Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lonny Stormo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Lonny thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. The more we talk about good leadership the more we think good leadership practices will spread and so we’d love for you to tell us a story about the best boss you’ve had and what they were like or what they did that was so great?

When I started my first full-time medtech job, I found that Jim, two levels above me, was one of the most respected and feared leaders in the company. As I moved up in the company, I eventually reported directly to Jim. One day I asked him how he was so able to be a visionary to know what direction we should go. He told me some great advice—”It is not that I know the right and ultimate direction we should go, it is that I have the courage and determination to make sure the direction we pick does work.” Everybody else sees a visionary, but much of it was courage and determination. From that talk, I was at the start of my journey to develop my four key characteristics of a great leader—Vision, Courage, Judgement, and Authenticity.

Through the rest of my career, I came to see that many leaders I respected had these four characteristics. And while they may not always seem like the nicest people, that is sometimes also necessary in leaders who need to take strong positions for the sake of the organization. However, that last characteristic in my list, authenticity, always comes through in the best leaders like Jim. I was amazed at how the grandfather would come out in Jim when I would bring my young daughter with me to work, and he just started talking so sweet with her. Great leaders may take strong positions to get the job done, but they truly do care not only about the organization, but they also care for the people around them.

Lonny, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Pops, the Own Your Life® company, has commercialized an AI Self-care platform for chronic condition management, starting in the diabetes space. Pops provides individuals the resources to enable them to successfully care for themselves versus remotely monitoring them. The platform is centered around Mina, an AI Virtual Health Assistant. Mina is surrounded by a growing ecosystem of service/education/sensors/therapies to reduce the barriers to optimal health, including Pops’ proprietary Rebel glucose meter. The platform is sold as a subscription service both D2C and B2B (through clients like Best Buy Health), and it is being used in all 50 states and in Australia with published clinical study outcomes.

I built Pops with co-founders to jump on the wave of in-home healthcare that is taking over with the advent of smartphones, wearable sensors, and the myriad of healthcare resources that are available at our finger tips. My personal experience prior to Pops was 30 years at Medtronic, the largest medical device company in the world. During that time, I was able to do most of the roles in Medtronic that involved bringing a product to market. It was great training ground for building Pops from scratch. My co-founders, Curt Christensen and Dan Davis, also had tremendous prior experiences with many years at 3M and other medical industry companies.

I am most proud that an idea we had in a fishing boat has been built into a product, a global supply chain set up, clinical evidence published in a peer-reviewed journal, FDA clearance achieved, and thousands of people have benefitted from that product.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

We started Pops out of just an idea to enable people with diabetes to more easily manage their condition. We built a better product with a digital assistant, Mina, and a simpler glucose meter. We set up the supply chain, gathered clinical evidence, and achieved FDA clearance. All of this was a three-year journey,

But the hardest thing we had to do was get that first client. We decided the best business model for our solution was B2B sales to employers who wanted to offer Pops to their employees as a healthcare benefit. Getting the first client is always difficult in B2B sales. Nobody wants to be first, and the typical question during these sales pitches is “How many other clients do you have and how many people are using the system?” Zero and Zero are difficult answers to give.

We spent months doing pitch after pitch. Finally, I was lucky to get introduced to a very innovative insurance broker. Because he was innovative, he also had innovative employer clients. The broker saw the beauty in what Pops was doing to address our healthcare issues. He pulled together a group of his innovative clients for me to present to them. Here I was able to promote this as the newest and best thing without the shame that we had no other clients yet using it.

I clicked with one of his client’s HR directors, and she wanted to continue the discussion. Instead of being scared she was the first client, she was proud of it. She did take advantage of that fact also in the negotiations and asked her price to be discounted, which I agreed to do. Finally, just in time for our product’s market readiness, we had our first client sign!

Have you ever had to pivot?

Our Pops product was being sold B2B to employers for one year before 2020 with a growing client list. We were displaying at conferences for employer’s benefits and getting some national clients. When covid hit in early 2020, employers were totally distracted and conferences were cancelled. We had to do something different to continue to grow.

Our decision was to start marketing direct to consumer. We felt this would be a good model for us, because our messaging and marketing were already that our solution works better for individuals’ lives. We worked on the best way to offer our product, revised our marketing and packaging, and started to offer Pops on Amazon.

We learned a lot in our first two years of selling direct to consumer. The first thing we learned is how difficult the Amazon platform is from a supplier perspective. You can’t just put a product out there. You need to be active in managing reviews, respond to Amazon concerns, and I am happy to say that we were successful in becoming an Amazon distributed product with an amazing listing and storefront. However, we also decided that we could do more ourselves and started a Shopify listing, which became our higher focus in selling direct to consumer.

We also learned a lot about how to drive sales through social media. We focused initially on Facebook presence and advertising. This worked well and we were able to drive our cost of sales down significantly from when we started. We also expanded our social media presence and following and started to focus more on organic sales vs paid sales. This is where we really needed to build our presence. Growing organic following and continual presence on social media is definitely a lot of ongoing work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://popsdiabetes.myshopify.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/popsdiabetescare/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PopsDiabetes
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@popsdiabetescare
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@pops_diabetes?_t=8a6LI2rpvNy&_r=1