Hi, this is Paul Zellazer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs 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 a positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Emily Kane Miller. And our topic is new Platform Alert impact measurement. Emily is the founder and CEO of Ethos Giving, which helps individuals, foundations, and companies determine their passion, maximize their social impact, and put the foundations in place to make it come true. Emily, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Paul.

I'm really excited to share with our listeners what you're doing. It's such good work. But before we get into the work you're doing today, Emily, if somebody was listening and they're like, I don't know who this Emily Kane Miller is, and I don't really know kind of anything about their backstory. What's the short version of your origin story before we get into Ethos Giving and all the good work you're doing now?

Great question. So I would say I've been somebody who has tried to be a force for good since I was a kid and then found a way to do that professionally. I'm a lawyer by training and have built a career around social impact, corporate social responsibility, and philanthropy.

Nice. And this idea of a platform, right. Our title is called new Platform Alert Impact Measurement. Like, this idea of leveraging a platform to help with impact and really being able to document how somebody or how an organization is moving the needle. Give us a little bit. Like, what was the thinking there? Why a platform?

Yeah. So I'm a regulatory lawyer by training, so I like data, I like rules, I like specificity. And coming into CSR, corporate social responsibility and philanthropy, there have obviously been technological tools available for decades. Those tools are really built for a model where there is a donor and a donor, there is a cash donation, and you're managing the logistics and timeline of that work. And while that's important today, as we think about social impact and leaders who are really looking to make change, those old systems and tools aren't going to cut it. And so I was really interested, and I kept saying for about 15 years, I need QuickBooks for social good. Like, anyone who's done any accounting, personally or in business knows that QuickBooks is a great tool because it allows you to run information and slice it and dice it by timeline or vendor or quarter or whatever it is. And I knew that this work was becoming more and more dynamic, that people were putting their thumb on the scale of good in all sorts of ways philanthropy, political giving, impact, investment, supply chain management. And as we say, I'm all about the and but we didn't have a tool or a technology ecosystem to host that work in a way that was really tied to the functions, right? What's happening, who's doing it? What are the outcomes, and also a way to tie work together that was maybe seemingly disparate but actually super connected. So a company or a philanthropist or a nonprofit may be doing ten different things in different ways, but they're all tracking toward hunger or they're all tracking toward literacy. And you want to be able to say through advocacy, through giving, through volunteerism, through communications and social media. We've moved the needle on this issue, and being able to actually pull reports that speak to that current reality was something that we were missing and that I was frustrated by and frustrated enough that I built a SaaS platform.

That's awesome. And we're going to talk about that platform just a second. As you were talking about Emily, I was thinking of two things. One is we have a podcast success team for Impact podcasters at Awarepreneurs. And they like to tease me about how many times I use the word granular, right? And I'm like, Social impact is like, we can talk big, beautiful concepts. But that was like so 15 years ago. We're seeing a trend and I'm thinking of one of our former guests, Masamisoto, one of the co founders of B One G One. And one of the things they do really well, it's a whole network of people who use the Buy One, Give One thing tom Shoes listeners. So they call it Giving impacts. And their network has been able to document 270,000,000 giving Impacts.

Right?

And that really allows them to leverage certain things that they've gotten that granular. And some of them might be in the realm of environment, maybe how many trees planted, or somebody else might be kids educated or whatever the areas. But having that, I'll put a link to in show notes to our episode with Massimi at the B One G One. But I just wanted to give a real world example of somebody who's doing something in the impact space who would agree with you. Those numbers allow them to have a global presence and to get into conversations with larger organizations. People have more power, people have more influence because they've been more granular. Rather than just somebody who's out there saying, but we do lots of good work. You should give us money or let us partner with your corporation. So can't agree more as Mr. Granularity.

Over here, I'm all about the granularity. And I'll just second everything that you just said in terms of storytelling, growing constituency, growing donors, et cetera. Also think about any other business model and trying to make good decisions without information about what happened before. In that same scenario, like no other business would ever be asked to function in that dataless void. And just because of the way that this work has come up, that's oftentimes an expectation in our sector and I really wanted to disrupt that nice, but.

We'Re really nice and we mean really well. You should give us money. Right? That's not necessarily a style that I would encourage. The other thing I was thinking about, Emily, as you were sharing that the way that that know, whoever gives doesn't have to be literally dollars, but giving money as the way it's partnered with impact. What happens if somebody's got a lot of social capital? Just think of how that builds in inequity in what we value in the impact space. Historically, somebody who gives money gets that kind of reporting. But if an organization brings their whole staff for some sort of more sweat equity or uses their social capital, it's almost like they're, oh, you're irrelevant, go away. Right. The real people that matter, the people we're accounting, is the dollars. And think of all the inequality and just makes my skin crawl. Right. To think of how not helpful that limited mindset is. So you've built a platform. Tell us a little bit about the platform and give us a little bit of an idea. What does it do?

Absolutely. So the platform is called Ethos tracking and it allows, as we say, anyone who wears a good cape. So anyone who's trying to be additive and create value in the world that might be a nonprofit, a foundation, an individual, a corporation that could range from a startup B Corp. To a multinational Fortune 500 company. So really, anyone that's putting their shoulder to the wheel of this work, as we know, is doing a lot of different things. As you just sort of illustrated, Paul, yes, there might be money and that might be dollars going to nonprofits. It might be dollars going to thoughtful supply chain management. Right? So, hey, we're spending $50 million a year to buy X for our company and we want to shift that supply chain budget so that 50% of it is spent within 50 miles of headquarters. Right. So just thinking about how you flex cash is more than donations to C three S, as we all know. But in addition to the cash, it's time. It is political capital, it's social capital, advocacy work, how you engage your employees and help upskill your people and so much more. So our tool really takes a look at all of the ways that the good cape community, as it were, creates benefit for society. And we've broken it down to about to 14 different what we call levers. And each of those levers can be utilized to track what you're up to. And we call that records. So most of our clients have hundreds, if not thousands of records per year. And they're logging all of the ways that they're creating good in society. Each of those records is then tagged with a ton of information that's beneficial from a tracking storytelling impact measurement perspective. What issue areas is this covering? What geography? Which department does it flow from? And we have that as sort of the thumbprint of what happened. And then the other piece of each record is what we call the deliverables. So KPIs, Smart, goals, whatever your team wants to call them, why did we do this thing? What are the pieces that we can look at from a data perspective, and then how do we use that to track over time if we're meeting our goals? It sounds very elementary, but again, having lived in software for two decades that didn't meet the needs of my team and me, I always said, why are we disaggregating the thumbprint? How is it working? And that's the functional record. The second piece, just knowing none of our teams have enough people or time, we really look to the technology to create efficiencies. So the first is that we have the ability to create surveys through the system. What are the five things that we're tracking? It allows you to send a survey link out to partners. Those may be internal partners. So, hey, Joseph in supply chain, tell me the ten things that I need from you on a quarterly basis. And it may be a third party partner, whether that be a nonprofit partner, an academic partner, whoever it may be that you can go and ask those same questions to, they automatically come back in the system. There's no data entry required. And you then can use those data sets and blend them, stack them to create all sorts of analytics. And then the system also allows you to turn those things into pie charts and bar charts and other cool features that allow you to do the storytelling more quickly. So the big idea, Paul, was I took everything that frustrated me for 20 years and created the technology I'd always wished I'd had to better understand all of the information that I know our teams need to be successful and then also share that back out to key partners, leadership, our boards, et cetera.

So you've used the word storytelling at least three times so far, Emily. So if I'm a listener, I'm like, well, wait a second. You're talking like KPIs and Data and Metrics and Deliverables, and you're talking storytelling. Maybe I'm not used to syncing those things up in my brain. Help me out. If I'm a listener saying what?

Sure. So we've all seen the model, and again, I would pin this to something that I believe is a bygone era in our ecosystem or going to quickly become a bygone era. Hey, friend, let me tell you about our mission. And I'm going to give you one illustrative story or two illustrative stories that help drive home the fact that we're meeting our goals. But I'm not going to give you data or metrics or information related to our success benchmarking, helping to understand that we were at point A and now we're at point B. And here's why I believe firmly. Whether you're talking to donors or politicians or community members, people are starting to ask for more than the anecdotes they're really hungry for. Know everyone because of Google, has become an investigative reporter, and people really want to understand not just the high level version of what's going on, but really what your impact is and how you substantiate it. So I believe in every storytelling opportunity, whether those be short form, you know, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, et cetera, or long form like op eds or impact reports, that people really need to show their work. It's like new math for anyone who has a kid in school now great that you know, that two times five is ten. We need to understand that, you know, how you got there, not just that you can memorize the equation. So how do we show our work? How do we show our philosophy? Through KPIs, I think is a really critical piece of any high quality storytelling today, regardless of your audience or your format.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I was working with a founder yesterday, and we were talking about getting another round of funding for their Impact business. And this founder, it had been a while and they weren't paying quite as attention to what's happened in the market over the past year. And it said basically, we're now seeing it's 50% more friction than it was a year ago. 50%. In other words, there's 50% less money going into startup. Funding right now is basically it is a 49%. 51%. Depends on what city in the US. This is us. Stats. I'm not as up on the world, but I am doing quite a bit of work with folks around who are raising money. And what we know in 2023, there's about half the amount of investment going into new businesses of all kinds and startups of all kinds. So basically think about it as there's 50% more friction is what I said to this founder. And that's okay, we just want to plan for it. And one of the things that we're seeing in the startup ecosystem is that whatever the resource you're trying to get signing a corporate consulting gig or you're trying to get somebody to give you a six or seven figure round of funding for your next exciting stage in your company. You're looking to bring on a very significant partner to help you scale that way through a strategic partnership. Just think about more friction in the ecosystem. What reduces friction in the human nervous system? Right? Stories. Good stories. That's been true whether we were hanging out around the campfire however many tens of thousands of years ago or thousands of years ago. Right. Or here we are, 2023. When it's harder, we just have to work a little bit. We have to be smarter about how we go out and get the assets that we need. And when I said it that way, there's more friction. So you just want to make sure that the rails are greased, right? If the rails are greased, that doesn't mean you have to work any harder. You just pay more attention that the rails are greased. If you don't grease the rails, you're going to work really hard to get the money you need to take your business to the next level. And the founders like, got it. Paul okay, great. How do we grease the rails? Right? So I'm thinking of that session here, and I'm thinking about good storytelling with data and turning it into visuals, maybe charts, pie graphs, whatever you're doing with it, how much that can grease the wheels. And I'm seeing that like, in 2023 right here, right now, people who pay attention to the storyteller, the storytelling in the way that investors or strategic partners, people who are in the ecosystem know there's more friction and the bar is higher. So let's be smart listeners. And what I love about the platform you've created, Emily, you're helping us be smart. You're helping us grease the wheels. Does that feel fair? Like top level description of what you're doing?

Totally fair. And the other thing I would know, whether we're talking about your founder that has a purpose led organization or our nonprofit partners or whoever the listener is for this audience, you all are making a big difference and you're doing the work right. So it's not even about adding to the portfolio or creating more programming. It's simply saying, we're already up to all of this. Let's make sure that we're tracking and managing all of the outcomes so that we can substantiate it in a way that helps people understand how legitimate it is. Right, so everything you said, Paul, and also you've already put in the sweat, right. And so make sure that you're getting the benefit of that greasing, which is to be able to share it.

Yeah. So give us a use case, Emily. Let's say give us maybe somebody who's on the earlier development or a smaller organization. And then if somebody is leading something that has scale, that has, I don't know, five figure employees, we have the full range from somebody who's like solo and in startup mode. And we have literally organizations that are some of the best known in the world who are listeners with thousands of employees. Give us a sense on those two ends of the continuum. How would somebody use a platform like this depending on the scale of their organization?

Absolutely. So on the smaller end of the spectrum, I'll use myself and Ethos Giving, which is our consulting firm, as the example. I have a four person business. We're early stage but very intentional. And we actually just went to we opted in and we received our B Corp certification, which was huge.

Congratulations.

Thank you. But for a tiny group, it's a big lift.

It's a big investment.

Yeah. And so really got to benefit as a user of Ethos tracking because we know all I don't have a data manager, right. I can't afford to have someone on my team who's exclusively focused on making sure we have all of our items in order when we need to recertify in three years. And so we use Ethos tracking to help manage all the things that we said we were doing related to B Corp certification. And that includes who our vendors are, who our clients are, what our clients do, what type of work they work on, how many folks we're supporting that are putting resources back into the community for underrepresented individuals, and all of these things that on any singular client level, I of course know, and I could rattle them off. But as our portfolio grows and as the years go by, needing to go back and kind of reinvent this wheel three years from now would put a tremendous burden on a small organization like ours. So the fact that we can track and manage this work as we go and not have to go back and engage with it retroactively is a huge benefit, number one. And number two, because I have all that data at hand, it helps me to be more strategic in the way we think about business development and storytelling around the firm. Not to use the storytelling word again, but I can start to see themes and say, well, we're doing a lot in Los Angeles, or we're doing a lot related to homelessness. That's super interesting. Maybe we'll write an op ed about that, or maybe we'll reach out to new clients who could also benefit from that same expertise and say, we've got these great case studies. Let's talk. And that's really beneficial, especially for a small group like ours. On the other end of the oh, sorry.

No. So I was just, like, highlighting. So I'm hearing, like, your B Corp certification hearing, business development applications, people, organizations who fit this profile. Wow, we're getting a lot of it. Or we're really moving the needle so we can go tell a more nuanced story to this particular demographic or organizations or individuals like X, because our platform is telling us, look at how we move the needle in this particular subset of humans or organizations. Is that fair to say?

Totally fair to say.

Cool. So, yeah, tell us about the bigger organization.

So, bigger organization, other end of the spectrum. Multinational CPG company, awesome organization, super big hearted. Had done a lot right? And if they were in the room, would say, we're not exactly sure what we have to show for it in terms of value to the community and value to our brand. It's all good, but we can't really explain or put our finger on how we're showing up. What our North Star is and how this work is working. So through Ethos tracking and our support in helping them to identify all of their key issue areas, tagging all of the work, whether that be at an employee volunteer level, corporate giving, supply chain management in kind giving for anyone thinking about product donations. If your company does a lot of those, most of them go underreported. And it's not to say that that's not okay, it's still creating good in society. But as you think about the brand and really leveraging 100% of your good work, the products that you donate should be a part of that story too and should be a part of the analysis on what your value is. Advocacy, thinking about how they utilize their social media platforms and help to be engaged and engage their base on issues that were relevant to their communities. All of those things went from being essentially untracked, right? Like people knew them and maybe they came up in meetings, but it really wasn't part of a cohesive strategy to once we got them on the system 100% trackable and within two months, it helped them to shift their strategy on every piece of the impact related work of the business. Who they were donating cash to, how they were thinking about Inkind donations, how they were thinking about utilizing social, what issues were getting the most engagement, and if they were getting core engagement, why and fixing that. And I'll say this is a 2023 effort. I am sure that their 2023 Impact Report, which will come out next January or February, is going to be head and shoulders above the reports that have come out in prior years, number one. Number two, the team is far more animated. Not just the social Impact team, but this is a global company with probably tens of thousands of employees. Everybody understands what they're up to from a social impact perspective, why it's special and how their individual roles contribute to the larger impact work, whether they're sitting in warehouse or in accounting or in the C suite. And that's a huge 180 for this organization and I think especially for big organizations. Paul it's really hard, and I lived this in house myself, it's really hard to wrap your arms around all of this work. And when you can create a tool that makes it easier for you and your colleagues, it goes a long way.

So you're able to say that an organization that uses this platform can say, our goal was to move the needle in such and such a direction. Here's some of the data we have about what went the inputs right here's, the inkind inputs, the cash inputs, product inputs, here's what we did with our social media all towards this goal and then here's what actually happened, right? And all of that has information that can be quantified but also can be turned into narrative storytelling. These are our values. We're so excited to have moved the needle in the following ways, but it's sitting on really good metrics in a way that previously has been really hard to do with just it would take a lot of muscle, a lot of human work hours to do this, and your platform is making it much easier. Is that fair to say?

For sure? And the folks who lead this work, whether it's their full time job or something they do on the side of their desk, it's coming from a place of passion. And you want to support those leaders and those doers with resources that help them avoid burnout, right? Like even the most excited individual on your team if they needed to pull teeth to put together an impact report. And it doesn't feel good because it doesn't really represent 100% of the work. And it kind of is a little bit of a downer year over year that depletes the energy from that team and takes some of the shine away from what could be a super powerful center of your organization. So it's an investment in the work in the short term, but also I think it's a long term investment in the sustainability of this work within your organization.

Beautiful. So let's do this in a moment. When we come back, I have some questions for you, Emily, about where this is going and how can we be mindful of keeping the spirit of an organization alive as we're getting into metrics? Having a ton of conversations about this, for example, with AI, but how do we use really nuanced data in a way that doesn't lose the humanity and doesn't become transactional? So I have some questions like that, but before we do that, let's just 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 Paulzelazer.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, everybody. In the second part of our show, Emily, we'd like to get granular even more granular and talk a little bit about Ethos giving, what your business looks like. But before we do that, I said I had a couple of questions. One of them is about this transactional nature or how do we keep it alive and not just turn everything into a graph or a spreadsheet? How can you help our listeners now that we're having these more powerful tools to get more data? How do we use that in a way that actually enlivens the conversations and brings more nuance and depth and doesn't turn everything into a spreadsheet or a graph in some way?

Such a critical question, and the last thing you want to do is kill the soul of this work, the heart of this work. And I completely agree that if it turns too much into data and meeting benchmarks and metrics and you miss the point, which is that there are real humans or the environment or other community benefits at the heart of this, we've missed the point, right? So I would say the way that we think through that is actually looking to identify data opportunities that speak to that soul. So we aren't just measuring how many hours for volunteers or how much cash, but rather going in and saying, what are the multilayered KPIs that we can bring in to identify if we met our goals of the communities or resources or spaces that we're trying to serve? So set another way. Let's pretend know, paul, you and I have worked to create some incredible literacy programs. I would say the cold approach, the more solace approach, is to say how many young people attended these classes? And once we've checked that metric box, we're good, right? Like, great. We wanted to get 100 kids, we got 100 kids. Move on. That's the opposite of what we need here. We need to understand for those 100 young people, were they served by this program? What are the pre post data sets? Let's look at the literacy rates in September and look at them in June. Fantastic. Next layer. We know that there were three indicators that we supported. One was related to parent engagement. One was after school hours and just sort of creating more infrastructure. And then the third was teacher training. Let's pretend, let's actually break down those KPIs and identify what was the biggest indicator for support so that next year, when we're doing the same program, we can offer an even better resource to these young people. And in that way, obviously, that was a fairly surface example. Any of our listeners would understand kind of how this relates to their organization. In that way, you really are centering the soul. You're centering the community that you're looking to benefit, asking questions, data related questions, but questions nonetheless that are specifically related to their user experience. The goals that you've all created together to identify how to benefit that issue area, that population, that community, and not losing track of the fact that these are real use cases, that whether you're talking about 100 people or a million people, that there is real work behind that. And I. Know, at the beginning of the show, we said we need to get away from the anecdotes and the stories. It's really important to center those within the team so that everybody remembers what the work is all about. It just can't be the only thing that we hang our hat on as we're moving Impact forward.

Absolutely. I think of the Goldilocks principle in the coaching world, where people think of goldilocks, this bed's too hard, this bed's too soft, this one's just right. That's become something that you hear in the coaching world a lot. The goldilocks principle. We're looking for that sweet spot where the narrative story at least for me, I'm looking I should say I I'm looking for that sweet spot where the narrative storytelling about an individual or a community or this school that we worked on. Maybe you work with 100 schools or 10,000 schools, but to be able to say in this school, this is what it looks like, or with this child, this nine year old, this is what happened in their life when this literacy program came in. Or they learned music, or when a woman found her in a really tough situation, got access to capital, and her business started to grow, and she could support her family and bring more nutrition. The girls could go to school, and formally, they couldn't. Right. You want to keep that. It's not about throwing that away. But we also don't want to lean so heavily on that, that we come across as less than fully 2023 versions of Impact entrepreneurs or leaders. Because in this economy, a lot of folks have moved in that space and have better data than what was true ten years ago. And if we only lean on those stories again, we're not going to have 50% more friction. We're going to have more than 50% friction because there's somebody in your space who's doing this. Well, I've been around long enough to be able to say somebody who's in your impact area is ahead of the curve with data because there are better tools. And if you're only leaning on the narrative, you're going to struggle more to get the resources you need to help the people you want to help.

It's so well said. Oftentimes we'll say internally and also to clients, have we communicated the head and the heart? Right? Have we effectively been able to share whoever our audience is, internal, external, et cetera, that this really matters and that we are confident and know that we have a real model here?

Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about your personal and where ethos, where your impact wants to go going forward from here. If you look ahead three to five years, you've built this platform, you're getting some pretty significant it's kind of like you're above your weight class with four people. You can now work with folks in a much more leveraged way, it seems like would be part of where you are now, but project ahead a little bit. Where do you want this ride to go?

Yeah, so I think you nailed it. I created the platform initially as a resource for our clients just because, again, going back to my frustration, I knew that we could do our work better. And very quickly, once the technology was built, I realized it was something that was beneficial not just for our clients, but for customers the world over who wear the good cape, which is exciting. And as we've built out this piece, it's become very clear that it can leverage our models. And my experience, I was really lucky to come into my career in my late 20s, joining an organization that had a super powerful drive for impact, that was multifaceted and incredibly ambitious, that was really demanding KPIs and ROI and all of the alphabet soup. And I thought that was normal. And then when I emerged about a decade later, I identified that we had built things that today's ecosystem, again, whether that's coming from the nonprofit, for profit, government side was hungry for, and that I could help share that expertise. And at first, obviously, that was just through not just through a consulting business, through Ethos giving. And now the fact that we can do that through technology means I can share our models far more broadly than I ever could with the boutique services firm in Los Angeles, California. So that's really exciting. The second thing and the piece that's a bit more macro and ambitious is this goal that I believe there are more people in the world today, and certainly more leaders, whether those be leaders of businesses or nonprofits or government leaders that really want to make a difference and that have a deep sense of altruism. And I know that that can't happen without data and without high quality resources to support better business management. And so my hope is that this is an offering that we can provide to anybody that's trying to do more with less, to help them supersize the value of whatever their platform is to do good and not just accomplish what would be sort of the baseline opportunity, but really be expansive and do more. And in that way I'll have felt like as a business leader and really just as a human in the world, as a parent myself, that I've been able to contribute to society and punch above my weight, which is an amazing feeling.

Yeah. So as somebody who's thought a lot about that, Emily, and it doesn't necessarily sound like that was originally your training. Like, you weren't a computer scientist. You were trained as a lawyer, if I understand correctly.

Right, correct.

And I was originally trained in community mental health. And I didn't create a platform, but I have a podcast and today I was talking to somebody in Bhutan and somebody else on the West Coast and somebody in Europe and somebody in Africa and none of that would have been happening. I live in Albuquerque. Right? Like, this podcast has allowed me to leverage my time and my impact way beyond anything I could have imagined as somebody who's trained in community mental health like leveraged. Look like you did a group of eight instead of seeing people one on one, right. What would you say to one of our listeners who maybe hasn't thought about scale and leveraging your time through technology? You weren't trained for it, as neither you or I were, and yet here you are doing this amazing work, and you kind of dove in not to make a gazillion dollars. Although you're a social entrepreneur, you're probably not afraid of making money. I hope you're not. But that's not the main priority of why you built this platform. You built it to have more impact. If there's a listener who's not yet fully wrapped their head about leverage and they're not trained in something that would normally say, oh, you should build a SaaS platform because it helped more people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah right. There are folks that's their professional training, but some of our listeners don't have that. What would you say to somebody who didn't get that training professionally? How can they start to explore with an open mind possibilities that might go beyond 1 hour exchange of their time for one person or a small group of people?

Yeah, it's a great question, and I think the first thing to say is that none of us know everything. And so being able to start from a place where that's totally normal and expected is really important. So taking that burden off your shoulders that that if you if you can't do it yourself or know it yourself, that it's unachievable. You know, I hope everyone can remove that barrier from their imaginations. And then once that happens, I think taking the thing that you love to do and really being focused on that, I love to help people manage more effectively for impact and grow their pie. Right. That's my thing. And really, what has been the cornerstone of this firm is identifying ways that we can be additive to that and then become exponential. So I think the question for the listeners is what's your superpower? What is it that you're creating in the world that is unique or that you have a powerful vantage point on? And then identify ways that you could grow that pie if you had limitless opportunities, right. And just no idea is a bad idea. Get it all on paper and then start to chisel away at that list and look at what would be most exciting to you and that you feel has the ability to be achievable within kind of like your current world opportunity. And then identify what you have expertise in and what you don't, and for what you don't. Reach out, say, okay, I need to speak to a computer scientist. I need to speak to a statistician, I need to speak to a web designer, whatever it may be. One of the most incredible tools in my Rolodex is LinkedIn, and I can't tell you the number of people who I reach out to who I don't know. I think Paul, we met through a Cold outreach, right? And really generous and excited to connect with interesting, like minded people. And most of the time you'll be able to get a very quick sense of from someone with the deep expertise, this is something that's realistic, or here's what the cost associated with something like this would be. And then you can make an educated decision about your ability to move forward based on learning from folks that have that expertise. But it's always good to do the first and second level of inquiry before you shelve an idea as impossible. Because I would have told you if someone said, hey, you're going to build a SaaS platform. Three years ago, I couldn't spell SaaS. I thought it was all Caps. I didn't know it had little, just a it's a wild world and things are becoming less and less expensive from a tech side than they've ever been before. And just because you don't build, like, the Maserati version on the first day doesn't mean that you can't build the Honda version. Excuse the metaphor, but you don't have to start with the biggest version of the idea and you can kind of create proof of concept, which is what we've done with ethos tracking, for sure.

Beautiful. Emily, I could hang out and talk to you all day and you're busy and our listeners are busy too. So if there was something you were hoping we were going to get to on this topic and we haven't touched on it yet, or there's something you want to leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye, what would that.

Know? I really enjoyed connecting. Paul, I think you've covered everything. The one thing that I would say is it's good to take the moments to check back in with why you started this. Know, whether that be reading a book or chatting with an old friend or listening to a podcast or a Ted Talk. I think so many of us come from a place of being deeply, deeply motivated. But it may be years or decades in the background where that initial spark happened. And just being able to kind of keep up with why it is that you do this is so important because we need every single listener of cast to keep doing the good work that they're doing and to stay connected and motivated.

Emily, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Thank you for having me.

So a big thank you for listening to this awesome interview. And just a quick reminder before we go. We love listener suggested topics and guests. It's happening more and more often. If you have an idea that you think would be a good fit to do an interview or if you have an idea for one of our solo episodes, please go to the Awarepreneur's website and on our contact page our three simple guidelines about what we're looking for. We try to be really transparent. If you take a look and you think it's a fit, please send your ideas in. So for now, 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.

You Sam.