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Everybody Else is a podcast about the invisible people who make life happen. What began as conversations with behind-the-scenes builders in the music industry has grown into a broader exploration of how people think, work, and carry responsibility across industries and across disciplines. Hosted by Wes Luttrell, the show centers on thoughtful dialogue with creatives, leaders, and operators whose work often goes unseen but shapes the world we live in. New episodes streaming every Tuesday.
speaker-0 (00:01.292)
This is the Everybody Else Podcast.
speaker-1 (00:10.39)
Most of the authors of the human story are unnamed. Invisible contributors to the greatest story ever written. So who are the invisible people writing our chapter today? Because behind every great city, industry, movement, and way of thinking are people who dedicate their entire lives to work that'll go virtually unnoticed. Work that builds on where we've been, shapes where we are, and points us towards where we're going.
There are those in the spotlight, and then there's everybody else.
speaker-0 (00:51.502)
It was a really interesting company. It was called Around Campus Food. And we sold advertisement in student planners all across the country. My first territory was Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Basically, whenever I left college, I was like, I want to go where the opportunity is. Both of my parents had moved away from home whenever they were younger. So I grew up kind of.
speaker-1 (01:16.0)
home by the way did you grow up here? Like slightly but...
speaker-0 (01:20.264)
On the Mount Vernon Evansville border. Okay. Head to Evansville address, Bowspote Z County.
speaker-1 (01:25.358)
Did you go to Mount Vernon? Yeah. Okay. I remember that now. We talked about this before. Okay, anyway. Your parents moved away and you were...
speaker-0 (01:30.942)
And yeah, I mean, my dad's from Connecticut. My mom's from here. So actually I grew up in the same house that my mom grew up in. And I'm getting ready to buy that house now. So it's been in the family for a long time. It's cool house, cool property. So yeah, I ended up moving away and I was like, I just want to go where the opportunity is. Wherever I can get the best job, I'm going to go there. And whenever that company asked me about which territory I wanted,
I was like, give me anything but the desert. was like, I'll go anywhere, you know. wish I would have done a little bit more research because Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma is not, like the premier landscape to spend three months a year in, right. up to four sometimes, but, yeah. So managed a bunch of sales interns at that company, 30 to 50, depending on the year. it was such a cool.
environment because we had basically college graduates from all across the country that all moved to North Carolina for this job. And so it was basically, it was a good transition from college life into real life adult life. Cause you know, we had five guys living in a four bedroom house. One guy was living in a hallway cause the rent was cheap.
speaker-1 (02:56.438)
So like the daily activities of like work changed, but the extracurricular environment stayed consistent with college.
speaker-0 (03:05.326)
Yeah, there was a, we had a little mini basketball hoop in our living room and the amount of holes we put in our drive wall from, from deeing up on that mini basketball hoop. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, it was, was a lot of fun and, uh, that really.
speaker-1 (03:21.002)
manager experience or like leadership experience up to that point?
speaker-0 (03:25.166)
I really didn't have much leadership experience. They have such a good manager training program there. The company had been around for a long time. I had some really good mentors. I'll go ahead and give them a shout out. Nate Curtis, he's one of my huge mentors. He was the one that saw me at that career fair back in 2012 whenever I was working at Buffalo Wild Wings and had long hair and a beard. And he saw potential in me and gave me an opportunity.
Really set the foundation as far as like my management experience and thought process. You know, he was one that originally taught me about servant leadership. He had a photo of, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but there's like a bunch of birds sitting on a telephone pole. And the way that a lot of corporate traditional structures are set up, it's the bird on top that's shitting on the other birds.
speaker-1 (04:09.974)
Mmm, okay.
speaker-1 (04:22.318)
Yeah, okay.
speaker-0 (04:23.37)
but in servant leadership that leader's at the bottom and all the other birds are shitting. Cause it's like, want to take shit off your plate, right. And help solve your problems. Right. And lead by example as well. You know, they're your employees or, you know, the people you're leading, volunteers, they're never going to do anything that you're not willing to do yourself. Right.
speaker-1 (04:29.315)
Yeah.
speaker-1 (04:49.23)
How do you go from, how do you start to work your way from the business world into weaving your way back to, I know you said you lived across country, different spots after that. What was the through line to get back to landing in Jacobsville where you're doing the work that you're doing today?
speaker-0 (05:13.068)
I guess I'll start with the transition from when I left North Carolina and started living in a camper van, a Ram Pro Master.
speaker-1 (05:24.354)
Which you still have? Same band? yeah.
speaker-0 (05:26.914)
Right now it's my daily driver because it's paid off. So I was living in North Carolina. That company that I had moved out there for had shut down. They told me one spring, it was actually the week of my birthday in March, and they go, you're still going to have a job, but you have to fire all your interns. And being in March,
summer internships only a couple of months away. These, some of these interns agreed to be an intern like in November and quit looking for jobs for that summer. Right. So really put them in a top position there. And my mentor, Nate Curtis had left the company a couple of months earlier to go start a company with his old boss, the guy that sold that company to Chick. Gotcha. So they were both investors of this new company called Coinmo.
And I called them up and said, Hey, if, if I come work for you, you're going to have a job for my interns this summer. Cause I didn't want to lay them all off. Right. and they said, yeah, we don't even have an app yet, but we'll yeah, we'll you got interns. We'll, we'll find something for them to sell, you know, we'll do it. So they hired me on. was their only employee, that was full time. and.
Our first summer we had 50 sales interns. Next summer we had a hundred sales interns. So it's called Coinmo. It was a cryptocurrency coupon system for businesses. So if they were, you know, needed a push, like a rush, right? And they were having a slow day, they could send out, you know, $21 coins to people's phones. They would have a push notification that come up on their phone.
speaker-1 (06:59.448)
What was the app?
speaker-0 (07:23.414)
Right. And you could even with the geolocation tagging, you could even ping people when they walk by your business. This was 2017.
speaker-1 (07:30.316)
What year was this, do remember?
speaker-1 (07:37.752)
seems like, I don't know, I don't really know the history of digital currencies, but it seems pretty like early in
speaker-0 (07:44.608)
It was early. it was early. And it was exciting, really exciting to be a part of that. You know, that definitely taught me a lot more because I got another mentor and his name is Cho Nguyen. Now he owns Vintage Broncos, which is like souped up new Broncos that they make look vintage. So I got a lot of one-on-one time with him, which was really great.
speaker-1 (08:07.231)
Interesting.
speaker-0 (08:14.03)
but it was our second summer and I just got in a car wreck, so I didn't have a vehicle. my sales interns were, you know, struggling that, that summer and, I.
liked being a manager. Well, I like being a coach more than a manager. I had hundred sales interns, right? I sitting in from my apartment in North Carolina because we didn't have an office and I'm just calling people up all day. Right. And I feel like I'm being a micromanager and I'm not a good micromanager. I don't like being micromanaged and I don't like micromanaging other people. Right. So I reached out to my boss and I said, Hey, I know
You know, in our last company, I was able to be there in person. understand why you can't afford to do that. You literally pay my salary out of pocket. Right. But if I live in a van, right. Then it's not going to be near as expensive. And I wrote a proposal out on a Wednesday.
I'm saying, hey, I'll hit 20 universities up and down the East coast, all the way from Michigan to Miami. And I'll do it for, I think it was $3,000. They didn't have to pay my per diem. They didn't have to pay hotel. They only had to pay my mileage. Right. And they called me on Thursday and go, what do mean you're going to live in a van? I was like, if the rest of it makes sense, trust me on that part. And they go, your sales interns can't know you live in a van.
speaker-1 (09:41.326)
Mmm.
speaker-0 (09:55.269)
I was like, deal. Right. And then they go, well, how soon can you leave? And so this was on Thursday. I said, give me a half day tomorrow and I'll look for a vehicle and buy it. I'll move into it over the weekend and I'll leave Monday.
So that's what I did. It was very rugged at the beginning. Like it was just a mattress in the back of a cargo van with a cooler and a jug of water. And then I drove south in the middle of the summer to Miami, which was really hot. So I learned quite a bit that summer, but really loved being in person with the interns and being able to be that.
that mentor and that, that coach for them. Right. So after that summer company shuts down, I get a couple months severance drive back to Indiana. My dad and I work on my van. my dad's a master electrician, we have four solar panels on top fridge. You know, he really just set me up. Right. And, then I was meeting a bunch of my high school buddies from Mount Vernon out in, Montana.
We were going to go visit Yellowstone and like Grand Tetons, that kind of stuff. Right. And so I drove out to Montana, picked them up. Right.
And one of my old friends lives in Montana up in Whitefish. The Mobly brothers. You've to Whitefish? I spent a lot of time in Whitefish. It's gorgeous. It's great. Yeah. So I called up the Mobly brothers. They went to high school with me. Their parents own Zeidler's flowers until recently. So they have a really nice lake house in Montana and they were working on building it still. And they allowed me to stay on their property for free.
speaker-1 (11:34.861)
I think.
speaker-1 (11:46.755)
catch ya.
speaker-0 (11:56.342)
while they were still designing their home. So I had Lakefront property in my van in between some mansions. yeah. In Montana for a couple months. So Cho Nguyen, whenever Coinmo shut down, he had another company. That company got bought out and they made him the chief revenue officer. So then he calls me up and says, Hey, you know, are you interested in a job in Dallas, Texas?
speaker-1 (12:16.931)
Okay.
speaker-0 (12:23.982)
He knew I was still living in my van and his plan for me was to kind of start up new markets for them. Cause it was still. Yeah. Yeah. And it made me better at my job whenever I could travel cheaply in my van for free working for these startup companies. Right. So, uh, they hired me in Dallas. I was the only outside salesperson at the time. was a little bit bigger of a startup. probably had 70, 80 employees. Um,
speaker-1 (12:30.318)
He's a traveling salesman, so he was going to send you, okay.
speaker-0 (12:53.644)
And it was called seasoned. It's still around. It's a restaurant recruiting software. So yeah, yeah, it's good because they're seasoned. They're seasoned at the vegetables and stuff and they're seasoned employees. So I started doing pretty well to the point to where the CEO flew down from San Francisco to go on ride-alongs with me for two days. I was the only outside salesperson.
speaker-1 (12:59.31)
Okay. It's getting to him.
speaker-0 (13:21.806)
And there was a whole team of inside salespeople in Austin, Texas. And I started out performing the inside salespeople after two months being in the job. so CEO flies down, spends two days with me at the end of those two days, takes me out to a nice, that was the first time I had Wagyu beef, took me out to a nice steak dinner, right, in Dallas. And he goes, is there any inside sales employees you want to keep? Because we're making room for salaries.
for you to hire outside salespeople to work for you. And this was in March of 2020.
speaker-1 (13:57.083)
wow. Whoa.
speaker-0 (14:01.112)
So I recruited a bunch. I had seven offers out whenever COVID hit and all the restaurants shut down in Dallas. And I had to call up people once again and tell them they didn't have jobs, which was tough. Then they've laid off half the company, the whole inside sales team, the whole customer service team. Now I've been here three months and it's, I'm the only person in either of those departments.
speaker-1 (14:29.774)
Uhhhh
speaker-0 (14:32.674)
But I didn't have to be in Dallas, Texas anymore. So I just hit the road. One day on a Zoom call, they were like, that doesn't look like Dallas. I was like, well, I'm in New Mexico now. So that's when I really got some good travel and was actually when COVID hit, I was able to just kind of hit the road. that was a lonely time because bars weren't open, gyms weren't open, restaurants weren't open.
I could talk to people at the grocery store and the gas station, but it's a small towns. Usually I'm going through, right? They don't recognize me. They're thinking I got cooties and COVID, you know, they don't want to talk to me. I've a lot of time by myself in a van in the desert in 2020 traveling around. My goal is to hit all 50 States before I turned 30.
I was able to do it before I turned 31. But right around this time, I wasn't ready to move back yet. My mom reached out to me because there was a family friend of hers that was selling this old school house in Evansville. And she wanted me to take a look at it. And it was a really good deal. I was surprised by the
the housing market in Evansville after, you know, living across the US. And I ended up buying the house before I was ready to move into it. So I moved my nephew into it and I was like, keep an eye on this while I travel for six months. And during that time I got a dog and drove. This was probably the coolest trip was in 2021. I went up
to a wedding in Connecticut, because my dad's side's from Connecticut, right? Got to spend about a month up in the Northeast. And then they announced that the borders were opening to Canada. I know I need to get Alaska off my list, right? But I'm in the Northeast, about as far as you can get from Alaska. To give you an idea, driving to Alaska from Evansville is 140 hours round trip.
speaker-1 (16:38.958)
That's right.
speaker-0 (16:53.793)
Yeah. Luckily I got a little bit of like a, I guess a heads up that the border was opening. They said it's going to open in a month. Right. So I'm like, all right, I got to hit the road. And I drove through the U S for the first part of it, cause the border was still closed. And then I think two days after the border opened, I crossed over in Minnesota near Thunder Bay, Ontario.
So kind of like the North shore of Minnesota up there, Lake Superior. And drove the great Alaskan highway all the way up to Alaska. So desolate up there. Like, yeah. Well, we're meeting with.
speaker-1 (17:25.463)
Okay.
speaker-1 (17:35.896)
Just you and your dog?
speaker-1 (17:40.238)
Do you listen to podcasts and audiobooks
speaker-0 (17:42.414)
Yeah, listen to a lot of audiobooks, listen to lot of podcasts. Yeah. On that, it was really forwarding. I got a good story about this. So I was listening to End of the Wild. I forget who it's by, but incredible book. Yeah. Familiar with it. I think so. It's about Alexander Supertramp and he's like a nomad. He went to a great college.
speaker-1 (17:49.198)
I'm a formative time.
speaker-1 (18:02.99)
Is it an old book?
speaker-0 (18:12.13)
know, great family, super smart, and then decides I'm just going to live off grid and travel around and hitchhike. And he ended up dying in a bus in Alaska. But I was listening to that book and whenever he was in that bus, he didn't have a journal with him because he didn't like the weight of having, you know, unnecessary paper. Right.
speaker-1 (18:24.462)
interesting.
speaker-0 (18:39.502)
So he wrote in the margins of the books that he was reading. That was his journal. And one of the things that he came to a realization whenever he was by himself in Alaska, and here I am by myself driving to Alaska, he said, happiness is only real if it's shared. And that hit me pretty hard. Because I was like, I went to doing this, I'm about to hit my 49th state.
And I did it mostly alone. So that's, and I'd already bought the house back in Evansville, but that's what really, was like, I'm going to go back to Evansville and be around family and friends. Tired of this lonely life by myself. Cause I'm a, I'm an extroverted person for the most part, but at. You enjoy the peacefulness, right. And I feel like you really find yourself when you spend a lot of time alone because you.
speaker-1 (19:35.137)
Yes.
speaker-0 (19:38.742)
you realize there's no other influences on how you spend your time. Right? I spend 100 % of my time doing exactly what I want to do. Yes. And what nobody else does, right? You you can go to the zoo and spend five hours looking at the monkeys, right? Because nobody's telling you we got to move on to the next thing. So that was a really, there was some definitely positive aspects of it. But, you know, after three years on the road, I was, I was ready to come back to Indiana after that Alaska trip.
speaker-1 (20:06.222)
When you thought about coming back to Indiana, did you have any sort of sense or feeling that you were gonna come back here with something valuable for Indiana? That something about your journey so far in life or your trips or your travels or what you picked up along the way was gonna come back and be of some sort of use to the community? Did you have any sense of that?
speaker-0 (20:31.522)
I think I, at the time I probably didn't see the bigger picture. I knew my parents always drilled in my head that having perspective is important, right? Because they both traveled whenever they were younger. I knew that that perspective was important, but I really didn't put together why yet. And I'm still kind of figuring that out in my new role here. But yeah, it's.
It was an interesting ride. It brought me back to Evansville. I mean, I feel like if I have been everywhere else in the U.S. and I still want to come back to Evansville, like that's a pretty good sign. Right. I felt like I put myself out there and did the exploring and I know Evansville is still calling me back. It's family, friends. It's a sense of home. Right. Yeah.
you know, building meaningful relationships with people that you've had for decades. Right. Yeah. And that kind of stuff you don't get, you get a lot of shallow conversation whenever you're on the road meeting new people every day. Yeah.
speaker-1 (21:43.002)
Tell me about what was the job when you got to Jacobsville. I don't really actually know that much about the organization. Tell me about your role today, where you've landed, but the last couple years. Tell me about what your role is today. What is the organization you work for?
speaker-0 (22:07.916)
Yeah, so I'm Jacobsville development consultant, right? I'm in charge of community and economic development in the Jacobsville neighborhood. First off, I'll tell you about the Jacobsville neighborhoods.
speaker-1 (22:20.322)
And I also want the story, not the history, but what you tell people who are like, what's so good about Jacobsville? So if you could package that up.
speaker-0 (22:31.566)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the people at Jacobsville and there's a lot of great history in Jacobsville as well. So Jacobsville is just north of downtown Evansville and it basically it's from Deloitte expressway to Diamond, First Avenue to Garvin street. Northeast corner gets a little wonky of the neighborhood. kind of cuts over and juts up a side road, but that's a joke.
speaker-1 (22:58.136)
So it includes, it includes North Main. includes like landmarks of like, you said Garvin, like Bossy Field, Vectron, CenterPoint, sorry. CenterPoint, Wasberry, don't know it Amcor. Yeah, there's some like big businesses right in that neighborhood as well.
speaker-0 (23:10.936)
Centerpoint.
speaker-0 (23:26.07)
I think they're three of the top five biggest employers in Evansville.
speaker-1 (23:29.39)
And they're all right there, wow.
speaker-0 (23:32.896)
Yeah. And there's about 6,000 residents in the neighborhood. But we have a lot more employees that come to work in Jacobsville.
speaker-1 (23:40.342)
Yeah. So tell me about when you got the job, when you began the work, what was the goal or what has the goal been this whole time?
speaker-0 (23:50.934)
Yeah. So, I mean, I told you a little bit about my background. I had no experience going into this when it comes to community and economic development, right? My experience is in leadership, it's in recruiting, it's in asking people for money, right? And this position, really, whenever I read the job description, I found out about it from a Facebook post.
speaker-1 (24:15.166)
Who hired you? Or like who is that? Not the people, like who posted the listing? What's the organization called?
speaker-0 (24:21.91)
Jacobsville Area Community Corporation. Okay. So we call it Jack for short. So I refer to it as Jack, but it's Jacobsville Area Community Corporation. Okay. So Jack was started a couple of decades ago. It was originally like with Central United Methodist Church kind of led it. Pastor Joe Easley, I believe. I never met him. I just read this in documents, right?
And they actually got together, you know, started putting people together and got the EPA superfund site in Jacobsville. That was one of the things they did pretty early on. Jacobsville is also home to a redevelopment area and a tax increment financing district. And Jack had been kind of liaison working with the city with that. And then they started running the Christmas parade in Evansville. That was their big thing every year. And yeah.
That was historically what they had done, know, kind of being a liaison between the city and the neighborhood. And the Jack board is actually built up of, we make sure we have representation from religious organizations, nonprofits, business owners and residents. it's really trying to...
speaker-1 (25:42.616)
People are on the board.
speaker-1 (25:49.454)
Like 30, 20, 20, okay. Cool. When you came on board, how long has it been?
speaker-0 (26:00.782)
been two and half years.
speaker-1 (26:02.146)
When you came on board, how did you begin building trust with the neighborhood? You. This new guy who's gonna come in and help.
speaker-0 (26:08.546)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (26:13.102)
I could tell you that there was definitely some hesitation from the community to build trust, right? I'll give some examples about it, like, you know, in 20, right before 2020, I don't know if it was 2018 or 2019, they had Jacobsville join in as an organization under Echo Housing and Community Development and...
there was a lot of things that were in the pipeline there and they were doing some great work. And then it all got shut down because of misallocation of funds. And so that was like something to where they felt like they had a good thing going and then that person will be, you know, yeah, ruin their trust. And so, and I'm sure there's more examples from earlier on about that too, but they, I think it started with
just going to the neighborhood associations, listening to understand, not listening to respond, not saying things like, that's not part of my job, right? Like, I'm supposed to be everything for these 6,000 people, right, in this neighborhood. Like, my job description's so broad in scope and narrow in geographical focus area that like,
So many people I feel like that I've talked to in different roles are comfortable with saying that's not part of my job. If it's in that neighborhood, I'm going to figure it out, right? And if it, and figure out who I need to go to about it.
speaker-1 (27:54.798)
Yeah. Again, that's the burn on the bottom of the telephone pole, getting all the shit on. It's not that they're shitting on you, but they're giving you all of the responsibility of what their thoughts are on the neighborhood because you're the only person who's probably asking with an honest ear of willingness to serve whatever that is. Not that you're going to build it all, or not that, like you said, you're going to go find the right people, but...
speaker-0 (28:23.278)
Yeah. And at the beginning, it was a lot of just building my network, right? Like I had just gotten back after 10 years of being on the, being all, you know, multiple locations around the U S and, um, I had to find out who's doing what in the neighborhood, cause it's a big neighborhood. There's a lot of businesses. There's a lot of nonprofits in that neighborhood, a lot of churches. Um, so figure out what's going, what's going well, right. And then try to build off of that. It also looked like me.
knocking doors and just meeting neighbors, right? Building that network up to where people knew who I was, that I could solve their problems, Then I feel like one of our big momentum kind of change in the neighborhood came around the work I did with trash in the neighborhood. I'll talk a little bit about it, but...
speaker-1 (29:17.73)
Yeah, I don't even... It's not an acronym, is it? You're talking about physical garbage.
speaker-0 (29:19.778)
That's garbage. so it started off with me wanting to get more people to walk down North Main Street. And I noticed a lot of, you know, trash blown in the streets in the neighborhood. Right. And so I was like, you know what? I'll start this thing called walking club, Jake is a walking club where we meet. We, at first we met twice a week.
We're down to once a week because people didn't like showing up to the 7 a.m. walking club. just weren't, recruitment was not happening with the 7 a.m. It's a hard sell. The 4.30 p.m. one was getting a lot of momentum. So we were like, we're going to drop the 7 a.m. one and stick with the 4.30. So that kind of started with just one neighbor in the neighborhood. His name's Tim Severs. He used to work with my mom at Channel 44 and Tim...
was willing to go walk, pick up trash with me a couple of times a week, right? Then we started hearing more about the trash and it was actually a Love Your Neighbor Day event. remember I was talking to Melissa Tynes. It's no longer Tynes, she just got married. Sorry, Melissa. But she was a Neighborhood Association president at the time and...
Dream Center hosts your Love Your Neighbor Day, which is coming up soon, later this month. Sweet. And I was walking with Melissa through alleys and we saw mattresses and couches in the alleyways. And I started asking her about, what does it look like to get this removed? You know, whenever you try to get a remove, what happens, right? And I'm finding out that the bulk trash removal is inconsistent in our neighborhood. Sometimes you...
You call and nobody answers. Sometimes you call and they charge you for bulk trash pickup when it's not part of our contract. You should get it for free, right? Sometimes you put it out there and they never pick it up. Right. And so there's a lot of inconsistencies in that system I'm finding out. So I pulled some people together and started asking questions. I started off with the Evansville Urban Enterprise Association.
speaker-0 (31:42.094)
which runs the recycling center in our neighborhood. So they have some ties to this, right? Because we have tri-state resource recovery in our neighborhood, right? So working with the neighbors and the businesses in that way. And I came up with a pilot program that ended up getting funding for six months. It started off as three months, but then they extended it because it was going well.
And this, actually there was one more thing that led to this. So the child in, in TP park that had lost fingers and toes because of rodent bites. that was something that just happened as well. Right. So I went to the building commissioner to ask him about the trash, right. Cause they were getting code enforcement violations as well.
speaker-1 (32:26.198)
Yes, I remember that.
speaker-0 (32:37.728)
And he goes, this is actually on my radar. I'm putting together a committee to try to address this, right? Maybe your neighborhood can be a good neighborhood to run.
speaker-1 (32:45.705)
the city he's trying to address this.
speaker-0 (32:47.724)
Yeah. And let's, you know, we'll try out a program in your neighbor to see if it works. Right. And.
What we ended up doing, I got funding for 300 Bluetooth enabled rap bait stations, which the city had never used up to that point.
speaker-1 (33:08.631)
I've never even heard of that.
speaker-0 (33:10.35)
It's new rat technology I learned all about. So basically there's weight sensors in these rat bait stations. And so anytime a rodent comes through there, it pinks. And so we could track data on how many of them are... is awesome. Right. The old way of doing it was they would hang a coat hanger with a piece of bait on it in every sewer. But...
You don't know what you're killing. You don't know how much you're killing. Yeah. Right. So.
And we started off with peanut butter in them because we had to get baseline data. So we fed the rats for a month.
speaker-1 (33:51.991)
Mm-hmm.
speaker-0 (33:54.17)
then after that first month, we put a community dumpster at Hope City Church. The church was kind enough to let us put a dumpster on their property for six months that anybody in the community could use. I send out a couple of direct mailers to the neighborhood with my cell phone number on it saying, if you have any trash, here's where the community dumpster is. and if you can't get it there.
Shoot me a text with your address and we'll stop by with some volunteers and pick it up. During that six month process, we did 158 tons of bulk trash removed from the neighborhood.
I don't have the data in front of me, but I believe it was 53 % of what the city did on a yearly average for the whole city. And we represent 5 % of the population. Damn. Yeah. So brought that to the executive director of Water and Sewer Department, building commissioner, a few city council members, right? We had everybody at the table that needed to be there.
speaker-0 (35:06.51)
Where that correlated with the rodents was we reduced the rodent population by 93 % in six months.
speaker-1 (35:12.756)
Wow. Wow.
speaker-0 (35:17.334)
Yeah. Yeah. So that was like, built a lot of trust with neighbors, right? Not only am I sending out my cell phone number.
speaker-1 (35:17.774)
Great job.
speaker-1 (35:25.368)
So practical too, that's like the, it's like, okay, yeah, go ahead, yeah. Not only are sitting at, yeah.
speaker-0 (35:31.63)
say on my cell phone number to them, say, text me if you need any trash counted out of your... Oh, got some crazy text messages. Oh, God. But yeah, it was... That's how you do it, know, getting your hands dirty, going out there, you know, getting in the dumpsters. You know, I was the one cleaning up the dumpsters every day. And then I'd, you know, put my polo on and go talk to city officials or whoever I'm meeting with that day. Right.
speaker-1 (35:35.182)
I'm to
speaker-1 (35:58.766)
Who is the guy again with the poster with the birds shitting on? Nate, has Nate heard this story you think? Man, Nate. That poster was a great job, Nate. Yeah. Inspired you to set this guy who was on a path doing good shit in life. That's awesome, dude. Do you have any other success stories like this? What else comes to mind?
speaker-0 (36:03.374)
Nate Curtis. I don't think he has.
speaker-0 (36:24.481)
Yeah, I mean, Abba-
speaker-1 (36:25.632)
Anybody know this? How did I- how did- did this get published in the paper?
speaker-0 (36:29.992)
No, so...
speaker-1 (36:33.067)
Wow.
speaker-0 (36:34.774)
It didn't. So some of the effects that came out of this, guess, that from a city-wide level, because we didn't have as much impact as we were hoping for, but there's still time. And they have made some changes, right? One of the changes they made was the building commission now has a full-time person with like rodent abatement.
experience, right? And they're using the Bluetooth enabled rat bait stations now. So that is a step in the right direction there.
speaker-1 (37:12.098)
Does listening sync to an app? Are they a software that it goes to? Interesting.
speaker-0 (37:18.774)
So I had heat maps and everything. It looks good. Then another change that they made was, this was actually really recently, they made some changes to the water and sewer contract. So now the water and sewer department is handling all the customer service calls for bulk trash pickups because they were, we were getting people, know, Republic was contracting that out.
And so sometimes you get somebody on the phone that wasn't familiar with the contract here locally. Right. And, or not good with the process of actually putting it in the system. So it gets picked up. I'm glad they're handling that internally. I saw they're also hiring a customer service representative. So hopefully they're building that team enough to where it can handle how many calls that they need to have.
Yeah, that was really the only change water and sewer department made.
speaker-1 (38:15.544)
But it's okay because to me, what it sets an example of is that I think that people have a tendency to outsource their problems or think that somebody else is going to take care of it and the problem swims upstream to a company that picks up the phone to solve the problem. They're like, we don't even know what you're talking about. Let me search the contract. It's so removed that problems just...
it all just falls to the cracks. Whereas you really surface this, this like on the ground, front lines initiative to solve a problem that must, it must send some sort of ripple effect through the like, then like no one's gonna solve our problem for us. I guess we have to solve our problems ourselves. This sort of like, let me pick up my own responsibility and do something about my neighborhood or my house or my life.
I think it's such a powerful way to do the work versus you're like barking at people to come do stuff. You're like, I'm just going to go pick up the damn trash. It was with one other guy and then we're going to see where this goes.
speaker-0 (39:28.63)
Yeah, I think most we had was 17 people show up to walk-in club. yeah I mean it's it's grown quite a bit over the last couple years and To talk about like the the process and that's not my job. That's one more thing I'll say on rats and trash real quick and then I'll get off my
speaker-1 (39:47.342)
Probably like some minor expert in like rats and trash. Yeah, it's awesome.
speaker-0 (39:52.974)
don't think I would have that, you know? I'm gonna do this. But yeah, I'm very well versed in rats and trash right now. That's so good.
speaker-1 (40:03.5)
It's like probably a side hustle consultancy you could start for people who have like big operations. like, we can't get a hold of the rats. You're like, dude, let me send you the link. This is the app you're wanting to get.
speaker-0 (40:13.614)
I want to add it to my LinkedIn profile under skills, rats and trash knowledge. That's awesome. another thing that we found out about this process, which was really disheartening while we're going through it and removing the trash, I was still having scenarios that I'm hearing at the neighborhood association from folks that tried calling in a bulk trash pickup. It doesn't get picked up.
and then they get a code enforcement violation.
speaker-1 (40:44.526)
Mmm.
speaker-0 (40:47.744)
I brought it to that committee and I said, you know, what's going on here? Right? How does this happen? I found out that the water and sewer department gets all the bulk trash emails. They don't communicate it with the building commission code enforcement. That got changed to where now the water and sewer department.
tells the building commission and code enforcement officers that a bulk trash pickup was scheduled.
Then once again, after I got that set up a couple of months later, I hear from neighbors again that it's still happening. So I go back to them and go, what's going on here? You know, I thought we set up this automated email and I get from the building commission that, yeah, we get those emails from water and sewer about the bulk trash pickups, but we don't communicate that with code enforcement officers.
speaker-1 (41:32.664)
Mm-hmm.
speaker-1 (41:51.278)
Why? Why? Yeah.
speaker-0 (41:54.558)
Like I'm sure you have somewhere where you could put notes on a property, right? and they said well if you get a fine for a Bulk trash or you get fined for trash in your yard and you have a bulk trash pickup scheduled if you call the Building Commission We'll waive it
How does anybody know that though? reactive, it's not being proactive. And that's something that I see as a bit of a trend being reactive versus proactive.
speaker-1 (42:18.891)
It's right
speaker-1 (42:33.068)
And it seems like, I'm so glad we're surfacing this because to me, a lot of what you are saying, like the communication breakdown part, the messages being sent, we live in the age of automation. the, we live in the, like there's never been a better time for automated messaging to just ping around to the right people. And it's, but I think that,
this, it's such ground level old structure. Like it's like such, you know, until somebody peeks under the hood and asks the questions, it's never been, it's just like inefficiencies. It's just like bloat that's just been, you know, caused over generations of systems. Systems are great, but they can also just become misaligned and inefficient, you know.
So you mentioned something when I saw you at an event recently about security. Can you talk any about the stuff that you're doing or ideas that you have or ideas that have been proposed to make the neighborhood safer?
speaker-0 (43:48.194)
Yeah, I can definitely dig into that a little bit. So that's something project I'm actually working on right now. yesterday I was installing security cameras and going through that process.
speaker-0 (44:06.67)
Safety is definitely like a concern in the neighborhood. Whenever I started giving them questionnaires about their priorities, know, safety is either at the top of the list or close to the top. So the first thing I started doing was tracking crime data. So the police department has a giant Excel sheet that where they keep all the, all the, every crime that happened, every 911 call, right?
speaker-1 (44:35.436)
Does that public data?
speaker-0 (44:37.006)
I don't know. You can ask for it.
speaker-1 (44:41.198)
Okay, good. Like a feed that they post online, but it's something that is.
speaker-0 (44:42.19)
from the crime prevention
speaker-0 (44:49.046)
I them for it and gave the crime data. So then I started doing some interesting work in Excel and categorizing things based off of, because I ended up getting a grant from Centerpoint Foundation to start implementing some of this. And that included security cameras to go up at residential houses.
so that we can help solve more crimes. And this was actually a concept, I got to give him credit, Leonard Collins. A lot of people know Leonard here in Evansville passed away recently in one of our meetings for the neighborhood focus council. He mentioned that, you know, one of the best things we could do for crime is having more security cameras up at residential houses, but you know, it's...
It's an interesting conundrum because a lot of the, in these neighborhoods, a lot of the houses are rentals, right? Sometimes up to 50 % or more. they're not, you know, rental homeowners aren't putting up security cameras at their house. Every rental house they have. So, and we're seeing that when police officers come to the neighborhood that they sometimes have issues accessing camera footage, right? So.
But to start off, I just wanted to track the crime data, figure out when crimes are happening, what days of the week are they happening? What crimes are popular at this point in time? Then I dug even deeper and started building maps of crime, maps of vacant homes, because crime is very tied to vacant homes.
speaker-1 (46:42.766)
It's like the natures of these crimes. Violence?
speaker-0 (46:46.862)
I mean, when you have a neighborhood of 6,000 people in the middle of the city, there's, it's all across the board. I've just been focusing on the violent crimes. Uh huh. Uh, the ones that significantly impact the residents is day to day life. Gotcha. Right. Uh, so I started tracking that on a month to month basis. And then we got a new crime prevention officer, uh, with the change in leadership in the city and
He's a younger guy and I started asking him about data, right? He was like, I don't know if we track any data here other than like crime is up or down overall year over year. Right. And so then he started using AI and
digging a lot deeper than what I could do. And he started off by just doing the charts that I was doing every month for the neighborhood, for every neighborhood in the city. So now all the crime prevention officers can show up to the Neighborhood Association meeting with specific crime statistics. Beautiful. Yes, that's very helpful. Yeah. And then he dug even deeper into it.
I don't know how much I can talk about some of this, he's, he's working on kind of an internal platform that'll help react to crimes in real time before the police officers get there. and we're running a pilot program in Jacobsville that we're working on, to get that network of security cameras up with the businesses and the, and the resident homeowners and the people that.
speaker-1 (48:24.067)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (48:33.39)
you know, care about their community getting better. And just by tracking the crime, we, year over year, this was a big statistic that I've found out a a couple months ago, whenever I was tracking last year's crime and comparing it to the year before. In almost every violent crime statistic, it was down. I think the only ones that were up were, it was like welfare check. And I think.
something about like breaking into like residential homes. forget exactly what that crime is called on their statistics, but, that's kind of tied with, unfortunately, like squatters people that are experiencing homeless, right? And we have a lot of homeless services in our neighborhood. And I also sit on the couple committees for homelessness and sheltering and
know, homelessness in Evansville significantly increased over the last year. And that does kind of make sense that those crimes went up, but I mean, shots fired went down 53 % in that same time. So that's how we build trust. We're starting to see progress, right? We're showing it in the data as well.
speaker-1 (49:54.292)
showing that data to the neighborhoods.
speaker-0 (49:56.866)
Yeah. Well, I'm doing it just to Jacobsville neighborhood, but crime prevention officers also kind of have structured this and put it out to other neighborhoods too.
speaker-1 (50:00.92)
Yeah
speaker-1 (50:09.144)
That is really, it's cool because I think I mentioned this to you at the Ozan on the event, was that I just returned from Jacksonville and I talked to the guy who was head of SWAT at the Jacksonville Police Department. And he was talking about during his last couple years there, he was helping build out the drone unit. And that one of the ways that they were utilizing drones was by
keeping them parked on top of buildings and telephone poles. And then any time that a call would go out in a certain area, they would throw the drones up immediately just to create surveillance in that area. But as I think about you guys connecting sort of like cameras with information that triggers things really fast, it's interesting to think about how all of those sorts of
Electronical things can talk to each other and work together to get eyes in the sky or just surveillance Information basically it surfaces information very quickly before a human being has time to get there and how How cool it is to live in a time where people like you and that other guy at the police office or at the Is he is he technically the guy the young guy? He's technically a crime prevention officer
speaker-0 (51:36.812)
Yeah, he's a crime prevention officer.
speaker-1 (51:38.958)
Is that like a form of being a detective? Or what is that?
speaker-0 (51:43.61)
It's more of a community facing role where they, they're like the ones that go to events, build trust with neighborhoods and they go to the neighborhood association meetings, right? They go to all the coffees in a cop there, but they do a little bit more than that as well, right? They really focus on the bigger picture of their sector that they're in charge of, right?
Now, I mean, his job is becoming a lot more data focused because he's somebody that showed an interest in this, know, taught himself how to code and do all this. And, he's really taken it full stride and, I don't know. one of these days he's just doing data.
speaker-1 (52:27.694)
This is a cut.
Because there's like a forensic-ness to that. There's some sort of behind the scenes diving into the numbers, figuring that stuff out. That is a super beautiful way to be utilizing these tools and using the information in an actually directly impactful way. Do you use AI in your work? Can you share some?
speaker-0 (52:54.434)
Yeah, mean, one of the things is grant writing. It's super helpful for that kind of stuff.
speaker-1 (53:00.312)
Can you take us through like a quick, you don't have to give the whole bit, or get away your secrets, but.
speaker-0 (53:03.03)
I mean, you could just put all of the requirements, all the FAQs, all of the questions that the grant asks you, right? And really build out your, well, one of the things I do is like compare different ideas and how competitive they're going to be for that grant based off of what they're looking for, right? So if I got two ideas, I'll compare them in AI.
with this grant application to see which one would rise to the top and aligns most with their mission and vision, right? Of whoever's giving out the money. And I think another way I use it, I I know as a marketing major, but like I haven't really done a ton of marketing in my career, more sales than marketing.
So I use it to help out with some of the marketing stuff. mean, Canva is a great tool as well that has AI features. But yeah, just kind of.
I mean, I use it for a lot of stuff. It helps me multiply myself and, you know, get rid of some of the, I guess, more boring type work, right?
speaker-1 (54:22.734)
The important but less Ted spending time on it being valuable work.
speaker-0 (54:28.47)
Yeah. Like if it was my full-time job to just sit down and like read documents and type emails, so like I probably would be terrible at it. Right. But like, because I'm the only full-time employee in this organization, like I have to wear all the hats. Right. So this kind of helps fill some of the gaps where I don't have a lot of expertise in. Right. I never wrote a grant before I got this job and now I'm going up against
know, competing against people, writing grants for decades, right? And, and have relationships with the people that are looking at these applications. and that's really tough to compete in that environment with not a lot of experience or a large network. But yeah.
speaker-1 (55:00.803)
Yeah.
speaker-1 (55:18.87)
Yeah, real quick two things the the fact that I hadn't thought about this before but the fact that Centerpoints in in the neighborhood. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was like wait, I got that name right. Yeah Centerpoint. They have the Centerpoint foundation, which is the nonprofit wing. Is this correct? Or not the nonprofit wing the fact being Okay, so so the same must be true for the other two big dogs. Do they have some sort of foundation?
speaker-0 (55:38.698)
to give away.
speaker-0 (55:49.262)
So Deaconess has a foundation. They just had a grant cycle that was open about a month ago. Suzanne Crouch runs Deaconess Foundation. She used to be Lieutenant Governor. Okay. And yeah, they do some good work. don't, I don't know if they have as many grants as CenterPoint does, right? But they have some that are available. And then Amcor.
I haven't had a lot of contacts with AMCOR, partially because of that change in leadership that happened. they're a 500-pound gorilla. got the most employees in the city.
speaker-1 (56:29.326)
They're a lot on their plate right this second, transitioning things.
speaker-0 (56:33.11)
And I might have been against their parking lot that they were expanding without the required trees.
speaker-1 (56:41.198)
There you go. But I was going to say the fact that it's like a those three being big entities in the neighborhood. The fact that their problems, or I should say like the neighborhoods problems are also their problems in terms of if security, trash, if these things are in the neighborhood and causing problems, they're probably causing some sort of problem for the business or like the
the parking lot, like the people walking to and from work.
speaker-0 (57:14.53)
I mean, Deaconess has their own police department.
speaker-1 (57:18.046)
Okay. You know, but you think that I hadn't thought about leveraging their business or their giving or their, you know, like their, their, their, yeah, their, their giving wing as a direct funder of the neighborhood. Cause I think there's so much of the negative story towards Centerpoint that, but, but what's funny is as I've been just
curious about it. There are stories that are surfacing of good things that do come from these 500 pound gorillas that do benefit people on a real practical way. But a lot of that gets covered up on Facebook. No one really posts about it on Facebook or other sort of social channels. But that's a really interesting thing I hadn't thought about was that there are these big entities there who share problems with residents.
in an indirect but very direct way.
speaker-0 (58:19.406)
Definitely. I want to give Centerpoint some credit. their foundation, one of the things they're very proactive. Like they show up to meetings that they don't have to be at because they want to hear what's happening and who's doing the good work. Right. And that's something that you don't see from every foundation. So.
speaker-1 (58:23.512)
Blessing.
speaker-0 (58:43.83)
I really liked that and they gave me a chance really when nobody else was giving me a chance. I just started, I the only employee at the organization, right? Had very little experience in nonprofit industry and they liked my idea, they accepted the meeting with me and have been supportive. So I think you can...
I got mixed feelings about it because you can be a great person and not work for a great company. And I think that that's one of the things that I noticed when coming back to Evansville and job searching. My software sales experience is not super valuable in Evansville because there's no software to sell.
speaker-1 (59:32.77)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (59:34.76)
and, didn't want to go into selling plastic or energy or drugs, pharmaceutical drugs. But,
speaker-1 (59:42.894)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
speaker-0 (59:51.308)
Yeah, they've been helpful.
speaker-1 (59:54.73)
I think there's like a huge opportunity to, I started like Googling or really chatting with Chad Givetti about, it's funny, I use the word Google for like some sort of verb of research, informal research, but I was asking about like telephone poles, telephone poles and like cruise and like hydrodynamic drilling. I'm like, who pays for all this shit? Who pays for
when a storm comes through and wipes out a portion of the electrical grid, who goes out and repairs it? Who maintains the grid that we are all plugged into? I started thinking, I'm like, if there's one thing that is pretty damn consistent in my life, it's that when I flip a switch on, the light bulb turns on. And it doesn't flicker hardly ever. And if it does, it's the light bulb's fault. And I think that
There's a, and I don't know the whole story, but I think that there's a side of the story that I think that we as people living in the age of everything happens right when we want it to and we want it as cheap as we can get it. That there's something that gets lost in the understanding of what we are like tuning into or tapping into. The same would be true for all systems that are like distributed where we get the end product and have cheaper, faster thing.
we become to expect these things and then I don't know what the full story is as to why things are the way they are, but I think that it's complicated. I think there's a lot to it that creates costs and creates these things.
speaker-0 (01:01:38.988)
Maybe I don't want to give them a complete pass, right?
speaker-1 (01:01:41.39)
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. I don't know the full story, but...
speaker-0 (01:01:45.816)
So I went to one of the IURC hearings, which is the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. They're basically the decision makers on any rate increase that happens with utilities in Indiana. From what I can tell, they're kind of the ultimate decision maker on the source of why we have such high utility bills.
speaker-1 (01:02:09.633)
at a state.
speaker-0 (01:02:11.18)
Yes. Indiana. Okay. I believe the whole regulatory commission is appointed by the governor of Indiana.
speaker-1 (01:02:19.672)
Okay.
speaker-0 (01:02:25.71)
I think it's kind of wrong to blame people here locally, right? Like local leadership really, to my knowledge, it doesn't have a lot of impact on that. It comes from state leadership, right? And the appointing of that IURC, which has pretty much been a green rubber stamp on rate increases.
speaker-1 (01:02:49.378)
Who's on that board?
speaker-0 (01:02:51.822)
I don't know everybody on the board, but I did get to speak to them once. But one of the things I said during that meeting was there was an interesting stat another lady brought up where she found the top 20 highest utility bills in the country. And this was a scenario where my perspective really helped me in this situation because I wasn't going to speak until she brought this up.
And I started doing digging. had my laptop in the audience. And the thing that stood out to me was these other cities were really nice cities, like expensive cost of living, high median household income. Right. So I started thinking to myself, I wonder where we rank and out of these top 20 highest utility bills, where we rank if you took a percentage of median household income.
And we were number one on that list if you took a percentage of our median household income that goes towards utility bills. And the other thing that stands out to me is we have a lot of power plants within a small radius of our, so we produce a lot of the power, right? But I would think of anything we would be able to benefit from that for producing the power, right?
speaker-1 (01:03:56.952)
Mmm.
speaker-1 (01:04:05.997)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (01:04:13.646)
and have cheaper utility bills. It doesn't have to go as far, right? We have power plants on every side of the city. There was a news article that came out a while ago about the America super polluters. And it was all of the power plants right around Evansville. But how do we still have the highest utility rates, right? On a percentage of median household income basis. Yeah.
speaker-1 (01:04:35.662)
That's a great question.
speaker-0 (01:04:42.284)
So I don't want to give them a complete pass, but there are great individuals at work there. They just maybe are not the ones at the very top that are making the decisions to increase shareholder value.
speaker-1 (01:04:56.246)
Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. It's a complicated problem. Glad to like get more. I'm glad to get more insight. you talk to local businesses in the neighborhood that you serve about adopting AI?
are utilizing or how they're utilizing it. Does that conversation happen ever?
speaker-0 (01:05:16.014)
I try not to push it too much because it can be almost destructive. Like if, give you an example, everybody knows what an AI flyer looks like. Whenever you just type in, make me a flyer for this, they all look the same pretty much.
speaker-1 (01:05:36.696)
Yeah, the people have fingers missing, the buildings are like glued together somehow and like, yeah.
speaker-0 (01:05:43.668)
So if I trained all the business owners in the neighborhood to use AI for marketing, and a lot of them would probably just come out with the same looking flyers all the time. So I know. try to dance around a little bit. If somebody's experienced a problem that I don't know how to solve, then maybe I'll give them some advice and type it in AI.
But also, I mean, sometimes they give me a problem and I type it in the AI and solve it and they think I'm a genius.
speaker-1 (01:06:17.71)
Yeah, yes. know, it's kind of a fun, balance. Yeah, because I think that the opportunity to share, I totally get what you're saying about the marketing thing, the opportunity to share in just general problem solving, that's what I think that the big opportunity is to share with people about is...
speaker-0 (01:06:23.152)
Yeah. How much time I have?
speaker-1 (01:06:46.626)
the thinking around how you're utilizing it practically that impacts your work to sort of begin eliminating the fear and the hesitancy around it. But also there's a fine line of walk that line, walk that risk yourself, Mr. Business Owner, because, and don't put in information you don't know where it's gonna go. There's probably some like, know, be careful like,
recommending it, I guess. But I think that there's an opportunity to share the beneficial ways.
speaker-0 (01:07:23.81)
Yeah, it's something that we could probably dig into at some point in time and get a, you know, go down that road and do some training with the business owners. And I'm kind of starting to work on that transition, right? One of the disagreements that I had early on in this job was with some city officials that they thought if I recruited businesses to North Main, then
that was going to make the neighborhood successful. Right. That was the main thing they cared about recruiting businesses to North Main. I kind of looked at it in a different way because I was talking to the business owners there and you know, some of them, some of them were struggling, you know, and dealing with problems because of the neighborhood, right. Where, you know, the owner of a business gets approached in a parking lot from somebody trying to harass her or
you know, building getting vandalized or something. We had a guy that was schizophrenic go through the neighborhood and draw X's on everything with a Sharpie. Right. So like weird stuff like that. Right. And I'm like, I want to change that first and then the businesses will come. Right. Bam. Like if they're, if they know that whenever they're doing work in our neighborhood, their tools won't get stolen out of their building.
whenever they leave for the night, or they know that, you know, they could get a grant for a mural on the side of their building or something, right? Like that definitely recruits them a lot more. And it's more of the, I call it like push versus pull, right? Pushing is more of sales, right? I'm going to, I want you to do this. You need to do it. It's good for you do it. Pulling is, Hey, whenever you're ready, we're going to be ready for you.
Right. And here's all the things that we're doing to make our neighborhood better. So whenever you do move in the neighborhood, you're going to have a thriving business. Right.
speaker-1 (01:09:29.966)
It's funny, you're like, you have a mission that is practical, that is alive, it is being lived out, and people, that draws people in. And I think that the microcosm of that neighborhood where you're saying, where city officials are saying, you need to bring businesses there, and you're saying, don't we make it a great place first? Why don't we make it fertile ground and then let it grow from the inside out? Is like the...
Uh, it's not a new approach, but it's like the, the right approach for right now that seems to be happening across different organizational types and in areas. Because even I was talking to a guy the other day about just the city in general, and he's a builder and he was talking about like, there's so much push to bring businesses here. And he's like, look at this, we have a city. Why don't we focus on this city instead of the out and in thing that we.
Like we have so much to work with here that we're just like not focused on. And I think that's such a theme.
speaker-0 (01:10:38.058)
Yeah, I would love to see more focus on small businesses, small business owners, right? I mean, we have a great organization in the Indiana Small Business Development Center, right? And they definitely do great work.
speaker-1 (01:10:54.22)
is a free organization that gives you advice.
speaker-0 (01:10:55.724)
Yeah, free things, to use, right? They have a great marketing person over there, David Jones, who used to work for Blackstrap Media. he's, you can go get his advice on marketing for free. And he was, I think it was chief operations at a marketing company, right? Like.
speaker-1 (01:11:15.47)
I started my record label, I felt alone. When I started my record label, I just went to the Small Business Development Center. I met Julie Foles. We still hang out. She's retired from there, but we still, I just had coffee with her last month.
speaker-0 (01:11:27.564)
It's it's a great resource. And that's normally where I push a lot of the businesses too, because that already exists, like to get that business coaching, right? Like I've never started my own business and ran it before. I've been part of really small startups. So I'm really close to it. I kind of took it as like a learning experience was, Hey, I'm going to use their money to learn how to run a business before I use my own money to do it. Right. But still like I've never ran a restaurant.
Right. Like, so there's, are different nuances involved in that, that I really don't have any experience with and don't feel comfortable giving them advice on that kind of stuff. So I sent them to the ISBDC, but I do believe that like, if we really focus on our, on our local businesses and bringing them up and our local entrepreneurs and you know, even college students that have great ideas and invest into them, then that's going to make them want to stick around the city.
Right. Instead of moving somewhere else and starting a business, which a lot of people have done. Right. And it's going to build us up here to more of a neighborhood level where we have cool little mom and pop shops. And everything where perspective helps was whenever I was up in Maine, I noticed there was like no chains. Like in some of the towns in Maine, they
speaker-1 (01:12:40.824)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (01:12:52.61)
don't have any kind of chains in there and it's all local businesses and it's just such a cool environment because you you have a relationship with the owner, right? Like you know the person that that's gonna be benefiting from this and they live in the neighborhood too and you know, it's...
speaker-1 (01:13:10.286)
which becomes the core.
speaker-0 (01:13:11.224)
Yeah, it keeps more of our money here. Instead of going to all across the US or even internationally and trying to attract major corporations to move here to solve all of our problem with one big manufacturing facility. It's going to create hundreds of jobs.
speaker-1 (01:13:13.271)
Yes, yeah.
speaker-1 (01:13:31.181)
Yeah.