MTO: Ido Leffler — Full Q&A Transcript
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Co-Founder of Yes To, Inc. & Yoobi.
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Zaw Thet: Exactly. All right, we’re on. Ido Leffler, thank you and welcome to Meet the Operators. Appreciate you being on.
Ido Leffler: Great to be here, Zaw.
Zaw Thet: So we always start MTO with some ice breakers because we want to uncover the humanity behind all these amazing entrepreneurs that we’re talking to. So, first one is who is your favorite super hero of all time, who did you want to be when you grew up?
Ido Leffler: Oh, it has to be Batman. I want to be, I want all the gadgets. I’m a gadget guy. I want the cars, the gadgets, the flying mobiles. Anything that flies, I want it.
Zaw Thet: All right, well, we’re going to have to get you a drone. Are you on drones yet or are you still waiting on them?
Ido Leffler: Oh don’t get me started.
Zaw Thet: Okay, so if you could bring anyone to your dinner table of historical nature, who would you want to have at your dinner table?
Ido Leffler: I think, if I think back to the historical nature, for me, it’s all about family. I want to meet my grandfather who I never got a chance to meet. I want to meet my family who, unfortunately, perished during the Holocaust. I want to meet people that helped create the family culture that I live in today and that I hope to grow.
Zaw Thet: Oh, that’s amazing, and can you tell a little bit about that story for your family. Did they, obviously they fled during the war, what happened after that?
Ido Leffler: My family, well, we’re European Jews who, unfortunately, 98% of, unfortunately, were taken during the Holocaust and perished in one of the concentration camps, and those that actually did survive, the majority of which ended up in Israel including my grandparents, and that’s where they set up via various countries, but that’s where they set up country and set up shop and that’s where we are.
Zaw Thet: So where did Australia come into the mix for you?
Ido Leffler: So my family, I was born in Israel. When I was 4 years old, my dad who was a mechanical engineer who specialized in artificial intelligence and robotics, decided to with my mum to move our family for what was meant to be a two year stint to beautiful Sydney, Australia. We landed two years became 20 plus years. Australia is now definitely home for my brother and I and our parents where they spend a lot of their time. They’re global gypsies right now. It’s where I grew up and love dearly.
Zaw Thet: That’s great, very cool. Last question for you on the ice breakers. If you were not doing what you’re doing today and you could do it all over again or say have another career when you’re done with this next one, what would you want to be doing?
Ido Leffler: If I could do it all over again, I’m pretty happy with the way things have turned out, I won’t lie. I’ve got to say though that as a kid I always dreamt that I would be a diplomat or someone who worked in government and was, to a degree, a public servant. Growing up I realized that my personality would mean that I would be a very sucky public servant and that I would very bad at that role. But I always wanted to be somebody of service, somebody who was either a teacher or somebody that was within the roles of global diplomacy. That was something that I sort of dreamt to be.
Zaw Thet: Well, my friend, I can say objectively that I think you’ve managed to fulfill both of those. I want to start and I want to just kind of unpack for little bit your first very successful venture Yes To which most people know from the Yes To Carrots brand, one of the largest consumer products brands now in the world. What was the original thesis behind starting that company and how long ago, can you fill that in for us.
Ido Leffler: Yeah, around 2006 my wife and I — I had just met my wife — we were living in Tel Aviv and I had this sort of journey. I left Australia after graduating from university, lived in Indonesia for two years, India for two years, and then ended up in Israel. We were very much the typical late 20s couple who were leading a pretty hedonistic lifestyle. Especially the Tel Aviv lifestyle, we were working hard, playing hard, eating well and, at the same time, we also wanted to improve our lifestyle. As part of that, we started to get a lot more fit and we started to do things like yoga, and eat better.
One of the things we noticed is that the stuff we’re putting onto our skin wasn’t particularly in line with that way of thinking. So we went to local supermarkets and we started to look at what was on the market. Everything what was on the market didn’t really appeal to us. Here we were at the time being these Mini-driving, Virgin-flying, Apple-using people and all the products on the market really didn’t play to that demographic. So my business partner, Lance, and I and our previous business had been helping brands develop their international protomarket strategies.
So we kind of knew the beauty market a little bit and so we said let’s create a natural beauty brand that was targeted to people like us. We were very fortunate, we started the company in Israel, we quickly moved to the United States where we were, we had a wonderful entry with a retailer, a small little retailer that you may have heard of called Walgreens. Today, they’re 8,000 plus stores and then others like incredible partners such as Target and the rest, and that brand really put us on the map.
But everything that we were trying to do with Yes To was to create a brand that was based 1,000 percent on positivity. That was all about that word Yes. Yes to the wonderful people that were working in it, Yes to the products and the ingredients that were putting inside of it and, most importantly, Yes to our customers and guests who were choosing to buy Yes To and creating something that they could feel proud of and know that they were also having impact while doing so.
Zaw Thet: For the average consumer that maybe sees that in the store, how do they know, how do they feel that impact of the brand?
Ido Leffler: So very early on we started what was called the Yes To Seed Fund. The Yes To Seed Fund was something that we are still very vocal about and you see it on every one of our packs and you see it very much in terms of the material that we put out to the world. The Yes To Seed Fund was originally created to help provide self-sustaining food to communities in need. That was our first big lesson in creating something that was a social venture as well as a for-profit venture. We had a very clear mission, we had a CEO at the time that was me, who sucked at sticking to that vision. The Yes To Seed Fund quickly became the “whatever made Ido cry” fund and turns into little things that made me cry.
Here we were with this fund that we’re wanting to do and initially with a very single vision. Thankfully today as the more we talk about the brand, now what we do is we really listen to our customers and hear what they want to do and I’m really excited that this year we’re actually about, we’re going to make an announcement in the next little bit which is the new vision and mission for the Yes To Seed Fund which I’m very much in support of and very excited about the team and our customers have helped put together.
Zaw Thet: Cool, and through the process of starting any great company, there’s always moments in time where it feels not so great. Can you talk a little bit about some of the skill and challenges that you may have had in the process of building this great business? Are there any that stick out to you as holy crap time?
Ido Leffler: No, we’ve had no problems at Yes To. It was smooth sailing pretty much the entire way. We never once said ‘holy shit. what are we doing.’ The first two years was one massive fire drill. Every day there was a fire to put out. To say which ones stick out, there are I could probably name a thousand.
We had a great example, there was this one amazing business publication in Australia, and my home country was very kind enough to put Lance and I on the front cover. As it’s always every entrepreneurs dream to be on the front cover of a magazine. Here we were on the biggest business press and everybody’s writing to us on Facebook, social, whatever social channel you could imagine and here we were that exact same week literally looking at each other across the table wondering how we’re going to make payroll.
I’ll never forget that particular week. It was one of the most humbling moments of my life. While the world — or at least the world around us — had put us on this amazing pedestal and was giving us this incredible ego boost, at the same time we were scrambling to find money so we wouldn’t have to close the business down and really let ourselves and everybody around us down.
What we’ve learned and the issues that generally got us to that point, was the issues that nearly every small business gets to or learns is that we over- forecasted our revenue, we under-forecasted our expenses and we didn’t do a good enough job of managing our cash flow as a result.
If I can give any advice to any business no matter what you are, whether you’re a service business, a product business, it doesn’t really matter what, you always need to have your eye on the cash flow and you need to be ready to make really tough decisions earlier on in the piece and not rely on that last month of runway or fumes to get you through. Because there’s a limit to the amount of Hail Mary passes that you can throw and I’d say that a lot of the ways that we got through those issues was that we, as a business partnership, so Lance and I were a 100% committed A) to the business, but 2) we were committed to each other to make sure that we were supporting each other in the need to make sure that we ideally …
I guess we supported each other in the sense that if I made a bad decision, Lance would support me, and if he made a bad decision, I would support him, and that we would, no matter what, find a way to get through the hurdle. A lot of the times it was luck, a lot of the times it was really good strategy but at the end of the day, we had a single focus which was to make each other successful.
Zaw Thet: And how did you, you get to a point where you decide to exit the business and to start Yoobi? What was that transition point for you, that you knew it was in good hands and were ready to move on?
Ido Leffler: Yeah, so Lance and I still are very much involved in Yes To, it’s still part of our overall portfolio of companies and but we like any business, there’s, a business is like a child and you know what it’s like, Zaw, you’ve got a little one at home and when you see your child go through stages, and you’ll see it especially as yours start to get older, is that you’ve got to give them some level of independence. You can’t smother your child their entire life although you sometimes wish you could.
What ends up happening is that you’ve just got to say hey, I’m going, my kid’s 7, I’m going to let you play art in the street on your own for a little while. Or when they get to the age of 13, they’re going to go out with their friends and there’s going to be sleepovers and there’s going to be parties and then there’s going to be college. Eventually, they go off on their own.
What happened in our case is that we realized that our business had grown beyond a significant amount of our skill sets and, frankly, it wasn’t what we were interested in doing. It wasn’t as fun anymore to manage inventory and stock planning and cash management and all these things. We were very keen to take a lot of the lessons that we learned from Yes To and take them into additional business categories that we thought we could impact in a similar way.
Today we have a phenomenal team who runs Yes To on a day-to-day basis, an amazing woman by the name of Ingrid, who runs the company as the CEO and an amazing leadership team around her that believes as much about the vision and mission of Yes as though they had started it themselves. That is one of the biggest lessons for us is to realize where when it’s time to really bring in solid leadership to take over and realize what we’re good at and what we suck at. In Yes To’s case, we realized that our baby needed to be in the hands of people such as Ingrid and the team. With us as support and there as founders every step of the way to make sure we stay as brand guardians but really to make sure that in order for the business to achieve its true goal, it needed other people to come and work with us to make that real.
Zaw Thet: That makes sense. As you think about the biggest lessons that you brought over to Yoobi, you talked a little bit about just quickly how you started Yoobi and what the vision was for that now.
Ido Leffler: Yeah, so stages of life, we started Yes To when my wife and I were dating. My wife and I now have three kids. At the time when we came up with the idea for Yoobi, it was two kids. I was walking down the aisle of a local store and one of the big mass merchants and before we knew it, you go from shopping the baby aisle, you start shopping the school supplies aisle. Here I am in the school supplies aisle and I’m looking left and right and none of the products on the market were very inspiring to me. My daughter walked passed that aisle as though it didn’t exist.
Now I remember when I was a kid, I loved the school supplies aisle. I used to stand there for what felt like hours, it was probably minutes but it was just looking and trying to argue with my parents as to what I was going to buy. It was almost like the toy aisle for me.
Zaw Thet: I remember having a very particular predilection about which three-ring binder I was going to have. It was a big deal. Pens and crayons.
Ido Leffler: I think so many of us resonate with that and when you walk down the aisle today, it didn’t feel, it became almost sterile. Not that the products were bad they just weren’t particularly inspiring. So that was sort of goal number one, how do we bring fun style back into the supply space whether it was school supplies, office supplies, home supply space, how do we make it fun again. Then the other problem that we wanted to solve was the idea around the lack of school supplies for kids here in the U.S. and around the world.
This was something that I had started to see through some of the work that I was doing with Yes To and a couple of other groups where we’re going to schools and you’d see classrooms, you’d see these classrooms that were either they looked like a waiting room at a DMV or they looked like something out of the Wizard of Oz. Inevitably, you’d ask the teachers the same question, what’s the story with the classroom. She would say one of two things, either I don’t have school supplies or “the school didn’t give any to me, we ran out, we don’t have any budget for school supplies and/or you’d hear that the teacher had bought the school supplies themselves.”
So we sat through some research and saw that the average school teacher spends close to $500 out of her own pocket for school supplies for her classroom. $500, my mum was a school teacher, can tell you $500 is a lot of money when you’re on a school teacher’s salary. The second thing that we started to do even further research, we realized that if you take that $500, that works out to be $1.6 billion worth of teacher’s salaries. Now that’s a lot of money. This is something that is just unacceptable. Some teachers go out of their way and spend up to $2,000. One of our amazing employee’s sister, who’s a principal at a school, spends even more than that. That just shouldn’t happen. So we said how do we fix that problem.
The other problem that we noticed is a lot of kids just don’t have school supplies full stop for themselves to do homework and home and a lot of families are struggling. We wanted to basically empower and democratize it because there is no reason why my daughter should have an advantage over a child at a school down the road because they have school supplies and they don’t. We’re talking about pencils, crayons, rulers, the basics in life. Almost like the bread and mortar of education. We wanted to solve that problem.
Zaw Thet: And so as you think about the lessons that you’ve brought over from Yes To now to Yoobi, what were some of the, were there any critical kind of management or tiring team lessons that you brought over with you?
Ido Leffler: Yeah I think we set up very clear … One of the biggest lessons, we set out a very clear vision and mission for the company and it was singular. It was a single vision. Single vision with regards to the product, a single vision with regards to the cause that we wanted to build. And every one of our companies today and going forward and including Yes To, are built on three key pillars: incredible people, kick ass product, and awesome cause. Incredible people means the people that we employ, the people that we bring into the picture, the retailers that we partner with. No matter what it is, it’s got to be amazing.
The second thing is kick ass products. So the product that we put out onto the market we want to be proud of each and every one of them. A product shouldn’t just go by the wayside.
Lastly, is awesome cause. Everything that we do with the cause needed to be really firm because when you start a company that gives money or product away, it’s very easy for a lot of people to try to lead you down different paths because they also have need. But it’s staying very firm to the need that you want to solve.
When hiring the team at Yoobi, it was so amazing and today when I look at the team, nobody is at Yoobi just for paycheck. People join Yoobi not because they see that they’re going to have a multi-million dollar exit a few years from now. People join Yoobi because they truly want to change the status quo for the products that we want to solve.
And that’s been the biggest learning. Hire the best, day one. Get people and the best doesn’t need to be from a CV, the best needs to be just the best people. And then make sure you not only hire the best but you get them engaged in the mission and be very, very open and honest with them about the positives, the negatives, and the way that you want to see the company going forward and empower them to help you get there.
Zaw Thet: And when you talk, let’s talk about empowerment because that’s a big topic of conversation. You know there’s all these books on how to manage millennials, and this and that. When you talk about empowerment, what do you mean?
Ido Leffler: When I talk about empowerment, I talk about if you hire someone, if somebody’s come through the hiring process of your company, there’s a very good chance assuming you’ve hired well, is it that person is qualified to this job. Now if their not qualified, it’s on you to teach them but if they’re qualified to do the job, let them do the job. Which means, give guidance, give direction, give empathy, give support but at the same time, let them do their job.
One of my biggest things when I hire people is that we look for people that get shit done. Most of our organizations there aren’t thousands of people running around so if one person is not hitting their average, they’re going to stick out like a sore thumb. So, at the end of the day, what we want to do is we want to bring people that are rock stars, give them the breadth to do their job. It’s not just about, we want to create wonderful environments where they work but it’s about making sure you give them the opportunity to put their hand up.
We have a thing in our companies which is very open communication about the issues that we’re facing, about the future paths of the company, and we also make sure that everybody in the company, whether they’re the newest person or they’ve been there from day one, that they feel like that they can have impact in the company in some of the decisions that we make.
Zaw Thet: And is that for you, is that a weekly all-hands meeting? Is that an email that you send out once a week? How do you communicate that with everyone?
Ido Leffler: So we have all-hands once a week where everybody gets a chance to tell the team what they’re doing. Then we do two major off-sites a year, out of the company. We do one which is sort of a, in the vicinity of the office within a 100 miles of the office and then we do one major one which last year included a surprise cruise to Mexico. Everybody got to go.
Zaw Thet: That’s hard to manage because who’s running the business during that time.
Ido Leffler: You know what, what we love is that people, we give people, people get very anxious especially my people when we tell them you’re not going to have internet connection for two days. We do arrange that people are connected and that things are there. We let people know in advance. We’re actually planning, we’ve got out next big major off-site coming up in May. If I told you where we were going, I would probably be fired from my own company. It is top, top secret. There’s only about five people that know. It is, we treat these things like Jedi missions in terms of how they’re planned and how they’re structured. Giving people experiences is something that we’ve learned is really, really culturally amazing for the company. Because it becomes almost folklore.
This Mexico trip, nobody who’s new in the company has not heard of this Mexico trip or the ranch that we had in the Sonoma. And it doesn’t need to be about spending a lot of money on these things. It’s about taking people and putting them in situations that they would not ordinarily put themselves necessarily. Playing hard during those trips but more to the point, working hard. And each of these trips there is specific outcomes that we look for, there’s specific roles. The leadership team organize them and put them together. It’s where you really get to bond as a team and we discuss all the major issues that are facing the companies, if anybody’s got problems that’s when they bring it up. We then discuss what people are excited about and then we come out with strategies on how to build the company to be bigger and better and bolder.
Zaw Thet: And how do you when you think about planning, are you, set a goal for the year and hit that goal or is it every three month?. I know it’s a little bit different for software and products sometimes. How do you think about your planning process after those off-sites or big sessions?
Ido Leffler: We build a big annual big ass goal and what are we really striving for. We sort of look at it as what is our three year goal, what’s our five year goal, what’s our one year goal. And then we break it down and in our world because we can in newbies case because it’s product related, we set ourselves weekly goals together with our retail partner to make sure that we’re hitting our forecast. We adjust accordingly if we’re not. Sometimes we’re very pleasantly surprised by the forecast, sometimes less so and it generally evens itself out where you get pretty good at forecasting. But for us it’s about setting a big ass goal and getting everybody to follow each other down that path to get there.
Zaw Thet: What are you most excited about for this year ahead? I know we’re coming up on our 30 minute mark so I want to make sure we talk about where’s the company going and how are you thinking about the next steps.
Ido Leffler: So for me, the next 12 months are really exciting. There are a lot of things going on. There’s a tv show that’s going to be airing on sometime in March, which I’ve been filming last year, which was really exciting, which is about empowering young entrepreneurs to do better in their world and to actually quit their day job and become an entrepreneur, which I’m really excited about. There is a, and with our businesses, we’re up to big things.
Yoobi was able to provide free school supplies to 1.2 million kids in its first 18 months here in the U.S. Every time somebody buys [crosstalk 00:31:46] new product. And it’s really simple because every time somebody buys a Yoobi product, we give another Yoobi product away to a classroom in need here in the U.S. We think we’re going to blow through that number this year. We’re really excited about that.
We had an amazing partner in Usher, the musician, for Yoobi last year and he’s a huge supporter of the brand. We’ve got another huge partnership which we’re going to announce soon coming up for Yoobi for this coming year with another incredible artist. We’re at a position right now where we want to get to five million kids. For us to get there, our strategy has been retail and focusing on our retail strategy including our own retail stores.
Now going into, we’ve had so many companies reach out to us saying that they want to be part of the Yoobi family and that they want to start procuring Yoobi products for their offices because it doesn’t cost them more, it’s better designed, it looks good, and it has mega impact in their local communities and in their local schools. As a result of just buying what they would ordinarily buy for their offices whether it’s a stapler or a pen. So our B2B side of our business is going to be a really big strategic initiative for us and in the end of the day what we look for and what we consistently look for, is just incredible new people to bring into the Yoobi family whether it be customers or employees or just part of the spread the word family like you. We’re just really excited, it’s an exciting time to be doing cool stuff like this.
Zaw Thet: Well, I’ve got to say after listening to you, I get even more pumped for folks that are listening to the podcast or reading, where should they go to get in touch with you if they’re interested in being part of Yoobi? Just on the site, what’s the best way to get in touch?
Ido Leffler: Yoobi dot com. I’m really easy to find on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in joining the family, send me a note, I’ll forward you to the right people. We are, Yoobi is based down in southern California, in Los Angeles. It’s a wonderful, wonderful team. We have a Yoobi north office here in San Francisco. And for those that are really interested, we have a Yoobi office in Sydney, Australia and in Hong Kong. So for us, we are, we’re just there’s so much positive momentum around brands that are doing good for the world and for the community around us. If you want to be a part of something like that, please let us know.
Zaw Thet: Awesome man. Well, thank you so much for coming on Meet the Operators. You’ve got so many amazing stories to tell, we’re going to have you back. But I want to be cautious of your time. I know you’ve got a big year ahead of you. Wish you nothing but the best and excited to follow your progress and success.
Ido Leffler: Zaw, likewise. This has been so much fun. Any time you want me on, I would love that and more than anything, make sure the other big lesson that I’ve learned in life and as I sit here talking to you, my wife just walked in, is making sure that all of us look for throughout the year ahead, that we think of what really matters which is the people around us and the people that we love and that’s what this is all really about. So, Zaw, you’re somebody that I love and I can’t wait to spend more time with you this year. So thank you very much.
Zaw Thet: I appreciate it, man. I’m excited for, we’ll get that set up again soon.
Ido Leffler: Thanks mate, cheers.
Zaw Thet: Thanks, talk to you, bye.
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