Jake KarlsCo-founder & Chief Rainmaker

A Chief Rainmaker is focused entirely on making friends and building relationships for the business, rather than managing operations or KPIs. I travel across North America to build connections with investors, retail partners, and creators, bringing those relationships back to our team to execute.

I stepped down because I was a terrible operator and manager. I was constantly playing to my weaknesses rather than my strengths. Stepping down allowed me to focus on storytelling, making noise, and building connections, while my partners handled the backend execution.

Corporate culture is often too buttoned up, bureaucratic, and political. People wear masks to protect themselves because they feel they have too much to lose. When employees access their genuine human capabilities instead of hiding behind a corporate facade, they generate true magic and drive organizational greatness.

After university, I tried to become an investment banker but failed to get a job. My parents told me I could not sit on the couch, so I started training people in their driveway, which grew into a successful outdoor boot camp. Later, I ran a college campus event and clothing business that went bankrupt.

I had no certifications, but I brought high energy and recorded myself training people for free on social media. People saw the excitement and wanted to join. It expanded from a driveway to a local park with fifty participants paying five dollars each, creating a successful business in Montreal.

They had spent a year and a half developing a healthy snack at home and needed a storyteller to build community. I was going through a painful breakup and needed a distraction, so I invested my remaining savings and moved back into my parents' house to launch the company in 2018.

I struggle with organizational structure, execution, and managing people. Management does not energize me. I realized that admitting these limitations was an ego check, but it allowed me to hand operations over to my partners, who are exceptional operators, so I could focus on what I do best.

If you spend your career trying to improve your weaknesses, you will run dry and fail to progress. When you focus entirely on your unique strengths, you excel because you are offering the world your best asset. Combining different individual strengths creates a collaborative outcome greater than the sum of its parts.

I was working nineteen-hour days, ignoring my body's warning signs, and chasing constant growth. While playing hockey, I injured my back and suffered intense shooting pains. Because I could not travel, I experienced an identity crisis, which triggered severe obsessive-compulsive disorders and blurred vision.

I took forty-two days completely off to prioritize my health, conducting extensive medical tests that showed no physical damage. I attended fifteen hypnotherapy sessions, which helped reduce my OCD symptoms and back pain, allowing me to gradually transition back to work over the course of a year.

I used to view rest as a sign of weakness and felt embarrassed by it. I learned that your brain must shut off to prevent creative burnout. Scheduling structured rest every quarter allows me to return with better creative output, strategic clarity, and energy for the business.

My LinkedIn posts generate hundreds of thousands of views, meaning strangers recognize me in coffee shops and planes to ask about the business. It is vital to protect your personal time and discuss non-business topics like sports or reading with the people you love to avoid being consumed by the brand.

We signed a contract to attend therapy together every week. Sibling partnerships carry childhood competitiveness and family dynamics that can destroy a business. Therapy provides a mediated, safe space to address alignment, money, and pressure, preventing partnership conflicts that typically ruin startups.

At first, it was painful because I received constructive criticism about my management failures, which made me feel insecure. Over eight years, we learned to communicate constructively without fighting. Even when my sister and brother-in-law faced marital challenges, we addressed it because family dynamics impact the business.

We got into Costco Canada by proposing a road show and promising to break their sales record. We utilized our social media community to drive massive traffic, breaking the record at the first warehouse. This proved demand to Costco, leading them to stock our products in their refrigerators.

We visited over twenty co-manufacturers, and they all stated our textured kitchen recipe was too difficult to replicate at scale. Building our own plant required raising millions in venture capital and government debt, but vertical integration gives us complete control over innovation and yields much stronger gross margins.

Cocoa prices quadrupled due to crop shortages and droughts. Raising prices would make us uncompetitive, so we chose to eat the cost and innovate a new product. We developed a no-bread peanut butter and jelly snack that does not use cocoa, which quickly grew to represent a quarter of our sales.

Executives should encourage their teams to share their personal stories on social media. We crave authenticity, and consumers connect with humans, not polished corporate logos. When your team shows up as their kind, authentic selves, they build deep trust and turn customers into passionate fans of your brand.