Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, draws out Christopher Jane’s framework for why remote teams fail on culture and exactly what Proper Good does differently.
This episode is for CEOs running lean, distributed teams who feel the culture slipping through text-only communication and siloed roles.
Key Takeaways
- When a team operates entirely without an office, replacing Slack messages with voice audio notes shifts communication from transactional to human — the tone and sentiment that text strips out come back immediately.
- CEOs who allow fractional and agency team members to see product wins, trade show photos, and real-time updates — even when those wins are outside their job scope — break silos without adding headcount or meetings.
- The most dangerous zone for a scaling CPG CEO is the middle: low barrier to entry at launch, strong economics at scale, but brutally capital-intensive in between — and most ideas that stall there lack true category innovation, not just execution.
- Proven unit economics in a simpler channel first is what allows a food brand to absorb the margin compression of retail — when the pandemic removed trade shows and sampling, Proper Good built that foundation through e-commerce alone.
- CEOs who self-identify as zero-to-one operators and try to stay in that mode past the seven-to-eight-figure mark create a misalignment between their natural wiring and what the company actually needs from them.
How CEOs Build Remote Culture Through Micro Touch Points, Not Team Days
Most remote culture failures come from treating text-only communication as equivalent to being in a room together. Christopher Jane, CEO and co-founder of Proper Good, the shelf-stable meal brand that launched in April 2020 and has operated as a fully remote organization ever since, identifies the core problem plainly: “You can get very, very nuts and bolts when it’s a Slack message or a quick email response.”
Proper Good’s solution is not a policy. It is a communication layer built on three specific behaviors: voice audio notes, cross-functional visibility, and deliberate humor.
Voice audio notes carry what text cannot. Jane describes them as a default tool for communication inside the company’s leadership group chat and across agencies and third-party logistics partners: “We do a lot of voice audio notes — it’s so much easier to get across sentiment and tone.” The note itself takes no longer than the typed message. The emotional register it carries is completely different.
Cross-functional visibility means letting people outside a project see the results that their work made possible. When Proper Good exhibits at a trade show, the team members who handled freight, shipping, and printing are not in the booth. Jane sends them photos anyway. As he describes it: “They did all the freight, they did all the shipping, they did all the printing. Just that micro touch point” — the photo, the quick audio message — produces connection that no meeting agenda generates. The company’s fractional CFO, who has no operational reason to see trade show booth shots, receives them too. Jane’s rule: “Does that make any difference to actually his tasks every day of running the P&Ls and sending the board updates? No, but that little 10% bleed over instead of being totally siloed really, really think helps build that culture.”
The third layer is explicit permission for humor. The goal Jane describes is making the weekly check-in something people look forward to rather than something they endure: “Hopping on the weekly call with me is not a chore.” That outcome does not happen by accident. It happens because the communication culture between calls — the GIFs, the audio messages, the casual asides — signal that the relationship is not purely transactional.
The standard Jane applies to the whole system: “At the end of the day, business is people.”
How Scaling CEOs Move from Operator to Conductor Without Losing the Company
The role of CEO in a CPG company does not stay the same. Christopher Jane has scaled two companies — Montana Mex, a clean-label condiment brand distributed through Whole Foods, H-E-B, and Albertsons, and Proper Good, a shelf-stable meal brand at the seven-to-eight-figure revenue stage — and his description of what the job actually is at each stage is specific.
In the early days of Proper Good, it was Jane and his co-founder, his sister. The job was entirely hands-on: “You’re literally setting up the bank accounts, doing the C-Corp documents. If someone’s going to design a label, it’s me in Illustrator.” Every function was a founder function because no one else existed to do it.
Past the startup stage, the job changes completely. Jane’s framing: “My day to day now is more of that — it’s a puppeteer. Most people are doing the heavy work.” The CEO role at scale is not doing the work. It is putting people in the right positions, giving them what they need, and not blocking them. As he puts it: “As a CEO, my job is to steer the ship, put the right people in the right engine rooms, and give them the resources to succeed.”
The problem is that many founders do not recognize when the gear has to shift — or they recognize it but resist the shift because the operator phase is what energizes them. Jane’s self-assessment is direct: “I love change. I love the chaoticness of it.” That wiring helped him build. It also helped him move from doing to directing. But he acknowledges the same wiring is not universal: “I have plenty of friends who honestly really hate that change.”
His recommendation is to identify what your brain genuinely enjoys, invest there, and fill the remaining gaps through hiring or delegation. When pressed on the harder version of that problem — what to do when the company needs a skill the CEO lacks and no one else is there yet — Jane does not offer a formula. His honest answer: “The worst thing I could do is spend the next two weeks trying to fix something I’m probably not good at. The easiest solution to that is obviously to hire that or delegate it.” The practical version of that in CPG is leaning on industry networks: in a small, niche industry, the next hire frequently comes through a friend of a friend who already knows the space.
The ceiling this creates for CEOs who cannot make the transition: Jane witnessed it directly with a peer who had raised venture capital and was one year into building. “He was just like, honestly, man, I hate it. It’s just so hard. I don’t enjoy it.” Jane’s response: “This is the bit you should be enjoying. It’s only gonna get harder from here as you become more of a manager.” That founder never shifted from operator to conductor. The role they loved — zero to one — had already passed.
How CEOs Should Build E-Commerce Unit Economics Before Entering Retail
Proper Good launched in April 2020. Trade shows did not exist. Retail sampling did not exist. The in-person trial that drives most early food and beverage distribution was simply not available.
Jane’s framing of what that constraint produced: “Restraints obviously create focus.” With no options for the normal launch playbook, Proper Good committed entirely to direct-to-consumer e-commerce. Jane’s model for thinking about that business is precise: “E-commerce is a math problem. It’s a mixture of average order value, customer acquisition cost, repeat subscription churn.” Those variables live in a single spreadsheet. The question is whether the unit economics work at scale. For Proper Good, they did — the company reached its first several million in revenue and first 10,000 reviews operating entirely through that model.
The category fit made this possible. Shelf-stable meal solutions ship easily, store long, and explain well through video and ingredient storytelling. Jane’s framing: “I think of us as a modern canned food company — cleaner, healthier. That’s actually a great item to shop online.” The product and the constraint matched.
When retail re-opened, Proper Good moved into multi-channel distribution. But the two years of e-commerce discipline left a structural advantage: the team already knew exactly which unit economics made the business work before adding the cost and complexity of retail.
The broader insight Jane draws from the food and beverage category applies here: the startup phase is accessible, the scale phase works, but the middle — growth stage, pre-scale — is where capital intensity and complexity compress margins and kill companies that do not have disciplined unit economics before entering it. The pandemic forced Proper Good to develop those economics first. Most companies are not forced that way.
Principles for Scaling a CPG Company Without Losing Culture or Capital
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Replace text with voice for tone-critical communication | Voice audio notes carry sentiment, humor, and care that Slack messages strip out — use them as the default for relationship-critical messages, not just crisis moments | Proper Good has operated as a fully remote team since April 2020; Jane credits voice audio notes as a core reason the culture held across that entire run with no shared office |
| Build 10% bleed-over into every silo | Allow team members outside a project to see the outcomes their work made possible — a photo, an update, a quick message — without restructuring roles or adding meetings | Proper Good’s fractional CFO receives trade show photos and account wins despite having no operational stake in them; Jane describes this cross-functional visibility as what keeps the remote culture intact rather than drifting into pure task execution |
| Treat e-commerce as a math problem before adding retail complexity | Average order value, customer acquisition cost, and subscription churn live in a single Excel sheet — prove the unit economics work at scale before layering in retail margin compression | Proper Good reached several million in revenue and 10,000 reviews on e-commerce alone before entering retail; when retail opened, the team could absorb its margin compression because they already knew exactly what made the business work |
| Assess what your brain enjoys, then hire the rest | CEOs who force themselves to operate in modes that exhaust them create a performance ceiling — the answer is self-awareness, not willpower | Jane’s peer raised venture capital, was a year into building, and told Jane he hated it — precisely at the stage Jane identifies as the most enjoyable; that founder never made the operator-to-conductor shift and the ceiling followed |
| Prioritize category disruption over flavor variation | Food and beverage ideas that reach national brand scale solve a format or category problem — not just a flavor preference within an existing category | Proper Good entered the shelf-stable meal category with a cleaner, healthier format that ships easily and explains well online — a category-level innovation, not a flavor variation within an existing aisle |
Quotes from This Episode
- “You can get very, very nuts and bolts when it’s a Slack message or a quick email response.” — Christopher Jane, CEO and Co-Founder, Proper Good
- “We do a lot of voice audio notes — it’s so much easier to get across sentiment and tone.” — Christopher Jane, CEO and Co-Founder, Proper Good
- “E-commerce is a math problem. It’s a mixture of average order value, customer acquisition cost, repeat subscription churn.” — Christopher Jane, CEO and Co-Founder, Proper Good
- “Restraints obviously create focus.” — Christopher Jane, CEO and Co-Founder, Proper Good
- “This is the bit you should be enjoying. It’s only gonna get harder from here as you become more of a manager.” — Christopher Jane, CEO and Co-Founder, Proper Good
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you build team culture when everyone works remotely?
When a team has no shared office, culture does not come from policy — it comes from the communication layer between tasks. Christopher Jane, CEO of Proper Good, which has operated fully remote since its April 2020 launch, uses three specific tools: voice audio notes to carry tone and humor that text cannot, cross-functional visibility so team members outside a project see the results their work made possible, and deliberate humor woven into the weekly rhythm so calls are not purely transactional. The key condition: all three must be present — humor alone without visibility, or audio notes without follow-through, does not hold the culture together.
When should a CPG founder shift from operator to CEO conductor?
Christopher Jane identifies the shift as necessary once the company has multiple people handling distinct functions — product, shipping, invoicing, finance. At that stage, the CEO who stays in operator mode creates a bottleneck rather than adding value. Jane’s framework: the CEO role is to “steer the ship, put the right people in the right engine rooms, and give them the resources to succeed.” The failure mode he witnessed directly: a peer who had raised venture capital, was one year into building, and said he hated it — precisely at the stage when the operator phase Jane describes as enjoyable was still underway. If a CEO does not enjoy the earliest, most chaotic phase of building, the transition to manager will not fix the problem.
How do you survive the capital-intensive middle stage of scaling a food brand?
The middle stage of scaling a food and beverage brand — past launch, before true scale — is the most capital-intensive period, with retail costs, distributor fees, and margin compression hitting simultaneously. Christopher Jane’s recommendation is to develop proven unit economics in a simpler channel first. Proper Good proved its average order value, customer acquisition cost, and subscription churn model through direct-to-consumer e-commerce during 2020 and 2021, reaching several million in revenue before adding retail distribution. Entering retail with that foundation meant Proper Good could absorb the margin compression without losing visibility into what made the business work.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
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.
