The Exchanges

Q Before we get into that whole research process, Other than looking at an aisle and saying, hey, this is ridiculous. I see the trends moving the wrong way. Was there anything else that sort of germinated in your head to figure out what the brand is?

A We did some research afterward, but I, there's something that's a phrase actually like New York Magazine uses it, which is like, I do believe in sort of the backlash to the backlash and saw a while ago, a couple of things that have come true. One was saw indulgence coming back. Initially, a couple years ago, you know, I'm a combination of a gut marketer, but also data, and saw things like confections on the rise. Now, dark chocolate was partly due to health and wellness, but I saw confections on the rise. Right now, and I think we're in the right place at the right time, the commodity that's going through the roof on the commodity markets is butter, if you want to call it a market. So butter is through the roof. So, you know, there's things that are pointing to indulgence and people treating themselves for This healthy lifestyle. And I think we're in the right spot with ice cream as a whole. There are some low fat ice creams or they're not really ice creams that are doing very well in the marketplace right now. But also the second thing was that you had 1.2 billion dollars in sales between Ben and Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs and they dom everything. Sometimes everything that scared people away from frozen were things that interest me. So some people say in the frozen aisle, you've got deep pockets. It's true. Unilever and Nestle are deep pockets. But they also have command, each of…

AI assessment note: “One was saw indulgence coming back.”

Q So inevitably when you start this process and you, you are in it, this isn't like how we build this and we're looking back 20 years and you've built this multi-billion dollar company. Hopefully you're in it now. What were the most unexpected curve balls that came your way?

A I'd probably say number one is we have a competitor out there. That is a low fat, high protein ice cream that is, um, has changed the category dramatically. So super premium ice cream is, is flat or down as a whole pints are doing really well. Private labels taking some hits, but a market trend, consumer trend was something that we all missed a little bit and it's having an impact. So it's sort of a quote unquote, healthier ice cream. It's not, but it's being positioned that way. And no one, People saw it, but no one, including myself, saw how big it was going to be. So I think we have some headwinds there. I think, as I mentioned before, Curveball was making our product. We didn't realize how hard it was to make our product initially. But, you know, when I talk about going from 20 grocery stores a year ago to 3000, you know, there's a lot of things that we've done right, too. So we have an incredible product, incredible brand. We've got great distribution. We have a lot of people that really have a rooting interest for us. So I think those things, I think those are probably the number one things if you wanted to find anything as a, you know, as a curve ball.

AI assessment note: “I'd probably say number one is we have a competitor out there.”

Q very shortly. All right. So this is going to be a little bit different from a lot of the conversations I've had, uh, with capital allocators and investors. You are an entrepreneur and we're going to walk through your story much in the same way people think about an investment, but why don't, why don't we just start with how did we get to be sitting at this table together?

A But we've known each other a long time. You know, it's kind of interesting running and being an endurance athlete. It's a big part of my business story and a part of my life story. And it's kind of interesting. A lot of investors immediate connection. I don't know if it's something where type eight personalities are doing Ironmans and triathlons and things like that in the investor community as well. But our personal story goes back to, we both ran together in high school and we ran many in New York marathon together. And I think when you see somebody, you know, blood setting Sweat, tears, and urine. You end up getting to be connecting with them. So talking about investments is easy today, but that's how we got to know each other. But running actually goes through my story. I was a, uh, four, 17 miler way back when in high school and college, and you can't see me on air right now, but I have a lot less hair. I should be more aerodynamic now. Then I still run, but not at that level by any means. I got these young kids at MIT I run with that don't know how fast I was. And as I'm going around the track, they slap me in the ass and they say, You're gonna, you're getting better every week, sir. And I'm like, I'm gonna kill you if you call me sir. And they're only running five minute pace. But, you know, running was always a big part of who I was. A loneliness, a long distance runner…

AI assessment note: “our personal story goes back to, we both ran together in high school”

Q And then there's, there's an orange flavored one, isn't there?

A There is. We're going to have a shop right down in the Jersey area is going to be carrying it with Roach Brothers carries it here, but it's called the orange a trois. It is vanilla with orange creamsicle wrapped around three kinds of chocolate, milk, dark white, and it's our sleeper flavor. But a key part of our DNA to kind of wrap up the overview was that I had been this runner to go back to where I started on the story. I've been completely healthy. I've run 37 half marathons. I'm running five or six New York marathons and San Francisco marathons. And then half Ironmans and in April, I'm wearing a bracelet on my hand, April first, April fools, 2014. I was not feeling well. And I went to the doctor's office and they ushered me out saying just before the saying, you're the healthiest guy we know. You're the healthiest guy we know. And I went to a new doctor here in Boston. I never saw this doctor before. And the doctor has never called again. And I went in and she said, I told her my symptoms, I've got nausea. And she said, oh, you're just a manic entrepreneur. I'm itching. It's eczema. I was about to leave that day, and I went back in, and I said, I'm sorry to be an ass, but why can't you test me? And 24 hours later, I got bad news where everybody gets bad news. I was at Target picking up toilet paper, and I was in toothpaste or something, and I was sitting in the parking lot,…

AI assessment note: “There is... it's called the orange a trois. It is vanilla with orange creamsicle”

Q Now, how do you think about growth and resource allocation, right? There are some businesses where you say you want to build your team and your resources ahead of the revenue growth that'll come, and others, you want to get to the point where you're cashflow positive as quickly as you can. How have you laid out your roadmap?

A Well, there's a bunch of different theories right now in consumer packaged goods. There's a theory that people are taking. So when we initially started, people were talking about margin and saying you have to be at X percent, 50%, 40%, 60%, whatever that number is. I know what that number is, but you have to be at X percent margin to, to be able to compete effectively. There's a philosophy right now that's going on where people are taking 15, 12, maybe 18% margin to drive top line revenue. And It's just a very, it can be a dangerous philosophy, but there's a lot of people that are doing that. There's companies that are grossing 152 hundred million dollars and aren't profitable and are selling at five X for a billion dollars. So there's, you know, we do have a plan to exit this business. So it's that, you know, that's number one is what is our vision and our plan and how many years is that? From a resource allocation standpoint, you know, we, our number one thing is to Brand build as I was talking about power bars to brand build and drive sell through. So from an allocation standpoint, we have to put money into marketing. We have to put money into trade spending, making sure we're priced competitively. And we've had a couple of little learnings there. So anything that drives sell through to build that effective selling story is where we have to put the money against. I think pro…

AI assessment note: “From a resource allocation standpoint, you know, we, our number one thing is to Brand build”

Q How do you get feedback when you're the leader of the organization?

A It's a really good question. One, my wife has no trouble giving me feedback on the business. Not always constructive, sometimes constructive, sometimes constructive, and I like to hear it. I think, number one, you get feedback from the consumer. I keep mentioning this as a theme. So if you're selling, you're getting feedback. If you're not selling, sometimes it's hard to identify what that feedback is. It could be something simple as awareness. It could be, you know, something we're new and Ben and Jerry's is 40 years old. So number one, you get consumer feedback. The second thing, I mean, there's a big difference between feedback on me and feedback as a brand and as a company. I really believe, again, I keep saying about being at retail. I'm at stores as much as I possibly can be. Like my wife sends me out to go get milk and it takes me two hours and she knows it cause I'm gonna hit four stores. I was on vacation in Charleston, South Carolina this weekend for July fourth, and I had to hit a Harris teeter and she knows that she's like only one, you know, I tried sneaking four, but I didn't have a car. So, so I like to be a retail hearing from consumers, hearing feedback on social media. Um, I take it very personally. I respond to everybody. I respond to everybody on social media personally, if I can, uh, pretty much everybody. And we just had a couple of posts today that came u…

AI assessment note: “One, my wife has no trouble giving me feedback on the business.”

Q homework, you come up with the idea, you give them the money, and then you're done. You come up with the idea, you're ready to roll, and then you're just starting. So, what was the process from, ok, we have a passion, we have an idea, we've done our homework, we know there's a market niche, we have a great concept, I know how to build a brand. Then what?

A And not to be so, you know, big picture or emotional, but I think that one of the things that kind of ties this whole picture together, and I've talked to entrepreneurs or anyone out there is I believe one of the most motivating factors in life is fear. And I didn't start this because I was afraid. I don't know what to do. I don't know. Even with my experience, I'm not sure what to do this and that I kid around that. It took me, I set myself back a year or two because I didn't know how to do a UPC code, which actually takes like 1:02 on the computer. So there was those initial days, which weren't long ago that Fear was setting me back a little bit. One of the big things was I actually hooked up with somebody in my, uh, Penn state ice cream university class and Nadine had been a Dean of DeLuca, New York, and she is sort of the wizard behind the flavors. And when we had knocked off those initial flavors, um, we had some advisors. I had some consultants. We knocked off the initial flavors and got the initial pint out of the kitchen. It made it real. And even when things were, we worked on, I went to a packaging agency and we developed packaging. And the initial packaging, we ran just some comps of just five, but it became more real when you had a product in a white pint and you had a black package, it became more real as a whole. It's interesting cause I haven't really, you know, …

AI assessment note: “knocked off the initial flavors and got the initial pint out of the kitchen”

Q How many potential ones are there out there that you'd like to get to, right?

A Yeah, thousands, and we're going to more, but I will tell you also in full honesty and talk about my self-awareness is really good. Now, I may have issues and blind spots that I'm aware of and don't do anything about, that's a separate issue, but I know one thing is from a relationship standpoint, while the salesperson may not be able to sell as well as I can, they have better relationships at the buyer levels and layers than I do. So, you know, a lot of these people who are in the sales and broker role go back many, many years with buyers and they go out to dinner with them and they may go on a hunting trip. They may go on a cruise with them. There's a lot of, you know, back slapping and I don't play any of that down or be self, you know, and, uh, look down on it all. It's a very valuable skill in that relationship building piece. And I don't think it's, um, necessarily my greatest strength. I'm a good relationship person, but in that environment, um, I move pretty quickly. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have ADD and the idea of like sitting there and having a two hour dinner and talking about, you know, hunting or the cruise driver drives me crazy. So, you know, there's people who are better at managing those relationships. I want to talk business when I go out, like a lot of other people. And Some of these, some of the people, buyers and other people don't want to talk a…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, thousands, and we're going to more”

Q So what, what does the next three to six months look like?

A Our goal is to, over the next The next five years is to build, you know, a national brand that has significant, you know, revenue, um, and is a major player out there to be a third brand to Ben and Jerry's and, and Haagen does in the super premium space. Um, and we really believe that indulgences is where things are going the next three to six months. You know, we continue to focus on sell through number one on opening up new markets. Number two, building out the team effectively and finding things in the right place. But, you know, we still have, you know, it's still about awareness also. You know, I remember being at Pepsi and finding out the, you know, key metric in consumer package because it's household penetration. And I think it was about 10 years ago, the number may have been this low, but I found out that Gatorade had, not awareness, but in terms of numbers of consumers simply that have Gatorade in their household was 12% of America. And you're thinking, Gatorade? This has been around 40 years, and like, you know, not that everyone's an athlete, but you find that some of these household penetration numbers are three percent, four percent. So my point is that our awareness right now, our distribution is less than five percent of America, and our awareness is probably less than that. So we still go out every day, and even in our hometown of Boston, we've been marketing f…

AI assessment note: “the next three to six months. You know, we continue to focus on sell through”

Q And then how did you go about building your team?

A You know, they say is, I had, I had, uh, sorry to give you another story, but I was drinking, I believe one of my number one philosophies, everything begins in a bar. So you meet a spouse in a bar, you meet investors in a bar. I was in a bar, and this is not necessarily somebody I met in a bar, but I was in a bar in New York recently, and it's a young guy there, and he was talking about his company, and you know, I think pros and cons of his CEO, and I'm not sure how highly he thought of a CEO. And he said, you know what? The only thing this guy's good at is he's really good at sales and, and he's really good at sales. He's really good at hiring people, but otherwise he's useless. And I was kind of like, you know, a CEO, those are actually pretty good things to be good at. So our team came together in a couple of different ways. Nadine came in through, you know, ice cream university and meeting her and, and with her came Renee, who is, who works with her closely. And then I was looking for somebody to help execute our first scooper bowl, a marquee event here in Boston that you pay 15 dollars for all you can eat ice cream and it benefits the Farber Cancer Center. 30,000 people come to try out ice cream. That's where I got a stack of resumes in from people who wanted this job in marketing. And again, going back to the theme, one of the people in the, in the stack of resumes, Moll…

AI assessment note: “So our team came together in a couple of different ways. Nadine came in through”

Q Why is that? Did somebody Have the name vice cream.

A You know, we could talk around it, but it was, I think in general, when you look at things in life, you can end up saying sometimes you want to bet on being successful and sort of cutting deals early. It was, I think we got rejected by the patent and trademark office the first time, just because they said, this is too obvious. We don't have any research. Anyone owns it, but someone has to own it, or you can't own the word vice. You can't own the word cream. We're like, we want both of them. So it was two years. And my, my lawyer, Aaron Silverstein, I should give a big shout out to him because He tells me that, you know, I don't appreciate his work, but we do appreciate his work every day. He, you know, Aaron calls and going, God, you don't ever listen to me. You're always on the go. Do you ever listen to me? So it's usually, he's like fed up with me all the time.

AI assessment note: “we got rejected by the patent and trademark office the first time”

Q Yeah. And so what are the, those are some great management disciplines. I'm sure you've learned from being involved in real professionally managed organizations. What are the two or three things that you would like to have on your team in terms of management leadership? That aren't there yet.

A There's this, uh, it's a very hot decision for us right now. I've been doing the sales role myself, and something I think you'll find is interesting is that we've presented to approximately 17 accounts, and we're 14 for 17 getting in. The only three are the ones I didn't go to. So I'm 14 for 14 presenting to accounts. Some accounts gonna listen out there and turn me down just to make me humble, but, um, you know, so the sales function is how do I Staff up and have like a mini me. How do I have somebody who can tell the vision almost as well as I can? There's still a lot of value out there and in people in what's called Founders FaceTime. And that's not just vice cream. You know, you think about business and great brands. I know I'm a little bit of a different interview, but Jim Cook here in Boston from Sam Adams. I don't mean to pretend to position myself as any of these people, but everyone wants to meet Phil Knight from Nike. You know, Travis at Uber's had his own challenges lately. I don't know about that, but there's people in the consumer world. I can't speak to The tech at all that people, you know, Justin Gold from Justin's has been incredible to me. People want to still meet the founder, even if it's not named after me, like Justin's. So there's some founders FaceTime. So how do you, how do you bring salespeople on that can sell the vision almost as well as you can? Tha…

AI assessment note: “the sales function is how do I Staff up and have like a mini me”