Founder Spotlights: Insights from Julia Niiro, CEO & Founder of MilkRun
In case you haven’t heard, we’re hosting a virtual event series in partnership with the NY Tech Alliance! Hosted by NYTA’s Andy Saldaña and Grasshopper Bank’s Micah Baldwin, “Don’t Panic, Let’s Talk” is a bi-monthly check-in for tech founders, entrepreneurs, and small business leaders looking to have candid conversations while we all navigate a global pandemic.
The food service industry was hit particularly hard as the virus swept through the U.S. With operating costs already eating into most of their margins, many restaurant owners were forced to close their doors for good. But today, we’ll take a look at a food business that found themselves on the opposite side of the spectrum — exploding with new orders.
Founded by Julia Niiro in 2018, MilkRun is an online platform created to help people buy great food directly from farmers. Julia recognized that the industrialization of the food industry was putting small farmers out of business and was weakening the connections between communities and local growers. When MilkRun was founded, Julia struggled to gain traction with the investment community because many thought the concept wasn’t scalable. In the last few months, MilkRun’s small operation has transformed. It’s become an unexpected food industry hero for the Pacific Northwest while everyone stayed home to flatten the curve. Julia joins us to discuss her unique experience and the lessons she’s learned along the way.
Ask for help when you’re “in the weeds”
MilkRun was invited to join the well-regarded accelerator program, Techstars, for their Spring 2020 program. When the MilkRun team met with the TechStars crew in Colorado, much was still unknown about the Coronavirus and what impact it would have. By the time they landed back in Oregon — laden with sanitizing kits courtesy of Julia’s mom — COVID-19 was already having a huge impact on their business. In a short span of time, MilkRun’s orders had jumped from about fifty deliveries per day to two hundred and fifty. The orders continued to spike as the restaurant industry halted and farmers’ logistic routes began to break down. Julia says, “We were crushed. It was nearly impossible… we had to call in the cavalry”. The industry rallied around MilkRun. An out-of-work friend in the business offered his facilities, a call went out for workers and the next day, nearly thirty people arrived to work shoulder to shoulder in a refrigerated room packing boxes and fulfilling orders, Julia among them. As an USDA certified farmer, she’s used to the hard work and her friends are too. Julia points out that restaurant and farm folks are some of the hardest working employees you could ever hire. She says, “It was madness but it never dawned on us that we weren’t going to do this”. With some grit and lots of teamwork, the MilkRun team pulled it off. Once they were “out of the weeds” (ie. no longer so overwhelmed), it was time to reassess. The question on Julia’s mind was, should MilkRun try to remain stable where we’re at, or ‘jump off the cliff’ and ride this momentum? They decided to go for it. Seattle was their next target market anyway, so the virus was simply accelerating their timeline.
Foster the culture your team is naturally developing
Growth is what founders aim for, but scaling your team inevitably changes its dynamic, especially when you’ve just added a ton of people who all had different jobs less than a month ago! Julia says, “Culture can be difficult to focus on when you’re small and young”. Suddenly, there were literal and figurative walls between MilkRun team members operating from computers or from warehouses. In an effort to include everyone in their next steps, she gathered them all to ‘talk marketing’ but the response was lackluster at best. It ‘felt like a job’, she was told. “So we went out to the parking lot in the middle of the city surrounded by a fence, and barbed wire and white vans,” Julia tells us. She acknowledges this might sound a little strange, but this was where the team felt more at home. When you work at a restaurant, your break is often just a few moments alone out back, if you can find the time. The MilkRun team’s marketing strategy came to life with a dry erase marker on a white delivery van in the parking lot. The culture at MilkRun was already developing and Julia was quick to both realize and embrace it. A more formalized way that she fosters the culture at MilkRun is using a buddy system, where your buddy’s job is to take 30% of your tasks by the end of the week. Julia points out that this means everyone shares, understands other roles, and keeps things fresh — from packing boxes, to testing engineering updates, to driving deliveries to customers.
“Everything is a reflection of learning. There is a constant question of who are we, who are we not, and who do we want to be?”, according to Julia.
Don’t let the status quo dictate what your success looks like
Julia’s attitude toward personal development has directly contributed to MilkRun’s success. She observes, “If I’m not celebrating the wins and instead, I’m getting bounced around, then I’m inevitably bringing that to my team and into our business. I’m also bringing that to every conversation I have with a potential investor, mentor, or partner who can help us make this happen”. This self-awareness as a founder and as a leader helped Julia to stay the course in the early days when she was regularly told by investors, “this isn’t scalable” and “no one wants this”. She had seen how quickly a large industry could change overnight and she knew that farm-to-consumer wasn’t just a “granola phase” as many investors had dismissed it to be. She’s even changed the minds of some of her naysayers — an investor who had doubted that MilkRun could scale, is now one of her happiest customers. Julia lights up when she tells us,
“Farmers are back in business. Recently, one of the older farmers we work with was beaming when he told me that no one has bought food directly from farms at this volume since he was a kid. Farmers are being celebrated as essential, they’re hopeful again, and they’re back in business.“
Watch the replay of the event here: https://youtu.be/7VT81sTU378.
We hope this story inspires you to dig deep and rise to the occasion when you reach either roadblocks or inflection points along your business journey. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
In our next virtual event in the “Don’t Panic, Let’s Talk” series will talk to Katharine Zaleski, Co-Founder & President, PowerToFly. Katharine is the co-founder and president of PowerToFly. PowerToFly is is a free upskilling and jobs platform that connects Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups that value gender diversity and inclusion to women in tech, sales, marketing and digital. PowerToFly was launched by Katharine and Milena Berry in 2014 and is building the platform to propel diversity recruiting and hiring. Join us June 30th at 12PM ET and hear about Katharine’s story.
In the meantime, please have a look at some resources we have pulled together that we’d like to share with you: Grasshopper Bank’s Resource Guide — A compilation of the best articles, strategies and tips for managing a business and maintaining your mental well-being during challenging times.
