[Music] thank you welcome to beyond the comfort zone a show that helps you step out of your comfort zone into a place of growth and learning today I have jessalyn Rollins here with us the CEO of BioLite welcome jessalyn thank you very much excited to be here with you Aviva oh it's awesome um jessalyn can you tell our listeners those who are not fortunate enough yet to know what BioLite is and what you use it for absolutely so here it is right here so BioLite the IV in a bottle is the first liquid supplement with the same amount of electrolytes as an IV bag so what you may not know is that um BioLite is actually my family's company so a few years ago my mom had breast cancer and when she was going through her chemo treatments she was very sick and very dehydrated to the point where she literally couldn't keep up with chemo treatments without getting an IV bag beforehand now my dad is an anesthesiologist he has years of experience tailoring his patients IV bags with nutritional supplementation to help them feel better so when my family was trying everything sports drinks children's rehydration products electrolyte powders and nothing was working to keeping to keep her hydrated my dad wanted to create a product that brought the IV bag home to her and to other people that needed it so that's how BioLite the IV in a bottle was born this is a fabulous story he was there to support your mom in a really tough time and I imagine it was never a thought that this was going to be some product that was going to be sold all over or was that part of the original idea no no no no no no so I think my so when my dad and my sister Sarah they both they work together on this project and getting it off the ground my dad really he told me he was like this this product is it's very helpful to a lot of people but I don't know if he ever saw it getting off the ground to be completely honest with you I mean it is it is such a pipe dream to be able to have you have created an invention and to actually have created an invention that that sells well and I I just I I don't know if there was a lot of expectation from his part that man this is really gonna explode it was more like man this is really going to help people but like hopefully people will learn about it well they've learned about it I think mostly thanks to you um so helping people learn about it for a second there's four flavors of BioLite you want to tell us what they are yes so BioLite as Aviva mentioned has four flavors that's it that is literally our four skews so you've got Citrus which is the original which I'm drinking today you've got Berry tropical and melon all of them are going to be salty so that's biolite's thing you cannot not have seven sports drinks worth of electrolytes packed into one bottle and not be salty you should not trust what I am saying if BioLite wasn't salty but it is and it is because it's literally shaped after an IV bag which is packed with electrolytes so Citrus tastes like a salty or lemon-lime sports drink Berry tastes like a raspberry strawberry sweeter type sports drink tropical is like a pina colada type Vibe Vibe and then you've got melon which we're thinking is going to be our number one seller is um like a watermelon type sports drink yes and I can attest because since I have known jessalyn I've had BioLite quite a few times mainly the last one when I had food poisoning and it had helped thankfully um well that's what it's supposed to do I mean literally any like if you are experiencing some type of headache fatigue or nausea due to severe dehydration and food poisoning food poisoning falls into that category that's where buy light comes in and really and really can help you out now off a little bit of the product so much I want to know a little bit more about you and the industry so what is a common myth about your job or your business that you'd like to debunk for everybody today so I don't think that movies about startups have done us any favors and what I mean by that and don't get me wrong I love movies about startups social network is one of my favorite movies um I I'm like totally into we crashed right now like all of the things however when those when those movies were like what they've put into everybody's heads is that like startup culture is when you've hit that stride like the work environment with the furniture and the amazing workspace and you know collaborating with your like your hundreds of co-workers that is not startup or at least it wasn't for me and he like let me paint you a picture of what startup culture if BioLite when I first got started what that looked like so my so my parents have a farm or in Canton Georgia and there it and we have a warehouse on that farm so when BioLite was first conceived we put pallets of BioLite in this Warehouse on my parents farm and literally my office was what my dad and I um and my mom my whole family really lovingly called the yurt so the warehouse was extremely cold and in the winter time you'd have to wear a ski suit but my office was literally like a tent um that you would see on the beach and my dad wrapped it in plastic so that we could put a heater in there and it could keep you warm so it's so legitimately that's what I worked out of and that is what my first hire Kelly Herra who's now our director of logistics worked out of the first couple of years and zero complaints that's why me and Kelly are boys so so anyway that like we just got this new amazing Warehouse up in up in Marietta Georgia and the the thing is is that we're the team is coming from a co-working space where we got free coffee and it was it was it was beautiful it was called Rome and they're they're incredible and if you ever get the opportunity to work in a co-working space go and hang out at Rome however moving into this new space we've had some we've had some comments about like you know the lighting isn't that great uh we don't have you know the furniture's not in yet all like the carpets ugly like all of these different all the real growing pains all of the real Growing Pains that all of these movies only give like five minutes to and then all of a sudden like everything's perfect and it's like super awesome that that has not been my experience and what I've had to really work through especially with like Millennial my age and younger is that like this is startup we are in an under construction phase and that that means things are going to be messy that means things are going to be unattractive um ugly like you and and that is perfectly fine because we're gonna get out of it we're not gonna be here forever but that is what startup is you are starting up you're getting off the ground so startup is messy not like it is in the movies no at 180 yes and you have to to really enjoy startup culture you have to enjoy that you have to enjoy that like the the messiness um and and otherwise this is not going to be it's not gonna be for you well I can see you've got the passion for it it just jumps out of the screen so if whisper that movie you can tell the story it's very passionate yeah um I appreciate it I'd love to know um you know what's the biggest leap that you've taken outside of your comfort zone and how did you grow from it um um so I I'm I'm one of those weird people that I I really enjoy pushing myself I really enjoy being like oh no what's gonna happen and I haven't just an insanely positive attitude that I'm like everything's gonna be great like my team every single time like I know that's probably shocking to the listeners but it's just everything's gonna be fine always and always in my brain and so I enjoy that leap of faith because I know that everything is going to be okay but probably the biggest out of my comfort zone that that I've had to experience to date is is recognizing that that the needs that the company has of you when you get started are very different than the needs that they have year after year after year and if you do not grow with the company as the head honcho leader then the company is going to outgrow you and you will not be the right person to lead the company anymore and that that doesn't go for just people in the company that goes for all of the members of the leadership team and so if you want to be the leader of a company of your company of BioLite if I want to be the leader of BioLite in 10 years I am going to need to take the time to to recognize what I don't know and really challenge myself to get better at the things that I'm not really challenge myself to learn about sales structure to learn about the financials and and how you make solid Investments based off of those financials like things that things that you can't improv your way through things that people know when you don't know what you're talking about um where do you go to grow there are so in the early days so so I didn't come from a business background I was a theater Communications double major and I was a human development minor from the University of Georgia I had like I had no interest in business whatsoever because if it was business it meant that it wasn't fun like if you saw me in a business class it was strictly because um it was strictly because there was a guy in there that I thought was cute so so that that comes with like I had no idea where to go I had no idea where to go for that mentorship or understanding and what what happened was my leadership team thankfully made it a rock for me so a 90-day goal for me to become a part of a group that I could receive mentorship from from a business angle this was like three years into BioLite at this point and what I did was I researched um a ton of different business groups that were out there and there's a lot of them and they all have really really good um they all have really really good assets to them but the reason why I chose this stage was one because you were my coach so I got a coach and that coach was bomb and had been in my shoes before um second of all was that you were in like my vistage group allowed me to be in the room with other CEOs presidents leaders of their companies at different stages so where I was probably at like the bottom half I was learning from the people that were Mo like 100 million dollars in Revenue alongside the people that were a couple million in Revenue that I could help out so there was this this feeling of like we're all at different stages but we're all here to like give a helping hand um so really that like my vistage group and and you Aviva that really has been like y'all y'all have been my my MBA pretty much and all of these issues that I can't bring to my leadership team or people in BioLite specifically that my vistage group knows all about them and helps me work through all these issues and it has been my growth from where I started to to where I am now um I think my I think my even my team would say that there's a noticeable difference foreign thanks to y'all that you have found a place that you can go that you feel comfortable opening up yeah what would you say has been your biggest failure to date and what did you learn from that experience I have a tendency to not want to have hard conversations and be more of a friend rather than a coach or a mentor or a leader and because I want because I have that people pleasing friendly cheerleading personality I sometimes kind of like ipso facto fall in this cruise control Vibe of like whoa doing great great five awesome when really I don't internally and what that has caused is for where you could nip something in the bud initially like hey you cannot speak to me that way or hey you should have been the one putting that presentation together or you know any any number of things that you experience as as a leader not having those conversations early enough legitimately that snake turned into a dragon hmm where you could you could have I could have cut the snake off at the head and we would have been fine but by saying like everything is gonna be okay and it's kind of like a double-edged sword from what I was talking about earlier one of my greatest strengths is positivity everything's gonna be okay but if you just think everything's going to be okay and not have those hard conversations you might have a dragon on your hand that now you've got to slay a dragon it would have been way easier dealing with a snake so sometimes positivity yeah King quote unquote bite you like the Dragon 100 and that that is very challenging for me especially with especially with people that I highly respect like total killers in the industry if I if if we have a disagreement on who to hire or when to hire them or this that and the other I've had to learn and there's a there is a um there's a term that I love and it's called a velvet hammer but I'm more like like I am not the type of person it doesn't look good on me to be like we're doing it my way and I don't care if you don't like it like that people don't respond well to that aggressive jesslyn and and personally I I don't feel like myself so I've had to come up with a way to deal with that snake but in my in my own way and uh there's that term the velvet hammer that I I think like hey gotta lay down the law but you you're you need to do it in a way that is kind considerate um of somebody else's feelings and be being more intentional with it yeah I mean being kind with your words and being honest with people is really critical right there's this um phrase I use like radical Candor right you have to be able to be that honest and at the same time you know there's a kindness to it or a way to do it um yeah this is one lesson I'm probably more like a bubble wrapped hammer maybe like a Barbie image is quite oh yeah so what's one lesson that you've learned in your career that you think everyone should learn at some point in their life that if you don't do what's hard now it's going to handicap you okay jesslyn Rollins is not that great with the numbers naturally I made A's in every single math class that I ever took however it took me so much studying to get there and if I did not take the time to learn the numbers learn the lingo learn you know business in general that was and keep learning business because there is no stop there is no stop point with that um it 100 would have handicapped me and it would have made it so that I wouldn't have been able to grow with BioLite and being a leader that they need me to be and the leader I can tell you want to be yes now I always ask this question because it's get such interesting answers what is your favorite productivity hack or interesting tool you use that other entrepreneurs or business owners might be interested in I mean the the number one productivity Hack That that we use at BioLite is the entrepreneurial operating system so we when we were first getting started we read a book called traction which laid out how your business should be run from an operational standpoint and it helped us form How We Do meetings how we do our bonuses what goals we needed to be focused on how long those goals should last like all of that kind of stuff we got started with that with EOS early on and I don't think that BioLite would have been able to double or more than double in Revenue not I don't think I know that BioLite would not have been able to surpass Revenue goals tremendously if it was not for Eos and especially implementing it in the beginning was so key for us because now every single new um every single new team member that comes on board I have it right here actually reads this book and we have book clubs that go through how we do what we do and why we do what we do and it is so much easier to move a skateboard than it is a cruise ship so the fact that we did it early on set us up for success and we are able to make turns a lot faster because everybody's running on on that model yeah it's great that you guys were able to do that so early on having implemented systems like that um at much larger scale it's a lot harder yeah to do later on um let's see I asked you about tools hacks what haven't I asked you that you wish I would have asked you so that you could answer it who are we hiring for ah there you go who are you hiring for in case anybody's got some great recommendations or they themselves would like to join by a light yeah absolutely so we're hiring for a lot of positions at BioLite um but the number one that I the number one position that I'm looking for is for um a director of operations okay so I am I'm actually looking for somebody that has experience with this with EOS um looking for somebody to really be the left brain to my right brain and very excited about that um about that person but we have so I won't I won't waste your time with the number of hires that we have open but if anybody is interested they can go to uh drink bylight.com and go to the careers page they're all listed right there I would love to have would love to have the best of the best if you're interested in working for buy light you know where to go um and I'll make sure we post that link when we post this video as well um now ask this to everybody who is on my show because it is beyond the comfort zone so what is something you'd like to try in business or in life that is outside your comfort zone that you haven't yet I want to own I would love to own my own pet okay I've never owned I've never owned my own pet like they've always been taken care of by my parents I mean they were mine like mine but actually actually taking care of a little tiny kitten would just be the highlight of of my decade to be honest but I have to but Aviva here's the thing I have to wait my um my husband who I lovingly call Key his name is Michael Kennedy he uh is allergic to cats and so he's getting allergy shots right now okay so do not go getting you a kitten is what I'm hearing no way he's getting allergy shots so I can get a kitten that's awesome that's uh true that's a dedication from a husband yeah so that you can get one well thank you Justin I'd love to do that really appreciate you joining this share about your path to where you are what you're working towards um telling us a little bit about BioLite um definitely guys if you haven't tried Viola yet go out and try it um if you aren't feeling well um or dehydrate anyway I'll speak to it again um it is a great drink and very very helpful um so and jessalyn it is just a joy and pleasure to have you on here is my guest um and everybody else you know as well please get out there and do something to get outside your comfort zone because again that's where growth occurs and Life Begins have a wonderful day [Music]