In this episode of The Inner Chief podcast, I speak to Mike Smith, Founder and CEO of Zero Co, on how to build a tribe of loyal customers, creating a better world through business, and personal growth.

Mike’s travels around the world exposed him to the devastating effects of plastic pollution, particularly in remote areas.

Inspired to find a solution, he founded Zero Co, an Australian company he launched in 2019 to eliminate single-use plastics in everyday household products by facilitating consumers to switch to eco-friendly, refillable alternatives.

Mike’s background was in advertising and marketing, and bringing products to market and he worked with some of the world’s largest brands, including Coca Cola. He then co-founded, launched and sold Hot Chip, a surfing technology start-up developed in collaborations with some of the world's best surfers and Billabong.

He was also the Co-Founder of Cake Wines, a disruptive winery that aimed to make wine fun again, which he scaled and sold to one of the biggest wine brands in Australia.

Mike is committed to broader environmental change, advocating for responsible production processes and raising awareness about the impact of plastic pollution on the planet.

In this CEO masterclass, we talk about:

✅ How to build a tribe of loyal followers for your organisation.

✅ On why a social enterprise can help you to balance meaningful work with making money.

✅ The evolution of Zero Co’s operating model from a buy-return-refill model to a circular economy model, and

✅ The immense work he has done on self-awareness and personal growth.

Connecting with Mike Smith

You can connect with Mike via LinkedIn.

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“We built this school. And then over the next 12 months, we ended up building two more schools in other, other villages around. And it completely changed my perspective on what meaningful work is.”

On the importance of a solid MVP

• The big lesson for me out of that experience was you can't build a business that relies on an external party or entity for exclusive revenue growth. You just can't lose control of your ability to scale your business. And so that was a massively formative experience that has shaped how I've thought about every business I've built since then and making sure that I can maintain control of our destiny.
• Get feedback along the way, lean into this MVP (Minimum Viable Product) idea. Just build the base thing that you can get to market, get feedback on it, put it into the world, iterate and grow from there. I think quite often people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants and market research and industrial designers. And they build this incredibly beautiful thing and they put it into the world but no-one buys it because they've designed a solution in search of a problem. And then burned all their cash up front.
• You can do all the market research you want. You can pay all the experts to go and do the research. But if you don't understand the needs, the wants, the desires, the hopes, the dreams, the frustrations of the person you're building this thing for, then you won't get it right.

On disrupting an established industry

• It (Cake Wine) was my second business. I had learned a fair bit in the first business. I learned how to read a balance sheet. I learned how to read a profit and loss statement. I understood the core things around union economics and how to scale and all of those types of things. So I came into my second business with some scars and some real world learnings from my first almost success. That was an outright failure in the end, but I learned a lot from it.
• It was another case of going into an industry and a category that I knew nothing about. And I've kind of done that progressively with every business that I've been in. And I think it has given me a unique perspective on these industries that I go into, cause I'm an outsider and I'm not encumbered by ways of doing things or the right way to do thing, or the way things have always been done.
• I started drinking wine and I found it really fascinating, but I also found it really obnoxious and stuffy and arrogant and uninviting. And the culture around wine just was at odds with me as a young person interested in wine.
• So my best mate and I decided to start a wine business and strip away all this stuffiness and make it accessible to a younger audience. We built the culture that we were interested in and put our wine brand in the middle of it.
• And it really resonated, like people just loved it because it was so new and different and allowed people to enjoy wine, but also not be afraid to say, I don't know anything about wine. So we were able to show them how to get a flavour profile in a wine or what makes one wine better than another wine. It was a really just an open and honest space for people to learn about wine.

On balancing meaningful work with making money

• During our travels to Myanmar, I was having this, this tension within myself of I'm building this business, which is a lot of fun, that's going really great. I'm making money, but it's not doing anything to make the world a better place. And I now have this newfound passion to want to go and do things and make the world better and have an impact in various ways that I can.
• And that's when I started thinking about how can I make those two things, the same thing, rather than having a job and then having this impact dream outside of work, how do I make those two things.
• And so that's when I said to myself that I'm going to sell this business and I'm going to take some time out and I'm going to think really long and hard about how do I build a life that is fulfilling and doing good in the world and also satisfying my entrepreneurial desires.

On the origins of Zero Co

• It was during that trip that I really started to see how pervasive the global waste problem is and it was really confronting because like we would literally in some of the most remote places you could possibly get to. There were times that we would be walking for two weeks without seeing another human up in the Himalayan mountains and you'd get to the head of a valley and there'd be a beautiful turquoise lake three and a half thousand metres above sea level, no sign of humanity and it would be full of rubbish and you just think how the hell has this plastic even gotten here?!
• It gave me a sense, a real juxtaposition of emotions, I guess. It gave me this deep sense of awe about how incredibly beautiful our planet is and just like staggering beauty, majestic places that just literally take your breath away. And that was it. It made me fall in love with our planet all over again, but it also filled me with this existential dread about the future and what these wild places will look like in 40 years. And so that's, that was what filled me with this sense of urgency to try and do something about this global waste problem.
• Whilst the global waste problem feels really big and daunting and overwhelming, the way we solve it, it's actually really easy. It's really simple. There's just two things we all have to do. The first is we need to reduce the amount of waste that we are producing at home. And then we've got to go and clean up all the rubbish that's made its way into the natural environment.
• I knew that we wanted to build a business that helped people reduce the amount of waste at home. And then we would use the proceeds from the sale of whatever that product was going to be to go and fund ocean cleanups.
• Doing my research, I asked where all this plastic was coming from in the first place, and it was coming from the supermarket. So I went and had a look at what people are buying and soI followed people around the supermarket for a few weeks and found myself spending more and more time down the last three aisles, where the personal care and the home cleaning products are stored.
• And that was the next big aha moment for me when I realised that it's a gigantic global category that's had basically no innovation for decades. Those aisles are just rampant single use plastic places. So I said, okay, I'm going to go and build a personal care and home cleaning brand that has either zero or very little single use plastic in it.
• The very first iteration of Zero Co was that you would get what we call a forever bottle, which is a bottle that you keep at home and fill up and reuse for the rest of your life that was made from recycled and ocean plastic. And then a plastic refill pouch that you'd fill up your bottle with and then send the empty pouch back to us. We would clean it, refill it and send it back out to another customer. So we scaled that model for about two years. I think we had about 50 or 60,000 customers in Australia at that point who were using this model.
• We realised that there has to be a better way. And we got some, some environmental auditors to come in and look at our entire supply chain. And what we found was that there was actually quite a heavy carbon footprint involved in our business because we have two-way logistics under this model. So we're shipping stuff to people, then we're shipping it back from them. There's then the use of water and electricity to clean and empty the pouches, refill them, send them back out.
• In the new system, we have forever bottles like we had previously, but we've replaced our plastic pouches with a paper-based refill. So it's the first time in the world that anyone has worked at how do you get a liquid-based product to exist in a paper-based packaging format. When the refill is empty, you just take it out and put it in your recycling bin. So there's no more reverse logistics. It's been certified curbside recyclable nationwide. And then we deliver a new paper-based refill to your door and you put it in your bottle.

On finding his inner chief

• I realised two years ago when we started this journey to rebuild this entire business from the ground up was that I need to radically improve myself as a person, as a leader, as an individual, as a husband, as a father.
• Unless I become the best version of myself, my mission to remove a billion water bottles from the world's oceans is never going to come to fruition. Deep hard self-reflection about the things that I need to improve on the things that I need to radically change about myself, in order to get where I want to get to.
• So I think that the big learning for me was around like humility and around understanding how to motivate and lead people. And how to surround yourself with truly exceptional humans and support them and give them what they need to achieve and succeed and then get out of the way and let them do what they are amazing at and what you hired them to do.
• Ego death has been a big feature of the work that I've been doing. And it's really hard because people who have big ambitions and want to do big things in their life, whether it's in business or in sport or in whatever the field you choose, you have to have an ego to do that stuff. Like it's just part and parcel of the personality type of the people who go and do big crazy stuff, but you can easily spiral on that.
• Often ego is a tool that we use without understanding it, to mask a lack of confidence or a lack of wisdom. And ego and arrogance are best friends, and so I learned that I was using arrogance and my ego to mask some insecurities I had around lack of confidence or lack of self-worth.

On normalising vulnerability

• I think it's really important for people to talk about this stuff because I think it doesn't get talked about enough. In the founder community in particular, the business community or in any kind of elite performance area, it's really hard. Like the mental health stuff is full on and it can be lonely at times.
• For myself, having been through this big transformational project over the last two years, I want to try and normalise it for other people.

On building a tribe of loyal customers

• There's so much over-analysis and scientific thinking around how you build a tribe.  My approach has been very human. I think about the people that I love and care about the most in the world. My wife. My daughter, my parents, my best friends. And I just think about what are the things that I do on a daily basis to build and maintain a relationship with those people that I care deeply about. And then you just do that to the people that are the next sphere out from you.
• Be honest and be humble and be vulnerable and be transparent and be supportive and be inspirational and all this normal human stuff. And if you do that, people will come and want to be part of the thing you're building.
• One of the interesting things we've been doing more and more of is bringing people to some of these cleanups that we do. So inviting our customers and our shareholders to come along to some of these cleanups. And some of the cleanups are deeply confronting and some people have not coped very well in that environment.
• Going into a developing country and then being way steep in a river that is dead and black and literally covered in rubbish with hundreds of thousands of kilos of waste is a pretty confronting experience.
• You can see the moment they get it, when they connect the dots of buying stuff at home that's wrapped in plastic and then chucking it away. And then it's ending up here in the beach and I don't want that. And I'm now here picking up the rubbish off the beach.

On the best advice he got from a mentor

• I've learned from a lot of great people that are more experienced and further ahead in their career trajectories about the power of perseverance. It looks hard today, but it will get easier and tomorrow is just a few more steps ahead.
• So keep walking, keep trying, keep pushing. Don't give in.

Final message of wisdom and hope for future leaders 

• We can and we will solve all of these mounting environmental issues that are facing us, whether it's global waste problem, whether it's global warming, we are going to get there, but the only way we're going to get there in time is if everyone pulls up their sleeve and gets involved and does a little bit of work today.
• We all just make small little changes every single day, then we totally are going to solve all of these problems.

Stay epic,

Greg