PJ Oleksak Transcript
Clint Betts
PJ, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the CEO of Nuts.com. I am very excited to talk to you about that. Tell us about how you became the CEO of Nuts.com and what Nuts.com does.
PJ Oleksak
Sure. And thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here today. So, I actually became the CEO of Nuts.com about a year ago, but I've been with the company for three years now. So I joined the longtime founder Jeff Braverman as president three years ago, and really some background on Nuts.com. So Nuts.com is a family business that is still family-owned today. It was started back in the 1920s in Newark, New Jersey. It was a corner store with specialty snacks and goods, dried fruit, nuts, and other things that the family was providing in an open-air market down on Mulberry Street. Then we had Poppy Sol, the grandfather of the family who had started that business. Two sons took over it, second generation Nuts, and then Jeff Braverman, who was third generation like, "Y'all work too hard. Don't make enough money. I'm going to go to Wharton undergrad and be an investment banker." And he did just that. It was during the .com boom, and he saw an opportunity to bring his family's business online. So he left his lucrative finance career and joined Nuts.com and brought his family business online at that time. What was exciting about that is because of the family heritage and having such great knowledge of the product and deep sourcing relationships, there was this great opportunity where he didn't have to build out all of that as a new business. He already had all of the access to this high-quality product, and it was just about opening up a website and seeing if he could give it a go. They did a great job building that business and were very focused on not getting over their skis, not taking on capital too soon, and just providing a great, high-quality experience to customers. Then, the COVID boom happened, and many food companies just had this ridiculous product market fit.
Jeff saw the opportunity and put a lot of capital the company had generated over the years into marketing, and the business blew up. And so he decided he needed to bring on a president to help him kind of catch up and create the systems and structure, processes and people to support this new scale and then think about how do we take it level because so much of the business was really relying on his brilliant brain and the family's hard work and great supplier relationship, this great high-quality product. But now it is reaching so many more customers across the country; how do we make sure we continue to grow it? So that's when I joined three years ago.
Clint Betts
How much did he pay for Nuts.com?
PJ Oleksak
The name? So there's a story that is probably not PG for the audience, but it was originally founded as nutsonline.com, and what happened was just like we have great B2B customers still to this day where sometimes I will buy from a place, there's one that I actually frequent now, I'm like, "These taste like our cashews," that I know because they're seasoned a certain way, and lo and behold, I'll reach out to my team and be like, "Do we sell to this company?" And they'll be like, "Yes." So Rachel Ray actually started talking about our organic products. It was not a paid placement, and she kept referring to the company as Nuts.com. So we were nutsonline.com back then. And so Jeff was like, "Well, now I have to pay up for it." And so he did. It was a UK company at the time. You guys can Google the rest.
Clint Betts
Prior to joining Nuts.com and being their CEO, you were Slice, which is another... Tell me about that. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it that you brought to your position today?
PJ Oleksak
It's interesting because almost as if there was such a natural build to my career and how I've gotten here, but I would say that if I go backwards, if you don't mind, and then I'll come back to Slice.
Clint Betts
Of course.
PJ Oleksak
So, I've always loved numbers, and I double majored in finance and accounting. I thought I would be in numbers my entire life. I started in investment banking, which is pretty traditional, then went to private equity, also a very traditional path, and I loved it. I loved investing. I thought I would do it forever, but I actually had the privilege of working with an operating partner at another private equity fund. We had a co-investment that we were co-leading in the middle market space together. And I saw this operating partner parachute in and be interim CEO for a portfolio company and completely turn it around. And I was like, "Wow, that was so cool. How do I learn to do that? How do I not just be the person on the side of the table providing guidance, doing modeling, and giving consulting advice? I actually want to learn how to do it; how do I grow? How do I turn a team around? How do I do these things?"
So, I crossed over and joined FreshDirect; it was interesting because the food was not my first choice, and as an investor, it wasn't a place I naturally gravitated to. I loved consumer products, I loved healthcare, but I didn't gravitate towards food. Why I went to FreshDirect and ended up in food because online grocery was still relatively new, and it was so hard. And so I knew I'd be going into a business where I would learn e-commerce, I would learn manufacturing, I would learn logistics, I would learn marketing, all of these things, and it would just be this deep, extensive, hardworking operating MBA.
I actually started as that founder's chief of staff and then grew in responsibility, taking on my first GM role, then owning multiple expansion markets, which we could talk more about, and then taking over a chief growth officer role and really had so much fun. One of the things I had the privilege of doing was co-founding an on-demand grocery business called FoodKick by FreshDirect. So it was a sister business, but it came from an insight on a piece of paper and we built out this whole separate company, so a different dedicated corporate team, different picking, packing, operations, different app, different merchandising strategy, different target demo, different branding, everything. And so it really was running a startup with the privilege of having lots of knowledge behind me and data, and I didn't have to do all the separate fundraising, which I think most founders would say is the hardest part of their job.
So I had the privilege of doing that, and I had the bug. Once I had built something from zero and got it to the $100 million run rate, I felt that very awesome energy of being able to build my own culture and being able to just grow so fast. So when I decided when FreshDirect hit a place where we had grown the business significantly, we had three exits during my time there, I knew I wanted to potentially do a startup, but I had been in private equity, I had been at FreshDirect when it had gone from family-owned to private equity owned, but I had never played in DC land. And so, as I was thinking about what was next for me, I received the call for Slice, and really, part of what attracted me to Slice was the mission. So, this mission is to keep the locals thriving.
And what I don't always get to tell my story is really I come from female entrepreneurs. My grandmother had Italian pizzerias, and my mother had Italian delis, so I have this natural inherent energy. Also, Slice is all about keeping local, thriving, and focusing on pizzerias. And my grandmother's business became challenged when one of the big four pizzerias came into town. So I felt like I had an ax to grind, and I was like, "I'm going to help these pizzerias. We're going to do this." And I love the idea of taking something that was... the founder at Slice is just... he's a very dedicated, great guy. He's done a great job with that business, and he's very mission-driven. That whole team punched way above its weight class and had great investors around it. So I joined as the chief business officer there and ran, gosh, we had a 1000-person global team at the time. About 70% of it was in my purview from a scope standpoint. And it was a very, very cool time to join because I joined probably about four or six months before the pandemic hit. And because it was such a mission-driven business, all of a sudden, you had this pandemic: everyone was shutting things down, workers were afraid to go to work, and our teams were just energized. How do we launch products to help these local pizzerias do what they have to do?
So I remember having conversations at the start of the pandemic, worried that my team was going to burn out. Everybody was working so hard because they were so passionate about the mission. And so that was a ton of fun, but it was really taking... I think I've just built on my skills over time, which is why my scope has continued to evolve, but I've always been a generalist. My skill set and my superpowers are setting clarity for where we are going and how we get there, working backward in terms of the plan, and really making sure I have the right people in the seat. I say building high-performing happy teams is really what I love to bring to the table, so plot that into different industries or different businesses, and that same methodology and formula is really applicable.
Clint Betts
Yeah, I think Slice is incredible. We've actually had the CEO of Slice on.
PJ Oleksak
Ilir?
Clint Betts
Yeah.
PJ Oleksak
He's great.
Clint Betts
He's incredible, and that whole story is incredible. When it comes to Nuts.com, I wonder about its logistics; it sounds like it is probably a pretty comprehensive and maybe even complicated area of the business. How did you figure that out? How do you think about that now, the whole manufacturing and, in particular, just like the logistics of getting these where they need to go?
PJ Oleksak
Yeah, I mean, it's funny to even hear it as complicated because, to me, it's so much easier than manufacturing and selling fresh food and the complications around delivering that. So I think with our supplier relationships, we source a really high-quality product. We have relationships with the farmers who are producing these different products all over the world, and some of our products are not farm-grown, but we have relationships there as well. And then, in our Grandford, New Jersey facility, it's like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. We are actually roasting the nuts. We are seasoning the nuts. We're chocolate coating. We're pan-coating some of our specialty premium chocolate products. We're doing our trail mixes. You can get customized trail mixes, so you can go online and tell us exactly what you want in what weighting, and we will do it and mix that for you. So it is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory over in Grandford, New Jersey. It's a lot of fun, but I would say that I don't think it's that complex. And then we have DCs across the country and our methodology with how we thought about the DCs over time, and most of them were put in place actually pre-pandemic, which happened to be very fortunate given the boom that was about to happen to the business. And we've moved one since then to optimize the location. But essentially, our methodology with how we thought about covering DCs across the country was that we never wanted our friends at Amazon Prime. We never want Prime to be a competitive advantage to us. So our mental model was speed is important to customers. Speed has only gotten more and more important in life. Even if you didn't think five years ago or ten years ago that you wanted it today or you needed it in five minutes or an hour, the market has now trained you that you can have it that fast.
And so we never wanted speed to be something that made someone go somewhere else. So one of two of our measurements is how many people in the country we can get it to in two days and how many people we can get it to [inaudible 00:12:06]? And so we can actually cover the country comfortably, 60% in two days, 90% plus in three, and often even faster than that. The reality is if I place an order right now, it'll be at my house tomorrow. So that is how we thought about the distribution centers and how we would optimize them. We also thought about our picking-packing operations across the country, and we have a delivery network. I mean, FedEx and other local careers are all doing delivery for us, and you're just constantly working on it. There are always new people coming up, and new partnerships are forming. You just really have to stay on top of it because that world is moving fast and always evolving, but it's not that complicated. It's harder to deliver fresh and frozen stuff.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that makes sense.
PJ Oleksak
The team does a great job here.
Clint Betts
Real quick, you're launching something, or you have launched something. Can you tell us about that?
PJ Oleksak
So we are getting ready. So, for our business, we do predominantly snacks and then long-tail specialty pantry items. What we are making a big push into this year is actually the gifting business. We have always had gifting products on our site, and our existing customers find them, love them, and trust us. We go gangbusters in Q4 around the holiday season so our customers know to come to us, they can trust us, actually our gift baskets and things like that. It's insane how much product we put in. It's probably almost too much. And so we've made a strategic push to really go after that market, done a lot of research, figuring out how does that fit with our current target demographic, what is the opportunity to expand our target demographic, what are they looking for in terms of assortment pricing, things like that. And so, actually, we are really excited to be pushing more heavily into that market this Q4.
I think it's going to be fantastic because we have such a high-quality product, and our customers know and trust us so much. It's something you can give with pride. And so we know with gifting, it is actually mostly about how it shows up, how it represents you as a gifter whether you're a corporate customer that's sending to your suppliers or your employees or if you're sending on behalf of yourself and your family. So we've made a concerted effort to go more seriously after that market, and we're really excited about it because it's massive. The food gifting market's like a $33 billion segment in our country, and we are just getting a tiny piece of it, but we know how excited our current customers are, so we're excited to tell the world more about it.
Clint Betts
Oh, that's incredible. Yeah, that makes all sense. You're launching it at a good time, too, as the holidays are coming up.
PJ Oleksak
Yeah.
Clint Betts
Perfect. What does a typical day look like for you, I wonder?
PJ Oleksak
So it's interesting. I tend to be... prior to getting to this place in my career and being a mommy and everything else, I was always a nighthawk. And I have learned as I've gotten older, you have got to be an early bird. So I like to start early and get a workout in, ideally before the kids are up and I'm off to work for the day. And then it's really, I personally, one of my cheat codes is the day before I go to sleep, I am still a little bit old school, and I prepare my to-do list for the next day, what must I get done, what would I like to get done that are the next things on that list, and make sure I'm just really rigorous about how I'm going to spend my time the next day.
So I get up and get my workout in. If it's a work-from-home day, I get to see the kids, and they go off to school, then I go down to my office. Otherwise, I'm heading over to New Jersey and it's about being a present, great team leader, a lot of cross-functional meetings, and a lot of communication, as I think any leader spends a fair bit of their time making sure you repeat, repeat, repeat, where are we going, how do we measure, how we get there, making sure people feel supported on the journey, and then making sure I reset for the next day.
Clint Betts
How are you thinking about AI, and how will that apply to Nuts.com?
PJ Oleksak
It's really interesting with AI because I have found that the leaders bringing in AI technology are not at the top so far, and we are making a concerted effort as our senior leadership. Hopefully, my CTO won't be mad at me for saying that, but it's just that naturally, the younger employees are gravitating towards bringing stuff forward. It's been the coolest thing to see. So there are the obvious ways we've grabbed onto AI, which is whether it's CX efficiency and things like that where you could leverage bots and AI tools to have a better customer experience. And that's worked really well for us to augment our fantastic team. And then also it's just operational. I have seen, whether it's ChatGPT or other tools out there, I have seen it be incredible how mundane tasks that as you see your high performers rising, they're just like, "All right, well, can I have junior people to do this stuff for me now," they just leverage technology to do stuff and increase the efficiency in their day.
We're almost learning from them. I find myself often learning from them. I also think the other thing that is unlocked is the team's ability to learn without repetition and revs. And what I mean by that is we were talking about something on the sales side, I'll give a specific example, and we were talking about evolution to our commission structure, and our director on the B2B sales side came back, had done some work with AI and essentially had gotten recommendations from what other world-class organizations are doing and come back with a really, really smart proposal that we wouldn't just have at our fingertips as easily as that. So a lot of operational efficiency. What I look forward to doing is leveraging it to enhance the customer. We have a huge catalog on our site.
We have 2,500 different products and over 5,000 different SKUs. How do we actually leverage AI to create a much more seamless customized experience and leverage natural language and other ways to really help people have a more personalized shopping experience that I'm really excited about? We have work to do, but I know some clothing retailers and things like that are already using it when they're cataloging and marketing. So I think I'm excited about how we leverage it to enhance the customers, not just from a DX remediation standpoint, but upfront as we're thinking about how they shop and have a more personalized [inaudible 00:18:53]. So that's what I'm excited about in addition to just getting rid of some of the grunt work for our great employees so that they can just do more thinking, exciting work, and learn faster.
Clint Betts
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. I think every company has to think about it, regardless of whether it's customer-facing or just internal, and how you're going to streamline processes inside of your company. You got to figure out one of those two things, if not both. And so yeah, I think you're exactly right. What do you read? What is a reading recommendation you have for us?
PJ Oleksak
I would say some of my favorite books, and they're probably been read by all of your audience. I love organizational behavior and team dynamics. Because I'm such a people-first leader, I definitely gravitate towards books like that. So some of my favorites, if by any chance they haven't been read, I go back to The Five Dysfunctions of the Team. I probably read that once every five years just to gut-check myself and make sure I'm keeping myself honest on the dynamics of the team. I also love Feed of Trust.
Personally, I have just found that when you have a team that understands each other, trusts each other, and has healthy dynamics; it is an exponential multiplier in terms of how fast you move and the types of goals the organization is willing to go after and how you support yourselves on the journey. That fear of failure, that fear of judgment, how it goes out the window, and everyone really locks hands and starts clicking as a team, I think team dynamics are probably even more important or at least just as important as capacity and competence because I think you can have really smart, talented humans, but if they're not working well, you're not moving that. You're not moving forward, not at the speed you can. So I love books about that. So, I'm a big fan of anything about team dynamics.
Clint Betts
How are you thinking about just our general macroeconomic environment and our general political environment? It's interesting that CEOs never used to have to comment on those types of things now, and it seems like CEOs are almost required to talk about things or comment on things that are outside of what they do for a living. I'm not asking you to, but I just wonder how are you thinking about the current macroeconomic environment as we go into an election season, as we go into 2025? How are you feeling about that type of stuff?
PJ Oleksak
Yeah, I would say it's been interesting as a senior leader because you saw the pendulum swing pretty fast where CEOs and companies all of a sudden had to opine and make very public statements about everything, which created such a risk of a divisive dynamic. So I witnessed a lot of that. I saw a lot of it at my time at Slice, kind of painful to watch because it just felt like it was hard for leaders to say the right thing.
I think that my personal stance and really how I like to lead is that I want to create an inclusive environment where everyone's allowed to have their opinions and beliefs and be who they are, and I want to create the appropriate amount of space for that. I don't want it to be a platform where I'm going to come out and assert my point of view and make it on behalf of the company. I think we're all of different backgrounds, convictions, and things like that, and I think we have to extract what is unique and amazing about all of us and how we bring that together and respect it and create a space for it, but not, I don't believe in personally inserting strong opinions and making it on behalf of the company. I think I don't know, but that's who I am. I want people to be who they are.
Clint Betts
It's kind of wild that CEOs are even being asked to do that if we're just being honest. It's such a weird, odd thing, but it's probably-
PJ Oleksak
I don't talk politics in my family. I certainly don't want to talk about it at work.
Clint Betts
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think it's probably because trust has been lost in so many other areas of leadership, and now people are looking for business leaders to trust or to hear something from that maybe they would like. I don't know. I think it's really interesting. In this interview, you've talked a lot about culture and various ways that you think about it, as well as how to integrate teams and things like that. Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a great example of this. We actually have him coming to speak at an event in January.
PJ Oleksak
Amazing.
Clint Betts
Yeah, he's great. He's awesome. I wonder how you think about culture at Nuts.com and how have you built it?
PJ Oleksak
Yeah, so it's been an evolution during my time there, and I think that was how I would describe the culture when I got here, which was still really special. It is, Nuts in general, is a very low ego, customer-centric, high passion, and really good people. And I don't want to discredit any of the amazing leadership teams I've had the privilege of being a part of, but it is really special to have been a part of an organization that really doesn't have those political dynamics from a senior leadership standpoint. Even with the evolution of one here or there, you typically have something. So, it is a very low-ego, customer-centric, and good group of humans. And that's been consistent when I joined and now. I would say that we evolved culturally because of the underlying family heritage; family is not a word I would associate with accountability.
It depends on your personal family dynamics, but in general, family is not a word that is associated with accountability. And so, coming in, everyone was very nice and kind to each other, but we lacked a rigorous goal-setting feedback culture. And so that's been one of the changes, which is like feedback is a gift. Telling people that they can do something better is good for their growth; it's helpful to them. The reality is that most people who show up to work every day want to do a great job and grow, so they want to hear it. Very few people can't handle it or don't want to hear it. Most people actually want to grow and get better. Then, it's about giving our leaders, managers, partners, and team members across the organization the tools they need to do that productively.
Because not all feedback is a gift, it has to be given the right way with the right intent. So really teaching the team how to do that and also creating a performance culture. I think that was one of the big differences where we evolved from being a team where, and I've seen it with plenty of companies where bonuses are just given out, and it's how you get it, you don't quite know to be more, it is clear, it's super transparent. You have individual goals. We're going to have OKRs set, and we're going to talk about them at a regular cadence. And you're always going to know where you stand for your individual performance and the company's performance and how that fits Nuts. So moving to that performance and feedback culture has been the evolution, but without losing that magic, we hire really great people who are super hungry and driven to provide this amazing customer experience.
One of the things we've also evolved during my time here is really being focused on revising our mission, vision, and values and making it clear why we are here and what we are striving to do. And our mission is to spark moments of joy and human connection through delicious food. And I think in a world where we're increasingly behind screens, and we're always responding to something, whether it's Slack, text, et cetera, giving people something that gives them that moment of connection, whether it's a healthy snack at the end of the day after your workout, to reconnect with yourself or that indulgent treat just to take a moment or a breath or something to share with friends and family. How do we bring more connections and humans into this world? Because we are just really good people who are super excited to bring that humanization of e-commerce in that form. So for us, having great people behind the food and behind the product is really, really important.
Clint Betts
Finally, we end every interview with the same question that is at ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
PJ Oleksak
It was definitely Jason Ackerman, the founder of FreshDirect. I always say, based on my resume, I would not have gotten the jobs. He kept letting me step in. He trusted me. I proved myself and my work ethic. I think that one of the attributes that served me well as an employee, as a leader, and as a human in life is that I have a massive sense of ownership and accountability. That has afforded me three great tours of duties with fantastic founders who knew they could trust me and that I would act on their behalf as an owner in their interests. So I think Jay did me a great service by... Listen, I worked my tail off. So, I think he was happy with the work that I put out there. But like I said, it was an amazing eight years working at that company, and I think I probably... I felt like I did 20 years plus worth of learning during that time. It was really incredible. Hard work, but wow, rewarding, super appreciative. We're still very close.
Clint Betts
PJ, I am so honored to have you on the show. It's been incredible and what a leader you are, and congratulations on everything you're doing at Nuts.com. Best of luck on the gift launch. I'm sure it'll be great, and I'm sure we'll catch up with you in the future. Thank you so much for coming on.
PJ Oleksak
Thanks so much for having me.
Edited for readability.