Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:01]
Keith Newman
Oh, hey. Welcome to the Look Back. With me, your host, Keith Newman, former journalist and media guy and go to market consultant in the Valley for the past few decades. Here we have candid conversations with newsmakers and rule breakers, the innovators, entrepreneurs and influencers who share their past contributions along with current insights in a casual yet candid content conversation. This lightly edited passion project of mine is a pay it forward contribution to the next wave of innovators and entrepreneurs. I sure hope you enjoy the program and feel free to share it with anyone who might enjoy it. Now onto the show. And now I'm here to introduce you a new series, kind of a spin out of the Look Back, called the Look Forward. And we're really excited to share with you something that's recommended from my audience. They said they want to hear about things people are experiencing today, what the new reality of the market is today. So with that, I bring you the Look Forward. Well, this is a real treat for me. I get to catch up with a friend of mine, Laura McCann, who is the CEO, founder and chief mood booster at Adora Therapy. Laura, welcome to the Look Back.
- [01:26]
Laura McCann
Thanks, Keith. It's so great to see you again. It's been a while, but I can't wait to jump in because we have so much to catch up.
- [01:33]
Keith Newman
You know, I'm a huge fan of yours from the first time we met. I'm looking over your. Your bio. I did a tiny bit of homework for our talk today. I didn't know you were in a movie at 16. Le Petit Serenity.
- [01:46]
Laura McCann
Oh, my gosh. I know. I have this very weird background because I grew up in France and I started as a child actress. I'd say the best part about that isn't so much being a child actress, but it was a great sales training.
- [02:00]
Keith Newman
Wow. Good.
- [02:00]
Laura McCann
As you write at a very young age, how to communicate and express yourself and also responsibility. Right, because you're carrying the weight of a production team and you're in the world as a grownup. And so I'd say that it was a great experience. Taught me a lot, and I use it every day in my entrepreneurial world.
- [02:20]
Keith Newman
Well, it's funny, as an entrepreneur, we do a couple things. We talk about the crazy drunken walk of the startup entrepreneur, then we talk about the need to be a great storyteller. So you got both working, then you throw in your fashion work at Parsons in New York, right, where I've had some family go there. What a combination. And then all of a sudden you decided to enter a category that's a little bit, you know, I, I guess we could call it wellness at a certain level and say, you know what, I'm gonna go do this wellness thing. How did you get to the idea and how did you come up with the launch plan? Because, folks, Laura is a meticulous thinker about things such as brand and launch and business plan and things like that. So I think asking you this question, it's, There's a lot to unpack, but I, I just leave it open to you to, to kind of take us through it.
- [03:14]
Laura McCann
I mean, it's a great question. So, you know, combining the creative and the business, that's a skill set that we just described. A background in design, product development led to a business in, in fashion, a career in fashion where I learned a lot of things about product development, sourcing, retail, manufacturing, and then becoming a CEO at the age of 26, which was my startup journey. I'm now 60, so that's how many years, long time. And, and then being able to use the other part of the brain, right? The part of the brain that's more analytical. Business, finance. And if you can do both, which I don't recommend, it would be wonderful to be able to be in one lane and have other people be in the other lane in different businesses. I've had partners that have carried some of it in this business. I'm still carrying both parts. That's a little hard. I came to this really because of my own journey, having burnt myself out as an entrepreneur. And so after ignoring all the things that were, let's call them, woo woo adjacent, and things around like how do you actually treat yourself, your body, your mind, so that you're not stressed and anxious and then hurting yourself, whether it's physically, emotionally, relationships, having to take a big look. And when I looked at some of the things that were available in an alternative wellness journey, things like aroma therapy, things like breath work, things like thinking of the body as a vi or yourself as a vibrational being, I saw the opportunity and I, I had always been interested in personal transformation, but I approached it in a very mental way, like if I'm smart enough and I know enough, I can solve it. And I had to give all that up because it didn't give me the, the journey I needed. The journey was really all about learning to love myself, adore myself, accept myself as I was. And through that journey, I've been able to really do the healing and kind of elevate myself to be able to not be constantly struggling ups and downs, all of us entrepreneurs talk about that. You know, we talk about burnout, we talk about anxiety, depression. I'm going to call it more like overworking my solar plexus. Right. Like being too mental, too controlling, too focused and too driven, which had an impact. So I came to the business through that journey and had the opportunity to learn the category and you know, when you know, a category like apparel, I was in that business for, for 20 plus years. No way I was going to go into apparel. So I was willing to approach it from the naive perspective where what I don't know, I don't know which is kind of more exciting than what I know, I don't want to know. And so I was willing to like jump into the, call it the beauty wellness category because it allowed me to take my skill set, but I also didn't have like a belief system that made me feel like it's too hard or it's already been solved. So it's been, it's been interesting because you always have to keep learning as an entrepreneur as, you know, and being in a category that I still had to learn, that's been, I guess, the growth where, you know, and then so much other.
- [06:22]
Keith Newman
But you were not a babe in the proverbial words, having done all the stuff that you had done. So even though it's a new category of sorts, it's still in the whole.
- [06:31]
Laura McCann
You know, it is where. Yeah, you know where I think it. It's hard. And everybody who's in a CPG consumer goods category will tell you you have to be like an omnichannel CEO. You have to understand wholesale, direct to consumer. You have to understand retail. You have to maybe have multiple channels to be able to do the thing. In the past it was like, I'm just DTC or I'm just, you know, wholesale. No, no, no. Today you got to be everything. Those are lots of very different skill sets. And I think that's where it's so challenging.
- [07:04]
Keith Newman
I wanted to ask you about that, but start with the whole part of the, in the CPG space and we could even take it beyond that. But the idea of building a brand from the ground up, what are the key attributes you were looking to create? I know you came up with do our therapy, which just like, you nailed it. That's so good. It starts with an A, right?
- [07:24]
Laura McCann
The A is great.
- [07:25]
Keith Newman
Yeah, I could, I could spell it.
- [07:27]
Laura McCann
But that's an acting story. You know why? When I was an actress, I had a stage name and they said, pick a stage name and so my stage name was Laura Alexis and my agent said, pick a name with an A. So when they roll the credits, your name is at the top.
- [07:41]
Keith Newman
Oh, gosh, that's funny. I love Adora, though. You could have been Laura, the Adora.
- [07:46]
Laura McCann
You know, now it could be Laura Therapy, but it's Adora Therapy.
- [07:50]
Keith Newman
I love that name. I think it works on the Adora standpoint. The idea of building the. The elements to that brand. You've done a fantastic job of making that connect to just that whole feeling of healthy wellness, you know, clarity and pre and supporting those things. How does somebody go about figuring that out? How do they go about creating that?
- [08:12]
Laura McCann
You know, it's. You can go to an agency, right? Yeah. And they can help you create your brand. But I think it's a journey. I think the journey, obviously you start with a great logo, hopefully one that you keep, and then the name that you feel like you can back up into. And today you wouldn't do anything without having the SEO piece thought out because everything is so technical. You know, you could say branding is this visual identity piece, creative colors, logo, and then the storytelling. But it's a technical thing. SEO, keyword search, metadata, you know, all of that. So, like, if you're lucky, you'll figure out how to bring it all together. But the journey usually starts with like that sort of more graphical, creative piece. The storytelling really is something I feel like you learn as you go because nobody really knows how it's going to go. And it's a very iterative process to some version of success. I think you get good because you do this kind of thing. You learn the sound bites, you learn what you want to say. You also learn the differentiation. But, you know, the traditional arc for a startup is, you know, you do that pitch deck and there's all those slides. And one of the slides is like your competitive differentiation, your ip, you know, you're this, that, and like, you kind of have to reverse engineer your brand to fit into the deck. So little by little, you'll address each slide. At the beginning you were like, what do I put on this slide? And you don't have anything. And as you go, you start to realize, oh, now I know what that slide is for. Some people, they make up the slide information before they've actually checked the boxes. Some people are good at that. A lot of us, we kind of have to get there to be able to be like, now I get what I'm doing a hundred percent and I can speak about it better.
- [09:59]
Keith Newman
Yeah. And, and just for the back, for a little bit additional background for the listener. You know, you're. You obviously started in E commerce. You sold wholesale. You had a retail store in, in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. Remember some of the grand opening pictures in the launch of that and how excited I was as a bystander watching you go live and, and what the elements were for that store. Then you just opened another store in Miami. But my point in bringing this up is just to illustrate the point you just made. It's like you learn a lot just by, you know, paying attention to what the customer is saying, where the market is telling you to go next. So you obviously decided, I got to go into retail. I'm going to go ahead and bite the bullet and try brick and mortar. I'm going to pick Asheville. And you picked an adorable place. And then I'm going to go pick Miami, which is like, oh, my gosh, over the top, right? But very different markets. But you decided because you listened to the market. That's what, that's what's kind of intriguing to me is sort of the, the moments along your journey when you said, yeah, I got it, I got something here. Like, you're really savvy. So when did that happen for you? Or maybe the other side? Laura, when did you go, oh, shit, this was the biggest mistake ever made. What am I doing?
- [11:12]
Laura McCann
There have been all of those. So the journey is usually like, like, you know, we do this chakra photo and with our aura reading component of our business, which is a big part of that story, and it shows, you know, your chakras on a bar graph and you see high and low ones. But that's the journey. It's like up and down, up and down. And then there's this point where you start to do the curve right where you're seeing the upward trajectory. That's when you know you have something. But there's a lot of iteration. In the beginning. The big thing for me is when I looked at all the business models and like very many people, I read a lot of the industry stuff and I bought into what I'll call the folklore of what a startup should look like in my space, I now believe it's complete bs. And as soon, as soon as I was able to break out of the feeling like I was supposed to do it that way, and then also it wasn't working for me to do it that way. The traditional journey being like, you should just be dtc or if you're going to be wholesale, you got to do it this way, nobody ever would have said, go into retail. That would have been like, you can't go into retail until you have a big brand or this much money or blah, blah, blah, or retail's dead. You know, that's been the past four years. Retail's dead. You know, Covid, retail's dead. Well, I didn't listen and I did it anyway. And it was the best thing I ever did. And I didn't do it because I knew I did it because it was another one of the tests that I had in my mind that I had to try. And what I was looking to achieve was recurring revenue. It's the hardest thing. How do you get recurring revenue? So every day you have a sale and every day you get money in. The other thing was, how do you retain that customer, make them come back, and then how do you acquire that customer and how do you do it in the cheapest way? And it just so happened that having a retail store hit all those things and built up enough cash flow, enough demand, enough learning about what, why they liked it, what they liked, so we could refine it, so then we could then address the other channels and be better at that too.
- [13:13]
Keith Newman
So, yeah, the idea of what brought them into the store, what do they like the most? You almost have like a daily focus group.
- [13:19]
Laura McCann
It's exactly that. And a lot of brands never get into a store. And when they're in a store, they're like, it should just sell because it's here. And that's the other thing. Nothing sells because it's just here. Although, you know, you have that thing you always heard your grandparents say, location, location, location. I'll always remember because my dad was in real estate and it was always like, location. I was like, okay, what does that mean? Location, location, location. It's like, you have the right location, your business is going to thrive, and if you don't, you won't. And it's true. If you're in the right spot, you get that customer, they walk by, they walk in, and eventually you convert them. And then the same metrics that you learn in the digital world, you can apply to the retail world. You know, in the, in the digital world, it's sort of like, you know, average cost per order, you know, gross margin, customer life cycle value. In a retail store, it's sales per square foot, orders per day. You know how there's, you know, revenue? Yeah, yeah, roi. The ROI is different because you may be advertising and doing things to bring them in, but in an online business, it's Very much. A lot of math, right? Like, because you don't even know who the customer is and you don't know why they bought. It's data, Data and data and data.
- [14:29]
Keith Newman
I love the fact that you're combining the idea of, you know, following the passion, listening to the customer, but also continuing to test whether you feel it's right or the book says don't do it, or you're just continuing to throw test at it.
- [14:43]
Laura McCann
You have to test. I really believe that. Especially when you're using your own money. You know, a lot of times when you're raising money from the outside, the litmus test is, you know, what are these things and do you meet the criteria for what they think is a good investment? I very much think that if you're, you know, using your own money, you should act like your own VC and you should put yourself through the same, you know, rigor. Right? What is the rigor? Am I going to write this check which is coming out of my own pocket and did I hit the thing or is this me just dreaming and wanting and I don't have anything to, to prove that I should? And then, you know, if you do that, oftentimes those are the people that get a certain amount of distance, but then they give up because it's super hard, right? And it's your own money, but you have to be rigorous and you have to say, is this worthy of putting in more? And the, the test is, you know, is it successful? Do people want it? Do people come in? Do they refer it to their friends? Do you see growth? And if you don't, you're just in that sort of launch and you're constantly feeling like you're launching. We were there a long time. I mean, our initial path was wholesale and we opened 500 retail doors. We were in everybody from a Whole Foods to a Walmart to a Canyon Ranch. So we were testing out the category, testing out the price points, testing out the verticals. The thing about the whole thing is I didn't see the recurring revenue. And I was like, it's costing me so much to acquire these customers, trade shows and samples and shipping. I was like, this is going to never scale. How do we get to a scale that's going to work? And those margins that you make in direct to consumer, especially if you're like us, we're vertical, so we're making really good margins. You then have the money to do all the advertising, all the other things. And it was like, okay, let's go back to the fundamentals of what makes a business successful. And you have to have margins, you have to have revenue and cash flow turns, you have to be able to make it so you can control your supply chain. And I, I kind of feel like the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants, which I am. And going back to what I call Main street business financial metrics, which is like you, you couldn't send your kid to college. And that's why all the, you know, immigrant grandparents were say, saying like, be a doctor, be a dentist because they knew that being a merchant was a very hard business. But many of them became very successful and did put families through college and went up by being merchants. But today being a merchant is a whole different kind of skill set as an entrepreneur. But to me it's like what we all need to be to be savvy brand owners is you have to be a merchant.
- [17:19]
Keith Newman
You kind of go into the lab every day.
- [17:22]
Laura McCann
Yes.
- [17:23]
Keith Newman
You know, whether it's where you are right now or one of the stores or whatever. Because here you are mixing potions to figure out your media mix or where we, where are we going to shoot a video? What's going to be the story? I'm mixing a new, I'm mixing a new fragrance. I'm mixing a new, you know, so in a lot of different ways you're always sort of.
- [17:43]
Laura McCann
Yes.
- [17:43]
Keith Newman
It's like some new formula.
- [17:45]
Laura McCann
Mixology. Yeah, you know it is. So you're testing all the time. And the things that you're testing aren't always new products. It's theories and strategies around, you know, what to do that's going to help you get to the next step. And for us we have again and maybe a non traditional path. We do the, the aura reading piece which requires that we do it in person. And the aura readings are our number one product sale. But because you can't ship an aura reading, you can't really do that direct to consumer. So you can pre book it. That's great. You can have them book it online. It's more like a spa service. You have to come into the store to do it. But an aura reading, when it's done well, sells products. So the aura reading is like the top of the funnel and we focus on that. Some people know us as an aromatherapy brand, some people know us as an aura reading.
- [18:34]
Keith Newman
Know that came later in your evolution too, that that was not in the business plan.
- [18:39]
Laura McCann
It wasn't. It was more like my personal life meshing with my business life and then trusting that that was a good decision. And then Understanding why that would be something that we should try out. But we honestly, we could have never guessed that it would have been. I'd call it the, you know, kind of the icing on the cake. It's what made it all come together and it turned the storytelling in the store into a real storytelling that was customized. I've always had this fascination with customization and it's very hard to do, but when you're doing somebody's aura reading, it is completely just about them and that is what people want. They want to be taken care of, to talk about themselves. So the personalization of an aura reading means that you can then customize what they buy, but they're buying from pre made products. But with seven chakras, there's lots of choices. With all the aura sprays, candles versus perfumes, there's so many things that they can pick from to help them on their healing journey. And our job is to diagnose them and then use that diagnosis, that's the therapy part, to help them then understand what they can use to help them with balancing and healing their chakras.
- [19:46]
Keith Newman
Yeah, Laura, again, it makes it so fun to, to watch what you're doing. And again, I need to go reorder. I realize I'm way beyond. So back to another sub point I wanted to ask you about. You do a lot of mentoring and coaching with other startups. You like, send the elevator back down as they say, right?
- [20:04]
Laura McCann
I love that.
- [20:05]
Keith Newman
I've actually stuck a few people in front of you and, and taking your advice as I listen as well. How, how do you go about counseling new founders, particularly on the female side or just generally speaking, what are some of the advice you get from these eager, enthusiastic startup founder, entrepreneur, big idea. And you get the. They give you the story and, and how do you go through it with them? What do you look?
- [20:33]
Laura McCann
Yeah, I mean it's different levels, so I don't formally mentor, but I will help anybody who asks for help. I kind of see that as part of my journey and my give back. And I do feel like it's a karmic loop. The more I can help others, the more the universe rewards me. So happy to do it. But it is sort of like a calling to be able to give and share. And also just as a curious person, I'm always fascinated by what other people are doing and how they're doing it. Today was really exciting. I went back to visit the store. I'm in Asheville. I've been in Miami for five months and a colleague in the Grove Arcade, where I am, they have a store and they also sell perfume. They sell traditional perfume. And I become friends with the team there because we're in the arcade every day all the time. We see each other all the time. We were on a board together and they were struggling with sourcing a bottle and a box. And I was like, tell me more about that. Well, in the end, I helped them source it. And today I was at their factory, which is also in the same building that I'm in, and I help them find factory space. So I have goosebumps because, like, I just was wanting to help because I can't stand to see people struggle. And I felt like I knew how to help. And, you know, I've given them tools for their business and they're not a competitor. But maybe, you know, we're both selling fragrance in the same building because why not? And I feel like it makes me so proud that I could do that. And it's like sort of paying it forward, you know, everybody wins. The factory got orders, the landlord got a new tenant. I have colleagues that I can talk to that care about the same things I care about. If I need something, they're going to help me. So it's a. It's a beautiful thing.
- [22:16]
Keith Newman
That's great. Let me just follow up with that because there's a lot to the. The whole mentoring thing and helping startups. What are some of the biggest misperceptions that you see, though, when this, when early stage companies are. Are coming to you and they think they have it all thought out? What are the. Some of the common pieces they're missing or the most common piece if you.
- [22:38]
Laura McCann
Yeah, you know, I think it depends on the journey of the entrepreneur. A lot of people are going to figure it out because it's a temperament thing. You know, they're. They're like the dog with the bone. They're not going to let go until they figure it out. And they have skill sets like I did, that may be tangential. They're not maybe direct skill sets. I think the biggest fallacy people have is that you can go raise money. It is very hard to raise money. Most people can't raise money. And if you do raise money, that's the beginning of your nightmare right there. You will have many other issues if you raise money after you raise the money. So it's not like the things you think are the things aren't the things in the end. So if you've never done it, there's so many things along the way that until you do it. So I always prefer somebody with scars on their back who's been there, has failed, has tried something and they're coming back at it. A new entrepreneur is so convinced that they figured it all out and they have to believe. And so I'm not there to say don't. But the biggest issue will always be do you have enough capital to do what you want to do? And if you don't, how are you going to do it? Because it's all about money. It really is.
- [23:44]
Keith Newman
If you don't, capital is free and, and yet fundraising is not a panacea. I'm double clicking on those things. We've lived it way too many times, seen it even more so you have to have to be aware. How about, how about Laura? Because the brand is so important with a company such as yours. What do you look at when you try to add to your team? I know you're very, you know, fire, slow fire, fast kind of a person, but at the same time, how do you, how do you find the right person? It's not.
- [24:12]
Laura McCann
Yeah. You know, when I, when I had my company when I was younger and I was younger, so it was much harder to be like a boss because people were older than me. Many times I had like 50 people and I had a company in New York in the Garment center. So I. And I had like friends who were entrepreneurs. And whenever you'd get together in these mentor groups like eo, which you know, or ypo, everybody would always talk about employees. That was always the thing, that was the hardest thing for anybody to ever deal with. So when it was time here to start building the team, I had a lot of beliefs I had to let go of around what it would be like to build a team and relanguaging and also, I don't want to say learning, but forgetting the things I knew that were, I think, painful and not so great about having a team. And the, the way I look at it today is kind of like mentorship. Like, I'm really excited that if I figure this out, I can give people jobs, I can pay them what they deserve and I can teach them to be in a workplace, valuable, significant contributors that are respected and that have a career path. And that to me is how I look at the work and the jobs. And as a result, I feel like I'm attracting people that are ready to be developed and they're. Maybe they don't know everything they need to know, but they have a certain excitement and a certain energy that matches the Energy that I'm putting out and that's another thing is like attraction. How do you attract the right people? And it's a mindset. If you're negative and you're this, you're going to attract those people. If you're positive and like this, you're going to attract those people. So I feel like it's like that. I don't want to say that it's like a hiring HR thing. It's very much an energetic thing about also wanting to do this and thrive with it and not have it make you angry or upset every day.
- [26:02]
Keith Newman
Why do I have such a strong the sense that if I come to Ashland or Miami, I'm going to meet a whole bunch of lore types?
- [26:08]
Laura McCann
Well, some of us, you know, we know all of our teams aura colors, so we know their personalities in a vibrational way. And we know who's good at certain things because we know who's cool and calm. We know who's mentally and who's energetic. I'm like a yellow green and like the person who's our VP of operations is yellow green. And we laugh all the time that were this yellow green aura personality. Because what that means is we're like, let's get this done.
- [26:38]
Keith Newman
My aura would set off the security alarm.
- [26:41]
Laura McCann
There's no bad auras, I'm telling you right now. Okay, well, you probably have like a cool and calm aura.
- [26:49]
Keith Newman
I think I'm working on it. What a fun chat. What's next for. For you?
- [26:56]
Laura McCann
Yeah, so we're growing in all kinds of different ways. Obviously the Miami store is a big focus. It's open now, it's starting to thrive. We're doing events which is something we hadn't done before, like festival type stuff.
- [27:10]
Keith Newman
Or what kind of events.
- [27:11]
Laura McCann
Yeah, we're. So the Miami store is pretty big, so we're doing sound healing and yoga classes in the store. We're doing a beautiful event next month for breast cancer awareness where we have a speaker series around aromatherapy and healing. We are doing, you know, events about menopause, mommies, like anything that's around, like certain kinds of things people want to achieve. Chakra healing series. So you name it, we're doing it. And it's a way to build community, share what we're doing, bring people into the space to animate it and drive traffic to the store.
- [27:48]
Keith Newman
So all of the above, keep it going. I love it. Everybody check out Adora Therapy. If you're in Miami beach, you gotta go. And also I. Asheville is just the, the coolest town. I haven't been there since I bought a piece of furniture down there a while back.
- [28:08]
Laura McCann
Asheville's hot too. Come and visit. You couldn't have two places that are more different, so either way we want to see you. Come and visit us.
- [28:16]
Keith Newman
You are such a delight. Thanks for catching up. Thanks for sharing some time on the Look Back. I'll hopefully run into you soon.
- [28:24]
Laura McCann
Sounds good. Keith. Big love.
- [28:27]
Keith Newman
Thanks for listening to the Look Back. We do appreciate your support. Welcome any feedback and would love it if you would subscribe to this podcast and even consider sharing it with some of your friends. For more information and other cool info, check us out@newman mediastudios.com.