309. From Getting Fired to Selling 232,000+ Sweet Tea Packets: An Entrepreneur's Journey with Darien Craig

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, and thank you for joining us today. I'm so happy you're here. Happiness solved is the place where we explore everything you need to become the best possible version of you. This is Sandee Sgarlata. And today I've got some exciting news for our dedicated listeners.

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We've just launched our exclusive members only portal. This is your ticket to a world of additional content designed to deepen your understanding and engagement with the happiness solved mission. To learn more about all of the exciting benefits, stay tuned until the end of the episode, where I will explain in greater detail. For those interested now, head over to happinesssolved dot supercast.com. Today is another amazing conversation, so let's get started.

00:01:10
Mary and Craig, it's such a pleasure to see you. I love your background. I love the name of your brand, y'all. Sweet tea. How are you doing today?

00:01:19
I'm great. How are you? I am phenomenal. I couldn't be better. Couldn't be better.

00:01:23
That's right. Yeah. We got the backdrop set up. We've obviously run a Zoom world now, and we film a bunch of podcasts and do a bunch of content our own. So I was like, I need to at least spice my office up a little bit.

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So it's fun. I don't have to move. I just turned my computer around, and I'm here, so already ready to roll, I tell you. I know. I mean, I've had different backdrops since I, because I'm in my fourth year of doing this, and my husband and I downsized, and we built a townhouse, which I love townhouse living as opposed to the big home.

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It's just different stages in your life, you know? And so I was able to design this the way I wanted it. You know, I like it. Is it ideal? No, of course not.

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But it's all good. I like the efficiency of it, especially. Especially small business. And, like, the grind of. You don't have time to go do all this and set up and go somewhere else.

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Like, just the efficiency of it. I look like I'm in a podcast studio. Turn around and I'm back to working, and you're rolling. So it's. It's efficient for me.

00:02:20
Yeah, exactly. And that's. That's what it's all about, for sure. All right, so we're going to talk about your brand, y'all. Sweet tea.

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I love that, y'all. And you're from Alabama. I love that. And are you still with your high school sweetheart. I love that.

00:02:35
Yeah, we met right out of high school, and actually, by one, my, my old fishing buddy, really good friend still, he tried to, he tried to go out on a date with her, and she said no to him, that he was too young. And then he passed me the ball and said, well, here, this is Darian. He's not too young. He's your age. And so he, he, he shot his shot and then just handed me the ball and let me run.

00:02:55
So it was kind of a funny story. We joke about it all the time, but that's awesome. Yep. And then we just had a, we just had our first baby boy. He's a year and a half now.

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And now some I'm getting a dad life. We've got a picture of him drinking a glass of tea right behind my desk, so. Oh, that's a lot of fun now. Yeah. I have one son, and let me just tell you, it goes by in a heartbeat.

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He, in my mind, he was born yesterday and he turns 24 this year. So, yeah, it goes by so fast, and it's. I can't even believe it. Sometimes I think, oh, my gosh, he's going to be 24. Like, how is that even possible?

00:03:34
Right? All right, tell me about your backstory and what prompted you to go into the entrepreneurial journey and to create a brand of sweet tea. I mean, I know it's huge in the south and it's becoming more and more, you know, big, you know, a big thing across the United States. But what was your, why was it that you said, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm going to do this?

00:03:58
I just. From a very, very young, a weirdly young age, 1011. My mom has stories of me saying things about the word entrepreneur before I even probably knew what it was. But I think the main thing where I started that was in high school, I was given, my aunt has a little business, and I was given a box of, like, 200 white t shirts. And, oh, I knew I could make money off these shirts, but there was nothing on them.

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I needed to print something on them. And at the time, I was doing a bunch of bass fishing and I built this, like, I was fishing tournaments, and I was starting to become known as bass fishing. So I literally had my signature, like, just my regular signature printed on the front of these shirts and a picture of me fishing on the back of them. And I didn't have money to pay for that ink. I just got these free shirts, but I didn't.

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I was in high school. Have the money for that, to get them printed. So I worked a deal out with the print shop. If y'all print the shirts for me, I'll give you half of them for y'all's inventory. So now I've got 100 finished shirts, and I just sold those at the high school.

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Like, two my friends and kids all over the school, a shirt with my signature on the front of it. And so, like, I hustled this deal with the print shop. I hustled a teacher into letting me store all the shirts in his closet. And I'm, like, selling eight dollar t shirts out of the, like, the back corner of the closet in between classes. So I sold 100 t shirts in, like, maybe the 11th grade.

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And I knew then I was like, people loved it. I was loving selling it. I was loving the whole process of everything. So I knew pretty early that I was. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

00:05:29
I didn't have the talent or the skillset to focus in class. Not book smart, really, at all. I just. A couple things I like focusing on, but class wasn't one of them. So I just felt like I was a little different, I guess, in, in that fact.

00:05:43
And I never let that. I just focus on that being a strong suit, like, those things. I noticed that all the smart kids in class weren't hustling stuff on the side. I was. It's like, they have their strength.

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She has her strength. I've got my strength over here. I'm going to run with it. And so out of school started a couple little small businesses, and they all failed. And I was working for a guy who doing social media pictures and for this big trucking company, and I got fired out of the blue one day with literally, I had no money at all.

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I had $7 on that Monday, and that $7 paid for. I just bought lunch and breakfast to store at work so I'd have food for that week, but literally had no money left. And I got fired that Friday, which would have been my last paycheck. And it was out of the blue. I was doing good work.

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And I just knew that that day was the turning point of my whole life, that I never want to work for someone ever again. I never want to be dependent on one person paying me ever again just because how I was. I was devastated by, like, I loved the job. I thought I was doing really good work. And so at that moment, I was like, I'm never working for someone again.

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And that paycheck is what bought the first bags of tea, the first bags of sugar, the first jars that we ended up selling tea out of. And so I often joked and always said that I don't like that guy, the guy who fired me, the guy that owns that company. But it was also a blessing in disguise. It was like, if it wouldn't have been for me getting fired, I never would have had, or, who knows if I would have had, but I wouldn't have had at that time that pivotal moment of, like, I never want to work for someone again. And it's funny, there's a lot of really high profile entrepreneurs that have a similar story of that.

00:07:22
Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank has a very similar story. And it's just funny to see, like, you realize, I've had enough. I think I can do it my own way. And so then that's how y'all sweet tea was born. And just quickly, I know we'll probably get into that later on, but it's like that thought, we're from Alabama.

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Sweet teaspoon, our thing that's we're born up with. I've got a picture of me in a diaper and no, you know, no shirt or pants on, bowls all over the kitchen floor. I just made a mess. But my bottle has sweet tea in it. Like, that's just how it was for us.

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So when we, when we got older and I get in this entrepreneur, like, midway through high school, I said to myself, I think we could sell this sweet tea. Like, my nana. Sweet tea is really good. My business partner, Brandon, his mom, sweet tea was really good. I can remember saying, like, this stuff's so good, we could sell it.

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And so then a couple years later is when I get fired from the job. And I just started thinking, like, what if we brought that tea idea back? And that's really just how it started. That's amazing. I love this story.

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And you said something really pivotal that I want to emphasize. And you said, if it wasn't for getting fired, you know, it was, it was really a blessing. Right? Yep. And I just want to remind the audience that, that moments like that in our life, when you can get to a point and you can say, this happened for me, not to me.

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Right. So it's a, it's just a, it's a perspective thing. It's all perspective. And it's, you see, on, I make this, when I tell this story, I make a reference to Facebook posts, and you see someone who's always, you've got the people, like our friends from town who always complaining on Facebook about something, but then you hear the other person who. We were in the same class together.

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We. I know that they have a similar scenario, but she's always really positive on Facebook. They're just the random post. It's like, she's always positive and it's just a perspective that you bring to life. And I think it's such a big deal because it's like, it's exactly what you just said that happened for me, not to me.

00:09:26
And, you know, I could have very easily. And I think it's. It's okay to be upset about those things. I certainly was upset on that drive home. But it's more.

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It more fired me up to prove them wrong than it did for me to just, like, cross my arms and pout, you know? Like, you can just pick one of the two because you're gonna have to pick. Either you complain about it and pout forever and let it weigh on you forever, or do something about it and, you know, turn the corner. So. Very pivotal moment for in my life and something I'm very, very proud of as well.

00:09:58
Well, I'm glad you are, because that's. That's so huge. Because in any given moment, and this is like the foundation of happiness, right. At any given moment, you have a choice. And yes, of course you're going to be upset.

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And I always like to remind my audience that the happiest people on the planet experience the full range of emotions. And it's okay to get upset. It's okay to be angry. We're human. We're supposed to feel that.

00:10:25
If we don't, then we're going to be like a volcano. And one of these days it's just going to erupt. Right. Become postal, which I don't even know if people even say that anymore. It just came to me.

00:10:36
I use it. You still use it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's so important because.

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Because you had a choice at that moment and you chose to make lemon out of. Make lemonade out of lemons or tea out of. Out of tea bags.

00:10:55
You're exactly right. Exactly right. Yeah. So what is the journey been like for you? Because it's so hard, and most businesses fail in the first five years, and it's hard getting funding, and then it's stressful because your suppliers don't give you weight.

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Whatever. Whatever the scenario is, you know, you've got so many different situations on a daily basis. Talk about that journey for you and how you've kept your head straight, so to speak, to keep you moving forward when life happens, especially in your business. I think that starting with the thing that I see that people do wrong the most, or the reason that a lot of people fail the most, in my opinion, is not fully mapping out their who, what, when, where, why, and like to the most basic. We learned that in the 7th grade about that's how you break down a problem.

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But it still applies in life for me every single day. And I use that weekly or every new project we have. When I started into the business, I always just stuck to that simple of a game plan of like, who are we going to buy? Who's going to buy this product? How can we get it to everyone and like just literally break down everything from the most fundamental, basic questions that if you answer all of those questions and go into detail, not just the basic stuff, but literally, like really, really get granular.

00:12:21
It's like you pretty much wrote the ro, you wrote the roadmap for yourself using your own answers. Not like if you wrote this roadmap and you trust your gut and you know, you do a couple of sample testings and prove that it works, just follow the roadmap that you wrote out and yes, there's going to be a fork in the road. Maybe, you know, why do my customers need this product? Maybe it ends up being a little different than you thought, but you have all of those other questions answered. So like it's easy to pivot at that point if you have everything really, really spelled out.

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And I think I see that most that people don't think thoroughly is they have a good product or service. They have a very quick way to make money, which is post on Facebook, hey guys, I just started this new business. We all go support it and then everybody in town supports that business like crazy for a month and then you never hear anything about it again. What's like the person who started that realized like we'll use baking cookies, for example. Like she, she makes really good cookies and she knows that all of her friends and all of her aunts and all of her co workers and all these people, well, that's the first 50 customers you've got.

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But expanding past those 50 customers, you didn't think that far yet. And if you want to make a business a real business, you have to think at that part. I'm going to start with these 50, but then make, and make a plan for what to do after that 1st 50. Because I think you just see that a bunch, like in small business, you see people get started and die off quickly and from the outside looking in. It doesn't have to do with raising money.

00:13:52
It can be way smaller businesses than that. I think people just don't think thoroughly all the way through their plan and go really far with that dream really big. Have a plan for how to make money this month and this year, but also, what does ten years look like and actually write that out. I would love to have my own packaged cookies and I would love to have my own package blanket. I'd love to be in a hundred grocery stores and already have written down the vendors of who's going to be selling to the grocery stores.

00:14:23
Call those guys. Hey, I'm a small cookie guy. I just started making these little cookies. I'm selling them at home. But one day I want you to be selling my cookies at Piggly Wiggly.

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What do you need from me to be able to do that and map that far in advance for dreaming stuff that you're not even close to yet, but you know what it looks like when you get there. And I have done that really well with every part of what we do. Just because I see that that's where other people fail at. And if you, if I see that's where everyone else is going to fail at, like, I just want to at least make sure I'm doing my due diligence. And when I talk to people about that, it's definitely the main thing that, like, opens people's eyes of, well, you're.

00:15:00
I was calling on people who sell to grocery stores before we even had a product to just see what it's like. How do you get the products in the grocery stores? And I want to know what that process looks like. We don't even have anything yet, but I think thinking that far in advance has been able that way, once you get done with your little project, you've got, you know what your next steps are going to be. Well, you said so many important things right there.

00:15:23
Sorry, I got a little tangent. Fires me up. It's all good. It's all good. I love it.

00:15:28
I love this conversation because what you're talking about is the pre launch. Yeah, yeah. Pre launch. Like doing everything, all the details that you need to, you know, before you actually launch it so that you're very clear. Because that clarity, the clarity is huge.

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Because when you've got clarity, that helps you with your confidence. Right. The confidence is going to help you when it comes to talking to suppliers once you have the product. But what I really want to emphasize, Darian, what you were saying is you were manifesting your vision is really what you were doing by writing down, okay, in ten years, I want to be in these grocery stores, and these are the distributors that are going to help me get there, et cetera, et cetera. That's really incredible.

00:16:20
The funny thing about the word manifesting is really special to me just because I believe in it so much. Probably my top. One of my top beliefs, but I. I didn't know what the word meant. Like, at a young age, even in high school, I can remember the fun, the craziest manifesting story that we've got.

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We live in this little town and the building that we're in. When they built this building, I would drive by this building, and we live in a tiny little town. This is like a really pretty place that they just built. And I always thought, man, that'd be the coolest thing. If I ran a business out of that building, it'd be the coolest thing because it's a beautiful building.

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We don't have anything like this in town. And just one thing led to another, and I always thought about it, and you pass this building, you know, 20 times a week in travel, and that's the building that we're in now. And I just spent so much of my life just thinking about every time I would drive by, like, where would we be parking at? Just the dumbest little thoughts that don't even matter, but, like, how powerful that is. Because if it stays in your mind that much, and you're literally thinking about, where would we put picnics at for the people who for break.

00:17:28
And you're thinking that thoroughly about this plan, you're going to learn one of two things. Either in two weeks of doing that, your mind is going to tell you, hey, dude, that's a dumb idea, or it's going to fall off. You're going to stop thinking about it. But if you don't stop thinking about it and it stays in your mind that heavy that you're thinking about where the picnic tables are going to go outside in years down the road, when we get the building, you need to act on that because it's not just a random thing, random reason that you're thinking about that. And so we're in that building now, which is the coolest thing for me, and we're so much bigger than this little building.

00:17:59
We need to be in a much bigger building now, but it's just the coolest thing now that we're in here. Manifesting story. Yep. I love it. That's an incredible story.

00:18:08
And it just shows how when you're putting these conscious thoughts out to the universe, it rewards you, and it came back to you. I love that 100%. That's incredible. All right, you've got some numbers behind you. What do they mean?

00:18:22
I see behind you've got that ticker. What is that ticker? That ticker is our running order count. And so every time we get a new online order, that ticker goes off. So we launched less than three years ago, and we've done 232,000 online orders.

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And so that's people going to y'allsweet tea.com, ordering any of our products, which we've got tea, coffee, seasonings, the pitcher you can see right there, like, a tea pitcher, and a bunch of other things that just make sense to have in the kitchen with the word y'all on it. Apparel. I've got a hat. But the main thing, I'll just jump into a little sales pitch. But the main thing is y'all sweet tea.

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This is a bag I opened yesterday on a Zoom call. But essentially, we created a blend of tea. Our competitors would be Lipton, red diamond, Louisianne. So it's a product that you boil the water on the stove, make it homemade, just like our grandparents did growing up. So we created our own blend, and inside of this is ten one 1oz filter packs.

00:19:25
So each one of these makes a gallon. So you boil your water, drop that bag in, and put the lid on. And we actually. So one of the coolest things. I'll pause and kind of back up.

00:19:34
When we started y'all sweet tea in 2015, we were selling liquid tea in a mason jar at festivals and traveling all over. You can't really ship that product because it's so heavy. Like, we made really good tea, but you can't really ship it. And everyone always said, what's your. What's the secret to this?

00:19:50
This stuff's so good. It was just a liquid that we would sell it to you, like, at a county fair or something. Right. So once we came up with this product, the goal was, let's put the recipe, our family, like, the real deal recipe, on the back of the bag, which is different than just, like, how to make sweet tea. Let's put the real recipe on the bag so we can mail this, which is a very lightweight, ten ounce product.

00:20:12
But when you get it at home, you can make ten gallons of sweet tea, exactly how we'd made it growing up. And it's so good. It's so perfect. And that kind of touches on what you said earlier. Which is that sweet tea is kind of, like, expanding across the US right now.

00:20:25
It's growing in popularity. We wanted to make sure people know how to make it wherever they're at. And we're seeing a lot of states we wouldn't expect to be growing as fast as they are with our online sales. And I think it has a lot to do with that recipe because we're mailing it to them, teaching them exactly how to make really, really good sweet tea. A lot of northern states, a lot of California, Hawaii, Alaska, crazy states that we wouldn't expect.

00:20:51
But I think you're seeing that just because the recipe that we put together on the back of the bag and how much that's helping people who aren't used to make drinking sweet tea or making it, specifically teaching them how to make it. Oh, my gosh, I love it. Yeah, because there's definitely more of an art to it because I grew up drinking sweet tea, and I would just throw the lipton tea bags in the pod and then, you know, I would just do it by taste, throwing the sugar in and just taste it. So do you have already made products that you're distributing as well? We don't.

00:21:24
We only have that bag, that bag product. So we've got two sizes, one that makes a gallon, one that makes a half gallon, and then we've got, behind me, you can see, I want to show. I want to tell one quick story, too. We've got flavors that we launched last year, and it's our same exact tea blend, but we added, Georgia Peach was the first one that we did. And so it's just a tea.

00:21:46
It's a peach blend of our regular tea. But the cool thing about online, and that ticker behind me is we sold 10,000 of these on our website in 35 minutes when we launched it. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. 10,000 units sold out in 35 minutes.

00:22:02
And so that just, like, how cool the Internet is, how powerful, once you build something and get momentum rolling. But, so we answer your question, though. We do not have a liquid product, a finished product yet, but that's certainly something that we want to have. We're in discussions with bottlers, that distribution network. You got to have a little bit more solidified, because tea expires really quickly, too.

00:22:26
So once it's liquid, it expires quickly. This is good for a year. So if we mail it to you, you got a year to drink ten gallons. We're pretty confident that's going to happen. But once we make a liquid tea, we don't want to use preservatives because that really kills the tradition and, like, the true southern flavor.

00:22:42
So you're only, you only have about 15 days with a bottled product, so you've got to have really good distribution to make a liquid tea, get it in the store really quickly and then it sell quick. So something that we're definitely working on, it's one of my biggest goals, but we're just not quite there yet. I would imagine that, you know, you'd have to hire some sort of logistics expert to really get that nailed down because it's, that's a whole other type of mindset and skill set. And, I mean, I know one of my good friends, her daughter, that was her high school, her college major was in logistics. That's a huge.

00:23:22
That's a huge, huge thing. Yeah. Huge industry. All right, we're almost out of time. Darien, you already gave so many golden nuggets.

00:23:30
What is one thing, if you could just give one piece of advice for somebody that is dreaming about starting a business, what is the most important thing that you can offer them for the dreamer. So the dreamer is someone who's spent that weird amount of time thinking about the little details that they're too scared. For whatever reason, they're scared of what their, you know, their aunt on Facebook is going to say, or their math teacher who follows them from high school is going to say, or their friends.

00:24:05
I think the most important thing is stop worrying about what those people think, because if you're going to grow a big business, think. I gave an example the other day, most people have a thousand friends on Facebook, just a regular Facebook page. You have a thousand friends. Out of that thousand, you're going to. If you post a picture, you might get 100 likes of your family at Christmas.

00:24:23
On, on, you're going to 100 likes. I want my business to be much bigger than 100 customers. So I'm not worrying about what those hundred people who are actively seeing my Facebook. I don't care what those people think. And if it's a negative way, because out of that hundred people, the majority of them are on your side.

00:24:40
They want you to succeed. Your business idea that you're, like, thinking of every night, the hundred people that is actively looking at your facebook, they want you to win. So out of those, maybe ten of them are haters, for whatever reason, from your hometown that you're scared they're going to make fun of you and send in a group to, those people don't care because if there's ten people, I want my business to be known by millions of people. So I don't care what those ten think. That's most important.

00:25:05
And that once you just swallow that, just start. Because most people also are looking at you for, like, just start. That's the main thing, is just starting. But I do want to go backwards. That's for the dreamer.

00:25:19
But also just mapping out, I think a lot of people are scared of, and I have been at times, too, but just mapping all of those very, very basic, fundamental questions out, but writing them down where you can look back at your answers, answering them as thoroughly as possible. So where am I going to sell this product? And then thinking all the way through that? Well, as of right now, I'm going to sell this product online, this bag right here. But I would also love to get it in Piggly Wiggly.

00:25:44
So that's just another answer on that line. But how do you get into Piggly Wiggly? So now you start breaking off all of your answers into more. And so by the end of this, if you thoroughly work through the who, what, when, where, why, you're gonna have pages and pages of answers. That is the roadmap to how to do your business, how to chase your dreams.

00:26:03
No matter if it's a business or, or anything. You, if you answer those questions thoroughly, you wrote the roadmap that is the silver bullet that everyone thinks we have this special sauce of. Man, you must be lucky that y'all had the sweet tea thing. No, I wrote out all of the answers and then just did what I. It's right there.

00:26:23
So I think proper planning in the beginning and the fear, overcoming the fear of what your Facebook friends are going to think, those are the two main things. Once you get past. Once you get past those two things, it's easy peasy. Love it. Well, like they always say, if you fail to plan, plan to fail.

00:26:41
Yep. Gotta have a plan. Gotta have a plan. All right, so where can everybody can find it at y'all sweet tea? Simple.

00:26:50
Yes, ma'am. Y'allsweet tea.com. And we're in, we're in a bunch of grocery stores, too. So we're in food city. I think you might be around some food city grocery stores in your area.

00:26:59
We're in the Virginia. We're in the Virginias, North Carolina. But all the store locators on our website, y'allsweet dot. And yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you so much.

00:27:11
And best of luck with, with your business. It's amazing. And I love seeing young entrepreneurs such as yourself just having huge success because it paths away for so many other people. So thank you. Yes, ma'am.

00:27:23
Thank you. All right, take Care, Darian. Okay, thanks everyone. Bye.

00:27:39
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