We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steve Shriver. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steve below.

Steve, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

Risk taking: Physical Risk vs Psychological Risk

I classify risk in two arenas: psychological, and physical. Psychological risk is the easiest to overcome, because the outcome is not life threatening. I enjoy “risk” sports such as rock climbing, so I can keep a clear focus of what true risk is. Nobody dies from a failed business risk they took.

Cautious Optimism: Calculating risk and executing. The reason my businesses survived is because I knew just how hard to push—and just how much to put on the line at any given time.

Summit is half way there: You visualize success, when you hit your sales goal, your profit goal, your conversion rate, or whatever it may be. Just remember, you now will have a new set of challenges on your hand. In mountaineering, you have to be careful because the summit is only half way there, and most accidents happen on the way down. You used up 90% of your energy but still have 50% of the way to go. In business, once you hit the summit just be careful for what might be next and approach with caution.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a serial entrepreneur and own 5 businesses in 5 different industries. My biggest business is Eco Lips, which I founded in 2003. Eco Lips is the leading organic lip balm in the natural products industry, and a top 10 brand in the mass market. We started by filling the lip balm with turkey basters in our kitchen and now run up to hundreds of thousands of balms per day in a state of the art, FDA inspected facility. One secret to my success is somewhat controversial. I think balance is bullshit and impossible for a start up entrepreneur. If you want balance, get a 9-5 job. If you are striving to maintain balance and start a business, you are fooling yourself and your business will be compromised, also compromising your livelihood.
For most of my career, I put my business first and family second. Although I’m not proud of it, I don’t regret it. Putting my business first, making that the priority, allowed my family to have the life I wanted them to have. Yes, I missed a few events and was traveling a lot, but ultimately, by putting my business first, I WAS putting my family first.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

How will you create a good workplace culture?

Workplace culture starts 100% from the leadership. It can also be enhanced or ruined by personnel. But the tone, vibe, and success of it is leadership-drive. No matter what type of organization you have, there’s a hierarchy whether you are not. The people in charge set the tone for the business. It has to come from the top until it’s coded into the DNA. But even then, it’s still a vulnerable piece of the business.

Toxic culture — not communicating, attitude problem themselves, if the owner’s walking around in a bad mood so will their people, clashing alignment issues between departments, mixed messages from multiple owners, no pride in the business, their work, or workplace; lack of engagement. Basically, leaders are supposed to lead by example. Always going to have things tugging at your culture: change, growth, cash flow, staffing levels. No matter how great your culture is, it’s always so vulnerable. It’s never going to automatically get better, but it can turn on a dime and get messy (dominos fall down, not up). You need a strong and positive workplace culture – the strong it is, the less likely it will be pulled and stressed to the point of break and people stop showing up. This is a type of resiliency.

Micromanaging. It can be a death of an entrepreneur and a business. You can’t control everything and you lose credibility through lack of empowerment in your people. You’re also limited your bandwidth and output potential because you’re not allowing your infrastructure to grow, breath, perform as intended. Like a garden hose with a kink – you are creating a bottleneck and you are the bottleneck. That’s the last thing you want to be. Or the entrepreneur is trying to control all parts of the culture, and that’s not scalable.

Entrepreneurs run afoul of these often (micromanging + toxic culture). When you are starting small, you might hire friends and family, you might hire the lowest qualified person – you’re not seeking out the top-level employees. Melting pot, or hodgepodge, of people who will just get the job done while you are proving your concept. Your business is also at a vulnerable stage because you’re figuring out as you go. It’s hard to maintain alignment in the early days. People can get resentful, feel like they aren’t being heard, or they were good for the business at first but not anymore, fractured loyalties. The entrepreneur is focused on the goal, which means they may not be able to stay in tune with the culture.
In established companies, the culture is defined. People are already operating within those boundaries. But when it’s undefined and new, that’s where workplace culture is vulnerable.

It’s 100% up to you to create the DNA of your legacy company (if that’s what you are creating).

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

We launched the first refillable lip balm in the world! Everyone we showed it to loved it. This was going to be our 100 million dollar product! We received verbal acceptance from every mass market retailer in the country so we proceeded with a million dollar investment in patents, molds, inventory, packaging, etc. After over a year of development we are finally ready to ship the product and most of the retailers changed their minds and we were stuck with a lot of debt and a lot of inventory.
Internally we had prematurely scaled up to get ready for the next phase of the company, and it all came to a halt. After not being able to make payroll one week, we had to right size the company, lay off a lot of people, and push forward.
There was a major benefit to this: The new technology got us in front of all of the major retailers, and although they didn’t buy that particular product, they bought our core product line and now make up for a majority of our brand sales.
Would I do it again? Probably.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ecolips.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/steve.shriver1
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveshriver/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/steveshriver