IAM1163- Founder Powers Corporate Perks for Top Brands

Brian Roland is a Social Entrepreneur and Founder of Abenity, the 6x Inc. 5000 Company that’s powering corporate perks for top brands including U.S. Bank and Mastercard.

While Abenity provides millions of subscribers with private discounts, the company’s social mission is fighting extreme poverty with every program it delivers. The company recently exceeded a million dollars of total giving and hired a CEO to accelerate growth with their fully remote team.

Brian lives in Scottsdale with his wife and 3 daughters and is investing his time in efforts that help like-minded entrepreneurs establish a social mission of their own.

• CEO Hack: My one-page impact plan
• CEO Nugget: Trust your instincts, lean into the wow, and think about how
• CEO Defined: Executors and creators who are chasing the vision

Website: https://abenity.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianroland/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbenityFounder
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AbenityCEO
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brianroland

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Transcription

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00:33 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

01:00 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Brian Rowland of Abinity. Brian, it's great to have you on the show.

01:08 – Brian Roland

Thanks so much.

01:10 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Brian so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Brian is a social entrepreneur and founder of Abinity, the 6X Inc 5000 company that's powering corporate perks for top brands, including US Bank and MasterCard. While Ability provides millions of subscribers with private discounts, The company's social mission is fighting extreme poverty with every program they deliver. The companies recently exceeded a million dollars in total giving and hired a CEO to accelerate growth with their fully remote team. Brian lives in Scottsdale with his wife and 3 daughters and is investing his time and efforts that help like-minded entrepreneurs establish a social mission of their own. Brian, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:52 – Brian Roland

Yes, sir. However, I am not a CEO because I was just hired to kind of take over the helm of the business and lead things from here.

02:02 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, But you're doing so many awesome things that we definitely need to have you back on the show. And I know you mentioned that you hired a CEO. So I guess I wanted to hear a little bit more about your story and what led you to be at the point where you were able to hire a CEO.

02:15 – Brian Roland

Yeah, so we started our business in 2006. I was selling cell phones right out of school, corporate, outside sales, B2B jobs. And I was told to go knock on doors and cell phones to other businesses. I was really too scared to talk to businesses about business phones. I was a musician in Nashville straight out of school, and getting all businessy wasn't my thing. I was already kind of frustrated. I was walking around in a tie every day. And, so I decided that you know, reaching my quota didn't have to go through kind of the B2B route. So I went and I just talked to people about their personal cell phones. And as I did that, I found out that there are employee discounts on cell phone service at big companies.

So, hey, if you work at Pepsi, you save 23% off every month. So I went up and I sat in the Pepsi break room and talked to good folks about their family phones and said, Hey, I can help you save and switch. And, pretty soon I realized it was a lot more efficient to send emails to HR folks about hey did you know that you have this discount we sent this flyer out which got my phone ringing which led to me talking to my brother hey let's build a website that helps people find their discounts and before I knew it Sprint Corporate was knocking on our door, saying, man, we cannot get our own internal websites built fast enough, can we use yours? And from there, we got introduced to some really big accounts.

About 2 years down the road, we realized that companies really needed someone to help them manage their corporate merchant relationships for their employees, for their employee discount programs. So we launched Benity as a managed service platform that helps companies offer discounts and perks to their people. And from there, we have grown it over the last decade and made the Inc 5000 list 6 times. Currently, we've opened up so that small businesses can get access to the same perks and discounts as the big guys that we serve. And we're, we're serving, you know, millions of members across every state with around a million redemption locations at this point.

We started that business when I left the cell phone role to kind of To start this, I had a real desire for more meaning at my job. I was doing really well selling phones and I was rewarded for that financially, but the, you know, finances weren't my, my performance measure of choice, it wasn't that meaningful I had more than I needed and that's, I wasn't wanting to deal with it. If anything, the more money I had to manage, the more frustrating complicated, and stressful it became. And so I was looking for meaning at work. And so we started our business with a social mission where we created an output to a cause for every input into the business. And we did that before we made our first dollar.

This was the same time in 2006 that Blake McCofsky walking around South America, deciding on his buy issue give issue campaign so social entrepreneurship was budding. It wasn't really a thing. The closest thing to it that was widespread was corporate social responsibility, which is a totally different beast entirely. It's a very reactive approach and generally motivated, not by improving the situation socially, but more as a PR kind of financial strategy. And, and so, so we launched it with a social mission before we even made $1, and that was motivating for us And, you know, we, a March kind of 10 years later, we just crossed the million dollars of giving in 2020, a great thing that came out of 2020.

We picked the cause that we supported. We decided to chase the fight against extreme poverty. And extreme poverty is, you know, there's about 500 million people left in extreme poverty in the world. You know, poverty is an issue everywhere here in the United States, for sure. But extreme poverty is you can identify extreme poverty if you're waking up in the morning and walking 5 miles to find dirty water to bring back to your family and hoping that you don't get too sick from it. And because of that, you're not able to keep a job and your kids aren't really able to go to school because you're just taking care of your basic life needs to stay alive. On top of that extreme poverty usually can be identified by deciding which of your kids you're going to feed today.

It's not an everybody gets to eat today scenario. There are about 500 million people in that scenario still. The United Nations' number one sustainability goal is to eradicate it by the year 2030. They're on track for that. We worked through a group called World Vision to do it and we sponsor kids. I got a really cool letter last month that said, Hey, World Vision is leaving this village that you've been sponsoring kids in because this village in Senegal, Africa is now self-sustaining. And so 116 of the kids you sponsor have graduated from the program and we need to go find you 116 more kids to sponsor. And so that was a really cool thing. And we're still running hard after that mission. And we're sponsoring kids with the Perks programs we deliver over at a Benity.

07:55 – Gresham Harkless

Would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for the organization the business yourself personally, or a combination of both. But do you feel like that's the thing that sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:05 – Brian Roland

I think when it comes to running a remote team, having a social mission is definitely a secret sauce. It is, it's something that everyone can identify with no matter where they are. And it's something that really extends beyond so that you can be driving meaning and purpose and ownership thinking and motivation at work. Steps that you should start doing to build it into your culture and who you are. And I've written about this quite a bit on my brianroland.com website, where I've talked about the unexpected perks of a social mission. But inside that, I also kind of break down how to integrate that into your day-to-day so that it's coming up for people and it's part of what they do.

So I mean, we set KPIs and our goals around our social mission. So instead of counting new customers, we count new kids that we're able to sponsor. At the end of the year, instead of cutting a check to World Vision, We allow our clients to pick a gift from the World Vision catalog, where they'll get something that goes with a donation from us but they get a handcrafted kind of artisan gift from a specific region in the country that needs support. And that brings people into the mission more. We do simple celebrations like cash-positive day inside the company so when cash in for the month exceeds cash out which hopefully happens more often than not, then we have something to then we celebrate internally with some kind of cultural trivia question and whoever gets it right gets to choose.

You know, what we're giving to in the fight against extreme poverty for that month across a ton of different categories and so there there there is this kind of need to include it in your lifeblood. one thing that I put together that is probably the best call to action I can do and help people get started is I put together a one-page impact plan that's just a blank one-pager. That's the 5 steps that we did 10 years ago that we've been consistent with. And it's something that can be downloaded and to just kind of play with the idea of what I need to do to start a social mission. What areas do we need to cover? What do we need to talk about? Then make a plan and stick to it.

I think the number one challenge that entrepreneurs have is not generosity. I think a lot of people are very, very generous. I think they for sure plan to give, And a lot of times they end up giving at the last minute. And the challenge when you give at the last minute is it's hard to build a story around it. It's hard to communicate it. It's hard to predict it. And you're leaving tons of impact on the table when it's not predictable when you're not communicating it, and you're not planning around it. So I'm trying to get people to step, step away from we're planning to give mentality to have a plan for giving that is already in place and can just be executed. And that's what this 1-page impact plan lets everybody do.

11:20 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Absolutely love that. And I almost feel like that's kind of like a, you know, a hack that we can kind of all implement because you have, you know, basically baked down exactly how you can execute on it that's available on your website.

11:30 – Brian Roland

Yeah. Actually, if you text the word impact to my number here, you'll get an auto-response with it right away. It's area code 6158026853. So just text the word impact to 6158026853 and you will get that auto response back. If you're not on your phone, you can go to brianrolland.com. You can find it there under the downloads link as well.

11:57 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. And as promised, we will always have that information shown to us as well too, just in case anybody might be driving or anything, they can definitely get a hold of that. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:17 – Brian Roland

You know, I think the hardest part about the entrepreneurial journey is just taking those leaps of faith that it takes to dive in. We're, I'm in the process of launching something new with our family. And as we're kind of talking about it with people on the outside, you just get that kind of pushback where they don't really fully understand the idea. They don't know the idea as well as you know it. And so it comes across as skepticism or concern. And it's really demotivating for the entrepreneur for for the creative thinker. I call it, you know, you've got the you've got the wow of the idea.

And most people only don't respond back with the wow like you want them to they respond back with the how which kind of comes across like a gut punch a lot of times and so the show is always hitting the wow and so for the entrepreneur you just have to trust your instincts. You lean into the wow and continue to think about the how. Don't be discouraged by people who don't get it because they don't have the full picture that you have. They haven't given it the level of thought that you have. They don't have the experience that you have. So just press on, don't get discouraged, go for it.

13:40 – Brian Roland

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And so I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question. And I know You hired a CEO and you have that CEO, but I wanted to ask you what you feel like being a quote-unquote CEO means to you.

13:51 – Brian Roland

Well, you have CEOs who are the executors, right? They're casting vision and chasing vision down. And that's really important. You've got CEOs who are kind of the analyzers and they're really looking out and looking over everything. You've got CEOs who are the creators that are more entrepreneurs and visionaries and they're going out and they're just being as disruptive as they can. And then you've got CEOs who are on vacation because they take their title and they let everybody else do everything.

14:35 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Brian, truly appreciate that. And I appreciate your time again. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get ahold of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on as well.

14:51 – Brian Roland

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'd love the listeners to check out abennady.com if they're not offering corporate perks and discounts for their people. You can get your first month free with the code founder150. If you've got less than 150 employees, it's just $150 a month to have the same corporate perks and discounts that we offer to the Fortune 500. We've got private discounts on everything from pizza and the zoo to movie tickets, oil changes, car rentals, and hotels.

So, you know, you can save a couple hundred bucks on your next trip to Disney for your family and many more things. I appreciate everyone listening in today. I would love to hear how they're making an impact with their businesses and their impact stories as well. And the best way to hit me up is to text me directly at my community number. It's area code 615-802-6853. And hit the word join if you just want to text and use the word impact. You want to get my impact report back right away and start working on that for your business.

15:55 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Brian. As I promised, we will have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can take full advantage of them. I thank you so much for, you know, of course taking some time out today, but of course, you know, the impact that you're having in, you know, people's lives in so many different ways. And of course, reminding us of how important it is and also that we are able to make the decisions to be social entrepreneurs and make an impact in so many different ways. So thank you so much for taking the lead and doing that. Of course, my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:20 – Outro