Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, sits down with David Simnick, CEO and Co-Founder of Soapbox, to explore the leadership principles behind building a mission-driven business.
This episode is for CEOs who have proven their product works and now find themselves the bottleneck — still mastering problems their team should own.
Key Takeaways
- Founder competence becomes a liability when it prevents delegation — CEOs who stay in problem-solving mode instead of people-building mode trade company speed for personal ego.
- The hiring filter that builds high-performing small teams is humble, hungry, and smart, in that order — humility must come first because it determines whether a person can recognize what they don’t know.
- A CEO’s best use of AI is not productivity automation — it is late-night strategic sparring: pressure-testing positioning, identifying category opportunities, and preparing for high-stakes retail conversations without pulling team members off their work.
- CEOs who reduce organizational priorities to three clear objectives — as Iger did at Disney across the Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm acquisitions — produce execution teams rather than scattered ones.
- Soapbox, fighting against L’Oreal, Estée Lauder, P&G, and Unilever, found its competitive edge not in awareness but in loyalty, cleanliness perception, and value — a BCG consumer survey ranked the brand highest in NPS and loyalty against a hard competitive class despite the lowest awareness numbers in the category.
Why Founder Competence Becomes a CEO’s Biggest Blind Spot
Glenn identifies the transition from hands-on founder to high-growth CEO as the stage where the skill that built the company starts to break it.
Simnick, CEO and co-founder of Soapbox — the personal care brand that has made the Inc. 5000 eight consecutive times while donating over 50 million bars of soap globally — names the mechanism precisely: “You need to have a certain level of competence, but that competence can flip over to blinding ego.”
The pattern Simnick sees across his portfolio of 20+ investments is consistent. Founders who built something real arrive at the scaling stage with hard-won skills. Those skills feel like assets. In most cases, they become traps. The CEO keeps solving the problems they are good at rather than hiring someone faster on that curve and moving to the problems only they can solve: running the whole company.
“I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs that whether it be ego or whether it be interest… they really want to master this problem. And I’m like, this is not your problem to master. The thing you need to master is running the overall company and getting people who are way better at this than you are.”
The decision rule is direct. When a founder-CEO spends ten hours becoming 20% better at something a specialist could handle at 100%, they are not investing in the company. They are investing in their own comfort.
How Soapbox Builds Teams That Outrun Aircraft Carriers
Soapbox competes against L’Oreal, Estée Lauder, P&G, and Unilever every day across Target, Walmart, CVS, Kroger, Amazon, Sally Beauty, and Wegmans. Simnick describes the competitive position without ambiguity: “We are this little tugboat going to war against aircraft carriers every day.”
The weapon is not budget. It is speed to innovation — and that speed lives inside the team.
Soapbox’s hiring filter comes from a framework Simnick credits to a book written in the 1980s: hire for humble, hungry, and smart, in exactly that order. The sequence is deliberate.
“You need humility within a great team member in order for them to realize that they might be really good at certain things, but more importantly, the things that they’re not good at.”
Humility comes first because it is the prerequisite for every other quality working correctly. A hungry person without humility chases the wrong problems. A smart person without humility defends bad decisions. Humility is what makes hunger and intelligence serve the company rather than the individual.
The result is a cross-functional team that generates millions in revenue per person — with Soapbox owning formulas and IP while working with contract manufacturers across the United States, enabling the innovation speed a crowded beauty category demands.
A recent BCG consumer survey confirmed what that team has built. Against a hard competitive class, Soapbox ranked highest in NPS, highest in loyalty, most clean and natural, most community-engaged, and best value. The one metric where the company trails: awareness. “We have the lowest awareness,” Simnick says. The response is not a rebranding exercise. It is a daily fight to get the product in front of new consumers who, once they try it, tend to stay.
What Teaching in a High-Crime Philadelphia School Taught Simnick About Running a Company
Simnick’s path to the CEO seat ran through Teach for America, where he taught in a ten-by-ten block radius in Philadelphia that carried the highest crime, murder, and poverty rate in the city. He is direct about what the experience delivered: daily failure, and the discipline of recovering from it publicly.
“Every day you are going to fail. It is about how you pick yourself up and it is about how you are brushing yourself off in front of your students.”
Four principles from that classroom travel directly into Soapbox’s leadership culture.
- Praise publicly, discipline privately. The visibility of recognition matters as much as the recognition itself.
- Failures are yours as the leader; successes belong to the team. A CEO who takes credit for wins and deflects blame for losses will not hold a high-performing team for long.
- What you measure matters. Whatever you incentivize — in a classroom or a company — is what people will optimize for.
- One core learning objective per session. Teach for America’s pedagogy asks teachers to open every class with “students will be able to…” — one clear outcome, stated before instruction begins. Simnick applies the same principle to leadership. Each department at Soapbox focuses on three priorities, and Simnick sometimes distills those down to one.
The Bob Iger parallel is deliberate. “He had three major things that he was going to do while he was CEO. And he accomplished all of them.” Iger ran Disney’s transformation — including the Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm acquisitions — by communicating three ideas clearly enough that a massive organization could execute against them. Simnick’s version of that discipline runs through every department at Soapbox.
How CEOs Use AI for Strategic Thinking, Not Just Task Automation
Simnick draws a clear line between how most companies deploy AI and how he uses it. The operational side — automating repetitive tasks, improving department efficiency — is table stakes. Soapbox invested in professional development through Chat Walrus, a firm that helps consumer brands identify AI applications by department, and then gave the team permission to build. The results, Simnick says, have been more than additive.
The more interesting application is strategic.
“The thing that I use AI right now for most is big strategic thinking. And you can go through various different models and basically ask it to not be sycophantic.”
The use case is specific: Saturday at 10 PM, when Simnick does not want to pull team members onto a call, he uses AI as a sparring partner for high-stakes positioning problems. How to frame a conversation with a VP of merchandising at a major retailer to win end caps. Where the biggest untapped category opportunity sits given Soapbox’s existing brand equity. What the company should be building toward.
The discipline he applies to those sessions is also precise. He toggles AI models toward objectivity — away from responses that reflect back what he wants to hear — and provides enough context about the business to make the sparring meaningful. He treats data protection as the air gap that must be secured before that depth of information sharing is safe.
On the marketing side, Simnick frames the strategic shift in terms most consumer brand CEOs have not yet internalized. “How are we using GEO as what SEO was a couple years back? How are we making sure that we show up in agentic searches as a brand, as a recommendation?” The question is not whether AI changes consumer discovery. It is whether Soapbox is positioned to be found when it does.
What Soapbox’s Scaling Principles Look Like as a Framework
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Competence becomes ego without humility | Founders who master problems their team should own slow the company down, regardless of how skilled they are | Across 20+ investments, Simnick has watched founder-CEOs who refused to hire specialists above themselves lose the innovation speed that defines the early stage — the company compounds at the CEO’s personal learning rate rather than at a market rate |
| Hire humble first, then hungry and smart | Humility determines whether talent serves the company or the individual — it is the filter that makes every other quality functional | Soapbox’s small cross-functional team competes directly against P&G, L’Oreal, and Unilever in Target, Walmart, and CVS — and ranked above all of them in NPS and loyalty in a BCG consumer survey |
| Three priorities, no more | Communication of a small number of clear objectives determines whether a team executes or scatters | Each Soapbox department runs on three named priorities — and the company has made the Inc. 5000 eight consecutive times while donating over 50 million bars of soap, a scaling result that requires organizational focus, not proliferation of objectives |
| AI is a sparring partner, not a replacement | The highest-value AI use for a CEO is late-night strategic pressure testing, not task automation | Simnick uses AI to prepare for VP-level retail conversations and identify category expansion opportunities when no team member should be pulled into a Saturday call |
| Praise publicly, fail forward as a leader | A CEO who takes credit for wins and transfers blame for failures cannot hold a high-performing team | Simnick credits Teach for America — teaching in a Philadelphia neighborhood with the city’s highest crime, murder, and poverty rate — with building the public resilience that allowed him to recover from failure visibly and repeatedly as a CEO |
Quotes from This Episode
- “Every day you are going to fail. It is about how you pick yourself up and it is about how you are brushing yourself off in front of your students.” — David Simnick, CEO and Co-Founder, Soapbox
- “He had three major things that he was going to do while he was CEO. And he accomplished all of them.” — David Simnick, CEO and Co-Founder, Soapbox
- “How are we using GEO as what SEO was a couple years back? How are we making sure that we show up in agentic searches as a brand, as a recommendation?” — David Simnick, CEO and Co-Founder, Soapbox
- “We have the lowest awareness.” — David Simnick, CEO and Co-Founder, Soapbox
- “The thing that I use AI right now for most is big strategic thinking. And you can go through various different models and basically ask it to not be sycophantic.” — David Simnick, CEO and Co-Founder, Soapbox
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CEOs know when founder competence is becoming a liability rather than an asset?
The signal is where a CEO spends time. When a founder-CEO is still mastering problems a specialist could own — driven by interest, ego, or an engineering mindset that wants to understand everything — they are trading company speed for personal satisfaction. David Simnick, CEO of Soapbox, identifies this as the most common blind spot he sees across 20+ investments: the entrepreneur who wants to become a master of a problem that is not theirs to master. The inflection point arrives when their time is worth more on the overall company than on any individual function — and the companies that scale are the ones where the CEO recognizes that line and crosses it.
What does a high-growth CEO’s effective use of AI look like beyond task automation?
David Simnick uses AI primarily as a strategic sparring partner for high-stakes decisions — positioning conversations with retail buyers, identifying category expansion opportunities, and pressure-testing thinking at hours when pulling team members onto a call would be unreasonable. He selects AI models specifically for objectivity, toggling away from responses that reflect back what he wants to hear. He also frames the emerging question for consumer brand CEOs as a GEO question: generative engine optimization is to 2025 what SEO was several years ago, and the brands that show up as recommendations in agentic searches will have a structural advantage over those still optimizing for traditional keyword ranking.
What hiring framework helps a scaling CEO build a team that can outperform much larger competitors?
Soapbox hires for humble, hungry, and smart — in that specific order. The sequence matters because humility is the quality that makes the other two function correctly. A hungry person without humility chases the wrong problems. A smart person without humility defends poor decisions. Humility is what allows a team member to recognize both where they excel and where someone else is faster on the curve. That filter has built a cross-functional team that generates millions in revenue per person while competing directly against L’Oreal, Estée Lauder, P&G, and Unilever in major retail chains including Target, Walmart, CVS, and Amazon.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies by Scaling Themselves First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
