Starting small, having a blast

Yesterday, I caught up with a good friend and told him what I've been doing lately.

"You're what?" he said, shock registering, peppered with disapproval. "You own two companies. Every time you travel, you make a fortune. How can you turn down speaking gigs?!? If you're so serious about philanthropy, why don't you just hire someone to run your foundation, so you can build up an endowment? Give four talks and you've paid your director's salary for the year!"

I've been struggling with this a bit myself. After all, though arguably successful, it isn't like we own a helicopter or anything - my definition of "rich." We aren't rich yet.

Meanwhile, he's right: I have been turning down business quite a bit lately. When possible, I line up another customer service expert to do the training. The thing is, a lot of potential clients want Jane or me in particular - after all, we're the authors. When we take a pass, many times the deal is off. So... well, my pal is right about that. I should do this philanthropy thing as a hobby, rather than making it my (completely unpaid) day job.

Well, yes and no. I'm giving myself an education, and that's never free. While I know a thing or two about business - and it is proving quite valuable in this new endeavor - I'm completely new to the nonprofit realm. I'm teaching myself the ropes.

I'm also new to Naples. I couldn't imagine a better way to meet my neighbors, to immerse myself in the community. I am quickly becoming one of the most connected men in this wonderful little town, simply because I'm in the mix fifty hours a week or more.

Chairing the CAN Ride is teaching me how to throw a fundraiser. Modest as this one will surely be, I'll be able to undertake the next event with a running start. I'll have a great Rolodex of sponsors, donors, and volunteers - and I'll know who not to bother. I'll be able to guide my team in all of their efforts. As Naples Social Action grows to national prominence under the moniker Local Social Action, I'll be able to draw off of this experience, and I'll thank myself for it. You can only start something once.

I'm a big proponent of a boss' getting his hands dirty, and knowing the job his subordinates are doing as well as they do. That has helped Coine Language School tremendously - we wouldn't be the leader we are without it. Ditto with Coine Training. This is Six Sigma in action. If Jack Welch likes it, it probably makes sense to at least give it a try.

Then there's that intangible but all-important aspect of this adventure: it's fun. I'm having a very, very good time. Perhaps this is a selfish pleasure, and I'm indulging myself. But I don't care. I haven't done door-to-door sales... well, ever. Even as a salesman in my mid-twenties, I was higher on the ladder than that. Walking into a storefront and asking the owner for sponsorship of a good cause is really neat. And every day, I make more friends, and more connections, and learn all sorts of cool things about our community that I'd probably never know if I kept traveling.

Barring a truck's running me down, I figure I only have forty more years of work in me. I want to enjoy every one of those years. And changing the world, making it a significantly better place for all mankind... no other work matters once you've started such an undertaking.

If The Coine Foundation is going to end poverty through education - and it will, just watch - its leader will have to know what he's doing. He'll have to be an expert. If Naples Social Action is going to transform how philanthropy is done, again, its leader can't be a dilettante.

I like to start things. To master them like no one else. To hand them off to outstanding people and then help those people as they continue to develop the organization. Can I run two companies and two nonprofits as each becomes a global player? Of course not!

But running things yourself isn't what leaders do. Developing and mentoring leaders is what leaders do. I know this because I've spoken to a few thousand leaders by now. I teach what they've taught me, and now other successful leaders pay me plenty to share my knowledge with them.

Here's how you build any great organization:

1. Be an expert yourself. Learn by doing.
2. Work out the kinks. Make mistakes and learn from them.
3. Recruit the absolute best people you can find.
4. Develop those outstanding people to become phenomenal leaders themselves.
5. Get out of the way and let them do their magic.
6. Advise as necessary.
7. Never forget this most important of all rules of success: HAVE FUN. And make sure everyone else is, too.

Repeat this aloud several times daily:

"A leader's job is to make himself obsolete."

New Friends Around Town

Jane and I have been busy lately.

Jane's been doing a tremendous amount of support work in our home office - hours a day on the phone and computer, collecting information and organizing it - filling out the online calendar, expanding our database, etc. ad infinitum. As I often say, she's the brains of the Coine endeavors, I'm the mouth.

So I've been using my mouth plenty. I'm a gadfly: I really enjoy meeting people and making new friends, and I've been doing both around Naples lately. Here are just a few examples of the people I've met in the past few weeks.

Two weeks ago I bumped into CAN, the Cancer Alliance of Naples. They help people who are struggling with cancer and so have trouble paying bills, or need to find a suitable support group, or whatever their need might be - when appropriate, they give up to $3,000 per person in financial support.

CAN has had two CAN Ride fundraisers, but this year the previous event chairmen couldn't participate (one moved to Venice; the other has to work!), so they weren't going to have a ride at all.

Well, we were exploring a fun fundraiser for Naples Social Action, and the model we're going to follow is to partner up with one charity per event, to (literally) spread the wealth and support causes we particularly believe in. A friend suggest I contact Allyson McLean, one of those two chairmen I mentioned. She asked me to do it with CAN. I met Kathy Nicklaus, the Executive Administrator of CAN, and we had a nice long talk. I knew right away that she is the type of person we want to support. An event was born - or perhaps I should say, reborn.

The third annual CAN / NSA Ride & Extravaganza is on! It will be held July 14th in Cambier Park, downtown Naples. It promises to be "The Event of the Summer!" For more information and to register online or download an entry form, go to http://www.naplessocialaction.org/.

I wrote that Kathy is the type of person we want to support, rather than saying that CAN is the type of organization we want to help, and that was no mistake. CAN is a very, very worthwhile organization. But that is more because of its leader than its mission.

One thing I know first-hand as an employer and a consultant to business leaders is that an organization is its people. The leadership of an organization is everything. With the right leaders, the group can be great; without talented leadership... not so much.

So as I make acquaintance with nonprofit leaders around town, I am assessing the leaders I meet far more than the charities themselves. As we teach in our workshops, "You are always on a job interview." Even when I'm meeting with well-established leaders who think they have nothing to prove, I am interviewing them. If they impress me, I'll try to support them. If they don't, I'll put them in the "Next" column. As in, "That interview is over. Who's next?"

When Jane and I were deciding where we'd like to hold the Coine Foundation's first ESL class, we chose based on leadership: Sheryl Soukup, in this case. Sheryl is Executive Director of Immokalee Non-Profit Housing (INPH), an organization that provides affordable and nice housing to the working poor in Immokalee. There is a terrible housing problem in Immokalee, and this group's mission is vital - but again, there are so many important causes around town. Why work closely with INPH in particular? Because from my first phone conversation with Sheryl, I knew I wanted to help her any way I could. Now that Jane and I have worked closely with her for a couple of months, I know what a good decision that was. Already successful, Sheryl is a rising star in the local nonprofit community.

I joined the board of directors at Literacy Volunteers of Collier County because I'm impressed with the sincerity and energy of their leader, Danny Tyler, and because the mission is so important.

I couldn't be more impressed with Ed Laudise, Executive Director of the Immokalee Foundation. As mutual friend Mike Reagen puts it, "Ed is social justice!" We have made ourselves available to help Ed as he changes the world - and a guy like that is bound to do it.

Speaking of Mike Reagen, President of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce.... Before we moved, Coine had been a member of three different chambers up in the Boston area. None impressed me, and I was turned off to the very notion of a chamber of commerce. But I went to a couple of Naples Chamber events, and they were great. I made acquaintance of a few chamber staffers, and they impressed me. Then I sat down with Mike, who was generous enough to give me a good portion of his morning, and I walked away a believer. Contrary to my expectation, I am now an enthusiastic member of our town's chamber.

It's all about leadership.

This isn't news to anyone, but Dawn Montecalvo at the Winter Wine Festival is a leader worth supporting. After our sit-down, I know exactly why she is a leader of the nonprofit community on a national scale. She's "coming from the right place," as my Dad liked to say, and she has the skill to - well, the Wine Festival is the biggest of its kind, worldwide. Enough said.

Grace Place is yet another inspirational organization, led by two amazing women: Stephanie Campbell, its founder and driving spirit, and her right hand Stephanie Robbins. We will be working with them more in the future, have no doubt.

There are plenty of other groups and leaders worth mentioning, and I hope those folks don't feel slighted not to be mentioned. I'll be profiling some of them in a future entry.

Of course, some of those people I haven't mentioned for a reason. Not every job interview goes that well. I've run into some appalling examples of uninspired leaders and staffers, people who seem just to be going through the motions to cash a paycheck. And there's one player in town we're undecided about. This group may actually be effecting the giving community in a negative way, but we'll take our time to decide.

But why focus on the losers? We're sorting through the bunch, making two piles: keepers and throw-backs. Jane and I are concentrating on the keepers.

Life's a lot more fun when your attention is completely focused on the positive. And if you aren't having fun, you're doing it wrong.

Immigration...

I'm enjoying an interesting repartee on immigration reform with a number of friends and acquaintances. I'd like to share an email I just sent, in response to one such friend's screed.

1. 50 million Poles, Germans, Italians, etc. may not sound like a lot to us in 2007, but looking at that as the percentage of total US population at the time (early 1900s), it was a tremendous influx of immigrants. Which leads us to…

2. Sadly, just as in the early 1900s, I find most of this debate inspired by racism. It’s sad or infuriating, maybe both.

3. I’m all for assimilation. Indeed, forced measures will make my own language school huge. My only problem with it is that people are demanding illegal immigrants learn English, but they have no avenues to do so. Naples is pretty good by comparison to Massachusetts, where there is a TWO YEAR or longer waiting period for any government-sponsored ESL course.

4. Anyone who says we don’t need illegal workers needs to get out there and meet some employers. I’ve spoken with thousands of employers, as that is my job. Even if we offered “born & bred” American workers $20/hour for the unskilled jobs that immigrants are now being paid $8/hour to perform, we still would have vast numbers of unfilled positions – and many of the unskilled American workers who might fill those positions are terrible employees. They're the failures of our educational system. It only goes to follow they might be failures as employees as well.

5. This is another form of “The Walmart Effect.” Much as we like to loathe Walmart, it is keeping inflation at bay and helping poor and middle class Americans afford to live better with what little they have to spend. Immigrants keep our prices low for the same reason.

6. Push, and people push back. It’s basic psychology that few people grasp. The more we denigrate Latin culture, the more Latinos will embrace it. And, if you look at “Irish-Americans” in Boston as an example, telling people their culture makes them inferior has an effect opposite of that intended: they embrace it all the more.

7. What we need – and I’d argue that this might be all that we need to focus on, as a country – is education that actually serves our Latino population. Half-measures are failing those kids, and thus the high dropout rate and continuation of the poverty cycle, with crime and teen pregnancy as byproducts. A number of influential groups have begun working on that in Immokalee right now. Stay tuned: the national model is under development right here in Collier County.

8. If we can make the move from Immokalee to Port Royal visibly possible for children of immigrants, all of this anti-immigrant ranting will lose its steam, and assimilation will happen as a matter of course.

Here is another Coiné endeavor:

The Naples English-Language Council was founded with three goals in mind:

1. Coordinate efforts among member organizations

a. Allow them to partner for fundraisers
b. Facilitate networking
c. Present a unified voice to policy makers at the local and state levels

2. Work together to raise community awareness of the needs of ESL in Collier County and Bonita Springs

a. Greater community understanding of the needs and challenges facing immigrants and those who help them will lead to more enthusiastic support

3. Allow ESL teachers to share best practices

a. Lessons
b. Classroom strategies

Participating Organizations as of May 17, 2007:

Literacy Volunteers of Collier County
The Coiné Foundation
Literacy Council of Bonita Springs
East Naples Library
English Speaking Union
Grace Place

...And this is yet another, related, Coine endeavor:

The Coiné Foundation ~ Ending Poverty through Education.

The mission of The Coiné Foundation is to teach essential life skills to those living in poverty or at risk of poverty, so that they can better fend for themselves and earn a place in the middle class.

In the United States, one of our main projects is to teach literacy and the English Language (ESL) to immigrants and their children using the Coiné Method, which stresses “fast and effective; fun and exciting” teaching.

$300 can pay for one mother to learn English for three months. She will improve one level in that time.

$72 can pay for her young child to learn English and other preschool skills at the same time that she is studying in a classroom nearby.

Men are also welcome to participate.

So if you're wondering what Naples Social Action does with donations, now you know: we support the Coine Foundation's efforts to educate the poor.

Immigration Threat? Maybe.

The following is a note I wrote in reply to a friend's sending me an article warning of the perils of multiculturalism and multilingualism in the U.S.

Thank you also forwarding this article. I am sympathetic to much of what I read. I too believe that the strength of this country, the most vibrant and successful country in the world, is our culture – the melting pot, not the salad bowl. I am appalled by what is happening in England, France, and some other parts of Europe because of their anti-assimilation policies. I have three observations to make, though.

First, having led ESL classes of immigrants (legal and illegal – we never ask) for over eleven years now, I find that the vast majority are eager, sometimes desperate, to assimilate. Their children quite often learn to understand the parents’ native language, but many do not ever learn to speak it fluently. The grandchildren are usually mono-lingual, and that one language is English.

As a caveat, there are places in the US – Miami, L.A., the Texas border, Chinatowns in many large cities, Boston’s Italian North End and Irish South Boston & Dorchester – where immigrants live in ghettos and perpetuate their native cultures and languages. It’s sad. Many of them do not want to assimilate, it’s true. Those people are inevitably poor. The business owners among them are always bilingual, and I’ve seen plenty of cases (especially among the Chinese) where these leaders exploit their countrymen and discourage assimilation of any kind. Then there is the slave trade, alive and well in pockets such as Immokalee and in alll big U.S. cities.

So there are exceptions. But I am certain that the vast majority of immigrants are dying to learn our language and blend into our culture. My friend Jose Tarrio and brother-in-law Ingo Zacher are no less American than my wife Jane McEleney Coiné. The first two are immigrants; Jane is the daughter of immigrants, and grew up in Dorchester, where even fifth-generation Americans still call themselves Irish, not American.

Second, my company works with numerous corporations, both in Boston and across the country. With a few exceptions such as financial services, there is no industry that is not dependant on immigrant labor – including illegal immigrant labor. So long as those illegals are able to provide legal-seeming documents, even the most law-abiding companies end up employing them by accident. I’m not claiming that companies like or prefer these workers (though the do!); I’m saying that they would have to shut their doors immediately were their immigrant labor pool to vanish. I can guarantee you that the farms, landscaping services, and construction services in Florida, and the entire state of Massachusetts, would simply cease to function without these workers. Americans don’t want menial and factory jobs, and that’s a great thing! It means that our native workers are getting better jobs.

My third observation is that we will never rid ourselves of the press of desperate immigrants trying to get into our country any way they can until those countries rid themselves of corruption and begin to develop their own free societies and thriving economies. If I were poor in Latin America, or even distant Ghana, I would do all in my power to get to this wonderful country, and worry about my legal status later. I don’t think we’re doing enough, both governmentally and privately, to help these countries turn around.

Thank you for indulging me. Warm regards, Ted

“What Do You Want?” Part II. (Or, A Brief History of Naples Social Action.)

When Jane and I moved to Naples from Boston last September, the very first thing we did, even before we found our house, was set up the Coiné Foundation. We’re still jumping through some of the hoops the government holds up for nonprofits, but we’re incorporated with the state, we’re established with the IRS, and we’re in business. We’re working with a great lawyer to win our 501(c)(3), a process that can take six or eight months or more.

Yes, you read correctly. I complimented our lawyer. I’ve employed a number of lawyers over the past several years, and I’m not allergic to them like most people. Ask any businessman or -woman: there’s nothing better than having a really good lawyer in your corner.

Sorry, that was an aside. We created the Coiné Foundation last September as the culmination of a long-term dream of ours, to really make a significant difference in the world. You see, Jane and I are bleeding heart capitalists.

Since 2001 and even before, our family and the Coiné Companies have been writing checks to good causes. The adults in our family no longer give gifts per se to each other at Christmastime; instead, we buy ducks, goats, and cows through Heifer International. We only see pictures of the animals, though, as the actual beasts are given to poor villagers in Appalachia, Bangladesh, and Guatemala.

My sisters and I give to the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and the American Diabetes Association in honor of our father.

Every Christmas at the Coiné Companies, as we tally our profits toward the end of our fiscal year, our colleagues choose which charities we should give to. We try to give 25% of our profits to charity each year.

Yes, 25%. A few years ago, Jane and I committed to splitting our after-taxes pie four ways: 25% to charity, 25% to reinvestment in the company, 25% to profit sharing, and 25% to stockholders. Since we are the only stockholders, we allocate that last 25% to reinvestment, for a total of 50%. Depending on the year, that’s a lot or a little. Welcome to business.

So, giving has been part of our family company from its inception. But we’ve always wanted to do more than just write checks. So, along with our move from Boston to Naples, we made another change and opened up our own nonprofit shop.

Then I took to the road for five months. Jane and I make a significant part of our income leading workshops on customer service, and we have to travel the country to do it. It’s a lot of fun – let’s be honest, we’re treated like rock stars by our clients and audiences. What’s not fun about that? – but it doesn’t leave much time or energy for running a charity. So we didn’t do much until February.

We met a lot of people around town, though. We took the time we were here to see what was going on around the nonprofit community. You see, we absolutely, positively, did not want to be redundant. We didn’t want to be a “me too” charity. That’s a business philosophy we’ve carried over to the charity realm. If you’re going to do something, make it different.


Let me sign off here with a few lessons that for-profits and nonprofits alike can benefit from:

1. “If you aren’t having fun, you’re doing it wrong.”

Repeat aloud as necessary until you believe it. Then continue repeating it aloud so others can benefit from your words.

2. Do something original.

“Me too” endeavors get “me too” results.

3. Stake out your territory as the best in your field, even if you’re tiny (in business, size only rarely coincides with quality).

After all, somebody has to be the best, and few people even try. There’s less competition at the top of the heap.

4. Absolutely and completely, do something you can be proud of.

Few people are proud of being redundant, and fewer still are proud of work solely for the sake of making money. We humans need a noble purpose. You won’t enjoy your work, and you won’t attract the top talent in your field, without such a purpose.

Find all of this a bunch of happy crap? Pie-in-the-sky bullshit? Think that real businessmen don’t think like this? (I say businessmen because you generally only hear men making this kind of comment). Not buying it? Good. I don’t want to change your mind. You go ahead and think small; we’ll change the world without you. See ya at the finish line. We’ll be waiting for you there.

5. Change the world!

Set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and go after it! Why on earth not? If someone can do it – and just ask business guru Jim Collins, there are people out there who do – then it can be done, can’t it? And if someone else can do it, why can’t you?

6. Have fun.

Did we mention that?

"What do you want?"

We get that a lot, and it’s completely understandable. Jane and I are new to Naples, and what we’re doing is new, too. We don’t mind taking some lumps until people get better acquainted with us.

After all, we’re from New England. You haven’t been held at arm’s length until you’ve spent some time with the children of the Pilgrims. (“We put the grim in Pilgrim” might be a good slogan for some parts of that region). Jane’s a native of Boston, and both of my parents grew up there, and I lived there from 1991 until last September. Our children were born there. We have a thriving business there still, established six years ago. No matter. To a lot of our friends, I’m still an outsider.

People in Naples are a lot – okay, a tremendous amount – warmer than that. But some people around town don’t trust me right off the bat; I think they’re afraid I’m a carpet bagger, storming into town to take advantage and disappear as quickly as I arrived.* There’s a lot of that in Florida. Who could blame them?

*(I say “I” here because nobody would ever suspect Jane of anything untoward. You can’t help but trust her as soon as you meet her. She’s just that kind of person).

So, what do we want? Nothing. And I think that intimidates a lot of people.

“What do you mean, 'Nothing?'” some people seem to think. “Really, what do you want from us? What’s the catch?”

Jane and I started our nonprofit to make the world a better place. Just like every legitimate nonprofit. What do we want? We want to help.

That’s the catch. Let us help you.

The Real Competition

You can't compete with a man who starts his work day at 4 AM and goes straight through till 11 at night. I'm that excited by what I do.

But here's the thing: who would want to compete with a nonprofit in the first place?

I've got two things to say about that. The first is, whether a donor gives her money to the Nature Conservancy, Naples Community Hospital, or to Naples Social Action, that's great! How on earth can I begrudge the Harry Chapin Food Bank their donor dollars? When one good cause wins, the entire community wins.

...Which brings me to my second point: maybe inter-group competition isn't really all that appropriate, or even all that productive, in the first place. We'd be foolish to vie for the dollars of current donors. Our real adversary isn't the 501(c)(3) next door. It's apathy.

I invite nonprofit leaders to join together to add to the total number of dollars given, and of volunteers contributing time, in our area. Let's work together for everyone's benefit.

Why fight over who gets a bigger piece of a little pie? I'd rather have a smaller cut of a bigger pie! In that way, everybody wins.