Build a legacy with a product company

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm your host of Conscious Design Podcast and channel. And on today's episode about launching a product, I want to talk about building a legacy with a product company. I've talked about this a little bit in a previous video, and today I just want to dive in a little bit more specifically for product-based companies and how you can be using a product company to build a lasting legacy that will actually last. So obviously, kind of the first thing you would want to talk about is your mission. If you're going to build a legacy, if you're going to build something that lasts with a product, you want to have a solid mission. You're going to have many opportunities. The market is going to change, and your product may change. Your products will probably expand, contract, to launch multiple products over the course of, of having this brand. So you want to establish your mission. Your mission is very important, and having one is going to be imperative to having a long-term product-based company. Now, I also want to talk about long-term planning, your impact, areas to improve specifically around products, and Really importantly, the observation and feedback loop, which without it and without using that, you won't be able to create a lasting legacy and a product that is able to keep getting better and better as you go forward. So, long-term planning. This, it seems pretty common to be mentioned, and I've talked about it before, so I won't make this super long, but Essentially, when you have a product company, you want to be thinking long-term generally anyway, because you want to have some sort of roadmap to take you from where you're at right now to product number 2 and 3 and 4. Now, with what we talked about with mission, when you create a mission and you make sure that you are very clear about what that mission is, you can use that as a way to help your long-term product planning. So that means, yeah, product number 1 does this, it makes this improvement, it offers this solution. And our mission is, you know, remove plastics from Industry X. Well, the first product is going to remove a certain percentage of that. But we know that we're going to need 15 products in order to make a big dent, maybe we'll remove 20% of plastics if we can get 10 of our products into the market and used really well and adopted and be able to replace those, those current products. So when you do that, your long-term planning becomes mission-based and allows you to have a very clear goal. You know, it's very easy to get distracted and have market make different sways and it changes. And without that mission guiding your long-term planning, your product roadmap tends to be a little bit all over the place and more of an attempt to guess at what the market will want rather than a product plan that is aimed at completing a specific mission, your mission, and whatever that is that you want to achieve. Next, what is your impact? So knowing your impact is really important. With a product-based company, your impact is bigger than what you probably think it is. You're going to involve a lot of people in order to get a product made, produced, assembled, and then shipped to someone, your end customer, whoever that may be. So identifying what your impact is and how it, how it interacts with your mission and your long-term planning. So you want to make sure that you're aware of what that impact is. making sure that you adjust your impact where you can in order to match your mission and of course match your long-term planning for your products because you want to be, you know, if your product is something that you know what the next few products are, then you can optimize it. And I've talked about this before, component optimization and things like that. So being aware of what your impact is also allows you to better plan products. Now, I want to talk about areas to improve. So there's basically 3 areas that you can always improve with a product that covers most, most things and definitely are areas that people are very aware of and care about now. So first, environment. Your impact is going to be absolutely environmental when you build a product. So this is where looking at sustainable materials, recycling, reuse, how to optimize and minimize material on a product, how to create packaging that is able to be a secondary product or is biodegradable or in some other way can be easily put into a process where it goes away in a clean way or it becomes another product down the road. Environmental is definitely something that is a huge focus for a lot of people right now. There's a lot of growth. There's a lot of materials coming out pretty much every week. It seems that there's some new material that I find— this is part of what I do, is finding new and unique materials that meet sustainable requirements and are able to actually do the job of materials that we have used for decades that are not sustainable and without degradation. And so there's a ton of new materials coming out. And it's very easy, at least compared to when I started working on sustainable products. It's a lot easier to find a material that's going to do the job now than before. And with new products and new materials coming out, quite often now it's something that kind of improving the environmental portion of a product is something that's absolutely achievable, even for small companies, startups. This is definitely something you can easily jump into and start being aware of and developing a product that is environmentally friendly or more environmentally friendly than what we could have done 5, 10 years ago. The second area is social. So social impact of a product is something that is coming about. And while we've been aware, you know, things like not being pro— you know, being anti-sweatshop and not wanting to have the worker environment be really terrible, things like that, slave labor, removing all of that has been something that's kind of gone along and it's definitely a huge awareness in that specific way. But there's also other areas that people are becoming aware of what the social impact of a product is and how to make the impact, the social impact of say, producing a product in a different country, or what does that look like for their society? What does it look like for the people that, that could have had that job in another country? So there's a lot more awareness, and it's not as easy. It's, you know, I can't just look up some sustainable materials and pretty fairly easily get you a very environmentally friendly material option. through, through process. Social impact is something that is growing and people are more aware of it, and people are figuring out how to actually measure that impact still. And it's just something to be aware of and think about. And there's places that are very socially aware. They create fair trade, things like that fall under the social impact portion. And they also cross into the financial, which is the third 3rd area. The financial impact of a product, a lot of people look at, well, what is the bare minimum cost and what is it— what's the cost impact to the company? But there's also, what is the cost impact to the employees? If you're producing a product that has just enough margins for the company to have only minimum wage people, what does that look like? And that kind of circles back to social. What is the personal experience of your employees and the people employed by your supply chain? Are you cutting your margins too thin to be able to not actually employ people the way you want to? Well, think about that. There are definitely products where low profit margin, totally fine. This all works. The volume is high enough where the money is there to make sure everyone is paid well, but not all the time. So being aware of what the financial impact of everyone attached to the supply chain, as well as your employees and the customers. You want to be cost conscious, not necessarily trying to be as cheap as possible or maximize. It's just being aware of what are the financial impacts of your product, both internally and externally to your company and team. The last area I want to talk about is observation and feedback loop. So when you're building a legacy. When you're building a product company and you want to have a good legacy, one of the most important things that you can do, especially if you're the owner and one leading the ship, basically, you need to observe and have a feedback loop of some kind. If you're not aware of something, you can't improve it. If you're not aware of something, you can't fix it. And without a feedback loop of some kind between, you know, if you're running the company, if you're the founder, if you're, you're managing the business, then you're not going to necessarily see everything yourself. You're not going to be hand-making every, every product yourself and experiencing everything necessarily by yourself. Maybe you are if you're a really small startup, but it's really important to build in feedback loops with your customers, with your team members, with your supply chains, your suppliers. Having that feedback loop Makes it so that you can observe more than what you'll actually just observe managing your company or running your company or creating a new product yourself. You know, you want to have those feedback loops in place as early as possible because it will help you avoid problems down the road. It'll help you catch problems. It'll help you catch potential issues and it'll allow you to look holistically at your business, at the environmental, social, and financial impacts that your company has, and be able to make adjustments to make sure that you are aimed on your mission properly, you're building the legacy that you want to have with your company, and it's all working the way it's supposed to. And it's— this seems really obvious. Most people think about it, and honestly, we all do, and then we start a company, then we start getting into the weeds of getting a product out, making enough money, getting a company off the ground, especially in the startup world, feedback loop can often fall behind and just get not intentionally ignored, but it becomes an extra thing that doesn't necessarily have an in-your-face return on investment. And it's something that's really important. And down the road, you'll, Every startup, every company I've ever talked to, every founder I've ever talked to that got to a certain place, they always have a point where they realize they should have started tracking things and created those feedback loops earlier, and it would have helped them avoid some issue. I'm sure there's somebody who managed to do it without any feedback loop, and maybe they lucked out and made everything work perfectly, but really commonly, not having those systems in place and being able to observe every part of the company And every impact you have, at some point you wish that you had that to look at in order to know what has that been, because some things you need a long time tracking. You need months or a year, more than a year of tracking something to know what your actual impact is, especially in cyclical businesses or seasonal businesses. You need to track for a year to be able to know what your baseline is and then track for another year to know whether it's gone up or down. You know, if your Christmas season is your biggest, biggest season of work, sales, whatever that is, you need 2 Christmas seasons in order to know what your original is and have data against it. And ideally 3. And anybody with data, you want 3 points. You want an original, you want a second, and you want a third to see if it's a trend or whether it's just bouncing back and forth. We don't know until you've tracked that data. So observing and creating those feedback loops, whether it's through data systems, whether it's through sending out emails to your customers at the right time, that information is going to create a better product for you, is going to create a better brand for you, and it's going to help you build something that lasts. You'll actually build a legacy out of it. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an idea, a better understanding on how to really go about building a legacy with a product company, some product-specific ideas to keep in mind. And this is just an overview. This is a topic we could go into far longer and far deeper than this little segment, but I want to give this as an overview so you can start thinking about it and have something in mind and putting together how you are going to build your legacy with your product company. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information and description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.