Adam Kroener on Spartan Leadership: Building Carbliss, Scaling With Discipline, and Creating a Legacy That Lasts

Adam Kroener walked into my studio with the kind of story you only get from a guy who has built something real with his own hands.

President and co-founder of Carbliss. Army National Guard veteran. Iraq deployment. Manufacturing operator who once ran a P&L close to $750 million before he turned thirty. Husband. Father of three girls. And the man who turned a $2,500 down payment on a kitchen idea into a nine-figure beverage company now selling in twenty-three states.

Adam is one of those rare leaders who can hold the tactical and the spiritual in the same hand. We talked about formulation, scaling, P&L discipline, marriage, military service, and what it actually means to build a legacy. I left the conversation thinking about my own kids and the questions I want them to be able to answer about me when I'm gone.

Here's what stuck with me.

A $2,500 Bet On A Can He Couldn't Find

The Carbliss story starts where a lot of great businesses start. Adam picked up a canned drink, thought it was underwhelming, and decided he was going to make the version that should have existed in the first place. The label said lime. He couldn't find the lime.

He told me he Googled "how do I bring my beverage to life," found a partner that wanted $2,500 to start formulation, and walked into the kitchen to pitch his wife Amanda with a line I'll never forget. He said he was going to "put it in a can" and "sell the hell out of it."

Amanda did what every great integrator does. She didn't shoot it down. She said, "Adam, what's your plan?" He repeated himself word for word. So she came up with twenty to twenty-five questions he didn't have answers to yet. Those questions became the original Carbliss business plan.

Adam grinned when he told me they now do almost the opposite of that original plan. That's the thing nobody tells you about building. The plan is the starting point, not the destination. Conviction gets you in the door. Adaptation keeps you in the building.

Building With His Wife

This is the part of the episode I want every founder listening to hear twice.

Adam describes himself as the visionary and Amanda as the finance and execution counterpart. The visionary wants to run through walls. The integrator wants to know if the wall is load-bearing. When those two roles are in sync, the business compounds. When they're not, it grinds.

What I respected most is that Adam and Amanda didn't try to force the partnership before it was ready. Adam stayed in his W2 until May 2021. Amanda didn't step fully into the company until January 2025. She tried part-time in 2022 and it didn't fit yet, so she went back to the corporate world until the strategy work caught up to her capacity.

That's wisdom. Building with your spouse is not a one-decision moment. It's a series of decisions about timing, capacity, and honesty.

He also told me about how they design the Carbliss label. She tells him what she wants. He builds it. She tells him what she hates. He adjusts. Seven iterations later they land on the answer. He used to take it personally. Now he goes into every project expecting twenty revisions and counts it a win when they finish on three.

That's the marriage. That's the business. Same skill.

Iraq, The Factory Floor, And The Leader He Used To Be

Before Carbliss, Adam served in Iraq with the Army National Guard. He went on to work in manufacturing, started on the factory floor, and eventually led an organization of more than a thousand people.

What he said about leadership early in his career hit me. He told me his original leadership style was to yell louder when something wasn't getting done. He's the first to admit it didn't work. The thing that changed him was reading Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends And Influence People in 2014. He's read it more than thirty times since.

The principle that flipped him was the very first one in the book. Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. Seek to understand.

In 2017 Adam took it further. He brought Dale Carnegie leadership training into his manufacturing operation and personally taught it to about a hundred and twenty front-line leaders, then another eighty the next year. Three shifts. The same eight-week class taught three times a day for eight weeks. He stayed twelve hours a day so every shift could attend.

By the time he started scaling Carbliss, he had already done the deep work on what kind of leader he was going to be. That's not luck. That's preparation meeting opportunity.

His working principle on process is one I'm taking with me. Enough structure to create repeatable success. Not so much that you suffocate the creativity of the people closest to the problem.

What Scaling A Beverage Actually Takes

The strongest tactical section of the conversation was Adam walking me through what it really took to turn a homemade drink into something a contract manufacturer could produce by the millions of cans.

The phrase he used was "scalable batch." A drink that tastes great in your kitchen is not the same drink at commercial volume. The chemistry shifts. The carbonation shifts. The mouthfeel shifts.

Adam eventually flew to California because he realized he didn't have the language to describe what he was tasting. He used the lemon-lime example. He kept asking for "more lime." The team wasn't getting it. When he finally learned to describe the sour pinch in the back of his jowls he was chasing, the team added citric acid instead of more lime, and the formula landed in one sitting after six months of emailing back and forth.

That's a small story with a big lesson. Scaling requires better questions, not louder opinions. Founders don't have to know everything. They do have to learn how to work with experts, name what they don't know, and refine their language until execution matches intent.

Backyard To Backyard

When I asked Adam how he thinks about competition from the giants, he gave me a metaphor I haven't been able to shake. He stole it from Craig Culver. Backyard to backyard.

Picture a sapling you just planted. A lawnmower nicks it and the sapling dies. Now picture a tree that's two or three years old, trunk a few inches thick. The lawnmower hurts it. Maybe scars it. The tree keeps growing. Now picture a mature tree. The lawnmower glances off and the tree doesn't even notice.

Carbliss is the fourth-largest in the category by dollars in the geography they serve. Above them, three national brands. Below them, twenty more. They built the tree thick enough to take the hit before anyone tried to swing the mower.

The brands that get killed in their first three years are the ones that overextend before the trunk is strong enough to take damage. The brands that endure pick a small geography and dominate it.

The P&L Religion

Carbliss grew from $80,000 in first-year revenue into a nine-figure business. Adam was clear that the skill set that got him to one stage was not the skill set that would carry him to the next, and he keeps a healthy fear of being the leader who outgrows the company he built.

The financial backbone of that growth is something he learned working in a private-equity-style manufacturing environment. Even a $2,000 variance on a $2 million maintenance budget — one tenth of one percent — had to be explained to the CEO line by line. He was the ninth plant manager in seven years at that facility. The other eight had been fired. He decided to figure it out.

That discipline, paired with Amanda's finance mind, gave Carbliss a level of operational rigor most beverage startups never build.

I see this in the leaders I coach all the time. They want growth without the discipline of knowing their numbers cold. It doesn't work. Adam's company works because the financial muscle was built before the brand exploded.

The Four Responsibilities Of A Leader

I shared with Adam something my coach handed me when I bought my father out of the firm. He said, "Josh, you have four responsibilities. Recruit the best people. Develop them endlessly. Build an amazing culture. Run strong financials. Anyone who walks in your office with anything else is trying to put their monkey on your back."

Adam's career validates every one of those, and his Carbliss culture is built on a book I'd recommend to every leader reading this — Patrick Lencioni's The Ideal Team Player. His hiring filter is character first. He believes you can correct behavior. You can't correct character. They've hired a hundred and seven people. Five or six have been let go. One has quit.

That's a culture metric most companies will never touch.

The Standard He Holds Himself To

Adam said something simple that I haven't been able to shake. If it comes out of his mouth and he says he's going to do it, he's going to do it.

What sets him off isn't failure. It's broken commitments. He doesn't get stressed. He doesn't yell. But the moment a team member commits to something boldly and doesn't deliver, he says trust is broken. So he's learned to work with people on the front end to soften commitments, pressure-test them, make sure the words coming out of their mouth match the math behind them.

That's the standard. Say what you're going to do. Do what you say.

He told me this is what he wants his kids to know about him. "I'm the proof that you can live the American Dream if you do what you say you're going to do. About ninety-nine percent of people don't have that discipline. If you do, you're ahead of almost everyone."

That's a Kairos sentence if I've ever heard one.

Why The Name Matters

Adam's parent company is SN Food and Beverage. SN stands for Stephan Nicholas Feidler, his best friend who passed away in 2016. Adam named the parent company after him.

That detail is the whole story in a nutshell. Adam isn't building Carbliss just to win in the beverage aisle. He's building it as a monument to people he loves and a proof point to his kids that the American Dream is alive for anyone willing to do what they say they will do.

That's the legacy lens. It changes how you make decisions. It changes who you hire. It changes what you say yes to and what you walk away from.

Five Action Items For The Operator Who Wants To Build Like Adam

This is where I want to slow down and give you something you can actually use this week. These are pulled directly from what Adam said, filtered through what we coach at Kairos around the Five Bridges. None of these require more money. All of them require more honesty.

1. Bring The Integrator Into The Plan Before You Build The Deck

The most important step Adam took in starting Carbliss was letting Amanda ask twenty-five questions he didn't have answers to. Most visionaries skip this step because the questions feel like resistance. They aren't. They're the plan.

This week: Identify the person in your life or business who thinks the opposite of you. Bring them a vision or decision you're chasing. Ask them to ask you twenty questions you can't answer. Write their questions down before you write a single answer.

2. Audit Your Commitments

Adam holds himself to a standard most leaders won't. If it comes out of his mouth, it gets done.

This week: List every commitment you've made out loud in the last thirty days. Marriage, kids, team, clients. Mark each one done, in progress, or quietly dropped. Then send one text or have one conversation per dropped commitment to either close the loop or formally retract it. That conversation is harder than you think. Do it anyway.

3. Find Your Language Gap

Adam couldn't get the lemon-lime formula right because he didn't have the words for the sensation he was chasing. The flight to California wasn't a manufacturing trip. It was a language trip.

This week: Pick the project in your business that has been stuck the longest. Ask yourself, "Where are my words too vague for an expert to deliver on?" Spend thirty minutes writing the specifics you've been waving your hand at. Then send those specifics to the person you've been frustrated with. You'll almost always find the bottleneck was on your side of the page.

4. Plant The Tree Thick Enough To Take A Hit

Adam dominates twenty-three states by choice. He could have spread thinner across fifty. He didn't. The brands that survive the first three years are the ones that get strong somewhere small before they get noticed everywhere.

This week: Look at your business, your team, or your personal life. Are you a sapling in fifty backyards or a tree in three? Pick the three backyards that matter most. Pour disproportionate energy into those for the next ninety days. Cancel something to make room.

5. Read One Book That Will Change How You Lead

Adam credits Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends And Influence People with rewiring how he leads. He has read it more than thirty times. He also brought it to the factory floor and personally taught it to two hundred front-line leaders.

This week: Pick one book that you suspect would change your leadership and you have been avoiding. Get it today. Read the first chapter tonight. Add it to your calendar twice a week until it's done. Then teach one principle from it to your team. Adam's life pivoted on that single decision in 2014.

Three Challenges I'm Leaving You With

These are mine, not Adam's. But they came directly out of the conversation, and they line up with the Five Bridges of Kairos — Spiritual, Internal, Relationships, Environment, Legacy.

Challenge One — Internal Bridge. Write the newspaper headline about you, the one Dale Carnegie made Adam write. What does the article say after your name? If the answer isn't clear, that's the work.

Challenge Two — Relationships Bridge. Ask your spouse, your kids, or your closest business partner one question this week: "What am I asking you to deliver on without giving you what you actually need to deliver it?" Listen without defending.

Challenge Three — Legacy Bridge. Adam told me if you need to have a son to carry your legacy, your legacy isn't worth carrying. The point hit me as a girl dad too. What is the proof-of-life you want your kids to see in how you operate, not just in what you achieve?

Where Adam Goes From Here

Adam has been pitched by half a dozen of the biggest beverage companies in the world. He's run every call. He told me he could keep building Carbliss for another ten or fifteen years and have a blast. But he also said something that stayed with me.

"If I fail to lead it correctly, I'm not allowing the consumer the option to choose this product." That's the real responsibility. Not running a business for fun. Stewarding something so well that the people who would love it actually get to find it.

That's the work. That's the standard. That's the bar I want every leader at our table to be measuring against.

If you take one thing from Adam, take this. Build something your kids would be proud to inherit, and run it with the discipline of someone who knows the name on the building.

Inspire & Impact,

Josh