Jacob Lapera, Author at Business RadioX ® Page

Nasutsa Mabwa And Sam Simon With Restoration By Simons

July 5, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Chicago Business Radio

Nasutsa Mabwa And Sam Simon With Restoration By Simons

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Nasutsa Mabwa, President at Restoration By Simons

Nasutsa Mabwa is President of Restoration By Simons, a MBE/WBE certified firm with the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois. Nasutsa brings an extensive background of commercial real estate development to Restoration By Simons. She is focused upon building the commercial and residential side of property restoration and construction business by nurturing and developing key real estate industry relationships.

For all her achievements and involvement, Nasutsa was awarded the Women in Real Estate Bright Horizon Award in 2008 and named one of Crain’s Chicago Business’s “40 Under 40 Class” of 2010. She is a 2015 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Graduate, and a 2015 Chicago Anchors For a Strong Economy/World Business Chicago Program Graduate. The firm is a SB100 Best of Small Business Award Winner 2021, Bronze Stevie® Award in the Female Entrepreneur of the Year category in the 18th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business, recipient of the 2020 Better Business Bureau’s Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics and the recipient of the 2020 Skokie Business of the Year Award, Honorable Mention Category.

Nasutsa previously served as a Senior Project Manager for McCaffery Interests, a real estate development firm. At McCaffery, she managed the Lakeside Development, a 600- acre mixed-use community on Chicago’s southeast side. Before joining McCaffery, Nasutsa worked for the City of Chicago as an Urban Planner and Director.

Currently, Nasutsa is the President of the Board of Directors for The Evanston Chamber of Commerce. Nasutsa also was honored by the Daily Herald Business Ledger in their C-Suite Awards Ceremony, 2020, and as an Influential Women in Business 2017 by the Daily Herald Business Ledger and an Influential Woman in Business in 2018 by the Chicago Business Journal.

Nasutsa holds two advanced degrees: a master’s degree in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois-Chicago and an MBA with a real estate development concentration from Roosevelt University.

Follow Restoration By Simons on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the business radio studio in Chicago, Illinois. It’s time for Chicago Business Radio. Brought to you by firm space, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm space.com. Now here’s your host.

Max Kantor: [00:00:21] Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kantor. And before we get started, as always, today’s show is sponsored by firm SpaceX, thanks to firm SpaceX, because without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. And we’ve got a good one for you today. Today’s show actually features two guests. We have the president of restoration by Simons, Natsuko Magawa, and the managing director of Restoration by Simons, Sam Simon. Welcome to the show, guys.

Sam Simon: [00:00:50] Thank you. Thank you very much.

Max Kantor: [00:00:53] So let’s jump right in. Tell me a little bit about restoration by Simon’s Oak.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:01:00] Well, our company is Restoration by Simon’s, and we provide commercial and residential water cleanup, water damage restoration, fire and smoke cleanup, and a whole line of specialty cleaning services to our customers in the greater Chicago metro area.

Max Kantor: [00:01:16] How did you guys get into this business?

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:01:19] Oh, that’s a long story. So Sam and I have been doing this for quite a bit. We just have this year our ten year anniversary. But originally we learned about a franchise opportunity as we were looking to some other business opportunities and decided it would be a really good way for us to have a better work life balance and grow our own business while we’re growing our own family.

Max Kantor: [00:01:43] How did you two meet? Like, what are your individual backgrounds?

Sam Simon: [00:01:48] Well, I’ll jump in on this one. You and I, we met as social workers. We were working in child welfare in the mid nineties and we met at the same organization and we, you know, we were social workers initially because we, we wanted to do something that was meaningful and to give back to the community and to help the community. And we did that for a few years. And then we we moved on to our respective careers. And then, of course, after marriage and children, we decided that we wanted to go into business for ourselves. And we happened upon the ServiceMaster franchise. And and while doing our research on the franchise and on the industry as a whole, we saw that this was just another level of of of working. Of course, managing a business and creating a business for ourselves, but at the same time, helping people put their lives back together after disasters like water damage or fire damage or smoke damage. So it was kind of utilizing our skills in helping people.

Max Kantor: [00:03:13] Yeah, I thought that was so interesting when you said social work, because the common denominator there between what you did and what you do now is caring and helping other people.

Sam Simon: [00:03:26] Exactly that we find know we work with people in residential or commercial settings who are are stressed out by the circumstance, by the damage. They’re in a panicked panic state. They’ve they’ve suffered some loss, whether it’s material loss, whether it’s damage to the home. I mean, it’s all initially shocking. And Masuka and I have developed these dispositions, these calm dispositions, and to help the customer, the consumer, see that although this is a type of shock, but ultimately it’s not something that can’t be cleaned, disinfected, dried and repaired totally.

Max Kantor: [00:04:14] And I think that’s such an important thing to bring, especially with a company like yours, when you’re dealing with people who are going through that shock, who are obviously very upset, it’s important to to look at, okay, we can help you clean up, but we can also help you feel okay as well. And you guys are bringing both.

Sam Simon: [00:04:33] Sure. I mean, my my my initial question, when I speak for the first time to a customer that suffered from a water or a smoke damage or a fire damage, my initial question always is, how’s the family? How’s the family? How are your pets? Is everybody okay? And I think by asking that question and they say, well, no, everybody is fine. And that immediately sets the tone for what’s to come after that. Right? Everything is okay. Everything can be repaired.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:05:07] And then we walk them through what the steps are so they know what’s coming because it’s very disruptive to homeowners and to property managers and business owners. But it’s disruption, right. And it can be very chaotic and stressful. And it takes time away from your normal schedule of events and your family. So by explaining to them what’s going to happen, what the restoration process entails, we’re able to help calm them, give them a feeling of stability, and know that it’s going to be resolved and we can restore them back to the pre lost condition before the water damage happened, before the fire and smoke damage happened or what have you.

Max Kantor: [00:05:42] So for someone who has to go through this, whether it be fire damage, water damage or any other type of need where they need you guys, especially cleaning, what do you recommend first steps be if someone has this happen to them?

Sam Simon: [00:05:59] Well. So, for instance, let’s let’s talk about water damage, for instance. I mean, if a property owners had a water damage of. Where do they come from? They need to understand where the water came from. Is the water coming up out of the out of the drains? Well, then that perhaps that means you have a drain blockage. So in that specific case, you probably need to call a plumber first to get that taken care of. So then we can get in there and start our work. Was it a water tank rupture? Have the water tank switched out? In some cases, we can work alongside a plumber. But in the case, for instance, where they’re rotting out the pipes that’s invasive and dirty and messy and they take up a lot of space for that. So sometimes we tend to wait for them to finish because they’re going to kick up a lot more raw sewage. So we we prefer to get in there after. So there’s a myriad of plumbing issues that can create water damages. So in those cases, it’s important to get a plumber out there first and then from there it’s really everything else is logistics.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:07:20] Right? You’re dealing with their content, too. If it’s in a basement, for example, usually people have things in their basement, personal content boxes, what have you. So that has to be removed. Some of it has to be discarded, some of it can be restored. So we talk through all of that with the customer as well.

Max Kantor: [00:07:38] Got you. Now, you two are in the process of writing your first book.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:07:44] Yes.

Max Kantor: [00:07:46] Can you tell me a little bit about it? I see it’s called Restore.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:07:49] Yes. So our book came out about a week ago and it’s called Restore. A Complete Guide to Protecting Your Home as Your Most Valuable Asset From Water and Fire Disasters. And Sam and I coauthored the book and basically within its pages are sections on water, fire cleaning and disinfection and also some information on insurance, because many customers will use insurance for larger claims. And it’s just small chapters. Each section, each topic is very easy to read and navigate. And we wanted to share all of the information and resources we’ve learned over the years with our customers, because we do this so often and we didn’t really find a resource out there to share with customers that we like. So we wrote our own.

Max Kantor: [00:08:36] Well, congratulations. I didn’t realize it came out so soon. So congratulations on the release of of the book. And now you mentioned that within the book you talk about kind of the challenges and successes that that you’ve had running a disaster restoration business for you. In the course of owning this business, what has been the biggest challenge that you’ve had to overcome?

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:09:03] That’s probably has to be answered in a multi response.

Sam Simon: [00:09:07] Which which challenge are you talking about?

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:09:11] In which time period? I mean, the most recent challenge would have been the pandemic, right? As business owners and we are entrepreneurs and we’re very quick on our feet and we’re responsive, we were able to pivot and offer COVID disinfection services in 2020 when the pandemic began and other services were being requested. And we needed to keep the business moving. So we switched to that service line very quickly, and we did that all of 2020 and into 2021. Today we get very few calls for COVID, but still, every week or two we’ll get a few calls in. That would be one example of a really big challenge that we had to overcome and to keep the business moving. In the past, before the pandemic, I would say it’s kind of finding the right team members to join the team, finding enough business to come in on a on a stable level and being responsive to the marketplace in terms of restoration, because the needs change over time, technology and equipment and just being responsive and agile to keep the business open year after year. So it’s evolved.

Sam Simon: [00:10:16] And some of it are understanding the nuances of consumer behavior, the nuances of weather behavior, and understanding how those play into our ebbs and flows in the business. Right. So, I mean, there are there are months where it’s gangbusters and there are there are days and where things are kind of calm and like traditionally the month of June is a little slower because it’s great weather. It’s it’s there there’s less rain. Rain happens to be a small part of our business. Right. The inclement weather. But so it tends to be a little more slow and steady. Then when you get in the rainy months of spring or the rainy months of fall or the freezing months of winter, sometimes that goes haywire. So it’s understanding those weather patterns, it’s understanding consumer behavior. And that takes some time. That takes a few years to understand and say, oh, yeah, remember, June is slow, remember, September is busy. And so you kind of get used to that and and you learn and you grow and you make adjustments to your business to, to align with that information.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:11:45] And I would say another thing that we’ve done is we’ve grown and gotten a little bit more mature in our business as owners, is focusing on the services that we do really well and having processes internally so we can succeed and meet our customers expectations consistently. That’s really important. We want more than anything always for our customers to be pleased and satisfied. So making sure we really are good at what we do and not just trying everything as some companies do, just focusing in on our strengths has helped us be more successful as well.

Max Kantor: [00:12:17] So that was the challenges that you guys have had to overcome. On the flip side, I want to ask each of you, what is the most rewarding part about what you do?

Sam Simon: [00:12:30] I can start that. I mean that. I’m sure Nasser agrees. We love getting in there. In a person’s time of need, in a person’s time, in a person’s time of panic. And and fixing the situation restoring the situation back to what it was before the damage occurred. We we we like to see the relief on our customer’s faces. We like to see the smiles on their faces. And let’s face it, we like to thank yous. We like the. Hey, Sam. Thanks. Or. Hey, nice. Thank you. We get satisfaction and fulfillment out of again. Out of helping people.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:13:24] Yeah. And we meet the needs of the customers because they have a problem. They call us because they have a problem they can’t solve or they don’t have the capacity to solve it. And helping them through that. And it can be very chaotic sometimes and sometimes not so much. But the really big projects that seem very stressful and challenging for customers, we were able to navigate through that and makes us feel like we’ve accomplished something because we’re helping others. We’re very passionate about what we do, but making sure that they’re calm and satisfied and finishing the project from beginning to end is very rewarding for us because we want them to be pleased and help them solve their problem, right? Because that’s why they called us in the first place. So it is rewarding every week as we help each customer.

Max Kantor: [00:14:08] Now. If someone listening wants to learn more about restoration by Simon’s or your book Restore, what’s the best way they can learn more about you to?

Sam Simon: [00:14:18] Well, they can they.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:14:19] Can.

Sam Simon: [00:14:20] They can certainly come to our website at ServiceMaster restoration by Simons dot com. They can go to our Facebook page which is Facebook at ServiceMaster restoration by Simon’s. They can. Or they can look up our book, which is on Amazon.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:14:42] It’s called Restore and they’re under the book section because there’s other items maybe similar. Sometimes it’s best to put in like restore water or restore fire, but it comes up right away and it’s live on their website. So that’s another place to find us.

Sam Simon: [00:15:00] They can always reach us by phone at eight, five, five, nine. Simons.

Max Kantor: [00:15:04] Awesome. Well, Nsukka, Sam, you guys are both doing great work and we appreciate all that you’re doing for the community. So thank you so much for being on the show today.

Nasutsa Mabwa: [00:15:13] Thank you.

Sam Simon: [00:15:13] Thanks, Max.

Max Kantor: [00:15:15] And thank all of you for listening to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kanter, and we’ll see you next time.

Intro: [00:15:24] This episode of Chicago Business Radio has been brought to you by firm space, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm Space.com.

Jennifer Diaz With Diaz Trade Law

July 5, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Association Leadership Radio

Jennifer Diaz With Diaz Trade Law

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Jennifer Diaz, President at Diaz Trade Law

Jennifer (Jen) Diaz is the President and Founder of Diaz Trade Law. Jen is a Chambers ranked, Board Certified International Attorney specializing in customs and international trade. For more than 15 years, Jen has provided legal advice and customized training on import and export compliance to industry, with a strong record of success in mitigating federal administrative enforcement actions.

Jen has received many accolades from the legal community, including being recognized by “Super Lawyers” as a Top International Attorney, having an AV rating of “Superb,” and serving as President of the Organization of Women in International Trade (2018-2019). A frequent media commentator, Jen has authored book chapters for The Florida Bar and the American Bar Association, numerous Bloomberg Law articles and other leading publications. Jen is Editor of “Customs & International Trade Law” a blog recognized by the U.S. Library of Congress as being an important part of the legal historical record.

Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

The major things customs is targeting
Priority Trade Initiatives
Real life case examples of detention/seizure/penalty cases (and how to avoid them)
Resources, where to learn more

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:16] Lee Kanter here another episode of Association Leadership Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Jennifer Diaz and she is with Diaz Trade Law. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:00:28] Welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] Well, before we get too far into things, I’m really excited to learn about Diaz trade law. Can you tell us a little bit about your practice?

Jennifer Diaz: [00:00:37] I would love to. That’s definitely where I spend all of my day. Well, besides, with my two year old, I am a board certified customs and international trade lawyer. I’ve been in this realm for a little over 16 years, so I spent ten years with a larger firm, and about seven years ago I started Diaz Trade Law. So we are a boutique customs and trade firm, which really meant nothing to me 17 years ago when I was in law school. So I had a whole lot of internships to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And when I was in my last internship, I realized I loved this area because it’s so incredibly diverse. There are 48 federal government agencies that regulate imports and exports. Can you believe that? I mean, it’s an incredible amount of agencies to keep up with. So we help companies on one of two bases. Either they want to import or export and they want to do it the right way. So we call that pre compliance. And as you can imagine, how many people want to do the right thing, the right way in advance of doing it and actually think of paying a lawyer in advance, right. So a small percentage versus, oh, no, I’m in trouble. So we have the flip side, which I call us being the 911 operators for trade. Oh, no, my bank account assets are frozen because I exported without a license. Oh no. Customs seized my goods because I didn’t do my pre compliance homework. Oh no I’m in trouble in some way, shape or form with US Customs, Food and Drug Administration or some federal government agency. So we are consistently putting out fires.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:07] Now, can we go back a little bit to when you were in law school? And obviously this wasn’t in your radar, this wasn’t when you were younger. You’re like, one day I dream to be this guru of trade law. Very true. When you’re when you’re an aspiring lawyer, how do you kind of sort out where you fit in the world and what is resonating with you? You mentioned going through a lot of internships. Well, so that was in a variety I assume a variety of specialties.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:02:38] Area you can imagine landlord, tenant, entertainment, criminal, you name it. I tried it because I had to know what I hated. I mean, to me, one of the most important things any law student can do is intern and learn what you hate and what you can’t do because you need to know what what type of job. Especially that’s not for you. Those are the monster things you need to know. And then if you get very, very lucky and like me on my 12th try you get to figure out something that you’re really, really incredibly interested in. I loved that every day was a different day. Every day was crazy exciting. It was new. Every day I learned something new. 17, almost years later. Every day I still learn something new every day.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:24] Now there’s a saying that I try to teach my kid. It’s when you’re making a choice, especially a big choice like that, it should be a hell yea or a no. Like it’s something that you should be very excited about. And if you’re wavering a little bit, that’s probably a clue. Either your gut feeling or some sixth sense that maybe this isn’t the thing. You should really be investing time and energy into how what kind of what happened for a trade law that said, you know what, let me just keep following what like all of a sudden it was this big dramatic epiphany moment or you were like, Hey, all of my skills are aligned here. I’m excited about going in every day. Like, what part was that kind of trigger? That said, this is where I want to spend, you know, now the bulk of your career.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:04:12] And I love the question and I love your advice to your kiddo that, you know, that feeling you have in the pit of your stomach where you’re like, oh, I really just don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. You know, that feeling that you get when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time? I never had that. I was never I don’t want to be here. It was never I don’t want to wake up in the morning. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to have to get dressed to be there. I don’t want to physically go to that office. I don’t want to deal with those people. I don’t want to deal with that type of work. I never had any of those those negative emotions. And on the flip side, it was that, heck yeah, it was that every day I’m learning something new, every day I’m intrigued. Every day there is something exciting that I want to learn more about. Every day I want to read more to understand more, to delve deeper into this particular area. I had excitement for this particular practice area that I never in a million years would have had for real estate, criminal landlord, tenant entertainment and all those other areas that I tried. I sat and. Courtrooms. It wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to litigate, so I needed to find an administrative practice area that was on the commercial side where I didn’t have to physically go into a courtroom and I could still be excited about that practice. So the bottom line is there is always some area that will excite you regardless of what it is. And anyone who tells a law student that you have to be in a courtroom to be a great lawyer is 100% incorrect. There are 100% wonderful areas of law that you can practice in where you can absolutely advocate on paper, verbally, via email or so on, where you don’t need to be in a courtroom as well. And I loved that aspect.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:55] And make the impact that you desire because that’s really at the heart of it, right? You’re impacting people’s businesses, their lives, their families lives. Sometimes their communities lives 100%.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:06:06] I mean, at the end of the day. We impact people’s businesses for sure. I mean, this isn’t a year. Well, not every day, but some clients, unfortunately, we wind up seeing where there are some criminal implications as well. And there’s a lot of cross sections dependent upon how they come to us and what their particular issues are, what types of mistakes they’ve made before we get the 911 call right before we get the emergency aspect. But quite often their business is on the line and there are costly mistakes that maybe they have made that determine whether or not their business gets to stay in or whether or not they they are no longer in business after these types of decisions that we have to make together. So there are huge decisions that we make on a daily basis with our clients in terms of what’s going to happen with their money and their businesses, their livelihoods.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:56] And like you mentioned, if there’s that many government entities touching an industry or a business, there’s a lot of room for miscommunication, misunderstanding, and a lot of I didn’t know what I didn’t know until it’s too late kind of thing.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:07:09] Oh, my God. Especially for the small guys. So the big guys, the Fortune 100, the biggest guys, they have wonderful compliance teams. They have huge, huge groups that are invested in compliance. So not only are not only that, but when laws change, they’re at the forefront. They’re the ones commenting. They’re the ones sitting with the government agencies, helping to write, helping to understand, helping to draft, helping to interpret those new laws. The small guys, do you think they even realize that there’s a freaking law and or that the law is changed and or that they need to stay up on it? I mean, Resources is one of the number one things I talk about for the SMEs, those small and medium sized enterprises, especially where I’m based in Florida, that’s the lifeblood of our businesses, our SMEs. So we represent a lot of them and I think they’re very strong and need to come to the table as well. So we try to get them to advocate as well to get their voices heard because I, I truly don’t think they’re heard enough because customs implements new laws like the new forced labor act that just came into pass. And I guarantee you small businesses have no clue what the implication is. And when they buy apparel, they don’t think about whether or not the cotton thread from that apparel is from a particular region of China.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:08:25] And whether or not they’re going to be able to import that particular apparel, they don’t think that they’re going to have their goods rejected at the border as a result of a new law that passed because they don’t even know about the law and they’re not keeping up with that information. And granted, if you’re the government agency, you’d say I but I put it on my website and I put it in the Federal Register. Notice I gave you warning. Why aren’t you keeping up? And that’s and that’s the that’s the hard part for the small business. So keeping up and keeping on top of resources and and keeping in the loop with what’s going on and finding a law firm that’s in this space like us, to keep our clients informed. I wish more more of our SMEs would do that. But it’s it’s a toughie. It’s a toughie. And there’s not a lot of love or compassion for the I didn’t know the the ignorance is no defense of the law is is a huge thing when it comes to any of these federal government agencies. There’s there’s not a lot of love for that type of defense.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:23] Right. And the ramifications are real. I mean, the ramifications could be life or death when it comes to that. Businesses, you know, continuing on 100%.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:09:33] Some of the ramifications dependent upon what type of issue. For example, for the forced labor issue that I was talking about, repeat offenders, it could be criminal. You could go to jail for that. And there’s some export offenses that are criminal. If you export to Iran, for example, without a license consistently, you can go to jail. I mean, it’s some of these things are biggies and sometimes it’s not necessarily a criminal implication, but the civil implications could put you out of business, could bankrupt you. Sometimes we see clients that have to go through bankruptcy proceedings because of mistakes they’ve made where they didn’t realize that their importations, for example, were subject to a crazy high anti-dumping or countervailing duty that they didn’t even consider because they didn’t even know it existed for their good. And they didn’t do the proper amount of due diligence or research and in customs mind, that’s your job as an importer. In my perfect world, in order to import, you would have to review an importers manual that customs has. That I think is great that I wish more people read and you’d have to take a test to actually truly understand the obligations and the ethical responsibilities you have as an importer and the potential enforcement that customs has, because the power is substantial. And we see so many companies consistently that say, but I didn’t know, but I didn’t know and it’s just not good enough.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:57] Yeah. As a small to midsize business owner who have, you know, kind of these bigger dreams and part of your bigger dreams is, hey, the world is my oyster. There are so many. Opportunities out here in the world. Let me think bigger. Let me, you know, kind of throw my hat over the fence and try to export or to import or to grow that way. It seems like it’s easy to make mistakes because it just seems like it’s just a logical evolution of your business when actually actually you’re getting into a whole new business and you need trusted advisor advisers around you to navigate the waters here because it isn’t, you know, doing business from Florida to Georgia is not the same to doing Florida to Georgia, you know, in the Eastern Europe, you know, like it’s a it’s a different world. It’s not that.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:11:48] Simple. I actually did a a program for the country, Georgia, a month or so ago, and we were teaching Georgian, the country, Georgia, they’re their producers how to export to the United States. So it’s funny that you mention them, but you’re so correct. We see so many clients that come to us that say, I was so excited about a sale, I just didn’t budget or think about compliance. And it’s it’s unfortunate. And that’s why I say we represent clients in two realms, the pre compliance or the 911 and obviously 911 gets a lot more ring tone than than the pre compliance style. And it’s unfortunate that that’s the case. But think about any business when you’re starting out, what are you excited about? Right. You’re excited about your sale. You’re excited about your marketing. Are you excited about reading rules, regulations? No. And I say, fine, I don’t need you to be excited about it, but I need you to pick up the phone so that I get excited about it for you.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:42] Yeah, well, thank you so much for the work you do in this area. I’m sure your clients really appreciate it. And this show is Association Leadership Radio, so I don’t want to forget about that. Sure. And part of I think the way you serve your clients and I’m sure the way that your clients can benefit is your activity in associations. And that’s that’s an area, I guess, that small to midsize businesses can, by being part of certain associations, really benefit from the wisdom of the larger players if they are kind of lean into that. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the associations or an association that.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:13:18] Works with your industry? I have and I will say back to the advice that we were we were talking about at the beginning of careers and to give to the youngins potentially that are starting out is at the beginning of my career. I said yes to every opportunity there was. So quite often I was on the board of ten associations at one given time at the beginning of my career. Now I’m actively involved in nine organizations, so granted, not much has changed and I’ll talk about my top five right now. One is the District Export Council in South Florida. I’m a board member. This is a great organization that’s under the Department of Commerce that has terrific education and conferences. So any business in the United States that wants to export their goods outside of the United States, I would check out the District Export Council and Trade under the Department of Commerce and terrific resources. Another is the Florida Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association. When it comes to customs brokers and freight forwarders, it’s the first line of defense. If you want to import, you need a customs broker that basically is the travel agent for the cargo that fills out the right paperwork. That entry process with US Customs and Border Protection, if you want to export, need a travel agent for the cargo to get those goods, let’s say from Florida to the country, Georgia, same thing.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:14:44] So the Florida customs broker is an association right now. I’m the education chair, so I help put together the programing for the association to keep everyone in the loop on top changes. So, for example, brokers regulations are changing in terms of the liability and responsibilities that customs is putting on customs brokers. So some of the programing applies specifically to brokers, but a lot of it is great for importers and exporters in addition to brokers and forwarders. What’s also nice about this association is it’s part of a national association called the National Association of Brokers and Forwarders of America. It’s NCBA, a terrific association that also has continuing education credits as well, and also great conferences too, to keep up education wise, an organization that truly has the the keys to my heart is the Organization of Women in International Trade that I’ve been heavily involved in since I started out in 2006. I’ve been on the board of directors in some way, shape or form the Organization of Women in International Trade. The thought process is if you are a woman that wants to be a leader and or be involved in international trade in some way, shape or form, and if you are a man that supports the advancement of women in international trade and business and.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:16:08] The Organization of Women in International Trade provides educational opportunities, networking opportunities. And in my day, we did conferences pre-COVID, which was a beautiful opportunity to get all of our 20 plus chapters in the world together. When I was president, we had Zimbabwe was one of our newer chapters and Nigeria was one of our newer chapters, which was really exciting. So we were expanding in Africa. We have chapters in Europe and all over the United States and such. So we were able to be in Kenya, for example, for one of our conferences, and then Tampa, Florida the next year. So truly an international organization that has wonderful education opportunities as well as networking opportunities. So when I started, I needed to find a like minded group of individuals that were also in my international trade space, and I needed to develop a network of individuals that I could call when I needed their assistance as well. I needed great brokers and forwarders, I needed great bankers. I need great marketing professionals. I needed great anything you could possibly think of in my Rolodex. So Oet as well as FCB for organizations that really did help me provide that Rolodex as resources for my clients that I’m truly thankful for. And the last two that I will mention are Beacon Counsel, which is a wonderful private public partnership for Miami-Dade.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:17:32] We have a trade and logistics committee where we work on the ground in the local area where I’m from, to talk about trade, logistics, not only educational opportunities and business opportunities, but we’re also trying to get students and educational institutions together with the business communities, to talk about that gap that we’re seeing in the workforce. That’s that’s a biggie where we have a lot of openings in our workforce, and we need students to have not only the training, but also the desire and the ability to stay in our counties and in our state to to fulfill those particular jobs. So we’re trying to bridge that workforce issue as well as the Florida Bar is my last association that I’m actively involved in, and I just got a really nice award from them because they am the chair of the certification committee. So kind of like doctors tell you have board certification for doctors, for lawyers in the state of Florida. We have board certification in the area of international law. And I’m the chair of that particular board certification committee for the Florida Bar. So I’ve been promoting the board certification area of law for Florida, as well as updating and adapting our exam so that it’s more relevant and updated to a book from the Florida bar that I helped write three chapters of, so that they’re actually tools and resources for our students to take.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:18:52] Because imagine previously when I took the exam ten years ago, the study guides said, Go to your local library, which was laughable, right? Go to a law library that was literally on the damn study guide. I almost died. So, like, really go to the law library. That’s really how you’re telling me to study for this. So I updated the study guide, updated the exam specifications, updated the exam, updated the website. So now there’s a usable study guide, usable resources, usable specifications. So any lawyer in the state of Florida that has more than five years of international legal related experience and good, please go to the Florida Bar’s website on international law certification and check out our standards and apply by August 31st and take our exam. And I promise, it’s way, way, way better than it’s been in the past, and it’s only getting better. And our committee is really great and dedicated to this. We want this board certification standard to truly stand out and be something only 52 lawyers in the state of Florida are board certified in international law. So I’m proud to be one of them.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:54] Well, thank you for all that you do. And I and you touched on this a little bit, and I think we’ve talked about this a little earlier, but part of this show’s mission is to inspire young people and to kind of, you know, learn from the mistakes of people, not maybe not mistakes, but just their the journeys of the people before them. And I think that leaning into an association, getting involved in, you know, you don’t have to get involved in ten like you or nine, but just to get involved in associations in your field is kind of a fast pass if you do this right. It’s not an ATM machine where you just put a card in and money comes out, but it can be over time in the course of a career. When you look back and you realize how many of the most important relationships and connections happened, you’ll kind of find a thread that a lot of times it is your association that is involved in that.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:20:49] So I think very specific advice in this regard and and very pointed because I could not agree with you more. My favorite people in the world are people that I’ve been involved in, in organizations that say what they mean and do what they say. And I take that incredibly seriously. And people love me on organizations because when I say I’m going to do something, my word is my bond. So what I would love to see more of is people that not only are are a member of an association, but they are active members of the association. I guarantee you any organization that you could ever belong in has committees. They have needs for members to be actively involved. It doesn’t matter what role you take, but if you take an active role and you do what you say and say what you’re going to do, and you actually fulfill that commitment in the time frame and manner with a wonderful result, people remember that for life. People will always remember that you said you were going to do X and you fulfilled, you delivered and it was a great product. Then people know they can rely on you and they can count on you because referrals are given based upon people liking you and trusting you and respecting you. You don’t garnish that trust and respect. If you say you’re going to do something on behalf of an association and you don’t care enough to do it and you don’t care enough to show up. So being a member isn’t good enough in and of itself. Being a member, showing up, wanting to get involved, getting involved, saying that you’re going to do something and then following through and doing it to the best of your abilities. That’s how people remember you and think of you and really want to think of you more and more.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:38] Yeah, to me, this is when people complain like I don’t have any connections or I don’t have any, you know, I’m not the person that knows the person. This is the cheat code. This is the way that you become that person. You get involved in your association and you don’t just pay your dues and never show up. You get involved, you take leadership positions. There’s always a leadership position available. They’re always hungry, hungry for people that are enthusiastic and get that can get the job done and demonstrate your skill not by lines on a resume, but by actually showing up to meetings and being involved and following through and helping move the ball. That’s the stuff that gets remembered. That’s where you’re going to get your next job. It’s not a place we’re going to get business tomorrow just by joining you. Lean in, you do the work and it will pay off over time.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:23:27] I will tell you both a weight and FCV I have been actively involved in since 2006 for over 16 years. And I will tell you from day one, when I became a member of both associations, the first day that I got in, I said, How can I get involved? How can I help you? And when I said just those words for it, for South Florida chapter, I was put on the board. I did not even know what international trade was in 2006, which I can admit now. And I was on the board of directors on an esteemed organization already. And that’s only because when I showed up, I said, I want to help you. And the organization desperately needed assistance. And I had a board of directors seat.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:13] Yeah, well, I mean, that’s I can’t emphasize this enough to young people. This isn’t just another thing you’ve got to do. And I know you’re busy and you’ve got a million things to do. These are investments in your career, and they are going to pay off if you really kind of come with pure heart that you want to be of service and help.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:24:32] Agreed. But I very much will emphasize again. You cannot specifically go into something saying, what am I going to get out of it? You write with a pure heart or you are going to get nothing out of it. If you give expecting to receive ten fold, you are never going to receive it. It’s not. It’s unfortunately not the way the world works. You have to be able to give in these organizations with a pure and full heart and people around you will take notice that you are the one giving ultimately. Right may not always feel that way, but that is I do believe in karma in that regard.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:09] Right. And being of service. And you’re here for kind of a greater good and you’re you’re trying to do your part as a good corporate citizen in your whatever industry or niche that you’re working in.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:25:20] Agreed.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:21] Well, Jennifer, it’s been a delight talking to you. If somebody wants to learn more about your practice, get on your calendar or maybe pick your brain about which associations are appropriate. One. What is the website?

Jennifer Diaz: [00:25:35] Sure. Two different ways. I’m on LinkedIn and love to connect on LinkedIn so you can find DIA’s trade on LinkedIn and my profile is definitely there. Jennifer Diaz on LinkedIn you’ll find me under the trade law under our employees and DIA’s trade. Ludtke On our home page, we have a top ten tips when importing, which I love cheat sheets. I love free resources. Who doesn’t love a free resource? Right. Yeah. So this is my free importing and exporting resource and it has amazing hyperlinks and extra resources, especially for small SMEs. So each of those two pages has at least 20 hyperlinks with terrific resources. And it’s something we we give away because we really do want our importers and exporters to to understand the road map and the rules of the road when it comes to importing and exporting. So on Diaz trade law, you’ll see Top Ten tips when importing and exporting, and I urge you to check that out. If you’re in the importing and exporting space and I urge you to connect on LinkedIn, if you have any questions in relation to associations or want to get involved in it. If CBF speaking council or or any other association, I’m happy to be a resource.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:48] Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Jennifer Diaz: [00:26:53] Thank you. That’s nice to hear.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:56] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Association Leadership Radio.

Craig Higdon And Shane Hunter With BetterPlan

July 4, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

High Velocity Radio

Craig Higdon And Shane Hunter With BetterPlan

00:00 /

Craig Higdon, Founder at BetterPlan

As a strategic digital leader with over 15 years of experience in design and technology, Craig Higdon helps clients get better clarity around their biggest business challenges, then organize and leads teams of strategists, researchers, designers, and developers to accomplish the amazing.

Connect with Craig on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

Business Strategy
Design and technology
Customer Experience
Digital Product
Start-Up
Project/program management

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Craig Higdon and Shane Hunter with Better Plan Work. Welcome, gentlemen.

Craig Higdon: [00:00:28] Hey, Lee. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about better planned work. How are you serving folks?

Craig Higdon: [00:00:36] Oh, sure. So better plan at work is how small business owners and entrepreneurs develop long term plans and the planning skills while they’re still trying to focus on keeping the lights on their business. You know, we all know that the tyranny of the urgent is is a beast for small business owners everywhere. Making sure that you’re growing your business long term is is what better planned out work is really focused on doing.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:03] Now, do you find that folks just don’t plan? They’re just kind of winging it every day and they have maybe a dream that they’re kind of vaguely going towards, but they don’t have taken the time to compose a plan that might be a better roadmap for their success.

Shane Hunter: [00:01:21] Right. So that’s that’s that’s a big portion of it. There are definitely a lot of people who who like to wing it and go with their gut feeling and and that can work for for a while. But when you’re when you’re really trying to be focused and and hit a specific place in the market, it can it can be really tough to to to keep that focus and not sort of chase the next shiny thing.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:50] So what are some of the symptoms that having a better plan would be a better strategy? What are some of the things that are going wrong in an existing business right now where having a plan or even a kind of this kind of roadmap would be more effective way to manage their business?

Craig Higdon: [00:02:10] So I think that there’s there’s one big word that is for us kind of kind of endemic to a problem. And it’s scale. Can you scale your business or if so, like, great. And you’re probably pulling the right threads. But so many people, they find themselves wanting to grow, but they don’t understand that they only have a certain number of hours a day. They keep investing and keep they keep working harder and harder instead of trying to figure out the fundamental parts of their business and really find a way to allow those to scale. So if you are a business owner and you find that like you’re just you’re kind of in that race and you’re on that treadmill, but you’re not getting you’re not seeing the growth of the scale that you want. That’s one of our first indicators.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:59] So if you’re frustrated, if maybe you had success previously and it’s not coming as easily, those are kind of breadcrumbs that maybe that you should be thinking about a better plan.

Craig Higdon: [00:03:12] Sure. And one of the things that one of the things that initially that I noticed early on in my career was we were working with some contractors who were software developers, brilliant guys, incredibly effective at the software development task. We asked for them. They were running their own shop and halfway through the project one of them has a nervous breakdown. I’m like, Man, this project wasn’t that hard. Like what’s going on? And his partner was like, Hey, listen, it’s not about this project. This project is great as well manage. We’re working together. We love what we’re working on. The problem is that we’ve got three or four people that previously that haven’t been able to tie things up. We haven’t been able to get the money we need out of them. And it was really kind of the business systems side of running the business that these very intelligent, very capable people were just not ready to handle.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:07] So when you have a situation like that where maybe kind of the work is being done at the appropriate level, but the infrastructure is kind of lacking. And maybe that’s not the superpower of the founders or the management team. How do you kind of insert yourself in to help them? Is this something that they hire you as a consultant and you roll up your sleeves and you’re doing the work? Or is it something that you’re teaching them how to be better managers or how to attract the right folks that are the players they need to grow the business?

Shane Hunter: [00:04:38] Right. It’s more about teaching them how to attract those folks and and delegate and and think about their business instead of at a higher level. Instead of working in the business, they’re working on the business. And if you take like a tradesman, a plumber, an amazing plumber, he wants to start his own business, maybe doesn’t necessarily know the best way to go about that. When when push comes to shove, he really knows how to do good plumbing work. So that’s what he works on all the time because that’s just what he knows and what he’s comfortable with. When when a business isn’t growing, isn’t scaling, isn’t getting where the owner wants it to be, that’s when they need to sort of step back, bring in those other people, bring in that that outside help through through planning, through tools to help them think about what they want to do with their business and then help delegate. Now, is this.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:41] No, go ahead. No, you go ahead.

Craig Higdon: [00:05:44] You know, I was going to say that and it’s that combination, that exact question you asked that really got us thinking about the features that better planned our work offers. Really, we focus on creating letting business owners create a focused area of of activity inside of their business while kind of training them, giving them options to build out those depending on what things they care about first. We give them almost scrips of sort that gives them the steps to walk through like, okay, if you want to increase or improve your reach, more people reach more customers. There’s a lot of steps to that. And first, understanding who your customers are, understanding who your best customers are, I should say making sure that you have the right way to reach out to them and stay in touch with them, that you’re offering the right things. So we take those goals and break them apart into really actionable steps, and then the tool helps them move through those steps. In a way, we help them track what they’ve been working on, what they need to be working on, who they’ve delegated this work to in a way that is is unique. And that’s one of the things we really want to focus on was it’s not just an education platform and it’s definitely not a blank slate like project management platform. What it does is it actually understands and helps people understand their goals and give them the steps that they need to take one after the other to actually start seeing these the progress that they’re looking for.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:21] Now, you mentioned that like this plumber example, does it work best in those kind of service oriented businesses where, you know, in some cases that plumber just wants to be left alone to do plumbing and they don’t want to be the marketing guy, the sales guy, the customer service guy. They want to be the plumbing guy. And then when you’re saying, hey, here’s a roadmap or here’s a plan, that all you have to do is, you know, kind of engage with the plan, it’s going to tell you what to do. It’ll teach you how to do this. What if the plumber doesn’t want to do this? They just want to be a plumber.

Craig Higdon: [00:08:00] Yeah. And so our our focus is really on people that are plumbers that want to grow a full business around them. And we all know as as business owners and founders and CEOs, that if we’re a craftsperson, that’s an important part of our business. But if you want to get out of that that treadmill of just kind of the tyranny of the urgent that so many business owners feel, that’s really who we’re trying to help. You know, if you if you’re if you’re having a great time working through just you’re working as solely a craftsperson. Fantastic. You know, and we we want to help the craftspeople that are that are amazing at what they do. Also start to becoming become amazing at running and managing and growing a business.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:49] That might be built on those same tenets that make them successful?

Craig Higdon: [00:08:53] Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it absolutely is. It’s it’s centered around their craft, centered around the things that they care about in the way that they do their business. And I think that’s where we tried to create a lot of flexibility so that people can come in and choose the goals that they want to focus on. It could be that that even if that person just wants to be a plumber, they’ve got to get their accounting in order. You know, like everybody’s got to figure that out at some point. They’ve got to they’ve got to have a clear path towards making sure that even if they’re working with subcontractors or that they understand how expensive some of their parts are. So the flexibility of the platform allows people to grow and improve their business in all sorts of different ways.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:38] Now, is it helping the person kind of glean opportunities that maybe aren’t obvious? Because a lot of business sometimes you’re so heads down doing the work, you there could be a great opportunity around the corner. But you’re your head’s down, so you’re not even looking up to see it.

Shane Hunter: [00:09:57] Right. Exactly. And and with this with this plan that that the owner would make. They would theoretically be looking at it often and and it would be sort of top of mind their sort of goals that they have for their business. So when they see those opportunities, they recognize them because they realize it’s in alignment with their goals. If something comes along that isn’t in alignment with their goals, maybe it’s best to sort of push that off and stop chasing the next shiny thing.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:25] And it is a kind of fine line between wanting to be an empire builder and then kind of getting outside of your lane or your expertise. So that helps them to manage that because there is a lot of gray in that area.

Craig Higdon: [00:10:42] Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And we want to make sure that people are making informed decisions about that gray area. We’re all living through that gray area in large portions of our business, in our business management journeys and our business journeys. So making sure that we are cognizant of when we’re drifting, you know, you might need to drift, you might need to change a goal. But we want you we want to make sure that those decisions are happening in a way that’s better informed.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:10] Now, what’s your back story? What’s the back story of both of you? How did you get together to kind of create this?

Craig Higdon: [00:11:19] So. Yeah, Shane and I have known each other for years. Actually, we’ve. We’ve had similar journeys going through business. Business schools. And this was really an opportunity we’ve been we’ve been working on. We’ve talked about a number of different things. And this was the one that really caught our attention. This is the one that really allowed us to go like, hey, we can we can take steps right now today to start helping other business owners. You know, my background is in professional services. I come out of a consulting background, formerly big four, now working for for kind of a more boutique agency. And I’ve I’ve seen I’ve seen these people trying to grow their business, whether they were clients or whether they were vendors. So I had a lot of access to to the challenges that both of them face.

Shane Hunter: [00:12:08] I came up through a sort of accounting background and. Consulting along with that. And I just just through all of the different businesses that I’ve touched that I’ve worked with, either being a part time CFO or or helping them with a thousand other potential issues that they have to deal with. There’s just a lot of similar threads came about and realizing that all of these businesses are dealing with all of these sort of similar issues and and figuring out how to help them best was something that that this sort of clicked in our heads.

Craig Higdon: [00:12:51] Yeah. And we realized also that not, you know, hiring consultants is a luxury for a lot of small business owners like to to pay a seasoned professional the hourly rate that they need is is an expense not many people can afford. And we really wanted to create a tool that allowed us to serve far more people at a much lower at a much more reasonable rate. And so that’s what got us starting to think about a software solution and or a software platform like the site better planned out work. And so that’s really what, what, what crystallized it is we can offer so much more help, but there are a lot of people that wouldn’t be able to hire us either through our businesses or through our employers, and in a way that that can really help them grow a business. So we wanted to focus on a way that in a platform that allowed them to do that.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:48] So walk me through what it’s like to experience better plans at work. So I go to this website. So, so walk me through what happens. Like, what am I being asked questions? Am I like, how does the software learn what my problems are and how do I input that data so they can help me make more informed decisions?

Shane Hunter: [00:14:10] Right. Right. Well, you would you’d go to the sites and and start start your plan, essentially. And excuse me, in in that plan, in the sort of first screen, there’s there’s some tutorials on how to to move through the tool, just, just to familiarize yourself with that. But then there are also examples, examples of of areas of goals that most businesses would have. And, and you get a sort of pick and choose which, which examples, which goals that that sort of apply to your business at this point in time. It could change, obviously, in the future, and you can create a new plan to deal with that. But when you go into the tool, you select these goals that that you sort of want to have for your business at the moment and and then just start working on them. It sort of populates a default set of steps that that you that you could take to to move closer toward reaching that goal. And you can modify those those steps as you see fit as might be more applicable to your business and then delegate them. If you have that ability to delegate those steps to other people and then you get to track them. There’s, there’s a section that tracks within the plan what has been done, what is the current focus, and what you should really be doing sort of next to to sort of help in those in those areas and. And the sort of the tool that you look up that you pull up every day would keep track of of who’s doing what and what needs to be done next. And if you want to add more things or recycle a goal because it you finished it and it was really good and you want to do it again, you can absolutely do that. And then yeah, I mean.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:09] So is it is it tying in with my accounting software? So if I say I want to increase my revenue or I want to grow, is there a kind of a metric that I can keep track of that’s going to give me a dashboard to see that? Am I making progress or am I not making progress? Or is this tactic working or not working?

Shane Hunter: [00:16:30] It doesn’t necessarily tie into an accounting system at the moment. It that would definitely be more informed by by your accounting system if if you’re doing what you need to be doing to to sort of reach those goals. But it gives you steps and says, all right, so now measure this or check this to see if you’re doing better than than you were a month ago.

Craig Higdon: [00:16:56] Yeah. And the activity is really, really what we’re trying to focus is focusing on the behavior that where you start seeing the outcomes in your in your accounting software. But the integrating deeper with with the infrastructure that people have set up is absolutely something that we care about. But because we really want to focus on people that are just kind of getting started or people that are that might not. Have the maturity yet, business maturity to have other deeper integrations set up. We wanted to get to really like the most basic steps, like how can we help you today start taking steps that will grow your business?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:36] And then, is this industry agnostic? I mean, you mentioned the background in professional services. Is this something that is better suited for that or is it can be a manufacturer? It could be any business because business challenges tend to be business challenges.

Craig Higdon: [00:17:52] Right. Exactly. It can be sort of any sort of industry. Definitely help with with that.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:58] And then really, the only prerequisite is that that their mindset is that of of a empire builder, that somebody wants to leave a mark and wants to grow.

Craig Higdon: [00:18:09] Absolutely. We want we want people that want to grow their business. And that’s that’s important. Whether or not you just got the idea and you want to start planting that seed and getting that seed to grow, or if you’ve already got a successful practice, whether or not you you’re running a bakery or you’re a bakery, that’s a caterer that’s working and selling, selling your services that way. We want to be able to help those people grow. If you’re if you don’t want to grow, I guess I guess it’s probably not for you, although we could probably help there. But really, we want to help the people that are looking to learn more about their business, learn more about what they need to get done and want to take action.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:49] So now how about sharing some advice for our listeners if they are thinking about this and this is something that they are considering doing and they want to be better and they want to have a better plan. What are some things they can do? What are some actions that would be recommended through going through the process? That’s kind of the low hanging fruit. Where are some moves they can make today, whether they have the plan or not, that’ll just give them a better sense of, Hey, I can do this and there is a better way to do things.

Craig Higdon: [00:19:22] So I come from a background in customer success in digital product. For me, it’s all about learning from the people who are using your tool or your service. My suggestion to everyone right now is go out, talk to your best customers, ask them why they like using you. What are the things that you’re doing well and what are the things that would help you grow? What what how can how can you make changes to your business in a way that makes them grow? This is valuable for a couple of reasons. One, these are exactly your best customers. You want more of them. You want more people that think and act the way they do. So learning more about them gives you a chance to go find other people like them and and target them. You know, I think a lot of people spend a lot of time in the abstract trying to grow their business. This is this this suggestion. If I could say anything to any small business owner, talk to your best customers. Thank them for working with you and start asking them questions about why they choose you. If you’re feeling bold, ask for ask for a new customer, ask for a recommendation, or ask them if they know anybody else that would like your service. That’s on the ground, boots on the ground. Kind of suggestion. Do that today. And you will you will start getting the hints and the clues to start growing your business.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:42] Now, does that strategy kind of go? It’s kind of contrary to a lot of people’s first move. They think that it’s easier to get a brand new customer or they want to invest money and resources in a stranger than it is, is to nurture and develop and serve at a deeper level. Their existing clientele.

Craig Higdon: [00:21:05] Yeah. And I. Of course you need a balance. But until you really know your your core customers and your core clientele and you have that, you know, we were talking earlier about making those conscious decisions. If you are making a conscious decision to go after someone new because you’ve really sown up your existing customer base, like great, you should grow. And there’s all sorts of different ways to grow, but you should have such a confidence that you know exactly what your customers need and want. And, you know, having worked in sales myself, I know it’s always easier to to get either an existing or previous customer to buy again or get them to recommend a warm intro to somebody that could also use your services than it is to go out and get a completely blank slate. Get someone you’ve never heard of that’s never heard of you, that’s never talked to you.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:57] All right. But that seems logical and that makes perfect sense. They already know you and like you, you’re already almost there from the new sales standpoint. But it just seems that business people, I mean, I see it over and over again, they would rather pursue some strategy that involves strangers coming into a funnel than it is to nurture and develop and work with and learn from their existing clients.

Craig Higdon: [00:22:24] Yeah, you know, I think that’s I think it’s easy to it’s easy to sell that, you know, it’s easy to sell, sell that kind of nebulous growth. It’s just not as effective if you if you need to start scaling. Absolutely. Building the systems that that that track your outreach, that start working people through the top of a funnel and building the steps down, that move people deeper into the funnel is what you need to do. But each of those steps should be informed by real world success. And you’ve had real world success. You have people that will tell you like, Oh yeah, when I first heard about you, I didn’t know you actually did. One, two, three. Because on your website, you say you don’t you don’t phrase it that way. Like, Oh, being that tells me what I can take to start moving somebody that a customer that just visits my site and starts moving them down the funnel, it’s that insight and that real world experience that lets that scale happen and lets other people that are like your best customers, new people that are like your best customers, move down that funnel faster, move down it more effectively, and that saves you time, that saves you money. But it all has to come from a real world insight and a real world action that is based on the success you’ve already had.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:37] Right. And less about how creative you are in front of a whiteboard. Just imagining some future world.

Craig Higdon: [00:23:43] Correct? Yeah. Base, base. You base your decisions in the success you’ve already had.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:48] So now if somebody wants to learn more about better plan that work, what is the way to engage with you and Shane and what’s the best way to get a hold of the plan or to learn more about the plan?

Shane Hunter: [00:24:03] Sure. Just head to our website. Better plan, work and sign up and get get on our email list and we’ll we’ll tell you all the information that you need to know.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:14] And this is software as a service. So this is kind of a monthly subscription. Is this how it works?

Craig Higdon: [00:24:20] Yep. We’re currently pulling people into our beta and that’s what that’s what we’re most excited about, is that we’ve actually got people in there starting to use this, starting to grow their businesses. And so that’s yeah, our it absolutely is software as a service, but we want to make it make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:41] Well, Craig and Shane, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Craig Higdon: [00:24:47] Oh, brilliantly. So are you. Yeah. Thanks for thanks for giving us a chance. And thanks for the service that you provide to all these small business owners and these empire builders.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:55] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on High Velocity Radio.

Nora Farhat With Pool Scouts, British Swim School And Mathnasium

July 1, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Franchise Marketing Radio

Nora Farhat With Pool Scouts, British Swim School And Mathnasium

00:00 /

Brought To You By SeoSamba . . . Comprehensive, High Performing Marketing Solutions For Mature And Emerging Franchise Brands . . . To Supercharge Your Franchise Marketing, Go To seosamba.com.

Nora Farhat already owns one location of British Swim School, another Buzz franchise with 200-plus locations that provide swimming lessons for children. She has been running her swim school for seven years and also owns a Mathnasium tutoring center.

Always eager to fill any gap she notices in a market, Farhat, who works with her husband, Neil, jumped at the opportunity to open a Pool Scouts unit.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

Pool Scouts opening
Recent success with British Swim School & Mathnasium
How Buzz Franchise Brands sets its franchisees up for success

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Welcome to Franchise Marketing Radio. Brought to you by SeoSamba comprehensive high performing marketing solutions for mature and emerging franchise brands. To supercharge your franchise marketing, go to seosamba.com. That’s seosamba.com

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here another episode of Franchise Marketing Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Nora Farhat and she is a multi unit, multi brand franchisee with Pool Scouts, British Swim School, Mathnasium. Welcome, Nora.

Nora Farhat: [00:00:49] Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:51] Well, I’m excited to learn about your journey. How did you choose did you choose all three of those brands simultaneously or did you start with one and evolve? Can you tell your your story a little bit?

Nora Farhat: [00:01:03] Yeah, absolutely. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if I picked all at the same time. You know, it was definitely a journey. I think that is certainly the right word. I started out my my career pretty much in corporate. Like most entrepreneurs, I was pursuing corporate type jobs. And then I always wanted to have my own business, but I didn’t quite know how to get there. I didn’t know how to start it. I didn’t have a craft. I didn’t have a specific skill set, I didn’t have a product. But I definitely always had the energy and enthusiasm I’m going to call it as an entrepreneur. But I started out in corporate and just through years of working through corporate jobs, owning my own business was always something in the back of my mind, and there was a point in time where I was working overseas and I was looking to transfer back to the US and I thought, you know what, this is probably the only time I can choose to either go get another job or I could potentially just pursue this. And that’s kind of what started my journey of franchising. So it was how do I give myself this chance of how do I take a risk on myself? After years of working a corporate world, I kind of knew where my skill sets were. I knew I was an operator, and that’s kind of actually what attracted me to franchising was I loved the idea that these models were proven out and you really got to take a concept that was already in the market and then just really bring it into a community and kind of run it the best way that you can.

Nora Farhat: [00:02:33] So just based on that starting point, that’s when we started to do some research working with some franchise consultants, and I ran into British Swim School. That was my first franchise and that was really just mainly, you know, through a lot of research, it seemed like it allowed you to either start off small and it allowed me to grow it the way I thought would make sense. And it was a kids business and I had young kids and they needed swim lessons. So I was actually probably the consumer of the product that I was out there kind of looking for. So that started us out with British Swim School. British Swim School Starts is swim lessons. It focuses on survival lessons first, stroke development second. And we start as early as three months and we go all the way to adult swimming. And that model really just kind of worked for us. It worked really nicely and we were able to be very successful with it. And after a few years later, we were going and driving our kids about 30 minutes from town for a really good math program. It was a math learning center and this is pre COVID time, but I recognize the importance of math skills and every time I would make a drive, I would just be like, Man, this is missing in my community.

Nora Farhat: [00:03:50] And then I thought, Well, am I waiting for somebody to open it or is it the right fit for us? So that’s kind of what led us to our second business, which was magnesium, which is a math learning center, and it focuses on working with kids, on filling their gaps or keeping them advanced in math. And it’s anywhere from first grade to kind of 12th grade is usually the range that it goes to. So with my British swim school experience, we still had that. Then we were able to kind of build magnesium. Then the pandemic made me realize how many people started to build or own home pools. And through that, through just kind of getting the phone calls, how do we service our pool? Where do we go for this service? Kind of looked around again where, you know, entrepreneur at heart. I was like, we have a problem here and I think we can figure out a solution. And that kind of led us to our third, which was pool scouts, which is a primarily residential home pool cleaning service and some maintenance work. So that’s kind of our journey. I don’t see it that it’s it’s ending any time soon, but it’s kind of one played off the other and it kind of kept building from there.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:04] Now, at the beginning of the journey, you mentioned you worked in corporate, a lot of folks who work in corporate. Their first move and leaving corporate is to be a consultant to the same people that they’re working with in corporate. How what was your thought process in and around that? Were you saying, look, I’ve just got to pull the ripcord. I don’t want to do this at all anymore and I’m just going to go in a totally different direction. Did you consider doing consulting and you just felt that this was just more of the same and you were looking for a dramatic change, like talk about kind of the mindset at that stage where you were right at that cusp of where you were and where you wanted to go.

Nora Farhat: [00:05:47] Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that’s such an important point because I think this decision could go so many different ways for people. I would have not left a a job to go pursue a business just blindly. I guess let me just kind of put that out there. I think, you know, there’s the financial side of it, there’s the experience side of it. For me, it was a transition period. Regardless, I had been living and working overseas. I was in the Abu Dhabi Dubai area for about eight years, and at that time when I was looking to transition with my family back to the US, I could have gone and pursued, just kind of stepped back into another corporate job or just transferred with the company that I was working with. But then I thought, what a rare opportunity. Instead of going and jumping from one corporate career to the other is where I get to kind of experience this. You know, I knew what funds I had available. I knew what timeline I had in mind in my mind. And honestly, my kind of leap was, if this doesn’t work or if this takes longer to kick off, then I think I want I’ll go back and get another job I trusted in my skill sets enough and I knew I had enough networks and you know, I could probably hopefully get another job down the line.

Nora Farhat: [00:07:04] So my plan was I’m going to take this leap of faith a little bit. And again, everybody’s situation is so unique, right? Like everybody knows what their own individual financial status is and timing and their spouse and so many different factors play into it. But for me, I knew it was the right time for me. I knew that I could take this on as that 24 seven kind of project. And I also felt like I had been working for this for years. I knew where my background was strong, I knew what I brought to the table, and I was really comfortable with that. It really just took a chance for me to kind of take a leap and faith on myself. But I recognize that that’s not everybody’s journey. I know I have spoken to so many people where maybe that’s not the right decision or they might look at it as This has to be something that works after hours. You know, I still need my job and I need to be there and that’s completely okay. So but for me at that time, that was kind of that leap that I was able to take, and I recognized that that was a rare opportunity and I would not do it otherwise if it was not. Everything was kind of aligning the way it should for me.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:11] So when you decide to make the leap into a different kind of career path and a different industry, now the world is your oyster. There’s thousands of choices when it comes to a franchise specifically, and other choices would have been to buy an existing business. And wherever you were moving to, I mean, there was there was a variety of choices that you could have made in this regard, but you decided to go the franchise route. Now, once you go down that path, then there’s a whole other bunch of choices, because no matter who’s advising you, they’re showing you only a sliver of what’s all of it that’s available. They’re not showing you the entire universe of franchises. They’re showing you what they represented, their companies represent. How did you kind of navigate those waters and and find, okay, these are the people I trust these people because it’s the Wild West out there. There’s a lot of great franchise people and there’s a lot of not so great franchise people. So how did you kind of get the lay of the land and know, okay, these are the good people. These people, I think I’ll just keep an arm’s length. I believe what this person is saying, this person, I’m a little skeptical. How did you kind of navigate that?

Nora Farhat: [00:09:24] You know, it’s interesting, but sometimes ignorance is a little bliss in this situation. I think I didn’t know how to start a business, and I think that that’s an interesting perspective. I think I was in the mindset of I want a business. I am not sure if I have a personal trait or something that I want to sell myself. Let me look at a franchise and then it was more just navigating exactly with my instincts. It was kind of going through and saying, I know what I want to spend X amount of money because you and I both know that that’s an important factor when considering a franchise. Some franchises, you can’t enter the market with less than $1,000,000. Others are going to tell you you need a minimum of this amount. So for me, it was also how much money am I willing to put into this venture? And, you know, what am I interested in personally? Honestly, I could have gone in so many different directions, but I didn’t let all of that inundate me too much. I think it was I like things very black and white for myself. So for me it was more, Hey, this is kind of the money. These are the fields, these are the areas I would be interested in. And then a franchise consultant said, Hey, here’s the 50 lists of different businesses you can potentially do. And I said, Well, let’s narrow that down.

Nora Farhat: [00:10:37] I know these are my skill sets. And then it was just kind of going on my own instincts. I think you have to sometimes if you keep checking and checking and recheck. You can keep circling that for a long time. I’ve run into people that say I’ve been searching for a franchise for the last three years or 40 years and they’ve talked to everybody. And I just thought, wow, they drown themselves with too much information. You know, you almost have to step back a little bit and just be like, wait a second, what is the right fit? First, you have to know what you’re looking for in order to find it. If you blindly let everybody give you the sales pitch, you’re going to feel a bit overwhelmed with it. I think the trick is first, figure out where your lines are, where your parameters are, and then how what meets my needs. Because there’s businesses out there that you can. There’s every type of business. There are small investment businesses there, service industry, there’s product businesses. But I think for me the very first step is what am I willing, what am I looking for and what am I willing to invest into this business? And actually what attracted me to our British swim school model. It wasn’t like the other swim schools where you would have to spend millions of dollars building out a facility, because I wasn’t ready to take that kind of jump yet.

Nora Farhat: [00:11:52] I didn’t know anything about that business. It was more, Hey, here’s a program. This is an excellent program, and I learned a lot about the program. So I love the program. But then it was you can start off with renting facilities, you can start off this way. My business, from the day I signed the contract, which started off as just renting facilities to today, I have my own million dollar buildout type facility. It just it transitioned into that. But it was not a decision I would have made when I first started seven years ago. So I think the first trick is what exactly are you looking for and what can you invest before you start doing a lot of that research? Because exactly like you said, you can get inundated with just too much information and I’m not looking for sales pitch. I have to look at the numbers. It has to make sense for me. You know, is this profitable? Is this a service? Do I see this working? And my biggest factor always is, is this something that I would buy? Is this something I would invest in? And even as you hear my journey, everything I kind of invested in was something I already decided that I would be a consumer of that product or service.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:00] Now, when you were going about this process and you were learning as you were going along and becoming more educated at every step, were there certain things that you were able to you know, maybe it was your gut instinct. Maybe it’s just your, you know, kind of your natural gifts of understanding business and people. But there are certain things that when you talk to a franchise or franchisor that were like, okay, these are kind of must haves. I need these qualities. This makes me feel comfortable when I hear too much of this. This makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m a little skeptical of this. Like, were there certain kind of signals that were like, okay, this is a green light here. This is a yellow, this is a red that you can share with the listeners who are going through the same process, like things that are kind of must have things that are run away from us, from based on your experience in dealing with a variety of these folks?

Nora Farhat: [00:14:01] Yeah, absolutely. I think it was just more my instincts. I don’t love too much sales pitches, so if somebody overselling me something, it always makes me step back a little bit. For me, it’s a little bit of a red flag because the reality is everything sounds great, right? We know that we everything can sound incredible and great. So sometimes with some businesses, it was almost like an oversell or urgency. I don’t believe in urgency. I don’t believe there’s only ten territories left. And if you don’t act fast, I find that I don’t I didn’t care for people who would put like, kind of arbitrary, like time time limits on me. I didn’t think it was necessary. I think a good business is a viable business in a good area. So for me, an over sales pitch was always kind of a little bit of a red flag for me or a time limit. There is no time limit to run when you’re not even ready yet. And again, granted, there’s always time parameters, but the idea that it’s selling out or that it’s an urgency that’s it’s kind of like a car sales dealership. And if you don’t sign today, you’re going to lose out because somebody’s behind you. Well, then maybe it wasn’t meant for me. I’m very comfortable with that. And I think that to me, those are my personal red flags.

Nora Farhat: [00:15:19] I know everybody has different ones. Also, any business that I could not see myself fully doing, some businesses were very sales like it was. You have to go. You have to go meet people. It was very driven by actions that I would have to take. And then I thought from all my strong suits, I don’t love sales. I could do sales, but I don’t love it. Like that wasn’t who I was as a person. And I knew if I had to show up every single day and go off in. These sales pitches. It wasn’t going to be the best fit for me. So for me it also depends on is whatever I’m signing up for something that I also fit within my skill set and something that I love. I don’t necessarily believe you have to hire somebody for Oh, I don’t want to do sales. I’ll hire somebody. I don’t believe that. Especially when you’re first starting your business. You have to first be the one that’s leading it. You’re fully comfortable with the business before you kind of start staffing it like that. So for me, it was knowing also my skill sets. I didn’t love a heavy sales side of it. Okay, I’m going to stay away from that a little bit. Deadlines, things like that were definitely red flags.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:28] So now when you got involved with Buzz, a franchise brand, and they had a brand that you were excited about, and then then then there were complementary brands that seemingly were also part of the evolution of your business. Did that once you were comfortable there? Was that pretty much it? Like now I’m part of the family. Now I’m going to kind of let’s bring as much value out of this relationship as we possibly can.

Nora Farhat: [00:16:56] So it’s interesting. So for everybody kind of listening. So Buzz owns British Swim School. Buzz Brands franchising, owns British Swim School, and they own pool scouts, both franchises that I have. When I originally signed with British Swim School, it was not owned by Buzz. It was owned by Rita Goldberg, who had developed the program. So that’s what I bought into. And then a few years later, that was sold off to Buzz, and that was a new corporate office kind of getting to know their style, what they do. Well, by the time I was looking for the pool business, it wasn’t specifically that I was like, Oh, I’m already in the Buss family. Let me see what they have. It was actually what I liked about it. It was actually the opposite. It was, Hey, we think that there’s a real need here. Who are the companies that do this best? And then through that due diligence is how I kind of looked back around. And obviously I knew Buzz. I knew what they brought to the table. I knew their strong marketing backgrounds. So those things were definitely attractive, but it was not what ultimately made my decision. So it was really more it was just, you’ve got to do your own due diligence and then you can kind of go with maybe what you know as well, right? So it kind of helped definitely played into making my decision, but it wasn’t the only factor. We looked at other companies that provided the same service we were looking for, but we did not feel maybe as confident or, you know, we didn’t necessarily I didn’t see it was maybe the right fit. So and sometimes there is no wrong answer. There’s just what is the right answer for you at that moment? And that was kind of that decision to stay within the Buzz family and do pool scouts.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:34] Now for you personally, now that you have experience in multiple brands and in multiple industries, really, have you thought of, hey, why don’t I do the a brand of some problem that I’d like solved and start your own franchise?

Nora Farhat: [00:18:52] You know, I can’t say I’ve never thought of it. I have thought of everything I have even you know, I think it’s a natural progression. I think as you grow, as you open businesses, as you know what it takes to run a business, I think the more you more options you have on the table. So definitely that’s something that I have thought of, I have considered. But right now I know that that’s not where I’m at. It’s not necessarily my next step today. I, I really love kind of taking concepts, bringing them to my community. That is a big part of how I built my portfolio. So I think I really like that route right now. But could that change? Absolutely. I think that experience is priceless. And I think a lot of what I’ve gained with multiple brands and working with franchises is that very diverse experience of being able to know. I know the difference between the different levels of support and what support I need and how to best kind of get that. So is it on the table? Hopefully in the future? Absolutely nothing is off the table. But for today, right now, you know, I love kind of where I’m at. I love being able to bring some of these brands and into areas that they’re not currently operating. That’s also very exciting for me.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:04] So what do you need more of right now? How can we help?

Nora Farhat: [00:20:08] What do I need? Famous last words. I think most business owners would say more staffing, but other than that, I think it really just comes down to. I think that the community as a whole, I think business owners, you know, there’s so much out there, there’s so much in the market, there’s so much about, you know, customer surveys and employee satisfaction. I think there’s so much mixed things out there. I think like everybody, I think ultimately is, you know, you want brand recognition. You want to make sure that you’re doing the best that you can. And I think that there is already some great services out there that provide a lot of information. But content is key. I always say to people, especially other business owners, speak openly and speak honestly of your experiences. I’ve spoken to business people that only highlight the best of the best, and then I’m sitting back here at night going, Oh, how is it everybody else figured this out? But I haven’t, you know, or I’d face a certain challenge and I’d be like, What is happening? But the truth is that’s not unique to me.

Nora Farhat: [00:21:13] So I think that the number one thing our industry needs is just more honest conversations, you know, putting it more out there, right. What is actually that growth? What did it take for you to build that? There is no black and white kind of answer for everything. I want the gray. I love, you know, kind of more of those personal stories and people saying, hey, this really does take seven days a week. This takes a lot of my time. You know, balance is kind of nonexistent. I left a a corporate job, but I’m also working 100 hours a week now. I bought a lot with that. Right. I got flexibility, income. I’m controlling my revenue and my income. There’s so many positives, but there’s also kind of that hard side of it that I think sometimes people glaze over, especially people that have been in the industry. And I think it’s okay to have both conversations because I think people should know also what they’re what they’re working with and how to get that motivation to kind of keep moving forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:11] Yeah, I, I hear that a lot. Like a lot of times, especially in the media and especially on social media, you’re just seeing kind of the highlight reel and you’re not seeing kind of the day to day. And a lot of people are hungry for that good, the bad, the ugly. So I know what I’m getting myself into. It’s not something that you’re necessarily dissuading me from doing something. You’re just telling me what to expect so that when something unusual or seemingly unusual is happening, I realize it’s not unusual. This is just part of the journey.

Nora Farhat: [00:22:44] Absolutely. And honestly, I find it kind of encouraging. I don’t see it as a negative. I don’t see if I tell somebody, you’re going to work a lot of hours, that’s not negative. That’s your baby. That’s your business. You want to hustle at your business, you know? But I see it as just a little bit more transparency. There’s many times in my own journey where I didn’t know what that next step was. I didn’t know where to go from there. Right. It was almost like I had to keep taking small steps and allowing it to keep developing. And there was many times, I think, within my own journey in full transparency, where I was like, Oh, this is just not going to work. This is not right. This is not working. And then it was like, wait, wait, wait, step back. Now let’s solve the problem. You know, I have to also kind of go through that. So for me, when I hear of a struggle, it isn’t necessarily like, Oh, see, it’s all bad. No, not at all. It’s kind of encouraging. It’s kind of like, Oh, okay, they went through it and that means we’re going through it and that means we got to just keep moving forward. And I think that that’s such an important part of the entrepreneurial kind of process, is just figuring that out too, like, hey, not every day is great, but you’re going to figure it out and just kind of look at it as one thing at a time, right? Don’t get overwhelmed with the details.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:58] Yeah. One of my favorite books is by a guy named Ryan Holladay who wrote The obstacle is the way that obstacles aren’t there to just mess you up. They’re just part of the journey. And part of the journey sometimes means going around the obstacle, over the obstacle through the obstacle. That’s just part of the journey. It’s not there to sabotage you or to stop you from getting where you want to go. It’s just there. So just deal with it.

Nora Farhat: [00:24:24] Absolutely. That is the best way you could have said it. Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:28] So if somebody wants to connect with you or learn more about your brand or brands, what is the best coordinates?

Nora Farhat: [00:24:35] Absolutely. You can find me at Nora Farhat pretty much on any platform that could be LinkedIn or you can find me on Instagram and it’s just Nora and Ray and my last name, Farhat F r h a t. So that’s pretty much the best way to kind of link up with me. Or you can find us on British Fool.com, you can look up our Detroit locations. We’re in the Michigan market or pull scouts or magnesium. You look us up, you’ll definitely find us.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:02] Well, congratulations on all the success. And thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Nora Farhat: [00:25:09] Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:11] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Franchise Marketing Radio.

Carolina Veira With CareMax, Inc.

July 1, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

South Florida Business Radio

Carolina Veira With CareMax, Inc.

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Carolina Veira, Director of Partnerships at CareMax, Inc.

Carolina Veira is an award-winning executive, authentic leader, financial strategist and Diversity and Inclusion champion, with a passion for the advancement and empowerment of Hispanics, women, and other groups across various stages in their lives, and careers. She is an advocate for mental health, upward mobility, social impact, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Carolina is a proud Latina entrepreneur with a successful trajectory in creating community initiatives and strategic partnerships with local, national, and multinational companies and NPOs. She believes in the power of building community by working together on financially sustainable and educational initiatives that transform and positively impact humans and communities.

Carolina is the leader of The Hispanic Star Miami hub, steering the strategy, fundraising & development efforts of various initiatives benefiting the Hispanic Community and expanding organizational reach on a local and regional scale. Carolina also serves as a Board Director of Deliver the Dream, an NPO that provides therapeutic programs to families facing serious illness, crisis, or disability; Accountable Impact, an award-winning company leading the way in advancing the Sustainable Development in the United States; and the Latin American Business Association (LABA), a business organization connecting and advocating for the development and growth of the entrepreneurial and business community in South Florida.

Carolina is a contributing author to Hispanic Stars Rising: The New Face of Power. A compilation of 92 stories written by Hispanic authors from across America. They share challenges and triumphs as they navigate everyday life in the U.S. She is also a contributing author to Today’s Inspired Latina, Volume IX. A positive, empowering read for anyone sitting on a dream and thinking it can’t come true. Today’s Inspired Latina™ shows that it can!

Carolina believes our voices and our stories have unlimited power and need to be shared with the world, that is why she also hosts ¡HABLEMOS! Conversations with talented humans who are leading with heart, and passion. Talks about inclusion, leadership and purpose as business drivers and a powerful way to elevate our community. These conversations are shared through video, podcasts and in written format on her website and through monthly newsletters. Carolina earned a double Bachelor of Science degree from D’Youville College in both Business and Accounting and a Master’s in Business Administration. She is Ecuadorian-American currently residing in Miami. She enjoys tennis, the Buffalo Bills, and speaks three languages.

Connect with Carolina on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

About CareMax
Serving the older adults population
The Hispanic community
CareMax has developed strategic partnerships with local and national businesses

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:01] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in South Florida. It’s time for South Florida Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here another episode of South Florida Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Carolina Veira with CareMax. Welcome.

Carolina Veira: [00:00:25] Hey Lee, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:29] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about CarMax. How are you serving folks?

Carolina Veira: [00:00:34] Listen. Carmax, we have both elements, both the medical services. So our patients go and visit our centers and receive primary care physician services and specialty services. So anything from seeing your doctor to nutrition, learning about your eyes and if you need glasses or not, diabetes, meeting with other other patients, that sort of thing. But we also have a technology component where we’re able to look at the patient’s data and get real time information and just to provide that whole approach to health care. We we not only worry about their physical health care, but also their mental health care, their social economic, their social determinants of health. How are they dealing with a community who’s taking care of them, who’s their provider, who’s there, who are their neighbors? All that information is, is, is needed to provide the best care.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:32] So what’s your back story? How did you get into this line of work? It must be so rewarding.

Carolina Veira: [00:01:37] It is very rewarding, actually. My my I started in the renewable energy field, actually, but then I moved when I moved to Florida a few years ago after living in Buffalo, because I know you need to experience a little bit of the cold go bills, by the way. Then I moved and I started working in the health care industry and truly, when you work in health care, you deal you obviously serve patients all ages, all socioeconomic backgrounds, all different professions. And you experience truly and you can see the need out there to not only provide medical services, but just to be there to support others. And and to do this tie to your day to day job is a blessing. We do say that it’s a blessing to be a blessing. And and that’s the type of approach that we take. We are all part of one big family and we want all the members of our families to be as healthy as possible.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:41] Now, it’s important that you mentioned all members of the family and in a lot of cases, those folks that need the most care don’t have the resources or the ability to kind of get the care that they need and deserve. Can you talk a little bit about how important it is for CarMax, you know, from a corporate social responsibility standpoint in order to make sure that everybody who needs the care can have access to it?

Carolina Veira: [00:03:09] Absolutely. And this is a beautiful question, by the way, because as I believe that not only our organization, but every organization, corporate America, should be taking more of a responsible and active role into ensuring that our communities are as healthy or as taking care as possible. I know that we cannot do it all, but we can all do something. And it’s not only about what you and I can do, it’s also about what corporations can do, what the government is doing. It’s all working together to ensure that everyone, but especially the most vulnerable members of our communities, are taking care of and are serve and are there. Their health is at the best level possible because only when we are only as strong as the most vulnerable members of our community. So it is a mission of love. I think it’s more than anything. It’s understanding that there’s a need out there and maybe we can do it all. But if we work together, we can do much more than just working, you know, just just doing a little bit of work. There’s, there’s unlimited resources out there from our end. And that’s what we focus is on understanding what the needs are, but also what the needs, the needs of our patients, but also the needs of our communities, where we’re our people, our team members are working. That’s where they live. So we want to ensure that we create partnerships with other organizations and especially the government agencies, to ensure that we’re all working in tandem and towards the same mission, which is to us provide the best health care, but with passion, with compassion, with kindness, and with those within our values.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:55] Right now, you mentioned how important these kind of strategic partnerships are in a lot of communities. There’s a lot of groups and individual organizations that are trying to solve this specific problem, but very rarely are all of the organizers. Nations that are trying to solve this kind of larger holistic problem, working together and not duplicating services or duplicating efforts. But how do you kind of build these relationships and partnerships with the variety of resources that are out there to help everybody make sure that we can get to as many people that need that have the needs.

Carolina Veira: [00:05:39] It is about it is my belief that it’s about truly understanding not only what we want to see happening, what what the end result or what we’re striving for when we’re building these partnerships with other organizations, but also very focused on what the real needs of that community of those patients are. We cannot it’s it’s a tailor initiative. If I’m a tailor made initiative, if I may say so, because you really need to understand what that community needs. You can assume that everyone needs the same thing. So it’s by by working on those relationships, understanding what the what they see as their main needs. Understanding what we have as assets that we can use for those communities. And then truly not focusing on creating big projects like, you know, that are going to take ten years. Yes, have that long term vision, but work on smaller, short term goals, accomplishing those short term goals that are more achievable. And you can provide results because only when you see the numbers and the results and the impact that the lives impact that it’s when you can encourage other organizations and other partners to join you and to really understand what you’re striving for. So I think that that open communication, that transparency, accountability, all those elements are so important. And when building these relationships but also understanding what people need, not only assuming but truly sitting down, having that cup of coffee, if you may say, but just having that conversation of, okay, what, what is what is it that you need? So that’s that’s how I build successful relationships and successful initiatives.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:30] I believe by listening and by hearing the stories of the people from the horse’s mouth, not not jumping to conclusions or making assumptions based on what’s kind of good for the organization. It sounds like CarMax is part of their culture, and DNA is to really serve this community in an authentic manner.

Carolina Veira: [00:07:51] Absolutely. And it’s not it goes beyond the patient’s right. It goes into their families, their neighbors, their their churches. If they attend one, the schools, the everyone in between, because everyone plays a role. So how can a corporation, a company like Cemex, can influence and can provide support and in an authentic manner? That’s what we work on every day. Not only we’re not only here. We’re we’re here in the business of providing health care. Obviously, we want to we want to make it sustainable. So we need to make money. But there’s ways of making or producing revenue where we all benefit from it. Our patients, our members, our team members also because we want the communities where we are to be as successful as possible so they live happier and healthier lives. Only one day they grow and they advance. It’s when everyone benefits from it.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:51] Well, it sounds like your efforts have been noticed, and you’ve been recently named one of the 100 most influential Latinas in 2022. Can you talk about that award and why it’s so important to you?

Carolina Veira: [00:09:07] Of course. And thank you so much for bringing that up. It Latino leaders, they identified the 100 most what they call the most influential Latinos in the US. And I was awarded with I was recognized by the magazine as one of them. So I’m especially proud because I know there’s all I can be representing, but I know that I’m the the summary of a lot of people working and supporting me in different roles and different initiatives. But more than anything, to me, it’s about representation. It’s about standing up for our community or for people of color, for women of color, for women who are trying to constantly break barriers in advance and show what we’re capable of. Right. So we can be what we cannot see. So we need we need more of these examples of success and whatever success means to you. But more people making things happen and whatever their goals are, just so others can see themselves in those those leaders and community leaders, those professionals, those mothers, those daughters that are truly not only representing but setting a tone and in elevating others. Because it ultimately, to me, it comes down to now that you get this type of recognition, what are we doing also to elevate others, to open doors for others, to make sure that others, the ones that are coming behind us are the ones that are with us. Right. That are part of our cohorts. How are we supporting them to also shine a light on their success? Because we’re all our individual stories are powerful. Our individual stories are needed. We just need to put to showcase this information so more people can achieve greater things just by looking at what’s possible.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:05] Can you share a story that might illustrate the way that you bring people together and maybe the most rewarding story that you were able to, you know, help other people kind of join forces and maybe get to create a bigger impact than than any individual might have thought possible.

Carolina Veira: [00:11:24] So I tell you what, during COVID night, I have two stories and I’m going to make the short and sweet because I know that we’re limited on time. But during COVID 19, we started delivering hot meals to our health care heroes at different hospitals. When people started realizing that this was possible and it was the the health care heroes felt good about it. We we had and by me, but we I mean, my team and I, we we had the support of bigger corporations like Beam, Suntory, Procter and Gamble with products so we can help. We were able to help other communities, farm workers and Homestead, people in Orlando, people in New York, people in different cities within the states to to during the time of need. Right. When when you are dealing with a pandemic. And if you don’t remember that it wasn’t that far back when we were all quarantined and we didn’t not everyone had resources available to pay for toilet paper and things like that. They were focusing on others, so this was meaningful to them and we really impacted a lot of about so far. We’ve impacted 40,000 lives with these initiatives. But the most recent one, I’m part of a book which is Latina to the Inspire Latina Volume nine and one of our colleges, Miami Dade College. We were able to talk to students about our experiences, professional and personal, and out of this group, a couple of girls, they have this initiative at school where they want to end period poverty. So now because of that experience, I motivated them to to go beyond Florida. And now they’re in different states, but I’m mentoring them and I’m working with them on establishing their MPO. They’re not for profit, so they’re probably 1 to 3. So these are initiatives that are meaningful but are impactful and can last and improve the lives of many, and it encourages others to join you. So I would encourage everyone to just, if they have a dream, to just go for it because you never know it will surprise you. And then people are willing they want opportunities to help others.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:36] Well, congratulations on all the success. The impact is real. And we appreciate the work that you’re doing and the community and in the lives of so many other people. And people don’t realize that when you make an impact like that, there’s ripples that are happening outside of your field of vision that are just as real to these people. So thank you for all that you do now.

Carolina Veira: [00:14:00] Thank you. And thank you for opening the doors and for this opportunity because. We need to continue telling our stories, our stories, so more people get encouraged and motivated by them and they do more. We need all the the support and the help and the love that we can get.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:18] Well, if somebody wants to learn more about CarMax, what’s a website?

Carolina Veira: [00:14:22] W w w CarMax. C a r e a x dot com.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:28] And if somebody wants to connect with you, is LinkedIn the best place?

Carolina Veira: [00:14:32] Linkedin is always the best place. Carolina and a m as my middle initial and Veda v i r a. And yeah, just send me a DM whatever it’s needed. And let’s work together on spreading love and empathy and kindness to the world.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:51] Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you. Yeah.

Recognized Senior & Passionate Brand Leader Michael Donahue

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Association Leadership Radio

Recognized Senior & Passionate Brand Leader Michael Donahue

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Mike Donahue is a dynamic strategist and spokesperson, for both major brands, associations, and influencers in the most relevant, relatable manner feasible for existing brand stakeholders at all levels.

He is highly recognized for his positive, proven team builder addressing the most important elements of an organizations culture. With detailed, empathetic understanding of existing objectives, he is a leader in helping execute change management needs, developing new ways of communicating and messaging existing entities objectives to promote their growth, enhanced relevance with internal and external constituencies.

His experience includes working in Brand Growth Leadership of two Fortune 50 Companies, 3M Corporation and in Senior Management as Chief Communications Officer for McDonald’s U.S. Company and later as a Global Advisor for the International President and Chief Operating Officer of McDonald’s, during some of the strongest U.S. and Global Growth of the company.

Donahue was a pioneer of brand management change in every position he held throughout his career, often serving with skilled leadership as an effective disrupter to existing orthodoxies, or as he prefers, a champion of the Anticipatory Issues Management (AIM) Model, that perceptively looked at the future, changing consumer trends and driving decisions to lead rather than allow external forces to “be the disrupters” and interrupt organizational objectives.

He subscribes to the earliest adopters of the importance of change management, Charles Darwin, who professed, “It is not the strongest of species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Most recently Mr. Donahue is one of the few executives who experienced at the highest levels the rich perspectives of Corporate Management at McDonald’s, and later after retiring from McDonald’s several years later helping the 1,400+ McDonald’s Owners, as their Executive Director, advance their agenda with a new, less collaborative McDonald’s Corporate Management team insistent on changing the model of “collaborative leadership” established by the Founder’s and so successful for nearly sixty years with one of the world’s most recognized and respected Brands. His vantage point from both levels is indispensable expertise as he continues his Senior Level of Strategic Consulting for agencies and clients.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the business radio studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:17] Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio and you’re in for a treat. I hope you have your paper and pencil ready. You are going to learn a lot. Today’s guest is Michael Donahue. He’s a recognized senior and passionate brand leader, proven innovative and anticipatory champion of relevant change management. He is a proven, intuitive, customer centric advocate for over 40 years at senior levels in some of the largest companies that you have all heard of. Welcome, Michael.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:00:53] Thank you very much. Lee, it’s an honor to be here with you today.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:56] I am so excited to pick your brain here and get your thoughts on the world of associations. Tell the listener a little bit about your background. I know you spent a lot of your years with McDonald’s, but you’ve been involved in associations, it seems like, for a very, very long time.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:01:14] Yeah, and I pride myself on that, LEIGH. The diversity has given me a kind of a unique perspective because I started out in the trade association business back in 1987, 1980, coming out of college as a I was one of the first public relations contract majors. They didn’t even have PR and earned media back then at the Fine Institute, we call the Harvard of the Midwest, Illinois State University. And so I came out of there and I immediately got an intern with a local state senator, and I started working down in Springfield, Illinois, in politics. I was from the Chicago area and then immediately got hired away. I realized what a breeding ground state capitals were at that time with Ronald Reagan, the 10th Amendment bringing items back to the state level, and a group called the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest trade association for small business owners. I think the vast majority have ten employees or less of their members. They hired me as part of this trend of getting back to the states to cover the Midwest area. And it was a great experience learning the association business from, you know, small business owners that were real entrepreneurs that had real problems. I migrated then I got hired from them because of our success. We actually repealed the state inheritance tax at that time. Of course, they they put it back on later. But the Governor Thompson, who was governor for 14 years, a very strong governor, they called him governor for life. He saw the work I had done with this small business group. And he was a moderate Republican and needed help. And he brought me in and had me run his Department of Commerce, small business and technology.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:03:20] So I got some government experience. And then out of that, I got noticed by corporations in the in the political world needing more help at the state level. And I got hired by 3 a.m. to do both sales branding and some some government relations work. They sold a lot of product. And then from there things seemed to kind of just breed within themselves. In this arena, I was able to go and get hired ultimately to McDonald’s Corporation, and I worked my way up there. I was there at McDonald’s Corporation out of Oakbrook, Illinois. They’re down now in downtown Chicago. And I worked there for 20 years. Lee And in a diverse group of experiences, I worked in government relations. I opened our first social responsibility group and response to all the groups like PETA and the they used to call them the obesity police and others that targeted McDonald’s. And we worked with them. And it was much like a trade association because we like to use our franchisees. Back then we had 2300 and every congressional district. So at McDonald’s we sort of worked. We said we were a multi local company, not multinational, because of the franchisee model. So I had a good experience with them, good experience with 3ma good experience with NFIB working for the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, which of course Chicago’s headquarters for many of the largest. But we worked for the largest all the way down to the smallest retailers. And then I’ve done a lot of consulting in between and have a rich history of both, seen it from the corporate larger side and then from the people that represent us in the trade associations as lobbyists or consultants and multi-unit groups like that.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:34] Now for the folks that are in the enterprise level and working for large corporates, can you talk about the importance of associations and how these large enterprises can play a role in really helping their entire industry if they lean into. Associations and really try to serve them to the best of their ability.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:05:59] I sure will. And if you have a big corporate office or people that are coming up in media relations, public relations, social responsibility, ESR, you name it, I have a significant statement for them. If they don’t use trade associations, if they don’t use third party advocates, they’re, they’re doing their brand an injustice. And that sounds a little harsh, but let me explain my experience with McDonald’s. I came into McDonald’s and the first thing I did, I was hired as a government relations specialist because that’s where I was coming under. And they wanted me to cover all 50 states, believe it or not. So I said, okay. I sat down and started my process, my inventory. I said, How many state restaurant associations coming from the retail merchants? Of course, knowing that Penney’s and Sears and all the large groups had really formulated all these state retail associations, and we had a coalition of national retail associations, and that was who they had. They hired powerful lobbyists in every state. So to some degree, they could protect their brand, you know, rather than go down and fight an issue that might be a consumer issue. They could have their trade associations doing that and talking from an economic and jobs and other reality. Well, I was told by my leaders at McDonald’s, well, we don’t join trade associations at the time.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:07:31] I will say as the industry leader at that time, long before Apple and others, we battled each year with Coca Cola to be the world’s most recognized trademark. And I guess there was a left over Ray Kroc and Fred Turner of the two founders, sort of I call it arrogance, but I have all the respect in the world for them. But they had prohibited their group or communications people from joining trade associations saying, we don’t want to share our secrets with other competitors. We are leading the industry. There was one statement somebody made in a meeting to me once that I just grimaced at We have everything to teach and nothing to learn. I went about and I realized that I was fighting upstream. Lee So I quickly developed a strategy and a plan to convince my management team all the way up to the top that not using the Restaurant Association’s was a major mistake for McDonald’s, that we were exposing the brand to unnecessary consumer hostility. There’s, you know, is there a brand that’s more consumer facing every day than McDonald’s? And if the word got out that we were fighting, let’s say a soda pop packs or we were fighting health care benefits, they could vote with their feet walking into any restaurant.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:09:07] And the same is true of any retailer and other group. So I started to put together a case examples of where we could be much more effective if we worked with our state restaurant associations as opposed to going it alone and and relying on others most at that time, QSR, as we call them, quick service restaurant rather than fast food. It’s more appealing, right? So we said, you know, if we join these associations, we have the internal expertise that they do not have. We have an obligation to give them that information because these issues. Do help other companies. And it’s just not a McDonald’s myopic issue. And as we started to do that and see some success, see some coalition building, I think others in the industry, the QSR industry and others began to realize the importance of that and join their local restaurant association. At first I had some work to do, Lee. We were met as arrogant. We were met as 19 players, and for business to split that way is a very detrimental way to lobby in the state legislature. When your opponents are coming in pretty well organized, if that makes.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:30] Sense. Now, when did you start getting traction? And then people starting to understand your vision and start believing what you believe that it helps when we lean into the association and that our work, that it’s not kind of a zero sum game that we are going to gain more than what we’re giving in actuality.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:10:50] So let’s take an issue. For example, let’s let’s say a well-intentioned legislator. Wanted to add a new tax on I use it before on beverages. We had the famous case of Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York trying to tax big beverages and sugary drinks. Think he was doing a social good? Well, that was around a lot longer than him, I can tell you. And we would analyze the tax. We would realize that it might be like another syntax, like cigarets or other things that legislators go for because they’re not as. What do you want to see detrimental to people? We realized early on that people didn’t understand the economics of these issues. So using our tax department, using our vendors like Coca Cola, several others, we would get together with the respective industry groups and by that I mean restaurant associations, chambers of commerce, let’s say it’s in Little Rock, Arkansas, was just repealed after years there sort of tax. It took a broad based coalition of led by the local restaurant and beverage associations to really defeat this because the cause that they were paying for was a good one, but it was an inappropriate tax on the consumer. And the consumer was already taxed 2 to 3 times on food products and other purchases and like that. And we considered that a regressive tax. And you can make a very good case. And this is where I think your message or your question to me about what’s the corporate, corporate person’s job is to realize this is not a tax on a brand, that there is a statement that I would use what many Chicago legislators, and they just shake their head and say, Mike, you’re right, but your people don’t elect me. When I would say there’s no such thing as a tax on business. We live in a free market enterprise system. Any time you raise a tax on a product, what does the retailer, what does the wholesaler, what does the restaurant industry have to do.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:27] Because they pass it on like.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:13:29] Small margins. So once we started this effort of a multidimensional group coming together, we found that we could go out and recruit consumers to be a big part of the group. And don’t you dare tax my soda. You know, it’s bad enough I have to go and get a value meal for my family to save money. We would take good enough. But it’s it’s important that I pay as low as much every time you pass a tax. It’s a double tax to me because the food tax. Isn’t that so? That’s what I would say for every industry, for every issue, almost even the very complicated issues, you can put together a coalition using that trade association as the lead. And the more you make that trade association strong, the more you bring resources to that trade association, the stronger you help your brand, the stronger that you make it. And then for any corporation that has franchisees or distributors or even sales representatives out in the marketplace, the local you know, it’s all Tip O’Neill used to say that all politics are local and you want your local franchisees that people see sponsoring the Little League, cleaning up the beach or sidewalk litter, participating in Little League baseball games or litter cleanup drives or whatever. You want that local contact talking to their local legislator and saying this is the problem and that’s the job of associations and it’s multiple voices with the same message. And I hope we played a role in bringing a lot of groups together. Once we started joining, I think by the time I left 20 years later, we had joined just about every state restaurant group. Sometimes we we join the retail group if it was more powerful and even local chambers of commerce.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:34] Now, if you do that right, can’t you really build some true grassroots campaigns like that are organically built from the ground up rather than some of these things that maybe have a big national budget that makes it look like they’re a grassroots campaign, but in actuality, they’re not.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:15:55] As a great and multidimensional question and I get paid by the word and my area of work. So you cut me off if I go too long. But Lee, it starts with this. Matt. Legislation. Legislative support is a game of mathematics. And a legislator on issues of the day like abortion or like climate control or other issues get thousands of letters and many of them are signed postcards that are worthless because they just throw them in a stack. I was married to a state senator for seven years and I saw up front how they handled it. But nothing is more compelling to that state senator or that local senator or that congressman or congresswoman or senator than a personal letter on personal stationery generated maybe from the trade association. But saying, listen, I’m a member of the community. I pay my taxes, I employ 60 people per restaurant. I contribute to X, Y and Z organizations. And what you’re doing to me will hurt me competitively from the district next to me, the state next to me, and hurt employment and other things. Because we’re a most people don’t realize it. We’re not an oil company. When you’re in the retail business or the restaurant business, we don’t sell oil and buckets of crude. We sell by value. So the margins are very small and that’s what’s important. And some of these taxes that people think they can get away with and not address the real issues and and and turn a business association’s or turn their members into the evil person is a big mistake. And especially in today’s world. You know, I could go on I could I could do that in a second, but I’d rather get your follow up before I go into my Europeanization of the United States.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:19] Sure. Well, let’s let’s focus in on on the task at hand in terms of what can or what do you recommend the association leader in a local market? Let’s start there. What could they be doing better in order to attract some of these larger players that have more resources, maybe deeper pockets, but still serve that individual, the small firm, the boots on the ground guy that that, you know, this is their livelihood. And and some of the ramifications are going to impact that person personally and their family personally. So, you know, as a leader of an association, especially at the local level, you have to serve multiple constituents. So how do you recommend them kind of threading the needle to serve both the larger corporates and that kind of smaller boots on the ground where the impact is maybe felt more personally to that person?

Michael A. Donahue: [00:19:25] I’ll start in the reverse order of telling you what I think. The biggest problem if a trade association is experiencing membership from big members or small members dropping off. I’ll start with what I think is the biggest. Miss or the biggest mistake of trade associations. Trade associations from their very origin origination were created to protect whatever their organizations. Trust me. For every one business trade association, there’s two or three consumer trade associations. There is more than that union organizations. There’s what I call the built in anti marketers that are going to be attacking your members every single day. Be it on nutrition if you’re a restaurant, be it on price hikes or credit card caps, if you’re a retailer, if you’re a small manufacturer, they think you’re loaded with money and they want to tax you on employees or things of this nature. And I think what has happened, the worst trend with all of the efforts, and I do call it I heard a wise man say this, it’s not my term, and I heard it 20 years ago. Lee So it’s not new. What is the Europeanization of the United States? And that is if you look at the traditional positions of business philosophy and how we were founded and kind of why we left the other countries is the idea of the power of the individual, the idea of the power of the independent entrepreneur, and the independent idea of market based philosophy is better than a government based.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:21:22] Now, you and I know and I don’t say this to be political, we’ve long lost that war, but trade associations are probably on the front lines of changing it. And I think the sense that they make is they see everybody else is going towards this new new world order and trying to be socially responsible, transparent. Whatever the case may be. And I would tell you that I talk to many trade associations that said, Mike, we have to change here because the dynamic is changing in Iowa or the dynamic is changing in New York or wherever. And I have to work here every day with these legislators. And I said, But what that means is you’re capitulating to the idea that the system you defend isn’t working. And for example, just the change of the messaging. To not go in and apologize for the fact that you represent, I could give you all kinds of examples. But I’m a restaurant or in the case of a chamber that you represent waste management or in other areas. Every one of these areas are doing great things in the social. It’s good business, you know, for McDonald’s to take many of the social responsibility positions we did working with the Environmental Defense Fund to come up with new ways to create packaging, reduce, reuse, recycle was good business. When we made key announcements, our business would go up now. What has happened is I would go to our tax department and say they want to tax X, Y or Z, and they would sit back in business execs that don’t know the political process would say, Well, what do you want us to do? I said, No, no, no.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:23:26] Don’t don’t take that approach. Tell me what’s the best for job growth, economic growth, tax growth in our business? And let me put that into messages and go sell that to the legislators. Far too many people are conflict avoidant and are afraid to take a stand. And it’s rare anymore. And I’m talking when I was running the trade associations, it was over 25 years ago, but I found it then, and even when I was hire an independent lobbyist to work for us, I was finding it. Then they were more worried about ruining their reputation with a changing philosophy in government than they were with trying to reiterate the importance of it and, and, and business and economic issues. I could go into a 100 examples, but the bottom line is, if you’re not afraid to speak your truth, my mantra at McDonald’s was we we’re often hiding because we are again before Apple and others, we were the world’s most recognized trademark. So it was easy for Teddy Kennedy or you name it, to attack our brand. Mario Cuomo stood on the property of a McDonald’s restaurant and said, we’ve got to get rid of this disposable world and get rid of the Styrofoam container.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:24:49] And he got nightly news and was all over the place. Next thing you know, McDonald’s is a scourge of the environment and we’re fighting for four or five years bans on polystyrene foam. But. If a technical issue like that, you get the facts and you have the company committed to defend what they’re doing rather than trying to cut in and find a solution, you can win the battle and you can win by making the point you want a landfill that doesn’t have leachate and methane gas and you want inert items in there. And Styrofoam is probably one of the best to keep it solid. There’s a reason why Chicago’s built on a landfill, you know, and there’s a reason why they have methane gas and everything else. Biodegradability we used to have a professor say is the biggest myth since Santa Clause. Now, I’m not trying to get on to I’m not trying to get onto one issue at a time. I’m just trying to say the same is true with the new workforce and the different ways that people are bringing in employees. And then legislators try to regulate that. You have to have a certain schedule or you have to have certain benefits or whatever. And the HR departments and the government relations departments are afraid to go to their local trade association and say, this is why we’re doing it. We have so many single mothers that this is an advantage to them and this is how it is better for them, for business.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:26:28] They rather worry about, you know, the the stimulus coming at them, then trying to change. As Stephen Covey told us, the difference between animals and humans is our ability to think between stimulus response. You know, often trade associations will run to us and say, oh, you’re going to have to change your X, Y or Z position because they’re introducing legislation. My response would be why? And they would say, Well, they’re sponsoring legislation. I said, Isn’t it a democracy? And whoever wins the argument, so let’s go back at them and explain to them why we’re doing it. And I think too many business leaders and I’ll take it all the way up to the c-suites. And you see what happens with recent decisions by Coca-Cola, by Delta Airlines, by others. They want to capitulate to what they perceive is the what should we say, the the loud minority, and they end up hurting themselves. Worse, people vote with their feet. You’ll never be able to measure how many people didn’t go into a McDonald’s because we had Styrofoam and people were blessed. And Styrofoam you’ll never be able to measure how many people are no longer flying a certain airline because they took a liberal position. And I’m not taking sides, but because they took a position that they didn’t belong in. And that’s why you have a trade association to represent you and those issues.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:27:57] And more times than that, when we did get with the Environmental Defense Fund and say, hey, don’t look at what goes out the front of our door. Help us with decisions on what goes out the back of the door. Corrugated cardboard, you know, plastic containers help us. We came up with a Harvard business case of 60 different ways we could reduce, reuse, recycle that weren’t going out the front. And it was less than 1% of whatever was in the landfill, those Styrofoam containers. Yet we couldn’t win the PR war, but we won the government relations war. And what I would say is association management has to be stronger. They have to be more willing to tell the truth. They have to talk about transparency, and they have to go to a company and say, listen, you’re going to lose your shirt because they don’t understand you. If you don’t do X, Y and Z or arm me with those, there might be time for modifications, for compromise. We all we’re all for that. But 90% of the time the legislator does not understand. A pal does not understand a business issue. And that’s what I mean by the Europeanization. We have less business support than ever. And I’m an economic guy. I’m all for it, you know, I’m all for doing the right thing for the environment, doing the right thing for everything. But you don’t automatically capitulate to the wrong idea.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:27] Yeah. I mean, in your career, you’ve seen a lot and you have a lot to share with others and something that we’ve seen over the years when there is lack of context and lack of understanding of the big picture. You know, they say history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. So we’re seeing some of the same things happen again and again based on, you know, not optimal information and capitulation. I mean, that’s that’s happening that’s happened throughout history.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:29:54] So this notion that you would tell legislators and they would look at you like. You know, you were a Cyclops. I’d say there’s no such thing as tax in business. All this talk about the corporations don’t pay taxes is such malarkey. If you add up what they really pay in personnel and property and sales and other taxes, there is no such thing. And people might want to argue with this as a tax on business in a free market enterprise price. It’s all about margins and the marketplace will take care of it. Why do we have to fight with all the fast food places on a dollar menu or on a value menu? It’s the marketplace setting those ideas. And so Governor Thompson used to like to travel around the state, and he was a moderate. So he liked to speak to a Republican, his Republican people. But then he also liked to talk to labor unions and sometimes got criticized. And I loved it. I say don’t walk away from adversity as a trade association, walk right into it and say, we want we got a point of view we’d like to have heard here and we’re going to bring our members. But he used to always say, because Illinois, like California, like so many other states, had a terrible worker’s comp and unemployment insurance and tax environment still does. But he would walk in and say, we’re trying to improve the business climate.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:31:34] And I pulled him aside one day as an economic adviser. And I said, Governor, why do you keep referring to it as the business climate? He goes, What do you mean? I go, Isn’t it the jobs climate? And he looked at me and he was a brilliant man, much smarter than me. And he goes, You know, you’re right. You can’t tax the job provider. And Illinois. At that time, we were losing manufacturing, basic manufacturing like crazy because of worker’s comp and unemployment and a simple message change, a simple ability. The art of the rhetoric to call it a jobs climate makes all the difference in the world. You know, now everybody wants to target business because they’re a big monolithic environment. When I testified in front of the FTC, when they were saying Ronald McDonald was no different than Joe Camel, I said, I’m here today to represent the more than 10,000 families, mothers and fathers that work for McDonald’s Corporation. And I assure you, we have no desire to make the world heavier, provide them with food that is not considered nutritious. It has the basic items. You have a lot of people that are hard to convince. But when you bring in that’s the other thing I recommend to our trade association is bring in your adversaries.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:33:08] The best thing you can do is bring in the adversary. Whenever we did state workshops or a federal workshop around the country, we’d bring in that guy that was introducing the Sirup Tax, that was introducing the retail grocery tax or whatever. And we’d have them by by talking to our members. They thought they were lobbying us until they start getting a question. And then another question. And then it might be Inner City Black from Chicago. Who would have a black owner operator who was the largest employer in that guy’s district go up to him and say, Do you understand what you’re taxed on, soda or cheeseburger or anything else? Do you know what it means to employment and to what I’m doing in your district? And it makes all the difference in the world. And what you find is people, when presented with logical facts, presented with the business case, are often persuaded in a different way. Just look at some of the changes that has happened. And and I think, you know, I think what’s his name from Tesla is a perfect example. He’s not a moderate or a liberal or conservative. He’s a common sense guy. And that’s what trade associations have lost. We retreat. We retreat. We retreat because the majority of legislators are not business oriented. Right. We know that. Right. There’s very few leaders left that would put themselves through those kind of things.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:35:01] So the immediate reaction of the business community is and the trade association is to retreat and say, let’s get the best we can out of this. And it’s like, What? Why can’t you make the case? You know, and there’s a great book, Conflict Politics. If the Enemy attacks and pushes you back two steps by criticizing and you retreat and come back with your evidence and they push you back to steps, you retreat and push them back one step. What’s their net gain? One step. And they just hurt your business and profitability as opposed to understanding you’re the job promoter or the job creator. And that’s the message I would give to summarize all that. All my rhetoric is I think trade associations in a way have to adopt that model that so many governors and and so many others. You know, Trump tried to steal it from Ronald Reagan. But taking back, taking back, you know, what it means to be an and free enterprise system and the damage that’s done. Now, I admit there’s things that have to be done to improve working conditions, all that, but not to the magnitude we’re seeing nowadays. You know, we’re reverting to a system that has failed everywhere else in the world sometimes. And again, I don’t mean to be too political.

Lee Kantor: [00:36:29] Now, I know you’ve retired for some of your work, but you’re still available as a free agent consultant, is that right?

Michael A. Donahue: [00:36:37] Absolutely. I’m one of those guys that I watched too many of my friends and colleagues when they got to be 65 and they thought they could go off and retire and play golf and take their boat out. And within a few years they were a fraction of themselves. I, I am convinced I love it so much, especially being an advocate, especially teaching businesses, trade associations, companies, new ways of going about things. Lee That I will work forever. It’s forever young for me. While I compartmentalize, I have the ability to do that and I like it a lot. And there’s this thing that most people don’t realize. It was started by Proctor and Gamble, and I shamelessly stole it, and it led to one of my biggest promotions at McDonald’s. It’s called The Idea of Anticipatory Issues Management. And it was created. I got to give her credit, Deborah, if you’re out there, please call me. I was going to form a business with at one time. She was a Ph.D. in environmental science at at, at, at P&G. And she realized they were getting chilled on things like phosphates from their detergents in the water and things like diapers when the whole solid waste crisis came on. You and I remember when we went out in the backyard and burned our garbage in United States, I never saw a seagull unless I went to Florida. Now they’re everywhere because we bury our garbage. Well, she created a model called Anticipatory Issues Management that I pioneered at McDonald’s that allows you to play offense on all issues.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:38:26] And it’s there’s only four. No matter what company, no matter what association you’re in, there’s only four elements of every issue. There is the emergence. And that’s when you hear your environmental or teacher, you know, the education’s talking about this crisis may be serious, maybe a Swedish study that’s not necessarily germane. Then there’s a triggering event. But if you follow the hierarchy before it becomes a triggering event, you get the media, you get other groups, liberal groups and others starting to repeat, you know, such and such is bad for the world. And then we all know there’s no leader. So the media picks up on it and starts running stories. And then shortly after that, your politicians start trying to affect it with regulatory and legislative policies, and then the next thing, the next. So there is the first step of emergence. Then there’s your triggering event. Think of the garbage, barge and Long Island sound that nobody would let dock because they’re out of garbage room. And then there is resolution where companies invariably, on any issue, spend millions of dollars in crisis management to solve an issue with big blue ribbon panel, you know, blue ribbon tables and all that experts. And then there’s resolution. The fourth step. And any trade association member ought to look that article up by Deborah Anderson. Anticipatory Issues Management Aim ought to ban the word crisis management from their vernacular. Same with company PR and other people and ought to say, how do I take my organization from the emergence to resolution? And what we did is we sat down and looked at every single issue in McDonald’s.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:40:29] When you’re the world’s industry leader, you could start with packaging, you could go to work in hiring, you could go to employment issues, you could go to environmental issues, you could go down the line to animal welfare. We’ve had to deal with every single one of them right down to where the symbolic scapegoat. Even if we don’t produce it, they’ll come after us in order to put pressure on our suppliers. So you identify all of those issues. You identify the top issues that are the most important, and then you engage and find out from influencers. And sometimes that means talking to your adversaries. And we did form our meetings with the environmentalists. I did talk to PETA for two years about animal welfare policies. And what we did hired Temple Grandin, the autistic PhD from Arizona, that showed us how to handle cattle and chickens and others in a more humane way. And we met with them when we talked about policies and procedures, and we came up with many solutions, like I told you about the environment. And that’s that’s going out and targeting problems that, you know, we used to say at McDonald’s, the fans are always on just waiting for the ketchup to hit them. And our job was to get the resolution before we went to the triggering event and crisis management. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: [00:42:03] Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to connect with you, is LinkedIn the best way to do that?

Michael A. Donahue: [00:42:12] Sure. You know, I’m kind of a hybrid of old school with my tried and true business practices. And then there’s a few people that have pioneered innovative solutions to deal with the world we’re dealing with today and the change of national psychology or philosophy. And so I have a perspective from either end of the continuum. Like I said, they can go to my LinkedIn, they can go to Facebook, etc. if I give my telephone number.

Lee Kantor: [00:42:47] Sure, whatever you like.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:42:48] 6304418080. I’m affiliated with a couple of great associations here in the Chicago area, so I have supporting crew on issues in that. But anything in public affairs, social responsibility, the culture, you know, they had it right when they said culture eats strategy for breakfast or lunch and not enough people think about their culture. And everybody from John Deere to a 20 employee manufacturing in the city of Chicago should be educating their employees. So they’re not taking the basic headline. You know, the opposition position and transparency is the key to all this, you know, transparency and then anticipatory management and walking into adversity. Those are the the biggest things that I could say.

Lee Kantor: [00:43:52] Well, Michael, thank you so much again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Michael A. Donahue: [00:43:57] Happy to help any way I can.

Lee Kantor: [00:43:59] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Association Leadership Radio.

Jeff Anderson With Kaizen Analytix

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Atlanta Business Radio

Jeff Anderson With Kaizen Analytix

00:00 /

Jeff Anderson, Chief Growth Officer at Kaizen Analytix

Jeff Anderson leads Kaizen Sales & Marketing across all Kaizengo-to-market models. He also serves as a Client Partner for key Kaizen clients. Jeff has worked closely with some of the biggest brands across a wide range of industries to help them shape, launch, deliver, measure, and continuously improve their analytics initiatives.

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

How Kaizen Analytix approaches data in new, deeper ways
Smarter data analytics
Small and wide data
The Kaizen Insights Anomaly Detection Engine

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Jeff Anderson with Kaizen Analytics. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Anderson: [00:00:35] Thank you very much. Lee, how are you doing today?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:37] I am doing well. I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your firm. How you serving folks?

Jeff Anderson: [00:00:44] Absolutely. Kaizen Analytics was founded back in 2016 here in Atlanta. Our first office was actually in a shared office space over on Pilot Street near a city market. It got cramped over there pretty quickly. And now we have relocated out to Ravinia over near Perimeter Mall. We also have offices in New York, Dallas, in Chicago. We’ve had remarkably consistent growth because what we do is help companies make better, faster and more profitable business decisions with data and analytics. The mission that we created back over on Pilot Street six years ago is true today. And what that mission is, is to make data and analytics actionable and accessible.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:31] So now a lot of firms, you know, you hear about big data and data is everywhere. And now you can keep track of data in places you couldn’t even imagine, you know, five, ten, 15 years ago. How do you help your clients kind of discern what is data that matters? What is data that maybe you can ignore? Or is all data data the matter somewhat and you just got to kind of prioritize it, like how do you help your clients wrap their arms around what seems to be a never ending supply of data?

Jeff Anderson: [00:02:03] Yeah. That’s a that’s an excellent way of asking that question there, Lee. For for Kaizen, it’s all about finding your unique story behind your unique data, quickly understanding what happened, why it happened, how to learn from the outcomes that you’re getting, and then moving on to predicting, optimizing and continuously improving your business performance. Now our name Kaizen, which is Japanese for continuous improvement. It’s core to everything that we do, not just the name of our company, because using Kaizen principles, we rapidly deliver an initial solution for a client in a period of weeks, and then we continuously improve that iteratively based on client feedback. So it’s an ongoing. That’s why I said your question was beautifully worded and that it’s a never ending continual journey that you’re on as companies continue to leverage advanced data and analytics.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:05] So how do they even know where to begin if it’s this giant pool of data that’s constantly being created and some parts that are super important, some parts that are maybe less important. But how do you even begin to know which where should I pay attention? Which is the area that I should focus on, where there’s a lot of opportunity? Where is an area that’s telling me there’s danger around the corner? What? It just seems overwhelming if I don’t have good systems and processes in place.

Jeff Anderson: [00:03:37] Yeah, that that’s a great point in itself. The way we would attack that with our clients is that we start small but we think big. We a lot of times will follow the money, so to speak. So we’ll look for the largest revenue streams, the largest cost buckets, and then attack those with the Kaizen approach of continual improvement.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:03] So that’s where you begin. So that’s a logical place to begin. Then you kind of dig in there because that the places that have the most revenue or the place that have the most cost, therefore you can have the greatest impact.

Jeff Anderson: [00:04:16] That’s typically what we see where the biggest opportunities are. Also, the more complex the business is, the more opportunity that you have. Because with complexity, things like revenue leakage, customer churn happens, fraud, those types of things. And what we can do is apply advanced analytics such as anomaly detection capabilities to find those situations and do that so that you and your team are not having to hunt through and sift through all the data and the spreadsheets and everything else that you use to run the business.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:57] Now, who is the kind of the ideal client for you? Are these these enterprise level, Fortune 100 sized companies that have the resources and have the data that can be attacked in this manner? Or is it relevant to small and mid-sized firms as well?

Jeff Anderson: [00:05:13] That’s the beauty of what we’ve got going here. It ties in. We have created an ability to support both larger Fortune 5500, 1000, even 2000 companies, and basically being able to provide capabilities for them that are to get them to actionable results. And that’s really that actionable part of the mission statement that I mentioned earlier. So for them, it’s all about making data and analytics actionable, finding real value within their data, leveraging analytics. But we also serve much, much smaller companies and we do that through the accessible part of our mission there. We have a suite of products that effectively allow much smaller organizations to take advantage of those same capabilities that the big clients such as, say, a Home Depot here locally or a Delta Airlines that have been investing in these capabilities for for many, many years with lots of data scientists and lots of IT professionals who do great things. But what we’ve set up here with our product offerings is, in a way for the smaller players to actually take advantage of these capabilities and deliver real business value.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:36] So what’s an area where a smaller company could lean on some of your tools to, you know, create more value for themselves? Is it around pricing? Because I think in smaller firms, pricing is kind of a let’s make a deal world and there’s not a lot of analytics behind it other than a gut feeling or what’s the temperature of the of the marketplace.

Jeff Anderson: [00:07:01] You took the words right out of my mouth with that gut feel. That’s that’s typically what we see. In some cases. It’s almost an afterthought. It’s like we got the new business, but then what are we going to price it at? So we have a specific offering. Kaizen Price Think of this as first of all, as an application, which you can consult from any smart device, but think of this as your pricing brain. It forecasts your demand, calculates your customers sensitivity to price optimizes the price, but then also factors in external data which sometimes has huge impacts, you know, things like weather, macroeconomic data. And we’ve created an ability with Kaizen price to essentially democratize the ability to price like much larger companies and do that for a very affordable price.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:52] So is this industry agnostic or does it work better in certain industries.

Jeff Anderson: [00:07:59] In terms of the I guess I’ll speak to that initially more broadly from a data and analytics perspective. I guess the two things that are driving the industry industry adoption overall is basically two things ever expanded data where companies continue to capture more and more data. And then also the pace of change in technology, which allows folks like us to apply new techniques to expand and push the envelope. But specifically speaking, I would say that you look at a couple of different industry groups, consumer centric industries that have extremely high volumes of transactions. You think retail, financial services, travel related industries. These industries are some of the earliest embraces of data and analytics, but honestly, they’re probably due for a facelift. Then you have industries using advanced machinery that have sensors now that capture literally subsequent data activity. Things are. Excuse me, something like chemical energy, industrial manufacturing. These are huge opportunities to leverage data and analytics. Then you’ve got industries such as that have kind of known throughout to be very inefficient from an operating standpoint. Health care comes to mind if you imagine how leveraging data analytics, how much more effective in terms of patient outcomes and more efficient these health care providers could be if they knew exactly who needs to come in to the or the optimal staff to provide the care, optimizing the treatments and really increasing the throughput to care for more folks in the in the operation. And then don’t forget about services industries, specifically where I’m speaking here of law firms. We’ve actually began recently working with law firms to use these same data and analytics capabilities. My lawyer buddies will say that lawyers are people too, and I would extend that to say they also have data too, and they can leverage that data and analytics for huge value within their law operation.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:10] So how does the data analytics work when it’s kind of a creative field or a subjective field where the value is kind of in the eye of the beholder? Like the art world say, like, how could you price a piece of artwork? You know, with any type of certainty or predictability when it’s so subjective. And, you know, you can put one thing up for auction, it could be worth millions and another thing be worth next to nothing.

Jeff Anderson: [00:10:43] With the in the world, like the art world, where there is some subjectivity, a test and learn approach would be really a failed self fail safe approach to that where we establish a price based on what we’ve seen in the past using as much history as we can in some of these cases, going with small and wide data instead of the big data is is a great approach. But what we would do there is establish a price, watch that to see the reaction and then adjust accordingly. So we call it test and learn and we would apply that type of approach in a in an environment such as when you’re selling it like a very unique art pieces.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:33] But that would come into play like say you’re a small producer on Etsy or one of these marketplaces. You know, you’re you produce something, a T-shirt, and you, you know, you kind of can guesstimate, okay, this is how much t shirts sell for. But how do I know if this is something that’s going to be have wild demand or no demand? So it’s this kind of test and iterate approach you think is kind of fundamental to any type of new or creative endeavor.

Jeff Anderson: [00:12:04] Yes, that’s exactly right. So you don’t like if you’re just starting a business and, you know, taking a test and learn approach, just really making sure that you are in fact, looking at it closely and frequently to see based on that price, how how fast or slow is your merchandise moving and then learning from that and then adjusting again. Going back to our our approach to how we deliver for clients, the continuous improvement also falls very much in line with that.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:37] So these are just the fundamentals of how you do what you do.

Jeff Anderson: [00:12:42] That is exactly right. You could probably almost every client engagement will be some element of a test and learn. So whether you’re brand new business getting off the ground and you want to use that approach or we’ve used it especially in the in the last two and a quarter years when we’ve all been impacted by COVID. A lot of those forecasting models for a lot of our clients really went out the window for that period of time. And using approaches like test and learn is small and wide data allow clients to nimbly shift when dramatic things like like a pandemic happens.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:24] But is that a practice that you feel that businesses should be incorporating at all times? Because change is always happening? It may not be to the degree of a pandemic or, you know, just tremendous inflation, but there is incremental change. So you should always be testing and always be optimizing.

Jeff Anderson: [00:13:42] Yes. That’s what we would recommend. If you think about the concept of a decision support optimization solution and there what you’re constantly simulating, what is going on and what you believe is going to happen in your business, taking those different scenarios and probabilistically figuring out which of those are likely to happen. But then preparing for the edge cases and just being being ready to kind of go with the market or go with the direction that the your business is going. But having the the machinery and the horsepower to have done all of those scenarios in advance and be prepared for any number is really that is a best practice that we see out in the market.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:36] Now is that it feels like it’s going against human nature a little bit and in terms of humans want things to be the same and they have this kind of security mindset or stability mindset and and it changes always. They understand intellectually, changes always happening. But you need to have mechanisms that are triggering alarms, right. That are telling you, hey, there’s danger around the corner or hey, pay attention to this, this might be occurring. So you have to kind of have your hand on the the lever in case you need to pull it. And you need to always know where you stand in the data analytics. Part of this is trying to help you if you’re open to it.

Jeff Anderson: [00:15:22] Exactly right, Lee. A lot of times what we will do is put in place, even if we’re not necessarily truly optimizing a solution, if the client is not quite ready for the true optimization business rule based alerts and establishing guardrails that once once these alerts are triggered or we’re seeing a situation outside of what we’re guarding against, then being able to trigger different operations, different processes, different decisions to really keep you more focused on and avoid catastrophic situations where you’re getting to real trouble.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:05] Now, you mentioned that I think that one of your tools is an anomaly detection engine. Can you talk about in a world where anomalies seem to be happening with more frequency or maybe we’re just aware of it more? How did this come about and how can your clients benefit from it?

Jeff Anderson: [00:16:24] Yeah. Our anomaly detection solution, probably one of our most exciting developments, very candidly, but it’s our newest offering in our Kaizen Insights Suite. What our anomaly detection solution does is it automates the delivery of very powerful, but at the same time hidden insights in your data. Importantly, without your team having to scour through and sift through all these different the data that you have, different structured, unstructured data, sources, reports, etc. What the solution does is it systematically looks through and finds patterns looking at all aspects of your data. It establishes what we call the business as usual baseline on key metrics like fraud, customer churn, revenue growth, even revenue leakage. But it’s looking for those metrics which ultimately can potentially drain company profits, and then it finds those outliers against that baseline. Great example of this is for a cable company. We use this solution to identify outliers that resulted in reducing their customer churn by 5 to 10%. So we found pockets of their customer segment combinations where churn was happening that looking at it in an aggregate, they couldn’t really see it, nor could they really act on it. But when you bring it down from your your base of 10 million customers down to a household group of, say, 4500, then you can take action and you can really move the needle. So but you are right in that there’s a lot of anomalies out there and really trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, what’s real and what’s not. That is the key to the whole thing. And that’s what we’ve got set up with this anomaly detection solution.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:21] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Jeff Anderson: [00:18:25] Well, you know, when you I guess one thing that I wanted to say is that with our presence here in Atlanta, Atlanta’s been an outstanding location to build our business. I would say that without a doubt, we would not have been nearly as successful starting anywhere else but Atlanta. We’ve got great clients here, amazing talent, access to to great institutions, and just a talent pool that is really second to none in this space and also a local community. I almost see them and feel them as champions fans, supporters, mentors like the Atlanta CEO Council. Great, great council that we’ve leveraged a lot. Great airport. Can’t forget about Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson. That allows us to move really quick and deliver for our clients, too. So it’s really about figuring out ways that your companies can use data and analytics starting small, we think big, but we start small. Really trying to understand that story behind your data, figuring out what happened, why, and then enhancing from there. And I guess just. You know, in summary here, just asking yourself the question, what’s your data really telling you? Where are those opportunities to to really have a huge impact in your business with data and analytics?

Lee Kantor: [00:19:57] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s a website?

Jeff Anderson: [00:20:03] Website is Kaizen analytics dot com I’ll spell it real quick. A Z in an ally t i x dot com. But we we would love to help and carry the data analytics torch forward in your organization. Lee, I appreciate the time this afternoon. It’s been it’s been great speaking with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:30] All right. Well, Jeff, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Jeff Anderson: [00:20:36] You bet. Thanks. Have a great day.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:38] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We will see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest With Kid Biz And Kristy Chadwick With Prime Leadership

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Cherokee Business Radio

Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest With Kid Biz And Kristy Chadwick With Prime Leadership

00:00 /

This Episode was brought to you by

Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest are co-founders of Empowered Youth Entrepreneurs, a 501(c)3 organization. Our goal is to empower kids with resources & education to grow their entrepreneurial spirit.

Follow Empowered Youth Entrepreneurs on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Kristy Byess Chadwick, Founder at Prime Leadership

Kristy began her career in the banking industry as Assistant Branch Manager of Security State Bank where she gained the knowledge to help in her next adventure of starting a new bank. In 1999, Kristy joined the elite 13 team members to start Community Bank of Pickens County. In this role as Banking/ Mortgage Officer, she set all policies and procedures for both the Consumer Loan Department and Mortgage Department.

Maintaining her relationship at the bank, she founded Cherokee Elite Mortgage, Inc where she successfully closed over $100 million in mortgage loans. After selling Cherokee Elite Mortgage in 2008, she moved into the fin-tech industry where she held the position of Chief Operations Officer for General Financial, Inc. until 2018. She managed the daily operations for the Company and was responsible for implementing and developing a positive, engaging, and encouraging workplace culture. =

By overseeing Human Resources, Accounting, Compliance, Collections, and Customer Service, she developed best practices and procedures to ensure compliance with State and Federal regulations and laws. During her tenure at General Financial, she increased the loan portfolio to over 40%, maintained a default rate of less than 8%, and a retention rate of 97%. Since 2018, Kristy has been developing leaders while providing interim leadership solutions to small to medium businesses.

Connect with Kristy on Facebook and LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Woodstock, Georgia. It’s time for Cherokee Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:23] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Cherokee Business Radio Stone Payton here with you this morning. And today’s episode is brought to you in part by Alma Coffee, sustainably grown, veteran owned and direct trade, which of course means from seed to cup, there are no middlemen. Please go check them out at my Alma coffee and go visit their Roastery Cafe at 34 or 48 Holly Springs Parkway and Canton. As for Harry or the brains of the outfit, Letitia, and please tell them that Stone sent you. First up on Cherokee Business Radio this morning, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the broadcast with Kid Biz Empowering Youth Entrepreneurs. Ms.. Renee Deardorff Good morning.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:01:11] Good morning. Thanks for having us.

Stone Payton: [00:01:13] Oh, it’s a delight to have you and your your your corporate structure here. Yes. In the studio, we had a chance to touch base at a million cups event, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I felt like you were. So both of you, you and Amy, both so articulate, so passionate about what you’re doing. But let’s talk about as we start here, mission, purpose. Why are you doing this, Renee?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:01:43] Well, our overall mission and goal is to empower youth entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial spirit through entrepreneurship. So the things that they learn through that journey, those lessons they learn, they’re invaluable. So whether or not they go on to run their own business or not, it’s the journey and the lessons learned along the way that we are trying to create a space for for that.

Stone Payton: [00:02:10] So I suspect you’ve learned a couple of things along the way, too, right? Absolutely.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:15] I just we’re leading by example.

Stone Payton: [00:02:18] So what was the genesis? A noble pursuit I think we can all identify with that is nobody says, oh, we don’t want to do that in this community. Right? Yes. But none of the rest of us did it. So what was the genesis? What was the catalyst?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:30] Well, I mean I mean, Amy can probably speak to this, but her youngest or her middle kiddo, Avery, wanted to sell cotton candy and started there. I don’t want to.

Amy Guest: [00:02:43] I mean, yeah. So about two years ago, one summer, Avery decided that she was going to rule the world by selling cotton candy.

Stone Payton: [00:02:51] All right, way to go, Avery.

Amy Guest: [00:02:53] She had her toy machine, and she wanted to be different, so she started figuring out ways to do flavors. I was all aboard. Like, I was like, this is amazing. I’m going to, you know, support you full wholeheartedly. Her sisters became her employees, and we started making cotton candy and going to farmers markets at least once a week as like a summer project. It kept him busy, which was great. And then our sisters were like, Wait a minute, we want to be a business owner. We don’t want to be an employee. So then we had to decide individually because she has two of them which who was going to do what and what was going to be their businesses. So now I’ve got three kids with businesses, oh my. Go into farmers markets. And then that kind of trickled because my oldest, best friend is Renee’s oldest daughter, Lila. So so then Lila was like, well, my best friend’s making money. So here we are in a trickle down effect with five girls, with businesses going to farmers markets around the county, just letting them explore what they could do and how they could run their own little companies. Everybody did something different, but we did start to notice that the community loved the ideas of having these kids out there, and we predominantly were the only kids out there in these markets. You know, most markets are even artist markets. Vendor markets in general are mostly adults. So it was a unique to have these kids out there. And so everybody was very supportive. But it kind of came down to, well, this is really cute, but if there’s an adult across the way making something a little bit better or it really wasn’t the right venue at the same time, so we’re like, we need a more even.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:04:43] Kid oriented.

Amy Guest: [00:04:44] Kid oriented, even playing field because there’s probably more kids out there. It’s not just our five kids that want to do this. So we kind of ran with that at the time. We’re like, Wait a minute, let’s see what we could do with this. And we.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:04:58] Actually, about a year ago now.

Amy Guest: [00:05:00] Right, was our very first time that we did it. So last August, we kind of just put it out there like, Hey, is do any other parents have kids? With an entrepreneurial spirit to have a small business, don’t know where to take them, don’t know what to do, want them to have a place to showcase what they’ve got. And we created the first kid Biz Expo and we had 28 kids. Wow, the very first time. And all we did was put make a post on Facebook and we had 28 kids right away. We hosted it at Sutley Baptist Church up on Highway 20, and we had so without anything residual, like no other events happening, no other things going on in that general area because it’s kind of out there on 20. Just with our promotion alone, we probably had at least 300 people from the community just come out solely to support these kids. Yeah, the the feel in the air, you could just everybody was stoked. Like it was very exciting. The kids you could just see going from like, we’re not sure about this to like, oh my God, I’m killing this by the end of the day. Like, their confidence levels. It was amazing. And everybody was very interactive, very generous. And, you know, they stop by each booth and they would talk to the kids like, how did you do this? What’s going on? Kind of things. And the community support was amazing, so we kind of took it from there.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:06:23] Yeah, they were like, Are you going to do this again? Not just the kids that were participating, the parents are participating, but the community like are. There’s going to be more of these and stuff. And so we packed up that day and we’re like and we’re tired. We’ll just we’ll revisit this revisit this in a few days. And just the very next day, we’re like, Let’s do this again. We couldn’t help it, you know. So then we did another one in November.

Stone Payton: [00:06:44] So I bet some of the businesses were interesting. What kind of businesses were the kids in and what kind of things?

Amy Guest: [00:06:49] We’ve had broad ranges, so our daughter’s alone. So Layla makes dip, dry dip mixes, Austin does epoxy resin. At the time, Avery did cotton candy. We have since rebranded to Popcorn. Ha Harper has done hot chocolate, but I think she’s doing muffins this time. But we’ve had like baked goods, lots of jewelry, some artwork in general. We had.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:14] Magic.

Amy Guest: [00:07:15] Kits, magic kit. Some of the boys get really creative trying to go in different directions. So we had five PVC marshmallow shooters walking sticks. We have slime.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:27] Melted.

Amy Guest: [00:07:28] Crayons, melted crayons, turning them into different shapes. The creativity out there was was quite amazing. It was a full gamut of options all bit.

Stone Payton: [00:07:37] And now this thing has grown beyond just the expo, right? There’s several pillars, aspects to the to the whole thing. Yes, I’ll speak to that a little bit.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:45] Yeah. So we have I guess if you consider the expo is a program, it’s the main overall goal that we’re trying to get kids ready for and let them showcase themselves to the community. But under that, we have the Kid Biz Workshop and that’s where a business professional in the community comes out and talks to the kids and teaches them a certain subject. It’s usually business related but can be mindset, just general life skills. And then we have Kid Biz Coach where it is a kid and a adult can, in a group setting mentor each other. And we’ll do that a couple of times a year. And then we have Kid Biz Connect, where it’s peer to peer networking so that they can be among other kids that are in the same mindset is them and going through the same life experience and learn from and bounce.

Amy Guest: [00:08:37] Just ideas.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:08:38] Yeah, brainstorm, but also just get just have someone relate to them.

Stone Payton: [00:08:42] Fantastic. All right. Let’s hear from some entrepreneurs, okay? Leila.

Leila: [00:08:48] Hi.

Stone Payton: [00:08:48] Hello, Leila, tell us tell us about about this business that you’re in now.

Leila: [00:08:54] My business is dip it good. It’s like dry dip mixes. They come in like there’s nine flavors. Yeah. And you can have samples at the market and you put them in sour cream. I have one sweet flavor. That’s cream cheese and they make dips.

Stone Payton: [00:09:13] It sounds marvelous. Just last night, I made, like, these chicken patty things, so I’m wondering if I couldn’t have mixed it in with that. Like, yes, I did some chicken and did some eggs and some breadcrumbs, but I could have put some of this in there.

Leila: [00:09:25] Fiesta is really good with.

Stone Payton: [00:09:27] Well, there you go. See, she’s taking me right to the. Yeah, she’s closing. She’s very good.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:09:32] She knows what pairs well with things.

Leila: [00:09:34] Now you can also put like the some of the flavors on the sandwiches. Some are good with like desserts, apples, carrots.

Stone Payton: [00:09:44] All right. So it’s cool now, but you had to get started. And entrepreneurs of any age, I think sometimes they can think it all through, sometimes maybe even overthink it through, but it’s getting it going. What was the the the the thing that you enjoyed the most about about launching it and getting it going? And what did you find the most difficult? The most challenging?

Leila: [00:10:07] The most challenging part was. Is. There wasn’t anything challenging, but. There was a part where like you have to figure out what flavors and which, like what’s better and what’s not. Because when my flavors, it was good, but it wasn’t like fantastic. So I had to tweak the recipe a little bit and that’s a really good seller.

Stone Payton: [00:10:31] Were there any flavors that sounded good on paper or when you were talking but or thinking about it and then you’re trying like, Nah, that’s not going to play.

Leila: [00:10:39] Actually, all of them have kind of worked out.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:10:42] Are you wanting to maybe change things up a little?

Leila: [00:10:44] Yeah. Feel like seasonal flavors would be cool. Like pumpkin, something for fall, like fun fruit, things for spring and summer.

Stone Payton: [00:10:54] That’d be cool. All right. So the the primary application of this that, you know, works is you mix it in with sour cream and then what do you do with the sour cream? There must be a gazillion things you can do with it once you’ve got your your flavored sour cream made.

Leila: [00:11:08] Yeah, you can put it sandwiches. Just with chips, with pretzels, with carrots. It’s really good.

Stone Payton: [00:11:15] Okay. All right. So you.

Leila: [00:11:16] Say.

Stone Payton: [00:11:17] Baby bagels. Oh, that sounds all right. So you go to the expo or. Or maybe someone finds you somehow, some way they know that you’re selling this. What does that conversation look like? Because they probably ask some of the same questions, but mainly they just they want to go home with something in the right thing. So what is that conversation like?

Leila: [00:11:36] I like, hi, I have samples. So that draws them in like, hey, free food and then they just try them all. Some people try. One is like, yes. And then like, I don’t try this one, I try that one. And then once they kind of have their mind set on a few, I have a deal where it’s like more for cheaper and then, you.

Stone Payton: [00:11:57] Know, whose idea was that to do like these deals? So it’s good to have a mentor or have some input, right?

Leila: [00:12:03] Yeah, they can order online. I talk about that and then sometimes people will ask like, how did you do this? What made you get into this? Where do you see going? So sometimes I would really long conversations about that.

Stone Payton: [00:12:16] Fantastic. All right. So did Harper switch with me or do I still have Harper on the other end here? Who’s at the mic right here.

Amy Guest: [00:12:23] In.

Stone Payton: [00:12:24] Austin? Okay. I think when I looked down at Austin, snuck in there. Austin, tell us a little bit about your business.

Amy Guest: [00:12:30] I sell a epoxy crafts, which include tumblers, keychains, trays, pens, all sorts of little things. Really. If it has a silicone mold, I could figure out how to make it so. So there’s a lot of those things and they can do all kinds of colors and glitters and any sort of design on the object itself.

Stone Payton: [00:12:51] So we have Austin tumblers in the room. I know you guys can see that out in radio land, but we have Austin tumblers.

Amy Guest: [00:12:56] I have made a cup for each of these.

Stone Payton: [00:12:59] They’re very good fun, and I’m operating under the impression we could have a Business RadioX tumbler.

Amy Guest: [00:13:07] Absolutely. Yes, definitely.

Stone Payton: [00:13:09] Cool. I think we should do that. And maybe like raffle it off or like a prize for a sponsor or part of a sponsor. Oh, great. That could be fun. So why that? Did you think about other businesses? And then you said then you kind of migrated to that well.

Amy Guest: [00:13:23] So like she said earlier, my sister had sort of cotton candy. And about a year or so later, my mom was scrolling on Facebook and she saw an ad for resin coasters and she was like, Oh, that’d be really cool to do. And so we went and bought the molds and watched a couple of YouTube videos and figured out how to do it. And once we did figure out how to do it, we realized there were so many other things you could do with resin. And so it started with a couple of coasters and then we went on from there. And then a little while later I started going to farmers markets with Avery. And so that’s kind of how that became a thing.

Stone Payton: [00:13:59] All right. Went and bought the mold. Let’s talk about that a little bit, because sometimes entrepreneurs have to make an investment early on before they’re getting a return. Did you get your capital? Did you get your money from another source? Did you save it up? Did you borrow to talk us through?

Amy Guest: [00:14:14] That was your primary investor.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:14:16] We’ve got some generous investors.

Amy Guest: [00:14:19] We’re quite generous investor. That helps me purchase some of my things.

Stone Payton: [00:14:25] So you got some of that? Do you do you pay it back?

Amy Guest: [00:14:27] Yes. After the Expos, I give her whatever amount spent on that specific expo, I give her back.

Stone Payton: [00:14:33] What does she get that a little bit more? Does she get an interest or like a return?

Amy Guest: [00:14:39] I get my products for free.

Stone Payton: [00:14:40] Oh, okay. There’s perks that’ll work. All right, so it sounds like it’s been fun. It sounds like it’s been rewarding. You clearly enjoy it and you’re a human. And sometimes things may not go well all the time. What are some of the challenges in running this business in particular? In business in.

Amy Guest: [00:14:57] General? Well, was this one specifically when you have to mix resin like perfectly or it will not harden correctly? And I’ve made a bunch of cups where it does not work and the resin still sticky. So you can’t use the cup or some of the other things that are bendy or just don’t look good. So that’s one of the things that. To work, and then sometimes any of the designs or stickers won’t stay. And so then it looks weird when you put the resin over it. So it’s become a science. It’s become a science that you have to.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:15:28] Perfect.

Amy Guest: [00:15:29] To make it work.

Stone Payton: [00:15:31] So what have you learned about the marketplace and what people want and maybe they don’t want or what they like more or how they like to go by or what have you learned from interacting with the customers?

Amy Guest: [00:15:47] Most of them, when they come up to my tent, they’ll start looking at the tumblers because there’s a ton of different designs that you can do. Or they’ll ask me like, How did this start? Or Why did you do this? Or What not? There’s a bunch of keychains that usually get bought that people will look at.

Stone Payton: [00:16:05] Keychains? Yes. You don’t have one that floats, do you? I just lost my hat. Did you do a hat? Didn’t I thought hats would float and I was. That was at the river. So anyway, just if you put a little floaty thing on one. But keychains are popular.

Amy Guest: [00:16:22] Yes. Jewelry, jewelry, necklaces, keychains and tumblers are probably the main three that get sold to.

Leila: [00:16:30] I have one of your necklaces I like.

Stone Payton: [00:16:33] Oh, you guys do business with each other, so you team up. And do you ever give her food?

Leila: [00:16:37] She gives me necklaces.

Stone Payton: [00:16:38] Yeah. And if someone buys one of your dips, you can all you can always say, oh, you might really enjoy a keychain or a tumbler. You can help each other out.

Amy Guest: [00:16:46] I’ve done that a couple of times and sent them over to her table.

Leila: [00:16:48] We have. For other children?

Stone Payton: [00:16:50] Yes.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:16:52] Is it everyone?

Stone Payton: [00:16:52] Well, no, that’s handy and it’s important again, no matter what age you are, you know, in my world, it’s it’s important that I work with other people, with other media platforms, and we try to collaborate other people in other lines of business. Or if I have a client who’s a professional services person, they might be a CPA, but maybe they tell her, you know, a business attorney, hey, maybe you ought to talk to the or at least come on the show. If not if not, become a. All right. So let’s talk about the where. So it’s nice when you have the expo and the people come to you. If you found other places like, I don’t know, like a website or a Facebook page or something like that.

Amy Guest: [00:17:29] Yeah. And we’ve also been to a couple different farmers markets. One was that River Church on Sixes Road. One of them was in battleground on that green.

Stone Payton: [00:17:40] Yeah.

Amy Guest: [00:17:41] And social media do sell a couple of things there, whichever Facebook page.

Leila: [00:17:48] So people can order my stuff on the Facebook.

Stone Payton: [00:17:50] Page. Oh, nice. All right. So you’ve got an e-commerce situation going there. Yes.

Leila: [00:17:56] So professional.

Stone Payton: [00:17:58] No, that’s fair. That’s fantastic. All right. So, moms, we have an event or some events coming up.

Amy Guest: [00:18:06] Absolutely. We have. Our next expo is July 24th. We’ll be here in Woodstock on the the green.

Stone Payton: [00:18:18] Like right behind reformation. Reformation is my beacon and then everything is in reference to reformation.

Amy Guest: [00:18:25] So that makes sense. We will be directly across from reformation in the arts green green event area switch. And that is, like I said, July 24th from 1 to 6. All right. We have right now 46 children signed up to be mine.

Stone Payton: [00:18:45] Yes. All right. Well, color me there. You know I’m going to be there. Yes. We would love to have you there. Absolutely. All right. So do you pay an admission to to get in the venue itself or not?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:18:55] No, it’s free to the public.

Amy Guest: [00:18:56] Yeah. The venue itself is just a fun, free community event. The vendors set up and do their thing. We’ll have face painters and ice cream trucks and all the fun things that make it a good, worthwhile event. But the vendors do their thing, so it is for them to do.

Stone Payton: [00:19:14] Very nice. So bring your wallet. Yes, right.

Amy Guest: [00:19:17] Absolutely. Come to shop and.

Stone Payton: [00:19:19] Be ready to shop and talk with these young, young entrepreneurs.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:19:23] Do want them we do want the public to talk to them because there’s a lot that can be they can learn a lot from the questions that they.

Stone Payton: [00:19:29] Ask.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:19:30] Yeah, but the public learns a lot from them, too.

Amy Guest: [00:19:34] Absolutely.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:19:34] It’s really, really cool.

Stone Payton: [00:19:36] All right. So let’s hear from a couple of other entrepreneurs. I have Harper and Austin. Avery and Avery, man, we have a studio full here. Yes. Yes. All right, Harper, talk to me. Tell me about your business. So you know what? You know what I’m going to do, Harper? I’m going to turn your microphone on, and that’s going to make the whole thing sound better. I turned it down when you guys were switching around. So I’m getting better at this, you know? Look, you know, we’re all we’re all practicing. Let’s try it again. Now that I turned your microphone.

Leila: [00:20:05] On so I make kind of, like, circle cakes, and I’m going to.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:20:16] Book called Cake Bites, right?

Leila: [00:20:18] Yeah. My business name is Cake and Glaze.

Stone Payton: [00:20:22] Cute chicken glaze. All right. So a lot of different flavors. Yeah. Yeah. Like different tastes, different people. Like different ones.

Leila: [00:20:30] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:20:31] What’s your favorite?

Leila: [00:20:34] Well.

Stone Payton: [00:20:36] I think I could like Oreo. Well, you have Oreo at this next event that they’re talking about. Will you bring Oreo?

Leila: [00:20:40] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:20:41] Yeah. How about jalapeno? No.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:20:45] What other flavors do you think you’re going to do? What do we get?

Leila: [00:20:48] Cinnamon crunch.

Stone Payton: [00:20:50] Oh, baby. Lemon.

Leila: [00:20:52] Lemon.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:20:53] Chocolate and funfetti.

Stone Payton: [00:20:55] Yeah. All right, so. So one thing that I don’t think the general public always acknowledges and maybe even newer entrepreneurs may not realize there’s there’s the where you’re at the booth and you’re at the event or it’s available online. But sometimes they don’t see all the activity, all of the work that goes into getting ready to be able to actually hand someone the Oreo cake and get to it. Tell me a little bit about all the work behind the scenes that has to happen, for example, to get ready for this event. There’s a lot of there’s a lot that goes into it, isn’t there?

Leila: [00:21:29] It’s really simple to me, to be honest with you. It’s you just it’s supposed to be like whenever I get the box is supposed to be a cake. So I make the batter and then I can there’s like this little mini oven, you know, and it has like nine spheres in it.

Stone Payton: [00:21:48] Yeah.

Leila: [00:21:50] And then.

Stone Payton: [00:21:53] So you figured out the process. But while you’re in there doing that work and I think it sounds like you enjoy the work.

Leila: [00:21:59] Yeah, it’s really fun.

Stone Payton: [00:22:00] Some of the other kids are out playing, right. And maybe you’re playing, too, which is part of why that’s entrepreneurs. We enjoy what we’re doing, but there’s a lot to it. Okay, so you’ve got to make up the batter, then you got to make them pretty right and package them so that it looks like something I might want to buy.

Leila: [00:22:17] Yeah, it’s going to be where someone buys it, and then they can eat it while they’re walking around the kitchen.

Stone Payton: [00:22:23] And then they’ll buy another one before they leave. That’s right. That’s a good idea. Encourage them to eat it right down and tell them to come back, buy on their way out. Right.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:22:31] You’re going to have samples, too, aren’t you?

Leila: [00:22:32] Yeah, it’s just going to be free samples.

Stone Payton: [00:22:34] All right. Fantastic. All right. Again, I’m all mixed up with the names. Austin.

Amy Guest: [00:22:40] Avery.

Stone Payton: [00:22:40] Avery. All right, Avery, lay it on me now. You started this whole thing.

Amy Guest: [00:22:46] The whole.

Stone Payton: [00:22:46] Thing. All right. So talk about that very first idea with the cotton candy. You personally like cotton candy? Was that part of it? Yeah. All right. So tell us more about where in the world did you think at what point did you say, hey, I want to do this, I want to make this a business?

Leila: [00:23:05] So I got a cotton candy machine for Christmas and I wanted to do something fun. So we started to get like logos and started to go to farmers markets at River Church.

Amy Guest: [00:23:24] And then how did you come up with your flavors? Because that’s where it was very creative.

Stone Payton: [00:23:32] Oh. Did you ask anybody what they might like? Or you went with your favorites at first.

Leila: [00:23:43] I mean, I went with my favorites and in some of the best sellers that I would take to.

Stone Payton: [00:23:53] There you go. Well, that’s what I did. I started out doing the shows that I wanted to do, talking to. And then I found out that clients and listeners and people, they had ideas for other shows, kind of conversations that they would want to have. And then, yes, I also gravitated to the best sellers. Right. That’s just good, solid business right there. All right. So this has not been that long. I mean, it might seem longer to you than it does to me because I have gray hair, but it’s only been like this whole thing is like a year a year old. A lot has happened in a year. Yes. I’m going to ask you both, but I’ll start with you, Avery. Where do you see this thing going like a year from now? Will it be bigger and all of that or what do you think we’d be selling more stuff?

Leila: [00:24:43] Yeah, I think it will definitely be bigger. And I’ll have more ideas.

Stone Payton: [00:24:48] In.

Leila: [00:24:49] Better flavors or. Any other ideas?

Stone Payton: [00:24:57] Yeah. How about you, Miss Harper?

Leila: [00:25:01] I’ll probably start game. I’ll probably start and make, like, other kinds of cake. Yeah. Yeah. Then I’ll just grow from there.

Stone Payton: [00:25:11] Yeah. So. And I’ll start with you, Harper, but I want I want to ask you both about this question. If we had and we probably do, a seasoned business person, a mentor who has been through a lot, probably made some mistakes, probably had a great many successes. If you could ask them a question that you think would would help you or something you’ve been curious about that might help you in your business, is there a is there a question or something you’ve been wondering about, something that you would want to have a conversation about?

Leila: [00:25:42] Not really.

Stone Payton: [00:25:43] You got to figure it out, huh? I do know you got to you don’t need a bunch of outsiders. You just but you do pay attention to your customers. That’s the customers are good mentors, right? Because they’re going to they will speak to you. If they don’t tell you directly, they’ll tell you by what they bought right at the last expo. You can you can learn. You can learn from them. Avery, how about you? Would you have a question that you would want to know, like anything from managing the money to how to sell more or you got this thing figured out to.

Leila: [00:26:13] I think I got it figured.

Stone Payton: [00:26:14] I love it.

Leila: [00:26:15] It’s true.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:26:16] They’ve been coming to our workshops.

Stone Payton: [00:26:19] You have been going to the workshops? Yeah. So what kind of things do they talk about at the workshops?

Leila: [00:26:24] Just like I to like time management.

Stone Payton: [00:26:26] Oh, okay. Yeah, well, I need to go to that workshop.

Leila: [00:26:29] It was very. That’s the only one I’ve been to.

Stone Payton: [00:26:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:26:33] Usually the older ones are the ones that. That can hold the tension long enough.

Stone Payton: [00:26:39] Yeah.

Leila: [00:26:39] Yeah, well, I can barely hold it.

Stone Payton: [00:26:42] That might be true. I think those of us that there’s some of us, regardless of age, that that remains a challenge. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I feel that. All right. So I’ll ask you to the same question, and I’ll start with you, Amy. Where do you see this thing going?

Amy Guest: [00:26:58] Well, our world wide world know our plans and our dreams and hopes and aspirations for Kid Expo in general. As our like as an organization grows, we would love a stable, a solid facility in the community. Okay. To kind of become that staple of where you send your kids to enhance their entrepreneurial spirit, to learn more about business, to learn life skills, to practice these these things, we could have more pop up shops. We could do like classes and camp longer classes in camps than just the occasional workshops. We could offer more to these kids that want to absorb it, just the things that they may not be getting in a traditional school setting because the curriculum doesn’t have the time for it or the focus for it, just based on different schooling systems, but just having an an outside resource that these kids can go to and learn these skills at a young age and kind of just prepare them for not only business, but just a lot of life skills.

Stone Payton: [00:28:00] Well, it certainly seems like there’s plenty of opportunity. I’m sure there are plenty of kids and parents who would love to to be a part of this. So it may be close to infinite as far as the number of people you could you could serve in that way.

Amy Guest: [00:28:15] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we would love to make it something where we could have chapters across the state. So like we’re the Cherokee County version, we can have a COB version if we solidify how it works and duplicate it and offer the more children can benefit from it.

Stone Payton: [00:28:33] Well, you know, you bring up a good point, because so much of what you’ve learned, you’re going to want to get this and maybe you’re already working on this. You’re going to want to get the I call it the playbook, but you’re going to want to get it bottled right and documented so that you have repeatable processes and transferable.

Amy Guest: [00:28:49] Tools in that process. We have a board of directors, so we are working on all the the done our I’s and crossing our T’s, getting everything organized.

Stone Payton: [00:28:59] That’s fantastic. So, Renee, what can the community do to help? How can the community at large, how can businesses, how can media, how can we help?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:13] Well, at the grassroots level, people coming out and supporting the kids at the Expos, sharing our workshops and getting the word out. And when you hear this, just getting the word out and getting letting people know who we are on a business level, we need donations because Amy and I operate at you know, we don’t take a salary from this. This is our own time. We don’t.

Stone Payton: [00:29:37] There hasn’t been a wealth building exercise, so it has been.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:39] A self-funded.

Stone Payton: [00:29:40] Exercise.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:42] But we’ve talked several times when it’s just me and her and it’s like, this feels important, so it’s 100% worth it.

Stone Payton: [00:29:50] Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:51] And it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to kind of build things where we can. Make this our full time thing, because overall it’s just more important than anything else. So but yeah, we we are a 501 three organization, so all the business donations are tax deductible. And they would go toward the donations would go towards our general operating funds that we can work on all of the programs and all of those lead up to the expose that we do three times a year.

Stone Payton: [00:30:25] Yeah. So that’s a nonprofit designation. So Cherokee Business RadioX was a nonprofit in February.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:30:33] Oh, congratulations.

Stone Payton: [00:30:34] No, no, no. Just in February. Oh, okay. Now we’re back in the black. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Under designation. Oh, yes, I understand. So. All right, so let’s talk about businesses. Is there is there a way maybe to get some returns? There’s there’s the donation side of things, and that’s great. But could we could someone like a Business RadioX or a law firm or whatever, could we be a sponsor? Yes. Like like at this upcoming event, what might that look like or probably get pretty creative with it, right?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:31:06] Yeah. So we have a, you know, event sponsorship for the Expos where it’s, you know, your traditional levels of donating. And then we also have annual giving that a business may able to do is to be an annual sponsor. Yeah. And then another way a business can give back to the organization is to lead workshops.

Stone Payton: [00:31:30] Ah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:31:31] So we in return would. Advertise your business and then you can come and get in front of these kiddos and really make an impact. So, yeah, donate your time.

Stone Payton: [00:31:44] No, the time is precious.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:31:45] It is. And we appreciate we’ve had so many people already do this and participate in the workshops. So those have been great.

Stone Payton: [00:31:54] So probably an off air conversation, but I want to plan a couple of seats with you before we wrap this segment and move to to our other. Yes. What if business radio sponsored an upcoming event and maybe got some presence in the value of that? I don’t know. In the literature there’s a banner or something like that. But what if periodically we had some of the kids come and talk about their business, either here in the studio or another idea that might be worth exploring? It might even help us get a third party sponsor they could help fund is at events like this. One of the areas was kid biz radio or that kind of wonderful and and really and let them kind of run the thing and maybe interview the board members. Yes that that’s what the.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:32:43] Explosions that sounds incredible because we’ve been trying to think of we thought about having like a booth there or something where we could interview people that are there, like to get kind of like testimonials, but just really hear back from the community what they got out of it. And then also the kids, what they’re getting out of it because because like we talked about, the kids learn what to make based off of the sales. We want to make sure that we’re serving the community the way that they want to be served. So we need that feedback and live and in person at that event is the best way to do that.

Stone Payton: [00:33:17] All right. So we got a thumbs up from Renee and Amy. But Harper, you down for something like that? You like that idea of having radio at the event? Yeah. Yeah. So would you be on the show and or would you be on the show but asking some questions. What do you think about that idea?

Leila: [00:33:34] That’s fine with that.

Stone Payton: [00:33:35] You’re cool with that? You got that? Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:33:36] You’ve done this.

Leila: [00:33:37] Expert.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:33:38] Now.

Stone Payton: [00:33:39] How about you, Avery? Is that something you could get into? Yes. Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:33:43] All right. Well, the kids interviewing kids would be. Really?

Stone Payton: [00:33:46] I think so.

Leila: [00:33:47] That’d be awesome.

Stone Payton: [00:33:48] Okay. We went from I think so to awesome. I think we’re making it. All right. So let’s before we wrap, let’s make sure that our listeners have an easy way to reach out to these to these businesses. And so I want to make sure that and let’s make sure we get the info and we’ll publish that when we publish. But for now, let’s make sure that they have an easy way to reach out and have a conversation with you or learn more about you and Amy, either one or both, whatever you think is appropriate, whether it’s a LinkedIn or Facebook email, whatever.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:34:22] So we’re on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok at Kid Biz Expo. So you can just search for us there and you’ll find it. And then you can go to Kid Biz Expo dot com for our website and everything’s there and you can message us on Facebook and we’re very responsive and we’ll be happy to talk to anybody that wants to connect.

Stone Payton: [00:34:40] Well, it has been a real delight having you and your entrepreneurs here in the studio. Sounds like we’re going to get a chance to do to work and play together. That sounds some more. But thank you so much. Keep up the good work. What you guys are doing is so important and we really do appreciate you and the community and Business RadioX Cherokee specifically. We’re going to we’re going to see what we can do to help. All right.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:35:03] Appreciate it.

Stone Payton: [00:35:04] Hey, how about hanging out with this gang while we visit with our next guest? We might learn something cool that. Yeah. You’re willing to stay with us, Harper?

Leila: [00:35:11] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:35:12] All right. All right. Next up on Cherokee Business Radio, please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with prime leadership Christy Chadwick. How are you?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:24] Great. Thank you for having me.

Stone Payton: [00:35:25] Oh, it’s a delight to have you here. So what’d you learn in that last segment?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:30] Well, maybe they made their way smarter than.

Stone Payton: [00:35:33] I am, that’s for sure. You picked up on that quick, huh?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:37] I did.

Stone Payton: [00:35:38] I did know. It was a lot of fun visiting with them. So we are going to get more involved. Okay. Let’s talk about prime leadership, mission purpose. What are you out there trying to do for folks?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:49] I’m well, I’m at the next step that these kids would take in their career. So I like to focus on the middle management where someone is just wanting to get into management, learning those life skills, learning the leadership, the culture, what it really means to build a great team, a great foundation, and what it is to really lead with culture.

Stone Payton: [00:36:14] So I got to ask, and I’ve been wanting to ask this question in the minute that I saw you were going to be on the show. So I’m going to ask her this question. I’ve asked a lot of people this question over the over the years, leadership. Is it an art? Is it a science? How would you characterize that, that word, that thing?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:36:31] I wrote about this in my book. So it’s part science. Part art. Okay. So part art is something that you’re going to learn by experience, by grace under fire, I guess by just doing it and learning, you know, what works when you’re managing someone, everyone is managed differently. Just like when you have kids, each kid is parented differently.

Stone Payton: [00:36:56] And if they burn the cakes, you got to handle that otherwise. That’s right. That’s right.

Leila: [00:37:00] Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:37:01] But the science part is the things that you can learn, meaning that, you know, you build your foundation with goals and core values at my, you know, at heart. And as long as you lead with your heart and with those core values, then that’s where the where the art comes in.

Stone Payton: [00:37:18] So if you do lead with your heart and your people see you kind of living into these core values that you’re espousing, do you? It’s my theory. So I will tell you, I my answer is yes, but I’m interested in your in your answer. Do you feel like people will give you a little leeway, give you a little space because they recognize your human too, and that if they see you living into that, they don’t just automatically turn off. Turn off. Is that been your.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:37:44] Well, I mean, leadership is loyalty and trust. That’s a lot of it. Yeah. So you want your people to trust you and you want them to be loyal to you. I learned that from being in a corporate world and now shifting my career to to helping others. But we the. Court. The court leadership and leading by heart is by, you know, leading by example.

Stone Payton: [00:38:11] So so the when you’re thinking through establishing, reestablishing, communicating, re communicating values, are there some, I don’t know, do’s and don’ts or some some things to try to keep in mind as you’re establishing them or communicating them? What’s your take on that?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:38:33] Setting expectations early. Yeah. So letting everybody know what the expectation is, what your expectation. If you was to interview 100 people who’s worked under me in the past, they would say that I’m hard but fair.

Stone Payton: [00:38:46] Hmm.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:38:46] And that’s because I’ve set a very clear expectation, and I it’s very high. But, you know, I give them the resources and communicate with them, let them know what I’m expecting, make sure that they’re successful. Because if they’re not successful, I’m not successful. And that’s the way I lead. And that’s that’s the workshops that I’m doing to lead other middle management to be top, top executives.

Stone Payton: [00:39:12] And when you set the expectation and it’s not met, it doesn’t mean you got to terminate someone. Right? But you can’t just ignore that or it’s no longer an expectation. Is that accurate?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:39:25] That is absolutely accurate. So you just have to coach.

Stone Payton: [00:39:29] Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:39:30] So you’re I mean, you’re when you when they’re doing something that you don’t like, you know, you’re having a meeting of the minds and you are, you know, maybe, maybe they see something that you don’t see. So you have to listen as a leader as well. You just can’t. It’s not your way or the highway per se, but you’re kind of meeting in the middle because sometimes they’re going to have better ideas than you. So sometimes that’s a hard pill to swallow. However, that’s how that’s how lead. That’s how leaders grow.

Stone Payton: [00:39:57] So talk about this workshop. So walk us through some of the things we might expect if we participate in one of your workshops.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:40:04] Yeah. So right now we have the ten day later, the ten day leadership challenge going on. So it’s just ten days. It’s virtual right now where you, you know, you get an activity, you send in the activity and then we talk about it at the end of the week in a zoom. So we do one of those a month right now. So it’s just now started. We just started in February. So it’s brand new and off the ground, but it’s so, so, so far so good.

Stone Payton: [00:40:31] Okay. So in the virtual environment, we have the conversation, we set the context, and then there’s there’s an activity or a set of actions, and then we’re supposed to go back to the ranch in our own environment and apply that activity.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:40:45] Correct. And then you come back with real world, real world experiences, feedback. So you’re in an a group environment with mentors. You know, we have other people that come in and help because obviously I don’t I don’t know at all. So I want to bring people in who know more than I do. Right. That can help help people who are in the workshop to engage and that kind of thing.

Stone Payton: [00:41:08] I would think that that would be an incredibly powerful method of of learning far more powerful than just sitting and listening to you, no matter how eloquent or articulate or how right you might be about all these, to just write it down in my notebook. I mean, there’s value in that. But compared to actually, okay, now go back to to the office and do that and then come back with the results which aren’t always pristine, I’m guessing.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:41:35] Correct. That’s part that’s half science, half art. So with them having engaged engagement, that’s your art part. So you’re learning to actually implement what your what your are your learning to implement, what your what we’re teaching.

Stone Payton: [00:41:50] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a for a practice like yours? I’m anticipating that it might not be terribly easy to just pick up the phone and say, Hey, would you like to participate in my workshops? How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a thing like your?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:42:08] Fortunately, I started by warm leads by just my network. I was at a position in November. I decided to part ways at the beginning.

Stone Payton: [00:42:20] Of this past November.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:42:22] Oh wow. And decided to go to do my own thing from some encouragement from some past coworkers of mine. Oh, good. So they had called me up and said, Hey, I’m wanting to teach your method to my coworkers, to my team. Will you will you come in? And I was like, maybe not. So I sit on it for a little bit, kind of like with me coming onto the show, right? So it took me it took me a minute to to say yes, but eventually I did. And I’m glad I did because it’s been it’s been real rewarding.

Stone Payton: [00:42:54] Yeah. All right. So the the early part of a conversation, if do you work with individuals as well or right now it’s.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:43:01] Individuals and businesses.

Stone Payton: [00:43:02] All right. So so if if it’s an individual. Or a business, I guess. Talk me through the early part of engagement. I recognize that part of what the execution might be a workshop or some individual coaching or any number of things, but that that first conversation, that early in the engagement, what is that like? Are you are you asking a lot of questions about my world? Like, what’s a what’s that first exchange?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:43:29] Like, I want to see what their mindset is. So I want to see what they I mean, this leadership or my style of leadership is half half science, half art. And I need to make sure that they don’t want to operate totally on science because they will not be successful. So I want to make sure that the partnership is successful. Kind of like when you’re hiring somebody new, you’re hiring for culture, not for not for their ability, because their ability most times, most times you can train somebody to do a certain task, right? You never can hire for culture. You can’t once somebody is who they are, that’s who they are.

Stone Payton: [00:44:08] Okay, so lesson learned.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:44:09] Yeah. So once, you know, you have to define that culture, your company culture, same thing. When I’m working with people, I want to make sure that it’s a fit and I’m not wasting their time. They’re not wasting my time. So I want to make sure that they’re 100%, you know, that I’ve set them up for success.

Stone Payton: [00:44:22] So what do you do now that you’ve gone out on your own, you’re doing this work, what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you enjoying the most.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:44:30] Help business owners, you know, redefine their operations. Yeah, putting people in the right seat, recruiting for them. So we started doing a little bit recruiting. So where we have people that come through our leadership training, we’ve now partnerships with companies, so we’re actually onboarding them. So we went into the company and we have we know how their operations work. So now we’re training those people. So now instead of that six, sometimes 12 week training period, that has been reduced because we’re training them as we’re onboarding them.

Stone Payton: [00:45:07] So the hiring and the onboarding, I intellectually, I know just how critical that is and practically I haven’t proven to be great at either. I at least self identified. I have a tendency to hire in my own image. Right? I mean, I’m probably not the only one, right? No. Is that a common pattern?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:45:30] Yeah, I would say more than 70% of people do that.

Stone Payton: [00:45:33] Wow. And I if someone tells me they can do something, I just I want to believe them. I want to give them that shot. So it’s a I’m not a I’m not a tough job interview.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:45:47] I don’t my interviews are not tough either. I like it to be very I want them to be very comfortable because I want to see how they are in their natural self versus their adaptive self.

Stone Payton: [00:46:01] Oh, yeah, talk.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:46:02] More about that. So that gets a little bit into the behavioral analysis. So you want to make sure that, you know, when somebody said adapt and have an adaptive personality, then that means that they’re they’re adaptive to being who you think they are. So it’s more natural in a pressure situation. That’s who they’re going to be is their natural self. So, you know, if the building is on fire and they panic, they’re not going to get your team out. They’re going to get themselves out. So, you know, in in an executive or a management role, you want to make sure that your your team comes out on top. So you’re only as weak as you’re you’re only as strong as your weakest link. And if you you know, that’s part of being big and culture, making sure that you’re making the natural self more than the adaptive self.

Stone Payton: [00:46:50] So in our earlier segment, we touched on the idea of mentorship a little bit. Have you had the gift of someone mentoring you in your earlier career or as you start this?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:47:03] I did. I did. She may kill me for mentioning her name on radio, but Geraldine Moody was my mentor. So I say she raised me in the bank. She was one of the founders of Community Bank of Pickens County, brought me under her wing, taught me everything that she knew. And I’ve been lucky enough to house that friendship over all these years. But yes, she would be my mentor.

Stone Payton: [00:47:28] So some insights, lessons learned on either side of that table as a mentor or mentee is. That’s right. Yeah. Like, well, let’s take it from the mentee. Let’s say that I have decided, you know what, I need and want to be mentored. Are there some things I could do or maybe should not do to get the most out of that relationship? The ways I can approach those conversations or any insights you might have on that?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:47:58] Nope. Just be honest to yourself. Have the right mindset.

Stone Payton: [00:48:02] Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:48:03] You know, always learn. From other people. So, yeah, you never want to be the smartest person in the room, that’s for sure.

Stone Payton: [00:48:10] Not been a problem for me. I got I got I got some challenges in this business that has not been one of them. So, like everyone in this room, your your enthusiasm for the business, your passion comes through, certainly here in person, I’m sure, over the airwaves. And I mean, you got to run out of gas sometimes. Where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place. How do you. Recharge the batteries and find your inspiration to keep going.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:48:44] My family, for sure. So I come from a huge family. I have. There’s five of me.

Stone Payton: [00:48:50] So am I.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:48:50] I have a brother and four sisters and two daughters, two teenage daughters. Both of them are very active. One of them does rodeo, so.

Stone Payton: [00:48:59] Oh, cool. I love these conversations, guys. And I’ve said this before on the air. If you want to really get to know someone and learn some interesting stuff about them, get yourself a radio show because there’s just so much. It’s that tip of the iceberg thing. There’s just so much. So do you have a family member in rodeo?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:49:17] My daughter. My youngest.

Stone Payton: [00:49:19] Oh, wow. How fun is that? I raised two. Well, Holly raised two wonderful young ladies, but I got to hang out during the process. And my youngest was a gymnast, and I was so proud of her. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the the bars and the floor exercise. I could not watch the balance beam thing. Right. Do you ever feel that way on it? Yes.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:49:45] My my oldest daughter was a catcher.

Stone Payton: [00:49:48] In softball.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:49:49] So I’ve spent most of my life since I’ve had kids and they’ve been old enough to be active, closing my eyes for at least 30 seconds during each event.

Stone Payton: [00:49:59] Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that is fun stuff. All right. So where do you think you’re going to take this thing? Do you want to at some point certify your methodology and have other people teach it as that or. Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:50:16] I don’t know that I would go certification, but, you know, I have some other people that work with me that I’m training to kind of teach the same thing, right? So, you know, more workshops more more people like myself that teach different things, you know, like social media or marketing technology.

Stone Payton: [00:50:35] So like maybe team up with other people who are best in class in that domain and bring them to the so. Well, that’s a neat idea.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:50:42] Yeah. I’m bringing bring like a group and then have, you know, maybe have a membership to that group where you meet once or twice a month and then you’re meeting the best, have a speaker. And then I like the engagement piece where you know you’re having activities and it’s just not a lot of lecture. And then you mix that up with some real world experience. That way you can test it out and then come back and say, okay, this worked, this didn’t work, why didn’t this work? Let’s go back and try it again.

Stone Payton: [00:51:11] Yeah. All right. Let’s let’s if we can leave our listeners, including the listeners in the room. So I’m going to ask you to approach it. You’re going to be covering some a lot of real estate here, but let’s leave them with some counsel, either from lessons learned, good or bad, some things that you have found. You know, these these couple of things I’m doing have really led to the progress so far. Boy, if I had it to do again or knew what I know now, I probably would not have invested as much time and energy in this. Anything along those lines that’ll help anybody in this room, including me?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:51:47] That’s a hard question. So if I could go back and do anything again, it would be get a coach early. So, okay. So I had a mentor, but not really a coach. So, you know, I’ve I learned the hard way. You know, I spent all these all this money on softball lessons and riding lessons. But we don’t we don’t do those lessons in your career and in your business. So, you know, as you’re growing businesses, you want to learn as much as you can. And a lot of this, they don’t teach at school, but some but you’re learning real world. So you can have you know, you want to do social media, find you a coach. Somebody knows how to do it better than you.

Stone Payton: [00:52:25] I think that’s marvelous advice. All right. Before we wrap, let’s make sure that that we leave our listeners with a way to reach out to you, learn more about your coaching programs, or if they’d like, have a conversation with you or someone on your your team.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:52:42] Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn. We have prom leadership, LinkedIn and Facebook, and we have a website so you can find us up from leadership dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:52:50] Fan Oh, I meant to ask why? Why did you call it prime? Why prime.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:52:53] The leadership it was I come up with a couple of names, sent it to my family. My husband’s like, This is it.

Stone Payton: [00:53:00] I said, okay, it sounds like your family and particularly your spouse, very supportive of this move.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:10] They are. Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:53:11] So so yeah. I got to ask, though, what was that conversation like when you went home saying, you know, I got this great job, hubby, you know, and this is all good, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go out on my own. It was was that a five minute conversation or was that a weekend?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:25] He said, it’s about time.

Stone Payton: [00:53:27] Oh, good for you hubby. Shout out for the hubby.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:31] Yeah, he said it’s about time.

Stone Payton: [00:53:33] All right, one more time. Coordinates. Best way to reach out to you.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:36] You can find us on website WW. Leadership or on I’m sorry on website WW leadership dot com or on Facebook at Prime Leadership or on LinkedIn at Prime Leadership dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:53:48] Marvelous. Well, thanks for coming down and visiting with us. Something you might entertain if you’re up for it. I think it might be an interesting segment. If you have a local client sometime that you’ve worked with, have them come on, maybe talk about their business so we can give them that opportunity as well. But maybe also talk about the relationship and what they got out of the coaching and the workshop and that guy. If you’re up for that, yeah, yeah. Reach out and we’ll have like a special episode. A special segment on that.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:54:16] Absolutely. And I would love to mentor these kids. So great pairing.

Stone Payton: [00:54:18] Very nice. I have no idea who’s sitting at number four, but it’s one of our young entrepreneurs.

Leila: [00:54:25] Layla.

Stone Payton: [00:54:26] Layla, I’m horrible with the names. Layla, what do you think about that idea? You like that? Thanks. Yes. All right. So we got a lot of we got a lot done here and we have a lot of future plans. All right. This is Stone Payton for our guest today and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you next time on Cherokee Business Radio.

Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Startup Showdown Podcast

Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics

00:00 /

Jake George Schuster, Founder of Gemini Sports Analytics, was born and raised in the Boston area.

He lived in 6 different countries through 20s to get MSc + PhD and work in pro sports before burning out and moving to Miami to be closer to family and launch first business.

Follow Gemini Sports Analytics on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Making data science accessible
Demystifying AI/ML
Why data ownership matters
How operational maturity and systems design can improve in pro sports
The pre-seed journey as a first time founder
Making sense of the minefield that is raising venture capital

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] We’ll come back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software web3, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:38] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics. Welcome, Jake.

Jake Schuster: [00:00:57] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:58] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Gemini sports. How you serving folks?

Jake Schuster: [00:01:03] Yeah, we we are a data science as a service company. So we are making predictive analytics accessible. And what we mean by that is, you know, most people have seen the film Moneyball that took place 20 years ago when the Oakland Athletics used mathematics to get an advantage on their opponents and won more games with 20 years ago, they were collecting about 50,000 data points per athlete per year. Now that number is between two and 3 million. And sports teams are hiring lots of data scientists. So we encourage that, which is just hiring more and more would be like asking Henry Ford for a faster horse. Someone’s got to build a car. There are automated machine learning platforms which allow non-technical people to do data science without having to write computer code, but they’re generic to industry and sports. People won’t use them. Sports executives won’t go pay for those platforms and use them because they’re not quite user friendly enough for their needs and the technical level. And they don’t contain APIs or data ingestion pieces for the sports data that’s being collected by these teams. So there’s too many steps for them to really harness that technology. We’re just bringing that kind of vertical SAS approach into sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:11] So what is the type of data that is important to these teams?

Jake Schuster: [00:02:17] Anything that will help them better make better decisions in how they acquire, develop and manage their athletes? So if you’re a professional baseball team in North America, you’re going to want to figure out which players to draft and which players to sign. You’re going to have long term development plans for those athletes that you need to optimize. And you’re going to want to keep those those athletes injury free and performing their best. And finally, you want to know which tactics to play against different opponents and to optimize processes. And so any data that’s going to help improve that process.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:47] And then where what kind of universe of data do you pull from to get that kind of information? You need to assess that. Okay. Let’s start Bill today and then Bob tomorrow.

Jake Schuster: [00:03:01] Yeah, great question. So you’d be surprised how few or how common these sources are the most teams are collecting. Every sport has a scouting database, every sport has an endgame statistics database. And then every sport will use, let’s say, about a half dozen of the same, you might call them biometric or performance and medical technologies. So jump tests that they do daily GPS and accelerometer metrics of how much an athlete’s running and game or running in practice, and therefore how hard they’re working your heart rate. Similarly, sleep is measured often, and lots of nutrition and psychological metrics are taken these days. And then each league has some specific stats, like something called second spectrum in basketball, and it looks at indoor movement tracking and other technologies that you see in different sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:49] So then the teams for existing players, they have access to certain data and then there’s probably just public information, right, that you’re you know, they’re these people are being filmed, you know, playing the game. So there’s data there. How do you kind of help them? Kind of first of all, take that public information and marry it to the private information that you might have and then and use that to make an informed decision whether, hey, maybe this guy’s hurt and he’s not telling us. But because I’m getting data that suggests that something’s a little off, but like like how is it used practically on a day to day basis?

Jake Schuster: [00:04:33] Well, our platform on a day to day basis, it’s important to understand that this is a tool in a user’s hands existing. I don’t like to use the word competitor because no one’s done what we’re doing before, but existing technologies out there are often third party or consulting style where they have to send you the data and then someone’s going to play with it and get back to you with insights. We are entirely, entirely putting capabilities in the stakeholders hands, so we do a lot of backend work that we automate and scale in terms of data preparation, making it easy to join databases and those different data sets that you mentioned. For example, our first piece of traction was publishing in an academic journal publicly available data on MBA injuries. Over the last ten seasons. It was the most accurate data model ever published to date in that space, and that was just to show that what we do is objective and academic, that it’s not a black box, it’s not a secret sauce. We are just using open source data models and wrangling them into a space that it’s easy for someone to use without writing computer code.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:30] But then it’s on the team to now take that data and then use it specifically to help. Them in some manner?

Jake Schuster: [00:05:37] Absolutely. I mean, we believe this is not meant to be man versus machine. It’s man and machine. And a lot of times you will see something where the computers are saying one thing and the executives are saying something else. And then this war takes place between departments. And that’s not how it should be. It should be that the machines are giving you some some information and you’re making human decisions based on that, not because of that or dictated by that.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:02] So what’s an example that the machine might help you make a better decision because it’s giving you pertinent information?

Jake Schuster: [00:06:10] Sure. So our first pilot project we did with an NBA team where they wanted to know how to manage their busy schedule. The MBA schedule is famously hectic and challenging and causes a lot of injuries. And so you want to find where you can get a day off any place you can are algorithms show the the wind probability of every game across the season based on travel, based on time zones, density, things like that, amount of rest and so forth. And within them it was very obvious how much better their star player was getting when he had a certain amount of rest. So we looked across the schedule and identified about 20 different times that they could give the player a pre pre-planned day off based on our metrics, and they got to pick the five that they wanted.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:54] So like I use a Woohp fitness product and then so it tells me like, hey, you have good recovery today, you have bad recovery today. Is that something that you can take that data then and then integrate it into your data so that you know that if I’m having a bad recovery day and it’s kind of near the time for this person to have a day off, maybe we should make today. That day.

Jake Schuster: [00:07:18] Absolutely. And a number of teams are using MOVE. It’s a little bit more consumer grade technology, but they’re using similar things that are a bit more precise. And that’s exactly how it works, where many people you might see tweeting or posting online, observing that their sleep metrics are very poor after they have alcohol the prior night in a similar situation with an athlete or with a consumer, the technology isn’t saying don’t drink. It might not even be that smart, but it’s going to show you what happens when you drink and then you or your coach or someone involved has to help you make the decision to not drink.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:53] Now, is this primarily geared to professional sports leagues, or does this trickle down to college and high school?

Jake Schuster: [00:07:59] Yeah, we’re already we’re about to be able to announce a partnership with a Power five college that we’ll be working with. I think high school doesn’t quite collect enough enough technology yet, although we’ll probably work with some AA groups. College is absolutely a market that we’re working in.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:14] And then so when you had the idea to do this, how did you kind of create the company behind it to help and roll it out? Like what? Like did you do this kind of on your own as bootstrapping? Hey, I got this idea. Let me just play this out. Or were you like, right away? I’m going to I’m going to scale this thing and I’m going to build the team.

Jake Schuster: [00:08:36] This bootstrapped for a long, long time. You know, self belief and traction have a funny parallel journey together. And I had this idea back in 2019, and I’ve been talking about it with my partner, Jose Fernandez, who’s the head of sports science at the Houston Astros, when they won a World Series with the biggest analytics department in sports. And he saw this problem and he saw that they needed software on top of all those developers. And we went around, we publish this paper, we did a pilot project. I went full time last August. We raised a small, small round of angel investment, put that into product design, and then went around with that product design and pitch venture capital and recently raised $1,000,000 combined from lead sports known a group, which is the combination of the grandchildren of the founder of Adidas with the honor of a Premier League team and Florida funders who are the most active venture capital firm in Southeast.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:29] Now, was it always kind of just aimed at the professional team or is it going to eventually trickle down to, you know, gambling and fantasy football and things like that?

Jake Schuster: [00:09:40] It’s funny how often we get that question, and I don’t have a great answer. My sense is that someday we’ll build a parallel product in that space. Everyone wants to know if the numbers can can give more accurate betting odds and things like that. I think the market is plenty big just to help out elite sports teams around the world, but I’m sure some investor will convince me otherwise at some point.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:03] Well, because if you’re capturing this data and like you say, it’s self serve, and if I’m able to take what exists, that’s in the public domain and then get an edge. I mean, that’s what all of these, you know, games of chance, that’s what it’s about, right? You want an edge?

Jake Schuster: [00:10:19] Without question. Without question. I think the important thing to understand why I’m a little bit defensive about that notion is that trust is everything and data security is paramount. And we’ve built out redundancy after feature after redundancy in our platform to ensure the security of athlete data and proprietary team data, which obviously we know is important because we’ve been in those positions working for those teams. There will come a point in time where the value proposition becomes what my original idea for it was, which is this big snowball of combined data that teams want to plug into because 30 to 32 teams worth of data is a lot more useful than one team worth of data, and the betting companies will be thinking exactly the same at that point.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:00] Right. But even if the yours is just the proprietary individual team data combined with the public domain data and if the consumer is just the public domain data, I mean, for a lot of people, that would be enough for them to, I would think, have a subscription. Now, what’s been kind of the funnest part of being a founder and what’s been the most challenging part?

Jake Schuster: [00:11:24] The most fun part is easy. That’s working with incredible people. And I know it’s a cliche, but being the least intelligent person in the room every single day is really fun. And this incredible caliber of advisors and investors and employees that I work with just blows my mind every single day. So that is just caused me to level up enormously as a person. The least fun part is how I’ve come to accept this, but it’s still not fun. People like you when you’re winning and people don’t want to have as much to do with you until you’re winning. And and traction is everything. And it’s it’s very interesting seeing who gives you the time of day at certain points and who doesn’t. And I think you just learn that that’s one of the few ways that the world works, and you’ve got to run with it.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:11] Now, for you as a founder, what’s kind of your superpower that makes you the right person to lead this adventure?

Jake Schuster: [00:12:22] I know how to, and I’m able to get the right people in the room at the right time.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:28] And then as part of the fundraising process, which has his own job, obviously. But how did you kind of stumble upon Startup Showdown and Panoramic Ventures? Was that just part of your due diligence of looking out for, you know, opportunities to tell your story and to, you know, see who’s out there doing what?

Jake Schuster: [00:12:48] You know what? I was trying to remember the name of who did it. I apologize that I can’t. But someone put it into the Miami Tech Life Telegram chat run by Ryan Wray and Damien DiMeo. Some information about this event and encouraging people to apply. So I applied and then frankly, I forgot about it because I applied to a lot of stuff for that period of time. And then I got an email that I was, I think at that time a semifinalist and went through the rounds and then it happened. And you know, the support along the way from the likes of Stephanie and Tammy was, was amazing. And that that’s what helped the group stand out.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:22] And then so what specifically were they doing? Were you’re like, hey, this is a good use of my time. I’m glad I participated in this.

Jake Schuster: [00:13:30] Well, if I remember it right, if it was the semifinal kind of round where you had, it was almost like a speed dating pitch. You gave your pitch, I think, five times in a couple of hour period to a bunch of different investors. And they gave great feedback each of them. They gave great criticism and great advice, and all of it was useful.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:50] And do you have a mentor or is there somebody that’s kind of your person that you’re aiming at? If this is the type of leader that I want to be or this is the type of leader that I can learn from.

Jake Schuster: [00:14:02] I have a lot of mentors. I would say, you know, it takes a village. My my advisory group is incredible. So whether that’s my my CFO, Johan von Leek, telling me about how to financially model and how we can move forward with this business really economically, or where some of our angel investors and advisors like Chris Haskell and Flynn and Joshua Tony, who have all run multiple companies, all work in and around professional sports, and all gone and done exactly what I’m trying to do. I just observe how these people live their lives and run their businesses. And that helps me do. Do mine.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:34] And any advice for other startup founders out there?

Jake Schuster: [00:14:38] Just keep going.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:41] But just keep moving.

Jake Schuster: [00:14:43] Be relentless. Be persistent. Persevere. If I had to give a big cliche, it would be that whatever you’re working towards is just on the other side of whatever you’re you’re working through right now. Like, I really think pain tolerance is one of the most important qualities.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:59] Yeah, that resilience. They don’t teach you that in school?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:03] No.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:05] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:08] I really appreciate you asking. I think being on this podcast is perfect because I think marketing is is a luxury, not a necessity at such an early stage. And we’re really fortunate that our first 25 customers are all going to come from direct relationships that we have right now. But what happens next? Right. So general exposure and general awareness of people about Gemini Sports Analytics is always appreciated. So I think being right here is great.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:39] And if somebody wants to learn more, get a hold of you or somebody on the team. What’s a website?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:44] Yeah. Gemini Sports Dot I and I’m at Jake Gemini Sports dot II.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:50] Well, Jake, thank you so much for sharing your story, doing important work. And we appreciate you.

Jake Schuster: [00:15:55] Thank you, buddy.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:56] All right. This Lee Kantor will show next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:16:01] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast. So you get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next startup showdown pitch competition visit showdown vs that’s showdown dot DC. All right. That’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.