Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, shares the life lessons he learned on early-morning bus rides, and reflects on being allowed to fail (a little bit), talking his way onto Wall Street, getting “behind the numbers”, the head and the heart connection, helping develop Dubai, defining “social impact”, and being valuable instead of just being important.

Special for Action Catalyst listeners: visit the link below, or use code "Action25" at checkout at MutomboCoffee.com to receive 25% off your order.

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Southwestern Student Coaching

It's great to meet you Bob, and I'm excited to talk

about your most recent endeavors around this. One of the things I

really love is exploring the journey to the current

destination. When you see someone who's generated unique

success, I feel like your resume unique is a good explanation.

Really excited to dig into it, because it's so different than a

lot of the experience that people have that have been on

the show in the past. So hear a little bit of the journey. Of

course, we can talk about the current destination as well.

Yeah, love to do that. I mean, sometimes I think the

journey looks more like a vagabond, and other times it's a

little bit more purposeful. But in all cases, it's been wonderful.

I love it. So tell me, you know early days, what

were some of your conceptions of what your you thought your path

was going to be? What track were you on when you were at a young

person, and then what changed?

Thank you for that good question. And I'm not one

to really do a lot of reflecting and reflection. I do a lot of

introspection, but not a lot of reflecting. And I would say the

first journey of any meaning that might be interesting to the

listeners is a journey that I took, in fact, my first year of

high school, I was born and raised in Southern Illinois, the

Mississippi River bifurcates, Missouri and Illinois. So I'm on

the East St Louis side, looking at the arch on the St Louis

Missouri side. And for four years, I commuted by bus, often

two busses, occasionally three busses to get to high school.

And so I would say my most significant data point on this

journey, as meandering as it's been, is that commute. You know,

I'm 1314, years old. Can't drive yet, needed to get to. I went to

a Jesuit boys school across the river, very fine School in St

Louis, that commute and being and I was undersized. I was a

bespectacle kid. I was a geeky kid. My book bag weighed almost

as much as I did. So you know those images of these little

kids with their backpacks and stuff, and so I'm kind of

dragging my, my pounds of books to classes every day, just the

interaction with the public, right? The lady who's, you know,

30am she's just finished her shift, or maybe the guy who

just finished his his midnight shift. And then there's the lady

who's on her way to work, because she's, you know, working

in a as a as a baker, and all these different sort of types of

people as I'm making my way to school, and I wasn't scared and

intimidated at all about it, but I'm like, How did my parents

allow me to do that? Right? And they said they were scared, but

I wanted to go to a good school. I enjoyed the challenge of that,

and I wasn't bothered by the two plus hour commute. I was up at

530 whatever I got done, I wasn't sitting at my desk by

eight for those four years. So that was the first journey, and

I remember thinking as I would go back and forth, either going

towards the arch or away from the arch. It was a tale of two

cities, and I actually wrote about that for my entrance exams

for college. How is it that such a short piece of river that's

less than a mile wide, the difference could be so grand and

so great, and so I'm leaving what would be called the inner

city of East St Louis, going into this beautiful campus with

very bright kids, and it comes from the St Louis side. I'm

sitting behind people whose parents own some of the biggest

companies in the Midwest, certainly in St Louis sports

teams and engineering companies and law firms, and that Taylor

two cities was very stark, but I learned through my classmates,

etc, that there was much more we had in common than not.

Oh, that's really extraordinary. And, you know, I

think, you know, you get into a different environment. What I

heard in your story that actually made me want to ask

another question. First is it sounded like you said you You

made this choice that you wanted to go to the school.

Yeah. And I can tell you, it's tough to make any

young teenager or kid, you know, at a certain point do anything.

It's just almost impossible. So one of the things that my

parents did is allow you to make choices, allow you to fail a

little bit, but not too much. A scared me is okay. Maybe a

broken arm is okay for. Some parents, but let's not lose a

limb, right? Yeah. And so yeah, it was truly a choice to go

because I I had a fire and an appetite for I was very

intellectually curious, and unfortunately, the programs and

the schools that were sort of the easy commute were going to

meet my academic interests, and so I had to there were two

schools that across on the st louis side that I that were

considered nationally ranked and world class. I didn't know what

the Ivy League was called and all that stuff. Then I just knew

that I showed a little bit of aptitude, and I wanted to be

around, you know, an intense sort of learning environment.

And so it was 100% my choice that my parents supported. The

tuition was quite expensive. I sometimes worked after school,

and it taught me discipline and but I it was a wonderful

academic setting. So it's certainly it was my choice, and

it was a choice that really put me on a very firm footing as I

went to other steps in that journey.

Yeah, well, you take out any any part of the

rest of your story, and you already have, you know, a

predictive amount of success that you know is coming out of a

young teenager. Because the other thing I do know about

teenagers is that they're not typically very inspired to work

extra hard.

Unbelievable.

So to actively make the choice for academic

rigor and to get on a bus of strangers, to get down there

says just a lot about the kind of character you had.

Two, brother. Two busses, sometimes three. But it

was fun. Learning was fun. Learning is still fun. I'm still

hyper curious. So it wasn't I didn't consider it rigorous or

challenging, it was just kind of a natural thing. So I guess I've

been blessed in that one.

So take that observation and then move that

forward through college to your entry into the professional

world, like the things that just occurred naturally to you. Yeah,

okay, I'll take three busses to get to a school that's

academically rigorous that I can learn from, of course. That

makes sense. How did that interplay into your early career

as a professional?

Oh, boy, so lots and so I'll tell you a story. I I

was a philosophy major. Went to a small college, Amherst

College, about 1600 kids. In fact, my college was about the

same size as my high school, and I chose there because it was one

of the toughest colleges to get into. I'd never been to Boston,

certainly not to Amherst. And we went to looked at the big, you

know, Ivy League schools, and I fell in love with the little

college setting, and studied philosophy and English

literature, read Latin and Greek. And so I'm I'm around

looking at all what my friends are doing and classmates, and

they're going to Wall Street, they're going to consulting

firms, they're getting their MBAs. And so wanted to learn

more about that. But mind you, I hadn't studied finance or any of

that stuff, but I applied to Wall Street because that's where

my friends were going. And I heard you could make a lot of

money doing it. And much to my surprise, they said, What does a

philosopher have to do with making money on Wall Street? And

I said, Well, I don't know, but I did pretty well in school. If

I don't have the same answer that all the other kids give

you, I bet I'll give you an interesting one. So they said,

Okay, you young whippersnapper, we're going to put you in sales.

And I said, No, I want to be in mergers and acquisitions.

They're like, You gotta be kidding. The M A guys, they're

the Masters of the Universe. Like, you gotta have a very

strong economic and maybe physics are certainly math,

grounding, etc, finance grounding. What do we do with

you there? And I said, Well, I'll learn it. Give me a chance.

And so I talked my way into being a financial analyst at a

major Wall Street firm, and they kicked my butt because I didn't

know nothing. 80 hour weeks, 90 hour weeks, some 100 hour weeks,

and I was put on the largest leverage buyout in the history

of finance, RJR Nabisco, and I was one of the analysts on that

deal. And so I went from studying philosophy to doing

high stakes, large buyouts as an analyst, and I had to make up

for what I didn't know. But I'm quite competitive, and I enjoyed

learning it, and I was a geek, so I didn't mind if I miss

social activities and stuff. I was sort of single minded about

learning this craft, but I had to bust my hump, and

occasionally I was hazed and all of that. And that's just part of

it. There were not a lot of African Americans on Wall Street

doing that kind of work at all. And so the notion of having a

mentor or having the support system, they, you know, they

throw you in the middle of the baton, and you swim or you

don't. And I just sort of, well, let's just get on with it. And

so I kind of Mr. Magood my way through all of these things that

others would say are challenges and and because, by the grace of

God, I. Always landed on my feet.

Yeah, with that analyst role, you being as

curious as you are, like, what were a couple of key

observations that you made as an analyst that said, I can make a

career out of this thing?

I'm not so sure. Cuz now, looking on hindsight, I

don't want to appear to be smarter than I was then, but

certainly so there's the observations I was making real

time, of course, and then there's the looking back 40

years observations. And so I don't want to sort of conflate

them, but it's kind of difficult to couple them, but sort of one

of the things that is a thread from my experience in high

school and the experience I had being in another pulled

environment with financial analysts and these Wall Street

bankers and stuff is that there really isn't that much

difference, a little bit of grit, a little bit of hard work,

being coachable, having some discipline. It's all the same

kind of stuff. So one observation was, whatever the

challenge happened to be, despite the fact I didn't sort

of walk in with the same sort of skill set, what I did have, from

my liberal arts background and my philosophy background was

very helpful. I got some fundamental understanding of how

to approach a problem, how to solve a problem, how to think

through a problem, thinking about methods and processes,

etc. And so I then I realized that why I navigated the

philosophy in the first place? Because I'm not particularly

intimidated by chaos or mess or data that doesn't seem to align.

I have a bit of a natural ability, thank goodness, but

some training to go into, whether it's any field, I think,

and through a little bit of hard work start myself out. And so I

think that was one of the key observations, is that this is

just another problem to solve.

Beautiful. Philosophy is a lot of things,

but there are a lot of rubrics for problem solving baked into

philosophy. And I feel like so much of navigating business and

growing business is a matter of of untying the knots and solving

the problems that are both inside and inside the business

and and the big problems that are the business is designed to

solve for everyone else.

That's right. Well, you know the biggest knot,

right? It's the people problem, that's the biggest knot.

People are your biggest problem and your

greatest asset. So, so how do you get just help us skip over

to this component. You know, your your role as a senior

investment executive took you to a lot of different geographies.

I mean, well, outside of the US, what drove you in that

direction? Or maybe it wasn't your choice.

Well, another sort of dot on this journey. We had a

friend and an undergrad who sister lived in Dubai in the

early 90s, and she was very cute, and he was very cool, and

he says going to visit my sister, as she lives in Dubai,

said, I'll come along. Never been to Dubai. And so we went to

the desert, and I hung out with Kareem and spent some time with

him and his family, etc. So that I first traveled to Dubai was

personal one, and just for fun. And while I was there, I was

talking to a gentleman who was a Bedouin, and he was dressed in

local garb, and he said, What are you doing here? And I said,

I'm on vacation. And he started laughing, right? This is the

early 90s, so he's struggling. Well, what are you doing on

vacation? I said, Well, I'd never been and my friend is

here. So we started chatting, and he said something to me,

very profound. He said, We don't need you here. And I said, What

do you mean? He says, we can send our kids all over the world

to your schools. So if you ever want to come back and you want

to do something here, it's not what you know, it's not your

learning, it's how you communicate and whether you

understand my culture and you can communicate with me. And he

literally took his hand and he moved it from his head to his

heart. You make that the head heart connection. And I would

love to have you back, but if you think you're going to go and

you're with your fancy schools, to come back and teach us

something or help us with something, don't need you for

that. And I really thought about that because I was contemplating

going to business school and doing more finance, etc, and I

shifted to go to study international relations, Arabic

at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

So rather than getting a traditional finance degree, I

went and started language skills, economics, cultural

orientations in Washington, DC, that actually helped orientate

me to, yeah, this is not about just the dollars and the cents.

There are people behind this, right? You know, there's the

famous the famous phrase that pilots don't fly planes, they

fly people. And so if you really want to get behind the numbers,

you got to understand. What those numbers represent?

Yeah, it's not just about recording the data.

It's it's how your ability to interpret it that really makes a

difference, right? And kind of makes or breaks someone's

ability, you know, career path in that area, I can see that.

And I think the international component, I mean, just it must

have been such a good learning experience in and of itself, to

travel like you gave in that great anecdote, meet with people

and break down different barriers that we all have in our

own mind and perceptions of the world around us. So this brought

you to your experience with, you know private equity, you know

venture capital, in the experience that you had and

where that led you. What were some of the bigger transactions

that you were a part of that provided significant lessons for

you?

Right, and so the role that venture can play in capital

formation and economic development, the role that PE

plays, I've had the good fortune of I moved to Dubai in the early

2000s to to work. I was an advisor to the Prime Minister of

the UAE and the ruler of Dubai, to talk about how to make Dubai

a viable and sustainable immigrant that was world class,

and what kind of services could be offered. And I was a small

part of a great team that helps develop the economic development

strategy of a wonderful immigrant and a wonderful

country, and so using the traditional tools of M A and

financial structuring and engineering and and

understanding optionality and all these things to bring it

into a very practical way, helping to develop a country,

develop a region. Fabulous. I was head hunted for the role,

and they wanted someone that had this curious admixture of of

skills and experiences. So the random guy I meet in Dubai is

why I study the Middle East and Africa, because I've done

finance. I had the finance I had worked in an entrepreneur work

working a couple of FinTech companies before it was called

FinTech around capital formation. Because while I was

in graduate school, I finally did go to graduate school, I

received a fellowship to travel through Africa, and I backpacked

through Africa for almost a year, visiting capital cities,

and one of the the first place I landed was in Accra, Ghana,

because Accra had just launched its its equity exchange and

Trying to understand how capital formation could have an impact

on the development of Ghana, the country, all these little bits.

And I didn't know sort of where these things were going to go,

but it's headhunted. It's like, Well, you got the

entrepreneurial bit, you got the economic development bit, you

know about the region. You got financial training. You seem to

be able to get acculturated pretty quickly. Would you come

from New York and and work with us here in Dubai? And I remember

telling some of my friends, and they were once, one funny story

is one of my friends said, you know, Bob, this is money making

Manhattan. What are you going to go do in the desert? And I said,

you know, I don't know, but they're saying all this crazy

stuff. If they can do half of it, this is going to be a very

interesting journey, and if it doesn't work out, I can always

come back to the US Now, fortunately, not married, no

kids, right? I didn't have those tethers, so that's how I ended

up moving to Dubai in 2003 and then working on what has to be

considered one of the most amazing formations, country

formations and formations in the last 100 plus years of what they

did in what was a desert into now a top 10 global destination.

No kidding, and to be on the ground floor to

experience that. So there's a stereotype Bob that maybe isn't

completely pervasive, but that folks who choose private equity

and venture and these things that you know, you know, they

don't really care about social impact. But this isn't obviously

a true stereotype. There's many that are involved, including

yourself. And so what you know, you obviously it took a slightly

unconventional path to get into the path that you did through

philosophy undergrad, so you already were outside the box.

But what led you down the path of creating social impact, and

how has business helped with that?

Yeah, I think you can sort of see the dots right. So

before you can criticize something, you might want to

become an expert at it. Everyone's got an opinion, but

every opinion is not informed. And so just starting with, what

does social impact mean? Right? That's environmental

sustainability, that's financial sustainability, right? That's

that, you know, those elements. Have some type of capital

component, and whether that capital is relational capital or

social capital or financial capital, I just see PE or

finance is just one of the tools that is necessary to creating

impact. And that social impact is financial impact, that social

impact is economic impact, that social impact is environmental

impact, etc. And so getting some proper training, and then

working in a in an immigrant and with other governments to sort

of figure out how we can take these traditional access to

capital issues, access to market issues, and create business

models around them. To me, this is a culmination of all of those

other things that I've done to see if I can take what to your

point, or skills, or one type of impact shareholder, ROI, and see

how you can if you have any kind of facility, right? And you

know, one of the, one of the challenges that the world of

Silicon Valley has and the world of Wall Street have is, what

kinds of questions are you asking? You ask the kind of

question about the kind of problem you want to solve, and

then the money goes to that. And you can, you know, do we really

need flying cars? But if that's the question, you can you can

come out a viable business model, there'll be someone

that'll help you fund buying cars, absolutely to your point

of sort of coming from the outside, whether that's the

outside, or having to commute to go to St Louis for school. I've

always had the blessing of being able to look at something a

little bit more broadly than most, and I apply that natural

instinct and these traditional skills to go, can I take this

totality of all these other experiences I've used in some

perhaps traditional ways, and bring those skills into

something by asking different questions and hopefully getting

better output and and I remember one of the first images that I

ever had that gave me a global perspective, and my father and

mother still have it. There was a an African boy who was

skeletal. Could not have been more than six or seven years

old, eating from a bowl that had a few pieces of rice, and I

remember asking them, and I still ask today, why does that

have to exist in our world with so much surplus? That's a

question that I had as a little boy, and a version of that

question I still ask myself, as we now are dealing much more

focused on the agriculture and coffee and cocoa and these

things. So it may look like it's this sort of security, strange

path, journey to get into social impact, but I think in the way

we define social impact, right? We're not a charity, commerce.

Can we use the commerce over charity? My partner may rest in

peace, has has a very viable foundation that has done a lot

of foundational work and has given millions of dollars in

education and health care. It's a nonprofit. When we started

this, he and I said, I we want this to be a social enterprise

that needs to use the same metrics of of operational

efficiency and capital efficiency as any other

business, because that's viability. And we're going to

use this model and the things that we've learned. So sir, you

are the passion and I'm the purpose, and together, we're

going to see if we can ask some good questions to have some impact.

I love it. I remember as a 20 something year

old having a an early midlife crisis, very early midlife

crisis, where I was thinking about, what's the purpose of

life, what's the impact I want to have, you know, and that kind

of led me to like, what's the problem I want to solve? And I

thought, Wow, there's so many problems to solve, so I should

probably be in politics. You know, I'd studied government and

politics as a result, and there's a point where I just

shut myself in my room for a couple of days to just really

write out all the things that were in my brain and to process

where, where I wanted to go and, you know, looking back on my

studies, you know, studying government, politics at

University of Maryland actually led me to this belief that being

a politician actually is quite limited in the type of impact

that you can have. And that's true and not true, probably, but

I came to a personal conclusion that one of the biggest

challenges were, are the people? What we started, people are the

biggest problem, the greatest asset, right? And I thought to

myself, you know, if we could change or impact education, and

maybe even in unconventional ways, we could help young people

develop a higher EQ, some of the things that are not taught in

schools, but how we manage our. Emotions, so that their emotions

can't be hijacked by others. You know that they could have more

self confidence and self value, that they can reverse engineer

their goals? I mean, these things that had helped me have a

transformative experience in my life, that maybe that was the

best place of impact, and that led to a career of coaching and

development and building a business that does the same. And

so I hear your story, and I think I agree with you that a

big part of life is making sure we're solving the most important

problems, and everybody's got a different perspective on that,

but we have some brilliant people in this world that are

chasing relatively silly problems to solve, or in some

cases brilliant people that choose maybe to just be

important in this world instead of being of value. You know,

what I hear you doing is being of value. And so what are the

biggest problems that you think are worth solving?

Wow, man, like, how long is this show? My goodness

first. Thank you for that. You know, do your own reflection.

And I love how you summed it up. You know, there are people in

the world that choose to be more important instead of being more

valuable. And it kind of links to the conversation that we had

a little bit earlier about understanding valuation mergers

and acquisitions, the valuation, the value to value an asset, and

understanding the values of an asset, right? And as much as

people can be a problem with regards to efficiency and

getting things done that the values are have to be about,

then it have to be distinguishable from the dollar

value. And this is a way that, when I'm sort of approaching a

problem, you know, I I'm very mindful of the, you know, what

are we measuring? How do we measure it? And is this, is this

going to be a values driven metric, or is this a valuation

driven metric? And they're both important when you're talking

about creating a sustainable model. And so in to get you your

question about what kinds of problems to solve, every problem

at some point has this tension, are we thinking short term? Are

we thinking long term? Or we want to, we want to, you know

whether it's health care, there's a cost benefit analysis.

Well, if we can get the vaccine out six months earlier, it is

going to have X percentage of people that can help, but Y

percentage of the people are not going to be helped because we

haven't, because there's maybe some additional things that we

can do. There's always contraindications, right?

There's always risks, there's always the obverse side of that

coin. And so to me, it's not so much which problem is more or

less important. It is. How do you tackle whatever problem

you're you're doing right? Because I don't want your

listeners, and I certainly don't think this way to think that.

Big problems, major problems. Oh, my problem is, I'm trying to

save the world from malaria. There are problems in your

neighborhood, there are problems in your school. The question is

the mindset around it, so let's not think about it in terms of

big problems or little problems. It is whatever problem there is

before you bring it, bring an interdisciplinary, bring a

diverse, bring a viable bring a perspective, a mindset,

recognizing that value and values are not the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, well done. I think that's a good it's

a great perspective. You know, big problems are important to

solve, but at the same time, they don't have to be hairy and

audacious and worldwide, in fact, you know, we need a lot

more people solving the local problem that adds up to a big

solution. And it's really about having a problem solving mindset

and how to tackle them.

That's right.