Gross To Net

Abby June Richards started working at 12, kept the books for her dad’s business at 16, and spent seven years in public accounting moving between audit, ERP implementation and outsourced accounting. In 2023 she left to start The CPG CFO, a fractional CFO firm that only serves emerging CPG brands. Nobody was offering her a CFO title, so she gave herself one, and her first project paid $800. Three years later she works mostly with brands doing $5 million to $50 million in revenue. Her core message is one George knows firsthand: growth can kill a brand faster than failure.

In the second half, George hires Abby for thirty minutes to fix the cash in a fictional brand. She walks through CASH FIGHT, her nine-part framework: conversion cycle, alert level, shelf pricing, shipping, financing, inventory, gross profit, overhead and trade spend. Along the way they cover why small production runs beat cheap ones before launch, why every founder needs a 13-week cash forecast, the real cost of hiring your cousin, and what happened to a brand that said yes to Sprouts and Whole Foods at the same time.

They also tackle the moment every founder celebrates and few plan for: a big retailer offering 2,000 doors. Abby’s first question is whether it’s a good idea at all. George explains what a last chance sticker really costs a brand. CASH FIGHT and the 13-week cash flow template are free at thecpgcfo.com, and you can follow Abby on LinkedIn and on Instagram at @thecpgcfo. George and Abby are on stage together at Rooted Expo in Dallas on October 21.

On September 2, 2026 I sat on the Reinventing the Pantry panel at the first Better Bites Food Forum in Austin, and this is the room recording. It's a little different from a normal Gross To Net episode: thirty minutes on stage with three brands and two of the merchants who decide whether brands like ours get into club. Tregg Brown of PLTFRM moderated. On the brand side were Sameer Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Smash Kitchen, James L. Harris, EVP of Sales at HYH America, which runs the ARIH noodle and beverage line at Walmart, and me for Yellowbird. On the retail side were Sam's Club merchants Christina Cho and Ashley Hobson.

The three brands are fixing different things (corn syrup and dyes in ketchup and mustard, instant noodles that got predictable, hot sauce that starts with vinegar and water) and we all land in the same place: there are a lot of ways to buy a first trial, but the second purchase comes from what's in the package. I make the case that bold and heat aren't flavors, and that we'll cut marketing dollars before we touch the ingredient deck. Sameer also announces Smash Kitchen's Sam's Club launch from the stage.

The back half belongs to the merchants. Christina and Ashley walk through what gets an emerging brand a real look (a clear point of view on who your customer is, something incremental to the set, club value, speed to market, and a plan for year two instead of just launch day), why club is usually a fast follow, how club-specific planograms let them test in one club or all 600, and why a pallet is a 48-inch billboard that a $1 million brand gets just as much of as a $50 million brand. We close on what we'd do differently, which for me was running the natural channel playbook into conventional. Thanks to Trevor Drinkwater and the Trusted Influence team for recording it and letting me share it.

What do you want your Monday through Friday to look like? "Iron Mike" Steadman joins me to talk about choosing a business that fits the answer. A Naval Academy graduate, former Marine infantry officer and three-time national collegiate boxing champion, Mike traces his path from a free boxing program in Newark to podcasting and category design. His work with OP4 brings an opponent's perspective to a founder's assumptions: where does the idea break when the market starts pushing back?

We get into the difference between inventing a category and finding a customer who can understand what you're selling today. Mike explains why venture-backed founders are effectively building two businesses, one for investors and one for customers, and how his own conversations with prospects helped him find a concrete way into a much bigger problem. We also talk about what podcasting makes you known for, why content can serve as a working résumé, and the limits of measuring those relationships in downloads.

Then the conversation turns to the economics of a life you actually enjoy: a core business that pays the bills, work you want to keep doing, and an ordinary day that doesn't require a spectacular exit to afford. For me that's something simple like biking to the library; for Mike it's writing over a cup of coffee in New York. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, read The Slap, and don't forget to follow Gross To Net wherever fine podcasts are served!

Jack Atlasov got into building with AI because his three-person e-commerce team had more work than it could do. He'd hired a data analyst, but he still needed to figure out where to spend the next advertising dollar. That led him into Python, coding tools, and eventually the research and testing systems he shares on GitHub. I went to one of his workshops in Austin and started borrowing his tools. For this conversation, I brought him a problem: food-service sales reps spend their days visiting restaurants, then have to enter all of those conversations into a CRM. How would he build something they could update by voice?

We walk through his process using that example: research what you don't know, compress what you've learned into something useful, then align on the job, build, and verify. Jack explains why he starts with research even when he knows the subject, why each feature should count as failing until it proves otherwise, and why the agent that builds the software needs a separate verifier. We also get into testing whether a skill improves on using no skill at all, the decisions that still belong to the person who knows the business, and what it takes to get an app out of your computer and into someone else's hands. This is a conversation about how we'd approach the CRM, with the research and build still ahead of us.

Along the way, we talk about keeping your view of AI current, creating instead of shopping, and why Jack values the attention that building asks of him. Find him on LinkedIn, X, and GitHub. Tools discussed include his Scout, Genome, SignalSweep, and SkillForge, plus Matt Pocock's skills. If you'd use a CRM like the one we describe, tell us what your reps need it to do.

Adam Schlegel and his brother Jon opened one breakfast restaurant in Denver's Ballpark neighborhood in 2006. Jon sent Adam the business plan back in 2000, and it took six years of pitching, hunting real estate, and getting turned down by investors and banks to get the doors open, which Adam describes as proving to the world that something that doesn't exist deserves to exist. He quit a consulting job at KPMG to help out, figuring he would give his brother a year or two and then go get a real job. He was twenty six. Twenty years later Snooze is roughly seventy restaurants in ten states doing over two hundred million dollars a year, giving away one percent of sales, composting nearly everything it can, and still closing every single day at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Most of this conversation is about how a company keeps its soul once other people are running it. Private equity arrived in 2012 when Snooze had six restaurants, a professional CEO took the seat for the next twelve years, and both brothers stepped away in their early thirties. Adam's explanation for why nobody ever bolted on dinner is refreshingly unsentimental. The one daypart already worked economically, so they never had to touch it, and adding those shifts means new managers, new inventory, and a whole new marketing motion for a business that was already best in class at what it did. We also get into building culture before scale, since the first restaurant ran alone for two and a half years, and what it takes to co found a company with your brother and still like him afterward. The whole partnership is explained by an old StrengthsFinder result. Jon's top strength was Belief. Adam's was Input. His read is that a founder's first job is to be the believer, and that his job was always to be the one asking whether the thing actually works.

Then he left, which he calls severing a limb, and moved his family to Melbourne while Jon moved to Italy and came back a winemaker. Adam spent the decade in orbit doing boards and food policy work and opening Chook, the Australian style rotisserie chicken shop he started in 2018 with James Beard winning chef Alex Seidel. Coming home from Australia most recently he sent two emails, one to the mayor of Denver and one to the company he co founded, and Snooze hired him back as a project manager. He is now Chief Growth and Strategy Officer, or as his email signature puts it, Consigliere, and he finally explains on the record what that means and why he and his brother consider The Godfather the best business book they never actually read. Find Snooze at snoozeeatery.com and Chook at chookchicken.com. Adam is not online and would like to keep it that way.

Cam Houser co-founded 3 Day Startup and ran it as CEO for a decade, growing it to 13,000 students across dozens of countries and helping launch founders who went on to raise more than 150 million dollars and sell to companies like Google and Etsy. Then he did the thing most founders never do. He stepped out of the CEO seat on purpose and rebuilt his working life as a one-man shop, trading the org chart for autonomy. Today he runs Actionworks, teaches entrepreneurship and AI to clients from the State Department to the Navy SEALs, and still lectures at UT. In this one he and George compare notes as two people who both walked away from the top job, and they get honest about what it actually costs.

Most of the conversation lives in the gap between what AI can do and what it cannot. Cam built an AI product on GPT-2 back in 2019, fine-tuned it on business books, and watched ChatGPT wipe it out almost overnight, which taught him more than any win would have. His throughline is that the hard, human parts of building are still the whole game. Relationships are the real moat, the tool is only the teacher if you actually use it, and the thing that changes a career is usually not a clever post but a scary message you almost did not send. He is bullish on AI and clear-eyed about its limits, and he makes the case that learning still happens best by doing, out loud, with other people.

He also gets into the part nobody warns you about. The CEO seat is lonely, the freedom he traded up for has its own bill, and after fifteen years without a job he is now thinking about taking one, not for the money but because he misses building shoulder to shoulder with people he respects. His mantra is a life well lived and a dent in the universe, and this is a warm, funny look at what that costs and what it is worth. Cam also promised George a sequel to the free hot sauce course they made together, so that is happening. Find Cam at camhouser.com and his newsletter at camhouser.com/newsletter, his company at actionworks.co, his video gear list at actionworks.co/gear, the free hot sauce course at actionworks.co/hotsauce, and on X at x.com/cahouser.

Most people meet a finance chief only after the interesting decisions are already made — he's the one who tells you whether you can afford them. Matt Dunaj has spent his career sitting exactly where those trades get made: as CFO at Follow Your Heart through its sale to Danone, as CFO/COO at Fly By Jing during its hypergrowth chili crisp era, and now as CFO at SWG Brands, the vertically integrated sexual-wellness group behind Hello Cake, Wet Lubricants, and Trigg Laboratories. Three categories that have almost nothing in common on paper, and one person who's been at the financial controls of all of them.

We get into how he actually reads a company on day one (the answer starts with the balance sheet, not the P&L), what nearly a decade inside a fifty-year-old plant-based pioneer teaches you that job-hopping can't, why the most successful month at a growing CPG brand can be the most painful one for cash, what changes when "filling a jar of vegan mayonnaise" turns into "filling a bottle of personal lubricant," and how to actually make demand-planning decisions before a Walmart pipefill when no math makes you certain. Along the way: a hobby that started as cactus collecting and ended in marriage, a meadow scythed by hand, a broken-TV recording that ended up sounding like music, and the fruit bowl analogy still running culture at companies Matt hasn't worked at in years.

Matt also calls himself The CFO Guy, which most people in his seat would never do — and the reason why is the most honest thing said in the episode. Find Matt on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-dunaj/. Gross to Net is hosted by George Milton — find him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-milton-a8348956/. If this one resonated, the easiest thing you can do is share it with one operator who needs to hear it.

Morgan Zanotti co-founded Primal Kitchen, bootstrapped it to $50M in revenue, and sold it to Kraft Heinz for $200M when she was 35. Then she did the thing almost nobody does — she stayed for five years, quadrupled the business from the inside, and kept her entire founding team in place the whole time. She eventually ran M&A strategy for Kraft's health and wellness portfolio, where she flagged the GLP-1 wave as a freight train before anyone at the company was paying attention. They told her it was a rich-person thing. They were wrong, and she knew it.

Now she's back at zero. Her new company, Waay, is a sparkling protein water — 10g protein, zero sugar, 45 calories — that launched nationwide at Whole Foods in October 2025 and has since picked up Sprouts and Target. We talked about what it's like to start over after a massive exit, why she tried to talk herself out of this for 18 months, how she ended up telling her therapist she should have just bought a car wash, and why she thinks CPG has become almost a billionaire's game. We also got into the stuff that makes the industry simultaneously maddening and worth fighting for — the antiquated systems, the mafia-like distribution networks, and the fact that at the end of the day, everybody still has to eat.

You can find Morgan on LinkedIn, on TikTok and Instagram @morganzanotti and @drinkwaay, and you can try Waay at drinkwaay.com or pick it up at Whole Foods, Sprouts, or Target.

Katie Horgan spent six years as a Marine Corps logistics officer, running truck convoys in Iraq and coordinating operations for a ship-based crisis response force in the Pacific. After earning her MBA at Columbia, she dove into the NYC startup world, holding operations roles at Plated during its explosive meal kit growth phase, then at Crave Crush and SelfMade. When that last role ended abruptly, she made the leap to working for herself, cold emailing brands from her personal Gmail and slowly building what would become Bravo CPG, a fractional operations firm that has now worked with more than 225 growth-stage CPG brands and grown to a team of 32.

In this conversation, Katie and George dig into the real mechanics of going from fired to founder, including the year it took her to figure out how to describe what she was even selling, the Gary Vee-inspired cold outreach strategy that landed her first clients, and the uncomfortable inflection points where she had to choose between a comfortable lifestyle business and pushing for something bigger. Katie shares what she's seen go wrong across hundreds of brands, from hiring senior leaders who end up as shipping clerks to the chronic disconnect between sales, ops and finance that quietly bleeds margin. She also introduces a framework borrowed from her military days: the distinction between "current ops" and "future ops," and why almost no startup has anyone dedicated to thinking 12 months ahead.

The episode wraps with Katie's van life adventures in her Sprinter van Bessie, a dubious ChatGPT tax strategy, and the question every van lifer dreads. You can find Katie on LinkedIn or at bravocpg.com, or email her directly at [email protected].

Nick Wiseman started cooking in D.C. kitchens at 15, trained under Fabio Trabocchi in New York, then came home and opened a Jewish deli named after his grandfather's grocery stores. Little Sesame was born in the 500-square-foot basement of that deli in 2016, inspired by the hummus his co-founder Ronen Tenne used to make for family meals on the line. When COVID hit, Nick turned the restaurant into a community kitchen that served 100,000 free meals — while simultaneously building a CPG lab in the back room. That packaged hummus launched at 14 Whole Foods in 2021. Today Little Sesame is the 5th largest and fastest-growing national hummus brand in the country, available in 4,000 stores.

In this episode, George and Nick talk about culinary-first manufacturing and why Little Sesame has always self-manufactured rather than co-packing — including a framework Nick borrowed from Patagonia: automate where human craft doesn't make the product better, and never touch the steps where it does. They dig into Nick's decade-long direct relationship with Casey Bailey, a regenerative farmer in Montana, how a $2.2M USDA grant helped scale that supply chain, and why Nick believes regen ag is "the purple bridge" between left and right. The conversation also covers the tension between mission and venture-backed growth, why the risk-reward profile for food founders is getting less compelling, and how Little Sesame is thinking about storytelling as it moves from natural channel into mass retail with a new snacking lineup at Target.

Find Little Sesame at eatlittlesesame.com and on Instagram at @eatlittlesesame. Connect with Nick on LinkedIn. Little Sesame is available at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, Wegmans, and independent retailers nationwide.