 Welcome. We are so glad that all of you are joining us today is the weird season in between Christmas and into new year, but we're not stopping here on the show and today I'm thrilled to have with us. Randy molland and he's joining us from Canada. He's going to tell us a little bit about himself but as you're joining us. Randy is the chief giving officer of give big strategies. Now Randy have already nerded out on a phone call we connected we both had really high energy. So I'm excited for this exchange, but Randy's here to talk about corporate philanthropy, and how corporate giving and growing success, you know how that really builds together for our community. So Randy, I'm excited to have more conversation with you. Sad that Julie is missing it but as I always say when Julia Patrick is gone when the cats away the mice will play. So I'm Jared ransom your nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven group. I'm honored to have a growing number of companies supporting us so thank you huge shout out of gratitude goes to our friends over at Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy, nonprofit thought leader. Also fundraising Academy 180 management group. Also thank you to your part time controller staffing boutique, JMT consulting nonprofit nerd, as well as nonprofit tech talk. You know I was speaking with our guest earlier and I mentioned nearly 1000 episodes and here's where you can find all of them. This is my van a white moment so streaming broadcast as well as podcast and then if you have phone near you which I'm sure we all do. Go ahead and scan that qr and you'll get the app downloaded onto your phone and you will know in just a couple hours later today that today's conversation with Randy has been uploaded and live so. Okay Randy, I am thrilled to have you here. You gave me you know your personal cell number so I even texted you this morning was like hey jump on my friend I'm excited. So for all of you watching, listening and joining us today again thrilled to have with us Randy molland chief giving officer at give big strategies welcome. Thank you so much for having me I'm fired up for this and like you said that we just had such great conversations already that I think we're going to bring a lot of a lot of energy today and hopefully give a little bit of education and a topic that's not talked about as much in maybe your space but how how businesses and nonprofits can start coming together and creating a win win scenario. Absolutely. So excited for this so tell us a little bit about give big strategies and let's like what is your title how do you get a chief giving officer title what does that look like. Yeah, I'll give you a quick snops of the background so I was in real estate investing at a young age I started when I was 25 and had a lot of success in it. I got caught up in the hustle culture and the wanting to get rich quick scheme and just grinded so hard through the mid 20s that I ended up having a non epileptic seizure by the time I was 28 because my body couldn't keep up with the stuff I was going through and I had some trauma it lost one of my best friends earlier in the years and things like that and so I came out of that experience and said there's got to be a better way of doing business clearly building it to get rich wasn't serving me and you know going through losing some close friends I realized that I didn't want to wait until I was you know 50 to retire so it had to be a better way. And that's when I heard a statement that said, if you want to make a million dollars a year, build a business that does two million, give a million dollars away and you'll be the happiest millionaire on the planet. And I was like, that's it. That's what I'm committed to. So I took my real estate portfolio and I started donating $10 per dollar per month from my real estate portfolio so our five plex donated 50 bucks a month and 10 plex donated 100 bucks a month and so on and so on. But it was passive reoccurring revenue for the nonprofits that we were donating to. And they kept telling us, wow, this is really cool right and he like, we're making consistent revenue we can actually start planning like this actually really helps us out a lot because although it's not a large amount of money you're donating right now. As this scales and grows and as you donate, we can account for that money coming in. So this is a really cool concept. So we started doing that in every business we had ever we touch we added a giving initiative so that we can support charities. That's when we realized that the bigger we went the more we could give we need to go big to give big so it's become our hashtag and our movement. And that was around 2018 2019 that we're doing that fast forward to 2022 I launched mail and podcast called the go big to give big podcast had some really cool conversations with people around how giving a business go together. Fast forward to 2023 and this is where I created the chief giving officer was I ran a mastermind of 50 entrepreneurs that all paid me and said I want to learn how to add giving initiatives into my business. And we ran that mastermind and at the end of the six months after spending one on one time with them speaking with them, doing all the trainings everything. I stood in the front of the room and I said, who here's officially added a giving initiative to their business, and only about 10% of the people raise their hands. And I was like, what are you guys kidding me you paid me. I just spent so much time. What's going on here. And so I started doing research and finding out why why didn't they add the giving initiatives. And that's when I realized that as soon as I gave them the advice, like any entrepreneur, they would go back to their work and there would be fires and things to put up to deal with and and employees and all this stuff. And the giving just got pushed down on the list. And so I was like, well, this is kind of hard, like, you'll pay for a, you know, CFO if you're counting was messed up, you wouldn't just put it down to the bottom of the list, you get it done. If you had to deal with some marketing or advertising, you'd put at the top your list. So then I realized that these people will go and hire somebody to take care of that stuff. And that said, well, if you're going to hire a fractional CFO to run your finances, or you're a higher fractional COO to fix your operations, why wouldn't they hire a fractional chief giving officer to manage all of their giving initiatives. And so that's where the the I coined the term a fractional chief giving officer. And as I started to build that out, I created a consulting company called give big strategies, where we basically go into organizations and build with their whole philanthropic initiatives for them. And then we go and actually take it one step further, because as you know, choosing a charity is like choosing a Netflix series. You don't even know where to start or which one to pick. And so we go in and we actually find out what buckets they want to support. And then we go find the nonprofits, we pair them together, we build the relationships, we make everything happen for them, all while they just run their business and don't have to do anything in the back end. I love it. You are speaking. I want to say my love language. So this is just amazing. Now, again, another compliment, let's get super nerdy because there's a stat here you're going to throw out. And for those of you listening, it's 89%. 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that gives. Tell us more about that because as you mentioned your mastermind, I'm thinking, why weren't these entrepreneurs making that happen knowing that 89% of consumers are more likely to buy. Yeah, it's great. And so this is like my favorite thing. I love geeking out on this. So we're going to get excited here. So once I started finding out about a lot of this stuff, I started doing a lot of research. And there's a lot of studies out there that show that consumerism is trending in the way that they want to see where companies are spending their dollars for good. Right. They want to start seeing how are you serving humanity? How are you doing good in the world? And the way of the greedy capitalist is going away. Right. I think in my belief is that in 20 years from now, we're going to look back and say, wow, I can't believe you ran your company for pure greed and profit of yourself. It's already starting, right? Like that narrative is already started. So I started finding the statistics out. And in a cone consumer report from 2019, I think it said they tested a bunch of people and they said 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from or be associated with a brand that has a giving initiative to it. Well, I thought, well, that's pretty easy. And that stat gets even deeper as you go into millennial females are 93%. Like it breaks it down into the categories. Millennial females 93% more likely to work or buy from or work with a brand that has a giving initiative to it. There's a ton of stats. I can say you're four and a half times more likely to get recommended 80% more likely to have your brand remembered in what you're doing. 93% of your employees are more likely to stay if you have a volunteering or giving initiative that you do as a team. Like there's unlimited stats. And so I'm out here saying if those are in the 80 to 90% and I'm in business and I know how important just getting a 1% advantage is in this space. Well, imagine if you and I have the same businesses, we sell the same product, I have a giving initiative. I'm going to take 89% of the consumers away from you in the free market over to my brand. And then we're going to be able to go not only make more good, but sell more products, which is going to make more money. And it's just a repeatable pattern. And I, this is my favorite part. I get to buy myself happiness. This is something that I talk a lot about is that when I was going through my burnout phase. And when I went through it was building business didn't excite me anymore. Right. I got burnt out trying to just grind to make more money and more money wasn't making me more excited. But when I started supporting kids and kids sport Victoria for every $300 put one kid through sport, all of a sudden going by 30 units meant that I got to help 12 kids a year. So it was like, I got to go by 30 units tomorrow. And all of a sudden the impact drove me. And so now when I can start helping businesses get driven by the impact of how the impact can actually make a difference in their business. And it'll actually scale and grow the revenues on the back end. That's when it gets really fun and really exciting. Okay, impact that we mentioned I mentioned to you earlier in the green room chatter and for those of you that have joined us. I'm so glad you're here. Uncharitable right that is Dan Pilata's latest movie that has been released and it's not out in most theaters yet but I want everyone to see it because as I first I made a mistake and said that you know how he defines philanthropy. It's changing but that's not true. The perception of how we see philanthropy and you hit the nail in the head Randy impact it really comes down to impact. Okay, so bear with me because I have a curveball question. There are so many charities in fact in the US and I know you're in Canada so I don't know those stats, but in the US there are 1.8 million registered nonprofits and I know you do a lot of work, you know with with the US. You know entrepreneurs and businesses. Is there a certain charity mission alignment that you see greater success for instance, you mentioned children right it like is that where you see the greatest success or is it, it really doesn't matter as long as we have a charitable alignment. It's it's 5050 a lot of it actually comes down to the way that we market it comes down to your passion behind the charity that you want to support. So it doesn't come down to part of the consumerism depends on you know if I'm going to go support, you know, a bigger organization like the Red Cross. A lot of people have bad associations to that type of big huge organization. So a lot of people might not have the same feeling as if I go and support maybe a more local organization that we have. So there are some differences there. But the actual causes that you're supporting are truly dependent on how you support it. I can sit here and say I'm into child sex trafficking and supporting those nonprofits. We don't think I don't want to do that. But when I share with you about how I've actually gone down spent time with the girls and it makes me sick believing that these five year old girls don't even have a place to stay they need food they need shelter. They need love they need counseling and all of a sudden when I can explain that and then when I say to you and every time that we go and sell X amount of stuff in our company. We're able to help one child for a month and that means so much to me because I've been there and I've seen those children and I know how horrible it is and I really want to make a difference. Now I'm able to say that in a different way that brings light to that charity that you're like I see his passion. I see why he supports and I see what he wants to do. So many people will just put in their marketing their messaging the branding just they and we support you know international network of hearts with 100% of our stuff and people like what does it even mean why even care I don't care about child sex trafficking. But when we start to use our messaging in a marketing to actually explain why we're passionate about it. It doesn't matter what you choose. It matters how you promote it and how you go about supporting it. And like I said the big difference is just the big red crosses versus the smaller ones. The smaller ones get a lot better response from your marketing because people want to see that versus they know red cross maybe whatever statistic you want to use 30% goes to the actual work and impact. That's where some people have that misconception. Yeah. Well thank you for that because I know it was a curve ball and I was curious to know your thoughts and what you've seen you know really be successful. Let's talk about profit motives and the meaning of work because you are shaking things up here Randy and I'm here for it. I love it. So talk to us more about the profit motives you mentioned you know your own real estate portfolio and how that really drove you to say I was burnt out but now I'm ready for 30 more because I'm so ready to make a difference in my community. Is that really what's driving this. Yeah there's a huge huge huge shift right now there's you know everyone went through that hustle culture phase and then through you know the pandemic everyone felt very exhausted and burnt out and people are coming into the business being like why am I even doing this anymore. What's even the point. I'm you know maybe I'm making a few hundred grand but what why like I'm done and burnt out exhausted. So those are the people that were going in and saying well what if we started going and attaching a charitable giving initiative to your business. And now when I'm standing there telling you hey do you want to make 100 grand a year do you want to make 500 grand a year and you're like I don't know 100 grand is fine for me. And I said but what if we went to 500 grand and you were able to go put 40 kids through child sex trafficking that's super meaningful to you. All of a sudden their posture changes they sit up they're excited like that'd be so cool. Is it cool we have to rebuild your business and get you re excited and reignite about creating profit because the more money you make the bigger you go the more you can give and the more kids you can help. Well now they're driven by the impact they can make not by the profit that they're trying to come from. And when we start driving by passion purpose and meaning that's what people actually want to take action and do things right when when there's something greater than yourself. You actually go do it. And so then I kind of laid the line of like so also I want you to know that if you don't go after this $500,000 for savers the $100,000 think of the 40 kids that you're going to let down that you didn't just help that you have the ability to you have the skills and you have the knowledge to take your money. You have the knowledge to take your business to that next level but you choosing not to. You're also choosing not to support those kids and that every time just gets people going. Oh my god. Okay, I'm in. Let's do this. How does it work. And so they throw the towel in and they're like I have to do better. I have to be different. And that's what we're looking at business differently. We're looking at capitalism differently. We're looking at if we have the ability as entrepreneurs to create more revenue tomorrow make a bigger business and do that kind of stuff for our own personal greed. It might not drive us but for a way bigger impact and cause. Imagine what the collective of entrepreneurs that just started adding a little bit of giving initiatives to it. Nonprofit donating is slowly dripping a little bit from what I've seen statistically through some of the resources that I've read. And we're coming in to say well instead of just going out of your pocket and going to everyday people right across the board everyday homeowners and just be like hey what can you donate and you get $10. Why don't you go to organizations and businesses as nonprofits and say hey what if we aligned together marketed together support each other and you donated a portion of every sale you did and it came to support us so it's reoccurring revenue. And now you have a win-win-win nonprofits are making consistent more revenue organizations are selling more and making more profit because 89% of consumers would rather do it and it's a win-win-win because they have more passion and purpose and everyone aligns. Yeah. And to me it's a total win-win-win and I love that you said you know it's really not about the mission itself it's really about the passion that we hold for that mission. Talk to us Randy more about how you know how businesses can engage their staff to give and give big so we're not just talking now the owner of the business we're talking about their staff so what have you seen by way of success for businesses engaging their staff in this. Yeah I got two stories I'll share with you because it's easiest share so I just brought in a new I put a position out there for a basically a director of operations and we're you know not in the startup phase but we're still growing. And so I just threw it out there for $70,000 a year and I was like hey I'm looking for someone that can come in help me build my business for $70,000 a year. The people that applied for that position when we told them that their job is to help us grow go big to get big and give big strategies around working with nonprofits and businesses to pair them together and do all the stuff. I'm having people apply that are very successful entrepreneurs have built their own startups in a bunch of places that like I just want to be a part of this mission I don't care what it takes. So I just hired my director of operations. She's built four startups, very successfully. She's paid herself a few hundred thousand dollars a year through her companies. She's still actively manages and owns percentages of a bunch of those companies. And she was like Randy, I want to help you build this out. And I was like, you realize the position was for $70,000 a year right and she's like, I don't care about the pay I care about the impact. And honestly, I probably had five people that I could have chose from that were well over qualified for the position. I was like, this is crazy. I just did the same thing for hiring a consultant for the business. I posted it. And next thing you know, the people that are applying are people that are typically, you know, 100 to $150,000 a year people saying I don't care what you pay me. I just want to be a part of this impact. So one, we're drawing in a whole different clientele for a hiring and the people that are passionate to be a part of it. My director of operations, she's working like, honestly, like 70 hours a week right now to get this thing off the ground. And it's excited and fired up and just like in a whole different trend. I've never been this excited to build a business. That's one story. On the other side of the story is how do you get your employees motivated if you have the business. Well, my friend ran a sales company and they sold, I believe it was like pool cleaning services and lifeguarding services in Texas. And he went in there and said, Hey, you know what? Why don't we support feeding children every single day with a portion of our profits. And so for every contract they sold, they knew they're able to feed. I'm going to use some numbers. I don't exactly what it is, but 100 kids. So every contract they sold, they fed 100 kids where he went into his whole sales room and staff and said, Hey, instead of saying, we need to sell 10 more contracts. He said, we need to go feed 1000 more kids. And all of a sudden the sales staff was like, we want to feed 1000 kids. And he said that his numbers were like, it was astronomical like 200% it as soon as he added this giving initiative to it. That his sales staff now became about it. And all of his company became about how many kids can we feed? And they ended up feeding like 2000 kids a day in, in Texas with his company. Well, the whole company culture, they would go down, they would serve the food, they would build his retention stage super high, his numbers skyrocketed, his morale skyrocketed. And he said it was just the best thing he ever did for his organization was talk to them about the impact that they're making in their company. And instead of selling for dollars, they were selling to go help feed more kids. How cool is that? I love that so much. And I can see it being a friendly competition, you know, and even if there's different sales teams or different divisions or what that looks like. I love it so much. So my question, another question. When does a business start this and I'm thinking really, you know, the entrepreneurial businesses where it might have one person, it might have, you know, some contractors. Like, do we need to wait until we're a multimillion dollar business or when do we implement something like this? That's a fantastic question. It's something I ask every single guest that comes on my show. Do you think entrepreneurs should start giving from the beginning of their business or wait till they've had some success and had some money and then go from there. And I would say 95% of the people all say the exact same thing that if you don't give when you have a dollar, you won't give when you have 100,000, right? If you don't give 10 cents on the dollar, you won't give $10,000 on 100,000 and you won't give $100,000 tonight. Tony Robbins talks a lot about this and it's one of my favorite things. He says, give when you have nothing because when you have something, you get rid of the scarcity mindset, right? So when you when you start giving, even when you have nothing, you get rid of your scarcity mindset. So it starts building the abundance mindset even if you're giving. So I love explaining it this way. I love thinking of like a box full of water and it's got a faucet on the bottom of it. And that's your giving faucet. So if you fill that bucket full of water of sales or revenue, eventually it starts overflowing. You're not putting new stuff in. You're not putting new water in because it's getting stale and it's there. If you open that faucet of giving, you've now started to stream out the bottom. Well, the universe God, whoever you believe in is just going to start pouring more water into you because he knows that you're a good servant with the money. He doesn't care how much you give. He cares that you give, right? We call it the law of reciprocity. You can call it whatever you want, an abundance mindset. I like the law of reciprocity. The law of reciprocity says once you give something, you will get. So if you start opening that faucet and giving doesn't matter how much it just says that you give. All of a sudden you will start getting on the other end and you'll get all this new water flowing in because everyone wants to be a part of supporting you and doing that space. So I encourage everyone. I don't care if it's $1 or $100,000, $10,000. Just start because that builds the muscle of giving like going to the gym. You don't go start curling 50 pound weights to grow your biceps. You know, you might start with five pounders and work your way up. Just start with building the muscle of giving and getting into that space because what will happen is it will trigger endorphins in your brain and you'll start feeling like, wow, that was kind of cool. Even though it wasn't a big impact, I want to do a little bit more. I want to do a little bit more. And then it continues to grow and you start feeling really great about it. And then you start varying it. Maybe you donate a little bit of your time. Maybe you hire somebody that's maybe not as qualified but you can support them. Maybe they have some sort of health issues or something and you can actually hire for that. There's so many different ways that you can give inside your organization, but it's about starting. And I will say one other thing is that I do this with every single client. Like 100% of my clients, every time they come in, they say, cool, Randy, we want to start doing this and then we can start growing this. And then once we get this, we can actually start working this nonprofit. Next thing you know, we can do this. And next thing you know, we're going to be donating $100,000 a year. We're going to have all of our employees and it's like, that's great. But you have to start because sometimes you start building this so big that it becomes too big to start. The goal gets too big and then you just don't know what to do. So we actually very simplify it. And most times when we go to organizations, whether they're making 500 grand a year, 5 million a year, we start by saying, what is the simplest thing you can give today? Do you want to start giving 10% off one product? That's it. We just start with one simple product and we just start and then we scale and grow over the year. Yeah, this is so inspiring. So for everyone watching and listening, you know, really what I just took away, final answer is start the same day you start your business, right? Like to really build that mentality of giving and receiving. And I also believe, Randy, that money is energy, right? It's meant to come. It's meant to go. It's meant to stay in flow. And just quick story, you know, for me, I love abundance. I love prosperity. I love that mindset. And I still catch myself at times feeling scarcity, feeling not enough, feeling like, Oh gosh, this month is going to be tight. And so when I feel that what I do, and I love this because it's all about your business and what you help others do. I typically go to a wish list on an underprivileged school, you know, and I will send something that's on their wish list. They have no idea who I am. I have no idea what classroom it's going to, but I know that I'm giving and I'm switching my energy as soon as that happens, right? And it doesn't have to be a hundred thousand dollars. It doesn't have to be a thousand dollars. It doesn't have to be a hundred. You know, it's just the act of giving, which is what I love so very much. Your business is about this, you know, and what you're doing. So I love engaging the staff in this mentality because as you said, you know, it's not it then became, it's not about the profit and loss. It's about the children. It's about the families we're feeding and those that we're serving in our community. So I'm on board for this movement, Randy, and I can't wait to see what happens next year. Yeah, we're very excited about it. And just, you know, like, like this call it is, we bought a flight for somebody that's in need. It's called give a mile incredible organization nonprofit. And we supported them and we bought a flight for someone to go back home through the holidays, go see their family in hospice. And instead of me just doing it and not sharing it with my team, we did it and I had messaged my team and said, hey team, here's the person that we're going to sponsor. Here's the flight we're going to do. This is what it looks like. Do you guys agree with me? And so I gave them that opportunity. Of course they agreed. They said, yeah, this is amazing. So we sent the money and we got a nice note back that said, hey, Randy, thank you so much for doing it. This is the family who supported this, the flight. This is what it means. And this is the note that person said. And I took that and I sent it to my team and said, hey team, this is what we did. We did. And all of a sudden they're sending me mess. Like, oh my God, I'm crying right now. This is so amazing. Thank you. Well, now when we start growing the business, what do you think is going to happen? They're going to be so excited to be like, Randy, what's the next thing we got to do? How do we get there? I'm like, okay guys, we got to make a little bit more money to get there. Great. Well, what do we have to do? Again, they're motivated by a whole different process. So I include my team and everything we do. I always use the words we and our team and we did this. It's not me. It's our team. And it's just been so great to watch and grow with the organization. Well, thank you for joining us today. You know, all about the spirit of giving the season of giving. And here we are for those of you that are inspired like I am and want to know more about Randy and what he's up to with go big to give big. Check out his website. It is give big strategies.com. He's up to some big things as you've seen and I'm just so excited to have you on Randy to share more about this. And then, you know, to be with you to witness as, as you move forward. Julia Patrick, thanks for letting me have this one-on-one conversation with Randy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd. We also want to say thank you to our amazing presenting sponsors, 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. So Randy, I guaranteed all of these companies also give back, right? Yes. What that looks like for, for our community. So for all of you that have joined us today, I know it's a weird time again, as I had mentioned earlier, any time between the holidays and the new year, it's just kind of like, what day is it? But we're glad you're here. Randy, so thrilled to have you here again. I know you and I nerded out on a quick phone call, which went by lightning fast, just as today's conversation. So again, thank you for joining me for all of you that joined us today. And as we in today's conversation, we are using the same mantra we have since day one. And we invite you to stay well so you can do well. Thank you, Randy.