Ryan Emmons of Waiākea: More than Water
This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter, BL&T (Borrowed, Learned, & Thought). Subscribe
Borrowed
“Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
From “HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself” (Clayton Christensen’s essay) [Book]
Learned
Someone recently asked me what happens if a guest on The Long Aisle is closed off. It’s a fair question, and it’s part of what I’ve enjoyed about doing this show. It’s a constant teacher in active listening and facilitating an honest conversation. I’ll say, though, it helps a lot when the guest meets you halfway. Ryan Emmons, co-founder and CEO of Waiākea, was one of those people. I hadn’t met him before we recorded, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I found was someone who was fully present, ready to talk, and cares deeply about what he’s doing.
Waiākea is a bottled water from the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. It’s called volcanic water because it starts as rain and snow on Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano. But if you ask Ryan, the world doesn’t need another premium bottled water, and in that way, Waiākea serves as a vehicle for a bigger mission. He describes it as pushing the beverage industry toward better environmental standards, and helping people along the way. In 2012, Waiākea was one of the first beverage brands in North America to use bottles made from 100% recycled plastic. This year, it became the first brand to put labels printed with algae-based ink on its bottles, and it chose to open-source the ink so other brands can use it too. Over the years, Waiākea has helped bring clean water to millions of people in Malawi. More recently, its impact work has focused on Hawaiʻi, where its programs reached 180,000 people last year.
For Ryan, some might think this mission is what keeps him going every day. It’s part of it, but he talked about how, as long as he’s making progress on what’s in his control, the weight of the mission doesn’t sit as heavily on him. What it’s actually about is the people. Almost every question I asked Ryan came back to people. I have yet to meet a founder who talks about people as deeply as Ryan does. It left me thinking about the people in my life, not just my immediate circle but the people on our team at Barrel, and the people in their lives, too.
Ryan is also a dad of two young kids, and selfishly, I’m always curious how entrepreneurs navigate life as parents. Ryan acknowledged the weight that comes with it all, but his view is to remember that it’s a privilege. I couldn’t agree more.
Here are my notes from our conversation:
- Small changes compound: “I saw a category that was only growing, and I realized that everyone sometimes looks at things as very black and white. But sometimes the bigger impact that you can have in a scaling large category is by making smaller changes that are economically feasible for everyone to make.”
- Growing up in Hawaiʻi: “[Those summers in Hawaiʻi were] a really foundational part of my life … A lot of the Aloha spirit and the constant positivity and love and empathy for other people is really what has shaped and defined my career and my development as a man and as a father.”
- How fatherhood changed him: “Fatherhood for me, I was already pretty empathetic, but now I switched from this more narrow mindset … I find myself to be way more empathetic of everyone, even people that are not in my inner circle. When I’m looking at behavior for adults, I’m always like, what happened to you? There must have been some things that happened when you were a kid, right? I end up finding myself having empathy for bad behavior.”
- Building trust with his leadership team: “If you’re checking in on your leadership team and they know that you care and you’re asking about their kids and their significant others … you’re vulnerable at the same time, you have transparent financials, everyone is in it together. That really allows a certain level of trust … We believe in empathetic leadership, servant leadership. I think that really percolates through the rest of the organization.”
- The two sides of Hawaiʻi: “There’s two sides to Hawaiʻi. There’s this tourism brand image … And then there’s the real Hawaiʻi, which is all [the] people that are working at that hotel … It’s actually a very, very blue-collar place … I’m acutely aware of that based on my relationships with my team and my family and my friends over there, and that’s one of the reasons why we do so much impact work in our community, specifically on the Big Island.”
- What’s in his control: “If you’re consistently actually executing on [the] mission and making progress, the weight of that mission doesn’t weigh as heavy on me, because I know that I generally have been executing on that mission with what’s in my control … I am less bothered by those other things because I feel like I’ve made enough progress.”
- Confidence that comes with experience: “Now I have a quiet confidence that I’ll figure it out, ’cause I’ve always figured it out, and I have a team now that I can rely on to also help me figure it out. In the early days, when it’s just you and two other guys, you’re freaking out because you haven’t gone through a lot of adversity. You haven’t developed that resilience gene. You don’t know if you’re gonna find a solution at that point ’cause you haven’t done it time and time again, like I have at this point, fourteen years later … You can’t calculate how valuable that experience is in terms of allowing you to face adversity.”
- Giving feedback: “If your team knows that you’re always thinking of them and prioritizing them and want the best for them, and also, as a byproduct of that, have high expectations for them … you’re not really worried about giving someone feedback … I care more about the corrective action and about moving forward, because after 14 years, there are so many issues and so many things that go wrong every single day.”
- Starting before he had a family: “I do not think that I would have been able to start this as a husband and father. I think timing is a big deal … There’s no way that I could continue at the frenetic pace that I was [at in] the early days, doing fourteen hour days, and also be a successful husband and a good father.”
- His dad as the benchmark: “My dad was super present and was at all my games and was a very successful CEO in his own life … That was really my floor benchmark. This is the expectation … I came into that knowing that I would put guardrails and I would put my family first, but that might mean that I’d have to put [in] a lot of extra work to be a good CEO and a good husband and a good father.”
- Losing his dad: “When you lose a parent, you start to see that parent in your kids and in everyday situations, and you realize that so much of who you are is a reflection of them.”
- Why Waiākea is his one and done: “I have no intent of starting another beverage or bottled water brand. Period. I wanna focus on growing this business that has my people that I love and trust. We’ve built all these systems together, we built all this scale together.”
- How he thinks about legacy: “I’m totally okay with Ryan without Waiākea. And I think the reason why is because I know what I’ve been through and I know what I’m capable of and I know what I’ve created. And I have a lot of self-worth based on the relationships that I’ve created along the way … I care about the legacy that’s like, who’s gonna show up at my funeral. Who’s gonna think of me positively as influencing their life, and providing them opportunity, or just hearing them when they were down.”
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Listen to the full episode with Ryan:
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More here: https://www.thelongaisle.com/episode/waiakea-ryan-emmons
Thought
Which of my responsibilities that are hardest to carry would I miss if they were gone?
