Preparing for Shark Tank with Skopos' Help: Amy Oh of Mama O’s Kimchi Gives us the Scoop
From the point of view of Amy Oh:
I’ve been with Mama O’s for four years now, spearheading growth, sales, and marketing, which is not at all my background. I’ve always worked for food companies, just on the operations and farming side. But, like with any type of entrepreneurship, you do what you have to do.
Kheedim, my husband and Mama O’s founder was a one-man show for years. He always had a production team to make the product, but in terms of the backend work, it was only him. It’s really expensive to hire people, especially people who care, and we have no outside funding. I opted to switch my career for the flexibility of working with my partner, and we decided to focus on growing Mama O’s into a national brand.
Brooklyn Based, Community Focused
Humanizing Finance since 2016
Bookkeeping is not many owners’ strengths. It was something I took an interest in, but it was an overwhelming task. Kheedim had taken a business profitability class with Elli at Evergreen in the past and said, We’ve got to use her. He never had the bandwidth to overhaul our books, so that was one of my first projects: to make our books provide us with the information that we needed.
We brought Elli on almost immediately after I started, and she completely revamped our books in a way that made it easy. This was deep in the pandemic so we relied on Google docs and Zoom meetings, but the process was clear-cut with very reasonable, measured tasks. In the beginning, Elli was gathering information to understand what we needed to see in our books: hashing out the details of our customer base, how we were charging different types of products, how we record deductions, and how all of this flowed into our business model, from our ingredients to types of products to packing. We spent a lot of time with Elli going over the numbers. She was wildly patient and provided this fantastic insight into the best ways to capture information.
Kheedim and Mama Oh actually went on Shark Tank right after I’d taken another class on forecasting with Elli (I was 8 months pregnant and stayed behind). Because of that class, we had perfect numbers when they went on. I learned so much about projections that we utilize every year. We still use that template every year to understand what we can anticipate in sales, just to prepare ourselves in terms of inventory, finances, and budgets.
We used a free accounting program back then. Elli brought us into QuickBooks and explained how to use it as a tool to ensure we’re capturing all our numbers. She totally redid our Chart of Accounts, which we’ve barely touched since. We add categories here and there, and make updates, but we haven’t had to do anything: we just get accurate reports. She assisted us with investing in machinery, which we hadn’t considered, and that helped with depreciation and keeping our labor burden down. Instead, we can focus on making a workplace that is efficient, safe, and fun for our employees. She also set up our SOPs: closures for the end of the year, quarterly reviews, and other documents we should always have on hand. We had some of them already, but they weren’t necessarily organized. After we finished our work with Skopos, Kheedim and I realized we had to raise prices, which we’d been fighting for a long time. But we finally had solid information that said our margins weren’t where they needed to be after we’d taken into account all the deductions we were getting from our customers for marketing. Suddenly, we had a clear idea of our margins and could ask, What do we need to be more profitable? What do we need to provide to potential future buyers to get us to a good place?
We spent a lot of time with Elli going over the numbers. She was wildly patient and provided this fantastic insight into the best ways to capture information.
Having someone tell you, “I need all these things, they’re going to live here, all you just have to update them” was one of the most helpful things she could have done.
I was anxious about taking over the bookkeeping, but this process provided a lot of relief and security for us. Especially when working with partners, not having a full understanding of how your business is operating is hard. Though I control most of the financial stuff, it’s now easy for Kheedim to go in and check reports; before, it just wasn’t an option for him. I think having a third party that will explain things in a different way than a partner would is really helpful. And there’s always more to learn—Elli is a wealth of knowledge.
One day we’ll have to update our Chart of Accounts, but right now we’re focused on growth and trying to ensure that we’re growing smart. Since we don’t have investors, we have to grow sustainably; we just don’t have the money that other companies do. Having better visibility of how our numbers are working gives us perspective on how we can get Mama O’s into new markets, and how we can support new retailers in terms of marketing and promotions…. we’re just hoping for growth and trying to make the best product that we can.
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