 I'm thrilled to have you with us today and today we're talking about managing a unique nonprofit. Today we have with us Howard Pearl CEO charitable adult rides and services with cars. He's going to help us understand the atypical nonprofit and I've already really enjoyed our what we call the green room chatter. So we also want to remind you who we are we've not met you yet, although Julia Patrick is taking some much deserved break today but Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit Academy. We have heard a thing for this platform. And I am sure ransom nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven group honored to have served alongside Julia for nearly 1000 episodes I was just telling our guest in the green room chatter tomorrow is our 1000th episode so don't forget to join us for tomorrow as well as today. Huge gratitude goes out to these amazing partners of ours so thank you to bloom arraying American nonprofit Academy nonprofit thought leader fundraising Academy at National University. 180 management group your part time controller staffing boutique JMT consulting nonprofit nerd as well as nonprofit tech talk. These companies that allow us to have these ongoing conversations. If you missed any of those previous episodes that I just mentioned, we've got you covered my friend you can scan the QR code right here on the screen download the app and you can still find us on your streaming broadcast as well as your podcast platforms. So Howard that is it for the housekeeping it goes pretty quickly. But again for everyone watching and listening today we have with us Howard Pearl he is CEO of cars charitable adult rides and services welcome to the show Howard. Hi there. It's a pleasure to be here thank you for having me. Well thank you for joining us I would love to start off would you share, not only with me but with everyone watching and listening a little bit about yourself and a little bit about cars because again we have, we have a conversation coming up and I would love to set the stage for everyone. Thank you. Well, I joined the car staff, almost nine years ago. Frankly, it was for a very short term assignment. They were transitioning from one CEO while they looked for another. They wanted to attempt to come on in and do a little bit of a transition for them. I was busy with another project but some friends put their arm on my shoulder and I interviewed for the, for the spot and agreed to step in for an assignment that was probably going to be 90 days until we'd hired a new person and got them settled in. I knew within the first week that atypically I wanted to stay at this I, the staff were just amazing. I'm really looking for leadership. The, the board was, you know, very forward looking board very innovative in their view. And I kept coming home with a smile on my face and my wife said you seem so happy like do we really need another startup. I'm in a bit of a serial entrepreneur had a couple of public exits. And, and she said why don't you stay and I said well they haven't asked me and she looked at me and sort of chuckled and said I'm pretty sure if you offer to stay they, they would like you to stay and I said well, it would be arrogant of me to just assume that. Anyway, I think I'm coming up on my 47th day of a 49 day stay, just under nine years, never been happier. It is my first nonprofit venture and to bring, you know, 30 years in the C suite into a nonprofit and understand how that, how that works out has been truly a joy and a blessing using the skills that you've learned over the years to contribute to the community in an atypical way so that's, that's pretty much it. Well that is great to hear and you know if you can come home with a smile on your face after this long, you know you're doing something right and you're sharing with me that your turnover rate of staff is actually so like minimal so again right like credit to the leader into the organization for all that you do so well let's dive in Howard let's talk about cars the history and the mission, and I love the photo here that Julia has put up on the show deck, but talk to us about the origin story of cars. Well, cars actually has a parent, a nonprofit here in in San Diego 109 year old nonprofit. And while we have our own board. And we are a completely separate corporation, they, they are the only member of our corporation or go they end up with whatever surplus that we whatever surplus we have to run our own nonprofit, which basically serves the San Diego community serves the San Diego homeless community. We have safe parking programs for people that are living in their car and we run a fairly large social service network and NGO that feeds we've fed about 500. I guess now, almost close to five million meals since the beginning of coven with with our with the profitability that we make our surplus business started again by accident. Donating vehicles to them 20 odd 20 by 22 years ago, and they would bring them down and leave them in the parking lot or one of the guys would run out and pick it up and so on and advertising the local newspapers and the local you know the local cheat sheets. They would run down on Saturdays and Sundays and by the you know by the cars and three or four at a time. Then the local broadcaster the local PBS broadcaster KPBS said, this looks like a really good idea really good way to, to raise some capital, would you do this for us. And they said, hmm, and, and started, you know, started into to do it. Currently we service about 600 public broadcasters and PR and PBS stations across the nation would pretty much cover the, the, the public media broadcast group, and it remained that way until I got here about eight and a half years ago they pretty service the public media partner group. Subsequently, we have started to take on many of the groups who now have a little over 8000 nonprofits and are stable that include American Red Cross, St. Jude, Shriners kidney. Susan G Coleman. So many players across the country are doing business with us but the really cool ones are, you know, the small ones that really have local impact, for example, small animal charities, you know, might be one or two people working in there. They only need up to $15,000 for their entire annual budget and we serve those that get the same level of service that that every other organization gets, and it's totally turnkey. The cost of the money to them is zero. And we provide 11 people in our full time marketing department that do everything for you turnkey so it works out pretty nicely. Well, I love that you mentioned, I'm going to refer to him as like the big dogs right the larger organizations they have more staff they have more resources, financially, and then you also mentioned the opposite, you know, spectrum so that pendulum swung the whole other way to the smaller nonprofits. Are you seeing more of these smaller nonprofits coming to you with this, you know, opportunity and interest. Actually, it's quite, it's quite interesting. It's quite amazing we have our business sort of broken up into into thirds right that what you referred to as that was called the big dogs with which, you know, require a different category of servicing and then we've got the sort of mid level people. People that have broken up broken up into chapters like a Catholic charity and so on and they're all individuals but collectively they're quite quite substantial. And then we have this third group which is sort of the, if you look at the aggregation of it it's about a third of our business, all these smaller nonprofits that look after themselves they can go on to our website and sign on on their own without having to interact with anybody. As long as they've got a, you know, we'll do the research on the 501 C3 to make sure of course that it's appropriate, and, and, and a lot of them just come on automatically and we you know we just start doing some business with them and again as an aggregate. You know I think our best year we did about 154 1000 cars in a year and some pretty good real estate our biggest real estate deal was in excess of 1.5 that was a home that was contributed to Shriners but we're talking about that a little bit later. So, so the mid, the mid and small guys, you know, who are having challenges out there these days, you know are finding it appropriate to sign up and work, work with us because it's turnkey that two things I think that separate us that really differentiate us from many other supportive or three things really that support us as one is that we're a nonprofit. But that only works with nonprofits so we really do understand your challenges big little small, huge ginormous doesn't matter, we get it we have the same problems. You do raising capital for our mission right so what do we need we need to understand gratitude and say thank you for the many gifts that we get from very generous people, and we need to understand no money no mission so we need to understand margin and the value. What we've got is a program that costs next to nothing in terms of staff time and in terms of capital. So people can utilize this program and the, if you will the ROI with their, their staff time and the capital is really quite huge. We return, you know, basically to most of our people depending what they are with most of our partners, you know are seeing a return of 80 they get 80 cents on the dollar we take 20 cents to run our business. About 9% runs the business and 11% is our margin. And that serves our community here of, you know, the entire San Diego County. Wow, well that is fascinating and I love hearing hearing the possibilities of this. Let's spend to managing the donations, and you mentioned vehicles but you also mentioned real estate and now's a good time to talk about that $1.1 million. You know, real estate property because I'm not hearing of this happening often. So tell us like wow us with these stories because I'm sure you've got plenty to share. Well, yeah, I think the average average real estate donation that we're finding is, you know, somewhere sort of sub 125,000 that's the smaller piece of property that people have purchased, you know, 25 and 30 years ago they were going to develop it into a second home or retirement home and as probably most of us have found in our lives it's one of those projects that gets delayed and delayed, and then ultimately it becomes superfluous in your lifestyle and and there are some tremendous advantages tax advantages now when you donate a vehicle. Our research shows us that the reason most people donate their vehicles is it's sitting in their driveway they've got to get rid of it. You know, somewhere down their second third or fourth even as the tax credit, but with property it's different because with property. The tax credit, depending on your tax situation and we always urge people to check with their tax people when they're doing you know real estate and we work with their tax people as well. Got a very good staff that make sure what we're doing is 100% correct and in your best interest. You get the appraised value. Now, it's not, you know, your mother-in-law is appraisal it's an, you know, it's an accepted appraisal by one of the many people that the IRS accepts the quality of their appraisal. And you get that full, that full credit and there's just a number of situations we've had commercial properties where people have had, you know, four or five strip malls one is really not working well the others are. We take that to market so say it's appraised for, you know, a million two and we get it we take a dox and we turn these things over generally under 60 days. It's immediate. Right. Yeah, we use real estate auctions and various other ways to move them and of course you really get the appraised value but even if in this particular case we got about $800,000 and the guy wanted to take a few dollars out which he can he pays regular tax on that. And then, you know, fees in a way it goes in the balance goes to the nonprofit so when you're looking at some of these bigger items you can you can wind up with five $600,000 $700,000 with a million five house that was given to Shriners because of the tax position that they were in Shriners ended up with you know with the bulk of that. That capital from a very generous donor, one of their high, high wealth givers anyway one of their, you know, more coveted givers but but they allowed us to handle the real estate problem with their giving officer still involved in the process we really like you to stay involved because they're your donors in our world. The single most important, you know, individual in the process obviously is the donor. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry go ahead. No, well I wanted to ask you like how do you attract these donors like how, how does an organization get the word out that, you know, donations of vehicles and real estate are acceptable gifts. Like, how do we even talk about that because I know many of us are trying to get, you know, monthly donations from our donors as small as $5 upwards you know $1,000 a month like there's there's a lot going on so how do we also add into the mix cars and real estate. Well, we reach them in several different ways. One, we as I said we've got a very active marching department that does video camera ready stuff. We have a live, you know, a lot live copy for people doing radio, we produce television stuff for them as well. Most people in the beginning start off using their, their mailing list and email to those people and then go go up to the referrals. A lot of people are investing in paper click, and we'll manage the paper click for you we just don't pay for it because we give you so much of 80% you know goes back we can't afford to do that and pay for the media. But advertising the usual ways word of mouth but the initially the mail list, people who have donated before and every donation gets a wealth screening report. You know we found, we found people that were getting you know got a car from a donor and then you know we turn over the wealth screenings and they find out that they're giving, you know, $75,000 a year to the, to the symphony in their city and they go oh my god why didn't we go after these people they're real philanthropy philanthropically oriented. So that helps so we do all of this stuff to help you maximize the relationship with your donor and give you all of the materials you need to target your market, and we have to work with you on that because you know better than we do. And what the category of your donor looks like and then we've got a lot of research we're willing to work with you to, to give you to help us determine who that is, and then we target them just like just like any any any other, you know any other product. Wow. And what about boats right like is that part of the auto category or is that off limits for cars. For boats like, oh no we'll do, we'll do, look, we'll do, you know, almost anything but riding mowers. I'm not getting golf carts or golf carts are good whether they're running or not. And boats. We likely won't take a boat. We'll take it to the water that doesn't have a trailer. But if it's in the water, we'll take it and and and then just about anything else and we've had some big boats and we've had some small boats of course we get a lot of boats out of the southeast and and so on so yeah doesn't matter. Look, and even some of the vehicles, we know on some of the vehicles we're going to, you know, we're going to lose money, because some of them are just, you know, real junk. Quite frankly we get some very high end vehicles a lot of specialty vehicles. Classics like 57 Chevy's we auctioned one off this weekend for for St. Jude event last year we got 87,000 sorry 82,500 for the vehicle one for a 57 chef this year we knocked it off a just this Saturday. 63 for Falcon 45,000 that sort of thing so we will. We will take just about anything. And it doesn't matter. We'll take those ones that we're not going to make a lot of money and because again it's about the donor right so a building your database. And again it's your data, your database, we don't, we don't use it we don't sell it we don't we don't anything we house it because we need to issue the receipts. And sometimes there are issues with card donations somebody buys the car we're going to take it or a toll on it, and we'll have to get that resolved. So that the old owner isn't responsible economically. Yeah. That makes sense. And one of my favorite viewers Jane just wrote in and wants to know if your model Howard has also been adopted in other parts of the world. So we're like where is this happening. We know Australia because we get called from them from time to time and get to do a little bit of the model. We know that in some communities in Russia there is another card donation program that's going. We're not the guys with the dare I say obnoxious jingle 1-800 thing that's not us I want to make sure you differentiate. So nobody knows who we are our job is to promote your nonprofit not ours. So nobody really knows that it's us or not. But I do know Australia anywhere where the tax laws are appropriate. I think there's some some of the, some of the European countries almost in the UK. Also, but I don't really know of anywhere, anywhere else. We did have a call from South Africa that was interested. Oh, yeah. So it is happening. That's that's good to know. Yeah, talk to us about the on the go program. What is this. And also is this Volkswagen van available because I might be interested in this one Howard. I think that's just a stock picture that has been chosen. We do get these VW buses from time to time, but they go as they say like hot cakes with blueberry syrup. There are categories of vehicles that are very popular when they come up. So this is really one of my favorite programs. Our parent locally here runs a program regional program called on the go. So it's a concept of, you know, how do we continue to provide dignity for an aging community in the US today there are 10,000 people turn 65 every day. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of infrastructure out there to support them to deal with things like, you know, loneliness getting them to and from social events to and from their doctors upon to and from the hospital that sort of thing everybody thinks it's just about medical. Sorry, pardon me. No time is short. I'll be very quick in my own case. My mother was in, you know, was in a facility. And I was hurting her one day and she said, look, normally these guys are supposed to take me to my hair appointment every Wednesday. They haven't been taking me lately. I'm not feeling well this week. I'm not going to meet my maker with roots. You better make sure these guys take me to my hair appointment on Wednesday. Boy, that's my mother. So I did make a mention and they took they took her to an appointment on on on Wednesday on Friday. She put on a little paint and powder lay down on her bed and that was it. She went off to meet her maker on her own terms. And it occurred to me, you know, at first I kind of chuckled about it, but it occurred to me. Getting your hair done or getting your nails done or getting an opportunity to go to do your own shopping maybe once or twice a month where you can pick out your own fresh fruit. And interacting or maybe you want to go to your, you know, to your family's home on a Sunday dinner, but you don't want to impose to have them come and get you all the time. Having a program like on the go, which is, which is basically a transportation transportation program for seniors and other communities that are barrier to transportation that's folks on the spectrum that have jobs. Adult kids, you know, that work in the labs at night, many, many of them and their parents are now getting to the point where they just, they just can't, they can't take them in that late at night anymore or pick them up at six in the morning. So it's a transportation program we're in 23 states. Most of this transportation is paid for by private organizations and or by the city or the county or the municipalities that are doing a great job so we have a lot of government grants and we're also going after private organizations to do this AARP has talked to us about a pilot program in eight states and so on. So basically, we dispatch UberLift, UberHealth, and Lyft and so on. And it's working out quite, you know, quite nicely. We're doing I think about 12,000 rides a month right now. But we're doing the program nationally and so on. And as soon as we get to a mature area where we've covered every state, we'll start to do B2C as well for low cost or no cost transportation. Well, that is so important to hear. And interestingly, Howard, I spent Friday volunteering several, several hours in a think tank discussion and it was for a local based organization in my community that serves foster care. And one of the big barriers for this community is transportation, right? And so how do we get these children to their appointments, their medical appointments, their hobbies, right, their sports, things like that. And then looking at oftentimes, you know, some of the caretakers of these, of these children are single parents, you know, like, like looking. So how do we make this work? So on the program. Yeah, they're in multiple kids. 23 states, you said. So I think that's fascinating. I'm always learning. So it's really, it's really cool to hear that that is a program associated with your organization. And again, you know, kind of coming from this atypical space of being a nonprofit. I love you said, Howard, you were like, you know, we're not really promoting our nonprofit. We're here working with you to promote your nonprofit and their 1.8 million registered in the US. So there's a lot of organizations out there with this need. Yeah, yeah. It's great. Well, it's a privilege to do this job, you know, you're not helping, you know, one organization or one person you're helping thousands. Right. So, so many of them. Well, this has been truly interesting for me to learn more from you and with you Howard. So again, for everyone watching and listening around the globe, you just heard from Howard Pearl CEO of cars charitable adult rides and services. Check out car easy.org. That is the web address for cars. You can learn more about this organization. And as you heard whether you're a big dog as I referred, or a smaller one, there's there's something in there for everything. So Howard, thank you for what you do. And I'm really glad that they they've chosen to keep you at the organization. Oh, thank you. Yeah, of course. Well, again, thank you to Julia Patrick for creating this platform. And I'm Jared ransom your nonprofit nerd immense gratitude to our partners which include Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy, nonprofit thought leader fundraising Academy at National University, 180 management group, your part time controller staffing boutique, JMT consulting nonprofit nerd, as well as nonprofit tech talk. These are the companies that keep us moving along on this journey. And as I mentioned, tomorrow is our 1000th episode. So it will be Julia and myself celebrating the milestone. So I hope everyone will join us. Howard, thank you for joining us today again, quite a pleasure to have you with us. Congratulations on the 1000th. Thank you. Not yet, but tomorrow. So, you know, who knows, but we're going to get there and I'm very, very excited. So thank you. Thank you for being a part of this journey. And for all of you that have joined us as we end every episode. We end with the same mantra, and it goes like this. We ask you to stay well, so you can do well. Have a great week, Howard.