In his current role as the CEO of the healthy snack food company Rivalz and during his previous military career, Peter Barrick has always been drawn to applying his skills and talents to achieve the greater good. After graduating from UC Davis, I had a calling to serve our country,” Barrick told Entrepreneur. “And so around 2005, I joined one of the most difficult branches of the military, the Marine Corps.”
Barrick was selected for the Navy-Marine Corps jet aviation program and flew in combat missions in Afghanistan. He then became a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, a complicated and hazardous role that involves being on the ground with infantry and directing military aircraft supporting the mission from above. Barrick spent a lot of time as part of the crisis response force operating in North Africa, East Africa and the Middle East, and in the last stage of his military career, became a Naval flight instructor. “It was very challenging and scary,” he says of his time teaching elite pilots. “You strap on two rockets every other day and you’re instructing a new student — it’s very dangerous.”
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When his time in the military ended, Barrick went back to UC Davis to get his MBA. He then worked at Mars Global, Wells Fargo and with entrepreneur Jon Sebastiani who started Sonoma Brands Capital. When Barrick connected with Harold Schmitz and Ralph Jerome, former executives at Mars, he felt that familiar desire to do something bigger. He listened to their dream of bringing affordable nutrition to the food market and it was the catalyst he needed to branch out and “start something from zero.”
Along with Schmitz, Jerome and Victor Friedberg, Miguel Reyna and Ilias Tagkopoulos, he co-founded the snack Rivalz. The bite-sized crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside snacks are packed with 8g protein, 4g fiber, and 7 essential vitamins and minerals per serving — with no gluten, wheat, nuts, dairy, soy, or animal products. (Imagine a super-healthy bag of Combos.) “We’re doing what General Mills and companies like that aren’t able to do,” he says. “We have none of the junk in our snacks.”
Credit: Rivalz
Rivalz will be in nearly 2,000 stores by the end of the year, they’ve struck a deal to be in L.A. Unified School District vending machines and their Amazon sales are up 8.4X year over year. “We’re flying for sure,” says Barrick. Here are some of the takeaways from Barrick’s career and leadership style that entrepreneurs can apply to starting or growing their dream business.
Embracing your strengths
“Everybody needs to understand who they are. You have to understand your strengths and weaknesses. I thrive when the environment is risky or chaotic. That’s what I was built to do — bring clarity to a foggy situation. I get meaning out of life doing the most challenging things imaginable and not knowing whether I’m going to succeed or fail. That’s what brings gratification to my soul.”
Getting inspired
“During my military service, I got to see food insecurity at its worst, especially in East Africa. Kids don’t know when they’ll get their next meal, but they still want to play a Friday soccer game. And the soccer ball is a tied-up plastic bag and the field outline is rocks. So that’s where I gained my passion. We created a premier snack that is off the charts in terms of nutrition and delivers protein without requiring refrigeration, one of the biggest factors facing sub-Saharan Africa or Southwest Asia and other regions.”
Related: 26 Inspiring Quotes About Crisis Management and Teamwork from Military Veteran Entrepreneurs
Testing your idea
“At the beginning of a company, entrepreneurs do research and figure out the emerging trends and then assess whether there are current products out in the market that meet those trends. If the answer is no, then you launch a company. If the answer is yes, then you don’t bother. We identified two major trends. One is that consumers, especially the younger generation, are moving away from three traditional meals and are snacking more. And you have the GLP-1 craze, where consumers are taking things like Ozempic. But they’re losing muscle mass as well as fat. So we’re the go-to snack for maintaining muscle mass while rolling back that 50-year pandemic of diabetes and obesity due to our low glycemic nature. So we hit yes on two major trends.”
Naming your company
“We thought about our end goal, which is to end a 50-year pandemic of malnutrition, diabetes, and obesity. The only way to do that is to rival the norm. And so that’s where the name Rivalz came from.”
Decision-making under stress
“In the Marine Corps and in the job I do now, being calm is king. The worst thing you can do is get angry or freak out when something goes wrong. It doesn’t help anybody. In the Marine Corps, they train you to compartmentalize and you learn to think when there’s chaos. You get comfortable with the unknowns, making decisions with 70 percent information or less. That’s one of the reasons for our nation’s success in battles. We train our troops down to the lowest rank to out-decide the enemy. They don’t have to wait for the chain of command to tell them what to do. I carry this over into business leadership. I created what I call decision boxes. I tell people that is your area of responsibility. I give clearly defined roles and goals. Then I provide department heads the freedom to maneuver how they see fit to accomplish those goals. Everybody is valuable with that kind of structure.”
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