In the summer of 2014, Elyse and her husband, Nick, filmed an appearance on ABC’s Shark Tank, seeking an investment in their bagel bites company, Bantam Bagels, which at the time was a small bakery in New York City. Lori Greiner ended up offering the Oleksaks a deal: $275,000 for 25 percent of their company. They took it on the spot. Life was never the same.
If you do Shark Tank right, you never go back to your regular life. As soon as we were done filming, we went to our hotel and probably laid in bed for 12 hours out of physical exhaustion, but we were on our laptops the whole time. There was smoke coming off the keyboards. If our segment made it to air (and they don’t guarantee it!) we needed to make sure we had Bantam Bagels set up as something people could search for and purchase, and that was like starting from scratch for us. What we knew was how to sell fresh bagels to people coming in off the street. For our bagels to be frozen and served in someone’s home, we had to go through research, development, and testing. We needed to find somewhere that could package and ship frozen bagels. And people needed a way to buy the bagels; we needed a website that could handle the traffic, and this was before Shopify! We basically had to reinvent everything.
When our episode aired, about six months later, our website immediately crashed. We stayed up all night, sitting on our laptops in the back of a CVS because we didn’t have time to go home, responding to every customer and begging them to come back. Nick and I were both Division I college athletes at Columbia University (that’s actually how we met!), but we didn’t walk on campus that way— we had to fight our way there. That’s the mentality we tapped into when it came to starting and running a business: we’re gonna sprint until we puke, because that’s how we’d been taught to succeed. When we got on Shark Tank, we thought: OK, this is the Columbia of opportunity. Now we need to take what we’ve been given and make something of it.
Above all, we focused on cultivating relationships. We would drop anything for Lori and her husband Dan. We stayed close with the Shark Tank production team, and we could tell them when we had big news, like our deal with Starbucks, or our deal with Delta. And we connected not just with the show, but with the audience. We showed our authentic selves to customers through our marketing, because we are who they connected with. The sales kept growing and growing. During this time, we moved to Westport, and it was like a gift. Our lives and business were so intense and chaotic, but this is one of the most supportive communities. I always know I can count on Westport. Being here was one of the things that kept us sane.
Eventually, we hit a point where we were growing too fast. The question became “Will we say no to sales, or seek outside money?” With our personalities, we were never going to say no to growth. We met with an interested party whom we felt a kindred connection, but because of the way their business was structured, the only thing that made sense was a full purchase of Bantam. It was so emotional— it was more than a sale. It was a way to keep our first baby alive. There was a lot of joy and relief.
Having gone through this incredible experience, I’ve had time to reflect on what it all meant to me. What I kept coming back to were the relationships. We could never have done this without the incredible people we’ve met. I felt like I wasn’t done with those connections– I wanted to give something back to everyone who had given me something. So I wrote a book [A Shark Ate My Bagel: How We Built Bantam Bagels, on Amazon now]. The book is really me saying thank you to everybody I have worked with or sold to over the years. It’s me saying: here's the impact that you had on me, and hopefully, I can give you a couple of nuggets of what I’ve learned along the way. And I want to keep giving back. My next goal is to start consulting with entrepreneurs to help them get their businesses off the ground.
All the ups and downs and the stress— when I think about the people we connected with along the way, I realize it was all worth it. Because of the connections we made, I can call our story a true success.
As told to Sara Gaynes Levy
"Above all, we focused on cultivating relationships."
"This is one of the most supportive communities. I can always count on Westport."