Business RadioX ®

Rohit Panedka With Microsoft

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Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Rohit Panedka With Microsoft
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Rohit Panedka is Microsoft General Manager, E+D Product and Atlanta Site Lead. He is responsible for M365 and Experiences and Devices Support, Care, Innovation and value generation for our customers through Care and Support.

His organization looks to understand customer needs with empathy and consistently experimenting on improving outcomes and experiences for our customers and aspire to scale those experiences to all our customers so we can live us purpose of impacting every individual and organization on the planet.

His professional career spans ~20 years in technology focused on delivering managed services, supply chain, and customer service/support/care, go to market, delivery and transformation.

He enjoys giving back and paying it forward and always open to engaging and learning from others. He serves as the Executive Sponsor for Asians at Microsoft Atlanta to advise and provide resources for the organization and leadership team.

He enjoys being of service to others as a mentor, support to HBCUs, donating time to charities such as Ronald McDonald House, Emerging 100 of Atlanta, Boys and Girls Club, The Urban League and MANNRS here in Georgia.

Connect with Rohit on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • About Microsoft’s work here in Atlanta
  • Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: 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: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio we have Rohit Panedka with Microsoft. Welcome.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you Lee. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to dig into this new report, the Work Trend Index that, uh, the folks at Microsoft and LinkedIn have put together. But before we get into that, can you just tell us a little bit about your work or Microsoft’s work here in Atlanta?

Rohit Panedka: Certainly. So I am the site leader here for Microsoft Atlanta, and I represent a great legacy of engineers that are building our M365 products, Azure products, all the ones that you’re probably familiar with, our listeners are familiar with. We also have a good presence of our sales and customer solution architects that engage with customers closely to help them adopt our technology and get the business transformation benefits that they’re looking for. User experience, you know, transformation. Yeah, that’s the that’s our presence here in Atlanta. We do pretty much everything that happens in our headquarters in Redmond, here in Atlanta for our customers, close in near to us in this region.

Lee Kantor: So what kind of Microsoft resources are available for the small to mid-size business owner? How do you interact with that community?

Rohit Panedka: So we have several ways. I mean, first and foremost, we have, uh, you know, many resources online and in digital methods for them to reach out to us. We also have support systems where they can reach out to get, you know, help with adoption or even when they’re stuck with a problem, you know, there’s free support where they can call A18 hundred number and get support. We also serve them through chat modalities. We have very specific programs around helping them first, you know, understand their jobs to be done, what we call what are they trying to achieve for their business and then help them adopt our technology to help resolve those jobs to be done. And then we have some persistent relationships with them to make sure that they’re continuing to get the best value out of our products, their subscription, and then also, you know, continue to look at as their business is growing and transforming, how our products can further help them. So we have very many ways that SMBs leverages to grow their business.

Lee Kantor: Now, part of that is this Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index. Can you speak of that? Any insight that you gleaned from that?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. You know a little bit about the work trend index itself. Uh, we started this report out, uh, back during the pandemic, you know, where work took a pretty huge turn towards virtual. And, you know, businesses and users alike had to adopt a lot of digital mechanisms to get work done. And we started publishing that report every year. And in 2024, uh, you know, we met with 30, 31,000 users and 31 different countries. We spoke to, you know, our, uh, the S 500, uh, what we call the fortune 500 companies. Uh, and we studied trillions of telemetry data from productivity software that our, you know, users and businesses use. And, uh, you know, we we found a really interesting, uh, shift in work, which is, uh, more and more users are bringing, uh, AI to work and using AI to help them with their work. Uh, Atlanta in general is largely leading, uh, that, uh, you know, trend almost four out of every knowledge worker based in Atlanta is using generative AI at work. Um, and, uh, about three out of four of those users are bringing their own AI to work, and they’re not waiting for, uh, their businesses and business leaders to catch up. Uh, they have found the value in AI, uh, to, to do better work and free up time. And, uh, they’re taking full advantage of it.

Lee Kantor: Now, how are you defining AI in terms of use? Because, I mean, people were using AI years ago when they were asking their Alexa, you know, what’s the weather today?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, that’s actually a great question. Um, you know, when we think about the current models, they’re actually based on large language models, which, uh, you know, have the ability to, uh, give more contextual responses rather than general, you know, uh, very high level responses to the point, uh, as an example, uh, I use, uh, generative AI to help me with my work, uh, particularly when I start the day, I basically come to copilot, Microsoft copilot and say, you know, help me identify all the important meetings of the day and tell me, what are the, uh, you know, critical pieces of information I would need for that? Those meetings, uh, what are the, you know, decisions that are waiting, uh, for me to be to make, uh, even during meetings? Uh, I, you know, ask questions like, what’s a really good question to ask based on this data? So these kinds of very contextual information based, uh, you know, uh, work support was not available in the previous versions of AI. Um, this is a very powerful, uh, you know, mechanism to help users really, you know, bring AI as an assistant to the work that they do. Right? That’s a huge shift. And as you know, many of us are not used to having assistants at work. This is really democratizing, uh, you know, uh, work assistants to, to pretty much all the knowledge workers.

Lee Kantor: So if you were an entrepreneur or even an aspiring entrepreneur, how would you kind of leverage AI today? Like what would you how would you kind of incorporate like, um, you know, maybe share some use cases or some, you know, actionable activities you would do, uh, to leverage AI throughout your entrepreneurial workday?

Rohit Panedka: That is a great question. You know, one thing that we are finding as entrepreneurs and business owners and business leaders are opting, I is, uh, you know, they’re pausing to think about what is their AI strategy. And what we’re finding is a better way to think about AI is think about your business strategy. You know, your core business strategy still remains the same. Your core mission of, uh, you know, what you want to serve your customers with or what products you want to go to market with, uh, and apply AI to make, uh, you know, speed up that strategy and transform that, uh, business. You know, good examples of those could be when serving customers in the customer service, uh, you know, engagements, leveraging AI. You know, large language models can help identify customers issues quickly, helping the customer service agents with knowledge at hand, uh, being proactive about the questions they can ask, making the whole customer service interaction a lot more, uh, you know, easy and pleasurable for customers, but also for the, uh, agents that serve them. Uh, so that’s a workflow that’s, you know, really up for disruption.

Rohit Panedka: And many of our customers are starting to leverage, uh, in that space. Uh, we also have, uh, you know, creative development. Uh, we have Estee Lauder as a, you know, customer that actually is using, um, generative AI for their product development and reimagining, uh, customer experience locally in Atlanta, we have, uh, Coca-Cola, uh, that has, uh, really looked at all stacks of their business, you know, back office work, uh, data analysis and data crunching, but also in some of the front office, uh, you know, customer serving, uh, situations. So I think we should think about, you know, if I were an entrepreneur, I would think of, uh, every area of my business, you know, how do I serve my customers better and faster? How do I make my employee experience better? Because with this assistance, they can be faster. They can, you know, uh, get rid of some of their menial tasks and focus on more of the meaningful aspects of their jobs, like being strategic and creative and happy employees equals happy customers equals great business.

Lee Kantor: But, um, as you mentioned, you’re making it seem like it’s pretty easy to integrate into your workflow. It just ask it questions, use it as an assistant. But isn’t it true that in order to really wring out as much value as possible, you have to be pretty good at asking those questions and those prompts? Because you can’t just ask, how do I make my, you know, um, employees happier? You have to ask a very a more specific question in order to get an answer that’s more fruitful.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, you’re spot only. And, uh, you know, this is where we are starting to also see the emergence of what we call super users, right? These are not necessarily, uh, born. Right? I mean, these are workers like you and me that are starting to leverage AI more. And it is a constant, uh, you know, learning and trialing and erroring, uh, kind of approach. So these what we’ve seen with these power users is they experiment every day. Uh, they’re consistent users of AI. Uh, they use it every day. Uh, they ask, uh, you know, these prompts, we also see behaviors of them sharing their prompting behaviors with other coworkers that are doing similar work, uh, learning from them. Uh, they also, uh, give feedback. So, you know, all of the copilot, uh, you know, uh, surfaces of ours have ability for you to give feedback of when a prompt didn’t work. That gives us insights to make sure that the product is consistently evolving and getting better at answering users questions. The other thing I would say from a business leader perspective, leaders leadership perspective is encourage this use and experimentation.

Rohit Panedka: Um, you know, we have seen that organizations that have these, you know, propensity for super users and being much of the workforce is when they hear from CEOs, when they hear from the leadership, the importance of AI, the importance of adopting it. And also, uh, you know, invest in some of these training. I’d also say one thing from a Microsoft perspective as well is when you open up and start using Copilot, for every prompt, you will see suggested prompts as well as, uh, as a, as a starting point. So even if you’re brand new, if you start typing a certain intent of yours, we give you suggestions on prompts, but also on the prompt box right next to it. We also have what we call Copilot lab, which is just a click away where you can start seeing based on the scenarios you want information on. We can guide you through that. And there’s pre-canned prompts. Now obviously, like I said earlier, as you start using this, make it very personal to your work and your situation. And the model learns with, you know, based on your own behavior.

Lee Kantor: So then as you’re kind of exploring an area, it’s remembering what you’ve previously asked. So it’s building on that rather than you starting from a blank page every time you’re using it.

Rohit Panedka: That is correct. It actually, uh, remembers the context of you as a user and, you know, bases it on your data, right? And not anybody else’s. So it’s very, uh, that’s also important from a, you know, data protection and privacy perspective. It’s all within your, uh, you know, usage and usage patterns and data.

Lee Kantor: So now how would an entrepreneur kind of leverage it in terms of inputting some of its own data into it? So it’s it’s building knowledge based on the universe that exists in that organization.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. So, you know, this is where we definitely encourage, you know, uh, working with Microsoft, you know, whether it’s your account, uh, relationship managers or customer success managers and, you know, have a strategy and an enterprise strategy, right? We we definitely recommend that, you know, we think through your business ideas. We have copilot, copilot scenario libraries that are very available and easy to use. Uh, so think through how and what data that you want to, you know, expose for these kinds of, uh, you know, business use cases and worker use cases and, and, uh, you know, put some boundaries around that. It all starts with how can you, you know, be relevant with your data, but also secure with the data in the way it’s used. And then, you know, obviously copilot does its job. Um, but I would say start with that.

Lee Kantor: Now, for the folks out there that are apprehensive about AI, there’s a lot of fear in the unknown, and especially when a new disruption comes into play, there’s a lot of catastrophizing of what’s going to happen in worst case scenarios. What would you say to the folks that are nervous about the future with an AI assistant as part of the team?

Rohit Panedka: You know, um, that’s that’s I mean, that’s a very fair concern, especially when a technology is new. Uh, we we are open to those kinds of, uh, you know, skepticism and, and, uh, but, you know, we continue to learn and we obviously steep ourselves in data, and data is very clear. Um, you know, workers are still reeling with, uh, you know, mounting amounts of work, uh, pace and volume is consistently mounting, which is why we are seeing four out of every five users in Atlanta using generative AI. We are seeing, uh, you know, three out of every four worker bringing their own AI. Now, this is a business opportunity for business leaders. You know, uh, get on with the plan, right? You know, make sure that we are creating a, uh, work environment and enabling our employees with those tools to take advantage of it. The third piece, I would say is, uh, you know, from a data perspective, while, you know, there is this fear that, hey, you know, jobs could be taken away by AI, that is not entirely true in the sense when we look at the data, when we look at the LinkedIn data, you know, almost half of the job seekers today are looking for a career change. And over two thirds of the managers that are looking for hiring individuals are looking for people with, uh, you know, AI skills. They’re even saying that they would hire somebody with AI skills more than experience. So I think that suggests that the future is going to be different, in the sense that there will always going to be demand for, uh, you know, people, uh, with, with skills. And in this case, the skills are going to be, uh, with, with AI skills.

Lee Kantor: Now, are you where are we kind of in this in the growth of AI? Is this are we at the very beginning? Is this the first inning? Are we in the seventh inning stretch here? Where are we at?

Rohit Panedka: Uh, you know, for the for from from our perspective, we say, you know, we are the first the first inning was experimentation. Now we’re in the, you know, first to second innings, which is, you know, take these experiments and translate this into business strategy. And as, uh, more and more users and entrepreneurs and enterprises start leveraging AI for their use cases, then comes the rest of the innings, which is there’s a lot more use cases to solve for, you know, beyond knowledge workers. There are frontline workers, uh, there are different verticals in the industry that are probably more, uh, you know, uh, you know, sensitive to security and privacy and things like that. So I think it’s going to take time and to, to get to all of the possible business transformation and user experience transformation. So I think we’re, we’ve we’ve kind of gotten through the first innings of, hey, was this novelty. Let’s experiment. Now we know. No, it’s actually really helping work and transform work in businesses. And we have to now start, you know, really sticking to that journey and invest ourselves, uh, and commit ourselves to that journey because we’ll all learn, uh, the more enterprises, entrepreneurs and users use these products, the better they become, because those that feedback is what helps us make sure that our products are meeting, uh, you know, everybody’s needs.

Lee Kantor: So how does an enterprise level organization like Microsoft help the end user when you have a disruption like this that like you said, we’re maybe out of the beginning stages, but it’s it’s, um, so rapidly evolving and the speed every year it gets so much smarter and so much, uh, more beneficial to the end users. How do you help kind of guide or sherpa the, uh, consumer into not only embracing the technology, but really kind of wringing out the most value from it.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. Uh, that’s a great question. And, you know, I think when we think about, uh, you know, our responsibility, that is key as well. Uh, you know, you might have heard of, uh, investments that we’re making in different markets in terms of, you know, learning and, and, uh, uh, training and skilling, uh, people with AI skills. We are also, um, you know, making available free courses on LinkedIn where, you know, there’s a ton of courses there if you go and look up for LinkedIn learning in LinkedIn learning, uh, for AI skills, there’s a lot of courses there for, uh, from, you know, from right from the beginning, where to start all the way up to scaling up. Uh, we also have to, you know, to your point of small business owners and, uh, even enterprises, uh, copilot scenario library, this is for folks that are in charge of making AI their strategy. And, uh, uh, you know, their business strategy. So we have those kinds of help. And as I said, you know, very large enterprises that have relationships with us, uh, we have customer solution architects and, uh, you know, uh, success managers and relationship managers that will engage and take our customers through that journey. Uh, we’re all in this together. And I say this again and again, which is while we do that, we are being very, uh, intentional about understanding how users are using it, how, uh, enterprises are using it, what are their guardrails? And we are making sure that our product is, you know, aligning to those so that we can be, uh, a one step ahead in terms of making sure as people are adopting more and more they have they get what they need.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, uh, connect with you, somebody on the Microsoft team on how to best kind of leverage this is it through LinkedIn or is it through Microsoft? Is it through a combination? How what coordinates would you send somebody to, uh, learn more?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. So, you know, I would definitely encourage folks to go to microsoft.com forward slash, uh, work trend index or work labs. Uh, we have a lot of resources there for anybody that wants to learn more about these technologies. But if you have specific needs, depending on whether you have a relationship with Microsoft, in the case of you having a relationship with Microsoft, definitely leverage your, you know, uh, account managers and uh, or like I mentioned, you know, our support channels that you can come through, uh, if you want to self-study, uh, you know, sources like LinkedIn, uh, you know, feel free to use any of those. And. Yeah, again, you know, if you have any, uh, you know, questions for us, just reach out to us on, you know, Microsoft.com and give us feedback, and we’ll reach out back to you.

Lee Kantor: While we’re ahead. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you, Lee, and thanks for the work you do for our Atlanta, uh, listeners.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Brian Biro With Brian Biro Enterprises

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High Velocity Radio
High Velocity Radio
Brian Biro With Brian Biro Enterprises
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Brian Biro is America’s Breakthrough Speaker of Brian Biro Enterprises.

He has delivered nearly 1,900 presentations around the world over the last 34 years. The author of 16 books including his bestseller, Beyond Success, and his brand-new Lessons from the Legends, he was rated #1 from over 40 Speakers at 4 consecutive INC. Magazine International Conferences.

With degrees from Stanford University and UCLA, he has appeared on Good Morning America, and CNN.

He was recently honored as one of the top 10 interactive keynote speakers in North America, and one of the top 50 Motivational Speakers in the world!

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn and follow him on Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • What is breakthrough leadership
  • Critical key to a richer life

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:05] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:15] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Brian Biro. He is America’s breakthrough speaker with Brian Biro Enterprises. Welcome.

Brian Biro: [00:00:28] Hey. Thanks, Lee. It’s great to be with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] Well, I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about life as America’s breakthrough speaker. How you serving, folks?

Brian Biro: [00:00:38] Well, you know, I absolutely love what I do. That’s the starting place. I’ve been a professional speaker, speaking mainly to organizations, corporations, associations for 34 years. I can’t it seems like yesterday that I started and, you know, my whole my whole deal is about helping people break through, break through fears, obstacles, and organizations break through to a better performance or better culture, and that the keys to breakthroughs are repeatable, simple, powerful. And they apply not only in your work, but in your family and your health and your life. So I think the starting place is to love what you do. It’s not even like work. It’s really my passion.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:16] So now how do you move from, I would imagine, a career as a traditional business person for a period of time to a career as a speaker. How do you make that transition?

Brian Biro: [00:01:29] Well, you know, I’ve actually had three really neat careers and each was a kind of progression. My first career, I went to Stanford University a long time ago. We went much, many years, and I came out of school and knew that what I loved was what I had done to put myself through school, which was coaching swimming. I was a swimmer myself, and I loved it. And so it was really the foundation of of working with people. Had a great run as a US swimming coach, working with young athletes to rise to their potential. When I went into the corporate world after getting an MBA at UCLA, I was in a pretty large transportation company, moved up pretty fast, but our team was not a team at that time. We were really siloed as it so often in many organizations, you know, operations didn’t get along with sales. Sales didn’t get along with operations. They both hated the Home Office just a little bit more. And so I had risen quite rapidly, become vice president in charge of kind of our culture called performance planning. And I talked to my CEO. I talked him into letting me go out and start doing team building in my own company.

Brian Biro: [00:02:33] So that’s really using some of the principles I learned at the swimming coach, which people think swimming is an individual sport. It’s a team sport. We have no idea how much we impact each other. And so I started doing these programs. We were we had locations all around North America. I spoke at every one of them, and that really did the trick. And I said to my wife, at the peak of this, it led to a tremendous turnaround. Our company did extraordinarily well on the bottom line in terms of growth, but more importantly, we really started to work together. Tremendous internal support, people having fun, great service. And so I said to my wife, at the peak of that, hey, hon, we’re doing great. Let’s quit. I got to go do this. This is what I was meant on Earth to do. And so that was kind of the springboard, really, that that team building element, which really to build a team, each person has to take responsibility for their part to contribute to that team.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:27] So, um, now when you’re working with organizations, are you coming in to give a speech or are you coming in to, um, you know, kind of solve a problem that may require more than, you know, an hour, uh, talking?

Brian Biro: [00:03:42] Well, yeah. Yeah, it’s kind of both. Um, every organization is is kind of the same and different. We it’s all the same in that it’s all about people. I don’t care what business you’re in. You’re in the people business. But it’s different in terms of where they are in this particular moment in time, in terms of what are their biggest challenges. So though I am giving a talk, giving a presentation that could go either from one hour up to a full day, although these days mostly they’re shorter, they’re kind of a acceleration of of time in, within my business what used to take four hours you need to do in one. Um, but each organization is unique. So I’m, uh, the process starts with a kind of in-depth interview to find out what are your desired outcomes, what are your challenges right now? Um, what’s the state of mind of your team? Um, where are the places where you really feel that you need to break through? So it really is a combination. That’s a great question, because there is that, that massive effort to customize so that it’s not something that you’re just pulling off a shelf as a presentation. Um, and yet there are foundational elements that are so important to every breakthrough and every people organization. So it really combines both that customization and and the presentation. And today’s world. You’ve got to you’ve got to entertain, entertain as much as you educate. So it’s kind of, you know, entertain is what we need to do. Because if you can’t grab people’s engagement, you’re not going to grab their spirits, you’re not going to grab their minds, you’re not going to grab their hearts.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:18] So what are some symptoms that organizations are having that they might have a need for additional team building? Is there any things you see that are maybe. Happening that they’re not kind of elevating to a, hey, this this is a priority. We really have a team building issue here.

Brian Biro: [00:05:36] Yeah, I think that, you know, one of the things is what I encountered in my own organization where we have different functional groups, operations, sales, sales and marketing, and then we’ve got maybe the administrative parts and and they’re separated, they’re silos. There’s a lot of silos. That’s. And until we pull together, you know, it’s when you think about it logically, operations doesn’t want to do sales. Sales does not want to do operations. And yet we’re constantly kind of internally blaming each other. So breaking through those, you know, moving from silos to synergy is a is a common one. Uh, another one that I think is really accelerated since Covid is just a feeling of connection, a feeling of are we on the same track? Um, you know, there was a lot of people switched from coming into an office or coming into a location and having that, that connection that isn’t necessarily so much even conscious as, as subconscious where you’re just collecting and, you know, passing each other chat and feeling a sense of connection. And so I find at this in the last couple of years, one of the biggest things of just holding an event is getting people in the same room, in the same space, instead of only on their computers. Doing only virtual um really creates a springboard. It creates an acceleration to becoming more of a team. Um, and I think finally, it’s just the sense of that, you know, together we may be many, you know, separately we may be many, but together we can be much. We can do so much more when we bring in and start to understand that different. I don’t want a team of people who are exactly like me, because then we’re only going to see a little bit that we need to value and honor the different approaches, different talents, different focuses, and merge them together towards a common, common goal. That’s when we can actually, uh, create the most, the most exciting results.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:34] Now, do you believe that, um. That there’s a leader within everyone at just a matter of getting it out of them. Or do you feel that some people kind of just naturally gravitate to leadership positions and other people gravitate to kind of the, um, you know, kind of worker bee, do the grind type person?

Brian Biro: [00:07:58] You know, that is a wonderful question. The foundation of everything I teach is that everyone is a leader. Um, and we can’t hide from the fact how we show up every day. That’s a big part of the way that we lead. Um, we’re all constantly teaching. How do we deal with adversity, with challenge, with change, with prosperity. That’s another another expression of our personal leadership. But probably most important of all, what kind of impact do we have on the people around us? Do we elevate them by who we are, by the choices that we make? So I believe that we’re all leaders and that we all have the capacity. Um, it may not be necessarily in terms of a hierarchical form of leadership, but we are teaching and leading and in the way that we that way we respond, the way we deal with it, with everything in our lives. So, uh, a lot of what I teach, I call breakthrough leadership because, uh, every event I speak at Lee is an event that’s held to break through. Whether it’s a breakthrough, we want to increase our sales. We want to increase our our operational productivity. Uh, we want to increase our teamwork. It’s a breakthrough from where we’ve been to where we want to get to. And so really, that what I want to help people to understand is that breakthrough personal self leadership is about controlling your controllables. Um, and there’s three that are most foundational. One is to shape your future. So that’s about vision. And I want to help people understand that what you focus on is what you create. So focus on what you want to create instead of focusing on what you don’t want. How many of us spend more time worrying about what will go wrong than focusing on what we want to create to go right? So start with shaping your future.

Brian Biro: [00:09:36] Second right is to energize and engage yourself in your team. Um, when you talk about any organization, whether it’s a business, whether it’s a sports team, whether it’s entertainment, so much of what will separate and differentiate us is our level of energy. And I want to help people understand energy is a choice. It’s a choice about the way that you move. It’s a choice about how much you focus on purpose. Whenever you’re full of purpose, you’re full of energy. So helping people understand that a controllable is your energy. And you can you can elevate your energy through choice. And finally, the third controllable is to build people, build teams and build relationships. As I said, every business ultimately is a people business. It’s it’s how much you grow and help others grow that determines how far you can go. And so by focusing on working on those three controllables, shaping your future, energized and engaging yourself and really working to build relationship by being present, by really focusing on recognition, acknowledgment, appreciation, kindness, those kinds of things will generate breakthrough results. And that’s where breakthrough leadership really grabs a hold of each person. And man, if I can get each person I ever speak to to know that they’re a leader, I mean, if you’re a mother, if you’re a father, I hope you find yourself being a leader. If you’re a student, you have a choice about what you’re going to go grow and and the study and focus on. We’re all leaders, and we have the opportunity to be breakthrough leaders.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:08] Now with a lot of young people suffering from anxiety and, um, and maybe frustrated with where they are on the planet, maybe because they’re immersed in social media and seeing other people doing better than them. Is there anything that you would recommend that’s actionable that gets this person that maybe isn’t feeling like a leader today to become the leader that they could be?

Brian Biro: [00:11:33] Yes. Great question. I would start with their self-talk. Um, when you’re feeling that kind of anxiety, you are living from a perspective that says, I have to do this or I have to not do this, or else something terrible will happen. We’ve learned that when we were children, and it was important when we were kids to protect us. You know, you need to do this or else something bad will happen. And those two words or else are fear based. So when you first thing I would do with young people, it sounds like a silly little thing, but it can be transformational. Find out in you. Start to ask yourself how often in your self-talk or even out loud, you say, I have to do this because when you get down to it, you really only have to do one thing that’s die. Everything else is a matter of choice and shift that self-talk from I have to do this, which has within it those hidden words, or else something bad will happen. Shift it to I want to, I choose to, I like to, I can’t wait to. And what happens is you begin to recognize that you have that you ultimately have a chance to live life from a place of choice. That yes, every choice will have consequences. But when you come from that place of I choose to, I want to, I. I’ve decided to you start to to start to take charge of your life.

Brian Biro: [00:12:52] You start to take charge of your choices. And ultimately, that’s really where you have an opportunity to to be a self leader. Um, so that’s really a foundational key. And once you do that, you recognize you do have a choice. You know, when I shifted from being a swimming coach to going into business. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had really lived my life with the decision, I’m going to do the things I love and and as you do that, you start to become more alert for opportunities. I call it seizing the Wu, seizing the window of opportunity. So as you use that, that forward momentum choice of self-talk, I choose to, I want to I can’t wait to you’ll open your eyes to and become alert to all the resources that were already there, but you had previously missed because you were coming from a place of fear. Every breakthrough ultimately comes down to breaking through, from fear to love and faith. And that really is the message for young people, is that you do have choices, and you can choose to live your life in a forward motion. You live your life driving in the rear view mirror means you’re going where you don’t want to get to. You know, start focusing on where you’re going you want to get to.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:03] Now, you mentioned that in your career, there were you’ve kind of had three major transitions and that, um, at the time making those changes, I’m sure there was um, it wasn’t obvious, but maybe now looking back, the all these, uh, these dots are connected in a, in a logical manner. Um, is there anything you can share about when you are contemplating making a change or a shift, maybe some clues that you’re that this is the right move to make, that you should kind of lean into it rather than, um, maybe feel like any apprehension in pursuing this.

Brian Biro: [00:14:46] Yes. And I think it kind of relates to your previous question as well. Many of us are frozen and terrified because we have such a need for comparison and approval. And when you are driven by, uh, the need for approval, you’ll never get enough. And so, uh, my mentor, the man who wrote the foreword to my first book, the man, one of the two legends I write about in my newest book called lessons from the legends, was John Wooden, who was, uh, you probably know Lee. Uh, but a lot of young people don’t know who he was. Uh, John Wooden, unless they watched, uh, Ted Lasso. Then they know, uh, John Wooden was the greatest men’s college basketball coach of all time. And Coach Wooden was an even better person teacher than he was a coach. And he was the greatest there ever was. Ten national championships. And Coach Wooden taught that success is peace of mind, and it comes from knowing that you’ve given the best of what you’re capable. And in that definition, there is no comparison to other people. There’s only only a focus on am I doing the best of which I’m capable and and the only one who can know that is yourself. And so when you get right down to it, when you focus on the things you do control your effort, your energy, your attitude, you’re going to move.

Brian Biro: [00:16:03] You’re going to get the closest to creating the results you want. So when it comes to making that shift in your life where something is, when you start to get that bug that says, I really need to do this when I would. I have loved being a swimming coach, but in the last year or two that I was coaching, I knew that I wanted something more in my life, something different. I wanted to because I only knew myself as a coach. I wanted to know myself as a person. I had no family, no prospects for family. And I listened to that inner voice that was saying, you know what? It’s time for you. It’s time for you to break through. It’s time for you to go to the next, the next level. Same thing happened when I left the corporate world to go into doing what I’ve been doing for 34 years. I knew inside, after teaching those team building events that this is who I am. This is this is not only what I want to do, this is who I am. But when I went forward, I wasn’t doing it to compare myself to others. I was seeking to be my best and pursue my passion. Um, the biggest change in my life really came down to one word.

Brian Biro: [00:17:07] Uh, as a young person, I always was, was hunting and and striving and driving myself crazy to be the best. Because like a lot of people my age, I had a dad who was had a hard time ever saying, I’m proud of you. And I was starving for approval and I was no fun. And I put incredible pressure on myself because I felt like I. I had to beat you at everything. I had to be the best. I was totally driven by comparison. One day, in the lowest point of my life, I realized that I realized that I had lived my whole life chasing something that was out of my control, and instead I. I made the switch to becoming my best, which was only about looking in myself. Did I give my best effort? Did I seek to be the best that I could be? And it transformed my life? Um. I’ve lived my life ever since I was 21 years old, and since that time it has been just an incredible transformation so that each of those changes wasn’t because of comparison or worrying about what other people think. It was about following my passion and really pursuing that which my heart said was the right thing to pursue. We can all do that.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:15] Now, you mentioned your book lessons from the legend. This is, I believe, your 16th book. Is that correct?

Brian Biro: [00:18:23] That’s correct, that’s correct.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:25] Yes. Now how important. Obviously it’s it’s part of your repertoire is writing books. But, um, was this something early on you discovered that I’m going to get into a rhythm of writing books regularly as just part of, uh, me sharing the knowledge as I’m getting it. Like, like how did, uh, book writing become part of kind of the, the mix that you offer to people and, and to why did you include them?

Brian Biro: [00:18:50] Great question. Nobody’s ever asked me before. Thank you. Well, I always love to write. Uh, I love stories. To me, stories are are the essence and the heart of what really connects, uh, presentations and books. You know, we read books for the story. Um, and, um, I’ve always been a storyteller, and I’ve really researched studies, stories. Stories like this will blow you away. The stories are 2200 times more powerful than simply giving people information. In other words, when you want to deliver a lesson, do it through a story. And so I’ve always loved to write stories, um, and write about my real stories, the things that I’ve learned in my life. And so, uh, my book writing started with my, my favorite story that I’ve told in many, many events over these years. I’ve done 1900 events, was a story about one of the swimmers that I coached who had a, uh, incredible breakthrough, transformation, um, and that I wrote that story. And then it was a springboard to man, I want to I want to take these, these key concepts in the story and turn it into a whole book. And so, uh, that was my first one that was called Beyond Success. Uh, the foreword was written by John Wooden, um, the great coach. And I used his what he called Pyramid of Success, um, which was the structure that he taught life to his athletes. Um, as the, as the structure for the stories I wanted to tell. Um, that first book took me 18 months to write, and, uh, I worked at it every day. Um, and some days I would spend ten hours to write -22 words. I would actually make no forward progression. But, um, it taught me that writing a book is is just like building a house.

Brian Biro: [00:20:36] If you you just got to do it piece by piece, inch by inch, sometimes you’re going to have to pull out some nails because you nailed it and wrong. Put it back in. Each of the books that I’ve written since then has taken progressively less time, because I kind of have figured out how my how I work to write a book. Everyone’s different, and, um, I really write books when I have something that I really feel driven, uh, to bring to people. Uh, this last book, lessons from the legend I Wrote, because it’s a book about character that your characters, who you are, your reputation, only what others think you are. So I wrote this book about two of the greatest coaches and teachers and people of of my life, uh, John Wooden and Pat Summitt. Pat Summitt was the greatest, uh, was what to to women’s basketball, what John Wooden was to men’s basketball. But more than anything, they were people of extraordinary character. They were humble. They were, um, they gave credit and took responsibility. Um, they were always seeking to learn. They never felt. They knew it all. Knew it all. Um, they were driven by hard work, but also balanced work. They were family oriented. And so this book was written because I feel that in the last few years, we haven’t focused on character in the way we should, um, the last seven, eight years. And, and I want I wanted to help people get back to how important it is, um, to live with dignity and respect, to be humble, to give others credit. And because it’s amazing what’s accomplished when nobody cares who gets the credit.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:13] Now, do you feel that character is kind of in the eye of the beholder, or is there some universal kind of tenants of good character nowadays?

Brian Biro: [00:22:24] Oh, I really believe that there are some very foundational keys to character. Um, and, and they are exemplified by Coach Wooden and and Coach Summitt. Um, starting with the one that’s never talked about, in fact, which in some circles these days almost has a bad rep. And that is humility. Um, many people can confuse they think that if you’re humble, you’re not really confident that that and that in business, humility is somehow soft or weak. It could not be further from the truth. Uh, because being humble, you can be very humble and very confident, because being humble doesn’t mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less. But the reason why humility is so crucial to your character, to your personal leadership, if you think about it, only those who are humble are actually lifelong learners, because only those who are humble would rather make a mistake and learn from it than pretend they’re always right. Um, so I think that that, that, that being a person of character starts with that, that hunger to learn. Um, next it’s about we go, not ego. Um, when we shift from me to we, we, we bring out the best thing about human beings. What’s the best thing about people? That that will will do more for others than we’ll do for ourselves. The service is love and action. And so one of the things I love about John Wooden and about Pat Summitt, about this book is it gets us back to stop talking about how wonderful we are individually, instead, to really look for the best in others, because what you focus on is what you create. So I believe that that there is there are foundational keys doing the right thing when nobody’s around. Um, giving credit and taking responsibility. These are foundational keys character. Um, being being a person who is is eager to tell the truth, even when it’s difficult. Um, those kinds of things are very powerful and more important than they’ve ever been before. Um, and so, um, I think that, yes, character is universal in its foundation.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:35] Now, if somebody wants to learn more about what Trap Tube may be, book you, or just get a hold of one or all of your books, is there a website? Is there kind of a place to connect with you?

Brian Biro: [00:24:46] Absolutely. My website is just my name. It’s Brian biro.com and it’s Brian Biro. I would love to come and speak to your organization. It’s as I say, it’s what I was put on earth to do. Uh, I, you know, I joke about it when I’m. When I’m on stage. Lee, I’m 25 years old again. I get off stage. I’m still 69, but I truly feel 25 up there. My energy shines. And that’s really a universal key when you’re when you’re doing what you love to do and you’re doing what you’re put here to do, uh, your energy is just fluid, authentic, joyful and contagious.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:26] Well, Brian, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Brian Biro: [00:25:32] I appreciate you. You do, you do the same. You really bring out the best in and help people through all your shows. It’s an honor to be with your show. Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:40] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

Dan Russell With Chase for Business

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Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Dan Russell With Chase for Business
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Dan Russell is the Atlanta Market Manager for Chase for Business.

Chase for Business has your banking needs covered. They’re not just a bank, they get to know you and your business.

Connect with Dan on LinkedIn and follow Chase on LinkedIn and Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Why Chase for Business is focused on the Atlanta market
  • How Chase for Business supports the local business community aside from events
  • Where people can go to learn more about the resources Chase provides for small businesses

Transcript-iconThis 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: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the Atlanta Business Radio, we have Dan Russell with Chase for Business. Welcome, Dan.

Dan Russell: [00:00:44] Julie.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Chase for business. How are you serving folks?

Dan Russell: [00:00:50] Yeah. Chase for business is our business banking team here in Atlanta. I am the market manager for the Chase for business team, uh, based out of Atlanta. And really, you know, our commitment to the Atlanta business owners is pretty substantial. You know, we are consistently focused on on getting out in the community, meeting our small business owners, giving them access to business consulting through our small business consultants. And then also, we’re really excited to be able to offer our event that’s coming up on May 1st, the Experience Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:24] Yeah, and we’re going to definitely get to that. But for Chase, for business, how do you kind of serve that small business market? I know we’re going to talk about the event, the experience, but on a day to day basis, how does Chase kind of make the small business owner feel important and be the priority that you’re saying they are?

Dan Russell: [00:01:44] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we know at Chase for business that small businesses play a critical role in supporting the local economy by driving job creation and innovation, which which we know boosts up our local community. And we’ve made several investments into the local business community here in Atlanta over the last few years. And just to give you an example, we recently partnered with the Russell Innovation Center for entrepreneurs to launch our first community Chase lounge, which is a really cool, uh, space designed to help level the economic playing field for the black business community here in Atlanta. And as a bank, you know, we really understand the role we play in the overall success of these local businesses. And and there’s a couple of things that that we’re doing. Number one is, is we’re consistently, you know, really looking at the products and solutions that that we offer our small business clients here in Atlanta and trying to make them better. And an example of that is we we recently improved our loan application process to really make it simpler for small business owners, but also to make it faster to ensure these business owners are having access to the funds that they need to support their overall business growth.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:53] Now, how would you recommend? If I’m an entrepreneur and I have a business, one of I would imagine you would believe that one of the most important kind of outside sources for help or an advisor would be a banker. How would you recommend building a relationship with a banker and really kind of wringing out the most value from that relationship with your banker?

Dan Russell: [00:03:18] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the great news is here in Atlanta, we have over 100 branches across the city. So we have a lot of different ways of small business owners being being able to connect with our team and my team specifically at Chase for business partners with these branches. So they’re in these branches every day on meeting these small business owners, having these conversations about access to capital or the different products and solutions that they need to grow their business. And we also have our small business consultants, where their primary role is to consult these small business owners on how to scale their business. They’re offering one on one coaching. They’re offering, you know, just personalized advice to help these businesses get to the next level.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:03] So you are taking that next step where you are not just kind of a vendor for that small business owner, you’re you’re trying to be a partner with them.

Dan Russell: [00:04:11] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we like I said before, I mean, we know the role that small businesses play in our community here in Atlanta. And but but we also know the responsibility that we have to the overall success of these businesses. So it goes beyond just the checking and savings account. It goes it goes into the advice and the consulting and the coaching, and that’s something that we’re absolutely committed to.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:35] Now, um, is there anything that you could share from a success story standpoint that since you’ve been the Atlanta market manager, a story where you’ve helped, uh, um, an entrepreneur maybe take their business to a new level or, or, um, you know, at least be along for the ride for that.

Dan Russell: [00:04:54] Yeah. You know, we’ve we’ve got multiple success stories that that we can share. And in fact, uh, and I know we’re going to talk about this in a minute, but we’re going to be spotlighting some of those success stories, uh, here at our at our event coming up, um, on May 1st, where they’re going to be sharing, you know, sort of how we, how we started with them early on in the process and got them the advice that they need. And, and in some cases, the access to capital that they needed to bring their business to the next level. And so we actually have some of these business owners that are going to be spotlighted on stage. Um, clay pits happens to be one of them where they’re going to be telling that story and, and sharing, you know, some of the strategies and some of the advice that they, they gained from our conversations with them to get them to the place that they are today. So we’re really excited to be able to spotlight that.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:44] All right. So let’s talk about the event, the experience. Um, so what is um, going to go on during that event? Like what is kind of the uh, agenda for the day?

Dan Russell: [00:05:55] Yeah. So we’re obviously extremely excited to welcome local business owners, uh, to the experience Atlanta at Pullman Yards on May 1st. So the event is going to be a completely complimentary all day, uh, expo packed with with different learning and networking opportunities. Um, business owners are going to be able to participate in marketing workshops, um, informational sessions from leading business experts. Um, you know, shop our Chase for business marketplace, which is a really cool opportunity for, for our business, some of our business owners that we’re going to be spotlighting, that are going to be offering their products to the attendees of the event. Uh, so we’re really excited about that. Um, they’re going to learn invaluable tips to help their business make its next move. And really, when when we think about, you know, all of the content and the workshop and everything that we’re going to be providing, uh, for the experience. Atlanta, um, it’s really geared towards providing business owners with the tools and resources that they need to start running and grow their business. And registration did fill up more than a week before the event, which really shows us that that this event is something that business owners are excited about. Um, but if you didn’t get to register for the event, there’s going to be more events to look forward to in the coming months, including our National Business Conference to Make Your Move Summit, which is going to be happening in June, uh, in Los Angeles.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:17] Now is this, uh, is this experience going to be something that’s going to happen on a regular basis, or is this a test for this or a beta, or is this something that you’ve been doing around the country?

Dan Russell: [00:07:28] Yeah. So so this is, um, something that we’ve done, uh, in a handful of cities and actually this is, uh, an opportunity for Atlanta here, for the experience. Atlanta is one of three cities that we’re doing this across the country this year. So, um, I think number one, we’re locally really excited that we have this opportunity to spotlight, uh, our small businesses in Atlanta. But number two, I think it really shows, you know, our firm’s commitment and chase for businesses commitment to the local business community here in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:02] And the fact that it sold out so quickly. It must be a good sign that these that people are hungry for this type of information and experience.

Dan Russell: [00:08:10] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, again, we’re we’re we were, um, extremely excited to see the event fill up as quickly as it did. Um, and, you know, quite frankly, we still have some demand, uh, to for the event, um, even though the registration is closed. So, uh, you know, for folks that do walk in the day of, um, obviously due to capacity, we’re we will certainly let folks in if the capacity, uh, allows us to, but it definitely shows that there is a demand for this type of event, the information that we’re going to be giving. Uh, and also obviously, for some of the industry leaders and experts that are going to be sharing their stories and strategies to really give our small business clients and the opportunity to learn, um, to to get their business to the next.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:59] And then if you were to give advice to a business owner to, um, be prepared for maybe your meeting with a banker to, uh, get to know them, what would be some of the things? What homework would you recommend they do so they can get the most out of a meeting with the banker at Chase?

Dan Russell: [00:09:18] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, you know, when we think about our most productive conversations with with small business owners, it really starts with, uh, is my team understanding their story? You know, where where they started, where they’re trying to go, what, what their goals and aspirations are. And then once we understand that, we’re able to fill in blanks with with the advice and the and cater the advice around, you know, where they’re trying to go with their business. So I think that’s really where it starts. We always want to get to know, uh, the business owner behind the business, uh, and kind of where they’re trying to take that business. And once we do that, we’re able to put together, um, some pretty comprehensive advice products and solutions to help that business, uh, continue to grow, whether they’re in the phase of starting a new business or just, you know, are up and running, you know, wherever they’re at in their business, we’re going to meet them where they’re at in the life cycle of their company.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:17] Now, when you talk about small business, how are you defining small business? Because sometimes, uh, people have different definitions of what small is.

Dan Russell: [00:10:28] Yeah, a great question. I mean, we we serve companies that started yesterday and we also serve companies that have been in business for 40, 50 years or second, third generation. So the great news for Chase, for business is, no matter where you’re at in the life cycle of your company, we have a place for you and we have a home for you here at Chase for business.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:50] So it doesn’t matter even if they’re just, uh, began their business or they’re thinking about their business, having a conversation with a banker is a good investment of time. I would think you would recommend.

Dan Russell: [00:11:02] Absolutely. I think it’s a great, uh, investment of time. Um, and again, so we have we have folks from my team, we have our 100 branches across the city of Atlanta, where we have small business specialists that can have those conversations as conversations as well. And we also have our small business consultants that, you know, are not necessarily delivering any product or solution recommendation. They’re just there to coat those small business owners to help, um, scale their business and get their business to the next level. So we have a lot of resources for these small business clients, no matter what stage they’re in, um, uh, of the life cycle of their company. And we’re happy to have those conversation.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:42] Now, does Chase help, uh, an entrepreneur with, like, a small business loan?

Dan Russell: [00:11:48] Yeah, absolutely. Um, we we have I think I mentioned it earlier, we have, um, several different options for small business owners to get access to capital. Um, and actually recently we’ve improved our, our loan application process to be simpler and faster to ensure that these business owners have access to the funds that they need to support their overall business growth. Because we know it’s important that that companies have access to capital, and we know it’s important, just as important that they have quick access to capital. And so we’re constantly evolving our products and solutions to keep up with the demand and the needs of the small business owner.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:26] So if somebody wants to learn more about, um, Chase for business, is there a website?

Dan Russell: [00:12:32] Yeah. So if you if you want to learn more about the resources that we provide small businesses here in Atlanta, you can visit Chase for Business.com. Uh, and you can also learn more about the ongoing commitment that we have, um, in the area, specifically to small business owners and the resources that we have available for them.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:49] And then what about information on the experience?

Dan Russell: [00:12:53] Yeah. So if you want to, uh, get information on the experience Atlanta, just visit Chase comm slash Atlanta event. Um, it’ll have all the information regarding the event. And again, we’re going to continue to have events like this throughout the country throughout the year. Um, because we certainly see the demand and how much clients or how much customers are seeking this type of information. So we’ll continue to build on the success that we’ve had with the experience. Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:19] Well, Dan, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Dan Russell: [00:13:25] Thank you very much, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:27] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Charles Potts With Independent Community Bankers of America®

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Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Charles Potts With Independent Community Bankers of America®
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Charles E. Potts is Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer for the Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA).

In this role, he drives ICBA’s innovation initiatives, and financial technology strategies, working with ICBA leadership to develop impactful, value-added solutions that help community banks seize new market opportunities to meet customers’ evolving financial services’ needs.

His extensive experience in banking and financial service firms provided the background he needed to start, co-found or lead various fintech start-ups including digital banking, mobile engagement, financial management and payments providers. Many had successful exits via IPO’s or acquisition via strategic acquirers. A frequent speaker at national trade shows and conferences, he previously served as executive managing director at First Performance Global, where he led international business and corporate development activities for its card-control and fraud alert platform.

Before that he served as CEO for NetClarity, a start-up in the University of Florida’s Business Incubation Hub. Prior to ICBA, he worked at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), leading the fintech practice where he mentored startups as part of the Georgia Tech-based incubator. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology, did his graduate studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta and attended the Graduate School of Banking at LSU.

Charles, an avid masters runner, cyclist and soccer fan, lives with his wife in Atlanta, GA. They have a daughter who recently graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was a nationally ranked pole vaulter on the Track and Field team.

Connect with Charles on LinkedIn and follow ICBA on Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Why community banks are so critical, and what unique advantages they offer to their customers and the local communities they serve
  • What innovation looks like for community banks
  • How the banking industry has evolved over his career
  • The strategies for achieving growth in today’s digital landscape
  • What is top of mind for community bankers right now and how they compete and succeed in today’s market

Transcript-iconThis 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: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Charles Potts, EVP and Chief Innovation Officer with the Independent Community Bankers of America. Welcome.

Charles Potts: [00:00:47] Thank you. Lee. Thanks for having me today.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:50] Well, before we get too far into things, can you tell us about Icba? How you serving folks?

Charles Potts: [00:00:56] Yeah. So Icba Independent Community Bankers is the national trade association, um, and advocacy organizations solely focused on community banks. Um, our primary mission based around that advocacy. So, as you can imagine, given our, you know, nearly 95 years of history, we spend a lot of time lobbying on Capitol Hill, based in DC. Our legislative outreach and regulatory engagement is is a key part of our history. We’ve also built an education arm that does hundreds of training courses every year, with thousands of bankers keeping them up to speed on all the regulatory matters, all the compliance, polishing their skills and certification from marketing to risk management to lending. And then the third part of our organization, the third pillar is really our innovation arm. And and I have the pleasure of, of running an important part of our innovation initiatives where where we really look to find ways to help our community banks continue to to flourish and have the kinds of tools and services and innovative approaches they need to better serve their customers and communities.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:13] Now, for the layperson who maybe doesn’t know the difference between a bank and a community bank, can you explain? Like how does a I call them a stadium bank? A bank that would appear on a stadium be different than a community bank?

Charles Potts: [00:02:29] Well, uh, look, let me let me just say that community banks, the, you know, the the thousands of them around the United States have been here for hundreds of years and are really deeply entrenched in their local communities. Um, these have a, a very local community presence. A lot of the deposits that they gather are, are, are loaned back into these communities. Community banks are where almost two thirds of all small business lending takes place. Over 80% of agricultural lending comes out of community banks. Um, they tend to be in the in the more, um, uh, you know, uh, rural, um, uh, suburban areas, uh, where there is, you know, a strong community presence and a strong demand for the kinds of personalized, uh, products and services that, uh, that these bankers, uh, can provide. Um, you you, uh, you would be, um, amazed to see the economic development engine that is, uh, that is really driven by community banks around the country. Have you think back to the PGP program? Um, an overwhelming majority of small businesses were served by community banks. I think the numbers are, you know, they they, um, they did more, more loans, um, in general, uh, to small business America. And that is, uh, that is where they play now.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:59] Is their target primarily the small business owner? Is it the people that live in the community, like, who is an ideal customer for a community bank?

Charles Potts: [00:04:08] Well, oftentimes that is that is one and the same. So if you think about the small business owner and then their employees, they are all a part of that community. And so the, the community bank, uh, is there to, to really meet the needs, um, of, of all of those, um, all of those constituencies in that community. So it’s not only the commercial lending to the business, um, the, the business loans itself, but it’s then servicing the, the individuals as consumers with their own retail banking needs as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:40] Now, when you talk about those retail banking needs, is a customer going to get kind of a similar experience in terms of all the amenities that are out there in terms of an app, and I can make deposits easy. I don’t have to physically go into the bank. Am I getting all of those things? And I’m just that.

Charles Potts: [00:05:00] Is that Lee is exactly why we have this innovation arm, and that is to ensure that we have solution providers out there who are able to deliver those kinds of products and technology needs to the community banks to ensure that their customers, whether it’s a consumer or a small business or a commercial, um, enterprise, have at. Their disposal the same capabilities as any large international global bank or fintech provider. And and we believe in this day and time and it really is fundamental to the work that we do. Uh, we believe we know we have seen in action that those solutions exist. And, and community banks are able to, to deliver, uh, similar services from a technology standpoint. And then the huge differentiator is really the personal relationship. We like to call it high tech meets high touch. Um, because, you know, frankly, you’re going to, you know, if you’re in a if you’re in a local community, you’re going to know who runs, owns and operates that bank. And so you not only have the advantage of the modern technology, but you have the force multiplier of of actually knowing who you’re banking with.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:18] And then for a small business owner, having that kind of personal relationship with a banker could make or break that business where I don’t. I think a lot of, uh, small business owners, I don’t think they’re appreciating the importance of that type of a relationship where the person knows who you are as opposed to you’re just a line on a spreadsheet in some of these mega banks.

Charles Potts: [00:06:42] Well, look again, the the numbers. The numbers don’t lie from from PGP, the heroic work that community banks did all over this country. Um, still should be applauded by everybody. And the the soundbite I heard from, uh, from a number of business owners, uh, some are close personal friends of mine, and, uh, and I was one of them, uh, in a previous life as well, an entrepreneur who built my own businesses. The the thing that that stood out was this quote, I learned that I needed to do it. I learned that I needed to be doing business with a banker, not just a bank.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:27] Yeah, that’s a big difference differentiator. Yeah, I just don’t think people understand the level of I don’t even want to call it customer service. It’s a level of relationship that you can have.

Charles Potts: [00:07:42] These these bankers, these banks are the centerpiece of many of these communities. And so all, all of all of these people in these communities, they’re their kids are going to school together. They’re at Friday night football games. They’re going to the PTA and the rotary. Uh, they’re seeing people, you know, on Sunday or Saturdays at their their places of worship. Um, they’re buying and shopping from one another. I mean, they, they, they are personally connected at a, at a very deep level. And, and that is a very empowering thing, uh, when you’re, when you’re considering your financial service needs and knowing where your money’s going, who’s taking care of it and, and how it’s being used to strengthen that community.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:36] So what is kind of the health of the industry? Is it something that is growing? Is it you hear a lot about consolidation in banking, like what is kind of the the landscape for the community banks?

Charles Potts: [00:08:51] You look into those numbers, the the the the trends are still showing a very healthy, strong and resilient community bank marketplace. And where some of the quote unquote consolidation is happening tends to be, um, at your larger regional, super regional banks out there, um, in general. But it is, uh, it is a very healthy industry. There are there are some 4500 community banks plus or minus out there. And um, and that is, uh, that is still a very, uh, very strong and resilient, uh, reflection of the strength of our small business economy and where job growth, uh, you know, really takes place. And you know this as well, given what you do. I mean, small business America is the economic engine that creates jobs, and community banks are the ones fueling that growth with Small Business America.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:50] Now as part of your role in the association? Maybe not yours individually, but the association as a whole is sharing best practices among the bankers so they can quickly iterate and learn from what’s happening. Well, elsewhere.

Charles Potts: [00:10:05] Yeah, yeah. And, you know, kind of going back, if you think about the three pillars of our organization advocacy, which is the core, you know, kind of lobbying stuff. But between education and innovation, we spend a lot of time we have a lot of our activities oriented to really help educate, coach, mentor, nurture, um, our bankers in best practices, whether it’s purely educational in terms of lending and compliance, um, or marketing, um, or even, um, uh, running, uh, the bank directors, um, uh, education as well. Or on the innovation side, how how digital transformation works, how this journey takes place. Um, the best way to handle, uh, third party risk management and vendor due diligence. We we have a lot of our focus around making sure that we elevate, um, the game, if you will elevate the, the experiences and knowledge and expertise of all of our bankers.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:12] Now, what advice would you give an entrepreneur to, um, take advantage and build a better relationship with their community banker?

Charles Potts: [00:11:21] The the the number one thing for an entrepreneur when dealing with a community bank is to, um, listen. Ask good questions and listen. Uh, you’re going to find community bankers will give you time. They will give you their insights. They will give you their experiences and knowledge. Um, to help your business, help your product, solution, service, whatever it may be. Uh, be better. And and the discovery side of of entrepreneurism and innovation of of of starting, uh, you know, a new business, um, is critically important. You got to go out there and talk to bankers, you got to ask them questions, and you got to be a really good listener because they will tell you. They will tell you what they need. They will tell you what their problems and issues and concerns are. Uh, they will tell you how products and services need to work properly, um, to work inside the framework of the typical community bank. Uh, they will tell you exactly how things need to work in order to satisfy the kind of small business operation that is typically a community bank.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:33] Now, what’s on your roadmap in terms of innovation for the community banks? Um, or is there any emerging technologies that we should be aware of?

Charles Potts: [00:12:41] Well, um, I, I would say that, um, our innovation initiatives and the programs that we, we run, um, the, the crown jewel of which is, is something we call the Icba think Tech accelerator are designed to help find solutions, solution companies, really early stage companies that are addressing very specific problems to your question. And, and our bankers, um, really drive that process for us. They help inform us of what are those concerns. And, and look, cybersecurity continues to be at the top of that list. It’s it it only gets bigger and more complex. Um, and it is a it is a constant investment that banks are making, uh, to address those needs. Um, risk and compliance management in general is always top of mind with bankers and uh, irrespective of what’s going on, either technologically or economically, uh, those are very important practices that banks are looking to always, um, uh, always improve upon, uh, make more efficient and more effective. And, uh, and right now, uh, I have to say laughingly, in the year 2024, who thought check fraud would be a a hot topic again? But here it is. We’re seeing a resurgence of check fraud. And, uh, and so the banks are paying very much, uh, close attention to it and looking to find new solutions to help, you know, mitigate some of the risks associated with with that and, and address, um, this, uh, this growing volume and then in general and we try to, we try to avoid, you know, dragging a bunch of shiny objects in front of the bankers.

Charles Potts: [00:14:39] We tend to focus more on, on very, uh, targeted solutions to very targeted problems. But the whole field of artificial intelligence in general, um, has a lot of promise in terms of the types of tools that are that are in that bucket of things that we call artificial intelligence, um, that can actually help with a number of things we talked about, whether it’s risk and compliance, whether it’s check fraud or it’s how do I make my bank more efficient? How do I how do I automate more of those redundant, repetitive, labor intensive tasks to make my people more efficient and effective and more valuable in what they’re doing? Those are the things that are very much top of mind. Uh, probably laying over the top of, of this subject, um, is really the data and analytics side of, of, of, uh, of banking and, and how do I, how do I, um, um, acquire, access, manage, manipulate, um, and then analyze and and deploy, um, sound and prudent, um, uh, activities with the data I have available to me. How do I make my bank better? How do I provide better services to my customers leveraging data and analytics? Um, and and things such as, uh, again, fraud, uh, detection and risk and compliance management.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:19] Now, is there any strategies or tips you can share, uh, for the community bankers right now in order for them to be successful in growing, um, in today’s digital landscape?

Charles Potts: [00:16:31] Yeah. Look, we we spend a lot of time, um, with this topic and talking to bankers on a national level or grassroots through some of our state association partners, um, or through our educational webinars and so forth. And, and really, the, the the short answer is get started. There are a wealth of resources that we’ve made available inside Icba that help the banks start to navigate, um, this landscape wherever they’re at on that journey. We have some very, uh, sharp, very progressive banks. At one end of the spectrum, we have a lot of banks that are still, um, you know, still following and learning and dipping their toe into the water, so to speak. And we try to make available to them a continuum of, of resources to help them on this journey. Um, come participate in our Icba think Tech accelerator programs. Um, this is a way for them to see the way these companies think and work and how they are working to solve problems that that community banks have. And then. You know, and then work through your state association and the innovation initiatives that that they’re offering. And taking on this ecosystem that we’re continuing to foster is very collaborative in nature. And so we know that there are a wealth of resources that can help banks of all shapes and sizes really navigate what oftentimes can be a daunting landscape.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:09] Now, where can people go if they want to learn more about Icba or your innovation efforts, uh, connect with you or connect with the association?

Charles Potts: [00:18:19] Yep. Start on our website icba. Org forward slash innovation that’ll give you access to all of our programs, all of our resources. It’ll help you get started on how to find us, um, how to find our calendar of activities and events that are going on. Uh, we’re getting ready here in, uh, in a few weeks to launch our seventh accelerator program. Uh, which is very exciting. We’ve got another cohort of six companies that we will be taking through our ten week program. Um, and, and banks can participate in this program, and they can find a way to sign up through our, our website. And we’d love for them to come, uh, come see what we’re doing, see what these companies are doing, and, frankly, give us the the feedback and guidance that we know is critically important to make sure we’re addressing their needs.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:14] Well, Charles, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Charles Potts: [00:19:19] Lee, I appreciate the time to talk to your audience and and thank you for doing this.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:24] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Hugh Massie With DNA Behavior

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Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Hugh Massie With DNA Behavior
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Hugh Massie is the Executive Chairman and Founder of DNA Behavior International – the Behavior and Money Insights Company.

As a widely recognized Titan 100 CEO and Behavioral Solutions Architect, he helps growth-minded leaders create an Exponential Future by developing a 109 (ten to the power of 9) Quantum Leap Growth Mindset and by building a plan for over 1 billion people impact. With that framework, he addresses every opportunity and challenge through a behavioral lens.

His purpose is to empower people worldwide to optimize their natural “hard-wired” talents and financial behaviors which drives quantum leap capacity, reduces stress, and enables greater happiness, more success, and improved health for longer. Further, he empowers organizations and teams to build “category king” people-centered businesses, and in the process, enhance decision-making, culture, and performance.

Applying the pioneering behavioral finance research he has undertaken since 2001, his moonshot goal is to implement an AI-driven BeSci Tech Platform that by 2030 fully informs 1 billion people annually on how to enhance their decision-making and relationships for increasing life, financial and business longevity by 30 or more years.

He partners with clients to create an Exponential Future by developing trail-blazing financial behavior apps for building the “New BeFi Economy” impacting all key areas of life, finance and business.

Hugh has authored the following books and eBooks:

  1. Leadership Behavior DNA – Discovering Natural Talents and Managing Differences
  2. Financial DNA – Discovering Your Financial Personality for a Quality Life
  3. Business DNA – Growing a People Centric Organizational Identity
  4. Mastering Your Money Energy – Unleashing the Quantum Power of Money
  5. Mastering Entrepreneurial Talents – Behaviorally Smart Entrepreneurship

Connect with Hugh on LinkedIn and follow him on Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • What has been a key factor in his business success?
  • Why is having an exponential mindset important for life and business?
  • What is the key factor which holds people back in life and business?
  • How does a leaders financial behavior impact the organization they lead?
  • How does he help individuals and groups improve their decision-making

Transcript-iconThis 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: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Hugh Massie. He is the executive chairman and founder of DNA behavior. Welcome to you.

Hugh Massie: [00:00:45] It’s great to be with you, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about DNA behavior. How are you serving folks?

Hugh Massie: [00:00:52] So DNA behavior is a behavioral science technology business. We’re helping organizations, growth minded organizations build a people centered culture. And we’re very keen on issues in the workplace like psychological safety, you know, unlocking people’s talents, improving decision making, improving the workplace relationships and productivity.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:18] So how do you do that?

Hugh Massie: [00:01:20] So our recipe for it is all around understanding people. So we help individuals in the business starting with the leader. So it starts right at the top. Understand what their natural hardwired talents are, what their strengths and struggles are, and then work on how do you navigate all of the differences, because that’s where the problems come, but also where where the assets are as well inside the business. So it’s you know, we deploy essentially a, in simple terms, a psychometric assessment on every person from the from the top down and get an insight into how every person is wired up differently and then put the building blocks in from there.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:05] Once an individual has that information, is then is everybody kind of know what everybody how everybody is wired. And and then they learn tools to kind of communicate and to interact with them in the most productive manner.

Hugh Massie: [00:02:18] Absolutely. And you know, Lee, it’s it’s interesting you ask that question. A big part of our philosophy to this is that if if the employees are going to be profiled and put through, you know, the DNA behavior discovery, then the information should be shared and that should be shared from the top down. Uh, if the leadership is not prepared to be vulnerable and share who they are, what their strengths and what their struggles are. They should go no further, uh, because it doesn’t build trust at the end of the day. And, you know, really what people are looking for is authentic. Is authentic leadership. They’re looking for the leaders to be authentic. And and I think everybody knows no one’s perfect. And and you know, I think if the leaders start out with that and, you know, leaders go first, then you can start to build a more open workplace, a stronger internal culture.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:12] Now, does this work, I guess primarily internally within a group, or can it also expand outside of the group, like to the clients of those folks?

Hugh Massie: [00:03:24] Good question. So I love that question because the first thing is, is it’s got to work internally and, uh, you know, so that’s the first thing. But but we’ve always encouraged this is used with clients and stakeholders. We do a lot of work with financial services firms, you know, large and small. And, you know, we believe the financial advisory teams go through this exercise themselves. And then they can get every one of their clients and the families as well to go through the exercise. And that’s really what builds a truly client centered experience. So, uh, you know, you’re bang on with that question. That’s exactly what we want to happen.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:03] So you mentioned, um, kind of the financial industry. Why does it work well in that space?

Hugh Massie: [00:04:12] One of the reasons it works well in that space is because the financial services, uh, advisers, wealth managers are trying to build a long term intimate relationship with the client. And so, uh, you know, knowing who the person is over the long term, you know, whether, you know, the long term could be, you know, 3 to 20 or more years, the person’s going to go through life’s ups and downs and knowing how to connect and collaborate with them. But also, you know, money is something that’s highly charged for a lot of people. You know, it’s got a very strong energy, you know, in fact, in a lot of my work, I talk about the energy of money. And so knowing how knowing how to communicate with a person when a market’s gone down particularly or there’s been a life event is very important. There’s no good being the smartest cat in the room with the best solution or being able to, uh, you know, have a financial product that makes the greatest returns if you cannot connect with the person emotionally. It’s not going to work and there’s going to be no trust.

Hugh Massie: [00:05:18] And, you know, and I think that that trust is what this is all about, whether it’s with the employees and their teams and with the clients. And so, you know, I set out in the financial services industry to, to work on this and to to bring the client centered model through behavioral understanding, you know, into that, into that industry. Because that’s really where I started, uh, you know, my own entrepreneurial career was with a financial services business. Uh, prior to that, I had been in a, in an accounting firm, and I wished we’d had all of this in that life, too. Uh, but but li it works, really, in any business where the organization is seeking to build long term relationships with the client. So there’s no reason why it can’t work in, uh, some areas of legal, uh, it it can work in accounting. And I think definitely an area I see in the future is healthcare. It’s just I haven’t got there yet, but I’m working with people that we’re starting to do that now.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:18] Um, I’m particularly interested in the financial services industry because I’ve interviewed a lot of financial advisors over the years, and something that always kind of stood out to me is that. They tend to be focused on their client, and they tend to want to have wealthy clients, by and large, and they don’t care as much about the children of those clients. And and I think it’s because of, you know, their typical career path is that they have clients and then they retire and they’re usually around the same age as their clients. And then so when they’re done, they’re done. But as a firm, I would think that you would want to put things in place so that you have, you know, kind of the next generation or some plan to, um, connect with the next generation of people within that. And you mentioned family initially. And that struck me is that, I mean, to me, that’s part should be part of a financial advisor firm’s strategy is to, you know, trickle down to the children of the clients, not just the client.

Hugh Massie: [00:07:24] Yeah. I think what I’m going to try to get to be very tactful with part of this response, I think financial services. Industry is still growing as a profession, and it’s been step by step moving from being highly transactional. So let’s say I meet a wealthy person or someone who’s just had a liquidity event because they sold a business. Great, great target client. I’ve got a solution for you. Uh, and the financial advisor makes money from that. Fair enough. There’s, you know, no reason. There’s no harm or foul in somebody making money out of out of that. But it’s it. And while they’re focused on the client. And keeping them happy with that. It’s quite transactional. And you’re right. What they haven’t done is the business building part of saying, okay, now I need to know the family and what’s the impact of this money on the family members? What’s the impact on the spouse? And a lot of, you know, when there’s a let’s say that. It is the husband or the patron? The male, uh, patriarch in the families made the money. It’s not always the case because there’s women who make the money too. More and more so these days. But if he dies, there’s a wealth transfer event. The woman gets the money and maybe the kids. Because they’ve got no relationship with the advisor. They go somewhere else. And, you know, uh, even though the, the, the female might have been or the wife might have been in some of the planning meetings because the good planners will have them in the, in the meetings. But there’s not the same level of trust being built. And, you know, this really gets to the advisory firms building the right teams, uh, you know, of different talented people serving, um, serving the husband and wife and then getting to know the kids and involving them in, in the discussions about money and their lives and their careers much earlier on.

Hugh Massie: [00:09:26] And, you know, I think this is the big miss for, for for a lot of advisors, you know, the topic that you’re raising is getting brought up more and more in the industry, but it’s got a long way to go. And this is really about the human skills. Uh, the money, the dealing with the money part is not the hardest part of financial planning. It’s the human side. And I think if you’re really interested, if you’re an advisor wanting to build a business. You’ve got to have the right team that can serve the whole family and recognize that you yourself are probably not going to be able to connect with the whole family. Because of different, you know, you’ve got your own style. You might be great at connecting with the entrepreneur who’s made the money initially. But it’s the rest of the family. Uh, and, you know, and there’s many, many different settings where money comes into a family, you know, through inheritance and, you know, and other events. And so I think that there’s so much work that can be done in the industry around this, and it is the human skills. And, you know, we all talk about communications being important, but not a lot is actually done to to really build it in an emotionally engaging way. The communication channels like it’s it’s fascinating.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:41] Yeah. And I think that, um, if the financial advisors really don’t lean into the younger, uh, people in the family, they’re going to miss out because the younger people are going to use a robo advisor, and they’re going to just bypass the financial advisor, uh, as a whole. So if the firm, uh, kind of holistically doesn’t have a solution, or even if the solution is a robo advisor, they should be making it part of the the services that they provide, because they’re, they they have to serve the whole family ultimately. I mean, if you to me, if you really want to serve, you’re not just serving that individual. And that might work for you individually as an advisor, but you’re not really serving the family.

Hugh Massie: [00:11:25] You’ve got to serve the whole family. And I think we’ve got to recognize in today’s age that with technology, uh, you know, the kids coming into the money are not silly. They know how to use technology tools and they can do some of it themselves. But at the end of the day, from the ones I know. They still want to engage with an advisor in the human conversation. When they themselves go through a life event, or there is a major decision to be made, and that decision could be around their careers, it could be that they’re going to get married. Uh, they’ve got kids to be educated, that type of thing. That’s when they’re going to need an advisor, but they don’t need the advisor holding their hand all day long, you know, for everything. Uh, and I think that’s where the some of the advisory models got to change as well and the thinking around it. But it’s also, you know, who you’re going to connect with if you’re if. And this is where I think that, you know, a lot of their financial advisors Li have got are, you know, the average age in the industry is around 60 now or 59, but just call it 60. You’ve got to have some younger people in your business, and a lot of them don’t want to pay for it. But that’s where you can build a very strong business by bringing in, you know, some capable 30 year olds. And, you know, and again, can’t put, uh, wisdom on a young head necessarily. But but, you know, with training, the education in this area is way better than it used to be with so many universities offering courses. There are. There are lots of kids out there or younger people out there want to be in the financial services industry. They should be brought into these practices to serve alongside the leader of the business or the financial practice. The whole family, as you say, it’s about building the right business model, I think, for this.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:17] Now, with your service, is it something that you’re you’re delivering some sort of an assessment or discovery you called it, and then are you also giving them the coaching to kind of make sure that they can communicate effectively, or is it just information because, you know, sometimes you need help and sometimes you need a helper.

Hugh Massie: [00:13:37] Um, so we we’ve got, uh, around our business, we’ve got a team of, uh, coaches. We’ve got some inside the business, and we’ve got a whole network of them outside of our business, you know that, I suppose, if you call it a more, uh, 1099 type relationships with us to, to help integrate the solutions. But, you know, we’ve also with technology, we’ve embraced technology very strongly in our business and. With AI. We’ve now got, uh, now our own, if you want to call it chatbot called Gene AI, that, uh, an advisor can ask any question they want to ask, and then they would know how to communicate, relate to their team, uh, how to relate to every client, to prepare the marketing scripts to, you know, we’ve got style matching tools in there. So which family member are you going to connect best with. And then and then you can look at how you’re going to adapt. So we built a lot of tools. To make this, uh, you know, sort of mysterious area of human behavior and behavioral finance. To make it very simple to use and accessible. Um, so, uh, if that, if that, if that helps answer that question. And if, if there are advisors listening to this, that this does not have to be hard technology now makes it easy for you, uh, to do.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:58] Now, why do you think that money is so emotionally charged? And why do you think that, um, this isn’t something that kind of taught like early on for with children because to me, money, you know, especially with the power of compounding that if you do some things right early, you can solve a lot of problems, you know, 50 years from that point.

Hugh Massie: [00:15:24] Yeah. And that’s the, uh, you know, li the very rational side of money. And I think the money has a number of dimensions to it. And, you know, I sort of talk about it having three and, you know, first one being money is a currency. And, you know, if you save money and invest it. It’s going to compound, as you say. And when I started my financial services business in Sydney in 1996, he always used to tell every person out there, money never sleeps. If you go and save enough of it, invest it. You’re going to naturally, over time, make more. And that’s where 50 years later, you make a great nest egg. My mother is a great example of and she’s 93 now of someone who’s done that. Uh, you know, all of her life. But money is also behavioral. And, you know, we’re all born, uh, with a certain behavioral style. And this is part of what got me into, you know, into this and that, uh, because of who we are and how we’re hardwired from early in life. We make this different decisions about money. So some of us just naturally are going to be spenders. Uh, probably the people who are the spenders are, you know, what I call outgoing, engaging type people. They’re great fun to be with. They usually dress well, uh, they like a nice car, but there’s nothing left over. Uh, and, you know, they’ll probably be be be always be your friends. That. But then you’ve got the, you know, the millionaire next door type person that’s very reserved, very task focused. They’re very much about saving retirement’s important. They fear not having enough money. But a lot of these traits come from from your life early on and who you are, and they’re to be worked on.

Hugh Massie: [00:17:15] You know, you don’t, you know, life. You can’t just save money and then not spend any of it because then it’s a pretty dull, uh, unfulfilled life. But then also you can’t spend it all. So, you know, this is the balance with it, but the but the part where money really gets interesting is it is an energetic force. It you know, one could say the thought about money is not with them all day long. Uh, in everything you do, it’s there 24 by seven. You go to sleep with it, you wake up with it. If you have thoughts about money when you go to sleep, you’re going to manifest those the next day or soon thereafter. Um, because it’s in our psyche. So it’s sort of like it’s it’s omnipresent and it causes a lot of stress. And Lee, this is where, you know, I’m very passionate about this area of behavior and money. It’s not just, you know, is getting people to communicate better is one part, but getting people to make better decisions, to think better about money, because money causes so much stress for all of us. You know, there’s there’s a stress level if you haven’t got enough of it to pay the bills. But there’s a stress level if you’ve got more than what you need, and then you’ve got relationship issues with it, or you’ve got a child that you worry about or what choice you’re going to make, money is there. And it’s something that’s got to be, you know, that’s got to be understood. Uh, you know, by each person.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:40] Now, how do you see technology helping in this area? Because I would think that in some regard, uh, a large, maybe not a large, but you would know the number more than me. But there’s a percentage of the population that just leveraging automation. Kind of can take money, or at least some of the stresses of money off the table just because it’ll automatically happen. Like you’re not having to think about every money decision, it’s just automatically happening in the background, whether it’s, you know, at least saving if your business or the place you work has a matching fund to just putting in the amount of the match so you can take advantage of that, or just, you know, some of these things that just take money out of your account every month and invest it into a variety of things, like how, um, how does that kind of help or hurt, uh, people with their money kind of thinking?

Hugh Massie: [00:19:37] Well, I think that technology makes it easier to deal with. With the money itself. You know, the fact that all of us now can go online, as you’re alluding to and buy exchange traded funds, you know, you can just essentially buy the market. And if it’s money that you, you know, you want to save and to, you know, to grow for your retirement or to, you know, meet a specific goal. Uh, technology makes it very easy to do that. It’s relatively safe. You don’t have to go and, uh, trade the markets like you once did. Which of itself is a stress? Uh, but you nevertheless, before you get to the technology, you’ve got to make certain decisions about how much you’re going to save. You’ve got to tick the box. If it’s, you know, you want to do the matching and you want to save. And that gets down to your fundamental attitudes about money. And I don’t know that technology can necessarily help with that. I think underneath all that, you’ve got to have the right relationship with money, which means you’ve got to have the right relationship with yourself. That comes with self understanding, uh, you know, knowing what you’re more about, what your identity is, where you want to be in the world. Uh, what drives you, motivates you once you’ve got that, once you’ve got that sorted out, so reasonable level of self knowledge, then the technology can make it a whole lot easier for you to, to, you know, to fulfill those dreams and to fulfill the life mission as, as it were. Uh, and, and so that’s, that’s how I would frame that.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:11] Now, in your work, are you primarily working with kind of enterprise level organizations, or does your work trickle down to individuals?

Hugh Massie: [00:21:20] I don’t deal with, uh, sort of the retail consumer walking in off the street to us directly. Our, our business is we work with the financial advisory firm. So we’ll work with, you know, a large, uh, organization like Fidelity or Schwab. And then we will work with their advisor advisory network and get them to, to be working with their clients that are at the consumer and retail level. Now. I will do we do do some work with families directly that want to address those communication issues. What are we going to do for the children? You know, we will do some of that work as well, or we’ll help. Uh, you know, we’re doing increasingly, Lee, interestingly, we’re helping more business leaders, CEOs out one on one address the money issues for themselves, uh, as the CEO, because, you know, some of them are making a lot of money. They’ve got complicated lives. So we do we do help there, but also how the money actually flows and, uh, into, in the business, because the energy of money itself, it affects a lot of behaviors inside the business and the corporate culture. So we’re doing a lot of work, uh, you know, with it at that level. But but it’s really our, our, our partners that use our system are helping the consumer on the street. And, you know, a big area we’re doing going to be doing a lot more work on in the in the retirement space because the gig economy is going to become a bigger thing. People are going to live longer. And, you know, you can’t just retire at 65 and do nothing. You’re going to live, you know, if more and more of us are going to live to 100, we’ve got to do something and we’ve got to make our money last. And, you know, the financial longevity of money is as big a issue as the longevity of our health. And so, you know, we’re working on some of those solutions with our partners at the moment.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:16] Now, why is the organization Boys Without Fathers important to you?

Hugh Massie: [00:23:22] Yeah. This is this is my, uh, very deep rooted, uh, passion project. Uh, I, I was a boy without a father, and my my father died when I was one. My mother was pregnant with my brother. And so she brought us up, uh, gave us a wonderful life, and. But what? You know what I learned. About three years ago doing podcasts with with our clients, just like I’m doing with you. Essentially, Lee is I did six in a row. With our clients, and I didn’t know this part of them, but they. But what I discovered was they were all a boy without a father. And one of them had done a doctorate in this in this area. And what unraveled was all these issues, you know, around literacy, uh, social difficulty, obesity, aggression, which could lead to, uh, you know, going to jail, uh, basically from a lack of boundaries. But, you know, there were there were 5 or 6 things that, uh, a boy without a father, particularly if the father leaves the home when or, uh, you know, leaves the home completely in some way. So mine was through, through through a passing of my father. Others. It’s the father just leaves or there’s a divorce. When the kids are younger, these problems are there. And and, you know, I want to help other kids to understand the environment that they, uh, have have, you know, existed in, in some way to get past it and not be a victim and to show them other men of influence who have.

Hugh Massie: [00:25:04] Lived with being a boy without a father and stepped out, overcome the barriers and been very successful. And so what we’re doing with boys without fathers is training. Men of influence out there. We’ve got a goal to train 100,000 men of influence by 2030. We’ve built the programs to do it and then to and then on the journey to be mentoring other boys. And, you know, and while I talk a lot about boys because this is my that’s my journey, the same thing has been done for girls without fathers. Uh, girls without mothers and girls without and and boys without mothers as well. You know, I think at the end of the day, the issues for them are different. But they’re there. They’re got equal in importance as well. But we but we know that there’s, you know, a lot of issues that out there with, with men because of not having had a father fatherly present in the home presence in the home. This caused certain behaviors that, you know, they need to get past and to develop, and this makes society better.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:10] Now, does your background, uh, you know, in behavioral insights, is that are you helping to kind of create this playbook for an individual so they can see who they are and seeing?

Hugh Massie: [00:26:22] Yeah, that’s what we’re doing is we’re using all the behavioral science, uh, that that we’ve created in DNA behavior. Plus also the, you know, the research, you know, for example, like, uh, Doctor Greg Spencer, who’s done the PhD work in this area, there’s other research studies, you know, we blend that together, you know, using our behavioral understanding to, to to provide the, the program and, and the training and the coaching and mentoring to deal with this.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:53] And the mentoring goes beyond like financial conversations. This is over.

Hugh Massie: [00:26:57] Beyond financial conversations. This is about life conversations. And, you know, is teaching resilience not how not to be a victim character, uh, how to make good decisions, uh, how to connect to the right people. You know, we’re talking foundational life life principles here.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:15] Now, before we wrap, can you, uh, share some maybe actionable advice for some, uh, some listener when it comes to, um, optimizing their financial behaviors? Uh.

Hugh Massie: [00:27:30] So though the. I think the most important thing is, is, is savings. Now that is a word that for at least half the population is sort of, uh, alien. Um, it’s a word that no one wants to hear. So if you think about it as a spending plan, but at the end of the day, the key to your future is to be able to save money. But it’s also to be in, in a role or a work that you that you love to do. That that is something that is important because, you know, using your talents is where you’re going to create money. Uh, and then, you know, it’s not to take risks that you can’t live with and not to do things financially that you don’t fully understand. I think that’s where people get lured into transactions. Uh, investments into things they don’t understand. And then they are very upset, uh, when it doesn’t work out. But it starts with savings. And then it’s, you know, at the end of the day, I suppose it’s making sensible decisions and things that you understand. But, you know, for people, what I would say to Lee is for people that need to, to change their life in some way, you know, to, to address savings, maybe it’s not the first thing isn’t always just to go and do a budget.

Hugh Massie: [00:28:50] You know, what I found with people is go and change a habit in one area of your life that you really enjoy, and it might be doing something that’s health related, sports, physical related. And then once you’ve mastered that and you mastered the habit change, it’s amazing how the rest of your life, uh, starts to to change. And you change a whole lot of other habits. And along with that, you’ll change the spending because you’re going to have a new life and you’re going to realize, uh, that you’ve got to have, you know, money for that and you feel more comfortable. But but if I just tell someone, just go and do a budget and stick to it, they’re probably not going to do it. But if you change a habit in another area, it’s amazing how you get the long term result. Right.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:38] The ripple effect of that decision.

Hugh Massie: [00:29:40] Yeah, absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:42] So if somebody wants to learn more about DNA behavior or, uh, boys without fathers, what are the websites for each.

Hugh Massie: [00:29:49] Yeah. Please go to for DNA behavior. Go to DNA behavior comm. And then for boys without fathers it’s boys without fathers.org.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:57] Well, you thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work, and we appreciate you.

Hugh Massie: [00:30:03] Thank you. Lee, it’s been great to spend time with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:05] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt With Xocolatl

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Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt With Xocolatl
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Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt, Founders of Xocolatl.

Since 2014, Atlanta craft chocolate company Xocolatl (pronounced “show-koh-la-tul”) has given back to the community—donating money, chocolate, and time to more than 30 local nonprofits focused on education, sustainability and food insecurity (w/ ongoing partnerships with Atlanta Community Food Bank and Second Helpings Atlanta).

Xocolatl prioritizes ethical cacao sourcing—buying directly from small family farmers and cooperatives. Sustainability has always been core to the business. From the very beginning, the owners worked to source sustainably grown cacao, sugar, and other ingredients, as well as packaging and supplies. In October of 2023, they officially became Carbon Neutral Certified by The Change Climate Project. The process of becoming Carbon Neutral Certified is a process – but one the owners prioritized. And, they’re looking to help other companies achieve it as well.

Follow Xocolatl on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • How did Xocolatl get its start?
  • How did they hear about the Gusto Impact Award?
  • How has it been working with the team at Gusto?
  • What’s next for Xocotatl?

Transcript-iconThis 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: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt with Xocolatl. Welcome.

Elaine Read: [00:00:44] Hi Lee.

Matt Weyandt: [00:00:45] Thanks for having us.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. I have had the chance to visit your store in Krog Street, so I’m a little bit familiar, but please share with the folks you know what you do and how you do it.

Elaine Read: [00:00:58] Yeah, well, first of all, I’m glad to to hear that you’ve been by our store. We opened our truffle factory and chocolate shop in the Krog Street Market is one of the first tenants in the market back in late 2014, and the company was born from a trip that Matt and I took along with our, at the time, newborn and toddler, down to Costa Rica. We had Matt and I had quit our jobs and decided that we wanted to unplug and go for a little adventure. So we moved to a tiny town in Costa Rica that we had backpacked through years before, when we were much younger than we were then. And when we were there, we discovered what’s called bean to bar chocolate. So a type of chocolate that’s made from the cacao that is actually growing in the the region that the chocolate producers were making their chocolate from, in a process similar to coffee roasting, where cacao beans are grown and harvested and put through a fermentation and drying process before they become ready to be made into chocolate. So that’s a really quick description of the bean to bar chocolate process. But Matt and I discovered that when we were living in Costa Rica, really enjoyed eating the the freshly made, wonderful dark chocolate there, and decided that we wanted to learn the process of making this style of chocolate and and bring it to Atlanta, which is what we did in 2014.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:26] And then when you came to when you came back here, or did you come back here or this was the first time you were here?

Matt Weyandt: [00:02:32] Yeah, we came back to Atlanta. Prior to that, neither Elaine nor I had experience in food. I mean, I worked in a burrito shop when I was in high school, but other than that, you know, we did not come from the food world or the chocolate world. So we kind of left our previous careers to start chocolatl chocolate.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:50] And then go ahead. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Elaine Read: [00:02:53] I was just going to say Matt’s actually an Atlanta native and I moved down here for him, but we’d been living in Atlanta and in the in the Inman Park and Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, uh, before Krog Street Market was developed. And we knew when we were coming back to Atlanta that that would be a perfect place for us to launch this new business.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:13] And then when you launched, the business was there. Was it using the factory kind of as a drawing card to the business, or was it, uh, we’re a seller of chocolate.

Matt Weyandt: [00:03:25] Yeah. I mean, so you’ve seen the space. Our original space was very small. It’s, uh, 400ft² in, uh, in Krog Street Market, which is a food hall and, uh, downtown. And originally we made all the chocolate right behind the counter. So we. That was our chocolate factory. We called it a micro factory. Right.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:44] That’s when I was there pretty early on. It was several years ago. So that’s what I saw it as, as that you were a maker of chocolate, like in front of me kind of thing, right.

Matt Weyandt: [00:03:54] And yeah, the idea well, one, we didn’t have money to have another space, but the other piece of it was really, you know, we wanted to kind of, I mean, before we took this trip down to Costa Rica, I didn’t know where chocolate came from. I didn’t know it came from a tree. I didn’t know anything about the process. And I think that was pretty common. You know, in in America, we sort of, you know, think of a Hershey’s bar and just kind of comes out of a factory. And that’s sort of what most people know about chocolate. So we wanted to bring that chocolate making process, uh, to people and tell people about chocolate and that it’s a, um, you know, it’s an agricultural product, which means that there are different varieties of cacao in the same way that there’s different varieties of coffee or wine grapes. Um, and we really wanted to kind of have that educational component and, you know, bring that to the forefront and also smells really nice when you’re roasting cocoa beans kind of fills the whole market up with the smell of brownies.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:49] So yeah, I’ve been throughout the country, I’ve been to several chocolate, kind of like yours, like kind of a microbrewery for chocolate, where they have some education, where they explain, like, here’s the cacao, and here they break it apart and they show you all the different steps. And then at the end, you see the kind of production line, and then they sell you chocolate at the end. And are you finding that the consumer is hungry for that kind of an experience?

Elaine Read: [00:05:18] Yeah, I would, I would definitely say so. Um, when we, uh, only had the one location at Krog Street Market, we would do, um, tours and tastings in the market a couple a week. Um, and the space is so small that the tours really meant that we were just, you know, our guests were basically just looking at one wall and then turning and pivoting and looking at, uh, what was happening in a machine on a different wall. Um, but it was very, uh, I think it was a very popular, um, event that we had. And, uh, when we expanded our factory into Southwest Atlanta. So we now have a larger, uh, chocolate making factory in southwest Atlanta. Um, and we last year launched, um, a few tours and tastings where similar to what you just described. We start off by giving people a pretty good, you know, deep dive into cacao touching on the botany, um, on the, um, anthropological side of cacao and chocolate making, um, and the recent history and then, um, what’s happening in the craft chocolate industry now, um, with an emphasis on ethical and sustainable, transparent sourcing and using high quality ingredients. And then we’ll take our participants into the actual factory side, uh, where, um, participants will see and actually be able to sample chocolate, um, in different stages of being made. And then we finish the, um, the event with a guided tasting of, of different dark chocolates, really focusing on the origin specific flavor differences. As Matt mentioned before, cacao from different of different varieties and grown in different regions will have remarkably different flavors. Um, so letting people experience what chocolate from uh, uh, chocolate made from cacao from Tanzania tastes like and how that’s wildly different from Nicaraguan cacao. Um, we ran several of those tours and tastings last year, and we’re kind of in the finishing stages of, um, updating our program and being able to offer, uh, tastings in our factory on a year round basis.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:31] Now, um, is the customer becoming more educated in terms of a, you know, back in the day, there was, like you said, Hershey’s chocolate. That was the choice, you know, and then and then for the adventurous, there was special dark chocolate, right? Like there were there weren’t a lot of choices back in the day. Are you finding that that the consumer is more educated in searching out for these kind of higher percentage, darker chocolates?

Matt Weyandt: [00:07:59] Yeah, I think that’s definitely the case. I mean, I think a lot of people now are aware of, you know, we have a lot of people who come to us and say, oh, I know dark chocolate is good for you versus, you know, the sweeter chocolate and kind of chocolate is at 70% or more. Uh, so, you know, cacao, the cocoa and cacao, same thing. People sometimes get a little confused about it, but it’s, you know, uh, the same, uh, two words for basically the same thing. Um, cocoa actually has, uh, all of these, you know, good properties, uh, antioxidants, flavanols, things that are good for your, your heart and your circulation. Um, it’s really the sugar and milk fats and a lot of the other stuff that get added to chocolate that, um, you know, can, can not be great for you. So we have people who sort of, you know, are interested in that side of it. And then we have kind of the step, the next step where once people kind of get into the dark chocolate and then they start having the different origins and kind of start to realize that there are these different flavors. And it is like having like, you know, a good coffee from Ethiopia versus a good coffee from, uh, you know, Nicaragua. Same kind of things apply or wines. And so we do find people who, who kind of get into really into that side of the chocolate world.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:15] So you can nerd out, you can nerd out on the chocolate just like you could, like you said, wine or coffee. Yeah.

Matt Weyandt: [00:09:21] You can go down there’s there’s a pretty big rabbit hole. You can go down. I mean, there’s a lot of, you know, we go into this a little bit in our tours and tasting, you know, there’s really genetic work that has just been done in the last 20 years on cacao and the different and, you know, traditionally there were sort of three different varieties, three different families of, of of cocoa is really, um, expanded. The knowledge is really expanded over the last couple of, of years. And now there’s been 16, 17 different kind of genetic varieties identified. And you can really go down a deep rabbit hole on all of that.

Elaine Read: [00:09:54] I think also going back to your your previous question, um, you know, Atlanta, I think, established itself as a food centric city quite a while ago. Um, and I think that that that nature of Atlanta also helps to, um, make the make the connections between, uh, chocolate, fine chocolate, um, and the, the different nuances and flavor, um, of different cacao’s. Um, so people who are in Atlanta who, you know, may be very well educated on, uh, different types of coffee varietals, or as Matt said, uh, wine grape varietals may not have known that the same concepts exist in cocoa, but then once learning that from either doing a tasting at our shop or tours at our factory, those pieces click, you know, and people get it pretty quickly.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:48] Now, how difficult is it to source a kind of the right being, from the right region, from the right people?

Matt Weyandt: [00:10:56] Yeah, I mean, that was something that was really important to us from the beginning. Um, one, because we wanted to have fine flavored cocoa. So, you know, there’s, there are different grades of cocoa in the same way. Again, the same way that there’s different grades of coffee beans or, or, uh, you know, other agricultural products. And, uh, so, you know, we wanted flavor was really important to us, but we also wanted to source directly from farmers and farmer cooperatives, because another piece that drew us to chocolate was we started as we learned more about chocolate and kind of the history of chocolate and chocolate production and everything. The a lot of the issues around equity, uh, farmer pay, uh, farmer equity, environmental issues, uh, so many of these things that we had kind of cared about in the previous work that we had done, uh, we connected back with chocolate. And so, um, 65% or so of the cocoa and all of the cocoa in the world comes out of West Africa, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. It’s really dominated by industrial chocolate. Uh, and farmers there are typically making dollars on the day for, uh, the cocoa that they produce. Um, it’s oftentimes not always the case, but it’s oftentimes not considered great quality, uh, cocoa either.

Matt Weyandt: [00:12:17] And we really wanted to buy directly from farmers or farmer co-ops where we were. We knew how much the farmers were getting paid. We’re paying above fair trade pricing for all of the beans, uh, that we, we get. And, um, you know, that was also an important piece of it. So we’ve spent, you know, a lot of time. We’re a very small, uh, chocolate company, and we work with other small craft chocolate companies to, uh, source beans together. We can’t buy a container load on our own. But if we get together with a couple other chocolate makers, we can, uh, buy a container load, bring a bean, bring the beans in, and then split them up once they’re here. And we’ve traveled down to Peru, uh, and Nicaragua and other countries and, uh, met with the farmers and the, um, farmer co-ops where they’re, uh, working together as a collective to ferment and dry their beans and arrange those, uh, you know, purchases sampled the beans while we’re down there. So that’s kind of been a big focus for us since day one.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:19] Now, is your a customer a typically kind of an end user like me going in to buying a bar, or do you sell to restaurants and you sell to like, people who make other things that want to use a kind of a better quality chocolate?

Elaine Read: [00:13:33] All of the above. When we started, uh, our, our end customer was our retail customer. Um, within I think about a year or so, we started making connections with other local Atlanta businesses, primarily in the food and beverage space, also some retail, um, who were interested in using our chocolate as a higher quality, you know, alternative to what they can get from their regular suppliers. Um, and then also retail stores that we’re looking for, locally made fine chocolate. Um, but that was a very small part of our business. Um, we had a website and we were very passively taking the, the couple of orders that would come in, um, from, uh, from our online customers. And then the pandemic hit. That really changed everything we saw. Um, our online, our e-commerce business, uh, boomed, actually. And a lot of that was our retail customers, uh, transitioning over to purchasing online. But it was also getting in front of, I think, other online customers from other parts of the country who would have never, you know, had the opportunity to to see us in Atlanta. And then our, um, wholesale business, uh, grew pretty significantly during the pandemic, too, which is actually a surprise to us. We didn’t anticipate that that was going to happen.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:51] Now, are your offerings is bars or is it, um, like drinking chocolate or, um, cooking chocolate, like, is it, uh, a, you know, a variety of all in every way you can use chocolate now.

Matt Weyandt: [00:15:05] Yeah. So, you know, we our chocolate bars, like you mentioned, drinking chocolate. We make a chocolate hazelnut spread, some trail mixes, even some cacao teas, along with some other products. Those are all, um, you know, we sell online as well as, uh, to, uh, you know, specialty grocery stores, coffee shops. We’re in, uh, Whole Foods in the southeast region, um, in their specialty food section. And, and then for restaurants and chefs, we sell, uh, bulk chocolate, uh, that’s used in, um, you know, bakeries, ice cream shops, uh, places like that that are, are buying, um, that’s typically where the, where the buying like the bulk chocolate that we make.

Elaine Read: [00:15:49] But our bread and butter is our, our chocolate bars. So that was how we started. Um, and our chocolate bars make up the, uh, definitely the majority of, um, the chocolate that we produce. We very recently launched a confections line. Um, so the micro factory in Krog, our original micro factory, where we used to produce all of our chocolate, uh, we have converted into our truffle and bonbon factory. So now we have a confections team that’s taking chocolate that we’re making over in our larger factory in southwest Atlanta, taking that chocolate, turning them into ganaches and, uh, chocolate coatings for bonbons and dragées and other fun confections that we’ve just started releasing over the last couple of months.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:34] And then, uh, recently you were awarded the Gusto impact, uh, or the Gusto Impact Award. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?

Matt Weyandt: [00:16:44] Sure. Um, gusto. It was doing a impact award, which was basically, uh, recognizing small businesses who have an impact in their community and the world at large. Uh, um, in three different, uh, cities, Atlanta was one of the cities and, uh, they just announced, um, a week or so ago that we were the winner. And I think, um, you know. From the beginning. I kind of mentioned this, touched on this a little bit, but the, uh, sort of some of the economic justice issues around, uh, farmers, uh, the work that they do, some of the environmental issues, those those issues have always been important to us. And so we’ve had a big focus on that. We last year became a certified carbon neutral company, which means that we did a complete accounting of all of the, uh, CO2 emissions that come from making our chocolate that goes all the way back from the farmers all the way through, including things like, uh, the paper that we use for our wrappers and, um, and basically everything we use in our office and factory. And, uh, then we’ve worked on a plan to reduce that footprint, and we, uh, and then are also offsetting, uh, the part of the, um, uh, CO2 emissions that we’re not able to totally reduce.

Matt Weyandt: [00:18:04] And we do things like power our factory and our shop with renewable energy and things like that. So I think that was a component of it. And then, uh, we’ve also done a lot of work in Atlanta area. We wanted to be, you know, we wanted the business to kind of, uh, be a way for us to engage with the community here. And so we’ve done things like, um, you know, support the Atlanta Community Food Bank, a dollar of every Easter bunny sale that we do every year we donate to the community food bank. Uh, we’ve worked with a bunch of other organizations. We’ve done tours for Atlanta Public School kids to show them the chocolate factory and the whole process and, uh, coordinated with teachers on kind of academic curriculum around that. So, um, we’ve tried to be engaged, and I think that’s kind of, uh, you know, what gusto was looking for, um, when they were, um, announcing these impact awards.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:57] And.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:57] Then the award was some money also, right?

Elaine Read: [00:19:01] Yeah. So, um, there were three components of the award. Uh, one was a $10,000 cash. Um, the other is a year of of free service from gusto. Um, and the third part was $50,000, um, in towards the marketing campaign that gusto is producing, um, on our behalf, which is, which is really actually quite wonderful because as a small husband and wife team, this, this business feels very much like, um, like our family. We’re we’re small, you know, we don’t know how to do everything, but we try and so, um, to and neither Matt nor I came from, uh, marketing backgrounds. So to be able to have, um, a professional team that knows what they’re doing, um, to, to help us with marketing, um, was a great part of the award.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:56] So, um, any advice for other entrepreneurs when it comes to deciding to go for some of these awards, like because that usually involves some work on your part on the front end in order just to apply. Like any advice for an entrepreneur of pursuing an award like the Gusto Impact Award.

Matt Weyandt: [00:20:18] Well, I think, you know, looking for things that fit with you and your company is kind of the first, you know, piece of it. And being, you know, um, you know, genuine and like, who you are. And, you know, we’ve tried to really build the company to our values and to our ideals. And, you know, I think that’s true for a lot of small business owners. Um, I mean, you know, creating a business, being a small business owner is, is an act of creation, and it’s going to sort of represent you. And so I think looking for, um, the types of awards that fit with your personality and the personality you’ve built for your company is kind of really the first and probably most important step.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:57] So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, or get a hold of some of the chocolate, what are the coordinates, website or addresses of where you’re located?

Elaine Read: [00:21:10] Yeah. So probably the easiest place to find, um, different ways of contacting us would be to go to our website which is Chocolatl chocolate com and that is spelled x o c o l a t l. Then the word chocolate.com. And from there you can contact us by phone or email, depending on what you might be looking for and whether you are looking to establish, um, a wholesale partnership with us, or want to learn more about our tours and tastings, or have questions on ingredients, anything like that. Hopefully the website, um, should give good give folks a good map to, um, what phone number, what email address they can call.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:50] Well, thank.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:51] You both so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Elaine Read: [00:21:55] Thank you lady. Thank you for having us.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:57] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Scott Mautz With Profound Performance

by

High Velocity Radio
High Velocity Radio
Scott Mautz With Profound Performance
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Scott Mautz, author of THE MENTALLY STRONG LEADER, is the founder and CEO of Profound Performance™, a keynote, training, and coaching company. He is a former Procter & Gamble executive who successfully ran four of the company’s largest multi-billion dollar businesses, he is also the multi award-winning author of Leading from the Middle, Find the Fire, and Make It Matter.

He has been named a “CEO Thought-leader” by The Chief Executives Guild and a “Top 50 Leadership Innovator” by Inc.com, he is faculty on reserve at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education and is a top instructor at LinkedIn Learning.

He lives in San Diego.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn and follow him Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

• What mental strength is, and why it is more critical than ever
• The six mental muscles and the habits that build them
• Proven tools for building mental strength habits — like “the lenses of resilience,” the “Think Big Blueprint” and the “Redirect Rhythm”
• How to determine which mental muscles you need to strengthen

Transcript-iconThis 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 Scott Mautz, author of the new book The Mentally Strong Leader. Welcome, Scott.

Speaker3: [00:00:28] Thanks so much for having me here. Lee. I appreciate what you do and looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned with your audience.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. But before we get into the book, can you tell us a little bit about your backstory?

Speaker3: [00:00:41] Yeah, you bet. I was born and raised in corporate America, spent just about three decades in corporate America, really studying over time what makes great leaders great and what makes really achievers achieve, and have been studying that for quite a long time and decided to leave the corporate world about 8 or 9 years ago to broaden my platform for making a difference with the the written and the spoken word, which is what I do now. You know, I speak from stage, I do workshops, I write business books, you know, one which we’ll be talking about here today.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:13] So what was it like leaving kind of the corporate world and then entering into the world of entrepreneurship and having your own business? Was there a mindset shift you needed in order to be successful in this new venture?

Speaker3: [00:01:26] Yeah, for for sure. I, you know, a big part of it, Lee was, you know, just understanding what really, really made me happy. You know, when I, when I was in the corporate world, I found after some time I was, you know, chasing approval more than I was chasing authenticity, you know, more than chasing who I really was and what I really wanted to be. So, you know, it took a leap of faith. And, you know, the topic of my new book, The Mentally Strong Leaders, it’s all about mental strength. It took a lot of mental strength to really muster up the courage to to be able to do that, to leave behind a really great career with a, you know, a great corporate world company and, and make the leap. But, you know, I find myself constantly saying now as a speaker and an author and a work shopper, it’s the best move I ever made in my life, and I’m so glad I did it.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:15] Now, can you share a little bit about where you were at mentally when you were contemplating making this leap? What was kind of going through your head in, in maybe calculating the trade offs you would be having to, to make in order to do this new thing?

Speaker3: [00:02:33] Yeah. Great question. I, I boil it down to me, Lee, really to, to one question that I just kept asking over and over so that I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. Right. Because that’s a big decision, you know, do I stick around? Do I keep getting promoted in this corporate world and, you know, with all the nice trappings that come with it? Or do I take a leap and, you know, do I go out and be an entrepreneur and a speaker and author and a writer and and you can get overwhelmed by doing the, you know, the list of pros and cons. And so I just kept going back, you know, at the time to one question over and over and over again, where will I have the chance to have a broader impact on the most people? Will it be waiting for the next promotion in corporate life and having, you know, a couple hundred more people under my charge, or, you know, will it be building a platform with a written in the spoken word? And and once I kept coming back to that question, Lee, it became patently obvious that the way I was going to have the best impact was as a keynote speaker, author, writer and workshop. And with that in mind, the decision became very, very clear.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:37] Now, do you think that a younger you could have come to the same conclusion prior to having a corporate career?

Speaker3: [00:03:45] It’s a really good question. And, you know, obviously we’ll I guess we’ll never know. But I would suspect that I may still have been able to do that, only because I became so clear on what really drove me was this desire to learn what makes great leaders great and what makes achievers achieve, you know, in its latest version, for me, you know, when I’m talking about mental strength, I, I think that even as a younger me, I was so drawn to figuring out those things that I think I would have been drawn and compelled to spend my time sharing with the world what I learned about that topic versus just, you know, making a company more money by selling 10% more widgets than I did the prior year. So.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:30] Now, what have you learned? Uh, you know, being out in the world nowadays, uh, are you seeing younger people kind of following that same corporate path? Is that is that as, um, maybe popular as it was when you were younger? Or do you see young folks today? Um, you know, wanting to kind of form their own path?

Speaker3: [00:04:55] Yeah. I think younger generations and this just isn’t my opinion. This is, you know, there’s plenty of data to back it up. I think today’s younger generations are, you see, a lot less of the, you know, the lifers, the ones that go into a company and say, wow, I feel blessed and lucky that I have a steady paying corporate job. I’m going to stay here. I’m going to stay loyal to the company. I feel, you know, lucky to have this position and I’m going to rise up the ranks. And I think, statistically speaking, we see that that’s happening less and less as younger generations are figuring out the key driver of their life. Their professional life needs to be what brings them meaning. How do they find a sense of purpose in their work? How do they maximize the impact they’re making in the meaning that they’re drawing from their jobs, versus just staying beholden to a job for sake of staying beholden to a job?

Lee Kantor: [00:05:44] Do you think that that’s because maybe there’s less trust on both sides. You know, from the corporation side, there’s maybe less trust that the employee is going to stick around for the long haul. And then from the employee side, they’re not trusting that the corporations may be going to keep its word and fulfill the promise that they’ve stated.

Speaker3: [00:06:05] Yeah. I think the overlay of just as a culture where we are right, that, you know, we have a hard time even agreeing on what the facts are anymore. Right? And, you know, I’m not getting into politics at all. I’m just saying, you know, it’s a it’s a truth that there’s that we, that we’re becoming in many ways more divisive in some places as a society and a culture. And I do think that bleeds over into the corporate world where, you know, there is more opportunities to breed mistrust than ever before. And, you know, I do hope that the listeners out there look at it instead as a message of hope that in your own world, in your own situation, you know, if you can lean forward and trust the other party to come to a better outcome than you’re currently at, that can only be a good thing moving forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:51] Now, in your book, The Mentally Strong Leader, is it a how to book on how to become mentally strong? Or is this a book based on research of what you found? Successful people had certain traits or is it both?

Speaker3: [00:07:05] It’s really both. And just by way of quick definition, mental strength is the ability to regulate your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors productively, even at adversity, as I like to say. In other words, it’s it’s how you manage internally. So you could lead externally. And I think, Lee, most of us know that we need to do that, you know, inherently to to succeed, we have to be able to some extent to regulate our emotions, thoughts and behaviors productively. But guess what? It’s really, really hard to do that. And you know, what I’ve been learning in my research is the effort is worth it, though, when you can build the habits to increase your mental strength. It’s like training your brain for achievement. One piece of research I did across, you know, the decades I’ve been studying mental strength, we asked 3000 executives thinking of the highest achieving organizations you’ve ever been a part of that overcame the most obstacles. What were the attributes of the key leader in that organization? And we found a whopping 91% of the respondents described, even though they didn’t know they were describing this at the time. They described mental strength in some form, specifically the leaders flexing one of six core mental muscles fortitude, confidence, boldness. Decision making goal focus, the ability to stay focused on your goals, and even messaging. Your ability as a leader to message positively to the troops. To keep a positive aura about your communications and a quality to your presence and to your intent. So yes, we it is a how you know the mentally strong leader is a how to you know, how to book and how to build those mental muscles to become mentally stronger. But it’s also based on just a ton of deep research to show that really, it’s the leadership superpower of our time mental strength. It’s how you train your brain for achievement. When you’re able to build those mental muscles and regulate your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors productively.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:08] Now, are those traits, um, kind of are you born with them, or are these that you think you can take anybody and teach them these traits?

Speaker3: [00:09:17] You can teach anybody? You know, it’s an important thing, the opposite of mentally strong. Lee is not mentally weak. We all have a baseline of mental strength to draw from. You just have to know how to do that. And you do that. You know, by building the habits. And in the mentally strong leader, it’s there’s habit building science baked into the book. So in other words, you know, in several ways, habit building science teaches us that if you want to create a habit of anything, including strengthening mental muscles and building your mental strength, it takes repetitions, systems, and frameworks that allow you to repeat behaviors and activities. And the over 50 plus proven tools in the mentally strong leader they contain. Those tools are built on systems and frameworks, as well as insight on the very first small step that you should take, which is key for habit building and what to do in moments of weakness. And here’s the good news, Lee. You can. In the mentally strong leader, you could start by taking a mental strength self-assessment to determine what your overall mental strength score is, and how you score across each of the six mental muscle developments that that equal mental strength the fortitude, confidence, boldness, messaging, decision making and goal focus. And you can find out, okay, which muscles do I need to build so that you can create your own custom mental strength training program, which is. A good thing, right? Because when you go to the gym, you don’t go to exercise all muscles all the time. You know, Wednesday might be leg day, Thursday might be back in arm day. So you can create your own custom mental strength training program based on the mental strength self assessment and the over 50 plus habit building tools in the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:03] Now can you share like say I want to work on my confidence muscle. What are what are some things, some actionable things I can do today to become more confident tomorrow?

Speaker3: [00:11:13] Yeah, in the mentally strong leader I have a there’s a ton of habits that you can build based on building your confidence. Just, you know, one example is to, you know, take a self-compassion break. That’s what I call it in the mentally strong leader of the book. And it’s to help you stop the negative inner chatter. You know, where first you have to, first of all, catch yourself when you’re beating yourself up with negative inner chatter. We all do it. And then, you know, step one is to stop beating yourself up for beating yourself up. Just accept that you’re doing it and go right to step two, which is in that moment you catch yourself beating yourself up. It’s important that you talk to yourself like a friend in need. If a friend was asking you, you know, clearly signaling to you that they wanted to tell you a story where they were looking for compassion and empathy, I don’t think you would interrupt them after five minutes and say, okay, I’ve heard your story and I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re a complete loser. You know, you would listen to them and you know, you would talk to them kindly. And so why would you, you know, beat yourself up in that way? You should, you know, do the same. And then you go to the third step in the self-compassion break, which is remembering the 9010 rule. 9010 rule is a rule for how you should value yourself, which is to say it should be based 90% on self-worth Self-appreciation self-love, 10% on assigned worth what others think of you. And the problem arises when you know that 10% of how others should think of you becomes 70, 80, 90. When? When 100% of how you think of yourself is based on what others think and not what on you think, the problem arises when you begin to chase approval instead of authenticity. The problem arises when you begin to focus on winning love rather than giving love and the self-compassion breakage. Just one of the many confidence building tools you can build to create a habit of confidence in the mentally strong leader.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:59] Now, if I’m a leader right now, is there maybe some symptoms of my people that I should be paying attention to where there might be room for improvement when it comes to their mental strength? Are there some symptoms of people that are lacking mental strength that that I can then hand them this book?

Speaker3: [00:13:20] Yes. Just as if you would go to the doctor’s office or physician’s office to figure out. Or, let’s put it a different way, a physical trainer to figure out where, you know, where do I need to build and get better. It kind of goes back again to lead to the six core mental muscles that equate to mental strength. You can look for signs of resilience and fortitude breaking down in employees. You can look for signs of lack of self confidence, like they’re beating themselves up. They’re always seeking approval. They suffer from imposter syndrome. They can’t stop comparing to other people. You can look for signs of a lack of boldness. They’re not taking enough risks. They’re not thinking big enough. You can look for signs of, you know, the other three core mental muscles decision making that they’re indecisive, goal focused, that they can’t stay focused on what they’re doing or even messaging, that they tend to get drawn into negativity rather than positivity at work and spread an aura of, you know, kind of a osmosis of negativity rather than just a positive culture. So, yeah, based on the mental muscles that equate to mental strength, you absolutely can look for signs and symptoms that your employees are not as mentally strong as they need to be, along with also, by the way, giving them the mental strength self-assessment that’s in the book, the mentally strong leader to help numerically determine where do they fall in their mental strength rankings.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:36] Now we’re talking about this primarily. Obviously, in terms of business, it seems to me that there would be, um, kind of a place for it in the home with a maybe a teenager or young person, uh, to kind of protect them, uh, from maybe some of the fragileness that you’re seeing today or the lack of resilience or even the fear, uh, that a lot of young people are going through anxiety. Is this something that can also work for a younger person, that maybe not in the business world, but it sounds like these kind of traits and these muscles are useful for any age.

Speaker3: [00:15:16] 100%. And that was the intent when I wrote the book and why I worked so hard on the mentally strong, literally the the title, you know, the mentally strong leader. When I say leader, what I’m really talking about is self leadership. It’s just as valuable personally as it is professionally. And I’ve done studies and data to prove that, you know, the tools in the book can help you just as much as it can personally as it can professionally. You know, if I were to walk into Barnes and Noble, you know, when the book launches, which is on May 7th, 2024, if I were to hope for, you know, what section do I hope to find this book in? I hope to find it in the self-help section, the Self Leadership section, because it’s not just a business book. Although there’s tremendous value and potential for all kinds of professionals with the book, it’s also a book for self leadership that you can find personally incredibly valuable.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:08] So when you’re doing your work in, uh, for corporations and businesses, is it are you doing kind of coaching, uh, at the leadership level, or is this something that an organization could hire you to come in and work with their team?

Speaker3: [00:16:22] Yeah, yeah, they could come. You know, I do a lot of keynotes so I can come in and do a keynote on the topic of mental strength and arm the audience with tools to help them build their mental strength, including the mental strength self-assessment. I also do detailed workshops, the, you know, ranging anywhere from, you know, 90 minutes all the way to several days where we really deep dive on each muscle that equates to mental strength and and help people build the habits that will make them mentally stronger. And I do the workshops and the keynotes, both in person, of course, as well as virtually as well, which is, you know, obviously essential these days.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:58] So if somebody wants to get a hold of the book or have a more substantive conversation with you, what is the coordinates website? Uh, the best way to connect?

Speaker3: [00:17:08] Yeah, you got it. Go to Scott Mortis.com Scott m a uts.com and you can find you can connect with me there to hire me for a keynote or for a workshop. And you could check out the book The Mentally Strong Leader. And I’ve also put together a free gift for your listeners. Lee. If they go to Scott Comm slash mentally strong gift, they can download a free 60 page PDF that will give them in advance the mental strength self-assessment so they could start seeing, you know, what they’re going to need to work on from a mental strength standpoint. And it also, the 60 page free PDF also has prompts in there questions to help you get the most out of the book. The mentally strong leader so they can go to Scott comm slash mentally strong gift.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:51] Well Scott, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Speaker3: [00:17:56] I appreciate you too and all that you do. Thanks for having me on, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:59] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

Dr. Lori A. Manns With Quality Media Consultant Group

by

Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Dr. Lori A. Manns With Quality Media Consultant Group
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Dr. Lori A. Manns, Chief Creative Officer at Quality Media Consultant Group.

She is an award-winning, trailblazing entrepreneur and has been the owner of a successful business consulting firm for the past 14 years. As a sought-after speaker, media personality, and business coach, she is considered an expert content creator and thought leader in the marketing and sales industries.

Her work has been featured on Forbes.com and other national platforms. Across her social media channels and private network, she has amassed an audience of over 40K people.

Lori’s goal is to help purpose-driven, female entrepreneurs grow their incomes and reach their first or next six or seven figures.

Connect with Lori on LinkedIn and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • The benefits of entrepreneurs attending business events
  • What types of business events are best for entrepreneurs to attend
  • Why should entrepreneurs attend business events
  • How should entrepreneurs prepare to attend an event
  • What are some of the key benefits for entrepreneurs to attend events
  • Events that entrepreneurs should avoid
  • The Trailblazer Business Summit 2024

Transcript-iconThis 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: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor. Here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the show, we have Dr Lori Manns with Quality Media Consulting Group. Welcome, Lori.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:00:44] Hi, Lee, thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] I am so excited to get caught up with you. For folks who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about Quality Media Consultant Group? How you serving folks?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:00:55] Yes, well, we are a business consultancy firm specializing in media marketing and sales strategies for optimal business growth. We help entrepreneurs and small business owners to get more dream clients, gain brand visibility and grow their income, impact and influence in record time.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:12] So how did this get started?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:01:15] Yeah, well, you know, I have been an entrepreneur for the past 14 years. And I started out, I like to say, as an accidental entrepreneur, because I got downsized from my corporate job in 2009 and just figured out that I did not want to work for corporate America anymore and just took my skills and talents and capabilities and started a marketing and media agency. And I started out doing media buying, which we still have that vertical in our business to this day. So we still do media buying and planning for our corporate clients and small business clients, and we also do marketing communications for them. And just as a way of getting myself out there in the public and becoming a expert in my industry and presenting myself as a subject matter expert, I started to do video and blogs, and that’s how I kind of got into consulting and coaching entrepreneurs and micro business owners, and I just took off from there.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:20] So is that your kind of sweet spot? Is the micro business owner and the entrepreneur?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:02:26] Yes, yes. As far as the coaching and consulting goes, yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:32] Now, as a rule, do you find that entrepreneurs attend enough events?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:02:39] Well, you know what I, I think prior to Covid and the pandemic, I think it was just the norm to attend events, right? Because we were just out there and we did a lot in the community. I know I did a lot, and just living in a metropolitan area like Atlanta, there’s always a business event to attend. But I have run across those entrepreneurs, uh, who just do not get out there, and they wonder why they don’t have enough leads coming in and they think everything is going to come from social media. So I really I really feel like it’s important to get out there in the community and, um, let your face be known, let your brand be known and make sure that people know who you are. And I just don’t really feel like now, post pandemic, that people are attending events, whether virtually or in person, as much as they should, to get their brand and business out there in a bigger way.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:49] Now, I know lately especially, we’ve been, uh, bombarded with the opportunities to, uh, broadcast live from events. And we work with a lot of the big business associations here in Atlanta, uh, to broadcast live at these events. How do you recommend an entrepreneur choose which is the appropriate event to attend? Because like you said earlier, there’s just so many of them popping up nowadays.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:04:16] Yeah, you’re right about that. Lee, I think there are a couple things that will help you determine what types of events or, um, which events are going to be good for you and or your business. And so I think the first thing you have to look at is. Are the speakers people that you need to learn from and do. They have expertise in the areas where you need to grow in? And if that is the case, you absolutely want to look at attending those types of events. And then you also want to look at the target audience like who’s going to be there? And based upon the type of audience that that event is going to garner, is it going to be an opportunity for you to network and for you to meet some people who may be in your target audience? And when you think about who’s going to be in the room or who’s going to be in the audience. Uh, sometimes. Who’s in the audience is just as important as who’s on the stage. So you never know if you’re able to connect with somebody in the audience who could be a new. Client, or who could be a new referral partner, or who could just be somebody who you need to know for one reason or another. So I think it’s very important to look at the speaker lineup, the topics that are going to be discussed, as well as who’s going to be in the audience. And then just looking at, you know, who’s presenting the event. And, um, based on all of these things, you know, are the presenters and organizers of the event, are they credible? You know, do they have a good reputation for putting on good events? And these are some of the things that will help you to decide. Is this an event for me and one that can benefit me and my company as to where we are right now?

Lee Kantor: [00:06:26] Now, do you recommend that an entrepreneur who’s serious about growing their business look at events like they do with their content, like with their content, they should be creating an editorial calendar of how you’re going to distribute and create content throughout the year. Should you be doing the same thing with regarding events in terms of, you know, like if I’m a business coach and I specialize in serving dentists, shouldn’t I be attending events that are for business coaches to learn? But also, shouldn’t I be attending events for dentists where there’s a bunch of dentists in the room so I can get there and meet them and be maybe the only business coach that’s there?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:07:05] Absolutely. Because not only do you want to attend events where you know it’s pertinent to your industry, but it’s got to be also pertinent to where you are trying to go, like what your goals are in your business. So, you know, it may be a situation where, you know, during the first quarter of the year, there is an industry event that you need to attend to, and they have the same event every year around the same time. And then maybe you want to attend an event that is more business oriented and it’s more, uh, wide scale. You know, it’s not a niche down event. Like if you’re a dentist, you want to attend the dentist conference. But maybe this event is for people who want to get into online courses or speaking or writing a book or things of that nature. So, you know, we’re all going to have multiple goals. So you definitely want to target the types of events that are not only going to be niche specific, but are also going to be business related and, you know, give you some intelligence and overall wisdom and knowledge about what’s happening in the world of business. Because, see, your competitors may be more well rounded than you are. And if that is the case, I promise you they are attending events not only that are specific to their industry, but they are expanding their horizons and attending events where they can get into other audiences and perhaps grow their clientele with different specialties and things of that nature. So you’re absolutely right. You may end up attending an event per quarter or per month, and it needs to be different types of events. Some need to be specific to your industry, and some need to be specific to whatever your goals are for that particular month or quarter.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:04] Now, is there a strategy when you attend an event, or is this something you just kind of go, oh, today’s the day that event, I just show up there and just kind of wander around.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:09:15] No. Absolutely not. You always want to have a strategy when you attend business events, because you just don’t want to spend money to go to this or that event. You want to have a strategy in place for every event you go to, even if you’re only attending as a attendee and you’re not a speaker, or you’re not a vendor, or you’re not a sponsor, even as an attendee, you want to have a strategy. And I think, uh, one of the basic things that you want to have is just a plan going into the event. What do you want to get out of it? Right? Even if you’re an attendee and you’ve paid, let’s just say you’re $100 to go to the event. Well, in order to make that $100 profitable for you and have a return on investment, you should think about how can I meet someone or make a connection where this $100 is going to be seed money, so to speak? It’s going to be money that I invested in my business and in myself. And somehow some way that’s going to come back to me. And so does that mean you need to meet at least five new connections or ten new connections? Does that mean you need to get your business card? You know, even if you have a digital business card these days, do you need to exchange business cards with at least ten people? Or does that mean you need to find out? You know, who is looking for the type of, uh, service or product that you offer, and perhaps they are in the market for what you do at that point.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:10:55] So you need to have a plan in place about what you want to get from the event, how many connections you want to make with people you know. Are you looking to meet, um, referral partners? Are you looking for new clients? Are you looking for joint venture operational, um, opportunities? You know, just what is it that you really need in your business? Are you looking for staff or, you know, do you need to hire some people? What is it that you want and go in with the idea that you’re going to try to make some connections with people who can help you get what you need? And not only that, who you can also help.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:38] Now when you’re deciding which events to go to, is there some criteria that you have of this is not a good event that I should be investing time in? Are there some red flags for events for entrepreneurs?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:11:52] Yeah. I think some of the red flags would, would be, you know, based upon what your goals are for that particular month or quarter. If you have not allocated the money to attend an event and it is a ticketed event, then if you’ve got to take money from something else that you actually need to pay in your business to attend that event, then that’s a red flag. You have to make sure that you allocate the the money to attend these events to make it work for you. And the other thing is, you have to make sure that what you’re going to learn and what you’re going to gain from that event is something that you’re going to take and apply and execute within your business within the next 3 to 6 months. So how timely is the information that is being discussed, and how timely is it for you and your business? Is it something that you can utilize within the next three months, six months, a year that you can turn around and make that knowledge pay for itself and make the experience worthwhile? And so I just believe that if you have the budget set aside and sometimes we don’t allocate enough money for events, right.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:13:19] And if you can pull money from something else that is not producing the the return on your investment and then invest it in this event and then boom, you go to that event and what happens is you end up meeting two people and that. Turns into a new opportunity or a new clientele. You know, I’ve had that happen to me before myself. You know, I’ve learned about an event. At the last minute. And I said, well, you know what? I’m going to take money from this thing over here that I’ve been doing that is only moderately successful and not really producing what I wanted to produce. And I’m going to use that money and go to this event. And I did that. And what happened was I got a speaking engagement from that event, and I got two clients from that event, and I was so glad that, you know, I was able to take that investment and leverage it into something more.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:22] Now, if you want to get take events to a new level is create your own event and you have an upcoming event.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:14:30] Absolutely. I always say, don’t just sit back and wait for people to invite you to their event. Create your own. And don’t just wait for people to put you on their platform. Create your own stage and shine on your own. And so that’s what I did. I created an event called the Trailblazer Business Summit, and it’s a one day conference where I invite my business colleagues and friends and connections to come out and share. Incredible. Tips, strategies, and actionable information that entrepreneurs can utilize right away in order to make a impact on their bottom line. And it’s so important to me to do that because, you know, right now we have been in an inflation society and everybody wants to learn how to make their money grow and make their money, um, move into something that is just very profitable and prosperous. And so our theme this year is Elevate to dominate. And it’s going to be Saturday, April the 27th. And I’m super ecstatic about it.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:46] And who is that kind of ideal, um, attendee.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:15:50] Well. It would be great for any small business owner. Whether you are a solo entrepreneur, a micro business owner, or a small business owner already established and doing hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions even because you’re going to get a refresher upon how to scale beyond seven figures. We have some, uh, entrepreneurs there who are going to be talking about scaling to seven figures and beyond. And then we also have some entrepreneurs that are going to be talking about, uh, just how to get to six figures for those people who are not there yet as well. So we’re going to be talking about the gamut. We have a power panel, uh, that’s going to be talking about how to leverage social media and digital technology in business so that you can increase and improve your bottom line. The incredible John Lawson and Maria Angelova and Sonia Krystal Williams are going to be on that panel, and it’s going to be amazing. And I also have Donna Ines from Georgia Tech who’s going to be the keynote. And I have Shaky Webster, who’s going to be the featured speaker. Excuse me. Excuse, excuse me, who’s going to be the featured speaker, Shaky Webster.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:15] Now, um, is this something that is in person? Virtual? Both.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:17:21] Yes, this event is a hybrid event. It is in person. Live here in Atlanta at the Courtyard by Marriott, and it’s also virtual for anyone across the country who wants to join us.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:38] And then if they want to learn more, what’s the website?

Dr Lori Manns: [00:17:44] They need to go to quality media consultants. Com. And once again that’s quality media consultants. Com. On the events page.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:58] Good stuff. Well, Lori, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:18:04] Thank you so much. Got a little bug in my throat there, Lee. Sorry about.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:08] That. Not a problem. I think you got the word out in the message out. And it’s an important, uh, summit again. The Trailblazer Business Summit 2020 for Saturday, April 24th from 10 a.m. on April 27th. April 27th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. eastern at the Courtyard by Marriott Buckhead. Go to Quality Media Consultants. Com to learn more, go to their events page and you will find it. Lori, thank you again.

Dr Lori Manns: [00:18:37] Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:39] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Larry Gaynor With TNG Worldwide

by

High Velocity Radio
High Velocity Radio
Larry Gaynor With TNG Worldwide
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Larry Gaynor, author of Take a Chance!: 101 Entrepreneurial Lessons for Making It Big, is the founder and CEO of TNG Worldwide, the beauty-product supplier whose best-selling signature brands include ForPro Professional Collection and Ginger Lily Farms.

TNG manufactures more than 1,000 products in several countries and launches between 50 and 100 new products annually. Gaynor has won numerous awards, including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Connect with Larry on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • How to be flexible in the developmental stages of new products or services
  • How to react to moments of chaos that entrepreneurs inevitably encounter
  • What to do to keep customers excited and engaged
  • The importance of learning our strengths through such assessments as Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 test.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:05] 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 Larry Gaynor, and he is CEO and founder of TNG worldwide and author of the new book, Take a Chance a 101 Entrepreneurial Lessons for Making It Big. Welcome, Larry.

Larry Gaynor: [00:00:32] Thank you. Welcome, and thank you for inviting me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:35] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Before we dig into the book, tell us a little bit about TNG worldwide. How are you serving folks?

Larry Gaynor: [00:00:43] Well, it’s a long story. That’s why I wrote my book about. But currently we are a manufacturer of personal care and beauty products. I manufacture over 1000 products and they’re primarily sold on Amazon.com.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:56] So what’s the back story? Were you always involved in the beauty industry?

Larry Gaynor: [00:01:00] I was involved in the beauty industry since I was 12 years old. I started my grandfather’s hardware store in Detroit and in the late 60s. I don’t know how old, how old you are, but I’m really, really old. Do you remember the show The Mod Squad? Sure. You do? What’s the guy’s name? What was the guy’s name?

Lee Kantor: [00:01:23] Link.

Larry Gaynor: [00:01:24] Yes, link. You’re showing your age. Um, okay. So. Okay. Hairstyle. Did he have.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:31] Well, somebody had an afro, and they had the afro.

Larry Gaynor: [00:01:35] That’s it. So, you know, back in the 60s, all the black guys were wearing afros, and all our customers were black. And they’re walking into the hardware store with their afros, and all of our employees had afros. And I asked her, how do you take care of those afros? And they said, well, we got to use the shine spray. So I kind of thought there were three manufacturers of shine sprays, and I contacted all three manufacturers to come into the store because I wanted to buy direct. They all came in. They said, this is a hardware store, why are you selling hair shine spray? Well, you can see all our customers are black and wearing afros. So they agreed to open me up. And after we opened up, we became the single biggest retailer in Michigan for black hair care.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:13] Added the hardware store.

Larry Gaynor: [00:02:15] I added the hardware store. So that’s how I got into beauty when I was 16. From the hardware store I went, my father and I did not. Get along in business because, you know, I was into cosmetics. I introduce, you know, lipstick in the hardware store. He almost had a heart attack and killed me. That was the last time that we had to open up a second store. So opened up a discount health and beauty store to suburbs, uh, which was called gainers. And, uh, from there, uh, I opened, uh, the current company inside that store based on demand for manicurists for professional nail supplies. And then TNG started in 1985 as a wholesale distributor of beauty products to Manicurists. So the story evolves? Uh, yeah. Over the years.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:06] Now, were you ever a creator of products or always a reseller of products?

Larry Gaynor: [00:03:11] Well, that’s a great question. So as a distributor, you’re reselling someone else’s brand. And over the years we got cut off so many times from our manufacturers, it was forced to create my own brands. So over time, 3,040% of our business was our own brands and 60% was distributor brands. And then came 2020.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:35] And was that good? I mean, was the pandemic good for you because or bad? Because people weren’t kind of showing off how they look. So maybe they were staying in so they didn’t need cosmetics as much.

Larry Gaynor: [00:03:47] So the pandemic was the biggest turning point for the company. My biggest pivot because as we were manufacturing PPE before the pandemic, so we were manufacturing nitrile gloves and hand sanitizer and disinfectant and face masks. And when the pandemic came, every, every all the businesses got shut down that were essential. All our competitors got shut down because they weren’t essential. We were the only really business that was open. And the demand for PPE, as you know, went through the roof and all of a sudden we’re starting to funeral homes and nursing homes and doctors and nurses and makeshift hospitals are opening up, but they can’t find PPE and they’re calling us for PPE and we’re supplying them. And I had to make a decision to focus 100% on manufacturing or keep the distribution business. And I decided to get rid of all the distribution business in March of 2020. It was like over 50% of our business, and it was a huge decision. And then we just manufactured more and more PPE, uh, during the pandemic. I even chartered a Fedex jet in China to bring seven containers over of face masks and gloves, because our customers needed so many face masks and gloves. Uh, just to help keep up with the demand.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:06] But then after two years, then what did you do at that point?

Larry Gaynor: [00:05:10] Well, actually it wasn’t two years. The the the country opened in June of 2020. We were still manufacturing PPE. Everyone started to try to get into the PPE business and they shouldn’t have. Uh, but because of the pandemic and because we were manufacturing PPE and because we were open, our products at Amazon took off exponentially. We started selling on Amazon in 2013. We’re one of the first beauty companies to sell on Amazon. And because of that, our business on Amazon grew and grew. And today, over 95% of our business is Amazon.com.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:47] So, um, was that just kind of being in the right place at the right time, or have you done something to kind of crack the code on how to be successful on Amazon?

Larry Gaynor: [00:05:58] It’s a little bit of both. As I said, we’ve been selling our products on Amazon for more than ten years. 12 years. We have more best selling beauty products than any other manufacturer on Amazon. And because of the pandemic and because of the demand for our products, uh, the brands gingerly farms and for professional collection continues to grow and grow. And today they’re just both, uh, mega hits on Amazon. And, uh, I think it’s all because of the pandemic and because we no longer focus on distributing other people’s brands, and we focus on our own brands instead, which in the book I tell, I tell my readers, if you have your choice between being a retailer, a distributor or a manufacturer, and you’re into products, definitely be a manufacturer.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:47] So, um, does the knowledge transfer. Like, if I have a product and I go, hey, Larry, I got a product I want to put on Amazon, like, would your learnings help accelerate my growth? Or is this something that because you are in an industry, you already have kind of been there for a decade plus, so you already have kind of a brand, so then you’re going to be successful in your brand. But it it wouldn’t necessarily transfer to my brand or what I’m doing in Amazon or the techniques and tactics similar.

Larry Gaynor: [00:07:20] That’s a great question. And the truth is, you can launch your brand tomorrow and it could be successful. Yeah, I had a head start, but there’s millions and millions and millions of resellers and Amazon and tens of millions of products on Amazon. But if you come up with a good product, a good value proposition. A competitive edge. You could be highly successful. And if you ask me which platform, which retailer, if you had a product that you want to sell to, which should you select? 100% I would say Amazon first, second and third. The. The fourth one I would recommend would be Walmart.com. But there’s still 5 to 10 years behind Amazon when it comes to what Amazon can do for resellers. Uh, other than that, if you’re thinking it goes, try to sell to Target or Kohl’s or another type of store like that. Uh, you’re spinning your wheels.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:14] So you would do online before you attempted to get into a retail store?

Larry Gaynor: [00:08:19] 100%. Not only would I do online first, but we have our own website and at one point we had over 100,000 customers. Our customers don’t even want to buy direct from us anymore. They want to buy our products at Amazon because they’re all Prime shoppers with Amazon, as you know. I mean, you’re an Amazon shopper, right? Sure. Of course we all are. There’s 170 million prime shoppers in the US alone, and they’re all Prime shoppers because they want their products same day or next day with us. If we ship Fedex or UPS, they get the products in two days to a week. But with Amazon, they could order everything they get and they can get it same day or next day. So yeah, I mean, we don’t even need our website anymore, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:09:01] But what about the trade off that you don’t really have access to those customers? Like you can’t go to Mary and say, hey, Mary, I got this new special or hey, Mary, sign up for my club where you I’ll send you something every month.

Larry Gaynor: [00:09:15] 100%. We had the best loyalty program in the professional beauty industry for more than 20 years, giving away millions and millions of dollars worth of rewards. Mary doesn’t care about a reward program anymore. Mary doesn’t care about her email blast anymore. Mary doesn’t care about our education. Mary doesn’t care about our trade shows, and Mary doesn’t care about dealing with our sales reps. All Mary wants to do is go on her computer, her smartphone or device and order the products that she wants and get them the next day.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:39] So that’s the way.

Larry Gaynor: [00:09:40] The world has changed.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:41] Well, that’s a big shift because, I mean, a lot of businesses, um, you know, are thinking in kind of a counterintuitive way, but you’re saying or what I’m hearing you say is that convenience kind of trumps everything, and Amazon has the most convenient way to buy something online.

Larry Gaynor: [00:09:57] That’s why Amazon, for the first time ever, is overtaking. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world. And when Bezos and Jeff started his company almost went broke during the.com crash, he was a bookseller. Nobody thought that he would get close to catching Walmart. Nobody would get catched close to catching Walmart in business. Walmart’s going to do over $600 billion a year in sales and Amazon’s going to overtake that. It’s it’s a phenomenal. Something that you. It’s like the solar eclipse yesterday. It’s like something that you rarely can envision happening and it happening. And not only that, Amazon has momentum because of I and I. You can take the smartphone, the PC and the internet. Those three amazing technological innovations combined won’t be as great as I is going to be in the next 5 to 10 years, and Amazon is at the forefront of that as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:57] So now how, as an entrepreneur, do you plug into this, uh, Amazon behemoth in order to maximize your chances of success? Because the stuff you’re saying that isn’t important, you know, in terms of email list and membership and things like that, Amazon is doing all of those things. They have my email information, they contact me constantly. They have a membership that I’m a member of. I’m a Prime member. So I get access to like movies and things like that. So they’re trying to add more value to my membership, that I get special delivery privileges and access to certain things. So how as an entrepreneur, do I use Amazon to further my needs but still have some control over the outcome? If Amazon decides to change the rules, which a lot of these third party platforms change the rules when it’s convenient for them.

Larry Gaynor: [00:11:49] Well, let me ask you about the rules. I mean, the politicians change the rules. You know, the Starbucks changes the rules when, you know, to their loyalty program. Mcdonald’s changes the rules. That’s that’s just that’s part of the game. And you’re Amazon has no requirements for. Styling your products. So as a entrepreneur, you can go on Amazon today and start selling your products tomorrow. There isn’t a single retailer that you that you can do that with. If you want to get into a retailer, you have to deal with a rep group. You have to deal with the buyer. Then you have to deal with other rules and regulations. And if the product doesn’t sell the markdowns and the returns, they don’t pay you for 90 to 120 days. Amazon pays you in 30 days. Amazon rules are straight and clear, and if you play their game and you understand their game, which is the best game you can succeed, you could take a chance and you can win, but you have to have a product that resonates with consumer. And what’s great about the Amazon story and the website in the millions of products is you can search and analyze every category, every product, every algorithm that you need to to figure out which attribute you need to succeed to introduce and launch your product.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:13] So is that part of your process when you launch a new product?

Larry Gaynor: [00:13:16] 100%. I launched between 50 and 100 products a year.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:20] So what? So what is your process? What are the you know, what’s the first three steps you’re doing when you launch a new product?

Larry Gaynor: [00:13:28] Okay, so let’s say Ginger Lily farms. Good question. Uh, we have the number one selling products for hospitality, Airbnbs. Gallons of shampoo, conditioner, body wash, hand lotion, dish soap, and so forth. And now we want to launch a new launch, a new product. So it could be a fragrance free product. Because dermatologists recommend fragrance free products to their patients who are allergic or eczema or psoriasis or whatever it is, and they recommend cerophyl. They recommend these high cost products. Well, uh, you go on Amazon and you look for fragrance free products. You see that they’re very expensive. And I said, okay, so how do I launch a new product that consumers want? Well, I know that they want fragrance free products, but they also want a value. So I introduce Zerodium, which is a dermatologist recommended, uh, fragrance free natural care line of personal care products. And it’s one of our best selling products. Now we have four amazing fragrances we want introduce another new amazing fragrance. So what do I do? Well, I go to Amazon. I look at retail sizes of personal care products and I see which brands are selling. The best selling fragrances, what the fragrances are that they’re selling. I also go to Bath and Body Works. I also go to the Body Shop. I also go to, uh, lush. I look at what their new fragrances are, what their best selling fragrances are, and then I say, oh, well, you know what? I’m going to add one of those fragrances to my line and that’s what I do. So you do your research with the best of the competition, steal the best ideas and apply it to your product. That’s what they do.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:06] But then how do you stand out kind of in the sea of things that look similar?

Larry Gaynor: [00:15:13] So the secret. Wow. There’s many secrets in my book that I share, but I think the biggest secret for your listeners is to develop a niche category and dominate it. So let’s say, you know, I started in the professional beauty business with nails. Well, the professional beauty industry includes hair care, uh, spas, nails, massage, facials. But the manicure part of the business is only 2%. So it’s a very, very small, niche business. But when you’re the leader in a niche business, you make a lot of money, and you could be much more successful than being a small guy in a in a big business. So look for the niche category. And try to dominate it. That’s my, uh, that’s my secret for your listeners.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:03] So that’s where you would start, is find a niche that is attractive, that there aren’t a lot of players in it, and then you go in there with something innovative and then try to dominate it to the best of your ability.

Larry Gaynor: [00:16:17] 100%. And you know all you need is a fragrance or no fragrance, a specific size that no one is offering. You need to offer a value proposition that consumers are looking for. And the thing about Amazon, if you search their algorithms, you learn so much information from them. And I search it every day. And the more you search, the more you learn, the more ideas you get for a product. And of course, you know, I’m in the product business. Uh. It will launch my book. I did a. Big interview. Extensive, extensive research program looking at Inc 500 companies Inc 5000 companies. 85% of those companies are tech. Very few percentage of those companies 2%, 3% actually manufactured products. So, you know, your listeners might be into tech offerings, apps and things like that. I and not so much into products. But Amazon of course is a product company. And that’s that’s really my focus with entrepreneurs is those entrepreneurs that are launching products and how they can be successful. And that’s why I wrote the book for.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:28] And then the book, um, what was there something, uh, that happened in your life that you’re like, I better write some of this down. Like, did you have a near-death experience? Was there some, uh, something happened. Somebody said, hey, you got too many ideas. Why don’t you share it? Like, what was the impetus to writing the book? Because writing a book is hard.

Larry Gaynor: [00:17:48] Well, you know, I started the first blog in the industry. Uh. I’ve been writing. I started and sold three different magazines for the professional beauty industry, so I’ve always been a writer. But last year, uh, January, I was on vacation with my son, middle son, and my wife, and I said, you know what? I’m gonna write a book. And they said, you can write a book. Are you crazy? I said, of course I’m crazy. I’m an entrepreneur. So let me tell you the date. Let’s say you drop dead tomorrow, right? What’s going to happen to you the next day after you drop dead?

Lee Kantor: [00:18:24] Nothing’s going to happen to me.

Larry Gaynor: [00:18:26] Of course something’s going to happen to you. The same thing that happened to you is the same thing that happens to everyone the day they die. What happens the next day?

Lee Kantor: [00:18:33] That life goes on.

Larry Gaynor: [00:18:35] No. You get your accolades. Oh, you were the best father.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:40] Really? You were the. Is that.

Larry Gaynor: [00:18:41] Everyone says how great everybody is after the day after they die. Okay. Famous people, when someone’s famous, like Jimmy Buffett, you know, passed away, you know, September 1st, last year, all the accolades came out as soon as he died. And I said, I said, you know what? I don’t want the accolades to come out for me after I die. I want them to come out while I’m still alive. So that’s one reason I wrote the book.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:03] For your legacy.

Larry Gaynor: [00:19:05] Uh huh. For my legacy. My kids to read my my employees, uh, my, uh. And then, of course, I wrote the book for the 5.4 million people who started a business every year in America. In three years time, that’s over 16 million people. And, uh, I said, you know what? I’m going to write this and write this book to help them out and help them succeed in that fail, because 75% of businesses fail within five years. And, uh, yeah, why not? Why not give back to that community while I’m still while I still can?

Lee Kantor: [00:19:36] Now in your background?

Larry Gaynor: [00:19:37] I wrote the book.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:38] Now in your background. You, um, have done some work with the Gallup Strengthsfinder folks.

Larry Gaynor: [00:19:44] Oh, my God, we’re at Gallup. Trade organization. Love, Gallup. Uh, it focuses on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Uh, your strengths are actually your talents. Uh, you ever wonder how, you know, the kid gets in the movies and they’re six years old? You wonder what makes an athlete. An amazing athlete at 12 years old, like, you know, Tiger Woods, how he became one of the greatest golfers of all time or someone that could sing, you know, like Kenny Chesney or Jimmy Buffett or Taylor Swift? They’re born with these genes. And they actually somehow, some way through, the parents figured out that they have these genes and they can be a professional athlete or musician or singer or acrobatic, whatever it is. Gallup focuses on your strengths as well. And there’s 34 talents that they identify that anyone can own. And you take the Strain Finders 2.0 test, which you can buy on Amazon. Uh, 20 bucks, $20.75. And you learn your top five and from your top five strengths, uh, that’s what you develop to be great at. And there’s two ways of developing your strengths, and that is coaching and training. And that’s why athletes are always coached and they’re always training and practicing, because that’s how you get better and better. And, you know, the thing with Gallup is, uh, you don’t worry about what you suck at. You you only are concerned with what you’re great at and how you can make yourself greater. And, uh, if you took that mindset to all our employees and, uh, you know, employees are you have good ones, you have bad ones, they have their strengths, they have their weaknesses. But if you only focus on their strengths and their what they’re great at, you develop a core team in a business environment that is second to none. So yeah, it was a it’s a remarkable organization. And, uh, you might think of them as the Gallup poll, but really, most of their business, over 95% of the business is, is is helping other companies, uh, just customer engagement, employee engagement and community engagement.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:57] And then a lot of that kind of the the theory behind it is, is focus on your strengths and kind of minimize your weaknesses, rather than just pick at your weaknesses and try to improve them to be strengths. It’s just double down on your strengths.

Larry Gaynor: [00:22:10] Yeah. I mean, do you have kids? I do. How old are they?

Lee Kantor: [00:22:14] I have one child that’s, uh, 26.

Larry Gaynor: [00:22:17] Okay, so let’s go back. When that child was 15 years old from high school, came home with a report card. There’s three A’s and a C. What’s the first thing that you say to the kid that has three A’s and a C?

Lee Kantor: [00:22:29] Great job.

Larry Gaynor: [00:22:31] Great job. That’s true. But most people say, what’s up with the city now?

Lee Kantor: [00:22:36] Well, I’m a big believer in Gallup, so you pick the wrong guy. I’m all in on your thinking there. I am a big believer in in, you know, having a superpower and doubling down and then eliminate or delegate your weaknesses.

Larry Gaynor: [00:22:51] Okay, so that 100% and focus on those three A’s and get that kid to develop those A’s even greater because that’s what they’re most interested in. They’re not interested in the C and forget about it. So yeah, I mean that’s what Gallup is all about.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:08] Yeah I, I’ve read their their first book and then there’s their second book and I take all that to heart I, I’m that resonates a lot with me. And it’s funny because before the show you mentioned my early podcast, Doctor Fitness and I, I was always the believer of focus on your strengths. And he was a believer in bringing up your weaknesses. We would battle about this regularly, that he thinks that you should be focused, investing time in making your weaknesses at least neutral, if not a strength. And I’d say you should be doubling down on your strengths and just be, you know, uh, as good as you can be with your strengths and forget about your weaknesses.

Larry Gaynor: [00:23:52] That’s right. You know, the world would be so much better if we all focused on what we did great and not what we sucked at.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:01] Yeah, I think mentally you’d feel better. You’d give yourself a lot more grace.

Larry Gaynor: [00:24:07] You do. And your engagement. I mean, you think about two people that get married. What’s the period called before they actually get married?

Lee Kantor: [00:24:17] What’s the period? I don’t know what. Engagement. Engagement. Right.

Larry Gaynor: [00:24:21] They’re engaged. Right? I mean, that’s like, the best time of someone’s life is when they’re engaged. Before they get married, 50% of the marriages end up in divorce. But engagement is the most fun, the best time of someone’s life when two people are engaged. And whatever that time period is, they don’t get married during the engagement if they break off the engagement. But the engagement is it’s just it’s just like you said, it’s just the greatest feeling that you can own.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:48] Yeah. And and I think that, um, I love the way in your practice that you take this thinking and you, um, make it an action in terms of your mission of 100% customer success, when you put that much energy and on a mission that is making sure your customers are satisfied, that motivates the whole team. And everybody on the team is clear on what the true north is for the organization.

Larry Gaynor: [00:25:16] Did you? Are you by coauthor? Did you write the book too? Did you think exactly like I do? But yeah, you’re right, I mean that that’s that’s it. And, you know, we haven’t hired a single employee since 2019. Our average tenure at the company is now 19 years. People just get it. They love what they do. They 100% customer success. I mean, and again, our customers are the internal customers, the external customers and community. And we take care of all three. 100% amazing.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:52] So, um, was out of the 101 lessons, was there one that was kind of, uh. Wow, that that left a mark. I got to make sure I write that one down. Was there something, uh, that was maybe a challenge that you overcame or something you can share that maybe isn’t one of the most easier or fun one of the 101 lessons, but one that was painful and that you learned from and were able to kind of grow from.

Larry Gaynor: [00:26:20] The reader is going to identify with most, if not all, of the lessons an entrepreneur learns his lessons the hard way. And of course, one of my favorite lessons is not how many times you fall down that count, it’s how many times you get back up.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:39] Right? I mean, I know.

Larry Gaynor: [00:26:40] I said that I think it’s important for entrepreneurs is starting out. Money is always an issue. And you know, money is an issue in families. Money is an issue in so many instances. But. To alleviate the money issue. A lot of entrepreneurs partner up with people and partners is a terrible way of starting a business. Because. You have the passion, you have the idea. You know, you have the gut instinct. Your partners don’t have the same passion, the same gut instinct that you do, but they have money. So invariably, a lot of entrepreneurs will get into business with partners and they’ll be a minority shareholder. And if it’s not a public company, it’s a closed corporation. One of my life lessons in the book is don’t be a minority shareholder in a closed corporation, because it’s just nothing good comes from it.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:34] Right with the right partner, you can do a lot of things, but with the wrong partner it becomes not a lot of fun pretty quickly.

Larry Gaynor: [00:27:43] Not only that, but the chances of starting a business and lasting a business with a good partner is very, very small.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:51] Yeah. So, um, for you, what’s next? After this book I saw on your website, you do some coaching, too? Is that, um, something just to give back as well? Because you’re. I mean, you’re running a big business.

Larry Gaynor: [00:28:06] You know, the coaching on my website, my publisher said, Larry, you know what? If you want to be an author, you have to be an authority figure. And to be an authority figure, you have to be a coach and public speaker and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know what? I coach hundreds of entrepreneurs. Because I want to. I haven’t charged for my coaching services. That’s not my not my gig. Uh, so what’s next? Uh, right now, I launched a one of the biggest pitch competitions in the US for entrepreneurs. It’s called Take a Chance. Uh, ironically, uh, pitch competition is for Michigan residents only. One $51,000 grand prize money. First prize is $101,000, and then there are six categories, and each category has a $20,000 first prize and $5,000 second prize. And to give back to the community and entrepreneurs, I’m finding it 100% myself.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:59] Wow.

Larry Gaynor: [00:29:01] So that competition is going on now in Michigan. Applications are open to take a chance that biz. The finals will take place September 6th in Detroit, and based on how that goes, I might expand it regionally in the US and take it from there. But yeah, I mean, I love supporting entrepreneurship at the university level and coaching and working with students. Uh, so yeah, I mean, that’s that’s really my passion right now.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:28] And then, uh, for those who want to get the book, obviously, I’m sure it’s available at Amazon. Um, is there a website for your company, for the book, for everything, or is there a central location for all your stuff or where should they go?

Larry Gaynor: [00:29:43] You could buy the book at any major bookseller. So it’s available. It’s available. It just launched today. It’s on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You know, you can buy it at Walmart, target. Uh, my website is Larry Gainer. Com and the company website for product information is TNG worldwide. Com.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:02] Well, Larry.

Larry Gaynor: [00:30:03] Larry, Larry Gardenerd.com, uh, gained our, uh, you’ll learn about my you’ll see my podcasts that I’ve done, uh, the book, the competition and, uh, my blogs. I’ve been doing blogs for over 20 years.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:17] Well, congratulations on all the success and thank you so much for the work that you do. It’s so important and we appreciate you.

Larry Gaynor: [00:30:25] Well, I really appreciate the time for the interview, and hopefully your listeners love what we’re saying, because, you know, you’ve been doing this for a long time. And the thing about engagement and your strengths and doing things that you like, and you wake up and smile every day and, you know, I go to Mexico for a week and, you know. I come back. And so how is your vacation? And you know what I say every day is a vacation.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:51] That’s right.

Larry Gaynor: [00:30:52] And people just get so worked up and people are angry and they’re not happy. And, you know, you wake up breathing, it’s it’s it certainly breaks beats not waking up breathing. Right. Absolutely. You gotta be optimistic. You got to be happy with what you got. And, uh, you know, I’m in Detroit right now. Today it’s 73 and sunny. Uh, after we hang up, I’m going to, you know, go up and, you know, take a bike ride or take a walk. Well, yeah. I mean, you really being an optimist versus a pessimist, it just makes life you smile more. Uh, they say if you smile for 3/10 of a second and someone sees that smile, you brighten up that person’s day. Yeah. And if we just smiled more, I think the world would be just a much better place.

Lee Kantor: [00:31:39] I’m with you. Larry Gainor, author of the book Take a Chance a 101 Entrepreneurial Lessons for Making It Big. It’s available now on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Larry Gainor, thank you so much for sharing your story this Lee Kantor we’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

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