In which Leela and Lisa discuss Judge and Co, a small landlord with a big heart, and the need for including people with a carceral system history in housing and job opportunities

Judge and Co on social media:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/judgeandco_/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cloverandbirch/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@judgeandco

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@judgeandco

Connect with Leela or Lisa:

Leela Sinha, aleixianoconsulting.com

Lisa Robbin Young, lisarobbinyoung.com

Patreon: patreon.com/LeelaS

Lisa Robbin Young 0:01

I, so I have, I have a really good friend who went through the judicial system and was in jail, and came out, and you know, workforce development was, was huge for this person, because you come out on the other side of jail time, and there are a lot of people who raise a skeptical eye to you, and all of a sudden you know they're wearing garlic around you and they're like stay away and it's like

Leela Sinha 0:24

oh no it's contagious

Lisa Robbin Young 0:26

right right exactly and it's like well this is a person who has served their time who has done the work of you know rehabilitating themselves through their time in the judicial system and now they want a fresh start, and you're putting even more stumbling blocks in front of them, like that's really not cool, you know. And, and everybody, every human being on the planet deserves a second chance. Every human being on the planet deserves the opportunity for redemption, and if we're putting all of these extra hurdles in front of them. We're basically saying, well, maybe you do, but you got to prove it first. You got to earn it first, and it's like, but they've already done the work of quote unquote earning it. Let's give them the leg up that they need, so that they, so that they don't end up back in the system, so that they don't end up being a statistic of all of the things that have gone wrong in this world,

Leela Sinha 1:22

so that they don't end up with no other choices,

Lisa Robbin Young 1:25

right?

Leela Sinha 1:26

Right? Like, and, and you know, of course, they've already done their time, that's one piece of it. And the other piece of it is, is every human being deserves housing, like, flat period, everyone deserves housing, and if you're saying, well, I won't, I won't house this person, but I also don't want them sleeping in a tent on my doorstep, and I also don't want to build shelters, and I also don't want to fund public housing that's good, right, and we see in New York City with Mam Daddy having to do all this work to like rehabilitate a lot of the public housing because it's not great, what what do you expect of them?

Lisa Robbin Young 2:05

Right,

Leela Sinha 2:05

what are you supposed to do, and I also have people that I'm close to who have come out of the carceral, and I, you know, I can't even bring myself to call it the justice system,

Lisa Robbin Young 2:17

right? Really, I feel that.

Leela Sinha 2:19

So, let's go back and start in the world of business. There are a lot of choices, there are a lot of lies, there are a lot of shortcuts, there are a lot of people taking those shortcuts and telling those lies. And then there are the people who choose to do it right at a time when so often profit is king. Those people are increasingly rare, but when those people are in charge, good things happen. Fortunately, some of those people are business owners, some of those people are bosses, and we are here to showcase the best ones. I'm your host, Lela Sinha, with co-host Lisa Robin Young. Let's get started. Hi, welcome to Power Pivot. This is episode three of season three. Whoo-hoo! I'm still really excited that we're doing

Lisa Robbin Young 3:05

me

Leela Sinha 3:06

too. And today we're going to be talking about Judge and Company, which is a small company that has a little four-plex where they house people with a felony history, and more broadly the issues of housing and employing people who have been justice involved in, in their histories, and are now trying to live their lives. This is my host, Lisa Robin Young, who is delightful and smart and thoughtful, and in her daily life, she is a consultant for small businesses. Is that an accurate? Yeah, I

Lisa Robbin Young 3:41

work with I work with organizations of various sizes, really helping them with the decision making layer of building a resilient business,

Leela Sinha 3:49

right. And I do team development, ethics development, again with, in my case, small and very small businesses, mostly startups that are trying to form a culture that makes it a good place to work, that makes the founder happy to be there, and that lends itself to strong ethical development as the company evolves. So, my initial vision was like, imagine, just imagine if Facebook had been founded with good ethics, imagine how different the world would be just with the influence of this one company. And then I was like, it's really hard. I know from my experience in congregations and other organizations, it's really hard to shift culture once you have a large organization. The more people and the more age you have in an organization, the harder it is to change. But what if we could change it right in the beginning? What if we could not have to change it at all, but just seed it correctly, get the right DNA from the beginning, so you can see why the two of us are interested in businesses that are doing things well. So, so today we are going to be talking about businesses that are supporting. People who have been justice involved, and I'm so looking forward to this conversation, because it's really close. It's really close to my heart. I have some very dear friends with histories with the justice. I hate that. I hate it with the with the carceral system, and and the kind of long tail of things like felony convictions,

Lisa Robbin Young 5:22

yeah, yeah, same, same. I have people that I care very deeply for who have had to go through coming out the other side and reestablishing themselves, re-establishing their, getting their lives and their houses in order, so to speak, literally and figuratively on the other side of having been imprisoned, and like, how do you, how do you put the roots down, how do you get that steady footing underneath you when it feels so often like the deck is infinitely stacked against you,

Leela Sinha 5:56

and it's not just, it feels that way, like it is, let's just be honest, the deck is stacked against people, and, and we have all these expectations of people, like, you have to prove it, you have to, you know, well, now you've done this terrible thing, and we don't really.. this is a.. this is almost a theological problem.. we don't really have a path to redemption for people in our culture, you know. Catholicism has confession, which is supposed to sort of wipe your slate clean, but a lot of faith traditions don't even have that, and the ones that do, it often comes with all these strings attached, and so when somebody has done a bad thing, then they're kind of stuck with that bad thing forever, or until they get to judgment day, or whatever the theology is, and the problem with bringing that into human space is that none of us are God,

Lisa Robbin Young 6:48

right? Right, yeah, we can, we can end the show right there. None of us, none of us are, and I mean, there are plenty of people who, who like to think they are, or want to play that role, and you know, we've seen how that kind of plays out in the worlds, not well, no, not well, and and I think that's one of the reasons why I was particularly interested in talking this week about the work that Judge and Company is doing because from a business model perspective, they've got, they've cornered a market, so to speak, right, like they've, they've found an opening that there's very little competition for, and that is providing housing for people who have a criminal record, and providing good, stable, safe housing for those folks. Right, like there are lots of transitional housing opportunities available post incarceration, and a lot of them aren't safe, a lot of them aren't clean, a lot of them have problems, and so what they have done is they've taken this four plex and they only rent to people who have a history of incarceration, and I believe only felonies, but I'm not sure about that. Yeah, felony convictions,

Leela Sinha 8:14

and the thing that they've done with this with this business model is not entirely dissimilar to some of the folks who specialize in Section Eight housing, right? This idea of taking a population that a lot of landlords don't want to, don't want to work with, and, and working with them, but what they've done on top of that, that I think is so exemplary, is that they work with them on the schedule of payment, they work with them on, you know, they try to be, you know, they started the series, I believe they started the short media series, where I found them, because somebody kind of half jokingly said that they were being slumlords, and they were like, so they started the slumlord series, but it wasn't actually, they're like, we're not slumlords, we bought a run-down fourplex, and we are fixing it up to the best of our ability. We both have jobs, we have kids, we have lives, but we believe that these people are people, and they deserve, you know, dignified, clean, well-repaired housing. And we believe that if you get paid every two weeks and it's easier for you to pay your rent every two weeks. We should make room for that,

Lisa Robbin Young 9:24

right?

Leela Sinha 9:24

We don't have to be like there. It's, it's unreasonable to say, "Oh, well, you have to pay me once a month. Why? If they're paying you twice a month, just save the extra half and pay your mortgage on time, like, like. And, and so this business of just treating people like people and being as reasonable and flexible as you can be, I think has done wonders for this little micro business serving a really underserved niche, because we certainly incarcerate a lot of people in this country.

Lisa Robbin Young 9:57

Right. Pause. Yeah, so. So, when we look at, you know, we were talking about this, we're not slumlords idea, right? Okay, one of the videos that I saw that I thought was really telling, and that I really appreciated, was one of the shorts that, that her name is, her think her name is Taylor Van Pelt, and and one of the things that she said that I thought was really, really useful for the world at large was this little video that she put out that said, you know, as, as a landlord, you have free will. You don't have to require that your tenants make three times the rent in order to qualify to rent from you. You don't have to, right? Right, you don't have to do all of these things. And I mean, I get where that idea comes from, because there's this - there's a financial model that says your housing payment shouldn't be more than like 39% of your take home pay, or whatever, so I understand to

be 25%

right? Right. And so I understand where the logic comes from from that, but I also recognize that housing costs are skyrocketing, and it's very rare in most communities that your mortgage payment or your housing payment is going to be 25 to 30% of your income, it's just, it's just, it's not feasible in most communities. So I really appreciated her coming out and saying, you know, as long as you're covering your monthly nut on the cost of housing and maybe making a little more, because it's, you know, it's a business, not a nonprofit, like you can decide how you want to do all of the different things in your business, long as you're being ethical and upfront and above board, and you know, doing, doing the right things, you don't have to do all those things, and I, and I, to me, that's an example of, you know, values in action, like you're walking the talk, you're not just saying, "Hey, we built, we took this fourplex, and we're renting, and we're not talking about how much money it does or doesn't make. We're not talking about, you know, we're telling you like these are the principles that we're standing on, and why we're doing things this way. I'm not just telling you these things; these are actually our lived experiences.

Yeah, and that it works out okay to rent to people with different income ratios, and it works out okay to rent to people you know. I think I think landlords, I find that landlords have gotten incredibly invasive in the last 10 years. In the last 10 years, the amount of information that any landlord asks me for in order for me to rent from them is just absurd, they want pay stubs and w2 and I'm like, I don't even trust you with that information.

Yeah,

like you're not a secured portal. What? How do I know what you're going to do with this information? And, and you know, there's just this, I think, increasing sense of entitlement among a lot of property owners,

well, I think the other thing that you're running into there is is blatant data mining, like let's, let's be honest about that, right? Like, when you've got these large rental companies that are national, they're pulling in all of that data and aggregating all of that information from all of their renters across the country, so that they can determine what their rental rates are going to be, so that they can determine all of these statistics that benefit them and what they can choose to charge for rental units. I had a rental experience when we were living in Nashville. We rented an apartment and we were on the ground floor, and we were getting drainage, sewage drainage, and backing up into art from the other units. We had water problems, we had all kinds of problems in this in this unit, and we had signed a 10 month lease, and when the lease came back, they're like, "Yeah, we're gonna raise your rent $200 a month, $250 a month, and I'm like, "But you're not even taking care of the problems that we asked you to deal with in a timely manner, and you want us to pay more for a terrible experience. I'm like, well, if, if you don't sign, we've got three people who would love to have this unit. I'd be like, oh, but that's the state of housing prices.

I'll tell them about

this. Exactly, exactly. Oh, I left a scathing, scathing review on Google, right? I'm like, you don't want to rent here, but they know because they've been aggregating all this data, they know that they can charge more, and they'll get it even if the unit is in a crappy state of repair, because there's demand, right, and they can gage that because they're pulling in all of that information from the renters that are renting from them.

What's that thing called that they're doing in grocery stores now, with the adjustable dynamic

pricing.

It's essentially that, right? And there have been lawsuits about it, especially the software that's allowing them to aggregate all this data and, like, figure out, like, how desperate are you, and what will the market bear, and at what point, you know, and they're doing this with. Job postings, too, where they're posting a job at a particular pay rate and getting a bunch of applications, and then they're posting it at, you know, $10,000 or $50,000 less, and and posting it again, and posting it again until the applications drop off, at which point they know what the lowest possible rate is they can post it at, and that's the those are the jobs they fill. It's just corporate greed has gotten disgusting. It's really gotten disgusting. So, what? That's one of the advantages of being a small, but you know, I'm always going to come back to what are the advantages of being a small business. One of the advantages of being a small business is that you have free will. You don't have to do all this other stuff because you're not publicly traded. You don't have to, you don't have to deal with your stakeholder, your stockholders, and and the liabilities that come from having other stakeholders in your system, because unless you're incorporated as a benefit corporation, your primary goal has to be money, and you can be sued for lack of fiduciary responsibility if you're not putting your bottom line at the top of your priority list, unless you're incorporated as a benefit corporation, which is a whole other something we should just do a show on benefit corporations, because they're awesome, and it's one of those rare cases where the government and an independent enterprise have gotten together and created a structure that supports people doing something other than pursuing profit, but, but when you're an independent small business, you can just be like, those aren't our policies, problem solved.

Yep, yep. Because I said so, that's why, right?

What's that line from Hamilton? Because I'm the president,

exactly, exactly. And that to me is one of the beauties of being a small business owner. Like, we get to be more agile, we get to make decisions more quickly, we get to change our minds more rapidly than larger behemoth organizations with 14 departments and 33 departmental meetings that have to happen before they can make a decision, right. And so, you know, when I'm working with clients and I'm like, you have the magic paint brush, take, take the ticket, take it, you have now you have the magic paint brush, and you can paint this to look and feel however you want, so long as it's legal, right, what do you want this business to really look and feel like for you, right? And so to give people or remind people that they have the sovereignty to choose differently, I was really pleased to see that in, in their videos, because it's a great reminder for everyone who's building a business that just because it's been done before, just because it's the quote unquote status quo, doesn't mean that that's the way it has to be, and you can choose differently,

right? And at the same time, you're not throwing out all your other judgment just because you know it's like I think a lot of the people in their comment sections are like, well, you know, we'll see how you feel about it when your house is full of, you know, active addicted people who are stealing all of your stuff, and they're like, it's not like we don't screen our applicants,

right? right, yeah, she's got another video where she talks about what it's like to be a business owner who has intentionally made this choice to rent to felons, and, and she says, you know, we work with the parole officers, and they want to send us their best, because they want to maintain a great relationship with us, because they know we'll give them good, stable housing, and they're not going to violate parole, you know, they, because they've got more of the deck stacked in their favor if they come into their living arrangements, so they're not getting, you know, the bottom of the barrel, they're getting the people who like really need the opportunity to make something of themselves, and this is the thing that's going to tip the scales into their favor, and they're kind of paying on time, and they've got a good job, and they're doing all the right things, like they're checking all the boxes. Why wouldn't you want to give a person like that an opportunity? Like, that doesn't mean you're like, "I'm just going to rent to anybody, but that's not what we said here. We said these are the criteria, and being a felon is just one of those criteria,

right? So, yeah, and, and you know, she works in workforce development in the prison system the rest of the time, and we could talk a lot about the ethics of working in the prison system at all, but it does position her well to understand what, what the system, parole officers, and so on, is going to need and expect in order to make this transition out of incarceration successful, and

yeah, she, she came from, she came from a different kind of business background, like she had an online Etsy store for years making wooden toys for. Children, and apparently, did pretty well with that, and through whatever happened in her background, she found herself working in workforce development, and she said, in one of her videos, she said, "You know, I saw firsthand the need for stable housing. We were putting them through these workforce development programs, helping them get job skills, helping them do the things they.. and on the other side of it, they still need a place to live, so I can go get me this fourplex, and I can put four people in a house and give them a place to live and help them get on their feet, like she saw any and she filled it, and like that whole, that whole being in the system, you know, and this is one of the things that that I say a lot, is you can't change a system from the outside, you can influence it, right? You can influence the movers and shakers inside the system if you're outside the system, but you by yourself outside the system, you, you can't, you can't enact change, it has to be from inside the system to make the change, and so she is someone inside the system at some point inside the system, who said I see a problem that I think we can fix, at least on a small scale. I think she's got another video that says, if you want to make a change, start with one, right? Right. And so she's starting with four, and she's like, let's go from there, and let's see what happens, and it's early days yet, but that that understanding of here's where there's a breakdown, and here's what I can do. Here's the thing that I know that I can do. Let's see where it goes. Let's do the best that we can with what we have, like that's what we need to be seeing more of in the world,

right? And, and being, you know, making yourself the proof of concept. So this is a thing that we saw in science before science, like, got rules, where you know, where a scientist would be like, huh, I think this will work. What if I inject myself, right? And, and that kind of making an example of your own life, of course, you know, and if you, if you watch her videos, you'll see that they're definitely strongly influenced by a Christian theology, and I don't exactly know what direction their Christian theology goes, but they do kind of cite this as a guiding set of principles, and this idea of making of yourself, making of your life an example is is not a bad one, especially when it comes to making this kind of change, because really you have two choices when you're inside the system, you can try and change the existing system or you can go build something that will create a different vision, and like we see that with, with these disruption models, right? We see that taxis aren't quite cutting it, and so then we get Uber and Lyft, you know, where, where, whatever the system is, it's it's disruption from somebody creates a branch of the system, and then creates disruption from inside of it, right? Because disrupting, you know, it's changing a system that's been around for a long time. Can you imagine trying to change the medallion yellow cab system from inside it? No. So, so you know, saying, okay, I see a problem. I can't create housing for everybody. I can't even create housing for everybody in this one prison where I work, but I can create housing for four people, and what that will do is not only create housing for four people, but also proof of concept. It will prove that it is possible, right? It is, it, you know, now. Now she can make videos that are like, I have four units of housing that houses people with felony convictions in their past, and you know what, they're some of the best tenants I can imagine having. They clean spontaneously, they take good care of me, they take good care of my property. They pay their rent on time. I really like having them as tenants. They're great. You could do this too if you wanted to buy a fourplex

or a duplex or a second place, right? Like you can start with one, it doesn't have to be right. Put someone in

your ADU,

yeah.

So I think that that this idea of starting micro is is germane in all kinds of businesses, right? Like, anytime you want to create this kind of disruption in the system, a change, especially when it's a, when it's an attitudinal change, when people like, oh, that's not possible, or oh, that's a terrible idea. Oh, what are you thinking? And especially when it's something that's good for your customers, when it's good for the people, and the story is, as it so often is, if it's good for the people, then it can't be good for you, it won't be good for your bottom line. Oh no, whatever shall we do, which,

if this season does nothing else, it is going to really shine a light on the fact that it can be good for your people, and it can be good for you.

Yeah, yeah, 100% And, and when you want to prove that, so often the best way to prove that is just to do it. There's another, probably another whole episode in the right. Restaurants that have decided to go to a pay what you can model, and restaurants that have, like, Heretic Coffee, which is right down the street from me in Portland. Heretic Coffee has started giving out SNAP meals, which is like a little basic meal that you can just walk in and ask for, and they started doing this in response to the cuts and snap benefits, and every day they post on their, if they post nothing else on their Facebook feed, they just post 38 people did not go hungry today, 43 people did not go hungry today, and people contribute. So I think this idea of, like, well, we can't solve hunger, but we can give out some relatively inexpensive meals and tell people were doing it, maybe we'll get some donations. At one point, they had like $350,000 in donations, and they actually decided that was too much for them to be fully custodial of, and they, they gave it to organizations that were also working on hunger, but like 43 people didn't go hungry today. It's just 43 people, but that's 43 people.

Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the starfish story, right? Like, the kids on the beach throwing the starfish, and some old man comes over and goes, what are you doing? It's not gonna make a difference, because there's all these starfish washed up on the sea, and he's like, well, it matters to that one, it makes a difference to that one, and you don't just, because you're seeing the impact on a small level, right, like the one person or the four people, you don't necessarily see all of the compounding ripple effects from that, and I know that that can sound cliched or Pollyanna or whatever, but I've seen it in business time and time again where you do for this one person or this one person does for you, and then that has an impact that then impacts, you know, three or four or five ripples out, all because of that one person, all because of that one conversation, that one thing. So, how much more impactful can it be when you put four people in safe, stable housing, and give them that foundation that allows them to go earn an income, take care of their families, right, because some of these people, they had kids before they went into the prison system, and to be able to say, hey, and this is this is one of my favorite stories, she had one of her tenants come and say, "Hey, I'd like to pay a couple of days late because I want to take my kids school shopping,

right?

You know, and in order to do that on that date, it means I've got to push this out. And she has a history of, you know, they all pay on time. I've never had, and she's like, as soon as I said that on TikTok, then, like, the next week somebody was like, "Hey, can I pay a couple of days late? But I was able to say yes to that because I was, I was giving them their dignity, like I was giving them the opportunity to provide for their family and take care of their kids and still honor their obligations to keep their rent paid, right, and that's what they want is an opportunity to just be human beings again and do the work of caring for themselves, their families, their communities, what have you,

right? And, and that story, particularly, was moving because she was like, this person didn't get to take their kids' school shopping for like 10 years,

yeah,

they missed that experience, that shared experience, that growth experience for 10 years, and they're like, I just want to do this thing with and for my child, and like, shouldn't we all be supporting people who want to do things with and for their children? Like,

yeah, there are plenty of parents out there who don't want to have anything to do with those kids to see somebody who's like been through what they've been through to say, my kids matter to me, and I really want to be there for them. Absolutely. Let's, what, how can we help? How can we, right?

How can we help? We can wait three days,

right?

Yes, we can wait three days.

Yeah,

and if your business is running such close margins that you can't wait three days, that's probably it would be good to repair that, but like then that's a different situation, right? Then you're like, okay, we have to, what, how can we compromise, what can we do to make this work together, but but but the beauty of being a business owner over time is that you start to recognize, oh, September might bring some of these requests, maybe we should have a little buffer for September,

right, right, right, exactly, exactly, and and this is this is one of those things when I'm, when I'm talking about with clients, I'm talking about like conditions for success, like what are the things that you need in order to be successful as you define what success looks like, and so if you're new to business and you're, you know, you don't have those historical cycles to go, oh, September might be a pat time when they're gonna need that, like, what, what can you, what, how do you price your offers, how do you structure things so that you can withstand the storms of the rise and the fall of of the ebb and flow of of money, because it's going to happen, business. This is cyclical, right, and if you're expecting that you're just gonna cruise along or cruise along in this, you know, horror vertical ascent for like you're fooling yourself, right. So you need to really be aware that money's gonna go up, money's gonna go down, income is gonna not always be stable and predictable. You need to build your business with a plan for that, and that's one of the things that I like in what she's done here is she's kind of peeling the curtain back and showing us, you know, yeah, we're doing this work on this on these units, and we can't afford to do it all at one time, and you know, we're doing it as we can, and we're doing the best of our abilities, and we're not losing money on this deal, because everybody's paying on time, like they're supposed to, right? Like, that's.. I think that's an important proof of concept,

right. And sometimes she's like, and you know, we left the materials for.. I don't remember whether it was cleaning or something like that in the laundry room, because I was going to get to it later, and I came back, and it had been done, and.. and this idea of developing, we're back to relationship, right? This idea of developing actively developing relationship with whoever you're in business with has all these little side benefits. People will communicate with you instead of just stomping off and being mad. If you're like selling a service or selling a product or selling an app, you know when you're, when you're in constant conversation and people know that you actually do care, then they'll relate to you differently.

Yeah,

and we can see an example of that, for example, in Graham Platinum's Senate primary race that just concluded, right? He got 74% of the vote in Maine, that is just Maine, is purple, that is just extraordinary. It is extraordinary. I lived in Maine for 10 years, so while I am not a Mainer in the sense that I was not born in Maine, I do have a deep connection and affinity, and I have a lot of kind of lived experience of what Maine is, and I, you know, I lived in Sullivan for a while. I lived on the Blue Hill Peninsula for a while, so that part of Maine is like home base for me if I were to go to Maine again, and and he has done the extraordinary work of building relationships. He went to places that nobody ever goes, because they're little tiny towns in the northern part of Maine. They don't have enough people to be important, but he understood that everybody was important, every relationship was important. And so he stomped around Maine, doing relationship building everywhere, and it made a difference. It made such a difference that even when major media went after him, Maine didn't listen, which is very Maine, by

the way. Well, it reminds you to try and tell

us what we're going to do. No,

right? Right. It reminds me of the story that Taylor Swift's first manager used to tell, he said, "You know, she came to me and said, I want to sell a half a million records, I want to sell million, I want to sell million records, and, and he was like, "Well, if you want to sell a million records, you got to meet a million people, right? Like, you, you got to go out and do the work of building the relationships, and now you know whether you like her music or not. She's got raving fans because of all that early relationship building she did directly to the fans, right, shaking hands, pictures, all of that. And you know that's a very high-level example, but that's an example. It's a teachable moment that you can bring down into your business. How are you relating to the stakeholders in your, in your company, in your organization, in your business, your clients, your team members, you know, like the community that you work in and serve in? Like, what relationships are you building, and how are you building them, and are you only building them with a certain kind of person, right, because of the expectations that you have around what that's supposed to look and feel like, or are you really looking at the human experience and allowing yourself to be a true part of the community that you know you're, you're a part of. When I look at the companies that we've previously profiled, you know, they're, they're, they're in their communities, right, like they care about what's going on in their, their communities, and that I think makes a big difference too.

Yeah, so I think it's, it's really, you know, you bring up the people we talked about before, and I think we might have to go back and talk about mr. Mixer for a second.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So our

last episode, our very just last time episode, was about mr. Mixer, who has this whole business. Where he repairs KitchenAids, and he loves repairing KitchenAids, and KitchenAids are repairable, and that's like the whole base of his business. So, what video comes out immediately? Like, I'm still.. I just finished editing that episode today. This, his video came out like two days ago. You want to tell everyone what it said?

Yes. So, KitchenAid is remodeling their mixer, they've gone solid state, and they're taking all the mechanical guts out of the machine, and they're replacing them with questionable upgrades, I mean, the marketing language is, hey, we had so many bakers who were asking for these features, so we're giving them to you, and the cost of doing business on that is, we're not going to have the mechanical parts anymore, we're going to have these electronic solid state pieces that you can't fix and repair and replace, and yeah,

so mr. Mixer is looking at manufacturing those parts, and I don't know how much he can get around the patents, but the patents are eventually going to expire.

Oh, patents have long expired. The only thing that hasn't expired is the shape of the KitchenAid mixer, because it's a trademark, right, and so as long as they keep the trademark register, he can never make anything that looks like a KitchenAid, but all of the parts inside, well, all of the old electrical parts inside are well past patent. The planetary design mechanism that's well past patent, those have all expired, I think they still have, like, the beater head, the plastic-coated beater head. I think that's still in patent, but they've redesigned the beater head, even. It's this flat,

yeah, it's ugly.

Yeah, it's, it's really not sleek at all, and it's, it's really disappointing, but that way they get a new patent, right? Like, they can issue a new patent for that, but the old pieces still work, so those old attachments are still gonna fit. We're gonna go ahead and probably still buy those old attachments,

right? So, mr. Mitchell is looking at starting to manufacture as many as possible, and he'll probably be asking for support from his followers to set that up, but just such a, you know, it's funny because I said he hasn't gotten in trouble with Whirlpool, and I think I don't know, he actually said in that video, like maybe it was me drawing attention to how repairable they were, I don't know, but but this is a classic case of a company trying the baby out with the bath water,

yeah, and, and Whirlpool has historical has a history of taking a product and modifying it in such a way that it's basically got planned obsolescence right there. I can't tell you the number of dishwashers and washing machines that have no fixable parts inside, right? No use of no serviceable parts inside. You're just gonna have to buy a new one. So, it doesn't surprise me that it has, that they have moved in this direction. It kind of surprises me it took them this long, but it may be a function of, hey, you know, it took us this long to figure out how to do it in this body, because this body is trademarked, and it's

right,

it's a, it's brand recognition, and we don't want to mess with that. So, we have to pull all the guts out and figure out, how do we, how do we electronify all of this stuff? So, yeah, which,

you know, I think I've been saying for years that people should, some company, some startup should just be a startup that takes out of out of date patents of really great 1950s and 1960s machines for the kitchen and for the house and builds them in this like deliberately repairable way, and I'm not the only person saying that, so my hope is that mr. Mixer becomes one of those microcosmic proof of concepts, proofs of concept that we were talking about just a second ago, right, where, where he's like, I'm already manufacturing the spring, I'm already manufacturing the Everdim, I'm all already made, so like I already have a kind of a workflow for this. What if I started to manufacture all the other parts that they're not going to sell anymore?

Well, and I mean to your point, this is this is actually this is the the the next step in proof of concept, right? Like the start with one principle, I think he started with the screw, right, spring or the spring, it started, he started with the spring, and then it was like, oh, okay, we've got traction on that now, let's do the advertising, okay, that's cool, now let's do the handle, okay, that's cool, now let's right, and so slowly it. Expanding the the offerings, but then also expanding the user base, right? Like the people who are aware. I didn't even know he existed until you told me something about him, and I owned a KitchenAid mixer for months and months. So, you know, like, as awareness starts to grow and the audience follows as buyers, now you can experiment with more things, and so I think it's great to see him saying we're gonna step out and do some more parts, we're gonna step out and try some new things, and hopefully he'll have enough traction to be able to make that work, but the thing that I think is really cool is he's not just crossing his fingers, he's saying hey, since you're already part of the community,

right.

We'd like your support in getting this off the ground, and

because he knows everybody's going to be disappointed, right. His whole audience is specifically there because of the repair ability and the mechanical parts of a KitchenAid. His audience is already complaining that there are too many circuit boards. His audience is not going to be happy that KitchenAid is wiping out the entire infrastructure that they love,

right? They're just,

they're not going to be happy. So I can see, you know, 10 years down the road, I can see the mr. Mixer becoming its own thing, like designing a body that's sufficiently different that it escapes the patent, and basically selling a fork of the KitchenAid, and that's similar, you know. We were talking about Judge and Company, which is providing housing, probably in the future. We're going to talk a little bit about the particularly pizza companies that seem to be hiring people with felony histories. I don't know what it is about pizza companies. Maybe, maybe that's there's a particular set of skills that you learn in prison, like if you end up working in the food service in prison that leads to pizza. I don't actually know, but but there are especially food companies that are that are hiring people with prison histories to work there, and even some that are only hiring people with, with histories in the carceral system to work there, and so when we get these two pieces stabilized, right, when we get housing stabilized and work stabilized, and you're not like a marginal employee just because you came in with that history, and you're not a marginal tenant just because you came in with that history. So you can stop carrying that constant stress in your head, that if you mess up even the tiniest little bit, you're going to get kicked out, because that's real.

Yeah,

then your stress level drops, your cortisol level drops, your health levels go up, and also this stable income allows you to provide for yourself things like health insurance and provide for your family things like care, and so you like this creating an ecosystem around yourself is is one of the best things you can do, so you know in that case, or if we look at mr. Mixer, you know, he, he started with a spring, and he ended up with a radically dedicated community, and that community means that if, let's say, he wanted to just stick to the parts and repair thing, but somebody else wanted to manufacture a mixer that could use all those parts, right, he, he could end up part of an ecosystem, and that ecosystem could grow beyond mixers, like I saw him repairing, or trying to repair a milkshake machine, a vintage milkshake machine.

Oh, real

ster, it was Oaster, it wasn't KitchenAid, but somebody sent it in, and he was like, "I'll give it a shot, and I don't think he was able to do it. I think something key was was burnt out, but but you can see the beginnings of the of the scope creep as people like, "Oh, you fix old kitchen things, can I send you my old kitchen thing? And and what happens is, when you're part of an ecosystem that is built out in that way, the whole ecosystem benefits, right? So, when we're talking about preventing recidivism and improving people's lives after they've been involved with the with the car show system, what we end up with is, oh, you've got housing, you've got a job. Now we're talking about, like, improving job skills, right? You have this job, but maybe this job is just the only job you could get. Let's, let's create the ability for career growth. Let's create something that uses some of the particular skills and experiences that you got that a lot of people don't have to build you into a particular industry. Let's you know, I've seen some videos of people who are incarcerated and who are already working in software programming while they're incarcerated on. Special work release can't work release, there's they're still there, but they're, but they're be they're able to work remotely, so they can build the skill set, so and then we end up with an entire ecosystem, and then we can talk about reducing poverty, and we can talk about improving, you know, other kinds of social supports, and next thing you know, we've reduced the need for a carceral system, which, of course, will make the industry of, of, you know, for-profit incarceration mad, but I don't care, right?

Yeah, if, if we can lose, if we can lose industries that matter because of things changing over time, and progress being made. Then, why can't we also be willing to let go of industries that are doing more harm than good? Right,

right, right, and that are actually encouraging, or forcing, or supporting our systems to do things that are terrible. We could stop, we could just, we could not do terrible things so often, that would be great. Any last words,

you know, for me, I came into this episode with a little bit of resistance, partly because I have people in my world who are very close to me, dear to my heart, I was not sure I was going to be able to get through this episode either without a lot of tears or a lot of rage against the machine, and at the same time I'm really grateful that we have an opportunity to highlight these kinds of, I mean, this whole season is like best bosses, right, like to be able to look at people who are making decisions that are actually serving the greater good and doing business inside, inside the system, inside the system, right? Like, right, we're seeing what good can come of people making choices to serve humanity and still be profitable.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, obviously I think this way I wouldn't be doing this podcast, but I think it's so important to recognize that these false dichotomies that are set up do not benefit any of us, like if somebody is telling you that xyz is impossible because while it would serve the greater good, it's not sustainable. I'm going to have my whole skeptical face on right there.

Sometimes, sometimes it doesn't need to be sustainable to be good and effective.

Also,

you know, like, okay, so it's not sustainable. I'm still going to do the thing because it's the right thing to do. It's like it's a, it's going to create good in the world, and maybe I can't do it forever, maybe I can't get all the starfish off the shore, but it's going to matter to the starfish that I can,

right, right, and and sustainable doesn't have to mean that it solves the entire problem permanently, right, exactly, it can be sustainable by just, you know, I stop throwing starfish and eat lunch every day, so that I don't die of starvation and dehydration while I'm walking down the beach,

and I invite some other people to grab some starfish too, right? Like, and we perpetuate it. It can be sustainable in different sustainability can look different in different ways if we're willing to use our eyes to see them differently, right? Like, if we always have this limited viewpoint of how we're defining anything, we're going to be stuck with that definition instead of seeing what the full spectrum of possibility is for the terms that we're using or the world that we're trying to define for ourselves.

Yeah, yeah, and I think that the other people piece is really important too, right? Because if you keep inviting people to the beach to throw starfish, you will eventually all be eating lunch, or most of you will be eating lunch together, except for like three introverts were like, I need a break, we can talk while we throw starfish, but I need a break, and making space for that too, right, making space for some people to be like, I need to not be quite so interpersonal right now, but, but creating the community, and then eventually what you usually end up with in a community specialization, so some people bring the buckets, and some people do the throwing, and some people do research about starfish, and discover that some of the starfish need to be walked out, and so there's this like brigade of people walking those starfish out into the water, instead of just flinging them right, and and so the care improves, and the community strengthens, so that if you can't make it, you don't feel like, oh, if I don't go out there, all those starfish are gonna die, no, if I don't go out there, a bunch. Whether people will be out there doing their best with the starfish, and I will be home in bed with my chicken soup, and that's okay too. And so, what we end up with is improving the sustainability by improving the community, because it's not sustainable if it's just me and I have to be out there seven days a week. It's, it is sustainable if it's me and 10 or 20 or 50 or 3000 other people, and we're all doing a little bit, and we're figuring it out, and improving, and changing our processes as we go. 3000 people don't fit on the beach the same way five people do, but they will fit on the beach, and they will make a difference, and maybe when you're at 3000 you can do a couple of beaches, right, and it starts to creep. There's so many grains of sand in the world. Yes, but we're going to start with these grains right here.

Start with one, start with one, start with, start with

one, start local, start with one, start with what you can do without harming yourself, and, and the beauty of doing that is also that you get to figure out what doesn't work before you're at scale,

yeah.

And, and, and as you build community, you find out what works for one person and doesn't work for another person, and so you end up with this kind of beta testing situation where nobody can nay, say your project, or they can try, but, but they're going to say, "Oh, well, that doesn't work, and you're going to go, "It works for these 10 people, it didn't work for these 15 people. So we designed something different for them, so they have this other system, and and then people like, "Oh, and they can't argue with, right, because you have 10 people here for whom it's working, 15 people there for whom that didn't work, but this does work, and, and the more robust your system becomes, the less people from outside your system really have any traction or any credibility.

Yeah, yeah, and it always slays me when you have these armchair quarterbacks who have never done this work, who are going to tell you all the ways that it can't work. You know what? When, when you get out of your armchair and you come over here and you work with us, then you've got room to talk. In the meantime, I'm gonna be over here with my starfish. You just go and try. I mean,

I have, I have certain concerns about Brene Brown, but the idea of being in the arena is real,

yeah.

You know that, that the people who get to talk about what I'm doing are the people who are in the arena, and if they're not in the arena, I don't want to hear. Well, thank you. This has been delightful. Thank you for

having me. I love with you,

and rant on some of our favorite topics together, wouldn't have it any other

way,

right? If people want to find you, where should they look?

The easiest place to find me is pretty much anywhere on the interwebs. Lisa Robin young.com is the website. Robin's Got 2b's and I am at Lisa Robin Young on most of the socials, LinkedIn, YouTube, you can find me to spend anywhere,

and as you can tell, she's great to talk to. So, like, get in touch, have a conversation, maybe she can help you. And you can find me at Allegiant Oh Consulting, which I will put on the screen, because it's a pain to spell, or you can find me on most social media at under Leila Sinha, but I'm less and less active on regular social media. If you want to support the podcast, come find us at on my Patreon at patreon.com/leela S, and sign up to give us a little boost and see a little more of my stuff. I kind of, I'm starting to aggregate all of my stuff on my Patreon, so if you want to see my other writings and things like that, you can find it there. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you again in two weeks. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Power Pivot Season Three, a podcast about using the power in your business for good with host Leila Sinha of the Intensives Institute and Allegiant Oh Consulting with Zim. You heard co-host Lisa Robin Young. The podcast is produced by Leela Sinha with support by William Jameson. To support our podcast and other related work, please consider joining our Patreon at patreon.com/lela S.

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