BONUS Episode #2 | March 2022 Blog | What's Your Story, Anyway?

Let's have some fun. Welcome to the LOCO Experience Podcast, I'm your host, Kirk Bear. This show is produced by me and my team, and sponsored by my small business, LOCO Think Tank, and sometimes others. Episodes feature a range of local and regional business and community leaders as guests in a conversational interview format. Our guests are interesting and successful people with unique business journeys, and the more business education and unvarnished truths we can uncover, the better. You'll feel like you really know our guests after each episode, and if I'm doing my job well, listeners will find business principles and tips from their journey, and a greater appreciation for each of our guests. Woven into these long format experience episodes are occasional thoughtful episodes, topically focused snippets of 5 to 15 minutes where our guests unfold important and timely business truths, and also I'll read the LOCO perspective bug posts because I'm lazy to infer to listen and then to read, and maybe you do too. Thanks for tuning in, and if you'd like to show a please subscribe, review, and share it with your favorite people. Welcome to another bonus episode of the LOCO Experience Podcast, this time the March blog. What's your story anyway? When we launched the LOCO Experience Podcast, we had a number of goals. We wanted to create a valuable program that would inspire and retain, we wanted to increase visibility and understanding of LOCO think tank and our guests, and we sought to give me a safer place than Facebook to have philosophical conversations and policy debate. Since we started though, with well over 50 episodes under my belt, I've fallen in love with the stories, and I'm so honored to be a party to their sharing. In this one's blog, I'm going to depend on some business stories, including my own, and enter into an examination of the role that story and narrative play in our lives. How do the stories we tell each other provide clarity and understanding? And how do the stories we tell ourselves impact our directions and habits? Finally, I'll share some tips and observations on how we can help ourselves and each other write a story with a happy ending. I'm going to lead off with a very abbreviated version of the business journey shared with me by my guest on episode 56, Heidi Gennall. Heidi's story is filled with tragedy and triumph and his testimony to the notion that the things that happened to you do not define you nor do they limit your future. In the mid-90s, Heidi was off to a strong start to her adult life. She had a great job that she enjoyed in pharmaceutical sales, a young marriage to a man she loved, dearly, and a growing stack of business ideas that she and he had sketched out over dinners at local restaurants. Life was good, and then it turns out. For his 25th birthday, her parents gifted him a ride in an open cockpit stunt plane, and after several stunts and maneuvers, the plane crashed to the ground. Her husband and the pilot were killed instantly, and her life was turned upside down. Heidi struggled through depression after that event, eventually remarried, and later found herself divorced, a single mom with a young daughter. She got an $1 million settlement from the plane crash, but it lost most of it to two failed business attempts and an ill-advised loans to family members and friends. The only constant in those years seemed to be the love of her dogs and her family. In one day, Heidi's brother encouraged her to dig out a specific old napkin and turn it into a business plan for a doggy daycare. She invested the last of her settlement dollars, and camped by while was born. Heidi leased a former American Legion hall, built an expensive vetting and training policy, opened the doors, and started walking her dogs in the park with her daughter, passing out milk bones to the dog owners with a coupon for a free first day. It took off. Dog owners loved seeing how much fun their fur babies were having and referred their friends, and soon there was a second location, and one of her customers encouraged her to consider franchising. As it turns out, my wife and I were clients of her second franchisee when we lived in Colorado Springs. By 2014, she had a young marriage to her current husband, along with three young children, including fresh twins. There were over 150 campbawos nationwide, with sales of over $100 million, and over 3,500 employees, dozens more locations in the works. Over half the franchisees were women-owned businesses, and for both the owners and the employees, it was a chance to take their love of dogs and people and turn it into a career or an enterprise. But was a young family and camped by while both needing ever more attention, something had to give. Heidi sold the company in 2014, staying on for two years as CEO. She has continued a life of impact through nonprofit causes, founded Charter Schools, and serves as a region for the University of Colorado, along with being a mom of four and a wife to a barbecue chef with a growing restaurant chain. She's now running for the Republican nomination to be governor of Colorado, and I have to say I'm cheering her on. You can snoop her more at the website, HeidiForGov.com, but her run is not the subject of this post. It's their story. We had a disclosure we always had to make when I was working in the investments world. Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. And though it's true, it's also oftentimes the best gauge we have. On paper and probably in spirit, Heidi was not in a good spot when she founded Camp Bywall. A single mom with a recently failed marriage, little income, but a string of recently failed businesses. If I was the banker and she walked in looking for financing, I'd be sympathetic but not optimistic. Founding that business though, renewed Heidi's sense of purpose and offered a chance to read a new chapter in her story. She could work hard, make smart decisions, create something that people loved. She listened, she learned, Camp Bywall grew and prospered, and over time tens or probably hundreds of thousands of people and dogs were impacted for good. I had the chance to make a presentation last week to the Windsor Chamber leads group, and I unfolded for them the local collaborative process. That's our four step process for clarifying challenges and opportunities with peers. And when I share these with groups, I don't simply describe the process, I tell a story. Usually it's my story, sometimes about others who've given permission, and I don't share because I like telling stories, though I do, but because it's supportive to the understanding. If I say first step is to set the stage by describing a challenge or opportunity, and then asking the group a question, it means very little. But if I follow that with, here's an example of a situation I was facing in June of 2015, and here's the question I asked my chapter, it makes a lot more sense. And there's time we take it to the next level by involving. What's the challenge or opportunity that you're currently facing, and how can we use the local collaborative process on that challenge? Given that experience, it's not my story that you'd remember, but your story, something that you will remember. In my story, from June of 2015, I ask about expanding my mobile food business by another trailer. I was working as hard as I could, but I still couldn't squeeze a sustainable profit out of the business. Feedback from my group helped me see myself and my story differently. I wasn't just a guy who was struggling financially and was an endless to-do list at Bears Backyard Grill, my mobile food business. I was the unique person who took the time to create and develop local think tank, and that was my scalable business. When we had gone through the process, and it was time for suggestions, one of my fellow members observed, Bear, you should park that food trailer in your backyard and go get a job. And the next suggestion was the same, and added, and you should get a job that's flexible enough that you can keep working on local think tank. That conversation opened up a new chapter in my life to my imagination. It was hard to hear at the time, but it was true. I really didn't want where success would have led me in that food business, even if I'd made it. When we meet new people and talk about the weather or current events or what we do, we're on a mission of sorts to find some common ground, places of mutual understanding. It's helpful to know where someone has been to give us a sense of where they're going, and more helpful still if they share with you the destination that they're envisioning. So many stories, so little space, but here's a short one from my banking career. I've been banking for nearly a decade and had built a strong network and a reputation for being a banker who sought to understand its clients' businesses, and helped them to better understand the financial elements at play. I had more success than most in getting start-up loans approved, but it wasn't until a client slash mentor slash board member of the bank made an encouraging remark that I began to understand why. You're such a good writer, Rayno remarked. I swear, if you weren't a banker, you could make a living off your writing. You tell your client stories in such a way as to help every reader understand the business and the reason for this loan at hand, and it makes it so easy for the loan committee to vote yes when they understand. This might have not been exact quote, but it's the just of it. And from that short conversation, the story I told myself about myself was changed. I had a superpower, or at least a really good one, I was a capable writer. I didn't quit my job and start a novel, but maybe I could have. I could freelance for magazines, or online news, or work for a marketing agency as a content creator, or any of a thousand things that writers can do to make a living. Of course, very few of these are paid more than being a banker, but that didn't matter. When I eventually did leave my banking career, I started bear capital advisors, LLC, which included a monthly blog. And then after I started the mobile food business, bears back our grill, that business, too, featured a regular monthly blog. And for over five years, we've distributed a newsletter to our subscribers at local think tank, and the lead off has been my blog. And why wouldn't this be so? I'm a writer. Now if there's a thousand people reading this blog, maybe a hundred of them have heard an encouraging word for Rayno. He was a master of that craft. I would see Rayno sometimes at his restaurants. He was the founder of the Agonye franchise, now first watch. When I was there just having lunch, and he would stop at nearly every table. Some were longtime customers, old friends, other who were fresh acquaintances, and for their first time. He had a gift for expressing gratitude and making feel special. That was his superpower, I believe, or one of them. His conduit for delivering that superpower to the world was food, especially breakfast food, and his reach was vast. I wonder if someone pointed out his superpower to him as a young man, or if he discovered it for himself through the restaurants, or if he even knows. But that's a question for him and a story for another day. Rayno, if you're reading this, or listening, you should come on the podcast and share the Agonye story, and bring Patty. Last fall, I had Allison Sebeck as my guest on the local experience podcast, and I was amazed by her story. After an education as a linguist, and three years working at an English school in Japan, Allison, her new husband, moved to Fort Collins and chose it as their new home. Allison took an entry-level position at a Fort Collins company called Proci, and five years later she was taking the reins as the president of the company upon her private equity buyout at the age of 29. She tripled the top line and the bottom line over the next five years, and during that time, it had become a member of a peer advisory chapter and was very successful in that role. After another private equity buyout, she left to spend more time with her kids and pursue other interests, and in late 2019, she joined the warehouse business accelerator as executive director, and she's made much progress toward building a world-class manufacturing scale of accelerator mostly during COVID. So I'm excited to see how this chapter in her story plays out, and I think it'll be an amazing success over time. When I heard Allison's story and her passion for the region's small business community, I wonder aloud if she would maybe come on as a local facilitator, maybe for a next-level chapter. But I've not been a founder, Allison observed, and so I don't really feel qualified to lead a group of mostly founders. And we determined in that same conversation that she would be well suited to be the facilitator of a key employees group, since that was the role in which she served. In the time since we've added to the ranks of both of our next-level chapters, Allison and I have been able to spend some time together, and she's executed some of the goals in Q1 for the warehouse, and now we're going to launch our first next-level catalyst chapter with Allison as facilitator. This group is for the integrators, the key employees, the second in commands within the businesses of our largest members, and has some really amazing people ready to become a part of it. Allison made such an impression upon me through her story and her values and principles that resonated with my own so much that I wanted to intertwine our stories in some way. Though not often as dramatic, companies are built in this way. The founder or owner has a product or service, and they demonstrate their values and character and attract others to be a part of that story. When you see those 30-year-old businesses with 27-year-long employees, it's because those individuals chose to intertwine their own story with that of that enterprise. I'm a part of something bigger than myself. So that you're asking someone to go out for coffee or to come to work for you at your business or to take your hand in marriage, it's an invitation to mingle your stories. It might be a one and done coffee, and these storylines just touch for an hour. It might be an employee that stays for many a season or a marriage that hopefully is more like a braided rope when done correctly. So be prepared to share the story of where you've been, and more importantly where you're going to help others imagine where their stories might intersect with yours. These intersections are best encouraged by listening to understand rather than to reply, and when you spot a superpower, don't hesitate to share an encouraging word. You never know when you might kick off a powerful new chapter in someone's life. Thanks for listening, and I hope you come back soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of the LogExperience Podcast. If you enjoyed this program, share it with your favorite people, and please leave us a review on your favorite listening platform. Subscribe to never miss a latest interview, and check out thelogexperience.com to learn more and find our library of episodes. Until next time, stay local.