← The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
How I’m Protecting My Family & Business In An Unstable World
00:21:02
This week, Morgan DeBaun opens up about how she’s preparing for uncertainty in 2025 — both at home and in business. With the world feeling increasingly unpredictable, Morgan shares the steps she's taking to protect her family and safeguard her...
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Morgan DeBon
So this is a different type of episode today, you guys, because there's just so much going on in the world. And I feel like we need to talk about some things, particularly like how I've been adjusting my risk management in our household and for our business because the world is really unstable. And I feel like all of us want to have this kind of, like, I don't want to be paying attention energy. Like, I would prefer for my own mental not to tune in. I would prefer to turn the TV off. But this is also the moment where you can't turn the TV off. Like, this is the moment where you have to find alternative news sources to figure out what's going on. Because it is very quickly becoming a situation where certain messages and certain figures who were sources of some variants of U. S. Propaganda, but really just like some allowance of some truth are being kicked off news channels. Like Joy. Joy Reid. And I look at people like Don Lemon, Angela Rye, Joy Reid, Roland Martin, you know, these people who have dedicated their whole lives to being stewards of truth and information and keeping the pressure on people's necks, and they are all building these giant YouTube and Internet empires that they can control so that they are able to actually still get information out to us. Like, I. I want to give a huge shout out to Roland, who literally anytime some, like, crazy shit goes down, Roland is texting me like, yo, sis, we got to do this. You know, like, he is just one of those people who's so genuine to his core of wanting what's right and what's best for African Americans and what's best for black people in this country. You know, even Amanda Seals, who literally is like, I'm off Instagram. I know a lot of people don't like Amanda, and I understand that she rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but she still was at least somebody who would apply pressure and allow us to think differently. Differently about. Maybe we should question the situation. Again, not saying you always agree with her, but at least she's asking critical questions. And so what kind of company do we become as blavity? What kind of people do we become as a community? What kind of citizens are we if we're not able to sit with other people who are critical of the system in which we are operating within a system that we did not choose necessarily. Some people chose it. Actually, millions of people chose the system that we're living in right now. And they're definitely in the, you know, fo situation because things are about to get real tough with these tariffs Things are about to get real tough with the stock market. So I just wanted to walk through some things that me and my family are doing as well as in business, what we're doing. Hey everyone. I'm Morgan Debon, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success us. With permission from no one else, I'm gonna start on the personal life side. So first things first, we stocked up on just some necessities because I'm most concerned with like the day to day risk that now we're incurring things like food quality, things like air quality, water quality, you know, in a system, particularly living in Tennessee, in a system where things are going to get dysregulated more so than they've ever been before and where the checks and balances are decre, you know, there's going to be a lot of room for capital, greed and people to cut corners and not really get checked for that. So, I mean, you guys have seen like every week it feels like there's a new report of listeria in some organic broccoli that I'm like, how does organic broccoli that's triple wash supposed to have like, how's it have listeria in it? You know, so nothing is safe. So we're shopping at farmers markets. We're doing local community CSAs this summer. So that's for community agriculture, effectively. We buy a box every week, we pick it up, it's got all the veggies we need for the week and more, frankly. And it's incredibly cost effective. We always grow our own basil and tomatoes and things like that here at the house. I'm very bad at gardening. If you listen to me talk before. I'm very bad at a lot of things. This is one of them. But we will give it a go again this year. The other thing that we're doing is Josh is in the process of researching deep freezers and we're going to probably buy, you know, some take it further with meat. So buy a quarter of a cow, probably some chickens, and just try to make sure that the diversity of food that we're eating is more localized in nature and also supporting the local agriculture nearby here in Tennessee. But then also just knowing that, like knowing the people that are making the food that we are eating, you know, the other Thing I think about a lot is, like, restaurants and restaurant food quality. I mean, even something as simple as like, Chick Fil? A. You guys have seen Chick Fil? A no longer has as many regulations around what type of chicken quality that they're even gonna give us, right? So the eating out, we are not very good at this. We eat out probably two, three times a week minimum, maybe even more, just because we've got a lot going on. So we're just trying to figure out, okay, do we do a lot more food prep and then have food in the deep freezer? We gotta figure out basically how to do that. So that's something we're working on. The next thing that we've done is buy a variety of types of batter. So batteries that are big enough to ensure all of our devices are charged, that are mobile. And then we also have a huge battery that is not very mobile, but that can generate enough power for our house. That's effectively a generator. Again, we live in Tennessee. There's lots of tornadoes, there's floods, there's all types of things that can happen on the power grid here. And so we just want to make sure that regardless of the situation, we have access to power so that we can do what we need to do and take care of our family. We created an exit strategy. Now, this is. This got really weird. Like, I asked Josh, what would we do if we needed to get out? Like, if we needed to get out of the city and we couldn't fly, what would we do? Because we're landlocked, right? So he was like, okay, I would probably drive to. We've got family that lives in Asheville. So he was like, I'd probably drive to Asheville. And I'm like, but if it's just popping off here, it's probably popping off in Asheville too. I mean, I guess there's like more nature there, so it's like easier to be self sustaining there. But we really had to think about if we could not fly to get out because we waited too long for whatever situation is going down, what would our plan be? Now, again, this might seem very extreme, but when you have a child, you unfortunately, like, your brain kind of forces you to go there. At least mine does. Because if it's just me and him, we can do a lot of stuff. Like, I'm like, bro, like, we got it, you know, But I got a toddler on my back. I need a. I need a plan. Because our son is not about to sit in the car for 10 hours necessarily like, you know, like, you don't do what needs to be done, but like, we need a plan and I don't want to be last minute with it. Which then brings me to kind of all of our materials and, and just making sure we have enough stuff so we actually have a relatively stocked house. So we don't need a lot of things. But there's some basics that I didn't have. I didn't have anything for water storage. I didn't have a water filtering system that would allow us to, you know, have drinkable water if we wound up in a situation where the water filtering system of the city wasn't working. So we bought that. We bought. I can't remember what it's called, but it's like the thing that you can store water in your bathtub if you need to, which goes a long way. We also bought a variety of seeds. So if we wound up in a situation again where food was something that we needed to manage, um, just bought, you know, backlog of like seeds and just some super simple food items that would allow us to manage ourselves and manage our family. I didn't go out and buy like a whole room of canned goods. Like, I feel like there's going to be a step between now and where we're. Where we're going, that we can go get some canned goods. Okay. But I did feel like there could be a not that much time between a step from where we are now and a. You know, we'd feel safer if we weren't in a city right now. Or we'd feel safer if we could just like filter our own water. I remember a few years ago here in Nashville, there was these crazy floods and people weren't ready. And so everyone's basement flooded and my parents basement flooded. My parents are in their mid-60s, so it was a lot of work to get all the water out and drain all the water out into their yard. And since everyone around them was also draining all the water into the yard, the neighbor to their left was draining the water from their yard and their basement into our yard. And so I was like, I'm not about to have my parents work all day, all night clearing this water out for then you to put more water back into their yard, you know, so. And we went to. We needed another water pumper because we just wanted it to move faster. And they were all sold out. Right? So like, in that scenario, the fact that my parent has had a water pumper at all to be able to get this water out was helpful. But like that's the scenario in which a disaster happens. You go to go get the water filter, you go get the water pump or you go to get the, whatever, the generator and they're all sold out because everybody had to do the same thing at the same time. So those are the things that we're basically just pre planning for and just making sure we have options for. So yeah, those are, those are like the main things we've also just thought about like do we have like matches in the house? Do we have fuel in the house? Like do we have gas, you know, somewhere in the house? Like just making sure that we have those things that if something happens, we're not scrambling for a basic necessity in order to be mobile. So that's what's going on in our personal life. I don't think that this is going to happen. I don't think that this stuff is needed. But I also believe that we can't be naive that this. There was a point in other countries in which people didn't think something would happen and then it did. And you don't know you're at that point until it happens. You know what I'm saying? So I think it's best to be thoughtful, spend a little bit of energy and time figuring out what makes sense for you and what your risk tolerance is. How much time do you think you have between point A and point B? And just come up with a game plan. We bought a paper map. Oh, that was critical. A paper map. Imagine a world in which you don't have the Internet. So how do you know where you're going? So we got a paper map. Okay, so just things like that. Just literally just ask your like what if this and what if this and then what? And then what? And then what? And then what? And then what? And don't do it forever because you can go into an entire depression and doom scroll and like all this thing. But just that is what I've done. Okay, so moving on to business. So business is a bit more difficult. So I run two companies, as you all know, Afro Tech, which is a community and ecosystem of technologists and innovators and it's tied to capitalism and it way it is either to encourage people to participate in owning assets as an employee and work at these companies that have extreme value and grow your assets through that, or it's to create your own companies, invest in other companies and take ownership that way. So how do you protect a company and a brand that's built on capitalism when the narrative is that when you are a person of color in this country, you're given all these extra steps in order to be successful and you're giving all this extra treatment to be given a seat at the table when that's actually not the case, you're given negative steps, they put more barriers for you to get a seat at the table and then put even more barriers for you to stay there and rise up. So there's kind of this catch 22 where in order for Afro Tech to continue to exist, we have to participate in the ecosystem in which there's high growth. And we also are living in a situation in a government that is highly influenced by tech oligarchs, if you would. Right. Like a very small amount of people, 10 to 15, have a significant amount of power and control all of the Internet that we are all consuming information and doing work on every single day. Everything from Slack to Salesforce, which owns Slack, to WhatsApp, Instagram meta to soon to be TikTok, Reddit. Right. Like it's just a handful of people that own all these things. So what do we do? So for Afro Tech, we've doubled down on helping and working with venture capitalists and founders. Because my belief has always been that one of the ways for us to grow as people and to grow in power is to be significant equity holders and asset owners. And in order to be an asset owner that's significant enough to have power, you really to be an investor where you're taking a 10 to 15%, 20%, 5% or you need to be a founder. Okay. And there's a time in Afro Tech where that was really a huge part of our focus. But then as the black tech community grew and professionals grew, the pie grew. And so even if we were able to serve a thousand, two thousand founders, you know, when you've got 30,000 young professionals that are really trying to get their foot in the door and grow, then they kind of gobble up all the attention. So we're really shifting our attention back to entrepreneurs, VCs and limited partners, people who are investing in even the top of the funnel for those venture funds and making sure that there's a seat for them at Afro Tech, that they're giving speaking engagements, that we're inviting them to our private dinners, our happy hours. And then we've also created a membership called Afro Tech Insider so that we can have regular meetings and skill based conversations with entrepreneurs, founders, small business owners to help them get to the next level. Because 80% of small business owners in this country have an employee of one themselves. So how do we help not just them raise money, but also just have a profitable, sustainable business so that they have optionality. There used to be a lot of resources for black founders. There was Founders Gym by Mandela. There was all these accelerators and different programs. There's NewME Accelerator by Angela. There's so many different things. All those things have kind of gone away. There's Techstars, there's Y Combinator, there's 500 Startups. But other than those three accelerators, which are not black specific, a lot of those resources have gone away. So we're trying to make sure that those resources are still available so that we can help people get to the next level. Because it's never been more difficult than it is today to raise money, which I feel like we say every year, but unfortunately it is still. It is still the case. The next thing that we're working on the media side is there's this really weird thing in media where all these brands are saying, we don't prioritize D and I. We're not going to prioritize D and I. And yet for them to grow as companies, remember, we're in a capitalistic society. So for them, in order to grow as companies, in order to increase market share, they're going to need minority consumers because the minority consumers are about to become the new majority, like in five seconds. Okay, so to basically say we're not going to prioritize black and brown multicultural agencies, we're not going to prioritize advertising to multicultural audiences, we're not going to run campaigns to celebrate multicultural communities and heritages. It's just, honestly, just dumb. And so they're saying one thing on the left. Well, really, it's on the right. They're saying one thing on the right, like, we're getting rid of dni. But on the left, they're still being held accountable to shareholder growth. And they're still being accountable to consumers actually buying their products and purchasing their products. And in order for them to grow their market share, they're going to have to convert black and brown consumers to buy their products. So they're at this really weird thing where they're saying one thing, but behind closed doors they're doing another. They're still buying ads with companies like Blavity, they're still doing content and advertisements in Spanish because they need to reach new consumers who are. Spanish is their first language. Like, so what we've been trying to do as a company is basically say, look, we saw your DNI statement, we don't agree with it, and now we're going to upcharge you effectively. So there's certain clients and certain partners where we're like, you're not allowed to buy these types of products from us because you're not really rocking with us unless we're buying your products. And we're a core consumer for you. So until your leadership makes a different decision about the messaging that they want to have, we're not a good fit for you. You can buy some display ads and stuff like that, but when it comes to, like, brand deals and sponsorships and stuff, we're being very careful with the things that we say yes to. And we're being. We're having a lot of conversations behind closed doors with these advertisers who said these huge public statements and then want to have a meeting about how to reach black consumers. As one of the brands that is the largest conglomerate for reaching black consumers, we have that power to basically be like, tell me more about the statement that your CEO made, though. Like, tell me more about that. So that's what we're doing behind the scenes. I've been on the phone with more chief diversity officers. I haven't been on this. On the phone with this many chief diversity officers who are changing their titles, by the way, but I haven't been on the phone with this many chief diversity officers since George Flores. Murderers. For real. And I don't love that. I don't love that. I mean, I'm happy that I'm able to give them some counsel, but I also am disappointed that everything's so fickle when in reality, we've been very loyal customers to so many of these businesses for so many years. So those are the different things that are happening behind the scenes and that we're working through. But I just think that for anyone who's an entrepreneur who's listening to this or watching this, you kind of have to decide where you're going to stand 10 toes down and then also decide where you're going. Like, you know what? This is just potato, potato. Like, I'm going to choose not to put a lot of energy over here while there's all this political fodder. And I'm just going to stay focused on my core mission. And there's going to be times when you're like, no, like, I'm actually going to stand up for something right now, and I think it'll make a difference. So you got to decide what that risk tolerance is for you in your company. The other thing is that we're reducing our budgets. We had a budget that we spent months building, and we're being even more lean this year. And the reason for that is we don't know what's going to happen at the top of the political system. We don't know what's going to happen with consumer spending, with the tariffs. And so if there's a situation where advertising decreases significantly, job availability decreases significantly, I want to make sure that our company has enough cash in the bank to withstand the ups and downs. And with any business, longevity and resilience is one of the reasons you win. A lot of my competitors, a lot of my counterparts have not won, and I've gone out of business because they overspent and then they did not pull it back. So we're doing that as reasonably as possible, you know, reducing frequency of content where needed. There's a lot of things we do just because it's the right thing to do or it's the fun thing to do. So we're cutting any sort of fat that doesn't impact, you know, our employees. So those are just the things that I'm managing. So hopefully that was helpful for you. Let me know what other questions you guys have about how I'm managing these things, personally or professionally. We are taking a new approach with the podcast of me spending a lot more time doing more direct conversations with you all. And I really hope that this helps you feel empowered to be in control of what happens to you, to be in control of how you react to situations, because you've been proactive, thinking through all the risk that might come your way. And that's one of the core values that I live by, is like, like I want to be in the driver's seat as much as possible and I can choose to think through various scenarios. It's one of the core kind of frameworks in my book is basically how do you make effective decisions and how do you think through decisions that allow you to have an openness to growth so that you, you already manage the risk in your mind proactively. And that's been one of the key things that has kept me growing year over year, regardless of what is thrown my way. So let me know what you think of this episode. Leave a comment if you are watching on YouTube, make sure you subscribe. If you're watching or listening to this on podcast, make sure you subscribe and leave a review until next time. I'll see you later. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Journey podcast. If you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own journey.