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Colin is the CEO and founder at Sheets & Giggles, a start-up that makes eco-friendly (and ultra comfy) bedding out of eucalyptus trees. Colin knew he wanted to found a business that could make an impact on his community and the earth, and he did it.
Colin talks to Andi about the balance between building a startup (and making investors happy) and the desire to give back to his community.
Transcript
Colin McIntosh:
We’ve donated 40,000 to COVID-19 emergency relief in Colorado, and I’m real proud of that. My weird little bed sheets company is donating almost as much as the Denver Broncos to the Colorado Relief Fund. That makes me happy. And I think that that’s important to set that example.
Andi Graham:
Starting and running a business is hard. Starting and running a values-based business is even harder. Doing so requires making decisions that put people before profits, that honor individuals as humans, and that sacrifice short-term wins for long-term sustainable growth. I’m Andi Graham, the CEO at Big Sea, and this is Walk the Walk. It’s a podcast for entrepreneurs who make tough choices in the name of integrity every day, even when it’s hard, like in the middle of a pandemic.
Andi Graham:
Today we’re talking to Colin McIntosh. He is the CEO at Sheets & Giggles, which is an extremely pun- filled and funny brand that sells sheets made from eucalyptus. It’s a technology that Colin found that uses sustainably grown trees and responsibly governed farms so that he’s not depleting eucalyptus forests. In the process of making these sheets, it uses 96% less water than the process of making sheets from cotton. And that’s awesome, but he does even more, which is for every tree that they harvest, they plant two trees in the United States. And for every single order that’s placed with them, they plant a new tree somewhere in the US that needs reforestation. So far, they’ve planted over 20,000 trees in the last year, thanks to the Sheets & Giggles community.
Andi Graham:
So Colin is doing some really neat things, and one of the things that I think is most impressive is how much he’s given back to the community and gives and gives and gives. So have a listen to Colin as he talks about the trials and tribulations of a startup and having investors and also wanting to give back as part of his DNA. This is Colin McIntosh.
Andi Graham:
So hi, Colin. I’m so glad to have you here today.
Colin McIntosh:
Thanks for having me, Andi. I’m really excited to talk to you.
Andi Graham:
Yeah. I just left Colorado a week ago, and I desperately want to go back. Florida is not the place I enjoy being in August. It is miserable.
Colin McIntosh:
Kind of funny. I’m from Florida originally, from Fort Lauderdale, and now here I am in Colorado. So almost a whole switcheroo. But where are you in Florida?
Andi Graham:
St. Petersburg, so the Tampa Bay area.
Colin McIntosh:
St. Petersburg, okay. So yeah, it’s still pretty bad, but definitely not South Florida levels of humidity at least.
Andi Graham:
No. Yeah, yeah. No, we’ve had heat indexes well over 100 every day, but the humidity is 98%.
Colin McIntosh:
That’s brutal. Yeah, I just went backpacking in Buffalo Peaks Wilderness last week in Colorado, and it was so nice. It was 75, 74 during the day. It was nice and shady. It was great. And it’s just one of those things that makes you… Then when you get off the plane, when you go visit in Florida, you go to visit your family and realize oh God, how did I do this for so long? It’s brutal.
Andi Graham: I know.
Colin McIntosh:
But yeah, a lot of good places to like about both states, at least.
Andi Graham:
Yep. So neither Florida nor Colorado are native eucalyptus states, regions.
Colin McIntosh: No.
Andi Graham:
So I’m curious how you discovered eucalyptus and then decided to start a sheets company. [crosstalk 00:03:29].
Colin McIntosh:
Yeah, it’s a good question. So I’ll give you both the nitty-gritty and then sort of a high level. But basically on the high level, I was trying to start a bed sheets company. I was really interested in the space. I can get into the reasons why I was so kind of enamored with the bedding industry. I really wanted to do a sustainability company. I really wanted to have a sustainably made product. I really was just looking into materials research and design, and I found a few different things, mostly around what’s called cellulosic rayon. Cellulosic rayon is rayon made from cellulose, so fabric made from plants. What that generally means is, let’s say for bamboo viscose, you harvest the bamboo, you turn that into a pulp, turn the pulp into a fiber, fiber to a yarn, and that yarn to a really nice, smooth fabric. Everybody kind of knows that bamboo is very famous for breathe ability and coolness.
Colin McIntosh:
Then the third generation of this exact same process, the cellulosic rayon process… Bamboo viscose is the first. The third generation is called eucalyptus lyocell. And so I discovered this process of making fabric that was kind of esoteric to people. I don’t think that people really, at least Americans especially, can understand how you would harvest a tree and then turn that tree into a super soft fabric. It’s a highly scientific process. The good thing about lyocell is that it’s a completely closed-loop production system, whereas bamboo viscose, you can’t re-use the chemicals in every batch of pulp production. So generally speaking, there can be some wastewater or run-off associated with the viscose process, but with lyocell, you can re-use about 99.5% of the chemicals in every single pulp production batch. We love it. It’s probably considered the most sustainable fabric in the world.
Colin McIntosh:
I did some materials research and manufacturing meetings with people who had the capability to produce this for us, and that was way back almost three years ago now in October 2017, and then I wouldn’t say I flipped the coin. I think the strategic nature of the eucalyptus was something I was really attracted to as well as the sustainability of it in the sense of I didn’t see anybody who was marketing it or selling it well. It hadn’t really caught on in the United States. It was an extremely low nonmarket share. I saw both a really great business opportunity and a really fantastic sustainable product and ran with it.
Andi Graham:
The environmental aspect is obviously important to you, but how is the bed sheet industry something that you… I am curious. I get the environmental aspect.
Colin McIntosh:
It’s a weird thing. The bedding industry was so attractive to me because of a number of different reasons. Basically, long story short, I got laid off from my last company, which was a startup that I put three years of my life into on September 25th, 2017. I still remember the date. It was 1 p.m. in the afternoon. When you get laid off at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, I think the first thing that’s reasonable to do is to go get wasted. That’s exactly what me and my coworkers did. It’s the truth. I’m not out here doing the “How I built this,” interview, like, “Oh, I went to a hotel, and I saw the bed sheets, and I was like, ‘There has to be a better way.'”
Colin McIntosh:
I went out for margaritas with my former coworkers. It was a bleeding heart company, that company. We were making wearable technology to try to fight sexual assault and violence. I loved what we were doing. I was on the founding team. I had written the original business plan. Getting laid off so unceremoniously like that for three years of blood, sweat and tears is pretty emotional. I was telling them I had this idea for… You talk to your friend, “What are you going to do next? Apply for a company? Are you going to do something else?” I told him, I was like, “You know, I can’t see myself going to work at Microsoft or Amazon or some other startup for somebody else and run my business for them.”
Colin McIntosh:
I was like, “I’m going to try my hand on building something myself.” I was kind of pitching my team… my former teammate’s ideas. The one that I was really enamored with was Sheets & Giggles. They were cracking up. I knew I was kind of on to something because they were laughing at it so hard. I had this idea for a couple of months to be completely honest with you. I had watched this movie in June of 2017 called War Dogs with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill, and Miles Teller’s character was selling bedsheets out of the back of his pickup truck really poorly. He didn’t do any research or pricing or understand his core audience or anything like that.
Colin McIntosh:
I wrote a business plan for a bedsheets company that night. I bought the domain sheetsgiggles.com that night, and I got all the social handles at sheetsgiggles, and I was so obsessed with this weird little brand that I came up with in an evening. Then three months later, I got laid off, and I had the opportunity to pitch it to a few friends. They all loved it. The core reasons behind it to touch on those very quickly; massive commodities market, 12 billion dollars in the US growing 10% year over year; zero brand differentiation or loyalty, so there’s no switching costs associated with buying one brand of bedsheets or another, so I didn’t have to worry about customers being sticky for another brand. It’s a highly fragmented field. I think the top five players in bedding only own about 27% total combined. It’s highly traditionally physical retail, so you can help bring it online with a more direct consumer model.
Colin McIntosh:
There were already people doing this. There’s Parachute, Brooklinen, Boll & Branch. Those are the main ones. But they were all selling cotton. Cotton is extremely unsustainable. All the other brands in this space were selling polyester or bamboo or something like that. The reason why I ended up going for it is because I looked at the brand space, and I looked at all their Instagrams, I looked at all their websites, and I was bored to tears. I was looking, and it’s always the white sheets with white wall with some exposed brick. There’s always a fern next to the bedside. There’s a french press coffee on the edge of the comforter.
Colin McIntosh:
I was just so bored to tears that I was like, “Man, if these people can sell sheets with cotton and that imagery, then I can sell sheets with Sheets & Giggles and a sustainable product.” That was really the genesis of it was it was a really, really tremendous business model that I had in my head for the company, and I was able to do things very differently in a super bland space.
Andi Graham:
Super bland space. I completely agree.
Colin McIntosh: Bland space, yeah.
Andi Graham:
Why crowdfunding? That’s where you started, right?
Colin McIntosh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Andi Graham:
What was that experience like?
Colin McIntosh:
May 2018. We started work on the company in January 2018, in earnest. And then May 1st, 2018, was the most important day of my life. We launched on Indiegogo. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with
Indiegogo versus Kickstarter. We chose Indiegogo, and we ended up doing… Our goal was $50,000. Internally we would’ve told you that we would like to do $100,000. And then we ended up doing $284,000 crowd fund. In terms of the why, to be completely honest with you, I didn’t think anybody was going to take me seriously until I showed that there was actually a market demand for a pun based, sustainable name brand.
Colin McIntosh:
I told a couple of investors about the idea, and I think that their initial response to me was, “What the F are you talking about?” That’s a completely fair thought when you’re pitching Sheets & Giggles. I just knew, “Okay, well, we need about $100,000 to do an initial production run.” I figured $50,000 would kind of show initial demand at the very least, $100,000 would help me get to market. Then anything over $100,000 was sort of gravy in the sense of it would just help us get to market with a larger audience, with more units, with a bigger brand, more marketing dollars.
Colin McIntosh:
We ended up doing the biggest Indiegogo ever for the bedding category. I know it’s a funny qualifier. Biggest Indiegogo ever for the bedding category. There were two other bedsheets companies that launched the same day as us on May 1st, and one of them made $15,000 and the other one made 50, and we made 284. We really blew them out of the water.
Colin McIntosh:
That was kind of our first initial proof point of we really got lightning in a bottle here with this brand.
Andi Graham:
Yeah, that’s really neat. You built the business over 2019?
Colin McIntosh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Andi Graham: And then?
Colin McIntosh:
I got my first employee in January 2019, first full-time employee. Until that point it was all shoestring and bubble gum. Then it became a lot more bubble gum and a little bit more shoestring after that. Now, we’ve got seven full timers and about to hire two more. It’s still a very small business, but we do a lot of business per head, and that’s my favorite metric.
Andi Graham:
That’s a good metric. I know that the pandemic is some old news, and everyone’s getting a little tired of talking about it. But I’m curious… we own an e-commerce development agency. We build complex Magento and Shopify integrations. It’s been a really good time for us.
Colin McIntosh:
I can imagine.
Andi Graham:
So I’m curious how it’s been for you as well.
Colin McIntosh:
Demand is wonderful, which is great. Supply is not so wonderful.
Andi Graham:
Yeah. Oh, that’s tough.
Colin McIntosh:
A combination of two things, right? We had a 75 day production stoppage for worker safety, so we were basically… We manufacture in India, wonderful partners over there, people who I love and trust and feel like family. I basically called [inaudible 00:13:18] and chatted with him a little bit in March and in April. I think India shut down March 24th, and that was when we ceased production and ceased for about two and a half months until India was safety reopening.
Colin McIntosh:
It’s still not completely reopened over there, but the factory has taken a lot of precautions to make sure that there’s no spread within the facilities. It’s also a highly automated process. It’s a very scientific highly automated process of production. I would say that the number one challenge has been making sure that we keep up with demand. The number two challenge has been because demand has been higher than expected, we’ve been sold out of all our best sellers, queen white, queen gray, king gray, king white, and all of our duvet covers for the last couple of months.
Colin McIntosh:
We basically outsold our forecast while at the same time having no replenishment for two or three months. That’s been very difficult and very frustrating, but at the same time there are worse problems to have, and I just thank my lucky stars that we weren’t someone that was hugely levered in physical retail this year because that would be… I have friends who have companies that I don’t want to say went up in smoke, but March and April were the most stressful months of their entire lives, and it was pretty stressful for me too. Don’t get me wrong. But certainly not as stressful as a physical retail store.
Andi Graham:
Yeah, certainly. Were your team used to working remotely or are they used to being co-located?
Colin McIntosh:
We have an office in downtown Denver, and I would say the remote work has been also a challenge. I think that everybody is kind of discovering this for themselves that people can be just as productive remote as they can be in an office, and that’s great. I’ve kind of toyed around with the idea of going remote actually for a couple of… maybe about a year now. The problem with that is if you have investors, which we do, you basically have to justify everything to them in one sense or another.
Colin McIntosh:
Maybe they’re not meddlesome or anything like that, but you just have to say, “Hey, we’re going remote, and here’s why I think it’s better for the company financially. Here are the KPIs and the metrics.” I don’t want to waste time with that, so we’ll just have an office and we’ll be productive. Now, it’s kind of like everybody’s been forced into this giant, massive, worldwide remote work experience. I think it’s been such a good experiment for us because we’ve discovered that not only are we… We’ve had a couple of record months during this whole situation. We’ve also had major downturn months because of the supply chain issues.
Colin McIntosh:
It’s been great to see the productivity from the team. We’ve actually added to the team. We’ve hired somebody new during this time. Now, we don’t waste time on commuting. We canceled our office space. We’re going to save probably $30,000 or $40,000 a year, which is really nice. It’s just been a really great experience. I will say the team building aspect of it is difficult, and then people hire people who are very much like themselves. I’ve hired extroverts who really crave words of affirmation. So to not have that in-person experience is also difficult when you’re just kind of talking on Slack.
Colin McIntosh:
I’m really looking forward to when we can safely have in person biweeklies and monthlies and quarterlies and that sort of thing.
Andi Graham:
I’m also an extrovert and so is my business partner. It has been extremely difficult for us. Our team are mostly extremely happy to work from home, and we’re down here all alone in the office going, “People, please come in and hang out with us.”
Colin McIntosh:
I think anyone whose love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation especially extroverts who get energy from other people, it’s hard. In April, I went through a pretty bad breakup in the beginning of April with the girl I was seeing. And just a personal note, I think that books will be written on relationships during COVID because I couldn’t go out and get a beer with friends. I couldn’t see my family. I couldn’t get a hug from someone. It is what it is. Back in hindsight, April was pretty savage on my mind.
Colin McIntosh:
It’s just one of those things that I think is probably under discussed right now is what the psychological aspect of the distance is doing to people. I hope that it makes people value their time with their loved ones even more moving forward. It certainly has for me. I’ve seen my family once during this whole thing, and it was incredible.
Andi Graham:
It’s really tough. It’s been really tough. Based on what I’ve read about you and the research I’ve done, it sounds like giving back is really important. I was reading about the tree planting. I think that’s really neat. It sounds like you’ve been giving money during COVID and things like that. Does that trickle down to your team, and how do you involve them in that? Some people do service days or company wide events and things.
Yeah, I could rattle off a list of a bunch of different things. From large to small, basically we include the team in every decision in terms of what we’re donating to, who, why. I have the team do research for us on which organizations they think are most deserving, whether it comes from the contribution dollars that their organization is doing from donations to actual groundwork or which cause that we’re focused on. In the last eight or nine months, we’ve donated to the World Wildlife Fund, to Save Koalas in the Wake of the Wildfires.
Colin McIntosh:
We’ve donated bedsheets to Denver homeless shelters that are experiencing a huge overflow of COVID- 19 patients who need linens for these isolated motels that they’ve built for symptomatic individuals to keep them out of the general population. We’ve donated $40,000 to Colorado’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund. We’ve planted 20,000 trees in areas in the US and Canada that need reforestation.
Colin McIntosh:
We really are kind of all over the map. We’ve donated to Black Lives Matter organizations who we think are doing amazing work in terms of reducing police militarization brutality in a smart policy driven way. My team and I have huge bleeding hearts, and I think that one of the things that we love about our business model is that we kind of have philanthropy built into our variable cost structure.
Colin McIntosh:
Just by being successful we do good as a function of the business. I was inspired by other companies that have done that like somebody like Bombas who you buy a pair of socks and donate a pair of socks. TOMS is obviously famous. You buy a pair of shoes and donate a pair of shoes. I love that sort of just… If you’re successful, you will help people type of business model. I think that that’s been really wonderful for the whole team to galvanize around.
Colin McIntosh:
It’s also extra motivation during a time where frankly it’s hard to stay motivated sometimes. Business goals in a time of this pandemic seem a little trivial at times. I think that it’s hard to stay motivated when you’re just looking at P&L as your end all, be all. If we can say, “Yeah, let’s donate 20% of our sales for a certain time period,” and we tell customers that, and we email them, “Hey, 20% of your sale has been donated. Thank you so much.” Twenty percent, that’s a big chunk of change in terms of scale. You look up after a few weeks, and it’s 40 grand that you just donated. I think some people are like, “That’s too much.” It gets me out of bed in the morning. It’s one of those things I love. It’s overall what we share with the team.
Colin McIntosh:
On a small level, we do something called Zestful. I’ll give a shout out to another great Denver company, great Colorado company. It’s an employee benefits card, so it’s a Visa card that you can spend on Netflix or groceries or a night out or whatever. One of the things that we do is called charitable giving. We have 25 bucks a month the team is able to just give to a charity of their choice. That’s probably the smallest thing. We’re also a pledge one percent company where one percent of our profit time product in equity has been pledged to Colorado charities.
If we sell the company for a hundred million dollars someday or we IPO, we get to donate potentially millions of dollars to Colorado charities in one fail swoop. That can only happen if we’re successful. I love that sort of thing. Planting a tree for every order is a big part of that as well.
Andi Graham:
That’s a long list and a lot of keep up with. I know in what we do we have a really hard time saying no to things. We’re also bleeding hearts. We get asked a lot, “Can you donate your time, your energy, financially?” Whatever those things are. How do you say no?
Colin McIntosh:
I tend to not. I know that’s what you’re getting at is how do you find the time or the bandwidth. I think that I just try to pick things that are going to move the needle the most and then frankly that are also strategic for the company. Our customers love that they plant a tree for every order. We love that we harvest eucalyptus, not from the national forest but from biodiverse farms, not in Australia either. The koala is sort of our little mascot. They eat eucalyptus, and they sleep for 20 hours a day. They’re like our heroes.
Colin McIntosh:
I think it was 17 grand that we donated to the World Wildlife Fund. It was 20% of our Black Friday sales last year. Should we offer 20%? We literally ask you. We send surveys out. We’re like, “Should we give you 20% off as a discount code or should we donate 20% of your sale to the World Wildlife Fund?” Overwhelmingly, people choose the donation.
Colin McIntosh:
We say no to some stuff. People ask us for donations all the time of vetting to different homeless shelters. We try to localize it because we’re still a very small business. We have shelters in Florida or New York or other places asking us for sheets. We tend to just tell them, “Hey, we try to donate in the Colorado area to maximize the impact.” It’s tough. I hate saying no. It really drives me crazy, but you can’t… My mantra is if you go out of business, you can’t help anyone.
Colin McIntosh:
That’s the thing with me is I’ve been a volunteer. I’ve knocked on hundreds of doors for political candidates. I make phone calls. I march. I volunteer at cafes and stuff like that. I love volunteering. I started charity in high school for free daycare for underprivileged kids. I’ve always had that kind of bone in me. At the end of the day, you as one person can accomplish as much as an organization of people. I just feel really privileged to be able to build this thing and then use it as a force for good both while we do business and as we grow we can do bigger and bigger things.
Andi Graham:
That’s neat. I interviewed the CEO of a large aquarium. He used the phrase, “More margin equals more mission.” I thought that’s really relevant to for-profit organizations as well especially those of us who are out trying to do as much good as we can, so more margin is more mission.
Colin McIntosh:
Hell, yeah. I totally agree with that. I will say there is a nuance you have to have where people will be like, “Well, great. That’s why we should have multi, multi, multi-billionaires who are the most philanthropic people in the world.” I’m like, well, I think there’s an extreme end to it where you could probably use that wealth in a more publicly conscious way if it wasn’t privatized, but that’s a conversation for another day. I think that good people in positions of power is a really, really crucial thing, and I hope we see more and more of it. The problem is a lot of good people don’t want power. It’s hard to-
Andi Graham:
Yeah. There’s too much responsibility, right? And too much shame and anger and all of those things right now. It’s just too public. Everything is too public. You are a very public person. What guides you as a leader? What’s important to you? I’ve looked at your Twitter feed. You are not shy about your opinions. What guides you here and keeping your team sort of motivated and your culture strong? What are some things you compromise on?
Colin McIntosh:
I’m public in some ways. My Instagram is private. I’ve been toying around with being a more public persona. I just think I don’t want that heat that comes with it. You know what I mean?
Andi Graham: Yep.
Colin McIntosh:
I’m a totally fallible person with vices, talking about getting wasted at 1 p.m. on a Monday with my buddies and going to a Colorado Rockies game. At some point, I just want to be a normal 30 something guy and have my life. At the same time, I think it might be better for the business to kind of determine how public I want to be.
Colin McIntosh:
In terms of your question was kind of around team culture and that type of openness, was that about right?
Andi Graham:
Yeah. I’m curious what kind of leader you want to be. What guides you as a leader?
Colin McIntosh:
I think you got to lead by example. I’ve always tried to be first one in, last one out at every job I’ve ever had. I don’t sleep much. I’m absolutely that 3 a.m. emailer. I’ve always been that type of person. When I was a recruiter back in my early career, my teammates would call me the recruiting vampire because they’d wake up with 20 or 30 emails from me about candidates or about a job search between midnight and three in the morning. This was before you could schedule the G-mails too. That was just me being up at night.
Colin McIntosh:
Leading by example is really important. I like to think about all the managers I’ve had in the past, all the terrible things they’ve done, all the good things they’ve done. I try to think about what are things that I’ve felt really appreciated, seen and heard. We give pay raises without people asking. We give bonuses without people asking. I talked earlier about professional goals and how that kind of has a limit in terms of motivation. We also do personal goals, which means that if you lose… Some people say, “I want to lose five pounds this month.” All right. Well, if you do that, you get a hundred bucks. Or some people say, “I want to write a blog post every week this month.” All right. Well, if you do that, you get a hundred bucks. “I want to read a book every week.” All right. If you do that-
Colin McIntosh:
We do $100 monthly personal goals and then $200 quarterly personal goals. That’s something that I wish a lot of other businesses would do. I think it’s one of the coolest most culture creating things that we do with the company because everybody knows who’s working on what. We know that… I won’t say names. We know that so and so is doing cardio four nights a week, and we know that so and so is avoiding ice cream for a whole month. We know that so and so is taking singing lessons and so and so is writing their first attempt at a book, first little novella. I love that we can kind of get that insight into each other’s lives and what’s important to us.
Colin McIntosh:
I think it creates a more tight knit culture. The whole time I’ve had the company we’ve only had one person fired or quit. It was just unfortunately not a culture fit. They were in and out in three weeks. I think we both knew that. Other than that, I just want to be a leader that… It’s a hard thing to answer because everybody has different leadership style. Mine is extremely, extremely laissez-faire.
Colin McIntosh:
I’m totally rambling. The one thing I’d say is that people hire people who are like themselves. I know that I’ve hired a bunch of people… There’s good and bad in that. That’s why white dudes hire other white dudes, and that’s why extroverts hire other extroverts. The person you’re interviewing for the job, you want to be the person you would hire for the job, the interviewer.
Colin McIntosh:
I think that I looked up one day and I realized I’ve got a dozen little Colins running around who are super autonomous. They hate being micromanaged. They can’t stand 9 a.m. meetings. They will completely reject your meeting request if they think that it’s an arbitrary meeting that they don’t need to have.
Colin McIntosh:
Sometimes I’m like, “I’m the CEO, dammit. I can call a meeting at 9 a.m. if I want to call a meeting.” Then I know the revolt if I try to push too hard on that. You got to think about who you are as a person and how you appreciate being managed and what you appreciate in a leader. Odds are, the people that you hire are going to have the same type of wants and needs and appreciation. That’s kind of what I try to keep in mind when I think about what type of CEO I want to be.
Andi Graham:
Do you think you’ve done it well?
Colin McIntosh:
No. It’s impossible to do it well. The CEO job is the worst job in the world, man. Everybody should be so lucky to say that their job sucks like that. My job is to unlock other people’s work and you transition. Founder CEO is such a shitty, difficult transition to make if I can be really blunt. I don’t know if I’m able to curse on this podcast or not; I apologize if not.
Andi Graham: Go for it.
Colin McIntosh:
It’s such a hard transition to make because as a founder you’re doing everything. You’re running the supply chain, and you’re creating a Shopify website and you’re writing every word of your copy. You’re designing your packaging. You’re answering your customer service emails. You’re picking up the phone. You’re pitching investors. You’re winning pitch meetings. It’s so intoxicating, right? You’re doing everything.
Colin McIntosh:
Then you get to the point where it becomes untenable to continue to do everything with agencies. You hire your first full timers. You’ve got to take your hands off the wheel one finger at a time. Then all of a sudden you realize I’m no longer a founder. It’s been three years. The company is founded. It exists. It’s here. It’s here to stay.
Colin McIntosh:
Now, I’ve got multiple teams of people. Like I said earlier we only have seven full timers. We probably have 50 or 60 people that touch the business on any given day. That goes through manufacturing, freight forwarding, legal, accounting, finance, investors, 3PLs, warehousing. It takes a village.
Colin McIntosh:
Looking at all that, when I look at my role, really all I do is make sure that everybody has the money, the inventory, the technology, the tools and the freedom to do their jobs appropriately. Frankly, I failed in that over the last three or four months with this situation. We didn’t have enough inventory to fulfill demand. It’s been a brand damaging difficult time where you know people… Americans for better or for worse are trained to consume. They don’t understand the difficulties of what a global supply chain looks like nor should they by and large. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Colin McIntosh:
You walk down the aisle of Target, you don’t know where the toothpaste comes from. You don’t know where Lay’s potato chips manufactures the chips. You don’t where your almond milk is grown. That’s fine, but people go to our website and they see out of stock on queen white, queen gray, king white. They get frustrated with us. It’s very difficult for me, and it’s very emotional for me because I’m a people pleaser. I cannot stand letting people down right now because we ran out of inventory in their favorite stuff and because we’re unable to meet their demand.
Colin McIntosh:
I can’t stand that I let my team down because my marketing team is upset because we don’t have the inventory that we need, and my director of product and operations is beyond frustrated because the global logistics situation is an absolutely shit show right now. You’ve got boats leaving ports half full. You’ve got UPS and FedEx not guaranteeing any level of fidelity in terms of when their shipments are arriving. The 3PLs are under tremendous amount of strain and load because E commerce has exploded four to six X with people who are anticipating in the next couple of years. It’s been a very challenging time. It’s definitely when you say have I done it well, I think I’ve done some things well in the sense of I feel like my team is happy and satisfied with me and with one another and loves each other and gives a damn. I think our customers love us. For the by and large for the most part we make people smile and make people laugh, and we do good. That’s all you can really ask to do.
Colin McIntosh:
On a logistical tactical level, no, I think that this has been a very challenging few months, and I feel a big burden every day to do better.
Andi Graham:
I think as long as you’re doing your best… I’m not saying that it guarantees success, but I think there’s so much out of your control right now that your team staying aligned with you and staying on your side is probably the most important thing that could’ve happened through this. Right? To me, if they’ll follow you and help you make decisions, that’s a stronger place to be than making bad decisions and then… I don’t know.
Colin McIntosh:
I agree. Long term. Long term, this is going to be great. Right?
Andi Graham: Yeah, it’s tough.
Colin McIntosh:
I’ve given people more autonomy. I’ve stopped micromanaging. I’ll tell you what, for me to not see every piece of copy that goes out the door is absolutely just the worst. I love copywriting. I love branding. I’m the most creative, funniest, most modest dude I know. The brand is me in a sense. Sheets & Giggles, when you come down to it, brands are founders. They’re just a founder voice. I see emails come out of my team or social posts or customer interactions that I haven’t seen, and then I see them, and I’m like, “Oh, that looks good. All right.” It’s not the end of the world. It’s okay.
Colin McIntosh:
We’ve had good performance and a lot of good key metrics. It’s just a good learning experience for me as well as when you take your hand off the wheel and you give people more autonomy and you trust them to do the job that you hired them for… If you hire good, competent, talented people who give a damn, good things happen. I think long term once we tick the calendar to September, October, we get into Q4, 2021, I’m really excited to see what this company can do cooking with gas like we are right now.
Andi Graham:
WTW E09 – Colin McIntosh (Completed 08/27/20) Page 13 of 15 Transcript by Rev.com
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That’s neat. What are some of the leadership… Do you have any leaders that you follow that you read or
listen to in podcasts or books that you’ve read that have really impacted you?
Colin McIntosh:
Books. I always like that question because I actually don’t read a lot of books. I’m starting to do more. When I was younger, I was voracious. I would read everything. Now that I’m older, I deprioritize things that aren’t [inaudible 00:38:54]. My goal for the quarter, my personal goal, is to read three books this quarter. I’m reading a book a month. I’ve got three on my counter right now. One is The Everything Store by Jeff Bezos. Two is Bob Iger’s autobiography, which is interesting so far. He’s a very different CEO than I am. Then a third is a book called Well Behaved Indian Women, which is a book written from the perspective of first generation Indian woman, which is a super different perspective than my perspective as a third or fourth generation white guy. That’s been really interesting for me to read.
Colin McIntosh:
I really love Venture Deals by Brad Feld. If you’re raising money, very important book. Do More Faster by David Cohen and Techstars. It’s a killer book for startup founders. Podcasts, I love. I don’t listen to a lot of useful podcasts. I listen to one-
Andi Graham: That’s okay.
Colin McIntosh:
I think to one completely useless, inane, ridiculous waste of time podcast, and that is the Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on ESPN Radio, and I love that long more than I can describe. It’s the Seinfeld of sports radio. That’s the way I’ve always described it. It’s ESPNs number one podcast. They don’t talk about sports, which drives people who like sports up a wall. I like sports, but I think it’s funny. I’m from South Florida, so they’re sort of my Miami podcast that I grew up listening to when I was a teenager.
Colin McIntosh:
I think it’s the graveyard of sport’s radio. I just absolutely adore it. That’s probably the only thing that I spend time listening to on a daily basis to get a sense of normalcy in my life. I started listening to the Joe Rogan podcast a little bit more recently. Joe is an interesting guy. I think he’s a very talented dude. The things he’s done in his career are very impressive. He’s also just kind of this brick wall that just sits there and lets interesting people kind of talk. It’s funny because there’s a lot of parodies about his reactions where it’s always the same, “Oh, wow, that’s so interesting.” Or like, “Talk more about that.” I really like that podcast because it’s a good avenue for interesting people to get their thoughts out.
Andi Graham:
A hundred percent. I listen to him only for the guests. If I’m interested in the guest, that’s my consumption of Joe Rogan for sure.
Colin McIntosh:
If you’re interested in the guest, that’s a great podcast because they will get three hours of their raw thoughts out, and that’s really cool.
WTW E09 – Colin McIntosh (Completed 08/27/20) Page 14 of 15 Transcript by Rev.com
This transcript was exported on Aug 27, 2020 – view latest version here. Andi Graham:
Yeah, that is cool. That’s neat. Well, Colin, I thank you so much for spending time with me today. If people want to find you, where can they find you?
Colin McIntosh:
I’m pretty easy to find. Colin McIntosh, Sheets & Giggles. I’m easy on LinkedIn, Twitter and sheetsgiggles.com is the website. I don’t know when this podcast is going to come out, but I just started my own website called colinblogs.com, that I’m hopefully going to be writing a few blog posts on. I want to write one about how to come up with good brand name, about hiring principles as a former recruiter. I’ve got a few other really good ones in the hopper that I hope to publish.
Colin McIntosh:
You can also just Google Sheets & Giggles. We’re there. We’re on Amazon as well.
Andi Graham:
That’s awesome. Thank you so much.
Colin McIntosh: Yeah, thanks Andi.
WTW E09 – Colin McIntosh (Completed 08/27/20) Transcript by Rev.com
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