How this founder runs two international businesses at the same time

If you think founding a company is hard, try starting another one on top of your first business.

Kelly Phenicie, founder and CEO of both textile startup Harkened and apparel brand The Endrey, is experiencing those difficulties firsthand.

After college in New York City, Phenicie moved to Peru to pursue human rights work but, “through an unpredictable path and series of events fell into knitwear,” she explained to Founder Brew. While living abroad, Phenicie joined another American’s Lima-based startup as an employee, managed knitwear production, and spotted an opportunity to grow the business by providing private-label manufacturing for other designers’ goods. It was a success. So successful, in fact, that the original founder thought she should take it over herself.

“She wasn’t super interested in it, so she proposed I buy her out,” she said. “I had a small panic attack.”

Phenicie decided to take the leap and took over the manufacturing company, now known in the US as Harkened. She started studying other founder stories to give herself a road map, specifically remembering Waze co-founder Uri Levine’s advice, “there are right decisions and no decisions,” to be particularly helpful.

Two years later, Phenicie saw an opportunity in the deadstock and specialty stitching products left over from excess production runs and launched direct-to-consumer knitwear brand The Endery in 2019.

Due to the international origins of her businesses Phenicie, now based back in New York City, also has to navigate taxes, regulations, and surprising cultural differences. For instance, in Lima it’s taboo to multitask while eating, so you should expect a reply to that noon email later in the day. “People are very, very religious about lunch,” she said.

Phenicie spoke with Founder Brew about the challenges of running two companies, the complexities of international business, and the founder advice she found actually useful.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Prior to getting the offer to buy out the original founder, had you ever thought about starting a company?

Absolutely not. I hadn’t thought about any of that. That felt terrifying. But I really enjoyed, or I was excited about the possibility of doing it with her. I liked her. We had a great dynamic. She’s smart. She’s scrappy, and then her approaching me to buy her out, and she wasn’t going to be part of it. It was like, “Holy crap! I’m going to have to deal with this by myself. How am I going to do this?”

Going into other people’s stories of how other founders started, and it’s like nobody really knows what they’re doing. Some people do, but there’s a lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing, and they just figure it out along the way. So that made me feel like I could do it too.

How did you apply “there are right decisions and no decisions” as a founder yourself?

That was something that really helped me power through getting stuck because inevitably you’re going to make the wrong choice, but you do the best that you can with the information that you have. It’s going to be fine for now until you figure out something better, and then you just change it at that point in time.

Even things like naming, “What am I going to name it? What am I going to call it? Does it need to be trademarked? Does it not?” One thing leads to another, and there’s always going to be a string of things.

I would maybe consider myself a recovering perfectionist, and what’s great about that is I do think about things deeply. I’m not not flippant with things. I take things seriously. I give things a lot of thought. I’m very intentional, but you can’t always get things perfect. They need to move forward.

Seeing the opportunity to start a second company, were you like, “Oh my God, I don’t want to do another thing,” or was it like, “I’ve kind of got this now”?

I was stoked. I was very excited about it. A lot of us entrepreneurs have shiny object syndrome, and so we get extremely excited about the possibility of something, and I was loving it at the time. Of course, it’s only later that my brain and body catch up. I’m like, “Oh my god, this is actually a lot of work.”Honestly, me being in Lima is a huge part of why I became a founder. The US, corporate NYC, there’s so much pressure to do things a certain way, or to meet a certain standard, to execute on a certain script, but in Lima I was off the grid.

That freedom has become a huge part of how I operate and what I tap into. It’s definitely more of my journey, especially since I’m bootstrapped and I don’t have funding. I like that. I do have to have these “come to Jesus” moments with myself, where I’m making sure that what I’m doing brings me joy, and it’s how I want to run things, and not just according to someone else’s script.

What have you learned about running an international business?

I started my company in Lima, so it’s a Peruvian company. Having to have a foothold here and start a US corporation, and then how they interact together has definitely been one of the harder parts of this. There’s a layer of complexity to my business that is not common for such a small business, like seven figures. Then I’m like, “How do I finance finding the experts, making sure I’m compliant with each of the governments?” That has been difficult for sure. And then there’s cultural nuances. Thankfully, I’m fluent in Spanish.

How much of your time does international compliance take up?

It’s awful. I don’t recommend it to anybody…Since I’m the person behind both companies, and there’s an international component, and they have a working relationship together, then transfer pricing is when each government wants to make sure that you’re not shifting the profit to one country over the other based on tax favorability.

In 2017, Trump makes this law, [Global Intangible Low-taxed Income], and it has the acronym GILTI, just to make you feel bad as well. Really, it was designed for Apple, Google, that have some sort of shell companies in Ireland and low-tax countries.

It just sucks up all small business owners into it. If you’re a global nomad or an American that has an entity offshore, then you might owe taxes to the US government as well if you’re not paying enough taxes in that country. Peru is a very high-tax country, so that wasn’t my problem.

I reached out to several people and I got just radically different answers. Beyond the regulation itself, actually finding somebody who navigates it, and then paying for these people, understanding what level of expertise you need and what that’s going to cost you is so difficult for a bootstrapped business under $10 million.

Finding a fractional CFO or somebody or a CPA who understands what’s happening is also another layer. There’s just a lot that goes into it, and maybe it’s not all that difficult if you have it figured out and you know who to go to. But when you don’t, finding that is quite the challenge.

What hard choices come up in running two companies at once?

Having the right people in the right seats…I almost feel like an engineer who’s watching how the machine runs, and then if something gets squeaky or it’s not quite running the way that it should, that’s where I start diving in to see what’s necessary, or a person’s bandwidth starts getting limited based on how the role has grown…and then how to support them, or how that needs to be built out.

But what I like about bootstrapping is you really develop this muscle of being able to understand where your time and money needs to go at any point in time. I think when you do get funding, it’s easy to just allocate to anything…but it’s not necessarily the right thing in bootstrap. If it’s not the right thing, you don’t exist anymore.

What would you say to a founder who has the opportunity to run two businesses at once? What advice would you give them?

I prioritize myself like no one’s business. For a long time, I was really tending to everybody else, and I’ve experienced burnout a lot as well and had to navigate it and move through it.

Running is really important for me. Runner’s high is absolutely a thing, like I’m a different person when I’m doing that. Then it’s making sure I’m sleeping enough, making sure I’m eating enough, am taking care of myself in order to run, and then basically the whole ecosystem of how I’m my best, because I’m still the engine behind all of this right now. The most important thing is surrounding yourself with a support network and making sure that you’re not discounting how important you are—almost like an athlete treats their body. Actually, just like an athlete treats their body.

The way that I built the second business was radically different than the first because I didn’t have time. In the first, I was deeply in the weeds. I hired everybody. I had a full-time staff. I was training everybody. I was engaged with everybody constantly. With the second, since I didn’t have time, I just hired people who already knew how to do the thing…I went out and I just found contractors who were experts in what they do, and who also conveniently already had worked together or knew each other. I would deal with business one, and then on business two, everybody already knew what to do, almost better than I did. I put them together, and they would do their thing. It required so much less of me. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is how you build a business without breaking yourself.”