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Erick Dickens of Kadenwood: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis or CBD Business

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

It’s crucial to empower your team to work through things together. There is something powerful about curating a business and its products, and it takes a lot of smart and talented individuals to do that — don’t take it for granted. Create a company culture where everyone has the passion and drive to think outside of the box.

As part of my series about “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis Business” I had the pleasure of interviewing Erick Dickens.

Erick Dickens is the co-founder and CEO of plant-based wellness company, Kadenwood, parent company of the CBD industry’s leading brands. He started his career in consumer goods after serving over eight years as a U.S. Army pilot and commander. He has over 20 years of experience leading teams and driving growth for category-leading brands in fast-growing start-ups and global Fortune 500 companies. Erick was recently selected to the inaugural Forbes CMO Next list of 50 top marketers redefining the role of CMO for his work driving brand and business growth at King’s Hawaiian.

Erick has managed household brands such as Post Cereals, Renuzit, Soft Scrub, and Right Guard at Kraft Foods and Henkel. Erick led LifeLock’s branding and product development effort resulting in a doubling of sales over three years and a successful IPO. At King’s Hawaiian, Erick built the marketing function and strategy from scratch–doubling the 68-year-old bread company’s revenue during his five years. In addition to traditional marketing mediums such as TV, print, radio, and digital, Erick successfully leveraged both branded entertainment and sponsorship to drive category-leading, new product launches.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share with us the story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I took an interest in transitioning into business after serving over eight years as pilot and commander in the US Army. Cameron-Brooks, a recruiting firm that specializes in helping former military officers transition into business roles, helped facilitate my transition into the private sector. Through their program, I was able to start my career in the brand management department at Kraft Foods in New York. I was initially hired by Doug Weekes, my current business partner and co-founder of Kadenwood, to be an associate brand manager on Post cereals. After Kraft, I went on to serve in positions of increased responsibility at Henkel, LifeLock and ultimately became the first Chief Marketing Officer for King’s Hawaiian where I led the effort to double the company’s revenue and build awareness of the brand in just five years. After accumulating an incredible amount of experience building household brands, I decided to partner with some of the most talented colleagues from my career to start Kadenwood in an effort to add traditional CPG expertise and discipline to the emerging CBD industry. Our mission at Kadenwood is to create the leading plant-based consumer brands with high-quality products consumers can trust.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

At the end of 2019 we were looking to hire a leader in hemp BioSciences. At the same time, a competitor had just announced a break-up of their company. My co-founder Doug noticed that their Chief Revenue Officer Garrett Bain, who was quite accomplished and well regarded in the industry, was a former Army Ranger. Doug said to me “Call Garrett and do your secret Army handshake to get him to join us.” I replied, “it doesn’t really work that way.” Well, apparently it does! I reached out to Garret via LinkedIn and he replied to set up a call. Several months later we were able to win the talent battle for Garrett and he’s now President of our EcoGen business in Colorado. The lesson I learned from this is not to underestimate how common experiences from your past can serve as a way to connect with people and establish trust.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

At the very start, Doug and I decided to reach out to some of our network to socialize the idea of starting a consumer products company focused on CBD to gauge their interest in investing. The first meeting we set up was with my former boss, LifeLock founder Todd Davis. All we had was an idea and some thoughts around how to develop an emerging category to resemble more established consumer goods companies. To our surprise, Todd immediately bought into our vision and decided to invest on the spot. He said, “You’re telling me I can invest in a category that already has 30 million active consumers led by two guys that can sell bread and water (referring to my time at King’s Hawaiian and Doug’s work helping to start Core water)? Sign me up!” We were caught a little off guard since we had not yet set up a bank account or even formed the company. The lesson I learned from this was to take the time to get basic structure in place before sharing new business ideas with potential investors.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We are currently working on a project to supply ingredients to an international company making products that treat symptoms of viral infection. While I can’t disclose the details of this work, it’s fulfilling to know that our efforts at Kadenwood have the potential to help improve the lives and wellbeing of millions of people.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

MLB Legend and Kadenwood co-founder Steve Garvey is the reason I decided to get into this industry and help start this company. When I was just beginning to consider the idea of starting Kadenwood and entering the CBD industry, the first phone call I made was to Steve to get his perspective on the category. Before I could finish explaining the business concept to Steve, he replied “I’m in.” He explained that he had been using CBD products already and believed in their efficacy. He had confidence in my ability to succeed as an entrepreneur, even though I had doubts, and bring the right team together to build an industry leading brand.

This industry is young dynamic and creative. Do you use any clever and innovative marketing strategies that you think large legacy companies should consider adopting?

Kadenwood has achieved success by bringing tried and true CPG discipline to the industry. While the CBD industry has gained notoriety through consumer word-of-mouth and earned media buzz, individual brands have not yet emerged as leaders amongst consumers. National broad-reach advertising and retail prominence are necessary to build national brand leadership. Like most companies in this industry, Kadenwood doesn’t yet have the cash needed to spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising. To overcome that limitation, we have been able to secure several media-for-equity deals with leading media companies that make them partners in our business and armed us with tens of millions in media to advertise our brands. These types of deals are unique in the CPG industry and Kadenwood is the only company with these deals in the CBD space.

Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the CBD industry? Can you share 3 things that most concern you?

  • 3 things that excite me about the CBD industry are:
  • The ability to make a real difference in people’s quality of life
  • Opportunities for product innovation
  • Building brand awareness

3 things that concern me about the CBD industry are:

  • Lack of regulatory clarit
  • The abundant presence of underperforming products that lead consumers to believe CBD products lack efficacy
  • The inability to make product-specific consumer claims

Can you share your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a CBD Business”? Please share a story or example for each.

  • Invest in talent. Despite being an early-stage company in an emerging industry, we have been fortunate to recruit and retain some of the best CPG talent at Kadenwood. Our people have ultimately been our greatest competitive advantage and the reason we have been able to successfully navigate challenging times.
  • Fundraising will be a challenge. Some institutional investors still restrict investment in the industry and others need to be educated on the difference between hemp-derived CBD and cannabis.
  • Advertising options are limited. We have had to utilize our legacy media relationships to open many of the doors available to the industry today, but we still have a fraction of the industry’s resources available to our industry.
  • Not all co-packers will work with CBD. The ability to develop and produce products at scale in this industry is more challenging than traditional CPG due to the limited group of outsourced manufacturers willing to work with CBD ingredients.
  • Educate your network about your new venture. When first starting out I was reluctant to share details about this new venture with my professional network. My professional network ended up being one of the most valuable resources to helping us hire talent, secure investment, and navigate unforeseen industry challenges.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

It’s crucial to empower your team to work through things together. There is something powerful about curating a business and its products, and it takes a lot of smart and talented individuals to do that — don’t take it for granted. Create a company culture where everyone has the passion and drive to think outside of the box.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I believe we are already in the midst of leading a movement to bring the wellness benefits of CBD to the masses via mainstream retail. We hear every day from our consumers about the positive impact our products make on their lives. Enabling broader availability of products like ours in both topical and consumable forms have the potential to forever change wellness regimens and overall quality of life.

What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickens/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Erick Dickens of Kadenwood: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis or… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.