Business RadioX ®

Beto Guajardo With Focus Brands International

by

Beto Guajardo
Atlanta Business Radio
Beto Guajardo With Focus Brands International
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Beto GuajardoBeto Guajardo was named President of Focus Brands International in April 2020. He commenced his role as President of Schlotzsky’s in September 2019. Beto brings extensive global experience in corporate and brand strategy, new business development, mergers and acquisitions and organizational structure.

Over the past three decades, his career has spanned a broad spectrum of industries, including management consulting, global retail, automotive, energy, consumer packaged goods, and media and entertainment. Beto joined Focus Brands from Starbucks Coffee, where he served as Senior Vice President, Global Strategy.

Beto built the Global Strategy team that was responsible for developing the company’s five-year strategic plan and operated as a coordinating body, developing and implementing strategies to succeed corporate goals. His teams worked extensively on executing Starbucks Delivery, acquiring technology to power Starbucks CRM, and developing new go-to-market processes to streamline store development innovation.

Prior to his tenure with Starbucks, Beto held senior leadership positions in corporate strategy as Global Vice President of Brand Strategy for Levi’s Strauss & Co and Vice President of Strategy for Avon Cosmetics.

Earlier in his career, Beto spent eight years in professional services consulting with McKinsey, Inc. and Deloitte Consulting, LLP. He received an MBA from Northwestern University and a BS from the University of Illinois.

Connect with Beto on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Leading a team from ideation to implementation
  • Why Costa Rica is the best place to hub centralized locations
  • Continued Disruption: Innovation in Global Training
  • Supporting the Great Resignation through virtual tools
  • What sets the Customer Experience Center of Excellence apart

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] 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 on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories today on the Atlanta Business Radio. We have Beto Guajardo with Focus Brand International. Welcome.

Beto Guajardo: [00:00:51] Thanks, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:52] Now, before we get too far into things, please share with our listeners. Focus brands for those who aren’t aware of what you all do. Can you talk about how you’re serving folks?

Beto Guajardo: [00:01:04] Absolutely. So Focus Brands is the parent company of world class franchising brands like Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s Moe’s, Carvel ice Cream, Jamba Juice, Mcalister’s and Schlotzsky’s. And the international division oversees the stores that we have in approximately 60 countries, about 2000 units across all time zones.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:32] Now, in your work, what is your main focus? Is it on kind of expanding the brands around the world? Is it on kind of getting the most out of each brands? Is it all of the above?

Beto Guajardo: [00:01:43] You know, it’s all of the above, Leigh. But the way I like to characterize it, I share with my team and our franchisees, our job is to make our franchisees more successful. And if we help them be more profitable, they’re going to want to open more stores, they’re going to want to grow faster, and it makes our lives easier.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:02] Now, are you seeing a trend in franchising that more and more folks are open to the idea of exploring franchising as a way to increase their wealth and as a career path 100%.

Beto Guajardo: [00:02:16] As a matter of fact, I think it’s an exciting time to become a franchisor. You know, one of the for for someone who comes into this business, you’re in business for yourself, but you’re never in it by yourself. You’ve got the power of the brands and the power of the corporate team, basically helping you be successful, ensuring that you’re spending your marketing dollars where they need to be spent, ensuring that you’re building your stores the way they need to be built, and ensuring that you’re serving your customers the way they need to be served.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:43] Now, are you seeing what typical franchisee is different today than they were maybe five, ten, 15, 20 years ago, where maybe back then they were an individual? It was kind of I’m going to just be in my area. And now today there’s kind of I call them professional franchisees where they might have several brands, they have more infrastructure and they’re like more empire builders.

Beto Guajardo: [00:03:08] Well, you hit the nail on the head. As a matter of fact. You know, when you think about how individual investors got into franchising 20 years ago, they usually started off with one store. They were maybe granted a geographical territory that allowed them to build a couple of stores and oftentimes they stop there. Now we have investors coming to us who want to own the entire country. And, you know, as an example, our Auntie Anne’s franchisee in the U.K. has the opportunity to open up as many as 190 stores. They have approximately 45 so far. And we signed an agreement with them that actually made them a master franchiser. So not only can they invest with their own money to open stores, but they can sub franchise to other individuals.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:59] Now, why do you think that this change has occurred?

Beto Guajardo: [00:04:02] You know, I think. In the world, especially in restaurants, you people are seeking customers or seeking consistency in what it is that they buy. They don’t want to walk into a brand that they might be familiar with and feel that it’s a completely different experience than what they had the month before. And franchise owners like ourselves offer up the tools and the capabilities to ensure that there is a consistent delivery of that customer experience. No matter where you go around the world. And investors recognizing that, see that, customers seek that, and it’s making their businesses more profitable.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:42] Now, the pandemic, which we’re hopefully in the final days of, has changed a lot of things. And especially in the restaurant business, it’s impacted a lot of folks, whether it’s in terms of attracting employees. Now, the expectations of the customer now where they expect things, you know, almost leaning more on heavily on technology to get what they want, when they want it in the manner that they want it. How has the pandemic or maybe spurred you and your team to kind of lean into technology, maybe to solve some problems that you were solving differently pre-pandemic?

Beto Guajardo: [00:05:21] Yeah, great question, Lee. You know, pre-pandemic, we did spend quite a bit of time on airplanes flying around the world and meeting our franchisees and visiting their stores and assessing their operations and helping them improve pandemic hits. And suddenly we found ourselves isolated from our business partners. We lived on Zoom, right, for nearly nine months plus, and the ability to actually leave the US was fraught with risks. You know, as an example, it wasn’t until recently that the US government lifted the requirement to be tested within 24 hours of returning to the states. And so if you flew somewhere, even if you were vaccinated and you ended up testing positive for COVID 19, you were stuck self isolating for ten days in that foreign market. Knowing that, but knowing that we also had to get into our stores, we investigated and eventually ended up building what we’re calling the Customer Experience Center of Excellence or CC for short. The CC is actually a virtual operation center located in Costa Rica. We have the ability to work with our franchisees and their store managers to do virtual virtual coaching and audit sessions of their stores. We’re operating 24 seven. And just to put it in perspective, you know, pre-pandemic Focus Brands International, I think we did a grand total of about 150 store visits per year. Since we’ve opened up the Center of Excellence in August of 2021, we’ve already done 1900 store visits. And so it’s given us an opportunity to actually be closer to our franchisees post-pandemic.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:16] Now, are your franchisees taking advantage of this additional coaching, and is it on demand or is this kind of schedule coaching calls like how does that occur?

Beto Guajardo: [00:07:27] Yeah, it started off as scheduled coaching calls. What we wanted to do was to make it as easy as possible for the store managers all around the world to be able to be on the other end of that virtual coaching session or audit. And so what we ended up doing is actually sourcing eight languages. Our coaches speak eight languages in Costa Rica, and we start off by reaching out via email and the store managers respond and are able to schedule their own time. So essentially they’re able to schedule their own time in their own language to be able to have this coaching session and tour. Now, in the beginning, you can probably imagine it felt a little bit like, what are these folks doing? What do they want inside my stores? And they were a little skeptical. But I’m telling you, and I’ve watched many, many of these coaching sessions 30 minutes into it, the ice is melted. They welcome the opportunity. They’re excited to show their stores, they’re excited to show their operations. They’re excited to learn more about how they can do a better job of serving their customers. And it is turning into an on demand service now where store managers and franchisees are saying, can we get another coaching session then? So it’s really been fun to watch the evolution of it even in such a short period of time.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:49] Well, it’s interesting because it aligns with the kind of growth of professional coaching in the business world. You know, at one time that was only for the either the superstars or was for some fixing somebody’s problem. Sure. And now it’s like everybody wants to have a coach that’s like a perk now. So if it’s framed right, I guess your franchisees look at it as more of a perk than punishment.

Beto Guajardo: [00:09:15] Leigh, I love the fact that you you framed it up that way. And you’re absolutely right. And I’ll tell you, the folks who are our coaches across our brands in the Center of Excellence in Costa Rica, I can honestly say, you know, the number one quality that we hired for was personality and attitude. And we’ve taught them the essence of restaurant operations. They actually trained for nearly four weeks in our stores themselves as individuals. But what they bring to the table in terms of the way they approach their coaching sessions, really building up the support for the individual store managers and using complementary techniques to get them to move to action is really the secret sauce.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:07] Now, are you finding that this type of coaching, it might be. It’s too early for this. Like while it’s there to serve the existing franchisees, it becomes a selling point for potential franchisees because they know they have this level of support as kind of built into the program.

Beto Guajardo: [00:10:24] Really, we are already seeing a significant amount of interest from investors around the world who are approaching us and saying, hey, you know, I might already be a franchisee with one brand, but I’d love to get into business with focused brands. And because of the services that you can provide, that’s going to help me be more successful more quickly. And then you’re going to love this one way. They’re asking if we can provide those services to the brands that they already have. So, you know, a lot of excitement around this around this program.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:56] So this could become a new franchise.

Beto Guajardo: [00:10:59] You know, it’s interesting. We’ve already been approached by other brands outside of focus brands to see if we could support their operations with our virtual center.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:11] Now, is this virtual is are you referring to it’s a training center in some ways, right? Is that how you’re referring to it?

Beto Guajardo: [00:11:18] Yeah. So basically, I don’t know if you’re familiar with businesses, business process, outsourcers, they are organizations that provide, you know, could be anything from back of the House operations. They could be doing your accounting, they can do your HR, they can do your I.T. and they’re usually located in areas that are much more cost effective to operate than, say, New York City. In this particular case, some some previous experience that I had, I knew Costa Rica would be a sweet spot because of the education of the population, because of their investments in infrastructure. And they also have something called free trade zones, which allow you to stand up operations in a tax advantaged environment. And so we ended up partnering up with a company called OCS. And if you can imagine, it almost looks like a call center, but a little bit more fancy. And they allowed us to actually bring in our brands. And so when you walk in to our section of this operations, it feels like you’re walking into a focused brand’s office decorated with the Cinnabons and the anti ans paraphernalia, if you would. And the coaches actually sit in several rows of cubes, if you can imagine, with multiple screens in front of them. But they actually work very closely with one another, coaching each other on things that they are trying out with their store managers to be more effective. So it’s a real collaborative effort now.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:49] Is the coaching kind of request, is it based on those audits? So you mentioned earlier that, hey, these numbers look down, here’s some suggestions that might help in this area. Or is it something that the franchisee is saying, hey, I’m having a challenge, maybe getting new employees in this market using these techniques, or is it all the above?

Beto Guajardo: [00:13:12] Yeah. Yeah. So let me give you a couple of examples how we see it manifesting itself. On the one hand, let’s talk about stores that score very high in what we call an OCR that stands for Operations Excellence Review. So let’s say a store scores a perfect 100 on the OCR. We are making it a point to celebrate that store success, publishing their names, their locations, their brands when they actually receive that score. And if we have someone in market ensuring that we’re having a celebration with those store managers that scored perfectly well, guess what happens? Other franchisees see this and they want to prove that they can score 100 on these orders. And when they don’t, they want to quickly remedy the situation and come back and have it done again. So it. Really is self perpetuating itself, really driven by the pride of the individuals who own and operate these stores.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:13] And I think that’s a great piece of advice for other leaders. Invest time in supporting and celebrating your top performers to encourage the others what what good looks like and how it’s done. And it’s doable. I think that not enough organizations really invest there. They’re always kind of bringing up the rear and trying to fix kind of the low performers instead of supporting and celebrating the top performers.

Beto Guajardo: [00:14:41] Absolutely. You know, I learned a long time ago with this little coffee company that I used to work for in Seattle, that celebrating those individuals, those operations that were proving themselves to be the best of the best, not knocking down the folks who weren’t doing well, but rather elevating and lifting up those that were doing great. Made more people want to be great.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:08] And a lot of the times when you show them what great looks like, then the other people are like, Well, I can do that. Like, it’s, it’s not some kind of something they were just imagining in their head. They’re seeing this is what great looks like. And now I have something to aim at.

Beto Guajardo: [00:15:25] That’s right. That’s right. I liken it to to being a star athlete. You know, if if you’ve never seen great before, there aren’t many of those amongst us who can actually create great. You know, you think Michael Jordan and all the creativity that he brought to the game of basketball and then how many individuals he inspired to want to be just like Mike. Right. That’s essentially what we’re doing in business.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:50] Well, good for you. So what is it we can do to help you? What do you need more of? Do you need more franchisees? You need more people to work at these franchises. How can we help you?

Beto Guajardo: [00:16:00] Yeah, absolutely. You know, for Focus Brands and again, I really like to think of us as an opportunity company, providing opportunity to investors who want to go into business for themselves, an opportunity for them. You know, look, we’re selling brands that bring joy to people’s lives. It’s fun. It’s a it’s a fun way to build your wealth. And so, you know, you can help us lead by getting the word out that we’ve got opportunities around the world, not just in the US, but around the world to be a part of our brand family.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:37] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you. If somebody wants to connect with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to get ahold of you?

Beto Guajardo: [00:16:47] Yeah, that’s the way is just to go to WWE Focus Brands there. You’ll see a link to either our domestic or international pages where you can provide inquiries. And we’ll get right back to you.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:59] All right. Well, thank you again for sharing your story.

Beto Guajardo: [00:17:02] Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:03] Lee. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:17:11] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere. Get one month free. Add on paycom.

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Gary M. Goldfarb With Interport Logistics, LLC

by

Gary
South Florida Business Radio
Gary M. Goldfarb With Interport Logistics, LLC
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DTLLogo-Blue-Bannerv2InterportLogisticsGaryGary M. Goldfarb is Chief Strategy Officer of Interport Group of Companies, a leading Supply Chain Management providing Foreign Trade Zones & Customs bonded warehousing, inventory control, Transportation, Distribution services and fulfillment and Duty Drawback expertise. With Interport, Gary has developed several key business units including “Compra Fora” Brasil Customs Clearance Center in Miami, GPS Tracking and Location Technology, Foreign Trade Zone, and Trade Facilitation Consulting (Over 280 FTZ activations in the past 6 years) as well as Supply Chain Engineering. Recently created the only Luxury Marine Industry Foreign Trade Zone in the US in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

He is also a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Team at Vanguard Tactical Systems, LLC, a company dedicated to Armor and Tactical Products for Government Purchases.

Additionally, Gary is also a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Team and New Day Food Company, a company dedicated to feeding large-scale population at risk (such as refugees or famine-stricken regions)

He helped bring The Miami Free Zone back to its glory days, with over 96% occupancy, reaching almost $ 1 billion in trade in 2006. Prior to the Miami Free Zone, Goldfarb developed and obtained patents for software solutions for International Logistics. (From2.com). He built and took public Golden Eagle Group (NASDAQ:GEGP) , which became one of the largest Third Party Logistics (3PL) Companies in the United States, specializing in Inventory Control and Just in Time (JIT) programs. He has more than 44 years in International Trade and Supply Chain Management.

He is actively involved in South Florida community and professional associations, serving in many Board of Directors and Executive Boards and Chairs International Trade & Logistics Committees. He is Immediate Past Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Beacon Council, Miami-Dade County’s official Economic Development Organization, Served as Chair of One Community One Goal-Trade and Logistics Committee. He is a treasurer and Member of the Board of Directors of The World Trade Center-Miami, Former Member of the Board of Directors of the International Trade Consortium of Miami Dade County, Board of Advisors of FDOT (Florida Department of Transportation), Chairman of the Board of Advisors of FIU (Florida International University) Engineering and Computing Master’s Program, Chairman of the Advisory Committee at Miami-Dade College School of Global Business. Chairman of US Department of Labor Apprenticeship Program at Miami Dade College, Former Member of the Board of Advisors of First Horizon Bank and Board of Advisors to one of the largest Hedge Funds.

Goldfarb is an inductee into the FCBF Hall of Fame (Florida Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Association).

Connect with Gary on LinkedIn

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Supply Chain Crisis
  • In-Shoring and Near-Shoring
  • Miami Trade Community
  • Foreign Trade Zones
  • The future of Trade

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

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

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here another episode of South Florida Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Diaz Trade Law, your customs expert. Today on South Florida Business Radio, we have Gary Goldfarb with Interport Logistics. Welcome, Gary.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:00:33] Thank you very much.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:34] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about airport logistics. How are you serving folks?

Gary Goldfarb: [00:00:41] Interport logistics is a very interesting company. It’s 20-21 years old, but it’s a surviving entity of a company. I started in the seventies, which went public and we’re very successful and we are again very large operator here and very successful.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] So what’s your backstory? Have you always been involved in supply chain and logistics?

Gary Goldfarb: [00:01:05] I have been in the logistics industry since January 12th, 1972.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:11] You remember the date, January 12th?

Gary Goldfarb: [00:01:14] Yeah, I remember the day of the date. I remember a lot of things. And that’s 50 years. And in 50 years, the business has gone from being a small mom and pop community where we used to have to ship by truck to New York to get to South America to being the gateway to the Americas and receiving cargo from Europe and Asia for the U.S., as well as Europe and Asia for the Caribbean, Central and South America. So it’s been it’s been quite a transformation.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:47] Now, for folks who aren’t familiar with they’re familiar with logistics when they go to the grocery store or get something off a shelf. But they may not understand how how difficult and challenging it is to do what you do every day. Can you share a little bit about the importance of having ports in the area and the ability to get goods from other places quickly into the country and out of the country and moving goods? It’s very complicated. I think people just kind of don’t understand the, you know, the complexity.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:02:24] Yeah, our industry is most probably the most complicated industry around. And people, you know, broad brush here, they call it people, they call it logistics, they call it trucking, they call it freight forwarding. It’s really the management of the supply chain. So the supply chain isn’t a factory that makes a finished good, that delivers it to a warehouse that receives a finished goods. It’s components coming together into a an assembly point. Is that finished product going to another assembly point or warehouse to be joined with other products to be first delivered to in the case of the United States, delivered to a distribution center or in the case of international delivered to another international port, for them to then deliver it to distribution center and then the merchandise gets to a store. So we handle a variety of very large, big box food retailers or club stores, if you will. They buy merchandise in 68 countries. But all of the merchandise in smaller quantities have to arrive in each one of their 24 stores. And we have to move the merchandise from the skate countries into centralized warehouses somewhere, whether it’s in Costa Rica, in Miami, in Los Angeles or one of our other facilities, then unload those those full containers of a single product, mix them with other products to create a store shipment to one of these mega stores containing maybe a thousand different items. It’s really complicated because you have to maintain tracking of where all these items are and what’s required in the store at any one time. Plus, if there are electronics, these items have serial numbers. So you have to track the serial numbers as well. It’s very complicated. I have gone to some of the high schools to speak to the trade and logistics students, because now in Miami, we have five high schools that teach trade and logistics. And I asked him if they know how they get a cell phone. And they say, yeah, they order online and it comes to their house. Well, all of that process of they order online and comes to the house. It’s all really complicated logistics.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:52] Now, you know, a while back, and I think we’re still kind of working through this supply chain crisis. And some of it was because of what you just said, where there’s a lot of parts going to a lot of different places. And over time, if one part isn’t there or one especially an electronic piece of technology isn’t there, then, you know, when the music stops, everybody stops, right? Like you can’t you can’t just send out that cell phone missing the one of the semiconductor components like that. Right.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:05:25] Or every car or a car with a computer.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:28] Right. So like, there are the cars just kind of backing up and they’re just waiting for the computer chip. Like, I mean, that’s part of what exacerbated the situation, right?

Gary Goldfarb: [00:05:38] Yeah. So the supply chain crisis began in February of 2020. At that time, I had written an article on the Hill advocating for something called stress tests of the supply chain. And the reason for that is we saw that any one hiccup could potentially damage the supply chain for very large companies that are publicly traded. And just like banks have stressed us to make sure the bank can survive its stress, nobody stress tests the supply chain of publicly traded companies and people buy and sell shares. Not realizing this company may miss their quarter simply because there are no computer chips for their cars or there is no toilet paper. As we saw at the beginning of the pandemic and I thought I truly thought accounting firms were going to pick this up and say, we’ll run this stress test. Nobody actually did. We did that for all of our customers. We ran a stress test for all of them and helped align their supply chain so that it wouldn’t be just in time. In the 1950s, when Japan was getting rebuilt by the US. They created a project called Just in Time Logistics, which meant that everything arrived just in time.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:06:57] You didn’t need warehouses or inventory to be able to manufacture. Over time, we created just in time retail and we were receiving product that was going to store shelf within a day or two. That doesn’t work anymore. So we’ve changed git over just in time to best deliver time. And when we work with our customers, we look at what is the soonest we can deliver all of it and we align all of the orders to have a best delivery time, not necessarily just in time, and it works. But some of the crisis is manufactured and some of the crisis was people or companies taking advantage of the fact that there is a crisis to profiteer. And you have steamship companies making billions and trillions of dollars of profit. And the rates are 20 times what they should have been. Know what they were. And 20 times. I’m not exaggerating. It’s it’s it’s a multiple of tow that’s profiteering. And some of that was allowed to happen. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:08] Now, was the thinking in just in time when you were just getting the element you need at the moment you need it, then you were saving money in warehousing it and and storing it. So rather than doing that, you were just getting it when you need it. So you didn’t have a need like the the shipping was the warehouse kind of.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:08:29] Right. So I did a Just In Time project for Airbus Industries in Toulouse, France, in the mid-nineties, and Airbus had 70 million square feet of warehousing in and around Toulouse, France, to be able to build an aircraft. And they had millions and millions and millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars of parts sitting around and in avionics. It’s the technology improves so fast that some of these parts were becoming obsolete. So we convince them to allow us to do just in time logistics. It took us a year to develop a computer program to be able to manage it all. And we used to communicate by satellite because the Internet wasn’t worldwide yet, but we were able to change those 70 million square feet of space into a 20 day transportation pair of products coming in to the assembly line to arrive at the right time. So the wing sections would arrive the right time, and two weeks later the landing gear would arrive. There was no point in having the landing gear if the wind sections weren’t attached first, and so on and so forth. And it saved them maybe having hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:09:49] It saved them from obsolescence and it saved them from having maybe two thirds of that 70 million square feet of warehousing space in Toulouse, France. So it does just in time. It’s a very. A creative, intelligent way of building things. They build automobiles just in time, and then there’s no glass for the windshield and the automobile factory shut down, or there is no computer chips for the cars and nobody can build the cars. So we’ve changed the whole dynamics of just in time, because as the world becomes more complex and now we have wars and in Eastern Europe and, you know, God knows what’s going to happen with China and Taiwan, all of those disruptions just don’t allow us to complete a task. So ensuring reassurance, reshoring or near shoring is very important for ensuring, which is a new terminology now, which means do business with friends rather than with strangers. French sharing has become very important, and it’s all because everybody wants to try to get as close to just in time as possible.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:03] But while still protecting themselves for these from these disruptions, because it’s very fragile. I mean, it requires trust on every and every every step of the way.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:11:16] Yeah. But part of it is, is a year long self infliction. We used to manufacture shirts in Colombia and a lot of the other apparel in Central America and computer chips in Costa Rica or the U.S. consumption countries that are still friendly to us over time. China and their giant manufacturing investments took the chips from Costa Rica to to China. They took the apparel from Central America. And therefore, we have a whole migration. Looking for work because there’s no work there. And they started to centralize everything in a location that is, at minimum 15 days transit time to the West Coast and 35 days transit time to the East Coast, a day at least a day’s travel, a different language and a different culture. So we set ourselves up. To fail. And on the first event, black swan event, we failed.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:21] And then are we making changes to prevent this from happening again, or are we still just kind of going boldly forward with what worked maybe five, ten, 20 years ago and isn’t really functioning?

Gary Goldfarb: [00:12:36] We were making changes under this administration. They’ve they’ve discounted those changes and re encouraged activities in China. But we were making changes. Mexico was starting the makela business all over again. Mexico at one time was our manufacturing base. It’s very important because Mexico is also a customer of ours. So it’s very important to do business with your friends because then they buy from you a finished product and a whole bunch of other services. Some apparel manufacturing is coming back to Central America. I don’t know that the chip business is coming back to Costa Rica, but there is some chip manufacturing coming to Texas now. But we haven’t made the inroads I thought we were going to make. The original reason for the famous China tariffs, what they call Section 301, which put 25% additional tariff on Chinese products, was to cause just that, to cause a movement towards manufacturing here. But the Chinese did is they went on to subsidize their factories by 8%. So the impact was a lesser impact and they still manufacture in China. China should be able to manufacture. Vietnam should be able to manufacture. And we do get a lot of product out of Vietnam, Taiwan, all of those countries should have a manufacturing base, but not to the point where they control our destiny. We should not allow that right.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:11] I don’t think that we can allow that, especially on things that are critical, not only just for our stuff that we enjoy from an entertainment standpoint, but for national defense. Some of these things are critical and we can’t be beholden to certain groups that may not have our best interests in hand.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:14:31] Or health care because a great deal of the components for our medicines and I’m talking about medicines that are that are to cure cancer or to or to arrest the development of cancer, come from from Asia, come from China. And the raw materials are the components to make this come from China. We move them, we know. And a container of that refrigerator, container of that medicine was prior to the pandemic. 3030 $500 in freight right now costs $35,000 to bring one of those containers. So if you go to the store and all of a sudden the medicine that you were buying costs twice as much, it’s because the cost of transportation has become exorbitant for no reason, because there’s more capacity. But since the supply chain has been disrupted, those who would profiteer are doing that. Some of the medicine is starting to come from Brazil now, but it’s not not in the volumes that they come out of China. Our. Most vital health care, health care medications, 80% of them are coming out of China.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:48] So where do you see things going like? Are we going to kind of lean more onto our friends and help our friends kind of spin up some of these components? Because we can be a good consumer of a lot of this stuff and we can be a good customer for them if we, you know, and that way we ensure kind of less disruption.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:16:12] Yeah. I mean, it takes political will and it takes political will on both sides. I was very impressed with the fact that that Nancy Pelosi actually went to Taiwan after being warned or threatened or insinuated not to go. And that’s the kind of stuff we need to see. During the previous administration, with all the, you know, the tweeting and all of that and putting all of that aside, we stood firm against China and we stood firm with Mexico, even though Mexico had a had a leftist election. And we said, we’ll work with you and we still trump to China. We said, we love to buy from you, but it can’t be everything. And we we need to be able to reshore some of these effects. Canada has the same issue in Canada has a bigger issue because Canada could be supplying us a tremendous amount of product, but they’re bringing a lot of product from China as well, a smaller population, more vulnerable to to stopping supply chain than us. So we need political will to be able to say, look, we need to make a certain amount of a product here and do a stress test of the government purchases, do a stress test of the publicly traded companies, and have a limit beneath which they can’t operate. So if it’s less if it’s more than 75% of your product coming out of one region, you have to you have to diversify.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:48] Right? I mean, we all know that.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:17:50] Or have more inventory, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:51] Right. I mean, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. And especially if that baskets held by somebody that doesn’t have your best interest at heart.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:17:59] That seems Walmart and Target.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:03] Right? I mean, it becomes a risk. I mean, the risk that, you know, that’s how, you know, a lot of these big companies, when they’re big companies, you know, 50 years later, they don’t exist anymore. It’s from decisions like that.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:18:19] And it’s all about the supply chain. And that’s how that’s why it’s so absolutely complex. What we do is really, really, really complicated. You have export customs at Origin. You have import customs here, which Jennifer Diaz, your sponsor, deals with on a daily basis. And that’s not the only complexity, but one of the complexities. So all of this has to move and flow really fast because our ports aren’t these massive land masses. Our ports were pretty efficient, but they don’t have room for excess capacity. So if things don’t flow through customs, then then it gets stuck there. And we’ve seen Port of Los Angeles all of a sudden come to a complete screeching halt with with 80 or 100 vessels sitting outside the harbor because it didn’t flow through customs fast enough. So it’s you know, it’s a really, really complex industry. You need to be very good in math because if you’re not good in math and be able to calculate and it’s all driven by computer systems, but our computer systems are vast with with multiple terabytes of storage for just one month of operation. So it’s Amazon Cloud boasts most of the supply chain companies simply because they have this vast capacity for for data. And look at Amazon Amazon notes is started to falter and not have the right product mix because they couldn’t get the product.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:01] So now what are you as these chaotic times are stressing everybody out, but are you overall optimistic? Are you kind of bearish? How do you feel about maybe short term and long term? You know, I think.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:20:17] Our companies are making a lot of all of our companies are making a great deal of money because we are now before we were not even considered. Now we are we are the solution of the problem. Right. So those companies like us who are were highly, highly computerized, very organized. Everything in our warehouses is run by radio frequency. So we were the winners of the chaos and our companies are growing and keep on growing and our business keeps on growing. But at some point in time, we have to, as a country start to manufacture. We we need to stress test our supply chain to see where the merchandise is coming from and have a hard and fast rule that any more percentage of X for any one product line should be manufactured in various countries. You have a tremendous manufacturing base in Latin America. You have a tremendous manufacturing base and capability in Africa. Nobody’s ever tapped. You have a lot of Eastern European countries that have great capacity to manufacture. If the if the missiles stop falling, the Ukraine is a major producer of technology. We need to focus on those more so that we have a truly diversified supply chain. But to do that, we have to test ourselves honestly.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:45] Right. Well, that’s the that’s the first step. Right. You have to get a clear picture of of where we stand. And if, you know, 90% of your components are coming from one place, you’re at risk. And if everybody knew that the companies would be less likely to put themselves in that kind of risk. It was the same, like you said, with the financial situation. They were stress testing and they said you had to have this amount of money in cash or available. You can’t, you know, kind of go upside down like you had been. It’s the same thing here. You have to know where you stand. And I think people would be shocked if they knew that some people were relying, you know, at the levels you’re describing on on these kind of dangerous locations.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:22:36] Yeah. I mean, what’s what’s more what’s more important than life saving drugs, right? Right.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:41] I mean, like, people aren’t aware of that, though. I mean.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:22:45] Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:46] But so you have to create regulation, is that it? You have to have the government come in and say this has to be or can you get companies to voluntarily do this and say, hey, we can self-police ourselves, we’re going to do this to let ourselves and our shareholders and our customers know that we have your back.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:23:05] I wrote the I wrote this article in early March of 2020 where? At the beginning of the pandemic. And if you read it today. It’s on the Hill. It’s still out there. We read it today. You’ll see that everything that we thought was going to happen actually happened and magnified ten times over. And it was really, truly painful. I have spoken to several senators, especially Florida senators, and I’ve spoken to some of the Florida Congress community and in D.C. to see if we can at least start to have a conversation about stress testing ourselves. Maybe it becomes voluntary, but if it doesn’t become voluntary, at least government agencies should stress test themselves because it needs that needs to happen. And I thought that I truly, truly thought that the big six auditors, I think, is now the big five. We’re going to lead the charge, because for them, it would be a new a new line of business. But nobody really understood what was going to happen. And then when it happened, everybody said, well, supply chain, let’s blame China, but let’s blame ourselves. We knew this was coming.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:22] Right. I mean, just take responsibility. Well, you can take responsibility on I mean, we can control that part of the equation. We can see what’s what, you know, we can count. You said math was important. I mean, to do the math of where your components are coming from, what percentage is it? That’s a dream that can come true if you want to. If you have the will.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:24:44] Yeah. It’s just we have to. We have to have the political will to. To look at ourselves, not as Republicans and Democrats, but to look at ourselves as citizens of this great country and say, okay, how do we prevent this from happening again? The next time. And if we’re serious as a as a country, we do that. I’ve spoken to ta ta ta Senator Scott and he gets it. But he’s one of 100. You know, we need to have a greater conversation. And I think it requires Congress to to at least have some sort of hearings and say, okay, the supply chain isn’t broken because the Port of Los Angeles didn’t manage itself properly. It begins, like you said. It begins at the beginning. Where is our flow coming from and why is it all concentrated in one area?

Lee Kantor: [00:25:48] Right. But the public, it seems like they see a, you know, a photograph, a satellite photograph of 80 ships waiting. And then it’s easy to go, wow. Well, that’s the problem. Like, it’s so complex, a complex issue. I don’t know if the public can grasp where the problem begins and ends. And and that’s just a visual. Like they can get that, oh, look, they can’t get in. So that must be the problem. And it’s just more complicated than that. That’s just that’s not that might be a symptom, but that’s not the cause.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:26:22] Right. So so, you know, when you have an outage in a community and the traffic lights go out and then the traffic lights get out of synchronous synchronization and for two or three weeks until they synchronize again, you stop at every red light and you don’t understand why you’re not being able to go through. So imagine a multiply that by a thousand times and then you have the Port of Los Angeles gets really congested. So all of us start routing cargo away from Los Angeles to the East Coast. So now the ports in the East Coast are totally congested because we have more cargo than we were planning on having. Right. So it’s the same is the same. No, no longer synchronized. The red lights and the Panama Canal got congested because now the ships have to cross the Panama Canal. Yeah, we need to look at it from the beginning and it would be wonderful. I would more than glad to participate in anything like this. But we need to create a wave. And maybe the groundswell starts from South Florida because we are the leading community for for the supply international supply chain of global supply chain. There are more freight forwarders in Miami than in the rest of the United States combined. There are more bonded warehouses in Miami than in the rest of the United States combined.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:48] Well, I think it’s one of those things where, you know, if change has to start with some somewhere and and change can begin with one act. So, I mean, maybe we should continue to be having these conversations and just make more and more people aware of how fragile this is. We got a sense of how fragile things are. But, I mean, once you I think you’re right on point with this. Let’s just stress test things and just let the public and let everybody know how fragile this is. I mean, this is it’s too important of an issue. I mean, you saw that we’re just kneecapped when, you know, in a blink of an eye, the whole, you know, the house of cards come crashing down.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:28:34] Yeah. I mean, maybe you want to start a groundswell. I mean. I mean, if you want me to, but.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:39] Well, I think it’s important to just keep. Keep having these conversations. And and I think you’ve got to hold these companies accountable in terms of. Okay, what percentage of your components, how reliant are you on these players and what’s what? I mean, let’s this shouldn’t be a secret. If everybody knew, they’d be shocked. And then I think we’d be taking more action. But I think you’ve got to start somewhere.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:29:05] So Wal-Mart missed expectations this quarter, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:29:08] Right.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:29:09] Because of the supply chain. But they’ve known this all.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:12] Along, right? They know it. But but they’re not they’re not being transparent enough.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:29:21] So if I was the FTC, I would require companies that that have a vulnerability to supply chain to have published a supply chain stress test.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:31] Right. It’s like, look, it’s just it goes down to like even at the basic level for individuals, understand, there’s a label on your food that tells you what’s inside. There should be a label on these companies that say what percentage of their components are coming and how reliant are they, especially on things that we deem as essential and critical. I mean, it can’t be a secret that this is happening and then we’re like looking at each other. How did this happen? And we’re blaming other things where there was a lot of control that we had in this. We could have, you know, if if they were truly transparent, we could have been holding them accountable and saying, okay, why aren’t you know, when you get to whatever the percentage that you think is the right percentage, then you have to diversify. Then you move a plant somewhere else. That would help kind of the global situation here because it’s a big planet here filled with opportunity and other locations that you can diversify into, especially into when they know that you’re going to be a customer, that it’s not just a super risky thing that, you know, if we build it, they will come. You tell them, Look, I can’t give you any more capacity. I have to move it somewhere else, and I’d prefer to move it somewhere. That’s my friend.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:30:45] Right. So I don’t know how we’re running on time, but I can tell you that Wal-Mart took a different approach. They said, well, you know, if we’re going to be have shortages, we’re just going to buy two or three or four times what we normally buy and we’re going to have inventory on hand, which they did. And over the year, last year and a half, they built up a huge inventory on hand. And then with the recession, the economy slowed down and their sales slowed down. And now Wal-Mart is saying they have too much inventory because they didn’t do a stress test to begin with.

Lee Kantor: [00:31:23] Right. But that was their way of dealing with it without dealing with it. And it’s like you said when you were talking about those that airplane parts, they become obsolete at some point. Nobody wants, you know, the the fashion you thought they wanted, you know, 18 months ago. It’s it’s obsolete now. They’re not interested. Exactly. So now what do you do with it? Now you’re going to have to discount it, and now you’re going to miss earnings again. So if you knew all of this or you were held accountable to this, then you wouldn’t be in this situation. They tried to kind of use their power of money and solve this by throwing a lot of money at it. But they didn’t really get to the systemic heart of the problem.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:32:07] You’re absolutely right.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:09] Well, Gary, I could talk to you all day about this because I think it’s super important and I think that people should know about it because it is going to affect them one way or another, whether they realize it or not. But folks who want to learn more about airport logistics, what is the best way to get a hold of you or somebody on your team to so you can help them solve their supply chain crisis?

Gary Goldfarb: [00:32:35] You can always visit W WW and deport us. And then there’s a link to me there. Or you can go on on LinkedIn and friend me Gary Goldfarb on LinkedIn, which is a great product for the business community to be able to talk to each other. So I’m always available.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:55] Well, Gary, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Gary Goldfarb: [00:33:02] Thank you very much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:33:03] All right. This is Lee Kantor will all next time on South Florida Business Radio.

Paolo Bilotta With Curava Recycled Glass Surfaces

by

South Florida Business Radio
South Florida Business Radio
Paolo Bilotta With Curava Recycled Glass Surfaces
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DTLLogo-Blue-Bannerv2Paolo Bilotta, Owner of Curava Recycled Glass Surfaces

Paolo Graduated from Phillips Academy (Andover, MA), B.S. from Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA), and an owner of 2 companies (Stone fabrication shop in NH and Curava) since 1998.

Connect with Paolo on LinkedIn

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • The business environment is South Florida
  • Combating product cost inflation
  • Importance of Sustainable Products like theirs
  • Importance of Small Businesses for the economy
  • The supply chain environment post Covid

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:01] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in South Florida. It’s time for South Florida Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here another episode of South Florida Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Diaz Trade Law, your customs expert today on South Florida Business Radio. We have Paolo Bilotta with Curava. Welcome.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:00:33] Thank you. Thank you for having me on the air.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:36] Well, I’m excited. I’m excited to learn about Curava Recycled Glass Surfaces. How are you serving, folks?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:00:43] I’m sorry. How are we? Oh, we’re serving folks. Basically, what we do is we’re a manufacturer and distributor of a particular type of surfacing product that’s primarily used for countertops, any horizontal surfaces. And it’s basically the product consists of a mix of a quartz and polyester resin, and the majority of the contents of that is actually recycled glass, which we source from landfills. We source from post-industrial sources that make shower glass. We basically reincorporate into the cycle the system waste that’s been that we sterilize ourself, we sort through colors and sizes, and we create the very interesting and beautiful surfaces that have a very, very unique look. So we’re kind of a niche market within the surfacing industry. But we’ve been we’ve been doing this now for 12 years and pretty much on a national level, even though our main our main market is actually our best market is actually here in Florida, we are not, but we’re present mostly along the East Coast and a couple of areas on the West Coast and around the L.A. area and up in the Denver area as well, and Colorado. But this seems to be our best market. Our product actually has a very it’s very contemporary. So Florida has very contemporary trends as far as kitchen cabinets and renovation. So it does very well, especially along the coast.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:30] So how did you get how did you get into this line of work? Were you always involved in this?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:02:36] I was always yeah. I was always involved in the in the stone industry since right out of college. And it’s a family owned business. But before this, we were actually it’s my brother and myself. We were actually mostly into natural stone and we were only doing commercial projects in particularly cladding, veneer cladding, exterior veneers of churches of, of courthouses with with solid pieces of whatever stone the architect specified. But that got to be a little bit stressful also because there’s different locations around the country. Then it became different, different projects around the world and it was a lot of traveling. So I basically decided to kind of branch off and and create one particular product and just just base here in the US and in Florida. And so it turned out to to work.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:38] So but what how did kind of recycle glass get on your radar to use as as part of this?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:03:46] It was just we were just running I was just running some experiments on on my downtime, like on weekends about how to actually create a surface that is a little bit different from the average quartz surface, which I’m not sure if the listeners are familiar with, but it’s it’s an engineered stone, it’s not a natural stone, but they have kind of they mimic it’s a way to mimic natural stone through machinery. Basically, it’s made in factories. So I wanted to be kind of in that. That general field. But I wanted to create something that was very unique and it had a very unique look. And so in just testing it out, we tested it out in cement before just to get the look. And it really appealed to me. And then I started showing it around to a lot of renovators and kitchen and bath dealers and it, it basically got really good feedback. So we started producing small batches and suddenly small batches became bigger batches. And now we, we do quite a bit of volume around the country. And we also have been working with one of the big box stores, only for one box stores for for probably about ten years now. Now, that’s helped to to make awareness to create awareness for the product.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:19] Are you the only firm that that does it with recycled glass like this, or is that becoming now more popular for other manufacturers?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:05:29] No, we’re not the only firm. We’ve never been the only firm. But we’re we were the first firm to to make it with a certain type of binder, which is incredibly resistant. But there were just a handful, maybe ten years ago now. Actually there are fewer, believe it or not, because some of them haven’t made it. And we kind of we kind of start we kind of grew and we feel that that spot. So I think there are are very local. There are not as many there’s very few maybe national providers of this product, but there’s probably more very localized shops that make this probably custom, custom made for any particular project or or need in the kitchen. But as far as the actual number has gone down as far as nationally available companies, is it which is interesting.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:34] Is it difficult to get the recycled glass? I mean, is is that something because that adds a new element to this, right?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:06:42] Yeah. Well, the easy the easy part is that there’s never a shortage.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:47] There’s there’s a lot of recycled glass out there just getting it right.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:06:51] There’s a lot of glass that is in that is in landfills or they’re in factories and they’re just sitting there and they’re basically waste. Obviously, it’s not toxic, thank goodness. Not something that, you know, it’s it’s something that can be reused as many times as possible. Glass can be melted and reused for other purposes, or it can be just incorporating in this. But so it’s not to your question. Oh, it’s not easy. The part that’s a little bit tricky is the obviously the sterilization and the crushing and the filtering, which is we do that and it’s basically every slab of ours has exactly the same formula as far as different grains and different sizes of glass per color, so that every batch is exactly uniform, which is a big plus. So every every slab, every color of ours looks basically the same, whether we produce it yesterday or two years ago, because it’s exactly the same. We control the glass sizes and the glass colors to the dot and they get electronically dosed for every slab. So now answer your question that the actual the actual quantity that’s available to recycle is is almost infinite.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:22] Now, is it? You know, if I’m using this on my countertop, is this something that is going to, you know, is it going to stay in the way that it’s looking or like, does it stay easy? Does it chip like are there like is the surface difficult to maintain?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:08:42] No, not at all. Actually, it’s very similar to any non-porous surface, like an engineered stone, like a quartz, mainly because we use a binder that is that is non-porous. It’s a polyester resin. The binder is basically it’s what keeps everything together and it’s not it’s a very small portion of the slab, but it’s actually it’s the most important part because the quality of the binder determines how durable the surface is. And we use an extremely high quality binder. And so nothing, nothing will stain it chipping. Not really, no. Unless obviously, you know, we do outrageous things like put a refrigerator on your countertops, maybe you may get a little chip. But no, for the most part, we don’t have any of those issues.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:34] Now in terms of sustainable products, I would imagine that this is attracting a certain customer. That this is a super important is have you found that to be so?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:09:47] Yes. It’s actually been interesting because early on when we started, believe it or not, the people that were most attracted to our product were actually attracted by the look of it, and secondary was the sustainability of it. But over the years, it’s kind of reversed. I mean, people I mean, I’m assuming they still like the look because it’s an essential part, but they’re more and more I found more more and more attracted to the fact that that we’re removing waste, we’re making it usable, and we’re and we’re making it to create something that’s esthetically pleasing as well. And that’s been interesting. I thought I thought that the sustainability factor would have been 99% of the decision of the buyers, but it wasn’t initially. It’s becoming more and more important now, especially on commercial projects.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:40] And especially I mean, obviously it looks so good that being sustainable is like the cherry on top, right? Like sometimes sometimes with sustainable products, you’re like, Oh, well, at least it’s sustainable. Like in this the product looks fantastic and it’s sustainable. Like you’re getting the best of both worlds.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:11:03] Correct. Yeah, but the funny thing is that the trend is that, oh wow, the product is sustainable and it looks fantastic. So I think the emphasis is shifting a little bit more towards the sustainability part, which is actually what we really wanted because that’s that’s basically what we’re trying to push right now.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:27] And how was it at the beginning when you were trying to find the recycled glass? Was it something because you’re taking other people’s waste and then putting it into your product? That’s kind of the featured element. Was this something that that companies were like, hey, take as much as you want? Like they were like happy to get rid of it and happy to use you as a resource to help them get rid of it or.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:11:49] Is for some. It’s a great question, actually. And for some it really depends on the color of the glass for for clear glass, for example, there’s such a big market, a lot of the clear glass we use is post-industrial or factories that make shower glass enclosures or etc.. And in those cases, actually, they’re first there’s a big market for re melting it and creating new plate glass. So in those cases, we actually have to we have to auction it and we have to we have to buy it for certain other colors. It’s actually it’s like you’re saying they are like, please, can you take can you take this this glass? Because we have we have way too many. Like, for example, there’s way too many beer bottles in landfills. There’s wine bottles, beer bottles and in other post-industrial products for for deodorants and things like that. So it depends mostly on the color, but but so it’s a bit of a mix. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:58] Now how has the kind of the small business community been for you? I guess you’re in South Florida now, but you started you said in the northeast, is that right?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:13:11] Correct. Yeah, we started up near Boston and in New Hampshire.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:15] And then. So can you share maybe the difference between the small business community and each each locale?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:13:25] Well, Florida is definitely a more vibrant I mean, even compared to Massachusetts. I mean, we were in New Hampshire, which is a lot a lot less vibrant than here, but Florida. There’s way more small businesses. And so most of our transactions and our sales are to small business owners that actually cut up our material, install it for the final customer. And it’s actually been the feeling. The feeling you get is that it’s so alive and now and it’s just becoming more and more alive because we all know what’s happening to the Florida population. It’s increasing so fast. It’s just there’s there’s always more and more going on. And there’s small businesses popping up left and right that are related to our industry. So it’s it feels more lively. And it’s it’s it’s definitely a happening market and it’s feeling like it’s going that direction faster and faster, which is, which is great because the more goes in that direction, the more we can sell, the more glass we remove from landfills.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:37] Right. It’s it’s kind of one of those righteous circles like at every stage, you know, you’re winning. People are winning at every stage. That’s fantastic.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:14:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s been honestly Florida here ten years in Florida and it’s been South Florida and it’s been I love it. I love working here and I really like. And then the interesting thing is it’s because it’s a big state. Every little every every area of Florida kind of has its own own market and its own type of small business, and they’re all good. I mean, we’ve had I’ve had very few bad experiences and I hope very few people have had bad experiences with us. So now it’s been it’s been very good.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:25] So primarily you sell to people who install it in consumers hands or can consumers get it right from you? Or they consumers can’t get it from you. They have to go through no consumers.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:15:37] Consumers would get it from from fabrication shops they’re called, which are basically the companies that have the equipment to cut down our slabs, which are pretty, pretty big and and cut them down into a kitchen doing all the edging. And then they’ll also install it in the homeowner. So, no, we don’t sell directly to consumers.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:59] And now any advice for business people out there that are in the business of selling to kind of middlemen, that they sell a product that a consumer is going to use, but it’s going to go through a middleman. Is there anything you’ve learned over the years that helps kind of identify the good ones and how to, you know, create win win partnerships with kind of, in your case, fabricators?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:16:27] Yeah, I think there’s one main piece of advice is to that the middle entity, whether it’s a business or an individual that handles their product and resells it properly. Educates the final consumer about the product, about the characteristics. That’s that’s essential because the more that they just describe in detail what what they’re getting to the final consumer, the more streamlined the process is the expectations also of delivery, the timeframe of the installation? It’s I think it’s key because when when people in the middle promised things that are not realistic, sometimes it’s it fires back at the people. Well, it hurts the consumer and then it fires back at the people that are making the product that were never really endorsed, the the the expectations of timing that the middle people promised their own customers. So I think it’s an essential part, just the the openness and the and the education to the final consumer about what they’re getting when they’re getting. And sometimes that doesn’t happen. But that’s that’s who, you know, that someone you can work with in the future or not.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:54] Now, that seems to be one of those things when you are getting in business with, in your case, fabricators to real, because they’re kind of you want to protect your brand, right? And then you’re trusting them to, like you said, communicate the truth and what what’s realistic and manage the expectations of the end consumer. To really have those lines of communication open. Seems like it could get tricky. Do you have some kind of can you share a story on how you were able to maybe build the relationships trust in a way that that they the fabricator was kind of kind of protecting your brand and telling the truth and helping educate the consumer in the way that it would be as if you were doing that.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:18:50] Yeah, well, I think the best I’m not sure. I mean, with a particular fabricator.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:57] I mean, don’t name any names, but.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:18:59] But no, no, no. I’m just thinking of if I could think of a specific instance. But sometimes it’s to to have our salespeople travel with the salespeople of the fabricator or actually be present initially on the first few jobs.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:16] Or oh, so you do so customer. So you’re really so your people are coming kind of along for the ride initially to help kind of that hand-off be as smooth as possible. So there are less miscommunications and there are kind of clear understandings of the correct.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:19:34] Yeah, correct. But I think the main tool that that that we’ve learned to use is to on our website, all of the information is available for the final for everyone, for the fabricator, for the homeowner. So it’s all there. And we encourage everyone to see it. What it’s what our product is made of, the use and care, the warranty, the basically anything that’s relevant, we it’s very important, I think, for our small business to put everything out there so that there’s just there’s no way that people can misinterpret anything or can can not understand what the product looks like, what the product feels like, how it performs. And and that’s been very, very helpful. So post if there’s any issues in general, we’ve been very, very proactive in dealing then with with the final customer if there’s any issue at all. And then because we want to we care about our name, correct? So from that moment on, we if there’s any, we just take over and and we work with the final customer in educating them and assisting them because so many times it’s it’s just easier.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:55] Now, you mentioned that fabricators are important part of your growth, like what is a fabricator who isn’t aware of your brand right now? Why should they be like, what is something like how would you pitch a fabricator that maybe isn’t carrying your brand right now?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:21:16] Well, simply because it’s a niche market of a much larger product line. And however, this niche is growing fast and people are now becoming more and more aware in general. About anything that’s sustainable. I mean, we’ve seen that with with with Tesla. I mean, now now today compared to five years ago, you see, I don’t know how many times more Tesla is on the road. So it’s just a trend that’s happening and it’s something basically fabricators need to be convinced that this niche will become. Constantly bigger. And it’s also a product where it’s considered a not specialty, but again, a niche one. So they can also do well installing it both financially and just ethically. And so it’s something that is a little bit of a I would say like a medium high priced final product. Not not not too expensive, but it’s medium high. And it’s it’s something that the fabricator can do well on.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:32] Well, if somebody wants to learn more and get a hold of you or somebody on your team, what is the website?

Paolo Bilotta: [00:22:40] The website is our name. So it’s qr a v a dot com. Well, thank you. See all the colors? You’ll see how it’s made. And you will see everything you need to know.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:54] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Paolo Bilotta: [00:23:00] No. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:01] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on South Florida Business Radio.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand With Polish Dental Center

by

Tiffany Rand
Atlanta Business Radio
Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand With Polish Dental Center
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PolishDentalCenterTiffany RandDr. Tiffany Jamison Rand is the founder and CEO of Polish Dental Center, a leading provider of general dentistry with multiple locations across Georgia. Dr. Rand graduated from Xavier University and received her DDS at the Howard University College of Dentistry. Polish has received countless accolades and was recently recognized on the Inc. 5000 list due to tremendous growth.

Connect with Tiffany on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Tech-Enabled Medical Practices
  • The Importance of Mentorship, Community and Breaking Barriers
  • Purposeful Risk and Getting Outside of Comfort Zone
  • Paving the Way for Future Black Female Leaders

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Lee Kanter 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 on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the Atlanta Business Radio, we have Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand, or as her patients call her, Dr. Tiff. And she is with the Polish Dental Center. Welcome, Dr. Tiff.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:00:55] Hey. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:57] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Polish Dental Center. How are you serving folks?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:01:03] Oh, well. So first, thank you for having me. I’m an Atlanta native, so I grew up listening to you. I am the CEO and founder of Polish Dental Centers. We have been serving Atlanta for the last ten years. We are a fast growing company of five practices, soon to be six, seven, eight, nine, ten. We just received the award and the INC 5000 for one of the fastest growing companies in the United States for for 2022.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:38] So when you started Polish Dental Center, did you always view it as a multi-location operation or was it something that just organically grew over the years?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:01:50] Well, I think it was it did organically grow. And as I’m I’m a dentist by trade, no MBA, no nothing. Right. So so my message to all dentists out there is that you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. Nothing special. Special. They’re really, really good at dentistry. Love dentistry. It is my passion, but also the business bug bit me because I grew up, my dad owned multiple sites, technology firms and so after a while I started to as being an operator in in dentistry, I was like, well, what’s my contingency plan? What is my retirement plan? I used to see so many dentists as they got as they age and get older. They had carpal tunnel. And and my mentor talks about about about about her body and how it broke down so quickly. I started to think about my future and scaling a business was the only way because I feel like dentistry combines that entrepreneurship, spirit and health care. And it just was a fit for me.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:59] Now, when you’re thinking about scaling historically, dental offices tend to be kind of dentist driven, so the person has a relationship with that. Given dentist, it’s not thought of like, Oh, I’ll just pop into this. Other dental office says the same name like you would, you know, like a a restaurant or a hamburger chain. How do you kind of get over that to create a brand but also create those relationships?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:03:25] Oh, excellent question. So I always tell everyone dentistry has gone very corporate. Right. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It has gone very corporate. I mean, there are people that know nothing about dentistry that by 100, 204 hundred dental practices, and that’s one model. But my model is no investors, no private equity money taken on my part. It is just me and as a dentist, which is, you know, dentists own dentists lead. We have the resources of a DSO, a dental service organization, which is what those larger ones are that some people do pop in and out of and have the have the private practice, feel that we give our give our patients. So we are that hybrid. We’re not that that one off dentists where, you know, sometimes there’s you know, the service and the technology might not be there to service a patient. But we are a group and we hire dentists that that believe the same thing that we do. Right. We want to give our patients a quality experience with the latest technology and, you know, the the lowest amount of fuss and have the how do you say the convenience of like something that has like a major rund? So kind of like chick or Chick fil A model, but still has a relationship with their dentist. And so like that, that’s, that’s our sweet spot and that’s why we’ve been successful.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:55] So how are you kind of leveraging technology and kind of this service first mentality in experience with the patient? Can you share how that would be different for a patient as opposed to kind of maybe the old school way of what they’re used to dealing with?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:05:11] Oh, sure. Yeah. Very simple question. Number one, you can access our schedule online 24 hours a day. So so we use technology so that you can actually you don’t even need to call us. You can go online right now, see an appointment for whatever service you need to book that appointment. You get a confirmation back and we are all we are mostly techs and we have a system where we know a lot of people don’t answer their phone anymore. Right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I have a whole bunch I don’t know what’s going on, but I just have a whole bunch of random, random people calling my phone. And with us, you know, we text you back, we talk to you back. I also have a 24 hour call center that feels all of our calls. So you can that you can call us at 3:00 in the morning and someone will answer the phone and they will you can put you right on the read our schedule and put you right there on our schedule. No, no, no questions asked. So that’s something that’s something different is access to us at all times. Access to the dentist. Right. Because because your emergency doesn’t just happen between the hours of 9 to 5. And we realize that. Another thing that we outsource is our insurance billing. There’s a lot of times people miss in dentistry. Human error is really high with insurance. So we have a dedicated team that verifies all our patients insurance to make sure that we don’t miss anything. So you don’t have any unexpected oops bills coming to you. So those are just a few things that we do.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:49] Now in your journey, as opposed to kind of growing an individual dental practice, you’ve decided to kind of build this dental empire here in Atlanta. Is this something you mentioned opening more and more sites around town? Is this something that’s going to go beyond Atlanta? Is that your vision that this will be a national chain?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:07:10] So, of course, you know, never my vision is God vision. But for me right now, as a as a as a wife and mother of twins, you know, it is very manageable for me to keep it in Georgia. I’m I’m from Georgia. I’m raised in Atlanta, born and raised in Atlanta. And, you know, this city and this community is something that I’m passionate about. And so, you know, everyone has teeth, everyone’s a customer. Or if they don’t have teeth, they’re still a customer. So, you know, we’re we there are plenty of mouths of service in and around the Atlanta metropolitan area. And right now we are no more than 20 miles outside of the city. And there’s there’s there’s plenty of people to service. So right now, we’re very, very much concentrating on this city, and then we’ll see where it takes us.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:02] Now, in your experience, I’m kind of fascinated by this going through like initially dentistry. That was the goal, right? Like I’m going to be a dentist, I’m going to have my own practice. That was kind of what you were aiming at. And then somewhere it kind of got modified to say, Okay, why? If I can do this in one place, why can’t I do it in five places? So that’s a that’s kind of a mental mindset shift. When you made that shift, is the dental community, your ecosystem around you of mentors and supporters, is that something that people in the dental world say? Yeah, that that makes perfect sense, go for it? Or is that are they encouraging or is that something that’s like, are you sure you want to do that? Like, that’s a lot of risk. That’s different, you know, like, what does that ecosystem feel about somebody that’s like you, an empire builder now?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:08:50] So it is very polarizing. I mean, you are absolutely right. You know, people that have have you in their mind as one thing, right. It is hard to change their mind to another thing. It’s just is more about finding other people that are doing it. So we have a I’m part of an organization called Dental Entrepreneurs Organization, which has been a organization that has connected me with other just regular dentist who want more, who want who want more, who want to scale their dental practice, who have these ideas. They’re just like, Hey, you know, I want to be able to pass on my quality of care and I don’t want to be. Run by a corporate driven machine that is going to treat my patients like a number. So, you know, there are people in our ecosystem that feel like they but they’re very few and small in between. There is a niche kind of thing. But no, you’re absolutely right. We we do have some dentists that are like, wow, how do you do that? I’m like, Yeah, you can you can do this yourself. You can do this with systems and implementation. And if you kind of remove yourself from chair side and really start thinking and researching, I mean, YouTube and Google, it has it all there. So it’s nothing. It is a niche and not everyone wants you to do that. But but they also support you. Like once you get big enough and you show that you can that it is something sustainable, people usually just get on board and and want to work with you or for you. And and so it’s been pretty good. It’s been pretty supportive for me, at least now.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:34] Recently I was asked to talk about the Atlanta entrepreneur community and the ecosystem here, and I’m a big fan of it. I think that we do a great job as a community supporting small to midsize businesses and a lot of places. There’s a lot of resources for an entrepreneur, maybe more so in the tech community than in other industries, but definitely in the tech community there’s a lot of resources. Have you found that to be the case as you’ve been trying to, to scale and being a black female entrepreneur, are you finding that this is an ecosystem that is supportive and that is trying to help? Or do you find it, you know, cumbersome and getting in your way?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:11:16] Well, it is very tough. I would say that the biggest barrier is to be, you know, there’s a lot of women. I forget what the statistics are. There’s like a very small percentage of women entrepreneurs, and there’s even a smaller percentage of women entrepreneurs that have that have employees. And so, you know, it is it is very tough. It is very hard. But, you know, if you if you put it out there, if you’re doing well, mentorship just kind of comes to you, right? People gravitate towards the light. And so whether it’s male or female entrepreneurs, you know, I do. I would say that I’m positioning myself more as a businesswoman, more than a dentist. So that opens up my ability to attract mentors that that that that can help me because at this point, I’m running a business. Not necessarily dental practices that we happen to sell dentistry. We are a business that happens to sell dentistry. So there are mentorships out there. But it is tough because mentors really, they people mentor people that they can see themselves in. And as a black female, there isn’t a lot of trailblazers, I would say, am I? That is doing what I’m doing. But I’m, I, I find myself more mentoring others to be like me because I do feel like there is the missing space as a black female in that in this ecosystem, this, this middle ground.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:54] In the dentistry ecosystem or the female entrepreneur ecosystem?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:12:58] Oh, no, in the in the dentistry niche. In the dentistry niche, not female entrepreneurs. It opens up when you, when you’re just looked at as a business. But in dentistry, there’s not a lot of female dentists that are scaling.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:11] Is there a lot of female dentists?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:13:15] Oh, no, there’s we have more, but it’s a it’s a male dominated career and especially males that are male dominated as you get older in dentistry. Right. As you as your tenure gets longer because women we decide on other paths because of family obligation and children and pressure to be a wife and a mother. So our career sometimes proved to be shorter in the field of dentistry. So like that also, that also makes it more male dominated.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:57] Now, you mentioned that mentorship is important to you. How about some advice for other, you know, entrepreneurs out there that are looking to scale their business and dream bigger and aim higher? Is there any advice you can give an entrepreneur out there to kind of maybe get out of their comfort zone and just, you know.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:14:18] So. Well, so my my my husband makes fun of me. He says, instead of ready, aim, fire. I’m ready, fire, aim. And he’s like, you just he’s like he’s like, you just do it. He’s like, the moment someone gives you an idea, you just do it. And so it’s a cliche, but just do it. Google YouTube, it, it’s going to be on there. Figure it out and just execute, execute, execute, execute. I have found that I’ve been able to execute my way out of every problem is all about consistency. Just keep it up and if you run into an obstacle, just continue to execute it is there. You can do it. There are there are resources out there even if they’re not people. Right. Like a lot of people spend a lot of time on, oh, I need to have a business plan. I need to do this. I don’t have a business plan. I never had a business plan. I had a vision board. That’s a vision for every year, right? Like what else do I want? And I just hit what’s on my vision board and like, that’s my style and that’s what has worked for me. I know it works for other people a different way, but for me it has been all execution and just putting the pieces together with with just with just resources from the Internet, essentially.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:37] But, but at the bottom line of this is taking action like get it out of your head and get it into real world information rather than just having all these ideas that you’re going to do one day. It’s better to just do something today then kind of dream of something tomorrow.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:15:53] Yeah. And, and you will get comfortable with it. Like eventually it’s called I would say what I would, I feel like it is, is controlled paranoia because once you stop getting that check like every two weeks, right. People are used to getting a W-2 every two weeks. Right. And one thing that you have to get used to as an entrepreneur is that I am is you have to be like you have to realize, hey, I am enough. I don’t need this check. I can I can live. I will live. I will make it. And when you put enough pressure there to to to live and sustain your lifestyle, oh, you’re going to you’re going to you’re going to fly. You know, like it’s going to it’s going to happen for you. But a lot of time, that comfort zone that that safety net needs to be removed in order for you to really take take a bet on yourself and take a chance on yourself.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:48] Right. Because ironically, that’s an illusion, the safety net, because now you’re dependent on other people. Now when it’s your own business, you’re relying on you. And who do you trust more than you? You know, some stranger who. Who treats you like a. A line on the spreadsheet or yourself.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:17:05] Exactly. You are the only you are enough. And that’s what I would say to anyone. You are enough. You’re right that you too. They can take it from you tomorrow. Right. And and you’re like, oh, okay. You know? And so you’re going to you are going to survive. You’ll live.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:23] Now for you, what do you need more of? How can we help? Do you just need more patients coming into the clinics? You need more dentists to partner with that kind of believe in what you believe in and want to kind of take their business to new levels. How can we help you?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:17:38] How can you help me? So the. I say this? The driving force of my business are good qualified providers. I can always find a dental practice to put them in. I have a machine, you know, bragging on myself. I have a machine that generates patients. Right. We have the model down. We can print dental practices. Having a good qualified dentist that believe in the perfect, perfect patient experience, that believe in same day start. Don’t waste our patient wasting our patient’s time. They’re driving back. Have you been to the dentist? Like. Like for one tooth, like, five times. It’s like, you know, like that doesn’t need to happen. Right. And so, like, like. Like having good qualified providers. If I had a provider come to me today, I was like, Give me three months and I’ll build a practice around you. Like that’s how confident I am about our model and our service model.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:42] Now, are these are these providers, are they right out of college? Do they have their own practice? Maybe they’re frustrated. They’re working with another firm and they’re frustrated. What is that kind of make up of that ideal provider?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:18:54] All right. So we have all so the reason the way I’ve been able to scale is I have distressed practices, distress practices. I bought distress practices. That means someone’s getting ready to retire. Someone’s died, someone’s divorced. You know, somebody is. So that’s how I’ve acquired them, right? And I judge them up and put our systems, and then they become this nice place that delivers the perfect patient experience. Right. And so those are ideal, right? Those people are ideal. Like, if you’re tired and you just want someone to take your practice over, that’s us. Now what we do is we put in people that have residencies, at least a residency. We don’t we don’t take fresh doctors out of school. They have at least had a residency and or 3 to 5 years of, of, of schooling already. They’ve already kind of been been in there, been in the game for a little while. But mostly we believe in doctors that they have to have a residency, some kind of residency, some kind of naval training, military training. Those are kind of residency programs. And we put them in there and then we kind of we teach them our thought process, the way we think about patient service, because we already know you have the tactile skills. We just we’re talking about a service and how you deliver service and how you think about delivering service to people because it’s all about people. And that’s how we have people that want to come back and repeat repeat customers just like anything else. I think I answered the question. Yeah, you were saying those are the doctors, but those are those are doctors we want.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:38] So you want them that you can kind of train them in your way before they got too many bad habits.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:20:45] Yes. And and and even we and by the way, we even we even now were at the at the precipice where we need doctors who are mentors with inside the company. Because we have so many we have so many younger doctors. We do need doctors who are just like, hey, I’m a good doc. I just don’t want to run a company. I don’t want to run a dental practice anymore because there’s like 100 bills associated with it. And I really just want to focus on quality of care. We’ll take that, too. And so we’re at the point where we need a clinical director besides just me, right? Because I wear a number of hats as a CEO, I wear too many hats, probably. But but yeah, we, we, we definitely are expanding and we’ll, we’ll need more seasoned doctors who just want to practice and we welcome them with open arms. So all of the above great specialist oral surgeons and honest, you know, we need those.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:49] Well, Dr. Tiff, congratulations on all the success and the momentum. If somebody wants to learn more about the practice or you or their dentist that wants to learn more. Is there a website that they can go to?

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:22:01] Yes, they can go to smile. Polish. Like nail polish. Smile Polish dot com. Or visit us on Instagram. You message us on Instagram or social media person. We’ll get to you Polish dental centers, plural, on our Instagram page.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:18] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Dr. Tiffany Jamison Rand: [00:22:23] Thank you. Appreciate you. Thanks for. Thanks for inviting.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:25] Me. All right. This is Lee Kantor will SEAL next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:22:33] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software. Anywhere. Get one month free at on paycom.

 

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Maija Ehlinger With Hypepotamus

by

Maija-Ehlinger-Startup-Showdown
Startup Showdown Podcast
Maija Ehlinger With Hypepotamus
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Hypepotamus

MaijaEhlingerMaija Ehlinger, Editor at Hypepotamus

Maija Ehlinger is a business reporter in Atlanta covering the startup and innovation economy. A native Southern Californian, she moved to Atlanta for college and has called it home ever since.

Maija is passionate about telling the behind-the-scenes stories of founders and entrepreneurs in town. She is a graduate of Emory University, Columbia Journalism School’s Lede Program in Data Journalism, and is currently pursuing her MBA at Georgia Tech.

Connect with Maija on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • About Hypepotamus
  • General startup trends in the Southeast

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

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

Lee Kantor: [00:00:39] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown podcast, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Shutdown, we have Maija Ehlinger with Hypepotamus. Welcome, Maya.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:00:59] Hi, Lee. Thanks so much. Excited to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:01] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us a little bit about hippopotamus. How are you serving folks?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:01:07] Yeah, absolutely. So we are a publication here in town in Atlanta, but we cover the southeast and we specifically cover tech startups, entrepreneurship and the venture capital ecosystem here in town. So it’s been a bit of a wild ride the last couple of years as the Southeast and Atlanta has really continued to make its mark on the tech scene. But yes, we’re here to to highlight the entrepreneurs and the founders and investors that are moving the ecosystem forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] Now, can you talk a little bit about the history? I know this started as kind of a venture from several entrepreneurs that wanted to serve the same community by telling the stories within that community.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:01:50] Yes, absolutely. So hydroponics has been around for for quite some time now. It actually started as a co-working space in the Biltmore for people that are familiar with the midtown Atlanta area. Now we’re just an online publication. And by that I mean we we are doing the editorial work to to highlight the great founders that are coming out of the out of Atlanta and across the southeast, as well as be a place where people can find their next job at a startup in town through our our free job board, as well as curated calendars of events to make sure that people know where they can meet people, network and continue to to help grow the ecosystem.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:37] So how did you get involved?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:02:40] Yeah, absolutely. So I joined just about two years ago and my background is kind of an interesting mixture of both startups and journalism. I went to school here in Atlanta and was working across different opportunities within journalism while I was in college. But after college actually ended up working at a couple of different startups in the ecommerce and kind of marketing space before landing full time in journalism. And yeah, it wasn’t looking for a new job, but the opportunity to take over and join hype came about in the middle of COVID, and it was a unique blend of of my background, both in journalism and working at very, very early stage startups.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:31] I think that that’s a wonderful path and I think that a lot of young people should pursue that path. Can you share a little bit about what your experience was in those kind of startups when they’re in those beginning stages where there’s so much energy and passion and hope, you know, to get involved in an organization like that, it’s a lot different than for folks that get a traditional college experience, get a job at maybe an enterprise level organization. It’s a different ecosystem and environment. Can you speak about what yours was at those startups?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:04:04] Oh, absolutely. And I give this advice to to many people who ask even if they’re looking for jobs in journalism, I say a career path is very rarely linear. And I think being having an opportunity to work at a startup is something that everybody should do at some point. Why? One, it gives you stories upon stories to tell. During interviews, you have to be able to learn how to think on your feet quickly, learn how to wear multiple hats, and often you’re going to be working on problems that you wouldn’t be able to do at a at a larger company. So, yeah, so my first experience out of college was doing marketing and operations for a menswear ecommerce brand. I had no background in men’s fashion, most definitely not. I didn’t have anything there, had really no operations experience, but for me it was I was willing to get my hands dirty and figure it out. A lot of long nights, a lot of early mornings. But for me, I use that experience so much in my journalism time now, both because I really understand what it means to join as person number three as a at a team that is literally building something in their basement. So I empathize with entrepreneurs in that way, but also just the opportunity to take on take on a challenge that. You don’t get to do very early in most people’s careers. When you when you’re at a startup, you kind of have to create your own path and be willing to jump in and and contribute to a team very quickly and to help it scale.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:55] Now, having gone through this experience, especially, like you said, employee number three, anything that you learned from leadership in terms of this person that convinced you to join the team, they had to transfer some of their dream onto you because it was their dream to build this startup. It wasn’t your dream. You were probably looking for a job and you were curious and interested. But anything from a leadership standpoint from as maybe including that first time but through the ones you’ve talked to, is how good leaders are able to kind of make their dream, your dream?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:06:34] Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I will say, my this this first job out, a startup out out of college, I followed it was a group of Emory entrepreneurs. I went to Emory and so it was through my network. I would say first. First thing is definitely the the ability to network and find people within your own network is really important. But yes, I think being transferring that kind of dream to me to want to come join a startup that I didn’t necessarily if you would have told me, hey, after college with a degree in history and working in journalism, you’re going to work in menswear. I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s what I wanted to do, but understanding the passion that those founders had for building up a consumer brand and an e-commerce platform in Atlanta, I was sold. They’re the really the ones that made me really excited about building something new and building something interesting in Atlanta. And so I would say that was a huge if you’re able to spark interest and excitement in your team, that’s really important. They also gave me a lot of autonomy, you know, having come in as as an early and very young, very green person at the time, they had the the the foresight and the trust to say, hey, if you have an idea, let’s talk about it and let’s see how we can bring it to to life. And that’s something that I definitely think as I’ve stepped into leadership roles, I try to emulate that as much as I can, because that’s how you get interest from and buy in from people on your team at any stage of growth for your company.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Now, having gone through the startup experience, you kind of went back to your journalism roots. Was that always kind of the plan was always to find a way to stay in journalism and tell those stories. And this was kind of a slight detour along the way. Or was this something that if this thing really got a lot of traction in energy, you might have seen, you know, a different a different Maya might be a startup founder right now.Remove featured image

Maija Ehlinger: [00:08:54] Oh, that’s an interesting question. Yeah. I think for me, I’ve always been passionate about writing and journalism, and so that has kind of been my North Star this whole time. And for me, when I was doing operations and marketing at this company, I was able to do a lot of storytelling for for the startup and for the team. So that was great. You know what, I now in this role at hype, you know, writing is, is my passion and the the chance that I get to talk every day with founders who are bringing their stories to life. I get so inspired by talking to founders every day. I see myself staying in journalism. But there are so many great founders out there that, you know, you never know life. Life takes you in different directions. So I wouldn’t say no to joining a startup at some point in the future. I think that, as I said earlier, you know, I don’t think I think a linear career path would be very boring. And so yeah, yeah, I think there’s there’s always opportunities to or potentially opportunities to dive back into the startup world down the road.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:04] So how did you get involved with Startup Showdown and and you know, in terms of being a judge there and and probably you’ve probably mentored people throughout the years as well. Can you talk about that?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:10:18] Sure. Sure. So, as I mentioned, you know, I joined Hype in July of 2020, which is a pretty fascinating time to join a new journalism start a new position within journalism, because, as you know, in journalism, it’s much easier to to network and meet people in person. I understand your sources and meet people in person. So I wasn’t able to do that. But I have to say, the people over at Panoramic who run Startup Showdown were incredibly wonderful and helpful in terms of always talking to me for stories and and pitching me stories that they were of, whether it’s their team or the companies that they’re investing in. So I was pretty connected to to that universe, I will say. And so when they started doing Startup Showdown, it started remotely because because of pandemic restrictions. And so I got to be a judge on one of the first few startup showdowns, and it was a really cool experience. That was my first time ever judging startups. You know, I speak and listen to their pitch competitions all the time, but it was a really cool opportunity to talk with other talk with venture capitalists across the judging panel and really understand what they look for when it comes to a potential investing opportunity.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:46] Now, was there anything that when you were kind of working with them and obviously they’re they’re putting their money on the line, so they’re looking at this through maybe a different lens than you. But was there anything that was like an aha moment? Like, Oh, wow, I didn’t realize that was so important or, you know, I didn’t you know, they connected some dots for you maybe that you didn’t see in the way that they saw an opportunity or a venture.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:12:13] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I steal this question from them, I guess. And because there is an overlap between there are some overlap between the questions that a VC would ask a founder and what a journalist would ask a founder. But I think that they do a really great job at at really pulling out from a founder y asking the question very directly, why are you the right person to build this? Because inherently, as a as an entrepreneur you are, you have to see the world in a in a different way. And you have to convince people that you are the right person. Not only that, there’s a a market for your idea that doesn’t exist now, but you are the right person to to build this and and bring more people in into your vision. And so I asked that question very pointedly now, and that is something that the Startup Showdown team definitely thinks about because yeah, they are investing money and time into a founder and they want to make sure they’re that’s the right person tackling the right problem at the right time.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:23] Now, do you have any advice, since you’re in journalism, any advice for the startup founders that are listening to this right now on how to get the attention of the press? It’s so difficult to get to be heard and to be found in today’s world. How do you stand out? Is there anything you could be doing to elegantly maybe stay top of mind in terms of a reporter or of a publication, a blog, no matter what it is? And today, there are so many different choices out there. But how can a founder get the attention of the media in an elegant way that’s not turning you off and it’s not obnoxious?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:14:01] Lee I really appreciate that question because I’m sure, as you know, journalists inboxes get pretty messy pretty quickly just in terms of the amount of pitches that go out there. For me, I think the best time to talk to a journalist and you should be creating rapport with with journalists and really the general PR world, I guess as well, long before you have news to share. And I say that because when someone raises funding, that story is going to be out there and potentially most likely picked up by multiple news outlets. You want to have a relationship with journalists that that’s before you send out that big press release, because that’s going to create a better story that you have a relationship with, with someone. And they will be they’re going to have more time to tell your story. More. Yeah. You’ll be able to dig a little bit more into what you’re building. I think a lot of times, and it happens probably every day, I get a story that says, Hey, we raised money and the embargo lifts in 2 hours or so. Can you tell our story for me? And I think I think a lot of journalists, too, that doesn’t give us enough time to to really dive in and do a great job.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:15:31] And we’re just we don’t want to just rehash the press release. We want to go deeper. So, of course, you know. I think developing those relationships early is great. Also, my other piece of advice is always pieces that if you can make your startup or frame your startup in more of a human interest story perspective, I think that’s great. You know, founders get very hyper focused on how cool their tech is and kind of the nitty gritty, technical things that make a startup happen. But if you’re not able to translate that story into why a consumer or a business should care about it, it’s going to be harder to get press. And so really take some time to think about why you as a founder are interesting and why your product is so different and unique in the market. I think that those help that helps journalists tell a better story and a better narrative about what you’re building.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:30] And I think that if I heard you correctly, it almost goes back to what you said at the very beginning about relationships being important and creating those human to human connections that help people, you know, so that you know each other prior to the story being told that, like you said, you don’t just want them to tell the story today. But if they had reached out and over time you built a relationship, you might be more interested in their story today than it was when, you know, maybe when it was a glimmer of an idea six months ago.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:17:05] Right. Absolutely. You know, I think keeping in touch is really important. You have to remember that putting putting out a news wire goes out to every journalist. And it’s so easy to to glaze over those a little bit just because, you know, you get you could get easily 100 of those a day. And so you’re reading so quickly through something. And so you want to make sure that if you want to stand out against all the news that’s going out out there, that you have those personal relationships.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:38] And so when you are kind of have a startup, you should identify who those key journalists are. That should be part of your network at the beginning, not just when you need them.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:17:49] Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s it’s very helpful for for us. And, you know, at at hype, we’re very obviously industry focused. We focus very much on on tech startups in the area, but we’re also geographically focused. So we don’t cover there’s there’s great startups happening all over the country and all over the world, but we are hyper focused on the southeast region. And so there’s, you know, four startups that aren’t in the southeast. There are awesome journalists and smaller publications in your area. I’m very sure of it in people who who would like to connect with other people. You know, I’m I’m I’m happy to connect people with with other journalists around the area or around the country, too, because I think that that’s important for people to to know, to know, to know your journalists in town.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:43] Now, if somebody wants to kind of follow hype and the different stories that you’re covering around the Southeast, what’s the best way to do that?

Maija Ehlinger: [00:18:53] Yeah, absolutely. So we put all of our stories out on Hippopotamus Dot and that’s hippie Potti and us dot com publish there pretty much daily. And then we have a twice a week newsletter that goes out as a digest of all of the the recent news and upcoming community events and jobs that are also available. So you can check us out on, on online or if you want to get a curated list, sign up for our newsletter that goes out Wednesdays and Fridays.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:29] Well, Maya, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Maija Ehlinger: [00:19:36] Well, thank you. I really appreciate the time and look forward to chatting with you soon.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:42] All right. This is Lee Kantor Lucille next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:19:48] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast. So you get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next startup showdown pitch competition visit Showdown D.C. That’s Showdown Dot DC. All right. That’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.

Zoe Newman With Capital on Tap

by

Zoe Newman
Atlanta Business Radio
Zoe Newman With Capital on Tap
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CapitalonTapZoe NewmanZoe Newman joined Capital on Tap in 2012, its founding year, fresh out of school. She has worked her way around the business from operations, product, partnerships, and, most recently, launching the product and team in new geographies.

Having recently moved from London to Atlanta in the US,  she is now the US Managing Director and building out the US business and team – along with enjoying all the new local Southern experiences and culture…and the fried chicken!

Connect with Zoe on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Zoe’s personal journey
  • The story of their US expansion
  • Capital on Tap
  • The evolution of their product
  • Atlanta as their US headquarters

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] 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 on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories today on the Atlanta Business Radio. We have Zoe Newman with Capital on Tap. Welcome, Zoe.

Zoe Newman: [00:00:49] Hi, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:50] Hello there. I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Capital on Tap. How are you serving folks?

Zoe Newman: [00:00:57] Sure. So thanks so much for inviting me to join today. And just to give you a bit of background about us, so as you can probably tell from my accent, I’m not originally from Atlanta. I have recently moved to the city from London. Earlier this year I’ve been working with Capital on tap since we first got started in 2012. And really our goal is to support small businesses, to access a really streamlined, easy to use business rewards credit card and basically all the all the good features and good stuff that they would expect from a small business card. But just trying to make that better, using better technology, better customer experience and really supporting their small business to give them the time to focus back on running their business and not having to worry about their finances.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:46] Can you talk about the genesis of the idea since you were such an early employee there? Was it always kind of geared to that small to midsize business owner to give them the capital they needed?

Zoe Newman: [00:01:58] Yeah, yeah, for sure. So as I said, it started in 2012 and originally we were trying to figure out what the best product was to support small businesses and their kind of working capital and payment needs. So we’d always been small business focused. It wasn’t kind of a broader market that we were looking at and then we drilled in on small businesses. So we’ve we’ve always kind of our founders and our roots have always been embedded in supporting small businesses in the best possible way. And when we first started out, we were more kind of a traditional loan facility and giving customers access to funds through a kind of working capital loan solution. And it was probably kind of four or five years in that we started to test out our credit card products, and that’s really where things took off. We saw amazing engagement from our customer base and customers were really kind of pleased they could use a line of credit with a really great rewards card and option earning, earning rewards for all of their business expenses in the U.K. It’s just not such a common thing to be to be earning rewards on all your credit card spend. And so we saw this huge opportunity in the small business market in the U.K. And then early 2021, we launched the business over in the US and have started to support small business and customers with the rewards card over here.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:22] So you got the short straw. That’s why they sent you over here. Or how did that how did you get chosen for this adventure?

Zoe Newman: [00:03:29] I definitely don’t think I got the short straw. It’s been an amazing adventure so far. Really awesome opportunity to come over to the US and to build the team and operations over here. So I was the last kind of two or three years was looking at international expansion, looking at new markets that could be interesting for the business to expand into. And the US had always been one that was kind of front of mind for us. Our CEO and CEO are both from Atlanta and they they definitely had a connection here and kind of that that goal of launching into the US. It’s always been been one for us. And so as we started looking into different markets, it then became apparent that US was going to be a great one just in terms of market size, opportunity and kind of some of the opportunities with with payments and banking systems here. I’ve, I haven’t used a checkbook so much since I’ve been over here in the last 20 years in the UK, I think. So there’s definitely opportunities to be really streamlining and improving that payments journey for small businesses.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:32] And then when you were looking at coming to America because of some of your leadership was from Atlanta. That’s why Atlanta got chosen. Or did you look at kind of the different places to be? And just because of the strength of our fintech, this became like kind of a logical place for you.

Zoe Newman: [00:04:49] Yeah. And I definitely, definitely a bit of both. And that connection to Atlanta was was strong for the for the leadership team and just coincidentally was also a really strong city in terms of payments, infrastructure and talent and and fintechs more generally. As I’ve as I’ve spent more time here, I keep seeing more and more amazing fintech companies popping up that I’ve been starting to connect with. So there’s a really awesome and kind of network and community of entrepreneurs, venture funds and investors, and also kind of the fintech space. So yeah, it’s been a really, really, really good opportunity and. Any great talent here. And yeah, it just just feels like we just sort of scratch the surface and really sing some some great stuff from Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:37] So how do you kind of kind of penetrate America? It’s such a large market and there are so many business people where I would think that this is something they should know about and, you know, and try. How do you kind of get the word out to help, you know, put your card on their radar?

Zoe Newman: [00:05:58] Yeah, it’s a good question. So our kind of playbook and how we’ve approached things has been see what has worked well in the. We’ve got that sort of foundation and that knowledge. And we’ve then brought over and kind of followed up one of our key values, which is just pilot and testing that and seeing if that sticks in the US market and has some traction here, and then if it works, then we run with it. So we’ve tried a complete mixture from online marketing channels, digital channels and PPC and pay per click and using AdWords, that sort of thing. We also have been approaching a lot of the aggregator sites. So those platforms where you would want to look for a credit card and you know the kind of household names of ones to go to and reaching out to those providers and trying to get listed. That’s been a really good opportunity for us to kind of gain brand recognition and credibility in the US market, where we’re pretty new. We also have used direct mail in the UK, so have started campaigns with with that channel and then also looking at some above the line, we’ve done some podcast sponsoring, we’ve looked at kind of some magazine ads and billboards potentially in the future as well.

Zoe Newman: [00:07:17] So really for us it’s kind of looking at those different opportunities and seeing which ones kind of work from a pilot perspective, sort of putting a small budget into one of those channels and seeing if we can attract the right business customers, if we can convert those customers to being kind of loyal customers that are choosing to use our card over others in their wallet and then doubling down as soon as we get that traction and we can prove that those economics are working and really then kind of going full throttle to roll that out and grow that channel as much as we can. One of the other interesting ones we found in the US has been, which has been interesting because the UK has been customer referrals and and influencer channel as well. So I think it’s a British thing. People often don’t like to talk about their credit products and if they’ve if they signed up for a credit card. But we’ve seen some really good opportunities through our customers, really going out and telling their networks, telling their small business owner friends about capital on tap and really getting the word out there, which has been it’s been an awesome channel for us.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Yeah, that kind of organic growth is probably the best because it’s coming right from the horse’s mouth. People who are benefiting from it.

Zoe Newman: [00:08:32] Exactly. Exactly. Just yeah. That whole piece, as I mentioned, sort of brand recognition, credibility being a new small business credit card in the market takes some time for people to trust and kind of be willing to take a punt on us. So having that that word of mouth and yeah, people telling their friends and kind of backing us in our abilities has been a really, really great channel for us and for some great customers.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:58] So let’s educate the market. So tell us about capital on tap and tell us why a small business would benefit by using your service.

Zoe Newman: [00:09:08] Sure. So as I mentioned, we are really trying to make it as quick, easy, streamlined and simple as possible to sign up and start using our credit cards. So we have a very simple application form. It’s one page on our website. On tap. And we don’t ask for a ton of documentation. We try and source that data as much as we can so that the customer’s not having to send in lots of paperwork and lots of proof of business and all of those types of things that traditional credit card providers might ask for. And we have an all digital journey. So within four or five clicks, the, the business owner can be all the way through the process and can be accessing a virtual card to add into their digital wallet and then can be using that, that credit card for their business spend and so matter of minutes that they can get all the way through that process. And then once they once their virtual card is activated and ready to go, they can start using it for their business, earning 1.5% rewards on all their spend, and also activating additional cards for any employees in the business. They want to get signed up as well. So your finance manager, your sales manager, people team, any of those different employees can have access to. The cards can have spend controls, receipt management, tracking, and then all of that spend can flow through into your counting package. So hopefully launching with QuickBooks in the next few weeks so that any spend on the card is just straight into QuickBooks and can be easily reconciled for your business. So just really easy to use simple products with great rewards and credit limits that small businesses are looking for and needing to help them manage their cash flow a bit more effectively.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:59] Now, is the business solely focused on business credit cards, or is it eventually going to be like, you’ll be my kind of merchant account where I can clear credit cards myself in my business? Or is this the kind of the main and sole service that you’re offering businesses at this point?

Zoe Newman: [00:11:18] Yeah. So for now, we are fully focused on the credit card products and it’s tough to build a credit card product. So we want to make sure we’re doing it right and we’re focused on building the best products that we can. And I think often other financial institutions, fintechs, can try and do a lot of different products for a lot of different people. That’s not what we’re about. And so we are really focused on supporting small business owners who historically have been forgotten about by other financial companies that maybe are going after consumers or going after larger corporates. And so we always think there is a market that’s really underserved. We want to fully dedicate and focus our time on supporting those customers. And for now that credit card products, we’ve still got work to do. We can still make it better. So we want to focus on making that the best we can. And who knows, in the future there will be other opportunities, hopefully other products we can start to look at, see what pain points we can solve for our customers, take that feedback in and start to develop over time, but for now pretty fully focused on the credit card.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:24] Now, is your team solely in Atlanta or do you kind of have boots on the ground in other parts of the country?

Zoe Newman: [00:12:31] Solely in Atlanta, we have one office and that is in Atlanta. And we do have a couple of remote team members. We have one one lady who is up in Brooklyn and then a couple of members of our team are in Maine, but everybody else based in Atlanta, majority of people coming into our midtown office. And yeah, just just really building out that that office culture and kind of startup atmosphere here in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:58] And so how has it been have you been able to get you know, are you are you growing at the pace you’d like or what do you need more of? How can we help?

Zoe Newman: [00:13:08] Yeah, it’s been it’s been good. It’s the first few months I was I was remote from London. That was definitely pretty challenging. And time zones and just not being able to be here was, was tough. But since I’ve been able to be here and since we’ve started to kind of build out our office in this midtown location, we’ve brought in a number of people. We’ve got over 50 people in our office here now. And so, yeah, really just always looking for new talent and new people to join the team and any of your listeners. I would I would always suggest reach out to us if people are looking for new roles in a in a new fintech interested in the space, we always love to hear from you. And then yeah, really try now to support as many small businesses. We’ve started to do a few events in Atlanta to reach out to the Small Business Network here. But yeah, if anybody is interested in kind of checking out our products, please, please come and see us and have a look on our website and reach out for any questions you’ve got.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:09] Now, is there a certain type of business this is better for? Like, is it better for, you know, brick and mortar stores is a better for ecommerce? Is it any service business, professional service, creative like? Is there a better fit or is it just kind of industry agnostic? And if you’re a small business, then you should consider this product exactly that.

Zoe Newman: [00:14:34] Yeah, we really try and keep it industry agnostic. We’re not specifically focused on ecommerce or service providers. We really want to keep it broad. And the small businesses we serve usually kind of less than 20 employees and kind of not multimillion dollar revenue is probably our sweet spot. So those smaller mom and pop independent retailers, stores, consultants, landscapers, they have real, real mixture of businesses. But as I said, ones that are often kind of seemed to be underserved by the banks can be forgotten about in terms of the products that is offered to them. And so that’s the pain points that we’re really trying to solve. So again, no industry specifics. Any school business definitely welcome to apply.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:26] Now, is there an annual fee for this?

Zoe Newman: [00:15:30] No, no annual fees. No fees. So if you’re ever traveling abroad and you’ve been charged 3% by a lot of the other traditional banks, yet we do it as a 0% fee on any international spend, no fees for kind of adding supplementary cardholders. And we also don’t leave any hard inquiry on the individual’s credit report. So no harm in applying. So it has no impact on the individual that makes the application always worth. I would recommend to anyone to just fill in that one page application and see if you can get through that journey and hopefully you would be approved and it has no impact on your on your personal credit.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:15] And if somebody wants to learn more, what’s the website or best way to connect with you?

Zoe Newman: [00:16:21] So our website is WW Capital On Tap and if you want to learn more, reach out. I’m on LinkedIn. My name is Zoe Newman and. Yeah. Come and come and come and learn more. Come and see more on our Twitter page or Instagram page. And hopefully we’ll be supporting many more small businesses in Atlanta over the coming months.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:44] Well, Zoe, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Zoe Newman: [00:16:49] Thanks so much, Neal.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:51] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:16:57] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere. Get one month free add on paycom.

 

About Our Sponsor

OnPay’sOnPay-Dots payroll services and HR software give you more time to focus on what’s most important. Rated “Excellent” by PC Magazine, we make it easy to pay employees fast, we automate all payroll taxes, and we even keep all your HR and benefits organized and compliant.

Our award-winning customer service includes an accuracy guarantee, deep integrations with popular accounting software, and we’ll even enter all your employee information for you — whether you have five employees or 500. Take a closer look to see all the ways we can save you time and money in the back office.

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Abdoulaye Djire With FIND

by

Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Abdoulaye Djire With FIND
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AbdoulayeDjireAbdoulaye Djire is currently a graduate student at Georgia State University getting his Masters in Information Systems. His entrepreneurial journey began as he was walking down the graduation ceremony to get his first degree. At that moment he realized the career path he was about to enter he could no longer see himself doing long term.

This led him to think long and hard about what his next steps should be. He realized a pain point that not only he experienced but several other people did too. He then created a social media platform and business around this core problem and that was the birth of his company, FIND. This newfound path also resulted in him entering higher education once again this time with the goal of gaining knowledge to increase the chances of his business succeeding.

The journey has been full of twists and turns but he is grateful to say they have garnered 1,000 users, 2,400 followers on social media organically, and over 800 posts on the platform thus far through bootstrapping. He is excited to gain more resources in the near future to grow the company and platform the way he envisions to make a truly lasting and positive impact in the world.

Connect with Abdoulaye on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • About FIND
  • The hardest challenges

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Lee Kantor are here. A very special episode of GSU ENI radio. Today on the show we have Abdoulaye Djire with FIND. Welcome.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:00:44] Hey, thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] Well, I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about find how you serving folks.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:00:51] Yeah. So for the people who don’t already know what find is, it is a B2B social networking platform where through the use of pictures, videos, comments and ratings, we can all share our best one of a kind locations, what we like to call hidden gems.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:07] So what’s the had you had this idea come about? What was the genesis of the idea?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:01:12] Yeah. So there is there’s a couple of different stories that kind of weave together to make this story come alive. The most prominent one would be I have some relatives in Paris and I went to go see them one summer. And for me I was able to explore the city and stuff because I was there for a month while they’re at work and everything and I got to discover all these just very unique experiences and very hole in the wall of places. But the issue was when I wanted to show them my experience and have them go there too, there was no platform that had a solution like that, right? And when I came back home, there was I noticed so many people around me were living in Atlanta for years, but there are still struggling to figure out where to go and what to do to enjoy themselves. So once I saw these kind of two things happen, I was like, okay, well, I might be the one that needs to make something or do something about this. So yeah, that was kind of the start of fine.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:11] So when you’re kind of creating these kind of experiences for folks, how do you kind of vet them to make sure that just because you like them, other people will like them as well?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:02:23] Yeah. Great question. So best way I can answer that. It’s kind of like what you see on your Facebook or Instagram feed, right? So that content, Facebook is not creating themselves to give to you, right? Those are your friends on the platform making it what it is. So essentially here it’s the same exact concept. The places that you’re viewing are from the people who you’re friends with on the platform. So it’s to everybody is a value added that everybody posts great locations and great experiences.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:58] And the more that people do that, then kind of the app gets smarter and then you’re going to be able to find those hole in the wall gems.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:03:06] Exactly. You got it? Yeah. It’ll get eventually. We’ll have some kind of algorithm that will even show you places that you didn’t even know you would love. And you end up loving those places just as the same as the ones you thought you would. So that’s what we’re gearing towards.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:21] Now, is this your first tech startup?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:03:24] Yes, it is. First, this is a quote unquote. Yeah, that’s the best way to put it. The first. Yep.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:31] Now, since you’ve never been a founder before, was this a kind of difficult is this how you saw kind of your career evolving or did you think, oh, I’m going to go to school and I’ll get a job? And that’ll be that and this I don’t know if this is I would assume in a positive way has at least derailed that a little bit.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:03:52] Oh, absolutely. Completely derailed it completely. So for me, I got my exercise science degree and the plan was to get my doctor in physical therapy school. And so once I got some time after school, when I got finished, I realized that my passion ran out for the health care field. And so I was like, Man, I need to I need to think about something. I need to figure something out. So after praying on and brainstorming, a lot of this kind of entrepreneurial pathway was for me, something where I felt like I could dive all of my efforts into and still love what I’m doing in the process of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:35] Now, are you are you the technologist on the team or did you have to find one?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:04:40] I had to find one. And so as I was finding one, I became more and more tech savvy. Right. So. I kind of messed around with different bootcamps on Udemy, for example, and now I can know what code is and what’s going on, and then I can do a little bit of coding myself, but I’m also in my Master Information Systems program at State as well. So that ties in the business side to the technology side of things. So definitely not the expertise in the company as far as the technology piece, but I definitely have a very, very good understanding of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:23] Now, any advice for other founders out there when it comes to finding a technology partner on the team? How did you go about doing that? That seems like, you know, that’s kind of important, right? You’re building a tech startup.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:05:35] Yeah. No, that’s a that’s a great point. It definitely is. Just like anything else, I think even outside of their knowledge and outside of what they’re capable of doing, it has to be more so that the person that you’re working with, if you can see that being a long term relationship. And what I mean by that is, you know, your partners become the people that you speak to more than anybody else, literally more than your friends family, more than your close friends. So it has to be somebody that you can not only see yourself in a professional setting with, but somebody that you can actually personally see yourself being around for long periods of time. Right. And second, to how does that person kind of go about adversity and how do you guys talk about conflicts are the most important things versus what they’re able to do for the company?

Lee Kantor: [00:06:29] So how did you find this person?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:06:32] Yeah. So at first for me, it was. Kind of figuring out the things we needed to in the journey eventually led to. I contacted a friend of mine from I’ve known him forever. We went to middle school and high school together actually, and he got me in contact with somebody else that he felt was capable of helping out with what I’m trying to do. And so that’s kind of what led us to meeting each other. And eventually that person in particular also has their own set of stuff going on in their place. So they did have to walk away from the company. But we’ve been able to fill in our technology gap through other developers and through other people.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:20] Wow. Exciting time. Congratulations. That’s a big milestone to be able to get that part right.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:07:25] Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:27] Now, how did you find out about the Main Street program and and how has it been?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:07:34] Yeah, it’s been amazing. I’m very, very, very glad that we’re in it. I found out about it through Georgia State’s website soon after I graduated. And so I actually I applied for it last year for us to get in and we didn’t get in. So this year it felt like all the pieces were clicking together and that this is the year that God planned for us to be a part of it as part of this cohort. And it’s been great in the sense that any kind of plans that we want to execute, we can have feedback from the Main Street mentors and all the other businesses in the cohort that kind of, you know, get what they would think about the execution and then sit down and we think about ourselves and then we can adjust it accordingly and have even more successful way of going about it.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:24] So has there been any part of the process thus far that’s been most beneficial?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:08:30] I would definitely say our our sessions, right? So we through the six month program, we have different sessions where we’re talking legal or excuse me, where we’re getting legal advice, where we’re getting product market fit advice, accounting advice, just everything to really grow a business. So this for me, anything that I haven’t learned on my own or anything that I haven’t learned in the classroom is also plugging in those holes. So this is kind of to wrap things up as far as knowledge wise been very beneficial.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:08] So have you been enjoying the process? This is it’s a different kind of challenge, right?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:09:13] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And me, I grew up playing sports, so I kind of that competitive edge or that kind of man. I really don’t feel like doing this as far as like certain things when it comes to the business. But it’s like, no, I know the end goal and I know what I want to achieve. So then you you’re able to kind of push yourself to do the things you don’t want because when it comes time to do the things you actually do, as far as the business, those are a lot easier, you know?

Lee Kantor: [00:09:44] So what’s next and what do you need and how can we help?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:09:48] Yeah, absolutely. The next few kind of steps that we’re taking is we learned a lot from our MVP. We garnered 1000 users organically on the platform and more than 800 gems were posted. So through all that feedback and the things we learned and that MVP, we’re taking into the full version of the platform and we’re hoping to get that launched and out there in the next couple of months. And our biggest challenge thus far has been really raising funding. So with the Main Street program, we’re able to get a grant, which was our first external funding and has been a blessing. And we also got second place in our first pitch competition. So that added on to some of our grant money. So really we’re just looking for funding to really do what we want to do because we’ve done so much with so little. So only imagine when we get the right capital to, to get this thing really going.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:52] And if somebody wants to learn more about the app or maybe get a hold of you, what is the coordinates?

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:10:57] Yeah, absolutely. My email is Abdoulaye at the find out and that’s as an app will be as in boy Diaz in dog 0ulaye at the find out dot com to find the app. And then also our website, the find app.com is amazing. And then last night at least would be our Instagram defined app underscore.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:26] All right. Well, congratulations on all the momentum and thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Abdoulaye Djire: [00:11:35] Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:37] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on GSU. Any radio?

Intro: [00:11:44] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere. Get one month free at paycom.

About Our Sponsor

OnPay’sOnPay-Dots payroll services and HR software give you more time to focus on what’s most important. Rated “Excellent” by PC Magazine, we make it easy to pay employees fast, we automate all payroll taxes, and we even keep all your HR and benefits organized and compliant.

Our award-winning customer service includes an accuracy guarantee, deep integrations with popular accounting software, and we’ll even enter all your employee information for you — whether you have five employees or 500. Take a closer look to see all the ways we can save you time and money in the back office.

Follow OnPay on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

 

 

Amy Hager With Association Rockstars

by

Amy Hager
Association Leadership Radio
Amy Hager With Association Rockstars
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Amy HagerAmy Hager, Co-Founder at Association Rockstar.

She is a true marketer at heart, uses her years of expertise and her go-getter personality to relate and apply business strategies across many businesses and industries. Her love of small businesses and the community is reflected in her work; driving revenues and new engagement tailored to a business’s strengths and breaking down weaknesses with strategy and tactics is Amy’s superpower.

Connect with Amy on LinkedIn and Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Build marketing and sales teams in non-profits and associations

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Lee Kantor: [00:00:20] Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Amy Hager with Association Rock Stars. Welcome, Amy.

Amy Hager: [00:00:31] Hey, thanks for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] I’m like, so I’m so excited to learn what you got going on. Tell us a little bit about association rock stars. How are you serving folks?

Amy Hager: [00:00:39] Yep. So Association Rock Stars is a online community where we’re really focused on singing the praises of those unsung heroes. There’s a lot of association professionals out there who are CEOs and working in different communities for different movements and missions. And we really think they all have a unique and different story to tell. And so we’ve brought them together and created a interview series that we do every single month, and we really just try to find these unique stories in the different communities of which we all live in.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:14] And then what drew you to associations? Why did you decide to focus in on that group?

Amy Hager: [00:01:19] Yeah. So my personal story of my association journey, because I feel like, again, they’re all so different, is I actually used to work for a publishing company as their PR director, and my main job was to belong to all of our local chambers and our local associations like Kitchen and Bath Association and everything along those lines. And so when I made the move out to Washington DC back in 2008 with my husband for a job change, I was moving to the Mecca of the association world. Everybody is in DC who’s an association. And so I started to work in the marketing and membership and events areas, and as I continued to grow my career and move into the executive director role, I was one of those executive directors that was out there just working so hard for my members and for my industry and didn’t really get a chance to connect with other executive directors who were working super hard for their industries. And so when I was presented with the opportunity to kind of create association rock stars with our co founder, Lowell Applebaum, it was just, again, this this chance to bring people together who are really champions for their association, because sometimes it is that alone feeling. You feel like you’re the only executive director of the organization and you’re going through a lot. So opening up the conversation so that they can collaborate and come up with solutions together because being a CEO sometimes is very, very lonely.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:53] Yeah. And I think that in today’s day and age, it’s much better to be investing in community than it is audience necessarily, which is kind of a slight departure for folks in in kind of marketing and the marketing world to invest in building a community where people can work together and collaborate and help each other. It’s it’s refreshing.

Amy Hager: [00:03:17] Well, and I think when you get a community of like minded professionals together, it is refreshing. You have the person to cheer you on when you need to be cheered on or to cheer with when you’re celebrating something. And I do think that through conversation, we become a lot more clear on what we should be communicating or how we could be communicating, or where we could be communicating a message. So I totally appreciate you nailing that on the. Headlee It is a different way that we think about marketing than what the traditional was communicating to an audience and broadcasting your message everywhere and instead focusing on building that collaboration, who’s really behind a movement. And sometimes the movement is the individual right. But a lot of times it really is that larger movement where we’re trying to better the lives of of the industry that we’re representing.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:14] Now on this show, we are talking to association leaders and we’re trying to share with them some best practices and maybe some tips and tricks that other association leaders have gleaned over the years. One of my I don’t want to say concerns, but it’s something that I’m trying to keep an eye on, is the attracting of young people into the association world. I think a lot of young people are cynical and aren’t embracing and leaning into associations and really taking advantage of the opportunities that they offer a young person, especially in a career. Do you have any advice for leaders of associations that want to kind of open the doors to younger people because they become the pipeline of of leaders, of future leaders, of the association? And if you ignore them for too long, you’re going to have a problem at some point.

Amy Hager: [00:05:07] Yeah, no, I think one thing that I’ve really honed in on as a leader of an association and as a leader of a team and staff and those. New generations coming in to the workforce. You know, I really feel that as an association leader, I have been asked to be a jack of all trades all the time. I need to be good at writing. I need to be good at speaking. I need to be good at video. You know, I need to be good at graphic design and putting together events and all the things. And I think what we’ve really unfortunately done by becoming a jack of all trades and trying to be really good at all these things is we’re spreading ourselves just way too thin. And so as this new generation is coming in and what I think current leaders need to really look at is what is the strength of that individual that’s sitting in front of you? What do they what do they bring to the table? Because a lot of young people are bringing amazing experiences, great new thought leadership to the table, but they’re just not being asked, what is your strength? Where do you rock at? What do you rock at? How do you want to create content? Do you want to create an audio file or a video, or do you want to write or do you want to do graphic design? And so instead of having these job requirements where they’re so spread thin with every single task, doing all the things, if we can micro task and we do this with our volunteers, a lot of times now I don’t know why we haven’t thought to really implement this one with our staff, especially newer staff. But I do think that that’s really a different approach to look at bringing on the newer generation is allowing them to thrive in their strengths and not telling them to be the jack of all trades that we were forced to be in.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:00] So what is your superpower? What is it that you bring to the table that really can help another organization get to a new level?

Amy Hager: [00:07:09] I would definitely say that the approach that I’ve been focusing on to help organizations market to the community and the like, I didn’t know you were going to mention how strong and how important communities are in marketing, but really to be able to attract those who can get behind a vision and a mission and actually repel the ones who aren’t the right ones, who aren’t going to be on that mission or vision with you. And once we really look at the attraction and the repel type marketing, tapping into your team and allowing them to especially market an organization market and sell an organization based off of their strengths and really shifting that narrative. That’s where I’m seeing the most success with the associations that I’ve been working with in adjusting their marketing implementation strategy. When you look at your staff and what you’re actually trying to achieve.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:09] And when you do get clarity of a true north or what the ideal person looks like, it is easier to say no to things and to recognize when you’re kind of stretching in areas, maybe you shouldn’t be stretching and you’re kind of compromising in places you maybe you shouldn’t be. I think that’s a key point to know not only what the person looks like, but also what they don’t look like and to to avoid those people.

Amy Hager: [00:08:37] Well, and I think, too, that there is an association for literally everything out there. Right? There’s a nonprofit association for everything. And so if that person sitting in front of you isn’t the right member for you, they will find support somewhere else. There’s plenty of people out there who need to belong to a community of like mindedness and who need to belong to a mission and a vision of how we’re going to move forward and whatever the industry is. Right. And so I think as leaders, again, we tried to not only ourselves be jack of all trades, but a lot of times the associations started to become the jack of all trades. And so if we really focus our niche on what our organization does really, really well and how we make that positive impact on the member’s lives, and we focus on the thing we do well and we help those who need that thing. That is your ideal member right there. And that’s who you need to be marketing to.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:35] Right. And those are the people that you have to be investing in and leaning into rather than trying to to fix somebody or to, you know, kind of force a square peg into a round hole.

Amy Hager: [00:09:47] Yeah, most definitely.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:49] Now, in your career, I’m sure there’s been ups and downs. Do you mind kind of sharing a challenge that you went through or maybe a mistake that you made that you were able to overcome and maybe got you going in the direction that you are now?

Amy Hager: [00:10:02] So I would say one of the mistakes that I made is when I was at an association where I was the only staff member and really did a great job of talking to. The members and talking to prospective members and figuring out their biggest pain point in their need because the association was spread way too thin. We are doing lobbying, we are focusing on marketing, we’re doing inspections and making sure that there were these industry standards that were being held. And when it really boiled down to what the actual member wanted, they really wanted help marketing. They really wanted help getting foot traffic into their businesses. And so when we switched the organization to focus on that, it was a great micro niche. I think the mistake that was made and this was a mistake on my part and by the board is we really structured the offer and the benefit of being a member based off of the benefit of my marketing strengths. And so when I left the organization and they couldn’t find a marketer who was a like minded marketer that I was, it really left the organization into a pinch of do they hire that square peg to fit in this round hole and try to make this person be what the organization needs them to be? Or does the organization have to shift and go back to spreading itself then being in all these different places? And so the one thing that really turned my perspective is making sure that we do have other professionals in, I guess, entering the workforce who see this new way of creating a association and making it sustainable by niching down.

Amy Hager: [00:11:52] Who agreed to that? Because it’s kind of hard to come across, but I think it’s slowly making a shift and I’m seeing this a lot better. And this was back in 2015, 2016. So we’re quite a few years away from there and also have experienced a lot different experiences. But it really did show me that we’ve got to make sure that we’re starting to get a shift of the leadership, either thinking differently of how to run the organizations who are currently in those positions or attracting future leadership who see it that way as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:27] Now, in your career and where you’re at today, when you made the shift to this community oriented marketing style, when did you start seeing kind of the breadcrumbs of, Hey, we might be on to something here? This is starting to resonate. This is I feel better about it. The people we’re serving feel better about it. When did you kind of get the hint that you were on to something?

Amy Hager: [00:12:51] I would say. Pretty instantly with the current members, with those really active ones who are going to tell you what they think no matter if it’s good or bad. It was very instant with them, with the potentials and with the people who have left the organization. It took about a year. It was an overnight success, and it took a lot of breaking down barriers that were not that old organization that was doing too much and trying to do too many things, and that we’re really focused on helping this piece. So I would say instantly with the members who were super involved, but it did take about a year and it did take a lot of one on one meetings for them to really gain the trust of the organization again, because they felt that they had been burned or they felt that the organization didn’t meet what they needed. And so building that one on one trust and building then those champions within the organization to help spread that message was super key. Because if I tried to do it again as the staff of one all on my own, we would have never achieved it. So it really was making sure that those who truly believed in the mission really saw the vision, were also equipped with the tools to then talk about that and really enroll other people into this new vision, into this new movement, into this new way of thinking, and get them to join onto that movement with us in when we built the movement, of course we had their input before, so it was kind of easy because that’s what they said they wanted. But it was getting them focused on that one pain point within business that an organization or an association can really help them do.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:45] Now, can you share a story? Obviously don’t know the name, but maybe share the challenge that the association you were working with had and then how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Amy Hager: [00:14:58] So I think again, when it comes to recruiting members and getting members behind that movement, if if it’s too widespread, it’s it’s too hard for everyone to buy on. And so when I’m working with organizations now, we really want to hone in on, on, on that process and on the results that you’re going to get from interacting with us. And a lot of times we focus too much on the oh, we have a conference. Oh, you can come network. Oh, you can come do this. You can do that. If we really scale back on the I call it the boat. So we’re selling the boat like the peanuts of the boat, the captain at the boat, the music that we’re going to listen to on the boat. And if we really talk about the results from being in the organization, the results from working within community, the results of how we’re moving this mission or this vision forward when we’re able to really have those higher level conversations and get out of the weeds of the how to and get into the result conversation, that’s where you really see the turn of the members who want to be there because they’re on that vision with you. They’re not there because they want to go to networking events or they’re not there because they want to have that trip to Orlando to your national conference.

Amy Hager: [00:16:24] Right. You see the turn in your membership becoming quality and more invested in investing more of their time and their business into the organization because of that overall movement. And so how I’ve seen this work out, organizations now, again, it’s a different way of thinking. You really have to reprogram the conversation and you have to reprogram the person who is sitting in front of you of how they see the organization. And it’s it’s definitely, I would say, like an educational type campaign, right? Letting them kind of build that like love and trust factor with the organization and and see that their business is going to benefit or their individual professional development or whatever the certification might be, will benefit from being in that organization. But I think shifting the conversations leave from instead of all the little the little cool, fun things that you get with membership and you know, you have a three page long list of all of these things. If we talk about the results you get by being involved in this community, being involved as a member and being a part of this organization, you will see the up level of that membership.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:42] Yeah, I think it’s funny that a lot of associations, they forget to ask what the outcome that the member desires is and they’re adding all these features in and what they. Membership perks, and they’re not really having conversations with the members to see what they’re really trying to get out of this.

Amy Hager: [00:18:02] Exactly. Very true.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:05] Now for you, what is the ideal association for you to work with? What what’s the profile of a good fit client for you?

Amy Hager: [00:18:14] I would say really the organizations who are working on serving their business, usually business based organizations. Even though I’m a certified association executive SCA and I also hold my IOM Institute of Organizational Management designation, and I believe that those trainings and those professional, professional development opportunities have really helped me in my career. I know that my strength lies within organizations who are really supporting businesses. So I really love working with local chambers, working with travel and tourism industry businesses and hospitality organizations, and really helping them connect that larger business community of how do they help those members? How do they help the members grow with foot traffic? How do they build the the economic developments that need to be built within a community to support business? So that’s really kind of where I thrive.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:19] Now, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what is the coordinates website, LinkedIn, things like that.

Amy Hager: [00:19:27] Yeah. So if you literally just look up Amy Hager it’s a y, h, a g e are either on LinkedIn, Facebook or if you Google. I do have a website. Amy Hager Solutions to get to the Association Rockstars. You’re definitely going to find us on Facebook. That’s where our major group lives. And then we also have association rock stars dot com, which you can read about our rock stars. You can listen to our interviews on our podcast. So if you got iTunes or Google Play, we’re there. And then also on YouTube, we’ve got all the interviews housed there as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:05] Well, Amy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Amy Hager: [00:20:10] Thanks for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:12] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on the Association Leadership Radio.

 

Chris Williams With VPPPA

by

Chris Williams
Association Leadership Radio
Chris Williams With VPPPA
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VPPPAChris WilliamsChris Williams, CAE serves as the Executive Director of the Voluntary Protection Program Participants’ Association (VPPPA), a 501[c](3) association representing participants and stakeholders in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program. Chris has served as an association leader for more than 20 years, leading membership growth, program development, and safety & health for a variety of organizations.

Connect with Chris on Linked and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Association leadership
  • Membership growth
  • Governance, safety & health
  • Program development
  • Emerging leaders

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Lee Kantor: [00:00:19] Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Chris Williams with the VPPPA, which is the Voluntary Protection Program Participants Association. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Williams: [00:00:36] Thank you for the welcome. I appreciate that. And I apologize for the mouthful there. It was a VPPPA.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:42] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about the association, how you serving folks?

Chris Williams: [00:00:47] So VPPPA has been around now since around 1984 or thereabouts, going on 40 years here we serve. The best way to put it is we were started as the Association for OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program participants. What that is, it’s a compliance assistance program for all industries that companies are involved in basically the best of the best in terms of safety and health programs. And as we’ve evolved over the years, the association has focused more on all companies. What we mean by that is there are other safety associations out there that represent the safety and health professionals and the companies that that really are striving for that VPP star designation. And also to be the best of the best, the world-class companies, we bring them into the fold as well instead of focusing just on that VPP program. So that’s as I’ve mentioned previously to a number of folks that are listeners here that I’ve worked with directly. We like our name Voluntary Protection Program Association, love it. It’s a mouthful. So we go by VPPPA because we represent, as I said, the best of the best in terms of safety and health.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:47] Now, when you have safety and health as the forefront of the mission, do you spend a lot of your time kind of in education mode where you’re just trying to share these kind of best practices?

Chris Williams: [00:02:00] Oh, certainly. In fact, our main focus as a5c3 is the education, not just of our members in terms of evolving their safety and health programs, but also industries as a whole. That’s construction, manufacturing, industrial, petrochem, everyone down the line from companies like Amazon all the way to Honeywell and some of the energy generation companies into the construction field as well. The education, it really starts with our safety convention, our symposium. That’s usually every August this year it’s in Washington, D.C. So coming up here soon and we focus on, as I said, not just educating the industries that we focus on, but helping them to connect and helping them to share their best practices. The popular saying from a safety and health perspective and I’m a safety and health person by trade. Previous experience with associated builders and contractors as director of Safety and Health, my father’s been a construction forever. We talk about until we get to zero incidents worldwide, we’re never going to have the very, very, very best program we can have. We need to keep evolving that program to continue to focus on helping all industries and all workers go home at the same or better condition in which they arrived. And that’s our primary goal.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:04] Now, how are we doing? Like what is the kind of state of the industry right now, in your opinion?

Chris Williams: [00:03:10] State of the industry, safety and health? We are better than we have ever been. I can tell that. I can say that with absolute certainty. You know, I’m old enough to remember back back in the nineties, safety culture was give a great example in terms of fall protection in construction. It was wear body belt. Well before that it was well, if you feel bad things are going to happen, you’re most likely going to perish. Then it was Wear Body Belt and if you fell, well, okay, you might be paralyzed from the waist down from the nineties. Oh, we evolved in that piece of equipment, evolved into a full body harness, which protects the wearer from serious injury. And so as we evolve safety in health, we’ve reached a point now that, especially with EPA members, are lagging indicators for our members, or at least 52% better than industry averages across the board. And while that’s great, as I said, one of the things that we as an association focus on, we continuously try to educate and share those best practices with our members to get that number to absolute zero. In terms of incidence every hour, our primary resource, our best resource we could possibly have are our employees, our workers out there. And our goal is to make sure that every one of them goes home safe.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:17] Now, do you find that the the companies you work with, a lot of companies, obviously, people are our most important asset and they there’s a lot of lip service towards that. But practically, you know, when the rubber hits the road, are you seeing them as maybe motivated and inclined to take action when it comes to safety and health as you’d like? Or is this something is it getting better? Like, where are we at from that standpoint?

Chris Williams: [00:04:45] That’s that’s a great question with VPA members. Our members, as I said, are always striving to be the very best. The best, and that’s what we look for. But as as we’ve expanded as an association and evolved our mission, some of those companies, sadly, there are companies out there. We see them in the news all the time that that they pay that lip service to. Yes, we safety is our priority. And yet you look at their their safety performance, it’s simply not there. And as we’ve evolved our association, our focus is to bring those companies in. We want those company. Used to join us. We want those companies to be a part of VPA so that they can learn and apply those lessons and get better. You know, we see them anytime I see a company and this is personal opinion, not a VP. Again, my safety backgrounds come into play here whenever I see a company or a person talk about safety as a priority. I always question that because priorities change. My priority for the longest time, every every January 1st, is I’m going to lose weight. And every March 1st, that priorities got. It’s changed. There’s something else to put out there. Safety to our members and our association. It’s a core value. It’s what we are. Our businesses, our members build their business on, their model on. And when I worked in construction, there are a number of companies that you talk about lip service say that their statement is essentially we will not perform any task if it is not completely safe. But those companies walk the walk. And our goal as an association of VPAS to bring members on board, to get them to where it’s walking the walk, in addition to talking the talk and to raise that boat with you, we talk about rising tide lifts all boats. That’s our association’s mission now and then.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:20] So, you know, you’ve been doing this for a minute and it sounds like it’s trending in the right direction. And do you think that just by kind of holding up the examples of the people that are doing it well and then I don’t want to say shaming, but just making the public aware of the people that aren’t doing it as well or could improve. Is that kind of the lever that you need to get more people prioritizing safety and health? Like, what are the levers you have to pull to, you know, encourage more companies to really walk the walk?

Chris Williams: [00:06:53] So it’s interesting to say that when we talk about shaming companies and that’s certainly been been something that that is an industry. And in terms of other agencies as well, they’ve worked towards, you know, it’s we bring attention to the company that’s not performing well. The reality is what we found in safety and health is that for the longest time I said the culture change is really started back in the nineties. I use the fall protection example, but the reality is safety is a culture. As the cultures of cultures evolved from the nineties, we realized that the culture of the generational leadership style of tell somebody to do something and let them do it, make sure they do it and come down on them hard. If they don’t do it the right way, it’s changed instead of shaming. Now it’s we work with not just employees but companies and say, listen, we understand these are things that are happening and we have the solutions for you. We can get you to where you need to be. Let’s work on that together and bring you up to speed so that you’re not going to be in the news for all the wrong reasons. You’re going to have employees who want to stay. You’re going to have employees that are working safe and understand the importance of safety because it is a cultural issue.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:00] So you’re finding that by bringing attention in a positive manner to the people that are doing it well and holding them up and spotlighting them and using them as an example, that brings more people into the fold.

Chris Williams: [00:08:13] Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’ll say this, our safety symposium we have every year, we have a large portion of our sessions dedicated, like I said, to sharing best practices and sharing our award winners, success stories, the best, the best. Again, showing how they’ve done it. That said, we also, from a safety health standpoint, know that we need to the best way to put this is most people their safety. Why why they do what they do, why they work safe. It stems from a catastrophic incident, a tragedy beyond explanation. And people that have gone through that loss, that have gone through either a death penalty on the job site or a serious injury with one of their employees. You can see the change there. And so what we also attempt to do is, is we bring in speakers that have have gone through that safety. Why? Because the last thing we want a company or one of our members to have to go through is that catastrophic incident to finally realize. So we try to duplicate that condition as much as possible and then promote the best practices after that and say, listen, this is something you never want to have to go through. Here’s how you never have to go through it.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:20] Yeah, because the people have lived through it. They, they know the importance, but they had to experience that devastation in order to really have it kind of sink in and probably make that cultural change. I mean it sadly. But you want to learn from their pain, really, so that you can eliminate the pain going forward for others.

Chris Williams: [00:09:41] Absolutely. I had a great conversation with one of our closing session speakers yesterday about this very topic, and she used to work at NASA during the Columbia disaster and said that NASCAR, and rightfully so, USA, has an exceptional safety culture. But unfortunately it was the Columbia incident and Challenger before that that there were slips. And in our profession, when there slips, it’s catastrophic. And so our mission is to avoid help companies avoid those slips.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:10] Yeah. I mean, it’s one of those things where, I mean, you’re dealing with human beings. So mistakes. You know, humans make mistakes. But if you can, you know, get to the heart of the systems and make sure that you’re catching some of these potential mistakes before they can happen systemically, then you can really make an impact and then you can prevent some of this.

Chris Williams: [00:10:33] Absolutely. And incident prevention in any industry is always a tremendous asset. And it’s something that we preach incessantly and for good cause. And it’s it also comes down to when we talk about culture as we’ve seen this this cultural evolution in safety and health. As I said, it went from. Do the job, get it done back it back up until OSHA was created back in the early seventies that it was all right. You work safe. But that was it. You were responsible for your own safety and you are still responsible for your own safety and the jobsite you’re on. But the cultural evolution we’ve now started to focus on in the early 2000s, and it’s been tremendous in terms of helping us get this message across, that it’s not just about you working safe, it’s about you watching out for the people around you to make sure that they’re working safe. And we’ve accomplished this. And in a way that I don’t think anybody, if you’d asked them 25 years ago, would have said this is possible, but we’ve accomplished it by. By having family days, by especially in construction, shutting down the job site and having families commit so that I, as an employee of the company, I as a steelworker, I as a carpenter, I as a laborer can see that the person working next to me has got got a wife and kids, got a husband and a child.

Chris Williams: [00:11:44] They’ve got parents. Those are the people that they’re working for. And so what we’re doing from a cultural standpoint is reinforcing that you’re not just responsible for your own safety, but you need to make sure that the person next to you continues to work it because they’re going to go home to a family. And if there’s that catastrophic loss, that safety, why that happens and we never want to see it, that’s where the loss is going to be felt. And I can this is a topic that I’m very passionate about because in my previous career with ABC as director of safety there, I had a member who shared a story with me from back. Back in the early 2000s on one of their job sites, a crane collapse killed a young man. Unfortunately, it was their safety. Why? And on a Facebook every year, we unfortunately have the parents of that young man. They post every year how much they miss them. And we’re now 20 years on from that. And it never we never want to have to see somebody go through that. And that’s why we do what we do.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:36] Right. And by including the families you are, you know, you’re kind of demonstrating the stakes like it is in Bob. There’s Bob and his kid and his wife and his, you know, grandkid like Bob’s more than Bob. So, I mean, the stakes are high. And everybody, it sounds like it’s very holistic. And I mean, I remember when I was in school and we’d read books about what it was like a hundred years ago. I mean, it seems like we’ve come such a long way because of, you know, organizations like yours that are really kind of giving people the tools to be better. And it sounds like that we are making progress. This isn’t a dream that can’t come true. I mean, with people kind of can learn from your association and the members and really can make a difference. And it sounds like it is.

Chris Williams: [00:13:25] Oh, absolutely. I pinpoint back and you can’t pinpoint a date, but when we when we realized that we could throw all the money and all of the best practices in terms of technical knowledge, in terms of personal protective equipment prevention to design, we could throw all of that technical knowledge into safety and health, but still not reach our goal. Once we figure it out, we need to include the human component. That’s when it really started to click across all industries that once we got the human component in there, realized that behavior really does have an effect on how somebody works. Not only that, the conditions they face off the job and we started to focus on employee wellness outside of the outside of the job, the workplace. That’s when it really started to shift. To get us to the point we’re at now. There’s still a long way to go, don’t get me wrong, in terms of any any any injury on any job site or any plant, any manufacturing facility is one too many. And as we still need to focus on that improvement, but we’ve come so far in the past 25, 30 years just from that. And then even before that, the famous photo of the New York skyline, the steel work is sitting on a steel beam. There’s I see that photo today. And I still my heart stops because, number one, I’m afraid of heights. Number two, there’s I can’t even fathom having someone at that height with absolutely no fall protection. And we’ve come so far and we’re so safe that I think workers from that day and age would be astounded to see where we are at from a safety and health standpoint. Again, there’s still some we still have to get to that zero.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:00] Now, are you finding that today’s generation of workers, you know, they’re elevating maybe mental health as high as physical health when it comes to their workplace experience?

Chris Williams: [00:15:14] Oh, absolutely. And we’ve started to see our members, VHP members are at the forefront of recognizing that employee wellness is critical to not just working safe, but the employees long term success in health. And we focused on, especially with our association. In fact, when I started I’ve been here about a month now. Like I said, my background is in safety and health. But it was amazing to see how proactive not just our members have been, but also the association itself in terms of focusing on that, you know, we have members that that will have mental health days for their workforce that say the force them to take the day off. And we do that as an association as well. We tell our employees, my team, listen, once a day or once a quarter, you’re going to take the day off and we’re going to pay you to take the day off. And we want you to go do anything that’s not work related. Because if you’re not mentally sharp and this is not just from the association standpoint, from a workforce standpoint in general, if you’re not mentally sharp and ready to go, that’s a mistakes happen. And again, in our in our industry, in safety and health, one mistake is catastrophic, can have catastrophic consequences, not just for you as an individual, but for those working around you.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:23] Now, is there an example you can share? I know that this is kind of new for you in this role, but maybe an example you can share that illustrates the change that can happen when a company leans into safety and health in terms of just better results and better maybe retention and better just, you know, you’re just a better organization when you lean into and elevate safety and health, not from lip service, but to actual action where you are kind of watching the back of your people.

Chris Williams: [00:16:56] Absolutely. And I can show you a recent example. I came over to the EPA from the Association of the Wall Ceiling Industry and Administering the Safety Awards there at a company when I started about five years ago that I talked to you guys, you’ve got a pretty good program. Why don’t you apply for a safety awards? And they said, well, you know, we’re still working on our culture and we still have some issues and some of our some of our officers, we want to make sure that we’ve got them on the right path. And so we brought them aboard the safety committee. And this is now three years ago, they applied for the first safety award they want for one of their offices. And they said, why don’t you apply as a whole company? They said, Well, we still have work to do. And that recognition, we haven’t earned it. The sea change from them when they applied last year and won our highest award at WCI was phenomenal from when I had started working with them. It wasn’t just the tangibles of employee retention, and the employees absolutely raved about their involvement in the safety and health program. It wasn’t just the increase, the better performance in terms of their lagging indicators. It was the fact that safety and health have become an absolute obsession with the company, whereas before it was, as I said, a priority. Now it was something that they strove for 24 seven. It was something that was at the forefront as a core value in everything the company did.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:17] Now, any advice for maybe other association leaders out there that are like you? You’ve been in this space for a while, but now you’re taking over a new association, how you can kind of, you know, maybe your first hundred days, how you kind of went about joining this association and kind of making a plan to make the largest impact you can.

Chris Williams: [00:18:42] That’s a loaded question, Lee. It’s like I said, I started here about a month ago, but in reality. Started when I was announced that I’d accepted the positions that was back in May. And so some of my advice is that when the opportunity arises, seize it for those out there looking to take that that top seat, that CEO, that executive director position, but start laying the groundwork for success even before you start that. That’s engaging with the executive committee and the board, getting to know what their goals are for the association, getting to know what the rules are, speaking with staff when the opportunity arises. Being able to really explore that relationship and build that relationship from a foundational standpoint with them from the outset. Because I can tell you when I started, I started July 1st and it was a half day and then July 4th was a monday. So all right, I’m in the office for 3 hours and that’s it.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:31] You eased into it?

Chris Williams: [00:19:32] Yeah, I remember. I won’t remember any any faces or names the next week because there’s there’s three and a half, four days in between. But because I had gotten to know everyone, because I’d had those conversations with both volunteer leaders and staff, it really sets you up for success and what you’re looking at, especially in the first 100 days. One of the things I’d recommend for anyone that’s interviewing for a position like this, the question always comes from the interview committee, the nominee, the committee, it’s what would you do in your first 30 days or 60 days or 90 days? No, it’s the first six months minimum, because the first 90 days in this position are spent learning. It’s that that old that old adage of children should be seen and not heard. Well, executive directors and CEOs, in the instances where they can they should be seen heard only on occasion, but absorbing as much information as they can. Because if you go into it with why I’m going to change X, Y and Z immediately, that’s that’s not possible in associations. I think we we all know the pace that associations move and on change, it’s it’s not quick and that’s fine. But we also when you go into it with that mindset, I’m going to make these changes immediately. In my first 90 days, you start to lose staff the buy it in. It’s critical to earn the respect of your staff, your team from the outset and also their buy into your vision for the association. That’s a more long term goal. So never, never go with that first 90 days. So it’s the first six months because it takes six months to build those relationships up.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:03] And you have to manage the expectations of the board in that regard as well, I’m sure.

Chris Williams: [00:21:08] Absolutely. It’s unfortunate. Vpas is in a really good position. Obviously with the pandemic coming out of this, there’s still uncertainty around many associations or is included in terms of attendance at our upcoming safety plus event, in terms of how things will look when we’re fully out of the pandemic, knock on wood. And so keeping that in mind, it’s it becomes one of those challenges of you don’t want to say, oh, we’re going to have 3000 people at this event realizing that the market conditions simply won’t support it. Or, again, coming out of a pandemic, there’s still uncertainty and there’s still travel restrictions. So it’s it’s not necessarily the old under-promise, overdeliver, but be realistic in your expectations. Don’t. My advice is don’t don’t go into it as I know I can make these changes and we’re going to do tremendous work and we’re going to succeed right off the bat. No expect that. As I said, you’re learning as you come into it and especially that first six months, make sure that the board understands that. Yeah, you need to take that six months to really be integrated into the association. And that’s not just the operations but the history of the associations, what the association has done before, and then laying out that vision in conjunction with your board of where you want to take the association, what you see the opportunities as being.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:22] Well, Chris, if if there’s people out there that want to learn more about the association, what is the coordinates or the best way to connect with you and your team?

Chris Williams: [00:22:31] Absolutely. I can always go to our website VP dot org. It’s got all of our contact information and if any, any aspiring leaders want to reach out to me. I’ve been on this journey now for 22 years and it’ll never stop because I love associations and also safety and health and they like advice and in this position they can always reach me. My email address is C Williams at VP dot org.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:52] Well Chris.

Chris Williams: [00:22:53] Remember three.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:53] Ps three PS V three PS in an A. Exactly. Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Chris Williams: [00:23:02] We appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:05] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see y’all next time on the Association Leadership Radio.

 

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