How Baby2Baby stepped up as LA wildfires raged, with co-CEOs Norah Weinstein and Kelly Sawyer Patricof

0:00Scaling a business in the US can feel like a maze. Each state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert, plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So, if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com. slash MOS and get up to three months free. One of the patterns I've seen over and over and speaking with successful founders is this.

0:40They don't wait for HR problems to show up. They build solid systems early on so their company can grow without tripping over itself. JustWorks is one of those systems. JustWorks is the human resources platform that helps you scale without sacrificing your team's needs. It handles automated payroll, benefits, compliance, even international hiring, so you can scale your team without slowing your momentum. JustWorks secures your hiring systems so they don't cost you time, money, or people, which is how you scale with confidence. JustWorks for your people. Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. This week, we're sharing my conversation with the incredibly impressive co-CEOs of the not-for-profit Baby2Baby.

1:31From day one of the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles at the start of the year, Baby2Baby was on the ground providing essential items to families in dire need. Disaster relief is just part of the support that Baby2Baby provides under Nora Weinstein and Kelly Sawyer-Patrikov's leadership. In partnership with not-for-profits around the country, they've now distributed more than 250 million diapers, and they now serve over a million families across the United States each and every year. We gathered recently for a Masters of Scale live event in Los Angeles, presented by our partners at Capital One Business, to talk about how Kelly and Nora have scaled baby to baby and what it was like to face a disaster in their hometown.

2:21You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I'm supposed to know what to do. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

2:51This is Masters of Scale.

3:00Kelly, Nora, welcome to Masters of Scale. I can't imagine a more fitting and important conversation for us to have on this stage in L.A. I've been here for 20 years in L.A. It's home for me. And the fires that we had at the top of the year were devastating for, I'm sure, everyone in the room. If you weren't personally affected, someone you love, some member of your family lost their home, lost their business, lost their community. And so I want to take us back to January 7th. Where was each of you when you first heard about the fires? The news obviously started unfolding slowly. So it was, I was talking to colleagues.

3:38I had friends calling. I live in Brentwood. And Baby to Baby has now responded to 100 disasters. but this one was different because this was our backyard. It was our home. So while we're used to saying, okay, everyone, we're having a huddle. There's a hurricane or this is hitting Texas or this is happening in Florida. This was the manager of our warehouse has now just been evacuated or I was figuring out where my kids were in school and finding out what was happening. So it was so personal from the get-go. we had to kind of juggle dealing with the personal and dealing with the professional, which was our jobs in this moment were to take what we had learned in 14 years and apply it where we're looking out for children and families in disasters and apply all the lessons we've learned into this moment where it probably mattered the most.

4:37Kelly, where were you? I was sadly in bed with the flu on the fire relief huddles on Zoom. And, you know, we're watching each of our employees be evacuated. One of our employees lost their home. Their sister lost their home. They evacuated with their children with just the clothes on their back. So we were really in it in a way we'd never been in it before. But that felt so different to us and personal to us because they're all around us. Not only friends were losing their homes, but also our staff. who we care so much about. And what was so amazing was that the community came together and Baby to Baby became this kind of like hub of like, what can we do?

5:19How can we help? We've never had like volunteer sessions so full, people like beating down our doors to come. And there were hundreds of people multiple times a day coming and wanting to help. And many of the people who came had lost their own homes. And they just, you know, would cry and say like, I want to do something. I don't know what else to do. I just want to help. And so people are putting together fire relief packages for children and, you know, families who've lost everything. And it was so scary and sad, but also so inspiring to see LA and the community come together in that moment and to have the space to be able to hold that.

5:57So how did you flip from we've got to deal with ourselves and our people to we've got to serve the community? How did you transition into that mode? I feel like we have seen it before because through our disaster relief work, we're constantly around people in these other cities who are having similar circumstances. Our team over 14 years has built this expertise and we've built it in 50 states and 300 cities. But in Los Angeles, our team knows this city every inch of it. And we know where children are and we know where the most vulnerable children are. How do you know that? Is there data telling you that?

6:34Is it because you've got partners? Where's that coming from? Right. So it's because 14 years ago when the two of us took over the leadership of Baby2Baby and built what Baby2Baby is today, we've always been a model where we don't serve families and children directly on a regular basis. We've always known that in order to scale, we had to serve partners, serve clients. So what that means is we've been building for 14 years a network of organizations in Los Angeles and all over the country. So speaking about Los Angeles, we have a program team that is working with hospitals, foster care agencies, homeless shelters, schools, community resource centers.

7:21And one by one, we onboarded them to serve them on a regular basis so that we might have a tiny homeless shelter in the valley and they have eight beds and we know that regularly they need supplies for the rotating eight families that might be coming in and out. Then we also serve the entire Los Angeles Unified School District where we're serving tens of thousands of students who go to school and they're identifying who the students are who are most in need, who are experiencing homelessness, who might be in foster care, et cetera. We know which shelters to be looking out for to think, well, that shelter must have burned down, so we need to get to these kids and they probably would have gone here.

8:06Or we know the principal at this school, so we're going to know who to contact. We were able to activate very quickly. Kelly, help us understand the scope and scale of what the relief efforts required and what Baby2Baby did in that moment. I think, you know, we have this huddle in the morning. It's 9 a.m. The whole team is on and it's every department and everyone's coming in. We're like, OK, this is what we need to do today. We're going to do a pop up distribution outside of our own parking lot at Baby to Baby. and we're going to serve families with, here are the top needed items. And it's diapers, formula, baby food, and people are coming through and they're driving through and we're putting everything in.

8:44We're also sending to these shelters that are already housing people who have lost everything. And we're making sure those shelters have everything they need because what we know is in these emergencies and in disasters, adults are really sort of the ones that people focus on. And we're there to focus on the babies and children. So if you have lost your home and you're in a shelter and you're a parent, there's no crib, there's no diaper, there's no formula, there's not a toy, not a book, there's nothing. So imagine being in that moment and being a mom or dad and being like, okay, but what about my kid?

9:15What am I doing? So we are there to provide those items. We have 62 members of our team. We're like, okay, we're all going to break up. We're all going to conquer this and we're going to handle it. And so we did pop-ups around the city. We were sending truckloads of items. And then we had our thousand partners sending in requests saying, okay, like this is what we need in this moment. And what we always do at Baby to Baby is we ask and listen. And in those moments, we're asking what is needed, not just imagining what people might need, but making sure we're asking and listening. We had this incredible outpouring of support from the community and our corporate partners are our lifeline.

9:53And they were donating millions of items from hygiene items to diaper bags and clothes and just people were being so, so generous. Yeah. Okay. So let's go back 14 years. Very few people know what Baby to Baby is 14 years ago. How did the two of you come in to lead the organization? Well, I was a model and I lived in New York and Nora was a lawyer and lived in New York. And in fact, I hate to give him credit, but I will. My father-in-law introduced us. It set the two of you up. Yes, he set the two of us up because we'd both moved from New York to LA. And we went to dinner and we were talking about like our next phase in life and what we wanted to do.

10:34And during my time modeling, when I was in New York and not traveling, I was volunteering at a Head Start center in Harlem where I got to spend time with so many children who couldn't really even focus on their schoolwork or do any of their schoolwork without basic essentials. So there'd be a little boy there with shoes that were three sizes too small, and he couldn't do his math worksheet. Kids that hadn't eaten breakfast, so they weren't able to focus on school. And it was sort of this thing that, like, inspired me. I want to work with kids. I want to do something to help. And Nora had a similar sort of situation when she was a lawyer working with children and mothers and pro bono work that she was able to do.

11:15So we sort of met and bonded over this. It didn't happen right away, but we were like, maybe we should start something. And we started meeting with nonprofits in LA to sort of see what the need was, like what was missing. We didn't want to start something to start something. Everywhere we went, we were so shocked. It was like, you know what we don't have? You know what? We're doing these services. We aren't able to provide diapers. And everyone kept saying diapers, diapers. And we were like, what? Diapers. That's so interesting. Now we know that like one in two families in America are struggling to afford diapers for their children.

11:52People are choosing between food and diapers for their babies. But at that moment, we really didn't know. And it was so interesting learning from a children's hospital, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, a school. And it was all across the board. It was the same answer. So it was this question that we asked that we kept hearing the same answer for. And we're like, we can do something about this. So it's one thing to say we have a shared mission here to then go and meet and gather the data and identify this core problem and decide to do something about it. It's another thing to say we're going to be co-CEOs of an organization and we're going to build something that has the potential to scale to national and potentially even global impact.

12:34So what was the inflection point where you said this actually has to be a thing, right? We can't just do this by going to our friends and raising some money and maybe talking to a big CPG company and getting some diapers donated. What was the flip point? It was the two of us. And we had one intern. And we were sitting in this like 600 square foot tiny space on Pico Boulevard and collecting gently used items from the community. Maybe your baby would outgrow the size two diapers and you might drop off like one or two packs. And that was sort of like the beginning of it all. and we were sitting there and we were like, let's like announce that Baby2Baby is, you know, the two of us and we're doing something and we like see a vision for it.

13:16So we scraped together a little event and asked a friend to donate alcohol, found a free space. We had a publicist friend who got a photographer and we had an event and it was 20 women. And luckily we had invited Jessica Alba and Nicole Richie. They ended up coming. As one does. We do live in LA. I don't know. So they came and a photo ran in Us Weekly and it said the baby to baby event. So we're sitting in our little 600 square foot space and we got a phone call and it's Edelman PR. And they're like, hi, we saw your photo in Us Weekly and we'd love to do an event with you and we'd like to give you$100 ,000 and 100 ,000 diapers.

13:58And we were like, what? At that point, we'd had like$2 ,000 and two packs of your diapers. maybe you dropped off and we were like okay this yeah I would love to do an event with you sure they're like can you just repeat what you did and we're like yeah great we'll do it so they're asking us like do you accept pallets and we're like yes and we're like what is a pallet like googling what is a pallet and then they're like do you have forklifts and we're like of course we have so many forklifts I'm like how do you rent a forklift and we just sort of started you know we were saying yes to everything and we had this event we got the hundred thousand dollars the truck showed up the biggest truck we've ever seen we were in heels just like this and we got on it with our intern unloaded ourselves without the forklift no forklift no forklift we did not have one still we didn't rent one either and we unloaded them the truck driver was really nice thank god he helped us and those diapers flew out the door in one day wow and it was like wow we're really onto something.

15:00How is that possible? Because you weren't scaled at that point. All of a sudden you have this deluge. Because when the need is that dramatic, people show up. So we made a few calls. We didn't know how this word spread, but they heard the word diapers and they needed them and they showed up in cars and they packed them till they were totally full and they tied them to the tops of their cars. And we watch. It's like if someone needs something and needs it for their baby, they will drive far. They came with their friends. They came after work. They came before work and word got out and we could have kept going.

15:34When there's something valuable, people show up. So I love this moment of yes, sure. Pallets, forklifts, all of it. Cause it's such every startup, every entrepreneur knows this feeling of like, Oh my God, I just have to say, yes. Like I'll figure it out. I'll build the airplane on the way down. The a hundred thousand and diapers, the$100 ,000, but all of a sudden you're out of product and the demand is still there. What happens the next day? I think now we were off. Like this is kind of, I think, what binds the two of us. And you hear that, you know, it's not always the model and the lawyer and that doesn't necessarily make sense, but we've had this vision of making this huge.

16:11And people, you know, we'd have very early interviews of someone saying, oh, what's the goal? And we'd be like to provide every child in the world with diapers and basic essentials. And it was kind of like, that's silly to say. Like that's not, and we were like, okay, you can think that's silly. Like we've had really big hopes for it. Well, maybe less silly and more audacious. Sure. Yeah. Yes. But I think like we didn't back down from it. We were like, we just gave out a hundred thousand. Like, great. What's next? When can we double that? You know, we had to make some key decisions quickly, which gets to the point of scaling and what we were saying before about how we weren't serving individuals.

16:46Because I think we realized quickly, if there had been a line of people who needed the diapers themselves, it would have been much more complicated. Yeah. Because we weren't going to ever decide who gets what and how many and what size. And we knew if we really wanted to serve the numbers we wanted to serve, we had to have a layer in between where one group could say, you know, that we had established this group is picking up for eight children. This group is picking up for 120 ,000 children. And that was a key decision early because we were like, if we want to just incrementally grow, we can just keep having a few friends in the space and have moms themselves show up.

17:28Like we could have given out the stuff that way. And it was like, no, we quickly wanted to go fast and furious. And we were like, we have to, we are going to have to do this through organizations. Still ahead, how Kelly and Nora learn to leverage LA's celebrities to explode baby-to-baby's growth.

17:55Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

18:45And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

19:29So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free.

20:02for 1.7 billion diapers. That unrelenting need, that diaper gap, drives Kelly and Nora to keep scaling. Once we started raising the$100 ,000 and then raised a little bit more, we started putting together a team. Our team has always been predominantly women. And we just put a lot of smart women together in the room and kept figuring out the next step. Some of it happened because of the celebrity. Now there was the next picture of the next celebrity and the next celebrity and the next event. And that helped because that provided for some incoming phone calls. So we'd get a call saying, I own a baby bottle plant or my friend does and they connected us to them.

20:43And we have 126 ,000 extra baby bottles. We heard you could do something with them. And again, we're like, yes. We also then had decisions made based on these things coming in. Like the plant was in Philadelphia. And we said, well, don't ship them to Los Angeles. I'm sure there's someone on the East Coast who could use them and we could use some. And so this was sort of how we started serving children outside of Los Angeles, came from an incoming call where we said, we're getting all of this notoriety from some of our celebrity relationships that's giving us press and attention. But now we can share the wealth when we have excess.

21:22Let's share it. So instead of saying, let's expand to Philadelphia today, it was really a call that started out saying, why don't we look for an organization that does similar work or could be able to do similar work in Philadelphia or a neighboring city? And I'm sure they can use half those bottles. And then why don't you ship half of the bottles to us? So some of our scaling decisions happened because we get really good phone calls. It sounds like you effectively built a flywheel. You built a virtuous cycle where you'd have a celebrity show up. that would get some attention that might lead to a donation.

21:54Is that kind of how it evolved? Yeah. Part of our job, we would joke sometimes like we're nonprofit CEOs, but we're also like agents. We're like doing endorsement deals. That first Huggies call, we got a hundred thousand diapers and a hundred thousand dollars. Our next one, we were like, well, Jen Garner will do it for 5 million diapers and 5 million wipes. And she did. And now we, 14 years later, just got an $8 million grant from Huggies in kind and cash. So it's sort of like a full circle moment, but we really did see like, okay, we can use celebrity to our benefit. Also makes the celebrity look good.

22:34Probably their agents and managers hate us because they don't get the percentage, but that's fine. And this corporate partner is happy. We get to serve children with the basic essentials that we need for them. And so it's sort of like a win-win across the board. And most corporations do need a corporate partner and, you know, want to, for their customers, look charitable and want to do that anyway. So it really worked. When wildfires hit Maui or a hurricane hits Texas or North Carolina or what have you, when you're talking about the disasters that are hitting these other areas where you don't have infrastructure, how did you figure out how to serve the needs there?

23:11partnering as we have from day one with other nonprofit organizations. So we are in there with the Red Cross with, you know, World Central Kitchen. We are side by side. We're popping up if we need to with our disaster relief team. If the Red Cross is like, we've got this, but we don't have the diapers, formula and baby essentials. Can you send them to us? Then we're, we're the person who's providing that. I think like we're called the Red Cross for kids, which has been a very proud name that we've taken on, but we are that. We're trying to be there to serve the children in these disasters. And however we have to do it, we'll do it.

23:50So if we need to get there with our team and do it ourselves, if there's a partner on the ground that we work with already that is like, send us the stuff and we can distribute it, we're like, great, we'll do it any which way we can. I think like being spry in these moments is like how we're able to get to the people and make sure that everyone is taken care of. So in terms of the scale of the organization, just picking up on the celebrity thread for a moment, can you talk about the gala and how you built that and how important that is to what you all do, the work you all do? Yeah, I think year one, we were like, I guess we should have a gala.

24:24Every nonprofit has a gala. Let's have a gala. We raised$1.1 million and we looked at each other and we were shocked because in that moment, that was so much money. It's a lot of money. A lot of money. We now raised almost$18 million this year. In one night. One night. In one night. And, you know, the growth of that has been exciting. But even in that first year, the same, like everything's still kind of like the same vibe. We were like, okay, let's make sure that we have an event that is fun, that people want to come to. It's not a sit-down rubber chicken and listen to some barney speeches. No rubber chicken is not in a hotel ballroom.

25:02No chicken at all. Right. There's zero chicken. Yeah. And nonprofits that have those, we love you. And we are your partner. So great. But ours is supposed to be, you know, fun, young, exciting. We have 20 chefs from around Los Angeles who come and cook at their own station. So Evan Funke's making you like Cacio Pepe. John and Vinnie are making a lobster roll. Like just things are happening and it's fun. Gwyneth Paltrow's feeding you an oyster from found oyster. I don't know. I mean, if I had a nickel for every time Gwyneth fed me an oyster, I mean, sure. Great. It's the best thing ever. So we've tried to make it something that people want to come to.

25:39But as much as people are like, oh, it's the funnest event of the year. And you honored Selma Hayek and Snoop Dogg performed. They're like, don't you have the best time? We're like, nope. It's work for us. We are there. We are working. This is where we raise 60 % of our operating budget. we plan it all year long those donations that roll in like the night of that are we do a live giving on the stage and you know whether it's Nicole Richie and Mindy Kaling and they're joking whatever and we are sitting there like okay like we plan that and it is part of everything that goes into our 364 days outside of the gala goes into that night so it is fun and it is something people want to come to we were proud to be called the Met Ball of the West so that was cool Yeah, but it is work and it is how we fund serving a million children across the country every year.