Transcript generated from the episode’s audio. Speaker names are identified from the context of the conversation rather than from recorded speaker data, and automatic transcription may misspell names and terminology. Please refer to the video for the authoritative version.

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 drink wear 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. And we’re excited to talk with Mike today. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Mike Beckham: Yeah, thanks for having me. So, that’s actually our new release. It’s called the Mesa Loop. And we’re just about to announce another bottle that’s in that family, the Mesa Sport. And I’m glad that you like it. We’re really proud of it, spend a lot of time trying to think through like what would the ideal bottle, what would be all the features that it would have and it’s also one of the best parts of the job is that I get to be a part of creating things and bringing things into existence. So I’ve seen a lot of different evolutions to get to the point that that’s in your hand, and it’s one of the most interesting things about making products in the physical world is that cutting the tools, designing them, going through the iterations.

Mike Beckham: This is a usually multi-year process and you spend multiple years trying to get one that looks the way that you like it and you want it, and then you make millions of it. So, it’s great when at the end of that process, you’ve got a lot of people that are able to enjoy the product. And we think about this a lot with the way that we design things because we are a mass market company. When you make something just a little bit better, it is going to end up impacting millions of people’s lives and they drink out of their cup a bunch. And so it’s going to actually impact tens of millions, hundreds of millions of interactions that people have with a product throughout its lifetime.

David Raubach: And that’s pretty interesting. It feels pretty high leverage.

Mike Beckham: Well, I think what’s neat about this particular bottle is there’s a lot of attention paid to specific details. So, for example, having this little ring that comes up, so it’s easy to carry.

David Raubach: Yeah. The carrying handle, the locking mechanism. Something else that I really loved about it was the fact that the straw screws on versus clipping on. And so, it, cuz we’ve all had that thing fall out of like a silicon holder.

Mike Beckham: Yeah. Yeah. It stays in place.

David Raubach: I love the fact that you can, there’s not a straw sticking up, but because of the way this is designed, you can still drink out of it as if it was a straw. You can suck out of it without having to tip it back. So, lot of great details on this.

Mike Beckham: Well, thanks. We’re really proud of it. We’re excited about the feedback that we’re getting. When you bring something like that to market, you always have an idea of how you think it’s going to be received and how people are going to respond. But, we’ve been very very encouraged. In fact, there was a YouTube video that started going around last night that’s gotten some pretty good traction of somebody breaking down the product and why they think it’s a great product. So, we love it. We love when we hear that feedback from our customers that we get to serve that they love what we’re doing.

David Raubach: Well, and the best part is too you can customize it. So, Cancer Project logo.

Mike Beckham: Yep.

David Raubach: So, it’s great. 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 the University of Oklahoma. What year did you graduate?

Mike Beckham: So, I was 06.

David Raubach: Okay. And so, I was in 03, so pretty close the same time.

Mike Beckham: Okay. Yeah.

David Raubach: So, and I have a history degree, so we were on different parts of the campus, I guess.

Mike Beckham: But, well, but you know, I actually took, I guess this isn’t history, but I was, I’m fascinated with history. I love biographies. And so, I ended up taking Freedom in Rome and Freedom in Greece and then a couple letters capstones, even though I was a finance major, and actually consider that to be some of the best education I got during my time at OU.

David Raubach: So not as different as you might think from the finance. Well, and I have an MBA, so I did both sides as well, the finance and history, and both are very applicable. So I think one of the interesting elements of your career, because you look at what Simple Modern’s doing now, it’s one of the largest retailers on Amazon, your products are distributed at Target, Walmart, also a lot of boutique stores as well. So, it’s been an incredible growth story, but you actually spent the first part of your career out of OU in ministry. So talk a little bit about why you chose to do that initially.

Mike Beckham: So, when I was in college, I would say that the spiritual aspect of my life became really important to me about halfway through. I had two pretty different halves of college, became a Christian halfway through college and that impacted the way that I thought about how I wanted to use my career pretty dramatically. But even then, I would not have necessarily guessed that that would have led to me being in full-time ministry. When I started taking finance classes, it really fit. It was, I’d always done pretty well in school and I’d standardized tested really well, but finance came more naturally.

Mike Beckham: It was almost like another language that I already knew when I started going through the classes. And I just assumed that the role that I had to play with my life and my career was to be successful in the business world and to use that to hopefully make a positive impact, to give, to create jobs, these kind of things. And while I was in college, I met my wife. She was a year younger than me. She was also in the business college, she was doing an accounting degree and also getting her masters, and we got engaged and we got married actually the weekend after I graduated and she was going to be at OU for one more year.

Mike Beckham: So, there was this kind of interesting gap year for me where my wife was still going to be taking classes and it created this opportunity for me to be open to maybe something atypical. And so someone challenged me, hey, you should think about a one-year internship in this ministry opportunity. It involved raising my salary, which I’d never done, and I know this is something that you’re a part of. So, I had no fundraising background whatsoever, and I wouldn’t actually describe myself as particularly great at fundraising. Like I don’t, I’m not good at asking for money. I don’t like asking for money, which is interesting because I think I’m a pretty persuasive person, but I just typically haven’t, you know, like I didn’t have a background doing that. I didn’t particularly like doing that.

Mike Beckham: So, I said yes to this, opportunity thinking I’d do one year of it and, raised my salary, which was not easy for me. And so my wife finished her degree and at the end of a year I kind of, to my surprise, I really recognized that I had loved that first year and I probably wasn’t done yet. So one year turned into two which turned into really all of my 20s and I spent my entire 20s investing in college students, meeting with college students at OU. So I had a long stretch from 18 to almost 32 where I think I was on OU’s campus at least five days a week, so a huge part of my life.

Mike Beckham: And right around my 30th birthday, I remember thinking, I guess I’m going to do ministry and I’m not going to do anything in the business world because there’s a certain point we get far enough out from your degree where you just become skeptical that, you know, anybody would even want to hire you with your experience or lack of job experience. And it was right around that time that my brother approached me and wanted to start a company. And I told him I would help him kind of nights and weekends. And that started me down a path that eventually led to me being full-time in the business world and an entrepreneur and Simple Modern and everything else.

Mike Beckham: But my early career was actually learning about pouring into other people, making a difference in the lives of other people through giving my time and that I think it pretty profoundly has shaped me, shaped the way that I think about running a company and culture and making an impact. The other part of this story that I think is interesting and relevant is we really do start to play this game where we think, well, I’ve got to make the right decision on this big fork in the road moment because if I don’t, then, you know, it’s going to kind of domino out into me not being where I want to be.

Mike Beckham: And I really think that what I’ve learned through my life experience is that that’s not as true as I once thought it was. If you had, at 22, if you had said, “Hey, Mike, you know, at 45, you want to be an entrepreneur. You’ll be running a company. What’s the best way to do that?” You would have never come to the conclusion that going into full-time ministry would have been the way to get there, right? But it turns out that that’s been the ideal path for me, at least, to get there.

Mike Beckham: And I talk to college students all the time and one of the things that I tell them is I’m kind of regarded, I think, at this point as a leader in the e-commerce space. I’ve been a part of selling about as much stuff online as almost anybody. And what’s interesting is I hadn’t sold a single thing online at my 30th birthday.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Mike Beckham: So this idea that you have to have it figured out, or if you know, if you’re want to get somewhere you’ve got to be on this linear progression on that path, that’s actually not been the case in my career and I’m really grateful for that. I think it’s made me a more well-rounded person and a better leader, that I did have some time where I wasn’t just learning business skills or learning how to work in the business world but I was thinking about larger things. I was learning how to mentor people. I was learning about culture and mission and vision and these kind of things. And that’s one of the reasons why Simple Modern looks like a pretty atypical company.

David Raubach: When you say atypical, Mike, what do you mean by that?

Mike Beckham: Well, the simplest way to say it is that the mission statement of the company is we exist to give generously, which seems kind of like counterintuitive, you know, like we’re a for-profit company, so how can a for-profit company be like really obsessed and thinking about generosity? But we, what we think about, I mean, there’s so many companies that sell drinkware or consumer products in the world and it’s like why does the world need another company that makes insulated water bottles, and the answer is, on its face, it doesn’t.

Mike Beckham: But if instead you say, “We want to build a company that is all about leaning into the idea that the more generous you are with your customers, with the team members that work with you, with the community that you’re planted in, that that actually is going to lead to a better business. And it’s not going to be a scarcity mindset. It’s going to be an abundance mindset that there’s actually going to be more to go around and that this could be a really good thing.” That was kind of the premise that we started the company with.

Mike Beckham: I don’t know that we knew it was true. It was just, hey, what if we did, what if we did build a company where we just said the more successful we are, the more we try and lean into generosity and where does this go? And we’re just about to have our 10-year anniversary of incorporating the company. That actually happens, I think, 10 days from now.

David Raubach: That’s great.

Mike Beckham: And I think the first 10 years have said actually that the more we’ve leaned into generosity, the more abundance there has been to share with the community and with our customers, with our, with the people that work on our team. And that’s been really encouraging. So the other thing that I think is probably a little bit atypical for the business world is that you’ve got this very aspirational idea of being about generosity.

Mike Beckham: And then we also have a really clear understanding that in order to be effective at that we just have to be excellent at our jobs. We have to execute at a very high level, the drinkware market for example is extremely competitive and what we’re really trying to do is be this intersection between real drive, ambition, excellence and generosity, heart for others. And I just think typically you don’t see that combination. You don’t see people try to optimize for both of those things. And that’s what we’ve tried to do with the company.

David Raubach: Do you talk to me a little bit about the challenges of maintaining that culture and that mindset as you’ve scaled? I think I read that of the first 15 employees that you brought on, you knew 13 of them or had known 13 of them for a long time. And obviously as you grow and get bigger you’re not able to continue to do that. So what have been some of the challenges and how have you overcome some of those challenges to maintain this mindset that you talk about as you now have hundreds of employees?

Mike Beckham: Yeah, when you’re growing a company, it is very easy for the company’s growth and the needs that that growth produces to start to make decisions for you and to start to kind of take the steering wheel and drive the car itself. And I think having really strong culture and the type of culture that we wanted to have certainly meant that from the beginning we had to have a clear view of what we were aiming for and we had to be willing to run the company in a way where we were going to get that type of culture. So really practically we had years where we grew over 100%. And when you’re growing over 100% it is just very tempting to feel like we just need to get bodies in here, we need to, you know, nobody is doing X or Y and that needs to get done and the business demands it and so who’s the best person we can get in the next two weeks that could fill this role.

Mike Beckham: And unfortunately, when you do that, what you’re doing is letting the business needs and the skill sets that you’re trying to get in the organization drive the composition of the team more than the fit of the individual. So, one thing that’s helpful about having a business where the goal is not necessarily to maximize profits, or it’s not exclusively to maximize profits at the very least, 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. Or there have been other times where instead of hiring someone with more relevant job experience that might have been less of a cultural fit, we hired someone that we felt like had a lot of runway but did not have a lot of experience in the particular thing that we were hiring them for.

Mike Beckham: A really good example of this is our Amazon team. We’re one of the biggest Amazon sellers in the world. Actually, we’ve run some numbers and if you look at the Amazon marketplace, there’s something like 15 million companies that have started selling on the Amazon marketplace. And I think based on where we’re at today as a company, we’re probably in the top 10 to 20.

David Raubach: Wow.

Mike Beckham: In terms of how big we’ve gotten while starting on the marketplace. So, we’re definitely an outlier. How have we done that? Well, obviously like that’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of focusing on that channel, but one of the more interesting things, if you looked at the composition of our team that runs our Amazon business today, only one, my co-founder Brian, had any experience with Amazon before they came to the company, every other person came from something where they really had no experience with Amazon or e-commerce and we have taught them and then they’ve been able to obviously be very effective and successful running an Amazon business within Simple Modern.

Mike Beckham: So like, one example, there was somebody who had a PR background but we also saw that she had been a part of the St. Louis Ballet. So, this is somebody who is really dedicated to excellence and has shown that in her past, but really had no experience whatsoever with e-commerce, and we thought, well, we can train this person how to do it.

Mike Beckham: So, I think that when you prioritize culture, it becomes easier as time goes on. And when you don’t prioritize culture, it becomes harder and harder to change it as time goes on. We’ve already referenced my time in the ministry world, but this would be a good example. I really had a clear picture of the type of organization that I wanted to build when we started Simple Modern. And I don’t know that if I knew it was totally possible, but I at least had a vision of where I wanted to aim. And so, we’ve been really intentional in pursuing that vision as the company’s grown. And we viewed maintaining the culture as even more important than how much we make in a given year or how fast we’re growing.

Mike Beckham: One other example of this that’s really straightforward and simple. We have tried to never grow the team by more than a certain percent each year. Okay? So we kind of view it as do you have a base that really is integrated, understands the culture, is part of the team, and we don’t want to hire, we don’t want to grow by more than 20% of headcount over that base, because if you, like, just as an example, let’s say you have a culture and you have 20 people and you feel like everybody’s on the same page, but then you go out and you hire 25 new people in one year, you can see how the 25 new people could start to dictate the culture even more than the 20 because they’re the majority now.

Mike Beckham: But if you bring in five new people, it’s like, hey, we can digest that. And even if we have some divergent views that come up with the new people that we bring into the organization, this is something we can handle and we can align and we can kind of digest. So we’ve been very intentional across a number of different vectors with how do we grow while still maintaining the kind of culture that we want to have.

David Raubach: What if we were to ask a frontline employee or somebody that was new to the company how they would describe the culture, what would you hope that they would say?

Mike Beckham: I think they would describe it as highly relational, highly mission-driven, customer focused, that they really enjoy coming to work. I mean, one simple example of this is that we’ve historically brought in meals for lunches and our team members consistently say this is one of their favorite parts about the company. But the reason for that is because lunch is really an awesome time for people to connect with each other. It’s not really working lunches. It’s more sitting down and hearing about what your family did over the weekend and people love that.

Mike Beckham: So, I think the level of connectedness and the level of trust that comes with that connectedness is probably the thing that I’ve had remarked on the most. People will come in and say, “I just haven’t seen this level of trust on a team very often.” And so, I think that that’s part of the reason why we’ve been able to have the results that we’ve had. And that’s not to say, I’m very quick to remind people, everything I’m saying sounds great and I do think it’s great. I am very proud of the company, but we’re not a perfect company because there aren’t perfect people.

Mike Beckham: And so often we in some way fall short of what we’re striving for. I think that the thing that has made the company so distinctive is that we are really sincere and authentic in what we’re pursuing. So even if we’re imperfect people pursuing it imperfectly, we’re really clear on what we’re running after and we’re really aligned on that and that makes quite a bit of difference.

David Raubach: How have you balanced, you know, you have a background in ministry, you became a Christian in college, not everybody necessarily 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 somebody feel that doesn’t believe the same way?

Mike Beckham: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I’ve learned over the years of like how do you work with a broad spectrum of people that have a variety of different views spiritually? How do you organize and lead people like that? And I think that there’s two things I’d say. One is that the things that I am the most convicted of and dedicated to are values that really transcend, I would say, just being a Christian. They are, now they’re motivated by my faith, but like the idea of generosity, that the world is simply better when we share, that it expands the future for everyone. Like that is an idea that you don’t have to be religious, you don’t have to be a Christian to believe that idea. Now not everybody believes that idea to be clear.

Mike Beckham: So what I want to do is I want to constantly communicate the larger values and ideas that I stand for, that I know a lot of people stand for and a lot of people aspire to, regardless of their spiritual leanings. But also, at the same time, saying we’re not for everybody, and I get that. I’m not for everybody, the company’s not for everybody. And if, for example, if you’re the type of person that thinks, I want to go to work to earn the maximum amount that I can, I don’t really care about the impact that the company makes in the community or giving that the company might do, I’d much rather the company just maximize my salary, you’re not going to be a good fit for our culture. And that’s okay, you know.

Mike Beckham: And so I think it’s more about, the other thing I’ll say here is that I just try to be very transparent that people really understand what drives and motivates my decision-making. So I’m not going to force anybody to be about values that they’re not about. That’s the first idea. The second idea is the reasons why I am about the values I’m about. I’m gonna be very transparent and clear with people about, 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. And I think that that’s authenticity in our culture is probably what is valued almost above anything else.

Mike Beckham: That people can deal with the fact that they think differently than you, if you’re respectful and if you’re not telling them, hey, you got to change, you got to do this, you got to do that, and if they sense that it’s authentic, that you really are, like hypocrisy would kind of be the opposite of that. You say you’re about some things and then people are like, “Yeah, but that doesn’t really hold up when you get behind closed doors.”

Mike Beckham: So, one of the litmus tests that I use for this within the company is when people come in for their first day, I will sit down and I will walk through our company mission, vision, values with them. And I always mention at the end that I’m very proud of the company, but I don’t want the company’s appearance to ever outstrip the reality on the ground. I don’t ever want it to seem better from the outside than it does when you’re on the inside working in the company.

Mike Beckham: And one of the ways that I try and keep a pulse on that is when somebody’s been at the company 30, 60, 90 days is just touching base with them and saying, “Hey, how has your experience inside the company compared with the expectation that you had coming in?” And what I have heard really consistently is actually it’s been better than I expected, or in some cases, you know what, it’s been a pretty accurate representation of what I expected and what was sold to me. And that’s great.

Mike Beckham: I have not heard somebody say, well, you know, really you kind of made it sound like this, but it’s not been that great. It’s been, you know, worse than that. And so this is where I think authenticity and transparency is really important. It’s, I don’t try to claim to be anything that I’m not. And I try to help people understand the way that I make decisions because I think it’s pretty indicative of how I’m going to live my life and how I’m going to make decisions as a CEO and as a leader going forward.

Mike Beckham: And then when you find people that are value aligned, you realize that like hey, you don’t actually have to spiritually agree with me for us to work on projects together, for us to be about these causes. So, I’ve got friends, for example, in the e-commerce space that I would say are all over the spiritual spectrum. In fact, I do a podcast with guys that would say they have very different spiritual beliefs than me, that I consider really good friends.

Mike Beckham: And so, it’s very possible, I think, to work really well with people that are in a different place than you spiritually. I think it’s impossible to work really well with people that the deepest held values that they have differ from yours. And so, like, there are, I think that’s the distinction that I’ve learned over time and that I really try to emphasize in the company and in my personal relationships.

David Raubach: Yeah, I like that. So it’s really, you mentioned generosity as an example. It’s really you don’t necessarily have to believe in generosity within the confines of what the Bible says about it specifically. But we’re not going to equivocate on being generous as people and as a company.

Mike Beckham: The application, and a good example of how this plays out. We had a question early on in the company. I mean, my wife have done, I would say, a significant portion of our personal giving has gone to explicitly Christian mission type things. And obviously, if you’re not a Christian, like you’re not going to be super excited about that idea. So, we, and with the early group that worked at the company, there are a lot of Christians. So there was this question of should we, the company giving, we’d give 10% of profits away every year. It’s over $10 million at this point that we’ve given away.

Mike Beckham: So the question was, hey, should we actually give to, you know, like explicitly, like Christian mission type things inside of the company. And the decision I made was no, I don’t think we should, obviously not because I think those things are bad or unworthy of giving, but because the company giving, I think, represents all the people that work at the company and it represents all the customers. And that’s not necessarily going to be the perspective of everybody that we serve.

Mike Beckham: And so we’re not opposed to organizations that are built on Christian principles that are doing fantastic nonprofit work. I think Water4 would be a really good example of this, great work in providing clean drinking water with a unique model, the founder of Charity: Water told me it’s one of the coolest models he’s seen of people approaching water insecurity, and they for sure have a Christian worldview that’s backing the way that they are thinking about doing the work, but they’re mostly, primarily, about bringing clean drinking water to people. And so we feel great about partnering with them at a company level.

Mike Beckham: There’s other causes where it’s like, hey, you know what, if I’m going to partner with that, I’m going to do it individually and personally outside of the company. Another thing that we do that I think is very appreciated by the employees and team members is that we take our giving budget, we peel off a portion of it, and we equally allocate it to every employee, and they get a chance to allocate that to whatever they’re most passionate about.

Mike Beckham: And really the only thing we ask is that you wouldn’t pick something controversial. You wouldn’t pick something that, if someone, you know, a customer saw the whole list, that they would be like, “Wow, why are you giving to that?” And so that also gives us an opportunity, I think, to express the desires of our team members and what we give to, in addition to the fact that they speak into the organizations we give to and how much.

David Raubach: So, how do you assess who you do give money to? I mean, there’s literally tens of thousands of charities out there that, and they, to a certain extent, all need money. How are, how is Simple Modern deciding where to allocate their profits?

Mike Beckham: Well, there’s, there was a point early on where I thought, man, you know, if I could just be successful enough in business, like I could just give as much as I want to all the things I want to give to. And I realize now what a naive idea that was, that the world is very big and the needs of the world are almost infinite in nature. And so, like, you do have to grapple with that.

Mike Beckham: I think when you get really serious about giving in philanthropy you have to realize there’s always going to be needy, there’s always going to be poor. There’s always going to be downtrodden. And unfortunately that’s a feature, not a bug, of the way that the world works.

Mike Beckham: Now I’d like to say also that I think capitalism and other forces have made the world a ton better over the last, you know, few centuries, and especially over the last couple hundred years, like if you look at almost any vector, whether it’s child mortality or reading or education or, like, slavery, like there’s just so many things that you see positive movement, but there’s still a lot of people that are struggling, that are hurting, that are dealing with hard things, because that, I don’t think that that ever fully goes away.

Mike Beckham: So, you do have to really start to prioritize and focus, is the short answer. That for us what we did is we picked five areas of focus and we said, and within these five areas, there were so many good people doing good things and we’re thankful for that, and the, often those good things are going to fall outside of our area and we think, we’re, you know, we think what they’re doing is great, we’re going to have to say we’re not going to give monetarily, like financially, to that cause.

Mike Beckham: What we will do in those cases is we’ll use product as much as we can, as liberally as we can, and then we’re going to pick these five areas, and we’re going to pick a few partners in those five areas that we think are doing a really exceptional job, and we’re going to try and focus our giving in that way. And I think that that’s been successful for us because it’s allowed us to think more deeply about a few issues, like human trafficking is one of our issues.

Mike Beckham: Clean drinking water is one of our issues. Education, homelessness, you know, there are marginalized communities, like there are these buckets that have been very helpful and we’ve developed partnerships with some really, I would say, fantastic leaders and nonprofits and over a series of years we’re working with them to make a real difference.

Mike Beckham: The other principle that you learn is like the world is really big and you just, not only do you have to focus on causes but you’ve got to focus on areas, and do you focus internationally because there’s less resources internationally, or do you focus locally because you have a responsibility to your neighbor? And we do some of both, but the longer that we’ve done it, the more that we’ve had the perspective of, hey, it would be good to focus the majority of our funds locally because this is the community that we’re planted in and we feel a responsibility to it.

Mike Beckham: So, that’s helped us to not go insane. But the reality is I have to say no a lot. And when you lead with generosity and with the heart that we have, like everyone is going to ask. And I think that’s good, you know, everybody should ask. I’ve been in fundraising. You’re in fundraising. Like, you know, if people aren’t asking, then they’re not really doing their job, so unfortunately, that means that for everyone, yes, I give out, like, I have to give out 99 nos, but, we’ve been really excited about the way that I mentioned that we’ve been able to use product also, in many cases.

Mike Beckham: And I know you wanted to ask about our involvement with cancer in particular, and that would be a good example of us using product as opposed to a financial partnership to try and make some kind of an impact.

David Raubach: So what did lead to that decision specifically, to, and maybe describe the details behind what you did? I know there was a giveaway to cancer patients of product, what led up to that decision and why make that decision? Why specifically cancer patients?

Mike Beckham: You know, I think that on the most basic level, I’m constantly challenging myself to say like, how could you think more radically about generosity within the company? And for whatever reason, I had an interaction with a cancer patient that really stuck with me and realized, man, you talk about people that are going through just a very trying, difficult time. I mean, going through chemo, being diagnosed with cancer, it is a little bit like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head and, what is the future going to look like?

Mike Beckham: And you’re going to have to go through this incredibly taxing process, and I’ve heard quite a few really moving stories about how our product has been someone’s companion through chemo because as you know, when you’re going through chemo, you were having to use really harsh chemicals and it’s just very important to be drinking lots of fluids.

Mike Beckham: One of the guys on our team went through Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was a college student and one of the stories he’s told me is that they were really emphatic with him that like when you use the toilet you have to flush twice because the chemicals are that caustic that you know you just have to make sure you’re flushing it all down the pipes, and this is in people’s bodies. They have to be drinking water. And fortunately our product is helping some people during this really difficult period.

Mike Beckham: So, I had the thought of like, well, what would it look like to really radically lean in here? And what we came to was we are going to make 50,000 tumblers that we are going to give away for free to anyone that is going through chemo, and there was really no question of like, hey, is this a good business decision? Because that’s not the point. That wasn’t the goal.

Mike Beckham: And we went live with it, I think probably at like 8:00 p.m., one night and they were gone by 8:30. So we had 50,000 claimed in about a 30 minute period, and it was interesting, you know, because there were some people that really tried to take advantage of the system and built scrapers where they could, you know, spin up 30 or 40 or 50 orders.

Mike Beckham: And then they really understood what we were doing and came back and wrote a support ticket and said, “Hey, I want you to cancel all these orders. Like I was kind of just trying to game the system, but then I realized what you’re doing and I don’t want to be gaming something like this.” And so when you do something like that, you don’t know exactly the impact that it’s going to make, but you trust that it is going to make an impact.

Mike Beckham: And certainly 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, you know, that was going through their journey with them, and we were really excited to do it and it’s probably an example of how we were able to give away the equivalent of, I don’t know, millions of dollars worth of product where the cost to us was probably more like a million dollars.

Mike Beckham: And that’s great, you know, like that’s a great example of using how we’re situated to try and make a positive impact in people’s lives and not saying like, hey, where’s the return in it for us, but just saying like, hey, did we make a positive impact on the world and on some people’s lives? And I think that the answer was yes.

David Raubach: What was the employee feedback for that initiative? I would imagine, you know, cancer is one of those things that impacts everyone, whether it’s a family member or a friend or them personally. Did you start to maybe hear some stories from employees where they talked about an experience that they had had that impacted you?

Mike Beckham: Yeah. I mean, I think that ultimately everybody gets up and you’re showering, you’re brushing your teeth, and you’re like, “What am I going to do today?” And you start walking through like your calendar, and it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to commute in. I’m going to the office. What are the things I have to do?” And it’s like, “Am I motivated to do that?” Other than the fact that I know I need to, I need, you know, I need to put food on the table. I need to get a paycheck. It’s like, am I motivated?

Mike Beckham: And it’s the same thing at the end of the day. It’s like you’re laying down, your head’s on the pillow, you’re about to go to bed, and it’s like, was today worth living? Did I do anything that mattered today? And I think that the thing that we really try and be intentional and deliberate about is creating a work environment where you can feel good, that the world’s a little bit better today because of what you did.

Mike Beckham: And we’re not trying to make it out that, you know, what we’re doing is more important than it is. We make drinkware and that’s, you know, it’s just a very, in many ways, normal, mundane thing to do, but we’re just trying to do it in the most impactful way possible. And I think it gives a great deal of pride and encouragement to the people that work on our team that they know that the hours that they’re investing and the time they’re investing isn’t just producing a return for some shareholder and it isn’t just producing a paycheck, but it is actually positively intersecting people’s lives.

David Raubach: So 50,000 mugs, that would have been, that this was across the country then?

Mike Beckham: Yeah. That’s nationwide. Yeah.

David Raubach: That’s amazing. So, is this an initiative that you think you might do again at some point?

Mike Beckham: You know, we’re constantly looking at this kind of stuff. What is more typical is us doing donations. We donate 50 units, 500 units, 300 units to causes that approach us, hey, we’re doing a banquet for our company and you know, is there a way that we could use cups as a fundraiser? And we try and structure all kinds of, you know, unique ways to provide value to nonprofits.

Mike Beckham: And so I think that’s kind of more the principle, is like how can we, as much as we are able, with how we’re situated, how can we help nonprofits in their mission, and we also, I think, it just depends on the nature of the business. Like this year was like a tougher year, that we definitely, we have already paid probably in the ballpark of $10 million in tariffs that we were obviously not budgeting for at the beginning of the year, and that’s, you know, reduces how much we have to give. It’s reduced our capacity.

Mike Beckham: But my attitude has always been that, you know, when we have the capacity and we have the ability, we want to lean in and we want to be a leader in thinking radically and thinking, and maybe pushing out on the boundaries of what a company can be. And so we’ll see. I mean, we’ve definitely done a lot of things that if you told me 10 years ago we would have been able to do, I would have been shocked.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Mike Beckham: And that’s my hope. I mean, when I think about the next 10 years, I think I kind of set out goals that are challenges for me personally of how do we get to the point where we could give $100 million away. Yeah, by 20 years out, and how many lives do we have the opportunity to impact, and that’s really motivating.

David Raubach: So, you mentioned that it’s been a little bit challenging with the implementation of some of the tariff policies this year. Talk a little bit about, and I’m sure there’s been some, you know, if you’ve had a business for 10 years, there’s been great years and there’s been more challenging years. Certainly, not every company has been as successful as Simple Modern has been over the last decade.

David Raubach: Or maybe a company’s just starting off and they want to have the same philosophy that you do of generosity, but maybe they’re trying to balance that with, well, we also just have to exist. We just have to, we just have to pay the bills. How do you balance the two? Maybe what have you learned over the last 10 years that would, or what advice would you give to somebody that maybe is not quite in the same position that you guys are from a profitability standpoint but still wants to have that same mindset and that same culture.

Mike Beckham: So the number one thing that I have learned, and this comes from the fact that there have been years where, you know, my personal earnings were below five figures, and where they’ve been, you know, in the eight figures, what I have learned is that generosity is a mindset, to share whatever you do have, and that it is not about the nominal amount. It is possible to give a quote unquote 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.

Mike Beckham: So one of the ways that this looks for me is I think about all the different areas of my life, my time, my skills, my abilities, and obviously my money. Yeah, it’s not just money that defines generosity. It’s a lot more than that. It’s what you’re doing with all the different things you’ve been entrusted with. And am I being generous across all these different vectors? And there have been times where I had a lot more ability to be generous with my time or my speaking than I did with my finances.

Mike Beckham: And then there have been other periods, the last couple years have felt like this, where I had more ability to be generous with my finances than I did with my time. So I think the first kind of thing that I’ve learned is that instead of thinking about generosity with a lowercase G, which is just cutting checks, that generosity really is a larger uppercase G, which is being open-handed with everything that I have for the benefit of other people.

Mike Beckham: And in different seasons of my life, that’s going to look different. But also for our team at Simple Modern, the ability of somebody in customer support, for example, to be generous is going to look different than me. And that might look different than our head of product development, but we challenge everybody in the company. What would it look like for you to be a leader in generosity right now where you’re situated today? And that would be the encouragement and the challenge that I would give to anybody that is hearing my words today.

Mike Beckham: You have the opportunity to be generous. And I can’t tell you what that looks like. I can tell you that it will cost you something, that it will, by definition, require some level of sacrifice. But I think this is where the individual has to really kind of say, where can I be sacrificial? Where can I make a difference in the lives of other people, through being open-handed with what I have and then a willingness to do that.

Mike Beckham: And so, when I was in full-time ministry, it was the willingness to buy somebody’s $5 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, and I’d encourage you to, I’d encourage you to do that in whatever way that you can.

David Raubach: Well, you’ve talked about having a personal goal of giving away almost all of your net worth over the course of your life. What, one of the things that I’ve, because there’s other people that have made that pledge, and one of the first things I think about is what do you tell your kids? Because if I’m a kid and my dad has a lot of money, then I think, well, shouldn’t I get some of that? So talk a little bit about how you think about that conversation.

Mike Beckham: So the way that I think about it first and foremost is that it’s a stewardship question of how am I going to use the resources that I have and that, especially when it comes to kids, that money could easily be the undoing of them or their children, and I don’t want that for them. And so there’s not a stinginess behind this of like, oh, people out there are more deserving than my own children. It’s more of this: number one, I don’t want the money to have a negative influence in their life.

Mike Beckham: And if you look at second and third generation wealth, it’s not pretty. Like there’s not a great track record. I sat with a wealth adviser once who had advised a lot of different people and I asked the simple question, based on all of the conversations you’ve had, if you had a really high net worth, what would you do when it came to your estate planning?

David Raubach: Mh.

Mike Beckham: And they said, I’d give it all away.

David Raubach: Wow.

Mike Beckham: Now I have talked to other people, families that I really respect that have taken different approaches. I think that the dependent variable here is, if you’re going to pass down money, do your children have the capacity to be good stewards or not, is it likely to be something that’s stewarded well and is helpful, or is it likely to be unhelpful? And you have to use your judgment there.

Mike Beckham: So there’s a possibility that I pass more money to my kids than I expect, but the only reason I would do that is if I thought that they were going to be good stewards of it. And that kind of goes to the second piece of it, which is I’ve tried, since my kids were very, very young, I have been consistent in telling them the reason why we have the resources that we do is because I believe God has entrusted those to us to be generous with other people.

Mike Beckham: And I think that with a high degree of confidence, if you ask my kids like, “Why does your family have so much money?” They would say some variation of that. And so they understand the family’s perspective that there’s a responsibility that comes with these resources and they’re really not primarily for us. They’re really for us to make a positive impact in the lives of other people. And I think that that has helped the way that they think about money.

Mike Beckham: It’s really actually kind of funny with my son, you know, he’ll get stressed out sometimes about like, he’ll be like, “Well, I just need to figure out how I’m gonna be able to pay for my rent and stuff,” you know, and it’s like he is definitely not the probably stereotypical kid who grows up in a wealthy family. And I think in a lot of ways for us, what’s been helpful is we just don’t think of ourselves that way. We don’t think of ourselves as being like rich or wealthy, we really think about ourselves the way that my wife and I do, the way that we did when we were in full-time ministry, and that’s kind of like our dominant worldview, because we just don’t think our resources are the most important thing about us, you know, a really basic level, money comes into your life and then it leaves.

David Raubach: 100% chance.

Mike Beckham: 100%. So really the only question is how will it leave your possession and how will you steward it while you have it. That’s it. That’s what ends up defining your relationship with money, because you can’t hold on to it. You can’t take it with you.

Mike Beckham: And so I try to be really open-handed with it and say, like, while it’s here and while I have stewardship of it, I’m going to try and do the best job that I possibly can. I’m going to try and mirror that to my kids and I’m going to try and make the best decision possible about how much money is entrusted to them and whatever. But our family as a whole is not going to take an attitude of this money’s got to be preserved for generations and held on to tightly, and we’re going to take the opposite, like this is here for us to make a positive impact in the lives of other people, and we’re going to lean into that.

David Raubach: That’s an amazing message, an amazing message for the kids. And I think, you know, it’s something that you can really appreciate. Like you talked about being in ministry, and I did one year with Athletes in Action, which is part of, yeah, part of Cru, and so I had to go through the process of asking people to fund, well, it was a summer, and so I think when you go through that process and then you become grateful for the generosity of others sustaining you at that point, and, of course, you did it for 10 years, and I can see how you’ve taken that and applied it to your family and to your company.

David Raubach: What, as we wrap up here today, what are some of your goals for Simple Modern over the next five or 10 years? You said that you want to, one of them you mentioned which was be able to hit that hundred million donation threshold. Maybe what are some of the one or two other goals that you have for the company?

Mike Beckham: Yeah, I think that we right now are continuing to learn how do you build a great multi-decade brand and I was actually talking with someone in the Thunder organization about this, my friend Will Searing, yesterday. My theory is that out of a hundred organizations, maybe 10 out of the hundred experience a really high level of success at some point, but out of the 10 that experience a really high level of success, only one out of those 10 maybe experiences really sustained high levels of success, that in general it’s very difficult for organizations to have high achievement, high success, and it’s even more difficult, it might even be an order of magnitude more difficult, to sustain excellence.

Mike Beckham: And that would be my hope, is that I’m helping to build an organization that is not reliant on me. It’s just an organization. I mean, I think that in the very long term, whether you’re talking like a decade or two decades down the line, I would love to build something where the idea and the ownership of the mission is bigger than me. Like, I’m happy to be the spokesperson. I certainly don’t feel like I want to go sit on a beach anywhere. Like, I think I’m in my mid-40s and I think I could go at least two or three more decades, but with that said, I do think leadership is at the end of the day, it’s about casting vision and multiplying the number of people that own that vision.

Mike Beckham: And so I would love the next 10 years of Simple Modern to really feel like that, that there’s just a large group of people. And I think one of the ways this will express itself, ironically, won’t be inside of Simple Modern. It will be people from the company that have worked at the company for a year or two or been influenced by the company that go on and start companies.

Mike Beckham: And like I think about it sometimes, like we want to be an exporter of healthy culture. We want people to have interactions with the company, whether that’s as a customer, as a teammate, as a community partner, whatever, as another person in the business world that just respects what we’re doing, that impacts the way that people think, influences the way that they think, and causes them to build different types of businesses, different types of families, different types of churches, different types of communities, and that in doing that, we will have been faithful in making the world just at least a little bit of a better place.

David Raubach: Well, that’s great. And I really appreciate your time today, Mike. This has been personally inspirational for me as a business owner and someone who has employees that I want to inspire and lead, but then I also know that it’ll be very encouraging to the audience as a whole. And we really appreciate, as another member of this local community that you’re a part of, your generosity to the local community and to the needs of the people in Oklahoma City and the state of Oklahoma, and 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. Well, we love being a part of the community. I grew up here and we’re very deeply rooted in it and in a lot of ways we think about part of our role is to represent the Oklahoma community nationwide, internationally as we grow as a company and we’re happy to do that.

David Raubach: Yeah. Well, thank you, Mike, and everybody go get your Mesa Sport bottle when it comes out here in the next few weeks, and again, thank you so much for your time, Mike.

Mike Beckham: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks.