Secret to Building One of the Greatest LA Workplaces | Leveling Up With Andy Mackensen (EP 3.1)

Today we are visiting Snack Nation. I'm gonna talk to the CMO, and the funny thing about this place is I started out as an intern when this company was doing $0 in revenue in Sean's apartment, who's the CEO. You're gonna learn a lot about how to build a great culture, how to be intentional about it. You're gonna learn what customer advocacy is. You're gonna learn about how Snack Nation pivoted from a prior business that was already doing $9 million in revenue, and how to actually pivot, how to make that happen. You're gonna learn what inflection points are, what their inflection point was, and how they go about growing their business today. How they do it from a sales perspective, how they do it from a marketing perspective, and understand what it takes to build an incredible business and one of the greatest places to work in Los Angeles. So let's dive into it.

Liftoff. Welcome to Snack Nation.

This is where the magic happens, huh?

This is where all of the magic happens.

All right everybody, today we have Andy Mackinson, who is the CMO and co-founder of Snack Nation. And we're gonna talk about the story, we're gonna tour the place, we're gonna learn all about the company and how you build an incredible culture. Andy, how's it going?

Holy cow, we're gonna do all of that right now?

All of that right now.

That sounds awesome.

On a Friday before we go home.

I am somewhere in between spectacular and phenomenal. The whole Tony Robbins thing, you can choose what state you're gonna be in. So let's choose to be somewhere in that realm right now.

Let's be spectacular today. So for full context, I actually used to intern for Andy. This was in what, 2010?

I think so.

Yeah, he hired an army of interns. We just cranked out a bunch of content and look at where they're at now. I think, you know, I think it's because of the interns that we all put this thing together, right?

Yeah, I read something where you can get a lot of free marketing labor through an internship program. So I wrote a long-form sales letter for the internship and put it out there. Eric discovered it. He was one of our first interns in 2010. I think we had 5 total interns that summer. And you guys did, you cranked out a lot of content. You learned about internet marketing, SEO, and I think that's where you actually discovered marketing, right?

That's where I discovered marketing. That's where my friend said, hey, you need to check out this internet marketing thing. And I signed up and he put me through the wringer. I think he put all of us through the wringer. But here's the interesting thing. SnackNation, we'll talk about that in a second, but it wasn't always what it was before. What was it before?

Well, it's an interesting story of a pivot from originally we were America's first healthy vending company. Started that back in 2008. And then we learned a lot of things through the course of that business and as that grew. And we realized one of the best markets to address was businesses. A lot of businesses would prefer to have a direct delivery of snacks and just receive them and have them put that— put them out in like their break rooms instead of having a vending machine.

So how did you decide to make that pivot? Because I know you got the healthy vending business to a certain size. How do you— it's not easy once you get it to a certain size to decide we're going to take the ship in another direction.

Yeah, yeah, it's not easy. The impetus was seeing first getting back to our core purpose. Why did we get in this to begin with? And then also how can we that core purpose with the market. So for us, why did we get into the vending industry? It wasn't because we loved vending machines, even though vending machines are amazing. I mean, like, think about them, they're so cool. No, they're not. They're brown, they're dirty. They're so cool. We did end up making our own, like, our own vending machine. It was white and colorful and it had credit card reader technology and all that.

Tried to sell ads on it too.

We did. We sold some ads on it. It had an LCD screen on the top and all that. We got into the vending industry because it's a ubiquitous channel. There's 5 million vending machines across the United States, which is about 1 vending machine for every 70 people. And it was a great channel through which to distribute healthy snacks.

Mm-hmm.

We got into the business because we wanted to have people eat more healthily and more conveniently. All the health problems that come along with poor eating and poor health decisions. And so that's originally why we chose the vending industry. What we learned, and why we ended up pivoting, Was that the business segment, they don't really like to have vending machines all over the place, and it's a much bigger segment than what we were focusing on, which originally was schools, hospitals, health clubs. So you combine, you know, we combined our core purpose of getting more healthy food out there into a bigger potential market. And then also some of the complications with the franchise model is you have a franchisee, you have vending equipment. With this new model with Snack Nation, it's direct delivery, so it goes right to the business. It's shipped via FedEx. We're not working through an intermediary. There's no intermediary, which is the franchisee. There's no vending equipment that needs to be upkept. So it was a better, it was a stronger model, recurring revenue. It got, it helped us fulfill our mission to get more healthy snacks out there. And, and so that we made a very, very difficult decision to start focusing on that new model.

Got it. So just for everyone's context, I mean, from numbers that you can share, how big did you get the vending machine business to and how big is SnackNation today?

Yeah, so we, it's public record, we got to number 168 on the Inc. 500 list. with the, with Hooman, which was the, the vending company that got up to $9.2 million in revenue. And then we proactively decided to not to continue growing that business and then shifted over to the direct delivery model with SnackNation. And SnackNation is absolutely definitely larger than Hooman ever was. We have about 140 employees now.

Wow. Okay. And one thing I want to touch upon, and, you know, we'll see in a little bit as well, is The culture that you've built. And even since when we were interns, when you were doing $0, nothing, you were very intentional about culture with you and your co-founder Sean. So can you talk about what that means to you and what you've done around it?

Sure. I've been asked, what— how do you define culture? There's so many different definitions. For me, culture is what your employees say about you and the company when you're not there. Picture you know, a couple employees hanging out on a Friday night having a beer or whatever, and their friend— they bump into a friend and the friend's like, oh, you're working at SnackNation now? What's SnackNation all about? Culture is how do they— what's the feeling that they have inside of them when they're describing what SnackNation is all about? And are they incredibly enthusiastic about it and they love it, or do they have kind of this like downtrodden, you know, depressed kind of like, oh yeah, it's just a job?

Right.

Or no, you know, Snack Nation or wherever they're working, it's my lifestyle, I have friends there, like how they light up and how they feel about it. That's, to me, that's what culture is.

So I mean, when I come in here, you know, I see it's a great-looking office environment, you know, people look like they're working hard, people are high-fiving, things like that. How do you hire for the right culture fit?

Culture, it starts from the top down, from C-level down throughout the entire organization. We have to live it ourselves and be an example, and then we also have to Proactively plan cool stuff. Like, you know, we just had an offsite 2 weeks ago. We went up to Malibu Wines and the entire team, we had some fun team building games.

All 140?

All of us. We all went and then we all wine tasted in the afternoon. And there was really nothing planned in the afternoon. Usually we have some sort of agenda, but this time around we're just like, you know what, we're going to do some team building games in the morning since we've grown the team very fast. A lot of people don't know each other as well as they could have. And then in the afternoon, just have some lunch and some wine and people just chat. And it went over really well. I mean, people loved it.

I find those to be huge. When you actually take yourself out of work and you're getting to know people, you actually become friends instead of just a number or just, you know, oh, we're in this for the 9 to 5 and that's it. So actually, who plans these things? Because I'm interested in, you know, people talk about offsites all the time and things like that. Logistically, it sounds like a nightmare to me. So what do you do?

Well, it varies every single stage you are as you grow. Our first offsite was 5 people. Sean and I planned it. We went up to Big Bear, had a house that, uh, that we rented out, you know. And it was more about— it was very much about like planning and goal setting and what are we doing for the next 6 months. And everyone was involved. And we've grown and we've rented a house in Malibu a couple years ago. So over— as we've expanded, we, we now have a full-time HR, uh, you know, head of HR. So he planned that. We have a full-time vibe manager, which is, um, vibe manager. You know, an office manager, but also Taking into account like how the team feels and the fun activities and stuff like that. So there's culture kind of built into that role. So combination of head of HR and our vibe manager planning the offsite, and that's where we are now.

Cool. You have an offsite with 140 people. What does that look like in terms of cost and like how many weeks do you have to plan ahead? Because holy shit, that sounds like a nightmare again.

Yeah, so it looks fun. You said what it looked like? Yeah, it looks fun.

Looks fun, yeah, but how's it feel?

We started planning for it admittedly a little bit late, about a month, maybe 5 weeks in advance, and that was cutting it a little bit close for some of these places. For venues that you can have a full 140 team members and have some activities planned, you know, we had an outsourced company come in and lead the team-building games and stuff like that. So yeah, you definitely— I think you want to start planning offsites 6 to 8 weeks in advance. To get the right spots. And then in terms of cost, I mean, offsites for us are probably $10K or $20K now.

Okay, so I mean, let's talk about the benefits for a second. So for a second, I mean, you have, you know, your camaraderie, people come back refreshed, you know, you talk about strategy, things like that. What are some other key benefits from offsites before we move on?

We have a lot of people here that are like, some of my best friends are at work, like, and a lot of new people that are like, I've made some You know, you talk to them a year later and they're like, I've made some of my best friends of my life at work. So when you can have that corner, that kind of feeling and culture there in the office, it's huge because people love coming to work. They love working hard. Retention is great when you—

Huge.

You know, you can look at the stats, but when you have best friends at work, you tend to stay at work longer. You don't want to leave and go somewhere else. And just fun overall. Like, I want to, I want to come to work and I want to have a great time. And when I see everyone else around having a good time— now granted, it's not all, it's not all peaches and cream and fun and games and high fives and—

Peaches and cream, sunshine and flowers. Yeah, thank you. Sunshine and flowers, I got it.

Yeah, it's not all that because the work that we're doing is meaningful and it's hard. But when you can infuse that fun and have those friendships in the office, I mean, geez, I don't know what's better than that.

Agreed. And it's hard to formulate it. You can't just say, we're gonna build a great culture. I think Traffic and Conversion Conference a couple months ago, I said, hey guys, like, you know, we need to build a fun place to work, and it's not gonna happen. Doesn't matter if I say it's gonna be fun, it's not gonna be like that. But thankfully that has happened where people stay late on their own. It's not like they're asked to. They stay till like 6:30, 7:00 or so, and they just enjoy each other's company. So I think it's really hard, but I think you have to be really deliberate about it. And I think Sean and you have done a really good job on it. So congratulations.

Whoo!

I'm getting hungry.

We got snacks in here? If you enjoyed this video, go down, hit subscribe, and then watch the next video in the playlist right over there. We're gonna talk all kinds of strategies to how to level up your sales team, how to get your business rocking, and how to just level up your life.