Ep. 27: San Diego Sport Innovators Executive Director Bob Rief on Helping One Person and One Company Each Day
In this episode, Darren Reinke chats with Bob Rief, Executive Director, San Diego Sport Innovators. Bob discusses his nonlinear career journey from ski rep to running companies such as Nike Golf, Reef Sandals, and Sanuk Footwear as well as how he helps small companies succeed and why the most important attribute of any company is authenticity.
San Diego Sport Innovators (SDSI) is a non-profit focused on the Sport and Active Lifestyle industries. Working with Executive Chairman and NBA great Bill Walton, their 100 company membership represents the “Southern California Lifestyle” and includes leading sports and technology brands, nutrition and yoga, surf, skate, cycling, golf and retail, as well as some of San Diego’s best service companies. They focus on relevant and actionable C-level content that benefits their member companies. SDSI’s award winning accelerator program features a 20 week mentoring curriculum whose graduates have raised $86 Million and have a 82% success record.
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SHOW NOTES
How an Injury as a Young Kid Led Bob to the Active Lifestyle Space [1:18]
How Bob Developed the Skillset Needed to be an Operational Expert for Merrel [6:40]
The Key Lessons Bob Learned Early On In His Career [11:55]
Why Bob Called Nike to Tell Them Their Golf Shoes Sucked [16:54]
Why Bob Describes His Time Working Directly with Phil Knight as Intimidating [20:06]
How Bob Tackled the Problem of Making Golf Look Like Nike [22:38]
How Bob Navigated Creative Conflict between Himself and Visionaries [27:40]
How Bob Made Sure Creative Tension was Productive, Not Destructive [35:10]
How Bob Helps Young Founders Navigate Doing Well and Doing Good [41:34]
Bob's Advice on How Existing Companies Can Authentically Execute Corporate Social Responsibility [46:53]
The Key Lessons Bob Learned From Larger Companies That He Uses To Help Small Businesses Achieve Success [49:14]
How the Founders of Taylor Guitars Gifted the Company To Their Employees [50:32]
Why Self Education is More Prevalent than Ever [59:01]
SHOW LINKS
SDSI Website: http://www.sdsportinnovators.org/
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For additional leadership tips, be sure to check out Darren's book - The Savage Leader: 13 Principles to Become a Better Leader from the Inside Out.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
San Diego Sport Innovators Executive Director Bob Rief on Helping One Person and One Company Each Day
[00:00:00] Darren Reinke: Welcome to The Savage Leader Podcast, where I interview leaders from all walks of life so that you can walk away with tips to apply to your life and your career. But this isn't your traditional leadership podcast because I believe that leadership tips come from successful entrepreneurs in business executives of.
[00:00:21] Darren Reinke: But they also come from unexpected places like from Navy SEALs, successful professional athletes, sports coaches, musicians, entertainers, and more. So let's dive right in to today's episode. My hope is: You walk away with something tangible that you can apply immediately to your life and your career.
[00:00:42] Darren Reinke: Today's guest on the Savage Leader Podcast is Bob Reif. Bob is the executive director of San Diego sports innovators and a nonprofit business development organization with an accelerator focused on the sport and active lifestyle industry. STSI supports companies in all stages by fostering innovation, providing business mentorship in building communities prior to STSI Bob headed up companies such as Merrill footwear reef.
[00:01:08] Darren Reinke: Synack in Nike golf. Bob, thanks for being on today.
[00:01:13] Bob Rief: Thank you, Darren. Glad to be here.
[00:01:15] Darren Reinke: So take me back. Talk to me about where you grew up in, what inspired you to get into the active lifestyle space? What were your interests, your hobbies, and just, how did that transition happen?
[00:01:25] Bob Rief: Not for a long time. As my dad was in the service, we moved every two or three years, and I think that's had some long term impact on my incredible lack of attention to detail.
[00:01:34] Bob Rief: After about three years seemed to be my life cycle, but we moved all over the US, and we lived back east when I was about 12 years old, and I got involved with a pretty serious. And my dad re transferred out here is able to go over to Balboa Naval hospital. And there, I had an open wound. My leg, the doctor suggested my mom would be good for me to get in the ocean.
[00:01:58] Bob Rief: We live right in Coronado, about a block from the ocean. That was the beginning probably of my long lifetime affair with the ocean. So of course we started surfing. I was 13. I don't know, maybe 10 of us in Coronado at the time were surfing. So, we would be out there, no wetsuits, freezing to death.
[00:02:14] Bob Rief: And had this wound that was getting a salt bath, every, whatever, three, four days, depending upon how active my mom was and watching us go to school, I'd go to the beach. I think that sort of set it in for me. And after that, we continued to move around and just when it was time to go off to college, which is going to be CU for me, My mom and dad were transferred to Japan in those days is a problem.
[00:02:36] Bob Rief: Japan was far away. I arrived at CU in a bus, and they arrived in Japan on a ship. And the consequences were, as bowler had discovered, it's really a country club for rich kids. At least it wasn't those days. I suspect it still is. So, I went to work right away, don't ever had to do to feed myself and so on.
[00:02:57] Bob Rief: And I fell into the ski industry by working in a little ski shop there. And one thing led to another. And after my wife graduated from school, we went back to San Francisco and I just knocked on the door of a local shop and a ski shop and said, Hey, I've been dealing with Bob bid from the ski team and been roomating with a roommate with people like spider Savage, who are my day famous, scares Olympics gears.
[00:03:20] Bob Rief: And I got a job and I found out that there are these things called ski reps and that they sell material to retailers and that in the ski business, they don't work in the summer. So, it was a perfect combination of my natural laziness and my interest in skiing that got me going in the business. I worked for several years as a rep and then as a product line manager and then national sales manager, some of those type of executive jobs, and finally helped a friend get a mural going.
[00:03:49] Bob Rief: And that was the beginning of a change for us because that happened at a time when I was awakened to the demographics in the marketplace, which I really don't have any concept of prior to that. And I found out that I'm not a baby boomer. I'm one year too old, but there are a lot of baby boomer males right behind me.
[00:04:06] Bob Rief: And it occurred to me that maybe that they might like to do the things I'm doing. And since I'm a little bit older, I've been there first. Maybe I can make a business out of it. So, the consequences were John end up at Clark Maddis up at Merrill, and we did a pretty good job of that and got it sold. As Clark still works there to this day, the founder, and it sent me on a trajectory of, in the startup community, usually as the operator.
[00:04:29] Bob Rief: And my, one of my clients was Ralph and Jerry Lauren, actually, Jerry who's the eldest brother. Of course, in that amazing experience called polo. But, Jerry helped us dimensionalize our thinking. We made the first polo sport boots by Merrill for them and got them started. And so, when I, when we sold Merrill, I didn't really have a job.
[00:04:51] Bob Rief: So I started looking for a job. And as it led to being the general manager, president, where we want to call it at Nike golf, and we had some luck there, sign Tiger Woods. It seemed to be a big deal and as remained one ever since, but I'm living in Portland, the rain tough. And I had the chance to go to work for Ely Callaway.
[00:05:10] Bob Rief: And as I came back down south and hooped in Encinitas and not, I don't ever want to leave it again. So, it set off a series of opportunities where, worked with the, for a while and then had the chance to work with, for non-one Sunday. Gary and at reef, and we sold reef and the non-test, my buddy, Jeff Kelly, worked with him at Sunoco, which was sold.
[00:05:32] Bob Rief: And we started a little stand-up paddle company at the very earliest, beginning of stand-up paddling. That was fun, called board works. My partner, Mike Fox, sold that business. And a little bit later, we started a business called OTC shoes, and we sold that to a big Korean company, a really big Korean company.
[00:05:48] Bob Rief: And I've been running STSI ever since. So, that's the 57-year history of the in business.
[00:05:55] Darren Reinke: What a fascinating history and just something extracted from our previous conversation. Just how. Just had the opportunity to align with so many early visionary founders and help create some of that operational stability.
[00:06:08] Darren Reinke: Some of those platforms truly be successful. But talk to me the first one, it seems like that was the Merrill opportunity and how you partner with the early founders to really get that off the ground. What was that like? How did you go about learning? Because your experience was in terms of working around the ski industry and on ski resort, it's been, how do you develop some of those skills to really be that operational expert in that leading that guiding hand for the marrow people?
[00:06:32] Bob Rief: Yeah, no, I think I looked out when I moved up north to Seattle, the first time I went up there to be a product line manager for this little company it's called a and T ski company. Prior to that, I had been a salesman, and we had some products. She knew a Solomon and K2 as an example, we were the first sales selling organization for those two brands.
[00:06:50] Bob Rief: And so I learned about retailing and I knew about selling. I was selling quite a bit of merchandise, selling almost a couple of million dollars in merchandise in those days. It was a pretty big deal. So, I know how to, what to do with the products when I got it. And I was forced to develop concepts for the brands to sell them to my retailers because in those days there wasn't much brand marketing, they're just advertising and probably to the detriment of the brands, reps across America, or developing their own story, their own brand story.
[00:07:18] Bob Rief: And I worked on mine too, to be honest, the next opportunity for me, came to move into the office and to start to help with the buying team. So then I was introduced to the whole necessity of managing margin, understanding forecasting trying to always keep a consumer's eye view to it while knowing that it's filtered through having to sell the ski retailers.
[00:07:40] Bob Rief: So I had a pretty extensive background, but I didn't know it. And we went on in our career path out to Vermont. I worked with a fellow named Hugh Harley and Dick Swan. And we were the first guys to actually start Nautica USA, which is a ski boot. We didn't really start the company. We opened the office in Italy and that went along for a while, but again, it's still, playing along now learning how to import, how to sell, how to market, how to distribute, how to run a warehouse.
[00:08:07] Bob Rief: None of those things were active in my business experience or just, do and learn, do, and learn. And try not to get too much scar tissue along the way, but by the time we're done with the ski business basically our time at rightly military ended in a kind of catastrophic way, the owner of the company was killed, and the ensuing ownership was not very interested in growing the business.
[00:08:30] Bob Rief: So I really had no choice, but to try and find a new alternative. And from my point of view, the ski business was getting very narrow and very wealth oriented, of course, as it remains. And it is very akin to farming. You never know if it's going to snuff, it doesn't snow as this or that. It's very retail.
[00:08:47] Bob Rief: It just seemed like it was a dead end for me. A friend of mine was the principal backer of Merrill. I had no idea what was going on, but he asked me to come up and join the team up there. I think he forgot to tell the team I was coming. So, it wasn't, I wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms, but we managed to get our act together and find positions for each other.
[00:09:08] Bob Rief: And to start to understand that Merrill was a real brand. It was not a label. It wasn't a fantasy, but it was a high-end brand. And that very time, I think we talked about this during the that's when Xcel was just coming into the very limited use, and I'm starting to learn. Columns and how you could use these things and take a three-year or five-year plan by taking three or five columns and get your thoughts down on paper.
[00:09:36] Bob Rief: And we discovered at Merrill that we could add categories within price ranges, and that we could start to appeal to a much larger group. We discovered that there were two really goods read three good retailers at the time who would help us do this, LLB REI in Eastern mountain sports, and that they reach far more consumers, and we could ever reach in our life.
[00:09:56] Bob Rief: I think being that you're, those years, was mailing about 7 million catalogs out. So of course, if we could be in there, it would be a great thing. Yeah, that was the beginning of bringing together all the aspects of managing design development, manufacturing, importation, distribution, selling, and marketing, and all came together.
[00:10:15] Bob Rief: And there were a lot of business lessons, too, for the original founders. Randy Merrill, John Schweitzer and Clark medal. It wasn't a, what you would expect being the founders because in order to keep the company going, they basically D equitized ourselves. And when we're representing the ownership, sold the company, I would say that we really did not benefit in it.
[00:10:37] Bob Rief: I put in, for me, what was a substantial amount of money and the payback I got was exactly equal to what I put into it. And that was three years after the company was sold. So, I can promise you, in those three years there, and I was thinking about my lack of prowess in the investing community and misunderstanding transactions.
[00:10:54] Bob Rief: And I got myself a lot smarter while I was up at Nike. But that's how it started. And I wish that it should have been more financially successful for Clark and John and Randy, and even me than it was, but we made a series of mistakes that young entrepreneurs, or attempted to make, by giving up equity and instead of debt and so on.
[00:11:13] Bob Rief: So I really learned a lot, and it reset.
[00:11:17] Darren Reinke: Yeah, those can be some painful lessons, but hopefully that's been very successful in terms of learning from some of those early lessons. What else have you learned from that experience? Because that sounds like a really important foundational moment of your career and really informed the rest of it, is what were some other key lessons you learned early on?
[00:11:33] Bob Rief: A couple of things. One, what I learned is what is my role? And unfortunately, a super ineffective way to find out what your role is, basically you fail upwardly until you finally figure out that the problem is not out there. It's actually you, what I discovered is, first of all were Clark and John are, I would say.
[00:11:53] Bob Rief: True entrepreneurs and had a unique prison. When they looked at things, their aperture was different than mine. When I looked at, Hey, it's a big market. There's a lot of people out there. Maybe they want a mirror, hiking boots. If we could break the categories down. And three or four categories with five or six products in each category, that'd be a lot better than selling one.
[00:12:11] Bob Rief: But John and Clark were thinking, know, there's a change going on. Young people want to go outdoors. Their footwear should reflect a technical way to get out of doors in the very best product that they were thinking. Branding. I was just thinking operations. I would say it really came to a head for us when we were contacted unbelievably by Ralph and Jerry Lauren to, to come up to Vermont.
[00:12:32] Bob Rief: So Jerry actually came to Vermont. You could imagine, this magnificent person in my mind came up, and he said, we understand that you guys are leaders in the footwear category and outdoor. We want to launch polo. You probably have to ask Clark. Maddis what his recollection is, but mine was total disbelief.
[00:12:49] Bob Rief: I couldn't believe he could find us. I couldn't believe this could be happening, but there, Jerry was sitting right in front of us, and he said to us in particular to Clark or did the design, Hey, tell me, open up your treasure chest and show me your treasures. And Clark is a literal guy. He says, I don't have a treasure chest.
[00:13:09] Bob Rief: Jerry said, let me start over again. What are your dreams? If you could make the ultimate boot, what would it look like? And Clark starts off by saying it'd be a $500, and before he could get any further, Jerry had this kind of, I don't know, theatrical kind of breakdown goes, Clark car park stop.
[00:13:25] Bob Rief: This is the design department. We don't talk money. We don't know about money that's for other people, we're designers. Tell me your design. What would it look like? What would it be? What really gets you going? And you can imagine we all leaned in and had a hell of a learning experience. And we found out right then and there.
[00:13:42] Bob Rief: Jerry already knew something we didn't know. And that is if we really had something, and it could really be something. And when Jerry left, it caused us to huddle up and rethink our roles. And I understood at that point that I'm not the entrepreneur, I'm more of an operator. I'm a thinker kind of, nobody wants to claim that, but at least momentarily, I have some good thoughts.
[00:14:02] Bob Rief: And I was thinking really heavily about the future starting right then and there, then how can we grow this company successfully? We know that we're way too small, and we don't have a lot of money. I started thinking all those types of thoughts. Those are operational thoughts, Clark and John continued along thinking about the best products, true branding stuff.
[00:14:19] Bob Rief: And that lesson came became more evident to me. A little bit later on in my career. My next stop, after we sold the Meryl, was that at Nike golf and there, you're definitely a player in a system. It's hard at Nike to be yourself because you're surrounded by so much talent.
[00:14:38] Bob Rief: This is completely different game, completely different games. That, those lessons taught that I learned at Merrill came back out as we got into smaller businesses, starting with reef. And so on.
[00:14:48] Darren Reinke: Sure. What a powerful lesson in terms of discovery or role, I think a lot about strengths. I think a lot of times people think about, who's the leader.
[00:14:55] Darren Reinke: I think people think I should be, or do I need to be the CEO? Do we need to be the visionary versus the reality, which is, Hey, in your case, it's an incredible operator who could really partner with those visionaries, whether it was the lower ends of the world or the Merrill's is just being that person who could actually take that business to the next level by operationalizing them
[00:15:13] Bob Rief: later on.
[00:15:13] Bob Rief: That was my thought, that often puts you in conflict with their visionary. I remember Jeff Kelly and I had Snoke we're working on a project. Jeff was frustrated with the, the process and founders often are, it's not hard to make things happen immediately. And Jeff said, I don't know what you guys are doing so well, Jeff, we're trying to make your dream come true.
[00:15:32] Bob Rief: He goes, you're not doing a very good job. There's always that issue there. But if you want to keep it in story context, when I left Merrill had a little chip on my shoulder about, what happened, we made this investment in time and money, and basically other people greatly benefited from all of our efforts.
[00:15:48] Bob Rief: And John went on to other things, Clark stayed on with the company as a designer, and he did quite well over he's still there. And, we're both hope he did well, but not for me. And so, when I got the Nike, it was a different story and it was completely accidental how I got there.
[00:16:01] Bob Rief: It was two parallel paths. I had shared. Footwear concept for new golf shoe with a friend of mine up in Canada and was expecting, I believe I told you this, I was expecting a call back from him. And I sent him my business plan. I don't know if you've been in this position, but I sent it to him on day one.
[00:16:18] Bob Rief: And on day two, I started sitting by the telephone, and after about 10 days, I was pissed off that I didn't get any call back from a really good friend of mine who was some advice simultaneously. I had bought some golf shoes to test, and one of them was a pair of Nike's in a plane, some guys from them in the golf industry.
[00:16:34] Bob Rief: And my shoes were killing me. I was limping around, and I didn't know if I was gonna make it 18 holes. And we were calling them the air bucket of blood, dreaming up all these nasty snarky names, probably a few cocktails as well. And finally, the Tom Brown whose publisher of Golf Digest in those days said, why don't you just call Nike and tell him the shoes suck.
[00:16:54] Bob Rief: That seems a little presumptuous, but I did. And they gave me a contact. I called him to talk to Tom Clark. The CEO of those days. And I think he's still running new business development for Nike, but anyhow, Tom came to New York, and we were chatting, laughing about the golf industry. And I asked Tama and I said, do you know anything about the golf industry said, no, I don't play golf?
[00:17:17] Bob Rief: And I don't think I will. It's the intimation does it, it's not really a sport. And he asked me if I've ever been in the business. I know I'm a, like a medium, low handicap golfer. I'd never been in the golf industry. I've been making shoes and apparel for a long time, but that's what I do instead.
[00:17:33] Bob Rief: Tom, do you know about the golf industry? He said, no. He said the only thing I know is we have a job and there's an awful lot of people from the golf industry trying to get it. And I don't know, in a moment of clarity, I told Thomas, I said you should be aware, that it has some legacy attributes that are not that great, like racism, sexism and so on, if you hire somebody from the industry, you might be importing those attributes.
[00:17:55] Bob Rief: And it seems like, to me, it'd be better to export Nike attributes into golf and make golf look like Nike. And he said, Bobby, that's a pretty good answer. Oddly enough, but a month later, I'm up in that Nike campus, parking my car out there at 5,000 other cars and scratching my head and running what the hell happened.
[00:18:13] Bob Rief: But once we got there, it was quite an amazing experience. And I had the pleasure of working more directly with filled, and probably I should have, I don't know why, I guess I should tell you the way I got there then was I talked to Tom about this job when my friend up in Canada had just sold his company to Nike.
[00:18:32] Bob Rief: That's why he didn't call me back. And he called me back and said, Hey, Bobby said just sold my company and I go that's great peers. You should be proud. It's all great. That's all about you. How about me? And he said at the end of the process. He said, Phil said that takes care of hockey. Now let's get after golf.
[00:18:49] Bob Rief: And he said, I had your business plan. I gave it to Phil, said, comment variation. Two separate things happen at the same time, resulted moving up to Nike. And then it was quite a ride from there.
[00:19:00] Darren Reinke: Yeah. What was that like? What was Nike golf like in the early days? And then what was it like working next to a, a true business luminary such as Phil Knight?
[00:19:08] Bob Rief: It was intimidating, and they're not shy people. So, Tom came over to my office before I got there and wrote on my Blackboard. And by the way, my office was next to risk management on the campus. I thought that was intentional, but he wrote on the wall, three things. I want you to fix shoes.
[00:19:26] Bob Rief: So I arrived to that environment a little bit later. I got a call from Phil. A welcoming call that I thought was a put on from some of my friends. So, I know who is this, and it's this Phil Knight item. Bullshit. I don't believe it, it was inexperienced. Nike is a monster, really efficiently run each employer.
[00:19:44] Bob Rief: There is a branding specialist. If you're a Nike employee, and you're not a brand champion, you won't be there long. I can tell you that. So, everybody understands the brand name very clearly, but it also works in a series of kind of vertical businesses that are organized around design development, manufacturing, and so on.
[00:20:01] Bob Rief: And you reach in to get the services, the bigger your enterprise inside Nike, the more resources you get or the higher quality resources you would get. So were at Nike. First of all, we didn't really qualify in most employees minds even be there. So, the business plan for Nike golf was to make Nike golf part of.
[00:20:21] Bob Rief: That's challenged right away. Because the supposition was for old white guys riding around in carts, smoking cigars and drinking. That's the golf's unfortunate image inside Nike. So, that was the first thing. The second, though, was to try and make golf look like Nike. That was the white lines that we were operating with all along.
[00:20:40] Bob Rief: And I had to say, I have to say I got some really good people that were assigned by Nike to me, keep me on the road. And they did a good job. And we ended up as with this idea of a global foursome that included ultimately tiger.
[00:20:53] Darren Reinke: I'd love to hear about that, but it's such a fascinating thing.
[00:20:55] Darren Reinke: You talked about exporting Nike into golf or making golf look more like Nike. It seems like it's so many other times it's in the action sports space, then harnessing the brand, the imagery from a sport, especially surfing's obviously the most noteworthy of that, but it's so interesting to think that Nike.
[00:21:13] Darren Reinke: Such a brand presence that they could actually influence the way golf was to proceed. Talk to me about that journey and how you guys thought about doing that. Cause that's a huge transition.
[00:21:22] Bob Rief: It was a really interesting thing. I was certainly not up to that task. Believe me, the outcome is far greater than me.
[00:21:28] Bob Rief: Yeah, that's for sure. But we did some research. We found out that the golf industry thought we couldn't be anything, that we wouldn't amount to a hill of beans that were nothing. And we were just the 800 pound gorilla with no knowledge. That was one thing. And then we had a really good sports marketing guy in our group.
[00:21:45] Bob Rief: His name is Joel Moses and Joe came from the really inside golf and Joe felt that four golfers was a big enough team that you don't need. Like now, they have everybody. I would still. To my mind, that's still not a great solution. I wouldn't do that yet. But at any rate, I don't know if it was Joe or the market guys suggest let's just get a team, one from each continent more or less and call it the global foursome and see what we can do.
[00:22:09] Bob Rief: And so the idea at first was simply to prove that we could be part of golf. And so, the first guy we harvest Nick price, one of the nicest people in golf ever, and an incredible talent, that's for sure. So, that softened the edge for Nike. And we ran a series of ads that said, Hey, we're playing golf. And it was pictures of guys standing in line since four o'clock in the morning, Beth page, to play public golf.
[00:22:30] Bob Rief: We felt, we proved to the golf industry that women still golf, maybe better than they did. So, that was phase one. It went quite well. We had Michael Campbell, a Maori indigenous person from down New Zealand and Alex, Chico's a very interesting check, as you could guess, who swam across the river?
[00:22:47] Bob Rief: In those days, the west Jeremy started playing golf swings. Pro golf. So, we had three elements and Peter Jacobson was our sort of PGA advisor. So, we had a foursome, but it was clicking. It was working. And then we are aware of the amateur world. And if you were following amateur golf, he could not avoid tiger.
[00:23:03] Bob Rief: He was at Stanford and lo and behold, the U S am was being played up in Portland at our home course where we were members. I don't know. I thought it was gonna be an opportunity. So, I basically hired the portion of the clubhouse, where the bar was a nice meeting area, and we had guests out. And on the qualifier day, I got a call from Phil about noon.
[00:23:25] Bob Rief: He said, Hey, Bob, do you think we could get tickets and go over to the tournament? Pretty sure we could. So, we went over and this was the playoff where they had six players and only four. It was, there was a sudden death playoff hole by home, and we watched it was excited. And then finally, quite a few holes cause the guys are so nervous, and finally, they got down to four the next day.
[00:23:45] Bob Rief: It was the first day of the tournament. And Phil again called it at 12 and said, do you think we could go over? And we, so we went over, and I'm new to this whole type of world. So, I didn't know Phil could actually talk to the tiger, probably not, but he could talk to Butch Harmon who was his coach and Phil, as an ex coach, the two of them fell into and pretty soon they hit it off.
[00:24:03] Bob Rief: And the next day we came again, and we followed tiger very closely. And then finally on Sunday they play 18 in the morning, 18 in the afternoon, and feel really wanting to watch tiger. We got them a little like an uniforms, coursework or uniform. So, Phil could watch, and he'd never had any interface with tiger, but he watched him and that night tiger won on the 36 hole.
[00:24:26] Bob Rief: It was quite a big celebration and. A couple of days later, if he'll call me up in the office, and he said, look, tigers at Stanford. And if he's going to stay at Stanford, let's hope he gets his PhD. Because he's one hell of a golfer, and he's going to, he could really impact the industry. Instead of on the other hand, if he's not going to get his PhD at Stanford, let's see if we can sign them in the next few weeks.
[00:24:45] Bob Rief: If he's interested in that, that started the wheels going at Nike, they have a team that does this. It's not me. It wasn't Joe or rod Tolman. It was a team of guys. They got working with tiger and solved all the problems and brought them on board. And lots of people don't know, but the creative director of widening Kennedy is a one handicapper, which is a really good golfer.
[00:25:04] Bob Rief: He was very excited to see tiger coming onto the team. And so, they led that collaboration, made all those fantastic ads. I'm sure you remember that. I am tired of what's ads with all the little kids and so on, and it was a fantastic experience, and it just clicked and got a life of its own. And several years later, a couple of years back again on Phil's birthday, I have the chance to talk to him.
[00:25:25] Bob Rief: I think it was his birthday, not so much about that. This isn't, that's, but that now that golf is for everybody plain and simple and not only in the US, all around the world. And I think we can claim a big role in that. So, I'm proud of that.
[00:25:39] Darren Reinke: Really neat in terms of just injecting some of those values and into golf, which was obviously not as much of a forward-looking progressive sport at that time.
[00:25:47] Bob Rief: Now they're doing quite a good job now.
[00:25:50] Darren Reinke: Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to fast-forward and just this idea of a visionary and an operator, and just the idea of it coming into some, hopefully some creative conflict in a positive sense, but also probably some challenges is, do you mind just sharing an example of this, how those forces come together, whether it was at reefer at Synack in terms of how you partnered with a visionary founder to really bring that business to life and operationalize it?
[00:26:13] Bob Rief: No, it there's a little bit different. If you start with, just to give you an idea that the difference between a visionary and somebody like me. So, Phil is watched tiger play golf for three days. And he told me at one point maybe than suing a couple of days, I can't remember. He said, Bobby knows that Tiger Woods is going to be the first billion dollar athletes, single athlete in the history of sports.
[00:26:36] Bob Rief: And that really I've been involved in this for six months. It never occurred to me. So, Phil saw right away that he saw that the market was right, that it deserved to be disrupted by values and that he was willing to put the, a portion of the wealth that Nike had into this mission to make golf open and available to everyone.
[00:26:59] Bob Rief: Nevermind all this racist, sexist, elitist stuff, just plain and simple bulldozer weigh in with our values, not with our pocketbook, not by trying to hire everybody on the tour, but by being focused. So, that was a revelation for me. And in, in my career, going down the path, with the, when we got to.
[00:27:16] Bob Rief: Chance to work with either Callaway next. Here's another complete, amazing visionary. As he invented the big head and club head, big berth as he called it. And it was completely rejected by the professional golfers, whether they were teachers or pro players, and it pissed him off. And he's really an amazing person, but, really just decided, so you have the traditional pyramid, right?
[00:27:38] Bob Rief: You got the pro golfer at the top. And as you go down the typical pyramid, you get down to the guy who can only play once a month. He's got used clubs, right? And so, that's the spectrum of use you. His genius was, he said, listen, our clubs make golf, more fun for more people. And we don't mind if pros use them too.
[00:27:58] Bob Rief: So he took the pyramid of influence and turned it upside down and completely as wrecked the golf industry with innovation and. And it's its obviously it's prospered and continued along. And the current management and Callaway has embraced that idea. So, it was really fantastic to see his vision.
[00:28:15] Bob Rief: His vision is we can make golf a lot more fun for a lot more people. Why don't we do that? And his enemy was the U S GA traditional thinking pros. And he didn't care about that. Just head down, this is what we're going to do. We did it. It was pretty cool. But the next step for me was working with Fernando and Santee down at reef.
[00:28:31] Bob Rief: And reef was built on the backs of these two genius brothers. Fantastic brothers, but what I would say with poor infrastructure, really great CFO, and then chaos below organizationally. So, the mission that reef was to help Fernando and Santiago relieve themselves with the day-to-day duties, which by the way, they were recovering over, like both brothers wanted to do design, both want to do marketing.
[00:28:54] Bob Rief: Nobody wanted to do finance, everybody, that type of thing. So, we just organize that. That was different than any challenge I had. It was just simply. Thank through when our organization charges based on function, not on friendship and, and prove to the brothers, to the owners that this could work.
[00:29:10] Bob Rief: And then the business accelerated very quickly when we got an organized, and it became a candidate for a sale and Fernando and Santiago did very well with it. It was a big sale, big transaction, and the business was super successful. So, everybody happy there except for me because I didn't have a job because we sold the company.
[00:29:26] Bob Rief: So I ran into Jeff Kelly, and it really started the next element in my life because Jeff is a mad inventor. Everything he sees around him can be done better if he just had time for. And I'm telling you virtually, that's how his brain operates. So, he has many ideas a little bit later in our friendship, we went to the Hong Kong toy.
[00:29:51] Bob Rief: Fair was a tragic mistake on my part because we took him into the, I accompanied him to the toy fair. I don't think in the day, I don't think we got more than a hundred yards because there were vendors on each side and everyone that Jeff looked at was awesome. And it's set off as bells, it was really cool.
[00:30:07] Bob Rief: So Jeff was really a super creative guy in any, he did a really wise thing. He asked himself, said, what am I good at? What am I not good at? How can I cover my weaknesses? And so, he decided that, he's really the design guy and design and developer, but he doesn't want to manufacture. He likes to market.
[00:30:25] Bob Rief: He doesn't want to sell all those, a good salesman. So, he decided that he would partner up with a lawyer to make sure he had all that type of thinking squared away and some, a lineal brain next to an erratic one, which was dance. And the two of them started Synack instead of dealing with the challenges of manufacturing distribution, they hired a distributor and gave him a long time long-term contract to handle that stuff.
[00:30:50] Bob Rief: I didn't really understand this. When I met Jeffrey surfing one morning, he said, what are you doing? I said, I've always sold reef. I'm not doing anything. He said you should come to work with us. I thought that's great. Because I thought. But I came to find out that us was the distributor of CNC traders, two really great guys that ran it.
[00:31:05] Bob Rief: So then the job became interesting a challenge because we have the creativity on Jeff on one side, and then you have the distributors on the other side, and distributors have to fund all this stuff that the pay for the research you have to pay for all the investigations we did. And they got to reap the benefits of the success.
[00:31:21] Bob Rief: And they also got to pay for the mistakes we made. So, there's a lot of dynamics going on there, but we were able to bring Jeff's ideas together. We started off on the sandal project. There were a lot of sandals that just came from reef and was easy for me to help Jeff decide what to do to create a sandal line that was easy.
[00:31:38] Bob Rief: And we actually created that those first sandal lines out of a box of samples that Jeff's team had in the office. We didn't have to do any research, go to China, do anything. Jeff had made so many samples, and they'd been rejected for one reason or the other, that when we got our act together and put them together and priced them correctly required.
[00:31:55] Bob Rief: But meanwhile, Jeff was thinking about this, the famous sidewalk surfer, which is the sandaled shoe. Nobody ever done that. If you walk into a three-point sandal it's very liberating compared to a shoe, but you're always holding on with your toes. I don't know if you've noticed that during your walk on, you launch your toes a little bit.
[00:32:11] Bob Rief: Jeff's idea was what if he didn't have to hold on with your toes, but everything else felt like a sandal. So, he invented this cool little way of putting a deconstructed shoe on a sandal bottom. I think, the results were consequential. It was a fantastic idea, and we brought it together. And at that point in my life, I was able to really oversee design development, manufacturing, sales, importation, and working with CNC to purchase and to their credit, they put up money right, and left to help us succeed.
[00:32:39] Bob Rief: And it really worked. And the business was sold for very, for big. They went away happy, but Jeff is truly a visionary. It's interesting. Now in, you should talk to Jeff he's local, the sale of Synack was not Jeff's finished line. It was his start line now he's busy in a million things, and I'm telling you every single day, see something he can do and fix and make better.
[00:32:58] Bob Rief: It's really, he's a fantastic person. Heifer friend.
[00:33:02] Darren Reinke: Yeah. And it was just a fantastic success story too, on a unique guy. So, talk to me about that partnership in terms of whether it was working with him or the two brothers at reef, and how did that creative tension, how do you manage that? How do you make sure that it was productive and not destructive?
[00:33:17] Bob Rief: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say it's always, probably 51% destructive here at STSI now we've started helping jumpstart here 130 companies at STSI in our accelerator. So, my vision backwards, first of all, you have to go through the filter of. Realizing that decisions that I was involved with them circumstances, or, when you viewed through your ego, it's, you tend to be apologetic for yourself, right?
[00:33:45] Bob Rief: But nonetheless, at some point you have to overcome this thing. It's called founder itis, not all founders have it, but many do. And it's the inability of the founder to really get out of the way and to quit preventing the brand from reaching its logical size because you're seeking perfection, or you don't like this or that, or you can't let go of the design.
[00:34:06] Bob Rief: That's one of the hardest things, Darren, it's a tough game. And some days it's positive, some days, like when Jeff said you're not doing your job to make my dream come true. It's crushing because you're operating 25 salesmen and who knows two factories and all this stuff in a bunch of countries internationally, you're doing your best, but still, most entrepreneurs are very unforgiving.
[00:34:27] Bob Rief: So it's a tough task. And that's why I think a lot of people like me tend to stay in these jobs for three or four years and move on because you can only carry the ball forward so far. It's a rare guy who is a founder. Who's super collaborative about these types of operational issues? Bear in mind, if you're working with a really, truly creative people, they're sharing their dream for their brand.
[00:34:49] Bob Rief: With you, everything you estimate you can do is often viewed by a founder as a promise. Think about it. You're going to break some promises as you go to break some hearts too. So, it's been tough. And after really working with Sunoco, I sorta decided I didn't want to be in that position any longer.
[00:35:08] Bob Rief: And we, this little experimental company, sold quite a few stand up boards initially and partnered up with some Hawaiian guys. And just when a standup, Palin was just starting to be known. We bought a little company. We, Mike Fox, bought a little company and brought me in as a partner, and we did the same thing.
[00:35:27] Bob Rief: Mike had a vision, he provided the money. We tried to make it happen. And we really accelerated the cell of a standard boards around juice everywhere. Very significant. But at the end of the day, it was an equal partnership. And, Mike lived in park city. I lived here, the business here, he was there, we got into those kind of conversations were very unfortunate about who's doing what, and it was just time for me to go.
[00:35:50] Bob Rief: I networked up with a friend who was just starting a little company called OTZ shoes. And Darren, that was a different situation because it's right in the wheelhouse. What we know how to do the designer, the original designer and honor super visionary guy, super easy to work with. And we got that company up and rolling in three years and had an unexpectedly high offer for it, such a good offer that there was really no choice, but.
[00:36:15] Bob Rief: And so we sold it and I call up the guys who are in charge of San Diego sport innovators and said, I have a candidate. And my friend John Sarkeesian said, is that you, I couldn't, no, it's not me. It's a friend would be great for STSI said, you should do it. It's just a part-time job. You make a few bucks, and it'll be fun for you.
[00:36:36] Bob Rief: So I thought should I have had all this experience? I should try it. I think he deceived me. I think what he said was, in reality, it's at least a full-time job with part-time pay. So for the last six years, as we've been working hard at what we do here at STSI, which is basically we formed a local community where there wasn't one of people who are in the lifestyle industry in San Diego.
[00:36:59] Bob Rief: It turned out to be something very significant. Bill Walton joined us 11 years ago. Everybody knows big bill. Not everybody knows he's a dedicated site. He had a vision for San Diego that we could be the cycling capital of the United States. Why wouldn't we be? We have an ocean and, all of us, a great ground.
[00:37:17] Bob Rief: And so when built joined STSI dimensionalize the whole program, and now our membership is from Sony to gosh, I don't do the smallest little bookkeeping company. There are 130 companies. We've quantified our industry. We're about $5 billion industry in San Diego lifestyle. If you can believe it's here in the county, we represent about 12, 1200 businesses.
[00:37:38] Bob Rief: We meet once a quarter. I don't know if anybody listens to this and interested in knowing more than go to our website. This is not designed to be an ad, but it's a really fun community. And it's amazing how collaborative it is and how helpful it is. So, what we do with our membership funds, among the things we do, is we help these companies do well.
[00:37:56] Bob Rief: Of course, that's the primary interest of a business development organization, but we also help them. And we support lucky duck foundation. We support all kinds of good initiatives around town. And the best thing that we do is we conduct this accelerator for small companies, and it's a 20-week program.
[00:38:14] Bob Rief: Each company, we run about 10, a cohort. So two cohorts, a year, 10 companies, each one of those companies gets four experts in different domains to help them succeed. So over the history of these graduates, there have been 130 graduates. They are 85% successful, which is a big number. They're 51% technology support technology based.
[00:38:39] Bob Rief: A large percentage of them are in the foodstuff, food wares category also, especially with the advent of good eating. And what's really interesting is that 51% of the founders are female. So, those are really amazing metrics. All the last one we've raised helped them raise about $90 million.
[00:38:57] Bob Rief: So this tiny little acorn, of a business development organization, has blossomed into something that's really exciting. And I feel so lucky to be a part of it.
[00:39:06] Darren Reinke: You mentioned something really interesting is that do well and do good. How do you help founders in these early-stage companies that manage those?
[00:39:13] Darren Reinke: What are often two very competing interests?
[00:39:18] Bob Rief: Yeah, it's really hard, putting young companies through a business accelerator is no, no different, in some respect than, say for instance, working with Jeff Kelly, you have a young person with a vision and your job in this case is to be a mentor and help bring that vision to life.
[00:39:31] Bob Rief: The difference is the way young people do business has changed substantially. And so now I'm not too sure who's guiding, who's learning and who's teaching at any one moment, I think is up in the air. There are a lot of the experiences that old people like I have had in terms of operations and so on is not so relevant any longer, Darren.
[00:39:49] Bob Rief: Yeah. Now with the internet, you can quickly form a company. You can go to Alibaba, get your products made. You can distribute them and you can find yourself. And several of these companies, many of these companies, find themselves with a million or two in sales, but no infrastructure. So, what do we do?
[00:40:06] Bob Rief: That's been where we're able to come in and help them get organized and just do well. But many of them are also cause-based and give, 1% of their revenues to something they believe in, and they bring that forward, right from the beginning for the older companies. It's a different game.
[00:40:24] Bob Rief: If you have a lot of revenue, I'll give you an example. We have an upcoming board meeting. You're pretty soon the end of the month, the beautiful Layla Maria, here in the Cadia. And we're going to focus in on homelessness in San Diego, and we've invited the founder of lucky duck foundation. It was a gentleman who's provided those three big tents down on that.
[00:40:44] Bob Rief: Waterfront and funded them with two of his partners themselves, come in to tell us how our group can help them. They are housing 500 people a night, they're approaching their million free meal for these people. It's really a fantastic thing. Last year we donated, I think 125, all weather jackets that actually convert into a sleeping bag.
[00:41:08] Bob Rief: So it's a small thing, but it's something that we can do. And it's a reminder that to everybody in an organization to speak, that you can do better. Now,
[00:41:15] Darren Reinke: there's so much good to be done in the world. That's fantastic that you're doing that through STSI, but also in terms of your companies, in terms of they're founded on the premise of not just doing well and not just about shareholders and profits, but really thinking about doing what doing good for the world.
[00:41:30] Bob Rief: Yeah. It's a very necessary component of young companies are completely dedicated to all the elements of what it takes, to be environmentally.
[00:41:39] Darren Reinke: Talk to me about that a little bit, in terms of about how you help companies to develop that as part of their offering, if you will, in terms of to the marketplace and how they make it part of their brand, how they make it part of their employee value proposition, how do you help companies become more focused on doing good?
[00:41:56] Darren Reinke: Not just doing well?
[00:41:58] Bob Rief: I think, again, it depends on whether you're in the startup community or dealing with large companies, the larger companies often offload this to HR as a way to get away from it. But the brands, if you look Patagonia would be the champion, right? You look at Patagonia.
[00:42:13] Bob Rief: This is in the fabric of the brand is not something you think about something you do, of course is something you do. And you put your mouth where your money is. Other companies are a little harder to get to the table, but if you look at locally, some successful companies, lucky duck, challenged athlete foundation, Charity, as opposed to we're a business development organization.
[00:42:33] Bob Rief: We tell people if you have money to give to charity, please give it to lucky duck or the challenge athlete. We're not a charity, we're trying to help our people make money. I think it's constantly exposing CEOs and HR directors to the opportunity to be play a bigger role in the community in San Diego.
[00:42:51] Bob Rief: So one of the things that's happened for us, Darren, over this timeframe is that because of bill, our exposure inside the San Diego economy is much greater than you would expect for a three-person company. Like we have, we are able to participate in little things like, quantifies in the size of our industry, which gives us a better chance.
[00:43:11] Bob Rief: For instance, our component of the industry is bigger than the famous San Diego zoo. So, we're not small any longer. We have some muscle and weight, and we just have to continue. Bring people back to places like the lucky duck foundation or the Padres have a pedal for the cause. So, there are all kinds of really good philanthropic opportunities.
[00:43:29] Bob Rief: And for the larger companies that have this type of money, it's a question of just making sure that they know that there's an opportunity to participate in younger companies. It's a different thing. We're making sausages. You don't want to know what's in there, but basically if you imagine a funnel where we're putting marketing, talk in the funnel and what's coming out on the other end is a business plan and finance talk so that these young companies can present themselves to an investor or to anybody else in five minutes and tell them what they're up to.
[00:43:57] Bob Rief: And if they have a need, if they haven't asked what the ask is, but you'll find fundamental. And all of those companies, some sense of environmental racism, that's just simply baked into it. And it's not something they bring forward in the big.
[00:44:12] Darren Reinke: What would be your advice to other companies, more legacy organizations, who have not tapped into that?
[00:44:17] Darren Reinke: I know everyone, it's a big thing, right? Corporate social responsibility, but how can companies become not just aware of actually how you can actually execute on it, but doing so in an authentic way?
[00:44:28] Bob Rief: That's a trick. I'll give you a good example. Qualcomm does a really good thing. And the foundation, they have a process where you can compete for an investment in your, not for profit.
[00:44:38] Bob Rief: And you go down, and you pitch it, but you pitch it to their employees and their plan plays a grade. You start off wanting to pitch the Qualcomm, but through an employee, usually an employee, who's a volunteer on your board. And if the employee feels into you're worthy, then they present you to call common Qualcomm, select 10 candidates, and you go down, and you pitch yourself.
[00:44:58] Bob Rief: The employees vote on you. I think it is a question of authenticity of that point and how believable you are. So, that's a good thing to do that, so it's a great thing. Somebody big, like tailor made or Calloway, could easily do the same thing with their teams so that you're getting engagement from your employees that makes it much more meaningful.
[00:45:15] Bob Rief: And there are so many things, Darren, in our world here that just think about the challenges that poor young kids might have down close to the border where they don't have school, and they don't have internet. They don't have a computer. How they supposed to get educated. There are so many opportunities here in San Diego to do good that if anybody who listens to this and doesn't have an idea how they can help, they can certainly call me.
[00:45:36] Bob Rief: I'd be happy to turn them loose on the many things we try to do to help.
[00:45:42] Darren Reinke: That's fantastic. I always thought, we could solve many of the world's ills if everybody volunteered, I don't know, four hours a week in terms of giving back and so many problems. Eminently solvable. If we actually just put some effort, intention to it.
[00:45:55] Bob Rief: Yeah. It starts at home. Doesn't it. Then that's one of the reasons I have grown into this job because my personal mission is to help one company or one person each day. And if you think about the long corporate career, all of us have had and all the unfortunate things that happened, I hope I can hold on to this job for about 20 years, so I can get the karma account squared away, but it's its a pleasure to open the door here in the morning and a pleasure to go home at night.
[00:46:20] Bob Rief: It's a really great thing.
[00:46:23] Darren Reinke: What are some of the lessons that you gain, and you talked about being a corporate refugee and climbing back down the ladder. What are some of the lessons that you've learned from the hard knocks of the corporate world of the Nike's of the world that you've brought back to help some of these earlier stage smaller companies be successful?
[00:46:38] Darren Reinke: I think
[00:46:38] Bob Rief: the first thing that I learned is be honest with yourself about who you are. The second thing is networking counts. That circle of friends probably holds a path to yours. Somehow. Mike, I said, look at my crazy life. I happen to know the Merrill guys happened to meet Ralph and Jerry Lauren, unbelievable happened to work for Phil.
[00:46:59] Bob Rief: These are all consequences of networks and not getting hired off a resume. The third thing is I wish I had gotten at least through accounting and my limited attempt at a higher education because the one place where you can't really finesse things with your good looks, class chairman intelligence is finance.
[00:47:18] Bob Rief: No amount of charm is going to cover for your ignorance and finance. And I point back to Clark John and my experience back in the day at Merrill, where we managed to lewd making any money off of the transaction sale of Merrill, very unfortunate. It would never happen again. And I'll have to say, Darren, I won't mention any names, but the same sort of situation has popped up in my ensuing business life and was really nice to be able to headed off in the past and take care of the implant.
[00:47:43] Bob Rief: The best ever example of employee wealth. Management's right here in the county with Taylor guitars, where the employees were woke up this year on the 5th of January to discover that the owners had basically given the company to them, really a fantastic story of an employee stock option program that really worked Aesop program.
[00:48:02] Darren Reinke: That's fantastic. Yeah. Tell me more about that. I hadn't heard about that.
[00:48:04] Bob Rief: It's hard to explain, but the bottom line is that the two founders, Taylor guitars value their employees. They know that the reason Taylor's successful is all the artisans that they have around the world. And by the way, they are all around the world.
[00:48:17] Bob Rief: So it's a com near retirement, semi-retirement for the two founders. And they decided that rather than sell the company to the VC firm or do something like other people might do, they decided they would gift it back to the employees. So, their CFO, Barbara White, did a fantastic job, got some great tax counsel, and they put a package together that basically.
[00:48:38] Bob Rief: Transfer the ownership of Taylor guitars to the employees around the world. And what I found really interesting is that if your job was duplicated in another country, let's say for instance, in Mexico, where they have a fabulous guitar factory, your compensation is based on your job definition, not your location.
[00:48:56] Bob Rief: So if you're in Mexico and you got this allocation of stock basically gifted to you as a reward for your employment, it has a bigger impact than it might in the United States. It might be transgenerational oh, wealth, for instance. So, it's really a fantastic thing. And, Darren, this is something super overlooked in the surf industry.
[00:49:13] Bob Rief: And everybody here in said, almost everybody here in San Diego is that there's an obligation, especially in a fast-growing company to, to share the wealth with the employees. That's the best retention strategy. Assuming everything else is the same in our businesses. And they often are, we know our brands, right?
[00:49:29] Bob Rief: We know a lot of the players in the brands, and we've grown up with a lot. But the difference between company and B might be how they approach the financial wealth of their employees. And it's a little soap box I like to get on all the time that if you want to keep your employees over a lifetime, we'll treat them correctly.
[00:49:45] Bob Rief: So at the end of a lifetime, that they have enough money to retire. Otherwise, we're just in the squirrel cage and that's, that's fine slowly but surely decided I don't like corporate life. There I was surrounded by people much smarter than me. I didn't feel like the victim, but I felt like I fooled myself over and over again.
[00:50:02] Bob Rief: And so it was fun to get back down to grassroots and help young people start businesses. And, the advice that I have for young companies is pay attention, to your finances, raise money through debt. If you can, don't take on partnerships, they sell them, work off, work out. You can always pay off a loan, but you can never get rid of a partner.
[00:50:20] Bob Rief: So it's that type of stuff that I try and pass onto them with all the wisdom I can at the same time, observing how. And the multichannel market, how to sell in a global market, how to understand that the FedEx and ups are more important to distribution than your own capabilities and so on.
[00:50:35] Bob Rief: So there's a lot going on, a lot of mutual learning happening at the same time.
[00:50:39] Darren Reinke: Yeah. A lot of complexity. I love that, though. In terms of the mutual learning, we always have things to learn from, not just because we're the leader or the head of an organization or a head of a team where there's so much that we can learn from the people on our teams.
[00:50:50] Bob Rief: Yes. If you look at a different organization charts, how they're presented around the world, in America, you have the typical hierarchy, one like the command and control, right? This is alpha, the top followed by beta all the way down to whatever the Z at the end. But you know what, in the w for young companies, that really doesn't work.
[00:51:12] Bob Rief: And most of the young companies now are really focused in on the consumer. And as I told you, once Darren, and one of our talks that, in my day, when you produce products, you actually. With the retailer or retail channel that you had in mind, you had certain price parameters, that Mr. A can only sell in his store.
[00:51:31] Bob Rief: He can't sell above 50 bucks. So, you have to design product for him. So, he can sell successfully these young companies because of the direct to consumer models. Now they're designing products for the end consumer. They're not designing products or services to be necessarily retail, if you will. So, there's a lot of learning that goes on with that.
[00:51:51] Bob Rief: You can imagine you are now it's really understanding deep understanding the end consumer is not the retailer. It's actually the consumer. And so, it's a big change in attitude. And when you see it work at scale, it's really amazing. I give you a VRE and clothing company, local one super successful.
[00:52:09] Bob Rief: Built on initially on a direct to consumer model with the fabrics of a beautiful hand, that the minute you touch him, that's all you want to own for them, for the foreseeable future. It's worked fantastically well, and same thing with sun bum, the founder of sun balm somehow has that mother's intuition about skincare and an attitude that Hey, you don't have to use sun bum to protect your child's skin or your skin, but make sure you use somebody.
[00:52:36] Bob Rief: And that changes the message from, Hey, buy my stuff. I want to make money to, Hey, be a concerned citizen, and make sure that you're taking care of your family or yourself first. And by the way, we sell products that can help. We hope you choose us. That's a different, completely different attitude.
[00:52:49] Bob Rief: Karen, I think very contemporary point of view from those two companies not to learn.
[00:52:54] Darren Reinke: Yeah, enabled by that direct to consumer model where you can truly focus on your buyer. And it's interesting how a new business model is really enabled by technology, but also it's enabling a greater sense of customer centricity, like true customer centricity.
[00:53:08] Bob Rief: True deep understanding consumer products is super important right now. You cannot succeed with it. And I'm also happy. I think one of the consequences of that is that this labeling that we see so often in industry, which has copycat business, I believe is beginning to disappear. It's much harder now to sell a label.
[00:53:30] Bob Rief: And the only way you can sell the labels is off price. So, it's a self identifier. So, I believe branding is on the rise and that authenticity is super important.
[00:53:40] Darren Reinke: That's interesting that almost runs Canada. What probably conventional wisdom in terms of copycatting going away because of the rise of the brand, the importance of branding and all, that's a fascinating point.
[00:53:51] Bob Rief: I'm not sure it's true, but I think the consumers are getting more tribal and are more careful about the brands that they select. We've talked about this, but the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. And if you're running a brand that the consumers in different to you are a label, a brand elicits an emotional response from the consumer, good or bad.
[00:54:17] Bob Rief: But the worst thing is nothing. And so, I think today that the consumer engagement super important, and it relates back to the first point that, you have to be designing your products and service with a deep understanding of the end user, plain and simple. And if you do that, you're automatically authentic in the, you can take missteps from there.
[00:54:38] Bob Rief: You can do wrong things easily, and you can jeopardize that relationship with the consumer. But my experience with the consumers that they're very. You get one, one swing at the ball more or less, and that's it, this is the time I believe, I believe in the rise of branding.
[00:54:54] Darren Reinke: I think it goes back to also in terms of how brands are created.
[00:54:57] Darren Reinke: It's through a lot of co-creation with whether it's athletes or whether it's their consumer, in terms of new products, they put out the use of social media, like truly authentic, less of top-down chief marketing officer branding, and more of the ground up the grassroots efforts that are actually featuring the consumers and how they're using the products leads to, I can imagine what you're saying.
[00:55:18] Darren Reinke: Great tribalism around brands.
[00:55:20] Bob Rief: really cool things that's going on right now that people don't talk much about, we have all these changes going on in the economy. It's all great home office. And then, liberation from the traditional Workday and all this sort of things is really great things for us personally, and leave me in the sport active and healthy living sector.
[00:55:36] Bob Rief: Anybody with a significant brand has really had a great. Because people are up to hours and getting healthy. It's a wonderful thing, but at the end of the day, you don't have to go to school to do this any longer. Self-learning is on a really fast rise, and it gets no credit. I don't know about you, Jeremy.
[00:55:54] Bob Rief: I can't figure out something. I go to YouTube and short of brain surgery. I've sold them been stumped, whatever it is you need to do is there. And I believe that is young people are so a digitally native that their resources are exponentially higher than traditional business people.
[00:56:12] Bob Rief: And they can get themselves so informed about a test so quickly. It's really amazing. And I am always surprised in the job search, the young people, don't spend more time doing what they do naturally, which is just simply get after it, find out what the job description is. Look up what the job definition is, which you can easily find, look up people who have had experiences in that and then apply for a job.
[00:56:34] Bob Rief: Chances are you're going to do pretty well. If you go at it that way.
[00:56:38] Darren Reinke: Yeah, there's definitely a wealth of information. Yeah. I interviewed a professional golfer for my book, and he actually didn't have a swing coach. YouTube was his swing coach. I thought that was pretty fascinating. It was a successful guy too.
[00:56:48] Darren Reinke: You don't think about YouTube as being the teacher of pro athletes, but there's definitely a tremendous amount of information out there.
[00:56:55] Bob Rief: Yeah, it's really true, but it, but it's also very focused. We see it in the young companies that are to come through the accelerators, that there'll be a component of that business where they're super familiar, more familiar than, for instance, the mentor might be.
[00:57:08] Bob Rief: And they've just, they've taken a couple of days and dug in and self-educated, so it's interesting to see the profile of these young entrepreneurs because they often are not college graduates. They might be in year one or year two of their education and hit upon what is for them, what the answer is and what their life dream has been to this point.
[00:57:30] Bob Rief: And they can stop now find friends through their social networks, self. Get started, maybe get the product made somehow and sell it in a variety of ways, and actually are going through that process. And in two years where, I'm thinking, in my case, it might be five or six or seven years, or as Jeff Kelly said, after 20 years, he's an overnight success.
[00:57:54] Bob Rief: These young people will be successful much more quickly or fail either. One is fine, when you're in the, in that time in life, when you can afford risk, and then you'd give it to you do what you can do and see what happens. If it doesn't work, you go back to ground zero and restart times have changed.
[00:58:10] Darren Reinke: Aaron. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot about my kids and just whether they're learning the right things, and weather, and that's a whole another topic, but just making sure that they're hopefully they're learning how to learn, learning how to think. And then it's about adopting all these other tools, learning about business, learning about technology and how they can apply.
[00:58:26] Darren Reinke: What did they go down in the more traditional career path, if that any more of working for a company versus starting your own thing, which seems to be more and more prevalent, whether it's a professional services company or a products company or technology company or whatnot. So making sure that they can master the art of learning and growing and getting better all the time.
[00:58:45] Bob Rief: Yeah. I would just add the word nimble to that nimble thinking. I think the path of public education is a compressive one. You start off with an open mind by S by the end of it, you may have a closed mind. It should be going the other way around. So to me, it's in inculcating that the principles that you believe in as a family, as the building block, and then, be having a nimble mind, being prepared to process all the things you're seeing, but putting them through the value system that you believe in and never giving up on your values.
[00:59:14] Bob Rief: It's a complicated world because there are a lot of invaders going on. And that process is you'll find someone.
[00:59:18] Darren Reinke: Yeah, including inventors or in your own head, whether it's pressure from the marketplace, from family, friends, media, et cetera, it's like keeping those invaders out, and you have values and anchoring those, using those to guide your decisions.
[00:59:31] Darren Reinke: I know I use them every day to stay on track and avoid the shiny objects and temptations.
[00:59:36] Bob Rief: I tried to, I look at the, I look at other people occasionally you can see the day in the life of Mr. X. I'm always curious to see how it works to see when people's value of time is if it's early or late. And I know that I try to use the early morning to balance my time, figure it out, get the creative stuff done before all those things you're talking about imploding and steal the day and steal your brain as well.
[01:00:00] Bob Rief: But it's a super modern time. And Darren and I really thank you for respecting us old people who have some add, some experiences. We're trying to pass them on. If we can help anybody where we'd like to do it, if they're in our space,
[01:00:12] Darren Reinke: I appreciate your time, and you have so much wisdom. I appreciate you sharing that with these young upstarts as entrepreneurs, but also just how you're encouraging companies and people that give back to the local community and the broader community.
[01:00:24] Darren Reinke: So I think that's such an important thing, but Bob, I truly appreciate your time. Where can people go to find out more about STSI, whether they're an aspiring entrepreneur, where they want to get involved as a mentor?
[01:00:35] Bob Rief: Yeah. Just go to STSI website is the easiest way, and we can also be a clearing house for lots of things.
[01:00:41] Bob Rief: I'm thinking about the Rob Machado foundation has a fundraiser coming up, and he's doing great things. There's a lot of really good that's going on in the community. So if they want to intersect with us, they go to the website. A lot of the stuff is there. If they need further information, they just email us through the website, and we'll be happy to get back to them.
[01:00:59] Darren Reinke: Bob, thanks for your time. Appreciate you coming on. So
[01:01:01] Bob Rief: Thank you. Thanks so much.
[01:01:04] Darren Reinke: Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Savage leader podcast. My hope is: You're walking away with tactics that you can apply to become a better leader in your life and in your career. If you're looking for additional insight into. Be sure to check out my book titled, The Savage Leader, 13 Principles to Become a Better Leader From The Inside Out. Also be sure to subscribe to the podcast and I would truly appreciate it. If you left a review and also rate the podcast. Thanks and see you all on the next episode.