Angus Brown: Move with the times to stay ahead of wellness challenges‍

Ten years can seem like a lifetime when working on a startup, and Angus Brown admits a heap has changed since Ārepa emerged a decade ago.

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After years of R&D and product development (which is ongoing), the brain food technology company launched its pioneering drink to improve cognitive performance in 2017. Today Ārepa has a team of 25, and Brown’s home team has also grown: he’s now dad to a toddler and a newborn. 

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And each of these different stages, he says, have posed their own challenges to his wellbeing as a founder. 

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“In the formative years when we were prototyping the concept, the biggest challenge was having the belief your idea is good,” says Brown. “I was trying to push, and still am, a brain drink. Nothing like that existed on the market 10 years ago when we first started, and the biggest challenge is to have the mental fortitude or the tenacity to go, ‘I think this is a good idea’ and keep pushing and driving and convincing and hustling and just never giving up.”

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Then when it came to early-stage production, he says it was about keeping a cool head when things went wrong in the factory. “Physically as well, it was demanding because we were hand-capping every single bottle at one point for the first year,” he says. “At that point I had my day job so you burn the candle at both ends [and] I was either single or didn't have any kids, so you’d go out and see friends and then you'd wake up the next morning and try to do your day job and then try to fit in this business startup.”

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“And then as you buy a house and have your first kid, time just gets pulled from you. And then we did a renovation,” he adds. “So once the baby was down you’d go out to the yard and try to rip up a massive tree stump or break up some concrete on the driveway or pull out some nails. You're paying yourself stuff all, so there’s a lot of mental stress.”  

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The biggest wellness change he’s made most recently, he says, is prioritising sleep.

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“It's like driving your car. You can drive it to empty and then it burns out and you do damage. So I look at how full my tank is and do I need to get some good quality sleep to fill up my tank? Being sick when you have kids and a business is the worst, so I do it to maintain my health from that mental, physical and productivity perspective.”

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Here are five other things Brown does to keep him in good shape to meet the demands of startup life:

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1. Shift one big rock  

I’ve been shifting my mindset from trying to do a thousand things, to now empowering our management team and focusing on, what's the one big rock that I can shift today? What's the one big thing that I can do today that when I jump back into bed tonight, I'll go, yeah, I've had a productive day. 

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So rather than making a list and trying to do a 100 things, just making a list of three and trying to do one or two – but they're bigger things that are meaty. It’s really looking at prioritising high-impact, high-priority work over low-impact, low-priority stuff that you fall into the default mode of doing as a founder from when you were running it on your own – answering customer feedback or paying an invoice, versus the finance manager doing it. It’s making sure that as CEO, I’m focusing on the bigger-ticket items. 

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2. Take a breath

Part of my morning routine is I’ll wake up and have a warm shower, finish with cold water and do a Wim Hof session. I do about 50 breaths. I come out of that oxygenated; you’ve got a dopamine hit, you're feeling pretty good. I’ve been doing that probably about four years now. I came across him on the internet – seeing this dude break all these records and expose himself to these gnarly conditions and through the power of breath get through it…For me, it's free, because I've been a poor founder for ages, and I could do it anywhere. 

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3. Fuel the team

Because I'm busy, I’d sometimes forget to eat or just not have time or money or both to go out and get a proper lunch. But now that the business is more established, we prioritise looking after our staff, including ourselves, through the business. We get a weekly shop done so that there's always good, healthy food available for our staff and ourselves at the office: heaps of fruit, nice bread, things like avocados. We also trade a lot of our own products for friends’ products so that we've got other supplements or powders for the team.

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4. Multitasking at the gym

On the theme of using your company to help improve and support your own health, we've done a corporate membership with a gym just down the road… that enables me to go, ‘yeah, I deserve and can go to the gym’ and we support our staff members to sign up and they pay a fraction of what a normal membership would cost. We allow them to go to the gym whenever they want. It's creating accessibility and dropping the barriers to that prejudice around, ‘you need to be in the office and you need to be working at your desk’.

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I try to go either at lunch time or if I've been too hungry and then eaten, then I’ll wait a couple of hours and do it in the afternoon. I'll take a couple of calls while I'm at the gym to gain that multitasking element, and then in between the sets, I usually punch out a few emails. It's a good way to just get away from the office, have some thinking time, and kick a few goals. 

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5. Lean on your board

The other trick is having a good board so that you can call your chair or your directors and cry on their shoulder if you want, because it is lonely. Having a good supportive board is really important; if you have directors who are not supportive, then you should bin them. Zac [Robinson] and I are the co-founders and we're on the board, but we've got our chairman and our other director who are amazing. With their records of having been there, done that, you can trust their advice.

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As told to Caitlin Sykes

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