Transcript | PULSE Episode 06
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Adam Smith:
I am Adam Smith founder Wisdom Board. I'm pleased to host this episode of the pulse podcast series, a collection of inspiring personal conversations with founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and board experts. Wisdom Board as a fast growing digital leadership platform, offering curated Bible content, better corporate services, deep knowledge resources, and expansive network of private company management. Wisdom Board founded summer 2020 is dedicated to enabling board directors and the members and CEOs to enhance sports success. Today we're joined by John Replogle, of BB Ventures and also take your seat and several other companies, including brands that I'm a big fan of. So I'm very happy to welcome you John to today's podcast.
John Replogle:
It'd be with you, Adam. Thank you.
Adam Smith:
Yeah. Now, it's great to see you. Again, congratulations on everything recently, seems we're all quite busy and the days are short. I think for our audience, I'd love for you to start, a bit on your career and where your passions were as you went through your professional journey and including some of the operational roles and brands that we all know well, and then we talk also about your venture capital and growth equity platform.
John Replogle:
Great. That sounds terrific. Well, a little bit about me I've been in the consumer world for some 30 years, started my career at the Boston consulting group, really in the consumer practice and then moved over to Guinness the beer company. And at that time Guinness was a standalone entity. It later became part of the ICO, but started with Guinness and in their strategy group, moved into sales, moved over to the UK, had the great fortune to run Guinness over in Great Britain, which was just tremendous. And then we bought a company called Seagram.
John Replogle:
So I moved out to the West Coast and helped put together our wine business before moving back to the East Coast and running Guinness in the U.S. And then I had an epiphany, a spear in the chest moment, where I really thought deeply about what I was trying to do with my work and my life mission and decided it was time for a change and made a great change to Unilever and worked in their personal care division and had the great fortune to work with a talented team on a campaign called The Campaign for Real Beauty, for dove, which is still in the market today.
John Replogle:
As I got further down that journey to trying to use business as a force for good, I made the switch to really private equity backed companies went to Burt's Bees as the CEO, build Burt's Bees and had a great time there. We actually took a partner in Clorox and stayed with Clorox for several years before deciding to not if you will do it again. So I went up to Burlington Vermont with a great company called Seventh Generation, and it's a leader in clean household products and personal care products and had a tremendous time building that business. Seventh Gen was one of the founding benefit corps or B Corp's in the country, and it just lit my fuse. It was a tremendous experience. We built that and low and behold wound up selling it to Unilever and became an employee of Unilever once again.
John Replogle:
And I really came to the realization at the end of that journey, that it was time for a switch. And so that's when we created One Better Ventures, which is a firm that advises and invests in purpose driven consumer goods companies. And so through that, I have great exposure at a range of companies from startup to scale to mid-cap and serve on a number of boards, I'm actually serving on the boards currently, so be great to talk a little bit about boards and governance in this age of the pandemic. So that's a big brief history of where I've been and what I've done over the course of the last 30 years.
Adam Smith:
Sounds great. Well, I've been on 10 boards and unfortunately six at a time back a decade ago, so since you're on eight, I can try to talk more quickly so you can go back to creating some minutes and getting on the backs of the CEOs that have a lot of work to do, but that's a fantastic history. Thank you for sharing that and I'm personally such a passionate investor and advisor and board member and fan of brands and the legacy sustainability of brands and what a brand means. We're actually working a bit with some of the more the brands centers of the business schools and it's very fascinating work in terms of building the brand and building brands that last, and what does that mean? When they last and how do you want them to last, what is their legacy? So it gets into the stakeholder capitalism conversation that we'll be having shortly.
Adam Smith:
Well, you've been in some beautiful places as well, up in Bangalore Maine with the Burt's Bees and Vermont, and now you're in the Carolinas. So thank you for that story and again, great brands as well. I think Burt's Bees had a AEA and it's previous to Clorox, is that right?
John Replogle:
Burt's is one of the great brands. Yeah, absolutely and I recently... the world is changing so rapidly, but I recently checked out TikTok and it's extraordinary the amount of traffic and views that Burt's Bees is getting on TikToK right now. So, it's a brand that has figured out how to spend multi-generations, so pretty impressive.
Adam Smith:
And it's still authentic in terms of one of the brands that is able to expand its identity and its product and channel penetration, but also stay true to its core. It reminds me a bit of... You see that with kind and honesty and even some generation kind is a great example. Just you can still have integrity or cliff bar. You can still have integrity even with scale, but it shouldn't be some brands seem to lose that as they get larger or they sell to a strategic. So it's nice to hear that you had good partners with Clorox just briefly. I recall that partnership with Clorox was a bit unusual, it was one of the more aggressive, I think, corporate venture capital or strategic investment, a minority investments or partnerships in a brand.
Adam Smith:
Maybe that's a interesting story to talk about because as you're making your investments in consumer brands, you're really bringing more of a strategic angle with an operating lens more like you see Invus and Catterton, Chan's be over the years of customer products. Maybe just tell us a bit about how you think about bringing expertise to the boards with the founders of these consumer companies and how is that also different for the BB?
John Replogle:
Yeah. So I think our role, when I think about, what is good board governance and what do I bring? My central focus is really around three things is, clarity of the mission. What's the purpose of the company? How do you align all elements of the company around that purpose so that we are true stakeholder focused leadership. The second then is on the CEO and the leadership team and making sure we've got the right people and the right resources. And then the third is ultimately the strategy is, what are the big decisions? How do you deploy resources and how do you make sure you've got a competitive strategy that fuels the business so that it can do more good.
John Replogle:
And that's how I approach kind of my board roles and central to that is tuning in with the CEO and understanding and building trust and chemistry and building alignment in particular. So those are the central elements. And then of course, I've been a CEO I've been in that chair and I understand what it takes, so I've got operating experience, and I leave that as an opportunity for the CEO to tap rather than something I dole out. Everyone wants to be able to have their autonomy to run their own business. So you've got to really find that fine line where you've got your nose in, but your fingers out.
Adam Smith:
That's great. Let's move over to One Better Ventures. I really liked the branding and that you are a B Corp and that you're covering both the earliest stage to be supportive, inspiring emerging brands, but also a bit later stage, you mentioned something recently with a larger backer that we both worked with. And I'm looking at some of your partners on the website, Jim Geikie and other experts. The team is very interesting. How, did you come up with a way to differentiate One Better Ventures? It seems that there is, of course the positive angle. There's the nurturing angle, there's the leadership support, so that you're a little more holistic for those and then bring us into your views on CSR and ESG as well, and how that relates to, to these smaller companies.
Adam Smith:
That's great. I like the tagline to do greater good. And you also are, I think quite the early stage of purpose driven investing in Venture because Venture is often forced to pursue a more asset management model with a larger number of investments to create statistical outcomes that are based on a very diversified holdings and having done 14 SPVs of my own since 2002, while they're inconvenient at times, they do force you to pay attention to each one separately and not to get into situation where you're having to, pay less attention, not have the bandwidth to curate your investments and to be mindful of your portfolio needs. So but there's always, the grass is always greener, but I personally like your model more than others, you also have a tagline as well, which is interesting. Do well, do good. Do one better.
Adam Smith:
It makes me think about the balance between being empathetic and mindful for the leaders, empowering them so that they do their work well, given that the buck stops with the CEO, you've been there as well. So you can have more empathy, but at the same time, we're in a capitalist society. And the primary mission is profits and growth and sustainability to, to recycle that profit into the company, which does create some pressure and conflicts and expectations. So maybe, walk us through some of those case studies, maybe at less, that you can use that as an example or another company to balance the two sides of that.
John Replogle:
It's interesting in your statement, that primary responsibility is to deliver a profit. I actually don't believe that, I think all things in balance. So I'm a big believer in the triple bottom line, people, planet and profit. Many of the companies we work with are in the wellness space. I fundamentally believe in the idea that you can't live a healthy life on a sick planet for too long. And the economic structure of capitalism has been broken where it's about internalizing the profits and the goodness and externalizing the waste, the costs we have to reformulate that. And Michael Porter at the Harvard business school said not all profits are created equal profits with purpose, create more value.
John Replogle:
And that's where I start. I start with the purpose, start with the people, start with the planet and you get those three conditions, right? And you'll build a long-term sustainable business that yields great economic value over time, as opposed to maximizing profit, because maximizing profit is often at odds with the other conditions and stakeholder management. If you start with the others, if you get the priority, write that order, right. Then you can have an enduring enterprise that creates value. And I think that's the new model for the 21st century, frankly.
Adam Smith:
I fully agree. I just wanted to get you going on that since my name is Adam Smith, I had to be somewhat supportive of the capitalist model.
John Replogle:
Yeah, over the last 50 years in the fortune 500, they're only about 50 on companies that remained. So why did the other 90% fall out? Well, because they were built on the old model, which put a short term profit maximization as their number one objective, which means you don't, refuel. You don't refuel your team. The values of the organization invest in capital, invest in community. And that's a short-term model. That's a burnout model that doesn't last decades. And that's what we're seeing. You know, the side of the road is littered with yesterday stars because they followed a broken capitalist model.
Adam Smith:
I think that's really powerful and wisdom board. We are building a very robust content and mission and network that is very mindful of the broader motives and purpose of a corporation. In fact, the original Latin word of corporation is grounded in the word of the people. So I think it's important to go back to the original core of mercantilism. And before the original Adam Smith created the invisible hand that presumed a more efficient, more of a closed system of the global economy. It doesn't work so well to assume that it's going to be efficient in the short term, perhaps in the longterm. It is moving over lastly to this exploding world of importance of CSR as we call it, but how it also incorporates ESG and impact and gender or cultural balance, both in terms of hiring in terms of the board architecture, whether it's independent director as a board observers, we can have that conversation in a separate podcast, perhaps in terms of the architecture of the board.
Adam Smith:
That's a whole nother conversation, but take your seed as an emerging force in providing inspiration and advice for better balance in both the board and leadership for racial balance in organizations. And I think we really support that now and before and in the future. And it's great to see how take your seat as quite unique. And you're bringing a lot of passion to it just briefly, if you could share how you're, you're creating this mirror and this reflection of diversity for take your seat for our listeners, and then how can they get involved?
John Replogle:
Yeah, terrific. Well, take your seat. Isn't new initiative from One Better Ventures and our partner Baldwin End and he literally is a white male. I was deeply disturbed and frustrated this past summer by the killing of George Floyd and Rihanna Taylor. And while I marched, I felt like I could do more and my outlet is business. And so the thought was, how do we bring about justice and racial equity and the best way I know how to do that is through business. So we started take your seat to help America's boards reflect America. Our focus is on putting black executives onto boards. We launched this about four or five months ago. We've already successfully placed a dozen people onto boards.
John Replogle:
We've got another dozen open searches. We have literally, over a 1000 candidates who are, have come to us and we have companies and partners coming to us. So we are creating a marketplace where we can introduce candidates to companies that are looking to diversify their boards. And we also provide resources, training and forums. We had a great conversation last night at dinner conversation via zoom that was open to our members. So if people want to learn more, they should check us out@takeyourseat.co.co. So we're underway and we're encouraged by the response. And we think we all need to lean in together because we know that the more diverse board, the better the performance
Adam Smith:
That's great. Well that fits nicely with the force for good, that you decided to pursue back just before, Burt's Bees and Seventh Generation and going into the Unilever environment, which is a great brand as well. So it's really inspiring from someone who has an operated companies really to watch and back and fund and mentor and learn from operators and see you going into the investment side is fantastic. So thank you for sharing. It's been a pleasure to include you today in our podcast series.
John Replogle:
Thank you, Adam. Great to be here and love what you're doing. Keep it up.
Adam Smith:
Thank you. I learned a lot from you today, so thank you for your time.