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The Conscious Entrepreneur | Leadership, Self-Awareness & Mindset
EP 119: High-Performance in a For-Purpose Business: How Strong Leadership, Top Talent, and Mission-Aligned Fundraising Create Generational Change
00:41:03
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- [00:00]
A
Today we're sharing a CEO story from the For Purpose world. My guest today, Jason Jantz, runs a 100 person $20 million organization with the mind of a business and the heart of a nonprofit. Cross Purpose walks with families from poverty to prosperity for as long as it takes, sometimes 10 to 15 years, offering career training, community and wealth building support that creates transformation impacting generations. We talk about why he rejects the help as many people as possible mindset in favor of serving fewer families far more deeply. And how that philosophy shapes the organizational culture and influences the business metrics that run his organization. Jason also offers an unexpected take on fundraising, one rooted in long term relationships and shared vision rather than transactions or gala dollars. If you give to nonprofits, serve on a board, or have ever thought about launching your own mission driven nonprofit, this conversation gives you a sharper, more grounded way to think about your potential impact. You're listening to the Conscious Entrepreneur and I'm Sarah Lockwood. This is the only podcast completely dedicated to the well being of entrepreneurs. It's where we do the inner work to become the leaders our businesses truly need. A thriving business starts with a thriving you. Let's get into it. Jason, welcome to the Conscious Entrepreneur.
- [01:32]
B
Hey, I'm glad to be here Sarah, thanks for the invite.
- [01:35]
A
Yeah, it's going to be an exciting conversation today because you're our first, first for purpose company leader that we've had on the show for a little while.
- [01:46]
B
Yeah, thanks Sarah. I'm one of the founders of Cross Purpose. We are a 13 year old nonprofit that actually walks with people from poverty to prosperity. So we take people who live in financial poverty below the federal poverty guideline, help them get skills for a job, wrap them inside family and relationships, or work on their inner selves as well. Then get them a job that's not just a job, it's a career making over $20 an hour. And then they can also enter into our wealth building and entrepreneurship program upon graduation or we will help them buy a home, save in their 401k for retirement, get a 2 and 4 year degree, save for their kids, college through 529s and start a business or a non profit as well. So that's kind of like it's the boutique all encompassing journey of just loving one human being all the way until the need is completely met. So that's the, the nature of the company. And yeah, I think the success to me is like we are trying to prove what love looks like in today's day and age, especially for the marginalized and those who've been left out of the economy and those who are suffering in poverty. And so I'm still on that journey. We're 13 years in. I'm going to give much of my life to this very question is how can we prove that, as Bono said, love is bigger than anything in its way. And I think, you know, we have gotten some recognition for the work we do because very, you know, most interventions are point in time, six months, three months or whatever. And we walk with someone as long as it takes. So it can be 10 years, it can be 15 years. Once you're part of the family, you're part of the family. So we also are really big into workplace culture. So the last five years we've won Denver Business Journal's best places to work in the small, medium and large companies. As we've grown, as we've scaled across the Denver area and have gotten medal of Excellence awards, things like that, that just are affirmations that this is the right thing for humans to do. We don't really spend too much time talking about the trophies on the wall. Our thing is, are people experiencing the American dream, which the majority of Americans think is no longer possible.
- [04:03]
A
And your organization has, as you said, grown over the years. You have over 100 employees. So this is not a small endeavor by any means. You're the CEO of a large organization with I think, four different locations, right?
- [04:19]
B
Yeah, we've had 40% year over year growth for the last 10 years. So we are pretty tired right now. We just closing out this month. Our last five year plan to move from one location to four locations. We moved from a $4 million company to a $20 million company. And that, you know, that's hard to do. And especially as a nonprofit, like we're not selling a widget that we, you know, take the profits and invest it to make two more widgets. We have to go get free money to do the work that we do. And that that's a hard ask. So. But you know, God's been good to us and we're grateful for it. And we, we now want to move, I think, from being a good company to a great company. And I think even Collins work great by choice will be one of our themes next year.
- [05:03]
A
Well, that's really interesting that you are thinking of the future in such a broad way and have bigger aspirations even after so much success that you've already achieved. I'm curious where this started and how you had a vision of the culture that you've created.
- [05:22]
B
Well, yeah, I was Born in poverty in the Midwest. And my family, we lost our home. It got foreclosed on when I was a kid. And so I grew up in poverty and my family left the Midwest and moved out to Denver, Colorado. And I've been here for 40 plus years. And this town gave us a new lease on life. But I've always had a high empathy for people in human suffering. And poverty to me is human suffering. It's when people don't have the basics for food, clothing and shelter within their context. And so that became a journey for me when my wife and I, I actually was a pastor for a period of my life and we felt that the church didn't, the church we were part of didn't really have a solution to solving the social ills of the neighborhood. And so we actually moved into an urban neighborhood in 2008 with our four boys to just live there, put our kids into the schools there, felt the pain of the neighborhood, live next door to people living in poverty. Of course, we were actually living in poverty at the time as well because we were on ministry type support. And so. But I started asking the question then, like, how do we not just help people in poverty become happier people in poverty? How do we actually help people get out of poverty? Which is a totally different question. Well, my next door neighbor, Tiffany, was living in a section department on SNAP benefits, was working at Walmart for over 10 years in the auto bay, changing oil at like 13 bucks an hour. She was smart, she had a management mindset, but she was living in poverty. So I was like, how do we help her be the woman she was created to be? So that became the North Star. How do we love our neighbor the way we love ourselves? How could we love her in such a way that she could live the life that we would live as a homeowner? We were a homeowner next to her in the Section 8 apartment. So that's really the North Star. I think when it comes to the work of an entrepreneur, the nature of us as entrepreneurs is that we're high adrenaline junkie startup people and we love the new idea. I think one of the plagues of entrepreneurship is that we bounce from idea to idea without actually spending the time necessary to make the idea great. Well, if it's not great, discard it. But if it's a good idea, it takes a lot of work to create an intervention to solve a problem in the world. And so I have been looking differently at longevity. Mother Teresa was 49 years in one organization. Like, we don't think of that anymore in those terms. So I have decided as long as the board would allow, I want this to be my life's work. So I have dreams far beyond where we've reached. I want to create an alternative economy where families in poverty can go get a car loan at 2% from us as opposed to 19% at the dealership with all these markups like so that would be tens of millions of dollars to create an alternative economy in partnership with banks to really unlock the capital and provide wealth opportunities to under resourced communities. So there's a lot of creating left to do in the sandbox. And that's where I focus my time and my energy.
- [08:33]
A
I like the continued focused effort over a long, long period of time. But another lens on that same idea is that rather than giving bit of help to a lot of people, the idea is to go deep with a few. Right.
- [08:48]
B
I think overall one of the plagues of the west is we are drunk on size and scale. Like we think if we, you know, if, if our book, you know, sells 100,000 copies, we're the stuff, you know, or if our product is in all 48 of the 50 states, we're national and by God, if we have three customers in Canada, we're now an international company. Right? Like that's like what we all want in the headlines. But we're not fooling anybody to realize that you can either go deep or wide. You can rarely do both. And I think in the nonprofit space because the problems are so Gargantuan. You know, 138 million Americans live below the average median income of and we would say are don't have really any assets. So then when you look at intervention like we're going to help with food, you just say how many people can we help with food? Food, right. So you end up saying that's what I'm going to focus on. So I would say that's a niche based approach to a specific problem set inside the poverty world. We're more navigators. We're saying if Maria walks into the door, how can we walk with Maria all the way to asset building and home ownership and providing all the support? By the way, Maria works way harder than we do. You know, we provide coaching support, we provide tuition assistance and things like that. But she's really doing the sweat equity necessary to make the most of her life. So you have to decide, I think sometimes on an intervention, do you want size or do you want luminescence? Right. And I've actually chosen like lighting A candle in the darkness is more powerful often than size. And so make something really great and let it attract people who will then copy what you do. You know, unlike many entrepreneurs, I desire to be copied. I want people to take our app and copy it, hack it, license it themselves, pirate it, I don't care. Like, go love people in Georgia, go love people in Maryland, go love people in Arizona. I don't care because there's so much need in the world. So I think when you. We need a different solution to American poverty and the same thinking that got us here is not going to get us out of it. So this is just a new way of looking at long term care and transformational outcomes, which I think I find deep resonance. One of the reasons that we've grown is because a lot of donors are tired of the wide versus deep and they're done with changing the world kind of stuff. And they say, let's just change one family. And by the way, this is how we all think about our own children. So our own children, we love them so much. I mean, I have four boys and one's a homeowner, one is in higher ed right now and he's not really interested in much of the job market. He really likes to study, he would love to study the rest of his life. And it's of great concern to his mother and I. I have another son who dropped out of college, became a scuba diving instructor and he's over in Thailand having the time of his life just now thinking about perhaps maybe I should get a job with a little bit better salary. And then I have one kid that just went off to college. I'm spending all of my time, energy, most of my wife and I's dinners are talking about our children and making sure that they're loved all the way so that they can experience a good life here in this country doing what they love. So if I just took that same thinking and thought of my neighbor in poverty in that way, wow, that would change the world. But it would take a deep sacrificial love over a long period of time.
- [12:21]
A
Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about the organization that you've created and the people that you're attracting to this, this purpose.
- [12:31]
B
As far as the staff goes. Yeah, we start off like most non profits. You, you, you get a few friends and family to support you in the endeavor and then you try to do the work and then you try to widen the net. And so we have aggressively pursued growth of good people. I would say there was a tier where we were all, I would say, taking the mission discount to work for a nonprofit. But then when you realize you're actually trying to solve one of the, I mean poverty is the number one problem in the world. It's the number one social problem in America according to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for the planet. So if you're attacking the number one problem, you actually need the most talented people. And I wanted to create a nonprofit where people didn't have to take a mission discount, where they could actually come and make a career here and they could take almost a lot of stuff they learned in the private sector or in grad school and apply their best thinking and skills. And so I'm proud to say that like we compete at the, often at the regular market or above. And our average salary on our staff is $91,000. So that is a different way of doing that. And to attract a C suite of executives and VPs, you know, we've worked on our comp to actually really start attracting great people. And we had great people at the beginning too, but they couldn't afford to stay there long term. If they had two kids, they had to go work in a different area to do that. So I think first of all is we had to treat our people right. And so matching 401ks every three day weekend. Here's a four day weekend. We try to do the benefits package as much as possible. We have leadership development opportunities inside the staff. We have five women who are currently doing leadership development and spent a week walking the Camino together with a coach. And it's that kind of stuff. I really believe people are everything. And at this stage we're helping so many people in high trauma in the neighborhood that having a good and healthy and strong staff, tackling the number one problem is vital. So tonight we'll have our Christmas party. We'll hand out bonuses, we'll hand out core value awards, we'll hand out checks. It's going to be a blast. And we love each other. That's the big key, is this staff spends a lot of time together building a strong culture.
- [15:00]
A
And you've talked, we've talked about this a little bit that you're a big, big believer in in person relationship building which is, you know, a little bit different in today's work environment.
- [15:12]
B
Yeah, we can't keep complaining about a social unraveling of the fabric and the polarization of culture when the primary place we all spend our energy is we're isolated inside our home offices. And I get it Covid changed the game on this. But our whole model of poverty is building economic, relational and spiritual capital. So the relational capital, in academia, we call that social capital. It's the most powerful force in the world. And so while economics might get you out of poverty, social capital keeps you out of poverty. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Well, when I spend time with people, you know, love can develop and trust can develop. And so we have a. We have a 4:1 on site, remote policy. And. But I would say beyond that, we meet. We have four locations around the Denver area, but we meet once a week in one location, all hundred staff together for an hour and 15 minute staff meeting. And they're shouting each other out. You know, we spend time together. One staff member every week shares their life story with the entire staff through pictures. And it's. It's the most favorite part of our weekly staff meetings. We do it three times a month and then we meet with our directors and VPs and managers once a month during that time. But I would say that is the beating heart of creating culture. I do not know how you can have a great culture without regularly having the whole team come together. Even if you did it online, everybody coming together on a regular basis, you're not going to build the social capital. I think to have a great culture, I don't know how else to do it. We are extraordinarily human creatures and there is something different about being close to each other now. We offer lots of flexibility with core work hours. You can choose to come in at 7 or 9 and leave at 3 or 6, things like that. So we try to be gracious around the scheduling and the flexibility for parents and things. But we spend a lot of time and money at building our family together. We take an annual retreat for two days up in the mountains with the entire staff and we play kickball and we tell jokes and we eat good food. So we want to create a workforce that people actually want to get up in the morning and go to. That's the goal.
- [17:43]
A
That's incredible. And in terms of the way that you actually manage the company and the framework of leadership in the organization, do you have any philosophies that you guys follow? I know we talked a little bit about Vern Harnish earlier as we were talking together. Do you have any sort of management styles or philosophies that you follow?
- [18:07]
B
Yes, we do. I would say that I was trained as a clergyman and I got a master's in theology, so I couldn't even read a financial statement coming out of my master's degree. But I found out I was a social entrepreneur trapped in a pastor's body. When I moved downtown, I put my kids into a turnaround school that was the only school in our neighborhood. But a philanthropist who was a Denver businessman, highly successful, his name was Tom Gammell, came in and adopted our kids school and gave it $1 million. Well then Tom asked me to come work for him in helping him give away his money. And so he actually became a mentor to me for seven years until he passed away in 2015. Ten years ago last month. And he was one of Denver's greatest businessmen, deal makers. And he taught me so much, he didn't even know he was teaching me. But I had never met a person of wealth until I was 35 years old. And he just became like a dad to me. And I miss him deeply. But he taught me how to create an outcomes based nonprofit versus an activities based nonprofit. Most non profits, I say, are funded based on a heads and beds model of funding. We helped 10,000 people this year and we provided beds for 30,000 homeless people. That's activities outcomes. Is was there any transformational outcome in the life of the that person? Right. Did they. Do we find greater housing, stability for them, things like that. So Tom said, I don't care how many people you train in financial literacy. I don't care how many people actually get a certification if they don't get a job that gets them out of poverty. We're not counting it as a success. Well, that changes your entire trajectory of how you craft the intervention and how you think about reporting your stats. Well, nonprofits don't like this because you report a much lower number on the transformational outcome than you do on the activities. So I'd say that's number one. I think number two, we adopted. I met Vern Harnish when I wanted to scale the organization. And so I said, how do you scale? So I googled and found Vern's book Scaling up and took my team and said, we're going to read this book together. And then of course Traction was published with eos. And then I have a friend, Chris Lambert, who took EOS and now has made a version for nonprofits called the Next Level Nonprofit. So we use an EOS like model for our management. And I say we operate with the mind of a business in the heart of a nonprofit. So we're very dashboard driven, data driven. Our results are on screens, on the walls that the public can look at and see where our outcomes are, where our finances are. But that builds trust because our sector, the philanthropic sector, is not known for having that type of rigor around the business. And so that's core to us. We are almost trained as nonprofit leaders that when high impact leaders come in and ask for the reports, we can come across really priestly and like, well, you don't understand how hard the work is here. And you know, transformation takes time and we have trauma, informed care. And so the these leaders just walk out because they're like, these people don't want to really be accountable. And so they get actually chump change gifts from philanthropy because they won't subject themselves to rigorous evaluation. And I was like, let's just do great, great, great work and let's operate with the mind of a business, but the heart of a nonprofit as well. We can do both. Right. And by the way, I think a for profit company can do the same thing, operate with the mind of a business and the heart of a nonprofit. That would make the private sector a great place to work too.
- [21:54]
A
So you're obviously very effective in your fundraising, and I have to think that this approach to the metrics is central to that capability. Can you talk a little bit about how you do approach fundraising in this? Especially as we've talked about, you know, a much more contrarian notion of, you know, it's a few people very deeply. So your metrics do look different and maybe you're looking for supporters that want to do something differently.
- [22:30]
B
Yeah, I think non profit leaders think that big numbers on the last sheet of their annual report will draw philanthropy. And a number is just a number. And so we want to show true transformation. And so we actually pursue what I'd call is more big idea philanthropy and shared vision philanthropy. So most philanthropy, my coach says, is full frontal assault. I sit at a table knee to knee with you, and I hold up my glass that's half empty and say, I need money and you can fill it. And then that person will write a check and say, yeah, we want to help you fill the cup. The best philanthropy is not knee to knee, full frontal assault. It's shoulder to shoulder, looking at a horizon and saying, what do we want to build together? And that becomes transformational philanthropy because you actually then end up in partnership and friendship as you build a solution. So we have people that deeply care about our families and their healthcare. And so we're building this healthcare program because most of our families, a good percentage of our families, have undiagnosed high blood pressure. And are pre diabetic, so we can get them a good job. But if they get diabetes, like that's going to really disrupt the trajectory on that economic growth. But we have other families that are like, I just, I mean, a man yesterday said, I want to give $50,000 just to help homeowners with their down payments. Like, he's all about building assets long term. Well, we've built a partnership with him, a million dollar partnership with him over the years to create on the wealth building side of the nonprofit, there are other people who just want to provide certifications so that people can get into the health profession. So you find out, like, what is the passion of the donor? It's actually donor centric. It's like, what is your heart and passion? Does it fit within our intervention and what we're doing? Or maybe I have a friend down the street and it's better to serve them with your philanthropy down there. But to me, that's become the highlight. We do not do. If I were to write a book on fundraising, I would say how we raised $100 million with no galas, golf events, or good old boys clubs. Because we don't do any of that. None. We've never done a gala, we've never done a golf event. It's small money philanthropy. But when you actually get in a relationship with somebody and say, let's build something together, that's transformational philanthropy. And I would say, even if it's not huge dollar philanthropy all the time, it's just enjoyable. You're building something together with somebody in the community, they can do what you can't, you can do what they can't, and it becomes a mutually enforcing friendship. We have a very small pool of donors that fund our organization.
- [25:21]
A
I was going to ask about that is do you find that it's sustained giving over a lifetime? Is it, you know, a point donation? What. What do you find to be most common?
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B
It's a little bit of both. But I would say if I was giving, if there's any nonprofits here or there are entrepreneurs here who are on boards of nonprofits, I would encourage you to move away from what I call transactional fundraising and move into transformational fundraising. So transactional fundraising looks like a gala. Lock the doors, give everybody a paddle and make everybody feel guilty that they're not giving a gift. That to me is the worst. It's just so dishonoring to me of the human spirit and it feels manipulative to me every time I see it. So I'm like, We don't have to put pressure on people to give. Like if you don't actually really believe in the mission, I don't want you having to feel like you have to give something. So I, I find that it's much more life giving to people to have that kind of relationship that is a transformational relationship.
- [26:30]
A
Interesting. Yes. I think that the norm for fundraising is like that gala mentality and then looking for a giant sponsor and having, you know, a huge dependency on one or two really, really cornerstone philanthropy gifts that without them you might not be able to continue. And that, you know, in that way you, it also sounds like you're a little bit contrarian in the way that you've, you know, financed this, this mission.
- [27:07]
B
Yeah, I mean, one of my coaches, he took over a shop that I think was at 17 million and he took it to 250 million a year with existing donors. Like he actually got better at the relationship with the people inside his house and started casting a vision to them. He called it the campaign of one. Usually someone's going to build a building, they make a brochure, do a capital campaign, get co sponsors, do all this stuff and he makes a brochure for each one of his donors. Like it's a customized and it's usually a multi year commitment, but that's the partnership that's catalytic. And so I, people tell me all the time, well, Jason, you must build a small donor campaign because that's sustainable over the long term. Just run the numbers. It's ridiculous how, how bad that math is. Getting $50 a month donors as opposed to finding a couple transformational donors that you can actually do the journey with. We still offer a small donor campaign. We just don't put a lot of time or energy into it. And I, and I say that because I might be coming across a little hard, but for some people, these are the only tools they've ever been taught is what I call transactional philanthropy. Even sponsoring a gala and you get the logo on the screen, it's technically a transactional, you know, the company is getting some benefit from sponsoring. That's not the big money. The big money is people being moved at their heart to make a sacrifice on behalf of people and suffering. And that, that is how we've grown.
- [28:43]
A
Wow, that's really powerful. When you think about someone who might be listening to this podcast, who is thinking of starting a non profit, they, you know, there's something on their heart that they feel compelled to solve through a for purpose business. As you say, like what Kind of advice would you give to somebody who's really at the beginning of this journey or considering it?
- [29:13]
B
Yeah. Thank you for asking this question. First of all, Google and see who everybody else is in the country that's already had your idea, that's already working on it. Chances are you're not the first. Maybe one out of a thousand. There's nobody else working on that. And then spend a year and go visit the best in the business before you craft your solution. Open your website and tell people you're now going to start an anti trafficking nonprofit. Like there's so much to learn in like, you know, tra. The trafficking anti trafficking movement has become kind of this more recent thing where a lot of people are starting up nonprofits, but there's eight different flavors of intervention on that. There's very few nonprofits that are going to South America. Walking into the house, grabbing the child kind of interventions. That's not really the best model for working on the problem. So I think socialize yourself, find the best people, then craft your intervention. Then you gotta be able to convince a couple of people that what you're doing is worth it. Or don't start because you'll just die a depressed person and you'll be mad and angry. But you've got to get a board chair who can help build a board. And by the way, early on, get a small board of people that you trust. Don't worry about getting the president of the bank. That's not the key to the board. The board is there to help provide some governance. They're usually not on a startup, not the biggest financial donors. But then you do need some keystone donors to help give you a year to two of Runway so that you can start crafting the solution to move forward. And then I say there's no shortage of money for a good idea backed up by a solid plan. Get a five page written business plan on how you want to do it, including the people, the budget, the timeline. And please don't forget the impact you plan on having in the first three years. That is your primary fundraising tool. More than a website, more than a business card, more than a gala is that business plan. And then you go to people that already trust you and you start from there. You show them the full plan and you ask them to engage in a three year gift with you to do a startup and say it's going to be a rough startup, we're starting from scratch. And you know, this is the life of the entrepreneur. But that's how I go about it and I would borrow most of your brains interventions from other high quality practitioners around the country that you can model.
- [31:56]
A
What I'm curious, when you are paying people on your team so much and highly compensating them, do you find a lot of pushback from people who are donating or financing this? About that, it seems, I mean, I feel like I'm involved with a couple of different nonprofits and one of the things I always have paid attention to in the past is how much money the sort of executive leadership is, is taking. And you're making me think a little bit differently about that now. But is that a pushback area?
- [32:32]
B
I get zero pushback. But I've also cultivated a family of donors that believe in this. They believe talent is the key to solving problems. It's what I believe. We have to ask ourselves a question. Why would somebody in the social sector working a job that is actually harder than the private sector because you have to go get free money, right? As your, as your customer, plus the customer that you're serving, so to speak, why would they get less? And if we pay them less, we're going to get less quality leaders across the board. Like there's exceptions. We're going to get the Mother Teresa once in a while, but by and large, you're going to get the talent that you pay for. And so if you're just not dependent on finding the next Mother Teresa, you got to figure out how to draw talent to the situation. The biggest complaint of our sector is that they're sloppy in the work that they do. 80% of all nonprofits are under a million dollars of revenue. We're not going to solve the problems of the world unless we grow and scale the social sector to solve some of our most pressing problems. So you could make the case that you should be paying social leaders, social sector leaders, 30 to 50% more than the private sector would pay a COO. If you really want to solve the problem, if you're worried that donors are going to flee, you're getting the wrong donors. Right? You're getting people that actually think this is just a charity play. This is the do gooders of society. We want to make sure that we're giving money to those that we serve. All those arguments at the private sector, nobody deals with that. So it's amazing to me that in a climate in which CEOs are making 100 and 200x what their bottom line employees are, that we dis executive pay. It's all out there. And personally, I've lived in Poverty, middle class and wealth in my life, the first two thirds of my life, I live below the average median income. But I get paid now based upon a rating on the size of nonprofits. Like if you're leading a nonprofit of this size, there's these metrics out there of what you should pay and things like that. So I just say we're going to pay at market. My goal is to have a comp package that has 100% on parity with the market and the private sector. And if people want to give generously back to the organization, they can. So I don't know if that helps, but that's really how I think about it. And there's a great TED talk, I think it's by Dan Palata on this issue of why we treat the social sector the way we do and why it's wrong. And he just came out with a movie called Uncharitable which talks about this whole issue of we've got to change the mindset around cop, even charity and philanthropy, on how we do things, how we approach funding these things differently. And he has some great interviews on there on that movie about really innovative ways. I mean, there's one woman who's taken her nonprofit public to the stock market and that's a different way of thinking about how we fund our most pressing problems.
- [35:46]
A
Wow, this looks like an amazing resource. I might put that on the old Netflix playlist. Get into it. What an interesting conversation today. And I think that this is great for our community of listeners who are entrepreneurs and thinking about your take on this, you've obviously been incredibly successful. You've done things very, very differently and found a tremendous amount of success. And it's kind of a case study for people who might be considering starting something on their own or you know, know, even just supporting a nonprofit or a for purpose organization, taking a little bit of a different lens on that support and if you sit on boards, you know, maybe bringing some of these ideas into those organizations, it's a, it's a different take and it seems like a very good one.
- [36:38]
B
Well, I, I also want to say this too. Like if you're out there, you know, I'm, I'm a member of EO and so I hang with 170 entrepreneurs here in the Colorado area. And a lot of people have a heart to give back and I would encourage you to think about what I would call leader backed philanthropy. So for some reason, if you go to Silicon Valley and you go to a pitch event, people don't really care what the app is that you're selling. They look at the team slide. Who, who is doing this venture and if it was one of the founders of PayPal or Amazon, that that like goes up to the top of the register because they say these people know how to build something. The idea is almost secondary to the team because they say if that team is working on this, then it's probably going to go. Even if it's an average idea, philanthropy is the opposite. We say we want to help food insecurity in our city and okay, now let's go find the nonprofits that can deliver this intervention. And it could be led by a very average leader. You might be just wasting your money. Why do we not think of the social sector with leader backed philanthropy? So rather than cause based philanthropy or like Mackenzie Scott, she's been coming out with what's called trust based philanthropy. She just writes a check to good organizations with no grant application, no reports due. I trust you. You're doing good work. Use the money how you see fit. That she's changed philanthropy just with how she's given money. But I propose a third one is leader backed philanthropy. Find a good leader who will make a commitment to an organ and intervention for a period of time and get behind them and write a non restricted check and bring your, not bring your friends together, say we're behind you. What is the whiteboard of your dreams and how can we help you get there? And you will keep good leaders in the sector when you do that.
- [38:47]
A
Great advice. I love that. Jason. Thank you.
- [38:50]
B
Well, Sarah, I do feel we're on the front edge of learning. There's a ton we don't have answers to and that we're pursuing. And so I hope I just what I shared causes people perhaps to think I care about the people who are suffering in this country. Like, if. We are going through the largest wealth transfer in global history in the next 25 years, $124 trillion will be transferred to the next generation. Okay, that's enough to craft. There's like 58 million households in poverty by the most generous definition. We could literally put a $200,000 intervention in place per household. $200,000 of an intervention. I'm not saying give them the money. I'm saying help them with a program to get them to achieve the American dream. That's not even 10% of the wealth transfer. It's not even $12 trillion. Like we need to. Like my plea to the listeners is let's go all in. Like our founders said, we believe in life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And to do that, we will pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Well, at this 250th anniversary of our country next year, will we make a sacrificial investment of our time and our treasure and our talents to help the people in our country who are still suffering? That that's my passion and my heart and my hope for anybody listening to this, that wherever you are, in whatever American community you're in, just love people for the long haul until the needs completely met.
- [40:40]
A
Well, with that very poignant question, I think we will close today. Jason, thank you.
- [40:45]
B
Thank you, Sarah.
- [40:47]
A
Thanks for listening to the conscious entrepreneur. Every episode here is meant to sharpen how you lead and how you live. If something landed for you, please share it founder to founder. I'll meet you here next week.