Loading summary
Transcript113 lines
- [00:09]
Ben Walter
As the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana, neared, Gary LeBlanc was planning to do what he did. Cook. His company, Mercy Chefs, was inspired by that storm, and he was committed to catering several events to mark the occasion.
- [00:25]
Gary LeBlanc
I committed to doing a couple of events that were a little beyond where we were at the time, but I thought we'd be able to find funding.
- [00:34]
Ben Walter
Had generally come easy to Gary, mostly because he was funding Mercy Chefs himself out of his own pocket.
- [00:40]
Gary LeBlanc
I would use my own credit cards to buy food and gas and all the other things we had to do, and then I'd get home and I'd raise some money, and I'd pay my credit cards back down, and then we'd be ready to go again.
- [00:53]
Ben Walter
And the 10th anniversary was a huge deal in the Southeast.
- [00:57]
Gary LeBlanc
I thought everybody was gonna get excited and find their passion and their heart again on the 10th anniversary of Katrina.
- [01:07]
Ben Walter
But it wasn't a big deal to everyone.
- [01:10]
Gary LeBlanc
We got down to it, and I was short. I was overdrawn in the bank account, and I wasn't gonna be able to make it happen. And for me, and the birth of Mercy Chefs and my heart in New Orleans, that was just crippling. And I called one of our board members at the time and said, bake, I've made a huge mistake.
- [01:35]
Ben Walter
Welcome to the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On the Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring moments of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. Today is a classic tale that many small business owners face. Where is the next dollar coming from? As a banker, this is a question I think about a lot. But for many of our small business owners, because they're working on a product or service they're passionate about, it's not always top of mind. They love their businesses, and sometimes the money comes second. But as we'll see today, especially for a company like Gary's, that's a not for profit. As great as the mission is, the money sometimes has to come first. Joining me again today is Kathleen Griffith.
- [02:22]
Kathleen Griffith
Hey, Ben. Glad to be back. Don't we all just love Gary? He's going up against natural disasters, hurricanes and fires and tornadoes and every calamity you can imagine. And he's this force of nature himself.
- [02:37]
Ben Walter
On today's episode, Mercy Chefs from Portsmouth, Virginia. To really understand Mercy Chefs, I think you need to understand a few things about Gary LeBlanc himself. First, he's from New Orleans.
- [02:54]
Gary LeBlanc
I have two Louisiana grandmothers, one very Cajun and one very New Orleanian.
- [03:01]
Ben Walter
Second, he was raised in the thick of Southern hospitality by those grandmothers.
- [03:05]
Gary LeBlanc
It was always about food and family and friends. And my grandmothers would cook for any occasion, and it would often go from three or four people to 30 or 40 at the drop of a hat.
- [03:18]
Ben Walter
Third, he hated cooking in professional kitchens, but he made his career in hotels and hospitality anyway.
- [03:24]
Gary LeBlanc
You don't have holidays. You work a bazillion hours every week. You rarely get a full day off.
- [03:31]
Ben Walter
He got started in some of the country's finest establishments.
- [03:35]
Gary LeBlanc
The commander's palace, Mr. B's, and then the Monoleon. My first year in the business, Paul Prudhomme was the executive chef. And watching his incredible passion in relentless pursuit of a flavor or a nuance or a remembrance. So my introduction into hospitality was with the very best practitioners of the art.
- [04:01]
Ben Walter
But by 2005, Gary was too far up in the food chain, so to speak, to have to work in kitchens himself.
- [04:07]
Gary LeBlanc
I had people that had people that did food. I was running a Hilton hotel group in Virginia as managing director, living very comfortably. Thought I had reached the pinnacle. I had achieved everything I wanted to do in the industry. And Katrina hit New Orleans.
- [04:28]
Ben Walter
For those who may not remember, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast on Aug. 29, 2005. It destroyed New Orleans, particularly the Lower 9th Ward and Lower land areas where the levees didn't hold. But the worst part of the disaster was man made. Local, state and federal officials failed to respond quickly or appropriately to the disaster, leading to thousands of people displaced in 100 degree heat. With no home to return to, the entire country watched as the city struggled to survive.
- [04:57]
Gary LeBlanc
It was incredibly horrifying for me. The images from New Orleans, the pictures on tv, those folks that were standing on the bridges waiting to be rescued. I started recognizing people that I used to work with. That was when I knew I had to do something. The pictures on TV were just too compelling for me to sit by and watch and not do anything. Texting $10 wasn't going to ease my soul. So I went down and did the only thing I knew how to do that could help. And I cooked with all these other groups and studied what they were doing.
- [05:32]
Ben Walter
And what Gary saw, he didn't like.
- [05:36]
Gary LeBlanc
Scooping green beans right out of the can and putting them on a plate with three frozen chicken nuggets and a slice of white bread. I mean, that kept people al they called that a meal, but that didn't show love, that didn't show respect. The food didn't reflect love or passion or professionalism. It didn't look like what I was used to seeing my family do, not throwing rocks at any of them. But I thought you could do high quality chef prepared food in the same quantities as other folks were doing bad food. And that dissatisfaction with what I saw and the aftermath of Katrina was the genesis. You can do better and there is an obligation to do better.
- [06:19]
Ben Walter
That thought occupied Gary's every waking hour.
- [06:23]
Gary LeBlanc
It took nine months and I was completely consumed with ideas. I was up in the night and I love to sleep. It's not like me to be awake at night. I had legal pads that were full of recipes, kitchen designs. I did BTU equations. I mean, crazy things, things that I had never done.
- [06:44]
Ben Walter
Btu, if you happen to be wondering, is a British thermal unit, which is a layman's term for a unit of heat. In this case, it would be like cooking appliances, stoves, ovens, and the like. Gary's BTU math was about how much heat he'd need to cook at the scale that was needed for a disaster like what had happened in New Orleans.
- [07:01]
Gary LeBlanc
It was a man on fire kind of moment.
- [07:04]
Ben Walter
This really became an obsession for a period of time while you were trying to get this thing off the ground.
- [07:08]
Gary LeBlanc
I was so consumed, I couldn't work. I was a madman. And one day I was like, this is not good. I'm distracted from my job. I have a lot of people depending on me and I've got to get rid of this. I can't keep being consumed. Obviously, Mercy Chefs is a faith based organization. And so I took that afternoon and I went home and I said, I'm just going to pray through this and I'm going to ask God to take this burden off of me and let me get back to my real job. And in that afternoon of prayer, it was a moment. It was an audible moment. I heard, feed people. Just go feed people. It was a transient moment in my life, in that moment of hearing that simple command, feed people. Just go feed people.
- [08:01]
Ben Walter
This was a definitive calling to pursue Mercy chefs. But Gary really, really didn't want to go back into the kitchen. He didn't know if he could get out of it, but he sure did try.
- [08:12]
Gary LeBlanc
I was drug kicking and screaming. I mean, I was Jonah. I was trying to run away from this thing. I sat down with one of those yellow legal pads and I wrote down seven or eight people that I thought could do this better than me. And I was like, God, wait, here are the people that you should be calling. Do you need phone numbers, emails? What do you need? I don't understand why you got me on the line. Wrong guy.
- [08:37]
Ben Walter
Unfortunately, it seemed Mercy Chefs had found exactly the right guy. So Gary gathered up his legal pads and got in contact with all the organizations he'd volunteered with after Katrina and.
- [08:48]
Gary LeBlanc
Said, hey, I've got this concept, this business model. And they were patient. They listened, they looked at it, and then they shook their head and said, you're insane. This is not sustainable. It's going to cost too much money. It's going to take specialized equipment. It's going to take specialized employees. You're going to have to buy groceries to do high quality. You can't use leftover warehouse excess. We're not interested at all. And so it became obvious to me that Mercy Chefs was going to have to just happen independently.
- [09:20]
Ben Walter
Gary confided in his family and friends about the idea. They also thought he may be a little insane, but not enough to stop him. They just had a warning. Proceed with caution.
- [09:31]
Gary LeBlanc
There are some common threads, but one of the biggest ones was, keep your day job. Great advice. And so I did. I kept my day job. We filed all of our paperwork and got our 501C3 very informally, just trying to plow along. And, I mean, I founded mercy chefs on LegalZoom, which was a really great idea at the time.
- [09:52]
Ben Walter
You keep saying we can I ask who we is in those early days?
- [09:56]
Gary LeBlanc
Well, in the early years, we was just me. I was just trying to grow to what I could put my hands around. I had no idea what Mercy Chefs would become. I just knew the next step. I used to drive and set up and cook and then tear down and then come home all on my own. And it just quickly became a lot. It began to grow.
- [10:20]
Ben Walter
As it grew, word spread that Gary was trying something radical. The first deployment for Mercy Chefs came from a friend at the organization Feed the Children.
- [10:28]
Gary LeBlanc
They were working a flood in Conklin, New York, and they said, we have a church up there, and they're doing really great, but they're tired and they don't have the professional acumen that you talk about. Can you go up and help out? So I took my wife and my two kids. They were 7 and 9, and put some cutting boards in my knives and a little hot box in the back of our car. And so we went up and just worked with them on inventory controls and rotation. And I showed them some high Volume cooking tricks and just gave them the tools they needed to be successful and saw a real change happen in that kitchen. But again, those early years, it was just sort of me against the world. It was good again. We were able to perfect some models. I was able to make mistakes, I was able to learn, I was able to get better.
- [11:22]
Ben Walter
Once he had that flood under his belt and knew what he was doing, the opportunities, the disasters, they just kept coming after that.
- [11:30]
Gary LeBlanc
It was a tornado in Arkansas, then there was another tornado in Florida. And yeah, I think Hurricane Ike in Beaumont, Texas was the first hurricane that we worked after we founded.
- [11:45]
Ben Walter
While the disasters kept happening, the money didn't always flow.
- [11:50]
Gary LeBlanc
For about the first five or six years, our business model was I'd use my own credit cards. And when my credit cards got full, that's when I knew it was time to come home. We had a bank account, but nothing in it. When I got home, I'd just call family and friends and raise enough money to pay off the debt that I had incurred and then we'd be ready for the next disaster.
- [12:12]
Ben Walter
They'd send what they could. But in the beginning, Gary was his own biggest donor.
- [12:17]
Gary LeBlanc
When you're the major donor, you really put some skin in the game. It's not a good business model. But again, people started to hear about what we were doing and came alongside.
- [12:29]
Ben Walter
Their belief in Gary's cause was tested when he decided he was ready to get his own mobile kitchen.
- [12:34]
Gary LeBlanc
We needed to raise $50,000 for that first mobile kitchen. It seemed insurmountable at the time. And there were just some people that said, you know, we really think this is what you need to be doing. Show us how to help.
- [12:51]
Ben Walter
So can you describe to our listeners, but also to me, what is a mobile kitchen? Cause in my head I'm just thinking food truck, but that might not be quite right.
- [12:58]
Gary LeBlanc
Yeah, I had never seen a mobile kitchen before Katrina. I had never worked in one. And so it's a commercial kitchen and they put wheels underneath it. Our kitchens are very purpose built for what we do. We're pulling hours now with freight liners. We have fold down sides or fold down backs on most of them. In our big ones, we put in walk in refrigerators right on the trailer. They have to be flexible, they have to be nimble. Are we doing 500 meals a day or are we doing 15,000 meals a day? And so the kitchens have to be able to do both very well. It's an incredible thing. We can pull into a parking lot and be putting out tens of thousands of meals overnight.
- [13:45]
Ben Walter
I am pleased to welcome Kathleen Griffith back to the Unshakables. I'm struck by so many things about the story. More than all of it. I'm struck by how he just willed that thing into existence. I mean, he literally willed it from nothing.
- [13:59]
Kathleen Griffith
You know what I loved? I loved when you asked, who is we? And he said, we is just me. Because that is the story of every single small business owner from the dawn of time.
- [14:11]
Ben Walter
You know, all of a sudden it was like he was telling his story and then he said, we did this and we did this.
- [14:14]
Kathleen Griffith
I'm like, yeah, no, but you're always trying to flex bigger and you just get into this strange mode of speaking where everything becomes a we statement. So that was funny. And he was earnest and honest about it. I mean, he's going up against natural disasters, hurricanes and fires and tornadoes and every calamity you can imagine. And he's this force of nature himself. But he kind of proved to me as I was listening to him, you don't necessarily need to be loud to do that. Like there's this quietness, this gentleness, this calmness, this peacefulness about him, but he's still able to, as you said, like, will this into the world.
- [14:54]
Ben Walter
Yeah, it's a good observation because so many of the people that we meet on the show and off the show who have created something out of nothing, they really are sort of their own form of Tasmanian devil. Because people who tend to be able to be that forceful, there are other things that go along with it. But Gary is very different. I mean, he's, he's soft spoken, he's humble, he didn't make one over the top statement the whole time we heard from him. And yet he has done over the top things.
- [15:21]
Kathleen Griffith
Yeah, it all felt so earnest. You know, I was just thinking about small businesses and what it takes from a resilience standpoint, the demonstrable impact it has on small businesses in particular. And thinking about all of these various places where we've seen events this past year. I was reading a report that FEMA, 40% of businesses never come back from a natural disaster. And for those that do rebound, it's short lived. A quarter of them aren't in business a year later. Like, the rebuilding process takes time and patience and there's this acute need for people to run in when everyone else is running out. But then there's this longer term need, which I know it's something you're passionate about and thinking more about what does the rebuilding process really look like over time.
- [16:07]
Ben Walter
Well, and you're seeing that out in your adopted hometown, right? Out in la. I mean, they're really struggling with that now.
- [16:12]
Kathleen Griffith
Yeah, I mean, it's been wild. This was my first fire season just watching what happened and how many small businesses were destroyed. And I love the Arthur Ashe quote, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. So I'm working on actually a physical build out of a retail location where people can sell and come for more. Skill building and training and bringing brands to the table as part of that. But it's the spirit of the small business owners. I've seen so many people rally in different ways and everyone's looking at what they can do.
- [16:46]
Ben Walter
For Gary, the answer is not enough. The need must just be unimaginable, limitless, essentially. So how do you decide what to respond to and what not to respond to?
- [16:59]
Gary LeBlanc
I always feel like I'm coming up short. I always feel like there's more to be done and that's the driver. As many people as I can feed, there's always going to be somebody else. And I know I'm never going to get to all of them. I know I'm not going to solve world hunger, but I have an obligation to get to as many as I possibly can.
- [17:20]
Ben Walter
That impulse really began to show itself a few years into the operation. For the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Gary planned to take the Mercy Chef's Kitchen down to cook, this time on his own terms, making the food New Orleans deserved.
- [17:34]
Gary LeBlanc
We got down to it and I was short. I was overdrawn in the bank account and I wasn't going to be able to make it happen for me. And the birth of Mercy Chefs and my heart in New Orleans, that was just crippling. And I called one of our board members at the time and said, bake, I've made a huge mistake.
- [17:55]
Ben Walter
If you thought you heard Gary call someone bake, you were correct. His nickname is indeed bake, as in bake it in the oven.
- [18:02]
Gary LeBlanc
I have overrun my supply lines. I'm really out here and I'm in trouble. Can you help me? And he said, okay, we're going to do two things. One, I'm going to help you. Don't worry about that. The money's already taken care of. But he's like, let's look at this and say, how did you get here? And how can you avoid getting here in the future? So it was a great business moment for me. Baek was just about proper planning. Did you make an emotional decision to commit to these events, or did you make business decision? Did you make a decision based on an assumption that people were going to be motivated? You need to get to a place where you have a cash reserve. You need to get to a place where there's a ready reserve. And then you can always work to the edge, but there's a soft landing.
- [18:47]
Ben Walter
What did you learn about how to finance and run the organization? That changed after that. Experience.
- [18:52]
Gary LeBlanc
Never promise something that you can't do and that you have the ability to get it done before you do it. But at the same time, I have to balance that with a faith walk. I have to be able to say, hey, I can take a chance. I can do what I believe I'm supposed to do and trust that God's going to come through with the rest of it. So it's this business head and a faith head, and how do you balance those two against each other?
- [19:16]
Ben Walter
Then there was an earthquake in Haiti. And while Gary had learned some valuable lessons, sometimes lessons take time to root.
- [19:24]
Gary LeBlanc
I was still using personal funds. I was using my debit card and didn't tell my wife I was on the debit card. And she's trying to run the household and pay bills, and we overdrew our account. And she told me while we were in Haiti, she's like, this isn't going to work. I love it. I love you, but we can't have this. You're going to have to come home and float your resume and go back to work. I agreed with her. And then a couple days later, a check came in, and it was substantial, and it was an encouragement. It was a reminder that I didn't need to worry about the money. I needed to worry about the mission. We always say that money will follow mission, but mission should never follow money.
- [20:11]
Ben Walter
Gary, you've used the word faith a couple of times. Can you talk about the role that faith plays in mercy chefs, in both the founding and in the guts of the place, how it helps shape both the mission and the way you do your work?
- [20:24]
Gary LeBlanc
Well, I'm a man of deep faith, and that faith, my relationship with the Lord, comes into play in everything that I do. It's why we do what we do. It's not just our belief system, but it's also that you do what you do out of faith. And if you believe you're doing the right thing, if you believe you're in the right place, if you're doing everything you can possibly do, you get to the point where it's not in your hands anymore. It's not your responsibility. You just have to have faith and believe. And when it's hard, when I have to dig deep, I start thinking about faces. I remember faces. When we do 20,000 meals in a day and our team debriefs at the end of the night, we always ask each other, who was your one today? You got to get the 20,000 people fed. But what's important is that one person that you made a difference in their life. And it's what motivates me because I know that for every face I've seen and fed, there are another five out there I couldn't get to. And so I'm constantly. How do I get to some of those other five? How do we do better? How do we work smarter? How do we work bigger? How do we do more? You can make me emotional. I'm going to cry.
- [21:36]
Ben Walter
In the last 10 years, Mercy chefs has grown substantially. It's now a global organization.
- [21:43]
Gary LeBlanc
It's crazy. It took us 10 years to serve a million meals. We served our next million in three years, and in the seven years since then, we've served another 26 million meals.
- [21:55]
Ben Walter
Oh, wow.
- [21:55]
Gary LeBlanc
We're almost at 100 employees now. And then our volunteers, we have 10,000 volunteers on our rule book and on site, we'll work with 100 a day.
- [22:06]
Ben Walter
And do you still go out to disaster areas yourself?
- [22:09]
Gary LeBlanc
Yeah, I get to almost every one of them myself. But our team has gotten so competent. Now I don't have to go to every disaster, but I still want to go. It's fun. I enjoy seeing the team work. It's a phenomenal thing to be on site and watch what happens today.
- [22:27]
Ben Walter
Gary has teams all over the world. How did you take this thing international? You already run a logistics business as it is. You run a logistics business at scale. And now when you think about global, I mean, you can't just take your trucks and drive them over to Europe. Doesn't work that way. So tell me how you did that.
- [22:44]
Gary LeBlanc
We launched our global division two and a half years ago, formally. And since then, we work on every continent. We build kitchens overseas. We grow kitchens. We'll find a small kitchen. We'll make it a lot bigger. We'll put some equipment in there, and our team will stand in and train and buy groceries. And until we can get these people working on their own, however long it takes.
- [23:07]
Ben Walter
I want to ask you a little bit, if I could, about the Defender Service Award and full disclosure for our audience. Chase's Auto Lending Group has a relationship with Jaguar Land Rover and is a sponsor of the Defender Award. So we do have an affiliation, just for transparency's sake. But I know, Gary, that you and Mercy Chefs were finalists in 2022. Tell us how that came about.
- [23:27]
Gary LeBlanc
Well, we got the invitation that Land Rover was doing a giveaway and you got to apply. And then it became a voting situation to see where the votes came in on who was going to win the award. And they gave away five Land Rovers that year. One in Canada and four here in the US and they picked organizations that were doing great work in their communities. Mercy Chefs was a finalist, and we were fortunate enough to go on and win that award and get a beautiful Defender, get to go to Asheville and run it on the course with the engineer. That was so much fun. It's been a great, great vehicle for us. We were just in California for the wildfires. We were working out of la and Land Rover was gracious enough to call us and say, hey, we know you're on the west coast and the Defender's on the east coast. Could you use a Defender while you're out there? We said we absolutely can. And so they came from the local dealership and loaned us a Defender to use to do distribution out in LA after those fires.
- [24:30]
Ben Walter
Wow.
- [24:36]
Kathleen Griffith
The Defender Service Awards, presented by Chase, recognizes nonprofits for their selfless mission. Now, through July 25, you can nominate your favorite nonprofit for a chance to win a customized new Defender 130 and a donation. Whether they're working in animal welfare, community services, search and rescue, veteran outreach, or outdoor education, your nomination can help them take their mission to the next level. Visit www.landroverusa.com chaseda2025 to learn more and nominate. Don't miss this chance to support your local heroes. JP Morgan Chase Bank, NA Member fdic.
- [25:21]
Ben Walter
Kathleen, what a terrific conversation with Gary. I mean, you can hear how much he cares, how deeply he's in love with this work.
- [25:27]
Kathleen Griffith
Were you trying to get me to ugly cry? Ben, don't we all just love Gary?
- [25:31]
Ben Walter
Yeah, he seems like a special guy. I have to say.
- [25:33]
Kathleen Griffith
It's the spirit of the small business owner.
- [25:35]
Ben Walter
I thought it was fascinating to hear it from the perspective of a not for profit. Because think about the difference mentally between, well, I had a business opportunity that I could have gone for, but I didn't. And now I have to go figure out what I'm going to do versus, well, the storm hit and people went hungry and I didn't show up. And so it was clear that he was sort of betting the farm, so to speak, in a couple of cases on he just had to show up. And on the one hand, he could have gotten in real trouble and not been bailed out and really been in a bad place. On the other hand, it worked out. So it's hard for me in hindsight to say it was a bad thing to do. On the other hand, I don't know how often I would encourage it, but if he hadn't done it, he might not be where he is today. So that's an interesting dynamic, particularly in the context of a not for profit, where the need is both acute and human.
- [26:20]
Kathleen Griffith
Yeah. And I think the how of using and maxing out debit cards and feeling like you're operating on a razor's edge, a lot of small business owners can relate to that reality too.
- [26:31]
Ben Walter
The most interesting thing I think in the recent past is his decision to go global. I think that is just a whole different world. I was trying to imagine, you know, he's built these kitchens. I'm sure they're customized and they're replicable and they're fit for American roads and American drivers and American trucks that can pull them. You know, he's in all these places where the infrastructure isn't the same and he's having to just figure that out. He's operating in both developed and developing nations, and I'm sure they're very different.
- [26:58]
Kathleen Griffith
Do you find with your clients that some of them are thinking really domestically and you've got to encourage them to think globally. Do you see a lot of that, you know, 30,000 foot perspective, like Ansoft matrix? Okay. New market penetration in another market. Let's go overseas.
- [27:16]
Ben Walter
It takes much more intentionality because to set up services globally, you're typically hiring in that local market. Language barriers, regulatory changes, legal rules, all that stuff. You're typically hiring local teams. And that's a whole different angle on running a business. You know, saying, I make widgets and I ship them to Germany when someone from there orders a product is very different than I have three people on the ground in Munich helping deliver my brand to that market.
- [27:42]
Kathleen Griffith
It's not for the faint of heart. It really is not.
- [27:44]
Ben Walter
No. And you have to be open to adapting to cultural, financial, regulatory and business model norms that are just in some cases slightly different and in some cases radically different from the way that things operate here in the States.
- [27:59]
Kathleen Griffith
Do you find just to pull this back to small business owners, that there are also small business owners who actually should be running nonprofits that if they just Reimagined. If they moved from an LLC to a 501C3, they'd be in a different place. Like I'm just thinking about Girls who Code and Reshma Saljani. You know, that's a $30 million a year business. CEOs making probably close to half a million dollars. Like you can do. Well, sometimes a business is just more of a nonprofit.
- [28:28]
Gary LeBlanc
I don't know.
- [28:28]
Kathleen Griffith
I see that sometimes. So I'm curious as to your take on it.
- [28:32]
Ben Walter
Well, I mean, there's two different things. There are some businesses that are not for profit because they don't make any profit.
- [28:37]
Gary LeBlanc
Right.
- [28:37]
Ben Walter
That's the wrong reason to be a not for profit. I wouldn't go as far as that. What you said, Kathleen, what I would say is to the degree that your mission is fundamentally at odds with a for profit business model, recognizing that early is important. I think there are a lot of cases where there are a ton of mission driven companies that can be easily aggressively for profit. And those two things align perfectly well. What happens is when you don't do hard enough thinking about whether you're for profit mission aligns with a for profit business model. That's where you get the dynamic that you're talking about. I've certainly seen examples of that. Whereas others are sort of like, I care more about the mission than I do about ever making money. And the reason it matters, Kathleen, is because the way that not for profits become self sustaining is so different than the way for profit companies become self sustaining. Not for profits have to constantly feed the fundraising furnace. And that's perfectly fine because there are some things like there's not really a for profit business model for feeding people after natural disasters. I get that. So he's formed a not for profit. But there are other things that can happen. There are other business models that serve a purpose, that are helping lift people out of poverty or that are helping people gain new skills that can be done completely in the context of a for profit business model. And that works just fine. It's when those two things don't line up that you end up in a bad place.
- [30:05]
Kathleen Griffith
Yeah, I think this is going to be very interesting for a lot of people because I do think there's sometimes some confusion about what the right formation is when you are a very, very mission led founder with a very mission oriented business.
- [30:19]
Ben Walter
And I have seen people try to force and wedge what is fundamentally a not for profit mission into one of these sustainable capitalism frameworks when there really isn't a sustainable business model behind it. So my view is if you want to line those two things up, you have to say that the business could exist without the mission. That the business could exist because there is good product market fit and there is demand, and you can produce the product or the service at a market return or a reasonable return, even if not a full market return.
- [30:50]
Kathleen Griffith
That's good. The business could exist without the mission. That is such a good litmus test.
- [30:56]
Ben Walter
Yeah. And so that doesn't mean the business would be as successful without it. It doesn't mean that it's not the motivating reason to do it. All of that is still present.
- [31:03]
Kathleen Griffith
Right.
- [31:04]
Ben Walter
But for it to be truly sustainable, the business model has to stand on its own and therefore support the mission.
- [31:10]
Kathleen Griffith
That's really clarifying. That's great.
- [31:12]
Ben Walter
Well, Kathleen, I want to say thank you for all your insights and of course, thank you for joining me on this season of the Unshakables.
- [31:18]
Kathleen Griffith
This was just a blast. And I loved ending on something that's so important. Being able to share this man's work was such a treat. So thank you.
- [31:28]
Ben Walter
So I want to finish, Gary with a question that I ask all of our guests, which is if you had one piece of advice for our listeners about how to start, run and grow a business, what would it be?
- [31:40]
Gary LeBlanc
Just do it. That was the call to me. Just go feed people, start. Whether it's a big step or a little step, just get in there. Be relentless. Find something that you're passionate about. Find something that you can't not do, something that drives you and consumes you. But then at the end of the day, just go for it.
- [32:03]
Ben Walter
Gary LeBlanc, thank you for joining us on the Unshakeables. It's great hearing your story.
- [32:07]
Gary LeBlanc
Thank you. It's been so good to be here. I've enjoyed it so much.
- [32:14]
Ben Walter
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Unshakeables. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it. Next week we'll be back in Texas talking to an Air Force veteran and NASA alum whose 3D printing business is trying to change the world one item and sometimes one toilet at a time. I'm Ben Walter and this is the Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from Iheartmedia. We'll see you back here soon.