Connect with Michael Moore and Bob Wierema

The Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/
Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/
Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/

Connect with Raleigh Green

Raleigh Green: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raleighgreenv/

Emerald Consulting: https://www.emerald-cp.com/

[00:00:00] Raleigh Green: If I was telling anybody, you got to start with yourself, you got to start with being real, and being honest, and you have to be happy. And you've got to have a smile on your face because nobody wants to deal with a dick. You’ve got to humble yourself because a lot of the times for you to build relationships, you have to get through a gatekeeper. And sometimes the gatekeeper is the toughest person to get through to get to the person that you want to really impress, or you want to do business with. 

I watched my father go into offices for five or six years and would walk in, sometimes with a meeting scheduled, sometimes without a meeting scheduled and would say, “I'm here to talk to the office manager. I want to do your office supplies”. And they'd be like, “Raleigh, we already told you we're using staples and we don't want to use you. We’re totally happy”. And he's like, “if anything comes up, just let me know. I'll come back next week”. And they were like, “no, no, no, don't come back next week,” and he never took no for an answer. And that was something that he really taught me early on is you can't take no, there is no such thing as no when you're selling yourself or selling a product – if you have the desire to talk to somebody or to meet somebody, then you have to become very creative in the way that you get to that person.

And a lot of times it was just persistence and not giving in to the word ‘no’.

Michael Moore: Welcome to The Climb Crossroads and Defining Moments. Today, we're joined by Raleigh Green, [00:02:00] founder and managing member of Emerald Consulting. Happy to have you here today.

Raleigh Green: Happy to be here. Thank you. 

Michael Moore: So, before we dive in in – because I've just got a lot of questions and Bob does too, with what we do for a living and our backgrounds, what you do we find incredibly interesting. Just tell us a little about you; where are you from, where you've been, where you're headed? 

Raleigh Green: Yeah, so born and raised here in Fort Worth, Texas. 

Bob Wierema: Great. I'm outnumbered again by design.

Raleigh Green: Born and raised here in Fort Worth. Went to Arlington Heights High School, went to the University of Texas on a track scholarship and came back to Fort Worth after four years of fun down at Texas, and actually finished my degree at TCU and then got married early on and thought I was mature and had the world by the balls and was ready to go conquer everything that was in front of me and after about 10 years, realized quickly that you don't have anything figured out and you're not mature and you better start figuring it out pretty quick. So, lived here in Fort Worth with my wife at the time, and ended up, unfortunately, getting a divorce. I have a beautiful boy from that marriage – he'll be nine in February. 

I moved after my divorce to Dallas and lived in Dallas for seven years. During that process, I put myself through business school and SMU and decided that it was time for a major change in every aspect of my life. And I met my current wife, my beautiful [00:04:00] bride as of July this year, in Dallas and moved her back to Fort Worth, which was a shocker for her, but she's a trooper and she's getting to love the community and love our neighborhood. We’re both entrepreneurs by trade; she just launched a business herself in March of 2020, she actually launched it two weeks before COVID hit and was in the process of starting her fundraising campaign, which was a very rough ride. And I had started Emerald Consulting a few years back, but really started picking things back up full-time with it. I would say in early 2018. So that's kind of where we are today. 

Michael Moore: On the theme of your wife – because Bob, Chris Powers, who we've had on the podcast and introduced us to Johnny, she was actually on his podcast. So, you sat in this room before – tell us a little bit more about the business and what she's got going on, because it's really neat. 

Raleigh Green: So, her name is Meagan. Megan Green. And she started a company called The Dowery. It's an online platform that connects local artisans from all over the country to grooms and brides that she created a wedding registry for.

So, she was also in a previous marriage and during her experience of registering for things, she found that things were very limited on what she could register for, and everybody went to the same big box retailers. And so, everyone for that year's home looked the same. They all had the same Pottery Barn or the same Bed, Bath, and Beyond or whatever it was. And she found [00:06:00] a hole in the market and said, “man, there's a ton of local artisans all over the country in the United States that only sell through their local retailers. And that's really their only channel. And these people aren't good businesspeople. They’re artists by nature, and so, they don't have the skillsets to push their products out onto some platform, a different platform than their local retailer”. So, she started doing a lot of research and we worked on her business plan for months on end. And we decided that now is the best time to dive in and try to tackle this 10,000-pound gorilla that's out there, and the business has been great. You can find her on www.dowery.com and it is not only a wedding registry gift site, but it's also just a standard platform that you can buy anything on. 

So yeah, it's been a rough year for fundraising for her business and for my business. But I feel like we finished the year pretty strong and she was actually able to raise a little over a quarter of a million dollars from friends and family, and we'll continue to raise capital this coming year. 

Bob Wierema: Well, I will definitely be sending this over to my fiancé here. We're hopefully getting married here in May.

Raleigh Green: There we go, congratulations. 

Bob Wierema: Yeah, we were supposed to get married last May and had the push and if she sticks around for another five months, this two-and-a-half-year engagement, we're going to get this deal done. I'll send it to her for sure. It's funny you say like that because I've talked to her and she's like, “yeah, well there's only like Crate and Barrel and West Elm and all the other ones” and whatever's kind of in style then is what everybody else [00:08:00] has. So that's exciting. I'll definitely send that over to her. That's great. 

Raleigh Green: It's a really cool concept and most guys aren't into it. We usually don't care what our wives pick and choose for what pottery we...