I've been listening to the Operators podcast since it launched, and I've certainly gotten some good nuggets from it. Generally, I would recommend it, particularly for people who are relatively new to the direct-to-consumer space.
To set the table, from my perspective Sean is far and away the most helpful of the Operators on the podcast. Whenever he weighs in, I find myself paying closer attention and considering whether there are ideas I should take back to my own business.
Mike also has some very good things to say, but I would find it extremely helpful if he discussed in greater depth the role licensing has played in Simple Modern's growth and the strategy surrounding it. A listener could come away with the impression that Simple Modern essentially parlayed generic water bottles into an enormous multichannel, multiproduct business largely through Mike's and the company's operational excellence.
From the outside, however, it appears that licensing — NFL and Disney, to name just two of its licensed properties — has been an important contributor to Simple Modern's ability to grow quickly, take market share, gain distribution across channels, and extend that distribution into new categories. Without those licenses, at least some of that becomes considerably more difficult. And, to be fair, Simple Modern deserves a great deal of credit for landing and successfully leveraging them.
Given how often Simple Modern's success and its status as a true multichannel business are discussed, it feels as though an important part of the story — and therefore an important source of potential learning — is missing when licensing receives relatively little attention. If I'm wrong, I'd genuinely like to hear why. It would be fascinating to hear Mike discuss how important licensing has actually been, as well as the economics, advantages, risks, and tradeoffs involved.
Jason may be a very smart guy, but I generally find his contributions less useful than Sean's or Mike's. In every episode he reminds us of his background as a banker and lawyer (which certainly gives him a different perspective), but because he wasn't a founder and seems somewhat further removed from the day-to-day operating challenges of building the business, his comments tend to resonate less with me as an operator.
With HexClad, similarly, I would love to hear a much deeper discussion of the impact its partnership with Gordon Ramsay has had on the business. It gets mentioned occasionally, often by the other Operators, but it strikes me as an integral part of the HexClad story. Understanding the economics, risks, rewards, and strategic impact of partnering with someone who has a platform as enormous as Ramsay's would be genuinely valuable to other operators.
My final criticism is that episodes include a lot of name dropping of others in their DTC network, and separately, just how extraordinarily successful various businesses have become. As an Operator myself, I think there is an opportunity to spend considerably more time on the messier parts of building a company — bad decisions, periods when growth stalled or reversed, cash constraints, failed initiatives, channel problems, personnel mistakes, and moments when the outcome was far from certain.
For most entrepreneurs, building a business involves considerable volatility and plenty of periods when things aren't going particularly well. Hearing more about those experiences — and what the Operators actually did when confronted with them — rather than primarily hearing about the victories would make an already worthwhile podcast substantially more useful.
