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Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
This NBA Player’s Legacy is Helping People All Over the World
00:31:30
In this episode of the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast, Dr. Rob Harter welcomes Bob Bush, co-founder of Mutombo Coffee. Bob shares the inspiring story behind ...
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- [00:02]
Dr. Rob Harder
This is Dr. Rob Harder with the nonprofit leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All these reasons combined led me to start this show. And it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who are successful successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Hey friends. Welcome to the show. Well, one of the things I most look forward to in the morning is a strong cup of coffee. In fact, I agree with my professor who once said when it comes to coffee, he used to hold up a cup of coffee and say, coffee is the nectar of the gods. I loved his saying and I couldn't agree more with the sentiment. And how about you? Are you a coffee lover as well? Well, if you are, or even if you're not, you know, there's been lots of conversations when it comes to coffee. Specifically when it comes to businesses sourcing their coffee, there's always questions of are they using sustainable and fair trade practices. Right. Well, my guest today is doing just that. His name is Bob Bush and he leads Mutumbo Coffee, which he actually helped to launch with the late, great Dikembe Mutombo. You may remember that name. He was a former NBA all star who sadly passed away last year from cancer. Now, Mutumbo Coffee is actually a for profit social enterprise. So they're not a nonprofit organization. But I believe the way Bob has gone about growing their business with the ultimate goal of making a social impact is really instructive for us in the nonprofit sector. In fact, in this conversation, I asked Bob all about the business entrepreneurial principles he has put into place to help grow and scale his business while creating strategies of resilience for long term sustainability. Again, even though Bob is leading a social enterprise, not a nonprofit, a lot of the principles he applies into his leadership to me are very transferable to our sector. In fact, I think many nonprofits can benefit learning from leaders like Bob who have a nonprofit like mission to their business venture. I think you're going to really enjoy today's conversation with Bob, even if you're not a coffee lover. All right, well, thanks for tuning in. Now onto the show. This podcast is sponsored by Donor Box, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Welcome to the Nonprofit Leadership podcast. Well, Bob, thanks so much for being on the show today. I'm so glad you can come from the perspective of a social enterprise because as I mentioned before, we hit record. I think what you're doing can really be instructive for us as leaders in the nonprofit sector. So thanks in advance for being on the show today.
- [02:50]
Bob Bush
Thanks for having me. Dr. Rob.
- [02:52]
Dr. Rob Harder
Okay, well, with that as a backdrop from your experience, then let's talk about what strategies can entrepreneurs use to focus on long term priorities while at the same time avoiding short term pitfalls that can jeopardize their goals. Maybe we could start there.
- [03:07]
Bob Bush
This kind of dovetails what we just sort of said the, you know, is there a difference between nonprofit leadership and for profit leadership? Is there a difference between a nonprofit organization and a social enterprise? And in our view, the heart of that difference is really the answer to that that is embedded in your question. Because typically a for profit is really about maximizing profit and maximizing short term gains. And if that company happens to be an s and P500 or whatever, literally people are glued to the ticker and you got the journalists and you got the media and everyone you know, every day marking to market, as it were, whether or not that company is maximizing its profit. And that's a really challenging way to run a business, which is as much as we aspire to be large, and you mentioned the Amazons, et cetera, of the world, it can create some perverse incentives, let's call it. And the essence of that is often not the scope or the focus. It really is this element of how you use and leverage time. And so we like to say you think about the long term and you work backward. And since our long term is really about social impact, what does that look like to us? Is it the number of farmers that we support? Is it the volume of coffee that we sell? Is it the number of kids that have gotten through grade school and high school and college? So what are those sort of key social impact metrics that you will only know are working over time and then work back to see what we need to do today to build towards that kind of future? And so in a way we think that there's this false dichotomy, false choice of maximizing profit, maximizing social impact thinking short term or thinking long term? I think whether you're a smart CEO in a for profit world or you are a smart, which we aspire to be CEO, that's trying to bridge the gap in a social enterprise world. Interesting data, right? And listeners and reader viewers may know this. It's what's the tenure of an S&P 500 company? The tenure in McKinsey did a study that in the late 50s, early 60s, that company would have a 60 plus year lifespan. And guess what? It is today it's about half that. And so even when you are a for profit thinking about maximization of profits, you still, you have, it's a declining trend and you are now not able to have the kind of lifespan. So something's wrong with that model when you're only thinking about short term gains. And I intentionally mentioned the S&P 500 because those are the public companies with the highest scrutiny, with the greatest resources. These are the iconic brands and the biggest boys in our capitalist society and they have half the lifespan. So something's gone on with that. Similarly, when you look at CEOs, similar downward trends that you're seeing, the average CEO over the years has declined 40, 50, 60%. It's now the, the last day I saw was the median was about four, four and a half years and the tenure is about seven, seven and a half years. Similarly downward trend. And so it really comes down to this notion of time. And are you going to make time compounding the good work you're doing today so that you have these long term strategic benefits, or are you going to use time in this way where you're looking at time as this sort of stock ticker and then what you find is the companies that typically do that do not have long lifespans.
- [07:06]
Dr. Rob Harder
Well, settle on that. And I think that gives a great lead in to what you said earlier about really your goal is as a social enterprise, the idea of building a values driven investing strategy. So how can others build a values driven investment strategy using a triple bottom line framework?
- [07:22]
Bob Bush
First we have to distinguish between values driven and value driven. And again, there is this sort of conflation of what is value, particularly when you're talking about a business or an enterprise. Value is most readily assumed to be profits and revenue and earnings. And the more value you are creating, the more profits and revenues and earnings, et cetera, that you have. While in the social enterprise world that we're trying to help redefine in some way, that's all very important. The more money I make, the more I can give away. In fact, I think it's, I shouldn't even say it that way because that creates what could be a moral hazard. The more I could invest because I'm not giving any of it away. We had to earn it and we're going to make sure that we invested properly. And it just may be that the goal may be different than buying another piece of capital equipment, but it's actually earning it and being very thoughtful about how it gets allocated and dispensed and invested as it goes out. Values driven is really, I think the key to this. Not value driven, value driven leads you to valuations, right. And multiples. Right. And so now here's the challenge once the market, because at the end of the day, we're selling coffee and coffee services, right. We're selling a product and the world doesn't really need another coffee company, right? Or so it thinks. So how are we going to distinguish ourselves, differentiate ourselves and really be better than all the hundreds of other coffee companies that are out there? And some of them are Bihabas, the giants, right. Huge billion dollar brand names. And here we are, little Mutombo Coffee thinking. In gaining that, we're going to enter that space, right. And it comes to this notion of distinction between values driven and value driven. And we think every customer is not going to be for us, Right. You know, we started the business talking to B2B companies and when you talk to the CEO or the C suite, they talk about their vision and they talk about their mission. But when you go talk to the procurement guy, he's got a budget and he's trying to figure out how he can get everything that he needs for the cheapest price possible in the B2B space, you have this conflict within that organization. The mandate of the procurement officer does not align with the mission and vision of that corporation. When you're trying to be values driven, dealing with certain parts of the decision making fabric and with your clients, they can't have it figured out, that balance. And so we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to communicate both these concepts that now, you know, is our. Is. Is the price of our coffee, the price of Our Coffee Service 3x what, what you're paying for the other guy? No, probably not. But if you get this additional value, right. If you. Right. Is that worth another 2% or maybe 3%? Do you really know where your coffee's coming from? When you haircut 10 or 15% for the price of your coffee or your cocoa, do you really know the impact that's having in that supply chain at Origin now that you know, can we do something about it? Because we're running, right? And so that's. We have to. We have these conversations all the time. It's a complex kind of conversation. And Ultimately give some strategies. So that's kind of the framework of how to think about it. So particular strategies that we use is this notion of what is coffee? If you view coffee as a commodity, then you're trying to do the bogo buy one, get one free. Procurement officer, if you think of coffee literally as a conduit for conversations, is a productivity hack. It's a means by which your teammates will come together. How many times during the course of a day will someone say, can you bring me a coffee back? What happened to the water cooler? And so we imbue values into our coffee service and our coffee offering because coffee is about culture. And once the C suite understands that our coffee is about maintaining a culture and creating collaboration and communication, hopefully, then they tell the guy in procurement, stop beating Bob up and his team on price, because there's so much more value that we're bringing and they're bringing into our organization.
- [12:18]
Dr. Rob Harder
Yeah, no, that makes sense a lot. And I like the idea, the distinction between value versus values driven. Thanks for clarifying that as well. Again, I think it's so wise for nonprofit leaders to know this and understand this. So let's talk about some innovative strategies you put into place. What innovative strategies did you apply to overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic? Number one, and then how has your lesson shaped future entrepreneurial resilience? Like, how have you kept going and stayed sustainable after the pandemic?
- [12:46]
Bob Bush
Yeah. So be careful what you wish for. Right. So the campaign and I.
- [12:52]
Dr. Rob Harder
Right, true.
- [12:52]
Bob Bush
We're having lunch. We were having lunch in the summer of 2020 on these kinds of topics. So we want to. He has a very formidable foundation in charity. And do we want to go strictly nonprofit to continue to do things if we want to create a new business? And so what I'm telling you is the result of those very early conversations that he and I had with our two other founding partners and realized that the social enterprise for profit way was the way to go. Now, what then happened was, and we assumed, because he is the global ambassador to the NBA, we had really good reach into sports leagues and sports teams and sports personalities and celebrities because of his status and stature in that world. But then Covid happens, right? October, NBA, it's not 32 teams out of the United States. Everybody goes into Orlando in the bubble. There's no arena we can sell into. There's no communication we can do. And we learned something very valuable then, and it has really helped form our DNA and leads to your question about resilience. What we quickly Realized to be a successful business, the same challenges that any other business is going through, particularly for us, because our supply chain is thousands of miles away. We're sourcing a product, and so we can't get it, but no one else is getting stuff in. Like, there's just no international trade, no international commerce happening. And so we rethought our strategy. And part of that was, assume there's going to be a shock. You don't have to predict it. You don't know when it's coming. But just make sure that you have a couple basic things in place. You have redundancy, you put some shock absorbers in. We can talk. What's a shock absorber? Shock absorber. One way is make sure you got a reserve of capital if you can. Redundancy is don't rely on one supplier. So when we launched the business, it was really about supporting the Congo farmers. But because of the lessons very quickly that we learned, we quickly realized Covid. Every challenge, every sort of obstacle, you can grow from it, or it can set you back. And we chose to grow through it. And so redundancy and resiliency and thinking about risk mitigation, Covid forced us to be much more intentional about that much earlier than we would have done so normally, right? And so we had Covid and we managed to then diversify supply chains, create more resiliency, realized that we were going to have to be a little bit more mindful about the cash we had raised and our spend, et cetera. So we did all of that very, very quickly. Then I had cancer. My partner got cancer a year and a half later, and he passed five months ago. So the face of the brand, the name on the brand, is no longer able to directly participate in the growth of the business. Another lesson through pain that we had to learn, right? And so I say to you, and I say to your viewers and your listeners, assume something. Assume something. There's going to be a risk, and you have to have the mindset that whatever it is, you're going to grow through it, you're going to learn through it. Have the mindset that there are certain things that you can't control. There's most things you cannot predict, and that's okay. And if that doesn't get you through, just realize, hey, whatever pain we're feeling, the guy across the street is feeling it too. And put in your competitive juices and keep on fighting.
- [16:40]
Dr. Rob Harder
I love it. Well, yeah, sorry to hear about your loss, but also how resilient you've been has been very impressive that you've worked through that and you have a plan to continue to move forward. We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Well, look no further than DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations and simplifies giving for your supporters. With Donorbox, you can create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is www.donorbox.org. well, okay, let's talk about another thing of leadership. What tools and methodologies can leaders really use to make informed decisions? From what you've experienced, particularly when faced with unpredictable circumstances like you just mentioned or, or limited information, what recommendations would you give to nonprofit leaders when it comes to that?
- [17:54]
Bob Bush
Again, I'll sort of start broadly and then we can narrow down to hopefully a few things that are actionable. There is the mindset part of which we talked about and then there is the skill set. Right. The mindset is just preparing for the worst case. And then the skill set is, well, how do you prepare for the worst case? Right. Teams, capital, social capital, financial capital, relational capital, emotional capital. And so I'm going to give you one of the things that I do personally and what I try to do with people that work with me, I call it alignment. And I think this is a bedrock for any entrepreneur or any nonprofit leader. It starts with the spiritual. I'm going to give you a vertical. If you don't recognize that you need to tap onto something greater than yourself, you are going to run out of energy. You're going to have your happiness is going to be too related to happenings and that's never a place to be. So that alignment has to sort of start from a principle or motivation in our case because we're faith based God. And then you go to the intellect, right? How do I align my thoughts, my analytical processes along with my moral compass, that spiritual compass that I have? Then it goes to my heart. Can I still recognize what the data is showing, recognize where my moral compass is and the way that I communicate? Can I still be kind? One of the challenges, and this is not directly your question, but one of the challenges we have and the current administration has, is that even if you're doing the things that you need to do, can you do them with grace? Can you do them in a way that is respectful of the pain that you may be causing, whether or not that pain is deserved or not, right? And then your hands, how do you work? And so that verticality of spirit, intellect, the hands, the heart is part of what keeps our culture, is part of what keeps me centered, no matter what goes on. So that's the north, south, that I call it the other tool, I call it my, my east to west, my horizontal tool. And a lot of people talk about balance, right? That's the, that's the east, the west, and the business that we're in, whether our social enterprise or non profits, there's no way you can weigh true social impact with dollars and cents. And so if you try to do that, you're going to run up against things because you're talking about something that is qualitative and trying to measure it against something that is quantitative. It's the values, value conversation all over again, right? And so what we try to do and we seek partners that think in the same way, it's not about life, work, balance, or making money or giving it away. It's about a blending. And your culture and your business and your teams should recognize that you never want a glass where the bottom of it has oil and the top has vinegar, right? You want to come up with a culture in a way that both of the, all of these elements blend together to produce a tasty treat or tasty drink. And so I use that north south analysis and my east west analysis to try to keep myself to weather whatever storms as well as the company, as well as the ecosystems in which we operate.
- [21:43]
Dr. Rob Harder
I like that. No, that's good. And related to that, then when you talk to, and I'll say both entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders, what are some of the most significant obstacles would you say to entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders today? And how can they build resilience? Again with that theme of resilience, how can they build resilience to overcome those obstacles?
- [22:01]
Bob Bush
I think typically people think, and this is not just what I think, there's quite a bit of data that suggests the following. And let's talk about capital. Many times we think we have a financial capital problem. A money problem. It might be, you have a relational problem, it may mean you have a social capital problem, it may mean you have an intellectual capital problem. Before we raise money or before we start thinking about the financial resources that we need, we've almost always, not in every case, but in almost every case, we realized it wasn't in the case of a nonprofit fundraising or the case of a startup Raising Series A or seed capital. It was really social capital, relational capital, emotional capital, intellectual capital. And if you can get those things, things cooking, the money will come. So the first thing is, if you think you got a money problem, you may, I don't know, you just might. But you might have something that, that's beyond a money problem. And, and the benefit of living in a place like America and being able to talk to people like yourselves and your, and your listeners is usually the money. The money is the least thing that you need to worry about. There are so many other things that if you get them wrong, right, there's a better chance than not that the money will follow. So whatever obstacles you have, try to resist framing it in. I can just throw more money at it. Or if we had a bigger budget, you show me that you can deal with a smaller budget with scarcity and you operate that well, guess what, you're going to get more money, for example, right? You can take a very interesting case that just came out in the last couple weeks is with deep Seq out of China. They're using old chips and they just set the world on fire. Cost all these fancy public companies a trillion dollars in market cap. Scarcity, not having the financial wherewithal, not having the most up to date technology, but they had high intellectual capital, they had some decent social and relational capital. And now everybody across the world is going almost, my God, what did these guys do in their basement? Right? And so now guess what? They can write their tickets for all the money they ever think that they would need because they figure out how to use scarcity, which is often a challenge for foundations, often a challenge for nonprofits, often a challenge for small businesses. And they still figured out how to crack the code on somebody.
- [24:38]
Dr. Rob Harder
Yeah, that's a great example. You're absolutely right on that. That's good. Well, another two options or things that leaders bump up against is risk assessment and just your management. And so when it comes to risk management and management, how do they influence economic decision making and what role does uncertainty play in shaping business outcomes? You mentioned uncertainty a few times. How has that shaped your decisions over the past several years?
- [25:05]
Bob Bush
Yeah, so fortunately I come out of the finance world, so I'm always sort of using tools that I learned in finance and economics and try to apply them into with our social enterprise. Right. And so oftentimes, and I think some of your listeners will understand this, oftentimes I'm just looking at out of the money options. Right. Can we experiment on something? Can we make a small Investment in something, if it hits, great. But we didn't bet the farm on anything. You know, a lot of people think that as entrepreneurs we're risk takers. I am probably one of the most conservative risk averse people you will ever meet. So how is it that I could start a coffee company with the team and keep it going in the middle of all this stuff happening now before COVID the issues that we're trying to address. Coffee in Africa is a 300 plus year old problem. So even before the compounding of the obstacles with COVID and then cancer, we already knew we were taking on something really monumental as we tried to enter this space. Having a risk mitigation framework of things. How do you do that? What edge do we have? What can we find out about local market conditions that maybe everyone else doesn't know? There are lots of things because people were making assumptions. A lot of the uncertainty. Uncertainty is not grounded in fact and reality. A lot of the uncertainty is you are not recognizing that just because you don't know doesn't mean that somebody else doesn't know. So sometimes you are assessing risk based off of your lack of knowledge than what the actual true risk is. So I'm in, I'm in Detroit for the next couple of days, right. And since I don't know where I'm going, I'm worried about what time I leave in the evening and what neighborhoods to go to. There's the actual risk in what the data says about the neighborhood and the likelihood of this and that. And then there's my uncertainty that it is born. Hopefully not by fear, but certainly it's a bit out of ignorance because I just don't know what's going on. And so our default is if we don't put in the work, we assume the worst. And that's not a bad default. It keeps us from being eaten by the lions and tigers or dinosaurs or whatever it happened to be. Although I think the dinosaurs were way before us. But you get the point. Right?
- [27:39]
Dr. Rob Harder
Right, right.
- [27:40]
Bob Bush
And so don't conflate when you're doing the risk, real risk with your fear, real risk with your own sense of uncertainty with your own. And you know how you can really bridge that. We, I, I've said it for the, for the first three years of the business. Do the hard work first. Learn your models, learn your competition, learn your values. If you got purpose and certainty and passion with what you're trying to do. What looks like a cloudy sky for some, well, you know, it's like, well, it's a little bit cloudy today, but thank goodness we've got an umbrella. Right. So I think a lot of this is born not by what's really happening on the ground. There's fear, there's lack of preparation. There are a lot of things. Now that's not to say sometimes it's not about your self doubt. Sometimes there's really something bad around that corner. Right. So I'm not saying be naive at all. I'm just saying be thoughtful about whether or not the risk is really what you think. Because often the stress that you have because of what you don't know could be alleviated if you could just find out more because there's actually information to find out. You just don't know it.
- [28:59]
Dr. Rob Harder
Yeah, well said. Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I think my listeners may want to find out a little bit more about Mutombo Coffee. Where would you send them? And I also know you've got a special kind of discount for my listeners. Maybe you could talk about that as well.
- [29:11]
Bob Bush
Thank you. So, yeah, mutumbocoffee.com I think it's M u T O m b o coffee.com, m u t o m o m b o. Primarily our business has been B2B and B2G, but we now have an Amazon store as well. Now Amazon is tricky, right? And I know you've got maybe people still listening from Amazon. If you put in our name, there's still a whole lot of paid ads that come in before us. So we don't, we, you know, in order to keep our costs down, we don't do a lot of advertising and marketing. We don't do any of that paid stuff. It really is by virtue of being able to have conversations, real conversations like this. We like to say our coffee is good, but the conversation between the sips is what matters and so it helps us keep our costs down. So Amazon, we have a site there, Mutumbo Coffee, as well as our website. And yes, we like to always say thank you when we're invited. On podcasts like yours, we provide A, a VIP pricing leadership 2. 5 leadership 25 and anyone that puts that in when they're placing their order, we give a 25% discount to your listeners. And so really loved it. I, I think you're at, you got, you've got some really cool shows coming up and love to figure out how we can do more with you and, and, and, and your, your listeners.
- [30:36]
Dr. Rob Harder
That sounds good. Well, Bob, again, thanks for taking time while you're in Detroit traveling to be on the show and share your leadership insights.
- [30:42]
Bob Bush
Yes sir. I appreciate you.
- [30:45]
Dr. Rob Harder
Hey friends. Well, I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google Podcasts, and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the nonprofit leadership Podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofit leadershippodcast.org well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox, DonorBox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.