"The best piece of advice I've received and it's something I wish I had heard sooner is that there is always going to be more work that needs to get done."
Shayda Torabi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Restart CBD, Texas’ premier cannabis brand. Shayda is also the host of the popular cannabis and marketing podcast To Be Blunt, interviewing leading brands and marketers on their strategies for success.
She is passionate about helping build great consumer brands and leverages her background in marketing and technology to help navigate the cannabis industry connecting the consumer to high-quality cannabis products and education @theshaydatorabi.
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Table of Contents
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffet, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Shayda Torabi: We are one of Texas’s premier brands helping educate consumers on the cannabis plant. Everything we sell is farm bill compliant, meaning it is federally legal, and we were one of the first operators going into 2023 celebrating 5 years in business.
We’re a women-owned and sister-owned brand that prides itself in our delivery of educational content to help our consumers along their journey navigating cannabis-related products from CBD to THC. We’ve won Best of Austin the last two years, and our CEO is a leader in Texas politics as an advocate for cannabis at the legislative level.
What advice do you wish you received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Shayda Torabi: The best piece of advice I’ve received and it’s something I wish I had heard sooner is that there is always going to be more work that needs to get done.
Having a healthy balance of hustle mixed with mental wellness is important in weathering the storms because those are inevitable in entrepreneurship. Going into the next quarter, my intention is to delegate more and not be so relied upon for every moving piece of my business. It creates bottlenecks for my employees, stretches me thin, and doesn’t allow for scalability.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Shayda Torabi: Now that online is becoming increasingly more important it’s critical how you show up online. We’ve recently reinvested in updating our product photos and hiring an SEO agency to ensure we are putting our best digital foot forward to stand out amongst the saturation pulling consumers’ attention in every direction.
It’s empowering to see consumers shopping with us from all across the united states, but it also requires us to stay on top of trends and realize little things like slow page load time can be the make or break for a customer abandoning cart and going elsewhere for their product needs. We’re always trying to improve how our website performs so we can eliminate that being a reason we lose out on a customers shopping experience.
Christopher Hitchens, an American journalist, is quoted as saying that “everyone has a book in them” Have you written a book? If so, please share with us details about it. If you haven’t, what book would you like to write and how would you like it to benefit the readers?
Shayda Torabi: I am working on a book! But I haven’t published it yet. My book is about how I’ve navigated building a business in a highly regulated industry like cannabis/hemp.
When we got into the industry we were one of the first operators, and since then hundreds of thousands have entered the market, so my story is sharing my journey of how we got into the industry, how we’ve maintained a leadership position, and how we continue to innovate on products as the market evolves.
I think this is an important topic to highlight how we’ve found success considering all the things against us from payment processors turning us down, to getting shadowbanned and censored on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Shayda Torabi: I think one of the most underestimated parts is the data and analytics side of things, and being able to attribute and leverage the data of what customers are actually spending to help inform what your next business move is. For example, it’s awesome to make a sale, but do you spend time looking into the trends of what customers are buying and why.
Using data to not only inform their purchases but to also look at who your target consumers are, when do they shop, how frequently do they shop, what products do they buy together, those are all insights that can help you scale towards your next level of success much more strategically than just throwing a dart on the wall and hoping something sticks by launching a new product or offering without any data to back it up.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Shayda Torabi: If I had a business superpower it would be to crunch numbers, unfortunately, I am a creative brain and have had to force myself to look at the numbers to assess the health of my business, but of course, it comes easy to some people and I admire that skillset and wish it was my own.
The good thing is we can hire for our weaknesses and I have an outstanding financial team member who helps make up for what I lack. But if I could wake up and have anything added to my tool kit, it would be to make sense of the reports, understand how to pull them and read them so I can be as informed as possible about the business.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Shayda Torabi for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Shayda Torabi or her company, you can do it through her – Instagram Page
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