 This is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Puneville Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game are about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, and finding greatness, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today is the anchor on KHON2 News and the owner of the very popular Cole Academy. She is Gina Mangieri, and today we are going Beyond Journalism. Hey, Gina, welcome to the show. Good morning, Rusty. Thank you so much for having me. Now, Gina, can you tell me about your background and where you grew up at? Sure. I grew up on the mainland in a small mountain town outside of Denver called Morrison Colorado, and I was the daughter of a journalist, a newspaper woman, and of a builder, my dad. After journalism, my mom went into her own business, a retail store. My father had always sort of been in his own line of work building different things around the city there, and so I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family. My sister and I, my mom and my dad, so when we were always worked together and always contributed back to the family business in one way or another, and I think between those two things, between growing up with a journalist to influence me and also being in a family business where the work never ends, it seems I've carried that into my own life with my family these days. Well, you are definitely one of the highly respected journalists here in Hawaii, and I want to know, what is it about journalism that interested you in the beginning? Sure. Well, in the very beginning, I learned to read that way, that's how my mom would pull pages from the newspaper and didn't have us read, learn to read that way, but also to have the discussions as a family about civics, about local government, about news and topics that we saw in the newspaper. You know, I can remember back in, oh gosh, being a little, little kid in the 70s and reading about Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan and all of that, and he started growing up talking about national politics, local politics, but really, as I pursued it as my own career too, and especially the investigative journalism that I do, it's to be able to serve a community purpose, to be the fourth estate, to hold government accountable, to right wrongs, to find where wrongs, you know, maybe be hiding or hiding in plain sight and to help give voice to the voiceless. So journalism has such an important role now more than ever in our communities, locally and nationally. I totally agree. And Gina, you have a beautiful family, your husband and your two sons. How did you and your husband meet? Well, these days, I can say we met the old fashioned way in a smoky bar. He came up to talk to me in a bar in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. I worked at a newspaper down there. Gannett had a newspaper had been in Washington, DC, just prior to that. And they had a great little newspaper down in the St. Thomas of all places that was doing pretty good investigative work. So I went down there as an editor and had real terrible hours. You know, you work from late afternoon to really late at night, went to the local bar with my colleague, one of the girls who edited with me and caught a drink and met my husband there and he's a boat captain. And, you know, one thing leads to another. And we couple, you know, within a year or two were engaged and said, you know, where can we live that we both can have our careers? I had never really thought of myself as an island girl, certainly not an island that small for a long time. So we needed to find a place that was a big enough city for me and the kind where I could do the sort of journalism that I wanted to do for the long haul and also a place that he could do his job, which is hospitality and ocean recreation. And so Honolulu was the perfect fit for us. Gina, he has a very successful boat business. Can you tell me about that? Sure, it's called Hawaii Nautical and it is in its 20th year this year. What a year to be turning 20. But it's it's been it's been quite a ride. Wonderful company, full of wonderful people of all different ages and talents and captains and crew and reservation experts and hospitality professionals. And it's 10 boats across two islands serving all of Oahu and also Kona and the Kohala areas of the Big Island. Well, I love hearing that. And and Gina, I love watching your always investigating segments. And I want to ask you, why do you think your segments are so popular among so many viewers in our community? Well, we really spend a lot of time. I get the good fortune of of a long time on in TV time, so to speak. It's in my my stories tend to be two or even three times longer than the average TV story might be. So I've always thought of myself as as a newspaper girl, even though I've been with KHON for almost 18 years now, I still think of myself as the newspaper girl I was back in the beginning of my career. And so I like to write. I like to investigate. I like to dig and research a lot. So I think one of the big reasons is there's a lot of information in there. There's a lot of detail and scope and context that we have the time to give. And also we ask the questions. I think that that the people want to ask no magic formula there. I'm you know, nothing that takes takes any kind of mystery formula. But it's the kind of things you might shout at your own television if you were wanting to know why in the world is that happening that way? Or how could that be? And simply being able to ask the people having the access to ask the people in power. Why is this so and what can you do about it? And I've always tried to be tough, certainly, but fair and kind. You know, and it's not that when you when you're doing investigative journalism, you don't have to be mean or harsh about it. You can ask tough questions in a very respectful way because we're both going for the same thing. Even if someone has done something supposedly wrong or there could be a better way. Generally, it's well-meaning people. Even, you know, even even even when they might be doing making the best choices. And together, we can get to a better result. And so I've always tried to hold that respect as well, even when the might seem like a confrontational topic. No reason to be confrontational in the in the interview process. Well, you're right. I do like it when you ask those tough questions and I'm sure they don't like it. But Gina, I want to know of the thousands of stories that you've covered. What's one of the most meaningful, impactful stories that that really sticks out to you? You know, this whole year of covering COVID, it's hard to get that topic in general off of my mind. I would have to say that this year wins out among anything else because there's so much information, so much potential for misinformation. And so many times where we have to really read between the lines to borrow a phrase from, you know, the title of your book to say, what? Well, OK, what what is that? There's a spike in numbers. OK, but what does that mean? And like take our most recent spike, for instance, big, big numbers in the summer. But thankfully, most of them, the majority of them were younger, generally healthier and generally recovered much more quickly. Now, it's hard to see that when the big, you know, some of the more tragic news can grab the headlines and it's still very important the tragic deaths that mount at a nursing home, for example. But that has to be balanced with looking at what the reality is as well in terms of for the vast majority people, they're going to be OK. And for the small minority of people, they're going to be very, very sick. And we need to help those people while still freeing up our economy to safely a handle the rest of us who may generally come through it in the end. And so how do you balance that without falling into that political shout match dialogue? You can see so easily on Facebook, right? Oh, it's just the flu. No, it's not just the flu. It's worse than that. But by the same token, we can live with it. And so I think trying every day to tiptoe that line down the middle to say it's a little bit of both and how to safely get through that. I think that's how I can continue to be the most impactful through this pandemic is communicating clearly and concisely. Well, you are fantastic, Gina. And you and my buddy, Justin Cruz, I mean, you guys are very popular, super terrific on the news anchor desk together. Why do you guys make such a great team? You know, Justin has been part of my life in one way or another for more than 20 years. Back when I first came to Hawaii, I was the editor at Pacific Business News and he was in the same building as I was down when he was at the radio station. So we were elevator buddies. I'd see him on the way to get a snack downstairs and just always thought the world of him, you know, who wouldn't? He's a kind, thoughtful, smart person who's just a joy to be around as a person. And as I got to know him more when he came to Channel Two, I saw we've kind of lived parallel lives. You know, he's kind of my brother from another mother in a way, you know, growing up in a small, hardworking family business. You know, we're about the same age. We sort of grew up in sort of the same everything from the music we grew up with to our experiences with family businesses. Even find these funny intersections in our lives sometimes turns out he was in the musical Annie in high school and so was I. So I rib him that sometimes we're going to have to reprise our roles from our from our illustrious musical careers. So even to this day, I continue to be surprised how much overlap we have in our lives. And I think we just sink up really well there. And we both fundamentally, I think, have the same belief in serving our community and informing people clearly and concisely, even on really scary things. And he's the master of that, right? Hurricanes, you know, he's the guy you want to watch. He's going to tell you what's happening, not scary and not sensationalize it. No, nothing about ratings there. Just give you the information you need to know straightforward. No, I like I like hearing that, Gina. And I want to know if you really look deeply, you know, into yourself, why do you think you're such a successful journalist and TV anchor? Oh, gosh, I don't know about the TV part. I've always wondered that myself, too, because again, as I said, I'm just I'm just a newspaper girl in a TV world, so I can't explain the television part. But I think from journalism, you know, it really is journalism for journalism's sake. You know, I never wanted to be in TV to be an anchor. I wasn't about, you know, image or being on TV or that or that for me. This just happens to be one of the mediums that I've been able to practice my craft in. And these days, of course, online, too, we could still write a lot and type up a lot of longer pieces that we put up on air, too. So the television part I think is, you know, this just happens to be the way that we are communicating right now. But the journalism part at its core, it's how can I best amass a whole lot of information, simplify it as much as possible for the broader community and get the questions answered and most importantly, get access to the people who need to be the ones answering those questions and solve some problems. So I think it's that part of it. It's it's doing the job of journalism with the end result in mind. What's the problem? How am I going to fix it? And who do I need to reach to hold them accountable to do that? That makes sense. And Gina, it seems like you guys have such a great culture of excellence among your co-workers at KH1 too. Well, why is that? I think we really are working for Hawaii. That's, you know, a tagline, but it's it's not. It was crafted from us, from ourselves, from talking together, not handed to us from a consultant or that it's I can remember over the years that really developing and say, well, what do we do? Well, we get up every morning and we we work for you, for our community. What does our community need to know to keep, especially these days to keep you and your family safe? We've had so many just crazy things, if you think over the years, lava flows and rain bombs on Kauai and hurricanes and pandemics. I mean, just take the natural disasters alone. That takes a whole community to stay in touch about how we can best keep each other safe. And then you think of the really big issues in our community, whether it's, you know, rail here on on Oahu or issues with with how and when the neighbor islands are going to more open to tourism safely in the face of a pandemic that largely has avoided them. Thank goodness. You know, so I think when you look at what we do, we think about that every day as a team, and then we just all jump in. There is, you know, we have, of course, as every business does, you have meetings in the morning about who's going to do what. But throughout the day, it's just constant communication. Oh, I can do that. I can grab that. Hey, did you hear this? Oh, I hear you're working on a story about that. Here's here's a phone number. Everybody's always throwing stuff in the stew together. And everyone really does jump in when they're needed to. I think that culture is it's never just a one and done for us as a team. It's constantly contributing and weighing in with each other about how we can do it better day to day. Well, and Gina, as you know, you know, I talked about, you know, creating that superior culture of excellence in my books, and I know you have my books and I want to know what principles stood out to you in my books. Well, one of the things I think they jumped out to me immediately is your four P's. I have four P's as well in our business. They're different, but but I could see where they really align. And when I read that in your book beyond in beyond the lines, I thought, you know, that that is isn't that something, you know, for you, it's it's the people, the purpose, the process, the performance, they just had an aha moment for myself reading that in ours in our business. We weigh everything on the four P's of people. We started with people as well. Partners also, if you think of especially this is real business oriented, right? Of course, so your bankers, your lawyers, your regulators, your licensors, prosperity. OK, I used to when we first started out thinking that third P was was profit, but that was too narrow. Profit might be good for me, but come at the expense of my people. They need to be prosperous. So we changed profit pretty early on to the concept of prosperity. Of course, the business needs to make money, but so do the people. That's why we pay our minimum wage is far above a minimum wage. It's the living wager above, right? There has to be prosperity. And finally, perpetuity. Can we do this for the long haul forever or whatever forever means, right? So in the ocean activity business, it's we don't swim with dolphins. We don't swim with man arrays. We don't use plastics and things that can pollute because that's not sustainable. That's we can't have perpetuity doing that. Might be able to make a lot of money, but it can't be done forever. You know, and same thing in for the preschools, perpetuity might mean something different over the years there. It's been making sure we look at the kinds of locations and the kinds of whether it's the physical structures, the security, certainly these days, the precautions against pandemics and what the future might bring for us there to say, how can this keep going safely for the long haul? So those are our four P's. I think that really synced up to me and I loved reading yours. And now I have eight P's. Well, Gina, I love your four P's there and it makes sense. And, you know, you're a very successful business entrepreneur. I want to know why why did you start the Cole Academy? Sure. Well, my husband and I are stay at work parents. You see, I always wish I could be a stay at home mom. I just never had that luxury. And so as stay at work parents, we needed to have a way when our first son Cole was coming along. Now, almost 18 years ago, he's almost off to college. And we said, you know, as stay at work parents, what do we want in early childhood education and in infant care? Most importantly, I only had six week of maternity leave back from the newspaper back in the day. And there at that time, there wasn't a lot of options for center based downtown specifically infant care that worked the hours that we needed to work. And so we started it. We started the Cole Academy downtown so that working moms and dads, grandparents and aunties and uncles, for that matter, could have a place where they could safely rely on us from bell to bell all day long, all year long, too. So you'll only see us closed on the big holidays when, you know, when the workers also have off maybe a fourth of July or Christmas Eve and Christmas day, but we don't disappear for a summer break or a spring break or fall. We're there when parents need to work. So the first campus opened downtown and then five more over the years through the different communities and into the into the suburban communities and even one off island on the big island. Well, it's such a I find it so interesting how, you know, you had that idea, you had that need, you know, for yourself and you thought, you know what, I might just open up my own my own place and and wow, to have six now to expand it to six, you know, like you said, five on a one on the big island. What do you think are the reasons for its success? The people, my number one, the people for sure. And their consistency and their excellence at what they do day in and day out. We were so fortunate from the beginning to have and to this day, she's still with us as our CEO, Emily, a while young. And when we were first forming the Coal Academy, we knew what we needed as parents and we knew we could handle the concept as a business in terms of finding a location, dealing with leasing, getting loans, those kind of things. That was our area of expertise. But we weren't educators and we needed to bring on the experts to turn that part of it over to and truly did. And from day one and to this day, Emily, our CEO, who has that background in that education, and she ran large center based care on the mainland before coming back home to Hawaii. She's a Hawaii girl born and raised and moved back home to Hawaii with her husband just as we were forming the Coal Academy. And you can see us sort of in parallel, us thinking, OK, we want this formal, high end, center based, safe, you know, bell to bell downtown oriented center, but it hadn't been done before. And Emily coming back from from, in her case, Portland, Oregon, running large centers there, her probably saying the same thing. Look at my skills. What am I going to do here? It doesn't exist here. So it was the perfect timing and the perfect marriage where she could continue what she was doing and bring that level of expertise to Hawaii and grow it from there. So she's just amazing and has has formed that education team, which grew at this point into six directors of campuses. Picture, they call it a principal of a preschool is essentially is a director. And then they hire all of their caregivers and their teachers from there. So it is it is those people, those dedicated, early childhood education professionals, they're not babysitters, they're teachers, they're caregivers. And they take that to heart. And boy, have we seen that in the pandemic, what excellence can really do. We never shut down. We couldn't or among the most essential of the businesses. How can the doctors and the grocers and the EMS workers, you know, and the nursing home workers, for that matter, get to where they need to be if we weren't there and Emily and her team kept it going without missing a beat safely and is just an astounding example of what can be done. Well, you're so right, Gina, about, you know, it's about the people and really having great leadership and what do you what do you feel the best leaders do? I think they are servant leaders. They lead from from behind. They encourage their people to find their passion, to work in their passion and to find that purpose, you know, every day and to fuel that for for the people. And something really jumped out at me from your book when you talk about discipline, not being disciplinary, it's not punishment, it's repetition. It's it's it's perfecting what you do to the extent that perfection can always be out there on the horizon, right? But it is it is the discipline to continue to do every single day what you do. And again, there's no we talked about this with the television, even with the television formula to there's no secret sauce to what we're doing, there's no magic formula. Our competition can see every day what we do. So when when what you do is not top secret, the only way you can succeed relative to the competition is to just do it better and more consistently. Yeah, I totally agree with you. You know, when you're successful, you already created a, you know, kind of like a model of, you know, of success for others to follow. Gina, I want to ask you, you know, personally or professionally, what's a big adversity or a challenge that you dealt with that you overcame? But again, have to be this whole year of 2020. I think this is going to be and has been for all of us. Where were you when it happened moment, you know, in the last ones before that for our economy being sort of the 9 11 moments, you know, so certainly this year has been the most adversity that we've ever faced as business owners, as parents of kids in the other room doing their online schooling. It's it's one challenge after another and one opportunity after another to just continue to test your resilience. And just when you think you're tired from your ultra marathon, you know, you've got another 26 miles ahead of you for another lap. Just pick it up and do it again. So I think this covid has tested all of us past the point, past the breaking point. If you had asked in March, would you be still, you know, running at full speed? Could you be? I think I probably would have said no, there's no way. There's no way I can make it to September. Especially when you look at the boat businesses, we were shut down for months, open for a sliver of time, shut down again. If you had told us in March, you're not going to really be in business until probably October would have been a, you know, soul crushing moment. I think none of us believed back then it would go on so long and it has. So you just you keep on going. I know it'll be in retrospect that we all learn really how we did keep going. But it's a matter of continuing to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Take help when it's offered. We've never been ones to reach out for help or ask for a dime that we didn't deserve. But, you know, in these days when when the the rescue loans, whether it's the payroll protection loans or some small grants along the way happened, that's been helpful for many small businesses, including ours. But again, it's it's those people being able to go to work every single day. Let's take, for example, the the news station or at the preschools, essential workers in both cases. Just get up every day, do your job as safely as you possibly can. Of course, personal safety number one. And then for those who had to be shut down by order of the government and the boat business, hang in there. Oh, my gosh, how? When am I ever going to be able to give back to my career? They're asking, will I ever sail again? And keeping keeping the momentum up there somehow, despite the shutdown, keep that sense of ohana and teamwork. It's been a challenge. We've managed to do it. The team is still intact to this day, despite being shut down in March in the hospitality business. It's remarkable to me that they've all hung in there. Well, you know, you're right. We learn a lot about ourselves during adversity, you know, because when we get through it, when we deal with it and get through it, we become better people for going through that experience. And, you know, it's it's a mindset. It's it's having the right perspective and it's having, you know, a choice that we all have, you know, that power to choose what we wanted. You know, how we want to achieve what we want to achieve. Gina, I want to ask you one more question before we wrap up. What what gives you fulfillment? The success of our people with the businesses gives gives me great fulfillment. The excess of the success of my people, my family people gives me tremendous fulfillment to see, you know, my husband enjoying what he's doing, to see my kids grow into their own individual young men with just amazing interests and pursuits that I could have never imagined for either of them. And to see them becoming their own their own young adults gives me tremendous joy and excitement. My oldest is, you know, will be going off to college this time next year. And it's I feel like I'm applying for college again with him. It's such a joy. And my younger one is just continues to astound us all with his creativity. He's a little artist and just an amazing person to be around as is the older brother with his. So, you know, I could go on and on, of course, as anyone could about their own kids. But just as I take great joy in them finding their way and finding their person, I really do think that about all two hundred and fifty of our employees across both family companies, they tend to be the older I get the younger they seem, but they tend to be younger people generally who are, you know, the world is their oyster. And I'm so sad that they've had to go through what they had to go through early in their careers with this COVID thing. But my husband and I can give him a few pearls of wisdom. You know, we did survive as a business through 9-11, through the 2008 and 9 crashes and little bumps and bruises along the way with the economy. And we have told them from the beginning, it's going to be OK. You're going to get there. OK, keep doing what you're doing and we'll be here. And, you know, we may cry ourselves to sleep at night wondering how we're going to be there, but they don't have to see that part. We're going to get them through somehow. And it brings me great pride and tremendous personal happiness when they succeed. Well, Gina, you know, it's been fantastic having you on the show today. I mean, you're making such a great impact in our community in more ways than anyone and really want to thank you for taking time to be on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech White. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com. And my books are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I hope that Gina and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.