Meet Chelsea & Ian Holmes

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chelsea & Ian Holmes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chelsea & Ian below.

Chelsea & Ian, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

We have both dealt with imposter syndrome our whole lives, and I don’t think we will ever really overcome it. It is something that prevented us from starting our entrepreneurial journey for many years, but finally we learned to take the leap and trust ourselves enough to start. Throughout the process of starting a small business there was always a voice in our head telling us we were not good enough, but we allowed it to be just that, a thought in our head that comes and goes.

We focus on providing the absolute best quality products to our customers, and even if they may not always be perfect, we know that we at least put every effort possible to do the best we could. Over the past year of running our business we have formed a local community of customers and fellow business owners that are consistently supporting us and cheering us on, that has really helped us build confidence in our skills and our ability to manage the business.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

We both studied mechanical engineering in college and have spent about a decade working in the industry. Chelsea always felt a little lost in terms of career direction until we started this business and she recently left her full time role in order to pursue this fully. She has never felt more confident in her career direction and purpose. Ian is still working as an engineer, but loves pouring his creative energy into new products and utilizing skills and techniques learned from his previous roles to improve our production and processes. It’s amazing how small changes to a process can greatly improve our product and it’s genuinely fun to think about how far we could take the scale of this business.

We share a passion for cooking & gardening (among many other hobbies) and quickly learned that when you make meals from fresh ingredients, they taste so much better. This inspired us to start growing mushrooms and we were so excited to share them with the local community. We are motivated every day to provide an ingredient that will bring together family and friends around the dinner table.

Good Human Mushrooms creates products with a singular question in mind: will this improve someone’s life? That focus and motivation has driven us from the first farmers market (where we brought along a single pound of mushrooms) all the way to expanding into secondary markets; building relationships with local chefs, food trucks and restaurants; introducing new products like mushroom coffee and Lion’s Mane Granola; and expanding our growing operations to run fully off-grid on solar power. Every investment we’ve made in this business has rewarded us in ways we could have never anticipated. All the sweat equity and financial investment has proven to be worth it when we see a new customer walk away with a smile on their face. We have a motto we love to share with everyone, “Eat Mushrooms & Be A Good Human”. It’s so important to care for the people around you and we hope that sharing a positive message and healthy products will influence our customers in a beneficial way.

We have a new product coming out in the next few weeks, that we aren’t ready to reveal yet. However, our current product we are most excited about is our Mushroom Mocha. It is packed with health benefits from organic ingredients like Lion’s Mane and Chaga Mushrooms, but it also tastes really good. It is similar to a chai with a hint of cocoa, we are hooked and our customers are too.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Confidence: we had to learn how to build confidence in our abilities and products in order to successfully sell them to consumers. If you don’t believe in your products, no one else will.
2. Resilience: we have learned to ride the highs and lows of running a small business, no two days are alike and sometimes the best and worst moments happen within 24 hours. It is important to stay consistent and focused despite these extremes.
3. Resourcefulness: the ability to DIY our entire mushroom grow room allowed us to save quite a bit of money on an upfront business investment. We have taken the time to learn new skills and it has paid off.

The best advice we could give is to come up with a detailed and well thought out plan, but don’t wait for the plan to be perfect to start because it never will be. You will continue to iterate and improve your processes every day as you learn and get feedback from your customers. Don’t let the desire for perfection stop you from getting started.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

Two books that have played important roles in our development over the past year are The Gap and The Gain and Unreasonable Hospitality. The former, suggested to us by another small business owner, our fitness coach, taught us to focus on the progress we have made to measure our success, rather than comparing ourselves to our idyllic future goals. After reading this book, we regularly talk about where we were a year or even a few weeks ago and it has improved our feelings about our success.

Unreasonable Hospitality stood out to us because it is a good reminder that just because something has always been done a certain way, doesn’t mean it always should be. Our line of products is not typical for mushroom farmers (we have both granola and cookies on our table). This is intentional, we wanted to create products that make functional mushrooms more approachable for people who are hesitant to try mushrooms. We believe everyone should benefit from the healing power of mushrooms.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.goodhumanmushrooms.com
• Instagram: goodhumanmushrooms
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/goodhumanmushroomsFL/