The Overlooked Building Blocks of Growth

We recent­ly sat down with one of our long-term clients Angela San­ti­a­go, CEO/­co-founder of The Lit­tle Pota­to Com­pa­ny (LPC) to talk about the incred­i­ble growth of the com­pa­ny – from a sin­gle field in Alber­ta, Cana­da to ship­ping her prod­uct across North Amer­i­ca – and her unex­pect­ed jour­ney to become an amaz­ing CEO.

Today, LPC prod­ucts are in about 20,000 stores in North Amer­i­ca, with annu­al net sales, over the last 12 years, grow­ing on aver­age almost 20%.

Meet­ing 15 years ago, when she attend­ed a Rock­e­feller Habits work­shop I gave in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da, marked the begin­ning of our pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship. To this day, I con­tin­ue to be impressed with her open, gen­er­ous approach to growth and lead­er­ship, and the tremen­dous growth of the company. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a series of blogs about her expe­ri­ences as a leader well-root­ed in strong val­ues and a sense of pur­pose. In this blog, we talk about the fac­tors that con­tributed most to LPCs impres­sive growth and her abil­i­ties as a leader.

Very often, lead­ers look at growth in terms of increased rev­enue, expan­sion of branch­es, mar­kets or prod­ucts, or acqui­si­tions. While these are true, Angela San­ti­a­go also con­sid­ers these more foun­da­tion­al fac­tors that con­tribute to her clar­i­ty and capa­bil­i­ty, as a leader:

• An inces­sant curios­i­ty that had led to find­ing peo­ple she can learn from, cre­at­ing a sup­port­ive Advi­so­ry Board, join­ing peer groups, and tak­ing the Har­vard lead­er­ship pro­gram. For Angela, learn­ing nev­er stops.

Hear more about the biggest impacts on growth:

About what she learned to trust about herself:

• Clar­i­ty of pur­pose and val­ues. These frame the cul­ture of LPC and bring agree­ment and align­ment to every lev­el of the com­pa­ny. To a per­son, her team knows why they do what they do, and how they want to treat each other.

Lis­ten to Angela talk about those pur­pose and values:

And the pur­pose of potatoes:

• An abil­i­ty to see how BHAGs show the way towards oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple, and how they are such a sim­ple way to demon­strate and track growth.

Lis­ten to Angela talk about cre­at­ing her not so lit­tle BHAGs:

Most impor­tant, she rec­og­nizes that growth is the result of what hap­pens out­side of busi­ness, by inten­tion­al­ly find­ing out how to be a bet­ter leader and a bet­ter per­son. This includes ther­a­py, ​‘fig­ur­ing out her own stuff’ to be the health­i­est per­son she can be.

For more, here are links to our recent LPC Case Study or watch the full inter­view with Angela below.

Oth­er Blogs

• How Do You Know You Have the Right Core Values?
• Core Val­ues as a Safe­ty Issue
• Your Busi­ness Pur­pose: No Small Potatoes

Old­er Podcasts

• Is Your Cor­po­rate Cul­ture Real­ly Aligned with Your Core Values?
• Why You Need a Core Purpose