A Hundred Ideas, And A Plan For One Of Them

Cheese, beef, yogurt, online sales. All of them, at once.

Hayley and Stephanie Painter wanted their family's dairy farm to thrive for generations. They had a hundred ideas for how, and enough energy to run all of them, and no idea which to start with or how any of it would connect.

The first money was a $3,500 grant from the Center for Dairy Excellence, which paid to set up the business structure and launch the brand. The aim was narrow and worth stating: a sustainable, nutrient-dense product line that could sustain the farm for the next generation.

The two decisions that shaped everything after

The first was the model. Build their own processing facility and focus on manufacturing, or partner with a co-packer and focus on marketing? They chose the co-packer, which freed the capital and the attention that branding and distribution needed.

It is worth saying plainly that this is the opposite of what Delicacy Meats decided in the same period, and both were right. The difference was which constraint was actually binding.

The second was the product. They chose yogurt, not because it was the favorite but because it used milk efficiently and the market research supported rising demand for locally made yogurt. Skyr specifically.

Then the numbers had to hold up to a bank

We refined the business plan and extended the financial model to a ten-year forecast, with margins broken out by sales channel, unit production costs for the yogurt, yield projections and labor expenses.

That work is what let them walk into their community bank prepared, and it is why they left with a $1M line of credit. Then we brought in a consumer packaged goods expert as their Fractional VP of Sales, because knowing how a category buyer decides is a specific skill and neither sister had it yet.

Years later, needing more capital to keep growing, they had sales goals, a financial model, a business plan and real early sales to point at. We connected them with a crowdfunding specialist and they raised $1.2 million on WeFunder.

Taking work off their plate, then handing it back

Starting a business is a heavy lift and in the early days the sisters were buried. We took execution on rather than just advising: identified the target market, built the messaging and brand guidelines, then decided which marketing channels to prioritize and what content to make.

From there we coached them through marketing and sales systems and hiring an internal team, and ran the marketing strategy, web, social, ads and email ourselves until their own team could take it over. Handing it back was always the point.

Where it stood

Painterland Sisters had become a national brand. The organic skyr reached more than 3,000 stores across all fifty states, including placement in Whole Foods.

At the time, the company projected $12M in revenue and had stated an ambition to become a $30M business. Those are their projections and goals rather than results achieved, and we would rather label them that way than let them read as history.

If you are at the stage they started at, with more ideas than capacity, the order of operations is the thing that matters: structure, then margin, then brand.

Where they are now