Learning Humility from the Communities You Want to Serve with Arturo Sneider

Hi. This is Paul Zellazer, and welcome to The Wirepreneurs Podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much.

Today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Arturo Schneider, and our topic is learning humility from the communities you want to serve. Arturo is the CEO of Prime Store Development, a retail sector leader that oversees a portfolio in excess of 750,000,000. Their mission is to manage and develop properties that empower the communities they serve and promote an ethical and rewarding work environment for their employees. Arturo, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. Really a pleasure to be here with you.

As we record this episode, we are now over 300 episodes. We published episode 301 yesterday, and we've never done a topic on humility. So when you proposed this, I was just thrilled. I'm so excited about what you're doing to introduce what you're doing, but also how you're doing it. So thank you for bringing that topic to our community.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having the interest in what we do.

So what would somebody need to know about Arturo before we get into the topic? Arturo, just like the short version of your backstory, how did you get into doing work around real estate and communities that are oftentimes left out of economic conversations and trying to be of service and positive impact? How did you get into that intersection and what would somebody want to know about who you are before we get into that topic?

Yeah, it was happenstance. I came from Mexico. I was born in Mexico City. I moved to Los Angeles in 1986. My older brother was a minority investor in a Mexican restaurant where I was a cook there at age 17. And the people that I worked with in the kitchen, my colleagues sort of educated me and introduced me to what their life was like in the communities where they immigrated to or were born into. And I became pretty fascinated with that topic. And through some friends and family relationships, I was able to understand the impact that real estate has on community.

And with a couple of pennies and no education, I started working in that in the neighborhood on the grassroots level, really as an activist effort to try to change the narrative in our communities of Latino and black neighborhoods.

Yeah, one of the things that we know is that if you look at the research communities that are black communities, Latinx communities, first of all, real estate is oftentimes similar. Real estate that should be valued equally oftentimes isn't right. That's one of the things we know as I was researching this, and also access to just the physical bricks and mortar space that people need to do businesses or people buying homes. There's a lot of inequality in the real estate world. Is that fair to say?

Tremendous. And I think one of the things that really drives the underbelly of that is infrastructure. We don't have in a lot of our communities sufficient infrastructure, whether it is the systems that do transportation or water power storm systems. Many neighborhoods we work in don't have a grocery store, a bank, any kind of a facility, a hospital nearby. And all of that influences where people end up living as a result of where they end up investing. And what we set out to do was try in as little, as small of a company as we are to hopefully begin to influence and get rid of the expression, what's my ticket out? As opposed to what is in my community? How can I be an agent of change to make my community better and stay here?

And this wasn't yesterday. So give our listeners, like when are we talking? When you started thinking this was a few decades ago, right?

Yeah. Prime Store has been around as a brand for 32 years, going on 33. This all started in the late eighty s and eventually sort of came to an impassioned cry for help with the Rodney King civil unrest of 1992 here in Los Angeles. As a lot of our communities were impacted and had either physical damage fires, it just became an urgent call for if things don't change, things for these communities and as a result for the industry and the city and the economy as a whole are just going to deteriorate. And so we've been at it for three decades. We have always built a team around the neighborhood. So the neighborhood has also been the supplier of our education and our team itself. So the staff, the teammates that the colleagues we have in the company, most of them come from the communities that we were able to serve.

So wind it back a little bit 30 years ago or 25 years ago. What did Prime Store look like? How did you start accessing the capital you needed to buy the properties? What kinds of properties did you first start buying? What kind of businesses or homeowners were in those properties? Just like give us a little bit of the details of how you got started.

The Prime Store entity really started on the heels of the 92 civil unrest. There was a property that my partner Leandro's father had. It was a very small, really old brick building at 69th and Western in South Los Angeles. It burnt down to the ground. And I was down there looking at just what did it feel like to be there? And it sort of dawned on me that there wasn't really a lot of motivation, interest or alignment from anyone, whether it be capital, whether it was users. The community felt pretty disenfranchised and uninterested in some way. Obviously too busy always working two, three jobs to make ends meet that there could be something done. And one of the things that dawned on us as well is that there was such a lack of basic services.

So I worked pretty diligently to find a grant and built a 4000 square foot masonry brick building with the county of Los Angeles as a health start program and of course, keeping things in perspective. For us to build a 4000 square foot building ground up was like an act of Congress. We didn't know anything and we didn't have any capital, we didn't have any experience or anything. So we were on the job 24/7, asking every possible question, digging into the way everything worked. Why did it work that way? Why did you pour cement that way? Why did you put your rebar the schedule the way you did it, everything you can imagine. And after we completed that project, we felt that it had changed us. My partner Leandro and I, as much as it had, had an impact in the community and it became addictive to see that real estate, as the word implies, is very tangible and can actually maybe begin to reshape the dialogue in the community. If someone's willing to spend the time, the effort and invest in our neighborhoods, then maybe we all should do it together.

And it was just basically one person worked for us as a secretary and basically Leandra and I were kind of doing everything and pre Internet, pre anything you had to hand carry everything around and go to the permit, go to the planning department, get a permit. It was hard work and super rewarding in every way. And not easy, of course, because the neighborhood, rightly so, is very skeptical about anything happening in their neighborhood. And so that also became a dialogue for us, between community and us.

It was this burned out building and you turn it into a 4000 square foot space, community focused space, in a place that was feeling pretty neglected or not resourced, maybe a way to say it. And that dialogue tell us a little bit like this whole thing is about humility and dialogue and connection with community. What happened when this building got built? And people are like, wow, we have this new building where suddenly there was a burnt out shell. What was the dialogue like then? And then I want to compare that in a little bit to what it's like now. But what was some of the dialogue like?

Well, the dialogue leading up to it is, I think, what built the foundation for the business because we realized that we were still basically outsiders to this community and we were not going to be telling a community what it needed or what it wanted or what it should or shouldn't have. The community understood its deficiencies and its strengths and weaknesses. We would go out to community meetings, gather in whatever community space or church and sometimes in the city hall because you had to go through the permitting process to talk to community. And we were amateurs at the time, sort of learning how do we interact, how do we ask the questions so that we can be well informed? One thing that became urgently clear was that the community needed us to be respecting the fact that they needed jobs and that the jobs were going to be essential to what we did. And so that meant construction jobs, that meant jobs inside the building. But it hadn't dawned on us that that was going to be a fundamental part of the business that eventually became and is probably the backbone of our company. That is economic development from within. And it really defined that.

Our core principle is humility, because you walk into any situation. And these days, whether it is a new community, a new type of project, a new type of relationship with let me just listen, let me absorb, learn, ask questions before anything else.

So one question I have for you, Arturo, is I listened to you talk now and it sounds really polished, right? Economic development from within or some language on your website, you talk about socially conscious urban real estate brand, that that's what Prime Story is like. These are really polished ways of being and of articulating what you're doing. And obviously that doing it for something for three decades really helps. But how can you stay true to that humility as you start to do projects? We said in your bio, you all are managing a portfolio in excess of 750,000,000 hundreds of thousands of square feet, lots of people being employed either directly or as a ripple effect by the folks who are inhabiting, who are working in the spaces you've built. So you're doing things at scale. How as a business, as a nonprofit, as an organization, scales, how do we stay true to humility and not get full of ourselves?

It's a great question, Paul. I think it's all about the culture and the team you build. And one of the fortunate things for us is that we have always been searching for talent and people to join the organization that in some way understand the self selection of what we do. It is incredibly hard work. It has no hours. It has limited boundaries as to what is expected of each of the team members. And we have in our core values the concept of humility and teamwork. And we review and the way we communicate with each other, the way we interact in our office, the way the senior management team interacts with their departments.

It is a constant work in progress, a constant remaining curious about how we can learn to be better, how do we not distance ourselves from the fact. To this day, Landra and I are physically in person in our community meetings. We're in our community outreach, we are in our Planning Commission hearings. We understand that we have so much to learn at every turn that the focus has to be on the culture, it has to be on the camaraderie that exists with the team. And at the end of the day, it is what you put in is what you get out. And I think that is the labor of love, of keeping the culture of humility alive. Hopefully we're doing the job that we believe we are, and hopefully we're getting better at it as we grow.

And speaking of growth, there's been a little bit of growth in 32 years, right? So it's not just you and Leandro anymore. Give us a sense of what does Prime Store look like now? Like your team or revenue? If somebody's trying to understand it from a business perspective and they just look like what's on the ground right now, what would they see?

So the first thing you would see is a team of about 55 people that are incredibly talented, passionate and diverse, representative, I would say, on steroids. The communities that we serve, everything from first to fourth generation immigrants, very diverse from backgrounds and cultures and ethnicity and race, and everything really adding value to each other based on perspective. We have roughly about 750 to 800 million under development and entitlement right now for new projects that are either in construction or about to begin construction in the next twelve to 18 months. The company is broken into service departments. So we have, for example, the way we label our departments may be a little bit unique. The Asset Management Department is called Asset Appreciation because they're focused on appreciating the value of the assets they manage. And Property Management is called Property Services because they really focus on the services that they provide to the community and to other departments. We have development services.

We have a Director of Residential Development, Delilah Sotello, who is fairly legendary in California and the affordable and workforce market rate housing part of the world in her department. She was born and raised in the system that she now builds for. So we have all of these departments. Leasing is done in house. Community Outreach is headed by Claudia Cardinas, who's been with the company now nearly 27 years, also from the community. So it is a fairly robust team that tends to focus on the executive functions. The portfolio that you mentioned, that the onset is divided basically into two different kinds of sort of assets. We have a joint venture with Federal Realty.

It's a publicly traded REIT that acquired a portfolio that we developed with Cal Stirs as a partner. And the Prime Store team did not want to sell that portfolio, but CalSTERS had to exit from that at that moment in time. Based on their needs. And so Federal Realty purchased the calstar's interest out of that portfolio and we rolled our assets over there, but we still manage, operate, lease, et cetera. And then the non Federal Prime Store assets that we manage and wholly own within the business. And those are a mixture of retail and some housing opportunities, mostly because Federal and Prime Store as a venture don't do any kind of ground up or entitlement development. That is mostly asset managed projects that we have either developed, ground up, or massively redeveloped.

And if you were going to give a sense, like how much of what Prime Store is managing today, here we're recording this listener in July of 2023, how much of what you're managing is retail versus office versus housing of one of those kinds, affordable workforce housing. Just give us a sense of the portfolio and if somebody looked at it, what's in it?

Well, today, in terms of own and manage, that is meaning properties that are quote unquote, in service or they're functional properties. We have roughly about a little bit over 3 million, mostly retail, commercial. And in the commercial space, I would include sort of health and wellness functions, sort of clinics or fitness or those kinds of facilities. And that is the bulk of what we manage today. Thankfully, we have no office and we feel the pain of our colleagues in that part of the world today. And on the residential side, we don't really manage residential, but we have several hundred units that are in development or about to develop. It'll be roughly about 3000 units over the next three to four years. So we have land or properties that are about to be or being demolished as we speak that are becoming housing.

I would say probably out of that unit count, 50% affordable workforce and 50% market rate.

That's quite a journey from a 17 year old who knew nothing about real estate working in the kitchen, right? Like, you really learned a lot. And I can imagine some of the ways that that has stretched you to manage the kind of projects you're managing now. So let's do this in a minute. I want to come back and ask you about some of your personal learnings. I also want to ask you about the impact side, both for your employees and the communities you're so passionate about serving, what you've learned about that. Before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you facing one or more important decisions in your impact business and you'd like an experienced thought partner to develop a plan about how to proceed in the complex times we're living, but you don't feel the need for an extended coaching or consulting contract that's going to cost you many thousands of dollars? You're looking for an affordable, targeted and time efficient type of support. Through Paulzellazer.com, I offer a strategy session package.

These packages are ideal for entrepreneurs who are facing one to three immediate decisions, like how to increase your positive impact, fine tune your marketing strategies to get more results for less effort, launch a new product or service successfully, or refine your pricing structure so it's both inclusive and provides you with a great quality of life. You can find out more by clicking below. And thank you so much for listening to this podcast. So welcome back. In the second part of the show, Arturo, we'd like to joke about getting even more granular. Sometimes listeners of this show tease me about how many times I've literally had people count how many times I use the word gritty or granular that Paul used. It four times in that episode, you were on a roll. So I like to get even more into the nuts and bolts.

And the reason I do this, listeners, if you're new here, the reason I find incredible guests like Arturo and Unpack in so much detail, as much as they're willing to generously share, is because I want you to be better. And I think that we get better as entrepreneurs and particularly as folks who are interested in both having positive impact and building our businesses by understanding the details. I really do think there's an incredible amount to learn. So that's why I'm so passionate about granularity and Gridina. Arturo, what would you say for you personally, right? You're the CEO of this and you didn't necessarily go to Stanford Business School and then go right into being CEO of this very you really rolled up your sleeves and listened and went to work and went to a lot of permitting meetings and sat with people pouring concrete and asked them why they did things. This was a very roll up your sleeves education. What would you say from where you sit now? What was helpful about the journey you took and where was there some real challenges that you wish could have been a smoother learning curve?

Would say that learning on the job and learning sort of, as the expression goes, flying the plane, as it's already in the air, building the plane, so to speak. The beauty of that is that you're learning what actually applies in the world, and you're becoming a problem solver on very tangible, measurable outcomes, which then forces you to realize that you have to have metrics. You have to have metrics of time and money, that there's only so much of you that you can give in hours and physicality, and therefore the results of all of that have to be calibrated. And I think that one of the things I've seen now that I have zero formal education, so to speak. When I hire people from Stanford or those kinds of universities today, they come with an incredible amount of knowledge that is text and didactic and formal in that way, but also they kind of feel like they're drinking from a fire hydrant the day they do have to hit something that wasn't in the books. And the word you use, that grittiness that comes from working the streets and having to solve for you're going to have the concrete truck come now and you don't have a permit. And the rebar guy didn't show up, or he's missing this, or you have in some cases, we had neighborhood violence or things of that nature show up in our projects. And you've got to be the agent of change and solve.

And I think it teaches us, and it certainly taught me that you have to be very adaptable, always present in what's happening. And I don't think I would have learned that at a university or formal education. I think that relentless curiosity for me is what has helped me always say, well, just because it hasn't been done or just because it's been tried a different way doesn't mean it can't be done differently because the circumstances are different. But I am always curious to learn the way things have happened or how they could happen, and I always want to learn more and more. So I'm an avid reader. I mean, I read everything that I learned. I learned by doing or by reading about it and asking questions. What I think about the other part of it is things were very difficult, of course, to start.

And after we built that building, we thought, oh, this is fantastic. What a great business. And then, of course, we spent nine years never building another building because we were now realizing that the financial markets, the tenants, the business industry was not embracing our business model, largely because they didn't understand it or because they had a perception about what it was when it really wasn't. And I think that's where we could have benefited tremendously from having that background, that formal education. In some ways, even the relationships that one builds by being in some of these universities and opportunities present themselves that could have made it easier. Maybe. I don't know, because I don't think there's a formula for how to be successful, whatever your definition of success is. But certainly to have a passion and a relentless approach to what you do, I think is essential.

So we've talked quite a bit about the business side. Arturo, let's talk a little bit about the impact side. As you look back on these incredible 32 years managing so many awesome projects, when you look back on that same Southeast La type of community I don't live in Southeast. I live in downtown Albuquerque. Right. Not exactly the same, but there's a lot of similarities. Let's just say, you know, I have some sense and have spent a lot of time in La. I have some sense of the kinds of neighborhoods and some of the issues that you're facing.

What are some of the impacts that have happened for the communities that you care so much about out of this incredible team now, 55 people working so hard for 32 years, moving the needle in some really exciting financial and square footage ways. But give us some sense. How do we personalize the impact of those numbers?

Yeah, it's probably the most fantastic part of the work. We realized early on that every project, no matter what community we were in, when we were doing the surveys and we were coming back and resurveying and reconnecting with the community, some of these projects have 100 community meetings over a span of two or three years. Every community. Number one on the list was either local hire or access to fresh foods, groceries, one or two. The majority were jobs. And as we realized that, we began embedding into our contracts and our leases, as we do today, as a matter of practice, local hiring is mandated, and we involve the community early on, and we become an advocate and a supporter to our businesses and to the community for creating that marriage and creating the pathway for hiring. That expanded, to answer your question very directly, that expanded into every aspect of our business. So if we finish a project and we're going to do a landscaping contract, we are focused on either creating or helping create or enforcing local engagement with our vendors to do landscape maintenance, landscape operation from the community, local security, maintenance, janitorial, sweeping, you name it, it's focused on local engagement.

And recently, a few years ago, we built a project in a community called Jordan Downs in the heart of Watts. It was a project that had been developed as housing for soldiers coming back from World War II. They were designed one little unit, one soldier. Eventually they moved out. And these units, instead of having one soldier, they had an entire family. And instead of being what originally intended to be temporary, housing became permanent housing for 60 years. And that just became a very difficult situation. Dead end streets, no services, no groceries, no drugstore, no bank, no nothing, and no access to the grid.

And in fact, every street looped back into itself. And so when we realized we were going to tackle this 70 acre project, we also said, you know what, we're going to have people that have been touched by the prison system be our ambassadors. And we created an ambassador program such as, like, well, Daryl Perkins right now runs it in Jordan Downs, and he is the expert in our community. He's the senior, respected and touches the neighborhood. He was raised in that community through hard know, had to deal with his life circumstances as best as he could. And today he is the face of the ambassadorship of the program. And that's a program that we use throughout our projects on a constant basis. And so he's able to interact with the people working at the grocery store, at the Nike store, at the Blink Fitness Center, at starbucks because they're all from the neighborhood and they all know each other.

And the service provider that comes in and interacts with Daryl is also part of that community. And so that's the kind of impact that I believe Prime Store is about. And what we set out to do, the future of what we want to do, is ensure that we can continue to expand that eventually to home ownership and to business ownership. We've done business ownership already a few times, but needless to say, it's a drop in the bucket and a lot of work ahead of us for that.

As you were talking, ARTO, I wrote down three words. I wrote down jobs, food, and housing. And it got really clear. And I think if I had a guess that earlier iteration go back 25 years ago, maybe that wasn't as clear for you. And that was maybe some of the struggle in engaging some of the more leveraged partners, whether it was around capital or somebody in the city planning department. Right. Is that fair to say that you've gotten more focused on what the benefits on the impact side? Jobs, food, housing. If you hire us, we're going to move the needle in this, especially in communities that don't have easy access to jobs, food and housing.

Is that somewhere along the line of how your story got a little more refined?

Yes, definitely. Also along the way know, in La. And we've developed in many states around the country, but in La, the zoning was very limiting many years ago. And so after the Rodney King incident, it began to change. It took another decade plus to change. But we started exploring as a community, as a system with planning the rezoning and allowing mixed use. And then the community, we would do outreach meetings and the community again would be educating us on whether they would embrace, reject, tolerate, love. The idea that you could have a business on the same property as a house or an apartment or living workplace, kind of the expression goes.

And that took some time, to be honest, because from the commercial side of things, a lot of the tenants that we work with, whether it's Target or Ross or Marshalls or Starbucks, whatever, they said, look, we understand your demographic story. We are back in the early 90s, late 90s. We're willing to test this market and learn from you that these are real markets for us. But we want to do it in the context of our traditional footprint with on great parking and we have our store and traditional. So both from a zoning planning perspective and also from a business perspective, there was a desire to stay true to one type of product and kind of suburban in nature. And as the city densifies, the community starts becoming more vocal. And we were very proactive in creating a voice for the community, creating a pathway to platform to express themselves that. Densification started coming together and the community educated us that they would support it and embrace it and encourage it.

So when you're listening now, 2023, what are some of the things you're hearing now that are maybe new or more that are different somehow than what you were hearing 30 years ago? Both with some of the communities you've been working with for a while, or also some communities that you're starting to bridge into and starting some early conversations about working together, but you don't have 3000 units in that community. What are some things you're hearing now that are different than what you heard 30 years ago?

Yeah, quite a few things. Firstly, I would say that the dominant language is English. And a lot of the Latino, whether it was a 50 50 black Latino community or mostly Latino community, we had a lot of Spanish translation, a lot of Spanish language conversations. Now there's a dominance of English. You could see the generational shift and that sort of acculturation assimilation process going through. So that changes the narrative and it also has changed a lot because now there is a clearer understanding that, yes, if we work together as a community, we can bring about the change we want to see. We can be facilitators of what we want to see, and there's less apprehension or reluctance to believe and to dig in with us to create the change. The two really neat facts that are quite interesting is one is regardless of the income level or the density of the community, more and more we're being asked now for unique brands and products where we were the first to develop some of the Magic Johnson Starbucks deals many, many years ago.

And the community was killing themselves over having a, quote unquote Starbucks in their neighborhood. That sort of symbolized something. And today it's more like, where can we get a coffee shop that is not Starbucks, that is more unique, more curated, more authentic, more organic, and that translates to a lot of different businesses. And the other thing that I actually brought tears to my eyes is in the interaction between the Latino and the black community in the younger generation and how they just coexist. Our brothers are sisters, they're part of the same neighborhood. I am just beyond words to say what that's like, to be able to see that in meetings and to have a common voice and a shared openness, to have what I call positive friction as you find a common ground.

Beautiful. So imagine it's five years from now. Arturo, it's the summer of 2028. What is Prime Store doing? How has it changed in the past five years?

Well, we were fortunate enough to have the first closing of our discretionary fund in March of this year. We're working towards our second and final closing later this year. We have been pursuing that goal for a long, long time. And that capital, having the wherewithal to take advantage of more opportunities, be a little more nimble on the decision making, gives us a lot more reach. It also attracts talent to the business. And so I think I see Prime Store as having invested fully its first fund, raising its second fund and investing in projects in other parts of the country. I think very likely working with partners, colleagues or mergers with like minded smaller shops in other markets that we could be bringing forth our culture, our vision, and leveraging each other in markets that perhaps are experiencing the needs and the growth demands that our business model has put forth. I see the team always staying in the main office, in the main presence, not much larger than it is today because I do think that it's always about the quality and the execution and leaving a lot of the nonexecutive functions to advisors, consultants and support because we have a very diverse and complex business model.

But perhaps with offices, as I mentioned, in other parts of the country, to do the work and continue to expand our fund investment, fund management business.

Congratulations. Raising your own funds is just a game changer, isn't it? Yeah, just huge. Congratulations for you.

Thank you. Talk about know. I think just when you think you know something, as Socrates would say, you realize you don't know much.

Speaking of it leads perfectly into my next question. So you seem like one of the things I teach my clients, Arturo, is from the book by Carol Dweck, the book Mindset. And one of the things she talks about leaders. And just as humans, there's kind of two main ways we can relate to learning. We can relate as a fixed mindset. We kind of know, I know what I need to know to be a CEO or to be a founder or to be a whatever. Fill in the blank and I kind of got the basics. And if some change comes along and I have to get certified on some new product, I will.

But basically I know what I need to know. And the other category she calls it is a learner's mindset. Right. There's always more to learn. And as we run into new situations and grow a company, we get ahead of it by cultivating a learner's mindset. Or I call it continuous learning. Right. Seems to me you're a continuous learner.

So as you're looking ahead with Prime Store and the things you've been leaning into lately and some things you're coming down the road, what are you working on learning as CEO to try to practice that continuous learner mindset.

Yeah, I know. You said that very well. I think I am definitely more on the Darwin side of things. I think the species that survives is those that adapt. I grew up doing martial arts most of my life, and always the learning about practicing, not being rigid like ice, but more like water was part of our education as kids, and it really is adapting to the world around you, adapting to circumstances. As I said, you make plans and God laughs. I think that, for me, I am always open to having open dialogue with community and team. We have a problem.

We have a new circumstance. We have a challenge. Things around us have changed. How do we adapt to that? And I am always taking courses. I'm always reading new books. I'm always having sessions with my team and friends and colleagues. I get very involved in conferences and network of different things to always be curious. And I think time in human life is so short.

And if you really think about what the universe has to teach us as you get older, it means nothing because that's just another minute in space. And so I think of my mind as always being that of an adolescent that wants to learn and learn and learn and is curious about things. And I am an avid reader, so I read practically every day, and I mix up a lot what I read, from a business book to biography to philosophy to novels. And I mix it up on purpose so that the brain starts to not settle, but is influenced by the creative as well as the didactic and academic side of things.

I don't think I've ever said this out loud, but one of the reasons I do this podcast, Arturo, is it's kind of selfish. Like, think of having hundreds of conversations with people like you, right. I just learned so many things and get to ask questions and how did you do this, and what have you learned over 32 years? And, oh, yeah, I read this book, and I learned this, and then I go track it all down and read. So one of the reasons listener, a mentor of mine called it enlightened self interest. Right. There's some self interest here in doing this podcast for hundreds of episodes because it helps me continue to learn. And I share full disclosure, right.

No, just the fact that you're doing it and the time you're spending means that you have endless curiosity. Right.

Arturo, I could hang out with you all day, and I know you're super busy, and our listeners are busy, too, as we start to wind down. If there was something you were hoping we were going to get to about the awesome work you're doing and we haven't touched on it yet? Or is there something you want to leave? Our social entrepreneur listeners who are working to get to more scale kind of in the realm of what you've been able to create and have more positive impact, and they're a few years behind of where you are now, and there's a tip or a strategy or a resource you can leave them with as we start to say goodbye, what would that be?

The thought that I've been dabbling with lately is that it seems to me that as we have been developing this technology of social media, the so called artificial, quote unquote, intelligence, a generation growing up in achieving things that aren't tangible that they're achieved in some digital world. They have a sense of accomplishment that isn't really accomplishing much, that we hopefully begin to ask the question not I don't like my government or I don't like the way things are, and just basically put it out there that way. But to realize that you have the agency as an individual to bring about change and to be a voice of that change, to be an activist in the movement to change the things that you feel and see that aren't right without interfering or impacting on others in a negative way. And I think that that is my biggest focus with the business now, is thinking about how do we bring on board new talent that realizes the difference between that real sort of outcome versus the perceived outcome.

Arturo, it's been fabulous having you on the show today. Thank you so much for the great work you do, and thank you for sharing it with me and our listener.

Thank you very much.

Paul.

Really appreciate and you have a great framework here for a podcast. Really appreciate you doing this.

Thank you. So, listeners, let's do what we do. Please go check out the Prime Store website. There's a link in the show notes with a couple of the other resources. But let's amplify. You know, I'm really passionate about finding great people, doing great work. If you resonated with this, go to the site. And especially if you've got folks who are wanting to move the needle and be effective in economic development, bringing food into communities that don't have access to quality of food.

Here's a great example. Let's amplify, amplify, amplify. Before we go, just a reminder, we love listener suggested topics and guests. So if you've got an idea for a show, it's more than 50% now. And you know what? It turns out that that is not common. I don't know why more podcast hosts don't say, hey, listeners, you know who we talk to on this show? Tell me who you got. But it turns out that's not common. But I love it when listeners reach out and say, hey, I've got a story.

I think it's a good fit. Try to be really transparent. So on the Awarepreneurs website, if you go to our contact page, we have three simple criteria. Gives you a sense of what we're looking for. Take a look at that, and if you think it's a good fit, please send your ideas in. We're well over 50% now. Somebody listens to this show sent in an idea, and I love that. I'd love to see that number go higher.

So before we go, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.