The $30 Million Turnaround That Started With 48 Hours of One on Ones | #650

Beck Williams took the CEO chair at Seed & Sprout in 2022. A business in decline. A warehouse full of bread boxes nobody wanted. And a plan to fix it that started with people, not spreadsheets.

If you've followed Australian sustainable retail over the past few years, you've watched Seed & Sprout climb. Beck came up through corporate, with an apprenticeship at GM Holden, a transformation role at Mercedes-Benz and a stint at Thermomix, before joining founder Sophie Kovic in 2022 to lead the turnaround of the Byron Bay brand behind plastic-free lunchware, kitchen and homewares. She rebuilt it around product, supplier relationships and a fiercely flexible team, and it now turns over $30 million and ships to more than 50 markets. As CEO working alongside a founder, she's also one of the clearer voices going on how that partnership actually survives.

Nathan sat down with Beck to dig into how the turnaround really happened: why she ran a one on one with every single person in her first 48 hours, how the team clears dead stock without slashing prices, and why radical transparency, from a $2 fuel surcharge to exactly where they use AI, keeps customers on side.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why Beck started the turnaround with a one on one conversation with every single person in the business, and why she refuses to do them in a group [06:02]
• The bread box gate cleanup, and how 18 months of dead stock cleared in six weeks as a gift with purchase [13:44]
• Testing new products in pilot runs of just 500 units using pre-orders and long supplier relationships [15:19]
• How Seed & Sprout separates a quality customer from a cheap one using AOV, second purchase timing and cross-category buying [27:02]
• The science behind the deliberately odd 8, 9 and 11 percent discounts [29:13]
• Why owning the $2 fuel surcharge out loud built more trust than hiding it [42:51]

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