Episode 5: Ise Lyfe
Cultivating Emotional Intelligence in Business with Ise Lyfe
Ise Lyfe believes that emotional intelligence goes hand-in-hand with the success of a company. Ise is the CEO of Lyfe Productives, a product development company dedicated to making health and education provocative for hard-to-reach audiences. He is known for creating many positive impacts on society through his business and is most proud of one particular deal where he partnered with the FDA and a local food distributor to bring healthy food to an urban community that he saw for what it was: surrounded by bio-chemical warfare.
In this episode, he explains what it means to institutionalize emotional intelligence in a company, how he creates a loving work environment that accommodates factors beyond his control, and the importance of creating a margin for error to help employees feel secure. Tuning in you’ll discover Ise’s management tips for how to cultivate an environment where people want to show up to work, resources that he recommends, and the power of pro-tips and the application of knowledge in the workplace. To hear all this as well as Ise’s recommended exercise for anyone wanting to start a business, tune in today!
Episode 5: Show Notes
Key Points From This Episode:
• The growth of Ise’s business and the point when realized he could no longer manage it alone.
• How delegation was less about the bottom line and more about emotional intelligence.
• How delegation resulted in the company becoming much more profitable.
• What it meant to Ise to institutionalize emotional intelligence.
• Why Ise believes that arousal, plus a label, equals an emotion and how this plays out in business.
• How Ise creates a loving work environment that accommodates factors beyond his control.
• The importance of creating margin for error to help employees feel secure.
• How and why his company tries to maintain awareness of the cognitive map.
• How the leadership team continues to curate and cultivate this space.
• The constant value the company places on pro tips and shared learning experiences.
• How a recent pro-tip led the company to acquire a nursery instead of building one.
• How Ise distinguishes between a recoverable failure and a performance issue.
• Ise’s company’s greatest creative accomplishment in light of his mission to make healthcare and education provocative for hard-to-reach audiences.
• Resources that Ise recommends to anyone who wants to enhance their creative practice, create value in the world, or push their learning to the next level.
• And an exercise that Ise recommends to anyone wanting to start a business.
Tweetables:
“Emotional intelligence, for me, is the ability to have a certain social literacy, the ability to understand the environment around you and yourself in relation to that environment.” — @iselyfe [0:07:51]
“I think, really, what folks need, anybody, regardless of their race or background, is you need to feel that you can err, that you can make a mistake, and it doesn't mean that your opportunity is going to be taken from you.” — @iselyfe [0:13:53]
“Not only are experiences taken from black people when they make a mistake, [but] we’re not even given the opportunity before we can make the mistake. Which means that, with people of color, with women, with poor white folks, there is this position of scarcity, that ‘If I mess up, it's going to be so punitive.’” — @iselyfe [0:14:14]
“What I try to infuse at the firm is that a confidence in our team, that nobody or no situation caused by you or an outside factor, is an immediate threat to your position and standing at the company.” — @iselyfe [0:16:20]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 5 [TRANSCRIPT]
“IL: First of all, someone— We noticed when someone says ‘pro tip’, and that we know that they’re really in the crew, when folks are owning that, and they're sharing that stuff, we celebrate it. If it sticks, there's a common practice where somebody says something, or shares something that sticks, there are these odd-shaped, large sticky pads in the office. I mean, they're large. They're probably 2-feet across. People will write that tip up and put it somewhere that it stood out at. On the virtual side of things, in Slack, there's a whole channel dedicated to those kinds of tips and things. Yeah, we definitely lift it up and have it a part of our flow.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:44] JU: Welcome to The Paint & Pipette Podcast. My name is Jeremy Utley. It's my job to illuminate the tactics of world-class performers across domains. As a day job, I teach at the Stanford d.school helping students learn what it takes to come up with ideas. I've realized, I need to stay in the classroom learning myself, and this podcast is my classroom.
[00:01:32] MH: Hey, hey. I'm Marcus Hollinger. I lead Marketing and Creative at Reach Records, an Atlanta-based independent record label. I'm also co-founder for Portrait Coffee, where we are seeking to reimagine the picture that comes to mind for folks in specialty coffee. I'm so excited to pull up my desk alongside my good friend and fellow learner, Jeremy. I think, y'all are going to love what we have for you this season.
[00:02:03] JU: We've got some amazing stories on deck, and we can't wait to dive in and learn alongside you.
[00:02:08] MH: Grab your pipette and your paintbrush, and let's make something beautiful together.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:02:16] JU: Today, we talk with Ise Lyfe, the CEO of Lyfe Productives, which is a product development company dedicated to making health and education provocative for hard-to-reach audiences.
[00:02:27] MH: He told us an amazing story about how he partnered with the FDA and a local food distributor to bring healthy food to an urban community that he described as being surrounded by bio-chemical warfare.
[00:02:42] JU: He shares many management tips for how to cultivate an environment where people want to show up to work, how to share knowledge, how to celebrate the application of knowledge, and make sure to listen to the end, where he lays out his proprietary recipe for learning how to start a business.
Marcus is SVP of Marketing at Reach Records, a hip-hop label in Atlanta. He's also the founder of Portrait Coffee, which is a black-owned coffee roasting. How would you describe Marcus? I don't even want to put words in your mouth. How would you describe Portrait?
[00:03:17] Yeah. Portrait is a roaster and shop. Our vision is to reimagine the picture that comes to folks’ mind when they think of specialty coffee.
[00:03:29] IL: Cool.
[00:03:30] JU: Right? It's pretty dope. Anyway, Marcus and I have a mission to get the spotlight stories of black creators, founders, entrepreneurs, artists. We want there to be a broader set of stories being told and being heard. Every week, either Marcus, or myself invites an amazing creative that we want to learn from, and whose stories we want to get out to a broader audience in the world.
We don't have a podcast as yet, but hopefully at some point, it'll become a podcast. Right now, we're just getting our feet under us and getting the cycles down. But we're recording all these conversations and the hope is that at some point in the near future, we could release into the world and showcase some amazing people. I don't know, Ise, if you've heard my –
[00:04:20] IL: It sounds very special, and I’m glad to being in it.
[00:04:23] JU: Well, I got to say, Ise, I mean, just to come right off the bat. Marcus, I don't know how much about Ise Lyfe and his work. I met Ise at the d.school. Now it's been, basically, a month ago. From the get, he had me at hello with an amazing story about hiring and growing a business and delegation. I won't spill the beans on that story, Ise, in case you want to drop it later, but there you’re being [inaudible 00:04:54], not mine. What I thought would be interesting to hear is when did the business get beyond your ability to manage yourself? How did you know you needed to start delegating, basically?
[00:05:09] IL: Whoa, that's a great question. I'm Chief Executive Officer of Lyfe Productives. We're a social marketing and product development firm, and our 16th year. I also started really young. I mean, I have a firm at 16-years-old. I am 38-years-old. I've been at it a really long time. For me, first of all, it took me probably three years to go, “Oh, I have a business.” That takes a second. You know that you're doing something and you know you're putting forth this great effort, but I think those of us have social enterprises, especially. You're really just trying to fill a void. That's what I was attempting to do out of the gate.
When it started to grow beyond my control, or when I knew it was time to get other people in the set, moving on everything from hiring decisions, to whether we took on a client, how we manage crises, how we sustain and maximize on really good leaps forward that were not turbulent, it came not so much around bottom line pieces, but more so around the emotional intelligence in our organization. That it was really necessary for us to make sure that we were fostering, not the emotional needs of our staff and clients, but the emotional intelligence, and people's ability to navigate what they're feeling was at the forefront.
That's something that shouldn't be personality based. It should be institutional based. Not only should it be the institutional memory of the company, but everyone. Even the leadership as a subordinate to that process, which as a founder you really – that's something to navigate. That's when I would say, I started to really see that.
It goes hand in hand with the success of the company. I could parallel when that became necessary with when we started to do really profitable business. I think that that, it went side by side, which isn't talked about enough, I don’t think.
[00:07:21] MH: Well, Jeremy. I see why he had you at hello. Amen. I'm really curious about – what I hear you saying is you realized at a stage in your company, that it was time to institutionalize emotional intelligence. What in my intuition, I feel, I understand that, but I would love to hear you just tell us, what does that mean?
[00:07:50] IL: I appreciate the question. Emotional intelligence, for me, is the ability to, at its core, the ability to have a certain social literacy, the ability to understand the environment around you, and yourself in relation to that environment. For example, emotions, or the way we talk about it at the firm, and remember, this is not a super esoterical space. We don't sell crystals, or anything like that, but it's still at the core of our makeup is this, is that arousal, plus a label equals an emotion. If there's a – something happens. For example –
[00:08:31] MH: I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but can you repeat that, because that sounds so paradigmatic, and much like, wait, whatever comes next is about to change my life. Can you please repeat that last thing you said?
[00:08:44] IL: I don't know. I hope it's helpful, at least. For sure, man. No, no problem. That arousal plus a label equals an emotion. In the business context, the way it comes out day-to-day at anyone's company, for example, is let's say, a client calls and says, “What's going on with the timeline of a prototype?” Now, that call might come in to me, and then I open the calendar, and I go, “Oh, it'll be there on the 14th.” Again, humbly, I've been at it for 15 years.
Someone newer in the mix, or even those of us have been around longer, we can still be guilty of this. That call comes in and the question is internalized and personalized to, “'m not doing my job,” or, “Is this person accusing me of not delivering this thing on time?” That arousal, then turns into the label. The label is, I feel let's say, not appreciated. Then the emotion to attach to that is frustration. Now comes, how they display the frustration. This isn't personal to anyone at my company. It can happen anywhere. Is it the how they start showing up in a gruff? Do they get insecure about their job security, so they start panicking? Maybe they take an interview at another company that they wouldn't have taken if they felt their position was secure.There's all of this rattling that goes on.
Then normally, just breathing and looking at it with a certain lens, and also as a business leader, well, we can make a mistake of doing is that, and this is big culturally as well, that if you don't want to come off fake, if you don't want to come off every day, validating people and telling them they're great, and awesome. If you don't innovate around other ways to evoke that same sentiment, then you may accidentally, six weeks go by, and you haven't taught – you haven't pointed out in a tangible way something that's great that somebody did. In a tangible way, you haven't lifted up a great solution somebody brought, especially in juxtaposition, or how many times as a leader, you'll bring out when somebody's messed up, or you express something that isn't going the way that you'd like it to go.
All of those pieces around how we maintain a loving environment, where know one is dreading walking in the door every morning, is I think, a big part of our continued success. I'm always glad to talk about and share it.
[00:11:17] JU: Ise, one question I'm curious about is maintaining a loving environment, where people are excited to come in. To me, what that triggers is, there's only so much you can control. Meaning, your environment that you said in the workplace is one element. Then you said, the client calls saying, “What's going on with the timeline of the prototype?” I wonder if you could talk about elements that are inside your control, outside of your control, and how you think about that? If you want to create that loving environment, how do you accommodate factors that are beyond your control?
[00:11:51] IL: That's a great question. Something that I – how I can frame it is I think about it often like this. I was born at the end of the 20th century. I became a man at the dawn of the 21st century. I will die near the end, or near the dawn of the 22nd century. In this span, what is the world that I found myself in? With our staffing and with our company, the question always is, okay, this company is thriving, in what era in world history and environmental history? What are the different spiritual and humanity-based principles that come into the work, whether that’s overt, or inadvertent?
When those outside elements, I begin with just a core at the company, around, “We're okay. We're good. By we're good, I mean, there's no – everyone is here, because we want you here. We want you to stay here, and it's great. Nothing from the outside world is going to come in and make leadership here doubt you.”
If I get a call from a client, they tell me something wild transpired on a project, it doesn't happen often. I don't take the client's word for it. I come and I ask, “What happened? What's going?” Making sure our staff knows that that's going to happen. Making sure our staff knows that it's okay to fail. Again, when we have some of these conversations about race and inclusion, I'm often approached and recently, was doing this talk at Google. They're like, “What do communities of color need to thrive in business?” I’m like, “The same thing you need. Access to credit alone, don’t shoot me on my way to work, and a chance to play in the field.” It's this exotification of the experience.
I think, really, what folks need, anybody, regardless of their race, or background, is you need to feel that you can error, that you can make a mistake, and it doesn't mean that your opportunity is going to be taken from you. From a black perspective, and I'm only speaking to this, because this is what I understand the framing of your show to be about, is not only are experiences taken from black people when they make a mistake, we're not even given the opportunity before we can make the mistake. Which means that, with people of color, with women, with poor white folks, there is this position of scarcity. That if I mess up, it's going to be so punitive.
The first thing about navigating those, our team being secure is knowing that there's room and margin for error, and that your position, or post in the firm socially and technically doesn't change. The other thing though, is that if there's an outside thing that comes in and you're fallible, or we're wrong, or there's something we could have done better, you're going to be held accountable to that.
The beauty in accountability, and then we blame ourselves when something goes wrong is, well, if I was part of the problem, that means I get the opportunity to be part of the solution. If the outside has all these terrible things that can come in and do damage to reputation and projects, well, that's really scary. If we know that something goes wrong, it's on us, just as much as something right, it's on us, then we're able to push through it.
I think that that's a big part of how we control, or how we look at those outside things, and not dramatizing them. I think, Jeremy, something that I see often is that there's a constant drama type – people use this word crazy all the time. For example, somebody will be coming in the office, and they get off the elevator. They're like, “Oh, I'm sorry. There were people on the elevator. It’s crazy.
[00:15:52] JU: Like, there shouldn’t people riding the elevator.
[00:15:55] IL: Yeah. Or, “Ma’am, I'm trying to get some water in this water bottle. It's crazy.” We dramatize every moment. I think, it comes somewhere from a lack of faith, really, in our environment, and something, a higher planned for why the world take the shape that it does. I think, we feel overly responsible for everything going right. What I try to infuse at the firm is that a confidence in our team, that nobody, or no situation caused by you, or an outside factor is an immediate threat to your position and standing at the company. I think, that goes far out.
[00:16:36] MH: I want to ask the question, because you talked about environmental awareness. Also, you talk about this dramatization. I want to ask. I want to put this in context of where we are right now, because there's a lot going on in our environment. We've seen, and we are seeing a lot of crazy stuff. Maybe take this into the June 6th, 2021. We've got this outside stimulus, the Capitol riot. Folks are probably seeing that on the news, showing up to work, feeling a lot of pressure, “Sorry, I'm late.” Crazy stuff going on. How are you guys putting this into practice in real-time where we are right now?
[00:17:26] IL: Great question. For us, because our work is so much of it is – not so much of it. All of this tied to social enterprise, long before the current issues of the day. We've always been operating from a space of addressing issues and challenges. We have that blessing of seeing ahead of being – not seeing ahead of the curve, like we’ve been really practicing. The first thing that we did at the start of the pandemic, and then a lot of social unrest and even just at the top of the year with this thing is, there's a safe space for folks to say they need them. It doesn't have to be tied acutely to some moment.
We encourage and we have monthly talks, or it be leadership at the company, or we invite someone in. One thing that we talk about a lot is being aware of the cognitive map.
Social media in a constant – My grandfather, he got the news twice a day. He got the news in the morning, reading the paper, on the evening news at night. There wasn't this berating of news. Also, let's say his neighbor read some paper that stood out to him, he couldn't run over and just tape it on my grandpa's face. Which is what I think it's like in the world of social media, where someone else can have a new story that they're really into, and they just throw it in your face.
We talk about the cognitive map, being mindful that the structure of news media right now that it controls the cognitive map. They can point in a way like never before, a billion people to be looking at and focused on and knowing about the same thing. From something as social and irrelevant as the latest dance craze, or a crate challenge, or whether Britney Spears is getting her accounts back to herself, to something as consequential as a global pandemic.
Whether we want to admit it or not, the degree that we talk about, or know about these things are often correlated right with the amount of coverage that's getting on the news. We try to create a space that, one, we make room for all the things that people care about and where they're being driven to in the day and we don't police that at all. Also, for us to be mindful as developers, because we're product designers, to be mindful of not being overly absorbed in it.
I think that that's a big skill to me at the – or a way that I was able to measure it was we gave a lot of [inaudible 00:19:50] at the beginning of the pandemic for folks to work remote, to come in before the stay-at-home order. We just head back, and what we saw that people wanted to come to work. I think that, I know that from some of the blind surveying we do at the company, that is that people feel it's a safe space where they can choose when to be in the wind of the day and when to be inside. Now, I'm proud of that. I'm proud of that. I take no credit for it, but I'm proud of it.
[00:20:18] MH: That's powerful. Just stepping back a little bit, because Jeremy asked the question about controlling what you can control. What are some of the inputs that the leadership team that you're a part of at the company are taking in to be able to continue to curate and cultivate this space?
[00:20:40] IL: There's a lot of self-appointed training stuff that our staff has access to, where they can be something that they want to go see, that they want to study, a class that they want to take, a course, or a training they want. We cover that. Also, if we haven't heard from folks in a while from people like, about them taking a training, or a course, or will come up in a review like, “Hey, you should take advantage of these resources. What would you like to do? What stuff would you like to explore?”
We read together. Or we read [inaudible 00:21:09] from business leadership spaces. We read those things together, a chapter at a time. Our staff meeting is weekly, but twice, once every two weeks, we get a section where we stay on an extra 30 and discuss whatever chapter we're on. We're still small. It fluctuates between maybe nine and 16 people on staff, and so we're able to have that type of group thing. There's a constant value on pro tips and shared learning experiences between us. I think, that's the what keeps us there. I think, more than anything –
[00:21:50] JU: Ise, do you celebrate that? When you say there's a constant value on pro tips, do you call out not just the pro tips, but also the sharing of them, the impact of it? How does that value get reinforced?
[00:22:03] IL: Oh, yeah. Big time. First of all, we noticed when someone says pro tip, and that we know they really are in the crew, when folks are owning that and they're sharing that stuff. We celebrate it if it sticks. There's a common practice where somebody says something, or shares something that sticks in there. The odd-shaped, large sticky pads in the office. I mean, they're large. They're probably 2-feet across. People will write that tip up and put it somewhere that it stood out at. On the virtual side of things and Slack, there's a whole channel dedicated to those kinds of tips and things. Yeah, we definitely list it up and have it a part of our flow.
[00:22:44] JU: That's cool. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I'm always curious about what environmental supports behavior like that has given. I love the example of big stickies get put up in the wall, a Slack channel dedicated to pro tips, etc. Can you tell us what's a recent pro tip that got shared that impacted folks’ behavior, attitudes, etc.?
[00:23:06] IL: A big one that came from my innovation strategist was it looks a math problem, but it’s just saying, “Acquiring is greater than building.” That really resonated with us. It was the context ideas that [inaudible 00:23:21] a kombucha beverage right now. We also are opening nursery, a tea nursery. Out of the gate, there's all of this, we're building it. The idea came up, “You know what we should do instead? We should go to—” well, first of all, this wisdom comes out on leadership staff saying, we should be focusing on acquiring versus building, and was giving all of these reasons why it makes more sense for us to acquire things than to build them from the ground.
One example, are how it went into practice is in looking at nurseries, we were looking at all the different land plots in the three different spaces, where we’re developing these nurseries. Instead, the team went, the development team went, and they just looked up nurseries that have two-star ratings and said, “Let's go to them and say, hey, do you want to sell this dump?” Because they already have the infrastructure in place, they have the watering systems, they're zoned, they have all of that stuff, and so that was a recent pro tip. Acquiring –
[00:24:24] JU: Well, wait. Hang on. Hang on. That, to me, that's really cool, because it isn't exactly what I thought you're going to say. How do you get from – so just walk me through it, real slow, because I’m slow. How do you get from, okay, I get it. I totally track with you that acquiring is better than building. I thought you were going to talk about acquiring customers, getting people to sign up. Tell me how you went from this notion of acquiring is better than building, or greater than building, whatever the formula is, to looking at two-star nurseries. How did that path get traveled? Because that's fascinating.
[00:24:59] IL: Well, thank you. It comes up in the conversations, and that in one of these bi-weekly sessions, this thing around acquiring versus building, and that we were seeing that the start time on when we're looking at what things are accelerating in the work plan and our Gantt charts and what things are delayed, what are the things that we were just already getting in the mix of that we're already developed, versus all of the bureaucracy from the ground up? That's how it came up.
There's a thing at the firm that we talk about measurable and tangible outcomes, always. Then, how do we make sure that we're not just pontificating in meetings about theory, or receiving stuff that people are giving us that's really great information, and then transmuting it only to pontification? There's already a culture like that there. The development team that works right underneath the management team, so we have an executive team at the top, a project management team, and then a development team. The development team is always looking for ways to apply what comes out of those sessions.
In our agenda for development team meetings, at the top of the meetings, there's an image of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and it says, “Applied Science.” It's a quirky way for us to talk about how we can apply anything that came up. The development team, with no project manager, or executive management alone, said, “You know what we should do.” We get our deputy director to get Ise to sign off on us going and doing bids on low-rated nurseries. I thought it was brilliant.
When it came to me, I think, they were expecting three weeks of back and forth. First of all, it was entertaining. I also thought it was brilliant. It's working. Because it turns out, there's all these folks that have these nurseries, that they really don't want them anymore, or they ran really poorly, but they're up to code, because they have to be for the way that the systems are going. That's how it happened.
[00:26:57] JU: Wow. I love it. I mean, the Bill Nye. You say, at the start of every one of these meetings, you've got Bill Nye saying, applied knowledge matters. Then what I'm hearing, I'm just reading it back to you and you tell me if that's basically it or not. What I'm hearing is, because you've got the executive management, you got project management, you got the development team all in the same meeting, the development team isn't just interested in theory. It's their job to pull something down to ground. There's almost this mutual accountability. The executive team, maybe your project management, I don't know, it's your job to bring the pro tips, bring the inspiration. Then, it's the development team's job to say, how do we turn this into action?
[00:27:38] IL: Exactly. That's exactly it.
[00:27:41] JU: Yeah, it's really cool. That's really cool. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, Ise, I'm super inspired. I'm just thinking about your earlier comments about folks feeling like, hang on, let me look. You said this earlier. Nothing's an immediate threat to your standing at the company. How do you distinguish between a recoverable failure and a performance issue? Meaning, everybody's going to fail, and you don't want people to be so afraid to fail that they don't take risks, or try new stuff.
At the same time, if someone's – I mean, maybe I'm answering my own question, but if someone's only failing, or repeatedly and can't deliver even basic value at some point, and they're always saying, “No, no. It's safe to fail here.” At some point you go, “Yeah, but payroll’s about to be in retrograde,” to borrow your friend’s another story, right? How do you distinguish between the two?
[00:28:33] IL: First of all, intent, willingness to correct, like a willingness to course correct. Then as crude as it is, is this a repeated failure, as you put it. If that's the case, then we have to make a hard decision. We do our best to preemptively address that hard decision by doing really great hiring, and really thinking through that process. For the person who is, would be repeatedly making mistakes, the first source of question is to the person who's responsible for training and leading that person.
It becomes even more daunting for their supervisor than them directly. Our question always is, how are we informing both the heart and mind of the employee? If I'm only focusing on how much they know, we hire smart people. They're going to know a lot. I'm only focusing on that. I need to also be focusing on how much they care about what they're learning, how much they really are absorbing their tasks and their job? That's the distinction.
If it's like, well, the issue is either unwillingness, or a lack of capacity to put real care and deliberate action into this issue, then you have to terminate the position, or the person in it. That's never something that we want to do. On a business level, it's counter-productive to business. If we're paying someone salary, let's say for a year and a half, before they lose their job, and we're not able to regain and make good-end profit from what the investment is in that position, and it's just a loss across the board. We try our best just not to get there.
Then the other thing about creating such a loving and supporting environment is that everyone is woven into each other. I have a, on the land at my home, I'm always planting stuff. It tripped me out when I realized, you can cut one stem that is 3 feet away from the other side of this plant. Down in that route, that stem on the left is attached to the one on the far right, and the one on the right dies as soon as you cut that one. In the business ecosphere, it's the same thing. You get people in the room that are building something together, and it's real, and it's genuine. Then a decision comes up, where someone has to go. That effects the whole company. We never want that on a human level and on a business.
[00:31:05] MH: Wow. The awareness of that is pretty profound for me. I want to try to connect that, because it seems like where we are right now. We're discussing some of the interworking and the mechanisms of how you guys are accomplishing your mission. What I understand Ise Lyfe’s mission to be is making healthcare and education provocative for hard-to-reach audiences. I'd love to ask, with the mechanism and that vision, what's maybe one of you guys's most, your greatest creative accomplishment, using the mechanism to accomplish that mission, and for you personally?
[00:31:48] IL: Marcus, I'll tell you a really cool story to answer that. That we started developing in the lifestyle, the health lifestyle space. What was a cool thing to leverage in those spaces is, every bit, wherever you go, and I'll keep the names of the companies out of this. If you go to Chain Co-Op, that sales camp here, you understand? Or a healthy bar that you purportedly can eat to climb the mountain better, or active beverage company, all of their branding, all of their messaging is all around environment and inclusion.
Forget the hiring and the staff, when you look at who they're making their products available to, it was really clear that this industry didn't think that people that didn't look like your typical person in Lululemon pants drinking a latte, have no interest in camping in the outside and health. I mean, it's totally negligent. Arguably, malpractice on a corporate level to be ignoring entire market. We went to probably the most popular, most-celebrated and at least known active health bar company out there, that is synonymous with you see somebody eating this, it's like a healthy protein bar choice. They had approached us before about developing just some regular messaging for them. I was looking at where they were available in stores.
For example, in Los Angeles, there's a certain highway, they're not south of. The Bay Area, there's a certain highway that they're not east of. The more we were talking, we went in, and there's all of these reasons. “We just can't figure out. We don't know.” Usually, you don't care about this area. I'm not saying that as an attack. I'm just saying that for whatever reason, you don't care about the region. Here's the business argument for why you should.
Because what I always try and get – I see the average inner-city community surrounded by biochemical warfare. McDonald's, KFC, the liquor store. That’s chemical warfare marketed on a community. If you can walk out your house, and in walking distance, there's five liquor stores that run on permits issued by the city that you live in. That's big. Instead of griping about this, how do we get a healthier food choices? This celebrated very known, very popular, successful posing a health bar company, they explained to us that the issue is that when they put it in the stores, it meets its expiration point and it has to leave the stores.
We cut a deal to work with a food supplier to come up with FDA-approved coding that would allow these bars to be on the shelf a little longer, four months longer, than they'd had been before, so that a concise marketing and development team to have a chance to really spike that community and get them and get this demographic engaged in buying the product. We got the contract to develop that, and then we successfully developed it, and then took it to market. Then got them a 20 percent growth margin in that market, which was incredible.
All of it came from first starting with this thing about, there's a health disparity, that there is across the country, there's areas not – that of course, correlate with race, but also class, that you can't – there's no option outside of technically toxic food. Can we solve that disparity with this company that has all the infrastructure to produce and deliver and ship to this area? We think the market introduce the people to the food, and it worked. That would be an example of something that worked.
[00:35:55] MH: That's amazing.
[00:35:56] JU: Incredible.
[00:35:57] IL: Thank you, man.
[00:36:00] JU: Yeah. Huge props. You know what I love is it takes a systems approach, too. You had to be able to work with the FDA, work with the company, have a sense of understanding of a systemic issue. It's not just one thing. Gosh, there's so much more we could cover, Ise. We want to be respectful of your time.
[00:36:18] IL: I have so many [inaudible 00:36:18] time for now. I got some to come over the booth. Really, I have some questions for you all. I'm just really [inaudible 00:36:24] at doing this. I won't to pose my questions, so how would you think about it, experience that you all are having in this conversation. I still got a bit, but I don’t want to hold you even. Feel free.
[00:36:35] JU: Maybe we could just wrap with this, because I think it's a cool line of sight into your thinking, especially somebody who probably is a purveyor of knowledge among your team. If you could recommend two or three resources for folks who want to enhance their creative practice, grow in their ability to see opportunities, come up with ideas, create value in the world, what are two or three resources you'd recommend, as far as somebody wants to push their learning to the next level?
[00:37:06] IL: Like, reading resources you’re saying?
[00:37:07] JU: Could be reading, could be podcasts, could be food, could be movies, could be, you name it.
[00:37:13] MH: Sneakers.
[00:37:14] IL: Cool. Cool. A book, a book that I would recommend, two books, and then one podcast. The books might be a bit of a cliche, but I think they're important. One, there's a book Miguel Ruiz wrote, called The Four Agreements. Very well-known book, of course. It’s these four agreements that a person makes with themselves. I would suggest that anyone interested in business, pick up this book, even though it's not a business text, because it deals with not taking things personally, being impeccable with your word, not making assumptions, and always doing your best. I think that it's a good – anybody that has a business mind.
The podcast, and I'm switching up, because I want to say podcast, because there's an exercise I want to encourage anyone that is listening to this to do if they want to start a business. The podcast, I really enjoy The Business Wars Podcast. What I like about The Business Wars Podcast, it’s one of my favorite podcasts is it will, for example, when I think of Nintendo, I think about, okay, if you guys [inaudible 00:38:23] Nintendo founded, I’d go, oh, Nintendo was founded in 1981. Nintendo was founded in the late 1800s. The dude that founded Nintendo, the grandfather, the dude who create the video games that we all know and love, he had a card playing company.
They'll do that, Nintendo versus Sony, or Harley Davidson versus Yamaha. Or one of my favorite ones was the WWF versus the WCW. With these really dramatic stories from products and things that we've known all our lives, that give a great background story that I think anyone going into business can appreciate. The exercise is –
[00:39:08] JU: That’s cool.
[00:39:09] IL: - I live in a time where everyone is talking about starting a business and having your own thing. They talk about it in this really light way. I think that I encourage you one, if you want to start a business, first thing I say is pick something that you really, really love to do, and don't do it for 30 days, and go fishing. Go fishing alone, catch a fish, filet the fish and eat the fish. Then last part of that I think is an interesting part of the exercise is that for every day, do something that's built in that 30-day span, that's building towards what you want to do. This concoction of things, without revealing what comes out at the end, it really is a great setting to the rest of what you're doing. It makes it very real, what the experience of starting and running your own business is like. That would be my offer.
[00:40:07] JU: Just to be sure, Ise, I understand the instruction, it's three parts. One is, find something that you love and don't do it for 30 days. Two is go fishing alone, catch a fish, clean the fish, probably cook the fish, then eat it, unless it's sashimi grade.
[00:40:24] IL: Eat it. Yeah.
[00:40:25] JU: Eat it. Then three is, do something every day that's building towards what you want to do.
[00:40:32] IL: Towards your company, your goal. Yup. I've done it and I’ve led many people on the process of doing that. It's a doozy, but it's a blessing.
[00:40:42] JU: I wish you could see Marcus's face right now, because he's going – I see the wheels turning for Marcus.
[00:40:50] MH: Yeah. I'm already there. In my mind, I'm on the boat with this fish.
[00:40:55] IL: Yeah. You know, the crazy thing about the boat part, Marcus? It's like, when you catch the fish, in that mind state, is maybe a little morbid to say, but the patience and the aggression the task takes is the man. Like nothing, we go in order some salmon at a restaurant. Somebody caught that fish on a boat and cut its head off. They pushed a worm to a hook and I sat there.
[00:41:21] JU: Then doing this fishing. I mean, somebody's going to listen to this maybe someday, or maybe Marcus is going to do it this weekend. Do you start with fishing? Is the fishing exercise day one of 30 days? Is it day 30? Does it matter when it takes place in the sequence of not doing something you love and doing something every day? Where does it fall?
[00:41:43] IL: The way that we've always done it is at the beginning, is just something that you really like doing. Normally it just stays. Normally something connected with food. People choose [inaudible 00:41:52]. Not doing that for 30 days. Within the span of that 30 days, you go fishing, and you stay out there. What it takes to make the time to do that, to actually go and do it, many people don't even know where to start. You realize it, I'll give you a cheat hint right here. Most people don't know, Jeremy, they don't go, “Oh, I need a fishing permit.” What it takes to actually get out there and be in the mix. I hope that's helpful, and I'm answering your question.
[00:42:25] JU: No, you totally are.
[00:42:26] IL: This has been great.
[00:42:28] JU: Ise, this is an incredible conversation. I feel like, it's a part one of a multi-part. Maybe we say, let's do part two after Marcus and I undertake the challenge, because I feel like –
[00:42:38] IL: Oh, cool.
[00:42:40] MH: That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.
[00:42:40] JU: Jedi Sensei and help us unpack our experiences. That can be pretty fun.
[00:42:46] IL: Well, I'm game for it.
[00:42:48] MH: Yeah.
[00:42:48] JU: Ise, thank you so much for the time today.
[END]
The quality of our thinking is deeply influenced by the diversity of the inputs we collect. Implementing practices like Brian Grazer’s “Curiosity Conversations” ensures innovators are well-equipped with a variety of high-quality raw material for problem-solving.