Scaling success: Gareth Lloyd shares the secrets of thriving businesses through recessions
Truly Nuts! CEO Gareth Lloyd about scaling successful businesses through recessions and cultivating a winning culture. Gareth Lloyd, founder and CEO of Truly Nuts, talks about the secret of scaling successful businesses through various recessions. He discusses the importance of hiring the right people and cultivating a winning culture in order to make profits from these activities. He also discusses the challenges of creating sustainable enterprises that empower communities to generate income and providing an alternative to deforestation. Finally, he discusses the challenge of finding the perfect product for everyone along the supply chain.
Publicados : 2 anos atrás por Patricia Cullen no Business
We talked with serial founder and Co-Founder and CEO at Truly Nuts, Gareth Lloyd about scaling successful businesses through recessions, the significance of hiring the right people and cultivating a winning culture.
You have been co-founding and backing businesses for over two decades. What is the secret to scaling successful businesses through various recessions?
It sounds obvious but it’s a difficult skill to get right, use the values and guiding principles of your business to assess candidates and make sure they buy into the purpose.
If you have the right culture and you have hired the right people, any obstacle or challenge can be handled, and solutions found.
Be at the forefront of technology, whatever industry you are in
People thought we were crazy building a Brazil nut factory from scratch in the middle of the Amazon jungle, but it enabled us to bring in technology and machinery from other industries and other nut sectors and modify them for Brazil nuts, creating the leading facility in the world, and disrupting the market as we went. It protects our margins and gives us huge efficiencies, which means we can make a profit in any economic cycle.
You give 25% of profits back into the Amazon. Could you tell us about this initiative?
We have always been deeply committed to giving back to the communities we love. Our charitable foundation has undertaken projects like building houses in Lima’s shanty towns, providing over 100 homes to re-house 500 locals over seven years. We ensure fair wages, with factory workers receiving at least 50% above the minimum salary, and prioritise women’s empowerment, with 70% of our workforce being women. By working collaboratively, we aim to disrupt the norm in a positive way while giving back to the Amazon region through our NGOs.
Truly Nuts is an even deeper testament to our passion for quality, healthy food, sustainability, and community impact. Recently, we partnered with One Tree Planted to identify a Truly Nuts rainforest in Peru near our facility where we can commit to agroforest efforts and planting 50,000 trees in our first year, regardless of profit. For 13 years, we’ve supported a shanty town in Lima, and Greg, my friend and Co-Founder of Truly Nuts has been based there for a decade, forging strong connections with the country and the region. Our mission is not just about giving money to people; it’s about creating sustainable enterprises that empower communities to generate their income. By doing so, we’re providing an alternative to deforestation, which is often the result of economic desperation.
Our ultimate goal is to build an infrastructure that allows these communities to harvest Brazil nuts without harming the rainforest. This is a unique opportunity that hasn’t been explored before and we don’t want to stop there. We aim to replicate this model with other products that are not only healthy for consumers but also environmentally responsible. In a world where big food companies are criticised for compromising quality and sustainability, we see an opportunity to disrupt the industry by ensuring our practices benefit everyone along the supply chain, from the local communities to the consumers. Our way of doing business is driven by a vision of a healthier planet and thriving communities, and we’re committed to making that vision a reality.
White Lion Foods is the leading exporter from Peru and your global market share is expected to exceed 16% in the next three years. How did you go about capturing such a sizable percentage?
A long road of moonshots and consistent incremental improvements and investments. We have used a hyper-growth funding technique, akin to a tech business to scale up quickly. We have focused on QUALITY as our core priority as a business. This is the number one factor that drives our economic engine and allows us to be the best in the world. When your product is of the highest quality in the market and we sell it at a similar price to our competitors, we deliver value to our customers, and they come back for more.
Are you all set for launching Truly Nuts? What were the main challenges in this business and how did you tackle them?
Yes, we are all set! All set for phase 1 anyway… We see a significant number of future products and iterations, but the team has done a fantastic job in such a short time to get us where we are today. The pace at which we have worked to deliver has been not without its challenges, and with equal collaboration from our teams based in San Diego, Singapore, Manchester and Lima, the time zone differences have also added to the complications, but we set an ambitious deadline and credit to the team, they hit it.
The core challenge was getting the people and the tech required to actually flavour a Brazil nut with a savoury flavour. This had never been done before, as far as we are aware, and almost all the experts said it couldn’t be done. This process has taken circa 9 months, and we are really pleased with the outcome, both smoked and chilli flavours have come out really well, and the salted gives a really nice variation versus just a straight raw Brazil nut.
You run the Amoria Bond Charitable Trust, a registered charity for child poverty & education. Could you tell us about this?
Within a year of founding Amoria Group, the staffing and consulting company, we started the process of registering our charitable foundation. Back in 2007, for a fledgling business like we were, to set up a charitable trust like we did was somewhat unheard of, especially when you consider the small size we were in year 1 and year 2. But we had always planned to build Amoria into a large global business, and we knew with this comes opportunity – we would have growing resources both financially and from a human capital perspective, and as we had no other investors, we had full autonomy to deploy those resources whenever and how ever we liked.
15 years in and we have done and continue to do projects in five of the world’s seven continents. There has been a big focus from the start on Peru, we have a relationship with one of the shanty towns just outside of Lima and we have built over 100 houses and 4 soup kitchens, which not only serve three meals per day but also create communities.
We also do projects local to every office we have. Our internal teams are highly engaged with both the local and global projects we run; in fact, another group of volunteers leave soon to go to Peru and spend a week supporting these communities.
What mistake have you learned most from in your career to date, and why?
As a leader, I am super passionate about developing individuals through our businesses and progressing their lives through career goals and promotions. A coach said to me once as we discussed this, “Gareth this is great, but you must delegate and not abdicate.”
The simple rule I learned is to make sure I continue to keep touch points with the leader I have delegated, to make sure they stay on track. I have been so obsessed with progressing people’s lives in my businesses, and at times, time poor, that I have trained them to do the job, passed it to them, but then ‘abdicated’ or allowed them probably too much space and given them too much trust without the regular feedback loop to keep them on track.
At the time, I didn’t think they needed it, and I didn’t want to do it, I wanted them to run with it themselves as I would have run with it should someone have given me that privilege, but that was abdication over delegation.
Perhaps once or twice I have abdicated more than delegated. But all with good intentions!
Tópicos: Business Leaders