How Echo is Transforming Lives through Entrepreneurship, with Geraud Staton
Geraud - 00:00:00:
Well, I can get you a fair living wage selling ice cubes. You just have to market good. But when you decide you want your ice cube business to be a multi-million dollar business, we got to start doing something different
Trevor - 00:00:21:
Hello, and welcome to the Founder Shares podcast. We’re so happy that you’ve chosen to spend some time with us. I’m your host, Trevor Schmidt. I’m an attorney at Hutchison, a law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. We work with founders and entrepreneurs in technology and life science companies start up, operate, get funded, and exit. We are daily inspired by the people we work with and want a chance to share some of these stories with you, our listener. So whether you’re already an entrepreneur, want to be one someday, or are just fascinated by the stories of how a business goes from idea to success or not such a success, this podcast is for you. Today’s guest is Geraud Staton, serial entrepreneur, actor, painter, and CEO of Echo. Geraud is a true inspiration for what he does to lift up the entrepreneurial community and make being a founder a little more equitable. Geraud’s entrepreneurial journey may look a little different from others because for Geraud, when he started to look for ways to make money, early on, it was completely out of necessity.
Geraud - 00:01:24:
I was poor kid, poor neighborhood, destined to go where all poor kids went to school, which now it turns out to be really good schools. But at the time, not so much. But they put a nice neighborhood behind mine, and we got re-zoned, and I was really fortunate, and I got to go to a much better school, but I did not fit in there, and so I started to—the only way I was going to get clothes to fit in and be able to go to any of the places where people went were to bring my own extra capital. So I started selling Blow Pops when I was a kid.
Trevor - 00:02:00:
Nice.
Geraud - 00:02:01:
I sold them. I bought them for a dime. I sold them for a quarter. And even then, I thought people were insane to buy these dime Blow Pops for a quarter, but that’s what I did. Every once in a while I’d get in trouble from the school. Yeah, your teachers, not selling drugs, but still not supposed to be selling candy in class. So just a few teachers were sticklers about it. Most didn’t care, but enough teachers, and I should thank them, actually, if I didn’t have that childhood hatred of them for ratting me out.
Trevor - 00:02:32:
Right.
Geraud - 00:02:32:
But I would get sent to the principal’s office, and my assistant principal at Carrington actually was one of the people who said, you got to charge these rich kids more. He’s like, well, they’re already insane for buying these things. But he kept harping at me. Not in a mean way, but just while we’re chatting and him having a Blow Pop and telling me to charge more and eventually I listened and I went from a quarter to 35 cents. Made everyone angry because I had to break another quarter. Rest of the day it was just fifty cents and by the time I graduated I was selling those dime Blow Pops for a dollar fifty—$2.50 if an exam was going on. That’s really where I got started and addicted to entrepreneurship I could start to see the difference that it made and it made a huge difference in my life. I mean, I bought a car with that money and was able to go on some of the field trips that we had that we would not have been able to go on. Yeah, it wasn’t just having some extra money in my pocket, it made a lifestyle difference for me.
Trevor - 00:03:35:
Yeah, well I think that’s interesting because I wanted to go back to you described it as necessity-driven entrepreneurship. And tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that, you may have already covered it.
Geraud - 00:03:45:
Yeah, I think necessity driven entrepreneurship is a little well, I think it’s very different because it’s a different mindset than people who have some capital of their own or they’ve got free time and they’ve always dreamt of having a bakery or doing this thing on the side. I think necessity-driven entrepreneurs almost don’t have any choice. Entrepreneurship is their only way out of poverty, single parents, lack of education. Right? It started very much with those very specific things in mind, when I started Helius a while back it was just this idea that the necessity-driven entrepreneur almost had no choice. Now we’re starting to see that it’s not that there is no choice, but that still entrepreneurship is a better choice for a lot of people, particularly when we start looking at job insecurity, when we look at the pay gap that people are starting to see. I talked a little bit about being a single parent and that’s really difficult for scheduling if you are not as highly educated. We’re in a place with three major universities. So if you’re undereducated that can be difficult for you to find work. But now it’s anything now if you worked for yourself for a little while then have a gap in your resume, if you’re close to retirement age, if you have bad credit, it is difficult sometimes to find a job. So necessity driven entrepreneurs turned to entrepreneurship with that in mind and the thing that makes it a little more difficult is that because it’s a have-to, this is not a worked a year on a business plan, talk to a business coach, they jump right in with both feet and make a lot of mistakes often. And so I think it’s important to recognize that this isn’t just some group of people that had a bunch of free time to put this together and read 30 books before they made their first move. They are experienced really quickly.
Trevor - 00:05:43:
Well, and I imagine too, as I think about it, it seems like there’s not going to be the same support network around a necessity-driven entrepreneur that you would see kind of in the traditional business school or an accelerator or something along those lines. And I imagine that’s in some respect where Helius comes into play or came into play.
Geraud - 00:06:00:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We started to find that people were—it’s easy, and we fell into the same trap as well. We used to think that we could not care more about your business than you do, and that was a running theme for us. So if you didn’t come to your appointments, then you were just out of the program. That was fine. But since then, we started learning that with necessity-driven entrepreneurs, and to be honest, a lot of entrepreneurs in general, there were a lot of reasons. And so though we concentrate, our organization concentrates on the learned helplessness part of it, because we think that’s a huge part of it, but there is still also that lack of support. And so there is one thing to come to me and sit across the desk from me and get the rah rah cheerleading and feel really good about what you’re doing and even see real numbers that your business can in fact be successful. And then going home to a spouse that does not understand entrepreneurship, or friends who would rather you hang out with them, or people who think that you’re betraying your family or whatever. There are so many crazy ideas that people have and they just are missing that support network. Most of us already know the entrepreneurship is a little lonely anyway, and so I think this lack of support really hurts a lot of those necessity-driven entrepreneurs.
Trevor - 00:07:23:
Yeah. So tell us a little bit again how you started Helius, how that came about and kind of what you were trying to solve when you started it.
Geraud - 00:07:31:
Yeah, there were a couple of things that had to work perfectly for Helius to really get started. So other than my journey with the Blow Pops and selling candy in school, which was a big part of it, but I think probably a bigger part of it is I worked when I went back to school for a business at North Carolina Central University, I got to work with a great organization, Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network. I was an intern there, a fellow there, and one of our jobs was to listen to people pitch their business—very shark tank like—see if that business was going to be high tech or high growth, bring in enough capital, enough. If so, we would refer them to an entrepreneur in residence who was someone that was huge in the community, did a lot of work, and they were going to get a lot of support. People who didn’t qualify for that, though, we couldn’t help them. I always sort of assumed they were getting help somewhere. But this is where I grew up, in my town. So every once in a while, I would run into one of those businesses and say, how are you doing? How’s everything going? Like, I loved your business idea. Sorry we couldn’t help.
Trevor - 00:08:38:
Right.
Geraud - 00:08:38:
And I heard a couple of one too many times, someone say, yeah, no one would help me. So it’s just gone. And this is a business that was going to hire 15, 20 people or some that they said, we might hire a couple of people, but this is going to be our successful business. But it can operate with very few employees. Well, that’s not who we worked with, so I started seeing more of that. I started an entrepreneur club at North Carolina Central when I was there, and one of the things that we did as a project was to start working with small businesses just to coach them. You don’t know anything about business, and you’ve got a really small business making jam or barbecue sauce or what have you. Most of them were service businesses, and then we started working with them and helping them just over a semester. And the difference that we got to see over that semester was huge. And so when I did graduate, it was like I think I had when I graduated, me and two of my partners had three or four businesses that were still in our pipeline. I couldn’t just leave them, so I kept working with them, and they would refer people, and other people started getting referred. And so I started seeing that this was not a small problem, but a really much larger than I thought. So those three things really had to work together. I needed to see that there was a demand for this. I needed to see that it was actually missing in the community, and I had to have that experience of my own to see what a difference that it really made for people.
Trevor - 00:10:09:
So it’s always interesting to me to hear kind of those backgrounds and to see those pieces moving into place, but it’s another thing to say, all right, I see this problem, and then to actually make something and do something about it. So how did you take that first step to really get it going and I guess believe that it’s something that you could accomplish?
Geraud - 00:10:28:
Yeah, I think the first step, I didn’t mean to take the first step. Doing it in school. It was important to me, and I started seeing these people, and I really wanted to help them.
Trevor - 00:10:38:
Right.
Geraud - 00:10:42:
In fact, it’s weird when you talk about all the pieces and how all this luck fits together. If, when I graduated, we had wrapped up all of those projects, I would have gone back to oil painting, which is actually what I was doing for a living at the time. That would have been the end of it. But I still had projects happening and then people getting referred. I think on top of that, I decided to try to make my life easier, because it wasn’t a full nonprofit at the time. It was just a project that I was doing, and I was getting a little money, but not much. I decided that instead of trying to teach people one-on-one, which is what our program was, that I would do it as a cohort model. I’ll bring in five to ten people and just work with them.
Trevor - 00:11:21:
Okay.
Geraud - 00:11:22:
So I put out sort of an RFP just to people that I knew and a few organizations that we worked with to say, hey, I’m putting a cohort together to teach these business practices. They have to make less than fair living wage in their household. They have to be actually in business, because we’ve tried to do this work with people who wanted to be entrepreneurs, and it did not work.
Trevor - 00:11:42:
Okay.
Geraud - 00:11:43:
And I got more than this, but the qualified applications that I got, I got 114 applications with a two week turnaround. Like, I just thought I’ll just take the first ten or whatever they come up. So I didn’t even give that much time. And in two weeks, I got 114 qualified applicants, most of which I had to turn down. I took 20 students. It was way too much for me at the time, but that was sort of the last thing. There was a very high demand for this. I do not often say, particularly with nonprofits: don’t start a nonprofit. Durham alone has over 4700 nonprofits. Someone is doing similar work to what it is that you’re trying. But I could not find them. I kept thinking at one point, I’ll do this. So Helius got started, I brought in a really small board, and the whole time we thought we’ll find the organization. Maybe I’m just not ingrained enough in the community. Eventually we’ll find them, and we will give them all of our people, and then we’ll be done. But we never really found them. And seven years later, here we have, I guess, eight years later, merged with another organization, Audacity Labs, formed Echo. So it’s been yeah, almost every step has been a surprise, but the need was there. And when you see that need, it’s hard to just pull out of it.
Trevor - 00:13:08:
So what do you remember about some of those first cohorts that came to Helius? Like, what were they trying to do, and how were you able to help them?
Geraud - 00:13:16:
Yeah, I think the first part and where we were wrong—so since then, I’ll talk a little bit about that learned helplessness model, because I think it matters with the work that we do. But I did see that with them. And so I had this group of entrepreneurs. Again, it started with 20, maybe 21. Yeah, 21. We lost two really early on, but we had a cohort of 19, and of that cohort, everyone was incredibly excited about the work. They wanted to do this. They understood that entrepreneurship was sort of their way out. We had some justice-involved people, almost all of them to a person were service industry because those had a low barrier to entry, right? We had a lot of food folks who thought it was a low barrier to entry, but it is not. But we had a lot of folks that just were really getting started and excited. Of that first cohort. I am pretty confident that three of them made it. Okay. And I think a lot of that was because at the time we didn’t have our heavy coaching model that we do now. And we learned about that when I started talking to folks that were in that cohort. And also because as I said, this was that time at the beginning where we thought we can’t care more than you. So reach out and we will help. Any questions you have at any point, call us, I will love to help you. We just didn’t get those calls.
Trevor - 00:14:39:
Okay.
Geraud - 00:14:39:
We started bringing in volunteer coaches and told them specifically make sure that your entrepreneurs are engaged. We want to make sure that you can’t run this business for them.
Trevor - 00:14:49:
Right.
Geraud - 00:14:50:
We were wrong. I was very wrong about all of that. And that’s one of those big mistakes that I look back to see how much of a difference we could have made. I started learning different by cohort 2 or 3.
Trevor - 00:15:01:
And when you say you were wrong in what respect?
Geraud - 00:15:04:
In the idea that it’s not about caring about the entrepreneurs business more than them. It was what they had to go through. So yeah, I’ll kind of jump into where this learned helplessness model came in and I wish I could remember even where I learned it. But I really started applying it to myself and then I could see this in a lot of our entrepreneurs. So in 1975, Dr. Seligman did a series of experiments that are immoral. You cannot do these experiments today. But he would have a cage. In the middle of the cage, a very low wall. He would have animals, dogs, rabbits, they would be on one side of the cage. A light would come on very much like Pavlov, sort of same sort of thing. A little light or a bell or whatever would happen. And then the animals on that side would get a horrific electric shock. They quickly learned to go to the other side where it’s safe and they learned that really fast. So the light would come on, they barely stir, they go to the other side, everything is great. The other group of animals, they would leash them in place so they would take this shock. They couldn’t get away. They would yell and scream and try to pull away. Horrific. Eventually they would stop trying to get away. This learned helplessness really starts to kick in, then now everyone’s like, yeah, duh. That makes sense. Like, at some point, why bother? The thing that was pivotal, I think, in the study is that when you unleash the animals, they never learn the lesson. They still they never go to the other side. Even when scientists pick them up and move them to the other side to show there’s a safe space, they still won’t go. They’ve learned that they feel there’s no point. Why bother? And even when it happens once or twice that they get away with it, they still feel like, well, that was a fluke, but it’s terrible everywhere. As far as I can tell, the whole world sucks. As heartbreaking as that is, there was a solution that was found, right? So this is a thing that we see with POWs and abused children and abused spouses things and generational poverty and anything like that, where we start to see a group of people who take a couple of steps forward, get batted back down. Eventually they stop trying to step forward. We all suffer from learned helplessness in some way or another. We’ve learned to—I always make fun of my wife. She’s like, Why don’t you do this thing anymore? Because a couple of times you yelled at me when I did it, so I’m never doing that thing again, right? She’s like, well, I was wrong. Do the thing. And I’m like, yeah, you were wrong, but I still don’t do the thing. There is an ingrained thing that I’ve learned now. So we started seeing that a lot of our entrepreneurs are going through this very thing. And so when we would callously, say, no, let them come to us when they have an issue. They aren’t going to come to us when they have an issue because this is a group, often marginalized, who has tried to go to people for help and not gotten it. How many times are you going to reach out to try to get help when you get your hand smacked away so often? So we changed our model almost immediately. We started doing coaching for a year after that because in the study, what we found was that, again, as terrible as it is, there was a certain amount of time that it took before the animal started to learn. And it was dozens to hundreds of times that you would have to pick them up and move them to the safe space. Which just means that we can’t coach by dropping knowledge bombs on people and expecting them to just, oh, that’s what I do? All right. Because if that was the case, we’d all be rich and successful and healthy. And so we realized that our job then is to care maybe more than them, to reach out when we don’t hear from them, to check to see how they’re doing, to constantly move them forward and provide that inspiration. And even when we’re not talking about necessity-driven entrepreneurs, again, just all of us, we have all sorts of things going on in our life and it is really easy for us to let our business sort of falter a little bit when we’re dealing with other stuff. But having someone call you to say, hey, a couple of weeks ago you said you were doing this thing. Did you do it? Like, oh yeah, you’re right and then you’re back on it again. So I realized that that was really important for our organization to be able to do.
Trevor - 00:19:30:
Well, I mean, that sounds also very labor intensive for your coaches and for you as an organization.
Geraud - 00:19:35:
It is, and I think that’s why there aren’t other organizations that do what we do. There are quite a few organizations that we have worked with that have great coaching programs and there are a lot. But then that next step of that year of coaching is just not a thing that they do. It’s cost intensive. And if we’re talking about a group of people, especially when we’re talking about a nonprofit that aren’t paying, it means that the growth is slow. And to be frank, that’s sometimes hard to fundraise for. When I say, yeah, I can help this one person but it is going to take a year of us constantly calling them there’s got a lot of man hours into this. 100% worth it though. Some of the businesses that we’ve seen that have gone through the program are just literally Main Street businesses. They’ve opened, they’re downtown Durham, they’ve got brick and mortars. They’re just growing it all over the place. And I love seeing one of the vans drive by like, oh, that’s someone who a few years ago couldn’t believe that they can make $50,000 a year. In fact, we’ve had people that I would say our goal is to get you to fair living wage. So if we can get you to around $45,000 a year—and I’ve had people just cry at the idea that that’s what we’re trying to get them. So getting to see that the difference that it makes is huge and hopefully more people will see that and embrace that high touch, long term approach to it.
Trevor - 00:21:08:
Well, I mean, in some respects it’s such a different model from most entrepreneurship. In some respects, venture capital, you’re looking for quick return, huge money coming back. We want to see results now. We’re not going to put in that time to see where we can be a year from now after heavy touch points.
Geraud - 00:21:24:
Yeah, absolutely. No, it can be really difficult. And finding capital is one of the big problems with a lot of our small businesses because of that, because they’re starting so small with so few resources and they are utilizing all those resources, big jumps or things that just don’t happen very often. We have the occasional business that just hits something just right and kind of as we talked about earlier. There’s a lot of luck involved with how the pieces lie too. And we absolutely have to recognize that. But yeah, that learned helplessness part of it is really at the time surprising. And now that it’s one of those secrets that when you see it, you can’t not see it and you start seeing it in your own life too.
Trevor - 00:22:09:
I wonder too, kind of as you talk about these types of entrepreneurs who are really kind of necessity driven, I imagine sometimes this is a side gig or this is something that they have to do in addition to something else. So how do you kind of work around, I guess, life for these people who are trying to also build a business at the same time?
Geraud - 00:22:24:
Yeah, we used to not take people that weren’t trying to do this full time. Okay. The big change was the pandemic, which changed a lot for everyone. We started to get a lot more entrepreneurs who came to us to say, I don’t want to quit my job. I just don’t trust that my job will always be there. Now things are more precarious for us and so we started doing more side hustles and seeing a growing number of them of people. I mean, a lot of our entrepreneurs have said, I am not leaving my job. It is not a great paying job, but it is a job. Our secret internal goal is maybe we can convince them to leave it, like we will do better than your job. But also that’s a scary move. I will admit to everyone listening. A lot of the work we do is trickery. We know that. In fact, when we first started, I used to give the entire ten-week workbook ahead of time. And people wouldn’t come. They would like just bail. And I thought because they were like me, oh, you’ve given me the whole book. I’m going to go work on this by myself. I don’t need you. Bye. But again, I started running into them like, yeah, I’m fine. How is the business going? Oh, no, it was just that book you gave me was too much. I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t think. I started looking through it. I was like, I can’t do all this. So then we started, literally. I wish I could say I was exaggerating. We give three pages. Like here’s first few steps of the business plan that you’re going to be working on. And it really keeps people from just freaking out. And so a lot of this process is that. Let’s do this in baby steps. I know you’ve got a food business. The steps to put this thing in place is massive. But if I give you all of those steps, you’re just going to go back to selling cakes out of your car. So let’s tell you about the first three things and when you get them—cool! Yes. You’re rolling! Hey, there’s a couple more things and then just keep giving them all those licenses and things that they need to do. And that really made a big difference. And when they started to see momentum, they had another reason to be excited. That helped with the learned helplessness to see that it was making a difference. So yeah, I think that was a really big part of our evolution.
Trevor - 00:24:42:
And I wonder, you had made a comment about kind of out of that first cohort, maybe three made it. And I wonder, does making it look different for these individuals than it does maybe for other types of businesses that aren’t necessity driven?
Geraud - 00:24:56:
Yeah, absolutely, most of them are. So our goal and also we know that this goal is low, which is sort of why I started a consulting business on this side. Our goal was to get them to fair living wage because I thought at the time, oh, all right, fair living wage, that’s getting them to a place where they can get access to capital and other coaches like we will help them for free up until that point. And they tended to also be excited about the idea of getting to fair living wage. Like, okay, it’s the American dream. Now I can go to Disney World, I get my kid in college. We know that’s not true at all, but at the time I thought, yeah, I didn’t realize how crappy fair living wage actually was, right? So I think that was a really big difference. So most of our entrepreneurs, to them success was that. They might not have the number in mind, but what it really meant is that they wanted to be able to get their kid clothes and be able to go to school. And maybe they’re not talking about Disneyland, but we should be able to go on a vacation for a week somewhere or make sure that we have our cars operating. And I don’t need a Benz, but the Toyota I have has to be able to run and me know that it will run to get me to work. Right. So they were really still in a place where most of them are trying to get to survival. Mostly. We have started working with more of our entrepreneurs longer, and there is a point where we can see this switch happen. It’s different for all of them. Some as early as a month, but most around the five or six month mark where they say, oh, I can make it and also I could be bigger. And you can see them start like, oh, things start turning. That’s probably my favorite point as I’m starting to talk to them when they start thinking like, I could make a million dollars doing this, and you’re like, yeah, let’s go for that. So yeah, I think that part is very exciting. Their goals are usually very different. They don’t have an exit strategy. They’re under the impression that this is the thing they’re going to do until they retire. We eventually start getting them to talk about it. But again, that’s one of those sort of coaching longer term things when we start to say, yeah, so what’s next after this? And that’s also a big part of our program. For most of them, this is their first business. Not all, but most of them, this is their first entrepreneurial endeavor. Our goal is that it is only the first, that we get them to make more things. We’re not just about having people become entrepreneurs because that’s sometimes no different than getting a job. Our real goal is social mobility, getting folks who cannot afford all the things that everyone gets to take for granted—our goal is to move everyone up to that point. So we’re not just trying to create a new crappy paid job for them. We’re trying to create at least the first business stream and hopefully that grows into multiple streams of business.
Trevor - 00:28:05:
Have you seen that at this point? Has there been a long enough time frame that you’ve been able to see business one, business two?
Geraud - 00:28:11:
Oh yeah, it’s great. We’ve seen one of my favorite stories is one of our entrepreneurs found that she just couldn’t do her business and managed to get a job so things worked out for her, but she had a really good business idea that she could not work. One of our other entrepreneurs had a fine business idea but because they were in the same cohort that one entrepreneur took over the other business and is doing great with it. So we’re seeing that. We’re starting to see people partner together, which is great. And we are in fact seeing people who are now starting a second business and taking the skills they already learned so they don’t have to go back through the program with every business and we don’t want that. And they are starting their second endeavors and those are sometimes it happens when the first business isn’t quite that successful. We count that as a success too. Like if you have a business that’s not going to work, get out of it as fast as possible. That’s really important to us. And so those people will pivot to a new business idea. But some people had a business that was really good for a while. One person sold their business and started another one. A couple of people have just decided like yeah, I grew this business and I’m really excited, but I only got it as far as really anyone could and they start one that is actually a little bit bigger. This is the catch 22 of what we do. A lot of our entrepreneurs are doing business. We say this a lot. I can get you a fair living wage selling ice cubes. You just have to market good. But when you decide you want your ice cube business to be a multi-million dollar business, we got to start doing something different. And so we’re really fortunate that a lot of our entrepreneurs were in a place that get to that success. In fact, we have a 91% success rate. And we need to reevaluate this from last year. We need to sort of add in our numbers from Audacity Labs as well. But we know that when we did the merger, Helius itself had 64% of people who start day one who get to fair living wage. 27% we get them to shut their business down. Well, we don’t get them to, but as we’re going through, they realize they need to shut their business down and they pivot to a new business idea. So, yeah, we’ve been really successful with that model.
Trevor - 00:30:27:
That’s amazing. And you’ve mentioned it a couple of times here, but you said you’ve merged now with Audacity. Kind of what led to that, or what was the thinking around it?
Geraud - 00:30:33:
Absolutely. So my partner, Anjanette Miller, was the executive director of Audacity Labs. So Audacity Labs was a great program. Among other things, one of the things that I was always really attracted to them about was that they worked with youth, typically high schoolers, teaching them entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial mindset, this idea that we could change social mobility through entrepreneurship. And they referred a few people to us who actually were starting to grow their business. Anjanette had this vision that this would make a really good pipeline going from Audacity to Helius. And then added to that was this idea that if we both shifted a little bit, so Helius really didn’t work with youth much.
Trevor - 00:31:17:
Okay.
Geraud - 00:31:18:
We had a 14 year old who came through. He was amazing. He did great stuff. Worked his way through school, ended up going to college, stopped doing his business then. But it did the thing that he needed. He hit his success.
Trevor - 00:31:29:
Right.
Geraud - 00:31:30:
And then Audacity was mostly just youth and not doing a lot with actual business building. So if they could do their entrepreneurial mindset training for adults and we could add actually helping youth to put their businesses together, that pipeline is just great. So through a lot of discussion between our two boards, we merged, started that process last year, ended up actually merging officially in mid November of last year.
Trevor - 00:32:00:
Okay.
Geraud - 00:32:00:
So now, our organization is echoSystem. We have a number of programs that are a combination of what Audacity Labs and Helius had. And we plan on growing even bigger and expanding outside of the area. We have some interest in Mebane. We did a little bit of work in—Helius did a little bit of work in Rocky Mount. So we’re looking at maybe picking that up again. And our goal for this is to actually be at least throughout North Carolina.
Trevor - 00:32:31:
When these programs are merging together, are you kind of creating a community where the kids are working with some of the entrepreneurs who are building their business as well? Because in my mindset, this is a beautiful picture of kids coming up and seeing people who are a few years down the road already successfully building their business, seeing what’s possible, seeing that they could do the same thing and just kind of build from there.
Geraud - 00:32:52:
That part is really important to us. We have a youth advisory board that comes in that works with us. So they look at what the entrepreneurs themselves are doing, but they also help the other youth in the program. We want to bring people back who are graduates of the program. Some of them are on our board, some of them become coaches themselves. And so it’s really important for this cycle to continue. Eventually, maybe the current leadership is out of it altogether. I always feel like the point of a real nonprofit is to work itself out of a job. So if we could get this to a place where the community is really embracing and we see it, we see it a lot more. The more entrepreneurs we see who are successful, the less excuses we hear from people around them. So right now it’s really easy if you’re from a poor neighborhood, to say, well, yeah, that person started a business. They’re white, they are fluent, they already had business experience. Like, of course they can do it, I can’t. But now we can say, no, that person lived next door to you. That person was from your neighborhood. That person made less money than you do now. And they were still able to do this. And so we’re starting to see that happen more. In fact, I think most of our, not, well, a little bit with the youth as well, but with our adult program, 90 some odd percent of them are referrals. Okay, so they come from other people in the program. They come from some of our partners that we work with. And so yeah, we’re seeing that they’re really starting to do this on their own.
Trevor - 00:34:21:
That’s great. So what would it take, I guess, to kind of what do you see as the next step, baby step wise, to expand out into North Carolina more broadly?
Geraud - 00:34:29:
Yeah, we’re starting to look at so when Helius started its expansion into Rocky Mount it was hard because I was going to Rocky Mount to teach classes, work with the cohorts. And so now our goal is to move into some of those communities and start helping them duplicate what we did, making sure that they’re making those right connections, that they can bring coaches in that are motivating. It is easy to find coaches that have been doing entrepreneurship and VCs for a while. It is really difficult for our entrepreneurs to talk to them. And so finding folks from the community that are closer to where our entrepreneurs are coming from will really help get things started. Then the entrepreneurs themselves will be able to come back. So really our big step is figuring out what areas we want to do that and we have a few in mind, even places like Wilmington. So we’re wanting to go there, find out who’s doing some of this work. Because though at the time there weren’t a lot, and now there are a lot more people in Durham who are doing this work with this particular group of people. So that’s really exciting. We don’t really consider them competition where there aren’t enough of us still to help the group of people that we’re trying to. But it’s possible that, for example, we go to Wilmington and there are organizations doing this already, then we don’t need to go there. But we can help them and show them some of the things that were successful for us. When we look in smaller towns like Mebane, that’s going to be a little bit harder. We’re going to need to go in more, try to find more people and actually more boots on the ground getting that work done. But everyone, my board included, are really excited about that prospect.
Trevor - 00:36:05:
Well, it’s got to be exciting. But at the same time, finding a you in Mebane or in Rocky Mount and kind of replicating that, I’m sure that’s a huge challenge.
Geraud - 00:36:15:
Yeah, that part’s hard. And my wife jokingly said, we’re not moving, but what if we go to Detroit? She’s like, no, this is town. Durham is where I—she’s from, Spokane. She always used to say, yeah, at one point we’re probably not being Durham. Right. And I would say what? No Durham forever, right? Now she’s the one like, we’re not moving, this is where we live.
Trevor - 00:36:38:
Well, that’s good. We got to keep building Durham up.
Geraud - 00:36:41:
That’s right. I agree.
Trevor - 00:36:42:
So what are some ways that others in the entrepreneurship community can support the work that Echo is doing and kind of help out in any way?
Geraud - 00:36:49:
Absolutely. Well, like every nonprofit, funding, that’s really important. But I think the other thing that we need and that we’re starting to see is that those coaches, as we said, it’s very hands-on and a lot of work. And so folks that are wanting to give that, and it doesn’t matter what level you’re at, we always say, if you’re a three on a scale of one to ten, you can teach ones and twos. And so if you have any sort of experience in finance, marketing, web, even AI stuff, now, we’re starting to see it. A lot of our entrepreneurs are starting to love—not a lot, but starting to look into this area. Right. And I think outside of that, our entrepreneurs need help with all the aspects. So it’s not just teaching them about videography because that’s what they do. It’s also about teaching them how to put their website together, which we can help a little bit with that, but professional would be much better. So making sure that we have coaches who can come in and are willing to help with that. We don’t want our entrepreneurs just getting a bunch of handouts. Our goal is to get them to be fully established, fully running businesses and operate just like any other business. But to start, a reduced rate, it would be great. We have a law firm that we work with that does that and so yeah, the more help that we can get for the community absolutely the better.
Trevor - 00:38:15:
Do you see or have you seen kind of a shift in the different types of entrepreneurs that you’re working with? You mentioned you’re starting to see more AI. Like the types of businesses that folks are looking to start, has that changed?
Geraud - 00:38:24:
Yeah, it’s changed a lot. It started with being almost 100% service industry. Again, just because of the barrier to entry. It was a thing that people knew how to do and so they just wanted to start a business doing that. But we’re seeing a lot more thought being put into problems. And some of this is because our entrepreneurial base is getting younger. We’re starting to see a lot more not just the youth, but we’re seeing more folks in their early twentys and that’s a group of people who is really good at identifying problems that they want to solve. And so a lot of those businesses are starting to be that. For example, I can’t imagine we would have had this at the beginning, but we had a guy who was doing construction work outside, doing a lot of yard work, who had dropped out of school and decided that he was going to create a cooling suit. Started working with someone in RTP to do this huge technological thing. Just absolutely amazing. That was probably one of the first that went outside of the box for us and just absolutely amazing to see that and since then we’ve had more people and it’s also one of our training parts like what problem are you really solving for the world? And seeing people who say oh, I came in here with this idea but when you started to talk about what problem we have to solve it was like no one else needs cake but here’s a thing that sucks and then people start shifting and they shift really quickly. So we’re seeing that shift happen faster. People care more about just making money is important to them but we’re seeing that they care more about a bigger thing. So if they can make money solving problems for the world they’re really trying to do that.
Trevor - 00:40:08:
That’s great. So what are some I guess aside from kind of the learned helplessness that you discuss, what are some common mistakes that you see some of these companies making early on or as they’re trying to grow?
Geraud - 00:40:20:
Yeah, I think some of it is just a matter of not knowing that they can. It’s a faith thing. Some of it’s back to that learned helplessness for sure, but I can’t tell you how many organizations were on a really good path and then they just hit a wall and then they run backwards. We had a cookie seller who was selling cookies for $0.35. It cost him, and we ran these numbers. Cost him like $0.85 to make a cookie. And he didn’t know why. He wasn’t making any money. He was like, oh, I sold out at the farmers market, but I’m still broke and I don’t know why. So we figured out why. So we convinced him, sell your cookies for a $1.50. And he’s on. Okay, yes, I can see that makes the big difference. And he went to the farmers market, he sold a cookie for $1.50. Then, and this is his story, then a little kid ran up and wanted cookies, and so the kid asked their mom, and their mom said no, and then he gave her two cookies anyway, and then he ate one. And then someone else came up and said, oh, $1.50. And he said, well, $0.50 for you. And then he sold them for $0.50 for the rest of the day. And so it’s just this value, this self worth that we have to sort of fight against. Almost every entrepreneur under sells, almost everyone. Just their costs are way too low because that’s the only marketing thing. That’s the only marketing trick they know undercut the competition.
Trevor - 00:41:49:
Right.
Geraud - 00:41:50:
And so that’s their primary go-to. We tell probably 99% of them, we’re going to raise your prices by the end of this. And so far, we’ve not raised anyone’s prices even enough, but we’ve raised them as much as we probably could in that short amount of time. But yeah, under pricing and undervaluing their services is the biggest one by far
Trevor - 00:42:11:
I’m seeing a consistent theme. We’re going back to the Blow Pops in school.
Geraud - 00:42:14:
Yeah, it was me. I mean, if someone had told me you could sell these for $1.50 and just started there, that story would have come to an end. Right. So I get it. I 100% get it
Trevor - 00:42:25:
Well, I think it’s the easiest thing to do is to either believe you’re not worth the services that you’re providing, or believe that if you put that price out there that nobody’s going to buy it. So I can’t do that.
Geraud - 00:42:34:
Absolutely. Imposter Syndrome is huge, and we’re hearing more about it because it’s such a major part of things, and we’re starting to do a little bit of work with that. There are organizations that deal with Imposter Syndrome much better than we do, but it’s very real and we see it with our entrepreneurs a lot.
Trevor - 00:42:49:
So, I mean, what’s that conversation look like? You’ve got somebody coming into you, talk to you, and you’re trying to coach them to believe that this is something that you can do. How do you have that conversation, given the baggage that you’re talking about, that you have to overcome?
Geraud - 00:43:03:
One of the things they do also have in common is they are proud of the work that they do, right? So very few of them are like, I’m a mediocre, whatever. They’re very proud of their work, and that’s been the way in. Usually it’s just putting numbers in front of them and then getting them to admit what they believe. So that imposter syndrome might be true. I don’t feel like I can charge $50 an hour to do this thing, but I also know I’m really good, right? Those two things somehow live in their heads at the same time. So what I often can do is say, look, and I’m surprised that very few of them have already done this. Let’s just go find so you do yards? Great. Let’s see how much people charge. And we just do a search just while they’re sitting right there, this person charges this and that and that. So the average looks to be about $50, $60 an hour. You charge a little less than that, but you’re better than average, right? And sometimes that’s just enough. That’s enough for them to say, yeah, I am better than average. And so they still feel it. You can still feel when they up those prices, how different it’s a worry, but they’re able to go to it a little faster because they start to see their own value in it. So that’s probably the I wouldn’t say the easiest way, but that’s one of the ways we’re able to do it. I think the other way is and this happened with me. Again, here’s why I teach it, because it’s happened. So with my art, one of my art instructors or one of my art mentors was talking to me about she said something offhanded. She makes a lot of money. And I said something like, holy crap, I barely sell a painting for, you know. She’s like, So how much do you want to make a year? I don’t remember what I said, but maybe I said, $100,000. I want to make $100,000 painting. And she said, yeah, you can absolutely do that. One of hers was like, 20 grand or whatever. She’s like, yeah, you can absolutely do that. Pause. How much do you charge right now? I was like, $500. She’s like, cool, cool. How many paintings do you sell a year? I was like, ten. She’s like, yeah. So one or two things has to change. You got to charge a lot more, or you have to paint a lot more. Can you paint enough to make $100,000 selling $500 paintings? I was like, oh, my God. No. But also the idea of making a $10,000 painting seems crazy too, right? So blending those things together and sometimes sharing with the entrepreneurs, like, all right, we figured out how much it costs you to do this. So you want to make a living at this? If you keep doing it the way you’re doing it, you’re going to make $20,000 this year at best. And they’re like, Wait, what? All the work I’m doing, that’s all I get? Like yeah. Sorry. That’s all you get—unless you raise those prices a little bit. And so sometimes that’s the other thing that does it, when they realize that there’s no hope if they don’t charge more.
Trevor - 00:46:06:
I said that the math doesn’t lie.
Geraud - 00:46:08:
The math does not lie. So I could tell you the value of your thing all day, pat you on the back. It’s great. But sometimes it’s just like, you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s great or not. This is all you’re going to get if you don’t raise your prices some. Between those two things, we get very few people that just won’t do it. Very few. Usually between those two things, we get them to a good place.
Trevor - 00:46:32:
So I’ve been wondering kind of as we’re having this conversation, what is your why for continuing to do this work? I mean, you could go out and do your own business, start your own entrepreneur thing and build your own million, 2 billion, whatever million dollar business, but you’re here kind of helping out support these other businesses. What’s your motivation?
Geraud - 00:46:52:
My wife asked that question too. It’s a fair one. I think it’s because I live this experience. First, there’s a thing that I learned that is not true. I don’t care what anyone says, but that money only buys happiness up to about $70,000 a year. That’s neat. That’s a cool number. But I don’t think that’s true. But I started to realize that it is probably not far off in reality as far as where a limit to happiness is. So maybe it’s not that happiness stops growing at $70,000, but that’s a good place to get to, to not have to worry so much about all the things that are going on in life. And maybe you’re not set with retirement at $70,000 a year. And again, you’re not buying Greece or Lamborghini or anything, but you’re at this good place. And so I think when my wife and I got to that spot, I realized how many people weren’t there. And so as this is growing, I will probably start being able to pull out of this a little bit as the community takes this on. That’s something I would love to see. But until that happens, it’s hard to just roll out of here, because I know for a fact the difference that it made and it was not little for me. Yeah, absolutely amazing. And the people that I see who are in that same spot, the difference for them, it’s just huge. It’s too easy to help this group of people and then to just bail on them. I’ve seen the memes like, looks like today Elon Musk also didn’t end world hunger. When I’m sitting in a place where I feel like, okay, I can help. You just kind of have to.
Trevor - 00:48:44:
Yeah. God bless you for it, because I hear again the echo of that story of you coming out of school and you still had four people left that you still needed to help and still got some more people you feel like you need to help.
Geraud - 00:48:54:
One day there won’t be people to help for that. That’s the dream. Or there’ll be enough hands on deck that I will feel like it’s in good shape. I can go back to painting or whatever things I decide to do.
Trevor - 00:49:11:
So we are the Founder Shares podcast. And so I always like to ask our guests if there’s one piece of advice that you wanted to share with somebody who’s either starting a business or currently running their business, what would that advice be
Geraud - 00:49:24:
Yeah, a good plan today is better than the perfect plan tomorrow. Start it. Just whatever it is. I think there are a few things that you can do where there are no take backs, that once you start this thing, it has to work, or everything just goes to crap. Right. But there are very few of them. And so I think a lot of those things, if you want to do a thing, if you want to start a business, start. Sell a cake. Go find a client. I think anything that you can do once, you can do multiple times. And so sometimes you just need to get that momentum started. Otherwise, we’ll just plan a thing to death and that thing will never get moving. Or, quite frankly, if you plan it too well, it becomes super intimidating. And I’ve even caught that myself sometimes, like, hey, Liz, I got an idea for another project. Let’s do this thing, but let’s take our time. And then by the time you look at it, you’re like, this isn’t something I can do. This is turned into some—so don’t wait. Just start.
Trevor - 00:50:31:
I like it. I like it a lot. And so how about for our listeners, if they want to connect with you, either if they’re an entrepreneur looking to get started or if they’re looking to support what you’re doing at Echo, how can they reach out to you?
Geraud - 00:50:40:
Absolutely. You can reach out to us at our website, www.echo-nc.org. Or feel free to reach out to me, Geraud Staton, it’s geraud@echo-nc.org. Love to hear from you.
Trevor - 00:50:55:
Fantastic, Geraud. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it, and I really appreciate the work you’re doing.
Geraud - 00:50:59:
Thank you very much. This has been great.
Trevor - 00:51:10:
That was Geraud Staton, CEO of Echo, which, again, you can find at echo-nc.org. If you’re a founder or business owner and need legal advice, we’d love to hear from you. You can start by visiting our website at hutchlaw.com. That’s hutchlaw.com. We have the capacity to help you out with just about any legal need your company may be facing. We’re passionate about the innovation economy and ready to help you on your entrepreneurial journey. This show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Trevor Schmidt, and we’ll talk to you next time on the Founder Shares podcast.