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Grow Good tells the story of purpose-driven leaders who grow their businesses while staying true to mission and values. Hosted by growth and brand strategist Anne Oudersluys, each episode features candid conversations with CEOs and founders about real decisions they make and how they operate across strategy, product, marketing, people, and scale. This show provides practical, thoughtful insight for leaders who want to grow with intention.
To Grow Good, the podcast for leaders who want to grow their business while staying true to their mission and values. I'm Anne Outerslice, a growth and brand strategist with over two decades of experience growing purpose driven brands. In each episode, we go behind the scenes with CEOs and founders to unpack the real decisions about how they scale. I hope you leave inspired and equipped to grow good. Blair, welcome to Grow Good.
Anne Oudersluys:Thank you so much for joining us today.
Blair Kellison:And thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to have our conversation today.
Anne Oudersluys:Wonderful. Well, so let's dive in with your background a bit. And early on in your career, you worked in corporate, but then there was a moment at which you decided to take a major pay cut and work for a purpose driven business. So tell us a little bit about what was going on in your life and your work experience that encouraged you to take that leap?
Blair Kellison:Sure, so the story is actually true. So I love to tell it. I was a CPA at Ernst and Young and I was an MBA at University of Chicago and I went to work at Nestle, world's largest food company. All that looked really great on paper, but inside Blair was not really feeling like he was that great and he was not feeling really fulfilled. And there was a lot of friction and tension in there.
Blair Kellison:Interesting thing about life and careers is you do all these things like take the CPA exam and get these educations and stuff, but the single greatest moment in my career was I was living in Los Angeles, I'm a kid from Indianapolis, Indiana, and I get transplanted to California, so everything is kind of different, especially around health and wellness. I go into the nineteenth Street Co op in Santa Monica, California, which is a store that still exists today, and it was a natural food store essentially. And I found out all these wonderful organic fair trade businesses that were not just making food, but they were really trying to change the environment and change the world through their business models. And I just fell in love with all of those kinds of companies. And I thought that my MBA, CPA, Nestle experience could be put to much greater use helping these companies compete than Nestle didn't need another MBA.
Blair Kellison:I became a vegetarian after I went to the store. Have not actually had not had a hamburger since 1992, however long that is ago. So I became a vegetarian, I wanted to work for a vegetarian food company, and I wrote to one of the companies that was selling there and I got an audience with the owner. I ended up taking a 70% pay cut. He was scared to interview me because he thought I was too expensive to even talk to.
Blair Kellison:And the premise of the whole conversation was I told him I would go work there for free. So every time he brought up that I was too expensive, I said, no, remember I'm free. And then we actually got engaged in a conversation about what I could do to help his business. And I think I said, basically I need to make my car payment and I need to pay my rent and I gotta go out on a date every once in a while. I settled, we settled on $3,000 a month pay.
Blair Kellison:And that was about 70% less than I was making at Nestle. Now, the moral of that story in some ways is, if you're relatively smart and you're willing to work for a really, really low wage, there's a lot of opportunity out there for you. But it turned out to be a monumental time of career, which you'll hear about today. It really allowed me to align my personal feelings and passion with what I did for a living. And another part of it that snuck up on me that I didn't realize it was gonna let me do, was that it was gonna allow me to be Blair.
Blair Kellison:I was gonna be able to be the same person at work that I was when I was going out for a hike. And that turned out to be the single greatest thing that ever happened in my career. From that, long story short, but I went on after that, and I've been a CEO of natural foods companies for like twenty five years as a result of taking that pay cut.
Anne Oudersluys:So you have a pretty interesting role in that, and correct me if I'm not getting this exactly right, that you are a professional CEO and you come in kind of as the primary leader after the founder and kind of lead the company through a growth period. And I'm curious, how do you take that purpose and the values and continue it in consistency from the founder through your period of growth and the way that you scale the company?
Blair Kellison:Okay, so first of all, I didn't set out to do this, but a lot of these health and wellness companies are created by somebody who has a passion, the founder. And so they are kind of run by the founder. And I've been a CEO for over twenty five years for six different founders, only for founders, I've never worked for anybody else. And for those six times, I was the first non founder CEO of those companies, so kind of a real niche. I always say that like, I had plenty of good skills, but I think my temperament actually enabled me to be more successful than my specific skills.
Blair Kellison:And that's really embracing the founder. Listen, all companies are better off with the founder than without the founder. I've been that for twenty five years, but not in the CEO role. Then the founders worry, well, what am I gonna do? And I've really been able to help create very meaningful roles for founders, and a very big element of my commercial success at these companies has been working with the founder and the ideas that the founders had.
Blair Kellison:And you take the founder away and Blair is nowhere near as successful at those companies. So that's kind of the basis for that. And so when you really think about these companies typically are started with passion, with purpose, with a real mission. Wanna, my founder at the very first company was a vegetarian. He really wanted to make good tasting vegetarian food available to everyday people.
Blair Kellison:And that was his passion. And what you'll find is that most of these founder run companies, the mission and the values are very strong and they're there, but they're kind of in the ethos, they're in the air of the company and they're in the head of the founder, but they're not really formalized. And so by kind of by definition, when you start to move away from the founder running the company and you have more of a team to run the company, you need to codify those. And so what I've done each of my companies is really sit down and then codify those values and go through a whole process to really what is our mission and then what are our values? And let's codify them and they're not just words like accountability.
Blair Kellison:Okay, that's nice. What does that mean for us? How does that translate to the way we work with each other or we do annual reviews or whatever those things are? And so I think that's the big thing I've done is not create the values. The values were there at these companies and that's what made them wonderful.
Blair Kellison:I really helped codify them. And kinda, there's a famous saying, you gotta take the values, the mission and the values and take them. So the first thing you do is you put them on the wall. So you're codifying them, but then you really, the real value is taking them off the wall. And they say, putting them in the hall.
Blair Kellison:That's like taking them and really making them part of how you do business. It's a formalization of that. So they're not just values that we talk about, they're how we hire, they're how we onboard, they're how we fire, how we make decisions about new customers. They become part of the infrastructure, the framework of how we make decisions at the company.
Anne Oudersluys:Can you give a specific example, maybe from one company or a repeated processor approach that you take for how you take them from the wall to the hall?
Blair Kellison:Sure, so it's really like a soup to nuts kind of a thing. You start with every new employee. So that was part of our onboarding process. When you interviewed for the job, you were told about the values. You were told that the values are going to be part of your annual review process and we would make them part of the annual review process.
Blair Kellison:We made them part of the onboarding. And so people came in starting with the interview. It was actually in some ways easier for the new employees and the existing employees because everybody came into that. We set it up so that you came into that, you were gonna kind of get indoctrinated before you accepted that you knew you're getting into. And then this is an interesting thing.
Blair Kellison:There's a lot of people out there that will tell you they wanna work for a mission values oriented company, and almost everybody would say, why wouldn't you, right? So almost everybody's interested in that, but there's actually very few companies really living and breathing and doing those values. And so we had to teach people, so we couldn't just rely on hiring people from other mission and value oriented companies. That was a really small pool. We had to bring everyday workers in and really teach them what it meant to be in a values oriented purposeful company.
Blair Kellison:We really started training and having employee meetings and we did the whole onboarding and hiring as part of it. It was part of your annual review. You were reviewed against the values and how display them or didn't and what you needed to work on. And they were really part of the way we did business. And so they were really, again, were kind of formalized.
Anne Oudersluys:Thank you for sharing that. I want to transition specifically to traditional medicinal. So this was a company right at least twelve years, I believe, and
Blair Kellison:grew fourteen from years.
Anne Oudersluys:Years Okay. And I think grew from $20,000,000 to well over $100,000,000 in revenue. So you really had tremendous growth when you were there, which is amazing. Tell us a little bit about what was distinct about the product and what were you able to lean into as a source of growth?
Blair Kellison:Sure, it had super high quality products. So we were in the teas, we were in the tea set, but actually traditional medicinals was really a medicine company, herbal medicine company disguised as a tea company. So that was part of it. And then they know a part of it. The secret to success was it was really an NGO.
Blair Kellison:What you think of an NGO, non government organization out doing social good in countries, it was an NGO also disguised as a commercial enterprise. So those were our two sort of secret weapons that we had, and they were the reasons that we were successful. Our products worked when you took them. And so people, whether you had a sore throat or you're constipated or you couldn't sleep or you're a nursing mom, our products really worked. The efficacy was there.
Blair Kellison:And then the social mission behind the company, we were buying 115 different herbs from 300 farms in 44 countries. And we were active in many of those communities doing anything that was neat. Well, first of all, we did fair trade, everything was organic and all of those are organic. So nobody was collecting any herbs from us using pesticides, so we felt good about that. And then we transitioned the whole company to fair trade as well.
Blair Kellison:So that means everybody was getting paid a fair wage, and the wages were being put into the community. And so in some level we were active at all those communities. And then other communities, we really went all in on some of our most important herbs. We would build great schools and we would build health clinics and dental clinics, whatever they kind of needed in those areas. And that's not a reason for people to buy RTs, but it was a reason for them to feel good about buying them and to buy them again and to tell their friends about them.
Blair Kellison:And that became kind of our story. And then as we became more commercially successful, that story got told and retold and retold. And when I left, it's been a couple of years since I've been there. We were educating 1,000 kids a day at five different schools in India. These kids woke up in the morning and they got a uniform.
Blair Kellison:They put on a uniform that we supply them. They got on a bicycle that we supplied to them. They rode their bike to school that we built the school. We paid for the teachers. We gave them a hot meal for lunch.
Blair Kellison:It was remarkable, just remarkable how much that could change a six year old's life in a country like India.
Anne Oudersluys:Yeah, I'm sure that's really a tremendous contribution.
Blair Kellison:Just to go back to our conversation about what's the founder do, and Blair's coming in, he's running the company now, that's what our founder did. Company was founded by sort of, was, traditionalism was founded by two people. One was an herbalist, so that was where all the quality and the high quality formulas came from. And the other one was really like a community organizer. And that's the person who ended up staying for all those years as the community organizer, super smart guy, but his whole thing was really doing good in the world through the business.
Blair Kellison:And so all these wonderful things that I'm talking about from a social perspective, he really led all of that and he was doing that full time. If they relied on me to drive that, it would have never been as successful. And that's just an example of a very meaningful, powerful role that the founder played, and still plays to this day at that company. And he's in his 70s now, and still loves to travel and go out to the regions, and is very knowledgeable on working with people for what they need in country.
Anne Oudersluys:That's a really interesting example because my perception is that once you have professional leadership come in, the founder kind of exits and isn't really able to play that role anymore.
Blair Kellison:I couldn't emphasize it more, companies are always, always gonna be better off with the founder than without the founder, just not in the CEO role. And not always, I'm not saying there's some that go on to be great CEOs for many, many years, but in general, they've got a passion for something. And Blair's got accounting and finance and then marketing and an MBA and trade spending and software, and like the CEO job is much more operational. And the founder of the vegetarian food company was a monastery school teacher, like who's more qualified to be the CEO of a 30,000,000,000 company, me or him? No, the company's gonna be better with him in it, but not in that role, so.
Anne Oudersluys:Right, so you led this company through tremendous growth and 700% or maybe more. And it started out as having these organic and perhaps fair trade came later, but you had a certain amount of sourcing and scale when you entered the business. But to grow that amount and then preserve the quality and the rigor behind organic and the sourcing and ingredients and everything else you have to do to take a company and preserve the the quality but grow at that level and rate can be challenging. So I'm curious, how did you think about what trade offs were you willing to make or a threshold for quality as you were scaling?
Blair Kellison:The founder and I would get interviewed a lot for podcasts like this. The number one question we got asked was, okay, you guys are 100,000,000 now and used to be less than that. What have you given up? That was by far the number one question we gave up. Kind of what you're asking really a little more eloquently, but that's what you're trying to get at.
Blair Kellison:And we didn't, we did more testing and we had more rigors around our efficacy. And I think we were spending about $75,000 a year in our regions of where we in those 44 countries. When I started, I think it was around $75,000 We had allocated about $75,000 annually to do different projects in these countries. And when I left that number was well over $2,000,000 So what you need to do as a really good, this is a really good question and really good thing to think through. Like, I'm not saying the breast cancer fund isn't a good thing, so don't take this the wrong way.
Blair Kellison:But like if your company makes a million dollars and it gives 10% to the breast cancer fund, that's a wonderful thing to do. Or it could give 10% to the Arbor Foundation and plant trees, and that's a nice thing to do. But anybody can do that. I can make a check. I can write a check to the breast cancer fund, and I can write a check the Arbor Foundation and plant trees.
Blair Kellison:So there was a competitor of ours that actually did an Arbor Foundation promotion every spring. They did a big thing, you buy a couple boxes of tea, we'll plant 100 trees, it was very successful for them. But the way we looked at that was like, yeah, but they have 30 teas and they have 100 different ingredients and not one of them is organic. So the employees that are out in the fields that are collecting their herbs are doing that with pesticides and working in fields with chemicals. As a consumer, I want you company, I want you to do that.
Blair Kellison:I can't do that part. And so there's that part of it. So consumers want you to do it as a company what they can't do. They don't want you to just do things that they can do. And so I think that's a really important distinction.
Blair Kellison:And then, but the most important part of it is the things that we did at traditional medicinals were the way we did business. So there was always a percent of the money that we bought in a region where we put towards social projects, and there was a percent that we put towards fair trade premiums. So that was built into our business model, and so we never had to say, well, how much money do we have at the end of year? Who do we want to give it to? We didn't have to give any money to anybody at the end of the year because we did it as part of our business model.
Blair Kellison:So if you do that, then as you grow, you're scaling your mission at the same and completely in tandem with scaling your sales. And that's the way you've got to look at it. You've got to build the purpose and mission and values into the way you do everything. And so then as you grow, your purpose and values grow. And then this is what I'm most proud about.
Blair Kellison:We had a quick conversation before I started today. What I'm most proud about is the scale, not because a 100,000,000 is a big number, it's because it was millions of pounds of herbs that were grown without pesticides. It was millions of dollars put into those communities. That was our measurement.
Anne Oudersluys:Right. Well, sometimes there are challenges, though, around supply. Like there's not enough organic crop of XYZ that is farmed. Or P and G, when I was at P and G, we ran into this with FSC certified paper. There wasn't enough supply of this type of paper to supply the full needs of the company.
Anne Oudersluys:I'm curious if you ever ran into circumstances where the size and demands that you either had to scale the entire, you know, the tribe supply chain with your growth and influence that you had there? Or you just ran into limitations on how much you needed and what was available?
Blair Kellison:We definitely ran into those problems and even organic. And I don't know about organic, but even fair trade will sometimes give you an exemption, you can say, hey, for the next six months, there isn't enough fair trade, we've grown it. Are some exemptions built into the standards for things when they do run out. But I think the difference, I don't wanna be cavalier, but I think the difference between us and Procter and Gamble were, we were involved with those growers. We were on the ground in those regions.
Blair Kellison:We were telling them how we were doing. We were showing them what we needed in a year and two years and three years, and we were working with them to buy more land and to grow more herbs and things like turmeric or licorice root. We only bought three year old product because that's the most efficacious. So we had to know three years in advance whether we needed that. And I imagine the Procter and Gamble's of the world are just going out in the world and just buying commodities and like, oh, we don't have any.
Blair Kellison:We were causing them to be grown. We were causing them to work with, I mean, our suppliers, and again, there was a 300 different farms. The vast majority of them, shouldn't I say the vast majority, but a very large number of them, we bought 100% of what they grew. We wanted a medicinal grade, organic fair trade chamomile, okay, so there's this much chamomile in the world, and there's like this much that met the traditional medicinal standard. Doesn't even matter if it's chamomile grows everywhere, but there was only a teeny tiny bit that was medicinal fair trade organic.
Blair Kellison:So we were constantly investing in farmers to buy more land, expand or pick up another supplier in another country, we were very active in our supply chain. And I think that's a critical element of being a sustainable company is most of what we talk about sustainability, most of it comes out of operations and supply chain.
Anne Oudersluys:Right. There's a theme that keeps coming up with a number of my guests where the supply chain is not transactional, but highly relational. And then that allows you to expand your capacity as needed to support the business growth.
Blair Kellison:Right, and then we had things like, we had a situation once where somebody accidentally sprayed their lavender with chemicals, and then we couldn't buy plot of land for three years, because it's like, but we supported them economically to help them through that. And then when you do those kinds of things, someday when there's only so much lavender to go around, traditional medicinals was always the one who got it first.
Anne Oudersluys:You mentioned that there was a voluntary recall that you had. Can you share that story for us?
Blair Kellison:Sure, not one of the prouder days of my CEO reign, we'd never had a, in about our forty fifth year, we'd never had a product recall. And it wasn't just to be very clear, it was a voluntary recall. It wasn't a death, wasn't threatening to kill somebody or anything. And the other thing is, it was a spot contaminant. And the other thing is we were always at low risk because our product is made with boiling water, which kills everything.
Blair Kellison:So the chances of getting sick from drinking a tea are near zero. That's why it was a there was a voluntary recall. So yeah, we wanted to figure out what was the right thing to do. Actually I credit one of my friends, John Foraker. He was the CEO of Once Upon a Farm Today and was CEO of Annie's for a long time.
Blair Kellison:I knew they'd had a couple of recalls at Annie's, and he was the first person that I called. And his advice, which we ended up taking was just, you gotta get out in front of it. And you gotta tell your consumers, you gotta to put this on Facebook and Instagram, you got to let people know and get the product off the shelves and spend the money. So that was pretty hard to take a product off the shelf in America. It's about $2,000,000 you spend in like twenty four or forty eight hours, because it's like $30 a store.
Blair Kellison:We are in tens of thousands of stores. It added up really quickly. So we did that and we were open about it. I think at the end of the day, actually enhanced our image. It didn't deter from it.
Anne Oudersluys:Hey, it's Anne. I hope you're enjoying this episode. If you're trying to grow a purpose driven company, but your marketing feels scattered or disconnected from your business goals, I can help. Through my company, Core Impact, I work with businesses to define their core customer, sharpen their positioning and messaging, and to create a focused marketing plan that drives real results. You can learn more about how to work together at coreimpactstrategy.com or shoot me a message on LinkedIn and Outer Slice.
Anne Oudersluys:Now back to our conversation. What was going through your head at that time when you were processing that, the pros and the cons, certainly you reached out to advice from John to understand what recommendations would be.
Blair Kellison:I give John a lot of credit, he was very helpful to me, but really what he did is he just helped validate what we wanted to do. I don't wanna sound like we were gonna try to hide it, and then he convinced us not, no, he was just validating what we thought was the right thing to do. And that was to let our consumers know, I wasn't sure exactly maybe how much we should broadcast that and how we go about doing that. But I think our go to always in life is sort of shrink and hide and hope it goes away, right? That's like a little bit of human nature is, it was really tough, it was a tough couple of weeks.
Blair Kellison:And I think, I don't think I know we ended up being a better company for it.
Anne Oudersluys:You mentioned that you think you came out stronger on the other side. Is that in what ways? What were the learnings that you had? Did consumers perceive you differently?
Blair Kellison:One of the reasons that it happened was we had at that time we were growing so rapidly. We were adding new suppliers more quickly than we normally did. And we definitely, we had a very rigorous process for adding new suppliers and we needed to, we definitely needed to do that, double down on that as we were growing at that time. So that was a lesson we learned. Then I think internally, I think everybody felt like it just, it was the company we worked for.
Blair Kellison:It was that we did the right thing and they worked for a company that was doing the right thing. And I think it only enhanced that. And I think consumers saw that as well. And it actually ended up not being very big deal at all. So my fear and everybody's fear would be, well, gonna make a bigger, I'm gonna make something a bigger deal than it needs to be, right?
Blair Kellison:That's your part of your reasoning for like not telling people, it's not that big a deal, not gonna hurt anybody, it's not, So you're reluctant to make a bigger deal out of it than it is, but in making and doing that, we made it a smaller deal, if that makes any sense.
Anne Oudersluys:Right, well, think so often our fears of what could happen rarely materialize. And then through that transparency, we build trust, which builds longer term relationships with customers who want to keep supporting us. How much would you say customers truly care about ethical sourcing?
Blair Kellison:That's being debated in hundreds of companies every day. I'd say a couple of things. It matters to varying degrees with varying people. I think if that really matters to you, a traditional medicinals, one of my board members said that one day, kind of had a conversation with him about this and he said, it matters to us. And if it matters to us, we need to make it matter to them.
Blair Kellison:We need them to understand why, or maybe he said, we need them to understand why it matters so much to us. So if it doesn't matter to them, we're not doing a good job of explaining to them why it matters so much to us. That was a really good advice. What I would say from maybe a marketing perspective is, well, I'll just talk about the traditional medicinal teas. The number one reason people bought those teas was because they worked.
Blair Kellison:I have a sore throat, I can drink my throat coat and my throat feels better. I think that the social mission and the way we did it, about doing business was the reason they felt it made them feel better about the company that provided that made them feel better about the premium that they were paying. It made them more likely to keep buying our product and it made them more likely to tell their friends about us. Think we had to accept it wasn't gonna be the reason somebody bought it. It's like, they're not gonna, oh, I'm gonna buy this one because they built a school in India.
Blair Kellison:No, you got to taste good, you got to work, you got to have some kind of thing. The way they do business is the kind of company I wanna buy products from.
Anne Oudersluys:So staying along the theme of marketing, you've worked in a number of categories where claims are not regulated by the FDA or FCC traditional medicinals being sort of in the I don't want to call it supplements necessarily, but
Blair Kellison:No, all our teas were dietary supplements.
Anne Oudersluys:And They were then most recently, you were the CEO of OM mushroom, which is a mushroom supplement company. This is a wild west of claims and marketing messaging. How do you think about being transparent and accurate with consumers, not being exaggeratory, but also still being competitive with what others are saying? What's the framework that you use to think about messaging and claims, especially in an unregulated industry?
Blair Kellison:So a couple of my mantras are one, the one thing that you would say about the product to your next door neighbor at the end of the driveway would be, hey, you should try this product. It really works. That's the one thing that you would tell your neighbor if they asked about why you take the product. And that's the one thing that you're not allowed to say. You're never allowed to say anything works, anything cures, anything you can never say it like, so that's hard because it's literally the thing you would just the thing that any casual person would tell their next door neighbor you can't say.
Blair Kellison:Okay, so that's a big challenge. And then my other mantra is we can be successful without breaking the law. So I think in the long arc of time, the companies that that do follow the rules and do make claims that are within the framework of DSHEA and have high quality products win. Sometimes in focus groups with traditional medicinals, people would just say things like, well, we talk about the medicinal quality and they would sometimes say things like, don't have any specifics on it, but I think that's the one, I know that's the one that works. I know that's the one that does it the right way.
Blair Kellison:I know that's the one that's better than the other ones. Think that's the high quality one like that was good enough for me because you know that's the best you can get with supplements because you can't say, hey, helps constipation or soothes your sore throat. Know, couldn't say so. I think it's around your image and your trust and being transparent about your supply chain. Being transparent about like education is a big, big part of it.
Blair Kellison:Like we educated people about herbs and their traditional use. And I think people looked at us as like the thought leader and we were knowledgeable and we were trustworthy and we had high quality and it was consistently high quality. And that sort of superseded not being able to say, hey, it really works. Consistent quality, you know, like our company was so rigorous. The throat coat that you drank ten years ago on that Tuesday when it was made was just as efficacious as the one that we made on Wednesday, eleven years later in that.
Blair Kellison:Our standards were so discerning, you know, and so it always was consistent. You can't be up and down with your quality.
Anne Oudersluys:Did you find that the standard you held yourselves to in terms of what you would allow yourself to say at any of these companies was less or not as inflated as what competitors were saying in the industry?
Blair Kellison:Absolutely. So an interesting thing that the way it works, and this is really challenging is the smaller you are, more that you're likely gonna break the law and say things you shouldn't say. And then the larger you get, the more you have to be compliant, because if they're gonna go after anyone in the category, they're not going to go after Susie's Tees who sells 200 boxes a year and says it cures cancer like they're probably never even going to call her. But if traditional medicinal says anything, as the market leader, we're the ones that are going to come and shut down our website. So as you get more successful, you actually have to be more and more compliant.
Blair Kellison:And then we were the market leader and then we had a lot of upstarts that was like just saying stuff that was just flat out illegal. The way the FDA works is it's all based on they have no compliance people out there. There's no one going to the shelves and checking. I mean, they have very, very limited staff. Their whole policing is based on everybody policing their competitors.
Blair Kellison:So, we'd file complaints from time to time if it was very egregious, but there's only so much of that you can do. So I think you just have to just keep doing the right thing over and over and over consistently and build a brand. I mean, that's where brand marketing comes in, right? It's like, so we had throat coat and everybody had a certain feelings about throat coat and Walmart could come out with a Walmart throat coat. And a lot of companies did try to compete with us and both at the private label and also competitors.
Blair Kellison:And we ended up only growing more because we'd sort of build a whole reputation around that product. We built a brand, we built a brand. I said to the founder once he, I don't think he liked it when I said this, but I said, Hey, this was like later and he was in his 70s. So it's not something you say to someone in their 70s, but I said, Hey, you can die now because everything that you care about and everything that you really value, it's built into this brand. And when people see traditional medicinals and they buy the brand, everything you ever wanted to do since you were 27 years old, starting this company, everything you've ever done, we've built into that brand.
Blair Kellison:He was like, I don't know how to take that.
Anne Oudersluys:So beyond traditional medicinals, maybe own mushrooms or another one of the brands that you've worked at. How do you think about building a brand where purpose or mission is integrated into how the consumer sees it. And you mentioned earlier, like the premium they will pay because a lot of the things that require this type of sourcing and quality of ingredients often do cost more. They are premium products in the category. What's your approach for building a brand?
Blair Kellison:We basically grew mushrooms indoors organically, we dehydrated them, we powdered them and we put them in a capsule, we put them in a bag. It was the purest product ever. You couldn't be more efficacious, you couldn't be more pure. And we were competing with thousands of products that were just using extracts and dustings of mushrooms and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And so super competitive, we were always just, I think you gotta be a storyteller.
Blair Kellison:And the thing about us at home versus all those other companies is they didn't have that story to tell. I mean, we could show the mushrooms and the sperm and the regenerative oats that we put them in and the sterilization and the people in the hazmat suits. And like, you got to tell your story. And usually if you're mission oriented or you're purposeful, there's a reason for it, and you have a reason you started a company, you have a listen, every company has a why, why do you exist? And it has a how, which is the culture, and then has a what, which are the mushrooms, okay, the product.
Blair Kellison:And so what you really want to do is focus on your why and focus on your how, because that's where you're different. It's harder for the consumer to see the difference between your lion's mane powder and somebody else's lion's mane powder, which only has a dusting of it in there. But if you can really tell your story, and your story is your why and your how, then that part of your brand story, and that becomes part of your brand. And then that's a story your competitors typically cannot tell. They can say it's cheaper, and they can say it's buy one get one free, and they can say all kinds of things like that, they can make wild claims that it's going to cure cancer, but they can't tell a story of their why and their how.
Blair Kellison:And so that's what purposeful companies need to be, as really good storytellers. It's why they need to work with people like you to really take that story and bring it to life, and bring it to life in all the different ways that you touch point, all the different channels, all the different vehicles. So whether you're on Instagram or you're on Instacart or you're in the store, you got a feeling about how is Old Mushroom showing up in each of those different places. And it's consistent and it's a story. And I like that story and I'm gonna pay more for that, or I'm gonna buy that brand versus everybody else.
Blair Kellison:And that's really where we're, and we have a founder and when we said like traditional medicinals was a perfect example, like we had too much story, we had too much to tell. And then if you were just an upstart and you were copying us, what's your story? You don't have a story and consumers, I mean, it's how knowledge has been passed on for eons is through storytelling. And you need to be a good, you need to have a story and then you need to be good at telling it.
Anne Oudersluys:I want to transition to culture. So I know this is a really important part of your leadership philosophy. Tell us a little bit about your approach to building culture.
Blair Kellison:Sure, so as a CEO, if you think about a company as a fish tank and the water, the fish tank is the company and the fish are the employees. It's very typical for people to hire a CEO and say, hey, we need some new fish in the tank, they're not swimming very well. And I've never done that. What I go in to do is I go in and change the water. And when you put pure, clean, oxygenated water into that tank, all the fish are gonna swim better.
Blair Kellison:That doesn't mean they're all gonna swim great, but most of them are all gonna swim better. And then you can really assess what you're at. And then what's at the bottom of every fish tank, a filter. And the filter are your values. What are the things that we care about?
Blair Kellison:Accountability, act like an owner, whatever those things are for your company that are really important to your company, attention to detail, people have all kinds of different things that are part of their ethos. And one of the ways to really figure out, one of the simplest ways to figure out the values of the company is just to take a couple of your favorite employees like, wow, Anne, Anne is one of my favorite employees, she gets her work done on time, she's always does it with a smile, she's willing to go to the extra mile, gosh, what if everybody at the company was just like Anne, wouldn't we have a great company? And so you those values from those core people that you really admire at the company and you make them that filter, that's filtering and the water is the culture, the water is the culture and you're constantly cleaning it through the filter, which is the values. And then what happens is it becomes self preservation. Then it's not Blair getting up in front of everybody and saying, hey, Anne, you're yelling at people, we don't yell at people at this company or, hey, you're not accountable, we're accountable here.
Blair Kellison:It's everybody's holding everybody else to the values. And that's how you sort of put them from the wall to the hall. So they're part of everything that we're doing. And then that becomes your self preservation is your values are keeping the culture and then the culture kind of maintains itself. And listen, culture is like everything, like culture allows people to come to work and be the very, to be happy, and if they come to work really happy, they will bring the best version of themselves to work.
Blair Kellison:And I can tell you, and I think studies bear it out, that people who come to work happy are way more productive, they're way more creative, they're way more innovative, and they're way more enjoyable to work with. It really becomes a competitive advantage. And then you can attract workers to come there, like people I never worked with, we had hundreds of employees at traditional middle school. There were many that I know their name and I would see them in the hall, but they never worked for me. I never was in a meeting with them.
Blair Kellison:I never gave them a review. They would say to me, gosh, Blair, you're the best CEO I've ever worked for. And what I heard when they said that was like, you actually have no idea, I could be an asshole in the meetings for all you know, you're never in a meeting with me. I think what I heard was, Blair, you're the CEO and you've created a culture for me to come here every day and be the very best version of myself. And for that, I thank you.
Blair Kellison:That's what's amazing and just happy fulfilled employees do amazing thing. They had these studies that show that like people bring 80% of their brain power to work every day. I And think at traditional medicinals, we got 95% of that, people just brought it, they came into work and they just brought it, they were excited to be there, they were excited to roll up their sleeves and get the work done, they felt good about the work. Culture is such a competitive advantage, and then there's this famous saying that culture eats strategy for lunch or breakfast or something. And so you can have the best thought out strategy.
Blair Kellison:And if your employees don't wanna do it, then they're just gonna gobble that up and there's nothing to it. You're much better off just to create a great culture, because the great culture will create a great strategy. A great strategy will never create a great culture. And it starts with the values and the onboarding. I always tell my team, if you have kids as a parent, you're modeling your behavior all the time, whether you're at the post office, the stop sign, the person who's irritating you in the grocery store line, whatever those things are, your kids are watching all the time.
Blair Kellison:And they're creating some kind of a baseline of behavior from that. And as an executive at a company, and particularly the CEO, you are being watched all the time. People are emanating, when Blair is the exact same person at the boardroom and the exact same person at the employee meetings and the exact same person on his family vacation in Florida, that's when you win.
Anne Oudersluys:So I've heard you say that model, and as you did hear, modeling is really the much more effective way versus lecturing or teaching. Do you have an example that you can share about what it looks like to model the culture?
Blair Kellison:It's just all the little things. Like one of the things I did, so whenever a new employee got hired, HR would send me an email for their start date, and I would put their start date on my Outlook calendar. And every year, I don't care how many employees we had, every year on your anniversary at work into the company, the CEO either came to your desk and thanked you for another year of service or acknowledged that it was your year of service, or you got an email from me. And there are people on that calendar, I haven't been in the company in three years now, there are people that I still send those, I sent two of them this week, I still send them those to those people. And it's like, it's all those little, I had a great story once our lady that was the head of packaging, it was her three year anniversary.
Blair Kellison:And so I would get up in the morning and I would look and see, who's on my list. They sometimes it was six or eight people. Anyway, one day it was the lady who did all our packaging and she had our supplier in from Green Bay for a day, our packaging supplier, they were coming in and they had just gotten to breakfast and it was like 09:00 in the morning. And I happened to be up in the lobby and I opened the door and she's coming in with crew, her packaging crew. And I stood there at the door and I gave her a high five and I was like, hey, this is your third anniversary at the company today.
Blair Kellison:And like, you're awesome and you've done all these great things. And those three guys from that packaging company were like, wow, I wanna work for a company like this. It's just all that little stuff, you know, and then it just, it's so there isn't like a magic bullet, you know, it's not like you just give everybody a 100 at Christmas or you, it's just like being a parent, you're constantly doing the right things. And sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes you feel like you're doing things that nobody notices, but it's when there's a company outing, I was always the guy that loaded the dishwasher and it's not fair, but if the lady who answers the door at the front desk is loading the dishwasher, nobody says anything, but if the CEO is loading the dishwasher, then everybody, what everybody else says, they kind of bring their plates to the sink. Because like the CEO is loading the dishwasher.
Blair Kellison:I got at least bring my plate in, like it's just, I know those are stupid examples, but it's just a lot of stuff and it's when somebody's mom dies and maybe they need to get a ticket to, oh, hi, I had a great thing. I had a guy, one of our mechanics, a big burly mechanics, these guys were always, they're important part of our company. Well, our machines that we made our tea were all made in Italy. And so every three or four years, some of the mechanics would get to go to Italy and see, they would tear down machines and they would learn all the new practices and they'd look at new machines. And so one of our guys, one of our mechanics Bart was getting ready to take his trip.
Blair Kellison:And I said, Bart, has your wife ever been to Italy? He's like, no, I said, take her with you. So, and then I sent him a note that I gave him a card the day left with $250 from me personally and said, hey, out to dinner on me one night while you're there. It's like all that stuff, it's like, it's so easy and it's so simple, and it's so freaking meaningful to people. I mean, look, I'm getting emotional with telling these stories years later, years later, but his wife had a blast.
Blair Kellison:She figured out like how far she could go on the train and still get back the same day. She'd go like 150 miles on the train to see as much of Italy as possible from Bologna and still get back in time. Like, a life changing trip for them. And that's his employer.
Anne Oudersluys:Yeah, I think it's so much of what you're saying is the power of really seeing people and knowing how can you serve them.
Blair Kellison:Those little emails on their anniversary that's being seen.
Anne Oudersluys:Very powerful. You're making me emotional.
Blair Kellison:Well, it's my absolute favorite part of being a CEO. I just love treating people the way they deserve to be treated. I just loved it. It was so much more fun than trade spend software and getting into Walmart and pricing. And I just loved to just creating an environment where everybody was loved and they were cared for and they brought their best self to work and they did their very best work.
Blair Kellison:That's my whole secret to success. I'm actually not that smart.
Anne Oudersluys:That can be really draining though. I mean, I wonder, does it require someone who has that personality? Is that how you're wired? Or is that something that you intentionally fuel yourself to have the energy to constantly serve others and see so I mean, be under under watch of everyone and scrutinized heavily. How do you fuel yourself to be able to be in a position to constantly serve others?
Blair Kellison:Yeah, that's a great question. It's actually requires zero effort because I was just simply being myself, no effort, completely effortless, all of that. This is just like the thing that came to my mind to do, oh, I should send his wife. Oh, I should acknowledge Sue's been here for a year. Know, it's like, it just, and you don't have to be like me.
Blair Kellison:So there's people who are CEOs that are leaders that are, you don't to be a CEO to be a leader, please. There's leaders at all levels of everywhere in organizations. You can be quiet, you can be funny, you can be sarcastic, you can just be yourself, just be yourself. It's like what they tell you in kindergarten, it's all you're ever really gonna be good at. And like, I can't tell you how many particular women I've worked with at Nestle that were just tough as nails at work, know, they were just tough, tough women.
Blair Kellison:And now all these years later, I've gotten to know them personally, they're just the softest, kindest, most lovely people. And they felt like they had to put that coat of armor on every day to walk into this male dominated Nestle. And that sucks. That Nestle was not bringing out the best in them.
Anne Oudersluys:So my final question for you is when you look back on your career, what advice would you have to give to leaders who wanna stay true to their values as they grow and scale?
Blair Kellison:My biggest thing is if I'm gonna write a book, it's gonna be called Lead Like You. Like just everybody's different, everybody's unique, and just be yourself. Be the same person in front of the employees as you are at the dinner table. Like lead like you, you can read a book about a Barack Obama and you can read a book about Nelson Mandela, but you're not Barack Obama and you're not Nelson Mandela. You can take ideas from them, but you can't read a book about Nelson Mandela and then sort of try to be like him everyday work.
Blair Kellison:You can only, you get to be Anne and I get to be Blair and that's what we're best at. And we should really get to know ourselves, what makes us happy and how we like to be with people. And we should wake up every day. The one thing we, okay, I'm never gonna be a Barack Obama, and you're never gonna be Meryl Streep, but we can wake up tomorrow, each of us can wake up tomorrow and you can be a better version of Anne than you were today, and I can be a better version of Blair than I was today. We can do that every day and we can put ourselves in environments that foster that.
Blair Kellison:My single biggest thing I don't like about being a CEO anymore is I don't get to put my arm around 200 people every day and love them. I miss that. Wonderful.
Anne Oudersluys:Blair, thank you for your honesty and all the insights that you've shared. Clearly you have such a heart for people and that is so inspirational. So I'm grateful for all your examples and your stories and being here today.
Blair Kellison:Thanks, Anne. Listen, I thank you because my voice is only as loud as people like you will allow it to be. So thank you.
Anne Oudersluys:Thank you. Thanks for listening to Grow Good. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. For deeper insights and monthly reflections, you can join my newsletter. The link is in the show notes.
Anne Oudersluys:And if you're interested in working together on marketing or growth strategy, you can find me at coreimpactstrategy.com. Until next time, keep growing good.