[00:00:00] Speaker A: Have you ever asked yourself, why in the world do we have green lawns across the US?
With the amount of habitat loss due to urbanization in recent decades, isn't it about time we rethought our relationship with our own lawns?
Welcome to rewildology, the nature show that explores the human side of conservation, travel, and rewilding the planet. I'm your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
Today we are going against the grain and flipping our relationships with our backyards. In this episode, I'm sitting down with Shuber Ali, CEO of Garden for Wildlife, an organization that is transforming residential landscapes into thriving habitats for local wildlife species.
That sounds like rewilding at its core, doesn't it?
Shubber is first and foremost a business genius and combined his passion for nature and his business acumen to develop a brand new e commerce model that benefits nature, human well being, and the reputable, nonprofit national wildlife Federation. Yes. Can you find a way to do all of these, which you'll soon hear about in detail?
I will say this is not your typical rewadology interview. Shubber and I dive deep into business concepts to find solutions to real conservation issues, and Shubber provides scaffolding on how you can apply his solution based thinking to the conservation issue you are most passionate about.
But of course, we still discuss Shubber's almost matrix simulation journey that somehow led him to today. The detrimental effects of manicured non native gardens have had on biodiversity and ecosystem health, and the tremendous positive impact garden for wildlife has already made in restoring precious wildlife habitat across the US.
Whenever you're done listening to today's conversation with Shubber, follow the podcast on whichever platform you happen to be enjoying the show right now. Follow the show on your favorite social media app and support the show by leaving a rating and review and maybe purchasing a piece of swag to show off your your rewildology.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Love.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: All of these actions are much appreciated and do so much to get voices like this out there in the world.
All right, everyone, get ready to be inspired as we go behind the scenes with Shubert Ali and his mission to make every garden a wildlife garden.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Let's dig in.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Yes, pun intended.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Well, hi Shevver. I am so excited to talk to you and just the diversity that you're going to help bring to the show, because the knowledge that you have is different in a great way. And we're going to learn so much from you because, you know, this isn't your normal business podcast or something like that, but it's going to be a big topic of today and the power of mission based businesses.
But first, that doesn't make any sense yet because no one knows what we're going to be talking about. So please, let's start from square one because your winding path is just fascinating to talk about. So wherever you want to start, whatever is start number one, page number one year number one, let's go there and tell me your story and how it brought us to today.
[00:03:35] Speaker C: Okay. Well, it's interesting because I sometimes joke that it's a little bit like, um, there's just too many coincidences. It almost feels like it's proof that we live in a simulation. But you have to wind back the matrix. Yeah, exactly. You actually have to wind back the clock. About 30 years. Actually, it's 30 years this year. I was just out of business school here in the DC area, Georgetown, and got my first job at KPMG in aerospace consulting. So my background was actually in aerospace and all that, and got to work at core cool stuff with like the space station and rockets and satellites and all kinds of stuff like NASA was my biggest client and I was in consulting. And I actually, that's where I first started donating to charity. And what happened was the United Way was the partner of KPMG and they had this kind of thing where you could pick you used through your salary, you donated through United Way, and then it would go to whatever organizations you picked. And so I had a kind of a little bit of a love for the outdoors, the environment. And so I picked a few environmental organizations. One of them was National Wildlife Federation. So that's kind of point number one is I became a member of NWF back in 1994. And then fast forward a few years and I started doing some pro bono consulting for small not for profits that I had been introduced to through a friend. And specifically they were in the rainforest protection and Amazon protection. There were these small little not for profits that happened to be headquartered inside the National Wildlife Federation headquartered building, which was in downtown DC at the time, and beautiful building. They long since sold that and moved to Reston, Virginia, where they are now. And then they're actually selling that building and moving again. But it just seemed like NWF appeared again in my life. But I was starting to like understand just how challenging the not for profit world was. But again, I was still just an outsider kind of helping a little bit. Fast forward, I did my career is if you look at my LinkedIn profile, I've done everything from consulting to multiple startups, some of which were successful and some of which were just great learning experiences, which is just a nice way of saying they failed, but they were actually good learning experiences.
And then I worked at Salesforce as a VP of innovation, and most of my career was in the innovation space, which was basically, and I hate the word innovation, by the way, because everybody has a different definition. So while I did a lot of innovation consulting, it was mainly trying to help companies and clients do what I did in startup life, which was to solve problems by looking at them fundamentally differently and then coming up with a business model and an opportunity, then creating a new business, which big companies are generally bad at. And so this is an area that I get to spend a lot of time in helping with, like transforming, when I was at Salesforce with digital transformation, basically things like these iPhones and stuff were brand new at the time. So it was, how do you incorporate that into your business and change the way you do things to make them better and less inefficient? So fast forward.
And I did another startup after I left Salesforce, and then I was asked to come back to Accenture, where I'd been before. And so I had this global role at Accenture where I got to go and do innovation with clients from Hong Kong to Dubai to lots of coins in the DC area as well. I was traveling all over the place and we decided to move to the DC area from San Francisco, in part because I was spending too much time away from my family. And so I was, okay, let's leave the Bay Area. Didn't need to be there. Came back here, no fires, more water, better schools, so good choice. At the time, the kids were nine, twins, and so I was working with clients mainly in this area, so I wouldn't travel as much. And I was like, look, I need to do something that feels like I'm actually making a difference. Because a lot of companies, one of the challenges is you work on big ideas. They're really excited about them, but they don't ever do anything with them. And so it kind of is a waste of time. And people who know me know that one of the things they say is time's the only thing of value that you have. Everything else you can replace, relatively speaking. Your health, of course, is valuable as well, but time's something you cannot get any more of. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you're Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or anybody else, you can't buy a second time. All you can do is buy tools and hire people who can make your time more efficient. But you can never get the time back.
I said, what can I do to make the time I'm spending more valuable? I said, well, let me go do pro bono consulting for not for profits again. So I reached out to the person who runs a not for profit practice here at Accenture, and we've since become good friends. And I talked to Ahmed that I'm like, are there any not for profits that can help with what I do? Because at least I'll feel like it's making a difference. And so I ended up doing projects with a number of not for profit organizations, one of them in particular. And this is where it comes back to now, garden for wildlife and how all the dots connect. One of them was, we just moved here to the DC area, and I was about to go and do what I've been doing for 20 plus years, because I've been a gardener, both vegetable gardener, and I grow lots of vegetables in our. In our. I've always had either pots or then, you know, boxes where I've grown stuff, but also growing flowers and shrubs for the butterflies and the bees and stuff like that, because I just thought, you know, let me help nature, since I care about nature. And along comes. At that time, a book was just released, this book right here. And I tell people, this book changed my life. And I've given away probably 100 copies of this book in the last two years. So I read this book.
Yeah. Including I sent one to you. Yes. And hopefully you enjoy it. Nature's best hope by Doug Tallamy. And Professor Tallamy has written a number of books. This is the first one of his that I read, and I found out about it through NWF because I've become a bigger and bigger donor over the years. You know, thankfully, I've been fortunate enough that I can do that. And so I got an email. It said, hey, this book's come out. I get the book, I read it, and that's when it was like that needle on the record moment. For those who are old enough to remember records, although they're coming back now, so you are young enough to know about this, that kind of scratching sound. Because what I discovered was everything I've been doing for 20 years in gardening that I thought was helping the environment was actually hurting. And that was a big kind of disconnect for me because I thought I was actually trying to help. And it turned out it wasn't. And the reason was actually very simple. I was planting the wrong plants. And this is where I first discovered the importance of native species and the clear connection which Professor Tallamy calls out in the book between the disappearance of songbirds, billions of nesting pairs of songbirds disappearing over the last few decades, the disappearance of the pollinators, specifically the butterflies and the moths, whose caterpillars are the food source for the baby birds, that therefore didn't become adult birds. And the loss of habitat, which led to the loss of the pollinators, which led to the loss of the birds. So I thought, okay, well, that's. Now that I know, I'll go buy the right plants. And so I went back to my local garden center, one of these big box stores, and I spent 3 hours googling every single plant in the store to find that none of them were native. Not a single one. Every single one. There were plants from Japan and plants from England and from the Mediterranean and from Africa, from South America, you know, other parts of Asia, nothing from the mid Atlantic. Okay, that's a problem. So then I started to look for the native plants, and it was actually hard to find them. And that's when I reached out to the National Wildlife Federation and I said, I want to do a pro bono project for you. We're going to solve my problem and the problem of many other gardeners across the country, which is, it's an arc. It's not just about getting native plants, but that becomes important. It was actually, you have to know that native plants are important, hence the book. Then you have to be educated as to what's native to where you are, because everything's native somewhere. I like to joke, even the stuff they sell at the local big box store is native, just not to here. So you have to know it's native to where you are. And then you have to have access to those plants.
And if you can solve for all of that, then you can make an impact. But you have to make it easy for consumers because people aren't going to drive 2 hours. Most people aren't going to drive 2 hours to go find some little nursery out in the middle of nowhere to get some plants. So it has to be where they can get. So we built a whole business plan and showed them how they could launch an e commerce company, which it turns out was perfect timing for the start of the pandemic. And so we ended up, they liked the plan. They said, this is great. More people are probably going to be gardening when they're locked at their homes and the rest. So we set up a model where you could go online, you literally punch in your zip code. Because NWF had built with Professor Tallamy probably, I think about 15 years ago now, they had built something called the native plant finder. It's a gigantic database of the trees, shrubs and perennial flowers that are native in the US at the zip code level. And so that became the basis for what we have. So you just go to the website, you punch in your zip code and it only shows you what's native to where you are. So you can't buy the wrong plants. So it takes all the friction out of the process for the consumer.
Built the whole thing on top of Shopify and Salesforce launched it and I was the very first customer. So I bought the plants and because I'd also, which you can't see it out my window here because the glare and stuff, but down the lawn, because there's a huge lawn at this house, I want to get rid of it. So I dug, during the first part of the pandemic, a pond with a shovel, because I was on AirPods just like this, on conference calls, because you. A lot of conference calls at work when you're in big consulting. And I put it on mute and I'd sit there and I'd shovel and so I dug like, you know, an eleven by 13 foot pond. And then I got a ponder because you can buy almost anything online. I bought a pond liner, put it in there, filled up the pond, and pretty soon the wildlife started showing up. I now have three turtles living in that pond. They came out of the woods, walked across the yard, they smelled the water and boom, they moved into the pond and then the frog showed up and then all these things showed up. But I surrounded them with the native plants.
In that first year, as you know, native plants spend most of their time growing roots and the roots were going deep and they were really building up that the saying, I think, is they sleep, creep and leap. And so they tell us.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Fun.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: Yeah. And so what they were doing is like, I'm looking at them going, well, that's not, nothing's happening, but something was happening. I just couldn't see it because it was below the surface. But what it was doing was fundamentally changing that part of my yard as well, because lawn only has, you know, root systems that go maybe four or six inches deep and then it's just compacted soil. But the native plants, those root systems go down as much as 15ft, depending on the species that you're putting in. But they're, they're opening up the soil which allows for things like water absorption. Right. Because.
And there's actually a program. I'm talking to somebody from the county later today. There's a program here where I live in Montgomery county in Maryland called rainscapes, where they actually will subsidize a homeowner up to $7,500 for putting in native perennial plants to create kind of rain gardens to help divert the water flow so it doesn't go to the Chesapeake with storm runoff and then pollute the Chesapeake. So they're solving the problem upstream because what it does is, again, those roots open up the soil and it allows the water to get absorbed more versus running off the top of the lawn and straight into the storm drains. So we did that, planted that. And that first year. Yeah, you had some flowers. It was, it was nice, but it was nothing, like big. What happened the next year was amazing. And every year since has gotten more and more amazing because they, they leapt, they, they took off. Now that they had the roots, then all the energy went up and you had these amazing, just like sea of black eyed susans and, you know, purple coneflowers and, you know, little bluestems and asters, all kinds of things just. It was just a sea of color. And then the birds showed up and the butterfly showed up and it just. It's like an oasis down there now. So it was amazing. So anyways, we built this.
We built this website, launched it, and, you know, about a year later. So we launched in the middle of the year. So that was kind of the beta test, so to speak. The beginning of the following year, I went back to them. I was still at Accenture and I was advising a woman, Don Rodney, who is now at the National Park foundation. Amazing woman. And she was leading this up. She was the chief innovation officer there. She was leading up the team that was building this and running it. And I was kind of being an informal advisor to her. And we talked about this. I said, you know, you really need to spin this out as a for profit company, which is not normal for a not for profit. I said, but if you look at the market, because we've done all the market research and said, this thing is a billion dollar business with no hyperbole, in all seriousness, because the market for gardening in the US, we did the market research, is about $50 billion a year. It's not a small market. And then on top of that, if you look at the landscaping market in the US, over 100 billion a year, but that includes services and other things as well. So it's a big market and the native plant market is a subset of that. But there's about 180 million gardeners total, of which there's about 40 or 50 million who are native plant users at some level.
The National Wildlife Federation already has millions of members. So if you start to look at it and you say, well, if I only ever sold to my own members, you know, in the first year, they were doing an average order was about $87. Now, our average order value today, as of last month, when we got our most recent numbers, is over $150 per order. People are buying more as they start to see the impact and they come back and buy again and again. So we said, look, could you create a company that's doing somewhere between 50 and 100 million in revenue? Absolutely. And is that a billion dollar company? Yes. So why is that important? Because, and this is the part that it took a while to really work with the board of NWF to understand, was that if NWF spins the company out as a for profit company, they're the biggest shareholder. And if you think about a company, when it goes public, what happens to the equity? Well, now you can monetize it. So if you now own the biggest share of a company, that at some point will get listed, that becomes a gigantic asset for this not for profit to use to fund operations, fund their mission, do whatever they want to do with. But at the same time, it also frees up the startup to go out and raise capital from other investors, like family offices, private equity, venture capital, et cetera, because it's a business.
And that allows you then to hire more experienced people, but not a not for profit wages, which is a real limitation if you're trying to build a business. So it became this kind of, all these pieces fit together.
It took about nine months, but they finally said, yeah, well, let's do this. And then dawn, at the same time, had made an amazing offer to go to the national Park foundation. So she had stepped out and went to go do that. And the board turned to me and said, will you be the CEO? And I was like, are you kidding me? Of course, I'd love to be. I mean, obviously I was involved in the creation of the concept. It was a big change from consulting, but having built startups before, it's not like a new thing to me. I got here at the end of October of 2022. So it's been about 17 months now, and we have now more than doubled in terms of number of people.
Last year we did about a million in revenue in terms of sales. This year we're forecasting that we'll do about three and we spun out officially. It took about ten months to do all the legal work to spin a for profit out of not for profit, because it's not normal. So we're breaking a little bit of new ground here. But we had great professional advisors and legal and accounting, and we spun out officially September 1 of last year. So we are now all the employees turned in their NWF badges and got their garden for wildlife badges. And now we're all garden for wildlife.
And we've since expanded. We now have. When I got here, we had a few growers. Now we think we have eight growers across a number of different states, and we added our most recent grower in Fort Collins, Colorado, which added four more states. So right now we are in 42 states, I believe, and eventually we'll be across the whole contiguous us and then expanding into Canada.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Wow, that was incredible. Talk about, like, I can see why you would say that. Sometimes it just feels like we're living in a simulation. You're like, how did all of these, like, strings and strands of your life come together in this one particular way when it felt like you were going down all these different avenues? I've had a couple of those, too, in my life, and it's just. It blows me away when that happens. And so, before we move back to the business side, I would like to focus a little bit on the conservation of the nature side of this for a while. Since this is rewadology, that just makes sense. Let's do that. So, first, let's talk about, just.
[00:20:33] Speaker C: Especially.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: If you have some stats to talk about it. I would love it. I love numbers.
[00:20:37] Speaker C: I'm a biologist.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Numbers are great. So could you talk first more, a little bit about maybe the destruction of habitat, especially in backyards across the United States, and then how much has been brought back through garden of wildlife? Because I think that if we look at this big picture first, what type of destruction has happened? We've all seen it. We've all seen the expansion of the urban footprint. It's getting pretty wild, honestly. Not.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: Not wild like anything, but we're turning.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: It back to wild, right? Yeah. So that. And then the ecological restoration that garden for wildlife is bringing back since it through our own backyards. So, yeah, teach me more about the conservation ecological restoration side of this for a while.
[00:21:21] Speaker C: Yeah, so it's interesting because. And this, again, a lot of this I learned from reading from much smarter people than me. Like, you know, again, Professor Tallamy is a great example. He talked about this. This actually goes back to the start of this country, right? When they. When the founding fathers came over and the settlers came over they wanted to recreate a bit of what they left behind. And part of that was these big open expanses of, like, green, open lawns. You go to Monticello, where, you know, Jefferson's place in Virginia you go to Mount Vernon or any of these places you get big lawns, right? Which is just like the english estate. And then that kind of got replicated all the way across the country as we started building homes after homes and suburban sprawl started and all the rest. Everybody needed a lawn. Which actually makes no sense. I mean, at one level, biologically and evolutionarily it makes sense because we were terrified of wild things when we were, you know, pre civilization humans, right? And so, like, the more you could see and you had the line of sights the safer you could be. Okay? I don't really worry too much about being, you know, killed by a saber toothed tiger. So I don't need to have, you know, I don't need to have a clear line of sight for 5500 yards of looking out my front door. But we've kept this.
And it's a term that I used in the consulting world, actually was.
I spent a lot of time with clients on this thing called orthodoxies which is just a fancy consulting word for. That's the way we do things here, right? Every company has them. Every not for profit has them. Every government organization, everywhere you look, they exist. And the orthodoxy about home building is that you need to put a lawn in and put a yard in. And so what do they do? They landscape it that way. And then people keep what they have because it's easier to keep what you have than to make a change. So what do we do? We slowly but surely terraformed our entire country into these sterile lawns that are everywhere. And I grew up in southern California.
There's no place where except maybe Arizona, New Mexico where it makes less sense to have a lawn than, say, long Beach, California, my hometown. Because what are you doing? You're paying to water a small rectangle of grass in front of your house that most people never actually set foot on. Like, when they had kids. Maybe the kids would play on the yard. But after that it literally is this, like, avoided area that's this manicured place. And then you pay landscapers to come and mow your lawn and do all this stuff. It's an insane model that everybody just accepts but the result being we've slowly but surely wiped out the places where the pollinators and the birds need to go. And so, like in the book.
And then Professor Tallamy launched this thing called the Homegrown National park, which I thought was amazing, is the idea that if everybody just took half of their lawn across the US and converted it back to native plants, which, by the way, doesn't mean it has to look terrible, there are beautiful native plants. Go to our website, you'll see there's so many gorgeous perennial gardens you can make with these things, which, by the way, cost less money over time. And I'll come back to that later.
If we just did that, we would create more park space than like most of the major national parks combined. He listed them out like Yosemite and, you know, I think the Everglades and a bunch of other ones, because there's so much lawn in this country anywhere you look, if you're, if you're, you know, listening to this podcast, start looking now. And when you look around, you'll notice lawns are everywhere. And it's just like this like accepted thing. But now imagine if you start putting in plants, what's going to change? And things that we've noticed anecdotally are now being backed by science. So I was talking to somebody recently, because we're very fortunate. We have on one side of our house here an area that will never, well, knock on wood, never be developed. So it's just woodsy area. It used to be grass, but then over the last 40 years, it's turned back to plants and trees and woods. And so all kinds of wildlife go through the back here now. So we see foxes, we see wild turkeys, we see deer, we see the occasional hawk and owl and all kinds of stuff. It's amazing. It's like wild kingdom out there. But what we also see is fireflies.
And most people probably remember seeing fireflies when they were younger. Fireflies, you can see the articles are coming out about it now, are disappearing. Why? Because the habitat for them is disappearing. Because they need a certain kind of habitat with the moisture and all the other things that come with it. But the most extreme example that everybody knows is the monarch, right? The monarch is, I think it just came out that the most recent thing was out west. It's like a 90% decline in the population.
Why? Because we have systematically gotten rid of milkweed and it's. Nobody really thought about it. Part of the issue is, and I actually joked about this with Doug last fall when we were having lunch, was one of the biggest problems, I think, is that we call things weeds. A weed is just a plant that shouldn't be there, right, that you don't want there. But we started naming things weeds. And by naming them weeds, it made them look less palatable to people. So people don't want them. You say, Joe pye weed, people go, I don't want that weed or sneeze weed, which, by the way, doesn't make you sneeze, right? There's like all these names. So we're like, well, we should rebrand all of this. That's half the battle. Get people to want these things. I mean, heck, look at the kiwi. The kiwi is actually a gooseberry, I believe, but nobody wants a gooseberry. But everybody loves kiwi, right? The little green fruit rebranded. So.
So from a loss of species point of view, it's been well documented. You know, again, I mentioned that the billions of pairs of songbirds that have disappeared, and that's really directly connected to the loss of food. And so I'm going to spoil a little bit. For those who haven't read the book, here's one interesting stat that I found in the book was a single nest of chickadees from the time they hatch to the time they leave the nest in that short period. And I think it's about five birds, if I remember correctly, it eats between six and 9000 caterpillars in that one little nest of chickadees, right? Okay, so that's a lot of caterpillars. Those birds are constantly flitting. Parents are flitting out to go get a caterpillar and bring it back. But if there are no caterpillars, because there's no native plants that support those caterpillars. And the keystone tree species are amazing because they support hundreds of different species. But when those food sources are gone, you can have all the bird feeders you want in your backyard. I've got plenty of bird feeders out there, and it's great to watch the adult birds eat at them, especially during the winter when the food's scarce. But they can't feed that to their, their baby chicks, right? Just like you can't feed a three month old a steak, that you can't bring them that food, right? So they need the soft proteins and the caterpillars, one of the primary sources of that. When you get rid of the food sources, you get rid of the babies, you get rid of the babies, you get rid of the adults. It's, it's kind of common sense once you, once you see the connection. Most people don't see it. But when I tell it to them, I haven't, I haven't spoken to one person about this who hasn't then gone out and bought native plants because they get it. It's not hard to convince people to do this. All we have to do is, again, make them aware, educate them, and then make it easy for them to do it. If you can do those three things, we can make a difference. And the beauty is, like I was describing in my own yard, you will see the difference in one year.
That's the guarantee. You will see a difference in one year. You will see wildlife coming back and not, you know, some people think of wildlife, think, oh, I don't want pests. I'm not talking about them. Talking about, you know, the butterflies and the, the native bees and the birds.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: And so how much, like, through garden for a wildlife since you've been up and running?
[00:29:18] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: You know, this isn't like, you know, month one, you've been up and running for a while. I'm sure you follow statistics really well. Do you have an estimated amount of land that has been converted through your platform alone?
[00:29:32] Speaker C: Yeah, so we actually.
And they'll tell you how we're accelerating it. So just, we've been operational for two full years, right? So it's not, we're not a very, you know, we're still a relatively new company.
But you're right, it's not month one. We've already planted, almost through our customers, almost a million square feet of habitat across the US.
[00:29:51] Speaker B: A million.
[00:29:53] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's like, that's a substantial, it's a real number. And it's. We also keep track of, like, the number of species that are supported because of that. One of the things we're trying to do right now is start to do research with some universities around carbon sequestration. Because I was at the cop conference a few months ago in Dubai, and one of the things that I've been struck by is how much greenwashing is going on out there. Again, coming from the consulting world. I know there's a lot corporations are looking for this. They don't want to do it, but they're looking to do something that they can report. Right. So you look at like, I bought an airline ticket recently, and they're like, oh, you can spend a couple of dollars and make your flight carbon neutral. And so I'm like, okay, well, how does that work? And so I click into it and find out there's like some not for profit they partner with who plants trees and I go, okay. Interesting. Well, the Guardian today had a great article on how in Africa they're just doing horrible things to the environment by planting all the wrong trees. And I met a woman from Africa when I was at the conference who told me about it. This is months ago. She said, you know, they planted, in order to sequester carbon, they planted a bunch of gum trees. And I've lived in Australia and I'm like, those aren't african trees.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: What are you planting there?
[00:31:04] Speaker C: And he goes, yes, we know they started to damage the water table. And I was like, see, the problem is, you know, you, we.
So I'll come back to that in a second. So they're, they're planting trees and assuming they were even planting the right trees, what they're planting are these bare root trees. I don't know if you, like, have seen a bare root tree. They're like, I've gotten some before in the mail. And bare root trees are basically a stick with a little root, few roots at the bottom, and you stick it into a pot and eventually will grow. But to become a tree is going to take years, many years to go from this little stick to a real tree, especially when you start thinking about bigger trees, like, you know, an oak or something like that nature or giant pine tree or something. So when they tell me I am offsetting the carbon from my floor with this tree, I'm highly skeptical because that tree is not going to be there for really eight or ten years before the carbon effect is even, like, manifested in a meaningful way. I give that to a counterpoint to why we're researching it. Because perennials, and particularly perennial flowers, but also the shrubs as well, they grow root systems really fast, right? That's what I mentioned before about the sleep creep and leap, because what they're doing is growing these root systems. And if you've seen photos of excavated perennial like prairie grasses and even like, coneflowers and black eyed Susan and the rest, those root systems are incredible and they're deep and they, you know, they're quite substantial, but nobody that we've found has been able to measure them yet in terms of or has done the work to measure how much is being sequestered. So we want to do that because if you can quantify how much is being measured, then you know how much carbon is being sequestered by that million square feet of habitat we've created. Because we'll know it by species. You start to accelerate that and that becomes a new market that we can tap into to help companies actually meet their goals, but the way I want to do it is not by selling them credits, because that's just deferring them doing the right thing. It's actually getting them to change their own corporate landscaping to put in these plants to help create these great carbon sticks and beautiful gardens and help the wildlife and actually improve employee mental and physical health, which we can talk about a bit later. But yeah. So the eucalyptus thing struck me as funny in a way. Not haha funny, but kind of weird funny because it reminded me of the childhood nursery rhyme, the old lady who swallowed a fly. I don't know if you remember the swallow fly. And then she swallowed a spider to catch the fly, and then the bird to catch the spider, and she keeps swallowing bigger and bigger animals to catch the small ones. And we keep trying to fix a problem and creating a new problem because we're not actually addressing the root cause problem.
Right. And so going and saying, hey, we need to take care of the carbon thing. Let's go and plant trees. Good idea. But if what you're doing is not taking into account biodiversity and water and habitat and all those other things as well, you're fixing one aspect of a problem and not the whole problem. That's why I like what we do in part as well, because what we do actually is holistic with the environment.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And this is one of the main reasons why I wanted to talk to you, because one of the big themes about rewad ology and what I have when I have people on the show, it's like actual application of this stuff. What is making a difference? The real things. Like, we can talk about this until we're blue in the face. We could talk theory, we could talk all this stuff. But we're to the point now where it's enough talking, it's time to do. And that is why I loved garden for wildlife so much. I'm like, okay, here's it. A solution that's coming. Like coming to fruition right now. It's like, okay, so ecological devastation is a massive problem across the entire world. What is the solution to that? Oh, let's plant native wildlife. Like native, you know, plants, so that native wildlife can come back. Okay, well, how do you do that? We have to make this simple for the consumer to do that. So, like, that is a fantastic idea and solution. And I love that you bring up greenwashing. I've talked about the problem of greenwashing countless times on the show. I even done many episodes on it. And it's a big problem, especially in my, what I do professionally, I'm in conservation, tourism. And there is a lot of, I mean, you want to talk about carbon sequestration, like that is a, in carbon credits. Oh, I've talked mad shit about carbon credits for a long time because also being a biologist and a scientist, it's like, okay, you can say whatever you want, but give me the real data. I need to see the data. Like, how do I know that me giving x amount of dollars to you is actually going to make my operations carbon neutral? Like, if you just think about it, you're just like, but how? I mean, but of course, a lot of corporations, they might not have the view or the wherewithal or the resources or even care to ask that question. And so I've been super skeptical about greenwashing for a long time, especially as the carbon credit industry got bigger and bigger. Again, great in concept, but in execution, there's very few organizations that I found that are doing it correctly. So to hear about the carpet sea crustacean model that you're going to be building along with garden for wildlife, like, ooh, it just makes me tingle. Like the scientists side is just making me so excited.
[00:36:23] Speaker C: Well, and I very much am as well. I mean, one of the things that, because you hit on this, you know, I spent most of my career working with big corporations, so, and last probably decade with the C suite. So I know a lot of what drives them and how they think. And, you know, you start with the fact that, okay, they're all people, right? They're all human beings. And it's like I tell people when I mentor them, I said, look, don't, don't fall into the trap of thinking, oh, that person's the CEO of this or the SVP of this, or they're whatever else, and therefore, like, they're different. No, they're people just like you and me. They get up every morning, they go, they just have a job, right? And oftentimes they probably have imposter syndrome because they don't really know. Like they somehow, all of a sudden now they're doing this thing and they've got to, like, keep it going and the rest. But if you can put a solution in front of them to a problem that they have in a way that makes it easy for them to say, yes, they'll do it because they, it's not like, you know, they're, they're like bond villains or doctor evil or something, or like they want to destroy the world.
They're just doing what they do. And so you have to figure out a way to help them. And so one of the problems that I've seen is that a lot of companies now are looking at things like scope one, scope two, scope three, emissions and saying, how do we address this? And the SEC just yesterday came out with their, okay, here's the reporting requirements. But it doesn't include scope three because too difficult for companies to figure out how to really account for that, which makes sense in some ways. But one of the challenges I've seen is that on scope one and scope two, companies treat it like something that they do to departments and to their employees, rather than how do I get my employees engaged in helping with solving the problem. If you have a company that has 100,000 or, you know, 500,000 or a million employees or whatever else, they can have a massive impact as the employees in helping you meet your goals by thinking differently about how you use them as an asset. And this is a big part, again, of the orthodoxy thing. How do you think differently about what an asset is and what are resources and what do I have?
We see countless examples of it in the real world, but people don't realize it. So think about like Uber or Airbnb. What were they? They were just platforms that connected an underutilized asset with somebody who needed that asset. Right? I need a place to stay. Here's somebody's started with a couch, but now here's somebody's house or apartment or whatever else. I need a ride. Here's somebody who has free time and a car and I connect them with that. And then there you go. Well, your employees can actually do a lot to help you meet your goals. And again, I go back to, well, what if you actually got your employees to do something in their own yards? What if you facilitated for them? Because companies spend tens of billions of dollars on wellness programs and most of it's nonsense, if being honest, right here, I'm going to give you an app or I'm going to give you some sort of thing, or we'll help you get meals prepared for your home, which is nice, right? It's subsidizing something for you. But what if you could do something that actually helped their mental and physical well being? And a, gardening is proven to do that. B, exposure to wildlife, as we've seen in studies that have come out for actually for decades now, but really it's starting to finally hit the mainstream. Exposure to nature actually improves your mental and physical health. Right? So now you say, okay, okay, so I can do this thing that helps the employees. But if they're gardening, isn't that something I can then measure and say, here's an impact I'm having on habitat and the environment. So what if I took my 100,000 employees and gave every one of them the resources to go put a garden in at their home? Assuming they have a home, right, or an apartment, you can put it in a plant or a balcony. That's all measurable impact. But they don't look at it that way. They see what their employees do in that space as being disconnected from the company. But the company can absolutely make that happen. So we just started working with a couple of companies now and doing exactly that, where they're actually giving their, excuse a pun, they're seeding the market by giving gift cards to their employees to get native plants. As the first step to then. And what we said is, we will give you metrics. Where were the gardens created? How many square feet was planted? What species was it helping? We'll even show you a map, a digital map of the area around your headquarters building where all these gardens are being placed. Because we know exactly where the plants are going. We know which plants are going where because they're buying them. So we have the data, right? So we take all that together, and now they've got something they can use from a ESG and marketing point of view and say, look, here's what we're doing for the environment through our employees. So it changes the narrative. And then the final piece of the puzzle is the thing. The reason why we exist as a business is to accelerate the impact of the national Wildlife Federation's mission, which is to restore this habitat and bring back the wild spaces and the biodiversity that benefit nature and human beings.
We're just using commerce to do it because there's a capitalist model out there that we can use to get faster access to market, get product to customers, do all the things we want to do to make this into a viable business much, much more quickly. Well, one of the things that I launched when I got here a year ago, a little over a year ago, was I said, how do we make an even bigger impact faster and in places that otherwise wouldn't get it? And what does that mean? Well, there are huge parts of the country. If you think about an environmental justice point of view. There are lots of places that don't have trees or shrubs or perennial plants, and they're not necessarily the cheapest things in the world, so they're not going to get them. But the pollinators and the birds don't care what your zip code is and how affluent you are. They need to go where they need to go. So now we can solve both problems at once, because we simply took a model that already existed. We stole it directly from bombas and warby Parker and the others. You know, bomb sells a pair of socks, they donate a pair of socks. Warby Parker sells a pair of glasses, they donate a pair of glasses. We sell native plants. We donate native plants. So every time we sell native plants, we set aside the same number to go and do donation gardens, but at scale. So the very first one we did was last June in Baltimore, in a part of East Baltimore where used to be row houses, but it was a giant vacant lot because they'd all been torn down.
And we planted. We had volunteers from the 6th branch, which is a local not for profit, but from veterans, the local not for profit that runs the community area there. And then we had volunteers from Amazon. Some of my employees were there. And we planted. We donated over 400 plants. And we donated, or we planted all these plants and put in some shrubs and trees. And I think the. I think it was. Lowe's donated a giant picnic table as well, which then got put in there, and it was painted by a local artist. It was beautiful. And we put in a garden. We've done, I think, over 80 of those last year, those gardens from Detroit to Baltimore, down to south, all over the place. And we're doing more every year because we want to accelerate the impact. And this is another way you can measure how you do it is all the places you're reaching as well.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: So cool. Just all the different aspects that you are targeting with a for profit business.
And I actually want to talk about this for a little while, because one of the things, as someone who has multiple degrees in the conservation space and different types, I've been in the field for a long time. Unfortunately, we're not top business. But once you start to become in your actual career, like I am now, I realize that there's this massive disconnect from what we in conservation do and what we know, like, okay, so we have like this. We're working on some of the biggest problems that are literally on this planet. I've had people on the show that I'm like, I don't even know how you're tackling this idea. And you just don't give up every day because of what you're tackling is so big. And so these people are doing some of the most important work on this planet with some of the least amount of resources and trying to find a way to make it happen. And everything comes down to funding. So I would like to talk to you about this for a little while. With your genius business brain and your innovation process and how you brought this idea to the National Wildlife Federation, could you maybe peel back the layers of just how your mind works for a while and explain to. Because I've already seen this, switching my career from nonprofit to the for profit and via tourism.
But maybe for other people that might would like to learn more, like the power of for profits in this industry. And then maybe also to your innovative mind, what is the process that you took to get, like, garden for wildlife going and all of that stuff? So maybe just put on your business hat for me, please.
[00:45:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Teach us, like, conservation business.
[00:45:17] Speaker C: Well, I've never taken it off, which is probably why we're able to do what we do. So. And this is very similar. I taught. I also, amongst the many things I've done in my life, I've also taught as an adjunct back at Georgetown in the exec MBA program, and also as a guest lecturer at Emory, also their exec MBA program. So I've been fortunate enough that I've had a chance to figure out how to tell people about this. So it starts with understanding what the right problem is to solve, and people don't spend enough time on what's the problem? Right. In fact, actually, when I left accenture to go and do this, my colleagues on the team that I was on there, six of us around the globe, who did this specific kind of innovation work, actually got me a t shirt that said, what's your problem? Which is funny on many levels for who I am. But that's the question I would always ask clients. I would always go in, there was like a broken record. I'm like, what's the problem we're solving here?
There's a great quote, and no one really knows who said it, but it definitely was not Einstein, although that's who it was attributed to for the longest time, it was, if you have an hour to solve a problem, spend 55 minutes defining it, and five minutes solving it. But if you think about it in the real world, most people, and certainly in the consulting world, most people will spend 810 minutes saying, okay, I know what the problem is now. And then they spend the next 50 minutes solving and resolving and resolving the problem and never quite getting it right, because oftentimes they're focused on a symptom and not the root cause. And it's only when somebody comes along and nails it and says, this is the thing that needs to be solved. And everybody looks at it and goes, this is like, I like to joke, my, my duh test for innovation is that the best ones I've seen out there, that's my initial reaction is like, it just seems so obvious, but nobody saw it until somebody did it. Why? Because we all have these orthodoxies. We think this is the way you do things. And so all solutions tend to fall within that same system of thinking. It's not until somebody looks at it and goes, well, yeah, but why aren't we doing that? So an example being, for instance, you look at something like. And sometimes those are also a function of changes in technology or society or any one of a number of different factors that can make something possible now that wasn't possible before. Great example being, you look at something like, again, Uber, which I brought up before Uber was nothing more than connecting an underutilized asset, two of them, a car, and somebody who had time with somebody who needed it. But if you think about the model that existed for decades of taxi cabs, they've been improving taxicabs for years, right? But you still had, like, you might have a credit card swiping machine in the back, or they have one of those stupid, annoying advertising things. Things now and the rest. But Uber stepped back and said, let me look at the bigger problem and understand the whole set of problems and fix all of them. Let me not just fix one, because if you just took a taxi and tried to improve it, what you would do is you maybe make the payment system better, or you might make the booking system better, or you might do this, you might do that. But there's a quote from a business school professor, Oren Hariri, I think is his name. He said, you don't get a light bulb through the continuous improvement of candles.
And that's good. It's spot on, because what they're trying to do is fix the candle instead of stepping back and saying, what's the problem I'm trying to do? If you want to do things like spotlights and strobe lights and all kinds of things, you can't use a candle for this, right? I mean, it'd be really hard. So you look at what Uber did, and Uber stepped way back and said, I want to, you know, let me imagine a customer or a person, and they're in a meeting or they're in a bar or whatever, and they're talking to somebody and they need a cab. Well, in the old model, you have to go and you have to call for one, and then you'd go and wait outside for it. But what if it's raining now? You're waiting in the rain because you don't want to miss your cab instead of finishing your conversation. Well, here with Uber, I'm going to, like. You're not going to actually go out to get your, your ride until right before it gets there because I'm going to show you on a map where it is, and I'm going to show you which car it is and who the driver is, and you're going to see the rating. And then when you're done, you don't have to fumble with all this stuff around. Hey, do I pay you in cash or use a credit card? I need to get a receipt, which is all these pain points that people had because it's all pre built. You just literally get out of the car and walk away and you're done and the receipts just mailed you. It's like when you. When you step back far enough, you can see a fundamentally different problem. Another example that I gave clients regularly when I was doing this when I was at Salesforce, was the Domino's pizza tracker. So if you've ever ordered pizza from an ominous pizza, and again, this was 1012 years ago, so it was still relatively new back then. Now, of course, everybody knows about it, especially post pandemic. But back when it was new and they released this thing, it was genius. Why? Because it solved a pain point most people hadn't even really thought about. But it was a fundamental one, which is I order a pizza for delivery. 30 minutes later, I'm standing at the door or the window. I remember this from when I was in school. In particular, you're standing and you're looking out the window, or you got the door open, you're looking at waiting. When the driver is 40 minutes in, you're starting to get impatient, you're tapping your toe. You're like, where's, where's this? Where's the car? And 45 minutes in, you pick up the phone, you call the pizza shop, where's my pizza? Right? Now, you've triggered a whole series of costs for them, including possibly lost revenue. Because if they answer your call, maybe another call coming in gets the busy signal. Right. All to find out that Bob the driver is two blocks away and he got stuck behind an accident or something else. You don't care and Bob's not getting a tip. And you are mad even though you haven't even tasted the product. So think about that experience and then say, how do you solve it? Well, the thing is, it's actually, the problem is a fundamentally basic one, which is information asymmetry, which is you don't know what's going on with your pizza, but somebody does. So how do you make that information available to you without having you talk to somebody? And the answer is you give them a pizza tracker. So on my web, on my computer screen, I can see, is it being assembled? Is it in the oven? Is it being put in the box? Is it in the car? And where is it on the road?
That eliminate all kinds of problems.
Why do I share the pizza tracker with people? Not because I say you need a pizza tracker, but when I was talking to the senior executives in the mortgage division of one of the largest banks in the US, the head of the team, the SVP, turned his team and said, we need this for mortgage applications.
So they already know what their problem is. They never saw it put this way, though. And once they saw that, they saw a solution. And this is the big part of innovation. And the reason I told this long winded story is because innovation doesn't have to be new to the universe. It doesn't even have to be new to your industry. It just has to be new to your company, your organization, your business. All it is is a way of unlocking value by doing something different. When you make it that simple, then you say, what could a not for profit or a conservation organization or whatever do? We'll start with what's valuable. When you understand what's valuable to somebody, you can then find a way to unlock that value. And if you can do that, you can now create value, some of which you can extract and some of which might go back to the person because you're doing something better for them.
Right. So in the case of this, what's valuable is people's time and scratching that itch if I want to do something right. So we make it easy for them by taking the friction out of finding the right plants, by saying, here's what's native. Here's what's native to where you are, we'll deliver it to your doorstep. What do we just do? We just took a bunch of friction out.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: Wow. So friction seems to be the big thing here. So let's.
Could you maybe then give us a template as we're thinking about this? Because, you know, like, what first comes to mind as a problem is this amazing shark researcher that I've had on my show. You know, they have started tourism as a way to help a local village that is dying because they were artisanal shark fishermen. And all of the big commercial fishing has devastated their stockfishes and what they do. And so now they're like, you know, it's life or death in this area. So, like, thinking about issues like this like some of the biggest in the world from, like, a nature, wildlife conservation even local community perspective that people on the show and listening do. What is, like a template that we can follow or, like, set of questions that we should be asking ourselves in our next think tank of how can we make an actual difference? What? What? Yeah, what, like scaffolding? Could you give us.
[00:54:08] Speaker C: Well, so there's actually a really easy to use tool that I've used in lots of different settings including we used it for the creation of this business.
And it's. It's one I'll tell your listeners now. It's easy to use. It's kind of like mad libs, if you remember mad libs. Right. You know, it's like you gotta put in some words, then it makes a funny sentence. Well, this one's actually a way to identify those orthodoxy, those blind spots. Because the thing about orthodoxy is they're so ingrained we don't see them, right? And because we don't see them we don't think differently than the way we're constructed. It's kind of like a fish doesn't see the water around it or we don't realize that we're actually in a fluid because we don't see the air around us. But when you wave your hand, you can feel the fluid. Right? So an orthodoxy, the tool is the way it works is it's about using a negative. And so what you say is what is something that blank would never say about blank, right? So that's the first step. You say, what is something they wouldn't say?
So I'll give you an example in a moment how that works. And then you say, why wouldn't they say that? And that's where you identify what is it we do today such that that would never be a situation that they would uncover. Right. And when you say that, then you go to the next step and you say, okay, because that's the way we do things. What are the risks or problems or challenges or costs it creates for us? And once you've got that clearly identified then you say, okay, how might we do it differently?
So. But you have to first uncover the orthodoxy to recognize the problem. So many, many years ago, this was actually done.
And those, your older listeners will appreciate this, I think, more. But in the hotel industry, this was actually one that was done with a client, and it resulted in a transformation in the entire industry because everybody did the same thing and they all thought that's the way you did it, until somebody said, why do we do it that way? And then everybody changed overnight, right, or over a decade. And the thing was this. They said, what are things that a business traveler would never say about a business hotel?
And lots of things came up. I used the facility, the leisure facilities, the place I take my family on vacation. And each one of those, you could say, why wouldn't they say that? Right? Why wouldn't they say, I'll take my family on vacation? Because back in those days, like, I remember when I first started doing consulting work in the nineties, hotels were big, boring, beige conference room with the slidable walls and the rest of that. Like, it was not an attractive hotel in LA today, right? But what that means is if you build a hotel in a busy city that's also a tourist destination, you're building it knowing that two nights out of the week, you're probably not going to be used very much because no one wants to stay at your hotel because it's a boring hotel, instead of, like, going to the w or whatever else might be there. And so that's a 28% reduction in your capacity utilization right off the bat. That's dumb if you're building a business.
But the one they focused on was the mini bar is a good value.
And every time I tell people about this, they laugh. Why? Because we all know it's not. Everything's overpriced. It's like a five dollar can of coke or a $7 Snickers bar or whatever else. And you have to go back and say, why was the minibar created? It was actually created decades ago to solve a real problem, which is business traveler gets in late, nothing's open. There was no uber eats or grubhub or any of that kind of stuff. There was no 711 down the street. You needed something. Kitchen was closed. So minibar. And it made sense. But fast forward many years, and all of a sudden, it became a cost center, right? It became a way of getting stealth margin.
It turns out there were three different costs. There was a capital cost. You build a hotel with 500 rooms, you need 500 refrigerators. There's an operating cost. You have to stock them, and then every day you have to check them. So housekeeping has to spend the time doing that. Or you can get one of those fancy refrigerators with the sensors and you're like Indiana Jones trying to like, check what's in there without actually setting it off. But then the real cost was the customer cost, because as some of you might have happened with some of your listeners, certainly happened to me on multiple occasions. I would have my bill and it would have something on the minibar that I never took. So then I would have to go down to the front desk, have it taken off my bill when I want to just leave the hotel and go to my meeting. So there's a cost. Either I eat it because I'm late for a meeting, or I go and I stand in line and then I get this thing taken off.
But the hotel figured out that over time, when a customer leaves, like Walmart even looked at this, what's the cost of an abandoned shopping cart? It's tens of thousands of dollars of loss of revenue. If I leave your chain and go to a rival chain, if I leave Marriott and go to Hilton, I'm not coming back to Marriott for a while. And so Marriott is going to lose a lot of business over a $7 Snickers bar. And all of a sudden it doesn't make sense. So the question, though is, how else might you solve the problem now that you've identified the thing? Somebody wouldn't say, what's the orthodox, the reason why every hotel room needs a minibar? Okay, what are the costs associated with the risks? How else might you solve the problem? And the answer, once it was developed, was so obvious, but nobody thought of it. Put a convenience store in the lobby and stock it with a lot more inventory than you could have in a single refrigerator. It turns over a lot more frequently and you don't have to worry about Miss billing somebody. And then if you've got fridges in the room already, empty them out, let people use them as a place to store extra food from when they went to dinner. It's. It was so obvious. And then, of course, almost every chain you go to now, that's exactly how they do that.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: Yep. Right in the beginning, right when you.
[00:59:23] Speaker C: Walk in 25 years ago, nobody did it that way.
So that's how you can change something, by really examining. So again, it's what wouldn't you say about something?
Why not? What's the thing you do? So, for instance, you would never say, like, what would people, everyday citizens, never say about not for profits. I love getting junk mail from them.
Why not? Because we don't. Right. But that's the way. That's the way you do it, right? Like, I get. Every day I get letters in the mail from all these worthy not for profits asking for money. Because once you start donating, there's an orthodoxy out there that not for profits sell mailing list to other not for profits, right? Because it's a revenue generator for them. But what it is, it's a pain in the behind for people like me who then get letters. I've got a stack on my desk right now from a bunch of great not for profits doing worthy causes. But I don't. Like, I have a limited amount of money I can donate to it, right? There's only so much I can give to so many. So if I want to give that one, I'm taking away from that one, right?
But that's the orthodoxy. So how might you solve it differently? Well, one thing we did, we actually launched a program a month ago specifically aimed at not for profits. And what we did is we said, well, if you think about your paycheck, I have, like, in my mind, I don't have a single paycheck. I have a bunch of different wallets. There's my mortgage, there's my car payment. There's my eating out budget. There's clothes for being my family, kids. There's travel, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's donations. Okay? Every not for profit is fighting for that same donation pool that people have. But what if you could get them money from a different pool, from a different wallet? And so we're like, well, why not? Why don't we tap into that $50 billion gardening pool and say, hey, if you're a not for profit, sign up to our super easy platform. It's really easy to use, doesn't cost you anything. And if you mail your supporters to go buy native plants, we'll give you 15% of whatever they spend. It's that simple, right? So now what you're doing is getting people to spend money on plants, helping the environment, doing good for biodiversity and the rest. And some of that money will go back to your not for profit.
That's how you think differently about it.
[01:01:49] Speaker B: It's just so cool. And I love that you have all of these tangible examples and also how you got there as well, because I think that's helpful, because when I was starting to think about our episode, I'm like, I could just ask you to list all of what you do, but that doesn't make sense because how you got there, there's stories to every single one. And all of which are valuable for us to understand.
And as you look towards the future, what do you forecast or what do you foresee? Is there anything in the short term that you can share with us? Or what is the long term vision of this? And then also maybe for you, like personally, what do you hope to get through all of this and your future as well?
[01:02:32] Speaker C: Well, that's a great question. As I was saying to my leadership team yesterday, we just had an off site and I'd said to them, look, one of the reasons I love doing this is because what we do actually matters. It actually matters. And you think, again, what I said before about spending your time on things, I love doing this because even though it's, it's a small company, it's stressful being CEO. Anybody who's a CEO knows, like it's, there's a lot of like getting up in the middle of the night kind of thing, but I'd rather get up in the middle of the night for this than to sell a widget because this matters.
Where I see us in the long run, long run for me is five years at the most, is that we are, well, one, I want to take this company public. So being really clear about that, that's part of the bigger strategy. But specifically, I want to make it even easier for people to get native plans. And the way to do that is to go where they are. And so I envision a world where you walk into the garden center of Walmart or home Depot or Lowe's or all the above A's, tractors, all that, because they're, they're just selling plants that they get from nurseries and places that grow them. But those are invasive species. There should be a almost think of it like a store within a store, a native plant section, garden for wildlife by the National Wildlife Federation and also the logos of all of our partners. Right? So we're working with the Cornell lab now of ornithology. We're working with wild birds Unlimited. We're working in lots of different places. All those are there. So when people say, I want to get native plants, because once they see it, they'll go, oh, wait, what's this about?
We're the number one brand leader in getting scientifically backed, locally accurate native plants to help the environment and make you feel good about your garden. And oh, by the way, they're beautiful and they come back every year and they actually cost less than the annuals after two or three years because they just keep coming back. You don't have to keep buying new plants.
That's my vision.
And then we set a goal that the National Wildlife Federation is part of the program, Garden for Wildlife, which was launched in 1973, started doing these certified wildlife habitats. Sign up here. They started doing certified wildlife habitat programs. There's about 300,000 now across the US, mostly homes. My house is a certified wildlife habitat, but about 10,000 schools, I think, and then some corporate locations as well.
We've set an explicit goal that by 2030, we'll have that in a million. So a million certified habitats across the country.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: That's a fantastic goal. And then for you personally, even after you go public, when all of these bigger, grand visions for NWF and garden for wildlife have been realized, what about you? Do you want to continue doing this? Do you want to then go help, like, the next big solution based conservation mission, or I guess, in your core, what do you want to do in the next 510, 1520 years?
[01:05:31] Speaker C: Wow. Well, still be here would be the first step. The second is. So I still do advising work. I sell the advisory board of a number of companies, chairman of a company that I previously co founded that's in the ski industry as well.
So I'd want to do more of that, but specifically to help, not for profits. So I have a couple of other ones that I absolutely adore that I've had a chance to do a little bit of work with. I want to do more with them, whether it's best friends, animal society, World Animal Protection, World Wildlife Fund, there's no shortage of problems to solve out there. It's really just saying, how can I be most helpful in doing that with those organizations? And so if I can do that for the rest of my life, I'd be fortunate.
[01:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that's definitely a worthy mission. I have a similar one in a different way, and that's giving people a voice, giving all of these people a voice to get their message out there and for all of us to learn from each other, which I love.
[01:06:33] Speaker C: And thank you for letting me bend your ear for a little over an hour now, as well as that of your listeners. And I mean that in all sincerity, because there's lots of ways people can spend their time and your listeners can spend your time, those of you who are listening to this. So the fact that you chose to listen all the way to here, thank you.
[01:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you. Thank you for coming on, sharing your knowledge, giving a different perspective on this very important field of conservation and ecological restoration. So again, Shabara, thank you so much. I very appreciate time.
[01:07:09] Speaker C: Of course, Brooke, it was a pleasure.
[01:07:12] Speaker B: Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today.
[01:07:17] Speaker A: I hope you've been inspired by the.
[01:07:19] Speaker B: Incredible stories, insights, and knowledge shared in this episode. To learn more about what you heard, be sure to check out the show
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This is Brooke signing off. Remember, together we will rewild the planet.
