Please give a warm Georgia Tech welcome to Jim McColl and. Thank you Billy and thanks for giving that background and good will now I don't have to do it that's great. It's wonderful to be back on campus but I have to confess that when I graduated from Georgia Tech if anyone had told me that I would spend nearly all about adult life so far working for Goodwill Industries I would have considered them completely delusional and yet I can't imagine a career that would have been a better fit for somebody who is wired the way I am. Now most successful careers are not planned mine certainly wasn't the most successful career while Peter Drucker put it this way most successful careers come from understanding what your values are what you do well what you don't do well the kinds of situations you work best in the kinds of situations you don't work so well in and you try to find a fit with all that and that's not necessarily easy to do but I was extraordinarily fortunate to find in a relatively early age what turned out for me to be a nearly ideal fit and what I plan to do for the next half an hour is is talk to yourself about the path I took. Some of the experiences that that I've had as our organization has grown and evolved and then some perspective that's resulted from all of that and I hope they'll be something in all of this that you might find helpful so so you heard a little bit about Goodwill Industries from Billy how in the world does somebody a industrial engineering graduate Georgia Tech get into this well I owe let's start back when I was fourteen years old decided that I was going to become an engineer and I also decided when I was fourteen years old that I was going to go to Georgia Tech and I grew up in central Florida and fortunately the admissions committee here decided it was OK for me to come here I'm not at all sure that would be the case today. OK. And I started I was a co-op student I started out as a bubbly and halfway through I changed my major to industrial engineering I worked as a co-op student and for a few months after graduating from a very fine engineering consulting firm working out of their Atlanta office but I graduated from Georgia Tech at the height of the Vietnam build up and I spent the next three years fulfilling my military obligation during the last half of that time I had a desk job in Washington D.C. where the work was somewhat interesting but not anything that I could see myself doing for a career. Outside work though I had some experiences that literally changed the course of my life now I was a young single guy I had a lot of free time and I attended a church in downtown Washington that was heavily involved in community service they had a program for example on Saturday mornings for children who had disabilities and they. As two of them right there they needed drivers to pick these kids up at their homes take them to the church two hours later take them home and so I did that they also had a tutoring program on Thursday evenings for teenagers who live in some of the low income neighborhoods of the city and they needed to that are so that well I've never done anything like that but I guess it could and so I tutored two boys to thirteen fourteen years old that's Mike right there one on one mostly in math and I got more satisfaction out of those volunteer experiences than with anything I had ever done I started wondering if there might be a place where I could utilize my industrial engineering skills and get a similar kind of satisfaction and get paid for it so I started calling organizations not for profit organizations that were headquartered in the Washington area Goodwill Industries happened to be one of those and they asked me to come in and talk and after some initial conversations they started talking to me about going into an executive training program. So I don't want to be an executive be honest with you I didn't even know what executives did I said Look I'm an industrial engineer I can help you with plant layout and design workstation design workflow materials handling these are the kinds of things that I know something about but they kept talking about executive training and to make matters worse they started talking with me about training in Indianapolis I said time out I'm a fifth generation Floridian. Now that's a rare species in itself but it's seldom found as far north as the American Midwest and I'm not interested. Eventually Houston became an option and after this dance had gone on for about six months I finally decided I was going to do it I turned down two other job offers either of which would have paid me forty percent more I made a four year commitment to work for Goodwill Industries I was twenty six years old at the time. It was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. But it turned out to be one of the best. In Houston the training was mostly on the job so I got out there just started doing things and learning after about a year my boss sent me over to Beaumont Texas ninety miles from Houston where there was a Peter branch operation and he and he wanted to separate it from the Houston Organization make it independent so he told me to go over there and do that make it independent within a year basically the operation was so bad when I got there there was hardly any way that I could have failed to show major improvement and after nine months we did separate from the Houston Organization about a year after that. I got a call from the C.E.O. of the Indianapolis goodwill now he had become a friend I greatly respected and he'd just found out he had cancer. His number two person had just left to go run a goodwill in another city and Al. I needed help and he asked me if I would come up as his vice president operations. And that well if I'm going to make a career out of this up probably ought to go and I did. Move to Indianapolis as vice president operations of that organization unfortunately seven months later my friend the C.E.O. died two months after that the board name me the C.E.O. and I spent the next forty one years trying to figure out how to do the job right. I was young I was inexperienced. Fortunately I suppose I had no idea how little I knew. But I had confidence and I had a lot of ideas and it just started trying things trying different ways to grow our businesses and accomplish our mission. They didn't all work but some of them did and that pattern continued for the next forty one years I counted up the number of what I considered to be significant initiatives that we undertook during my career now some of these were extensions or variations of something we were already doing some were major process changes some were totally new services or job creating ventures and I came up with one hundred four. Now out of those I categorize them in baseball terms. We had twelve home runs eight with bases loaded. We had eighteen strike outs. We had a lot of singles and a few doubles. We didn't but the whole farm on any of them and the impact of those eight home runs with bases loaded far exceeded the cumulative impact of everything else that we did during my career. Along the way we adapted reasonably well most of the time to the incredible changes that were taking place in the world around. And US changes in demographics the economy technology competition laws and regulations. And of course in forty years nearly everything did change but the economic changes at times presented us with some major challenges for example in the late one nine hundred seventy S. and early eighty's the U.S. was in a deep recession. With a heavy dependence on durable goods manufacturing Indiana was particularly hard hit unemployment rose to over eleven percent and it stayed there for a long time. Goodwill was affected by the economic situation we were very concerned about the impact on our on our employees many of whom had disabilities they didn't have a lot of options and we didn't want to have to lay them off so I decided we'll just start some new businesses and will employ them ourselves and we did we had some pretty good woodworking capabilities in those days as a result of manufacturing of variety of wood products for the federal government and so we started a business to refinish institutional furniture our biggest customer was produce university dormitory furniture or they tore it up in a hurry it was a good business where yeah we bought franchises and a home cleaning business the altar furniture up like now you certainly don't. We bought franchises and a home cleaning business we started our own upholstery business we designed a line of greeting cards that we printed in our print shop we had a greenhouse in those days and we started a business to provide plants and floral arrangements for parties banquets conventions and weddings and we manufactured fabric cases for cassette tapes look it up on Wikipedia. I know. All of those little businesses grew. They grew to about two hundred two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year and then they stop growing. We didn't have the capital to grow any of them and what little management talent we had in those days was spread so thin I'm not sure we did anything very well now we did keep some people employed and as the economy improved we gradually extricate ourselves from all those little businesses but we had learned a lot including a lot about how hard it is to start and operate small businesses and I knew I needed to learn a lot more I wasn't at all sure that I was approaching much job in the best way possible. Indiana University had an executive M.B.A. program back in those days that was structured just perfectly for somebody in a situation like mine and with our board support I enrolled and I spent the next two years going through that program with a cohort of about thirty other people made career most of them work for large corporations I was the only one from an off for profit and over the two year period we got to know each other pretty well and as we compared experiences I was surprised to learn that some of those big companies they work for were doing even dumber things than we were. I I eventually concluded that we weren't as bad as I'd feared we might have been but we certainly weren't as good as we needed to be and we have a great learning experience and then about a year after I got that M.B.A. I woke up one beautiful spring morning having a heart attack. I was forty three years old a nonsmoker I didn't weigh any more than a way right now. I've been a runner for twenty years but the bad genes more or more powerful. Incidentally six months after that the F.D.A. approved the first Staten for commercial use I've been on whatever since I figure that's probably a big reason. While I'm still alive some a big fan of pharmaceutical research. At the organization did OK during the weeks that I was out recovering but I resolved during that period of time that I was going to build a team that was so strong that the organization could keep running without missing a beat for months if necessary if I suddenly died or otherwise became unable to function and I deliberately started seeking out recruiting and hiring people who could run every aspect of the organization better than I could have run it now that was a pretty low bar and so it wasn't too hard to find him but as the organ as the team became stronger I began to spend more of my time on long range and strategic matters and new initiatives which quite frankly. Was what I like to do anyway and it was a lot more fun for me. But best decisions in my entire career by the way were good hiring decisions. My worst decisions bad hiring decisions of course. In the late night hundred eighty S. early ninety's we placed a few more bets and efforts to create more jobs and most of these lasted a few years and then one away but for a track record was was better this time around we still had an occasional clunker though the worst of those was was a attempt to manufacture nurses uniforms for the Defense Department it was a complete disaster part of it was our fault part of it was the government's fault but we finally shut the thing down took our losses and we haven't tried to manufacture anything since we did continue to grow and improve our retail side we created e-commerce unit that now employs well over one hundred people still processing good selling online filling orders. We created a concept for an outlet store and recycling operations that. Enabled us to extract more value for from some of the goods that people were donating and we continued to have continued to provide labor intensive small assembly and packaging jobs for a variety of companies some other types of labor intensive work and we also provide some services for federal government installations in the Indianapolis area. And over the years with much better talent we became a much larger and much more complex organization and we evolved into a form that quite honestly I didn't even imagine a decade ago the rate of evolution began Excel rating when we opened public charter high school in two thousand and four. And that turned out also to be the catalyst for an absolutely incredible. Organizational Learning experience what is now the Indianapolis much Paul high school serves a high poverty high special needs population of students. When we open that school in two thousand and four we started coming face to face every day with problems that we had known existed but they had been our problems they were somebody else's problems Well now they were our problems so we had to figure out what we were going to do about it we found out what we discovered found out we found up of course that that early on that if we didn't help some of those kids deal with some of the stuff they were encountering outside of class they were going to be in class so we started rapping services around some of those kids and sometimes members of their families and we also started to appreciate how critically important it is that every one of those kids have a positive long term relationship with at least one responsible adult because that was missing in far too many of their lives. And then we kept learning and then about four years and. To it now we're up to two thousand and eight. Trying to better understand what we were dealing with we started doing some research into the links among poverty low education levels crime rates teen pregnancy and and a whole host of health issues and we we came back we found an enormous amount of data and some of it was really pretty dismaying for example we found that federal spending on income security programs which is the bulk of all federal anti-poverty spending from one hundred sixty eight to two thousand and eight one up five hundred eighty seven percent in constant inflation adjusted dollars but the official poverty rate in two thousand and eight was higher than it was in two thousand one hundred sixty eight similarly per pupil spending on public K. through twelve education in this country. More than doubled from one hundred sixty nine to two thousand and nine in constant dollars and yet measures of education attainment fell. Law enforcement and corrections spending went up tremendously and here there was some good news because crime rates have actually come down but will increase it Carse rating people at three times the rate we were in one nine hundred eighty and four times the rate we were nine hundred seventy and we're looking at this and say what is going on here we're spending a lot more money and we're getting worse results and by the way during that same forty year period. There was an incredible proliferation of not for profit organizations in this country so why aren't we seeing better results Well we also found an enormous amount of data showing how all of these factors are interrelated they reinforce and compound each other. And yet if you look at the way we tend to treat them as a society we don't treat them as if they're related we treat them in isolation one from another the public sector doesn't through silos you've got Education Workforce development social services criminal justice housing transportation the silos don't communicate well if at all with each other. But if the public sector looks like this the not for profit sector that I've been part of all my adult life looks more like this it's an incredibly fragmented sector a lot of organizations doing a lot of good work no question about that but most are small typically focused on one problem or issue one target population or one often tiny chip graphic area they have great difficulty aggregating capital or talent great difficulty replicating what works and getting scale neither of those sectors is really structured to deal effectively with complex social problems and so we're looking at all this and we're thinking what do we do with what we're learning and we started asking some a lot of questions first of all really trying to understand our context and this by the way I don't care where you are you really need to understand where you're fit we started asking questions were do we fit in the communities where we operate where do we fit in the fields that we're engaged in how does what we're doing relate to what others around us are doing. What's happening out there that could affect what we do or how we do it that might create an opportunity or pose a threat. We're asking increasingly How can we have the greatest impact in the lives of people and the communities where we operate and in particular how can we add unique value if what we're doing is the same as other organizations can do as well as maybe better than we are is that how we should be deploying our resources can't we find a way that we can deploy our resources use our capabilities to add some truly unique value. And we also defined our overall objective in general terms as maximizing mission related impact while maintaining a financial position that's good for a long term. Viability. Now during this time we also articulated a set of general directions and and principals to to help guide us in our decision preferences to help guide us in our decision making for example we we decided we really want to have long term impact not just provide short term help for people as much as possible we want to have long term relationships with the people we're working with. Also as much as possible we want to try to incorporate holistic whole family to generation approaches with the with the families that were that we have contact with we really want to to emphasize the enhancement of education attainment educational attainment levels and other credentials that increase employee ability as much as possible we want to help prevent problems and develop potential rather than come in after the fact and be involved in rehabilitation and repair. Our aspiration. To utilize our resources as much as possible to help reduce generational poverty and a lot of the social problems that go along with it and everything that we do in our organisation directly or indirectly in one way or another helps individuals and families increase their economic self-sufficiency well. Our culture is built around what we call five basic principles and one of those is innovation and improvement and if you look at the organization over time you're going to see a lot of little incremental improvements that that do make a big difference but occasionally you're going to see some major innovations and in my entire career by far the greatest innovation that we ever came up with is something that we call the Excel Center now this grew out of some of the experience from the first school that we opened where we saw that none of the older students the eighteen and nineteen year olds who enrolled with us who were way behind in their credits succeeded not one of them they needed a different kind of school. We also threw some of. Research had discovered that fourteen percent of the adults in Indiana did not have a high school diploma and this by the way is pretty much the case all over this country give or take a percent or two. And we had also seen some data that showed if a GED is the highest level of education that you attain you don't make any more money than a high school dropout but if you got his high school diploma there's a forty one percent bump an average annual earnings if you add an industry recognized certificate on top of that there's another bump of at least twenty percent more in average annual earnings and so we set out to design a diploma granting high school for older youth and adults who had previously dropped out of school that would fit their life's circumstances. It's open year round. We've modified the curriculum to enable students to accelerate credit attainment still meet all of the state's academic standards. Every student has an individualized learning plan. There is free childcare for the young children of our students while they're in class and every student is assigned to a life coach who helps keep them on track academically and to helps them deal with issues that might be affecting their ability to stay in school. Eighty percent of our students receive at least one form of public assistance when they roll with us. Only fourteen percent are employed full time when they roll with us fifty eight percent have at least one child under the age of eighteen. We opened the first Excel Center five years ago last month with three hundred students. We knew there was a need we had no idea what the demand would be. With no advertising six months later we had two thousand people on a waiting list. We started adding schools. We short today we operate eleven Excel centers in Indiana and we're licensing the model to groups and outside of our geographic territory and now have Excel centers open under licensing arrangements in South Bend Indiana Austin Texas Memphis Tennessee they'll be one opening in Washington D.C. next year and today and tomorrow in Indianapolis there are representatives of twenty two other organizations meeting to learn more about this model and how they might be able to license its use from us as well. We have thirteen hundred fifty five graduates to date and that number is increasing now at a very rapid rate with more schools or two thousand and fourteen graduates eighty four percent have earned a post-secondary credential or their enroll in college. Upon enroll but with us only twenty seven percent had been employed at a part time or full time post-graduation eighty eight percent are employed or there and rolled in college. Now something else that came out of some of this research. Led us to bring to Indiana a program that had been developed by someone else it had been in thirty some out of the states we didn't have it in Indiana. And we thought state really needs it something called Nurse Family Partnership. And this really we. As we were doing all this research and we were kind of dismayed trying to figure out what we should do I started asking the question is there anything out there that works is there anything out there that where there is solid evidence of significant long term impact and we kept running across Nurse Family Partnership it's a home visitation program for first time moms and low income households who voluntarily enroll no later than the twenty eight weeks of pregnancy and then a registered nurse goes into the home on a weekly or bi weekly basis from that point to the child is two years old they work with the parents not only on health related issues but also on parenting skills and how to. Create the kind of environment in the home that's conducive to the proper health and development the child this program has been researched and refined randomized control trials done over a thirty year period of shown incredible impact in a number of dimensions for example thirty one percent reduction in child maltreatment through age fifteen thirty eight percent reduction in language delays a sixty seven percent reduction in behavioral and cognitive problems for these children are six years old and a forty six percent reduction in crimes and arrests of these children between the ages of eleven seventeen we work for three years to figure a way to get to Indiana. We now we've been implementing it now for four years we have six hundred twenty five moms and expectant moms and rolled. Median age of a mom is twenty ninety one percent are unmarried only forty five percent have high school diplomas here's the really neat aspect of all this we can now link those young moms with education opportunities through the Excel centers we can link them with employment services that goodwill offers and we can link them with other services provided by other organizations that services the families might need it and we can put all of this together in a coherent holistic whole family approach that we believe if it can be scaled enough really has the potential to start reducing generational poverty. And it is all this has been happening our whole organization has been taking on a different form it's really becoming an array of networks each of which involves other organizations in addition to our own working together leveraging complimentary resources and capabilities. To increase long term impact and help make more productive use of existing resources and all of those networks are supported by and often linked by shared services that grew primarily to support our retail side. And it's all built on a solid financial base that is a result of the retail operations which now consist of fifty fifty nine retail stores e-commerce operations. Employing twenty two hundred people and two thirds of those individuals have limited options because they have a disability a felony conviction on their record or they lack a high school diploma. Now. I would love to be able to stand here and tell you that what the organization has become is a result of a grand plan that we brilliantly conceived and we have flawlessly executed. And that's not the way it's happened at all it's been an organic process and it is constantly evolving. It's primarily a function of our people we have a lot of smart talented people in the organization who bring to their work every day not just their knowledge and skills but also a strong commitment to the mission in other words they bring the head and the heart and we have to have both. It's a function of the relationships that our people have with individuals in organizations in all the sectors not just in central Indiana but in many cases around the country and it's a function of a culture where people generally work well with each other across departmental and official lines and it's also a culture where we're always looking for better ways to do our work and fulfill our mission. My whole career was categorized by trying things lots of things lots of different ways to grow our businesses and accomplish our mission. Learning from our experiences learning from others learning from doing research learning from any party possible way and adapting as the world around. This change and if you do this you try things you learn you adapt the organization tends to evolve. From a personal standpoint. My career has been a constant learning and growing process I had the same title for forty one years but the job itself changed immensely over the years. Along the way I had the opportunity to work with people at nearly every level of society in all parts of a community. In all the sectors. Largely because of a personal interest I also had opportunities for significant involvement at national and international levels the love of riding. My mother is ninety three years old. Her short term memory is completely gone but she remembers well a lot of what happened years ago and in our weekly a telephone conversations she will frequently remark about how much she knows I've enjoyed my work and then she will remind me that my dad who's now been dead for thirty eight years never had a job she liked. And I think how awful that must have been. And it makes me even more grateful to a bit in a position where I can honestly say I cannot recall a day in my entire career when I woke up in the morning wishing I didn't have to go to work. But a lot of people haven't been so fortunate. Over the years I have met with countless people who have been doing something for a living that they hate for ten or fifteen or twenty years and they they want to make a career change in hopes of getting more satisfaction out of what they do for a living for the next ten or fifteen or twenty years and I've nearly always told them to look for four things that as it turns out have been primary factors and why my career has been such a good fit for me. First look for good. Use fit your values and those of an employer don't have to be identical but they better be compatible or you're going to have problems. You want to look for a place where you can use your abilities to a substantial degree or you're going to be frustrated. You want to look for a place where you can learn and grow and that's more important today than it's ever been. And finally look for a place where you think you're likely to enjoy the people you work with that after all you might be spending half your waking hours with them. If you get all four I figure you're probably better off a ninety five percent of the population and I had all four in abundance my entire career so as I said I consider myself a pretty lucky guy. My career really has been a great adventure so I hope yours will be too and I'd like to close by just sharing with you my favorite description of a successful life and that it goes something like this that when when you get to the end of your life you compare what you did with what you might have done and you compare the kind of person you were with the kind of person you might have been. It's relative measure it's not an absolute It really has an awful lot to do with how close you come to realizing your full potential. As a human being your full potential in your your work life and using that description I just want to wish all of you much success in life and in work I want to thank you for listening and I look forward your questions one. Of us. We have a question over here. I was from his first career yes you briefly touched earlier on your military. State during the Vietnam war. In hindsight do you think of any ways that that. Had any influence in preparing you for your C.E.O. position at such a young age. I don't know it all you never hear the question. I don't know that that I could say that had a lot to do with preparing me for that kind of a position certainly I was in a leadership role in it certain times during during that experience. A lot of what I was doing was technical. It it was a good experience it was interesting it was broadening in that sense I would say yes it certainly helped. I think that. There were aspects of it that were I also learned some things that I'm not good at and some kinds of situations that I that I would say I wouldn't want to spend a lot of years and and so it was valuable from that perspective as well but directly preparing me for. I don't know that I would say it had that great an impact. Yes. So you mentioned many projects and businesses that ultimately fail so how do you maintain you your and your team's motivation during those that act you know if you. You hire the right people you have to do a lot of motivating. We had. We were we were successful in finding just some a lot of terrific people and and they would get just as excited about the organization as the rest of us were and and excited about the mission. Our key people. Are are really really committed to the mission and they understand what we're all about and there's a. There's some elements to to the kind of culture that that we were able to create that are are just very attractive and and make it a pretty nice place to be and and I would say that one of those elements is just very strong. Concern about making sure that that they've got a good balance in their lives between what they're responsible for at work and and their family responsibilities for example. It's. Particularly mid and upper levels. We don't have a lot of turnover. And so you spend what we spend a lot of time on the front end and hiring and if you do that you get the right people. It's. You don't really have to motivate a lot so. What's Yes. I can't top this. So good will offers a lot of integrated services that I didn't really know about and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what the mission statement of the organization is as a whole and how your values impacted this in the direction of the company when the. I have to I have to give you a little bit more background on the all the organization as a whole in order to respond to that because. Goodwill started in Boston at the beginning of the twentieth century and it was started by a young minister who was looking for a practical way to help a lot of unemployed people in the south and slums of Boston at that time no government safety net. He got an idea of putting some people to. Going around to wealthy areas of Boston and asking people for the goods they no longer wanted or needed but other people to work sorting through the goods repairing some other than selling to the public and to use the money to pay wages to the worker So in effect he was creating jobs and I would say that ultimately every good will organization is is is interested in trying to help improve the economic self-sufficiency of individuals now the way we do that though varies immensely from city to city because as the idea spread basically it was like different. New units opening up and they were all different they were local. Locally governed locally managed they were and still are operating within a defined geographic area. And with very few operational standards a lot of just minutes flexibility to do whatever the local board and executive leadership decides they want to do in their communities and so you have huge variability from one to another. There are positive aspects to this kind of a structure there are a lot of negative aspects to it too but we have a he likes a good what you see one good will you've seen one good will because they are so different so we have evolved differently in our organization than any of the others over the last ten years and it's primarily because we made a decision to get involved in public education and one thing led to another to another to another everything building on what we had learned from earlier experiences and everything really in an effort to try to increase long term impact. There aren't there are some goodwill that they're primarily concerned simply with employing people by the way I mention that we were looking for ways that we can add unique value we came up with three One is the historic role. Of providing work for people who don't have a lot of options and in our in our case about forty percent have disabilities over employees twelve percent have been convicted of a felony within the last ten years twenty percent of our workforce and Indianapolis. And about thirty four percent don't have a high school diploma now some have multiple barriers. And that is a it's a way that we can add some unique value in the communities where we operate a second way that we're adding unique value now is by providing opportunities for people who drop out of school to get high school diplomas and post-secondary credentials that make them more employers will and then a third way is is now we we are able to leverage our resources with those of others in some really unique ways and and help cost some good things to happen that otherwise probably wouldn't happen and that's just developed over the last five or six years so there are a lot of organise a lot of the Goodwills are are looking at this they're interested in it. But what we're we we've really evolved quite differently from the rest I'm so up so I can't give you a simple answer to your question but that's kind of the way it is. There's Next Yes thank you so much for your presentation that was really interesting I learned a lot as as Megan said So you said that when you were finished with college everything you had three job offers one from Goodwill and then you turned down the other two for good will in you that was the hardest decision of your life and then when you went to Indiana you said if I'm going to make this a career I might as well go so was there it's high time if that decision was so hard was there a time during those four years really maybe I'll try corporate or step away from the not for profit. When what I want over to Boma to run that little branch. I found I really like running something. And I was able to do that at a really young age. And. And I had some success doing it and and so I help OK I can run this little organization down here maybe I can run one that's bigger and let's try it and I was willing to take a chance and then once I got into it and we started growing and we started having more successes. I never seriously considered changing careers I couldn't think of anything that would that would provide the the various. Kinds of experiences the ability to come up with an idea to to try it to have a board that said Yeah don't risk the whole place on anything but you know if you if you try something you give it a really good effort and it doesn't work that's OK learn something from it and keep on going and that's that's kind of a unique situation I did consider going to some larger markets from times but every time I looked at one of those. I thought you know I would have to do over there what I've already done here I'd rather stay and just keep building on what we've created here and so. I that's that's just kind of the way it turned out and because we were always able to be doing new and different things it never got boring. So. Yes. Mr Rico and I was wondering if you might be able to give another specific example of maybe time not with with your company that something has failed or an endeavor that goodwill has done that it's failed how you're still able to learn a lot from that. You know when we started all those little businesses in the white seventies or the early eighty's we became a mini conglomerate of too high. Hundred fifty thousand dollars a year businesses and I still can't imagine a worse form of organization. For a lot from a long term standpoint you don't want to do that. It met an objective of keeping some people employed at a time of very high unemployment some of the other things that we try to mention I mentioned the nurse's uniform we also had. We have spent we invested about a million dollars. Somewhere in that in that time period on some supposedly state of the art equipment to take. Milk jugs that kind of plastic and convert it into plastic pellets that were of a quality that could be you could manufacture you could use them to manufacture something or some other kind of plastic product and the company that we bought the equipment from could never get that equipment to to operate. To a point where we could get the highest quality which is what we had counted on and so we were able never able to get enough of a price for that product for that Plas those pellets that would enable it to be economically viable and we tried for about a year we did not do enough due diligence on that company and they really there were there wasn't any we didn't have a lot of recourse we eventually sold that equipment to a consolidator of plastic recycling. Small plastic recycling operations like ours so that was another one. You know before before. We came out of the auditorium which is talking as a group of students and and I mentioned that the the the times that were the most difficult for me were when we tried something that didn't work and it resulted in some people losing their jobs. Those were the most difficult times and we didn't have very many of those but occasionally we did and and. And those are the times when you know you have a sleepless nights and you wonder what could we have done could we have done this differently could we have done it better was there anything that that that might have changed the outcome so you have those experiences but fortunately. The positive experience is far outnumber the of the negatives so. What's Yes. And near me now yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your story and that of it well my question is that you talked a little bit about how your involvement with your church was something that kind of sparked your interest in working in something more of the nonprofit sector. And how the founder of goodwill plays minister So would you say that faith is a big part of the company even though it's more of a public company if it was at the beginning it is a secular organization now there is no there is no. There's no affiliation or relationship with any religious body. But I would say that a lot of the people that we have in the organization there have a a strong feeling that this is their values are very consistent with the values of the founder let me put it that way and some of that comes from a humanist perspective some of it is coming from a very religious perspective. But there's a there's a just a very strong emphasis that that every individual has. A very strong belief I would say that every individual has value that. That we want to try to give everyone an opportunity to. To function at the highest level that they're capable of and that when we can help somebody who isn't getting a lot of op. To develop whatever abilities they do have and be able to function in society hopefully be able to support themselves. That. For many of us we feel that that's very consistent with whatever faith system that we do aspire to or have and and that it's a good thing to do so I would say that probably you know my value system comes from primarily the way I was brought up family church. You know all of these were very very. Significant elements in in in my my value in the development of my value system and I would say it's probably true with a lot of the people that work in our organization although the organization itself today. Is As I said earlier secular going to answer your question OK. Yes. Yes Or you said that a lot of what goodwill does today and what it's become was just from trying new things and seeing what worked do you believe in still trying new things and changing things up and areas such as education where you're already doing a great job or do you kind of just stick with hey you are doing a good NOW I think I think you always got to be trying to find ways to improve. I'm never satisfied with the status quo anything. Everything can be improved. I think that. Unfortunately in public education in particular. There's there's a lot of polarization just as there his and our whole political system now. You know that. What we were looking for is ways to provide. Options for kids opportunities where they might be more successful. Opportunities that maybe they haven't had. It's not that there's a certain type of school that's that's good there's no other type of school that's bad it's what's best for this kid and everything that we've done we're really trying to find ways to help help kids develop to their fullest potential and I don't I don't think will ever I don't think we'll ever find the solution to that I think that I think we just got to keep working to improve it all and I'll tell you I think I think in public education I think there's a lot more work yet to be done in my opinion. Yes. So one of the things that shocked me not a good way in your presentation was the graphs that you show with the spending the government spending and the problem like the failure of that do you ever feel like you're as the organization and organizations like yours are left to pick up the pieces that were what left to pick up the pieces of the government and maybe do you take part in any sort of lobbying or interactions like that it would you run for office because I would vote for you here. So I was the last party run for office no no no temperamentally I am definitely not cut out for that. Here here's the way I look at this. There is some times I mean in enormous gap between the ideas of policymakers and the realities on the ground. And let me give you I'm going to give you a couple of examples. One of our local congressman. About two years ago. Called me and he said I'd like to come out like Bring on my senior legislative assistant with me. And I want to find out more we want to hear more about your family partnership. And they came out they spent two hours asking probing questions going as going deeper and deeper and deeper and we had some of our grassroots people with us trying to understand the problem and why that particular program is so successful. And. After two hours as they were leaving the legislative assistant stopped me and he said. This you have no idea how helpful this has been to me. He said too often the only people I talk to are other people on the Hill like me who are you talking to each other they have their ideas they're writing the legislation and they don't really understand what's happening at ground level. I had another person who. Had been a city councilman in Indianapolis I know something about the background of this individual he grew up in a low income area you would think that he would really be very much aware of the of the problems and possible solutions and a year or so ago he started volunteering as a tutor in this high school that we operate for traditional high school age kids and I saw him about six months after it started and I and I said Hey how's it going. And he and he pulled me aside in a and quietly said Jim. I. Thought I understood the issues but instead until I got to know some of these kids one on one. I didn't have a clue. Another friend of mine one time said Jim. I live on the north side relatively affluent part of the city I go to work on the north side I go to church on the north side is a jam I don't know any poor people a cyclone doubt I'll introduce you to some this is part of the problem there there's a gap and one of the reasons I think we're not being any more successful is because there is such a gap we've got to find ways to close that but I think I think the best approach that we've got is we're not going to remake either sector that's just not going to happen the best approach that we can take I think is to start bringing pieces together there are a lot of good pieces out there a lot of organization to a lot of good stuff let's start bringing them together funders are going to have to drive a lot of this and the government is the biggest funder. But bring the pieces together and form these new these new networks these new relationships where you're leveraging complimentary capabilities and resources other resources and and I think we'll start see. Greater impact. OK I guess I actually have I have to buy the last the first one and then I'll get the answer and then I'll sneak it in the the other day about the organizational. Questions the the first one I'm curious about the relationship among the different Goodwills and their relationship to Goodwill International but the headquarters how is quality maintained are you like franchises does does the money flow up does it flow down how does it work goodwill is a membership organization all goodwill our members of Goodwill Industries international. Goodwill international own the name and the trademarks and controls how those are used that licenses the members to use those. The locals pay dues to National National does not control the locals but there are certain standards you have to be a not for profit you have to you have to be accredited You have to have. An audit every year you have to share that audit you have to share of financial information other statistical information. But there is not control and the reason for that is because of the governance structure and it's local C.E.O.'s who really control national ensure that it's not in call a national office call it Member Services Center. It's a confederation is what it is it's and it's I if I were if I were setting it up today I think it probably was a good structure in the first half of the twentieth century if I were setting it up today I would I would give national more power and I would structure it more like a good franchise or with really strong standards. You have great C.E.O.'s all over it's not a problem but if one young overpays a C.E.O. you're all going to it's. We're vulnerable yes but OK The second question is you know it seems to me that you goodwill the original social business and we've just been incorporating social entrepreneurship thank you saying that classes and so do you see yourselves as you know essentially a you know a social business and how and that leads to the actual question at the question about what proportion of your budgets really come from your earned income that then end up serving your mission eighty some odd percent R R G. and A expenses in our organization are about eleven percent of our revenue the rest of it is all going into programs Yeah yeah. But but. Yeah Right now it's mostly it's mostly retail that does very it is a social it's a social enterprise helm the founder of that was the original social entrepreneur and one of the early social entrepreneurs in my opinion. Yeah it's kind of interesting that you know a lot of people think this is new but the social enterprise social entrepreneurship would do it a long time if you. Didn't hear it that's OK That's our right thank you thanks very much.