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The Bello Method
From the start, Bello has said he wants to build Adina’s globally-inspired coffee line to challenge Starbucks’ domination of the ready to drink coffee category. While he won’t get on the street, he said he will play director for Adina’s next act, and instill the organization with the “Bello Method.”
The Bello method is a blend of football-coach motivational strategy and guerilla – he calls it “go-rilla” – marketing. In his SoBe days, Bello was known to march into convenience stores, rip the Snapple stickers off the coolers and replace them with SoBe stickers. He also motivated his team with “Bello-isms” like “Snapple is crapple” and “put AriZona in a coma,” and made curiously effective use of the company’s voicemail system, according to John Kenneally, who headed up SoBe’s West Coast sales.
“He would encourage everybody in the company to get on that voicemail on a daily basis and talk about positive things in the marketplace,” Kennelly said. “It rea
lly fired you up.”
When someone at SoBe failed, Kenneally said, they didn’t have to be chastised. They went home knowing that they let down their coach and their team, and that powerful mix gave the staff a strong dose of motivation.
“I would wake up in the morning and want to run through a burning wall of fire… to make him proud,” Kenneally said.
Kenneally, currently working on Cytosport’s RTD line of Muscle Milk, said Bello’s tactics made SoBe’s staff feel like a tight-knit sports team pursuing a championship.
Of course, every championship coach makes a few mistakes. Just ask Bill Belichik.
Bob Miller, one-time SoBe executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing and now executive vice president of sales and head of strategic planning for Function Drinks, said he disliked Bello the first time they met. The two crossed paths at a 1994 trade show when Miller worked for Mistic and Bello worked for AriZona.
“At first, I couldn’t stand the guy,” Miller said. “(He was) just like real arrogant and cocky.”
Bello framed conflicts in terms of war, Miller said, and was unwilling to lose a battle. Miller recalled one instance where a distributor said he wasn’t interested in carrying SoBe. Bello yelled his way up the company’s chain of command until the last person he reached declared that the distributor would never carry SoBe, unless Bello left.
Miller later developed respect for Bello, he said, and he saw at SoBe how that cockiness played out in a business environment. That all-or-nothing attitude could have had a lot to do with what was at stake for Bello, Miller said. He said The Lizard King built his kingdom by leveraging his castle, offering his house to the bank as collateral so that the company could get a line of credit. And while Bello’s bluster may have cost SoBe one distributor, he eventually sold the company to Pepsi for a cool $337 million.
But that 2001 sale still stands as Bello’s crowning achievement. Before starting the company, he achieved notable successes at NFL Properties; after leaving SoBe, he and Sherbrooke facilitated the estimated $75 million sale of IZZE sparkling juice drinks to Pepsi. In between, however, he’s had a hand in a couple of ventures that have limped into transition. Or failure.