Kodiak Cakes

“It was probably in the realm of 20, 25,000 bucks. You know, something like that.”

“So the first offer was Kevin. So Kevin says, I'll give you that 500 grand, but I want half the business.”

“It took us 16 years to hit a million dollars in revenue, right?”

“If, well, yeah, if you include myself, my dad, my brother, and Cameron, then we are a majority.”

“So we got this PO. It was 260,000 dollar PO.”

“John drove it around for a while, and then he sold it, and he made 1400 bucks. And so he was kind of like, look, I think I can actually start my business on this.”

“They totally did. I remember I knocked on it, so we lived in a cul-de-sac, and I went around to all the neighbors in the cul-de-sac, And I think everybody bought one, you know, I mean, I'm this eight year old kid. And I was actually pretty outgoing as a kid, l…”

“So like people, particularly at Target, and I think it's because Target was mentioned on the show, and so people went to Target, and they just cleared the shelves, and so we struggled for a couple months just to keep up with it.”

“And so Gary, John and I, we all started talking and Gary said, all right, guys, I'll put 35,000 bucks in for, I can't remember, it was like 18% of the business or something like that. He's like, look, let's start with 13,000. And then when you need more, you k…”

“So we went on the show trying to get, we were pitching for 500,000 dollars for 10% of the business.”

“It was in not until about 1999 that I actually incorporated the business. And then I went back to John and I gave him half the shares back.”

“And in early 2008, I took a job and left Kodiak cakes and I licensed the brand over to Another small business to kind of manage for me and to pay me a royalty.”

“I think we lost about 25% of the revenue.”

“On December first, 1995, John and I took a trip to Jackson, Wyoming. We left at, like, four a.m., four or five a.m., We got in his car, and I remember he had this Mazda six to six, and it would hold exactly 19 cases of Kodiak cakes. And the cases were big. I m…”

“Yeah, we should go over that this year.”

“What I do remember is so, you know, when I took it over later in two, in 1997, the revenue that year was 29,000 dollars total revenue.”

“So he went down to the bank. He got a check on his home equity line. So he had to borrow the money and he showed back up to my office with a check for 260,000 bucks.”

“What we did to actually formalize it, we actually made a little contract and John literally sold me the business for a dollar.”

“So in 2004, I had been working on sales, you know, kind of part time and I'd been working with Safeway. And I sent some samples out to this buyer. Her name was Donna Sullivan. She called me and she's like, Hey Joel, we're going to bring your pancake mix in to …”