Founder of Zero Co, Mike Smith, on scaling a sustainable business

Nearly five years after launching Zero Co on Kickstarter, the sustainable personal hygiene brand is opening up its closed-loop model with the introduction of a ForeverFill bottle and paper refills.As the company rolls out its latest product innovation and rebrand, Inside FMCG spoke to Zero Co founder Mike Smith to learn more about his career trajectory and what it takes to be a sustainable entrepreneur.Smith opens up about his greatest challenges scaling a business, the advice he would give to aspiring entrepreneurs and his approach to work-life balance.Inside FMCG: Tell me about your career journey. What are some of the different roles you’ve held along the way that led to you founding Zero Co?Mike Smith: I studied commerce at University and then my first job was in an advertising agency. I worked for probably the first three or four years of my career in advertising. I guess that’s where I’ve learned a lot of the things that I use on a day to day basis in terms of brand building. So it was quite a formative experience. I realized after a few years that I didn’t want to work in an advertising agency for the rest of my life and so that’s when I decided to go and start doing my own things. So then I went and joined a startup as a co-founder that was building some wearable technology for the action sports industry, so similar to Fitbit, but prior to Fitbit existing. It was for surfers, skateboarders and snowboarders. Basically I did that for a few years and that technology that we built was acquired by Billabong. Then I had a little career break to think about what I wanted to do next. Then I went and started a wine brand called Cake Wines which I spent five years building, maybe six years building. I sold that business and I took another career break, and then got really passionate about the plastic problem and ocean waste. Then I started Zero Co.What does your day to day look like at Zero Co?It’s changed a lot, to be honest with you and it’s more and more now becoming about the impact work. So I’m going to most of the major cleanups now, and being involved shooting content and doing the storytelling around the cleanups. There’s still a lot of work that I do in product development. So we have a head of product, but I spent a lot of time with the product team designing products, developing products, testing products, all that kind of stuff. And then the third bucket of my time would just be the business admin stuff and day-to-day management.What are some of the challenges you’ve faced since founding Zero Co and how have you dealt with them? Probably one of the biggest challenges for me was the scale with which Zero Co went from, it was just me that started it and then we had 30 staff a year later. It was a very quick growth and I’d never run a business that grew that quickly before. So I guess the biggest single challenge was scaling up my leadership skills, and upon reflection I didn’t do a great job of that in the early days of Zero Co to be completely honest with you. But over the last couple of years I’ve invested in a leadership coach. I have regular catch ups with a coach and I’ve really just invested a lot of time and effort into developing myself and developing my leadership skills. I think that has been really powerful, not just for business, but just in my life. Looking back on your career path, what is a piece of advice that you would give someone looking to launch a brand with a sustainable mission and perhaps trying to emulate what you’ve built at Zero Co?I think the first thing is just go and start. I feel like lots of people procrastinate or give into fear, or they think because they haven’t got all the answers right now that they can’t get it started. My biggest lesson has just been that you don’t need to know all the answers. Just start, take the first step, then the second step, then take the third step, and you’ll learn along the way, and you’ll improve along the way. There is no such thing as perfect, you’re always trying to improve, but if you never start because you don’t have the perfect solution, you’ll never get started. That would be the first thing.The second part of that is that we just need more people in the world working on all the problems that we face. There are just so many environmental problems, and there’s no one single solution to them. We just need lots and lots of people coming up with lots of different solutions. And so that’s the only way we’re going to solve all these problems, if people get involved.What is one of the more surprising lessons you’ve learned along the way since launching Zero Co?  I think one of the things that’s really surprised me is the scale of this waste problem globally. Everywhere that we go we just find rubbish, it’s getting worse. It’s not getting better. We literally just did a cleanup in Arnhem Land a couple of weeks ago, in a remote Indigenous community, there was like no one up there, like the middle of nowhere, deserted white sand beach, and it was just covered in rubbish. It just never ceases to surprise me, the scale of the problem and the fact that it’s everywhere – plastic waste has reached every single corner of the planet, and it’s shocking. It’s surprising, but it also fills me with a sense of urgency that we just have to do more. We have to do it quickly. We have to act now. With such a hands-on role as your own, what is your approach to trying to maintain a work-life balance?I do not have one, to be really honest with you. My life consists of work and home, wife and daughter time, that’s it. I don’t do anything outside of those two things. My thing is, you’ve only got so many hours in the day and you can’t do everything. So I just made the decision that right now, the two priorities of my life are scaling Zero Co and being a dad and a husband, and they take up 100 per cent of my time.