What would make a successful person consider leaving their six-figure engineering career they not only liked, but also thrived at?

How about kombucha?

A 2014 graduate of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, Matt Lancor had only been at his first job for a few months before what many would consider an average decision at a grocery store would spark the idea for not just a product, but an entirely new business: Kombuchade.

Formulated with athletes in mind, Lancor combined his knowledge from materials science, his lived experience as a Division I rugby athlete, and his desire to impact others into a product that gives people a gut check to their gut health. One decade later, Kombuchade is available in stores around the Chicagoland area, online, and in Harvest Markets in Champaign and Springfield, Ill., and Carmel, Ind. 

But like most journeys, it hasn’t been straightforward or easy. In fact, Lancor compares it to how one climbs Mount Everest. In this Q and A, Lancor shares not only his path to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the beginnings of Kombuchade, but also his learned lessons and how he turned his dream to help people improve themselves into a reality.

This interview has been edited for clarity.  

I have always had a bit of an entrepreneurial bug. I was mowing lawns and doing some landscaping stuff, starting in middle school. Then I got a job working as a lifeguard and swim instructor. The big thing I pulled from that experience was seeing people go through personal transformations in a short period of time, like coaching kids who were scared to even get in the pool and watching them be able to jump off a high dive eight to 12 weeks later. So, there was this entrepreneurial bug mixed with this emotional affinity towards helping people through personal transformations or impact. How could I have a big impact in a small amount of time? 

I had a math teacher who was a U of I graduate whose daughter was in the material science engineering programs, and he encouraged me to just check the program out. I went down to Engineering Open house and I came across several booths that really sparked this creative, innovative thought process inside of me, and specifically, one of them was about sports equipment. I've been an athlete my entire life. I used to do gymnastics, soccer, American football, rugby, and wrestling. I was looking for an engineering program where I could also play high level rugby.  

I applied to the U of I with this fantasy that I could use materials engineering to create new sports equipment. But the reality of it was this understanding that new material developments drive large impacts in the marketplace. There was a gap between when these things are discovered and when they create impacts in the marketplace, and I wanted to be right in the middle. I didn't want to be the guy in the lab and I didn't want to be the guy 20 years later who said “I wish I knew about this technology.” I wanted to be the entrepreneur/product developer/bring these new things to market.

When I was getting close to graduating, I had this goal to get into a role that would support me and help me build the skills that I would need to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t know what that was going to be, though. In a twist of fate, I stumbled upon technical sales and there was a role that was open in a Chicago suburb.  It was a branch office for a German automation company that manufactured industrial components for Fortune 500 companies. My day-to-day was like the TV show, ‘How It’s Made.’ I would go into 10-12 manufacturing plants per week and they would describe to me their entire process. Through that role, I got to see behind the curtain of domestic manufacturing: automotive, pharmaceutical, materials, handling, and food and beverage.  

At the same time, I was competing at a high level of rugby. I was competing in a national championship out in Seattle and was with a friend of mine. We were out shopping for some snacks, and he said “Hey, we should try this kombucha drink. I heard it’s good for your gut health.” We bought three bottles and I drank one that night. I actually didn’t mind the taste, but what I really respected and loved about it was how clean label it was. It just felt like an organic, healthy soda to me. We used to get some indigestion because at these tournaments you’re under a lot of stress and you're typically living on Cliff bars, bananas, caffeine goos and caffeine tablets. It just kind of settled all the indigestion.  

Later, I was at a beer brewery in Wisconsin working on a project and I just got this epiphany: Hey, this stuff’s super functional for athletes, but everybody that’s making kombucha is formulating it and marketing it towards hippies. Because of that, none of the guys on my rugby team had ever heard of it or considered it. I just got this download of ‘Hey, kombucha is going to be like the craft beer of health and wellness, and there’s probably 100,000 people out there that are like you that would want a product like this if it were formulated and marketed towards a more active, everyday kind of person.’  

I started brewing in my mom’s kitchen and I got a nutritional therapy certification online. It took me about six months, researched different herbs and teas that would be useful, and I just started selling it at my CrossFit gym, my yoga studio, and at rugby practice. I was doing about $2,000-$3,000 a month in cash, and that was the kickoff.  

He said, “Matt, you’re really good at this job, but you’re going to be good at whatever you do. So, if this is what you’re going to do, I recommend that you just go all in.” I was shocked and surprised at that. I told him I was thinking about leaving at the end of the year, which would have been December 2015. They actually laid me off right around Thanksgiving that year, which sucked. But the silver lining was I had about nine months of unemployment checks to essentially launch my brand. So, I initiated the ‘I’m gonna go all in,’ but I was essentially fired and thrust out of the nest and just had to make it work.  

I don't even know how to describe it sometimes because I just had this faith that this project was going to work out. But the reality of it looks like living on $18,000 a year, driving for Uber, shopping on food stamps, and working on a pizza truck at a farmer's market, just trying to find a way to make ends meet. I also had $100,000 in student loan debt from the U of I that my parents had co-signed. I never missed a payment, and I did that on my own, although I did qualify for some income based repayment programs at one point that did help.

There was an intense amount of financial pressure, but I really believed in the future of gut health as the next wave of human development. I just had to figure out how to communicate that, manufacture it and penetrate that market. 

I knew it was going to take 20 years. I mean, I’m 10 years in this journey, it’s going to take another 10, or even 20, until it’s in a place where somebody might consider purchasing it. But the original motivation was freedom of time, being an entrepreneur and having a lasting impact and transformation in other people. That’s what keeps me going. The money will come and there will probably be an exit at some point just because of the nature of the game. But that’s not my north star.  

My north star is kids drinking Gatorade on a Saturday morning and consuming the corn-based sweeteners that are contaminated with glyphosate, which has been shown to mess with gut health, and that creating chronic health issues for people, and how can I synthesize this chronic health problem that we’re facing into something that’s cool, drinkable, easy and convenient for people. 

If I were to draw revenue terms, you start at zero and go to one. A lot of people never even make their first dollar. They're trying to get the perfect product, the perfect marketing plan, and they never even make their first dollar.  

So I made my first dollar, then I try to think about 10x increments. I made $1, now how do I make $10? And I'm in that phase now where we've consistently done $100,000, and am exploring how to make this next 10x jump to $1million. At that $100 million mark is where we're going to either be crushed or acquired. It could happen sooner. But the goal, if I can target 100,000 people drinking three cans per week, that would be $100 million in annual revenue, roughly.  

In the last 12 months, we have added some really talented/experienced individuals to the advisory board: David Butler (former VP of Global Design at Coca-Cola), Dr. Bob Murray (co-founder of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute), Greg Via (former head of Olympic Partnerships at Procter & Gamble), Wayne Lutomski (former VP at Gatorade, Snapple, and Starbucks Frappuccino), and Jacque Scaramella (sports dietitian for Olympic and Paralympic athletes). We have a manufacturing plant built in Chicago with the operational capacity to scale to a million in annual revenue. We have the accounts in the pipeline that will get us there, and we're actively going to be opening a fundraising round here soon to some angel investors. We're talking to some of the Illini Angels who are going to be a part of that conversation. They haven't committed yet, but we have some early interest.

I've often questioned that myself. Why am I this way? Again, the two core values for me are this entrepreneurial ability to create value and impact and my freedom of my time. I look at my life through that lens. And if I can create value, and I get to choose what I work on, and what I'm working on can create transformation or impact for something bigger than myself, then I seem to have unlimited energy.  

I have helped my wife launch an online mental health therapy practice. That's impact. It's just business development, and how do we create impact for millennial women? As a hobby, I don't make money from it yet, but I run a seven-acre permaculture orchard which is in its third or fourth year. That's super cool, and that's related to microbes. It all comes to this idea, again, that gut health and microbes and that whole interaction with food and how we feel and how we show up in the world, is a way for me to have a massive amount of impact over time. I'm really religious about my time management, something I really put a lot of effort into. 

It was formative, from the unique mix of materials engineering being so highly ranked to the level of professors and researchers that were here at the space to my access to Division I rugby club and the extracurriculars. I was a part of the Illinois Business Consulting Group, which was super formative in rounding out my engineering skill sets. I got the perfect blend of social, high-level research and engineering mixed with some extracurricular business development and entrepreneurship exposure that built an incredible platform and foundation for me to do what I’m doing now.  

Illinois is how I got my first job; other employees were U of I engineers.  There’s this ancillary effect of the network effect. As we have this conversation, there could be thousands of people in the U of I network that will now be inspired to find their own purpose and passion overlap for themselves. 

The barrier to entry to starting your own business has never been lower. You can leverage AI in ways that are unimaginable to people even five years ago. You can start a website, file an LLC. If anything, the biggest problem they’re going to face is analysis paralysis of the opportunities that they have available to them. I encourage them to figure out what their core values are, spend some time investing in them and just get going. Even if Kombuchade crashed and burned tomorrow, I will have developed my skills and built a network that is going to launch me into whatever’s next.  

I think my advice is just identify those core values and just start going in that direction. You don’t have to have it all figured out.