Matt and Libiss Skinner are the co-founders of the Charleston Hemp Collective and High Rise Beverage Company, both which have been guided by their commitment to highest quality ingredients.
Their CBD brand makes tinctures, topicals, gummies, pantry items and beverages.
After only five years in operation, Charleston Hemp Collective brings in a couple million dollars a year. After only two years, High Rise Beverage Company has a $40 million valuation. They started both businesses in their mid-late 40s.
They've been featured in Charleston Magazine, South Magazine, the local Charleston News and many more. You can find a link through to their business in the episode's description.
Websites:
Subscribe on Apple Podcast , Spotify or other major streaming platforms.
If you have a comment, a question you wish I’d asked, an idea for an episode or want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you!
For inquiring guests, please keep in mind that this podcast is for the benefit of listeners and I am not interested in any “puff pieces.” Thank you for understanding!
Feel free to send me a message through my website, or through LinkedIn.
A diary of episodes are posted on Instagram at
How I Built My Small Business.
Matt and Libiss Skinner are the co-founders of the Charleston Hemp Collective and High Rise Beverage Company, both which have been guided by their commitment to highest quality ingredients.
Their CBD brand makes tinctures, topicals, gummies, pantry items and beverages.
After only five years in operation, Charleston Hemp Collective brings in a couple million dollars a year. After only two years, High Rise Beverage Company has a $40 million valuation. They started both businesses in their mid-late 40s.
They've been featured in Charleston Magazine, South Magazine, the local Charleston News and many more. You can find a link through to their business in the episode's description.
Websites:
Subscribe on Apple Podcast , Spotify or other major streaming platforms.
If you have a comment, a question you wish I’d asked, an idea for an episode or want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you!
For inquiring guests, please keep in mind that this podcast is for the benefit of listeners and I am not interested in any “puff pieces.” Thank you for understanding!
Feel free to send me a message through my website, or through LinkedIn.
A diary of episodes are posted on Instagram at
How I Built My Small Business.
Don't make money the focus of your success. It took me to be 45 years old and it's this business, here, for the first time in my life, where money hasn't driven me, and that's sad. I'm sad. I mean I've never even said that before, but I think it just after talking this transparent on this call.
Anne McGinty:Welcome to the 20th episode of how I Built my Small Business, the show that is dedicated to sharing the insight that entrepreneurs have about how to start and grow small businesses. Join us as we unravel the stories behind their entrepreneurial journeys. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today we'll be talking with Matt and Libiss Skinner about their journey starting a CBD brand. Matt and Libiss Skinner are the co-founders of the Charleston Hemp Collective and High Rise Beverage Company, both which have been guided by their commitment to highest quality ingredients. Their CBD brand makes tinctures, topicals, gummies, pantry items and beverages. They've been featured in Charleston Magazine, South Magazine, the local Charleston News and many more. You can find a link through to their business in the episode's description.
Anne McGinty:Before we get started, if you've been listening to and enjoying the show, there is one thing that you can do to help me reach more listeners, and that is to please hit the follow button on your favorite streaming platform. All right, let's dive in. Thank you to our listeners for being with us today. Livis and Matt, thanks for coming on the show, thank you for having us.
Anne McGinty:Thank you very much. So to start out, can you tell us a little bit about what it is that the Charleston Hemp Collective is?
Matt Skinner:You know I'm coming from Chico, California, so I definitely have an appreciation for the West Coast and what we've seen in cannabis out there for so many years. But coming back here to the Carolinas, this story is about her, and I'll let her share with you how we got started.
Libiss Skinner:Yeah, so we started roughly five years ago. I was having some health issues and I went to my doctor and I was finally, after several years, diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and my doctor's recommendation was 11 pills a day, or steroids or one pill every day for $2,000 a month, and this was going to be my plan for the rest of my life.
Anne McGinty:Oh my gosh.
Libiss Skinner:I was in my early 40s and I didn't want to get on that route. I was terrified. Actually, I watched both of my parents taking pharmaceuticals my whole upbringing because of their health issues and I just didn't want to get on that road. So I spoke with Matt and we took a trip that weekend just to get away. And one of our friends had started talking to us about CBD and I didn't know anything about CBD at the time, but I did know about cannabis. I've been a fan of it since I was younger and it always helped me. I just didn't realize it was actually helping me. So we started talking about it and then we went up to Asheville, north Carolina, where they were making a lot of new movements in the hemp industry. So we wanted to check things out and Matt and I got really passionate about it really quickly.
Libiss Skinner:So we came back to Charleston, where we were living at the time, and we really put our heads together and thought you know what, if we're going to do something that we think is going to really help us, why not dive in this together and help other people?
Libiss Skinner:And that's pretty much how Charleston Hemp Collective was born. Matt is one of those guys that if you're going to go in, you're going to go all in. So he said if we're going to do this, we're going to make sure we're making our product, we're going to know what's going into it, we're going to tell our story, we're going to get really vulnerable and we're going to get really brave and we're going to just put it right down on King Street, which is one of the main streets in Charleston, and we're just going to go all in. And that's what we did. And with just a couple of months of being open, we realized we needed to be manufacturing everything and we needed to expand already. So, within two months, I think, of being opened, we signed contracts on other retail stores as well.
Anne McGinty:So Charleston Hemp Collective is a brick and mortar store?
Matt Skinner:It started yeah, absolutely, it started as a brick and mortar store. But, like Libby was saying, one of our key components of what we wanted to be as a brand to separate ourselves from other brands is actually have our own product line and not necessarily white label a product that we could have picked up somewhere else. We wanted to craft our own products, so we put an investment into a manufacturing facility up in Boone, north Carolina, who actually had experience, had extraction going on everything. We wanted that seed to sell situation with our brand. So we started putting together our own products and the ingredients that went in them. But we started as a brick and mortar.
Anne McGinty:How did you handle the product development? Do you have science backgrounds?
Matt Skinner:We don't. But we were fortunate enough that the gentleman that we partnered with up in the manufacturing facility. They were crafting products for other people as well, so getting involved with them, they led the expertise there. We got to come in and share what was important to us ingredients, wise, health, focus wise. We crafted like just your standard gummies, your tinctures, your medicinal stuff. We wanted to create the first culinary line because we come from Charleston, south Carolina, where culinary is a big space to our hearts. So you know we wanted to create some things in the culinary sector. So we were the first ones to kind of craft a product line with, you know, honey, olive oils and there's other people who have done individual things like that out there, but we created a whole line of products like that so people could go home and have a social experience with it.
Anne McGinty:What other experience did you have before starting the Charleston Hemp Collective that enabled you to have the confidence to go down this path?
Matt Skinner:Well, I lived in California for a good portion of my life and just moved out west, spent some time up in Humboldt County which we know that that's the mecca of where a lot of this started from and just always had a love for cannabis and just the healing aspects of the plant. Libis, growing up, we've known each other since we were kids and so we've grown up in a cannabis world our whole life together. We've known it as a way to be social. But growing up in the South, in the space, it was very much kind of an underground, not that a lot of people didn't do it, but you kind of found yourself a little more reclusive at parties because it wasn't socially as acceptable as it is like out West.
Matt Skinner:So when the farm bill happened and took place, you know, six years ago, it really kind of brought a level of legalization across the country, even though it wasn't marijuana, in this hemp space. And as we found ways to actually utilize the powers of hemp through CBD, through a microdose form of THC, which we can do now and then we started to get the science behind all these cannabinoids. It just got us excited about it. And, like Libby said, up in Asheville, north Carolina, which they call the San Francisco of the East. They were just very progressive in the space and we got to walk on farms and see people taking their farmland and actually start grow hemp and then they were making their own products and we just got excited and really wanted to get behind the movement.
Anne McGinty:So exciting to be one of the first ones in that space over there. So, beyond identifying a manufacturer, what were the next steps that you took in preparation for launching?
Matt Skinner:It's kind of been a very organic movement for us. We've been fortunate. It's been a passion project that one day has led to the next and where most people have a complete business plan they put together. We thought it was going to be as simple as a storefront and it turned into four storefronts really quick and it turned into a whole distribution center and we didn't expect that to happen. It just it kind of worked that way for us. And again, I do want to share one story about Libis real quick to tell you how this happened, since we're talking about this when are you going to share that?
Matt Skinner:We'll go ahead and share it. I think you should tell it.
Libiss Skinner:So our plan was we had no plan. We opened the store and thought, okay, we're going to have one retail store, this is going to be great, we're going to sell our product and we're going to help everybody. And then, like I said, within two months we needed another store. Then we needed our own manufacturing. Then we needed our own manufacturing. Then we needed two more stores. Then we just wanted to really expand.
Libiss Skinner:And then COVID slapped us in the face so hard. Was this good or bad for you? You would think it was bad, but it wasn't bad. It actually Matt and I were working so hard, working every day, sunup, sundown. All we were thinking about was the business.
Libiss Skinner:So, covid, one thing it did for us is it gave us time to kind of regroup with each other and come back together and make sure we're staying in line with exactly what we want to do. And it also helped us to become even more vulnerable. Matt came to me and he said Libby, to become even more vulnerable. Matt came to me and he said Libby, we want to keep this thing going, but our doors are shut. So what can we do to stay open? What can we do to keep the message going, since we're getting all this momentum in the store, and that's when Live 5, which is a local station here, tv station here, Live 5 News came to us and they were trying to talk to different businesses, but not in our space.
Libiss Skinner:But they did reach out to us and they asked if we wanted to come on and talk about our story and talk about our business.
Libiss Skinner:And I didn't want to do it because, one, I didn't want to go on TV and two, ulcerative colitis I refer to it as the bathroom disease it's just, it's uncomfortable to talk about. And Matt was like Lilith, you just you have to go out there, you have to tell your story, you have to be brave, and you just got to let people know that there are other people out there suffering from the same thing you're suffering from and we have actually found a way to help ourselves. So it's another way for us to help other people and I think I ended up doing it four or five times because the feedback we were getting. I remember the first episode that I did before I even got to my car, I had two phone calls and that was people that were watching and they were like, oh my gosh, I suffer from this, or I know somebody that suffers from this. What are you doing? And it just really kind of helped us.
Matt Skinner:And it kept the mission real.
Matt Skinner:And you know, a lot of times when people talk to us today and they're like man we've seen a lot of companies come and go.
Matt Skinner:You know, again, like Libby said, all power to her because she really had to be so vulnerable and go on air and share something that was so, so hard for her to talk about.
Matt Skinner:For many years I didn't even know she suffered from that because she wouldn't even let me know and I'm her significant other and I didn't know she was facing these challenges on a day today. But she went on there across the Charleston world and spoke up and that's when the true testimonials started coming in. And then that's when it didn't really matter anymore. But every single person we worked with it was so heartfelt and genuine and when you're changing true lives like that, you find a whole nother purpose. Sometimes you can forget about that when you get in the business side of it, but when moments like that started taking place and people would literally share tears with us on the phone saying thank you so much for what you've done in our lives, it makes you realize your purpose, you know, and so it's just been really cool and that's kind of how the whole thing kept on track.
Anne McGinty:Vulnerability is definitely one of the best ways to speak to other people. I know that it must have been very difficult to speak about personal health in front of the public, but that's amazing. So, going back to the very beginning, when you decided to go into this, how much capital did it require to get your business up and off the ground?
Matt Skinner:Yeah, we put initially. $100,000 is what we had to invest and open a storefront Again, we didn't think it was going to be anything much more than that, so we didn't have thoughts of expansion. But after we did that first store, we had a neighbor that was moving to Savannah Georgia said listen, I love what y'all have done. Can I duplicate this and can we do another location? So that's what made us think about store number two very fast. We knew how passionate they were about what we were doing. It offered us an opportunity to have a partnership that could actually handle the operation side but also help with the financial side and carry the vision of this brand on for us in another location. And the two stores did so well that it allowed us to quickly start manufacturing our own products.
Matt Skinner:So that $100,000 initial investment which I have to say there's a lot of people who've gotten this industry and unfortunately haven't done as well, because a lot happened so fast and it was a lot of competition I think where a lot of people fail in this category is they lose intent and they chase being financially successful over quality, and staying focused and true to a vision is extremely important in anything we do in life.
Matt Skinner:So, again, because we kept it there, which made some financial challenges for us, meaning that the margins in some areas weren't quite where we wanted to be, but quality was first, and being price focused where it was hitting the market's needs, Even if we didn't have the margins we needed, it ultimately led to the volume we needed. So, yeah, we put $100,000 in this and we have expanded now into, like we said, multiple locations, a full-blown distribution center. We do a few million dollars a year out of our distribution alone and we've expanded into a whole nother brand that's called High Rise Beverage and that brand in itself has kind of blown up. We've partnered with Anheuser-Busch throughout the country. We're the first brand in the hemp-derived THC space to grow the way we're growing throughout the country. So you know, it's been a journey and it's been awesome.
Anne McGinty:I have no doubt that you are going to be one of these $100, $200 million businesses. I mean you could even go into a billion, because beverage companies have like a 20x multiple. So I mean I am wishing you all of the most success that you wish for. So how long did it take to become profitable?
Matt Skinner:We sold out a product our first week and we were heavily, heavily stacked. We had to shut our doors down for two days because of how much product we were moving out the gate. So it was a hard to shut business down. No one wants to do that, especially for a reason of just running out of product. But we we at the time couldn't produce the product as quick as we were selling it.
Anne McGinty:Would you say, then, that your integrity story and mission is the cause of the rapid growth of your CBD business, or is there anything else that you've done?
Matt Skinner:I would 100% say that's what it is. For example, our beverage line that we've launched. We created a beverage first that we looked at the ingredients and then we added cannabinoids to it. We wanted to create a drink that, regardless of whether it had cannabinoids in it, was something that was desirable, that was focused on health and wellness, and we don't even call our beverage a THC beverage. We call it a wellness beverage.
Matt Skinner:We won the best wellness category in the Charleston market. Charleston's got a lot of people who are focused on fitness and health in this market and, being on the East coast, it's tough to be in the cannabis sector in the South, but to win a best wellness category in a hemp cannabis sector it was unheard of and we won that our first year. We just found out. We won again this year along with the best in a product, along with the best cannabis product. So we won three different categories with that, and then Charleston Hemp Collective wins best CBD shop for two years straight now. So it goes back to not sacrificing quality ever. So, then, when you build your customer, even if it's one at a time, which is what it is you know people know that everything you do, you're not going to sacrifice that quality, what you're offering to them?
Anne McGinty:Well, congratulations, first of all, on those awards. I'm sure that they are well-deserved, and I can't believe that your business is only five years old. This is incredible.
Matt Skinner:Thank you, it's been fun.
Anne McGinty:How many revenue streams do you have now and what are they?
Matt Skinner:So we have our storefront and we've been strategic with our last few stores. We bring in partnerships in those. We don't have a franchise model with that. We want to have our hands on our store so we can make sure we're really involved with them. But we do have partnerships and those partnerships usually derive from somebody who's been intricate in our life, whether it's through the growth of our brands or we've just known well enough that can carry the storyline and we know they won't derail from that.
Matt Skinner:Outside of that, we have a distribution center and we sell directly to all of our stores. That's where stores get their product from. And then we have wholesale accounts throughout the Southeast. And then we have our beverage brand, and our beverage brand has a full-blown distribution side of it as well and it sells throughout the country. And then we have online for both of the brands, and our beverage brand has a full-blown distribution side of it as well and it sells throughout the country. And then we have online for both of the brands and we have wholesale for High Rise. So it's a lot. We've got about eight different outlets right now that we work through.
Anne McGinty:Nice, and which one is showing the most promise or is the most exciting for you Right now?
Libiss Skinner:We never, ever ever, expected it to go the way it's going. And it's just we'll be two years, Memorial Day weekend, and it is exploded beyond our wildest dreams.
Matt Skinner:Exploded. I mean to a different to like you were sharing some of those crazy multiples a minute. It's exciting to see what beverage can do and some of those crazy multiples a minute. It's exciting to see what beverage can do and when you get dipped in with the right distribution network, which we feel like we're with the right teams now it's a new sector altogether. I mean, I'll tell you one thing about beverage which I just want to share this with you. When you talk about hemp or cannabis, you really get selective, with people that feel comfortable walking into either a CBD dispensary or a regular dispensary. You get a specific clientele and most of the time it's generally cannabis users. But something with beverage it just has gone so mainstream. Every soccer mom in America feels like they can pick this up instead of a glass of wine and enjoy it and feel good about it, and feel good about it.
Matt Skinner:You know we have 497 accounts in the Charleston market from our last thing alone and 50% of them are on premise. And when I say on premise, your highest end restaurants that are your highest end steakhouse, have us as an alternative for an NA, where it's an effects-based drink, so it's getting in so many more people's hands. So the beverage side is really where we feel like it's just the next level.
Anne McGinty:And to get to this point where you are today, have you done any fundraising, any rounds of investment?
Matt Skinner:We actually have. Yeah, we've never had to do that with the Charleston Hemp Collective brand, but the growth of High Rise 100%. We actually have a meeting this evening with our whole investor team at a restaurant down here to thank them. We got big swag bags for them all, but we've gone through four rounds of funding there and the way we're hockey stick growing right now we are continuing to go through rounds of funding with that brand.
Anne McGinty:And what about mentorship? So I assume with this investment, you have now a board of directors who you can go to for advice on how to scale. Can you share anything about that process and what you've learned through the securement of your investment funds?
Matt Skinner:Yeah, absolutely. That's been probably for me the most entertaining part of this. You know, getting away from the passion of it I love business and getting in this side of it. It's one thing to do a small little brick and mortar store and that nothing wrong with it. It's great. You still have a tremendous education piece that comes with that.
Matt Skinner:Everything has its own challenges, but crafting a board and having a chair I'm the CEO, but I got a COO and I've got a chair on my board. I mean, actually he's from the UK and he's in the other room right now. He flew in for the last two weeks and he's going to be at this thing with us this evening. But it's been very interesting putting yourself around a table of people where everybody at that table is a lot smarter than you are, and I think if you're a great business owner, you know you should have it that way. That owner, you know you should have it that way. That's the only way to have it. To be honest, it lets me be a much better founder because I'm in great hands of superior people around me. But I've loved that challenge and that has been a new part of a chapter of my life over the last year for sure.
Anne McGinty:How did you find your investors in the first place? Did they come to you or did you go in and pitch?
Matt Skinner:Well, it's interesting, I didn't even have to do that. We've got a gentleman here in town. His name is Gunner and he has got a huge following in the workout world. He's a fitness trainer amazing human, become a dear person to me. But he's very selective of the people that he allows in his gym because he can only take on X amount of people. So he really puts people in his gym that are focused and I think he also uses it a place to get some mentorship by people that have done great things in the community.
Matt Skinner:High Rise did so well that when he realized that I was going to go look for funding which I was talking to, my family first round was just direct family members, but it was like listen, if you ever want to go, I'd love to share High Rise to my network of people that actually come and that has ended up turning into a family that has grown tremendously for me, everything from lawyers in our community to people who own their own real estate companies, restaurateurs who own chains of restaurants in this community.
Matt Skinner:But now we've got a massive group of local support and you know our next time funding is going to be looking at like a 15, $20 million raise on our brand, but we were thinking about taking it to institutional money. But I don't even know that we're going to have to do that because we've got such support here in our community that everybody wants to jump in on the next round. So it's the love for this brand. Charleston one thing I'll say about Charleston, south Carolina, is it loves the brands that come from here and they come from intent. So we've had so much love. We've been fortunate in that respect.
Anne McGinty:Charleston really is a very special place, so can you give us an idea on what your financials have been like?
Matt Skinner:So Charleston Hemp Collective has kind of gone a little bit on the back burner. And when I say that we were a small team when High Rise developed, Charleston Hemp Collective was doing great, our distribution was growing and if we were growing $500,000 a year annually in sales through our distribution model, we were happy with that. However, high rise we thought was going to be an afterthought that would just go into our current storefronts and be another. But then once everybody locally started picking up in the restaurants and the bottle shops started picking it up, we needed a lot more manpower and understanding that distribution model and beverages a whole nother animal.
Matt Skinner:High Rise is two years in. We're at a 40 million valuation right now. So it's grown astronomically. We think we'll be at a hundred million at the end of this year. Quite honestly, that's how fast it's growing and the Charleston Hemp Collective brand a couple million dollars annually in sales there. But as you can see from just that part of what I share with you, the beverage is kind of shifting all our focus because you know we feel like we're going to win the race with this product. We have with that across the country.
Anne McGinty:So anyway, yeah, and what is the approximate profit margin between the Charleston Hemp Collective on that side and then beverage on this side? I mean, I know what I've heard from other people in the industry and I'm just curious to know what that's been like for you.
Matt Skinner:Well, it is as crazy as everybody said, because the margins in this industry are really good when you have layers to your industry, meaning that we have a retail storefront, we have distribution, we have manufacturing. We've got four channels we go through and each one of them run anywhere between a 25% to 35% margin with each channel. So the cost to manufacture something by the time we get it to retail it's gone through that cycle of right at 30% twice.
Anne McGinty:Amazing. Yeah, you're vertically integrated. Yeah, so you get it every step of the way.
Matt Skinner:Yeah, being vertically integrated is great for the brand, for sure. When you're falling short in one area, you can lean on another, and it's nice.
Anne McGinty:And when you were seeking that investment to grow the High Rise Beverage Company, how was that process when it came to negotiating giving up equity?
Matt Skinner:Yeah, Again, this is where I say we've been very fortunate. A lot of times when you put together a strategic board, you're sharing equity points of some caliber in that transaction of having them. All of these players that are part of my board were actual investors that came in at the valuation of that time and cared so much about this brand's growth that we were able to select and we haven't had to share any equity with that, except for the chair of my board. He started with me when I was day one and we were moving a pallet or two through and when I say a pallet I'm talking about like a hundred cases through our just Charleston network. But Charleston alone moves over 20 pallets a month now in just the Charleston market but he's been the one that's helped me scale this and understand how to connect with these people and help make it work.
Anne McGinty:And you mentioned partnerships, collaborations, Anheuser-Busch. How do you go about creating these collaborations and partnerships with other businesses, especially ones of that size?
Matt Skinner:The Anheuser-Busch network really is what triggered everything and that started through Southern Crown here in Charleston, south Carolina. They watched us independently distribute for a year and a half and they just got to a point. They're like, listen, we got to figure out how to talk to these guys. They're in every restaurant we go in. You know they're very selective of who they're going to work with. You have to be a power brand just to kind of get in their network. They don't just bring on anyone and because we did this in this market and they see this as a whole new category, they were kind enough to pick up the phone and call some other independent bud houses and before you know it, the word just kind of got through the network and that's kind of what's going on now.
Anne McGinty:Wow, that's amazing. And through the last five years beyond COVID and not knowing what was going to happen there, has there been anything that has just really rattled you and kept you up at night?
Matt Skinner:I mean we got a ton of stories we can tell.
Libiss Skinner:At the end of the day, the biggest challenge is always having the same vision, which we do. We're very lucky in that, having each other's back, which is something we've always had. We just know and we talk about this. I can honestly say weekly we're in this together. We have the same goal, we have the same dream. This is our passion that we want to do together.
Matt Skinner:The tough part is when we both it wasn't like one of us took the course of I'm just going to get a nine to five job, some security, so if something should drop and this shouldn't work out, we both went all in, and so I definitely think that brings strain. And then, of course, another big thing that's hard is we love our dog very, very much.
Libiss Skinner:The travel is the biggest thing.
Matt Skinner:And we travel a lot and we don't get to see him as much as we would like to. So leaving him, as funny as that might be to a lot of people, is hard on us.
Libiss Skinner:Yeah, I guess if we didn't have the same vision, we didn't have the same passion and we didn't have each other's back, the challenge would be, when we do face an obstacle, not being able to come together and figure it out. We always come together and it's not. We come together weeks later and, like, figure it out. We both know to just trust each other's guts and usually it's within hours of having a challenge we figure it out.
Anne McGinty:It's like that phrase the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, you two together is not two. You two together is like 20 because your minds together are more powerful. So what is this ultimate vision that you two both share? What is the lifestyle that you want to live? What is your dream for this company and beyond the company as well, in your personal lives? How will the success of your company lead to? Whatever this ultimate vision is that you have for yourselves?
Matt Skinner:I think we're pretty easygoing people. You know we talk about where this company's going and I can't sit here and act like we don't talk about it and I, wow, look what's happened. Where are we going to be if we one day go through an acquisition which we're 50 years old? Now I'm 50. She's two years younger than I am.
Matt Skinner:She's a lot younger, but you do get to a point in your life where you hope that your mission behind your business was something that translated into a message past just the people around you, and I think we've been able to do that now that we're hitting a national scale. And the great thing about the beverage side is that people are learning more about us and they're leaning more into Charleston Hemp Collective and they're learning about the other products we make, and so it's helped that thing. But with that being said, would we like to one day move on, and I tell you what that means for us. It means we'll put backpacks on our back and we'll travel and then not to sound so cliche, but we'd love to go to different countries and do some great work for people that have just needed that their whole lives, and then, I think, ultimately land on a ranch in Montana and we'll call it a day, so that's with our dogs, and we'll live that way, and that's that's good enough for us.
Libiss Skinner:We're definitely on the same page there. No matter where we end up with this company and when we end up on that ranch in Montana, we will still always be on a mission to help people. As cheesy as that sounds, as broad as that sounds, we will constantly be figuring out ways to just impact somebody in some way, and I mean that's given us the most fulfillment in our life, so we talk about it all the time.
Libiss Skinner:That makes us so happy, so yeah, we were in Walmart the other day it was Easter Sunday oh yeah.
Libiss Skinner:It was Easter Sunday the other day and we were at Walmart I don't know what we were getting, I don't even remember, but they have the greeters and she was saying goodbye to us and she was checking our receipt and we said happy Easter. And she said yeah, and it's my birthday too. So we walked out and I looked at Matt and I was like she needs some flowers. She's working on her birthday. She's working on her birthday, she's working on Easter. So we went back in and we got her some flowers and a $40 visa gift card.
Matt Skinner:And it just selfishly made us feel really good, but like it wasn't a lot, but you could tell it made her it made her day. Her coworkers were around. She was like, thank you so much, and it just is awesome to do stuff like that. Man, we're in a place where you got to give back you got to.
Anne McGinty:Yeah, I'd say that we share that mission. This is all about helping other people, and I'm not monetizing. I don't get anything out of this. I mean, I'm learning, but ultimately it's about sharing knowledge and I love your mission. So I've got two more questions for you. What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Libiss Skinner:Stay true to your intent. If you have a desire to do something, do it with your whole heart. Don't give up. Don't get derailed. Follow your gut up. Don't get derailed, follow your gut.
Matt Skinner:Follow your passion, follow your dream. Don't let any surrounding members of your life tell you that you can't be something or do something. If you believe in it, it's coming from deep down inside of you. Follow that and I've learned something at a late age in life. I've done a lot of things in this world that have been successful, but I wasn't successful because I wasn't happy. I did it because I thought that that's what would bring me happiness the first time you challenge yourself and you follow your dream. That's true, true success. And so I just tell people follow your dream, go for it. People out there want to hear your story.
Libiss Skinner:And if you're lucky enough to have somebody with you to do that with you, you'll be even more fulfilled. We wouldn't want to do this without each other, just wouldn't work.
Anne McGinty:So for a last question if you could both go back and talk to your individual younger selves, when you were, say, 20, what life advice would you give yourselves that you haven't already given?
Matt Skinner:to be 45 years old and it's this business here, for the first time in my life where money hasn't driven me, and that's sad. I'm sad. I mean I've never even said that before, but I think it. Just after talking this transparent on this call, I just kind of want to come out. I've never been more happy. It's a shame that it took me to be 45 years old, but at least I found it. A lot of people never get it, but never let money drive your success.
Anne McGinty:What about you, Libis?
Libiss Skinner:I would have to tell myself to have more confidence. I've got this. Have my back more Me myself. Have my own back more and be confident. Don't get in your head Just if you want to do it do it.
Anne McGinty:I love those messages. Well, thank you both so much for coming on the show and being so vulnerable to share your story with all of us.
Matt Skinner:Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it.
Anne McGinty:Today's key takeaways. Vulnerability can be a key to growing a successful brand. Customers, especially the younger generations, want to know your story. Authenticity and a genuine passion are foundations that resonate deeply with customers. If you've seen a successful concept and you want to get involved, try and have a conversation with the owner and see if there is a partnership situation that would help them build their brand to another location. Give them an opportunity to expand their brand's reach and profitability while also providing you with the access to an already proven model and brand. It doesn't have to be a franchise or available in a franchise model. It can be more of a partnership that works for everyone involved.
Anne McGinty:Don't lose intent by chasing financial success over quality. Stay focused and true to a vision that is based on more than just money, and have integrity in your approach. If you're looking to scale a business and you don't have the knowledge or experience, build a board of directors a table, so to speak, of people who are smarter and more experienced than you are and who can provide guidance and strategy while you stay at the helm. If you're considering starting a CBD brand, consider vertical integration. As Matt says, when you're falling short in one area, you can lean on another.
Anne McGinty:Stay true to your intent and don't give up. Don't let people around you tell you that you can't do something or be someone. If you believe something and it is coming from deep down inside of you, follow that intuition. Don't make money the focus of your success. In Matt and Libby's situation, they share a mission to help others and that authenticity has resulted in their success. But if they had only been chasing a dollar, it might not have worked out. And lastly, have confidence in yourself and have your own back more. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.