Jon Kidwell With The Kidwell Team

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for Coach the Coach Radio brought to you by the Business RadioX ambassador program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to our Ambassador Dotcom to learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one. Today we have with us Jon Kidwell with the Kidwell team. Welcome, John.

Jon Kidwell: [00:00:42] Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Kedwell team. How are you certain folks?

Jon Kidwell: [00:00:50] Yeah, so the Kedwell team is the business that my wife and I own and that I operate and run. And what we do is we work with non-profits. I’m a nonprofit leadership and business coach, so I work with nonprofit executives, leaders, pastors and and really help them serve people well, earn money in the process so that they can have a really big impact through their mission.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:15] So now what’s your back story? How did you get involved in the nonprofit space?

Jon Kidwell: [00:01:19] Great question. It’s a fund when it goes back all the way to my very first job at 16 years old, I’ve always been in the nonprofit space in some way or form. So I started off camp counselor day care after school. I was a professional teacher and thought I’d be a principal and I just felt this call to be in a different space and so got into more of a nonprofit business organization and really started testing. What is it like to serve people but to do it while also paying attention to selling programs, selling memberships, fundraising, going after grants. And and I did that for six years, actually entered into the YMCA of Greater Houston as an entry level leader and in six years grew to be our vice president of innovation and operations. And that had me leading about 1100 people, 12 areas of our business and responsible for about a fifth of our 140 million dollar nonprofit organization in Houston.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:24] Now, being a nonprofit doesn’t mean you don’t need money, and I think that’s one of the misconceptions that no matter what kind of organization you you’re part of selling is part of this, you have to kind of have revenue somewhere. Is this kind of a mindset shift that you have to help your leaders work through, like to feel good about the money exchange part?

Jon Kidwell: [00:02:49] Yeah, it is this interesting thing, right. And I think for those of us that have that heart of service where we care about people, we always want to make sure we’re on that side of the fence. Right. And maybe it’s just me, but I’ll play out the the the Madoff story or the Enron story. And you think if you just even tiptoe close to that cliff of being too muddy minded, you’re going to fall over. And and that’s often not the case. But but working through that mindset is often part of it. About half of the folks that I work with don’t yet have organizations that earn money. So they do grants and they fundraise. And as you said, so well, they’re selling involved in both of those. Right. And in donations, I am connecting a donor with an impact that that they’re seeking to make. And in the grant world, you are selling the fact that you’re going to deliver on what the government or an organization wants to see happen.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:45] And then once you kind of help them understand that it’s OK to ask for money and in fact we can’t help people unless we really get this part figured out because it’s a you’re kind of limiting yourself if you’re only relying on that one revenue stream of, you know, government grants. Right. There’s a whole lot of other more impact you can be making if you kind of broadened the people that you’re asking money for and serving.

Jon Kidwell: [00:04:12] Absolutely. So I’ll ask you a question, if I may. If you were looking to give a thousand dollars and I said your thousand dollars is going to put 400 meals out to hungry children or your thousand dollars can support my R&D where I get to get better food or figure out a better delivery mechanism, where are you more likely to put that money?

Lee Kantor: [00:04:37] Right. So when you tell me and especially if you show me 400 people’s faces, that’s pretty persuasive. But if you show me the R&D part and show me 10000 people’s faces, that’s pretty persuasive, too. So and I guess it has to align with everybody’s individual kind of desires on what type of impact they want to kind of have.

Jon Kidwell: [00:04:59] Absolutely. Absolutely. And and you you said something really powerful, right? When I see the faces, when I see the hungry kids, that’s usually the more immediate need. And they usually take precedent, usually in grants. You can’t ask for some of those other things. And in fundraising, it’s much more what’s the need in front of you? Where when when we develop our programs and services, products or goods that we can sell as a part of our service. You and I both know that we can build in a margin inside of there where we can look for ways to pay living wages to our team, where we can put money into retained earnings instead of having to fundraise for that. All of it in service of the mission and the people that that we aim to to impact. But like you said, it’s a different avenue. And not only does it give us the extra bandwidth, as you were talking about, it also diversifies if I lose. And here’s a quick story for you. 2016, we kind of had a perfect storm in our organization. We would raise about half a million dollars a year.

Jon Kidwell: [00:06:03] And in the matter of weeks, we had two grants and four major donors, about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So 30 percent roughly of what we raised every year just vanish, gone. They were just stopping their support for our organization. And that would have left us devastated. We would have had to choose which programs we weren’t going to do, which kids aren’t going to get the meals right. We had earned revenue programs and we said, OK, we have a way to serve people. We also have a way to make money. We also know that we’re not at our capacity. What if we intentionally went after serving more people through our earned revenue programs? What kind of stirring the pot, looking for more funders and grants? But we said this is a focus of ours and we did. And we earned one hundred and ten thousand dollars over budget, which meant instead of 30 percent of our programs, we looking at about eight percent that we said, hey, we just really can’t do this this year.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:03] And that’s just by kind of looking at it a little differently.

Jon Kidwell: [00:07:06] Yeah, absolutely. The the kind of phrasing and words that I use are servant heart and and business mind. And in my head, what that is and what I share with folks is that this is that leader that is absolutely passionate and devoted to the mission to making sure that people are taking care of and can also focus on making and managing money so that the mission, taking care of people and furthering it gets to continue and that it doesn’t stop. They walk that hard line of balancing people and money and how we make them work together for a greater good.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:48] Now, I think that some of the challenges in nonprofits are the same challenges that for profit companies have, is that in the in the general population, the word profit is kind of a bad word. And that’s something that is in people’s mind. For whatever reason, they connected with greed or exploitation or, you know, taking advantage of one group. And I think that we as leaders of both nonprofit and for profit, we really have to take that word back because without profit, you really don’t have a business.

Jon Kidwell: [00:08:25] Yeah, it’s simply margin, right. If if I need to spend five dollars in terms of my people and my cost in my delivery and my tech, if if I make five dollars or less, there’s there’s no room for doing anything outside of that ever. Right. And. So if, in fact, we make ten dollars on something that costs us five now we have five dollars of margin. And so here’s the thing with nonprofits that is is different than a for profit entity. They have rules that say that I as an individual, see you as a board member. We don’t get disbursements of that profit, that five dollar gap there. We get to use that to do whatever we can to further the mission, the explicit mission of the organization. But we don’t pay out individual shareholders based on that.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:19] Right, and that and that’s a big difference, because then the mission is aligned with the cause, which is aligned with the money coming in, like there’s more kind of the incentives are all aligned.

Jon Kidwell: [00:09:33] You got it. Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:35] So now when a nonprofit, are they hesitant to invest in a coach? Because like you said, this is the margin. So they’re taking some of their margin and investing it in a coach with the expectation that that’s going to increase the amount of revenue and they increase the amount of margin.

Jon Kidwell: [00:09:53] Yeah, and, you know, I can’t answer for all of them, I would say that that it depends. And so in my experience, working with executives, talking about how we look at coaching and what that return should be. Right. If you pay me X amount, your leadership, your program offerings, what we work on, whether it’s developing products, whether it’s your leadership style, whether it’s looking at finances, those should return more than that to the organization. And that’s part of that conversation. And there’s also different needs. And so one of the things that that I do in that we do is look at how do we take a principle that’s powerful for all of us in terms of community and bring that into coaching through group coaching, where we can bring executives from different organizations, kind of same stage in their executive leadership in life, but bring them together to lower the cost for nonprofits. But then also, as you said, talk to and speak through. Here are the tangible benefits and the ahli that working with a coach can bring back to your organization in terms of leadership to people and to the bottom line.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:04] Now, for that leader of a nonprofit out there, is there some low hanging fruit that they can be attacking on their own before they invest in a service like yours, that they can help them at least open their mind to the different opportunities that are out there?

Jon Kidwell: [00:11:20] Yeah, absolutely. And so I had shared earlier that about half of nonprofits that I work with don’t yet have earned revenue. They do grants and donations. And and I would tell and I do tell for anyone that will listen that nonprofits can and should earn money as a way to further the mission. And so if someone was listening or asking, I would say that you are doing something, you have a program, you have a service that is a good a product, whatever that may be, that is likely similar to a for profit business that does the same thing or something very similar. And you have an opportunity to sell that as a way to serve people and fund the mission. And I would encourage people to look at that. What problems are they solving? What limitations are they putting on themselves, saying this always has to be free because we’re a nonprofit. Typically, there are people that need problems solved at all ranges of ability to pay or ability to engage with your organization in various ways. And so I would encourage them to to look at at what programs service they can offer charge for and fund the mission through that.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:41] So now how does like how does that kind of brainstorming session work when you’re working with these folks? Like, are you just kind of whiteboarding out, OK, what are all the services we do right now and just start listing them and then just seeing which ones you can project, productize or monetize?

Jon Kidwell: [00:12:57] Yeah, absolutely, that is a great way to start, is inventory, what do we do, just looking at what is it in fact that that you do that matches and similar. And so I’ll tell you a quick story here. It was back with the Y and we had what we knew to be a game changing program. We were going to watch something new. This was a group coaching health and well being program. So think Weight Watchers. So we kind of saw an external business that was doing this and doing this fairly well. And and we said that this is somewhere that we can go. And so just we just went for it right away. We started planning. We invested in training coaches in our team. We invested heavily in marketing. We made sure to plan that this thing was going to launch in January and we signed up 11 people. We have one hundred and fifty thousand organizations and we signed up 11 people, so, you know, we usually learn the most after we fail something. And that was the case for me here. And so now outside of that whiteboarding, what would I do and what I work through with non-profits and what I would tell them to do with me or on their own is that you have to test your idea and what you plan to sell for purpose for people and for promise. If it does not land squarely in the triangle of that three part Venn diagram, it is not as likely to be successful as something that lands inside of purpose people and promise.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:34] So now, in the case of that, if you were to kind of do an autopsy on that at that test, where did it go wrong? Was it something that people weren’t interested because they already had another solution was a lack of clarity of not that they didn’t understand the value.

Jon Kidwell: [00:14:51] Yeah, excellent question, are 11 people total bomb on this program, right? Where did it go wrong? So if we look at purpose I described, purpose is doing the right thing for the right reason. And I would tell you that that’s a it’s a really introspective heart matter. So first and foremost, we launched that program to make money and we did not have the reverse in our mind when we went out. So that was kind of one inside a purpose. It should be mission oriented. That one was. But then you and I both know that anything that we start is is going to take longer, be harder and will be more frustrating than we planned. And we didn’t have team members that were passionate about it. And then beyond that, in that people, buckett, we didn’t have the capacity to deliver. We had three main team leaders. And I would tell you that all of us were carrying 10 pound sacks that had 20 pounds worth of stuff in it. And and we didn’t have any bandwidth to make sure that this got anywhere. So did the program have tremendous promise? Yeah, it did. Right. Like there’s a funding model in place that worked. We knew that the audience was out there because we could see it elsewhere and people were telling us this. We really missed out on doing something for the right reason and making sure that the team was equipped and in a place where they could do it with good intention and just run full speed into the unknown.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:19] So then maybe looking back, doing it a different way, maybe the same concept, but finding that super fan that really believed in this and testing it only in their one location to get some traction and learn in this pilot program with a small group of people. And seeing actual success from it might have been an easier way to kind of ease into this or get more escape velocity.

Jon Kidwell: [00:16:43] That is exactly what it is, we use that concept inside a promise. Call it a test and see that it is good. And so get your small, small group of people, ask people for feedback, find out like, hey, this is different than Weight Watchers. Did this work and feel and sound the same as this program. Right. This is a little different than this, but run some people through the program, get some tests, tweak along the way. The key there is making sure that you’re not just asking a whole bunch of people pleasers for yourself, but really testing and seeing how people are going to respond to that. And when you do that, then then, you know, OK, this has promised, right. We’ve had both good and bad feedback. We’ve tested it a couple of times. We have great results. People are ready to give us reviews. We’ve also built some brand ambassadors.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:32] And that’s an important I think that I think that this is people in both for profit and nonprofit forget this part of it, that they’re looking to scale too quickly. They got to kind of earn their way to scale. And you earn it by I think Seth Godin calls it the minimum viable audience that you have to kind of master this small, get all the bugs out and then organically scale. It isn’t something like, hey, we got this idea. We have access to 100000 people. Let’s just spewed it out there and see what happens. I think that people are looking for shortcuts. And then you really got you can’t do that. You got to earn your way up the ladder.

Jon Kidwell: [00:18:14] You’re absolutely right. And if we think about the people in that smallest viable audience that that you were talking about, that’s the group that it should be for. That’s the group whose problem you are aiming to solve. And if it is extremely successful, as you said, that group grows because others then see, oh, maybe that is a problem that I want solved or it’s working for these people. What are they doing in that smallest viable audience should be paired with the size of funding model that you’re planning on, right? If my smallest viable audience is 50 people, it should match the return that I need to make sure I can keep delivering the program for those people or whomever else comes in. So that’s kind of testing, right? If if my smallest viable audience for that program launch was going to be twenty five hundred people and we never served more than two hundred either, didn’t test that audience well enough or I didn’t build a funding model that keeps us serving those two hundred people properly.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:15] Now is there a typical kind of point of entry for you and your work? Is the nonprofit struggling with something or you coming in in a crisis where they’re like, hey, we got to do something, we better call John and his team? Or is it something that there are leaders out there that are being proactive that say, you know what, we’re plateauing, we want to get to a new level, let’s let’s call John in this team?

Jon Kidwell: [00:19:39] Yeah. So that was. Where I am now in terms of where I enter nonprofits, is it’s typically in an executive transition. So someone has coming in and they’re looking at, OK, we either need to improve some of our programs or we need to launch new. And right now is one of those times, kind of as we exit out of the covid pandemic and people are re reimagining and re engaging and we’re not quite fully here yet. We’re kind of in this limbo and they’re saying, what what is it going to look like for us on the backside of this? We changed everything and now we might have to change everything again. So executive transition or crisis and then also just when they’re doing innervating dreaming and thinking about what’s possible, it usually is tied to some sort of change in terms of leadership money or kind of the stability of the organization.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:41] Well, if somebody wanted to learn more and have a conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website?

Jon Kidwell: [00:20:47] So the website is my name, John Kidwell Dotcom. And it’s Jon without an H. I figure you can’t hear it, so I don’t need it. So Jon Kidwell, dot com. And for anyone that goes there, you know, a volunteer, a board member, nonprofit leader, we have a free resource I would love to give away to them. And it’s seven powerful reasons why non-profits need to earn money. They can get that just by sharing their email with us. And for those nonprofit leaders, they get it or board members that want to take something back to their nonprofit. We do put in some ideas, money making services that are available and really popular inside the non-profits.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:26] Good stuff. Well, Jon, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Jon Kidwell: [00:21:33] Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:34] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach Radio.