Pursuing A Life Of Significance With Aaron Walker
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Having money, a big house, and a profitable business can lead to a fulfilling life – or so we all think. In this episode, discover what a life of significance truly means as you learn from life and business coach Aaron Walker. Successful in business, Aaron first experienced retirement at the early age of 27, but it did not scratch an itch he thought it would. Learn how pursuing a meaningful life led him to masterminds and a podcast, and his “why” in writing his book, View from the Top.
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Listen to the podcast here
Pursuing A Life Of Significance With Aaron Walker
Our guest is Aaron Walker who is a life and business coach and runs masterminds for men. He’s a veteran businessman. He continues to inspire countless entrepreneurs with his leadership skills and his transparent and authentic life. His purpose in life is to mentor men to be better versions of themselves. Having more than 40 years’ experience and more than a dozen startups allow him to lead with confidence. He is the author of View From The Top, Living A Life of Success and Significance. He shares practical insights and wisdom on how you too can find hope and inspiration. He has an amazing real life-story that will challenge your thinking and motivate you to action. Aaron, welcome to our show.
John, thanks for having me.
Would you mind taking us back to your own story of origin? I would love to find out what made you who you are. You can go back to your childhood, high school, college or whatever grabs you.
I’m going to take you way back. I’m almost 60 years old now so I’ve got to go back to when I was thirteen years old. My dad woke me up on a summer morning and he said, “Get out of the bed. We’ve got some work to do. We’re going to go down and we’re going to remodel a pawnshop.” I said, “Can I make any money?” He said “Yes.” I said, “I’m all in.” I didn’t even know what a pawnshop was or know what that was, but I went down and helped him for the summer. When we got through doing that project, I went up to the owner at the time and he was 23 years old. This guy was opening a pawnshop in Nashville, Tennessee, where I’m a native. I said, “I don’t even know what a pawnshop is but I go to school across the street and I would love to work here after school and on the weekends.” He hired me on the spot. I worked every day and then on Saturdays and two years later when I was fifteen years old, I decided this is what I want to do for a living.
People asked me, “You’ve got to be kidding. What did you enjoy about it?” I said, “It’s the people. I love the different people that came in.” I went to summer school and night school for eighteen months. I had enough credits to graduate at the beginning of my junior year. I started working every day and I met a couple of guys with a lot of money because I didn’t have any. My parents were very poor and I didn’t have any money. I went to them one day and pitched us going into business together and they laughed at me. They own the 21st largest insurance agency in the country at the time. I said, “Why don’t we take my pawnshop experience and your money and open a store?”
They said, “Mr. Walker, how old are you?” I said, “I’m eighteen.” They started laughing again. They said, “We’ve never had anybody eighteen years old approach us.” I said, “That’s beside the point. Are you interested?” After two months of negotiation, they agreed to do it. I went and opened a pawnshop when I was eighteen years old. I wasn’t even married. I was still living at home. A year later, I get married to Robin and I said, “We can’t mess this up.” We agreed to pour every dollar back into the business. In 36 months, I paid off a ten-year loan. I was 21 years old. I had a paid-for-business and I said, “I can duplicate that.” I did and then I did it again and then I did it again.
When I was 27 years old, a Fortune 500 came and made an offer I couldn’t refuse and I retired. I was 27 years old and I thought this is the American dream. I go from broke and a convict to making enough money to retire by the time I’m 27. That lasted about eighteen months. I got fat and lazy, I was getting in the bed in the middle of the day and Robin goes, “This is not what I signed up for.” I went back and bought the company I worked for when I was a kid. We spent the next ten years quadrupling that business. As I shared with you a little bit earlier, I had a very serious accident in 2001 where I ran over and killed a pedestrian. It rocked my world when that happened. I sold the business. I took off for about five years and didn’t do anything. We traveled around the world. We built a new house and took a break.
My wife approached me again and said, “You’re getting fat and lazy again.” We go into the construction business. We build a very successful construction company. I turned 50 and I retired. Robin goes, “You’re going to drive me crazy if you don’t do something.” The mastermind members of mine, which is Dave Ramsey and Dan Miller and some of those guys said, “What are you going to do now?” I said, “Nothing. I’m going to retire. I’m going to call it good. I’ve been working since I was thirteen.” They said, “You’re too young.” I started coaching. That led to doing podcast interviews which led to mastermind groups. Now, we have fifteen mastermind groups, 150 men from nine different countries. I’m having the absolute time of my life helping people be successful and significant.
That is quite a lot to unpack. I love the story of the fantasy that, “I’m going to retire at 27. I’m going to retire at this age.” There’s something about not being relevant and not giving back that I think you are probably more equipped than almost anyone else because you’ve gone through this multiple times. It’s almost like in the Wizard of Oz when you go behind the curtain and you say, “That isn’t it. That’s the fantasy.” You work hard to get to this place where you don’t need to work and then you can find a life of significance. You’re saying it isn’t the answer.
It’s not the answer at all. I thought it was, and I want to warn people, if you’re working to stop, quit doing that because it doesn’t scratch the itch like you think it’s going to. I thought by being a poor kid that I was going to have enough money, this big fine house, a vacation home, nice cars, that I was going to feel meaningful and purposeful and I was going to live a life of leisure. Quickly, I discovered that it’s not what I thought it was going to be. Don’t hear me wrong, John, I want to make this clear. I hate when people with money go, “Money is not important.” I want to go, “You liar.” It is important but I don’t want you to make it your only focus. I don’t want you to make it your God. Focus on why and your purpose in life, then you have something that’s tangible that you can hang your head on.
[bctt tweet=”The Facebook persona, for the most part, is just a lie. People don’t really share the things that are going on in their families.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Aaron, what motivated you to write your book, The View From The Top? The thing that I love about this is not just success but success and significance.
To be totally honest with you, I didn’t want to write the book and let me tell you why I didn’t want to write the book. As I said, I’ve been in a mastermind with these guys that are here in Nashville. We all live in Nashville, Tennessee for decades now. Sitting on my left for ten or twelve years was Ken Abraham. Ken is probably the most noted ghost author on the planet. If you look him up, you can see he’s written over 95 books and some of the biggest name people on the planet. He’s written their books. He had sold millions and tens of millions of copies of books and sitting on my right was Dave Ramsey.
They’re all good friends of mine. Anyway, Dave has written a dozen books and sold millions of copies and Dan Miller sat across the table from me. He has 48 Days To The Work. He’s written seven or eight books. I said, “Who’s going to read my book?” I’m in this group, with all these people that are very successful, who’s going to read my book? Ken Davis did my mastermind group and Ken wrote a book called Fully Alive. He’s traveled all over the world. He’s a keynote speaker. He’s an amazing guy. He said, “Aaron, you’re writing the book for the wrong reason.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “When I wrote Fully Alive, the first year it came out, seventeen people wrote me an email and they said, “Mr. Davis, I didn’t commit suicide because I’ve read your book Fully Alive.” He looked at me and he said, “Aaron, if you can change one life with your book, will it not be worth it?” I said, “You’re right. It’ll be worth it.” I’m going to write that book because now the reason is different. Now, I write the book to help people uncover for themselves what’s important in life. I teach them how to be very successful financially, all the while being significant. That’s the piece that people are missing.
I have loved this concept. My own personal mission is to help as many people as possible get off this self-esteem rollercoaster where they only feel good about themselves if they’ve gotten a certain amount of success or book sales or whatever it is, likes some social media. What I hear you saying is when you let go of that attachment of how many books did I sell and that is it more than this person and comparing yourself to other people, you are free to create something with a very different purpose without the attachment to the outcome. Would that be an accurate summary?
100% and first of all, you’re never going to win in a comparison game because I even almost did it at the beginning myself when I looked at Ken Abraham and Dave Ramsey. I said, “How could I ever compare to this?” I couldn’t compare. After the book first came out, a guy that was in my mastermind group, his young son picked up my book and read it and there was a life transformational experience for him as a result of reading this book. He got onto a different path. He was on some substance abuse and he couldn’t get off of it. This book helped him reframe his life. I got a phone call from him and said, “Thank you for your book because it’s radically transformed my life.” I went in and told my wife, “If nothing else happens, if I don’t get any speaking engagements, if I don’t get anything, if nothing happens, it’s changed this one man’s life, his family tree.” It was worth the effort. It was worth the time.
You touched earlier on the pedestrian fatality that you didn’t intentionally cause, but it did happen. A lot of people would not be so transparent and authentic about that and yet you are. I want to bring that up for people to take a look at that blind that we’re only as sick as our secrets or people can always tell when you’re trying to hide something. People who haven’t experienced something like that, we all have something that we have trouble forgiving ourselves for, I would imagine. I know someone who that happened to him as well. He did it as a young boy. First of all, I have several questions about it clearly. I want to acknowledge and applaud you for your authenticity and transparency because when you are willing to do that, you inspire other people to do that. My first question around is what made you so confident to do it and tell that story?
First of all, by being around very successful people and coming to discover early on in my career that the Facebook persona, for the most part, is just a lie. We don’t share the things that are going on in our families. Everyone sees is the nice house, they see the nice car, they know you have this job and you’ve got 2.3 kids and you’ve got 3.7 cars and you’re living this thing. They’re not privy to the conversation that’s going on inside of the home. Inside of the home, one of the partners is working more than they should and they’re doing it at the expense of their family. They come home one day with a pocket full of money to a house full of strangers. What I’m teaching people to do is to prioritize your priorities and focus on what matters. The only way that you can do that is to be authentic and transparent and vulnerable with a few people.
I’m not saying go out and air your dirty laundry to the world but I am saying that you need a group of people around you such as a small group, an accountability group, a mastermind group or a connect group. You can call it whatever you want to call it, but you need an environment where you can go and go, “Things are not going so well right now. I’m struggling in my relationship. I’ve got a child that’s gone wayward. My job is on the bubble. I’m not even going to have an income a few years from now. I’m not making my mortgage payment. I’m wrestling with these trials and tribulations in my personal life and I don’t know where I stand as an individual and I don’t have this self-esteem or this hyper sense of awareness to myself and I’m getting myself in trouble.”
The reason that I am so authentic and transparent is that’s where strength begins. When we address who we are as an individual to a group of non-biased, trusted advisors, they then can help us. If they’re giving us advice on things that we’re telling them that’s not reality, how in the world could we ever get good advice to go forward and build on a solid foundation? I’ve had the privilege of experiencing that with a number of very successful people. That’s why I come forward with telling my story.
Authenticity and transparency are where strength begins. That’s such a powerful way of combining something that people think, “It doesn’t seem like you’re coming from a place of strength at all,” but in fact, it is. Was it hard to forgive yourself and any other insights from that experience?
A Life Of Significance: People struggle to have enough money and material things thinking that they’re going to feel meaningful and purposeful. Disappointingly, many discover that it’s not what they thought it would be.
It’s been eighteen years and the first five years were very difficult. I had to go to a lot of counseling and talking to a lot of trusted advisors to help work me through this. First and foremost, I do want to mention, it was not my fault. It wasn’t an error of judgment. He didn’t see me. He was 77 years old. He was crossing the street to catch a bus and we found out later he couldn’t see good and he run right out in front of me. It was a very horrific automobile accident. Still, he was somebody’s father, somebody’s husband, somebody’s brother and it took me years to work through that.
What I come to realize working through that is how fragile everyone’s life is and in the book, View From The Top, the chapter that I talk about this, I call it Blindsided. We all can be blindsided. There’s not a person listening to my voice right now that a phone call might not change your life. Something could happen that’s devastating to your life. You may get a message or a note or a phone call that you never saw it coming. What I discovered through this accident was that we had had tremendous success early on but it was all about me and my family. What I started thinking about was my legacy. I said, “What would my legacy have been?” My legacy would have been, “A poor kid from Nashville, Tennessee makes enough money to retire at age 27 and nobody cares.” I said, “That’s not what I want. What I want is I want John’s life to be better as a result of having known me.” That’s the reason I share this.
That leads right into the never-ending power of a mastermind. You were talking about how you started your own and now you teach other people how to create them. Tell us the journey of masterminds and how people can either possibly start their own or join yours to find out.
I appreciate that and I want to touch if I may on some of the reasons that I think being in community is so important. You call it accountability mastermind. You can call it whatever you want to call it. We weren’t designed to be in isolation. Isolation is the enemy of excellence. We’re designed to be in community and we need people around us at all times. First of all, for accountability purposes. If you think about it, we need people calling us out. We need a sense of encouragement today. We need people to come up to us and say, “John, I believe in you. I know you can do this.” We can find that in the community. We need relationships which I think is the most important asset that we could possibly have. We all have blind spots and a lot of people are unaware of those. We need people to call us out and say, “John, I’ve noticed that you’ve saved this. I noticed that this is going on frequently in your life. This is going to catch you if you’re not careful.” We have people pointing that out.
I also say that masterminds give us access. It allows us to be in other spheres of influence. We talk about the insight that it can give you. We talk about perspective. What it gives me more than anything is the ability to see things differently. There are so many things like that that we have insight, different things that we need in our life that we would never have in a million years. It’s the insight that it can give us. There’s spiritual health that we need. There’s vision, there’s mission, there are values, there’s so much that this community or mastermind can give us.
That’s the reason that I am on such a quest to be sure that everyone is involved in this. People call me regularly and they call me big A. They say, “Big A, how in the world have you scaled masterminds to the level that you have?” We developed a program called the Mastermind Blueprint. What this is, it’s teaching people if you’ve never even had a mastermind how to start it, how to grow it and how to run it. A lot of people want to scale it to the heights we have. Other people just want one or two groups. If you start thinking about your sphere of influence and the impact that you could have on other people’s lives, you could start a mastermind and impact and have life transformational experiences for the people you know.
Yours is called Iron Sharpens Iron. What a great visual that is. Describe how you came up with that as a name.
I’m a Christian by faith. A biblical proverb is Proverbs 27:17, “One man sharpens another just as iron sharpens iron.” I’ve had the privilege to be in these groups where they call you out. They call you out and say, “I’ve heard you say this or I’ll watch you do this or you don’t do this.” In order for you to get better, these are the things that you’re going to have to do. It’s not for the faint of heart. We need people in these groups that are willing to call one another out and we just decided that if we’re going to help other people accomplish their dreams and goals, there have to be some sparks flying. That’s why we call it Iron Sharpens Iron.
What a great analogy. You’re only focused on men. If there are women that are reading and say, “I would like to start a mastermind for women,” could your program work for them?
Let me explain that a little bit. Some women get offended by this and let me explain and hopefully you won’t be offended. Women have become our biggest advocates because they say, “Big A, you’ve done something with my man. What have you done? He is not the guy now that he was when he joined ISI.” There are women’s groups out there. Michele Williams has BVU, Better Version of Yourself, a mastermind for women and does the exact same thing. I can introduce you to Michele. I’m happy to do that but our course is gender-neutral. If it’s women, if it’s man, if it’s mixed, it doesn’t matter. We can walk you through the process. We give you two and a half years’ worth of content to teach you and to help you along the way. You don’t have to create anything. We give you the lead magnets. We walk with you for six months, twice a month. You have support from us that gets you up and going. We don’t leave you. Once you buy this, we walk with you through the whole process.
[bctt tweet=”Isolation is the enemy of excellence. We need others to help us break our upper limits because we all have blindsides we need help seeing.” username=”John_Livesay”]
For people who might not understand the distinction, can you compare this to mastermind versus a networking group?
For group coaching or things like that, this is a whole different level. This recaps what I’ve been talking about the whole interview. You can do group coaching, you can do networking but you just deal with the surface level when you’re talking about networking. I’m talking about something that’s life transformational, personally and professionally. I’m talking about people that walk with you on a weekly basis to help you accomplish your goals, your dreams and to hold you accountable, to connect to you and to give you the resources that you need in order to be successful. I could stand up here for an hour and give a dissertation or I can lead a group coaching but that is not going to have the same impact if you get in a group and you’re meeting with the same ten trusted advisors week in, week out, month after month, year after year our people have in our groups. We’ve had people to double, triple and quadruple their business. We’ve had people that have absolutely transformed their personal lives because they have this close-knit community, their board of directors that walk with them every single day.
You talk about that isolation is the enemy to excellence. Many people don’t realize the importance of having a tribe or not doing it alone all the time. Can you speak to why isolation is the enemy of excellence?
If I don’t fess up and I don’t tell you, then there’s no one checking in. If I don’t push the ball down the field, no one knows. Brian Moran wrote a great book called The 12-Week Year and we’ve implemented that into the very fabric of what we do. You focus each and every day on these lead indicators. You focus on the task. You have weekly accountability meetings related to the objective that you’re trying to accomplish. You repeat that every twelve weeks. Procrastination is the enemy also. We continue to procrastinate and this doesn’t allow you to do that. We have people around you and that surround you, make sure that you focus on the task at hand and then the goal takes care of itself.
The reason that the isolation is the enemy to excellence is if you don’t tell anybody, they don’t know. If you don’t share your troubles, you can’t get over your Achilles heel or your blind spots. When you have people surrounding you, they can encourage you, they can help push you through these upper limit challenges. We all have upper limits challenges. It doesn’t matter who you are. We all have a threshold that we bump up against the ceiling and these people can help take you to a different level. It opens doors and possibilities that you never dreamed possible. I would just suggest that if you want to excel, you have to get involved in some topic community so that you can be all that you were called to be.
We all have upper limit challenges and it’s from our childhood and our belief systems. If we’re not associating with other people who can hold us accountable, show us where we’re limiting ourselves, whether it’s a belief or a behavior that needs to be changed, then we will just stay at our own upper limits there. I imagine that part of this successful mastermind is the quality of the people that are in it. Can you speak to what criteria you use when you help people develop their own mastermind?
When we first started doing mastermind groups, if you had the fee you could get in and I quickly saw that wasn’t going to work well. We developed an application process that we go through and we do an interview. We vet every single person that comes in and we turn away a number of people because they’re takers, they’re not givers. What we are trying to do is to fill up a room full of givers because in the natural reciprocity, you’re going to get all you need. When somebody is interested in themselves, they only want to come in and get out of it, if it’s only beneficial to them, that’s not how you grow. That’s not how you build relationships.
We take a look at the motivation of why you want to be into groups. Once we establish that you are the giver, then we go through a series of questions. There are about 25 questions. How we can help you? More about your family. What you’re trying to accomplish? What your long-term goals and aspirations are? It’s a very lengthy process and then once we worked through each and every question, we determine whether you’re a good fit for this group or not. When you’re very careful vetting this many people, getting the right person in the right seat, as Jim Collins says, on the right bus, there’s the magic that happens when you have that level of synergy.
You certainly are walking your talk and hats off to you for that. Then taking it one step further and allowing people to not just hear about it but learn how they can start and run and scale their own mastermind. I haven’t seen or interviewed anyone else who’s doing that and you’re taking your own success and not just showing people, “Here’s some fish, learn these life lessons.” You’re teaching them how to fish, which is such a great gift because you’re scaling the scaling.
Someone asked me, “Why do you do this? Why don’t you just continue to add mastermind groups, other facilitators?” There are seven billion people on the planet. We have 150 people in our mastermind. I have an abundance mindset. If you have an abundance mindset, you’re willing to show your cards. I don’t hold them close to my vest, I’m like, “First of all, I live it and I do it and you teach it.” We’re at the stage in our career where now we’ve lived it, we’ve done it and now we’re teaching it.
A Life Of Significance: Masterminds give you access to be in other spheres of influence and the ability to see things differently.
How can people follow you? I know the website is ViewFromTheTop.com. If someone has been motivated and said, “I need to learn how to start my own mastermind,” what’s the next step?
The easiest way is to go to ViewFromTheTop.com and I make myself very accessible. My phone number is there. My email is [email protected]. Reach out and send me a note and I’ll personally give you a call and we’ll talk through it. I’d love to be able to share with you more as well.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing your time, your wisdom and your passion. You are someone who I’m glad to have in my world.
Thank you, John. I certainly enjoy being with you.
Important Links
- View From The Top
- 48 Days To The Work
- Fully Alive
- Mastermind Blueprint
- Iron Sharpens Iron
- Better Version of Yourself
- The 12-Week Year
- ViewFromTheTop.com
- [email protected]
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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The Titanic Effect: Helping Startups Navigate Through Icebergs with Drs. Todd Saxton and Kim Saxton
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Hitting icebergs is just part of the business, especially when you are in the startup stage. Nevertheless, it does not mean that you can’t steer away from them because the fact remains that these mistakes can be costly. We double up the insight in this episode as host John Livesay interviews business professors Drs. Todd Saxton and Kim Saxton. Giving us a preview of their book, The Titanic Effect, they help startup founders navigate the icebergs that so often sink startups in the ideation and early stage of development. As they touch on the four oceans that startups have to get across and how they can do that, they also offer great advice on practicing your pitch.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Titanic Effect: Helping Startups Navigate Through Icebergs with Drs. Todd Saxton and Kim Saxton
Our guests are Drs. Todd and Kim Saxton. They’re award-winning professors at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business as well as co-authors of The Titanic Effect. The book is a practical guide to help startup founders, as well as their investors and supporters, successfully navigate the icebergs that often pop up that sink startups in these early stages. They’re going to share their decades of academic and professional experience, business strategy, marketing, venture-funded startups to help you navigate these deck burgs that often sink early startups. Drs. Todd and Kim, welcome to the show.
I’m fine. Kim is fine. Thank you so much for having us. It’s a pleasure.
I’m excited to be here and chatting with you.
Let me ask you to each tell me your own little story of origin before you became professors, married and all of that stuff. I love to hear one of you start and say, “When I was growing up,” you can go back as far as you want, “my dream was,” and give us a sense of how you became a professor. We’ll get into the story of how you started working together and got married.
Here I thought you were going to do the origin story of how we got together, which was already dialing back many years.
I’m always fascinated, especially people who dedicate their lives to teaching the university level. Did you know in college this is what you wanted to do or did you as a young girl know, “Someday I’m going to be a professor?”
If I say what my real childhood dreams were, honestly, my first dream was to be the president of the United States. I went to MIT because at some point in high school I discovered I was good at math and computers. I worked in a debit processing center at the local junior college and got to play with some of the first personal computers that were coming out. By the time I got to MIT I had realized, that whole be the first American female president was going to be a tough way to go and would be fraught with a lot of icebergs even though I didn’t know that term. I thought, “I’m going to go make money instead. That’ll be a lot more fun.” We both got into consulting directly out of college, helping companies identify what they’re going forward, strategies ought to be as what I did. Todd did something some related. Todd started to want to go back and get a PhD and follow in his dad’s footsteps of being a professor. I pulled out my SAT scores and I discovered that what I told the SAT when I took that exam to get into college was that I wanted to be a professor as well.
[bctt tweet=” Practice your pitch on your least likely prospect first. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I can’t wait to hear. Your dad was modeling for you, Todd, what a professor’s life was like?
The academic connections, it’s funny because Kim and I have both been out six years from college and working in business consulting on the East Coast. Circle back a little bit, I’m a Jersey boy. I grew up selling newspapers on the Jersey shore. My mom bought the lawnmower in exchange for me mowing our own lawn for free, which meant I could use the lawnmower to mow our neighbors’ lawns. That’s my connection back to your network.
I can relate to you both well of Kim talking about early computers. I was at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and we had Plato where you can touch the screen back then. That was totally cutting edge. I don’t know if you’ve ever remembered or heard of those. I also had a paper route, Todd. I would do the entrepreneur thing, knock on the doors, “Do you want to subscribe?” You sell it, you deliver it and you’ve got to go collect it at the end of the month.
If you’re good, you make your money in tips.
Don’t throw it in the bushes.
There are things you throw in the bushes in New Jersey, but it’s not your customer’s newspapers.
Ironically I skipped over that. My early pitching was as a Girl Scout, I went door-to-door. Those times you had to haul the boxes with you. After a little while, you only had one type of cookie left.
You had pushed those. The mints are gone. Now we’re pushing peanut butter or something. I can relate.
You learn how to message pretty quickly so that you don’t have to haul those cookies back to the house.
The Titanic Effect
Let’s hear those story of the origin of how you too wonderful people connected. You can make it as romantic as you want or as academic as you want. The choice is yours.
I’ll share the non-romantic part. Our first jobs out of school were at the same consulting firm in the DC area. Kim was the sixth and I was the seventh person hired. This was a relatively small entrepreneurial consulting firm. For the first few months, we struggled to work together. We did not get along. Kim may ask me to cut this out, for now, just between us, when we started dating and it got serious enough. We were like, “One of us probably has to leave.” Kim went to talk to the founder to say, “I’m moving onto something else. Part of the reason is I’m dating someone here.” He went through every member of the company, including some that were married, the other women, the janitor, the company dog and the only entity left was me. It was like, “It can’t be Todd.”
We got to keep that in. That’s at least likely to be dating. Kim, what’s your version of that story?
It’s pretty much like that. In fact, at that time, I was conservative and he was clearly liberal. There were so many different ways that we should not get along at all. As we tried to work together, that same founder one time said to me, “Would you stop yanking his chain already?” I didn’t realize I was. What ended up happening is that over a weekend thing, we realized that there was some attraction. We thought, “You can’t ignore chemistry so what we ought to do is probably date and get this over with so we can move on to the real love of our lives.”
It’s fascinating because I talk about going from invisible to irresistible in a business sense but also in a dating sense. If you have so much pressure that this has to be the investor that funds my startup or this has to be the customer that hires me or this has to be the love of my life. It’s too much pressure. If you think instead of, “Let’s get through this and we know we’re not going to be a fit, there’s no pressure.” The irony of that, if people could take that away from this show, I’d be thrilled that if you start to hold things a little lighter in your hands, how much that shifts things.
That’s interesting as a way to think about it. I never connected these two before. I counsel entrepreneurs when they go to their first pitch, whether it’s for money or a customer, go to the one you think is going to be most challenging and least likely first because you’re going to screw something up. You’re going to mess up the value proposition or the connection or frame of reference, whatever that might be. You’re going to hit icebergs. Get an iceberg that isn’t your biggest opportunity, whether it came from funding or a customer perspective because you’re going to get beaten up. You’re going to learn something from that and get better. As you get better, you got closer to home and the bigger and better opportunities because you fit some of those icebergs but survived.
He gave me that advice. He’s had to do some cold calling and I said, “Here are my best prospects.” He said, “Don’t call them. You’re not great prospects. Get them out, burn through five or ten of them. By then you’ll be ready for the good ones.”
Practice your pitch on your least likely prospects first, that’s unique advice because you’re not attached to the outcome.
[bctt tweet=”Be accountable as you scale.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Maybe it’s a phone instead of practice. There is a chance to compare it. We’re still married for many years.
Honing and practicing for me. We are rewriting everything already. I know in your book The Titanic Effect, originally, this metaphor was a sideline. It became something that anchored the whole concept. Let’s hear the story of origin for how did you come up with the idea for the book?
It started with the term technical debt, which you’re familiar with and some of your audience, for those that are not when particularly software. Any physical product that you’re trying to build it, you can’t invest enough time, resources, energy to build it all the way into the robust version that you might envision eventually. You have to cut some corners. You’ve got to build your software on some code that might be a little bit flimsy to go out there and get that minimally viable product or that early testable model to get feedback. The challenges, as you start to scale, as you move from that one pilot customer to five customers to hopefully ten, twenty plus, if you’re building on this weak foundation, it’s going to collapse upon itself. That’s from a technical standpoint, from a product standpoint, and that’s the term of technical debt. There are equivalents in our metaphor, these other oceans.
You have the people that you work with, who you surround yourself with, how you allocate equity. You get advice from who helps guide you, who you hire as your early employees. In the human ocean, all of those are important decisions, but also have associated debt with them. As we thought about it was all of these decisions look obvious and easy when you are resource-strapped, and that’s the part above the water. There’s all of this mass below the water that you can’t see or anticipate because you’re making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. That connoted the image of the iceberg, and at least many of us, when we think about iceberg and failure, we associate that with the Titanic. I’m like the superficial naming guy was like, “We’ll call our presentation The Titanic Effect, then something after to make it a little more specific.” They were like, my co-authors, Michael and Kim, “It’s a good idea. It’s catchy. We should probably make sure there is some substance.” I was like, “Substance, that’s your bailiwick. I’m out of here.”
You have images of all the different icebergs and things. I’m a big Titanic fanatic. I’ve been to the museum, the menus, touched the cold ice and watched all the documentaries. You’ve got me in a minute. The research that you showed people that it’s not what icebergs are not all the same, Kim?
We started with that idea originally of marketing debt and human debt. We started thinking, “Let’s name the debts and all that.” We got onto the iceberg. We started doing iceberg research. It turns out that icebergs are super cool. They have such a variety of size from little bergy bits. Imagine a berg all broken up to iceberg islands. It’s huge masses. They have different shapes. Some are downed, tabular and all this stuff. We started getting into it. It was easy to envision these debts as different icebergs. Even since I focus in the marketing area, I have a visual image of each one of the ones as something a little different. In the book, they all look the same. There was too much granularity to try and talk about size, shape and all that. It was pretty exciting. I’m the researchy person to do that background work. I said, “If my very creative co-author and partner here is going to come up with a fancy title, I need to figure out if it has any legs. I started researching it and it turns out that there’s a lot that’s been written about the Titanic.
There are many resources too. We’ve read books, documentaries, online research. The museum has a lot of information too. We started finding thing after thing that matched up. Todd usually tells the story of a change of investors bringing on a new investor caused them to change the shipyard that they use. You can imagine what the ramifications of that are going to be. They have three different segments, this luxurious class and the steerage as we know about. The groups of people are trying to do different things. What was cool is that the first-class luxury passengers were Americans and the third-class steerage was from Eastern Europe. Can you imagine trying to have a successful marketing program that bought those two different groups of people into the same boat?
The Titanic Effect: If you don’t have alternative opinions, you’re not going to be able to aim your product into the market and understand the variety of needs that are out there.
Never were they supposed to interact. The romance went out as it did with your relationship. Did you dance to Celine Dion’s song at your wedding?
Can you imagine doing that in 1912 like share difficulty of that is mind-boggling?
I hadn’t thought about it like that. The buzz of getting the wealthy people, you’re like, “I’m sure everybody wanted the glamor of all that.” The masses, what would make them want to get on that versus all the other ways to get across? One of the things I want to talk about what you have in The Titanic Effect is the four oceans, the human ocean, the marketing ocean, the technical ocean and the strategy ocean. I know you have a whole chapter devoted to each one of those things. It’s such a great incentive for people to start thinking of this metaphor in a way that, “I want to buy this book now because we started dabbling in the marketing ocean there a little bit.” You can each talk about each one or you can split it up however you want to do it. Let’s dive in on what’s the human ocean? What’s the biggest mistake people make when they’re putting their team together?
The human ocean has these different seas within it. I know geographically that doesn’t quite work, but in the metaphor, please forgive us and allow us there that you have your co-founders. The biggest mistake that I see early-stage and first-time entrepreneurs make, and frankly even seasoned entrepreneurs, are allocating all the equity early and equally across co-founders. Your three people go out for coffee or a beer and they sketch out this idea on the napkin. They get all excited. They’re going to start this company. We’ll split everything three ways equally. A few months later, how many times that everyone is completely pulling their waiter or even able to fully contribute? The co-founders, how you allocate equity, whether you have the appropriate mix of people. Those are some of the debt bergs on the human side within co-founders.
The next sea that we talk about are the investors and advisors. Those are the people that you enlist their help, ideally some money as well. You need that feedback, encouragement, support, connections and how you go about doing that. Who you choose, how many you choose and how you interact with them are some also important sources of either resource or in some cases step bergs as well that can limit your success moving forward. Finally, within the human ocean are the employees and who are those early employees that you hire? Do you go after the cheap but enthusiastic interns who may be graduated or aren’t even through college and bright, but don’t know a lot and maybe can’t help the venture as much and spend a lot of time training, etc.? The other end of the spectrum, the giant whale hunter who has had the huge success and demands $250,000 salary and a lot of equity. It turns out they’re a one-hit-wonder and don’t know what they’re talking about. That can also be a huge source of a debt berg. Who those early employees are, how you leverage outside resources, that’s one of the other major elements we talk about in the human ocean.
In the employee sea, Todd, I wanted to add, the iceberg that’s named our debt berg has named the dearth of diversity is one that deserves more attention. We have been working with some incubators and looking at some of their companies. I was struck that out of all of the companies and all of the founding teams, there were four people who did not look like everybody else. Academic research is interesting when you have people who are much like you, more homogeneous, you get along better. Startups are a hard path to go. Getting along better is probably good. On the other hand, if you don’t have those alternative opinions, you’re not as well going to be able to aim your product into the market and understand the variety of needs that are out there.
Let me ask you about advisors within the human ocean. How important are they, is the first question, which they’re very important. What’re the criteria of what makes a good advisor? How often should you expect them to talk with you? What equity do you have to give them over time? I have so many questions about advisors alone. It’s one little grand of sand in the ocean there of human odds. It’s something that you are expertly qualified to answer. I haven’t heard many people talking about that granular level if you don’t mind.
[bctt tweet=”Get an iceberg that isn’t your biggest opportunity because you’re going to get beaten up. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I can’t pretend to have all the answers on that as you suggest. It’s a complex and nuanced question. At some point, it boils down to rapport. The fact that you like working together. It’s going to be a slog when you’re involved in any new activity, innovative activity, new project, and especially a new venture. It’s a long journey and they’re going to be hard moments. You want to be with people that you genuinely like, respect, appreciate and have fun with. That’s an important underlying element. The more objective criteria, I wouldn’t dare call it a rule. I’ll have somebody who documents and shows me, it only took X, but it’s a 50 and five rule that it will probably take you meeting with 50 people having a cup of coffee, a beer, whatever, lunch to share your idea. To get five that you feel are truly in that inner circle that is our trusted advisors that you have a good rapport with that get back to you.
One of the mistakes I see some entrepreneurs make is they try and maintain connections with 50 people and you simply can’t do that. The goal isn’t to make your network as big as possible. You want to be more engaged and activated, but also it takes a lot of networking and searches to find those five, settle with the first five you get. Within those five, you want some people who are not exactly always devil’s advocates in your face, but at least aren’t yes people that do challenge you. That you’re willing to have that and that gets back to that alternative perspective that Kim talked about and having a diversity of perspective is important.
Following that, it is having some diversity in terms of their backgrounds that you have one or two advisors that are more industry experts. You have one or two that perhaps have started a company, have grown one or two that are more on the investor perspective, that’s financial savvy and hopefully, connections that when it comes time to raise money. I think of it as this critical mix of elements that are all part of the stew that or ocean that helped you be a successful startup, but also help you identify different types of debt bergs in different oceans. You want advocates and advisers who can help you navigate that journey.
I wanted to have Kim speak to this one particular thing you said, which is that you’re not hiring a bunch of advisors who agree with everything you say and being comfortable enough to be coachable, to hear other people’s perspectives or maybe even criticism like you’re going down the wrong path or whatever it might be?
Nobody likes to have Negative Nancy around all the time. You have to be tough with yourself and say, “Who is going to be the person who’s going to see all the bumps in the road?” Who’s going to be able to point out those hazards to me and it’s going to tell me 1,000 ways that this isn’t going to work. For some of us and me, if you tell me all the challenges that I’m going to try to cross them, surround them. It’s good from that perspective, but also you want somebody who maybe can see things that you can’t see. There’s this hard thing about being the founder of a startup or the founding team is that you have to be enthusiastic. You have to be persistent. Sometimes you need to go a different path and to be doggedly persistent and not to be able to hear or listen is tough.
The ultimate pivot that everyone ultimately ends up doing. That’s why people invest in the team more than the idea and that awareness is something that a lot of people don’t register with or they feel embarrassed sometimes that they have to. I’ve seen it time and again where you have to be willing to let that go a little bit. We obviously don’t have time to go into all the oceans. I did want to have maybe you talk one little bit about the strategy ocean because some people think, “Why does strategy have its own ocean or its own chapter?”
But before we go on, I’d like to close on one more thought on that advisor side because we frequently get asked to be advisors. In fact, some years we’ve done hundreds of lunches and coffees and things like that. As advisors, we have a talk and a coachability metric that we use. We’ll take the first coffee with anyone and we’ll have lunch sometimes. You go away and if you ask a second time, we’re very likely to take the second one as well if we’ve already given the first one. If you come back in the second one and you have tested nothing that we said in the first one and/or you are doggedly holding to ideas that we suggested negative things about the first time, we recognize you as not being coachable.
The Titanic Effect: One of the mistakes entrepreneurs make is they try and maintain connections with 50 people.
That’s great criteria or excuses of why you haven’t done something yet.
Moving into the strategy ocean, we recognize that we don’t have all the oceans in the book. We pick solutions that were in our sweet spot, our comfort zones. There are regulatory issues and legal issues and all that. The challenge that we see with some startups and probably most startups at different points in time are that because you have these different arenas that you’re moving forward. You’re moving forward the human stuff. You’re moving forward the funding. You’re moving forward what your customer relationship is going to look like. You’re moving forward the product. The whole thing gets unwieldy.
You get something that’s very in-depth on the product side. There’s no understanding or recognition of how this could be marketed or what’s valuable to customers or you get something at the sales and marketing side starts promising something that employees can’t do. That’s why we call it out the strategy ocean because that’s the place to bring the other three oceans together. To remind people that you have to be coordinated, you have to move one piece forward a little bit. The next piece forward a little bit.
That lack of coordination, one department sales promising something that engineering can’t deliver or is a nightmare even at a small scale.
Measurement, what happens, we’ve seen a lot of startups is they get so busy doing and they’re shorthanded, that they don’t even have metrics in place. They know the metrics that they’re going to need to see if they’re going to go do an angel pitch or a VC pitch. They’re not effectively running the business with metrics. We advocate different metrics at different points in time, but identifying what those metrics are and having somebody look at them. The third sea in the strategy ocean is about accountability, which is, we all think we’re heading in a certain direction, but until you put a name to it, it doesn’t happen.
Always be the founder or even the founding team as you grow up a little bit, as you start to scale, that accountability has to start to transfer to others within the organization.
What you’re saying is sometimes accountability is delegating stuff too. It’s not doing it all yourself. It’s been a fascinating look at the Titanic as a metaphor and the oceans that we all swim in, whether we’re starting a business or working in a business and all the challenges that we face. The book is called The Titanic Effect. Is there any last thought or piece of advice you each want to leave us with?
I’ll cut in on one and it comes back to very much the theme of a lot of what you talk about and making sure in your picture, in your story, you know what you’re trying to get out of it and that it is both stage-appropriate and context-appropriate in a very personal sense. We’ve talked about our own interactions with each other. When we’re looking for feedback, I’m going to characterize two different types and try and make this brief. We do a lot of writing. If I have a deadline that I’ve got to get it out by midnight and into a journal for review or whatever, I have to signal to Kim, “I’ve got a tight deadline. I need these superficial and it’s okay if you say, “That’s great, Hon.”
[bctt tweet=”If you’re good, you make your money in tips. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
At the early stages of this project, however, when we were trying to flesh out this metaphor and extend it, we needed to be ruthless with between all three of us. What may have created some challenging discussions, but that early stage, that’s the time to be open to much more discursive conversations about what’s going to work, what isn’t, what is clear and what is not? Understanding where you are in the journey and what you were looking for in your pitch, whatever that might look like is an important part of the process. As you very well know when articulate in many ways, a pitch is not this model with the constructed. A pitch varies a lot by what you’re trying to accomplish, who your audience is, etc. That’s certainly very true as you’re navigating from an early stage of launch and ideation through the later stages of growing a venture.
Keep on sailing, that’s the goal.
If people want to follow you on social media and track the book, what’s the best way for them to do that?
They can check out the website at www.TitanicEffect.com. We have a weekly blog and we email out little tips once a week so we don’t clog your inbox, but it’s fun when people email or text us and say, “I love that.”
Thank you both for sharing your expertise, navigating the waters that we all face.
Thank you so much. It’s been a lot of fun and good luck with your endeavors. To the audience, good luck with your pitch, whatever that might look like.
Thank you.
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Social Purpose Investing with Joel Solomon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
One good life purpose is to do as much good as you can and leave the world better. Joel Solomon, the author of The Clean Money Revolution, shares that deciding that finance business and capitalism could be a powerful force for good was an awakening for him. Joel is the Chairman of Renewal Funds, a $98-million mission venture capital firm. He’s invested in over a hundred early growth stage companies delivering above-market returns while catalyzing positive social and environmental change. In this episode, he shares a wealth of knowledge about social purpose investing. When we take responsibility for where we are investing, it reveals who we are as a human and what our belief systems, philosophy, morals, and ethics are.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Social Purpose Investing with Joel Solomon
Our guest is Joel Solomon, who is the Chairman of Renewal Funds, which is a $98 million mission venture capital firm. He’s invested in over a hundred early growth stage companies delivering above-market returns while catalyzing positive social and environmental change. He also published a book, The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose and Capitalism. Joel, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
I want to ask you to tell us your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college or wherever you want. Where did you start to figure out what you wanted to do with your life?
I think I’ll go back to the pre-Joel roots a little bit and say that I come from two lineages, one of which was a German-Jewish lineage and the other was Russian-Poland-Lithuanian. The one left earlier than the big troubles but came to the United States for the opportunity. The other was shipped away as a ten-year-old to escape conscription and bad conditions in Russia at the time. My grandfather ended up in Atlanta and they had an experience shortly afterward of a Ku Klux Klan march around their neighborhood and moved up to Chattanooga where it was quieter. My father and mother met at the Democratic Party convention in 1952 on a blind date. I grew up in Tennessee.
At eighteen, I went away to university in the northeast and then over the years, my father became a very successful entrepreneur. I spent some time thinking about life. I worked in politics. I started making seed capital investments. I was diagnosed with genetic kidney disease and told I could die soon or live a long time, but there was nothing I could do about it. That led me to think about, “What does the kidney do?” When I realized it had to clean the toxins out of my blood, I started looking at the ingredient labels. That led me into a career in organic food investing along with climate issues that we invest in. A friend gave me her kidney several years ago. I ended up moving to Canada to take some great opportunities here and got to enjoy the Canadian healthcare system, which I never heard the words insurance or money. I get fabulous care and I’m healthy now and all that went well. It did put me into a career of thinking that life’s purpose was to do as much good as you can and leave the world better.
What I love about that story is the awareness of a personal challenge and that’s what I see a lot of great entrepreneurs having is they’ve had some personal problem. They want to solve for themselves and then realize other people have similar problems that they can solve and scale that solution. It generates a lot of ideas. The concept of having a kidney issue and figuring out what it does and then leading into healthcare and into a social impact is quite fascinating.
[bctt tweet=”Vision, Grit and Passion are keys to success” username=”John_Livesay”]
The journey with deciding that finance business and capitalism could be a powerful force for good was an awakening because I’d started in the ’60s with lots of questions and all kinds of things were going on then. I was a bit confused about what’s the best pathway. As I found the movement of entrepreneurs who thought that they could do good with a business, I found that very attractive. It was able to combine multiple sources of myself. My mother became an artistic photographer who shows the underbelly of psychology and emotions of humans on the planet. Combined with the optimistic entrepreneur dad and a serious look at the other side mom, I had a nice combination of critical thinking and enthusiasm for making things happen.
I love anything to do with critical thinking and I’ve heard it used in a lot of different arenas including the healthcare industry where for example, nurses need to have critical thinking skills to not just follow things exactly by the book. If they see something going wrong, they need to be able to respond to that. How do you define critical thinking in terms of entrepreneurship?
First of all, it’s a constant, daily critical thinking in terms of where are the opportunities, where are the challenges, what are we doing wrong and what can we do better? What are the hurdles to there? How do we assemble the right resources in terms of people support, boards of directors, other investors and expertise of all kinds? As an entrepreneur of building, we like to call it mission venture capital, we have to first assess what it is we’re interested in and we think we’ll be successful. Secondly, we want to understand the entrepreneurs and particularly their senior team, but as much about the culture as possible. “These people that are adaptive, can they assess what the circumstances are and make good choices?” You do as much due diligence as you can. You never know for sure well, but you’re making a bet on people and on a fairly long-term relationship. That’s how that pathway led to being an investor.
Let’s talk about what you look for besides having a great team when you hear a pitch.
The basics that you would think of are the core of it. Does the premise make sense? Does it look like there’s a marketplace opportunity? Do the entrepreneurs know what they’re doing or seem to know what they’re doing? What is competition? What’s the landscape? What are the resources? All those kinds of common sense things. What is really important to me is to understand the character and personality of the people I’m getting involved with. Everyone sells well or many people sell. What are they like under pressure? What kind of choices will they make when it’s not so easy?
What about when the plan that was enthusiastically presented doesn’t work? It’s more in the challenge points where you find out someone’s character. We do our best, I don’t have any special tricks for it other than experience with humans. I’m going through a lot of different entrepreneur situations and things like that and all kinds of situations, but I think it’s a lot about the inner skills, the psychological and the emotional. How do you handle conflict? How do you handle the pressure? Do you know what the truth really is and how to be very straightforward with people while still maintaining optimism and strategy?
Investing In Social Purpose: The art of understanding our emotional and psychological being is quite under-trained and under-utilized.
I think that’s fascinating information and choice of that. Wayne Dyer once said that if you squeeze an orange, you always get orange juice. It doesn’t matter what time of day, if you squeeze it in the corner, you still get orange juice. The thing about how consistent are we. If we get squeezed into a corner, does a different side of our personality come out or are we consistently calm and rational or what kind of choices are we making when we’re under pressure? That reminded me of that little analogy there. What is your favorite way to handle conflict that you could give as advice for people who are struggling with that? Many people say, “Let’s avoid it. Let’s bury it. Maybe it will go away. I don’t want to have that difficult conversation.” What advice can you give of how to handle conflict for people who are afraid of it or just try to avoid it?
It begins with my own journey through that myself. I went and sought help. I tried to be open to the professions that are there to help people. You can talk about the psychological and the mental stuff and the study of human nature, that kind of thing, but there’s a whole other level of knowing how to understand what one is even going through. Am I feeling something? What are the emotions I’m feeling and being able to identify them? If you become practiced at understanding yourself, when are you afraid? When are you angry? When are you sad? When you notice that and you learn that you do have the power to just simply by seeing it and acknowledging it, it’s a huge doorway, but then you can gain tools over time. It might be, “I’m going to take ten seconds and take a breath.”
That gap between stimulus and response is something that isn’t talked about very much.
“I’m going to go for a walk. I need a break.” I need to call somebody I trust and say, “I’m having a hard time now. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it was whatever my wife said to me last night or my kid or who knows what.” I think that the art of understanding our emotional and psychological being is quite under-trained and underutilized. There are no courses in the university. I don’t know if incubators and accelerators have taken this up these days, but an entrepreneur is typically supposed to be an invulnerable hero of super person magnitude and be able to do everything. That is a mistake to try to be that person.
What I want to be is the most aware and conscious person who’s capable of seeing what’s going on in myself and understanding what the choice options are and then making a clear choice. I’ll say one more thing about this. Often if it’s a business situation, I will go so far as to say, “I’m having a bad day and I’m a little grumpy. I’m sad about something that happened or I’m worried about this or something.” It dispels so much to be vulnerable and honest that way. I don’t consider it a weakness. I consider it a strength.
Brené Brown certainly agrees with you. She was giving TED Talks on it and wrote books about the need to be vulnerable but that’s how people connect and relate. This concept of being aware of your feelings. “Am I afraid? Am I angry? Am I sad? What is triggering the anger in particular?” Do you have any experience or tips for people who struggle? We all have our hot buttons and we try to deactivate them to the best of our ability. If someone you find is constantly critical or a little condescending and you’re focusing on the 1% or 2% things you’re doing wrong as opposed to the 80% and 90% you’re doing right, do you have any suggestions on how you would personally handle that? What do you suggest to other people on how to not get so triggered?
[bctt tweet=”How do you use critical thinking?” username=”John_Livesay”]
To be a little more explicit about the professions out there that can help us get better at this, we bring in all kinds of expertise to our companies. One of the last things we’re typically going to bring is HR or organizational development or executive coaching. A good executive coach or those other professions, they have these skills, they’re good observers, they know how to give us feedback about it and they can help us both craft our own behaviors and then a corporate culture. Marketing, sales, finance, there are all kinds of tangible skills that are needed. This gets left off the list.
The EQ, the emotional intelligence, not just the IQ.
We’re in a world that demands more of this than ever before. We are looking at people less mechanistically like we’re machines and robots who are supposed to figure everything out exactly the same way. The modern marketplace and the modern backdrop to that marketplace like social-environmental trends and human trends, labor trends, younger people and how they are going to be in workplaces and what do they want? What is expected of us with a company and our values, morals and ethics? What kind of citizens are we in the world? It’s getting more complex, but at the same time, there’s something very simple in here which is opening to the idea that I can intentionally grow as a human being and as an entrepreneur.
Let’s talk about what inspired you to write your book. I’m always interested in that journey because that is not something that people undertake on a whim because it’s a huge amount of work and commitment. The Clean Money Revolution, what does that mean for people who don’t know?
What Clean Money is about is that I need to take responsibility for what my money is doing, whether it’s in my pocket, whether it’s in a bank, whether it’s invested somewhere. That is my responsibility. It reveals who I am as a human, what my belief systems, philosophy, morals, ethics are. I don’t want to end up invested in things that are damaging people or damaging places. That’s not a sacrifice I want to make. Everything’s imperfect, so I’m not talking about perfect. I’m talking about moving on that scale and taking responsibility. How much plastic do I buy? How do I treat other people through my money?
I got very fascinated with this idea and I had a fairly unique career. You can read about it in the book, but I had a fairly interesting career and I feel like I had a lot of privilege. Some of it had to do with just being in new areas early, which allowed me to be at the beginning of certain concepts or early stages, different business ideas and things. I realized that I’d been exposed to an awful lot and there’s not enough information out there about the moral and ethical sides. We talk about business ethics, but we don’t talk about the ethics around money itself very well. I think that future generations are counting on me to make good choices about my purchases, my buying and things like that.
Investing In Social Purpose: You end up with deep social unrest and serious problems if you don’t think about everyone at some kind of some level.
I wanted to share ideas about that and I also wanted to share that there’s a movement underway. It’s called impact investing in the sector I’m in. We’re looking at everything in society and we’re considering the long-term impacts, the manufacturing impacts, where stuff comes from and who’s affected. I wanted to share about that. The first part is the personal journeys. How did I think this all through and get this way? Second, there’s a movement underway. Here’s a personal taxonomy that I may have seen early stages of a couple of subsectors and here’s how they’ve grown. The third part is to talk about the moral and ethical aspect of this state of the world, the crisis we’re facing on all fronts and how do we be the best that we can be.
When you decide what you’re investing in, do you invest in companies only in Canada or the US and Canada?
We are US and Canada-focused. We can’t do international because it’s too much for us to take on. Our investors are from around the world, but mostly US, Canada. We have one advantage, which is depending on what are fairly big swings and exchanged rates, it might be better to be shopping for investments in one country or the other. That gives us an interesting little bit of diversity that isn’t it as common.
When you talk about social impact, is it only companies that are helping the environment or if you see that someone is creating a product or a service that has a positive social impact on people’s life or their ability to buy a home or something, does that fall under something you invest in? Is it only environment?
One thing I wanted to say, by the way, is that we’re raising money and I haven’t updated my bio, so we’re going to push near $200 million under management, maybe over that. It’s succeeding over time. We’d look at all the factors, but we are primarily focused on soil, agriculture and food and everything to do with the environment technologically, which there’s really a vast world of that now. However, we are looking at social factors, we’re looking at the human beings, we’re looking at what kind of a workplace it is. We don’t ignore that but our first doorway has to do with the environment and climate.
When you talk about reinventing power and purpose, let’s take a dive on how do we reinvent power and is it by the way we spend our money or what companies we invest in? Is that what you’re talking about? Are we giving those people more power by attracting that kind of money?
[bctt tweet=”How Do You Handle Pressure?” username=”John_Livesay”]
What I meant by saying that is that power is distributed in a quite imbalanced way currently on the planet. We have created the benefits to flow to those who needed the least. Tax benefits, access to education, all kinds of things. We are steadily reducing that access for people who have the least. Legislation and all kinds of things keep changing that is going what I consider the wrong direction. You end up with deep social unrest and serious problems if you don’t think about everyone at some level. By power, I’m talking about who gets to have and who gets accessed and who gets to decide. A very few of us relatively speaking, have that power and there are choices to make.
You can be a consultative leader, you can be a dictatorial leader. You can cultivate a safe workplace for ideas and innovation or you can not want to hear anybody ever question you. That’s where power is. I’m using it very loosely there, but it’s deep. If we don’t pay attention to this, I think we’d get in trouble. I was born with less than three billion people on the planet and I could live to see eight billion. How are we going to split up everything and how are we going to take care of each other? What’s going to happen? Who gets to decide who gets what? That’s what I mean by the power in that one.
We often talk about the Ford Foundation committing over a billion dollars in the next ten years to helping people get affordable housing and financial services accessibility. That is where I am really fascinated and the social impact that that has. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy, until we have some basic needs met and give people access to qualifying or getting some cash without going into debt so much, if everybody’s living paycheck to paycheck then they never get up the hierarchy to start self-actualizing and caring about the planet. If you’re still wondering where your next meal is coming from or if you’re going to pay your rent. I love what you’re doing here. Is there anything from the book that you want to say to somebody, “If you’re struggling with this, you’ll find the answer in The Clean Money Revolution?“
I might offer you more questions than answers, but I’ll tell you a lot of stories in that book. I like the parable and the storytelling. The living example to make the points rather than to overly act like I know exactly how things should be done or people should be done. One of the greatest things in my life is the stories that I’ve been able to be exposed to or be part of. Early on, one of those was Jimmy Carter. I went to work for him in my teenage years when he decided to run for president. I worked through that. Another was after I was diagnosed with kidney disease. I went out on seek and search and I ended up caretaking an island that was an Orca Research Laboratory that was founded by the guy who started Greenpeace’s Save the Whales campaign. I saw two examples between age 18 to 25 or 27 where one individual decided to take on some huge complex task and both of them actually succeeded at it through vision, grit, learning and going for it. Those were very helpful to me and then in the entrepreneur world, I get to see other stories and it goes on from there. It got me in the pattern of stories as the best teaching methods.
You’re singing my song. My whole book is Better Selling Through Storytelling because Plato said storytellers rule society and it’s as true now as it was 2,600 years ago. The more we can become storytellers to get people engaged in caring about a particular issue, I think that’s where it hooks the emotions is storytelling.
I’m so glad we’re aligned on that and it’s the ballgame. You can learn it in a lot of different places, but doing it takes practice. You’ve got to remember.
What’s something you’re working on now that you’re very excited about?
We have 300 investors at this point and influencing those investors, their families, friends and advisers that there is a different way to invest. There’s a different way to make money and here’s a whole bunch of stories that you’re going to get exposed to. That’s one part. The second is proving to the citizenry and to industry sectors and everyone else, that there are better ways to do things and that you need to pay attention to that continual improvement. If there are practices that you’re waking up to and you’re going, “I don’t know if I want to tell my grandchildren about what I did to build this industry or the sector or this product.”
There are increasing ways to make better choices because human ingenuity both do well on greed. Human ingenuity does a great job on accumulation and domination and that kind of thing. My friend gave me her kidney. That’s unfathomable really. We’ve gotten used to this kind of thing and in every different part we look and we don’t like something in the world. We’re in an era. If we can maintain it then don’t blow it. We’re in an era where the possibilities of human vision, passion and caring could make a fantastic future or we could blow it.
Let’s stay optimistic that the vision, the grit and the passion will allow us to not blow it and in fact continue to have great social impact. I can’t thank you enough, for coming on and sharing your wisdom and the insights from your wonderful book. If people want to follow you, where should they go?
Joel Solomon, I’m in the major social medias. That’s one way to find me under my name. The book is available, The Clean Money Revolution out in the world, you can get your bookstore to order it. You could go to your favorite online bookstore and etc. The two websites, RenewalFunds.com is about the businesses we invest in and how we do what we do. The JoelSolomon.org, this podcast will be there and lots of other interviews, ideas, blogs, connections and things like that.
Thanks again, Joel.
Thank you so much.
Links Mentioned:
- Renewal Funds
- The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose and Capitalism
- Ford Foundation
- Save the Whales
- Better Selling Through Storytelling
- RenewalFunds.com
- www.JoelSolomon.org
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