How I Lead This: Behind The Leadership Brand Of Firebelly Tea Founder David Segal
Can rooibos and matcha boost your leadership brand … and maybe even spawn a business empire?
If you’re David Segal, the answer is a resounding yes.
The DAVIDsTEA founder has long been known as an evangelist for the health and productivity benefits of tea. He’s leveraged that brand to accelerate the growth of his latest venture, Firebelly Tea — a new way to buy premium organic teas, online.
Born in Ottawa, Segal spent 13 years in Montreal, including time studying commerce and English literature studies at McGill University. In 2008 he launched the first DAVIDsTEA retail outlet in Toronto. The company scaled up quickly, opening roughly 160 outlets.
David soon became known as a thought-leader in retail strategy. As one website puts it, DAVIDsTEA brought “radical innovation to a 5,000-year-old product category.”
In 2021, six years after leaving DAVIDsTEA (and after co-founding restaurant chain Mad Radish), he launched Firebelly with Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. David has continued to build on his personal brand through public speaking engagements, podcast appearances—his own Big Shot, which he co-hosts with Finkelstein, and others—and in articles for publications like the Financial Post.
On LinkedIn, he shares business updates and his passion for tea with 11.2k+ followers. He is also active on Instagram under the handle @tea_maverick.
Here’s what Firebelly Tea’s David Segal had to share with The Helm:
Emoji you can’t live without: 🙂 Important to smile and enjoy the ride
TED Talk you’d really love to give: The most important thing to manage is your own psychology. In many ways entrepreneurship is a personal journey disguised as a business pursuit. You grow through the often painful and sometimes lonely journey with all the highs and the lows of building a business. Learning to become less impulsive and more resilient over time leads to far better decision-making, and also a better attitude. When you develop your identity independent of the success or failure of the project du jour you’re less absorbed by the difficulties of the moment and able to maintain clearer perspective.
Secret sign from childhood you were destined to be a leader: I wanted to build a skating rink in the backyard when I was nine. My parents said no because it was too much work. But I was determined to do it, so I started filling up empty sour cream containers with water from the sink, walking outside with them, and dumping them on the snow in the backyard one by one. I did this for hours until finally my family realized I wasn’t going to stop despite the futility of the effort. So they joined in, and we did it properly. My dad fired up the garden hose, and we all took turns watering what became a great skating rink that the entire family enjoyed that winter.
Stories are everything in business. What’s your go-to story that consistently moves people? When we started DAVIDsTEA, I was a tea salesman. Nothing more. I worked in our first few stores directly with our customers learning how to sell tea and make customers happy. Even as the company grew to hundreds of stores, I never forgot the importance of connecting directly with our customers—and on almost every store visit I would hop behind the counter and sell tea. No matter how big your business gets, never distance yourself from the front lines and lose sight of why customers exchange money for your goods and services.
As a leader, what keeps you up at night? Very little that I could clearly articulate. When something keeps me up at night, it’s usually the byproduct of an overworked mind that’s ruminating and stops making sense. Anything urgent, critical, or disturbing has the potential to keep me up, but I try really hard to shut it down early enough in the evening so that I can get a bit of distance from it, a good night’s sleep, and awake with a clear head ready to solve it.
What words or phrases define your leadership style? What we stand for shouldn’t change, how we do things should never stop changing.
My biggest insecurity about how people perceive me as a leader is … [that I’m] overwhelming. I don’t necessarily act on everything, but I entertain a lot of ideas and initiatives. And I’m an intense person. When someone already has a full plate and I come charging in with something I think is important in that moment to evaluate it can be too much.
Social media as a leader: love it or leave it? Love it. Great way to tell stories and connect. I love tea and am the main person in Firebelly Tea’s social. Would love to carve out more time for my personal social as well.
Your #1 must-follow account on social media: @BigShotShow. It’s a podcast I started with my friend Harley Finkelstein to archive the stories of the most successful Jewish entrepreneurs on the planet (most of whom started with nothing). Their stories are enormously entertaining and full of timeless wisdom.
What is the biggest benefit you’ve seen from building your leadership brand? Building a leadership brand is a modern-day, dynamic version of a resume. It can connect you to incredible people and communities and interesting opportunities.
A big thanks to David for lifting the hood on his unique leadership brand for The Helm. You can find David on Instagram @tea_maverick, on bigshot.show and of course at firebellytea.ca.
