#7 :: Growing Grass to Save the Planet, with John Reid - Waterfield Farms
The most successful social innovation comes from great questions, not someone’s whim. In college, Waterfield Farms’ John Reid posited a compelling question, took a chance on a subject he’d never considered before, and decades later continues to feed people affordable, quality food while improving multiple environmental situations. The silver linings of 2020 helped advance his team’s mission, bringing them closer to a breakthrough solution to the climate crisis.
Waterfield Farms: https://waterfieldfarms.com/
Recorded on 11.19.20
TRANSCRIPT
[Music & Intro]
Andrea Spirov: Hey everyone, welcome back. Today we are stepping into the world of farming here at the 100 CEO Project. Fish farming, to be precise. With us is John Reid, CEO of Waterfield Farms which produces organic tilapia and giant shrimp, along with herbs and vegetables in an integrated ecosystem, which I'm going to let him explain to you in more detail very shortly. But first, John, welcome to the show.
John Reid: Hi there. Hello, fun to be here.
AS: So your entire business model is focused on sustainability and so we're excited to hear about what you've created. But first, can you share with us a little bit about the current market conditions for fish and seafood and give us an understanding of why Waterfield Farms is such a critical venture at this point in time.
JR: Okay, well that's a lot but simply let’s start off with a few statistics. The United States imports about 85% of all its seafood. We have the largest area of coastline in the world and yet we import huge amounts of fish so just right off the bat we need to grow fish, we have immense agricultural resources but we're importing. So to grow fish in the US makes tremendous sense. We then chose to grow species that are the most profitable but also the lowest cost fish in the market and our key goal is to produce not just organic regenerative food, but low-cost food to serve the market. Most people you know love seafood but it has often become priced out of the market for most people, so we're about bringing the price back down to make seafood affordable again. And also in the 20s and 30s seafood was considered a poor man's protein. But then, people discovered it ‘oh wow’ and they started eating lots and lots of it and the price went through the roof because there's not enough of it in the oceans. And the oceans is another part about what we are very committed to is that we're really outstripping the capacity of the oceans to produce enough fish. So most fisheries are overfished or in some cases they're collapsing. So growing fish on land became a great way to feed the country but also not strip out the very dwindling fisheries resources around the planet. So I can go on but I'll pause there.
3:30
AS: Last time we spoke you talked about some silver linings for your business in 2020 so can you share a little bit about that?
JR: Well, um, a few things. One, our primary market has been supermarkets, not restaurants and whatnot, because it's just, we had to pick a market and supermarkets are a better low cost option for us to sell into. But it turns out that during recessions, people tend to eat... They go out less and in this case, they can't go out at all. So supermarket sales always go up during recessions and during a normal recession when you're not just limited to staying in your house, like we are now, instead of, you know, going out and treating yourself Friday or Saturday night to a fancy dinner, people go and buy upscale a little bit in the supermarket and buy a little bit more of a fancy something and cook it at home for their family. So supermarket sales always go up during recessions and and other times and particularly in the pandemic so that has been a small silver lining, but a different one has become really people have started to understand the importance of food resiliency. You know people are panic buying and rushing - food's going to run out. And that often is because the food chain in this country is super, super long most food comes from 2,000- 3,000 miles away from it. In some cases it's shorter than 1000 miles but still very far away with a lot of opportunity for interruption in that supply chain. So growing food locally, sustainably, resiliency that has been something people started to really get in the very visceral sense now, as opposed to as maybe an intellectual concept but now it's really come home and there's a lot more of an understanding and a desire for local food, and the market is more susceptible is more open to that now as well. So there's several silver linings, unfortunately, to the pandemic.
4:48
AS: You had some things going on with your business as well, correct? To do with building new facilities...
JR: Well, yes, we're expanding two operations. One, to tell you a little bit about what we do - we grow fish in large tanks of water and then the water from those fish tanks is circulated through shrimp tanks and the water from there goes to plants, and basically the uneaten feed from the fish is fed to the shrimp and the shrimp manure andthe fish manure is fed to the plants. The plants clean the water, and is returned back again so it's a recirculating system 100% recirculation. So we do that and we ran a facility in Amherst, MA for about 20 years shipping to about 650 supermarkets all across the Northeast. We had to shut down because of loss of the lease of land and a bunch of challenges. So we're restarting an operation in Albany, New York. I'm pointing because right now Albany is that way. So Albany, New York, and so we're working with investors to raise the funds to expand and that this time has really helped investors see what the importance of what we're about, food resiliency and then the later point I'll bring up about carbon sequestration reversing climate change was another thing we're very committed to. I’ll explain a bit more about that later, but relative to our fundraising and secondly, there's a hatchery in Florida that we're in the midst of purchasing and that is very important for us because of the genetics of the fish we grow. A lot of people are focusing on growing much more expensive fish to sell into the higher premium market, which is a good business model you know growing salmon and high end fish where you can get a lot of money per pound but our approach is exactly the opposite. Growing as cheap a fish as we can as inexpensively as we can, and sell a lot more fish at a lower price. That means we need to work on growing fish that grow faster on a lower quality feed, lower protein diets not sort of feeding them super high test feeds that cost a lot of money. So having a hatchery we can breed, stock we can use, and then a facility to grow out that stock.
And our mission is not just to grow just in upstate New York, it's really to replicate our systems outside of each major market. And an interesting distinction. We don't want to be in the market because a lot of people say they want to grow in the city. And that's really quite nice but when you think about how do you distribute inside the city? I have some friends that run some container farms in Brooklyn, and they literally get on the subway to deliver their product, which is kind of innovative in some regards, but at the same time they can't move volume. A lot of farms who have built in the city, they wind up shipping their product in big trucks out of the city to the distribution centers to the distribution centers that surround most cities, and then those trucks take it back into all the city markets. So we build outside the city on the edge at the distribution center so we can immediately ship directly into the, into the market. So, one of our key traits is we call ‘same day fresh’ so we pick and pack and harvest by 10 in the morning. It's on our trucks in the supermarket distribution centers by around 12 to one o'clock, it distributes out to the stores your local supermarket store by around three or four, so you can come home from work five or six and buy what was growing in our greenhouses the same day. So that being close allows us to do that same day delivery cycle. If we’re too far away we can't do it. It's just not possible physically. So our program is to replicate systems, outside of major cities where there's a big enough market to serve the large facilities that we build. So that's another aspect of when you mentioned what we're what we're building out and what we're developing
8:29
AS: You were calling this “grass fed fish,” and you want to talk about the carbon sequestration issue which I thought was really, really interesting. Can you tell us about that?
JR: Let me throw in a word before that called multi trophic. So what we do is, what that means is feeding on many different energy levels inside an ecosystem. So what we do is we feed the fish, which are sort of our apex fish, and then the waste stream that falls down from that, we then recycle. There’s a great saying, “don't waste the waste,” because that's really important. If you look at when you feed a fish about 20 to 25% of what you feed the fish becomes fish, and 75% is lost as fish manure, which you might think is pretty bad. But tell you look at chicken, which about 15% of what you feed a chicken becomes chicken and all the rest is lost as manure, or for cattle on a good day it's 2% of what you feed a cow becomes a cow. And that's sort of the foundation why some people have such a beef with growing livestock because they don't convert their resources very efficiently. So for what we do is we fish already 25% that's one of the best conversions in the industry. But what we then do is we feed that leftover feed from our fish to the shrimp, they consume about another 20%. And that goes on to the, to the plants and that consumes about another 10%. So we get about another 55% conversion of our feed into saleable product and that's what gives us such great margins as a business and what allows us to sell product at a very low cost because we're fully utilizing all of the value.
So it's like if you buy a bottle of wine and you pour out three quarters of it before you drink it. It would be it would be nuts, but that's what most what's most protein producers do. So we're really shifting and there's more species we can add into that mix in time we'll be getting in freshwater mussels, and that'll get us to about a 70% utilization of our diet. So that's the pre, the pre ramble as I like to say, for the feed that we give them. So we use feed very very efficiently. But the feed itself. we started off. Most fish feed contains a lot of fish and it's surprisingly, many people some people will know that fish meal, a little baby fish are caught, ground up and mixed with grains and then fed to high protein eating species like salmon and bass and things like that, which grows fish really well but it's pretty horrible for the ocean fisheries because we're catching all those little baby fish that need to be in an ocean, we've eaten all the big fish. So now we're, and to recover those fish need to have the little feeder fish to eat. But if we catch all those little fish and fish meal, the oceans can't, the stocks can't recover. So, that's pretty bad ecologically for the oceans, but also a lot of those fish are at the bottom of the food chain. They eat a lot of toxins, whether it be polluted algaes, grasses, things like that and that becomes a vector for contamination into our system. So cutting fishmeal out of our diet is very important for ecologically helping to preserve the oceans, but also not to allow contaminants into our organic system. So, so first we cut out fish meal we had an all grain based diet. And we thought we were quite proud of ourselves, this is great and we did, we did well with this for a few years, but then we realized grains are almost as destructive in terms of destroying our topsoil, and a whole lot of other resources, carbon emissions. As using fishmeal. So we really started searching, how do we cut grains, out of our operation? And we came up with the ideas of using grasses to blend with our grains, and we have a thing called a grass-based diet, or we call grass-fed fish to play on the slogan I'm sure you've all heard of. So, yeah, that became a real focus for us. And that was again to create a sustainable issue particularly relative to the destruction grains create. Grains are wonderful for us to eat, but we shouldn't be feeding them to animals, and the reason being is that we have a very grave topsoil crisis in the world. By different accounts we have 75 to maybe 100 years of topsoil left. And we're out of soil, like no soil no food, no us. So it's a pretty big problem. So grasses because they’re ground they're cut and then grow again, we're not turning over the soil. They allow this soil to grow back and recover. And so we're rebuilding topsoil by growing grasses, so the more grasses we can put into our diet, the less grains, the more we are regenerating our top soil.
So a huge, huge issue, but then it came to realize you know what is soil when you said, when you regrow topsoil. What is that? What's it, where is it coming from, and we were like, Well of course it's carbon from the atmosphere and then we started doing a bit of math and sort of discovered that we're sequestering huge amounts of carbon in the process. So for every acre of grass that we grow, we can sequester anywhere from a ton to two tons of carbon per acre per year into the topsoil and that's what the rebuild topsoil is the co2 and other things too but a lot of co2 gets built in that topsoil. So we've came to realize that grass production is one of the single largest forms of carbon sequestration on the planet, and we then did a bit more math, if we would convert and a little bit of another statistic about 33% of all the grain that's grown on the planet is fed to animals. In the United States, it's about 70% of global grain is fed to our animals, our animal industry, but globally that's 30%. If we were to convert just that portion of grain, that's grown to feed animals, the grasses to feed animals. And remember that we sequester a ton to two tons of carbon per acre per year so we can have rid of all those acres to grasses, we would suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere and a new topsoil, we would reverse climate change in around 50 years, it seems to be the single biggest factor to reverse climate change. Period. And that's controversial - I’d love to get people to say no no no, there's another way but so far and I put this to a lot of climate scientists about a bunch of reports and papers we've written on this. So far no one has, other than sort of my bad spelling, has had any issues with what we've done. Stoichiometrically, scientifically etc. Now, how's the market? How do you get people? If this grass stuff is so great. No, and I've had some friends who are Ireland grain farmers and they say, I want to grow grass. I see myself disappearing before my eyes. I know I can't give my farm to my kids, because there's nothing to give them, you know, soil. I can’t give them a rock farm but there's no farm left. So, how do I convert? I can't just plant grass and grow it because who's gonna buy it.
So part of our mission is to develop the market for grass-based diets, first by using it ourselves, developing it ourselves and we can afford to do it, in the beginning sometimes our first diets we run grass that's about 10 years and our previous facility in Amherst, and the beginning it didn't grow as well. It was slower it wasn't as efficient, but we worked on the recipe - we tuned it, we got things growing just about as good, but we can afford it because our margin is so good we can afford to experiment and still make money. We can even have a slightly less good margin, and still make money with our grass diet. So we're developing the market, creating the volume and farmers. Getting farmers to grow, to supply those mills and slowly building a market for ourselves because we have a decent volume of demand, but then offer it to other aquaculture growers, other growers of tilapia, which is that if I mentioned, you mentioned that we grow tilapia, which is the fourth most consumed fish in the United States. So it's a lot of demand for tilapia, so we can convert the bulk of the tilapia industry to be using grass based diets. We'll start to build a pretty good foundation. And then, in time we look to convert the recipes for poultry because about 60% of all the grains in the United States are fed to chicken. So it's a huge market, but chicken feed is really really cheap. And it's actually easier to make a chicken diet because it's a lower protein than what a fish needs. But, cost wise it's really hard to get twice as much chicken feed right it's cheap stuff. So getting the data that means we have to get our volume up get really efficient and our production cycles. Get the farmers efficient tune all kinds of things, it's going to take us you know some years to get this worked out but then we can start to get the volume up, get the acreage is starting to convert to grasses and then we then we're off to the races then I said I think it's about 20 years to get the volume of grass, the grass based up to the volume it needs to be at. Run that for another 30 years and we can really take the worst of the climate impact, out of the atmosphere. I can get into some co2 numbers and things if that would be useful. I don't know how far you want me to get into the weeds here, to the grass weeds.
17:30
AS: Nice pun. Well, that's interesting. I mean it doesn't seem very exciting to grow grass, but I'm guessing that it grows more easily then... I live in the middle of the country and there's a lot of corn and soybean and you know if you're not having a very good year it just seems like, very complicated - the farming industry... So if you can grow grass sounds like it might be an easier thing to grow?
JR: Well it's much easier in a sense, obviously you don't have to till. So you skip that right off the bat. An initial bat, you don't have to seed. So right off the bat, you don't have that expense. It takes a lot less fertilizer and a lot less irrigation, and it grows, it's much more tolerant to cold and to heat. So if you have a bad frost or a bad drought or excess rain, all the above really hurts your corn or soy, and other crop yields where grasses are much more resilient. And as climate change comes on those types of really erratic weather is becoming more and more prevalent I mean we all see this now. It was predicted 20 years ago, it's a fact now that climate is very very impacted. So grasses are much more resilient to this kind of change and even if we were to stop emitting all new carbon tomorrow, if we were a carbon neutral planet, we're going to have 20-30 years of impact that we've already created with our climate; that takes time to get things back to the winters that our grandparents knew, rather than the winters we know now where it's November and it's barely 20 degrees outside where I’m at. So when normally we'd have hard frost and snow on the ground. The lakes that we used to be able to ski across in November. Sometimes they're open water until January. So, that's, we’re very clear there. So to your point about farmers, it makes the resiliency of the farmer easier. And there are other challenges there's markets we have to get the protein content up, there's challenges to working on that. Grasses, grow it at a good day about 17% protein, but most grains want to be around 25 to 30% protein, so some tricks we're working on to get those ratios to work right and then we still can blend in some grains as well to adjust to that. But to your, to the point I started with about co2 I'll give you a very simple thing that when our grandparents were living co2 in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million. Just think of it as a number as a reference point 280. Most people have said to stop the planet from heating more than two degrees of temperature rise. And we've already risen a degree. So, to stop that second degree of rise we can't be above 350 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere. That's a pretty recognized number; we got to not be above 350. Right now we're at 412 actually 414. It keeps going up and changes on me, the numbers. 414 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere right now that's obviously way above 350. So we are on track for about three degrees of climate change now. So even if we would become a carbon neutral culture, society, planet. We're already cooked, we've got to take carbon from the air out. We've got to go from 450 back to a minimum of 350 and that's that stops us at two degrees temperature rise. There used to be a debate exactly is not going to be on the number but, you know, 1.752 and a quarter but that gets us to a place where we're barely tolerant to what people consider is too high and most people are going to say we can't go above one and a half degrees of temperature rise, but we're on track for three with 414 parts of co2 in the atmosphere. So this is why sequestration is such an important part, really, of our of our lives; literally our lives depend on this, our children's lives especially, you know, humans will probably exist, we'll get by somehow right but an awful lot of humans will suffer a lot will have to migrate a lot will die trying. Our economies will be in tremendous risk. The Fed, US Fed just issued a report three days ago that climate change is a material risk for our economy. And so when the Fed acknowledges climate change as an issue you know something has finally gotten - they kind of said it's a risk factor, right, they're not saying you know alarm bells like some people are saying but they're of course very staid, and how they present things they don't want to freak people out. But even that got people to sign up and pay attention.
So, how do we get this carbon out of the air. Well, one way is grasses and there are lots of other, of course, now we take 33% of our soils, and we start to question that's with grasses, but the other 70%. There are many, many other techniques other farmers can grow, no-till agriculture is a big, a big factor, many, many other ways to get organic matter into your soil. So pretty much if we can just get the world to stop putting new carbon in the atmosphere. Agriculture can pretty much reverse climate change, if we get the grass production going, and we get all the farmers to be a lot more responsible to always planting cover crops never leaving bare soil so many things - that could become a whole new show about how that how that happens but the simple part is, get that carbon back in the ground, build back the topsoil, climate change becomes something we talked about that almost killed us in 30 years. But right now it's it's it's it's gone. If we don't stop because again we're on track for three degrees if we go to four or five degrees. That's, you know, pretty much, that's an apocalypse, and no one really fully understands what's going to happen but it's it's really not good. I mean, the bulk of the culture and society we know today. Pretty much disappears. Something else will come in its place, but it's likely not going to be nearly as abundant, or as great even as it is now. We have a lot of problems in the world already with equity and poverty and that just becomes massively exacerbated, and we become part of the impoverished in the process.
So I don't want to be too much. Too gloomy about this, although it is pretty gloomy as well; it's hard to put a good perspective. Everyone always likes the happy ending. We're almost going to die, but..everyone's likes to put that ‘but’ at the end. We can do this, and we’ll be saved. So, so there is that, You know this is saying we're the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change, but the last generation that can do something about it. And that's that's very true but the good news is we do have a way so we're really focused on of course our core business is food for people, but a second really really important thing is how do we really kick off the markets to sequester carbon. And we're committed to market forces, you know market forces really made this mess in the first place, and markets themselves aren't necessarily bad, but we need to harness the market power and the power of consumerism because if every consumer - what I'd love to do is get packaging that has a carbon content on each packet - so consumers often feel helpless that what can I do? I'm just along for the ride. There's nothing I can do about this, but if you could look on every package, and see what the carbon content is, you could buy as low as you could, consumers have some real power then in buying low carbon or carbon negative content products. I time we can grow a carbon negative food. So I really believe in the power of consumers, informing consumers and giving them the power to purchase responsibly and and so between that and having but they can't do it now it's not in the market, but so that's our mission to create that the power of good low cost food that also was sequestering carbon and transforming climate change, so we have a real future. So there we go there's a, there's some sort of light topic to think about.
25:26
AS: So, you've been in this business for over 30 years What advice can you give to entrepreneurs or even seasoned companies on how to go about creating real change with their sustainable ventures, or even just how to be successful with bringing them to market like you have?
JR: So there's a lot to that. I can start by saying when I was in my freshman year in college, I sat down with a little black and white composition notebook and I wrote a question. What can I do, that does the most for the most people that I'd be good at? And I started scribbling and writing and thinking, and I wrote not, what do I want, what do I like, I wrote what can I do that does the most for others that I'd be good at. And this model came up very early on I developed and I went on and built on the south side of the dorms and my college, a greenhouse and started growing fish and plants. And so since 1980 really 81, I've been developing the system. I came to me quickly but it came quickly because I asked, I think, a good question. So you have to have the proper question first, and then the biggest thing is to get yourself out of the question like, what not, what do you like? What's fun for you... I can't find myself in the world. If you find something you can do for other people, you will learn to love it. And a great example was, I was doing chemistry, physics, biology, all the undergraduate stuff and this question came about. We had our wonderful little system running in this greenhouse on campus, and then I realized Okay, how does this actually make a difference in the world. And I switched my entire degree to economics. And if you talked to me, and now I'm almost a senior. You know when I was a freshman, I was gonna be an economics major here right what they put in your, your soup at lunch. Totally like that’s where fun goes to die right. That’s the expression for economics, right. So, but now all of a sudden economics is fascinating, because it gives me the access to how do I solve these questions because to a great degree economics is the study of ecosystems. So, so again, if I thought what do I like, I never would have taken economics. Horrible right? Who wants to be an economist? Apologies to whoever is an economist, but anyway, it becomes something we become passionate about. So you find yourself passionate about things you would not have thought. Once you get yourself out of the way and that that's like the single biggest thing. And then of course just being relentless, getting very grounded in what you, what you show and then just sticking into it. You know, when I first started growing fish people used to make jokes. Oh you grow fish, what do you do? You put them in the soil and plant them... and you put the head up or the tail down when you plant it...like all these dumb jokes and growing fish was considered ridiculous. And tilapia...no one knew what a tilapia was. But you know you stick to your convictions, and then eventually you know if you aren't completely insane, you've grounded your conviction in something that is real and you make it happen. So, but having the right question I think is the first most important thing to look after and then having conviction and believing in yourself, to just go make it happen no matter what. Damn the torpedoes, as they say.
So, so that's that - I don't know what other, there's lots more that I think I've done, being very controversial you know. Here's one funny analogy you know so trying to raise money one time I was trying to get this one guy, Carl Icahn, who was a big venture capitalist back in the 80s. I was trying to get him to investment in my business and I could never get past his, his secretaries and wall of people. So I went outside his house and I stuck my business plan in his mailbox, which is not legal. Because you can't put anything but mail in the mailbox So, but how the letter carrier didn't see it and it got into this house and he read it. I got a note back about six weeks later saying, I love the, I love the spirit. Nice try, but no thanks. But at least I got through to him. So it's just crazy things like that where you just you just do just to be unstoppable is something that I've kind of been and gotten pretty far and we got some pretty big challenges still in front of us. I mean it's time it's a bit of a burden to think, you know, people often feel anxious that they don't know what to do, there's this huge image problem. And they just feel helpless and and it's not much better if you think you have the answer, because then you have to go do that. And then speaking to people and addressing it and you say I think I have a way to reverse climate change and people look at you like, where are the folks in the white coats and take this guy away. He's crazy. So having a great idea can be almost as hard as not having any idea, but we're getting there we're getting enough people start to see the possibility of what we represent both from a business side but also from the environmental and the climate changing side, and the people side.
There's a lot of things I didn't mention. You know people count too in this right. So a lot of the work out of our physical infrastructure is designed to employ persons with disabilities too. About a quarter of our workforce are people with disabilities that can do some of the - Frankly, in agriculture some of the work is pretty boring. We've got to be moving a plant from one hole to the next all day long harvesting packaging, and people who have a lower mental aptitude like that kind of consistency. So we've developed a broad range of tasks for sort of all different. We have folks with doctorates, and people who will be effectively, you know, a second grade aptitude all their life. So we have a full - and everyone, you know, everyone works together. We have our Christmas parties with the whole gang. So, it's very fun to incorporate. You know, it sounds silly but to bring people into the whole mix and have that be part of the whole process for us. So that's, that's really fun. That's really rewarding even when the chips are down and things are hard. We have a team of people that you're really building. And I don’t have enough time for the stories of the loyalty that we've had towards our company and our projects. It's just incredibly amazing. So there's another aspect to all of this is really, you know, I guess I mean, the more professional thing to say is build a team, a good team always be the dumbest person in the room, hire as many smart people you can find so you're the dumbest not the smartest person. And I can clearly say that I accomplish that regularly. But in any case, those are the things that are fun that are that are what I've looked at is trying to be unstoppable and having some really good questions that you that you will work to solve,
AS: Not silly at all. I think that's tremendous that you've worked out a way to incorporate people of varying abilities into your workforce. That's wonderful.
JR: So many things that we do but that's that's like the crux of what we're about. But it's about people. Right now it's about low cost food people can afford. It's about the people that helped produce the product. There's a whole approach we do for sales and marketing that we can't get into but it's about reaching people. I mentioned earlier when we were speaking that one of things we do is we hire acting students as our core sales and marketing folks, because they're great at expressing and engaging with people, what we're about because we don't really sell and instead of saying you don't sell your product, you sell a story. You don't sell the steak you sell the sizzle. So it's about generating with people what you're about, and that's a super important part of what we do is try to reach out to the community, you know, obviously, we have a community outside the business that we really try and engage with as well. So on many many levels we're working with what are often referred to as regenerative principles; of really regenerating relationships with regenerating our soil, regenerating our environment, regenerating us as a culture and as people and as human so it's about all of that, all in one big. I’d say neat bundle but it's actually a very big messy bundle, but it's coming together. So,
AS: John Reid, thank you so much. We're out of time but I love hearing what you're doing and look forward to seeing if anyone - John had mentioned earlier if anybody has any questions or comments regarding his plan on the grass fed fish, you're welcome to send those over and submit to us.
JR: Oddly enough, I love critique because you know if I'm doing something stupid if someone tells me I could just stop being stupid. I pay attention to them. So it's always nice to get pointing out when you're doing something that it's not gonna work. So it's very helpful.
AS: It sounds so promising even great. We're so glad that you were able to join us and where can they find you?
JR: There's obviously Waterfieldfarms.com. There's our website, and LinkedIn, I'm John Reid, on LinkedIn so it's pretty easy to find me that way as well. So many ways. In this connected world it's hard to hide actually, but yeah Waterfieldfarms.com and myself John Reid on the LinkedIn platform. Those are two good ways to get me.
AS: Thanks so much. This has been great.
JR: All right, great. Enjoy. Thank you again.
Laure Pillow: Hey, guys, we hope you've enjoyed today's episode. And if you did, please share it with your friends and colleagues who also have to navigate this leadership stuff. As you can see, this project is about to be a mini masterclass in every episode. Best part. It's free. So if you like it, please do us a favor and take a screenshot, share it on social with the hashtag #100CEO. That way we can say thanks and share it in our stories. And finally, if you've got some insights you'd like to share and you're a CEO, we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at 100CEOProject.com, or on LinkedIn at the 100 CEO Project. Until next time, keep leading by example.
To become a guest: https://www.100ceoproject.com/become-a-100-ceo
Follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Hosted by: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow
Writing and research: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow
Edited by: Laurie Pillow
Produced by: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow
