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29 May How Simple Mills Found Innovation In Their Employees’ Kitchens

Posted at 20:30h in Dave Knox

Many companies want to believe that innovation is a process that you can map out in a nice clean path. But Katlin Smith, Founder and CEO of Simple Mills, knows that more often, innovation comes about by mistake. I sat down with Katlin to talk about her journey building Simple Mills, how the company is leading the clean food movement, and why some of their best innovations have come by hiring people who share a passion for changing the food that we eat.

Dave Knox: Simple Mills was really an early entrant into the clean food space in 2013. What has changed over that time?

Katlin Smith: Well let us start with what Simple Mills does. We make baking mixes, crackers, and cookies out of very simple nutrient dense ingredients and do it in a way that delivers a really delicious product. If you think about a cheddar cracker or a cookie, instead of using a bunch of wheat, we things like almonds, sunflower seeds, or coconut sugar. We focus on the things that we want to be eating more of. We operate in these center store categories of the grocery store. What we’ve found is that we are serving this need for retailers because as more and more consumers switch to cleaner eating and recognize the connection between what they eat and how they feel, those center store categories have been in decline. People have been leaving the center of the store to shop in the perimeter, shop the produce, and get much more nutrient density in their diet. So, what we have really been doing is bringing consumers back to those aisles and providing solutions in those categories. The other thing that we have really seen in the past seven years since we launched, is that there are more solutions for people to eat well in the grocery store. And that gets me really excited because it means that overall people are eating better.

Knox: Those center aisles have traditionally been dominated by big food conglomerates that have very strong retail relationships. What allowed you to get past the traditional gatekeepers in retail and open their eye to the value of new brands and new offerings?

Smith: There are a few different things. One of them is that the problem itself is that people recognize that the food that they were eating was having a negative impact on their bodies, which really had a negative impact on that trust relationship that these large brands have with their consumers. So, they said, Okay, these products are healthy for you. They’re better for you. And then as people realized, oh my gosh, these same foods are the ones that are not making me feel great, that are having a negative impact on my health. It really destroyed that trust that was built between those companies and the consumer. And so that really primed the market for entrants like Simple Mills to come in and talk to consumers in a way that is much more honest and authentic.

The second is we built our team out of people who are passionate about this, who really understand this connection, and want to help change our food industry. And as a result, the insights that we have as a team are different than if we are just paying some large agency or research firm to figure things out for us. We already know the answer because we are the ones personally experiencing it. And this enabled us to accelerate innovation and solve problems in a way that is much more helpful to help them eat better. And that also translates into really people who are passionate and have a fierce commitment to our mission, which does help us move faster and break through boundaries and walls and do things that might seemingly be impossible.

Knox: How has innovation being at the heart of your culture helped you achieve this?

Smith: Culture is one of the very first places where it starts. It is about the people and the culture that you create within the four walls. By hiring people who were passionate about making this change in food, it enables us solve the problems quicker and to understand them with greater depth because we have those insights internalized. We do not have to learn them.

But it is also about continuously reinforcing this throughout the way you work as a company. For instance, for some time we tried to work with external food scientists. They would come back to us and say, “what you’ve asked for is not possible…you have to compromise on one of these things.” We decided to fill out innovation and R&D internally were the kind who think, “who says it is impossible. Let us figure it out.” Many of our greatest products came from our people moving without perfect information and leaning into that intuition.

But even with that, another tenant that we have is not compromising. If there is a product that we cannot launch without compromise, we are not going to launch it. There have been times in our history where the concept itself was a great one, but we had trouble meeting all our requirements. In those cases, we just said that we are not launching it instead of taking a shortcut that would compromise our values.

The strategy is usually the easiest part, it is the execution of that, that is really difficult. It is about not compromising on those tenants and making sure that the product does taste great. Figuring out how you satisfy all those things at one time is really the magic.

Knox: By hiring people who had a passion for the mission of clean food, has that led to any product ideas from their own kitchens?

Smith: All the time. Companies like to create this innovation process and say, “okay, you move from step A to step B, to step C, to step D and then magic at the end of the day, you have this product that consumers like.” But I don’t think that real innovation and creativity happens that way. It’s just sometimes a mistake. Take our new Veggie Pita crackers where vegetables are the number one ingredient. Those were inspired by the fact that our team was at home, trying to figure out how to fit more vegetables into their diet and asking where they can “hide” the vegetables in a pasta sauce or a smoothie. We asked the question, “how do you hide some vegetables in a cracker?” Then another one is our almond flour crackers. That one happened because I just took one of our baking mixes home one day and turned it into crackers for fun really. It wasn’t that we were trying to create a new product. It was just playing. And as a result, we developed our almond flour crackers. That play component is really important to innovation.

Knox: What advice do you give to entrepreneurs that are facing the journey that you started seven years ago?

Smith: Continue to learn and to be open to learning. When I first started out, I felt like I had to have all the answers, which is really just silly and naive. But that’s part of the reason why you have people around you to help you out. The more you can be honest about the things that you do not know, the better solutions you can create, the more you can learn, the faster you can learn.

Also as you build your team, there are always learning opportunities for leadership. Clearly communicate with the team, help them understand the path ahead, and understand the direction that things are going. There can be a lot of ambiguity and the ambiguity can create a lot of uncertainty as well as an inability to move for people. As a leader, you have the opportunity to clear things up.

Finally, learn to be flexible. That is a muscle that we are continuously flexing and making stronger as an organization. It teaches people that you do not have to have a hundred percent of the information to figure things out and to come to a solution. Things that are going to change in business. You have to quickly pivot and change. When people can do that, they feel a lot more powerful and that they can handle anything. It’s not the businesses that have never encountered difficult times or the people who have never encountered difficult times that are the strongest. It’s the opposite. It’s the ones who have encountered those things that grow stronger.

*This article first appeared in Forbes on May 20, 2020

Dave Knox has been recognized throughout the industry as an innovator who bridges the world between brand marketing, digital and entrepreneurship. Invite him to speak at your next virtual or LIVE event!

01 May What I Learned From Doing 15 Virtual Keynotes In 21 Days

Posted at 22:50h in Rohit Bhargava

Six weeks ago nearly every event got cancelled, postponed or moved to virtual. Like many professional speakers, I started delivering my talks virtually. But taking a 45 minute talk and doing it over Zoom doesn’t work. It’s too long, tech gets in the way and it just feels boring.

I knew I had to get better at this.

So I started researching. At first it was YouTube videos. I watched a 34 minute overview on selecting the right cardioid microphone. I took notes from a masterclass from a Hollywood lighting pro on techniques like loop and butterfly lighting. I consumed hours of videos on acting techniques, professional studio setups, and product demos. I also asked for advice from some professionals in the entertainment business from my network and read what my friends and fellow speakers were sharing on social media.

And I started writing a book all about everything I was learning when it came to presenting virtually, working more effectively while remote and building trust with people without being in the same room (or perhaps without ever having met in real life. This week, I’m launching that book as a FREE download (get it here) and throughout the process of writing and researching it, I kept presenting and experimenting.

Over the last three weeks I have learned a lot and gotten better. Though I’m continuing to do presentations and getting better at virtual storytelling, I thought I’d share some of the biggest things that I have learned which will help you get better faster, and perhaps skip watching hours of YouTube videos in order to do it.

1. Don’t fear the tech.

I realized over the past month that I have been completely spoiled at events by working with a professional AV crew. At home, it’s just me. And when faced with complex technology, my tendency has too often been to claim ignorance. I was, after all, an English major. But in a professional setting, when you are on your own without an IT department, technical problems just end up making YOU look bad. There’s no one else to blame. So skip the excuses, watch some YouTube videos yourself and conquer your fear of getting technical. This isn’t like programming the Mars rover. You can do this.

2. Get dressed.

It’s a beautiful thing that we can now present in our pajamas. But I don’t. In fact, I usually dress the same way I would if I were presenting from the stage. For me, it helps me to bring more energy in an artificial environment where I don’t get the benefit of audience feedback. So I don’t look the same in every video, I also try to wear something different for each talk.

3. Embrace the unperfection.

Most of us don’t have a professional studio at home. It’s ok. In fact, it might be better. When we see each other’s homes in the background, or some of our personality – we feel more connected. So let it be a little bit unperfect and focus on being authentic instead of perfect.

4. Face the window.

All of the light tutorials I watched on YouTube were great, but complicated. You can buy ring lights or hook up web-enabled dimmers to your phone – but the real secret to how I’m getting pretty good light on all my calls comes down to three words: face a window. When your face is to the window, you avoid backlighting (the biggest lighting problem most people have) and odd shadows too. The picture below is me in my home office with NO additional lighting. I literally just turned around to face the window instead of putting it behind me. Of course, this won’t work if you’re in a room with no windows (or at night) – so if that’s the case, get good lighting from the front (a ring light works for this) and start with that.

5. Invest in sound.

If you are going to spend money on anything to improve your virtual presentation, make it a high quality microphone. Headsets generally are a great way to get good sound and avoid background noise. The problem is you end up looking like a call center operator. The alternative is a good cardioid microphone (a microphone that mainly picks up sound from the front). The microphones to avoid are omnidirectional (they pick up ambient sound from around the room).

6. Play with the tech.

Whenever my boys encounter something new, they want to press all the buttons. As they get older, they still do that. We can use some of that same mentality when it comes to using videoconferencing platforms. Do you know what all the buttons do? Try them out. On a Zoom call, using the space bar is a shortcut to go off mute. Skype has similar keyboard shortcuts. The best way to get better at using the tools is by playing with it … and pressing all the buttons.

7. Skip the apology.

We all know that virtual meetings aren’t seamless. Sometimes people are hard to hear. And your WiFi may be slow. It’s tempting to always be apologizing for this, or even worse, apologizing before anything even goes wrong! Instead, go with the flow and adapt to the difficulties. If they persist, be decisive in what to do about it – whether it’s asking everyone to log out and then back in, or the worst case scenario of rescheduling the meeting. People may not like it, but they will definitely appreciate it more if you didn’t waste 30 minutes trying to get everything working before finally canceling.

8. Speak to the camera.

When you are on a video call where multiple people are sharing screens, you will want to look at them. The problem is, doing this appears as if you’re looking sideways. The only way to offer the appearance of eye contact is to speak to your webcam instead of to the images of the people. This is logical, but very hard to consistently do because it feels unnatural. To be honest, I haven’t found an easy way to do this, apart from asking everyone else to turn off their video screens. So I’ve just been practicing ignoring their videos and speaking to the camera instead.

9. Use props.

One of the nicest things about presenting from my home office is that I can have all the tools I usually use right next to me. So while I used to share a picture of a stack of books that I read from the stage, now I can actually SHOW people the stack. Props are a great way to break up the monotony of a talk and bring your personality too.

10. Update your website/profile.

Everything is changing, but a lot of what we see online seems to have been created before Covid-19. As a speaker, I wanted to be sure to let event planners and potential clients know that I’ve adjusted what I do, so I changed my homepage and my speaking page to focus on virtual events. If you want to show potential customers or even your colleagues that you’re adjusting too, consider updating your site (if you have one) or your professional profiles too.

Rohit Bhargava is an innovation, trends, marketing expert and Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author. Invite him to keynote your next virtual or live event.

27 Apr Cybersecurity And Compliance In The New Decade

Posted at 17:26h in Uncategorized

Dave Knox sat down to talk about the rise of cybersecurity and why today – particularly in our new work from home environment – it is becoming a topic of board room discussion. In 2002, Scott Price was 26 years old when his employer, Arthur Andersen, went out of business following Enron. With his focus on auditing security around technology controls, Scott started his first company, growing it to $11 million in revenue seven years later. Sensing a broader opportunity, Scott left to start A-LIGN in 2009. As CEO and Founder of A-LIGN, they help companies comply with different regulatory and information security standards globally.

Dave Knox: When you started your career, audits and compliance were mostly financial. Early in your career, you saw that a change was coming and that need would broaden. How has cybersecurity changed compliance over the last decade?

Scott Price: I think compliance really allows businesses to trust each other. I talk about the fact of what we do allows businesses to trust and respect each other. They want to be able to trust businesses back and forth of sharing data and us as consumers, we want to make sure our companies respect the data that we give to them. A-LIGN’s focus on having a very broad framework of how we attack those from a security controls perspective, I think really adds value to our clients because they see the fact that they can either raise funds, do business with a new company, move upstream or really just improve their business because of that trust. Having great cybersecurity controls in place is going to mitigate risk and make your company more successful.

Knox: Is the conversation around cybersecurity changing at the executive level?

Price: I think people are starting to talk about it moving from behind the scenes to the board room and I really do believe it’s become a board room discussion. But security is still not the place where we say okay, if we have a dollar to spend on sales and marketing or we have a dollar to spend on security, we’re going to choose security. Companies are going to consistently choose growth metrics and growth dollars over the fact that these are things that could happen. Let’s face it, with cybersecurity we know it’s going to happen, it’s not the if but the when it will happen. You do see it continuously getting more exposure at the board level though. And the focus will continue to increase as greater fines are incurred, companies lose major customers, and relationships are strained when you’ve influenced their cybersecurity environment.

We’re clearly biased as a company that helps organizations of all sizes reduce cybersecurity risks, but we feel that the ability to spend dollars to demonstrate compliance with cybersecurity regulations really will allow sales and marketing to drive further. We found that 66% of our client base takes on Series A funding or greater within 160 days of hiring us. We’ve seen the fact that they will get the funding and then want to move up market, so they’ll need to build these security controls in place. Or they’ll be looking for the funding and they’ll want to make sure that they have the best security controls as they go through due diligence. Investors and Strategic Buyers are starting to look at the compliance framework during the diligence process so it’s becoming a bigger, bigger issue.

Knox: Is there a way to measure an ROI when you think about security?

Price: I think the ROI is more if you don’t do something. You have to do it. People continuously underestimate the risk of bad things happening. I go back to the movie the Big Short. They found great investments because people don’t think that bad things are going to happen. They always undervalue it. I think it’s hard to put a dollar exactly on what the ROI is. I think it’s more along the lines of how it drives the sales and marketing aspect which you can put a dollar on that. It’s easier to measure the growth than to measure the penalty.

Knox: We mostly think of compliance and security as an IT responsibility but what you’re saying is it’s moving closer to being something the entire c-suite needs to care about. How do you think about that role of cybersecurity becoming more horizontal?

Price: There’s an often used phrase that they say cybersecurity is a team sport. It really is. We see the fact that sales and marketing are looking at their competition and seeing the types of certifications and assessments that those competitors can promote. They realize they need the same thing to be able to compete in the marketplace. We see it more and more driven by sales and marketing and then it becomes a responsibility of implementation by IT or operations. That in itself allows compliance and cybersecurity to have more visibility and not just sit in the back closet.

Knox: As a founder yourself, how do you coach and think about entrepreneurs engaging with security early on and planning ahead versus reacting?

Price: When you’re in a startup mode you don’t have time to go back and redo code, redo processes and procedures. You want to build those controls that are required for these cybersecurity regulations into the code, into your processes because you’re moving so fast. We really get excited when a CEO calls us of a startup and he or she is engaged with us before they’ve even been asked for the audit or the assessment, before they’ve even building their application and they just have this idea. That’s where we can have the most impact because it’s not going back and retooling a process. That allows us to understand what works for you at this stage and you can grow into that process. For us, the value that we get derived of interacting with what we call “Startup Steve” and that buyer persona is really fascinating for us.

What we find is that this founder is typically someone that came from a large company and they had first hand experience of going through that process, retooling things, and seeing their teams bogged down. They recall that pain and don’t want to have it happen with their startup. They want to align their strategy and their compliance objectives. We love to partner with them early on and be able to not have to experience that pain.

Not some people haven’t had to experience that pain before. For them, the biggest thing is to try to relate to them of where their objectives are and how we can fit into that and get them there sooner. They want to be able to get to market and they want to be able to acquire new customers. We tell them that if we partner now, we’ll be able to do that with you in a much easier format, take you to market quicker and be able to achieve whatever they want to do faster. We are able to talk about our experience with 2,400 clients, many of which we started working with when they were in the startup and small business phase. We can make those connections and help them understand why it’s so important to do this work at the startup phase rather than building processes and having to retreat later on.

Knox: In your own journey as an entrepreneur and as you have worked with over 2,400 companies, what lessons do you wish you had when you were starting that first company at 26 years old?

Price: I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned is I wish I would have focused more on how to be a good leader and CEO and to invest in our people early on. I constantly hear “you’ve built this great company in A-LIGN” but the thing is, we don’t sell a widget, we don’t sell a car. We sell our people being experts in their industry and being able to go out and interact with our clients. As we received our investment from FTV Capital, we’ve invested tremendously in our people with training and also in our technology. Those are the things that I wish I had done earlier and raised capital in order to be able to do that because we’ve seen the dividends of that pay off. If we had done that work in 2014, we might be 10 times where we’re at now.

We have four values and one of our four values is innovate constantly. We firmly believe that our clients want us to innovate and be on top of what we’re doing because they’ve chosen us as their trusted provider to be able to do just that. For someone that wants to grow and be pushed to the limit, this is the best feeling. This is what I love to do because we are constantly learning about new attack techniques that hackers are trying to do. The great thing is the hackers get worse every day and we have to get better to be able to support our clients. Standards change every day because cybersecurity threats change every day. This is one of the most interesting industries that allows us to have these constant changes, to keep it interesting. The standard is constantly evolving. Our client’s risk is constantly evolving. The technology behind what they’re doing is evolving. This makes this very interesting. We don’t sell black and white TV’s at A-LIGN. We’re in cybersecurity and it’s constantly evolving.

Knox: COVID-19 has created a new cybersecurity threat landscape for C-suite executives – especially CEOs, CIOs and CISOs. What kind of threats are organizations facing and what should you consider when choosing a compliance partner?

Price: The new threat landscape created by COVID-19 is our new reality – and even the most prepared business continuity plans likely did not plan for a worldwide pandemic that would disrupt business and IT operations. Organizations are facing new risks regarding a remote workforce and compliance initiatives as cyber criminals attempt to exploit the fear of the unknown. Continuing to maintain compliance, even during uncertain times, remains vital – and finding an experienced partner you trust that has the right people, process and platform will transform any security and compliance experience.

Dave Knox is a leading consultant, speaker, and coach in the areas of innovation, marketing, and digital transformation. Invite him to keynote your virtual or LIVE meeting/event.

(This article first appeared in Forbes on April 20, 2020)

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