Elana Rosenfeld co-founded Kicking Horse Coffee and still runs it, three years after selling a majority stake to Lavazza. Her definition of growth has two movements rather than one. Expansion is the part business already knows how to talk about. Contraction is where the foundations get built.
The analogy is agricultural and she means it literally. Spring produces the visible growth. The work that makes the next spring possible happens in autumn and winter.
Key findings
- Asked to choose between purpose and values, Rosenfeld chooses values, and her reasoning is about ownership. Purpose is why you are doing it. Values are how, they govern behavior daily, and every person in the company can hold and act on them.
- Her test of whether a company’s stated position is real is whether it cost anything. She cites a pharmacy chain giving up tobacco revenue, and her own decision to go entirely fair trade and organic against advice from brokers and retailers.
- The hardest decision she describes is not what to do but how. Changing route to market meant ending distributor relationships of more than twenty years, and her account of the decision is entirely about the manner of it.
- What she wants from a marketing leader is a peer to finance and sales, out in front of the company rather than behind it. What she does not want is following, and she is direct that this is what she thinks marketers usually do.
- Her evidence is her own company’s history. Neither organic nor fair trade coffee existed as a consumer or retailer demand signal twenty five years ago, so following the market would have produced a different and smaller business.
A minor in ethics, and where the values came from
Rosenfeld describes walking into the management building at university and knowing it was wrong. She studied religion and women’s studies instead, and spent four years on ethics.
Asked whether her values have changed since, she draws a distinction that is worth keeping. They have not changed. They have deepened. The three she names then are the three the company touches now.
The company’s stated purpose is short enough to hold: uniting goodness and prosperity, with the business itself as the platform.
The drive, and where it started
Asked what fuels her, Rosenfeld gives an unusually specific answer. Her mother told her that two people were not going to sell coffee out of a garage, and should retrain instead. She says it made her angry, and that some of the drive since has been proving the point.
What replaced it is less combative. She describes a need to make the opportunity she made for herself available to other people, and measures it in the hours a person spends at work and what they carry home from them.
Five minutes on Thursday
Rosenfeld leads a five-minute meditation at the start of her leadership team’s weekly meeting. She describes its function practically: it sets the frame for the conversation and puts people in the room rather than in their own lists.
The evidence she offers that it works is that people notice its absence. When the meeting has not happened, they tell her they have missed it.
She is careful about how far this can be pushed onto other people. Personal priorities are part of the yearly cycle, but the expectation is set by example and people meet it wherever they are.
Influencing a parent company you do not control
The interviewer points out that Rosenfeld is in the same position as most of the audience: a small part of a much larger organization, trying to move it. She agrees, and is unusually candid that she has not solved it yet.
The route she is taking is to make culture legible in the language the rest of the company already uses. Kicking Horse is a roaster running a kaizen program, and she is weaving values and brand into it so that they can be tracked and owned like anything else on the board.
The relationship half of it was set at the start, as an explicit rule rather than a hope: she raises her hand at a yellow flag, not only a red one, and said so before the deal was done.
Is it real
Rosenfeld says recruitment changed by itself as the company got clearer about what it was. She did not have to hunt differently. The applicants changed.
The question those applicants ask is always the same one, and she reports it as the sentence a recent senior hire put to the recruiter before applying.
Pressed on whether hiring for values fit produces a room of identical people, her answer is that the fit is the non-negotiable and the diversity arrives on the other axes: age, gender, experience, nationality.
What the company actually did
Rosenfeld’s account of the crisis is a sequence rather than a statement. Health and safety first, with the roasting plant as the thing that could not be allowed to close.
Second was keeping people financially whole. Retail coffee volumes were high, the work was hard, and she paid extra monthly.
Third was the thing the money could not buy. Asked what people needed, the answer was time, so the company shut for ten days in midsummer, which it had never done.
The fourth is aimed outward. Employees were given an allowance to spend with local businesses in the slow autumn months, on the reasoning that the company’s position and the town’s are the same position.
Ambition, and the people who push
The interviewer raises the Dutch idiom about cutting down the grass that grows too tall, and asks whether her ambition is large enough. Her answer pairs ambition with humility and with the intention behind it.
She then says plainly that she cannot supply the push herself, and lists the things she has done to get it from outside: bringing in equity investors, selling to Lavazza, joining the program this conversation is part of.
Her own development goals are specific and unflattering to herself: confidence in articulating what she believes, and a note on her desk asking what she is avoiding.
Trust as the thing to build next
Asked whether companies should take public positions, Rosenfeld sets one condition. Consumers are asking for it, and a company should do it only where it is sincere and matches what the company actually is.
What she wants to build next is trust, which she reads as having declined worldwide and treats as infrastructure rather than sentiment.
Scope and limitations
This is one founder’s account of one company, recorded in 2020, and the claims about how Kicking Horse performed through the crisis are hers rather than audited. Rosenfeld also says she is not a marketer, and her views on the function are offered as a chief executive’s rather than a practitioner’s.
Source
This page summarises HGS #3: Elana Rosenfeld about humanized growth, the role of marketing and purpose, by Frank van den Driest, 2022-02-14.