The Key to Sustaining Success, According to This Female Founder

CBD can provide relief for stress, heart disease, and pain, among many other things, and CBD sales are nearly $5 billion in the U.S. alone. Still, people have questions about how to use it and why it works. That’s why for this episode of The CEO Series, I sat down with Coco Meers, the CEO and co-founder of Equilibria, a women-focused company specializing in CBD products, to get some answers about the products and her company’s role in the industry.

“We love to focus on women because CBD helps bring balance to the body,” Meers told me. “And name a woman who’s only balancing one thing? And our job is to demystify it for them and help them live better lives. That is why Equilibria exists.”

Watch the video above to hear her insights into the company’s mission and growth, and read below to get highlights of that conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

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Breaking down the business

“Equilibria is a 360-degree women’s wellness platform. We pair premium products with wellness goals like sleep, stress, balance, and mood. And more importantly, we are pairing them with a certified wellness coach who’s ensuring that they’re using those products appropriately. CBD is an unbelievably efficacious functional ingredient. Rather than being a Band-Aid solution for the body, it is actually addressing the root cause.”

Establishing company culture

“If there’s one thing we do, we help our members know that it is okay to not be okay. So as a CEO and co-founder, we have the privilege and the responsibility of creating a culture of support. We’ve set up great systems and processes for asynchronous, highly autonomous work to allow people to get to do work in their own way and on their own time. I’m really proud of that. Being a mother makes me a significantly better leader and founder. I am much more empathetic. I’m much more patient. I am not an effective leader when I am not connected with my children. When I’m home, I put my phone down and take meaningful tech breaks for bedtime, for family dinner. I am present with my children. And when I get that time, my batteries become full.”

CBD as a lifestyle

“We were early to introduce this notion that wellness isn’t just products. Wellness is lifestyle. Wellness is education. Wellness is understanding how these ingredients work in the body and why they’re important. It makes you feel empowered to make your own decisions about your wellness journey. As a wellness company, I take mission very, very seriously. That is what we do when we get up every single day. We are a data-driven, science-backed products company. We’re seeing more and more companies start to introduce services platforms like ours that are educating their members. We welcome that, it’s important to educate in this industry. Should you start with 10 milligrams or 100? Should you use a patch or take a soft gel or hold oil under your tongue? There are a tremendous amount of questions when it comes to how to adopt a functional ingredient into your wellness routine.”

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Advice for CEOs and founders

“Optimize more for the bottom line than for your top line. It’s not rocket science. Unit economics should be your driving thought in the morning, afternoon, and night. Can you acquire a customer for less than you make on them the first time? If not, are you certain that you will bring them back to generate profit? It is extremely difficult to acquire and retain customers in a delightful and sticky way, so it is okay to be in love with your model, but make sure that both your heart and your head are in line with each other and that the model that you’re in love with is one whose unit economics will work now and into the future.”

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Advice to her younger self

“I wish I knew when I was first starting out in business to ride the lows a little higher and the highs a little lower. Just when you think everything is going right and you’re experiencing that hockey stick and you’re up — watch out because something is around the corner. And just when you’re in the depths of despair and your whole team is crowded around a room in a war room brainstorming because something is horribly wrong, I promise you, you’ll have your very best idea. There are many things beyond our control. All we can do every single day is maintain culture, keep everybody aligned around one vision, one mission, and be very data-driven to make sure that our precious time and resources are moving the ball forward against that mission.”