I had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Angelillo, Founder/CDO of Sourced Craft Cocktails & @chiefdoingofficer.
As a successful tech entrepreneur and global business leader, Tim Angelillo brings 15+ years of experience running divisions of publically traded companies like Yahoo! and Time Warner as well currently founding and leading three start up businesses in Austin TX. These experiences allow Tim to share detailed insights on how to apply an entrepreneurial drive and marketing, sales, technology, and management skills both inside global companies and the tech start up world.
As Global Business Leader for $900 million of revenue overseeing Yahoo! Sports and the Y! Commerce divisions and Executive Director founding and overseeing $100 Million of Sports Illustrated licensing, properties, and retail business units, Tim shares his experience with audiences around the world.
Tim’s passion is to be of service to consumers, clients, partners, and other tenacious entrepreneurs by sharing his story and solutions that can be applied to companies large and small. Tim is an avid runner using more than 30 miles a week to think up the next business venture and the grateful husband and father of three children, RJ, Cooper, and Grace…all under the age of 10.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I grew up in lower Alabama — which is way different than Los Angeles! I was blessed to play two sports at Washington & Lee University in Virginia. As a Division III athlete, I’m lucky to have found the library, received an amazing liberal arts education, and spent the first decade of my career working in sports. In fact, my first job was actually a “pivot” as a Marketing/Sales executive at Sports Illustrated given I discovered there were a lot of 6’3″ shooting guards that could shoot the lights out and not play defense so working in sports was going to be a little different than I dreamed. 🙂
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
As my grandmother always said: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again!” Success is not a straight line and the learnings of failure are the most important lessons to get us to the right win.
Can you tell our readers about your upcoming c.d.o. Campaign and the initiatives you have surrounding it?
After 10 years leading startups, I came to realize that my job is not Chief Executive Officer. It is Chief Doing Officer! Leaders of the 21st century are going to be people who roll up their sleeves with their teams & help get it done.
The challenge as entrepreneurs is we have to teach ourselves how to do everything, from scratch — every day.
c.d.o provides EVERYONE with an aggregated content platform of the lessons of how to do life, well done in Wellness, Education, Leadership, and Life.
Can you tell us about the specific “Aha moment” that gave you the idea to start this new path?
With the constantly shifting environment caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, business leaders of both small and large companies are living in a daily pivot. This moment in time took us from the normal “how do you” Google it week and ramped it up to always teach ourselves reality.
I decided it was insane to have to teach myself and our company, Sourced Craft Cocktails, how to do everything from scratch every day. So we are launching @chiefdoingofficer this month to deliver a curated content platform that allows other c.d.o.s in my network to share how they are getting things done successfully in life and business.
In short, we’ve aggregated the most successful doing lessons from c.d.o.s. across technology, food & beverage, and media industries so those that join @chiefdoingofficer on Instagram can go faster, build stronger, and accomplish Life, Well Done.
Why did you create the Chief Doing Officer Platform?
I wanted to provide a platform where people can learn from one another. So that we short circuit the amount of time and energy it takes to actually get the right solution to market, because some people can go around for so long and not get it. And so when you have the tools to do it, and do it better and easier, it makes it so much better for everybody.
Every single person at any level in the company, you can be the intern and be a CDO. By creating a job title that doesn’t exist, we wanted to make sure it was open to everyone to be what you need is the tenacity to decide you want to be a CTO, and then the entrepreneurial spirit to want to share how you’re doing.
We’ve built CDO so that each week we’re releasing a chapter of how to do something around four different content verticals, wellness, education, leadership and life.
The middle two are of business oriented. And the first and the last are more lifestyle. And the job of a leader is to take care of others. That is literally what you signed up for 1,000%.
That’s really what CDO is meant for. Which I always tell people, particularly when they’re early in their career, and the last for career advice, and I say internship. My first one was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and I made more money in the first three months than I made in the next nine months, at Sports Illustrated, working full time. So in three months, I made more money than nine months, but I realized I didn’t want to eat a big potato out of my hand, while trading hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of stock, no matter how much money you could pay me. I have made so much money, but I was not fulfilled.
In a Work from Home (WFH) era, how do you help employees connect, share company culture, and reward them for productivity in these challenging times?
This is a really great question — and it is SO HARD right now. At Sourced Craft Cocktails, we invented an experience called Sourced Socials — a Real, Virtual Happy Hour to help solve this exactly.
Ultimately — what we help companies across the country accomplish is:
- Breaking Groundhogs Day — every single day for almost a year is the same on repeat. Wake up, still suck at home, 10 Zooms, “virtual” school lessons, go to bed. We help break that cycle by not only delivering a real cocktail kit to the employee’s front door but also creating unique, educational content like the Bulleit Virtual Distillery Tour that brings employees into one of the most successful bourbon distilleries virtually.
- Shared Experience — the difficult part is recreating the shared experience where we’re all doing the same thing, at the same time when we are all Working from Home across the country. We solve that by being the last one mile delivery mechanism.
- Have FUN — very little about the pandemic has been fun. We try to allow organizations to take a 1 hour pause to share a fun, unique experience over a shared cocktail.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
@chiefdoingofficer would not be possible without my mentors. They have literally taught me the most important “how do you do” lessons and you are going to get to hear from them directly as I’ll be interviewing them as c.d.o.s. each month!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started in this new direction?
Starting a new brand with c.d.o., with no monetization interests of any kind, has helped me a) learn how to do things in my for profit business and b) meet new people to expand my tribe of other @chiefdoingofficers.
Life never ceases to amaze me that way — do things to genuinely help others with no return expectations — and you are enriched beyond your wildest imagination.
How have you been able to succeed during the times of COVID?
Why we decided to start chief doing officer in the middle of a pandemic, an unprecedented time, there’s two options, you can either pack it in, and try to ride it out, or you can try to innovate your way into the future. And that’s really what we decided sourced was.
This gives us an opportunity to allow the transformation that was already happening in this consumer packaged goods industry, from brick and mortar to digital, and statistically made five years worth transformation happen in about six months.
On our end, we served over 900,000 consumers, from your phone to your door in eight states. And we think a lot of that will continue. And I think one of the things that has happened is it’s gone on so long that real consumer behavior change has happened. And it’ll also give us an opportunity to continue to add back in the other revenue streams that the business, it’s spent five years perfecting it. Source was designed to fix alcohol distribution. When you think about the alcohol industry in the US, it’s a $232 billion a year marketplace. And it is recession proof. American consumers drank 14% more alcohol in 2020, than they did in 2019. And that’s huge. That’s the 14th time since the Great Depression, that the economy has gone through a downturn. And every single one of those people actually drink more in a bad economy than they do in a good one.
We also brought it back into our enterprise product, which we call source socials, which is a real but virtual happy hour. So we’re able to service our office manager clients at tech companies, real estate companies, and service companies, mainly financial and legal services, where we’ve been hosting for over 2300 enterprise companies across the country. We’ve been hosting a real but virtual happy hour, so we actually deliver a real cocktail kit so that everybody’s having a shared experience, like we did with the US Open. So we delivered the Honey Deuce cocktail kit, with real melon balls and the real commemorative cup, and then everybody got on zoom. And we taught people how to make the cocktail history of the cocktail and what was in the cocktail. We invited people from the alcohol industry to share interesting facts about how you make spirits and found a really interesting solution that helps people create a company environment. While everyone is still working remote.
And we took that relationship with Disney through ESPN, and then brought it forward into ABC with the bachelorette. And now the Bachelor. It’s the camaraderie of the shared nature of it that we crave, and that we miss. And that’s sort of what sort of socials were built for was that we’re delivering the same cocktail kit to 10s of 1000s of remote workers. And then we’re allowing them to come on zoom, and actually enjoy that it sort of breaks what we call the groundhogs day moment.,
For us at source, it’s been a remarkable year. And we’ll actually bring a subscription product out for our enterprise clients that will allow them to take our draft cocktail machines, which are called sourced on tap, and actually put them into their office buildings. Where we see, the future of work is platooning. And we’re all going to work at a remote site, once a week, once a month, once a quarter. The office manager is going to platoon in sales and marketing right or engineering and finance. And what we’re gonna do is we’re going to have a workshop day. We’re gonna spend one day in a conference room, innovating whatever the business needs at the time between the departments, which ends like every other workshop you’ve ever been to in a happy hour, right. And so we’ve built a product that allows that office manager, whenever she has the departments in, all they have to do is pull the tap handle and a perfect cocktail is sitting there waiting for them, which is amazing and very innovative.
So many of us have become anxious from the dramatic jolts of the news cycle. Can you share the strategies that you have used to optimize your mental wellness during this stressful period?
So true — and really a massive problem for business leaders as everyone looks at us to be rock solid. But we struggle with a lot of the same stresses and fears found within the ranks of our troops.
Wellness — along with Education, Leadership, and Life — is one of our 4 pillars @chiefdoingofficer for that reason exactly!
For me, how do you stay sane is a two part process:
- Mental — provide myself the space to learn lessons by failing myself. I find that patience by remembering that I, too, am Practicing my craft, need to have Patience while I learn, and BELIEVE I can get it done!
- Physical — I run 20 miles each week. This is the only “me time” I take between 2 businesses & a family of 3 kids but it is imperative that I make this time without any guilt or excuses as it allows me to a) burn stress and b) think about big picture solutions.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
EVERYONE — from any background and at every level of a company — can be a @chiefdoingofficer! The best way to get experience is to have the courage to ask for help and borrow someone else’s experience with how to get the task done.
That is literally the entire purpose of c.d.o. — providing the successful lessons of DOING across Wellness, Education, Leadership, and Life to enable you to go faster and build stronger.
How can our readers follow you online?
Join the movement to learn and share the “How do yous” of Life @chiefdoingofficer on Instagram.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!