353: Eating Natural and Being Natural – with Steven Novick

We've all heard it before. It's cool, you know.

Welcome to Social Capital, weekly podcast that dives into

social relationships and why the investment you put into them is

so important. Your host, Lori Highby will connect with

industry leading professionals and dive into their networking

experiences. expert advice.

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click.com Okay, today's guest is Steven Novick Steven Novick is

the CEO and founder of farmstand farmstand, cooks and delivers

fresh, fast, healthy and affordable meals to businesses

and consumers that they personalize. Their website is

eat farmstand.com Stephen previously built $2 billion

businesses and climb the Seven Summits including Everest, the

very top. He's beaten cancer, which has made him passionate

about food and the environment. And growing up working class

made him appreciate affordability and convenience,

which is why he started farm Stan. Steven, welcome to the

show.

Thanks very much. Great to be here.

Oh, I've got that's a goodies to dive into. But

let's let's talk about farmstand. I mean, there's so

many meal delivery services out there. And it just seems like

there's more today than there ever has been before. How is

farmstand better? Well, I

think there's a lot of things that are out there. Like

I said, there's there's certainly a tremendous amount of

meal delivery services out there. And I think you know, how

we distinguish ourselves is really in four ways we're

affordable, we're fast, we're healthy, and we're also zero

waste. So we describe as the farmstand formula is we're $7 $7

a meal, five minutes to heat zero added sugar in zero way. So

ultimately, we're 10 times better than the competition.

Well, firstly, as much as there, we do do a direct to consumer

service, and we deliver directly to homes. Ultimately, what makes

this highly unique is we have large contracts with Office

caterers and large institutions. But what makes us 10 times

better than the competition is we're fresh versus frozen or a

meal kit. So we're ready to eat. We're 50% less expensive. We're

90% faster to cook, and we have 100% personalization. And oh, by

the way, we take up 90% Less fridge space than a HelloFresh

would

love all of that. And now this is the part that

I'm sure most of our listeners are going to be not super happy

to hear. But you're not available in the US at the

moment. Correct?

Yeah, at the moment. We're just in the UK. So we

cover UK nationwide. But a contract that we've signed with

a food service provider called ISS and us is sort of the UK is

largest bank, Barclays, that contract, although it starts in

the UK, it's a subscription agreement, or subscription only

business allows us to expand into Europe and the US. And so

our hope is to be in the US starting in a b2b basis as early

as the first quarter of 23. All right,

love that I'm definitely eager to learn about

more about when you are in our territory a little bit. Let's

talk about this other item that was in your bio. So you've

previously built $2 billion businesses. How have you done

that? And what's important to get right from the very

beginning?

Yeah, so prior to starting farmstand, I co founded

an investment firm and now manages about $2 billion in

invested in private companies. And then prior to that, I was

head of business development at a health tech business that

raised about 50 million in venture capital. We scaled to 20

million in revenue, and it filed for an IPO a $650 million

valuation, which is today's dollar might be about a billion

dollars and then that business was acquired. So I think the the

fundamental thing is like We start when we started farm,

Stan, I think that the foundation of everything is on

values. And then you know behaviors as well. And then

ultimately what you stand for as a business. But I think you in a

business, you start or you join, I think you have to be very

values driven. And so for us at Farm, Stan, that's been a real

big driver. And so one of our big, you know, values that we

really centered around, especially in the environment

we're in is around, you know, making sure that what we're

doing has zero waste, we have zero food waste, zero packaging

waste. We're a B Corp certified business, just like a Patagonia

or Ben and Jerry's. So these are kind of some of the things that

are really important. I think, if you don't have the right

foundation, when you start a business, you can't grow, grow

from that.

I love that. And I agree 100% With all those and I

started my business fairly young and didn't have that foundation

fleshed out. But it's definitely been a core focus of mine and

something I communicate to my team and even clients when it's,

you know, we're talking about their marketing and their

messaging, it comes down to you know, what is what is it that

you believe that's going to help attract the type of people that

align with your thinking and your philosophy?

Yeah, I think that's right, and you ultimately your

customers are going to follow you and get excited about us,

you know, based on what you do. So we're ultimately want people

to take a stand and take a farm stand for that matter. So it's,

it's on affordability, you know, healthy meals shouldn't just be

for the wealthy. And you ultimately want these these

meals to be healthy. So no added sugar is a really important

thing. I mean, 73% of the US population now is overweight or

obese, if you eliminate sugar, that helps a lot. And then

ultimately, we all are short on time. And so you can pop our

food in the microwave, and you have to be ready in three

minutes, or Wilson hot water. And you can you can you know

make that happen. You know that way we kind of describe our

business as kind of a build your own salad bar meets Uncle Ben's

ready rice, because our pouches, which are our meals are

basically a base a main and aside, they all come separate,

and you just put them in boiling hot water, and that that's a

really great solution. And then now with with the environmental

problems that we're having, and the increasing temperatures,

making sure you have zero waste. So what's great about us is we

we have no food waste, we have no packaging, waste, and after

three deliveries, customers can return all the packaging to us.

And we reuse that. So we effectively make a profit on on

the return which is great, great for us for growing our business.

Yeah, I think that's fantastic. That's one of

the things that I always kind of struggled with, when I did the

any sort of food meal prepping is the amount of packaging, I

felt there was a ton of waste involved. And, and that was it

was hard to make the investment from a waste standpoint. I love

that if you look at if you also look at you know, these

meal kit businesses like HelloFresh, they've been around

might be slightly less than a farmstand, we would retail in

the US for $7 a meal. You know, the problem you have with meal

kits is that, you know those meals, the ingredients can go

off just like groceries very quickly. Ours are vacuum sealed

pouches. So you have no food waste, you often have 25% of the

food delivered to your house goes into waste. So at the end

of the day, if you have a ready meal, you have no food waste,

and you have no packaging waste. So it's a win win situation.

I love that. So I hear you been writing a book for

about five years, five years now.

Through that, yeah, so it's something that I wanted to

do for a while. So you read books like Shoe Dog, you know,

which is written by Ray Knight about Nike, and you know, other

books out there. There's about like your experience. So yeah,

so we, our business, we initially started it was

effectively a dark kitchen, and we were mostly a b2b play pre

COVID. So we had effectively 12 farmstand branded concessions

inside large corporates like JP Morgan, Barclays, BlackRock and

KPMG, when COVID hit, we effectively had to shut that

entire business down. And we started completely from scratch.

So the book is, it's called Keep going. So the five things you do

when things get difficult, and this is not only in work, but in

life. So the first thing is, is you write down the list of the

problems, right? So when things are when things get difficult.

The second thing is you come up with, you know, hopefully a set

of potential solutions to those problems. The third thing you do

is you, you know, ask for help. And then the fourth thing is you

you start executing on on those things. And then the fifth thing

ideally Is that when you fix your problems and you try to

help other people's, that's the general idea around around the

five things. And, you know, I think in life, it's the same

thing, when you have a, you know, you have something, it's

difficult, you have to really think about what the problem is

and, and be rational about it and try to come up with

solutions. So I think whether it's work or life, you really

want to rally around, just keeping things as simple as

possible, trying to be as rational as you can about it,

whether it's relationship with your partner, or with a work

colleague, or it's work in general, it's just, you know,

got to always keep going, you gotta be solution oriented. You

know, it's one of the things that we believe at farmstand,

one of our behaviors, people can talk about anything they want

with us, be, you know, complained about anything they

want. But ultimately, you need to find solutions to problems,

not just simply complain about them.

100% agree with all of that. I like that thinking.

So what's the timeline to get the book wrapped up? Well,

obviously, with restarting the business from

scratch in February, and the business growing, you know, more

than 20% a month, you know, since we started, you know,

folks right now is raising it raising a bit more venture

capital, which we just started doing. We're part of an

accelerator in Milwaukee, which is how we met called generator,

which is, you know, top 10 nationwide business accelerator.

So we're focusing on raising capital right now, you know, and

if we're here at the end of January now, it would be nice to

get something out probably by next year is kind of the idea,

maybe to coincide with us launching our business in the

US.

Cool. Love it. All right. Well, this would be a

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your own guide today.

Even the purpose of my show here is to help people

not so feel not so fearful or scared when they hear that word

networking. So I'm hoping that you can help remove some of that

fear by sharing one of your experiences or you're more

successful or favorite networking story that you've

had.

I think every opportunity we have, and we're

walking down the street or in the park, or in a grocery store,

or wherever we have an opportunity to meet people I

don't like actually like the word networking, I just, you

know, effectively connecting with people is kind of how I

view it. I'm actually much more of an introvert people have a

hard time believing that because I can get up in front of large

groups of people and talk and do that. But my natural inclination

is to be, I like to read and I'm much more of an internal person,

I'm an external. So I think on the networking side, I think the

best thing to do whenever you're, you know, reaching out

to people, I think LinkedIn I, you mentioned that you're on

that platform, it's probably the most, you know, helpful platform

that's out there to helping you build a business or learn or

think about building a business. And I think if you're genuine in

your approach, and you're honest about things, I think people

generally respond very well to that if you open up by trying to

sell something, or super aggressive or send repeated

emails, you know, it's not going to work. So I think you're

always putting yourself in the other person's shoes. So whether

it's, for us in the case of trying to contact people or food

service providers, or corporates, or people looking to

help us, you know, that's, that's kind of how I've gone

about, I guess, you know, networking or connecting with

people. I think a lot of times what is super helpful, whether

you're trying to raise capital, or you're trying to build your

business, is getting introductions through other

people. And the easiest way of getting your introductions to

other people is preparing an email that's very simple, very

short. And to the point, asking someone to make that

introduction, it's clear what you want the reduction for, and

then they can just forward that email on to other people. So I

think, you know, one, you know, example of a relationship that

helped get our b2b business started as we went to our first

office catering relationships was with with JP Morgan and a

friend of mine, Stefan happened to work there, run a division.

We had a pop up restaurant in my house before we started the

business. He came over like we were doing, when we had a

gathering, you know, to kind of launched the business, his

daughter came along, and most of our food is gluten free. And she

was like, hey, you know, Dad, wouldn't it be great if you had

this at JP Morgan? So Stefan was able to make an introduction to

Aramark, which was the food service provider. And then the

the person that worked at JPMorgan that oversaw the

relationship with Aramark and effectively headed food services

for JP Morgan. So there's a good example of using effectively a

friend and obviously the help from his daughter who liked the

food, you know, proposing the idea that led to things you

know, progressed with us, that was our first relationship with

an office caterer. And that led to our second with Compass. And

then the third being with ISS, which is, is, you know, based in

Copenhagen in a very large relationship for us now.

Yeah, I love that. And then just letting being

clear on what type of connections you're looking for,

it makes it so much easier for someone to, to make that

connection actually turn into reality.

Yeah, there's another really good book out, free the

name of it now. But there's like three ways to describe people,

either you're a giver, or a taker, or you're kind of a bit

of both, I'm definitely a giver, I don't expect anything in

return. So if I happen to be talking to someone having to

have a chat with someone a couple days ago, looking to

invest in our business, he works in a sector that's not really

similar to ours. And I happen to know someone that knows a lot

about his sector, that also runs an investment fund. And I said,

Hey, you know, you're looking at potentially moving into this

investment field, you can probably talk to my friend, he

didn't ask me to do this. But I think just volunteering and, and

willing to help other people out, usually, that comes back

and helps you as well. So I think being a giver versus a

taker, I think generally works works to your advantage, you

don't want to be taken advantage of because you also may have to

do your own job. But I think being generous with our

relationships and our network with other people also can be

can be a useful thing, too.

Absolutely. What advice would you offer the

business professional who's really looking to grow their

network?

So first thing about me, which is kind of maybe a bit

odd, is I never offer advice. I'm not a person that offers

advice, because that presumes that I know more than the other

person. And nine out of 10 times, I probably don't even

know I realized we sometimes up to a book a week, but what I do

offer suggestions, but only when asked. So my suggestion, you

know, if you're going to try to grow your business, whatever it

is, whether it's a b2b business, or direct consumer business is

figure out like, if especially if it's gonna be focusing on

sales or, you know, looking at ways of network effects, which

is taught which Reid Hoffman talks about in his book

Blitzscaling is ultimately look for the two or three or four

contact contracts or relationships that could

potentially lead to large revenues, versus taking in, so

be more of a rifle shooter or a sniper versus using a machine

gun approach. And just try to keep the approach, very

targeted, very focused, versus being too broad based. When you

launch a business even for us. There's a lot of things we could

not have done to launch our business, we, you know,

initially started off our business, you know, meals for

four, and that was portions for four, then we started with meals

for two. And ultimately, we settled on meals for one because

that individuals is probably easier to market to them to to

families as at the end of the end of the day.

Sure. Yeah. Interesting. So here's a fun

one. If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what

would you tell yourself to do more of less of or differently

with regards to your professional career?

Well, it's a really good question. I really haven't

thought much about that. But I would tell like, any one,

especially you can look in the rearview mirror is always work

with people that have, you know, good values and good behaviors,

because ultimately, having being around good leaders, you know,

has, you know, the right influences long term. And I

think some of the jobs I've taken in the people I've worked

with, some of them have had exceptional ethics, and others

haven't. So I think the 20 year old self would be, you know,

focused on working with really high quality people and high

quality organizations, because that will lead to further

opportunities with similar people in businesses.

I think that's great advice. It's definitely

something that if I can go back, I would, I would put a little

bit of emphasis on that as well. Gordon, I'm gonna give you the

opportunity to interview me here, Steven. So what is

something you'd like to ask me? Well,

you know, Laurie, so what why did you decide to I

guess, first thing, you know, launch a marketing business.

That's the first question and the second question is, you

know, why a podcast? You know, I've been on a handful This is I

like the format of this. But I guess the first question is, uh,

how'd you get into marketing? And what what made you choose

marketing?

Yeah, I actually started going to school for

commercial art, because I love very creative like, you know,

making beautiful pieces of art, a lot of painting on a drawing

and how I could translate that into a career. commercial art

was the path I start pursuing. But while I was actually going

to school, I took a sociology course and was simply fascinated

by how colors and sounds and messaging have such an impact

and influence on the decision making process that people make

and, and cultural impact, and how people actually end up

buying products. So I took that passion for creativity and kind

of took it at a bigger, broader picture. And that's how I

decided to pursue the marketing path. I've always been on the

agency side, I worked at two other agencies before starting

my own, I have learned a ton over the last 14 years that I've

been running my own business, I'm sure you've learned a ton as

well. No, I learned something new every single day. But I

absolutely love what I do. And I love sharing my expertise and

what I've learned with others. And that was kind of one of the

reasons for Springboarding getting a podcast started. So as

a business owner, especially in the marketing space, best

practices to have some form of thought leadership to share

expertise, and build, build authority, build your audience

as a means to potentially generate new business

opportunities. And I wasn't, I tried blogging, doing email, and

I struggled with the consistency of it. Video was something that

I was interested in, but I just felt there was too much required

from not only does it have to sound good, but it has to look

good. So there's another layer of complexity with video. But I

was interviewed on a couple podcasts. And I was just really

fascinated with the medium, just as you kind of commented on and

decided, you know, this is this is the channel, this is the

medium that I'm going to leverage for my own thought

leadership. And here we are episode. Oh, goodness, I think

it's like 350, something something

amazing, amazing. Yeah, like, look, I think it's a great

format as well. And I think when you get to know someone,

especially initially, getting to know them through their voice

versus in person is often the best way because you could just

connect with them and understand them and not have the

distraction of like you said colors, faces and things like

that. So I think it's a great, it's a great format. And like,

Look, I've there's only a handful of ones that I listened

to. But I think it's really interesting. As as a format, I

guess in terms of advice, is there any advice you give to a

business, whether it's direct consumer, or b2b, if you were

going to, you know, launch a business, what would that one

bit of advice that you would give

launching a business, um, you know, there's

so many pieces of information that I'd share. But I would, I

would say, and you kind of spoke to this a little bit, but find

someone who's already paved the path a little bit, find a

mentor, someone that's got, you know, 510 years of experience in

that same space so that you could learn from them, get some

counsel and kind of build a team around you some, you know, not

just people in the same space, but you'll you'll need a team of

experts to help guide you in and give you some direction. Because

you can't go it alone. And it can be very lonely, running a

business on your own, but having that support, and that

professional counsel and expertise can just help you get

from A to B, a hell of a lot faster than if you were trying

to do it on your own.

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. I mean, our

core team, when we first started the business was through friends

of friends, you know, and I, having come from different

sectors and having to learn food tech, you know, you're getting

advice and suggestions and authority of people you can

figure out things important than you have to try lots of stuff

and yeah, but I think that's that's great. That's great

advice.

I love it. Alright, so I'm gonna throw the advice

back to you any final word or based off for our listeners

around growing and supporting your network? Oh, yeah, I

mean, I think the back to you know, kind of what your

we talked about originally, which if you're going to be

doing posts, whether it's daily or weekly or monthly, I think

authenticity is the best thing that people gravitate towards to

gravitate towards. Because you know, you can post about lots

Some other things, but I think what people really like

especially is authenticity, storytelling, whether it's good

news or bad news. I mean, life isn't perfect. It's not always,

you know, linear. It has ups and downs. And I think sharing that

with, you know, your network and your friends and your family is

really important in this day and age of Instagram and Twitter and

all this other stuff. I think it's important that and I think

longer term, we're going to find that authenticity is going to

really win. And I think that, to me, is the most important thing.

So if you're going to be maintaining relationships with

your network, whether it's through a podcast, or through

email, or, or getting together in person, just, you know, being

honest, being authentic and and talking about the good news and

the bad news, because people like to hear both.

I love that. And that's, I've got my three, three

rules of networking. And my first one is to be genuine and

authentic. So you're right on with, with what I preach all the

time on this show. And people always say people can smell

fake, they can, you know, if you're trying to be something

that you're not, it's pretty obvious, I would say to most

people in the professional space, but 100% Agree, Be your

authentic self, and you're gonna attract the type of people that

you actually want to spend time with and do business with.

Absolutely. I see. But if anyone was interested in getting in

contact with you, what's the best way that they can reach

you? Kind of

like you it's the best way is through LinkedIn. I'm

just Steven Novick. There's a nice photo on there of me and

there's some farmstand food which is which there and then

I'm also on Instagram on Steven underscore Novick and o vi CK

and it's Steven with a V.

All right, we will include all that information in

our show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show

today.

Absolute pleasure. Really enjoyed it. And yeah,

thanks again.

Absolutely. All right, this wraps up our episode

of social capital. Huge thank you to Steven for taking the

time to connect with us. As mentioned before, let's connect

on LinkedIn connect with me connect with Steven, we're both

looking forward to hearing from you. I hope you enjoy today's

show. Most importantly, go reach out and connect with someone.

Reconnect with someone from your past or find someone new that

you'd like to connect with. That's what it's all about. Go

build those relationships.

That's all for this episode of the social capital

podcast. Visit social capital podcast.com For show notes, more

episodes, and to see who will be on the show next. Thank you for

listening, and we'll see you next episode.