1. Define your company’s values beyond a purpose statement: This approach ensures a strong brand foundation, leading to an exceptional customer experience and significant impact.
2. Listen more than you speak when engaging with customers: Active listening fosters empathy and helps you understand customer needs, leading to genuine connections and valuable interactions.
3. Hire people who take accountability and embrace growth: A cohesive and motivated team can drive the business forward and achieve long-term success.
4. Create a source essence document for your brand: This document helps define your brand's mission, values, and direction, keeping everyone aligned, especially during challenging times.
5. Position your product with clarity and relatability: Even if your product isn't entirely unique, strong positioning can help differentiate it from competitors and resonate more effectively with customers.
Mason Taylor's journey from a 14-year-old health enthusiast to the creator of the biggest medical mushroom brand in Australia is one of tenacity and determination. He not only founded a business, but also started a natural health movement. Explore how Mason created SuperFeast to incorporate traditional Taoist knowledge into the contemporary wellness realm.
Meet Mason, Founder of SuperFeast!
SuperFeast creates tonic herbs with integrity. In 2011, founder Mason Taylor's passion for health and wellness culminated in creating SuperFeast, which provides customers access to helpful supplements, herbs, and medicinal mushrooms.
Since then, the company has expanded, and now, SuperFeast has become Australia's leading supplier of tonic herbs and mushrooms. What seemed like a dream to Mason thirteen years ago has become a thriving business that helps people of all ages find the natural health remedies they need.
The SuperFeast brand is very personal to Mason. He's very connected to the core lessons of his business, and through the brand's values, he wants to make a significant impact on the world.
When crafting the brand, Mason wanted to find a way to mitigate degenerative diseases. Since he was 14 years old, Mason observed that most older people had to cross their fingers and hope that they wouldn't be diagnosed with this disease. If they were, then surgery and endless medications were the only options. As he grew older, Mason strived to find a solution.
Eventually, he discovered Taoist tonic herbalism, which became the foundation of SuperFeast.
The Taoist belief system demonstrates how to value the treasures of your body and spirit. Even though there will always be some challenges in your life, a handful of herbs might aid you along your journey.
When Mason founded his business, he saw the process as yin and yang — both positive and negative. At first, he was nervous about selling his products and the financial system as a whole. Mason overcame his mental blocks in time because he believed in the core philosophy upon which he founded his business. Mason had to stay true to himself and his values as his business grew and developed.
Over the past 13 years, SuperFeast has found its harmonious flow in the corporate world. With a core team of people who carry out the essence of the brand, the company has found success.
To master customer experience, Mason says a company has to dig deep and define its soul. Founders have to outline the company's values beyond the purpose statement. From this understanding, the customer journey comes about naturally, and business leaders are able to understand their growing impact and contribution to the marketplace.
When it comes to his marketing team, Mason explains the key to success is simple. In each interaction with the customer, they can only share information about the brand 20% of the time and make the rest of the conversation about the customer.
CX agents must understand who the customer is and figure out what they need, which takes empathy and a knack for listening to the customer. Whereas some marketing professionals try to emphasize and promote the product, engaging with customers should be about the impact of the product and how it can help the consumer.
Mason considers this the greatest juxtaposition. The SuperFeast team has great pride in the product and what the company stands for, but they don't overwhelm the customers with it. Instead, they connect to the customer genuinely and authentically. The team's pride shines in each successful customer interaction as they educate customers about the ethos of SuperFeast.
As a business leader, Mason says you have to craft synergy amongst your team to ensure that everyone can collaborate and strive for the company's goals. Once that momentum is solidified, a founder can carry out other tasks and responsibilities.
Hiring New Members
Team member integration benefits the SuperFeast team because it helps everyone stay on the same page and makes the work the team completes more efficient. Mason likes to hire potential team members who adopt a winning mindset, take accountability and can collaborate with their colleagues. He looks for growth, accountability, and momentum in each person he hires because those values catapult the company toward more success.
Mason says that his team is meant to carry out the purposeful expression of SuperFeast and each role they were hired in. He prefers to hire people who can take their role and continue to improve and expand their work past the job description. He wants everyone to strive to build a legacy in their position.
Mason and the SuperFeast team are innovative in listening to customers. Mason says his approach to connecting with customers stems from the Daoist focus. His company's ultimate innovation is creating a brand based on a simple idea — to develop new ways for people to prioritize their health.
Maintaining Motivation While Innovating Within Regulations
Australia has a strict set of regulations that Mason must work within to sell his product. Unlike most of his colleagues, who also tried to bootstrap companies and gave up, Mason has found a way to adhere to regulations and still expand and innovate his company and the products he sells.
No matter the pushback, Mason and the SuperFeast team continue to transcend boundaries in search of a greater good. Despite the challenges, he and his team have delved more into the scientific language to define precisely what the product is and the benefits it can provide.
Over time and with perseverance, Mason's company has soared to new heights. Currently, it is the most widely distributed medicinal mushroom company across Australia in pharmacies, health food stores, and supermarkets.
Elevating to the Next Level
Although the company ships its product from Texas, Mason hopes to expand SuperFeast's presence in the US in the near future. Additionally, Mason wants to establish governance at his company's executive, cross-functional, and departmental levels. These strategies will help the SuperFeast team operate as an organism rather than a machine. For a business to become an organism, great collaboration and accountability are required.
Mason advises his fellow entrepreneurs to adopt punchy product positioning to help customers relate to their products. Even if a product isn't unique, excellent positioning will help put one company above the rest. Once a leader understands the product they want to sell, Mason explains that they should create a source essence document outlining everything about the brand — its mission, core values, and more. The source essence document will help leaders define their brand and will be invaluable when conflict resolution is needed.
Can’t-Live-Without-Tool: His phone and Monday
Favorite Book or Podcast: “Holacracy: The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy” by Brian J. Robertson
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