What happens when a personal health journey collides with an entrepreneurial spirit? Amy Lacey, founder of the billion-dollar company behind the first ever cauliflower pizza crust, is the living answer to that question. As we talk with Amy, we unravel her compelling narrative of battling autoimmune diseases, her inspiring resilience, and the discovery of a game-changing recipe that not only transformed her life, but also those of many others.
Amy's passion for using food as medicine and her unwavering belief in the versatility of cauliflower could leave even the most skeptical listener amazed. Through our conversation, you'll get a firsthand account of the viral success of her innovative product, and the journeys she undertook navigating the notoriously tough food industry. Amy also reveals her down-to-earth approach to success, which includes her 16-month reign as the number one product on Amazon and the recognition from a myriad of celebrities and athletes, yet she never let the spotlight distract from her core mission: to make her product accessible to those who needed it.
But our chat with Amy isn't just about her business triumphs. She bravely shares her personal journey of healing from trauma, revealing how therapy, reconciliation, and personal growth have guided her to a new path and venture in natural supplements. Amy’s story serves as a powerful reminder that personal adversity can be channeled into creating something impactful, that one must be open to unexpected opportunities, and that staying true to your values is a key factor in finding your calling. So, buckle up for a riveting chat with Amy Lacey, an advocate for health, innovator, and businesswoman extraordinaire. This is one conversation you won't want to miss!
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on social media and tag Ken Joslin.
What happens when a personal health journey collides with an entrepreneurial spirit? Amy Lacey, founder of the billion-dollar company behind the first ever cauliflower pizza crust, is the living answer to that question. As we talk with Amy, we unravel her compelling narrative of battling autoimmune diseases, her inspiring resilience, and the discovery of a game-changing recipe that not only transformed her life, but also those of many others.
Amy's passion for using food as medicine and her unwavering belief in the versatility of cauliflower could leave even the most skeptical listener amazed. Through our conversation, you'll get a firsthand account of the viral success of her innovative product, and the journeys she undertook navigating the notoriously tough food industry. Amy also reveals her down-to-earth approach to success, which includes her 16-month reign as the number one product on Amazon and the recognition from a myriad of celebrities and athletes, yet she never let the spotlight distract from her core mission: to make her product accessible to those who needed it.
But our chat with Amy isn't just about her business triumphs. She bravely shares her personal journey of healing from trauma, revealing how therapy, reconciliation, and personal growth have guided her to a new path and venture in natural supplements. Amy’s story serves as a powerful reminder that personal adversity can be channeled into creating something impactful, that one must be open to unexpected opportunities, and that staying true to your values is a key factor in finding your calling. So, buckle up for a riveting chat with Amy Lacey, an advocate for health, innovator, and businesswoman extraordinaire. This is one conversation you won't want to miss!
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on social media and tag Ken Joslin.
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of as the leader grows podcast. I am your host, Ken Zoslin, and I've got a first for you, ladies and gentlemen. I've got my good friend, Amy Lacey, the founder of the first ever cauliflower pizza crust in the world. She built a billion dollar company. She's a best selling yes, and that's built. She's a Best selling author, mom of three. Now she's the founder of a new company called Soursop nutrition. We'll talk a little bit about that today. When I say first ever, you're like, Ken, this is like your 150th podcast. No, no, no, no, no. What I mean is we got on a call two weeks ago to have a podcast and an hour and 35 minutes into our conversation we never hit record and we're just having this amazing conversation and I'm like man, this is so good. I said okay, so that was our get to know each other conversation. Amy, thanks for being here. My friend, oh, thank you for having me. Are you kidding?
Speaker 2:This is like such an honor and I have really enjoyed our time together. Yeah, we've had we've had a lot of conversations and I feel like we're really like minded in a lot of ways. So I'm excited, let's do this. Yeah, I make some pump.
Speaker 1:I've never had a.
Speaker 1:A scheduled podcast go into a. We always get that three to five minute get to know you time before the before we go live, and ours turned into an hour and 40 minutes, which was, which was phenomenal. We'll talk a little, talk a little bit, a bit. I mean, you're probably number one thing you're known for. You've got several hundred thousand followers on Instagram. You're known for cauliflower pizza crust. Walk us through what is so special about this podcast. Walk us through what it's like not just to be an entrepreneur this is such a loaded question, right but to be a female entrepreneur and build a billion dollar business. And I'll just let you go from there, cause I can, you could, you could go a million different directions with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let me just backtrack. First the business. I created the cauliflower pizza crust just to serve my own needs. I was diagnosed with lupus and chogrens. I had family fun night with my three kids which consisted of pizza not cauliflower pizza, pizza and games, or pizza and movies, and I would wake up Saturday morning just really unable to really move and just six. So long story short. I was diagnosed with lupus and chogrens, so I went out on a mission to find a pizza crust that was gluten free, grain free, and there was nothing out there. So I found this recipe online and I started making it and friends loved it, family loved it. I even got my picky. Oldest is so picky won't touch a vegetable. I even got him beat it. So then one of my friends was like you should take this to farmers market and be a great job and show the kids how to work a job, and it'd be just fun, little money. So we did that. We got discovered by a few local grocery stores. Next thing I know I'm putting it online, I had been a health and life coach at that time was trying to help people get off their medicines, like I did because I was on steroids and plaque when I was the drug everyone was talking about during COVID.
Speaker 2:I was on those and I was able to get myself off of those using food as medicine. One of those products was the cauliflower pizza press. So in 2017, that story of one of my clients went viral. And here I had a business that I wasn't even planning to have and this, the pizza press, went viral at a time when there was just ahead of cauliflower at the grocery store and, as you can imagine, like cauliflower is usually like the last veggie standing on a vegetable tray at a party Like it's not very.
Speaker 2:It wasn't popular. There wasn't the rice and all the things you could do with cauliflower. But and look, I didn't even love cauliflower. When I first started working with that, I was like this is stinky, I don't like it. Is it really a vegetable? It's not green. You know, vegetables are supposed to be green, but the beautiful thing about cauliflower is it's bland. It takes on any flavor. So the next thing, I know I'm making all kinds of things with cauliflower and people are loving them. So the business became a business. It went viral and it literally became a business overnight and in 2017, we ended up being a seven figure business and I had to figure out real quickly what the food industry was like.
Speaker 1:Let me, let me, let me back you up just a little bit because I want to talk about the whole viral thing, because if people don't know your story, they're not going to know. I was blown away when I heard this. So you started doing this for yourself, or some autoimmune diseases that you had because of some of the food, and obviously you and I had a long conversation about how terrible our food sources are in America and the kind of stuff they feed us and allow us to be able to eat. So you're doing this cauliflower like. Take me back to the very first time you made a. I mean, would you like mashing cauliflower going? What in the world am I doing here and how is this going to turn into a pizza?
Speaker 2:Well okay. So the first time I made it it fell apart. It was a hot mess, but I had been doing juicing and I was juicing all kinds of fruits and vegetables also just to be anti inflammatory. And my daughter's like why don't you try juicing the cauliflower? It'll get the moisture out and the pizza crust will hold. And that worked. So when we went to farmers market I bought a juicer from Jamba Juice actually one of their old juicers and I started making it as a cottage license In my kitchen.
Speaker 2:And my client, who was one of my health coaching clients, she had a severely autistic, nonverbal autistic daughter and she started. The doctor put that little girl's name was Kenzie. The doctor put Kenzie on a low carb diet. Well, I never created the pizza to be low carb. It turns out it's low carb.
Speaker 2:So Jesse, her mom, asked me if I would give them some pizza crust to try. And Kenzie loved it. And seven months later, after eating our product and they were eating it a couple of times a day, actually we were sending a lot of crust Kenzie became verbal, was able to go back to school and Jesse lost over 100 pounds because her daughter wouldn't eat unless she sat down and ate with her. So that's the story that went viral. It was really a story of telling Kenzie's story, but the before and after pictures of Jesse also were just incredible and people really that story went viral and people wanted that pizza crust and so we started selling it to accommodate orders online and local grocery stores picked it up and you know I tried to get into some major chains and people are like a cauliflower pizza crust no, we got.
Speaker 2:No all the time and I always saying no is next opportunity, yes, yes. People that let no shut you down. Just realize that no is just simply a diversion. It's next opportunity.
Speaker 1:Let me. Let me ask you a question real quick. So you, you've got this desire to do this cauliflower pizza crust, would know like I mean not a real passion or dream or vision to start a business, you're just doing it for you. And then locals are like this is awesome. When you because the story you told me was and correct me if I'm wrong she wanted to come see you. This this girl did and you said no, I'll come to your house. She opens the door and tell me what happened.
Speaker 2:And I was shocked, like absolutely shocked, because she never told me she was losing weight. So I was blown away, not only by Kenzie's success, but Jesse's. And then I was like we have to get pictures, we have to take pictures, like I just I'm in shock at how this is, what have you been doing? And she's like, well, I've been really watching what I've been eating, but I've also been eating your pizza crust like twice a day. We eat it for breakfast, we eat it sometimes as tacos, we eat it as pizza. Yeah, I was blown away. I wanted to share that story with so many people, that their success and my success, because the inflammation went away and I was eating a lot of the pizza as well. So, yeah, that went viral and literally by the end of that year, we had done millions in the pizza.
Speaker 1:And there's when that went viral. When did it click to you like, oh man, we've got something here.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let me backtrack on this story, because this is pretty powerful and I don't usually share this, but in the environment that we're in, I feel like this is very powerful. Before that, before Jesse and Kenzie, before that happened, I was on my knees. I had gone through about $200,000 for the product Basically farmers market and a few local stores and some people online not a whole lot of business online. Before that story went viral and one day I was on my hands and knees just praying to God and I said, god, I've gone through our savings account. I've gone through. We were in the process of building a garage and converting our garage to a game room. I've used up that money. I cannot go into our retirement. And I was on my hands and knees on the side of my bed. My husband was sound asleep and I just said look, so many people love this product. It's helping me. I know I can help a lot of people, but, god, it's not making any money. I have no margins. I can't get it out there. So either shut it down or make something happen. And this is where I sometimes struggle. Telling the story, because I'm not kidding Within a week is when Jesse and I connected and that story went viral and so I believe the power of prayer being on my hands and knees.
Speaker 2:And yes, it was working for Jesse prior to that, but I didn't know that and within days, we went viral and it was just sharing that story on Facebook. And then, boom, I started just getting messages and messages. Can I get that? Can I order that? How can I order it? And so we started sending them to a Shopify store. We didn't have an email list. We didn't. I didn't have Instagram, we didn't have anything major. We had Facebook and this is 2017. So, yeah, I believe the power of prayer, I believe getting on my hands and knees, I'm not kidding. Within days, I had one employee. She called me and said after we posted the Jesse story, she called me and said are you seeing Shopify numbers? And I hadn't been paying attention because we hadn't really sold that much. And she said we've done $4,000 today alone. So in the month of January of 2017, we did more than we had done in 2015 or 2016.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And all of a sudden, I started paying attention. All of a sudden, we had to find a copacker. All of a sudden, we had to build a team and by the end of 2017, we had done 5.3 million in sales.
Speaker 1:So let's back up in January because here's a couple of things I want to ask and how you process through these. They're super excitement, like everybody's excited. This girl's life changed. Her baby girl started to talk for the first time ever. You have to feel like a million bucks. So that's on one side your spirit's like yes, and on the other side you're going holy crap, how, what? In 4,000, I remember you told me when we had that conversation today. You're like it was $4,000 yesterday, it's $4,000 today. The next day was $4,000. The next day was like and it just kept growing and growing and growing. How do you, as an entrepreneur, how did you balance the excitement and the passion and all of that with oh man, now I've got to turn into a business woman?
Speaker 2:So it was. There's a lot to that question to answer that question, but I'll tell you right away. I had to figure things out quickly and I can remember gathering a group of people and we rented out different church kitchens just to fulfill those original orders. I had a cottage license, I had a co-packer, but they couldn't accommodate those. I couldn't accommodate that amount of sales, nor could the co-packer I had. So it was really just figuring it out quickly. I ended up deciding that I needed to go where all the cauliflower was being grown, which was Central California. I lived in Northern California at the time, so I went down there and I found some excellent farmers who helped me find a co-packer, and then we grew with that co-packer and that co-packer was just such a godsend really. And then eventually the venture capitalist that I sold to bought that co-packer's business ended up buying the manufacturing facility that cauliflower was, that cauliflower foods was produced in.
Speaker 2:So a full circle moment there he helped me. In the end, they ended up helping him by buying his business.
Speaker 1:So you go from nothing to $4,000,000 today to $5.3 million in 12 months.
Speaker 2:And then $20 million the next year over $10 million.
Speaker 1:Tell me what that rocket ship ride was like.
Speaker 2:We were number one on Amazon for 16 months straight. So we were being bobbily. Mama marries all different kinds of pizzas, not just cauliflower or pizza crust. It was a crazy journey of highs and lows and there were a lot of highs and a lot of lows.
Speaker 2:We had a lot of attention very quickly, anything from being invited to the Esbys Emmys to provide pizza, teen Choice Awards to the Cast of Hamilton, having us come down in New York and throwing pizza parties for them. I mean just some crazy things. The Tennessee Titans went plant-based and they took on our pizza crust. I mean we had some really exciting things.
Speaker 2:I remember just being down there with the Tennessee Titans and influencer of ours, erin O'Priah. She's like come down, you're here, let's throw a pizza party. And I said, great, we're throw a pizza party. She's like it's just gonna be a couple of my friends and Martina McBride walks in and she's making pizza with our pizza crust and writing a cookbook at the same time that I had started writing a cookbook. So a lot of wonderful things like that happened. But also during that time and I think this really does well now for people as well we were getting a lot of letters. I was getting a lot of letters and I read every single one of them. And so, like we had Gavin that had a brain tumor and his doctor put him on a low carb diet, we started sending that family crust. We had a three year old little girl that was a type two diabetic right.
Speaker 2:Not juvenile diabetes, type two. That's an epidemic that's happening in our country right now, and when our kids are getting type two, you know there's something really wrong with the food industry. I don't wanna go on a squirrel divert, whatever. I'm known to squirrel. I did a talk once and they named it the squirrel talk. But I do wanna tell people, our food industry, the FDA, allows a 20% error of margin on your labels. So you could have 20% more sugar and not claim it, or 20% more bad of anything and not claim it, and I think that's a problem. And you don't see that in other countries. I mean you can go, I can go to Italy and order a pizza and not have any inflammation.
Speaker 1:It'd be fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but if I have it here I blow up. So you know, I believe food is medicine, but it's got to be the right kind of food and buyer beware and really read those labels. But no, there could be a 20% error there. So when we started getting letters from different families and we got a few of them because, like the little girl that had the type two diabetes, her family wanted us to educate our platform by sharing her story so once we shared that story, or we shared Gavin's story, all of a sudden we started getting more people. Oh yeah, my nine year old has type two diabetes. Oh yeah, my 11 year old. I mean, it's insane, it's sad. It's not insane, it's sad, it's very sad. So I became like it was like my mission to get this product out to people, for that more than it was to be an eight figure business.
Speaker 1:I never. That was my question.
Speaker 2:It was never about the money for me, it was about paying it forward. And I went and I did Donald Miller's story brand Again back in Nashville. I felt like I needed to move to Nashville, just outside of Nashville Franklin, and I learned that the customer is the hero. And if you cannot talk about your product all the time and how great your product is, but showcase your heroes, your customers and sell your product that way, that's the way to do it and I still believe that's the way to do it today. I really do.
Speaker 1:I love that. And in the journey, Amy, most people are bottom line, bottom line, bottom line. In my book I wrote a couple of years ago Best Seller I have a whole chapter on Return on Mission versus Return on Investment, and so your face lights up when you talk about the changed lives. Way more than your counting, it changes. When you talk about the revenue, Talk about what that meant to you. And the second part of that question is how did you relay that to your team to inspire and encourage them as well?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Okay, so let me answer the second part of the question first. I first of all my one employee I had that helped me when we started doing the 4,000 a day. She happened to be my esthetician. Now, backtrack, I had was diagnosed with chogrens. Chogrens is dry eyes. I could no longer wear mascara, so I started getting these eyelashes on and she was my esthetician applying eyelashes. For all you women out there that get eyelashes, you know it takes a while. So she and I. She is a daughter of a pastor. I'm a newbie Christian. I'm laying there with my eyes closed, she's putting eyelashes and we're talking about the Bible, and I just felt immediate trust with her. She did a lot of every time I went in there she taught me something new, and so it was this incredible experience. And when she ended up getting carpal tunnel, I said I don't know, I have a health coaching business. I don't need an employee, but come work for me, we'll figure it out. And so she was my one employee.
Speaker 2:We ended up building a team of like-minded people. We had well for those that wanted to partake in it. We had a Bible study. We had a book club. We hired online trainers to work with my team as personal training. So I really invested a lot in my team, my team. I didn't have to motivate them. They saw the testimonials, they saw what was happening. I took them on the road with me. When we went to the cast of Hamilton or the SB's Emmys, new York Choice, team Choice, new York food show I'm trying to say two things at once. They went with me. So the excitement was there. We were like a big Cali family. We actually called ourselves a Cali family.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:So that was. You know, they were very motivated. And again, I have to say I'm going to admit this now because in my second business, the one that we're launching, I'm doing things a lot different. We had a lot of money coming in but I wasn't paying them top dollar like what people deserve in those positions, because I didn't have anything to compare it to. I didn't realize it Until the venture capitalist came in and bought the company and basically fired my team and hired their own C level. I didn't realize like the person in charge of marketing should be making what they were making. So my team really worked hard for very little.
Speaker 2:They were mission based as well. They had to be, or they would have come to me and asked me for a raise. Nobody ever did. I mean we would bonus and we would go on trips and stuff like that. But you know, and every time we went to a big city we would go to church wherever, whoever wanted to go to that church in that city. So that was really fun as well. Got to meet Joel Astine and a few other people.
Speaker 1:Tell me a little bit of tell me a little bit. I'll back up this little bit. I want to tell me about the Hamilton experience, because I know that's something that we shared. That was absolutely phenomenal. I thought it was. I thought it was a crazy, crazy story.
Speaker 2:So we start and I want to tell my email story too. But we start with we started having Instagram and I have this. I'm embarrassed to say this, but I'm like what's Instagram? I didn't even know what it was at the time. So we we get hooked up with Instagram and we get a private message on our Instagram and the girl that was managing it says this guy messaged us, he lives in New York, he's part of the cast of Hamilton, he wants to play the character Burr and he had to lose 27 pounds to be able to play Burr and he's been eating our pizza and he's lost 27 pounds. And he says if we're ever in New York, let us know, let him know and he'll get us tickets to Hamilton. Well, immediately I'm like okay, send him a lot of press and we're all going to New York.
Speaker 2:Six of us went to New York. They gave us backstage passes. It was very cool. I think I told you John Revolt and Kelly Preston were there and the cast was definitely talking to them, but immediately came over to us and spent a ton of time with us and we ended up throwing pizza parties for the cast of Hamilton. And when they went on the road, they went to San Francisco and Portland. We did pizza parties for them in those cities, as well as New York, multiple times. Very cool people that play in that production. It's an amazing experience and just one of those things that randomly happened for us.
Speaker 1:The one thing I want entrepreneurs to hear because we have entrepreneurs at every level that listen to this podcast is that it's just not about the bottom line, but it really is about the team. It's about the experience it's about and I love what you said just a minute ago I realized I didn't pay my team what they needed to be paid and coming into this business, I'm like, okay, you learned course corrected for your new business, but it was about really about the team and the community and the culture and the difference you're making in people's lives through your cauliflower crust pizza and how I mean literally medical issues were being taken care of and healed because they were on this low carb, healthy diet. At what point, at what point in the process, did you or ever did you kind of step back, amy, and go, wow, my God, you're really good and we built something really, really cool?
Speaker 2:Yeah, many times, and I feel it get welling up right now Many times. See you next time.
Speaker 2:I think the doors that opened and the people that came into my life were incredible and the opportunities I had. I can't we don't have a long enough podcast to talk about everything but I was a new being believer. I think I told you that I didn't grow up with religion. I had a little bit of a troubled childhood and when my mom I finally reconnected with my mom and my mom married my stepdad, he was an atheist, so I became a Christian in 2015. And this business basically started in 2015. And I really believe if you look at my Bible the only one I ever had you can see where I studied it all through the Califlower days and I can see where prayers were answered or even beyond my expectations. Just crazy things would happen that were so positive and so just I don't even know how to explain it Just unbelievable. You know it's like I randomly found Jeff Walker, the power of email. We didn't have an email list. I randomly found him and I listened to his podcast and I call my one employee Now this is, after we've gone viral my one employee, jimmy at the time. I'm starting to get more employees, but I'm calling her on a Friday night at 9 30. And I say, just listen to this email. This guy on the power of email we have all these email addresses from orders that have come in from going viral. I said can we send an email to this to these people? And she said, yeah, we can create an email list. And we we both listened to his podcast again. We created an email to send out that night.
Speaker 2:The next day I'm driving to the Bay Area with for my son's lacrosse game and I had had on my phone. Every time we sold a pizza it would ding and my, my, my phone was in my purse and my husband's like what's that noise? It kept and it was six o'clock in the morning. We put the email out at like 11 o'clock at night the night before and it's going to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to. It's just going. I pull out my phone and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's the email that that Jimmy put out. We have sold $38,000 worth of pizzas in a matter of whatever six hours and in the middle of the night, no, no less. That day we sold $87,000 worth of pizza on an email list and I never stopped using email after that, wow.
Speaker 2:Just things like that. That happened that just. You know every single email list now, but did you?
Speaker 1:did you send Jeff Walker a thank you card with a gift card to Starbucks on that?
Speaker 2:I should. I would love to have some. Yes, you should, yes, you should. Do you know him no?
Speaker 1:I do not. I've never heard of him. I actually wrote it down. I'm going to investigate that as soon as we get off.
Speaker 2:Okay, I actually just wrote that down, yeah yeah, donald Miller promotes him a lot, so I mean he's, he's in this space, but everybody's using email and I didn't even realize how powerful email could be. Isn't that funny? But the crazy thing is, in 2018, I started losing sight of what was really important. I started getting asked to be on a lot of different shows the doctors, dr Oz, the View I was on a lot of. I was in a lot of different articles, magazines. I started having venture capitalists really interested in the company and a lot of attention, and I stopped putting in that gratitude that I had what was given to me In November of 2018, you know, I lived in Northern California at this point.
Speaker 2:You know we're we're doing eight figures. We have a little pizza bar restaurant. I'm writing a cookbook for a publishing company in New York. Our growth is insane. We're launching pasta, a two ingredient pasta, now that we brought over from Italy going back and forth to Italy. Just major things are happening and I'm losing that daily in my Bible gratitude.
Speaker 2:And so, november of 2018, a fire starts in Northern California. I'm actually in Southern California, but the little town of Paradise, california called the campfire burns down in minutes and that is where my mom, my stepdad and my aunt live, and so I'm in LA and I'm I'm actually getting ready to go to a mosaic conference of all things. I fly home and everybody's in my house because the town's been evacuated and the town has burned to the ground and we don't know if their homes are standing or not. So, long story short, both our homes don't burn down, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. The curse is you can't live in that town anymore. There's no water, no electricity.
Speaker 2:My aunt's home was the only one standing out of probably 50 homes. My parents many of the homes in their neighborhood made it. There's was one of them, but again, you couldn't live in it and they didn't get the insurance. So I had an offer from venture capitalists and I decided okay, this is with a lot of prayer. It's time for me to sell off part of my company because I need to help my family, I need to move everybody out of this area. There were no homes that you could buy, so I ended up selling a huge chunk of the company off. It was. It was like my gut knew I shouldn't do it.
Speaker 2:I knew it, I wasn't listening to my gut and I should have went into deep prayer. I say I prayed, but I should have went into deep prayer and been patient and listened, because I think I would have heard a different message. What I did was I jumped at the first offer. I jumped at money. I had two offers on the table. I jumped at the money so that I could help move everybody out of California to Florida. And you know, my family didn't have any money. My family didn't have any money.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to be able to help them and that's what I did and I knew in my gut I was probably making the wrong decision. And the venture capitalists like so many venture capitalists do they restructure the company. You think it's going to be the same. They're going to take what you built and they're going to run with it and make it even better. But they ended up firing my team and again, I didn't go into a lot of detail about my team, besides the fact that my esthetician was my first hire, but a lot of them were friends of mine from 20 years because I couldn't afford to hire anybody else. I didn't know anybody else and we were growing so fast. I'm like come help me please, I need your help. And they ended up being my employees. So everybody got fired. They changed the recipe, they changed a lot of theme marketing, they dropped a bunch of products. They ended up putting me on sabbatical because they didn't like that. I didn't like what they were doing and this is. You know, I've talked to a lot of founders. This is normal. You know. This is normal behavior from venture capitalists coming in and I had taken money off the table, so I did give up some of my ownership quite a bit of my ownership, actually so I didn't have the same rights that I did as a full owner. I couldn't make major decisions, so that was really hard. And the hardest part about that is my team. It happened so fast and they were kind of just left in the wind and remember I didn't pay them a lot and they gave up a lot and they worked so hard to build this company up. They really took it like it was their own, treated it like it was their own and here they were fired and just like just left behind. So they stopped speaking to me. So I moved to Florida, get everybody settled. I'm very blessed that I was able to sell all three of those homes, my home included and COVID hits.
Speaker 2:I know nobody in Florida except for our family. My friends no longer speak to me and I have lost my identity. I'm no longer the CEO of this massively growing company and I'm just like I just went into the deepest depression I've ever been in. I thought I couldn't get any lower than when I was diagnosed with lupus, because I couldn't take care of my youngest child then because I was so sick. I was the lowest I've ever been in 2020. And this is why I know money does not buy happiness. Money does not buy peace. Money helps and people that have a ton of money always talk about that. But I was at my lowest point. I had the most, or I have the most beautiful home on the water, our dream home on the water. My family all has homes. They're all safe. We all have our health now.
Speaker 2:But I am so low because I've completely put all of my self-worth in this company. It no longer was about my daily with God and gratitude for what God has done for me. It was what interview am I going to be on next? What show am I going to be on next? How many sales are we having today? Who wants to buy my company? That kind of attitude and not the gratitude that I needed to be. So I lost myself. I literally didn't know who I was.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes, no, I think I know sometimes God allows us to go through things he doesn't cause. He allows. One of my five, one of my five informations is I am whole. I choose to use past pain to help others find healing. So talk to me about a couple of the things that you learned in that low point of your life and how you've taken those lessons and transferable principles into this new company that you're starting now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so not only did, not only was I at my lowest, my mom got diagnosed with cancer during that time also, and I had a lot of time on my hands, so I took her to all her appointments. And my right hand person, jimmy, also was diagnosed with cancer. Literally, they were diagnosed both with breast cancer within like a week. So Jimmy chose to go holistic. So I started doing a lot of research, just spending hours researching holistic ways. And then my mom chose to go Western medicine. So I took her to all her appointments. So I learned a lot about cancer. Now, during that time, I discovered this fruit called SourSot, which a lot of people were using for cancer. I can never promote it for cancer. Never will I. That would just. I would get shut down in a heartbeat.
Speaker 1:But in the midst of we should tell you something about our medical system.
Speaker 2:Well, in the midst of learning about this super fruit that's grown in the Caribbean and people have used it for a very long time for other illnesses. It's also anti-inflammatory, cell rejuvenation. It builds your immune system. So of course we were all trying to build our immune system.
Speaker 2:During COVID I was really freaked out because I had autoimmune issues and plaque when I was the drug. I was so proud that I was able to get off of that everybody was talking about during COVID wanting Anyways. Basically, I realized this fruit can do a lot for myself as well and it has antidepressant abilities in it as well. So I started getting the fruit. It's very expensive, very hard to get. And the next idea came to my mind during that very low point and I really believe that and I couldn't see it then. But when we're at our lowest it's just God's redirection. He has a different plan for you.
Speaker 2:I know CaliFlower was my education into business. It was my education in learning what we're lacking in the food industry. I can say food is medicine, but really we are lacking a lot in the food industry. We need supplements to bridge the gap between our food industry and Western medicine. So I'm married to a doctor. I believe in Western medicine, but I also know what little time they have and who educates them, which is Big Pharma. So they write a pill or they do a treatment. That's what they know. They don't understand. What can SourSoft do? What is cell rejuvenation? What is building your immunity natural? So I started playing with these products and other products as well, and I realized that this is definitely a superfood that can help a lot of people, and so that's how that business. I kind of threw myself into it. It pulled me out of depression. There's another side of that, too, that I love to talk about that I never talked about. Here we go with a squirrel moment.
Speaker 1:Come on girl.
Speaker 2:I experienced some trauma at the age of 12. And this is when I was in the foster system, and what have you? I experienced some trauma without going into that. I never dealt with that trauma. I buried it, buried it, buried it. That's what we do. So come in my 40s, that manifested into what I believe is why my body started attacking me and why I got lupus and chogrens.
Speaker 2:So during this low point, my family said you need to go get some counseling for depression, for your struggling. We don't know how to help you. So, along with experimenting with superfoods like SourSoft, I also got counseling and during the counseling it was discovered that I needed to do EMDR therapy and really dive into treatment on that trauma that I experienced. So going through 16 months of trauma therapy unleashed so much and I believe if you have any viewers that have experienced any kind of trauma and it doesn't have to be like what I experienced I mean there's all different levels of trauma If you don't address it, it's going to manifest it in some kind of illness, it's going to attack your body in some way. So, addressing that finally I thought, wow, thank you God, thank you for the intervention, thank you for the family that cared enough, thank you for live well, that happens to be here in Florida that does EMDR and was able to pull that out of me and really it just was so healing and it was a confirmation that I'm ready to start something new, like that whole platform of cauliflower was just to get me to where I am right now. So God's redirecting me in different ways. He's helping me in different ways, and I believe that this next business and this next journey of helping people and that's what I care about is helping people more than anything else.
Speaker 2:Of course, I want to make sure that everybody gets paid well, but you know what's really funny about this? If you had told me three years ago this would happen, I would never believe you. Five of my team members that didn't speak to me are now with me on SourSop nutrition. They've come back. Two of them are investors in the company. So it's just. You know, everybody needed to heal. They went through their own pain. They saw they got fired, they saw me move across the country, they saw me buy a big house and they were left in the wind. And now we're coming together and building this new business that's going to help even more people.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to ask you a question that we have not talked about. I knew part of that story, but how important was it for you to own some of the mistakes that you had made in the past with them, to start that reconciliation process?
Speaker 2:Oh, 100%, 100%. I had to humble myself and look back on where I made a lot of mistakes. A lot of mistakes. I mean there were obvious mistakes of like packaging errors and things like that that cost the company money.
Speaker 1:Or labels you can't read.
Speaker 2:Labels you can't read which.
Speaker 2:I'm dealing with right now. No, but there was a lot of mistakes like that that I made that I learned from. But the mistakes on how I reacted to the fires and took the first big amount that I could get, that reaction, how I let communication just lack of communication and hurt just divide us as a team and divide my friendships. I didn't try to reconciliation what happened like really sit down and figure out what happened, I just wallowed in my pain. I didn't think about what they were going through until later. I was just so self-absorbed. It's really sad for me to look back on that and think, wow, how did I get like that? That's not who I am. That's not the kind of person I am.
Speaker 1:Had you not went through that, Amy, that trauma in the past would not have surfaced.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And you would not have been able to walk through EMDR. And that's really. We talked at the beginning of the podcast, an hour and 40 minutes that when we started talking about trauma, we were like, oh me too, oh me too. And we spent a lot of time talking about the therapy that both of us have been through for the past year and a half to two years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Going through the trauma therapy has made me a better mother, a better mom, a better wife. I didn't realize that I was a little bit of a rager. I would come home from, let's say, being gone for a week with cauliflower. I'd come home and if things weren't exactly how I thought they should be, I would start raging. Especially my oldest son probably took the biggest brunt of that. And through this counseling I realized, wow, I am so far off of where I need to be, and so I had to go through a lot of healing. I mean, I spent 16 months healing before I could get to where I am today, which is about launching a new product, a new company. We have multiple products. My kids are in such a great space.
Speaker 2:And I have a wonderful relationship with them and things are so much better. I mean, are they perfect? No, it's always a work in progress, but it's funny. I had a realtor and the realtor actually sold, helped my family find a home. She didn't help us with ours. I didn't know her then. I met her at church. I've gone through a couple of churches since we lived here in Florida and I called her one day and I was crying and I was like I forget what I was even crying about. Something wasn't going right.
Speaker 2:This is during that time where I was in a low and she said Amy, have you gotten into the word? You just need to get the word. Where's your Bible? And I realized it was packed in a box somewhere. I hadn't even pulled out of the box. And as soon as I got into that, that's when everything I got back into the word again. Daily gratitude, journal, daily starting to be grateful for what I have and not wallowing in self-pity, is when the therapy opportunity came about. Everything started shifting for me. So I'm grateful for Stephanie the realtor for making me realize that that Bible was still packed somewhere in a box and I hadn't pulled it out and it had been over a year I've been in the you version online at but I hadn't been actually physically in my Bible reading.
Speaker 1:You know I shared this morning in my podcast I drop a coaching with Ken episode every Monday and today's that drop. I was at a. I spoke in Vegas last week with Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr and Brad Lee and just some amazing human beings. Oh, I had a blast. I had a blast.
Speaker 1:I had a really cool moment with RFK, with Robert F Kennedy Jr, and we was a small meet and greet 10, 12 people and you know I he spoke the same day, I did and we got done and we were just talking and I just said I said hey, mr Kennedy. I said thank you. I said thank you for your family's sacrifice. I said you, your family's, probably paid a price that most families can't even understand. I said I can't even imagine what it was like to grow up without your uncle and then without your father. And he just tears dwelled up in his eyes and we spent about three or four minutes just having a conversation. He put his hand on my shoulder after that I've got a picture of the moment and he just put his hand on my shoulder and he looked at me and he goes Ken, thank you. That that means a lot. And I said I can't even imagine what it's like to have been in your family.
Speaker 1:But at the conference, what I got, the question I got asked more than anything else was Ken, how do you continue to show up for so many people? And the answer is is you can't show up for others until you first show up for yourself, and you have to do that consistently. And that's exactly what you were talking about. Amy showed up for Amy because before, when you didn't show up for yourself for a period of time, it has a negative effect on all the people around you. So last question when Amy sits down in the morning to get ready and she sees herself in the mirror, now what story do you tell yourself?
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm like what are we doing today? I mean, the first thing I do is get into the word before I do anything else. It's so hard, though, because I want to check email and I want to check those social and what have you.
Speaker 2:But it's the first thing I do is I get up and I sit down and I just have that quiet time. And that's what I did when I was building Cali Flower, when I became a Newly Christian. That was something I did because I wanted to do it. And I'm back to I want to do that. And then when I look at myself in the mirror and I'm brushing my teeth and stuff, I'm like okay, what are we conquering today? I mean, the old me used to say when I was wallowing in self pity.
Speaker 2:I used to look at myself and say, oh, you're too old to do anything else, or you've gained weight again. You let yourself go again, you're letting the depression get to you. And I would put on a smiley face for my family and they would go off to school and this is before they were homeschooled with COVID. They'd go off to school and work and I put on a pretty smile and whatever, kiss, goodbye. And then they walk out the door and I would sob all day, I'd be just in tears. And then they would come home and I would put on that makeup. And it was fake, it was all fake. I was pretending I was something that I wasn't, and so now I just get up and it's like sometimes, after I've been in the word, I'll just go live in my jammies without it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it, I love it.
Speaker 2:I'm so ready for this next adventure. I'm so excited because I'm meeting people like you. Honestly and I'm not just saying this because I'm on your podcast I'm meeting people like you. I'm meeting some amazing people lately and I know that has to just be the energy I'm putting out there, the opportunities that are being presented to me by being faithful and living in gratitude. It's huge. It comes back to you, and so I remember what that feels like from 2017, 2018, before I lost track of it, and it feels so good. And I just can't wait to see what the next few years bring, because I want to be with like-minded people Surround myself with like-minded people.
Speaker 1:That's so good. Amy Lacey, ladies and gentlemen, founder of the first cauliflower pizza, helped build a billion dollar industry and category bestselling author now in a new business, founder of SourSop Nutrition. Go follow her. Hey, amy Lacey on Instagram, go check her out, follow her. She's got a couple of followers, about 300,000. She is a rock star.
Speaker 2:But I'm just, I'm super glad God got us connected so glad because it was a random way we connected, and one thing I want to say is I manage my social media, which is why it looks like a hot mess, but if you private message me, I will message you back. It is me.
Speaker 2:And I'd love to meet new friends. So, yeah, I'm not exactly sure how we found each other, but it keeps happening to me Good people like you. I love talking to you today, obviously, but definitely just getting to know you the last few times we've spoken. We have a lot to talk about and it's cool what you're doing, all the things you're doing and the people that you're helping, and I'm amazed at people like you. I'm grateful and amazed that you're in my life and I hope to expand that.
Speaker 1:The feeling is mutual, my friend. The feeling is mutual and I'm excited to see what God does in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're doing such cool things, you're doing great things. You have a thing coming up in January, I'm excited.
Speaker 1:It's good. It is good. Guys, thank you for joining us on another episode of as the Leader Grows. As always, if this has added value, I'm going to ask you to do a couple of things. Number one, if you'll click that subscribe button. Number two, if you'll leave us a five-star review, head over to HeyAmyLacey, follow Amy on Instagram. Also, if you screenshot this podcast, re-enlist, tag Amy, tag myself. We'll share it. And then, last but not least, head over to our new Facebook group. We just started a public group. It's GSD community ton of value, ton of stuff that we drop on there. I go live on there all the time. I bring friends on, like the amazing Amy Lacey with me as well, just to add value to you and in your life. And, as always, thank you for joining us on as the Leader Grows. We'll see you next week.