Fabian Geyrhalter
Welcome to the show, Bennett.

Bennett Maxwell
Thank you. Excited to be here, Fabian.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Yeah, it’s awesome to have you. You’re the founder of Dirty Dough. Which is one of the fastest growing restaurant concepts in the US. I believe you’ve got 70 locations, but a huge amount of locations in development. I think, like, I heard, like a couple hundred. That’s a crazy amount. Tell us how does one get into the cookie store business and turn it into a nationwide franchise success?

Fabian Geyrhalter
And on top of that, which, as if this wasn’t big enough of a question, you’re the founder, but there was also another founder before you. So how did all that work?

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah. To answer you stumble through it and you figure it out.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Yes.

Bennett Maxwell
My background has been in sales at a solar company before doing this. A buddy of mine that I went to high school with started the company out of his apartment in Arizona, started selling cookies, posted on Facebook saying, hey, I sell out most nights. I wanted an investor to open up the first storefront. So I invested the first storefront opened in March of 2020. Perfect timing, you know, Covid month. Towards the end of that year, I was pushing him to franchise it to me. Crumble just opened up in San Diego and they were crushing it. That’s where I was running my solar company out of, I’m like, hey, I’ll be your first franchisee. And his reply was, I’m burnt out. I am sick of working 80 hours baking cookies. Like I just want to sell and get out. So I bought it from him three years ago. First year we kind of revamped everything and create, I mean, other than the name Dirty Dough, every recipe, process, we centralize all of the production, hired, you know, all new employees. And then we launched franchising in December of 2021. And then fast forward 12 months ago, we had seven stores. And today we have 60 something stores plus another 13 mobile franchises. So, yeah, we went from 7 to 70 in 12 months.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Unbelievable.

Bennett Maxwell
And crazy, a lot of good, a lot of bad.

Fabian Geyrhalter
And so you said that, you know, most everything was revamped, so you really kind of are the founder now of that of the new Dirty Dough. But the name was already there, right?

Bennett Maxwell
Correct. Yep. We kept we kept the name and I was the CEO, you know, I bought the company, I’m the CEO and I’m building an advisory board because I just learned what an advisory board was. You got these all star people and give them, you know, half percent or percent of equity over a two year vesting period and you get to pick their brain, you know? So I got our first guy, John Richards. He’s done, his first company’s a $30 billion company. I’m like, I need this guy on my team. And then we got Steve Hart, who owns the largest, property management franchise or in the nation. And then I went to go find the third one, and it was Jill Summerhays who was the founder of Maui Wowi Smoothies and Coffee. And she goes, you need me to be way more than advisor. You need me to run this thing. And I’m like, well, if that’s an option, I’ll take it. And then I said, well, what’s my title? She goes, well, you’re the founder because you found the company to buy it. It’s like, okay, I’ll go with that. Now my title is the chairman, now that we have like an official board, we’ve grown a little bit more. But yeah, that’s kind of the relationship of other than the name, though. Yeah. The logo, the colors, the branding, the messaging, the product itself, as well as all of the processes, have been redone.

Fabian Geyrhalter
I love having the title chairman after a couple years. Two that must feel, pretty rewarding. It’s amazing because what you just said about the advisory board, I was just on a podcast myself and they asked me what is one of the biggest, lessons I learned with my own startup that I would like to share with entrepreneurs. And I said exactly that. I’m like, it’s an advisory board. You have to have one early on. You’re going to have so much wind in your sails. It’s amazing. So that’s what that’s what I did too. And you know, I’ve got the founder of Hydro Flask and, you know, of Cambridge Audio and all of these people that I had no idea, you know, like the audio space was new to me. The hardware space was new to me. And so you get the experts on board and suddenly you’re a much, much bigger company. And so great. I love to hear that from you too that that helped tremendously.

Bennett Maxwell
Oh, absolutely. It was, I didn’t, I thought of a board as like, you know, you’re sitting in this old hotel.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Stuffy.

Bennett Maxwell
Boardroom, you know, and it’s all these old dudes. I didn’t know the difference between, like, a board of directors and a board of advisors. And then you can get all stars on your team when you’re brand new. And then, I mean, the experience is one thing and that they provide you in the direction they provide. But another huge part of it is, I mean, nobody wants to buy a franchise from Bennet Maxwell because who the hell is Bennet Maxwell? You know, but leverage these other people that have had really good successes, you know, and that builds trust with your customer. You know, your potential franchisee.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Exactly, exactly. No, I spot on, spot on. But when we talked about, you know, Dirty Dough having been the name from the get go, why is the Dough Dirty? What what made you decide to keep that name? Because I’m sure that, you know, I mean, leading with a negative and branding usually it’s a bad thing. I mean, things have changed these days with Liquid Death and brands like that. But what is the story behind the name?

Bennett Maxwell
The real story is, Tyler, who founded the company, and his wife, Keena. They just felt like it sounded, you know, catchy, Dirty Dough. When I had purchased the company, I heard one of the employees tell the customer, and they said, why is the name Dirty Dough? And the employee said, well, it’s because the dough is dirty, because we have more mixins, like we focus on the inside of the cookie. And I’m like, I like that. How many, how many cups of chocolate chips do we put in a batch of like, six cups. We’re going to increase it by 50% to 9, to 9 cups. Right. And then so I took the existing name and then adapted it to what it is now. And Dirty Dough means the dough is dirty. So all of our cookies, rather than focusing on the exterior of the cookie, like a lot of our competitors, it’s kind of a plain cookie with a lot of frosting. Ours is the opposite. It’s we have three layer cookies. So you look at a cookie and it looks like a peanut butter cookie, but when you break it open, there’s a chocolate dough inside with an injection of hot fudge. And then that really was the first stepping stone in the messaging of our brand, which is now adapted, a relationship to mental health of the inside matters most. Life gets messy, and that’s okay. So these cookies are a representation of life, that they don’t always look perfect and clean and cute, but you can always, you know, they can always be enjoyed and they taste amazing.

Fabian Geyrhalter
I love so much about what you just said but that idea that you kind of inherit a name, right? Like it comes with the purchase, and you don’t quite know exactly how to navigate it, and you just kind of, like, roll with it because it’s there. And then you and then you find new ways of how to position that in a more to you, you know, and the growing brand in a more meaningful way that actually goes deeper, you know, internally and externally. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that I do with, with my clients. And it is so cool to see that, you know, just happening organically over time where you’re like, wait a minute. I finally have a much, much better story. And this actually has legs and can go places. That’s super cool. That’s super cool. And it’s great that it didn’t happen as an exercise in a quote unquote boardroom, but it actually happened there. You know, the employee was talking to the customer and you’re like, wait, that makes sense.

Bennett Maxwell
That’s a great idea. Let’s run with it, for sure.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Love it. Love it. And then you talked about the three layers, which obviously are, you know, like a key differentiator with your brand versus a lot of other cookie brands. I read that that’s kind of like, a thing that you almost like trademarked. I mean, something that you were the first three layer cookie brand or something like that. Is that, it’s amazing I mean, cookies have been around forever, but that is literally an innovation that is, you know, you guys.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah. I still haven’t seen anybody else doing the three layer cookie. And it’s to do what I described, you know, it’s very hard to do by hand. You’d have to make, you know, your peanut butter dough and then you flatten it out and then you make your chocolate dough and then you flatten that out on top of it. Then you put hot fudge in the middle. Then you try to wrap it all up and then, good luck doing that a thousand times a day with 18 year olds. Like it’s just not going to work. It’s not going to be consistent. So it really came down to finding specialized machines. And then I guess repurposing them to make these giant, multi-layered cookies. So yeah, from what I’ve seen, nobody else has has done that. Not that we, I would love to trademark it but I can’t. So, you know, it’s only a matter of time somebody else will probably figure out.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Sure, sure. But you’ve got the process down and you’ve got, yeah. That’s I mean, that’s really the thing that’s so hard to do is like, if you have the supply chain, the logistics, the process of how to actually get this done in your way, that’s really the hard thing.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah. And I think coming first, you know, first to market with like that’s what we’re known for right now. So even if somebody else comes along in their new company, and they start doing a three layer cookie, we have a pretty big, head start, you know, with we’ve sold 400 something franchises and 70 of those are already open. So we’re really adapting like that is who Dirty Dough is, is the stuffed, multi-layered three layered cookie. So even if somebody else comes out with it, you know, in the future, I think we’ve kind of staked our claim to the, you know, the world’s first three layer cookie.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Well, and you have a little bit of experience with that when it comes to, even if bad things happen, you can still put the fist in the air and come out okay. So let’s talk a little bit about, a subject that you have been talking about a lot. So you’ve been, so Crumble, right? They started lawsuits against you and another cookie startup, or maybe a couple of them. You dubbed it on social #CookieWars. And that nearly took you out before you really were able to grow the company. What was that all about? And what did you what did you learn in the process?

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah, the premise of the lawsuit was the brands were confusingly similar. So somebody was looking at our multilayered stuffed cookies with a cursive blue Dirty Dough logo, walking in, buying cookies, walking out of the stores they’re gonna be like, oh shit, I just thought I bought Crumble, you know, like reading the lawsuit was comical. Like their side by side pictures of their cookie with sprinkles and our cookie with sprinkles. And I kid you not, their vanilla ice cream and our vanilla ice cream looked too similar. I was just like.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Wow.

Bennett Maxwell
So I viewed it as a way to stifle competition. And just like you said it, it really did almost take us out. I mean, it was several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees before it was settled and dismissed. And the only reason we were able to go through that was because, you know, we had a public, witty, kind of fun reaction, with billboards and commercials and things like that poking fun of the lawsuit, which gave us a lot of press, which, you know, got us on multiple national news stations, which then gave us all of the attention that we needed to then sell franchises to, you know, not only recoup the few hundred thousand dollars worth of legal fees, but, you know, ten x that amount in franchise fees. So I always looked at every time we had to pay the attorney, I looked at that as a marketing expense because I’m like, in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have came up with a better marketing campaign to give us more exposure on my own. It was just the circumstances that we were in. And then, you know, let’s run with it.

Fabian Geyrhalter
That’s amazing. I’m sure that’s not how you felt the first day when the lawsuit came in the mail.

Bennett Maxwell
No, no, it was actually, it was six weeks from the time that the lawsuit came in the mail till I actually got on social media. And it was because, a local news article picked up on it. So I’m like, oh crap, if it’s out there, I might as well give my side of the story, right? But no, for that first six weeks, it was just like, oh man.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Hell on earth. Yeah. No, absolutely. But look, I mean, any of your competitors, or future competitors who want to try to three layer stick, you know what’s going to happen. There’s going to be quite some social media campaign against you. So, Dirty Dough now knows how to do that.

Bennett Maxwell
Yes I guess yeah. Hopefully it wards away other lawsuits.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Exactly, exactly. So when, well, actually let’s go back to something that we were talking about a second ago with like the three layers and how hard it is to actually create this and therefore duplicate it. You have, a couple of cookie flavors that pop up only for a week. And you do that every week. Correct?

Bennett Maxwell
Correct.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Crazy cool way to obviously get people into the store weekly and then get people glued on socials of what’s happening. What are the flavors? But that seems to be a super hefty load on R&D, on menu upkeep, staff training, etcetera. But since you are, you have that, you know, smartly run logistics in the background. How do you do that? You know, how do you scale something like that with a franchise?

Bennett Maxwell
It’s been very hard because I have to order ingredients today for any cookies that are going to be in rotation in ten weeks, not only do I have to order and cover all the capital, I then have to, you know, produce the cookies, get it out to the franchisees and predict how many they’re going to sell, which has been very, very hard. Recently partnered with Craveworthy Brands, a management group out of Chicago. We became their 10th, one of their 10th portfolio companies just the beginning of the year. And we’ve made a lot of changes. So I guess this is the first time we’re announcing it publicly. Not that it’s a secret or anything, but we are greatly reducing the amount, like right now we have 50 something cookies that we’re rotating through. But they’re all each very unique. Now there’s only so many ways you can make cookies. You know, there’s only so, a brown sugar base or a sugar base or chocolate base.

What we’re doing instead is we’re reducing it to ten bases, and then we’ll still have, actually we have 70 recipes that we can now use off of those ten bases. So that allows the stores to stock up as many cookies as they want with a guarantee that, hey, even if you don’t sell out of your peanut butter base this week, it’ll come back in two weeks as instead of a peanut butter cup, it’s a peanut butter Butterfinger, I don’t know. So we are refining that process. And with that, we’ve drastically reduced our cost to the franchisees, which is very exciting. We’re announcing that all the new pricing to them, next week, which I’m very excited about. So it hasn’t been without its challenges. And we’ve done a lot of pivoting and, you know, shifting to make it better and better. But that’s the plan going forward is reducing the amount of bases while still expanding the number of recipes that you have available. So you could keep that weekly rotating menu going.

Fabian Geyrhalter
You know, and that’s the kind of stuff that no one thinks about when they go in the store and buy a cookie. And it’s like, so amazing. Like how that streamlines the process while, you know, like doing nothing negative to the creativity of, you know, like what you can do with it. Right. It’s amazing. And so you’re actually so the cookies that are only, you know, like there for, you know, on a weekly basis, they’re rotating, right? They’re part of the 70 or 80 or however many. And they will come back. Right? They are just kind of like, you know, they’re only here for a certain time, but they do come back.

Bennett Maxwell
Yes. But you’d have to get through 50 different cookies typically for it to come back.

Fabian Geyrhalter
No problem.

Bennett Maxwell
Just have, you know, ten different cookies. And of those ten different cookies, every store can have those on stock, you know, all the time. And I guess to give the listeners just a little bit of background, rather than, Dirty Dough doesn’t make all of their cookies or any of the cookies on site. It’s all made on a centralized production unit, so you get economies of scale when you’re purchasing flour, sugar, butter. You mix thousands of cookies at a time with professional bakers, and then you machine portion them to get stuffed cookies and three layer cookies. That is then shipped out to the franchises, each location to be baked fresh on site so you don’t lose any freshness. You don’t have to use any preservatives, but it creates a lot of simplicity for the franchisee, lowers the, you know, the cost to open, but that means, you know, all of that burden is now on corporate, which is very hard. So that’s why we’re, you know, always pivoting and adjusting to see how we can, streamline that process so our franchisees can still offer tons of different cookies at an affordable cost without, jeopardizing the freshness or the quality of the cookie.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Fascinating, amazing. Super, super interesting. When you, so when you, looking back, you know, there were a couple of stores in the beginning. When did you, when did you feel like, you are actually turning into a brand? I know it’s franchise and in franchise there are different terms, but really, that’s what it’s about, right? When you turn from a startup of a couple stores and then suddenly you feel like we’ve got, there’s something bigger happening here. People really love us. We are, you know, like something usually happens, for you it might have been a lawsuit, but something usually happens where you feel like, you know what, this is the day or this is the week, or this is the month where we are actually turning into a brand. Do you remember what a moment was?

Bennett Maxwell
Yes. It came to me as soon as you started asking that question. It was September of 2022. I was in Philadelphia. So I’m out of Salt Lake City. We have maybe three stores at the time that original one I purchased in Arizona, and we probably opened up two in Utah. So we have three stores. Two of them are less than two months old. I’m in Philadelphia, literally across the country with my Dirty Dough shirt on, at a franchise conference. And I must have got stopped by a dozen people and they recognized the brand. Now, so that was the moment that was like, wow, we’re becoming a brand. What led to that was what we’ve been talking about. What you mentioned was the I shouldn’t say the lawsuit. It was our reaction to the lawsuit that really put us on the map.

Fabian Geyrhalter
That is amazing. And you know that’s what they always say in entrepreneurship. Right. It’s like or in life, right. Like when you’re really, really down when it’s a really low point, like you getting into this lawsuit before you really even have the ability to take off. Like sometimes those things can be the biggest blessings. And I mean, for you, just looking back now, that that triggered the response and the response triggered you actually, you know, gathering a tribe around your brand so that people notice your logo when you’re in a totally different state where there is no Dirty Dough. That’s remarkable.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah, yeah, it was a good feeling. I’m a recognizable brand now, so. Yeah, it was definitely a high.

Fabian Geyrhalter
That’s super cool. On the flip side, what was a ginormous fail? Like what was something that the company went through or the brand went through, maybe brand related, or maybe just, you know, like, overall, scale or growth related, where you feel like that is something that didn’t go well and others can learn from it.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah. I mean, there’s, I’ll name one on the branding side because I feel like I’ve made I mean, I still make mistakes on a daily basis, but on the branding side, before it was redone, it was a very bright orange kind of in your face color. And it was at ASU, Arizona State, you know, big college crowd. And the thought was, you know, this resonates with college kids. So the, you know, the colors weren’t appealing to who ended up actually becoming our target demographic, which was, you know, females 25 to 50 years old with kids, right? So I think that was a big, like the target demographic research wasn’t done at the first time when choosing the color and seeing how that relates and what emotions that drives in a customer, or a potential customer, I think that’s one. The other thing that I didn’t even know companies did this, but I didn’t love it because when I bought the company, I dove into this and I found out, we paid somebody, I don’t know, ten, twenty grand to create their original Dirty Dough logo. But really, the agreement said that you could use that logo for up to three retail locations. Then you have to pay $2,500 each retail location you open up thereafter.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Oh, smart.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah, smart on them. Not smart on us.

Fabian Geyrhalter
No, for like 500 franchises. Yeah.

Bennett Maxwell
So that was a thing that again I was like, oh crap, we don’t even own our logo. Even though we paid for it. We only paid for the rights to use it. So regardless, even if we love that logo, which I thought it was a good logo, it just needed, you know, to be changed a different color. But we had to redo the entire logo and pay for it again because that first time we didn’t, you know, dot our I’s and cross our T’s to make sure that we were set up in a way to expand to our goal of a thousand locations. That would be way too expensive under that agreement.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Well, because in the beginning it might have been like, well, yeah, we don’t care. We’re not going to grow that much. And each one that, you know, like two and a half grand, that doesn’t matter, doesn’t hurt anyone. Yeah. It’s a different strategy. Well two big takeaways here. You know, if you’re a creative, go for it. That sounds great. If you’re, if you’re an entrepreneur, don’t sign it. That’s hilarious. And I mean, color, you know, the importance. You know, it’s one of these esoteric things of like, yeah, color, whatever. How important can it be? It can be extremely important, right? Because if you don’t, if you don’t hit it, you know, right with the target audience, and it doesn’t fit into their lifestyle at all. It’s the college crowd versus, you know, the moms, it actually can change how a business can grow and is being perceived. So that’s really, that’s really interesting. So did you have, how was the brand language derived? Like did you have a creative team from day one or was that slowly something where you started accumulating, you know, a team to create that brand voice over time?

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah. We paid an agency, when we did the, an initial rebrand, you know, these are the fonts. These are the colors. But the messaging was very, it has evolved and evolved and evolved, which I think was, like the messaging in the beginning, like our tagline, our original tagline was, we eat cookies with a fork or something like cookies so good something to do with a fork.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Mhm.

Bennett Maxwell
And I don’t think that, not necessarily, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there wasn’t any meaning behind it. Where when I purchased the company, I was kind of going through my own midlife crisis in my 20s. And I told my solar company, and I felt great. You know, I had a good exit. I achieved a lot of the financial goals I wanted achieved by the, you know, before 30. But quickly, I realized that my base levels of happiness, I mean, I returned to my base levels of happiness within a week or two, and I started working nights and weekends, and I just set the next goal. And I told myself, I’m going to feel better again when I hit this next goal. So I caught myself in that cycle and I’m like, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. I need to figure out what my actual like life’s mission is. So I took a lot of time to figure that out. Did a lot of different activities, read books, got feedback from others, wrote my own obituary, and I landed on fulfillment. And then I threw in despite life’s dirtiness, one, you know, as a as a tie in with Dirty Dough.

But two that spoke to my personal journey of don’t wait to sell your solar company to have more joy and fulfillment. So that was like my life’s mission statement. And then I’m talking with a business coach. I say, okay, now I have my personal mission statement. What’s my company’s mission statement? He goes, you dummy. It’s the same thing. Like, your company is an expression of you. So then I started posting about that and I remember I was super nervous. I was like, man, I think mission statements are stupid. Like, how am I going to be up front and out? Like with what I stand for? And authenticity in this and that. But the more I did that, the more I feel like it attracted people. And this was like mid 2021. So when the lawsuit in 2022, I feel like a lot of that messaging and around the joy and fulfillment, life’s messy and that’s okay. You know, the core value, all of that had already been spelled out. So when the adversity of a lawsuit happened, the messaging and the core values were already in place. So we could really push that out there. So I feel like it’s still evolving. But a lot of that happened over the first year, just a little by little.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Absolutely. And it always evolves. Right? I mean, it’s organic, but the way that you put your own mission first and then tied it into the company. I mean, that’s when everyone in the company starts feeling like there’s a human involved and there’s a real emotion. Right? And it’s not eating something with a fork because it’s so rich, but it’s more like, you know, like now we actually have an emotional narrative, right? That’s huge. And customers can feel it and everyone can feel it. So bravo for bringing in your own personal, you know, mission or mantra or North Star, you name it, plenty of words for it. And start making it one with the company.

Bennett Maxwell
And just to kind of give you the shift. So it was, you know, we eat cookies with a fork or whatever, something with a fork. And now it’s the inside matters most, which again, speaks to it doesn’t matter, the exterior. Again, the life gets messy, but it’s the inside that matters. And that’s why we focus on the inside of the cookie, which then ties into the name. Yeah, or the new meaning of Dirty Dough. The dough is dirty and the inside matters most, I believe, has an emotional attachment to it. And people can relate to that because we know we’re, You know, we’re not all models on the outside. But the goodness is on the inside. So I feel like attaching the emotion, has been very beneficial to the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter
I love it, and I mean that is the difference between like product sales driven marketing and emotional branding, right? It’s the exact same value prop of a fork. Oh, that means there’s richness inside, right? And now you just talk about, you know, it coming from the inside. And that’s where, that’s where it is. It’s, it has legs. It can go anywhere. It’s wonderful. And while we talk about esoteric brand statements and, you know, things like that, this is a really good segue to hear from you who has been an entrepreneur now for quite a while, but in very different and very different ways, you know, with a solar company and now, you know, selling Dirty Dough. What does this misunderstood word of branding mean to you now?

Bennett Maxwell
And I’m not gonna, I’m gonna make this up, right? Because I make up everything I do.

Fabian Geyrhalter
I like that. Just like a good cookie.

Bennett Maxwell
Like a good cookie. Branding is what represents your company. Really again, for me, I’m looking at an emotional standpoint. So, like, what is the emotion that you are, want your customers to feel? And then keeping that consistent through all touchpoints, whether you know, marketing or your website or your packaging, your store decor, we have different, you know, messaging on each of the boxes and narrowing down what that emotion and that message that you want to give out to the public. And then being consistent with that. That’s how I would say, that’s what branding means to me.

Fabian Geyrhalter
I love it, and that’s, I mean, that’s really it in a nutshell. And it sounds it sounds simple, but it’s not. And so it’s, I totally, you can see it even with Dirty Dough how this kind of, like, came along, organically and over time. But getting it right took took a while, and it feels like everything has complete clarity now, when you go through the site and when you kind of like, you know, read the narrative and consumers can feel that and they can associate with it. And I think it’s extremely smart, the idea from within, because a lot of times we all know it. We crave a cookie because, you know, we had a crap day or we feel like we deserve it. Right. And then the idea that it’s the inside that counts versus the calories is kind of important. So it’s a smart message. It’s not just a good emotional message that ties in with the product values, but it’s actually smart, on many levels. When, if you take your entire brand, so really that means, you know, internal. Right. So all the franchisees, all the owners, all the employees within every one of the franchises, the customers who actually, you know, buy the product and need to enjoy it. You know, investors, the board, whoever, right? Like, if you take all of it and you put it through a funnel and out comes kind of one sentiment, one word, you know, like you know, Everlane is transparency or Liquid Death is mischief, right. Like what could be that one word? And I know this is a big philosophical question that would come out of the Dirty Dough brand altogether.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah, I would say authentic. That’s the message that I’m trying to get off both from a brand as well as me personally of again, there’s no need to put on a front to act like you’re perfect on the outside because we know nobody is right. It’s just about accepting your authentic self. And again, kind of going back to any whether it’s the lawsuit or any other challenges, it’s like, that’s what I’ve tried to do more than anything. Like we get hit with the lawsuit. I did a 13 post series breaking down every single point of the lawsuit, and my opinion on it, just very, very open. I may be wrong about all of this, but at least you know where I stand. And I think that authenticity, is really what I’m pushing.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Amazing. And back to the lawsuit for one last time because you brought up something really interesting. It would seem that your lawyers would be like, you can’t talk about this in public. This is still happening. Kind of like, you know, behind closed doors. How did that work out where you’re like, no, I’m just going to talk about all of that publicly, like, because you don’t hear that often. You don’t see that often.

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah. I mean, you get advice. And also be careful because you say what your attorneys tell you that, you know, my attorney told me this, then you break attorney client privilege. I’m going to not say that, but you get advice from people. And they’re not business owners, though, right? They have their strategy. And everybody’s strategy is different. And typically the strategy is keep your head low, play it safe. You know, live to fight another day. Or my question was more like, okay, well if I do this, is it illegal? You know, and that was like, are there going to be legal repercussions? If the answer is no to that, then it’s like, okay, well what’s the downside? Well, they’re going to, you’re going to draw more attention to yourself. And I was like and then what, are they going to sue me harder?

Fabian Geyrhalter
Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.

Bennett Maxwell
I’m already being sued. What else can they do, right? So that was again, I already had my mission statement on our website. I had all my core values on our website. I post about it. I had done podcasts about it, like it was already clearly defined, like that’s who I am. I’m not going to I am outspoken and I’m authentic and I give my opinion it might mean nothing if I have no value, but either way, I’m not shying behind that. So I had already made up my like I knew what I wanted and it didn’t matter what some person would, you know, advise me to do or not to do.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Unless things could have gotten much, much, much worse. And you took that advice to make sure that that is not something that is in the cards.

Bennett Maxwell
I don’t, I don’t do anything illegal.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Right, right. Exactly, exactly. Of all of the amazing advice and directions and thoughts that you shared with us was there any kind of like, maybe brand advice or entrepreneurial advice that you still have, up your sleeves that you didn’t share with us yet that you would like to share with us as a takeaway?

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah, I briefly touched on it, but with my solar company, I didn’t have a mission. I have core values. I didn’t do any of that cause I thought it was, I just didn’t believe in it at the time for whatever reason. But I mean, before the show, we were talking about your new business and the heaven and the hell and the ups and the lows. I mean, the ups and downs, and it’s like it gets so hard if you don’t have your messaging attached to something that you personally believe in, that if you had all the freaking money in the world, you would still be doing what you’re doing because you’re passionate about it, because you’re achieving what you believe is your mission. I think that is absolutely needed, rather than well my mission is to make a lot of money, because if I’m making a lot of money, then I could help people. But it’s like, but why do you want to help people? What’s the emotion that you’re after? And really narrowing down to the emotion that you want to feel, and you want your customers to feel, being clear on that and building your company around that mission rather than, hey, I have a cool product. Let’s see how it goes, right? I think you have to have the deeper meaning, and that’s what separates, you know, that’s what’s going to allow you to push through those hard moments that happen every single freaking week. Versus you’re like, oh, this is not worth it. Money’s not that important to me. I don’t want to get my face kicked in every single week by all these issues.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Thanks for the therapy, Bennett. And you know what the great thing about this is, is like I wrote two books called Brand Therapy. And, you know, it’s like the shoemaker’s kids always have the worst shoes, right? So it’s that kind of thing where does everyone, regardless of how much you’re into the world of branding or how much you don’t believe in it in the beginning. Like we have to remind ourselves that that’s what it’s all about, right? We have to get up in the morning and there needs to be a mission, and it needs to be a desire, and it needs to be much bigger than just making dough. Wait a minute. No, that’s not it. Making money.

Bennett Maxwell
Haha. Agreed.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Alright listen, what’s next for the Dirty Dough brand? What are you excited about in the next six months? Obviously, lots of expansion happening. Tell us anything you’re really excited about. I think you already let it slip. During our conversation today.

Bennett Maxwell
Yes. I mean, changing how we produce the cookies is exciting, because next week, we’re hoping to announce to our franchisees, hey your food cost is XYZ, and we’re going to reduce it by XYZ amount, which, you know, that’s exciting because part of the mission and achieving the mission of joy and fulfillment that we have is lowering the barrier of entry to entrepreneurship, because that’s just something that’s brought me a lot of joy and fulfillment. So anytime that I could help, you know, fellow entrepreneurs, especially in the franchise system, that is extremely rewarding. We’re also adding, quite a few different product lines with our Craveworthy partnership. Edible cookie dough. We’re doing dirty sodas. We’re doing ice cream sandwiches. So it’s all still cookie themed and cookie inspired, but over the next, I mean, now till the end of the year, we should have all those products. We’re testing coffee, both hot and cold, in some of the stores. We’re expanding store hours, so it’s kind of like, let’s get the stores open, let’s get the customer base. And then now we can slowly add on to it, which I’m excited about. And we have, I don’t know, 45 stores right now under construction. So I think we’re supposed to open up nine this month and another ten next month. And wish me luck.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Yeah I do and what I wish much more is that you’re coming to California. When is that going to happen? We need some stores here.

Bennett Maxwell
Yes, we have Dana Point. Rancho. Oh freak, I just forgot the name, somewhere else in Orange County. And then my brother’s actually opening one in Poway which is the San Diego area.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Oh, fantastic.

Bennett Maxwell
We’ll open up in the next May, maybe June.

Fabian Geyrhalter
All very close to me. That’s all I care about. Perfect. Excellent. Hey, how can people follow you personally? I know you’ve got a podcast going on. Where can they or the Dirty Dough, can they order it nationwide? Do they need to be close to a store? How does it work?

Bennett Maxwell
Yeah, we do nationwide shipping, but it’s definitely if you’re close to a store, we’re in 20 something states. So go get a fresh cookie. Bennettmaxwell.com is my website that just has links to all my social media, which I do post typically twice a day, focusing on business, family life, mental health, entrepreneurship, sales. Anyways and then DirtyDough.com is for cookies. And then my podcast is Deeper Than Dough and it’s all about, you know, deeper than dough, more than money finding joy and fulfillment despite life’s challenges.

Fabian Geyrhalter
Bennett, this was awesome. I so appreciate you spending, almost 40 minutes with us on, on on this Tuesday morning when we’re taping it. Thank you so much for your time and for you for your insights. This was really great.

Bennett Maxwell
Thanks for having me.