The Monster in the Meeting Room

Photo by Yaopey Yong on Unsplash

When it comes to driving change at your company, sometimes you have to paint a scary picture for your stakeholders.

When I took over as CEO at my former company, it was a 40-year old, brick & mortar company that sold directly to other brick & mortar businesses such as vitamin shops and natural foods stores. We were thinking about e-commerce and digital sales but we weren’t feeling urgency, just yet.

This was back in 2016 or so, and what I did was to explore the future of wellness. I joined an organization called Abundance 360, led by Peter Diamandis, who wrote a book by the same name that discussed the technological forces that were going to change everything, such as high-speed computing, genomics and so on. I even hired an “entrepreneur-in-residence” to help us think more innovatively and test new ideas.

But to get the whole company behind this idea, I felt I needed to do something rather more alarming — something to rattle and shake up the troops a bit and change the paradigm. So, at our January, 2018 Town Hall company meeting, I rolled out the theme of Climbing Everest. We had fleece snow ball fights and an oxygen bar and had fun with it. But the theme supported our serious need to pivot from a retailer-centric brand to a consumer-centric one, putting the consumer in the middle and then giving her a consistent shopping experience across all channels.

In order to catalyze this pivot for a 40 year old brand, I spent a good hour at the town hall outlining why we needed to do this. We had lots of data showing the coming trends around e-commerce and the growth of Amazon, and I created the “monster” notion that we were losing business to smaller brands in specific categories. (It was true!) The threat to our growth wasn’t from other medium to large companies but from a band of digital natives who were nipping at our heels, pilfering our market share in different categories.

I spent a good hour scaring the daylights out of my company in order to make my point that if we didn’t make this pivot, and make it hard, we were going to be left in the dust.

And so coming out of that event, we invested a couple million dollars in our own e-commerce platform. We hired several new players and specialists who could help us do this. And we did it in the space of a single year, even creating our own in-house entrepreneur to explore ideas such as health tracking and DNA testing.

The lesson in all this is that if you’re a change-the-world founder who has to motivate an internal team or outside stakeholders such as investors, to pivot, sometimes you need to create a monster, something that poses a threat to your organization. Something to go after.

On the other hand, your monster needn’t necessarily be scary. It can be beautiful, instead. Another way to think about creating a monster is just to create a huge opportunity around something that you love. For example, one of the companies Findaway Adventures invested in is called Hustle Clean. We are inspired daily by their commitment to more than just their business. This past year they started as a 501c3 called Free Play. The founders Justin Forsett and Wale Forrester grew up in underserved communities, found a way out of poverty through football and created their company to be able to give back to those same underserved communities.

Their Free Play initiative is so powerful and on point that it motivates Justin, Wale and everybody (including me) who crosses paths with them to embrace their purpose with open arms.

Ditto for another company we’re working with called Holmes Mouthwatering based in Cleveland. The company makes applesauce but also has taught hundreds of underserved youth in Cleveland about entrepreneurship through the Holmes Entrepreneurship Initiative. Founder Ethan Holmes has been focusing on entrepreneurism within the greater Cleveland community, but he hopes to take his program national and international.

The point is that as a founder or a leader who understands what is going on in your marketplace, you can leverage your passions and purpose or leverage the threats you see to motivate your team to take things to another level.

If you haven’t tried this yet, do. And if you have tried your hand at monster-making, tell me how you are banging on that drum over and over again at your company.

Sincerely,

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!