I know I deserve is often at odds with what someone else believes I deserve. Conversely, I may not always see the value of what someone else feels they deserve to be accurate. Often this leads to situations legal experts refer to as “negotiations”, or so my lawyer tells me. Disagreeing with someone is usually awkward for me. However, it’s a necessary evil of doing business. When it comes to negotiating a deal I always fear that I’ll lose the deal entirely if an agreement can’t be reached. Obviously concessions are made to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement. What I learned over time is that if I have to make all the concessions then I’m not getting what I need and the deal is better off not being made anyways. Mapping out best, realistic, and non-starter scenarios ahead of time is what makes it possible to ensure I’m not wasting time with an uncomfortable situation. Planning out points, thinking through their validity, and even practicing with a friend ahead of time has helped turn an unbearable situation to a tolerable affair. Although I wish I could avoid most negotiation scenarios that’s not how things work. So, it’s best to learn to deal with them head on and improve my chance of success by planning ahead.
If you’re still reading you might remember how earlier I mentioned what inspired my move to Colorado was a joke about a THC ice cream company. You may also remember that I said that I have a CBD ice cream company. How did I get there you ask? A lot of planning, and dealing with the ultimate discomfort caused by confusing pivoting with failing.. Starting a THC infused ice cream company is no easy task and it requires a lot of capital. I went from never making ice cream before to learning how to master creating THC ice cream. Additionally, I had to become an expert with state marijuana regulations, and figure out how to create and market a brand all while trying to raise the capital needed to do so. For 3 years, I put myself through uncomfortable situations so that I could create a perfect business plan. After a year of negotiations with investors fell through, around the same time as a horrible break up, I felt as though I was right back where I started. Actually I felt worse than when I started because I felt like I failed. My business partner suggested pivoting to CBD ice cream because it had a lot less hurdles than THC. The idea horrified me. At the time it meant that not only had I failed, but also given up. I decided to just go for it and deal with feeling like a failure while getting things started. The feeling of failure didn’t last. Because I had spent so much time planning for a THC ice cream business, I was in a much better position to start a CBD ice cream business. Who would have thought? Not me. Although there were more, like way more, uncomfortable situations to be had in getting this business off the ground, the feeling of failure finally subsided. In fact, those feelings blossomed into courage that led me to leave my day job at the start of a global pandemic to pursue ice cream full time.
Putting myself into uncomfortable situations over and over again taught me how to deal with them. By doing so I learned how to plan for future uncomfortable situations, and it will continue to help me for all that is yet to come. Even with that knowledge, I still deal with being nervous quite regularly, especially in situations where I should feel more at ease. When I find myself feeling anxious or uncertain, I recite a line my friend's Dad said to calm me down before our band went on for our first big concert.
“It’s alright to be nervous right now. It doesn’t mean you’re not prepared, it just means that you care.”
- Sam
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Thank you, Sam, for being a guest contributor for #TheGroundFloor!
I am always looking to welcoming guest contributors to #TheGroundFloor! If you are interested in writing or have a specific topic you’d like discussed, please contact me!
- Andrew