Demand has never been a problem for Rebecca Brady’s company, Top Seedz.
Her most enduring challenge has been matching production of her artisan crackers, which are literally handmade, with heavy inbound interest from food retailers across the U.S.
Now she’ll get that chance.
Brady’s company was the $1 million grand prize winner of this year’s 43North competition, which seeks to seed and support growth-stage startups in Buffalo. Winners strike an investment-style bargain, giving up 5% of their company to 43North in return for the prize money.
It’s a natural for young software firms that are pursuing the archetypal startup path – riding investor funding to fast growth and then rewarding those investors by being sold or going public.
But Top Seedz fits, too, as a company that needed equity investors to fuel the opportunity at hand. Brady told 43North judges that she wants to become a $100 million company within five years, in the process going from 350 stores to 6,500.
She took a moment this weekend to enjoy the adulation: Brady has two children who are fielding an influx of requests not just for the crackers but Top Seedz “merch." Her 20 employees, many of whom are female refugees, are elated. And she visited the first store to sell her crackers, the Wegmans on Transit Road in Amherst, where her presence caused a minor commotion among employees who have known her for years.
Then she immediately started planning for what’s next.
The current operation off Cayuga Drive in Cheektowaga will continue to grow incrementally, but the major project ahead is to build a much bigger factory with automated equipment. Only then will she be able to grow with current customers and take on new ones at the rate suggested by her inbound demand.
It will be a major undertaking – when a 43North judge asked Brady whether it is possible to maintain excellence of her crackers in a more automated production setting, she half-jokingly answered, “Yes, because my husband is an engineer and he told me it is.” But this is the project that will define how big, and how quickly, Top Seedz can go.
"We have to grow our current facility while at the same time setting up a new factory with equipment that will help us supercharge our growth" she said. "We have a lot of different ideas for new SKUs, and we need to make sure our next decision is big enough that it has everything we need going forward."
Brady is being actively mentored by Ronald Schreiber, a longtime local businessman and 43North board member, as they develop a plan that will guide their real estate search. And she’ll lean on 43North as she brings new skillsets into the organization, from manufacturing engineers to enterprise sales managers.
This is new territory for Brady, who has always tightly controlled all aspects of the Top Seedz operation. She said it’s “likely” the company will seek additional investment as she populates the new space with equipment such as a house-sized tunnel oven.
Faced with the suddenness and enormity of the business challenge before her, Brady is focusing on the methods that got her this far. That includes breaking down the overall puzzle into solvable problems.
“I've always thought, ever since I started this business: 'Just break it down, do it one step at a time, and it's manageable,' " Brady said. "At the end of the day you back and go, 'OK, we did it.' "
