Interview With Sodalicious Founder Kevin Auernig
Interview With Sodalicious Founder Kevin Auernig
Author: Joseph May · Published: November 10, 2015 · URL: https://medium.com/@bretoncompany/interview-with-sodalicious-founder-kevin-auernig-a0a15e239c76 (first posted on the Breton Company blog and on LinkedIn Pulse)
One-line: A short show-notes post for Episode 10 of Joseph May’s Entrepreneur Stories podcast: Kevin Auernig, CEO and co-founder of the Utah soda chain Sodalicious, on a hard childhood, dropping out of college, and bootstrapping from one store to seven.
Summary
Joseph May, who describes himself as a “recovering attorney” and first-time business owner (The Breton Company), used this post to announce the tenth episode of his interview podcast, Entrepreneur Stories. The guest was Kevin Auernig, CEO and co-founder of Sodalicious, the Provo, Utah soda shop that had grown to seven locations by November 2015.
May leads with the backstory. Auernig is the first guest he had interviewed who knew in the second grade that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, and May ties that to a childhood of survival: keeping the house warm when the electricity was cut off, and making sure he and his younger sister had something to eat. May’s read is that the hustle was learned long before the business.
The conversation, per the post, covered starting Sodalicious, growing it from one store to seven, hiring, and leaving college. The episode’s own description calls it “the story behind bootstrapping Sodalicious and growing it from one location to seven.”
The most useful detail is the reading list. May calls Auernig “a self taught individual” and lists the books he cited on air:
- The Art of Thinking Clearly (Rolf Dobelli)
- David and Goliath (Malcolm Gladwell)
- You’ll See It When You Believe It (Wayne Dyer)
- Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill)
- The Greatest Salesman in the World (Og Mandino)
- Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
- Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
The mix is telling: three classics of the self-help and sales canon, one pop-psychology book about underdogs, and two 18th- and 19th-century novels about surviving on your own resources.
The episode itself: “10: Keving Auernig, CEO and Co-Founder of Sodalicious” (the typo is in the published title), 43:31, released November 9, 2015. The iTunes link in the post no longer works; the audio is still in the show’s Libsyn feed.
Full text
Archived privately against link rot: ../attachments/interview-with-sodalicious-founder-kevin-auernig/interview-with-sodalicious-founder-kevin-auernig.md. It is taken from the original Breton Company blog post, which kept the book list that the Medium repost dropped. The archive also records the episode’s audio enclosure URL.
Connections
- Sodalicious: the company. The post is a snapshot from November 2015, when it had seven stores; it had 13 in Utah and Arizona by February 2017 (Daily Herald).
- Kevin Auernig: the subject, co-founder and CEO.
- Entrepreneur Stories Ep. 10 — Kevin Auernig (Sodalicious): the episode this post announces.
- Bootstrapping: the episode’s own framing of how Sodalicious grew from one location to seven.
- Entrepreneurship: a founder-origin story in which the drive comes from a childhood that forced self-reliance, not from a credential.