YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Morris

lines on the record: 101
first: 2023-10-09
most recent: 2023-10-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There are unquestionable perks to being Piper, Milo Ringo Suzu and Piper. There are definite perks. They definitely eat well. I think, yeah, they probably luck down a bit showing up at the Morris house.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That Scott Morris, co founder and president of Fresh Pet. By the way, Scott is very happy to tell you about his own pets. He has one dog, an OsseDoodle, and two cats, or three if you count his grown daughter's cat, which, of course, he does”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's interesting going all the way back to early on in athletics, I had one, a great coach. His name was Jeff Ward, another one was Charles Foster. They both said to me, you know, if you take a step back and you look at the people that have created been great athletes, they said there's two parts to it. One of them is they believe they can do it and the other one is they have the skills to pull it off. And I think the third one is being at the right place at the right time or some level of luck or fortune or whatever you think it is. So everyone's going to have luck pass by them and it's a question of what you do with it and how you think about it and how you take advantage of that luck.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't exactly know in five or ten years, but I try and be super objective about that. I sit back at the end of every year and I think about the contributions that I've made and the work that I've done and how I feel like I'm still helping to guide and lead and create the company and lead to success. And the day I stop having impact and contributing significantly to the organization is the day that I need to walk away.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, you started this company in 2006. We're talking now in 2023. It has been a very successful brand. And presumably, part of the mandate is to get it to profitability in the next few years. Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting. So when we made the commitment to retailers and we said we're working with you and we're putting our fridges in the store, the deal was we weren't going to go around the retailer and go direct to consumer. And we feel as though the opportunity to deliver fresh food is where people are going to buy their fresh food over time. And that's going to be, they're typically going to make a trip to a store to do that. So that fresh trip is owned by the brick and mortar guys. And those are our partners that we went in with in the beginning. So even when we have played with this idea of shipping food to consumers, we're actually working with our retailers to actually ship it through their stores. Their distribution centers.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The blue cans go in the blue fridge. And what I'm talking about is Coke and Pepsi So we use precedent that was out there. We use the initial kind of agreement. And I think we also kind of laid out kind of a business. And it's a scary conversation, but you had to have it and you had to be honest about it.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out there across the market, the number of fridges that we have. So we went back to Walmart and we explained the perspective and the point of view that we invested in this category from the very beginning. We spent all of our money. We invested hundreds of millions of dollars to figure this out and build it and buy these refrigerators. And those were our refrigerators. And it was their stores. And if they didn't want our refrigerators and their stores, they could let us know that and we would move them out. But if they were okay with it, we would continue on the model that we had always kind of moved forward with, which was our products going our refrigerator. And if they wanted to put other products in, someone else needed to buy their own refrigerator. And I think over time Walmart didn't like it, but they think they got comfortable with the concept that, you know, the analogy that's out there is the red cans go in the red fridge.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a series of very, very difficult and challenging discussions. And I think the initial discussion was what we had internally was we can't allow anyone to put anything in our refrigerators because if I have one problem, I've got 25 or today over 30,000 problems.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm curious about this kind of, I don't know what to call it, this dispute with Walmart that happened, I think, before the pandemic, which was they apparently wanted to. Amu had refrigerators in all these Walmarts, they accounted then and maybe even still do now for 20% of your business And they wanted to use your fresh pet refrigerators to sell other refrigerated pet food. And you guys were, you know, you were facing an 800-pound gorilla here. How did you prevent that from happening?”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And, you know, the question starts to become what's acceptable in the marketplace? And the market on their acceptance and their comfort level with some type of loss has kind of ebbs and flows over time And I think the, you know, especially moving through kind of the last several years, the appetite for companies that are like losing money and not having a clear path to profitability has really waned. So we've definitely kind of modified some of our plans along the way. And now we had a couple years where we were growing over 40%, and we want to kind of trim back the growth just a little bit. We want to stay in that kind of 30-ish percent range. And that's going to allow us to basically grow and be able to fund our growth going forward. And that's really the plan that we've laid out to the public markets.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, now that obviously you are a public company, all of your data is public as well. And so I was looking at your sales figures for 2019, which were very impressive, 250 or $250 million in sales that year and a very small loss. I mean, it's $1.4 million. At that point, it seemed like you were probably on track to hit profitability, but at the same time, I guess... For you, the strategy then and still is to just expand, continue to grow even if you are posting losses.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you're always aware of it. And I think that there are a lot of people that have not believed in what this could be early on. And then, sure, like you start going public. And boy, you're on a different type of stage. And we were making incredible progress. We had over 40% growth the year we went public. But operationally, we had a misstep and we weren't as profitable as we thought we were going to be. And our margins slipped a bit. And it caused an incredible change in the stock and a loss of confidence in the market. And I mean, the thing that was terrific is the people that believed in us, that stayed with us after we were public were able to kind of ride back the progress that we made and make many, many times their investment.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew that we needed additional capital for a significant expansion in our manufacturing, and we felt like going public was really the right path forward for the organization”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much larger. It's larger, right? Yes. Dogs eat more. Yeah, they eat a lot more. Think about the size of a cat and then the even if you take the average size of a dog.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So early on, I'd say early on like 2010, we had cat food. It's been a very small piece of the business for many, many years, but it's something that we see as a potential long-term opportunity for the organization.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think what we did is you steal the quote from Wayne Greske. You always want to be where the puck is moving to. And I think what happened early on is we got there too early. And then all of a sudden in kind of 2010 and 2011, when we started getting the entire model figured out. The puck was now coming to us, and we wanted to be in all the retailers and as many stores as possible and as many consumers as possible. So we really started thinking about, well, how do we get retailers and consumers when they're thinking about pet food to think fresh first? Fresh is the center of the bowl, as the base of the meal”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had an opportunity with both Kroger and with Target. And when we had kind of talked about the expansion with Target, we wanted to go with these open air refrigerators. And especially at night, the refrigeration or the air conditioning was turned off in the store and the stores would get hotter and the refrigerators just couldn't hold temp. So we ended up having to over time put doors on all the refrigerators and Enclose them, which was absolutely fine, but it was a long, it took months in order to figure it out.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were losing a lot of money and we were fortunate enough in 2010 to unwind the Tyson deal and we brought in a private equity firm called MidOcean Partners and they invested in the company and they helped fund it and the next thing that started to happen was not only were we able to prove it out on a fridge by fridge or a store by store basis, but we started using kind of broad level marketing and we were able to get dramatic increases in sales and we were getting incredible returns on our advertising. And when they saw the potential of adding all these fridges, they recognized that all they needed to do was feed this machine and it would start to take off.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meantime, you are still losing money and you were hamstrung, you couldn't raise more money. So, I mean, this is a long period of time, almost two years where you're hamstrung during your ability to bring in more capital and you're trying to expand retail sales, which means that you've got to expand capacity and you've got to invest in manufacturing and even advertising. So you guys were just, I mean, you were probably losing a lot of money at the time.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was never easy to sell in new refrigerators because every single retailer said, even if you said we were doing great at retailer A and B, they're like, that's not mine. That's not my store. I want to test it. So they would start off with one fridge or maybe five. Or if someone was really aggressive, 10 stores. And you'd have to prove it out in those 10 stores. And we just kept building the network slowly over time.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So essentially, you have this, you've got this challenge, but meantime we were expanding. I mean, you did manage to get into some big stores like Kroger, even Walmart, some safeways. How did you convince those stores, given the skepticism around refrigerated dog food, how did you convince them to let you put a refrigerator in the pet food aisle?”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, exactly. And it was from, oh my goodness, we're working with Tyson and we saw a path forward for really delivering the potential that this company had to within a year, literally being back into the worst crisis we'd ever had. And Charlie on his own, the original angel investor and our chairman at that point, stepped up and gave the company like an extended, significant loan for a period of time in order for us to get through that period.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, this is classic case of a new CEO coming in and just being a jerk. And, you know, and just discounting anything their predecessors did. And he was like, let's just give them nothing, bleed them dry, and then we can acquire them for pennies on the dollar.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, let's get rid of all these other businesses. And they were basically like, well, what do we want to do with Fresh Pet? And he said, I don't care. Don't give them another penny. And because they had the ability to basically decide whether we could raise money or not, they were literally trying to bankrupt the company or trying to get us to give them the company.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when we found Tyson and we found the right person to Tyson, we found a gentleman who he was basically running a group that was looking to create other business units out of Tyson's kind of main or core business units. And they made an investment in us. And as part of the criteria, they had basically a term in the agreement that means they could decide if we had any other fundraising what the terms were. And what happened was there was a change from one CEO that we originally shook hands with. And it turned from one CEO to literally the day we signed the deal, it was another CEO that was kind of in place for a while. And then finally about a year later, a third CEO, so kind of end of 2009 into 2010. And the last CEO that came in did not get along.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was absolutely critical. This was, I mean, we realized if we didn't get a significant investment from someone other than the Angel group that we weren't going to be around.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there were definitely a core group of consumers that started showing us that they were really willing to spend money on their pets. And we started making a little bit of progress, but it was moving inches and we had to go miles. And it was stored at a time, stored at a time, a little bit of progress, a little bit of progress, fixed the product, raise a little bit of money, continue to make more improvements of the product and it was just, it was kind of every day. It was you're playing whack-a-mole. And I remember one day leaving work and getting in the car and openly sobbing in the car on the way home. And I tried to never. Let anyone see that we were scared or we were losing confidence. But quite honestly, it was one of those things go home, go for a run, wake up the next morning and get back to work and go figure it out.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So one of the people that we'd worked with at Meow Mix that was almost immediately involved was a gentleman named Dick Cassar, and he knew this other gentleman, Charlie Norris. And he said, you know, I think Charlie may have some money. You should go talk to him. So Kahole and I flew out to California and we met him in kind of one of the lounges at the airport in San Francisco. And Charlie flew up from LA to meet us. And we explained to him what we were doing. And he said, look, I believe in jockeys, not horses. He goes, and I believe you guys can make this work. And I want to think about it, but I may be able to pull some funding together for you. And that was the original Angel Funding Network that we were able to pull together was led by Charlie, who eventually became the chairman of the company, and he just retired after, I think it was 16 years with us.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you, I mean, essentially, you had to, in the first, I think, probably in the first three years, I mean, you had to constantly imagine look for money. To finance because you bought a manufacturing facility in 2007, right? I mean, that was a slightly larger one.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember one time I was literally in our booth at a kind of a pet show setting up where retailers would come and walk the floor of a trade show. And I had an island with a cutting board and we had a refrigerator and I had gotten these hay bales and I hear this Morris Turtle Morris fresh pet food. Boy, oh boy. I wish I had thought of that. And it was someone I had worked with at Purina that was now at a different company. And he was happy to see me, but he thought what we were doing was completely ridiculous and laughable. And I think that was pretty a pretty tough moment.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of 2007, how you can just feel when the economy's starting to change. So then retailers were like, you know, your dog food's still kind of expensive. Your pet food's expensive. And although consumers may love it, how can you expect people to pay for this?”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. That came into the situation where we presented to retailers, and even after we made a little bit of progress with Petsmart and Peco and we started talking to other retailers, it was back to the, you want me to do what? And I don't care if you were successful there I don't think that's going to work in my store. And it was so hard for them to understand that we wanted to put a refrigerator in the middle of their aisle So there was a lot of, there were a lot of eye rolls. And at the same time, with all of these challenges, we literally had the economy starting to fall apart in 2007.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, unfortunately. So, I mean, there were times where you start questioning, wow, is this a good idea? And can we do it? And I think what's really important for me was I think you can talk a little bit about that with the team because you want to be honest, but you can, I think you can never lose their confidence. Once the team starts losing confidence in what we're doing, then I think it can literally become a quick failure.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not going to, you know. We're not going to use discounting. It damages the brand. And it was a real key learning. And it became one of those incredible principles that we put in place up front.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We weren't making much, and that was another problem that we had to, like we wanted to, again, make it as affordable and as accessible. We kind of sacrificed some margin up front because we felt it was important to get the momentum going behind it and getting it into consumers' hands. So we want to make it as cost-effective as possible for consumers.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we were at $9.99 for initially like it was targeting $9.99 for a six pound roll, which was pretty cost effective, quite honestly.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was more expensive. I think that when people don't know about what something is, they're hesitant. People typically are not like fast adopters to change. And I think that piece of information applies to almost everything, but now you're feeding your kid. And I want to make sure that this is a good food and a good product that is safe for my kind of quote-unquote kid or pet.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I think we went from version one to version two of the product very quickly. And it was the only way we were going to be able to get any type of significant investment is if we solved that problem.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but what we didn't realize was 12 weeks sounded like a long time, but to start shipping it around the country to make it and ship it around the country and then actually have it sold out of a refrigerator. There was a concept they were introduced very soon after and it was called sell it or smell it. And it was literally you would, if you didn't sell the food, you'd start smelling it because it was going bad. And that was really kind of a rude awakening. And we realized 12 weeks was not enough shelf life for this to work in the beginning and get it started. We needed a longer shelf life. And we were absolutely 100% committed to making sure that it was all natural. We were not putting any artificial preservatives in there.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it did probably okay. It was a little below expectations, but the complexity of the supply chain and making it in Pennsylvania and shipping it to the West Coast and then having the right product and inventory and then filling those fridges. And there was so much product in the fridges that it would have had to have done extraordinarily well for it to sell fast enough to get through it before we ran into shelf life.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We definitely have done some of those things along the way. We've been willing to ate it and taste it. I actually had, we had a reporter tour a factory probably about five years ago and I literally took a bite off the line. And so did she. So yes, we did everything. We had people in those markets that we call these kind of road warriors and they would spend time literally driving around and visiting bed offices and going to dog parks, dog daycare, giving out samples. So it was very much kind of like on the street kind of ground level gorilla type marketing to try and get enough people to try the product.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest single thing that we did were just demonstrations or demos, and we'd stand literally in the store and we would show consumers what the product looked like and that it looked good. It smelled good. And the one thing that was working for us is as we gave people samples, they went home and they propheted to their dogs, obviously. And the dogs, they had a great experience. And then once they started using it a few times is when they started seeing the performance of the product.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. You know, I always equated to, it's like when you're dealing, you're watching an incredible basketball team. All five of those guys know where the other one is and what they can do. And that's the people that we wanted on the team. We knew how they could play. We knew the positions they could play. We knew what they could get done. So now we had a ton of overhead. We had these people coming in. We started building manufacturing. We're now buying refrigerators and we were quickly, quickly. Business was not developing fast, and we were quickly running out of cash, and it got very, very scary and very, very real very fast.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think for this period of time, we had enough money in the very beginning, but we quickly started realizing, wow, this manufacturing piece is taking a lot more money. And then we're now buying refrigerators. And then we also had this team of people that we had worked with in the past that we were like, wow, this is going to take off and we're going to need this team of people and we don't want to lose them.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He didn't recognize the sign. He just drove past it a little bit. And he came in and said, what did you guys do? And I said, John, you're going to thank me for this later. We could not be Professor Connors. We needed a name that really was understandable and quickly digestible by consumers and retailers. 20 or 30 years from now, it may be Kleenex or it may be Xerox, where it's the name of the category. For now, this is the right decision for us to be making. And I think within about a minute, he realized that it was the right decision for us and it was a good decision. And I mean, today the name of the category is literally, you'll see the sign in the grocery show, fresh pet food. Up on the sign, and it was super important to have a name that told the consumer what it was fast.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Professor Connor's Delhi Fresh was the original original name. And I know it's a little bit of like a tangent, but John, we kept talking about we got to change this name. And John didn't really want to change it. And he went away over on vacation. And the second he walked away, I turned to Colonel and said, we have to change the name of this company. I said, we're going to regret this forever. And we ended up changing it to FreshPet. And when he got back, I had changed the name in front of the, we had a small little house as our office. We changed the business cards.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It said, yeah, well, actually, we initially started the company under the name Professor Connors. We wanted to name it Dr. Connors, and then we couldn't name it Dr. Connors because you needed a vet to be able to call it Doctor. So then we called it Professor Connors. And then it was, I joke about it as it was one of my moments of weakness where I agreed to call the company Professor Connors. And it was around for about a year as Professor Connors.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had some open air, we had some closed air refrigerators, we had all different ones that we would use for the test. But we also had this idea of go big or go home. So we felt like we needed a really big display, big merchandising for someone, you know, the consumers to actually look at it and realize what it was.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was us kind of starting to launch into owning all of our refrigerators, but it was, we not only ended up in the pet food business, but we ended up in the refrigerator business.”
2023-10-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Freshpet: Scott Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT