Espresso: Who Gives a Crap founder: The Pillars of High Performance Cultures

0:06I probably with Shabin there was a part of me that was you know I was so I truly believe that for it to work, the experience had to be so good that it didn't matter whether we gave money away or not. And we do apply that same lens to who gives a crap. You know, we need to, we just need to deliver a customer experience that's several factors better than what you get if you're buying supermarket product of, you know, someone else's brand. And so with Shabeen, I think I lent into that idea of, of the experience needing to be so good, regardless of the purpose that we probably didn't play on the purpose to all of its strengths.

0:45And, you know, I don't think purpose-led brands should only play into their purpose. You know, it creates one-dimensional brands and we think brands should be like people that have several different aspects to their personality and you can discover that about them over time. And they, you know, yes, care about the world or the environment or both, but they also know when to tell a great joke and you like the way they look and they have a funny sense of dress, you know, whatever it is. And so with Shabeen, I think we were so focused on getting the customer experience really great that we probably underplayed purpose and probably most importantly with our team, where I think, you know, now we might talk about this later, but when we think about culture, we think about the three pillars of that being autonomy, where we're setting clear goals for people, mastery where people are, sorry, setting clear goals and then getting out of their way to allow them to achieve them, mastery where people are working on a course, get set of skills they want to master themselves and purpose where they know that the work they're doing today ladders up to the greater good that we're trying to achieve together.

1:52And with Shabeen, we had tons of autonomy, had tons of mastery, but we didn't nail the purpose piece. We didn't sort of, you know, do our monthly all hands and say, hey guys, you know, the reason why we're here is to try and prove this business model out and to try and send as much money as we can out to these organizations. And here's some of the impact that we've been able to have to date. You know, here's hearing from our partners with an update on what we've been able to do or, you know, what we're going to try and fund next. So we could have done a better job of figuring out how to, I think in Y Combinator, they call this mission to metrics, how to connect the mission of the organization into the metrics that are driving the organization every single day.

2:35And so, if we could have done that really well, we could have showed every staff member how, you know, the impact of every drink that they were selling and what that looked like at the, you know, the end of the financial year and figured out a way to kind of quantify that in the number of shifts that they do or, you know, the role they're playing in the business. And so I think I probably learned a lot more about that by getting it wrong and realizing that there was so much more potential than what we were able to unleash with that business when it came to leading a team with that purpose behind it.

3:09Yeah, I love the Y Combinator and Paul Graham. I read his stuff all the time. I think his maker versus manager article is one of the best things I've ever written or I've ever read. It's so, so good. Quick one, guys. guys, Espresso's got a brand new sponsor, Unleashed. Unleashed is inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software. We use Unleashed daily at Ireland. I bloody love it. We've got our admin time in half, saving approximately 30k a year. Why use it? Save money, save headaches, save stress. Get granular clarity on your margins. No way, your stock is.

3:44Don't miss availability. Look, your favorite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone. Candykins, Tiny Rebel, Trip, Always Religiously. Look, there's a link in the show notes. Please feel free to book a call with Josh. He's a wonderful sales team at Unleashed. They're amazing. Even nothing comes of it. And even better news, you'll get your first month free if you reference Hungary. Thank you. In terms of this mission to metrics thing, how do you do that? Because there'll be people listening to this, you have a purpose-led brand, or not necessarily a purpose-led brand, but like a vision.

4:14And I always find it's like, how do you get the vision that's in the founder's soul or the purpose that's in the founder's soul and get that to kind of spread through the organization. But like, how are you specifically do that, doing that on like a monthly basis maybe? Yeah. So what, what we do at Who Gives a Crap is, um, and the, again, we didn't get this right first time around. It took a few years of sort of to figure it all out. But, um, as the team got bigger, you know, when the team's small, that purpose is sort of implicit and ingrained. You know, it's part of the story of who you all are.

4:50As the team gets bigger, you have to find ways to make it explicit to create the space for people to rally around it. And we sort of followed, you know, partly what Phil Collins talks about in one of his books, Good to Great, where you have a big, hairy, audacious goal or a BHAG that is, you know, audacious because it's really hard to achieve. You have to really kind of crush it, you know, many, many times over for 30 years to get to where you're trying to go to. And so for us, we realised a few years in that we needed to have that BHAG to anchor people around it. And so for us, that's making sure everyone in the world has access to clean water and a toilet by 2050.

5:30So we've got, you know, 27 years to try and close the gap on the many billions of people that don't have access to sanitation today. And that's the goal that everyone in our team kind of really rallies around. But that's hard to quantify in terms of, you know, how is me helping this customer with this order laddering up to that BHAG? And so what we do is we take it down to a five-year view and say, well, if we extrapolate out where we are today to where we're trying to get to in 30 years' time, in five years' time, we have to be here. And that means that we're a business that's this big doing these things and we're making donations of about this much money.

6:07And so we start to use our donations as the driver to tell us where we're trying to get to in order to solve this huge problem that we have in the world. And then from there, we come down to one year and say, if we're trying to get to this place in five years time, it means that this year we have to do this thing and the business needs to get to this stage. We want our donations to be this big. And then we get down to a quarterly level. That means that this quarter, every team are trying to do these core things. and this is how the role of each individual person in that team ultimately enables us to achieve the things that we're doing this quarter.

6:40So we start to really tie into what each individual person is doing this quarter to help us get to that 30-year view, but we thread it together with a one-year or five-year and then the 30-year view at the end. Yeah, so there's like the principal agent problem, which is the bigger you get, the further away the employees are from the principal, i.e. you. It's always the hardest thing of how do you get them to buy into the mission and the culture. And what you've said there about this Zoom, like taking the 27-year project almost or mission and boiling it down, I think there's real value in that for people listening.

7:20I know before we hit record, we talked about your childhood. You were born in the UK and then moved to Oz when you were like four years old. I'd love to know when was the first time you realized in your like maybe from like 5 to 16 or 20 that you realized like, okay, I am philanthropic or my why is to do something bigger for the world. When did that first begin to bubble in you? I think for me it was actually relatively late. So the thing that was always intrinsic in me was the entrepreneurial nature. I was that kid that put flies in everyone's mailbox to try and pet sit their animals for them when they were away.

8:11I made stuff and sold it to kids at school and was kind of always trying to figure out what that entrepreneurial nature looked like. But through that journey, the idea of kind of taking something that I'd made and I knew how much it cost and selling it to someone for more money than what it cost me, that felt a bit kind of icky and gross. And I could never quite figure out why. And I think when I was growing up, you know, business people weren't painted well. Entrepreneurs weren't painted well. Thank you so, so much for listening. It honestly means the world to me. I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day.

8:50let's be having you if you want the full episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes for the full episode thank you so much please stay friends as well it means the world to me