Greg Vetter of Home Grown Brands: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A Founder
An Interview With Dina Aletras
Imagine you hire yourself as a brand and product consultant to poke holes in every aspect of the idea you have. Make yourself a “hater” for the day and look at your idea as someone who is trying to destroy it. What are the results of this process? I was convinced that clean salad dressing that tasted good had to exist. And so, I went out into the marketplace to find it. It didn’t exist. I kept searching, I kept buying and trying products, but nothing was there. I was trying to prove myself wrong. It turned out, we had stumbled onto something big.
As part of our interview series called “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A Founder”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gregory Vetter.
Gregory Vetter is an innovator and disrupter in the “clean food” movement. His first venture, Tessemae’s All Natural broke the rules of the sleepy salad dressing category by using real ingredients and shunning gums and flavor substitutes. He subsequently founded Alta Fresh Food Company, which pioneered a way to get great tasting salads to the masses using an innovative “master kit” process, and Home Grown Brand Accelerator, a coaching company empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs. His accolades include Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year and EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist. He lives in Maryland with his wife and four children.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
At the ripe age of 25, I found myself standing utterly confused in my townhouse kitchen. I had searched every inch 3 times over and now I need to make a phone call that I don’t want to make. I have to call my wife at work to ask her a ridiculous question because apparently I’m blind.
“Genevieve, where is the salad dressing? The lemon garlic dressing, did you take it? I’ve looked everywhere.” She laughs, “maybe someone took it?” “Took it, What?,” I shouted. “I can’t help you, Greg, just look.” She hangs up, frustrated. I scour the kitchen one more time with eyeballs as wide as I can make them thinking that will help. Are you kidding me?
I pick up the phone and call my next door neighbor. He answers and gives me the answer I already know is coming, “no dumbass, I didn’t take your salad dressing.” I call 3 more people and get the same response. I then throw a Hail Mary and call a guy that usually eats Taco Bell everyday. The least likely culprit for homemade salad dressing. He picks up and I ask my question. “Yupppp, woke up jonesing for it, hopped on the scooter, knew the code to your house and now I’m crushing a salad, do you need it back?” I reply, yes. And then I stood there dumbfounded. What kind of man steals another man’s salad dressing. What kind of salad dressing is good enough to break into someone’s home and steal? I had been coming home everyday for 3 months during lunch to stand on my head (both literally and figuratively speaking) and wait for an epiphany on what I was supposed to do with my life….and finally after countless minutes upside down on my head without any answers….a thief had given me the lighting bolt I was looking for.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?
The following passage is from my recent book debut:
I was out of bottles. I had only purchased ten cases of these fancy 8.5-oz rectangular bottles with corks, thinking that was enough inventory for two months — not two days!
I started calling bottle suppliers around town, and no one carried 8.5-oz rectangular bottles with a cork. I finally called a local bot- tle distributor located in seen-better-days Baltimore, and a woman named Cathy picked up. “How can I help ya, sweetie?”
“Hi, Cathy. I need your help. I have a salad dressing company, and we just sold ten cases of dressing in two days, and I need an 8.5- oz rectangular bottle with a cork to keep this train moving.” She started laughing. She had a devoted smoker’s vocal fry. “We ain’t got that darlin’, but I got a 10-oz beer bottle with a screw top. That’s close to 8.5 oz. No one will know the difference.” I tried to process this substation idea. “Cathy, my current bottle is rectangular with a cork, and this is a round bottle with a screw top?”
“Yup. That’s what we got, hon.”
I looked at my watch. “Fuck it. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
I bought twenty cases of bottles and thanked Cathy. I called my graphic designer and had him change the label size for a 10-oz beer bottle, and then I went to the printer to pick up the new labels. This time, he only charged me his normal hourly rate for the work instead of the lazy river beer tax I paid to change the name. I rolled into The Rolling Bones at 10:30 p.m. with my brothers, made the dressing, and showed up the next day with round bottles instead of rectangular ones.
Cathy was right. No one knew the difference. Go figure.
Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
I was more concerned about being a total failure in my life. That fear lingered daily and turned into the fuel that I needed to overcome the daily obstacles of starting a business and figuring out how to scale it. With each win, the drive grew stronger. With each obstacle overcome, the drive grew stronger. It turned out that drive is actually a muscle that can be cultivated.
So, how are things going today? How did grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?
I made it through the end of my first business in the complete opposite way that I had imagined it would end. Restructuring it and then eventually selling it off for pennies of what it was worth and, in the process, tested every ounce of my being. But in being tested I realized that I am made of grit and the lessons that I learned could be applied to new businesses and adventures. I now own multiple businesses and have added some new pursuits to my body of work, including writing a book and advising CEO’s.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The following passage is from my recent book debut:
Are You Dock High?
Our first bulk order was olive oil in fifty-five-gallon drums. The driver called and asked us to meet him outside at our storage unit. We walked out expecting something like an Amazon delivery van was going to pull up when an 18-wheeler stopped in front of us. “HOLY FUCK” I said. Brian and Matt started laughing in disbelief. The truck driver got out. “Where is the loading dock?” We pointed to the side of the storage unit. He gave us a weird eyebrow movement and didn’t look convinced. “Is it dock high?”
We had no idea what that meant, so we just nodded. But he kept asking. “It’s dock high? This thing is dock high? I ain’t never seen a storage unit facility that was dock high.”
Completely baffled by the foreign language he was speaking, we all just kept shaking our heads yes. Hesitantly, the driver got back in his truck and pulled around to the loading dock to find . . . it sure as hell “ain’t dock high!”
There was an approximate three-foot gap between our storage unit — the dock — and the back of the truck. We were about three feet short of “dock high.” Not happy about how stupid we were, the driver then asked, “Y’all got a dock plate?”
At this point, we couldn’t lie anymore. “We have no idea what you are talking about . . . what is a dock plate?” I said. The truck driver was not amused. “A dock plate is the metal you put in between the loading dock and the truck so you can move the product over that little gap into your building. I can’t get the product into the building without a dock plate.”
Now that I understood that a “dock plate” was essentially a bridge, I told the driver I would be right back and sprinted to the guy at the front desk and asked him if he had a dock plate. He also didn’t know what I was talking about and shook his head no. I ran around the inside of the building looking for something metal and found a door that looked heavy duty. I ran back to the driver and said, “How about a steel door?” He told us it was either that or he was leaving, “I got shit to do, boys, and I can’t be fucking around with this bullshit.”
I ran inside, unscrewed the door, and carried it over. It was the right length, but the width was just barely adequate. There was no room for error. And that wasn’t even our biggest problem. We had a major issue with the thickness of the door. It was about two inches thick, which meant we had to jump the two-inch lip to get the pallet onto our makeshift dock plate. As we were setting this physics experi- ment up, the driver was losing patience. “I ain’t fucking with this, you boys got it?” We looked at each other and said, “Sure! We got this. How hard could it be?”
Brian and I jumped into the back of the truck and Matt held the door/dock plate on the other side so it didn’t slide away. Brian and I began to push the pallet . . . it weighed as much as a car. Each drum weighed 500 pounds, and there were four of them. As we pushed the pallet up to the door, we just stopped. The thickness of the door was too high. We couldn’t just roll the pallet onto our makeshift dock plate and into our storage unit, and couldn’t get the pallet to jump that two inches. So we backed up and tried quickly pushing it, hoping the momentum would pop the pallet onto the door. But it was like running into a brick wall over and over.
I looked at Brian and said, “We are going to have to Cool Runnings bobsled this motherfucker onto the door.” He started laughing hysterically at my movie reference. We backed up and started pushing it like it was a Jamaican bobsled as fast as we could, but we still couldn’t get the pallet onto the door. It was a dead stop.
The good news is that our bobsled efforts were creating just enough damage to help us. Each time we shoved the pallet forward, we were crushing the lip of the door. It looked like we could poten- tially use the damage to the lip of the door as a ramp if we pushed it hard enough.
At this point, the truck driver was so amused by our spectacle that he stopped complaining about his wasted time and started laughing at our insane and ignorant predicament. And we didn’t disappoint our audience. We started the Cool Runnings hype chant: “Feel the rhythm, feel the ride, come on, boys, it’s bobsled time . . . coooooolllllll runn- nnninnnnngggggssssss!” And we took off. We pushed the pallet of oil as hard and as fast as we could from inside the truck and popped the pallet on the door.
“YEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!” Everyone screamed with celebration, even the truck driver, who was now hysterically laughing at how stu- pid we were. “FUCK YEAH, BOYS, this is nuts!”
Step 1 was complete. Now we had to get the oil to the loading dock. Slowly, we walked it down our improvised dock plate. And then we heard the “clunk.” The metal door began to give way. We jumped down and assessed the situation. The wheels of the pallet jack had sunk into the door from the weight, and the door had begun to buckle in the middle. The pallet of oil was balancing on the door like a tightrope walker in a windstorm.
The truck driver was no help. Now that the oil was off the truck and onto our door/dock plate, it was our liability, not his. So, if the oil fell off the door and exploded, not only were we fucked from a cash standpoint, but we were going to have an environmental disas- ter on our hands. We needed to make a decision quickly before the oil toppled over, and the only thing we could come up with was to “linebacker hit” the pallet onto the loading dock. The truck driver was now watching our stunts like he was at the circus. Brian and I got into the truck and moved as far back as we could, took off running, and attacked this pallet like an NFL linebacker on a goal line stand. We popped the pallet onto the loading dock, and nothing exploded. “IT WORKED! YESSSSSSSSSSS!” It was a small miracle. We were jumping and high-fiving like we had just won the Super Bowl. The door was completely destroyed. The driver couldn’t stop laughing. We had spent about an hour getting this pallet off this truck. We were drenched in sweat, but the oil had made it. Then we looked at each other and said, “Holy shit! All of this for one pallet? We need to figure out a better way.”
The driver just laughed as he climbed back into the cab of his truck. “Just tell ’em you don’t have a loading dock, and they will bring a truck with an automatic lift gate. Like you see on moving trucks.”
That was all we had to do? Just fucking tell them we didn’t have a loading dock? Holy shit. You live and you learn. But we needed to stop being so fucking stupid and start picking and choosing the times when we faked it and the times we were honest and told them we don’t know shit.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
My story standouts because of how much I experienced and what I was able to overcome. My journey reached the highest highs and then the lowest lows. My book is an unfiltered story of it all so entrepreneurs and business people can learn from my mistakes and my successes.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Organize your perfect day and work towards that. Figure out ways to try and be the optimal version of yourself. Bring in outside specialists in areas where you are weak to improve your personal performance. Be ruthless with yourself as it applies to your time, nutrition, sleep, and continuous learning. If you aren’t getting better or growing you are dying. In manufacturing, we call it “preventative maintenance.” How can you stay at, or as close, to 100 percent as possible? There are little things you can do daily, weekly, and monthly to make sure you are grounded and focused. One of the things I do at least once a quarter is read the 10th-anniversary introduction to The Alchemist to make sure I’m not committing any of the four obstacles of Achieving Your Personal Legend. There are also little things I do daily, like journaling, reading, meditating, ice baths, etc. Everyone will have their own “preventative maintenance” plan.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My wife has always been my biggest fan. I always say “show me your spouse and I will tell you if you are going to be successful”. There are too many examples to list but from the first moment when I had an idea to start a salad dressing company she was on board and believed it was an idea worth fighting for…all the way to my most recent decision to write a book…She continues to be my biggest fan.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Leadership in my opinion is leading by example and leaving things better than when you found them. My book is my attempt to leave things better than when I found them. The unfiltered learning lessons from success and failure can be a tool for future generations of entrepreneurs.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me before I started leading my company” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
These are 5 of the field guides from my book that I think can be helpful.
What You Need to Know
Prove yourself wrong. Just because it’s your idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
How to Do It
Imagine you hire yourself as a brand and product consultant to poke holes in every aspect of the idea you have. Make yourself a “hater” for the day and look at your idea as someone who is trying to destroy it. What are the results of this process? I was convinced that clean salad dressing that tasted good had to exist. And so, I went out into the marketplace to find it. It didn’t exist. I kept searching, I kept buying and trying products, but nothing was there. I was trying to prove myself wrong. It turned out, we had stumbled onto something big.
What You Need to Know
Disarm everyone with kindness.
How to Do It
My dad always used to say, “You will catch more bees with honey than vinegar.” I didn’t know what that meant until I needed ran- dom strangers to help me solve life-altering obstacles. Don’t act like an expert when you are not. Don’t be an asshole when you don’t need to be. Smile. Have a positive tone in your voice. And begin every conversation with, “I don’t know shit about shit, and I really need your help.” And then say thank you.
What You Need to Know
Create things that you are proud of.
How to Do It
Be a motherfucker about the quality. Don’t cut corners. Don’t make excuses. Don’t settle for mediocrity. The reason we got the yes for twenty-six SKUs in the world’s largest retailer is that we made products that were amazing and didn’t cut corners.
What You Need to Know
Train like a warrior that runs through storms.
How to Do It
Prepare every morning to battle. Map out what “winning the day” looks like and what it’s going to take. Get visual with it. Prioritize the day in time slots and attack each task like you are a mercenary. The more efficient and methodical you become in this approach, the more productive you will be. The more you mentally prepare to run through the storm, the easier the run becomes. Don’t plan for 72 degrees and sunny with a slight breeze. Plan for a hurricane.
What You Need to Know
There is only trust.
How to Do It
TRUST: It’s everything. I should have never gone back on my universal law of “when someone breaks my trust, they are dead to me.” How you do something is how you do everything. If someone can’t be trusted, that carries through to everything they do. Don’t ever make excuses for their lack of character or trustworthiness.
Your gut knows all. Those feelings you are getting in your gut are real. They are trying to tell you something. Your brain will try to rationalize it away but don’t do that. The gut knows when things are bad or something is up. It’s probably one of our last animal instinctual traits we can still rely on. When the gut speaks . . . listen.
Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?
Master the morning. Wake up early and do things that prepare you to be the leader you need to be. Have your day mapped out in a journal that was already completed the night before so it can be your North Star as you battle each day. Workout hard and do something that makes you feel accomplished or that you won a little battle before the rest of the world is up. A feeling of accomplishment early in the day is a good momentum starter. “A healthy mind cannot live in an unhealthy body”.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Master the morning. The morning routine and the discipline that surrounds my morning was the main key of surviving the journey while being as productive and present as I could be. Its hard, its early, there will be sacrifice…but as they old saying goes “only when the rest of the world is silent can you hear its deeper vibration”
How can our readers further follow your work online?
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About the Interviewer: Dina Aletras boasts over 20 years of expertise in the corporate media industry. She possesses an in-depth understanding of growth, strategy, and leadership, having held significant roles at some of the UK’s largest media organizations. At Reach PLC, the UK’s largest tabloid publisher, she served in various director capacities. Additionally, she held leadership roles at The Independent Magazine Group and DMGT. Her extensive knowledge spans editorial, digital, revenue, sales, and advertising.
Upon relocating to Switzerland, Dina took on the responsibility of managing and promoting the international section of Corriere del Ticino — CdT.ch pioneering the English page “onthespot.” She also was the Co-Editor of Southern Switzerland’s first official Italian and English bilingual magazine.
