Ep122 Transcript: Interview with Lori Bush

Andrea Vahl: What does it take to build a billion dollar company? Today’s guest, Lori Bush, was the CEO of Rodan and Fields as she helped build it to a billion dollars. She’s now launched a new integrative beauty line called So Vasa. She’s also done a multitude of other things. Listen in to her tips on perseverance and grit.

Hello Dreamers. Welcome to the Late Starters Club, giving you the inspiration mindset and tools you need to start something midlife and beyond. Remember, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

Hey, late starters, it’s your host, Andrea Vahl, and today I am joined by Lori Bush, who is amazing. I am so excited to dive into her story. She is a beauty and wellness entrepreneur, executive bestselling author. She’s the founder of Soul Vasa Integrative Beauty, but she is also the former CEO of Rodan and Fields.

She’s a breast cancer ass kicker, mindful footy, foodie, footy, restaurant owner, and wine grower, among all the other things she’s been doing. So welcome, Lori.

Lori Bush: Hi, Andrea.

Andrea Vahl: It’s so great to have you here. I’m so excited to dive into some of the things that you have done. Rodan and Fields one of the most recognized brands out there in, in that space, and I just love that you founded that, but now have gone on to do amazing things and you also host a podcast and are launching a new podcast and all kinds of things, so it’s amazing.

Lori Bush: So let me just qualify. I did not found Rodan and Fields. I was responsible for partnering with Katie Rodan and Kathy Fields and doing a restart from as terms of late starters, we were a re-starter company and I worked with them to pull the company out of a channel of marketing that wasn’t working well and knowing that we had something there and to completely relaunch it from zero again.

And once you find that great fit between your market and your go-to market strategy and your product, things just happen magically. So I just wanted to qualify

Andrea Vahl: Yes, I’m sorry. And I did actually know that and I just came out as founder, but that is awesome that you were the CEO and turned that around, turned it around and brought, some great new life into that. And that’s a challenge. And it’s itself just, because it’s, there’s a lot of moving parts already in place and to have to yeah, turn a ship around is probably a challenge.

Lori Bush: I think that’s a good lesson for anybody thinking about starting a business is that sometimes we think of things as being an overnight success. But there were years of the struggles and the turmoils, and then things just, when you find that alignment and everything starts working for you, then things start to happen.

But sometimes it’s finding that right fit and it that takes some empirical creativity and an exploration. So it’s just something about being said of not necessarily throwing good money after bad when you start something. But recognizing that getting everything to line up perfectly right out of the blocks isn’t usually the case.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah. That’s such a, it is a good lesson because I think we see, we look at those at those success stories and think that there’s, it’s been easy and it usually never is. There’s always struggle, that we don’t see. Yeah.

Lori Bush: For sure. Yeah. Sometimes I’ve heard reference to Lori took the business, some things out there on the internet. I don’t know where it came from that I took the business from 50 million to a billion. And the reality was we never actually had a 50 million year, and that zero to 50 million was much more difficult than the 50 to a billion and I always chuckle at this idea that, what was so great to take a company from 52, to its billion dollar level, but getting started is really the most difficult part and it’s in many ways, also the most fulfilling and and greatest joy to really build something out of wet clay.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Which actually brings us to what you’ve launched lately, which is the, you’ve co-founded Solvasa, Integrative Beauty brand. And you guys do so many different things with the mindfulness app and the the focus. So tell us a little bit about launching that and where that came from. I read the backstory, but I’d love to have you share that with our listeners here.

Lori Bush: Yeah I had actually intended to retire in 2016, and I always joke that I’m a failed retiree. That retirement was my. My biggest failure in my career that I had retired in 2016 from active management. And, I was expecting to start my late starter career on boards and as an advisor and doing work with academia.

And that was all going great. And then about a year and a half after I stepped down as CEO of Rodan and Fields, I found a little lump in my breast. Which is something I’ll say for all the women listening to this, that my breast cancer would’ve been missed if I wasn’t doing self exams. So just a heads up to everybody mammography and regular mammography doesn’t cut it.

But I happened to be somebody who was, for years doing self exams, I found a little lump. I thought it was going to be a cyst, but I followed through on it and lo and behold, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ultimately, I was referred to, through a friend, one of the premier breast surgeons in the world, Dr. Kristi Funk. Well known for having done surgery on Angelina Jolie and Cheryl Crow, the go-to for breast cancer on Good Morning America. So I had this opportunity to get really close to Dr. Funk while we were working on taking care of my breast cancer, but also she built a little team around me. And so I was very privileged in terms of my treatment and part of the team was plastic surgeon, Dr. Ritu Chopra, and my oncologist and I had their cell phone numbers and they were all talking to each other on my behalf. So I had a very fortunate experience. My. Unfortunate experience throughout all of this was as I was really drilling into what I was going to do to need to take care of myself, going through this cancer treatment and the drug I was going to be put on as the drug had all these side effects and I’d spent a part of my career.

In what we used to call anti-aging skincare. Hate the term anti-aging now, but spent a lot of my career and then in the skincare technology area, working on keeping this looking bright, healthy, youthful. And now I’m reading the side effects of this drug, which was an aromatase inhibitor that I was going to be put on and it was going to plummet me into old age, according to all the potential side effects. So I get the prescription and I go to the pharmacist to get the prescription filled. And as a pharmacist, the pharmacy will often do it’s, do you want a consultation with the pharmacist? And in this particular case, I said, yes, in fact I do. And I went up to the pharmacy window and I said, I’ve been doing all my research and I am trying to find ways to prevent.

These likely or potential side effects for the drug. And and she goes you might not get any of the side effects. And I said I’d rather get in front of these things rather than try to recover for things that happened that are undesirable. And in my skincare career I used to say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of filler.

And. Stay in front of all of this, and the pharmacist said you know what you may not get any of these side effects. Why don’t you just start on the drug? And I said, you know what? I’m seeing my oncologist in a couple days. I’ll wait to start the drug until after I have a chance to talk to him about it.

And her response to me as I was standing there was, You have cancer, take the drug. And that was the only time throughout my whole entire breast cancer treatment and experience that I felt. Like a cancer patient, not like a person. And that was devastating to me. I actually teared up over that where I hadn’t cried at all.

I’m somebody who cries happy tears, not sad tears. And I was angry. I was frustrated that I was being treated as a patient, not a person. And so I started doing a lot of research on this whole aspect of the impact of inflammation. And on your overall wellbeing and basically understanding the direct correlation between what’s going on in your head, what’s going on in your body, how that manifests on your skin, and started looking at skincare after this long career and skincare.

Looking at skincare very differently. Okay, so now I’m going through reconstructive surgery. And what I learned throughout this experience is when you choose to have go through surgery with reconstruction, the doctor you see the very most is your plastic surgeon. So now I’m having this wonderful experience with these great doctors who are really watching out for me, talking to each other on my behalf.

And Dr. Chopra starts chatting with me about beauty and the beauty industry and skincare, and he starts talking about an idea that he’s had for a product line, which brings together the best of eastern tradition and western cosmeceutical science and putting them together in a line. And one day he says, would you take a look at the line for me?

And the funny thing that happened at that point is that I had to say, can I put my clothes on first? because I’m having my breasts examined, my ugly reconstructed breasts at that point in time. During the course of the, stills, the scars and everything, and I’m looking up at the ceiling and he’s talking to me about the beauty industry.

So I go right into his office and I look at the line and I said, you have some really interesting ideas, but based on what I’ve experienced going through the surgery and based on what I’ve experienced with you and Dr. Funk and Dr. Hoffman, is that one, the world doesn’t need another skincare line.

What the world needs is a more integrative approach to beauty that addresses inflammatory stress, which is at the epicenter of everything we don’t like about our skin or our health otherwise. And I’ve been thinking about some of these things and doing a deep dive. And if I were you and I was going to start a skincare line, Or a beauty line, I would look at things very differently.

And that was the beginning of what became, what we came to call integrative beauty, which brings together the body mind connection with skin as your biological advertisement of health. So that’s how it all got started. I had no intention of starting another business. In fact, I said to him, you know what?

I’ll help you pull a team together. I’ll help you raise some money. But I’m not going to be the operator of this business, and at the end of the day, I’ve ended being the operator of the business.

Andrea Vahl: That’s great. And I know when it’s exciting, when you find an idea that you’re excited about and that you feel fills a hole in the marketplace, it can just flow naturally. It’s almost like you can’t even. Stop it. It’s like you just, keep going with it. And I think the universe pulls that idea into being, and you’re the one to drive it, or to be a driver in it.

Lori Bush: Yeah. When you’re, when you’ve, when you have the, not just the idea, but when you know that you have the special resources that probably not many other people have to take the idea forward. It’s almost as you said, the universe just pulls you along. There’s pretty much no stopping it.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. And I think it’s some, sometimes it’s just our job to say yes, right? It’s our job to say yes to the universe. So that’s great because I, I love what the beauty brand represents. I love, I l I love the idea of not anti-aging. It’s not, it’s not us against aging. It’s,

Lori Bush: Yeah it’s positive aging

Andrea Vahl: right.

Lori Bush: is one of the terms or optimal aging are things that are the terms, in fact, allure. Publications, allure Magazine and online media will no longer use the term anti-aging as it relates to beauty. So we’re, it’s hard to find the other words, the more positive words, but that’s really where we’re trying to get.

Aging is not failing, basically, and especially as women.

Andrea Vahl: Exactly. And I’d love for you to talk about your mantra there with with Solvasa where did that three bullet mantra come from and where did that, how did that develop?

Lori Bush: There’s a few aspects to that. First of all, because, I used to think that meditation was for people who had nothing better to do with their time, and I didn’t really understand what mindfulness meant. It mindfulness isn’t necessarily about sitting on a cushion and contemplating your navel for an hour.

It’s about clearing your mind and shutting down the monkey mind. That’s that self speak, that’s all rather negative. We tend the voices in our head tend to be predicting things that will probably never happen. And so an aspect of mindfulness, we, part of the team the founding team at Solvasa included a neuropsychologist named Dr. Kristen Race, who really specializes in what she would call mindfulness for kick ass women with big ass lives. And she wrote a book called Mindful Parenting with the concept that we are a population, a generation of stressed out adults who are therefore raising stressed out children, but also recognizing that if you’re going to start bringing mindfulness practices into your life, You have to make little changes to make any big wholesale changes.

And it doesn’t mean taking a half an hour out of your day and doing these meditation. It could be something so simple we talk about a three breath meditation, but also if you just take a couple minutes. What we wanted to do was have it stack mindfulness practices into your beauty routine or self-care routine.

So you really weren’t adding more time to your day, you were just making whatever you were doing more effective. So we have a cleansing mask that needs a couple minutes to clot. Dry down in the morning and we were building some little breath, mindfulness practices around it. So a mantra is a really good way to do that.

But when we started thinking about what we stand for overall being present is really what mindfulness is about, being present in the moment. And by the way, happiness is really tied to presence as well. It’s about really appreciating the things that happen. And for years I’ve always talked about identifying perfect moments and being present for them, but just learning how to be present and not having your mind go all over the place.

So a mantra helps. So the mantra that we had was, is intention over habit. And just deconstructing that a little bit. The idea of the big, hairy, audacious goals are so early new millennium. They’re the ideas now, especially with all the volatility in the world around us, is to be intentional about what we want and make the little changes that work towards those intentions.

And so intention over habits. So if you start being intentional about what you’re doing as opposed to just doing what you do because you’ve always been doing it. So that was that’s the first part of the mantra. The second is attitude over age, which is, I think, self-explanatory that. So much of how you relate to the world is some of it is related to the mind mindset biases of our generation, but there are ways to break out of those biases and a continue or adopt, a can-do and positive attitude.

So attitude over age, and then presence over everything just being present in your life. And in time. So it’s intention over habit, attitude over age, presence over everything. And when you’re breathing and having those things going through your mind, you can’t be thinking about, all the the bills that you’ve gotta pay or the fact that your sales officer is off on a bender somewhere. Have that time to clear your brain and and start your day as you’re using this cleansing mask to dry down on your skin and brighten your skin. And that’s you’re starting your, the day with a clearer skin and a clearer mind, basically. And it makes a huge difference. Just a few minutes.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Just taking yourself out of that, that internal dialogue that starts up the minute you wake up sometimes, with what’s going wrong that day, or what do you have to worry about or Yeah. How the

Lori Bush: that’s the default mode for our brain. They call it the default mode and it’s monkey mind. It’s all this crazy chatter that will start to cause your brain to pump out cortisol, which then starts to, over time, wear and tear on your body. It’s it’s really interesting. The little changes can make a big difference.

They’re not so little.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that is awesome. I love that. Yep. It’s a huge thing and I think there’s, I think we know about stress, but we don’t always know what to do about it. And and it feels like we have to do something big, like it’s spend an hour meditating or something.

So that’s great

Lori Bush: Yeah, no, and if you try to do something that’s too big, it’s probably going to add more stress because it’s going to be hard. You’re going to feel like a failure. Little changes in James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habit or BJ Fog from Stanford talks about habit stacking, making little incremental changes, just committing to a little something and getting that.

To become over time, a habit. 21 days that they say starts to make something more of a habit, and then you continue on for 90 days. You start to see the changes that motivates the next little change, and they start to accumulate.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah. So I’d love to, I’d love to hear, you’ve obviously. Done big things in your career and and continue to do big things. I’d love to hear about some time where you’ve felt overwhelmed. What have you done to move through that? What helps you in get through that time of overwhelm and just.

Just to share some ideas with our audience, because that’s always, I think a lot of us feel overwhelmed with everything these days.

Lori Bush: And especially lately this aspect of burnout happens for so many reasons. And, a lot of the overwhelming part of it recently just comes from uncertainty. And uncertainty is more challenging to your brain and your health than even knowing something bad is going to happen. So it puts our brain into this alarm state.

That’s a pretty unhealthy place to be. So one of the things that you can do to deal with the uncertainty is to find, first of all, Things that you can take control over that you do have some control over and whether it’s even a little thing like, preparing a meal or doing something that you would maybe otherwise push aside because you’re dealing with this crisis to, to step out of the crisis and take control over something.

So that’s really important whether that’s work related or personally, but the other part about it, and it took. Me years to really learn this. And I think the book peak Performance, if you haven’t read or listened to it talks a lot about it. It references athletes, but it also references athletes in the context of other things like business and this aspect of.

Of performance and then recovery or training and pushing the envelope, and then this recovery. So this element of recovery, when you’re in a high stress situation, finding a way to take yourself, give yourself a break. So if you’re working out for, in some sort of athletic, if you worked out at full intensity every single day, you’re going to burn out.

And so you need that break and whether, and one of the things that I found I had built in breaks, especially as we were building Rodan and Fields, which was about the most intense thing you I’ve ever been through in my career. In terms of, start restarting this business, not having many employees, but I was at first commuting from Salt Lake City to San Francisco every week.

And when I was in San Francisco, I was 100% focused on the business. Pretty much. My family wasn’t there. I was, I would stay at the office as, as late as I needed to. I probably was. Doing something not good. I wasn’t sleeping many hours because I was working so many hours, but I think what saved me is that when I flew back to Salt Lake every weekend I turned the business off and I focused on my.

My wellbeing and recovery. And so that aspect, and that’s a lot of, and I’m not saying it, it necessarily needs to be something like mindfulness or yoga or me, it’s something where you can basically just give your brain a break and take yourself out of that stressful situation. You find out when you come back to it you’re recharged and ready to go.

And the other thing is also giving yourself, That chance to let some of the theta waves work and stuff. And one of the things I found is the greatest ideas and concepts or solutions to challenges I was having happened when I stepped outside of the day-to-day grind and I was head down and was getting little things from everyday life.

Oh, that’s, I need to think about that in terms of the business. I actually did a keynote at at Temple University on their business school graduate commencement. One year, and my theme was really about a work-life mashup and allowing your work to make your life more enriching, but allowing your life to advise your work in many ways.

And my opening line was, what does world of Warcraft, stinky Bassett Hounds and a date gone wrong have to do with building the largest skincare brand in the United States? It was all things that happened outside of my everyday work that took me back in fresh and gave me the kind of the perspective and the ideas to move things forward.

And so that would be, how to keep going when things get tough is step out of it and

Andrea Vahl: Yeah, I love that. And it and so many people don’t. We think we just have to push through and push, keep pushing. And when you take that break, when you go on that hike, when you get out, do something different. That can be such a great way to get ideas, like you said, and just to let our brain rest, because I think we need that and we don’t. We don’t allow that too often we think we just have to keep pushing through. So that’s great advice and hard advice to take. When you are in a stressful situation, you think, I don’t have time to break. Take a break. And it’s really almost like you don’t have time.

Not take a break you.

Lori Bush: Exactly.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. So that is great. That is great. I now I feel like I want to listen to that commencement speech too.

Lori Bush: Yeah.

Andrea Vahl: sounds amazing.

Lori Bush: That’s a whole session in and of itself.

Fun stories that, of things that inspire or that just give you that aha moment.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. And what, so what what unexpected obstacles has come up because, so Solvasa was founded you founded it in what year? I just lost that.

Lori Bush: We launched in 2020, so the obstacles pretty obvious.

To start, and it was originally launched as a social selling company, not online. It was intended to be more of a direct selling, people coming together, learning, growing. In fact, we called our representatives connectors, and that really came from the power of connections, people connecting to people for wellbeing and growth and learning. And and the idea of the connector actually came from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, the Tipping Point, where he talks about the three kinds of, the three different mindsets that make things happen. And he references people who are connectors, who know a lot of people, know a lot of universes, love to bring people together.

And that was really the go to market premise for. So Solvasa and then we launched at the end of January of 2020 and I actually thought we couldn’t fail. It was with the work we had done leading up to that with. Focus groups and bringing our initial connectors together and this powerful, uplifting, our manifesto was that we’re a community of intentional optimists and we launch at this time where then we’re in lockdown and, we’re all trying to figure it out and locked behind a zoom screen and.

In some ways our intention for the brand and the business became even more relevant. But people were so distracted and the, so we got out of the blocks. Okay. And then it was just one thing after another. The political issues the health issues. And and what I will say is unexpectedly politics.

Entered into my business in a way I never would’ve seen coming, and it actually was so disruptive. That we decided that we were going to have to sunset this direct selling program and pivot to more of a online, direct to consumer. On social media and running social media posts, our message was maybe at the time, 15 minutes ahead of its time, but becoming so very relevant.

But that’s a very difficult thing to communicate to people who are doom scrolling on Instagram. And we got focused on things like creating the content to really build the brand. We’re right now in the process. In fact, as of tomorrow, we are take, we’re suspending sales for a period of six months because we’re doing a complete reset on the business, unfortunately.

And in a way that I feel very privileged in some ways, as I’ve thought about, just totally, writing this off and shutting it down. I’ve had way too many people as I’ve. Explored, how to sunset the entire business saying, what your brand and what you’re doing is so important.

We’ll invest in keeping it going. So I have investors and other industry experts who are with me on this reset. And in fact, part of the reason I was connected to you, Andrea, was Because of somebody that I’ve been talking to about what the go forward strategy is and finding that customer and business model and product alignment and fit.

So I, we’re in the process of a complete reset where I didn’t expect to be, I thought we were going to be a, an unprecedented success right out of the blocks. And no, it wasn’t so much that way. But I’m really excited about taking the learning from the past three years and applying it to our go forward strategy.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think that it’s great that you are realizing you need a reset, because sometimes people don’t know what to do. And I think a reset can really help you just take a step back, look at the bigger picture and say, how do we move forward from here? And what do we want it to look like?

So that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, and I just wanted to also just give a quick plug because I know you are also going to be starting a new podcast here coming up. So I want to have you just tell us a little bit about that podcast because it’s very much an alignment with what we’re doing here at Late Starters Club.

Lori Bush: Yeah, it is. As we were working on the idea for the reset of Solvasa, I actually had an opportunity, I had a house guest here that was working with me on some of the thinking behind Solvasa, who happens to be a very well known actor. She’s Won two Academy Awards and I’m not going to drop names, but she had us at Hello.

So you can guess who it would’ve been. And and I was asking her about what her interest in Solvasa and this whole idea of integrative beauty was. And she goes, I come from an industry where for women much more so than for men, That aging is failing and aging is not failing, but we we need to think about this differently.

And that really stuck with me. I even mentioned it earlier today. I started thinking about, this aspect of coming into the prime of our lives. When we’re in our forties, fifties, sixties and beyond. And there was a, formerly popular CNN news anchor, or anchor who, notoriously mentioned that a woman aged 55 was passed the prime of her life.

And, and that was, bye-bye to his career. But, Really got me thinking about why are the rules different for women than for men. And I was chatting with a colleague about it, a male colleague, and he goes, my wife has said the same thing. You need to do a podcast. And about all aspects of women coming into what I’d like to think of the prime of their life.

So I’ve been, I was thinking about doing this podcast and then I’ve. Was in conversations with two other successful women who have continuously reinvented themselves. And I’ve become, somewhat a student of biohacks and from a wellness perspective and life hacks. And so the three of us got together and we’re calling the podcast the Better Half.

And meaning for women, in the second and better half of their life. And there’s three of us that are co-hosting it and it’s going to be launching later in August. And one of the women is in her mid forties and. The other one’s in her mid fifties and I’m in my mid sixties and we’re taking turns, hosting or leading the discussion with some guests.

And it’s largely about lifestyle careers and wellness related to this time in our lives that should be beautiful and special and optimized. So the Better Half. Coming to a podcast platform to near you soon.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Great. And we’ll link to the yeah. And we’ll link to that. As soon as it’s out, let us know. We’ll put that in the show notes for, when that comes available too. But why don’t you Oh, actually what I want to also what I’d like to close out with too is would love to hear your favorite quote or motivational saying and because I just, I’m such a quote junkie and I love hearing from others.

Lori Bush: I love that you’re asking me because I am also a quote junkie and very much known for that

my very favorite quote is by the late Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes Fame, and it’s that everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the growth and happiness occurs while you’re climbing it. And that’s really what happiness is about. It’s about the experiences. And the other thing I always want people to keep in mind, and there’s been a lot of studies on this, Sean Anchor who wrote The Happiness Advantage, has pointed out that happiness is more likely to lead to success than success is to lead to happiness.

And so that’s why I love that quote so much.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. That’s great. I love that. So wonderful. Awesome. That is very inspirational. This whole I. Been inspired by this whole interview, and I know my listeners will be too. So thank you so much for your perspective on this time of our lives and the work that you’re doing out there in the world to have people be more mindful and just be living their best lives at this time.

Why don’t you let us know where people can find you, the best place for people to connect to you.

Lori Bush: During, as I mentioned, this sort of break, we’re taking on selling the Solvasa products. I am continuing to feed articles into our blog that’s called Solvasa Life, S o L V A S A. L i f e, all connected.com, where I’m writing articles about longevity, wellness, beauty, so you can find some of my thoughts and work there constantly putting things out there.

And then you could find me on LinkedIn and you, I’m sure you’ll put in the show notes, my Instagram handle is. Lori H Bush, l o r i h b u s h, which is also my Twitter handle, and so I’m all over the place out there.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Awesome. We’ll put those links in the show note notes, but thank you so much for your time today and sharing, sharing your great insights with us. And we’ll be excited to listen to the podcast when it comes out in August.

Lori Bush: Thanks and thanks Andrea, for what you’re doing for women careers. It’s so great. Appreciate it so much.

Andrea Vahl: Thank you.

Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide Top Tools for Late Starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.