In our inaugural episode, we will talk to the guys behind the podcast. We are very excited to introduce our hosts, Peter and Jeremy.
In our inaugural episode, we will talk to the guys behind the podcast. We are very excited to introduce our hosts, Peter and Jeremy.
Learn about their personal and professional journey and what they love most about working in the B Corp space. Their stories are rich with experience, knowledge and curiosity – all of which contribute to the quality of content that you can expect in every episode!
Watch us on YouTube
To contact Peter on LinkedIn from KarmaDharma Creative Marketing Agency
To contact Jeremy on LinkedIn from DeepNet IT Consulting
If you want to be featured on the show, or you know someone who should, feel free to contact us podcast@karmadharma.ca
Intro: Welcome to The Awakened Organization.
Jeremy Stayton: Hi. Welcome to Awakened Organization. I’m Jeremy Stayton
Peter Georgariou: And I’m Peter Georgariou.
Jeremy Stayton: – and today we get to talk about one of our favourite topics, ourselves.
Peter Georgariou: Woohoo.
Jeremy Stayton: But really, this is just to get to know us a little bit and to introduce the podcast we’re going to be talking about going forward and the type of guests that we’ll be looking to meet with. Peter, do you want to talk a little bit about – I’ll interview you.
Peter Georgariou: That’s hilarious.
Jeremy Stayton: So tell me about your personal journey and story; how did you get here?
Peter Georgariou: I’m glad we have six hours ahead of us here. It’s been a long one. I grew up a little all over the U.S. My dad was a U.S. Marine, actually a Vietnam vet. And then my parents got divorced and my mother, who was a receptionist at the time, remarried a Canadian snowbird lawyer in Florida and I moved up to the great white north and I’ve been up here ever since. So it’s had me kind of between two borders, two languages up in Montreal without a lot of roots which is super interesting.
And then I got into a career – I’ll save you the middle-aged and the whole sex, drugs and alcohol phase, but I’ll hop into work. And I got into radio and into broadcast and then was working for some really, really big corporate, at least Canada-wise. You know, 60,000 employees and 20-some-odd billion and working for the machine.
And then I ran into a lot of dissatisfaction with where I was headed and a lot of discontent. And then I self-sabotaged myself in the best of ways, where I talked to the head of HR and told her my life’s mission was not to generate shareholder value for my current employer and I –
Jeremy Stayton: How’d that go over?
Peter Georgariou: She was very polite. It’s funny you ask that, she was like, “Hmm, interesting” and –
Jeremy Stayton: And she’s Canadian?
Peter Georgariou: And she’s Canadian. Well, they’re always polite in Canada, dude. And then I was promptly removed from their NextGen program. Like within months, it was really funny, all of a sudden I was no longer the horse to bet on, which wasn’t a bad thing.
And then I was in the radio and TV business, and we went through a long history of downsizing and cutting people to hit 3 percent of EBITDA goals. And it was funny because our company was heading up a huge mental health initiative, yet we would continue to cut staff every year and pile on more to other people so that we could hit those said profit goals, but damn did we celebrate good mental health.
And then it was my turn to get cut and they handed me some money and so I got the hell out of Dodge. And that same day my wife was sending me over some job interviews and potential places, and I was like, “Wait a minute. If I don’t go out on my own and give this a shot and see if I can test my own vision against the world, rub it up against reality, I will forever resent myself and resent you.” And so I started up KarmaDharma.
Jeremy Stayton: All right, let’s pause there. I want to find out more about KarmaDharma but let’s pause there for one second. I’m curious, so it sounds like the universe delivered you a special gift –
Peter Georgariou: It sure did.
Jeremy Stayton: – in the form of a severance package.
Peter Georgariou: Yeah.
Jeremy Stayton: What was the vision that you wanted to test? What was it at that time that you wanted to test that you need to find out if it was for you?
Peter Georgariou: I was watching my light go out at Bell, dude. I was watching my – just like a slow dimming and I was getting into having two kids and the golden handcuffs and running after a future that I wasn’t passionate about, and I really wanted to see – I worked with entrepreneurs, right. Our clients as a radio station or a TV station we helped other businesses market, and I was looking at all these men and women and I’m like they’re not that much smarter than I am, dude.
I’m watching them and like holy crap what’s missing between – the difference between me and them, and some of its circumstances but my big takeaway was just a lack of courage of my own to like venture out and bet on myself. I grew up with a bunch of doubters and people who helped me deconstruct any sense of self-confidence, so getting out on my own was a necessary place to do that.
And so to answer your question it was really to see if can I do it. First of all, like the first iteration is am I smart enough to run my own biz, do I have what it takes and the resilience and the work ethic and these things. And then, you know, the first few years you have the fear of God, am I a going to be able to support my family. My number one thing is still do I have what it takes to provide long time for Jodie and the girls. Once you start to stabilize a little bit and you’re like OK, well wait a minute, I don’t want to sell any more cars and I don’t want to work on selling businesses or working with a-holes that don’t share my values or just stress me out every time I go to a meeting.
And then the pandemic hit, you know. Like for my five years of business, there was two of stress. Year three I got cancer and overcame that, in years four and five there was the pandemic. So that’s been like my five years of being in business and we’re still around. And when the pandemic hit, we fired our biggest client by a mile, like 20 percent, 30 percent of our business because he was toxic and then we just started running after business that we cared about.
And we – I hate to use the word pivot – but we just switched lenses on both the types of people, the type of business, the impact we wanted to make, people who valued what we did and gave a crap about what we had to say. So yeah, that was my big thing. So a) testing do I have what it takes, and now b) in today’s – we’re having this conversation on April 12, 2022, is can I make a living helping other people change the world and fulfil their personal missions and help them have the courage to be themselves in this lifetime.
Jeremy Stayton: Nice.
Peter Georgariou: How about you? How about I throw that interview back, what brought you to April 12, 2022?
Jeremy Stayton: I’m not going to unpack all of it here because then this would be a therapy session and –
Peter Georgariou: I think more so.
Jeremy Stayton: – probably not as interesting – or maybe interesting but for all the wrong reasons. So moved a ton as a child, long story short, and we were quite poor. We were part of what we call the spiritual community, which was actually a cult. A few things. So one, I had a great childhood. We didn’t do any weird stuff that I regret in that sense, but it definitely taught me about self-reliance, moving all the time, being poor, you know, value of economic prosperity. So from a young age, I wanted to start a business, like I was the kid with the lemonade stand, I was the kid with the whatever it is to sell or figuring out how to run a business in third grade or whatever.
Peter Georgariou: You had the hustle going on.
Jeremy Stayton: I did and one of the by-products, which now is probably cool but then was super weird and I had to keep it a secret, was I had to meditate before Saturday morning cartoons. So it was like one of the things and so – and it was like a secret because nobody knew what – that word didn’t even mean anything, you know, 35 years ago. So it gave me some measure of self-awareness and also just the power of stillness and thought, and I was appreciative of that as a tool growing up.
I also grew up working – helping my mom who worked and ran non-profits. She would also do a bunch of volunteer work like feeding homeless people in San Francisco, soup kitchens, handing out sandwiches. Whatever the case was, you know, many, many causes over many, many years. She recently retired but her whole life dedicated to service and she really, really resonated with Mother Teresa and that was like kind of her personal patron saint was just this life of service.
And so that really instilled in me this service, this selflessness, this maybe responsibility towards a greater good. And then combine that with that being poor and not wanting to be poor and be in a life of service, then enter a Green MBA program that I went through in 2008 right – kind of during the econ-apocalypse in the U.S. And that helped me to kind of bring a bunch of different desires and wants and needs together. And at the time, like you, I was in a corporate gig valuing stability and tried to be an intrapreneur, which is changing the organization from within.
Peter Georgariou: How’d that go?
Jeremy Stayton: Two years with some very expensive consultants that the executive team had brought on to determine what needed to be done to fix this organization. And I was part of this leadership Canada program and this cross-section of the multinational that we were part of that met – we all flew out together and met.
For two years we were interviewing and coming up with a thematic synthesis of what it is and basically what it came down to is that the values were not being modelled from the executive team and that the problem is at the top. There was backstabbing and mistrust up there and so that was everywhere else in the org.
Peter Georgariou: I’m sure they were happy to hear that as you reported back.
Jeremy Stayton: Yeah. They actually took that report, they shelved it and they said, “We need new consultants” [laughs].
Peter Georgariou: I bet they did.
Jeremy Stayton: And, “We need a new head of HR to oversee this,” so that’s what happened. It was terrible and tragic, so I quit. I joined up with a friend from grade school, who is still currently my business partner, and –
Peter Georgariou: What year are we talking now?
Jeremy Stayton: 2012.
Peter Georgariou: OK.
Jeremy Stayton: 2013. Yeah, it was an opportunity to do things different. I went from servicing Microsoft and Apple and Google and meeting with the CMOs over there and [unintelligible 00:10:01] those relationships to working for like five-person law firms and, you know, 20-person non-profits and in a completely different industry.
So basically just completely scratched my career path and trajectory and decided to build from the ground up with a friend that I knew and love and trusted and shared vision with me on really the thesis of if you prioritize your employees, if you treat your people well, they’ll then treat the customers well. They’ll then be empowered to live more fully professionally and personally and that the more of themselves that they can bring to work, the better off we’ll be. That’s proven true.
Peter Georgariou: It’s pretty mind-blowing, treat people with respect and they might do good work.
Jeremy Stayton: I know, shocking.
Peter Georgariou: Just like –
Jeremy Stayton: Shocking. There’s a lot of PTSD to do undo from folks that we hire that have just been traumatized. You know, we have this blacklist of words that we’re not allowed to use anymore; manager, merger – what was the other one – and there’s another one. Anyway, there’s just like words like manager conjures in people’s minds this terrible thing. Merger also conjures a terrible thing. So there’s all these words that have been co-opted and they don’t have to be bad. So anyway –
Peter Georgariou: Mental scarring –
Jeremy Stayton: – it inspired me to a bunch of awesome organizations that I will likely tell the stories of many times over throughout this.
Peter Georgariou: And we got to go get those people on this podcast.
Jeremy Stayton: I’d love to.
Peter Georgariou: You know, and it’s funny you say that because coming from big corporate, even some of what we put into place when we started KarmaDharma was leftover stuff from what we knew from massive organizations whose HR departments didn’t share our values yet we were going through the same weird, rigid performance reviews, or fixed pay raises on these percentages because you have this bucket. Like there’s the mental PSD of being in a place that feels slightly out of focus.
Like I was in there long enough and my wife said to me, she’s like – now we look back at it now, she’s like, “You were really unhappy,” I said, “Yeah, I was a good soldier putting on a good face.” And then I’m here not making as much money, but my happiness quotient is pretty through the frickin roof along with my fulfilment quotient, but there’s a lot of unravelling of that. You know, it’s really a slow burn of just burning off all of that excess crap to get to that core essence of who we want to be and what we want to do and give back and it takes time.
Jeremy Stayton: Yeah. I think we can thank, you know, this next generation entering the workforce and the internet, the acceptance culture. You know, it’s the whole tide change and I think the legacy dinosaur way of doing things they have to shift, there’s really no other way. And, you know, this is pretty perilous times I think overall, and people feel it.
And I’m excited because I feel like for the first time ever, we have a critical mass of organizations and businesses, in particular, for-profit purpose-driven organizations that kind of have filled every business need so you can kind of only do business – we’re really close to being able to only do business with other businesses that are – each dollar you spend with them goes to have a positive impact in the world. That’s cool.
Peter Georgariou: It’s awesome. Tell everybody, what started your B-Corp journey as you guys went into – what prompted hey, let’s get certified and tell us a bit about the journey?
Jeremy Stayton: Yeah. So I actually got familiar with B Lab in 2008 in my Green MBA program, and this is before they were even really a thing, it was more of a concept. You know, they were around but it was still like can you modify your articles of incorporation and your by-laws or your operating agreement and will that work, will that uphold in a court.
So the whole idea, maybe just a little framing for folks maybe that aren’t already B-Corps, is that, you know, all traditional corporations, C-Corps otherwise, it’s maximized profit to shareholders. That’s in the corporate charter, that’s what they have to do. There’s some infamous examples, Ben & Jerry’s was subject to a hostile takeover because they decided to prioritize people, shocking, and they actually had a shareholder resolution and they kicked out the existing board and – because they weren’t maximizing profit to shareholders and went a different route. That was a hostile takeover for the worse, right.
And so largely in kind of response to that possibility, B Lab came up with this idea of being able to balance the needs of profit as one of the kind of stakeholders, but also people and the planet. So triple bottom line is a common way to think of that, but multiple bottom line because there’s probably even more out there that some organizations track.
And so that’s what ultimately inspired me early on around kind of B Lab and B-Corp, I even applied for a job there actually in the early days. And I never thought – because we’re an IT company, a tech company, I never thought that we could have much of a positive environmental or social impact and so I actually delayed the decision to become a B-Corp for a long time.
It was always on my radar but it was kind of like we don’t really have a supply chain, we already went 100 percent, you know, remote, virtual so we don’t have an office footprint, can’t institute the composting program and whatever else we want. And it turned out that no, that actually the B Lab – the B-Corp assessment is quite robust and it measures across a bunch of different categories, six different categories, every business can make massive improvement just going through that process.
You don’t have to even get certified, just go through that frickin assessment and it will challenge you to do better for your people, do better for your stakeholders, report on things, actually measure things that matter which oftentimes I never even thought I could measure that. Yeah, you can. And so that was eye-opening for us and so we – it was really part of us achieving enough size and scale to be able to have the resources to invest in doing it just because it takes time and, yeah, we started the process in 2019 and got certified in 2021. I guess we’re a pandemic B-Corp [laughs].
Peter Georgariou: Your biggest takeaway, Jeremy, for you and the – like OK. So you went into it, you got an idea of what it was, and then you go through it. I remember you mentioning to me just – you know, because we’re starting our journey this year, you know, every organization should just go through the assessment just to see how a business could be run. So now that you’ve gone through it all, what was your major takeaway from the process or where does it leave you today?
Jeremy Stayton: I think you’ll see this is probably pretty common with most B-Corps, but a lot of pride. Because it’s no small thing to get through because coming out the other side of the assessment in order to achieve a passing score of 80 makes – it forces change or adoption of change in policy and practice to become a better organization. So it was kind of a conscious evolution of the business. And so I would say that that was the biggest takeaway.
So we still – I mean we had to create the policies and the tracking and a lot of the things in order to get through the assessment that are in place today and that are now selling points for prospective employees that come in and our benefits package is amazing, and our path towards employee ownership is, you know, solidified. And like there’s all these things that that started that were – I think it’s so easy to get caught, especially as a small business owner, in if this then that thinking, “Oh, if we get to this much profit then we can do these things. And if we can get to this number of employees then we’ll have enough time to do that thing that we want to do.”
And so this was really kind of flipping that around of well, let’s just od that thing and then that will lead towards employees having more time and employees – and us having more money, more profit because it’s aligning our business with our values and our people and bringing in better talent and not having to face turnover the same way and having a more passionate workforce and having a more committed and passionate customer base. So it turns a flywheel that didn’t turn before, that felt like it was always out of reach. So that was probably the biggest kind of bit for us.
Peter Georgariou: Yeah. You’re laying that values-based foundation at the beginning rather than waiting. I hear all the time it’s too – “We’re not ready to get married” or, “We need more money to do this” or waiting for that perfect moment, that perfect moment that –
Jeremy Stayton: Having kids, yeah –
Peter Georgariou: – never really comes.
Jeremy Stayton: – said now’s the right time because it’s never going to be the right time [laughs].
Peter Georgariou: Yeah, yeah, it never is. I have a question because I want to ask – this is what I want to ask our guests. Is there any one policy you put in place that you think everybody should do tomorrow B-Corp or not, that you’re like, “This is the bomb, everybody should have this policy?”
Jeremy Stayton: I’m proud of a lot of our policies.
Peter Georgariou: You can pick two, dude, this is [unintelligible 00:18:49].
Jeremy Stayton: Yeah, yeah. This one is often I think abused but I love our unlimited planned time off policy and our – just the way we handle – it treats employees like adults [laughs] honestly is what it comes down to. So the core –
Peter Georgariou: Another crazy concept.
Jeremy Stayton: – of the policy is really a philosophy that is spelled out in the policy itself, which basically says we all have a metaphorical goodwill bank account with our team, and this bank account contains goodwill and you either are depositing or subtracting and your job is to keep your account in balance. So just like any other frickin banking transaction if you’re taking out too much, you’re burdening the team. If you’re only putting in, then you’re burdening yourself and you’re burning out. And so harmonize and be thankful to the people that are depositing when they’re depositing because you’re withdrawing.
That’s the core of that. I’m also quite proud of our – so we have an e-waste policy. So we deal with a lot of e-waste because we’re on the tech side and deal with the technology of our customers, but everybody has technology. There’s two primary non-profit kind of e-waste resources in the U.S.
There are organizations that have certified small local e-waste disposal companies and sites and they ensure with a certificate both that you can like securely wipe drives of data and stuff, but also that it’s not going to end up in a third-world landfill polluting, you know, some kids that are picking it apart for copper. You know, that it’s responsibly disposed of. The e-waste problem is huge, the waste problem, in general, is huge so I’m proud of that one because we’re able to divert a bunch for our customers and they don’t even have to lift a finger about it, they can just know that it’s being done.
Peter Georgariou: I feel we should like publish those policies in our show notes if anybody just wants to grab them.
Jeremy Stayton: Yeah, I’d be happy to share our policies or even publish on our website because it’s almost a marketing thing again for employees, know the policies before you apply for the job. That would be pretty cool. So I’m going to turn it back over to you. We kind of ended at your deciding to become a B-Corp, but what were the –
Peter Georgariou: Yeah.
Jeremy Stayton: – what was the straw that broke the camel’s back of being like, “OK, we’re committed to this journey?”
Peter Georgariou: Yeah, that’s a good one. I’d been thinking about it for a couple of years, but I realized last year – I ran into a good friend of mine, she’s become a great friend of mine, Jenny Singh, she lives in Toronto, and she really brought me onto this path of understanding the depth. She works for an organization actually in the U.S. committed to reducing racism and growing equity and changing the system to allow for that.
So I started to get like this mass, multi-weekly dose of how frickin ignorant I was as another middle-aged white guy soaking and basking in my privilege and I was embarrassed. I’m turning 48, dude, in two months and my level of ignorance was alarming to me and so I started to get educated. And I took a course up here on the history of the Indigenous population in Canada, I’m taking an inclusive leadership course now. Both are free on Coursera, FIY.
And then a good friend of mine who we’re going to interview eventually, Mike Gerbis, he’s in my peer group, he owns a sustainability consulting company up here in Canada called Delphi and we brought him in for call it an environmental state of the union address to which once again you’re aware, but you’re not like aware-aware. You know, you’re just like that 30-second news clip aware and I said enough is enough, this is absolutely ridiculous, we can be better, we can do better.
And I really believe – so a couple of things happened. You and I talked about it and what stuck with me are two things was the one was even if you don’t become a B-Corp, but you go through the assessment and figure out what you don’t know – it’s like taking the blue pill from the Matrix, like once you know you know. You can decide to ignore it. I can’t remember if it’s the blue or the red pill, but you get my drift, you can’t shut your eyes anymore. And so I just realized that let’s paper this, like let’s make this real.
And hey, I’ve been married it’ll be 20 years this fall, 20 years and for me that’s important. There’s something about – it’s not true for everybody, I get it and respect everybody’s choices, but the paper and the commitment is just that extra level of – not justification, but it’s that extra level of something to live up to, an accountability.
And so if I have it documented, and our staff can see that we have it documented and we’re committed to this – and FYI we just got our HR policies finished. I was reviewing them before this podcast which includes our unlimited personal time off clause that hasn’t been announced to the team just yet but is coming out, we’ve been talking about it. So a) I wanted to go through the process, b) I was tired of being ignorant, c) I want to document it.
You know what really pushed me. My stepfather’s brother was a Jesuit priest, brilliant. This guy he ran a university, he had two PhDs and a master’s, he was like ridiculously smart. And at one point he told me way back in the day, he’s like, “Peter, you know you don’t have to go to church to be a good Christian,” and secondly he said, “It’s not actually what you’re going to do in this lifetime, it’s how you’re going to show up and how you’re going to do it.”
And that really stuck for me for KarmaDharma where I’m an OK marketer but I’m more passionate about transforming the journey of the people I work with and asking good questions. And so how we’re going to treat the people who are going to work here and how we’re going to treat the people we work with is way frickin more important than how good is my Facebook ad.
And so I really anchored into how I wanted to be showing up and the B-Corp just was like – not that it was going to give me this legitimacy, but I just felt it was a commitment and was going to hold me accountable to that next level that I want to be living.
Jeremy Stayton: I think it’s actually the red pill for reference.
Peter Georgariou: OK, fine. I took both so [laughs] – no, I’m kidding.
Jeremy Stayton: Well the little blue pill is usually the Viagra, so [laughs] that’s how you can remember it’s not the blue pill.
Peter Georgariou: It’s a no to that one, no to the blue.
Jeremy Stayton: Awesome.
Peter Georgariou: Yeah, so we’re there now. We’re there now, we’re going to work with our consultant who’s going to help us through the process. We’ve already started our policies. The team is on board. You know, it’s interesting in talking to the team is they’re all down when you talk to them about it, but I realize, you know, B-Corps don’t have a huge brand awareness yet in the market. For the keeners who know it, they know it –
Jeremy Stayton: Keener for non-Canadians is – could you explain that one?
Peter Georgariou: Keener, for real? OK, hold on. Keen is someone who’s an eager beaver. Is that American enough?
Jeremy Stayton: Yeah, yeah.
Peter Georgariou: Yeah. So for the people who aren’t up on it, not everybody knows about it. People are hearing it, now you’re seeing it in corporate America through ESG – environment, social and governance policies, or corporate social responsibilities – and some are doing it for all the right reasons, and some are not.
But I feel the team, just getting them educated on, “Hey, this is what we’re going to stand for and we’re going to put it on paper, and we’re going to live to it and we’re going to abide by these rules,” they were all on board. It was crazy, dude. I started going through the B-Corp, we showed them the assessment and as we were going through all that and their face is kind of like mine, “I didn’t know that existed,” I said, “Well hey, funny enough, neither did I” [laughs], “Not too long ago, I’m only a few months ahead of you here.”
So yeah, it’s been really a rallying for all of the troops and now we’re interviewing, we’re hiring to extra people. We just confirmed one yesterday and we’re probably doing to confirm a second tomorrow. But our policies and the way we treat our people, I said it, people are interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing them and so half of all my interviews are questions about why we believe what we believe, why we’re doing what we’re doing. Part of it’s on the everyday, day to day, but people want to know why you’re committed to doing what you’re doing and a lot of that gets entrenched in our values and our policies, right.
Jeremy Stayton: It’s remarkable actually, this whole great resignation thing and this whatever which is not – it’s not a thing for us. Not to sound conceited or anything, but it’s just not something that I had fear of. Creating the best place to work and that being a focus as a business strategy, which it is for us, means that it’s one – it’s the place people resign to go to. And so yeah, just it continues to pay dividends.
I strongly, strongly believe that this is the business model of the future. The dinosaurs are trying to turn their ships around and it’s hard but again, a lot of credit to the upcoming generation of not wanting to work for a soulless, purposeless company for almost any price. So I think that there is a change and it’s gaining momentum and movement.
And one of the pieces for me that kind of stood out as – I guess kind of popped up for me when I was involved with doing much of my Green MBA work was there was a cool – it’s a website that was started by I think it was Paul Hawken who wrote Natural Capitalism. And it was this basically Google Maps with an overlay of all of the non-profits, like globally. And so they’re trying to create – it was really cool, they tried hard. And so you could go to your local community, you can see all the non-profits, you can click on them and access and get information.
But one thing that just stood out so starkly is how many non-profits there are in the same city doing almost the same thing, competing for the same donor dollars, the same grant money and the same people, you know, the same employees. The most well-intentioned, mission-driven but ultimately some slight difference in approach or slight difference in something, no real good market forces to determine which is the best approach and then consolidate into that approach.
And so that was one of the things that got me inspired around kind of the for-profit, purpose-driven model was that there’s these market forces at play that are really good at forcing efficiency and value and making sure that you’re current, making sure we’re current with the times. So I like the challenge of it and I love market-based solutions that solve real environmental, social – real-world problems, yeah, because they’re usually creative and interesting and inspiring.
Peter Georgariou: 100 percent. And there’s room for both the for- and the not-for-profit do-gooders out there. So we’re on this podcast journey, getting started you and I. What are you hoping to take away? Like I reached out to you, and you looked at me funny and then you said, “Hell, yeah,” and now we’re here. But, you know, what are you hoping to take away from our interviews and what are you hoping to give back with this podcast?
Jeremy Stayton: That’s a good question. Take away – and so we looked at this, my business partner and I had a strategic retreat a few years ago and it involved a pyramid and that’s all I’ll say about that. We were determining kind of the future of the business, like where do we want to take this company.
And all of our competitors are hyper specializing by vertical, so just like hedge fund managers or dentist offices or whatever, right, doing the technology support for those types of organizations and then getting deep into knowing all the dental tools that connect to the computers and whatever. And the idea of going to like – and no offence to all the accountants out there but going to like an accountant trade show it kind of made me want to drink myself to death.
So instead it was like well who do we want to – what would be fun, who do we want to spend time with, and it was other people trying to change the world. And that was really the genesis of the pivot, going against the market, common advice, our competitors and charting a different course to being around the people that are inspiring, that I would want to talk to anyway. So now for work, I get to talk to awesome people that I love –
Peter Georgariou: Sweet.
Jeremy Stayton: – that I want to be friends with, and we get to do an awesome job for them. That’s way, way fulfilling and knowing that we’re furthering their impact – by them choosing us as a vendor we’re furthering their impact, that’s a beautiful, symbiotic relationship.
Peter Georgariou: Nice. I just want to say for the record that no accountants were hurt in the recording of this podcast. Yeah, so for me, I’m really hoping to learn, you know, a lot about what’s possible and looking to amplify the voices of people who are already in market kicking ass, taking names and changing the world.
You know, I read a while back that no organization can elevate its consciousness past that of its leader. So at a certain point if your leader is stuck in the mud it’s going to be hard for the organization as a whole to rise above. So I’m excited to tap both into the individual journeys of the people that we’re talking to and how that translated to their organization, and then how they took that out into the world.
So I’m excited to hold space for both, right. As we learn, hopefully the people, the listeners will take away what they want to take away and they can apply that in their life in real-time. A little bit of inspiration will do good in this world.
Jeremy Stayton: It helps. I think it also helps to hear from other folks that have been maybe in the same spot as people that are listening and how they –
Peter Georgariou: Totally.
Jeremy Stayton: You know, sometimes it seems insurmountable to see –
Peter Georgariou: 100 percent.
Jeremy Stayton: – a company that’s all the way through a transformation and how did they get there. It doesn’t mean it was easy, but they just started with taking one step and it’s sometimes helpful to hear what that one step was and that there were mistakes along the way and they weren’t catastrophic and –
Peter Georgariou: What?
Jeremy Stayton: – and just humanize the thing. Yeah, and so I’m, yeah, appreciative to be on this journey with you, it’s fun –
Peter Georgariou: Yeah, me too, dude. I’m excited. I say let’s see how this turns out. You know, we went with an idea that we’re both jazzed for, so I don’t think you can ask for anything more than that. And so I’d like to ask everybody just to stay tuned, we’ll be posting a list of our guests as they’re upcoming. We’re going to try and stick to once a month. We both want to do more.
So we might get to more, but we wanted to stick to something we could commit to while we’re running our own businesses. So if we can have a faster schedule we will be out there, but we’re committed to once a month for now. And like we said, if you know of anybody who might be interested in coming on and that might be you, or if you know someone who definitely needs to be on here and their story needs to be shared, please let us know.
Jeremy Stayton: So stay tuned for our upcoming episodes. You’ll find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, any place that you find your podcasts. Subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on any of those platforms and we will look forward to the next episode.