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Hi, this is Tony McWilliams, and I’m here with my daughter.
Hi, I’m Lindy Duckworth, and I’m here with my dad.
So that’s the point where he started looking for something that was a little bit more sustainable with maybe heavier engines. Yes, he started finding, he went looking and he did find something that would create sustainability. And that was the issue. I mean, that’s the issue with almost every nonprofit organization that has any sort of mission is that there has to be some sustainability so that they can go into the future with this.
Yeah. Okay, so then what? Did he already have a business or he said, you know what, I need to start one?
Well, I told you he was in the nutrition business.
Yeah. He had actually, once again, even in the nutrition business, he brought products to market that were disruptive, technologically advanced, life-changing, quality of life enhancing. And he really did great with that nutritional business. So much so that over a 20-year period, he built that business to half a billion dollars a year.
Okay, is that million with a cold?
No, that is… That’s a B, billion?
Yeah, half a billion. In other words, $500 million per year.
Wow. So he knew his business. He knew his nutritional business. He literally had people from 26 countries of the world, a total of 3 million people who joined his program, who joined his direct sales company. He knew how to get out there and get the job done.
But then all of a sudden, the social business focus starts happening and he realizes it was like the only option because the donor charity model wasn’t getting the job done. And so he decided that they could do the social business model.
At about that time, somebody sent him a magazine article. Another person sent him a book. Another person mentioned it to him in a conversation. Then he ran into and got to know the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, who also was talking about social business and who eventually held the first symposium on the subject of social business in all of Latin America, to which he invited Sam to attend. A great thing for Sam to experience because there he was learning about all this stuff. And then he’s rubbing shoulders with other literally global social business people, global social entrepreneurs, one of which was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is the reason why Bangladesh started to get out of the poverty mode that they were in for so many years. They were in the top five of the poorest countries in the world.
And there was a man, Muhammad Yunus, who ended up with the Nobel Peace Prize. He actually started a social business bank and started a thing called microcredit, where they would loan $30 to $40, mostly women, who would start businesses and they would help get their families out of poverty. And it literally affected 40 million people. A social business in Bangladesh affected 40 million people. And it became the standard for other organizations to use in places where they were fighting poverty, namely the microfinance or the microcredit.