“To create a fantastic work culture, make sure to express concern for employees’ wellbeing” with Theo Lee CEO of KPOP Foods

…Expressing concern for employees’ wellbeing — Again, we believe its important to build relationships outside of just work, and an important aspect is our employees’ wellbeing. As a manager, I can’t view our employees as simply robots, but instead, we view them as part of our family, which we call the KPOP Fam. We try to do small things such as ask our employees how their week is going outside of work or how their parents are doing, etc. Of course, it takes time to build that sort of relationship, but any way we can show we care, we try our best to do it.

As a part of my series about about how leaders can create a “fantastic work culture”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Theo Lee, the co-founder and CEO of KPOP Foods, a fun and outgoing Korean food brand with a line of sauces and seaweed snacks. Prior to starting KPOP Foods, Theo spent four years in banking and one year at a fintech startup as a Manager of Finance. In 2015, Theo pursued his MBA at UCLA Anderson, where he met his co-founder, Mike Kim. While at UCLA Anderson, Theo specialized in finance and entrepreneurship and during the final quarter of the MBA program, Theo and Mike debuted KPOP Foods’ first product, KPOP Sauce, on Kickstarter and successfully raised nearly $40,000 from over 1,200 backers.

Theo holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from UCLA and MBA from UCLA Anderson. During his free time, you can find Theo training in Krav Maga, cooking and eating food, watching his UCLA Bruins, and spending time with family and friends. Outside of working, you’ll also usually see him holding an ice-cold beer.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

As a Korean American, I was fortunate to grow up in a family that associated food, especially Korean food, with family, friends, and fun. This really resonated with me and my co-founder, Mike, also grew up with the same experiences.

At UCLA Anderson, Mike and I were always taking our friends and classmates out to K-Town in Los Angeles for Korean BBQ and food. It was always great watching our friends and classmates connect with each other over a meal and embrace the lively atmosphere of Korean BBQ. When we started to see how much our friends loved the Korean flavors and atmosphere, we thought, how come there isn’t a Korean food brand that reflects this inclusive spirit. After eating some Korean BBQ and drinking some bottles of soju (Korean liquor), we decided to start doing some research and seeing if we could start a Korean food brand.

After doing the research, we saw that there was an opportunity. I told Mike how my grandma used to send me bottles of her gochujang sauce when I was in undergrad and how much my friends loved it. We started with that recipe, started making some batches in my kitchen and tested them with our classmates at UCLA Anderson. After making some minor tweaks and working with a food scientist, we were ready to launch. We created a Kickstarter campaign for KPOP Sauce and everything took off from there.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

A lot of interesting stories come to mind, from how our classmates at UCLA Anderson helped us with our Kickstarter campaign to meeting chef Chris Oh, now our Head of Product and Product Development, through a message on Instagram. But maybe one of the craziest ones was the final day of our equity crowdfunding campaign on SeedInvest.

Last year in August, we launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on SeedInvest with a minimum fundraising amount of $200,000. If we didn’t hit the minimum, we would have to return the funds back to the investors. On the final day of the campaign, we were at $167,000. You can imagine the type of things that were going through our heads. Mike and I began following up with investors and people at 7am and by about noon, we were at $195,500. We were now literally so close. I had to catch a flight that afternoon for one of my good friend’s wedding and once WIFI was up, I began sending out emails and text messages. Suddenly, Mike texted Chris and I that we had hit $200,500. I immediately began trying to refresh our campaign page and once I saw that we hit our goal, the amount of relief was unreal. More investors ended up committing the next couple of hours and we ended the campaign having raised $217,100 from over 50 investors. This experience really showed us that anything was possible, no matter how glum the situation may look. We are also incredibly thankful to have a group of amazing people believe in KPOP Foods and what we’re building.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes, we just launched our newest sauce, KPOP Honey Glaze Sauce, a light and sweet chili sauce inspired by the flavors from Korean fried chicken. As part of the launch, we created two new sauce sets, the “Show Me the Honey” Sauce Set featuring the KPOP Honey Glaze Sauce, and the “K-Town” Sauce Set featuring KPOP Honey Glaze Sauce, KPOP Kimchi Mayo Sauce, and KPOP XXX Sauce. All these sauces packed with flavor and thus far we’ve received amazing reviews and that motivates our team to continue pushing.

Along with that, we’re also working on some partnerships with restaurants. While it’s still early, we’re excited about these partnerships and can’t wait to share them with the world.

Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?

I think this unhappiness is caused by several factors — limited responsibilities, lack of personal and professional growth opportunities, inability to have or see how your work creates an impact, unstable work-life balance, high stress or frustration, lack of transparency, and more. I also believe company culture plays a huge part in this — how do other employees interact with each other, is there a lot of “politics” within the organization, do the managers look for opportunities to grow members of their team and credit them on their successes to executive management. Of course, I believe employees need to demonstrate their value by showing their work ethic and passion for their job, but if they do that for months without seeing changes, it can get very demoralizing, and tie that with a poor culture, it’s pretty easy to see why people are unhappy.

Based on your experience or research, how do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?

An unhappy workforce will definitely cause a lot of problems to all of the elements you’ve listed. From a productivity standpoint, why would employees put their best foot forward if they feel demoralized and defeated? Are employees going to be focused on the task at hand and really dive into their work is they’re unhappy? Instead, the work will likely fall onto one or two people, likely managers, who could also be focusing their time on other initiatives and projects, so company productivity will definitely fall. With productivity also comes profitability as people stop looking to help drive the company forward and take initiatives and projects that will grow the company’s bottom line. Finally, on employee health and wellbeing, I think being unhappy definitely takes a toll, especially on one’s mental health, which in turn, could then lead to issues physically.

Can you share 5 things that managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture? Can you give a personal story or example for each?

1. Open communication with employees — We’ve found that one of the most important qualities for a manager is having open communication with your team. Building a strong relationship with you co-workers and employees is important to make them feel comfortable to speak up or come to you with anything. As a startup, we’re a small team and very close knit because we’re constantly engaging with each other. But along with work, we’re always looking for ways to bond with our employees so that the relationship isn’t just centered around work. We take time to learn about our employees’ hobbies, interests, families, and more. Another thing we do is biweekly meetings with each employee to provide feedback and advice, but also get a sense for how where he or she may stand and feel.
2. Responsibility — Being a good manager means trusting your employees. We hired members of our team for a reason, and while it’s easy to micromanage them, we know that creates a poor work culture and limits people’s ability to think creatively. We trust our employees with projects fairly quickly to give them confidence and demonstrate that we trust them, even if they make a mistake. We know that no one is perfect, and Mike and I have made numerous mistakes while growing KPOP Foods, but if we see the effort and willingness to improve and grow to help move the company forward, we can’t really ask for much more. With some of our interns, even though they’re young (but incredibly intelligent and talented), they have some amazing ideas. We encourage them to take the lead and assist them with thinking through the strategy and execution to make it happen.
3. Demonstrating and celebrating passion — Similar to responsibility, we really hone on whether some is passionate about his or her work and if they believe in what we’re trying to build with KPOP Foods. In our interview process, we try to see if someone has demonstrated passion for their work, whether a project, club, or even extracurricular activity. We encourage people to be passionate by showing it ourselves, from going the extra mile to get something done or uncovering a creative solution. Its “leading by example” and we’ve seen it carry to our employees — they start to spend extra time on their own to make their work perfect and when we see this, we make sure to celebrate it and encourage it.
4. Rewarding hard work and goal achievements — Its crucial to reward hard work and its one of the biggest ways we keep our employees happy and motivated. As much as we’d love to provide our employees with bonuses and amazing perks, we’re just a startup with limited resources. However, that doesn’t hold us back from ordering pizzas for the team for lunch, or one of our favorite activities, going out to Korean BBQ as a team to celebrate the end of a quarter. We’ve also found that setting goals is critical for our team as it cultivates a culture of purpose to our work and helps keep everyone on track. Rewarding our team for hitting these goals gives everyone pride in their work and motivates them to drive harder in the future. And of course, there are times when we don’t hit our goals, and we find these times just as important to learn from and improve the next time. Sometimes, this actually helps us as a team even more as it allows us to talk about things that didn’t go as planned and how to solve them going forward.
5. Expressing concern for employees’ wellbeing — Again, we believe its important to build relationships outside of just work, and an important aspect is our employees’ wellbeing. As a manager, I can’t view our employees as simply robots, but instead, we view them as part of our family, which we call the KPOP Fam. We try to do small things such as ask our employees how their week is going outside of work or how their parents are doing, etc. Of course, it takes time to build that sort of relationship, but any way we can show we care, we try our best to do it.

It’s very nice to suggest ideas, but it seems like we have to “change the culture regarding work culture”. What can we do as a society to make a broader change in the US workforce’s work culture?

I think it starts by leading by example. As part of our company culture, we also focus on treating our business partners, vendors, suppliers, and anyone else that interacts with us fairly and the same way we’d like to be treated within our own company. By doing this, we hope it inspires other people and organizations to want to improve. Additionally, I think its up to everyone to always look for ways to improve. While I believe we’ve created a great work culture at KPOP Foods, there’s still a ton of room for improvement and we’re always seeking role models, such as other companies, to learn from and use as an example. By doing this, I think the US workforce will slowly begin to improve, little by little.

I also think that by having open discussions about things such as work culture, such as this interview, helps shed additional light on key issues and will hopefully make people look at their own situations and find ways to improve and grow.

How would you describe your leadership or management style? Can you give us a few examples?

I’m very much a leader by example. A lot of it has to do with my role models when I was younger, especially my water polo coach, who exemplified leadership by example by doing the workouts and practices with us. I’m also very optimistic and try to spread that to my employees (another reason why Mike is a great co-founder for me as he is much more grounded).

From a management style, I’m very hands-off, to a point that I sometimes may not properly communicate projects and tasks, something I learned early on and have been working to improve upon. I’m a big believer that someone who does the due diligence, grunt work, and strategy behind something, should make the key decisions regarding that project. My role as a manager is to equip people with relevant information that may impact their decision and provide support in any way I can.

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 about that?

Absolutely, one person that has been a huge help and continues to be someone I look up to a lot is my dad. My dad is a very successful businessman and has had an incredibly successful career in the power and energy business. Some things that he’s really instilled in me is ethics and empowering employees to make decisions. From an ethics standpoint, he taught me the importance of being around and hiring people with a high ethical standard, something we look for when hiring at KPOP Foods. From an empowerment standpoint, a lot of this came from the corporate culture he worked in at AES. He loves telling me stories of how the leaders of AES created a culture of empowerment, allowing their employees to make decisions, and take ownership of their work.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Last year in November, we partnered with Dog Haus, a restaurant with approximately 30 locations throughout the United States, to create the KPOP Burger as part of their “Chef Collaboration Series”, where Dog Haus partnered with a different chef for two months. Our Head of Product, Chris Oh, was selected as the final chef of the series for Dog Haus and created the KPOP Burger and with the purchase of each KPOP Burger, $1 was donated to the charity, No Kid Hungry. As a company, we were really focused on making this partnership as big as possible as we know not every kid has access to food. Through our marketing campaign, we were able to make the KPOP Burger a huge success!

Along with that, we are also always looking for ways to inspire others to follow their dreams and pursue their own business ideas. Mike and I are always looking for opportunities to share our learnings with founders and entrepreneurs as they start building their own business. We hope our story will serve as an inspiration for people to achieve their own companies, which will hopefully have a positive impact on the world.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One of my favorite quotes came from Admiral William H. McRaven during his commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. He said, “if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” What he meant by this was “if you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.” This quote really stuck with, and believe it or not, ever since I heard it, I’ve always made my bed (or at least made a conscious effort). But really, I think its important to consider the small things, things that won’t always get noticed by people, but by doing them right, I believe it leads to the opportunity to bigger and greater things. For me personally, regardless of how small the task is, I do my best to do it right. Of course, I make mistakes as I’m not perfect, by putting in the effort in everything I do, I believe it gives me the best chance for something bigger.

During the early days of KPOP Foods, we were looking for partnerships and were fortunate to connect with a pop-up dinner restaurant that changes its menu monthly. Fortunately, that month, they were doing a Korean-inspired menu and so they were interested in incorporating KPOP Sauce into their meal and providing small samples of the sauce in their gift bags to customers. While we could have simply just put the sample bottles into the bags, we wanted to do things right and included a small card with a note thanking the customers. A couple months later, someone from one of the meals reached out saying they remembered our samples and wanted to include us in a large partnership their company was working on. This led to a huge deal for us and if we realized, had we not done the small thing of adding the note, we may have never been offered the opportunity.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire 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. :-)

A big thing for us is bringing people together and our way of doing that is with Korean food. If we could spark a movement to have more people connect over a meal, I think a lot of great things would spark out of it. It’s an amazing feeling to see people from different background and experiences come together and what better way than through a meal, especially a Korean meal haha.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you continued success!