Tasia Malakasis with The Company Lab

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s time for Chattanooga Business Radio now. Here’s your Business RadioX host.

Stone Payton: Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Chattanooga Business Radio. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. This is going to be a good one. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast author, speaker, serial entrepreneur, and CEO with The Company Lab Tasia Malakasis. How are you?

Tasia Malakasis: I am great, Stone. Thank you so much for having me on. And you know what? I just want to give you big, big, big kudos for being able to speak Greek the way that you just did great with that name.

Stone Payton: Well, I’m practicing because the family is going to Greece about April or May of next year. So I’m getting some good practice.

Tasia Malakasis: Okay. Wonderful. You just let me know if you need any other tips. I still have family there and go every year.

Stone Payton: You got it? Well, listen, I got a ton of questions. I know we probably won’t get to them all, but I think maybe a great place to start would be if you could paint a bit of a picture or articulate for for me and our listeners. Mission. Purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks?

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah. So colabs, um, absolutely. Our raison d’etre. Um, our reason for being is to support entrepreneurs and founders, um, at various stages during that journey. And as you may or may not know, Stone, you know, you can come come to us with an idea for a business, or you can come to us to help you scale that business that you’ve already been working at for several years. So we’re we’re working across that spectrum to support those founders in our, um, industry strength areas and also just as generalists for, for business support. But what we do is we exist to support those founders, I.

Stone Payton: Got to know the backstory. How in the world did you find yourself doing this kind of work and serving this this constituency?

Tasia Malakasis: You know, I have been always on on the other side of the table as a founder and working on founding teams and in two different industry sectors, predominantly stone building businesses. So that’s been my life’s work really, 15 years in the media tech industry and then 15 years almost in the CPG industry. And I had my last exit, so I sold my last company and took it. I had purposefully planned I got my son off to school and I’m an empty nester, and I said, I’m going to take your gap year. So I said, I’m going to take a year off. And I landed in Chattanooga and was sort of tooling around, wasn’t really sure what my next move was going to be, or even if I was going to have one for a while and came across the company lab and I thought, well, what could be more fun than helping people do what I’ve done my entire career, which is which is build and scale businesses. So I think it was a it’s been a match made in heaven.

Stone Payton: So at this point and you’ve been at this a while, what what are you finding the most rewarding? What’s the most fun about it for you these days?

Tasia Malakasis: Well, so as you might imagine, like so if you’re a founder or an entrepreneur, then you’re you probably are a really good starter. And what I mean by that is like, you’ve got a vision, you’ve got an idea, and you’re willing to take those incredible risks to say, yes, I’m going to bet whatever that that bet is on this business. So that being around people like that really is. And that’s I would say that’s my tribe, those that are crazy enough to say I can change the world with this solution. And I’m going to I’m going to, you know, put all the put all my chips on the table, so to speak, for that. So I’ve enjoyed that part. But also I would say that in terms of starting, we have started some new programmatic efforts in the organization that have really been exciting. And that’s and that’s and that’s the kind of thing that, um, that I think I do best.

Stone Payton: Well, it sounds like you’re working with a variety of organizations at different stages, like from start to, to scale. Walk us through that work a little bit if you would. And if you’re up for it, maybe share a use case or a success story so we can kind of get a feel for it.

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah for sure. So the organization has been around for about 15 years and really started as kind of an economic development play to revitalize a particular area of Chattanooga, actually on Main Street. And the organization was called Create here. And really getting to see that those businesses there, which were a lot of artists to see themselves as businesses and to help them to, you know, to shore up their their business efforts and their success stories. Then we morphed into we took over that, that 501 C3 because that organization was meant to sunset and then walked into more tech enabled businesses. And the first partnership in terms of answering your question about start was, as your audience may or may not know, Chattanooga has the fastest internet in the country and developed that with the, you know, gig speed internet with EPB. And we started working with them on like, what would you do if you had access to this speed internet? So that was really more focused on start. It’s just ideation to business creation. And but it was centered around an asset that we had here. We’ve continued that over the years. And I would say that that’s probably more generalist as opposed to industry specific support.

Tasia Malakasis: Um, we have now really are focused our start efforts in our ten county area and are working with rural entrepreneurship. And again, from ideation to business creation. And on the scale side, we’ve as opposed to being generalist and saying any idea, any business, any sector on the scale piece, we have focused on an industry sector that we really believe is Chattanooga’s at the heart of Chattanooga’s competitive advantage. And what we have done is we we have put together a program called Sustainable Mobility Accelerator, and that is focused on the future forward movement of people, goods, energy and data. As a city that’s been given the moniker the Silicon Valley of Freight, and we’ve got these incredible energy companies and battery tech and Volkswagen making their electric vehicles here. We’ve got the largest or the yeah, the largest testbed for connected autonomous vehicles in the world. I mean, all of these assets, we’re focused on helping those businesses scale and then offering in turn, value to our corporate partners there. Now, that was a lot of words. And I might have gone too deep. So reel it back in for me if I need to. If I need to. Hope you didn’t go.

Stone Payton: Too deep for me. And I gotta believe that’s gotta be incredibly rewarding work to to see anybody with just even an ember and fanning that flame and giving them the encouragement. So to make this happen is their curricula. Do you have, like, you know, Margarita Mondays? How what’s the programing?

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah. If there’s not a margarita involved. I’m not. I’m not kidding. Um, yeah. No. So we do have, um, what we would call programs that we run on both the stark side and on the scale side as an example of a program on the stark side, we we offer, um, a either a two day boot camp or a 12 week course that’s called Co.starters. And Co.starters is an is a program that helps get your business from again, from that idea all the way through. It’s really an intensive business plan writing exercise where you go through every facet of the business. Where do you need to focus? What are you leaving out? What’s your ideal customer profile? Takes you through all of those pieces to get you to the place where they. I’ve got a roadmap that I know how to build this business, and that is an incredible tool that we’ve had for a number of years. In fact, we developed it at at Colab, and then that spun out. And now it’s a it’s an international offering that, um, for entrepreneurial support organizations like ours all over the world. So that would be an example on this start side. On the scale side, what we’re doing with our Sustainable Mobility Accelerator is we bring those teams in. It’s an application process and it’s competitive. You have to apply and get accepted. And upon acceptance there is an investment into your business. And we are we’re walking you through in 12 weeks how to get your business to scale predominantly by pairing those businesses stone with corporate partners here like Volkswagen, EPB, TVA, Novonix, Kenco, Freightwaves, etc. so with the industry strength that we have in Chattanooga for freight and logistics and transportation, just mobility in general, that’s the way that we offer that program.

Stone Payton: Do you find sometimes that the aspirational entrepreneur or the new entrepreneur? Um, well, and I guess maybe even the one that’s had some success and now is looking to scale, maybe sometimes walks in with some inaccurate preconceived notions about getting a business off the ground. Like maybe that’s a little strong to call them myths. But, you know, I know in my world there are some inaccurate assumptions sometimes about how to help people and make money with this platform. For example, I got to believe there’s some around getting a company off the ground and scaling it as well.

Tasia Malakasis: Oh, 100%. And I would say stone that by and large, when you look at some of the, you know, some of our most successful business stories in this country, they most often involve a pivot, meaning I walked in with an idea and started down a path for a business, found out that what that offering was was not the best offering. The market didn’t respond well to that, but there was another pivot that then led to a success. So there are absolutely, um, dozens if not hundreds or thousands of instances where, uh, founders and entrepreneurs say, I’m going to go solve this problem. But then it turns out after spending some wheels, you find out that, okay, there’s actually a better problem that I can solve. And and those are, those are interesting moments to watch happen.

Stone Payton: Well, you’re I guess you’re hanging out with other entrepreneurs, other people struggling with some of the similar issues. You may make a real connection. You can, even if you’re starting a surfboard company and somebody else is starting a a cheese company. I mean, you can probably help each other. I bet you lifelong relationships, friendships, business opportunities. Yeah.

Tasia Malakasis: 100%. I think you know what we sort of talk about or what you hear a lot about in this sort of entrepreneurial ecosystem is that, you know, these just sort of synergistic connections that are made between founders, that they’re watching another team or company really grind and work hard in that fuels the other one. Or, you know, here’s what I found works better when you’re trying to figure out who your ideal customer profile is, etc. like, there’s lots there are lots of synergies. And yes, they’re all sort of in the same, to use that term again if it’s appropriate. Tribe. Right. But these are these are people that are grinding to make something happen. Um, and, and and betting all of it on, on that concept. So yeah that absolutely happens. And again, I don’t know that there’s a better word for it than other than just sort of these collisions that happen when you put like minded people in the same room as.

Stone Payton: You’ve been describing the work and the people. The mental picture I’ve been painting for myself is like this, this entrepreneurial oasis. And there’s probably some some truth to that. And at the same time, I have to believe that the, the, the larger business climate of the Chattanooga community must be incredibly supportive. How are you finding the the Chattanooga area, the business climate? Do you find that they are supportive?

Tasia Malakasis: So I don’t think I’ve ever been in an in an environment that is as a supportive of Chattanooga. Now I’m not you know, I don’t want to preface it. I mean, I’m not on the campaign trail for, you know, for Chattanooga at all, but it and I as a newcomer, relatively newcomer to Chattanooga, I feel like I can say this from a perspective of having been in lots of other cities. I have not found a more rich and inclusive and collaborative environment in general than Chattanooga. It’s it’s really impressive. And just to give you a really quick anecdote of that. I was invited to go to a program at, uh, participate in a program at Harvard Business School, um, which is called Young American Leaders Program. And it’s really about US competitiveness. And the way they think about that is that cities are the heart of our national competitiveness. So we’re I’m in a cohort with we’re Chattanooga’s got to be the smallest city that’s included in this program. We’ve got Pittsburgh and San Diego and Miami and um, and think of, you know, that caliber of size Boston. And it’s a case study led program. And all of the participants from all of these cities vote on which case study of a city was deemed successful. And Chattanooga and the cohort that I was in was the only city that was deemed successful because of the collaboration efforts that exist here, that you can plug that in. And I’ve consistently found that to be true. So it’s not just an anecdote because Tayshia likes it. It really is. There is something special in the water here.

Stone Payton: Well, there’s all that. And there’s the hot chicken and the moon pie store right there.

Tasia Malakasis: There are those things, too. Yes. And that river and the mountains and all the outdoor activities. It’s a it’s a great place to be.

Stone Payton: I know the answer to this question is yes. So I probably ought to figure out a way to rephrase it, but I’m just going to throw it out there. What I wanted to ask about is, have you had the benefit of one or more mentors along the way, as you had to navigate the terrain of building your businesses, exiting from them? And now in this new world where you’re trying to to serve these folks? I the answer has got to be yes, but speak to that a little bit about the mentor, uh, relationships. Maybe you’ve had a chance to to profit from.

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah. For sure. So I would say yes. The answer is yes. So, um, that mentors play a big part of that. And so I’ve now, I would say sort of on my third career is finding people who know the industry that you’re in and that are willing and most people are that have been that’s my it’s been my experience that most people who have had and led and have climbed the ladder to success are very eager and open to giving back. So as an example of this, Belchev was a goat cheese company that I acquired and scaled, and when I thought about who I wanted to be in that market in terms of brand, personality and presence, and who did I look to? What kind of brand in that space I could? I see that had done a really great job, and one of the rebranding efforts that I did with Belchev, it was only sort of in the high end cachet cheese shops in the country, and I wanted to try to take something that seemed sort of high end and maybe unapproachable and make that approachable and fun and an everyday event. Not the two times a year that you have wine and cheese with your family or your friends. So immediately Ben and Jerry’s came to mind. So I reached out to, um. I reached out to Jerry and made a connection and even asked him to be on my board. Talked about why, you know, where the synergies I thought were.

Tasia Malakasis: They’re a premium brand. But, you know, I just love the way that they had gone to market and how they grew their business from a, you know, one shop to, you know, to, to an international brand. And he couldn’t join the board because of a relationship with their acquirer, but would said, you can call me any time. So my that has been my experience that if you find someone that you really want to emulate and you really want to learn from, go find the person that best emulates that and call them. And by and large, I would say 96%. This is not science. I haven’t done the numbers really, but most of those people will want to be on your side. And outside of my personal experience with that, we have established our programs to be heavy on the mentor side. So we are currently have five teams in our Sustainable Mobility Accelerator with us from all over the world here in Chattanooga. And they have a series of mentor, what we call mentor swarms. So we’re pairing them with the business leaders in this community who either have subject matter expertise in the mobility space or they are. They’ve just been, you know, business leaders that have general business advice that they can offer and they’re willing to give their time to these teams. And it’s the smart team that really leans in and figures out how to leverage that.

Stone Payton: Well, that is marvelous. Well, I often ask my guests, you know how the whole sales and marketing thing works for their practice or their firm? I don’t. Is there even a sales and marketing aspect to your work, or are people knocking down your door and you need more space and more staff?

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, there is a good bit of outreach, right? So I think, um, not not every founder and it is sort of a lonely thing in some ways. I was actually listening to someone’s journey today about starting a business. Being a founder can be very lonely, and you’re working really hard so that, you know, but there is a lot of outreach for people who don’t know that we’re here to support them. So we are letting people know what our offerings are and how they can be with us. And we would and I would say on the on the scale side, we do active outreach to try to find teams that are working in that space that will be of benefit to either Chattanooga or to our corporate partners. So we are out looking for great teams to work with, and we also want to make sure that our messaging is out there enough. So if there is someone, um, that’s looking to start a business and they don’t know what the resources are and they don’t know how to get started, that we have services to to provide them. Now, we do have our phone ringing and we do have plenty of offerings. But yeah, we but we also spend time on making sure that our, that our audiences know that we’re here to support them.

Stone Payton: Well, speaking of time, do you ever take some and do something completely outside the scope of your work that we’re talking about? My listeners know for me it’s hunt, fish and travel. That’s what that’s where my white space, I call it is. You nerd out about anything other than the work from time to time.

Tasia Malakasis: Sure. Well, I mean, I’m mostly nerd out about food, stone and then travel. So if I could figure out how if someone would just pay me to travel and eat, then I would be the happiest clam that has ever been. But I haven’t figured that one out yet. But those are. If you find me happy most often, I’ll be in the kitchen, preferably with a glass of wine in my hand and cooking for those people that I love. So that’s what led me to the food industry, from from tech. And so that’s certainly the other piece. But or I could be a nomad, you know, like I love the travel aspect, not doing much hunting and fishing. But I did do a little fishing with my son this past weekend.

Stone Payton: Oh, good. Well, I have come to believe I choose to believe that. If I do take a little bit of a break and go to the water, go to the woods, or we or we take a trip across the pond, or that I feel like I, I do recharge and I come back that much better equipped to serve my clients and the people around me. So I’ve come to believe that it’s important for us entrepreneurs that are like 24 over seven, at least in our head around our business. That’s anyway, that’s my perspective on it.

Tasia Malakasis: And I’m in your camp, so I absolutely believe that. And I don’t think if you I mean to use, you know, a vehicle or an electricity analogy, if you don’t have any battery left, you’re no good to anyone, right? Um. Not yourself, not your employees, not your customers. So I don’t some in some ways we we get in this really strict work culture where we think we’ve just got to grind all the time, but it’s not sustainable. So, you know, make sure that your passion is involved in your work. And I actually would say you should make sure that your work is your passion too, and I’m certain it probably is your stone.

Stone Payton: Oh, Amen. It certainly is. And we’ve circled completely back to the Margarita Monday idea, I think. Oh.

Tasia Malakasis: Let’s do it. Let’s make it happen.

Stone Payton: Hey, uh, before we wrap, I would love to leave our listeners with a couple of things to to chew on. Maybe a couple of, uh, actionable. I call them pro tips. Maybe something on starting or scaling, but let’s leave them and look, gang. The number one pro tip is reach out to the company lab, learn about their work, have a conversation with Tayshia or somebody on her team. But to to to hold them over between now and then, let’s give them a little something to chew on.

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah, well, thank you for that stone and I appreciate. Yes, absolutely. Pro tip is, is reach out for support because we do have offerings and we are here to help. And we are a 501 C3. So that’s not going to cost you anything. That is that is our mission is to support you. The biggest pro tip that I believe the most firmly in stone is, is, is really it’s perseverance. Um, and and so in order to if it is hard, right, it’s I mean, this is hard work. And I just remember there was this one speech that Steve Jobs had given. He was saying, if you don’t love it, you don’t love this thing that you’re trying to do, then you’re going to quit because it’s hard. And then every single, almost every single business success story that I’ve ever heard came upon some time where they thought, I can’t do this anymore, or I’m close to bankruptcy, or how am I going to make payroll? Or I don’t know that this is the right offering. How do I pivot that that determination to have persistence and perseverance through those times? It’s typically right around the corner when you’re in that middle of that space. Now, that’s not always the case, and I’m not going to tell anybody to persevere when they’ve, you know, they’ve lost all their you know, they’ve put their life savings on the line. But often times that perseverance is, is, um, is is is a key piece.

Stone Payton: Yeah. All right. What’s the best way for folks to tap into your work. Have that conversation. Learn more about the company lab website, whatever the right coordinates are there.

Tasia Malakasis: Yeah, the website is probably the best. And, um, we’ve actually just launched a new one and it’s at the company lab.org, all spelled out the company lab.org. And we’d love to hear from you. I think there’s an input tab on every single page. And, you know, one of my pet peeves now with websites is you can’t ever find a phone number to call anybody. We have our number so you can call us. And if you need me, I’m Tasha at the company. It actually Colab is so you can reach out to me directly.

Stone Payton: Well, Tasha, it has been an absolute delight having you on the broadcast this afternoon. Thank you for your insight, your perspective, your enthusiasm, and thank you for the work that you’re doing. The the work that you and your team are doing is so important and has such tremendous impact on on so many. Keep up the good work and just know that we sure appreciate you.

Tasia Malakasis: Well I appreciate you saying that, Stone. And we need people like you in our camp. And so I’m glad to have you here and glad to have some time with you. So thanks for having me on on today.

Stone Payton: My pleasure. All right. Until next time. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Tasha Malakas and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you again on Chattanooga Business Radio.