Welcome to the Maverick Mindset, a podcast where we sit down with operators behind the most influential consumer companies of our time. On this show, we'll move past the stories you've already heard and uncover the bold moments that truly shape their journey. I'm Natalie, I'm a partner at Maver, and today I'm sitting down with Kat Cole, CEO of AG1. Let's get started.
Kat, welcome to the show. I am so fired up to have you here. Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1. I have taken incredible inspiration from your career and the learnings that you've shared. And I want to start at the beginning of your career, which for you was in your teens. It was such an early, you know, sort of rise from 15 to hostess, I think at 18 at Hooters, 19 a waitress, at 26 you're, you know, a pretty senior executive. You've been opening these franchises in Argentina and Australia, and sort of in that hypergrowth kind of career period, was there a tension between outpacing the environment that you grew up in?
Yeah, I, you know, I started work when I was a very young teenager and then more like W-2 proper work when I was 15. And so I was working in malls and cleaning gym equipment when I was 15 and 16. When I was 17, I became a hostess at Hooters. At 18, I became a waitress. At 19, I started traveling around the world to open franchises and eventually took a corporate job at the age of 20 and dropped out of college because I was traveling so much I was failing. I don't recall that ever being on my radar. But there were micro, little micro moments where I could feel the responsibility shift from being a peer to a leader, a peer to a leader. I was a waitress and now I'm a waitress and a shift leader. I was a director and now I'm the vice president in the company. And so when that happens and we're all still there, but we're in different roles, those are the moments where I remember being confronted with people who would go, 'Well, you were just one of us. Now you're the leader.'
You're asking us to do things differently. Wow. You didn't do them any differently. And needing to think I have a few choices. One is I could let the confrontation of my past peer role keep me from doing the job I'm supposed to do as a leader. The other path, which is the path I chose, would be to acknowledge, yeah, I, you know, I was your peer. We did do things this way. That wasn't right or best. Now I'm responsible for the work getting done. So this is what I'm asking you or telling you to do. This is what we need to do. I'll still help. I'll still lead by example. I'll still show the things I should have done then that I'm doing now and asking you to do now. But that's all in service of better work, better outcome. And that's when you can feel that anchor drag of your past and your peers pulling, trying to keep you in a place of the same performance level when really a new role and a new responsibility is an opportunity and a requirement to elevate the practices of the roles that are now leading. And it's a respect of the past, acknowledging the past and that you were in those shoes before, but frankly setting the expectation that, you know, things are going to be a little bit different. Even just calling that out is powerful.
Yeah. I think it was also what is my role? Is my role to be your friend? And when you're someone's peer, it feels more friend-like. Right now I have a new role. Well, of course, I'd still like to be friendly and collegial and have things be mostly positive and happy, but I'm also very clear on what my new role and responsibilities are. And that's a testament to the training I was given, the communication of what was expected of me in a new role, and my willingness to commit more to what is expected of me with new responsibility than feel beholden to the friendships or the expectations of my past.
You mentioned sort of training and expectations that were given to you. You know, I would say I think you far exceeded some of the maybe expectations that were given. How did you know though kind of what good, great, exceeding expectations? I mean, so much of your career has felt like there wasn't a clear playbook or there wasn't a clear kind of what good looks like. How did you know, how do you know what good looks like? How did you know what great looks like? And then I think in many cases you sort of exceeded the bar and paved a completely new path for yourself.
And it felt pretty obvious because I'm listening to the customer and the team members and then adding in my experience with other leaders. And some leaders give you examples of what you absolutely don't want to do or who you absolutely don't want to be. And so I had plenty of examples of good and bad. Where I demonstrated positive exceptions, so not just doing the bad and doing the existing good, would be when I deeply connected to customers and team members. So team members would tell me this is in our way or this makes our job hard and I would take extra steps to remove friction and improve their ability to deliver on their work. Those were the times where I would exceed the playbook because I wasn't following a, you know, an established norm. I was listening to the customer today, to the employee today with today's technology, and then staying very close to that allowed me to do things that wouldn't have been in a playbook or that I might not have seen in a past managerial example.
How are you able to stay so close, particularly when the scale of both employees and customers is just huge?
Yeah. At Focus Brands, when I was president and COO, we had, I mean, close to 100,000 employees if you combine our global franchise system, and certainly millions of customers per day. So the discipline is having enough frequency and enough representation of the different types of customers and the different types of employees and the different experiences they have for it to indicate, signal, to then go dig deep. Of course, when I'm in a single restaurant, I can talk to almost all the customers and almost all the employees. But then when I'm opening many restaurants around the world, of course, that's not true. And so there are ways to stay close to those who are close to those who are close to get some feedback loops. My calendar reflects this as a priority. Regular one-on-ones and skip levels with different team members, regular conversations with customers over Zoom, on the phone. When we launch nationally in retail, I'm in that retailer sampling and talking to customers and just standing there, you know, by the display. And not just me, my team, my leaders. It's a cultural imperative. So you solve for the scale by it not just being you, that there are other people who embody this idea of staying close to the customer, close to the employee, pulling those more qualitative insights together with proper quant work that help you match what you're hearing and what you're feeling and what you're sensing to what's actually happening in a transaction pattern or in something else you can see in the data that help rank and prioritize options, resources, and activities.
I think frankly a lot of brands talk about staying close to their customer, but it is a practice. It is an intention. It is a system. I think of Sam Walton in his early days of building Walmart. He got his pilot's license so he could visit, you know, three different stores in one afternoon. And commitment.
Go in there. But it's commitment, right?
Yeah. No, it's commitment, but I think it's being close to your customer requires, I think, in some cases extreme behavior or such intentionality because it's easy to get distracted or just focus on other items.
Been watching sort of your career, you've also leaned in on some hard times. You mentioned you admire leaders that stood tall. At Hooters there was an opportunity I think for you to leave. You had a lucrative offer. The company was going through a restructuring. Cinnabon, different scenario, but great recession, difficult time for mall brands. But you made the decision like repeatedly in your career to lean into the harder thing. You think about the leader that you've become. How have those moments shaped kind of who you are as a leader today?
Yeah, I was at Hooters as a company for over 14 years, but within that easily 10 different roles. And I was at Focus Brands for 10 years and within that three different distinct C-suite eras. And now I've been with AG1 for over four years. And yet when you're with a company that is growing over that amount of time, the company itself is a different company many times over in that window. Then as you move through different levels of leadership and different functionalities, those are also almost like they're different jobs. They're different eras. They're just, you know, under the same entity umbrella. And yes, there were times in each of those where I was recruited to do something different, to leave, that had its own advantages potentially. But anytime I have an opportunity to do something different, either because I'm wondering should I do something different or I am presented with an opportunity to consider, I think two things. One, is my work done here? It's my first question, is my work done here? Whatever that means at that moment, do I feel my work is done here? I've done all I can to make an impact, to make a difference. And then the second question is, could someone else do a better job for what the company needs next? So the first question was about me, is my work, is my desire, is my impact and influence. This is about the company. Could someone else do what the company needs now, next, better than I can? If the answer to both of those is yes, I should definitely go. And if there's not an immediate opportunity to go, I should facilitate someone else coming in. But if the answer to one of the questions is no, then in line with my values, this is still where my next best opportunity is. Either I have to change the work or change the influence, or I need to change myself for what the company needs and how I'm prioritizing my time. And so any existing company, especially if you're a high potential individual with a desire to learn, with a willingness to fail and put yourself out there and there's growth, there are many opportunities within a single company, many careers.
So much growth because you have an advantage. You have an unfair advantage. You know the business. You know the systems. In my case, I'd worked every job from the ground up. Certainly, there are disadvantages. People see you as you were because they've had more historical reference with you and you have to overcome that. But I focused on the advantages, like why would I go start over if I have traction and advantage and reputation and relationship and growth opportunity? So I found that over and over and until the answer to both of the questions was yes, my work is done and someone else could do a better job. Therefore, it is time for me to go somewhere else where my work will just be starting and I am the person to do what the company needs next.
Talk to me about the decision to join AG1. You started as an adviser. Really wonderful way to get to know the company, the team, the product, but a much smaller company than what you had traditionally worked at. What got you excited about the opportunity at AG1?
Well, my first role with the company was I was a customer for two years.
And that is a huge difference maker.
In an opportunity, if you yourself are the target, a fan, a user, it cuts through so much of what would otherwise be a very cold considered opportunity. So for two years I was a customer. I had challenges with my gut health and energy and some of the outward manifestations of that, hair, skin, and nails. And I was taking all these separate pills and powders. I was going to Whole Foods. I was going to, you know, these pharmacies and natural stores and hearing about something or reading about it. I'm like, 'Oh, I'll take that probiotic and, oh, what about this whole food superfood powder since I don't eat enough vegetable diversity and I need a multivitamin, you know, I need that.' And one day my husband just said, 'Half this stuff's expired and you travel so much you don't stick with it.' And he recommended AG1, then called Athletic Greens. It was really big in the endurance community because it's so simple and high quality and comprehensive. And he's like, 'Stop everything and try this.' And I did. And it made an enormous and fairly immediate difference within weeks. Less bloating, more energy. I could feel the difference. I digested food better. And so I was just a fan. I was a fan. And I thought the company was tiny. The company was small compared to the giants that I had run, but it wasn't tiny. And so the founder heard me on a few podcasts, reached out, asked for me to advise him because the company was growing so quickly. And I was so excited. I thought, 'Oh, I'm a fan. I'm such a fan.' And of course, I'm in an advisory chapter of my career. I just left Focus Brands after 10 years. Wanted to focus on my kids who I had later in life, 39 and 41. And I'd been working since I was 17. So I felt like I'd earned a little bit of a more flexible window. And so he called and said, 'Will you give me some advice?' I thought, 'Of course. I love this product. It would be my joy. This is literally what I'm doing with my time right now, advising, investing, and helping people with frameworks for difficult decision-making during high growth and complex eras.' And so I started advising him. And after a few months, he applied the advice and it worked, applied, it worked. And then he, like any great founder, you know, started luring me in. 'Come help me build this. Come help me build this. You're a customer. You get it. You appreciate it. You have what we need. Come help me build this.' And for a minute, I thought it's, you know, it's pretty small comparative. And but very quickly, and my husband was a mirror for me. He's like, 'You're already acting like you run this company. You're already a customer. You love the product. You're helping them understand how to scale. You know how to work with founders, which is pretty rare for someone who's run big companies. And it's an epic opportunity to get into a company that's still, while proven, we were doing about 160 million in revenue that year over four years ago, but still with a lot of upside. We were growing at, well, yeah, bootstrapped, growing at well over 100% at that scale.' And so it, you know, everything said this is my ikigai, the, you know, the Venn diagram of purpose and opportunity and impact and fulfillment. And I joined formally in November of '21 and joined the founder as president and COO, but effectively running the company. And then I stepped in as CEO and over that window of four years, we've over 3x'd the business. It's been profitable for multiple years consistently. Moved it from single product, single channel to multi-product, multi-channel, now national in Costco. Another big retailer coming up very soon. Moved into sleep with AGZ in addition to nutrients and gut health with AG1. And so now there's almost a refounding of the company for its next chapter to still be about simplifying supplement stacks and super high quality third-party certified. And we consolidate the supplements and the nutraceuticals, the herbs, the vitamins that work well together in a single step. And we're very good at making that into a drinkable routine that drives ritual, which helps adherence. And adherence and consistency of high quality inputs drive felt benefits and people are more likely to see research-backed benefits. And so we've just been doing a lot more of what the company was designed to do. Doubling down on the core, strengthening our operating capabilities, setting up the opportunity to innovate, then launching the innovation and now scaling the innovation is where we are.
