A million dollar deal can be a game changer for most small businesses, but it could also be a financial burden, and not a benefit at all if the product pricing and the deal aren't structured correctly. In this episode, Sarah is sharing the role she played in the negotiations between her client and a distributor that could result in $1 Million in the first year alone! She walks us through everything the founder has done to ensure the deal will be successful, beneficial and profitable.

Are you getting ready to launch a new business? Or maybe you're preparing to launch a new product, or considering launching into a new sales channel? You don’t want to miss this episode! Jason McAlpin is the Founder and CEO of daio – a better sparkling water that combines incredible flavor with functional ingredients. The brand is set to launch in 2024. In this episode, Jason joins Sarah to discuss the work that he did throughout the pre-launch process. They both share the biggest lessons they have learned around planning and forecasting so that you can enter a launch with confidence.

We’re back with another selection for The Good Food CFO Book Club! The Great Game of Business, written by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham, is a documentation and story telling of how SRC Holdings Corporation was approaching business differently. SRC wasn’t run in the traditional top-down way most other companies are. They practiced what Jack calls “Open Book Management” and found success playing “The Great Game of Business”. The result was that they built a repeatable system that enabled their associates to run the company and even branch off to build a new arm of the business.

In this episode we are celebrating the life of a hugely influential member of the food industry, Bryce Fluellen. Sarah had the honor of sitting down with Bryce at the end of 2023. Unfortunately, the world lost Bryce in early 2024. We hope that this interview tells his story and preserves his legacy as a Servant leader for so many in this industry, as he fought for food justice and social equity in every role he served.

Scaling promises to bring not just more revenue, but more profit, more cash flow, and a sense of ease in doing business. And it seems every business owner is eager to get there. In this season opener, Sarah Delevan is answering the #1 question we get asked inside The Good Food CFO Community - “How do I scale my business?”

Profitability is the goal of every business. But at times it can feel like you are doing everything right, everything traditional business media says that you should be, and yet your business is still running out of cash. In this episode, Sarah breaks down a different way of thinking about your finances and improving your cash flow and profitability.

Nikki McNeil is a Co-Founder at Vividly, a trade spend management software which aims to deliver clear value through efficiencies when analyzing trade spend dollars. Whether you’re a founder managing trade spend for one partner or hundreds, having the right system in place can ensure you stay on budget and receive proper payment from all of your distributors and retailers. In this episode, Sarah got to sit down with Nikki to discuss managing trade spend, and what kind of systems you can put in place to support you and your team at any size.

Sourcing the best ingredients for your good food product has many implications for your business. Eran Mizrahi co-founded Ingredient Brothers to support founders in this process.

In this episode, Sarah and Eran connect over their shared buyer and finance experience, building a relationship with your purveyors, and Eran shares an approach to strategically reducing ingredient costs that was spot on and totally new to us!

Traditional business media celebrates big revenue, new accounts, and most of all growth and scale. Cutting revenue in the short term, letting go of accounts and scaling back are the exact opposite of that. So of course right-sizing your business can make you feel bad, and like you’re moving in the wrong direction.

We need to look at the benefits of doing things differently, the benefits of doing what is right for YOUR business, rather than what is generally celebrated in the public eye without context.

In this episode, Sarah shares the reasons behind right-sizing and pulling out of retail, and we hear from 2 founders that chose to right-size, and their reasons behind the move. Sarah also discusses how right-sizing can impact your bottom line in a positive way, and gives us an update on our founders’ stories.