What Building Suja Really Cost Me: The Thing Nobody in CPG Talks About

The call came on July 3rd, 2018. House full of family. Fourth of July weekend. My boys running around, Linda getting dinner ready, noise everywhere.

Scott Uzell was on the other end. Coca-Cola wasn't moving forward with acquiring the rest of Suja.

I walked downstairs after that call and wept in front of my kids.

Not just from the grief of it. Six weeks before that call, Coke's management and HR teams had been at our facility talking integration. We had every reason to believe it was happening. Eight years of my life. Eighty-hour weeks. Eleven fundraising rounds in seven years. And then... nothing.

I woke up the next morning in Mayville, New York. Fireworks going off outside. Blue skies, 82 degrees, parade rolling by. I felt sick to my stomach. Wondered for a split second if I'd dreamed the whole thing.

I hadn't.

Here's what I've never said publicly about the year that followed.

Todd Fisher, our CFO, and I lived inside weekly cash projections. At times we were operating with less than $100,000 in the bank on a company doing $100 million in revenue. We had $40 million in secured debt coming due in October. Burning more than $10 million a year. I couldn't sleep.

And somewhere along the way, I was drinking far too much.

When I finally stepped away from Suja, my family sat me down. Linda and the kids. They told me they believed that if I hadn't left when I did, I might not still be here today.

I spent a month in rehab to reset my life.

I don't tell this story to be dramatic. I tell it because nobody else in the CPG world is telling it. And they should be.

We put the Forbes covers on the wall. We celebrate the exits and the distribution milestones and the acquisition announcements. We talk about slotting fees and velocity and gross margin. All of that matters. But we don't talk about what building something this hard actually costs you. The personal ledger. The toll that doesn't show up in your P&L.

Think about how U.S. presidents look when they enter office versus four or eight years later. Now imagine you don't have the staff, the institutional support, or the security detail. You've got a co-packer that might not deliver, an investor meeting Thursday you haven't prepped for, and a retailer review next week where your velocity is down 18%. You're running on four hours of sleep and whatever you grabbed from the airport.

That's CPG.

I've been building companies for 30+ years. Raised $200M+ across 40+ funding rounds. Eight companies, $700M+ returned to investors.

Of those 30 years, I've been actually making money in about five of them. The rest was real loss, real struggle, real sacrifice. I invested nearly $1 million of my own money into one company's final year just trying to keep it alive. That one didn't make it.

I know founders who ended up divorced. I know founders who missed so many dinners and school plays that their kids stopped asking them to come. I know founders who hit the bottle... or something else... and never told anyone.

My own parents ended a 25-year marriage partly because my father wanted to pursue a risky venture and my mother wanted stability. I watched that happen. I never forgot it.

So why am I writing this?

Because the founders reading this right now, the ones grinding through 2:00 AM shifts and investor rejections and retailer reviews where nothing is working... they need to hear the honest version. Not the filtered, polished, Forbes-cover version.

The hidden cost of building a CPG company is real. And it's largely avoidable if you're honest with yourself early enough.

Here's what I know now that I wish I'd known in my thirties:

The "Rule of Twos" applies to more than just money.

You've heard me say it before. Everything in CPG takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you planned. But it costs twice as much personally, too. Your relationships take more of a beating than you expect. Your health degrades faster than you think. Plan for the personal Rule of Twos the same way you plan for the financial one. Budget the recovery time. Build it in. It's not optional.

Your family are silent co-founders.

They don't get equity. They don't get press. But they carry weight alongside you every single day. If Linda hadn't been as strong as she is, Suja doesn't happen the way it happened. I don't come out the other side.

Have the real conversation with your partner before you start the serious push. Not the "I'm going to be busy for a while" conversation. The real one. What does our life look like for the next five years? What are the non-negotiables? Where are the lines we won't cross for the company? Clarity now prevents resentment later. I've seen it save relationships. I've seen its absence end them.

Watch for the substitutions.

The clearest early warning sign of burnout isn't exhaustion. It's substitution. You start substituting alcohol for sleep. Scrolling for decompression. Aggression for confidence. Isolation for focus.

I know because I made all of them.

When a coping mechanism shifts from occasional to structural... that's the signal. Don't wait for the crash to course-correct. The crash is expensive and the recovery is long.

Build a board of directors for your personal life.

I have a therapist. A chaplain. A small group of people who know me outside the business. Not because I'm particularly enlightened. Because I learned, the hard way, what happens when the pressure has nowhere to go.

The strongest founders I know all have something like this. The ones who blew up often didn't.

This isn't soft stuff. This is infrastructure. Treat it that way.

The "Suja years" math cuts both ways.

I always said one Suja year was worth seven years of traditional business experience. That's true. I believe it. But one Suja year also costs about seven years of physical wear if you don't manage it. Your body keeps the score whether you're paying attention or not.

Sleep, movement, food. These aren't luxuries. They're the operational infrastructure that keeps the CEO showing up. Your company can't afford for you to go down. Protect the asset.

After rehab, I came back. Built Proda. Co-founded CPG Founders Group. Now en route to attempting Everest.

The dream didn't die because I fell apart. It evolved because I survived.

But I won't pretend the fall wasn't real. It was. And parts of it were avoidable if I'd been more honest with myself earlier. If I'd asked for help sooner. If I'd protected the people around me better.

I didn't.

So if you're somewhere in the middle of the build right now... convinced that the next round or the next placement is going to fix the way you feel inside... hear me when I say this:

Hope is not a strategy. Not for your business. And not for your life.

The margins of a great company don't mean anything if the founder isn't there to run it.

Dream boldly. Plan soberly. And take care of yourself while you do.

The summit is real. So is the climb. Respect both.

If you're serious about building something that lasts without it breaking you in the process, come find us. CPG Founders Group exists to give founders the strategy, structure, and real-world support they need at every stage. Explore the CPG MBA and our 90-Day Breakthrough Program — built by founders who've been in the room where it gets hard.