Do Cool Sh*t (20 page)

Authors: Miki Agrawal

My mother started the Gifted Children’s Summer Camp in 1989 to keep excelling students engaged and exploring their creativity. She couldn’t find a good educational summer camp in our area, so she simply started one herself. With no experience (sound familiar? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!), and with English as her second language, she just figured it out as she went along and the camp existed for years with hundreds of kids and very grateful parents.

A couple of years later, my parents started “Tomorrow’s Professionals,” an educational electronics company that made fun kits to teach kids about electronics. This was the early ’90s and it had become clear that computers and electronics were going to be huge in the future. My dad wrote the manual, and my mom assembled the kits and drew the artwork. I still have two of these kits as mementos (and will one day sell them as vintage kits for hipster kids), and I can’t help but feel a little tickle of pride and amazement every time I come across them. My mom spent time teaching inner-city kids how to use these electronics kits, so they too could excel in this new and growing field. It was always so fascinating to watch my parents create little enterprises for the good of society.

I don’t know if the term existed back in the ’80s and ’90s but these businesses that my parents created were the classic examples of
social enterprises
. Today, there seems to be a clear zeitgeist around the way people view social impact. Having positive influence in the world has officially become “cool.” Young people are getting behind movements (think Change.org), caring about the environment (think the Leonardo DiCaprio film
The 11th Hour
), and gay tolerance (think Macklemore’s song “Same Love”), and are looking to innovate and change things in their local communities for the better.

Another perfect example is Tony Hsieh. After selling Zappos.com to Amazon for more than a billion dollars, his new purpose became to create a real community in downtown Las Vegas, an area that never really had a sense of community before. Las Vegas had been known to be a tourist destination, which made it difficult for large communities to flourish.

His goal became to change that.

His dream is to create a place that is a mix between the best aspects of New York City, Silicon Valley, Burning Man, and South by Southwest. He wanted to help facilitate serendipitous encounters, which is one of the things that makes New York City so special. New York City has a huge population in a small amount of space, and whenever you go out, you have the opportunity to run into more people, thus creating a tight-knit community. In Las Vegas, the houses are quite spread out, and part of Tony’s mission was to build taller, affordable housing in downtown Las Vegas and to invest in local small businesses so that a real sense of community can be built.

He is now well on the way with this project and has recruited and invested in one hundred businesses already to grow their roots in downtown Las Vegas, and in 2013 is even moving the Zappos.com employees from the suburbs to City Hall, the building he is renting as the new headquarters for the company. He now talks more than just about ROI (return on investment) when he makes an investment; he more often talks about ROC—return on community. How will your idea have a direct impact on the community? I love that.

President Clinton said the same thing. In December 2010, I managed to get myself invited to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), where leaders from around the world would unite to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. CGI has successfully improved the lives of 400 million people in more than 180 countries so far. Not too shabby. The way they ensure quick turnaround for change is to have individuals and organizations make annual pledges to hit positive impact benchmarks. These pledges keep people motivated and excited to come back the following year to share their positive impact stories.

For example, a pledge could be for a company to build all their new constructions with solar panels. Another pledge could be for a company to help buy clean syringes for underprivileged community hospitals. Or to give away one thousand pairs of shoes. It can be big or small, it doesn’t matter. As long as positive change is being achieved.

President Clinton consistently speaks about “doing good and doing well.” To create a financially successful business that has underlying good for the community built into the business model is the way of the future.

This concept of “social entrepreneurship” kept reappearing and continued to resonate with me.

I started to think about my own business using the lens of “doing good and doing well.” My restaurant was definitely built with the same intention: to create a pizza that both tasted good and was good for you, and also supported as many local businesses as possible.

We worked with local produce and dairy farmers, local microbreweries, local vineyards, fair-trade coffee and tea companies, and even worked with a local packaging company. In this way, we not only were helping employ thousands of local jobs and supporting the local economy, we were getting food onto people’s plates that had higher nutrition content because of the short transportation times as well as playing a part in helping the environment by cutting down our use of fuel and cross-country (or even farther!) packaging materials and costs.

Still, I knew we could do more. I wanted to engage and educate our clients, especially the future leaders of the world: our kids!

The obesity pandemic is growing, and obesity has become an issue of national importance. At the restaurant, Rads and I noticed that kids never ate vegetables on their pizzas and that they pretty much stuck to plain cheese pizza with its naturally limited amount of tomato sauce. They never ate salads or our vegetable appetizers. We knew that there had to be a way to help the parents in their quest to get their kids to eat healthier.

Radha took on this challenge like a champ.

We knew that we needed to create something different that would engage kids about healthy eating in a fun way, so we brainstormed and thought about all of our favorite childhood playthings.

Our first dolls were Skippy, a cute little chipmunk doll, and Ganzy, a little bear doll. Rads and I would play with Skippy and Ganzy all day long and create long stories and adventures with them. We then recalled our other favorite toys: Transformers and Care Bears, and our favorite movies were Superman and Batman installments. There were two common themes here—superheroes and adventures!

What better way to educate kids than through superheroes going on adventures? So Rads began to create a really fun coloring book on the inside of our restaurant menus and kids would come to the restaurant and color in the menus and learn about why the different vegetables were good for them (without knowing that they were learning, of course), and we let their imaginations run wild while they waited for their pizzas to arrive.

It was really great to watch these little superhero characters change the way the kids thought of vegetables. It actually worked! Kids would run and order broccoli because they wanted to be super strong like the character Brian Broccoli, or they would order eggplant because they wanted to be super smart like Erica Eggplant.

The kids ordered (and ate!) more vegetable toppings and ate more greens than ever before. The parents were ecstatic.

So we (mainly Radha) took this idea that was clearly working and over the next three years built a 2.0 version of a classic children’s show like
Sesame Street
complete with puppets and stories that focused on food and nutrition. Since the Super Sprowtz was born, she has published four children’s books; produced a live puppet show that has been performed for more than a hundred thousand kids; and created a TV show and produced a series of a dozen PSAs with celebrities including Russell Simmons, Shaquille O’Neal, and Aasif Mandvi from
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
. She even has a permanent exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan! Check out supersprowtz.com, and you will fall in love with Colby Carrot, guaranteed.

Do Cool Shit Takeaway

Here’s a simple method that people can use and one that many of my successful entrepreneur friends have employed to create “social enterprises.”

Ask yourself these three questions:

What is a problem that you are passionate about that’s negatively affecting your life or the lives of others in your community or other communities?
What is an idea or a solution that could alleviate the strain of this problem?
What is a product, service, or business you could create that could make this solution possible?

My responses that led me to create
my restaurant
:

My belly was hurting all the time. I was passionate about food. I found out that it was because food was becoming more and more processed and full of antibiotics, hormones, and pesticides, and this process was affecting millions of people around the world (including me). And like 65 percent of the population who suffer from a reduced ability to digest lactose without knowing, I was also lactose intolerant and didn’t know it.
To create a place that offered food (pizza!) that was free of processed ingredients.
We are a farm-to-table pizza concept where people could be entertained and eat their favorite comfort food without guilt.

Here are Radha’s responses that led her to create Super Sprowtz:

Childhood obesity is a big problem in America, and parents needed a fun way to teach their kids about veggies and to show them it’s “cool” to eat healthily.
To create a fun way to teach kids about nutrition, health, and eating more vegetables.
Super Sprowtz is an entertaining adventure series about veggie superheroes who save the planet one veggie at a time. Through books, live puppet shows, a TV show, an educational curriculum, and museum exhibits, children everywhere are inspired to eat better and lead healthier lives.

WHY PEER PRESSURE CAN BE AWESOME

When you’re hosting an event, whether it’s for your own business or for your passion project to help your community, the most important thing is to make sure the invited guests promise out loud and in front of the others that they will create specific tangible impact goals. Saying it out loud will help that individual keep to their goals.

Create follow-up events (six months and one year later) and celebrate the success stories of those
who have
achieved their goals and show those who didn’t that it’s easier than they thought to make a difference.

There’s nothing like a bit of peer pressure to get people doing good work. Ultimately, everyone wants to be heard and have the ability to share success stories. Sharing positive stories within communities gets people even more excited to do good work and it creates an upward spiral effect.

THE CALL TO ACTION

Create a double-bottom-line business around solving a societal and/or community problem in conjunction with being a financially profitable company. This will reap the most rewards overall.

Look around you—there are so many problems to solve, it’s just about your taking notice and deciding to take action! If you feel the calling within your heart to be part of this movement, go start a social enterprise and tell me about it on docoolshit.org!

So! You just learned
a lot about what it takes to get yourself started to begin your dream journey in business and create lasting impact. In order to continue to kick ass in business and follow your passion at full throttle, having a fulfilling and healthy personal life will give you important perspective in your life, which will actually enable you to make better business decisions in the long term. You will have time to step back, recharge, spend time with your friends and loved ones, and take yourself outside of what you are doing workwise and get outside the box. It has been incredibly important to me to have a personal life because it actually fuels my business life too.

So these next chapters are meant to remind you that staying healthy, finding love, and building your community are equally, if not more, important to your overall happiness as is your life’s work.