The path to being an entrepreneur can be challenging. That is why entrepreneurial stories can mean so much, especially to aspiring entrepreneurs out there. Sharing the highs and lows guides and inspires others in their own journeys. Not only that, your story helps you control your cause and vision so that what you’re doing has meaning. Your narrative is a very important part of your career.
Join Elliot Begoun as he talks to Jeff Klineman about telling your entrepreneurial story and the beverage industry. Jeff is the Editor in Chief of BevNET. Jeff really cares so much for people who are struggling to stay employed, and he writes stories about these people. Share your narrative and start finding the meaning behind your why. Also, learn more about BevNET Live and what you can learn from it.
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Listen to the podcast here
The New Age Of Entrepreneurship: Telling Your Story With Jeff Klineman
The cool thing about doing something like this is I get to hang out and talk with my friends. If you want to read it, that’s cool, but if not, I’m still hanging out and talking to my friends. That is the theme of this episode. With me is my good friend, Jeff Klineman. Those of you know him as the understated, quiet, and somewhat demure Editor of BevNET. We’ll talk about what’s going on in the industry, what we’re seeing, things that are exciting and alarming us, and our takes on the economy. For the one reader who may not know who the hell you are, Jeff, why don’t you share with the folks a little bit about you?
I’m sorry, one lucky reader who doesn’t have to know me because we’re going to ruin it. Elliot, first of all, thanks for having me. Even if I have to go on a show, I will do anything to have the chance to sit around and rap with you. It’s great to be here. I started with BevNET in 2005. Before that, I was a freelance writer and a newspaper guy. It was a great happenstance that I happened to be looking for work at a time that BevNET had bought was Beverage Spectrum Magazine.
They were looking for someone to make it more readable. I happened to have a son, and I needed insurance. We managed to find a way that I could move into a real job again. It was great. I was an American Studies major in college. I was able to think about how Beverage reflects mass culture so quickly. In the years that have followed, we have had this amazing front-row seat to the flowering of the entrepreneurial beverage movement and food as well as craft beer.
We’re seeing cannabis and spirits brands’ evolution as well. One of the most exciting things that have happened was the recession in 2008, which was brutal, but it gave a lot of people who were overeducated in dead-end white-collar jobs the opportunity to reset their lives according to their passions and diets and create this whole new group of capable people who wanted to live and grow in the natural and specialty foods industry. It has been wonderful to see it since then.
It’s interesting to say that because we have been talking a lot about this over the past few years with the pandemic. What we’re seeing looming on the horizon with the economy is that this industry benefits from disruption. When we go through periods of disruption, that’s when things happen and change for this industry.
It doesn’t mean that it’s easy and that there isn’t some carnage along the way, unfortunately. It’s also exciting because entrepreneurs are best built for change. Also, people are a big part of what I’m seeing with this “Great Resignation.” People are resetting their priorities. One of their priorities is trying to have some control of their destiny. That also creates more entrepreneurialism.
I hate seeing the kind of pain that folks go through when they’re trying to find their way to their next run or over a barrel financially. That’s one of the reasons you and I have always gotten along. We understand that the big exits that are dangled are all well and good, but these people are making food. You can make a good living making food if you’re on top of your capital, your expenses, and what it takes to do it every day while still looking down the road.
I’m a great admirer of your thoughts on capital efficiency. For a long time, I personally have felt like my highest and best calling is trying to keep entrepreneurs off unemployment. I feel for these folks going through it because you see so many great ideas, products, and people doing all the right things, but they still can’t catch a break. There is a crapshoot idea to it.
First of all, thanks for the nice things. That’s the cool thing about this industry as a whole. We’re part of that group that comes together every couple of weeks of folks in the industry who are honestly champions of the entrepreneurs in the industry and want to see our entrepreneurs win and succeed. It crushes us when some don’t. There are so many things in this industry that you can control.
You can control your unit economics and how far and how quickly you grow. You can control to some degree your spending and how much money you bring in. The things that are completely out of your control are serendipity and luck. Oftentimes that’s the determinant between success and failure for an entrepreneur or a brand. What I try to encourage is that you can at least get to the point where you increase the likelihood of running into that luck or catching up to that luck if you’re nimble, capital-efficient and build in resilience so that you can continue to survive and get knocked down.
You remember this now that you’re a man in your 50s. There are the old Bobo dolls that we used to beat the shit out of. They would go down and pop right back up. That’s a metaphor for entrepreneurialism to me. They’re all Bobo dolls. They’re constantly getting knocked down and popping right back up. That’s the key.
Eventually, if you can do that long enough, be resilient enough, and if you’re flexible and adaptable, the chances of you running into that luck and catching up to that moment of serendipity go up dramatically. I don’t know of any other better formula. I wish there were. I wished we could say, “If you do this and this, you will succeed.” Rather, what we can say is, “If you do this and this and get a little bit of luck, you might succeed.”
There are some amazing examples of that. The one that comes to mind is Bragg, the vinegar company. This is a 100-some-year-old company. A few years ago, they were the IRI Pacesetter for no other reason than all of a sudden, everyone started looking at good health, kombucha, and switchel. They realized, “There’s this incredible legacy brand that has been on the shelf forever.”
The sales went through the roof, which is also tough because you have to be ready and be able to manufacture at a certain level when that happens. It’s a long and slow process. I would rather see folks not sweat through the night about whether they’re going to make a payroll. Maybe I’m more risk-averse. I don’t even do this stuff. I’m just a writer-editor, but it’s always more reassuring to me to see folks operate a trade.
I hope that fortune comes to them and that you can make the big score, but at the same time, I want you to be able to control your destiny, cause, and vision, which is incredibly important as well, so that what you’re doing has meaning. I wanted to ask you, Elliot. Everyone is talking about this. What do you think about the sunsetting of Honest Tea and what’s going on there?
There are two things. One, I want to go back to something you mentioned in terms of you being risk-averse. It’s something that I found to be an interesting lesson because if you had asked me years ago about entrepreneurialism, I would have told you that my thought would be that entrepreneurs are inherently more risk-prone. They’re willing to take more risks than the rest of us.
Entrepreneur Story: You can make a good living making food if you’re really on top of your capital and your expenses and know what it takes to do it every day while still looking down the road.
I’ve learned that not to be true. What I’ve learned is that entrepreneurs are on the same basic spectrum that the rest of humanity is in terms of how there are those who are willing to jump out of airplanes or go BASE jump and those who are afraid to get on an airplane. They run the same gamut. They are no more risk-averse or risk-tolerant than the rest. The difference is where they see the risk.
While those who aren’t entrepreneurs see the risk in taking action, entrepreneurs see the risk in inaction. They worry that if they don’t do this, they see the risk and don’t do it. Not doing this is like, “What if I did this? What if somebody else comes up with this and makes it happen?” That’s it. They still worry as much about making mortgage payments, credit card bills, and finding ways to survive. They fall on the same spectrum.
Don’t you wish that they quit fiddling when they get something right? That’s the other part of entrepreneurialism that can be tough. It’s that bias to action even beyond when it’s working.
We talk about me well enough that I sometimes talk in this form. The two things that we say all the time is, “Don’t confuse activity with results.” Activity in and of itself is not what this is about. The most successful entrepreneurs do the least because they figure out a formula that works, sit back, and let that formula work. When you start tinkering with shit and start trying to do those things because you’re trying to assuage any concern, worry, or fear by masking an activity, you can screw up a good thing.
The other challenge for entrepreneurs is that their mindsets are often shiny objects. They like the problem-solvers. They like to go out there and do it. They get confused and pulled away by the interesting and lose concentration on the important. One of the great stories was told to me by Lew Jaffe. He and his business partner were the first to create video conferencing.
At the time, it was some giant machine. He winds up on Sand Hill Road in some VC’s office with this big machine and a TV on top of it and his partners in Boston. They were going to show this VC how they can do not only compressed audio but also a compressed video thing. Some well-meaning associate in the VC says, “This thing is super ugly. Let’s put a little skirt tablecloth around it.” What Lew had forgotten to mention to that associate is that this thing throws off as much BTU as a backyard barbecue.
In the middle of the presentation in the VC, the tablecloth catches fire. They jump up, grab a fire extinguisher, put it out, and so forth. Lew was wrecked and incredibly devastated that this happened in front of the VC and so forth. Afterward, he debriefs with his partner. He said, “I can’t believe this.” His partner was like, “The fact that we caused a small fire in a VC’s office is interesting. What’s important is we had our first successful coast-to-coast video call.”
“We identified an important design flaw.”
“There’s an opportunity to be doing barbecue conferences that you can throw.” I’ve got to imagine how he was devastated. He hates seeing it, but we have now seen it a few times. We’re seeing a realization of some of the bigger strategics, recognizing that they can’t maintain the authenticity of a brand within the space that is speaking to that audience. They’re out over their skis a bit. They have devastated, destroyed, or stripped it of any culture. It comes down to economics, focus, and so forth.
This is my opinion. I don’t think that’s going to slow the M&A activity much. It has already changed a little bit of who’s in the market, who is acquiring, and who isn’t. It’s going to get people to rethink what an exit looks like or what a strategy should be. Also, there’s going to be a lot of people circling around these secondary markets for when these things get spun back out. There are good brands. Honest Tea is a good brand. There’s value in that.
I don’t know if that would ever get spun back out, but it is nice to see some of the other ones, although it’s hard. Remember, Sweet Leaf got spun back out and circled gradually into the Atlantic. Something like Suja or Bullhouse, there’s a ton of potential in those brands. There’s Evolution Craft. I love seeing those two brands put together. I wonder. In terms of cause, do you think he was able to move Coke at the same level that Ben and Jerry’s has moved Unilever?
No. It moved them slightly, but they were having to move to some degree defensively anyways. I don’t think that Coke embraced it the way that Unilever has. It’s different. The Ben and Jerry’s brand was so synonymous with what that was.
They’re the category killers.
They knew what they were getting. They were going to have to. It’s interesting. We’re seeing this across a lot. You have to wonder what the future in the industry is. Is it going to continue to be strategics and multinationals? Is it going to be more PE and putting together portfolios of businesses? That’s why it will be interesting because if they’re longer-hold types of businesses and things along those lines, there’s going to be more attention coming back to things like positive EBITDA, making money, and doing all of those kinds of things.
When somebody says to me, “I’m building an exit,” my comment always is, “The best way to build an exit is to build a good business or a business that has a strong brand but also has strong economics, potential, innovation pipeline, team, and all of that.” That’s the best way to build an exit. It’s not just building top-line revenue and a brand because so many brands nowadays are disposable.
I’m always amazed at some of the beverage exits because there’s so much sunk cost priced into the cost. You have to hit a home run to get to an exit. People look at things like Bodyarmor or Bai. Those are expensive propositions. They’re expensive toys when the companies finally buy them. It takes so long to build them up.
Entrepreneur Story: Make your big score, but at the same time, you should be able to control your destiny. It’s important to control your cause and vision so that what you’re doing has meaning.
In the end, I’m still not sure if it’s lip service or not, but you hear from a lot of the strategics themselves that they want brands that are least edging toward profitability because the shareholders want to see that. PE wants to be able to see profitability. An owner-operator wants to be able to see profitability. The strategics want to be able to see at least a path toward profitability. There’s something in there. Maybe you don’t want to operate that big of a loss.
Also, the reality is that it’s too risky to operate at that big of a loss anymore. You and I have both seen the valley of death where a brand has a couple of successful raises, goes out, rushes, starts growing distribution, and falls a little short of that next big growth in the distribution or top-line revenue. It creates enough concern in the existing investors that they don’t go back in, which signals to the rest of the market. Suddenly, that next traunch of money isn’t available. What then?
A good brand that has done a lot of good things has a lot of good legs because of the way the market is signaling. It’s caught out in the middle of this without the resources to get to this to bridge to the next size of the business they need to be with no way to slow the burn enough, retrench enough to go back to the other side, and slow it down. They die. That’s why so many brands don’t make it in this business.
I’m a contrarian here. I get it. There are brands where it makes good sense because there’s a window of opportunity. It’s a rare thing. They can run. I’m all for that. That’s fine, but that’s rare. I’m a contrarian in the fact that I think of building businesses slowly. That’s not always attractive to ventures, especially larger ventures, because they need to see that return within a window of time that makes sense for them. You can’t build a business for ventures. You have to build a good business.
The part where a lot of entrepreneurs make mistakes is that they don’t match their go-to market strategy with their capital strategy. They’re misaligned either in the fact that they’re not looking at the timing, the tranches, and the types of capital, or they’re misaligned in terms of the speed of the growth and what it means for the business and so forth. The three factors of a financial model, go-to market plan, and capital plan all need to line up.
What do you think about how the D2C reset over the past couple of years has done to that plan?
I’m supposed to be fricking interviewing you, but that’s okay.
You’re smarter than me. My job is to ask questions. You’ve done stuff, Elliot.
You can’t help yourself. I’m not smart. I shit the same way you do. I’m a student when it comes to that yet because the jury is out. It has been a massive ground shift. It was a big pendulum swing. At the height of the pandemic, if you look at the numbers, we went from 6% of grocery sales online to something like 40% at the apex of it. It has worked its way back down, but it’s well above 6% now.
It accelerated and slowed down a little bit.
While it was slowing down a little bit, the cost of it was going up, especially in acquisition. The CAC is continuing to grow, but I like it for a lot of reasons. I like both D2C and some of the things that are standing in between and disintermediating the business a little bit when it comes to taking some of the gatekeeping out of business. I like the D2C side, where brands have to stand on their own and own the relationship with the consumer.
There is nothing more telling for a brand than understanding its ability to separate cash from its targeted consumer. If it can do that routinely, then chances go up. You’re going to succeed. If you can’t do that, no matter how much distribution you get or how much growth you have, you’re in trouble. You can learn that well on D2C. You can iterate on D2C, throw things up and innovations, and try things you can’t do.
Where we make a mistake as an industry is we talk about these things as distinct and separate channels. I don’t think they are. If we look through the lens of ourselves as shoppers, we don’t wake up in the morning and go, “I’m going to spend from 8:00 to 10:00 shopping eComm D2C. Maybe later in the day, I’m going to do a little bit of shopping in the natural specialty channel. Club sounds fun for the afternoon. I’ll finish my day off with a little bit of time en masse. I’ll do a conventional the next day.”
“I ended up behind the convenience store.”
The truth is we buy shit. That’s all we do. There are only two activities to us buying. One is discovery trial, and the other is replenishment.
Where do you think convenience falls under? Is that under replenishment? It’s not the channel.
Entrepreneur Story: The worrying thing for brands that are growing up in an online environment is that they don’t understand the amount of spend that comes on the Salesforce side.
It’s both. Convenience sometimes is impulse, which is discovery and trial. Sometimes it’s repeat and replenishment because it becomes a ritual. I stop and grab a Kokomio or something like that on my way. The activity that we’re doing is either trying and discovering something new or buying something trusted and replenishing. There’s a physical plane and a digital plane to that.
What I try to encourage entrepreneurs is to think about it like you’re alongside the parade route. You can either jump in one of the intersections where everybody else is, try to jump up and down, say, “Pick me,” and get seen, or you can find that less-trafficked alleyway, slower side street, or something where you could camp out and have a little bit more room. Maybe you’re not quite as visible or don’t get the best view there, but you can own it.
The job of an entrepreneur is to find out where effectively, efficiently, and innovatively they can intersect or bifurcate that continuum and separate the consumer from their cash. You have to be able to do it on both ends. That’s why you come back to things like omnichannel. When most brands and entrepreneurs start it, they’re either starting it because they sensed or saw an unmet need or were solving a problem.
If you go to where the problem is most acute or the need most palpable, then you increase your chances of discovery and trial. That’s the riddle. To think of these as a separate, distinct channels is a disservice. I think of it more as all about trying to find the optimal intersections for you to connect and capture your consumer.
The operational factors between these media are different. It’s hard to find a salesperson who feels as comfortable dealing with Amazon or even with Shopify as they do with Target or Lassens. One thing I worry about for brands that are growing up in an online environment is that they don’t understand the amount of spend that comes on the Salesforce side. They haven’t built that in ahead of time because that’s where it does become a different channel and way of operating.
There are two things I’ll say about that. One is that you don’t want to build the brand around a team. You want to build a team around the brand or the business. That’s the hard thing. It’s not easy because it’s very rare that you’re going to find people who have true cross-functional skillsets. That’s why we’re seeing the continued expansion and growth of fractionalized roles because people are renting that skillset for the portion that they need and paying for that rented scale.
You’re right with the fact that as digitally native brands start thinking about going into brick and mortar, they don’t realize all of the costs of going into brick and mortar. It is capital intensive for the team and sales team. It’s moving to have an intermediary where you have to sell it wholesale, get deductions, and all those things. You’re holding more receivables for a lot longer. It’s holding more cap and pressure on working capital. You have to understand that, but I’ll flip it around and say a lot of businesses that build brick and mortar don’t understand the same thing going to eCommerce.
There’s the cost of pick, pack, and ship and the cost of performance marketing and all those things. You sit down, build what you’re going to do, and understand the economics or the waterfalls. I always get entrepreneurs to do what I call these waterfalls. They start with the price they’re going to charge, whether that’s the wholesale price or the retail price. Underneath it, start trying to work on all the hands in the cookie jar and everything that’s going to come in, take some of that away from them, and then see what’s left.
What’s shocking for a lot of entrepreneurs to recognize is that a lot of the time, that net contribution, especially in the early days of brand building, is a negative number. There’s a huge benefit to understanding that because if you start understanding that instead of paying attention to revenue and start looking at the net contribution dollars you’re bringing in transactionally by a new piece of business, oftentimes it changes the mindset from being, “This is growth,” to being, “This is an investment.”
You start thinking about this new piece of investment instead of growth, new revenue, and new doors. You start thinking, “This is an investment. I’m deploying capital here because it’s not going to give me a contribution that helps me absorb my fixed cost. Is this going to return some ROI for me? Either it’s going to prove further traction that’s going to help me scale and help me get my cogs. What’s the return here in the near-term and long-term?” It also hopefully gives them some empowerment to say no. That is the one word that entrepreneurs don’t say enough.
You go up and down the line. More experienced people are able to identify that no again and again. The other thing I want to celebrate quickly is we’re moving across areas of the business. From a storytelling standpoint, there’s heterogeneity in the way people succeed, innovate, and develop businesses, brands, stories about these brands, processes, and winning strategies.
That’s so interesting to cover. It’s such a privilege to have entrepreneurs tell these stories and think about the things they consider, what worked, what didn’t, why they’re doing it, and why they might spend all the time on their bottom line to create an attractive company or product, or why they might kill innovations that aren’t helping. The classic example is the Starbucks founder who wanted to do an incredibly traditional espresso bar but found out customers wanted lattes. You sell the damn latte. It enables you to do so much more.
If you think about the brands that have had success, one of the things that you can do is go back and look over the arc of that success. Often it’s not the original product that they came out with that is what wins for them. It’s some iterative thing that they have recognized by letting the market give its feedback. You think about products that come out. With Suja, it wasn’t their juices. It was their shots because they listened. Things like that are always interesting to me.
The other thing is it can come from distribution and leadership. I can’t recall his name now. He worked for Coke for a long time. He worked on this Chaqwa coffee program that they were doing. He spent a couple of years inside Coke trying to decode what builds an innovative company. He came up with a bunch of different elements. One of the ones that always stuck with me was how you get it to people, what the purpose is, and what the premiumization is. Those are all cool, but it’s one business advantage that you can execute behind that eventually allows you to move forward. I’m going to dig up this guy’s name because it’s so cool.
That’s both one of the coolest and most aggravating things to me about what I see with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs in general, especially in our industry, are innovators. They’re such creative thinkers, but the aggravating thing for me is a lot of them check that creative thinking at some point. They’re super innovative. They come up with a brilliant product and a unique go-to marketing plan, way of messaging, or something along those lines, but then they fall in line like lemmings for the way they raise their capital or when it comes to how they go through the sales process.
I would like to see more pervasive innovations from our great innovators. Challenge the thinking, disrupt the damn stuff that isn’t working, find a different point of entry, and do things differently instead of the same. There are times when we’re seeing more of it. I’m interested to see the continued evolution of equity crowdfunding. I’ll give an unsolicited shout-out here to Wefunder because I like the new nomenclature that Wefunder is putting around. They’re calling it a Community Round.
Entrepreneur Story: Instead of paying attention to revenue, start looking at the net contribution dollars that you’re bringing in transactionally. It changes the mindset from being “this is growth” to “this is an investment.”
You have a friends-and-family round, and then you can have a Community Round, which invites all the people who have interests in your product, brands, space, and so forth. I like that democratization of capital. There are a lot of innovations and things that are being done on the distribution side to disrupt that, whether it’s platforms like FARE or distributors like Pod Foods. There’s that beginning movement to try to change some of the other aspects of the business fundamentally.
I hear that, although I worry about passing the risk to the people who aren’t prepared to handle it. One of the things that’s great about the storytelling aspect of this business is I always think of a lot of the investors, particularly the family offices with the more patient capital. They want to be invested in it for the story and the cocktail party part of it, “Try this drink that I’m a part-owner of.” It takes a lot to get a return on investment in this business. For people who are doing equity crowdfunding, I love it as a marketing and small-scale support strategy, but I also worry a little bit about the investor.
I have done some research and found the man’s name. It’s Udaiyan Jatar or UJ. He’s the Founder of Blue Earth Ventures. He’s out of Atlanta. He’s a smart fellow. I met him early on and loved his talk on the seven disciplines in creating transformative brands. I would encourage everyone out there to check them out because they take you outside of the aspect of the brand itself and into other aspects of it that might enable incredible growth. Maybe it is your distribution strategy or your packaging. That’s the more novel part. You have to be flexible.
I’m going to check it out. I do believe in that. Too often, brands are wracking their teams, “What could we do differently in our product? What could change? What’ the new ingredient or thing?” The reality is that they could make a good product but change the way the package sits on the shelf or where it goes or change their distribution model or where people find them. There are so many other ways to innovate.
If all else fails, you go for a peach mango flavor. One of my favorite things about the beverage business is every once in a while, you will meet an entrepreneur who’s like, “Our sales are clicking since we went with the orange mango.”
I want to talk about what you’re seeing, hearing, feeling, and so forth. Let’s start with any category. It doesn’t have to be beverage and food. It could be supplements. What category or subcategory is exciting you? Which one is scaring you?
I’m excited about a few different things. We’re doing a panel at BevNET Live on soda. It’s this space where the sweetener quality and the helpfulness quality have gotten to the point where there’s a healthier opportunity, but it has to be able to hang in there for the long-term because so many adults who were raised on soda are in the brand. For them, the category is these brands they were raised on. You’ve got to find this whole new generation of people who want to drink Culture Pop, Poppi, Wave, or Holypop and have that be the means to them.
There’s our famous product. I’ve got to plug our brand here for the Australians that are coming in.
That’s an interesting one. The one that I’m worried about is anything reliant on CBD as its major point of differentiation. There has been some interesting stuff that has happened in terms of brands retrenching themselves, moving into healthier auras without CBD to establish a brand in distribution, and hoping that the regulators would get their stuff sorted out.
You have a bunch of brands that are like, “We started because we wanted to put weed in beverages. We did CBD as a way to get in there, but this channel of the dispensary is growing to the point that we can try and make a go of it with a beverage that has THC.” You’re seeing pivots back that way, which is intrusive. There’s this incredible bifurcated growth of nonalcoholic spirits and even not alcoholic cocktails that are soft drinks and also an incredible expansion of traditional cocktails made in cans.
I don’t know where we’re heading out, but it’s great to see folks being able to live out their passion that way. I worry about what’s happening in kombucha a bit. It has always been a category with a little bit of a moat around it from a flavor or consumer adoption standpoint. I worry that it’s running out of room. Here’s the other thing that I’m worried about. From our coverage, you might not know it because we write about the way the money is going.
It’s the plant-based meat versus lab-grown meat versus plain old products made from vegetables and where the maximum benefit to the planet, consumer, and founder is. From that perspective, we had a great story that a reporter of ours named Erin Cabrey did, which was on the fact that all this high technology and products seem to end up with a chicken nugget of some kind. What kind of consumer change are you creating that way with another nugget?
That whole meat analog space is very interesting to me because much of the products that are out there are not aimed at people who are true plant-based eaters. They’re aimed at the meat-eater who maybe wants to eat a little bit less meat either to do a part for their planet or they’re thinking slightly to make a move to improve their health. For the most part, it isn’t plant-based. It’s so interesting to me. I read a stat before. Forty-two percent of Americans consider themselves flexitarian.
The funny thing is that 99% of Americans are flexitarians. We all eat unless you’re a weirdo like me that’s vegan. You eat plants and animal products. That’s a flexitarian. Nothing has changed there. I worry about overprocessing and complicating food versus simplifying food. The other thing that I worry about too is reducetarianism. I don’t know if that works either. It’s going to be interesting to watch.
What do you mean by that? I don’t know that word.
It’s people who are trying to reduce their impact to some degree on the environment by their choices, but a lot of the things that they’re replacing don’t necessarily accomplish that.
Entrepreneur Story: From a storytelling standpoint, there’s heterogeneity in the way people succeed, innovate, and develop businesses. Entrepreneurs need to share their stories of why they’re doing what they’re doing.
That’s an interesting problem. There’s the whole idea of recycling. I’m all for recycling but moving the responsibility from the corporation to the individual is such an incredible job by the marketers to avoid a certain level of responsibility for the amount of junk we’re throwing onto our planet.
It’s an interesting time. All of this stuff is so interesting because, in some respects, we’re voting with our consumption, our mouths, and what we put on. It’s cool for businesses and entrepreneurs who can get out in front of it, but it’s going to be more likely for bigger companies to try to greenwash and confuse because they have the power of marketing. I want to make sure we talk a little bit about what folks should expect at BevNET Live and NOSH Live. What’s on the agenda? What’s going on with the two?
Without getting too specific, we have this great mix of people. I think about it like football coaches. They love to share pages from the playbook, knowing that not every team is built to run it. It’s more about how you think about what you’ve got to arrive at the place you’re going to run. The people we have to stand up and give case studies about things that have worked and haven’t worked, and how they think about the way they run their businesses and the way they try and grow is as important as the results they have gotten. How do you think through what your advantages and opportunities are?
Recognize what you’re investing in, even if you’re losing some money for a while that you’re building something for the long-term. We’ve got some pretty wild folks. The one who comes to mind is Jack Owoc, who is certainly a more bombastic member of the food community if he would consider himself a member of the food community. Maybe that’s a question I should ask him.
We also have these great founders and executives from agricultural-based brands like Harmless Harvest, Ocean Spray, and Uncle Matt’s, that are talking about the things that they have to do to be able to preserve innovation at times when their supply chains are uncertain. They have a lot to teach entrepreneurs who are dealing with much more stable inputs traditionally that are in complete turmoil.
If your brand is closely tied to farmers or imported products, you’re always accounting for the fact that things can go haywire. Their techniques for preserving innovation and building redundancy on their supply chains are doubly important when you can’t even get sugar without a hassle. On the NOSH side, we’ve got some interesting folks speaking. Certainly, Mid-Day Squares is going to be there. The Kroger team is going to be sharing some insights about both their consumers and their stores.
This is interesting in light of what we have talked about. We’ve got a talk on what different founders have done after the investment has come in and how you treat that capital, and think about what your brand is going to do now that you’ve got some funding behind you. We’ve got Denise Woodard from Partake and Chris Kirby from Ithaca speaking there. It should be fun. It’s always great to get everyone together. As much as I might want to say that the content is important, these people spark things themselves. It’s like getting a whole box of matches into a centrifuge and seeing what happens.
I’m going to give my little shout-out. First of all, the panel conversations are always incredibly interesting. What is the secret sauce about BevNET and NOSH is that they’re much more intimate events than what we typically have elsewhere in the industry. BevNET is quite large, but in comparison, it’s small, and NOSH is even more so. There’s an opportunity to have some great important conversations. The people that are on the panel are also mingling in the room. You can chat with them. It’s cool. If you’ve not attended, you should. If you’re going to be in New York City for fancy food, you should. Don’t miss out.
Thank you, Elliot. We try for a flat hierarchy and do that at BevNET as well. Everyone can contribute as a company but also, we want our speakers to talk to everyone else. My favorite thing is when we go for a break, the speaker comes off stage, and there’s a line of people waiting to talk to them. They will sit there and do it. People have time constraints and get busy, but it’s always amazing to me when people like what you’re doing and say, “I went to one because I was a speaker, and now I’m going back every time.” It makes me feel like maybe we have some value. It’s a nice group. There’s no kind of crazy like food and beverage crazy, except maybe a Philadelphia crazy.
It’s the best kind of crazy. Are there any last parting words of wisdom for those reading?
Think about what your narrative is and what’s your story. People fall short on that. Also, anytime you commit news, let us know. We’re happy to report them. I have one final question for you, Elliot. Celtics or Warriors?
You know my answer. Go, Dubs. I’ve been a Warrior fan forever. Here’s a little bit of trivia. Steve Kerr and I went to college together. He was one of the great lessons to me early in my life about the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Here’s my quick story about Steve. Steve and I both blew out our knees at the same time. We both had knee operations by the same orthopedic surgeon, went to the same rehab, and attended the University of Arizona.
After my surgery and before my rehab, I was given a handshake and a pair of crutches to get around the big and sprawling campus. Steve was given a similar handshake and a decked-out golf cart to get around. Fortunately for me, Steve is a truly good standup guy. For eight weeks, he came and picked me up for classes in the golf cart. We cruised around campus and did that.
What I love about both teams is that you have coaches who are willing to try different things, open to different ideas, and recognize that the team is huge even if there’s a stellar player and that a system can be so much more important than the individual parts.
They’re both innovators. I am glad it’s the two teams. I’m a fan of both, but I am a Warrior fan. The one thing I’ll also do is to call out and talk about all the tragedies that we have seen of late with Uvalde and so forth. If you haven’t listened to Steve Kerr’s impassioned speech around guns, you should google it and listen to it. I say that because he comes at it from a very different perspective than most understand. Steve’s father was assassinated by terrorists in Beirut. He was a professor at an American university. He has a close relationship with violence. I find his messaging credible.
Were you at the game where they were chanting at him?
Entrepreneur Story: Just think about what your narrative is. Really find out what your story is because a lot of people really fall short on that.
I wasn’t at the game that they were chanting because the game was at UCLA in Pauley Pavilion. We didn’t travel with him, but I remember it. It’s an interesting story. All these years later, my youngest son made the decision to go to UCLA. I struggled with it because I hated UCLA so much for so long. The idea of sending my money there pissed me off, but I acquiesced.
Being a sports fan, you see these people who have real purposes in life and who transcend the job. I would recommend everyone out there to read I Came As a Shadow, which is John Thompson’s autobiography. I had a chance to read it over the winter. It’s fantastic because you realize people’s capability of being more than their gig. They’re both conscious teams. You see a guy like Jaylen Brown out leading marches. You see Ime Udoka, the Celtics coach, talking about Uvalde as well. Not to put too much here or worship into it, but it’s good to see conscious teams.
It’s good to see you using your pulpit with intentionality. We’re over. We have to let everyone go and get this wrapped up. Thanks. We need to do this more often.
Thanks for giving me some time on the pulpit. It’s great to see you, Elliott. Good luck, everyone.
I’ll talk to you soon.
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About Jeff Klineman
Communications leader and journalist with a deep knowledge base in the food and beverage business. Thought leader with domain expertise over brand, product, corporate culture, consumer trends, fundraising, distribution, and sales/marketing strategies. Award-winning writer, reporter, and editor. Frequent speaker and moderator, conference curator, and industry expert for New York Times, NPR, Fortune, and Bloomberg. Honored twice as a “Consumer Products Kingmaker” by Forbes.
Areas of Expertise:
Marketing & Brand Strategy: Expert on challenges facing growing companies in marketing, brand strategy, development, and execution. Partner with senior leadership teams to understand key priorities and overcome challenges. Drive outcomes by thoroughly understanding the ramifications of changing markets, product trends, and consumer culture.
Communications Advisor: Develop and execute communication platforms for brands across multiple channels and consumer touch points. Ensure businesses keep current with cutting-edge content. Trusted listener, confidant, and counselor to high-level executives, founders, and teams. Skilled interviewer and former investigative reporter.
Community Builder & Connector: Cultivator of massive network within the consumer packaged goods industry and broader financial, cultural, and media communities. Serve as point of contact and spokesperson for internal stakeholders, external agencies, retail/distribution gatekeepers, key media, and the public.
Industry Analysis: Quickly assess market potential across retail channels, industry verticals, and advisory relationships. Analyze positions of companies, executives, and marketing programs for return on investment potential. Firm understanding of retailer, investor, distributor, and brand concerns for businesses.
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