Scaling with Soul
.
Streaming here
When we reflect on scaling our businesses, certain things seem implicit. Yet, bigger is not always better. Should we always be aiming to scale for the sake of it? And how do we scale without losing the soul of the brand we worked so hard to build?
On this week’s episode of Commerce Chefs, Kyle and Tom chat with experts who have found success scaling, without losing their souls: Joel Silver, an e-comm giant who has scaled iconic brands like Indigo and David’s Tea, Sophie Wilmer, the General Manager of Kitras Art Glass, a generational family business that has scaled into Canada’s largest hot glass studio; and Roxanne Law, the COO of Diva International, a brand that notably defined an entire product category—one they now lead.
They discuss what it means to scale without sacrificing the soul of your brand. They also look beyond scale as a monetary construct and break down what it means to scale vision and impact.
Learn more about our guests:
Transcript
Kyle And one and two and three, and welcome back to Zoom Zumba everybody
Tom For the last time, Kyle. It's just Zumba, but I will say your form is looking better. Keep it up, buddy. Good work.
Kyle Form over function, baby.
Tom Function is still extremely important. You know that, right? You could hurt yourself.
Kyle No pain. No gain.
Tom Gains aren't always the point, are they? I mean, you got to look at health and flexibility, quality of life.
Kyle Look T Pain. Just trying to scale my body without losing my swoll.
Tom OK, good play on the episode theme but please never say that again.
Kyle The T Pain bit or the swoll bit?
Tom Both plus all the Zumba is going to make you lose weight. I'm not sure about all these gains bro.
Kyle All good. Gettin my gains from my diet. Hawaiian for breakfast, veggie deluxe for lunch, double meat lovers for dinner and treatza pizza for a little post protein treatza.
Tom Is that all pizza Kyle? Are you, you're just eating pizza?
Kyle Uh-huh.
Tom Look nutrition is like eighty percent of the work. That's awful
Kyle Huh. I mean I do feel a bit bloated and usually pretty sick after these workouts come to think of it.
Tom Yeah. Don't get me started on your gas. Gross.
Kyle *Kiss*.
Tom Did you just kiss your arms?
Kyle Yes, sun's out, guns out.
Tom Welcome to Commerce Chefs, a quirky and thought-provoking show for future focused commerce leaders. We're going to pit the world's most brilliant, inspiring and driven D2C visionaries, the commerce chefs with riveting questions to uncover their secret ingredients at the intersection of passion, performance and leadership in practice.
Kyle For the past decade, we've led teams of designers, strategists and digital wizards at one of the leading e-comm agencies in the country to help brave brands become enduring classics.
Tom And we're here to indefinitely borrow the strategies and pro tips that will make us all better leaders and make the brands we lead better, too.
Kyle I think. I think I'm done with Zoom zumba.
Tom You want to try Soul Cycle next
Kyle For the last time, Tom, it's swoll cycle. Hundo P, I'm in
Tom Nobody calls it that.
Kyle In it to win it!
Tom Kyle is bigger, always better?
Kyle Yes, absolutely, yes, unequivocably yes.
Tom And why do you say that, Kyle?
Kyle Well, even if there's a bit much and you have left over, you could eat a cold or you could take it for lunch.
Tom No Kyle, not pizza. E-comm. You know what our show's about?
Kyle Oh, right. Can we start a show about pizza, though? Because I have thoughts.
Tom I'm sure you do. Well, we'll we'll talk about it later, OK?
Kyle All right. OK.
Tom Today we're talking about scaling. For any commerce leader, and especially in e-comm, one of the most implicit goals is growth. Bigger always seems to be better. But why is this? What's the point of scale?
Kyle And as we progress, does this always ring true? Should every business leader set their sights on scale?
Tom Maybe not. So how do you know if scaling your brand is right for you? And what does scale look like?
Kyle And once you know, where do you go from there? Is there a recipe for scaling that lets you balance success and authenticity to the brand you worked so hard to build?
Tom In other words, how do you scale the soul of your brand?
Kyle To help us nail down the recipe for scaling with soul, we couldn't think of a better guest than Joel Silver. Joel is an executive consultant and e-comm guru who has scaled iconic brands like Indigo and David's Tea, where he was president and CEO until 2018.
Tom At David's Tea, Joel, led a two hundred and forty million dollar empire into e-commerce and doubled e-commerce growth within 18 months. He worked to triple stock prices at Indigo and owned the PNL for their 80 million dollar e-comm division. With this in mind, we asked Joel about what leaders need to keep in mind when trying to scale and which businesses might not be a fit for scale in the first place.
Joel There's crafting the product and service, and then there's some people who really just want to craft the whole digital experience page by page, and I think if they want to craft the digital experience as well as their own product experience it's just getting them to focus. If you want to do that, it's just a smaller business. It is the mom and pop shop of e-commerce. That's just what you have to kind of get to. And some people want that, they're fine and they say, OK, I don't want my business to be more than a couple million dollars and I have happy and profitable and I'm here. But some of those scaling things to make the brand unique at the beginning, they just kill you. And it's hard to kind of give those things up. Getting the team to think about, hey, you really have to give up anything that's unique or custom, because getting on to a standardized platform, just even how the user interfaces with it, they just they know how to engage with something. So that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is the more speed serves to really matter in terms of as you're scaling that business. So as you as you start to pull back from everything custom and you're really just making decisions saying you still want to have the life of the brand, but you've got to be brutal on removing things that are just unique to you. So again, we've had this crazy photography size that's incredible for these kind of close up tea shots. But you're killing the, you're killing the speed of the site, which kills conversion. So those are just things that people didn't see, they didn't realize or think about as they were trying to scale the business. And that business went from, you know, they were under 10 million, but they're on track to probably to closer a hundred million today. The efficiency of these platforms now, whether it's demand or Shopify are that they are built to scale and they're built to kind of absorb these crazy amounts of traffic, which you see you never knew you had.
Kyle So if scaling e-comm is for you, digital efficiency is key
Tom and this might mean letting go of some things you held close to your heart
Kyle and soul.
Tom Beautiful Kyle. This might mean letting go of some things you held close to your heart and soul like a custom platform or an indulgent and flashy user experience in favor of speed and efficiency.
Kyle Wait, hold up, Tom. So elephant in the Zoom here. Digital's kind of our jam at PB&J, our agency. And so are you saying that we shouldn't invest in user experience and things like design and brand?
Tom It's a great question, but I'm actually saying the opposite. Investing in user experience and design is an extremely important exercise. Understanding what and why something is marrying art and science of the intentional decisions that go behind things within a user experience or UI setting is huge. You need to weigh pros and cons. You need to look at what bringing a certain feature or functionality may do to the performance of your site, especially at scale. So good design and good UX. It is an exercise and an investment that needs to be done in order to look at speed and efficiency.
Kyle I love that. Good design, good user experience is that. It's marrying all of those factors and all of the stakeholders into one solution. OK, so we're talking a lot about digital efficiencies, but they aren't the only thing we need to worry about when it comes to efficiencies.
Tom And we spoke with Sophie Wilmer, the general manager of Kitras Art Glass. She helped grow this generational family business into Canada's largest hot glass studio. It's been featured in retail stores across North America.
Kyle We talked to her about how building operational efficiencies, particularly with handmade artisan products, helped his mom and pop shop grow to become a household name.
Sophie Everything is made by somebody, we're just farther removed from that process, and I think when you start to think of it like that. All things are made somewhere by some people, by maybe some by machines, but a lot of things are still made by people. And so what it comes down to in our thing was that you're looking at a lot of systems and you're looking at a lot of processes. And so for us, when you can systematize and it's like, OK, so we all are going to put the pipes in the glass the same way and we're all going to roll the color on the same way. And we're all going to kind of do these things in the same way. And even though every craftsperson has their own nuance of the way they do things, everybody can learn consistency when there's a process and a system to follow. And I think that is really whatever your scaling in whatever way you're scaling it, whether it's a handmade product, whether it's a digital product, like whatever it may be, as long as you have it, you have a system and there's a process, you can have that consistency.
Tom So if we've learned anything so far,
Kyle efficiency and consistency are very important.
Tom But these can't be the only important trademarks of scaling. If they were, the only things that mattered would all be Amazon. And we're not and we're not even trying to be.
Kyle And for more about why you shouldn't try to be Amazon, take a listen to episode seven, The Resurrection of Retail. To dig in further on operations when scaling, especially when leading a revolutionary brand. We spoke to Roxanne Law, the COO of Diva International, who's been with the company leading operation for the past nine years.
Tom You might know Diva better from their flagship product, the Diva Cup. And Roxanne has been on the exec team as they've 10xed their team certified as a B corporation and defined an entire product category in which they now lead.
Roxanne The surprising thing is having a vision is important, but you can only last so long on gut instincts. Eventually you have to bring in business systems, you have to bring in processes. You have to bring in plans and strategy and become a business entity. So I think the surprising thing is that we didn't do it sooner. It's not easy and it takes your whole team. I guess that wasn't surprising to me, but it was. It takes the whole team. Everyone needs to be on board and you need to be transparent with your whole team in order to really scale up. I think the most important thing is stay focused on your team. Out of all of the assets on your balance sheet I really think your team is probably the most valuable that you have. Without a cohesive team, I don't care what you say, you're not going to scale up. So making sure people have the motivation, making sure they have the resources they need to do the job that they were hired for, but I think more importantly, keeping focused on giving your team the gift of knowing what they do every day is helping to the cause. And I say it's a gift because I think a lot of companies and a lot of leaders forget that people are motivated by how they contribute to a common goal. And if you don't take the time to share with them, first of all, what the common goal is but share with them how they are contributing to that common goal. I think you're going to have people that are going to be leaving and your retention will be very, very low. And I think that really came to light in the leadership strategies that were driven over COVID. That there's more definition on being empathetic, there's more leadership training and webinars on LinkedIn now on how to properly lead your your teams as motivation. Those are always there. But I think this this whole situation that we've lived through in the last year has really brought it to the forefront that this is what we need to focus on in order to find success. I think a distraction would be looking at too many opportunities at the same time, looking at that shiny penny, you know, when you have a strategy and you have a plan, it is really easy when you're scaling up. There's so many amazing opportunities out there. And, you know, most of them would be really good. But if you don't focus on one or two specific opportunities at a time, it's that old saying that, you know, you can do a lot of different things in a mediocre where you can concentrate on one or two really good things and really become expert in that in that field. And I and I think that is definitely one of the pitfalls or one of the things that leaders can get into that they just, especially in scale, they could focus on way too many things and not really become good at anything in particular.
Tom Roxanne!!!!
Kyle Tom we promised that we wouldn't do that. Can we fix that in post?
Tom Sorry, I couldn't help it. Yeah, we'll we'll fix it in post. All right. All right. Prioritize building a strong team. Keep your focus top of mind and you'll be able to manage whatever scaling throws at you.
Kyle We asked Sophie about the types of problems she's encountered scaling and how she's managed them.
Sophie You know, as you grow in any way, you're always kind of dealing with the same things just in a bigger, different way. It's like, you know, when your kids are like babies and you're like, oh, I can't wait to get to the next stage. And then you get to the next stage, you're like, but what? Now you're doing this? And then you're like, oh my God, I can't wait to the next year. But now that! And it's so much when I think about like growing or scaling, whatever word you want to use a business is is like, OK, when we get to that level will be so much easier, you won't have those problems. And it's true, you don't have those problems anymore. You have a whole new set of problems. I remember looking at other wholesale companies and like I was like, man, they're able to bring out like 600 skus every two months. Like, I wish I could do that. If I could only do that, I could grow. If I only could have done this, I could grow. But then I talked to those people. They're like, oh, we have all these shipping headaches and we can't get this. And then the retailers are like, yeah, I ordered it, but it never arrived. And you start to be like, oh, OK. So they have problems that are different. But I also have solutions to those niche problems so I can provide that. So hey, is that my super power? And so then you start to like figure that out too, and you start thinking less about, oh, I wish I was this or I wish I was that. And you start to more appreciate what you actually are and can do. And if you just flex on that, the other stuff kind of just like whatever,
Tom Roxanne agrees that taking the time to be grateful for your wins is so much more important than a lot of leaders realize.
Kyle In fact, she thinks it better equips her to lead her team.
Roxanne I've really taken the time personally to slow down as well as professionally to slow down, and I think that has really benefited my team. If you can take the time to assess the situation, to reflect on a situation, whether it's good or bad, there's always something to learn from it, but also take the time to sit down and be grateful for the wins and grateful for the people around you that got you there. Because I think in having that gratefulness, you're not going to burn out as a leader, especially when you're growing in a team and you're wearing many hats and you're involved in a lot of different things at a company and the leaders of a company, you can burn yourself out pretty quickly. By always going to the next goal, always looking at your KPIs, always measuring yourself against those, but to really sit back and say, what am I grateful for to get to this point? Who are the people in the company that I want to say thank you to today because we did get to this point, and I think reflecting on that has made me a better leader.
Kyle Airbnb famously used the activity, elephants, dead fish and vomit to retool their culture and reflect on the important things of the past. Today, we're introducing a new tool we like to call: it's been a slice
Tom of really stretching it with this pizza metaphor here Kyle.
Kyle Just like good dough.
Tom OK, today we're going to pay homage to the things we've said goodbye to on the Road to Scale, founder to founder.
Kyle Goodbye doing the office supplies order myself. It's been a slice
Tom Au revoir playing ping pong for three hours a day, thinking it was building life skills. It's been a slice.
Kyle It really did though. Sayanora, getting away from using the free versions of apps and platforms. It's been a slice
Tom Adios having low overhead and simple operations. It's been a slice.
Kyle Ciao connecting meaningfully with each and every employee in one day and still having time to grab lunch. Oh, it's been a slice.
Tom Arrivederci control. I may have started this company to get it, but, well it's been a slice.
Kyle Hmm. Yeah. Aloha dreams that don't involve a PNL or a recurring cash flow stand up. It's been a slice
Tom Auf Wiedersehen shaking people's hands, meeting face to face and general human contact. It's been a slice.
Kyle Farewell, the time I had all the answers. It's been a slice. Anybody hungry? I'm hungry.
Tom I'm going to make a pizza.
Tom And we're back, so efficiency is important, but so is having a vision and growing with your values, all those delicious ingredients for the soul of your brand,
Kyle No matter how efficient you are, efficiencies alone can't guide your decision making in tricky situations of the soul. Purpose driven brands always have a North Star to guide them through the inevitable problems that occur when scaling their brands.
Tom We talked to Sophie about how to keep your mission, vision and brand values top of mind as you scale.
Sophie One of the things like when my parents very, very first started that my mom always said was that when people call here, I want a person to answer the phone. And I think that, like, there's so many ways that that spills out into your business. Like it's not just the person who answers the phone, it's the person who does this and it's the person who cares enough to make sure, oh, is this the right take, I'm not sure, who double checks the things that are weird. And the more you can try and build that, I think that personalness into it I think is really important. Doesn't happen right away. It really takes a lot of work.
Tom Now, according to Joel, staying true to our brand while scaling is simpler than it seems,
Kyle his take is that we need to give our consumers a bit more credit.
Tom The little things that seem precious to us from the inside of the brand we think make us unique, probably aren't as important to our customers as we may think.
Joel Everybody thinks they have a unique business and unique experience and I think for books at the beginning we had again that was the variety, we had a couple of million titles online in terms of platform we had, and then speed. But everybody thinks they have these unique elements. And I think people are attracted to your brand not because of unique necessarily web experience or touches. They're connected to the brand, because the product and service and whatever else they're there. And I think trying to customize the Web experience too much so like I talk about image size. I talk about user flow. Those are just kind of two that are there. We're trying to scale the business post that 10, 20 million range, trying to get it to one hundred million. And you're just all those things they need to be automated or just figure out a very different way or really start forcing yourself to say, what are we taking out of the user path? The faster and cleaner your experience, you know, then you start to get the other speed or speed rewards from Google and the search rewards or from the search engine as well. So huge opportunities there as well too that kind of everything you think you're making you unique. They're just they're kind of little ants in the flywheel that start to slow you down.
Tom So the things that are really integral to our brand success are things we can continue to keep top of mind and consistent. It's not about the handwritten notes, for instance, as much as it is about being customer centric.
Kyle In scaling, we must let go of many things. The tactics have to change in order to do it, while at the same time we must hold on tightly to the big things that matter like purpose, values, vision and our customers.
Tom Roxanne agrees that if you truly live and own your values, they don't easily fall to the wayside as you scale.
Kyle Your story can evolve without your core mission and history changing.
Roxanne When you're a company that really holds true to your values, I don't think there's any difference when you're scaling up or when when you're starting out, your values are your values. I think the difference now is that there is a competitive space, there are a number of menstrual cups, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. The thing is that we're trying to build the category in that we have to know that there's going to eventually be competitors in that in that space. So I think the shift that I've seen over the nine years has been going from that small niche product to really family own centered business in scaling up to what it is today, which is still a family owned business with all the values and care. But we're operating more as a business system now. I think stories always have to evolve as your consumers evolve, as your product evolves, as market evolves. Of course, the story changes. The story at the beginning was of a mother and daughter that came out of a small town in Canada and created a company that really meant something. But I think where it's changed is now coming into the Diva Cares program and bringing in more intentional giving and more intentional sustainability in the world, both in people and in planet. I think the main story is always going to be there. It's our history. But the evolution of the story is coming to a company now that employs 50 people and continuing to grow and continuing to put a good quality product on the market. That's helping a lot of people revolutionize the way they experience their period. It doesn't have to be something they're dreading at any point in time, in the month, they can actually celebrate and they can go on with with their lives, with whatever they were doing when they were not bleeding as to when they were bleeding. So I think that's that's the change in the story, being revolutionary and giving opportunity. I think there's always a place for a really good visionary. Without visionaries that can look at something out of the box or look in the future, you're not going to have steady growth with a company. I think a stagnant company is a is probably a company that's dying or starting to fizzle out. So I think visionaries that are crazy and going all over the map are always important. But I think what's important is having underneath that visionary is having people or teams or an integrator that can help find focus of those visionary visions to help find a plan and a strategy to move forward in in a fiscally responsible way and an environmentally and a people sustainably way. So I think having that crazy visionary is always going to be important. And I think our founders of Diva Carinne and Francine, always had the vision that this product needed to go to anyone who menstruated who wanted it. And that was there. That was our focus from the very beginning. And I think that is still our focus today to bring this to as many people as we can because we know that it will be a good thing for them. And and so in that respect, it hasn't changed. And I don't think it ever will.
Kyle Roxanne's talking about not just scaling for growth, but that they're scaling for global impact and trying to reach their market in a meaningful way.
Tom When we talk about scaling, it's important to remember we're not just talking about sales KPIs and unicorn valuations. There's so much more to it than that.
Kyle That's what I call soulful scaling.
Tom How do you stay true to your values and vision when you are pursuing ambitious growth?
Kyle I think you just got to do it.
Tom I like that.
Kyle I mean, in some ways it's as simple as that. But as humans or maybe just as founders and entrepreneurs, we can easily get distracted. So I think it's about keeping those values and vision front and center. They need to come to life to be part of your monthly and quarterly cadences. They need to be part of your internal and external accountabilities, how you measure things. Remember that the ambitious growth is actually there in the first place to amplify those values and vision. That that's the point. If you can kind of keep that as the framing, it'll be good to go.
Tom I love that. Our experts all had different stories about scaling and views on the priorities, pitfalls and pains of how to do it successfully.
Kyle But they all agreed that it was important to remain pragmatic and positive.
Tom OK, enough with the Ps
Kyle Yeah, did I mention pizza?
Tom Goldstar, buddy. Sophie left us with this important story of a kid and a Ferrari.
Sophie He was like a 12 year old kid and his friends are all looking at this picture of this Ferrari and they're all like doing and eyeing over this Ferrari and he's like, OK, cool, that's a cool car. Like, I don't really get why everyone's all, like, oohing about it. So he goes to his mom is like mom, like these kids were like they're all obsessed about this car, like, what's the big deal? And she's like, well come on, like, that car costs more than our house costs. Like nobody will own that car. And he writes in the book, he goes, But I thought to myself, somebody gets to own that car. And then his mom's kind of like, yeah, but like that car costs so much money and most people never have that much. And he like writes in the books, but he walks away, knowing that somebody gets to drive that car, why not me? And I think there is so much in like when I you to look at other businesses, I'd be like, oh, that's not for me or we can't do that or. And then it wasn't until I kind of got in that space and it was like, yeah, why not me? Why don't I get to drive that car? I want to. And I think there's so much no. There's so much no. When you're trying to grow stuff or do stuff, you can do it all. You just can't do it all at once. I think that if you're you have to have patience. And if it doesn't all just happen right now, look at what is happening and just embrace that and it will grow.
Kyle Step by step, you can get there, you need to focus on fundamentals, finding your efficiencies both digitally and operationally and maintaining consistency even within creativity.
Tom But if you want to scale without losing your soul, you need to keep your values and your vision at the core. They need to perpetually remain front and center.
Kyle Look, T Pain. Speaking, of- core, we are we still on for dancersize tonight?
Tom Yeah, I mean, of course,.
Kyle OK good.
Tom Scale doesn't demand the binary choice between profit or impact.
Kyle So we ought to start striving for scale in a broader, more holistic sense, leveraging scale to amplify values and vision and the impact that your brand soul can have in the world.
Tom So don't just focus on income, but impact as well. Not just about bigger but better.
Kyle Not just flat bread, but a pizza with sauce and toppings and yummy.
Tom Kyle, this pizza thing is a bit overdone I'd say.
Kyle It's not a steak Tom, you can't overdone a pizza.
Tom Well, you can and you have. And speaking about overdone, just like Kyle trying to get swoll without paying attention to his diet, you really can hurt your brand on the road to scale if you don't pay attention to all of the inputs along the way.
Kyle Still don't see an issue with the pizza diet. Scale is a journey of many steps. Like Sophie said, I believe that you can do it, but that you can't do it all at once.
Tom And when the soul is kept at the heart of your growth, you stop trying to solve impact and scale and start looking for impact through scale.
Kyle There you have it. That's episode eight of Commerce Chefs Thanks so much for listening.
Tom We hope you've gained some insight and perspective on how the journey of scaling your brand can and should be about so much more than dollar dollar bills, y'all.
Kyle If you're looking for more insights and recipes for success, make sure to join the Commerce Chefs community by following us on social @CommerceChefs. Ask us questions. Send in requests. We want to hear from you.
Tom We do. And we're currently cooking up the next episode of Commerce Chefs, so tune in on May 13th.
Kyle Lastly, if you like this episode and you know you did and you want to support us and you know you do, make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave us a five star rating and review. Until next time. This has been a pinch of Kyle.
Tom And a dash of Tom. We'll be cooking with you in two weeks.
Kyle And one and two and three and welc back.
Tom Choke on your tongue?
Kyle I don't know what happened, the words, they were in my head they just didn't come out..