Tori's blog: Dream, Believe, Achieve

Thank you to the 50,000 people who signed up for the Zoe Foods Consumer Advisory
Panel to try the new Zoe’s Crunchy Granola last month. We really appreciate your interest in Zoe Foods and are working hard in getting our new crunchy granola out to you. As we mentioned in our original email, we do have a limited supply, but we’re working on getting back to all of you. We thought that perhaps we’d have a response of 5,000 people at the most, and lo and behold, we got a response that is ten times greater!

The more you request our products at your local retail store (okay, demand them if you must!), the more granola we’ll be able to send out. As a small, but growing company, we really appreciate your support and helping us to grow.

Zoe’s Bars are hit by a car and the company gains a new customer! Several weeks ago we received a voicemail from a gentleman who explained that he hit a box of Zoe’s Bars that were lying in the middle of the road. (For the full story, see the original blog entry: http://www.zoefoods.com/blog/zoe-bars-hit-by-a-car-in-bellingham-ma/ ). He called again recently to thank us for sending him fresh samples of Zoe’s Bars and to tell us that he likes them so much that he has started buying them from Shaw’s (Wild Harvest section).

Who would have thought that this story would have such a happy ending for all? Perhaps we should just start leaving cases of product in the middle of the road and see if we can gain some other new customers!

As I was putting my youngest daughter to bed last night she said to me, “Mommy, you’re not going to go away again?” I asked her what she meant and she explained “Like when you and Daddy went to the wedding and Grammy and Grandpa had to stay with us.”

I explained that although we don’t have anymore weddings coming up, I do have to travel for my work and would be away this coming week for one night. How do you get your children to understand that even when you’re away, your heart will always be with them?

Sitting here watching the Olympics with my husband and the commentators were discussing the Americans chances for winning the women’s gymnastics event. They were debating which of the two Americans had the best shot of winning. Then one of them said that the Chinese were there to ruin the Americans’ chances. Since when do competitors ruin your chances of winning? Without a competitor, there is no race or competition. No wonder Americans aren’t particularly liked outside of our own country. I understand that the American commentators may be rooting for the Americans, but really, let’s try to be a little more sensitive about how we say things.

Is it just me? How do people have time to stay involved in virtual communities? Facebook is a good example. No matter how much I read about Facebook or explore the site, I just don’t really get how I’m supposed to really utilize it. Clearly I’m missing something here since I have trouble keeping in touch with my full-bodied friends. When someone figures out how to create virtual time, then I can have a virtual life.

Last Spring I heard Brian Scudamore, the founder and CEO of 1-800-Got-Junk, speak at an Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) conference. To say that he was inspiring would be an under statement. I can see why Brian was able to turn everyone else’s junk into a $400 million + business and have fun while doing it. I took home some interesting “best practices” that I swore I would implement right away. Hmm, didn’t happen.

As fate would have it, looks like I needed a reminder. Several months ago the former COO of 1-800-Got-Junk spoke at a local EO event and was just as inspirational as Brian was. It was high time start implementing these best practices at Zoe Foods. Well, I didn’t start right away, but swore I’d get started as soon as our granolas had been reformulated and that I had some new hires up and running.
I now have a terrific team and we have just finished reformulating Zoe’s Granola to taste better than ever, and with even better nutrition. We’ve also revamped our website, and I have faithfully been writing my blog for a couple of months. I think that day has arrived and it’s high time to start to implement what I learned from 1-800-Got-Junk. Besides, if Scudamore could create a $400 million business from other people’s junk, I should be able to create a successful company by creating foods that taste great and are good for you. Sounds easy!
The two best practices that I learned from Scudamore that Zoe Foods will be implementing are: Daily Huddles, and “The Painted Picture”. Daily huddles start this week at Zoe Foods. Simply put, they are an all company meeting for seven minutes in which “wins” and “stucks” are brought up. The goal is to facilitate communication and hold each other accountable. The discussion and decision making takes place after the huddle. I admit that I’m a little dubious about these daily huddles, but it seems to be a common practice among successful, fellow EO members in Boston, so worth a try! Scudamore’s “Painted Picture” took me a little over a day to create. It is a two-page document describing Zoe Foods looking three years forward.
As I started to write the Painted Picture I used the future tense. Suddenly I remembered the book, The Secret. I threw out what I wrote, started over and wrote in the present tense. So this is what a vision is all about! I needed to be experiencing what it was like to have already grown Zoe Foods now, not talk about what I’d like it to be three years hence.
Athletes always talk about envisioning their performance before they actually compete. I realize that writing a vision for a company is no different, just more complex because so many more people are necessary to make it happen.
On that note, I think it’s time to go watch some more of the Olympics to see what Best Practices I can glean from these most incredible athletes.

My husband and I recently went out to dinner with good friends of ours who were visiting from Nebraska. At dinner I discovered that both Betz and I write blogs. She about life in Nebraska and missing Boston, and me about work, family, and a healthy lifestyle.

The funny thing is that Betz and I both learned that neither of our husbands have ever read our blogs. Hmm, what does that say about our husbands? Or really, what does that say about our marriages? The ironic part about this is that the most public of forums, a blog, is where I could keep secrets from my husband. Betz, are you out there? My dear husband, are you?

About 20 years ago, one of my good friends, who is a doctor, told me that when you drink diet soda with aspartame (often called NutraSweet), it goes into your body and doesn’t come out. Since I couldn’t just Google “aspartame” on the Internet back then, I decided to just stop drinking the 3-5 cans of diet soda I consumed weekly. If I really wanted a soda, I drank the real thing with all the sugar.

Now the funny thing was that I started drinking diet soda because I was concerned about keeping my weight down and wanted to satisfy my craving for something sweet. Guess what happened, I lost about 5 pounds from never drinking diet soda again, and I never put those 5 pounds back on!

After so many years, an article in O Magazine spurred me to finally find out the real deal about aspartame. There are lots of websites that will tell you that your body converts aspartame into aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol, and that your body processes these the same way that it does as if they came from whole foods. Whether or not that ‘s true or not, I don’t know. To get an independent opinion, I took a look at the Mayo Clinic’s site. According to the Mayo Clinic, aspartame is only dangerous for people with the rare hereditary disease phenylketonuria.

However, the Mayo Clinic does state that drinking soda is consuming empty calories. You may enjoy the taste, but you’re not putting anything in your body that will help fuel it. So drink soda as an occasional treat. From my personal experience, if you don’t have diabetes, eliminate the diet soda and for the occasional treat, have a real soda with all of the sugar and corn syrup (none of which is good for you), and I’ll bet you find that you’ll lose a couple of pounds permanently with this small change to your diet.

I’ve taken a week long hiatus from writing my blog; I didn’t intend to. Last weekend my family gathered from across the country to spend four days together. It was fun and certainly wonderful to see my parents, sisters, their families, and my cousins. However, the word “relaxing” doesn’t come to mind.

Whenever we have this time together in Maine, it involves a 5+ hour drive from where we live outside of Boston. 5 hours is a long time to sit in the car, and certainly long for my 4 and 5 year old girls. We let them watch one movie, so that leaves about 225 minutes of being strapped into a car seat. The rest of the time we made up stories, read books, played I Spy, and for the first time, played 20 Questions.

I couldn’t believe how quickly our girls caught on. When it was my youngest daughter’s turn to think of something we had to guess, she’d very quickly announce “Okay, I’m all done thinking!”. She never once tried to stump us with a Disney princess (phew - they really do think about other things)! When it was my 5-year old’s turn, she blew us away with what she came up with. Through our questioning, we learned that it was a thing, it was alive, and it was real (not make-believe). Hmmm…

Can you guess it? We finally did. It was the planet Earth.

I’ve learned that my children and employees (not to infer that they’re childish in any way) do have similar qualities. When given a goal, they can surprise you with their initiative and the solutions they can create if you would only get out of their way. Hmmm, maybe I should take more time off. Thank you to the Zoe Foods team!

Before I started to get ready to go to work the other day, my youngest daughter, age 4, came into my room and wanted to play a quick game of Connect 4. Before we started playing, she looked me directly in the eye and with a very serious expression (which is unusual for this giggle monster), said “Mommy, if I win, you have to have another baby. And, I want a baby brother!”

How did my four-year old learn how to make a bet on the outcome of a game? It certainly isn’t the standard practice in our household.

I hesitated for a moment in my reply, “How about if Ozzie [our 85lb. dog] is your baby brother?” Weak answer, I know. How do you tell your child that your work is essentially one of your babies? I guess when she’s old enough to read, she’ll find this blog archived somewhere and by then, hopefully, she’ll understand.