Costco Connection - March 2011

ferent health businesses to work with. While on the flight, Amy read her Costco Connection and was intrigued by my story. She mentioned to Phil she thought we would be a great fit as we live locally and share the same passion for health. Phil e-mailed me from the plane, and when they arrived back in Michigan we met.

Phil and Amy truly appreciated the foundation of the business: health, passion and helping others discover true health. I was taken by the structure, ambition and business sense Amy and Phil brought to the table. For me, this meant moving myself on to actually running the business instead of working for it, and adding dynamic, strong business partners to Raw Way.

Now, eight months after our partnership [began], we have five employees working for Raw Way. We moved our manufacturing to downtown Flint, Michigan. This not only brings us our own space, and more of it, but it is allowing us to be part of a city that is trying to revitalize.

Next, we have added a new crunchy raw candy bar to our line and updated our entire line of bars. Our next big endeavor is to find a large retail chain to carry our bars, as we have customers from all over the states asking where they can buy Raw Way bars, thanks to The Costco Connection n

Young entrepreneurs
share their successes

Justin Brotman, Healeo

article was published and said their mom showed them the article about Launch and put it away until they planned their move. They would then dig out the article and call us when they were ready and really found this resource to be a relief.

Sean Whalen, Alter-G, Inc.

Manufactures and sells anti-gravity treadmills ( www.alter-g.com)

In the past year our revenues have almost doubled in a very tough economy. Our rapid growth has been propelled by the new Anti-Gravity Treadmill launched a year ago (the M300 model), combined with an expansion of our sales force and the appointment of more than 15 international distributors.

We have shipped almost three times more units than we did in 2009 to a broad base of customers. These include pro sports teams such as the Dallas Cowboys, colleges such as Princeton and Harvard University, medical facilities and fitness centers. We also sell a lot of units to the Veterans Affairs system that help our servicemen and -women rehabilitate from injuries sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan. The largest increase in units has gone to nursing homes, where our product enables the elderly to get up and walk or run pain free in a fall-safe environment—and thereby resume normal living.

After being the driving force in creating and bringing the Alter-G to market, I have now turned to a building-the-market role. I moved to Europe to manage operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa—locating and setting up distributors, finding and training customers, and setting up a customer service and logistics organization to support our rapidly expanding global presence.

DAN DELONG/RED BOX PICTURES

Justin Brotman, Healeo

Retail health food store and juice bar ( www.healeo.com)

The Costco Connection article was a major launching pad for my business in a few different ways. Our national presence was immediately established as measured by our Web sales. Customers from around the country and world began ordering from our online store. Never before had we shipped anywhere farther than San Francisco [from the business’s headquarters in Seattle].

This jump-start of our e-commerce business gave us an unexpected source of revenue aside from our physical retail location.

Another important outcome of the article was its psychological boost for our staff and me personally. E-mails, calls and visits from new people were incredibly supportive and enthusiastic about what we were doing.

Running a small business can be emotionally taxing, to say the least, and this support was a main factor in fueling us to work that seventh day in the week and that 12th hour of the shift. C

Sean Whalen, Alter-G, Ltd.

Bethany Herr-Hatfield, Raw Way

Manufactures and markets raw-food bars ( www.rawwaylife.com)

The first few months following the article, my online orders grew by the hundreds! My self-run business was taking off at a much faster pace than I could manage. I was covering manufacturing (hand-making each bar, which takes 30 hours from start to finish), packaging, shipping and handling, and customer service with the help of a couple of family members. I quickly realized my business needed some structural support, and fast.