Honest Tea Founder Shares Tips for Success During Campus Talk

Your professor could be your business partner one day.

That was just one message that Seth Goldman, the founder of Honest Tea, shared Oct. 8 with an audience of about 250 Montclair State students and faculty plus local entrepreneurs at the university’s conference center.  Goldman started the Honest Tea organic beverage company in 1998 with one of his professors at Yale School of Management, Barry Nalebuff.

“It started in the classroom, so make sure you pay attention to what your professors are telling you,” Goldman said.

Goldman told the audience how he was still brewing the tea in his kitchen when he landed an order from Whole Foods for 15,000 bottles. Undaunted, Goldman told the food-store chain, “Give me a few weeks” and delivered on the order.

The event was presented by the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship.

A theme of Goldman’s talk was staying true to a company’s mission, even as the company grows. In 2008, Coca-Cola purchased a minority interest in Honest Tea, fueling further growth.

“If you’re doing something you believe in, you’re in the right place at the right time,” Goldman said. He later said, “If you build the business the right way, the margins will come.”

View photos from the event.
View photos from a dinner before the event.
View video of event highlights.
View Goldman’s full talk: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

When asked by an attendee if he was now working in or on the business, Goldman said he started as the accountant, label purchaser, head of operations, tea purchaser and more, and still stays very engaged in the direct management of the business even as the company has grown.

“For me, it’s important to still feel closely connected to the business,” he said.

Involving students in the audience, Goldman asked three students to guess the cost of making one bottle of Honest Tea. The guesses were 15 cents, 65 cents and 70 cents, and the student coming closest won a T-shirt. Using a flipboard, Goldman wrote down each component of the cost, arriving at 40 cents to make one bottle, which is then sold to a distributor for 77 cents, with stores paying $1 and a retail price of $1.49 to $1.59.

Seth Goldman lists cost components to make one bottle of Honest Tea.

Showing the company’s creativity on the marketing front, Goldman reviewed Honest Tea’s “National Honesty Index,” a social experiment that often generates free news coverage in each city where it is launched. The index measures how honest citizens are by asking people to leave a dollar for each bottle of Honest Tea they take from an unmanned kiosk in public, while hidden cameras roll.

Goldman, who lives near Honest Tea’s Bethesda, Md., headquarters, also signed copies of his book, “Mission in a Bottle,” which he co-authored with Nalebuff. The business book is a comic book, in part because one of Goldman’s sons is dyslexic and the Honest Tea founder wanted an offbeat way to tell his story after bonding with his son by reading comic books together.

Goldman’s talk was well received by attendees.

“I think that was the best presentation,” said Brian Teets, a Montclair State MBA student and budget analyst in the university’s budget office. “I thought he was very engaging and inspiring, about how he started his business to where he is now.”

Read more reaction to the Goldman talk by visiting our Meetup page for the event:
http://www.meetup.com/Montclair-State-Entrepreneurship/events/139423972/