The New Age of Conscious Capitalism

When I co-founded LIFEAID Beverage Co., it was with a two-fold mission. First, create the next generation of functional and energy drinks. Second (and more personally and more importantly), build the company I have always wanted to work at: one that advocates a more holistic, humanistic approach to corporate governance and values all stakeholders, not just the shareholders. That’s the magical (and less celebrated) part of founding a business: You have a blank canvas to create it in your own image.

Jamie Dimon, the ceo of JP Morgan Chase, recently reminded me and the business community about the importance of this, and visionary leaders like John Mackey of Whole Foods Market has been living and espousing these ideals since starting his company nearly 40 years ago. And as my business partner and co-founder Aaron Hinde and I just returned from our annual 3 day employee retreat this past week, I find myself revisiting the principles that inform the way our business is run.

Entry level: Appreciating the business from the ground up

Don’t underestimate the impact of everyone starting at some kind of ‘entry level.’ It’s a terrible analogy because LIFEAID is about ‘better for you,’ but in the entertainment industry anyone who wants to be a talent agent starts in the mail room. At LIFEAID, most new, younger employees start their career here working the customer service desk. Aaron and I built this business on consumer insights, and gleaned most of them from both of us working customer service. It’s a training camp for sure, but also a way to vet an employee’s commitment to what we do. Team members who today work in marketing, accounting and sales started working at LIFEAID manning the customer service email and phones. You learn about the product, the process and how our consumers connect with this brand. Companies like Walmart are legendary for promoting from within. With the high speed pace of food and beverage brands looking for strategic acquisitions or an IPO, most challenger brands look outside for proven talent. Sometimes the best talent is the talent you nurture.

Truth + Transparency: Building trust with all the stakeholders

Transparency is a frequently used buzzword in the food and beverage industry, most often used to describe a products ingredient label or formulation. Following the principles of conscious capitalism at a time of elevated transparency informs new notions of corporate governance, stewardship, and trustworthiness, particularly between the company/brand and consumers, and just as important the trustworthiness between and amongst us founders, senior leadership and all our employees. When you decide to join an entrepreneurial business, you want to understand the ethos and health of that business. At LIFEAID, we publish our financial results for all employees to review. The LIFEAID brand is financially sound and growing at a healthy clip, and we want every team member to understand the dynamics of that growth, as well as the company’s potential areas of improvement. We want every employee to feel deeply invested in the brand’s success.

And then there’s the transparency between our brand and our consumers. We know that 53% more consumers are more willing to purchase from companies that are transparent on social media, and LIFEAID emphasizes transparency every day with its more than 500k social media followers. And transparency leads to more evolved and conscious behavior with all the brand’s stakeholders. This in turn attracts others.  This virtuous cycle is reinforced and perpetuates long-term value to the organization.

Maintain a 360-degree view

Conscious capitalism dictates shifting the focus from revenue to a 360-degree view of the business. In CPG, in food & beverage, the general metric of success is always ‘units sold’ and ‘depletions.’ At LIFEAID, the number of beverages we sell is just one facet of how we look at the business’s success and positive impact. We continue to nurture the business partnerships that helped build the brand. A high profile example of this is our ongoing relationship with the CrossFit® community. CrossFit boxes were the first place we started selling our beverages – to like-minded consumers that immediately understood the value of our proposition. Leveraging the loyalty of that community we successful proved the efficacy of our LIFEAID beverage, today a staple of CrossFitters. And years later, we continue to support the CrossFit community with the corporate sponsorship of the CrossFit Games®.

On a less high profile level, we also support some of our earliest suppliers and vendors. Eight years after founding LIFEAID we still continue to use the same packaging company, H. Bray, endorsing their business and helping them grow it. Our e-commerce, which was critical to our business when we launched, remains a top focus for us even as we emphasize a presence in stores, and our business on Amazon alone is up over 300% this year.

We employ daily, company-wide KPI dashboard checks, and emphasize that it’s just as important for us to understand exceptional growth surges as it is to address sales dips. My co-founder, Aaron, and I have a mandatory weekly breakfast meeting to discuss the state of the business, and the topics range from high level concerns to on-the-ground needs for our office and staff.

LIFEAID is of a size that we are able to implement these principles but we’re also keenly aware as the business grows, that we’ll need to continue to fine tune our approach to conscious capitalism. But this is where the practice and discipline make all the difference – and we’re already ready.