Jessie Dean, founder and CEO of Asheville Tea Company, gives her best advice for raising money, which is to know that you're going to need funding to grow your business. She says she thinks her business would've grown a lot faster with a lot less stress if she had that big-picture overview of where she was trying to take it in the beginning.
Looking back now, if I were to start any business over again, I would know that we're gonna need funding. I would know that we're gonna need to become an LLC. (laughs) This is a beverage so it's a product people drink. So wanna make sure that we make everything right from a quality perspective and liability perspective. So some of those things now feel really obvious. Of course, we're gonna need funding to grow. Of course, we're gonna need to structure a business a certain way. But at the time, I didn't know of that. So luckily I've had really great mentors and advisors along the way, to help me learn that. But I think that our business probably would have grown a lot faster, and with a lot less stress had I had that big picture overview of where I was trying to take it, and what I needed to get there from the start.
