Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Simon Griffiths

Intro: “Who gives a crap” … well Simon Griffiths does and I do too actually but a little more on that in a moment. Firstly, hi I’m Jenelle McMaster and this is episode 9 of Season 3 of the Change Happens Podcast. Conversations with influential leaders on leading through change and the lessons learned along the way. Today I’m joined by Simon Griffiths, the co-founder and CEO of Who Gives a Crap, a social enterprise committed to their motto “Toilets for everyone”. Two and a half billion people across the world have no access to a toilet. This lack of sanitation in the developing world results in 2,000 children under five dying every day. Simon has made it his mission to do something about it. He’s a businessman, philanthropist and activist and his company has, to date, successfully donated more than $10 million towards its cause, to its charity partners. Simon is also well known for his work as co-founder of Shebeen, Australia’s first non-profit café and bar, known for donating 100% of its profit to seven development aid projects. He is a fascinating guy with a fascinating business, working tirelessly on things that really matter in the world. I took so much away from this discussion. He has shown that there is a different way to do capitalism. He’s shown how you can use stubbornness and antithetical thinking and polarising ideas to do amazing things and he lives humour is an incredibly powerful lever of change. There was so much in this discussion, and I absolutely loved it, I hope you do to.

Jenelle: Hi Simon, thanks for joining us today. I’d love to start, if I could, by having you help the audience understand, you know, who you are, a bit about your family, where you grew up.

Simon: So I was born in London, we moved to Australia when I was four and I grew up in Perth. Kind of a classic, you know, middle class Australian upbringing I guess, so a lot of time on the beach. We were fortunate to live quite close to the beach, which you know, having British parents, I think was kind of one of the main goals of moving to Australia. Yeah and now, you know, ended up moving over to the east coast of Australia and I spend time between here and Los Angeles working with our American team and so my day job, if you will, is running a toilet paper company called Who Gives A Crap. We sell, you know, different forest friendly toilet paper, kitchen towels, tissues, cloths and more recently some hair and body products under a new brand called “Good time”. We use half of our profits to help build toilets in different parts of the developing world and Who Gives A Crap is the name of our toilet paper company that we started about ten years ago.

Jenelle: Okay, well it is an unusual name – right. That’s a start right there. It’s certainly incredibly unique. How did you come up with it and I’m interested in whether or not the uniqueness of that name influence or impacts the way clients have perceived your business.

Simon: [laugh], I think it depends on who the client is [laugh]. I think, no I would say 100% it has but the way its influenced it depends on who the client is. So [laugh] …

Jenelle: So how did you come up with it and then tell me a bit about those different reactions.

Simon: Yeah, so I guess, you know, what … something I learned early on in my career is that the best ideas are the ones that some people love and some people hate and ideas that when you tell people them, they say “that is so simple, so perfect, I can’t believe someone hasn’t done it before” and those two things, these really amazing early signs that you’ve got something that has a high viral coefficient because people like telling other people about things that they love or things that they hate or things that are so simple that they can’t believe that no one has done them before and so the Who Gives A Crap name, you know, that came from … it was a quarter second business idea epiphany, you know, those classic kind of …

Jenelle: Quarter second … I haven’t had one of those yet, I can’t wait until it happens [laugh].

Simon: [laugh], those classic kind of moments that people talk about, that was exactly what happened but it took ten years of thinking beforehand, you know, trying to understand how I could use the skills that I developed, which are around economics and engineering and finance to solve problems that I cared about which were, you know, social mobility, particularly in developing worlds until one day walking in the bathroom and seeing a pack of toilet paper sitting there and saying “oh my god, we should sell toilet paper, use the profits to build toilets and call it Who Gives A Crap” and I called three friends and they all said “I love it, you’ve got to do it, it’s awesome, I can’t believe no one hasn’t done it before” and then as I started talking to, you know, marketing experts and people who knew a lot more about brands than we did, we got this polarising response of “I love it” or “you can’t do that, that’s not okay” and that for me was like a, you know, huge tick box of, you know, making sure that we’re on the right track and realising that this was something that was going to be special.

Jenelle: God, there is just so much in there that I want to kind of understand a bit more. First of all, on that polarising element, that’s really interesting to me because somebody who maybe has a high need to be liked or be highly resonant with everybody, which is probably impossible ideal to chase, how do you kind of deal with the nays … like how do you … doesn’t that sort of freak you out a bit that there’s a whole lot of people that go “oh hell no, that’s not going to be a thing”.

Simon: Um …

Jenelle: Where does your confidence about leaning into the polarising nature of that come from?

Simon: Yeah, like I think … I think as an entrepreneur, you have to, you know, you’re doing things that no one has ever done before, that’s kind of the definition of being an entrepreneur and innovating. I’m not super interested in kind of copying things that have been done before. That’s like less exciting for me. We’re not in it for the money [laugh], you might have figured that out already and so there’s no real benefit of copying someone because all that you’re doing if you’re copying is trying to make money and that’s sort of not what gets us out of bed in the morning. If you’re trying to do something new, it’s inevitable that you’ll be told you can’t do that and you have to work out when to use that to fuel your fire and to, you know, to prove someone wrong, that actually you can and when you have to listen and heed to that advice because it’s actually true and correct and being an entrepreneur, I think is often about learning how to walk that line and understanding when someone is giving you feedback, whether you should listen to that feedback or whether that feedback tells you that you’re on the right track even if they’re telling you not to do what you’re doing and I think that’s a really interesting part about, particularly things that … like Who Gives A Crap and the business that I worked on before this, a really interesting part of them is that a lot of people say “oh, that makes me feel slightly uncomfortable” and I think that’s a really interesting place to be, particularly when you’re talking about the sanitation problem which is slightly uncomfortable, you know. Its toilets and its icky and its gross, it diarrhea related disease. Its things that people don’t like talking about and so getting to the edge of that place where someone feels slightly uncomfortable I think is kind of a really interesting and powerful place to be.

Jenelle: So you said when to use no to fuel your fire. Do you … are there … do you have any early recollections of that, of being told no, for whatever it was. Whether you were at school or something like that where you felt that burn in you to go “well, let me show you” … any early memories.

Simon: [laugh]. I mean, you know, now we’ve got … we have a six year old boy who is a mini version of me [laugh].

Jenelle: Oh how do you feel about that [laugh].

Simon: So its bought up all of these … these kind of, you know, I don’t know if they’re memories or just these deep sort of emotions in reflection on who I was as a child and realising that, you know, he exhibits a lot of the same stubbornness as what I did as a kid and probably, you know, didn’t have done and probably still do in many places as an adult. So I think that, yeah, 100%. You know, I think when people talk about what makes kids really special, it’s often that they have this deviant streak and if you’ve got a kid who always does what they’re told and is really well behaved, that’s often kind of lesser, you know, less interesting that a kid who … who will push back and push the boundaries a bit and that’s 100% who I was as a child. Now as parents, it’s incredibly frustrating [laugh]. I have so much empathy …

Jenelle: [laugh] are you a parent sitting back going “yeah, welcome to our world”.

Simon: [laugh] yeah, they kind of laugh at us having a hard time with it and … because, you know, they see exactly what they went through 30 years earlier.

Jenelle: Did they foster that in you? Like how did you … were there lessons about the way that you were … were you encouraged to explore your stubbornness – put it that way?

Simon: Yeah, we’ve got really deep really quickly. Let me just say this isn’t somewhere I would normally go on a podcast [laugh].

Jenelle: Sorry, this is where I go, it’s my fault [laugh].

Simon: But yeah, you know, like I think they laugh as well because that’s the struggle that they had because I was a mini version of my dad and so …

Jenelle: Oh, the gift that gives on giving!

Simon: You know, so it’s this, yeah, it’s this generational déjà vu that just keeps presenting and happening that I’m sure we’re going to have if our son one day has kids, then we’ll see the same thing happen again. For me, it’s been really interesting to realise that that stuff is … there’s a lot of nature in there and maybe a little bit of nurture but it’s really deeply ingrained in who people really are and that’s I think, has been fascinating to realise that, you know, a lot of those attributes are present from birth and they can go in the wrong direction and end up taking people to places that aren’t great. For me, I was able to use it and harness it and it enabled me to get to a really good place but …

Jenelle: What’s the difference? What makes the difference to harnessing those … I mean I’m fascinated by that because you’ve used a bunch of words that typically are associated with negative things. You’ve talked the stubbornness, you’ve talked about polarising. You’ve talked about … you even used the word “deviant” in there – right, so how do you take those attributes which could and should be, maybe neutral words, but they are seem negatively, what’s been the ingredients that have made that be allowed to be channelled in a really constructive social conscious way, the way you’ve done it.

Simon: You know, I think what's really interesting about part of what got me excited about this space that we’re in today, is that we had a different view of what the world should look like and no one was building it and so we couldn’t just go out and get jobs and work for people that, you know, shared this vision of how the world should look in the future because it wasn’t … there weren’t people that were building that version of the world and so we had this, you know, this deep fire in our belly, this stubbornness to wield that world into existence, that was why ultimately led us to go and create, you know, a string of different businesses and this one being the on that took off, that has showed that there is a different way to do capitalism and that that is actually a really positive way to build businesses from a lot of the traditional business metrics as well as the social impact metrics and so I think, you know, that deviance, that stubbornness, they’re all things that have played out really positively for me. They … they’ve also got me into trouble many times before as well, especially as a kid as we’ve talked about, you know, and that would have been very hard for my parents and it was very hard for my parents [laugh] at points but you know, they are positive things. You know, there’s this … this quote, I think it’s George Bernard Shaw, “the reason a man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”. Now let's forget that we’re just talking about men in this quote because it seems a very old quote …

Jenelle: Let’s take that as inter generic, yeah.

Simon: Yeah let's remove the gender from that quote but you know, when you think about all progress depending on the unreasonable man, that requires people who are deviant by nature, that they think about the world differently and that they’re stubborn enough to really try to bring something to life that no one has done before and so, you know, they are unreasonable qualities that I think are necessary if we’re going to progress the way that the world operates.

Jenelle: Tell me a bit about, and I love that quote by the way. Tell me about your view of how the world should be? What is that vision?

Simon: I think, you know, what I started to realise as I learned more about business was that I didn’t understand why people were obsessed with maximising profit for shareholders [laugh]. It’s a meaning … like there’s all these other things that are problematic out there in the world, people don’t need more money, that’s not going to go and solve, you know, problems. The way I viewed it in a simplistic naïve way of looking at the world when I was younger was that all that was doing was making rich people richer and the, you know, there’s diminishing returns on happiness once you have a base level of income that’s enough to get by on comfortably. It didn’t make sense to me that the rich just got richer and there were all these people that were being left behind that were finding it very difficult to get their foot onto the economic ladder to start, you know, climbing their way up and I just saw this massive piece of inequality that existed and capitalism was there just to make the rich richer when there was an opportunity to actually use capitalism to create a more positive version of the world and I believe that there were many other people that thought the same way that I did and that they just needed products that enabled them to, you know, show this latent demand that I believe truly existed in the marketplace in the economy and so creating products that gave back and were profit making but had a donation model embedded into them was, you know, what we did to try and prove out that actually the old way of doing capitalism was not the right, the best, the perfect way of capitalism and if we’re trying to, you know, truly make the world a better place, then we should do capitalism differently and those that do will be rewarded by this, what we think is quite a large amount of demand that exists in the economy in the market.

Jenelle: I want to come back what you’ve learnt around doing capitalism differently, but first I want to understand where your level of social conscious comes from. It feels really deep and really core to who you are. What … where do you think that comes from?

Simon: It’s probably … it’s from a few different places. So I was that kid at school who sold stuff to everyone at school [laugh]. You know, if there was a buck to be made, I was trying figure out how to make it and there was something in the thrill of making a buck but there was also something kind of icky and disgusting about selling things to other people that also made me feel a little bit uncomfortable with myself. So I think, you know, I loved kind of certain elements of capitalism from a, you know, an operator perspective but there were parts of it that something just deep down didn’t feel quite right. So that’s kind of a, you know, one of the earlier kind of pieces of puzzle I guess and then I think I had this other really formative experience when I went through University and got good grades, probably for the first time in my life and sort of got funnelled into the more … one of the more traditional career paths and ended up working as … first of all as an engineer and then as an investment banker in, you know, really kind of archaic corporates and for want of a better word, and the experience working in investing banking was really interested because I had … I was getting paid very very well and realised very quickly that my happiness was at an all-time low, while I was doing math work, despite having more money than I had ever had before … yeah and so for me, it was this very clear disconnect between money and happiness that made me think about what was actually truly important in the world. It was at that point that I started to say “well, if I don’t want to do these … the jobs that are held up on a pedestal to students at University, you know, these are the tier one kind of places to go and work, what is it that I want to do” and started thinking about what it was I was actually really passionate about and that was when I realised that I needed to think about some of the things that I had previously done as hobbies, like going and travelling and volunteering and doing different stuff in Southeast Asia and further afield throughout University and why that was interesting and then what part of it I could try to carry through to a potential future career. So kind of joining the dots between “here’s what I learnt at University and the skillset that I have and here’s the problems that I truly want to solve in the world”. How do I get those two worlds to collide? What's the kind of overlap and realising that we could start and run businesses in Australia that used profits to help fund projects in different parts of the developing world to improve social mobility and for me, that was this kind of beautiful moment where capitalism started to not make me feel icky for the first time and as a result it, you know, it just felt right and I knew that that was kind of what was … what I wanted to go on and explore next and try and prove was, you know, a new different better way of doing things. There’s something about the developing world that I find really fascinating because there’s innovation, there’s the scrappiness to … scrappiness as in the ability for people to get things done in ways that you never would have thought of, that is bred in that environment that we often miss in Australia and the US and other more developed parts of the world and I think I hadn’t truly unpacked what I was really interested in in that environment until spending some time thinking about it and realising that what I found really interesting was, you know, why myself or someone born in Australia or the UK would have these vastly different set of opportunities available to them than someone that was born in, you know, somewhere in Southeast Asia or somewhere else in the developing world. They might be born one side of an invisible border to someone else 100 metres away and again, the two sets of opportunities available to those individuals could be vastly vastly different, you know, North Korea and South Korea is a great example. I mean there it’s not an invisible border, it’s a very much visible border but I think the realisation that billions of people with access to adequate sanitation, there’s hundreds of millions without adult literacy, without, you know, clean water, without potentially debilitating eyesight that can easily be restored. All of those people, engineers, there’s inventors, there’s entrepreneurs, there’s musicians, there’s artists. There’s all sorts of people that exist in that part of the population, that may never ever be able to see what their true potential is because they’re just … need to stay focussed on survival and, you know, doing the best that they can and to me that massive massive untapped potential, I think, is one of the most unfortunate things about the state of the world that we currently live in and if we could somehow figure out how to tap into that, we might have many more Einsteins, Picassos, you know, brilliant brilliant thinkers, doers, out there in the world that would make the world a vastly different place and that’s I think what is truly where my passion lies.

Jenelle: It’s so interesting listening to you Simon because to me, as I listen to you, you’ve … it feels like you’ve got that really interesting combination of being highly instinctive, ie you listen to the pit of your stomach and you think “oh this feels icky, what is that about” and highly cerebral, like an engineer who’s thinking through the mechanics of a business model and how could we, you know, systemically change all that sort of stuff. It’s a really interesting blend, I think, of both sides of your brain and the way that you operate. Do you see it that way as well, that you are sort of head and heart?

Simon: Yeah, I mean I’ve always thought about it slightly different to that in that, you know, like I understand brand and marketing which for me are about emotion and the way that you react to something emotionally and the feeling that things give you but can also, you know, I understand the numbers and the metrics and love, that side of things as well. So, I guess with a permanent business lens on, that’s the way I go. I think about the left and the right sides of the brain but maybe … you know, maybe I think you’re kind of describing it in a slightly different way that perhaps, you know, is maybe more contextual from a psychology perspective but yeah.

Jenelle: Maybe! Its … just sort of thinking about that, those different elements. There’s a really interesting just the position of the irreverence and the humour of your company name and the brand, with the gravity of the cause. How does that play out in your organisational culture, people that work with you and how that sort of rings through your organisation?

Simon: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So the way that we think about culture, and it’s taken us a while to kind of codify this and realise, you know, what's the magic that’s in there but the way that we think about it now is, you know, we’re trying to optimise, for culture we’re often thinking about how we optimise for happiness because we believe a happy workforce is the most productive, the most resilient and the most helpful. I think 30/40 years ago, if you asked, you know, workplace experts how do you make people more happy, the common answer would have been “well you need to pay them more money and give them more pay increases and something to shoot for” but I think today, we actually know that that’s not true and we subscribe to Dan Pinks theory that he talks about in his book “Drive” and his Ted Talk, he talks about motivation. I think it’s a pretty good proxy for happiness. So he says that it comes from autonomy where you’re setting clear goals for people, then getting out of their way and allowing them to achieve them. Mastery where people are working on core skill sets that they truly want to master themselves and purpose where they understand how the work that they’re doing today ultimately ladders up to the greater good and so if you think about our organisation, purpose is such a deep part of our DNA which we’re very lucky. Every organisation has purpose. It’s a deeper part of our DNA than it is for a lot of organisations. So we have to think, you know, not … carefully about not what that purpose is but how we connect our team into that purpose and we do that by thinking about, you know, what are the metrics that we’re setting in the company and how do those metrics flow through to the impact that we’re trying to create, be it our social impact or our environmental impact and the, you know, the gold standard, what we’re trying to shoot for is getting to a place where every team member could say “I’m doing this task today because I know that if I get it right, it achieves this which allows the company to get to its impact that it’s trying to achieve at the end of this year or in five years, at the end of our 30 year horizon that we’re shooting for”, and that’s kind of the gold standard that we try to get to. We’re not perfect so I think we’ve gone through phases where our culture has been incredible and we’ve gone through phases where it’s taken hits because we’ve not got one or all of those things working perfectly well and culture, as you know, it’s something that’s living and its changing and it grows and it shrinks and, you know, I think of it a little bit like a sourdough culture or a kombucha culture. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sourdough culture but if …

Jenelle: No, but I’ve had sourdough [laugh], don’t know about sourdough culture!

Simon: Yeah, if you forget to feed it, it like starts to smell funny and goes like a funky colour. If you feed it too much, that’s not good either [laugh], its very kind of delicate and I think that … you know, delicate is not the right word but culture is something that you have to constantly work on to, you know, to keep it really great and it changes and it goes through periods where it’s better, yeah and so I think that’s kind of very much true for our culture as well and when we’re going through those phases where we’re not getting it 100% right, it’s often because we’re not, you know, we’re doing something that’s making it harder for autonomy to be pervasive in the organisation or we’ve moved away from the checks and balances that we have in place to ensure that everyone’s working on mastering a core skillset that they truly want to or, you know, we’ve let the distance between our purpose and our team grow too big. You know, it’s one of those three things that we’re not getting right over time that … well we’re getting all of those things really right over time that leads to a great culture or a culture that needs a little bit of work to get it back to its true potential.

Jenelle: So, a couple of things. One, I love that you have, I guess, being clear on what you mean by happiness because I think that term is … can be quite fraught and I think it can be an ideal state that … or a state that people push to be ideal. Obviously we experience things like sadness, that’s okay, that’s a normal and natural emotion but I think is it distilled by motivation, mastering purpose is a really good way to think about that. How do you know when your culture is not quite right? You just said there, you know, it’s this thing that has to be nurtured and sometimes we don’t always get it right. How do you know?

Simon: I think it’s like any … it’s like any relationship. You know part of it is, you know, like reading the room and part of it is asking [laugh].

Jenelle: Yep.

Simon: Hey, you know, like how’s our relationship going at the moment? What do we need to work on? And so we’re all always reading the room but then we also do bi-annual, you know, twice a year culture app surveys for our team to understand what the engagement score looks like overall and then how we’re going and the buckets that we’re working on to try and improve and so we constantly have, in our case, okay ours or goals that we are setting to improve or work on different parts of our company culture, whether that’s our enablement or yeah, other parts of our culture, we’re constantly looking at those and thinking about how we can intentionally work on them and improve them over time and that’s hard. It’s a really hard thing to … it takes times, there’s no quick wins. There are some quick wins but mostly not quick wins [laugh] and so it’s, you know, something you have to really intentional and meaningful about how you approach that work. I should say we have a whole people and culture team as well. So this is what they think about day in, day out. It’s not something that just sort of happens in the background. It’s like a very large part of our organisation and culture is something that the whole company talks about, kind of like innovation. You might have an innovation team but every part of the business is responsible for innovation as well and that sort of broadly how we think about culture.

Jenelle: So zooming back out then to, you know, the way that you run your business model and the way that you are trying to change or embody the change of a different way of using capitalism. How are you going about trying to engender that more broadly than just your own organisation or is it by showing people through your organisation that there is another way?

Simon: So our company’s mission is to make sure that everyone in the world has access to a clean toilet and clean water and we want to do that by 2050, which is 28 years away from where we are today. There’s about two billion people globally that don’t have access to adequate sanitation today so this is a really crazy huge lofty goal that we’re going to try and achieve. We will not get there by ourselves. You know, we need many other organisations that are attacking the same goal but we think that we can, you know, attack part of it, we can raise awareness about it, we can also try to further innovation and new technology that will help to achieve these things and hopefully we can, you know, get all the way there in 28 years from now but I think a few years ago, we realised that if we pull that off and it is an insanely lofty goal that will be incredibly hard to achieve, so if we pull it off it will be miraculous, you know, incredible amazing outcome, very very hard to do. If we do pull that off, we’re going to be just so narrowly focussed on making it happen that we realise that there are a lot of these other kind of big social challenges, social problems that are out there in the world that we would never ever be able to touch ourselves cos we’d be so focussed on sanitation and clean water and so a few years ago, we asked ourselves if we’re truly trying to have the most impact in the world, is it right to be so narrowly focussed on, you know, sanitation and clean water and we came to the realisation that yes it is. This is a very hard goal to bring to life so we need to have this very narrow focus but we can potentially impact some of these other areas if we can show that our business model can achieve financial returns for its shareholders at scale whilst also generating social impact at scale and if we can do those two things together, then we’ll start to bring more entrepreneurs and more investors into this space that we’re in, to hopefully create many more business models like ours hopefully. Better than ours cos they’ll be able to iterate and improve on what we’ve done and think about things differently and hopefully be smarter than us, to have many more, you know, thousands of more business models that can go out and solve some of these other social problems that we have in the world. And so, we see our role in sort of almost being kind of a lighthouse for this sector, this space that we’re in, to do those two things. To show that we can generate financial returns at scale whilst also generating social impact at scale and that this business model, you know, therefore can … can work in ways that pave the way for a different way of doing capitalism and if we can get that right, then will enable many more people to come into this space.

Jenelle: And what will it take to achieve that lofty goal. Like what is the … what has to change in the world in order for 28 years time, for us to be sitting down, looking as young as we both still do [laugh] and saying “we did it”. Like what has to change?

Simon: I mean we might look younger in 28 years time …

Jenelle: True true [laugh].

Simon: … that much better [laugh]. What has to change? I don’t know if that much does have to change. I think that, you know, what our business does is that it appeals to that little part of everyone that wants to make the world a better place and I think that exists in everyone. It’s just bigger in some people than it is in others and so products like us that, you know, the total address for market is every single person in the world that today uses toilet paper or tissues or kitchen towels and that market size is growing because there’s more people that are starting to use toilet paper and kitchen towels and tissues for the first time. As we see, you know, incomes rising around the world. So what has to change? I don’t think we have to change, you know, behaviour or anything else. I think we just need to make our products available in more places to, you know, so more people can use them so that we are able to raise more awareness around what we’re doing, raise more capital for what we’re doing. Probably the one thing that does have to change is on the technology side. You know, toilets are very effective in countries that have really good plumbing. They’re not as effective in countries that don’t have great plumbing and this isn’t a plumbing problem. This is a toilets problem. We need to figure out how we can make highly effective toilets work in unplumbed environments because you’re never going to be able to plumb, you know, really dense urban slums. You’re never going to be able to plumb very difficult to reach regional areas in relatively poor parts of the world. So you know, I think the technology around toilets and sanitation has to shift [overtalking] …

Jenelle: Are you working with providers on that element or is it that the proceeds goes to organisations to work on it? Like how close to that line of technological innovation are you?

Simon: Yes, so we’ve always said, you know, we know more about toilets than 99.99% of the population but there’s still people out there that knows a hell of a lot more than we do. So let's go and find them and fund them. You know, let's be the experts on selling toilet paper that has a social mission and find other people to be the experts on implementing on how to go about solving the sanitation problem. So we partner up with organisations that are doing that work. A great example on the technology side is an organisation that we work with called Sanergy in Kenya who basically work in the urban slums of Kenya. As I said before, very difficult to plumb so they’ve built above ground sanitation solutions. Toilets essentially with canister in them that you can put lids on, remove the waste, put it onto a trolley, take it out of the slum on a trolley down the very narrow streets because you can’t drive cars through them and then load that waste up onto trucks that get taken away for offsite processing. They’re then mixed with, you know, restaurant waste and black soldier flies come and eat that waste and then the black soldier flies are essentially harvested and farmed and turned into pet stock, you know, live pet stock feed or into fertiliser that gets used to increase crop yields and so they’re able to monetise the waste stream to bring down the cost of putting more toilets into those areas and the big bet that they’re making is if they can get the costs of putting a toilet into around US$10 a head, then it becomes more cost effective for the government to go and fund toilets for everyone living in the urban slums than it does to allow the sanitation problem to exist because the public health cost of the sanitation problem is greater than US$10 a head. And so it becomes economically viable for the government to step in and provide sanitation to the eight million people living in the urban slums of Kenya but this then becomes a global and scalable solution that can be rolled out in other parts of the world as well. So the technology there is not, you know, it’s not electrons, it’s not computer chips, it’s how you supercharge, you know, harvesting of waste essentially and that’s a really exciting area that we’re seeing many companies around the world start to tackle and if we can get that right, then it will, you know, fundamentally change the way that sanitation works in lots of parts of the world.

Jenelle: Fascinating. Speaking of, you know, you being able to broaden your impact by with more people buying the product, I’ve got to talk about covid. That was a bit of a gift to a toilet paper company that precisely no one saw coming or maybe you did, I don’t know but how did all that panic buying of toilet paper impact your business.

Simon: [laugh], yeah I think it was … it was a shock for us [laughing] as well. So, you know, I think I was actually parental leave on the end of February/early March and I think I got woken up by a phone call from a, you know, a radio station at 6.30 in the morning saying “hey, can you comment on the phenomenon that we’re seeing”. I was “okay let me … let me understand [overtalking and laughter] and so you know, the story there was, I think on the first of March we did like a two times regular day of sales. On the second of March we did a five times day of sales. The third of March we did 12 times day of sales. The fourth of March we were going to do a 30 to 40 times day of sales. So more than a month of sales in a day. I think at our peak, selling 28 rolls of paper every second which I’ve got a feeling made us, you know, the largest toilet paper retailer in Australia in that moment and so we ended up having to move our store to sold out to make sure that we protected inventory for our subscribers. We want to make sure to never runout of product again and so we did that and turned on email signups. You’d be able to find out when we were back in stock. We expected a few thousand people to sign up for that wait list but ended up with more than half a million people on that waiting list which was a bit of a shock …

Jenelle: Unbelievable!

Simon: … so, you know, I think out team at that moment, the operations side of the team were tearing their hair out, freaking out about how we were going to deal with this. The marketing side of the team were, you know, their eyes were lit up realising that they’d kind of hit this … this incredible marketing pipeline for us to figure out how we could kind of work with but, you know, the team I think were also realising that it was this sign of this horrible state that the world had somehow got itself into and that if we could figure out how to solve this problem and get toilet paper to the most people possible, it would result in an amazing donation come end of financial year and so everyone, you know, started working early mornings and late nights trying to figure out how we could break the back of this problem and eventually figured out that we could repack our large 48 roll boxes into smaller packs so we had more orders that we could ship. We hired and trained 25 freelances in a week to triple our customer service capacity which removed that bottleneck and then we essentially set up an “invitation only” version of our website and invited just enough people through that store every day to take our warehouses and our careers to their maximum daily limits before the wheels would fall off and so we ran this, you know, secret online toilet paper club through our website for about eight weeks before we were able to officially come back in stock in June of 2020 and then the icing on top was getting to the end of June and making a 5.85 million dollar donation …

Jenelle: Wow!

Simon: … which, you know, we knew the 2020 donation was going to be a good one coming into February and then March to May just took it from, you know, round to two and a half million up to just way higher than what we had anticipated and so that was an amazing moment for the team to see that really direct connection between the work that they’d done to the impacts that we were then going to be able to create. What I think we hadn’t appreciated was that that wasn’t the end of the lockdown for most of our Victorian team and the several months after that were incredibly challenging so, you know, I think from a culture perspective, that was when we really had to take a step back and think creatively about what we can do to make sure we’re not pushing people to a state of burnout because, you know, people’s mental state through those months were in a challenging place and that made it very hard to make all sorts of decisions about how and when people should take time off. I know I had a lot of leave cancelled, for example, and I think what we ended up seeing through particularly August/September was that the capacity of our team just wasn’t where it previously had been because everyone was incredibly burnt out from the several months prior to that and as a result, we ended up saying in, I think September of that year, that we were going to give everyone in the company an extra week off. We said if you take one day of annual leave, we’ll give you four days of leave for free. We’re going to do it two weeks from now so you don’t have a choice to get your work done, you just have to figure out what you’re going to deprioritise and we’re going to do it over two weeks and the entire company will take one of those two weeks off with 50% off in the first week, 50% in the second week and then the other week, when you’re on, we’re going to call that a slow week and cancel all standing meetings through that week so that there’s no expectations of anyone in the team that they’re letting anyone else down by being away from their work for the work that they’re off. And so, coming back from that, I think we saw … it was a huge productivity boost. 62% of the company that we surveyed said that they experienced an increase in productivity coming back from that period, a significant increase in productivity and so now every quarter we run one of these slow weeks which we’re actually on at that moment, where we cancel all standing meetings for the week and allow people to focus on their big rocks for the quarter, to think about, you know, what they’re trying to achieve before the end of the quarter and then trying to move them forward as much as they can, in that week that we have. So it’s been a big sort of shift for us in how we think about productivity and the role that always being on and meetings can kind of create in leading to burnout as well.

Jenelle: Ah, it’s a really important … really important insight and thank you for sharing that and what great initiatives there. You know, as you were speaking, I was thinking … was there, I mean it just occurred to me right now, but I mean I think it’s fascinating that there was this panic buying on toilet paper, you know, it felt really random but I wonder, is there something about the … in crisis people realised that … like one of the worse things would be that they could not have access to something like that …

Simon: To a toilet

Jenelle: … but to a toilet or to cleanliness or to sanitation, I don’t know, maybe I’m overreaching here and was that … is there not the opportunity to equate this to, well this is how a massive part of the world lives all the time. This is exactly what we’re trying to solve.

Simon: Yeah totally. I think one of the … one of the things that we talked about in that moment was, you know, people here are freaking out about not getting access to toilet paper …

Jenelle: Yep, it’s a live reality for so many!

Simon: … yeah, for two billion people not having access to a toilet, let alone toilet paper so it was … I think we tried to encourage people to sort of have empathy for what was going on in the rest of the world at that moment in time. Be it neighbours internationally without access to toilets or in some cases in Australia as well but also, you know, our neighbours closer to home who might not … who might have run out of product and our customers had a box of 48 rolls potentially sitting in their cupboard. And so we were trying to encourage people to, you know, have that empathy and think about what they could do in those different scenarios and yeah, we talked about ‘plying it forward’ and making sure that people were giving rolls to other people. It was lovely to kind of see that, take off on social media through those couple of months as well. Especially for our subscribers who could … they could order from us still because we protected inventory to make sure that they would never run out and so they were the, you know, the only people in all of Australia, the US and the UK that were able to order toilet paper at will [laugh].

Jenelle: Now, you talk about empathy there Simon and I think of storytelling is quite a powerful way for people to be empathetic, whichever way you go, on the plight of others. For people who have heard you speak or anyone who’s visited the Who Gives A Crap website, as I have, it’s very clear to me that you are storytellers and I wonder, you know, how have … have you been intentional about that, have you honed the skills of storytelling of your business, are there moments of stories or stories that, you know, kind of stand out as those pivotal critical moments of change?

Simon: So first of all I should say that one of my co-founders is the expert at this so, you know, it’s something that we all love doing and I guess, developed more skills on over the years but it’s also something that some people really naturally have and he’s one of those people that really naturally has it. So I think from the outside looking in, sometimes you see leaders of companies and think that they’re great at everything and that’s how they’re successful but the reality is that often leaders are very good at, you know, one/two maybe three things and terrible at a lot of other things and they surround themselves with other people who can kind of … who can cover those bases and Danny’s who we bring into, you know, any situation where we’re thinking about how do we craft this story to get the most impact and we do that through everything, whether it’s, you know, internally when we’re doing our monthly “all hands” which we call our Town Halls, whether it’s annually with our annual strategies. You know, we think really carefully about the story that we weave through those strategies that everyone can see how they connect together and how they connect into the impact of the organisation. One of my favourite examples of this was when we brought investors into our business for the first time. So, you know, an investor pitch and presentation is usually a pretty stale boring presentations that’s got a lot … I mean some people get excited about it but most people would find it pretty boring …

Jenelle: Yep!

Simon: … a lot of numbers, a lot of jargon and so we really said “how do we let Who Gives A Crap brand shine through in a moment that is typically, you know, done in a very kind of square box and nothing really is allowed outside of those edges and so we put together a deck that kind of had a narrative through it of the Who Gives A Crap journey and then, if you read really carefully, you’d find jokes embedded into the footnotes. I think there was a slide that talked about how serious we were about, you know, going about what we were going to do next and then the next slide said “but not too serious” and had our top five toilet jokes that …

Jenelle: [laughing]

Simon: And then we had a dataroom, which again is, you know, an even more serious part of the investor kind of process where you essentially allow investors to go through all of your financial files and corporate files and make sure that everything is in order. We had a file of links that we put into the dataroom that when you opened it up was links, whether that was a linksys, you know, modem from the 90s or, you know, a chainlink fence. So there were all these different images of different types of links so it was kind of a visual pun joke that was great and then we had another … I think we had a board of dogrectors and how, you know, five different dogs that were the, you know, the Chief of Naps and the Chief …

Jenelle: Love it and how did these investors react?

Simon: It was amazing cos we didn’t … we wouldn’t say anything until you jump onto these calls and they’d sort of, you know, [laugh], sometimes not react and sometimes we’d just sort of break out laughing and … but I think it was … it was really amazing that they said to us “you know, we’ve been through so many datarooms and that was by far the most fun we’ve ever had in a dataroom”. And to them, it showed that if we can think about how you bring brand into an environment that brand has previously never existed in, then we can do that in parts of people’s households, in parts of people’s lives, in parts of people’s minds, where brands previously have not existing in ways that are meaningful and so it kind of just illustrated the way that we think about the opportunities to lean into places that sometimes don’t get leaned into and I think that was the most powerful part of it, was that it was kind of showing through an example of, you know, what's possible in the way that we see the world is a bit different to other people.

Jenelle: And is Danny one of the people who architected your … you know, you’re sitting on a toilet until you raise $50,000 for toilet paper [laugh]. It’s a lot of toilet contemplation time, I’ve got to say!

Simon: Yeah, no. Danny … Danny was very much behind the dataroom. He looked at it and said “this is really boring, how do we make this a bit more Who Gives A Crap. So that’s was 100% his initiative and then he sort of said “okay, let's brief it out to our creative team and see what they can come up with” and I think the Board of Dogrectors and the file of very important links, I think was what it was called, were two of the things that came out of that very serious brief that came from us but he … no, I think he would love to claim the toilet. That was actually someone else incredibly creative who worked on our very first crowd funding campaign and he said “you know, if we’re truly trying to get this viral, I don’t think we’re going to get there. We need to have something else to get people’s attention” and yeah, I remember jumping onto one of the calls, just before we were going to go on shoot the crowd funding campaign video and he said “I think what’s missing is that you need to shoot this on a toilet and pledge to not get off the toilet until you’ve presold the first $50,000 worth of product.”

Jenelle: How long … how long did you sit on that toilet for?

Simon: I mean I was prepared to sit there for a week but it ended up taking 50 hours, 50 horrible never to be repeated 50 hours of my life.

Jenelle: Oh, what was that like to finally get off that seat?

Simon: Um …

Jenelle: Numb bum!

Simon: I don’t know if you’re ever stayed awake continuously for 50 hours [laugh] but you essentially start hallucinating so the world was kind of not 100% how it should be [laughing] at the time. My bum didn’t actually hurt as much as my calves so I think …

Jenelle: Right!

Simon: … I kind of did some pretty serious nerve damage and blood flow damage and had to go and get checked out for deep vein thrombosis. Fortunately got the all clear and everything was fine but yeah, so have to be a little bit careful with my legs, you know, ten years later [laugh].

Jenelle: Geez Simon, that is really committed to the cause I must say!

Simon: But I think, in my mind when we did that, I would be able to get off the toilet and kind of sticky tape my hand, you know, gaffer tape my hand to the toilet and have a nap overnight but then we ended up being really popular in Brazil and Greece, which when you combine that with Australia and North America, we ended up with 24 hour coverage and as a result, you know, we realised that if I got off the toilet, the joke would be up and viewers would go away and so I just had to stay on there and luckily, you know, the timing of it enabled us to make it all work which was fortunate [laugh].

Jenelle: Unbelievable! So tell me Simon after all of this fascinating stuff we’ve been hearing about you, what have you learnt about yourself as a leader over all these years?

Simon: Um … what have I learnt about myself as a leader! I think the journey that you get to go on in a high growth organisation is incredibly humbling because you’re just constantly doing things that you don’t know how to do. You know, you’re out 40 to 60% as good as something as what you should really be and you’re just trying to figure out how to do it as quickly as you possibly can and so it’s an amazing journey cos you have to learn things incredibly fast which I find really exhilarating and exciting. It’s really exhausting as well and as a result, the role of how you have to lead changes the entire way through that journey very very quickly and that’s probably, you know, quite different in organisations that have a head count that’s more stable. Whereas we’re … we tend to be adding, you know, 50 to 100% of our head count in every year consistently.

Jenelle: So what ways has your leadership evolved as the head count changes?

Simon: So I think when you’re a team of one to five people, you are very much doing and so you’re leading by example and bringing people around problems and figuring out solutions to them and really kind of hands on and involved and so your leadership is often quite physical in terms of doing things and academic in terms of helping people solve problems. As you get to a bigger team, it then becomes about managing. So how do I … how do I make sure that these individuals have got … are feeling safe and supported and have got the support that they need to be able to carry out the problems, that … you know, to solve the problems that are in front of us to get us to where we need to go. As the team has grown above 100 people, I think leadership becomes more about creating a really inspiring vision that people believe in and can get behind and feel inspired to carry out their best work and so often that requires not just the building of the vision or not just often, but all the time that requires. Not just the building of the vision but constantly bringing people back to it to inspire people to, you know, get excited to solve very challenging problems and understand how the work that they’re doing is ultimately connecting into what we’re all trying to achieve together and the role that they play in that is, you know, incredibly important and powerful. I can’t comment, you know, what happens when you get above 200 people cos that’s where we’re at today but …

Jenelle: [laugh] I’ll let you know that but yeah!

Simon: … I’m sure it keeps going. Yeah, no doubt lots of books that I could read about that, that next stage of growth but that’s sort of where we’re at today and … and I think the challenge is that its … you form habits at every stage and so you’re constantly having to say “I’ve got to stop doing those things that were the right thing to do 12 months ago cos now I need to focus on this very different way of us working in order to make sure that we’re getting to where we need to go” and that’s the biggest challenge in that … in that leadership style role and that high growth environment, I think.

Jenelle: I am so conscious of how many questions I’ve asked you, especially about Who Gives A Crap and there’s a whole other life you’ve led with leading an organisation called Shebeen. You’ve worked in the … I think you’re Australia’s first fellow of the Unreasonable List Institute or the Unreasonable Institute …

Simon: Yeah.

Jenelle: … you’ve worked in NGOs in South Africa. There’s so much there to unpack and I know we’re running short on time. I’d like to, maybe just an open question about those prior experiences. Anything from there that you would call out as being fundamental to, I guess, who you are and the work that you’ve been doing that you’ve taken from there.

Simon: Fundamental to who I am! You know, I think all of those experiences are so I’m a big believer in “no regrets” and that everything you’ve done has kind of led to where you are today and so having regrets just means that if you’d done things differently, you’d probably wouldn’t be where you are right now and to appreciate where we are now, I think is the most important thing. So I think in terms of, you know, what's been really instrumental to our work, the Unreasonable Institute was probably a really stand out experience that, you know, we don’t probably talk about that much. Jahan and I were both there and we met Danny, our other co-founder while we were there. So Jahan and I were fellows and Danny was a mentor and so that’s been hugely instrumental to the success of Who Gives A Crap. I don’t know if we could have got to where we are without that but on top of that, the Unreasonable Institute was a social business incubator that promised to take, from an idea through to a … something that you go and execute on in the 10 weeks of the programme …

Jenelle: Sorry, I’m just going to ask. Was that an intentional connection to the George Bernard Shaw Unreasonable or is it coincidence?

Simon: Yeah, it was. Yes so that’s where I first became aware of the George Bernard Shaw quote which has kind of stuck with me ever since because I think it really aptly described exactly what they were trying to do with the Institute as well as the types of people that ended up, you know, spending time there and so really really instrumental for us. A lot of incredible mentors that helped us hone our skills around and knowledge around philanthropy, how supermarkets worked, how to bring CPG brands to life, that, you know, I don’t think we could have ever got to where we are without those ten weeks. So really amazing experience and then yeah, as you said, the quote I gave before was, you know, what inspired the name of the Institute, they were very much supportive of trying to foster unreasonable men and women to go out and create progress.

Jenelle: Love that. Now finally, before I get to the fast three anyway, yours is a high pun density business, as you’ve said. You have excellent metrics like PTR – poke through rates. Kind of gross but hilarious all at the same time. You claim, I think somewhere in your website I read, 1,200% more puns that any other business. So 13 years in Simon, are you seeing any slowdowns in the pun factors.

Simon: No I think … I don’t know if we’ll ever see a slowdown. I think … I think there’s an endless amount of pun density that continues being explored for many many years to come. Something that we’re excited about, you know, launching new brands which enables us to have new brand names that have new puns tied into them. So maybe that’s another way that we can exponentially increase the number of puns that we have available to us [laugh].

Jenelle: I love it. Its very “punny”. So finally three for you Simon and don’t overthink this one. Tell me, what are you reading watching or listening to right now?

Simon: So reading – I haven’t done as much as what I used to cos we’ve got young kids which seems to make reading quite challenging but I recently finally read Peter Singer’s, I think “it’s a life you can save” …

Jenelle: Okay!

Simon: … which probably should have read ten years ago when it first came out but really kind of accurately described how we think about, you know, our role in the world and that there is a base level of income that’s enough to get by on and once you have more money than that, you know, the additional happiness and utility you get from it is declining, yet there’s people all over the world that could have their eyesight restored for under a hundred dollars, that dying of diarrhoea related diseases cos they don’t have access to a toilet, that a donation to the organisations that could help solve those problems can massively change someone’s life, if not save it. And so it’s a really kind of great philosophical view of the world that I think aligns to how we think about, you know, building Who Gives A Crap and what our role in this world looks like as well.

Jenelle: What would you say your super power is? Now that can be something additive to the world or it can be a useless party trick. What’s yours?

Simon: We had to do this for work recently to try and figure out what my super power was and what we came up with was that I can see the forest and the trees. So I love the big picture but I also love getting right down into the detail and understanding the menusa of how something works and what drives them, what makes it successful and to me …

Jenelle: That’s a pretty awesome super power I have to say!

Simon: … its, you know, it’s the art and the science of it …

Jenelle: Yeah.

Simon: … kind of coming together, so yeah, love it.

Jenelle: And if you were going to put a quote up on a billboard, what would it be?

Simon: I mean I think the Bernard Shaw quote that we talked about before is a beautiful one, doesn’t make much sense on a billboard probably. I’d probably … I don’t know who said this but “every dollar you spend is a vote for the future you want to live in” I think is a very powerful way to think about the world because we all spend money and that has the potential to shift the way that demand and the economy works and Who Gives A Crap is built on that belief that there was all of this demand for products that more closely align with people’s ethics and values than what was currently available and I think we’ve hopefully proved that out and hopefully paved the way for people to be able to spend many more dollars in ways that more closely align to the future they want the world to be.

Jenelle: What a powerful powerful quote. I absolutely love that. Simon, I really want to thank you for your time. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and have taken a lot of things away from it. I think it will be one, a conversation that will continue to play back in my mind. I’m grateful for you intergenerational stubbornness, grateful to your Dad to instilling it in you and I can’t wait to see what your son does with those skills and I think the ability to turn some of those attributes that we traditionally quell or quash, you know, stubbornness, polarising views, belief that there is another way to do this, is exactly what we need in this world, channel towards good of course. I think that your ability to have shown there’s a different way to do capitalism and live and breathe that is incredibly powerful. I think that your views about culture and how intentional you are around fostering and optimising a culture that’s optimised for happiness and by that, you talk about, you know, motivation and mastering a purpose and, you know, I will think of sourdough culture now when I think about our organisation. I love that you have the lofty goal that you do and I do believe that you are the lighthouse that shows that we can generate social and business outcomes at scale. I also think the fact that you use and you live the power of … I was going to say storytelling before but I think its humour and humour allows us to bring levity to a, you know, serious situations and long may you continue to think outside the bowl [laugh] and you know, here’s to an endless pun density factor for the rest of our lives. Thank you so much for everything you’re doing and the way that you think and move in the world.

Simon: Yeah, thank you, its been great to chat, really enjoyed it.

The ‘Change Happens Podcast’ from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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