A Different Kind of Mojo: Building A Mission-Driven Medtech Without Venture Capital

What if you could slash a medical device’s cost by 75 percent, scale to 39 countries, and still avoid venture capital? That’s the story we unpack with Keto-Mojo’s cofounder, Mr. Mojo himself, who turned a personal health crisis into a mission-driven company that put $1 ketone strips in millions of hands—and backed it with rigorous clinical science.

We start at the spark: a ketogenic diet that lifted depression, shed 47 pounds, and sparked a hard question about why strips cost $5. That curiosity led to reverse engineering the supply chain, securing FDA-cleared manufacturing, and financing the first buys with a home equity line. Hypergrowth followed, but so did cash walls. You’ll hear the real mechanics of staying alive: weekly rolling cash forecasts, inventory math across 30–45 day builds and 45–60 day transit, and why “business is messy, never run out of cash” became a mantra. We break down the decision to use debt—Shopify/Amazon advances, mezz loans, SBA refinancing—over equity to preserve a long-term health mission rather than chase a quick exit.

The playbook isn’t just financial. We dive into the brand’s information-first strategy that drives unusually high conversion, the shift from pure DTC to a 40% B2B mix, and the global expansion that required tight KPIs, clean closes, and disciplined ROAS. Then the plot twist: tariffs threaten the model. The team secures 120-day supplier terms to turn a manufacturer into a bank, pauses shipments, and wins a binding ruling under the Nairobi Protocol to protect a critical diabetes channel. Transfer pricing, DDP imports, and collaborative partners round out a masterclass in resilience.

Most powerful of all is the impact. With devices used in 100+ clinical trials and a nonprofit funding research and education, Keto-Mojo has helped people put type 2 diabetes into remission and supported oncology and PCOS care with data. The proudest moment lands close to home: an 82-year-old mom announcing her own remission. If you’re a founder weighing growth capital, wrestling with inventory risk, or building a mission that must outlast fads, this conversation offers clear principles: price for access, plan cash like your life depends on it, and protect nimbleness. Subscribe, share with a founder who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest cash lesson.

Connect with Keith on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithkohler1/

Transcript

Meet Mr. Mojo And The Mission

Keith Kohler 0:04

Hi everyone, it's your financing man, Keith Kohler, and here we are in episode number 11 of how I financed it. And again, by way of background, what I do is I help companies get the right financing at the right time. That's transaction me. And I meet companies where they are and founders, sorry, uh, and guide them along their financing journey. That's transformation me. So transaction plus transformation equals financing man. And here at How I Financed It, what we do is we look at an entrepreneur's journey from startup to where they are today, primarily through the financing lens. And yet that also uh leads into what I call energetic tangents and discussions on strategy and personal development, any types of things you can imagine. Today's discussion is going to be a very fruitful one. I know that for sure, because uh uh Doran Grinnell, also known as Mr. Mojo from Keto Mojo, has grown uh extraordinary business. And uh I got to know him early on in his early stage days, several years ago. And now here he is today, uh not just providing an amazing product, but uh doing some important work in the community that he has led and been such an integral part of. So I can't wait to bring Dorne Grinnell, Mr. Mojo, to the stage.

Dorian Greenow 1:33

There you are, Dorne. Welcome. Hey, thank you for the intro. That was absolutely fantastic, and it's great to to catch up again. You know, I I I think when you when you invited me on to onto this podcast, I was like, hmm, I had to go back and just look at when we first met. I think we had an email introduction on July the 13th in 2018.

Keith Kohler 1:56

How about that? Um, it's funny, I was I didn't look at it like you did, but I was thinking it was 18 or 19. I wasn't sure, but wow, let's just think about what's happened in seven years, right? Of this journey.

Dorian Greenow 2:09

Yeah, I was basically, if you think about that, I was uh we we we started the company in February of 2017, started pre-selling in the September of 2017. In fact, we first shipped our first product on Gemma's birthday, um, my wife, Mrs. Mojo, uh, on September the 12th. And so if you think we were literally only roughly nine months into the journey of trying to grow a company.

From Personal Health Crisis To Idea

Keith Kohler 2:37

Yeah, and when I when we got to know each other, you had again, you started your sales in nine months. And what was interesting about your origin story, and I hope you can share this with our audience, is you made a a very strong commitment uh on the self-financing, particularly in the initial period, right?

Dorian Greenow 2:57

Correct, yeah. And I sort of like there's a there's a backstory um to that. I mean, possible. So this is a bit of a personal journey that has been for me. Back in 2015, I was over 225 pounds. Uh, I was on antidepressants, um uh and I was spiraling through jobs, um, gone from being like seven or eight years in the job, and I'm now getting down into one year or nine months or six months and things like that. It just I was like in this fog, and I went on a well-formulated ketogenic diet, and within one month came off of all antidepressants. Within eight months, had lost over 47 pounds. Was that feeling absolutely fantastic? And at that time, uh, I was testing with which is now a competitors meter, an Abbott meter, and I was using data to guide me. Just like in our businesses when we do a PL or a balance sheet, I was using that data to see are the dietary choices that we are I'm making working right for me. And it was, you know, when you get that clarity that you get from being on a well-formulated ketogenic diet, I was looking at the strip and I took the strip apart, going, like, why is this thing $4, $5? And that was sort of, this doesn't seem to compute. So I drew up a list of a hundred different manufacturers across the globe, crossed that to the federal regulations, and went out, visited different manufacturers, and eventually got one to get the time on their on their manufacturing line. And then I went back to Gemma, and this is like the first part of how do you finance it, and said, Hey, Gems, do you mind if we if I borrow a part of this our home equity line of credit to go into what is essentially a medical device company? And she said, Well, how much do you think you'll you'll need on this? And I was like, Well, probably all of it. And like, I I was in, I was in the wine industry. So this is like $250,000. I was in the wine industry before that. Like, what do I know of medical device sales or or anything in in that respect? Um, but Gemma was like, said, okay, if you think so, go do it. So that was the first key piece that it was like, okay, that was the first bit of financing that we could think for the first purchase of the inventory.

Keith Kohler 5:20

For the inventory, okay.

Killing The Middlemen, Cutting Strip Costs

Dorian Greenow 5:21

Yeah. So it was inventory. And at that stage, I was like, okay, I won't take any, I won't take any weight for myself. We'll see what we can do. And I think the first thing I did was do a pricing schedule. I think when people think about becoming entrepreneurs, they think, oh, I need to learn how to be an entrepreneur. Uh I never went to a school for an entrepreneur, I never went to university. I got kicked out of school when I was uh 19. Uh, I went to the school of hard locks, and everything that I've done, I've learned along the way, but I've looked for skills that could be transferable. Uh, and like when I was in the wine industry uh doing events, doing events uh at Pine Ridge Winery, my boss there, then Colleen Dre, she made me learn how to do budgeting. I had to budget off how many events I was going to do a year, how to work out what the cost of what those events are, and I had to work the margins coming out of that. And I didn't know how to do any of that. So I went to the controller, Teresa Woods, and said, Hey, can you help me with that? How does this work in the general ledger? She taught me how the GL worked. And then when I was doing direct-to-consumer at the wineries, we learned how to do connecting sales systems and how to um uh do e-commerce because you couldn't have all of the storage of four or five years of bottles in your small winery, so you had to have it off. And that's how I learned how to do e-com. So when we started the company, it was from that basis of A, knowing how to do e-comm, B, how to do pricing to see is there enough margin there, and C how to build out a model to say, could this be a viable business? And I have to tell you, I've been wrong on every single business plan for the first four years. It grew much quicker, much faster, and it was like pay paying pin the tail on the donkey.

Keith Kohler 7:14

I really want to witness you and come back to that a bit. As I listened to you, Dorian, it's uh quite fascinating because here you had a again, a mainly a marketing background, right? And you had a strong sense of purpose of hey, I knew that this worked for me and I knew that I could build a better mousetrap, right? That there was something inherently wrong with the product and service offering for the ketogenic community, mainly on the basis of cost, right?

Dorian Greenow 7:47

Correct. Yeah, you had a few biotech companies who had command of the situation. They were doing the typical three-tier system where they were selling for to one person who was doing to the distributor that was selling on to someone else. So you had middleman bloat. And we see that we saw that in the wine industry where because it was highly regulated, you have to sell through a distributor.

Keith Kohler 8:11

That's right.

Dorian Greenow 8:11

And so what wineries did is they pivoted direct to consumer because they could make more margin on that one, and then they could have a better relationship with the customers, they're telling their story. If you go to any luxury winery, you'll always hear the story of the founders that kind of comes on into play. And then we knew that if we could get rid of the middleman blow, go direct to consumer. If we could make it affordable for the consumer, that they would potentially adopt. And when we launched uh in um in September of 2017, we changed the price by 75% overnight.

Keith Kohler 8:45

Wow. So you had quote you talked about a five-dollar strip became about a buck 25, something like that.

Dorian Greenow 8:52

No, it became a dollar. We guaranteed a dollar a strip for life when they first started up that we would never change the price on that. And subsequently, we have actually even reduced the price down to about 80 cents for a um a ketone strip as we got um economies of scale that could come on into play.

Keith Kohler 9:09

Even with tariffs, supply chain, all the things that could mud muddle up cogs, right?

Dorian Greenow 9:16

Yeah, I mean, if you look between when we launched in 2017 to now, inflation over that time has been 18.5%. We've never changed the price, we've actually gone down on price on it like that as we got economies of scale, as we got out a lot of the inefficiencies that we had when we first started the company.

Keith Kohler 9:38

Yeah, and the other thing that a couple of other things from this origin story. Here you were very curious, right? You had a high sense of purpose and motivation to disrupt an industry because you knew that that personal benefit that you got for yourself is something you could do for others. And so I'm I was really fascinated. You you you built your own database of all these manufacturers, a hundred of them?

Home Equity Bet And Early Cash Triage

Hypergrowth, Cash Walls, And Survival

Dorian Greenow 10:03

Yeah. So I mean, basically it was like I researched and looked for as many different um suppliers as possible. Um like I looked at all the different brands, and then it's kind of like a little bit in quite often what you see in the wine industry is somebody will, there's a thing called a shiner, and that means you can buy a bottle of wine without a front label, without a back label, and with a plain cork in it. And then you set up your company underneath that regulatory TTB rules as a subsidiary, if you will, and then add to file that you are licensed to be able to make wine from that facility. And then what you do is you put a front label on it and you put a back label on it, you put it in a package in a box and you go sell it. So that's what I was looking for. I was looking for the people who had the ability, already had the regulatory affair work done by the FDA, in which, and when you look at that field, that actually that 100 narrows down really, really quickly to only about five me core players. And Abbott, who was my competition, wouldn't want to work with me. Nova wouldn't want to work with me and couldn't get it to me at a price. So that left about three other players, and that's how eventually I was able to convince them to say, I would like time on your manufacturing line, I would like you to make for me. But you end up with MOQs that you it's a pay-to-play game, and that's when it was like, How much do you think we're going to need of that line of credit? That'd be probably all of it. And so then when we launched, quickly we got adopted in the um by the direct consumer um community. But then when we launched in Amazon of March of uh of 2018, we had a meteoric rise at that point. We within three months became the number one selling ketone meter in America. And I remember Sami Inkenan of Verta Health, I had gone to him for a little bit of advice and said, and I like to take little things from every leader that I meet and try and take a phrase and hold that in there. And one of it, he said to me, Growth can kill a company. Whatever you do, do not run out of cash. And I was like, okay, that sounds interesting. And then I was sacked, I was hunting for money now because I was running out of cash pretty rapidly. We launched in September of 2017. I used the home equity line of credit. On the fires of October the 9th, we lost our house in California. And then I was like, oh, okay, now I don't have access to capital, and I'm still trying to grow this up there. We're on Shopify, and I'm like, and I can recall being at the side of the road in my truck, and I've got I've got uh fire engine after fire engine after fire engine after fire engine part of it. And I'm almost in tears with my Shopify rep to say I needed to get into their loan program. And if you look at their loan programs, the rates that they had, they're like, it's like I've got to get into this, you've got to kind of like help me. And I hadn't slept for like days. Uh, and you know, you kind of like look at go back and you think about those moments of like, my God, you know, we were we were moments from from bankruptcy because we were gonna run out of cash. And then it became, and then I sat down with another mentor friend, um Joanna Beer. He was um uh formerly the GM for Frog's Leap Winery, has a great um uh import brand called True North Wines, and he's a very good businessman. And um, and we're there and I've got my Shopify account settling in there, and every time a sale came in, it was go, it would go ding, ding. Oh, that's it. And he was he was getting irritating. He goes, like, what's that noise? And I said, Well, it's a sale. Every time it comes in, it goes ding. And he goes, Oh no, we you've got a completely different problem uh on that one. Because I was showing him a spreadsheet of like how do I manage this, and it was like, you need to be buying in cash. It's not about profitability at this moment, it's about buying and getting cash to grow, and that's kind of like whether I put those two pieces of ice is like, okay, we need a we need a better mousetrap, we need to find a better way, and we need to do different bits of financing to debt finance it up. Now, the choice on debt financing was key because we realized early on that this was more of a mission, and it's in these moments when people are hyper gross, is where the vulture capitalists sit. They know this happens, yeah, and those vulture capitalists they will. That's where they wait to come on in because they've got the cash, you need it, and they want part of your equity. And I didn't want to give away that equity because once you got the vulture capitalists in there, they want 65 points of margin and an exit strategy in under five years. Whereas if you're trying to change people's bias on and on how they eat, this is a multi-generational problem that we have to affect. It won't be done in this generation, so we have to take this longer-term horizon timeline horizon for change. We can make decisions that sometimes aren't based upon profit, but they're based upon for the betterment of society and and human beings. And that's where we kind of like hit at a tangent. And this is where Gemma and I chose that this debt finance way was going to be potentially the way to go.

Keith Kohler 15:35

Yeah. I want to I want to um go back to a couple of things because you've shared a lot of interesting nuggets over this uh this time uh past few minutes. Uh first I want to witness you and Gemma and say I think for a lot of people, uh, the fire and the losing of a home could have uh uh completely driven you into uh having everything fall apart, not just uh tangibly so but also mental health-wise, or even the ability to want to move on and grow a business. And I'm wondering, was that because you just felt very connected by the purpose and you saw the the initial results? What what motivate you in the face of such horrible tragedy?

Dorian Greenow 16:18

I mean, sometimes when you're in the river of life, you've just got to keep kicking your feet and and swimming. Uh, I think there's that there's that part to it. And then sometimes when you suddenly realize that, yeah, you might have actually caught a little bit of lightning in a bottle. Um, and that there's something that is too to that. And it's it was a double-edged sword. I mean, I would not recommend to anybody losing their house. The amount of um the amount of what it hits you with is is huge. I mean, I do remember walking up to the nationwide um catastrophe center uh in a in a in a parking lot uh near a home depot. And I looked across from there and I suddenly realized how lucky I was because I could see some of other people and all that they had were trash trash bags with the put their possessions. And if you think about the barbacks and the the waiters who were living in rental homes and they didn't have rental insurance, they lost everything. We had insurance, thank gosh. The first thing I did was like, did we have the policy? You know, like did I forget to pay the premiums? You know, you know, you've got that like fear in your mind. But then it became a double-edged sword. Yes, it was really bad. But then we got that first check for our lifetime of possessions. And I went to Gemma and I said, Gems, do you mind if I put this into the company?

Keith Kohler 17:43

There's a moment, right? Yeah.

Dorian Greenow 17:45

Yes. You then have to go to say, you know, most people, it's sort of like, What is what is your essence of risk? And I kind of like think at this moment, if you think like the old westerns, you know, they're playing the they're playing this game of cards, you know, and they know that there's a risk that's associated, and then they push all in, they put all of their money in. And then they kind of like bring out their papy's watch and they throw their papy's watch onto the table. And then finally they bring out the last thing is that there's their gun because they're going to make sure they're going to die with their boots on, but they're going for it. And that's what it was like. I've I'm not a gambler in any way, shape, or form. But I've done which is probably the biggest gamble that anybody could have in their lives, is put their entire lives' possession in. Because when we got the check for the first check for the house, I went to Gemma and I said, Gemma, do you think we can put the money into the company? And realized that she wasn't even in the company at this time. She was the hardest employee to bring on in because she had just passed the Somelier exam. She was in love with the wine industry, but I needed to have that strong person by my side that I know that I could trust to do things because we'd been together for so long. We're now 29 years of marriage. We used to work in catering together when we were in New York City. And so here it was other that. So the ability that you can bring somebody into the company and have their shared experience. But you have to give ground rules when working at home for all of those things. But it's it was that willingness to go all in that we could see the potentiality that would come on down.

Choosing Debt Over Venture Capital

Keith Kohler 19:19

And happily you had the proof of concept.

Dorian Greenow 19:22

Yeah, we had revenue coming on in. You know, we were we were cash flow positive from day one, which is pretty impressive. It was a simple buy-sell at that particular moment in time, and we were able to work with our community. So we knew the community first. You know, by going to the conferences, being in the Facebook social media areas, we understood our consumer extremely well. And so when we launched, we were basically 100% consumer. Now we've diversified. We're now probably um 40% B2B, 60% direct to consumer. And I think we've just um got authority to sell into Turkey. So that now puts us in the ability to sell into 39 countries now.

Keith Kohler 20:08

39 and counting.

Dorian Greenow 20:10

And counting, yes, 39, 39 countries, which I think if I look back in those early days, and that's where I've been wrong on every business plan, because if I had put that business plan to the bank, they would have just laughed at me. They'll be like, no way will you take this into an eight-figured uh eight yeah, eight medium eight-figured company in under um uh uh seven years.

Keith Kohler 20:36

No, I don't think they would believe it because for a lot of reasons. One is just the financials themselves, but it's funny because devices usually the typical founder profile of someone who does something in the middle of a device has either a science background, a medical background, or an engineering style background, right? And here you're coming in through the lens of uh building the better mousetrap because you live this experience with all this curiosity, all this passion, a true vision, mission, and purpose, which is not what they typically see, particularly in something technical.

Cash Forecasting And Inventory Math

Dorian Greenow 21:21

Yeah, absolutely. And the challenge that you have sometimes is if you're trying to bring in a new product in, is that you've got that burn rate as you do the RD. What we did was said, okay, let's get an existing product, be able to get a low enough cost on it, get rid of the bloat and the middleman, and then approach it to a specific audience, and then get on to cash as quick as we possibly could and try and grow and try and grow the business. But you know, I have to say, debt financing is it's not for the faint of heart. It's not for everyone at all. No. And and I think there's there there you can look there's different types of there's a spectrum that you could do. Yes, you can get the VC money coming on in, and there that you get the angel investors early. You can do a combination, a hybrid approach of what you need on that part there. Uh and then you have what we did where we chose, okay, we're going to debt finance it up, we're using our own cash to kind of like go into it. We can be the captain of our ship and the masters of our souls, and we can be make good decisions and make quick decisions. And you know, I I recall I'm sat, I think it was I'm sat in in a rental house, um uh and I think I'm on my second glass of wine, and I've got 10 days to find a million dollars, or we're gonna run out of cash. 10 days to find a million dollars, but I'm looking ahead four months in the in ahead because I know that where we've got it by growth, and I've got to place a purchase order for $1.5 million. And like if you think I was a director of hospitality at the winery, I was only earning about $100,000 a year. You know, I didn't have any real rich friends. And those who I had initially gone to to say come for help, they said like, no, they didn't want to touch it because they'd already had their fingers burnt by working with another friend within the area. So I couldn't get that friend's help that was needed to grow. I tried to go to banks and I spoke to a friend of mine who was uh uh a and an executive, a vice prize president at the um the Bank of the West. And he said, like, banks are not going to be your friend right now, you've got to find other options. So friends was out, um, banks were out, didn't want to do the VC road, so it's sort of like, okay, how do we get cash to be able to do that? Uh and that then became everything then became it wasn't a problem of trying to market the business anymore. It was how do I buy cash, how do I find cash, and how do I make sure that I can get ahead of it because it takes time. And I think just before we got introduced by Ted Taken or SATIP, by that time I was running every single credit card I could. Yeah, I was doing revolving loans on Shopify. I hadn't yet got the magic loan button on Amazon. Uh, I was doing the mezzanine with Sellers Fi, On Deck, and the likes of those. I was doing the three-month revolvers. So, my A, my rate, if you look at the APR rates on those on Shopify, it's like, oh my god, how much am I being hit at like almost somewhere in the reason 80 to 30 percent? But then it was we didn't want to worry about the profitability, we wanted about how do we get enough money to grow. And when I when I had that last sip of that wine and said, Oh, F it, and press the button for the PO, by the hairs of our Chin Chin Chin, somehow we got in and managed to find that last million dollars in that in that 10 days that carried us forward for the for the next piece. And and I think this is the the founder's dilemma and the ability to realize the timeline it takes to get cash to grow gets harder and harder and harder sometimes.

Keith Kohler 25:16

Yeah, there's so much here, Dorian. And again, what struck me when I first met you was your way of talking about what you needed. And I'll give you an example. So, or I I can actually recall our conversation. You came to me and said, Keith, I'm going down this, I have my projection, I'm going down this growth arc, and I'm gonna hit the cash flow wall. Right? Yeah, and every in fact, every conversation I ever had with you within the first minute after, hey, how are you? You would always say, My cash flow wall comes here. How do we figure it out to get to that next point? And I was so blown away by that because to this day I cannot think of a single founder I've spoken with, and there's been well over a thousand since we first were introduced, whoever expressed themselves that way and who had such a good handle on cash requirements. And of course, as you said, all the projections are wrong, but at least you had a stake in the ground or whatever you want to call it, a mile marker saying, This is where I think it's gonna be. No one has ever been as dedicated to cash requirements, cash management like you are. And I think now that I know the origin story of that, how important that conversation was, and how it deeply it resonated with you about hey, don't run out of cash.

Scaling Channels: DTC, Amazon, Global

Dorian Greenow 26:50

And I've I I've suffered my position on walls because I think in the early days I'm right, those that were in the past, yeah. Those are the those are the positions where, like, okay, you're gonna hit the wall and you're dead. Okay, guys, that's it. You've got no more cash. You you can't pay your bills, and you always must pay your bills on time. And we always prided ourselves on paying bills on time and early because if the money went out of my bank account, I could clearly see what we had had left, and that that made it for a clear. And then every Monday we would readjust our cash flow from the Saturday's bank account so we could reset. We had a rough idea of how we were doing in, but we created spreadsheets with triggers so that we could auto-do a rolling forecast, if you will. So I now thought think about it like the cash flow narrows. Think about it like sailing that you want to sail into that safe bay, and there is a there's a channel that you need to hit, and there's going to be rocks on either side, and you need to see how much depth that you can get your ship through that narrow. And that's based upon inventory kind of like coming on in, cash flow coming on in, and what your projected outflows are going to be. And with us, with B2B and others, you've got a good, roughly four-month vision ahead where you can have a certain amount of certainty, and then you kind of like that, and then you start realizing that there are a few levers, like how many days of inventory on hand are you going to keep to maintain um uh you know your business continuity plan? Like, is that is the Suez Canal going to get blocked?

Keith Kohler 28:22

For you, right? Yeah, because you were and you continue to produce in Asia, and so that's how you can get from the at first outflow to when you get your product to when you sell it, yours is this long. Correct.

Dorian Greenow 28:37

You know, you've got your 30 days to get 30 to 45 days to get the product manufactured in in Asia, then you've got your roughly 45 to 60 days on the water, then if you're trying to run through um uh your inventory in 60 days, that's your cash conversion cycle. And so all of that has to live within your cash flow. And if you're not making much money at the bottom line, like the profitability, you know, when on the early days you've got more costs, you might have more blurbs, you might only be getting 3%. So if you've only got 3% free cash, but you need to spend more, there's there's the value of death that can exist, and that's where the debt financing kind of like really came on into play. And our first one we did together, uh, that was the big one because I was worried about tax season, because I hadn't paid my taxes along the way, estimated taxes, because we had grown so massively in that year. In that first year, we had grown huge. We'd were gone from, say, I think the first year was like 1.00 to the next million to be nearly 10 million or something like that for of revenue in the year. It was like it was hyper growth.

Keith Kohler 29:48

Yeah.

Dorian Greenow 29:49

And because I'd been spending all the money buying inventory and having inventory on the water and trying to have enough positioning, we didn't have enough, and so the tax was looming. And uh it was at this time, I know I kind of like handed my books over to you to say, like, do you think you can get me an SBA though? And what I liked about it was is like you you looked at my PL, you looked at my balance sheet, you looked at my borrowing costs, and you were able to say, I think you have a uh have a a good um uh a good case here. But what I also really liked was from the introduction from Ted Taekwum, you were already in the nutrient space, and we were all about food. It was all about what a well-formulated ketogenic diet is, even though it was a medical device. And I think the bank that you first brought this to, you had already had one good SBA loan or several more under your belt. So we didn't have to re-explain to a banker what a well-formulated ketogenic diet is.

Keith Kohler 30:49

Right.

Dorian Greenow 30:49

We just had to try and explain to them that it's not a fad, and that becomes a challenge.

Clinical Proof And Community Impact

Keith Kohler 30:54

Yeah, and that was it's it's an interesting thing as I go back down that memory lane with you. What resonated with me and where you were, particularly and where keto was, and you being a pioneer and one of the first, it so reminded me of my own journey in gluten-free when people were saying, it's bad, it'll go away. Um why especially, of course, in the venture community, many naysayers, there's no way I'm gonna do this, and how would you unseat the legacy players? All kinds of things, a lot of uh headwinds that were really quite just garbage. But there was a lot of speaking among industry leaders and a lot of the followers who would say, Well, if uh this one is saying gluten-free is a fat, I'm gonna I'm gonna subscribe to that because his or her voice uh are authoritative and uh they were right in the past or something like that. And so the advantage I had happen as you were indicating is uh happily when I look at my financing sources, um I'm not just a paper pusher. I really want to uh teach and educate uh the BDOs, the business development officers, and the underwriters on hey, here's the industry you're supporting. And what also helped me and made it easier for you is and here's an extremely passionate uh founder or founders, uh husband and wife, who uh you know, you they you can really get behind that story. And that I think is an important thing. Again, I get to remind myself in two is that people can look at PL and balance sheets all day long, and yet when they see what's behind it, oh here's Mr. and Mrs. Mojo, Dorian and Gemma, who are uh being the face of your company, right? Who are out there I'll say the word evangelizing about the benefits of what this community can do and showing up in huge service and contribution, not just exact, I remember not just you exhibiting at the events, but taking real leadership, helping out younger companies starting out. So it was easy to sell what the banking term calls character. Because top to bottom, you and Gemma were all the facets of character that when financing sources take the time to understand it and listen to it, that they can really get behind.

Dorian Greenow 33:27

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. But it's but what we also were getting was real world results.

Keith Kohler 33:33

We were seeing people you had to those those are basic.

Dorian Greenow 33:36

Yeah, we were getting real world results, but on like that, but we also were seeing when you look at the personal stories, we were seeing people put their diabetes into remission. We were seeing women who had polycystic ovarian syndrome who couldn't have children actually have children. We were seeing survival rates increase on cancer. And so when we pivoted early on, because you know, when I hear from the bankers, oh, it's going to be a fad, I'm like, how do I convince people that this is not a fad and that this is a physiological state? And by the way, the first well-reformulated ketogenic diet that was written in a medical paper was in 1797 by a Scottish GP, um uh Dr. Rollo. And so this has been going for almost as long as America. And like if we go into Hippocrates at 450 BC, you know, let food be thy medicine, and they spoke about fasting for epilepsy. So it'd been there for a very, very long time. And so when we pivoted back into the medical community, and we're like, okay, we're now going to invest in more clinical trials and studies because when there's no magic pill, we need evidence-based to be able to do that. So I'm really pleased to say that we're now involved in over 100 different clinical trials. 100? Over 100 different clinical trials our product has been used in. And Gemma and I also set up uh a 501c3 nonprofit public charity called the Ketogenic Foundation, where we support education and um uh clinical trials and studies and um uh for the efficacy and use of kidogen therapies for the benefit of humankind. Because Gem and I, we don't have any children. So the question is what is your legacy that you make a buck or you you make a difference? And we're already looking at our succession planning, and when we pass away, everything will go to that foundation because we're trying to set up a multi-generational approach to affecting um change of people's health on a global scale now. And I think that's an important thing, is once you kind of like realize that you're in this beautiful position to get there, but it took a long time to get there. Yeah. Uh I mean, we started that back in late 2018-2019 when we realized that we had to have this reinforcing um function to help um support the community onto that part. How many loans did we do together, Keith? What's that? How many loans did we do together? Wasn't it four? I think it was about four. We did the big one and then we did our one, right?

Keith Kohler 36:14

That got you out of the gate.

Dorian Greenow 36:16

And then that was that that first million dollar one. I just want to share this. Like, I mean, it was again one of the things about the hair of your chinny chin chins like that. Just before the taxes were due on April the 15th. And I get this check for a million, and I turn around and I give it directly to um uh Uncle Sam. And you know, like people go, wow, you got a million-dollar tax bill, isn't that great? And it's kind of like, well, that is a champagne problem. But it also meant that I it it was only this year, yeah, at the beginning of this year, that we finally got to the position where we were able to pay off all of the SBA loans. So I've been paying that tax bill since then, uh, and trying to pay it off. Indeed.

SBA Loans, Taxes, And Discipline

Keith Kohler 37:03

Yeah, and I think about that, Dorian, is what was clever and unique about you is you were you had incredible conviction about, hey, I have this proof of concept, I've gotten the grown the company this level. Your sit your willingness to say, hey, sign me up for what's next, sign me up for what's next. There was no blindness in that. You totally knew what you were doing from a cash flow perspective. And I think what what was the name of the uh your team member who helped in preparing the forecasts?

Dorian Greenow 37:37

Uh well, we now had Elise that is in um uh in the Netherlands, but we also have Shannon um on the on the east on the east coast. So Shannon takes care of.

Keith Kohler 37:48

Was it another person? I I'm forgetting.

Dorian Greenow 37:50

We we've actually been through several because we grew out of people. That's true. Well, uh in fact, uh my accountant, uh my local accountant here sort of like fired me and said, like, hey Goran, you're you're you're in a different game here. I'm not right for you. And and I think that's kind of I I find the honesty of CyberLick of what when they actually did that was saying, like, hey, we're no longer right for you because now we are into Europe and we were into other countries, and yeah, and it was always a different game. I mean, a tax return, I don't know, is like 1400 pages now. It's it's crazy.

Keith Kohler 38:22

Yeah, I just I just brought that up because I do recall that in a lot of our interaction, I always felt that you had good support there in providing really good forecasts.

Dorian Greenow 38:33

Yeah, but it also had to be instilled into them. I mean, a lot of accountants are just used to doing closing the books, PL, and I get it done by the 20th, and here's your balance sheet. But then the added complexity of saying, well, that's not enough. You know, what we need to do is then take the actuals, and we've got to look at the actuals to um uh to budget. And so now we get a rolling forecast so that we can see where the target is gonna end up at the end of the year, and we need to make sure that we have somebody that's looking at the inventory so that as those inventory buyers are coming on in, we can then plot out the forecast for the cash flow as to what it's gonna be. So I look at cash flow on a weekly basis, and we plot out an entire year from what is our budget from our general GL purpose, and we start the budgeting process in uh at the end of June. So we've got six months in. We spend about three months trying to figure it out and go like what does next year going to look like? How do we think that would be? And then we kind of think of what the programming that we want to do to try and achieve it, and then we plug that into a spreadsheet where we put switches in that we can adjust and change at the time so we can get that course to see whether or not we can make it through the cash flow narrows. And you know, if we look at the the joyous moment of this year of being able to pay off debt, and I think if I recall at one stage, I had we had about eight million of debt, which is that's a pretty hefty number. I mean, especially when I come back to, you know, you know, I think I had as max maximum on one of my credit cards was like 30,000, you know what I mean? And I was running four, four credit cards, and then you kind of like think of all the little tricks that you did. I don't know if you do remember the Brex card that came on out where they would give you a you were one of the first I ever saw using that. Yeah, because it gave you the 60-day roller, so you could get a little bit of extra day, it would roll for 60 days, and I was able to push that up to about 300,000, 400,000 limit. Um, my American Express card, I could push that up to about a 300,000 limit. But the challenge with those is everybody thinks, oh, American Express is unlimited spending. No. You do get a cap when you're a business and they kind of cap you at 300,000, especially when you don't have eight years of of of um taxes filed. They get really kind of like worried. And so you start hitting these ceilings of where you can get the amount of money from. And that's where I think the SBA comes on in wonderfully. Yeah, I wish it was not as complicated for people.

Supplier Terms As A Financing Engine

Keith Kohler 41:12

Yeah, and definitely it was the right finance at the right time, giving your stage and your use case, right? Between the tax bills andor refinancing higher interest rate debt or working capital. Right. All of those use cases were very straightforward for me to work on with you once again, because you had this badass forecast. And you could easily say, so I I get frustrated a lot of times when I talk to others who are not quite as dedicated as you and I'd say, okay, I think I want what are you going to use it for? Right. And I often get perplexed phases where they might have an indication. And the irony is ballpark is okay to get a discussion started, but it really I sometimes struggle to impress upon my clients and my founders the importance of granularity, that hey, if everything's a round number, we can use 50,000 for marketing, 100,000. It really is more interesting for me and a better sell if the instead of 50, it's 48,226, right? To to provide real invoices and real analysis that says that. And you always had so much more of that clarity.

Dorian Greenow 42:27

Yeah, a little bit, I think that there is a inside a policy decision. Um I'm very much personally come from the school, a Dave Ramsey school for my own personal finances. I used to be awful as a young lad, ran up debt crazily, stupidly, and then go like, oh my god, it's gonna take me ages to pay all of this. Then I heard about the seven baby steps of Dave Ramsay and I applied those to myself, but I also apply it to business. I think you can have strategic debt. So, with my risk tolerance for debt is purely based upon about being able to buy inventory to be able to sell that. So I look at my crystal ball, which is up there. When it comes to operating costs, that is being able to do your ad spend, to be able to do all of that, all of that must come from cash flow from operations. Because if you've got to fit within your means of cash flow from operations so that you get to your bottom line, eBay, your net profit of what you want to have out of those those areas. And then risk, the RD piece of getting to the next generational product or building out um uh building out your software systems, that has to come from cash flow from operations or retained earnings. Jerem and I have not taken a single penny out of the company in eight years. Yes, we get a wage, yes, we put money into our 401ks, yes, we save for retirement, and yes, we do um on the baby steps as a company where you do. Go and help fund um uh nonprofits who are at that late stage that you would you would want to have. But when people are trying to, I think it's potentially dangerous, though I don't know, other people might have another approach, of utilizing loans for your marketing spend if you're not getting the lift that is up there. I think you should look at cash flow from operations. But I could be wrong.

Keith Kohler 44:22

I think no, it's a really good point, Dorian, and particularly in the e-commerce space, um to the degree folks are actively tracking their ROAS, right? And other key metrics so that they have a good sense of, hey, I I can mainly do this from income from operations if my metrics are strong enough. If you're achieving above an industry average, and I don't know what what you find the industry average to be, but I see at least a two. And anything two and a half, three ROAS is really usually quite strong in any type of industry and any product that you're you're selling.

Tariff Shock And The Nairobi Protocol

Dorian Greenow 45:01

Yeah, uh absolutely. I mean, and and we use KPIs all the time. I mean, I I use data driven for my health. So we need to do data driven for um uh for for the company, you know, simple things of making sure that you are disciplined on your clothes. All right. We need what Europe gets closed by the 10th of the month, um, uh Canada as well at the 10th of the month, the foundation gets done at the same time, and then the 20th month because it's America. Uh we do more in one month in America than an entire year in in Europe to kind of like put it into context of what it what it is that America is where the game that gets closed on the on the on the 20th. So we have to maintain that the discipline that is on that, and that's what we look at it every single month on that. And then for the different business units, they also got to look at their KPIs. You know, what are the tacos, what is a ROAS, you know, what how many people are coming to our website, you know, are we seeing 2.8 million? What is the conversion rate in Shopify? You know, our Shopify conversion rate can be as much as 10%, which is unheard of. You know, most people have a Shopify e-comm conversion rate in the twos or threes or something like that. Because at the end of the day, we're trying to convince people to prick their finger. That's a hard, heavy lift. I mean, like for someone to say, hey, not only it's just saying convincing somebody, oh, you're gonna go on a diet, yeah, you've got to exercise, but now we want you to prick your finger and get some blood in the game. You've got to find a motivated individual. And so we realize the consumer journey early on, and that's what we we changed our website from being a sales website to an information site. In fact, if you go to KitoMojo.com, yeah, the shop button is in the top right hand corner, it is out of the way. We never go and send an email out that says buy my product. We all we do is now we have a medical science writing team and we look at the latest evidence and we present the evidence. Um, a good classic one. Uh, one of the first clinical trials that we were involved in was for glioblastoma, which is brain cancer. It's a very aggressive form of cancer. And the overall survivability rate is about 14.7 months. And back in um 2016-2017, um, Eric Metzger, my chef at Pine Ridge Winery, uh, he was uh I worked every night with him when we were doing events in the caves. Uh fantastic chef, really great character. Uh he was also a certified Tamelier, as well as being the chef, and his crab stuff morales were just like off the hook. They were just incredible. And sadly, he got a glioblastoma um diagnosis. And, you know, anecdotally, uh, we'd heard that a well-formulated ketogenic diet could be having advantageous to it. And you know, I went to Eric and I told him about this, and um he tried to do it, but he couldn't get any help, and he went to his oncologist. And his oncologist said, Well, you know, that's a diet of last resort. Of last resort. Well, he's got glioblastoma, he is at last resort. And sadly, he passed away.

Keith Kohler 48:11

Yeah.

Dorian Greenow 48:11

And then Dr. George Dr. George Hugh and LJ Marrow of Cedar Sinai Hospital said, Hey, we'd like to do a clinical trial uh for glioblastoma. Would you be able to donate products? And I said, Absolutely, we're gonna do it in the name of Eric and we're gonna go do this. But clinical trial work takes a long time, takes a long time. And just this year they published um uh their results. And they their overall survivability rate was 30 months.

Keith Kohler 48:44

Double.

Dorian Greenow 48:45

Double. What is twice as much life worth? And of those original 18 people, two are still alive, you have a 10% survivability rate. But now we have the evidence to prove it. But it's only changing what you're eating, doesn't it? There's just this normal standard of care, is what they had done on it. So it can be an extremely powerful tool. And so what the Gemma and I look at is that we have a responsibility to use our profitability to try and go back to these people. I mean, for me to be able to taste Eric's crab stuff morale, which is keto, by the way, that would be super cool. And so, along the line, along this journey, have been so many personal stories as to what keeps us going. When I was in the wine industry, you know, you're slinging boxes. Yes, you enjoy the romance of what the wine industry is here. But here now, and you know, there aren't any real wine emergencies. So I think there might be some mothers after their toddlers had quite the day, would think that there is a wine emergency. But you know, here there's this difference. And you know what? I don't mind the long days. I don't mind working, you know. I remember the early days of customer service. We were, I'd be up at 4:30 doing customer service on the East Coast, then go try and work with the um uh the European team, then work with the the East Coast accounting team, then we work with the the Central Time and the Pacific Time marketing team that was on there. And then in the evening I would start with the with Asia working with manufacturing, and you're doing that you know every single day almost. You only got Saturday off because Sunday it is um Monday in in Asia, and so this is where but you can only do that for a certain period of time, and I think the founder burnout is something very, very real, and that you have to be very cognizant of it, and you also have to be careful of the hubris that you're gonna be the person that's going to take it to the next level. And both Jem and I had deliberately said, okay, we're gonna step back a bit and we're gonna try and find a general manager or new leadership to come up within. Yeah, so we can focus on the other things. And I think founder syndrome, you've got to be careful, you've got to get over yourself sometimes.

Collaboration, Transfer Pricing, Resilience

Keith Kohler 51:04

So much there, Dorian and um among all those things you said in the last few minutes, again, just the fact that um you made a strategic and operational decision to pay off the debt, I think was huge because A, glad that you could, and still have an eye on the prize of the growth objectives that you wanted to achieve as well.

Dorian Greenow 51:28

So, what can I do some hindsight on that? Yeah, because the exquisite vision of hindsight. So, how were we able to pay off the debt? Well, I was chatting to a friend in the wine industry, uh, down the beer again, and he told me about supplier side terms. So I was like, okay, I need to get supplier side terms. Well, my current supplier that I first started with at the company, they weren't coming down in price, even though that we were scaling up. And then another young, hungry uh company in Asia wanted to come on in and take the business from this other competitor. They would say, like that. But it meant that we would have to move from one platform to another platform. But it gave us an opportunity at that moment to get a little bit more hard-nosed on terms and on contract. Now, one of the things that I like to do is I will always position a difficult contract negotiation in the afternoon. So, what generally happens in Asia is you're gonna go out for a big old lunch and they're gonna be eating all of their carbohydrates, and now then we know that their sugar level is gonna go up physiologically, and then they will get the crash after the carbohydrates where they've got that slump, that tiredness. They're probably gonna want to have a cigarette at that particular moment in time, and this is where I hold them at the table, saying, No, we've got to get into this, we've got to go through these businesses because in the afternoon my ketones are actually going up. The ketones follow a circadian rhythm. So I can use biology as an advantage to into a negotiating technique. But what we did was we got these for supplier side terms, which means I get 120 days to pay with nothing up front. That suddenly meant that we could use our supplier as our bank. All of that sunk inventory that we were holding for roughly 120 days, that four or five million dollars worth of inventory, all the money bubbled up, put us onto a cash position. So now we're on a really good cash position. And I was like, okay, I'm looking at our forecasts. I think this is going to be a great year of what we're gonna come into. Let's pay off all of the debt, get debt free, Dave Ramsey style, absolutely awesome. And then the tariffs hit. Tariffs hits. Now you're faced with basically you've got roughly three million dollars worth of inventory on the water, and all of a sudden you're faced with 145 um uh percent tariffs. You've just paid Uncle Sam in April, so you're on a low cash position because you paid up everything because you had a successful year the prior year, and all of a sudden you're in that OMG moment. What are we gonna do? At 145% tariffs, we were like bankrupt. Um, we looked at zombie mode. We're like, that's not gonna work, where we fired absolutely everybody and nobody got it. That wasn't gonna work. We looked at moving it to Indonesia, but we had so much indecision into what would be what tariff, what would be the next bit.

Keith Kohler 54:41

Sure.

Founder Burnout, Leadership, Legacy

Dorian Greenow 54:42

We looked at how are we going to bring um uh manufacturing to America and how do we get the machines in? But to get the engineers, you need to have the special visas to be able to get the engineers in to be able to get them over because there's not a deep enough bench of engineers in the United States. And you can't just spool up a class two medical device factory overnight. So we were faced with this fact that we had 120 days to figure this problem out. Well, I said send everything back. So everything stayed on the ship and everything went back whilst we kind of like tried to figure out the problem. Because, you know, I always like it when a member of staff goes like, Oh, I don't know how to do this, nobody's taught me. And I'm like, no shit, nobody's taught me any of this. You know, we have an internal phrase, and I got this from a guy called uh Mr. Barry here, uh, and he's called FFIO. I'm gonna change the first word to freaking figure it out because you are faced with these problems and you've got to figure it out. And uh, and then then this weird thing came around where somebody had heard, they're like, Have you heard of the Nairobi protocol? And I'm like, what is that? Sounds like sounds like my thriller, doesn't it? It's Mr. Mojo in the Nairobi Protocol.

Keith Kohler 56:02

That's it.

Dorian Greenow 56:03

And what it was, it was uh uh an act of Congress that was passed and by multiple countries that if a product is specifically used for somebody with a disability, then there shouldn't be any duties and tariffs that is on that product. But we had an issue because we were used also for wellness and for other disease studies. But my number one customer, Verta Health, who was the company that clinically proved that you could reverse and put into remission type 2 diabetes, we were making their product for them specifically. And so we found um uh we we asked uh our around our circle of friends if anybody knew of a really good um uh uh legal team that could help us in customs and border patrol, and we found this very high-flying uh New York law firm, you know, the type of law firm with the number of zeros per hour is absolutely scary, and that you wonder what their offices are like in downtown Manhattan and the view, because that's what they get. And I was like, this better be good, and that we pivoted the whole team focused on getting everything together. We put a 40-page dossier. This was, I think, by um this was like late April, May, and then we went, then we went on a big seven-week trip to try and build the European business, which didn't have the tariff issues, to try and see if we can blow it up. And it wasn't until late July, August that we finally got a binding ruling from the US Customs and Border Patrol that that product, that the Verte product, uh, which by the way, Verta announced this year that they've done over 200 million in revenue and have changed hundreds of thousands of lives and put into remission, that they have a 56% all-cause mortality less uh chance under their program, that they had a 91% reduction in exogenous insulin. Uh the work that they're doing is incredible, but I was able to anchor what is now nearly 40 to 50% of my business and they're on a meteoric rise. I expect them to grow significantly. And so this is how you know you look at how being an entrepreneur, it does not stop to build the company. There's the thing that's always gonna come by and attack you, and that's where that cash flow comes on in every single day. And I think of accounting should think of themselves as a Janus, the double-headed god. Yes, you've got to look back, you've got to do compliance, and you've got to file your taxes and your VAT, but you must always keep looking forward. Imagine trying to sailing your ship, and all you were doing was looking about where, how, how well you'd have gone and never about where you're gonna go. And I think that's it, how you hold your hand on the tiller, how the wind is coming on in, how fast you can sail, what is the depth that you can go through. And I'm not a sailor in any way, but that's the way I kind of kind of like think of how you steer the ship as a company when you, as an entrepreneur, have to wear your CFO role.

Keith Kohler 59:08

Yeah, I really want to witness what you did. You hit an exogenous shock, you had an exogenous shock, you looked at all the available solutions, and how wonderful that you knew you could work with a top customer and solve this together and essentially get the policy exception, dare I say, that prevented you from having to absorb the hit of all these tariffs, right? Yeah.

Pride, Remission, And Final Lessons

Dorian Greenow 59:35

And then what we also could do was like, hey, how else can we do it when we work with our and both our supplier side and our customer sides, we're all willing to work so well with them. You know, we have multiple quarterly business reviews with them, we have a very in touch, we we travel and we meet them on a regular basis because they are our cause. And that's been very collaborative. I think that collaboration has been key. If I hadn't known that Anisha, the chief operating officer Melissa Rondi over there, and them working really closely to help us with the information that we needed within them. Uh, if it wasn't for um uh my manufacturing partner, um uh VivaCek being so good to us and helping us work through it. And then the last little thing was what we found out that was if you think about tariffs, when you're buying something from Asia, you're buying it with their profit built in. So you're paying tariffs on the profit of that company. And what I was lucky was that my manufacturing partner had a US subsidiary. And so what we could do is we could say, okay, we want to buy the product from the US subsidiary. And so then the manufacturer does all of the import due delivery and duties paid, but doesn't put their profit on it. So they import, and we're not going to pay um uh tariffs on profit, they're importing at their raw cocks. Then the American company has now has an inflated profit, just like if I look at my Canadian subsidiary, like there's no boots on the ground in Canada. So I've got none of these operating costs, but I have all the operating costs for the parent company who looks after Canada. And so you can do something called transfer pricing, which is you say, Well, I'm gonna charge a management fee to Canada, and that reduces down the amount of gross profit to what is a reasonable amount of things. And so you can do the transfer pricing exactly the same way, and so this is where you've seen as tariffs have come on in, a lot of people might have only gone up by 10% because this is how they re-shifted. But there's definitely been a cost, and I was able to load weight across both putting prices up a little bit, taking less margin, and having my number one customer really, really happy with me at the same time. And so we were able to balance it out.

Keith Kohler 1:01:48

Yeah, so much here, Dorian. And as we conclude our time together, first of all, I can't wait to see what's next. Um, both uh um in the growth of the core business that you started out with, Gemma. And most importantly, the impact and legacy, as you said, that you're having on the world and you will continue to have. Um you're changing lives, you're saving lives, you're doing all those things. And I think it starts it it shows how much you continue to demonstrate for me how much your passion has resulted in these paths, you opening up these paths for yourself and making them happen. Um nothing was given to you. Um you and Gemma really created all of this together. And um I do have a tradition of closing off uh each episode with just a couple of quick things. And one of them is a very simple, straightforward question. I think you could I'm I can't wait to see how you answer this. And the question is, what are you most proud of?

Dorian Greenow 1:02:57

I'm most proud of the ability that we have had enough um success that we are now able to give back to the foundation, and that we have the ability to have a multi-generational approach in being in changing the lives of many people, and that was manifested this year when my mother, who's 82, got a type 2 diabetes diagnosis last November, and she was given the NHS guidelines and she looked down at it, and we'd been trying to say to Mum, Hey Mum, you really must do something about it, but she didn't listen to me. Or do you have it? And then we stopped. We didn't want to have say anything more, and then she said, I think I might do what my son does. And on May the 13th this year, she wrote me uh a Facebook message and she said, I'm delighted to announce that my type 2 diabetes is now fully in remission. Her A1C, as it's measured, which was at 54, is now down at 32. Her LDL had heart, and her endocrinologist was so happy because it was the only time that they had seen it in their office. And they asked, Can you come on in and say what you did to others? So the ability to be able to change future lives and even change those that are close to your loved ones, and to have more time with mom. I'm proud of that. That's pretty cool.

Keith Kohler 1:04:38

Yeah, it really is quite something. It makes me emotional too because um I'm just glad I know you and I know that uh I'm happy to have played my small part in this story. And I'll just ask the last question, Dorian, is what would Dorian today tell Dorian in 2017 when you were just getting started?

Dorian Greenow 1:05:05

I would use the words that Sami Inkenan gave to me. Business is messy, get used to it. Whatever you do, do not run out of cash. And remember that as an entrepreneur, the most precious nest egg, the thing that you must guard with everything that you can, it costs you nothing, but can cost you everything, is your ability to be nimble.

Keith Kohler 1:05:35

A great lesson, very succinctly put. Uh Dorian, thank you for spending some time with me here today and being part of how I financed it. And also again, thank you for the way you and Gemma have showed up. You were you uh worked with me at a time when I know a knew a lot less than I know now, and yet you were very formative in helping me to understand a lot more of how I could show up. for companies like you and the others that I've been able to work with. So thank you to you both and thank you for being part of How I Financed It. Thanks, Keith. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of How I Financed It. I encourage you to reach out to me on LinkedIn at Keith Kohler1 and I look forward to connecting there.