If you are creative, if you are a true entrepreneur, you will be able to come back and do it again, and the next thing will be better.Floss Dental is located in Broadway, a thriving inner Sydney suburb within walking distance of the Sydney CBD. But use this period to build you for the next stage in your life, which can be unbelievable. It is not there coincidentally, and this may sound maybe a little bit too spiritual and mystical, but I would say listen to it carefully. Hell has benefits on the way you talk to other people and how you think about business. It has benefits on your ego, and ego is a very destructive element in our personalities. I would say it even stronger: This is a one-time opportunity. But hopefully - and this is what I told myself - you're not going to go through hell many times. You ask: How could this happen to me? Even though you know that part of it is probably your fault. You're angry at the world, angry at God, angry at everyone. But then he said, “You need to stop doing this and this and this in Little Brown.” I said, “I cannot, I already have franchisees, and you know you’re jeopardizing my concept.” Well he didn't say anything much, and then one day on a Friday afternoon, somebody knocked on the door and said, “You're being served.”Īt a certain point, you just want to collapse. But one day the chairman of Max Brenner came to me and told me, “Listen, I don't think it's working between us, we should split.” I told him no problem. So I opened one on the upper East side, and then I had a franchise in Russia and one in Dubai, and I leased another store in Chelsea… they never told me I was doing anything bad. I pitched it to Max Brenner and they weren’t interested, so I told them, “I think it's not in competition with Max Brenner, and I want to open a store like this under a different brand name.” They said no problem. And eventually I decided that I wanted to start a new concept, like a Starbucks of chocolate - smaller stores, self-service, quick serve. But in general, I wanted to be involved less and less. I was showing up for PR, events, interviews, whatever, here and there, and I was making new recipes sometimes. At some point, I started to show up less to meetings, and I think they were relieved because they didn't want to see me there. I mean, they cannot work together.įor a very long time, bitterness and frustration were building up. It’s not good or bad, but they are thinking and analyzing and slowly, “Let's bring in a consultant.” An entrepreneur and a consultant, they are like oil and water. And the corporate is mostly people who are running an already existing business. Doesn't matter.” This is almost his nature to push forward and make things happen. But he just says, “Okay, so this was a mistake. Why do you think this is the way?” The entrepreneur usually doesn't think, he knows. When you say, “Let's try to sell in Japan,” it’s, “Why Japan? Who told you it's a market?” But the Japanese love dark chocolate! “How do you know, show us research. It's, “Let’s think about it, analytics, who told you this is true? Why this packaging? Why these colors? Why are you changing the brand language?” It's endless. The corporate process is extremely different. He wants to do things, he wants to see them happen right now. I don't want to generalize, but usually, an entrepreneur is a very impulsive, gut-instinct person. Many people told me that an entrepreneur cannot work in a corporate environment. I really turned it into a chocolate amusement park.” You say, ‘I'm addicted to chocolate, I want a chocolate fix.’ So I created a big syringe full of chocolate so you can shoot it into your mouth. Let's create a ‘hug mug,’ so you can hug your mug close and feel like you are in a chalet on a ski vacation. I said: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Let's create chocolate pipes that go all around the restaurant. So this was the beginning of Max Brenner. Traditional chocolate stores treat chocolate almost like jewelry, in these beautiful boxes - don't touch it! But when I talked to my customers, they were talking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, sexy gifts, romantic childhood memories, the emotional connotations of chocolate. “I felt there was a big gap between the way people talk and think about chocolate and the way they experience it in the retail world. “The things I was doing in my shop were very out of the box, different from classic European chocolate stores,” he says.
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