A good white road book.
In Chapter 3, Gary Erickson, founder of Clif Bars, introduces the metaphor of red road vs. white road. Most business books and entrepreneurial advice assumes you are taking the red road, i.e. building a startup funded by venture capital, to maximize valuation, bring aboard investors, and eventually exit. Most business books are this way to keep capitalism going — i.e. create artificial demand, grow at a torrid pace to maximize shareholder value, and sell (not just companies, but copies of the business books advising this).
However, this book focuses on the white road — off the beaten path, privately owned companies focused on long-term steady profits, fueled by organic demand and re-investment of profits into oneself, without outrageous borrowing from venture capital funds or acquisition.
The Good:
1.) Quality production. The paper is white, high-quality stock. The binding doesn’t feel flimsy or self-published. Images have high-quality, with strong Clif Bar branding on everything from package design to mock wrappers showing each of the company’s mission values. It’s clearly a product published in-house, with care, design, and taste.
2.) Content is organized by topic, with quotes and stories sprinkled throughout. Lots of vivid stories, anecdotes, about the origin story, biking, the adventures that shed light on Gary’s values system, and how he wanted to run Clif Bars.
3.) Gary speaks with transparency about American corporate goals like exit strategies. Intense focus on the mindset behind remaining private. He walks us through his mindset with transparency and truthfulness.
4.) Importance of Grassroots. Community service. He names lots of companies and sponsors, from the Breast Cancer Foundation, Patagonia, Organic Valley, Stonyfield Farms, Fetzer Vineyards, New Leaf Paper, Tulip Printing, Leave No Trace, the Access Fund, Pesticide Action Network, GreenTreks, the Food Alliance, the Waterkeeper Alliance, the Circle of Life Foundation, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, and many others, that share values and help build each other. Page 256 extols the importance of grassroots, both to employee motivation (they can talk to customers face-to-face) and to word-of-mouth-driven branding and marketing (athletes can wear and spread the brand in person, at real events). This is an excellent case study in organic growth and organic marketing — gauging demand without artificially creating it through digital ad spend!
5.) White road vs red road metaphor — this is telling and original. The journey off the well-traveled "red road" symbolizes Clif Bar’s story well. It made me want to find more books and companies that choose this path, since the majority of what Amazon and Goodreads recommends us deals with the red path. (i.e. grow at all costs) I want to ride the white road with Gary!
The Bad:
1.) Chapters are long and could have been logically broken about ten times per chapter into smaller sub-chapters to make the book more readable.
2.) Chronology is unclear. Jumps between early days, pre-acquisition, and steady-state. We go from the day before their acquisition, to the pre-founding days, to post-Lisa, and back in time to pre-Lisa when developing a play on sustainability and
3.) Too many statistics, millions of this or that, big picture. I can’t visualize what "saving $450000 a year" on caddy wrapping the length of Texas means, but I would benefit from knowing what design saved that, i.e. the physics and materials behind it. Far too often, statistics like profit/loss, savings, and sustainability sound like advertisements of the company, like a sales rep touting how green or ecologically responsible the company is, while remaining profitable. I don't care about how many hours of paid community service (2080) the company permits on paid time, or how many wind energy credits you're buying, just like the benefits and compensation package just sound like company or HR sales-speak. It doesn't boil down to actionable things, like how you found/approached the supplier that allowed you to cut your printed paper costs down, or how you designed the wrapper, or what ingredients you chose, the factories you found, etc. Rattling off stats is like bragging about a 6-minute mile, or comparing race times -- it's meaningless without knowing how they were accomplished, so readers can do something with the knowledge.
4.) Not enough micro on supply chain logistics. It’s great to hear "we continue to look deeply into our supply chain to find ingredients produced with organic or sustainable methods for all our products," but it does me little good to read advertisements, without knowing how to accomplish this myself. How exactly do you find organic farmers and engage them? How do you reach out to them, and negotiate deals that work for both sides? How do your source ingredients? How do you choose which grassroots tournaments to attend, and then meet their organizers? How do you choose which athletes to sponsor, and pitch to them? More stories and micro-details need to be told.
5.) For a company so focused on food, taste, and ingredients, they say almost nothing on core product Recipe. Reading this book got me into the science of bars, but I had to find all of my information in other books. For example, why is Clif Bar all chocolate? How did they decide what to put in Luna? What about fruit? Nutrition? What makes a "good" bar outside taste and calories? How does the quality of a bar impact the rider’s mood, health, and performance?
Not enough details at all, just stories about momma’s kitchen, and quotes from Italians like Gaetano, who said, "My mother spent twenty-four hours making a spaghetti sauce. Clara spends twelve hours a day and my daughter-in-law buys sauce at the store. I can taste the difference. Something is happening to our culture and the food of our culture. We are so busy" (195). I get the spirit of what they’re trying to say. But they don’t give us enough guidance to follow that spirit! Quotes are all good, but when it comes down to it, how exactly do you replicate that 12-hour natural sauce-making? Give us the secret sauce, or at least details on how you choose the ingredients. Why do almost all flavors of Clif Bars include chocolate?
Overall, an interesting read with lots of stories and philosophies, but quite thin on execution or implementation.