CFOs must help secure organizational success while keeping the finances golden. Gary Cooperman, COO and CFO at Pressed Juicery, calls this profitable growth. Joining Jack McCullough, he shares his impeccable strategies for turning this goal into reality, which involves proper team collaboration, strategic partnerships, and a strong relationship with the CEO built on trust. Gary also shares his experiences from the tech industry to the world of consumer-packaged goods (CPG), as well as his valuable insights on using AI tools to elevate his responsibilities as a CFO.
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Welcome back, rockstars. We have a great episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. I have a fantastic guest, and I was excited to have him on our show. Let’s get right into it. Gary Cooperman is the COO and CFO of Pressed Juicery. Pressed Juicery offers cold-pressed juices, plant-based foods, and wellness products. They focus on providing nutrition and convenient options to support a healthy lifestyle. One of the things I’m excited about is that I’m a customer and a lover of their products. Gary, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
It’s a pleasure to be with you, Jack. Thanks for that intro. I’m excited that you are a consumer of our products. The brand is doing well, and I am excited to share with the readers what we’re doing over here.
I haven’t found any stores dedicated to it, but they do carry it in local grocery shops in Massachusetts, and my understanding is it’s across most of the nation. I do tend to oversimplify things a little bit, Gary. Can you maybe fill in the blanks a little on the company description?
Pressed Juicery was founded in 2010 and started with humble beginnings with a truck that delivered juice in the Brentwood area. From there, it expanded into about 100 company-owned stores. That’s our pedigree. The company’s background is very solution-oriented, with cleanse systems, detox systems, bloating systems, and things like that.
What we’ve done over the last several years is expand our offerings to other better-for-you, healthy, consumable foods like our dairy-free plant-based yogurt, which is growing very fast. Secondly, we’re trying to have our products available all across the nation through traditional outlets outside of our stores. You mentioned the Boston area. We’re at the front end of expanding with places like Costco, food service, and traditional retailers. That’s going to be a big focus for us over the next few years here.
I may have discovered your company at an airport. Is that possible?
It is possible. Over the years before we had traditional distribution, there was so much demand in higher-end locations like airports, higher-end hotels, resorts, and coffee shops that people would come and order our product. We would ship it. It’s a cold chain distribution, so we would ship it with ice packs and round boxes. That’s still a significant part of our business, so that we could be everywhere in the country without traditional distribution. It’s fun to see that.
I travel a fair amount, and I’m diabetic, so I have to be careful, but sometimes, just going to McDonald’s for a burger and fries is tempting. It’s good to have these healthy, sugar-free options available at the airport. I want to talk a little about your background before we get fully into Pressed. Where did you grow up, Gary?
I grew up in Southern California in a town called Woodland Hills, which is in the San Fernando Valley. I lived in the same house my entire life until I went to college, which was at UC Santa Barbara.
Did you come from a big family, with brothers and sisters?
I have three older brothers and a pretty close family. I grew up middle-class and hardworking. My folks owned a religious gift store that I started working at when I was about seven years old. I had that entrepreneurial spirit early on in my career. I’m the youngest of four brothers, and we have diverse backgrounds. My oldest brother was a software engineer who worked for the government on defense systems. He was one end of the spectrum. My second-oldest brother was an elementary school teacher in San Diego for 30 years. He retired. My last brother took over the family business and works in that. It’s been fun having that diversity growing up.
It is cool to grow up with three brothers, but there must be some challenges from Mom and Dad. I grew up with just sisters, so I was spoiled. I was the only boy in the family. When you went to school, you got a BA in Economics and Sociology.
I was very much a math major in high school, and numbers came quickly to me. One of the things I would do at the store was calculate the sales taxes before the fancy computers or cash register systems, being able to calculate it faster than my dad could look it up. Those are some of the math games I would play. When I got to college, we didn’t have a business. It was liberal arts at UC Santa Barbara, but there was a Business Economics area and an Accounting focus.
I thought the first accounting class I took was easy. This is going to be math. I ended up failing my midterm to my chagrin. I hunkered down and said, “It’s not quite math, but it’s another language.” I dug in and enjoyed it. Having said that, I also had an interest in other areas, and I thought, “What if this business stuff doesn’t work out for me? Maybe I’ll be a college professor.” I started studying sociology. I had a dual major in Sociology and Business Economics.
You’re the first person I’ve interviewed who majored in Sociology. You mentioned being good at math. We’re about the same age and have some experience. Do you remember the original Texas Instruments calculators? I could compute numbers in my head quickly. My friends used to race and do it on the computer against me. I couldn’t beat modern technology, but back then, you could watch it flashing. I was most of the time quicker than the Texas Instruments calculator. I was a CFO for some time, so it probably paid off a little bit. You got your MBA at USC Marshall. What was the thought process behind that decision-making?
There was a gap. While I was in college, I had mentioned this affinity for accounting. I was a TA for a couple of years and took off a quarter. We’re on the quarter system there. I had an internship with EY in LA, which was a great experience. I was putting on a suit every day when I was nineteen years old and seeing what the world was like, but I realized that the CPA route wasn’t the end-all for me. I knew I wasn’t going to be an auditor, but I wanted to get that CPA certificate.
I finished up with school, moved to San Francisco, and worked in EY’s Entrepreneur Services Group. I was with Arthur Young at the time. While I was there, we went through the merger. We were the first of the Big Eight to merge and become the Big Four at the time. That was pretty exciting. I was in San Francisco. Ultimately, the company transferred me to New York. I spent some time there. After I received my CPA certificate, I took a break and took a trip around the world for a year. That was formative in terms of my career and what I’ve learned. Being able to associate with different cultures of different folks, I draw on those experiences in my career.
When I came back to the States, I was a consultant. I was an interim CFO and controller. I realized that I wanted to be a CFO, and I needed more formal training. As I went on my journey towards being a CFO and worked for close to 8 or 9 years, that’s when I went back to school and got my MBA. I was firmly established. I was a controller at the time, moving into the VP of Finance, and went to school at USC. I did this at night while I was working in a fast-paced growth environment. I can’t recommend it enough for folks out there.
I got an MBA around the same time as you. It’s such a great move, even if you’re not exactly sure what you’re going to do with it, because it just exposes you to so many issues in a relatively short period of time that you might not see in a day-to-day job.
I wasn’t switching careers, so I was on my path towards being a CFO, but it was a very case-based environment at USC. The biggest thing I learned from that is being able to take the perspective of, “Today, I’m going to be the HR manager as I look at this case study,” or “I’m going to be the engineering manager.” It is thinking about different people’s perspectives, which has been invaluable in my career, in my CFO role, and in guiding the executive teams that I’ve worked with. It is being able to stand in their shoes and understand where they’re coming from. Not exactly, but getting that experience has certainly been helpful.
You’re probably one of the elite thinkers for finance in the CPG industry, in particular, the beverage space. You’ve worked for some great companies, but was that a conscious choice? Was that something you were passionate about, or was it more like you fell into it, you were good, so you stayed in it?
My career started in technology. I moved up to the Bay Area in the late ’80s or early ’90s to be around technology. I worked with some great software and telecommunications companies. What I learned and realized about myself is that I wanted to be closer to the consumer. I was always thinking about all the software or telecommunication services that we were selling. How does that translate to the consumer? What is the consumer economics? Even if I were selling to another business, everything trickles down to the consumer at some point, and the consumer is what drives the economy.
I wanted to get a better understanding of what makes consumers buy things. How do we add value at the consumer layer? I made a conscious effort to move my career using my technology background and my big data background into consumer-based companies. My first move into that was working at an affiliate network that dealt with a lot of consumer products, and then working with the direct-to-consumer wine business.
From there, I ended up with an opportunity at Health-Ade Kombucha, which was fascinating. I was at an investor conference. I met the founders. They were telling me all their problems, and they said, “We’re looking for a CFO.” I said, “I’m not looking to move, but tell me more about your problems.” As I dug into it, I thought, “Here’s an industry that can use more technology,” which I had a strong background in, and “I like to fix and improve things. I like the founders.” I moved into that role at Health-Ade, and this was in 2018. When I did that, I realized I had a very significant passion, not just for CPG, but for better-for-you.
I’m very fortunate. A lot of CFOs out there are fortunate as well, where you can take your skills and translate them into many different industries. From my perspective, especially at this stage of my career, being able to do good and help is important for my career trajectory, not just helping people and team members, but to the extent that I can help society feel better, live better, and consume better. Being in that Health-Ade environment is certainly a good step towards that. What we’re doing over at Pressed Juicery is not only, from my perspective, an advancement in that trajectory, but it’s all coming together for me. I see those benefits. We’re excited about what we’re bringing to the consumers out there.
It must be a great source of pride that you’re working for a growing, healthy company, building value, and in your way, making the world a better place to live. That has to be so rewarding that you can do great things and make a healthy living doing so.
Kombucha is the product. It is fermented tea. It was Health-Ade Kombucha. When I joined Health-Ade, we were the fourth player in the category and had a mission to bring that better-for-you product to the masses. This was at a time when, pre-pandemic, Kombucha was just coming up. Better-for-you beverages were becoming more popular. It was exciting to see consumer adoption and people moving away from sodas and what they were putting in their bodies. It made me think about how you get that message to consumers out there, especially when it’s new.
As an example of that, I think about our product set at Pressed Juicery. There’s been a big move over the last few years for no sugar. You see this in the Celsiuses of the world, the alt sodas, the Olipops, and the Poppis of the world. Our belief is that there’s a place in everyone’s diet for real food. There are calories in our products, but our green juice, which I have every single day, is 50 calories. It’s good food. It makes you feel good. Our mission and my personal mission is to bring that to as many Americans as possible so they’re consuming this in their bellies.
You were in the technology industry, and then you switched to the CPG space. Did you have any key mentors along the way that helped you learn the new industry and become a more successful CFO within the space? They’re not as different as possible, but they’re quite different.
Earlier in my career, before I made the transition into CPG, I had some strong CFO mentors for me. The biggest lesson I’ve learned there is to simplify. I had a manager when I was at a company called Helio, a gentleman by the name of Todd Tappan, who was very successful. He worked in a lot of public companies and challenged me when I would present board of directors decks. “Don’t make it five slides. How do you get what you’re trying to get across in one slide?” The thinking of simplifying and communicating is paramount in the role.
Those who can simplify and get the message out so it resonates in the fewest words possible help move the business along much further. Those are my big formative lessons from those mentors, per se. As I’ve moved my career into the CFO role over the years, working with CEOs and executive teams, I’ve learned a lot. Not just having that direct manager relationship, but the peers that I’ve worked with, the strong CMOs, and the strong head of manufacturing have solidified my thinking in how I approach CPG from all different angles.
Whenever I’ve spoken to a CFO, they all say they had fantastic mentors along the way. Some of the people may not even be aware that they serve that role in their career growth, but nevertheless. I want to talk to you a little about CPG. How did the opportunity come about, and what was it that attracted you to it and ultimately made that decision to join?
My first foray into CPG was with Health-Ade Kombucha, and Health-Ade has such a strong brand. When I look at opportunities, I think about where I would like to work and where I’d like to spend my time. First and foremost, I think about 1) Where can I add value? 2) Is it a strong brand and a strong space in the marketplace? 3) Am I going to gel with the team that I’m working with? That’s always a challenge when you’re in the CFO role. Am I going to get along with the CEO? What’s my relationship with the CEO and the board? All of those dynamics are certainly important.
At Health-Ade specifically, I saw an opportunity to bring my technical know-how, my understanding of big data, understanding of looking at this concept of incrementality, which is very important in the D2C world. Anybody who has a D2C business will understand it’s a little bit higher conversion rate and a little bit more customer adoption. It’s a little bit more difficult to measure in the CPG space because you don’t have that direct data. You’re looking at SPINS data or other sell-through data at a high level, but understand what each of your customers is doing from a customer acquisition standpoint, LTV standpoint, and things like that.
I wanted to bring what I knew I could do to this industry. What was exciting for me was being with a team that was open to that, not just the founders and the board, but my peers. While I was at Health-Ade, we received an investment from Coca-Cola. I was spending time with them and within their offices in Atlanta, and seeing what we were doing in a lot of ways was at the front end of even what they were doing. It was exciting to be out in front, certainly from a technology standpoint. When I think of technology, it’s around efficiency and scalability. How do we utilize technology towards those goals?
Coca-Cola has made a little bit of an imprint. You mentioned the reference with the CEO in Justin Nedelman. How do you build that trusting relationship? For years, CFOs have said, “My most important partnership is with the CEO.” I’m not questioning the sincerity, but it’s been the other way around. CEOs have been saying, “It’s the CFO who is my most important strategic partner.” How do you proactively build that trusting relationship?
That’s my philosophy for sure. I see that. It’s an interesting relationship because generally, I’ve been working in companies that are between $50 million and $300 million in sales, somewhere in that range. The reason why I’m so passionate about those size companies is that I view myself as the navigator for the company, interpreting the CEO’s and the board’s vision and implementing that across the organization. In those-sized businesses, it allows me to get my arms around the entire business, which is something I’m passionate about.
That part is helpful, but that only works if I have that strong relationship with the CEO. What I find, especially with founder-backed companies, is that the founders are generally smart folks. They’re founders for a reason. They’ve hit a certain level of success for a reason. For most of the opportunities that I’ve been at, I’ve been the first or the second CFO coming into that relationship with the CEO, and so they don’t necessarily know how to work with a strong CFO and understand that “This needs to be a partnership.” There’s a little bit of trust-building that’s required at the front end. I’ve been in situations where I view that every customer that we have has full P&Ls, like a one-customer analysis type of thing.
How do you get to that is tough sometimes with legacy accounting systems and how you’re running your FP&A. Sometimes, I’ll find CEOs will say, “I haven’t been able to do that before. It can’t be done.” Part of my journey is an education with the CEO, showing them not only what can be done, but how we can utilize this information to advance the business and their vision. There’s a lot of trust building that goes along with it, but ultimately, my measure of success there is having that partnership. The CEOs are not making any big decisions without pulling me in. I love the aspect of running fast.
I’m a growth-oriented CFO, and things are moving super quickly, not just at Pressed Juicery, but all the other opportunities I’ve worked at. I was having the CEO be able to text and call me, “I’m thinking about doing this. This is what we’re going to do,” and building that relationship over time. It’s a tough one because you don’t know day one if you’re going to have that strong relationship. You’re looking for those complementary skills that you have versus the other.
Another point there that is pretty interesting, as I reflect on Pressed Juicery, is that I’m a growth CFO. I have an accounting background. Certainly, I have the technical background there, but I’m not the accountant’s accountant. I may at times not be the most detail-oriented CFO. I recognize that myself. I make sure I have a strong controller with whom I’m working to balance those skills, but also looking for a CEO who balances that as well.
Justin and I both have complementary skills, where there are times he may be a little more paranoid in the marketplace and a little bit more pessimistic. I may be a little bit more optimistic or vice versa. It’s like any relationship. You want to build it over time. I am super happy with where it’s going. I see that’s going to be a key success not only for me in this role, but it’s going to help the company grow better by us being a formidable team.
You mentioned, and a lot of CFOs share this with me, that you rely upon a world-class controller to take care of the things that you’re not necessarily good at or maybe not passionate about at this point, too. It brings me to the larger question. How do you build a world-class team in your space? It’s such a competitive environment right now, and maybe it’s a little bit easier because you’ve got a hot brand behind you. It might make that a more attractive place to work. What are some of the secrets that you’ve learned, and how is it different from working in the tech industry?
It’s a combination of the environment that you get thrown into. When you come in as a CFO for an established business, there’s a team in place. There are times when you need to rotate the team out. There are times when the team is very strong, and there needs to be coaching and development. Every situation is slightly different from that perspective. The theme is the same from my perspective. My vision for the accounting department, specifically, is that we all need to be analysts. I come from an accounting background, and so I’m leveraging and utilizing my own experiences.
As I was growing up in the industry or business, in my accounting roles, the more I understood the business, the more value I could add. A lot of companies, especially fast-growing early-stage companies, view their accounting and finance departments as big accounting groups just to show me the numbers. My perspective is that it needs to be a lot more strategic because the accounting team specifically is seeing everything, all the numbers that are coming through. We don’t want them just reporting on them. We want to see the numbers and then make improvements in the business.
My lens is that in everything we do, how do we make things more efficient towards that eye, either towards growth or profitability? That lens might be a little bit different for a stable company that’s maybe growing 3 percent per year with stable profits. You might have a little bit different objectives, but my objective always is that, “What is the profit profile for either the entire business or something that we’re trying to do? What is the key metric, a guidepost that we should get to, and how do we get there?” What I try to do is educate and work with my teams to understand what best practices are and have a lens towards how we get there.
I’ve been proud of my team at Pressed Juicery. They’re living up to those challenges and working through them. I’ve been in circumstances where you may have a team member who’s not quite the right fit. It’s somewhat like puzzle pieces because in smaller organizations, it’s not like you have tons of people with tons of bench strength. You want to promote within. Sometimes, you’d have to go without, interject new blood into the team, and rebuild as you go forward.
I’m assuming you’re involved not only within the finance and accounting empire but across the entire enterprise. Does that bring any particular challenges? It’s an easy sell, other than the fact that we’ve got the tightest job market, probably within our own careers anyway.
In my role, I’m directly responsible for the accounting, which I have a controller on the FP&A function, and then manufacturing and supply chain. Those are the key areas, as well as real estate, controls, and risk. I share the risk side with our general counsel. Those are the core functions. Beyond that, as I think about my COO hat in the company, how do we make the entire company run like a Swiss clock? That would be ideal, which is something you strive for. You’re never going to get there completely.
To make that work, especially in a fast-paced environment like I’m dealing with at Pressed Juicery, we’re in a build mode as we’re expanding channels and products. We’re bringing in new team members and new executives. I spend a lot of time thinking about what we need to build up this area, whether it be sales, marketing, or innovation. What are the right folks, and how do the pieces come together? We are making sure they understand the vision that the company has towards success and making sure we all work together, have best practices around process and project management, and things like that.
I think that’s a fantastic approach. I wanted to ask a couple of questions specific to Pressed. What are not only some of the biggest challenges, but maybe some of the best opportunities facing you in the short to medium term?
I joined in 2024, and the company’s focus has primarily been on the company-owned stores. We have about 100 company-owned stores, and about 70 percent of our revenue comes from those stores. The rest is coming from our wholesale business, but this is our third-party distribution through food service, Costco, Target, Kroger, Albertsons, etc. One of the challenges there was balancing those businesses. One of the reasons that I came to Pressed, not just because of the management team and the brand itself, is that I saw a massive opportunity in the CPG space, bringing our products to those traditional retailers in a big way.
The company purchased the old Odwalla plant from Coca-Cola in Central California. We have this massive facility that can do well north of $500 million of revenue waiting to be filled up. The challenge there was to educate the organization and work with the organization on how we leverage this great asset, this iconic brand that we have, and this great product that’s efficacious for the consumer base, and bring that to the masses. One was getting everybody’s mind around that, working with the CEO. It’s a new management team coming in and putting on the gas there.
When I look at the opportunities going forward, I couldn’t be more thrilled about what we’re seeing in the marketplace. We have a great partnership with Costco. Our products are doing well there. We see that as an avenue to get our products across the country so that more folks can consume what we have. Traditionally, we’ve had a strong presence in California and New York with our company-owned stores. We have a presence in Texas and Boston, where you’re from as well. We have a store in Florida, but across the entire country, we’re not entirely known. That’s a massive opportunity for us.
Now that we’re starting to scale in those areas, one of the things I think about a lot is capital allocation. We’ve got a couple of different businesses going on with our business. We have our company-owned stores. I’ve got this traditional wholesale business that we’re scaling. We’ve got a D2C business within our company-owned stores. A lot of it is digitally driven. People buy systems online and pick them up in the store. We are truly omnichannel.
In fact, it is not only the most omnichannel business that I’ve been involved with, but one of the broadest omnichannel businesses I can think of, certainly in the CPG space. No other beverage brand I can think of has a company-owned store where we can develop a product, three months later, trial it in our stores, see success there, use that data, and bring it to third-party retailers. That’s an unlock. How do we make that happen in practice is a big challenge and an opportunity for us going forward.
One of the things in CFO’s minds and all executives is the balance between growth. You do have what sounds like an explosive and exciting growth opportunity. In your heart, you’re a financial person. You want to make sure that you do it in a financially prudent way. How can you, as a CFO, make sure that that happens the way that’s responsible and doesn’t put the brakes on something that could be special?
This is a challenge for CFOs all the time because, especially in private equity-backed businesses, which we are, there’s always a desire for profitability. There’s always a balance. This balance between growth and profitability depends on where the company is in its life cycle. I find it even more so where they are in the investment cycle. If an investor comes in earlier stage, there’s much more focus on growth. Typically, as investors, the longer private equity firms are in a deal, maybe itching to get out, but more towards profitability, there’s always this inflection point as you get close to profitability. You become profitable. You want to keep it up. As the business is growing, there are always opportunities for growth.
I mentioned earlier the capital allocation and the balancing of that. It’s challenging. I’ll be in environments, and the CEO or the head of people will come to me and say, “How much can we afford for the holiday party? Is it $50,000? Is it $100,000?” When you’re talking about a business that’s $100 million plus, it’s not going to kill the business one way or another. Those aren’t easy questions, but somebody has got to make the decision. It’s a big responsibility because I’m balancing $25,000 here and $100,000 there.
If we can balance that correctly, now we have this money that we can invest in growth avenues. The term I use is profitable growth. One of the big ways I balance this is by looking at markers for whatever we’re doing, whatever business cycle or function I’m working on, growing my company-owned stores, introducing new products, and building out my traditional wholesale channel. What are the best metrics that are going to lead me to what we’re trying to achieve? There may be certain channels that may require an investment upfront and might not see a payback for two years. For other channels, I might want to have a payback right away.
How we structure and partner with the CEO, the head of the departments, and the board towards that, so we’re all on the same page as we’re allocating capital, is the best way to do it. The more communication with all your constituents, whether it be your bank, if they’re helping you finance, the board with the capital, looking for profit, CEO’s objectives, the individual department heads in terms of their own personal objectives, and making sure everybody is on the same page, is probably the most important aspect of my job in order to make sure capital is allocated properly.
You’re a CFO and a COO. What that means in your company is you’re probably the only person who’s a financial expert, a strategic thinker, and an operationally focused person. How in that role do you make sure that strategy and finance aren’t living in different silos, that finance supports the strategy and strategy recognizes financial realities?
That’s another aspect that’s never in a perfect state, that you’re always striving to do better. When I joined the company, we had our company-owned stores and a growing wholesale channel in how we cross-populate across the different teams so that they understand each other’s activities to be one company and grow and leverage from there. In terms of taking the strategic plan and implementing it with your financial goals in mind, I make sure that it starts with a plan. I love variances.
If you hit your plan 100 percent all the time, that’s no fun. You want to understand the key metrics where you can drive the variance and understand where things are off with the goal of getting towards that optimal state. That’s what we’re trying to get to. When I say that optimal state, it’s not just from a financial number perspective, but what are we trying to do as a business? As an example, I have a goal to feed as many mouths as you can with our Pressed Juicery products. One of the things that we identified when I came to the company is that we had a catering business where people were coming into our stores who knew our products, like yourself, and said, “My company is having a wellness event. By chance, can you supply us with some wellness shots or something like that?” We would do it.
I looked at that and said, “Here’s an opportunity. We have 100 stores. Why don’t we do outbound instead of inbound and be proactive around it?” Something like that’s not going to have an ROI on day one, but building that foundation so that we can get to tens of millions of consumers, and not just selfishly from a revenue perspective. We want to help people. You should be drinking our juice, but versus those competitors’ juices, it’s better for you. It’s healthier for you. It’s better than a soda and makes lives better. It starts with making sure that we’re all aligned with the mission. A big part of my job as a COO is to make sure the tactics are aligned across the organization that support the financial plan on one end and support the vision and the mission on the other end.
You mentioned performance metrics that you measure. What are some of the most interesting KPIs you use to evaluate your company’s performance?
EBITDA is probably the number one. Our company is a little bit different than most CPG businesses in that we have company-owned stores. Those have different KPIs than my traditional beverage brand CPG business. Some of the key ones that we look at, certainly from the store perspective, are same-store sales, the governing metric that’s most important, and annual revenue per store. One of the key initiatives we have as a business is to bring more guests into our stores to enjoy the products that we have. About 50 percent of our business in the stores is our plant-based frozen yogurt, the dairy-free product. It’s a super unique product, very good for you, and low calorie. Not enough people know we have it.
One of the key metrics I look at there is my in-store traffic. What’s the AOV, or my average ticket size, for those that are coming into the stores? Those are metrics on the revenue side. On the profitability side, the biggest controllable piece there is the sales per labor hour. We spend a lot of time focusing on the hours of the day and making sure we’re staffed properly, and making sure of the guests’ experience as well. That’s what we look like on the retail side.
On the wholesale side of the business, the key metrics we’re looking for there are around sell-through. What is the velocity of the products? The velocity is interesting because it tells you how you’re doing relative to your competition, as well as how well it’s working for the retailers. At the end of the day, if a Kroger puts your product on the shelf, it needs to generate a certain amount of profit for you to earn your keep. One thing that’s very fascinating for me, which we just wrapped up, is that we did a partnership with Target where we took our cleanse system. It is a big part of our digital business.
We put four bottles into a box for a half-day cleanse and sold them in 200 Target Super Centers. Nobody is going into Target looking for a cleanse system. It’s sold out in four weeks, and it sold better velocity than they expected. It’s interesting for us because it gets back to this thesis that people are looking for better-for-you solutions and real food. The more we can introduce and find innovative ways to introduce our systems into traditional retail, the better it is for everybody, not just the company, but for the broader consumers as well.
You’ve got a perishable product, a direct consumer model, and it’d be hard to have picked up a newspaper in the business section in the last few years and not hear something about supply chain disruptions. How do you manage that? You’ve got to mitigate most of the risk, but on the other hand, you can’t tie your whole financial model up around that either.
If I have ten gray hairs, four or five of them are coming from that supply chain issue for sure. We certainly need to be mindful and think about it. Every business has different aspects to its supply chain. When I was at Health-Ade, we were bringing our glass from overseas, from Southeast Asia, in the middle of the pandemic. I saw shipping container prices go from under $1,000 to upwards of $15,000 or $20,000. Things like that certainly play havoc with your cost of goods sold.
What we’re trying to do is give as much value as we can to the consumer. It’s interesting as well. Because we’re not a pure commodity, it’s not like when inflation goes up, we can raise our prices 3 percent. Our prices generally do not change. Even I look at Health-Ade, and the price has been the same. Even with inflation, your goal as the company, as a CFO and a COO, is to find efficiencies in the manufacturing chain and scalability so that you can control those costs.
Having said all that, in our particular business, we control a lot of the manufacturing because we’re not a co-packer. We manufacture ourselves, and we manufacture in the Central Valley. All of it is fresh product. We source the majority of it from the Central Valley of California, which is nice. We do have some components, some products, that come from overseas, which we’re mindful of. The good news for us is that we’re not super concerned about the tariff aspects. Certainly, inflation is important to keep an eye out for. It’s always a race in my mind to find either manufacturing or operational efficiencies to offset any cost increases, whether they come from tariffs or inflation.
Gary, you started your career with a lot of tech focus, and now you’re in an industry that’s certainly not like the companies you worked for at an early stage. How do you use technology, not only in finance and accounting, but throughout the entire company to give you, perhaps, a competitive advantage?
That’s something we strive for all the time. In our business, and I was fortunate when I came to Pressed, we had a Snowflake in a Tableau instance, which I don’t want to say is at the forefront of the entire technology staff, but for a CPG brand, we’re very far along from that standpoint. We put that in primarily because of the metrics we needed for our stores, and we’re leveraging that to our entire business. The rate of technology is certainly accelerating in a way that is beneficial to you.
One of the things that we’re doing as a company is that a handful of our executives are involved in an immersive AI course, where we want to be the tip of the spear and bring AI to the entire company. It’s interesting because in some ways, I feel like we’re late to the AI party in terms of how people are using AI. I’m not looking to do things with technologies to be ahead of my competitors, but how do we make things more efficient? It cascades back to those primary goals we have as a business. “How do I grow profitably, and how do I scale this business?” AI is going to be a key unlock because there are so many questions that we have in terms of why people are using our products. How do we get the message out there that resonates?
I mentioned my catering business that we have. How do we find businesses that are supplying juices and snacks to their employees? How do we use technology in a more efficient way to accelerate the mission that we’re on, whether it’s on the backend or the data side? The Tableaus of the world is one piece of it. What I love about AI is that it’s causing the entire company to think about the questions. When you read about AI and you think about how it’s going to transform the world, it comes down to the questions that you’re going to ask.
I think of the correlations. In my early days, I spent a lot of time with big data and understanding those correlations, whether it’s looking at fraud, predictive churn analytics, and things like that, which is at its core. What I encourage all the would-be CFOs out there, those that are CFOs that are starting their careers, think about your questions and have a perspective on correlations between different things. “The tariffs are coming. What does that mean to my supply chain? This new product’s coming to market in an adjacent category. What does that mean to my consumer base in terms of what they’re putting in their belly?”
One of the studies that we did when I was at Health-Ade was looking at the different beverages people consume in a day. Those who consume kombucha consume ten different beverages throughout a day, whether it be coffee, water, kombucha, energy drinks, and so on. There’s just a place in your diet. How do we get more mindshare for that? Think about your mission. Think about how your data correlates to that. How do you use technology to further that mission versus technology just for technology’s sake?
It’s ten different drinks. Three glasses of water count as one, not three, right?
It is a handful of different drinks.
I’m not quite at ten, but when I started thinking about it, I’m probably about six. This has been fun. Speaking of fun, one of your colleagues shared with me that not so long ago, you took one heck of a vacation. I’m wondering if you can share with us some of the details around that.
Early in my career, I had my internship at EY, worked for a few years in San Francisco and New York, and then was itching to travel. It started out with, “I’m going to get my CPA certificate, and then I’m going to travel to Greece for a couple of weeks.” The more I thought about it, I realized that, “If I’m going to be in between jobs, why not take a little bit more time? If I’m in Greece, why don’t I go to Turkey? Why don’t I go to Egypt?” This was an interesting time because there were these plane tickets that went around the world. As long as you go in one direction, you’re able to hop on and hop off type of thing.
At the time, it was $1,000 to get this plane ticket that went around the world. I convinced a friend of mine who was in a similar state, looking for a career change. We saved up $10,000 a piece, left our jobs, got a backpack, and traveled around the world for a year with the goal of seeing, absorbing, and learning, but no timeline in mind. We tried to stay with friends and family where we could. We started it in England and worked our way eastward around the world. I remember maybe 8 or 9 months in, we were on the coast in Africa with our long hair and our bracelets. We were super tan and fit. We looked at each other and said, “I think it’s time we wrap this up and start coming back home.”
We spent the next few months in Southeast Asia rounding out the trip. It was fascinating because I came back to San Francisco, cut my hair, put on a suit, got a consulting assignment with KPMG in their tax department, and forgot how to use a computer. It was an interesting time, how the mind just turns. I reflect on that all the time. My friend and I would socialize and say, “Can you believe it’s been years since this happened?” It’s still experiences that I draw on. My daughter caught the bug. She lived in Sweden for a bit. She’s out traveling. I encourage everyone out there to find time for themselves.
If you can take a break, great. Even while you’re working, finding time to experience different cultures and experiences is invaluable. When I went, this was pre-Internet and whatnot. The communication was a tough one. My friend that I went with was an artist. He would draw a train station and things like that. It was interesting because when we came back, we said, “Maybe there’s a business here.” We spent a little time putting together a book. It didn’t get published, but we were putting a translation book together. It was an interesting experience of reaching out to the book publishers and getting that entrepreneurial bug of how do we build something here and leverage some of the experiences that we’ve had. It was overall a fabulous experience.
I’d love to end on that note, but I do have one question for you, tying back to business. You’ve had a great career, done a lot of fun things, and worked with some important companies. What advice would you be willing to share with the next generation of CFOs, those who were maybe in their first CFO role or on the cusp of getting that?
My recommendation there, whether you’re early in your career, you’re still in college, or you’re just about to be a CFO, is to think broadly about the business and ask a lot of questions. I’m very inquisitive, and that’s the way I learn. I know everybody has different learning styles. To be a successful CFO, the more you learn and understand, not only your micro environment within the business, but the macro environment, the more valuable you’re going to be to your business, as well as the contributions you’re going to be able to make and ultimately, your career satisfaction.
With AI, I encourage everybody to embrace it, ask those questions, and just seek out as much as you can around your industry and that knowledge there. At the end of the day, I do think that in not just the CFO role and other executive roles, the winners out there are going to be the ones who can connect the dots and see the correlations. The only way from a CFO that you’re going to be good at that is to understand the hands-on aspect of it. We have a dual responsibility of not just asking those questions, but understanding how the dots get connected. It’s challenging to move an organization. How do I make sure everybody is asking those questions, or the right people are asking them? How am I presenting the data so that they can interpret it and move their businesses forward? That’s my advice to everyone out there.
You’re a wise man, Gary Cooperman. That’s going to be invaluable advice. With that said, I’d like to give you the final word.
I think this was good, Jack. I hope that everyone enjoyed this conversation. I certainly did. It’s a great career. I thoroughly enjoyed moving into the CFO role. I wouldn’t trade my career for anything. I enjoy what I’m doing. Hopefully, I have another 20 to 30 years left in me to do this some more.
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That wraps up this episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. A huge thank you to our sponsors, Planful and TravelBank. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review at Rockstar-CFO.com. Until next time, rock on.
