By Aaron Tsamasiros, co-founder and operations director, COCO HIT
Before we founded COCO HIT, I spent 10 years in the civil engineering industry, which was as far from retail and FMCG as you can get. Nobody in that world could prepare you to launch a coconut water brand, but it turns out, the two aren’t as far apart as you’d think.
Civil engineering is a discipline built on systems and operations; everything needs to be assessed in detail and adjusted if it’s not compatible. You don’t just build a road and hope for the best, you design, plan, and sequence the work, accounting for variables that could go wrong while building in the margins to absorb them.
Going into an FMCG beverage startup blindfolded taught me a lot, and it was a huge jump from what I was used to. Looking back at those formative months mapping out the vision for the brand, I started to realise just how transferable my engineering mindset was to building a business that was operationally sound from the get-go.
We were learning as we went and there was always the risk of getting things wrong, but the foundations of how I approached problems were surprisingly familiar.
When my partner Steph and I launched COCO HIT in September last year, I didn’t have a beverage industry playbook to rely on. What I did have was an engineering mindset; a way of looking at problems as systems, understanding the inputs, dependencies and potential failure points.
It turned out to be exactly the kind of thinking a young FMCG brand needs.
The instinct that served us best wasn’t creative, well not on my part at least, but it was operational.
Steph built the brand; she came from the makeup industry and understood how to create something people wanted to connect with. My job was making sure that once people wanted it, we could actually get it to them at scale
I’d default to, “that’s a supply chain problem, and a supply chain problem is an engineering problem”.
We went from zero to more than 750 stockists across six states in eight months.That kind of growth doesn’t happen just because you have a good product; it happens because the distribution system behind it is built to support it.
We then signed five state-based distributor partnerships early on, one in each major market, instead of trying to run national logistics ourselves from our Melbourne kitchen table whilst raising two kids under two.
These decisions can easily get overlooked in the early stages of a startup, particularly when so much attention is focused on marketing and sales. But every scalable business needs sound foundations and systems behind it; systems that allow for smooth growth, create efficiencies at volume and make sure the business can continue to deliver as demand increases.
As an engineer, my mindset was always: how can I complete this project ahead of schedule, under budget and with the least resources required, while still achieving the overall outcome?
That same way of thinking had to come into COCO HIT from day one.
We knew that if we didn’t put the right foundations in place early, growth could very quickly become the thing that exposed our weaknesses. There’s no point creating demand and opening doors if the business behind the brand can’t meet the expectations and commitments that come with those opportunities.
In engineering, you don’t go into a project without thorough planning and analysing the different scenarios that could unfold. You need to understand the full scope, anticipate where things could go wrong and have a Plan B, C and D ready if they do. It’s about knowing the details well enough that when the original plan changes, which it often does, you already understand the path forward and make a quick decision.
I also think engineers are trained to be comfortable working within constraints, under pressure and making important decisions when there’s a lot at stake. You rarely have unlimited time, resources or budget. You learn to assess the information in front of you, understand the risks and make a decision without always having the luxury of perfect conditions.
Early-stage founders operate under exactly the same constraints: limited capital, limited time, limited resources and very little room for wasted momentum.
If there’s one piece of thinking I’d pass on to another founder starting an FMCG brand with zero experience in the category, it’s that creating a great product is only one part of the challenge.
The real test is building the systems around that product that allow the business to deliver, grow and ultimately scale.
One of the biggest learning experiences for me has been realising that running the operational side of a business is, at its core, not all that different from engineering. It’s about building systems, solving problems, managing constraints and constantly finding more efficient ways to reach the outcome.
Combine that with the creative side of the business that Steph does so well, and we’ve built COCO HIT on two very different but complementary strengths. Steph creates the brand people want to connect with, while my focus is making sure the foundations and systems behind it can support where we want to take it.
We’re still building and learning, but we’ve created a foundation that’s ready to scale and something we can continue to build on sustainably for the long term.
