Archives for 2018

November
20, 2018

4 min read

Spending time at a hotel during the off season doesn’t need to be like a scene out of The Shining. In fact, if you can home in on the right destination, off-season travel can be some of the most fun, rewarding and — yes — cost-effective vacationing you can do. Plan your trip right, and you’ll be able to gain access to hotels, restaurants and events that are too crowded (or expensive) during the tourist-swarmed high season.

Related: 21 Ways to Get Inspired (Infographic)

Over the winter, Long Island’s East Hampton — home to celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Jerry Seinfeld and Martha Stewart — is chock full of activities for budget-minded travelers looking to unwind. Besides possessing some of the most gorgeous beaches on the east coast, the swanky town is packed with all the arts, shopping, eating and drinking the savvy vacationer could want.

Here are five reasons an off-season trip to the Hamptons is the perfect way to recharge.

1. Killer accommodations

A quick scan of booking.com or Airbnb will demonstrate the obvious: It’s way cheaper to find a place to stay in East Hampton over the winter. We suggest checking out Journey East Hampton, which maintains the hip and sophisticated spirit of the Hamptons without the stratospheric cost.

Image credit: Journey East Hampton

All the rooms feature a cozy lounge area, ultra-modern bathrooms and an insanely comfortable bed courtesy of Serta Simmons’ Tomorrow Sleep mattress. Guests can enjoy craft cocktails in the lobby bar or step outside by the bonfire and warm up with s’mores. You can’t do that over the summer. (Well, you can — but people might look at you funny.)

2. Easy travel

Unless you’ve been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours on end on 27 East, it’s almost impossible to comprehend the agony of driving out east during the summer months. But get this: Not only is the one-shot route to the Hamptons mostly clear in the off-season; but once you arrive, the town’s country roads — usually backed up with beach-goers — are incredibly fun to wind through. If you’re the type who finds spirited driving a Zen-like activity, East Hampton’s windy roads can be your nirvana. In fact, in her book, Drivetime, Professor Lynne Pearce, of Lancaster University notes that driving can “positively direct and structure thought.”

Related: 3 Important Changes That Can Save Yourself From Burnout

3. Unique activities

As one of the hottest travel destinations on the East Coast, East Hampton in the high season can be a touristy mess. While certain activities are off limits over the winter (now is not the time to take those surfing lessons), there’s still lots to do on the chilliest of days.

Ice skating at Buckskill Winter Club, cider tastings at Wolffer Estates and special screenings of live theater from the Metropolitan Opera at GuildHall are all totally worthy daytime options from December through February.

4. Trendy restaurants

Try to make a reservation at locals-only Italian favorite Nick & Toni’s during the summer, and you’ll be lucky if you can sit after 4 or before 11. During the off-season, however, you can rub elbows with some of the town’s biggest names. (Alec Baldwin is a regular.) Typical waits at Bostwick’s Chowder House, a casual, locals-approved seafood spot, can be well over an hour from May through August. We much prefer walking right in and scoring one of their legendary lobster rolls immediately, thank you very much.

Related: 11 Habits of Truly Happy People

5. Natural beauty

Fighting for towel space on one of the Hamptons’ iconic beaches is hardly a calming experience. But a brisk, centering, off-season morning stroll on Indian Wells Beach or Atlantic Avenue — both open during the winter and blissfully uncrowded — is just the opposite, and sure to recharge your creative spirit. Science backs this up as well; in his research on the psychological and cognitive effects of the outdoors, neuroscientist David Strayer has found that time in nature enhances higher-order thinking, restores attention and boosts creativity. For even more inspiration, visit the 16-acre garden at LongHouse Reserve with sculptures by acclaimed architect Buckminster Fuller. It’s the ideal place for smartphone-addicted cubicle dwellers to unplug, unwind and invigorate.

November
19, 2018

7 min read

In this ongoing column, The Digest, Entrepreneur.com News Director Stephen J. Bronner speaks with food entrepreneurs and executives to see what it took to get their products into the mouths of customers.

Chris Hunter is one of the guys responsible for Four Loko, the formerly caffeinated alcoholic drink that was blamed for causing a few deaths, and which the government then cracked down hard on.

Four Loko is still on the market today — and apparently selling well — but Hunter, who was 25 when the brand was created, has since moved on to other businesses. His current pursuit is leading Koia, a plant-based protein beverage company. Quite the career pivot, right?

The beverage brand launched nationally in Whole Foods in 2016 and has since expanded to the shelves of more than 4,000 U.S. stores. It expects to have $10 million in sales for this year. Koia’s products include five flavors of its original protein beverage, as well as three fruit infusion flavors. The company plans to introduce a keto line in January.

Related: How This Alcohol Industry Newcomer Created a Japanese Whiskey Brand for the U.S.

Entrepreneur asked Hunter about his career shift, what interested him about Koia and his advice for launching a product.

Chris Hunter

Image credit: Courtesy of Koia

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you go from Four Loko to Koia?

My life had evolved. I was in my early 30s and my first son was born. Life was just different than it was back then. I was looking for something I was a little more aligned with. Craft beer was really popular at the time, and it still is, so I found a small craft brewery outside of Chicago that was creating an alcoholic root beer. I formed a relationship with the creator and founder — essentially we brought in this company and brand under a subsidiary of [Four Loko parent company] Phusion Projects — and we created the brand Not Your Father’s Root Beer. We ended up selling that brand to Pabst shortly after.

At that point life was changing again, and my second son was born. He was born dairy intolerant, so we became a dairy-free household. My wife was studying to be a nutritionist. We were starting to eat a lot differently. My workouts were changing from when I was younger, from typical gym days to now doing yoga and triathlons. I was much more aware of health and wellness in general.

I started investing in some small, better-for-you companies and products, from meal delivery kits services to a product called Raw Nature 5, which was the original form of Koia. It just so happened that the product was in my gym, and I had been drinking it.

Why was an attractive product to you?

As I started to do my due diligence, Raw Nature 5 was a really bad name, and it had this really bad bottle and label. But it was selling really well. It was only in 30 stores in Chicago. I started to dig into it a little bit more. One store told us it was their best-selling product, and it was selling for six bucks a bottle. I stopped into a Whole Foods and noticed there was a good amount of shelf space dedicated to this product. As I was standing there, I watched a consumer basically pitch the product to another consumer.

A bunch of industry veterans, including Mark Rampolla who created Zico, invested in the product, so I invested alongside them. I was the local guy who had some entrepreneurial experience, so I formed a good relationship with Raw Nature 5’s co-founders. As they started moving along, the company got into a difficult situation — it was running out of money.

Image credit: Courtesy of Koia

We collectively decided to pull Raw Nature 5 off the shelves, because it wasn’t a scalable product at that point. There wasn’t a process in place to sell it nationwide. But I believed in the product so much, so me and other investors decided to invest what was a significant amount for us. I talked about wanting to bet on myself and take the reins. So I came in to help pivot the company and co-found the new company and new product, which we collectively rebranded as Koia.

Related: 5 Ways Switching to Plant-Based Diet Boosts Your Productivity

What can other entrepreneurs learn from your experience of launching into Whole Foods?

There’s multiple ways to go to market. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. A lot of companies will saturate one particular market like New York or L.A. or wherever and prove out their story and then launch nationally. We were fortunate that we had an opportunity to launch nationally with Whole Foods. You can’t really turn that down, but it’s an expensive way to go. We had to take on investment and grow the company quickly.

My advice would just be to think through what you want the final outcome of your company and product to be and what route to market best fits that, whether it’s a regional build or national rollout.

What has been the company’s greatest challenge, and how were you able to overcome it?

The natural food beverage industry has a ton of new products launching, so it’s a crowded space and there’s a lot of noise around it. It’s a difficult route to market. How we overcame it is we added an extraordinary amount of support to any retailer that we’ve launched at. When we had the opportunity to launch with Whole Foods, we didn’t have the mentality of, “Oh great, we’re done, now let’s sit back and watch what happens.” We hired merchandisers. We did a lot of in-store demos. We did price reductions. We did everything in our power to make sure that consumers were exposed to the brand.

We made sure that the labeling really spoke to our selling points that there’s 18 grams of protein and only 4 grams of sugar in the entire bottle. That draws people in right away. They’re intrigued. We were confident that once people tried our product, they would like it and become repeat purchasers. That’s an expensive thing to do, but I believe that’s the right way to go to market.

Where does the name Koia come from?

As we came up with the name Koia, we used a branding agency, and looked into our belief as a company and what we wanted to stand for. We honed in on blue zones — places in the world that people live longer than others. What we started to look at is there’s these five common trends with people that live in blue zones. One of them is they eat a primarily plant-based diet, which clearly fit with Koia. It fits with our mentality as a company. The name Koia is derived from one of those blue zones, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.

Related: This Beverage Entrepreneur Got His Start by Simply Asking a Big Company to Let Him Sell Their Products

What is the most unusual thing about working in this particular niche?

What’s interesting to me that it’s such a small industry. It seems like everybody knows each other, but it’s also such a friendly industry. I’m just shocked at how many other companies and brands we collaborate with are open to doing that. Other companies we talk to share their stories of successes and failures, and we try to figure things out together.

How do people react to your past with Four Loko?

People want to understand how I went from that to this, because it’s pretty opposite ends of the spectrum. To me there’s no right or wrong. I’m not ingrained in one way of eating or drinking versus another. It’s about options. What it ultimately boils down to that I like to work on things I’m aligned with, and Koia is aligned with my life and my lifestyle right now.

November
17, 2018

2 min read

According to an infographic by Business Backer, 93 percent of employees feel that trust in their boss is essential to being satisfied at work. Employees who aren’t satisfied might be tempted to work with less excitement, to miss work or cause problems within the workplace.

That’s why, if you want to keep your business running smoothly, it’s important to build trust with your employees. Good leaders use all sorts of communication tricks to learn what their employees are feeling, adapt based on those feelings and then clearly explain what to do next.

This infographic breaks down 10 proven ways to build trust, which include:

1. Show them the big picture. If your employees can understand the company’s direction, they can contextualize their efforts and see why they’re important. That’s why you should always introduce company goals, ways of working and role expectations for every new employee.
2. Set clear expectations. This goes back to the first point. But if you can define exactly what’s needed, then your employees can be more focused and trust that their efforts are worthwhile. You should ask them to recap what you’re telling them and ask if your expectations are achievable. That way, everyone is on the same page about what comes next.

You can learn about the other strategies in the infographic below.

November
16, 2018

8 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Amazon recently opened two of its three Amazon 4-star stores, making its collective brick-and-mortar experiences tally up at over 100 locations between Amazon Books, Amazon Pop-Up, Amazon Go and now Amazon 4-star. These investments from Amazon have customers, competitors and commerce-driven professionals alike speculating the future and the present of what Amazon is up to, but one thing is for certain … physical retail is here to stay. Make no mistake, however, that Amazon’s investment into this space is unlike anything we have seen in the past.

Related: Why This Online Clothing Company Started Sharing Its Profits With Brick-and-Mortar Stores

Merging its extensive consumer and inventory data generated from Amazon.com with futuristic ideas of what brick-and-mortar retail should look like, Amazon has opened its 4-star stores in the Soho neighborhood of New York City, a suburban town just outside of Denver, Colo., and most recently in Berkley, Calif. Presumably, these stores blend in with others if you were to simply stroll by and take a quick peak, but blending in with other retailers is exactly the opposite of what Amazon 4-star delivers.

In a recent interview I had with Cameron Janes, vice president of physical stores for Amazon, he explained that Amazon 4-star has been “built around customers and will continue to operate with consumers at the core of every decision we make.” Expanding on this, Janes stressed that “with data leading decisions, humans have approved every single product in our stores.”

With the human touch often dismissed in our technology-centric world, how is an online marketplace giant like Amazon welcoming the human touch in their physical storefront experiences? And what can other business leaders learn from this?

Below, consider four tips to take away from the newly introduced Amazon 4-star stores.

1. Customer insight should drive every decision businesses make.

Amazon 4-star stores have a curated mix of products that are only rated at four stars and above by customers on Amazon.com or are recognized through sales data as top selling or top trending items. Collectively, these details reflect what customers across the globe are buying and loving — ultimately helping to narrow down expansive product searches for customers and deliver trusted consumer finds. This approach to identifying the inventory assortment available at Amazon 4-star stores is something any business leader can learn from, but too often businesses dismiss data generated from their customers. At Amazon 4-star, however, this data is proactively reviewed and then applied to the decisions made regarding immediate and future inventory assortments — among other decisions, as well.

Related: What Small Retailers Can Learn From the Industry’s Push Towards AI and Big Data

Genna Gold, senior manager of local business outreach for Yelp, explained to me that the value of consumer ratings “have changed the way consumers evaluate where to spend their time and money.” Expanding on this, Gold shares that “reviews support customers in their purchasing decisions when they’re already in buy mode, which makes them highly transactional.”

According to a BrightLocal survey of over 1,000 U.S. consumers, 85 percent of respondents trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Amazon 4-star is smart — to say the least — to bring this review strategy into its physical environments. Supporting these 4-star or higher ratings are actual customer testimonials, which Amazon 4-star displays via printed review cards merchandised next to each respective product in combination with digital signage that is updated in real-time and highlights the price, customer ratings, product details and Amazon Prime price savings. The main takeaway here, however? Past customer purchases are what help push future customer sales.

2. Be where your customers are and know who they are.

When it came time for Amazon to identify where it would open its first three Amazon 4-star stores, it knew one thing mattered most.

“Whether it’s in a mall like our Colorado location or is free-standing such as our Soho store is, we just wanted to be where our customers are,” explained Janes.

The Colorado location marks Amazon’s second physical store within Park Meadows, Colorado’s largest mall. Joining an Amazon Pop-Up, the Amazon 4-star store benefits from already having established data on the local demographics of this particular area. And local — believe it or not — is an important factor in the Amazon 4-star strategy.

As Janes explained to me, “In each of our Amazon 4-star locations, customers will find products curated specifically to their regional market. In our Colorado location, for example, we feature ‘Trending Around Denver’ items that have been top-performing items sold in that area. We’re able to change this frequently based on sales data to proactively accommodate local customers and ultimately better support each unique, local environment.”

As it turns out, being where your customers are is only one piece to the retail puzzle for Amazon. Knowing who they are is just as important — and as Amazon 4-star shows us by example, supporting customers with real-time inventory insight and product offerings in direct response to historic sales, local market trends and real-time data can help achieve this. Business leaders across all categories can use this same strategy in their own efforts to achieve stronger sales success.

Related: Alibaba’s Futuristic Supermarket in China Is Light-Years Ahead of the U.S. — and Shows Where Amazon Will Likely Take Whole Foods

3. Focus on your customers, not your competition.

When challenged with whether other merchants impacted Amazon’s decision-making in opening physical stores, Janes confidently stated that “we don’t focus a lot on the competition.” Instead, Janes stressed multiple times that what Amazon does focus on is “our customers.”

With a customer-centric strategy leading their decisions, Amazon recognizes that for most consumers, the stores will be the first physical interaction they have with Amazon. As a result, employees are trained to put customers first — plain and simple.

“What matters to Amazon is customer obsession. We obsess over their experiences and want the employees within Amazon 4-star to do the same,” Janes explained.

To help support its customers, Amazon 4-star designed its stores with an easy-to-navigate floor plan that highlights various categories of products that include consumer electronics, kitchen products, home decor, toys, books, games and more through simple merchandising strategies without distracting displays. Using both traditional signage and digital signage, customers shopping within an Amazon 4-star store can easily gain product knowledge, customer ratings and even suggested products to complement other items based on past customer purchases. This clutter free approach to merchandising has another benefit, as well, which is allowing employees to easily see throughout the store and more easily support customers as a result.

“Our merchandising is simple because it doesn’t need to be complicated. We answer the most obvious questions that customers want to know through our signage and there’s a clear line of vision throughout any point of our store. This helps our employees engage more easily with customers and view the entire store to identify who may need assistance at any given time,” explained Janes.

Expanding on this, Janes shared that “it’s a responsibility for our employees to know about our inventory so that they can make sure our customers end up with the right products based on what they need.”

This customer-centric approach is not futurist like many of Amazon’s other commerce strategies, but then again today’s modern merchants are not necessarily known for customer service anymore. Amazon is re-inventing how customer service looks in brick-and-mortar environments — as well as that despite competition, the customer should always remain top-of-mind.

4. Incorporate technology in combination with the human touch.

Amazon 4-star stores are highly curated and represent a direct reflection of their customers, but this doesn’t happen by observation alone. Amazon depends greatly on technology and data to identify what are top selling items and must-have products for its stores. Additionally, Amazon 4-star is the perfect destination for consumers to engage with tech products such as Alexa to help customers identify if it’s a purchase they want to make. Collectively, these experiences help Amazon 4-star deliver stronger customer engagement opportunities and sales alike. But, the human touch is not dismissed in these actions since every product being sold is in fact based on past human choices thanks to technology.

Related: Amazon Opens 4-Star Store in New York City

Through technology, Amazon has gained more clarity about who its customers are, what their customers want and how they can better support their customers in their end goals, which is to purchase products they both need and want. Conveniently enough, when putting the customer first, Amazon also reaches its goal, which is to continue to be a leader in the world of commerce — not just online.

As you aim to reach your own goals in business, consider who is really leading your decisions. Is it exclusively technology? Or do you welcome the human touch, as well?

As Janes explains best, aim to create something that is “data driven yet human approved.”