← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - What Happens When CEOs Stop Chasing Revenue ($100M Founder) | Melissa Urban - CEO of Whole30
00:14:07
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- [00:00]
A
In this lessons episode, discover how small habits create lasting change and why genuine connection matters more than productivity hacks. Learn how avoiding comparison strengthens leadership and culture. Understand how self awareness builds trust within teams. And explore how prioritizing community over profit creates brands that endure. I ask you because I know that you know, outside of like whole 30, you're just like a very self aware person. So I feel like you've, like, you mentioned you looked into all this stuff before. You probably try anything that you hear on a podcast or a show or some, some executives figured out some way to sort of improve their life by 1%. Like you figured out or you've tried it does. I'm so, I'm curious, what are the, what are the ones, what are the things that you do in your life that is sort of like not just fads, they actually seem to actually impact your life.
- [00:51]
B
Yeah. So one of the things that I did when I first moved to Utah from New Hampshire, so I grew up in the east coast and like, we're not rude on the east Coast. We just don't need to talk to you, right? Our. If you are my cashier or my barist or my waiter or waitress, like, it is purely transactional. So when I move and that, that's just how the culture is. When I moved to Utah, we showed up at the grocery store the very first day and the cashier was like, hey, how are you guys? What are you doing this weekend? And I was like, why? Like, why do you want to know that? We don't know each other. I'm never going to see you again. So I did this talking to strangers experiment where for 30 days I talked to everyone if it was appropriate, right? If there was like a huge line behind me, I wouldn't. But if it was a waitress or a barista or there was someone next to me in line who appeared to, you know, be amenable to chatting or my cashier, I would just talk to them. My Uber driver, I would just talk to them, you know, hey, how's your day going? You know, are you in the middle of your shift or the end of your shift? What are you doing anything fun this weekend? Have you tried this brand of whatever that I'm buying? And I found that it was the highlight of my day. The highlight of my day was spending two minutes, like, making someone feel good, eliciting this, like, genuine human connection, even if we talked about nothing, even if I never saw them again. And occasionally I would have these experiences where I would like end up hearing someone's story usually in an Uber or you know, on a slow day at a restaurant. And I was like, every single person is interesting. Everyone has a story. And it's kind of like I think Brene Brown says that like you wouldn't have this interpersonal conflict if you just like talk to each other. If you got to know each other right, our differences would come together. And that was such an awesome and fun getting out of my shell experiment. And I still do it to this day. I'm not like fanatical about it, but that was a really, really fun one. One of the things I will say though is that I think it's important going back to self awareness to know that just because someone else finds it a productivity hack doesn't mean it's for you. So you hear about people like batching their day where they only check email twice a day. I check at 8am and I check at 3pm awesome. If that works great for you, awesome. I'm never going to do that because that's not how I use email, it's not how I want to use email and that's not how I want to schedule my day. So I think it's equally important to know what is not for you. And maybe you need to try some self experiments that don't work for you to start to get a feel with that. But I think you can also trust your intuition if you hear someone talking about, oh, I use this app and I do everything in it and I'm like, oh, that just sounds really restrictive to me. That's not for you. Maybe.
- [03:30]
A
I wanted to, I wanted to ask a couple like leadership questions just to pull some experience out from you. Building whole 30 in the company. So now we sort of covered, we've covered some health and wellness, we've covered some like some, some mindset or whatnot. But before I go into like leadership lessons, last thoughts on just like healthy entrepreneurship. What are some main things that you'd impart on somebody who wants to build their own thing? What is the, what is the main health entrepreneuring mindset that you have to have if you want to build something and stick with it for the long term?
- [04:06]
B
My biggest lesson or one of my biggest lessons while I was building was don't worry about what other people are doing. Don't worry about it. I would get distracted by looking at my competition, other people who were doing similar things in the space and looking at the direction they were going, a resource they rolled out and thinking to myself, oh, I have to do that too. Now I have to be in that space. No, no, no, no, no. I had my vision. I knew exactly what I wanted Whole30 to be, where I wanted it to go, how I wanted to connect with my community. And the minute I stopped worrying about what other people were doing and focused all of that energy on where I wanted to go was, it not only felt so much better for me, it was much less stressful, it was less confusing and anxiety producing. But now I got to put all of my energy into what I wanted to build, not like what other people were doing. So for me, that was a huge lesson really early on. And I still abide by that to this day.
- [05:03]
A
Amazing. Now, as you, as you've built Whole30, how do you make sure that you're a great CEO to your team, to your company, to your customers?
- [05:16]
B
I hope I'm a great CEO. I think it goes a lot of it goes back to self awareness, recognizing that everything comes from the top down. Your company's culture, boundaries, communication, style, leadership. If I am not embodying and living and demonstrating the values that I want my company to have and I want my team to have, then like it is entirely my fault. It's 100% coming down from me. So I have to be really self aware. When I think of something at 6:00 clock at night, I have to remind myself, don't send this email right now. You can schedule it and send it tomorrow morning because I don't want to. Our culture is such that like when we're off, we're off, we're with family and unless it's an emergency, I don't need anything from you and I don't want to have action that goes against what I'm saying our values are. I have to employ pauses really often. My management style is very direct. I work very fast and I often don't take the time to say hi. You know, I'm kind of like, hey, we're working on this. Let's just like get it done. So I have to pause very often and remind myself that it's in all of our best interest to speak to people the way they want to be spoken to. I have some employees who really like, you know, talking about their weekend first or talking about what everyone else is doing. And even if I'm in transactional mode, it's super helpful for me to recognize like, oh, this would be so much better served if I took like a two minute break and we just like chatted a little bit. Right? I can, we can do that. So I Have to sometimes put my own tendencies aside for that. I also think it's important for me to recognize and acknowledge what I'm not good at or what I am not adding value to. And I've had to do that quite a bit lately because I feel like I'm in a place right now where in order for the business to continue to grow the way I want it to, I have to step back in some areas and let someone else step in and take us to that next level. And that's been a two year process that was somewhat challenging, but not as challenging as I expected. I don't have as much attachment to the title as I thought I did or attachment to the, the power that I thought I. And it is in the company's best interest, which means it's in my team's best interest, in my community's best interest for me to step back on some things and bring someone else in and let them run it so that I can do what I do best. So I mean, we keep talking about self awareness, but I think that's a really important part of being a good leader. It is, yeah.
- [07:43]
A
And how do you find those people? So how do you find those people that are going to lead the other parts of the business? What's your, what's your hiring? What's your, what's your strategy for finding that incredible talent that you can trust to sort of scale your baby?
- [07:56]
B
Yeah, I had a ton of experience in hiring before I joined Whole30, my old job in insurance. I managed a group of about 20 team members in three different offices across the country. And I had to do a lot of hiring. So I got really practiced at interviewing. I learned to hire for talent and not skill. So I can teach someone Microsoft, I can teach someone WordPress or I can teach someone the vernacular, the language that we use around Whole 30. Right. We don't call it a diet, we call it a program. What I can't teach is like that talent, that entrepreneurial talent or the quick grasp of like the vision and you know, being able to implement it or taking past experiences that may not be like a one to one, but figuring out how to employ the learning lessons here, those are things you can't teach. So we also tend to hire from within our community, like always from within our community. So you already believe in the whole 30. You already are familiar with the community. In some ways you're like on board with the mission before you even start working for us. And that makes, you know, your kind of indoctrination. Into the team so much easier. You're already part of this, like, mission that you were part of as the community member, and now you're kind of on the inside. And then for me, I think my number one, my team knows this, my number one kind of metric is loyalty. I want to see that you are loyal to the program and loyal to the company, and that doesn't mean abandoning yourself. I want you to show up with integrity and I want you to push back if things don't feel right to you or if we're asking, you know, something of you that that is too much. But I want you to demonstrate that, like, you're really here for the growth of the community and for the good of the brand and the mission. And I've done a really, really good job. I have incredible people in place right now who are like, determined to, you know, steer the rocket ship with me.
- [09:51]
A
And. Last question on, on this one, because I thought the, the last thing that I've seen you, that I've seen you do really, really well is create community. And that's an incredibly hard thing for any CEO business to do. But when you can do it right, it's an exceptional tool for product feedback. It's an exceptional tool to find. Well, you're using it to hire people, to evangelize your product, whatever it is. But how do you, how do you actually build community? What was your strategy? Did you, was it, was it something that, you know, you, you focused on building community or was it just you had a great product and you decided to like, sort of double down on that and allow people to sort of chat amongst themselves and, and you built a community almost accidentally. What was the, what was the strategy behind the community?
- [10:39]
B
Yeah, I won't say I went into it with like a very specific strategy. I did have a great product, first of all. So you can build the best community in the world and have great marketing and great word of mouth, but like, if you're product's not that good, that's not sustainable. I have a great product, so that really, really helps. I recognized early on and like, maybe part of my success just happens to do with my personality. I'm not a profit driven CEO. That doesn't light me up at all. What I am, what really does get me going is recognizing that, like, we are helping people and hearing people's transformations and listening to their stories and recognizing that, like, what we're putting out in the world is making people's lives better. That's what I love. So, you know, for the first three years we gave, we still do, but we gave everything away for free. The Whole30 program is completely free. You don't need to buy a thing except the food you eat to do it. That stands to this day. That will always be true, but especially in the beginning. It was, everything I do is for the community. Everything. It's, what do you need to be successful? What are your pain points? What are we missing in terms of resources? If you have this question, can I write this blog post and answer it for you and every person who comes after you? When the program grew and I started bringing on team members and we started partnering with brands, all of the decisions were, is this in the best interest of the community? And I turned down big deals because it wasn't. And I occasionally would be like, oh man, this would be amazing to partner with like this brand. They're so big and it would be so good. But it wasn't the right fit. And I recognized early on that it's so incredibly precious to build this kind of loyalty with your community and this kind of trust and with one deal, that can all go away with one misstep. So I really, I treasure that. I do. I have always said that I have never had a good idea in my life. Every good idea that we put out, everything that we do, is because the community needed it or suggested it. And my entire business is focused around the community. Like Whole 30 is, at its heart, a community. My team is on board with that. And even for the people in my company who are responsible for generating revenue and profit, we still won't do it at the expense of the community. And that's a really important point for us.
- [12:48]
A
Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.