Three Hive Strategy

0:00Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Hummingbirds. Hummingbirds is the go-to platform built for creator-powered retail activations. They're connecting everyday creators with CPG brands to generate shelf-level awareness, drive in-store momentum, and generate authentic content in markets that matter the most. Go to hummingbirds.com for all the details and let them know I sent you. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most.

1:35If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you.

1:47Naomi Honig:Now, let's dive into the new episode. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Today, I have an industry expert on the podcast who's going to talk about people and culture and how to build a team, even what to think about in the really early stages when you're probably doing it all yourself. And she also happens to be a CPG founder. So Naomi Honig is on the podcast today. She is the founder of Three Hive Strategy. And Naomi, I'm so happy to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for having me. Really happy to be here. Yes. So let's first dive into, I'm obsessed with your background.

2:33I love how you're bringing in all of your experiences into your agency. But I first want to start off with what is your business now and how you work with other businesses before we dive into your background?

2:48Naomi Honig:Sure. So Three Hive Strategy is a fractional HR consulting firm. And we work with a lot of startup and growth businesses in setting up foundational HR functions built to scale that are right size for the moment, but also built to scale. So what that can look like is, and with consumer brands specifically, often we are sort of an outsource people and culture team that feels really embedded. So while we're fractional, we're also part of your culture and we build to suit to your culture and your team versus implementing policy procedure that is just HR rulemaking, right? We want to be a facilitator of your business.

3:31Naomi Honig:We want to be a business partner and feel like we're on your team to everybody who we're interacting with. So generally for consumer brands, that's how we engage. Additionally, we do a lot of HR tech implementations. We're kind of experts in that area. We do a lot of diagnostic work around HR functions and HR teams. We do like finite HR consulting projects where we're doing a compensation benchmark or updating a handbook or helping with total reward strategy. So it spans We're sort of startup generalists in the HR field, and we love working with consumer brands. As you mentioned, I was a very early stage CPG founder myself.

4:10Naomi Honig:So food and hospitality and nourishing others is sort of near and dear to my heart. So those are sort of our favorite brands to work with. So cool. And that is something that really stood out to me. I have seen so many emerging brands over my 15-plus year career. And one of the biggest struggles and pain points that I see past launch, so post-launch, is as they start to grow and scale, building their team and making sure that the culture that they brought to the table themselves and what makes their brand cool and feel a certain way is then able to be duplicated, but in an organic, authentic way.

4:54so that everyone on the team also embodies that. And it's not easy. I've also learned this the hard way in being behind the scenes of many consumer brands. So I would love to hear what got you on this track because I know that you've worked in food, hospitality, CPG founder. Why did you get really passionate about HR?

5:21Naomi Honig:So I accidentally fell into HR. I was actually a hospitality operator and I think HR kind of falls into that vein. You're doing a lot of HR. I was, I was scaling up a restaurant group nationally. So doing tons of hiring, doing tons of manager training, doing tons of like frontline employee training and had this amazing opportunity to scale a business from 75 people in one location to 800 and, and simultaneously founding my own business that didn't even have any employees and got really fascinated with different stages of companies and how they evolve and sort of where things start to break down and fall apart.

6:03Naomi Honig:So I really love working with founders and early stage teams to help educate them and bring them through that process of how to structure their business to prepare for growth, right? So what are the things that you need to think about now when you are just one person, you or two people? Where does that culture piece start to break down, right? Like what employee count and how do you start to sort of build it organically so it's not all reliant on one person carrying that. I would love to hear how that experience was. I know this probably could be its own podcast episode, but going from 75 to 800, passionate, top level, but can you walk us through that experience alone?

6:49Naomi Honig:Sure. So it was, it was an interesting challenge and we, we would bring people from, you know, a lot of it was, had to do with the training programs that we put in place and sort of bringing these like evangelists of the culture into the, into the new spaces or into the new groups to help sort of carry that forward. I think that was a really critical piece of it. um also just how do you build cultural touch points into new hire orientations and how you're sort of evaluating performance and and how you're giving feedback to people and right all of those little pieces how you're weaving these like pillars of culture of whatever culture you're in throughout that employee life cycle so that it and you know like for a company of 800 in multiple locations, they're all going to have their own little flavor of the culture.

7:41Naomi Honig:But what are, well, like distilling down, what are these really important nuggets that are, that make this place feel like what it is? And really intentionally weaving that through and bringing it in to the team. To help a new founder understand exactly what we're talking about, what can you break down a little bit more of when you're building a brand, right? We think about customer touch points, what makes a brand its own feeling, vibe, personality. It's the look, it's the feel, it's the product description, it's how they're showing up on social. But what you're talking about is really the behind the scenes of making sure that brand feels, quote unquote, on brand.

8:26So could you help someone who's super new just understand a little bit more of that nuance of culture and people so that they can have a better working understanding of how to connect those dots?

8:40Naomi Honig:Yeah. I don't think that I think of it entirely. I'm not a marketer, but I don't think about it much differently than it is a branding exercise. It's like an internal employment branding exercise. Right. And I think that it happens really, really naturally in the beginning. And then really, because you have generally like an inspirational, super passionate founder, but really like a lot of those brand touch points that you're bringing to your consumers, you need to really be educating and kind of harping on with your team because they are like, they need to live and feel and breathe then feel the same passion about the brand.

9:23Naomi Honig:And then also, I think really important to define, and this is where it's like really organic in the beginning, but has to become more intentional of like, what are the values of how we kind of operate with one another internally? And what does that look like? Like, what kind of behaviors do you want? What type of like accountability structures and right, like, if authenticity is really important to you, like, what does that look like within the company, right? How do you show up in conflict together? Those types of things thinking through and actually having those discussions. Because after you're like, you know, even five, 10 plus people, and you're not directly managing everything, everybody in the company, like those things need to be very intentional.

10:12Naomi Honig:And you need to be able to like, have people manage through you versus you doing it all yourself. Which is such a hard part of this puzzle of being a founder and scaling a consumer brand, because like you said, in the beginning, it's you. Then maybe like one or two people who are similar, probably energy and passion of what you're doing, but then going beyond that, making sure that you're not the bottleneck and that everything can't go through you anymore. Like you have to educate people on how this brand shows up. And startup hiring really like goes from hiring like the person of all trades that can do like everything in the beginning because those are the skills you need.

10:59Naomi Honig:And as you start growing, those roles become more specialized and you want the expert salesperson in a certain category or whatever it is, right? And you have to think through how that is all evolving, how your org chart is evolving, how you want people, how you want your culture to look and feel, how you want them to manage your team. And again, if you rely on just a founder to have the responsibility of doing that, it's just too much. It's too much. It breaks down. It falls apart. The wheels fall off. They fall off with us. Hard. like if you're just going off of vibes you know and and then that founder gets busy or gets turned in a different direction I've just seen it so many times so many and I have moments in my own agency you know we're 12 people now that I'm like okay I need to start thinking about this for my own agency now right absolutely how do I build that in intentionally and have everybody sort of speaking the same language and operating under the same principles and values So when did you make the leap from the hospitality group starting a CPG brand and now your company?

12:14so after the hospitality group I sort of built and scaled a couple other experiences I was like

12:20Naomi Honig:okay I've done this now and on a pretty significant scale but I need to I want to touch different industries so I did it again in cannabis and had like a really great experience did it in a tech enabled sort of e-commerce cycling company and did like a huge scale up and then a scale down and really discover that this was kind of my sweet spot, right? Like the fixer, the problem solver, the scaler. And I had a team of people that I had worked with throughout the years that also were kind of experts at this and wanted to join me. So three years ago, I started 3Hype with that in mind of how can we do this piece that is like super impactful, right this is our superpower we know that hr is not necessarily the superpower of the operator or the marketer or the salesperson right so how can we provide the super targeted expertise that is very commonplace for us but even like a simple for a super early stage right consumer founder how do i hire and pay someone how do i make sure that i'm compliant with xyz law right Okay, so that was going to be my next question.

13:33Naomi Honig:How do I make sure that someone has health insurance, right? Yes, yes. All those things feel so daunting and so big. And you're like, I have no idea. I'm kind of figuring it out as I go. So I would love if you could walk us through those really early stage next steps of like, okay, it's me, maybe a friend, co-founder, but I got to get serious with this. What are some early things? You talked about benefits, how to hire or what to communicate. Can you walk us through some of those early things to get on the radar now? Sure. So I think thinking about your org chart, what does it look like six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now?

14:22Naomi Honig:What is the order of operations of how I want to hire people? What can be sort of outsourced with contractors? What should be sort of employee-based? And then when you're thinking about that, how do I hire and pay people? How do I provide them benefits? This is getting a little more technical, but do I want to be on a PEO, right, a professional employment relationship? Do I not? What are the differences? What do I need to pay attention to? What are the pros and cons of having an in-person workforce versus a distributed or hybrid culture, right? Those pieces that are kind of hard to undo once you put in place.

15:04Right.

15:05Naomi Honig:Those are all really early things, I think, that are important. And then you get a little bit bigger and you're starting to think about how do I onboard people into my organization? How do I hire the right people, I guess, before you even get to the onboarding? boarding? What does that process look like? So I'm hiring the right person. How do I bring them in and educate them both about my brand and my culture and how to do their job instead of throwing them in and say, okay, do your job. Yeah, figure it out. And I've worked in many, with many startup brands and that's how you learn, but also that's not a scalable process either.

15:42I have a question for consumer founders who are maybe hiring freelancers right now. I'm thinking of those early steps of design, website, social, different advisors possibly. Is there anything that people should keep in mind as they're maybe still in the hiring freelancers to help with their team? And then as they start hiring maybe part-time or full-time employees, things to keep in mind when making that jump. Sure.

16:19Naomi Honig:So one thing that's really important and kind of a, it's a very significant sort of hot button employment law piece is, are you correctly classifying contractors or employees? So, and there's legitimate business risk in an audit scenario, or if someone were to file a complaint if you were having them work as a contractor, but they were working like tremendous amounts of overtime, for example, that would be like a flag. Seems minor, but it can have significant business impact. So understanding the risk and what it would take to kind of unwind that in the future. Oftentimes, even having a conversation with me or someone on our team or someone, you know, just someone who's an expert in this field.

17:08Naomi Honig:So you know how to think about it because it's not intuitive. I think in a lot of ways, even experienced business people, we're coming in with our much larger clients, walking them through these conversations and having them do, like we get brought in often by private equity firms when they're getting closer to exit and we have to do like large cleanup jobs. Right. So talking through with advisors, but how should I think about this? What is a contractor? What is an employee? What's the difference? What is a simple, yeah, just for someone listening who's super new to building a business, do you have a simple way of just thinking about that?

17:51Naomi Honig:No, it's not simple, but there's like a 20-point rule for the IRS, but how are you directing their work? Are you evaluating their performance like you would an employee or kind of allowing them to be the expert in doing their work? Are you providing them equipment to do their job? Are they bringing their own? Are they setting their own schedule? Or are you sort of requiring them to work particular hours? So like, are they doing this for other people or other companies? Got it. Or doing it only for you? Like, those are the kind of criteria you want to think through with that specifically. And again, like everything in HR, and I think this is maybe what sets us apart a little bit, It is, yes, you should want to strive to do things correctly.

18:36Naomi Honig:And at different stages of your business, you have different risk profiles. So talking through of like, what is the risk of doing this this way now and changing it later, right? And just really making educated decisions at the end of the day. It's like up to the business owner how much risk they want to take. But understanding all of those pieces, because the employment landscape is really complex now. And it varies greatly state by state. So you think like now you're having everybody sort of all these remote workforces and the level of complexity for employers is tremendous. is. That's a great point too.

19:13Is there anything that you would recommend for someone again in the early stages to start thinking about, maybe start taking note of, or even how they want to approach conflict or how they want their team to communicate with each other, even if they are a one-person team as of today. Anything that you think they should be starting to think about or taking notes on? I think it's important to have, like, build a culture of continuous feedback where that's normalized from the start in a really authentic and respectful way.

19:54Naomi Honig:We, and we talk about this all the time on my team, continually surprised by even the most, like, experienced executives. they resist giving honest feedback to people for various reasons, because they don't want to be disliked or it feels hard or whatever. Building that culture of transparency and communication and feedback early on and having that be normal takes the stigma away from having to have difficult conversations at work once you have the team. And I think that that is something that I wish that founders and sort of early stage business leaders leaned into more because it gets so hard.

20:41Yes. And something else that you were talking about too, of not waiting until HR is an issue to start reaching out to build a proper HR team and structure. Can you just elaborate on that too?

20:56Naomi Honig:Yeah. So a lot of the way that we engage early on with smaller consumer brands, like a handful of employees as we come in and do what we call a diagnostic. So it's a little bit of a like peek under the hood to really understand what's going on. How are you operating? So we're able to provide kind of a roadmap and some feedback on, Hey, these are some compliance considerations that are upcoming for you or you need to deal with now to when does it make sense in like the life cycle of my business to start implementing these processes and systems around people doing that earlier and having it not be a surprise or how do I like set up my benefit strategy and what do I contribute to benefits that make sense now but also can scale with my business.

21:49Right. That's a great point too. This whole conversation I know is going to be so helpful for many, many early stage founders who they're very much in the early trenches, but just starting to put this stuff on their radar is so impactful. And I really appreciate you breaking down a topic that usually when you think of HR, you're like, oh no, something happened. HR is now involved, right? Like it kind of has this, things have gone wrong and that's why HR is here. But I love your approach of how to build a really solid culture inside of your brand so that you can execute on what you want to achieve with your brand and having a great team and creating a great foundation to build from.

22:43Yeah.

22:44Naomi Honig:And that really, like at the end of the day, it really drives business success and like achieving business objectives. It absolutely does. So how do people connect with you to learn more and possibly work with your team? So I'm happy to have, you know, a 30 minute conversation with any, any, you know, emerging brand founder that just wants to ask, ask questions of like, what do I need to think about? But you're welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. My email is Naomi at threehive strategy.com. I'm sure that Kelly will sort of share that in the podcast notes. I will. You can check out our website as well and click the get in touch button and send me an email.

23:26Naomi Honig:But happy to connect with anyone and provide guidance. And then as you grow, we would love to love to be a partner for you. Amazing. Thank you so much again for breaking all of this down and making it feel way more tangible and approachable and actually something fun to get done for your business. And knowing that this is something as you grow and scale, you're going to need and how to start thinking about it now. So thank you again. Yeah. So happy to, so happy to share. And thank you so much for having me. You're so welcome. Thank you everyone for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.

24:01This podcast is brought to you by Hummingbirds. Hummingbirds is the go-to platform built for creator powered retail activations. They're connecting everyday creators with CPG brands to generate shelf level awareness, drive in-store momentum, and generate authentic content in markets that matter the most. Go to hummingbirds.com for all the details and let them know I sent you. This episode was brought to you by Glimpse. As we know, building a brand is not as sexy and glamorous as it looks on social media at times. A lot of those unsexy problems come into play when brands start to scale in retail distribution.

24:48Founders are always incredibly excited to see their products on shelves at major retail chains, but they don't realize all the hard work that starts to begin. Retailers and distributors are known for their processes of deducting amounts from invoices. Most of the time, those are totally valid. Promos, slotting fees, free fills, and all the things that brands agree to to be part of the retail experience. But sometimes those deductions are invalid, costing brands thousands to millions in fees. Actually finding those needles in the haystack though and fighting to win back lost revenue, it's a costly, manual, and time consuming issue.

25:37And that's where Glimpse comes in. Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most, scaling their businesses. With a team of in-house deduction experts who come from some of the most successful and profitable CPG companies and custom built AI with 100 % accuracy and precision. You'll recover money that you never should have had leaked in the first place. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you.