843: The Secret to Making a Bigger Impact with Your Business This Year

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2:02Contributing to the outcomes of other human beings connect us as humanity. And all the studies show that, you know, when you support other people, you get those dopamine rushes, you know, you just feel good. And so that is part of why people are incentivized to help and participate in social impact because it just feels good. I'm Jenna Kutcher, your host of the Gold Digger podcast. I escaped the corporate world at the age of 23 with nothing more than a$300 camera from Craigslist and a dream. Now I'm running a seven figure online business that feels even better than it looks all from my house in small town, Minnesota with my family.

2:41Here, we value time is our currency. We mix the woo and the work, and we are in the pursuit of building businesses that give us the freedom to live lives that we love. I've always loved turning big goals into reality, and I'm here to help you do the same. This isn't just a peek behind the curtain. Come along with me and my guests as we tear the whole curtain down. Every week, we tackle practical, no-fluff marketing strategies and host honest discussions on what works and what doesn't. Join me and my expert guests for actionable insights to help you grow your dream business with confidence. Pull up a seat and get ready to be challenged, inspired, and empowered.

3:21This is the Gold Digger Podcast. Do you ever wish you could unlock the secrets to leading with purpose on a global scale? Like what if you had the keys to running an organization that is absolutely changing the world? Well, today's guest is about to hand you those keys and let you inside of her reality. Kylie Scales is the CEO of Pencils of Promise, which is a global for-purpose organization that's transformed education for over 800 ,000 children across Laos, Guatemala, and Ghana. Since 2009, POP has built nearly 600 schools and tackled some of the biggest barriers to education, like access to clean water, sanitation, and even menstrual health.

4:03Under Kylie's leadership, POP has become a force for change, and today she's here to share about how you can lead with purpose in your own work. In today's episode, we're diving into the do's and don'ts of leading a for-purpose organization, how you can tie your mission and your business to greater results, not just for your own success and bottom line, but for positive impact on the world, ways to get involved both locally and globally, and the why behind the work that she does. If you've ever wondered how to make real change, if this year is the year that you want to start giving back with your money, with your time, with your talents and energy, if you want to learn how to lead with heart and strategy, or you want to deepen how you are leaving your mark on this world, this is the conversation for you.

4:50Kylie, welcome to the Gold Digger Podcast. Growing a business isn't for the faint of heart. It's a whole lot of everything, building an audience, nurturing leads, managing channels, tracking metrics, and juggling all the moving pieces of your strategy. And let's not forget those late nights, long days, and working weekends. Sound familiar? Sometimes it feels like you're wishing for just one thing to make it all a little bit easier. Well, meet Breeze, HubSpot's brand new collection of AI tools built specifically for marketers just like you. With Breeze, attracting the right audience, increasing leads, and turning those leads into loyal customers just got faster, and dare I say, easier than ever before.

5:31Imagine less stress and more success, more wins, and fewer all-nighters. With Breeze, you're not just keeping up, you're staying ahead. And pretty soon, your business is going to have a lot to celebrate. Check out Breeze at HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. That's HubSpot.com slash marketers. Kylie, what is the biggest myth about leading a nonprofit organization that you wish people understood? Yeah, I love that question. I would say that the biggest myth is that when you We work for a mission-driven organization rather than a for-profit group that leadership doesn't have to be as skilled in the work.

6:14And that couldn't be farther from the truth. In the nonprofit sector, there's just so many moving parts. It's incredibly complex. We have, for example, we have so many stakeholders that we look after, like our beneficiaries and our donors and our partners and our leaders, especially if we're working globally. So we're working with groups of people all over the world and that's just part of it. There's also resources that we have to understand as it relates to fundraising and as it relates to expenditures. We have to think about impact in a very specific way. So we don't measure impact monetarily.

6:51We measure impact as it relates to our beneficiaries and social movement. So communicating that effectively, We also have to communicate our mission very specifically so that people feel truly connected to the impact that we have. So the skills run the gamut. We have to have a high emotional intelligence. We have to have a high financial acumen. We have to have global understanding of leadership. You know, there's just so much. And for some reason, there's that myth out there. But I'm here to tell you, it's a myth. Yes. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad we are starting here because I think the nonprofit sector is the most challenging.

7:28I mean, like you said, you literally have to be the best and clear and empathetic and like leveraging every tool that is necessary out there to further the mission, but also in a way to market the mission so that people continue to give and further it. And so when you think about it from marketing, there's another one goals. Yeah. It's like, dude, you have to be the best at all of the things to really survive and to make the impact that you are intending to make. I'm so glad we kicked off with that. I mean, let's talk about how you got into this, how you got started. Pencils of Promise is an organization I've heard about for over a decade.

8:08Lewis Howes was one of my friends and mentors, and I remember him talking about it years and years ago. And so how did this all come to be? Yeah. Well, the organization, well, I can start with me and then we can segue into the organization. Well, I started, I've always had a career in social impact. I started very early when I was 20 years old. I was supposed to be a famous singer. I studied classically how to sing a voice. And so that was my aspiration. But I also grew up in Queens, New York, in a place where it's really difficult not to get involved with your community and doing things within the community.

8:44And so at a very young age, my parents really wanted me to become involved in my world. They wanted me to volunteer. I started volunteering probably at like 11, 12. My first volunteer role was working at a place where foster students were transitioning from their original home to their foster home. So that was very interesting as a young person to just kind of play with the kids. And I understood and recognized very early on in life that life kind of wasn't the same for everyone, that there were just changes and disparities that people experienced and that ultimately life wasn't always fair. And that's really stuck with me.

9:21And as I grew older, I just got an opportunity to work with a candidate who was running for Congress in Brooklyn. And he asked me to be his fundraiser. And I was like, I'm a singer, sir. I don't really know what you mean. Do you know who I am? I don't know. And he described for me, I was volunteering for him. And he described for me what fundraising was and the impact that people had in this world. And there was an actual role out there for people who wanted to bridge the gap between folks that wanted to inspire change in the world and folks that had solutions that they needed resources to motivate into action.

9:58And I was just like, there's a lot, but it does kind of sound like something that I might be able to do. And he was right. And so that was my first role. And it kind of snowballed from there. And I've worked in over 20 countries all over the world. I've worked with CEOs and heads of state. I've worked for the Queen of Sweden. I've worked with Tony Blair. I've worked with just so many people with the through way of equity. I've always worked in mission-driven organizations that wanted to ensure that all people had opportunity, that all people had healthcare, that all people had education, that all people had all the things that we as people deserve because we knew that it would make the world better.

10:41So at this point, it's compulsory. I'm here to help repair the world. And it just makes me feel like one can either contribute to a problem, one can harm, or one can heal. One can contribute to solutions. And so I'm just very grateful to have had a very incredible career all over the world with incredible people of solutions-focused work. So I'm here to help fix and so repair, make better. And so, which led me to Pencils of Promise. I was appointed as the CEO by the founder and the board. And because I believe of that long history of contributing to the world and Pencils of Promise made so much sense for me, especially because of its focus on education, which I believe is one of our basic human rights.

11:33We all deserve to have knowledge. We all deserve to fulfill our highest potential. We all deserve to be able to be in environments that are conducive to that and have the basic resources that we need to explore talent, which is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. So I'm very honored to lead this incredible organization with an incredible global team of people who believe just that and do just that on a daily basis. And we have our long-term deliverables and outcomes for our students, but we also impact and change the lives of students on a daily basis. So that's amazing. Pencils of Promise has achieved so many amazing milestones under your leadership.

12:22Can you share just a little bit about what you guys do and kind of how people get involved with it? Yeah. So for those who are unfamiliar, and thank you so much for being someone who is very familiar with our work. I appreciate that. But for those who aren't familiar, Pencils of Promise helps to remove the barriers for education for students throughout the world, particularly in Ghana, Guatemala, and Laos. We work in the most rural areas in those countries to ensure that students have the basic things that they need in order to stay in school and matriculate throughout the course of their school career, which will open up future opportunities for them.

13:00And some of the things that we address, we're probably best known for building schools. So we focus on infrastructure. To date, as you said, we have built 615 schools around the world, which is amazing. I say the number sometimes and it just is like, oh yeah, okay, 615. But then when you see a school and you see how just the scale of it, of what a school looks like in a rural community, and you also get to experience the hope and the joy that such a symbol represents to a community, it is just astounding to think about. So we build infrastructure that includes classrooms that are bright and beautiful.

13:43Oftentimes we go into communities where they're lacking in that type of infrastructure and we either will repair it or we'll build from scratch. So places around the world, like in Ghana, for example, students, just there's overcrowding. There's not enough room. The schools are very old. They aren't necessarily the safest structures for our students. And And in some places, students are learning outside. Students may be learning under trees. And while that may sound whimsical, it really isn't. Because if there are climate concerns, if it rains, school is over, or there may be distractions like bugs that fall from the trees or animals.

14:18And these are young children. We work in the primary school level. We work in public schools in the primary school level. So these are like the little ones who can't be distracted during the day when they're learning. And so we make sure that they have these safe, beautiful, bright, colorful classrooms that they're interested in going to every single day and excited to be with their peers. In addition to that, we also build private bathrooms, which is very important to students. Imagine a world where you don't have access to bathroom facilities. Many of our students don't have access to bathroom facilities, even in their home communities.

14:52And they have a communal bathroom. but we're able to build private bathrooms for students, which is transformative to a child's experience on a daily basis. They can go to school with comfort and ease. And that's especially important for girls. We make sure that teachers within the classrooms are adequate. So sometimes in the areas where we work, teachers don't have or haven't learned the best ways to increase literacy competencies. They haven't learned the best ways to engage students in the classroom. Sometimes corporal punishment is still utilized in the classroom because teachers have not yet got the message that that may not be the best way to engage a student.

15:28So we have a very strong teacher support program and where we train teachers sometimes in language. There are places where we work in the world where there are multiple dialects that are being spoken and students come together and there's multiple dialects. So we want to make sure that there's one language that everyone is learning. So we train teachers in English and in other languages to make sure that they have the tools that they need in order to engage our students. Another barrier that students face going to school are health. Lots of times children get sick because they don't understand or they've never learned the basic principles of hand washing.

16:03They don't have access to safe water in their community. So often they'll drink water from the river, the nearby river where people wash dishes, their bodies, clothing, and children are drinking from those sources and they get sick or because they're not washing their hands, they get easily communicable diseases. And so they're left without going. They can't go to school. As we know, if you get sick, you can't go to school. And so we make sure that students have access to safe water for drinking. We build hand-washing stations so students can turn on a tap in many cases to wash their hands. We provide soap.

16:39We teach them the hand-washing song, but we're able to provide all of that. And I'm extraordinarily proud that we have very specific emphasis and focus on girl students. We want to make sure that there's gender parity in the classroom. We want to make sure that girls who become women have the same opportunities in life. And that begins very early in the school setting when girls have an interruption in the classroom. They can't continue school. The onset of their period usually marks that interruption. They stay home. They fall behind. They become susceptible to things like early marriage or they drop out and they don't matriculate and they won't have those same opportunities in life.

17:20So we make sure that there's menstrual health training for both our students, our teachers, both boys and girls. We train our community members. So in case there are any myths that need to be overcome about the importance of girls in school, those are eradicated by bringing those communities together and our team training those communities. And we get to see market uptick in student attendance. We get to see students who are performing better in areas where we're training the teachers. We're getting to see students who have better outcomes than their peers who are not in POP schools. And so we're just really excited about all of that.

18:01And yeah, that's POP. It's amazing. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, banking that helps entrepreneurs do more with their money. Okay. I remember in the early days of my entrepreneurship journey, clients would literally mail me checks and then I would have to drive all the way to the bank to deposit them. It took me literal years to make things go digital. And I am ashamed to admit, I still have a filing cabinet with paper contracts because I'm way too afraid to throw them away. But that's the beauty of growth, right? You learn what systems serve you and which ones hold you back. Mercury is one of those systems that just works.

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19:56That's bowlandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D branch.com slash gold digger to save 20 % and unlock free shipping. Exclusions apply. You know, I think there's just so many layers to it. And I think that your organization has handled it and just navigated it so beautifully with education purely at the core of everything. And I think that's just so incredible. One thing that I wanted to talk to you about, Kylie, is that so many of my listeners are entrepreneurs. And I feel like entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs because they want to change the world, right? Like they want to impact the world in big and small ways.

20:36And one of the best ways that I feel like entrepreneurs have an opportunity is leveraging their income to make a greater impact. And I'm curious, you know, you've worked with some really incredible entrepreneurs. That's how I found out about your mission in the first place. What are some interesting ways that entrepreneurs have looped in giving or made pencils of promise, a focus in their business or really impacted their level of impact through their entrepreneurship? Yeah. And I love this as well, because I think that if you're an entrepreneur and I have a very entrepreneurial role, this work is very entrepreneurial and you get so distracted.

21:14There's just so many things that you need to handle. And sometimes supporting social impact can feel like, oh my gosh, another thing. And someday I'll get to that. And once I get to this certain level, then I'll be able to do that thing that you know that you want to do. because we all understand that contributing to the outcomes of other human beings connect us as humanity. And all the studies show that when you support other people, you get those dopamine rushes, you just feel good. And so that is part of why people are incentivized to help and participate in social impact because it just feels good.

21:54But sometimes we're worried. We're just like, oh gosh, there's just too much on my plate. One of the things that I've observed with POP in particular is because of our mission and because of our focus with students and with children, and because we are able to create deep connections with our beneficiaries and our communities, we know teachers' names, we get to engage with students, we know communities, we know community members, we know all of that. We have the opportunity to really offer that deep connection to folks that want to participate in social impact. And I think that's possible for a host of different organizations, that there is something there that you can connect deeply to.

22:35And it's important because that dopamine rush that I talked about, that belongs to all of us. So our customers, our clients, they want to feel that too. And if they know that they're working with or they are supporting a company that provides that to them as well as their product or their service, that will build trust, that will build good feelings, that will create loyalty within your customer base because they're like, I get to not only get the service, I get to not only get this product, but I get to feel good. And I get to hear about the impact that I get to make in the world through my purchase, through our relationship.

23:13And that is an added layer that will help develop those relationships a lot deeper with your client base. It'll help develop those relationships a lot deeper with your clients because you offer something that no one else can, truly, completely uniquely. And some of the ways that I see people do that, we have a lot of, PopDust has a lot of connections with newer, up-and-coming, burgeoning businesses because we get to tell our story together. And when you are a burgeoning business, you're a founder, you have a story to tell. And when you're able to bring that story together with a story of hope, a story of success, a story, particularly as it relates in our case to children and education, when you're able to connect those dots, the story is enriched.

24:00It becomes deeper. It becomes more motivating. People are like, tell me more. Tell me more about you. Tell me more about what you're doing. And it just becomes this real way to have this relationship with the base that you are hoping to inspire and engage. I love this so much. And I think you make so many good points. And one thing that I've noticed, especially with entrepreneurs early on, is it is that delayed future of like, well, someday I'll give to these causes. And I remember, I think it was Tony Robbins said something like, if you can't give$100 out of a thousand, you're never going to be able to give a hundred thousand out of a million.

24:40Like if you don't get in the practice of looping in your contributions and your giving when you don't have a lot, what makes you think you're going to be able to part with it when you do? And I just think that's so beautiful because it's always stood with me of like, get into the practice now. And then as your results grow, so can your impact to grow. And I feel like it's just so beautiful. And I think that so many of my listeners are likely in that state of thinking, I can't give. And I would argue that you can. I would argue that you absolutely can. And something that is interesting that's happened with me is, you know, in the past, in the building of this business, for a long time, I had money to give and not time.

25:22And recently, as I've shifted, we do a four-day work week. Our culture has shifted. we have way better work-life balance, I now have time and money to give. And it's been just interesting to see how enriching that experience not only is, but also just how your level of consciousness and awareness expands. Like you were saying, where when you started, when you were so young, being exposed to the realities of what is happening in your own backyard, in your own communities and globally, it really just expands not only the way that you think, but also the way that you show up. And so I absolutely love that.