JACK ZOUMARAS
​ARTISTE PLASTIC SURGERY

KATE'S ADVICE WHEN STARTING YOUR BUSINESS

My advice for anyone wanting to start a business is you have to know why you're different and there has to be a gap. If you're just doing what somebody else is already doing and maybe you're doing it a little bit better or slightly different, business is hard enough without having your own point of difference. Something I've always focused on is being different, from day one I’ve always tried to create products that didn't already exist, and I think we definitely delivered on that.

WHY KOJA?
 “I'm so passionate about this business, I think essentially it comes down to nutrition education. I think that all of us should know more about what we're eating and what our bodies need, what certain foods do and how they're digested and what nutrients and vitamins and minerals are associated with what function in the body and without, encouraging everyone to go off and study nutrition for years or months or anything like that. I'm very much about keeping it real, but I do think that we should understand those basics so that when we wake up feeling slightly tired or at the end of the day, we might feel bloated or the myriad of conditions that we might have without health. There's some basic understanding as to why that might be happening and how we can change the way we eat in order to alleviate perhaps like the bloating as one example or fatigue and things like that."

FOLLOW KOJA

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THE JOURNEY TO KOJA?
Probably like most young kids, I loved animals and I wanted to be a vet. I loved my dog and that was the dream, but I diverged away from that pretty quickly. While I was starting out with my brand, I was working with a start-up, I didn't have any equity in the business or own the start-up, but I was engaged to start their business from scratch. It was a pretty exciting opportunity; it was with the Carlton football club. They wanted to create their own range of nutrition supplements for their players and for other elite athletes. I had a great opportunity to learn how to launch a brand, find manufacturers, source ingredients, work with the TGA and the food standards Australia, the regulatory bodies for supplements and for the food industry. And everything else that's involved with a start-up, budgeting, marketing, financials, margins. I quickly realized that my heart wasn't in supplements. I'm very much a real food advocate and couldn't continue to promote products that I didn't believe in with all the synthetic and artificial, awful additives and preservatives that were in supplements

KATE'S FOOD JOURNEY
I understand like a lot of us eat for pleasure and for hunger. And so sometimes you just don't have time to sit down and really think about, what nutrients you might need in that moment. There are so many other things in life to think about and to worry about without needing to add additional stress. I think it becomes relevant when we have a problem with our health. And that's where I started to learn more about nutrition. My problem was that I moved to London when I was 18 and worked in a pub and pretty quickly put on about 15 kilos. I Put my jeans on one day, bent over and they split, can't actually believe I'm telling you this, but it happened. I moved back to Australia after living overseas for 18 months and had all this excess weight. Never something that I had throughout my teenage years. I was always very fit and healthy. I thought to myself, I'm back in Australia I definitely want to get back to a normal weight and that was when I started asking, what is food?  What is it doing? And Why do I feel rubbish when I'm eating all of these diet foods and meal replacement shakes, all the stuff that the advertising tells you to be eating when you're overweight. The advertising telling us we should be having chocolate flavoured bars with only two points; we should be having diet and artificially sweetened products instead of real food and I just felt like rubbish. I had no energy; I wasn't losing weight and that for me was just an awful year or two trying to get back to a healthy weight. What finally worked for me with cutting out all the processed rubbish and just eating whole foods. Real food and vegetables.

THE PROCESSED FOOD TRAP
Processed foods are the real trap for a lot of people. People think, okay, I'm going to make a change a good move for my health and cut out gluten and you then end up consuming more processed foods and processed foods have a lot of sugar, as well as other additives, hidden ingredients, salts and sugars and artificial stuff. And that’s it in a nutshell, processed food doesn't agree with most of us and causes issues like bloating and it's not digested properly. You can have all sorts of digestive issues and we think that's coming from gluten. I mean, obviously for some people are celiac. But for a lot of us, when we cut out processed foods, we feel better. Health is different for everybody, but I think one thing that does agree with most people is real food and, that's our essence at Koja. We're all about it, our tagline is ‘real food and feel better. And that's exactly what we've started talking about, which is that when you eat real food, you feel better.

THE KOJA STRATEGY
We’ve had many over the years and, and plenty that haven't gone according to plan. Last year was a real turning point for us. We launched our bars two years ago and for the first year I really didn't know how to talk about them or how to market them. I was so close to the brand and I knew what was so good about the bars, how great they tasted, that they were whole foods, satiating, you have one and you’re so full for hours. I knew all of this, but what I forgot was that people that are new to our brand have no idea what I'm on about. So, what I did last year is, I got back to basics in terms of what is our brand? What are these products? What are the one or two things that people need to know? And that we came up with our claim, 75% less sugar.  I think that's a really powerful statement. 75% percent less sugar than your average natural snack bar. And that's because we sit in a category with all of the natural snack bars are sweetened with dried fruit, which is usually dates. And so, most of them are 20 grams of sugar in a small snack. Using our 75% less sugar, we wanted to catch people's attention and make it really easy for them to understand, if you're wanting to follow a low sugar diet. Here we are. We had to rework our strategy across communications, social's marketing, all of our presentations, how we talk to buyers, what the packaging looks like to make this change. Everyone is so busy, and we need to be able to respect people's time. They're not, I mean, as a consumer myself, I go to a website and if he can't give me the information that I need in two or three clicks, like I'm out of there.

​YOUR UNIQUENESS IS KEY
I mentor a few other women in business and I think the USP (unique selling proposition) whatever it is that makes you different, is something I go on and on about, because when you find a new customer, it's what they'll want to know about you. It's also what keeps a customer. I think especially in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) keeping customers is almost more important than gaining new ones. If you gain new customers all the time, but they only buy your product once, you're going to have a pretty extensive marketing bill. For us, what's been successful is that we’ve got customers that discovered our brand five years ago and still buy from our website every month. They feel like family even though I've never met them.

INVESTMENT: TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT?
For a lot of people that have their own business or have an idea, investment is something they will consider. For me, shark tank was interesting as I ended up turning down the offer, in hindsight I realised no one's going to work and care about this business as much as I do. So as much as on shark tank, they s all promise I can do this and I'm going to help you with that, and I can mentor your things. The reality is, at the end of the day, if they've done a season of shark tank, they've probably picked up 20 businesses and just don't have time. Shark tank is a great platform to speak to your consumers and get that b to C communication. It's not an angel investor program or an accelerator program. once my episode aired, I realised that there wasn't the right synergy between the investor, and it was season one and was John McGrath there wasn't the right synergy between what his expectations with the business were and what mine were. And so, I didn't go ahead with it. I think what's really important and what I'd really like to share about investment with your listeners is just that I always thought that I needed an investor to be successful. And I think maybe this is a female thing, I'm not sure, but I didn't have the confidence in my own ability. I thought, I have never done this before, how on earth do I take a, a little idea from my kitchen bench and a farmer's market to now be stocking in supermarket shelves? I always thought that I needed an investor and also most investors are male. Over the years I realised that like I'm a quick learner, I'm very motivated and it doesn't matter that I don't know everything. There are people that you can ask on how to do things and you can learn back yourself and fake it. I think it's really exciting to be here now where I haven't taken investment and I still learn own 100 percent of the business and I'm pretty confident that we can continue to grow.

MINDSET AND THE BIG PICTURE
There are two things that I do, and I probably make this mistake on a weekly or a monthly basis. So, it's something I'm always practicing. Having a big picture goal is always really important. So instead of getting bogged down in the little day to day things, cause some days, you know, everything can go wrong and it's blow after, but you know, you get a shitty email and an annoying phone call and a delivery doesn't turn up and it's just like things go wrong. But if you always have that big picture plan, in the next three months, this is what we're trying to achieve. If we're always moving towards that, even if you get a day or a week of hiccups, if you can come back to that bigger plan, you know, like that you're moving ahead, that eases the anxiety around all the little things that go wrong.
The second thing that I do regularly which I catch myself on, is thinking that things are personal. Your business is personal and It's all about building relationships and finding people that you can work with and trust who are on the same page as you, but also understanding that everyone is coming to life from their own point of view and it's not always about me. I think sometimes I'll be like, Oh, why didn't that person stock my range? maybe he/she doesn't like me. I’m like actually Kate get over yourself, it’s got nothing to do with you. I work predominantly in sales, as any business owner probably does, but especially in an FMCG, you're selling your product all the time to different people, different buyers and different channels. Any sales role involves a lot of rejection. I just reminding myself that every rejection is part of the sales process. For me a lot of my career has been working predominantly on my own. I haven't had a manager, or you know, any, anyone really to say, Kate, this is what you need to be working on. It is about being your own manager and doing performance assessments on myself in some way. I've been doing KOJA now for five and a half year before that I worked on another business where there were directors, but I was the only full time employee as it was a start-up. Most of my career has been me with a laptop trying to make shit happen. ​I'm far from perfect. I'm still learning lots of different things. And some things I think like when we find our weaknesses, sometimes it's not always necessary to change them. I think it's also just about acknowledging them and then playing to your strengths

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KEY LEARNINGS FROM THE SO CALLED FAILURES
I launched this business with Breakfast Toppers, and they are essentially a failure because I launched them into hundreds of retail outlets across the country and they were so slow to move and to sell that they got pulled off the shelves really, really quickly. Now breakfast offers are sold in 10 stores across Australia and so they are our failure. The interesting thing about why I keep selling them is, for one I love them, and I eat them every day, so it's kind of a selfish thing. also, we do over $10,000 a month on our website in breakfast topper sales. They're successful in that sense that the people who love and understand our brand are literally addicted to the breakfast toppers. I would never stop making them, never say never, but I really don't want to stop making them because even though they failed in the retail space. The main thing that I learned was that they're $15.95 or $16 and for an FMCG product that's a really high price point. Most people, when browsing the shelves are not going to spend $16 on one product. The way Breakfast Toppers worked was 

when I was at the farmer's market and I could really explain to people that they're like a natural multivitamin. They're a mix of nuts and seeds and two tablespoons a day provides 25 vitamins and minerals, plus a really nice hit of fibre. They balanced out any digestive issues and there's nothing else like them and people kept buying them. In terms of failure, for years I pushed those products and through shark tank we had a lot of success in sales, but it just didn't get easier and it was always really hard to get that growth. So that's definitely what I would define as my failure. There were parts of the product that worked, but a lot that didn't. At the time I didn’t have any other products, I didn't have the protein pancakes or the peanut butter bars. I thought okay, I've got this great brand and this great business but I'm not growing and I'm working so hard to try to grow the business on these three breakfast toppers and it wasn't happening. You start thinking should I shut down the business? And that was something I definitely considered. Or do I evolve? And I obviously evolved and got what worked, and this is all just through talking to customers and having a little bit of a gut feel myself but understanding what is it that customers love about these products. But what is it that stops people from buying them regularly?

AT KOJA WE CHOOSE A BETTER PRODUCT OVER PROFITABILITY!
Some healthy products have got a two year shelf life in the Coles aisle where we're sitting now, a lot of them are actually made overseas in the US or in Asia. We’re putting product on the shelf that was made within a few weeks and will be sold within a few weeks. When you buy a Koja Bar it’s got a six or a nine month shelf life on it, we don't use any preservatives, it's just a shorter supply chain. our bars are made in regional Victoria and then they're delivered to the Coles, in Victoria and new South Wales a week after they've been made. There was an interesting statistic I heard recently that was there's a direct correlation between the shelf life of a product and the profitability of that range. For example, a Mars Bar if they can increase the shelf life of that product, they're going to make more profit off that product. For big corporate food manufacturers, they're always looking for the next chemical that means that they can have a longer shelf life. When it comes to food and particularly for us at Koja, it's not about trying to make more money, it's about trying to put out a better product.

WHAT DOES BEAUTY MEAN TO KATE?

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