David Raubach: Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of the Cancer Project podcast. We are privileged to be joined by Mike Beckham, the founder and CEO of Simple Modern, one of the largest drinkware distributors in the country. I have an example of one of their mugs here with me with the Cancer Project logo on it. One of the neat things about Simple Modern is that they have a goal to give away 10% of profits each year, and some of those profits have gone to support patients going through cancer. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Mike Beckham: Yeah, thanks for having me. That’s actually our new release — it’s called the Mesa Loop. We’re just about to announce another bottle in that family, the Mesa Sport. I’m glad that you like it. We’re really proud of it. We spend a lot of time trying to think through what would be the ideal bottle, what all the features would be. It’s also one of the best parts of the job, that I get to be a part of creating things and bringing things into existence. This is usually a multi-year process, and you make millions of them. So it’s great when at the end of that process you’ve got a lot of people able to enjoy the product.

David Raubach: I think what’s neat about this particular bottle is there’s a lot of attention paid to specific details — the carrying handle, the locking mechanism, and the fact that the straw screws on versus clipping on.

Mike Beckham: Because we’ve all had that thing fall out of a silicone holder. It stays in place. And you can still drink out of it without having to tip it back. We’re really proud of it and very encouraged by the feedback we’re getting. There was a YouTube video that started going around last night and gotten some pretty good traction of somebody breaking down the product and why they think it’s great.

David Raubach: And the best part is you can customize it — Cancer Project logo right there. So, Mike, you have a really fascinating story and background. We’re actually both University of Oklahoma graduates. I believe you have a finance degree from OU. What year did you graduate?

Mike Beckham: I was 2006. And I actually took classes like Freedom in Rome and Freedom in Greece — even though I was a finance major — and I consider those some of the best education I got during my time at OU. So not as different from the history track as you might think.

David Raubach: I graduated in 2003. I have a history degree and an MBA, so I did both sides as well. Now, Simple Modern is one of the largest retailers on Amazon, with products at Target and Walmart and a lot of boutique stores. It’s been an incredible growth story, but you actually spent the first part of your career out of OU in ministry. Talk about why you chose to do that initially.

Mike Beckham: When I was in college, the spiritual aspect of my life became really important to me about halfway through. I became a Christian halfway through and that impacted the way I thought about how I wanted to use my career pretty dramatically. But even then, I would not have necessarily guessed that would lead to full-time ministry. Finance came very naturally to me — almost like another language I already knew. My wife was a year younger, also in the business college doing an accounting degree. We got married the weekend after I graduated, and she had one more year at OU. So there was this gap year that created an opportunity to be open to something atypical. Someone challenged me to consider a one-year internship in ministry, which involved raising my own salary — something I’d never done and was not particularly good at.

Mike Beckham: One year turned into two, which turned into really all of my 20s. I spent my entire 20s investing in college students at OU — a long stretch from 18 to almost 32 where I was on campus at least five days a week. Right around my 30th birthday I remember thinking I guess I was going to stay in ministry and not do anything in the business world. And it was right around that time that my brother approached me and wanted to start a company. I told him I’d help him nights and weekends. That started me down a path that eventually led to me being full-time in the business world and to Simple Modern.

Mike Beckham: The other part of that story that I think is interesting is we play this game where we think we’ve got to make the right decision at every big fork in the road. At 22, if you’d asked me what’s the best way to become an entrepreneur by 45, you would never have concluded that going into full-time ministry was the way to get there. But it turns out that was the ideal path for me. I hadn’t sold a single thing online at my 30th birthday — and I’m now regarded as a leader in the e-commerce space. That non-linear progression made me a more well-rounded person and a better leader.

David Raubach: When you say Simple Modern is an atypical company, what do you mean by that?

Mike Beckham: The simplest way to say it is that our mission statement is “we exist to give generously,” which seems counterintuitive for a for-profit company. The world doesn’t need another insulated water bottle company on its face. But if instead you say we want to build a company that leans into the idea that the more generous you are — with your customers, your team members, the community you’re planted in — that actually leads to a better business, an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset, that was the premise we started with. We’re just about to have our 10-year anniversary of incorporating, and the first 10 years have shown that the more we’ve leaned into generosity, the more abundance there has been to share.

David Raubach: Talk about the challenges of maintaining that culture and mindset as you’ve scaled. I think I read that of the first 15 employees you brought on, you knew 13 of them for a long time. As you now have hundreds of employees, what have been some of the challenges and how have you overcome them?

Mike Beckham: When you’re growing a company, it’s very easy for the company’s growth and the needs that growth produces to start making decisions for you. We had years where we grew over 100%. When you’re growing that fast it’s very tempting to feel like we just need to get bodies in here. But when you do that, you’re letting business needs drive the composition of the team more than the fit of the individual. One thing helpful about having a business where the goal is not exclusively to maximize profits is that there have been points where we grew slower than we probably could have because we didn’t feel like we knew the right person to put in a seat.

Mike Beckham: A really good example is our Amazon team. We’re probably in the top 10 to 20 Amazon sellers out of something like 15 million companies that have started on the marketplace. How did we do that? Only one person — my co-founder Brian — had any experience with Amazon before they came to the company. Every other person came from something with no e-commerce background. We have taught them, and they’ve been very effective running an Amazon business. One example: someone who had a PR background and had been a part of the St. Louis Ballet — deeply dedicated to excellence, but no e-commerce experience whatsoever. We thought, we can train this person. When you prioritize culture, it becomes easier as time goes on. When you don’t, it becomes harder and harder to change it.

Mike Beckham: One very straightforward example of protecting culture: we try never to grow the team by more than 20% in headcount over the base in any given year. If you have 20 people all on the same page and you go hire 25 new people in one year, those 25 could start to dictate the culture more than the original 20 because they’re the majority now. But if you bring in five new people, you can digest that. So we’ve been very intentional about how we grow while maintaining the kind of culture we want to have.

David Raubach: If we were to ask a frontline employee or someone new to the company how they would describe the culture, what would you hope they would say?

Mike Beckham: I think they would describe it as highly relational, highly mission-driven, and customer-focused — that they really enjoy coming to work. We’ve historically brought in meals for lunches. Our team members consistently say that’s one of their favorite parts about the company, because lunch is a time for people to connect with each other. Not really working lunches — more sitting down and hearing about what your family did over the weekend. The level of connectedness and trust that comes with that connectedness is probably the thing that’s been remarked on the most by people who come in.

Mike Beckham: I’m very proud of the company, but we’re not a perfect company because there aren’t perfect people. The thing that has made the company so distinctive is that we are really sincere and authentic in what we’re pursuing. One litmus test I use: when someone’s been at the company 30, 60, 90 days, I touch base with them and say, how has your experience inside the company compared with the expectation you had coming in? What I hear really consistently is it’s been better than I expected — or in some cases, a pretty accurate representation. I have not heard someone say it was worse.

David Raubach: You have a background in ministry, you became a Christian in college. Not everybody would believe the same things that you believe. How do you balance bringing spirituality or religion into the workplace while also being sensitive to how that might make someone feel who doesn’t believe the same way?

Mike Beckham: The things I am most convicted of and dedicated to are values that really transcend just being a Christian. They’re motivated by my faith, but the idea that generosity — that the world is simply better when we share — is an idea you don’t have to be religious to believe. I want to constantly communicate the larger values and ideas that I stand for that a lot of people aspire to regardless of their spiritual leanings. But I’m also saying we’re not for everybody. If you’re the type of person who thinks, “I want to go to work to earn the maximum amount and I don’t really care about the impact the company makes in the community,” you’re not going to be a good fit for our culture — and that’s okay.

Mike Beckham: The second thing is I just try to be very transparent so that people really understand what drives and motivates my decision-making. I’m not going to force anybody to be about values they’re not about. But the reasons why I am about the values I’m about, I’m going to be very clear with people, and they’re going to understand why I do and say the things that I do regardless of whether or not they agree with them. Authenticity is valued almost above anything else in our culture. People can deal with thinking differently than you if you’re respectful and you’re not telling them they have to change — and if they sense that it’s genuine.

Mike Beckham: I do a podcast with guys who would say they have very different spiritual beliefs than me, that I consider really good friends. It’s very possible to work really well with people who are in a different spiritual place than you. What I’ve learned over time is that it’s impossible to work really well with people whose deepest held values differ from yours — and that’s the distinction I really try to emphasize in the company and in my personal relationships.

David Raubach: How does Simple Modern decide where to allocate its charitable giving? There are literally tens of thousands of charities out there that all need money. How is Simple Modern deciding where to direct those profits?

Mike Beckham: There was a point early on where I thought if I could just be successful enough, I could give as much as I wanted to everything. And I realize now what a naïve idea that was — the needs of the world are almost infinite. When you get serious about philanthropy you have to realize there’s always going to be people struggling. So we picked five areas of focus: human trafficking, clean drinking water, education, homelessness, and marginalized communities. Within those five areas we’ve picked a few partners we think are doing an exceptional job, and we try to focus our giving that way. That’s allowed us to think more deeply about a few issues and develop real partnerships that make a difference over a series of years.

Mike Beckham: We also have to decide whether to focus internationally or locally. The longer we’ve done it, the more we’ve landed on focusing the majority of our funds locally, because this is the community we’re planted in and we feel a responsibility to it. And we take a portion of our giving budget, peel it off, and equally allocate it to every employee so they each get a chance to direct it to whatever they’re most passionate about — the only rule is don’t pick something controversial. That also gives our team a voice in where the company gives.

David Raubach: What led to the decision to specifically give product to cancer patients, and can you describe the details of what you did?

Mike Beckham: On the most basic level, I’m constantly challenging myself to think more radically about generosity. For whatever reason, I had an interaction with a cancer patient that really stuck with me — the realization of what people going through chemo are dealing with. It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. And I’d heard really moving stories about how our product had been someone’s companion through chemo, because when you’re going through it, you have to be drinking lots of fluids. One of the guys on our team went through Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a college student and shared that they were emphatic with him that when you use the toilet you have to flush twice because the chemicals are that caustic. These chemicals are in people’s bodies — they have to be drinking water.

Mike Beckham: So I had the thought of what would it look like to really radically lean in here. What we came to was: we are going to make 50,000 tumblers that we are going to give away for free to anyone going through chemo. There was really no question of whether it was a good business decision because that wasn’t the point. We went live at about 8:00 p.m. one night and they were gone by 8:30 — 50,000 claimed in about a 30-minute period. There were people who built scrapers to spin up 30 or 40 or 50 orders, and then they really understood what we were doing, came back, and wrote a support ticket saying they wanted to cancel all the duplicate orders because they didn’t want to be gaming something like this.

Mike Beckham: When you do something like that you don’t know exactly the impact it will make, but you trust that it is going to make an impact. We’ve gotten just countless notes from people where, when they were going through the most difficult time of their life, it made their life a little bit better. It made them a little bit less lonely to have a companion going through their journey with them. We gave away the equivalent of millions of dollars of product where the cost to us was probably more like a million dollars. And that’s a great example of using how we’re situated to make a positive impact without asking where the return is for us.

David Raubach: What was the employee feedback for that initiative?

Mike Beckham: I think everybody gets up, brushes their teeth, and starts thinking about their calendar and their commute and asks themselves, “Am I motivated to do this?” And at the end of the day, when your head hits the pillow, you wonder: was today worth living? Did I do anything that mattered? What we try to be really intentional about is creating a work environment where you can feel good that the world is a little bit better today because of what you did. We make drinkware — it’s in many ways a very mundane thing — but we’re trying to do it in the most impactful way possible. And it gives real pride and encouragement to the people on our team that the hours they’re investing aren’t just producing a return for a shareholder or just a paycheck, but are actually positively intersecting people’s lives.

David Raubach: 50,000 tumblers sent across the nation. Is this an initiative you think you might do again at some point?

Mike Beckham: We’re constantly looking at this kind of thing. What’s more typical for us is donations of 50, 500, or 300 units to causes that approach us. This year has been tougher — we’ve already paid probably in the ballpark of $10 million in tariffs we were not budgeting for at the beginning of the year, which reduces how much we have to give. But my attitude has always been that when we have the capacity and the ability, we want to lean in and be a leader in thinking radically about what a company can be. In the next 10 years, I want to get to the point where we could give $100 million away by 20 years out, and that’s really motivating.

David Raubach: What advice would you give to somebody that maybe is not quite in the same position as Simple Modern from a profitability standpoint but still wants to have that same mindset and culture of generosity?

Mike Beckham: The number one thing I’ve learned — and this comes from having personal earnings range from below five figures to eight figures — is that generosity is a mindset. It’s to share whatever you do have, and it is not about the nominal amount. It’s possible to give a large amount of money away and not be particularly generous. And it’s possible that being extremely generous doesn’t mean you have that much capacity to give. Instead of thinking about generosity with a lowercase G, which is just cutting checks, generosity really is a larger uppercase G — being open-handed with everything you have, including your time, your skills, and your abilities, for the benefit of other people. In different seasons of my life, that’s looked very different.

Mike Beckham: When I was in full-time ministry it was the willingness to buy somebody’s five-dollar lunch when I made almost no money. It looks a lot different today, as it should. But no matter where you are, there’s an opportunity for you to make a difference. I’d encourage you to do that in whatever way you can. You have the opportunity to be generous — I just can’t tell you exactly what that looks like. But I can tell you it will cost you something. It will by definition require some level of sacrifice. And that’s where the individual has to really say: where can I be sacrificial and make a difference in the lives of other people?

David Raubach: You’ve talked about having a personal goal of giving away almost all of your net worth over the course of your life. What do you tell your kids? Because if I’m a kid and my dad has a lot of money, I think, well, shouldn’t I get some of that?

Mike Beckham: The way I think about it first and foremost is that it’s a stewardship question. Money could easily be the undoing of my children or their children, and I don’t want that for them. It’s not a stinginess behind this — other people are more deserving than my own children — it’s more that I don’t want the money to have a negative influence in their lives. If you look at second and third generation wealth, it’s not pretty. A wealth adviser I sat with once, who had advised a lot of different people, said that if he had a really high net worth he’d give it all away. That said, the dependent variable is whether your children have the capacity to be good stewards. The only reason I would pass more money to my kids than I currently expect is if I thought they were going to be good stewards of it.

Mike Beckham: Since my kids were very young, I have been consistent in telling them: the reason why we have the resources we do is because I believe God has entrusted those to us to be generous with other people. With a high degree of confidence, if you asked my kids why their family has the resources it does, they would say some variation of that. They understand there’s a responsibility that comes with these resources and they’re really not primarily for us — they’re for us to make a positive impact in the lives of other people. My son, for example, will get stressed out about being able to pay for his rent — he’s definitely not the stereotypical kid who grows up in a wealthy family. Our dominant worldview is much more like the way my wife and I thought when we were in full-time ministry.

David Raubach: As we wrap up today, what are some of your goals for Simple Modern over the next five to ten years?

Mike Beckham: We right now are continuing to learn how to build a great multi-decade brand. My theory is that out of a hundred organizations, maybe 10 experience a really high level of success at some point. But out of those 10, only one maybe experiences really sustained high levels of success. It might be an order of magnitude more difficult to sustain excellence than to achieve it once. My hope is that I’m helping to build an organization that is not reliant on me. In the very long term I would love to build something where the idea and the ownership of the mission is bigger than me. Leadership is at the end of the day about casting vision and multiplying the number of people who own that vision.

Mike Beckham: One of the ways this will express itself ironically won’t be inside of Simple Modern — it will be people from the company who go on and start companies of their own. We want to be an exporter of healthy culture. We want people to have interactions with the company — as a customer, as a teammate, as a community partner — that impact the way they think and cause them to build different types of businesses, different types of families, different types of communities. And in doing that, we will have been faithful in making the world at least a little bit of a better place.

David Raubach: I really appreciate your time today, Mike. This has been personally inspirational for me as a business owner and as someone who has employees I want to inspire and lead. We really appreciate — as another member of this local community — your generosity to the local community and to the people of Oklahoma City and the state of Oklahoma. You guys have done just amazing work and we’re really privileged to have a company like Simple Modern here in Oklahoma City.

Mike Beckham: Thanks. We love being a part of the community. I grew up here and we’re very deeply rooted in it. In a lot of ways we think about part of our role as representing the Oklahoma community nationwide and internationally as we grow as a company — and we’re happy to do that.