IAM1106- Innovator Establishes Best Practices in Preventing Chronic Illnesses

Karl Ronn spent nearly 30 years with Procter & Gamble, winding up as vice president of R&D and general manager of new business/healthcare, where he was responsible for developing P&G’s capability to deliver disruptive innovations. Karl developed new markets for household-name cleaning products like Febreze, Swiffer and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, as well as personal care products like Old Spice and Secret. Since leaving P&G in 2010, Karl has founded multiple startups and consulted with Fortune 500 companies wanting to create billion-dollar growth engines. Karl has also sat on the advisory board for the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for the last 15 years. He leverages his expertise in consumer marketing, demand creation and behavioural change, most recently to establish best practices in preventing chronic illnesses like diabetes.

• CEO Hack: Working with The Innovator's Dilemma author – Clayton Christensen
• CEO Nugget: (i) Focus on finding a very big problem (ii) Keep learning
• CEO Defined: Helping make other people better

Website: https://firstmilecare.com/

Karl's handle: @kpronn
First Mile Care handle: @first_mile_care

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00:28 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Karl Ronn of First Mile Care. Karl, it's great to have you on the show.

01:04 – Karl Ronn

Hey. It's great to be here today. Thanks for letting me spend some time with you.

01:09 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Super excited that you get to spend some time with us. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read about all the awesome things that Karl is doing. Karl spent nearly thirty years with Procter and Gamble, winding up as vice president of r and d and general manager of new business in health care, where he was responsible for developing P&G's capability to deliver disruptive innovations. Karl developed new markets for household name cleaner name cleaning products, including Febreze, Swiffer, and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser as well as personal care products like Old Spice and Secret.

And since leaving P&G in twenty-ten, Karl has founded multiple startups and consulted with Fortune five hundred companies wanting to create billion-dollar growth engines. Karl also sat on the advisory board for the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for the last fifteen years, and he leverages his experience in consumer marketing, demand creation, and behavioral change, most recently to establish best practices in preventing chronic illnesses like diabetes. Karl, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:07 – Karl Ronn

Sure. I am. Love to. Thank you.

02:09 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, thank you for doing all the awesome things that you are doing. So before we jump, I guess, a little bit more into what you're doing, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:20 – Karl Ronn

Yeah. So, I currently run First Mile Care, and we run a national diabetes prevention program. But we didn't invent the diabetes prevention program. It was developed by the CDC and the AMA, and I happened to be in a meeting with the senior vice president of the AMA who works in that area of, chronic disease, Karen Kometic, and she talked about this fabulous program that had these great clinical results and they'd gotten about fifty thousand people then to take the program, and it was the most effective way to prevent diabetes. And I thought, well, that's cool. But how many people have it have prediabetes in a situation of blood sugars that are too high but not diabetes? And it's like eighty-four million people. I said, wow. That's huge.

So if I were trying to deal with that, we'd set a goal of saying half of those people are gonna have taken the program ten years from now, and then we just figure out how in the world to keep doubling and doubling and doubling for ten years, and eventually, we'd get to giant numbers. And she engaged in it, and it sounded really interesting. And I went back, and I thought about three months later, it had been bugging me. And I called her back, and I said, hey. If you're serious about doing something, maybe we could help you do it because that would be a cool thing to, do to prevent half the population from ever getting diabetes. Okay. And so and she said, well, of course. Okay. And so after a couple of years of figuring out what everybody else had done, we founded a company to solve what we hope could be part of the solution.

03:55 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. And that's a huge solution. And considering the numbers and the impact that type 2 diabetes can have on the population. I love that you're creating a solution. I even love your side, I noticed reducing the risk and scaling the solutions. I love that tagline because I think it speaks to that forty million or fifty percent, I guess, of the impact that you can have with all the solutions that you're creating.

04:15 – Karl Ronn

Yeah. Thank you. I think that a lot of times what happens is when we get these big numbers, we reduce what we can do to our capability rather than building the capability to meet the need because it's just so big and that's why this ten years imagine we're gonna get half these people done, and so what's in the way? And then just keep at it with a sense of doubling, and you get that put a penny on the first square of the check of the checkerboard thing. And it's like you can keep doubling while anything becomes possible.

04:44 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more about First Mile Care. Could you take us through, like, exactly what you're doing and how you're making that impact?

04:51 – Karl Ronn

Yeah. And so, to prevent diabetes, you have to change your lifestyle. And, it's really hard because it's not a small thing to ask people. And so you can't lose weight, and that'll come back and things like that. What you have to do is find a way to iterate to keep addressing what happened so that you can live in the moment and say, oh, I shouldn't eat that right now because I did this. And so you get the ability to predict the future and then take a practical little step. And you're gonna fail a lot along the way, but you're gonna come back and say, but I can see I'm moving. I'm gonna make better and better and better choices.

And so this whole program is set up in a year. That in and so it's twenty-two classes over a year in groups that you do. And so the curriculum works. The problem was, how do you get people to take it, and how do you make them stick to it? And so two classic problems of trial and retention. But what we realized and this is where, again, working with the AMA was so helpful, is that if I wanted to ask you to change your life, you're already doctor would then have to know that if I prescribe it, we could fill it, if you will. It would be available. And so what we do is we partner with the VA if you will. It would be available.

And so what we do is we partner with physicians. In a physician's office, you probably live within thirty minutes of your physician because you only need to see him once or twice a year or something like that. But I need to have you come to classes every week, so I can't be thirty minutes away. And so I know from my consumer experience that it should be modeled like a shopping habit, so I need to be within ten minutes of your home. That's why we call our company First Mile because we want to enrich the first mile where you live, not the last mile of Imagine getting the service to you. We want to be where you are, And that embraces the reality of the social determinants, how zip code is destiny.

And so I can't tell you to do this if it's not where you are. And so we wanted to make it possible then for your physician to imagine that community around them, that thirty-minute radius. And we would make the program available at, say, seven locations within that radius so that if I asked you to if the physician asked you to do it, you would find, oh my. There's one just around the corner from me, and it's available when I could take it. And so we created a massive quantity of offerings, by popping up with coaches and locations in a kind of an on-demand economy type of approach to be able to, be able to recruit for the physician. And so we make it possible to extend the practice, and we work there with their entire group of patients and work with the doctor to determine who would benefit from this program.

And then we make the offering on their behalf, and we pop up with the locations and the people and the coaches so that when you take the class then with your neighbors we're learning from people like us rather than what I always say is, like, you should eat more salmon that is steamed than broccoli. Okay. Whatever. Well, ain't gonna work. Okay. You know? And so you know, some of my wife's from New Orleans. Okay. Whatever. Salmon and broccoli are not the answer in New Orleans. Okay? It might be here in San Francisco. Okay. But it's not in New Orleans. Okay. So it's the little steps. Okay? So by being hyperlocal like that, we enable the doctor to have the ability to prescribe this program, and you can stay in it because it's right it's convenient to your times. It's close to home. And you like the people that are in the class because you're on the same journey together. It's not some theoretical journey. It's a practical journey.

And, so in Houston where we are, you know when the freeze happened, it was happening to everybody, and so we could all go through that together. And so we can say, so what are we gonna do? And so resilience is dealing with what you got, and so we're there with them together. And, of course, the freeze is irrelevant to anybody else because it didn't happen to them. And so being hyperlocal allows us to increase the chance that you'll be committed and stay committed, and you'll learn, and you'll make small changes, not theoretical changes.

09:01 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself or the business or a combination of both. But what do you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique?

09:09 – Karl Ronn

I think, there's an important commitment to realizing that all I can do is try to help enable you. I can't help is not a good thing. Okay? That's a little hands-on thing. I don't care whatever. Is there any way I could enable you to do what I believe you can already do? And my role is to enable that. And I realize that it's not always easy, and you might have some gaps, but I've still gotta enable you to take care of yourself because I can't be with you forever. I have to build to make you stronger, but you have the strength already. And so I can't give you hope. You have hope. It's not my job. My job is to help you by enabling you, and whatever works for you is what works for me.

09:54 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. And I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:06 – Karl Ronn

So I live in Silicon Valley, and I didn't always. I was thirty years in Cincinnati with Procter and Gamble or living in South America and other places and stuff like that. But where I gravitated to here. Why? Because you can either sustain or disrupt businesses and if we wanna make a big change, we have to figure out what we mean by positive disruption rather than chaos generation. Okay? And so, you know, if we had a long time, we can talk about whether or not everything that happens in Silicon Valley is good or bad for the universe, but I'm gonna try to work on the good stuff. And my inspiration for that was Clay Christensen. And so I had the pleasure of working with Clay Christensen, who's the Harvard guy who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma.

And so I got to work with him over several years because I was at P&G and could understand this question of, is our job right now to extend the market that exists, or do we want to create a new one? My choice was to spend my time now on creating the new ones. And what happens then is everything's legitimate. If you wanna run a small business, great. You wanna run a big business? Great. But there's a difference between wanting to not have a boss and wanting to change the world. And they're both great. Not one's greater than the other, but they're different missions. And so I focused on things that would be billions of people, very big markets. And so I have to know whether or not what I'm gonna do is not only gonna be disrupted, but it's gonna scale. Is it gonna be catalytic so that it will grow?

11:35 – Gresham Harkless

So, I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine you would tell your younger business self.

11:42 – Karl Ronn

Alright. I guess a variation of it is that you have to focus on finding a very big problem. Okay? In other because you might only be able to solve one percent of it. And so if I started with a problem that was a million people, one percent of a million is a pretty small number, and so I'm gonna be a factor in some part of the San Francisco Bay Area if I do that. If I start with one hundred million people and I get to a million, well, I'm still only, at least I'm a big factor in a big city or something like that. But if we want if we wanna change things, you have to start with a big thing. And so a lot of times what I do is is people are too incremental.

And so one of my favorite questions is, what's keeping you awake at night? And that's what I wanna work on because what's keeping you awake at night is what I should be innovating on so that you could sleep. And I don't sleep. I don't lose sleep over little things. I lose sleep over things that I can't do. And so what happens is the things that we can't do, we often don't address them, and we keep working on this other thing too. So what keeps you awake at night? Say it out loud, write it down, and then create a lot of little experiments. So in thirty days, what would I do? And so I build a learning organization to work on the things that scare you the most. Okay?  And say them out loud and then plan lots and lots of experiences.

So I believe we we we have to we have to not know things. We have to learn things. But what we have to do is pick a big market and what keeps you awake. Oh, I do that, except I don't know that I could ever do this. Well, that's what you wanna learn about. And so plan some experiments, and then some of them are not gonna work. It's a learning thing, and so you're not failing. You are learning. Okay? If, like, over time, though, a year you've been at it and nothing's working, well, you probably are just not the person to do this. So I didn't say you failed, but you need a different plan, and it involves more than you because time is the variable, not cash. Okay? In other words, then you committed to it, and you're not making any progress.

So watch your time, but pick a big problem and learn your way in little thirty-day steps and forget all that you don't have to read all the lean management books and everything else like that. They're fine but miss the point. Work on the problems that are the toughest and see if you can crack them. If you can crack them, you're great. If not, go ask a friend and bring somebody else in until you can crack them, but be a learning organization. And that really works even when you're I used to deal with, I had thirteen billion dollars of Procter and Gamble business that I was dealing with. You're still a learning organization because if you're not, somebody's gonna come out of left field and take you out of business, and so you're always a learning organization.

14:15 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Karl, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:23 – Karl Ronn

My job as a CEO is the same thing as the mission of the company. It has to be helping make others better. It's not about me. Okay? Our job is to make other people better.

14:36 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. And, Carl, I truly, appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all those things you and your team are working on.

14:50 – Karl Ronn

Well, I appreciate the chance to talk with you. It causes us to reflect on the realities of the business while you're busy, down there trying to get everything done. People can reach out to us at Firstmilecare.com, okay, whatever, to talk about the business. I'd be happy to do that. I happen to have written a book about rest called Reciprocity Advantage. I wrote it a few years ago. And mostly you could reach out to me on that. But the Reciprocity Advantage was really about the idea of how to create new businesses together with big and small companies to create the future.

And I did it with Bob Johansen, an Institute for the Futurist, where how do we allow people to see the future and then turn it into a business? And so I have a strong passion for others being able to help create the future and that happens to just be another avenue that where I thought, or I was forced to put it down in words that somebody else could use, and so maybe that's a help for other people. I don't worry about making money on books. It all goes to a foundation if anybody buys it, reach out to me at Firstmilecare.com and we'd be happy to talk, And, especially if you're on the journey the same journey I'm on, I'd love to hear about it. And so, anyway, thank you very much for the chance.

16:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Carl, I truly appreciate you for doing all the awesome work and all the words of wisdom that you gave us today. We will have the links and information to show notes as well too for the book and your company so that everybody can follow up. I'm a get a copy of the book, but thank you so much for reminding us to stay true to the journey that we're on, and how we can even collaborate to do that as well too. So definitely appreciate you, my friend, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

16:27 – Outro