We had our first real tradeshow for Small Potatoes last week. We’re called a holding company cause we own a portfolio of other companies, but we’re really one company doing a lot of things. That’s hard to explain at a food & bev tradeshow. We tried, though. We got a stand-up banner with our Small Potatoes logo, then surrounded it with the food brands we own - mostly cookies, but also dog treats, this time. we left our ingredient brand and soon-to-be relaunched migraine bar brand back at the warehouse.
I know the organizer fairly well, he promised he gave us a good spot. He picked it. Either he didn’t know or he actually hates me. It was the very back corner of the tradeshow. We faced a brick wall and two tables with surly venue people sitting and staring back at us. Maybe they were a help desk, maybe they were there just to intimidate us, only bare concrete floors between us. The tradeshow floor kinda ended before it got to us. Not too many people ventured out of the rich and delicious lines of companies and samples to this big empty corner to meet us. They’d round the corner, maybe just to be nice, and they’d sheepishly say “small potatoes, eh…” and then look at the tables of cookies and dog treats and pause in pure confusion. “Soooo….these are all made with potatoes?”
“No potatoes harmed!” I’d excitedly say. I’d jump into what we do and how amazing our cookies are. I’d continue “to your right here we started with full-sugar indulgence, Meli’s, then low-sugar, high-protein GLP-1 cookies, then no-sugar Keto cookies with Chipmonk.” I’d see which they gravitated towards and push a sample on them. I was having the time of my life. I was bursting with energy from absolutely nowhere. We were dressed in corduroy bell-bottoms and surrounded by the warm, earthy colors of the seventies. We were “retro,” as I’d say, “going back to a time when flavors were natural and ingredients easy to pronounce.” We had disco hit tunes and a strobe light on the backdrop. I danced for most of the day. Jessica was far less enthused and shared some of the confusion of passers-by. She was stuck in the current stresses of the company and life.
Almost ten full years from the last time I had a “first real tradeshow,” with Veggie Noodle Co. That was a banger. I had this super-clear vision of the design, which we won an award for at that show, and it was a coming-out party of sorts. We had operated quietly for the prior two years, just like this time. But that one was, from the outside, everything a founder dreamed of. Accolades, a big crowd around the booth, lots of buyers clamoring for our product. But I wasn’t really there. I was in operating stress and investor convos in my head and already on to the next show. I accepted the award thinking about how it would help me prove credibility to investors and marketing prowess to buyers.
In Do You Want To Grow I talked about how projections are the noise that presence clears out. Where I was receiving that award and where Jess was in our Small Potatoes booth were the same thing wrapped in opposite emotions. Standing in the present moment, unable to be there. Projecting themselves into the future where things were better, more of what they wanted. I have spent most of my life doing that. My mind has lived in the future instead of the now. I would tell myself it wasn’t the worn out journey vs destination trope because I was working out the future in my mind, not just hoping to be there. But it was full trope. Pascal says something like “as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.” I like how the ancients get to leave out conjunctions. The editor of my book won’t let me. Anywho, facing that wall on the outside of the show, dancing to disco music and pushing cookies at very confused people felt….complete.
As the day ended and we headed back towards our hotel room my mind started racing into the future again. I saw the next steps, I saw the success our path could lead to, and I wanted to stop and bask in the moment. I didn’t want to reach the future because I knew it didn’t hold the key to anything. We found this super-cool real fire at our fun hotel so sat down to try and unwind. Jess was still overwhelmed with the stress of our lives and I remembered that feeling, too. Both the stress and the joy faded so I thought I could hold onto this tiny moment of anticipation as the real reward. I tried talking about the good things that were to come and she wasn’t hearing it. In that warm and cozy moment we were both elsewhere, in very different places. Neither wrong, neither present.
I should have looked at my arm - chop wood. carry water. - and moved on to the current moment to give it my all. It’s never off in the future and it’s not in the past either. There was nothing for me to hold on to, really, just my ego wanting to replay the things that made me feel good and big. I worked the next day without her cause she had to return to Austin early. It was not as fun, I was not as present. I packed up the booth by myself with a relaxed pace. The people around me couldn’t possibly get out of there fast enough, as if there was a contagion in the room now that it was over. The sensory-rich experience that was robust just a couple of hours earlier emptied into a bunch of brick walls and bare concrete floors. I felt presence draw me back in, looked around one last time, and shuffled out to the car to drive home. Happy.
beautiful brother, thank you