Podcast: Leading a DTC Brand to $50M in 3 Years: Dean Brennan from Heart & Soil

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Free to Grow CFO podcast, host Jon Blair chats with guest Dean Brennan, CEO of Heart Soil, about the challenges of scaling a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand.

Touching on everything from leadership to strategic decision-making, Dean shares his insights on the unique challenges and opportunities faced when scaling a brand. He emphasizes the significance of being consistent and proactive and maintaining a strong alignment with the brand's purpose. He also highlights his leadership philosophy which includes principles like trust, relationships, humility, prioritization, and high-value activities. Dean's journey, from his entrepreneurial influences as a child to his rise as a CEO, provides valuable lessons for growing a successful DTC brand.

Meet Dean Brennan

Dean Brennan, CEO of Heart & Soil Supplements, leads a pioneering brand in nutrition and health, with a focus on premium organ supplements. Under his helm, Heart & Soil has served over 200k+ customers and scaled to 50M in revenue in just three years, a testament to his vision and steadfast dedication to servant leadership with purpose. This commitment drives the company's mission to provide unmatched nutrition and lead a movement toward profound health and vitality.

Episode Links

Books or courses mentioned in the episode:

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success by John Wooden and Jay Carty

Decision by Design - FS Course by Shane Parrish

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Jon Blair: Okay. Welcome to the Free to Grow CFO podcast, where we talk about all things growing and scaling a DTC brand with a profit first mindset, I'm your host, Jon Blair. And today I'm super excited to be chatting with one of our Free to Grow CFO clients. It's Dean Brennan, CEO of Heart & Soil. Dean, welcome. And thanks for coming on.

[00:00:19] Dean Brennan: Happy to be here, Jon. Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:22] Jon Blair: So, as you know, at Free to Grow CFO, we're fractional CFOs and accountants for growing profit first DTC brands. And given where we sit in the space, you know, we're uniquely positioned to spot common challenges and opportunities across dozens of brands that we work with.

And the challenge that I want to zero in today and for the next couple of weeks on, on the pod is. The common constraints to scaling. And here, here's why, because every DTC brand that we talk to, like, they all say that they want to scale, but it's what I've found. Is that only the elite brands have like a solid, well thought out scaling strategy.

And I think a lot of brands think that, hey, spend a bunch of money on advertising, that's how you scale. They don't think about the fact that there are specific constraints to scaling along the way, right? And, and your constraints that going from say zero to five million are not the same as going from five to ten, aren't the same as going 10 to 20, 20 to 50.

And beyond, and so what, what I want to talk about is I'm a big fan. I'm a big reader. I'm a fan of several different books related to scaling one traction about EOS and the other one scaling up by Vern Harnish. And, and Vern lays it out really nicely in scaling up in terms of the constraints to scaling.

And he puts them in this order saying that you have to tackle these constraints in this order. Cause if you don't tackle them. In priority order, the ones that come afterwards just don't matter. And, and the constraints in order of priority are marketing because marketing is the engine that drives the plane.

And if, if you don't have solid marketing, you're not going to scale, but once marketing is working, you better have solid leadership because your organization is going to be growing and you need to, you need to build a machine that's led well to keep up with the marketing. And then third is cash and profitability.

And so you have a huge passion for sharing your leadership journey. I love following your content on LinkedIn. And so I thought who better to talk to about the leadership side of scaling constraint than, than you. So to get things kicked off so that the audience knows a little bit about you and, and why, in my opinion, you're, you're an authority.

On this subject. Tell me just a bit about your personal journey and how you ended up as the CEO at Heart and Soil. 

[00:02:43] Dean Brennan: Yeah. Happy to what's funny about the leadership constraint is I kind of realized throughout my journey that that's what was holding me back. And we can get into that more, but you know, I had a pretty normal childhood, grew up in Michigan, small town, lived outside of the city, which was kind of nice.

There were a number of, I think, formative Experiences and people in my life that helped me get to where I'm at today when I look back at it, and I didn't know it at the time, but had a really amazing grandfather for one who was very close with, you know, for example, playing sports growing up. I'd look into the stands every single game from being a child all the way through high school.

He was always there. And, and that when I look back at it now, is kind of centered in my why and, and why I do what I do at heart and Soil because I want, I want people to have healthy and happy grandparents. You know, you, you want people in your life to, to be that way because it, it only, it only helps.

One interesting thing I, I think growing up there is my father at a young age faced a pretty tough decision when I, when I was young. Mm-Hmm. . He was laid off from his job and he had another job offer in pocket that, you know, it was a better, a better offer than where he had, he had previously worked and like his dad did.

And like his brothers did, he decided, you know, I'm going to start my own business. So, you know, most of my childhood into. My teen years were kind of working alongside my my dad, you know, not every day, but he started out of our garage He had a trade. He was an appliance technician and he literally started from nothing from scratch and When I look back at that now, I'm like, okay I think I formed some kind of self identity around this because you know my dad was one of the heroes of my life and You know, I saw, I saw how he navigated the business.

I saw how he treated people. I went on service calls with him and I would learn the technical aspects of like how to fix things and, how to mark up products, essentially parts. I would look up parts, answer the phone call, phone calls from customers. So I was doing like sales, administrative work, all kinds of stuff growing up, even mowing the grass.

So, so I think that that, you know, it was really cool. opportunity growing up, like being surrounded by that. And it kind of instilled in me this desire to want to understand business and to want to do it and be like my dad. The other thing that I'll mention is that I was always an athlete and there's a lot I learned through through sports.

You kind of learn to be a teammate. You learn the importance of being a teammate. And, you know, not selfishly trying to get all the accolades yourself. There's one moment when I was young, I didn't understand why we kept having to do these drills. I was a running back and, and they're like, you know, here's a ball, run through this thing with all these little paddles that are gonna like try to knock the ball out of your hand.

And then we're gonna come over here and the coach is gonna try to punch it out of your hand. And I never understood. I always just wanted to play, like, just let me play. And sure enough. He was like, I don't know, our third or fourth game in the season. We're on the end zone or close to the end zone. Time's running out and I get, I get the call and I made it to the end zone.

However, I fumbled the ball before and I lost a game for the team. And that, that feeling of. Knowing that it was on you and that you let everybody down, that's kind of when it sunk in for me that, and this is at a pretty young age too, but I kind of realized, okay, I gotta, I have to practice these fundamentals and, and try to get better and better.

So one, so that doesn't happen again. That's not a good feeling when, when you let everyone down. But the other side of that is. There's always the next game. And so you, you can't let that get in your head for too long and you have to move on and you have to learn from it. So anyways, long story short, you know, those were some good moments in my life.

And then I think those kind of helped me out in my college career, my first job, which was up in Michigan. And I reached a point of being comfortable. And I kind of knew, you know, when I get comfortable, I don't like it. I'm like, that's usually when growth stalls and when it stops. So I moved across the country down to Austin, Texas for a job, didn't know anybody and just thought, Hey, I need this kind of pressure to help me grow and take it to the next step so we can get into my career now, but that's, that's kind of where I'm from and where some of my mindset was formed, I think from, from an early age.

[00:07:41] Jon Blair: Man, I love that. There's. So much that we could dive into there, but don't have all the time in the world to do so, but a couple of things that I hear just going on my own personal leadership journey for the last 15 years and kind of pulling out some things that are noticeable about your upbringing, like one, the focus on important people.

Right in your life and like the focus on people first from my perspective Is just it's it's non negotiable in being a leader like there's no such thing there is no such thing as being a selfish leader and there's no such thing as leading purely for your own benefit, it, it, that just doesn't exist that, that can, that can produce results for a certain season and a certain period of time.

But eventually all the, you know, no one's really going to be following you right at the end of the day. And and then the other thing is the entrepreneurial spirit in your family. And like, you know, funny enough, my, my dad is, he's a dentist, but owned his own business my whole life. Right. And, and my mom was the hygienist in the, And so like a small business is what is what our family lived off of my whole life.

And like, it's very formative watching your parents deal with the ups and the downs of running a small business and even more so a service business, right. Where like at the end of the day, you're not selling a widget. Or some product that some manufacturer makes for you and, and you're, you're just really good at the marketing and delivering it like your business is your service, right?

And so it's like very personal in terms of like taking care of your clients and then scaling a service business. I talk about leadership, leadership challenge. Like you have to scale on the back of people, right? And so you have to have people who are really willing to follow you and put their heart. And so into delivering the service as well as you, the founder have.

So like, I love all of that. What I want to talk about next, take this last question to kind of the, the, the next stage of your life, which is you have scaled or been a part of leading scaling heart and soil from zero to 50 million in three years. Walk me through that journey, some of the highlights and maybe even some of the low points in the learnings.

[00:10:06] Dean Brennan: Absolutely. Trying to figure out where to start on this one because a lot of like when the company started, I was kind of in a unique position to add some value in certain places. And that was from a couple stops before where, you know, I started my career in higher education and. I had a really great time, but it was also a very tough time in my career journey.

I heard I learned a lot of lessons the hard way and just the system of government. And bureaucracy, I was paying attention and I learned a lot of like what not to do. And my next stop after that was in a mission oriented FinTech company where it was like just complete opposite of the bureaucratic system.

So I got a pretty good education there. So what originally brought me to heart and soil, the other aspect here, that's very important when it comes down to. Our ethos as a company and our brand is that I in my twenties had ulcerative colitis, and I was able to essentially get off the medications that doctors told me I was going to be on for the rest of my life.

And I did that through eating essentially real food and cutting back almost completely on, on processed food. And when I went through that experience, I started thinking like, why, you know, why didn't my doctor ask me about my diet? Why, you know, we put so much into our bodies every single day, three times a day for a lot of people, six times a day.

Why wouldn't we consider that as maybe a first place to look when we're dealing with, with issues. So, you know, I wanted to scream this from the rooftops and. So I started a health coaching practice and started doing that. And then I eventually met Paul Saladino, our founder in Asana with two other guys, Dylan and Doug, our chief operating officer and Dylan, our chief research officer, and I could tell just pretty much from the first meeting that, they wanted to start a business, but it wasn't just the precipice for like why they wanted to start the business wasn't just to create a business. It was because they saw a problem in the world that they wanted to contribute to that they wanted to fix. And in my opinion, that's where some of the best.

Businesses come from. They come from solving an actual problem and not necessarily just wanting to make a business very important there. So when we started, you know, the passion was was high and that that's only going to get you so far, right? We had the opposite issue that some businesses have in that.

Well, I'm not even going to call it an issue. It was a challenge and I'm very fortunate for it. But our founder had. You know, very large audience with high trust before the business started. So, you know, when you open the doors, we've got, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of people emailing us about the product and.

There's three of us, well, there's more than three, but three of us kind of like working on, on the business with zero e commerce experience. So if you can imagine, not knowing what you're doing at all, thousands of messages coming in, supply chain issues. I mean, you name it issues with the platform, with the website, everything.

So we had to, we had to very quickly learn how to navigate that. And so we started. With a lot of those issues, a lot of process issues. So we started with customer experience, which is a little bit different, too, I think, than some businesses we because we had so many people emailing us. We're like, let's make sure we take care of these people that we answer their questions that we guide them in the right way.

So we came up with a framework for that and use some of our technology to to help us Recall information quickly, those types of things, SOPs, you name it. And we had a lot of issues on the supply chain to iron out. And that's where Doug comes into play. And Doug is a godsend. He was able to really take the chaos of chaos of our supply system.

And, You know, and again, it starts with people, you know, he spent a lot of time calling, talking with building relationships with folks, and kind of leading them towards a solution, you know, we sometimes I talked to people and they're having issues with vendors and they're like, Oh, you know, the first thing they say is like, I'm going to switch vendors.

And it's like, well, what are you doing? proactively to try to work on that relationship to try to proactively raise the issues and work together on a solution. I think some businesses move too quick to move on and the opportunity cost there is pretty great. So we had those issues at first, ironed them out for sure.

It doesn't help podcast, which also It was bad timing because we were out of stock of almost everything.

I mean, pretty much, I think the story of story for us in the beginning was we did, we tried to do everything and that, you know, isn't a good move. So you want to really scale back and figure out like, what is it first and foremost that we can do that's going to add the most value. And then let's build a great foundation of system process.

Marketing, understand your brand story, everything else. And then as time goes, you can build onto that. So we tried, we tried everything at first. I mean, we were shipping to every country. We were on Amazon. We were on Shopify. We were in a little bit over our heads. We had to tame all that chaos. 

[00:16:04] Jon Blair: So there's a, there's a few interesting notes that I took here that I think are, are interesting things to, to dive into a little bit further, at least call out one is going back to kind of my intro talking about how, you know, Vern Harnish scaling up.

He says, marketing is the first constraint then leadership, right? Marketing was working. Cause you're. you know, your founder, who's getting all of this huge exposure for the business that's driving demand that's working, but then there's things internally that are, you know, breaking or not, you know, fully polished.

But then you mentioned something, Doug, your COO, a godsend, right? So again, going back to this framework of scaling constraints. First, marketing as a constraint needs to be removed when that's opened up, then you need really solid leadership in the business, right? And you mentioned, not just you, but other functional leaders, and specifically you called out Doug, your COO, right?

That are able to really proactively get their mind wrapped around Challenges in the business and then themselves go execute or put together the plan to remove those constraints. So talk to me a little bit about like, when you, when we're talking about leadership as a constraint, as you guys were dealing with all this demand, what were some of the other key leaders?

that you had to get put in place other than just Doug, the COO? 

[00:17:33] Dean Brennan: Yeah, it's a good question. So it was really the three, it was myself Doug and, and Dylan who does all of our product development, he's our chief research officer. And our founder, Paul was in the same room with us at that time as well. I think what it really boils down to in those early days is.

And even important later as you get more, more, more people is that you have to, you have to show up and lead by example. So. We were proactively trying to support each other and the problems that each of us was trying to deal with. We also had to be very clear about whose responsibility was what, because, you know, you only have so many people and you have probably each person like 80 to 100 hours of work to do per week with, with more.

So prioritization is also key. So I think that was the biggest thing for us is that we all knew that each other. We're there to support each other and to make the business successful. And we were willing to do just about anything to make that happen. So at the end of the day, that's like the number one key there in the beginning when there's only a few of you is like, you can't be in a position where you're starting a business.

And, and you're just going to bark orders at people. So like you have to actively be involved, you have to be willing to admit when you don't know anything. And you have to be proactive and you have to move quickly. And sometimes you have to be okay with making the wrong decision, but being able to pivot from that fast.

So I'd say that there was a level of trust through. Going up for each other. And that really helped us in those very tiring and trying moments because they were, I mean, I think we worked like a year and a half, maybe two years without like a day off working weekends, working nights, working mornings, and, it was a grind.

It's a grind to start a business. And it's another reason why I think. For me anyway, my passion in health and wanting to spread this message. If it wasn't for that, I don't know if I could have put in those hours. I don't know if I could have done that work. And I know the same is true also for Dylan and Doug and the rest of the team that was there in the beginning.

[00:19:56] Jon Blair: I love that. So there's a couple other notes I took. Here you, you keep coming back to these, I, I would say very critical tenets of leadership, which like one purpose, purpose is fueling everything. Right. You, you, you mentioned this in a couple of different words, like one, why, what's your, why, right?

The other one, you know, when you and and Doug and Dylan were kind of like, talking about starting this business, that the passion that was behind it. So there's kind of passion and purpose. Then there's prioritization, another P word, right? Where first you guys are trying to do everything, but then you had to say.

It took the leaders to step in and say, what's the focus, right. Because, it, it, that has to start at the top, the focus and the prioritization of, of the, of the organization always has to start at the top and like the number of times that I've heard about a scaling business, whether it's a DTC brand or not, basically, you know, buckle under its own weight because they're trying to do everything right.

I mean, it's just, it's just so. Common. And so really quick on the purpose front, it's funny that you mentioned this. Cause like when we, when I started Free to Grow CFO, I, before I ever even, I didn't even know that this was going to be a fractional CFO business. I sat down, I'm an, I was an EOS coach. And so I'm, I'm a big fan of the EOS VTO, Vision Traction Organizer.

I printed one out and I sat down and I was like, what do I really care about solving? Right. And I wrote down DTC brand founders are so stressed out. It's overwhelming. They're overworked. Right. And, and everyone's always asking for a handout. No one's ever asking to help, right. Maybe being a little bit overly generalized, but that was my experience being on the brand side at guardian bikes.

So it was like, I want to help bring some more confidence and reduce some of the stress of being a brand founder. Cause I've been in their shoes and it, it's just this overwhelming feeling. And then what's our purpose. We're going to be a business that's profitable, but that exists to care for people.

Right. And the reason why I'm saying that is because. Growing Free to Grow CFO is like really hard. At times we're, we're still only two years into this. So we're still at that, like, we're, we're starting to, we're starting to scale beyond the founders, me and Jeff. Right. And those are like the hardest years in my opinion, because it's like, you used to do everything.

You can't keep doing everything at scale, but that, like the growing pain of like building a team and delegating and building the systems is really, really hard. And it's, it's almost like you have to have two jobs for a period of time, right? Before you can go to having the one job, which is the elevated executive of your company.

And, and what gets me through that every Monday, I read our businesses, VTO. It's where I read our core values, our reason for existing. And our mission and I'm like, okay, everything's going to be okay now because this is why I'm doing this. It's not because of all the emails that are in my inbox or all the slack messages I haven't gotten back to or all the things I need to get back to clients about.

It's about that we are here to fight back against the stress and overwhelm. Of scaling an econ brand and we exist to care for people. And so, how do you as the CEO of heart and soil champion to yourself and across the business, the purpose and the mission that you guys are on to keep everybody going through the hard times.

[00:23:35] Dean Brennan: Good question. And one working with you guys, I would, I wouldn't know that you're overwhelmed to have a lot of work as you guys show up all the time for us and shout out to Jeff because he's amazing. Amazing. So appreciate it guys. Yeah, you know, I started feeling that probably, you know, we've scaled to 50 million and it was probably around the 10.

10 to 25 million mark where so in the beginning, I was very in the weeds in on the marketing realm because my background is in storytelling and creative. So I naturally, you know, kind of fit in that realm. Anyways, when I started pulling out, you're right. I was doing like two, two jobs trying to facilitate that transition.

And working very closely with the folks on the team who are kind of taking over those responsibilities in certain areas of, of marketing. But to answer your question about keeping like the purpose front and center is. I think structurally in your business, you can, you can put some certain things in place and design it around it.

For example, the hiring process, the way we do it at heart and soil is that, I just, I will not hire someone. In a full time capacity that's coming into our HQ every single day, who is not intrinsically motivated to want to pour into this mission. And so what that means is I recruit from our community, I recruit from friends of friends of people that work here that live an animal based lifestyle that already take our products and, you know, there's challenges to that, on one side.

But. At the end of the day, what we're doing is like extremely important and I don't want to deal with the mess that will be if you bring in somebody who doesn't really fully, you know, believe in this and want to contribute to it. So we have a number of things that we do there on the hiring side from like the conversations that we have with candidates.

We have them out to HQ or we have even deeper conversations and experiences with them. And so. I really want to know that the people that we're hiring are very much into this and, and that there's no question there. So that, that is a, that's a non negotiable in our hiring process. And that is, you know, essentially lined up and guided towards our purpose and our mission.

So we did the traction thing too. And our purpose is to live the animal based lifestyle and spread it to others. So it's another important point in leadership when you, when you do have values. When you do have passions, if you say you are one thing, you better not do the other thing. You better do the thing that you're saying.

And this goes down to brand and storytelling, right? If you tell your customers, Hey, we're this, and then you're not that in their experience, whether it's through their email conversation with a support rep or whether it's through the product, then you have what's called a brand gap. And in a brand gap is where you diminish trust.

And the same thing goes for if you're a leader at a company, or if you're an employee at a company, right? If you say one thing and do the other, you're going to have problems. So, the key there, if you are a leader, is audit what you're saying, figure out what you want, figure out who you want to be, write it down, think on it, and do that.

And. And it sounds easy. It sounds easy, but it's, it's, it's very difficult to do, especially if you're, if you're in this environment, let's say you're working somewhere, you're leading a team and it feels kind of chaotic and you're not quite moving and flow. You'd be good not to point your finger at other people and to ask yourself, what can I do about that?

How did I contribute and figure out who you are, who you want to be, and then be non relenting in your decision making towards that. And don't feel bad for it. Don't right. Have a little courage, make the hard decisions and move towards that. Cause at the end of the day, if all that's in alignment and your team's working in flow, your bottom line is going to be affected in a very positive way.

[00:27:52] Jon Blair: I love all of that. I love all that. There's, there's so much there. I I'm, you know, it's funny. One of the questions that we talked about discussing, I'm not even going to ask, cause we've just. We've just kind of, we've, we've hit it multiple times, but you know, the core tenets of your philosophy on leadership, I'm pulling out trust and relationships, purpose fueled, being humble and consistent, being, you know, driving prioritization and, and high value activities within the business.

One thing that you mentioned. That really hits home with me on the consistency front. One of the reasons that I decided to start Free to Grow CFO besides like the purpose in the marketplace or like the problem we're trying to solve in the marketplace and the passion behind that is because I've worked at other places where leadership was inconsistent.

Say one thing, do another. And when you're an employee or even for me, even harder, like I was on a, on a founding, on the founding teams or on the executive team, right? And when you have the organization saying one thing and you're trying to adhere to that, but other people on the executive team are not.

It's really frustrating because you have your group of people who are loyal to you and you're trying to do right by the company's purpose, but then the rest of the org or maybe other functions are going in a different direction. And so one thing that I set out, I, I mapped out all of our guiding principles before the business started and wrote them down and read them once a week, sometimes more than once a week.

Because I don't want to be a hypocrite. Now, I, I've, I've, we screw up and when we, when I screw up, I know the best thing to do is just say, guys, I messed this up. I own this, you know, I'm one of the top leaders in the business. We made the wrong choice. I led us down the wrong path. We shouldn't have acted in this way.

Right. And so I, I always tell my team, like we're humans. And I always tell our, I always tell my clients too, like, Hey, we know what we're doing, we know what we're doing, but we're humans. And, and, and one other thing too, that I want to point out, and I think this is really awesome that you're doing this.

I first started posting on LinkedIn to just be helpful, right? My, my goal was to just be helpful, put out helpful tips cause I'm a huge content consumer and it's helped my leadership and my ability to scale a business. And I always want to try to give back what I've learned right in, in my content, but I've noticed a new thing that comes back to a very powerful.

Force of sharing your ideologies in social media and it's accountability to myself that I'm sharing with everyone on LinkedIn that this is what Free to Grow stands for. This is what Jon Blair stands for. And I actually will go post things sometimes. This might sound crazy. But I've been in this season recently like leaving and it's something that I want this company to adhere to but it's scary to say it and I'm gonna force myself to say it on LinkedIn because It's out in the open and, and, and if I don't adhere to it, everyone's going to call me out.

And so that might sound a little extreme, but that's something I've been doing recently because I feel like it's so necessary. And I, I think I even see, whether that's your heart behind it or not, I definitely see you out there sharing your philosophy. And I'm sure people on your team see some of your content.

And so it doesn't get more vulnerable than that. You know, 

[00:31:18] Dean Brennan: yeah, no, it's a really good accountability tool. I think the other thing that I think is really useful for is, you know, we just talked a little bit ago about why it's important to know who you are and what you stand for as a business. And as a leader, I realized at some point where, you know, we kind of have this, like this information problem.

You can read a million leadership books. They're all slightly the same. They all have like. Some different twists to them and everything. Well, in this journey of scale, I realized that I couldn't fully articulate my leadership philosophy and what I wanted for the company and figured that that was probably, it's a bit of a knowledge gap, right?

Cause there's like. When you are a master of your domain, you can easily articulate something. And so the LinkedIn content and the Twitter for me, partly, I hope it's useful for people, but it was me sitting down every morning for 30, 40 minutes and challenging my thoughts. And writing about it, putting it to paper, because when you write something, it, it makes different connections other than thinking about it.

And you see things that you don't see when you're talking about it. So, I'm still going through that exercise, still trying to figure all of that out. But I'd encourage anyone who's In a leadership position to do that, to sit down and write out what is your philosophy on leadership? Why do you think that?

Why could that be wrong? And and kind of go through those segments of thinking. And trust me, when you're when you're done with it, you're gonna have a much tighter grasp on what that actually means and how to apply it at your workplace. 

[00:33:04] Jon Blair: I love that. I love that. So what? You know, we've got we've got a few minutes left here, and I want to give you an opportunity.

Was there anything else That you want to make sure the audience hears in terms of like, we've talked about a lot of different core tenants of, of leadership. We've talked about how some of the ways that that helped you guys scale heart and soil, but is there anything that we haven't touched on that you're just like, this is a key part of my leadership philosophy and I want other DTC brand founders to hear this.

[00:33:33] Dean Brennan: That's a good question. I did think of one thing. Another application to keep the purpose and the why top of mind. Our company takes an hour out every single week on Wednesday and we have what's called a win meeting. And it's a very informal meeting where we all get together as a whole team. And there's like 30 of us now.

And. We share, we share our wins and every so often we'll, we'll talk about our whys and we like, that's an ongoing conversation. So it's not like you come on one day and you have your onboarding and you know, you talk about your why, well, it's revisited often and then we read customer stories and we share them and we, and we talk about them as a group.

So we keep. That connection to who we're serving and why we're doing it. It's been a really great thing because you'll hear conversations going on, like outside of that meeting about these things. And I just love seeing it. Have you ever come across a good definition of, of culture? I'm curious. 

[00:34:40] Jon Blair: So have you ever read the book culture code?

I believe his name is Daniel Coyle. 

[00:34:47] Dean Brennan: I've, I've heard of it, but no, I haven't read it. 

[00:34:49] Jon Blair: I can't remember the definition of, of culture that he used, but it's a, reading that book is very formative for me and for him. Culture was more about safety than anything else, meaning that like you as the leader build an environment of safety where no one feels like they have to hold anything back, right?

They can be their true self and that when you have this culture that feels safe, right? And then you layer on top of it, like whatever your mission and purposes, it's this incredibly powerful thing. 

[00:35:26] Dean Brennan: I like that. Yeah, I think that's important to like, allowing people to make mistakes and you know, you have to be very intentional to your reaction to just about anything.

If you're in a authority figure, you know, at a company like for us, I admittedly open my mistakes, you know, to the whole team often because I screw up. All the time. Sometimes it's a lack of preparation, which can cause so many issues down the road. So I always try to be prepared, but there's times in the phase of scale where sometimes things get really overwhelming and you're looking intended for different directions.

You need to take a step back and really, try to figure out what is it that you need to be prepared for. And sometimes you don't get it right. Yeah. So preparations. I think key, but admitting mistakes in front of your team and then not, you know, a lot of people I've been in environments where people get berated, you know, for a mistake and then nobody wants to.

Actually speak up when there's an actual issue and that's a problem because you miss things you miss opportunity That's never a good thing. 

[00:36:34] Jon Blair: So with our last little bit of time here I want to switch to just talking about your personal life because As you mentioned before and as I've seen in your content, it's incredibly Important to your overall holistic health and being just what is Dean Brennan's personal life look like these days?

[00:36:54] Dean Brennan: Yeah, good question. It's, it's changed a lot over the last couple of years. I just had my first child in April. So I'm still kind of getting used to that transition of, of being a father. It's the greatest, I think, life gift that I've ever been given. But from a scheduling standpoint, it's been tough to kind of figure out how to prioritize everything, you know, you go from, you know, we're like getting work done on the weekends to not doing that anymore to working into the evening to not doing that anymore.

And I don't want to sound like a workaholic. It's just like, I love, I love my job. And I think that's important is finding like a work life. Integration rather than balance. So finding something that you are so motivated about intrinsically that it doesn't feel like work to you. And that's how, that's how hard soil feels to me.

So I get excited. You know, in the morning when I get to go to work and solve problems and, be with my team and yeah, with the child, it's like, okay, the clock stops at five now. Cause I, you know, I try to schedule my family priorities first on my calendar and then. My, my work obligations. And then if I have any time after that, it's like, okay, I might play basketball.

I might play guitar. You know, I try to find little spots, you know, for hobbies, but yeah, adjusting, adjusting to the, to the schedule. That's been, that's been a big, big, tough one for me. 

[00:38:28] Jon Blair: Good for you for prioritizing your family, man. As you know, I have three little kids we were talking about before we hit record hardest thing I've ever done in my life is.

Be a CEO of a family and the CEO leader and founder of a business at the same time. And it's a, whew, it's, it's a great joy, but it is, it is hard. Last thing before we, before we run here, what's something you're reading or listening to that you recommend to the audience? 

[00:38:53] Dean Brennan: I love this question. You'll always find me reading or listening to something.

But I do have a New Year's resolution to create more than I consume because again, it's that problem of information. If you're not creating, then you get too distracted with everything that you're learning. But I'm taking a decision course right now by Shane Paris. Parish. It's the Fs blog. I don't know if you've heard of it.

He does an excellent job. He talks about thinking and mental models, and he has a really great course on decision making. So I'm going through that right now with our COO. One key takeaway there, I think for the audiences. Separate your problems from your solutions and define your problem first. So don't have a meeting where you're doing both have a meeting and get on the same page with your team about what the root problem is and then work on the solutions.

That that's one good takeaway from the first couple chapters of that. And then a book wise, I'm revisiting John Wooden's pyramid of success. I don't know if you've read it. But, yeah, all time. Great leader. What I, what I like about his philosophy is that he wouldn't even call himself a basketball coach.

You know, he was a teacher. And I think that is a lot of what leadership is. It's, it's guiding and teaching. And he focused on the, on, on the fundamentals, similar to my football story about, learning how to hang onto the ball and doing that over and over again. I think greatness comes through sometimes boring repetition.

So yeah, I'm revisiting John Wooden's pyramid of success and loving every bit of it. 

[00:40:33] Jon Blair: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that with us, Dean. Thanks for chatting. You know, DTC brand founders out there. Dean just gave us a laundry list of really solid leadership philosophies to consider as you're scaling your brand.

Don't forget once you get marketing figured out, leadership will become a constraint. So you need to be proactive on thinking through what leadership your brand needs as you start to scale. And you know, until next time thank you all for joining. Again, Free to Grow CFO podcast, talking all things growing and scaling a DTC brand.

We'll see you next week. Thanks,Jon