Building a Business with Purpose

Mike Pinkus: Over the last 10 years at ConnectCPA, we've had the privilege of witnessing the incredible journeys of over a thousand businesses. We've been there for the thrilling highs and daunting lows of entrepreneurship. We've celebrated wild successes and monumental exits, and we've also stood by businesses as they've navigated the stormy seas, facing roadblocks and challenges that every entrepreneur encounters in their day-to-day grind. Join us as we dive deep into the stories of these resilient individuals who dared to dream, who persevered, and who were a testament to the power of entrepreneurship. This is their journey, their lessons, and their triumphs. Welcome to GrowthTales. I'm your host, Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA.

Mike Pinkus: Today we have an amazing guest in Rami Helali, co-founder and CEO of Kotn. For almost a decade, Kotn has made a major impact in the apparel industry, starting from nothing and scaling into a multimillion-dollar business with both an e-commerce and retail presence. Today, Kotn is a large team with retail locations in Vancouver, Toronto, Brooklyn, LA, Montreal, and Calgary. But I believe what Rami's most proud of is the social initiatives that Kotn has undertaken over this last decade—helping to build schools, create jobs, helping local farmers, and cultivating community in Egypt. Wow, what a crazy, amazing journey you've had. Rami, thank you for joining me.

Rami Helali: Oh, thanks, Mike. Good to see you.

Mike Pinkus: I hope I didn't butcher your last name. I'm terrible.

Rami Helali: It's all good. You got it. Great.

Mike Pinkus: So, Rami, I think where we could start off is: what is the origin story of Kotn? How did you pick apparel? I know you went to business school, so where did it come from?

Rami Helali: Uh, that's a great question. I mean, to be completely honest, I think it was, uh, it was a lot more—we just jumped into it, to be honest. That's the short answer. I think at the time I was working in New York. It was a kind of a fund that invested in music royalties—nothing to do with apparel, nothing to do with fashion—but really a job that married the creative world with the business or kind of commercial world, which was kind of where I got my start. And my co-founder, Ben Mackenzie, was also living in New York. And to be honest, Ben called me one day and made a very simple statement, which today, in hindsight, I understand the things that maybe we saw as the commercial reason. But at the time, it felt like just a big jump to jump into it.

And he said to me, he's like, "Hey, you know how these t-shirts that we're wearing out to work and all these things are either kind of like low-quality fast fashion or high-quality and kind of luxury and expensive? I wonder if we can do something that is affordable and really good quality." And really, the question was a commercial question.

And the impact piece—at the time, no one was really talking about it. It's been eight, eight and a half years now, and no one was talking about sustainability, ethics, impact. The word wasn't really even used in 2015, 2016. But for us, it was kind of a natural way that we approached it. It wasn't a kind of feature that we thought about to add. We just wanted to do the commercial thing, which we felt like these retailers—there's this middle ground that wasn't being served in terms of customers wanting fashionable, high-quality stuff, but not at a really high price.

And the impact and kind of the supply chain that we built was a natural extension, I think, of our personal beliefs.

Mike Pinkus: Oh, that's amazing. And you commented on quality, and you went right to the source—going to Egypt. Did you have great connections in Egypt? I watched your video on your website where you talked about that original story. So how did you build out those connections in those early days?

Rami Helali: To be honest, again, I think the way we built the supply chain was because, to be honest, I knew nothing about the industry. And I was asking, today, some questions that I think more people should ask. But I kind of assumed that if you were gonna make a product—any product, apparel or otherwise—you would start at the fundamental building block, that raw material that went into it, and build your way up to create a final outcome.

I've since learned that no fashion company does it that way, and no one really goes to the source in that way. But because I had very little knowledge and experience in the industry, I was able to ask these kind of first-principle questions and end up on these cotton farms in Egypt. I quit my job in New York, and I spent six months literally living on a farm in Egypt.

I did not have any connections. My maternal grandfather is from a village where, growing up, I heard they grew Egyptian cotton. I heard that Egyptian cotton was supposed to be good quality. That was kind of the extent of the knowledge and connections I had. But I booked a flight—one way to Egypt from New York—quit my job, and I quite literally drove to this village three hours from Cairo, and I was walking around asking people if they grew Egyptian cotton. And it was literally as simple and as absurd as that.

And then this person I met, this farmer, said yes and invited me over. And I think culturally, that's like a big part—just kind of breaking bread and enjoying and having meals with both friends and strangers. And we became really good friends. And I ended up living with his family for the better part of six months, and understanding how the growth of cotton worked, how the cycle worked, how the farming piece worked. And at the same time, I was working out the yarn, the fabric, the dye house, the cut and sew—the whole chain, beginning to end. And I came back six, seven months later with 150 or 200 black and white plain t-shirts that I was very, very proud of—the quality and the things that went into it.

Mike Pinkus: I can definitely speak to the quality. I know when we bought Kotn shirts for our team—before that, we had gotten random apparel that we had, like, printed things on, and they fell apart. And they told us that they fell apart. And the Kotn t-shirts were the first ones that held up against the test of time.

Rami Helali: I'm happy to hear that.

Mike Pinkus: And what I'm curious about is, you went both retail and e-commerce. You have a very large e-commerce presence, but you also have storefronts in Canada, in the U.S. What made you have that dual strategy?

Rami Helali: So we were kind of—the genesis or the inception of the brand was during kind of the height and the craze of the direct-to-consumer kind of mania that existed for a couple of years. Basically, there was this hypothesis by venture capital, essentially, that you could put unlimited money into this machine called Facebook. And because e-comm distribution was lighter—or so they thought—they could scale infinitely, and this could look like a software business in the way that it scales, the margins, the way that it could.

I think, for the most part, it has since been debunked, right? I think we understand now, almost a decade later, that these brands that we all love and know and we interact with—both in food and clothing and whatever category it is—these consumer brands, this takes a lot more time to build that emotional connection with customers, to trust, the equity that essentially, you know, in kind of the tech world you'd call like organic traffic, like that word of mouth, that recognition of the brand. That takes time, and sometimes decades to build, right?

So we inherently—whether we were able to articulate it or not in the early days—understood that the best shopping experience happened in both online and offline. And although we started in 2015, 2016, we opened our first store in 2017—very early on. This was at a time when no direct-to-consumer, sort of like, you know, purebred direct-to-consumer businesses that are all e-comm, were doing any retail. This was a time when internet was everything and you scaled infinitely. But from an experience lens, from a customer lens—I personally, maybe to this day—I don’t think I’ve bought any clothing online. I need to touch it. I need to feel it. I want to see how it fits. And it’s a big part of that experience.

And I think brand building is that time you spend in-store. And then the other piece is, for us, our retail strategy isn’t just retail, but we focus on opening community stores.

So we don’t go to the most commercial street or the malls. We focus on places where we know there’s a cluster of our customers already existing, and we open them on streets where they might actually over-index on coffee and food and beverage—kind of like these neighborhood streets, kind of the high street, if you call it—where I think a lot of communities are built around the interactions at the coffee shops, the interactions at the bookstores or whatever that is, and integrating ourselves into the day-to-day life. That’s kind of how we think about it.

It’s why we’ve avoided malls. It’s why we’ve avoided, I don’t know—in Toronto, whatever that main, main, main street is—and really think about being integrated into the daily outcomes of our customer. And that’s really why we did retail. Today, we are moving closer and closer to a 50/50 business. We’re not there yet, but we’ve made strides every year. And it doesn’t mean that e-comm’s not growing—it continues to grow in a healthy way—but we’re growing retail at a very, very rapid pace.

Mike Pinkus: Oh, that’s great. And I think it also keeps you top of mind—the Kotn brand. Sometimes someone might buy through e-commerce, but they might have spotted you for the first time in downtown Toronto or in L.A. or in Vancouver. So it's a very smart strategy to just be top of mind, I’d say.

Rami Helali: I think that, like, we obsess—or the industry obsessed—over attribution online for so long. They talk about like, well, did this purchase really happen on Facebook? Or was it because of this ad or that ad? I think the answer is no one can draw very clean-cut, data-driven conclusions on this. And attribution is directional.

So to your point, it may be that you saw a tote bag walking down the street one time and you didn’t even recognize it. And then the next time you saw a Facebook ad, and maybe you paused for a second and you maybe absorbed a little bit of the brand. And then the third time, you were walking down the street with your friend visiting a new city, and you saw one of our stores in the right neighborhood, culturally. And you popped in and you had a good experience—you may not have bought anything. And then that fourth time, you get whatever, an email or an ad. And then you've been kind of—not primed—but you’ve experienced the brand enough touchpoints that, whether consciously or subconsciously, have built that trust and are ready to transact.

And I think the world in which people thought you could scale infinitely online did not consider that you need these multi-touch points across both on and offline for you to build and continue to build upon that trust and kind of directional affinity for a brand.

Mike Pinkus: It makes a lot of sense. And you're seeing a lot of brands take that direction because, like you said, people assume it's coming from one spot, but it could be a multitude of things. So, Rami, I want to pivot a little bit here. You've done—you started—as a certified B Corp, right?

Why did you start as certified? Like, did you know that you wanted to have a social initiative—the big things you're doing in Egypt, the building of schools, creating jobs, helping out local farmers? Was that part of that initial strategy with Mackenzie and Ben on day one?

Rami Helali: So I think I was kind of trying to allude to this earlier. I think what was always there and has never faltered was our belief in how people and places should be treated. And today, that sounds like a social impact business, but I think that the biggest force for good in this next phase—of whatever you call it, our economies, capitalism, whatever it is—is this updated version of it, right? Where you include more of the stakeholders across all the places that we touch in the decision-making.

And I believe that it's better outcomes for the business and better outcomes for the societies, the world, the environment in which we live. And what I mean by that is: when you have a business, and then separately—after the business outcomes—think about sustainability or impact or whatever it is, the second you have a hard year, the second you have a hard quarter, the second you have a hard month, the first thing that gets ejected is those add-ons that have been bolted on after the actual business model is built.

And for us, our belief has always been: build a very strong business with a very strong brand, with a very strong product that happens to be sustainable and impactful. But build it in how the economic outcomes are achieved. And in our case, we get better margins because we work directly with these farms. And even though we pay them more than market rate, there's no middle people between our farmers and our yarn, our yarn and fabric, right? So there's actually economic incentive for the business to continue to invest in these communities. By building that hand-in-hand, it makes it so that the viability of the business model is intertwined in an inseparable way from the impact initiative.

So to answer your question—we didn’t start as a B Corp. We started as an impact company. And maybe three or four years in, one of our investors was like, “Hey, you should look into B Corp.” And to be honest, I used to always be very cynical about a lot of these accreditations and logos that people put on. Because I would go to these factories in the early days and they’d be like, “We’re accredited” or “We’re certified this and that,” like Green Planet and Blue Dolphin—whatever, all these different green-sounding certifications.

And I’d walk in and I’d be like, I know very little technically, but that smell I’m smelling doesn’t sound like it should be going back into the earth. And the way that these workers are being treated—I can tell, regardless of the certification—is not the right way to treat your team. So I was very cynical about a lot of these sorts of things. But when I went through this B Corp process, it was a very invasive and tough sort of certification process.

And it made me think, okay, well, if this is happening to us, this is happening to others. At the time, there was a very, very small number of companies that were B Corp certified. It was like Patagonia, it was like Ben & Jerry’s—there were a few of these kind of leaders in what I was talking about: the business model being intertwined with impact.

So I felt much better about it and got certified. And really the way I think about B Corp certification is: we’re in the top—I don’t know what it is—we’re in the top one or two percent of all B Corps. It’s because we’re not making business decisions to squeak over a line of whatever B Corp considers good or bad. We’re in the absolute top of it because we have our own internal lines and beliefs on how the world should look and be, and how people should be treated—that we march towards.

And then when we apply the B Corp certification kind of process over and above it, we end up in the top handful of percent because we’re on our own holding ourselves to a different outcome. And it’s not just financial success, it’s also the schools that we build, the farms that we work with, the business model that we want to replicate. It started in Egypt, but now we’re thinking about: how do we do this in South Africa? How do we do this in Pakistan and India? How do we do this in Peru? What does that look like?

So that’s how we approach it. B Corp is really for the customer that doesn’t have the time to do the research. It’s a really quick way for them to filter: is there impact, yes or no? And I think that’s how I think about B Corp. But I don’t think about it guiding my actions in terms of the impact or the business.

Mike Pinkus: And I think what you're saying is a huge point, which is—I can see it’s authentic. To your point, like, you see certifications and all these things that companies use as a way to maybe bolster sales or be in the limelight as an ethical brand. But you going to Egypt, spending the six months, knowing who's making the product, touching and feeling the product—it is genuine, it's authentic. I've known you a long time and I know it's real and authentic. And I'm glad you explained it—like, you were skeptical about this when you started. I didn’t know that part, that it was an investor recommendation. So I’d say kudos to you, Rami, that you guys have done it that way.

Rami Helali: And I appreciate that. And I think for us, the thing—if you asked our team and everyone across the board what we're most proud of—it’d be like the 20 schools that we’ve built and run, right? That’s like a Toronto District School Board worth of elementary schools. That’s crazy. Today, run, right? Like we have today, over the years, that’s compounded into tangible outcomes.

Today we work with close to 3,000 smallholder farms that we buy directly from, subsidize, etc., etc. So the numbers have started to compound. In the early days, it felt insignificant that we were subsidizing 10 farms. You know, it’s like, “Alright, well, that doesn’t feel like a lot of impact.” But I’ve learned over the years, the power of compounding both works on the economics of the business but also the impact that you have.

And today, when we do these impact assessments across our supply chain, we’re looking at, like, a hundred-and-something thousand people that are directly impacted by our work, right? Which is, you know, not a small city worth of people.

Mike Pinkus: That’s incredible. And to go back to the business side—'cause I know you are a business person at heart—you came from a pedigree of a top business school, and Rami, you’ve also played the long tail. Meaning, you guys have been around for—what are you in—year 10 right now or year 9?

Rami Helali: We’re in year—well, in March we’ll start year 9.

Mike Pinkus: Amazing. And so building a multimillion-dollar business is not easy. And you’ve been doing it for a long time, and I feel there’s scars and wounds for a CEO going through this. And you’ve survived. I’m not gonna go through the stats, but very few businesses make it to the level that you have.

What have been some of the—I know there’s probably a thousand challenges—yeah, if you could give me a couple of the biggest challenges you’ve faced over the years, what would they be?

Rami Helali: I think it's always—and this goes for the thing that probably gives me the most amount of energy and fulfillment in my role and also the other way—it’s always like: how do you consistently build the best team while you're reinventing yourself annually, right?

And the challenge here is, like, if you're a business that's doubling every year, let’s say—and I know that's a very small group of businesses—or even growing 20%, 30%, whatever that may be, the way I see it is: if you are a Director of Operations at a company today that's $10 million, and then next year it's $20 million—well, in my opinion, you basically have to be twice as good at your role to just be as effective as you were last year, right?

And I think that, for me personally, I did not appreciate this steep curve that was going to be required in learning, in scaling, and operationalizing things, and putting things down into processes across the board. But, like, understanding something intellectually versus understanding the actions that are required to keep up with the speed was something that was kind of a tough learning moment.

Maybe year five to six or six to seven—somewhere in there—we kind of stumbled for a year in terms of the speed in which we were growing because we hadn’t taken the actions early enough to set us up for success down the path. Like, you know, going from one to two million, adding $1 million in revenue is a challenge. But going from twenty to forty, for example, is adding $20 million in one year. And although the growth rate looks the same, it's literally 20x the number of whatever inputs—dollars, whatever it is—coming in and out, right?

So for us, it was not getting ahead of some of these things early enough. And in the same way, not understanding—I think for me personally, from my role as CEO—understanding the types of systems that would need to be built to be able to handle something like that. So that was one of the big ones for me: not kind of anticipating and putting things in place early enough, consistently enough.

And then all the other things. I think early on—especially today in the world where we read about these really massive valuations over very short periods of time, and these exits, and this and that—I think it alters our perception on what we expect out of businesses. And in the early days, the things that made me self-motivated to show up to the business—I realized maybe two or three years in that external motivators would not work. And this would have to be internal motivators.

And what I mean by that is: the promise of a big dollar amount or a big impact or whatever it is—those things are very unpredictable and out of your hands. And you would have to find an internal motivator to make you show up and take on these challenges every day. So I think I’ve seen this with peers and friends where they start because of an external motivator, and then they do find an internal motivator. But then a lot of people don’t find that internal motivator and walk away from businesses.

Because if you go into a business for promises that you're gonna be able to pocket $50 million—well, the probability of that is quite low in two years, right? Or three years, or four years. But if you have to stick around for a decade—which I know you’ve done, a decade, maybe more—if you have to stick around for a decade, you may never see that money.

Rami Helali: You may—and it may take 10, you may—and it may take 20. But if it's an internal motivator, whether it's building teams, building the company, building the impact, or all of the above, then you're able to show up day in and day out. So for me, recognizing that a year or two in was a shift. Maybe not a mistake, but a conscious shift about, like, hey, you have to enjoy this day. Find what you love about this, or move on.

And thankfully for me, there were many things that I love about what I get to do.

Mike Pinkus: I think it's incredible the way you explained it. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with this—which is: going from a dollar to two dollars is very easy, or a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand, a hundred percent growth rate. But going from two to four, or ten to twenty, are very, very different things.

Because you can't just look at the growth rate. The absolute dollar impact is a very, very difficult lift. Meaning, the bigger the numbers get, the more challenging, the more at-bats you have to put in—whether it’s marketing dollars. So I think what you're saying is something that a lot of entrepreneurs, early on in their journey, probably are not aware of. Meaning, they're going from one to two thinking, “Yeah, we just hit a hundred percent,” because you're—

Rami Helali: Just looking at a spreadsheet, right? And the spreadsheet just says a hundred percent every year. And it doesn’t matter what the number is—it’s just the spreadsheet showing a hundred.

But then you realize that like, shit, I’ve never seen that much money in front of me, ever, in my life. Like that is 10, 20, 30—whatever it is—five million dollars, whatever that number is. You sometimes get, like, there’s a you disassociate from the figures and you just look at the growth rate.

And like you said, it’s very different.

Mike Pinkus: It’s funny how you say the spreadsheet. It’s like—Mike Tyson said it—everyone’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face, right?

Rami Helali: Yeah, exactly.

Mike Pinkus: “Oh, the Excel model said it’s easy,” right? But it’s not.

Rami Helali: Exactly.

Rami Helali: That’s a terrible industry. [laughs]

Mike Pinkus: Well, look, I guess it’s in the eye of the beholder. But yeah. Have you emotionally dealt with this? By the way, everyone I talk to thinks their industry is the worst industry—I should have mentioned.

Rami Helali: No, no, this is a constant across the board. No one believes they’re in a good industry, because everyone’s going through a similar version of absolute devastation and how difficult it is—just building something. Going from zero to one—the act of creation—and then the act of scaling that, the act of... all of those, each one of those kind of chapters of the play is incredibly hard in its own way.

But listen, I think everyone probably gives you a version of an answer where they find some sort of purpose. And that can come through a combination of spirituality, meditation, whatever that is—but a separation and an understanding of controllables and non - controllables. And people have frameworks, whether it’s religion, spirituality, whatever it is, to separate and start understanding and grounding themselves in what they can actually impact and what they can’t impact.

Because I think that’s the piece where emotions start getting really difficult. I think if you’re at peace with what you can handle—and just understand that you will give 100, or 200, 500% to every controllable—and understand that the chips will fall where they’re gonna fall...

In the last five years, we’ve had a pandemic, and then a pandemic surge, and then a pandemic crash. And then, I don’t know, we print money—it seems like—every day, and the economy doesn’t make sense anymore. And like, all these things have happened in the last four years, right? So if you’ve run a business that’s survived the last four years, that has existed before or after, you’ve seen an immense amount of things that are non-controllables.

And I think if your emotions follow those non-controllables, you’re gonna really have a rough time, right? The ups and lows—you just can’t handle that, I don’t think. But if your emotions are only tied to the controllables, I think—things like effort, hiring, the way you treat people, the way you set strategies, the way you execute on strategies, the accountabilities you set—those are things you can control. And just understanding the difference between the two.

So to answer your question—emotional, how to handle it—for me, what I’ve learned is really clear differentiation between controllables and non- controllables, and having almost no emotion towards non-controllables. Take the day to be upset—that’s what I always tell myself. Like, if it’s a non- controllable, feel sorry for yourself, stomp your feet, you have the day to do it. But tomorrow it’s done. It’s gone. It’s the new reality, and you’re just handling controllables from then on.

So I think creating that separation has been one of the most impactful things for kind of the emotional ride that comes with entrepreneurship.

Other than that, I work out a lot. I am very fortunate to have a loving family. So there are these other outlets, and people that you lean on. I think spouses are a big part of it, family, whatever it may be. That direct circle that you learn to lean on.

And to be honest, I don’t think entrepreneurship is the hardest part. I think it’s everyone around them that gets the brunt of it, right? Because we chose—we signed up for this. They kind of got dragged along one way or another. Even if they knew when they got involved, it still isn’t the same thing.

So for me, they’re the real MVPs—it’s everyone around us in this support network that, whether they signed up for it or not, are now a part of it.

And I think that’s kind of how I approach it. It’s hard. It’s messed up. You keep taking these punches—they don’t stop. The amount of difficulty and pain doesn’t decrease. It just evolves. The shape of it evolves.

In the early days, it’s like how do you create from zero to one, then going from one to two, then from two to whatever. The pain, the difficulties, in my opinion, are the same. It’s just sometimes it’s internal reflection work that you have to do.

Like, I think entrepreneurship forces you to look inwards in a way that you may feel uncomfortable doing in the early days, for sure. You’re like, “Oh shit, that is all me. That is all ego. And that is all grossness from inside of me that I gotta fix to be able to better handle these situations.”

And you’re constantly put in these situations to reflect. It’s just a pressure cooker. So you have to evolve much faster. You have to reflect much deeper and much more often than I think I would have had to if I hadn’t pursued this path.

But again, it goes back to internal vs. external motivators. It’s gonna be hard. The emotions are gonna exist—no matter how stoic, or how much you understand what you can control and not control—it’s still gonna remain hard, and it’s going to continue to be that way.

But I think having the right internal motivator—and honestly, perspective—right? Like, for me, at some point a year or two in, I went from, “Why is this happening?”—you know, whatever that problem is—to “Holy shit, I get to do this.” And I get to solve these problems. And I get to be paid to choose who I get to work with, and build something that didn’t exist that I feel very strongly should exist.

And that is such an honor and something that I’m grateful for. And I think that shift in perspective has been huge for me.

Mike Pinkus: That’s great. The reason why I even asked the question is—you seem more grounded than most. I mean...

Rami Helali: I think we all figure it out. Honestly, I think we’re all treading water the same under whatever facade we put out. But we learn, I think, to maybe disassociate the brain from the treading. I think that’s how we get better—like the thought, the strategy, the execution—needs to be separated from the panic of the day-to-day where you’re just treading water, right?

Because that’s the heart of the difficulty, I think, of entrepreneurship. You have to be calm and collected and think about how you’re going to deal with an external or internal situation. But at the same time, your day-to-day does not stop. It is unrelenting. And you have to continue to tread while you give yourself space to think ahead.

So that’s the difficulty of it. But that’s why it’s also the most rewarding thing—when it works.

Mike Pinkus: Well, there’s no doubt. It’s funny—we started this podcast because we wanted to hear the stories of people we’ve worked with, people we’ve met over the years. And the funny thing that keeps coming up over and over again is—unless you’re HubSpot or Slack—these are some of the most successful businesses, people I admire. And every one of them has war stories.

Because entrepreneurship is like what you said—you don’t know what you’re signing up for, but you become a different version of yourself through the journey. And Rami, I think you’re definitely an example of that.

The last question I want to ask you is: given all those lessons and challenges, if you could give advice to your younger self—go back eight, nine years into the past—other than the same answer everybody gives, “Oh, I’d pick a different industry”—yes, I know…

Rami Helali: I would do that. [laughs]

Mike Pinkus: What advice would you give yourself to steal a business?

Rami Helali: Honestly, I think about this a lot—and it might seem counterintuitive—but I think: protect your naiveness.

I think that in the early days, you’re naive and you see the world through these optimistic, rosy glasses. And that’s the impetus—or the reason—why you decide to create from zero to one. You believe that this thing needs to exist, and you’re naive enough to believe that you are the person, the right person, at the right time, to do it.

So much of it—and I think so much of the companies that inspire us—was just because someone had an uncompromising view, which was rooted in being naive, that the world should look some other way. And they decided to do it.

But as the company grows and you start hiring grown-ups—and I guess I’m kind of a grown-up now—but in the early days it felt like I was a child, and I was hiring grown-ups. Like, I remember the first time I hired someone who had kids in university, and I felt closer to university than to someone who had kids in university. And I remember being like, “Shit, who put me in charge?” [laughs]

And I think—just protecting that naivety. Like, a space to be naive. Because you start hiring grown-ups who, naturally and as they should, want to build process and repeatability and predictability, right? And the chaos of unpredictable, kind of ad hoc, which is how it is in the early days, starts turning into more of a shaped, process-driven, repeatable thing because there are grown-ups in the room.

But I see this often—and I’ve seen us do a poor job in one quarter versus another—of protecting a space to be naive, and to kind of think outside the box and reinvent yourself. Because as you know, you might be the hot tech company today, but tech in two years from today is going to look very different.

So if you survive two years, you’re going to have to reinvent yourself again in two years, and again two years after that. And if you don’t protect a space to be naive and to think like that, you’re going to go to the side—just like the businesses that you used to see back in the day when you started the company and were like, “We’re going to build something that puts these dinosaurs out of business.”

So you can very quickly become one of them. So for sure—just protecting a space for it, I think, is the advice that I would give. Maybe not if I was just starting a business, but if I was thinking about how to go from year one to five, and five to ten, that’s the advice I would give.

Mike Pinkus: Well, Rami, I don’t want to hold you any longer. But I do want to congratulate you on what—first of all, Kotn is an incredible company. For anybody who hasn’t checked out Kotn, it’s an incredible, incredible company, incredible apparel.

And I think you understate what you’ve achieved over these years as well. Because I don’t know what the stats are of even surviving eight, nine years—or even achieving a seven-figure, eight-figure, whatever-the-number-is that people aspire to achieve—it’s very, very difficult. Not many companies do it.

And I feel like entrepreneurs are hard on themselves. So you’ve achieved a lot—appreciate it.

Rami Helali: Right back at you, Mike. I have a lot of respect for what you’ve done.

Mike Pinkus: Rami, thanks for joining me.

Rami Helali: Thanks. And I feel the same way. And of course, thanks for having me, Mike. I appreciate it.

Mike Pinkus: Awesome. Thanks so much, Rami.

Mike Pinkus: That was Rami Helali, CEO and co-founder of Kotn, who has had an incredible journey building a multi-million dollar business while also giving back and making a social impact along the way.

Two of the lessons I took away from Rami:

You have to separate your emotions from the swings or variance you experience in the business day to day. There are inevitable ups and downs over a long enough time horizon, and the steadier your emotional state, the better.

You may have started the business to become wealthy or achieve a big exit, but somewhere along the way you have to find a deeper meaning for why your business must exist. Because if you don’t, you’re more likely to give up when things get tough.

That's it for today. Until next time, keep scaling up and breaking barriers.