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Adam Mendler



KARMIC BOOMERANGS


I recently went one on one with Elliot Begoun, founder of TIG. TIG has launched a number of companies in the natural product products space, focusing on building brands nimble, capital-efficient, resilient brands.


Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?


Elliot: I spent the first 25 years of my career following what I thought was the safe and expected route after college. I went to work for a corporation, climbed the ladder and eventually became part of the c-suite. However, with each successive rung, I found myself less and less fulfilled. I felt like a pariah. I wanted to change things and make things better. The status quo was boring. One day I was heading into the office, and my wife simply said, “You’re miserable, and if you think you can hide it or fake it, you’re wrong. It’s time to do something different.”


I resigned a few weeks later with only a rough idea of what I wanted to do next and no real understanding of how to make that into a business. On paper, it was crazy, we had two kids in college and one in high school, and I chose this moment to sow my entrepreneurial oats?


Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?


Elliot: I knew I wanted to work with entrepreneurs. Having been in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry for so many years, I felt I had a lot to teach early-stage founders. My wife always claimed that I was a misplaced college professor. It turns out that my professorial thinking was a bit arrogant. I find myself, 7+ years later, playing the role of the student as often as I am the teacher, which, by the way, is pretty cool. I love that I am learning every day. I believe that is the fundamental lesson of entrepreneurship: to be curious. To commit oneself self to lifelong learning.


Adam: How do you know if a business idea is worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?


Elliot: Ultimately the market decides if a business is worth pursuing—the savvy founder figures out a way to test his or her hypothesis before leaning in too far. For example, my aha moment came when I was at a retreat at Stanford's d-School (design thinking). I recognized that most of the accelerator models in the Natural Products industry are modeled after Tech. The two industries could not be more different. I started to ask myself, what if I created an accelerator that didn’t follow the tech model? One that was not cohort-based, time-limited, required founders to step away from the business and had an equity mandate. Yet, before I ran headlong into building that program, I pulled together five founders who were representative of the type of brands and entrepreneurs I wanted to serve. They became my focus group in return for some advisory work. With their input, I developed a model that met the needs of those I hoped to serve. A model I was now confident would be well-received. Put simply: I believe the best approach to testing is to build a growth hypothesis and then develop a method to validate the hypothesis’s basic assumptions.
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