Welcome to Season 15 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Molly Blakeley, founder and CEO of Molly Bz, talks about how she built a nationwide cookie brand from $150 and an InstaPot experiment. Sponsored by CoPack Connect.
In Episode 4, Molly shares the keys to getting the most out of mentorships – from both sides.
Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.
Joanie Spencer: Hi Molly. Thank you so much for coming back for a fourth episode.
Molly Blakeley: Thanks for having me. This has been fun. I’m not gonna lie, I’m having a great time.
Spencer: Oh my gosh, I’m having a blast too. Okay, so your story is different from a lot of people that I met in the industry, or a lot of entrepreneurs in that you spent your life absorbing lessons from your parents without even realizing it. At what point did you see that your parents were actually mentors, that you were learning from them, and not just being parented by them?
Blakeley: I’d have to think about that. I think it was how they were parenting me. So it wasn’t really even mentorship. It was just like some kids have to wash dishes after school, and I had to run a bowling alley. You know? It was just like different. So to get my allowance, my $3.25 an hour I was getting or whatever at the time, it had to work. So it was very normalized for me. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal.
So for me, I don’t think I ever was like, “Oh, wow, they were mentors for me.” it was just like, that’s just what you do. I think now, though that I’m writing the memoir, I appreciate it so much more, you know. But truly … and people ask me all the time, “How do you just go and do it and don’t have fear?” And I’m just like, I don’t know. How do you have fear? What are you afraid of? Just do it. So it’s just a different way to be raised. I guess I’m I’m so blessed that I was raised that way,
Spencer: Yeah, for sure. And it was just such an interesting upbringing that just fearlessness was the status quo.
Blakeley: Yeah, it was just like, if it doesn’t work, try again. That was really what we did. When my parents had their businesses, some of them didn’t do great, you know, but then we would just close it and start another one. There was one time I remember my mom … my mom and dad. I say my mom because she was a creator. My dad was a background guy. So, you know, he made sure the wheels kept turning. But, at one point she had, like, Stormin’ Norman’s, the arcade, with the ice cream shop and the restaurant. She kept taking out walls and building it bigger. So it went from like three tables to, I think at the end, it had like 50 tables. She just kept expanding and expanding.
And then we had the bowling alley, and then the roller rink, and the radio stations, the pawn shop, the flower shop, everything kind of going at once. Plus she was a landlord. Then she also had a dress shop called the Classy Chassis. All those things were going and just for fun, she decided in her office to start doing like Lee press-on nails when they first came out, and she was doing like, women’s nails, like, as a side hustle for fun. And now that I look back on it, because she was so busy, she didn’t have a lot of, like, lady friends, and so they would come in and they would just gossip and have so much fun. And so she would just listen and glue on these nails and stuff for them, and she’d get, like, two appointments a week or whatever, and she loved it. So, you know, it’s just so funny. She just was always doing more things.
Spencer: So, in your adulthood, then, and in your professional life, and specifically with Molly Bz Cookies, who have been your professional mentors?
Blakeley: Oh, wow. I’m really big about learning from everyone. I love to see what people are doing and and just learning from them. Brian Duffy from Bar Rescue, he was like the food mentor in the very beginning seasons. And he’s also done some stuff. He’s been on, like Bobby Flay and that sort of thing as like a judge and stuff. He is my personal friend, and and so he’ll call to check up on me, and he’s done a couple brands and stuff. And he has, like, a spice brand he did, like the loaded cheeseburger, I think, at one time, like a little device he had, so he knows about that kind of thing. And plus, he speaks food. Food is a great mentorship for me, because I like to say, “I think I’m going to try this and this and this.” “Oh my gosh, that’s such a good idea. And do you know what else you should add? This and this and this.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’m gonna do that.” So we geek out together. So I love Brian, and he’s so fun, and he’s so nice. He’s been to Alaska twice in the last year and a half, so I’ve gotten to hang out with him, which is always fun, and we went to the World Food championship together. And I don’t know he’s a good guy, so that would definitely be one of them.
And then truly, like, I love that show Food That Built America on Discovery. Have you seen this show? Oh, it’s so good. Is just like, I fan girl hard on that. I’ve watched every episode. Like, I fan girl on it. And one of the hosts of the show started following my LinkedIn. So I reached out to him and said, “like, I want to send you cookies.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, it’s so cool.” He and I become friends. He ends up doing a post about me saying that I’ll be like, the next big thing that builds America. And I just … I couldn’t … I cried. I was like, “This is the coolest thing ever.” Of course, I sent it to everyone I could think of, you know, I’m like, “Look at this.” He did this post screenshot, you know, making it on his Instagram, too. I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited.
So there are people that like they just make such an impact on your life that don’t realize it. When I went from 20 boxes a week to 45 boxes a day, I had been shouted out on Buzzfeed, and that was the thing that made me think, “This is something. I’m going to be bigger than what I thought, because Buzzfeed is national, and I’m just in this little, tiny Alaska town.” That guy who wrote that article still doesn’t know what he did for me, and I’ve tried to locate him.
People can make such a difference in your life, like you are making a difference in my life right now by having me here, you know. And there are things that make you go to a new level and level up and stuff. Those are my mentors. Those are the people who bless me.
Spencer: So, then. who are you mentoring?
Blakeley: I mentor about 120 women and men … businesses. It started out like part of, like a group thing, and it just kept building, like some group chat thing, and people would just ask questions on, like packaging or, how do you do this or that, or whatever. And because I’ve got such an array of experience in basically everything you could think of, I can go off of that experience.
So I’ll say, “Oh, yeah. if you want to do that, this is how you do it. It’s going to take this many UPC codes. Here’s where you buy your UPC codes and everything.” And I don’t charge for mentorship. I just want to bless people. So I think later on, once I exit out of Molly Bz, I’m going to coach maybe make a living at that for a while. But I just really enjoy seeing people win.
And there are some that are, if they really listen and they … there’s a difference. You have mentees, I call them, that listen and do what you say, and you can watch them grow, and they really succeed. Not because, listen, I’m not, I’m just going off of my life experience, you know. But then there are other ones that don’t listen, and then they fail, and they fail doing exactly the opposite of what you told them to do, and that’s hard. And then there are people that just will take up hours of your time and not do anything. They just want to talk to you, you know, and so it’s weird. You gotta kind of give and take. That’s why people charge for it, you know, because there are people that will waste your time.
Spencer: What do you get out of it personally? Like when you know, you said that people have made an impact on your life, and they don’t even realize it. How are the people that you mentor impacting your life?
Blakeley: Hearing them succeed. There’s one little gal here in Alaska. She started a little cheesecake business, and she had never done wholesale before, so I kind of walked her through everything, and she got her first restaurant to carry her cheesecakes, and the second restaurant to carry her cheesecake. Now, she got one of the Alaska big chain stores. Oh, she’s selling like, 1,500 cheesecakes a week right now with these people.
We talked about pricing, and she wanted to charge too much. I said, “Do you want to make really, like, 70% margins and have 100 customers? Or do you want to make 50 or 45% margins and have thousands of customers? That’s your choice.” And she was like, “Oh.” And just like getting that to lock into their mind, that it makes a big difference. So, that has been fun.
Fred Meyer just called her. They called her. And so I said, “Girl, the next thing we do is we locate a co-packer. Like this is where you’re going. Once you expand so much in Alaska, you can’t grow anymore, like I did. That’s when we go to the next step, and I can help you with that, too. So I’m really excited. And she texts me constantly, daily. This is what just happened. This is what you know. So it’s been fun. Yeah, it makes me proud.
Spencer: Okay, so how big — finger quote big — is Molly Bz? So how many people do you have on your team?
Blakeley: It’s kind of a broad question, because, like, I have me, and I’m the sole employee, and I 1099 everybody. Okay, so every I don’t have anyone that’s just works for Molly Bz. Everyone on my team does other things for other people. So for me, that was great when I was growing, and it’s still great. So my vice president is Frank Alfieri, and he’s been with me from the beginning. He’s the one I met … He got me on QVC, and then he was just like, “I worked with a million brands. Molly, this brand’s going somewhere. I want to be a part of what you’re building.” And then that also, what an impact that made on me, for someone like that, to say that to me. I was like, “Wow, he really believes in me. This is something.”
And then we. Have a Emily Desoa, and she owns it’s called Joy Creative. Every single store has a different portal, and I suck at portals, and she is, like, amazing at portals. So a lot of people don’t know that there’s, like, back ends to every website that you know, obviously, but like walmart.com, target.com or if you just want to get in their stores, you have to go into their portals also. And the distributors have portals. None of them are the same. They’re all different, and they’re all quirky. So it’s like Emily knows how to do all of that, and without her … Frank and I have a saying, “Thank God for Emily.” So we’re gonna get hats and T-shirts that say T, G, F, E because she helps us all the time.
My daughter Emerald is my marketing media manager. She is 26 and she is also the mom of my grandson, Henry, Henry Norman. And so she is phenomenal, and this is a new spot for her. But I really, I really want to build this legacy for my family. So I want her to learn it and do it, and she’s doing a beautiful job. It’s been amazing … email marketing and all the things.
Our content creator is Brianna Whalen, and she comes up with everything you see on our Instagram, on my LinkedIn and everything. That’s all Brianna with the reels and everything she keeps up with all the trends. She’s incredible, and she’s also my niece. That’s kind of a mentor story, because she just had a great Instagram when I first started. I said, “Will you run my Instagram?” And she’s like, “Oh, Aunt Molly, I don’t think I could do that. Like, that’s I can’t do a business.” And I said, “I love what you do on your personal Instagram, and I want you to just try it. What do we have to lose? I’ll pay you 100 bucks and we’ll see how you do.” And she started doing phenomenal. And then after, like, the first year of her, she got a second media person, and then she started doing photography, and now she does our brand photography, and she has grown huge. And so you just have to see talent in people that don’t even see it in themselves, and pull it out of them, and now that’s what she does for a living. It’s so cool. So I’m excited.
Spencer: So she built her business by helping you build your business. Oh, that’s cool.
Blakeley: That blesses me. And then we have eight different co-packers that we work with, and they all have hundreds of employees, some 50, some have hundreds. So it just depends. So all in all, the whole encompasses hundreds of people work with Molly Bz, you know, with our three PL warehousing and all those things. One little cookie business to start with, $150 is now helping so many people like put food on the table, that sort of thing. It blesses me. I love it.
Spencer: So what do you look for, like, what are specific attributes that you look for in someone that you want on your team or someone that you want to work with?
Blakeley: You know, it depends on what their talents are and what we would need them for. Knowledge, people that work in excellence is really important. I want people to work in excellence. So it’s easy to cut corners. And I cut corners for many years, and now I realize how very important it is, especially as a national brand, to never cut corners. And so that’s the No. 1 thing I look at: Are these people completing it with excellence, or are they cutting corners? You’ll be able to tell right away. And so that’s the No. 1 thing I look for is integrity in them and their heart. They have to have a good heart. It’s not necessarily the experience … more that if they’re a good person, because I can train anyone anything, pretty much. Anyone can. And so if they have a good heart, and they really want to do well, and they’re going to be on time and and work in excellence, then I got something to work with.
Spencer: So that’s a good segue to what I wanted to ask you next, and that’s the you know, many leaders or like hiring managers, they often say that technical expertise or subject matter knowledge can be taught, but work ethic and grit cannot. And so my son is 15, and this is something that I’m telling him now that he just got hired for his first job, for a summer job. Skills can be taught. Work ethic can’t, like who you are inside is who you are, and that can’t be taught. So how do you … when you when you meet someone that you want to work with or that you want to mentor, how do you sort of weigh those personal attributes?
Blakeley: Well, I think it’s important to check references, you know, and this time and day, you know … back in the day, we would talk to someone and be like, “Hey, what’s with John over here?” And they’d be like, “Oh, don’t hire him. He never showed up. He was late all the time. We caught him sleeping on the clock,” you know, whatever. Now they can’t say those things. Everything’s against the law.
So you can legally ask, “Would you rehire them?” If they say no, that’s like, that’s a tell all for me, you know. And then I’ll go right to them and say, “Why? Why did they tell me they wouldn’t rehire you? What’s the story? What’s the backstory here?” I believe that everyone deserves a second chance. People make mistakes. I made lots of mistakes, and so if it’s something that I feel like we can work with, I go with it.
Spencer: Have you ever met someone that you’re like, “Okay, they don’t really know this business, but they’ve got that tenacity that I need.”
Blakeley: Yeah, absolutely. Well, like my niece, like she’s a perfect example, Brianna. I knew that she had the talent, even though she had none of the experience, except for her own personal Instagram, and now she’s running several people’s social medias on several platforms, in just a few years. I saw that talent, and I knew that she worked in excellence. So yeah, she’s an awesome example of that, for sure.
Spencer: That’s so cool. I love your family. I feel like I’m like, getting to know your whole family.
Blakeley: Come on over for dinner.
Spencer: Okay, so what do you, in your opinion, in your experience, what do you find to be more fulfilling to mentor someone or to be mentored? And has it changed as you’ve kind of grown deeper in the banking industry and in CPG.
Blakeley: 1,000%. I love to mentor people. I love to make a difference in people’s lives. I love to be able to teach them something they don’t know, and then see them implement it into their life or their business, and for to have success. And if it doesn’t for them to come back, we’ll re-look at it together or whatever, or to simply just say, “Oh yeah, don’t buy your pouches from those guys, they’re three times the price. Go to this person over here, they’re way less.”
I will give away tea all day long, like there’s no reason for … all these people are competitive. And the one thing I’ve seen early entrepreneurs are they’re like, “I’ve got this idea, but I’m not telling anyone.” Guess what? Hardly anyone in the whole world is going to take your idea from you. But it’s really good to get that feedback, because what if it’s a weird idea, or what if someone says, “Oh, I have a really good pivot for that. Try it with this instead, you know, put a bow on it.” That’s one thing that is that I see a lot, is a lot of people will say, “I have the secret. I don’t have a patent yet,” and all these things. But what if someone can make it so much better, and no one has the kind of time for their your project. It’s your project, so you’ll be okay. Now, at this time, now we have NDAs and then whatever. But for beginning startups, I I think that people get really caught up in their romancing their idea for a very long time before they even do anything. But they just got this idea. It’s a whole Nike thing, just do it. I just say, just did it.
Spencer: So what would you say are the necessary ingredients so to speak, to have a successful mentor mentee relationship.
Blakeley: Honesty and to actually do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t waste your mentor’s time. Like, if, if you ask your mentor, A, B and C, like, “How do I do this? What do I do? Should I rent this location? We’ll just say that I found a place I want to rent it. What do you think of it?” Send me a link, and I look at the link and I’m like, “They’re asking way too much a square foot.” You can negotiate that, because a lot of people don’t know you can negotiate rent. It’s not set in stone ever. You can always say, “If I put flooring in, that’ll bring up the value of this property, can I get the first two months for free?” Like people don’t realize you can do the negotiations, but if they don’t take that advice, and they just pay full price, and they don’t even try because they don’t have the courage to do it, and then they come back and they’re upset because they signed a five-year lease on rent that’s way too high because they didn’t listen to me, that’s frustrating. And I’m not saying you have to do what I say. I’m just saying, learn from my mistakes. I’m here. I’ve got nothing to hide, like I’ll tell you all the things that I learned from
Spencer: There is value in being open to hearing a different perspective and considering different things. I think it’s hard for people sometimes, especially entrepreneurs, when they have a great idea and they’re so … it’s an extension of them, and so they keep it so close to themselves that any constructive criticism they forget the constructive part.
Blakeley: They get offended. “What do you mean it should be pink? It’s been red my whole life. Everyone loves the red.” Well, why don’t you just ask, do a poll on Instagram, and then they will and 30, you know, 30 people like red, and 70 people like the pink. And just, yeah, you have to be open minded.
You know that I said this a lot, but the peach story? Have you heard the peach story, the story of the peach? This is what I tell all of our mentees, to not take it personally when someone doesn’t like your product, because you could have the most juicy, ripest, most wonderful, beautiful peach in the whole world. And some people just don’t like peaches, so don’t take it personally. They just don’t like peaches. So that has helped me tremendously. Like, when I have someone take eat a cookie of mine, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s just not for me.” Okay? That’s okay, because there’s lots of people it is for. There’s 8 billion people in the world, even if a million of them like my cookies, I’m pumped.
Spencer: Okay, that’s really good perspective. That is really good perspective. Okay, so I want to talk about a book that you wrote because you’re not just an entrepreneur, you’re not just a cookie maven or just a mentor, you’re also an author. So you wrote a book called How To Be Fearless in Business.
Blakeley: I didn’t know you knew.
Spencer: Yeah, I did a little bit of homework. So tell me about that book and why you wrote it, and why it was important for you to share your journey.
Blakeley: This is actually the craziest thing. I wrote that book right when I got frauded. That’s when I started writing that book. And I didn’t want to write the book, and I don’t read books, just so you know, to be completely clear, like people say, “Oh, have you read this book? Nope.” Okay, I’m not a book reader. I’m a magazine flipper.
But I was at church, and I was in prayer and singing and just having the best time. And I heard very clearly, “Write the book.” And I thought, “I don’t write books.” And so then, like every night, sometime during the night, I would hear “write the book, write the book, write the book, write the book.” I don’t know what I’m going to write a book about. And so I thought, “Well, what do I know about? I know about business.” And so I started writing a book about business.
I would write at night after I was applying for jobs and making cookies all at the same exact time and raising my son. So that’s when I wrote that book, How To Be Fearless in Business. It came out No. 1, first best seller of new books or whatever on Amazon when it came out, and it was super cool. I actually took it off at one point and then put it back on. So like, the reviews and stuff are not really high, but that was because I was messing around with something on Amazon and accidentally deleted my book.
But it’s a good book, and I think you can get it on Kindle for free. Again, I just like to help people, but it walks you through, like, the difference between an LLC, a C Corp, an S Corp or a sole proprietorship, how to name your business, like all the things that we’re talking about right now, it covers it. And, you know, being a startup is so cool right now, but it’s mostly about brick and mortars. It’s not a lot about, like, e-commerce or whatever, because I wasn’t really doing that, but I knew a ton about brick and mortars at the time, and I still do, not at the time, but that’s what I focused on in that book, and it’s a good little book, and it’s helped a lot of people. It blesses me.
Spencer: Well, I really like it’s how to be fearless, yeah? So it’s not how to be successful. Like, I’m not going to give you the secret sauce to make your next million dollars in business, but you’re talking about being courageous in entrepreneurialism. I think it’s really important for those lessons to be shared. How much of it is about you know, this is what I learned in my life, learning from the hard knocks, I guess.
Blakeley: Every chapter. There’s discussions on why I came to that conclusion, or why I think that would work because this happened to me. I really tried to put it in my life experiences so and then at the end of every chapter, there’s a spot for notes, so you could go in and make notes of what you learned that you think will help you with your business. So I thought that was really important for people to, you know, I’m not just saying this off the cusp. I really, truly have lived it.
Spencer: Okay. That is really all I have for this week. Molly, I love just your ability to build relationships and then build that into how you run your business, really, and how you’re marketing your cookies. So we didn’t really talk much about the cookies this time. It was more of the personal journey in building this brand.
Blakeley: Yeah, it’s been fun. As usual. I’m having the best time.
Spencer: Awesome. And I mean, I do think it’s important in the baking industry that we talk about more than just the product and really how you develop yourself in building that brand and building the product, so I really enjoyed this particular conversation. And then next week is going to be really exciting. It’ll be our wrapup week, and we are going to talk about how to let go of limitations. So that’s going to be a cool one. I can’t wait.
Blakeley: Cliffhanger. I’m excited.
Spencer: Okay, Molly, I will see you next week.
Blakeley: Okay, thank you so much. Bye, everybody.
