Your weekly disruption
Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.
David Freeman: Personal Disruptor
Following last week’s interview with John Donlan, it was a real pleasure to catch up with David Freeman the CEO & Founder at H2CoCo on this week’s podcast. David’s success can be put down to one key focus – Living & breathing personal disruption and inspiring his growing team to follow suit.
Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 5
Personal disruption flourishes when you are learning. You are feeling the effects of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in your brain that makes you feel good. It is an office dweller’s version of thrill seeking. David Freeman got his ‘aha’ in a yoga room in New York and combined with his passion for health & wellbeing parlayed this into an amazingly successful start up – H2CoCo. Hear the secrets of a true entrepreneur.
Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 5
Backing Yourself
Taking The Right Risks
Never Giving Up
One of my core beliefs is to never give up. And as cliché as that sounds, it probably took me two or three years, maybe four years to even get any traction. And I was literally knocking on everybody’s doors, trying to present to them “coconut water is going to be the next big thing.” And I do think that if you throughout the whole process of never giving up, if you constantly remain humble, and you’re constantly, open and transparent about what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re trying to do, I really do believe that you can you can launch a brand successfully. What has kept me anchored is that I do feel that I’m making a bigger difference to people’s lives by giving the better for you option and healthy option.
Embracing Constraints
What allowed me to launch H2CoCo was definitely that disruptive approach to it. I think the innovation, the determination and passion to want to make this successful. And knowing that I could produce something that was quality first, market led and could really make a difference to people’s lives was probably the biggest driver. When we launched nine years ago it was pre every health trend. Nobody really cared about healthy beverages or healthy foods. Sarah Wilson hadn’t quit sugar yet, and we launched prior to that. And I was determined to offer the healthy alternative and capture that healthy moment. I wanted to make sure that we were in the game, producing quality products that were healthy, that would help people change their lives. And that has been our mission statement from the beginning, and that won’t change in everything that we do as we will always be focused on improving people’s lives.
Building An A Team
The team is definitely the most important part of your business. And the hardest thing to manage. Finding the right people and employing the right people for the right position is, as always, I think is a struggle in any business, and will continue to be a struggle until you get better at it until you become a better leader. We’ve changed lots of different positions and lots of different people in the business over the years, I’m really strongly passionate about the team that we have now and think that it’s probably the strongest team that we’ve had in the business. We’re a small, nimble fast acting business, and all aligned with the same values. Our business has seven different values that we live by and live. The challenge is implementing those values into the business, like owning your role or candor. If I can get each team member to participate and engage in the values and understand the values of the business and get everybody working really well together and really love what they’re doing here; it is the secret ingredient. I think it’s a hard thing to get that in people. And I haven’t really found the easiest format to really say how do you find that right person for it? When I go through an interview process, when we’re looking for someone new, I actually do a bit of a different interview process than most people. Most people get a resume they read it; they asked like what strengths, weaknesses, the sort of standard sort of boring interview process stuff, and I take a different approach. I ask them “how would they plan out their most ideal working day.” It gives you the opportunity to understand a person’s character. I don’t want to read anyone’s resume. I don’t want to know where they’ve been and what they’ve done or what they’ve written on the resume. I want to get to know that person. And I want to find who that person is? And are they going to be related to our company culture. Culture is a big part. And if you can find the right person with the right culture for your business, then you’ve got a better chance of them enjoying what they do here. And if they enjoy what they do they do a better job.
Living Your Values
We’re quite a quite colourful office, we’ve got lots of stuff going on that lives and breathes the brand. And I think our marketing, our people, and our products all need to relate to each other. And I’m not saying that everyone needs to be the healthiest person that comes into here. But I guarantee you after working over six weeks; you’ll become a lot healthier. I think that it’s really important for people to embrace the culture. We don’t have the layers and layers and layers of hierarchy. It is making sure you live our values, own your role and if they can do that, they can succeed in their role.
I’m constantly referring to one of our seven values on a daily weekly basis in all of our meetings. We conduct formal reviews two times a year. And one of the questions in those reviews is, “how has the team member displayed or shown their belief in our values?” We get them to answer that. And we also have our say in it. Having it laminated on the back of a door or somewhere like that isn’t the way, you literally need to live and breathe it.
Being Discovery Driven
There’s certainly been times in the starting side where I thought, what am I doing here, yet I believed constantly in the product. And nothing comes easy, businesses, not easy, businesses always going to be tricky. I’ve actually learned to overcome those stressful moments. I’ve done it through a form of meditation. When something bad happens to you, or something goes wrong, or something happens, the normal way for most people is to dwell on that for a long time. And it will constantly play on your mind. It’ll build up and will have a snowball effect. And that’s why you build up on stress. And what I’ve learned over the years, that is when something does go wrong; you’ve got to first accept it. And that may be hard at first, and you might get your knee jerk reactions to certain things. And then the way to help you accept it is to first understand why this happened. I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason. And the third part is, what can I learn from this going forward to help me overcome it? And if you can learn those three steps, you can learn to overcome stress and realize that you don’t have these things playing on you. And I believe that you can better yourself and better your business from the mistakes that you’ve made in the past.
I think mentorship is a very important part of business and personal life. For the first five or six years of this business, I didn’t really have any mentors, as maybe I just wasn’t really game enough to reach out and ask people for help. And I thought that I could do it on my own but the last couple of years, I’ve really taken an interest in mentorship and not only having my own, but also mentoring some other people. I’ve got two major mentors that I talked to a lot of the time. One of them I really close friend of mine, John Winning, who has probably the biggest online retailer in Australia, of white goods. It’s not, food and beverage brand. He’s an amazing person really switched on and he’s a whirlwind of information and knowledge and someone that I can just relate to openly and candidly. The second one would be a guy called Toby Brown. He is like a father figure – an absolute, saint of a human. Toby’s got a business called Pharmacare that has 34-35 brands underneath and he’s a sole founder of these brands and businesses. The thing with John, Toby, and I is that our personalities, and our values are all very much aligned. Toby said to me a couple of years ago, if I had the help that I could give someone 15 years ago, I’d be 10 times bigger than what I was and it was something that kind of just resonated with me that this guy’s just a really good person. And he’s got really good experience and knowledge and wants to help so I catch up with him at least once a month and we talked through the good times are hard times and fun times and what’s next and all that sort of stuff.
So the key to a personal disruptor is to find mentors. Who have you caught up with lately?
So many great takeaways from this conversation. Listen to the episode in the player below, or download, subscribe and enjoy it on iTunes.
Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 5
If you want your Sales team to Gamify it’s performance please contact us at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/
Next week we are going to delve deeper into the elements of Creating The Game.
If you are looking at running a Sales Game workshop either email Mark at mark.truelson@superiorsales.com.au OR dig for more information at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/workshops/
At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/
At Superior Sales our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/
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