Lisa Smoot President of San Francisco Bay Coffee Company | CEO's You Should Know

Lisa Smoot President of San Francisco Bay Coffee Company | CEO's You Should Know

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Carolyn mccartill. Welcome to this episode of CEOs.
You should know. We are here in the San Francisco
Bay area and I am with the president of San
Francisco Bay Coffee, Lisa Smooth. Welcome, thank you, good morning.
How are you great? Good caffeinated? Caffeinated. So I want
to start with your dad. I want some backstory on

(00:24):
your dad, how he started the company, how everything came
to be got it. My dad was a My dad
was a visionary and I can't say enough great things
about him. He was born and raised in Detroit. He
went to the Whaland Academy in I think Beaver Creek,

(00:46):
Minnesota or something like that that sounds right, and then
he went to Princeton. And my dad was always a
hustler from the time he was a kid, he was
a hustler. So his freshman year in college at Princeton,
it snows a lot in New Jersey. So his first
year there, he's making money to put himself through college,

(01:06):
and he when it snowed, he'd knock on doors and
he'd shovel walks for twenty five cents, which was a
lot of money in nineteen fifty sure, so He goes
to the one house. He knocks on the door. Lady
answers the door. Do you want me to shovel your walk?
He says, She says sure, he shovels the walk. At
the end of the shoveling, he goes back and knocks

(01:28):
on the door to collect his twenty five cents and
out comes a barefoot Albert Einstein. And he comes out
and he's just sort of looking at the snow coming down.
And my dad was literally mouth open. And it was
Albert Einstein's last year at Princeton and my father's first
year at Princeton. Wow, isn't that crazy? Did he give

(01:50):
him more than a quarter through? No, of course. But
I have another great story about my dad in when
he was seventy years old, so it was about two
thousand and three. My dad's always thought, we've got to
do this, We've got to do this. So he said
to me, Lisa, we got to figure out how to
get on this Twitter. Twitter is the way we're going
to start. We're going to start advertising. And I didn't

(02:11):
know anything about Twitter. I knew nothing about it, nothing
about how it works, what you do, any of that stuff.
He goes just go figure it out. So I posted something,
which I now know was a tweet. I posted something
at the time, I didn't know what it was, had
no idea. So I post a tweet something about coffee.
And later on I'm checking and i get a comment

(02:33):
from Sexy Sally and I'm like, what the heck? And
I go, Dad, Sexy Sally, are you kidding me? What
the heck is this? What is this? And he goes,
I don't know, you just got to figure out. I go,
I don't think we want to do this, Dad, I
think I'm going to stop doing this. And you know,
if I had listened to him and stuck with it

(02:54):
at the time, I mean, look at it today. I
know it's crazy. You know, those tweets are there forever. Well,
I'm sure I could go find it. I'm sure I
could go find it. I don't even remember what my
name was back then. I might have said Lisa smooth
like a dummy. I mean, honestly, I'm more curious about
Sexy Sally and who that is and where she is now. Well,
if that was two thousand and three, what are we

(03:15):
in twenty six? That was twenty three years ago. I
had a life a hard life. Maybe a hard life.
Maybe hope she's listening. Yeah, Sexy Sally. If you are,
you can call in buy some coffee, yes, Bob Chaser please.
Speaking of stories, do you talk a lot about your dad?
Was your dad the one who started the company or

(03:36):
did it come from beyond him like grandparents? So I
grew up in Connecticut. Yeah, born and raised in Connecticut.
My dad worked in consumer products. His last job before
we left was vice president of mitcham There, which is
a division of Revlon. Needed sales in marketing, and he
got the offer he couldn't refuse, and so he came

(03:57):
to us and said, what do you think, And I'm
thinking surfers, beach boys. Yeah, I'm in let's go. And
the boys are like, oh, I have three brothers. Oh
I don't know. And I'm like, no, We're going to California.
I want to see those blonde surfers. So we moved
to northern California. The water's fifty two degrees. There are
no blonde surfers, and I hate my life. And my

(04:19):
brothers just thrived. And for a year it was really tough.
My dad worked for a company called Shackley and he
was in charge of their vice president of sales and marketing.
And after a year he said, you know, this isn't
this isn't great. I don't really want to do this anymore.
And they had given him a year contract and they said,
at the end of the year, if you don't want
to renew, we'll send you back to Connecticut or do

(04:40):
whatever you want to do. Yeah, So he said, what
do you guys want to do? And I said, well,
we're you know, we all said we're already here. Let's
just stay. So he started looking for companies to buy.
And there was a toothbrush company, a dog food company,
or this bankrupt coffee and tea company in San Francisco,
and we said, well, we're already here. Let's just buy
the coffee and tea company. So he this bankrupt coffee

(05:01):
and tea company from the Perfect Recipe, which is a chain.
It was a chain of coffee shops in the Embarcadero
back in the seventies. And we got into the flavored
coffee and flavor tea business and we had an office
on Third Street and my dad at forty two years old.
I remember when I was third forty two, sitting in
my kitchen thinking about this. At forty two, he liquidated

(05:23):
everything he had, took out two mortgages on his house,
took all of our college money, and bought this bankrupt
coffee and tea company with a senior in high school,
a junior in high school, a freshman in high school,
in an eighth grader, and moved. You we were already here.
We were already here. We had moved for the job,
and we were here already. But he liquidated everything, and

(05:45):
my mom goes, great, let's go wow crazy. There's no
way I would have done that. I don't think I
would have had the guts to do that. It's just
to me, it's too scary and too there's too much unknown.
But my dad, my dad, it was a really interesting
sort of for word thinking person, and he just knew
he would succeed. He just knew it. And he had

(06:08):
the experience of big corporations from the from the East coast,
you know that he developed his skills they are so
he just put it all to work here and we
just started going and we started, you know, developing and developing.
And I remember the first year he's like, Okay, I
need you guys to help me and he plopped down
a bunch of catalogs on the floor and we were stamping. Discontinued, discontinued,

(06:29):
discontinued on all this stuff that was being sold by
this bankrupt company that wouldn't help us make any money.
And we were cheap labor. We did every job, you know,
as we got out of school. We did every job
while we were in college and out of college, we
did every job that you know. I answered phones, I
did accounts payable, I did accounts receivable. You know, everything

(06:50):
that we needed to do we did to get the
job done. Did you do you have confidence in what
you do now? Like, do you feel like when you
make decision because now you and your brother, like your
whole family, this is a family affair. Still, when you
make big decisions for your company, do you feel like
I have full confidence in this, because it sounds like
your dad was obviously such a confident man. Yeah. Does

(07:12):
that trickle down to you or is that something that
you kind of learned from? No. I I think instinctually
I know what I need to do, and I think
my problem is sometimes I act too quickly and I
should stop and say, let's look at this from different
poke holes at it before we say go. So I

(07:32):
have had to learn over the you know, I've been
doing this for six years now. I've had to learn
to my knee jerk reactions probably wrong, and I need
to slow down and have other people challenge me and
poke holes at it. Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. It's you know,
it's I think for me. My dad retired in twenty seventeen,
and I have a really bad memory, but what I

(07:55):
remember at the time as he came to all of
us and said, do you want to run the company.
And I was living in San mate I have four
kids that were in college, high school, I mean, and
I said I can't do it now because I've got
kids in school, and he goes, so what just move?
And I go, well, that's not the point. You know,
my kids have to finish their careers. He goes, Oh,
they'll be fine, just move. And I said, but you know,

(08:15):
my husband's got his law practice in San Mateo. He goes, oh,
he can visit you on the weekends. My dad was
very single minded in what he wanted, and I said,
I can't do that. So my youngest brother took over.
And my youngest brother was always chasing the one hit wonder,
and so he started doing all this crazy stuff that
sort of distracted from our core business and our core

(08:37):
values in our core you know, what we needed to
do to succeed. And after a couple of years, my
dad said this isn't working for us, and we had
a family meeting and we said, you know, we need
to get back to basics, and this isn't working. His
feelings got hurt, and so he made an emotional decision
and resigned immediately and left the company. And then I

(09:03):
said to my two brothers that were left, I said, okay,
we need this was a Sunday need to come to
the office tomorrow. We got to figure out who's going
to run this. And they go, we think you should
do it. And I thought about it for a second,
and everyone was in college except for my youngest, who
was his senior year in high school, well on his
way to college. And I said, I can do this. Okay, fine,

(09:23):
And I said, okay, I'll do it. And I knew
nothing about nothing. Yeah, I was going to say, there's
so so many components of that. There are a lot
of components, but there was a lot that we needed
to strip away first, before we could get to building
up what we needed. For example, there was a lot
of things we were doing. We had a retail store
in Kona. We have a coffee farm in ConA, and

(09:45):
so someone had the great idea to put a coffee
shop in. And coffee shops you don't need a lot
of space for coffee shop. We had almost ten thousand
square feet of space, and the landlord dictated that we
had to be open from seven in the morning till
eleven at night. He dictated what we could or could
not sell, and we were losing sixty five thousand dollars
a month. Gees, I know, that's what I said, and

(10:08):
so I said close it. Yeah, So instead of closing it,
we remodeled it, and that didn't work, so we remodeled again.
So literally, on December sixteenth, my first day, I said,
we're closing the retail store. Coincidentally, COVID hit in the fall.
We started doing the unwinding of that and hanging out

(10:29):
of the lease and getting out of that stuff. Right
after we did that, COVID hit and I and that
area still has not recovered from COVID. So it was
we were so lucky in the timing of getting that
out of the way. It was a blessing in disguise,
but we undid in the first year. I think I
undid fifty seven things that we were doing that. And
I'm not a I'm not a smart person, but for me,

(10:50):
it did not make sense. Why are we doing ice coffee?
You know, there's when you were when you're selling canned
coffee like the you know, the cold brew type of coffee.
There's two ways that you have to do it. If
you have it pasteurized, it's shelf stable, but pasteurization can
affect the taste and it takes away from the taste.

(11:12):
So whoever put our line in decided that we weren't
going to pasteurize, which meant you had to refrigerate it
so it wouldn't go bad. But they didn't do the
due diligence. So when you put those cans of coffee
in those little refrigerators by the cash register, the markup
the stores one on that is, you know, seventy five
eighty percent versus twenty to thirty five percent, and it

(11:32):
was cost No one wanted to buy it, yeah, because
it was too expensive. I'm like, well, this is done.
Why are we doing this. So I sold the line
to someone who was a bottler, and when he came in,
he goes, who put this thing together? It's backwards? Oh funny,
And I was like, oh my gosh. We you know,
I couldn't figure out why we could never get more
than twenty cans thirty cans a minute. Yeah, and it

(11:53):
was because it was backwards. I find it so interesting
that you came into the company and you undid things,
because I feel like, and I am no market expert,
but I feel like most people would come into a
company and they'd want to just start adding just everything
they can, just bring what they can and just keep
adding and building and building. And you came in and
actually looked at it from a different perspective and thought
what can I strip away first? Yeah, it's almost like

(12:15):
a reset in a way. You know. The easiest thing
for me was that, you know, we're in on the
West coast and we are not very well known. We've
never had a marketing department until three years ago. We've
never done advertising till last year, so we we didn't
you know, we didn't do anything because we didn't have

(12:35):
the funds, we didn't have the resources. We didn't have
the people. So we have a really strong following of
the people who buy from us, but there's a lot
of low hanging fruit, especially in the West Coast to
start with, because we're not in every retailer, we're not
in every grocery store. So why are we trying to
do cans of coffee and when we haven't even sold to,

(12:57):
you know, the grocery store down the street. So let's
build our awareness first. And we also did a lot
of We spent a lot of I think it was
almost two years of market research, focus groups and talking
to consumers and people who buy coffee and learning what
the habits are and what's important to our consumers and

(13:18):
what's who our core We didn't even know who our
core audience was. And it's also very interesting that coffee
consumers don't are brand loyal, but they might have two
or three different coffee brands in their pantry. So when
this person comes over, they might serve San Francisco Bay
Fog Chaser, and when Grandma comes over, they might serve

(13:41):
Folgers or whatever. There's a bunch of different ones that
are in there to appease at different times in people
that they're serving the coffee too. We didn't know that.
I'm curious to know when you started advertising three years ago,
what did you notice did you when you on the numbers?
Obviously you have what were the results like when you

(14:03):
actually did put your the awareness out there? Well? We
also we also did consumer panels on what messaging would
be important interesting, which you know, the woman that I
have running in the marketing departments, you know, she's very meticulous,
she's very data driven and she you know, she considers everything.
So we knew, you know, what would work, what you know,

(14:26):
what might work, what wouldn't work. We knew what direction
we should be focusing on, and the engagement and the
numbers and the I forget what the all the metrics
are that they use in marketing. But you know, everything's
been very very positive, you know, and it's a sort
of the snowball is starting to run down the hill now,

(14:47):
if you will, and it's getting traction. So that helps
with the sales team. You know, when people are buying
our coffee, the buyers in the different markets have heard
of us, and then yes, we'll take an appointment from
you and they'll hear what we have to say. So
it's sort of as my team calls the flywheel is
starting to spin faster and faster, and I think in
the next couple of years it's going to be and

(15:08):
give us a lot of traction. One of my favorite
things about your product is the compostable pods. Huge because
how many of us have used those terrible pods where
you think you can recycle that plastic and put the
coffee grounds on your front lawn. Yeah, put the rest
of the recycling be which I don't Those plastic pods
aren't even I don't think the recyclable. I think there's

(15:32):
especially I think there's a special type of recycling you
need to Doah, don't quote me on this, but that's
what I think I remember. But you know that whole
sort of sustainably sourced environmental concern, you know, taking care
of people. That is sort of like in my family's
DNA from as. For as long as we were doing

(15:54):
social programs, before social programs were cool. In nineteen eighty three,
we started building school, you know, medical clinics, bringing doctors
into source countries to the farm areas. You do a
lot in South America, right south and Central, a lot
in Central America, some in South but it's it is
sobering when you go to a coffee farm and you

(16:17):
see people living in one of those plastic corrugated you know,
sheets of there's three walls and that's that plastic corrugate.
There's a plastic sheet that's the front door, and inside
it's dirt with three stones in the middle, and they
sleep on the floor and they cook on the three
stones in the middle whatever they're cooking for their meal.
And because of the smoke from the wood fire, you

(16:40):
can see, you know, the soot on the walls and
they're breathing that stuff, and it's very it's very primitive.
They're very very you know, they're very they feel very blessed,
but it's you know, we said, we can't, we can't
do business with people that let people live like this.
So we started insisting that the farmers that we do
business with have to build accommodations. And it used to

(17:03):
be in the old days, in the eighties, you have
to import pickers to come to your farm to pick
your coffee because it all comes in at one time,
and if you don't pick it at the same time,
you're gonna lose half your crop. So you might have
fifteen hundred people sitting on your farm picking every day,
six days, seven days a week, and they need a
place to live, and they need food, and they need

(17:23):
you know, accommodations, and it would be like one big,
huge barn with just wooden slats for miles and miles,
and you you know, you'd have a section of an
area where you'd sleep and the families would put like
a sheet or a drop cloth in between, so they'd
have a little bit of privacy. But you know, if
I got sick, everyone in the same area would get sick.

(17:44):
So we started, you know, building housing units and we'd
have you know, cement stone walls and you'd have your
own little area, and across from that we would have
a kitchen area that we built with propane so that
there's no breathe in of the smoke and that kind
of stuff. And then there were bathrooms and things like that.
So just providing that kind of stuff for the pickers

(18:07):
so the farmers could make sure that those pickers would
come back every single year. That was the first thing
we did. Then we have doctors come in and and
administer to the sick people in the community, and we
would you know, build schools. If there wasn't a school
and a kid was walking four hours a day down
a windy trail to get to school and then four
hours home, we'd build schools in the community and then

(18:28):
we'd pay the teacher salaries to come in. And we
did we you know, I think up to now we've
built something like twelve hundred housing units sixty two schools.
But we stopped doing that when COVID hit. There was
no there was no way, no one was doing anything.
Everyone was sort of stuck at home. So that gave

(18:48):
us pause to consider was that the best was that
the best use of the money and you know resources,
And we decided there are a lot of people. Coffee
farming is generational, and you do what you do because
your great great great grandfather told you this is what
you do and this is how you do it. And

(19:10):
there's not a lot of sharing of information because people
feel competitive and they don't want me to do better
than you, and there's not a lot of documentation. So
we started a coffee training program I think two years ago.
And with coffee farms, you have to prune the coffee trees,
just like you do in wine, because if you don't

(19:32):
the tree continues to grow, and then you'll start losing
yield because there's so much energy spent on trying to
get leaves out to the ends of the branches that
it can't produce cherries. So if you every three to
five years you pune it up to three meters high,
as it grows back, the yield and two more years
will be higher. But for coffee farmers, that's a scary

(19:53):
thing because you're telling them to get rid of a
third of their revenue. So we started a training program
last year. We trained twelve hundred farmers on especially small farmers,
and small farmers could be anywhere from a couple hectores
to twelve plants in your backyard how to farm better.

(20:14):
You know, wind to fertilize, and there's a way that
you can sort of assess what your yield's going to be.
As the coffee tree is growing or the branch is growing,
they'll be like a bud, sort of like when trees
flowers bloom. Before the flowers woo, there'll be a clump
of whatever and that will end up being the coffee cherries.
And you can go in and count how many buds

(20:34):
there will be and it's usually between thirteen to eighteen
buds per clump, and there's usually anywhere from you know,
twenty five to let's say thirty forty clumps in a tree.
You can figure out what your yield is, but they
didn't know that. So just giving them the tools that
they can sort of plan ahead financially, Okay, well this
is what I could be expecting this year, and then

(20:57):
just documenting their yields, you know, and what their costs are.
And when we went to Indonesia, the Indonesian government loved
what we did so much that they have given us
a plot of land to use as a training facility
for all the Indonesian coffee farmers in the area to
come in and do this training with us. When we

(21:18):
go in there and it's you know, there's we have
video of a one guy I can't remember. He's in Mexico.
He was very apprehensive about pruning. So the first year
he didn't do what we told him to do. He
did a small fraction of that and he lost I'm
going to make it up because I can't remember the
real numbers, but let's say he lost one point five
million dollars million pesos that year. In coffee farming. The

(21:42):
next year with pruning, he broke even The next year
after that he made you know, three hundred thousand pesos
in coffee farming. In the fourth year he made one
point one million pesos profit. So he is sort of
our you know, our spokesperson in our success story that
we take around to all the other farmers so he

(22:03):
can show them, hey, this really does work. You got
to do it. And it's not only helping him and
his family. If you think about the ripple effect, you know,
the people in the area where he has to buy
his supplies from and the farmers, and he's paying his
pickers more so the pickers have more money that they
can spend in the community and it's just a win

(22:25):
win for everyone. So it's been two years that we've
been doing this, and I forget what our goal is
for this year. I think it's eighteen eighteen thousand. I
think we did I what is it, twelve thousand. I
think it's eighteen thousand. This this next year that we're
going to try and train. But you know, people say yes,
I'm going to do it, and then they don't show

(22:46):
up or you know, they're apprehensive and they don't follow
the program. So it's it's you know, getting the buy
into Yeah, are you guys, what percentage of your company
is family? I feel like you have so many family members.
We have a lot of family members, but not a
lot of family members are in the company. We have
five of generation three and three of generation two. Yeah.

(23:06):
You do such a nice job too of giving back
and and like you know, it's funny like when you
shop in the grocery store and you see, like you
mentioned folders, so I'll just use fultures and you just
think like big corporation, right, And then we have these
conversations with you guys, and you're local here in the
San Francisco Bay, and it's just I love hearing these
stories behind the scenes about like what you do to
give back and that you have family in your company.

(23:27):
It's all these things that like make us love you more.
Plus oh bonus, your coffee tastes great and you've got
you know, pod desad in ninety days. Yeah, so I
love learning all this stuff about you guys. Yeah, just
it's fantastic. There's so much and the thing that I
think would be very eye opening for the consumers. Have
no idea how many hands touch each cherry and each

(23:51):
bean before it's roasted and ground and made into that
cup of coffee. I think it would blow people's minds
to see all the different people who touch every single
bean before you're drinking your cup of coffee. It's just
no one has any idea, and there are so you know,
the coffee market is very volatile. You know, we had
tariffs for a while and that made it, you know,

(24:12):
the Brazilian tariffs through the whole system out of Whacken
at the same time that that was going on. Coffee
is a very volatile commodity. It's the second most volatile
behind oil on the on the stock exchange, and it's
gone anywhere from forty cents per pound up to record
high in this year of four dollars and fifty cents

(24:33):
or four dollars and forty cents. So there's a lot
of volatility and there's a lot of uncertainty that makes
it even you know, more stressful for the roasters and
the farmers and everyone that's involved in the in the
industry of coffee. There are so many people. If you
think about logistics and you know, freight and shipping and

(24:53):
all the people that are involved. There are so many
people that are involved in it, it's just mind blowing.
I want to talk about leadership for minute, okay, and
I want to know about tell me about like a
significant leadership challenge that we have faced. I think the
most significant challenge I faced was when I first started.
I think the my personal opinion was that the company

(25:17):
was in a really sort of downward spiral. It felt
very just heavy and not fun, and like you'd go
into work and people's office doors were closed and no
one talked to each other. And when I went to work,
I was like, God, this place is a bummer. I
hate this. And when I took over, so previously, if

(25:42):
you said no to the guy running the company, you
were punished somehow, whether it was you'd get in trouble
or whatever happened, you know, you ended up leaving the company.
So the first thing that I said, the first challenge
I said to my two brothers is you may not
say no to anyone. You may not say no for
six months. If someone comes to you with an idea,

(26:04):
you can say, thank you very much, let me think
about it, let me figure it out, and I'll get
back to you. And I said, then you have to
get back to people, because no, you know, shut people
down shuts down the creativity, It shuts down the camaraderie,
it shuts down the collaboration, it shuts down everything. And
then we also had everything was done in silos, which

(26:27):
was ridiculous, and we had it like we had it
when I first started. We had a problem at our
plant in Mexico. And my CFOs came to me and said, hey,
we got a problem in Mexico And I said, okay,
what's the problem And he told me and I said, well,
ask some questions. And he goes, well, I don't know,
I've never been there. And I go, what, you're the
CFO the company. What do you mean you've never been there.

(26:48):
I go get on a plane and get down there
and figure out what's going on. And he was like,
oh okay. And our Green team there was a problem
something that we have a bunch of people we call
him the Green team that buy the coffee. They checked
the quality, the you know, consistency. They're in charge of
buying everything that we that we roast in package. And
there was a problem with a lot or an order
that came in and I said, what's the problem. And

(27:09):
they said, well, we think it's blah blah blah. And
I said, well, what did the quality teams say? And
they said, well, we don't know. We were not allowed
to talk to them. And I'm like, that's the dumbest
thing I've ever heard. Yeah, you know, you should be
hand in hand working together on these things. So it
was stripping down the walls and creating more of a

(27:30):
collaborative environment, and that took That took a long time
because I think people were sort of very guarded and
making sure that you know, pinched me, this is this
too good to be true. But I remember thinking one
day when I came in and I equate this too.
I'm a mom, and I remember when my kids the

(27:50):
first time they did something, whether it was a laugh
or a stand or a mama or whatever. I remember
my head swinging around going, oh my gosh, and it was,
you know, sort of an you know, it's awe inspiring moment.
And I came into work one day and as I
walked in, we have a table over coffee area and
there were a bunch of people standing there and they
were all having coffee and they were laughing, and it

(28:13):
was something that I had not heard in a very
long time, and it made my head spin and I go, oh,
we're back, We're back. It was the beginning. And you know,
I never want to be the smartest person in the room.
I always want to be challenged. I want to challenge people,
and I think there's a way to do that. So
it was a creating the mindset that just because we've

(28:35):
always done it this way doesn't mean this is the
right way. What is the best way to do it?
Is there a better way to do it? And you know,
I'm not you know, I remember we had a problem
and we had all these senior leaders trying to figure
out this problem, and I go, well, have you asked
the coffee roasters. Those guys have been doing this for
twenty five years. They know better than you. Go ask

(28:55):
them and they were like, oh. So it was sort
of giving people per mission to look in to not
know the answer, one, to ask for collaboration and say,
poke holes at my theory, this is what I think
I want to do. Yeah, So that that came along,
and then the next thing was creating a positive culture,
you know, and making sure that people understood that, you know,

(29:19):
we have mission vision, values, and we have expectations for you.
And then also, you know, what do you want to do?
You know, there was a guy who when I first
got there, we had we had no formality to pay periods,
you know, like and you'd be there for twenty five
years and you'd just get every year cost of living

(29:40):
increase and it would keep going up and up and up.
And I was like, well, that's stupid because it's going
to break the bank. So we created job descriptions, pay bands,
and you know, if you're going to be in the
quality control department, you make let's say, between five dollars
and ten dollars an hour. I'm making this up. I
don't remember what it is. And so Hugo had worked for
us for twenty five years and he said, Lisa, this

(30:01):
is not fair to me. I said, okay, talk to me.
Why is this not fair? He said, I've been here
for twenty five years and Katie just came in. She's
brand new, and she's making the same amount as me.
And I said, okay, I said, who go. There's a
list on the wall of every single job with the
low end of the pay band and the high end.
If you want to make more money, go after another job.

(30:24):
I said, you were better than what you're doing here.
All you're doing here is the same thing every day.
You're not even exerting your creativity. So he finally, after years,
went out and he started working out on the floor
as a quality supervisor for their operations. And then when
something opened up in Green, he moved up again. And

(30:45):
I think it gave people permission to dream bigger than
they were dreaming, if you will. And so he's now
in our Green department and he's in charge of all
the roast, creating the roast profiles for all of the
coffees that we do, and then wherever we're roasting coffee,
whether it's a sample that we're cupping or on a machine,
making sure it's the exact same roast profile wherever we are,

(31:06):
so that it's consistent across the whole thing. And he
every day comes to work with a smile on his face,
and he's so happy. I said, you know what, who
go six years ago? You wanted to, you know, keep
me in the fanny. I said, look at you now
coming to orc smiling and enjoying his job. And that's
you know, you spend so much time at work. You
shouldn't be coming to work going oh, this is such
a bummer. So I really enjoy talking to people, you know,

(31:31):
what do you want to do and how making sure
we're not really good We're good at promoting people, but
we're not really good at helping the people we've promoted
to get the tools to recognize who their employees are,
whether they're you know, how do you get out the
best of your employees and if they are a rock
star that maybe could be going up higher, how do

(31:54):
you recognize that. So there's something to be said about
creating a culture and work for a manager that you
genuinely feel like you are a valuable part of the company.
And it sounds like you've done a really good job
with that, coming in and clocking in every day and
doing your job like anybody can do that. But when
you feel like your ideas matter and you've got somebody

(32:15):
like you that goes to Hugo and says like we
want to help you. Look, you could be doing this instead,
you could be making more. We value you. You've been
here for twenty five That says a lot about you
and your culture. It's you know what my dad when
he was running the company. He used to walk around
the office twice a day, and so I do it

(32:36):
three times a day because we have three different shifts
and I talk try and talk to different people in
every shift. And I learned this from my youngest when
he was in elementary school, I had to go to
either Coasta Rica or Mexico for something. Everyone else was
in high school. I didn't have a babysitter, so I said,
come on, you're going with me. And my biggest fear
growing up is that, or my kids growing up is

(32:56):
that they'd get kidnapped. And We're at this resisord or
something and I'm talking to trying to talk to these
farmers in broken Spanish slash French, and I look around
and I can't find my son and I'm like, oh crud.
So I get a little bit panicked, and I'm, you know,
walking around in it's a really big outdoor patio and
I come around the corner and he's sitting at a

(33:16):
table looking across at someone else, and there's a line
of my employees behind the person he's talking to. And
I'm like, what's going on here? Oh hi mom? And
I'm like, what's going on? And this guy who works
for me goes, oh, we're just talking, and I go
and I thought Michael was in trouble. Yeah, because it

(33:39):
looked like the conversation was serious. He and Andro said no, actually,
Michael's asking me what I like about my job. And
Michael at the time was like, in sixth grade, what
I like about my job, what I don't like about
my job? And if I could do any job at
the company, what would it be? Sixth grader was saying

(34:01):
that did he get that from you or your dad?
I got that from him. I'm not kiddzy, I know.
I know and so and I and I watched him
talking to them, and they they were truly talking to
him as an adult. He's in sixth grade, but they
were giving him honest answers. And I thought, those are
really good questions, and I like, note to self, I'm

(34:22):
going to start. So I asked those questions a lot
of times, and I have I get a lot of
really good ideas. You know. I have one woman who
came to me one time and she said, hey, you know,
can I talk to you about something? I said sure,
and she said can we get a She said, you know,
right now when we're working on the line, and like

(34:43):
and if we have to go to our locker because
it's you know, our time of the month. It's really
embarrassing because we have to go all the way to
the break room or purse. You can't have your purse
on the floor. We have to get whatever supplies we need.
Then we have to walk back in, we have to
go to the bathroom. Then we have to go back
to our purse, we have to washer handsOn come back.
It's really embarrassing. Can we have a machine in the

(35:05):
in the women's bathroom? And I was like, oh my gosh,
I can't believe we don't have one. I mean, I
mean I just assumed that, right, I just assumed. Yeah.
So I said, so, I, you know, said to hr
figure that out, you know, and put a machine in there.
And they said, well, yeah, there's a problem because you know,
they can't have money in their pockets because if it
falls out of their pockets in the coffee mate, oh yeah,

(35:26):
of course. And so I was, oh my gosh. So
I said, okay, put it in there for free, and
just put a note on there saying, you know, this
is enough that should last a certain amount of time
and if you guys take advantage of it. It's going away,
and there's never been a problem, I know. But those
kinds of things, you know that you just assume. So
I don't assume anymore. I am. You know. One of
my leaders always to saying, Lisa, be curious. So instead

(35:49):
of making assumptions, which I do very very rapidly and
very frequently, I am, you know now asking questions and
trying to understand. And that's the way we always did business.
That's it's not the right way to do business. So
we need to make sure that we're taking care of
our employees needs no because they're choosing to come to
work all day. You know, in the old days, we're

(36:10):
up in Lincoln, California. It's hotter in heck up there,
and because we're roasting coffee, it's hot in the warehouse.
It could be one hundred and nine in the office.
And these people are choosing to come to work and
clock in and sit there. You know, there's no air conditioning.
You can't do air conditioning. So two years ago, do
the best you can. Get an air conditioner, get something

(36:31):
in here that's going to make it a difference. And
we have this contraption. It looks like a big sock
that runs through the walls and it last year it
never got hotter than eighty five degrees in the warehouse,
which made a huge difference. And everyone's like, oh my gosh,
thank you so much. And it's you know, make it

(36:52):
easy for them to do their job, you know, don't
make it harder for people to want to come to work.
How nice for them is employees, though, to have managers
that actually care about their well being and like want
the best. Because guess what, if you care about them
and you're giving them the resources that they need to
do a good job, it's a win win for everybody,
exam and for you exactly. My dad always considered our

(37:14):
employees like family and so you know, and without them,
we wouldn't have a business because we could not roast
and produce our coffee if we didn't have them. When
we were in we used to be in San Leandro, California,
and after the earthquake was it eighty nine earthquake, there
was a coffee roasting company, I think it was in
Los Gatos. We roast coffee roasters roast with gas, and

(37:37):
their gas lines severed and the building blew up and
someone I don't know if someone died or got hurt,
but my father said, that's it. We're moving. We got
to get out of out of San Leandro. And when
you take in consideration where the fault lines are, you
had to get past that, and then we're into the
flood zones. So we ended up looking in Lincoln and
there was a million square feet of h x HP warehousing.

(38:01):
They had said we're coming to California and they were
here very short lived, and then they said this stinks,
we're out of here. So we were coming in my dad.
Before we came up here, my dad hired I think
there were three fifty six passenger buses and he you know,
the employees he wanted to come. He put him on
a bus and we came up to Lincoln, California. We

(38:23):
toured Lincoln. We had realtors that talked to them about housing, schools,
you name it, to give them sort of a sense
of what this would mean moving to Lincoln. And a
lot of the people who moved that, I mean every
single person that we asked to move said absolutely. And
some people tell us stories of you know, when they
were in East Oakland. They're coming out to take their

(38:43):
kids to school and there was someone shooting up on
the streets or there's a you know, a shootout or
a gunfire or whatever. And they were moved from a
place where it was not safe to raise your family
to a place where they could raise their family. And
you know, when wife had people that have come to
me when they've retired and said, if it hadn't been
for your father, I would not have been able to

(39:04):
buy afford a house and buy a house, and I
owe everything I have to your father. So you know,
he took care of his people. And it is not
lost on me that I have to continue on with that.
That's really important to me. What do you think your
dad would think if he was, you know, looking down
on you today and if you got to have a
conversation with him again, what do you think he'd say
about the business now and the job you've done with it.

(39:28):
I you know what, I think he'd be very happy
and very proud. For the first reason is that I've
got generation three coming in and I'm doing you know,
my dad used to when we were doing our job,
I'd say, Dad, I don't know how to do a
marketing plan He's like, figure it out, just go do it.
And you know I never did it because I didn't
we didn't have any marketing to do. But but so
we have development plans for these guys for Generation three

(39:52):
in their individual jobs, and on top of that, I
am throwing them into the pit. Like when we had
our senior leadership doing our strategic planning for the next
three years, Generation three came in and watch what we
do and how we do it. They have financial quarterly
or monthly financial meetings with our CFO to talk about finances.
And we have a very complicated business because we have

(40:16):
businesses in Mexico and in Panama and in Rwanda and
in other areas, so it makes it very complicated. So
he's helping them to get acclimated and get more familiar
with the financials of that. And then in this next
year they all have individual development plans and once they've
got into that, I'm going to focus more on you know,

(40:38):
what does it mean to be a Rogers or a
Smoot in this business. And my dad's old CFO is
helping me in a project. He's actually come back and
he said, this is so much fun and I have
so much respect for your father. He'd be so proud
of you as as am I and I would love
to help you develop a generation three. So he's going
to help with some development and plans and telling him

(41:01):
stories about working with my father and all the fun
things that they did. So that's that's really neat. It's
really really really neat. Yeah, it is. It's you know,
he'd be very he'd be very he and my mom,
my mom. My mom said whatever my dad wanted to do,
my mom said, yes, go ahead, do it. But both
of them, you know, their whole life was their family

(41:21):
and their business, and my dad had very strong opinions
about how to do things and it's my way or
the highway that part of the business. You know, I think,
you know, I don't agree with. But it's a different
time though. It was a different time, and you know,
my dad was born in nineteen thirty three, so you know,
they had the traditional marriage. When you were in Connecticut,

(41:42):
my dad took the train to New York and my
mom was home with the kids, and we'd pick him
up from the train station and the kids would be
in our pajamas and you know, mom who cooked dinner. Yeah,
serve him exactly exactly, and you'd have your family dinner,
and you know, it was very, very traditional. And then
when my dad passed, I realized my mom literally had

(42:03):
no idea. You know, he took care of all the bills. Yeah,
she didn't know how to hard in the phrase, but
she didn't know how to live. No, she didn't done everything.
And I learned the hard way that because everything, like
the credit card was in his name. When the bank
found out that he died, they turned off the credit
card and I'm like, okay, well I'll use a credit card.
But she had to apply for a credit card. And

(42:24):
then you know, my mom was like, oh, you do
it for me, honey. And by that time she was eighty.
She was too old. You know, she didn't want to.
But you know, they had the very traditional marriage. And
it was funny because when when we first started working,
my dad was you know, he was sort of traditional
but not traditional. Like he wanted me up in Lincoln

(42:45):
every single day, and I'm like, well, I have little
kids and I can't do that. Every day. I worked
from home. But he also, you know, he also expected,
you know, my husband to be the breadwinner in my family.
And I'm like it doesn't work that way. It doesn't
work that way. It's fifty to fifty, so different. Yeah,
it is different. So what is next for San Francisco

(43:05):
Bay Coffee Company and exciting developments or expansions that you
guys have that you can talk about. Oh gosh, we've
got a lot of obviously a lot of fun things planned.
The most obvious thing that we're working on right now
is we have a lot of old, antiquated equipment, So
it's upgrading our equipment, making sure that we have the
best state of the art equipment to roast the coffee

(43:26):
perfectly and make sure it's an efficient way to do it.
We have been working for the last year on a
package redesign for the San Francisco Bay brand, which will
be coming out in the spring, and it is a
complete departure from what we do, what we've ever done before,
which makes me nervous, but it's exciting. It's I mean,

(43:47):
it's really gonna be great. It's gonna be great. I
know it's going to be great. And the reason I
know it's going to be great is because we did
the research and the consumer panels all pointed to what
we're going to The direction we're going to be going.
So that's coming out I think in April or May,
and then we soon yeah, that's soon on it now.

(44:09):
And then the last thing is, you know, if all
things go as planned here, we will finish modernizing our
plant and streamlining our processes and then open a second
plant someplace. ELTs in the United States. Good tea, I know,
I know, yes, Oh you just wait. If there was
let's say one thing that you wanted people to take

(44:30):
away from your mission. If you pick one thing, what
would that one thing be? Do your homework. There's there's
a lot of people, there's a lot of terms that
have been you know, whitewashed over the years. You know,
whatever they are, do your homework and make sure that
the companies you're supporting support your values, have the same

(44:53):
values as you do. Now everyone can say, oh, we
are you know, sustainably sourced or we or this or
we are that, but you know there are varying degrees
of that and what does that mean? And you know
there are different certifications, and I think you just need to,
you know, find someone that resonates with what you believe in,
and then you know, unless they prove you wrong. Stick

(45:16):
with them. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, I love that. Okay,
final question for you before we go, Okay, is there
a call to action that you would like to share, Like,
how can people engage or support the work that you
guys are doing well the obvious way, I mean, byside
from buying your coffee. Yeah, well, buying our coffee. I mean,
we don't we entertained the idea of IF people because

(45:40):
we had people writing in at one point saying, oh,
I want to help you build this school. I want
to help you do this, but it's too hard to
track from a you know, i RS standard. So I
would just say just supporting the brand by you know,
by buying our coffee, right, and the more that we sell,
the more we can do, you know, the more coffee
people we can train and all that kind of stuff.

(46:01):
So yeah, yeah, thank you for being here today. Thank
you so much, and thank you for the work that
you do. I appreciate it. We're obviously in the Bay Area, Yes,
we're recording this in the Bay Area, and you guys
are so entrenched in the Bay Area. Now we love it.
Thank you for advertising. Yes, it's how we found out
about you. So I preep up the time. Yeah, keep
up the good work. Thank you, hey,