Make It A Great Day: Leading in today's world with Jason Pellegrini

In this episode, we talk with Jason Pellegrini, CEO of Quantum Health. Jason talks in-depth about managing and living their mission in a time when their products are now more in demand than ever. How do you ensure you keep your teams safe and healthy while ensuring you keep your customers in the supply of your product. Some awesome insights and stories. I hope you enjoy this episode.  

Transcript

spk_0:   0:07
Well, hi, everybody. And welcome to make it a great day. The power of positivity. Riley coming to you live and direct. We continue our series on talking to some incredible leaders about how they're managing through the pandemic and had a great opportunity to talk to an amazing leader. Jason Pellegrini, who is the CEO of quantum health. And Jason talks about some really interesting things about being in the health care industry during a pandemic and how they're managing. Ah, lot of things, really. One of the biggest things, obviously, is their mission is to help people in times like this. And how are they doing that? So let's dive right in. Hey, it's Riley. Make it a great day, the power positivity. So excited to be talking to an amazing leader, Jason Pellegrini, who is the CEO of quantum health. And Jason's gonna talk a little about kind of what it's like to be in a pandemic and how Thio manage through that in the health care industry. And so, Jason, thank you so much for joining me.

spk_1:   1:04
Thank you so much, Ryan. I'm really excited to be be part of this. I'm a listener and a fan. So I'm excited to be participating. Thank you.

spk_0:   1:11
Well, thank you. Well, first thing I just love to understand. For those that may not be familiar. Tell me a little about quantum health. And what it is that you guys D'oh.

spk_1:   1:19
Sure, quantum health were based in Eugene, Oregon. So proud, Uh, probably based in the North Pacific Northwest. Where ah, family business. We're on the second time, the second generation. We make a lot of natural products across a variety of segments. The one that's probably the most popular right now is our cough. Cold and immune kind of supplements. We make a lot of those, but we also have deep free insect repellents. We have products for cold sore. We have products for eye health. Number of products are sold all across food, drug mass across the U. S. And Canada as well as pretty much every natural store in the country. We started off in 1981 with selling into whole foods and a few other accounts back men and now our nationwide and U S. And Canada. So really excited.

spk_0:   2:04
That's awesome. 80 ones a good year. I, uh I will say that coming into this wonderful world, which is offthe, um, we're just curious, kind of. Why Quantum health kind. I know, he says. The family business. But what brings you to be excited and fired up to be a part of that every day and kind of what your journey been to get there?

spk_1:   2:22
Sure, it's a great question. Uh, it's been a long journey. I was. I'm from the Midwest originally. Kind of was raised traditional business guy with a business undergrad, and when got an MBA and started working at big companies and found myself working in the beer business for actually a number of years, which is a great business, really exciting lot going on. Had a lot of roles in that company. But as the opportunity came up to join the family business, my wife's originally from Eugene, Oregon. So it was easy, easy decision to move back, cool sort of family for her and also the opportunity to kind of make products that are a little better for you, I guess in many ways, and so we a lot of our products really help people live healthier lives. That's one of our you know, kind of visions is how do we help people live healthier lives and just excited to take something and really kind of take control of it, really drive growth in a business that really does help a lot of people. So that was really the main initiative as well as, you know, work life balance. Living in a place like Eugene working with my family. My kids were very young at the time when I took over and spending great living here, being able to spend time with them. Coach their sports teams do things like that that I was unable to do when I was traveling all over the country in the beer business.

spk_0:   3:33
Holy it's everyone might say the beer was just helping people, too. I'm obviously just a little bit of Ah difference there with that. Well, I never liked the word challenge. I always think in life there's opportunities, but I'd love for you to talk a little bit right now, just kind of managing today in this pandemic and how your business works. What are some of those opportunities that have presented themselves to you home of the last trip? For weeks

spk_1:   3:57
we have ah, certainly presented then presented with many opportunities. This one's a tough one. It's obviously amore of, Ah, human condition, you know, element to it, as opposed to, you know, normal challenges you face in your business, which are a little more. You know, a retailer is shutting down or retailer doesn't like your price or decides not to promote you. Yeah, those air, those air frustrating and opportunities to do different things. But this is really something that's obviously affecting people, and not just people on the outside, your company, people inside your company. So I

spk_0:   4:27
think the

spk_1:   4:27
biggest kind of challenge for us is how do we relate to the kind of the fact that our employees are people, too, that all have the same struggles, the same fears, the same? Um, I guess, just confusion as to what's going on in the world while also trying to take advantage of an opportunity to get a lot of our products and more and more people's hands. So we had a month of March was, you know, three times bigger than normal, because everybody was ordering our cough cold on immune support products like like never before. And so we had to prioritize who would get them, who would get the products? We had to prioritize, um, how to get things out, how to increase your Internet Internet orders by 600% and figure that out on the fly. So we're constantly faced with opportunities to get more product in people's hands, but also challenges with supply challenges with employees that were, You know, we haven't had any employees test positive for Covert 19 but we've certainly had employees that have been out of the office or have that loved ones or other people that were sick and not knowing what it was. And so we've had to fight through personnel issues with being supportive while at the same time really tryingto work aggressively towards solutions. We've had suppliers that you know, have been started work from home. Communication's been a struggle, but we've we've really come out of it really strong. We're actually operating a very high level right now through a lot of hard work by every single employee. So it's actually been a lot of fun.

spk_0:   6:01
That's awesome. And I think as we all would say, you know, in difficult times, sometimes we get a chance to see some greatness come about as you talk about balancing the human side versus the fact that you have such demand. What kind of ways were you guys allowing for your team members to speak to you and really kind of talk honestly about how they're feeling And maybe some fears of actually coming in and filling those orders?

spk_1:   6:24
Sure. I mean, one thing we did is, you know, obviously we're not experts at Covert 19 or Corona virus, but what we really have been relied on his lane County public health. We've relied on so city and government kind of ordinances, but just information on how best to proceed. So we followed all the CDC guidelines. We followed our governors guidelines here. We've kind of tried to be just right away implementing all of those things so that we can at least say, Listen, we're doing everything people are recommending right now. We don't know any better, but we're at least gonna implement that stuff immediately. So we did that kind of right away. We've also had a fairly generous kind of sick leave policy already prior to any of the changes that have happened. We also very quickly got people up and running on laptops who weren't on laptops and things like that. So that was just an opportunity for some people who may be they weren't used to working on a laptop. But we said, Hey, we're gonna get you one. We're gonna get it up and running quickly. We literally ran out to local retailers to just scoop up two or three laptops because those were actually running. It's a little known fact by a lot of people. Laptops were really hard to come by Yes, a few weeks ago. So we ran out and got those for folks so they could just kind of more comfortably work from home or working environment they're more comfortable with, um, we bought a ton of cleaning products. We actually, you know, my wife and I actually bought some ourselves and brought him the company because we just were ableto find someone a few retailers around when it was early on in the process. So I think we're just fundamentally just kind of a little ahead of the curve in terms of grabbing stuff. Um, we had all of our, you know, folks kind of layout what they needed to you. know, do their job more effectively while maintaining social distancing and things like that. We're lucky and that were set up both our office under warehouse. There's actually quite a bit of space. In fact, you have room to grow as a company, which also meant we had room to spread people out and make sure we could kind of, ah, support all the concerns there. And then, of course, we're being extremely flexible with folks on, you know, if they need to work from home if they need Thio, do something with their Children. You know, we have several employees, obviously, with schools being closed toe have struggled to how to care for kids while at the same time being able thio help other people and then we very quickly one of things. I think that was the most impactful for us as we started talking early on as hey, I don't know. I don't know anything about this virus. I don't know, I'm not a microbiologist, but I do know that products that help your immune system having a stronger immune system is going to be good defense against anything. And so never in a 1,000,000 years and my my saying anything about our products fighting Corona buyers. But we do have products that help your immune system. And so my point of view was in my message to the company was, Let's listen, I don't know what you know what, exactly which product in which consumer. We're gonna be selling it, too. But there's somewhere out there. There's somebody who were gonna really help support their immune system in a way it's in and give them some peace, a peace of mind at a minimum. And so we're really helping people get through a really difficult time, and so we kind of owe it to them to kind of work really hard. Were classified as an essential business with dietary supplements and mean are a lot of our direct customers air? You know, Walgreens and CVS and Rite Aid at Whole Foods all sorts of places that people are looking for to help support themselves. And so that's what we spent a lot of time on. We've also we actually very early on also gay people, little extra income in the very beginning of the process, just to help him kind of get through some of the stuff for some of the mystery. We haven't had to lay off anybody. We anticipate being able to make it through all of this, depending how long it lasts with full staffing and able to kind of keep people employed and able to help their families. So that's really what we've been focused on.

spk_0:   10:09
That's awesome. And I love your ability to tie back into the mission in what you guys do is a company and seeing that opportunity that, yes, you have to do the right way and being able to spread out and do the things that you did. But your product is something that really can impact someone very, very major way in a time when they need it most. I think people know that they're led by that, Um it opens your mind a little bit, and I think you have a little bit more grace. And so I think that's awesome that you've done that. What have you learned about yourself during this time? You know, Are there any things from a reflection standpoint that kind of surprised you? Just about you? Yeah. You

spk_1:   10:42
know, I'm a pretty animated guy in general. And what I've been surprised by the most is I'm very calm under the more extreme the situation gets, Um, I think part of that is because for me, it's always about controlling the control of ALS and so things that are not controllable. I tended to actually be very calm and can very, you know, I have a very, uh, calming way to deal with situations that we can't control. And so a lot of the everyday battles like Oh, well, we can't do this. We can't do that because of this and said, OK, well, let's figure out what we can do and it's I've been surprised how calm I've been throughout the whole process. I tend to get a little more frustrated on simple things that I feel like we should be doing right. But for stuff like this, it's been very easy for me to stay relatively calm, both both work wise. But just in terms of, as you know, as a husband and father, just able to kind of a lot of fears out there. A lot of kids are frustrated that can't go to school or, you know, my wife, you know, trying to go shopping. You know we're trying to figure out what's what's going on. Something's closed, figuring it all out. And, you know I need I need a haircut. Despite my lack of hair, I actually needed to get it taken down a notch. But I've just been very calm. Joeckel process. So I've actually been very surprised how calm I Ben during a relatively

spk_0:   11:56
extreme situation. Well, I I think that's an awesome thing. And I think, you know, as leaders if we can find that columnist anytime we're in that storm, you know, people are looking to us to I'm kind of be that true North and that beacon and showcasing that even though it's not easy, I think it's a really good thing. It's not, um, glass question. I'm just really fascinating curious as you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but what do you see coming out of this? How fundamentally what things in your business could you see just changing and that you might be excited about having to go through this and you mentioned online orders and some things like that and laptops and flexibility just curious any big staff that you're like, man, this actually could probably really help us,

spk_1:   12:36
Yeah, I think you know, I think there's a few days there's the obvious kind of group of things like, Yeah, like the ability to work remotely uncertain product projects, the familiarity with things like Zoom Or, you know, Microsoft teams or some of the other tools people are able to use any. Getting the whole company up to speed on that makes people just more comfortable when you need to have those conversations later, instead of saying, Well, we'll wait till Thursday when we're all together We could just hop on a call like this, um, a zoom call, I think being able to see people's faces and interact like that, like I think we had a lot of calls we would have that now. We were just converting a zoom and probably will stay zoom so like we could see each other's faces. So I think that's a that's a big one, for sure. I also think it just really emphasizes the need both personally and professionally. Just have a little more long term view of the world, whether it's you know, how you run your household, whether it's financially for your business, just having kind of rainy day funds or or whatever it is or the ability to quickly handle something that would be disruptive. Because even though this disruption I don't anticipate happening happening every two years, there's lots of other disruptions that would look very similar. And being able to react and cross trained people and, you know, figure out how can we, you know, work around this as a team, and how can we communicate better? So I think a lot of better communication is gonna come out of this. Better use of technology is gonna come out of this. Um, and then I think just better Long term planning and thinking is gonna come out of this for us as well. So really excited about that opportunity that will have over the next months and years for sure.

spk_0:   14:11
That is awesome. One last thing is, you know, I do love quotes, and I'm always asking everybody kind of what quote inspires you. And I'd love to know. Jason, What? What's that quote that you go to? That helps kind of fill you up?

spk_1:   14:22
Yeah. And, you know, I love to read all sorts of biographies and all sorts things on people and, you know, as I was thinking about, I'm always, like, kind of living different coats based on the times, but one if I've been reading a lot of ah kind of Bill Gates and how he's really pursuing helping everybody help solve this problem. And I was just looking at some of his other writings and some of the other things, he said. But I really like Cody, He said, which was Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable. And I think that could give us all a lot of lessons because, you know, we're treating things by stimulus packages and ventilators and social distancing. But fundamentally, what are the things we can do? Preventative, longer term. And you can You can take that and run enough number of different ways. But I thought it was just a very, uh, you know, applicable quote for here and now. So

spk_0:   15:13
absolutely. Maybe even that Ted talk he did a few years back about what? If it hadn't pandemic doing OK, that was

spk_1:   15:19
that was pretty wild. To hear him say, That's unbelievable foresight.

spk_0:   15:23
Unbelievable. Jason has been an absolute pleasure. I think everyone really take advantage to listening and hearing a lot of your great thoughts, and I really can't stress enough how important it is for what kind of health does every day and the impact that you guys were making. And I just really appreciate taking time to Come on.

spk_1:   15:38
Thank you so much. Ryan. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, and I look forward to seeing you in person sometime soon. Absolutely.