Lessons - What Happens When CEOs Stop Chasing Revenue ($100M Founder) | Melissa Urban - CEO of Whole30

In this lesson's episode, discover how small habits create lasting change and why genuine connection matters more than productivity hacks. Learn how avoiding comparison, strengthens leadership and culture, understand how self-awareness builds trust within teams, and explore how prioritizing community over profit creates brands that endure. I ask you because I know that, you know, outside of like Whole 30, you're just like a very self-aware person. So I feel like you've like you mentioned you looked into all this stuff before you probably try anything that you hear on a podcast or a show or some some some executives figured out some way to sort of improve their life by 1% like you figured out or you've tried it doesn't so I'm curious what are the what are the ones what are the things that you do in your life that are sort of like not just fads they actually seem to actually impact your life. Yeah so one of the things that I did when I first moved to Utah from New Hampshire so I grew up in the East Coast and like we're not rude on the East Coast we just don't need to talk to you right our cut if you are my cashier or my barista or my waiter or waitress like it is purely transactional so when I'm and that that's just how the culture is when I moved to Utah we showed up at the grocery store the very first day in the cashier was like hey how are you guys what are you doing this weekend and I was like why like why do you want to know that we don't know each other I'm never going to see you again so I did this talking to strangers experiment where for 30 days I talked to everyone if it was appropriate right if there was like a huge line behind me I wouldn't but if it was a waitress or a barista or there was someone next to me in line who appeared to you know be amenable to chatting or my cashier I would just talk to that my uber driver I would just talk to them you know hey how's your day going you know are you in the middle of your shift or the end of your shift what are you doing anything fun this weekend have you tried this brand of whatever that I'm buying and I found that it was the highlight of my day the highlight of my day was spending two minutes like making someone feel good eliciting this like genuine human connection even if we talked about nothing even if I never saw them again and occasionally I would have these experiences where I would like end up hearing someone's story usually in an uber or you know on a slow day at a restaurant and I was like every single person is interesting everyone has a story and it's kind of like I think Bryne Brown says that like you wouldn't have this interpersonal conflict if you just like talk to each other if you got to know each other right the diff our differences would come together and that was such an awesome and fun getting out of my shawl experiment and I still do it to this day I'm not like fanatical about it um but that was a really really fun one one of the things I will say though is that I think it's important going back to self awareness to know that just because someone else finds it a productivity hack doesn't mean it's for you so you hear about people like batching their day where they only check email twice a day I check it 8 a.m. and I check at 3 p.m. awesome if that works great for you awesome I'm never gonna do that because that's not how I use email it's not how I want to use email and that's not how I want to schedule my day so I think it's equally important to know what is not for you and maybe you need to try some self experiments that don't work for you to start to get a feel with that but I think you can also trust your intuition if you hear someone talking about oh I use this app and I do everything in it and I'm like oh that just sounds really restrictive to me that's not for you maybe I wanted to I wanted to ask a couple uh like leadership questions just to pull some experience out from you building whole 30 in the company um so now we sort of covered we've covered some health and wellness we've covered some uh like some some mindset or whatnot uh but before I go into like leadership lessons last thoughts on just like healthy entrepreneurship what are some main things that you'd impart on somebody who wants to build their own thing what is the what is the main healthy entrepreneuring mindset that you have to have if you want to build something and and stick with it for the long term my biggest lesson or one of my biggest lessons while I was building was don't worry about what other people are doing don't worry about it I would get distracted by looking at my competition other people who were doing similar things in the space and looking at the direction they were going a resource they rolled out and thinking to myself oh I have to do that too now I have to be in that space no no no no no I had my vision I knew exactly what I wanted whole 30 to be where I wanted to go how I wanted to connect with my community and the minute I stopped worrying about what other people were doing and focused all of that energy on where I wanted to go was it not only felt so much better for me it was much less stressful it was less confusing and anxiety producing but now I got to put all of my energy into what I wanted to build not like what other people were doing so for me that was a huge lesson really early on and I still abide by that to this day amazing now as you as you've built whole 30 how how do you make sure that you're a great CEO to your team to your company to your customers I hope I'm a great CEO I think it goes a lot of it goes back to self awareness recognizing that everything comes from the top down your company's culture boundaries communication style leadership if I am not embodying and living and demonstrating the values that I want my company to have and I want my team to have then like it is entirely my fault it's 100% coming down from me so I have to be really self aware when I think of something at six o'clock at night I have to remind myself don't send this email right now you can schedule it and send it tomorrow morning because I don't want to our culture is such that like when we're off we're off we're with family and unless it's an emergency I don't need anything from you and I don't want to have action that goes against what I'm saying our values are I have to employ pauses really often my management style is very direct I work very fast and I often don't take the time to say hi you know I'm kind of like hey we're working on this let's just like get it done so I have to pause very often and remind myself that it's in all of our best interests to speak to people the way they want to be spoken to I have some employees who really like you know talking about their weekend first or talking about what everyone else is doing and even if I'm in transactional mode it's super helpful for me to recognize like oh this would be so much better served if I took like a two minute break and we just like chat it a little bit right I can we can do that so I have to sometimes put my own tendencies aside for that I also think it's important for me to recognize and acknowledge what I'm not good at or what I am not adding value to and I've had to do that quite a bit lately because I feel like I'm in a place right now where in order for the business to continue to grow the way I want it to I have to step back in some areas and let someone else step in and take us to that next level and that's been a two-year process that was somewhat challenging but not as challenging as I expected I don't have as much attachment to the title as I thought I did or attachment to the the power that I thought I did and it is in the company's best interest which means it's in my team's best interest in my community's best interest for me to step back on some things and bring someone else in and let them run it so that I can do what I do best so I mean we keep talking about self-awareness but I think that's a really huge part of being a good leader yeah it is yeah and how do you find those people so how do you find those people that are going to lead the other parts of the business what's your what's your hiring what's your strategy for finding that incredible talent that you trust to sort of scale your baby yeah I had a ton of experience in hiring before I joined towards the whole 30 my old job and insurance I managed a group of about 20 team members and three different offices across the country and I had to do a lot of hiring so I got really practiced at interviewing I learned to hire for talent and not skill so I can teach someone Microsoft I can teach someone WordPress or I can teach someone the vernacular the language that we use around whole 30 right we don't call it a diet we call it a program what I can't teach is like that talent that entrepreneurial talent or the quick grasp of like the vision and you know being able to implement it or taking past experiences that may not be like a one-to-one but figuring out how to employ the learning lessons here those are things you can't teach so we also tend to hire from within our community like always from within our community so you already believe in the whole 30 you already are familiar with the community in some ways you're like on board with the mission before you even start working for us and that makes you know your kind of indoctrination into the team so much easier you're you're already part of this like mission that you were part of as the community member and now you're kind of on the inside and then for me I think my number one my team knows this my number one kind of metric is loyalty I want to see that you are loyal to the program and loyal to the company and that doesn't mean abandoning yourself I want you to show up with integrity and I want you to push back if things don't feel right to you or if we're asking you know something of you that that is too much but I want you to demonstrate that like you're really here for the growth of the community and for the good of the brand and the mission and I've done a really really good job I have incredible people in place right now who are like determined to you know steer the rocket ship with me and last question on this one because I thought the last thing that I've seen you that I've seen you do really really well is create community and that's an incredibly hard thing for any CEO business to do but when you can do it right it's an exceptional tool for product feedback it's an exceptional tool to find well you're you're using it to hire people to evangelize your product whatever it is but how do you how do you actually build community what was your strategy uh did it was it was it something that you know you you focused on building community or was it just you had a great product and you decided to like sort of double down on that and allow people to sort of chat amongst themselves um and and you built a community almost accidentally what was the what was the strategy behind the community yeah I won't say I went into it with like a very specific strategy I did have a great product first of all so you can build the best community in the world and have great marketing and great word of mouth but like if your product's not that good that's not sustainable I have a great product so that really really helps I recognized early on and like maybe part of my success just happens to do with my personality I'm not a profit driven CEO that doesn't light me up at all what I am of what really does get me going is recognizing that like we are helping people and hearing people's transformations and listening to their stories and recognizing that like what we're putting out in the world is making people's lives better that's what I love so you know for the first three years we gave we still do but we gave everything away for free the whole 30 program is completely free you don't need to buy a thing except the food you eat to do it that stands to this day that will always be true but especially in the beginning it was everything I do is for the community everything it's what do you need to be successful what are your pain points what are we missing in terms of resources if you have this question can I write this blog post and answer it for you and every person who comes after you when the program grew and I started bringing on team members and we started partnering with brands all of the decisions work is this in the best interest of the community and I turned down big deals because it wasn't and I occasionally would be like oh man this would be amazing to partner with like this brand they're so big and it would be so good but it wasn't the right fit and I recognized early on that it's so incredibly precious to build this kind of loyalty with your community and this kind of trust and with one deal that can all go away with one misstep so I really I treasure that I do I have always said that I have never had a good idea in my life every good idea that we put out everything that we do is because the community needed it or suggested it and my entire business is focused around the community like whole 30 is at its heart a community my team is on board with that and even for the people in my company who are responsible for generating revenue and profit we still won't do it at the expense of the community and that's a really important point for us thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one