Linda Lattimore: The Necessity of Social Responsibility

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Linda, thanks for jumping on the learning from other show. Yeah. I’m excited to be here with you and spend some time with you. This is, I gave you some credit. Um, you know, we don’t have to dig, dig too deep into what’s going on, but you you’re welcomed, uh, grandchild, just like. Three hours ago, is that what’s going on?

Yeah, maybe, maybe two hours ago and little grand girl. That’s three weeks earlier than expected. So we’ve all been running around kind of crazy. And I’m sorry, I feel a little frazzled, but I’m also really, really excited. So congratulations and that’s super cool. You know, we chatted offline that we can, we can reschedule, but you just a little ones down and we said, let’s roll with it and see where we get.

So I appreciate you jumping on. Absolutely. Yeah. Now I’m here then looking forward to it for a few weeks. Yeah. So I like to start with kind of two questions, one, um, to give a little introduction into what we’re going to dig into deeper, and then one kind of just an icebreaker. So first, what are you good at that we’re going to be learning from you today about

so, you know, the thing that I really enjoy doing, because I think that being good equals you have to enjoy what you’re doing. Right. Um, it’s helping people really understand what their value proposition is. Which comes from their life experiences, not the value proposition from their school or their education, but honestly what they’re bringing forward out of their life, if they can use in their career and then their relationships that has turned out to be something I enjoy immensely.

And I think I’m pretty good at, um, yeah, I’m excited to go into that more and, and. Have you kind of walk us through how you bring that out in people before we jump into that, let’s learn. What are you bad at honestly, today? I think I’m bad at feeling, you know, like I can roll with the punches. I’ve been running around this web here trying to, you know, I don’t have my charger.

I don’t have any, you’re trying to get over so my daughter could run off to the hospital. So I think today that would be it staying calm. Um, but I’m terrible at things like, I think I’m directionally challenged when it’s driving places. At least I’ve been told that, um, There’s a whole bunch of things. I’m terrible at math, you know, but, um, you have to own the things that you’re bad at and just smile about what are you going to do?

The, you know, I never realized how big of an impact Cardinal directions were, um, because I’m, I’m in Utah. And so we have just the huge mountains. Um, and, and so I never realized until I went somewhere else, it’s much more flat like Florida. How you rely on those markers, because I always know where I was, where North is, because there’s just a giant mountain that’s on the East side.

And so, um, I, I don’t blame you for we’ve become, so, um, you know, we’ve become so stuck with GPS that we become so stuck with GPS that. We just go with that. And then you don’t know where you are, you know, half the time you never eat soggy worms. Isn’t that what it is. Do you remember that Northeast?

Southwest? No. What is that

already? That was sounding terrible. Let’s say you go, you go clockwise. You start at the top. Never eat soggy worms. Northeast, Southwest hilarious, never eat soggy words. Okay. I’m never, I’m never gonna look at the direction like that again, you know? Okay. All right. So Linda, you’re a seasoned lawyer, a C suite executive and business strategist.

And I’m excited to talk to you because you believe that. With an emphasis on a higher purpose as a corporate requisite and the companies that don’t adopt a social impact measure, stand little chance for us to sustain success. And we’ll, we get into more about your credibility into why you have, um, you know, the credentials to make a statement on this topic, but why don’t we start with the basics and how you define social responsibility in your context?

Yeah, I think that is so confusing. Um, I didn’t realize how confusing it was to the, to the average person, but I mean, I’ve had conversations with partners at major law firms that I, that I knew and quite of other people in they’re like, well, what is that? And so I generally go back and I remind people, what is the word?

Social media, and social just means anything having to do with people. So it could be our employees. It could be our investors. It can be our consumers. Um, it could be the community around us. It has to do with people. Definitely. You could have an anthill that was socially well, but it’s all about community.

And so then you tag on the world responsibility and it just means, are you, are you responsible to the human beings around you? And that includes the planet that we live in because you know, that keeps us all sustained and alive. So. Once we understand that, then we can start talking about, well, from a business perspective, what kind of programs do we have for employees to make them happy?

You know, what are we doing to make our investors feel secure? What are we doing for our customers and how are we staying engaged with them? And then, you know, we do have a citizenship component back to our communities. So it sounds like that it can be very depending on the business or the entrepreneur or the owner, it doesn’t necessarily have to strictly be the surrounding community and giving back, but it can just start internally as is that a fair understanding?

Add it’s a complete understanding of it. I mean, I don’t know where someone people started thinking that, you know, social responsibility, corporate social responsibility, which they don’t use the word CSR that much anymore. They’re talking more about, you know, positive impact and stuff that it had to do with philanthropy, but it has nothing to do with philanthropy.

That that may be one small component of it. Um, but it’s whether or not you’re running a business. Um, you know, that’s good. That’s in it for the long haul. So it’s not just about, it’s not just about your bottom line anymore. It’s about what this business is going to sustain itself in all of the right ways.

And it doesn’t, I mean, you do a philanthropy, although that’s a nice ad. It is nice to say that we’re also doing a bake sale for someone or right. I mean, that’s, that makes you look like you’re a good guy and you are a good guy. If you mean it. Yeah. Um, so let me give, let me give our list. There’s a little bit of a background of, of your credentials on this topic.

So you released your first book solution airs. You are the answer in 2018 and it became an instant bestseller. And then this book is helps give individuals a path forward to meaningful and financially rewarding work. So. That’s the topic I want to touch on, but then you also have another book, social response to this social responses, ability toolkit that’s coming out this year.

Is it coming out this year? Right? Yeah, hopefully, yeah, it’s written, it’s just a matter of the final tweaks and touches and, you know, I’ve discovered after solutionaries that it’s not something that happens overnight. There’s a whole process of writing these books. Right. So that’s the goal is that it’s not by the end of the year, for sure.

Yeah, no, I just finished my first book on SEO and it’s just barely, like, I think it probably took. Um, you know, nine months to a year to write, and then it took a year and a half a year and a half after that to like, I know, right. Then you don’t have any idea how long it’s going to take between the edits and the, the whole launch process.

Yeah. It is a process. Yeah. So yeah. So kudos. What happened on that was, I was actually. Well, I was working on, you know, they’re kind of backwards because I was working on the corporate social responsibility toolkit, trying to help small to medium sized companies create, you know, these programs, compliance and green and employee programs so that they can did, um, a contracts with the bigger guys.

So if you’re the keyboard guy, you can’t bid on a contract with Dell, for example, unless you have all these programs in place it’s right in the contract. And so I was working on that book when I started getting phone calls, just random phone calls out of the blue. I got four and four days from people that have been referred to me saying, you know, I was referred to you and I want to do work.

That makes my heart feel good. And I feel flat. I’m tired of what I’m doing. And, you know, they needed the emotional. Quotient in addition to the financial piece. Um, and I wasn’t sure why all these strangers were calling me at first, except that I am a business lawyer. And I also have a nonprofit that has done microfinance projects around the world, helping, um, poor women.

In developing nations with small lines. And so I honestly, I shall entrepreneur at heart and my friends knew it, I guess, and will referring these folks to me. So I scooped up all these people and said, you know, let’s, let’s do a mastermind and let me work with you. And I think that I can help you, um, figure out a way to where you feel like you are being emotionally rewarded as well.

And I began running them through a mastermind that took about eight weeks at the end of it. I had written all these guides and all these templates, all these people were feeling really excited about new projects. And I had accidentally written Solutionary here are the answers. So I kind of call it my second, my accidental book, since it wasn’t the first one that I was working on.

So you had actually started social responsibility kit and yeah. Yeah. The other one just came floating along. Yeah. It just came floating along. I just was getting phone calls, um, from people. And like I say, I think they were being referred to me cause they knew that I have not just court. I had been general counsel of three multinationals, three multinationals and had a pretty staunch corporate career.

But I had this whole thing inside of me of wanting to help people. And so I had set up a nonprofit and I, and I guess they were being referred to me from people who said, Oh, she did it. She managed her. She managed to combine to call her. Yeah. You know, you know what? It was hilarious, um, offline before we jumped on the call.

So obviously I have an intake form for guests to fill out with some bio information and, and in, uh, so we had a, we had a guest applicant a while ago that, um, they ended up having to decline because I found out he had, uh, you know, some. Some things in his history that I didn’t want to showcase. And so I said, you know, maybe there’s more of these guests that, you know, because troublesome times fall a success.

And so I put in like this little asterix that says, have you had any problems in the past? And your reply was hilarious? It says, no, I’m like, I’m an expert prosecutor. I’m the furthest, the problematic background. I’m sure. There’s plenty of other ways, but in terms of committing a crime, yeah. I ran the white collar crime section for a number of years at the us attorney’s office in Houston.

Was it the district attorney’s office before that? So I’m like Pollyanna when it comes to that kind of stuff, you know, I didn’t know why you had that question there, but it was no, you don’t have to worry about me. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve since massage that, that, uh, Intake question, but I thought that was funny to see your reply.

So I want to ask you about why we need social responsibility, because it kind of sounds like there’s two reasons. And I assume the answer is a little bit of both, but, um, is it because it’s, so does social responsibility help keep us as entrepreneurs or business owners? Um, keep our internal emotions of float or do we need social responsibility because of external reputation and visibility?

Okay. You know, it’s a combination of all of those, but what I will say right now is the 2019 was really a pivotal year in terms of, um, companies realizing that they are in fact corporate citizens. Um, I think, you know, historically corporations had one reason for existing to make money and to, and to create a rate of return for their shareholders.

A few years ago that started changing. There was a interesting group, maybe lab that, um, put together a certification process where companies can come in and get kind of like a good housekeeping seal of approval. If they went through this assessment and the assessment was see if they did have green programs and what kind of impact the programs they had and what kind of compliance programs.

And they willingly took this assessment, posted the results online, and then they could put this, um, Like I say this B Corp onto, onto their marketing materials, wherever and, and face it. Consumers want to do business with companies through the good guys and investors want to know that their investments are secure.

A few years later, B lab, um, got really into an advocacy space in addition to this assessment. And they started working with different States, um, to create what we now have as a benefits corporation. So. 33 or 34 States now have this. And it is finally a whole new legal entity that we never had before. We used to be able to elect escort prosy court.

Now you can elect to be court, which means that you can have a social purpose in addition to making money. Um, which is great because honestly, before there was a lot of shareholder lawsuits, if, uh, if a shareholder got mad that the company was spending some money on some community work or philanthropic work, or some of these other programs, they could file a, um, some kind of shareholder lawsuit and say, look, you’re only supposed to be getting me a high rate of return.

So it kept the companies very much handcuffed, uh, to focusing only on money. And this whole tide has turned now it’s really turned and, and, um, in 2019, it’s really showing up the CEO of BlackRock, which is largest investment company in the world, stepped out and said, you know, uh, stakeholder primacy has now superseded shareholder privacy, and right behind that, the business round table, which I think was made up of about 180 CEOs of large companies, pretty much came in and said the same thing.

So they’re putting stakeholders, which are all these people. We just talked about, the social class employees, customers, investors, they’re now putting that ahead of rate of return. So it’s a, I call it a real paradigm shift and what’s going on our business world. And quite frankly, I’m really happy to see it.

Yeah. That’s, that’s really interesting cause I never, I never heard of B Corp. And so I wanna kind of revisit that for a second. Cause I imagine a lot of others haven’t heard of that. So it’s a legal entity. And like you said, it’s comparable to, um, you know, an S Corp or an LLC or C Corp or anything like that.

It’s an election. Like you elect for escort. You know, or a C Corp, when you file your corporate papers. Now in these fates, you can elect for benefits corporation too. But the interesting thing is, although the first one out was, um, Maryland and, you know, California jumped in on Wharton Delaware,which is pretty much the bellwether of all States in terms of corporate filings also has benefits corporations.

 

I don’t know about Utah, but, um, Each of the state laws are a tiny bit different, but they’re patterned after. Um, they’re pretty much patterned after I think Delaware a lot of them, but it just allows what it does is it just allows and gives the management, the tools and the decision making authority to say, you know, we are going to have these extra programs for our employees and we are going to make sure that we have these green programs and we aren’t going to make sure that, um, we care about our community as well.

You know, whoever that circle of influence is right around you, um, that you’re impacting every day. We get to take that into consideration and all the investments that we make, the business decisions that we make for the company. So it almost sounds like, you know, a lot of the times when you decide how to class your business, it’s based on your protections now, largely those pretend those protections are external, but it almost sounds like B Corp benefits.

You internally with internal protections, allowing you to make decisions on how you want to represent the company. Is that a fair assessment?

I’m not sure I’m tracking what you’re saying. Let’s see. It affects you internally more than externally. Well, you know, for smaller businesses when they decide, do I want to be. And an S Corp or like a single member, LLC. It’s largely based on liabilities, you know, how is it worth me paying a little bit, yeah.

More on filing fees and taxes and whatever else just to have that extra external liability buffer. And so it almost sounds like B Corp is an internal buffer where you can say, Hey fellow team members, we want to make sure that we’re protected the rights to make these, um, Operational or charitable decisions without any repercussions, because it has a financial impact because we feel like we want to do these things for other reasons beyond finances.

So is that a fair interpretation that it affords? I mean, I, I mean, I think it actually impacts both and I mean, I say it’s, it moves it from the inside out, but yeah. I don’t only, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t always recommend benefit corporations. Um, I mean, I recommend benefit corporations sometimes over the B Corp certification, which I really, I liked that a lot, but it is a lot, um, it’s a lot of paperwork

It’s a lot of work for new small companies that may not have the manpower to do it. They can, however, get set up as a benefits corporation, the legal entity. Yeah, not the good housekeeping seal of approval kind of entity, but you know, it affects an awful lot of things because you know, next gens are really, really interested in companies that care and that want to make a difference.

We’re being left with a lot of problems out there. There’s a lot, there’s a lot of problems. Everyone can try and pick up one thing and fix it and we’ll be light years ahead, but there’s a lot going on. And so in terms of recruiting and retention, You know, they’re seeking out companies that are showing up as good corporate citizens.

That’s who they want. That’s who they want to work for that. So they want to play with, and once you have things like a reduction in turnover, then that’s another way that directs it’s, you know, it does fall directly to your bottom line because you’re saving money. Same thing when you have solid green initiatives, right.

Those do lean out the company and companies are really very interested now in not listening. Um, any kind of negative impact and maybe even picking up a little bit, and that actually ends up saving them money as well. And of course, then when you have compliance initiatives, your risks go down and a lot of times that will save you money too.

So, so from a all around perspective, they’re showing up better in the stock markets and everything else now, um, You know, from a marketing perspective for a while, you probably remember this, there were all these little tags on the clothes that would say, you know, buy the shirt 10% goes to the rainforest.

Well, it was very much a cause marketing thing, you know, it started off really cool and now people are very whole-home about it because everyone had tags on the shirts and send it’s one to the rainforest, or everybody gets tired of leaving their towels. Like I have to use dirty towels every time I go to the Hilton.

I mean, Right. People were like, okay, I don’t know, saving the world. Or if it’s just saving your water bill, you know what I mean? So people, honestly, our consumers have gotten pretty savvy about this. So if the, if the business is not serious about an all around effort from inside out, not just this, we’re giving money to this company or that company, if they’re not really serious and walking the talk, these consumers and these next gens, see it, and they don’t want to work for you and they don’t want to buy from you.

That’s funny. That’s exactly what I think when I walk into a hotel room and on the bathroom counter is, is the little placard sign. And the first thing I think is this is just such crap. This is really to say it drives me nuts. I’m right there with you. I think it’s so silly. What I want to know is. What I truly want to know is how are you treating the people that work for you?

What else are you doing in your, what kind of are you just throwing stuff away? I mean, are you paying attention to the materials that you buy in your hotels? Are they hurting the planet? I mean, show me that kind of stuff and I’ll see that you mean it, but telling me to use dirty towels. I mean, that’s just, you know, why did I pay

all right. You know, so. I just think we’re all getting really smart about it right now. And, and I’m like I say, I’m thrilled about that, but if you, if you are coming into the business, you, you better be prepared to jump into the fray because you’re going to get left behind. If you don’t have these programs in place.

Yeah. When, so you mentioned that in your opinion, this has been a large shift in the last year or two, but when, when did this all start? When did the B Corp certification thing, when did that get established? Like how long of a timeframe are we talking before? Potential world was international. Don’t have any of that material in front of me.

So I’m going to say. I’m going to say 15 years. I mean, I just can’t remember right this minute when it was, I will tell you that, you know, it’s not like it’s not like consumer activism. Hasn’t been around for a million years. I mean, I tell folks, let’s take a look back at fair trade, sugar years ago, slave trade, the slaves are doing all the sugar and people started saying, well, we’re not going to buy, you know, sugar that slaves are going out in the fields with.

And although they didn’t have. Yeah, the internet and they had the print off pamphlets. Um, people, you know, people were out there doing pamphlets, don’t buy the sugar and they got that reduced. And then you think about the industrial revolution where people were saying, we’ve got children working. We have, you know, women working these ridiculous hours and, and then comes Ralph Nader right with cars.

So fortunately we’ve all been as a, as a population. You know, focusing on activism. It’s just that now it’s become the norm before it was an oddity. Now, if you don’t have the program, you’re the one that’s not part of the norm. You know, you used to be a nice to have. Now it’s in reverse. You’ve got to have these programs in place.

Yeah. So how do you start to identify what these value propositions are? And I thought it was really interesting that you kind of separated the definition of value propositions and what gets your heart beating. Um, so that was an interesting perspective. So how do you, how do you start to dial that in and see what makes sense for you and for your business success?

Well, it’s interesting how the two emerging, cause like I said, the, the two books were so different for me and now I realize they weren’t different. At all, they just started in different places. Right. So when all these folks started coming to me and saying, You know, we want to find other work that we find fulfilling.

What I realized was that so much of our population right now are kind of like what they, I live in there’s things like, you know, a deer in the headlights frozen, right? There’s there’s just, we’re getting the bad news news day in, day out. Every time you turn on the phone, every time you look, it’s just bad news constantly.

So people put on blinders, they’re just becoming almost immune to it. So, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to help. It’s just that what they don’t realize is they don’t have to go solve global poverty. They don’t actually have to put out the fire in Australia. They don’t have, I mean, it could be that they’re really interested in a crosswalk to get the kids across the street.

I mean, they can start at a very granular level. Right. So what I like to do with everybody is say, you know, I don’t know who you are, honestly, because what you have on your LinkedIn profile. Is basically a summary of job skills or education, but I don’t know who you are. Therefore you need to put that out.

So like a track flight, if you want to find, and a company that is interested in the same thing, things that you are like, they gotta be able to see what you’re interested in. So. Working with individuals, I’ll say, we’ll go back and we’ll look at life experiences and we’ll come up with, you know, six or seven when I called them.

So something in their life happened either when they were a kid or first marriage or I, or whatever. I mean, some experience. Caused them to shift the perception and now they value something. So someone was dishonest to you. Chances are you appreciate honesty. If you never have the chance to have education, you will probably really value education.

So we come forward and we say, let’s find these words and okay, now I know who you are. What’s important to you. I think it’s time to weave it in and out of your bio’s resumes and profiles. So I remember I had someone come to me and say, she always thought she was in venturesome, but she didn’t think anyone knew that.

Well, you know, we put that right in there. Uh, she is adventuresome and enjoys sex, blah, blah, blah. The truth is I want to hire someone that’s adventurous and that’s actually a quality that for an innovation company would be really interesting to me, but people don’t use those words right now. They think it sounds.

They’re still stuck in the old way of writing resumes and LinkedIn bios. Right? So once we move into that, now we can say, let’s find a handful of things that really interest you or bother you. These folks didn’t know what their passion was, right. They were kind of, they were just lost on this, but we can find things that interest or bothers in terms of social issues could be cyber bullying.

It could be, I don’t know, clean water, whatever.

To resolve that very issue that you’re interested in. And then let’s see if their values match with yours. Now you found a place where you can contribute both on jobs, skill, set, and values to a like-minded company that has the same values, because we studied that. And they’re looking for someone like you because they can see you and you have a much better chance for success.

So. That is working really well from an individual basis. Sometimes they come to the end of it because I run masterminds on this. And so sometimes they’ll come to the end of the mastermind and they’ll say, well, I’ve actually found no one that’s working on the issue that I think should be fixed. And so they’re ready to go start a social enterprise.

And so then we’ll move them into how you actually implement and create that company. Right. So what I’m finding now is I’m starting to, I’ve been working with corporations saying, look, all those. All those pillars that people stick up in the kitchen, these companies, these are our values. These are. Most of the employees cannot resonate with them at all.

They mean nothing. So I don’t even know who wrote them. Right. But we’ve all worked with him. You’re just in the kitchen by the coffee pot or something, or they’re in your onboarding materials, right? No one can connect with them. I got the perfect example. So right before our call, about half hour before I got back to the office, I chaperoned my third grader to movie today and we took his class and I’m in a movie theater, big, giant local movie chain, and they got their value propositions and mission statements on the wall.

And the mission statement of this very theater was enrich lives. I’m like what? It just didn’t connect with me at all. Like how, how has this movie theater that just oversold me on, um, unhealthy popcorn snacks, $50 for the drinks. And that’s my point. No one has the time, no one even knows who wrote it.

Particularly it’s a larger company. I was with a lot of larger companies. Right. And, and so, so really what I’m trying to do now is say to these companies, let me come in and work with your employees and let’s really understand what their values are. And that’s then let me work with them to match up what their values are with the company’s core values.

Because once they understand the bridge across, then they have a tether to it. But you, but you need to identify, or quite frankly, once you understand all the companies that all the employees values, you know, sometimes maybe the company needs to shift their own statements a little bit. Right. But there’s no bridge right now.

Right. It’s, you know, we’ve got to really get everybody on board on what they think is important. And then somehow cross that bridge with these corporate entities. So who, who is it that you typically work with? Is this like, C-suite a solopreneur somewhere in between, like what’s your average person that you work with?

Yeah, I would say so. So if I’m just, I run the masterclasses for individuals who are just trying to really get what their value proposition and, and the kinds of companies that they, they should be wanting. And that’s my eliminate class. And then, um, but I do go in. In terms of corporate training with larger companies that have, you know, a fair amount of people that they want to cross this gap or with newer companies.

And I don’t put it by dollar size. I actually put it by number of employees. Right. Cause it’s not about dollar size. It’s about, it’s about everybody getting on the same page or I’ll, I’ll work with smaller companies that just want to start it off. Right. They want to get there? Well, we used to do call vision statement, which has now started a tr sort of turning into a purpose statement.

You know, I envision a world in which, and then your mission statement, great. How are you going to get there? And then now they have to have their value statements, which is one of the boundaries that we work in as a company I’ll go in and we’ll set all those. And we’ll kind of get on board with all the employees, right from the beginning.

And make sure that everybody’s moving forward. Like, what are the employees? It’s fascinating to me too. What are the employees interested in, in terms of social issues outside of that company? Does anybody ask them what I’m finding out? Is that the CEOs or someone in marketing, they’ll say, okay, you know, this is going to be our big project with junior.

Let’s say junior achievement about junior.

Something else’s but you assess the employees once you understand what they care about in terms of even community outreach. Now you’re going to have programs that your employees are engaged in and you haven’t just told them what they have to go volunteer it because you just don’t get the traction like that.

So it’s really a lot about having, you know, really having some, um, some real deep dive from. It’s not C-suite to me. It’s it’s it’s it’s um, I think it’s lower than mid-management. I was talking with a bank recently and I said, you know, you need, let’s start with your tellers and your, the people that are in your front office, let’s make sure you know, that they, that they can show who they are from a personal branding point of view.

So they’re gonna be the ones to bring in the customers. And the best way to show who you are from personal branding view is. The social impact you’re making in the world. We want to be here. We want to be around people that inspire us. You know, do you ever have anybody that comes to you and say, this all sounds fancy, Linda, but give me a tangible metric to benchmark the success of this against,

um, I recently spoke to a large group of women lawyers, um, up in Dallas and one of the first things, one of the partners at one for instance was like, do you have measurements? Um, it’s hard finding these measurements right now. It’s, it’s not hard to measure, but you know, this is a long haul game. This is not a short haul game.

You’re not going to see it this quarter. Um, if what you’re doing is retaining your employees longer because they’re happier. You’ll be able to benchmark that over a year. You know, how many people did we lose last year? And you’ll, you’ll start setting programs up. What I tell everybody is if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.

Don’t waste your time on it. Because the whole thing is about the impact. Yeah. If it is recruiting and retention, you know, how much better are you doing? If you have some employee programs that show you’re listening to your employees and you should be in your supply chain to be able to check, you know, your green programs, uh, and see, you know, how we’re doing financially, you can do that.

Um, But it’s not, it’s something that you, when you set the program up, you immediately identify the ways you’re going to measure. And honestly, that’s not unlike you would do your business strategies the same way. Please don’t go sell a product that doesn’t sell. You’re going to, you’re going to run some numbers before you start pre launching new products.

You’re gonna gonna kind of look at the market out there. You’re going to see how, how well competitors are doing. You’re going to really understand your market and you can go out and you’re going to launch that product. Well, there’s social impact programs are in there different. You’re going to kind of take a look and you’re going to make sure that they support your business strategy.

I was heading up there an interesting conversation with someone at. It might’ve been Boeing. It might’ve been going years ago. I can’t remember exactly which company, but it was a really great group of employees, but they were doing bake sales and they were doing this and they were doing that. And I said, well, how does that relate to the business strategy?

And they finally said, well, you know, we do go work with students, um, engineering students for science students, our engineers go out and work with them. I said, now that is a program that supports your business strategy at the bake sales. I mean, you know, that your impact program is work in tandem and then they lift up the business programs and you begin to make more money.

Yeah. Now at one point it almost sounded like, so this, this all makes a lot of sense on existing business owners and existing businesses, but it almost sounded like that. You also sometimes get people that say. I want to start a business. So they’re, they’re not already running all steam. And so do they come to you?

So, so two questions, a, did I hear that correctly? And B if so, do people just basically come to you and say, you know, I want to start a company. What type of company would I love doing the most? Helped me figure it out. Yes. Yes they do. And I have a protocol ready to launch, um, And I haven’t, I do, I either bring them in to a mastermind.

We meet on zoom once a week and they, they get assignments and downloads on whether it could be, you know, understanding your competition, understanding your customer, avatar, like really need to understand who you’re trying to sell to your mission, vision values, how you’re going to structure the company the whole bit.

And I’ll run people from day one. There’s a lot of people that have great ideas, but they don’t really know where to begin, you know? And, um, So, yes, I do have that program and I, and I enjoy it. I mean, it’s fun. Um, and then we have to get, we get them to the point where they actually have to generally go out and find some, find some funding to, but at least when they’re ready to go find some funding from somebody they’ve got a solid business plan outlined and they, they were really strong sense of direction of what they can bring to the market, you know, into themselves.

Right. So this has been an interesting conversation. Um, aye. Aye. Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. You know, social responsibility is a thing that most of us are aware of, but I’ve never really thought about it from the perspective of somebody who that’s, that’s their thing. Like that’s their, their main objective is to help others with it.

So this is, this is, this has been all new for me. Um, and honestly it’s been refreshing, so I appreciate you bringing this to the table and now. Oh, no, I’m, I’m, I’m thrilled to be here because I mean, I’m kind of like a, a dog with a bone right now on it, because I’m, I’m seeing what I’m seeing is so just won’t work the other way anymore.

It’s just not working anymore. Um, or. If they’re just getting in and they’re not attaching some kind of perk. Well, I’m going to give you an example really quick. When I was talking with some folks recently that were in the service business, I was talking with, like I say, with this group of lawyers and I said, look, here’s the deal.

Mary needs a lawyer. Now this could be financial services. It could be insurance. It could be any homogenous kind of product. Right. Which is not different from all the others. Mary needs a lawyer. So all our friends give her the names of lawyers and she looks up all five. Well, they all look exactly alike.

And they’re all really expensive. They all went to good school, but she, I mean, she can’t tell, but then she happens to see a picture online of Susan. Who’s standing next to a horse with a little girl on top, and she’s on the she’s on the board of equine therapy board, which services, children and beds. And Mary says, you know, my husband’s a vet that’s who I’m hiring.

So she hired, she hired the lawyer, not because of her credentials. Not because of her product, because she could relate to her through an impact program. And that’s what we’re seeing. Now. People want to come to you because you do more because honestly, products and services don’t change that much. I mean, there are no new ideas out there unless Elon Musk is coming up with something new today.

Right. But I mean, by and large there’s how has he set yourself apart nowadays? You set yourself apart about. What you’re doing for the world and what you’re doing for your community and your employees and everybody else. Yeah. I mean, everything’s, um, most things are about as cheap as they can get now. And so people aren’t buying as much based on low cost.

And so they need to be able to relate to the product in some other way. You know, it’s super bizarre is this is, um, The the, the last guest, I had a bunny young lady with a great story and she brought up equine therapy too. And, Oh, that’s funny. I was telling her her about, we had a guest. I incorrectly told Bonnie that the guest name was Angela Demery, who was also.

A guest, um, and is into horses. But the, the guest I meant to reference was Andrea Hall. And she’s any client gestalt coach. And like, that’s what she does is she takes horses and introduces them into therapy sessions and lets the horse like read the patient and figure out what’s going on. And then they build a relationship.

And so, I mean, when I first heard about acquiring to coaching, I’d never heard of it before. And now all of a sudden, it’s like this reoccurring theme on guests lately. So it’s interesting that it’s out there. I know, I know various people who are doing this and it’s fun. I went one time and. You’re out in the ring with a horse you’re not riding on, but supposedly the horse knows what you’re thinking and, and, um, I thought it was very interesting and fun.

Yeah. Yeah. What are the chances of that? That’s crazy. Well, Linda, I appreciate your time. Um, I want to give you, uh, the opportunity. I’ll give you the floor for a moment where you can put out contact information or leave us with a parting message. That’s all you. Oh, thank you so much. Well, I’m really happy to be here and I’d love to, to visit with anyone that wants to talk with me about any of the programs, whether it’s my eliminate program, figuring out, you know, what you can do to make your life a little richer.

And then my ready to launch for the, for the young entrepreneurs and. A lot of boomers coming back, creating businesses right now. And then, and then I had my corporate training and you can find me very easily on my website, which is www.lindalattimore.com. So L I N D a L a T T I, M O R e.com. And there’s a contact sheet there.

So yes, please reach out to me. It’s fun. I’d love to have anybody else join during the solutionaries tribe. There you go. And Damon, thank you so much for your time. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the book. Congratulations on the granddaughter and, uh, thanks for jumping on her. Mother’s I appreciate it. Yeah.

Thank you. Have a great day.