IAM695- Founder Leads a Vegan Ice Cream Company

Dylan Kendall is a designer of social ideas and social objects. She is the owner of and designer behind Dylan Kendall Home: a company that believes happy homes make happy people and currently stepped in to lead Seva Foods, a vegan ice cream company. She was the Founder and Executive Director of Hollywood Arts, the only educational agency in the nation to use arts-based learning to mainstream homeless young adults. She is an environmental advocate, a foster mom, teaches entrepreneurialism to inmates, and a rescuer of cats and kittens.

• CEO Hack: Reading and focusing on books
• CEO Nugget: Gather your peeps
• CEO Defined: Putting a couple of ideas together

Website: https://dylankendall.com/

Instagram: @dylan_kendall

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Transcription

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[00:00:02.20] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

[00:00:30.19] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dylan Kendall of Dylan Kendall Homes. Dylan, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:39.20] – Dylan Kendall

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you.

[00:00:42.29] – Gresham Harkless

Definitely to have you on the show. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Dylan so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And Dylan Kendall is a designer of social ideas and social objects. She is the CEO of Astro Bites and the owner and designer behind Dylan Kendall Home, a company that believes happy homes make people happy, and currently stepped into lead Save A Foods, a vegan ice cream company. She was the founder and executive director of Hollywood Arts, the only educational agency in the nation to use art-based learning to mainstream homeless young adults. She is an environmental advocate, a foster mom, teaches entrepreneurialism to inmates, and a rescuer of cats and kittens. Dylan, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:24.09] – Dylan Kendall

I am. Very good to be here. Very glad to meet your audience.

[00:01:27.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. Super excited to have you on the show. So I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and, I guess, kind of start from the beginning here a little bit more about what I call your CEO story, what they did get started with your business.

[00:01:37.50] – Dylan Kendall

I am an accidental CEO, which means I never even really thought that my way of being was more akin to a slacker lifestyle. I had an actionable CEO lifestyle, and I think that's an important distinction to make. I did not grow up with entrepreneurial parents. I grew up with very conventional parents. I did not go to business school. I went to art schools. I just believe that my failure to be able to hold a corporate or nine-to-five job was a reflection of my own personal shortcomings and that I was just a slacker who could not keep down a job. I had been fired from my big corporate gig after six months, And it was running meeting somebody who was a Wharton MBA, who had a much more traditional entrepreneurial path, who said, oh, no. You're not a slacker. You're an entrepreneur.

And I thought, wait. What? Like, is there is there a word that describes the type of personality I have? And that was an awesome, incredible thing to hear because it took someone whose personality type didn't fit. It was a square peg trying to jam into a round hole, and it made me feel like I had something to offer the world after all. So with his counsel and his mentorship, my entrepreneurial journey began. And I, again, I think somewhat accidentally built saw a problem right out of the gate with, homelessness in Los Angeles and built my first business, which was a 05:01 c three, so a nonprofit, to solve that problem, which was a decade ago, it was before the state of crisis in which Los Angeles currently finds itself.

But at that time, we still had a significant number of homeless young adults on the street. Like I said, I wasn't necessarily looking to do this. I just the problem came across my table, and I had a solution to it, which I thought made sense. And with my mentor's guidance and support, I decided to activate that impulse and learn how to build my first business via you know, back then, we didn't have the Internet like we do now. There weren't all these these classes online. So I read books and I learned how to ask a lot of questions. And, and so that happens and quite successfully. We took we took some risks. We took a problem that everyone thought was intractable, and we designed, a school that then when I stepped down out of that position as founder and CEO or executive director, my board of directors merged with another agency serving the same constituency, which I was thrilled about.

I think sometimes often CEOs and founders can become a little bit too caught up in their egos, and that can be at the expense of a healthy institution. And so when my board of directors took what I had built, continued it for many years, and then merged without my fingerprints on it any longer, I felt that I had accomplished something quite significant. And so I guess that goes to speak to this idea about being an accidental entrepreneur. I never had the skill sets that I received in college that would have positioned me to be very risk-welcoming. I didn't have a network of people whom I could have turned to to fund, like, a lot of MBA programs provide in addition to the education. And I didn't know necessarily that this could be.

This idea of building your own business, fundraising your salary, and then inevitably fundraising others, the salary of others, was a life option. But it, you know, was it worked, and I found that that was my flow. That the flow spot for me was seeing solutions to problems and, building the infrastructure around them, but we now call the entrepreneurial, you know, the business, and and then going forward. I discovered also that I'm a better visionary than I am a manager. And so when I stepped down from Hollywood Arts, it was in many ways because of that. We had grown quite significantly large, and I decided that it needed someone to stabilize it and to just keep the moving parts on track versus adding more moving parts, which I was better at doing. So I stepped down from Hollywood Arts and then turned around and launched the company, which you cited in the bio.

I was looking for something whimsical and sort of palate-cleansing after the stress of building a school for homeless kids and being on the streets a lot with a very difficult population. So I had this impulse to bring back to the market this whimsical little bowl with feet I had designed in my ceramic studio decades earlier in my early twenties. And I never I didn't know anything about consumer products because, remember, I'd come from charity. I had, nobody that I knew who knew much about consumer products, so there were very few tools available. And it was still a boys club. It still is. But, definitely, back then, it was. We let me get ahead of myself. I decided to put my feet on a bowl. I had some pictures taken.

I sent them off naively with a good story to some design blogs who then picked up the bowl. They'd love the pictures. Within three weeks, I had eighty thousand dollars worth of purchase orders, which was astonishing and not expected on the site. And I had found a US factory. There were very few still doing ceramics because it's expensive here, and I found one in Southern California. And I drove down there in my station wagon, and I said I need to now make this many bowls, and he said there's no way. And no way could we do it for the cause you need them to come to market at. So I spent another year figuring out how to manufacture overseas. Again, pre-Alibaba, this is now where we insert huge boys club, international manufacturing.

It's not something that women were easily invited into in the early, two thousand and tens at the beginning of that decade. So, it was a bit of a fight and a bit of struggle to find factories that were willing to take me seriously to even, you know, both visit them and figure out how to deal with them on Skype. And but I did, and we did, obviously, because we were in the market for many years. And I think after I left the school for the homeless, I had a moment or two of thinking, really, Kendall? This is what you wanna put your attention to? Like, you are you are changing the world only a few years earlier, and now you're selling a little whimsical bowl with feet. And I think I struggled a tiny bit internally about the social impact of what I was doing and wasn't changing the world.

But that fear or that concern has been spoken to so many times over via emails that the company gets from customers who talk about how important these items are in their lives, and how important these items are to their families, how they're becoming mementos, how they, make them wake up with a smile. And I realized that if we are going to change the world, happy people are going to be more the warriors we need than people who are not happy. So I felt I felt a little bit better about doing this sort of novelty product, which sold around the world. So in some years, we were distributing to about nine countries, Russia, Brazil.

We did have factories in China. We were in Bed Bath and Beyond. We were pretty much everywhere overstock, and, that was great. And then we decided that the margins on the product were hard to I mean, with Amazon coming, it was tricky. We had an expensive product to make that sold for not an expensive amount in the market. So we we were not smart in that respect, but we were I wanted to make a product that was democratic, that was accessible, and I didn't want to inflate the price to, add a margin. That would have been larger than what we were currently doing. And so in time, that company just sort of slowed down.

It kind of was officiating its tail, after many, many years, though. I'm quite lucky Dad said. And then I brought my team together, which is going to, I think, speak to again, something else you're gonna ask, but I brought my team together and I asked them if they wanted to work on a snack food product with me. And they said, sure. And I will tell you that that is such a gift. And so I brought my chief financial officer and my attorney from Dylan Kendall home to now launch AstroBites, which is a vegan so dairy free, which is the key, differentiator right now, and what's the demand in the market. So it's a dairy-free, sugar-free, healthy, freeze-dried, super fun to eat, sweet snack, and, as really an alternative to processed candies and cookies. So we're we're really proud to stand behind it. We're proud of the ingredients. We're proud of its potential in the market, and that's what we're working on right now.

[00:10:11.89] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. I definitely appreciate that and hearing how everything kind of aligned as well too. So I know you touched on, you know, how the different ways you've been able to serve clients. Did you already kind of mention this, what you feel like is your secret sauce, and the thing you feel kinda sets you apart, you, or your organization apart?

[00:10:26.89] – Dylan Kendall

Yes. I think that there are a couple of things that have set me apart both as an individual and as a company. Even when we were building Hollywood Arts, we built an art school that used creative pedagogy to mainstream homeless young people. I knew that attempting to apply the conventional educational protocols to a group of eighteen-year-olds who were living on the streets, who had no structure because they'd grown up in foster care or disrupted families would never work. The way I could get them to invest in themselves was to make learning fun. I think that's sort of the unique selling proposition to answer specifically the question that if you work with me and my brands, you get you have fun, and a good time, both in the office and not. I'm still mastering the best text jokes for WhatsApp right now.

[00:11:13.29] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Right. No. I absolutely love that. So I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:25.39] – Dylan Kendall

I know I should be reading more books than I do, but I'm a big reader. Let me just say, that I have a library full of books in my house, and I have read them all, you know, decades ago. But as I get older, I get more hyperactive. I think I'm growing in reverse. And so now it's difficult for me to sit still and focus on books.

[00:11:45.70] – Gresham Harkless

I love that hack, and I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something you might tell yourself if you were to hop into a time machine.

[00:11:55.00] – Dylan Kendall

When I coach both high school kids and formerly incarcerated or currently incarcerated men, I have a couple of takeaways I always want them to leave with. And one of them really is about gathering what I call gathering your peeps. So gather your people.

[00:12:11.70] – Gresham Harkless

I definitely appreciate that nugget as well. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.

[00:12:19.29] – Dylan Kendall

It just means that I get to put a couple of letters in front of my idea that I'm not a slacker any longer. Yay.

[00:12:28.79] – Gresham Harkless

I truly appreciate that, Dylan. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is bash you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

[00:12:42.29] – Dylan Kendall

The thing I think I want to say the most is, number one, it is hard. It is very easy to listen to someone like me and say, okay. She's done it. She just pushed through. But let me tell you, it was rocky. There were, you know, I had the same challenges that every other woman in the sector threatened to take me to court. We ended up settling out of court because I wouldn't have sex with him. I mean, these are real challenges, and you have to really, truly believe this is the only path you will ever be able to walk on internally and happily for yourself to want to do it. I  truly cannot emphasize enough that, it will be hard.

Where there's no you will even your ideas, you will realize. You will start to question even your ideas after a minute. Right? Should I have done this? It's not happening that easily. So it takes a true commitment to know that your happiness is going to be found in this space. And I think that would be the one thing I would add to anybody listening to first-time startup CEOs who haven't who are still a little bit naive and ideal, don't abandon that naivete. It will be what it will definitely be that moves you through. But when you hit the hiccups and the knocks, just remember that that's not unusual and that if you're committed to this, you will have to find a way through them.

[00:14:18.20] – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. No. I definitely appreciate you for letting us know that. And people that wanna find out when your book goes live and all the awesome brands and everything you're working on, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:14:27.50] – Dylan Kendall

Oh my gosh. The book? Who knew it was so slow to write a book? Holy moly. I like, I've been writing for a month, and I'm, like, on page thirty-one. So if we do the math on that, we're all gonna be, like, on, you know, rocking chairs on the porch of some retirement community. Or I feel like this book actually makes it to see the light of day. I'm hoping in about a year, maybe I'll have penned my way through the next, like, a hundred pages. But we, you know, the Dylan Kendall website is I'm going to bring back these products. I have to. I feel like I would be facing a mutiny in the world if I didn't. So once we get through some COVID nonsense and some tariff nonsense, we'll go back and bring the footed products to market.

So I finally set up a grab on my website, Dylan Kendall dot com, if you wanna leave me your email address, I can let you know. And that's the best way to get in touch with me still. Anyway, either join the newsletter to be kept abreast of what I'm doing or, just send me a note and and ask me something directly. And then AstroBytes were probably I mean, we're about to head into a race during a lockdown. I don't know. You tell me. What are what are our odds of success going to be? We feel quite optimistic, but that's because we're entrepreneurs. But the reality is it could take, you know, another ten months to get the funding we need. We may need to wait for this pandemic to settle down a little. But, I think those are the best ways to keep up with me. I still anchor with the Dylan Handle dot com website.

[00:15:52.00] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dylan. I truly appreciate it. I will have the links and information in the show notes, but I appreciate the reminder as well too because I think there's so much, kind of glory around entrepreneurship and business, but not as much glory around, the difficulty it can be. Not yeah. Most of the time, pretty much ninety probably percent of the time, it is, and the difficulties that you have to have. And I think that having awareness around what it actually is helps out so much. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that. Appreciate your time again, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:16:22.79] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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