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  • Business Opportunity

Richard Rimer with Initiating Protection Law

December 20, 2021 by Kelly Payton

This Episode was brought to you by

The Innovation SpotAlma Coffee

 

 

 

 

Richard Rimer Richard Rimer, Managing Partner of Initiating Protection Law

Richard helps businesses protect their brands. He has a broad-based IP practice that includes consultation, implementation and strategic planning for domestic and international trademark and domain name registration and enforcement. Richard regularly assists clients with trademark clearance, investigation and enforcement of branding rights, gaining rights before both the US Patent and Trademark Office, defending rights before the Trademark Trials and Appeal Board and general problem solving for advertising, copyright, branding and trademark issues.

Additionally, he has advised clients in the preparation and implementation of trademark manuals, licenses, purchase and sale of intellectual properties, internal processes for the capture and creation of IP rights and intracompany agreements. Richard has also negotiated and drafted a variety of agreements concerning intellectual property rights, including consulting agreements, confidentiality and non-compete agreements, franchise agreements and corporate intellectual property policies. Prior to becoming an attorney, Richard was a Certified Public Accountant with a Big 4 accounting firm. In his spare time, Richard enjoys spending time with his daughters and coaching soccer.

Initiating Proteciton LawConnect with Richard on LinkedIn

Steve McGuinness from Setco for the Outback-Grill and Energy Seal and Anna Teal from Aphasia Readers

November 16, 2021 by Kelly Payton

This Episode is brought to you by

The Innovation SpotAlma Coffee

 

 

 

 

 

Steve McGuinnessSteve McGuinness, Founder and CEO of Setco for the Outback-Grill and Energy Seal

From a young age, Steve McGuinness has been founding companies – three in college alone. And despite some ups and downs (sometimes with disappointing business partners), he went on to found a successful roof coating company for which he developed innovative products.

But his curiosity about the world and drive to push himself to new heights has caused him to do even more.

In the past two decades, he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, completed full Ironman’s, jumped out of planes and started an acting career. “I call doing Ironman’s my midlife crisis,” laughs McGuinness, who also has a pilot’s license, snow skis, kayaks and scuba dives.

And the middle-aged entrepreneur isn’t done yet. He’s launched another passion project: a portable grill for outdoor enthusiasts inspired by how bonfires naturally attract people to congregate around their warm flames.

“Since I was a kid, I’ve always camped and loved to hike. I did a lot of backpacking in college and when I had kids, we did a lot of family camping,” McGuinness says. “I wanted to create a product that would create these warm memories for people and be incredibly versatile.”

The Woodstock, Georgia resident created a grill that is light, adjustable and adaptable, and portable for car camping and RV travelers: The Outback Grill Explorer 300. It also can serve as a firepit.

The entrepreneur believes that while it’s important to go “full throttle, it’s even more important to know how to slow down, sharing food and fellowship around the campfire.”

As CEO and founder of Outback Grills, the undertaking has had its own share of adventures, including travel to China to find a manufacturer and creating a niche in the world of grills.

“It’s definitely David vs. Goliath. I’m up against some major, major names. From production to the website, strategy research and start-up capital, it’s been a big undertaking.”

But training for Ironman races has inspired him to go the distance with his business endeavors.

“The Ironman triathlon and climbing Kilimanjaro pushes you beyond what you think you can do and that inspires me. And it transfers over to business – to be able to endure things that you thought you’d never be able to endure and keep going.”

The Explorer 300 burns any kind of fuel, from hardwood logs to lump charcoal. It’s sturdy and portable with 300-square inches of cooking surface. Telescoping legs means people can put it at a comfortable height and the adjustable grill surface means outdoor chefs can control the heat of the grill. And it only weighs 22 pounds, while being sturdy and well crafted.

Steve McGuinness is available for interviews about his inspired journey, can-do attitude, and the Explorer 300.

Images of his adventures are here and the grill are here.

Outback GrillsConnect with Steve on LinkedIn and follow Outback Grills on Facebook and Instagram

 

 

 

Anna TealAnna Teal, Author and Owner of Aphasia Readers

Aphasia Readers is book series developed by a husband and wife team who realized a need for simple readers with adult-themed content to help practice reading aloud as a form of speech therapy for those with aphasia and apraxia. Each book was thoughtfully designed with a spiral-bound construction for easy page-turning for those with a weaker side. There are icons and visual support throughout the book to help with word retrieval. The illustrations are done in calming colors to help keep the mind at ease while practicing. Our first book has six sessions for scalable practice (practice as much or little as you desire). We also included customizable sections to build on practice sessions. Each session included dialogue relevant to everyday issues that a reader may encounter in real life, making it easy to recall those phrases in everyday life outside of practice times. A portion of the proceeds from each book set goes back into supporting aphasia awareness.

Aphasia Readers

Connect with Anna on LinkedIn and Follow Aphasia Readers on Facebook

 

 

 

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Woodstock, Georgia. It’s time for Cherokee Business Radio. Now here’s your host.

Speaker2: [00:00:23] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Cherokee Business RadioX Stone Payton here with you this morning. And today’s episode is brought to you, in part by Alma Coffey, sustainably grown, veteran owned and direct trade, which of course means from seed to cup, there are no middlemen. Please go check them out at my alma coffee JD.com and go visit their Roastery Cafe at thirty four point forty eight Holly Springs Parkway in Canton. As for Harry or the brains of the outfit Letitia and tell them that stone, since you, you guys are in for such a treat today, a little bit later in the broadcast, we are going to welcome back to the Business RadioX microphone. Miss Anna Teal. She’s got a completely new and different project. She’s here to talk about, excited to get caught up on her work and learn all about that. But first up on Cherokee Business Radio, please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with outback grills. Mr. Steve McGinnis. How are you, man?

Speaker3: [00:01:25] I’m doing great. Great. Thanks for having me today.

Speaker2: [00:01:27] Well, despite the fact that we let you in the lobby for, you know, half hour there as we were visiting about Hannah’s new project before we came on here, we are delighted to have you on the on the show. Outback grills give us a little bit of an overview of that, that business and how you’re trying to help folks, man.

Speaker3: [00:01:44] Sure, sure. It’s a portable grill that can burn hardwood logs, lump charcoal or charcoal briquettes. It’s portable. It has adjustable legs so you can sit it down and use it as a fire pit or raise the legs up. Put the cooking grate on top. You can cook on it steaks, burgers, whatever you want.

Speaker2: [00:02:07] Well, it sounds marvelous to me as many of our listeners know and certainly are one in this room knows by now because we spoke for five minutes. I love to hunt and fish. I love the outdoors. I’m not near the the athlete or outdoorsman that you apparently are. We’ll learn more about that in a moment. But no, I find this whole idea attractive. The portability, because I hunt in different places. In fact, we’re dark after this episode through Thanksgiving because I’m headed down to Northwest Florida and I’m thinking, maybe I should have an outdoor grill in the back of the truck right next to a case of natty lights, right? Absolutely. Show up prepared. So, yeah, talk a little bit about your background, if you will, and maybe within that. What prompted you to create a product in a market that I would think, you know, there’s already some activity in this sector, right?

Speaker3: [00:02:57] Yeah, I’m learning that the hard way I got the idea years, 25 years ago, I went on a trip to South Africa selling another. My day job is roof coatings, so I had a distributor in South Africa and they have barbecues very similar to ours. But they call it a Bri’s and it’s more of the event. The cooking is the event, whereas here in the states, you’ve got a guy on the back porch flipping burgers. The other guys are watching the game on TV and then women are in the kitchen drinking wine. But in South Africa, everybody came to the braai, everybody came to the cooking feature and it was very relaxing, very fun in the sense that you got to to interact and talk with the people who you’re having the barbecue with. And I brought that idea back, and I try to explain it to my friends and they all said, Well, just don’t get it. It’s just a barbecue. So I worked with with a CAD drawing company, and we’ve designed the cad drawing for the grill. I had a couple of prototypes manufactured and shared the prototypes. My friends are like, Are now I get it. And it’s just not the grille on the back porch. You could take it with you car camping RV to the beach, tailgating. And once we had the CAD drawings drawn up and the prototypes made, I actually applied for a patent and got a U.S. patent on the design. Yeah, that was that was kind of a neat adventure.

Speaker2: [00:04:25] So what made it patentable? Is that a word in a patentable patent worthy? Yeah. Well, it

Speaker3: [00:04:33] Had some features that other products on the market they don’t have. It has telescoping legs. So again, you can raise it and lower it. Yeah, it has a cooking grate that also can be raised and lowered above the flames. And what’s really cool is when you’re finished with it, you take the legs off, you close them down, you put them under the cooking grate and then you can carry the grill like a briefcase. Oh, sweet. It’s about it’s about twenty two pounds, about 18, 18 and a half inches across. So it’s not really large. Yeah, and it’s not overly cumbersome to to work with.

Speaker2: [00:05:10] Now this is not your first entrepreneurial rodeo. Yeah, you have an entrepreneurial background.

Speaker3: [00:05:17] Yeah, yeah. Some people call it a bent, so. Yeah, I’ve I’ve always been into business. I mean, when I was 13 years old, the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a file cabinet. Yeah, just to organize things. I know it’s really weird. I think back and I still think it’s weird. But when I was in college, I started three companies and that’s where I think I really got the taste for. It is, you know, once again, I get out of high school and into college. You’re making big, big boy decisions. And I really enjoyed the three companies I made, and I’ve kind of always had that mean going forward. Four or five years ago, I was in St Thomas with my family. We were diving and the Dove Master had his little plastic PVC tube with like bibs in it, and she would rattle this tube to get your attention underwater. Well, I was always down on the reef out in front of everybody, and it sounded like coral rolling across the bottom of the ocean, so I never really heard her shake that. So when I got back, I said, he’s got to be a better way of communicating on the water. And I came up with a product called the Dove Cricket. And basically, it’s when I was a kid, we had toys that mimicked crickets. You know, you push the metal tab and release it and make two tones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I found something in a different market, in a different industry and repackaged it and relabeled it. And now I sell it as a Dove Cricket underwater communication. So that was, yeah, that was fun. That’s really cool.

Speaker1: [00:06:58] As a fellow diver, I can appreciate that. Do you

Speaker3: [00:07:00] Guys? Yes, we’re going to. We’re going to Key West for Thanksgiving. So I think about that.

Speaker2: [00:07:06] That’s awesome. So and now roofing coatings, roof coating.

Speaker3: [00:07:11] This is my day job. I’ve been in the roof coating business for almost 30 years. It’s hard to believe it’s been 30 years. Basically, the liquid applied coatings that’ll make a roof waterproof and reflect about 90 percent of the heat from the sun. So they’re very energy efficient. Yeah, primarily used on commercial and industrial roofs. And that that’s that’s taken me around the world, I had distributors literally in 16 different countries. So that was that was a big adventure.

Speaker2: [00:07:40] Wow. So let’s go back to this to this grill. You can see the idea and then you get the CAD drawings. Or maybe I’ve got the sequence wrong when you’re when you’re launching something like this. I mean, it’s all beautiful. You’ve got to go to his website. Is it outback grills, outback dash grills, dot com

Speaker3: [00:07:57] Outback dash grills?

Speaker2: [00:07:59] I mean, it’s cool. It’s got video, it’s got explanations. It’s got I mean, they’ve got a great guarantee. The whole, the whole bit. It’s beautiful down. It all look so easy, right? Oh yeah, of course I could have done that, right? No, that’s what it looks like when you see the finished product like that. Tell us a little bit about the process, what was going on in your mind and sequence. Did you put a lot of energy and thought into the marketing side of things? Or was it more on the production? What was it like getting a product to market?

Speaker3: [00:08:29] Yeah, it was. It was a much bigger lift than I thought it was going to be. Once we had the design and a prototype manufactured, then I had to find an actual manufacturer. And I searched a number of fabricators here in the states, and I just couldn’t find anybody who would who would manufacture it. So I had to go offshore. So that was that was an adventure. I found the manufacturer through a outfit is based in Texas and they have an agent in China in this guy. This company, they partner U.S. manufactures with Chinese production facilities. So in essence, I have a guy in country that Swatch watches out for our interest, but finding him and making sure that fit worked. Then he identified three potential manufacturers. We settled on one, and then I went over to China and met him toward the facility. Fascinating. It was absolutely fascinating.

Speaker2: [00:09:32] And then so did you know early on what your marketing channels were going to be? Is that still evolving for you? And I mean, if Cabello’s or whoever approaches you, you’re open to a conversation or absolutely.

Speaker3: [00:09:46] Well, when I got the first prototype, I took it to Cabello’s. I talked to the store manager. I said, Look, I don’t want to sell you anything. I don’t. I just want your opinion. And I brought the gorilla and I set it up. I said, Could this live on your shelf? He goes, I’ve never seen anything like it. Absolutely. This is great. He brought three or four other managers in and they looked at it and they thought it was wonderful. So right now we’re developing, excuse me, the product through social media. We have a Facebook presence, Instagram. We have a website. And I’ve learned that bricks and mortar Cabello’s Bass Pro Shop REIT, which you might really my target market. Right? Right? They want to supply the market, they don’t want to create the market. So what we have to do is we have to create the market, create the demand right and they’ll fulfill the the supply and demand. So we’re still in that stage of of. Going up against, you know, David versus Goliath because of other manufacturers out there that really don’t have a similar grill, right? They have portable grills, but it’s it’s nothing like the Outback Grill, but they have much bigger pockets, much deeper pockets and we’re trying to to to create that demand and and control it. You know, we don’t want we don’t want this thing to take off like wildfire and then we can’t supply the demand. And then it kind of peters out, right? We got to control the growth and then show the bricks and mortar that there is a market for it.

Speaker2: [00:11:20] So my world is probably a little bit small. But what immediately comes to mind for me, because everything I know about hunting, I get off of YouTube brain and all my buddies that tell lies with me at the campfire. So there’s Steve Rinella on the Meat Eater YouTube, and then there’s deer meat for dinner. Rob, Robert Harrington and I would love to see. I would love to see Robert Harrington deer meat for dinner or Steve. I’d love to see him cook it on your grill sometime. But sometimes a little boost, a little. Somebody that has some notoriety like that can really provide a boost. But to your point, maybe too much. Too quick, too. I don’t know.

Speaker3: [00:11:55] Right? I mean, I’d love to talk to him. I mean, that could be a great opportunity.

Speaker2: [00:12:00] Yeah, that would be fun. Well, if I get further down South Florida hunting, which I want this year, then I’ll just I’ll pick up an outback grill and I’ll just drop it off, you know, because I think the one guy the deer meat for dinner guy lives like in South Florida somewhere. So maybe you should drop one off on your way to Key West?

Speaker3: [00:12:17] Not a bad idea.

Speaker2: [00:12:20] All right. So so what’s next then? What’s the what’s the plan? You got it up and running. You got the website, you’ve got your Oh, you know what? Let me ask you about that. This this guy. This is one reason to have your own radio show. You get all this free consulting here. Business RadioX. We’re trying to get our arms around more of a some e-commerce for our for our product service suite. How did you land on the on the whole e-commerce infrastructure? Did you get some help on that as well?

Speaker3: [00:12:45] Oh, absolutely. That’s that’s above my pay grade. I graduated from LSU in marketing.

Speaker2: [00:12:51] Yeah, so you played ping pong and pool like me? I did.

Speaker3: [00:12:56] And now the the way to go to market is just completely alien. I don’t I don’t understand social media, so I have a company that I work with, does the marketing and then have another company I work with that does the PR. So I’m delegating.

Speaker2: [00:13:13] You hear the wisdom of this guy, you’re you’re trying to work with best in class and all these different domains, you’re staying in your lane, you’ve got this idea, but and you’ve got an idea this practical because you’re out there living at two, I think, is a big piece. We talked a little bit about this before we went on air and about, and we’ll dove into your stuff here in a little bit. But it’s the design is so much more functional and has such better legs. I guess when the people who are involved in creating the product or the service are actually living the challenge?

Speaker3: [00:13:44] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It is a challenge, but it’s fun. It’s been a lot of fun.

Speaker2: [00:13:50] But you do. Have you got a lot of irons in the fire, man? I mean, I can I can tell in your voice, you just you have a great deal of passion for it. You’re having a good time. You’re finding the work rewarding and inspiring, and sometimes you’ve got to run out of gas. Where do you go for for inspiration and ideas and to recharge? Is it this outdoor activity? Is that your thing?

Speaker3: [00:14:13] Well, yeah, I think I’m not one that sits still very long. You know, I have to go. I have to have do something. My midlife crisis five years ago, I ran my first Ironman. Holy moly. So that’s it’s cheaper than a girlfriend.

Speaker1: [00:14:31] Congratulations.

Speaker2: [00:14:32] But before you go on and I do want you to go on what exactly is entailed in an Iron Man because it’s several things right?

Speaker3: [00:14:37] It’s a 2.2 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride in the twenty six point four mile run. Wow. Oh, it’s so long.

Speaker2: [00:14:44] I don’t think I could do any any of those a little bit combo.

Speaker3: [00:14:49] Yeah, it makes for a long day.

Speaker2: [00:14:51] I’d imagine I was complaining before we went on air that I wasn’t complaining because I had a great time, but I went to hunt in Utah. That’s completely different terrain. I’m about to go hunt. Tallahassee, Florida, right? It’s just like flat. And I mean, here’s this old fat guy me and making it up these hills and I mean about killed me. I mean,

Speaker3: [00:15:09] In the Alps, dude, I’ll get you two. Yeah, yeah. I learned that I climbed Kilimanjaro about 10 years ago, and that was one of the things you couldn’t train for is altitude. You know, here in Georgia, we got a thousand feet right, but you get almost half of mountain. It’ll get you.

Speaker2: [00:15:23] All right. So you got good at this. You got good at the outdoor stuff. You clearly have reached a level of accomplishment that many of us could only aspire to in that in that regard. How do you think what contributed to you becoming a good businessman?

Speaker3: [00:15:42] Hmm, that’s a great question.

Speaker2: [00:15:43] Well, hey, it took me a minute to get it out, but I thought it was fantastic. I thought,

Speaker1: [00:15:46] That’s a great yeah, that’s a great question.

Speaker3: [00:15:52] Perseverance. I think I think it’s perseverance, you know, you want to do something, you set your mind on doing something and you just do it. You have to persevere and take the good times of the bad times, but always have that goal in sight.

Speaker1: [00:16:07] That’s a good answer.

Speaker2: [00:16:08] That’s a great answer. And we haven’t recorded it. So now it’s like a Business RadioX answer. You just think that it’s not just a steve answer, right? You want to know stuff. Tune into Business RadioX. All right. So where can our listeners get their hands? And let’s throw in the clicky clicky thing. What’s that thing?

Speaker3: [00:16:26] Dove Cricket.

Speaker2: [00:16:28] Where can they get their hands on time cricket? And, more importantly, for the purposes of this conversation? What’s the best way for them to get their hands on the on the grill and or if they are in some sort of marketing channel potential environment like that? Or maybe even investor? I don’t know if you want to have a conversation with you or someone on your team. Let’s leave them with some coordinates in a way to connect man and get the product.

Speaker3: [00:16:52] Absolutely. The website is W WW Outback Hyphen Grylls. Okay. Ok. You can order the grill there. You can contact me there through the Contact US link on the website. The Dove Cricket that’s on Amazon Sweet, the Outback Grill. We’re working on getting on Amazon. It’s just a little bit more difficult than than I thought it was going to be to get on Amazon, but it will be there probably next week.

Speaker2: [00:17:21] Really? Yeah, yeah. All right. So I was getting ready to wrap, but now I got to ask another question on Amazon. Is it when you weigh that thing, that opportunity? Obviously, you feel like it’s worth it. I was operating under the impression that you’re giving up a lot of margin when you do that. Is that not the case or is it just worth it?

Speaker3: [00:17:41] Well, the exposure, it’s huge exposure, OK? It’s a great opportunity to reach a lot of people really quick, quick, right? And it is it’s a different margin. It’s a different equation, different margins. Absolutely. So it’s. At first, I thought it was a really big hit, right? But the number of people that you can reach out to and the ease of the sale, right, I guess it’s going to outweigh the loss of margin. As you pointed out earlier, you know, if any of your listeners are interested in investing, you know, we could be open to to that opportunity, either financially or maybe somebody’s been down this road and has done something like this and understands the markets we’re trying to go after. I’d love to talk to them.

Speaker2: [00:18:22] Ok, so there is an investing opportunity, or at least a conversation absolutely around investing or contributing, playing, playing in some way? Sure. All right. Well, I’m going to get my grill. I’m not going to wait for Amazon. I’m going to get my outback grill from the website. Perfect. You know, and since since I got the inside track with you, I’ll I’ll I’ll just drop your name a little bit. Perfect. Or are they going to charge me like a surcharge if I?

Speaker3: [00:18:51] Take care of it.

Speaker2: [00:18:52] I do that. All right, before we before we do rap, and we really will wrap this time because I want to talk with Ian as as well. What can we be doing? The the folks who are tribe, if you will stay, the folks who listen to this show, the folks we attract and candidly, the folks that we’re sort of attracted to. Yeah, they listen in and they definitely want to advance their own interest. But I got to tell you, man, our crowd really tries to help each other. What can we what can they what can the Business RadioX movement be doing to support you, man? What can we be doing to help

Speaker3: [00:19:28] Buy a grill? And I think what we need more than anything is reviews. Ok, I’m learning that reviews on the website. All right. That’s going to help, I think, establish the market for us and get get the word out and you push the push, the website, you know, all the traffic we can get, I think is going to help as well.

Speaker2: [00:19:48] All right. Well, we’ll make it happen. We’ll continue to try to get the word out for you. And we’re going to continue to follow your story as it unfolds.

Speaker3: [00:19:57] And you know what? I tell you what if you place an order for the grill and there will be a coupon code if you put Radio X, 10 will give you a 10 percent discount on the grill.

Speaker2: [00:20:08] Oh baby, what if I put Radio X 90? Give it a try. Guys, see what happens. No, that’s that’s what we’ll do then. And I mean, I mean, you know, they’re a little bit and just have it because I can have it shipped to Rusty’s House. My my brother’s house, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And you know what? Holly, my wife, my boss, would probably approve the purchase if I said it was a present for the Thanksgiving House. There you go. I like it. It’s all coming together, man. All right. One last time. Let’s leave them with some coordinates website, LinkedIn, email, whatever is appropriate, man.

Speaker3: [00:20:41] Sure, outback hyphen grills. That’s grills, plural.

Speaker2: [00:20:47] Fantastic. Well, Steve, thanks for coming in and hanging with us, and I’m quite sincere. Let’s have you come back as this as this story unfolds. It might be an interesting conversation. Maybe, have you? And if you do have a market partner, you know, like a channel partner at that point or just come in with a delighted guest, but it might be fun if you’re, you know, if at that point you’re working with some other marketing channels, have them come in and talk about the work together, but we’d love to have you back. Yeah, I’d love to do that. Yeah, fantastic. Hey, man, how about hanging out with us while we visit with our next guest?

Speaker3: [00:21:19] Oh, absolutely.

Speaker2: [00:21:23] All right. Next up on Cherokee Business Radio this morning we have with us with aphasia readers LLC. Miss Anna. Good morning.

Speaker1: [00:21:34] Good morning, St.. How are you?

Speaker2: [00:21:35] I’m doing well. So what did you learn in that last in that last segment?

Speaker1: [00:21:39] I feel like I share a lot of the same pain points. You know, the Amazon issue, you know, just listen, those for who are listening like for a business, if you really want to contribute and help buy through their website because we have to pay a larger margin on Amazon. And so we get the more bang for our buck through our website. Even though Amazon is a great channel, like you said, to reach a huge audience and it’s a great tool, we do make a little bit more to, you know, for our products and services, so. But yes, that that totally rang true for us and what we’re going through too. But for us, we our main mission is to give back to our community through, you know, for the aphasia community. So that’s that’s a big push for us for like if you’re going to buy our product, then please go to our website. We love Amazon, but you know, we make a little bit more money if you buy direct.

Speaker2: [00:22:35] All right. So tell us about aphasia. Maybe, maybe it’s appropriate for you to share your back story and maybe you can. We can kind of ease into what this this this thing is that you’ve created here.

Speaker1: [00:22:46] Right. So my husband, he had a stroke. Ryan, he’s here with me. Hi, say hello. He had a stroke at the age of thirty four, so it’s been three years now. And as most people probably don’t know what aphasia is, but one in three people who have a stroke are left with aphasia. So aphasia is a speech and comprehension disorder. And you know, it’s one of those things where it affects your language, not your intellect. And that’s one of the things that we’ve dealt with is some people who try to communicate with Ryan. They’re like, What’s wrong? You know, we’re like, No, he’s he’s still smart and as bright as he ever was. But you know, it’s it’s that communication the the, you know, the pathways that were there before are no longer there. And you have to kind of with speech and practice and in different levels of therapy, you have to reroute your brain to get it out. So it’s it’s a very lonely condition. And, you know, people just without the practice in the speech therapy, they don’t have the confidence to communicate with their family, which is sad because before the event that may have caused the aphasia, they were so freely able to say, I love you and communicate to your loved ones and have, you know, tell stories and you know, and but it’s it’s not there anymore.

Speaker1: [00:24:14] So it’s it’s kind of a heartbreaking condition. But, you know, through Ryan’s journey, we really, you know, he did so great with trying to read out loud like and that’s been a proven source for those recovering from aphasia. The repetitive practice of reading aloud is very important, and it can help recreate those pathways. Look again. Yes. And so, you know, through, you know, because we’ve been involved in all kinds of therapy, you know, occupational therapy, speech therapy, so that’s been our life for the past three years. But the speech thing, you know, Ryan has said to me multiple times, if there was one thing I could get back, it would be my speech. And so that’s something that we’ve really tried hard to get that back and make him feel more confident and communicate. But one of the the ways to do that is reading aloud and, you know, reading and practicing aloud simple sentences, functional phrases, which are phrases that you would typically use every day like, I’ll have a beer, I’ll have a beer. That’s a great

Speaker2: [00:25:20] One. Right, right.

Speaker1: [00:25:22] Ryan definitely can say that, you know, beer. Yeah, he’s actually ratted me out in a couple of speech therapy sessions for that which he’s not really happy about. But so. But yeah, so yeah, those things are so important. And throughout our journey, like I said, we have noticed a severe lack in resources and supplementary tools for adults with aphasia to practice on a simple level and a lot of our friends in the aviation community, they’ve had to resort to children’s books because those are the only form of simple readers available, which they’re not relevant number one to an adult. And they can make you feel a little demeaning. You know you’re you’re already going through a tough time. You’ve lost your speech. You you can’t do what you, you, you know, used to do. So, you know, it’s just a hard time and you want something that’s supportive and that’s relevant to you. So we were shocked that there was nothing available on this level. And so we were like, Well, you know, we’ve gone through it. We know what it’s needed. Let’s create it. And you know, Ryan did a stint in intensive therapy stint and university admissions Michigan speech and language clinic there, the number one aphasia clinic in the country. And we made great friends with the people that run that clinic, and they have helped us over the past year develop these books.

Speaker1: [00:26:52] Well, the first book we just released, but we have a plan for three to help, you know, fill that gap of adult supplementary simple form of readers to help you recover help you practice on a relevant level. And so, you know, the aphasia readers book, it’s comprised of six sessions. That’s like I said, it’s it’s relevant early on in your recovery. So you’re just, you know, overcoming and you’re you’re not far along with your speech recovery yet. So we’ve got six sections that you would typically have filled with functional phrases and sentences that you would typically need in that setting. So, so one is about a good morning. So helping you have a conversation with your spouse. So practicing that dialog so you can practice with with a friend or a caregiver or, you know, whomever, or you can read it by yourself, you can practice it by yourself. And we also tried to be very thoughtful in the design of the book because most people are recovering from a stroke that’s the most common form. And so they have a weaker ride right or left side. So we we did it with a spiral bound structure. So it’s easy to open, easy to keep open, easy to use, easy to, you know, just, you know, use on a simple on a simple level.

Speaker2: [00:28:16] This came up in our previous segment when we were visiting with Steve. When you’re living it, you’re there. Whether you’re you’re grilling wild game out in the field or whether you’re living this, you are uniquely qualified to create something that is functional and productive. Good for you.

Speaker1: [00:28:35] Yeah. So I mean, we know more than ever and we’ve been to so many, we’ve we’ve lived in speech clinics and we’ve done so much practice. So I in a way, I’m not a licensed speech language pathologist, but I kind of feel like I could be. You got your street degree. Do I have my street cred or sloppy? But yeah, so we took all of those things and put them together in a resource and put them in a book. That would really be a helpful tool. That’s affordable, number one, because speech therapy is so expensive and insurance doesn’t cover it. Hardly ever.

Speaker2: [00:29:10] And I did not realize that.

Speaker1: [00:29:12] Yeah, yeah, it’s been a big struggle, you know? But we had to fundraise to get Ryan to the speech clinic in Michigan because it’s just it’s ridiculously expensive and, you know, insurance doesn’t cover it. So that’s that’s going to be that’s one of our missions behind this book is to rate, you know, whatever proceeds from the book purchase, they go to create a vision awareness and to kind of fight to get. Insurance insurance to cover more therapy for people who need it and to really further that mission to educate people about it because we didn’t know about it before Ryan had a stroke. Like what is aphasia? Sure. And so, you know, and a lot of people in the medical field don’t really know what it is. You know, people would try to communicate. The Ryan were like, Oh, he has aphasia. What is aphasia? It was like they didn’t teach you that in medical school. So, you know, there’s there’s just a lot of awareness that needs to be done and in that area. So we’re committed to that and we we want to be able to do like more books and we want feedback from people who buy our books. If they want to see a certain session in their or a certain theme, we want to know about it. We want this to be a community thing and something that you know, we pull together and, you know, help each other get better and find their find your voice, you know?

Speaker2: [00:30:39] All right. So this book and we thumbed through it a little bit a little while ago before we came on air, but it’s illustrated as well.

Speaker1: [00:30:49] It is illustrated. It’s kind of a comic book style, illustrated book, and below it, it has simple sentences with visual support. So with aphasia sometimes to route to kind of get the word out, you need different types of support. And sometimes icons above certain words can really help with word retrieval. And so we found that that’s very important to include. So all of the sentences have that support in there, as well as illustrations that that can help. And at the end of each section session, we included a a illustration or a scene to help with writing practice because that’s important. And we also have customizable sections so people can write in it, customize their coffee order, you know, practice that so you can feel more independent in the community because that’s important. So, yeah, so we are just we are really happy with the result, and we’re so pleased to be able to provide a really multifaceted tool that’s going to help someone with aphasia really get the most out of their recovery and to help practice.

Speaker2: [00:32:02] So as you build out this, my frame for this is like this user community, right? And I envision this community returning the learning to the organization, right? So I’m working with someone and then returning what we learn, I suspect, and maybe you’ve done this already, certainly from your own personal time and energy investment. You’ve probably learned how to use a resource like this to a long, long time ago, when I had black hair and something much closer to a real job. I kind of came from the training consulting world. And so like in my mind, I’m thinking facilitator, guide, additional job age, you know, like resources. And I’ll bet as this effort continues to unfold, you’ll get some great input from other people who are actually living and say, Hey, here’s the book. Love it. Thank you. Here’s how we’re using it. And here’s boy next time on the next edition, think about doing this right?

Speaker1: [00:33:02] Absolutely. That’s what we want. And we’ve from the very beginning of conceptualizing this book, we worked with University of Michigan and their network to do some focus groups, and they were so excited about it. They were like, Yes, yes, yes, like, you know, get it out. Like, We want it, we need it. They were so hungry for that resource. And it’s, you know, one thing about our community is they’re so supportive and so, you know, helpful. Everybody is dealing with the same issues, same things. And we’ve gotten so much like love from them and so much support. It’s just been overwhelming. So we’re trying to we were trying to get it out quick and get it to them so they can use it and feel good about it. Because I mean, it is a common thing. A lot of people have to resort to children’s books to to read

Speaker2: [00:33:52] And never even occurred to me makes again in retrospect, you know, makes perfect sense. And I think we have the storyline for the level to book. I think it’s grilling outdoors. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:34:04] Yes.

Speaker2: [00:34:05] That at have Blake and he’s already he’s he’s texting his marketing partner, his guy in China right now. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:34:14] Yeah, I know we are. We’re open to any kind of feedback. And you know, like I said is, I just I’m really excited. This has been a total, you know, work in process for a while now. So it’s kind of like birthing a baby. You’re sending it out into the world, which I’m sure you can really do too. Absolutely. It’s like you had do all this work up front and you go through the highs and the lows like you. Mentioned and like we dealt with paper shortages and like all kinds of things, you know, trouble with illustrators, you know this and that and the other. And so, you know, it’s it’s really a good feel, good feeling when you can just say, OK, like this is sick and really sick.

Speaker2: [00:34:55] So aphasia challenges aside, and I don’t mean to minimize that, but just for the moment, aphasia challenges aside, writing a book, creating a product with your spouse. That has to have some of its own challenges, right? And rewards, I’m sure.

Speaker1: [00:35:13] But yes, Ryan is anybody who knows Ryan. He is a very sweet spirited person and very patient, and I’m very thankful for that because he has been a guinea pig on so many different levels. And I’m very appreciative for him being being so wonderful in dealing with my crazy harebrained ideas because I’m like, Oh, what do we do about this? What do you do? No, I ask him questions and feedback, and he is a very good about editing, and he’s got a great creative eye. So I constantly go to him to to make sure that we’re doing everything the way he would want to see it. And so he’s been a very important part of of creating this tool. So it’s been nice to have him as a partner. So no conflicts, you know, we’ve had no conflicts, but we’ve we really work well together, so I’m thankful for that.

Speaker2: [00:36:11] So, so this initial product, what all comes with it because there are some other resources right or right, or at least once you get the product, you’re aware of the other resources available because you have a whole website, the whole bit, right?

Speaker1: [00:36:26] Yeah. So we have aphasia readers and on there you’ll find a lot of resources, like if if your spouse or someone you love is just recovering from a stroke has aphasia, they can go and get really great resources again. We partnered with University of Michigan. Some of their resources that they developed are on there. They were so kind enough to let us link to their website. So they have a wonderful library as well as we have fridge functional phrases available which to elaborate on that. It’s really the whole mission of those worksheets is to help those with aphasia be able to practice and prepare for social events. So with the holidays coming up, you know, for Ryan, you know, practicing how to communicate what’s words to practice that are relevant to that time period so he can be able to communicate with family and feel confident about it? Did you say

Speaker2: [00:37:21] Fridge

Speaker1: [00:37:22] Fridge as in refrigerator fridge and the whole fridge part comes in? It’s because we

Speaker2: [00:37:28] All have heard that

Speaker1: [00:37:30] We always struggled to find time to practice and sometimes we would forget about it. And so what we did was create a worksheet that was just easily printable to put on the fridge. And so, you know, you’re always around the fridge. You’re always and, you know, I don’t know about you guys, but you know, the kitchen is our center of our home, you know? Yeah, it’s the center of our home. So we felt like that was a good place to put it to remind us that we needed to practice this. And so

Speaker3: [00:38:02] Certainly he thought of everything

Speaker1: [00:38:04] I’m trying. Yeah, we my whole goal is, you know, it’s been a really tough three years and anything that we can do to help others who are going through a similar situation. I feel a duty and a tug on my heart to to provide everything I know and to make it easier for someone. If I can make it easier for someone, that that’s just that, that’s where my heart is. I want to be able to provide some sort of I know I can’t do a manual. I would love to have had a recovery manual, a step by step guide as to how to get my spouse, you know, better. But the the thing that I just I felt really passionate about is helping others through through tough and tragic times. So, I mean, for us with him, we we didn’t know what the future held and it was a scary time and it can be a very stressful time too. And you know, if we can help provide resources that are easy and just turn key, then you know, that’s what we want to do. We want to help others through difficult times because we know how hard it is.

Speaker2: [00:39:12] Well, you clearly do. And when you and I asked a similar question of Steve earlier, when you do just sort of run out of gas and you hit a wall and and I’m operating under the impression that occasionally you do for you personally or for you guys as a couple. Where do you go to recharge? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place, you know, are you reading or are you where do you go to? Kind of. It refreshed.

Speaker1: [00:39:39] Well, I turned to my Bible, OK? You know, my God has been such an instrumental source in our life, and I mean, Ryan is a miracle. And we’ve seen God work in his life, in our life, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without, you know, our faith. And so when things get tough and when you hit those roadblocks, that’s been our go to and that’s what keeps us strong and keeps us going. And you know, like I I don’t know how people who who don’t know the Lord do it because he’s just been my I mean everything. So. And we accredited this book to to that. And you know, he’s been all over this project, and I know that it’s just it’s going to help. A lot of people say that’s kind of been, you know, that’s where we go to get our to get our peace and in relaxation and to kind of refuel a little bit because we know that he’s got good plans for us. And, you know, he’s notorious for taking a tragic situation and turning it into good. So that’s that’s kind of what we’re we’re trying to achieve.

Speaker2: [00:40:47] Well, the story is fascinating. Your story is amazing. The two of you are nothing short of inspiring. I mean it. You know, when you know, we all hit snags and then and then when you find out you learn of a story like this and how you’ve chosen to deal with it and work through it, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s like stone to grow up and just deal with your little itty ant bite, you know? But it’s just starting. You’re just getting going with this thing. This you have plans well beyond this first product. You have to speak to that a little bit before we wrap.

Speaker1: [00:41:27] Yeah. So the aphasia readers level one, which you can buy on our website and on Amazon. That one just released and then we’re now working on level two. So that’s going to be slightly harder, a little bit more like two syllable, three syllable words to challenge you. So, you know, once you get comfortable reading level one, you can kind of, you know, take a step up and to continue to work on improving. So and then we’ll have a level three as well, which will be even harder. So but they’ll follow the same kind of template as our current books do. So we’re not going to switch anything up on you. But, but yeah, that’s that’s our plan is for three books, and we’d love to do more than that. And that’s where I’m kind of relying on our community to kind of, you know, tell us what they need, what they want to see because we do have those resources available to, you know, get something out or to do something special. So, you know, we’re we’re really hungry for feedback and, you know, happy to happy to work on new things and to help.

Speaker2: [00:42:34] Well, we mentioned this. We touched on this earlier in the conversation, but I do think you’ll find we’ve discovered this with the Business RadioX community, and some of our clients have discovered this with communities that that they continue to build. Your community is going to be such a marvelous asset because they really will feed that feed that to you, an idea. And it’s a conversation to pick up off air, something that that we started doing a little over a year ago. And my business partner, Lee Kantor, whose idea I can’t take any credit for it. We’re about to do another session after this show is the reason it comes to mind. We do these pro tips and Lee and I, we’ve just been around a while. We’ve got some scar tissue. We’ve learned some things about using this platform to help people and make money. And so we’ll just record like a dozen. We call them pro tips today and then we just, you know, consistently drip them out there. And I I wonder if that’s not something, and you may or may not choose to use this medium, or maybe you do it in text or whatever. But if the whole community got behind kind of creating some tips on just dealing with all the aspects of this, that could be fun for you.

Speaker1: [00:43:43] Yeah, absolutely. We’re we’re totally up for that. I think it’d be great. You know, we would be the perfect fit for that.

Speaker2: [00:43:51] I’ll send you a bill. Yes, thank you. Appreciate that. All right. For those listeners who would like to learn more about this topic in general, who might want to have a conversation with you or anybody on your team or in your community, let’s leave them with some easy ways to do that, whatever you think is appropriate.

Speaker1: [00:44:11] You can go to our website, aphasia readers. So it’s a P-H or a page, a CYA readers dot com. I had to think about that for a second. And then we’re also you can also shoot me an email info at aphasia readers dot com as well. And I wanted to mention that we’re also with Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up. We’re going to do a promotion to where, you know, any order placed for the first 200 orders, we get there get like a silicone aphasia awareness band, Yap in our colors. So we’re going to run that promotion. And but yeah, we’re we’re looking to to really we’re really excited to see how this does in the marketplace. So we can’t wait. We’re also going to do a Giving Tuesday promotion to for those who feel like they want to donate and contribute. We’ll be offering a T-shirt, which a person portion of the proceeds will go back into, helping us fund the second book because illustrations aren’t cheap. So we’re going to be running that. So if you follow us on our social channels at aphasia reader Adcom, you can see those things come through and as a reminder, if you if you’d like to donate or participate, so.

Speaker2: [00:45:27] All right, so but Grand Central here, Ground Central, what is ground zero anyway? The place to go is aphasia readers. That’s the place to get. Yes.

Speaker1: [00:45:40] Hey, I have to spell that out for everyone who doesn’t know what aphasia is because they’re like, How do you spell out? I don’t know.

Speaker2: [00:45:48] So yes, that’ll be in level six of the book series, which is

Speaker1: [00:45:53] Really odd because if you have aphasia, that’s one of the hardest one said they weren’t very kind to naming

Speaker2: [00:45:59] That.

Speaker1: [00:46:01] So, so yeah, so we’re we’re excited.

Speaker2: [00:46:05] Well, it has been an absolute delight having you and Ryan on the show. So much, so much you got going on. Thank you for joining us and and yet come back and keep us posted when the next book in the series comes out. Let’s circle the wagons and let and let folks know about it. But please don’t be a stranger.

Speaker1: [00:46:26] Of course. Thank you so much for having me on the air again.

Speaker2: [00:46:29] All right. This is Stone Payton for our guests today and everyone here at the Business RadioX family. Sam, we’ll see you next time on Cherokee Business Radio.

Shannan Collier, PC. and Kelly Nagel from Nagel’s Bagels

November 12, 2021 by Kelly Payton

This Episode is brought to you byAlpha and Omega

ShannanShannan Collier, The Law Office of Shannan S. Collier, PC

We truly believe that once you are a client, you are a client for life. We concentrate on building and continually facilitating our relationships. We work closely with each client, whether a business or individual, and endeavor to exceed expectations and shatter myths. We are proud to state that we have had numerous clients for over fifteen years and that we have assisted clients in all types of matters, from business formation, restructuring and acquisition to business succession and ancillary personal estate matters to complex franchise establishment and development.

When clients have legal or other professional needs that are better satisfied outside of the firm, we offer and contribute unparalleled assistance in managing the professional team and assisting accountants, financial advisors and other attorneys in performing their tasks to accomplish a final goal. We constantly strive to fulfil our mission statement: To provide professional, competent service to each client to the extent required and desired and in a diligent manner, so as to encourage continued confidence in our abilities.

Connect with Shannan on LinkedIn

 

KellyKelly Nagel, Chief Marketing Officer at Nagel’s Bagels

Experienced Marketing Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Nonprofit Organizations, Event Management, Media Relations, Corporate Communications, and Fundraising. Strong marketing professional with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) focused in English / Creative Writing from Florida State University.

Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn

 

 

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:08] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Woodstock, Georgia. Welcome to women in business where we celebrate influential women making a difference in our community. Now here’s your host.

Speaker2: [00:00:29] Hi, I’m Laurie Kennedy with Business RadioX, and I’m here in the studio with our producer Stone, as well as Kelly Nagel and Shannon Collier Salvi. Did I say that properly? You did. All right, I’m going to start with you, Shannon. How are you doing today? I’m doing well. Thank you and you. I’m doing fantastic. I wanted to ask you what originally? Now tell us what you do and then tell me how you originally chose to get into this line of work.

Speaker3: [00:00:58] So I am an attorney. My practice is primarily limited to business, estate and tax planning. How I got into this line is since I was three years old, I have wanted to be a lawyer, so I made it happen.

Speaker2: [00:01:13] That’s awesome. And so I’m guessing that times at your house when you were growing up were probably a lot of fun. Did you tell your parents, like, you know, how they were supposed to do things properly so that they would stay out of trouble? Or did you just create the trouble and then make them keep you out of it? I don’t know.

Speaker3: [00:01:33] I was the typical goody good girl, so there was never trouble on my side. I was definitely the one who was the straight and narrow. Maybe more out of fear than anything else. But my father was the one who taught me. Really, everything in law, he’s not was not a lawyer. However, he played well on TV as I tend the joke. His best friend was a lawyer and he always told me, Mean what you say? Say what you mean? He used real words with everything. So at probably five, I knew what oxymoronic meant. At eight, I knew what subterfuge was because my father would throw those words at me when he was fussing at me and I’d stop to wait. What does that mean? Because he’d be fussing at me and I didn’t know what that meant, he says. Go find out. I’d run upstairs, open the dictionary, see what it meant, run downstairs. I was not engaging in subterfuge. I was telling the truth from the beginning. So, so I would say that really, the household was was led by my father and he guided me to be able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish.

Speaker2: [00:02:36] Ok, did you grow up in Georgia?

Speaker3: [00:02:38] I did not. I was born in Georgia. I am old Savannah. But when I was very young, my parents moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and that is where I spent my formative years.

Speaker2: [00:02:48] Ok, all right. All right. Well, Kelly, tell us about your business and how long you’ve been in business and how you got there.

Speaker4: [00:02:56] I guess it’s a funny story. Kelly Nagle with Nagel’s bagels and obviously our last name. It was clearly God intended us to make bagels. But I’m from the south and my husband is from Southern California. So, you know, how do we make bagels? Well, he would do a lot of traveling with his job as a consultant in New York, New Jersey, Boston, and he’d come home because as a, you know, a good boy, he brought his southern girl back to the south. And we come home here to Georgia and there’s no bagels here. And I kidded him and said, Well, then figure out how to make them Nago bagel. And it was in June of 2019. We were sitting on the couch, and I only remember because it was the week of Chrissy, the youngest daughter’s birthday. And he goes, I’m going to figure out how to make a bagel. And he started researching and watching YouTube videos, and he did some batches and they were awful. They could have been a boat anchor. They could not have been a bagel. And that was the really the best thing that could have happened because he was like, Oh, this isn’t going to beat me. And so he just started, you know, making batches, giving them to every Yankee Jewish person we knew and to really, you know, say, OK, this is this a bagel? It’s this right? And he tweaked some things, of course. And then we have the bagel that we have. Well, this was supposed to be his hobby, and it turned into my full time job because of COVID. I got laid off. I was doing marketing and business development and for a company and obviously couldn’t do that anymore with the pandemic, everybody being home. So I got laid off and one of our friends said, You know what, if anybody can make this work, you can so see if you can make it work. And we’ve been drinking from a fire hose ever since and it’s just been exploding so well.

Speaker2: [00:04:47] I find that interesting because I jumped into helping my husband with Alpha and Omega Automotive during COVID as well, and it was really challenging to try to figure out what things like he’d been in business 20 years. What things could I help do that he wasn’t already doing? Or how could I not step on his toes and bring something that helped alongside him? Did did you find that you were walking through any of that as well?

Speaker4: [00:05:13] Oh, absolutely. I tell people all the time that our marriage counseling has worked so much more within our business than it ever helped in our marriage. We have a great marriage, but that learning what lanes we’re supposed to be in and learning to be able to say, Oh no, no, that’s my lane and this is your lane. So he’s the baker. He does all the back of the house stuff and he is very, very organized. He writes everything in an SOP and I am the front of the house person. I love doing these kind of things, speaking to people, being in the community, marketing, business, development, that stuff. So that’s that’s what I do. I go out and get the accounts and, you know, I’m in the community and he bakes.

Speaker2: [00:05:58] Yeah. Shannon, with you. I know you’ve been growing your business and adding people like what it would is. How has that transformed what you were doing like before COVID and now?

Speaker3: [00:06:09] Honestly, COVID has not affected me. I’ve been very fortunate where I’m not seasonal and when the economy is good, my business is good. When the economy is bad, my business is good because there’s always people starting businesses, losing jobs, starting their own businesses are growing. People always need a state planning tax planning. So I’m very fortunate in that aspect. It’s been somewhat coincidental, however, that around the COVID time my business has exploded. You’re right, I have been attempting to expand. It’s very difficult, though, in this day and age to find competent professionals who upon whom I can rely. So that has been the hardest growing pain for me. I’ve been fortunate enough. I found a fabulous associate attorney who I have now. I have a great paralegal. I have a fabulous administrative legal assistant who is my right hand upon whom I rely entirely. But I would love a couple more people to maybe take the pressure off and let me spend more time, as Kelly says, doing more things like this. Being in the community. Meeting with people who might be able who might need my help, whom I might be able to provide assistance because that is my goal.

Speaker2: [00:07:15] So I want to hear from both of you. But since we’re speaking with you, Shannon, right this minute, go ahead and tell me like, what are the things that you are involved in in the community and that you like to do in ways that you like to to serve others in that way?

Speaker3: [00:07:30] Closest to my heart is truly the veterans and first responders. My husband has a very, very soft spot for the same, so he has his own business as well. And through his business, we have focused on hiring former veterans and homelessness homeless individuals to get them real jobs. Unfortunately, my husband can only employ so many people, so what that led to is doing is forming our own 501c3 that we use to hopefully one raise funds to contribute back to being able to get veterans displaced, homeless and the like back into the workforce and then also to provide another opportunity for them to have a job. If we can give them training in something as basic as stalking and retail, as opposed to having to be trained to go into an office environment or have a skill that they are just not in a position to learn, this, we believe, is something at a level that is not being addressed sufficiently. And we’re hoping that we can possibly get more of these people in the workforce to work at local retail establishments. Unfortunately, these people don’t have addresses, don’t have showers, don’t have phones. So we work closely with most ministries and other types of veteran support organizations. They identify people. We are looking to give them that six months through our five one three and or through Brian’s, my husband’s company having them work, getting them a resume, getting a even if it’s a temporary like a housing or a long term stay facility, it gives them an address, lets them take a shower, let’s give clean clothes, lets them afford a phone. And then that way, when they have the opportunity to apply for a job, they can give an address, they can give a phone number, they can show up and clean clothes, they can show up showered and they have a letter of rec and a resume from me. So they have a lawyer and a Wednesday and maybe another business who are all giving them vouchers for saying This person wants to work. This person is reliable. We recommend you hire this person.

Speaker2: [00:09:39] Well, it gives me chills. I love that. I love that. Kelly, what about you? How are you? What are things that you’re passionate about in the community?

Speaker4: [00:09:47] I love being with people, as we said, and I one of my biggest things. One of the most important things to me is that people feel sane no matter where they are or what station they are in life, you know, whether they’re homeless or whether they are the CEO. So often we don’t see people as people. So that is truly my passion and the fact that we do make bagels. I also feel like we can’t make something as basic as bread and live in a community where any one person has food insecurities. And so we truly our goal is to ensure that no one is without food. There’s actually a really amazing tradition in bakeries in Eastern Europe, where they there they go and they buy bread every day. So you walk into the bakery and you buy your bread and you say, I want, I want a loaf of bread, and then I want one for the hook. And that they would pay for two loaves of bread and one goes on the hook and they take one home. And then if somebody comes into the bakery and can’t afford bread, they asked, Is there any bread on the hook? And the baker gives them whatever loaf of bread is on the hook. And so rich and I have have decided that that’s we haven’t gotten to the point to be able to form a 501c3 yet. But we use that tradition of on the hook, you know, being able to provide for others in the community. Law enforcement is really close to my heart. My father is a retired police chief here in Georgia, and so no one in uniform ever pays for anything. And any time I have leftovers, I’ll go to fire station or the police station and give them extra bagels, or just bake some for them just to to give back. Because gosh, especially in these last few years, they are so under appreciated and so underpaid. And so if I can just in a little way, let them see be seen and loved. And it’s true for anybody, but especially that those groups people.

Speaker2: [00:11:56] Yeah, I love that I love. And also the be seen part like that’s something that’s close to my heart as well. I spent a lot of my childhood feeling unseen, and so I want to make others feel same because it kind of stinks to not feel seen, you know?

Speaker4: [00:12:13] Absolutely.

Speaker2: [00:12:14] Do you think that off the hook, like the the saying off the hook came from something like that?

Speaker4: [00:12:20] You know, I’ve heard mixed reviews because I am one of those weird people that likes to go down the rabbit hole and figuring that out. I just, yeah, so I have I’ve. Heard that it’s that or there’s a few other theories, but yeah, that whole, you know, hey, are you on the hook for something or you know that that it is possibly related to that tradition?

Speaker2: [00:12:40] Yeah, because letting somebody off the hook means they don’t have responsibility for whatever it just was. And basically, if you’re getting free bread, then you’re getting something without the responsibility of paying for it, I guess. I don’t know. I think that’s pretty interesting.

Speaker4: [00:12:55] I think we can deem it so right here.

Speaker2: [00:12:57] Ok, let’s do it.

Speaker4: [00:12:58] Let’s see how done we’re so powerful.

Speaker2: [00:13:02] So, Kelly, what motivates or inspires you?

Speaker4: [00:13:07] Well, that’s such a good question. Ultimately, ultimately, that’s Jesus, ultimately, that’s my relationship with Christ is what motivates him as far as me, I believe that he put me on this Earth for specific reasons. In order to give a purpose and show love, I tell people that my motto is Love God, love people in that order, and nothing else really matters beyond that. But what gets me out of bed in what we do now is the fact that I do get to be out in the community, I get to meet people and I get to help meet people’s needs. Sometimes that involves Nagel’s bagels, sometimes it doesn’t. And I’m OK with that. I don’t care if I, you know, know somebody. Actually, I did it. What? A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine was in desperate need of a lawyer. He didn’t even know it, and I was like, I’m hooking you up tonight with my friend, hooked him up with Shannon, and he literally texted me before while I was walking in here and said, You saved my life. And it’s just to be able to do that because I know different people in the community that makes me know that I’m doing what God put me on the Earth to do.

Speaker2: [00:14:12] Yeah, that’s awesome. Shannon, what about you? What motivates and inspires you?

Speaker3: [00:14:17] When you ask that the first thing that popped in my mind, of course, was family. But when I thought about, in reality further how it goes, it really is people. It’s so difficult to answer this the way I can’t verbalize what’s in my head, it’s so emotional to me. I always want to do the best for my family. But as I’m out there, what I find myself doing is interacting with people and. Finding that what I can give gives me so much more. So similarly, a lot of the guys who work for my husband, like I said, they were homeless. They’ve been off the streets for 18 to 24 months now. And everyone who comes to my house or everyone whom I see on a job site calls me Mama. I get hugs from every single one of them. They ask Brian to invite me to lunch if they know they’re near where I’m working that day. It’s it’s events like that at situations like that that motivate me to continue to go out every day and do what I do.

Speaker2: [00:15:27] That’s awesome. So. That really kind of goes into my next questions, which were, how does who you are as a person reflect in what you do and what makes your life significant. So I feel like we kind of addressed all of those at once, don’t you all? Pretty much. Yeah. So and also the next one was how do you use your influence in the community? And you guys have already talked about that as well. You are so far ahead of me.

Speaker4: [00:15:56] All right.

Speaker2: [00:15:57] So tell me about how do you handle mistakes in your business, Shannon? Like what? How do you? I’ve already heard you say something like, let me see if I can remember what this was like. There are no mistakes. There’s just another way around something that was it was kind of something like that. Tell me,

Speaker3: [00:16:15] Ok, first off, there’s no mistake. Only a learning opportunity, OK? However, as a lawyer, we can totally make mistakes. And when we do, the first thing would be me cursing for a stream. And then after I calmed down, it is addressing it. It’s owning up to it. It’s fixing it immediately. As a lawyer, if we file something wrong, we have to fix it. If we put something out there wrong, we have to retract it. If we, you know, if we are, we’re at a different level where it’s such a high fiduciary level of representation and honesty to the courts and to each other as lawyers that I cannot let something false stay out there if it’s a mistake. Of course, everyone understands that, and I have before reached out to an attorney to say, I’m sorry you misunderstood me, or I’m sorry I misunderstood you, or I’m sorry, I don’t believe I clearly stated what it was. Let me clarify. Let me fix. Let me retract if we flat out mess up, file something wrong. It is a matter of going back and fixing it immediately and owning up to those mistakes and then learning from them. This week, my associate made a huge mistake by copying opposing counsel in something he shouldn’t have. Oh, and there was a quick apology. And reaching out for that and warning that we don’t do things like that in the office, but that we all make mistakes, so let’s learn from it.

Speaker2: [00:17:38] Yeah, I think when we were talking at one point in time, it had to do with a, I don’t know, something that like we had closed on this house and it was about how we were filing these. Oh, how we filed it this way or that way. And you were like, We just need to figure out, like if he did it this way, we’ll figure out how to make it work the other way. So what are some things that you have found for your business people that you’ve been able to redirect the way that they’re? Doing something.

Speaker3: [00:18:11] Ok, so if a client comes to me and they’ve done something they shouldn’t have and I don’t mean criminally, I mean, it would have been more advantageous to do something a different way. It might be more tax benefit.

Speaker2: [00:18:21] Thank you for specifying that.

Speaker4: [00:18:23] I’m just saying I don’t do criminal. She’s not going to be our alibi. Is that what you’re saying?

Speaker3: [00:18:27] No, I did not say that. No. Two really different things here. It’s not just that I won’t be defending you in it, but I can totally be your book the. The possible means or ways in which that can happen is too expansive to say, how have I done that? But what I’ll do is I’ll say, OK, you did ABC. And really, that wasn’t the best way to do it. You really should have done this. We can’t go back and really do this. But let me find an alternate way to get us to a same or a similar end without taking that ABC or I guess ABC’s we should have done. Def-, we can’t do DPF now, but let’s go ahead and do guy because that will get us. So the end result that is more advantageous in the ABC. So I will definitely look now. Sometimes we can’t. Of course, sometimes things are done. An example I had someone call me yesterday and say, OK, it’s year end. I’m going to have horrific tax consequences. What can I do? So we can’t go back and undo anything. Unfortunately, there’s certain things we can fix before the end of the year. Luckily, if you call me on January 1st, I can’t fix the year prior. That’s too late. But so I gave him some ideas of what he can do now to go back. This calendar year can’t do last calendar year, but so I’ll do what I can to the extent legally and ethically proper in the client’s given situation.

Speaker2: [00:19:53] Yes, that just made me reminded me. I’ve got to call my financial advisor about my I.R.A..

Speaker3: [00:20:01] Whatever triggers up, either. Think of it. Remember? Look, now everybody, don’t wait until December 1st. Look at everything

Speaker2: [00:20:07] Now. Yes, absolutely. What about you, Kelly? How do you deal with mistakes that are made? And I and let me just before you answer this, I’m just going to say that from what Shannon says, at least an automotive. Yeah. I mean, you’re not going to do everything perfect all the time, but owning up to it and fixing it is like, I don’t think anybody expects you to be perfect. I mean, they want that. They really hoped for it.

Speaker3: [00:20:31] But they could be mad when you’re not.

Speaker4: [00:20:34] Yeah. But the truth is, is that no one’s perfect, right? We all know that and we all know that about everyone. But and so what our philosophy, what my philosophy has always been is authentically and honestly on what you did and extravagantly apologize. And what I mean by that is, for example, we had someone it was very, very early on. We were testing out different packaging for different bagels and we had someone purchase some bagels from a place and within 24 hours they had molded. Obviously, it was poor packaging on our part. He called us and said, Hey, well, first of all, thank you that he called, you know, they don’t always do, right. Most of the time they’re like, Oh, well, I’m never going to buy them again. But he called us. Well, he literally bought two bagels from this place for three weeks in a row. I does. I delivered a dozen bagels to his house every week for three weeks in a row, completely free. And you know, that cost me some money. But that was two years ago. He is still a client. Are you still a customer? I don’t even like to call them anything but friends. You know, he’s still one of our fans, and he still comes out of his way to find our bagels. And he almost always is telling other people about, Hey, this is the company you want to go with. This is who you want to talk to. This is who. And it’s because we extravagantly apologized and that it it doesn’t matter how much it costs, it costs the bad will that you create by not doing that cost so much more in the long run.

Speaker2: [00:22:11] And yeah, for sure, absolutely.

Speaker4: [00:22:13] But it does have to be honest and authentic to. I do believe that being honest and authentic, even back to when I was a waitress and I messed up someone’s food, I was like, You know what? I truly, totally screwed up. I know that you said this and I put in the wrong thing. Let me fix it. And I think when people see that and feel that honesty it, it goes a long way because everybody deep downs knows that they’re not perfect either.

Speaker2: [00:22:38] Right, right? Yes, for sure. So what are some misconceptions about your industry,

Speaker3: [00:22:44] Kelly,

Speaker4: [00:22:48] That what you see on the surface really is all there is to it, and I bet everyone could say that in this room, right? That what they just see, whether it’s that they see one of our bagels at a coffee shop or they see us at a farmer’s market or they see what we bring into their office when we’ve catered something that that’s all it took. They don’t see the 48 hour ahead of time, all of the work that it took, and they also don’t see the amount of money that bagel equipment cost. And that’s why if you go to a bakery, a lot of times a regular bakery won’t make bagels because bagel equipment’s very specific and ridiculously expensive. And so they they don’t see that kind of planning. I think they also don’t see the the care that my husband. And took in choosing everything that we do, everything down to this specific flower, to this specific oil, to the specific sugar to, I mean all of those things to make sure that it comes out the way that it should come out and that he truly we both truly that he is amazing how much he cares about that end product.

Speaker2: [00:24:04] So I am curious now that you talk about this equipment, what is different about Baikal equipment versus other baking equipment? And on my assumption is it has something to do with the thickness of the dough.

Speaker4: [00:24:15] Maybe well, most bread is you have a mixer and you mix up the ingredients and then you’ll let it proof and then you put it in an oven. Well, bagels, if they’re done correctly, are boiled and baked. So you, you do. Really? Yes, I had no idea. So we do have the same. We do use now. We are not New Yorkers, we are. So we do not say we have New York style bagels, although we do produce in the traditional New York style. However, we’ve tweaked those six ingredients just a little bit, not a ton, but to to to elevate it. A little, I guess, is the way to put it. And so we do mix those ingredients and we have a very specific proofing process that causes them to always be soft, which isn’t always true with bagels. And then you boil in water and rich can geek out with you on water and the chemistry and what all has to happen there. But it’s water and and you boil them and then you decorate them. You put, you know, whatever the seasoning is or whatever, and then you bake them and and the oven that you bake them in is you can either do like a pizza type oven. They have to be very, very hot or a very hot convection oven and steam has to be present as well in the baking process, too. So it’s not like you can just do it in any old regular oven as well. It’s better to have so like a kettle that is the boiling thing. Could, you know, is really specific to bagels or that type of bread? Most people aren’t using a kettle for anything but that

Speaker3: [00:26:01] Bagels one

Speaker2: [00:26:01] On one. I know it’s well, it’s really interesting. I know, like my husband’s from New Orleans. So French bread in New Orleans is different than French bread here. And a lot of it has to do with the altitude and the weather and that sort of thing. So when you said you tweaked some of the recipes, I was the first thought that came to my mind was maybe that’s specific to our climate or, you know, how much moisture we have in the air, humidity and that sort of thing?

Speaker4: [00:26:28] Oh, absolutely. And we have to treat we have to tweak things as seasons change. So the weather just got colder. And so our proofing time went from 20 minutes to. It could be as much as three hours simply because you can only control the environment in your bakery. So much so, yeah, right.

Speaker3: [00:26:50] And of course, there’s that high quality of ingredients that you offer without all of the extra garbage that we see. And maybe some commercial brands

Speaker4: [00:26:58] Know there isn’t a single preservative or artificial ingredient in ours

Speaker2: [00:27:03] At awesome. Where is your store located?

Speaker4: [00:27:06] We actually don’t have a storefront. We have a commercial kitchen in Cartersville and we sell wholesale as well as doing home delivery and we do at Farmer’s Market. So there are about 15 coffee shops and cafes that use that sell our bagels. And what I love about that is kind of goes back to my purpose, right? Is I love that I can also help other small businesses elevate their business. I can use that marketing and business development background that I have to go into a coffee shop or a brand new cafe and say, Hey, let me help you. Let me help you do some marketing. And you know, let’s wheel. Both of our ships will rise by doing that as well. So that’s been fun to do. And and then we do farmer’s markets, home delivery, business delivery. But we are actively looking for a bigger space. We’ve kind of outgrown our kitchen, our commercial kitchen. And so we wouldn’t mind a storefront to go with our new place if we can find one.

Speaker2: [00:28:01] Anyone listening? Yes, please just get in touch. Well, so Shannon, what are some misconceptions about your industry? I know as as a lawyer, there are lots of them, but why don’t you share some, some situations that you’ve personally seen?

Speaker3: [00:28:16] In my sight, at least because I am not the personal injury attorney, so I’m not the ambulance chaser. But a lot of people do believe and to some extent they might be right that the services are very expensive and relatively yes, legal fees are expensive. What people don’t realize, though, is if you don’t set the proper groundwork, it’s much more expensive on the other side. And that sounds like the sales pitch. But as we stated earlier, mistakes the clients make think about now how much they’re paying me to go back and find that alternative. Like I said, the deaf or the guy or whatever, that costs a lot more now that I’m working at a different level and trying to work around the mistake as opposed to if I put it in place in the first place, right? So that’s probably the biggest. Another is people think, Well, if I if I own almost nothing or if everything is jointly with right of survivorship, I don’t need a will. You always need a will. I find so often there is that one asset someone didn’t think about that has now made it so that we have to file intestate probate, which is more expensive just because there’s a couple extra steps.

Speaker3: [00:29:20] It’s a little more time consuming, which means more legal fees. So misconception that you don’t need a will. Also, don’t forget something to think about. I’m going to bump me off. Let’s say that that I die and before my estate is administered. But after I died, my mom dies. Well, if if things are passing, either before I die or after I die for my mother, to me, it can affect what assets are now in my state that weren’t previously so. Mom dies. I die a month after mom. I don’t have a will, because everything I own was jointly with right of survivorship with my husband. But guess what? The assets had just passed to me from my mom are not jointly with right of survivorship. And now there has to be an intestate filing to get my assets from mom to flow them through to my heirs who are actually my husband and my son.

Speaker2: [00:30:13] Ok, so how often should you update your will?

Speaker3: [00:30:17] That is really a relative question. I tell people the big things to look for are birth, death, marriage, divorce, inheritance or lottery. Things that primarily change your financial or social position in life because it’s been 20 years is not a reason to revise your will. It’s a great reason to review it. I had someone this morning say, Look, we have no kids. We have had no changes. Or will, as 20 years old, do we need to revise it? Let me just look at it. Let’s see. I’m willing to bet you you don’t as long as it’s a Georgia will and you executed it properly. If the people are still the people or if someone has died, but you’ve named the successors to that person, there’s no reason you’re going to need a new will.

Speaker2: [00:31:03] Yeah, I think many of the times that we’ve changed ours, it’s had to do with when our children were at different ages, you know, like when they needed somebody to keep them. If something happened to both of us, then that was a different. Document or whatever. Then now that they. Well, we think they’re grown up.

Speaker3: [00:31:21] It depends, really. Even that is not necessarily if you have one child, which is a birth. So that was a reason for new will. Yes. And you name a guardian and you have a second child if it’s drafted properly, that guardian should apply to both children or under the third and to the fourth. Now, if that person dies again, there should have been a successor named if it was drafted properly. I’m hoping it’s a good will. There should have been a successor named now if there wasn’t or if you decided to change the successor. That’s not even a reason for new will. You can do a codicil just saying, Hey, everything else in here is still good, but I do need to change my name as Guardian. That is much quicker and easier than having to do a full will, unless there’s other reasons that you need a new will as well. Now, when the kids become adults, what happens? The guardianship provision just won’t apply because they’re adults. But at that point, you may want to name the children as fiduciaries in your will, and that may be a cause for a further adjustment. Possibly a codicil, possibly a full new will depends on how smart you are.

Speaker4: [00:32:18] No, I will say a misconception that I have heard people have about lawyers that you have actually rectified. For me, Shannon, is that you won’t have a conversation without charging, and that is so not true. It’s so, not true.

Speaker2: [00:32:32] You just invite her to lunch. And by all means

Speaker4: [00:32:34] She’s fine, right? Absolutely. You can’t get

Speaker3: [00:32:37] Me to stop

Speaker4: [00:32:38] Talking at that point.

Speaker2: [00:32:40] Like, I couldn’t write fast enough

Speaker3: [00:32:42] Now I I can’t help helping. It’s it’s sort of in my nature. Of course, when it comes to the actual work part, yes, they’re going to get charged for that. No, I’m not going to say come into my office for free console, but you know what you call me or you have a friend call me or you call me with a friend, or I walk into a meeting with three other people and I hear someone say something and I give him advice because I overheard a conversation. Little things like that happen to come out of my mouth without me even thinking,

Speaker2: [00:33:10] Yeah, I hear you. Well, tell me what is. Tell me a situation. Obviously not people involved, but a situation where you change the course of direction for a company and how and why. Like, what are the details around something like that?

Speaker3: [00:33:26] I don’t know if I’ve ever changed the course of it, but I have facilitated in the direction of a company more than one. I have one client who was undergoing a merger and they had a plan, and for tax purposes, I saw taxes that can be triggered upon the sole owner. When the merger happened that we could avoid or minimize, we could reduce the tax consequences if we structured it slightly differently. So we did that. I facilitated in changes of of. The one company was an Inc and we change it to an LLC because the structure they were heading, it would be more advantageous for the way they wanted to own it moving forward to have it be an LLC as opposed to stay in Inc. So things like that are more where I’m integrated. They call and say, Shannon, we’re thinking about this. Can you help us get there or what do you think? And that’s when I came in. So I don’t really change the direction they know where they want to go. My job was not to change that. My job is to maximize the benefits and efficiency for them in getting to wherever it is, they decide they’re going to go.

Speaker2: [00:34:32] Ok. All right. I love that. And. I lost my train of thought because I was enveloping all that within my being. Let’s change the subject. Mentored, mentoring and mentored, so, Kelly. Are you being mentored and are you mentoring others and what does that look like?

Speaker4: [00:34:57] Oh, absolutely. It is a huge passion of mine. I feel like I’ve said to people before, if you were not growing, you’re dying. And so and the only way to grow, obviously, is you have to have two parts of that you do need to mentor. But you also need to be mentoring someone else, you know, to to learn is. I mean, part of learning is teaching in someone else. And so yes, I have both of those in various aspects of my life. You know, I have a spiritual mentor, a woman that is amazing, that helps me learn and grow in my biblical and spiritual life. I have several actually business mentors, women that help me stay grounded. And one of it which doesn’t even know she’s my mentor because I don’t know her personally. But if y’all have ever heard Sarah Blakely, who owns banks, I mean, just I just read and listen to everything that she does because she’s amazing and so grounded and has just taught me so many ways to think of things and perspectives on that. So I do love. I love that, and I love her and love listening to her. And most mostly, I mentor my children, my 15 and 16 year old daughters when they allow that. You know, they are 15 and 16 year old daughters, so they come back.

Speaker4: [00:36:23] They please from your mouth to God’s ears. No, they are amazing women. They are strong, strong willed women. And as my mother would say, you would never want to raise weak willed women. So they are wonderful and I cannot wait to see how they’ll change the world because I know they will. And they do. They’re starting to allow me to to mentor a little more. But I have some other little. They’re not little girls, they’re teenagers, but they’ll help in the bakery or they help it farmer’s markets and stuff. And we’re able I’m able to mentor and speak life into them. And I mostly, I mean, the biggest thing that I try and teach people is, do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it, and that just changes so much. If you can do that and just, you know, own it on what you do and on what you can’t do, that’s OK, too. So yes, I feel like if you’re not teaching, you’re not showing the next generation. Well, then you’re kind of leaving this world in a bad place. And if you’re not learning, then you’re dying. So yeah, we have to be in that place in the middle.

Speaker2: [00:37:37] I definitely am all like on board with that. I feel like and there’s scriptures that say, you know, choose life like you’re either living or you’re dying, like you say. And I feel like if you don’t so into others, then that that attaches back to being seen like being seen as also being remembered by other generations and as you sow into the lives of others than part of your remains, you know?

Speaker4: [00:38:01] Absolutely. I think it was Maya Angelou that said people might people will probably forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel and making, you know, really authentically hearing and listening and pouring into people. You make them feel good. You make them feel seen, make them feel loved and known. And in our society that says all about, it’s all about me, it’s all about what I want. If you can model giving to others, I mean, there’s no better thing to model, no better witness to give.

Speaker2: [00:38:35] Yeah, that’s great. What about you, Shannon? And mentoring and being mentored and also tell us who’s in your family?

Speaker3: [00:38:43] Oh gosh, I consider my family really everybody. I’m very southern in that aspect, so we’re very extended. My dad had two brothers. My mom has a sister, so there’s plenty of cousins and children of the cousins. So I consider them all family in my household. It’s my husband and my son. My husband and I have been married three and a half years, and my son is 22 and similar to Kelly. I’m fortunate enough that he’s not a teenage girl, and because it was the it was only two of us for 15 years. He he’s always asked me questions and asked for my advice and come home and told me about his day and to this day, still living with us. He will come home from work and he will come to me and say, This is what’s happened and this what’s going on and this is what’s happened. My last medical school application and what do you think about this? And would you review this for me? And I’m honored that, you know, since he was in sixth grade, he asked me to help him put his plan in order to get where he is today. And he listened to me and he worked with me. He continually followed up and touched down just to his goals with me. So that is probably my proudest Mendy.

Speaker2: [00:39:53] You know, for me, Kelly, did you hear her say medical school?

Speaker4: [00:39:56] I did. I guess we’d need a doctor in the family,

Speaker3: [00:39:59] My son, the doctor.

Speaker2: [00:40:01] I can’t wait to say that.

Speaker4: [00:40:02] You know

Speaker3: [00:40:04] What? More could a Jewish mother ask for?

Speaker4: [00:40:06] That’s so true.

Speaker3: [00:40:08] And then as far as mentor, my first mentor, as I referenced earlier with my father, my father guided me. He raised me as his son, which I don’t want to, you know, pooh pooh the women in business aspect here. But he raised me to to really have no preconceptions, misconceptions, directions regarding what I can do. And there were never limits, and he raised me to be outspoken and strong and never really think that there’s anything I can’t do. I’ve never particularly set a goal because I just in my head. I think I decide to do something and I do it or I don’t, and it is what it is, and it’s not what it’s not. So he’s probably my, my primary and strongest mentor I’ve ever had as far as professionally. I was fortunate enough to have a local attorney, Frank Bird, to be my first true mentor when I graduated law school. Unfortunately, that’s when the hiring freeze went on in the government, so I was going to be hired by the IRS and they could not hire me because of the hiring freeze. So I was a struggling little girl by myself and he met me and he saw my tax background and my business background, and he brought me on.

Speaker3: [00:41:18] And here he is, relying on me for my tax and estate planning, and he was truly my mentor and truly guided me and supported me and will ever forever be my heart as that as far as professional mentees. I have had several attorneys come through my door who found me because they graduated the same law school I did, and they moved to Atlanta and they would talk to me. And of course, I was not hiring at that time. But I always said, You know, if you need to call me, if you if you want to talk, I’m always here. Whenever I teach continuing ed classes, I always tell the lawyers I am there and I have gotten calls and I have gotten questions, and I will help anyone any way I can because I don’t see any reason not to. I’m fortunate enough now. I have an opposing counsel who’s one of my mentees that I had years ago, which was so cool when he called me as a Shannon. And I don’t know if you remember me, but you were kind enough to help me out when I graduated and I’m now representing this client. And you’re opposing counsel. That’s fabulous. I’m so happy for you.

Speaker2: [00:42:20] Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:42:21] So that’s kind of my my history of mentor mentorship.

Speaker2: [00:42:25] That’s awesome. All right. Well, this will be our last question. I’ll start with you, Shannon. Ok? What advice would you give to others who are trying to enter the field that you’re trying to enter?

Speaker3: [00:42:36] Oh. I know you caught me off guard.

Speaker2: [00:42:40] No, I didn’t write that one down because I just thought of it.

Speaker3: [00:42:42] Oh, really, it’s stay within your wheelhouse because in law, it’s so easy to get lured into an area in which you’re not competent because you need the money just flat out. You need to survive, you need to make the bills. And I get that. But what you can do is find somebody and they will either mentor you through it or they will help it, or they will do it for you, or they will do it with you. So be very careful. Don’t stretch yourself too thin and don’t take on the client that your gut tells you you shouldn’t. That’s sort of

Speaker2: [00:43:20] That sounds like a story for later. Lots of stories

Speaker3: [00:43:23] On that one, but yes.

Speaker2: [00:43:26] Wow, OK. What about you, Kelly? What advice would you give to a woman in business trying to get into her, trying to get into a business or into food industry or

Speaker3: [00:43:37] Anything of that nature? Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:43:39] I mean, food is cutthroat, I will tell you. A lot of people make a good something and then say, Oh, well, then I’m going to open this. And I would say, whether it’s food or anything, I kind of have three things. One is be humble, be very, very humble, be used to being uncomfortable and be lean into uncomfortable and well, I guess it’s for things now. Think about it, ask for help, ask questions. And I guess that goes along with being humble. Ask, ask, ask, ask everybody that, you know, don’t ever let anybody think, Oh, well, I have it all together because they all know you don’t. So it’s OK. And the last one is have about three times as much money as you think you need. Oh, heck yes, right? If you’re going to play the lottery, I mean, you save, say, save, save, save, save, save.

Speaker2: [00:44:37] Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, ladies, for being here. And remember, if you if you think you know everything, then you’re sure to learn nothing like, that’s one of my go to saying. So that’s my advice for today and thanks Stone for helping us out and we’re son and off.

Seth Morgan from MLA Companies

November 11, 2021 by Kelly Payton

Seth MorganSeth Morgan, President and CEO of MLA Companies

Seth Morgan is the President and CEO of MLA Companies, which he founded in 2006, As a strategic advisor, he brings insight and accountability to business leaders. He also represents sell and buy sides in M&A transactions. Seth’s experience includes mergers and acquisitions, operations, internal consulting, controller operations and general management, bank negotiations, compliance audits and negotiation, business valuation experience, risk management, budgeting, and forecasting, and dealing with the pressures and dynamics of small business ownership.

MLA CompaniesConnect with Seth on LinkedIn

 

 

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:08] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for workplace wisdom sharing, insight, perspective and best practices for creating the planet’s best workplaces. Now here’s your host.

Speaker2: [00:00:30] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Workplace Wisdom Stone Payton here with you. You guys are in for a real treat this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast CEO with MLA companies Mr. Seth Morgan. Good afternoon, sir.

Speaker3: [00:00:49] Hey, thanks for having me, stone. Good afternoon to you and all your listeners. Thank you.

Speaker2: [00:00:53] Well, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Man, I know we got a lot of stuff to talk through. Before we go there, though, could you give us a little bit of a primer, overview, mission and purpose of MLA companies? What are you guys out there trying to do for folks?

Speaker3: [00:01:08] Well, that’s a great question. And don’t we spend a lot of time trying to answer? We started in two thousand six, so with really fractional CFO work is the center of our of our business that quickly expanded into. We do some merger and acquisition now, some back office bookkeeping support. We still are very involved in fractional CFO support, which really looks like a mix of consulting and on the ground execution with our clients. Recently, we started to expand in different disciplines outside of finance, so some organizational development and process improvement, et cetera. We believe business is a force for good in the world, and we believe it’s best led by people who view it through a stewardship lens. We spend a lot of time on that and we just really want to help those stewards be the best stewards they possibly can be. I know that sounds a little cliché, but we think because of that, it’s it’s it’s really an effort and creativity and innovation and ingenuity that these stewards are bringing to the table on a daily basis, whether they’re leads of departments or owners of companies. We have real passion for that. And MLA, that’s the that’s the succinct answer.

Speaker2: [00:02:16] Well, I’ll tell you, it seems like an interesting dynamic to me because not only are you courting and striving to serve the end user client, but you also find yourself, I suspect, working to recruit, develop, retain the practitioners themselves, at least with this fractional CFO. Where can you speak to that sort of finding yourself in two different environments and having to serve both?

Speaker3: [00:02:44] Yeah, that’s a great question and one that we spend time on. So as the CEO, you can imagine, you know, early on and in my in my career running MLA, it looked like making sure that diapers got changed and food got put on the table. And as the company has grown, I’ve had to do what everybody does in business and and really look myself in the mirror and say, Am I trying to build an enterprise here or am I just practicing a craft? And I suspect some of your listeners are facing the same question, and I made the decision to try to build an enterprise. So a board has been put in place for working very hard at getting MLR ready to go beyond me, and that means thinking very carefully about our clients who are the best clients, how do we recruit them? And then exactly what you said, Stone, are people who are the best people and how do we recruit them? So. So much of my time today is devoted to working to promote our brand, working obviously in business development. I still serve some clients from time to time, but absolutely then it’s thinking about who are the folks that we have at the leadership level, who are the folks that we have in the trenches? And how do we continue to keep that fresh and exciting, not only for our current team, but for our recruiting activities and then ultimately to serve our why to serve our purpose, right? How do we have the right people that will give the best advice to those stewards leading these organizations for good that we call businesses?

Speaker2: [00:04:05] Now, have you found that this labor pool, if that’s the right word, has changed or been impacted to any great degree with the advent of the pandemic coming on?

Speaker3: [00:04:18] Oh, I think it has grown, and there’s all kinds of theories on why that is. And so mine are no better than anybody else’s. Or maybe the better way to say is they’re just as good as everybody else is. You know, we probably see it more dramatically playing out inside of our client base where, you know, almost every client, regardless of what industry they’re in or complaining about labor shortages. It’s not to say that we don’t see our own challenge, but frankly, in our space, good people, we’re challenged to find pre-pandemic. It’s not new because of the pandemic that there’s a shortage. And I really think so. This is I was doing an interview over the weekend. This is playing also off of the generational shift that we’ve we’ve been talking about for years as business leaders. And that is the move from boomer to X to millennial. And we’re seeing that in many ways. I think stress and uncertainty really just drives to the surface the deep seated issues or changes or or shifts that we sense. And I think the pandemic maybe just sped those up made them more evident to us. So I think as businesses are grappling with this labor shortage, they’re also grappling with what’s really. A cultural shift underneath the surface of how employees and talent are thinking about what they need from their employer and vice versa. So I really think all the pandemic did is put a put a spotlight on it. We could talk about public policy, we could talk about macroeconomic conditions. I think all of those things are playing a part in making this labor shortage feel more acute. But I really think it’s simply it’s isolated and highlighted issues that were already there under the surface. It’s really what the pandemic did to us and maybe even for us.

Speaker2: [00:06:03] So the work itself that these practitioners are engaged in and the environment in which they find themselves, I got to believe that’s changed, too. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:06:13] Well, absolutely, if you’re referring specifically to our team. Yeah, I mean, the one is not changed and what won’t change is, you know, it’s a pretty noble thing to lead a business, right? And I’m not talking about my role that wasn’t a self gratifying or promoting statement. But I think if you think about the risk takers of America that that that are evident in our history and their evident in the living rooms that we’re talking to right now and in the offices, it’s a pretty noble thing. At least it can be. And those nobles, if you will, that are taking that challenge on and putting capital to risk and putting reputation to risk because it’s so much more than capital putting, putting their their own energy into and trying to build something that’s so often goes well beyond the generation that thinking about that they’re living in today, those stewards are still asking the same questions, which is the same basic questions we’ve seen thousands of books written on and the timeless questions How do I serve my community? What’s my value proposition? If I serve my community, I don’t necessarily mean, what’s the social impact or social good, although that’s obviously part of it. But so much of that social impact and social good is in the products or services we produce. It’s not necessarily the check that we write to the YMCA, although that might be a very wonderful thing. But it’s it’s the fabric that’s being built by these these stewards in business through their communities, through making for great team members and employees who are responsible citizens who are able to provide for their families and and do good in in the in the passion in areas that they have access to.

Speaker3: [00:07:50] This is a the beauty of business is we all know is is it can be a tree that continues to reproduce, not just not just inside that business itself, but then in the families of living rooms that that it’s affecting. So there’s a way long winded answer, probably not what you’re looking for, but those stewards. The questions are the same as the environment change. But of course, uncertainty is high right now. I really don’t care if the economy is doing well. I think if you talk to the average CEO, they are concerned and rightfully so. The macro conditions are just unsettling. And while there might be great short term stories of economic success and even maybe some of our clients are feeling that some are not as much, but some are feeling it. They’re seeing it. Their balance sheets are flush with cash. There’s still a level of uncertainty, certainly that the labor shortage is hurting us. The supply chain concern is out there that there’s a lot that the stewards of businesses today are struggling with. It absolutely has changed how our practitioners have to think about their flexibility, their empathy and even practicality. Like some obviously things like social distancing and distancing and businesses closing that obviously affected us as well. So all of those things, we’ve just looked at those just speed bumps along the road that frankly are not much different, not much more difficult than what our average business owner or client is facing. Anyway, that just required us to be flexible and quick on our feet as we continue to try to serve them as they serve their customers and vendors and importance.

Speaker2: [00:09:22] I got to ask me and I got to ask about the Seth journey, the back story and maybe even some insight into when and how it shaped this wide of yours. And I love the Stewart frame. But yeah, tell us a little bit about your back story. And if you, if you might, how that has come to influence, where you’ve landed on your why?

Speaker3: [00:09:46] Yeah, that’s thanks for asking. And I’m just going to be really direct. You can hit the mute button if you want to do so. You know, it’s not a very sexy story. You know, I joke with people that MLA started because I was about to be fired. I have a background professionally and public accounting and started to feel that entrepreneur itch as I started to work inside mergers and acquisitions for that public accounting firm, realizing that the world was so much bigger than the debits and credits and tax returns. And that really just fed my dissatisfaction, if you will. With that, there is nothing wrong with the public accounting industry. I’m not picking on it. I own a little public accounting firm that kind of serves as a system that is not picking on that. But for me, it wasn’t quite enough. And so I had the opportunity to work for a turnaround from a very experienced, well-capitalized entrepreneur that was taking a company off the Nasdaq, taking them through a three sixty three restructuring bankruptcy. It was looking for new talent. Two years into that, we weren’t turning around and I was probably going to be fired if I didn’t raise my hand and say, this is my turn to go. So at the age of whatever, I was twenty six or twenty seven, I don’t exactly recall, partly because I don’t remember the timeline I can. I can think that through what it was, twenty six MLA launched, I was backed by that CEO, my boss.

Speaker3: [00:11:01] We put a little business plan together. He was a basically a passive investor and we exited him in two thousand nine. It really probably wasn’t until twenty eleven or twelve MLA was a nice company. That had a small team, and we just did our thing. But that I really had that, if you want to call it, come to Jesus moment where I looked in the mirror and said, What am I doing like? I’m giving these clients this advice about building companies, and I was obviously growing in my career and my my confidence. And but I had to make that my own decision, which was, you know, I could probably make more money if I just went and found another job someplace. Or do I want to take take a shot at building a company that can actually scale and live beyond me? And that was the choice I made. There’s been an awful lot of hard knocks along that way professionally, personally and every way along the way. I reconnected with a pastor of a church that I had attended, and we really spent a lot of time building in some theological background. Even to that why question for us, which we now call our business consulting model about trying to get all weird and cliche, but we call it the business redeem process. We don’t think there’s anything really new there. We think it’s an orderly way to observe created order is what we would call it and how people and organizations address challenges.

Speaker3: [00:12:21] And we get a real kick out of getting in the mess with our clients, rolling up our sleeves and not just giving good advice, but actually putting pressure against those questions, doing some calculated risk taking with them. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that writing a check or even just writing a check, what it means more is, is those those calculated risk in business that we’re all facing every day where we put pressure on a team member and we put pressure on a department, we put pressure on the market in some way and we watch the feedback and we help our clients process that iterative learning that we’re all doing. Whether we recognize it or not, we happen to believe finance is the tool that got us here. We’re going to stay. We’re going to stick with that. We’re excited about it. But there’s plenty of tools that use that same iterative learning process to really steward well. And that’s why we eventually just recently started to move into some other disciplines as well opportunistically. But that’s again, I hope I’m getting back to the why, but for me, it’s really a merge of personal challenge, personal opportunity and even and even a pretty strong, not pretty, a very strong faith element in that and kind of how we think about the world that that has led us to the place for that today.

Speaker2: [00:13:36] So so I fall into this trap here in business. I’m the number two guy in our Business RadioX network and I and I run a studio. I fall into this trap at home and that is, I’m a little quick, a little too quick, I think, to start implementing a strategy before I have some of the foundation pieces in place. What counsel, if any, might you have to offer in general and with specific respect to your domain? Some ducks we should get in a row before we start even trying to form a strategy.

Speaker3: [00:14:10] So, so you’re probably, you know, if there’s any great MBA, I have one, by the way, that’s neither here nor there. If there’s any great MBA out there, consultant, they’re probably going to call you up in a little bit and say, don’t ever invite that idiot Steph back on. I think if you’re I think if you’re a three billion dollar business and you can go out and hire Deloitte and McKinsey and spend time doing market research and building up this case for what your, you know, every possible outcome you might be able to perfectly form. And I still don’t actually believe that. But let’s just for the benefit of the doubt to bless my brothers and sisters at Deloitte, McKinsey, you know, you might be able to get to the point where you’re like, You know what? Within a margin of error, we know exactly what the risk is to this, to this question that we’re that we’re struggling with, where we have to decide, when do we start to actually execute? I think the more realistic version for all of us, but I’ll just lop off those that are able to hire the Deloitte’s and McKinsey and say the rest of the peons in the world like us are are more likely going to need to spend some time thinking and planning and being thoughtful, maybe praying about that decision and then seeking counsel from your board of advisors or your management team or just the people that you rely on. And then what we’re going to do, and this is very much what our model is built around, is we’re going to execute on some portion of that and we’re going to watch the response.

Speaker3: [00:15:37] And I know that sounds again, maybe a little counterintuitive. It might sound a little clunky. It doesn’t normally happen. And like their step one, their step two, it normally happens in a very kind of organic way. But the reality is we’re doing that all the time. What it is? Take an example. We have a question with our kids. We are iterative learners. That’s what we do. It’s part of our creativity as people, at our ingenuity, as people, we are constantly processing the data of what just happened and how do we respond to that. And I think that’s a very useful tool in business as well. So I’m. Not going to argue, going back to your question with, no, you’re y know your vision and mission, of course, know your values. Those are all extremely nice and important things to understand. It’s not like we had MLA for ourselves. Don’t spend significant time on those questions, but we believe they are best contextualized with actual data. If you and I started a business tomorrow, we could absolutely theorize that we were blue in the face about awesome grand plans and ideas, missions, values, visions. But the reality is it would be stone and sus starting a business with certain skills, certain weaknesses, certain fears, certain courage, courageous moments. We would be in essence at that moment the sum, if you will, of of our own weaknesses, failures and opportunities that existed. And so we believe very much an MLA of we’ve got to get those things understood.

Speaker3: [00:17:04] And sometimes the really only way to understand that is to actually put it into action and watch it. And I don’t mean for three years, I’m talking about sometimes even the course of a meeting. I can’t even tell you the number of times we have purposely walked into a meeting and kind of a control setting with with the steward of that client that we’re serving, knowing this is about to happen. And we purposely instigate an argument with the intent of drawing to the surface the things that we suspect might be there so that we have better data to then actually go back and solve the problem that’s been presented to us. We find so often that’s where our clients are stuck is. They go off and talk to some consulting and they get told will clarify your vision or someone else has a in the cam process. We very much believe in the fact no, those of you sit around the table that have to make this decision, you’re going to be responsible for it. You’re the stewards of it. We’re not. We’re going to help you see what’s actually underneath that surface to help clarify the question that’s actually in front of you. So you can then get to the solution that probably you already know what it is. You just don’t have the context to get to it. So I don’t know if I’m answering your question, stone, but that that would be that would be how we have learned process those types of questions.

Speaker2: [00:18:14] Well, you absolutely have asked the question. I’m so glad that I asked it. My interpretation of it in stone speak is throw your hat over the fence, get the data in, make adjustments accordingly. That’s that’s what I took away from that.

Speaker3: [00:18:28] That’s pretty accurate. I think I think it can always be made a little more complicated, but but that’s pretty accurate.

Speaker2: [00:18:36] Well, and

Speaker3: [00:18:36] They’re staring at the fence whole the whole time, wondering how you’re going to jump over it. You’re never going to get there. No.

Speaker2: [00:18:41] So, yeah. Amen. Well, my listeners already already know this, and you’ll quickly learn here that one of the great benefits and one of the things I thoroughly enjoy about doing all the shows and particularly this one, is I get so much great counsel, you know, as a product of a 15 20 minute conversation. So thank you for that. I really am glad I asked. You’ve mentioned a couple of times board or board of advisors. Can you speak to that? The value of it and maybe even some insight for, you know, small, medium size outfit like ours to go about creating such a thing?

Speaker3: [00:19:19] Yeah, I think it’s a real opportunity that carefully used can be of great service. I’ve seen clients of ours implement a board of advisors and frankly not use them. And I can tell you that. So I’ll start with the negative. Is a good finance person, right? The downside to a board if you don’t spend the time trying to set it up correctly and I’m going to get to what I mean by that in a moment is it can simply become a nuisance. There’s a level of embarrassment if you’re not ready for that board meeting. If you’re constantly educating those board members on what it looks like to operate inside your industry, you’re not going to get much value out of that. And what you’re going to end up doing is just kind of wasting your time, probably wasting your money if you put some money behind it, frustrating the board members, frustrating yourself. And it’s just going to be another one of those things that kind of sucks life out of you as an entrepreneur. Again, not going to say, we’ve got it right, but if you haven’t already figured out, I’m a little bit of a contrarian, maybe even a rebel. And so when we thought about our board of advisors, we tried to take a different approach. Now part of that stone is because and again, we’re we’re living by our own advice.

Speaker3: [00:20:23] We threw the hat to use your phrase over the fence and got started. We have changes to make, but we did spend a little bit of time saying, what are we trying to accomplish here? And one of the original goals, those goals have changed now a little bit, but one of the original goals that still is true was to was to set in motion almost a a organizational comfort with the idea that we had a board, an organizational comfort with the idea that the CEO was going to be accountable to a group of people. That was very intentional and it was intentional for the purpose of thinking about my future, thinking about MLR future and saying if our goal is to get to the point where we can transfer value and I don’t mean just financial value, but beyond Seth Morgan, the founder, then we have to get to a point where there’s a group of men and women who can. Take that governing responsibility and oversee it, because the intent is not likely for me to magically overnight go from majority owner to zero owner and somebody else is majority owner. No, it’s probably because of the model we’re in. Just start to share that wealth and ownership inside of a bunch of minority owners with a CEO being selected, perhaps among them, perhaps from the outside, and then some board required to oversee and give give oversight and governance to that.

Speaker3: [00:21:41] And not every business model works like that. So some of the things that I would say are probably that might be good counsel and thoughts for your listeners. For those that are the professional service world where you’re thinking about maybe distributing equity over time to your team, but then some of the things that I would say that just have been practically useful to us. We purposely this is another one of those rebel moments for me. We have purposely selected a board that is now has team input. I’ll be honest with you, Stone. We don’t get near as much participation from the team as I’d like for us to probably an opportunity for us to go back and rethink. Pick the hat up off the ground and think about a different way to throw it back over the fence again. But it’s an opportunity for us to allow the team to have some input into the board, so there’s a nominating process for them. That’s very unusual from what I can see in the private market. We have purposely allowed certain internal individuals to be on that board so that they bring to the table that specific experience set now that there’s a lack of perspective in that in some degree, right? Because they’re not outsiders. But we purposely have designed something where we have some outsiders, we have some insiders and then bluntly stone when I, especially when I was setting up the first board and working through that alongside of someone that I trust deeply, that works inside our business regularly.

Speaker3: [00:22:58] I spent some time making sure that there were people on that board that could hold me personally accountable. I’m not just talking about, did you hit your your business marks? I’m talking about people, for instance, someone that knew me intimately, knew my marriage, intimately, knew, knew and frankly, he was my pastor at the time, someone that was already walking alongside of me because I wanted the opportunity in those board meetings for us to go wherever we needed to go. And for me to be able to look at other people in the room and say, Is that true about me and not get some bull crap answer that they thought I wanted to hear or worse, because this is so hard for business leaders who are already kind of lonely, right? Worse, they get some negative answer that isn’t really contextually correct. Or is it correct that can be just as damaging? We often think of it as yes, men and yes, women, but we don’t want those around us. But the reality is you get somebody that’s just a contrarian, it’s just blown up the room because it makes them look good. That’s almost that’s worse, right? So people that I trusted that I could look at and say, Is that really true? Like, help me work through that problem now is our organization grows.

Speaker3: [00:24:01] I’m sure our board will continue to mature. Our intent is to move that advisory board into a governing board. Eventually, that would not probably be wise for many of the listeners that you have. But because of those early steps when we meet as a is a group and I have a board meeting actually this week, I’m just going to say I get one to one value out of the time put in on specific advice that they give me. But I do get a lot of value out of that board. And truthfully, stone, we’ve even started to use it inside. The organization is a little bit of a buffer for me. So it does bring an extra set of power when my number two announces to the team. These are changes we’ve made. We have vetted them with the board. This is what the board has asked us to do and this is what Seth is doing. There’s some value in that as well. So those would be my I don’t know if that was three or 10 pieces of advice, but it takes work. It does take work. It don’t do it just for the sake of, say, I have a board that is a complete waste of time.

Speaker2: [00:24:58] So tell us a little bit about the MLA methodology or process. I guess maybe walk us through the high points of what an engagement might look like, especially maybe the early pieces.

Speaker3: [00:25:09] Yeah. So I guess I’ll give you kind of the nirvana here for us, but I’ll briefly answer reality first. And that is just, you know, I was just editing a proposal from one of our team on an M&A process that’s going to look very much like a typical M&A process. We pride ourselves in stepping in with our client wherever they’re not to sound touchy feely, but there felt need is we’ve got clients that start with us on succession process improvement on the floor, some organizational problem. More often than not, it’s obviously a financial issue. It’s they need fractional CFO or accounting back office support. I think if you were to say Seth, but talk to me about purely applying your model, we have seven steps to what we call the business redeem process. And we believe again, institutionally organizations are doing this, whether they realize they’re doing it or not. We just think there’s value in identifying them and having for our team at least. I mean, in many ways that that model is more about our team understanding where we are in this process than it is telling our client, you need to think about it this way because fundamentally, we want the client to be transforming and changing and. In a good way, regardless of exactly how that they understand how they got there, so so many of our clients, just like most small business people, are so focused on the daily matters of running a business they may or may not want to read another book about it.

Speaker3: [00:26:26] And we don’t think we’re necessarily smarter than any of the other, any of the other books. But and kind of in a vacuum, if you will, if you could like pause time, if none of us can do and say, this is how we think about it, we would say there’s there’s these seven steps. And for us, it would be reality. What is the current situation that it’s kind of that’s kind of a historical look, right? So obviously, it’s finance people that there’s all kinds of history, right? Most accounts are accused of running a car from the rearview mirror, right? Right. So it’s that it’s that historical lesson. What do we have today? It’s perspective around that. So what perspective does MLA bring to that conversation? Sometimes that’s not just MLA, but once you start to get that data perspective starts to flow, right? Sometimes they’re just simple, easy, low hanging fruit things that we can immediately move on, that it’s coming out of a historical look. Once we start to transfer into the future, we think about it in terms of what we call runway. So what can we define? How big of a plane can you get off the runway? You have that runway may be confined. It’s really a constraint question by cash could also be people talent. It could be just plant capacity, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. And kind of only then are we going to say, OK, what dream got us here? And how does that dream need to be affected and changed? We believe most consultants make the mistake of starting with dream.

Speaker3: [00:27:40] You know, Stone, what do you want to do? I want to solve world hunger, who is not going to get behind that? But the reality is we have a reality question, a prospective question and a runway question for Stone to answer before he can really contextualize that dream. So what is it about that? What do we know about the dream now in the context of reality, perspective and runway? Then we think about what we call the map. That’s really strategic planning. We also think then there’s a point, and this is where we believe the past meets the future because we would say runway dream and strategic planning are obviously all future exercises where the past meets the future is when you stone decide as that business leader to execute. That’s where we come full circle and we come back to, Okay, now we have something to do. So the question is now now you’ve got those done. And again, we’re talking robotic because this is happening in a much more organic, natural, quick way. Sometimes it’s a long process. Sometimes it happens over the course of a two hour meeting. Now we’re hitting the button and we’re pulling the trigger on some decisions in a great world. We then pause, we move back into past tense and we see how that what’s the reflection of that? What’s the reward? What’s the like? What do we learn through that process? And guess what? We start the process entirely all over again.

Speaker3: [00:28:55] What did that do to our reality? What’s our new perspective? What’s our new runway? If there is one week recalculate that inside of the dream, we’re trying to accomplish what’s next decision we’re making? We think it’s not like MLA has said, Look, this is the way we think every organization is doing this in some capacity already. We’re doing it with our families, we’re doing it with our spouses, we’re doing it to our kids, we’re doing it with our businesses. We think there’s just value in saying, frankly, again, more for our team than anything for us to teach our team, this is what your client is going through. Sometimes there’s great value in us giving that to the client and saying, this is how you’re experiencing this pretty much every case. They said, Oh my goodness, that’s relieving. We can see it, but we try very carefully not to, like, lay that on them and say, you must now go through this step because that’s not the speed of business. So again, I hope I answered your question. I feel like I’m going to be taking the longer path with all these. I hope that’s OK, but that that would be our nirvana. Engagement is where we have a client systematically working through that and seeing it, and we try to do that as best we can, whether they’re fighting a huge fire or have the time to work through a more organized process as they go.

Speaker2: [00:30:04] Well, it’s more than OK. I personally, and so many of our listeners love to go back and listen again and of course, review the transcript. So no, I sincerely appreciate the the depth and the breadth of response. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a firm like yours? Are you at a point where the phone rings or do you still have to have some sort of structured approach to going out there and developing new client relationships?

Speaker3: [00:30:30] That’s a great question. Stone and I should just stop and let you give me advice. You’ve got a great sales background. You know, we don’t have that solved quite yet. The phone is ringing more and more, and obviously we’re excited about that. That’s good news for us. You know, I think that’s a credit to our team. It’s a credit to the reputation we’ve built in the markets for most active in. But it’s not good enough for me. You know, most of our client buys do opportunities come through referral sources. That’s not going to change. We’re in a very highly personally relational business, meaning stone, if you came to. Me today and said, I want to hire MLA, you would not only question MLA as a brand, but you would probably even more so question who’s the team assigned to me? Right? Because you would want and I want that as the owner of MLA, I would want Stone personally connected with the individuals that we’re working on your account. And so that that’s tough, right? So we struggle with that for years. We’ve gotten to a point where we’re confident enough in our brand and our why and our mission and how we do life, that we’re now more proactively spending money on brand development with the intent of giving our people on the ground more ammunition to talk about in the market. But the reality stone is most most of our team are finance.

Speaker3: [00:31:54] Most finance people don’t like to sell. So generally speaking, their phone is ringing too. And so we’re trying to empower them with confidence that they’ve got something to talk about. We’ve we spent a lot of time on collaboration so that a CFO that’s really good at what we might call a financial planning and analysis doesn’t have to be an expert in M&A. So we spent that time on collaboration so that they’re more and more comfortable to pick up the phone and call the M&A expert in our firm and say, Can we have a joint launch? Whatever. So I realize is again, long answer, but there was no one short answer to this. We we are working, but have not quite cracked it to our ability to say we’re going to roll into a new market. We’re going to turn on a machine and we’re going to expect to see X number of results from that. We’re just not there yet. I’m not entirely certain if we’ll ever get there because we we have again, we have a model that is just so personally involved with our clients that I think we can tell a story that is attractive that’s been proven enough. So again, that we’re spending money on it that the market will respond to. But we can’t accurately predict when that business owner is going to get to a point where they’re kind of at their end of the rope and they need a helping hand and they pick up the phone and call.

Speaker3: [00:33:09] And not every client for us looks like that. They’re not all problem sets, but but sometimes it’s that sometimes it’s they’re ready to make a decision on a CFO. They’ve grown to the size they needed or they don’t like who they have or their bank is telling them they need some extra help, whatever. But in so many ways, that’s a market education question for us. Not because, you know, frankly, we’re not we’re not a CPA firm. I own one on the side, but that’s not what we’re talking about right here. So it’s not like every business has to have our services. So it’s about market education, how the value we bring to the market. There’s not many firms like us out there, so we’re fighting all those battles. But I’m going to say, and I’m not saying this to sound good is on the CEO, the guy. It’s a blast doing it like it’s fun to be a kind of a market that we get to define. But there’s a downside of that too, which is we’re in this constant market education mode and personal development relationship development. So we think we’ve identified the tools to get us to that point, but it’s still not a perfect science for us by any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker2: [00:34:10] Well, it certainly sounds to me like you’ve got a pretty good handle on it and in terms of not completely cracking the code. Welcome to the club. I will tell you, if you want to build relationships and get to know some really smart people, get yourself a radio show. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker3: [00:34:25] Yeah. The funny thing is, I used to do one of these in politics back in the day, you know, having a long time. But I enjoyed sitting there with the headsets and hitting buttons. I don’t I don’t know if that’s still how it works. I’m probably dating myself. But yeah, good for you stuff. Congratulations. I’m sure you’re right about that.

Speaker2: [00:34:44] So this is kind of tactical, but you know, hey, it’s my show. Oh, right. What? What insight might you have, if any, on working with finding and I guess, retaining just managing top talent? You know, maybe contrasted to, you know, the also rans and the and the folks that are, you know, doing good work. But maybe you wouldn’t characterize as as top down anything we ought to be doing differently or make sure we do or don’t do in that regard.

Speaker3: [00:35:17] Oh, you know, we have a model stone that allows us a lot of flexibility, it’s one of our kind of core attributes as a firm that we don’t want to change. Partly that’s because it’s reflects its own right. I pride my flexibility, perhaps more than anything. So one of the keys for us has been to apply that than to our recruiting to that top talent. You know, I don’t know if that’s a perfect application for your listeners, but what seems to always come back. So even if you’d ask the question, so what are what are some of your clients doing? What did you do through the pandemic? You know what? What advice would you have on retention? I think it’s kind of similar to the answer on top talent, and that is really understanding what what do they desire and need? So we spend a lot of time as a company thinking about our value, our core competencies, our value sets, what what are the traits that are going to set us apart or just we’re going to hold ourselves accountable to and we have to recognize that individuals have that same, that same question and answer. Most of the time, individuals have not thought through it well enough to actually answer it. But they do have an answer. And your job is someone who is supposed to be caring, especially about probably about anybody, but certainly about that top talent candidate you’re after is to try to extract from them. What are those core values that they care about as well? And then can you craft something to accomplish that? Partially, probably because we’re a financial firm and we think like this, you know, I tend to think I try to break things down, so, you know, frankly, we’re not big enough to to to hire or to have on full time W-2 staff all the top talent that we have have.

Speaker3: [00:36:59] Yeah. So instead, we find the top talent that is I’m thinking of one gentleman right now who is very active in overseas missions, who is active in his own discipline of sports competition. He’s a triathlete. So those things take up a lot of time. He has aging parents. He’s made a lot of money in his life. I don’t know the specifics of that, but it’s pretty clear. But he wants a place to market his talent through, right? So we’re not going to him and saying, here’s the box fit in it where instead saying, how do we how do we take that, that inventory, if you will, and the things you clearly value because of how you’re using to steward your life and put them side by side with us? And now what value can be created between us? So some of the best talent we have in house is or under our umbrella is where we’ve taken that very direct approach. You know, some of the younger talent that comes to us that we’re trying to develop, it looks very much more traditional. It’s salaried hours being tracked because we’re obviously trying to mold and craft them into something because they don’t have those questions to find or even answer for themselves.

Speaker3: [00:38:09] But some of our very top talent hats, and so I view it as our job to learn to be flexible with them as well. The other thing quickly, I would say, is we’re always recruiting and you’re your listeners should be to like people come to me and say, Well, I don’t know if you’re looking for and I’m like, Well, you know, obviously there’s there’s the clear capacity question for me. Do I have enough capacity to meet the demand I either perceive or know about in the market, whether that’s whether it’s coming or already in house demand. But the reality is, I’m always on the prowl for somebody good. And if I find that person, I’m probably going to do what all good entrepreneurs do, and I’m going to figure out a way if they’re interested to take risk and get them on the team. Now, partly if you think about it, our product and I hate to talk about our team this way, but that is our product. It’s our team, right? So that may not be exactly the same for all your listeners. But if you want to think about top talent, you should never stop recruiting. The most effective thing you can do is bring in that rock star who’s truly a rock star. While we’re all scared of that is how many guys have gotten burned by not being appropriately flexible, not thinking it through carefully enough not skips some cliché checking the references. And I don’t just mean picking up the phone and calling you, I mean, like working through a if that if that top talent is in too big of a hurry, you’re probably not the right talent for you, right? But where that time is taken, relationships are built.

Speaker3: [00:39:29] You understand their why and you match it up with your why. My guess is you’re going to figure out how to get them in and when you get them in, that’s going to be a good match and that relationship is simply going to grow. The gentleman who’s had the most effect internally on us, this former pastor I talked about who helped us flush out with some of the theology behind it. It started over a cup of coffee where he wanted to test some theories on me that he had about macro cultural effects and something triggered in me. And I looked at him and said, I think there’s an opportunity to do this inside businesses. Let’s keep talking about this. Well, what we ended up doing was matching our wives. And he’s been with us now for, I don’t know, five, six years. He chairs a board of advisors. He’s instrumental in our clients. He’s instrumental on my management team. He is a wonderful asset to our organization. And yet there’s still a piece of him that he holds outside of L.A. because it doesn’t directly relate to business that goes back to some of those theological roots. And we are more than happy to give him the freedom to do that because of the effect he’s not only having on our clients, but on Ebola itself.

Speaker2: [00:40:32] That counsel alone is more than worth the time and energy for me invested in this conversation. We’re probably going to cut that clip out and just and share it stand alone. I’m so glad that I asked, like so many entrepreneurs, people who have built something like you have from the ground up, I’m sure that occasionally you might run out of steam and need to recharge. And I suspect because you’ve mentioned it more than a couple of times your faith, I’m sure that’s part of the answer. But where do you go for for inspiration, refreshment, recharging? Is it reading? Is it, you know, where do you go for that?

Speaker3: [00:41:13] Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, kind of like the story of the start of the business. I wish I had something like, you know, mountaintop experience and a vision from on high and MLA was birth that I don’t have a good answer on that one, either. It’s like exciting. Like, you know, I’ve tried a bunch of different models, you know, not models, but things. And truthfully, you know, I always fall back to the same spot. People don’t believe me, but I’m an introvert by nature, and I don’t get energy out of constant people interaction. So. It’s time for me is a quiet date with my wife or just some quiet time at the house with the kids, or even just a long nap on a day where I should otherwise be working. So I hate I hate Stone, and it’s not something more dramatic than that. That’s the truth when when I’m really up against the wall, those that know me best would say I’m a pretty determined guy, and I think that’s true. But so the question I might rephrase it a little, although it’s your question in your show and that is what what keeps you going when you don’t want to keep going, right? So some of that is, yes, how do I rest and reflect? But it really does come back to that stewardship question.

Speaker3: [00:42:21] When I hit the wall, most often I have to remind myself that I’m not the only questioner in that frustration story in that moment, right when I’m feeling that urge that there’s a team of roughly thirty five people that that call themselves part of the melee that deserve a CEO to get off his lazy, you know what? And I’m not calling myself lazy and get back in the game that there’s frankly to make it personal. There’s a wife and children that that that need that same thing and I shouldn’t have. It’s not just I don’t have like, woe is me. I shouldn’t have the luxury. I don’t even think it really be a luxury. Don’t have the right to take myself out of the game like that because I’m just so worn down and beat up. So now all that said, sometimes I find the most rewarding thing I can do is take a break, right? And so but for me, that really does simply look like reconnecting with the people I deeply love. I would people sometimes think I’m a reader.

Speaker3: [00:43:21] I’m not. I’m not on a hit song, but I have found, yes, reconnecting with my faith. And I don’t mean, like some again, mountain top experience. I’ll give Gary credit again, sometimes simply reminding myself of what I believe about God reminding myself, and that sometimes I comes as reading the Bible or reflecting or listening to a worship, music or a song, or even a sermon, a speech or but where I’m reconnecting. I learned this from Gary, too, with what are the what are the foundational things that you really believe? What that often does is it reopens energy and creativity for me to reengage in that stewardship mandate I have for my team, for my clients, for my family. And so it energizes that determination that for all of us gets sucked dry sometimes. But if you really say, well, what do you do for fun, for me to be ahead to the mountains for a couple of days with people, I love to be able to shut the phone off and do stupid stuff while I’m able to lay by the fire or the pool, kind of all at the same time, if that makes sense. So that’s the best answer I can give.

Speaker2: [00:44:27] Well, I think it’s well said. All right. If our listeners would like to reach out and have a conversation or learn more with you or someone on your team, let’s leave them with some coordinates whatever you think is appropriate, whether it’s a LinkedIn or a website or an email. But let’s give them a way to connect with you guys.

Speaker3: [00:44:47] Of course. Yeah, so the best and easiest way is just simply to go to our website MLA companies. That’s MLA, just like it sounds, companies is plural. You know, it’s a typical marketing brochure online, of course. But if you’re just looking to get in touch, click on the about the let’s see it’s MLA team. I’m looking at it now. You click on the MLA team tag and my name comes up right at the top. There are other principals and staff members on the team that are listed. It’s not the entirety of our team, but they’re there. I’d be honored to get a note and I’ll either direct it correctly or respond directly myself, so we would be happy to. Our phone number is LinkedIn. Emails are all there, so so that would be the best way and most efficient way for your listeners to connect, and we hope they do.

Speaker2: [00:45:32] Well, Seth, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your insight and your perspective, man.

Speaker3: [00:45:41] Yeah, it’s great to be with you, Stone and I got to just tell you, you know, I my folks are from Kentucky, even though I live in Ohio and I love I love the Georgia voice that you have. And being an FCC fan because my cats aren’t going to make it, I’ll just say, go dogs. So you keep it up.

Speaker2: [00:45:58] All right. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Seth Morgan, CEO of MLA Companies and everyone here at the Business RadioX family, saying We’ll see you next time on workplace wisdom.

Sarah Amico from Jack Cooper Investments

November 9, 2021 by Kelly Payton

Sarah AmicoSarah Amico, Executive Chairman with Jack Cooper Investments

Sarah Amico is the Executive Chairperson of Jack Cooper Holdings Corp., North America’s largest car haul company and a WBENC-certified Women-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE). As Executive Chairperson, Mrs. Amico oversees the Company’s Board, Strategy, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Human Capital Development. Prior to her appointment by the Board as Executive Chairperson, Mrs. Amico served as Vice Chairman of the Board. She has been a Director since 2011 and serves on the Board’s Nominating and Governance Committee.

Prior to joining Jack Cooper, Mrs. Amico worked as the Head of Strategic Planning at APA Talent and Literary Agency in Beverly Hills, where she also launched and led the company’s Entertainment Marketing & Brand Integration Department. During this time, she secured multi-party agreements amongst top content creators, marquis talent, large content distributors, and leading brands. Mrs. Amico began her tenure in media at the William Morris Agency in both Beverly Hills and New York across a variety of departments, including The Mailroom Fund, a seed capital fund raised in partnership with AT&T, Venrock and Accel Partners. During her time in the entertainment industry, Mrs. Amico worked on initiatives for some of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands, including Time Inc., Reader’s Digest, Amtrak, Harry & David, and Virgin America Airlines. Mrs. Amico received her B.A. in Politics magna cum laude from Washington & Lee University and her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Jack CooperConnect with Sarah on LinkedIn

 

 

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:08] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for workplace wisdom sharing, insight, perspective and best practices for creating the planet’s best workplaces. Now here’s your host.

Speaker2: [00:00:31] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Workplace Wisdom Stone Payton with the Business RadioX network here, and you are in for a real treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Jack Cooper Investments. Miss Sarah Riggs Amico. Good morning, Sarah.

Speaker3: [00:00:50] Good morning, stone. It’s great to be with you today.

Speaker2: [00:00:53] Well, it is a delight to have you join us on air and very interested in this conversation. Certainly timely and want to dove into some of the specific issues and topics that I know you are working with on on a daily basis. But before we go there, could you help our listeners out and me as well with a little bit of a primer, overview, mission purpose about what you, you guys are out there trying to do for folks?

Speaker3: [00:01:21] Yeah, absolutely. So Jack Cooper Transport is a ninety three year old business. We were founded in nineteen twenty eight just outside of Kansas City, Missouri, and in fact, we still operate today in that same location where we serve one of our largest customers, General Motors. In fact, we’ve been a supplier to General Motors for that entire ninety three year period, which if you think about it in a world where so many supplier and customer relationships are so transient, so temporary is really remarkable. So the company was founded, not surprisingly, by a gentleman named Jack Cooper, and three generations of the Cooper family ran the business. And for a long time, this has been this gold standard in the car business. So for your listeners, anyone who’s ever seen those double decker trucks full of cars, that is what we call a car haul rig. That’s what we do. And we usually in a normal year, twenty twenty one, for many, many reasons is not normal in the supply chain, as I’m sure many of your listeners have heard, but particularly for automotive. In a normal year, we move about three and a half to four million vehicles a year, which is about one out of every four cars in the North American market we will touch. So we operate across the U.S., Mexico and Canada with about thirty five terminal operations delivering to over twenty thousand points of delivery.

Speaker3: [00:02:51] And we are very proud to be family owned. We are a certified woman owned business. I’m very proud of that. We’re certified by the Wesbank agency, so we represent hundreds of millions of dollars in qualified diversity supplier spin for our largest customers like Ford and General Motors. The Cooper family ran the business until two thousand nine and at that time, Mr. Tim Cooper, the grandson of the founder, was the head of the business. And of course, we were in the midst of the Great Recession. My family had acquired a small business called Active Car Hall, which was about one hundred and twenty employees and about twenty eight million in revenue in two thousand eight. And the company was dying. And thanks largely to the work of my dad at the time, we were able to save that business and the Cooper family was really struggling with Jack Cooper. And one of our largest customers came to us and said, We know it’s unusual, but we’d like you to help save one of your competitors, Jack Cooper. They’re really important in the auto supply chain, and we’re worried they’re not going to make it. Remember, this is early twenty nine late two thousand eight, so it’s a very scary time right before the auto industry bailout. And we said, of course, and we worked out a plan with Mr.

Speaker3: [00:04:14] Cooper how we thought they could save their business. And he was an absolute gentleman, he said. You know, I believe this will work, but what I really want is another family to take care of our people the way my family has for three generations. And so he sold us his business and overnight we grew by tenfold. And you know, about a month after we bought Jack Cooper, two of our largest customers, General Motors and Chrysler both declared bankruptcy, and it was the kind of white knuckle turnaround work that you think you’ll only read about in the paper. And I can tell you, it’s a lot different when you’re experiencing it on the front lines. So we were very fortunate we not only survived the Great Recession, but the company actually grew. Today, we employ over two thousand five hundred people. About two thousand of those or Teamster truck drivers were very proud to be union. We’ve been Teamsters since, I believe the nineteen fifties. And we also have machinists and some of our auto mechanic shops or our mechanic shops. So it’s a great business. If you drive a car, it’s about a one in four chance. You have Jack Cooper to thank for transporting it at some point in time. And that’s a pretty extraordinary thing.

Speaker2: [00:05:29] What an inspired. Barring origin story, and I think I know for myself and I suspect this is true for a lot of laypeople, let’s say I, I tend to not dismiss but forget about or not fully acknowledge just how dependent we are on moving goods in and around this country until I go on a road trip and. And then it dawns on me, all of these folks, you know, hauling all of these things we need from from food to vehicles. It’s such an important part of the infrastructure of the country and the economic system. Now it strikes me that it might be and maybe this will sound old fashioned, but I’d like to get this validated. It seems to me like it would be a little bit unusual to to have a female in an executive level position in a in a trucking company. Am I just being old fashioned or is that actually still the case this day and age?

Speaker3: [00:06:33] You know, it is a little bit unusual, and I’ve told the story many times that for a long time at the business, I was the only woman on the management team at the senior level, so the only woman in the boardroom. But that has changed. I’ve been an owner since two thousand nine. I’ve been on the board since 2011 and I was elected executive chairman by our independent board in twenty fourteen. So I’ve been at this for a good long while now and I’m very proud to say at this point. Jack Cooper is actually a leader in having women in management. About 30 percent of our management throughout the company is female. We’re currently being considered for a major award in our industry for diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe that having a diversity of management and employees at all levels is important, not because it checks a box, but because it broadens your horizon. It broadens your point of view. It makes the discussions in the boardroom or the executive team or a department or a business unit more thoughtful, more inclusive. And we find that that produces better business results. And, you know, I think it’s a key component to Jack Cooper’s resilience. This is a really tough business. You mentioned how important trucking is, and I always like to joke, if you eat oranges in Idaho in the winter, you’re welcome. Thank you. Thank a trucker. You know, we have over three million kdl commercial driver’s license holders in this country. Truck drivers have been heroes on the front lines of this pandemic, making sure that the goods we need, the food we eat, the clothes we wear gets where it needs to go.

Speaker3: [00:08:18] Putting in long hours, particularly now as we look at some of the backups and the ports around the country and some of the supply chain disruption. But for anyone listening, if you’ll just take a look around the room you’re sitting in or the car you’re in, the clothes you’re wearing. Over 70 percent of it traveled on a truck for some good distance, and most things travel on a truck for what we call last mile. So you may be able to take the railroads for stretches of hundreds or thousands of miles, but at some point the railroad doesn’t stop at Walmart’s loading dock. And so trucking really is part of what keeps this country moving and fed and what keeps our economy humming. And so I think a big part of being resilient within that context is making sure that you’re connected to the communities where we live and work. So so yes, it might be a little odd in the traditional sense to have a female chief executive, although there are others, most notably, of course, here in Atlanta at UPS with Miss Tom and and I think this is certainly changing. But I can tell you what, Jack Cooper, it’s changing intentionally. We want a workplace that reflects the communities where we live and work. We want a management team that looks like the world around us, and we believe that we’ll deliver better business results for our customers, our investors and our team members.

Speaker2: [00:09:41] So you shared specifically the imagery you used was, you know, we didn’t just want to check a check a box, do some do a few strategies, tactics, I don’t know. Cultural guidelines come to mind that you guys are just actively trying to to practice some disciplines that you’ve employed to ensure that this this diversity equity inclusion really comes to comes to life for you guys.

Speaker3: [00:10:09] Yeah, absolutely. And I think it starts first and foremost with respecting the dignity of work, whether you are a custodian and one of our buildings. By the way, I have two of my four grandparents who worked as custodians. One of my grandmother on my mom’s side cleaned hotel rooms and hospital rooms and. She had to leave the workforce for Alzheimer’s, and my dad’s dad started as a janitor and his elementary school and later was a custodial worker, by the way, in a General Motors factory, which sort of began my family’s three generation love affair with the U.S. auto industry. And so I think respecting the dignity of work, whether you are the chief executive or the guy delivering the cars, the people who make the business happen is at the core of everything we do. But Jack Cooper is a values driven company, and we have those values printed on our business cards hanging in our locations. But most importantly, connected to our operations. So when we talk about excellence and operations, we mean it. We measure a variety, a wide variety of metrics every day and every week that filter all the way up to the chief executive and the board to check how we’re doing and to track what the business looks like, where the hot spots are, where there’s room for improvement and where there are the best practices that we need to take across the organization. When we talk about integrity, we mean it. There can be no progress and there can be no success in a business.

Speaker3: [00:11:49] Or I would argue in society if you don’t have a common set of facts. Meg Whitman, of course, was famous for saying, If you can measure it, you can manage it, but you got to be measuring stuff that actually exists. So integrity is at the core of what we do. And I think we are unique, probably among trucking companies, and that one of our core values is innovation and imagination. And I think that comes partly based on our family’s ethos. My dad and I are both fans of Star Trek movie called The Wrath of Khan that some of your listeners might have seen. Oh yeah, and it’s famous, right for this scene where Captain Kirk is talking about the Kobayashi Maru, which is a test for the, you know, the Starfleet captains coming out of the academy designed to teach them how to deal with the no win scenario. What happens when the ship is going to go down and everybody’s going to die? How do you lead in that moment? And of course, Captain Kirk sort of games the system and becomes the first cadet ever to beat the Kobayashi Maru and to win. And later in the movie, he’s stranded and some alien planet and a young cadet played by Kirstie Alley actually asks him What gives what? What happened? And he said, It’s very simple. I don’t believe in the no win scenario. And I think we’ve adopted that same sort of ethos.

Speaker3: [00:13:20] This is a tough business, and if you’re willing to fly the white flag every time it gets tough, you’re going to be out of here in six seconds. But it’s a great, yeah, it’s a great business. You just have to be creative. You know, we’ve we have bought businesses out of bankruptcy. We’ve restructured the company in a bankruptcy. We have merged and acquired. We have adapted our operating systems. We have had to be agile to survive. And so creativity, innovation, imagination. Those are really at the core of how we solve problems and probably one of the best examples of that. It always makes me giggle a lot of trucking networks because people deliver freight from, say, point A to B, but a lot of times have trouble getting what we call back haul freight. So that would be returning from point B to a right or routing through a network back to your point of origin. And when you make specialized freight like cars, for example, they’re not sort of just laying around on every street corner. It’s a pretty sophisticated logistics network. And we wanted to eliminate empty miles. We certainly wanted to lower fuel costs and idling and sort of the cost of the truck stay relatively static. Whether or not you’re higher, you’re hauling freight that produces revenue. But we couldn’t afford to go and get brand new technology for fuel efficiency. To replace our whole fleet would have cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And this was right in the middle of the Great Recession or sort of coming out of it.

Speaker3: [00:14:57] And so we thought, Well, what else can we do? And we did what nerds do we? We use math. We came up with an algorithm that would more efficiently route our equipment and our drivers and those 40 to different permutations of tractor trailer combinations we had through the system. And it was a it was a pretty remarkable thing. We’ve taken our loaded miles percentage. If you go out full and you come back empty, that would be what we call 50 percent loaded miles. Average in our industry is probably somewhere in the mid fifties. I can’t think it’s much higher than that. Some people may get up in the sixties. We’re heading towards 70 percent and I’m confident we can hit seventy five. But it’s not because we had more. Money or better equipment? I would argue we do have better drivers. Of course, I love our Teamsters, but it’s because we were more creative so that innovation and imagination is at the core. And I think health and safety, you can’t run a transportation business without it. And longevity. This is a business that has been around for the better part of a century and as we approach our one hundredth birthday in twenty twenty eight. My job as the executive chairman is to chart the course for what the next century will look like. How can we survive and be competitive and not just survive but thrive, provide great service at a great price and a great working environment for our team.

Speaker3: [00:16:33] And I think part of how we do that is really envisioning what the industry could look like. I call it doing good and doing well. We have always tried to do right by our people, whether that’s investing and what we call Jack Cooper University, which is a continuous education program available for free to all of our employees. Whether that is supporting our union, their health, welfare and pension, it’s a great job. Many of our drivers make six figures a year, and that’s a good that’s a good way to provide for your family or whether it’s health care. We are unique in many ways our Jack Cooper transport team. We pay one hundred percent of the health insurance premiums for all of our employees and their families, and it’s good insurance. It’s the same insurance my family and I have. Our executives have we we’re all on team care, our Teamster insurance plan, and we didn’t do that because it’s the cheapest thing to do. And we certainly didn’t do it because it’s trendy. We did it because we believe that’s the right way to treat your people. And it’ll be a cold day in Hades before somebody who works for me is sick because they’re poor or poor, because they’re sick. I don’t believe in that. And so I think when we think about the next century and how do we continue that ethos of doing the right thing, trying to do good, but also do well, we’re thinking about how do we become a carbon neutral trucking fleet? How do we take our carbon emissions, not just down, but to zero? How do we expand that diversity, equity and inclusion so that it touches every part of our company, not just again, to check a box, but to do better, to be a better company with better ideas? How do we take care of our employees better? We think we do a really good job.

Speaker3: [00:18:22] We have paid leave, we’ve got unions, we’ve got paid health insurance, we treat people very fairly and we’re proud of it. But what else can we do? Those are the kinds of things I’m thinking about as I look to the next century, what is the kind of company I would want my daughters to work at? How would they treat my kids? And if it’s not good enough for my daughters, it shouldn’t be good enough for any of our employees. So I think it’s a very long winded way to answer what was a relatively straightforward question. But it’s not just about gender. This is about the values that we tell people we live by. And if you’re going to put them on your card, you’re going to put them on the wall in your office. You better be willing to put your money where your mouth is. And I’m proud to say at every turn that I can think of, we’ve done exactly that.

Speaker2: [00:19:11] Well, we can hear your passion, your pride, your commitment, even your resilience, just in your voice, I can only imagine what it must be like hanging out with you and being in it involved in this organization. With that, that theme and that ethos so firmly grounded and in the the work, the the integrity and the dignity of the work. Are you finding? Or have you discovered that COVID has kind of had a little bit of a Kobayashi Maru impact? Is it one of those?

Speaker3: [00:19:55] Yes. Yeah. Oh my gosh. What a great question. It is, right? And by the way, it’s not just COVID. We’ve been whipped a few years in a row in 20 19. General Motors, as I mentioned, 93 or customer of ours. And by the way, one of the companies I will admit to being just mildly in love with this is the company where my granddad had a job as a custodial worker. My while he was there, he noticed some young kids with short sleeve white shirts. You know, this is like the sixties, seventies and ties. And he said, Who are those kids? And somebody said, Those are the GMI students. Well, what’s I? And they said, that’s General Motors Institute. That’s a program where kids can work for six weeks in a GM factory or a GM office, and then they can go to college for six weeks, and that’s how they pay their way through. They go every six weeks between working and studying. And my granddad went right to HR and he found out how to get an application for my dad, and that’s how my dad afforded college. And that college still exists today. It’s called Kettering University. Very proud to still be in contact with them. I think we’ve done over one hundred and twenty scholarships for kids at the college, so we’ve definitely tried to pay it forward. But but that that love affair with GM is strong and I say that at the same time that, you know, they had a pretty rough strike in twenty nineteen.

Speaker3: [00:21:26] I want to say it was one hundred days since the first time since the seventies they’d had something like that. And that’s tough for a supplier like us. And then we had a restructuring and a Chapter 11, and it was it was a consensual restructuring. It took us about three months, which is lightning speed for restructuring. And we do turn around work, as I’ve said. So it wasn’t out of the realm, but it was a difficult year. So that was twenty nineteen. We get to twenty twenty and we’re all breathing a sigh of relief, thinking, Oh, finally, this is going to be our year and I’ll be darned if we didn’t get hit with a global pandemic and the whole industry shut down for four months. And, you know, had it not been for some very creative work on the part of the team and for programs like PPP, I don’t know that we would have made it or if we had not restructured the year before. I don’t know that we would have made it, but by the grace of God, we wouldn’t be here. And so twenty twenty, we have the COVID shutdowns. We finally got back up. We were operating at a great clip in September of twenty twenty. And right about that time it became very obvious that the semiconductor chip shortage was going to be devastating for our industry. And so right when we’re thinking, well, twenty twenty one will be hit, this is probably been the hardest of the three years we have had up until last week, not a single week in the year.

Speaker3: [00:22:50] Twenty twenty one were all of our locations were open at General Motors and Ford were shutting down critical plants. I mean, these are the plants that make the f one fifties. The SUVs that you like, the the Chevy’s you drive. I mean, these are iconic brands that consumers know and they’ve been idled. And when they’re not making cars, we’re not moving them. And so, you know, yeah, COVID whipped us, but it’s part of a three year tsunami for us where we had the GM strike. Our restructuring then covered in twenty twenty. And then the chip shortage in twenty twenty one. So what I can say is if I were going to bet on a management team, not just in trucking, but in any industry, I’d bet on mine because for those three years, these guys and gals have rolled with the punches. They have found ways to make it work and they’ve done it all without cutting it out of the backs of our people. They still prioritize doing the right thing for the people who make the business possible. And so if I’m proud of anything, it’s that that that this team has weathered some real choppy waters, some huge storms, and they’ve sort of come out of it still swinging the bat. I mean, what a remarkable group of people I get to work with.

Speaker2: [00:24:11] Well, it certainly is sobering to me, and I don’t really pretend to understand any of the intricacies, but it is, I guess that’s the best word, sobering to me. The way the dominos can fall and apparently have falling have fallen. When you have a shortage of something like semiconductors, I mean, that just impacts a lot of stuff, doesn’t it?

Speaker3: [00:24:33] Everything, right? Wait till Christmas. I mean, the semiconductors are just one part of what’s happening with supply chains in this country and really around the world. But the chip shortage for auto has been brutal. So to put it in perspective, if any of your listeners have tried to buy a car recently or even just been to a dealership lot, just look around. They’re parking the cars at angles, so they take up three spaces, so it doesn’t look as empty because they have no inventory. We have customers telling us that it’s going to take them three years and an incremental hundred plus days of production just to replenish the inventories of the dealerships. And that’s on top of the three shifts, seven days a week kind of operation that they’re going to have for the next few years. And that’s all because there are millions of cars. We estimate this pent up demand. People who wanted to buy a car but couldn’t has at minimum, a little over three million cars. And so, you know, the good news is when we get to the other side of this, it should be a really good few years for the company. The bad news is consumers right now don’t have a lot of options. If they want to buy a car, they. And remember, cars are one of those depreciable assets, right? Like the way they wear out, you have to replace them in some instances, but more to the point.

Speaker3: [00:26:02] Americans love to replace them, right? We love cars. This is part of our ethos and the open road and the highway system. And I think I think we’re in for for more disruptions through the rest of this year, probably through Q1. I’m hoping the semiconductor issue is is largely sorted out in the first half of next year. I think we’ll turn a corner probably early next year. But again, that’s one piece of the supply chain. You’re also looking at container ports that are backed up, warehouses that are full. The Biden administration, I think very smartly has started to move to 20 for seven operations that some of the most congested ports, like those on the West Coast. We’re certainly seeing that here in Savannah at the container port. And I think that that’s good, but we still need to do more right throughput, this is operations one on one throughput needs to consider everything that moves goods out of those ports and starts getting those containers back to Asia or to wherever their point of origin was so they can be replenished. That may mean we need to look at weight exemptions of a few thousand pounds for trucks. Trucks are limited to about 80 thousand pounds Class eight trucks.

Speaker3: [00:27:17] So what most of your listeners would think of as big rigs or or, you know, sort of heavy trucking? But we might want to consider giving them a five percent exemption four thousand pounds just for the first fifty or one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles out of the port so that they can increase throughput by five percent. And I think those are the kinds of solutions that we’re going to need to use. If it were up to me, I’d probably add incentive to that and say, if you’ll convert your fleet to zero emissions, whether that’s natural gas powered vehicles, electric trucks, I think fuel cells are coming along, but I’d probably allow those weight exemptions for for zero emissions vehicles more broadly because I think that’s a great way to start to transition our industry toward carbon neutrality. But but we’re going to have a lot to deal with, and I think consumers are going to be very aware of this as the holiday season approaches. It’s, you know, I’m glad I’m not a mom in the nineteen eighties looking for a Cabbage Patch doll. Right? You would not find it. Yeah, the supply chain issues are real. So shop early and I think manage expectations for the littles because this is going to be a rough one.

Speaker2: [00:28:36] Now, as I understand it, you have been all along and continue to be adamant, I guess, is the right word that there should not be another auto bailout. Is that accurate?

Speaker3: [00:28:50] Yeah, it is. And I can explain why. So first and foremost, I want to say that I became a Democrat in large part because of Barack Obama over the health care issue. But if I had to pick a second issue, I would say because of the auto bailout, there’s no question it saved our industry. It saved our company. It saved thousands of jobs just in my little business. And so I am grateful for what was done during the Great Recession with the auto industry bailout. But at this point, I think the automakers are going to be OK. I’m sure it’s not going to be their most comfortable years of margin. What I’m really worried about is the suppliers companies like Jack Cooper. You know, a lot of people don’t talk about this. But during the Great Recession, there were thousands of suppliers in our industry that went bankrupt. There were dozens just in my industry that no longer exists. I can think of a million companies of Pete’s being one of the biggest examples. I think they went straight into liquidation. There was Allied Systems Holdings based out of Atlanta. They went into bankruptcy. We bought them out of the bankruptcy. So we were able to save probably 12 hundred jobs there. But there were literally half a dozen a dozen companies just in my space, my little segment of car haul that disappeared. But there were thousands of suppliers to the industry that went under. And it’s usually disproportionately the small guys, the mom and pops. You know, people just kind of like doing their best to create something that’s theirs and to provide a good product at a good price. Those are the guys that get walloped.

Speaker3: [00:30:30] Most of the bigger companies will be OK. So if if there were going to be another bailout, I would certainly hope they look at the suppliers who can’t control whether or not there’s a shortage of semiconductor chips, right? We have two thousand five hundred employees and we’re based really entirely in North America. Delta COVID waves in Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam have massively disrupted semiconductor chip production, but there’s not a darn thing Jack Cooper can do about that. And I think about the companies that make everything from the interior of the vehicles, the materials they use, and there’s been a rubber shortage during COVID as well did not realize that, wow, OK. Yeah, there’s all kinds of little players, the people who make components of the parts that are supplied to the auto industry. So I’m always in favor of the U.S. investing in the sector. There are eight million jobs in this country directly tied to the automotive industry. If you look at dealerships, manufacturing, logistics, this is a job creation machine in America, so I’m in favor of investing. But if we were going to look at a bailout, they need to be looking. At the suppliers like Jack Cooper, like the smaller players, even who’s been hit by these through no fault of their own. And honestly, the one two punch of the COVID shutdowns last year and the chip shortage this year. I think that’s going to be fatal for a lot of these companies if they’re not given some assistance. So we’re very fortunate PPP. I think that a lot of companies through last year. But I do. I worry about some of the smaller players in particular and whether or not they’ll make it.

Speaker3: [00:32:20] We’ve been very lucky at Jack Cooper. Know this year there are a lot of moments where you felt like you were kind of holding it together with duct tape and chewing gum metaphorically. But you know, there have got to be people out there that are really struggling for cash. And I worry what happens to them. I think that the automakers are really doing well right now. All things considered, this is a brutal time, but they’re doing the best they can to navigate those waters. And what I love is that they’re continuing their mission, right? Mary Barra is talking about transitioning to an all electric product lineup by twenty thirty five. I mean, that’s extraordinary. She’s talking about introducing 30 new EV products by mid-decade this decade. And so they’re they’re continuing to move the ball down the field. They’re continuing to create really new and exciting products. I mean, look at the new Corvettes. I mean, my gosh, they’re beautiful. Yeah. Very proudly moved by Jack Cooper, by the way. I’m very proud of that. But, you know, the Broncos sold out the new Broncos. A lot of the new EV models are selling out within hours. You have the Mustang Mach-E being made down in Mexico and coming up here. There’s some great products, so I think the automakers are going to be fine. But I do worry about the supply chain and candidly, I’m not hearing a ton of rumbling about bailouts, but but if they do, I will be very loud that this should be directed at some of the companies that are kind of more on the margins of the of the supply chain.

Speaker2: [00:33:56] Well, it makes perfect sense to me and based on this conversation, I sure hope that the powers to be the administration will at least lean on and take and listen to experts in logistics and and and major players in the supply world and get that, you know, and try to get the benefit of that knowledge and experience base to influence these critical decisions that they’ll be making.

Speaker3: [00:34:26] Yeah, I mean, I think they do, and I think they try, right? It’s a big country. It’s a big industry, right? We talked about three million CD holders. Trucking is a big sector, but I think relying on expertize is really important. We don’t always have subject matter experts in government. We have a lot of them. But car haul, just as an example, what we do is a very small niche. There may be 15 20 thousand rigs total in the continent. I think it’s probably closer to 12, to be honest, and at least a couple of thousand of those are. So it’s it’s it’s a niche market. There’s plenty of specialized transportation niches where I would I would be very dubious that we happen to have an expert in car hall working on that problem. And I think if they can lean into the executives like like we are out in the field and the drivers also right there, they’re seeing a lot of these effects up front as well, up close and personal. So I hope they lean on us. They they seem to be listening, but I think we’re in a period of tremendous uncertainty right now and writing the supply chain. Overall, not just the chip shortage, we’re potentially looking at a couple of years of disruption still.

Speaker2: [00:35:53] Earlier in in the conversation, I think you mentioned something about Jack Cooper being a Witbank certified women owned business enterprise. Could you speak to that a little bit? The process, the value, your take on on on that, on that.

Speaker3: [00:36:11] Yeah, sure. I love this organization. So we’re probably on the larger side of certified businesses. We have to go through a little bit of a special process because of our size, but we’re very fortunate. My mom, my sisters and I control the company. And on the board, I think I outvote all of the other directors combined. So we’re very clearly owned and operated by women. And you know, I have two sisters and no brothers, so I’m not going to lie. We’re we’re very proud of that and it changes the way we operate too, right? I remember one of the first things when I was chairman was child care in this country is such a crisis for working parents, but for working mothers in particular. And we ended up just putting a daycare in Kennesaw at free to our employees because we could not crack that nut for our employees, and we knew it was limiting the number of working moms and parents we could get. We, of course, had men and women who use the service. Paid leave was another thing that I implemented getting paid leave. Whether you adopt a child or have a child or foster a child, foster parents also qualify for paid leave in our business, so being women-owned is something we’re proud of. We’re a little bit unique. We don’t do government contracting or anything like that. So we’re not, I think, a lot of companies, the certification is really important because there are set aside budgets for diversity suppliers in, for example, federal contracting. We don’t use it that way. For us, it’s more of a way to hang our hat, to hang our sign on the front door, so to speak, to say this is a company that that is investing in women and investing in in diversity, equity and inclusion.

Speaker3: [00:38:08] But I do think it’s important to some of our customers, the auto industry. A lot of your listeners may not be familiar with it, but they really are exemplary on this when it comes to supplier diversity, whether that’s women owned, disabled, veteran owned, minority owned. These companies have billions of dollars in commitments for supplier diversity spend. And so we’re very proud to contribute a part of that in in transportation and logistics. The process itself, the we bank agency, I can’t say enough good things. It is rigorous. So for any of your female entrepreneurs out there listening, I highly encourage you to seek certification for any of your listeners that are wondering whether it’s a real thing, right? Or if it’s just kind of an easy sticker and logo you can get. It is not. This is a tough certification. They tour your sites, they talk to your team. I had to explain business units two or three levels down the organization, down to the granular nature of their operations. For example, in Southfield, Michigan, we have an office that stores keys and titles for rental car companies and actually had to explain what the physical vault was for those products. So it’s it is a very granular and you know, of course, that those are all things I’m very familiar with, but I spend most of my work in capital markets strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions. And you know, if you were not somebody who was very involved in the operation of the business, I I don’t think you would pass muster on the screen.

Speaker3: [00:39:48] It is a rigorous long term, lots of paperwork, lots of legal structure, review process. And it should be right because people shouldn’t be able to get this certification if they’re not actually run by women. And so I felt very good about the process. I think the women there, even now, they’ve known us for years, right? They still hit me with the tough questions every every year when we get certified. And you know, and they know, I know the answers, but but I appreciate it. And I think for a lot of smaller companies, the networking value meeting other women who own and operate businesses has a tough thing. Anybody who’s ever had to make a payroll knows it. This is not easy. And so I think having that network is a wonderful resource. But for us, it’s a statement of values, and I think that’s a consistent theme. As we’ve talked about today, for us, it is finding, how can we tell the world that we don’t just claim values, but we lift them that you? And trace, everything we tell you about who we are to the way we operate that business. And by the way, you’re going to make mistakes along the way. Something’s not going to go right, especially when we have thousands of employees. But the commitment has to be to go in and fix it to to be committed to that constant, consistent work of improving the environment and and advancing those goals and those values.

Speaker2: [00:41:18] Let’s leave our listeners, if we can, with some some points of contact, some some coordinates, if they would like to dove in and learn more about any of these topics. Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’ve got listeners that want to see if there’s any way at all they could come work with Sarah Riggs Amico and Jake Cooper. You know, whatever’s appropriate a, you know, a website, a LinkedIn, whatever contact information or resources. And yes, I too would encourage them to kind of look into this, this Witbank organization. Full disclosure We for our listeners here at the Business RadioX network, we’ve had the distinct pleasure for the last couple of years of co-producing a radio show series with the Greater Women’s Business Council here in the in the region. And so I’ve been on the periphery of some of these conversations around we bank certification and have had the pleasure of interviewing. We have several of those of those members, but at any rate, if you if you would. Sarah, let’s let’s do leave our listeners with, you know, a place to go and learn more and continue the conversation if they can.

Speaker3: [00:42:29] Yeah, absolutely. So you can follow us on Twitter at Drive Jack Cooper, you can go to our website, Jack Cooper. You can. You can follow me on Twitter at Sarah Riggs Amico. I’m constantly talking about the business. I can’t share a ton right now, but I will be able to soon. I am heading out of the country tomorrow to go to a pretty exciting summit with a lot of heads of state, a few chief executives talking about how we can achieve carbon neutrality and how we can advance women in these industries. So I am super excited about that. But I’m at Sarah Riggs Amico and call us, email us. My DMs are usually open and I am always willing to to meet smart folks who want to be a part of finished vehicle logistics. It’s it is a tough but really rewarding industry, and I’ll just close with this. If you think about it in the time that we’ve been in this business, our family, we have been through the stock market crash in two thousand eight, the Great Recession, the bankruptcies of two of our largest customers. One of the largest strikes in our industry in decades. Our own restructuring in Chapter 11, a global pandemic and now a global supply chain. Disruption and semiconductor chip shortage. This is not the place you come to hang out in the coast, but if you are an innovative problem solver who likes dynamic industries and really dynamic, amazing teams, we’re a great fit for you. So when we went through one of our big transactions a few years ago, I got the chance to do the thank you’s for our team that led that effort. And if you know the story of Ernest Shackleton, a famous early 20th century explorer whose ship was stuck in Antarctica for a year and he managed somehow back before there were even things like crampons for the ice, gripping shoes to save every single life of the I think it was twenty six men or so in his care who survived in Antarctica for a year under his leadership.

Speaker3: [00:44:54] And if you’ve never read it, a Shackleton is a great. I think the book is called The Endurance, which was the name of their ship, but he had a very famous advertisement for his crew before they set sail. And when I gave the awards to our team for leading some through some of these really difficult times, I gave them a copy of this poster and his poster said men wanted for hazardous journey small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition in case of success. And you know, if you think about it, it’s no wonder they all survived. It was a self-selected group of people who wanted to go out and make the world better to take human knowledge further than it had been. And they understood the hazards, and certainly in our case, I wouldn’t say small wages. We try to we try to be on market there, but that’s the kind of ethos I’m looking for the people who look at the horizon and the world we don’t yet know or how to do things better in a way we don’t yet understand. Those are the people that I want on my team who can navigate those tough waters and come out of it on the better side, the other side better for it. What’s the old saying? The smooth seas never made for a fine sailor.

Speaker2: [00:46:17] What a marvelous way to wrap this inspiring and informative conversation. Sarah, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show, and I hope you’ll seriously consider joining us again sometime updating us because this story is going to continue to unfold. Your story is going to continue to unfold, and I think it will provide so much marvelous benefit to the folks that we’re all trying to serve out there. I can’t thank you enough for investing the time and energy to visit with us this morning.

Speaker3: [00:46:51] Well, stone, it’s been such an honor and I’m so grateful you’re taking the time to let me brag on some of the folks I get to work with and and to highlight the trucking industry. This has been an absolute pleasure and I hope we’ll get a chance to talk again soon.

Speaker2: [00:47:05] All right, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Sarah Riggs, Amico with Jack Cooper Investments and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying, we’ll see you next time on workplace wisdom.

Josh Nelson from Nelson Elder Care Law

November 4, 2021 by Kelly Payton

Josh Nelson

This Episode was brought to you by

The Innovation SpotAlma Coffee

 

 

 

 

Josh NelsonJosh Nelson, Josh Nelson Elder Care Law Attorney

Passionate about protecting assets through effective tax and financial strategies. Josh Nelson is an Attorney and Alliance Architect for Nelson Elder Care Law. He specializes in finance, banking, and insurance to compliment his specialty in elder law. Josh is active in the community, building relationships with people and key businesses in the areas. He has developed strong alliances in the community to provide holistic solutions to our clients in order to secure their future and protect their loved ones. He has a passion for protecting the assets of the people he serves through effective tax and financial strategies.

Always up for a challenge, Josh successfully completed his Juris Doctorate while simultaneously earning his Master of Accounting degree in Taxation. Prior to joining the firm, Josh served as a student attorney in the Phillip C. Cook Low Income Tax Clinic at Georgia State University where he provided legal advice and representation in a variety of tax situations including Offers in Compromise, 1040x Amended returns, and Tax Court cases.

Nelson Elder Care LawConnect with Josh on LinkedIn and follow Nelson Elder Care Law on LinkedIn and Facebook

 

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Woodstock, Georgia. It’s time for Cherokee Business Radio. Now here’s your host.

Speaker2: [00:00:23] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Cherokee Business RadioX Stone Payton here with you this morning. And today’s episode is brought to you, in part by Elma Coffey, sustainably grown, veteran owned and direct trade, which of course, means from seed to cup, there are no middlemen. Please go check them out at my Elma Coffee and go visit their Roastery Cafe at 34 to 48 Holly Springs Parkway in Canton. As for Harry or the brains of the outfit Leticia and tell them that Stone sent you. You guys are in for a terrific treat this morning. Please join me in welcoming back to the Business RadioX microphone with Nelson Elder Care Law Mr. Josh Nelson. How are you, man?

Speaker3: [00:01:10] I’m doing great stone. Thanks for having us back. We definitely appreciate everything you do and being on your show with you.

Speaker2: [00:01:15] Well, it’s a pleasure to have you in the studio. You were so kind very early on when we got the great news that our offer was accepted on a house here in Woodstock. I’d promised Holly for some time now that when we got settled that I would open up a studio here and here in the area and you were saying you had to have been like the first one or two interviews that we officially did for Cherokee Business RadioX. It was so kind of you to accept because you didn’t know me from Adam’s house cat. It was a marvelous conversation then, but I know that things move very quickly in your world, so I’m really excited about getting caught up before we go there, though. Just a brief primer mission purpose. Just a little overview of of your domain, the work that you do. Can you just speak to that in general force?

Speaker3: [00:02:07] Absolutely. First, glad to be with you again. Like I said, amazing to see you grow into what you’re turning into now. You’ve got a beautiful studio here. Everybody should come join your show if they get the invite. But what I do at Nelson Eldercare Law is help people plan for their future. We really focus on helping people make educated decisions to protect themselves and their loved ones as they go through life. And so a lot of people think about it as estate planning, but it’s not quite that we use a lot of the same tools like wills, trusts, powers of attorney, but we do it more in a way that you can really protect yourself. Make sure that you’re qualifying for any kind of government subsidies or benefits that you might be eligible for and maintaining your autonomy so that nobody is like throwing you in a nursing home or making decisions for you that you wouldn’t want to be made.

Speaker2: [00:02:50] Well, I got to tell you all of those things sound important to me, but the last one, when you talk about autonomy, there are two people, one people in this world. I can guarantee you that would be the court that is Pete Payton, my father and Stone Payton sitting right. That would be one of the most important factors.

Speaker3: [00:03:07] Well, I think that’s one of the scariest things that keeps people from the traditional estate planning is that it gets scary whenever you’re signing paperwork that says, you know, even your kids can start making decisions for you, you’re like, Oh, this feels a little wacky. So we want to make sure that everybody knows that the way that we do it, we really sit down with you over four different meetings, sometimes five or six, to get to know, you know, your story, what’s valuable to you, what kind of values you want to instill in the next generation, but also making sure that you understand how you can have a plan in place. It doesn’t restrict your freedoms.

Speaker2: [00:03:40] So do you find that there people have some preconceived notions about this whole area? Maybe some of which kind of keeps them from wanting to come in? It’s like, it’s like not wanting to go in and get your checkup right again. Guilty here. But do you find that that that sometimes they they they have some misconceptions or they’re just downright wrong about stuff and you need to kind of get them educated? Is that why the four meetings?

Speaker3: [00:04:08] Yeah, it’s really. We always start with just a free consult, which kind of sets us apart in the elder law arena is we’re giving a lot of value, we’re giving a lot of education. So a lot of people charge for that. We feel it’s important to remove that barrier so that people can make educated decisions. So many people have misconceptions about I need a will or I need to trust whatever they really don’t. You know, if you just have a bank account or an investment account with fidelity, maybe you don’t need some of that stuff. Maybe it doesn’t work the way that you think it works. The biggest thing that I think most people need is just a plan. And most people come in focused on the actual documents or the tools not thinking about how it all works together. So whenever you sign up with us, one of the big things that we do over there is different meeting processes is actually talk with you about your finances, talk with you about your bank accounts. We actually send somebody to your local bank with you to make sure that it’s set up right. A lot of times people don’t realize if you have a joint account with your spouse and one of you passes. It just goes to the other one. It’s that simple. You don’t need some fancy court process or trust or anything to make that happen.

Speaker3: [00:05:18] But then whenever you start talking about how you get it to the kids? Now, all of a sudden, we just need a little thing called a pod or Todd on there and a lot of cases, which is just payable on death or transfer on death. It’s a form you fill out with your bank. You don’t really need an attorney to do it. But whenever you work with us, we’re going to guide you through every step of the process so that it really works the way it’s supposed to. The scary part coming about the next couple of months is we get into what we call probate season, which is we get a lot of calls about people that have passed or. You know, mom’s going quick or dad’s going quick, and we don’t know what to do. And sometimes it’s just too late by that point where you know you’re going to get stuck in this court process that takes months and is expensive and people fighting just by having one little card at the bank, you could have skipped all that. And so we try and help people through that and make sure it’s practical and easy, something that the family is not going through a burden some time later for.

Speaker2: [00:06:11] So even though we have the word elder in the work that we’re talking about, should somebody at 30 be thinking about this stuff and lining stuff up, or at least having a conversation about and get some basic stuff in place?

Speaker3: [00:06:24] Yeah, I mean, I think it’s hard for some elders, a horrible name. It’s I always go back and forth. Are we going to change it or we’re going to change it? Everybody tells me we need to change it, but it’s refers to a specific type of law that focuses on asset protection and benefit qualification. So as we get older, whatever that means to your listeners and you out there, I got seven clients over one hundred and a couple of them still tell me they aren’t old.

Speaker2: [00:06:49] That is fair. Seriously, you’ve got. Wow, that’s cool.

Speaker3: [00:06:54] My average clients are going to be over 50. I’ve got so usually it’s the kids are about 18 somewhere around that age, and they’re trying to think about what the next step is. Their friends are starting to worry about getting sick. They’ve started to amass some wealth and they’re starting to think to themselves like, Man, if I got sick and I had to go to the hospital, what does this look like? Let me get some clarification to make sure that if my business fails because of whatever’s going on in the world, that I’m not losing my house, that I’m not losing my personal stuff.

Speaker2: [00:07:25] Well, guys, this is a perfect reason to have your own radio show because I’m getting some great advice here. No, if I don’t talk her out of it, my wife is going to retire next year and I own 40 percent of a pretty good little business, and then I own 100 percent of this little business the way that we’re structured. So, I mean, there’s a lot of moving parts that maybe it’s not nearly as complicated as it’s wheeling around in my head, but I bet sitting down with you guys and just talking it through would probably saved me a lot of heartache and reduce the friction and shrink the timeline for just getting things set up, right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:08:05] Yeah. I think a lot of people focus on like their financial advisor or their tax strategist or their accountant or just kind like their business coach. And it’s all just piecemeal. And so what we do is kind of quarterback the whole process, just walk you through and make sure that your life insurance is set up right, that your business is set up, right? And then just talk about questions. And so whenever we’re sitting down with you, we’re going to get to know you really well. Ask you about the 40 percent of the business that you have. Do you have an actual articles of incorporation? Do you have a membership agreement? If something happened to you, where do you really want the other part to go? Right. And so often we get people that just don’t think about it from that perspective, they’re like, you know, Oh, I set this up years ago. I’m an 85 percent owner. I got a 15 percent guy and he’ll pay out my wife. Uh. Well, that doesn’t really work. You know, we had a guy come in that had over $20 million in real estate holdings as an eighty five percent partner.

Speaker3: [00:09:06] And whenever he died, his wife just thought this other guy was going to kill him, a check for eighty five percent the value of the firm, and he just couldn’t get liquidity. There’s no way for him to just go finance us all of a sudden and her walk away with money, let alone. Can you imagine what the capital gains would have been if it did work like that? And so whenever they originally structured that nobody talked them through the practicalities of how it actually worked? Yes, they had something on paper. It wasn’t like they’re just going into it blind, but they didn’t see what the real result was going to be. And that’s pretty scary. So now this lady’s a business partner with a guy that doesn’t want to be a partner with her. Right? She doesn’t really know how to run the business. And so pretty sure that’s going to end up in what we call a coup where, you know, the partners just end up fighting or overtaking each other. And that’s a scary business to be in.

Speaker2: [00:09:54] So what’s next for you coming into the to year end and on a new year? Do you and your firm focus on a certain aspect of the business or

Speaker3: [00:10:05] Yeah, as we get into kind of the last quarter of the year, whenever most businesses are slowing down for the holidays, we actually get really busy, huh? And it’s busy with the kind of work that’s a little bit heartbreaking, but it’s important to do. And so often what happens is this is what we call our crisis season or dealing with people that go and see their loved ones that may be over the phone. They’ve been hiding a couple of things, you know, maybe whenever you talk to mom or dad on the phone, you don’t realize there’s a little bit of cognitive impairment going on. And then all of a sudden you show up for Thanksgiving and you say, Oh, this can’t wait. Then we get the people that do see something and they’re trying to figure out, Is this something concerning? Is this something we need to deal with right away? Or is this something that we can just start taking baby steps for? We call it crisis planning or just advisement, depending on what the level of health issue is. So often our parents can cover for each other, especially if both of them are still alive. Right? You know, dad’s not going to tell you that mom is being a little wacky and mom’s not going to tell you dad’s being a little wacky.

Speaker3: [00:11:06] But then all of a sudden, whenever you see him, you’re like, We need to. We need to check into this. And so what we normally do with people like that is the kids can come in and talk to us a little bit about how to have some of those hard conversations. Nobody wants to again lose their ability to make their choices. If your kids came to you and we’re like, you know, hey, I think it’s time for you to go to a place, the first thing you’re doing is locking everything down, right? We aren’t even having this conversation, but there’s ways to talk about it and just say, you know, Hey, are you feeling safe? Are you needed a little bit of help? Maybe we start getting cleaning person or a cleaning company to start coming in. Take a little pressure off of mom or dad if they’re in that caregiver role. And maybe we start getting things like the ability to just talk to the doctors so often, especially as guys. Unfortunately, whenever we go to the doctor, the doctor is like, How are things going? And you’re like, Say,

Speaker2: [00:11:59] Good, my wife shows up with a composition notebook and I’m like, Yeah, I’m good. I’m not hurting anywhere.

Speaker3: [00:12:07] And that’s what I think a lot of people don’t understand is it’s baby steps like maybe go into the doctor with your parents just to make sure that you’re hearing the right thing. So often whenever we speak with people, they mishear things. I always talk about my grandmother. She’s a sweet, sweet lady. But one day she came home from the doctor and said, Doctor told me to quit eating vegetables. I was like, Well, that doesn’t sound right. That doesn’t sound like a real thing. And what happened is she was on some blood thinners and she would eat right for a couple of weeks. She’d go get her blood test done, they’d reduce her medicine and then she’d go back to eating all the junk that she normally likes. And then they’d have to raise her medicine. And she’s on like this ebb and flow cycle that was just really frustrating. And so somehow the doctor said something who knows what it really was, but she heard. Well, let’s get off this roller coaster of medication adjustment, I’ll just quit eating vegetables. I don’t think that’s what the doctor said. So I started going to the doctor with her and come to find out. She has a little bit of inconsistency with it, but we were able to get a good plan going that she lives with. And it’s just the kind of thing where having that extra set of ears is really important.

Speaker3: [00:13:18] Even for myself. I’m a pretty young guy, but a couple of years ago I had a medical issue where the doctor calls me on my cell phone, and this should have been a big red flag. Like, when was the last time your doctor called you right? It’s always a nurse or a PA or something like that. And she was like, Hey, I think you need to go over to the hospital, is what I heard. And then a couple of hours later, I get a call from my mom who’s like my next like an agent for health care. And she’s like, You know, did you get in a car accident? Why aren’t you over at North Side? Like, what happened? I’m like, No, I’m at work. And she’s like, The doctor called me. I wasn’t way, you’re not there. Well, come to find out. I had a test that showed some internal bleeding, and I swear whenever I talk to the doctor, that’s not what I heard it was. It’s just as like cognitive dissonance that we have whenever it’s about us. And so it’s always good to have somebody there, and that’s one of those baby steps. It’s not anybody taking power away from you. It’s not anybody stepping in, but just so that you make sure you’re walking out of the conversation, hearing the same thing that the doctor is telling you. There can be a big step.

Speaker2: [00:14:19] Well, it sounds like marvelous advice. It really does. You spoke earlier in the conversation about people in other domains, professional services advisors, your your financial planner personally. So it’s it’s incumbent upon you. You coordinate with all of those folks, don’t you, or you or you’d like to. At least that’s the ideal scenario whenever you

Speaker3: [00:14:47] Come in and work with us really, ever since January of twenty twenty, we’ve done this kind of full quarterback system. Ok? And the reason for it is before that, what happened was people would come in and they’d get a plan. It’d be a good plan and we’d give them a list of stuff that they needed to go do is what we call kind of like homework or follow up steps. Mm hmm. And they wouldn’t do it. And the problem was before what happened is we tried to like charge differently for it, we’d say, Hey, if you want us to send the person to the bank with you, here’s what it charge. Here’s what it costs. If you want us to work with your accountant, here’s what it costs. And nobody saw the value in it just because they just we couldn’t do a good enough job educating people on it. And so now we just wrap it all into the package and we say, Let’s get you a good place out. Let’s make sure that you don’t have to worry about whenever your wife passes thinking about What do I do? You call us, everything’s already put together. Everything is already in the system. Now we are financial advisors. We’re not tax accountants. We don’t try and control your money. That’s an old estate planning trick.

Speaker3: [00:15:49] We don’t do anything with that. We work with your people, it’s still your financial person, it’s still your tax accountant. But at least they have a better idea. You know, your tax accountant whenever you go to them, they probably don’t do a whole lot of trust. They need somebody to tell them how this really works, right? If something happens to your house where you’re selling your house, I know you just moved. But eventually, whenever you move, you want to make sure that you’re still getting the same tax benefits that you can. What’s called like the one twenty one exclusion makes it so that you don’t pay capital gains on the first two, fifty or five hundred thousand of your house. We can keep all that, but we’ve got to make sure your tax account knows that because if they don’t file the right way, then you’re like, Oh man, I missed out on that opportunity. Or even things like whenever you do need in-home caregivers or, God forbid, your parents go to an assisted living or something like that. All that’s medical expense, that’s deductible. And people forget about that. You know, if your accountant’s not used to working with people in assisted livings, right, they may not look at that. And that could be $60000 a year worth of medical deduction.

Speaker2: [00:16:50] Wow. So there is a hole, and I’ll stay with the analogy and the team, if you will, if there’s a hole, if I’m missing a position. It strikes me that you probably have some marvelous, trusted relationships with CPA aides, financial advisers, these kinds of folks. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:17:09] Absolutely. We’re always looking for more. So if you get listeners out there on your business network here, you don’t want to reach out. We’re always happy to sit down and talk about it. We do have some high standards for people that we refer to just because we want to make sure that they have the same holistic approach that we do. But overall, I mean, we work with who you have, and if you don’t have somebody who will help you find that person, a lot of times what we deal with lately is people that come in that don’t know who there are power of attorney should be or they don’t know who their trustees should be or their executor. And we think it’s a conflict for us to serve in that role because then there’s no checks and balances on us, but we can help you find people that can serve in that role, even if you don’t know who it is. Maybe your kids are horrible with money. You don’t want to be your power of attorney. Yeah, maybe you don’t have children. Maybe your children have supplemental needs where they just can’t handle the stress of losing you and doing this right. We want to make sure you have a good plan and those are historically the people that we’ve seen that don’t do anything because they don’t know where to turn to.

Speaker2: [00:18:15] And so someone in a professional capacity can be one of these, like they can be the power of attorney. And it’s not they’re not your nephew, they’re not your uncle or anything. They are trusted and have to live up to some code of ethics and standards and all that jazz. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:18:31] So they’re actually called professional fiduciaries, and that’s just a fancy way of saying they have to do what’s in your best interest, even over their own. Okay, even if your kid does it, they’re a fiduciary for you. They sign acceptance of like the power of attorney. But usually what we’re talking about here is either a retired social workers that kind of are getting out of it and saying, Hey, let’s help people with this right. A lot of times it’s retired attorneys or retired CPAs, and they’ll step up and do this for you. And they have the experience, they have the guidance. Usually we’re going to get ones that are insured in bondage just in case things go south. Then your family is protected. But it’s a really, really good way for people that maybe have family that’s busy. You know, we have a couple of clients that have kids that love them dearly. But just work 60 hours a week, yeah. You know, if your kids live out in Seattle or out in Utah, maybe they can’t be here to do what you need to do. So let’s find you somebody local that can step in and your kids can oversee that. They can be the checks and balances and things like that, right? Or especially a lot of times of the older generation right now, like people in their late 80s and 90s, the women just didn’t handle the books. And so if the dad passes, us, guys generally go first. Unfortunately, yeah. In one of the kids isn’t financially sophisticated or able to step up because of other obligations. Maybe we need to have somebody in there helping mom. It doesn’t mean that we’re taking power away from her. Maybe it’s somebody that sits down at the kitchen table with her and helps pay her bills and balance your checkbook. It costs about one hundred, one hundred and fifty bucks a month to do that, but it’s probably worth it.

Speaker2: [00:20:14] Well, one of the things that is striking me during this conversation and I feel like I’m getting the free consultation that you talk about, but it’s it’s how not so challenging, not how big and hairy. Some of these ideas are that, but I’m just unaware of them, you know? I mean, like, just never, you know, hadn’t thought about it. Like, you don’t have to come storming in and take dad’s keys. Tell mom she’s got to do a, you know, whatever. You could just do little things to start, you know, and just kind of ease into it.

Speaker3: [00:20:47] I think that’s a good point. Everybody wants to make sure that as they’re going through the process, that it works. If you get to the process and you just come barging in which a lot of times kids try and do, they call up and they say, I don’t like Dad’s new girlfriend. Like, how do I take something away from it? That’s not the business for it, but sometimes it’s having that conversation. A lot of times we act more as like a counselor or like a life coach or anything else, but we can’t even do that until we sit down and meet you. And that’s really why we do offer that free sit down at lasts between 60 and 90 minutes, right? A lot of people are shocked by what that process really is because it’s really just getting to know you like, how is this affecting you with your time? How is this affecting you with your family and how is this affecting you with your money? Everybody thinks it’s about the money whenever you talk about an estate plan, but it’s really about how your reputation with your kids. How is your reputation with your spouse? What are you going to do as far as time management, if you’re going to be the child that’s taking care of mom and dad? Everybody thinks, you know, equal means fair, and especially if you’re like a child caregiver and you’re giving up your time at work or time with your family. Maybe it’s not for kids. Get 25 percent each, but let’s plan for that, right? The other thing is, we’ve been through this with over 3000 families.

Speaker3: [00:22:11] And so whenever you come with just a really dumb idea, we don’t say, you know, Hey, Stone, that’s a dumb idea, but we’ll walk you through some of the practicalities of it. A lot of times cohabitating is really, really a bad idea. And so most people start out saying, you know, Oh, I’ll let mom come live with me or I’ll let dad come live with me, and that can work well, depending on what their medical condition really is. You get somebody that has late stage Alzheimer’s or cognitive impairment. That’s not going to be something that you can really care for if you got teenagers at the house still right or if you do want to try it, let’s at least sit down and talk about some ground rules. You know, communication and a plan is always better than not having a plan. Who’s going to set the rules? Remember, whenever you lived under your parents’ roof, they were the boss. Right now they’re under your roof and you want to be the boss. How do you balance that? How do we talk about if you want to go out on date night, who’s supervising mom or dad, especially if they got cognitive impairment? Right? These are all just things that we got to talk about. Not necessarily just for the moment now, but also for the future. You know, it’s usually a five year, 10 year long plan whenever we do one of these. How do we make sure that we’re thinking about it through all the stages?

Speaker2: [00:23:30] So for those of you who are listening, the vast majority of people who listened to to our work listen on demand so, you know, they could be listed, we are. I would love to say tail end, but we’re late in the COVID thing. And it’s it’s it’s in November of 2021, so it’s still really fresh on our mind. And there’s people, you know, arguing over whether to get vaccinated and there’s people who are getting it and all that kind of stuff. So I want to set that context for people who may hear this six six months from now. But my question is, has that dynamic impacted your world at all or not?

Speaker3: [00:24:08] Really, it’s impacted us hugely. I mean, I think everybody was really taken back last year. We’ve. Work a lot with assisted living and nursing homes, which have a lot of restrictions on visitation even in November. Twenty twenty one here. There’s a good chance that depending on your community, whether it be assisted living or a nursing home, if somebody gets it, somebody has COVID, they’re probably locking down again. And so you’re at least under another 14 days of quarantine. If you want to go into a community, you usually have to quarantine. A big problem right now is staff, too. And so we walk through families about how to better utilize staff. Just this morning, I got off a call with a guy who his father’s sick enough that he needs to be in what we call skilled nursing or a pretty high level of care. And we work with the family instead of paying eight, nine thousand dollars a month. The guy gets it for free through the government subsidies. Wow. But then he wonders like, How do I make sure dad’s getting good care? And it falls back to again, a lot of non-legal stuff, just checking on it, making sure that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so to speak, bringing in some cold drinks or some Starbucks gift cards for five bucks to the staff there. Uh-huh. Don’t you think that dad’s going to get a little bit of better care than if he’s not? People always say, you know, that’s not fair. Well, I don’t want fair for my loved ones. I want them to have an upper hand. And so that’s why I’m going to bring in donuts or cupcakes or cookies or whatever. I mean, I always joke that having a little candy bowl with those like, you know, go to CVS or whatever and get some of that discount Halloween candy right? Throwing the ball, you know, don’t do unwrapped candy. Like one time I had a lady that heard me say that and did M&M. That’s just gross. No, don’t do don’t do something. We’re always sticking their hand into a jar anymore.

Speaker2: [00:26:02] There goes my M&M sponsorship, Janet.

Speaker3: [00:26:06] We’ll get you on the Milky Way’s or something funny. But it’s the kind of thing where just that extra little treat, you know, think about if you’re a caregiver. Most of these people are making less than 13 bucks an hour doing a job that most of us wouldn’t really want to do. If there’s a little candy dish in there, don’t you think they’re at least stopping by in? No person is going to stop in and grab a little candy bar and not say, Hey, how are you doing? Right, right? It’s the little stuff like that that makes a big difference.

Speaker2: [00:26:32] So if I if I have one of these initial consultation skills with you a few weeks out or whatever you are. What are some things that I should do could do in preparation so that we would get the most out of the out of the meeting? There’s probably a few things that I could show up and might even facilitate the maximize the meeting.

Speaker3: [00:26:53] We really don’t put a whole lot of barriers, you know, so many law firms have you fill out these like five 10 page worksheets to ask you all about your money and your Social Security number and all kinds of crazy stuff before you even meet them? We don’t do that. Like I said, the first meeting is really just talking through whatever issues you want. If you want to bring some questions, we’re happy to walk you through and it’s just because, like now we start chatting. It’s good to write them down, so we make sure they get covered right. But other than that, we have a script. If you don’t have your questions, that will go through. It just asks about where you’re at, where you’re going, where you want to be. And just gets to know you and talks about, can we help you? You know, there are some people that come in that we just can’t help. And the reason for that is maybe they’re too late. You know, if mom doesn’t know who you are or who she is, what she’s signing. You can’t do a good plan, then you know, you’ve got to go through this court process called a guardianship conservatorship. And we can help you with that, but it’s pretty expensive. It’s kind of off putting to people how much that costs. But then whenever we talk about people that are, you know, do have cognitive capacity or legal capacity to still make a plan, we’re going to walk you through all the facets and we don’t expect you to not know what you don’t know.

Speaker3: [00:28:07] Whenever you walk in, of course, you can bring in a ballpark of what your net worth is. You can bring in a ballpark of what business entity you have. You know, is it an LLC or a C Corp and SE Corp? But if you don’t know that stuff, we don’t need to know it at that stage whenever we decide to work together. We’ll give you a list of what we need and after you sign up after the first meeting, there’s another meeting that’s pretty quick after you usually within 24 to 48 hours or at least the same week, and then you’re going to sit down and we’re going to give you some homework for that meeting. Just some things to think about. And then we’re going to start with a foundation. And so the foundation for us is always going to be like a power of attorney and advanced health care directive, which is like a medical power of attorney. We just call it something different in Georgia, a HIPA release that you already have it. All your doctors makes it so that people can see your medical records and stuff like that and then just get kind of a basic estate plan going so that if something did happen to you, you at least know where your stuff goes.

Speaker3: [00:29:03] Then after that, you’re going to have two more meetings where we get on top of that foundation and start building on it, making sure that it works the way that it’s supposed to and really start talking to you about things that you want to have happen. So often we have what are called like blended families where it’s like, you know, a second marriage, maybe kids or previous kids for another one. If something happens to one of those spouses, you have to be realistic about the fact that the mom in law or the dad in law probably doesn’t have a great relationship with your biological kids. If you die, you’re the thread that holds them together. Yeah. And so we’ll talk to you about hard conversations like, do you want to have part of your inheritance, be a trip to support them? And so what really works well in our experience is paying for a trip to wherever you guys thought, like the coolest place to go was right. And then make like step mom and the kids and the grandkids and all go and you pay for it. Like, think about that way to really like, grieve and create new memories compared to just normally. Kids are like, step mom’s holding me up from getting my share. Right? Yeah. And so just sitting down and having those like those kind of conversations, those talks really makes a big difference for people.

Speaker2: [00:30:15] I cannot believe that that this work must be so well. And I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not fraught with its own set of challenges, but it must be incredibly rewarding work.

Speaker3: [00:30:29] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think people don’t realize how good it really is to help people. And so just last Thursday, we had four clients come back in and do some video testimonials. And you know, I’m a strong guy. I won’t say that it made me cry, but it definitely pulls on the heartstrings to hear the difference in people’s lives that you can really make whatever most of the clients come in. I mean, we’re hugging even in post-COVID era, just because you’re changing these people’s lives for the better. They walk in and they got something stressing them out, whether it be money or sickness, or they just not don’t know where to turn right. And you can literally see the stress come off of people’s shoulders like I never realized before. I did this that you can see people take a true sigh of relief, which is just so cool.

Speaker2: [00:31:21] So I was normally I will ask a guest, I’ll often ask them where they draw their inspiration and usually it’s from. It’s often outside of the work, but I suspect most of yours is drawn from the work itself. But is there a place you go? When I say a place, I don’t necessarily mean a geographic place, you know, whether it’s books or movies or whatever. Where do you draw inspiration? Getting fresh inspiration, if you will, if it’s outside of this?

Speaker3: [00:31:52] I think it sounds really quirky, and I know that before I got into it, I thought it was pretty fufu. But you hear people talk about like, mindset work. Yeah. And I think it’s more important for a business owner than anybody realizes. And you know, you go through these different stages as a business owner where first you have, you know, three employees and then five employees. And then we’re at nearly 30 people now and we have two offices, ten thousand square foot of office space. We’re helping somewhere around 60 clients a month. I mean, the amount of good that we do is just. Flabbergasting, it just blows your mind that seven years ago, whenever we started with one attorney, we’d be where we are now. We help so many families, but there’s a lot of stress that goes with it, and so making sure that you’re doing constant tune up of your mindset that you’re ready for the next challenge is that you’re hanging out with other business owners that are better than you. So this weekend, there’s a big event in Atlanta for attorneys that we’re going to go to. Where guys are doing, you know, like John Morgan and Alex Shannara, these huge, huge attorneys that run like multistate practices, right? And you go to dinner with them and you sit down and chat sort of like what we’re doing right here. You know, there’s always somebody that you can talk to, whether it’s in your industry or not, it’s better than you.

Speaker2: [00:33:15] And so go, Paul. It wouldn’t be any challenge for me at all. I think I could find them.

Speaker3: [00:33:20] That’s like, you know, go pull and get inspiration from them, talk to them. You know, it’s sort of like if you’re in fourth grade, you know, a sixth grader can still show you some things, right? Right. You don’t have to go to the teacher all the time. And I think that’s one of the biggest things is just making sure that you have an eye towards growth and eye towards improvement. As we’ve grown the staff, one of the big things is making sure we’re doing staff development for the same kind of stuff. It’s like next week we’re going to shut the office down for a day and do a big training just because it’s important to keep everybody on your team going in the right direction. But if it was one thing that I think really is the focus, it’s you got to make sure that the mindset is right and then the team’s mindset is always under development.

Speaker2: [00:34:03] Amen. Before we wrap, if we could, let’s leave our listeners with a few quick tips. I’ll call them and we can we we can go in any direction you want, or maybe sprinkle a few across the business owner, the aging person, or the person that is trying to plan for that, the kids of aging parents or other professional advisors, how and how and why or what to be thinking about in terms of teaming up with an elder care law. For any of that, just if we could just leave him with a few ideas, that would be fantastic.

Speaker3: [00:34:37] Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just to always ask. What happens after this, so a lot of people think that like whenever somebody has a will, they just walk into a bank and walk out with money? It doesn’t work like that. A lot of people think, Oh, I can just invest my money enough where I don’t need to worry about long term care costs. Well, that’s not the reality for a lot of us. A lot of times people look at their accountant and don’t realize that they’re not a tax strategist. And so the person that gives you your tax strategy is probably different than the person that actually files your returns. It might be in the same office, but it’s just a different task. Thinking about things from a higher level or like a 10000 foot view allows you to see more of this. The guy that’s down there grinding and putting stuff into your 10:40 probably isn’t the same person that has the big picture. That’s like, you know, Hey, Stone, make sure your truck has more than a six foot bed so you can deduct the whole thing this year. It’s the little stuff like that that you got to make sure your advisors are looking at all the facets. And I think that so often people are afraid of business getting stolen or, you know, like, Oh, whatever firm over here, and then he’s going to refer them over to some other guy, or he’s going to throw me out of the bus where if you really do it in a collaborative way, everybody wins.

Speaker3: [00:35:53] I mean, think about if your client has a great, great outcome from your financial plan and then whenever they pass, their wife is the one that comes in with you and they see it work well. Then the kids see it work well. They’re going to be throwing your name to everybody they know. And so your business grows exponentially compared to trying to hoard those small clients or hoard the kind of sole advisor role. You look at people that are truly wealthy and they always have teams. Yeah, it’s not just one person. And so that’s really where we want to bring that to people that aren’t as wealthy. You know, most of our clients have under a million dollars, including their home. Hmm. Just because those are the people that are really worried about health care costs and protecting their future, you know, we help people with small businesses. We help people against all aspects. But especially with these new looming tax rules, you need a team because if they change something fast, you need to make sure that I can call your financial guy and we can say, you know, let’s switch this this week rather than 30 days from now.

Speaker2: [00:36:59] Well, Josh Nelson with Nelson, the elder care law. This has been an absolute delight, incredibly informative. A little, you know, I feel like maybe I’ve left some things undone, so maybe just the least little bit unnerving, but it doesn’t seem as big and hairy. Now some of these topics as they did, you know, an hour ago? Well, I think

Speaker3: [00:37:20] That, you know, first always. Removing barriers for people to come in. Nobody likes attorneys. Everybody’s scared of us. You know, I always joke with people, you know, attorneys ruin everything, even though I am one. It’s. You know, even things like what you can do for your spouse has changed over the last 50 years, and it’s all attorneys faults. But if we really look at it, we try and reduce some of those barriers. We try and take away some of that fear. Whenever we do work with somebody that’s always flat rate, they know what it costs up front. There’s no like hourly billing where you get invoices later about scary stuff.

Speaker2: [00:37:54] Well, and that’s one of the scary things to to a person like me. You know, I see on TVs, some soap opera, whatever the attorneys throw in the meter, right?

Speaker3: [00:38:03] Yeah. Even like the Britney Spears thing, whenever we see that her court appointed attorney got more than three hundred grand. I mean, it’s like, that’s just mind blowing, right? And so that’s why we do everything flat, right? And you know what it is whenever you’re coming in, we offer payment plans and stuff like that because it isn’t cheap, but it’s valuable. And again, just if you don’t know what questions to ask, we’re the right firm for that because we’re just going to sit down and talk with you. There’s no pressure or anything like that. We end up having people come in that will hire us three years later because they just had to think about it that long. And that’s

Speaker2: [00:38:38] Ok. You’re not going anywhere, are you? We’re here. All right. If our listeners would like to and I’m sure they will, if they’d like to reach out and have conversation with you or someone on your team about any of these topics or to set up that initial consultation, let’s give them some coordinates. The best way to do that. Whatever is appropriate, email website, LinkedIn, whatever’s appropriate.

Speaker3: [00:39:01] We generally do best with starting that on a phone call, and so it’s just six seven eight two five zero nine three five five four Nelson Eldercare Law. We also have Nelson Takealot.com. You can even text through to us if that’s more your style. I know that as the time passes, less people are excited to jump on a phone, but you can text into us and everything like that and we’ll make it work. But you do have to text through our website there at Nelson Eldercare dot com.

Speaker2: [00:39:25] Josh Nelson, thanks again. So much, man. This has been

Speaker3: [00:39:29] Marvelous. Oh, absolutely. Any time you want. Thanks so much.

Speaker2: [00:39:32] This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Josh Nelson with Nelson Elder Care Law and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying, we’ll see you next time on Cherokee Business Radio.

Eric Bailey from Bailey Strategic Innovation Group

October 25, 2021 by Kelly Payton

Eric M. Bailey, Bailey Strategic Innovation Group

Eric M. Bailey is the bestselling author of The Cure for Stupidity: Using Brain Science to Explain Irrational Behavior and President of Bailey Strategic Innovation Group, one of the fastest-growing human communication consulting firms in the United States. Eric has a diverse set of experiences that includes helping NFL All-Pro Larry Fitzgerald pet a rhinoceros, doing barrel rolls in an F-16, and chatting with LL Cool J on the campus of Harvard University. Eric is the creator of the Principles of Human Understanding™, a leadership and communication methodology based in brain science and psychology. Eric’s unique style blends fact and emotion and finds ways to appeal to the analytical thinkers, the emotional feelers, and everyone in between. Eric has a unique ability to communicate seemingly complex concepts in practical, easy-to-comprehend ways, aiding in self-awareness and knowledge retention.

Eric has been featured on CNN, Huffington Post, Forbes, the Like a Real Boss Podcast and has helped leaders and teams across the world see common problems from new and different perspectives. Eric works with Google Inc, the US Air Force, Los Angeles County, the City of St. Louis, MO, Phoenix Police Department and many more. Eric also runs a YouTube series of 2-minute executive lessons called The Walking Meeting (www.thewalkingmeeting.com). Eric has a Master’s degree in Leadership and Organizational Development from Saint Louis University and is a lifetime learner of human and organizational behavior. When not working or researching, you can find Eric and his wife Jamie racing on their road bikes, being cheered on by their three children.

Bailey Strategic Innovation GroupConnect with Eric on LinkedIn and follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

 

 

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker1: [00:00:08] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for workplace wisdom sharing, insight, perspective and best practices for creating the planet’s best workplaces. Now here’s your host.

Speaker2: [00:00:31] Welcome to Workplace Wisdom Stone Payton here with you this afternoon, and gang, you are in for a real treat, please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Bailey Strategic Innovation Group. The man himself, Mr. Eric Bailly. How are you, man?

Speaker3: [00:00:48] I’m doing well. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker2: [00:00:50] Oh man, we’ve really been looking forward to getting you on the show. No stranger. Incidentally, guys to the Business RadioX microphone, we’ve had the pleasure of having Mr. Bailey in our Phenix studio. So he is. This is what do you call it at the end of the concert when the people won’t go home this encore man or more and more and more? But no, we want. We want to talk to you about a variety of things, one of which it’s my understanding that you’re quite accomplished. And if it not, if not, at least a tremendous student of this, this whole body of work around around brain science. Can can you talk to us a little bit about that and how maybe it relates to diversity and bias and inclusion and privilege? And, you know, speak to that a little bit, if you would.

Speaker3: [00:01:39] You got it. So I am. I call myself a self-proclaimed geek of brain science and and brain science isn’t really a science. It’s really a collection of many different scientific topics. So you’ve got neuroscience and psychology and linguistics and anthropology. So all of that kind of comes together is kind of the science of the brain. And I found it very fascinating to not just understand, like to pay attention to what people are doing, but to start to understand why people do what they do or why people react the way that they do. And over the last decade or so, I’ve really started to read a lot of psychology, research, neuroscience, research, anthropology, linguistics, all that, all that research and realize that we can start to explain why you can be neighbors with somebody for 30 years, and then they put the wrong political sign in their front yard. And now you can’t trust them, right? So we see these things happening over and over again and why we separate from each other, why we get frustrated at each other. And, you know, in a more more specifically recently in the conversation of diversity and why why does why does talking about even the word bias? Why is that send some people into really highly emotional state and they want to shut down the conversation and understanding the brain science? This it actually allows me to engage with folks on a level of dialog rather than kind of preaching at people or telling people what they should be thinking.

Speaker2: [00:03:06] So, so knowing what you have come to learn about brain science, would you approach a conversation differently based on some early responses you got from me in that conversation? Or would you approach it differently because you’ve learned something about my background? Like, exactly how do you leverage this thing called brain science to to to impact the way you conduct these conversations?

Speaker3: [00:03:30] Yeah. So I’ve developed a set of principles called the Principles for Human Understanding. And essentially, they’re 20 to brain science principles that help us understand each other. And so, you know, if let’s say that we’re in some kind of, you know, heated debate about something, and I think it should be done one way and you think it should be done another way or I think this is right, you think it’s wrong and you know how your blood pressure starts to rise, your heart starts to pound, you start to get sweaty, like those are all signals that your body is actually going into defense mode, right? Like back when we were in cavemen and cave women running away from saber tooth tigers per say like, we have this reaction to protect ourselves. And interestingly, we have the same physiological reaction when we’re in those kinds of debates. And when you can start to recognize those signs in yourself, you can you can realize that your frontal lobe where your higher level thinking is your executive function is has less resources, less blood oxygen available there and you’re not going to you’re not going to be at your best. You’re going to act more and more animalistic than you are human. And so you can recognize those, take a couple of breaths and calm down and then engage. One of the things that we realize is that if you’re fighting me about something, I’m fighting you about something. There’s actually a benefit to me letting go of my thoughts, letting go of trying to win and trying to understand why you think you’re your position, not necessarily trying to change my idea, but to understand the humanity or the context or your history that got you to that belief and what that does, it will connect us in a place of humanity. And from that point, we can have really cool dialog.

Speaker2: [00:05:15] Now you’re using these principles, you are you are using this and applying it to to work with organizations, brands, associations on topics like diversity and inclusion. Is that so how does this? How does this plug into your work around diversity, equity, inclusion, all those things?

Speaker3: [00:05:37] Yeah, great question. You know, interesting. It’s actually there’s many layers to it. So so at the first layer, there’s a colleague of mine out of Harvard. His name is Frank Dobbins, and he’s written a series of articles and studies about why, you know, quote unquote, diversity training doesn’t work. And the main reason is because people will associate a quote unquote diversity training with some problems. So if you’re telling me I have to go to diversity training, you’re telling me that I’m racist or sexist or a just or whatever, some kind of some kind of you’re accusing me of being a bad person. And so people will actually walk into these sessions with with like they’re already on the defense, right? They already resent you for sending them to training. And so what we do is at the very beginning, we clear all of that out. Wait, we’re not here to tell you you’re wrong and all of these words that you think mean that you’re a bad person. They actually don’t mean that we kind of redefine the word bias. We redefine systemic discrimination. We redefine all of these things so that people can truly understand what they mean. And so you know how we understand brain science. We know when people are getting defensive, they’re not going to be open to listening. And so how can you make them feel safer in dialog? How can you make them feel safer in conversation? And then the other layer of it is all of these principles of brain science are fundamental communication principles. And so you can understand when someone gets frustrated they’re going to behave in this way. When someone feels hurt, they’re going to behave in these ways. And so you can recognize when they’re happening and say, Oh, this is not my intention here of this communication. Let me pause, apologize, empathize and restart. And when you when you kind of layer it all together, you end up having really meaningful and powerful conversations.

Speaker2: [00:07:28] All right, so let’s back up a little bit and think through this, there’s this fundamental assertion of principle in place here. And I want to test it with you and get your take on this, that organizations that are more diverse or at least identify as more diverse that they really are. That equips them to to outperform their competitors. Is that accurate? Is that what people think? And is that is that the why is that why you’re doing this work?

Speaker3: [00:07:59] It’s not necessarily the why that is a result that we see. So we see that organizations that are that have better representation across many different categories, descriptor categories, you find that people feel that they belong. And I don’t know if you know that right now, kind of across North America, people in the workplace are reporting being more lonely than they ever have been. Now this is this is research that comes from before the pandemic, before people were actually socially isolating, but being more more alone feeling identifying feelings of loneliness. And so the reason that’s happening is because we aren’t engaging with each other as much as we used to. In conversation, we’re spending more time staring at our devices. We’re kind of separating ideologically, you know, and we’re working at our cubicles. And then when we go home, when we’re supposed to engage with people, we open up our laptops or our iPads, and we focus on those things as well. And so when you when you really start to think about how belonging will impact someone’s work, work output, well, if I feel like I belong, I’m less worried about not belonging. And so I’m more focused on getting the work done.

Speaker3: [00:09:12] I need to get done if I feel like I’m connected better with my 10 closest peers that I’m more likely to be collaborative. And if I run into some problem, I’ve got nine other people that I know can help me solve the problem. Unfortunately, a lot of times people are struggling through problems on their own because they’re too embarrassed to ask for help. And when that happens, I mean, they’ll eventually get to some solution, but may not be the best solution. It may take 10 times as long to get there. And so, you know, all the data that shows that the organizations that are that are diverse among a lot of different categories, you find that there’s higher levels of belonging. You find that people the the turnover rates are lower. The productivity rates are higher. The downtime is lower. The recovery from from traumatic issues like financial issues, they recover faster. And so I don’t think that that is the why I do the work that I do, but it is a really powerful motivator for other organizations to step into the work as well.

Speaker2: [00:10:17] But I’m pretty sure already after a couple of minutes into this conversation that that I don’t have the patience or the I.Q. points to do the work you’re describing. But but it sounds like it must be incredibly rewarding work. I mean, I can just I can hear it in your voice. I can almost see it in your eyes, even though this is a virtual interview. Do you really enjoy this work, don’t you?

Speaker3: [00:10:38] I absolutely do, and I think the reason that I love it so much is because, you know, I call myself a recovering HR person. I used to work in H.R. for a few years and and I know what it’s like to sit through, you know, mandatory trainings and whatever. And it’s awful. It’s, you know, it’s life sucking. And and now I get to do these. These like intentionally designed workshops and trainings and and organizations with organizations around the country or around North America. And what I find is that people who typically don’t engage in these kinds of conversations, they end up coming to me afterwards and say, I have never once felt comfortable in a conversation like this, and I felt you welcomed me in and I learned so much and I can’t wait to do more. And that’s that’s what lights me up. It’s not the person that has gone to one hundred diversity sessions and they’re like, Oh great, I learned something new. I do like giving people new stuff, but I like welcoming more people into the conversation because if we’re, you know, we’re talking about inclusion, well, wouldn’t it be great if everyone felt included in the conversation about inclusion? And every, every, every time I do this, I get at least one email from somebody, you know, sometimes it’s a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes one person, you know, is a three page email, and she said, You know, thank you. Here are some issues I’ve always run into, and you dismantled all of them, and I’m seeing the world differently now. Thank you. And that’s that’s what speaks to me. If I can help someone take one step forward, if I can help an organization, take one step forward, then that I’m definitely doing doing my best work.

Speaker2: [00:12:19] So I got to ask how how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a firm like yours? Is this topic just so central right now? And you’ve been at it a while and your phone is ringing? Or even now? Do you still have to go out and try to or someone on your team go shake the bushes a little bit and say, Hey, this is important work and we do it and we’d like to talk to you about doing it with you. Yeah, how does that work?

Speaker3: [00:12:45] Well, interestingly, I’m very I’m very privileged, very blessed to not have to to to run out and ask my, I think, the response that I’ve gotten, you know, I started my company exactly five years ago, six, six years ago, this this week, but I started my company and my work, my style, my delivery. My impact is unique enough. Like, people have never seen anything like this that as soon as they’re done, if they see me at some conference speaking or running, some workshops speaking, they run out and tell other people about it like, you have to talk to this guy. And so, so the entire span of my business, I’ve really just grown organically through referrals and people say, I need you to speak at this conference and I’m happy to do it and oftentimes they’ll pay me to do that. And so then I go out and I speak, and then five people who sat in the audience then call me up and say, I want you to do this for my organization. So kind of I kind of get paid to do my marketing, which is which is a benefit. But you know, I find that the people that are referred to me by other folks who’ve maybe seen me before work for me before, they are already the kind of person that are ready to do the work. So I don’t I don’t have to filter anybody out, usually because people are already ready, ready to do the engagement with me. So I definitely think I’m very, very fortunate, but I’ve worked really hard to when I get the opportunity to be in front of people, whether it’s on a small stage or a large stage that you know, five thousand people in an auditorium or, you know, even 20 people I worked really hard to. If I get that platform, I’ve got to knock it out of the park because this is my opportunity and and, you know, fortunately, knock on wood, it’s gone well so far.

Speaker2: [00:14:37] So, so good work. Doing good work is a great sales tool, right?

Speaker3: [00:14:41] It is. It is. You know, people people say all the time like, you know, you work on your branding, work on your branding. And I’m also a former marketing guy. And before I was in HR was in marketing and I I’m a graphic designer. I know how important it is a good logo, good fonts, good kerning and spacing and colors. I know how important it is, but that’s not the brand, right? That is maybe an element of the brand like the brand is what people feel about you when you’re not telling them about you. And so if you go out and a perfect example right now, Tesla Motors, one of the fastest growing car companies in the history of the world, they’re dominating electric cars everywhere, and they they’ve put together a really good car. They don’t really have a marketing department at all. They’re not they don’t have a quote unquote branding department at all. They don’t even have a PR department. But what they’ve done is they built a really good car that people love to drive. And that is their brand. Their brand is this is a great car to drive, it’s fun. If you talk to anyone who’s ever owned a Tesla, they don’t say it like a Tesla. They say, I love my Tesla. Everyone says that. And that becomes the brand. And so I think a lot of folks spend a lot of time on the the colors and the shapes of the logos. And I think what we really should be spending time on is making the experience for our customers or our clients as good as it possibly can be. So they can’t wait to go. Tell somebody else about you.

Speaker2: [00:16:10] All right. So just between us girls here. No, I’ll cut it out if you decide you don’t want to answer it, but I got to ask, do you ever find yourself? Just you go out and you’re brilliant on the road, you know, maybe you’re worn out when you get back at your own organization and you’ve had tremendous impact and you really you’re putting a dent in the universe. You come back to your own, to your own ranch and you’re human and some of your own people because they know what you’re out there teaching and they know what it’s supposed to look out, call you out on not doing what you what you just went after her daughter. Do you ever find yourself? Maybe, you know, sometimes falling short of the of the of the mark in that regard.

Speaker3: [00:16:52] Every single day? Yes. And I think I think that’s I think that’s one of the most interesting things about about the way that I do this work is that I will never claim to be an expert at it. I literally wrote the book on this stuff. My book is called The Cure for Stupidity, right? And so like, I literally wrote the book on this, but the these principles are basic humanity. Like, we all fall victim to these every single day, and it’s not about perfection, but rather awareness. And so I give full rein to everyone on my team to call me out on my stuff. And it happens all the time, all the time. And I think, you know, when I’m on stage, I’m talking about my own failures, like the examples that I give are my own failures and people relate to that. I come in with humility and vulnerability, and I tell stories about, you know, how I, how I mispronounced a word my entire life and someone told me about it and I reacted really harshly and strongly like, you were crazy. What do you mean? I know how to speak? And and then after a while, I’m like, Oh, maybe there’s something for me to learn here, right? And I think that’s that’s exactly it is. I go out and I do this, and I do not want to put out the image that I’m perfect because I am absolutely not. And I think I think you hit the nail on the head like creating this environment where, where, where my team can say, Hey, Eric, you realize that you misspelled three words on your presentation and like, how I show up after that means a lot more than what I say. I’m on stage, right?

Speaker2: [00:18:25] Right. So, so tell us about holy shift.

Speaker3: [00:18:31] Mm hmm. So, so holy shift, that’s the make sure you enunciate all of the you and say, well, because it can lead people to to say What are you talking about? You got to edit that out. No, no holy shift. It’s it’s it’s caught up and developed to really help people engage in this conversation a different way. So the full title is Holy Shift, completely changing the conversation about diversity and discrimination and bias and privilege using brain science. And so the shift that we are making is from the way that we’ve previously thought about these concepts and into something new. One of my favorite quotes of all time is is Albert Einstein, and he said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Now that it’s often misquoted, you know, Einstein’s definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. He never said that. He said this and this idea is that we will oftentimes get into these patterns of behaviors and habits and then find ourselves in some trouble. And then we employ the same patterns of behaviors and the same habits that got us there to get out of trouble. And it makes no sense. We do this over and over again. And so what I’ve learned to realize is that if we can do things differently, if we can think about these things differently, if we can explore differently, we can have different results.

Speaker3: [00:19:56] And that’s really what I want to give people. So so we’re going to talk about things like racism and we’re going to talk about things like privilege. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable. Great. Pay attention to that feeling. Let’s explore why it’s uncomfortable. And I ask people, you know, I’ve probably asked twenty five thousand thirty thousand people around the country, you know, how do you feel when you hear the phrase and this is something we use a lot in the United States is phrase called white privilege. And people have this huge range of emotions. I’m going to ask that question. I feel angry. I feel shame. I feel upset. I feel like it’s a weapon. I feel like I’m an unfairly criticized because I’m white. I feel like I’ve worked hard and I’m not being acknowledged for what I’ve done. All these different things. And I’m like, I say, Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for your candor. Thank you for exploring. I think you’re trusting me with that. And then what we do is we break that down. What does what does privilege even mean? Right. And so we think that privilege, you know, it sounds like, you know, a quote unquote life of privilege.

Speaker3: [00:21:01] A silver spoon in your mouth never had to work for anything chauffeured. That’s not what it means. White privilege just means that a member of a group may not have to worry about something that a member of a different group may have to worry about. And so when you think about it, like, I don’t know if you have kids, but I’ve got three kids, and my job as a parent is to give my kids privilege. Like, I don’t want them to worry about the things that I had to worry about. The goal is to give them privilege. There’s this concept that we have called the quote unquote American dream, which is, you know, essentially one generation doing better than the previous generation. Right. And and that really is all about privilege, right? A lack of worry. And so privilege isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a thing, and we can acknowledge it in such a way. And then I’m like, OK, well, if privilege is all about worry, then there are an infinite number of qualifiers we can put in front of that wor