All of this might have been tolerable if the general level of unhappiness around our house was not so high. Though from New York originally, Maura had left years ago and was miserable in the cold weather and missed El Salvador. With the move, the new business, and renovating our new house with toddlers in tow, we were all exhausted and overwhelmed. Before Thanksgiving, our daughter Lexi was hit with a stomach flu so severe that we had to check her into a hospital to get her rehydrated with an IV. Nothing would stay down—not even Zico, which had always worked. Not long after that, the basement of our house flooded in a storm. Perhaps inviting Maura’s family to Christmas would put us all in a better mood, we thought. On Christmas Eve with a full house of guests, the sewer backed up. If Maura and I had been in a better place, we might have been able to laugh about a run of bad luck. No one was laughing.
We went to stay with Maura’s parents in Rhode Island to celebrate the New Year. We toasted the departure of 2004, happy to see it in the rearview mirror but also trying to honor all the effort we had put into it. We were sure 2005 was going to be the payoff for all that hard work.
I dropped by the office the following day, even though it was technically a holiday, and started sorting through a pile of mail. At the bottom of the pile I opened an envelope addressed to “President, Zico LLC.” I assumed it was junk mail until I noticed the return address: New Jersey Office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. My mind went quickly to the four shipping containers of Zico that were somewhere in transit from Brazil. My heart sank when I opened the letter: “NOTICE OF EMBARGO” it read in big block letters. Not a great way to kick off 2005.
STRAITJACKET
Late in January 2005 the temperature had risen only slightly above freezing when I left for my run at five a.m. Snow fluttered through the air when I started out but it was drizzling a freezing rain by the time I returned. It was a Saturday so there was no need to get the girls up and off to school, and Maura was still in bed upstairs. I was having flashes of thinking that maybe I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur or take a swing at the big time anymore. But we were in far too deep to change course. It would be like the captain jumping out of a small but sinking ship before the crew.
I sat down at my computer and opened Skype to prepare for the conference call I had scheduled with Geoff Abbott, who would be logging on from Australia. I had met Geoff in El Salvador as he was completing his research on cross-cultural integration by managers for his PhD in coaching. I paid him as a coach when I started Zico. When I told him I could no longer pay for his services, he told me not to worry about the bill for a while, that he wanted to see me through the tough times.
My Skype phone rang. In his regularly cheery Australian accent, Geoff said, “So how’s it going, Mark?”
“Honestly,” I said, “not well, Geoff. Not well at all.”
I went on a little monologue describing my tragic situation, that sales were slow, that I had cut everything I could think of, and how we were running through our last cash reserves. If that weren’t enough, the USDA had put four containers of Zico under quarantine. We weren’t going to make it through the quarter and we’d probably lose the house. Maura was depressed. The girls were sick. And we all missed El Salvador.
I couldn’t help thinking how the optimism had vanished and both Maura and I felt so uncertain about what lay ahead. Maura would often ask, “Can I just push the fast-forward button to get through this part and see how things pan out?” I tried to reassure her but underneath I was worried as well. Even if Zico succeeded, I realized, we might remain deeply conflicted about whether it was worth the price we were paying. If Maura’s feelings weren’t unnerving enough, I overheard our daughter Ciara explain to a friend: “We were really happy in El Salvador and then my dad had to move us to New Jersey to start Zico.”
When I finally ran out of terrible news, Geoff let a moment of silence go by.
“Mark, I’m so sorry to hear all this but is it really all that bad?” he said. His response was more than a little aggravating. Yes, I told him, things were that bad. Losing my home, all of our money and that of our investors, the specter of declaring bankruptcy. How much worse could it be?
“Okay,” he said, “I want you to go to your front window and look outside.”
“What are you talking about, Geoff?”
“Just humor me,” he said. So I picked up the laptop and walked to the front window of the house.
“What do you see?” he asked. I told him I just saw trees and the lawn and the street.
“Do you see a white van?” No, I said. “Okay, good. And there are no guys outside in white jumpsuits in your driveway?” No. “So you’re telling me there are not two guys that are going to put you in a straitjacket, throw you in the back of a van, and put you in a padded room for the next twenty years?” I said no.
“Then what the hell are you complaining about, Mark?”
“Okay, I see your point,” I said.
“I’m not sure you do, Mark,” he said. “Let me try to be clear. You are still young, you have a beautiful family. You’re happily married. You’re well educated. Zico might do great or it might collapse; either way you and your family have about a zero percent chance of going hungry. I think you’ll probably figure some way out of this but if you don’t, you’ll find another opportunity. You cannot control everything that is coming at you but you can control how you react.”
Later that morning I sat alone thinking about what Geoff had said. I had been looking for sympathy and he served up some tough love. The truth was that I wasn’t used to facing major setbacks in my life. The other social structures that I had been a part of—college, the Peace Corps, graduate school, and as an employee at major corporations—were much more forgiving than the make-or-break realities of the start-up world. Before, there had always been a support system, a boss or a teacher or a team member, to pitch in or give guidance. If I failed at a project, I usually got a second and sometimes a third chance. I was new to facing the potential of real failure, and because of that I took every downturn like a bullet.
It would take a while for Geoff’s sage advice to sink in, a good year at least, but I had begun to realize a fundamental truth. What Geoff helped me remember was that no matter how bad things got, by any reasonable measure (and certainly relative to the billions in the world who are in true poverty and desperation) I was incredibly fortunate. Yes, things hadn’t gone exactly as planned since the launch seven months ago at the Fancy Food Show. In fact, nothing had gone according to plan. But the truth was, Zico—while running deep in the red—was still running.
Our financial situation was no doubt very serious. But it wasn’t life threatening nor was it a true existential threat to who I was. Like Geoff had reminded me, I wouldn’t be any less of a loving father if I failed. Nor would I be any less of a husband, son, brother, or human for that matter, especially if I tended to those sides of me along the way.
But what if this failure lasted a lifetime? What if I never fully recovered financially or in my career? What then?
To try to sort out what was truly important, a friend suggested I try what is called the Eulogy Exercise.
How would I want people to speak about me at my eulogy? I basically came up with two scenarios. In the first, I am recognized as a brilliant entrepreneur who amassed a huge fortune. University buildings and art museums have been named after me, and I helped make a major impact in the beverage and other industries. Looking down from on high, I see only two of three ex-wives are at my funeral and I know they are fighting tooth and nail with my young fourth bride over my estate. All my kids are there, but I hardly recognize them because I haven’t seen them in years and in fact was rarely part of their lives. I see a few friends but the crowd is mainly business associates, some of whom talk about how I screwed them over on the path to success.
In the second scenario, my funeral is a small celebration-of-life ceremony h
eld at my favorite beach with thirty or so close friends and family. Maura (my one and only wife), my two beautiful daughters, their young families, my siblings, and my closest friends are all there. I made a decent living but never had a lot of money. I contributed to my local community but never made a big impact on the world. But I was a good man. I was there for my kids and grandkids and other friends and even strangers in need. Some of the attendees recall that I had once taken a shot on a crazy business idea called Zico. It flopped but I had moved on with my life. Other entrepreneurs had picked up the mantle and built coconut water into a major global business that made a positive impact on the world. I never envied them their success. The success I had achieved had been far more personal.
Obviously these were extreme scenarios, and of course I’d ideally like to have the best elements of both. But the exercise reminded me that no amount of money or status in business could make that first scenario appealing. And the remarkable truth was that I had most of the second scenario already in my life. I was already winning in ways I deemed most meaningful.
After putting my fear and ego in proper perspective, I began to see that the problems I was facing with Zico were only insurmountable if they stopped me from moving forward. The USDA embargo was a perfect example. I started to think about each problem, one at a time, and figure out how to solve it and move on. I got clear on what the FDA’s concerns were and I found a lawyer with experience in these sorts of disputes as well as a renowned food scientist. I assembled the necessary data, completed the forms, created the reports, scheduled the meetings. I broke down the problem into manageable steps and plowed forward.
In the end, I was able to avoid a product recall and prove that it was just a paperwork filing issue. I voluntarily re-exported $50,000 worth of product that had not been put on shelves, which we donated to the relief effort for the victims of the South Asian tsunami that had just occurred. With the correct filings in place we were able to start a new production run that would arrive in time for the Big Geyser launch.
On the financing front, I had met with numerous potential investors since we launched, but in the end the same existing investors committed an additional $500,000 in early 2005, eight months after they wrote their first checks. Though not the $5 million I hoped to raise, it was enough to keep us solvent through the year.
I took a similar yeoman-like attitude toward my mental health. On my morning runs, I would count my blessings and then repeat mantras out loud to myself. “All I ever need is inside me now,” and “I am thankful for my body, which is healthy and strong; for my mind, which is sharp and clear; and for my spirit, which can’t be beat.” I’m sure my neighbors might have thought I was unhinged chanting this as I left for my four-thirty-a.m. runs, and I don’t have scientific studies to prove that this sort of positive psychology has much effect, but I can tell you that it helped me to stay focused on the tasks at hand and keep perspective at the same time.
THE MEAN STREETS
In March of 2005, nine months after introducing Zico to the world, I had my shot at the big leagues when I was given a chance to address the hundred or so route owners of Big Geyser in advance of our spring launch with them. These were the men (and they were all men) who would be delivering (and hopefully selling) Zico into new accounts. The route owners all started their day at a Big Geyser central warehouse in Maspeth, Queens, and from there fanned out in delivery trucks to every corner of the five boroughs of New York City and Long Island, covering almost two thousand square miles, twenty thousand accounts, and a population of fifteen million.
These route owners were basically running their own businesses under the umbrella of Big Geyser, and their buy-in was critical to the success of any brand they carried. They were hardworking street guys from various walks of life, but what they had in common was none of them were pushovers. They worked in a cutthroat cash business and the daily grind of fighting New York traffic, negotiating with penny-pinching store owners, battling other distributors for precious shelf space, and often butting heads with Big Geyser themselves, put them in perpetually bad moods. They were allergic to sales pitches, fluff marketing, and bullshit in any form.
Maura and I arrived at six a.m., thirty minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start, and found parking down the street from Geyser’s warehouse, in front of what looked like a garbage processing depot. It was still pitch-black, freezing cold, and the pothole-lined sidewalk was a mix of slush, gravel, and ice. We entered the open-air, unheated warehouse filled with delivery trucks.
In the time since the rollout at the food show, we had hired a small team and had a few college students working part-time doing demos and events. I had all of them come to this presentation in the hopes of looking like a bigger organization than we were. In truth, only three (counting me) of the eight were full-time employees.
We met a few people on the warehouse floor and followed the crowd as it moved down a small hallway. Most of the people who I took to be the route owners and Big Geyser salespeople flowed into a separate room. The rest of us, all taking off heavy coats and hats to display branded shirts—Vitaminwater, Fuze, Mistic, GuS Soda—muddled around outside noshing on bagels, donuts, sausage, and eggs, which I assumed was the breakfast Zico had sponsored for $1,000. As the new brand on the block, we were told that buying the breakfast was our “opportunity” to do something nice for the Big Geyser route owners.
Every ten or fifteen minutes, for the next hour, a little man would open the meeting room door, poke his head out, and call the next brand on the agenda: “Fuze!” or “Mistic!” then “Vitaminwater!” One team would funnel out and the other march into the room. The Vitaminwater team must have been twenty strong and looked like a college frat party, bros and cute sorority girls included. Their energy carried into the room and when the door closed we heard laughter and banter flying back and forth. Then it was calm for a few minutes. Then dead silence and some yelling, followed by a huge uproar. The door flew open and out stormed a couple of route owners clearly in a huff. The Vitaminwater guys came out a few minutes later, yucking it up.
“How did it go?” I asked the young guy who appeared to be the head of the Vitaminwater reps.
“We gave away a fucking F-150 last month for top case sales and this month they bust our balls for a forty-five-cent price increase. But hey, you’re welcome. I softened them up for you. You’ll do great. You’re the Zico guy, right? I’m Andy, love that shit.”
We stood next to the door waiting to be invited in. Instead, Jerry came out and said calmly, “Mark, sorry, we’ll need a few more minutes with these guys alone. You’re also going to need to cut your presentation back to five minutes. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?” He didn’t wait for an answer before closing the door. Listening at the door, we could hear yelling and cursing and what sounded like a chair slamming to the floor. I felt like I was an extra in a Scorsese movie.
A few minutes later the little man opened the door and called out, “Zico!” I let Maura and the rest file in and I came in last. I went to the front of the packed room. Jerry introduced me over the bustle of everyone in the room talking at once. “Guys, can you please settle down and show some respect? Like I said, we’ll continue this conversation tomorrow. Many of you have seen coconut water popping up on your routes and asked us to take on one of the brands. We believe this category is going to be big and that we have the best brand with the best team, and here to tell you about Zico coconut water is founder Mark Rampolla. Let’s give Mark a nice welcome.”
I was just about to speak, when four big guys got up in unison, noisily pushed their way down their aisle, and walked out. Three others followed. I didn’t know what to do. Jerry stood up and shouted, “Anyone else?” and paused for a minute. “Mark, please continue, so sorry about that.”
I had done hundreds of speeches and spoken to audiences of five hundred or more, in foreign countries and in Spanish. But I had never been this ne
rvous or thrown off kilter. I tried to roll with it but I would have rather spoken in front of rioting prisoners at that point. I explained what coconut water is, how we came up with the idea, how we’ve been selling it. I went off script and tried to end on a big note: “You guys are gonna make a ton of money off Zico, trust me,” I said, trying to affect a slight New York accent that I’m sure came off like Mr. Rogers doing a Tony Soprano imitation.
I got a lukewarm round of applause as the audience shifted in their chairs. Jerry stepped back up and said, “Thank you, Mark. Guys, take it seriously, please. There’s a real opportunity here. Mark and the Zico team will be handing out two free mixed cases for each route. Please take only two. Use it to seed a few of your best accounts and give this brand some attention, please.”
We went out of the room. Jerry followed and said, “I’m very sorry about that. Distributor issues. Don’t let it get to you. We’ll do this again in a couple months.”
High-Hanging Fruit Page 11
