Engaging Champions
Ian Fisk:
The topic of this call is for those of us who run for-profit businesses, but have partners who are not employees, but who are champions of the work we do because we are mission-driven businesses. And what are your best practices in that, because it’s both similar and different from the traditional employer-employee relationship.
Evie Kanhai:
I’m Evie from Guyana, and that’s in South America, and my project is a incubator-type co-working space, and the reason we need partnerships and non-employees is because we would like to use a lot of resources in terms of training and finding persons who can contribute to training around and keeping them motivated. So it’s not something that we would be using in traditional employer-employee model. It would be more] consultants and people that are already involved in training activities, or persons that already mentor young people and using our space and encouraging those persons that are members.
Natalie Guzman:
Hello. I am Natalie, co-founder of a handmade jewelry made with ecological process, and the reason for making this call is for me and for
[inaudible 00:04:10]
looking for organization [inaudible 00:04:12] or people that can help us to bring the business in the world of business [inaudible 00:04:21], and to be able to make this business profitable at a better rate, but other helping other people at the same way. Thank you.
Mike Malloy:
Hi, I’m Mike Malloy, the Program Director at the Halcyon Incubator. We work with cohorts of early stage social entrepreneurs and some of the EB, find a lot of different partners and sponsors and folks to help provide training, pro bono consulting, legal advice. I work with a ton of people in the community, and almost none of them get paid by Health San, so figuring out how to build and nurture those relationships.
We also have an application that just is actually opening this morning for the spring cohort, and a big way that we recruit is through reaching out to community partners asking them to share information about the program and applications. So look forward to talking about some of the best practices there.
Alexandra Tureau:
Yeah. Hi, everyone. I am a Chief of Staff at a technology and business consultancy run out of the DC area. I’ve always had a real … I’ve almost always worked in the private sector, I should say, and I’ve always had a really, really strong passion for social enterprise and innovation, obviously one of the reasons I’m involved in MCN. And building community and finding new ways to be innovative is something I look to do while at work. I’m looking to do more of it. And being that we are in the startup phases, almost anything is possible, so finding ways to build community in really small, tight-knit organizations and also across larger sectors.
Ian Fisk:
All right. So who has a challenge or practice they want to share to get this started?
Evie Kanhai:
Currently, because I have marketing background, I try promoting them, promoting them within our networks. Kind of getting them a lot of advertising space where we operate. Most of all I’m networking them and pushing the one line using our social media and our website to highlight their work as we highlight our own work. And also inviting them to benefit from maybe if we have access to free training, or if we have access to events or giving free tickets, and things like that. So doing that as well as referring them for paid jobs has helped grow the community.
Evie Kanhai:
But also the challenge of that is that they’re not always available. You kind of have to access them on the basis of their availability. Yeah, you kind of have to plan your activities around them.
Ian Fisk:
What has worked? What has been a challenge?
Evie Kanhai:
The challenge would be to organize people at the time we might need them, or organize them to spend more time in the space. What has worked is promoting them, giving their companies reviews, offering maybe a few free services or discounted services to them through whatever we do. And that serves as an incentive to have their participation and their involvement.
Ian Fisk:
So one of the … all right, go ahead, Mike. But it occurs to me I should talk on this one since this is the entirety of what the MCN does, so I will contribute as well. But Mike, you were about to say something.
Mike Malloy:
Yes, I was, and I’m stoked to have you contributing too, because I’m sure you’ve got a lot of thoughts herein. In terms of … sounds like you have different partners and sponsors and incubator co-working folks that you want to activate. One thing that I’ve found works well is talking to do some informal customer discoveries on peoples’ schedules, and what day of the week or times might work well, and then setting up recurring things. So most Monday afternoons at 4:00pm [Halcyon 00:09:51] has a pitch session. You know if you have some Monday afternoon time, and if you have these we do them three out of four weeks a month. And on Thursdays we do advisor office hours. We’ve gotten sponsors and partners to come over from 10:00am to 4:00pm, post up for a couple hours, there’s usually some food around, and meet with some entrepreneurs, is a way to create in-person interactions where people in the network and the community around can engage, get to know one another and then develop kind of deeper relationships over time when they see the same people two, three, four times. I find that conversations can be more valuable for both parties.
Ian Fisk:
I agree, creating a sense of connection. Why do folks volunteer for a profit-making entity, right? So non-profits is a different thing, and we are all mission-driven, so there’s some overlap. But in the end, sort of the question as this was originally posed by our entrepreneurs is why should people help you, even if they agree with your mission, if you’re getting paid?
Ian Fisk:
Now most of us aren’t getting paid a lot. So one of the challenges, for example, that I run into is people ask me … We have a pool of about 1,000 folks around the globe, some of whom are on this call, who have been mentors with us. Do you pay your mentors? No because while we could afford to pay some of them, we couldn’t afford to pay all of them. And some of them are people who make $50 an hour, and some of them are people who make $500 an hours, and you couldn’t really create a balance, right? If you were to pay in cash, it wouldn’t … there’s no financial model which to the Mentor Capital Network works in which we pay our mentors a reasonable wage for their time. It just doesn’t make sense because we’re not an investment arm.
Ian Fisk:
But what does work is how do we provide benefit to the folks, they are engaged. You guys are on this call. One of the things that really … you all know how the program works. We have the feedback packets. When we started sending the feedback to the other reviewers, that really actually pushed stuff up because they could then benefit from seeing what other people had to say about similar companies.
In business school there’s a case study about kindergarten teachers. And the question on the case study was how do you motivate people without paying them more money? And the solutions are generally around making sure that even though these are licensed professionals, they’re not treated that way, and this happens with volunteers as well. That you treat people as professionals so that you connect with them in a two-way conversation so that you’re listening, so that even though you’re not in a position to provide financial support, that people, as long as people are treated like professionals, they are happier to continue to engage to support a mission even if somebody else is getting paid.
Ian Fisk:
One of the other things that shows up is we charge a small fee for folks to participate in our program, and we can charge a larger fee. When I go to do independent consulting, essentially the same kind of work that we provide to the MCN, I can get $2,500, $5,000 a company. But if I were to charge that with the MCN, a lot of the mentors would be like, “Hi. You’re now getting paid real money. I’d like some”, which would be fair. So we charge between $10 and $100 a company, and the mentors are not overly concerned because clearly I’m not getting rich on this, right?
Ian Fisk:
And what is the line as a mission-driven business where you have people who are supporting you who are not getting paid, where they’re comfortable. Our volunteer network understands that I’m not independently wealthy, and I need to pay my rent. And people are comfortable with a certain level of salary for work that they’re helping for free, but then presumably if I were taking home $600,000 a grand, there might be issues. I’m not, in case anybody’s wondering. But how do you walk that line? So I’ll put that out there. And Mike, feel free to reference any of the Halcyon companies who might have similar issues.
Evie Kanhai:
Maybe not having all your financials out there, but being open about talking about what your expenses are, what your overheads are, and helping them to have an understanding of what it costs to run the program or run the business.
Evie Kanhai:
if they can also share in the benefit. Like I said, maybe we would need consultants, definitely persons who might have their own business and also be operating in their own projects. And if they can tap into the network or the resources that you’ve created, it may just be the incentive that they want. Just a suggestion.
Natalie Guzman:
. I personally was chosen to be a mentor from Bolivia by organization that help woman entrepreneurs in … to make baby clothes. And they employ 600 women. And the reason I was a mentor, I am a mentor, and is like for free, even though that organization has 17 years in the market is because I want to help empower more women. I want to help that they grow no matter if I do … is a big challenge. I need to dedicate a lot of work to help them, but I really in the organization I believe that it can make change. And I want to bring back that I am coordinated with all the programs. How can I help to these women to be more profitable to grow their business, and the help others.
Ian Fisk:
What are some specific tactical things that people have done to inspire your community partners? So little things in us where we show people the other feedback, creating community. So once a year I buy dinner for any group of mentors in any city in the world that they can put four or five folks together so they can meet each other. Although I have learned my lesson, and I do not pay for the alcohol. That was an expensive lesson. And often the mentors will not charge us, and somebody in the group will pay for it themselves, but it’s a tactic to give people the chance to meet each other. It’s a thing they want to do.
Ian Fisk:
You have folks supporting you. What are the tactics you use to … we get the why. They want to support the mission, but what are the specific tactics you use to encourage that?
Mike Malloy:
I’ve got a few tactics in my toolbox, and I think building community and as you said, bringing people together in person, sharing a meal of food, being able to break bread and tell some stories, and sometimes the alcohol does flow, I can confirm that. We do a mentor dinner at Halcyon where each cohort, we’ve got eight ventures and they have eight brand new mentors that are usually folks that haven’t been in a Halcyon universe before. We try to bring in new people for new ventures, and we invite the cohort one through 10 mentors to come back and have dinner. We always get Foodini, which is one of the Halcyon ventures, and I have found personally and in working with different mentor groups the biggest benefit is meeting the other mentors and making new friends and learning what they do and thinking about other business ideas. And as you build this community, the more people around you that are meeting without you, and having coffee and going off and going down rabbit holes of different ideas or beautiful projects, I think the more powerful the community is and the more people want to engage and participate because they see the direct as well as kind of tangential benefits from contributing that insight to their community.
Alexandra Tureau:
One thing that I feel is … one thing we’re actually doing at my organization, and we’re just trying to build it up a lot, it’s in the starting phases, but I find to be a really strong community builder is if you have a skill at your organization, find people who want to learn that skill and just offer that teaching service. So for example, at my organization we do technology and business consultancy. So whether it’s our engineers and program managers teaching students how to code, how to build websites, or if it’s people who are just in the starting phases of their career, people at other companies who don’t have trying programs, bringing people together who have a desire to learn those skills and just offering them for free or very nominal fee, or it’s part of a training program. It brings a lot of people together who have a passion, and then we’re offering our skill to the community at nothing, and that really builds … it’s something positive for us, but it’s something positive for them, too.
Alexandra Tureau:
So I think if your organization has a hard, tangible skill like that, it’s something we can all work into doing.
Mike Malloy:
How do structure that program? How do you get people to say, “Hey, I’m really good at doing X skill? When can I sign up to teach a class?”, or something?
Alexandra Tureau:
Yeah, we don’t really have it structured that way right now, and that’s probably something we could build up to. But what we’re doing is reaching out … we’re a fairly small organization still, so if I reach out to my engineer, or one of our principals reaches out to an engineer and says, “Hey, we want to do this”, it’s pretty …
Alexandra Tureau:
We want to help people who are early in their careers or changing or learning something new, so most of our people will allow them … we give them the space and time to do that. So whether that’s an hour in a work day or giving back time during the week or something, it’s pretty flexible. And then we look for, we reach out to students. We reach out to colleges in the area, and one of the great things is we’re fairly virtual. So right now we have a student from Georgia, and she is working with one of our engineers in Washington State. That’s across the country, but she is able to … and she is in a technology school, but she is looking for mentorship from an organization. And so they’re able to partner together, and he’s able to assist her in whatever way she desires.
Alexandra Tureau:
So finding those bridges of people’s schedules and saying, “Hey, this is something.” If it’s an organization initiative, I feel like … and there’s a lot of positivity around it, I feel like there shouldn’t be too much push and pull, but I don’t have it set up quite yet to the grandeur of what I would want and what you’re talking about.
Mike Malloy:
That sounds great, though. That was really helpful. Thanks for sharing.
Evie Kanhai:
I’m the Managing Director for Girls Inside Guyana. It’s a global non-profit that works to end gender inequality in tech start ups and technology driven businesses. And we work on volunteers, and even the advisory board is purely volunteers. We’ve got some really great women on the advisory board. Like Ian was saying, well paid, high level, pages and pages of quality [inaudible 00:22:50].
Evie Kanhai:
And like Alex was saying, connecting them up now. I’m lady that makes the jewelry. I should say if you can connect people to the mission, they want to be there. They want to be doing it not for money, but because it kind of satisfies and they get self-realization from it also.
Ian Fisk:
So let me ask a question because I think it applies to most of us on this call. How are you … what matters in terms of distance and virtual support? Most of my community is not in Washington, DC. Evie, you’ve obviously got a big local presence, but you’re also you’re working in a place where there’s a lot of amazing resources that are not in the city you’re in, which is why you’re building your organization to create those resources in your city and in your country.
Ian Fisk:
Natalie, I know that you’re looking to expand globally beyond your immediately community. What are ways to engage people that you may have never physically met? Most of my, say the 2,000 people, of whom 600 people I might interact with in any given year in my network, I have personally met maybe half of them, right? What matters in that regard?
Alexandra Tureau:
As an organization that’s … we’re predominantly virtual, it can be really hard to build virtual communities that feel very strong because you don’t see people face to face. Like you’re saying, Ian, all the time, and I have not met half the people that work at our organization either, which can be a strange feeling sometimes. But to me what matters is when you do have those connections, they need to be really genuine. You need to remember that someone else is on the other side of the screen or the other side of the phone, and I think-
Ian Fisk:
And what does genuine feel like to you? So we have a sense of what that word means, but what is that-
Alexandra Tureau:
Yeah, so, and that’s a really good question, Ian, and something I’m still building up to. But right now for me what that looks like is I’m not in an office space where I can see someone’s pictures on their desk or know what their life schedule is. So when I connect over the phone with someone, or over video, I try really hard. I don’t jump into work immediately. I want to know about their life, and even someone on a very different time zone, respecting that. Just knowing who they are, not just in the role and the title that they have, but building … if you were face to face you would spend time building a relationship, and you would know someone, and you would have jokes and office banter. And so I try and build that into all of my interactions so that at the end, even though I don’t necessarily see them every day, I don’t get that regular banter and interaction, I still know who they are as a person.
Alexandra Tureau:
I feel like when I say it out loud it sounds fairly trivial, and it sounds really small, but I think part of building genuine work interactions is building genuine people to people interaction. And so I think just spending the time to do that if you’re virtual really helps bring people together, because otherwise it’s just a conversation with manager A and manager B. And if you guys don’t know each other, then there might not be as much of a symbiotic relationship being built.
Mike Malloy:
I think that’s great advice, kind of starting with the interpersonal connection. I just read The Trillion Dollar Coach.
Alexandra Tureau:
Yeah.
Mike Malloy:
Yeah, a great book, and one of the things they said about his coach was that he started every conversation, every meeting, every staff meeting with, “How’s it going? How’s life? How are the kids? What’d you do this weekend?” And even the Google executive leadership means I start with a trip report. If anybody went on a trip that weekend, on Monday morning you’d say, “Hey, what’d you do?”, and build that human element outside of work. I thought it was interesting, something Ian said, or I forget who it was, you treat them like a professional. Even if you’re not paying them, you still treat them like a professional in how they’re serving. There’s also the personal level to connect on. Know how old their kids are, and if somebody just had a birthday, and let them share what brings them joy outside of work strengthens that bond even if you can’t be in the same room. And video is definitely better than phone, when possible.
Alexandra Tureau:
I just wanted to give one trick for if people struggle to remember birthdays or remember things, if you have a wide network or a wide stance that you’re working on. A trick that I use, and I just want to offer this up, is that I actually keep a separate calendar. So I have my work calendar, and then I keep a separate calendar, and that’s where I actually put things like so and so’s birthday, so and so’s anniversary, so and so’s kid is turning five. I actually put those things into a calendar, which maybe sounds a little calculated and callous, but it actually … who knows how many people you’re working with? It really helps for you to remember those things and touch base with people on them. So just offering that tip up.
Ian Fisk:
Yeah, and so you can turn it on and off because Facebook will do that automatically, but then you end up with 600 things on your calendar and you don’t … you want to be able to turn it on to check it in the morning, and then turn it off so that your calendar’s not crammed with it.
Ian Fisk:
So one of the distinctions since we’re talking about community partners is … I, as someone who has been employing people, often peers, sometimes people older than me, for 30 years now, more … when somebody is my direct report when they are reliant on my decision whether or not they can pay their rent, I can be friendly with them, but being friends is a different issue around which there are more constraints. When somebody is a volunteer … so when you talk about how cozy can you get with people, there are … as the manager, when the team wants to go out drinking, I’m the one who doesn’t go because I’m the manager. It’s a thing you do or don’t do, depending on the organization.
Ian Fisk:
But with volunteers there’s less of that. And this isn’t about drinking and alcohol, but there are, certainly in the US culture there are sort of limits to how close an employer can and should be with an employee. And this isn’t even about harassment or anything like that. This is just sort of normal process. And has anybody found anything different in terms of we’re dealing with a support network, and we can be this way towards them in a way that might not fit with people who are our W2s or who are our direct reports. Or maybe there’s cultural differences. Maybe I’m just being the uptight American.
Natalie Guzman:
When I was, I went to United States to venture company in Boston, and network event, it was first like what you to do, and if it were for me or not for me that I in people when they ask me something. And if they’re interested in something that you do, they continue to speak up, but also I try to not only in the … okay, I can work with you like that, but also I can benefit with my knowledge in this aspect, and I try to give them some tips about different that they can use. But just it is very different, and you it is necessary to the difference in culture.
Evie Kanhai:
Socializing is kind of a norm here in Guyana. It’s workmates and stuff like that. Not to say that Guyana, but not participate in too much of staff activity. But one of the things that I do intentionally try to stay away from is things involving people’s personal lives, in terms of if they have relationship problems and things like that. Not that I wouldn’t if they asked for help be able to direct them somewhere. It’s just that it’s hard to be neutral. Maybe it’s just my personality but sometimes, and I’ve made a mistake in the past of hiring employees based on their situation, and then when their situation changed, they no longer needed a job. And I’ve kind of used that lesson as how I approach our relationships with co-workers or people that I ask to work on projects with. If they really have a hard time with their relationships, and they’re very vocal or … and I use this word cautiously, but some people have a persona of bitterness. They’re very … how they operate because of their experiences. So I personally try to stay out of their personal and their personal problems, and try to keep it professional, but at the same time have a relationship where I can ask, of course, “How are you? How are your kids?”, and things like that.
Evie Kanhai:
But like I said, this all goes back to my personality in that I don’t think that I can really handle or navigate relationships where the person is really through a lot, whether it’s in a relationship or in their life. And if it’s a friend, it’s different, like Ian said. But if we are friends because of our association with the business, that’s just a line that I prefer to draw.
Ian Fisk:
Any other angles on working with profits in your for profit business who aren’t regular employees?
Mike Malloy:
I also think it’s useful to get the different partners together. We talked about mentors coming together. One tactical thing we do is have a partner happy hour where we get Deloitte consultants and lawyers and AWS engineers and our mentors and our leadership coaches and the entrepreneurs and the staff. We get everybody in the room and kind of see what happens there. I find it’s kind of like rappers think basketball players are cool, and basketball players think rappers are cool. When you put them around each other they’re like, “Oh, this is cool.” It’s nice to meet people doing things that you don’t necessarily have those skills for, and sometimes it’s nice to make lawyer friends if you’ve got a quick question, you want to figure something out.
Mike Malloy:
Creating those opportunities, and it’s kind of … I sometimes think about science when you put molecules in a dense space, they’re going to collide with one another. Don’t have a massive auditorium with 10 people there. Put 30 people in a room that holds 25, and maybe have a bar in there as well, and it’s a great way to stimulate new connections and conversations with the partners so they’re able to find new value.
Ian Fisk:
Completely agree. We deliberately at MCN try to bring together mentors and entrepreneurs who aren’t necessarily doing the exact same thing, although ideally we look for, we call it diversity of perspective, although that’s a loaded term. Andreas Joyce Rooney has done a bunch of really interesting work on that, Mike, if you’re looking that up for all of you, on how to find people who want to learn from each other but are contributing to a common challenge. In part that’s what these calls are.
Ian Fisk:
Any other thoughts on the day to day? This call doesn’t have to go an hour. I just … folks have thoughts they want to share and bounce of the other people on the call, that’s what we’re here fore. What else we got? What’s a question anyone has for anyone else on the call?
Mike Malloy:
I got a question I’ll put out there. What are the best practices ways you guys have seen to share information about a program? We have an application opening today and closes October 10th. What I’ve learned is that, and we want to get as many people as possible to start the application as early as possible. You don’t have to finish it. I can remind you the last seven, four, three, two, one days, and we’ll get a bunch at the end, but how do we get the word out there to new people who’ve never heard of the Halcyon Incubator Program? And what sort of community partners and strategy and also tactics have you all used successfully to spread ideas like that?
Evie Kanhai:
Using the media through press releases has been really great for us, just because of course we’re mission driven we can do that, and talk about different projects coming up and continue to push through the media in that way. We’ve found that sponsoring certain programs and activities where the people we want to attract are. For example, sponsoring something a price for a rosary or through a club has helped spread the word of what we are doing.
Evie Kanhai:
Facebook as well is popular here. A lot of people use Facebook advertising. A lot of people are in groups, and we use Facebook advertising. Websites not so much. Mobile applications are now catching on. And tapping into the different stakeholder networks. For example, we have various chambers of commerce that we spread the mission through or we spread the word through, as well as linking with government organizations that have a similar interest in what we are doing, or they have similar programs running and can benefit from our networks, or we can again just maybe give some time to them or do a activity or two with them, and you get a lot of exposure that way.
Alexandra Tureau:
Oh no, I just wanted to chime in and say those are all really, really good ways to reach out to people. And one of the things we’re doing, which beyond posting on all of the typical websites and reaching out to the people we know, is really trying hard to tap into your six degrees of separation. So hosting and reaching out to people who you don’t think are directly linked, but people who might be a little bit removed because their communities actually might be looking to be involved, or looking to someone in a community that isn’t directly related to Halcyon is going to be really passionate about starting an application. And so reaching out to people you might not normally reach out to and say, “Hey, can you reach out to your community?” So tapping into different communities, and you’re probably already doing that, but I find that to bring a lot of fresh perspective.
Ian Fisk:
So one of the things that’s been interesting about the progression of the Mentor Capital Network over time is that we essentially stopped advertising about five years ago. We still have a public web page, and I will still make the occasional Facebook or Twitter or whatever post, but we looked at the companies that we ended up working with, and they were not necessarily companies that we personally known, but they were companies that were recommended to us by someone who knew how our program worked and how the applicant would benefit from it.
Ian Fisk:
So that we’ve had a much higher sort of success rate in term … because there’s a cost to us for taking the time to process your applications. It’s a time cost, but pretty much everything is a time cost with us, right?
Mike Malloy:
It’s a big cost, yeah.
Ian Fisk:
Mike, I’m sure you get some variety of this problem as well, where we get a bulk of our applicants are completely inappropriate for us, and I feel bad because I got nothing against somebody wanting to open a bar or a tow truck company. But clearly when they get to the question of how do you make the world a better place or however we’re phrasing it, our social value question that year, it’s not a thing they’ve thought about, and it’s not why they’re applying. They were just told to apply because they thought we might have money. And what’s worse, we don’t even have money. I mean, we do connect people to money, but not directly or promise it.
Ian Fisk:
And so people, our reviewers, our past applicants, these folks find us the companies that they know would actually benefit from the way our particular program works. I know Halcyon does very different things for very similar people, right? There’s almost always in any given Halcyon class there’s an MCN alum, and there’s a Halcyon either about to be or alum in any given MCN class, right? But we’re providing very different services. We’re not competing, though I still want your mention.
Ian Fisk:
But finding the people who know who is going to benefit from the work that you are doing has been extremely valuable. We did a … at one of the, I don’t know, 2014, 2015, I don’t know if you were there, Mike, at one of the earlier ATAs, right after the transition from being the [EON 00:43:00], we had an all-day session amongst incubators and accelerators how do you find your people, your applicants? There were 128 ideas on the wall. One hundred and twenty of them involved us reaching out to people, not mass market posting. Oh, because the question wasn’t how do you find your applicants? It was how do you find the applicants you end up taking? And so for a co-working space when I was at the Affinity Lab we definitely found our best members when they were referred by other members. For jewelry, I guess there’s the analogy of who are the people that know what … the people who know which of their friends would appreciate the kind of materials and work and the why of what you and your mother are creating, Natalie, right? Who are your partners? And also we have been joined from Tunisia. Hello.
Khadija Jallouli :
I am from Tunisia. I’m a founder of HawKar start up, building a smart electric vehicle for people with physical disability. That’s it.
Ian Fisk:
And who are your partners? So the topic of this call is as for-profit companies, mission-driven, we will sometimes work with partners who are not traditional employees. What does that look like to you?
Khadija Jallouli :
For me maybe it will be our technical partners, suppliers, contractors right now. Those are our main partners right now.
Ian Fisk:
What are the … your technical partners, what’s the relationship look like that makes it different from an employee-employer relationship?
Mike Malloy:
First, you don’t give them salaries. They don’t work for us. We essentially work in collaboration together for a certain product. So it’s not like, it’s not the same. So we have to collaborate and for make strategic partnership together. So to make certain things finalized, for example.
Mike Malloy:
Some of them we are partners, and that we don’t pay, so they are involved in some products, and they share a common purpose. But we don’t pay for certain things we make together.
Ian Fisk:
Are there any differences in working with business partners for a mission-driven business? So obviously this is the everybody does is that they have business partners that aren’t employees, but does being mission-driven make a difference there?
Natalie Guzman:
Yes. Didn’t sell a product. You don’t sell … okay, I don’t sell a piece of jewelry. I make out a mission, a mission of how our community be ecological not follow the same rules of the industries that only want to and be more successful. I want that money that I get, I want to share with the community and share the knowledge, and also to bring out a more … about the thinking knowledge about how to make everything.
Ian Fisk:
All right. It feels like we’ve, unfortunately for our late joiner, it feels like we’ve reached the end of our hour. My apologies for the timing. These calls … I’m about to go on vacation for two weeks, but these calls will resume in September, and they will also be offered at a wider range of time zones. We’re going to do some Africa- and Asia-friendly time zones at that time as well.