Just Start: Interview with Joshua March, Co-Founder and CEO of SCiFi Foods

I recently went one on one with Joshua March, co-founder and CEO of SCiFi Foods. Joshua founded and sold two other companies before launching SCiFi Foods.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Joshua: I'm from England originally and when I was growing up, I always thought I would go to law school and enter the political track to make a difference. However, the older I got, the more I realized that technology can actually be a way more impactful way to create positive change in the world than politics. I founded my first startup (an ecommerce company selling fair trade and eco homewares) while I was still at university, but didn’t really know anything about business at the time, and it was a flop. I learned a lot of painful lessons, and realized that it didn’t matter how good an idea was if you couldn’t market and sell it. I started learning everything I could about online marketing, and got really excited by the (at the time) completely new phenomena of social media. This led me to found one of the first Facebook marketing agencies in the world, iPlatform, in London. I quickly realized that customer service was one of the biggest pain points with social media, and we spun out a software company, Conversocial, to help big brands communicate better with their customers over social media, followed by messaging platforms. As part of this, I moved from London to NYC to launch the business in the US, and ran Conversocial for almost a decade before it was acquired. There were a multitude of ups, downs, failures, and successes over the years—too many to list here—all of which have helped shape me. I’m really excited to now be putting all of these lessons to work on a project which will have such a huge, positive impact on the world. 

Adam: How did you come up with your business ideas? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?

Joshua: I’ve always been a fan of science fiction—often, science fiction books give us the best roadmap for what we need to do from a technological and societal point of view to building a better world (and sometimes, what we need to make sure we avoid doing!). And that’s exactly where I got the idea for SCiFi Foods! I was reading a book by Iain M. Banks almost fifteen years ago where he spoke about the idea of cultivating meat in tanks instead of growing it from animals. It was only a tiny part of the book, but it just immediately struck me that we had to make it a reality. I knew that if we could get meat on to the technology cycle, where every year we could increase the efficiency of production and decrease the cost, then that would be something that would change the world—most obviously from a climate change perspective, knowing that meat (and especially beef) is one of the biggest contributors to climate change (a problem that will only get worse as meat consumption increases around the world), but also from an animal welfare perspective (especially with factory farms), and just generally in terms of how we can produce whatever a growing population wants and needs, without destroying the planet.

Cultivated meat is a big challenge, requiring real scientific progress in order to make it affordable and scalable. But if you want to make a big impact on the world, that’s the kind of challenge you have to undertake. And that’s often the advice I give. Any startup will be hard, any startup has a high likelihood of failure—so set your aims really high, and work on something that can really make a difference. 

Adam: How did you know your business ideas were worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?

Joshua: As Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. The biggest mistake you could make is to have an idea and then stick to it stubbornly regardless of what you learn as you go out into the world. In the early stages of a new startup, the entire goal should be to learn as much as you possibly can. This means speaking to as many people as possible—potential employees, potential partners, potential customers, potential investors, potential experts and advisors. Solicit as much feedback as you possibly can. You don’t need to follow it all—and many of it will be conflicting. But you’ll learn an incredible amount, and in doing so will be able to refine and refine your ideas. Even with this approach, you won’t ultimately know if something will be successful until you’re actually in the marketplace, and see what customers actually buy. But it will give you the best chance of success. 

Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your businesses? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

Joshua: How you grow is really specific to your company and your market. Once you’re driving revenue, this is a little more straightforward, in that investors want to see rapid growth, and then eventually profitable growth (not that driving either of these things is straightforward in practice!). We are still in the R&D phase, which means that growth for us is really all about driving our technical and scientific progress forward. In the cultivated meat space, this is all about cost and scale—hitting the key milestones that demonstrate we are de-risking scale-up and our ability to produce an affordable and profitable product at scale. 

In a pre-revenue company, there aren’t necessarily clearly defined milestones, and instead you need to figure out how to tell a clear narrative of progress. At each stage, we’ve mapped out what we think the key milestones are that demonstrate this progress, and then kept a laser focus on hitting those milestones. Distraction is the biggest start-up killer; the most important thing is to maintain focus on the most important thing. 

Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?

Joshua: Product and brand really go hand-in-hand. It's crucial to have a great product—and to also be clear on what attributes you’re really aiming to win on. For us, this is all about taste; our goal is to have the best tasting alt-burger product on the market. For others, the goal or top priority may be health, price, or other factors. It is also essential to have a brand and story that reflects your product(s), company, and yourself authentically. Today, more than ever, people see through typical sales and marketing messages (especially when it comes to "new" foods). There is so much noise, so many startups, and a constant stream of new products entering the market all the time. If you truly want to stand out, then you have to be bold, authentic, transparent, and fun. And make sure that you’re talking to what your customers really care about—which may not be exactly the same as the primary motivator for you to do the business. For us, a prime motivator is to build a more sustainable future. But while many consumers may intellectually agree with that vision, it’s not the thing that will drive them to buy a burger on a Friday night. That’s got to be because the burger tastes ridiculously delicious and the brand makes them feel happy when they look down at it in their shopping cart. 

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Joshua: Of course leaders need to be professional and competent at whatever their functional area is. But on top of that, there is a set of pretty universal traits to help someone be an effective manager and leader—ability to communicate, to prioritize, to make decisions, to take ownership for results, to be able to zoom in on the details and zoom out to the big picture, to be emotionally resilient/intelligent, and more.

Being emotionally resilient is one of the most important of these. Building a company, especially a fast growing startup, can be stressful and difficult. The situation can change incredibly quickly, requiring you to make constant, trying decisions. And as the leader, you must be the calm rock in the storm for your team throughout the entire rollercoaster ride that will inevitably occur. 

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?

Joshua: Your team IS your company, it is your culture, it is the most important determinant of your success. You should implement a rigorous and unbiased system for hiring to ensure that you’re assessing people consistently and fairly, and invest meaningful time into hiring—as CEO, you should still be getting personally involved in hiring for as long as you can, especially in sourcing and meeting with strong potential hires. And if someone doesn’t work out, don’t be afraid to pull the plug and move on. No hiring system is perfect, and if you hire someone who isn’t a good fit, it isn’t good either for you or for them. Better to recognize it quickly and move on. Similarly, the needs of the company will change over time. Many people will adapt and grow with the company, but some won’t—and that’s OK, as long as you recognize it, and help those people move on to other opportunities that are better for them, sooner rather than later. 

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?

Joshua:

1. If you want to do something new, just start—there isn’t such a thing as a perfect idea, and your idea will evolve as you work on it. So don’t wait, just get going. 

2. We can make a huge difference in the world if we work on the hardest problems. The climate crisis is huge and real, but we can solve it through technology (combined with regulatory support). 

3. Keep learning every day. Make time to read, both news and books. Don’t stop studying when you leave school!

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Joshua: To succeed in business, you often have to make hard, rational decisions. But this doesn’t mean you have to be hard and rational in how you execute those decisions. So make the hard decisions, but be kind and human in how you carry them out. 


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

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