Real Good Company

Real Good Company is a show where we talk with real people building good companies that are making a real impact. We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest, Brett Hagler, the Co-founder and CEO of New Story, an innovative nonprofit that pioneers solutions to end global homelessness.

Founded in 2015, New Story works to solve the problem behind homelessness through creative and innovative solutions to decrease the costs of homes. The organization got its start in Haiti and now works in El Salvador and Mexico. Since its inception, New Story has funded 2,300+ homes, built 30 communities and raised more than $25M.

After college, Brett knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur as well as be a part of impact-oriented nonprofits. Right after college, at 22 years old, Brett started a for-profit, online ecommerce company. They partnered with two charities, Charity Water and Mission of Hope in Haiti, which is where he was first exposed to the issue of homelessness. After a trip to Haiti, Brett was moved to compassion to see the effects of poverty on families. 

When he couldn’t find a nonprofit that was forward-thinking and moving forward with technology and innovation, Brett was inspired to start his own organization. New Story was launched to create a fresh perspective on the outdated model of charity. They focused on 3D printing as a form of innovative home design that could significantly decrease the cost of a house and the time to make it.

In today’s interview, Brett tells the story of how he and his team went through the famous startup accelerator, YCombinator. He shares how he and his New Story team have run the nonprofit as a business. He also offers advice on taking big risks and navigating the hard parts of launching a nonprofit.

You can find out more about Brett and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Brett on Twitter at @bretthagler and New Story at @newstorycharity. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

Real Good Company is a show where we talk with real people building good companies that are making a real impact. We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest, Brittney Kelly, the founder and designer behind Tribe Kelley, an ethical and sustainable clothing brand. She is also a mental health advocate.

Tribe Kelley, which started with just three t-shirts and two pairs of bell bottoms, now sells women’s and men’s clothes online. They have two stores, a flagship store in Nashville and a second store in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, and are about to open up their wholesale division. Brittney prioritized making Tribe Kelley an ethically conscious brand and manufacturing clothes in a moral and sustainable way. 

Brittney got her start in the business world on Etsy with her own shop called Wondertown, where she made custom hand-dyed t-shirts, purses and new jewelry out of broken and reclaimed, vintage jewelry. After graduating college, Brittney married Brian Kelley of Florida Georgia Line and she went directly onto a tour bus with a group of about 12 guys. Meanwhile, she was writing the blueprints to her own brand during her first year of marriage. She launched Tribe Kelley in 2014 on her one-year wedding anniversary. She knew she wanted to do something with fashion and make people feel good about what they put on with a give back initiative.

In the early days of the brand, Brittney focused on keeping manufacturing as many of the brand’s goods in the United States as possible. They develop and design every piece either in Nashville or Los Angeles to make sure their products are made ethically and in line with their morals. Tribe Kelley gives back with every clothing line launch. In 2020, they worked with a nonprofit called Home Street Home, which serves the homeless community in Nashville. They were able to donate $50,000 from the launch of their butter sweatpants. 

Today, Brittney tells the story of how her business has succeeded through adversity. She shares how to be taken seriously in the business world and how to get the wheels moving on a big dream. She also offers advice on carving out time for creativity, setting boundaries between work and her personal life and overcoming challenges as an ethical brand.

You can find out more about Brittney and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Brittney on Instagram at @brittneykelley and on Tribe Kelley @tribekelley. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

Real Good Company is a show where we talk with real people building good companies that are making a real impact. We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest, Holly Hayes, an award-winning author, world-renowned recovery ministry expert, and founder + CEO of Sanctuary Project, a community of advocates bringing hope and healing to survivors of trafficking, violence, and addiction. 

Sanctuary Project is a survivor-run nonprofit social enterprise that empowers and employs survivors in the jewelry design and creation business. One hundred percent of the sales go directly to providing more job opportunities and training to survivors. Hayes, a survivor of trauma herself, has always been an entrepreneur and hustler, even when she was in the darkest part of her life. A natural entrepreneur, she innately saw margin and opportunity to build business from a young age.

Sanctuary Project was recently named Austin Woman Magazine's 2020 Women's Way Business Awards "Business to Watch - Under $3M." Their impact jewelry line can be seen both online and at several local and national boutiques and was picked up by Target.com in the Fall of 2020. An award-winning author of the book “From Basement to Sanctuary,” Hayes is passionate about helping others find "sanctuary" from trauma. She is also a coveted women's ministry and business leadership speaker and has spoken at conferences all over the globe about transformation from trauma.

A full circle moment, Hayes uses her business prowess to bring good to the world. Today’s podcast focuses on From a life of drugs to trafficking, to a career in real estate to starting her own company, Hayes’  journey taught her the skills and the pitfalls of running a company.

Today, she speaks in the women’s jail and shares her story to inspire them to harness their innate talents and skills for good.

Hayes tells the story of the turning point of her story in 2001 and how she turned her life around. She shares business skills and leadership skills that she harnessed from her past experiences to create her business. She also offers advice for founders on how to determine how much equity to give investors and employees.

You can find out more about Brant and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Holly on Instagram @hollychristinehayes and on Facebook here. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

Real Good Company is a show where we talk with real people building good companies that are making a real impact. Today’s guest has a prolific resume in the entrepreneurial and social enterprise worlds. Jessica Jackley is the founder and CEO of Alltruists, a monthly subscription box that provides at-home, kid-friendly volunteer and giving projects for the whole family. Prior to launching Kiva, in October of 2005, she co-founded Kiva, the world's first crowdfunding site for microenterprises that provides entrepreneurs with affordable capital to start or expand their business. In its first year, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. Today, Kiva has facilitated more than $1.5 billion in loans worldwide. 

Jessica is also a cofounder and General Partner at Untapped Capital, an impact capital firm that invests in startups that are making a positive impact in the world. To top it all off, she harnessed her entrepreneur acumen into her own book. In “Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least,” Jessica shares lessons learned from successful businesses in the world’s poorest countries and how to tap into the innate entrepreneurial spirit we all have for social change.

A natural entrepreneur, Jessica grew up in the business of doing service. After founding Kiva, Jessica went back to business school at Stanford and was able to apply the lessons from class on how to operate a nonprofit like a business. She shares her journey of debunking and demystifying the myth of entrepreneurs and for-profit businesses versus nonprofits. 

After going through a divorce from her husband and the co-founder of Kiva, Jessica stepped down from the organization and set out to create something new. Through a process of resetting, she learned her identity was not wrapped up in one company or in what she does. After a three-year sabbatical, she spent a year writing case studies about female entrepreneurs. She later remarried and today the happy couple has four children.

On today’s podcast, Jessica discusses her journey as an entrepreneur and the art of combining problem solving and solution-finding with the life-giving and redemptive purpose of giving back. She shares how her journey as a mother inspired the idea behind Alltruists and creating kid-friendly volunteer projects at home. She also offers advice on using both your heart and head and how to do good in the world while utilizing business skills and entrepreneurial thinking.

You can find out more about Jessica Jackley and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Jessica on Twitter @jessicajackley. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

Real Good Company is a show where we talk with real people building good companies that are making a real impact. We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest, Tina Wells. Tina is a business strategist, advisor, author and the founder of RLVNT Media, a multimedia content venture serving entrepreneurs, tweens and culturists with authentic representation. 

She is the author of the best-selling tween fiction series “Mackenzie Blue” and its spinoff series “The Zee Files,” which is exclusively sold at Target. Most recently, she launched Elevation Tribe, a mentor group and online platform for aspiring female entrepreneurs, specifically women of color. 

Tina got her start after answering an ad in Seventeen magazine to be a writer at a newspaper called The New Girl Times. A suburban teenager and the oldest of six kids with dreams of being a fashion writer, she was hired as a product review editor. Intent on finding a way to “finance her suburban lifestyle,” Tina didn’t think she could make much money, but she thought it might be a fun way to get the product she liked. 

In 1996, at the age of 16, Tina launched her first company, Buzz Marketing Group. Two years into it in college, one of her clients told her that she had a business in market research and that she should “figure it out.” So she did. By her senior year of college, she had six-figure research projects and was working with big name clients like Dell, The Oprah Winfrey Network, Kroger, Apple, P+G, Johnson & Johnson, and American Eagle 

Nicknamed the “millennial whisperer,” after a decade of studying the purchasing decisions of the millennial demographic, Tina was in the position for clients to find her. As the buzz grew, Tina enlisted the help of friends. They nicknamed themselves “buzzspotters,” a network of trendspotters that did market research for brands. In 2000, after a blurb in Cosmopolitan about Tina and Buzz MG, she got 15,00 applications from teenagers from around the world for the role of “buzzspotter.” 

A decade into running Buzz Marketing Group, Tina wrote her first book, “Mackenzie Blue.” She put her journalism degree and her marketing experience to good use to write a book series for the tween girl market with good values. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A couple of years ago, Audible bought the audio rights to it. 

Tina is a true marketer who understands the balance of art and science in marketing. Today’s podcast focuses on her passion for consumer insights and the intersection of research, content product and community. She also shares research insights about what today’s youth are craving and what is changing in product and content. 

For authors, she shares the value of seeing your book as a product, the importance of deeply knowing and understanding your audience and matching that product toward what the consumer wants. She also shares advice for the upcoming entrepreneurs and authors on how to market themselves and work with big name brands.

You can find out more about Tina and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Tina on Instagram @tinawells and on Facebook here. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

Real Good Company is a show where we talk with real people building good companies that are making a real impact. We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest, Brant Menswar, a speaker, author, core values activist, and author of “Black Sheep.” 

The book was inspired by his son, Theo, who was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer at the age of 14. After 263 straight days in the hospital, the family was told to say their goodbyes. Unbeknownst to Brant, his brother posted a Youtube video pleading for help for Theo. The video went viral overnight, and doctors around the country reached out offering to help. They found a solution to an impossible situation, and Theo survived.

After the jarring experience, Brant was motivated to live with more intention and to figure out his nonnegotiable values, aka his “Black Sheep Values” or the things that make him 100 percent, original, and unique. He went on a years-long journey of doing the work to figure out his “Flock of Five,” his nonnegotiable values that can be honored on a daily basis.

Today, Brant’s values are clearly established and unchanging. His Flock of Five (plus an additional bonus value) include: hope, creativity, impact, empathy, family, and authenticity. Every decision he makes gets filtered through these six things. Previously, before finding his non-negotiables, Brant was speaking about 25 to 30 times a year. After he did the work to find his values and to live with intention, by July of 2019, Brant was speaking 70 times a year, his speaking fee tripled, and Washington Speakers’ Bureau named him one of the Top 10 Speakers in the country.

On today’s podcast, we focus on values-driven leadership and how discovering our nonnegotiable values leads to success. Brant says that people who know their Black Sheep Values have a competitive edge in life versus those who don’t know their non-negotiables and are just winging it. 

Brant shares how to bring your values to work and how to create values-driven leadership and values-driven organizations. Without these “organizational Black Sheep Values,” a company’s success is based on pure luck or chance. He shares how connecting the head and the heart helps establish those values. Brant also explains how organizations have to be deliberate about how their values are going to be experienced and creating bridges between employees’ personal values and organizational values.

You can find out more about Brant and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Brant on Instagram @brantmenswar and on Facebook here. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

We’re continuing with Season 2 of Real Good Company! We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest, Alli Webb, a New York Times Bestselling Author and the Co-Founder of Drybar and Squeeze. Today, her business spans more than 150 locations across the U.S. and has catapulted into a nationally recognized and highly sought after brand. The Drybar brand has even expanded to products that are sold at major retailers such as Sephora, Ulta, and Nordstrom!

The leading business lady was always obsessed with hair. Growing up in Florida, Alli’s curly cues were a piece of art that quickly learned to work with. She was always doing something different, coloring or cutting it. She first opened up to her brother, Michael, about her desire to do hair professionally. In her early 20s, she decided to go to beauty school and instantly felt like this is where she was supposed to be. 

After spending 15 years as a professional hair stylist, Webb left the hair industry in 2005 to start a family, but after being a stay-at-home mom for five years, Webb decided to find a way to continue pursuing the creative side of hairstyling at a new-mom pace. She began offering affordable in-home blowout services to her mommy friends, which quickly expanded into a mobile operation by 2009. 

What started as a mobile hair blow out business where Alli went to her clients’ home became a brick-and-mortar hairstyling brand. After realizing that women truly just wanted to feel and look good and that there was a hole in the market for this, in 2010, Alli and her brother (Michael Landau) and ex-husband (Cameron Webb) went to work to conceptualize the idea and open the first Drybar store in Brentwood, California. 

When they opened, they were booked full for the entire first week. They were so busy so fast that they were having to turn people away. Drybar was a success, and the team quickly began opening locations across Southern California.

Alli shares candid advice about how failures are not truly failures in the journey of an entrepreneur but an opportunity to learn. She also opened up about her experience on “Shark Tank” and shifting to being in the tank as one of the sharks reviewing business pitches and evaluating other people’s business plans. Alli also opened about the highs and lows of her personal life from her divorce from her business partner and husband and the struggles of parenting.

Today’s podcast focuses on going from a passion to a real life business, how to scale a business and make it profitable, and the willingness to make mistakes as an entrepreneur. Alli shares about her career journey, how she found her passion for hair, the story behind Drybar, and why she believes it became so successful.

You can find out more about Alli and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Alli on Instagram @alliwebb as well as Drybar at @thedrybar and @squeeze. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. 

Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

We’re continuing with Season 2 of Real Good Company! We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest Laura Modi, the CEO and Co-Founder of Bobbie, an infant formula brand that is taking the formula industry by storm. Although the Ireland native never thought she’d leave her native country permanently, Laura’s proclivity for adventure landed her in Silicon Valley. Laura would go onto work at major companies such as Google and AirBnB before launching her own company with Co-Founder and COO, Sarah Hardy.

Dubbed as Allie’s own “Women in Tech Hero,” Laura is known for her easy going, quiet confidence and her ability to take risks. With a little bit of luck, hard work, and being in the right place at the right time, Laura landed a job at Google as the Program Manager in 2008 on the heels of the recession. Her internship experience at Google Ireland gave her a leg up in landing a job in the U.S. 

After four years at Google, she left her dream job to join a little start up called Air Bed & Breakfast, aka AirBnB. In 2011, She joined as one of their first Operations leaders as the Host Operations & Community. There, Laura met her husband, and shortly after, they had their first daughter. 

Quickly, Laura learned the struggles of breastfeeding as a new mother and the disconnect between her expectations and reality: It’s time-consuming (about 30 hours a week of pumping). It’s painful, or you’re so stressed that you cannot produce the necessary milk supply to give your child sustenance. Five days after having her daughter, Laura found herself in a pharmacy tired and confused as she purchased formula, a decision that 80 percent of new parents eventually make. After experiencing the shame and stigma that came with feeding her child formula, Laura knew she wanted to make a change. 

In 2019, she left the tech industry and took her real life experience as a mother and the knowledge of the gap in the formula market to launch her own U.S. infant formula company with her Airbnb coworker and mother of two, Sarah Hardy. Laura’s love of risk taking paid off and today, Bobbie provides thousands of new moms and babies with a high quality European style recipe modeled after breast milk. Bobbie is the first national infant formula to launch in five years, and it is the only infant formula brand to meet European nutritional standards.

Today’s podcast focuses on the shame and stigma attached to baby formula, the importance of taking risks in career and in life, and the baby formula “black market.” She shares her story on leaving the tech world, her motivation as a mother to disrupt the formula industry, her journey of pitching to 68 investors, and raising two and a half million dollars of investor capital before her son was born, and how her team faced being recalled by the FDA.

You can find out more about Laura and everything mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Laura on Instagram @lauraclairemodi as well as Bobbie at @bobbie. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

We’re continuing with Season 2 of Real Good Company! We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest Beth Collier. Beth is a Communication, Creativity, and Leadership Strategist based in London. She grew up in the United States in a small town in the Midwest. After 15 years of working in the workplace communications space for large corporations on three continents, she shifted to launch her own communications company that helps people improve their communications, creativity, and leadership skills.

Lauren’s passion is to help people improve their communication skills and have the confidence and tools to communicate well, inspire others, and get their ideas across. She believes that learning the fundamentals of communication can change people’s lives. She also helps people learn creativity skills, which she defines as the things that make teams work well together and leaders more effective.

Lauren’s journey to become a communications specialist started in her formative years as a curious kid. She loved to travel, meet new people, and learn about cultures. Her childhood dream was to move to sunny Los Angeles. At 20 years old, as a part of a university internship program, she moved to L.A. and was suddenly at NBC studios and on the Warner Brothers lot surrounded by celebrities. The following year, she moved to London to study abroad where her curiosity for diverse cultures and people was piqued. 

Her career first began in New Zealand where she learned to write speeches, internal communications, publications, and media management. There, she found a passion for communications. During the financial crisis, she moved back to London and while working at an investment bank there, she had an “Oprah ah-ha moment.” She realized her true passion was to help people communicate well and have the confidence to get their ideas across.

On today’s podcast, Lauren shares the importance of communicating well, tips for communication in business, how to engage well on Zoom, how culture plays a role in how we communicate, and how storytelling aids in human connection. Lauren breaks down her effective communication strategy acronym “P.A.C.E.”: Purpose, Audience, Curiosity, and Empathy. Another acronym she stands by is to be an “A.C.E. communicator,” which is someone who is: Authentic, Clear, and Engaging. Lastly, she explains the pertinence of identifying the “why” or the purpose behind your communication and even shares her admiration for Taylor Swift's short, simple, and clear communication skills.

You can find out more about Beth Collier and the communications advice mentioned on today’s show here. Also, you can find Beth on Instagram @beth.c.collier. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!

We’re continuing with the launch of Season 2 of Real Good Company! We’re so excited to welcome today’s guest Raan Parton, Creative Director and Co-founder of Apolis. Raan started Apolis 15 years ago with his brother, Shea Parton, with the mission of connecting small, developing supply chains to larger markets.  He and his wife, Lindsay Parton, lead Alchemy Works and have recently launched FREE MARKET_, a retail chamber of commerce, alongside business partner Paolo Carini.

The word “apolis” means “man of no country” and, for the Apolis business model, this word has expanded to mean global citizen. Jokingly dubbed “Carmen San Diego’s clothing company,” today Apolis makes essentially every product you can imagine—glassware, fragrance, shoes, bags, tailoring, technical outerwear from Poland, cashmere in Nepal, handwoven scarves in India/Burma border. 

Raan created Apolis with the notion of not just wanting to be a spectator of different cultures and places but to be a participant. This required a fair trade relationship with supply chains. His desire was to not just be a tourist but to actually affect how consumers interface with different cultures.

As a leader in the business-for-good space, Raan talks about the greatest responsibility of selling products and to be a social enterprise that creates something that people want. A feel good product that people don’t actually want won’t solve anything. While a lot of businesses-for-good focus on the narrative, the focus actually needs to be on how to supply the demand. Social enterprise is able to change the trajectory of a supply chain when they are focused on items that have the exponential possibility of scaling.

Raan shares about the journey of creating a product that stands the test of time while focusing on the integrity of how it is produced. He delves into how Apolis has created a sustainable business model by not trying to do everything and sticking to their guns. He also shares about the process of creating sustainability over a decade and the financial and emotional investment that it requires.

Today’s podcast focuses on refining supply chain efficacy, the importance of integris for a true business-for-good, tips for how to keep a business alive for a decade, creating inventory that has efficiency in the consumer product business, and how to maintain work/life balance.

You can find out more about Apolis and Raan mentioned on today’s show here. Also, You can find Raan Parton on Instagram @raanparton. Get to know our hosts on Instagram @CaitlinCrosby and @AllieBridge. Please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe so that we can stay in Real Good Company!