Business can be a means of impact in so many ways. Today’s guest is Bryan Barringer who is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation at Christian Brothers University. Bryan not only impacts the businesses around him with his expertise, but he’s also teaching young entrepreneurs the real world skills they can use to be effective in business.
Remember, no matter what your passion is, there are ways to use it to impact the world. You just need to embrace your gifts and skills, build a plan, and act.
Show Links
Ed Gillentine:
EdGillentine.com
Instagram: @journey.to.impact
Journey To Impact by Ed Gillentine
Bryan Barringer - Director, Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation
Email: bbarring@cbu.edu
Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation
LinkedIn
Facebook
Dr. Leslie McAbee - Director, Center for Community Engagement
Email – lmcabee@cbu.edu
Center For Community Engagement
LinkedIn
Books
The Lean Startup: by Eric Ries
The Startup Way: by Eric Ries
Crack the Funding Code: by Judy Robinett
Testing With Humans: by Giff Constable
Talking To Humans: by Giff Constable
Full Podcast Transcript
Ed Gillentine
I believe that business, yes, for profit business, I think it's one of the greatest tools for the good of mankind. Right? When I think about lifting people from poverty, economic security, dignity, finding your calling, all those things, shared purpose when you have a team, I just think it's really powerful. Talk about maybe a story of how you've seen the work that you guys are doing that leads to flourishing in the community.
Journey to Impact Intro
Welcome to the Journey to Impact podcast, where we show you how to turn your unique passion into a strategy to change the world. Yes, business can be a means of impact in so many ways and today's guest, Bryan Berenger, is not only impacting the businesses around him, but he's also teaching young entrepreneurs, the real-world skills they can use to be effective in business. Remember, no matter what your passion is, there are ways to use it to impact the world. You just need to embrace your gifts and skills, build a plan, and act. It's time to get off the bench, let's do this! Here's your host, Ed Gillentine.
Ed Gillentine
Welcome to the Journey to Impact podcast, I'm your host, Ed Gillentine. I'm here with Bryan Barringer, who's the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Christian Brothers University here in Memphis. Bryan, welcome!
Bryan Barringer
And thank you, thank you for having me.
Ed Gillentine
So, Bryan and CBU are doing some really neat impact related stuff. And as always, there's way more that we'd love to talk about than we're going to have time to get to, but before we dive in, let me give you a brief background on Bryan. He was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, graduated from the Auburn University in 1994. By the way, I did a little research on that, that was a good year football wise forAuburn, other than they were under some sort of sanctions or something.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah, we were, but it was a good year. It was the second time we beat Alabama at home.
Ed Gillentine
But it was the best year for my University of Tennessee Volunteers, because you will remember that the great Peyton Manning...
Bryan Barringer
That's true.
Ed Gillentine
Was his freshman year. And after the other two starters ahead of him got injured, I believe they went eight and one the rest of the year.
Bryan Barringer
That's true.
Ed Gillentine
So those Halcyon days of the Tennessee Volunteers, which are fading almost into oblivion right now.
Bryan Barringer
Almost, it's getting there for the first time in a couple of decades.
Ed Gillentine
He's a serial entrepreneur, three decades of experience. I think he shared with me, he got started when he was eight. So, I don't think I started cutting grass till I was maybe 10. He's been involved in 10 startups and I think this is interesting, correct me if I'm wrong. Six of which were financed and three of which were successfully exited. That is very difficult to do.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah. I mean, I wish I had the Bugatti sitting outside because of those three exits, there were kind of family office, business type, smaller acquisitions. And I did have one larger one as you know, with one of my own companies that have by myself, but it certainly gave me a lot of experience understanding what M and A is all about, just how to, how to close out those exits. So it did provide valuable experience if not the Bugatti sitting outside.
Ed Gillentine
Well, you know, you can get the Bugatti later. And so.
Bryan Barringer
I got a Lego version, so it's all right.
Ed Gillentine
I love that. That was probably harder to get or harder to build. I don't know. Currently, he's a professor adjunct professor at CBU, and as we mentioned, also, the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He's married with three kiddos. Did I kind of cover it all?
Bryan Barringer
Yeah. I mean, that's the, that's the short version I like to tell.
Ed Gillentine
I love it. So why don't we just dive in with the cliff note version of how you got from Birmingham, Alabama, via Auburn, to Memphis, Tennessee, Christian Brothers University, and doing what seems to be what you love to do.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah, I didn't, I couldn't have written this last chapter or whatever this chapter is. Hopefully it's not the last chapter. If I tried thinking back to who I was merely just four years ago, much less, 30 years ago.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
I you know, as you said, I'm a third generation serial entrepreneur, which means that my parents and my grandparents were entrepreneurs. My grandfather owned a, an antique store. My grandmother owned a gas station and car dealership. And so they were, you know, they were definitely entrepreneurs that I learned from very early. So even in my younger threes and fours and fives, I'd actually go and work in the antique store and, and different things like that. So I gotta, I gotta, you know, certainly a taste of entrepreneurship.
You know, at the same time I was learning how to run and ride bikes. And then as I grew up and I was in my 8, 9, 10 year old my father, who had a full-time job as a sales person for healthcare, he was an entrepreneur. So you had all these side hustles and most of which, I didn't have a lot of involvement with just, just hearing, you know, at the dinner table, what he's talking about. And some of them are crazy different things that he just tried, but he kind of gave me that take the leap of faith you know, experience.
Ed Gillentine
Those were probably ones you learn as much of it as the others on.
Bryan Barringer
Absolutely. And he knew about customer discovery before I even knew the words because he was doing customer discovery on his own son who was burning a hole through a bootleg copy of Star Wars in '78. And we opened a video rental store.
Ed Gillentine
Can we just clarify? That was the first Star Wars, right?
Bryan Barringer
Absolutely.
Ed Gillentine
That's not whatever they call it. Is it like number four now?
Bryan Barringer
Yeah. By, by George Lucas terms, the candidates it's number four, but certainly it was the start of it all. And so he decided, you know, take a gamble of VHS versus beta, which probably very few people younger than us actually know what I'm talking about. But, you know, the VH test was the gamble he took and we opened a retail business. And by the time I was 10, I was working there on a daily basis. By the time I was 13, I was managing two or three people in the entire. I'd built inventory systems on his old IBM XT, which was not old at the point. And it was as big as the table I'm sitting at.
And I just was very entrepreneurial without understanding anything about entrepreneurship at that early age. And we sold that business by the time I was a teenager, we sold another one over retail is by the time I was, you know, getting into college. And after graduating, moving up here to Memphis, all I really thought about working on was technology for FedEx.
I'd forgotten about that entrepreneurial gene I had in me, but it didn't take me too long to figure out that I did not. I love FedEx, but I did not like working at a business. Right? I wanted to control my destiny. I wanted to get to innovate on things I wanted to innovate upon. And I wanted to find co-founders that I could build businesses with.
And so that's what I started doing. Jumping off into a few startups some small, the.com bubble burst, but I was able to actually bring a successful business out of that from a failing business that I bought the intellectual property from that I actually created while I was working at that business.
So, I created the intellectual property there, and then I bought it from him for about 30 cents on the dollar, and then spun it into a business that we later sold quite effectively in 2005 to a business out in California. So, it was this great set of experiences. And that, to me, that experience of going from nothing all the way through acquisition and then actually working for the company for a few years afterwards; really, it was kind of those things where if I was ever mad a decision that entrepreneurship was going to do for the rest of my life, that was it. Right.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
And so, even though I did go back to FedEx a couple of times as a consultant because I wanted to work on technologies, but I still was their Entrepreneur-in-Residence and their Innovator-in-Residence for them too. So, it just became one of these things where entrepreneurship was what I wanted to do, but in this last go around on a business it failed quite, quite hard. The only thing that was fantastic about it was I married my co-founder. So she and I are, are now locked in as co-founding that role for life. But.
Ed Gillentine
One of the few times failure was worth it.
Bryan Barringer
Right. Absolutely.
Ed Gillentine
Actually, you always learn from it.
Bryan Barringer
Absolutely. And we learned a lot from it and it was fantastic. So as I was looking for something to do, a friend of mine at University of Memphis said why don't you to just come over here and help train the young entrepreneurs in our accelerator program.
And I came in on a Thursday and then I came back that Friday. And by the Tuesday the next week he's like, do I need to start paying you now? And I said, yes, you should start paying me now. And so I became the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at University of Memphis. And really after about a month and a half there, I realized, wow, this is something brand new for me of which I can be entrepreneurial and creating programs and creating education and creating tools and techniques that I've learned from both education of through accelerator programs, but also just picked up on my own. Working in an academic setting is both challenging and rewarding because we had to change a lot of status quo.
Ed Gillentine
I was going to say the culture from
Bryan Barringer
Absolutely.
Ed Gillentine
Entrepreneurial culture to an academic culture has got to be distinctly different. Wow. Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
But most universities and certainly the administration at universities want to be entrepreneurial because according to a recent article by Forbes and some studies done, 54% of generation Z are planning, not want, not desire, planning to be an entrepreneur.
So if you have over the majority of the new students coming in that are planning to be an entrepreneur, they want the skills to be an entrepreneur. And if we're not teaching those skills, then we're missing, you know, missing the opportunity there for economic development for the entire nation world region, you name it city and
Ed Gillentine
So much for the myth that the younger generations don't want to work and don't want to take a risk.
Bryan Barringer
They want to work like they want to work.
Ed Gillentine
Yes.
Bryan Barringer
We all were conditioned to work as we were told to work.
Ed Gillentine
Correct.
Bryan Barringer
Or how we were expected to work.
Ed Gillentine
Totally different ball game.
Bryan Barringer
They don't have that ball and chain attached to their ankle.
Ed Gillentine
I like how you say that ball and chain, it can be that.
Bryan Barringer
And it's fantastic for them. And it's fantastic for me because I get to say, okay, don't put on that ball and chain go to vocational school.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
Let's turn our school into a vocational school. And I don't mean not just welding and everything else. I mean, start thinking skills oriented, as opposed to theory oriented, teach the skills, you know, challenge the status quo and the norm to deliver a better product to the customer. Which is in this case, students. And CBU is completely on board with that.
We brought on a new President a couple of years ago, about a year, about a week before I started he has an economic development background. He's really interested in entrepreneurship and pushing that. And he knows that that's kind of part of the future, just part of the future for his university. So when I came from University of Memphis, had an opportunity to go to Christian Brothers and open up the Center for Entrepreneurship there and then work on the 800 Initiative, which I'd like to discuss as well. I really began to see that this was my calling. This is where I needed to be. And educating students and then being able to educate other entrepreneurs, even skilled experienced entrepreneurs at any age was like, "great, I get to itch that that entrepreneurial bug all day long? And I get to ideate with these people and help them better their products taking no risks on my own to be honest. And it's like the uncle handing back the baby to the mother, right? And then walking off and going and drink a beer at their own home, right? You know, it's like, I don't have to worry about your business, I can worry about you, but it's not my bank account.
Ed Gillentine
The fun stuff.
Bryan Barringer
Right. But I tell them how to find the funding. Right. I tell them how to stop, spending their 401s and their IRAs and everything else cause those are retirement funds that you need to retire with. I tell them to, you know, how to build a product or a business that customers want to buy and therefore investors want to invest in. You know, and these are things that they just don't hear from other avenues. So it became, you know, it's a long story. They were why I got into the university setting, but it's been a very serendipitous one over the years.
One that I've embraced every challenge along the way to find out at this point, this is where I really need to be. This is my calling. Right? All of these all of these acquisitions weren't to get me the Bugatti, it was to be able to get to the point where I can teach people how to be successful. And it's allowed me to be on advisory boards and a few other things to help and be a part of those teams too.
So I get a little bit of the itch in a different way or scratch a different way, but it's been very rewarding so far. So, yeah. Sorry for the long answer to your question.
Ed Gillentine
That's fantastic. And, and, in the Journey to Impact book that we wrote, one of the things that I'm passionate about is encouraging people to find why they're on planet earth and, and it takes a while, right?
I think,
Bryan Barringer
Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
One of the things I try to tell young people is, you know, at the risk of sounding negative, cause I don't mean it that way. You don't really know anything till you're 30. And so take your time, try out these different things. That's, what's neat about your story. I mean, from antique stores to car dealerships, to, to VHS, I mean, you're all these different things you're learning.
They all come back to what you're doing today and it's like, you found your groove. It did make me think of a question. Do you think looking back on your own life and being surrounded by entrepreneurs. Do you think entrepreneurship is a gift? It's like in your DNA? Or is it a skill? Is it something can, you can learn? What are you thoughts on that?
Bryan Barringer
I used to think it was purely in your DNA. I mean, I thought there was entrepreneurs and there was non-entrepreneurs.
Ed Gillentine
The rest of us.
Bryan Barringer
Right. And it's funny that you say about the 30 and it's like, I think, you know who you're going to be at 30, and I don't think you really realize who you are until you're 40, but I'm 50 and I've got even a different perspective at this point.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
You know, and, and, and it's, it's, it's a lot of clarity that's come with those years. You know, it's, it's, it's to the point of like, it's, what do you really want to do with your life? And where do you want to take it and everything in that regard and how do you want to impact the world? And, and that's where I really started to question myself along the way.
And it's like, you know, it's not just something that you're born with. It's actually something that can be taught. And once I realized that, and actually the part that made me realize that I started teaching a class on design thinking. And one of the first questions I asked, I just thought about, just to ask this question is how many people in the room think they're creative?
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
I did this just yesterday with a class and, and I got less than half of the people raise their hands. And I said, great, I'm going to talk to you for about an hour and a half. And I'm going to ask you that question again. And usually by the, do this over a course of a semester, and by the end of the class or end of the semester, I ask the question again, who in here, things are creative and everybody raises their hand at that point because the class I teach teaches them the skills on how to be creative.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
There's people that are artistic and there's, people are not artistic, but everyone can be creative because it's just a process, right? It's just problem solving.
Ed Gillentine
I've always felt like I'm not a musician. My wife's an artist. She's a painter. I'm not creative. And then I would say 10 years ago, I realized I'm super creative at putting a deal together. I'm super creative at spreadsheets.
Bryan Barringer
Right.
Ed Gillentine
It's my creativity. And that was really freeing.
Bryan Barringer
Right. It's not a definition of a skill. It's a definition of a process that one goes through to be creative about whatever they're passionate about and yours is in finance. So you work on deals in that way. And that's, that's, that's the crux of the whole thing is like entrepreneurship is the same way.
If I can boil down the experiences I had into components that can be educated, you know, that can be taught with tools and techniques to go along with it, and an overall timeline of when things should happen, then anybody can do it. It's all about the one thing I can't teach is the leap of faith.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
Right? And that's when, and I'm struggling right now with an entrepreneur, who's making a really good salary at a business, but he's got a fantastic idea. And I'm like, that idea is not going to launch and you're not going to get any investment until you quit your job. He was like, I don't want to quit my job.
I was like, I get it. I get it. But, and you're going to take a big, huge pay cut because I don't want you to pay yourself what you're paying now when you start your entrepreneurship, I mean your business and you're getting investment. But the fact is, is like, I can't teach that leap of faith, but when I teach them that the landing zone on the other side of leap of faith is one made with process and tools and techniques.
And it's not a void they're jumping into. It's actually another plateau they're jumping into to start walking down their path of entrepreneurship. So once I realized that, and once I actually started building out actual education it really became a method of teaching, as opposed to just, hey, this is what entrepreneurship is.
It's hard and it's dangerous and you're going to be stressed and depressed and all these different things. Yeah. All that happens. But here are all the things to mitigate those. And here are all the things that I use as coping tools while you're going through these things. And here are things to look at when things, when you hit a brick wall.
And, and, and that's really been quite beneficial to all the entrepreneurs that I've had the pleasure of teaching so far. And I've really realized that it can be something is taught. And now that's all I'm really focused and energized on doing is teaching as many people as I can because the statistics of 97% of businesses fail and 99% of restaurants fail.
And, you know, you always fail on your first startup, maybe your second startup and your third one might be successful. I want to just really throw those stats out the window.
Ed Gillentine
They're terrifying without context.
Bryan Barringer
Right. Well it's, and it's terrifying without context because the context is they don't have the education and the tools. They need to be a successful entrepreneur. So they're flying blind. And so I want to be able to be part of that, you know, that, that push to teach them all the skills and techniques so those numbers are irrelevant because we actually have statistics based off of companies being successful. Right. And long-term, and growing by 1, 2, 3, 10, 12 X.
And so I think if we just keep at this we'll, we'll, we'll train a whole new batch of entrepreneurs that could be much more successful than previous.
Ed Gillentine
I want to come back to that. Hopefully we have time. Cause I think it's important. If you think to me, you think of the talent pool in Memphis, Tennessee, which I think is huge.
If it's a function of the training, you get to dramatically increase your likelihood of success as an entrepreneur. I mean, how critical could that be for Memphis? And that probably does. Sort of segway well into the 800 initiative. So talk about that for a minute because I've been following it a couple of years.
I'm really curious to get an update from the inside.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
But tell us about that and then how it's impacting Memphis and how you see it being such a big deal.
Bryan Barringer
I think that was at least 50% of the reason why I took the job at CBU was the opportunity to work on the 800 initiative, which had been going on for about a year before I started.
So this is three years ago. Mayor Strickland and his infinite wisdom, as far as this goes with wanting to make an impact to the city decided that he was going to work with Director, Joanne Massey, to create a variety of resources for small businesses and entrepreneurs in the city. They opened up the Office of Business Diversity and Compliance.
They opened, they took the universal life building over and made that an entrepreneurial network center, which is fantastic over there. And Mayor Strickland put forth an idea along with Joanne and Andre Fowlkes from Start Co. about taking one of the accelerator programs. This was actually presented by Andre three years ago, three and a half years ago, to take one of their propel accelerate programs, which is a minority accelerate program, and actually build that into a much larger initiative. We looked at 2010 census data and found that there are 69,000 privately owned firms in Memphis. This has been validated by 2020 as well. There's 69,000 privately owned firms in Memphis of that 39,000 of those roughly 40,000 are minority businesses owned businesses.
But of that 69, that 40 only makes up 2.7% of the annual receipts, right? So the annual revenue generated by private businesses and Memphis, and this is not the FedExs and the AutoZones this is small privately owned businesses. They're only making less than 3% of the receipts. So when you have 97 of the rev, 97% of revenue made up of only a third of the businesses, you really have a huge gap between the other two thirds.
And so since the other two thirds are seen as minority businesses, predominantly Black and Latin X at that point and we, and we put women minority founders or women founders in those two categories, so they're included as well; but when we found that out and we decided, look, there needs to be a concerted and very deliberate effort to help.
And so we joined, we, we built a consortium with Start Co. obviously is one of the first people Epicenter, which is our entrepreneurial ecosystem hub here in town. Both the city of Memphis and Shelby County cause they, they did a match challenge with each other FedEx, Kresge Foundation, Chase, and a few others.
And then CBU came on as the fiscal agent, as well as the educational component to that.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
And program facilitation. And then with me coming on board as part of that, the charter was actually to establish a center for entrepreneurship CBU and to hire a director. So I became a part of CBU through the 800 Initiative actually. Our goal was to bring resources, funding, so capital, education, acceleration, incubation, you know, virtual interns and entrepreneurs and executives and resonance amongst a few other things, all to bare to help these minority businesses. We built a portfolio and now we have 52 privately owned minority firms in that portfolio. It's an active portfolio meaning we work on, on a daily basis.
All of them have received funding for a certain level or most of them have. We took care of Zack money this past year and actually dispersed $200,000 in two months to these firms through micro grants and stipends for why they were in the program. We've touched over 2100 firms in three years through programs, workshops, events.
We have 500 firms that have actively received programming. And then, like I said, 52 that are in our portfolio. We've created 171 new jobs. Now that took a hit and COVID, but pre-COVID we were there, and about $19 million in net new revenue over three years. So these $19 million of new revenue brought to these businesses that they didn't have before.
And a couple of very compelling financial capital infusion funds that are there at their disposal to help them reach capital milestones to reach new things. So it's become this extremely rewarding program. We just got a fourth year of funding from the county, I'm sorry, from the city from Mayor Strickland which wasn't even planned.
So Mayor Strickland said, 'Hey, we're going to re-up up and do a fourth year because of all the work y'all been doing, the impact you made,' which is a great testament to what we're doing and again shows the continued effort of, of Mayor Strickland and the City Council and Director Massey.
And so it is just a really great initiative of which now we've seen Knoxville form the Knoxville 100, which is a clone of The 800 Initiative. We did a, you know, we had a few meetings with them and talk to them about our structure and then they created their own and it's working. They just got five new firms in it the other day. I talked to St. Louis this morning with ITEN their entrepreneur network up there in Lindenwood University, because they want to start doing some of the programs that we're doing. We talked about the 800 initiative this morning. St. Louis and Memphis are very, very similar minority, majority cities.
They have to, they have a city and the county mayor as well. So it was kind of funny to talk to them about that, but, you know, they want to see things. So we're seeing a push regionally and it all comes from really, and just, you know, speaking on behalf of a CBU it's, you know, CBU's mission is very community minded.
We're Lasallian and so our mission is to "enter, to learn, leave to serve," right? So we put ourselves and our students and our faculty out into the community purposefully and deliberately to bring those resources, any resources, that we can muster to those communities that have been disenfranchised for so many years.
And we're bordering on two opportunities zones, almost three, with South, Orange Mound, and Bing Hampton between us. So we really focus a lot in those areas and that's, you know, we were hoping to have Leslie McCabe join us today as well. She's the Director of the AutoZone Center for Community Engagement.
Just one example beyond The 800 initiative. If I may, you know, we have a capstone course or a program at CBU where we have students, seniors that are matched up with community partners, businesses, like Shamichael Hallman from Cossitt Library downtown with the library system, they reinvented Cossitt completely from the ground up, leaving the walls and doing everything else, but turned it into a brand new resource center and library and it's all part of the gateway into the Fourth Bluff. So our students joined with Shamichael and the rest of the team to build my Fourth Bluff, an application that allows for people to find out what's going on with the events and the resources and community engagement and everything else. And that's a great example along with The 800 Initiative, of how CBU in particular is really trying to not just focus on what's inside of our campus, but take our students outside the gates of our campus,
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
And expose them to opportunities to impact the city and through these engagements and through our two centers, Leslie's and mine, we're very, again, I like the word deliberate.
We're very deliberate and in a concerted fashion to say, 'where are we going to make an impact?' Not just how, but where? And we look at that, that and say, okay, we can make an impact here because the Fourth Bluff and Cossitt and that whole library system, which is a safe haven downtown all needs to be revamped so it can be a better place, a destination, for our citizens to go to. So let's do this collectively. Let's bring in the youth and the students and our seniors on capstone, because they're going to learn from this impact. Let's work with community leaders like Shamichael and really build an application that is good for our business.
I mean, good for our businesses and Memphis and our citizens. There's some great examples like that. So 800 and what Leslie's doing are stuff that I really never dreamed would be the icing on the cake of being able to teach entrepreneurship, but it really is. It's been fantastic.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah, you know what a powerful combination to be able to teach young people, college students, a framework to think.
Bryan Barringer
Right.
Ed Gillentine
And then go out in the real world and see how it really works because it's not as clean as it is in class. And you got to learn that, but the best way is to go do it. So that's a great combination.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
I love it.
Bryan Barringer
And that's that's yeah. I, I might've come into the university setting and I certainly don't like the fact that COVID happened, but the fact that I came in during this period of time, and there was this global reassessment of our lives and how we have to change and how we were forced to change.
It's something that's also in turn made the universities realize that virtualized education is something that's completely legitimate and can be done asynchronous and synchronous. And, and still have that interaction with the students hybrid is something that is also very beneficial to both the students and university, so half and half.
But understanding that traditional students are not the only students.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
Right. And so the community has thousands and thousands and thousands of people that desire to be educated collegiately, but don't have the time, or maybe even also the desire and certainly the economics to go to a full, get a four-year degree.
Right. The Associates degrees are great, but it also takes commitment and financial, and even those are mostly paid for now. It still takes a time commitment. And I still don't believe that most of the Associates degrees are something that they want to get. Right. So if we have easier ways for these people to take certification courses, get certificates and badges and different points and different things to add to their resume or do two year educational programs at colleges, or seek a four year degree, but having a variety of solutions for the variety of people really is where university is going.
And that's where the CBU is really pushing pretty hard of trying to figure out how to educate more of those people. That desire to be educated, but have been excluded for one reason.
Ed Gillentine
I love hearing that. One of the things that, that The 800 Initiative seems, and, and really the, your Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation kind of is holistic.
That's the word that keeps coming to mind. Yeah. Why is that important in, in your view to be engaging with government, semi-government, for-profit, non-for-profit, all these different community connections. Why is that important?
Bryan Barringer
Yeah, again, very timely. I was literally, before I came in here, I was on another conversation with a colleague, a peer in St. Louis. Who's just starting his career in this space where I was a two years ahead of him. So I was sharing some things, but that's what we were talking about. The 800 initiative would not be successful if it didn't have this special recipe of people, this special collection of ingredients that went with us. And I think to me, it's government private and public, right?
You have to have the municipalities behind this because generally they always have the resources that you need. They have, especially with the City of Memphis, they have of the certification process. So every business comes in and get certified through the, through the city, right. And the minorities get certified and we can know that.
And that's a good thing. They also have a good understanding of both their financial needs through bids and RFPs, as well as others that are in the city. So they collect that information. Our city has the ODBC, the Office of Business Diversity and Compliance and the Entrepreneur Network Center. So we have all these resources.
So the city is a very important part and they financially put money behind us, which is also important part, you know, money behind the passion.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
You know, the, the public side where you have the, the more of the, you know, the, the, what I'm saying by public is also the commercial side, the corporate side, right?
You have the FedEx's, but then you also have the foundations like Kresge and Kauffman and Chase, and a few of those others, but then you also have the resource centers like Epicenter and Start Co. Then you have universities like CBU and U of M working on different things. And when you have this combination of all these critical resources and everybody's putting forth resources, time, and money, then everyone's skin is in the game.
Everyone is motivated to make it a success because no one wants to. I mean, faith, at least no one wants to be the point of failure, right. So we all want to succeed. So we all want to do our part and not let the other parties down. And then when you actually see the impact you're making as a consortium of, of resources You can, you can truly see the impact that a large consortium of resources can make on a smaller community.
Right? And then you can see that it can make it that same impact on a larger swath of that community. And then you can actually target those to certain opportunities zones as well. And so that's, that's, that's what I think is kind of been the key to success of the 800 inches is enough players that have important enough roles and positions, not necessarily their titles, but who they represent.
Coming together again in a deliberate fashion. That's gonna be the key word of this podcast, deliberate fashion to bring resources to those that are in need. Yeah. And I, I think without that, without that grouping of powerful players at the table, it, it, it can't do as much as. Would like it to do and often it fails.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
And then we see a bunch of siloed resources, like we've always had. And again, COVID helped us because what we realized is we couldn't be siloed anymore. Even the ones outside of the 800 initiative, like The Edge and some of the other entities in town. So when PPP and all these different things, programs came in, all the entrepreneurs got very confused.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
And they had money being thrown at them. They were in desperate need of it. So they kept, they just grabbed it. Right. Which left our capital funds kind of dry for a little while, you know, at port, if you will. And, and that was okay because we were helping them, advising them on how to utilize the government funds and the Cares Act funds.
But what we realized is we needed to all the players on the phone call on a weekly basis. Right. So we. You know, Tommy and, you know, rest in peace, but all these different people that came in and, and worked together, Leslie Smith and all these powerful people, we met on a weekly basis to talk about all of our resources and how we can actually pass people back and forth.
Say this, my program is not going to work for this people, but your program was like, oh great. I didn't even know these people existed. I'll take them. We had people from the unemployment office on, for every week. So we were getting statistics on number of people filing every week, helping out the restaurants that we started working with during this period of time, understanding staffing and stuff like that.
And really trying to talk to them about what's going to happen when people come off of workman's comp or not where the unemployment rather. Right. And stuff like that. I think I said workman's comp earlier, but unemployment. And so, you know, all of us coming together also helped. We really, you know, con you know, in a concerted effort to, to bring those resources to the, to the population.
That, that makes a lot of sense to me, but I also know it's incredibly difficult to, to manage and to cast that vision. One of the things that I hate doing is reinventing the wheel, right? A matter of fact, in the book, I've got a chapter on warning signs of impact organizations. And one of them is you, you keep reinventing the same wheel over and over.
Is the 800 initiative unique to Memphis? Is it a Memphis thing or where the ideas taken from other cities or around the U S?
Bryan Barringer
I would say that most cities have a minority development center of some sort. And we've had very successful ones here in Memphis for a long time, too. So everybody's, again, to the silos.
I would say most major cities have some sort of resource or resource pool for minority businesses and entrepreneurs struggling. But I don't think there's a lot of things like The 800 initiative.
That's really neat. When I heard you talking about Knoxville and, and in St. Louis. I mean, again, it goes back to me to the talent, the creativity that's in Memphis. We've got a lot of really neat things to export and it's neat to watch what you guys are doing. And I can only imagine as it grows.
Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
The exporting of these ideas. I mean, holy smokes, can you imagine some of the larger cities like Detroit and Chicago being able to start working together across all these different disciplines and different public private. I mean, that would be, that would be really huge. So I'm excited to see the influence you guys have across the country.
Bryan Barringer
Well, I th-I'm I am too. I mean, that's one of the things we were talking to St. Louis about this morning and not in great detail of let's get started, but it was like, 'hey, let's think about this.' We have this opportunity where, you know, you have the research triangle out east and you have Silicon Valley and the corridor down south, and then Boston, that whole Chicago area. But we don't really have anything that goes through this Mid-South area.
Right. So the St. Louis' and Kansas City's down through the Arkansas' through the Delta and down even to New Orleans. Right.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
There's this quote, unquote, "corridor of opportunity" there that's not necessarily a tech corridor, but it could be an entrepreneurial corridor, right? Where all the cities work together on our you know, collectively, but we also are working towards, and for those businesses that make up our cities, right, we all want a tech unicorn to be born.
Ed Gillentine
Sure.
Bryan Barringer
Out of our cities who wouldn't want that? But the fact of matter is, is if I had to, if you gave me the opportunity to choose between one. 10 10 X on unicorn or a thousand family businesses that I can help go to two X, three X? First of all, do the numbers. I'm making more, you know, more money to be made for the city on the thousand than that one.
But that's really more of a rising tide lifting boats. Then the one is, and if that's the same case in St. Louis and the same case in Arkansas and Little Rock and Bentonville on the same case in New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi that allows for those entrepreneurs to feel like they're in the right city for them, because they have resources up and down, it brings economic development up and down, and then, you know, people can move from city to city, but other people from other cities that are looking for that will move here.
They don't have to be technologists, just entrepreneurs.
Ed Gillentine
Right. And I'm thrilled to hear you say that because sure. Everybody wants the home run.
Bryan Barringer
Right.
Ed Gillentine
Right. But when I think about a thousand versus one, I think of a diversified portfolio, right. It's much healthier, you know, a lot of these unicorns can yank their cities around too. And they ended up going back and forth.
Bryan Barringer
And then they leave. Right.
Ed Gillentine
And then your unicorn
On tax credits for four years.
Right. And they're out of there, but those thousands small businesses. And, and, and I think I read something maybe it was Andre Fowlkes talking about just, you know, raising their revenue up to a million dollars a year from, I think an average of 650 or something like that.
I mean, that's a huge think of how many people you can employ, think about moving to a living wage. I mean, all of these things and it touches, all over the city.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of people moving into or have been, and now we're succeeding in, in the construction space. We have the union row.
We have, you know, the pinch it's, it's, you know, it's going to happen eventually we have the south side going and everything else. There's a lot of new development, corporately and residentially across the entire city, which is opportunity. Right. And that's where we need to focus on, but we need to have these businesses, minority and otherwise, be worthy of that business.
It's not just cause I mean, they're worthy of it, but are they capable? Right. And that's what I mean by worthy. It's like, can you do a good job to get that repeat business, to get that exit, that upsell business, right. To incorrupt grow your capacity. And that's where we want to help them is really like, look, you have an opportunity to, to bid on this union row thing, not just because they've earmarked a certain amount for minority businesses, because you're the best business. That's exactly it's this, regardless of your skin color. And so that's, that's where we want to be.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah. I love that. So metrics are a big deal to me. I know they are to you guys as well, but relative to what you guys are tracking for The 800 initiative, what are some of those data points and why do you think they're important to track?
Bryan Barringer
I think the most critical data points that we picked up very early on was net new revenue and jobs. And someone say, oh, well, that's a simple thing to choose. Obviously those are obvious ones. And we're like, yeah, but those are also key components to to, to bridging between that 3% that I talked about earlier in 50 to 60%, right.
At least owning a half share or a majority sheriff since you were a majority group. So, you know, net new jobs meant to us a, a point of where. Because of those 39,000, only 800 of those firms had more than one employee. Okay. That's SAS and 39,000 firms that were a single proprietor firms. Okay. And you want to talk about a scary existence as an entrepreneur being on your own is a scary interaction, right?
So our idea first off was not just to bring in net new revenue for those companies that had more than one employee, but it's to bring those companies that didn't have an employee to the point where they did to us bringing someone who is single threaded and then allowing them to add capacity by bringing on another person.
And this is why we have the intern program and our Executive, our talent augmentation program is to allow them to gain capacity, which has allow them to do more sales, allow them to capture more sales, allow them to operate and execute on more sales and then generate revenue and then take that revenue and grow and scale and do the same thing. Just rinse and repeat as you keep going on.
Ed Gillentine
And those are key entrepreneurial skills, right? That kind of only you can do as the, as the leader of the organization. You got no capacity, you can't do it.
Bryan Barringer
Absolutely. I mean, I've been a single threaded founder before, and there's always reaching that litmus point when you just can't do it anymore.
And I have a saying that I teach everybody which is "do less, better than more worse." It's six words, but it's like, just make sure you understand that you need help and capacity. Bring people on, put less on your plate, put more on other's plates as well, spread it out and do less. And do it better. Right?
And so instead of trying to do it all, and so that's, that's kind of the goal and this is what we have to teach. And so adding capacity allows that person, that single threaded person to actually have more capacity. And then once they bridge into that next group, that 800, and this is really where the name came from because we were focusing on the 800 as well as to get you into that a hundred was to add people.
Now, when you're in the a hundred, our focuses on net new revenue. And it's not just about increasing the opportunities you have with your current customers is by going out and getting more customers because current customers are great and you can grow with them, but they're going to limit you in time.
In fact, they might go away in time just for natural reasons, not because of anything you did, but in everyone bids, you know, rebids every few years anyway. So you might lose out for somebody else. But if you grow in the number of clients you have, and the number of revenue opportunities you have and in the sources of revenue then you diversify your entire, you know, your entire, you know we'll, we'll, we'll say portfolio in this case, but you're in your operations.
And so you have a higher likelihood of success across the board because your points of failure are fewer and far between. So that's where our main goal was, is add jobs and add net new revenue.
Ed Gillentine
There's an interesting thing, which we can maybe talk about this later offline. There's a point at which your business becomes an asset that's sellable, right?
So you think about a retirement plan. You know, it's, it's kind of rare, at least that I see in my line of work that an individual entrepreneur and individual business does has, it's rare that it doesn't have a higher return than say the stock market because it's you you're, you're passionate about it, usually good at what you do, but it is very difficult to get that to a sellable point where somebody else could come by yourself.
I think that's why systems are important. That's why a lot of customer I shouldn't say a lot, a diverse customer base is really important,
Bryan Barringer
Right.
Ed Gillentine
Because that protects the buyer, right, from some downside. So I, those are, those are really good metrics and I'm glad y'all are focused on those.
Bryan Barringer
They, they, they're, they're pretty important ones for us.
Ed Gillentine
So I guess core value for me, I believe that business and I would say yes for profit business. I don't think profit is a bad word. I think it's one of the greatest tools for the good of mankind, right? When I think about lifting people from poverty, economic security, dignity, just finding your calling, all those things, shared purpose when you have a team.
I just think it's really powerful to bring people together to do so many things. Talk about. Maybe a story of how you've seen the work that you guys are doing that leads to flourishing in the community.
Bryan Barringer
Well, we're seeing a lot, you know, there's and there's something you said earlier that I haven't seen before that I'm starting to see now, which is conversations about acquisitions.
You have small businesses thinking about buying other small businesses, and that's not something that generally happens, more or less something that's discussed. Usually small businesses simply see other businesses as competition, not an avenue for expansion or scaling. Right. So we've had conversations.
So, I mean, I think that's one of those things. I mean, it's not necessarily a community impact and I'll come to that in a second, but it's also just an economic impact thing where you have a company that's going to do X growth based on acquisition, which is not something that they would typically think of before.
So it's certainly proof in my opinion, that the education that we're giving these people, the resources we're giving these people they're starting to think in a different box. Right. I mean, it's certainly out of the box. They were. Yeah. But it's in a different format of saying, okay, well, there's more ways than one to scale.
Right. And so, and there's more ways one, to diversify my portfolio or, or diversify my product offering or whatever it is.
Ed Gillentine
That's a pretty huge paradigm shift.
Bryan Barringer
Right. Or just go grab their customers. Cause all we want is their customers so I'm going to take away everything else. I'm just going to scuttle them. So, you know, it's, it's, it's an interesting thing.
So I think that's impactful from an entrepreneurial and economic and corporate perspective. You know, I see things, I think the best example that I can see is the impact that our interns make on these businesses, but also the impact that the businesses make on the interns.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
So I'll consider this to be a social impact for me and I think it's pretty clear one, which is when you have a student that is not feeling like they're a warm body punching numbers, doing data entry or anything else, but actually has marketing campaigns they were asked to do. We had students developing apps next last semester and websites for people. These are the things that they're learning how to do in school and they're applying those in real world. But these are also minority businesses that have been struggling over the last year. And so when these interns come in, the level of passion that the interns start to put forth to these businesses is measurable and you're like going, okay, that's making an impact.
They're not just a college student anymore. They're a college student that now has experience in a struggling business. And they're passionate about helping that business succeed through this or survive through this. So the impact of the student has been great, but when I interviewed the founders, the business owners, it's equally as impactful for them too, because they've brought in a student that wasn't just a warm body.
They might've thought that before, but the student then challenged them to say, I want more, how more can I help you? And when they say, well, okay, you've done the data entry thing. Let's talk about marketing. What would you think about marketing? And they start contributing. That person is getting, the student is getting exceptionally good experience firsthand, but the founder is also learning how to work with another person.
So for these single founders that are bringing on interns, now they're realizing, 'oh gosh, I can get a lot more done if I have more capacity.' And so I think that's both the, again, an entrepreneurial economic impact, but also a social impact. It's bringing two generations together. It's allowing for someone to understand a different level of experience than you would from just being in college.
You've got the founder looking at capacity in a different way and the scaling options that they would have and that brings on economic development and economic wealth because of it. So to me, that's an impact. And it's one that connects resources to people in need. And these are future staff considerations.
So you had an intern they're a Junior, that graduating Senior, you make them an offer, you bring them on board full time.
Ed Gillentine
Yep.
Bryan Barringer
Right. And then that's all part of the whole mix of, of impact.
Ed Gillentine
And that holistic approach that you guys are taking. I mean, that's fantastic. Well, as we try to land the plane, sort of a lightning round questions for you, I'll start you off easy. Okay?
Bryan Barringer
Sure.
Ed Gillentine
Ice cream or baked desserts?
Bryan Barringer
Ice cream.
Ed Gillentine
What's your favorite ice cream. If you had to pick, I'm just curious. I'm an ice cream fanatic.
Bryan Barringer
I'm still a vanilla kind of guy at heart, but I like toppings. I never, it's never straight vanilla.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah, I hear ya. Yeah, you can, you can load that up. I really like that. So bourbon, beer or nonalcoholic?
Bryan Barringer
Bourbon.
Ed Gillentine
Favorite bourbon?
Bryan Barringer
I, I was I'm always a Buffalo Trace guy. I mean, because I love a lot of different ones, but, but that's the one I always go to or that distillery. Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
That's the go-to in your cabinet. I like that. All right, I'll get a little bit more serious. One quote, if you could share one quote today, what would it be?
Bryan Barringer
"You miss all the shots you don't take."
Ed Gillentine
I love it.
Bryan Barringer
That's either by Michael Scott or Wayne Gretzky, depending on if you've watched The Office or not.
Ed Gillentine
I was thinking Michael Jordan, but yeah, well, yeah, you're there.
Bryan Barringer
I was talking to the students about it today. You know, you don't, You don't take the shot. You definitely are not gonna make it.
Ed Gillentine
You know what, and when you're like us 46, 50 years old, you look back and you say, man, I learned something almost every missed shot, right?
Bryan Barringer
Yeah, absolutely
Ed Gillentine
I love that. I really do. One book. If you were, it could be something that's like shaped your life or just something you read yesterday.
Bryan Barringer
It's a really weird book, but The Singularity Effect is something I read about seven or eight years ago. It's not widely known. The guy talks a lot about Harry Potter, oddly enough, and correlates a lot of what he's talking about Harry Potter. But the essence of the book was really him talking about how every seven or eight years, there's a fundamental shift in technology that exponentially grows the, the world. Right? And I think we're in one of those things and I've been able because I read that book. I've been able to identify the last few singularities.
Ed Gillentine
Oh, that's cool.
Bryan Barringer
And it's kind of been when these things were it's like. Okay, I see that, you know, and I, I see that. And so it's, it's kind of helped me. The Lean you know, The Lean Startup by Eric Rice was a great one and The Startup Way because I do have a corporate history, so I always wanted to teach corporates how to be more entrepreneurial. And I haven't got that chance yet. Maybe I will in the future, but that, cause I was always entrepreneurial when I was working for those. So it's, that's a good book that I like a lot, because it talks about the corporate startup world and entrepreneurial- ship.
Ed Gillentine
Yup.
Bryan Barringer
So those, those few books so most oh, and then Crack the Funding Code by Judy Robinett.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
So that's a great one too.
Ed Gillentine
Really kind of the main reason I do these interviews is because I want to get to that one question, about books, cause that's fascinating. Not only do you get to see into other people's souls, so to speak, but you also get to learn a lot because most of these books aren't really that I'm hearing are not really New York times bestsellers. They're just books that touched somebody.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah. You know, I used to be a big nonfiction guy and a big fiction guy, and I read a lot of stuff and, and I just, for some reason, those books just stuck out to me and How to Eat a Grasshopper in One Bite, you know, Testing and Talking with Humans. I mean, these are small little entrepreneurial books that I've read over the years that have really made an impact.
Ed Gillentine
Yeah.
Bryan Barringer
So it's yeah. So hopefully are you and your listeners had a few more books that you hadn't thought about.
Ed Gillentine
That's perfect. That's perfect. We're going to post them in the email notice too, just so people can click on them and go get them. So you should get some royalties from the authors.
That'd be great.
Yeah, absolutely. That might could get you the car. So last but not least one person who significantly influenced your life and in 30 seconds or less, how and why.
Bryan Barringer
I used to say my dad and I used to say my mom at different times, but now I'm going to say my wife, Chelsea Barringer, she's a branch manager at Coldwater Bank here, which just opened the other day. She's been there for about a year, but they just opened their first branch the other day. It's been you know, it's one of those things where she was my co-founder five years ago and now we're, you know, we're life partners and, and husband and wife. I don't think I was ever challenged enough growing up as well as believe it or not, as well as you know, going through the first periods of my adult life.
And she constantly challenges me. It's awesome. And she's an exceptionally good entrepreneur. We learn off each other every day. And so I think today, you know, I can get past that you know, my dad made a big impact to me and my mom made a big impact on me, both as entrepreneurials and human beings, but that my wife is the one who constantly makes me better.
Ed Gillentine
I bet those are some fascinating dinner conversations.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
So, how can impact minded people or companies get involved with what you guys are doing or find out more?
Bryan Barringer
You know, so Epicenter is a great source. The Center for Entrepreneurship at Christian Brothers, my name, I'm on LinkedIn, anybody can reach out to me there. I'll give you my contact information for you to include in the perfect and the footnotes as well. You know, reach out to me. I have, I'm fortunate enough to have a very large, you know, quote unquote Rolodex, if anybody knows what that is anymore. And I it's taken me a long time to build it and I, I, I cherish it greatly and I don't just let it go to anybody that doesn't deserve it necessarily, but I'm willing to represent just about anybody who deserves it. So if you need something, if you're an entrepreneur in need, or if you're someone who wants to make an impact, and there's a lot of people in this country, in the city who have a lot of money, that can be very impactful. Either are in the pursuits of, or not realizing where to go to look, to put that money.
It's not, this is not an entrepreneur asking for a million dollars for my business. This is me asking for money from those individuals. So I can put those into hundreds of businesses.
Ed Gillentine
Right.
Bryan Barringer
Through resources and capital infusion and building out our incubator that we just started to two days ago you know, and, and doing, you know, building out our center. And I want to build a retail incubator for retail pop-ups and everything else. I mean, these are all things that can be a very extremely, extremely impactful if we have more resources to do that. So whether that's sweat equity and somebody wants to volunteer, or whether somebody wants to donate, or once somebody wants to do both donation with, with equity, sweat equity, I'm all ears. And all you got to do is reach out.
Ed Gillentine
That's fantastic. Well, I can tell you how much I appreciate you joining us today. Yeah. It's it's fascinating to say the least, right? So thanks for coming.
Bryan Barringer
Yeah.
Ed Gillentine
You can learn more about impact at EdGillentine.com. It's a great resource. We hope for impact articles, white papers, website links like what's going on at CBU and other resources that we hope are going to help your journey to impact you can get the book, Journey to Impact, in any printed form or major digital platform at our website or at Amazon.com directly or Barnes and Noble, or believe it or not, I saw it on target.com the other day. You can also on our website, go back and listen to the podcast and the other interviewers. And please leave us a review us, know what you're thinking and what you want to hear about because we take your feedback seriously. Again, thanks for joining us. And until next time, get off the bench, get into the game.