How Heaps Normal is finding new solutions to old problems
Trigger Warning: This podcast references suicide and domestic violence. If you need to talk to someone, support is available. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
In this episode of The CMO Show we welcome Pete Brennan, Co-Founder and Head of Brand at Heaps Normal - a beverage company offering its customers a non-alcoholic alternative to beer without sacrificing on taste.
Hit play to hear the sometimes sobering, always inspiring story behind the company's success.
A hangover might be the last state where you’d expect inspiration to strike, but for Pete Brennan, one too many rough mornings ignited a fresh idea that’s helping to change our relationship with alcohol.
Pete’s the Co-founder and Head of brand at Heaps Normal, a beverage company offering its customers a non-alcoholic alternative to beer without sacrificing on taste.
“We don't make beer for people who are sober. We make beer for people who really enjoy a good beer,” Pete says.
“We've always said, "Hey, if you're a designated driver tonight or you're sober for life or any mix of those two extremes, there's an option for you." And I think people have really appreciated that.”
Since Heaps Normal launched in 2020 it’s been a fast and furious road to the big time.
Today, you can find it anywhere from supermarket shelves to behind the bar at your local pub – something Pete is still pinching himself about.
“I remember shopping this brand around to a bunch of Sydney breweries and getting politely laughed out of every boardroom,” he says.
“They just kept saying non-alcoholic beer is not a thing and it's never going to work. But I just couldn't let it go.”
So how’d Heaps Normal beat the odds and build a brand that’s connecting with customers all over the world? Take a dive into this episode of The CMO Show and hear Pete’s story.
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Credits
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The CMO Show production team
Producer – Rian Newman
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
Got an idea for an upcoming episode or want to be a guest on The CMO Show? We’d love to hear from you: cmoshow@filteredmedia.com.au
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Transcript
Participants:
Host: Mark Jones
Guest: Pete Brennan
Aussies. We love our beer and we love our beer brands. Campaigns like Carlton’s The Big Ad and the walking tongue from Tooheys are just a couple that have left a huge cultural imprint for better or worse. They’re bold, they’re funny and in some cases, even a little wild. But as times change and our attitudes to alcohol are under the microscope, is there a beer brand that can promote responsible drinking and keep the larrikin spirit alive?
Mark Jones here, great to have you with us for The CMO Show, our very first for 2023. My guest today is Pete Brennan, he’s co-founder and head of brand at Heaps Normal. Now I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but this is a non-alcoholic beer company founded around two years ago, and it’s going gangbusters.
In the last few months I’ve seen Heaps Normal at a conference, down at the local pub, I’ve even seen it on the shelves in Wollies, I might have even enjoyed a couple. Now, you really do get the sense with all of that, this is a market leader emerging in a really interesting category. I think there’s a lot to learn for us as marketers and CMOs thinking about brand building. Speaking of which, Pete says his brand, his lived experience and a capacity to tell their story has played a big part in building the business, and I loved unpacking that with him in our conversation.
Before we get into it, I just want to mention that we do touch on some topics such as suicide and domestic violence, and that might be quite triggering for some of you. If that’s the case, please know that support is available, we’ve left some phone numbers and links in the show description.
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Mark Jones
How you doing, Pete?
Pete Brennan
Great, Mark. Really good. Thanks for having me on, mate.
Mark Jones
Look, it's a pleasure. I wanted to just begin to just cut to the chase. It tastes pretty good, doesn't it?
Pete Brennan
It's not bad. Yeah, it's all right. Yeah, we've had some good feedback, so we're pretty thrilled.
Mark Jones
The reason I wanted to start out there is that probably one of the greatest misperceptions of a non-alcoholic beer is that it's watery, it's no good, doesn't taste great. A friend of mine actually offered me a Heaps Normal. He says, "What do you think of this?" And I'll never forget that moment on his deck, having a go of this Heaps Normal beer. And I was like, "My goodness me." Suddenly my world sort of shifted a little, right? And I think that's probably an experience for a lot of people. Just how important is that experience in this whole journey? Because I just feel like the experience of drinking beer, obviously you've got to enjoy it, otherwise it's game over.
Pete Brennan
100%. Yeah, it's a really interesting call out and it's something we put a lot of thought and effort into pretty early on. There's typically two traditional ways to make non-alcoholic beer. They both involve essentially extracting the alcohol out at the end of the process. And the problem with that is it pulls half the flavour out. So non-alc beer has been around since the '70s. It's nothing new. But traditionally, those two methods of doing it have resulted in a pretty watery liquid that's given, non-alc beer a bit of a bad rep over the years. So when we started the business, we were obviously, brand is kind of my remit as such I guess. But the product obviously itself was a huge consideration. And Benny Holdstock is a co-founder of mine and I had a product and I had a brewer and it is just the most incredibly talented brewer you could imagine.
He's worked with some incredible breweries around Australia in his career and essentially what he did was really innovate on the process. So we've used a very specific yeast that micro-ferments to just under 0.5%. Anything under that is classified as non-alcoholic. So interestingly, things like orange juice that's been in the fridge for a week or a ripe banana or a loaf of bread that's been on the shelf for a few days can have up to 0.5% alcohol. You can't get drunk on them no matter how many of them you drink. But yeah, the feedback we've had has been great that it tastes like a real beer, which is just music to our ears.
Mark Jones
It's interesting. And you mentioned your role in the brand because with a consumer product like this, a large part of it is that brand, how it looks, the product itself, the name, et cetera. So that broader experience piece. How do you, from a strategy point of view, think about the development of the brand knowing that actually the product itself is a big part of it? So there's a more broadly sort of a push to commoditize a lot of supply chains in the way that products are produced. You don't have that luxury. So just give us a quick insight into the way that you think about your strategy and your role.
Pete Brennan
Yeah, absolutely. It's been an interesting journey. We turned two at the end of July, so we're still in nappies in the grand scheme things as a company, pretty early days. But yeah, from day one it was just, we wanted to do this properly. We wanted it to be a product that you could sit around the barbecue or hang out in the pub with your mates and have one in your hand and not feel alienated or weird or strange because you're not drinking with everybody else. So brand has played a really big part into building this business and I think there's been a few reasons to our success. I think first of all, not being preachy has been really, really helpful to us.
I say this a lot, but my little boy's four. If I say, "Don't touch the hot plate," he's touching the hot plate no matter what. So I think from a branding perspective, if you tell people what to do, they're not going to do it. People don't kind of respond well to that. Our brand tone of voice has been a little bit fun and cheeky, a little bit self-deprecating. We've never really taken ourselves too seriously. We've never preached sobriety, but we've always said, "Hey, if you're a designated driver tonight or you're sober for life or any mix of those two extremes, there's an option for you." And I think people have really appreciated that.
Mark Jones
Pete, if we go back to the beginning, you've got a personal story and that was to do with your father. Can you just tell me how foundational that experience is and if you sort of connect that to launching the brand now?
Pete Brennan
Yeah, for sure. My dad was a pretty abusive alcoholic. I lost him to suicide when I was 11 and grew up in the shadow of that. So I've personally never had a good relationship with alcohol. I spent my 20s in London in a pub and we'd do Monday mornings and meetings in a pub because that's what you do when you live in London, over a beer. And never had a good relationship with alcohol myself. So I was the guy that would go out and I'd have a hell time and have fun and I'd wake up in the morning with a headache and often couldn't remember how I got home. And nine times out of 10, it was no big deal. But there was the odd occasion where I would've upset some friends or said something to somebody that I might've regretted. And I was reminded about that by people I was out with the morning after.
So it became a thing for me where I think probably a little bit too later on in life, but I realised I was a problem drinker myself. And Heaps Normal is really scratching an itch, really. I was just personally sick of going out and faking an ear infection and pretend antibiotics that it was a reason I couldn't drink when I knew that if I had one, I'd probably have 10 and probably make a fool of myself. So yeah, the reason to wanting to start the business was to go out and not have to drink Coca-Cola or orange juice and explain myself to everybody.
Mark Jones
Yeah, that's such a hard thing. I think a lot of people really wrestle with the emotions and, if you like, mental load around that experience that you've just shared. How widespread an issue is that, do you think, particularly here in Australia, in terms of getting people over that mental hurdle, so to speak?
Pete Brennan
Yeah. Look, we don't talk about the stuff very openly a lot, but the stats around drinking in Australia are unbelievable. I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's into the billions of dollars for costs to the economy for alcohol related issues. So domestic violence, diseases, car accidents, things like that. And it's all down to alcohol. So I think we do have an issue with alcohol. And for me it's just conditioning. I have vivid memories of my parents having a glass of wine with a meal because that's what you did. And we drink to celebrate and we drink to commiserate.
And when you're brought up as a child and that's all you see and that's how you're conditioned, that's all you really know. So I think coming of age as a young man myself and starting to realise that maybe the way I was brought up wasn't the best way in terms of building a relationship with something like alcohol and then really doing the deep work on a personal level, going to therapy and speaking to somebody and working through those things that have been issues is kind of really what led me to wanting to start a non-alcoholic beer company.
Mark Jones
I guess from a brand point of view, we'd say, well that gives you authenticity, it gives you credibility, right? It's a good reason to do it. But I imagine you have to approach telling this story pretty carefully too.
Pete Brennan
Yeah. I think when you have life experience in something, you somehow become kind of an expert in something because you've been exposed to it more than other people. So for me, I guess I would consider myself Jedi level of being around drunk people, sometimes that would've been me as well. So really learning firsthand that there's probably a better way for me to live personally and not pushing that onto everybody else.
Mark Jones
So part of your story of course, is this agency background, Electric and Analogue. So presumably, that's still part of your workload or at least certainly a big part of your experience. How have you thought about, I guess from a personal career point of view, approaching all of this? Because you're really stepping out of that agency world, aren't you? It's doing it all for yourself.
Pete Brennan
Well, yeah, it kind of is. It's an interesting situation. My wife and I run a branding studio together called Electric And Analogue. We're six years old now as a business and that business has flexed. At one point, we had 10 staff and a big office in the city and all sorts of overheads and things like that. And it was about two or three years in, we had a little bit of imposter syndrome about creating brands. We wanted to know if we could build a brand on our own without a client telling us what to do. So we kind of put our heads down and created an iteration of the brand, which is not what it looks like today. But we created this brand and we just thought, hey, there's something in this, this could be a real business. So it's a juggle.
Just to explain I guess the story from there, I went and shopped this brand around to a bunch of breweries around Sydney and got politely laughed out of every boardroom just saying non-alc beer is not a thing and it's never going to work. And I just couldn't let it go. So eventually met up with Andy Miller, who's our CEO and my co-founder. He'd been working at Young Henrys and had since left and was doing some consultancy work and he was really the first person that kind of got it straight away. He understood what I was trying to do and he saw the vision and he kind of jumped in and he pulled in Benny, who they'd worked together at Young Henrys for a while and I pulled in Jordy Smith who's a childhood friend of mine and a pro surfer and a co-founder as well. And we kind of went to town.
So in terms of how I juggle the two things, yes, I still run the branding studio. My wife and I run that together on our own now. We've kind of taken it right down in size. There's no big overheads and KPIs and all that kind of stuff that distracts us. But we manage to be really selective about the brands and the founders that we work with and create some really interesting brands because it's really genuinely a passion of ours.
But obviously, Heaps Normal has gone on to be this kind of a great proof of concept, a great case study for a branding studio like us. But it's obviously takes up a big part of my life as well. So I do juggle the two still to this day. I work eight days a week and don't wear it as a badge of honour by any means because it's definitely not sustainable. But yeah, it's interesting. I feel like when you genuinely love the work that you do, Monday mornings are the best part of the week because you just get up bouncing out of bed because you love the work. So Heaps Normal and the branding studio literally tick both of those boxes for me. So it doesn't feel like work.
Mark Jones
That's great. So tell me then what you've learned about that shift from a creative agency owner to having your own product and you made a reference to clients not telling you what to do and some of the drama that perhaps we occasionally experience in that area. What's that been like for you?
Pete Brennan
Yeah, it's definitely a transition for sure. There's a very big difference between, I think anybody in any sort of practise or endeavour that they work in, going from being a member of staff and doing your job to actually running a company is a very, very different kind of transition for starters. As an employee to designer, you kind of sit behind a desk and you get briefed and you design things and then you start a branding studio and you got bills to pay and targets and growth metrics and all sorts of adult things that you don't really know about when you're younger. And then transitioning into starting our own company has been a bit of a baptism of fire to be honest. But we've surrounded ourselves with some incredible people. Our investors are amazing, we've got an incredible team of people as well now. And yeah, it's one of those things where I think if you don't view it as learning continuously, you've done something wrong because we're learning stuff every day.
Mark Jones
Well, to your point though, it does sound like you've traded the clients for investors and stakeholders and growing the whole business itself. So that develops its own energy. What's it like with selling in the idea to investors? Because I did read one report that you'd secured, was it Series A about eight and a half million. That was one of the public figures that was floating around.
Pete Brennan
Yeah, it's all out in the public domain, actually. But I think probably the biggest kind of milestone for us was getting accepted into Startmate in the early days. Startmate is the accelerator programme run by Blackbird Ventures, one of the biggest VC firms here in Australia. And we had a friend of the family who, of Andy's actually, who said he's a partner at Blackbird and said, "Hey, you guys should apply to get into Startmate because you'll never get in because we have over seven, 800 applications and we only choose 12." So he said, "Getting asked those questions of the application process and getting you to formulate your answers, you guys will learn so much about your business and it would be really beneficial." So the three of us sat around here where I'm sitting now in my little home studio and we answered all these questions and we kind of clicked submit. And we went, "Wow, there were some tricky ones in there," some curly ones that we realised we needed to refine our elevator pitch and things like that.
But yeah, short version of the story, we got shortlisted to the top 40 and then we did a bunch of speed dating with some incredible mentors and investors and then got selected as part of the final 12 for the cohort. And that was a real big thing for us early on. They give you a valuation pretty early out the door and then you have essentially 12 weeks of being surrounded by these incredible mentors and get taught how to do things like run a meeting efficiently that you think how to do that after years of working in a company. But when some high performing individual says actually, have a 12 minute meeting instead of an hour meeting, it kind of changes your entire perception.
Mark Jones
One of the things I love about your story is the sense of adventure that I'm picking up here. It's sort of, what if we did this thing? And it turns out people liked the thing and we made it and it tastes great. And then what if we went even further and scaled it and became proper grownups who actually treated this... I can just see the progression of thinking and as an entrepreneur, as a visionary myself, I just love that. Particularly when you have an idea and it just works. On the shadow side, there's always challenges. So you go from your origin story to the vision, we're going to take over the world or whatever the vision is, and then you suddenly discover working with people is a bit tricky or you discover maybe just getting into the supermarkets isn't as easy as we thought or insert any problem here. So from a brand marketing and leadership perspective, how do you deal with challenges?
Pete Brennan
That's a good question. Look, I think surrounding yourself with the right people has been a very, very big impactful kind of thing for us. Coming through that Startmate community, we needed to raise some money off the back of that Startmate programme. From memory, I think we needed $1.2 million. We ended up being massively oversubscribed, closer to $2 million. So we scaled a number of people back and took on some very strategic investors of people that have got stronger track records in areas where we lacked. So that was a very, very important decision to do that. And those people have come on as our investors. We've got people like Kate Morris from Adore Beauty and Danny Milham from Koala and Milkrun and Simon Griffiths from Who Gives a Crap and some incredible people that have built businesses before us and know how to do this. So they've definitely been in our corner and helping us through some tricky things.
But you're right, it's difficult but it's also fun. And I think when you're having fun every day and you're doing something with meaning and with purpose, that lens of we're always learning, we're never going to know everything we need to know, surrounded by a real actual, a genuine why, a real personal purpose that's personally driven. Like I said earlier, it doesn't feel like work. We have so much fun. Yes, there's pressures, yes we have adult meetings and things like that. But from a brand perspective going on, the brand is, like I said earlier, it's pretty self-deprecating. We don't take ourselves too seriously. We have a lot of fun with things. It's really kind of all of our personalities coming through and not just the founders, the team as well. Everyone's so vested in what we're doing and when you give people a little bit of creative freedom to come up with ideas and exercise those, some real magic can happen.
Mark Jones
Now, I imagine there must be a bit of fun with the four of you and you've talked a bit about the team of four. It almost feels a bit Beatles slash rock bandish. We all came together and had this idea. How do you manage the brand and the product in that context? Because I imagine everybody's got an opinion.
Pete Brennan
Oh, massively. And I think being self-aware that you have an opinion that is going to be biased whether you like it or not or you realise it or not, is one thing. We have some pretty, how do I say this, kind of minds and personalities in the team that really kind of believe in what we're doing and really have an opinion as well. So for me it's kind of getting that ego out the way things like can designs, we'll do a whole bunch of different options for designing a can of a new beer. And then me, I guess as the creative and the team will be, "Yeah, this is brilliant." And then there might be pushback to go, "Hey, that's actually not what we thought. I imagine something different." So being real open to that feedback and really putting it down to everyone else. And I'm happy to be out voted if the rest of the floor thinks that my option's not the best one. So it definitely comes down to democratic votes. But yeah, just surrounding yourselves with the people that we have has been really helpful.
Mark Jones
Yeah, good. Well, it sounds like constructive band meetings.
Pete Brennan
Yeah, exactly.
Mark Jones
So now let's get a bit geeky on the marketing side for a moment. How did you start? Now, I know it was through some specialist retail stores. How have you gone from that early start and scaled and in particular, what are the channels that really drive growth for you?
Pete Brennan
Oh, absolutely. Starting out very early on in Startmate, we got kind of posed a question, are we going to be a wholesale business or a D2C business, which are very, very different types of companies. So the immediate reaction was, we're a wholesaler but we're going to do D2C as well. And it kind of dawned on us pretty early on that they're almost like two separate types of companies. And to do both very well is quite tricky. So we've focused on wholesale initially out the gate. We do have a D2C channel that we're investing in at the moment and trying to double down on and build up. But wholesaling has been kind of the first thing that we did.
When we first did our first round of cans that we made, of beers, our first round of production, we couldn't afford to print on the cans. So we got plain silver cans, we got these little kind of Heaps Normal round stickers. And my wife and my daughter and I put them on by hand in our kitchen. We did 1,200 sticker cans in one day. And then we put them in brown paper bags and we had a list of our dream restaurants and independent shops and the venues that we loved as fans personally and we'd love to have our beer stocked in there. And we went and knocked on the doors and said, "Hey, we've made this beer, would you like to try it?" And people tried it and then we told them it was non-alcoholic and jaws hit the floor and we had feedback from sommeliers and chefs and really educated pallets and people going, "There's no way this is non-alcoholic." And we kind of went, "Yeah, it is."
So that for us was a real big milestone to get, okay, we're onto something here. People like it, people enjoy it. And from there we just focused on independence. We just wanted to build relationships. We got told pretty early on, if you want to get into the big grocery supermarkets, you're going to have to have four years runs on the board and you're going to knock on the door for 12 months and they'll eventually let you in and they'll haggle you down in price. And our experience was the opposite of that.
About eight or nine months in the space of two weeks, we got cold emails from both Coles and Woollies going, "Hey, we've seen you guys. You're category leaders, we want to have you on the shelf. And initially it was, we said no because we just knew we were, at the time, we were in three or 400 venues that were independent mom and pop shops and restaurants that we just built the brand off that been our first early customers. We looked internally and went, "Hey, if we're going to go from 300 venues to 2,000 overnight, we'll fall over. We won't be able to do that."
And to be fair, they were both kind of really understanding. They really got it. They scaled with us. So we did 100 stores a month to kind of grow and up that kind of production schedule that we did. And yeah, it's worked really well. I always find there's three types of people, the consumer that we come into touch with. There's the one person that goes, walks past a stall that we're doing at a big conference or something goes, "Non-alc beer, you guys are wasting your time. It's never going to work." And that's fine, we can't be everything to everybody. And then you get people who go, "I love Heaps Normal and I follow you on Instagram," which is always flattering and lovely to hear.
And then there's kind of a third type of person that goes, "I've seen this non-alc thing, I don't really understand it. Why would I drink non-alc beer?" And the kind of response is like, well you could go out tonight and have eight beers and you're probably going to miss work tomorrow and break your phone on the way home and probably get in an argument with your partner, or you could have four normal beers and four Heaps Normal beers and you're probably all right to get up and go for a surf before work. And the light bulb kind of goes off and then they buy a four pack and they drink it and then they have that experience. And then within a few days we're getting DMs on Instagram going, "This is amazing. I had five beers last night, they were all Heaps Normals. And I went and did a yoga class before I got up and started my day." So it's been an interesting journey.
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Mark Jones
This is a big segment and I think a couple years ago we wouldn't have said, the whole non-alcoholic segment. One research study reckons it'll be up 31% by 2024 and I suspect it'll be even greater than that. So what advice do you have for other people who are looking to get into this? Not that you want too many competitors I'm sure. But how do you think about tapping into this type of customer and this type of experience? Because I think what interests me is the broader social impact. It's the, how do you build an authentic brand rather than just jumping on the bandwagon?
Pete Brennan
Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. I think it for me, it comes down to brand. This is something that we all genuinely believe in that we're doing. We were by no means the first non-alc beer company in Australia. We had people like Sobah who have come before us and done an amazing job. And I think in terms of people out there who are looking to get into a category like this, go for it. I think it's important to have an abundance mindset. There's enough of the part there for everybody. And I feel that the more brands that play in the non-alc space, the better.
All it does is it increases kind of awareness for the category, which is good for everybody. And I think it's really also really important to call out. I think the category, because it's still so juvenile and so young and so early on in such early days, it is quite often misunderstood. We don't make beer for people who are sober. We say we make people beer for people who really enjoy a good beer, but they want to cut down, whether that's for the night or they're taking some time off the booze. And I think that's been, like I said earlier, that non preachy thing has been a real help for us.
Mark Jones
Yep. What about on the metric side? So I understand there's an initiative that involves 2%, so 1% for the Planet and then 1% for causes. How do you work that into your story?
Pete Brennan
Yeah. It's one of those things where doing the right thing, I feel like shouldn't always be screamed about and brought into the story.
Pete Brennan
I think doing the right thing is doing the right thing. Another example, we win a lot of awards, but we never post about that stuff because it just feels braggy and it just feels a bit weird to go, "Look at this shiny trophy that we've won." And it's just off brand for us. And that's for the business, but also us as people. It's just not something we really shout about. So yeah, we do have a 2% for purpose initiative, which is great. But it's just doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is always the right thing.
Mark Jones
Now, speaking of that, and this is probably heading off into the future as well. But when we talk about social impact, we talk about long-term sustainable positive change. And it seems that you're very much are committed to that idea of changing behaviours. And I know you've been widely quoted on that and it's also been a big part of your own personal story as well, sort of from a family background perspective. How are you thinking about engaging in a deeper way with that social impact? Because I imagine in the future, there'll be an opportunity to talk about the lives of people and communities that you've changed as a result of this product or products. How are you thinking about how you might tell that story in the future?
Pete Brennan
Yeah. Look, we do a lot of storytelling. It's kind of been a backbone of our business. So in terms of how we tell it in the future, I guess it would really depend on each individual situation. But we've just launched, well last year we did a series called Normal People. That was a YouTube series that we did, which was shining the light on people that are the general public might not think is normal, but to them it is normal. And just trying to normalise those things that we've been conditioned and brought up to think it's not.
For example, we did a piece with Zoe Terakes, who's a non-binary actor. They don't identify as male or female. They've starred with Nicole Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers' amongst some other kind of awesome things. So just shining a light on their story and going, "Hey, this is who Zoe is. They don't identify as male or female. This is their story." And things like that. There's no product in it. It's not us pushing cans of beer. I think there's like a logo at the end screen and that's it.
But yeah, just telling the stories in the right way and for the right reasons. We're just about to launch another one for a guy named Michael Laurie who's an Indigenous First Nation musician. And his language is literally, it's disappearing. His mission is to really come and create song and tell stories. So we love just telling stories with people like that. I mean, in terms of the future, how that's going to work out, I really don't know. It's something that every few months, we look at how we've progressed as a company and we change tact a little bit because things move a little bit different direction, a little bit quicker or slower than we thought they might. So a little tricky to foresee the future, but we are going to keep doing what we're doing, for sure.
Mark Jones
Yeah, great. Well yeah, it sounds a bit like there's opportunity to grow in that area and also take a look at social impact measurement, which is a broad discipline as well.
Pete Brennan
Absolutely.
Mark Jones
We see a lot of overlap with that and storytelling. So I think that's in part why I ask.
Pete Brennan
Yeah. We've got a lot of work to do around that. I think sometimes we forget we've just turned two as a business, so we're still very early days. And trying to do the best we can with the resources that we have. But it's so baked into our DNA as a brand in terms of telling those stories, doing the right thing, and not just pushing product, which I think a lot of brands do.
Mark Jones
So, a couple years in then how does it feel? People talk about through COVID wanting a meaningful job, which is, "I just got to do something meaningful."
Pete Brennan
The great resignation.
Mark Jones
Well, yeah. And I don't know to what extent that was a really big thing here in Australia. But I guess I'm interested, what's your sense of satisfaction about having come this far?
Pete Brennan
Yeah. It's a weird thing because I think starting a business and then we are super lucky that it's really taken off, is equal parts exciting and terrifying because we're doing the best we can and we're surrounding ourselves with the right people and it feels like we're really making a difference. But I think anyone who's doing this would not be honest with ourselves if they thought it was going to kind of turn out this well. It's something that surprises us daily and we're grateful for the support. We're so thrilled and stoked that people believe in what we're doing. And yeah, just growing a business the right way.
Mark Jones
That's great. Well, yeah, I really appreciate getting to know you a bit more. Thank you for being so honest as well and open about it. I think from the experiences we've had, not just on the podcast, but in our work, the appetite for connecting with the deepest story behind the decisions that we make as a leader is really high. And so I trust that in sharing your story, you've been able to encourage some other people as well. So yeah, I really wish you all the best, Pete.
Pete Brennan
Thanks, mate. That's awesome of you to say that. Thanks so much.
Right well there you have it, a really good guy and what a fantastic brand story.
I’m always inspired by guests like Pete who bring so much of themselves to their work. And I think Pete is a great example of that.
It’s been a whirlwind couple of years for Heaps Normal, and that sense of adventure, authenticity and doing good has been really critical for connecting with customers and growing the business, and so I’m excited to see where they go from here.
Meanwhile, we here at ImpactInstitute are not going anywhere, we’ll see you again in two weeks time for a brand new episode of The CMO Show. As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.