Starting Small

Hosted by Cameron Nagle

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Oct 2026

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Starting Small, is a podcast hosted by entrepreneur Cameron Nagle. Tune in, as Cameron interviews CEO‘s, founders, and entrepreneurs, discussing the stories on how their organizations and businesses were created from the ground up.

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November 6, 2026Episode 29146 min

STEELPORT Knife Co: Ron Khormaei

Ron Khormaei left Iran alone at 15, a year before he’d have been drafted. He finished high school in Oregon and went on to earn a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in electrical engineering, all from Oregon State, with plenty of exchange-student adventures along the way. He started out planning to be a doctor. His mom got her “Dr.” anyway. His first job was at a small Oregon display company, where he led an $18 million program funded by DARPA, the Army, and Boeing to build wearable augmented reality systems. Offered the job of running manufacturing at 100,000 units a year, he turned it down because he had no idea how to do that. He spent the next 13 years at HP learning how, bringing up a fab in Singapore, running procurement across continents, and launching a printer shipped across three regions at once. Then came Logitech, a turnaround there, and an itch to go back to small companies. Since 2010 he has been involved in eleven startups (“I didn’t say eleven successful startups”), and has taught at Portland State for sixteen years. One of those startups was FINEX, a premium American-made cast iron brand that started as a sketch a stranger sent him. Their Kickstarter raised $200,000 from 1,600 backers, and Ron sold FINEX to Lodge in 2019. Then he walked through William Sonoma and Sur La Table and noticed that not one kitchen knife in the store was made in the U.S. He teamed up with chef Ethan Zayas and launched STEELPORT in 2020, with a 65 Rockwell carbon steel knife that takes over 200 steps to make in Portland. It carries a coffee patina, and a one-piece handle wrapped around the full tang. STEELPORT has since added a patent-pending cutting board called SteelCore, with recycled paper composite on one side and walnut end grain on the other, held together by steel bars. It sold out when it launched in 2025, and in April 2026 it arrived at Crate & Barrel. Ron is also starting to license the SteelCore technology to other brands. Make sure to check out STEELPORT at: https://www.steelportknife.com Join us live at the Starting Small Summit 2027 on Wednesday, Feb 17, at the Everest-Rohrer Auditorium in Mishawaka, IN. The lineup is Charlie Clifford (TUMI, ROAM), Hap Klopp (The North Face), Shahab and Durana Elmi (Cymbiotika), and Chuck Surack (Sweetwater). Get tickets here: https://startingsmallmedia.org/startingsmallsummit Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle This episode is brought to you by Grado Labs. Founded in 1953, Grado remains a family-owned business known for its distinctive sound and dedication to music. Their new Signature S150 headphones bring that musical experience to you at just $295. The S150 is assembled at Grado's original Brooklyn, New York location, continuing a tradition of bringing listeners closer to the music they love. Discover more at https://gradolabs.com/ Starting Small is powered by Riverside.fm, the AI-powered platform that lets you record, edit, repurpose,and distribute studio-quality content as easily as if you had a crew behind you. Check them out now at https://creators.riverside.com/CameronNagle

October 30, 2026Episode 29035 min

Maman: Elisa Marshall

Elisa Marshall was 12 and running an eBay business out of Unionville, Ontario. She had asked for Spice Girl dolls for her birthday, listed a spare on eBay, and watched it go for $85. Her dad helped her work out why: Canada was a test market for the merchandise, so she could buy things that weren’t available in the U.S. anymore. She started buying up everything Spice Girls, from bubblegum to stickers to dollar-store rings she sold for $60 apiece, and checks were arriving in the mail before she was a teenager. After fashion school, she ended up with five jobs at once: fashion PR by day, a cupcake catering company, wedding planning, and interior design. On her second date with her now-husband Ben, a corporate lawyer who grew up in hospitality, she described the café she wanted: warm, homey, a space for events and brand collabs, in a city that was all industrial chic. Maman opened in SoHo in 2014, funded by their savings and money from family and friends, with parents painting walls and visiting friends sanding tables. Within the first week, Grub Street called their chocolate chip cookie the best in town. The lines wrapped around the block. In 2017, an editor from O Magazine tried the cookie and asked if they shipped nationwide. Elisa said yes, even though she had never shipped a cookie in her life, then recruited friends across the country to help figure it out. The cookie landed on Oprah’s Favorite Things list and took Maman national. They bootstrapped the first five locations. In 2020, right after wrapping a roadshow to raise outside money, the world shut down. Maman pushed into shipping, wrote its cookbook at home, and signed 14 leases while landlords were desperate. It has grown from five locations to 65. It’s now on Technomic’s Future 50 list, has a multi-year menu collaboration with Martha Stewart, and has a baby line. Elisa’s longer-term goal is a lifestyle brand that reaches into the home, with a Maison Maman hotel on the wish list. Make sure to check out Maman at: https://mamannyc.com/ Join us live at the Starting Small Summit 2027 on Wednesday, Feb 17, at the Everest-Rohrer Auditorium in Mishawaka, IN. The lineup is Charlie Clifford (TUMI, ROAM), Hap Klopp (The North Face), Shahab and Durana Elmi (Cymbiotika), and Chuck Surack (Sweetwater). Get tickets here: https://startingsmallmedia.org/startingsmallsummit Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle This episode is brought to you by Ergobaby. Those first weeks with a newborn go by fast, and you don't want to spend them waiting for your baby to grow into their gear. Get yours at https://ergobaby.com/en-us , and use code ERGOPOD15 to save 15% at checkout.

October 23, 2026Episode 28928 min

Realberry: Chad McWhinney

Chad McWhinney was in seventh grade in 1986 when he and his fifth-grade brother Troy built a roadside strawberry stand at their grandparents’ mobile home park. They sold out both days of the first weekend. Within a few years, four brothers were running close to 30 stands across Southern California, with around 100 employees, plus pumpkins and Christmas trees in season. They even got city ordinances changed to keep the stands legal. In high school, Chad worked out a deal with his principal to leave class during the day to run the business, on the condition that his teachers came to tutor him at night. After the 1991 Gulf War crushed sales, Chad enrolled in college, lasted about a week, and moved to Colorado after reading a Time magazine piece on a coming real estate boom in the Rockies. His dad offered to sell him the family’s inherited farmland in Loveland at appraised value, on one condition: he had to move back and become part of the community. Chad and Troy ended up assembling options on 28 neighboring farms, around 3,300 acres, at depressed agricultural prices. By the time they had to close, the market had come back. That land became Centerra. From there they went from land investors to full vertical developers, building master-planned communities, apartments, industrial, and hotels. The defining project was the restoration of Denver Union Station, completed in 2014, along with The Crawford Hotel inside it. The company now manages $3.4 billion in assets across seven states, has paid out $481 million in cumulative distributions, and is working on the revival of the Cal Neva at Lake Tahoe after more than 120 neighborhood meetings. For nearly 35 years the company carried the family name, McWhinney. In early 2026 it became Realberry, a nod to where it all started, and it opened its doors to investors writing checks closer to $100,000 instead of the $1 million-plus it used to require. Make sure to check out Realberry at: https://www.realberry.com Join us live at the Starting Small Summit 2027 on Wednesday, Feb 17, at the Everest-Rohrer Auditorium in Mishawaka, IN. The lineup is Charlie Clifford (TUMI, ROAM), Hap Klopp (The North Face), Shahab and Durana Elmi (Cymbiotika), and Chuck Surack (Sweetwater). Get tickets here: https://startingsmallmedia.org/startingsmallsummit Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle

October 17, 2026Episode 28829 min

Caldera + Lab: Jared Pobre

Jared Pobre graduated USC in 1999 with a finance degree, took a short detour into wealth management, and quickly pivoted into the early internet industry instead. By 2001, during the dot-com crash and right after 9/11, he was watching startups collapse around him — so naturally, he started his own lead-gen business on the side while working a day job at Autobitel. Within three months it was doing six figures in revenue. He quit soon after. That business ran on a single client, a mobile carrier called WorldCom Wireless, until WorldCom went bankrupt four months in and left him holding the bag on publisher payments. He diversified, rebuilt, and eventually turned it into Future Ads — a fully bootstrapped ad tech company that grew into nine figures of revenue with no outside investors and no debt. In 2015, a roll-up group bought a third of the business and merged it into a new entity called Propel Media, with Jared staying on as the largest shareholder and eventually executive chairman. Propel later acquired a pre-revenue company called DeepIntent in 2017, which Jared helped fund and build — and sold entirely to private equity. Around that same time, Jared and his wife built a vacation home in Jackson, Wyoming, and he tried stepping away from entrepreneurship altogether. It didn’t stick. What did stick was a problem he couldn’t solve: the high-alpine climate was wrecking his skin, and nothing made for men actually worked. He started using his wife’s skincare products instead, got real relief, and realized a handful of other guys in Jackson were doing the exact same thing. He spent two years in R&D and ran independent clinical trials before launching Caldera Lab in January 2019 with a single product — The Good, a serum built specifically for aging, dry, weathered skin, something that essentially didn’t exist for men at the time. The brand stayed fully DTC, grew through COVID without ever getting the bump many beauty brands saw, and scaled to eight figures in revenue entirely bootstrapped before finally raising its first institutional round, a Series A, in 2024. Caldera Lab has since expanded into Nordstrom as its first national retail partner, with the brand now sitting near the top tier of men’s grooming there, alongside a growing lineup that includes the Base Layer, Clean Slate, Grade, and Hydro Layer. Make sure to check out Caldera + Lab at: https://calderalab.com/ Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle

October 4, 2026Episode 28744 min

ICON: Jonathan Ward

Jonathan Ward ended up on Broadway at seven years old by complete accident. His mom signed him up for an open audition on a trip to New York, mostly just to kill time, and he landed the part in Peter Pan. That turned into a full childhood acting career — Charles in Charge, his own show on Fox called Beans Baxter, and the lead role in Fern Gully next to Robin Williams. He was never actually famous, in his words, just famous enough to get a stalker, which is ultimately what pushed him out of the business entirely. Cars had always been the real thing for him. He'd been restoring them in a one-car garage since before he had a license. In 1996, he and his now-wife quit their entertainment jobs on a whim after a trip to South Africa and started TLC — short for Toyota Land Cruisers — with a dozen trucks, a $10,000 loan from his sister-in-law, and a website he traded a truck for because he didn't know what a web designer was. The neighbors in his industrial park ran a betting pool on which month the business would fail. Years in, Toyota's then-chairman personally called his shop and asked him to prototype a modern FJ40. Jonathan built three versions, Toyota's board picked one, and that work eventually shaped the FJ Cruiser. He took the money from that job and used it to build something fully his own — a ground-up, computer-designed version of the FJ40 with a modern V8, instead of the junkyard-parts approach everyone else was doing. Mickey Drexler, the guy behind Gap and J.Crew, told him not to cut a single corner to hit a lower price, and bought the first one himself. That truck became ICON. Years later, Ford's CEO — someone Jonathan had known back when he worked at Toyota — personally called and asked ICON to build a one-off Bronco to tease the model's comeback. Ford's own engineers didn't think it could be done. When it showed up at SEMA, Ford's team pulled it straight onto their own booth. TLC eventually got sold off so Jonathan could focus entirely on ICON, which now builds fully bespoke Broncos, FJs, and classic Chevy trucks — and has a customer base loyal enough that over 30% of owners come back for a second, third, or fourth vehicle. Make sure to check out ICON at: https://www.icon4x4.com/ Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle Starting Small is powered by Riverside.fm, the AI-powered platform that lets you record, edit, repurpose,and distribute studio-quality content as easily as if you had a crew behind you. Check them out now at https://creators.riverside.com/CameronNagle

September 18, 2026Episode 28647 min

Ring: Jamie Siminoff

Jamie Siminoff invented the video doorbell in his garage. Five years later, Amazon acquired his company, Ring, for approximately $1 billion. In between, he appeared on Shark Tank, turned down Kevin O'Leary's offer, and went on to build what became one of the show's most successful businesses. The story behind Ring is far more complicated than a doorbell. Jamie spent years building companies, learning telecom infrastructure, and figuring out which ideas could grow into something meaningful. When DoorBot appeared on Shark Tank in 2013, the business was still operating under serious financial pressure. The exposure helped drive a surge in sales, giving Jamie the opportunity to rebuild the product and scale the company. We talk about the fear that someone else would build the billion-dollar business he envisioned, the decision to expand Ring from a video doorbell into a broader home security platform, and the pressure of delivering on the $1.15 billion in trust Amazon placed in him. Jamie also shares why he returned to Ring after stepping away, how AI is opening new possibilities in home security, and the potential of Firewatch, which uses Ring cameras to help create more accurate wildfire maps for emergency response. Make sure to check out Ring at: https://ring.com Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle This episode is brought to you by Behr. I'm right in the middle of a full exterior and trim refresh on my property, and I'm using two of their top lines to get it done — Behr Marquee and Behr Premium Plus. Marquee is one of Behr’s most advanced paint and primer lines, offering one-coat coverage in hundreds of colors and exceptional fade resistance, and it holds up beautifully on siding, trim, doors, you name it. I'm pairing that with Behr Premium Plus for the interior and exterior trim work, giving everything a clean, durable, long-lasting finish. Behr's been trusted for decades, and once you see these two products side by side on a property, you understand why. Whether you’re planning a room refresh or a full home transformation, head to Behr.com to find the right products for your next project. And when you're ready to get started, stop by your local Home Depot or shop online at HomeDepot.com .

September 4, 2026Episode 2851 hr 1 min

Kinzie Foods: Walter Kinzie

Walter got his first job at four years old sweeping a lumber yard in Edna, Kansas, a town of 150 people. At seven, his dad co-signed a $125 bank loan so he could buy a pig — and the bank required him to come in quarterly to review his own P&L. By his senior year of high school, that one pig had grown into a fifteen-head cattle operation. One week into his freshman year of college, a rare kidney condition put him in and out of hospitals for three years. From a hospital bed, he taught himself how to produce concerts — a dream he'd had since watching one at his county fair at age seven. At twenty, he met another sick kid whose wish was simply to go to prom and graduate high school. Walter produced his first concert to raise the $70,000 the kid needed for care, using a loan secured against sponsorship contracts he hadn't even finalized yet. They raised $71,000. On the drive home, he decided he'd never put a ceiling on what he could achieve — and told himself that night he'd one day produce concerts for George Strait and Garth Brooks, and produce a presidential inauguration. He'd done all three by age 35, including Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration, and went on to run private events in 76 countries, including parties for billionaires the public never hears about. When COVID shut down live entertainment entirely, Walter refused to furlough his full-time staff — he sold his house and his office to keep paying them. Ninety days in, on a solo road trip to clear his head, he passed three drive-in movie theaters in one afternoon and had an idea: stage concerts broadcast to drive-ins nationwide. Within two days he had 125 theaters signed up. Within five days, Garth Brooks agreed to be the first artist. Within three weeks, 725,000 people were in line for tickets. That summer, Walter's company hosted 1.7 million people safely across drive-in concerts with Garth Brooks and Metallica, inventing the live-stream-to-theater technology from scratch. Kinzie Foods started as mason jars of his aunt's barbecue sauce, given away as gifts for years until the requests got expensive and time-consuming enough that his wife told him to just start charging. He priced it at $20 a jar hoping people would stop asking. Orders spiked. He doubled the minimum. Orders spiked again. He went from strangers' kitchens to his own garage to a real production warehouse, cold-messaged CEOs of major condiment brands on LinkedIn for advice, and built a lineup of bold, unexpected flavors — Pickle, Espresso, Pistachio, Jalapeño Lime, Dubai Chocolate — designed to get used at every meal, not just backyard barbecues. Kinzie Foods is now in 70+ stores just months after launch and recently took first place at the largest BBQ sauce competition in the world. Make sure to check out Kinzie Foods at: https://kinziefoods.com Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle Thank you to this episodes mid-break sponsor, Gozney. A couple years back I had founder Tom Gozney on the show, and it's still one of my favorite stories we've ever featured — the guy started building pro-grade ovens for restaurants before bringing that same technology home, and now Gozney's become the name in outdoor cooking. Their lineup covers everyone — the Roccbox for portable, take-it-anywhere pizza nights, the Dome for the full hybrid, wood-and-gas experience, and the Arc line for something compact that still hits restaurant-level heat. We just got their Arc XL in for hosting, and if you know me, pizza and having people over is basically my favorite combination — this thing gets to 950 degrees and turns out a 16-inch pizza in about 60 seconds. Whatever setup fits your space, Gozney's built something for it. Check out the full lineup at https://us.gozney.com/ Starting Small is powered by Riverside.fm, the AI-powered platform that lets you record, edit, repurpose,and distribute studio-quality content as easily as if you had a crew behind you. Check them out now at https://creators.riverside.com/CameronNagle

August 28, 2026Episode 28435 min

Green Compass: Meredith Cook

Meredith Cook grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of four kids in a small house with two working parents. She was later diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, which made traditional school a struggle, so she skipped college and trained as an esthetician instead — working odd jobs on the side, including driving medical specimens between cities at night for quick cash. She spent nearly a decade working under a Charlotte dermatologist after literally walking office to office asking to work for free just to learn. After her second son was born, she felt a disconnect she couldn't explain — not herself, foggy, disconnected from her kids and the people around her. She pushed through it quietly for years, assuming it was just what motherhood felt like. The turning point came when her brother, training for an Ironman in Wilmington, started experimenting with hemp and CBD for his own recovery and encouraged her to try it. Her husband bought everything on the shelf at the local health food store. The fog lifted — but so did her trust in what she was actually putting in her body, once she realized the hemp industry at the time had zero transparency or testing standards. Her husband's connections in agriculture led her to a friend growing USDA organic hemp through a pilot program. She started taking their clean product, felt like herself again, and started sharing it with her mom, her mother-in-law, and friends — watching a business snowball entirely from word of mouth. In 2019, she officially launched Green Compass with her brother and husband, built on a referral-based model where the people sharing the product were the same people who'd felt it change their lives. It grew to $40 million in revenue in two years, almost entirely without paid marketing or PR. When that channel began to shift industry-wide, Meredith resisted changing course longer than she probably should have — she was emotionally invested in the community that built the brand. Eventually, alongside customer surveys and community input, Green Compass transitioned to a DTC model, now generating roughly 80% of revenue from recurring subscriptions, with a growing lineup that includes Core Bloom, a broccoli sprout and mushroom blend, and more product innovation on the way. Make sure to check out Green Compass at: https://greencompassglobal.com Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle

August 17, 2026Episode 28339 min

FOND: Alysa Seeland

Alysa Seeland grew up on her grandparents' dairy farm in northern Illinois, chased a Division I volleyball scholarship through high school, and pivoted to speech and debate when she realized the sport wasn't going to be her path — placing second in the state of Illinois for original oratory her senior year. She studied communications and English literature at Gordon College, then cut her teeth in marketing at a Boston fintech startup that went through Techstars, learning firsthand how founders build trust with customers from scratch. Five months after her first son was born, a medical crisis nearly cost her life: emergency surgery, and a surgeon telling her to expect a second procedure within months. Instead of scheduling it, she found a decades-old book, "Nourishing Traditions," and went on a five-week bone broth diet. She never needed the second surgery — and went on to have five more sons. That personal healing became FOND. She sold her first jar at a farmers market in New Braunfels, Texas in 2015, working out of a commercial kitchen with her husband dropping her off, hoping she wouldn't come home in tears. She sold out. From there, FOND won a People's Choice Award through H-E-B's Quest for Texas Best program, landed a Whole Foods and Sprouts partnership, and grew into a genuinely regenerative supply chain built on direct farmer relationships instead of concentrate. In 2022, while raising a Series A, the co-manufacturer's facility burned down, wiping out over $4 million in product against a $150,000 insurance payout — all while she was pregnant with her sixth child. She walked away from the raise, put her own equity up as collateral for a $3 million rebuild loan, and launched an internal initiative called "Break It and Rebuild It" to get every channel profitable or cut it loose. Eighteen months later, FOND launched its tallow line and came back stronger. Today the company is profitable, debt-free of outside investment, growing 48% year over year, sold in H-E-B, Sprouts, Whole Foods, and now Albertsons — all while Alysa homeschools six boys. Make sure to check out FOND at: https://fondregenerative.com/ Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook. com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle

August 7, 2026Episode 28256 min

TUMI & ROAM: Charlie Clifford

Charlie Clifford grew up a self-described "scrappy Jersey guy" in a town of 5,000 people, and won his first entrepreneurial prize in sixth grade: a watch, for out-hustling a classmate whose dad rigged the contest by buying magazine subscriptions wholesale for his medical office. After business school at Indiana University, he joined one of the first Peace Corps pilot programs recruiting MBAs — sent to Peru to work with small businesses under a Stanford professor who'd later teach Nike's Phil Knight. He came home with $10,000, invested it in a scrappy import operation selling handcrafted South American leather goods, and in 1975 broke off to start his own company focused on travel bags. He named it TUMI, after a Peruvian ceremonial knife. The brand's real breakthrough came when Clifford shifted from leather to black ballistic nylon — a fabric built for flak jackets — manufactured through a partnership with a small shop in Vidalia, Georgia. Bloomingdale's 59th Street flagship picking up the line put TUMI on the map. A conversation with a longtime retail partner, who told Clifford he had "so much product" he should just open his own stores, led to the "side-by-side" concept and eventually freestanding TUMI locations. By the 2000s, TUMI was the brand road warriors carried through airports worldwide, and it went public in 2012. Clifford left the company in 2004, when the private equity partners who'd taken majority ownership after 9/11 decided to sell. He spent years distributing other people's luggage brands before realizing he wanted control over the product and the story again. In 2017, he and his former TUMI EVP Larry Lein founded ROAM — American-made, hand-assembled, and built around a philosophy that's the opposite of TUMI's black-on-black uniform: total color customization, so no two suitcases look the same. Make sure to check out ROAM at: https://www.roamluggage.com/ And TUMI at: https://www.tumi.com/ Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle This episode is brought to you by Panasonic. I just installed their WhisperGreen Select on a recent project, and I've gotta say — it's not what you picture when you think "bathroom fan." Panasonic's been in the ventilation game for decades, and this thing is proof. It's whisper quiet, ENERGY STAR certified, and you can customize it — airflow settings, LED lighting in five different color temperatures, even Wi-Fi and motion sensor add-ons if you want to get the best out of your new fan. It's a small detail in a home that makes a real difference. Make sure to check them out now at us.panasonic.com Starting Small is powered by Riverside.fm, the AI-powered platform that lets you record, edit, repurpose,and distribute studio-quality content as easily as if you had a crew behind you. Check them out now at https://creators.riverside.com/CameronNagle