We are in the final weeks of the year, and if you are a small business owner, an entrepreneur, a startup founder, I highly suggest you listen to my recent episode Evaluating your Tech Stack because at the end of the year, you want to start thinking about what systems
have you been using that no longer serve you? Because on January one, for many people and for many processes, you need to clean break, and a fresh calendar allows you that clean break so that you can go in the year and do things more efficiently, more effectively with better tools that suit your needs. That's episode one forty three Evaluating your Tech Stack. I highly recommend it for you. You, yes, you, I highly recommend it for you as you close out
twenty twenty three. Did you know you can get your daily dose of black tech news at afrotech dot com. Well, you can like this new story up about Terrence Howard, who is suing caa creative artists agency, claiming he received thirty to fifty percent less than what he should have per episode of Empires.
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I believe it drops next week on YouTube. So makes you subscribe to Black Tech Green Money on YouTube. But John Villard is programmed.
Lead of this SAYRE task Force at.
Northwestern Mutual, which stands for Sustained Action for Racial Equity Sarah Sarah encompasses an accelerator in Northmester Mutuals ongoing commitment to fight racism, prejudice, and social injustice in all forms and focuses on making BOWLD long term positive impact within Black communities. Through SAYRE, they're focusing and supporting black entrepreneurship, black small business supplier diversity accessibilities for clients and other
important enterprises initiatives. So prior to Sayer, John was senior director of Centralized Supervision at Northwestern Mutual. And Northwestern Mutual actually recently committed one hundred and seventy five million dollars to reduce the wealth gap and support businesses and entrepreneurs as they continue to grow and create positive economic momentum
within local communities. And as we reported in October, they've made a total of sixteen investments nationally and local to Milwaukee, which has led to further investments of nearly fifty five diverse businesses, the majority of which are black owned. Enjoyed this conversation with John Vard. John's good to have you here.
Willis an honor pleasure to be with you.
Absolutely. So you are program lead for Sustained Action for Racial Equity task Force at Northwestern Mutual, and I want you to talk a little bit about how you came into that role, a little bit about your personal story.
Sure for sure. So I am a first generation American. My parents both immigrated from Haiti in the late seventies and met in Chicago, and so I grew up in a small household of five but with a deep, deep connection to a Haitian community that was based in Emison. So titaned Haitian family all about kind of uplifting each other and making a way for ourselves in the country. So fast forward, I started working at Northwestern Mutual and have had an amazing journey throughout my thirteen years with
the company. But in the summer of twenty twenty, was finding myself really sort of having an identity crisis around you know, what am I doing in this kind of corporate space, not really being as much part of the solution, you know, certainly post George Floyd and everything that happened that summer, and I was thinking about my wife was that was nine months pregnant at the time, and I was thinking about what would I tell my son about our roles to play, you know, during this really trying
time for the country, and like what do we do about anything?
Right?
And this Sareah role came up in terms of like how do you align the mission and objectives of a corporate entity with actionable impact.
Outside our walls.
And so I went from very much being on the brink of like I don't think this is this corporate thing is for me anymore. I think I need to like really step out to now. Not only can I have a meaningful career here, but I.
Can drive like real impact.
And I would argue, maybe even more so than some local politicians or what have you can when you can channel millions of dollars of corporate resources to moving the needle.
So yeah, yeah, so I'm interested. Twenty twenty was a year that a lot of corporations were making promises, you know, around what I want to talk about impact funds and why it's important to Northwestern Mutual because you know, you guys committed a hundred and seventy five million last I looked to your impact fund designed to you know, help neighborhoods, to small business owners and et cetera. There's ultimately no
entity outside holding people accountable. So how do you guys hold yourself accountable to the promises that you guys have made to you know, these communities.
Yeah, that's a great question. It's a really important one.
And so what I love about the way our CEO, John Schlisky has kind of set this all up is we treat this as though it's any other business imperative. Right, This is not like a nice side project. We have a budget with oversight, executive oversight. We have you know, regular cadence of meetings with our CEO at the table saying where is this and why isn't this moving fast enough? What are the impediments unless clear them? And we've had
that really since its inception. And the other thing that I think is really cool is we have very specific measurements again like you would any other say, sales strategy or growth measure right, and we're held accountable littles on a monthly basis. So stuff is not looking right or moving at the pace that folks think it should, believe you'll have to answer to that at the literally senior
most level of the company. And that's what makes it a game changer is that you have CEO investment in presence basically day in and day out for the last three plus years on this.
One of the things I love about what you guys are working on not only funding you know, things externally, but also incorporating small businesses, minority owned businesses, black owned businesses, and your vendor profile and so often you know, because I've have small businesses and you hear this term about
capacity a lot. You know, we don't work with them because they don't have the capacity, And so how do you clear that hurdle and what kind of responsibility might you feel to help people build the capacity so that they can do more stuff?
Yeah, I love that question.
So one of the things that I love about what we did with the supplier diversity or business diversity spaces. Okay, uh, the large, tried and true suppliers that we that just maybe do have the capacity that we've relied on for years. It's holding them accountable to as the experts in that particular field, how are you building up other small like
smaller businesses or more nascent businesses. And so we changed our contract language and our expectations of the those bigger vendors that we are in a position to kind of jump away from right away to how are they building up others and certain targets within our spend with them
that need to go to those smaller, newer businesses. In addition, we're doing things like a mentor protege relationship where Okay, your business may not be ready for a fortune one hundred supply chain today, but how can we dig in your books, dig in your pitches, dig into how you present you know your business, proposition your value, and help coach you up so that you're ready and we'll go
first and bring you into our portfolio. But then not only that, you're ready to go compete for others, and so recognizing that there's there's a heavy front investment to get people to that point of maturation. Everybody's not ready for this for fortunate one hundred and what comes with that?
Right?
Do you feel like it's your responsibility to help people not only get them in and vet them to see if they can do their work, but also to help them Do you feel like that's your responsibility one percent?
Hundred percent?
I think specifically as it relates to like a place like Milwaukee, which has been our home for oh, I don't know, one hundred and fifty plus years, there's definitely this this this ownership of what are we doing as a huge corporate citizen, as one of the biggest corporate citizens to uplift others and invest in others in our own backyard first and foremost. So you'll see, even as you talk about like the Impact Investing Fund, we have a whole sleeve that is just dedicated to what's going
on in our backyard at Milwaukee. Right, So we can be doing all these things on the national sleep, but if we're not making those investments in our community to build those businesses up down the street, yeah, that's not really worthwhile.
You know, I was doing some research on the Grow Gather Against the Gap conference and I found this quote from you, and you had said, you know, we have a small army dedicated unapologetically to accelerating progress and not just with today in mind. Everything we do at NM is with the next one hundred years in mind, not
just the next quarter. So like, talk up because you mentioned some of the those that you guys hold yourself accountable to talk about some of those goals that you're measuring against to see if you're actually making progress.
Yeah, absolutely so.
I think if you can think about our work in say as sort of being like within our house, get our own house in order first and foremost. So it's what's the representation look like across all levels of the organization, So not just frontline you know kind of folks answering the phones, but what do we look like in the executive ranks. And I think our best sort of barometer for our measurement for successes, Does.
It look like the nation that we operate in? Right?
If we're a national company and let's just say black folks, for example, are thirteen and a half percent roughly, well, we should at least be reflective of that thirteen and a half percent, Not that it's a quota per se, but that's a good starting point to say, do we even look like the nation we're trying to serve?
Right? So we have that, So that's kind of getting our own house in order.
And then one of the things that we're doing externally, it's all about the goals of you know, one, helping to close the wealth gap. So how are we putting the hundreds of billions of dollars that we, as an enormous institutional investor have putting it to work in building small business, building black businesses of varying sizes, right, narrowing that wealth gap through investment, access to capital, et cetera.
And then the last piece is what our company does is leave people off better off than we found them with financial plans, you know, risk mitigation strategies, right, things like life insurance that black folks folks may not know, have a higher propensity, they have a higher desire for life insurance than any other segment in the country. There's this like this, this notion of legacy and paying it
for it. How are we reaching more black households to help give them access to that, to those critical products and strategies to help protect their family for generations. So we talk about more black households, We talk about putting more billions of dollars to work. We talk about, you know, diversifying our supplier pipelines and things of that nature, and then of course getting our own house in order. Uh.
You previously mentioned Milwaukee, which I love. So a lot of the work I'm passionate about is about the middle is because I recognize that most of us who are interested in tech and et cetera don't live in New York at LA. We live in these other cities. And so what is unique or important or an advantage of being based in Milwaukee? Then a lot of other places that you guys could be Yeah, yeah, are their advantages?
Yeah? I think so.
I think as somebody that is raising us his son in Milwaukee, I definitely think so. I think when I think about Milwaukee, I first and foremost think about like the value proposition to like live and just have a wonderful life. And actually I was talking about this with a colleague of mind even today. The accessibility, the the the access to to culture, to to just good hard working people, like there's just all the things that you would want in a place to sort of raise a family.
So that check there.
I think that there is tremendous opportunity as you think about Milwaukee being a destination for talent, that we might have some work to do in terms of the external image, but once you actually come and experience it, it is a really special place with I would argue world class amenities that are kind of a best kept secret, if you will, so that when people get there it's.
Like, oh, wow, this is dope. Milwaukee's dope.
Come people walking into summer, come in the winter, coming this summer, and you'll say, wow, I never would have envisioned this about you know, Wisconsin or specifically Milwaukee.
And so I think as a place to live, it's huge.
When you're talking about building tech talent and things of that nature, I think what you have are several really really strong corporate entities, strong partnerships across you know, government, and things of that nature that are really trying to create an ecosystem that fosters that kind of creative growth, if you will. So you have a bunch of leaders in the area that are really invested in making it a destination a choice for talent, for tech talent in particular of them.
I want to talk about the Impact Fund again, and so I imagine I don't know this, but I imagine a lot of the bet you're making or funds that you're exporting from your bank counts to other folks, is put into organizations who are doing the work in those communities. I mean, I'm gonna let you speak to that, but I want to talk about how organizations who are doing the work reach out to you guys to say, we're doing this great work in whatever city. Can we be
part of this thing? How does the fund work?
Yeah?
Absolutely, So I would start by saying, impact investing in Northwestern Mutual is the way to kind of, you know, reach out and download sort of what it is that we do, what it is that we offer in that particular space. And so our fund is really divided into two sleeves that I think I mentioned earlier. One is a local sleeve that is very much focused on local
impact investing in Milwaukee business owners and Milwaukee businesses. And in that space, we've made some investments that we're really proud of in CDFI, so Community Development Financial Institute and what those are.
Think them as like local.
Community banks that have the sort of ground game to do the kind of like smaller scale lending and investing that our community needs. Right as a huge corpord entity, we're looking at money in pretty big terms, like in the millions, right, but everyone doesn't need a million dollars plus to get invested to get their business off the
ground are accelerated. So these cdfives have the ground game to say, let me get really intimately familiar with Will's business, his books, et cetera, make the right sort of lending and investment decisions to help him be successful, and then also do other wrap around services to help consult on things like taxes and all these other things that you may not necessarily be familiar with starting a small business.
So that's kind of the local sleep. On a national level, we really partner with a number of strong financial national and global even financial institutions that have a really good pulse on a number of different sectors that advance sustainable housing, that advance educational priorities in all the sort of pillars that we have, and so they're really looking at how can they put larger swats.
Of money to work on a national sleeve.
So we're parted with folks like Black Rock and others that that had that sort of ground game too.
You mentioned a little bit about your CEO and his involvement, and so often these efforts aren't led by somebody in senior leadership, and yours is, and I wonder can you speak more to how serious you guys take this, because at the end of the day, sustainability is what matters.
One hundred percent. I will say so from day one and to this day, our CEO has been at the table. He chairs our Sustained Action for Racial Equity, the task
force that we talked about. We have six of our senior leaders So think of these are folks that are responsible for huge portions of our business, that are directly accountable for the results that that that we set out to accomplish, and so we have executive oversight, we have we have rigorous reporting metrics and and real accountability in the sense that like if we don't hit some of these things.
Some of this is out of our control, but the parts that are it.
Will have direct impacts on people's performance and myself included performance in a very very real way. This is no different. I cannot emphasize enough. It's no different than any other growth priority that we would have as a fortune one hundred. It's it's it's treated with that same level of intensity. I would argue in some spaces even more leadership investment an investment in terms of like their physical presence, their
physical they're like engagement in a meaningful way. And then again, what gets measured gets done, and you know, success is required for folks to accomplish their their personal goals and their performance goals.
I want you to share some information about your Black Founders Accelerator program. You know, I think about some of the issues I've experienced and heard about through black entrepreneurs where they might get invited to expos and conferences where
people want to hear about their business. And what I've heard and often many different spaces, is we come and do we do these expos that we present and it's a big it's a dog and pony show, but nobody ever walks away with a deal or they never walk away with a meeting to actually get a serious look at what they do, talk about how yours is, how yours works, and how it might be different.
Yeah. Absolutely so super proud of this.
So our Blackfounder Accelerator, we choose ten businesses per year. We typically do two cohorts of five each year. And that might not sound like a lot, but it's intentionally very very selective. So I think we have upwards of seven hundred and fifty applicants that we like, thoroughly vet
and go through that process with. And essentially what we're doing is we partner with a company called Generator that has a really strong sort of development game for early stage entrepreneurs and mid stage entrepreneurs as well, and we go through a twelve week program with them where we're helping them or find their pitch, their business, their you know, every aspect of their business. Really we invest one hundred
thousand dollars, so this is not like a get. We are very much investors, and we also open them up to further investment in other parts of our business. And then we appoint an executive mentor to sit in with those founders and really provide particular guidances unique to their business.
Excuse me.
So you might have a business with some strong regulatory concerns, So we're going to try to find somebody from the Northwestern mutual ranks that's an expert in regulatory you know, fintech regulatory considerations, and try to pair that founder with them so that they could really get C suite level insights on how to build their business in a way that will ultimately be attractive to the big both further investors but companies that might want to use that service
into the future. So we do that, We bring these cohorts in, we really try to build a sort of spirit of family across the cohorts and the alum and then what we do after that is try to really keep them as a part of this ecosystem and introduce them connect them to as many resources and further opportunities to raise more capital. In fact, going back to our dashboard and in our metrics for results, one of our results, one of our metrics is are we helping our founders
raise a particular amount of capital? Right, So we have targets to help graduates of our program meet certain fundraising criteria, so that incentivizes us to really be diligent about how can I introduce Will to as many people in that lane that can help him further grow that business after
he's left our program. So we're specifically very choose, like we're particularly picky and very very much kind of overweighted in the not overweighted, but very much leaned into how do we make this a very very thorough partnership and be close with them?
And speaking about partnerships, you guys partner with Kellogg, which is like a leading business school in the world. You partner with them for Gather against the Gap a lot of your initiatives. Why is that partnership important in what do you hope that it lends to success?
Yeah, I think thanks for the question.
So our CEO is actually in the lum of Kellogg and so that's sort of where the initial idea came. But the thought being that Kellogg is a world class institution, like you mentioned, I think, top two or three in all business school rankings year over year. And what's so special about Kellogg is they have you know, many many decades of shaping business practices successfully. And so we think about one Evanson is but an hour away from Milwaukee.
So there's that proximity too. We had the connection with our CEO being in lumber More importantly, they have sixty five thousand executives across the globe that sit at the helm of real, real capital like organizations and dollar amounts that can change the makeup of this country and even the world.
You know, I'm not Oh, it doesn't sound too part this.
Guy, but the world like they can do that. They have that in their alumni ranks. They have nineteen of the Fortune five hundred CEOs or Kellogg alumn Wow. So the thought was, Okay, this is a world class research institution, world class alumni bas teaming up with them and using ourselves as a case study to say, look, Northwestern Mutual doesn't have all this figured out, like we're learning. We're
still learning every day. People have been at supplier diversity and things of that nature impact investing for much longer than we have. But we're here, we're fully invested. What can we learn from you as an academic institution, and then what can we learn in and how can we inspire others within your alumni base to steer their organizations
towards driving impact as well? And by the way, you're also pumping out and cultivating future executives of tomorrow that need to have this this as a part of their game, right, they need to know how their organizations are making an impact beyond just shareholder return.
Right.
Gather against the Gap. I've been touching on this and lot people don't know. Let's talk about first. What Gather against the Gap was? Yeah, speak to that.
Yeah, So Gather against the Gap was this idea of Okay, again in the spirit of us trying to get better at doing this work. We don't have all the answers. We're proud of what we done, long way to go. How can we convene other leaders, other you know, large corporate entities leaders at the helm of these massive amounts of capital. I think we had in the room more than a trillion dollars in assets under management.
And that was just you, That was just We had two hundred I think it was like two hundred and twenty five, two hundred and fifty something like that in attendance, physically c suite leaders.
Okay, and you know, kell Loogg brought this academic lens of Okay, if we removed all barriers and thought about what are the levers that corporations can pull that the business community can pull to legitimately begin to narrow and eventually close the wealth gap.
Like it's possible.
But what it takes was essentially investing in black businesses, right, So black business development. It's getting more corporations to open up their supply chains and start to bring in black business as a part of that. So grow business through through leveraging the supply chain, and then that's access to capital.
And then when you.
Combine all those things over time and you really can create a sort of like a multiplier effect, we.
Can start to move that needle.
And so everybody in that room was aligned on that vision and came to get actionable, like practical when you go in on Monday, here are three to five things that you can do from your seat, and I think we accomplish that in space.
Your CEO had this to say about one of the themes that came out of the conference. He said, sustained action requires sustained leadership. When leaders show up consistently for their impact initiatives, they create a multiplier effect to your point, within their organization. What do you hope other businesses in your vertical takeaway from that conference and then you know, how do you continue because you said you guys kind of want to be a representation like this work is
possible if we collectively do this together. Like what do you hope they take away from that initiative and that's the work that continues.
Yeah, I think what's been most impact I think to folk so like obviously if you got like literally skin in the game and this is something that you know, this is just so you're so passionate about this topic, Like that's one thing. There's sort of the there's the moral imperative to to close the wealth gap because it's gonna help benefit the country undeniably. But then there's also
a real business case for doing it too. So let's just say that's not enough for you as a leader, Like, yeah, that sounds good, but I've got I've got shareholders to worry about. I think what our CEO would argue, you know, not to be his ambassador necessarily, but there's real growth potential and business value. That's what we wanted to do together against the gap. And in many respects, what we're doing with say is how can we do both? Right?
It's not an either or when you put these things together you'll see tremendous growth like our company has enjoyed since we've started this work, unprecedented growth and our advisor force and the productivity of our advisor force. And that growth didn't come from you know, middle aged white man. It came from the diverse segments that we've been more intentional about bringing on.
It's powered unbelievable growth for our business over the last couple of years.
So I guess what I would say to take away is this isn't a charity case, right. This is a combination of obviously the right thing to do that will benefit us all, but then also it's good for your bottom line too when it's done right.
For the people who when you think about doing this work, the people who may never own a small business and may never come to you know, be in your pipeline of future employees, but they just work normal.
Everyday jobs.
How does this work benefit them potentially?
I love that question. That's a deeply personal one for me. So I mentioned earlier this goal of trying to reach more Black households, more American households, period, but in particular black households, and I think of my own family, right, So I mentioned family came here from Haiti, built up from the ground up, gave three kids a college education, what have you? And I watched my parents work very, very diligently to rise in their own spirits. My mom
did own a small business. It was a home daycare owner, had kids at our house every day. My mom my dad worked for a variety of banks, worked up from the mailroom to manageagement.
Will have you? So really a career company man.
And at the end of that, I think about, well, what did all that get them?
Apps in a financial plan?
And so right now we're at the stage of their lives where they're looking at a retirement.
That it's not looking so great because they didn't.
Have somebody that sat down with them and got them on a game plan early on. There were things that I wish they had the right advisor. I wish they had an advisor to expose them to things really really think things that would be seem like really small investments at the time that could have been paid dividends for them in their retirement years. So now we're trying to figure out how do we supplement that and give them a respectful retirement.
But it's kind of late in the game for that.
So what I would say is, as much as our folks can get get a financial advisor to help you, and you know, I happen to believe that we have the best in the industry at Northwestern Mutual, but get somebody to sit down with you and.
Talk through a plan.
Talk through things like disability insurance if you happen to be disabled and not able to go back to work, talk about how you're putting money away thoughtfully before it's so late in the game that you know you're really trying to play catchup, which is tough.
So you've guys said which I imagine Gather Against the Gap falls under that, this relationship with Kellogg falls under that Black Founder Accelerator falls under that, the Impact Fund, I imagine falls under that. When you think about Kellogg, like that's an important relationship. Just from externally, I can know that that's an important relationship. What does the future hold for? What the direction you guys want to take that, How do you want to grow that relationship.
I think we learned so much with Gather Against the Gap, and the key being we need to be able to provide the business community with actionable, like tangible, practical takeaway
steps to make any of this stuff actually happen. And so I think we've only begun to scrape the surface of how do we take the learnings from these in person convenings of the different conversations or research that Kellogg is doing, and then how do we partner together and using them as a case study, Like we'll be that case study, how do we partner to is still more of that down and spread it across the business community. So we'll look forward to looking at, you know, across
the different dimensions of say procurement and supplier diversity. How do we get the best of the best together to talk about those and distill those action steps down you talk about access to capital, impact investing, things of that nature, how do we get the best.
Of the best there, pair it with the research and distill that across the business community.
So we're really looking at not just hey, we did this nice event, A bunch of people came, it was great, we took great pictures, check out the video and turn it into tangible a campaign of academic and sort of like business facing communications on how to go put.
That stuff to work.
Right. It's not just it's not trying to be a commercial like, let's actually get this stuff done.
So people want to learn more about what Northwestern Mutual is doing, what the founders, the Black Founders fund and so if they want to learn more about this stuff dive in.
Where should they go?
Yeah, I would send them to Northwestern Mutual dot com. And then if you have any any questions or your business you think might.
Be a good fit, you want to learn more about impact investing, impact investing in Northwestern Mutual. And then we'll make sure we'll get your right folks to hear that via due We'll have you man Pleasure, Pleasure. It's so much that was fun.
Black Tech Green Money is a production of Blavity Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast Network and I Hire Media and it's produced by Morgan Debonne and me Well Lucas. The additional production support by Said and Rose Lucas.
Special thank you.
To Michael Davis, Vanessa Serrano, Mayam Moltdrew. Learn more about my guess and other tech this There's an Innovator's an afrotech dot com. The video version of this episode will drop the Black Tech Green Money on YouTube next week, So tap in enjoying Black Tech Green Money Shore U to somebody, we'll get your money.
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