Change is accelerating and you need to design your organization to monitor change and adapt. Taylor Foxman, founder and CEO of The Industry Collective, joined to talk about the pace of change and the importance of being aware of change and being flexible.
Change is accelerating and you need to design your organization to monitor change and adapt.
We spoke with Taylor Foxman, founder and CEO of The Industry Collective, about the pace of change and the importance of being aware of change and being flexible.
Taylor is also Vice President of Communications and Experiences for Parallel, leading cannabis company, and an official member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council.
Watch the full session: https://bit.ly/3uxCZY1
Have feedback? Connect with Scott Case on LinkedIn
Visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions, watch past sessions, and see what topics are up next.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside, and I created Founders Focus to help share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by my awesome team at Upside. Please visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions or to catch up on past topics.
Scott Case 0:28
Let's do this thing. Taylor, now that you have demonstrated what it is like to provide yourself IT tech support in the middle of a pandemic, because there's nobody else to help you, you're completely on your own switching your WiFi, trying different things, plugging things in, unplugging them, turning them off, turning back on. That is what entrepreneurship is all about – being resilient and overcoming obstacles that are the most ridiculous and the most frustrating at times.
Taylor Foxman 0:59
Thanks so much, Scott. And mean, this is literally exactly it, you just figure it out as you go, right? But, yeah, nice to meet everyone. Thank you Scott and team for the opportunity.
Taylor Foxman 1:11
My name is Taylor Foxman. By day, I work in cannabis as vice president of a privately owned cannabis company. And then what I call by night, which I know probably some of the listeners call as well, call their things side hustles, full time jobs, part time jobs. By night, I am CEO and founder of a company called The Industry Collective, which is a global drink think tank of experts in the beverage sector, and then a lot of up and coming brands in the space as well.
Scott Case 1:44
Awesome. So you started this adventure at the beginning of the pandemic, which is a great demonstration of what I often tell entrepreneurs, which is there's never a good time to do anything – start a company, have a baby, get married, buy a house, go to college, get an extra degree. So every time is a good time. So how did you decide to get after it about a year ago? And what was your goal? How did you kind of make the leap?
Taylor Foxman 2:12
Yeah, I mean, for me, I love stability to be honest, I know that's a weird way to start this off. But I kind of always knew that I wanted to stay in beverage, but I wanted to professionally start thinking about how do I broaden what I'm doing. So by day I started working in cannabis, but even part of my contract when I started working for the company, I said, I think I'm going to dabble in doing some consulting in alcohol. So I knew I wasn't really ever going to get out of that space, but didn't know what that really met at that point.
Taylor Foxman 2:43
And as I had said to you, I know there isn't a perfect time to start something. But for those who are not familiar with my background, my husband just moved here from Europe for good this past summer, we've been doing long distance for almost four years, and he due to COVID had to stay in Germany for a longer amount of time, so that was hard. And then my mom was diagnosed with cancer at the same time. And that's when COVID started. So virtually worst time you could do something additional.
Taylor Foxman 3:18
And honestly, the timing thing, the reason that I started this when I did was really because for my day job, things were slowing down just a little bit because of COVID. Like it didn't feel right to do a lot in the cannabis space externally during that time, other than to provide patients with products. So given my role in the company, I was told to kind of just watch Netflix and hang out, and I'm sure you, Scott, wouldn't do that either. And I just kind of took it upon myself to take that time to think about, well, what do I want to do in alcohol? I've been in this space for 12 years on the corporate side. But what did I think was necessary? What was missing? And so yeah, it just kind of came about because that was a time when with my day job, things got a little bit slower, but then obviously, things have subsequently ramped up. And I just used that time to start ideating and really just from the beginning have spent most of my days between both of these jobs, obviously prioritizing my day job but yeah, from the beginning, it's just been like, figure out how to make it work while having a day job.
Scott Case 4:32
So what problem did you identify that launched The Industry Collective? Like what were you seeing in the market that wasn't being fulfilled? And then where are you in the development of the business?
Taylor Foxman 4:48
Yeah, so what I was seeing was two bigger opportunity areas. One was you have all these experts that work in the space. So you have bartenders, sommeliers and brewmasters, and the first kind of void I was trying to fill was they had no way to work together, there was no way for them to communicate, to come up with ideas, to collaborate, other than some of these pretty dusty and archaic conferences, right? Maybe two to three times throughout the year, which, quite frankly, you don't even really have the time at those conferences to network that much. So the first idea was, could I create a vehicle for these experts to be able to work together and get to know each other and have like a collective voice? And some of them were more well known than others. But it was just kind of the opportunity to raise the visibility of all of these experts, people of color, men, women, paraplegic, sommeliers, just really anyone that I felt had a really interesting expertise or story to share.
Taylor Foxman 5:53
And then on the other side of the coin, having worked for 70 wine, beer and spirit brands, I realized they don't really know a lot what they're doing when it comes to experts and developing things. So I kind of thought, Well, can we create a one stop shop, where brands can come to us with problems, whether they need new gin, new whiskey created, they need people to tell their story, they want someone to copyright for them and we can plug and play the right experts to work on the businesses. And that is what has transpired.
Taylor Foxman 6:30
In terms of where we're at, so virtually, we started with no clients. And we only really started getting our first clients in September of this past year. And we've brought on one new piece of business, one new client every single month since then. And I haven't spent $1 on this other than QuickBooks and I just hired someone to help me. I have not put any money towards marketing, towards advertising, towards PR. All of the business has been organic. It's been word of mouth. It's been people saying that they know that we can help these brands grow and scale. And so we have 40 experts, and we have nine brands, 10 brands and growing day by day. So it's really exciting.
Scott Case 7:21
That's awesome. Well, we have few questions. I want to dive into the juggle between the day job and the side hustle, so my first question is do both jobs know about each other?
Taylor Foxman 7:40
It's like you're dating people, right? I alluded to it a little bit earlier, but I did say when I signed to start at the company that I probably was going to do consulting in the space. So I keep everything church and state. So if you were here, I call it like my mastermind workshop, whatever I have, everything is separated. I have two phones. I have two computers. I even have two airpods. Everything is church and state.
Taylor Foxman 8:10
And in terms of the prioritization of time. I mean, I always prioritize my day job because it's my day job. I try to find opportunities to get on calls with clients as well as I use Clubhouse, we have a huge base on clubhouse. So we have 400 or 500 people in our club, I have 1,600 people that follow me. So I do things in the drink space during lunch, during after hours, I interview all of these CEOs and founders in the drink space. And I do that during times that are kosher. And that's when I do this. I do all this stuff at night, on the weekends. And now that we're expanding so quickly, as you know, Scott, it's really important to realize you can't do everything yourself. I know this has been a big struggle for me, so I hired actually the previous head of communications for discus, which is in the drink industry the only legal council, it's the Distilled Spirits Council of America, so they run all of the regulatory efforts for the entire industry based in DC. So now I have her so she's able to devote a lot of time that I can't to a lot of the more day to day business, so I'm very grateful for that.
Scott Case 9:28
I think your effort of really putting a box around the two businesses and keeping them physically isolated and logically isolated. It's two o'clock in the afternoon, you don't have a day job meeting, you get a call back from a client on the collective – do you take the call? Like do you integrate these things and that also means that if you got to work late some night to get a communications release out for your day job, do you do that? Like, is there some overlap where you give yourself some grace and flexibility to deal with the fact that we live in reality?
Taylor Foxman 10:07
This is a good point. Obviously, again, you know, you try to do things the right way, right. So I do try to keep my time management very church and state. However, as everyone who's probably listening knows, we're in a global pandemic, you work all the time, no matter what. So I am less focused on and I've always been, I've never really had a boss that like knows where I am and what I'm doing, I do my work and I get it done, and I've never been that way with people that I manage because at the end of the day, I don't really care what you're doing, I just want to make sure that you're devoted, you do your job, you do it in the timeframe is to which you're expected to do it. So for me, everything's kind of fluid. Because some days, like you said, Scott, there's going to be nights where I'm doing the biggest SPAC merger in cannabis history, and I'm working literally 24 hours. And then there are times when it may be slower for one business and busier for another. Quite frankly, I think most companies don't know what the hell their employees are doing remotely some of the time. I mean, as you know, a lot of these people have roles that have particular nine to five, and maybe three hours of the day they're not doing something, they may be watching TV or reading a book or taking care of their children. And so it's to me, it's not as much like, you know, where do I slot it in, it's more am I committed to what I'm doing. And I'm always very committed to parallel, to the job that I'm doing, and if there happens to be a moment in time, like, yeah, 100%
Scott Case 11:48
I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, and I'll use your side hustle as an example of an another thing that you're dedicated, committed to, whatever expectation wise, whether that can be family, that can be other projects or hobbies. And it's very hard to get to a place where you could measure balance, but it's definitely the case that you can integrate these things, but you have to look at the priorities as a whole, right? And so you have done that. You said, Look, this is my number one priority, whatever I got to do, I'm gonna drop everything else. But it doesn't mean that there isn't a number two and a number three that might emerge as number one in any given 15 minute period, which I think is a big deal for entrepreneurs to get used to that because it's in your case, it's a day job and your side hustle. But for other people, it may be, as you said, it's anything - yeah, I'm running my business and I have to do something else and those get interrupted.
Scott Case 12:44
I want to shift gears a little bit here. And we may have some time for some questions at the end. So you started this new business. Tell us about your current like business model and how it has been evolving? Because you're at that early stage where you started to get your first clients September, you're adding new clients, do they all look the same? Are the deals all the same? Because you're kind of doing something that doesn't really have a formula to it yet?
Taylor Foxman 13:21
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting, because as I said, there isn't really overhead. All the clients, I started this during COVID. So first, clients are based everywhere, haven't met most of them, which is crazy. And the experts, some of them I knew, so I'd met them pre COVID times, and others I just brought on board remotely.
Taylor Foxman 13:43
And then in terms of the way I work with the clients, and it's interesting, so I kind of put a framework into place. And I know that's kind of a bigger thematic of the conversation. I only will be doing rolling contracts. Now that doesn't mean that in those scopes of work with these companies that there isn't a formalized set of deliverables, expectations. But I just felt like the nature of business, forget about the business, any business right now, there has to be fluidity. Because without having that understanding of if you're a vendor, whatever the vendor may be, or a partner, you need them to understand that things change every hour of every day.
Taylor Foxman 14:26
And so this sweet spot that we found working with these brands that are more on the emerging side of the space, and I can talk about what they all look like and who they are and stuff if you want, but they very much appreciated that model. Because they have as entrepreneurs like you like myself, they have 1,000 things that they are looking to try to tackle, to try to do, to try to pay for, and so the whole business model is first rolling where we have obviously scopes of work, we have deliverables, we have contracts of what we're doing with these people, but shit comes up on your end, we're here, when you can take us back, we get it. It just kind of takes away the confines and the shackles of that like vendor of record concept. Because I always hated having to feel like I needed to keep spending $20,000 for this company or 40,000, because that was literally contractually bound to me. Whereas at the end of the day, if it comes out, like, Okay, look, they're gonna keep paying us if we're doing a good job and they like the work that we're doing. So keep it more fluid.
Taylor Foxman 15:36
I mean, granted, when you hire more people, you want there to be consistency. But there's even this mentality with the people that I'm bringing on, at a more senior level being like, Look, I'm balancing, I have my own company on the side, I have a baby, I want to do this. Everyone's kind of at that point where they all want that flexibility. So in terms of the model, we keep it open, we keep it rolling, we have phases of different things. But over time, if our services are needed, they're still part of our collective group, and we're there for them. But it's just, anyway, it's a different model. I'll stop for a second. But it's a different model than I think a lot of companies would have done pre COVID. But I'm sure there are companies during COVID that have taken that mentality, I would assume, in terms of billing and stuff like that.
Scott Case 16:24
I think you're right. I'm starting to see more and more service providers, particularly who want to have a long term relationship, but there's a recognition that the money doesn't have to flow necessarily as evenly throughout. So we've been talking to some folks about doing some work where it's like, Look, if we have to suspend this for three months, no problem, right, I'll come back when you're ready. And I think that what I was surprised by at the beginning of the pandemic was how many software as a service providers were unwilling to do things like that. We had a few, but I was like, we're in the travel industry, it went to near zero, right? And the ones that were flexible, our team, forget me as the CEO, but just our team who used those tools who need them, they got pretty unhappy with those companies that weren't willing to be flexible on those terms, and they really became power fans of those that were. Having nothing to do with any of us, but it was the reputation of it, particularly when you're serving clients that are either in a volatile market or in ones that are just early stage, right? The ability to stay in the customer relationship could be way more valuable for certain types of companies. And I think a lot of companies are a little short sighted there.
Scott Case 17:51
So flipping it around to your business, you often don't know that, in the case of your role, Taylor, you're contracting as the collective, but you also have a day job at a giant company. And guess what? If one of your partners or vendors treats you really well, chances are that could be a gateway into a whole nother opportunity that the person can't see. So I always encourage entrepreneurs to sort of think around that flexibility.
Scott Case 18:18
One of the questions that came up around your model is, and this is probably different for different types of businesses, but to bring on a new client, do you have any onboarding costs or setup costs that that you need to incur to bring them on? And do you pass those along to the client, just to make sure that you're made a whole at least on getting the client up the curve?
Taylor Foxman 18:44
No, no cost. I mean, in terms of like how we scope things out, we don't need to get into like actually what the scopes are. Currently, we provide different services in the liquor space to all these brands, we have a rolling contract, and then how it works is we have a monthly fee. And it's based on the project, based on the need case, and that is it. I am also of the mind frame having come from in-house, having come from agencies, you can bring someone in and say let's say, Scott, you need a social media company, whatever, and you're like, Okay, this is in my budget, I can afford this for this amount, and then all of a sudden you get a bill on top of your monthly bill and that's double. So it's the same amount of money that you were going to spend on that agency, but that's just in fees, in additional billable hours. I just I hate that because, again, it's back to well, we put in hours, well what did I get from those hours, you know what I mean? And so again, I'm scaling up the business, so every client we bring on, we've asked for more money, because we're continuing to show our worth and our value and our roster.
Taylor Foxman 20:09
But also like, it's also that sense of transparency, I think is just huge. I know that's like the buzzword of COVID. But again, like being an entrepreneur, most of the companies we work with, by the way, are not at the beginning of the business model at all. I come in for companies that are starting from the beginning and help on advisory level. The companies we work with are like 5, 10 years into their businesses. But a lot of them are at that inflection point where they're looking to raise more money next year or now, or they're looking to get acquired by one of the bigger guys, or they're looking to bring on more human capital, like there's something in their model that they're willing to bring me in. And they also have to be still very cognizant of spend. And so the model itself, the rolling model, and then also saying, I am not charging you a dime. You know what I say? Sometimes I go out to meals, with people, partner, potential partners, people, social media, media, journalists, I'll bill you for that. And I usually go out to about two meals a month, and they're about this much money, and you will get an invoice for that. I mean, I'm literally down to that level, but you know what, these companies can't get blindsided. They just can't, and they can't afford it. And quite frankly, you're ruining a relationship. So for me, it's not that I can't charge more, it's not that I can't be more contractually bound to these companies. I guess to your point about flipping things, I'm just flipping it and looking at it from their perspective versus from mine.
Scott Case 21:43
Look, I think that's huge. And I think it's a big difference between long term partnerships that are successful, and you're managing expectations, hey, I'm going to go to two of these meals, I'm going to pass it through to you then they know in advance that that's a thing.
Scott Case 21:57
You know, you're in an industry. And you talked about these emerging brands. And it's always funny to me, because, we think of things as overnight successes, and they're usually five to 10 years in the making. And that's true for most businesses and most products. But you're in an industry that has some very, very large players that are, you know they're giants in the industry, and they've even consolidated, so you've got even bigger players that are there on the production side. And then you've got this weird three tier system where you've got huge distributors that can sort of control the lock. And then you've got all these smaller players that are trying to basically squeeze their way through the little gap. But a lot of that is changing now. The pandemic accelerates and things. Can you talk a little bit about the tension between really the legacy business and then the disruptors that are starting to create new space?
Taylor Foxman 22:55
Yeah. I love the question. We did a huge panel last night on Clubhouse around the future of e-commerce in beverage alcohol, and you had the big players, you've had the craft guys. It's this David and Goliath situation. I came from the side, and I love these people, but you got to look at it, there are over 14,000 craft brands in the US, if not even more, I may even have undershot that. But point is to say even if I'm under shooting it, 14,000 is a lot of craft brands. And up until now, there were a few problems. One is the people like Diageo, or let's use a singular brand, a Tito's. In terms of leading innovation, in terms of driving conversation and trends, that was through these big guys and gals. Why? Because they have the money, they have the power, they have the clout, right?
Taylor Foxman 23:54
On the distribution side, I won't get into the whole thing. But for the listeners that aren't as familiar with how it works, virtually as a distributor of spirits in particular, you can't sell directly to consumer, which sounds crazy, but you can't. So as a result of that, you have these distributors that distribute your product directly to consumer. So technically, all these businesses are kind of B2B, because they can't sell to consumers, so that's crazy. So anyway, here's what happened.
Taylor Foxman 24:23
Over the last year, to your point, Scott, the whole system just got ruffled. Because first, I work for a lot of CEOs that run ecommerce platforms that now say to these craft brands, Hey you 14,000 brands, you can come to us, you can actually sell your products online through our platform and keep more of the cut and directly sell to consumer. So then the smaller guys are like, well, I'm never gonna be at the top of conversation for some of these bigger distributors, why wouldn't I do that? It doesn't make sense not to do that. And the other part of it too is that in terms of how many distributors, there are three or four that own that space. We're not talking about 200. And out of the 4, 90 percent of this distribution in the United States is owned by two companies, which is quite a jarring statistic.
Taylor Foxman 25:17
So now, when you're talking about like, where the trends are in this space, and I see this with food too, by the way, a lot of food up and coming disruptors, the trends are coming from these types of brands that are innovating, that are bringing in diverse leadership, that are coming out with cool products, that don't have to wait 500 years to launch a rose, they can do it tomorrow. And I think not only are now like trends being launched by these people and conversations – through the collective, a lot of these things are happening too, like these leaders are now getting out there and leading conversations around e-commerce, innovation, r&d, diversity and inclusion. They would never have had that platform until now. And now they can not only have that voice, lead the discussion, but then also sell directly to their consumers. So you can see how excited I get because it was such an antiquated model and I think COVID, I think the time was right, I think companies like mine I'm hoping are helping to give these brands and these small entrepreneurs opportunities that they've never had before.
Scott Case 26:33
Look, the internet itself, one of its greatest assets was a democratization of access to both information, but also to communications. And we're going to continue to see innovation. What's been surprising to me is, we've had about 10 years of disruption happen in about a year across every industry, and those legacy industries that were probably a decade away from being really disruptive are suddenly finding themselves on their heels because it's changed.
Scott Case 27:04
We've got about five minutes and I want to dive in on a few things that we haven't gotten to that that came up in questions here. So one is you mentioned Clubhouse. The core question is - clubhouse and other social media as you've been getting The Industry Collective off the ground, you said you didn't spend a dollar, has that played a really important role and what do you think that it has delivered for you? And you can talk specifically about Clubhouse or anything else you think is important.
Taylor Foxman 27:35
Yeah, Clubhouse is it. Look, it has changed my life. I mean, outside of my business, I will literally give you one case study to tell you just how impactful that platform was. To answer your question on the other channel, I mean, I have all of the Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and it's fine, I'll use them, I got the domains, we're pushing stuff out. But to me, this is my perspective, it hasn't moved the needle. I haven't had the time, so maybe as I have more time, you know, you got to think about it. If you want to spend money to invest in advertising spend, it's up to you.
Taylor Foxman 28:11
As a result of Clubhouse, I'm spending no money on Clubhouse. I'm just getting on there when I can plug in my airpods. Every time, because now I'm someone that can speak on behalf of this industry, I'm pulled on the stage daily, throughout the day, then people follow you on the platform. And so you get followers, right? I have brands that hear me talk about something, they hear I'm in Miami, they then contact me and say a driver is coming to your house to drop off tequila sodas that I created in a can, I'm a founder of a company so that you could try it before 6pm and enjoy it for the weekend. I'm having founders across the board literally pitch me their business and want to give me their money because they hear me on this platform. It is literally changed, and for this industry in particular, as we just said, you have so many people that need help, that don't know how to do these things, so when they hear I'm there, they contact me, leave me audio messages, calling me, dropping off products. So just yes, the power of Clubhouse for me is immensely real and for extremely little amount of time. You know, I pop on and I pop off for not a lot of time, for literally no money. And I see a question in the chat – It's an app. It's an invite only app, so, Scott, I have 16 invites if anyone that's listening in wants to be on the platform, I can give them to you and you can give them to the audience. But I've acquired handfuls of these. So if anyone who's listening wants to get an invite to clubhouse, I'm happy to share one.
Scott Case 29:53
It is currently highly limited and the exclusivity of it is both part of its charm and part of a giant problem. But I think that will emerge. They've obviously raised a lot of capital and they're pushing. Right now they're only available on iPhone.
Scott Case 30:09
I want to move past clubhouse to another question that we got along the way. I think somebody was looking at your bio. Can you tell us a little bit about chief?
Taylor Foxman 30:19
Yeah, Chief, I'm involved in a few. like I'm on a nonprofit board for female empowerment. So I work for an organization called step up, which helps mentor young girls in low income cities to become female leaders. And then I'm also part of Chief which is an invite only group for women executives. If you are looking for women, networking opportunities and opportunities to like grow your leadership skills, it's cool. They have a clubhouse in various cities, obviously, because of COVID, I haven't been to any of them yet. But what I would say in summary, it's an investment, but if people are looking to maybe move up the ladder as a female leader, or they're looking to liaise and network with more women that are executives, it's something to consider, for sure.
Scott Case 31:19
Awesome. We have a couple of other sort of speed, speed round.
Scott Case 31:32
I don't know what you call them, not the brands but your experts, your experts. So is it everybody - a general manager, is it chefs, is it back of the house, is it front of the house, who are the primary people there? So that's a quick one.
Taylor Foxman 31:49
Got it. Experts are mostly in the bev-alc space. So they're bartenders. They're mixologists. They're sommeliers, they're influencers, I hate that word, but influencers who like have big social media followings, their editors who cover it, it's virtually anyone that touches the sector that is an autonomous expert, doesn't work for any bigger conglomerate and can take on projects.
Scott Case 32:13
Got it.
Scott Case 32:14
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Founders Focus. What did you think? You got any feedback for us? Got a topic that you'd like us to discuss, or maybe a future co host? We'd love to hear from you. Just hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case. And join us at foundersfocus.com to stay up to date with the latest episodes and join us live every week at our Founders Focus sessions. Hope to see you there.