Faces of Marketing podcast: Joth Ricci, President of Dutch Bros.

Beverage industry prodigy Joth Ricci is President of Dutch Bros., co-founder of TASTE: United for Equity, and godfather of cold brew when he was CEO of Stumptown Coffee, to name a few of his many hats. Though the road has not always been easy going, in the face of such challenges as a dramatic downturn from day one of his role heading Jones soda, Joth takes it all with positivity, perspective, and the mindset that we learn the most in difficult times.

From an active childhood spent embracing the outdoors and small town life, Joth entered college in his hometown of Corvallis. He graduated with visions of teaching and coaching basketball, but landed in business and quickly flourished. Now, he sees companies as classrooms, where he has the opportunity to teach others and go together towards improvement and people-centered success.

Tune into this podcast interview between Joth and me on the Soundcloud audio file above, or on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or most other podcast players.

Transcript:

Ryan: Hey there, welcome to the Faces of Marketing podcast, where we talk about the human stories and lives of different people and perspectives in the marketing profession and entrepreneurs and movement makers. This is your host, Ryan Buchanan, and I’m here with my good friend Joth Ricci who is president of Dutch Bros coffee. Welcome to the show, Joth.

Joth: Thank you, Ryan. I’m honored to be here.

Ryan: Awesome. Awesome. So just to give the audience a little bit of context, Joth and I met four years ago in the summer of 2015, when we were both brought together on this kind of CEO adventure race weekend, in the middle of nowhere in Antelope, Oregon on 66,000 acres of what used to be the Rajneeshee compound, and we were racing in these games there. That was super connecting, and now we get to go on all kinds of different journeys in this conversation.

Ryan: So we’re going to dive right in. So right now, you’re president of Dutch Bros. You’ve got 10,000 employees across seven western states. You’ve got this incredible culture that’s built on Dutch love and generosity and there’s Harvard business case studies and all this stuff written on Dutch Bros, which is this really, really cool brand. But I remember a couple of years ago, you shared with me this notion that it might’ve all been different, and you were super passionate about coaching and potentially being either maybe a small college basketball coach or — there’s some story that I never got the full bit in, but it’s like the movie Run, Lola Run, or something; Like if you took a side door, this might’ve happened. So I want to go out of chronological order, but understand a little bit of that story.

Joth: Yeah. So let’s go back to the spring of 1991. I had just graduated, during the middle of my fifth year at Oregon State. And my degree actually is in education.

Ryan: Okay.

Joth: And I had this accounting teacher in high school who was also the head girls’ varsity basketball coach. And I just remember, I just wanted to be him. I wanted that life. I wanted to coach basketball. And so I spent really, all through college, I coached high school basketball and was an aspiring coach, did a lot of camps; and so coming out of school, I was really looking for high school coaching jobs that had a business teaching element to it so that I can teach personal finance and typing and things like that during the day. And then I was going to coach hoops, so, as the world would have it, in a shorter version of the story, I actually interviewed for the JV boys’ basketball job at Sandy High School.

Ryan: Okay.

Joth: And didn’t get it. Got turned down for the job, and was number two. But the person they hired was from Sweet Home High School, and so I went down and met with the Sweet Home High School people and they offered me the head girls’ varsity job, and they happened to have a business teaching position available as well. And so I was all set. [In coaching] you have to start kind of at the bottom and work your way up. So that’s what I was ready to do. And at the same time I was doing every odd job known to the world: at a food broker, in Portland and —

Ryan: To make money?

Joth: To make money. And, actually my girlfriend’s mom at the time worked for the place. And so I was taking out the trash, I was changing light bulbs, I was doing resets in grocery stores. I was learning a lot. And I did a special project for a woman who had just left McNeil Consumer Products, which was the largest division of Johnson & Johnson at the time. And she said, “hey, there’s an entry-level sales position open in Seattle. I think they already have it filled, but I can get you an interview with a great experience for teaching.” Long story short, I went for the interview for the free breakfast, had no money and ended up getting offered the job. So I had this job offer to be an entry-level sales rep at Johnson & Johnson or be the full-time business teacher and girls’ basketball coach at Sweet Home High School.

Ryan: Didn’t you already accept the teacher one?

Joth: I had not accepted yet.

Ryan: Oh, okay.

Joth: So these two worlds kind of came together at the same time. So I actually called the basketball coach at Creston Valley High School who had been my mentor.

Ryan: And that’s where you went.

Joth: I went to high school there and grew up there. And I said, “you know, I’ve got these two offers.” Like, I was a kid from Corvallis. I’d never really traveled much. I hadn’t been out. And, he basically said, take the J&J job because you can always come back and teach. But if you don’t take that job, you’ll always wonder what would have happened. And he was right.

Ryan: But in your business life — and you’ve gone on to be CO of Stumptown and Adelsheim and now Dutch Bros and few others in between. When you watch basketball games, do you watch like the pregame or the post-game of how the coach analyzes it? I mean, you’re still passionate about watching coaches and how they lead, is that right?

Joth: Absolutely. And what’s interesting about that is, is that I actually never stopped coaching. One of the ways I was able to fulfill my lifetime dream of being a coach is, I have coached, at some level of basketball, since1988. And even through my professional career, my side-gig has always been as a basketball coach.

Ryan: For your kids’ teams, or?

Joth: Kids teams, not kids teams; I’ve coached Special Olympics… I’ve always been around the basketball court. I guess my side hobby would be I still study the game. I love the game. I love to watch the game. I love to watch really good leaders in the sport, like Coach K, and I think John Wooden’s probably one of my longtime heroes for how he did things. So I’m still very much a part of it and have that. I had to figure out a way to fulfill that or also would not have been fulfilled as a person if I wasn’t able to have that as part of my life.

Ryan: That’s super cool. I knew there was a bigger story there, but that’s awesome. Cool. So, now we’re going to go back to back to our regular programming. Just talk about how you grew up. You grew up in Corvallis. What was the relationship with your folks like? You have siblings? What did you do as a kid?

Joth: Yeah. So, first of all, growing up in Corvallis was awesome. I mean, it was just a magical place. It was a great small town environment where you could ride your bike everywhere and kind of do everything. I felt like we were always active, always doing something, even from the time I can remember, being like in first and second grade. I just remember being always around town and riding our bikes and just having fun and just playing Just remember all that during that time.

Joth: When I was born, both of my parents were still in college at Oregon State. That never really hit off very well. So, they were divorced by the time I was nine, and so kind of had this rough first period of time where you really weren’t sure, lived in a bunch of different locations along the way, I had a younger brother that was born, he’s four years younger than I am. So we just kinda got through. Had a single mom and we all kind of had to rally together and just kind of grow up during that time. So that’s the 70s and 80s in Corvallis.

Ryan: Was she working too, or?

Joth: So both of my parents actually were schoolteachers.

Ryan: Okay.

Joth: And then Hewlett Packard, in the mid-70s put their inkjet plants in Corvallis. And my mom was probably [one of] the first 10 employees as part of that plant in Corvallis. And she ended up basically working there for the better part of the next 30 years.

Ryan: Wow.

Joth: And then retired from Hewlett Packard. So it’s a great opportunity. She’s a great kind of small-town story, that, when school teacher just took a job, got a job at Hewlett Packard, and was able to ride that out and provide great for our family. She was always there for us. And then she remarried when I was in the sixth grade, and we had a great family unit. And being in Corvallis you were close to the ocean, you’re close to the mountains. So we camped a lot. We water skiied, we snow skiied, we kind of did a little bit everything.

Ryan: And is your brother as into sports? So you played basketball; did you play baseball as well?

Joth: I played baseball, basketball and football. When I was in high school I just played basketball and baseball, and then played a lot of golf in the off-season. My grandfather was around quite a bit and he was a big golfer. And so we played a lot of golf together, as a kid. But if it was round and it could roll, I was doing it.

Ryan: And what about your brother?

Joth: My brother was not as athletic, and he was [into] soccer. It’s funny; if I was, I was basketball, baseball, he was more soccer and wrestling. Those are the things he did. We were both just really active. And again, my mom was big into the outdoors, so we did a lot of camping, lot of fishing with my grandfather. We were outside constantly. I think we were always on the boat.

Ryan: So you told the story of going to Seattle for J&J because you got the advice from your high school coach to get out of this small town basically. But the way that I see you now is this, like global citizen travels all over the world, takes your family everywhere, but you really didn’t leave Corvallis until you graduated from college.

Joth: Yeah. When I was 22 — so I lived in Corvallis all the way through college — and I had never been east of, really, probably Bend (Oregon), at the end of the day, and I’d been to California a couple of times. We did one family vacation to Hawaii when I was 16. I had been to Seattle a couple times, but outside of that, I really hadn’t ever traveled. So, we lived a pretty kind of low-key, small town life. We didn’t have a lot of money. So you were really reliant on the camper and the boat and the tent, and those really were your vacations. The opportunity that I get to have now, and then my wife and I get to provide for our kids, is something that I think my mom would have always wanted. It’s a privilege, it’s very much a privilege, and we’re honored to be able to provide that for our kids and do something that that really provides these great experiences. And my mom to this day is so excited when we get to go do those things, because I think she sees it as a way for us to provide something for them that she wasn’t able to do.

Ryan: That’s cool. Okay, so you’re playing all these sports. Did you mainly just hang out with the jocks or were you in lots of different crowds?

Joth: In high school I was the different crowd guy. I think my senior year I was voted friendliest or something like that in my senior class. So I like to think that I was able to connect with everybody. I never like to see people get excluded, but also have this ability to kind of weave in and out of it. In those days, you had the stoner group — if you go back to the movies from the 80s — if you see all the groups, like that’s definitely [it] — where there was the jocks or the loners or the stoners or whatever. I felt like I could weave in and out of all of those. And I think one of the surprising moments for me in high school was that we did an air guitar contest and I was asked actually by, what we could call the stoner group — I was asked by the stoner group to be part of their band, and we did Turn Up the Radio, and it was this big rock presentation that we did in school, and I think it shocked everybody that I was in the middle of those guys.

Ryan: Because you’re pretty conservative in how you act — you kind of have liberal politics but you’re like a democratic version of Alex P Keaton, like came out of the womb with a briefcase in your hand. But yeah. So you broke the mold mold.

Joth: Yeah, I always was that way. I was friends with anybody.

Ryan: That’s cool. Yeah. So, you go to Oregon State and having both parents there, and then now both of your kids go there, you’re huge alumni and all of that. But whether it’s high school or college, what was that big challenge like? Was it kind of scary to leave the nest and go to college even though it was close by, or was there something else going on personally or in your life at that time that was kind of challenging?

Joth: Yeah, so I grew up in Corvallis, but my dad moved up here in the late 70s, and so I spent a lot of time in Portland kind of going back and forth. And so while I grew up in Corvallis, I did have a lot of experience in the big city at the time, which was Portland. And I think one of the challenges during that time was navigating the Corvallis scene and the Portland scene and kind of doing all that. And then I actually met my wife in 88 and she was going to U of O, so I spent a lot of time in Eugene as well, and she was from up here. So there was a lot of kind of navigating around. But I think that probably from a challenging standpoint for me, especially during school, is that I actually wasn’t a great student. In fact, I was a terrible student. My first two years at Oregon State, I survived with just a little over a 2.0 GPA. I just was not a good student.

Ryan: Were you on double secret probation?

Joth: I was; on one term I think I had a one eight that balanced out a two two and then two four, and it was a little dicey there for awhile. Like, should I stay…?

Ryan: Because you are socializing, or you were distracted with girlfriend and…?

Joth: Probably distraction. Probably socializing, probably a little bit too much of it was good time. But then also I think I was overthinking everything. Like I wasn’t a good multiple choice test taker and I really wasn’t sure what I was trying to do. Actually started school with a hotel, restaurant, tourism management. I thought that that sounded like fun and then figured out that wasn’t going to be a great life. And then with the business and just kinda had to figure out my way. And then once I got to education, I four pointed the last two years of school, so I had a rough couple of first years and then salvaged it in the last couple of years.

Ryan: Yeah. My thing, it’s funny, I was trying so hard to be different than my parents that I studied environmental science. I thought I wanted to raise chickens and be off the grid and be like, so not part of society. And then I took one business class and I’m like, “oh, I’m kinda good at this and this is not that evil.” Like I just had this whole construct in my head of how evil business people were, and then I’m like, “okay, I kind of like this. I’m gonna…”

Joth: It doesn’t have to be that way.

Ryan: Yeah. So, when you and I first met you told some stories of coming into this kind of iconic brand Jones soda and there was some crazy stuff going on there, but they had some — not everybody’s heard of them, but they had flavors for their soda, like a mashed potatoes and gravy, and like all they kind of started long before Salt and Straw. They started with some crazy branding stuff. I don’t necessarily want to go through your whole Linkedin profile of your journey of like, J&J, and then this, and then that. But was that the first time that you came into something a little chaotic and messy, when you came into Jones soda at a pretty executive level? Or had you been doing some executive consulting and stuff like that before? Like how did that happen that you ended up becoming CEO of Jones Soda? But I felt like that was like a pretty pivotal thing where you got a ton of leadership experience, like under the gun.

Joth: Yeah, it was crazy. I think that through my career leading up to Jones, most of the jobs that I ended up having a Johnson & Johnson, I had been asked to do something that had never been done before. Either start a new position, try something different, do a job from a different location. So I was getting used to this idea of come in and develop something, create something, be kind of this test driver for where we were going. And I had a lot of really great experience there. And when I decided to move home in 2000, from Philadelphia, I went to work at Columbia distributing again under the guise of kind of almost like professional management. So Columbia was this big company that was still being run like a family business and needed to just professionalize around every corner.

Ryan: So beverages, alcohol, yeah.

Joth: So big alcohol, but big business and just needed change. So I kind of went in and kind of had my influence across most of that business and also the supplier community. I was getting a really good reputation amongst suppliers of like, “here’s this guy in Portland doing something different than basically anybody else in the country. Have you seen what he’s been doing?” And so the Jones soda people called, and if you’re not familiar with Jones, in really in the decade of the 2000s, Jones soda was kind of the hot beverage brand. It had created these flavors, it really came in with a flavor system that was new and different for everybody, where lead flavors were like green apple and blue bubble gum. And then we started to create even more funky flavors.

Joth: It was famous for its Thanksgiving lineup, which is turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, you know, name the bad flavor and it basically existed… So the biggest news were the flavors that were the worst things for rank, but it created the most buzz for the brand. Well, at the time Jones was also publicly traded on Nasdaq…

Ryan: That was kind of weird because it was a small company to be publicly traded.

Joth: Yeah, very small. It’s a great lesson in: when do you do an IPO, and why, and can you afford it. And in today’s world, Jones would’ve never been able to afford a public offering. The cost alone of being public just would sink the company. But Jones was hot and it was kind of the place that you wanted to be. I mean, it was really like this hot brand. They were taking cans to Walmart. They had taken Coke out of Alaska Airlines and you could only get Jones on Alaska Airlines. We had replaced Coke at Seahawk stadium where it was the first major league sports arena, not to have Coke or Pepsi. It had Jones soda.

Ryan: Based in Seattle?

Joth: Based in Seattle. The founder had been from Vancouver and, in a funny story, he had known two things. One is it he had to create a simple name. So these are going to be Jones or Smith. And the second thing is that he moved his company from Vancouver, BC to Seattle because he knew the only way that they would become big in the United States they had to be a US company or else they’d never be taken seriously.

Joth: So it’s ’07 and I get a phone call from the founder and he says, “Hey, I’ve been watching what you’ve done at Columbia. Would you come do that for me?” And so I kinda knew enough of the story and I said, well…

Ryan: As CFO or CEO?

Joth: He wanted me to come in and be COO, chief operating officer with the transition plan to take over as CEO because he was going to step down because the business had really got beyond his ability to really run it. And fast forward: so, publicly traded; when I get in there, the day I get hired, the board had fired the founder, and he was this beloved founder, but had made quite a few mistakes along the way in kind of navigating some financial things. There was a shareholder lawsuit on the company. The founder had been fired.

Ryan: This is day one? Wow.

Joth: Day one. I walk in, Cramer had gotten on the stock about a year prior to that and it ran the stock to about $32 a share. It was an $850 million market cap, unaccompanied. They hadn’t done more than 40 million in sales. And so fast forward, it’s November of ’08, the markets crashed, our stock is at 27 cents. And one of the biggest challenges through that time — it’s one of those things, like you learn the most during difficult times — and the crash of that stock from 32 bucks, 27 cents. And dealing with having to explain that to employees, who were really kind of thinking they were going to make a lot of money on this program, to investors, to analysts who had missed why the stock was going to move that way, to customers who have bought into the founder’s story and supported Jones in a big way. But then we had to walk away from things because we couldn’t afford it… and there’s story after story.

Ryan: Yeah, I think you know my story of when I was undergoing such extreme stress from a near business death experience. It literally manifested in my own health, of like tasting iron in the back of my throat for two weeks, and that is the last sign before you have a heart attack, in my thirties — which fortunately it didn’t happen, but — there had to be so much stress that it had to manifest in certain ways in your life. Did you just compartmentalize it? Like how did that affect you?

Joth: No, I think most of the time I was so focused on everybody else that I probably wasn’t even worried about myself and didn’t really realize — I mean, I don’t think I realized what I was going through until a year or two after I left, did I really understand the magnitude of what I had been through. And, so my whole thing was try to stay positive, get through the tough times. And there was story after story after story in that two and a half year period, that take you from Kyoto to Bentonville, Arkansas to, I mean, you name the place — to downtown New York — and really kind of took you through hard times. And I broke once. I broke after a very difficult phone call with one of our board members yelling. My entire board left basically.

Ryan: I’m sure a ton of employees left too.

Joth: Well, we laid off. We had to lay off about 80% of the company during that time. But, I had been through so much, I finally broke down. One of the few adult times of my life that I just broke and just lost it was in one point after a phone call with a board member, and I just didn’t know what to do. I mean, I was so broke. I never let anybody see it. I never shared it.

Ryan: Broken. And maybe broke too. Maybe more broken than broke.

Joth: Broke in lot of ways. But the cool part was, is that two and a half years later, probably a year after I had left, I’m speaking at an event down in Miami a guy waits in the audience. Probably a thousand people in the audience. Guy waits to the end. He comes up to me and we started talking, and he hands me his card. He says, “I want to write your book.” And I said, “excuse me?” He goes, “I followed every move you made at Jones.”

Ryan: Because you’re public. So all of this is transparent and visible. It’s like glass underwear.

Joth: And we were hot. So when I reported my first earnings loss, we were covered in the Wall Street Journal. I mean, it was a big deal. We’re the number one loser on Wall Street the next day. It’s fantastic.

Ryan: You have a trophy for that?

Joth: I think I still have the paper around somewhere, but, he looked at me and just said, “listen; I followed every move, and nobody can teach you in business school what you had to go through.” And he’s like, “if you ever want to write the book, here’s my card.” He goes, “I think that young management everywhere deserves to hear the story.” And I said, “I appreciate that.” I said, “I have no interest in reliving that right now. Maybe someday we’ll do that.”

Ryan: Yeah, its trauma.

Joth: As you know, you went through it, and going through it on a public sector was just… the eyeballs that are on it, and the intensity that’s on it, and then unwinded commitments that had been made because the company was never going to be able to afford those things, was really challenging. I mean, going to Japan and sitting in the Mitsubishi Tower and telling people…

Ryan: They were an investor?

Joth: We had an ingredients contract that we were trying to unwind our way out because we were never going to be able to fulfill it financially. But going there and telling them that we’re going to have to walk away from this deal, that’s not good business practice in Japan and they didn’t really appreciate that.

Ryan: It’s not good business practice anywhere, but yeah, you had to survive.

Joth: Of all the time in my career and all the great things that I’ve had the opportunity to do, that was one that I look back on and say, you know, it was the hardest. It was hardest on me and my family. It was the hardest on me personally, but it was one that a lot of who I am today came out of the experiences that I had at Jones.

Ryan: All right, so let’s get out of trauma and into this whole notion of coffee, somehow. I think you got introduced through some private equity folks to come in and take the helm at Stumptown coffee. And you got, I don’t know if it’s the official or unofficial title, of the godfather of cold brew. A lot of really hopped up people — cause it’s like three times more caffeine than normal coffee, right? Yeah. But not that Jones was like a sad story and Stumptown was this like really happy story — way oversimplifying, but that had some really good outcomes to it. Describe your journey at Stumptown, because now, you’re kind of being seen as like the coffee guy a little bit. So what was Stumptown like, and since this is a marketing podcast, how you walked into a brand that was already a premium brand, very different from the crazy flavor, crazy brand, good but just like off the wall, to like super premium, almost elitist about how to pour the perfect coffee and all that stuff. What was that journey like?

Joth: So first to finish the Jones soda chapter, I think that one thing I’m very proud of is that they’re still in business today and they’re actually doing some really good things. And I think the work that we did at Jones on that brand, on the positioning of that brand for the long term and stabilizing it, while it’s much smaller than it was when we were there, I think it’s a better business today because of the work that we did during that.

Ryan: Cool.

Joth: My Stumptown experience was amazing and honestly, even though I was from Portland, I didn’t know that much about Stumptown coffee. It wasn’t on my radar. It’s a thing that I knew of.

Ryan: Die-hard following.

Joth: Die hard. Because of my Jones experience, I was sitting on another company board, with Steve Smith, the tea maker. And so Steve and I got to know each other very well and Steve knew the Stumptown team really well. Dwayne and Matt Lounsbury and that crew. And so Stumptown had this thing called cold brew that they were making. It was a toddy and they were making it in plastic buckets, in the back of their locations here in Portland. And then there were also hand-filling these these stubby bottles. And Dwayne was a big fan of Olympia brewing. And so he took the old, old way bottle, basically got his hands on the mold and bought their first few palettes from Full Sail. So the original Stumptown cold brew bottles were actually sessions bottles, from Full Sail, because they didn’t have enough capacity. They weren’t filling enough of what they had bought, so they’d loan some.

Joth: So, they were trying to figure out what to do with cold brew. They didn’t really know what to do. And so Steve said, I know the guy who can help you figure it out. And so he introduced me to Dwayne and Matt, as just, “hey, meet Joth. If anybody can help you figure out what to do with cold brew, Joth can figure it out.” And so myself and a business partner in mind, we basically went to Stumptown and wrote the business plan for cold brew. How do you scale it? How do you make money with it? What price points it needed to be, why the market was open for a super premium beverage? We really canvas all of the cold coffee market, and looked at retail, saw where Frappuccino was sitting and what it was doing, but what it wasn’t doing.

Joth: And what we found was that there was this massive void in super premium space, for what I thought, ready-to-drink coffee. So we presented this to the Stumptown team and the TSG who was a private equity investor. And long story short, I ended up becoming CEO of that company about six months later. And it wasn’t even really to realize the dream that could be cold brew. It was actually to get in there and figure out the business and figure out what it looked like: great brand, but kind of like this great brand that was afraid of what it didn’t know.

Ryan: It’s kind of purist. And you brought your business lens to it.

Joth: Very much that way. And so, what I really help the team understand was like, how do you expand beyond the things that you’re really good at and know that it’s okay for the brand? And so how do we pick the expansion of this business, but do it intentionally so that all the dots still connect back to the Barista that does the pour over at Stumptown downtown for example, or at the original location on Division? It has to go all the way back to that Barista experience. But how do we scale the brand so that it’s allowed to be in more homes, be available to more people. We kind of had the “screw the man” mentality, so we had to kind of overcome, that the man wasn’t bad, if you did it the right way and it was a way for us to scale the brand.

Ryan: So you kind of went from rebel brand to rebel brand, and now you’re at a loving brand.

Joth: With Dutch? Yeah. I’m a beverage guy. I don’t know that I’m necessarily a coffee guy. I think coffee is one of the things that I do. What was great about Stumptown is actually met the Dutch Bros people during that time. And we connected, very like-mindedness. And our connection is that we’re there to serve people. And in the coffee business, you’re very much about customer service. For a lot of people to go into a coffee shop, it’s the best part of their day. They’re going in to get their day started, the smile on their face.

Ryan: This is hearkening back to your hospitality major, all that.

Joth: And just the fact that I like people, like lots of different people. So from taking it from Stumptown to the cold brew thing, which was magic, and it built fast and it took across the country, and we did some amazing work on expanding that business, and introducing Nitro cans and in different flavors and what you could do with cold brew… To fast forward, one of the links to Dutch Bros is, not only our great culture and our people, which is very different from Stumptown, it’s very much the same but very different. But it’s also about innovation and it’s also about leading and giving something to the customer that they didn’t know that they could have. And so at Stumptown we were doing that on a limited basis, at Dutch Bros, we do that on an expanded basis where we say that we have over 100,000 different combination of drinks that we can provide to a customer.

Joth: So, it really isn’t just about coffee. I think coffee’s the link between all of those. And the coffee business is actually fascinating unto itself, of this global product that’s only made 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the equator. But from a supply chain standpoint, it grows and has different harvest time throughout the year in different parts of the world, which is why coffee can sustain itself throughout the year and not rely on one crop. And it’s this fascinating agriculture that happens out there. But at Dutch Bros, we’ve really gone beyond coffee. I mean, when we say coffee on our name, and we’re really about — we do tea, we do lemonade, we do energy drinks, we do different flavor systems. We can make just about anything.

Ryan: So what are you going to be godfather of next? It’s not about that.

Joth: For me, I like going in to — I don’t know if it’s upgrade or if it’s to get people to think differently. But at the end of the day, now I look at my companies like a classroom. I treat the Dutch Bros situation today —

Ryan: Not a basketball team, but a classroom.

Joth: It’s a classroom. And I think that in every company you have different learners. You have people that run at different paces. It’s no different than being in a classroom of 30 kids that all have different levels of learning and come from different backgrounds and come from maybe different socioeconomic situations. Like when I walk into Dutch Bros, I see it as a way of like, okay, so how do I make this work better? The company’s not broken, but how do I improve it?

Joth: How do I teach people things? And whether I was at Jones or Stumptown or Adelsheim or anywhere in between, you only know the things that you’ve been exposed to. And I’m lucky enough that I’ve worked for basically nine different companies and had 17 different jobs to be able to bring some experience to people and teach them how to improve on what they do. And in all the businesses I’ve been asked to go into, I’ve never intentionally terminated anybody. I brought all their new people. All the new people have inherited, I’ve brought along for the ride and tried to teach them along the way. And so that’s from a leadership standpoint, I think that’s been an important quality that it brought to people.

Ryan: So this is kind of a segue, Dutch bros and your own value system being really inclusive. You talked about that even in high school — Like I describe myself as a bit of like an Australian sheepdog, always wanting to like heard people together and all of that. So, I’m curious: You and I have been meeting pretty much weekly up until this event that happened a couple of weeks ago called TASTE: United for Equity. You are the co-chair with fellow Faces Marketing interviewee, Kali Ladd, who’s the other co-chair, of celebrating the equity heroes here in Portland and things like that. But I’d be really curious to hear — I think you and I have been talking about it for a while, but what your personal connection to racial and gender equity, both in your personal life, in the workplace and just in community, and how you’ve been more intentional maybe recently than you were, or maybe you always have been. I’ll just leave it open-ended.

Joth: I’ll see if I can answer it. Open-ended question with am open-ended answer…

Ryan: Go for it.

Joth: So, growing up in Corvallis I didn’t have a lot of exposure to diversity. I think there might’ve been five people at my high school that were of color, at the time it was a very white community. As I’ve grown older, you kind of build your “who am I” basis. And I think that one is it that I think it’s important for everybody to understand different people’s experiences. I think different experiences at the table make everybody stronger. I think that our world is changing in front of us. And I remember living in LA in the mid-90s and about that time they were calling for, in the next few years, the LA population was going to become majority minority; and just what a change that was making, and really just thinking like how our role was going to be changing, and how my kids’ world was going to look very different, and that we had to be open to all levels of communication, all levels of socioeconomic participation.

Joth: And I think that our cities in the US over the last 30, 40 years have been learning how to mature and develop. And I think that Portland is a leader, in Portland, as one of the many great leaders, In Portland I think that you have to be conscious of the fact that it’s our turn to become that type of city and that type of region. And that we’re behind. Where LA was 20, 25 years ago, Portland is kind of becoming that today. And I think in order for us to be a great city — and I think I learned this actually from you; you said this at one of our steering committee meetings with Janet Labar, and you said, “listen, minorities in leadership is one of our key economic platforms for the city of Portland with Greater Portland,” that really opened my eyes up — was that in order for Portland to be a great city, we must improve our equity and diversity programs across everything that we do.

Joth: I wanted my kids to go to Beaverton High School because 60% of that population is minority. There’s 45 different languages spoken at Beaverton High School alone, with the amount of diversity that sits in there. And I wanted my kids to go to public high school and understand what it meant to be in a community like that and understand how to work within that community, because that was going to be one of the most important gifts that I could give them, was to learn how to communicate work, be open to different perspectives and be well-rounded. And I think that we all should be very aware of those kinds of things.

Ryan: Yeah, I like that. I also think it doesn’t really stick until you really have like real relationship and I think friendships kind of change the world. So I know working with you on Taste, you built a lot of relationships with other leaders of color in the city too. Hopefully I would imagine there’s a richness to that relationship that helps you get better about how you think about things differently and all that stuff.

Joth: So I think that that’s without a doubt. And I’d like to think I’ve been doing that for a long time. And Taste just became another opportunity for me to be a part of that. That wasn’t new for me or was just something that naturally is an extension of a lot of the things that I’ve done over the years. And it was pretty cool, but I think that it can be one evening, but it also needs to be this broader conversations. I know you and I have talked about that a lot. (That’s a whole ‘nother podcast)

Ryan: Yeah. I think we’ve talked about how… it can’t just be once a year because — I was talking to some other folks in the founding committee of Taste, and I believe Portland has a soul, and it’s soul proved to us that night, two weeks ago that it’s craving celebrating this equity piece instead of so many other places. It’s like when you go to these events, it feels very heavy, very kind of, not traumatic, but just feels like, a weight. So anyway, huge props to Kali and her vision and the work that you did on that. Okay. So last question is, I might kind of combine both questions, but one: someone who really inspires you. And then the final question would be, and I’ll have you answer both of them at the same time: just something that was like a life moment that was pretty defining earlier in life, where it either gave you independence or grit or both, that it’s not a surprise you are where you are.

Joth: So for an inspiration, it’s my mom. My mom’s been through a lot in her life but she was always just awesome through everything that we were going through. She always wanted what was best for us. She always tried to give her best. And it wasn’t through the easiest of times. We really didn’t have much money. A lot of times it was just she and my brother and I, and the older I get, the more respect I have for the things that she did for us through the years. And she became a very good professional at what she did. And she she did that from nothing. She kind of had to deal with having kids very young and going through some times that they were very challenging. So she’s very inspiring to me. And even to this day, she’s in her seventies now and she’s gives back a lot in the community. She spends a lot of time working with people. She’s traveling all over the place and then she’s always busy. It’s like she’s never stopped. So that’s pretty cool.

Joth: A defining moment for me. It goes back to I was 19 and I was in a fatal car accident where my best friend died. And he and I were in the car together, driving, middle of summer. It’s August. And we were in an old ’68 Mustang. I had my seatbelt on, he didn’t, and we were talking about life and we were talking about — we’ve been best friends basically since we were five — we were talking about where life was going and we were just like in this moment, and talking about girls, and all this stuff and we didn’t see a stop sign and got into a collision at 50, 60 miles an hour.

Joth: And we got hit right behind the seats and he actually flew through the windshield and died on impact, didn’t have a seatbelt on. And I had mine on. Car split in half. I went low and I spent the better part of 10 days in the hospital, the first four or five in ICU, and was lucky to live — to a degree, that was pretty amazing. But then also got to experience true friendship. I got to experience the rally of a community around you. I got to experience some pretty challenging times. I missed school for the better part of two terms and had to kind of come back from not just the loss of a great friend, but also just physically being injured. And so when I fast forward and there’s very rarely as it probably a week anymore that goes by that I don’t think about that or think about the family.

Joth: But it gives me just this perspective on life that I know what hard times are, and I’ve been through some pretty challenging times, and most of what I deal with every day is not necessarily a challenge. It’s more about opportunity, it’s more about being positive, and a lot of people just needed to be led through those things. So I’d say from a perspective of what it’s changed me, it’s just my attitude on things. I’m very grateful for just being here because of what I went through. It also gave me a reason to be in really good shape and I vowed to myself that I would be in good shape the rest of my life, because if I’m not actually, those injuries from that time will creep back on me. And and I also vow, friendships, maybe more than anything, because great friendships is what got me through all that. And it’s still been, my friendships are a lot of what’s made me who I am today.

Ryan: That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing and thanks for being on the show.

Joth: Thanks for having me. And thanks for being a good friend.

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Right back at ya.

The author, Ryan Buchanan, is a social and for-profit entrepreneur who co-founded a pathway to leadership program for professionals of color called Emerging Leaders as well as founder + CEO of a data-driven, digital marketing agency, eROI.