Kill the cash cow, ship a breakthrough in 12 months (Andreas Wilhelmsson)

Richard Medcalf 00:00
Founders, CEOs, what if the fastest way to hit your goal takes you in the wrong direction? What if the thing that's making you money right now is the exact thing standing in the way of what you actually set out to build? And what if your whole company is organising itself around a smaller, safer version of your vision and calling it progress-that's exactly what we're going to explore today. I'm Richard Medcalf. I work with pioneering leaders in one of two moments: either the next big leap isn't happening fast enough, or you've achieved more than you ever imagined and haven't recalibrated to what's now possible. In each episode, you'll see how elite CEOs handle high-stakes decisions they haven't rehearsed, so that you can fold the principles straight into your own business. I hand them a defining move they haven't made yet, live and unscripted, and we find out what's on the other side of it. Today's guest is Andreas Wilhelmsson. He built one of Europe's largest vertical farms, survived a funding collapse that killed most of his competitors, and then made the harder call, walking away from a profitable lettuce business to chase something bigger. His company, Supernormal Greens, has found a way to grow plant compounds at concentrations nature can't reach on its own with the goal of putting them in the hands of a billion people by 2030. Get ready to find out what happens when I take away the business paying his bills and give him 12 months to ship something the market has never seen. Welcome to the defining move. So you, what I know about you, Andreas, is that you have survived the brutal economics of vertical farming, and then you pivoted your business around this bigger insight that plants are biological factories, and so now you're growing valuable plant compounds at concentrations that nature can't match, which is amazing. And you've got a goal

Andreas Wilhelmsson 02:00
of getting your products into the hands of a billion people by 2030. Now I know that's fairly early days. You only pivoted relatively recently, but first we'll just start by saying, like, whereabouts are you on that number? We started our vertical farm 2017. We ended up with growing lettuce, and did so quite large scale. So we shipped to 1/3 of all the grocery stores in Sweden. But then what we did a few years ago is that we started to experiment in our lab on other types of plants, plants that you can use to have the compounds in the plant valuable as a beauty ingredient or a health ingredient, so supplements or cosmetics, anti-aging, all of that. I don't know exactly how many people have had our products yet. It's not anything close to a billion, but the goal still stands for 2030.

Richard Medcalf 02:49
So let me hit you with your defining move that we're going to explore. So you've decided that supernormal greens has to be super normal, and so you've gone to your board and you've staked your role as CEO on your ability to put a superior health, beauty, or performance product in the hands of, let's say, a million customers in the next 12 months, and to do that and to free up resources to make that possible, you've got the agreement from them to shut down everything that was just making a better copy of what's already out there. So perhaps good, solid products, but they're not the transformative, super products that perhaps you could be creating. So that's the goal. That's your defining move. What's the feeling that comes up at that point in terms of is that exciting? If you're thinking, "Oh my word, how the hell am I going to do that in such a short time? Does that feel that's going to be easy? We're pretty much there. I mean, what's what's going on for you emotionally as you kind of think about that fictional move?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 03:51
I'm getting very excited because it's not that fictional, actually. So we are in the middle of ramping up great ingredients, great plants that are commonly used today. So there's a plant called lemon bar. In there, you have something called rosmatic acid as the normal compound you usually want to use. And we have been able to increase rosemary acid compared to the control 26 times over. Ramping that up has a value, and we are doing that as we speak right now. And of course, we'll sell that, and that will generate great cash flow. What we can do with the very same plants and or another plant is targeting other molecules that you normally don't use in that plant and create super products that have totally different benefits.

Richard Medcalf 04:36
So, if you are only focusing like your entire company effort on scaling the super product,

Andreas Wilhelmsson 04:43
yeah,

Richard Medcalf 04:43
right, and creating that, launching that, scaling it within a year. First of all, does that million that I just I just threw out a million?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 04:50
Yeah,

Richard Medcalf 04:51
your interaction was I feel very confident in that. So does that that million at this point feel like that's actually are we are we shooting too small with that million?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 04:59
Yes and no. So, being in the hands of 1 million, if we're talking about creating this new super ingredient that we are planning to create, so we are preparing for the clinical studies, claim studies, and all of that. So, so this is in the making, but we will have the ingredient out the door within a year, definitely. Being in the hands of 1 million people, that means it needs to go through the product development cycle of our customers. And when we talk about some of these huge brands, I'm very confident in hitting 1 million people. That's not difficult. But doing it within a year, having a product development cycle in huge companies within a year, that's tough.

Richard Medcalf 05:38
Well, hey, we're here to do some difficult. So let's let's stick with it because I get I get it. There's lots of delays and yeah, but that's perhaps the thing to be thinking through, right? How we could accelerate. So the first thing is there is a cutting that we have done in this move, right? So the the cut was we're going to actually stop all activities which are not dedicated to the development and scaling of the super product. In other words, the bet here is we're going all in, right? To scale our blockbuster product and all the kind of sensible scale cash cow products, we're actually going to like not do in this scenario, so that you can have entire strategic focus on getting this out the door, right?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 06:20
Yeah, I'm. I'm getting. Yes. So this is a fun question. So if I if we were to stick with the goal, okay, you need to hit 1 million people within a year. So how are you going to do it? Well, the customers have two slow product development cycles. We doesn't necessarily have that. So to be able to succeed, then I don't think in in in the long run it's necessarily bigger impact, but short term you have more control. It would be to develop the end product. So we are an ingredient developer today. But if my sharp goal was like your your life is on the stake, your company doesn't survive otherwise. You need to hit 1 million people within a year. I would start to produce right now the end product and the ingredient we're going to put in the end product, and based on my current know-how, this is interesting because customers in our case is normally targeting supplements or skincare creams and and kind of serums and so on. That that's the most common thing. So supplemented boosts your energy and so on. But if I were to use my network and I want to hit 1 million people, I would be very confident in hitting 1 million Swedish consumers. I would probably go to develop a very healthy drink and go through the retail network of Sweden. If my if the company Survivor was on it and it was very fixed that we need to hit 1 million people. I would do that with all the traditional super large, and we could use. I mean, Super Normal Greens is our international name now. We use the name on the brand as well, but we also have a Swedish name that we don't use anymore. That was tied to the letters, which is Usegorda. So what I would do then is to make a massive marketing splash. That because people were so sad when we removed the lettuce from the shelf. That hey, we're back now. You have a healthy drink choice instead, and we would put down some of the super healthy ingredients. If we take lemon balm, that's something you can use to reduce stress in your system, I will probably do some kind of anti-stress drink and a drink just to be able to hit mass consume it because not everybody takes a supplement, but you can get everybody to get a drink if you hit the right price.

Richard Medcalf 08:34
Yeah, yeah. So something I think that's

Andreas Wilhelmsson 08:36
what I would do, and and that's a combination of the there is a factory within one hour from our facility that can do the drinks, and I have the network of launching large scale in all Swedish retail chains. That's a few phone calls away if we have a good product. So, so yeah.

Richard Medcalf 08:56
What you're saying is, you could actually get you could actually get a product out and and actually a track record established with your own with your own leverage.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 09:04
Yeah, yeah. I do. That doesn't necessarily is the quickest way to 1 billion people in 2030 but to get to 1 million very quickly, I would use that because that would be maximising the brand, maximising the the mainly the Swedish network to make yeah super launch out of it,

Richard Medcalf 09:22
yeah. That's I love the fact that you already have you've already got assets and relationships that you you immediately can see how you would do that.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 09:30
I think what I so also I I think I know because me and my co-founder talked about this. So my co-founder is Samoan. He's the plant guy. His grandmother was a medicine woman, so using plants to heal people. So we'll probably also do some branding that ties a little bit to that as well. That origin story, yeah,

Richard Medcalf 09:50
perfect. Okay, so you have this one strand which you've kind of admitted is is like a short. It might be a bit of a short term thing, as in you could possibly get to a million. It would. Necessarily help you scale beyond that. What about what about the partnerships with the existing the other clients, right? Because what I heard right now is you kind of said basically they have a fixed product development cycle and they are kind of structurally incapable of doing what they need to do. Let me just challenge that, right? Because if you could do it, is there not another player that could do that? And what would have to change in how you worked with that player for them to perhaps launch at even bigger scale in the same time

Andreas Wilhelmsson 10:30
frame? You need to then be-I mean, we're talking multi-billion euro companies and multi-billion-dollar companies as well. We are to be able to speed something up like that. We would need to be higher up in the hierarchy. So then, what I how would I? Okay, so if that was my you you need to do this, I would lock in on one or two of them that we have good collaboration with. So you have internal proof points that you can point to us being a good supplier. What I would need to do is to go as high up as I can, find owners preferably or board members, and then from there push down, but push down with urgency tied to it. Because if you push down, and so you can get things moving and people lined up for a meeting doesn't necessarily go quicker. You need to have a very senior person telling this needs to be out by them. So yeah, I would need to scout like okay, good customers, but go all the way up to yeah to owners or take a smaller company, maybe a 100 million euro company, because then it's easier. Then we already have some founders that we can go for. Yeah, yeah. One. Yeah. Okay. It's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I'm thinking about one client now that could maybe launch a new supplement within that time frame if they got. Yeah. Let's say you you develop the product together, so you help them with everything, but they launch it. So you have a brand and a customer base that you launch in.

Richard Medcalf 12:05
Yeah, I mean you you talked about kind of urgency, like actually putting a timeline. I think that's a really key. And the other one probably is a bit of scarcity, as in you want to say, look, we are you know we have developed this breakthrough product. We are looking for a flagship partner to launch and get it in the hand of a million people in the next 12 months. We're going to work, develop it, you know, co-develop it together, you know, and you know, be out there, you know, way beyond the rest of the market is going to have, you know, you know. Although we're happy to sell it to you know sell it to other channels, we want to have one partner who is blazing a trail and showing what's possible? We just want one partner, one partner who's capable to you know who's able to commit to at least a million a million in the year. Yeah, and and then I think you're right. Like you can go to the large companies where you have it, and then the challenge is stepping up the people that you're speaking to. Or the one is to go to somebody who is highly agile and slightly smaller, and actually has that pioneering instinct, but also a distribution channel to actually say, you know what, we're gonna, you know, we we can turn on a dime, and we want to work with a small agile company and make this happen.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 13:13
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, yeah. My head is spinning now. I started thinking we should actually do this. Like, it's not. It's a pretty good idea to do the full product concept and get your launch partner for it. So you have a ingredient in the bottom that we will be making that is unique and everything, but you're kind of helping the your customer what to use it for. So you develop the full concept and see who's going to earn the right to to take on this concept, there are two. There there should be one condition. Then it needs to be launched within a year out on the market. And the one who can have the biggest impact, hit the most people, will be chosen to be the supplier. And or you put a time frame to it, so you have the other way around. It needs to be 1 million at least, and the one who is the quickest will be the launch partner. But it's an interesting to do. You could also take on, you could possibly also take on someone who has products that not necessarily do what we want to do now. Let's say we're going to do something anti-stressing. You can take on someone who maybe don't have supplements for stress, but have stress-related products and add to that because then you have a product development cycle, but we would be the one doing everything in that case.

Richard Medcalf 14:28
Yeah. So there's really kind of three scenarios. The first scenario that you originally kind of jumped to was okay, we'll do it all. We'll have the brand. We'll use our existing Swedish brand. We'll roll it out, you know, to my retailers that I know in Sweden. Then there's other one, which is okay. Let's look for these kind of like you know you know like traditional partners, but actually structure the frame of what we want to do in the vision that we have in a way that kind of puts you a little bit more in the driving seat. And then this third one that you're kind of coming to is Super Green. You know, we'll we'll bring. We'll bring the product development process partner. We'll bring the brand, and together we will go and get this out there before the rest of the market. These are kind of interesting options.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 15:11
Yeah,

Richard Medcalf 15:11
the first place you went right was, and you were very quick at it, and actually, you know, incredibly clear. Was like, okay, I can see it exactly. It's going to be our Swedish brand in the Swedish retailers, and you know we could definitely make that happen. It wouldn't really scale beyond that, but we could at least get to a million that way. The second two options, right, came up later in the conversation. So I'm wondering just like what what that kind of tells you about your own instincts as a leader, or your own response patterns that that was where you went first.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 15:41
I think, and that that's a good question actually, and that ties a little bit to how I think and what I've learned. So sometimes I don't spend enough time thinking about is it the right goal. So when we did define the goal here, I was only looking for the quickest way to reach the goal, not questioning the goal because the second solutions are better because they are beyond the goal. They they they don't only read they they jeopardise the goal because it can challenge the fact to hit 1 million people within a year. But the the second and third way definitely within two three years are way better in terms of reach and everything, and that has struck me several times as a leader. I very often can lock into okay too early or too little talk about what we want to achieve, and once it's settled what we want to achieve, I super generate strategies to hit that as efficiently as possible. So that's a thing that I've been working on, still work on is to take a step forward and do exactly what I do, but thinking about what's the best goal to achieve this larger goal. For example, do that great when primed that way, but it's in many scenarios I do not prime my brain like that. So don't question what's the goal, basically.

Richard Medcalf 17:00
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a great insight. I see it often in my own clients. High achieving leaders, fast thinking leaders, right, can immediately see can see a line to get to a particular milestone that they've just agreed on or a particular solution. But as you said, that might be a local maximum, right? That might be

Andreas Wilhelmsson 17:19
yeah,

Richard Medcalf 17:19
and that might not be the thing that's going to get you 10 times more than that in a couple of your time. You're a visionary leader. You see the future first. How would you deploy that, or would you need to enhance that in some way to succeed at this new game that we're playing? Right to get to really execute in the next 12 months on this.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 17:44
So first of all, you you need to align all stakeholders, of course, and I would more refocus. So so my management team are really good at managing the people in the company. So once it's launched and the strategy is all set out, I would focus on reaching out to the main stakeholders that we need to get get my attention. So something like that, I would do. I would try to do that total time if I'm on the clock two weeks. I think to get all of that rolling. Yeah.

Richard Medcalf 18:13
So what's the most likely way that you might sabotage the success of this 12 month bet?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 18:18
Same thing that will make it succeed can also kill it, which is the urgency. I will have an enormous urgency to get this going, and that sometimes means that you short term are too urgent to let things sink in before you keep on taking the next steps. You kind of get this serial because when when doing the proper pre work with communication, getting everybody on board, taking the time to do that. So, so let's say the tendency for me would be to like, okay, get this thing rolling, rolling, rolling within a few weeks. While as it's maybe better to let it take two months and then get going at a much higher speed through the whole organisation, so that that would be the tendency, which is both good because it gives us direct feedback very early when getting engaged with customers and stakeholders and so on. But it can also leave the organisation behind and that you miss risk factors and all of that. So it's a balance. But from a habit point of view, the solution to that is to take a step back and make sure that everybody got it and everybody is with you while doing the things in peril.

Richard Medcalf 19:28
What I'm hearing is, yeah, you need perhaps a bit more time to build up a head of steam and a real momentum in the organisation before you kind of like open the gates and everybody charges out together.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 19:40
Yeah, but you can still. So, so, so talking about stakeholders. So, so the the optimal way to do that then is actually start to talk to the stakeholders, meanwhile taking the organisation through it. So then you're optimising both.

Richard Medcalf 19:56
What would you need to do to actually spend a if. We're spending a little bit longer to create that momentum. How would you use that time?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 20:06
So I would want to talk to people at the customers or or similar people in other organisations that are doing that product development. I would want to talk to product formulators then and really understand what's everything that needs to be done and kind of back and forward. Well, if this was possible, could this be an angle and all of that? But the second goal would be to understand, really understand. Okay, if I have an idea for an end product, who actually uses this? What's a typical end consumer? So I would do those two things as getting insight. I will take lunches, go and do visits, and do this before I start to engage people. So, so this will yeah, some

Richard Medcalf 20:51
really external research, right? Like the marketing customers and the and the partners.

Andreas Wilhelmsson 20:55
Yeah, I would probably like call someone who is as close to. I would think about one right away. Like if I were to go for the drink idea that we talked about first, I would call someone who have that kind of business or have exited that kind of business, and okay, how would you do this? Is this a good idea? So I would get some external input first before bouncing it off internally.

Richard Medcalf 21:20
What would be the hardest conversation that you would need to have to actually make this thing a reality?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 21:26
Telling the investors that you would jeopardise short-term cash flow, of course, because it's their their money that would be on the line.

Richard Medcalf 21:34
I think the interesting question is the one of what I see quite often as I work with founders, trying to help them really preserve the integrity of the the full scope of the vision that they set out to achieve. Often, one of the risks is that the organisation crystallises around a slightly smaller, safer, more investable vision. You know, because it's like, oh, look, we found the first thing that's giving us positive cash flow. Let's do more of that. One way of looking at that is that that's pragmatic. Second, the other way of looking at it is that might also be the thing which stops you doing the thing that you really wanted to do and and can do. It does require you to then recast the vision to the board. You know, potentially saying, look, if we get a million shipped this year with the right partners on a product which is genuinely transformative, that is our blockbuster product that is going to allow us to go 10x 100x whatever, but beyond what we think we can do in the red ocean, right? So to speak. We started this conversation with you, kind of with kind of saying, you know, I don't think it's possible. You know, like our customers have got these long development cycles, and therefore the question is more, um, yeah, how do we how do we speak at the higher levels in our companies? Who do you feel you have permission to go and talk to right now in those largest customers or in those largest partners? Right, because you kind of said, yeah, I think I need to try to try to find the owner. We'll see how high I can get, right? So perhaps my challenge would be, well, what if you saw yourself as the person who had the like the best business opportunity for business owners of these brands that you know you you know better than me, and actually they need you more than you need them in a sense, right? Perhaps there's a kind of an inner shift there, which if you actually saw yourself not as the kind of I don't know the the scrappy upstart, fast growing Swedish business, but as that kind of global partner that these people absolutely need for their business, that might be a different posture for you to hold. Might be worth playing with. Given what you've found in this discussion today, what does that tell you about the opportunity that's already sitting in supernormal today? What does that? How does this change about how you see your business or how you see yourself?

Andreas Wilhelmsson 23:39
Well, all the theoretical things we discussed is very possible to do, like where we are right now, and it's not as big of a pivot as it maybe sounds to do something like that. So, from an opportunity point of view, what will be going in my mind afterwards is a lot about what's the end product. So, not not ingredients, but the end product that people want on the market that's not on the market today, where you need a super normal ingredient to be able to do it. So, so that's probably what will float around in my mind a bit, and maybe poke a few conversations when when meeting relevant people and see what it takes me.

Richard Medcalf 24:20
So that was the conversation. What I loved most was halfway through when Andrea stopped and said, "My head is spinning. I'm starting to think we should actually do this. That's the sound of a vision getting bigger in real time. But the moment that struck me most came just after, when he admitted that sometimes he doesn't spend enough time asking whether it's even the right goal. Here's what he saw and what I would draw out from it. And this is fast. Give him a target, and he'll have a brilliant, concrete plan before you finish the sentence. Within seconds, he'd built the entire plan to get a million products delivered. In 12 months, and it would have worked, but it was a local maximum. The two bigger ideas, the ones that could actually take him where he wants to go, only surfaced once we slowed him down. His speed is genuine leverage, but leverage aimed at the first goal he's handed rather than the right one builds something smaller than he's capable of. His greatest strength is exactly what can narrow his field of view. And if you're a fast-thinking leader, this is the trap waiting for you too. You'll build below your ceiling not because you aimed low, but because you hit the nearest target so efficiently that you never looked up to find the right one, or the higher one, that's the leverage work that I do with founders privately, making sure the horsepower is pointed at the right goal before it's poured into the wrong one. In that work, we use your real situation and not a scenario. So here's my challenge: next time a big decision lands, before you let your brain do the thing it's brilliant at and generate the plan, spend the first five or 10 minutes on a different question entirely. Not how do I hit this goal, but is this actually the right goal? If you like this episode, you're perhaps like the one with Hugo Fry. Hugo is a leader with 30 years in his industry, and I offer him the defining move where he has to walk on stage and stake his whole company publicly on a single bet that he can't take back. And we ask, what happens when keeping your options open is the very thing keeping you small? Now, if all of this landed, it may be because you can fill the gap between the dent you're making and the one you're capable of. That gap is almost always a leverage problem and not an effort problem. That's the work I do privately with a small number of leaders each year, finding the one critical leverage point that takes the company to its next level in a way that expands your energy instead of draining it. If you want to find yours, head to xquadrant.com forward slash speak and tell me where you're stuck. I'm Richard Medcalf. This was the defining move.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai