Your Next Move - Building Your Team

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Hiring and retaining the right team to help your company grow is essential at all stages of a well-run business. This episode offers detailed advice on how to build and retain a highly effective leadership team, from what roles to prioritize hiring for to how to find the best talent to meet your company’s needs. It also features hard-earned wisdom from a founder, Seth Goldman, who has worked at all life cycles of a company from launch fresh from business school to exit to rebuilding again. Seth Goldman is Co-Founder of Eat the Change®, a planet-friendly snack and drink company that recently launched Just Ice Tea, a line of organic bottled tea to go along with the company’s Cosmic carrot snacks. Seth and his co-Founder, Celebrity Chef Spike Mendelsohn are also co-founders of PLNT Burger, a plant-based quick-serve restaurant that offers delicious burgers, fries, and soft-serve. Seth is also the Co-founder of Honest Tea and Chair of the board of Beyond Meat. In 2023 he took on a new role as Chair of the Mission Guardians for Tony’s Chocolonely, an international chocolate company committed to creating an exploitation-free supply chain. He has been widely recognized for his entrepreneurial success and impact, including the Washington DC Business Hall of Fame, Partnership for Healthier America’s CEO of the Year, and EARTHDAY.ORG’s Climate Visionary of the year. He is a graduate of Harvard College (1987) and the Yale School of Management (1995). Seth and his Honest Tea co-founder, Barry Nalebuff are the authors of The New York Times bestselling comic book, Mission in a Bottle.

With the VentureX Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with no preset spending limit, your purchasing power adapts to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at capitalone.com slash VentureXBusiness. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Sarah Lynch, and you are listening to Your Next Move,

audio edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. On today's episode, host Ayesha Bowe talks with Seth Goldman. Seth is a highly experienced entrepreneur. He co-founded and was CEO of Honest Tea and served as executive chairman at Beyond Meat. Today, he discusses his latest venture, Just Ice Tea. In their conversation, they discuss how to build a team of people who are interested in all areas of the business, what it means to be a mission-driven sales company, and how the mission shows up in the work every day. But before we get to that interview, Inc. correspondent Britt Morse spoke with Aparna Saran, chief marketing officer at Capital One Business. They talked about how important it is

for small and mid-sized businesses to develop team members by building a plan to upscale talent and creating an organizational culture of learning. Aparna, thanks so much for joining us today. I am excited to be here, Britt. A key component of nurturing talent is learning and development. How can small and mid-sized businesses develop their team members? The first and foremost thing that I always like to keep in mind is the recruiting strategy. Finding the right talent which has that learning agility is really, really critical. And that's something that I've always kept in mind over years as I've built multiple teams in my career.

The second is when you bring teams along, sort of build a very deliberate strategy around learning and development. Identify areas that your business will need to incrementally focus on, and build a plan around upskilling your talent across the board. You have said that maintaining agility and a learning mindset are important to teams. Can you share how organizations can foster that culture of learning and development? I think the most important thing as leaders we can do is be the right role model for the team and embrace that two-way learning. The second thing that's really important is make time and space for learning and development. Ensure that you have the budget as well as allocated, dedicated time and resources to build out that learning and development plan. Can you share how you cultivate this as a priority with your team?

Perhaps give us an example or two? The current makeup of my team is very diverse in its skill sets. So on one hand, I have traditional marketers. On the other hand, I have data scientists. And one of the things that we have institutionalized is this culture of cross-training the two diverse groups and building and creating dedicated time for sharing lessons learned, mistakes that have helped us on our learning journey.

And one of the things that small and medium-sized businesses can do is really inculcate that culture, like stand in front of your teams and share what is the one new thing that you learned, what is the thing that you are struggling with and you want to be able to learn, and, you know, build a culture where everyone is open and willing to share their own learning journey. What other advice would you share about developing an organizational culture of learning? I think outside of just the hard skills, I also would encourage leaders to invest time and energy into self-awareness and development of leadership skill sets. That is such an important part for

the team's development and for the team to come together and build that trust with each other. There are so many online tools available these days which give you an insight into your personality type. Find the one tool that resonates and works for you and make that a common language within your team. Thank you for sharing these insights about team building and employee development, Aparna. Thank you for having me here, Britt. And now here is Ayesha Bowe's conversation with Seth Goldman. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Ayesha Bowe, and I'm here with Seth Goldman, founder and CEO of Eat the Change.

Welcome to your next move, Seth. Thank you. Glad to have you here. Seth, you're known for innovative, healthy, and environmentally conscious food brands, from Plant Burger to Honest Tea to Just Iced Tea. And you've also worked with the likes of Beyond Meat and Tony's Chocoloni. But I hear that you started Honest Tea in your kitchen. Yeah. Can you take me to the beginning? Like, how did it all start? Well, actually, before I launched Honest Tea, I was working in the investment field.

I was doing marketing and sales for a socially responsible mutual fund. And it was good and meaningful work, but it wasn't entrepreneurial. And so I was kind of thinking, what's an idea I can own and bring to market? And it just so happens that after an investment presentation in New York, this is back in 1997, I went for a run in Central Park. And after the run, I was thirsty. So I went to a beverage cooler looking to quench my thirst. I was with a friend. I said, there's nothing here, my friend. So what do you mean? There's hundreds of options. I said, they're all the same. They all have 100 calories per eight ounces. They're all made with high fructose corn syrup. Why isn't somebody making a drink with just a little bit of calories and a real natural taste? And that brought back to me a memory I had

had in business school at the Yale School of Management where my business school professor and I had agreed this was an opportunity. So I said, well, maybe I should go out and go after this idea. And when I spoke to the business school professor again, he had just come back from India where he had come up with the name Honest Tea. And that kind of blew my mind, like, wow, that was able to bring in five thermoses of tea and an empty Snapple bottle that I'd pasted a label on and presented that to the buyer. And that was how we got started. I hear that Honest Tea started off with a very small team. Who did you hire in the early days? Well, I did do everything. And it was

actually a really useful skill to develop, whether it's accounting or marketing and sales or production. Being involved in each of those undertakings really helped me understand the kind of people I needed to hire for those. So the first person I hired was a consultant to help me just figure out how to make the product. So one of the I hired was a consultant to help me just figure out how to make the product. So one of the reasons we called it Honest Tea was we were brewing it with real tea leaves. And we go to the bottling plants and they say, yeah, but everyone uses a concentrate or powder. And we're like, yeah, but we don't want to do that. We want to use real tea leaves because it's Honest Tea. It should be brewed. And so I found a guy who had been involved in

apple juice packing plants up in Canada. And he came down, he actually lived at our house for about eight months in our basement and just helped me figure out how to get this thing up and running. And so that was a really useful skill. And I learned a lot from him as well. So your first hire lived in your basement? Yeah, he did. And it was such a wild time with our family. So my wife and I had three sons all under the age of five. Our second son, literally after I just made that first presentation to Whole Foods, got diagnosed with a very serious heart ailment. He was going to need major cardiac surgery. And so it was just this really intense time. I had left a job, a good paying job to start this startup. We had our brew master living in the basement.

It was just a very memorable time. Wow. Had you done any hiring previously? Yeah, I'd worked in that mutual fund company. I had hired people. And I actually had run, before I went to business school, I ran a summer demonstration program for what became AmeriCorps. So we had a 50 core member team with a great staff. And I really, as I think about sort of my skill sets, I think hiring people both who are passionate and inspiring passion into them is something I think I've gained a knack for. And so it's not just hiring the right person for

the skill. It's hiring the right person who will work within a team that where their skills can shine, but who can also compliment other people. Can you share a little bit about how your hiring process has evolved over the years? How did you tackle the first round of hires? Did you find that there were certain qualities that you thought were important that maybe were less important? I know that I've struck out a few times as a founder at that. I want to know how your process has evolved. One of the places I've learned the most is with respect to operations. Because when I started out, I thought operations was someone who's well-organized and can just make things happen.

So I literally hired for our first head of operations someone who had worked logistics in a warehouse. And they were really good at getting the deliveries on time to one place. And it turns out, you know, we're a food business. And so what you really need is someone who's experienced with food safety, with equality control, and working and negotiating with co-packers. And so part of that was my own just ignorance. Again, as I said, I didn't know a lot about this business. And so now we have one of the advantages now that we're launching Just Ice Tea is I've got, I can leverage the 25 plus years of experience I've had. And so the people, so we have just brought back, it's like a little family reunion.

So someone who worked with me as head of operations at Honest Tea, who then went on and did the same within Coca-Cola. And so to have him running operations now is kind of like this huge weight lifted from my shoulders because he knows exactly how to scale a beverage business, which turns out is what we're doing. Can you tell me a little bit

about the personality attributes you look for, certain qualities in building your team? I think one of the things that's really important in an entrepreneurial company is to have someone with humility. You have to understand we're going into places we don't know. And so arrogance or a conviction that you know exactly what to do is just doesn't, not only is it not helpful to the business, it's not helpful within a team dynamic. We have to understand we're going to fail. We're going to make mistakes. And so I don't want to say embracing that, but just having that awareness makes you a lot better at accepting criticism or questions or challenges. And we have to do that.

I have to do that all the time. And I always remind myself, I mean, one of the really interesting dynamics with Just Ice Tea is a lot of our team has done this before, but the risk is that we just go back to the same patterns and it's a different world. It's a different consumer. It's a different marketplace. And we have to, we have to challenge ourselves to say, wait a minute. Okay. Yeah. Honesty was good. And we certainly helped to achieve that success. But if we're going to go beyond that success, we have to make sure we're not just taking everything the way it was. We have to recognize the different landscape, the different context we're operating in. Can you tell me if you evolved into that? I know when I started out,

I always kind of felt like I need to know the answers, I need to lead. And the more that I realized that I did not know, the more I was like, I'm going to humble answers. I need to lead. And the more that I realized that I did not know, the more I was like, I'm going to humble myself and I'm going to let you lead because I'm going to empower you. Did you have an evolution that was similar? Well, nothing is a better teacher of humility than failure. We've certainly had failure. I mean, look, this whole business, Eat the Change, we started out as a planet-friendly snack company. So we had a mushroom jerky, we had certainly had failure. I mean, look, this whole business, Eat the Change, we started out as a planet-friendly snack company.

So we had a mushroom jerky. We had a carrot snack. We kind of just accidentally got into the iced tea business. And at this point, we've already discontinued the mushroom jerky. It was a great product. We liked it, but it didn't succeed in the market. There's just the category was too small. Going back to the Honest Tea days, for six years, we owned a bottling plant.

We were co-owners of a bottling plant. And those were the longest six years of my life. I would be driving back and forth to Pittsburgh in a day, trying to worry about change parts and boilers and water issues, all these things that had nothing to do with building the Honest Tea brand. And it wasn't that we sold it, we basically handed the assets of the bottling plant off to somebody else that kind of freed me up to say, okay, this is, not only is this what's important for the business, it's what I'm good at. It's where my passion is. And so having, I joke, you know, when I started this, I didn't have any gray hair and, you know, the business has definitely brought that to me.

But it's having that, learn those failures is what keeps you humble for sure. And it also helps you understand you don't know the answers. You have to be, and you have to be open about that. Mark Cuban said recently in one of his masterclasses that founders should try out all of the roles. Oh, yeah. Can you tell us about the roles that you have embodied in this company? Oh, I literally have done every role in the company. So the one I've done the most is sampling, just giving out samples of product. And because of this, when you're bringing out a new taste,

they can't just tell you about it. Or I could tell you about it for 10 minutes. I could have you sip it in 10 seconds, and you'll understand it much better than all the talk I've done. So sampling has been and continues to be our main form of marketing. So I've done that. Production runs, going and to bottling plants. You're often staying up through the night, through the shifts to get the taste just right, figuring out how the product works at scale. Because we can make it in our test kitchen and it comes out a certain way. When we make it times 10,000, the sweeteners interact differently, the acidity changes, the water quality changes, the taste profile evolves. So you have to have that awareness as you formulate these products.

And then the thing I do all the time is sell. So just this week, I was in Brooklyn for two days walking up and down the street with a cooler bag on my backpack and going into stores and selling the product. And of course, we have other people who do that too. But one reason I stress it's important for me and everyone in the company is we have to understand the business we're in. So what's the competition look like? What does the shelf look like? What are the factors that a store bases their decision on and whether to carry our product?

Is it pricing? Is it what else is on the shelf? Is it what consumers want? So you always have to be connected to the marketplace and to the consumer. And I put a ton of time into that. And literally every day people tease me because every day I'm in a store, even if it's just walking across the street to the giant, but I always want to make sure I'm connected. And I've told the team, you know, we may get beaten by the competition, but no one's going to take me by surprise because I'm always going to know what's going on with the context that we're operating in. And then certainly finance. Again, as I said, I set up all the accounting systems for the business early on, and they weren't pretty, but it was really useful for me just to understand the inputs and what

are the drivers of our ability to operate. And then I think the other piece that I continue to also do is the strategy, thinking about how this business evolves. And so part of that is, how do we make sure we have the capital we need to grow? But also, how do we think about what are going to be the inflection points of growth? So is that meeting with key distributors, or is it meeting with key retailer partners? And so no day is the same. And I still really do have a hand in every part of the business. For someone who might just be starting out, can you share how you figured out what roles

you could do yourself and what roles you really needed to hire for? For me, it was important to understand, as I said, understand every role, but then think about which of the roles that I add the most value to. So accounting is super important, but whether I put numbers into a system or somebody else does, it's almost interchangeable. Communicating the message about why this brand is important, why this mission is important, is something that I've, I'd say, developed both through my track record and through my experiences, a really effective way to communicate that. And I certainly want others to do that as well,

but I also want to model it. So for me, that's work that I'm happy to share, but I don't delegate. I won't sort of let someone else take the lead on because I do think that's my strength. So for me, it's where can I add value? And then the other thing is what gives me joy? You have to make sure you're enjoying your work every day

because that also radiates, right? What you shine at can inspire others. So I love it when there are people who are as engaged in sharing the message as I am. And I'll never discourage anybody from doing that. But on the operations side, those are usually ones that I'll hand off more readily. How do you find the best talent?

We've been really fortunate to find people who are passionate about our mission, but also experienced. And I often find it's people who have worked in other fields where maybe they've been frustrated. And, you know, so one of the best hires we made just in the past few months was someone who had been run operations for me at Honesty Tea. And he had retired, or he thought he had retired. And what I've learned is that retirement is often overblown. People think it's better than it is. So when I reached out to

him, we were having some challenges on our team where we were going to need some backup. And I reached out to him. I said, any chance I can talk you out of retirement? He says, I'll get on a plane tomorrow. And I had known his work. So when you find people who are capable, but maybe either frustrated in their previous work, again, on the sales side, we had people who had worked for me before at Honesty and then gone off and done other things. And when I reached out to them to say we were creating this new company, they're like, I would love to come home, you know, to re-engage in mission-driven work. So for me, what's going to sort of make the difference between someone who's just an employee is when the mission kind of propels their passion. I'd love to know what qualities do you prioritize when you're hiring

people? The first thing has to be their capability, right? If they're in accounting, they have to be good and confident in accounting. They have to have sort of zero risk in terms of integrity. I have to sort of make sure their references check out and that they come across well. They also have to have that entrepreneurial mindset. So this is not nine to five work. This is things come up. I mean, we just had an opportunity just this month

where Sprouts, a national retailer, decided they were going to launch our cans nationwide two months earlier than expected, which for us was like, absolutely, that's great. But what it means, so it's a little bit like the duck, where like, oh yeah, that's great. And you start means, so it's a little bit like the duck where like, oh, yeah, that's great. And, you know, you start scrambling because we had to move tea around, we had to move cans around, we had to get production, we had to just everything happened, happened really quickly. And that's, there's no time, there's no sort of, okay, well, I'll get to that. Like, that's not a choice. No, this has to happen. A national opportunity like that is critical for us. We have to jump on it. And so I believe that in a broad sense, we're employee-friendly and consumer-friendly, but on a weekly basis, it can be a grind. But it goes in cycles. And I think over time, it balances out and people are motivated and stay, but it goes in cycles. And I think over time it balances out and people are motivated and stay,

but it can certainly be demanding. And so it has to be people who embrace that entrepreneurial challenge. And then I think the other thing that I always say is I do need people with special skills, but I don't want specialists. So everyone, I want well-rounded athletes. So I want everybody out in doing these crew drives. It's important that whether you're in accounting, sales, or marketing, you are in front of, you're willing to, you know, put that backpack on with the bottles of tea and get, you know, walk up and down the street and sell tea. You may welcome it when you get back to your desk and you can just sort of input numbers. But I do want people who embrace the totality of our business. And so when we have a meeting, whether it's a

whole company meeting or just a director's meeting, I never would want somebody who's in HR to only speak about HR. I want them to think about it. And similarly, I want someone in marketing to think about, oh, okay, well, maybe have we, why are we treating the accounting, why is the accounting treatment of our margins happen like this? I just want everybody curious about the whole of the business. I want everybody to think of themselves as an entrepreneur. Can you tell me a little bit about the size of your team and how your involvement with the hiring process has changed? Yeah, we are trying to be as labor efficient as we can. So we have about 30 people on our team,

and we're on track to do around $30 million in sales. But just by way of comparison, Honest Tea, when it had $23 million in sales, had 52 people. So we're trying to be more lean here, because I feel I never want to be in a position where I've got people I can't carry and have to make cuts. But I've also got people who are more experienced than they were at Honesty because a lot of them are the same people. So they know how to do more with less. And that's important, too. And then for me, the team has to be complementary.

So I have to bring in new skills or new experiences. Great. But fresh insights are important, too. And so it can't just only be experienced people. And I just have to think about the overall balance of the team. Tell me about your involvement in the hiring process. I struggled with that early on because I wanted to find and approve every single person. But then I realized that I kind of needed to have a dialogue with HR and that sometimes I

needed to hire people who were very different than me and that worked out. But then sometimes that didn't work out. Yeah. So one of the great things is having a great HR leader. And I'm really fortunate. I've got a person leading HR who worked with me going back more than 15 years. So she already knows a lot of sort of the mindset I'm looking for. And then you have to empower people. I certainly don't bring somebody in and say, hire this person. But I'll say, if we're doing a search, we should be talking to this person. And then usually what I'll do, if it's a position that reports to me, I'll definitely speak to the three finalists. If it's a senior level person, if it's not someone, I'll still be involved in their orientation and intake.

And as I said, I'll take them over to the store and we'll walk the store together just so they get a sense of how I think and what I'm looking for. But a lot of it, the hiring is empowering our team. And when you get a good core team, that's certainly the first task. And then there'll be that much more effective hiring people who fit in well as well. How do you ensure that potential hires mesh with the cultural fit of your company?

Well, you never can ensure. I mean, it can't be 100% sure, but we definitely put a lot of emphasis on creating the right expectations. So in our handbook, in our interview process, we want them to hear from multiple people. So we do make a practice of multiple interviews along the way. It's great if they are going to be in the office, they definitely need to come to the office and see and interact and understand me. One of the biggest, easiest ways to screen somebody out is for them to walk here on a busy day and just hear all the noise and understand that there's only two closed offices and they're for conference rooms. So nobody has, if you value privacy or you

can't focus, if there's a lot of noise, you shouldn't come here. And so we want to make sure there's as much awareness about what they're going into, getting into from the start. We're going to take a quick break and be back with more from Aisha and Seth. And when you travel, you'll have access to over 1,300 airport lounges. Just imagine where the VentureX business card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureXBusiness. One of the things that you said earlier that I thought was really important was this idea of building a team in a way that not only that people were cultural fit, but it also allowed you to experience and spread joy. Can you talk about how you integrate joy in your practice of leadership?

So a lot of it really does start with your own essence, right? And so I always say, people often say time is your most valuable resource. I think energy is your most valuable resource. So I have to make sure I'm taking care of myself if I've got the right energy coming into the building. So part of that is like doing exercise every day. Part of that is really investing in relationships that give, you know, that make me feel like a whole person with my wife and my sons, with other people I love and care about. That means that when I walk in, I can just feel a sense of balance as opposed to feeling turmoil. And then one of the things I've just

over and over, and we've had some health challenges within our team, is really embracing the whole person. So, you know, yes, these people spend a lot of time working in this company, but they have other parts of their lives. And I'd venture to guess that for most of them, work is not the highest priority. It's a priority, but they should be investing in other parts of their lives as well. And we and I have to support them in that.

And by supporting them in their whole lives over the long term, we build that loyalty and engagement. So if somebody's got a health issue, you got to take the time you need. Or if someone in their family has a health issue, you have to take the time you need to do that. When you come back, you'll both be that much more appreciative of your work, but also appreciative of this company that helped support you in that journey. So I obviously never would wish for anybody to go through some of the challenges that some of our team has gone through this year, but by sticking with them through those challenges, we actually

build even deeper connection. I've observed that you care about work-life balance. However, you've also said that this is not necessarily a nine-to-five job. Can you tell, how do you balance those things? It's hard, right? I mean, first of all, the work is fun and engaging, and we all could be working 10, 12 hours a day. There's plenty to keep us occupied. But there's also a recognition that quality over quantity. And so I have a firm cutoff. I've always had a firm cutoff. Dinner with my family is more important than the work.

And so I would always leave. And in fact, ironically, there's this crazy period it was actually a six-year period where i was the head coach for my son's baseball travel baseball team so travel baseball is like you know so i'd be leaving the office at like 3 30 because i had to drive carpool twice a week and then for tournaments and frequently i'd be leaving the office like i can't believe i'm leaving this This thing stops on fire, whatever. But I made a commitment to my son, and I'm going to both model that behavior for him and for the office.

And I'll get to work later. I'll do it at night, or I'll come in on the weekend. I'll get stuff done. So one of the things about being an entrepreneur is you do get to define your own terms in general, not on a daily basis, but in general. And those decisions were really important. And they also, as I said, modeled for others what's acceptable. And if I'm leaving the office at 3.30 to drive a carpool, like I'm not going to give you a hard time if you come in late for a doctor's appointment, or if you've got to take care of a family member, like everybody's got their own thing, but results really matter. And so, yeah, of course we've hired,

we've, you know, fired people over the years. And I'm, I'm, what I think I've gotten much better at, and we just fired someone a few months ago, the person understood right away. It was not a surprise. It's a bad sign when you fire somebody and they're surprised because you haven't created the right expectations and understanding of their role. And so, like I said, of course, the ideal is not to have to fire anybody. But when you fire somebody, by the time you get to that point, they should understand it. And part of that is understanding expectations,

and we're going to always evaluate people and results. When I walked in this morning, I was struck by the vibe here. I absolutely loved all of my interactions with your team. And what I noticed was the mission of the company resonated with them, and it also showed up in how they interacted with me. Oh, that's nice. Can you talk a little bit about how your focus on the whole person shows up in how the people support you? Well, ideally, and I don't want to over-take credit, because we've just had some great people who are attracted to what we're doing because it resonates with them. But what we're

trying to do with Just Ice Tea, I mean, the name Just Ice Tea has the word justice in it. So we are trying to both treat people and our whole supply chain and our employees fairly. There's a sense that we want to support them in a way that we can feel good about. And so, you know, I'm sure there's times when we err and don't get it right, but as much as we can, that's the kind of thing that really feeds on itself. And I will say this whole experience of, you know, sort of seeing honesty disappear, and then just I see coming back has felt a little karmic, a moment of karma. Not just that you have the second life, but that the energy and the intention we put into Honest Tea,

even though that sort of had an end point, it kind of reincarnated itself here. And so we see it with the relationships with our suppliers. When Spike and I went to Mozambique, even though we'd never met the people of Mozambique before, what we had done, because of what we had done with Honest Tea, the goodwill was already there. And in the marketplace as well, the retailers who we had worked with at Honest Tea were absolutely embraced Just Dice Tea.

I just saw it just this past week in Brooklyn. Obviously, stores I'd never been into before, but where they had seen Honest Tea and they loved what it stood for, were very ready to take Just Iced Tea on their shelves. I'm really curious about the mission and your team. How do you all, like, how do you manage that as a founder? What I mean is, yes, you're out there

and you're sharing the mission, but does it show up in your training materials? Does it show up in your meetings on a daily basis? How does the mission show up in the work you do? So within weeks of launching Just Ice Tea, I took my co-founder, Spike Mendelsohn, and we went to Mozambique where we source a lot of our tea. And it was important for Spike, but it was also important for the team because I wanted to make sure we could communicate what we were doing. Of course, Honest Tea had done lots of fair trade things, but this is a new brand and a new supplier. And I wanted to make sure we all understood what's at stake here. Because

one of the inspiration points for launching Just IT was that when Honest Tea was going to be discontinued, it meant all of the supply chain we had set up, literally thousands, tens of thousands of people in India, China, Africa, and South America who were involved were going to lose the business that they had created. And they had all invested in organic and fair trade supply chains. And so coming back from that trip and being able to share this is what we're doing at Just Iced Tea. We are helping create economic opportunity in one of the poorest countries in the world. We're helping to make education and healthcare available in a province where the average life expectancy is 54 years old. This can be an impact that comes directly from us selling tea.

And then to, so sharing that, sharing, so both the video from the trip and the experience of the trip really was important. It was important for Spike and for me, but it was almost more important for our team to sort of understand this is what we're engaged in. And now we have a project we're working on with our partners in Mozambique to fund a pathology clinic. As I said, such bad health outcomes in this province. And if we can help fund diagnoses of whether it's AIDS, cholera, typhoid, or malaria, these can be a real health pivot point for this community. And so again, having this cause be part of our work is inspiring, motivating, and something you can really be proud of. And frankly, even the retailers, they love hearing about it because they want to feel like they're playing a role. And of course,

the consumer embraces it too. So that for me has always been certainly what drives me. And to the extent I can have others be inspired by it, I want to do that. If I've got two candidates who are equally qualified, and obviously by the time I'm interviewing they're the finalists, then I really want to understand how much this mission resonates with them. And that's often the tiebreaker. The skill sets have to be comparable. And of course, as I said, certain disciplines, skill sets are really critical. But then I want to understand their own work. And one of the things that I've seen,

someone will tell me, oh, the work you're doing is so important. I care so much about the planet. I care so much about health. But then I see their resume and I'm like, well, you were working for, in one case, you actually worked for a tobacco company. So how strong, how deep is that conviction? So the choices people make along the way help define them. And I talk often at schools and I'll always say, you are your own brand. And so a brand is certainly what you do helps define a brand, but what you won't do also helps define a brand. And so when I see someone who has done, I use this label values neutral or values negative work, it just helps me understand the factors. And of course, I don't want to sound like a purist or holier than thou.

I mean, sometimes it's a luxury. You know, sometimes for economic reasons, people have to do values-neutral work. But when someone's made the sacrifices to do work, the only work that they believe in, that's actually impressive. It's not something everyone gets to do. I hear you've worked with Leonardo DiCaprio. By that laugh, I think that's true. It's not something everyone gets to do. I hear you've worked with Leonardo DiCaprio. By that laugh, I think that's true. Yes. He was an ambassador for Beyond Meat, and we had a fun visit with him to work that partnership out. How do you decide when a celebrity is the right fit?

The first thing that's important is they have to be an authentic fit. Leonardo had been doing lots of great work around environment and sustainability. And so with Beyond Meat, as we're looking for people who could be effective ambassadors to tell the story of why plant-based protein is better for them and for the planet, he was super effective at that. And it has to be authentic. And so, you know, again, here we are with Just Ice Tea, and we have lots of love on Instagram, people who will just show themselves drinking the product. And for us, those are always the best ambassadors. And so going back to the Honest Tea days, we had a lot of fun moments where people would talk about the product. One thing I'm not as

excited about is, and we don't do, is paying people to just say they like a product. Because by that point, first of all, it's not authentic. Authenticity is so important in our business. So you're saying that if you're like me and you love the tea and you're on IG taking pictures of yourself loving the tea, that you might actually be able to become an ambassador? We'd love you to be an ambassador.

That's great. Yeah. I mean, it's always that authenticity is so important. So now I'm a candidate and I've gotten my dream job here. Tell me about the onboarding process. How do you make sure that I'm successful in my role? Well, one of the things that we've really emphasized with everybody coming in is they've got to get as quickly as possible into the trade. And by that, I mean, you know, selling product, like whatever you're doing,

I want them, as soon as we have an opportunity to get them to put on a backpack with tea and go up into the street, we want to get them doing that because that just helps them understand what drives this business. And so I always talk about this as a mission-driven sales organization. And that's pretty specific, right? I mean, marketing is important, finance is important, operations is important, but it's all in the name of, and why is mission and sales connected? Because the mission's only impactful if we're selling a lot. So sales is our priority.

And I want to make sure that mindset is inculcated in people. So both our handbook and our orientation emphasize that. And then as quickly as possible to get them exposed to other aspects of the business. If someone can get there, it's useful because it helps them see how the way we make our product is different than other brands. So the way most bottled tea is made is someone has a powder or syrup. They put it in liquid, stir it, and then run it through a bottling line. We take tea leaves, brew them in hot water, filter them. And that gives both a different taste, but it's also a different level of authentic ingredients. And we want them to see that so they can appreciate when they talk to people about it, they understand this is what goes into making this product. And it is a lot more than the typical beverage company. Can you lay out the first two weeks? Is week one, hey, I'm getting a backpack, I'm heading to the street, I'm going to sell tea?

Yeah. So it's not always the case because the crew drives or time of year isn't, but as soon as possible, we'll want to do that. The other thing we'd love to have people do is if they're not necessarily with a backpack, they're in a store for a sampling. Because you want to hear how the consumer encounters this product. Even though they've been a consumer of this beforehand, by going to the store and sort of being on the other side of the table, you understand, especially as you encounter literally in just a few hours, you'll see dozens of people come up. The first thing you'll see, by the way, is that let's say there's 36 people you encounter, 12 of them are going to walk past you without even acknowledging your presence. Oh, did I just turn invisible? So that's important to understand. But then the other 24, what are the messages that

they hear? Oh, do you want to try some organic tea? Do you want to try a tea that's, you know, lightly sweetened? And they'll ask about caffeine. So just what are the questions consumers have about our product? And again, to make sure our employees sort of hear those things. Oh, it's a glass bottle. That's so nice. I, so nice. I've been trying to avoid plastic. So you just, you sort of very quickly can get a little quick read of where the consumers are on our product. Your companies work with tea gardens and distributors on a global scale. How do you bring in team members and manage the projects all over the world? We have some great partners on the ground around the world. So, you know, we don't have the budget or scale that we can send people to these communities all the time.

So often, well, I guess I've been to just about all the suppliers. We also will meet regularly with the intermediaries. Sometimes they're brokers or in some cases, longstanding partners. In more than one case, I've actually started the business relationship with a father, and then the next generation will take over the business and I'll still be connected to them. So being able to have those relationships, and then we always connect. There's an annual trade show where we'll see all those people and again, get the chance to reaffirm or learn more. And again, I always put

that emphasis on making sure they share with me that I can share with our team, whether it's a video or a conference call we can do just to learn about what's going on on the ground. How do you prepare and support your team through periods of significant growth? Preparing and supporting teams during significant growth is kind of easy because it's so energizing. The harder thing to do is finding ways to keep them going when times are tough. And so here at Just Ice Tea, we're growing so quickly now. Like it is kind of a, I don't want to say it, it is a drug. It feeds enthusiasm and energy and you kind of get addicted to it.

So you want to keep going. What's interesting, and we've seen this at Beyond Meat, is when you go through a challenging period where maybe the consumers have some questions and you need to re-engage them. And that's the harder thing. How do you make sure? And that's where the mission really comes in. Like, guys, what we're doing is important. And so we can't give up. We can't sort of let a different narrative take hold.

And that's the bigger challenge. And that's where you kind of double down on the mission. Growth on its own can just feel good, and that sustains itself. But it's when you have challenges that the mission is even more important. We had a trade show once where a new team member just started dissing the competition in our booth. And that's just, while what he said was accurate, it's just not our vibe. So one of the fun things we do in our company, we always have these quotes under the bottle cap. One of our bottle cap quotes was actually a quote I got

from the show Fat Albert, which says, he who throws mud only loses ground. And so this guy was slinging mud at our booth. And I literally had the CEO of the company he was dissing come up to me and say, we heard your person at this booth say this, and we're going to bury you guys. And it was really hot. I mean, I understood why he was. I would be upset, obviously, if somebody says. And so I just helped the team understand, look, we all are competitive people. We all want to win. We're not in here to come in second place, but we also have to do it a certain way. So it was a teachable moment. Eventually, actually, that CEO eventually came around and understood that wasn't how we roll. But those things happen. And you just have to make sure the team understands why that doesn't

make sense. How did you address that with the employee? Oh, I just said, look, I just got chewed out by a competitor who at the time was much larger than us. I said, that doesn't help us. That's not what we do. And he immediately understood why that was behavior that needed correcting. But he continued to work for us. You certainly rarely will somebody make a one-day mistake that means they can't be with us. If it's something around their integrity or truth, that's a different thing. But if it's just an error in judgment, as long as it's teachable and coachable, we'll

work with them. In your observation, do you think that there are specific ways that people should hire or things that could be done better in today's market? When you think about it, the way we generally hire people is sort of like, maybe it's 40 minutes of a conversation, often online, for work, that is multi-dimensional. And so that's usually not a very effective way to assess somebody and their fit. So certainly when possible in person is always going to be better. You'll just get more cues along the way. You'll see how they interact with people and how sort of they feel in a certain environment.

To the extent you can get them to do some of the work they'll be doing, that's helpful. So if someone is, you're hiring someone to do, you know, in marketing, let's give them an assignment. It's not make work, it's relevant. I mean, you want to see, can they handle the pressure? Can they turn it around quickly? How creative they are? Do they pick up the language or is the language they're bringing you interesting or engaging? I'm a much bigger believer in as much relevant kind of kicking tires as you can. What's your next move for building your team? Well, the first thing we have to do is we're still rapidly gaining distribution. So as we branch out distribution into more, so we're in the natural channel, pretty well distributed, but now we're starting to go into what we call up and down the street opportunities, whether it's convenience stores,

drug stores, or even small shops. And for that, we need more feet on the ground. So as we were just launching this year into New Jersey, and we're going to need to bring people who know that market and who can really cover it. Same in California. We're really fortunate that we have, again, some really wonderful people we'll be able to bring back into the fold. But that next step is to move from a discovery brand,

an innovation brand, into an everyday brand. And that's going to take some time. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for having me, Seth. It was great to have you here. We can't wait to see your next move. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move.

Our producer is Matt Toder. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christensen. Thank you.