Beyond the Comfort Zone - Interview with Jim Stiff of Goodwill Middle Georgia

[Music] good afternoon everyone this edition of beyond your comfort zone i am interviewing jim smith of goodwill middle georgia and helms college i'm so glad to have you here with us today jim it's great to be here awesome well jim i would love you to just briefly tell our listeners a little bit about goodwill middle georgia what the primary purpose is what you're trying to accomplish sure goodwill of middle georgia is one of 157 autonomous goodwills in north america and we happen to have the territory assignment that goes from macon to aitkin to help people earn the bacon so we're about helping people to develop their god-given gifts their skills and to be able to move up in a career path so that they can obtain a living wage and a bigger slice of the american dream now goodwill middle georgia has something that's a little bit different than a lot of the other goodwills with helms college can you tell us a little about helms college and then its relation to goodwill so helms college is named uh in honor memory of dr edgar j helms who is the founder of goodwill industries and he founded goodwill in 1902 in boston and if you went back and looked at the operations in the first 10 years it really was more set up like a trade school so he worked in partnership with the business community and helped people to learn specific middle skills a cobbler a seamstress upholster a watch repairman and in a workshop next to his church those skills were taught and then all that product that was collected from the wealthier communities became tools to teach people to trade in these different workshops the product that was produced then was sold in the first goodwill store and that store was a way that he was able to generate revenues social enterprise revenues to be able to pay people a paycheck so they could earn and learn but also then he was able to open up new schools and new programs that help people develop more skills and more wrap around services and so helms college today is is our effort at our local autonomous goodwill to put together what are the high demand middle skills of 2025 and beyond and so we we have on our 2025 strategic plan basically four main schools that were growing programs that are licensed and accredited and federal financial aid eligible and those are a school of hospitality a school of health services a school of trades and will soon be opening next year a school of business and technology excellent um i'm curious what is a common myth about goodwill that you would like to debunk um for my audience because i know there's a lot of myths that are not really true about goodwill yeah no there's especially about this time of year in november or so the um facebook and so other social media get this post that says decide what charity you want to donate to and it lists all these different charities and it lists goodwill on the bad list and it says that it's owned by a guy named michael curran who makes four million dollars a year and so you shouldn't give the goodwill you should give to these other charities that it lists and and the reality is we're not owned by anybody except the community every goodwill is a 501c3 autonomous entity that has a territory assignment they have a volunteer board of directors that do get paid a pretty good lunch but that's about it um and and those volunteers uh are the governing board members that hire a president or a ceo of that local goodwill and that local goodwill and that group uh basically put together a strategic plan for that organization and that strategic plan um the ceo hires a team to to actually implement that plan and to achieve the success measures of that plan so so that the reality is that goodwill belongs to you in the local community it doesn't belong to any individual so while goodwill is run very much like a business to be effective and achieve its goals and accomplish um at the end of the day it is still a non-profit out there to help the community is that what i'm hearing yes and in some ways the fact that we're run with some very good business acumen and very good mba type leaders that run most of these goodwills around the country um has gotten in the way a little bit of us being looked at as a charity you know and so we're a social enterprise that that generates you know revenues so that we can invest those revenues in mission and training education initiatives and programs and so uh you know even our founder edgar helms came up with a phrase back in the 1920s which has kind of hurt us a little bit which is not charity but a chance that we're supposed to give people a hand up not a handout and sometimes it gets extended to our organization but we don't need charity because we run our own enterprises and our self-sustaining and uh the reality is as a nonprofit a charitable organization anybody that gives us a charitable gift allows us to build our capacity to serve more people but our enterprises then underwrite operational expenses so we don't have to go to the community and play a violin and say by the way now that you've helped us build this new campus if you don't give us more money we're going to go out of business and so we need you to sustain our operations we're not looking for sustaining cash we're looking for philanthropic investors that want to help us build capacity so we can lift people up through new educational and enterprise locations makes a lot of sense what would you say is the biggest challenge right now that goodwill middle georgia is facing um as a as a business or as a non-profit the uh i mean it's it's the same that most companies are dealing with it's the the talent uh the talent void even though we're in the talent development business um you know we've had a challenge everything from entry-level workers for the thousand employees we have we have a lot of those are entry-level workers so the void that we have to recruit entry-level workers as well as to try to get top innovative creative staff to fill executive positions as we continue to grow as an organization and we're needing new talent to take us kind of to the next levels and so i guess talent is probably the biggest void or challenge we have right now is there anything creative you're doing as an organization to tackle that well we one of the positions that we're recruiting for as a senior vice president of marketing on the top of their to-do list will be to begin to help us with our brand awareness and the brand advancement and part of that kind of brand initiative will be branding us as an employer of choice especially to entry level employees because we offer to our employees once they've been with us six months and their dependents of free education and training industry industry certification programs that cost nothing to them or their children to be able to advance their careers and then we offer half-price tuition to all of our degree programs at helms college which means if they qualify for a pell grant our tuition is low enough that they can graduate from college debt free by being one of our employees and so we're we're trying to brand ourselves as an employer of choice and saying that you know you can come to goodwill and grow your career and you then from here you can go anywhere we're not interested in keeping all the great employees we want to turn over them to fill the voids at other companies and we want to be able to educate and train them and so so that's one initiative we have to to try to recruit you know new talent that's incredible i mean that is an offering you don't find other places so hear that everyone um goodwill you can get education alongside work um and a paycheck that's pretty awesome that um and i mean it's great that you're doing that to help develop talent you know for the greater talent pool not just for yourself um very mission driven now a little bit more about you and your leadership um i'm curious what's the biggest leap you've ever taken to step outside your comfort zone and how did you grow from it so the biggest leap i've ever taken outside my comfort zone um [Music] it probably was you know us as a community-based non-profit deciding to start a college i think that was uh you know a bit of a you know a stretching goal that uh we're still you know chipping away to make it more and more successful but all of the hoops that you have to jump through to get you know licensed in the state and then accredited by accrediting body and then approved by the department of education and then [Music] learning all kinds of new compliance and uh requirements in order to stay in good standing um you know that was that was kind of a whole new world to uh to an adventure into back in 2007. that sounds like a gigantic leap into the new um wow how did it feel doing that but it felt mostly as the right thing to do um you know i've always had a conviction that people have these amazing you know seeds of talent and gifts inside of them and you know to create a an environment where people could be educated and they could water and grow those gifts and those talents and those strengths and then use them to you know have a sense of not only a dignity of a paycheck but career advancement and then to be able to take their families out of poverty and put them into um you know a living wage environment um that that was the right you know the right thing to do part of it that i think drove us to continue to uh overcome obstacles and and the department of education and other organizations didn't know how to interpret us because our accrediting body is the same one that accredits a lot of for-profit colleges so you know they were looking at us out of the corner of their eye not quite knowing how to classify us the department of education was looking down and saying well they're accredited by that group but they're a non-profit and they're seemingly a bunch of do-gooders you know there was a lot of figuring out what box people could put us in and we were we were unique because we were trying to create the um the best example of an experiential learning college in the country because every one of our programs and schools has businesses that were growing for applied learning so those students will go from the classroom to the lab then to our business enterprise for their applied learning before they ever get to a clinical or an externship stage of their education so we want people when they show up to those externships to have already been there and done that and then that allows them to rise to the top as cream of a new employer's talent pool and your business is a joke because i've eaten in one of your restaurants and it was delicious edgar's edgar's hospitality group is you know the applied learning hospitality network of restaurants and conference centers we operate a private city club we do food service contracts for textron easygo to feed a thousand people a day so all of those are different experiences that our hospitality culinary arts students can have to figure out what direction in hospitality would they like to go into for their career path now i always ask this because strong leaders all have had failures that they've learned from but most people never talk about failure and some people look up at great leaders as if they're perfect and they've never had to go through anything rough in their life which is very often not the case so i'm curious what's your biggest failure and what did you learn from it i mean i've got you know probably so many failures it's hard to pick one out that it is and i learned a lot from edgar helms too because in his life he tried all kinds of things and most of them failed but then the ones that were successful really were home runs so i always tell the employees in goodwill 101 at orientation that it's not how we fail but it's how we recover that's important it's the guest recovery experience that's important so i think one of the failures was there were set aside contracts um through the state of georgia for organizations that serve people with disabilities and we have very large contracts robbins air force base and fort gordon where we have uh you know 80 percent of our workforce have some type of severe disability and they're cleaning six million square feet a day and doing shelf stocking and so so we were we were very skillful at doing large facilities management contracts and there was a state set-aside opportunity that came along [Music] to try to work with a for-profit organization that that sold postage meters and so we decided to become a franchise that would be specializing in working with government organizations at the state level to have a set aside postage meter contract to replace the 600 pound gorilla postage meter company that did all the state work right and this was back in the early 2000s maybe late 1990s and we spent quite a bit of you know capital investment to set up the training area and to buy the equipment and to begin to get ready to bid on the contract and um the political forces out there didn't allow us to even get to first base and so we ended up kind of writing that one off but it would have it would have been a kind of a new way to help people with disabilities to learn new skills and uh i don't know how relevant hostage meters are today compared to where they were in you know 1999 but so that was that was one that was a a sour vic sour loss if you go back and give your 18 year old self one piece bit of ice what would it be eighteen-year-old self oh my lord i think um i would say you know do your best to get to know successful people uh ask them what their stories are and do lots of listening to what you perceive that made them successful when you listen to their stories because people love to tell especially when they get a little older in life they love to tell stories right and so you know so so make yourself available to hear those stories i think i would have advised my you know my young self to do that instead of trying to come up with so many nifty ideas on my own what's one lesson your career has taught you that you think others should learn at some point in their life well i mean it's probably the the old lesson that you know millennials probably are much better at this than the workaholic folks that are a little older is that you know [Music] don't don't marry your your job um too intensely because you may lose things like your marriage so that i i think you know the whole work-life balance um trying to figure out how to savor life more often instead of and how to you know celebrate as opposed to moving on to the next mountain to climb without pausing in between i like that celebrate so and talking about it you know advice you would give you know from a career to yourself um you know are there any books or podcasts or anything you'd recommend to my listeners on leadership or life that you think they should know about we we read as uh as an executive team my team that i work with two books by gregory boyle and the first book is called tattoos on the heart and the second book is called um [Music] barking to the choir and and both of those books um have wonderful quotes from all kinds of philosophers and business leaders by a a priest that runs the largest gang ministry in the world in los angeles called homeboys uh so he he tells these amazing humorous stories um [Music] that you know talk about how he's trying to help people become their best and how we can learn from people who have barriers and challenges they have more to teach us than almost any other uh kind of class of people and and and one of the take-homes too was being in the helping profession that that i need to show up with people to be with people on the margins and not act like i'm going to fix them or heal them but how are they going to fix and heal me and what a what are they going to speak to me that i can hear to change my life and then that will change their ability to be open to me working you know with them in partnership in kinship is what he likes to say very interesting i will have to look those books up because i'm not here to be there though myself so um just in the heart and the other one again my dog was really relevant a minute ago with parking i came to the choir the park came to the choir um i always ask people you know a lot about getting out of their comfort zones hence the name of the program but who is somebody that influenced you to get out of your comfort zone when you were younger what did you how did they inspire you what did you learn from them i think it was probably my uh my grandfather [Music] maternal grandfather willard wernett and i actually have quotes from him around our properties one of the quotes that i have says put your signature in the corner of everything you do and another one says do your job and then do a little bit more so so the stories that he kind of told me as a young boy about his adventures of taking a train to alaska when he was 16 and both of his parents had died and the adventures he had in alaska always had a moral to every story he told me he was called the tin kid he actually did his father had a sheet metal business we learned how to make little tin ovens for dog sleds and so people out there would be able to have their little you know oven to take with them um out there in the uh the tundra frozen tundra and so just but the stories that he told me were all about adventures about new opportunities about building things he helped the episcopalian bishop to build a hospital so all these all these stories got me out of my comfort zone being brought up as a suburban young lad on a lake in michigan where everybody you know kind of grew up and stuck around and didn't travel much and so i think he inspired me probably more than anybody in my youth to see the world and you know to try new and interesting things that would help me to grow as a person but also to to make the world better than than when i found it the way i found it sounds very inspiring um definitely tried some adventurous things too yes what's one question you wish i would have asked that i didn't well you asked a lot of good questions [Music] which one of your venues would you tour somebody through if you wanted them to experience your mission maybe maybe that one that's a good question so now i'll ask you for the answer so so i would probably take somebody on a tour of our i've been making at our campus today but i would take them to our augusta campus and i would tour them from the donation drive through [Music] where we're collecting things and processing those things and teaching people um very good organizational skills and production skills we do 5s quality training and all this stuff and so we take them from there and show them the pathway that the employees could take from an education and career development into hospitality health care and i would take them through the educational areas that those employees could go into and i would take them to the applied learning venues like edgar's grill where they would work in their fourth quarter of their culinary degree to do front of the house and back of the house applied learning and [Music] and then i would sit with them and have lunch and have the the helms college students tell their individual story to the guests and why the the education helms college was helping them to better themselves and to create a career path and having done at least part of that tour myself a few years back it's pretty incredible experience that's one of the reasons i asked you to be on today i think goodwill does some really amazing things particularly what you're doing in middle georgia with the college that people don't know about they just think of um goodwill is the place where they drop off things they don't use anymore um and there's so much behind the scenes and beyond that that is happening to support um people developing their careers so i wanted to make sure there was a shot to really highlight the great things you guys are doing and the leadership you are bringing to the table um i'm about out of time but i do want to ask you one more question in the spirit of the getting out of our comfort zone um what is something you would like to try in business or in life that you haven't yet i think that uh you know i would like to do in in life i i would like to travel you know to countries that i've never been to the far east i've never been to um [Music] africa those are two countries i'd like to adventure to too i'm incontinence and then i would like to help other people start a branch of helms college in their part of the world those are probably a business thing and a personal thing i'm with you africa sounds like fun and i love your vision of expanding on what you've built um that's very exciting and i look forward to seeing more of it as it continues to occur um so thank you jim for being with us today well thank you for letting me tell the story behind the store awesome well everyone um goodwill little georgia get out there donate support you now know what it's all about and there's so much great stuff behind it so thank you it's been a pleasure today [Music] you