How to Build a Thriving Business During Economic Uncertainty

[0:00]  now we're at at evolve we're around 40 40 individuals and we have unlimited PTO right we want people to really lean into their personal lives and spend time with friends and family and that's part of the culture that we're trying to create um however we have really high expectations around what they're going to deliver on the professional side so if you can get your work done you manage your own schedule right we're not going to uh you know you want to do a yoga class in the middle of the day go for it good for you you know so I am not into micromanaging people I want to bring people onto my team who have the ability to manage their own time um but I think people need to listen to their bodies because I think our bodies tell us a lot so if you're getting headaches or you've got aches and pains I mean yes go to a doctor but so much of our stress

[0:48]  manifests ourselves itself in our bodies and I think we have to listen to our bodies um and give ourselves a chance to take a break all right guys welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle podcast today is going to be an amazing conversation where we're talking to an incredible leader across this digital table with me today we're sitting down with Amy who is the CEO and founder of evolve giving group Amy welcome to the show super excited to have you here thanks for having me absolutely so to kind of level set we're going to talk

[1:35]  about a couple things today we're going to talk about your journey specifically when it comes to nonprofit Consulting I would say trading in our 9 to5 for a 247365 building a leadership team specifically when it comes to supporting women in your organization we're going to talk about what your team looks like a little bit later yeah we're also going to talk about risk-taking learning from failure work life balance and so much more but before we kind of get into that I want want to level set everybody with how you got started on this journey now you went to grad school for nonprofit Administration and management with a secret hope that you were going to get your master's degree and then go back into Direct Services as a social worker what happened yeah I guess the joke was on me I thought that I was gonna you know play the system and utilize this grant to go

[2:23]  back into direct service because I always imagined myself sort of on the other side of the desk uh really working with people directly my field placement and graduate school was in a foster care agency um I worked in early childhood as a college student so I really saw myself delivering services and um my experience within this program really develop helped me develop an appreciation for the administrative side of the nonprofit world and so I owed three years um to any Jewish Federation in the country as part of this grant program and I came back to Chicago which is was my hometown um and I worked at the Federation in Chicago and I just sort of fell in love

[3:11]  with fundraising so again the joke was on me they really got exactly what they had planned to get out of this investment as me in me as a young person um and I appreciated the ability to apply that skill set that social work skill set in developing relationships with stakeholders of the organizations that I worked with I think it's so beautiful I've noticed a pattern here I've had a lot of different leaders come on to the show who are amazing leaders and CEOs now guess where they all came back or what their history was 99% of them were social workers isn't that interesting it's interesting I asked one of my guests about that and I said why do you think social workers I were able to make the transition to leadership and my last guest on the podcast said you know we're able to make the transition

[3:58]  of meeting people where they are if it's a fundraiser a community partner a client a team member that's what we do and I feel like this is a super skill set that I've been able to kind of identify through having so many conversations with leaders who started out in that social work space yeah or start out in any I mean I I haven't have two um young adult children I've got one in college and one that just graduated and we're so obsessed with what is our major right what are we going to do right out of college and you know I've got one studying music who's a vocal major major um and another who was a Psychology major but but the the the lesson that I have learned is that it's not about what you studied right or where you came from like good get that good broad liberal arts education but you never know what you're going to be

[4:46]  doing 20 years from now stop thinking so much about the major and think about what brings you Joy where what are you passionate about what issues energize you um and I wish more young people got that message um that it's not you don't need to Define yourselves as 20y olds right there's a lot that life is going to put in front of you that may change the way you see yourself and what you want to do with your life I mean this a perfect example of me I was a sociology and Communications major right I always thought I was going to go into broadcasting or journalism or something like that and then one day after I left a summer job an opportunity popped into my to my lap where I became an entrepreneur in the healthcare space and all the things that I learned in the past I had to take little nuggets from but they didn't exactly prepare me to meet with the CEO of an organization or

[5:32]  a nonprofit or XYZ through that Learning lesson crazy yeah ever don't it's a don't you think we put a lot of pressure on kids though when they come through the education process right you're a high school student you're 17 18 years old you graduate from high school you're asked to make some of the biggest choices of your life AKA take on debt to pursue a major and pick a career path but yet just one month before these kids came to college on average they were having to raise their hand to go to the bathroom doesn't that seem like an interesting dichotomy does what's wrong with us you're right you're right you're right I mean and and so there's so many different paths there's so much pressure and again what you love what you're doing right now go for it pursue what makes you happy because you never know

[6:19]  where that path is going to lead you you and I are bro both great examples of that so here let's kind of get back on track a little bit here so we're now going through our process right we've got our masters we're now going through the process of doing everything else that we're talking about you have a phone call that starts coming in from some smaller nonprofit organizations who are looking for advice on how to do fundraising how to do XYZ and then you have a conversation with your business partner where you say I think that there's a business here what was that conversation like or what was that aha moment like yeah I mean this was probably my fourth or fifth job in fundraising and and you have to remember that I was at this point a young mother which really impacts you know your everything I mean that being a parent and thinking about how you want to show up in the world and

[7:08]  use your time and focus your time and energy um and so when we started getting phone calls asking if we knew anyone who could write Grant proposals or we knew anybody who could help with a capital campaign or help with an event and we kept referring those Pro sure I know someone call this person right and at some point it occurred to me I mean we're all looking for but I think especially as a young parent you're looking for that flexibility you're looking to be able to do it all you know I I want my cake and I want to be able to eat it too and so this idea sort of popped into to my head what if we stopped referring all those projects out and what if we took them right there seems like there might be a

[7:56]  business there because what did exist and still exists in the in the nonprofit Consulting space or the firms that work with very large nonprofits so the hospitals the universities the museums big budgets what we call large or extra large in the nonprofit sector and what seemed to be missing to me were firms that would not only um support but really welcomed a partnership with small to midsize nonprofits and that's where we got our start so almost right off bat before we gave notice at our current place of employment we had four projects where we walked out the door and we sort of had a business ironically that was 2008 so it seemed like that might the you know the first big economic downturn of recent memory it should have been a

[8:46]  terrible time to start a business but I think what was happening and we weren't aware of it at the time is nonprofits were laying off um some of their full-time people and so they needed external support so that's where we showed up I think about what it was like in 2008 when everything seems to be falling right I lived in metro Detroit at the time and I just remember everybody's house going for sale everybody was talking about not having the money can't go on vacation XYZ but it seemed like you kind of really leaned into the founders mindset and this opportunity of saying hey we're seeing all these opportunities let's start up our own org to be able to take care of and I would say Harvest on some of the opportunities that are coming our way what were some of the conversations like with your business partner back then cuz that seems like a time of instability often not when people choose to go all in on starting a new business right I

[9:34]  think we were just responding to a sense of the market at that very moment you know the incoming calls the requests for help sort of noticing what was going on in this space I'll also say there was a lot of naive on our part we had no idea what it would be like to found a for-profit business we both only worked in the nonprofit space so but I I almost think that na naive worked to our advantage right there was nothing we didn't know enough to be afraid um and we really just sort of went into it with eyes wide open and wanting to learn and absorbing the wisdom and the advice of people around us I think that that is so important for us to kind of double click on that naive of somebody who's starting a business

[10:22]  you know often we hear that your brain is very good at coming up of all the reasons why we will fail right if I say how am I going to not do well it's like we're not going to get customers we're going to have an outage on technology we're not going to be able to meet people travel's going to be tough we're not going to be able to find babysitters XYZ but when we have that naive it gives us the opportunity to kind of start with a fresh slate and that naive is often the superpower of that original founder who said we just didn't know what could have gone wrong and we just rolled the dice anyway yeah I think about all the things that I talk about with my senior team on a weekly basis now utilization right staff utilization HR issues and policies I mean none of that was on my mind if if you had told me that was part of the job I probably would never have done this right because I I I had no concept of that and again I think that

[11:10]  that uh you know ignorance is bliss sort of thing it just I I I think that worked in our favor where we were just willing to start from the ground up and learn everything we needed to know what was your previous role in the organization that you were at before you accumulated the four customers and the jump to the I was the director of development and Communications so I had been working in fundraising in every every job out of graduate school some for local organizations um and one national International Organization so I worked for very large nonprofit and I work for some local um Community nonprofits and it was kind of fun to go back and forth to learn both sets of shops and experiences so at that point I was working on a capital and endowment

[12:01]  and annual fundraising campaign all of these different kinds of projects for a an independent school in Chicago okay so we make the transition right now we're CEO and founder of this new organization were there any type of like mindset lessons or I would say Leadership Lessons that you had to unlearn when it came to building your own team to execute on your vision yeah I mean I think as a director of development you feel total responsibility for for um I mean at least for my team for my department like I needed to know everything right I had to be good at grant writing I had to understand Government funding and and government grants I needed to know how to do events I needed to know how to do Capital campaign I self-educated around plan giving and endowment it sort of felt

[12:48]  like I had to be a a Jill of all trades and I think walking into um this for-profit space but serving exclusively nonprofit so I knew a lot about what my clients were facing I knew nothing about putting together a for-profit budget and how that differed from the kinds of budgets that I had written into organizations that I had worked with I knew nothing about HR um I mean there's just the list goes on and on and um so what that forces you to do is really take advantage of the resources in your network so I had a friend who was an attorney and I turned to him to say okay what do I need to know about esta lishing this we talked to people about HR practices we initially started hiring contractors versus employees so what

[13:36]  does that mean less risk and we still do that today we have contractors on our team so I think it really teaches you the importance of Delegation collaboration interdependence you don't have to be the smartest person in the room you don't have to know a lot about everything but you need to know how to go out and find those things and you need to sort of keep your ego in check we often find I me when we're founders of an organization right we often have the this is my baby fallacy where it's like I have to do everything and if you've ever heard the saying you can go fast alone or go far together you have to be able to bring the team together I actually uh had a conversation with an employee yesterday we just did her annual review and she's been with our team for about I would say three years now and our conversation was very interesting I said what did you

[14:24]  think about the last year in which we spent together she said honestly this has been the most fulfilling year of my work career and I said why is that she said because you've started to put so much trust into me to execute on the vision and giving me control over the things that I have control over and she's like he know you weren't doing that you I'm not saying you weren't doing that before but over the last year you've really leaned into me and this has been a huge Learning lesson for me as a leader if we want our team members to feel fulfilled from the work that they do we have to trust them and that means delegating the mindset of saying I could do it better than this person and allowing for our team members to step up which is a huge maturity lesson for me I I couldn't agree more and I think about my senior leadership team now I I couldn't do any of their jobs right they they know things they know how to do

[15:11]  things better I I joke with my uh you know our vice president of finance and operations all the time um if she left me I would be in really big trouble because I don't know how to do 90% of the things that she does but it is about trust and delegation and collaboration and she's taught me a lot so just just remembering that we have a lot to learn from the people around us and we are only as good as our teams when it comes to building a team we have the opportunity to be very strategic not only in the talent that we bring in but what our team also represents in our previous conversation I'm not going to get these statistics right off the top of my head you said like 74% I believe of employees are in nonprofits are female but only 45 of leadership 7545 okay 7545 beautiful yeah why is that and how are you kind of zigging

[16:02]  against that zag that is such a normative I mean if I knew why that that happened um I I would be a much better place but I have I I have suspicions of why that happens again I think that you know we pull or we I think this is changing but the nonprofit sector really does pull from that social work or did for a very long time pulled heavily um from the social work sector and if you look at those Social Work graduate school classes they're predominantly females so these helping professions tend to attract females which by the way is not a bad thing um I think we're exceptionally good at that work but what concerns me is that as we rise through the ranks why are we not making it to

[16:52]  the top position so we look at you know the that 8% of the top nonprofits in this country are run by women and the statistic is much lower I think it's 1% if we look at women of color so um and we also find that when you look at Boards of director nonprofit boards that are onethird to one half women they are much more likely to hire a female CEO so we are fighting against sort of years of uh the myth that says we can't have it all right we can't women's uh you know childbearing years interrupt their ability to excel into management roles they are not mentored and courted and trained as managers um one of the things that we do

[17:41]  with a lot of intention both internally for our own team and externally for women who work in the field is offer that mentoring and support one-on-one coaching one-on-one mentoring matching people with mentors in the field we offer free webinars um last year we did a a webinar with three female CEOs in the Chicago area who moved up through the ranks because we want other women to get a sense of their paths and and how did that happen for you what experiences did you expose yourself to what other roles did you have how did you work with your board of directors how did you create a sense of confidence in your ability um so I love the opportunity to do that again both within my team and for women in the field because I think we need to see more women showing up in leaders

[18:29]  positions I'll also say this the changes that are being made at the state level in terms of salary transparency and making it um inappropriate to ask not just women but anybody what what they're making at their last job um really helps create a um a an equal playing field for everyone who's applying so I think some of the changes and some of the new rules and regulations being made on a Statewide level will help women um so that we don't apply for a job and for you it's $25,000 less right and for um you know this this white male that the salary range looks very different I had a um a client we one of the things that my team

[19:18]  does is executive recruiting executive Search In addition to fundraising strategic planning board development um and one of our clients said to us about one of our our candidates why does she need to make that much money what does her husband do I mean so that's that's still a question yeah real life question recent question that we got I mean that's the mentality that we're still working with um in the nonprofit space and I suspect in the for-profit space as well it's interesting to me that um I was listening to a conversation about pay transparency yesterday and the whole thing was the stories that we've been telling ourselves as business owners where we can't be transparent about pay but the example that this keynote speaker was giving was have we ever looked at the structure of a large public organization publicly traded

[20:06]  organizations are incredibly transparent about all the dollars that they spend including bonuses that they give to team members is it a story that I would say less sophisticated or smaller business owners tell themselves where we can't be transparent about the numbers of our business and how much we're paying people it seems like the data is clear on the wall but we keep running in this fantasy world where we can't talk about these things because they're Taboo it's really interesting to me yeah and I think that's especially true in the nonprofit world because we have so many people who are underpaid you know and and therefore feel undervalued so if you are if you've got people who are making less than a 100,000 and Senior leadership roles in your midsize nonprofit and yet Amy's team at evolv comes in and says you

[20:52]  really need to pay 150 for a topnotch development director it's very hard for you to be transparent about that because your other directors are going to see that right so the problem is then we have to right siize the the whole ship and that's that's something that is very difficult to take on so I feel I feel for these hiring managers on the other hand we need to bring nonprofit employees period teachers administrators Service delivery clinicians up to livable wages based on their years of experience I want to I want to rewind a little bit because when we were talking about you know building a team a leadership team of women you know I think about the multiplicative effects

[21:38]  on the Next Generation and I want to kind of ground this in a personal story co-founder in my business is actually my younger sister she's 31 years old and she loves business over the last year she's just become so engrossed and so infatuated with all the things that we do in our business and how she can create a business that she can own a couple weeks ago she went to to um a all women's Business leader conference in New York City she came back from the conference so jacked up about what she wants to do with the future because she said Keenan for the first time I was in a room full of other women who understand the challenges of being a woman and building a business and not to say anything negative but the energy was just completely different in the room than when then what it was and I think about just like small examples of like

[22:25]  what you're building are multiplicative into the future about inspiring the next generation of great female leaders to come into these spaces and take their industries by the Bulls or by the horns by the bull horns of the bull whatever that's saying is I can't speak right now I couldn't agree more and I think you know I don't know if your your sister felt like there was some potential mentors in the room but I think that modeling and mentorship is so rare um and again I can speak most knowledgeably from the the nonprofit perspective but again I had of all the positions I had before started Consulting I had dual reporting to one female my entire career most of my bosses were men and some of them were exceptional some of them were not by the way um but some of them were exceptional the problem is I I couldn't

[23:12]  see myself in those men like in other words I couldn't imagine my my path to the top and so what what we need as females in this space in the nonprofit space and in the corporate space as well is we need mentors and modeling and I'm so happy that your sister got excited about what she saw because that's how it should be is that we should be taking each other under our wings and say this is how I did it I love when people call me up um younger women who say I'm thinking of going out on my own tell me how you did it it's the most fun conversation that I can have what do we tell them when it comes to going out on their own because it's a scary process do you give them any type of like mindset reinforcement or like preparing them for the unstable road that they're

[23:58]  going to be on for a while yeah I do and I think we we we typically talk a lot about um failure as a positive in other words there's just no chance you're going to start your own business or do your own thing and not face some major bumps in the road some of which are going to feel pretty catastrophic um and you know it's funny if you ask me about my successes over the past you know almost 20 years that I've been insulting at this point I I have to think for a minute about them but if you ask me about my failures I come up with like five right off the top of my head because that sticks with you right the things you feel like the turns wrong turns you made um really like don't don't leave the brain and so but

[24:48]  but I also can point to those same failers or risks I took that didn't pay off and say well here's what I learned from them so what I tell young women is go for if you can right not everybody is prepared to go for it you need to be able to take that take on that Financial Risk I was lucky and that I was able to do that at the time not everybody can um but if you can take on that risk and you can sort of lean into what you love and what you know and the relationships and the networks that you have built and really draw on those to start your own business you AB absolutely should but expect the failures welcome the fa failures and be open to learning from them you can become a really powerful individual when you lean into trying to

[25:39]  fail because failing is a prerequisite to success I actually went through a little bit of a diabolical phase where in one of my notebooks that I have around here I would hop onto my sales calls and say how many failures did I have this week knows and I would tally them up and what I found was the more failures that I had the more business opportunities came because I was looking at the number of NOS that I got ahead of the yeses and I was like okay only three more Nos and I can get a yes it was a weird way of gamifying failure because we often think that our journey is going to be un it's going to be unblemished if you will but the people who are willing to fail the most are the people who are more successful on the longer time Horizon yeah I I'm still working on if I think about the things that I'm really consciously still working on one of them

[26:26]  is recovering from failures be even just from a day-to-day process like we bid on a big fundraising project and we don't get it right I'm thinking about that for like the next 48 hours straight which is not so healthy I don't recommend that but I but I'm working on recovering from that and part of that is I think we put oursel like I have a team of really passionate invested people folks um so any proposal we put out there there's like six of us who worked on it and thought about it so we all sort of feels like uh you know um we we use so much team time energy passion KN how to do this but I think we all benefit from one of the questions we always ask is thank you for letting us know we can get the

[27:13]  project but can you provide any feedback about what we could have done better or your experience with us and I would say about 50% of the clients are willing to say yeah here let let us tell you it was about price or it was this other firm has more experience doing this I mean it's really important to ask for that feedback and then be able to process it and integrate it so I I'm still working on that I uh have been putting a little bit of a framework around this exact challenge because I struggle with this as well I was talking to a mentor about two weeks ago and we were talking about at the end when this is all over what is the biggest regret that we're going to have and he gave a phenomenal answer and it inspired me to say my biggest regret at the end of this entrepreneu journey is going to be not enjoying the process

[28:01]  more along the way and even enjoying the process of saying do you guys remember when we spent 23 hours as a team of six putting together this proposal and then they came back and said no and we were like what the heck it's those memories that I think we need to lean into a little bit more as Founders and leaders of our organization because this is a life journey and we might as well enjoy it as we go through the process but it's so natural to get hung up on the losses but what if we can look at them as just part of the journey because because they make the victory so much sweeter that's right and again they make the next one better right so I'll be better prepared for that next opportunity I want to talk a little bit about work life Harmony versus work life balance now I said it a little earlier kind of in a funny way when we trade in our 9 to5 for a 247 365 work can become all consuming especially

[28:51]  as a Founder in a CEO finding that Harmony in life and work can be really tough really difficult tough how have you kind of maybe struggled with this how have you improved in this how do you frame it these days especially with the early inspiration of having more flexibility to spend with your kids you know as a mom what does that look like for you yeah I mean that the irony um around that sort of early inspiration which is oh let's let's go into this business Consulting business because you know I only want to work 30 hours a week and I you know want to be able to spend more time with my kids it's you know what ended up playing out and again when you have your own business you're really on call 247 so I never ended up working that 30h hour work week but I did go to my kids soccer games and ballet recital

[29:39]  and and and shows and so I was happy to trade in here's where the harmony comes in and I still am happy to trade in the the you know the evenings where I have to end up working because I took a couple hours off during the day I'm a night person so I'm happy to be up until midnight if it meant that I could go to my kids show and I think that's what the harmony is about it's never and that's why we talk about Harmony rather than balance if we're looking for balance we're going to be looking forever right it's it's just it's not a it depending on what you do for a living there just isn't a lot of balance out there and I think it's that's especially true for women but probably everybody but if we can think about a a harmonious life how do we balance

[30:28]  the ability to be able to get out there and take the vacations that we want to take and spend time with family and friends and uh biking and Hiking which is part of the reason why we moved up to Michigan is like to really take advantage of the outdoors um and I'm in the work hard play hard um sort of category is that I'm willing to you know work my Uno what off in order to have those opportunities and experiences and I have said that from to every single member of our team who we brought on now we're at at evolve we're around 40 40 individuals and we have unlimited PTO right we want people to really lean into their personal lives and spend time with friends and family and that's part of

[31:15]  the culture that we're trying to create um however we have really high expectations around what they're going to deliver on the professional side so if you can get your work done you manage your own schedule right we're not going to uh you know you want to do a yoga class in the middle of the day go for it good for you you know so I am not into micromanaging people I want to bring people onto my team who have the ability to manage their own time um but I think people need to listen to their bodies because I think our bodies tell us a lot so if you're getting headaches or you've got aches and pains I mean yes go to a doctor but so much of our stress manifests our itself in our bodies and I think we have to listen to our bodies um and give ourselves a chance to take a break Amy I'm gonna risk it here um and say that I'm sure there are people from

[32:06]  the previous generations of leadership who say Amy your team is probably making you look like a sucker you're giving them un you're giving them unlimited PTO right and you have high expectations how do you glue both of those crazy worlds together is it trust that keeps these things together or what does it look like well I mean let's just say this the the at the end of the day you know whether or not you're getting the products and the deliverables that you need so I'm about I'm in the camp where give people the space to be creative and Innovative and and flex as they need to and then if they produce excellent work stay out of their way right lean into that so I struggle again there's a the segment of my team that does executive Search and we've got a lot of um members of the nonprofit Works Force who are

[32:55]  coming out of covid and really had that flexibility never thought they wanted to work from home never yearned for anything like that and now wouldn't take a job that required them to come in the office five days a week and here I am trying to convince senior Executives that they should consider those two days of you know Flex time and so they're saying the same thing to me like how will I know what they're doing I think if you're a a strong manager you are setting expectations your your team understands the deliverables they know what what you want to need they show up for team meetings right I'm not saying there is no value in face tof face time I think there's a lot of value there but if we can give people I think this is especially true about the younger generation in the workforce if we can

[33:44]  give them that flexibility I think they produce better work I I think you know I'm I mean we've always been a remote team so it wasn't a huge uh move for us but I work with dozens of organizations who have come to that place and really understood that like you said it's about trust it's about strong man management and expectation setting and if you can get that and allow people flexibility you're enabling a very strong work work culture which is what it's about it almost I went to the place weirdly in my mind of thinking about your friends in high school the friends who you had who had over-the-top overbearing parents who controlled every minute of their their lives were often the wildest right I could not agree more it was the people

[34:32]  it was the parents who were like guys we trust you do what you need to do who had the best kids and I feel like we need to re-engineer our work lives to be more representative of that trust that we have in our personal lives and I think that's what people are yearning for the kids who went crazy freshman year of college were all the kids who were not allowed to drink and had those early curfews right and they have to experience I think you're right so here's a question for you um do you ever and this is kind of like a personal question I'm asking outward do you ever struggle to keep the accomplishments that you've accomplished in this long career front of Mind instead of the pursuit of the next goal and I want to share a quote with you from a mentor of mine that I heard he's on the internet he's not actually Mentor mine but he said remember you've already accomplished things that you said would

[35:19]  make you happy what does that kind of mean to you yeah that's so interesting I love that question um I think you're right I I think that that the pace with which we work right now in this you know um this environment where everything is like now next next next I mean I and I'm guilty of that too like I just want to check off the boxes right I want I have a list in front of me and I just want to keep getting through it or through my inbox um and the ability to actually take time and think about like where am I where do I want to be how how far have I come right um what's that next Frontier look like for me not not just shortterm like what's on my list in the moment but what is what is it that I want to do and be

[36:09]  and for me that happened in June of 2020 when when my former business partner and I decided to go our separate ways and I took 19 members of my former team with me to evolve giving group we had the opportunity to not just start up the same firm with a different name but to really think about okay who are we and what do we want to be what are our Val like we sat down and had a conversation about values um which was fascinating what kinds of organizations do we want to serve what is important to us what is the change that we want to see in the world how do we help the world become a better place by supporting the nonprofits who contribute to that world in a on a daily basis so I don't do enough of what you just suggested I wish I did more of it and thank you for the reminder um that I need to do more of

[36:57]  that um that kind of thinking and taking stock um I do think all the time about you know back to the you're only as good as your team I I count my blessings and my lucky stars on a daily basis that I am surrounded at Evol by such talented passionate dedicated people I you know to me that that's something I never take for granted um I don't often sort of think about my own accomplishments that way but but um I work with great people which is really exciting and motivating and energizing on a daily basis ever since my younger sister came back from that business conference I told you about a little earlier um she's had a different perspective on what she wants to create in the business right

[37:44]  and it's not just about we want to hit this amount of Revenue because we've accomplished that many times and it still feels like we need to get to the next Notch yeah but what she said was you know I would really love for this business to be a vehicle that allows for our employees to be able to experience life at a more fulfilling level and I had to reflect on that this weekend when I was thinking about what am I focusing on as a leader it's empowering my team members to feel like the work that they're doing is fulfilling it's giving them the flexibility the unlimited PTO so they can go to practice and go to all the events and all the family milestones and memories that are so important and honestly I Now understand why leaders always talk about culture being so important being a leader who is

[38:32]  basically not a CEO but a chief constraint officer that can eliminate the constraints of their team to be the best version of themselves like that sense of leadership and power and authority to impact other people's lives is addictive and I understand why it's so impactful and it seems like we're kind of both at that stage of being able to be the creator of people's lives by the business and the risk that you took so long ago which is so powerful I agree and you know we just went through U we hired a consultant so putting my money where my mouth is right to take us through a growth planning process at year four you know evolve is four I've been doing this work via Giving Tree and evolve for like I said since 2008 but you know we're we're sort of coming out of our infancy as a company um and thinking about what's next for us and like you we have

[39:20]  achieved some of our uh Revenue based goals our financial goals but sort that what's next conversation with was difficult for us and so we brought in someone from the outside who pushed us to understand what growth planning is so when people said to me well how big do you want to be I didn't even know what they meant like do you mean how many people do you mean how much what what our profit is what our revenue is I mean sort of like what is growth if not what you just said if not being able to pay people fairly right to be able to take afford to take on the kinds of projects that are consistent with our values to do able to do some pro bono work to be able to offer complimentary coaching and webinars and to be able to speak for free at conferences like I you part of our growth allows us the financial

[40:09]  stability in order to be able to do those things so for me I want to be able to create a growth path for my people that seems exciting I mean that's what growth is to me it's not sure there are some numbers um that are tied up in that equation but I think it's so much more about what do we want for our eles as a team the kind of work we want to do and the environment we want to be able to offer to our team that's to me what growth is and that's been our Focus um as a senior team contemplating growth it kind of takes me back to the place of um playing sports right I always think that a championship in whatever sport we're talking about is a byproduct of creating the team and creating the culture that gels together that then out of their ability to work together

[40:56]  creates the results down the road and I think that that's just a beautiful place for us to put a little bit of a bow on today's episode Amy part of our tradition that we have here on the podcast is our previous guest wants to ask you a blind question okay now our previous guest is the CEO of an amazing organization called Lemonade Day they're a social entrepreneurship group that helps young kids experience entrepreneurships through starting lemonade stands across the country it's beautiful part of our conversation was very similar to what we had here today she was saying you know the line between personal and professional life is becoming very blurry for a lot of CEOs and Founders so your next guest I'd like to know what is your personal life or what what is it about your personal life that is even more present in your professional life these days that's a

[41:44]  great question um I think because so much of the work that we do um focuses on Equity social justice you know again making the world a better place um I think harder about how I do that not just on the professional side but what am I doing with my volunteer time so I am more I think because of the work I do I contemplate in a different way how I spend my volunteer hours and I don't I don't actually feel complete as a human if there isn't that if that aspect of my life is not active right so what am I doing to contribute to my community so whether it's um right now you know last night my husband and I were making phone

[42:33]  calls encouraging people to vote in the upcoming campaign um what that looks like different things at different times it might be volunteering um at a food pantry or a shelter in town for us so um for me I just feel a little bit more intentional about exploring that aspect of who I am because I think it rounds us all out as people if we can step away from ourselves our own needs our children's needs and and think about the communities that we live in I love that well Amy it's easy to say for everybody who's been watching in tuning or listening and watching here today um you are the definition of heart and hustle and we can't thank you enough for taking risk and creating your organization and uplifting your team and creating a future where people can be their best version of themselves seriously thank you so much for joining us on the show

[43:19]  we really appreciate you this is a lot of fun I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and that's the ref guys we'll catch you in the next one