Number two, who are you hiring for your sales and marketing outreach? Most people are limited in the growth of their business because people don’t know who they are and why they matter. And so you’ve got to have a deliberate game plan for people to know who you are and why you matter. You can’t determine how you’re going to win if nobody knows to even consider it. And that’s the second thing I learned. and the third thing that took me the longest to learn.

People say all the time that people are your most important asset, right? Developing your people is how you retain them. Aligning the personal goals of the individuals you lead with the goals of the firm tightly is how you retain people in a talent crunch market. that, those are kind of the three things that I learned in fits and starts, but then when I think about it, now I’m able to do things maybe better, faster, or teach people is I know those priorities sooner, and I’m not learning them in spite of myself.

As you grow as an entrepreneur, you’re growing kind of in spite of what you don’t know. And that’s why at times it seems so hard, but those are a couple of things that are solid learnings from some pretty interesting mistakes over the year. 

Trevor: Well, it sounds to me that especially that last point is something that’s going to be especially important right now with this labor market that we’re in, you know, being able to retain your team is just such a huge challenge.

Don: Absolutely, and money is going to be an equalizer, right? Because people are going to be able to command a competitive wage in this market. So then what are the dynamics of your organization that really separate you? And one of the things we found through the research that we’re doing with the diversity equity inclusion work that we do and working with CEOs of startup firms, of multi-national corporations, is that employees are looking for mentorship, sponsorship and career mapping. 

And if you’re not incorporating those growth skills that allow your leaders to spend time growing the skillset of the team members, then they’re going to find it somewhere else, the money and the prestige is going to be relatively equal from company to company. So it’s really about what you, as a leader and as an organization are pouring into folks to grow the business.

And I’ve talked to some leaders, I will share on this. Well, why do we want to overinvest on growing people when turnover is so high? Well, it’s kind of a catch 22, because if you grow them, you can get higher level of productivity while they’re with you. And even if they leave, the recommendation powers high.

Trevor: Right.

Don: And then your recruiting prowess is stronger for the next champion that you’re trying to develop. And so there’s really no downside in growing people, unless you think about it short term. 

Trevor: Sure, that makes a whole lot of sense to me, for sure. So tell me was, after that exit was Walk West the next step, or was there something in between?

Don: So after that initial exit, we create a spin-out company, which was ICI Digital. And I became the chairman of the board and Greg Boone, a local entrepreneur ran that business and they synced exited that business to Behringer Capital, private equity group.

And then they rolled that up into Emphasis a couple of years after that. So they did great. Walk West was a small investment that I made in 2015. Now, I do you have my dates right, this was 2015. And I was looking at the landscape and understanding that digital communication was going to be here for the next three to four decades. Whether it be the web, whether it be social media, whether it be, how do you create your SEO strategy, whether it’s your brand and video and communication, that’s leading us to the zoom culture we live in now, the way that you have remote hybrid working environments, the way that people do their research on companies are going to do business with before they ever meet you.

And so in 2015, I said, you know what? Let me put some time, effort and energy in the digital space because a I wanted to learn it, and two I thought it was really important. And partnered with Brian Onorio, a talented founder there. And we grew that firm, from 2015, $300,000 in revenue, right to 2018, 2019, and 2020 being three years in a row, INC 5,000, and a multi-million-dollar business.

And so one of the things I’ve learned over the years is if you can take a business from zero to a million dollars, you get the business. And so independent of your strategy, independent of your industry, independent of how amazing you think you are, what is your game plan to get from zero to a million dollars?

Because those are the reps you need to understand your client, to understand your ability, to recruit, to understand your abilities as a leader. And you can make a lot of mistakes growing from zero to a million that will then make from one to five, five to 10, much simpler. and that’s really how I put a lot of focus these days.

Trevor: Was there much of a difference as far as your challenges as CEO or as a leader running as a strict tech company versus running, you know, the digital company that Walk West or…?

Don: Yeah, there’s a couple of differences. One, engineers, computer scientists’ hardcore sales folks, it was more of a male dominated environment. You could get away with kind of some bro-code speak, right? You could get away with a little hierarchal top-down, right, this is the way I want it done. The creative space is radically different. The talent base is different, and the drive for collaboration was ahead of its time in the technology space. Now technology’s catching up in different ways, but to answer your question, Walk West was radically different. So I had to create a different leadership model to build Walk West than to a business that was more and more successful.

And that took time, effort, energy, more so with me than the team, because I had to slow down and listen more than just charting the path and kind of pushing forward. So short answer is depending on industry, the type of talent that you’re working with, there are some very stark differences.

Now today, fast forward, right? 2022 and beyond, I think all businesses like that, where its really employee centered, and you really have to think through your strategy from the employee outside to the rest of your stakeholders, because that’s the most scarce commodity right now is the talent to execute against your game plan.

Trevor: Now you may have preempted this question, but you know, I was going to ask you, as you were kind of learning the differences between running a tech company and running, you know, Walk West, where those lessons that were taught to you by your employees, or did you get outside encouragement as far as how you’re going to have to change the way you approach it?

Don: One of the things Trevor that I have done well, and I’ve done a lot of things that are learning experiences, but I’ve always been a really avid leader right. And I’ve always been someone that wanted to listen to folks as experienced. I could do something faster, better if I could. Learning from experience is just so much more painful.

And as a, an athlete, I was always used to being coached. So the short answer is I got good at networking, developing mentorships for things where I was lacking, and I stayed pretty open to be able to do that. The second thing is listening to employees and it’s both listening to those that stay and listening to the reasons why people quit. And those experiences will teach you, and one of the big lessons that I learned is the documented job description is never outdated. People get things confused. People have amnesia under pressure. So the ability to have a conversation of what’s expected to memorialize that and refer back to it, step one, and then there’s this concept of an annual review that’s super outdated versus having more consistent conversations with team members about how they’re doing.

I’ll give you an example present day, and this happened to me this morning. So we hired a young professional in, at, at one of our companies, and they were a little less experienced in the role needed. So we adjusted our offer to that leveling. And we shared that with the candidate. And we said, look, if you accept this job, here’s a price point we think is amazing.

And we’re willing to groom and mentor you and all these good things. Well, now six months in right, this employee is doing well, and they slowed me down. They said, Don, I just want to make sure we remember that when I started, you were talking about the grooming and the growth and the different things. How am I doing now?

And I was like, oh, you’re doing great. Awesome. Glad to hear it. Do you think maybe we could have a conversation, not wait for a year, but we could do it now. A couple things, Trevor. One, it was very well done from an employee employer standpoint, because the employee came to me talking about their value contribution, what thing they can work on. And then they mapped it right to can we rebalance right, some of the financial things. 

So what occurred is, instead of me feeling like I got a demand letter, that employee got a partner. I immediately forwarded information to the HR of this thing, I fully endorsed, let’s talk about this. Let’s build a game plan so that we can get this individual where they need to be. I don’t always get that opportunity to have a partnering conversation with folks, but man, when you do right, it’s so much better and it’s better for the employee. People think that demand letter is good, but this is a relationship business. Whether you stay in a firm, moves to another company, XYZ, the relationships you develop can feed you for a lifetime in your career. So every conversation is a great way to practice relationship building.

Trevor: I think that’s fantastic advice and just wish I could just book in that, pull it out and hand it out to people that I talk to about having those conversations with, you know, their bosses, whether that’s in the law firm, whether that’s in a startup. You really have to approach it as that partnership approach and, and really kind of talk about the value that both sides of bringing to each other. I think that’s just great advice. 

Don: Yup. 

Trevor: So tell me a little bit about the origin of The Diversity Movement.

Don: So when we were working at Walk West, and that was my focus, we started to get questions from clients about building multicultural brands, and we would look at the videos they were constructed was like, wait a minute, right, are your clients all white? They’re like, no, it’s like, but your video only has white people in it. Right, is that what you want? And the client was like, no, oh my God, we didn’t even think about it. Like, it wasn’t like a negative thing, it was people’s experiences and perspectives that showed up in the way that brands were being represented. 

And so when we started to answer these questions for employees, for our clients, and then we started asking them, hey, would you like to handle this more from the inside out? Would you like to start to learn about some of the things relative to cultural resiliency in terms of how do you really think about diversity, equity, inclusion from a branding sense, and overwhelmingly our clients said yes, but here’s the challenge. We don’t know anyone in the DEI space that also understands the business pressures we’re under to align DEI with how we operate as a company. 

And what we found is that there was a lane that we could fill. There’s plenty of folks that are talking about social justice and we believe in all of these different things, but businesses are created to drive shareholder value. They’re creating, there’s bottom line pressure, so if you can link the two, you’re going to get more folks that are excited about diversity, equity, inclusion. So as an entrepreneur, you know me, there’s an opportunity I think I can fill it. So we set out Trevor, we thought we were going to get rich selling a DEI training courses and just building e-learning courses.

And we were going to put them out in the world and sell a billion dollars’ worth, right? So we built diversity beyond the checkbox was our first flagship course, five modules, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, research, and because of our technology background, we put it through a beta test.

We have 50 companies test it with us, gave us feedback, and then here’s what happened – companies like, we love it. You can change this, we love it, tweak us, but can you help us after we take this course? What do we do specific for our executives? This course doesn’t cover frontline workers. Is diversity more than race, right?

What about LGBTQ? We started getting all of these questions and then I was like, man, there might be a business here. And in my mind, I said, all right, next step is, can you get 10 clients? And we pretty quickly got 10 clients that was like, whoa, we got 10 clients, we’ve got this digital tool, all right. Can we get this thing from zero to a million dollars? And anyway, we started to figure out that there was a niche available for business people that were thinking about DEI in the context of running a profitable enterprise. That’s the lane where we live. To where we talked to business owners, CEOs, executives, CFOs, and we link the DEI initiatives to the bottom-line growth of the organization.

And we’ve grown the firm from zero to a hundred clients in 12 to 18 months. We have a global footprint in terms of clients right here in North Carolina. Our company has been recognized by Inc in one of the tops, innovative companies in the space. And we’re, we’re doing what we can to make a dent in the world in a better way.

Trevor: Well, I mean, it’s important work that you’re doing, and I appreciate kind of the work that you are doing, but it just still strikes me, how do you make a business out of having what can be very difficult and uncomfortable conversations?

Don: So now think about the question you asked, which I think is super powerful, and then I’m going to make it super simple. You’ve created a business as a law firm out of having difficult conversations 

Trevor: Yeah.

Don: Because no one calls a lawyer and says you got. I would love to chat with my competitor over here, and they’ve breached my intellectual property, but I probably didn’t mean it. Why don’t we just chat with them and it’ll all work out, but there are folks everywhere that need someone to guide them in areas where they’re not experts. And so we said two things, we can be a non-judgmental bridge between folks that want to understand DEI, but have lots of questions and need a safe place to ask those questions where they’re not defined as a racist, where they’re not defined as somebody that doesn’t believe in gender pay equity, but they have questions because their experience is different and they don’t understand, number one. 

And then number two, we wanted to bring our ability to productize the DEI journey. So we built out a suite of technology tools that allows you to scale your DEI initiative across mobile, across analytics, across we, our latest offering is Netflix for DEI. We have close to a thousand micro videos of two-to-three-minute snippets of DEI content, so corporations can invest in this platform for their team, their team can hit a button on their mobile device their computer now all of a sudden they can take two-to-three-minute tutorials on DEI, on questions that they have, that they might not want to make publicly available. 

And so our goal is to build diversity equity inclusion into the flow of how people work every day. And we think you’ve got to incorporate technology in order to be able to do that. 

Trevor: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a great way to kind of frame the issue and frame the problem because, and, and actually it really stood out to me. I was listening to one of your podcast episodes where you’re talking with a guest and she kind of characterized DEI is really kind of a skillset. So she talked about, you know, in the same way that you have to teach financial literacy.

You may have to teach diversity, equity and inclusion, and it’s a skillset. It doesn’t have to be this loaded issue. And that really kind of stood out to me in the way you just characterized the approach of The Diversity Movement, it really makes sense as, as it may be a difficult conversation, but this is a skill set that people need to learn and have the tools to, to learn it.

Don: I wholeheartedly agree. I was talking to an executive yesterday and one of the amazing parts of my role is I get to talk to phenomenal leaders about a sticky subject. Man, that creates some trust and bonding pretty quickly. And so I’m developing some really nice relationships, but this is a multi-billion-dollar financial institution and was talking to their chief digital officer.

And what we ended up talking about is if we respect everybody’s center of authenticity, some people it might be their sexual orientation, some people it’s their race, some people it’s their religion, but we all have core sets of beliefs, core sets of things about us where we look at the rest of the world through that lens as a dominant perspective, the goal is not for me to change your center of authenticity.

My goal is not to dismiss it, but to understand you better by hearing. Getting everyone to agree is like peace in the Middle East. Like, I, I, don’t not in my lifetime. Do you know what I mean? I’m not going to say never going to happen, but I’m like not in my lifetime. So agreement is really not as much power as what is the goal we do agree on and how can we use our unique differences to achieve that goal that we agree on together. Growing the company, growing the nonprofit, growing the organization, better opportunities for people in underserved communities, low trust communities. 

There are many things we can agree on, but we let the megaphone of the negative narrative, right, politics and media and all these things to keep us apart from one another when actually there’s so much that we have in common. And that’s really the fight is how to build the dialogue from the things we have in common. 

Trevor: I think that’s great. And it provides kind of an interesting segue because I understand the diversity movement founded in 2019. Is that right? 

Don: Yeah, that’s what we started. 

Trevor: So then you come into 2020 and you know, you had the George Floyd murder and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, all of that was going on in the country and they have the cultural response to it. And then what has been a continued polarization of the country on so many different levels? I just wonder if you could speak a little bit about how that’s impacted The Diversity Movement as a business and how you approach the companies that you’re working with and also how those companies approach you. 

Don: I’ll answer your question, but I’ll give a quick segue. So I’m doing some executive coaching for CEO of a multi-billion-dollar global company. And my question to their global head of HR is like, how did you find me and why me? Right, cause I don’t do that as like, that’s not my, my niche or, or what have you and, and they told me who recommended it. And I said, all right. And they said, specifically, we need somebody that is used to, comfortable with dealing with tough issues, real time with grace. 

And so one of the things to now answer your question is that I certainly had some emotions seeing someone that looked like me, with a knee on his neck being murdered on live TV, right? Like I have some emotion about that, and my role in making an impact so that that life is meaningful, ongoing, is how do I get others that don’t have that experience to better empathize with my perspective, my experience, right. Something they’ve not personally felt. 

And to do that, what we now impact in the diversity movement is we’re not your judge, but we can be your partner in helping you understand, ask questions about things that may make you uncomfortable, but we know at the end of the day, we’re all trying to get over this mountain together. Those are the firms that we want to work with. 

Organizations that are just trying to check a box they’re, they’re not our client. And it’s important in any business, any movement, any organization to know who your client is. We’re looking for people that are seeking answers and we don’t have them all, but we trust that we’ll find them together if we work on it. 

I’ll give another example in that, in, in these things, and it’s, it’s more on the LGBTQ space. We had a conversation with an executive leadership team and started talking about some of these issues and it didn’t go great, right, it was too, it was too much too soon. It was, it was whoa. These are a lot of terms. This is a lot of difference. But the thing that was so powerful, the CEO said is even though this is a little overwhelming for us, we’re not going to stop. Can we just approach it in a little bit different, stair-step?

Trevor: Hmm.

Don: Can we try it a little bit in a different. And so we’re in heavy search for leaders that want to be on their DEI journey. Our goal is not to describe or prescribe how fast that journey is, but to provide tools and expertise to mirror that journey with the goals you have as an organization. That’s the impact we’ve been able to have from some of the tragedies that have made people more open. And when people are more open, we want to step through that door and we want to meet them where they are, not where we prescribe we think they should be right. That comes across as a little more arrogant than we are a little more self-serving than they are. We want to take people on a journey where they can co-develop that process with us, and that served us pretty well. 

Trevor: Now, I wonder if you could speak to that as, as far as like a, almost from a client intake perspective. How do you differentiate between those who are really serious about making a change within their organization and those who are really checking the box, we’re trying to get that press release and that taken care of it? Is there something that indicates it?

Don: Yeah, super easy. Like it, it’s a great question, super easy. If I’m talking to the CEO and I can have a dialogue with the CEO throughout the process, usually they’re more into it. If I’m, if I’m screening through three or four different folks and the CEO just can’t seem to make time. 

Trevor: Right.

Don: And we, we know pretty clearly, right that even though we are collaborative in organizations these days, even though there’s more bottom-up leadership, there’s still a hierarchal structure in most organizations. People define what success is through the lens of the CEO of the org. That’s just, that’s how we’re built corporately, and that means we need C-level endorsement for our best customers to have the most progress because the works so hard and the results are not immediate. 

If the results are immediate, you can work at a lower level in the organization. If results for something, take time, effort, energy, and there’s going to be a little bit of pain along way. You got to have stronger buy-in from the top of that organization, whether it’s a 15-person startup or a hundred-thousand-person organization. It still is the tempo and the temperament of a few key leaders that drive the rhythm of the organization.

Trevor: That’s helpful. And I’m wondering, as I think about the constituents who often listened to the Founders Shares Podcast, we’ve got startups, we’ve got investors and some other legal professionals, and I wonder if you could speak to how diversity, equity, inclusion might look differently for each of these groups, or if it’s really to some of the same principles across those three different groups.

Don: It’s similar principles, but they are applied differently. And so when you think about an organization that’s emerging, right, taking outside funding, and every nickel is scrutinized. you’ve got a startup, that’s got five to seven people, and investment in DEI training is offset by the $10,000 they could put into Google ads that month. So there’s some real financial and time constraints, the smaller the organization. 

So what’s most important. And, and the other thing that’s challenging is usually there’s not a dedicated resource that’s focused on DEI. It’s usually the CEO, the HR professional, the COO. It’s a, it’s an amalgamation of people that own that responsibility for corporate culture.

So what we’ve done for the diversity movement is that’s another reason we wanted to focus on technology so that we didn’t leave anyone behind. So think about this – if we have a network or a portfolio of close to a thousand micro videos, it doesn’t cost me more to have a price that aligns for a start-up and a price that aligns with a hundred-thousand-dollar enterprise. If I have a mobile application, same way. If I have DEI learning tools in an LMS, same way. 

So the reason we wanted to build some self-service tools is So that organizations that are emerging and building and growing still impacting our community, doing great stuff, but for $10,000, they can still have a highly impactful package and partnership with us the same way that a larger organization at a hundred thousand dollars can. And so that is really important in terms of the implementation that the smaller business will be a little more self-serve, and what if they can take best practices off the shelf? What if they could pick up the phone and have a one-on-one coaching session with an expert? 

All of a sudden they can at least move in that direction and then pick up momentum over time, but we’re not leaving them out of the conversation or out of the tool sets that we’re developing. And hopefully others feel the same way. We’re a for-profit business. We did that also one purpose because if we were a nonprofit that just comes across a certain way to a CEO, we’re a for-profit business.

So we know you’re going to pay us if we drive value. That goes into everything we do, but we’re also a mission-based business, that means decisions we make about our culture, about our marketing, about our tools means that we want to make sure that we’re inclusive in our offerings as well. And that’s why we have things for emerging companies as well.

Trevor: So then how about for some investors and maybe it’s not what TDM does for the investors, but maybe, and maybe it is, do you work with investor groups?

Don: We absolutely do. So, everything from let me give a couple of examples, right? So our friends here locally over at Cofounders Capital, are going to have us in for a lunch and learn to talk to the CEOs of their portfolio. Accel KKR is pretty strong in the private equity space, right, in the nation. We’re working with seven of their portfolio companies and with their core group. And so we work with investors of all size, both as individuals to learn and understand, but also to start creating educational pathways with why a better culture makes your investment board valuable? Why as an investor in angel investor, you should be asking these questions of the prospective CEO? 

They don’t have to have all the answers, but if they’ve not thought about it, it should be a red flag because at the end of the day, if we believe that people are our most important asset, then you can’t have a great organization only with code. You have to have code and culture, and then you can have the long-term cash.

Trevor: And it’s interesting as I hear you kind of talk about that. It still seems to be focusing downward towards the portfolio companies and these businesses that are growing. But, you know, as, as we know, access to capital for diverse organizations can be very difficult to come by. And so is there avenues for the investors themselves to kind of learn from these principles?

Don: Yeah, you know, I’m smiling a little bit because we’ve had some of those challenges ourself as we’ve been in our capital raise and different things. And it’s one of the reasons we started out bootstrapping from a consultancy. We’ve used our profit to build out our products. And now people are taking our calls, right, but two years ago, you know, not so much. 

We still have a long way to go there. What I would say, however, is the success within the businesses is the language of the investor. The investor, by and large, when you invest your hard-earned money, that you’ve earned the things that you’ve created to have extra liquid funds to invest, you’re not typically doing that from a social place. You’re doing that from a financial growth place. 

And so, yes, there’s social good funds and different things, but by and large, it’s from a capitalistic, I want my money to grow. So our strategy is to help these portfolios grow and then create from the success within these portfolio companies, a narrative with investors that wait a minute, we’re seeing these increased returns, we’re seeing better retention. We’re seeing more market value, right, because the company you invested in cared about these things.

Trevor: Yeah, it almost ties back into that first part of our conversation where we talk about money, not necessarily being money for itself, but a tool for something else. And that way money’s the, the language that’s speaking as to why this is important and why it’s successful.

Don: Yup. That’s exactly right. It’s about the choices. 

Trevor: So talk to me a little bit about law firms, you know I know you’ve done some work with the legal arena. So how does DEI come into my field?

Don: You know, it’s, it’s pretty interesting, right, when you think about finance, when you think about the legal field when you think about the agency space that I lived in for a while, there are organizations and environments that are still pretty male dominated, pretty white male dominated and whether right or wrong it’s what it is. 

And so when I talked to folks in these organizations, they’re like, well, how do we change our demographics? Well, that’s not going to happen overnight, but you can change mindsets. You as a law firm, when you all are hosting something for investors, or your, your legal team, you can make sure that you source that catering from a woman owned or Black owned business, right.

When you’re doing pro bono work, and you can make sure that you are taking your time, effort, and talent and working within our collective networks and looking at emerging companies for, for things that you’re doing. So all of us can start where we are making a difference in DEI. We don’t have to think about something to where it’s like a microwave answer, right? DEI’s not microwave popcorn. but there’s ways that we can think about it ongoing. 

The biggest challenge that I put out for folks is your personal education and journey, because it’ll make you think differently. When you’re counseling the CEO of a corporation, you’ll start asking questions of where DEI fits in, and you’ll link them back to the diversity movement or another. From that, that you go your value as a lawyer, your value as an accountant, my opinion, having worked with, with lots of folks in this space is not your ability to do a contract for me, stand alone. It is also your network and opportunities you put me in front of.

And so that network aspect from the legal field is something where I think can be a very powerful, in fact. There’s a law firm and I won’t drop names, but they’re in the employment law space, and thousands of lawyers, so big law firm, but handful of their lawyers is recommending companies like The Diversity Movement to their clients as a way to foster that DEI outreach. It can’t change their law firm tomorrow, right, in terms of, but they did take a specific training, a specific education and said, you know what, where we see opportunities, I’m going to try to do some connecting that’s valuable for my clients, valuable for what I want to do and what I want to see in the world.

And quite frankly, we’ve been the beneficiary of some of those meetings. Now, when I get those meetings, I still have to sell for my supper. I still have to be high value, high quality, my price still has to be right. But man, if somebody opens a door that I wouldn’t even know was there. Man, that’s a, that’s a powerful introduction that can change the scope of businesses. 

Trevor: Yeah, I think that’s great. And very helpful, just again, to look for those opportunities, for lack of better word in your sphere of influence, where you can make a connection, make a difference and work from there and build off of it. So any particular success stories that stand out to you from your experience so far with the diversity movement?

Don: I was talking with another business. And he gave a compliment of the work we’re doing, and hopefully your audience will take this as it sounds, this isn’t about the diversity movement. This is about the impact that we can make. Highly religious individual, and he said, Don, I really appreciate it, appreciate your company because you didn’t try to judge me for my views or my beliefs. You expanded my thinking so I could be more thoughtful of others. 

And that curiosity is helping me grow as an individual on things I didn’t fully understand and was just dismissive of, but the way you approached it allowed me to move from critical of kind of the DEI programming and what do I need to do this for to curious, right where I’m open and you know what, man, I’m, I’m moving towards being more committed. And that was such a powerful compliment, right, because that’s what we’re trying to do. 

Success story. I’ll use one of our flagship clients, Bayada Healthcare. And there are 30,000-person organization, billion-dollar organization in the home healthcare space, 26,000 employees, and they were one of the first large organizations to bet on us. They have obviously enough money, influence, different things. They could have went with a Deloitte, like they could have, they could have picked anybody that has a big brand name and a DEI practice, but they gave us an opportunity to have a seat at the table and share how we can help.

Fast forward. All 500 of their key managers have taken us beyond the checkbox course with 92% completion. We dropped another course into their LMS and in an inclusive language course, and 2000 people took the course and literally the first 30 days. 

Trevor: Wow.

Don: We’ve presented to their board and their C-suite on DEI initially. They’ve now promoted someone internally to head up their DEI for the whole organization. They’ve now incorporated DEI into their weekly meetings that they have, and it’s in being improved in their hiring processes, their applications and their flow. 

The success story is we’ve helped be the catalyst for Bayada, but they have taken this mantle and made it a part of the fabric of their business. And having that CEO take that lead is now effecting an organization of 30,000 people. And that to me is a success story because if we can move a single leader, the network effect of that movement is 500, 1,000, 5,000, a hundred thousand people at a time. 

Trevor: That’s what I was saying. I meant the exponential growth of that, cause as they go into other businesses, as they go into, you know, their own startup, as they go into their daily life to take all of that with them and that just grows and grows and grows. 

Don: Absolutely, and so thanks for giving me that space to, to, to, to brag a little bit, but we are its hard work. It’s highly emotive work, but it’s worth it work. 

Trevor: Well, 

Don: I’m excited about it. 

Trevor: I appreciate all the work that you’re doing. I understand you have a book coming out this year. Is that right?

Don: I do. So it’ll be out, let’s see the latest it’ll be out in early November. We got, a really great publisher Morgan James out of New York to bet with us, that we had something in, in a story to tell and some things to learn. And the title of the book is Underestimated: The Journey of a CEO. and so I’m looking forward to just sharing some of the lessons, some of the mistakes, some of the, some of the victories of my life, and hopefully inspire some others to keep pushing as well.

Trevor: Well, I hope everybody checks that out. And I do, if you, if you’ll permit me, I got one more question for you. Cause you know, we are the Founder Shares Podcasts. So every guest that I have on I’d like to ask, you know, if you have one piece of advice that you would like to share for somebody who’s thinking about starting a business or who already has their business and kind of in the trenches, what would that piece of advice be?

Don: It’s a great question. And I’ve got a lot of things floating, but here’s the thing. Talk to a hundred people about your business, your concept, before you start building your product. When you do that, you’re going to find out how to get faster product market fit. You’re going to find some initial clients. You’re going to find a couple initial investors that have those hundred conversations before you code a thing to truly hone the message of what you’re trying to do, who you’re trying to serve and why you deserve to exist in the marketplace. And if you’ll do that, I think you’ll be able to get out to a faster start. 

Trevor: Well, that’s great, Don. I really appreciate the time. I just appreciate all the work that you’re doing and that you took the time out to talk to us today and thanks for everything you do.