Source86 turns five this week. Here is what the last five years actually taught me.
Five years ago I could not have told you where I would be sitting today. About to become a father. Settled in a new city. Running a company that looks almost nothing like the one I started. You plan, and it turns out different, every time. That is most of what I have learned in five years, and somehow it is also the best part.
I have always learned from other people’s stories. I read how someone navigated a hard call, connect it to my own situation, and use it to find my way. It has never worked as a rulebook, but as a guide it has pointed me in better directions more often than not. So on Source86’s fifth anniversary, here is my contribution to that pile. These are not rules. Everyone’s story is different and mine will not map cleanly onto yours. But if even one of these helps you connect a dot, it was worth writing down.
A little context for where this comes from. We started around 2021 as an ingredient importer called Ingredient Brothers. Today we are Source86, a B2B sourcing, private label, and supply chain company. We import from more than thirty countries, hold a BRCGS AA food safety certification, run a team of around fifty people spread across a dozen of them, and supply some of the largest retailers in the US. None of that was on a whiteboard on day one. We got here one iteration at a time, and the lessons below are the ones I keep coming back to.
Growth is just a rotating set of constraints.
Once you have market fit, the only real question is how to grow, and that mostly comes down to allocating capital well, not running out of money, investing in the right places, and building both a model and an organization that can scale. We have been through every stage of this more than once. Working capital is the binding constraint, until it isn’t and the organization becomes the constraint, until that loosens and customers become the constraint, and then it rotates back around. You do not get to solve these once. You work on all of them all the time and shift your focus to whichever is tightest this quarter. The goal underneath it all is a machine that allocates capital, earns a good return, and does it again and again.
Compound it, or it doesn’t count for much.
A great thing that happens once and can’t be repeated is still great. It is just not as powerful as a smaller thing you can do over and over. So before we celebrate anything, I try to ask three questions. Is this repeatable? Can we compound it? Can we build it into the organization so it does not depend on me or any one person? When the answer is yes, that is where the real growth lives, the kind that shows up in year one and is still paying out in year fifty. A heroic one-off feels good. A boring, repeatable system is worth far more.
You iterate into product-market fit. You don’t start with it.
People look at a business from the outside and assume it had product-market fit on day one. When you read the granular story, you almost always find a lot of testing and iterating before anything clicked. We still look like the ingredient importer we began as, but the product underneath is close to unrecognizable. What we trade, how we handle customers, the services we wrap around the product, the quality and traceability we own across the supply chain: all different from where we started. We did not arrive with the answer. We found it by trying things, keeping what worked, and quietly killing what did not.
Finding product-market fit in the US market is the first real milestone, and the encouraging part is that there is enough demand for almost anything once you find it. The sobering part is the flip side of the same coin. Once you figure that out, the hard work actually starts.
There is leverage hiding in every business model. You just have to find it.
This is the part that still gets me out of bed. Every model has leverage somewhere. It might be a product, it might be a process nobody else bothered to build, but for us it has been people, and specifically a global team. We are in the business of solving global supply chain problems, and it never made sense to try to solve them from a single office in a single market. So we built a team that spans more than a dozen countries, close to the suppliers, the origins, and the time zones where the work actually happens.
There is an incredible global workforce out there, full of people who want to do great work, and being able to tap into that talent wherever it lives has been one of our biggest advantages. A global team solving global problems is not an edge a competitor can copy overnight. It builds on itself: the more we invest in the team, the more capable the whole company becomes.
If you are looking for it, leverage is there, in every industry and every model. Your job is to find it, unlock it, take advantage of it, and then go looking for more. Especially when you are small, this is what compounds into growth.
Start from a strong foundation, then spend your time on the 20 percent.
One of the best decisions you can make early is to hire people with real experience, people who have already built the thing you are trying to build. It is tempting, especially when money is tight, to figure everything out yourself. But most of what a business needs has already been solved somewhere by someone. If you bring in that experience, you get to start from a strong foundation, which means the work in front of you is the unsolved 20 percent rather than the 80 percent the world already cracked. The 20 percent is where you add your own spin, your own idea of how things should be done. That is the part worth your scarce attention. The rest you should borrow.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Look outside your own industry.
Closely related, and worth saying on its own. Look at how other industries handle sales, quality control, and systems, and take the best of what you find. The trap is to look only at your own industry, because that is how an entire industry stays stuck doing things the way they have always been done. Copy the proven practices so you do not waste energy inventing them, and save that energy for challenging the things everyone in your space treats as fixed. Some of the moves I am most proud of came from asking a simple question: who does this really well, even if they are nowhere near our business, and what can we take from them?
Not everything that matters can be measured, and that is fine.
I like numbers. But some of the most important investments a CEO makes are the ones you cannot put on a dashboard, the short-term spend that pays off long-term in ways you will not see for a while. If you insist on measuring everything, you will quietly talk yourself out of those, and they are often the ones that matter most. The discipline is not to measure everything. It is to know clearly what you can’t measure, understand it honestly, put other controls around it, and then have the patience to let it work before you judge the outcome.
The ground keeps moving, and that is the job.
The last five years have not exactly been calm. We built this company through a stretch where supply chains, freight, costs, and the rules themselves kept shifting under our feet. Early on I think I treated that turbulence as something to get through, as if stability were just around the corner. It is not. The shifting ground is the job. A company that handles ingredients and global supply chains lives in a world that will keep throwing curveballs, and the goal is not to wait out the chaos but to build something that can absorb it and keep moving. Some of our best work has happened precisely because the ground moved and we were ready to move with it.
The scoreboard lies, at least about you.
Some days I feel smaller than I thought I would be, and some days bigger, and it usually depends on nothing more than the model, the forecast, or the time of day. We have hit our goals, missed them, and blown past them, same as every startup that has ever existed. For a long time I let my sense of success or failure ride on a number that, by its nature, never stops moving. That is a hard way to live, and it is not a clear-eyed way to run a company either. What I try to hold onto instead is whether I am on a path I enjoy and doing work I would choose to do regardless of the number. That is far more durable than any quarter, and as it turns out, it makes for better decisions too.
There is no formula, and that is the honest part.
I want to be clear that there is no secret here, and no romance either. Statistically, surviving to year five puts us in a much better place than we were at the start, and I do not take that lightly. What I do take seriously is loving the work, appreciating it every single day, and the responsibility of providing a place for fifty people to come and do something they care about. We have flown that team from Morocco to Cape Town to Tokyo to build a culture together across a dozen countries, and that, more than any number, is what I am proudest of.
If you want to build something, you probably should, especially here in the US where there are real resources to help you start or buy a business. It is not for everyone, and being a founder is not more noble than the many other good roles a person can have in the world. But if it is for you, take what is useful from stories like this one, leave the rest, and go find your own path.
Five years in, surrounded by this group of people, building something a little different in the food supply chain, I cannot think of anywhere else I would want to be. Here is to the next five.
