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Founder's Story
From Teenage Dream to $60M Empire and Impact: How Peter Khoury’s Give Kindly is Redefining Charitable Giving | Ep. 146
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- [00:01]
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Peter Khoury
So here's your chance to take a deep breath in. Now give a nice long exhale and repeat another 10 or so times. This healthy suggestion is brought to you by Regents Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon. Together we Health.
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Daniel
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have Peter Khoury. I love what you're doing, Peter, because you are the founder of GiveKindly and I am all about impact. It was like a few years ago for me where my journey was like, you need to focus on impact and everything I do is all around that. I know you are super successful with your group holding company of R2B. I think you're at a valuation of like 60 something million dollars. And this is, I believe you mentioned it's something from 24 years ago that was an idea that's coming to fruition.
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Rosetta Stone Representative
Now.
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Daniel
Let's talk about that. Why did you launch GiveKindly right now and why are you so focused on Impact?
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Peter Khoury
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. In business in general, I've always felt it's about the why. And I believe every founder's journey kind of gets to a point where financially accrual doesn't make any more sense. There's nothing else you can buy, there's nothing else you can do. So for me, it's always been about the purpose. Why am I doing what I can do? Why am I doing what I do? And by that I mean I'm striving for something every single day. But it has to be beyond myself because essentially there's nothing left to buy. It's all about how do I make a difference in this world with the gifts I've been given. The question of why now? Simply put, I've tried before. So as you said, 24 years ago, age 13, I registered giftkindly, gave it a good shot. But obviously a 13 year old doesn't have the tools or skills to do it. It needs to do law, doesn't have the capital. I launched it again when I was 17, 18 here in Australia and again didn't have the capital behind it. My budget was $4,000 and just again, not the experience. And now having gone off and built, you know, my own business sort of empire in Australia, I've always come back to the point of what am I doing this for? What's the purpose? And now that I've accrued what I need to accrue, I need to put it all behind the mission, which is doing something beyond myself and creating a difference in this world we want to see.
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Daniel
I think there's this founder's dilemma and I know there's a few different dilemmas, but the one specifically I'm thinking is happiness. It's like you go into business most of the time in the beginning because you want to make money. You want to make, you know, freedom of making unlimited money. You don't want to be held back by a job where, you know, they tell you how much to make, but then you buy what you want, you get to travel, you get to do the things and then you're kind of left with this dilemma of what's going to make me happy next. Did you ever find yourself in there and then what brings you happiness now?
- [04:00]
Peter Khoury
Yes, it's a funny thing you mentioned. I remember working in the cinemas when I was a little younger and I'd recruit like two or three weeks for the pay packets and I had 400 in my account and I said I want to go buy something and I went through the shops, I'll buy aisle, you know, department store after department store. And at a very young age of 14, I learned that there's only so much things money can do and then as you grow up, you get there, I've got a house, I've got a car, we live a decent lifestyle, we've got our kids in school. But again, it's not that I'm excessively wealthy, but what I've learned is that money isn't the key to it all and it comes down to service. You know, essentially what makes me happy is being impactful for what I achieve. As you probably may be aware, success is a selfish pursuit at times. You neglect a lot of responsibilities to achieve certain tasks and I can't justify doing that purely for the sake of more money. So the only way I can justify the work and effort I put in is to actually have a go towards something beyond myself because then I can justify just putting that little bit extra. So I've never had that real dilemma about how to push forward because the lesson was learned before I made my first dollar that, you know, the actual monetary piece of it can only go so far.
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Daniel
Man, I love that it's great when you can learn these lessons early on because I think we know entrepreneurship is like all about lessons, failures, right? It's like there's no real blueprint. I don't think you could really go to school and like learn entrepreneurship necessarily because it's like once you get into it, everything completely changes. Let's dive into the mission. I'm always fascinated with how as people grow, they really hyper focus on this mission. So what led you into this specific mission and how are you going to make this mission global?
- [06:05]
Peter Khoury
Absolutely. Thank you. So Gift Cardly is about letting charities do what they do best. It's an online platform where people buy what they're going to buy anyway. We're focusing on females clothing and accessories right now. When they buy, a percentage goes towards a charity of their choice. So we know humans, Americans, they want to give, they want to be impactful, just as I do, just as you do. But they don't often have the avenues to do it within their means. So we're saying if you're going to buy clothes, buy clothes. A percentage of each purchase goes towards a charity of your choice, the charity that you want to impact, the mission that you want to impact. So not only am I empowering myself to make an impact, but I'm also empowering the consumer to make the impact that they want to make. And the ethos behind that is quite simple. The charities are so bogged down in generating recurring revenue, bringing more money in. In fact, the whole plot of a charity is somewhat doomed. You raise $10 million, you spend $10 million, and you have to spend the $2 million making the next $10 million. They can't take risks like we can take risks. Right. And I believe that's why it's on the responsibility of the business owner to generate recurring revenues for charities. If a charity gets involved in investment, the investment goes south and then you, Dan, you've put money in there, you're going to say, why is my money going towards business endeavors? It should be going towards the cause. Everyone's always questioning, you know, how much of the money I put into that charity is actually going towards that course. So what I'm trying to say is it's necessary what they do. They have to accrue money to make more of an impact. But what I'm suggesting is it's not their responsibility to do so, nor is it their skill set. It's not what they do best, it's what we as entrepreneurs do best. So I'm establishing mechanisms to generate profitable revenue generating businesses that fund these endeavors. Because if I lose all my money tomorrow, not a single person will lose a tear for me. No one will care. And that's fine. That's the job of an entrepreneur. But if a charity does it, they're in strife. So we have to end this vicious cycle of raise money, spend it, raise money, spend it. Because the scrutiny they get, it's just not fair as well. They shouldn't be asked to constantly have 50% of their proceeds going to generate more revenue. Because that's the difficult part of this whole process. Not the alms giving that they wish to do.
- [08:28]
Daniel
Yeah, I dabbling into the nonprofit space, I've come to realize it is very, very hard to run a nonprofit or charity. Like I don't think people understand how difficult it is having to constantly, like you said, raise money and bring in funds and not do what you wanted to do, which is help people give back, like do these things. Instead. You're focused on always, you know, where's the next money coming in? Otherwise it'll go out of business. So I appreciate what you're doing and I'm really interested too in the whole.
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Rosetta Stone Representative
Like globalization of things. Right.
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Daniel
Like you could start a company in Australia, but maybe your client is in New Zealand or Iceland or you know, some other country. Right. Or some other continent. And it's very interesting now with obviously the Internet and, and so many places have access to it that you can sell a product and service in a totally different place than 20 years ago or 30 years ago. How's the experience for you when it goes to bringing your product and service to other countries?
- [09:31]
Peter Khoury
Yeah, so I mean, the world is so small, right. I think we had the conversation earlier, me and you. I was saying that the smaller the world gets, the more complicated on some levels, but also the simpler on some levels. We're not having this conversation with you live right now and it's going out to all your supporters. The reality is things are exactly the same in terms of technology here than they are there. In fact, America specifically has got so many different opportunities that it's just substantially easier, less barriers of entry. But one of the main things I want to share is why I'm choosing the states as opposed to launching this in Australia. And you know what I'm saying, and through my many visits to America is the genuine community spirit en masse in the States. It is such a huge place compared to Australia. I mean, Australia's population is 24 million. We don't even. I think our GDP is 1/3 the size of California, just as an example. But despite its ginormous state, it's really got a community feel. People are always there to lend their hands. I always found that that community aspect has been really embedded in to the American psyche. And I just thought what a place to launch giftkindly where the people are really, you know, have really bought in to the idea of community making a difference.
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Daniel
It is interesting how different countries view like you're saying community and just even business and entrepreneurship or how they treat each other is very fascinating. And I could see what you're saying about the US being very community centric in the sense of like wanting to give and giving back. I can't wait to try out the platform. I love the idea of the customization and transparency which is something that is probably going to be everywhere in the future. Like we want to customize things, we want to give to the charities that we want versus you saying it has to go, you know, X, Y, Z. I'm curious though, when it comes to some personal things with you, business is not easy. Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is very challenging in my opinion. There's a lot of ups and downs. What's been a challenging time for you and what is a lesson you learned?
- [11:53]
Peter Khoury
But I. You hit the nail on the head, right? In any kind of business, it's always challenging every aspect of it. So I look back at, you know, my existing journey here at R2B Group holdings, you know, just gotta significant valuation is growing, you know, a million miles an hour. Every single milestone we achieved was an overcoming of a challenge.
- [12:16]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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Daniel
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- [14:11]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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- [14:35]
Daniel
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- [14:50]
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- [15:56]
Peter Khoury
So I mean, just to give you some context about our business, if you've got two seconds, our company helps people buy properties in Australia with zero deposit. The property market in Australia is quite difficult to get into and there is somewhat of a housing crisis going on right here. So our whole goal was to basically fund deposits, which is not done in Australia, so that people can get into that market sooner. So to do that, we go, okay, we've got this concept. We need a funded element of deposit. How do we do that? So the first stage was let's get them into an incubator and get them structured and organized. So we went through, got their credit sector sorted out, we made sure everything was going well, their budgeting was fine, and the next step was, okay, now you've got that, let's get their loan approved. Okay, this doesn't exist. Now we have to create a loan product for the first mortgage, that is. And then now we have to fund the second mortgage. How do we do that? Okay, we have to start making revenue to do that. So we can't just charge a saving. Okay, we have to get the real estate component. We developed the real estate land, then we have to do the build component. Then we bought a law firm. So it became nine little small companies, all the profits feeding into our credit license, or the bank license, as you might refer to us, and that issues the deposit loan. If you think about every single stage for the last six years in building this, we would sprint towards a brick wall and literally bash our head against it until it cracked open. And we can go to that next stage. And to give some context about the actual kind of growth aspect of this, we'd be up very profitable the first year and then we'd make a massive loss. And then we go up next year and make a massive loss because we have to keep investing and to give scale to when that breakthrough period is. It's not a breakthrough of five, six years constant sort of progress. For us, it was six years. And on July 1 this year, it was an explosion where we went from 3 million to 90 million. And then we've just signed two other massive deals, which unfortunately I can't disclose right now, but that goes to the next level as well. And we do business in general. It's exactly like you said. The challenges are just consistent. And I think the founder of Nvidia said it best is people will never Tell you how hard it is. Right. And that's why you're never creating a video again. Right. He's always said it was that bloody hard. And I think that's the connection that us entrepreneurs have is we know how hard it is, so we're not asking ourselves about the successes we're going. That was tough, right?
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Daniel
Yeah. I think that's super inspiring that even people, the level of your success, you know, you can talk through what the challenges were because I think a lot of times the Internet, everything looks great. Social media, everything is perfect. Man, this person is doing amazing. And then when you start to dig into it, they're living paycheck to paycheck because like you said, they have to reinvest all the money back in, but they have to have this Persona online. So. And it could be, I think, very stressful. Mental health is can depreciate for a lot of people where they dive into business. And we know many businesses fail within the first few years.
- [18:57]
Rosetta Stone Representative
But thank you for sharing that.
- [18:59]
Daniel
I love it's like building the plane as you go or building the parachute. Like, these are the realities of business. But it's been really great today. I'm super inspired by what you're doing. I really, really love the impact. I can't wait for you to launch in the U.S. so when are you launching in the U.S. also, how can people find you? How can they look up the company?
- [19:19]
Peter Khoury
Absolutely. So I believe by the time this is November, we'll be live. And by November 5th, we are going live. 40% off all the items on our website. So that's 40% of everything that makes a loss on every product. I'm funding a loss for everyone all the way through to December so people can actually experience the website all the way through to Christmas. So 4th of November, we go live. 40% off everything you can find us on givekindly.com and also you can download our app on Android and Apple Store the giftkindly app again. Our focus right now is female clothing and accessories to start the board game. We've had some great responses so far in our soft launch, but as a fourth of November, you can go hell for leather. Choose your charities, do what it takes. We're going to basically fund a loss to make sure you can experience the gift kindly piece. And hopefully as a supporter of a charity, you also become a supporter of us.
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Daniel
Well, Peter, thank you so much for all that you do to help. I can't wait till November. Great conversation today. Really inspired. I think a lot of people get some takeaways and just you're having this mission in life. I mean, from 13 years old an idea to 24 years later like that is incredible. Like, most people would have given up and just said, you know, that Idea was dead 24 years ago, but the fact that you've kept through it, I mean, that's incredible. And thank you so much for joining us today on FounderStory.
- [20:53]
Peter Khoury
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it, Daniel.
- [21:01]
Indeed Representative
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Daniel
It's been so long.
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Rosetta Stone Representative
How have you been? Hello. I'm doing well.
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Daniel
Dave.
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Rosetta Stone Representative
Why are you talking that way? Please say one a compliment or two for a question. Yeah, this is weird.
- [22:12]
Daniel
I think I'm gonna go.
- [22:13]
Grammarly Representative
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