Nathaniel Ru (sweetgreen) | Expanding the Customer Experience Through Technology and Automation

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A recurring theme has started to pop up on the CMO podcast, Sustainability. One of our recent guests even incorporated sustainability into his job title. He might not be alone. According to Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report, Sustainability continues to be a focus for brands. While some organizations may want to pull back on sustainability initiatives in times of economic uncertainty, consumers continue to stress that a brand's commitment to sustainability is critical to their preferences. However, only 25% of brands that Deloitte surveyed say their focus for 2023 is on urging consumers to take action. Instead, organizations are recognizing that focusing on their own sustainability efforts can have an even more positive impact on the planet and on their business. For more inspiration on how to make this year, be your organization's most impactful year yet. Check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report at Deloitte.com slash global marketing trends. Favorite dish, your mom and dad each made. On my dad's side, it was, I would say, joint effort by my dad, my grandmother, but she made the most amazing one-tons and one-tons soup and on my mom's side, a lot of tamales. So I'm half Mexican and half Chinese, so I grew up with a great exotic menu of things. Hi, I'm Jim Stangle and I help major brands find their purpose and activate it and the profits follow. For seven years, I was the Global Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, where I oversaw the marketing of hundreds of brands. You may not know it, but the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of all of your favorite brands, are trying to connect you with your favorite products and services through purpose. And on this show, I delve into how they do it. My guest today in the CMO podcast is Nathaniel Rue, the chief brand officer and co-founder of Sweet Green, the fast casual restaurant chain that serves creative, healthy salads. Nathaniel founded the company in 2007 in Washington, D.C. with two classmates from Georgetown University. Fast forward to today, 16 years later, the three are still running the company now with about 200 restaurants and 5,000 associates. In 2021, Sweet Green went public with a market cap at the time of this recording of roughly $1 billion. My guest Nathaniel was born and raised in Los Angeles, a son of immigrant entrepreneurial parents. His mother has Mexican heritage and his father Chinese. Nathaniel graduated from Georgetown University and within three months, with his co-founders, he had opened the first Sweet Green on M.Street in Georgetown. This is my conversation with a guy who believes in the power of being naive. Here's Nathaniel Rue. On Nathaniel, welcome to the CMO podcast. I don't know if you're aware of this, but your restaurant has been a key player in this show. When I first started, before the pandemic, everything we did was in person, every episode, every recording. We did them in Hudson Yards. You have a great restaurant in Hudson Yards and every day, I had lunch there. I loved your harvest bowl, the avocado with greens. Every podcast to me has a Sweet Green feeling. Thank you for nourishing the show. No, thank you for the kind words and for being a long time customer. If I can ask, what's your go-to Sweet Green order? It's probably the harvest bowl. It's kind of hardy, kind of healthy, but honestly, I don't think there's not a bad one in the lot. I go through phases. So harvest bowl is definitely up there for me as well. More of a fall thing, maybe, but it's good. But I have a niece who graduated from Georgetown. I don't know, maybe five or six years after you. And when I told her I was talking to you, she was, oh my God, I remember that store on M Street. And she talked about the strawberry mint, frozen yogurt. They used to go out there for that. Another fan, by the way. Thank you. Last week, this is kind of well-timed. We're talking now. You and your company were featured in a big story in Bloomberg Business Week. And I read it. It was fascinating. So how did that come about? What was the kind of catalyst for that story? Innovation has always been part of our DNA at Sweet Green. And one of our kind of core principles here is how we kind of see around the corner when it comes to the industry. And so we actually had met the founders of this company called Spice Kitchen, which was based in Boston for students, essentially MIT, there were hardware engineers. And they shared actually a very similar story to us as founders at Sweet Green, where their mission was to figure out a way to make healthy eating more accessible, but by using automation and leveraging robotics. And so they opened two restaurants in the Boston area, one in downtown crossing and one in Harvard Square. We've just always been, we're always impressed with the way they approach their business. And also just like the level of humility and partnership that the four of them had. And during COVID, we started talking a little bit more and decided to acquire the Spice Kitchen and fold them into Sweet Green, really, with the vision of how do we continue our mission together and provide more healthy food in a more accessible way. And so for the last call a year and a half, we've been working with the team at Spice to take the technology they built and we call it the infinite kitchen. It's essentially automated assembly line that goes into our restaurants. And we've spent the last year and a half kind of tweaking it, remixing it, designing it for our menu at Sweet Green. And we actually launched the first pilot store a few weeks ago just outside Chicago. So far, we've been really pleased with the first few weeks. It's still very early. But the main principles and the main goals of the Michigan or one, is to actually, one is really around consistency, right? How do we make food in a way that is more consistent and at the same quality or better that you get in the existing units? One of our biggest complaints at Sweet Green is sometimes we miss addressing or we miss a protein and accuracy is something that we've been really trying to work on. And the infinite kitchen really helps that. The second thing is, how do we create an experience that is even more convenient? So faster and higher throughput and really thinking about speed of service as a big core tenant. And then the last one is it almost sounds counterintuitive when you think about automation or robotics. But how do you make the extor experience even more focused on hospitality? So what we've done is with the labor savings that we've saved in the back of house, we've actually added two roles we call them hosts in the front of house that are really there to kind of greet you, walk you through the store experience, tell you about the seasonal menus if you want that information and kind of just be a guide for the overall experience. And so so far, it's been a great pilot and a lot to learn going forward. What was the reaction to the store in Bloomberg? I thought it was overall good. We've known Liz, the journalist who wrote the piece for a while and I personally toured her around the space, kind of walked her through it. And I think the reaction was more that this is definitely something that's forward thinking in the industry. I think it's definitely, we're building it as a pilot. So it's not trying to over promise anything. But I think just focusing on what are the things that are going to move the industry and how can companies like Sweet Green and others leverage automation in a way that is a win for the customer and a win for the team member? The day we're recording today, we dropped an episode with Jay Livingston at Shake Shack. Yeah, I know Jay, really well. And you know, there's a lot of similar principles and themes in your two companies. And it was, you probably haven't listened to it yet. It's only a few hours old, but it's a lovely episode. He's a lovely guy, and I've long admired Danny Meyer and almost anything he touches. So it's nice. I'm interviewing you after him. This is going to be really fun. A bunch of food, the CMOs, you know, growing up when we were starting the company, setting the table by Danny Meyer was a huge inspiration for us and how we thought about experience, design, and him as a mentor has been incredibly helpful. And then what Jay and Randy are doing at Shake Shack is also really inspiring to watch. You know, the way they've built community around the restaurants and some of the more culinary forward innovations they've done have been really cool to see. I've learned a lot about you and my research before the show and there are two big themes in your life, right? Food and music. Yes. So I want to start there with a little bit of a lightning round. The first one is your favorite live concert ever. Favorite live concert ever? It's probably the first show I saw. I was raised against the machine in a here in LA. It was back in the day, but it was definitely the power of sound and the power of live music was the kind of like my first experience with that and it definitely is memorable. I'm going to super date myself. One of my most memorable was Bruce Springsteen before he was Bruce Springsteen playing in Georgetown University in Macdonough. Wow. He was in Macdonough with no breaks. That is epic. Three or four hour show, oh, man, you know, wow. It's in my top two or three. The first dance song at your wedding. Can we be pretend by billweathers? Oh, nice. How was your music case shifted since your days at Georgetown? You know, it's a little all over the place. I would say I've gotten more into, you know, disco music as I've gotten older. I feel like just the power of community and our friends and electronic music and disco music has been a big force in my life recently. Favorite dish? Your mom and dad each made? I would say on my dad's side, it was, I would say joint effort by my dad, my grandmother, but she made most amazing one-tons and one-tons soup and on my mom's side, a lot of tamales. So I'm half Mexican and half Chinese. So I grew up with a great exotic menu of things. Your go-to order at Sweet Green. Okay. So right now I'm doing custom kale wild rice, black and chicken. I do avocado, carrots, cabbage, zither hard bread crumbs, half green goddess, half me so dressing. I'm not sure there should be custom. I think this might be a dish. It's in there somewhere. And your favorite restaurant when not at Sweet Green? I'm really into the four horsemen, it's a restaurant in Brooklyn, it's a great kind of wine bar and has amazing food. As creative and marketers, we understand the struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing content demands. And the recent surge of interest among CMOs and chat GPT and other language learning models has added fuel to this fire. Today businesses should embrace streamline workflows and automated processes to step into the future of the content supply chain. Good news, Deloitte Digital can help. Their content supply chain solutions can help your business improve collaboration across teams, increase efficiency and reduce costs, all while maintaining high quality content. With Deloitte Digital Solutions, you can create more targeted and relevant content without having to leverage your internal resources. Visit DeloitteDigital.com to learn more. As a marketer, a job is to be creative. But what does that mean? I love George Lois's definition of creativity. George is of course a famous art director and he said, creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything. I love it. The way I think about creativity, I love George's definition, but I think of it as fresh and unexpected ways to solve a problem or to discover new opportunities and new approaches. In the world of business, however, creativity can be a scary word, but it doesn't have to be. In the 2023 Global Marketing Trends report, Deloitte surveyed more than 1,000 top executives from today's top brands to understand how they plan to meet their customers' needs this year. Turns out, some of these high growth brands are reimagining creativity in their organizations. At a time when we're seeing a shift from creative skills to analytical skills in marketing, these brands are often doing the opposite. And some CMOs are discovering creativity can be their superpower. Are you looking to make a meaningful impact in your organization in the year ahead? Check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report today at Deloitte.com slash global marketing trends. Alright now I've talked to about 270 CMOs in the show and your role I think is the most unusual. You're the chief brand officer, you're a co-founder and you're of course on the senior leadership team, and you are a board member of a publicly traded enterprise. Unless you seem to be a pretty active mentor for young people inside and outside your company. So of all these hats you wear in a manual, how do you decide where to spend your time? You know I asked myself that question a lot. I really try to focus my time on three main things. The first is I would call like team and hiring, spent a lot of time making sure that team culture, morale and just the overall rhythm of how we work together is at the highest quality and I'm also very involved in every single new hire that we make on the marketing and brand team. Two, I would say really I would call it brand strategy and campaign building. So the way we tell our story from the smallest moments to the biggest campaigns and how they all connect to each other is something that I spend a lot of my time on. And honestly a lot of us as founders, we connect on that regularly. I believe that brand is built one drop at a time, it's in every little thing you do, whether it's a social post or a large out of home campaign adds to it. And then the third thing that I really focus on is spending time with our culinary team and our product team and understanding kind of the work that they are creating and we have a food lab here in LA and how that connects to some of the insights we're seeing from the consumer and then how we can create really great creative against that. And that's the majority of how I spend my time. What interesting insights are you seeing these days from the consumer? One, there's a lot of interesting insights around return to office and how people are moving around. As you know, as you know, back in your days, you know, in New York, it was heavily corporate and that lunchtime, Monday through Friday, Friday, workforce and when COVID happened, that all kind of moved around. And as the lights are turning back on or some return to office, a lot of people working from home, but also using sweet green differently in the suburbs. A lot of our growth now is coming just more in the middle of the country and suburban neighborhoods. And we've kind of seen an interesting diversity of how people are using sweet green and a lot of success in just having a little bit more of a diverse portfolio of restaurants overall. I would say the second thing is what we're hearing loud and clear from our customers is they are looking for more options for sweet green at dinner. And so what's a big focus for us on the culinary and marketing team is how do we create products that are a little bit harder, a little bit more filling, a lot of harvest bowl and make sure that we're relevant at the dinner date part as well. And not surprised, but I think you're probably much more of a, I don't know what your hours are on all your stores, but much more of a 24-7 thing than you used to be before the pandemic. Correct. So of all the roles that we just talked about, which one gives you the most energy and which one doesn't, if any, if it does, if one doesn't. I mean, I've been on a couple of boards. Not all that board is fun. You know, it's, I do have an interesting role because I've been a founder and essentially, you could say a board member for 16 years and I never was a trained marketer. I never went to school for it. I had to learn by doing, but I think inherently, I know inherently every founder has to be a marketer. They have to be good at sales. They have to be good at telling stories. They have to be able to go to raising money, which is inherently marketing in itself. And so I fell into the role of CMO or chief brand officer really because I love our mission and being able to create amazing stories around it. Our formula is really, I always say, starting with the best ingredients, you using data to really understand our who our customer is and then using human creativity to tell great stories around food. And I would say to your question, that's my favorite part is the creativity around storytelling and how it's evolving and how people's relationship with food is evolving. And when we started sweet green, we always joke that we saw the food companies that had the best marketing were traditionally the ones that were the most unhealthy. And we said, how do we do something similar but for healthy food? And so we've spent the last 16 years really focused on connecting food to lifestyle, food to culture and doing it in a way that build community, but also kind of took a playbook out of bigger fast food and connected it a little bit more to lifestyle and mainstream culture. You've built a differentiated and at least from what I see, a pretty loved brand in a tough category, right, where you have a lot of money being spent and you seem to have done it with not a huge investment in traditional marketing. So and you're the cheap brand office, you say that's what gives you energy. What could others learn from your 16 years of building quite a brand without the marketing that we see from your competitors and the overall food category? Well, first, I would say it's a, you have to think long term. I always tell founders that if you're going to start a company, especially in the restaurant business, it's a 10 year commitment because it takes a while to build a brand that has really high loyalty and I think any company, but sometimes I hear a lot of founders trying to build something for two years and try to sell it and I feel like that's, it's always not, I don't think that's the right approach to build the right type of company or right type of brand. I also think that there's a lot of ways when you're starting a business to think more about brand building and entertaining the world versus marketing the world. And we've just focused more of our time on things that generate earned media versus things that are around paid media. We've through a big music festival as an example for six years in Washington, outside Washington, we had the strokes, Kendrick Lamar, the weekend play and it was really our way of building a lifestyle platform that could extend beyond just food. We've worked with chefs and the world of culinary to kind of show that even some of the best chefs, you know, eat healthy and make that their type of cuisine more accessible. And recently we've worked with a lot of famous athletes and so it's really just figuring out what the brand stands for and finding ways to generate more earned media than paid media. So when you and your co-founders, you know, started the company and you know, at some point decided to assume three different roles, right? And you said you, you know, your energy is with the chief brand officer. Tell me about that process. Was that difficult? Was it easy? You know, was this obviously, it sounds like this was your first choice, but take us back to the room. Are you three decided? Yeah. I will. I'll take you. I would say the year is 2007 and we were deep in writing the business, like writing finishing the business plan, raising money, we were still in college and there was three of us and you know, we kind of looked at each other and we said, the opportunity cost of starting this company now versus a few years from now is much lower because it's easier to fail when you're younger and we didn't have any jobs and I don't know. We all also had parents that were all first-generation immigrants that kind of gave us the permission to try something that was a little bit more entrepreneurial and so what we give them a lot of credit for just giving us the permission to do that. And we all started as kind of just, we didn't really have titles in the beginning. We were just co-founders, the three of us. We did every job. I mean, we essentially worked in the restaurant for the first entire year that we had that store on Georgetown and I was cashier and Nick was station one and John was outside doing marketing and so we were all kind of just in it. And I think the beauty of the relationship was the fact that none of us had any experience. None of us were a technical co-founder. We didn't have any, I don't know, previous ideas of how to do this and so we all kind of grew up in the business together and surrounded ourselves with just experts in the field. And we all became, over time, there was three co-ceos and it was more of a formality than anything else. It wasn't like there was huge distinctions in the roles. And then as we got bigger, I think in 2017, we decided that the company was at a stage where we definitely needed to almost own spheres of influence in the company. And so at that moment, John, my co-founder, became CEO, Nick really focuses on our food and culinary roadmap and I kind of took over marketing creative in the brand. And the three of us have a really interesting partnership. We still sit in the same office. We spend a lot of time together. Our wives joke that we prepare each other for marriage. So we have a pretty strong bond. We also have a ton of trust and respect for how each other runs their portion of the business and almost operated kind of like a family-run company. And I think that's what's truly special about the partnership that we have. It's unusual, you know, 16 years, the same three. You've gone through starting a company, taking it public and you've just affirmed everything I've sort of read and heard that you're strong friends, your wives are strong friends. And so tell us what makes that work. I mean, it's the kind of environment all of us would like to be in, right? Yeah. I would say it just starts with trust that really starts with mutual trust and a shared passion for trying to do what we set out to do originally. And yeah, there are moments when we have disagreements and when we don't, you know, debate certain decisions, but it always comes from a place of what's best for sweet green versus what's best for the three of us. And I think that's that filter for decision-making that's really kept the bond strong and also sustainable. I think a lot of times, you know, this is my first business partnership. It's our first company. It's our first job. And so we've been really intentional about knowing what we know and knowing what we don't know. And every year, the three of us take like an annual offsite or some type of time solo just the three of us to recognize the things we did well and also recognize the things we didn't. And just make sure that we keep that time for ourselves to really course correct or invest more in the places that are working. And I think it's just this combination of casual interaction during the day with more kind of these like moments of time where we can connect that are outside of the day-to-day as well that really help keep it going. So once a year, you go away to three of you and just three of you and you just kind of review how it's going and what's working, what's not reaffirm your vision. We actually just did this in January, three of us went, brought food, cooked our own dinners for a weekend and sat there and just talked to kind of turned off our phones, turned off our email and just took stock of the journey and the things that we just need to improve on and do better and also just use it as a moment to kind of hang out and have some fun. Yeah, sounds good. How's the relationship changed? You're all 16 years old, you're not in school anymore, but how has it evolved in these 16 years of working so closely together and building an amazing brand? Yeah, I would say that it's definitely evolved. You have to imagine the three of us, two of us lived together, one lived across the street and that was the very beginning and we would walk to work and built a company and now all of us have families and different obligations and I definitely think we have busier lives outside of sweet green, which I also think is a good thing to kind of create some balance, some boundaries. But I think what hasn't changed is just our energy level, I think that's even as the company gets bigger, we almost feel more and more energized to continue with our mission and we see the opportunity and we see the customer reaction and how we were able to be a small part in their lives and that gets us really excited and I think even though our personal lives have gotten a little bit busier and our obligations outside of work, what remains the same is the same energy that we had as founders when we started the company. You went public, I think about two years ago, right? Yeah. What changed anything in terms of what you work on, what they work on, the vibe in the company? Yeah, going public is definitely a milestone but not something that we focused too much on. We always thought it was a step in the journey of sweet green, not the final step. And yeah, I think it's definitely been a huge learning experience for us as founders, for us as a company and I think the volatility in the market is something that we've also the way that we've kind of addressed it is just being as transparent as possible. We as founders just believe in like over communicating the things that are happening in the market or trying to talk about the wins and the opportunities in the business and going public just puts, it puts more pressure but it also puts, I think, the right type of constructive pressure on prioritization and the things that we need to do. I feel like pre-IPO, we were kind of focused on doing a lot of things and I feel like now we're focused on doing less things but bigger and better. You have an incredible board. I was looking at the characters on your board and I saw a young me moon is on your board, the Harvard professor. Yes, she's been on there for a while. Yeah, she has. She was doing a book about when I did my first book so we kind of exchanged notes back then. Actually, we had the same publisher and agent. I got to know her through that process and I loved her book. The one different. It's probably about 10 or 12 years old but it's a lovely book. Having a board, obviously, is a different thing. What have you learned about being a chief brand officer working with the board? I was actually a PNG of course and my board was if leverage right massively helpful in counsel, advice, someone to talk to, so could you speak a little bit about, I mean, two years now you've had a board. How has that helped you be a better chief brand officer? Yeah, our board, I have a ton of respect for them and just grateful that I get to work and connect with them very frequently. I would say my experience with the board kind of happens in two different ways. One is at the board meetings themselves so as a collective group, feel like me personally and I think us as founders, we get a lot out of the discussion, the decisions that we make and a diversity of experience that is able to kind of shape something, shape an idea that may have been 85% of the way that they're and having them in the room gets us that last 15% and that's been really helpful and supportive. The other way that I really love working with the board is actually just one-on-one, so young me, as you mentioned, has been really instrumental in just helping me think bigger and in a way that can just change a frame of reference on storytelling, campaign building, building community as a whole and we actually met young me right when she came out with that book about 10 years ago, I think we were in 2013 and we were just really impressed by the way in which she was, how she articulated how great companies work and what makes them successful and it's those one-on-one conversations over the years when maybe you're feeling stuck or maybe when you just need a little bit of advice that I really appreciate from our board and personally as a marketer because they're able to kind of spend time with you one-on-one, which is a very special and magical time. Now let's go back to when this concept of sweet green first happened. You were all at Georgetown. Tell us a little bit about people talk about starting companies, starting businesses, a lot of people don't follow through with it, but you did. What was that conversation? When did you kind of tip it over from chatting about something to actually pursuing it and deciding that's what you're going to do? What was that conversation like? Was it an event, a person, a particular night you went out and had a glass of wine together? What was it that kind of tipped it? So we were seniors at Georgetown and I remember John and the three of us weren't actually best friends. We were close, but we all kind of had our different friend groups, but we were the friends that always had these business ideas and we were just throwing them around. I remember walking down M Street one day with John and we would go to Chipotle a lot, but we got to a point where we put kneaded every day and then there was a deed in the loop across the street, but that was way too expensive for us. We were just chatting through being from California, is there a way to create something that was healthy, affordable for college students, but also kind of fit our values and what we wanted and on our walk every single time we would go off campus was a screen little tavern that we would walk by and we essentially just, we wrote a business plan and it had four pages in it. It was a cover page, it was executive summary, it was one page of financials and a picture of furniture. It was a very light business plan and to be honest, we actually even took it to some of our professors and advisors at the school and we got a lot of, I can't look at that, I don't want to be responsible for your failing. We were kind of a little bit on an island. We did have one professor, entrepreneurship professor at Georgetown that was really helpful and somebody that, I don't know, almost like our parents gave us permission to do it and so we started writing the business plan, we finished it, we fell in love with that first location on M Street, we ended up signing the lease, getting an architect. This is all in the course of three months and we started construction and we thought that was going to be kind of easy, we thought we were going to graduate, we were going to have this restaurant builds and all of our parents and people would come visit us during graduation and come to the opening and of course the restaurant was two months delayed, it was way over budget and it was the middle of the recession, the start of the recession in 2007. So it was a really challenging time not only as first time founders but with no experience and in the middle of what was going to be a big recession in the restaurant business. So we ended up opening our doors August 1st, 2007 and I mean everything that could go on wrong went wrong like it started raining and all the green paint started going flowing down the street, I remember we had magnetic menu boards that we created and there was stainless steel on the wall and we weren't sticking to the stainless steel, our yogurt machine at the time wasn't working and so it was really just the moment of problem solving and I think that was the first time we really felt the difficulty but also the growth of starting a company and feeling super tired and not knowing what to do but also kind of embracing the unknown and really just stepping into creating something and yeah we opened our doors somewhat successfully on August 1st, 2007 and have been kind of committed to that dream ever since. When was the moment that you thought you had something that could go national, maybe international? I think when we opened our first restaurant in New York, we actually we opened New York in Boston, 2013 so call it six years after we opened the first one and we had restaurants, we had about 18 locations in DC and Philly and we were really nervous to open in New York because there was a lot of competition, the rents were more expensive and we spent a lot of time especially on the creative and marketing side of almost starting over and pushing ourselves to think about how do we truly differentiate the company, how do we make it look and feel different than what other competitors are doing and how do we show up differently in a city that is notoriously really challenging for startups and so the focus was a few things, one is we actually hired a brand new architect, so an architect that had never done restaurants before they did more kind of, I would call it like bigger like fashion brand and retailers and they forced us to kind of strip down the experience and focus everything on the colors of the food versus the colors of the wall and the furniture and we created a bit more of a modern approach, it had, I remember that store in New York had bleacher seating and stadium seating and it converted into a stage so that we could have events and local music kind of come perform inside the store and it was really about creating a great food experience but also building a lifestyle around that restaurant and so once we opened that store and the one in Boston we saw the customer reaction line out the door and that was kind of the moment, at least for me we could make this a much bigger thing. Was there ever serious doubt from when you opened the first store? I mean of course the startup issues etc but did you ever lose your conviction as a set of three founders that this thing is really going to make it? Yeah definitely there's been a lot of those moments and I don't know I feel like just threshold for pain has gotten, you think what's changed? Definitely threshold for pain has just gotten much stronger but I go back to that very first winter that we had in DC so we opened 2007 in August and December of 2007. You have to remember we were only serving salad and frozen yogurt and it was freezing outside with no seeds in 500 square feet and so we had very little business like our sales got cut in half and it was the first time we almost didn't make payroll and I remember Nick when Nick and I were sitting in my apartment and this is we had a stack of these invoices, these almost like old school produce invoices that were this high. We were trying to teach ourselves how to use QuickBooks and input invoices and doing all the things and realizing that if things didn't turn around and kind of in the rest of the winter early spring that we would probably have to shut it down and and I think it those are the moments that you just have to be really persistent and confident that you can get through it and that's the biggest lesson of any I feel like any business owner I'm sure a lot of CMOs and is there is a level of survival that you can only learn by doing but once you get through those moments they're truly explosive and magical because they help to find the kind of the rest of your career and I think that having those as as scary as they may be and as uncomfortable as they may be really help as you get get bigger and have that experience. Well you're bigger now and you have a marketing group that's probably quite a bit bigger than it was back in 2007 when it was pretty much you so could you talk a little bit about I think this is always fascinating when you start a company from scratch I mean how have you built a team in marketing where did you start what was the first you know kind of person or kind of capability you thought you needed to add to the company so kind of walk us through your thinking and building up marketing from you to whatever it is today. So first marketing hire was an intern from Georgetown who I still keep in touch with and what I feel like I've had a lot of success with is hiring young hungry talent that really believes in our mission can get their hands dirty and can almost act like their like their own entrepreneur that's that's kind of the filter in terms of how I hire people is sweet green is is still even though we're 200 restaurants today we it's still very much a we we approach it like a young company and very entrepreneurial but it takes a certain mindset where you can thrive off a little bit of ambiguity you can thrive off having a less budget you can be you kind of come alive when you become scrappy and so I kind of like that younger kind of energy in terms of experience and so over the years the positions that I have always thought have been the most impactful have been great brand thinkers people that kind of think outside the box when it comes to storytelling really great creatives whether that's full-time or freelance and then really thoughtful UX designers and just designers as whole people that kind of kind of help take their pen to the brand and and not just aesthetic design but also like content and narrative design but over the years I've really kind of tried I don't really believe in having a huge marketing team I think having a core group of really solid A players people that are really really talented and have a lot of passion for the brand and then supplementing those people with outside help when we need them specific project-based work you know the world is now very much remote and freelance and a lot of the great talent is out there and so very much keeping the core team in-house but also leveraging kind of a hybrid approach to new talent how would you describe the culture of marketing at sweet cream I mean it lives in a larger culture of course but how would you describe it I would say it's it's really rooted in creativity and everything we do has to either entertain the world make people laugh or feel smart as a piece of work and it all starts from almost it almost starts with like a mindset right it's a mindset of creativity versus and the work will be good and so my job and what I what I like to do is just create the right environment in the world of creativity for the team and I think it's really easy and we're guilty of it too but you kind of get stuck in hamster wheel of meetings and the next project and and different KPIs and metrics which are all really important but trying to find a whole space for creativity and and the freedom of making mistakes and and having ideas that maybe we won't do but helps create another idea that we will do and and just using providing the right canvas for for some of those some of that thinking is really important you have quite a growth mindset at the company I was looking at your some of your public filings and your growth plans their store openings your revenue plans it's quite a quite an aggressive positive ambitious set of goals is there anything Nathaniel about marketing of the company that you think needs to change to achieve that I mean you just you just described the culture within marketing talking about the overall company culture you have something very special here and scaling something that's really special is never easy right so so what what has to what has to change you think is you have this aggressive plan and what can't change yeah scaling anything is very challenging and I think scaling special is almost counterintuitive when you think about it because as you as most companies get bigger especially food companies you kind of get worse almost and our push to ourselves is that as we get bigger how do we continue to get better and it's there's no blueprint for it's not easy and we we kind of we have this mantra and sweet green is how do we create intimacy at scale and as we continue to grow and and in terms of marketing there are two big focuses for us and for our team and one is what I'm calling crossing the chasm of crevability and I feel like sweet green you kind of know that it's a healthy place to go taste great ingredients are good but how do we really if we're going to compete with larger fast food and and be some be a company that's a little bit more for everyone how do we make sure that when we add new items to the menu people actually also perceive sweet green as starting with taste and flavor and filling versus just healthy and salad and so that's a big focus for us as we evolve our marketing making sure that that people understand the flavors and the culinary integrity and just like the deliciousness of the food first and then oh on top of that it's healthy and so that's been a really fun challenge and an opportunity for us and the second thing which I'm really excited about is bringing back a lot of the community initiatives that we used to do pre-COVID when the pandemic happens the light's kind of turned off for a lot of companies and we we used to do a lot of work in communities whether it be impact events or dinners or experiences or even music festivals and and so bringing back a little bit of that IRL power and the power of just like building the right types of tribes in the neighborhoods that we're in because it's it's still even those weekends bigger the best way like one of our like our best channel is just through our restaurants the word of mouth and so the more that we can support our store teams our head coaches with the right type of tools education and community support that that's the power of the brand so really excited for the next few years let's switch to the creator brief to close out this wonderful chat and my first question is your parents are immigrant entrepreneurs what did you learn from them that has helped you in starting and starting to scale sweet green the power of persistence and the power of humor I love that sense of humor is critical right life can be hard if you can laugh about it when it's hard it makes it a lot lighter yeah and telling great stories and and being able to it just make people smile I've heard you say that being naive has helped you and your founders throughout this whole process what do you mean by that and do you feel like you're still naive yeah one is I don't think we've ever we would ever do sweet green or start the business if we knew what we knew now so if that's a lesson is I feel like you get to a point when when you're doing anything and you've studied and you've studied and you just get to a point where you can't study anymore and you kind of have to take test and I feel like that's what entrepreneurship is is you got to get to a point where you have the self self confidence and self awareness to just just jump and I think that's that that's really important in in many businesses but it's a big lesson that we learned early on is I think that the fact that we didn't know everything was one of the reasons why we get it and and now that we've kind of evolved that thinking it's sweet green even today we call it beginner's mindset you know it's like how do we how do we just always have that almost like childlike wonder to the things that we're doing having a beginner's mindset and and not just doing the same things over and over again because they kind of the things we just did and if the world and the pandemic and how generations are changing or any signal of how things you have how you have to adapt you really just have to have that child like wonder and sense of beginner's mindset to really win in this new world what's the first brand you remember making an impact on you growing up in LA do see if you know if you see as it's clothing brand I was big into surfing and skating and hugely impactful for me so you're a surfer skateboarder I surf I'm not very good but I like to get out there and go surfing who has been the most inspiring person in your life I would say my grandmother because she she really was somebody who was really good at listening and because of it she was really great at knowing when to do the right thing when to say the right thing she was almost like she was one of the best gift givers too because not in a financial way but in terms of a way of giving her gifts because she just knew you so well and I think there's people in all of our lives that around us that are just really good at giving gifts because not because they're expensive or because they're big or fancy but because they just know who you are as a person and I learned that early on from her I was talking to a company about their interview questions from new employees and this one company said we always ask what's the most meaningful gift you've ever received it says a lot right says a lot it says a lot both given and received it says a lot about who you are so who would you like to hear on the CMO podcast who should we bring on the show that because you reached out to me on LinkedIn to say you like the show you enjoy it yeah I did I'm a fan so I don't have you ever I don't know if it's the CMO so maybe it's breaking the rules but Dave Lee at Squarespace has been a good friend of mine mentor and he's a chief creative officer so it's not the CMO yeah but I think he does a lot that just pushes the art industry forward and I would love to hear from him love it okay we'll see what we can do and I'll give you the last word I've been on giving you a barrage of questions here and nothing anything for me before we sign off no this was amazing thank you for hosting and creating the space and just for the thoughtful questions and I remain a huge fan and hope to meet in person one day I would love that all the best your team keep it going I'll be following closely and I'd love to meet you at one of your stores soon let's do it let's have a harvest bowl together I skip lunch today so I'm I'm really hungry so I wish you were within arms reach here but we're not I'm in Cincinnati today in New York it's a different story but someday someday soon thanks Jim that was my conversation with Nathaniel Rue three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life the first one is all about culture this was a beautiful discussion about building a fantastic culture Nathaniel talked about being involved in every hiring decision where he spends his time is on team building having a beginner's mindset as you approach every day the power of creativity in your culture it was a beautiful discussion on building a strong attractive magnetic culture second take away it takes time to build a brand with strong customer loyalty Nathaniel said when they started this brand they realized they were in it for the long term and it would take a minimum of 10 years to build the brand they understand what kind of brand they want to build very very deeply and they take the time and the patience to build a brand it's a good lesson for all of us last takeaway I love Nathaniel's take on technology and automation sounds like a scary thought maybe the food business it's not at all the way he and his team are approaching automation and technology is to make the customer experience way better make the product experience way better and to open up some resources so that people can be closer even closer to their customers that's it for this episode of the CMO podcast if you found this helpful and entertaining I would be so grateful if you could share our show with your friends and I would be super happy if you subscribe so you can be updated as we publish new episodes and if you really want to help leave us a five-star rating and a positive review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen the CMO podcast is a gallery media group original production