225 - The Impact of Emotional Intelligence and Personal Connections in Business with Plantify Foods' Suzette Ramcharan

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Suzette Ramcharan, you are the CEO of Plantify Foods, found at plantifyfoods.com, and You have one of the most interesting backgrounds of the 200+ guests I've had on this show. Welcome to the show, and I can hardly wait to dive in and share what I've learned about you with my audience. Thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, Douglas. It's awesome. And, and yes, I think it's a unique background, and so hopefully it'll enlighten some listeners today.

Absolutely. Let's start with the backstory. You, you grew, you were born in the West Indies. Start, let's start there.

Yeah, born in the Twin Islands of Trinidad and Tobago. If you're a rum drinker, if you like Carnival, we'd like to say we live behind God's back. We never got tourists, we weren't really a big tourist destination, but it was a really great way to grow up. A third world country, obviously. And then relocated or immigrated to Canada in 1986. Most of my mom's family had already immigrated, so we followed suit and grew up in Ontario. In a small town called Scarborough, although it's not that small anymore. And my original life path was my parents wanted us to have a, a better education, so they would've sent us either to Canada or the US for post-secondary anyway. So intended to go to university. After one year at university, I didn't have a lot of money and it was really stressful and I was disillusioned and I thought I wanted to be a corporate lawyer, but then school just kicked me in the butt and I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I dropped out and I studied at the School of Life.

And you eventually got into the mining business. Tell us about that.

And I always tell people, I say, I think mining saved my life. And I'm a firm believer that there are things in life that happen for a reason. So I dropped outta university. I was working and partying and partying a lot more than I was working. And I had an aunt that, that sat me down and said, what are you doing with your life? Like, you're 21. Like, you really need to get it together. Your parents brought you here, and we all had the same immigrant struggle, right? So your parents sacrificed everything to bring you here. What are you doing? She said, why don't you come work for me? And I helped her. She was writing resumes and doing, um, career coaching at the time. So I went to work with her, and still disillusioned, she fired me. Good for her, because tough love— you need tough love. I grew up in a family of tough love. She fired me. She said, listen, you're not— you're too complacent. You, you have skills. You need to hone these skills. You need to get a good job where you can move yourself up. And so I I went downtown to Robert Half recruiting agency. There was a company hiring for admin support. It was a receptionist role, happened to be a mining company. I had no idea about mining, lived in Canada, and I felt so— I was like, how do I not know about this? Joined that company, and 21 years later, I had a career in mining and started as a receptionist and worked my way up. And I exited, I was the VP of corporate development for a junior exploration company.

Wow.

Yeah.

And this was in the late '80s to—

This was the— this was not— this was 2000. I joined mining in 2000, and I think it was June or July, and it was just— it was an interesting time. It was just after Bre-X. So if anyone knows Bre-X, it was a big scandal, and so it put mining in a highlight or limelight, I would say. And the price of gold at the time was $250 US, an ounce of gold.

Pretty cheap compared to—

Yeah, very cheap compared to today.

Right. So how did you, how were you able to, with one year of college, no graduate school, and you move from being hired as a brand new administrative assistant with virtually no skills to becoming the vice president of development? No hard skills.

The soft skills I had, I think the soft skills are what got me through life. And I, I've gone through, we've, we're all growing every day, so we're different people every day, but I've gone through some very I would say large transformations at different points in my lifetime. But one thing I always realized was I wasn't dumb. So I had the ability to take in information and, and understand it if I put effort behind understanding it and then learning it. And number two, I had this knack for being a chameleon, which I originally thought was a negative thing. I was like, oh, I'm being fake. I'm just trying to fit in. But no, it's not that. It was just an ability to build relationships and to speak with people and to be genuine in that moment and absorb as much information and listening, understanding and listening. And my curiosity, I think, is what took me really far. I was curious about everyone and how they got to where they were and where they were going and what they wanted out of life and what were their— what were things that benefited them or hindered them and learned those things. But I read everything that I could get my hands on. I had really great leaders around me that offered to answer any questions that I had, and I took as many courses as I could. I found I found a niche in investor relations and I honed my skills on that. So that's more marketing and PR and found I love to talk. I always knew I liked to talk, but honing that into a skill set, investor relations, you talk a lot about your company and what you're trying to do. And so that, I think that and finding a community. I joined the Canadian Investor Relations Institute, built up my network. And so that's one thing I always tell people is you're never too young to start building up a network. And especially if you have an idea of an industry or field you want to be in, build a network with those people. They're going to be your mentors. And yeah, it's a, if it wasn't really lucky that mining had a lot of good people that wanted to help, just genuine people from all walks of life, all over the world. And I worked my butt off. That's what I can say.

Good for you. So what caused, you were in the mining industry for 21 years. That's pretty much a career.

That's a career.

I was a trial lawyer for 22 years before I left. So I understand. What, what caused you to leave?

So if you've ever heard the term imposter syndrome.

Oh yes.

I had that for a lot of my career and obviously I didn't have a post-secondary degree and I'm competing with MBAs and very technical people, but I always had this imposter syndrome. And in 2008, the company I was working with got bought out, which was a really good buyout. But it was 2008, markets crashed, and then it was really hard to find a job and all of my previous bosses and mentors that said, don't worry, good people always find work. But this was September when it happened. Then by January, a lot of my friends were getting laid off who were in investor relations. And she said, let's go backpacking. Let's backpack Argentina for a month and then put out some resumes. And then by the time you're back, we'll figure it out. So we did that. We went to Argentina, backpacked from north to south. So really cool. Made our way down to Patagonia. And then I got a call for a mining role and I came back and that situation, and I'd put out resumes outside of mining as well, and they required post-secondary, that situation made me feel trapped. It gave me a sense of feeling trapped. And so I said to myself, at some point, I really should try and see if I can make it outside of mining. If I'm, if understanding these very technical terms and understanding this mining language and everything else, am I stuck? And I don't like to feel stuck. COVID came around, a good friend of mine, she wanted to start a tech startup during COVID She asked me to join. So we partnered and we built a mobile CRM that solved the problems that we had as investor relations professionals. And that was the start of my brain going, ah, there's a life outside of mining and you could probably do it if you put your mind to it. And so that's what kind of started that sort of curiosity outside of mining. Now, having been outside of mining for, oh my God, 3, 4 years now, I do miss it. I miss being so connected because it's such a connected industry. You have to understand global macroeconomics and a lot of things because it's a very small component that makes its way into end-use, majority of our end-use products. But I will say that I don't feel stuck and it's nice that I have that knowledge base that I can go and I can reinvent myself back into mining if I really wanted to. But honestly, the pushing myself and being an entrepreneur and learning the, those skills, which are again, soft skills, but like that grit, that determination, that loneliness that drives you to keep going on, they were good learning lessons for sure.

Do you know where the term soft skills came from? Most people don't.

The term what? Soft skills.

You know where it came from?

Oh, I, I don't know the origin.

No, it was coined in 1966 by the United States Army Training Command. Huh. And the training officers were trying to distinguish the skills that it took a batt— a battalion commander to control a battle space as compared to a soldier who drove tank or drove a truck or shot a rifle. Those were hard skills. The soft skills were the new ones. Strategic thinking, critical thinking, empathy, listening, emotional intelligence, all of these intangible skills that you couldn't measure objectively, and they ended up calling them soft skills.

Ah, nice.

And they wrote all these training manuals about how to develop soft skills. And of course, the greatest leadership training organization in the world is the US military. That's all, that's what they're all about. And, but somehow it got into business and now you hear business people look at soft skills pejoratively, like the, oh, they're weak, they're worthless. They're not, of course it's total BS.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because I just looked at, it was an article talking about the fact that soft skills are now in higher demand than your hard tangible skills because we live in a society where we've forgotten how to socialize and listen to point. It was funny. It's not, are you listening to me? Are you comprehending? There, there's list— like, are you hearing me? Yes. But true listening is hearing and comprehending.

And I'll take it even a step further than that. True listening is making sure that the speaker feels heard from the speaker's frame of reference. So I would want to make sure that you, Suzette, are being heard by me. That is true deep listening. Yeah. And that's a skill that very few people have. That's the skill that I teach. How do I validate you? How do I make you feel heard so that you're now in a position to listen to me? Because you will not listen to me until you feel heard.

Yep. Yep. We are selfish.

We're hardwired.

Yeah. It's hardwired. But yeah, no, I, I do think, yeah, soft skills. Um, I guess they're soft because of the differentiation between the tangible hard skills, but to your point, they're they got belittled in a way, or we reduced their significance. And now we're realizing, especially with the emotional intelligence, there are— we— you can look at social media. Social media is a small capture of the entire global population, and of course people that live on that realm. But you look at various things in it, and it's— we don't face daily adversity anymore, so we don't know how to deal with adversity. We don't deal with daily things like we used to, so we don't know how to deal with things like we used to. And if you're not speaking with someone where it's a two-way conversation and you're not picking up and learning that me speaking doesn't mean anything if you— yes, Doug, you're nodding and you're looking at me. You're validating that you're understanding and you're collecting the information, and that's what's making me feel heard. So you have mastered those skills very well. It's that give and take. It's, am I doing something while I'm talking to you? That's not true communication, right? There's soft skills, but there's hard components to it.

That's right. And to really master these skills requires adopting some counterintuitive ideas. For example, we are not rational beings as humans. We are emotional beings and we don't have any rationality in us whatsoever. Rationality is a myth that's been perpetrated on us for 4,000 years. Every decision we make is an emotional decision. We have critical thinking skills and reasoning skills and logic and stuff like that to help us solve problems, but that's not our essence. Our essence is emotion. And that's a hard thing for a lot of people to get. They all think were these Spockian people out there, Vulcans, right?

I wanted to be a Vulcan. They're so calm and collected, right?

Yeah, but always cracked me up on the Star Trek series is whenever you saw the Vulcans, especially when on the movies where Spock was in front of these tribunals who were all— they were just as emotional as he was. It would just crack me up.

That's a good analogy.

Emotions are really powerful, and what I teach And what I proselytize is that we have to learn emotional skills to deal with our interrelationship, our relationship problems. We can't, we have to abandon reason in order to have strong relationships because reasoning has no place in relationship. Think about, you were talking earlier about how you, as you started out your career, a young woman, imposter syndrome, but you were a chameleon. You were able to relate to people. Is there any reasoning involved in any of that stuff?

I don't know if there was reasoning involved, but there was a sense that I was always curious as a child. So I always had this curiosity. And then I don't know if it was, uh, it's probably a combination of a couple of things. My uncle was an anthropologist and he taught at Berkeley University in California. And he was well-written, well-known in the anthropological circles. And he got me interested in travel. He would come and visit and show us all these things. Africa was one of his favorite continents. And bring us all these things and talk about and teach us about our Indian culture because he had studied it and all of these things. And that got my, me curious on people and civilizations. And then probably moving from one country to another got me more curious about where everybody's coming from. And especially Canada and Ontario, that's such a melting pot. You've got such a huge plethora of the world that are conglomerating in one spot now. And Scarborough was a lot of immigrants. So just getting to that curiosity, and I think That is what sort of was the basis for me being curious and talking with people. But the more I talked with people who came from completely different backgrounds, like a lot of the geologists were Aussies, some of them grew up in the outback, some of them grew up in Sydney, various places within one country. And you've got this diversity. And then I just got so much more curious and I understood that sitting and talking with someone and again, when you learn these things in networking, it can sound cold. It's ask someone a question about them. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. This is how you build this engagement thing. But it really wasn't a hard skill anymore. It was just habit for me going, I want to learn where your origin story is and I want to know what kind of makes you and how you got here and how can all these various people get here and then where are we going from there. And so as you're speaking with people, you learn personal information about them. You get to understand again where that emotion is coming from, what was driving that emotion in the moment, and you just ask them little questions.

Fundamentally, you found that to be really satisfying.

And it was just conversations, but those conversations stuck more than me talking about 10, oh, we had this last quarter and that. You built the relationship first almost. And so it does allow you to do business better when you're on that personal, more personal level.

And you're illustrating my point is that curiosity and feeling that deep satisfaction of getting to know somebody and learning about them and making them feel heard. Is a process of emotional intelligence and emotional competency. It is not a process of reasoning, rationality, and logic. That's the point that I'm making.

And October last year, I attended this, it's called Spiritual Entrepreneurship. It was a, a 2-day gathering or 2 and a half day gathering. And a group of people, 40 people that I'd never met before from all walks of life, again, looking for, it was a really cool group. They were trying to bring spirituality back into the business world. So realign values with the bottom line. And I was talking with a group and we said something about being rational and they said, Suzette, we're not rational human beings. I said, I beg to differ, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They looked at me and they said, the one girl, she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, when you realize, and I realized we're, we have this veil of rationality or logic, but we are completely emotional and I see it and I've seen it. You're talking to fund managers that are managing billions of dollars, but They get the story, gets them.

That's right.

Story. And it's the passion. And it's, are these people the right people to take this project forward? Because you can have a really great asset and a shitty management team and it can't go anywhere. But if you have the right management team, so again, it comes down to people. It comes down to how they are equipped to deal with it.

And people are emotional. So you learn to relate to people on an emotional basis. You build a connection and then you can problem solve. And you feel like you can collaborate and create, but you can't do that until people feel safe and they feel safe when they've been heard and listened to.

And that's the secret. Yeah. It's powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you got out of mining and you went into consumer.

Yeah. So I got out of mining. We started a trend, right? I moved from Toronto to Vancouver during COVID as well and fell in love and decided to relocate here till I figure out where my next— I feel like I'm on a journey, so I don't know where next, but Vancouver's home for now. But then I was talking with these DC guys and they were asking me about— we were just talking about life and I had quit drinking in December of 2019 and they were asking me like, what do you drink now? I said, there's a couple things on the market, but none of them are really great and a lot of them have a lot of sugar and I just drink water really. I look like a, I don't know, I look like a weirdo at the bar, but that's what I do. And they said, we would like to invest in trends and we see this non-alcohol trend being a boom. Why don't you build the company for us? We'll invest. And I said, guys, I'm, I don't know anything about building a company. No, we will, we'll help you. We'll get as much support as you need, but we think you can do this. And so I built a non-alc beverage company with a group, didn't do it all by myself, had a group, and obviously we were funded, which made it a lot easier. But that was a really unique learning opportunity for myself about myself and a crash course in consumer packaged goods and new trends in these new categories of food and bev. So it was a really great learning opportunity. I met a lot of, I And again, networked as much as I can to meet a lot of people. And we managed to gain national distribution within our first year of launch, which is, it was extremely fast-tracked. I don't think we actually stopped to appreciate the benefits of that, but by the end of that 2 years for me, I was extremely burnt out. And I realized, I said, this was, this fit because I wasn't drinking, but it's not really my passion or my dream. And we had brought on a COO and he ended up taking over and I exited that company. I took about 4 months off. 4 or 5 months off to soul search. And then a friend of mine referred me to Plantify. They were looking for a Canadian-based CEO and I'd already been in consumer packaged goods, TSX Venture listed company, capital markets, right up my alley. So met with the team and joined them September 1st.

Wow. So you, yeah. And Plantify, it's an Israeli-based company as I understand it, producing super clean food.

Yes. So it's clean label food, which means it's minimally processed. We use the whole natural ingredients and then through proprietary process and the know-how of the team in Israel, we are able to get— so we do dips, soups, salads. So think hummus, baba ghanoush, any kind of soup like a sweet potato soup, a tomato soup, stews like a veggie non-carny, and then falafel balls and different nuggets, but no chemical preservatives. And we get the same, if not similar, shelf life to our competitors that use chemical preservatives. So you're going to see maybe one ingredient in there that's possibly a stabilizer depending on what it is. But the rest of it, you— it's like everything that comes from your pantry or kitchen. So very clean was the purpose for Plantify. Being Israeli-based, everything is manufactured there. There's been obviously dealing with a war that's going on that I—

been a little disruptive.

I think I was— yeah, I was over a site visit beginning of September and I did not see this coming. Different part of the world, they just deal with things. There's, there, you know, and, and again, coming from a third world country, I always, I have this, how do I word this? I sometimes look at people and I laugh because I'm like, ugh, you don't know about your first world problems. I'm like, you don't know how lucky you are that you could turn on the tap and drink the water because I couldn't. But then you're met with a different group of people where it's, you don't know what it's like to put a meeting on hold because there's air sirens going off and then postpone it and then just keep having it because your daily life has to go on. So different type of grit and resilience. But really innovative country. And so we've still been producing and we've still been working and we've been growing customer base in Europe, in the US. Knock on wood, we can still continue.

So what is it that gets you up in the morning, gets you excited to go to work?

It's funny. I enjoy the variety of the work that I do. On top of Plantify, I'm also helping out another startup in the plant-based food sector. They're out of Las Vegas, a really unique product that I think has a lot of, a lot of possibility to help out a lot of marginalized communities just with the protein source that it is. So getting up in the morning for me is number one. Is it going to be rainy? Is it going to be sunny? Because it's Vancouver, I don't know. I try to play Russian roulette with the weather. I don't check the night before sometimes, but it's really exciting about working on a variety of things and moving things forward. I like to see things move forward and get executed and then what I could learn in that day in what I'm doing because a lot of it is, it's not brand new, but it's new to this specific product or this specific market or this specific whatever and there's always something that can go awry. So dealing with problems or dealing with challenges is what gets me up. And then of course, I'm a fat kid and I love to cook. So when I wake up and I'm like, ooh, what do I have to eat? I'm gonna be honest with you, food drives my life.

You're a foodie.

A foodie, yeah.

Wow. Fascinating. What is it that you think, as you look at yourself today, how you've grown, and you really have grown a lot in your career, personally and professionally, what do you think is unique about you today that you bring to the table that makes you so successful at what you do?

I would have to say there has to be something in me that it's a drive kind of thing. And as my, I, because I don't wanna sit here and say I don't get anxiety, or I don't feel uncomfortable when it's something new, or I don't feel challenged, and there's not an immediate sensation in my body that this is not something I know how to do, or I don't know if I'm going to do it well. And there's a— I have a bit of a perfectionist in me that I'm trying to get rid of. It's a bit of that trauma stuff that you work through. But so I still— there's still this little bit of fear or hesitation or anxiety, whatever. But I think the one thing that I have is that I have nothing to lose. This is the way I think about it sometimes, is I really don't have anything to lose. So what if you mess up? So what if you ask that dumb question? And the more you get comfortable with that, the more you are comfortable doing it. And there's a way to ask questions where you— it's not just a dumb question. And sometimes you watch Friends, obviously Chandler Bing likes to self-deprecate. I do that as well. Like you make a lot of jokes about yourself, but I always say, can I ask a really dumb question? No one is ever going to say that's a dumb question when you preface it with, can I ask a really dumb question? So you learn these little tricks to make you feel— it's self-soothing, right? It makes makes me feel less uncomfortable in moving forward. But I think that's one of the things that, if I look back, has allowed me to succeed, is, or I will figure it out. And if I don't have the— I will figure it out. There's no way I can't figure it out. And then building a network that I can rely on to lean on when I need help or I need to, to bounce something off of them. And again, I think the networking, building— and it doesn't have to be friends, it can be friends, but expanded from that, it's just a group of people that you can rely on that have a different view on life than you would have so you can get different perspective and then knowing when to trust your own gut as opposed to listening and continuously listening to other people. You have to have your own instincts that you follow. And so I will say the quitting alcohol. I was drinking since I was 15 and I was a professional drinker. I like to say I went pro early and retired as a professional drinker. And the mental clarity that comes from being sober is unreal, but you have to learn a lot of things. People ask me, they said, what's the hardest thing in sobriety? I said, in the beginning, it's the amount of time you have. You, you have a lot more time on your hands because you're not hungover and you're not just at the bar drinking. And so you fill it with different things. And so that's why I say I have nothing to lose. Like I've been, I've hit rock bottom many times in my life. If there's a challenge, it doesn't scare me. It's a challenge that yes, I'll feel like, oh, but we'll figure it out.

You just answered my next question. How have you managed your imposter syndrome? And you, I think you just answered it.

The imposter, you know what the imposter syndrome is? For me, it was an unwavering sense that I was never qualified. I'm never going to be qualified for this. Right. And then people ask a question, you talk this and that, you talk, and then after a while, so I did, I got a certified professional investor relations certification through CIRE, and it was amazing for me because it was the first time I was going to be able to get a designation. And hopefully it would grow and this would become the standard. They've hit some snags in it, but it was really good because it gave me that financial understanding that I didn't have. So being able to read the financial statements and everything else and understanding all of the various types of ratios and different things that we use in order to analyze financial stability of a company. So that was one. Those are hard skills. Let's call those hard skills that I needed. But the more you recognize that just because you don't know something doesn't make you stupid. And it's a skill to know what you don't know.

That's right.

And so those kind of things, I think, helped me come through the imposter syndrome, was, you know what, you may not have this degree, but you know what you're doing, and you know that you don't know how to do that, so you're gonna ask for help and you're not gonna screw it up. I think that if I'm remembering my life correctly, I think that's what it Good for you.

One more question and I'll let you go. This has been a fascinating conversation. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Um, okay. There's two things. Number one, I, I'm diagnosed bipolar. And the only reason I say this is I was diagnosed with depression when I was a teenager. And I used to say suffered from depression all my life. I don't say that anymore. I've dealt with depression, and for a lot of people, I'm always upbeat and happy, and they're like, you depressed? And I say, yeah, it's that, um, fake it till you make it. I fake the happiness, and somehow it just— it— if you wake up and you try to be happy every day, you will have some semblance of happy every day. So not even if you're not suffering from depression, there is this sense of you can manifest how you want to feel in that day. And so it's just a matter of waking up and telling yourself, today is going to be a good day. Today might not be a good day, but if you start off with that, it should start rough on a good day. The second thing is that I'm really shy.

You're an introvert.

I, and I learned this during COVID I'll tell you something really interesting.

And I've said this before on the show with other guests. Of the 230 episodes I've done on this show, 230 leaders, only one of them was an extrovert.

Really?

Every successful leader I've ever met, is an introvert. I'm an introvert. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, that is. I like those stats.

Yeah, no, it's incredible. We get our energy from ins— inside. So I'm guessing that if you're like me, if you have free time, you'd rather be by yourself or with a friend or intimate partner by yourself, as opposed to going to a party or a concert or a sporting event where there are huge crowds of people.

Yeah, I— and I used to love those large crowds, but that's when I didn't know who I was, right? And it was draining. I didn't understand why it was so draining.

That's right, because people are pulling the energy out of you.

Yeah, yeah.

Alone, where you can build up your own energy inside yourself.

Interesting. Very interesting. Yeah.

Suzette, this has been an absolutely incredible conversation.

I had no idea.

I do this show, I get to meet really amazing people like you. So thank you so Thank you.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, Would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.