How Chocolate Saved Shawn Askinosie

After a particularly dizzying murder trial, Shawn Askinosie thought he was fine.

From that moment on, he practiced as a homicide attorney for five years, wondering why after nearly 15 years of loving his career he was struggling with panic attacks, mental fog and even the symptoms of a heart attack.

At some point something broke inside him: he loved being a lawyer, but just couldn’t do it anymore.

He listlessly tried to find his place in the world and stumbled upon the manufacture of chocolate. Now 15 years later Askinosie chocolate makes some of the highest quality chocolates in the world. On the journey, he also found a new meaning in life that helped him come back from the abyss.

With insights from Buffer’s Small Business, Big Lessons podcast episode one, and the accompanying unpublished interview, Shawn explained how chocolate saved his life – and how he uses his chocolate business to help others succeed.

Shawn Askinosie

From defender to chocolate maker

The trial began quite routinely: he represented a woman accused of murder.

Just before the trial was due to go before the jury to deliver the verdict, the judge pulled him and the prosecutor into his chambers.

The judge said he was revoking the jury’s mandate. Instead of a jury verdict of prison or death, the judge would give the woman a suspended sentence. Shawn wanted to keep fighting – he wanted his client to be released completely and not accept parole – but the woman told Shawn that he had done enough and she accepted the parole agreement.

After this process, Shawn tried to forget about it and move on for five years, but he couldn’t. He even got physical symptoms.

“I got these little mini panic attacks in the courtroom,” said Shawn. At the time I didn’t even know what a panic attack was, I had never heard of anything like it … my doctor thought it could be a heart attack. “

Though luckily it wasn’t a heart attack, Shawn’s doctor was deeply concerned about his mental well-being and told him to see a psychologist. In the end, he started taking antidepressants to keep himself afloat so he could continue the career he increasingly disliked.

“I loved what I did so much and then I didn’t – it really threw me off,” said Shawn.

Eventually he could no longer continue the law and resigned.

He spent a lot of time figuring out what was coming next and fell into food. He cooked a lot of barbecues for his friends. Then he tried baking. He enjoyed it, but nothing sparked a real passion.

Then a thought occurred to him: What about chocolate?

He learned the basics of making chocolate on a few blogs and was immediately drawn to the process. When he saw the spark of his passion, he traveled to Ecuador to meet cocoa farmers and learn about the entire production chain from bean to finished product.

It was on this trip that Shawn realized that his new passion would be to make the best chocolate in the world.

Shawn Askinosie and Lawren Askinosie inspecting cocoa beans with their farmer partners in Mababu, Tanzania (2019)

Honor family, support farmers and build community

Shawn set out to turn his passion for chocolate into a business so he could support himself and his family. But unlike his legal career, which was driven by an enthusiasm for the game and the mountains of money he could make, Shawn approached chocolate making as a tribute to his grandparents.

“My grandparents were farmers and an inspiration to me, just very nice people who led a simple life … and I wanted to honor them,” said Shawn.

He thought of his grandparents and wondered what he should achieve with the company beyond making economic profits.

He landed on three keys: caring for the farmers he worked with, providing great jobs for his future employees, and providing care and resources for the communities he worked with.

In his eyes, winning gave him the opportunity to focus on these other, bigger things. In his opinion, all companies should adopt this belief when considering corporate social responsibility (CSR).

“Even if it’s chaotic, we need to spread CSR efforts across all aspects of the company,” said Shawn. “… [It should] Don’t just be the elite in the company who have the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and really serve others. “

With his three keys in mind, Shawn Askinosie built Chocolate. He now has a profit-sharing agreement with farmers in his supply chain, he sets sales growth targets with an explicit amount for increasing employee wages and benefits, and started a nonprofit called Chocolate University Teach citizenship, entrepreneurship, and civic spirit by teaching children the chocolate business.

Shawn Askinosie inspects cocoa beans with farmer partners in Mababu, Tanzania (2019)

Building a service-driven company

During his ten-plus year journey, Shawn has put a lot of thought into growth. But it is nowhere near his top priority.

“Everyone tells us we have to grow, grow, grow,” said Shawn. “Why?”

Shawn knows that when people ask about growth, they always come with good intentions: your friends and family want you to be rich, while your local chamber of commerce wants you to provide jobs. But he would also like to take action against this idea and ask how companies can stay small and still make an impact.

“Scaling is a strategy that is not without sacrifice,” he said.

A quote Shawn regularly comes up with when the pressure to grow for the sake of growth is high is: “More is not enough”. And he wants entrepreneurs to focus on “enough”, not just “more”.

“We have lived this life of massive consumption and overconsumption, and the younger generations are pushing against it … because it’s a truth they want to live by,” said Shawn.

The rebellion against mass consumption is part of a larger movement that Shawn calls “corporatocracy” when a few large corporations control most of the economic means of production.

However, beneath the corporatocracy lies the future Shawn sees: responsibility for social welfare.

“There are a lot of really small businesses that do [you] I don’t even know, have never heard the term ‘social entrepreneurship’, but they have rolled up their sleeves and are doing a good job on their street, in their neighborhood. “

For new entrepreneurs trying to fight corporatocracy, Shawn has a simple rule: ask yourself how much is enough, don’t just ask for more. While “enough” will change over the course of your life, it is important to find out what is just enough for you and then align your actions with that goal.

This, said Shawn, will help “create companies of the future that are not driven solely by profit, but by this idea of ​​serving their brothers and sisters in need”.

Build a business, rebuild a life

There is a saying that you should always start how you want to continue. But the problem Shawn sees is not starting with good intentions; Most entrepreneurs do that. Instead, these intentions remain in the foreground when growth is required.

You can – and should – still aim for profit. The key is to balance profits by staying true to your purpose and your “enough.”

For Shawn, this profit balance proved to be “enough” to be his salvation. Instead of wondering why things don’t feel good when he’s “successful,” Askinosie Chocolate has meaning behind every action and dollar win that helped restore Shawn’s mental health and give him a new sense of the world admit.

“I admit that my company is less valuable than it otherwise could have been,” said Shawn. “And I agree. Why? Because it would have been out of balance to end the company the way I started it. “

Listen to Shawn’s episode and interviews with fellow small business owners on Buffer’s latest podcast. Small business, big lessons and come