 Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us. If you joined us for the chitty chat chat You can tell that the three of us are fast friends and today is going to be a really good conversation We are just going to go and flow and super excited for that Really honored to have our guest with us today Derek young junior co-founder and executive producer of leadership Brainerie which I got to tell you Derek as a non-profit nerd or the non-profit nerd Anything with Brainerie is like So I'm excited to have you on to talk to us about this topic everyone can see here It's mergers and acquisitions. So before we do go into this conversation with our new best friend Derek Patrick joins us today. She's the CEO of the American nonprofit Academy. There's my nerd glasses that will hopefully Compliment the Brainerie. I'm Jarrett Ransom your nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven group and again Julie and I are both so extremely honored to have the continued investment and support from all of these sponsors that you see before you These companies literally exist to help you do more good. Yes, you your mission All nine main sectors within the nonprofit community These companies exist to help you drive your mission goals forward So please check them out, although not now but as soon as we wrap up today's show which will go by Very quickly because again our guest today Derek young junior co-founder and executive director with leadership Brainerie Welcome Derek. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for the conversation You know, I don't know if it's like the planets have aligned or something But within the last 36 hours, I've had a very venerable organization that actually my grandfather was involved in Call me up and say we think it's time for us to get involved in an M&A and we need some help and we had this really interesting chat and I was like, I swear, you know, tune in And it was it's just crazy so that we would have this, you know, fortuitous opportunity but before we get into all that I would love for you to talk to us about your journey and how you came up with leadership Brainerie and what it is that you do Yes, yes, most definitely. I always get excited to share this story because Leadership Brainerie came out of my lived experience, both my lived experience in my co-founders of experience. And so we were college students at Grammar State University in Louisiana. And Jonathan Allen, who serves as our director of development here at leadership Brainerie was the student body president and I was on this executive board. And so my responsibility was student relations and how do we really listen to our students concerns, build relationships with the administration And really get things done on campus to add more progress to all the issues that, you know, many institutions face, especially historically black colleges and universities in the south. And so we started doing a lot of great things, not only at Gremlin, but across the country. And so many of our peers started reaching out Saying, how are you getting so much done? And can you all help us do that? And so while we're in college and throughout graduate school, we would travel around the country to different universities And train student leaders on how to get things done and how to build those relationships with their administrations. And then once we got to graduate school We experienced being one of the only few black men in our Masters and doctorate programs. And so I went to Tufts School of Medicine for my master's in public health. And I was the only black man to enter my cohort there. And then I went to BU Law before our Boston University School of Law before I ended up self eliminating myself. And I was the One out of two black men are coming to my class out of 250 students in 2017. I'm saying for Jonathan when he was to get his master's at SMU in his JD at BU. Very similar makeup. And so as we asked leaders, we started asking the universities, not only the ones we were attending, but across Boston and across the country. What is the issue? And if we really want to close opportunity and wealth gaps for marginalized populations, we need to ensure that all levels of education are accessible, especially the highest levels of education like master's and doctorate degrees. And so, like many of them typically say, we have a hard time finding and tapping into diverse communities. And so we said, well, we train Young leaders all the time that aspirations to be in these occupations that either preference or require postgraduate degrees. And so that's when leadership ran or evolved into a nonprofit in 2018. And we took our current community And created a pool and pipeline for diverse talent into master's and doctorate degrees. And so now we are an organization with a team of five. We've been operating for three years. We have 14 postgraduate member schools who recruit our talent. We have corporate partners and almost 500 individual donors that support our work. And so it's just a really great mission that we're really excited about and excited to build a movement around because for so long, we've had many movements around access to college, which is extremely important. But not much conversation around access to master's and doctorate degrees and we understand that it's expensive. It's a lot of barriers to get there. But there's so many communities who have had access to this level of education for so long. And if we don't certain communities on ketchup will continue to see these opportunity and what that's Wow. Wow. I know I'm just like when I was in undergrad, I was looking forward to spring break and holiday breaks. I was not nearly as You know, forward thinking and as civically engaged as it sounds, you know, you and your team really dedicated to. So first of all, thank you. True. Thank you. For me, genuinely, all of this is so inspiring. Love hearing the story and really, you know, Julie, I watched you two and we're both of us were just like, Oh, my God. Well, you know, I think this is the thing about privilege is that you you only know what you know. Yeah, and I think it's really a fascinating thing for you to identify this push to get people of color into the university system. But then it kind of stops, you know, how do you get them out of the system to graduate and then to advance degrees and that is fascinating. I love the story. And I love the trajectory that you've been on. So you have this amazing concept. You have a first person experience and mission. You're moving through a lot of success. People are looking around. And saying, Yeah, these are two guys that I want to get involved with because I see what's going on. I would imagine that that is what took you into This explosive growth because people are looking around and saying, Wow, yeah, this is an issue. And how did you manage such explosive growth or interest when you're trying to work within your sector or your little community and then all of a sudden It's like exploding. Yeah, no, that's a great question. You know, I would say, of course, it just wasn't the two of us. We have a very supportive community and so we couldn't do the work that We are doing without our supporters without our donors without our talent who even pour into the operations of our work. And so It's been a team effort over the years and, you know, honestly, I think it really just requires the structure, the dedication, the affinity to the mission. And you'll get it done. And so we've had some great growth over the last three years. And I think, you know, it's also contributed to the other Opportunities we've had in life. You know, we've just been very involved in a lot of different organizations, very multicultural networks. And so being able to bring everyone around and mobilize everyone around this mission. And they're finally saying, Oh, wow, you know, that is important. And we've had so many conversations just as a nation. As a world over the last few years around diversity and leadership roles. And when we do look around at a lot of leadership roles and we look at their academic credentials many times rather those postgraduate degrees, give them the ability for more Career mobility or you have those occupations that absolutely required like a lawyer or a doctor or professor and so forth. You can't have those occupations without the degrees and so You know, just folks having more awareness has really helped with our growth and let's just continue to get support around it. Okay, so now you've got a great mission. You've got passion. You've got some support financial social emotional intellectual But this is the reality. What do you know about managing the nonprofit sector and how did you take all this energy and interest and frame it In getting business done in the under the nonprofit, you know, lands. Exactly. No, that's a great question. Yes, we had no experience in nonprofit and it's still a learning experience every single day growing a greater love for nonprofit every single second. You know, I would say again, you know, it's really my community. And this is why leadership right now exists to open up these opportunities for others. When I was in graduate school, I was able to meet a lot of different folks who had experiences in all fields and, you know, I really understand how nonprofit, you know, is you just don't need nonprofit professionals to make You know this work, you need lawyers, you need educators, you need business folks to really put their minds together to make sure that you have a sustainable Organization and so we were able to mobilize the right people, you know, and that's was really help us even just open ourselves up and say, Hey, we're open to learning. You've had this experience. How can we bring you in learn from you. And really build that that support around our movement. And so it's, you know, our board of directors, our advisors have been are really supported and important their their experience that they've had over their lifetime in the nonprofit space and to us as well. One of the things I know we've heard of More and more of the last two years is truly this conversation of mergers and acquisitions. In fact, I want to say about a year and a half ago now Julia, we had someone on from Utah. And she shared with us a statistic over the entire state of Utah in the nonprofit sector. It was looking at about 30% I believe on average 30% of all of the nonprofits registered in Utah. We're saying that they may not make it through the pandemic. Right. Clearly, we're still in this pandemic. Right. This global pandemic In urgent acquisition conversation has come up more than ever. Curious if you can give us, you know, really this whole. What is a merger and acquisition? What is the different and is it different in a nonprofit sector. Yeah, no, for sure. So, of course, you do have the for profit M&A and then you have the nonprofit in a I think it's a very thin line between what's the difference from the merger and the acquisition. But for our experience we did do an acquisition and so I'll start there. And so the acquisition is really when two organizations come together and you have a surviving organization. And so you take all of the The emerging organizations assets and, you know, you decide what to do with their team with their board. A merger is a bit different in terms of the that Both organizations may still keep their foundation, but they just come together to support each other around resources and mission to really grow their impact. And so You know, for my experience has been more so do you want to have a surviving organization or bring two organizations together. Okay, you choked me up there, Derek. Sorry. Okay, so then so I love the way you define that and described it. So now move us into the conversation about dear future colleague because this is an organization that is in the same community where you are working, right? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So dear future colleague amazing organization. I'm so excited that it's now a program of leadership binary. And so this comes back to the conversation we were sharing earlier around our support system. And so I'm actually our board member, one of our board members, Gavin Alexander came to us about your future colleague. And so, you know, of course, always keeping your board up to date of everything so they can, you know, be out in the community advocate and talk about you is always critical. But Gavin is a graduate of Harvard Law School and leadership writer has worked with HLS over the past years we had our first impact summit in 2019 at Harvard Law School and so He was talking to the Dean of admissions there and they had a student Nancy Fairbank, who was who has started the organization that had really took off during the pandemic. And so what Nancy and her team started to do was to mobilize law students from around the country that go to mostly tier one law schools to mentor prospective law students. And so in their first 10 months they had mobilized over 500 mentors around the country and did manual pairing to over 400 mentees and it was very specific pairing so they pair based on need on identity characteristics on what schools you may want to go to and what mentors do we have. And so when Gavin had brought that to us we were like that's incredible, you know leadership writer of course we have the same mission of increasing diversity and within these postgraduate degrees. However, we did not have a core mentoring component yet within our programs, DFC head this great mentoring program that they had built out leadership writer he had just got some technology for us to be able to mobilize our community on online platform and so when they brought that to us Nancy the founder of your future colleague shared you know she's going off to work for you know some large law firms in New York. And of course, the mission is going so well and the impact is happening that they really need an organization that is sustainable to be able to take it on. And so that's when we started in that process we had the technology so that they no longer had to do matching manually, but now we can do it automatically which helps with a lot of time and for us to keep up with evaluation and so forth. So it was just a perfect fit we really aligned with our missions but then our needs for both organizations. So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, you know you are a directed charismatic man who's very good at communicating your vision and your passion. And this is one of the hallmarks that we see with people that start nonprofits, because it's hard. It's really really hard and you have to have that. You know that passion. And that ego gets in the way. And I'm wondering for good and for bad. How could you marry these strong personalities that you were probably working with. Yeah, you know I think at the core. We all had the. We all really care about the impact in our missions. And so, you know, ego aside, we went in from that vantage point and so the first time that we met. We just bonded over our values of wanting to see more equity in our society and we did come from completely different backgrounds, racially, social economic status and so we were able to put our both lived experiences on the table, and just bond over that and so I think, you know, initially, the vision is first and so you know as you go through the process, of course you did have some different things that you may but heads, you know gets and you know that has been a learning experience around what is best for a leadership brand and then also what has been working with your future colleague that we want to continue as they are now under our organization. But we've had to make some sacrifices on both end and just really come together and say, beyond our egos and what we want to see happen on what is best for the community that we serve. I think once we ask that question, we always get to the best solution. I wish, and I hope that we can like take the snippet of what you just said lasted and it goes viral. If more people had that thought and the ability to think, let's connect first of all with our core value. Let's focus on the impact. Let's let ego and I love that you called it out Julia you're like, you go on the table right. But it's true. I mean we call it founder syndrome. Yeah, for a reason I mean it is a defined behavior behavior. Yeah. And it goes beyond founder syndrome, you know really to I think title and structure and pay and you know really everything because mergers and acquisitions happen even beyond that founder level and I've seen it really here in my own community. And to see where okay our focus is to provide food to people in need. So there's multiple organizations doing this but how might we come together in this collective space focused on the impact, focused on this core values that you know eloquently describe them Derek so thank you for that and again, if we just take that sound but and just is so impactful. I'm curious as we wrap up today's episode and we warned you it goes by very quickly. And unfortunately we're not going to have much time to talk about that great Cajun food that we talked about. Yeah, what are some things you wish you would know right hindsight what are some of these things that I wish I knew this or I wish we had considered this what are some of those elements that you would recommend to our viewers today. And most definitely I think you know what we did to try to really ensure that the mission and heart of your future colleagues stayed around the founder joined leadership writers board of directors and so we still have probably engaged with the organization as a whole. One thing that you know as we look back and we're still in this transition period of what I wish we would have done earlier is have the critical conversation for more than just the leadership. So, you know, we were having the founders and like the management of both organizations, and we're having the conversations but we didn't engage our team members into after the acquisition final. And so there was just some gaps in communication, you know, some of the team members and volunteers felt a bit that they were engaged in our decision making. And that did, you know, tarnish morale a bit and, you know, open up some issues that we could have prevented. And so you know that's one thing that I really encourage folks you know I think from a management perspective you often don't want to involve everyone in the process because things change and so forth. But there has to be a point before everything is final that you engage your team and say hey this is where we are do you all have any feedback, anything that we should be considering so we even make sure that now the transition of bringing these teams together and you know some team members may having to lead know depending on the structure and like now fundraising for staff members for DFC and so forth, changes up and so we just want to make sure everybody feels, feels a part of that decision making So that's one thing in. Let's see I would say one thing that we did that I would encourage anyone thinking about it and they to do is to get pro bono council. And so both, you know parties did get pro bono council and many times when I read about merchants and acquisition they do talk a lot about making sure that you have the legal fees and so forth but a lot of that can be a little bit if you just ask some council for help to I find that you had fear within your, your teams about changes hard and we're going through these pandemics dealing with all these problems. Did you have to alleviate some fear. And that's question one and then question to how did the community look upon this did they say oh wow somebody's in trouble. I guess I guess another fear based question, or yay team this is great and how did that kind of play out. Yeah for sure. I think in terms of the fear of the team members initially, more so on your future colleagues side of them saying okay well we're being acquired. So what happens to us, you know and I think that's a common question, you know you should ask that question. And so like I said earlier being able to articulate that much early on is key. But the way that we have really gotten through that is still making time available for that DFC team to express their feelings express their concerns, and not me just answering those and addressing those myself, they go back to my team going back to my board making them feel comfortable perspectives, because you know you don't want that ego to come up, you want to say okay well I know it's best for leadership brand or because this is my organization, making sure that always have other perspectives is key to amazing. Are you still co branding or using their name or is that moving away or you use the word program. So how you're you've pulled that through. Yeah we pulled it through of making it one of leadership brand or school program so now your future colleague is a program of leadership brand and we love the name. You know it's like your future colleague. The great name because you kind of get what it, you kind of figure out you into it I guess what you're trying to do. Exactly like you know and that's what mentorship is all about right you know you are mentoring folks to join your community and so you know dear future colleague this is who I'm engaging with. And so we kept the name, we did do a little color brand changes to match leadership brand or a bit more. But for the most part, the name has changed the online platform, of course they didn't have that initially. So that has changed. And we have hired a new full time manager of dear future colleague now. So that has changed and wasn't someone who was formally on that team and so we're still bridging those relationships making sure that she is very familiar with the old structures and being able to work with their own team to own more properly. Wow, it is so fantastic and you know as we wrap up our, our short time together what's in the future what can we expect for you in the new year. And as we have something really exciting. Yes, yes, yes, so many times when, of course when folks go to graduate school or college in general days tend to stay on their campuses, especially graduate students to because you're always in the library you're always so busy. And so what leadership rendering has done, we are opening up our first physical, what we're calling leadership rendering clubhouse. And so it is in this beautiful location in Boston and as you may know Boston is the academic hub and we have so many universities here. And so now, when graduate students do come for part of our member schools they have a place in the heart of downtown Boston to be able to come and network and access professional development. And so not only are we wanting to strengthen our relationship with our institutions by help they recruit talent for us but then they have a hard time retaining their talent to and so now their students and hey I found community in Boston. Even if I was one of the only few of my institution I found some folks another institution and we go out, you know we have great time. Then Boston also has a big brain drain so many folks come here for school and then they leave. So we have very just horrible diversity issues here in the city and the workforce and so our goal with our clubhouse is now all the talent that we do have from our mentors to our mentees, then being able to build a relationship with each other in a local community in Boston, hopefully some of them will decide to stay so we can continue to diversify the workforce here too. I love it and I'm thinking already Julia. I'm curious if Derek would allow us. I think when we talk about going on the road we need to broadcast a from the yeah to highlight that wonderful community asset I just think we think creatively outside the box and really better understand what is it that our clients are constituents need and how can we best support them. I just think that's fantastic so thank you for sharing that that with us. Thank you, thank you for this platform. It's been a great conversation and I'm so grateful for the work that you all do to really hiding the voices of our profits. Well you can come back as long as you color match the deck. I'm going to know that we did not plan this. That's how sharp you are. It's been really interesting, Derek and I love that you in the midst of a lot going on in your life could figure out that that something could be bigger than yourself and could take this on. And I think as I say to Jared every once in a while, this gives me hope for the future. It's super cool to see this and yes, I think we need to take the nonprofit show and broadcast from your new clubhouse because that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our grand opening is February 4 it is a beautiful place so I have to see you all the promo video. I would love it. Please check out leadership brainery.org absolutely fascinating. I think that there's some wonderful things ahead of you. And we hope to keep track of you and see how you take this organization and really make inroads across our country. It's really fascinating and best of luck to you. Hey, what a great conversation. And we have conversations like this every day. I'm Jared and I are so fortunate to be a part of the nonprofit show. If you want to find more of our episodes we're coming up on our 450 500 episode, we are on Roku YouTube, Amazon Fire TV Vimeo. Oh my gosh, some other ones as well but check us out because we've got a lot cooking. And again thank you to all of our presenting sponsors without you, we would not be here. Thank you for this conversation as we have with Derek and Junior amazing insight into something that I think we're going to find more and more of a useful tool the merger and acquisition aspect of our nonprofit sector. Okay, Jared, I'm totally excited by this conversation today. Yes. Thank you so grateful. I feel like the three of us have been connected well beyond today's sharing your valuable time, your expertise, wish you wish you the best in this and again we'll look forward to that promo video to be sent to us for the February grand opening. Yes, most definitely thank you all so much for this platform and I look forward to returning. Absolutely. Hey, as we end every episode we want to remind all of our viewers and our community and the nonprofit sector to stay well. So you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone. Thanks so much.