[EO San Francisco] Building a Purpose-Driven eCommerce Business After Burnout With Chris Farkas

Chris Farkas is the President of EmergencyKits.com, a company that provides high-quality emergency preparedness kits and supplies for individuals, families, schools, businesses, government organizations, first responders, and the US Military. In January 2025, as Manager of Second Mountain Holdings, LLC, Chris led the acquisition of EmergencyKits.com, aiming to support its growth and innovation in the emergency preparedness sector. Under his leadership, the company continues to operate from its headquarters in Simi Valley, California, maintaining its commitment to quality and customer service.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:21] Chris Farkas recalls his childhood struggles with ADHD and a traumatic classroom experience
[10:29] Innovations in early mobile devices and lessons Chris learned from working at Handspring
[12:29] Understanding supply chain forecasting and managing seasonal inventory cycles
[14:51] Building data-driven tools to streamline purchasing and pricing decisions
[16:56] The dangers of staying opportunistic without a focused business strategy
[22:45] Validating market fit through customer discovery and real-world feedback
[27:15] Using acquisition entrepreneurship to reduce startup risk and accelerate growth
[35:38] Evaluating e-commerce opportunities based on simplicity, scalability, and purpose
[40:09] Leveraging inventory management expertise to unlock hidden business value

In this episode…

Leaving behind a long-time business can feel like a failure. But sometimes, it’s the first step toward alignment. After nearly two decades building a consulting firm, one entrepreneur chose to walk away, not because it wasn’t successful, but because it no longer lit him up. What happens when you decide to start over and build something that reflects your values and vision?

According to Chris Farkas, a seasoned entrepreneur with deep roots in supply chain and software, starting over meant buying a business that aligned with both his skills and sense of purpose. He highlights how acquiring an e-commerce company with a mission gave him the chance to apply his operational expertise to a meaningful product. This approach not only revitalized his energy but also offered scalable opportunities for impact. Chris explains how being burned out pushed him to seek simplicity in business models, and how owning a product-based business gave him the hands-on control he had been missing. His story is a blueprint for reinventing your career on your own terms.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran sits down with Chris Farkas, President of EmergencyKits.com, to talk about building a purpose-driven e-commerce business after burnout. They discuss his transition from consulting to owning a product business, how he chose the right company to acquire, and the mindset shift required to step back from something you’ve built. Chris also shares lessons from past failures and how he’s using them to fuel his current success.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“Don’t hire anybody that you can’t fire.”
“If I’m not going to do it now, I’m never going to do it.”
“I wanted it to be something that I felt good about putting my name on.”
“I love that aspect of being able to experiment and test and really figure out what’s right.”
“To the extent that there are opportunities the owner didn’t pursue, that’s unrecognized value.”

Action Steps:

Define your personal acquisition criteria early: Knowing what kind of business fits your values and strengths helps filter opportunities quickly.
Validate market demand before building: Talking to potential customers ensures you’re solving a real problem and reduces the risk of failure.
Prioritize simple, scalable business models: Choosing operationally straightforward businesses creates more room for experimentation and faster decision-making.
Leverage your unique skill set post-acquisition: Applying past expertise to optimize an acquired business creates quick wins and builds momentum.
Treat employees with transparency and respect: Building trust during transitions fosters team stability and smooth cultural integration.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:13

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the co-host of this show. And if you are new to this show, you can check out the archives. Because we have a lot of great episodes with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from a range of different companies and organizations.

And I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25, where we help connect B2B business owners to their ideal prospects using done for you podcast and content marketing, and also our new division, Strategic Gifting as well. And this episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco, which is the Bay area chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than 19,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 60 plus countries. And if you are the founder or co-founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over $1 million a year in revenues, and you want to connect with other like minded, successful entrepreneurs. EO is for you. And if you want to learn more about what we do over at EO San Francisco, you can go to EOnetwork.org/SanFrancisco.

All right. My guest today is Chris Farkas is the CEO and Owner of EmergencyKits.com formerly CEO and Principal consultant at eAlchemy. He’s a seasoned leader, 25 years of experience in empowering supply chain teams with effective tools and processes. And you know, he’s got a background, a varied background, having been involved in entrepreneurship for many years now.

And as we said earlier in the corporate environment before that, working for various different startups around the Silicon Valley area and San Francisco. And, you know, Chris, I’m really excited to have you here today because you’ve got a varied, interesting background. And let’s start with the fact that when you grew up, you said you likely had ADHD, you had some behavioral struggles, some social struggles. You moved as a kid, and you moved into this new classroom where you had this disciplinarian former nun teaching you and a little bit of a harsh experience through that one. That was a bit traumatic.

And I moved in the middle of the school year before in fifth grade. And that is traumatizing in itself because it’s a cultural shock. You got to make new friends and all that kind of stuff. Tell us this story about what it was like for you and this this experience.

Chris Farkas: 02:21

Yeah. Thanks for having me, John. I’m really excited to join you on your on your show. So I moved at about the age of eight from Southern California up to Northern California Mid-school year. The teacher that I had was a former nun.

Very strict, a little bit harsh. I almost certainly had ADHD, had trouble staying in my seat, was yelled at constantly for that particular day in the middle of winter here in California, and I was feeling nauseous. And I had been yelled at so much about getting out of my seat that I was raising my hand trying to get the teacher’s attention, and it seemed like she was almost intentionally neglecting my urgency. And when I finally got her attention, she sort of harshly dismissed me to to go use the restroom. And so I ran over to the coat rack, which also happened to be the place where everybody kept their lunches.

And in the process of getting my coat, I threw up all over everyone’s jackets and lunches. I think in some ways this story is like kind of endemic of my or typifies my my elementary school experience. And I struggled academically. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I struggled behaviorally just because of some of the ADHD stuff. And I struggled socially, quite honestly.

You know, throughout elementary school, it was a pretty tough adjustment moving up here.

John Corcoran: 03:54

And I know you participated in model UN and kids would tease you for that involvement.

Chris Farkas: 03:59

Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of a funny story. You know, by the time I got to high school, things were a little bit different. My math teacher in junior high happened to be the JV football coach, and he recruited me to play football in high school. It turned out I was a pretty decent football player, but I also was really interested in stuff like model UN and. And so one day I was late to practice because I had gone to model UN after school and was running out to make it to practice.

And man, I got the ribbing of my life from some of my teammates and my coach for doing this, you know, nerdy thing. When most of us were, you know, you’re kind of your typical jock.

John Corcoran: 04:40

Yeah, it’s funny because I, I say the same thing about myself. I feel like I had one foot in the Nerd Dome, which was I was on my school newspaper and eventually became editor of my high school newspaper and even went to journalism camp, which is like band camp but nerdier. And then also did football too. So it was like, you know, usually people fit into one of those silos, not both.

Chris Farkas: 05:05

Yeah, I was very much like that in high school. I was involved in at the time what was called peer counseling. You know, I, I wasn’t the best student, but I went to all the meetings with my, my nerdy friends for California Scholarship Federation and National Honor Society and things like that. And my little group of friends who had started out as like the total nerd group, ended up being on student council, you know, president, vice president, secretary. We ran the sort of gambit of roles on student council, and we’re putting on all the events and things like that.

By your senior year.

John Corcoran: 05:41

You lost your father to cancer shortly after graduating from high school, only six months after he was diagnosed. And you said that it was the best and worst thing that happened to you?

Chris Farkas: 05:52

Yeah, I don’t say that to a lot of people anymore because it kind of weirds them out, I think.

John Corcoran: 05:57

Yeah, I could see I could see that for sure. But you can also see how.

Chris Farkas: 06:01

I shared it with you because of the kind of connection that we have, you know, and, and I think you understand the depth of that. Yeah. I was 19, I was going to the local junior college because I hadn’t been a great student in high school and, and had been kind of lost a little bit. And yeah, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. We weren’t he didn’t tell us at the time that it was a pretty bad prognosis.

And yeah, it took about nine months for that to run its course. And yeah, it was the it was the best thing and the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. You know, I lost my dad and I didn’t get to have this friendship that a lot of adults, a lot of kids get to have with their parents when they become adults. And probably one of the greatest sorrows of my life was to have missed out on that opportunity. But I also learned at a very young age that we can’t really take anything for granted.

And, you know, a lot of people in in other types of circumstances, they get angry at, you know, somebody gets murdered or whatever. I didn’t have any person to blame. And it seemed like my dad’s death had no purpose. And I kind of came to this realization that, like, his death could have purpose if I made something happen from it, something good to come from it. And I think it helped me to focus in school and sort of simultaneously or shortly after that, I really found subject matter that I was really excited about, and that helped me to focus as well.

But I think the two things coming together at the same time translated into me being this from from being this really lazy student to being super charged in my studies and really thriving and finding my way.

John Corcoran: 07:44

And there’s certainly a part of your father that lives on in you. And he was actually an early computer science major. This was before computers were what they are today. And that actually ended up being something you took a basic programming class, which ended up becoming a passion of yours.

Chris Farkas: 08:04

Yeah, I took a Basic programming class in high school. Yeah. My dad was a computer science major when computer science was punch cards, you know. And and in high school, nobody really identified that as being a real strength of mine. I think people saw that I did well in the class and whatnot.

It’s actually a lesson that I take away from that is trying to pay attention to what my kids are good at and have a passion for, because I think those can oftentimes be the things that we turn into to thriving in, you know. So after graduating from college, I went to work at HP and, and I started sort of just hacking away at computers on my own. I had built my own computer in college. But when I say hacking, I mean software wise, I started using tools to streamline my desk. You know, we had these very repetitive processes in a large corporation like that, and I started using computers to automate a lot of that.

That skill eventually translated into me starting my first company, which was E alchemy.

John Corcoran: 09:09

So. And did HP recognize, oh, here’s a young budding kid who’s got skills around automation. Let’s let’s give him a promotion or no.

Chris Farkas: 09:18

Well, I was really lucky.

Chris Farkas: 09:20

People did recognize, you know, my capabilities. And I was given a bunch of special projects and things, and I was really thriving, even amidst some layoffs and whatnot. I was protected. You know, being recognized as somebody who had some real potential. But after about two years, when I applied for my first management position, HP was a very old school kind of place, and the expectation was that you were going to put in your time and earn your stripes.

And and I was sort of identified as being several years away from being management material. And so that’s, you know, when I decided that I needed to sort of take my skills to, to greener pastures and went to work for handspring, which was a company that was sort of born out of palm.

John Corcoran: 10:03

Yes. I want to ask about that because I was so crazy passionate about Palm Pilots, and back in the day I wanted one so crazy, and they were expensive for me at the time. You know, they were probably 300 or 400 bucks, which in today’s day and age is probably like a thousand bucks, right? They were pretty pricey. And you end up going working for handspring, which created also a handheld device.

What kind of technologies were on these devices back then?

Chris Farkas: 10:29

Yeah, before I get into that, I just got to pay homage to Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who were the founders of handspring are founders of palm as well. Really fantastic people with tremendous character. And that that affected me a great deal. Yeah. I mean, you know, these were small handheld devices, right?

I mean, handspring actually invented maybe what was the very first handheld phone called the visor. And it didn’t end up taking off. You know, iPhone obviously became the first very successful handheld PDA phone device. But handspring, those of us who worked there are proud to have been involved in the creation of really what was probably the very first handheld phone and PDA together.

John Corcoran: 11:20

That’s pretty cool. And you end up going on to Gap, where you helped with kind of supply chain management and forecasting. Let’s talk about what.

Chris Farkas: 11:30

Yeah.

Chris Farkas: 11:30

How you.

Chris Farkas: 11:30

Ended. Yeah. That’s what I got into it.

Chris Farkas: 11:32

At.

Chris Farkas: 11:33

At.

Chris Farkas: 11:34

Sorry.

Chris Farkas: 11:34

At.

Chris Farkas: 11:35

Hewlett-Packard and what I did at handspring as well. So I, I sort of stumbled into this world of supply chain management, which, you know, it turns out most people don’t even know. I when I met my wife, she said, you do what? She didn’t even know that was a job. But it involves a lot of data, right.

And both forecasting what you expect to happen in the future. Taking lots of information about what is happening or has happened, and trying to translate all of that into this succinctly, I’ll say, balancing what we call balancing supply and demand. Do you have enough stuff to sell to the people that want to buy it right at.

John Corcoran: 12:16

The.

Chris Farkas: 12:17

Right time? The the goal is to. Right. The goal is to have just the right amount. Not too much, not too little.

And yeah, to have it at the right time.

[Continue to Page 2]

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Search Interviews:

[EO San Francisco] Building a Purpose-Driven eCommerce Business After Burnout With Chris Farkas

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

In this episode…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

Action Steps:

Sponsor for this episode…

#1 Our Predictable Podcast ROI Program

#2 Our Comprehensive Corporate Gifting Program

Episode Transcript:

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