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On this episode of the @WhatWorked podcast, Tyler Rachal and Mike Wu sit down with Dr. Michelle Dulake, CEO and Co-Founder at Fera Pets. Are you an aspiring entrepreneur? Listen to this episode about Michelle's journey from the veterinarian's clinic to the boardroom.

We covered a ton of great topics:

• The  process of pet product development for pets
• Changes between startup and corporate culture
• The special relationship formed with a co-founder

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Transcript edited for clarity:

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Tyler Rachal

Welcome back to another episode of What Worked. We're joined by an extremely, extremely special guest, Dr. Michelle Dulake of Fera Pet Organics, Big Boss CEO and also a friend of mine for a long long time. That's why I say very, very special. So we've been begging Michelle to join the podcast. She finally relented and decided to come on and tell a little bit about her story of growing a business from literally nothing, selling it to one of the biggest companies in the world and also raising kids in the interim, just kind of doing everything. So Michelle if you don't mind giving a quick introduction to our audience: Who are you? What is Fera Pet? And we'll just go from

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Michelle Dulake

I'm so happy to be here, hello, everyone. Thanks for having me on What Worked. This is very exciting and just a little bit about me. My name is Michelle Dulake. I'm a veterinarian. I've been a vet for 11 years now and I started a pet supplement line that provides a holistic approach to each body system. We use Eastern and Western ingredients to improve the overall well-being and longevity of pets. So that’s a little bit about Fera Pets but we can get into the longer story if you guys want.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, we definitely want to get into the longer story. We'll start there, it's kind of crazy, I have to remind myself that I've been, I feel like since I've known you since right around the time when you probably started the company, pretty close. So I always think of you as Christine's friend Michelle, who's a veterinarian. But then you kind of became this business owner and all that jazz. So how the heck did you, let's start at the very beginning. How did you decide to become a vet, besides your love for dogs?

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Michelle Dulake

Yes, so I've always had this love of animals. When I was a little girl obviously I would always want to go pet dogs. I'd be on walks with my parents and there'd be like a Rottweiler or a German Shepherd barking its head off at me and I just would still  want to go up to it and pet it and my parents would have to hold me back. So I've always had a passion for animals and just wanting to be around them and help them. And even in my fifth grade yearbook, I wrote that I wanted to be an animal doctor. So that passion has kind of always been there.

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And then growing up in high school, I volunteered at animal shelters, worked at vet hospitals to gain more experience. And then I got into UC Davis, which was my dream school at the time because I could major in animal science and it would bring me closer to starting my veterinary career. Becoming a vet is actually a lot harder than people think because there are fewer vet schools in the U .S. than medical schools. And so there's actually a current shortage of veterinarians. If you try to get a vet appointment, I don't know if you have a dog, it's very hard to get because there's just a shortage. And I think there is a big mental health problem in the vet community right now just because we have these patients that they can't talk to us so we have to really do a thorough physical exam. We also have to do diagnostics. But I felt like most of my job was convincing people to spend money on their pet to do these diagnostics. But pet owners have this idea that vets just charge a lot of money and they shouldn't be spending that much money on their pets. 

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So that's always a struggle because you go into vet medicine thinking you want to help pets, not thinking about the human aspect of it and having to convince people to do these things. So I think there's a part of that that's hard for vets. And then also like we have to euthanize pets, which is not easy. And then on top of euthanizing them, we have to be like a therapist to the family. So anyways, there's just, there's a lot that goes on behind being a veterinarian that people don't think about. 

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So anyways, I graduated from UC Davis. I got into vet school at Western University in Southern California. And then after that I did a one year internship at VCA West LA, which is the biggest vet hospital on the West Coast. And internships are kind of like boot camp for for vets. I spent 100 hours a week working, doing ER shifts. It was a crazy time, but I learned a lot during that time. And then I ended up going into private practice, which led me to the Valley in Sherman Oaks. And I worked four days a week and I actually quickly got bored of just being a vet for four days and off for three days, which just shows my personality. I just kind of always want to keep going. I didn't have any kids at this time. So I talked to my boss and I said, I want to do more. I want to learn more about holistic medicine and I want to get my acupuncture license and so he agreed to fund that. So I got my acupuncture license at Colorado State University, which then opened my eyes to a whole other world of Eastern medicine therapies that have been used for centuries, especially in Asia. So while doing acupuncture on dogs and cats, which is a very L .A. thing, a lot of those pet owners would ask me for herbs to do in conjunction with the acupuncture that I was doing. And I had been thinking about starting a side hustle for a while and I considered various ideas, like one of them was an accessory line using hemp material, which, why is a vet starting a pet accessory line? That's a stupid idea but…

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Tyler Rachal

Why not?

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Mike Wu

Yeah, what was the worst idea? Give us the worst idea that you worked on.

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Michelle Dulake

Me and my partner, who I will talk about a lot, looked at starting a dog cafe or a cat cafe. We went to different places to rent. We're just trying to think what is the least that we can do that will give us the most passive income? That's literally kind of what we were thinking.

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Mike Wu

Well yeah, you had a job

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Tyler Rachal

I think you just figured out entrepreneurship, you just described it in a nutshell.

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, so we just bounced around ideas and then, having this holistic background, I went to lunch with a friend who was like, well, you guys should just start the supplement company yourself. And so we kind of got the courage to do that. And obviously, subscription based companies are the way to go. And so we just decided, me and my friend, Emily, we've been friends for 25 years. She was actually working for logistics, doing logistics at a pet bed company. And so she kind of had already been in the pet space. And we've been talking about doing something together for a long time and so after kind of deciding on okay let's really focus and do pet supplements. We decided to go for it. 

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We started an LLC. and we started attending pet trade shows, learning more about manufacturing, ingredients and just learning the competitor space. And then we launched Fera in 2017. Both of us still were working our daytime jobs and which was which was hard to do. At that time, I still think I was just pregnant, so I didn't have Scarlett yet, my first kid. But we decided to basically launch on our own DTC site and Amazon. You can go on different software like Jungle Scout and see like, wow, that supplement is making X amount of money monthly. Like, let's try to do that and just see if we can do that. Not realizing that it would lead us to create a whole brand that would take up 150 % of our time to where we are now. But that's what we went into thinking, let's just have this product on Amazon and just let it sell and see where it goes. So, yeah, that's kind of how we started.

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Tyler Rachal

That's amazing and I want to expand on a key part that you just talked about. You talked about this lunch, which by the way, if I'm not mistaken, was that lunch with Mike Zhang?

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Michelle Dulake

It was.

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Tyler Rachal

Okay, so we have here just a beautiful mutual thing, we should definitely clip this and just praise Mike Zhang here for a second, because he gave you some incredible advice, and a lot of people don't know this about Hireframe, but Hireframe largely started also based off of our relationship with Mike Zhang, who's been just an incredible supporter of ours…

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Mike Wu

Yeah and customer.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, and customers. For Hireframe, people don't know that we literally got our start because Mike came to us and he was asking to hire some staff for the company that he was building at the time, Good Money. And he said, hey guys, I'm looking to do this and I know you guys have expertise and can you think of any partners over in the Philippines or wherever,

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to get the staff and we were kind of like needing basically to do something that earns some type of income. We're like we'll do it for you and here's what it looked like. So that's the beginning of Hireframe, but that's so cool that you had that lunch. How did that feel in that moment when he gave you that feedback? Because you were thinking about hemp collars and that sort of thing. Were you defensive or were you very open to his feedback?

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, I think we actually had been meeting with Mike and Andrew Tsai for a couple meetings just because they had built a company and I was just really looking up to them as entrepreneurs to learn from them. And obviously I wanted to get other entrepreneurs’ feedback before starting this company. I took it as a positive feedback, like, hey, you're a vet, you should definitely create a supplement brand that you can actually put your expertise into versus anyone can build an accessory line or have a pet cafe or whatever. So I think it just solidified that this is what we're gonna do and this makes sense. And so it was just really great to have another entrepreneur mind give their feedback and approval. So that was awesome

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Tyler Rachal

Totally, that's really cool. And then you mentioned that you guys started this really as a side hustle, but you said it eventually took up 150 % of your time. What was the in-between? How did you guys go from, hey, this is a fun way to make a little bit of extra cash, I'm gonna still be a vet, Emily's still gonna do, what was Emily doing at the time?

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Michelle Dulake

She was working for a pet bed company and then also she opened a restaurant with her now ex-husband. So she was very busy doing many other things. But that also gave her the experience to start another business, right? But yes, we were very busy. I would say in the beginning, you know, I don't know how to market things. Like I don't know how to get the word out about a pet supplement. So it was interesting because I actually got a puppy in 2014. Her name is Pippa. She's the best dog. Now she's almost, she's 10. But I actually started a dog Instagram account for her back in 2014. Okay, what that lesson taught me was I learned how dog influencers thought because I was trying to be a dog influencer for Pippa. So that actually plays into the marketing because I used her account to spread the word, to get other dog accounts to try it, and then slowly more and more people would post about it saying that they love the product, they love the quality. And so I was like, huh, people are really looking for a holistic solution for their pets. 

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So when we launched this first product, it was a hip and joint soft chew, which we thought you need a hip and joint product to get into the pet space. That's what everybody makes. Every dog has arthritis issues, joint issues. And so we started with that product. And then I soon realized that I actually didn't like the inactive ingredients in a soft chew because you need inactive ingredients that are not the best to mold it together and keep it together And so we shifted our entire portfolio to be as clean as possible focusing on mainly powders and oils so you didn't have to have inactive ingredients. So our next product which is our hero product now It's an organic pre -biotic and probiotic powder for gut health. It's flavorless and it's actually for dogs and cats which expanded our ability to market it to a bigger, broader audience.

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And so I would say like at that time there's no single event that made our product kind of go viral on Amazon But it did, our powder became way more successful than our hip and joint. And it's probably attributed to higher quality ingredients, doing more brand awareness, gifting on social media, having a halo effect and just starting ads on Amazon. And so I think people were just looking for a clean, organic, powder-based approach. And that really resonated with customers since there weren't that many products out there. So then as the product portfolio expanded, I just basically formulated everything from what I saw in vet clinics with a lot of intention. So the next big problem that people come in with is skin and coat issues, so I created an official Omega 3 and then people come in for cardiac issues, heart murmurs, and then I created a cardiac supplement. So every product that I made was made with intention and care. Which I still look back and I'm like, how did we launch all these products while having another job? Like it's really crazy. 

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Then in 2020, I actually previously went through a miscarriage right before COVID. And so I really wanted to have another baby, my second kid. And when I found out I was pregnant, we went into lockdown two weeks later. And I was an essential worker and so I still had to go into the vet clinic and work. And I remember I went in and everybody's freaking out about COVID and a pet owner coughs in my face. I just found I was pregnant and I was obviously very anxious about losing the baby again. So I was like, nope, I'm out. I'm gonna go take a break while I'm pregnant, work on Fera full time. We knew that there was something just because we were growing pretty quickly, not even putting a hundred percent effort into it. And so this kind of marked in my mind, the real beginning of Fera was in 2020 when we both quit our daytime jobs and focused a hundred percent on Fera.

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W we bootstrapped the company from the beginning. We we only put a little bit of cash in at the beginning, but we reinvested everything and we put that into new products inventory marketing. So it just started with humble beginnings with Emily's mom actually doing all of our fulfillment and shipping in her garage to now, obviously, we have 3PL and things like that but it's cool to see where we started and now where we are. So that's kind of when we shifted to really go all in.

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Tyler Rachal

That's incredible. Shout out Emily's mom, the way. That's the OG first employee. Hopefully, you know, you guys hooked her up with something., I know Mike's got a question, but I did wanna highlight a really awesome thing that you maybe unintentionally just talked about. People talk about how do I start a business and get a big idea. And I think the thing that you did, you tell me if you feel like this is accurate, but you were a part of the community. I think that's a key part of your success is you were a vet, you were actively searching for these different treatments, whether it's acupuncture or whatever it might be or different Eastern, Western medicine. And then you were also doing the dog influencer thing. And I think that's really, really important because you are basically getting a very, very good understanding of who your customer was and where the opportunities were in the market. 

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But I can also relate to when people ask me about how we ended up where we ended up, I just kind of am like, I don't know. I've barfed thousands of decisions made over years. People were like, well, why'd you do that thing? And I'm like, because we literally were trying the other thing and it wasn't working. So I had to just do something else. People, when they talk about things later on, they wax philosophically where they're like, you know what? I always had this idea. And I always knew no, you didn't. So I think that's pretty cool. You were part of the community. I think that's a huge part of your success.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, think, Tyler, you mentioned just making a bunch of these decisions and then just following what's working and what's not working. I think it comes back to the feedback loops. We mentioned Mike earlier on the call. He was one of our first customers. And what's unique about having a close friend as one of your first customers, there's pros and cons to that, obviously. But one of the best parts about that is that he gave us really honest feedback early on about what was good about the service, what could be better, and that sort of thing. And Michelle, it sounds like you did something similar by, you know, one of the ways you kind of shortened your feedback loops was becoming the customer,  or becoming one of your distribution partners by setting up your influencer account, your doggy account, whether you knew it or not, but like you, that was really cool, because like you got in the seat of the customer essentially, and one of your kind of other stakeholders in your ecosystem, and you learned, you had that feedback loop and you seemed like very analytical because you talked about you know did this one product, it didn't feel right or you didn't want to do that anymore you changed it you went through like a couple it sounds like like significant pivots between starting and and then going full-time. 

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You mentioned you did this bootstrap so I'm curious I want to ask you, when I hear physical products, all I hear is like dollar signs going out the door and so inventory R&D, let's not gloss over the fact that you were creating supplements for the first time ever I imagine. While you are a vet, you're doing a lot of stuff for the first time so that sounds to me like expensive R&D lots of iteration, can you walk us through what was that like from like a capital standpoint? Where were your big investments? How do you even start building like consumables?

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, I mean, I went to a lot of different trade shows, human side and pet side, and I learned a lot about how you actually formulate just by going there and meeting different suppliers and meeting different manufacturers. I think a lot of it was actually more time spent going there, formulating on calls things like that. But the actual R&D, like the capital to start it, was very minimal to what we are now like very minimal. Me and Emily did not pay ourselves for the first couple of years. We had other jobs, so that also helped, right? And anything that we made we just put back in and so I think the only capital was for the purchase order. That was really that was really it, I mean, yes, on flights and things like that. But it was mainly time and every product takes me about a year from ideation to actually launching it's it's about a year just because I research the ingredients that I want, I find the dosage that is accurate for dogs and cats, and then I reach out to the manufacturer, I get the quotes, is it possible to make this formula? Okay, then I get the samples, is it palatable, is it safe? I go through many different rounds of revisions for the formulas. 

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But I really try to focus on what’s working in the human space. Because obviously if you are buying a mushroom supplement for yourself, you are more likely to buy one for your dog. So I really try to follow what is happening on the human side. So that's why I do attend human trade shows to see what ingredients there are, what trademark ingredients, what clinical studies are behind those ingredients, and then try to transfer that over to the pet space because humanization of pets is only going to increase. People are having kids less. People are buying pets, paying more for their pets, more than even like themselves. So I think that it's just important. I always just follow what's happening on the human side and use that. 

Mike Wu

Yeah, are you saying that the dog cafe has never been a better idea then? 

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Michelle Dulake

I mean there are some clubs now in LA where it's just for dogs. I'm not gonna put their name out there because I'm not a sponsor but I think they're doing pretty well. So it's not a bad idea now to have a high-end club.  

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, there's a spot near us where it's like a, you pay like a membership for like effectively 

a private dog park. 

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Mike Wu

SoHo House

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Tyler Racha

And this place is, it is poppin'. It is SoHo House for dogs. So still a good idea and, Michelle, still time, still time to do it. I was gonna say, I tend to put probably entrepreneurs into kind of three buckets, three call it entrepreneur labels, right? There's your product builders, right? Your idea people, inventors. There's gonna be your operators, people that are really into team building and operations and efficiency. And then the last one is people that are just at their heart of hearts, they're sales and marketing people, they're really great marketers. How would you characterize yourself if you were to only pick one?

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Michelle Dulake

I mean I am the inventor and the marketer and Emily is the operations. So we cover it all but I would say at the heart of it was the inventor side of me. 

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Tyler Rachal

That would be my guess too, for you.

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Michelle Dulake

I'm really passionate about it. If I could only do that now, I would be happy doing that and I have expressed that to my now boss. So they know that that is my true passion, creating, innovating new products. Which is great, they need someone to be passionate about that.

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Mike Wu

Michelle, is that something you always knew or you more recently discovered through Fera in the venture?

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Michelle Dulake

I only realized that through the first process of making my first product, I was like, this is so much fun. It's actually like a creative outlet for me, because I have that scientific background, but I can use that to create something. So it's like that outlet. I loved it, I still love it. So I definitely learned it through starting Fera.

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Mike Wu

That's  awesome. I think starting a business, you can learn a lot about yourself. I know what Tyler and I have and I think you're hitting on a point that we kind of learn the lesson, sometimes the hard way, which is that you got to find things that you really enjoy doing to carry on in this marathon. So if you're doing stuff you don't like to do, you're not going to make it.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of learning a lot about yourself and then also each other, I want to talk about your relationship with Emily, your co-founder. Oftentimes when people ask me about the thing I'm most proud about with Hireframe, it's really my relationship with Mike and how we've worked really, really hard. And I liken it to truly, it's a marriage. It's as close to a marriage as you can be without being a marriage.

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But just like a good marriage, it takes  serious work. So I'm kind of curious, over the years, how did you guys manage that relationship? Did you ever hit any bumps in the road? How did you get through that and still preserve your relationship throughout the entire experience?

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Michelle Dulake

Me and Emily, we've known each other for 25 years now. We met in high school. We were in different girl groups. I would say that I was in the good girl group and she was in the bad girl group. So we actually didn't really overlap, but we overlapped enough, we were in orchestra together. We were in student body together. And that's where we really became close was student council senior year. And then we kind of just always kept in touch, really with our love of animals. She actually got a puppy. I was working at a vet clinic in college and she brought her dog to me and I helped neuter that dog. And so we just always kind of stayed in touch. I think it did help that we weren't like best best friends, but we were like pretty good friends that we were able to still work through issues. Cause if you're working with your best best friend, that's hard. I wouldn't want to live with my best friend. wouldn't want, like that's, it's too much. But she was a close enough friend where we could really work together and we are very different people. 

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So I'm a very type A person and she's a very type B person and so we definitely get frustrated with each other, but we also work very well together. I don't think having two type A or two type B personalities would work well in the long term. So I have learned a lot about managing people over the last seven years and it's been really hard for me to let go of tasks and not knowing everything and not micromanaging. But I think the biggest thing that we have had disagreements on and this is going to be really funny. I think you guys will be like that has never come up with us before. 

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Tyler Rachal

You never know.

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Michelle Dulake

It's actually me having to take the role of traveling more because she doesn't have the extra help, she is a single mom, which I give her so much credit for. It's incredibly difficult. I just started to grow a little bit of resentment because all the travel kind of started to fall on me. And so after a while I was like, I want to spend more time with my kids too, but that resentment started to grow. I think also being a single mom, I wanted her to have the extra help. It's too hard being a single mom and trying to grow a business. And so we would have these discussions where I'm like, you need to hire a nanny, you need it. But then really at the time, it's not like we had all the funds. I think we just had a lot of discussions around that. 

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And so we just had to work through that. And then also like she would get frustrated with me because I'm really impatient. I want things immediately done and everything in my mind is urgent. So that's not good either. And so she would push back when I'd be micromanaging, so there's just a lot of different things that we had to work through through the years. But one of the best things that we did as business partners is actually reach out to an entrepreneur coach slash therapist. I'm a very vocal person. I like to talk about emotions and just work through it. But she's not that way. She likes to shut down and hold everything in. 

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So I reached out to this executive coach and I said, we really need to work on our communication. And so we took time. We both did individual sessions and then we came together and did like couples therapy together to improve our communication. Because at the end of the day, like we both have the same goal. It's just how do we communicate that and work the best together? And honestly, we only did three to six sessions together. I can't remember now, but it was very helpful in our communication. We both get back on that same page. We felt like we were a team again. And so I just, I love therapy. I think that it's great for everyone. And I think if you have a co-founder, don't be shy to reach out to those coaches and therapists to really get back on track.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, I think that's awesome and I know you said that we can't maybe not relate to this one, but I actually think that we can relate to it. Definitely, I mean you touched on a bunch of stuff there that made me want to talk about that really hit a lot of chords there, which is great. We started our family before Mike started his. Congrats to Mike, Mike's got a three month old, basically the same age as Cooper. So he's now going through a lot of the things that I went through when we had Rory. And what I would say is that it wasn't the exact same thing, but there's definitely a period of time where just the intensity of having effectively a less than one year old, right? A baby. And all the things that I was going through, just in terms of the crazy sleep and all these different things, there was a lot of times where a lot of the business workload and responsibilities would fall on Mike. And it definitely was an uneven workload share, if you will. And I always say that Mike's a far more mature person than I would be. I definitely would have been extremely resentful and he was always very patient. But to touch on some of the things that you talked about, at the end of the day almost all of our issues have always come down to communication. It's like what is said and then what is perceived. That's at least the battle that I have in my mind is a lot of times

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Mike Wu

Yeah, it's a lot of how it's said. It's not what, it's how you say things. Yeah.

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Tyler Rachal

Yes. And I certainly too, I'll just say just to air out our own dirty laundry for me, not Mike's. But personally, even if Mike is not saying like, hey dude, I'm doing a lot more because you've got like a one year old and this is unfair. In my head, I'm going around feeling extremely - there's this guilt that you carry as a parent entrepreneur where you just feel like the expression I always tell Mike is that when I'm at my lowest, I feel like I'm not doing a good job for anyone. It's like my wife's not happy with me, my kid is not happy with me, and my business. I'm not giving enough to anyone.

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And those are like the worst moments. But a lot of times when I'm feeling that way, Mike can say something very innocent, like, dude, what's the status of this thing that we're working on? And I'll be like, what's the status? I get kind of pissed off, you know? And it's because in my head, there's a whole separate conversation that's going on, where it's like, there's emotions, there's like, I've interpreted things a certain way, and he's like, I actually just wanted to know what the status was. You know?

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So I can relate to a lot of that. And the therapist, that's a great call out that I think it's tough. Did you guys have a hard time spending the money on that though, at that stage in the business?

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Michelle Dulake

Well, at that time we had our first investor come on board. So it was, it was okay. I felt like it was okay to spend the money on that because it's vital to making the company grow. But I do want to say that I couldn't have done this without a co-founder that was a mom because obviously the same exact thing. I would get pregnant, then I would give birth and she would kind of take over for the first couple of months and then we both had two kids during this time. It just ebbs and flows on who takes more responsibility at different times. I just don't think if I didn't have another mom, we wouldn't be able to understand the struggles of trying to be everywhere all at once for everyone. So it's definitely more advantageous for me to have another co-founder that's a parent and working. But it does come with some hard times because you're working with someone who has kids, that means that there has to be more sacrifices and there's not always a hundred percent attention from both parties at all times. Emily and I always joke around that how much more successful would we be if we didn't have kids or we were men? I know that sounds really I just or like even fathers

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Mike Wu

No, it's very fair.

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Tyler Rachal

No, makes total sense.

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Mike Wu

I think a lot of moms can relate to this, but I think dads and just guys in general, it's hard to think. I think about this a lot now with my wife just having given birth, but like it's years long of in and out of work if you're having one or two kids or more. It's like you're bouncing back and forth between things for years. It's a crazy chapter of your life. It can't be understated how much goes into that and how challenging that is. One thing I was thinking about recently, Tyler and Michelle, was going through building a business and having your business partner and co-founder also going from no kids to having kids and then just experiencing that chapter of life, which is just such an interesting chapter, together. It's nice to have your family with you, your spouse or with the family growing, but then it's a unique blessing to have a co-founder that's also, it's such a unique relationship. It's like another person that gets to experience that journey with you. I think it's awesome.

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Tyler Rachal (43:57.172)

Yeah. I don't know if you feel this way too, Michelle, but to me Mike occupies a singular, unique space in my life where it's like when people say, who's your best friend? I wouldn't even put that label on him, but somehow he has access and privilege that a best friend would never get with me. He's truly family and we talk about a lot of times with our kids, we joke, but we're pretty serious. We're like we can't wait till Rory's like sweeping the floors of some business that we have or whatever it is. And she's like our summer intern or whatever.

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And it's just this thing where he has a window into my life that no one else has besides literally Christine. So it's this thing and it makes me really sad, I’m amazed at the way you handled it with Emily, but it makes me really sad when I hear about co-founder breakups. I think that's really hard. You can tell when you talk to people about that, they're really heartbroken about it, just in the same way like you would through a bad divorce.

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, I don't think that I could handle that. Me and Emily both wouldn't be here without each other. I can't even imagine being a solo entrepreneur. It sounds so hard to not have that support. That was interesting that you said that you wouldn't even label him as a best friend because at General Mills, they always say, the two best friends or whatever. It's true, I wouldn't even label her as a best friend because it's so much more, it's deeper in different ways. And she sees emotion from me that no one else sees, not even James, my husband. So it's just a different -  yes, it's family, but there's nothing that will replace this friendship.

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At the end of the day, it's going to end at some point, right? It's gonna end at some point. And so, ugh, can't even think about that, because it's so sad to think about, which is why we keep going. We're just gonna keep going until the wheels fall off here, you know? 

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Tyler Rachal

No, you can keep going. That's it. Yeah and then it's on to the next venture. So yeah, we totally relate to that.

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, and I do want to give a shout out to Emily because being a single parent is very difficult and she went through a difficult divorce during COVID and I think we were very lucky to just have each other during that time. Because not only were we there as friends, but I had a better understanding of what she was going through with and with work. So we just have a lot of empathy for each other and we're very understanding and supportive. So, yes, big shout out to Emily, love her. 

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Tyler Rachal

Shout out to Emily

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Michelle Dulake

I couldn't do it without her.

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Tyler Rachal

Emily, we hope you're listening. You should be. This is your more than best friend talking on What Work Podcast. But yeah, no, I can relate to all that. And I do want to switch gears a little bit and we'll eventually talk about your other partner, your life partner, James. We want to talk about his influence on this whole thing, but we've talked about General Mills a bunch. And you headline here, you guys ended up selling to General Mills. But how the heck did you pull that off? You have quite the story, so I would love for you to tell it and then also you mentioned this investor as well, so how did you find this silent investor, that's so silent we don't even know who they are?

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Michelle Dulake

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So like I said, when we went all in in 2020, we just ran it ourselves, but at some point you need more capital to really market it more. In 2021, we actually had a lot more investors reach out to us and we're very lucky in the way that a lot of things were inbound, like sales, distributors, a lot of things were inbound for us. So again, knowing that we were on the right path for a great brand.

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So investors would come talk to us and luckily my husband, who we will probably talk about more later, he's in finance. And so he did private equity and iBanking. And so I would actually forward him all the investor calls and he would just take them first to screen them, like who's good, who's bad and so that was very valuable to have that. And so in 2021, there was a specific VC that we were interested in. And once they got our financials and they were like you guys are just a little bit too small. We thought you would be way bigger for your presence online. But so, but like you're just a little bit too small for us. But hey, I want to introduce you to this woman. She's fantastic. She's a solo investor and she's already in the pet space. So we feel like she would be like the best match for you guys. So we met with her. It was great. She's so sweet, so supportive. Still love her. It didn't, it didn't end so well when we sold because she didn't want us to sell the General Mills, but still love her. She got us to a good place and so with her capital we were able to increase marketing spend, hire a team, which was wild hiring four people within a short couple months, and then we built a new website and then eventually we attended our first trade show 

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So it was about we got her in like May of 2022 and and then had our first trade show in March of 2023. General Mills has a venture arm group, 301 Inc. and they found us at Global Pet, which is in Orlando, in March of 2023. And then basically they initiated conversations with us and we thought they wanted a minority investment because that's what 301 Inc. does. And then they learned more about us, our values, mission, got financials, all that stuff. And then they were like, we are punting you to Gold Medal Ventures, which is their other arm that acquires 100%. So everything happened very quick.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, it happened pretty quick, like two years

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Michelle Dulake

Me and Emily were not looking to sell. We just want to raise a little bit of money and cause it's not like we needed the money to stay in business, which you would be in a worse position trying to find investors, but we just really needed the money to thrive, I guess. And so they gave us an offer basically in May of 2023. And then James, he's always been supportive, insightful. He advised us on the offer. Obviously, I take his advice to heart, think very highly of him. And he was like in this economic climate,  you guys should just hear them out and seriously consider this offer. So then we continue the conversations. Two months later, they gave us a letter of intent. Another month later, they presented a formal offer. And then August, September, October of last year was just all due diligence, which was so intense for our size company. I'm like, why, why? But it was General Mills. So they had to scrape every corner. They wanted to know everything. And so that went to the end of October and then we closed in November. And I've been working for General Mills since November and it's been really crazy. It's been a wild, wild ride.

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Tyler Rachal

Does that feel crazy to even say that? Like you work for General Mills and they obviously are very focused on building this brand, which is pretty crazy.

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Michelle Dulake

I mean, yeah. I still can't believe it, sometimes I still have to pinch myself. How did this even happen? Because when you go into starting a business, I was definitely not thinking about selling to a big corporation like this. This is insane. I was just like let's just start an Amazon supplement brand to see where it goes. So I think I'm still processing the whole thing, but it's been really good.

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Mike Wu

What's it like, Michelle, at General Mills? Are you guys running independently still? Have they brought you into the fold? What does that look like when General Mills acquires a company like yours?

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Tyler Rachal

And also, have you had any funny big corporate moments where they're like, here, register for your employee now number 401 -6721 blah blah blah? Like all that jazz?

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Michelle Dulake

I mean, yes, yes. We had to get on Teams, which I haven't been on. I have a whole General Mills, XID, there's all this stuff. I mean, it's been crazy, but I think the way that we work right now is because we're under their venture arm. There's disruptive growth, which is like a branch under General Mills, and they have three arms. The 301 Inc is minority. The middle is Gold Medal Ventures, which is 100%. And then they have G -Works, which is where they hire  co-founders within General Mills to try and build brands within them. they incubate. So those are the three arms that they have. And we run separately. We are not getting integrated in their pet category. So they own Blue Buffalo, which is a billion dollar dog food company. And eventually the goal is that we will roll up under them if we, if we reach the goals that they want us to within five years or so. 

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But right now we are working independently, it's still CEO led. I do have resources to anybody that I wanna talk to, but they have a group of people called Emerging Brands Center of Excellence, and there's like 12 to 15 people in this group, and they have a specialist on supply chain, specialist on marketing, specialist on retail. And so I get to pull from those people, and then they advise us on different things and help us move initiatives.

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But I think the most frustrating thing so far with working with them being a big corporation is they're just slow. They're just slower than I am. Me and Emily would be like should we do this? Think about it for like three minutes. All right, we would just be able to move quicker and now it's like let's check with this person to talk about this thing and set up this meeting to prep for that meeting. It's just like there's so many more meetings and people so it's just it's just slower, lots of PowerPoints.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. On the flip side of that, are there things you're like, hey, this is some big company stuff that we've actually brought into Fera Pet. We like the way this gets done. This is extremely professional. That's something we want to work towards.

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Michelle Dulake

Now that I have a boss and a board, we didn't have a Fera board and board meeting. That's been, that's actually been really cool to learn. So we have board meetings quarterly, obviously reporting on the previous quarter, but looking forward. And so we have a Fera coach, shout out to her. Her name is Karen Peters. She's amazing. She really helps put together these board meetings and the PowerPoints and helps me perfect my speaker notes and all that stuff. And so I think learning from her and just like the EBCOE team has been great for me and my experience. And I need to learn this corporate stuff. I think it's super cool to have that experience and how quickly they can pull together PowerPoints. I am very impressed. Even for a simple call, Karen will be like, I just made this quick PowerPoint. And I'm like, how did you create this in an hour? It's just wild to me. I'm just very impressed.

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Tyler Rachal

Mike doesn't like when I make this joke because he doesn't think that it's truly fair to his character, but I always joke that Mike speaks in PowerPoints because of his investment banking and he has a very traditional business background consulting, whatever it is. I'm like, PowerPoints is his love language. I used to put that in his about description on the website. Mike's like, can we take this off? This is not me.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, so, Michelle, would get sales emails from people that are like, hey Mike, I saw that PowerPoint's are your love language. Would you like to buy the software? I was like, all right, Tyler, we gotta take this off now. This is...

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah. I am looking forward to full transformation corporate Michelle, when you come to me and the crew and you're like, Hey guys, we should go to Vegas. And like, here's my six slide deck on like why Vegas is a good investment and blah, blah,

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Michelle Dulake

Ohcan't wait, now that's a challenge. I'm gonna take you up on that.

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Tyler Rachal

You gotta do it. You just gotta pull us all next time we're over at your house for like some sort of get together. Be like, now that I've got your attention, if you guys could just look at the screen over here.

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah. Tyler's Tyler's 40th birthday party. We got to go to Vegas, hit these spots.

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Tyler Rachal

That's right, some cool graphics. So that whole story is wild and the timing's incredible too. So you guys really did time the market, I think, extremely well. You had James advising you the whole way. Just in knowing you and also knowing James, obviously I've kind of got a personal relationship with both of you. I'm so interested in the dynamic there because I oftentimes think about Christine and Mike's wife Jess, they're basically the other co-founders, right? They're your business partners, that's how it works. I always tell people when they're gonna start a business, your spouse, they are your partner whether you decide that or not. 

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But how did those conversations go just in terms of his ability to give you just his frank advice as someone who knows a lot about you, knows finance, but also he's at the end of day he's husband, he's your life partner and he knows how hard you work, he knows like in you selling the business, you're not like selling it and just walking away, you're taking on this big corporate role. So I'm just kind of curious, how those conversations went between the two of you. Was it ever, not contentious is not the right word, but was it ever hard? Did you feel like you could always, you know, just basically lean on him to kind of help you make those decisions? How was that?

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, I think him having the background that he does have in investment banking and private equity and now he works for a nonprofit foundation. I think I just value his opinion so much, especially when it comes to finance, because he's the expert. Just like if there's any medical issues in our family, he would value my opinion. So I think we really respect each other in our careers in that way. I'm trying to think back to when we started Fera and what his thought was. Was he like, why? I don't really remember what it was, but he was supportive from what I remember. It wasn't like he tried to push back at all.

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I ask him sometimes, when did you know that we actually had something and you were excited for us? And he always just says like, every year you guys would grow in triple digits and you guys didn't even put that much money into it. And I think when we hit 1 million in revenue and we still had our other daytime jobs, he was just like, okay, maybe this is gonna be something when you guys aren't even putting 100 % effort into it. And so I think I've always had his support from the beginning. And then like I said, I would send him investor calls. And when that started to pick up, I think he was like, wow, this, this could have a potential great outcome for you. And so he always looked at our financials from the very beginning and the Excel sheets that he makes are insane. I mean, I could never make this Excel sheet. 

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Having that from the very beginning and using that financial model for the last seven years and then showing that investors they're like wow, what like they would be like so happy that we had everything lined up by marketplace by product you know but like everything was already set up and so I think having him as a partner was very instrumental in us getting to where we are and also he would sit in on every investor call he would sit on in on the first call and actually our first meeting with General Mills in person, he was there and it's a funny story because we didn't tell them that we were married and so they came to this meeting in person and like halfway through the meeting I was like, yeah, by the way, we're married and they were like, what? They were so shocked. They just thought that he was our CFO, but didn't pay himself and they were like, that's weird. Why is he not paying himself? 

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Tyler Rachal

That's so funny. They're like, man, they're like, this girl's really convincing. She's getting people to join her company and she's not paying them anything.

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Michelle Dulake

I know. You know, obviously having him was huge and getting the deal to move forward. But also it was just nice that he would see how hard I was working because he was integrated in some of those calls, he kind of knew the sequence like he was in it and he was invested in it. And so he would see me working at night time after we put the kids down, he would see me on all these meetings and stressed out. I think if a partner that's not as involved, they'd be like why are you so stressed out or what are you so busy doing? But because he was like in it he was so supportive throughout the whole thing and I'm just so grateful that he was a part of that story. And it's like simple things. 

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Moms have a lot of tasks that we take on with kids, the home life, everything like that. And so there was one night I came home and I was just like, I can't do, I can't make dinner. And you just need to take dinner over. And he was like, okay. And then he just started to take dinner over. And that was just - it meant so much for him to just take that from me and not give me any hard time about that because he just knew how much I was doing. And even still to this day it's been eight months since but he'll just see me going to General Mills and doing a board meeting he's like I'm just so proud of you, it's really crazy what you've done and to hear that from him it just means a lot because he's seen a lot of transactions happen through private equity and things like that and he'll always tell me do you know how many women entrepreneurs have made it to where you are and you should be so proud. He just makes me feel very supported, yeah.

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Tyler Rachal

Go James. Shout out James. Yeah.

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Mike Wu

Shout out James.

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Michelle Dulake

He's a great great great team partner on this journey, and he's a great dad on top of that so.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, I'm smiling the whole time. Mike is too. I think we both can definitely relate. Obviously, I don't know what Jess specifically does in support. I see it with her, we have this text thread between us and our wives. We're showing them like, guys, we just did this LinkedIn post. Can you please like it? But yeah, what I'll say is I think about just a recent thing with Christine, it’s just these little things that mean a lot, the school, Rory's preschool, was closed for summer break for two weeks. We did like a summer vacation thing, and then on top of that, leading up to it and then as soon as she got back into school, as kids tend to do, she got sick, like sandwiched, you know what I mean? So in other words, over the course of probably six weeks, I probably worked like four actual work days.

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What's just really cool is just even doing this podcast. Christine was just like this week, you need to work. Rory got sick again, but she's like, we'll figure this out. I'll take both kids, which is insane. And she's like you need to go to work. You need to do work, whatever it is. And I just know, especially, I'm sure you can put yourself in her shoes. Cooper is not even four months old. For a mom is going through so much, but just to be completely willing to sacrifice for this dream that I'm chasing, it means so so much to me. So I get it. Shout out Christine. Shout out. Jess. Shout out James. 

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Michelle Dulake

Shout out Christine. Jess and James, all the partners.

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Tyler Rachal

They're sticking with us. Yeah, Mike, I feel like I've been dominating the questions. Do you have any other questions for Michelle?

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Mike Wu

No, I mean I want to know, we talked about where you're and what it's like at General Mills, we want to know what are the plans like going forward?

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Tyler Rachal

The future for Fera and then also I know that you want to see the Fera mission through, but do you ever think about what you would do, life after Fera?

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Michelle Dulake

Okay, well I guess I'll start first with what I see myself doing at General Mills. So I do wanna stay around for a couple of years. Also there are incentive payouts in the future, which can't get into, but I wanna stick around and see how that plays out. But they do know that I like product development, like I said. And so I've kind of hinted at becoming just the chief medical officer and not really staying on as the CEO because let's face it, I'm a vet. I'm not a CEO. I mean, I am a CEO, but I don't know. Sometimes you have that imposter syndrome. You're like, but I'm not really a CEO. I've never trained for this. I didn't go to business school. So I know that they can find other candidates to really take Fera to the next level. And I'm okay with being like a chief medical officer or a brand ambassador doing educational content. Like they just want me to be like a vet influencer and make content and education. So that's kind of what I see myself transforming into over the next couple of years. But after, honestly, I don't really know and I probably shouldn't even say it in case one of them listens to this..

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Tyler Rachal

General Mills, General Mills, stop the episode, episode over for anybody from General Mills. Employees 61249 and above, turn it off. Just turn it off. Don't listen. Mute it.

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Michelle Dulake

Yeah, I'm not sure. Me and Emily always talk about doing something together, because we just can't separate. So whether it's in the pet space, I don't know if it's going to be in the pet space. I don't know. We've talked about real estate. I don't know. I don't really know. We talk about helping women entrepreneurs. I don't really know what I'm going to do. And also, I might just take a little break after I am and just be with my kids. Be with my kids.

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Mike Wu

So fair.

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Tyler Rachal

No, now you're talking crazy. Now you're talking crazy. No breaks. No, no, think all that is, anybody who is listening from General Mills, you'd have to be completely ignorant to not think like entrepreneurs live many lives, they chase many dreams, and that all makes a lot of sense. I had something, but Mike, you wanted to chime in on something.

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Mike Wu 

That's what I want to hear about, just what you want to do next. I think that's a very fair answer. I think taking a break is a good, very honest answer. I think what happens when you have the success that you've had, Michelle, you've built so many skills and you've had so many experiences that you could take things in so many different directions. You could advise. You could, with a higher chance of success, start a brand new business from scratch. You could invest. You could go into other industries. It's like a good problem to have.

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Michelle Dulake

Yes, it is. We always joke about, since I have been like overseeing the marketing for Fera and so I've interviewed so many agencies like Amazon agencies like Google and like so many, I wish I never could be on another like audit call, but I Emily always jokes just like I feel like you could start your own Amazon agency just because I how deep I've been on Amazon. I would never do it but it definitely just speaks to the different amount of skills that I've had to learn over the past seven years. It's just been, it's been insane. And going back to the break thing, I don't actually think I could take a break just because my personality would not allow it. Like I think, I think I would get bored pretty quickly.

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Tyler Rachal

I think that your career path and the path with Fera. It's a very common one where it's like you're the you're the idea person. Basically along the way, you've taught yourself these business skills because you had to right? It's like when you're a size of company, you are someone's got to learn it. Someone's got to do it.

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But then the joke that Mike and I always have is like at some point if you're lucky enough to build a business like Fera, you get to a place where the business people, air quotations, they start to come in and you know eventually you hire some CEO, it's probably going to be like, no offense James, it'll be like a James you know what mean? Someone's gonna be like hello I speak in PowerPoints and like you know spreadsheets you know and and the joke that I would say to Mike is I'm like dude if we ever get bought by a big company they're totally gonna keep you because you're gonna be like their guy and they're totally gonna stick me in a closet somewhere. I'll be of no use. And I always say that I get pre-sad about it. I'm pre-sad about us getting broken up. Because I can see they'll be like, Mike's gonna be GM of this division. Tyler, we have a desk for you on the marketing team. You'll be an entry level hire. 

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Michelle Dulake 

They need the balance, you know? And I think, they do, they do. I think that one of the biggest reasons why General Mills was interested in us was because we could tell the story and we were so authentic to the story. We truly believe in what we're making. We're very passionate about what we're making. I think that when people are looking for those types of founders, they need that to keep the passion alive. And as you grow a team, you still need that passion.

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Mike Wu

You need it more than ever. When you're growing, you need it more than ever.

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Michelle Dulake 

It's not like you can just hire a bunch of Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can't have a bunch of Jameses managing a team with like, no, need like the, not saying James is not fun, James is very fun, but…

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Tyler Rachal

The flavor, the energy, yeah. Listen, we get it. But shout out, James. You've got flavor, too. Anyway, I was going to say, this has been an incredible conversation. I'm sure that it's kind of incredible, one of the things that we didn't expect with this podcast is just the reactions that we tend to get. People say, I listened to your episode and the timing was just right because I was going through this thing. My hope and guess is that there's going to be someone who's going to be listening to this episode who is maybe a mom, or just a woman who is thinking about starting her own business. And so my question to you is how do you prefer someone get in touch with you? If they wanted to reach out to you, you know, maybe to get your advice or talk to you about an idea or something like that or just connect with you, what's your kind of preferred, you know, you're our first guest to have any Instagram presence. So maybe it's Instagram. Most of our guests are like LinkedIn, email, company email.

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Michelle Dulake

No, I first of all, I am here for any women or moms that want to just pick my brain or want to get advice, just like I got advice from different entrepreneurs before I started Fera. I would love to be that for other women entrepreneurs. So I think the best way is probably LinkedIn, honestly, shoot me a message on LinkedIn and say, I listened to the podcast, on What Worked. And I love Tyler and Mike. If you put Tyler and Mike in there then I will definitely pay attention. 

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Mike Wu

Yeah,, code Tyler and Mike and you get a 15 % discount.

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Michelle Dulake

Yes, LinkedIn. But follow us. You can follow us on Instagram, FeraPets, Facebook too, FarahPets. Follow us and check us out.

.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, follow and I was gonna say check you out, but if you've got pets, it would be silly not to buy the products. Just all the things that you mentioned earlier in terms of gut and everything like that. Nowadays, the modern pet owner is kind of a crazy person. Just kidding, no, it's like truly, let's be real, this is an honest statement. Most pet owners, they value their pets more than they value, maybe, children. So yeah, if you care about your pet, check out Fera. They have amazing products. Michelle does things the right way. And honestly, in supplements, you don't always hear that. She does. I know for a fact. yeah, check her out, check out Fera. Reach out if you've got an idea. Thank you, Michelle, for being on What Worked. This has been awesome.

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Michelle Dulake

Thank you so much for having me. You guys are great. Thank you. Thanks.

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Mike Wu

Thanks, Michelle.

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