 Mr. Gregory Dunn, he is the president and CEO of Better Business Bureau here in Hawaii. Welcome Greg. Thank you. Good to have you on the show. So thrilled to be here. Wonderful. So to begin, tell us a little bit about Better Business Bureau. How long it's been in Hawaii and I'll let you start with that. Well, thank you. First I want to say congratulations to Reg because he's done some remarkable things for small business in the state of Hawaii. He really deserves the award that he's receiving today. Hawaii's Better Business Bureau has been in Hawaii since 1944. We were founded as a project of the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii as a way to try and put a stop to carpet beggars that were coming into the community and making false advertising claims and promises to community members. So we're set up to protect people. Wow. Since 1944, you said, because earlier on when we were chatting about the show, I told you that I lived in Canada for a while and first time I heard about Better Business Bureau was, okay, if you have an issue, you got scammed, you talk to them, but I had a chance to look at your website which has a lot of great information, but obviously you're doing much more than just looking at scams and all that. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the structure of the organization, how many members you have. Sure. If we look at Hawaii's BBB, we have around 2,600 members, 25, 41 members right now spread out across the state and they're anywhere from small business to large business. And those members are accredited businesses. And so businesses apply for accreditation to support the work of the BBB. And those businesses vow to support and uphold certain standards. Consumers recognize those standards and say that this business is exhibiting the accredited business seal. So I know I can trust them. I know that if I have a problem that they're going to work with me through a dispute resolution process, I know that I can count on that business to be trustworthy and to be honest in their dealings and their representations and then their advertising. So the BBB in Hawaii has been built around those tenants and our membership is very strong and committed to upholding those. So you said that these businesses to join you as a member, they have to fulfill certain criteria. So how stringent are they and how do you go and I guess audit these criteria? The criteria are fairly stringent. If we look at number seven, you're going to see seven or eight ways that businesses have to fulfill those standards. And we expel members all the time who are not living up to the standards. If a business has said in their agreement as an accredited business that we promise to engage with the consumer in dispute resolution but they fail to respond to a consumer concern, those people will have their accreditation revoked and we will end their membership and they'll no longer be able to claim that they're an accredited business. So within the last year, we've had eight revocations in the state of Hawaii that I can recall. Oh, so how does it compare to the other better business mural across the country, I guess the revoking members? The revocation number is fairly standard across most BBPs. We find that when a business makes the commitment that they follow up on it. So it gives consumers a continued high degree of trust because we have a good reputation, we do a good amount of vetting on the front end where when a business applies for accreditation, we review their professional licensing and make sure that they don't have a criminal record or a problem with lawsuits at the state, in particular with consumer-related transactions or even business-to-business lawsuits that may cause concern. We look at their complaint history, we look at customer concerns, other review sites that where people have comments about, ultimately we want to make sure that is that business a business that we want to have associated with the Better Business Bureau. It's not just about the money, it's not just about growing the number of members, it's about having the right members as a part of your organization that best represent the mission of the organization. I'm glad you brought that up, but before I ask you more questions about the benefits of members, remind me again, so how many members do you have across the state? Across the state right now, around 2,500, and they're split out across all the islands. So we have members on the island of Lina'i, and Big Island, Maui, Maui County, Kauai. The majority are on Oahu, obviously we have the largest business census on Oahu, but in the most recent business census we have around 33,000 total businesses in the state of Hawaii, and we have approximately 8% of those businesses are accredited businesses that support the work of Hawaii's Better Business Bureau. We're a non-profit organization and we rely on the support of our members and the donations of others to continue the work that we do for the community. So you talk about your organization being a membership driven organization, you also have non-profits. So how does that help you accomplish your mission then of BBB? Well, the BBB's overall mission is to build a community of trustworthy businesses. And so the 501C6 BBB membership organization, Better Business Bureau of Hawaii, focuses on developing the website, providing web content, information, developing our membership so that they can be better businesses. We've recently developed a suite of web products and mobile products that our businesses are able to deploy as a benefit of their accreditation to help them be better with consumers. We also have a 501C3 non-profit foundation. That non-profit foundation allows us to receive charitable contributions that are tax deductible that help us to do more community based messaging on fraud prevention and helping the people to avoid being taken advantage of by scams. We also work with the military community and that supports our military line efforts in helping service members and their families to better transition when they move to Hawaii and also help them to avoid being taken advantage of. Because we find nationally that service members are high risk population for being taken advantage of because many of them are moving to new communities where they don't know a lot of people and the scam artists take full advantage of them and try and get the money out of them as quick as possible. So other BBBs across the country, they also provide service to a lot of military service members. Interesting. Based on what you just said, there's so many questions in my head, but maybe let's go back to membership. You said that most of your members are here on Oahu. So I'm just curious, since we have members across the state and different islands, how do you service them as well? Do you travel a lot to go meet with them? Absolutely. For example, one of the projects that we've been working on for the last two years is a collaboration with the Lanai Chamber of Commerce. So with the closure of the two hotels after Mr. Ellison had purchased the majority of the island and renovating the properties, we worked with the Lanai Chamber of Commerce to provide tools for their members and our accredited members on the island to help consumers understand that the island was still open for business. And we were able to set up a landing page on our website. We funded it with Google AdWords that our organization helped to contribute. We received a grant from Google that allowed us to drive traffic to the landing page and help increase the exposure for the neighbor island businesses. And we helped them to come up with a way to increase their number of day visitors in particular, so by featuring golf and bringing the ferry over from Maui. So it was a very interactive process. So we do those types of things in bringing our expertise and our gravitas in the online marketplace to local businesses and helping to connect them with consumers in the ways that consumers are now shopping. People are utilizing mobile devices more and more. In fact, 78% of the traffic to Hawaii's BBB website in the last year originated from a mobile device. A consumer looked at either their phone or their tablet to access the information on Hawaii's BBB. So we're able to help our local small business owners and even large businesses like understand the change in consumer behavior, help them adapt to it and utilize the tools that the BBB has. You've touched a lot on technology and how things have changed, how business have to adapt. Actually, that's something when I looked at your website, I find it surprising. Surprising in the sense that there's a lot of information about technology. So how has that affected the issues that you may have to deal with at the organization? Well, it gave us a narrative problems. I mean, from one over the last four years, we had to internally retool our processes. We had to retool and train our staff. We had to help them understand in a better way their engagement points with consumers and businesses needed to be done in a different manner. It wasn't just about people walking in the front door and filling out a complaint form anymore. It was about people wanted a certain type of information and they wanted to receive it in a certain way. So we had to develop new channels that met the current needs of our community. So for us, we were able to incorporate a new database. We incorporated our new website. We provided new ways that business owners could leverage their accredited business profile and take greater advantage of the high ranking of the Better Business Bureau on an international basis to showcase themselves. Oh, that's great. But now you're talking about making it easier for, say, consumers to file complaints or it's really more the process improvement part. But in terms of issues, scam issues that you mentioned earlier on how a military personnel may be susceptible to that, how has technology played a role in that area? Well, in some ways, that's a more frightening aspect of technology. Used to be a criminal would use a crowbar and pry open your window or they would show up on your doorstep and try and con you into buying a used vacuum cleaner. Today, the criminals are invited right into your living room via your computer or your smartphone. Or in many cases, you don't even know they've gotten the information through a Trojan horse or a virus that they received from an email or via social media where they've they've taken some silly quiz on on Facebook and they've given away all of their personal data. Hawaii's BBB has been very active in providing messaging in the community. In the past year, we've had over one hundred and forty two million impressions of our nonprofit message of scam and fraud prevention just in our Hawaii marketplace with a publicity value of over four point two million dollars that would have cost us to buy the equivalent advertising space. And that's because it is such a pervasive problem. And our local news media has been very helpful in getting the word out to educate consumers on how to protect themselves. So we get the message out, but we still have the live bodies in the office that are able to answer the phones as part of Hawaii's partnership against fraud so that if a senior citizen falls victim to a scam or a fraud or is afraid they may, there's a live body for them to reach out and talk to on the other end of the phone. So we still have the live person in the human aspect while we're balancing the increase in the technology and the distribution of the content. That's really impressive. And I think technology is one issue that I'd like to continue after the break. We're coming on a break, so we'll continue afterwards. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii will be right back after the break. Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of Eyes on Hawaii. Make sure you stay in the know on Hawaii. Join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then. Aloha. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Diveheart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Diveheart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Diveheart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Diveheart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search Diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. You're watching Think Tech on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts five live talk shows from noon to five p.m. every weekday and then streams our earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from ThinkTech. Welcome back to Business in Hawaii. My name is Alice Lee Hagen. Today, my guest is Gregory Dunn, president and CEO of Better Business Bureau here in Hawaii. Before the break, we were talking about technology and, I guess, some of the technology related scam issues. Now, you mentioned how you were able, there were a lot of, I guess, consumers that came onto your website. And I guess the value translated to about 42 million worth of, I guess you have to remind me again. So 142 million impressions of data. That's where our message goes out and is obtained by different people through various channels. So now I know that your organization's mission is really to create or to make sure that businesses who are here would provide trustworthy kind of business value to consumers. So when people join or when organizations join, what are the benefits for them? Because from my perspective, I say, OK, it's great. BBB is protecting consumers here. But what are the benefits for your members? Well, the biggest benefit for our members that I see is that we're helping to protect people from losing all of their money because if they don't have any money, they're not going to be able to spend it with you. So if you're looking for a transactional relationship where you want a quid pro quo, I want X number of leads in exchange for my dollars, you're not going to get it here. What you will get is feeling good about the fact you're protecting your community and you're protecting your employees. There's a little known statistic that if someone falls victim to identity theft as one of your employees, let's say you have an employee, one employee who falls victim to identity theft can spend up to 700 hours trying to restore their identity and prove that those charges weren't their charges. They don't owe that money and they owe that money until they can prove they didn't. So now where do you think that those 700 hours are spent? Certainly not at home. They're spent normally on the job while the person is at work. And those are nonproductive hours. Fortunately, with the BBB, we have people that are there to help walk them through the process of how to repair or prevent. In most cases, we hold the identity theft. And so you have to think of it as an investment into the community. So that's one of the main things from strictly an informational standpoint. Consumers are looking for data online. They're looking for who to work with online. Nielsen recently did a study that indicated that 83 percent of consumers believe the information they find on BBB.org because they know it's been vetted. It's third party independent verification. They also, those same consumers told them that they believed 58 percent of what they found on Angie's list. And they only believed 51 percent of what they found on Niel because they understand that those platforms are not necessarily as vetted. And because people understand that the information is more pure and is more resource rich on the BBB website. That's great to know, because as I said, I went to your website and I would never have thought that I would find information on, say, things like scams on Valentine's Day or how to protect your kid's identity. So this is great to know. And I hope that, you know, listeners or people who are watching our show right now, they will go and visit your website, which again, as I said, it's treasure trove of information. Well, one of the things that they can do is if they go to hawaii.bbb.org in the upper right hand corner, there's a little button that says scam tracker. And on the scam tracker, you can click on it and you can see where all of the scams across the state have been reported in real time. You can do a search to see if someone else has reported of getting a phone call from a certain number or a certain person has come to the door. So it's crowdsourcing of scam information so that you can participate in that and learn from it. Again, that's one of the things that our membership and our foundation hope to support. That's fantastic. Now, great, let's come back to you. How did you join BBB and what's your background? Well, I have a fairly diverse background. I have a liberal arts degree, which basically means I was going to go to law school and wound up not, so I have a degree in history and a background in business. So I've also run nonprofit organizations. And as we had discussed before, I was the executive director at the Atherton YMCA at UH for a while. I was also able to work with the Hawaii Nature Center and a statewide capacity as that executive director. And then I went back into the for-profit world as executive for Fair Horizon Capital and doing real estate investment for that firm. And then as the market began to shift and change, I was looking for a different challenge. And my predecessor at the BBB was retiring and the board was looking for someone that had both nonprofit and for-profit background to come in and take a look at the organization and see how the organization could be retooled to better fit the needs of the community. And so it was a really unique opportunity for me to be able to step into and sink my teeth into it. So now you said that you've been at the organization for the last four years. I'm sure you'll be there for a while. But looking back at those past four years, what are some of your proud accomplishments? I think the proudest accomplishments are the number of staff we were able to maintain during a period of very drastic change. One of the challenges in retooling an organization from scratch is you're inheriting a group of people that have worked together in some cases for the better part of 10 to 15 years. And you're asking them to rethink the meaning of their job. In many cases with nonprofits, people begin to believe that the program that they're providing equates to the mission. When in reality, your mission is why you exist. And then you deliver a myriad of different programs to achieve that mission. And so as you're moving people from one mindset to the other, it can be challenging to maintain the staff. But really, the proudest accomplishment was maintaining a very good core of the staff that believe in the mission and are serving our community incredibly well. That's great. Now, looking forward, you mentioned that BBB currently has about 2,500 members. Do you have some maybe ambitious goals in terms of trying to grow your membership? It's an interesting question. I had a board member ask me that just last week. So I love this because they were they were really surprised when I said that the net number of members that you have in an organization is not an indicator of success. An indicator of success is are you meeting the needs of the community? Are you meeting the needs of the members you have? You can look at the financial metrics that were run by and you can see that over the last four years, our budget and revenue numbers have grown every year. You can look at the metrics in terms of the number of people that have left reviews on our website have skyrocketed to the point where we now have have served 3,000 percent more pages of reviews this year over last year from people looking at the content and people visiting the website and becoming more engaged. You can see based on the increase in our public outreach and the messaging in the community where our, you know, when we started out, we had 24 appearances on television in the year before I started. And then in the last year, we have 462 media appearances in the calendar year. So you look at those metrics as as success metrics, not necessarily the number of members, because if your your metric is simply to bring on more members, you can decrease the membership cost and drive the membership number up or you can reduce your standards and bring in more people that are less qualified. We're about quality and we're about providing the services the community needs. Now, and I agree with what you just said. Increasing member doesn't necessarily indicate a success. But at the end, I also know that you're here to serve the business community consumers. So if you have more members, that means more of them in agreement with your mission. So at the end, I guess that would probably still be a goal. It would be a really good goal. And I'm not saying I wouldn't mind having more members and that that our board would love to see more local businesses agree to abide by our standards. But the challenge with the BBB is you have to apply for membership. You can't just write a check and become an accredited business. And you're held to standards along the way. So there are there are points where you as a business owner are going to be forced to make a decision about maintaining your accreditation. And that's something a lot of people don't think about. They think strictly based on a transactional level about what benefit am I going to get back in exchange for my membership dues? And the BBB doesn't operate like that. We're looking to build a community of trustworthy businesses. We want businesses that believe in it. Not everyone's going to believe in it. But the more people that we can help understand what we do and support the mission and subscribe to accreditation as a community promise and a commitment, the more work we can do in the community to help educate people. Now, we've talked mostly about your work here, but BBB is actually across the nation. I know that Canada has better business bureau. Could you talk a little bit about that or even around the world? Do we have better business bureaus in Europe or in Asia? So currently the International Council of Better Business Bureau is the master licensee for the better business bureaus around the world. And so we currently have better business bureaus in Canada, US, and in Mexico. Eventually we'll see BBBs in Asia or in Europe. A lot depends on the community needs and is there support from that business community to establish a better business bureau in their community? Mexico has recently said there is. So we've been doing work with the BBB of Mexico to help them look at how we in Hawaii have been successful in working in a high tourism market. To provide information and content. It surprises people to hear that we have approximately 23 to 24 percent of our web traffic comes from pre-arrival visitors. It's international traffic of visitors looking at wedding providers, hotels, travel, tourism, anyone that they're about to engage with. They find on our website and they look at the information and the people that have the BBB accreditation are viewed in a much more favorable light because even international consumers recognize the value of the accredited business seal versus just having a letter grade on your business profile. That's great to know. Now, we're coming to an end to our show, but one last question would be if there's one thing that most people won't know and you would like them to know about Better Business Bureau, what would that be? I would really like people to go online and download our various mobile applications and take a look at the information. It's not your grandfather's BBB anymore, particularly in Hawaii. We want you to engage with us. We want you to feel comfortable about engaging with the community. One of the things that is different about commerce today than what it has been so much more so in the past is it really is about your reputation and your BBB reputation is the cornerstone of your online reputation. The BBB content and information of our letter grade and the accreditation information not only shows up on BBB.org, but it also shows up on Google in terms of translating the customer experience stars over. Shows up on porch.com, yellowpages.com, home advisor. We recently signed an agreement with TripAdvisors. So the content and your letter grade and accreditation status is being republished across multiple platforms. So it's from a technology standpoint. The Better Business Bureau is on the cutting edge of content creation and providing various channels as a way for you as a business owner to highlight the fact that you're a trustworthy trading partner. Well, Greg, I certainly have learned a lot and I fully believe that, you know, the website really provides a lot of great information. Great to have you here as our guest today. So thank you so much for coming. Thank you all for having me. Thank you. You've been watching Business in Hawaii, Think Tech Hawaii. Stay tuned for our show next week. I'm Alice Lee Hagen.