Changing The Status Quo
Make people’s lives better, change the status quo. These days, it’s really popular for a startup to “do good.” But 19 years ago, it was far less common to create a product and build a company just to make people’s lives better. Meet John Holahan, founder and inventor of just such a product – SimplyThick.® If you know anyone who has difficulty swallowing (a disorder called dysphagia) and has to thicken their liquids, chances are they rely on this thickener to drink.
We’ve been extremely proud to work with John and his entire team from the start by creating their brand. Today, SimplyThick® EasyMix™ is unrivaled in the market and is served over 150 million times each year.
John, you built a company with a unique product that helps hundreds of thousands of people daily. What are you proud of?
I’m most proud that SimplyThick was founded on the philosophy of improving the quality of people’s lives. For those on a dysphagia diet, it makes different textures of foods and liquids easier and safer to swallow.
How did you get started?
In 2001, I had just graduated with an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. My wife was pregnant and was preparing to quit her job and stay home with our family. I had an offer to work for a large company and while driving to pick up our newborn’s pictures, we discussed whether I should do this start-up thing or take the job with the big company. I knew what the big company job was going to be like, I’d had one like it before. I’d be doing some exciting work and it’d be fun.
The alternative was to launch a start-up for a dysphagia product. The products on the market at that time were terrible, they did not serve patients well. Did I want anyone I know to have to drink them? Absolutely not! With so much room for improvement, my answer quickly became, “alright, let’s do it” – because I knew my product would improve people’s lives every day.
Now, 19 years later, it’s worked. Everything we’ve done has been centered on that goal and we’ve changed the industry.
What makes SimplyThick so special and innovative?
It’s hard to explain what a novel product this was 19 years ago. It’s a liquid and everything else was a powder. And at the time, it was unique in that I used xanthan gum – the only thickening agent that can be frozen or heated and still maintain its thickness, which is essential for safe swallowing.
You say SimplyThick is a product that people need, but don’t want?
Our typical consumer is different. No one actually wants to use our product. People don’t call us and say, “Happy day, I get to thicken my liquids!” It’s more like, “Oh no, I have to thicken my liquids.”
The reception has been overwhelming for your new formulation, SimplyThick Easy Mix, allowing easy mixing with a spoon. When we worked on the design, it was a secret, even from your team.
Yes, because it would replace our existing product, we had to launch it in one big step, otherwise our salespeople would have a challenge selling the legacy thickener. The 3-year project started with 2 people, and then grew to include our operations team. Then, after the first production batches were in transit and on the ocean, we finally had a big huge reveal to the entire company. It was such a huge relief to finally get to share the exciting news with everyone!
We keep improving our product to meet our customers where they are and where their ability is. During the pandemic, our team has been working on higher quality puréed, minced and moist recipes and better presentation of them.
Can you explain the new standardization going on in your business?
In the past, there hasn’t been a good set of standards to describe foods served to people with dysphagia. Terms like “dysphagia mechanically advanced” didn’t help consumers understand it. In 2014, a group of global experts formed the International Dysphagia Diet Standardization Initiative (IDDSI for short). They developed international standards and descriptive terms to help people understand. For example, when you say your dad’s on a “minced and moist” diet, you intuitively know what the food texture is supposed to be – instead of calling it “dysphagia mechanically altered.”
When the National Dysphagia Diet (NDD) came out in 2003 in the US, there was not sufficient data to put any type of standards in place for liquids. Worse, the NDD suggested that advanced technical instruments (rheometers and viscometers) be used to measure the thickness of liquids. These were too costly and too delicate for use in a commercial kitchen or private homes. To rectify this, IDDSI created a simple, inexpensive test where 10 milliliters of liquid are added to a syringe and then monitored for how much liquid comes through in 10 seconds. This allowed thickness levels to be categorized with a test method that can be done anywhere. As soon as I saw it, I embraced it and and started promoting it.
Your ongoing philosophy is to help people. What’s an example?
It’s not a good day when a customer or their family member calls us and have just found out they’ve been prescribed a thickened liquid diet. They’ve been through the healthcare system; it's been an emotional couple of days or weeks and they’re just trying to get their loved one home. Even though most of our product volume is with industrial customers, the majority of our calls are from consumers or their families.
In this instance, I’ve always felt that we just need to treat people right and we can't make it hard for them. We set up our system to deliver quickly. We don’t offer our product in pharmacies because they are difficult to navigate and they’d charge a high price for a small serving.
I’ve heard you say, “we do customer service differently,” For instance, bringing your call center in-house?
In the beginning, we used an outside call center, so we could offer support 24 hours, 7 days a week. Occasionally, we’d hear an agent experience was not great. As the systems at the call center improved, we were given access through their website to hear the interactions between representatives and our customers. We decided to do quality audits by listening to multiple calls and analyzing their outcome. After one week, the team came back and said, “John, they don’t represent us well; we need to do something about it.”
We brought the call center in-house and it’s been a great plus for customer service. I’m confident our customers are taken care of. Let’s face it, in today’s marketplace, the public’s expectations are very low for decent customer phone service. With SimplyThick, customers are usually quite surprised that they get a live person without a menu tree and that the person who answers can usually respond to their questions. We train everyone to be able to answer 90% of the questions, off the top of their head, with accuracy and ease.
What's the most important thing in supporting your team?
Trust. And when you have solid guiding principles it makes decisions easy. Over the years, I’ve grown and the team has grown to where we live by our principles more. We’re in a global pandemic and everybody’s working from home. While I don’t hear what they’re saying to our customers – I trust them. We’ve learned to really try to live what we do.
Does this influence how your internal team operates on a daily basis?
It all comes down to, does your team believe in you? One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is to not offer my opinion. I used to think that I was just sharing my thoughts. I did not recognize that what the recipient hears is that John Holahan, product inventor and president of the company, just said something and I'd better listen to it. My standard joke is that when employees ask me what color we should paint the office walls, I’ve thought about saying – 'purple with pink polka dots would be really nice.' No, don’t do that. Of course, I’m just kidding. But then, I bet I would end up with purple or pink polka dots! Everyone denies it, but I’ve seen my actual opinions taken as though they were a mandate too often. Understanding that, I have to refrain completely from offering my thoughts and instead encourage people that it truly is their decision to make.
It starts with me. If our customer service team is not feeling the freedom to actually make decisions, it’s my fault. And it probably isn’t that they aren’t listening; it’s that I’m not giving them all the cues they need to behave that way. Really good customer service agents are very empathetic — they can hear tones in your voice or see things in your body language that you don’t know are there. They’re compassionate and even a little grumble in my voice can be taken the wrong way.
What advice do you have for other business owners looking to replicate your success, in terms of how you serve your customers and support your employees?
It’s always about looking at the long-term. It’s remembering that if I cut a corner today, team members are going to remember it. In my case, over-serving my customers and treating them well has worked and that may not be true everywhere. But, as a business owner, you concentrate on what you’re trying to do and make sure that you’re focused on the customers, their experience and what’s going on. This has served us well.
Is there anything else you’d like to bring up?
A couple of years ago we started tracking servings to our customers. Right now, there are around 150 million servings per year; 75 million are in the bottles and 75 million are in packets. So, our product reach is vast, and so is the brand image Enrich continues to create and manage for us.
I was thinking about it today because I knew we were going to talk. Does the Enrich team ever stop to think about the literally hundreds of millions of packets, packaging and other design pieces that have gone out and go out every day – all over this country and in Canada? At the office today, there was a semi-truck full of your packaging that had come all the way from Australia. We move about 14,000 units a week and that’s just the big packages, not counting the individual pieces. I don’t know that Bruce and the rest of the team have thought about the fact that literally hundreds of millions of prints of your design work have been used around the country over the last 20 years.
John, we’re proud that your brand image has stood the test of time and very grateful to be part of it.
Thank you for what you've done, all the great work over the years, hundreds of millions of servings a year.
