Fabian Geyrhalter:
Ben, welcome to the show, Ben.

Ben Christensen:
Thanks so much for having me.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, it’s such a pleasure to have you. Let me start off by saying that there are many, many different ways in which I identify, and I book guests for this show. And most people listening don’t even know that. But most of the brands I either read about or I see them somewhere in the wild and they catch my attention and then I contact the PR team through the website. But some of them are sent to me by PR folks, not too many, but then meet Cambium. It was an interesting one. So I learned about your company because your website caught a colleague’s eyes and he posted on it on LinkedIn about the site and how great it was, and especially given the space that Cambium is operating in, which is not necessarily the B2C, D two C type of space, right? It’s not normal for a company in your space to have a very well thought through, highly designed, very well branded, great storytelling type of website.

And plus of course, I look through the side and I love what you do and what you stand for. And hence here we are. So Cambium goal, and I’m paraphrasing this from your website or from one of your interviews in the past, Ben Mia’s goal is to make it so that every material can be sourced in a way that is regenerative, that it’s done in a way that creates local chops and it’s done just as efficiently, if not more efficiently, than it is done today. With that preamble, welcome officially, and tell us how did you get into wood? How did Cambium get started? How did we get here?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, really, really appreciate that and I’m sure we’ll dive into more of the why behind the high design website in a space that traditionally doesn’t have it. So I grew up Inwood. I grew up in a town of about 200 people in rural New Mexico up in the mountains end of a dirt road. And my house didn’t have central heating growing up, so we wanted to stay warm in the winter. We had to cut wood and spend a ton of time really in the forest. And as an only child, my best friends were the trees. And when I was about six or seven bark beetle, which is a pest, essentially came through the forest and killed a ton of those trees. And my mom is a scientist and she helped me understand from a really, really young age that that was directly connected to climate change.

And so I was devastated, but also really turned that into a core focus, which I’ve had since really, really young, that my life’s work is to address climate change at scale. So that’s what I’m working on from the macro. And then the other side of it is spend a ton of time with my dad in the shop. So he was a construction worker, a carpenter, so grew up spending every summer building furniture with him and working within wood and ended up working in forestry more broadly through college. And ended up going to Yale for grad school to the Yale School of Forestry where I was kind of taking this climate science background, this real deep understanding of wood and trying to think about how do you scale it. And while there came across the scale and this problem of wasted wood, which is something that we don’t think about at scale, and realize that we could source almost half of all of the wood that comes in the US from reusing material and started looking at that in a much bigger way, recognized there’s a huge technology gap in this space. And then now what we’ve built is the platform that we hope to really scale across materials as we get bigger. So that’s how we started. I think the last really important thing always along the way is I definitely don’t know everything. It’s one of the things I’ve learned most in life. And so have been really lucky to have a great team of folks with really different perspectives and big attitudes that help us grow.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. Yeah, I love how that upbringing really already predicted your future. It’s magnificent how both of your parents played such an impactful role in where you actually ended up. Cambium does a lot of things when you really dive into the cambium website and you go through all the facets. Your tagline has an actual, a very specific yet all encompassing focus. So the tagline is, we build better supply chains. Tell us how the supply chain is at the heart of it all and how you filtered all of these things that you do at Cambium down to those five words of we build better supply chains.

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, it’s a great question and one that certainly in the early days of starting working on this, I had this existential belief that one of the things that we’ve missed in business building in the last a hundred years as a country is that we think often as complexity as the enemy. And there’s spaces where that’s really true. I think when you’re building a team or you’re thinking about internal processes, complexity is the enemy. But part of what we’ve missed is that when we think about complexity as the enemy, when we’re producing a product or we’re producing a service, oftentimes complexity is what you need to get in order to do it well, in order to do it in a way that is circumspect and good for the world and is a holistic solution. And so in the early days of what we do, which is addressing the supply chain side, so people who have logs, truckers, millers, drying facilities and sort of stitching all of that together and then working with large end customers who are buying material at scale, there’s a lot of different parts of that problem.

And what we realized was that you have to get a lot right to do that, but if you can get it right, you can create a lot of value. It’s a very defensible solution and there’s a ton of opportunities to grow. And so part of why we’ve really zoomed in on and centered our core focus on building better supply chains is because fundamentally that’s what we do. We serve each of those different nodes across the entire supply chain. And our whole belief here is that if you can do that really well, you can create better impactful communities, you can create better economics for customers, you can create a better customer experience. And so across each of those steps, you do it really well, you’re creating a better supply chain, and you’re ultimately creating a better world from that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And now we’re a good amount of years into the existence of cambium, but what we did not talk too much about is how you started it in the first year, the first two years, because you don’t start with the supply chain. That’s a big thing. I mean, as you said, it’s extremely complex. How did you first get into the business? What was the first year or the first two years, and then how did you pivot into this much, much bigger, I don’t even know if pivot, it’s such a horrible word, it’s overused, but it’s kind of like when did you grow into seeing that there is a bigger underlying theme that if you don’t attack that theme, you’re never going to have the actual results you’re looking for?

Ben Christensen:
So we started really working much more on the sourcing side. So basically we realized that there’s about 36 million trees that come down in around cities every single year. Almost all of that material is wasted. It’s just a huge problem. It’s really bad for the climate, cost us a lot of money to get rid of that material, and we could be reusing it if we had better sourcing. And so we thought the initial problem was working with cities. We thought it was about going in, connecting with city governments, understanding what their challenges were and then helping build solutions for them. And what we realized in that process was that, whoa, actually there’s a lot of infrastructure here and there’s a lot of opportunities to grow the technology in this space. And if you could actually connect that waste material to a facility that could use it, that’s going to be much faster than helping a city actually develop their own facilities or sort of approaching a problem that way.

So we started and basically we’re like, okay, the gap is not at the sourcing. The gap is actually at the processing step. And one of the key things that processors lacked was really technology. And so their ability to actually sell, their ability to actually run their businesses very effectively. And so we started to build technology for them to really service this industry that traditionally does not have a lot of tech in it. And then what we recognized was that, well, a lot of these businesses would be willing to use this waste material, be willing to take that material in, turn it into a valuable product, but they’re only going to do that if they have a place to sell it. And if you don’t have a place to sell it, you’re not going to take in that material. And so our sort of next step in our business was saying, okay, we’ve now got a bunch of folks who are using our platform, how do we help them actually start really utilizing the waste material at scale? And we did that by starting to bring on in customers by really launching our customer-centric brand. And it’s been off to the races since then.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So well, let’s talk more about technology and that platform. A month ago you announced an 18.5 million series A raises. And since no company gets funding right now without using the two metrical letters, ai, even Cambium is building an ai, which is not the first thing you think about when you see wood and when you think about that, but when it comes into supply chain and what you just mentioned, things start to actually make sense. So I read in TechCrunch that you’re building an ai, what do you build? How does it work? Walk us a little bit through how AI enhances the entire journey.

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple of things. The first is that what we are fundamentally trying to build is a better supply chain as we’ve been talking about. And those sort of key attributes of a better supply chain are it’s faster, it’s more reliable, it’s more adaptable. We know that we live in a global context where the dynamics of trade shift overnight. No, I know, it’s crazy. It’s wild.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I haven’t checked the news in the last two minutes. Wait.

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, exactly. Well, everything’s totally different now. And so you have to have supply chains that are really adaptable. And the way that you sort of create each of those attributes is by having better data. And so data ultimately is the thing that allows you to shift from one facility to another to be able to source in the most effective ways, and ultimately to be able to source in the most sustainable ways as well. And so what we’re really building is the data platform for the wood industry. So there’s all of these different steps, and a way I often talk about it for folks who don’t live in breathe, the industry is if you’ve got a desk or a table, there’s some wood as part of your house, probably about eight to 10 different businesses touched that material before it ended up in your home. And what that means is all of those different steps, there was a logistic step in between them.

So there’s about eight different times where wood is on a truck and it’s moving from one shop to another shop. And so in all of those steps, there’s a real opportunity to improve the transaction, to improve the customer experience of selling and moving that material. And that’s what we’re working on. And the big opportunity there is that if you can really build the data, you can then optimize it. And that’s where our AI really comes in, is in optimizing that data. So as we really start to scale, there’s more and more opportunities for advanced analytics and really driving supply chain scale. And then the other way that AI really plays a role for our business is helping work with our users. So I grew up in wood, my dad’s one of these people, it’s like a space where you’re very hands-on, you are not at a computer, you’re working fast. And so part of that, and part of what AI can do is it can help really take a space where you’re very verbal. The way the wood industry works is you pick up a phone and you call somebody, you sort out your order, and then it happens. The future of that obviously is that you’re using AI to help facilitate those conversations to make sure that they’re digitally and to really leverage the power of software underneath that as well. So those are the big ways in which we’re really building AI to grow.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing, absolutely amazing. And as we talk about this data platform, another aspect of data is customer data. And so when you start a business, you listen to your customers, you look at focus groups or you run tests and you get data back of what they want, what they need. And I think you did that with the government in the beginning of cities. What do they need? And then afterwards you moved on. Was there ever a finding that was data-based that you guys looked at and then you said, you know what? I see that that’s what the data tells me, but we are actually going to go a different direction because our instinct tells us that the world doesn’t need faster horses, that there is something else to maybe uncover that the data doesn’t tell us. Was there anything like that happening within the first years of your company where you did that?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, so one of the things that we were seeing is so within the sort of salvage wood space, bringing waste wood to market, and now we work with waste wood and we also work with traditional forestry and have really grown beyond that. But early days we were very, very focused there. And the key thing was that the sort of industry data says that if you’ve got a tree that has fallen in a city, you should share exactly where that tree came from because people really want to know that. And fundamentally, we’re a company that is built on transparency and traceability. But one of the things we were realizing and I was thinking about myself is I was born and raised outside of in a small town as I mentioned, but I went to middle school and high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And you think about any city that you’ve spent a bunch of time in or you grew up in, once you start thinking about the neighborhoods within that city, you probably feel a lot more affinity to certain neighborhoods than to others.

And I’ve thinking about that with Albuquerque, where there’s places in Albuquerque where I love, then there’s also places in Albuquerque where I just didn’t spend any time or I had a bad experience. And so where that’s going is that if you tell somebody that this wood came from Albuquerque, they start to fill it in with all the things that matter to them, it reminds them of the places that they care about. But if you zoom in and you tell them, Hey, it came from this specific neighborhood in Albuquerque or this cross street in Albuquerque, unless that happens to be one of the neighborhoods that they actually really love within the city, they then are like, oh man, I don’t like that neighborhood. I don’t like that spot. And it stops resonating with them. And so the key thing we realized is the industry standard data was you get down to the actual street level and the transparency that you shared. We realize that from a branding and a marketing perspective, what you really want is you really want to be at the city level. You still want to create that local connection. Obviously from a carbon tracking data compliance perspective, we have all of the data that goes underneath that. But from an actual branding storytelling perspective, you want to be at the right level where you create enough negative space for the user or for the customer to fill that in with what they want and what they hope.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is so fascinating. And I mean it is all about storytelling. I mean, you are in the storytelling business. I mean, yes, you’re in the sustainability business, but really with your product, if the storytelling isn’t right, you just made that perfect point, right? You’re missing on a lot of opportunity and now we can finally talk about that site on your website. I mean, it tells that, it tells the process, it tells the journey, and it does it in an engaging and simple way, but it still digs deep into impact into data and sprinkles culture on top of it, which all of that is actually really, really difficult to do. But you and your team obviously spend the right amount of time on getting it just right. How has the storytelling aspect of your brand evolved over time? And do you feel a return or did you see a return of that investment into branding, design, storytelling, copywriting?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, we absolutely have. And when I think about brand and how that’s evolved for us is, as we were talking about earlier, our business is complicated. One of the hard parts of that is that it actually takes a while to explain, and we’ve gotten better and better at it. But if we’re actually going to talk about all the different things we do, we do a lot of different stuff as a business and especially as a startup company. And so in the early days, talking to investors or customers generally the feeling I got after somebody would look at our website and we’d come into a first meeting is they’d be like, I don’t understand what you do, what do you do? And then after we talked about it for 10 minutes, it’d be like, oh, that makes a ton of sense. I’m interested. I’m excited. And what we realized, and we spent a lot of time trying to make it visual and interactive and trying to distill what is a complicated concept, which is building new radically different supply chains into something that was simple, tangible and accessible, is that when people enter conversations with us now they get it and their questions now are about nuance or business mechanics or some of those pieces that are much more like the types of questions I would want to be having a conversation about rather than what do you do?
I don’t understand it. And that is a huge shift, and it was pretty amazing how immediate that was after we launched our new website is that really quickly all of my investor calls started. It was like I had already done the first call with them and now I was in a second call. And that was really important for us. And again, I think there are simpler businesses where that’s probably less true, but for something like ours, that’s pretty complex, that has actually been really, really helpful in this space. It’s also been very helpful with customers, anybody who’s approaching the brand, just making it easy and understandable,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Even for recruiting and even internal, right? People have that pride and people understand all the aspects. I would’ve been surprised if you would’ve answered this in any other way because it is so apparent that you do in such a great way telling that story, which is inherently extremely complex. And the idea that now you enter conversations and the primer is done, you don’t need to come in and do the dog and pony show. You’re like, okay, let’s talk specifics. You’re already interested. That’s why you’re here. Let’s go down to business. Super, super interesting. One thing that caught my interest on the Cambium car brand is you have the main brand and then you have Carbon Smart Wood. So there are two brands, two sides, two social channels. It seems like there might be more coming with biochar, I’m not sure. But how did you arrive at the decision to separate the company from the product? And most probably, I already answered it with future products down the line, but tell us a little bit about that separation of a church and state there.

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So fundamentally, what we realized is that we really have sort of three audiences as a company. So we have the folks who are in the supply chain who are producing material. We have wood buyers, people who are purchasing material to build buildings or build furniture. And then we have our overall general, maybe the general population investors, people who are trying to recruit people who are purchasing furniture from a company that we sold material into. And so what we recognized is that our overall supply chain story is the big brand that is Cambium. That is where we really spend our time. And then for the demand side, we wanted something that was scalable, that told the story, but also could really be much more material centric. So the example I always use is, are you familiar with Gore-Tex?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yes. Yep.

Ben Christensen:
Yeah. So you buy a Patagonia rain jacket and it’s made with Gore-Tex, and that tells you something about quality of the material, but it also does, it allows the company Gore who produces Gore-Tex to be in all of these different brands, they’ve become a brand in themselves that is B two, B2C, and that creates velocity, it creates scale. And the same thing is true for us by having Carbon Smart Wood specked into a new building, when an architect says, we’re going to use this material, well, now the general contractor says, oh, what’s Carbon Smart wood? I need to go source it. And the building owner says, oh, why do we put Carbon Smart Wood in here? Now I’m interested in it. Then what we find is that that creates a lot of really scalable value for our customers and then also for us. So that’s sort of how and why we decided to have a material type there that is very focused on the end customer that is more of a refined story and can allow us to do things.
One of my favorite Carbon Smart anecdotes is Sycamore is a wood that basically nobody uses. It’s not a material. Anybody is like, oh man, I’ve got Sycamore in my house. No one talks about that. And that’s a branding gap. But what we’ve done is we’ve taken Sycamore or London Planetree, which is the most common tree in US cities. It’s also a massive source of waste material, and we’ve rebranded that as City Mahogany. It actually looks a lot like Mahogany. It actually functions a lot like Mahogany. And so now you can buy Carbon Smart City Mahogany, and that is something that you’re actually very interested in and has a brand and has imagery behind it. And so by tying that sort of core carbon smart branding in, we’re able to create connectivity to these new sort of wood types

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is so awesome. That is such an amazing story, but just changing the perspective, which is literally what you do day in, day out with all of your different target audiences. But what a great story. Listen, your accolades, your award list, it’s stunning from Forbes 30 under 30 to fast companies, world’s most innovative companies, your environmental impact that you already had is amazing. But looking, and I know we can talk about this for hours and I’m sure you would like it, but looking back, what was that one big breakthrough moment as a startup where you felt what just happened today or what just happened yesterday? I think this is going to be big. I think we’re going to turn into something big and however you identified that and whatever big means, but when was that moment where you thought, you know what, we are making it with this one.

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, well, as you said, we got a lot more work to do, but we definitely have had a lot of scale and a lot of recognition. And I think the first moment for me, and this is one of those things where I’m born and raised in wood, I’ve spent my life in this industry, this is my life’s work. I’m not going anywhere. If this company, for some reason we couldn’t figure it out, I’m going to come back with another one. So I’m very, very focused on the problem. And one of the things that happened to us early on, again, when we were thinking about this in a way that was very different from where we are now, when we were thinking about it from the city perspective, we basically got this grant from the Nature Conservancy to try to go and understand why is all of this waste material coming out of US city? So it was sort of the central question, and we put out an RFP, and at that time I was a grad student, there’s like three of us on the team. We had no business really soliciting city proposals, and we had 35 cities apply. Almost all the major cities in the US were like, Hey, we want this question answered. And that was the first moment where I thought we were going to get maybe three cities to apply.

And that was like, oh, wow, we are not working on a small problem or something that’s niche. We are working on something that cities all across the country are really hungry to find solutions for. And again, we’ve now evolved. We still work with cities, we still do parts of that work, but our solution is much more macro. But that was the first moment where I thought, alright, this problem is there’s something here because people are really hungry to solve it and people are really hungry to solve it at scale. And so that was the initial impetus of, man, this is worth totally diving in on, and there’s some scale here,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Complete validation. Right, absolutely. Amazing. And on the flip side, obviously for every startup success there are like 500 failures. Was there anything that happened maybe on the brand level, maybe not where it was something that you guys just screwed up or where you didn’t see something coming that maybe you could have seen coming and it might be interesting to share with the audience besides all the successes?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, I think this actually fits well into sort what we were talking about with what works with the website is it took us way too long to invest in that. If I was going to run Columbia back, I would do a lot of things differently. But one of the main things I would do differently is I would invest in a high quality explanatory video and a really clear website from day one because we spent about three years, three and a half years, essentially always playing from behind in every single conversation we had. And that wasn’t because we didn’t have a relatively clear perspective of what we were building as a business. And obviously it’s gotten better over time, but we knew what we’ve been doing, but we just didn’t invest in explaining that well and invest in design and invest in storytelling. And I don’t think I would go back and overly invest in that. But getting that right at the beginning I think could have moved us way faster. And I go back and look at a bunch of our early websites and it’s like, wow, it’s egregious. Obviously this, obviously people were confused when they came onto a call.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
They still called me

Ben Christensen:
Still. And so that’s a big place where I think we just missed as a company and would do that very differently in retrospect.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and thanks for sharing that with others, right? Because sometimes that is something that is just overlooked and you constantly look at other things that you can fix, but that might be sometimes with something very complex in your industry, this might be a core problem that would just enable everything and empower everything to just be done so much quicker after all of those learnings. I mean, what does this weird word branding, which really people think it’s slapping a logo on something or people think it’s just like Gucci, it’s like, but what does really branding that philosophy, that idea thereof, and you just talked about how important it was for you to get it right in the end. What does branding mean to you?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, branding is a feeling of attraction. Like you are drawn into something. It’s sort of ineffable magnetism, and I’ll go back to wood for a second, which is that sort of, I can either sell you London Wood or I can sell you city Mahogany, and they’re both the same material with the same material characteristics. But for all of the different reasons that Mahogany has been built into this really high class, it’s associated with the finer things. It’s a classic line from Anchorman. It’s part of the cultural zeitgeist when you think around wood. And it seemed very favorably in that, and it seemed favorably in a way that makes it attractive. And so for us, a lot of this storytelling and what we try to do with bringing wood to market, changing the way that people see material is about really tying into these core existential cultural trends that we’re often not really aware of.

And it’s always interesting for us in this industry because to be honest, most people don’t think about wood hardly ever once in a while. Maybe they’re building something in their house or they start thinking about it, but it’s all around us. Any person listening to this, I guarantee you, look around you and you will see wood. I mean, it’s a trillion dollar industry. It’s one of the oldest industries in the world. I think maybe the oldest human job ever is, Hey, can you go gather some firewood? It’s been around forever, but you don’t actually think about it. And so part of our challenge as a brand is creating that connection point between, Hey, here are the stories that I do think about. Here’s the things I’m interested in life. Here are the things that tell me my place in society, and I want to connect those into material into a physical object.
And that’s always a challenge. But when we get that right, we find that people start quite literally seeing the world differently. They start seeing physical objects as things with stories, as physical objects that came from somewhere that people worked on. And our belief as a company is that when people actually do that, when you start to see a piece of wood as something that, Hey, came from John over here and was processed in a shop in this county and ultimately delivered to you in these ways, you start to care for it differently and you start to value material things differently and you start to move us towards a world where it’s less about, oh, I get something in and then I just let go of it because it doesn’t matter to me. And much more towards, man, all of these objects have such a powerful story underneath them and they have a feeling that is associated with them that makes me want to care for them, that makes me want to talk about them, that makes me want to really cherish them. And we think that’s a better world to live in.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. And I think once you actually study wood and you get to know these stories, you also look at it as something that is much closer aligned to life than a piece of plastic on your table. So it’s like that idea where it comes from and that it was a living and breathing thing. That alone, I think is so mind blowing. I was in a lumber shop the other day doing a tour, they might even be affiliated with you in LA, and they showcased all of these reutilized wood pieces that now are amazing tables for extremely rich people in la, but they were literally trees that just fell and they got reutilized. And that story of knowing that this tree fell in this neighborhood in Los Angeles, and it is now our table, huge, that emotional connection that you suddenly have, it’s really amazing. We talked at the very beginning of our conversation today about the tagline, which is only five words short.

Congratulations. That’s amazing. Getting it down to something like that. But something that I do with my clients at the end of our work where we basically crystallize a brand and say, look, weve talked about your brand for X hours. If we would put it all through a funnel and outcomes, one word that literally describes the essence of what you do and who you are and what you’re all about, what would that word be? And for liquid death, it would be mischief. Or for Everlane, it might be radical transparency. I am so interested to hear what it is for Cambium because there are so many things that you do. But I mean there are some words that bubble up. But I would love to hear, and I gave you a little bit of time, a little upfront idea that that question is coming up. Could that one word be for you guys?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, as you know, it’s the classic adage of if you want me to talk immediately, I can talk for a really long time, but if you want me to talk concisely, I need a lot of time to prep for it. Exactly. Appreciate that. The word that we were really zooming in on, I actually threw this to my team. I think it’s a really interesting question is story. And obviously the frames of your exercise are, you only get one word. We were really struggling to get it down to one because I think what actually fits for us is a better story. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And my proposition for you is that most brands, most companies out there are focused on growth, are focused on how do they sell at scale? And we’re focused on how do you do that and do that in a way that is impactful.

And so we fundamentally see our business as sort of a yes. And so maybe that’s a plea to allow us to have two words when we define our business, but I think if we had to pick one, it would be story. And if we got to pick two, it would be better story. Because fundamentally that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to write a better story for how we source material. We’re trying to write a better story for how it feels to use material. We’re trying to write a better story for jobs and reshoring manufacturing and the impact on our planet. And so that’s what we came up with.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And hereby, I allow you to have two words. Yes. Alright. Listen, I think this is so interesting because I wouldn’t have thought that that would be the word. And I am so thrilled that that is the word, and I’m so glad that you actually had your team think about this and brainstorm about it because it is not easy, but it is also such a great platform upon which you can keep growing and building and the idea of better story, even though it is not directly connected to your business, it is completely intrinsically what your business is about. And I think it was one of our opening questions today and one of these consistent thoughts throughout our 40 minute conversation today, which is it’s all about story, right? It is about story and what is the supply chain in the end, it is pieces put together, right? So super interesting. Great, great brand, DNA, is there any advice, and it’s always such a silly question to ask entrepreneurs because they’re like, how long do you have? But do you have any brand advice specifically to branding for founders or for marketers as a takeaway from today? Not that you need one more because we already got a lot from you, but is there anything on top of your mind where you think you can share it with my audience?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that we’ve done that’s been most effective in helping us scale, particularly in industry that is unbranded, that does not have a ton of technology that is relatively averse to our type of solution set or it’s pretty new, is that we’ve really focused on something we call participant led sales. And so the idea there is rather than going to a customer and saying, buy our product, buy our service, how can we get you to buy our service? What we’re really going to customers and saying is we’re saying, Hey, we’re trying to solve this problem. It’s a hard problem. It’s a complex problem as we’ve talked about, what do you think we need to do to do that? And the way that that actually plays out is that we spend a lot of time trying to get customers in spaces where they feel like they’re part of what we are building rather than, Hey, we’re trying to pitch them on using our material instead of somebody else’s.

And that’s been a really big unlock for us in what we’re building. It’s a harder thing to do when you think about brand or sort of external facing material, but much more on the sort of interactive space. That’s been a massive unlock for us because it changes somebody’s existential approach to what you doing. And a lot of people are really bought in on our sort of, if we can do this at scale, they want to be part of that. They want a world state where we exist and are scaled. We have a lot of work to do to get to scale. And when people actually start thinking about, oh, you actually should do this, or You should talk to this organization, or you should dive in here, they then start to feel ownership of the solution. And usually those folks end up turning into customers because they’re bought in. They feel like participants in what we’re building rather than just somebody who’s being sold to. So that’s something we try to do a lot.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. I thought about that strangely enough yesterday I thought about how there are companies that are employee owned, and I thought, how interesting, because a lot of brands should actually be customer owned. They should think about that that way. And this is literally what you just said it is. It’s like customers have ownership and they want to be a part of that story, but enabling them to do so is a different thing. It’s not easy, but that’s great. That’s great advice. Hey, what’s next for the brand? What are you excited about in the next six months? I mean, you just got a huge wind in your sails with having that investment round that now should enable you to do a lot of great things. What are you going to be up to?

Ben Christensen:
Yeah, I can’t wait to share more, but the core of it is really working with some much larger customers. We just announced our partnership with Amazon and are excited to share what that actually looks like in more detail soon. And the big thing that we’re really working on is scaling across the country in bigger ways. So really working to unlock our solution of better stories and better supply chains in more and more regions. And yeah, lots of new material, lots of new projects and lots of new things to offer in the next six months. So things are growing fast.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Can’t wait to follow along that journey. Where’s the best place for people listening to follow the journey of Cambium or you personally maybe?

Ben Christensen:
Sure. Well, you’ve waxed poetic a little bit about our website, so appreciate that. You can find us at cambiumcarbon.com at carbonsmart.com, either one, and you can follow me. I’m also very active on LinkedIn, respond to dms there. So just Ben Christensen on LinkedIn and you’ll find me.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Ben, thank you so much for taking almost an hour out of your morning today and sharing the story and giving all the advice. We really, really appreciate it. This was great.

Ben Christensen:
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for having me. Really, really good questions and really excited to stay in touch