Shownotes
Trish Groom, business development leader and serial entrepreneur, takes us into her journey towards success as she lays down the attitudes and mindset that got her there. From opening a coffee shop called Sidney’s Café to evolving into other business ventures with Splick-it, Inc, she shows that determination to reach her goals. As a business owner making her own name in the game, she encourages women to become investors as well. She has built this community for women investors to tap into an industry that no one taps them into. Talking more about her businesses, she gives great advice on how to inspire other people to become successful in their areas as well.
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The Spirit Of A Serial Entrepreneur with Trish Groom
We have Trish Groom on the show. She was the Owner of a coffee shop called Sidney’s here in town. She’s the Cofounder of Splick.it. Trish, thanks so much for taking time out of your day.
Thanks for having me.
Trish is a serial entrepreneur. She’s on more than one business. She’s involved in many different things in the business community. In Splick.it, tell me about your role and who does Splick.it serves?
I was Cofounder and in business development. We built an online pre-order, pre-pay app and web for businesses, for restaurants specifically. We target more franchise companies. The sweet spot for us are franchises that have between 500 and 1,200 locations. We white label for them and provide the service. We manage the backend and the customer experience for them.
I’m not a restaurant person. Let’s say I’m the franchise owner, what improvement or what change should I expect to see by using Splick.it?
A lot of restaurants lose revenue because they lose people at the end of the line. They can’t wait. In the early stages, we were one of the first to come up with this idea where we were taking your pre-order and pre-payment and putting it on an app. That way, you can still as an owner, get that revenue in the door and the customer can still get served quickly like they need to do be.
That’s the sticky factor on the long line. For the app, is it an app that the customer has to have or does an employee come from the restaurant with the app?
We do the marketing. We help the franchise market the app to a customer. They download it and create an account. We have a credit card on file so it’s easy for them to order and pay.
The consumer won’t know that it’s Splick.it because it will be private labeled for the franchises. How long has that company been around?
We started in 2009.
That was an auspicious time.
It was rough, a lot of early-stage friends and family rounds.
Serial Entrepreneur: If you’re going to run a race, do everything you can to win.
What folks don’t realize is you didn’t come from a business background. Your first foray in Boulder was you bought a coffee shop.
I did buy a coffee shop. What I didn’t realize was that I had never drunk a cup of coffee in my life and I thought that was a good idea. I didn’t realize that was unusual at the time.
Do you drink coffee now?
I do. I learned a lot. I was traveling in South America for a year and had this idea that I wanted to own a coffee shop. Not because I loved coffee, but because I thought that there was some community aspect to it that was intriguing. I came home from South America and I had no money and no business owning a coffee shop. I had no experience whatsoever. I was teaching at the time, but I ended up in Telluride during the summer at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. My parents probably don’t want to know this part, but I drink a lot of beers and ended up buying a coffee shop from a couple there that I had met and ran into. Two weeks later, the universe conspires sometimes and the next thing I knew, I bought a coffee shop.
When thinking about some of the decisions that business owners make, do you remember the thought process or moment when you decided, “I’m going to do this?” Do you remember what that was like?
Ignorance is bliss. I was willing to bet on myself. I’d always take a chance on me. That was my moment in time. I had no idea how to run any business, but I was like, “I’m going to do it because I believe in me and I will bet on me first.” I take that leap of faith any day. That’s how I went into any business. That was the first moment.
Women can also be investors.
For the parents who are out there saying, “We want to instill that same type of self-confidence,” what do you think your parents contributed toward that? If so, what did they do?
I was super active in sports, so that helped. The self-confidence came from my parents encouraging me to be better than everybody else on the field. Not that I had to be the best shooter because I never was or the best dribbler, but I was the best hustler and they wanted me to be the best hustler. If you’re going to run a race, do everything you can to win to get to the front, be at the front. I was never the best player, but I was encouraged to be captain of the team. Those skills built the confidence of like, “If nobody else is going to do it, I can do it. I’m going to step up and do it because I believe I can do it.” I was supported to believe that.
There are both sides of that leadership gig. When things go well, it’s pretty easy. You have two sisters. Your dad had a particular skill set that he passed onto you guys.
He was a wrestler and he was multiple times the best wrestler in the country. He’s in the National Hall of Fame. He’s won national championships and he had three girls. We got heavily trained.
We were chatting about that a little bit and I said, “Do you still wrestle your sisters?” The answer is, “Yes.”
They don’t want to admit that, but yes.
What’s your favorite hold? What’s your favorite move?
We were trained on the famous Head Chuck. That’s was what he was known for. We know that skill well, single leg, double legs. We were trained that if someone comes up behind us with a gun, what do we do? How do we handle it? It’s helped a lot. In college, I ended up playing rugby and I played rugby for many years. It was a lot of those same skill sets went right in there. Sports have helped me a lot to become a first-generation business entrepreneur. You don’t know what you don’t know in the business world as well.
Tuition is expensive typically in the business world. When you went down to South America and came back, what do you think the chief lessons coming out of that time in South America were?
I traveled with my cousin. Going down to South America as two young women is pretty dangerous. We had to come up with some ways to stay safe. One of them was we shaved our heads the night before we got on a plane to present ourselves as like, “We’re this crazy. You don’t want to mess with us.” That helped but being in those countries for that long, there’s a sense of vulnerability and rawness that you have to be prepared to expose yourself to. Through rawness starts to come to some self-realization and truths that were impeccable for me to go through to achieve some level of success in my life and truths about myself, truths about who I am and where I want to go in life, and what does that look like to me.
It certainly gives you an idea of what less than good looks like. Week one in the coffee shop, thinking back to the thought process and the learning curve, you had some interesting ways of getting tutoring when required. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
I had to get creative quick and being resourceful is something I’m good at. I might have learned that from my dad. We’re not the smartest crew out there, that’s for sure, but we figured out who the smart people are. There are a couple of things that happened in the coffee shop that I didn’t know at the time was going to be super helpful. The first one was that the coffee shop was built on personality. I had asked the original owners to stay on for a year with me because it was built on their personality. I had to get the customers to start trusting me and my personality. There was this transition period that it had taken for me to establish the coffee shop on my own.
We get stimulated by other people’s ideas.
Through that trust, I was able to ask my customers for things that I didn’t know how to do, and I traded coffee for it, and be in that vulnerable state because they’re my customers. They also wanted to help me because we built this relationship. I had no idea how to do accounting. I traded coffee for accounting. I didn’t know how to do marketing, so I traded that. I didn’t know how to do branding, so I traded that. I probably traded more coffee than money that came in. That cost some tuition going in. I also traded coffee for programmers to help me with that first beta on Splick.it, building that first beta, seeing if the idea that I had worked, and solving for my own problem of losing customers at the end of my line.
It’s interesting to address a pain point. You see it in the restaurant business frequently. How do you turn the table? How do you get the customer through? Can you turn the tables enough? It’s the ongoing challenge. Most people look at it then go, “There’s nothing I can do.” The difference for you is you weren’t willing to take, “There’s nothing I can do.”
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
It’s getting resourceful quick and I had amazing customers as well. I had the founder of Celestial Seasonings coming into my coffee shop every day. I had this opportunity to tell me, “What do I need to do?” That’s how I learned about the E-Myth book. I read that and had a complete panic attack.
Did you find that there was resistance for people saying, “Can you help me?” Do you find much resistance with people helping you when you ask?
No, but through sports, I learned the skill of being coachable. That has played out significantly in my life. Coming to the table in a demeanor of, “I’m coachable. I’m willing to listen. I’m willing to learn,” opens the doors quite a bit for me and has carried me far. I didn’t have any resistance there, but I also think there had to be a lot with our relationship.
You think about the best professional athletes, they have a multitude of coaches. You think about the professional golfers, they have a multitude of coaches. You’ll see somebody with talent that’s not coached and you go, “Why aren’t they doing it?” because they clearly have the physical skills. Being able to listen, it’s a lost art. There’s the germination of the idea for Splick.it and your coffee shop. You sold the coffee shop at some point.
I sold it after owning about four years.
For the folks that have a business looking after the sale, what advice or takeaways did you learn post-sale?
I felt like I can fly. I didn’t realize the amount of stress and pressure that I had on myself to succeed. I sold it. I signed all the papers on a Friday at [4:00]. Our coffee shop was luckily closed on the weekends. Monday morning when I got up at [4:30] AM, I felt relief and like, “I don’t have to hold the burden anymore.” That is a beautiful feeling. It’s an addictive feeling, though. You go back into entrepreneurship because you want the thrill of it all. You certainly want the sell too because you want to be relieved.
We talked about how do you exit properly. When you think about the lessons learned on a previous exit, those thoughts, how did that shape your approach to Splick.it after having sold the coffee shop? Did it change how you approached that company?
I can’t say I had the intuition that a lot of those skill sets should transfer because I went from coffee to tech. I didn’t believe that I’ve done this before because it felt different building a tech company. Looking back, almost everything transferred. I didn’t think it at the time.
Women are amazing philanthropists and we have to have that as part of the solution.
Business is business and you hear that a lot. There are a lot of factors in business. You can be selling trucks or you can be doing tech or you can be doing something else. At the end of the day, you have a customer somewhere. You have to take care of the customer, relationships and deliverable of some kind. You’re now in the throes of potentially exiting Splick.it.
That’s the goal, to get acquired there and there’s a lot of activity in this space. We’re going to see something. It’s a matter of when and at a valuation that we love.
It’s an interesting challenge to go through that exit halfway. You’re doing it twice now. You were talking about some of the things that you’re doing in the community and in the community with women about business. Let’s dig into that.
I feel my life is full of a lot of a-ha moments and becoming a woman investor is one of those. I didn’t know as a kid I can be CEO. That conversation never happened. This is also one of those things I learned later in life that women can be investors. When that light switch went on for me, it was game-changing. I was like, “I’ve got to get involved. I’ve got to do this. I have to be part of this solution.” Nobody ever told me before that I can be an investor.
I’m a huge fan of the thought process. When you had that a-ha moment, do you remember what that felt like or what you were thinking at the time?
I remember exactly. It was across the street from here. I was at a luncheon and this woman was raising a fund. I was invited to the luncheon and her speech wasn’t the thing that caught my attention. It was somebody else in the crowd who stood up and said, “I am starting a woman-only fund. Any woman in this crowd could be an investor. I’m going to show you how to do it. You’d be part of my fund and it’s learning by doing. We’re going to go build a fund. We’re going to bring in companies. We’re going to teach you how to be an investor. We can do it.” I was like, “Those words are mind-blowing.” I went to her right after I said, “Count me in, whatever it takes.” Whatever that intuition was, I learned the details later of why it was important to be an investor, that other women step up and be investors.
Serial Entrepreneur: We’re not here to take over the world. We’re here to bring it back to center and balance.
I think about that as like a lightning rod. You were a business owner already. You had sold a business and started another one. You’re at this meeting, telling that you can be an investor. The next thought is as an investor in this group of women, what’s been the follow-on or knock-on effect of you being associated with the women in the investing community?
What I have been exposed to is this network of amazing women. What has been a struggle being a female growing up is not enough role models, especially being an aggressive young girl. I had muscles, but I never saw a girl in a magazine with muscles. I didn’t see a girl in a magazine with muscles until Athletic came out and that store. I felt alone in much of my path and then being exposed to all these women who are everything I’ve wanted to be in life or as an entrepreneur, as a business person, I now have access to. I have an example. I have someone to talk to. I have the ability to get advice from. That has been invaluable for me especially at the stage of where I want to go.
My daughter is out in the space and in the business community and so on. I’ve been a business owner for a long time. When I was growing up, no one in my family had owned a business. You think about that key differential. If you were to start another business after, which I can’t imagine that you’re not, given your experience from these two businesses and the community of women investors, how do you think you would approach the next business differently or would you?
I would because I’ve seen enough pitches now. I know what a good idea is, what a bad idea is or how to even sell an idea. With a lot of the conversations I’ve had with entrepreneurs, I don’t want a list of your exit strategies. Don’t tell me who could potentially buy it. What is it? What’s the plan? Who are you already having conversations with? To start the next businesses, I don’t want to start with just the idea. I also want to start talking to the potential exiters because I want to start that business with what they need in mind. How can I fulfill what their gaps are or their weaknesses are with a business I’m going to build?
If you had your young children, boy and girl, and you were going to take and offer advice to the audience that had young children and they go, “She sounds cool. We want our kids to be like her.” What advice would you offer those folks?
I would love to take my son to Demo Days. There are a lot of accelerators that have Demo Days because it exposes them to people who have ideas. It exposes them to people being brave enough to step in front of a group of people and share their idea. They could be anything. I was exposed to, “You can be a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor.” It’s not until my adult years that I’ve learned of all these possibilities that I would have probably gone after if I knew about them, but I didn’t. I had to take my own path.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Populating the thought process is an interesting thing. My kids are now in the late twenties, early 30s and you look at the mistakes that you get to make that your kids will remind you about later when you thought that you were under foot the whole time. I’ve always advocated for them to do business, but we’ll see how that pans out over the years. We’re shifting gears a little bit. It’s the part of the episode where we talk about things that are influential and so...
