0:00:02 Amanda Stassen: Welcome to Purpose Power brand, a podcast for leaders and brands transforming business into a force for good. I’m Amanda Stassen, business and brand strategist, entrepreneur and founder of BIZU Innovation Group. I’m speaking with leaders who are proving that not only does purpose drive profit, but the future of our world depends on it. If you want to outperform your market, grow your customers, build your employee culture, or attract investors, you’re going to want to lean in.

0:00:28 Amanda Stassen: Welcome, everyone. Today I’m speaking with Sonia Strobel, CEO and co-founder of Skipper Otto, a community supported fishery and sustainable seafood subscription service. Sonia, welcome to the Purpose Power brand podcast. Excited to have you joining me today.

0:00:44 Sonia Strobel: Oh, hi, Amanda. Thanks so much for having me. Awesome.

0:00:48 Amanda Stassen: And a big shout out to all our canadian west coast friends. So let’s kick things off. I want to start by asking you what purpose powers you? This podcast is all about purpose and harnessing what I believe to be the regenerative power of purpose, to transform people’s lives, communities, society and the world. Purpose is a uniquely human thing, I believe. It actually speaks to this idea that we were all created for something more.

0:01:19 Amanda Stassen: And we all know that it takes just one person to make a difference. So now that I’ve given you loads of time to think about it, tell me, what purpose powers you? What purpose inspires and motivates your everyday and the work that you do?

0:01:34 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, I was thinking about even just the name of your podcast, because purpose is what powers me, what gets me up in the morning. And I know for many of us, I’m sure many of the listeners, too, it would be hard to stick to a job that doesn’t have purpose. It’s really what drives us, and it gets us through the tough times and the hard days is to remember what your purpose is. And so for me, purpose is really about community.

0:02:01 Sonia Strobel: It’s really about meaningful connections between people. And that’s what gets me up in the morning, is just knowing that the work that I do every day is repairing relationships, reconnecting people who traditionally are broken apart by industrial food systems. The industrial food system has us completely separated so that people go in the grocery store, they don’t know who made that food, they don’t know the story of where it came from, they don’t know what their dollars are supporting. And so to me, that relationship that’s repaired through things like community supported fisheries, like the work that we do, is so meaningful.

0:02:47 Sonia Strobel: It reminds us that we are all part of a human family here, sharing air and water and food together. So yeah. So community, important, meaningful connections between people. That’s what gets me up in the morning.

0:03:00 Amanda Stassen: I love that. That’s so powerful. What you were just describing about repairing relationships, our relationship with one another, our relationship with food, our relationship with the world that we live in. So important and so powerful to have that be the driving force for your work. So take me on the journey that brought you to Skipper Otto, and I want to set some context for our listeners. The year is 2008.

0:03:31 Amanda Stassen: You’re doing your teaching job. You’re teaching English at a secondary school, and your father-in-law, Otto, who the business is named after, I understand, you know, he’s an independent fisherman in BC at the time, and he’s going through maybe a hard time trying to make a living. So that’s kind of the broad stroke context. But I’d love for you to fill in the blanks and maybe share the genesis story of how really, an english high school teacher became the CEO of a community supported fisheries company.

0:04:06 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, it’s sort of hard to imagine when you look back on anything now. How did that come about? But I think that’s like a lot of things in life is that if we look at the end and we say, oh, gosh, how do I make that thing? It’s so complex. How do I build that? That’s really overwhelming. But if we go back to the beginning and we just solve the one problem that’s in front of us right now, that leads us to the next problem to solve and the next and the next. And so things become more complex.

0:04:37 Sonia Strobel: That’s kind of how I came to be where I was, but, yeah, where I am now. But if I go back to where I was. So interesting, as you say, I was teaching high school, I had married into a fishing family. So I didn’t grow up fishing. And, in fact, I grew up with this belief that I didn’t like seafood. I really didn’t like. Yeah, I’d had seafood that wasn’t great quality. And I think that’s the experience of a lot of Canadians.

0:05:05 Sonia Strobel: You’ll hear lots of people say, oh, yeah, well, my husband or my mom or whoever doesn’t like seafood, and I often ask them, have they had good seafood? Because good seafood is really good and bad seafood is really bad. And I grew up eating the latter, the bad seafood. And I married into a fishing family, and I was surprised by how amazing seafood is when it’s good quality, when it’s fresh, when it’s handled well, and all of my friends and family couldn’t access that great quality seafood.

0:05:36 Sonia Strobel: And then, as you say, I married in, and I could see what a difficult go it was for fishing families to take on all the risk at the start of the fishing season. And that includes all the expenses of having a boat and running a boat and fueling it, and all the gear to maintain, and all of the risk of going out to sea, not knowing what fishing opportunities there will be, and not knowing what you’ll even catch, and then not knowing what the market for that will be, because the market’s really set by things way out of our control in a global industrial seafood system, currency fluctuations, abundance in different parts of the world, different habits and interests in different parts of the world.

0:06:20 Sonia Strobel: These can affect the price, and they’re things that a fishing family can’t control. So I would watch Oto take on all this financial risk, go into his line of credit to get set up for the fishing season, and have no way of knowing what he would make for the year. And I thought, this just doesn’t make any sense. And then that seafood would all be exported. He would come into the port with a load of beautiful salmon that I know he handled so well, so beautiful.

0:06:48 Sonia Strobel: And it would just sort of get dumped into a big tote and exported. And I know that he felt a sort of sadness for that, having put his love and his energy into that fish and then having it just disappear and having no connection to who he was feeding in the world. So I saw those problems. And as you say, I was teaching high school. In fact, I was just heading out onto maternity leave, had a brand newborn baby, and thought, there’s got to be a better way to do this.

0:07:16 Sonia Strobel: I love that. Yes. And I was part of community supported agriculture programs. And those are like, farmers have been doing those for, like, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years, where you pay an annual subscription and then you get a weekly box of vegetables or fruit. And I was part of that and saw that and thought, what would be the equivalent? Of course, it wouldn’t be exactly the same, because the nature of fishing is different. But how could we build such a thing that would protect this fishing way of life, that would help guarantee Otto a fair market for his catch, but would also provide local seafood to people who otherwise don’t have access to it?

0:07:55 Sonia Strobel: And that was sort of the inspiration. And honestly, I didn’t know what I was doing. As I say, I had a newborn baby. I made a website, which I’d never done before, and proposed, basically mail us a check because it was in those days, and we’ll get you fish. And I remember the first day when I said, okay, the fish has come in, and people should come down and get fish. I hadn’t even thought about what they would take their fish home in, so I was like, oh, gee, bags hadn’t thought of that.

0:08:24 Sonia Strobel: I just solved one thing at a time. One thing at a time. And so that first year, we had 40 members, just a small kind of startup, which was manageable. And then the second year, we had 200, and it just kind of grew from there.

0:08:38 Amanda Stassen: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. I love how you took a really big problem and you broke it down into little steps. And I think that just was one of the questions I wanted to ask you. It’s like you saw a problem, fishermen and fisher women not being able to make a fair living, and even more, the fishing way of life becoming more and more difficult with just all the global markets that are happening, and then even more difficult for young people to consider as a possible job because there’s a graying of the workforce, even.

0:09:15 Amanda Stassen: And then you basically said, we need to do something. But then how do you navigate the ‘What the heck am I doing’, ‘I’ve never done this before’. And you started with step one. It’s like, okay, I need to build a website. Or you saw an idea from a different industry, and you thought, well, is this something that could work here? You didn’t know whether it could work, but you just started getting the ball rolling.

0:09:41 Amanda Stassen: I love how you broke it down into steps. Were you conscious that you were breaking it down into steps, or did you learn to do that along the way?

0:09:50 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, I mean, I think I was conscious of that because it was the only thing that was really digestible. It’s like, well, let’s just solve a really small first issue here first. And to be honest, even to go back before 2008, Otto would come home with the final load of fish, and he would just bring us a few fish that we would cut up ourselves and keep. And then the neighbor wanted one, and then one of my colleagues at work wanted a fish. And so we were just solving even those small problems, saying, well, Otto, how many fish can you bring home? And what would be the timing on that?

0:10:23 Sonia Strobel: Well, you know what? I can set up a table in my backyard, and I can teach people how to cut fish. So we were just solving these small problems. And then in 2008, what’s interesting, because I want to tie it back to community, I thought, surely someone’s already doing this, right? And so I started googling and thinking, well, I should learn from somebody who’s already doing it, and I couldn’t find anything.

0:10:46 Sonia Strobel: And as it turns out, there were two others in the US that same year who coined the phrase the same year that we did ‘community supported fishery’. And they started their versions of it. And we found each other a couple of years later and together a group of us fishing practitioners, community supported fisheries, academics, ngo’s. We formed a network called ‘local Catch’. And we’ve been supporting each other since about 2011 when we found each other. So I think that’s an important thing is to remember there’s sort of this myth of the lone wolf entrepreneur.

0:11:24 Sonia Strobel: And that’s why I tie this back to community. None of us live in a bubble, none of us live in isolation. And actually we’re all stronger together by collaborating and working together, rather than going off into our silos and trying to invent something alone. We’re really all part of a community.

0:11:42 Amanda Stassen: I love that. I was going to ask you, what does ‘community supported fisheries’ mean? But I think you answered it so well. In those early days when you’re breaking the idea down, you’re thinking about how it can be done. How did you stay on track? I mean, as an entrepreneur, it’s super easy to get distracted by great ideas or even just stay focused. How do you even make decisions? Was there something that you used?

0:12:15 Amanda Stassen: How did you navigate that water?

0:12:18 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, believe me. There’s so many good fishing puns. I was going to say, believe me, I am famous for chasing shiny objects. I think a lot of us kind of founder types, it’s just part of our dna is that we’re excited and we’re like, oh, I could do that. Oh, neat opportunity. And it’s so easy for us to just chase all the things and to become inefficient because we’re just distracted, we’re doing too many things, or we become paralyzed by decision making because it’s just too many things. How do I decide?

0:12:54 Sonia Strobel: Actually, it’s a great question because it ties back to my teaching career. So I was a teacher, I was a high school english teacher. And so evaluating or grading or assessing something as complex as a grade twelve english essay, that can be really subjective and so you need to turn it into something a little bit more objective. And so in teaching, we use rubrics, or these are grading rubrics you can use. Maybe people have heard of decision-making rubrics or matrices.

0:13:26 Sonia Strobel: So, yeah, a matrix like this essentially has, if you imagine a chart, a graph an excel spreadsheet. So imagine down the left hand side, you’ve got, what are the criteria here for making this decision? And so maybe if it’s an essay we’re talking about. Oh, it’s the idea and the supporting ideas and the evidence they used and the quotes. I don’t know, grammar. You would have those items down the one hand side, the left hand side, and then along the top you have 12345, for example, if it’s a five scale.

0:13:58 Sonia Strobel: And then in each one, I would write a detailed paragraph saying, what would be a five out of five for a thesis or an idea? So I kind of took that idea into business, and I said, okay, so what is our purpose here at Skipper Otto? What are we trying to achieve? How would we know that we were successful or not? And we sort of boiled it down to our five key considerations that go in that rubric are conservation, reconciliation and decolonization.

0:14:28 Sonia Strobel: Protecting a fishing way of life in coastal communities, food security, and then lastly, the company stability. So a decision that we make needs to score a five out of five, you know on all those things or four on all of those. And so for know, we had an opportunity to carry, we’re based on the west coast here we have fish caught on the west coast and in Nunavut, and we had an opportunity to welcome aboard an east coast harvester with lobsters. And so we thought, well, that’s kind of interesting.

0:14:57 Sonia Strobel: What would that look like? So we held it up to our key considerations, and there’s a lot of reasons we would want to protect a fishing way of life on Canada’s east coast. So, yeah, I mean, this could score a five out of five, but we wouldn’t be getting the lobsters direct from a harvester. It would be from a second individual sort of distributor. So then, I don’t know, am I protecting a fishing way of life? I don’t know for sure, because I don’t know what the harvester is being paid. So that drops the score. And then food security. Well, yeah, I mean, sure, it’d be great for Canadians to be eating more canadian seafood.

0:15:31 Sonia Strobel: Reconciliation? Well, we weren’t supporting an indigenous harvester for this work, and it wasn’t connected to an indigenous community. And there’s real complexities in lobster fishery on the east coast that I’m not connected to. So it started to become a little bit cloudy. Company stability, yeah, maybe it would be great, because maybe it would be another product to be popular, might sell a lot of it, might have good margins, but if everything else is weaker and we really look at those things. In the end, we had to say the time’s not right for us to carry lobster because it doesn’t score high enough on the decision-making matrix.

0:16:05 Sonia Strobel: Right. And so that’s kind of how we make decisions with everything to whether to do it or not to do it.

0:16:11 Amanda Stassen: I love that. And again, breaking it down. Who would have thought that the grading rubric would be something that you could bring into business? But what a great idea, too. And there’s different ways to evaluate ideas, but I think putting yourself to that discipline to always evaluate those new ideas, those opportunities, the relationships, all of those things can be run through your purpose rubric, if you will, and then evaluate things objectively, have conversations with the team about why or why not. And it just levels out the playing field and it reduces the noise because there’s a lot of noise in entrepreneurship, as we know. So that’s really great.

0:16:55 Amanda Stassen: So Skipper Otto is now in its 15th year. Clearly you’re doing something right. So let’s talk business model. So it’s a membership subscription program where members pre purchase a share in the catch before the fishing season. Break that down for me. What does that mean? How many members do you have today and how does the model actually work?

0:17:21 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, so today we have around 8000 members, and they’re spread across a big section of Canada, from Victoria to Ottawa in Ontario, and as far north as Fort St. John and as far south as Windsor, if you will. So quite a large stretch of Canada. And those 8000 people, they agree to support our 40 fishing families for the fishing season ahead, by committing to eat with the ecosystem. And by that we mean they commit to eating what is abundant and sustainable and what our families are catching in their small scale ways that year.

0:17:57 Sonia Strobel: So they’re not going to say, well, I only eat sockeye salmon or I only eat halibut. They’ll say, well, let’s see what’s available. And of course, we do have sockeye salmon and halibut, but we also have other lesser known species that our members can pick and choose from. So let’s say you were to join Amanda, and let’s say you decided, I’m going to eat, I don’t know, $500 worth of fish in the year ahead. And we have a tool that will help you decide. So let’s say you said, okay, I’m going to buy $500 worth of fish.

0:18:24 Sonia Strobel: You would subscribe, you can go on a monthly payment plan so you can pay your $500 over time, and then all throughout the year, you can go into the online store and you’ll see your credit there up in the top right hand corner. And it’s just an online store like any online store. And you can see what’s available and pick and choose, but you can actually drill down on each piece and see who caught it, where, when, how, using what gear.

0:18:49 Sonia Strobel: You’ll see the face of the person who caught it there and their whole bio and their whole story. And so then you’ll pick it. For example, oh look, I’d like a half pound piece of halibut and I’d like some smoked tuna. And you can pick and choose what you’d like. And then you choose your pickup location. And we have about 100 pickup locations across that section of Canada. And our staff pack those member orders and then ship them to the pickup location. And then you just go in and collect your order whenever works for you. So if you only want to order twice a year and you have a huge freezer at home, great. If you want to order every week and get your fish throughout the year, you can do that too.

0:19:26 Amanda Stassen: Wow, that’s awesome. And 8000 members. So it really brings me back to your purpose word, which is community. And it’s interesting, when you build a subscription business model type business, it’s all about community. I wonder, can you share some of the ways that really helped you to build up your community? Like was there one or two elements that you instigated that really took you from that 40 families at the beginning to now 8000?

0:19:58 Amanda Stassen: What were the things that really made a difference in building up your community?

0:20:01 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, I think it’s about seeing every person as a human and really thinking about their experience. So in business, you might talk about knowing your audience and things like that and having your target audience, but it’s really about empathy and understanding what’s going to work. I’ve been part of community supported agriculture for a long time. And sometimes it’s challenging to just get a mystery box of vegetables every week. And I thought, wow, we have an opportunity with seafood not to do the mystery box every week because we can flash freeze it. And that from a members perspective is just so much more convenient. So there’s an empathy piece to understanding your audience and likewise that applies to fishing families. So really understanding as a fish harvester, what are your challenges, what works for you, what isn’t working for you, and how can we innovate and come up with some new way of doing things that works for you? So yeah, it’s about community. It’s about thinking about the individual.

0:20:57 Sonia Strobel: And then it’s about the connection. So we always say, like, harvesters need to know who’s eating the fish just as much as the consumer wants to know who caught it. And so a number of years ago, maybe five or six years ago, we started a program that we still do today, and I will share it with you because it’s such a good illustration, and we do it at the holidays, and we call it the Secret Santa project.

0:21:20 Sonia Strobel: And so what we do is we assign each of our members to one of the harvesters that we know they ate their seafood this year. So let’s say, I know you had salmon from my husband Sean. So now you would be assigned to Sean, and I would say, amanda, can you write a letter to Sean thanking him for the salmon? And if you’ve got a personal story or a photo or something, share that with him. Maybe a little video, little selfie video.

0:21:44 Sonia Strobel: Well, the program, the first year we did it, we couldn’t believe how it just blew up. Each fishing family just got hundreds of letters with photos and videos, the most touching and beautifully personal stories about the role that their fish played in that family, in their life. So, people, it was grandfather’s 91st birthday, and here’s a picture of us all gathering around you, or halibut or these kinds of beautiful personal stories. And I’ll tell you, those fishermen came to us just, like, kind of blown away.

0:22:21 Sonia Strobel: They’d never really experienced anything like that. So it’s become a part of the program every year that we invite them to connect, and it really changes how even our fishing families think about their work. Sometimes it’s a nasty, stormy day, and you just don’t want to go out there. But one of our fishermen said, well, I guess I got to go get something for the members. So it just changes the relationship to work and to community and to your day, to how you think about what you do when you can connect people like that.

0:22:53 Amanda Stassen: Wow, that’s brilliant. That’s actually brilliant. Again, it goes back to the ethos of your brand and what you’re building, which is restoring relationships and putting a face to who’s doing this work, who’s actually fishing this seafood that you’re eating and enjoying and making it real, that it’s not just something that’s mass produced or mass caught. Which kind of takes me to this next question that I kind of wanted to chat with you about.

0:23:22 Amanda Stassen: I recently watched the documentary that CBC did on Skipper Otto called Fresh Catch, and it was really great. And if anyone wants to learn more about fisheries and what Skipper Otto and others are doing out on the west coast to bring change. I would encourage you to watch it. We’ll make sure to put the link in the show notes. But one of the issues that they brought up that really caught my attention specifically was about salmon farming and how bad fish farming is for the natural ecosystem.

0:23:51 Amanda Stassen: One of the issues is the parasitic sea lice infestations, over the years, become more and more resistant to the chemicals that they’re using to treat them. I’d love to hear your take on fish farming, this issue in particular, but also the impact on fisheries.

0:24:10 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, I think it’s a common thing that people hear about ecosystem challenges around fishing or human rights abuses in fishing globally. Or they hear all these kinds of bad news stories and they say, yeah, you know what we shouldn’t eat wildfish. We should just farm fish, it’s going to solve everything. Right. And I can understand that impulse to think that initially, but when you scratch that surface a little bit, it’s not so simple.

0:24:36 Sonia Strobel: We like to eat, the fish that humans tend to like to eat are carnivorous, and that’s a really important thing to think about. We don’t farm carnivores to eat them, typically.

0:24:46 Amanda Stassen:

0:24:47 Sonia Strobel: Why, because there’s an inherent problem. You have to farm some other animal to feed to the animal that you’re going to feed to the people. And so the costs, the carbon footprint, all the complexity around farming carnivores is really huge. So when we farm salmon, we tend to farm them in open pens in the ocean. And these salmon, typically in their life cycle, they migrate, like, halfway to Japan and back.

0:25:15 Sonia Strobel: So they travel massive areas of the open ocean, eating along the way, eating the fish that are along the way. So you take those fish, now, you put them in a pen, you know thousands of fish in tight, tight quarters in this pen, in the open ocean, and then you have to feed them something. And so there’s a few problems with that. The primary fish that are fed to fish in fish farms are harvested by massive extraction vessels off the west coast of Africa, where they’re stripping the protein from one of the most food insecure parts of the world.

0:25:49 Sonia Strobel: Stripping their protein so that we can feed it to salmon so that we can have a fresh salmon on our plate. It’s highly problematic. Right. And then, of course, there’s the disease, as you alluded to. When you put that many salmon who normally travel such huge spaces into a small open pen, you create disease. So now you have to treat disease, but you are treating it in the open ocean. So you are pouring antibiotics and you’re pouring all kinds of things straight into the migratory path of wild salmon who are encountering disease, and they’re encountering lice, and they’re encountering pollutants and nitrogen that’s falling to the bottom of the sea and killing off any living organisms on the bottom of the seafloor because of the lice. You know, they’re enormous pollutant to the open oceans. And there’s been efforts in Canada now to remove open pen salmon farms, particularly from the migratory path of some of our most vulnerable wild salmon.

0:26:48 Sonia Strobel: We’re already seeing the wild salmon bounce back in numbers, just with the first 15 salmon farms coming out of the migratory path. So it’s having a huge effect on the health and safety of our wild salmon. And if we get out of the way, we know that wild salmon, they bounce back. We know that if they get out of the way, they do. And we have countless examples throughout history of salmon recovering from absolute devastation, near wipeout by landslides and things like that. And they recover to be even more abundant than they were when we get out of their way. So I have great confidence that wild fish, they can feed the world’s population when we get out of the way and stop trying to solve the problems in ways that destroy the wildfish, we can coexist in an ecosystem, as humans have done on this coast for 14,000 years. We know that it can be done.

0:27:40 Sonia Strobel: We just need to do it in a respectful, balanced way and not come up with these technologically complex solutions which ultimately are for profit generation. Ultimately, we create these highly complex businesses because they generate a lot of profit for a small group of people, as opposed to community based fisheries, which can create viable, long term living wages for people in their communities to persist in their chosen way of life, that’s very different proposition.

0:28:11 Amanda Stassen: Wow, it’s such a good overview. And in our world, in my world of brand building, it makes me think that I would really call Skipper Otto a challenger brand. A challenger brand is one that sets itself apart by its mindset really.

0:28:30 Sonia Strobel:

0:28:31 Amanda Stassen: It not only has a purpose, but its ambitions are often bigger than its resources call it. More often than not, challenger brands they’re not just prepared to do something bold, they’re going to go against the status quo and existing conventions and the way that things have been done in the category in order to have that breakthrough. So, like Warby Parker, for example, the way we think about and purchase glasses has completely changed.

0:29:00 Amanda Stassen: But one of the characteristics that you’re reminding me about, of a challenger brand, which most brands that lead with purpose are like yourselves, is their ability to tell a story just like you’ve just shared and the importance they put on telling that story. What are some ways that you’ve used storytelling to build and grow the Skipper Otto business? Are there any tools in your toolkit that you use for storytelling that are your go tos?

0:29:29 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, storytelling is absolutely critical. I think you’re right. It’s just the foundation of our brand is that storytelling. And that can be challenging. You’re right. Especially when we have a story as complex as fishing to tell, which even just scratching the surface of the fish farm question, you can see how complex that is. And you can go down a negative spiral of storytelling if you’re not careful. There are documentaries, I’m sure people have seen that just really put a negative spin on the whole industry.

0:30:00 Sonia Strobel: And that can be very powerful, but also very dangerous if we’re not solutions based or solutions oriented. So that’s something that we dance, that balance all the time of how do we provide information? And I think my teaching background probably helps with that, especially teaching in English. And a literature background is like, how do we break things down, how do we break down stories? Again, we’ve talked a lot about that today. Breaking things down into manageable chunks. So we have to break our stories down into manageable chunks. And we need to balance them, the negative stories, the bad news stories, we need to balance them with solutions all the time. So we try to do that. I write a lot in our blog, and I’m balancing our personal family stories. I just wrote one today about our last day of fishing this year.

0:30:52 Sonia Strobel: Those personal stories that explain why this way of life matters, matters that we don’t just turn ourselves into robots, but that we have a way of life that’s meaningful. Trying to balance those personal stories also with some of the bigger picture. Maybe it’s around policy, federal government regulations, around the industry, and how there are they’re helping or harming community based fisheries and giving our members then an opportunity to actively engage, sign a petition, call their mp to advocate for a policy change.

0:31:28 Sonia Strobel: So every time we’re kind of telling a story like that, we’re giving an opportunity for some kind of action, too. So that’s the blog. It’s also social media, things like that, too. Videos, the documentary film you referenced. So just accepting opportunities to tell stories on different platforms. I get asked often to speak at conferences, and I always take those opportunities to storytell. Right. And to do what you and I are doing now, which is like, look at the complexity, break it down, see opportunities to do things differently and to change. And incrementally, we are making things better every time we have an opportunity to storytell.

0:32:11 Amanda Stassen: So good. And you’re so clear about it, too. I love this. I can’t actually believe we’ve come to the end of our time together. Oh, my gosh. Sonia, it’s been absolutely an honor and a privilege spending time with you. Before I let you go, though, I want to make sure that we take a minute and have you share with our listeners two practical tips. And you’ve shared so many already. So if you want to synthesize, that’s totally cool, but that they can apply today to their business, to their career, to purpose, power, their business or brand, what two tips would you share?

0:32:45 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, I think you’re right. It ties back to a lot of things we’ve hit on. So I’ll try to pull that together. And I think the first one is to remember that you’re not alone and you can’t do this alone, and that you need to put people first and build a community that is so critical. And I’ll tell you, in the early days, when it was just my husband, Sean, and I, that was hard. And then when I first began to hire, I hired on students with employment grants from the federal government on a three months and this kind of thing because I was afraid I couldn’t afford to pay people.

0:33:19 Sonia Strobel: But I’ll tell you, a big change happened for us when I decided that we needed to hire fewer, more experienced people.

0:33:27 Amanda Stassen: Right?

0:33:27 Sonia Strobel: So I think that’s one big tip. Just to bear in mind, we have a smaller team in some ways now than we have had at different times over the last 15 years. We have about eight full time permanent staff. But all those eight people are all smarter than me in some way. So whether that’s in marketing or finance or whatever it is, having people who have 20 plus years experience in the industry, bringing those people aboard with a living wage, a competitive salary, that’s super important. Your people are so important.

0:33:58 Sonia Strobel: So remember, you’re not alone, Wolf. I think that’s one important one. And along that line, another thing I want to say just about that is just to remember what you, your actual strengths are and then put yourself into positions where you’re working, aligns with your strengths, and then make sure that you have a business partner or team who counter, who kind of, like, complement that. And so an important book for me, if anybody listening likes to pick up a book, I picked up a book years ago called Rocket Fuel.

0:34:30 Sonia Strobel: And it’s really about the dynamic leadership team of two leaders that they refer to as the visionary and the integrator. And I am totally a visionary type person, as the book describes it. Lots of big ideas, lots of energy. But I can really derail things if you don’t put me in check. My integrator is my reality check. My attention to detail person, the person who makes sure that I don’t whipsaw the team with new ideas all the time. And having the right partnership at the helm is so critical. So that’s the one thing I’d say that’s connected to community and people and your team.

0:35:11 Amanda Stassen: Yes. I love it. Honestly, they’re so good. I want to write these down. So, number one, remember you’re not a lone wolf and surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. And number two, get yourself some rocket fuel and be partnered with somebody who can bring that, the opposite strength to what you have to really propel the business forward. I love that. I’ve taken notes. I’ve taken notes for sure.

0:35:39 Sonia Strobel: Good. I love it. And build yourself one of those decision making matrices and then you’re going to have a rubric and you’re going to be all set. Right?

0:35:48 Amanda Stassen: I’ll be golden. And for all the seafood lovers out there, myself included, or even the seafood curious, tell me again where people can find and connect with you and learn more about Skipper Otto. What’s your website handle?

0:36:03 Sonia Strobel: Yeah, that’s great. We’re at skipperotto.com, so people can come and check us out there. They can also find us on all the social media platforms. At SkipperOtto. That’s Otto. Not A-U-T-O like the car, but O-T-T-O like the name. So you can check us out. Our sign up season is open. You can join for as little as $100. So if you’re just like you said, seafood curious and people kind of want to say, let me just check it out. It’s pretty low barrier to entry. You can buy $100 share.

0:36:31 Sonia Strobel: You can place an order, check it out. Doesn’t work for you. No harm, no foul. But if you are happy with it, you can top up your account, add $100 increments and keep buying seafood all year.

0:36:42 Amanda Stassen: Amazing. Sonya, thank you so much for sharing your story, your passion and your learnings. I think the work that you and your team are doing at Skipper Otto is amazing and so important. Thank you for living your purpose. And I just want to say to you, today the world is made better because of you and the work you’re doing. So thank you again.

0:37:01 Sonia Strobel: Oh thank you Amanda. And the world is made better by you and the work you’re doing. Thank you for bringing all of us here and sharing our stories and reminding us that we’re part of a community of people doing purpose work in the world.

0:37:14 Amanda Stassen: Thank you so much. Hey, thanks for listening to the purpose Power brand podcast. I’m Amanda Stassen. If you liked what you heard, be sure to share and subscribe on your favorite podcast player. We’d also love to hear what resonated with you. Or if you have a guest suggestion, drop us a line at info@bizu.co. Special thanks to Mark Salam for original music and lead podcasting for production. Lastly, if you’re ready to purpose power your brand to grow, win and impact at scale, let’s talk.

0:37:43 Amanda Stassen: Visit www.bizu.co. That’s www.bizu.co. Bye for now.