Killing It

Sheryl O'Loughlin

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062475350
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Imprenditoria
• Index: Business

The former CEO of Clif Bar, Co-founder of Plum, and serial entrepreneur offers insights about launching and growing a business while maintaining a fulfilled life in this practical guide filled with hard-won advice culled from the author's own sometimes dark, raw experiences. With a foreword by Steve Blank.

Aspiring entrepreneurs are told that to launch a business, you must go all in, devoting every resource and moment to making it work. But following this advice comes at an enormous personal cost: divorce, addiction, even suicide. It means sacrificing the intangibles that make life worth living.

Sheryl O'Loughlin knows there is a better way. In Killing It, she shares the wisdom she's gained from her successful experiences launching a company from the ground up (Plum), running two fast-growing companies (Clif Bar and REBBL), and mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs (Stanford University). She tells it like it is: If you don't invest in your wellbeing, your business will not succeed, nor will you.

Sheryl knows firsthand the difficulty of balancing the needs of her growing family with her physical and mental health, while managing other work and life challenges. In this warm, honest, and wise handbook, she gives you the essentials for killing it in business—without killing the rest of your life.

Filled with real-life examples and anecdotes, Killing It addresses common questions including:

• How do you prepare your significant other for your business venture?
• How do you time launching and growing your business with the ebb and flow of family life?
• How do you find joy in the day-to-day?
• How do you maintain meaningful, supportive friendships?
• How do you walk away and start again?

The ultimate life and business course, Killing It gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to start their enterprise and thrive—both in the office and at home.

Part I

GETTING READY—WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW

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So many people who become entrepreneurs aren’t prepared for what it really takes. And I’m not talking about the stuff they teach in business school. I mean the questions no one tells you to ask, the things no one tells you to think about, and the ideas you don’t know to think about. For instance, business school doesn’t teach you why it’s important to have good friends around you, or how to handle the emotional fallout when a cofounder relationship breaks apart. They don’t tell you how to maneuver the tricky spots with your partner, or with your kids if you have them. Yet these things are arguably just as important—if not more so—than putting together budgets and marketing plans. And so here I offer you questions to ask of yourself and those around you, and advice I wish I’d heard before taking the leap. Make no mistake: even had I known all of this when I was starting out, I would have taken the leap anyway. But I’d probably have had a lot more fun.

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CHAPTER 1

Heart on Your Sleeve

The Entrepreneur and Love

I’ve often wondered why we save words like “love” for home. Every moment—whether you’re reading to your child, making dinner, or running a multimillion-dollar corporation—is an opportunity to create and express love. Love belongs in everything we do.

It wasn’t until I met Gary Erickson—the cofounder and owner of Clif Bar—in 1997 that I learned that love belonged in work. Prior to meeting him, I worked in marketing for big companies where the conventional wisdom was that in order to effectively analyze a product, you had to remove yourself and your personal likes and dislikes. In other words, you had to remove your humanity. That was the only way to be objective. Gary’s philosophy was the opposite. He brought his entire self to his business—his love for the outdoors and for being physically active, his commitment to the environment and to his family (when I first met with him in person, he interviewed me with his daughter in his lap), and his enthusiasm for food—particularly natural foods. At this point, “natural foods” was a new concept for me, considering that I got my start working on products like Kool-Aid. Believe it or not, there’s not a whole lot that’s natural in Kool-Aid. Gary encouraged everyone who worked with him to be as committed to the mission on a personal level as he was, to bring their full selves to their work.

I learned that to be entrepreneurial, you have to let the curiosity that led you as a child come back into your life. Watch a baby explore his world—what does he do? He wants to touch everything. He thinks, Hmm, a ball. What happens if I crawl to it? What happens if I pound on it? What happens if I put it in my mouth? He learns how the world works by watching, touching, poking, prodding, and waiting for the results of his experiments. If I could channel that pure curiosity and put it into my work, where would it lead me?

In part, it led to Luna Bar. Gary taught me that what was important to me might be important to others. I should look to my own life for inspiration. Well, as I got deeper into the world of Clif Bar, I discovered that I wanted something a little lighter, something that wouldn’t have more calories than was practical for a light workout day but would still have some sweetness. More important, I wanted to create a nutrition bar that was just for women, with the hope, and the higher purpose, that it would ultimately be a source of empowerment. That concept, along with the perfect bar that Gary developed in his kitchen, led to a $70 million business in three years.

In 2000, Gary received a lucrative offer to sell his beloved company to a large strategic buyer. It was a critical crossroad. Gary turned the offer down, and instead committed Clif Bar to serving five bottom lines: sustaining our people, community, planet, business, and brands—that’s how deep his love was for his company, and how strong his commitment to integrate it with his personal values. And I had the good fortune of running this company, which delivered against all five bottom lines.

My passion has been wrapped up in the natural food business for decades, but passions come in all forms, whether it’s a delicious, sustainable nutrition bar, software engineering, or social media. One of the many entrepreneurs whose stories I collected for this book is Victoria Lai, who had a law degree and a prestigious government job when she cashed in her savings to start Ice Cream Jubilee. Yep, from the halls of government to ice cream. But that’s where her passion lay. “Musicians think in whatever instrument they might play,” she said, “and painters think visually. I see everything around me in flavors.” Which begs the question: How do you see everything around you?

For Love or Money

Maybe you became an entrepreneur because you had a great idea, or a solution to a problem. Or maybe you wanted to make a lot of money and felt entrepreneurship was the way to do it. Or maybe you just couldn’t stomach the idea of having a boss and working for someone else. Maybe you were driven by a desire to create something, to have an impact that you could shape and control. It’s possible you don’t really know what drives you. But if passion isn’t in there somewhere, be it passion for the chase or passion for the product, you need to tread very carefully.

One of the many hats Will Rosenzweig wears is advising business school students. He told me that the last time he held office hours, he was struck by how many students didn’t feel passion for their planned endeavors. “Many thought they were going to launch a business coming out of school, not necessarily to solve a problem, but the problem they were trying to solve was their own employment and livelihood,” he said. “The naïveté of that really struck me.”

By certain measures, around 95 percent of startups fail.* So starting a business for money is a gamble with terrible odds. (The popular book The E-Myth did quite a bit to dispel the romance around starting a company as a shortcut to owning a penthouse.) Without real love for the endeavor, entrepreneurs won’t have the childlike curiosity or the motivation to spur them through the tough spots. It’s love that will keep you up into the wee hours of the night to launch, say, a photography business, while you hold down a steady-paycheck job during the day. It’s love that will give you the energy to lead rafting trips on the weekends and during vacations, in the hopes that one day you can make it your primary gig. You don’t make those sacrifices of time, energy, and money without love. Why would you?

Larry Smith is an economist and an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo who has served as a career adviser to thousands upon thousands of graduates over the past twenty years. In his experience, passion for one’s work is not a luxury reserved for the fortunate, but a necessity to thrive in an increasingly competitive, fast-changing global economy. In his book No Fears, No Excuses, he argues, “Can you create any significant degree of credible edge without a passionate interest in the work itself? Can you imagine creating this edge, this commanding competitive advantage that will survive your working life, without such passion?”* If someone is passionate about math, for instance, she won’t merely think about numbers sometimes; math will be the framework within which she thinks about almost everything. Those who simply are okay in math or even just like it can’t compete.

Lack of love accounts in no small measure for why so many ventures fail. Starting and growing a company is so all-consuming and takes such herculean effort that without a wild, passionate love to start with and an ongoing, endearing love thereafter, the entrepreneur will quit. It just becomes too hard. Many marriages fall apart for this reason; it only makes sense that startups would as well. What’s to keep it all going, if not love for the business? Note I didn’t say love for how the company serves your sense of self, or for how it makes you happy. It’s a different feeling. When you love the business purely, you’ll do whatever is right to keep it viable and sustainable without thought about your ego.

Love for the Solution

Perhaps love of the field or product is your primary driver. Or perhaps you’ve worked in a field for a long time, and you see a problem that you feel drawn to solve. Why has no one fixed this, when the solution is so obvious? you wonder. You don’t just see a solution; you feel a driving need to implement that solution.

When Neil Grimmer and I came together to start a business, we used our passion for healthy, sustainable products as a launching point. We were witnessing authentic-to-the-core organic and natural brands such as PowerBar, Balance Bar, Ben and Jerry’s, and the Body Shop “sell out” to mega-conglomerates in order to grow. Each of these once special brands would usually lose their soul in the process of going corporate. A few stayed independent, like Clif Bar and Organic Valley, but they were the exception to the rule. Our idea was that soulful brands would “sell into” our company, which we called the Nest Collective; we would nurture them to thrive in their financials but also in their spirit and heart. We were determined to find a way to keep Nest dedicated to this mission and wanted to find a way to get our investors liquidity down the road, without having to sell out Nest. When we first developed the concept, our idea was broad. We would acquire brands that were focused on products that you put on your body (like lotions), in your body (food or beverage), or outside your body (home care). We would grow these brands through fast-to-market innovation, user-focused design, and exceptional branding. Neil and I passionately wanted to build a company with a very special culture. We had both seen how Clif Bar was able to attract great people, retain them, and inspire them to do their best work because it was such a fun place to work, a place where you looked around at your colleagues and felt you’d found your tribe, that you belonged. It was 2007; the importance of a company’s culture wasn’t universally acknowledged then the way it is now. We wanted our employees to love coming to work each day, to love the mission, to love being together in our Nest family. We referred to our mission as “nurturing the human spirit.” We wanted people to feel that they had huge impact in shaping our company and that each one of them mattered. We wanted to make sure that we all recognized the humanity of each other and that we never got lost in the machine of business. We would nurture Nest and each other.

In the first three months of the company, we pivoted our far-reaching idea and thought it was important to focus on a specific consumer category so that we would become experts in it. To figure out where to focus, we looked to our own lives. Neil and I were both parents of young kids, and we talked about them all the time. Neil and I and our spouses had all experienced the frustration of trying to pack a healthy lunch for our children, only to have it come home as a ball of uneaten mush. As we thought more about it, a focus on nurturing and nourishing kids fit perfectly with the idea of Nest.

The more we talked to other parents and walked the aisles of the natural food stores in 2007, the more we realized that there seemed to be this great divide between convenient and yummy food versus healthy and organic. Kids were drawn to the junk they saw in the colorful, fun packaging in the grocery store that tasted good to their palettes. And parents were forced to either spend the time making their own baby food or lugging around jars. That point had been brought home to me when Patrick and I had taken Connor, who was then just seven months old, backpacking at Glacier National Park in 2002. We went to the Granite Park Chalet, which involved a seven-mile trek in which you had to carry your own food. We carried about fifty pounds of weight on our backs: thirty-five of Connor and fifteen pounds of baby-food jars. No wonder he was the youngest kid ever to visit the place!

The point is, there was a problem that needed solving. Neil and I went to the 2007 Natural Products Expo East trade show (the semiannual showcase for the natural products industry) and witnessed firsthand the absence of companies addressing this market. This was also when the drumbeat was becoming louder and louder about the fact that one out of every three US kids was overweight or obese. This would be the first generation of children, in the modern day, who would die at a younger age than their parents, if the trend kept going at the current rate. With proof from the consumer, the retailer, and society that this problem had to be addressed, we became determined to be the ones to do so. Our company changed as we became more focused on kids specifically, and in time Nest’s mission statement changed to acknowledge this new purpose: “nourishing kids from the highchair to the lunchbox to help kids develop a lifetime love of healthy eating.” At the same time, we operationally shifted our thinking from purely acquisitions to build, partner, or buy—whatever it took to achieve our goals.

Love for the Game

With Nest, Neil and I had a deep love for our purpose. But there are also founders for whom the love isn’t about the subject, the industry, or even the solution to a particular problem. Rather, they love entrepreneurship itself. Some love the effort, they love the quest, they love the energy and adrenaline of it, or there’s some other component of the job they’ve fallen for, and hard. This is why you meet people who do it again and again, the serial entrepreneurs. The subjects of their endeavors might be vastly different, but the subject isn’t the point—it’s the game of it all. My friend and mentor John Hahn started, sold, and bought back his company seven times. Then he started a whole new company. Why did he do this? Because of the bliss he finds in the journey. In the throes of an endeavor, he finds the flow that means he’s performing at his best—he’s in the zone. And that feeling alone is addictive.

Pete Vlastelica wasn’t a particularly avid sports fan when he cofounded Yardbarker, a network of sports websites. But he loved the thrill of the chase. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you run into this crazy darkness and have to come out of the forest somehow,” he said. “It’s like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey, for those who need a refresher, is a template that narratives from Star Wars to Trainwreck follow. It’s more complex than this, but essentially the hero is called to adventure, is helped/mentored along, faces an abyss of some sort, and is transformed.

But there are other components that Pete and many others love about entrepreneurship. Namely, Pete loves the ability to steer in the direction he wants to go. “When you’re working for someone else,” he said, “you’re inherently following their path. The great thing about a startup is that you get to shape it to your liking and you get to build something that’s a reflection of your perspective, not just on the economy or on an industry, but on life and what people should want to buy and what the world needs more of—a reflection of your own aesthetic and worldview.”

The ability to have that level of impact has always been a huge draw for me in entrepreneurship. While large companies tend to be filled with politics, you get to bypass most of that when you’re at the helm of your own ship, especially when you own most of the company. You get to spend your time solving customers’ problems. You get to steer the ship where you want it to go. You get to make an impact on a daily level, and to see the fruits of that impact. I will never forget when I was in the throes of the early days of Plum, and our whole company was talking with moms in this small, sunny park in Berkeley to understand what they thought abo...