Bant Breen:
Jordan is the Co-Founder and Director of Good at Doing Good Works, which is a certified B Corporation that provides resources and opportunities for young people aging out of foster care. Tell us about the business and how you guys are printing promotional items. How does that function with the the the individuals that are aging out of foster care?
Jordan Bartlett:
We are a distributor in the promotional product industry. If you need your business cards, a t-shirt printed with your logo on it signs, banners, all of those things, that’s what we do. We’ve got good printers all over the country that we work with. Then within that business model, we have what’s called the 10-20-30 model. 10% of our corporate profits always go back to supporting young people in care. That could be paying for an internship, it could be housing costs, could be transportation costs, it’s kind of filling in the gaps that are there now. 20% of our time as employees, everybody in the company has one day a week for mentoring. That could be mentoring interns, or outside of the organization as well. I’m a court-appointed special advocate. I’ve got a young man who’s in foster care, and I go to court on his behalf. Some of those things take me out of work for the day. We have that built-in. Then 30% of all of our hiring comes from young people that have been impacted by foster care. Every pen we sell, every business card we sell, feeds that 10-20-30 model, and the bigger we get, the more impact we can have.
Bant Breen:
‘m wondering if you guys ever get asked by other companies to tell them how you do it?
Jordan Bartlett:
We do. Some people even say like, “What if someone steals the model?” That’s the best-case scenario. If more people are kind of thinking this way, I think it would be good for everybody. We’ve had a few people reach out, we’re still in the process of figuring them out as well, even from the equity standpoint. We’ve looked into co-ops and how can we kind of spread the ownership outside of the two shareholders that have it now, and looking at some of those alternative ownership structures as we grow kind of the promotional product side of the business, but also the mission side of the business as well and start to kind of find some other business models that can feed into that mission as well.
Bant Breen:
As you think about just the day-to-day what you’re doing, what makes you happy? What brings you the most joy?
Jordan Bartlett:
The 20% of my week. Working with our interns, we’ve got 16 interns that are in our cohort this semester. I’ve got two that I’ve mentored personally. I talk to them every Friday, and we go through the different domains of life, how to overcome going into grad school or finding housing, or all those things. That part’s amazing. Talking to customers that get it because of our mission, we’ve always led mission first. It’s gotten us in the door with some large customers. It’s fun to watch them react to it when we tell our story and some of the stories of the kids. The way the business community has reacted is awesome as well. Getting to work with like-minded businesses and then the standard business of creating solutions for those customers. Everyone is still in this weird position of how do we engage employees? I think we’ve come up with some cool solutions for that. That’s a lot of fun to work with a team on that because that excites everybody as well.
Bant Breen:
Jordan, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:
