June 10, 2025 • 32 mins
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Gary LeBlanc did what he knew best—he showed up to cook. But what he found on the ground was far from comforting. The food being served to survivors wasn't physically or spiritually nourishing. That moment sparked the idea for Mercy Chefs, a faith-based disaster relief organization committed to serving high-quality, home-cooked meals to people in crisis.
In this episode, Ben Walter and Kathleen Griffith sit down with Gary to hear how he built Mercy Chefs from the ground up, often with no money in the bank and no backup plan. They'll also discuss the true price of answering a calling, and what it takes to serve others when the storms just keep coming. These are The Unshakeables.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in New Orleans,
Louisiana neared, Gary LeBlanc was planning to do what he
did best. Cook. His company, Mercy Chefs, was inspired by
that storm, and he was committed to catering several events
to mark the occasion.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I committed to doing a couple of events. They were
a little beyond where we were at the time, but
I thought we'd be able to fund them.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Funding had generally come easy to Gary, mostly because he
was funding Mercy Chefs himself out of his own pocket.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I would use my own credit cards to buy food
and gas and all the other things we had to do.
And then I'd get home and I'd raise some money,
and I'd pay my credit cards back down, and then
we'd be ready to go again.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
And the tenth anniversary was a huge deal in the Southeast.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I thought everybody was going to get excited and find
their passion in their heart again on the tenth anniversary
of Katrina.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
But it wasn't a big deal to everyone.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
We got down to it and I was short. I
was overdrawn in the bank account, and I wasn't going
to be able to make it happen and for me
and the birth of Mercy Chefs in my heart in
New Orleans, that was just crippling. And I called one
of our board members at the time and said, Bake,
I've made a huge mistake.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Welcome to the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby
Studio for iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.
On the Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring moments of small
business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories
of how they got through it. Today is a classic
tale that many small business owners face. Where is the
(01:56):
next dollar coming from? As a banker, this is a
question I think about a But for many of our
small business owners, because they're working on a product or
service they're passionate about, it's not always top of mind.
They love their businesses and sometimes the money comes second.
But as we'll see today, especially for a company like
Gary's that's a not for profit, as great as the
mission is, the money sometimes has to come first. Joining
(02:20):
me again today is Kathleen Griffith.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Hey, Ben, glad to be back. Don't we all just
love Gary?
Speaker 4 (02:25):
He's going up against natural disasters, hurricanes, and fires and
tornadoes and every calamity you can imagine, and he's this
force of nature himself.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
On today's episode Mercy Chefs from Portsmouth, Virginia. To really
understand Mercy Chefs, I think you need to understand a
few things about Gary LeBlanc himself. First, he's from New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I have two Louisiana grandmothers, one very Cajun and one
very New Orleanian.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Second, he was raised in the thick of Southern hospitality
by those grandmothers.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
It was always about food and family and friends, and
my grandmothers would cook for any occasion and it would
often go from three or four people to thirty or
forty at the drop of a hat.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Third, he hated cooking in professional kitchens, but he made
his career in hotels and hospitality anyway.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
You don't have holidays, You work a bazillion hours every week,
you rarely get a full day off.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
He got started in some of the country's finest establishments.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
The Commander's Palace, Mister Bees, and then the Mandolin. My
first year in the business, Paul Prudomme was the executive chef,
and watching his incredible passion and relentless pursuit of a flavor,
or a nuance or a remembrance. So my introduction into
hospitality was with the very best practitioners of the art.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
But by two thousand and five, Gary was too far
up in the food chain, so to speak, to have
to work in kitchens himself.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I had people that had people that did food. I
was running a Hilton hotel group in Virginia's managing director,
living very comfortably. Thought I had reached the pinnacle. I
had achieved everything I wanted to do in the industry.
And Katrina hit New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
For those who may not remember, Hurricane Katrina hit the
Gulf Coast on August twenty ninth, two thousand and five.
It destroyed New Orleans, particularly the Lower ninth Ward and
Lower Land areas where the levees didn't hold. But the
worst part of the disaster was man made. Local, state,
and federal officials failed to respond quickly or appropriately to
the disaster, leading to thousands of people displaced in one
(04:50):
hundred degree heat with no home to return to. The
entire country watched as the city struggled to survive.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
It was incredibly horrifying for me. The images from New Orleans.
The pictures on TV, those folks that were standing on
the bridges waiting to be rescued. I started recognizing people
that I used to work with. That was when I
knew I had to do something. The pictures on TV
were just too compelling for me to sit by and
(05:17):
watch and not do anything. Texting ten dollars wasn't going
to ease my soul. So I went down and did
the only thing I knew how to do that could help,
And I cooked with all these other groups and studied
what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And what Gary saw he didn't like.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
scooping green beans right out of the can and putting
them on a plate with three frozen chicken nuggets and
a slice of white bread. I mean, that kept people alive.
They called that a meal. But that didn't show love.
That didn't show respect. The food didn't reflect love or
passion or professionalism. It didn't look like what I was
used to seeing my family do. Not throwing rocks at
(05:58):
any of them. But I thought you could do high quality,
chef prepared food in the same quantities as other folks
were doing bad food, And that dissatisfaction with what I
saw in the aftermath that Katrina was the genesis you
can do better, and there was an obligation to do better.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
That thought occupied Gary's every weeking hour.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
It took nine months and I was completely consumed with ideas.
I was up in the night, and I love the sleep.
It's not like me to be awake at night. I
had legal pads that were full of recipes, kitchen designs.
I did BTU equations. I mean crazy things, things that
I had never done.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
BTU, if you happen to be wondering, is a British
thermal unit, which is a Leman's term for a unit
of heat. In this case, it would be like cooking appliances, stoves,
ovens and the like. Gary's BTU math was about how
much heat he'd need to cook at the scale that
was needed for a disaster like what had happened in
a New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It was a man on fire kind of moment.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
This really became an obsession for a period of time
while you were trying to get this thing off the ground.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I was so consumed I couldn't work. I was a madman,
and one day I was like, this is not good.
I'm distracted from my job. I have a lot of
people depending on me, and I've got to get rid
of this. I can't keep being consumed and obviously Mercy
Chefs is a faith based organization, and so I took
(07:28):
that afternoon and I went home and I said, I'm
just going to pray through this, and I'm going to
ask God to take this burden off of me and
let me get back to my real job. And in
that afternoon of prayer, it was a moment. It was
an audible moment I heard feed people, just go feed people.
It was a transient moment in my life. In that
(07:51):
moment of hearing that simple command, feed people, just go
feed people.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
This was a definitive calling to pursue Mercy Chefs. But
Gary really really didn't want to go back into the kitchen.
He didn't know if he could get out of it,
but he sure did try.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
I was drug kicking and screaming. I mean, I was Jonah,
I was trying to run away from this thing. I
sat down with one of those yellow legal pads and
I wrote down seven or eight people that I thought
could do this better than me, and I was like, God, wait,
here are the people that you should be calling. Do
you need phone numbers, emails? What do you need. I
(08:32):
don't understand why you got me on the line, wrong guy.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Unfortunately, it seemed Mercy Chefs had found exactly the right guy.
So Gary gathered up his legal pads and got in
contact with all the organizations he'd volunteered with after Katrina.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
And said, hey, I've got this concept, this business model.
And they were patient. They listened, they looked at it,
and then they shook their head and said, you're insane.
This is not sustainable. It's going to cost too much money.
It's going to take specialized equipment, it's going to take
specialized employees. You're going to have to buy groceries to
do high quality food. You can't use leftover warehouse excess.
(09:12):
We're not interested at all. And so it became obvious
to me that Mercy Chefs was going to have to
just happen independently.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Gary confided in his family and friends about the idea.
They also thought he maybe a little insane, but not
enough to stop him. They just had a warning proceed
with caution.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
There are some common threads, but one of the biggest
ones was keep your day job. Great advice, and so
I did. I kept my day job. We filed all
of our paperwork and got our five oh one c
three very informally, just trying to plot along. And I
mean I founded Mercy Chefs on legal zoom, which was
a really great idea at the time.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
You keep saying we can, I ask who we is
in those early days.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Well, in the early years, we was just me. I
was just trying to grow to what I could put
my hands around. I had no idea what Mercy Chefs
would become. I just knew the next step. I used
to drive and set up and cook and then tear
down and then come home all on my own, and
it just quickly became a lot. It began to grow.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
As it grew, word spread that Gary was trying something radical.
The first deployment for Mercy Chefs came from a friend
at the organization Feed the Children.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
They were working a flood in Conklin, New York, and
they said, we have a church up there and they're
doing really great, but they're tired and they don't have
the professional acumen that you talk about. Can you go
up and help out? So I took my wife and
my two kids they were seven and nine, and put
some cutting boards in my knives and a little hot
(10:51):
box in the back of our car. And so we
went up and just worked with them on inventory controls
and rotation, and I showed them some high volume cooking
tricks and just gave them the tools they needed to
be successful and saw a real change happen in that kitchen.
But again, those early years it was just sort of
me against the world. It was good again. We were
(11:13):
able to perfect some models. I was able to make mistakes.
I was able to learn. I was able to get better.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Once he had that flood under his belt and knew
what he was doing. The opportunities, the disasters, they just kept coming.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
after that, it was a tornado in Arkansas. Then there
was another tornado in Florida. And yeah, I think Hurricane
Ike in Beaumont, Texas was the first hurricane that we worked.
After we founded.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Well, the disasters kept happening. The money didn't always flow.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
For about the first five or six years. Our business
model was I'd use my own credit cards, and when
my credit cards got full, that's when I knew it
was time to come home. We had a bank account
but nothing in it. When I got home, I just
call family and friends and raise enough money to pay
off the debt that I had incurred, and then we'd
be ready for the next disaster.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
They'd send what they could, But in the beginning, Gary
was his own biggest donor.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
When you're the major donor, you really put some skin
in the game. It's not a good business model. But
again people started to hear about what we were doing
and came alongside.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Their belief in Gary's cause was tested when he decided
he was ready to get his own mobile kitchen.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
We needed to raise fifty thousand dollars for that first
mobile kitchen. It seemed insurmountable at the time, and there
are just some people that said, you know, we really
think this is what you need to be doing. Show
us how to help.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
So can you describe to our listeners, but also to me,
what is a mobile kitchen? Because in my head I'm
just thinking food truck, but that might not be quite right.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah. I had never seen a mobile kitchen before, Katrina,
I had never worked in one. And so it's a
commercial kitchen and they put wheels underneath it. Our kitchens
are very purpose built for what we do. We're pulling
hours now with freightliners. We have fall down sides or
full down backs on most of them. In our big ones,
(13:18):
we put in walk in refrigerators right on the trailer.
They have to be flexible, they have to be nimble.
Are we doing five hundred meals a day or are
we doing fifteen thousand meals a day? And so the
kitchens have to be able to do both very well.
It's an incredible thing. We can pull into a parking
lot and be putting out tens of thousands of meals overnight.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I am pleased to welcome Kathleen Griffith back to the Unshakeables.
I'm struck by so many things about the story. More
than all of it, I'm struck by how he just
willed that thing into existence. I mean, he literally willed
it from nothing.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
You Know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
I loved when you asked who is we and he
said we is just me, because that is the story
of every single small business owner from the dawn of time,
you know.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
All of a sudden, it was like he was telling history.
And then he said we did this, and we did this.
I'm like, who.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
Yeah, no, But you're always trying to flex bigger, and
you just get into this strange mode of speaking where
everything becomes a wee statement.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
So that was funny, and he was earnest and honest
about it.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
I mean, he's going up against natural disasters, hurricanes and
fires and tornadoes and every calamity you can imagine, and
he's this force of nature himself. But he kind of
proved to me as I was listening to him, you
don't necessarily need to be loud to do that. Like
there's this quietness, this gentleness, this calmness, this peacefulness about him,
(14:49):
but he's still able to, as you said, like will
this into the world.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, it's a good observation because so many of the
people that we meet on the show and off the
show who have created something out of nothing, they really
are sort of their own form of Tasmanian devil. Because
people who tend to be able to be that forceful
there are other things that go along with it. But
Gary's very different. I mean, he's seft spoken, he's humble.
(15:15):
He didn't make one over the top statement the whole
time we heard from him, and yet he has done
over the top things.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
Yeah, it all felt so earnest, you know. I was
just thinking about small businesses and what it takes from
a resilient standpoint, the demonstrable impact it has on small
businesses in particular, and thinking about all of these various
places where we've seen events this past year. I was
reading a report that FEMA forty percent of businesses never
(15:42):
come back from a natural disaster, and for those that
do rebound, it's short lived. A quarter of them aren't
in business a year later. Like, the rebuilding process takes
time and patience, and there's this acute need for people
to run in when everyone else is running out, But
then there's this longer term need, which I know, something
you're passionate about and thinking more about what does the
(16:03):
rebuilding process really look like over time?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Well, and you're seeing that out in your adopted hometown
right out in LA. I mean, they're really struggling with
that now.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Yeah, I mean it's been wild.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
This was my first fire season, just watching what happened
and how many small businesses were destroyed. And I love
the Arthur Ashe quote, start where you are, use what
you have, do what you can. So I'm working on
actually a physical build out of a retail location where
people can sell and come for more skill building and
(16:34):
training and bringing brands to the tables part of that,
but it's the spirit of the small business owners. I've
seen so many people rally in different ways, and everyone's
looking at what they can do.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
For Gary, the answer is not enough. The need must
just be unimaginable, limitless, essentially, So how do you decide
what to respond to and what not to respond to.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
I always feel like I'm coming up short. I always
feel like there's more to be done, and that's the driver.
As many people as I can feed, there's always going
to be somebody else, and I know I'm never going
to get to all of them. I know I'm not
going to solve world hunger, but I have an obligation
to get to as many as I possibly can.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
That impulse really began to show itself a few years
into the operation. For the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,
Gary planned to take the Mercy Chefs kitchen down to cook,
this time on his own terms, making the food New
Orleans deserved.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
We got down to it and I was short, I
was overdrawn in the bank account, and I wasn't going
to be able to make it happen for me and
the birth of Mercy Chefs and my heart in New Orleans.
That was just crippling. And I called one of our
board members at the time and said, Bake, I've made
a huge mistake.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
If you thought you heard Gary call someone Bake, you
were correct. His nickname is indeed Bake, as in baked
in the oven.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I have overrun my supply lines. I'm really out here
and I'm in trouble. Can you help me? And he said, Okay,
We're going to do two things. One, I'm going to
help you. Don't worry about that. The money's already taken
care of. But he's like, let's look at this and say,
how did you get here and how can you avoid
getting here in the future. So it was a great
(18:22):
business moment for me. Bake was just about proper planning.
Did you make an emotional decision to commit to these
events or did you make business decision? Did you make
a decision based on an assumption that people were going
to be motivated. You need to get to a place
where you have a cash reserve. You need to get
to a place where there's a ready reserve, and then
(18:43):
you can always work to the edge, but there's a
soft landing.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
What did you learn about how to finance and run
the organization. That changed after that experience.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Never promise something that you can't do and that you
have the ability to get it done before you do it.
But at the same time, I have to balance that
with the faith walk. I have to be able to say, hey,
I can take a chance, I can do what I
believe I'm supposed to do, and trust that God's going
to come through with the rest of it. So it's
this business head and the faith head, and how do
(19:12):
you balance those two against each other.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Then there was an earthquake in Haiti, and well, Gary
had learned some valuable lessons. Sometimes lessons take time to root.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
I was still using personal funds. I was using my
debit card and didn't tell my wife. I was on
the debit card and she's trying to run the household
and pay bills, and we overdrew our account. And she
told me while we were in Haiti, She's like, this
isn't going to work. I love it, I love you,
but we can't have this. You're going to have to
(19:45):
come home and float your resume and go back to work.
I agreed with her, and then a couple days later
check came in and it was substantial, and it was
an encouragement. It was a reminder that I didn't need
to worry about the money. I needed to worry about
the mission. We always say that money will follow mission,
(20:05):
but mission should never follow money.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Gary, you've used the word faith a couple of times.
Can you talk about the role that faith plays in
Mercy Chefs, in both the founding and in the guts
of the place, how it helps shape both the mission
and the way you do your work.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Well, I'm a man of deep faith, and that faith,
my relationship with the Lord, comes into play in everything
that I do. It's why we do what we do.
It's not just our belief system, but it's also that
you do what you do out of faith. And if
you believe you're doing the right thing, if you believe
you're in the right place, if you're doing everything you
can possibly do, you get to the point where it's
(20:44):
not your hands anymore, it's not your responsibility. You just
have to have faith and believe. And when it's hard,
when I have to dig deep, I start thinking about faces.
I remember faces when we do twenty thousand meals in
a day and our team debriefs at the end of
the night, ee always ask each other who is your
one today? You got to get to twenty thousand people fed.
(21:07):
But what's important is that one person that you made
a difference in their life. And it's what motivates me
because I know that for every face I've seen and fed,
there are another five out there I couldn't get to,
and so I'm constantly how do I get to some
of those other five? How do we do better? How
do we work smarter? How do we work bigger? How
(21:28):
do we do more? You can make me emotional, I'm
going to cry.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
In the last ten years, Mercy Chefs has grown substantially.
It's now a global organization.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
It's crazy. It took us ten years to serve a
million meals. We served our next million in three years,
and in the seven years since then, we've served another
twenty six million meals. Oh wow, We're almost at one
hundred employees now. And then our volunteers. We have ten
thousand volunteers on our rule book and on site, we'll
(22:03):
work with one hundred a day.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
And do you still go out to disaster areas yourself?
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah? I get to almost every one of them myself.
But our team has gotten so competent. Now I don't
have to go to every disaster, but I still want
to go. It's fun. I enjoy seeing the team work.
It's a phenomenal thing to be on site and watch
what happens.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Today. Gary has teams all over the world. How did
you take this thing international? You already run a logistics
business as it is. You run a logistics business at scale,
and now when you think about global, I mean you
can't just take your trucks and drive them over to Europe.
Doesn't work that way. So tell me how you did that.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
We launched our global division two and a half years
ago formally, and since then we work on every continent.
We build kitchens overseas. We grow kitchens. We'll find a
small kitchen, we'll make it a lot bigger. We'll put
some equipment in there, and our team stand in and
train and buy groceries until we can get these people
(23:04):
working on their own, however long it takes.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
I want to ask you a little bit if I could,
about the Defender Service Award and full disclosure for our audience,
Chases Auto Lending Group has a relationship with Jaguar Land
Rover and is a sponsor of the Defender Awards, So
we do have an affiliation just for transparency sake. But
I know Gary that you and Mercy Chefs were finalists
in twenty twenty two. Tell us how that came about.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, we got the invitation that Land Rover was doing
a giveaway, and you got the apply and then it
became a voting situation to see where the votes came
in on who was going to win the award, and
they gave away five Land Rovers that year, one in Canada,
four here in the US, and they picked organizations that
(23:47):
were doing great work in their communities. Mercy Chefs was
a finalist and we were fortunate enough to go on
and win that award and get a beautiful Defender, get
to go to Ashville and run it on the course
with the engineer. That was so much fun. It's been
a great, great vehicle for us. We were just in
(24:07):
California for the wildfires. We're working out of LA and
Land Rover was gracious enough to call us and say, hey,
we know you're on the West coast and the Defenders
on the East coast. Could you use a Defender while
you're out there? And he said, we absolutely can, and
so they came from the local dealership and loaned us
a Defender to use to do distribution out in LA
(24:28):
after those fires.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Wow, Kathleen, what a terrific conversation with Gary. I mean,
you can hear how much he cares, how deeply he's
in love with this work.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Were you trying to get me to ugly cry?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Ben?
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Don't we all just love Gary?
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah? He seems like a special guy.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I have to say,
it's the spirit of the small business owner.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I thought it was fascinating to hear it from the
perspective of a not for profit because think about the
difference mentally between "Well, I had a business opportunity that
I could have on for but I didn't, and now
I have to go figure out what I'm going to"
do versus "Well, the storm hit and people went hungry,
and I didn't show up", and so it was clear
that he was sort of betting the farm, so to speak.
(25:11):
In a couple of cases on he just had to
show up. And on the one hand, he could have
gotten in real trouble and not been bailed out and
really been in a bad place. On the other hand,
it worked out. So it's hard for me in hindsight,
to say it was a bad thing to do. On
the other hand, I don't know how often I would
encourage it. But if he hadn't done it, he might
not be where he is today. So that's an interesting dynamic,
particularly in the context of a not for profit where
(25:32):
the need is both acute and human.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
Yeah, and I think the how of using and maxing
out debit cards and feeling like you're operating on a
razor's edge. A lot of small business owners can relate
to that reality too.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
The most interesting thing I think in the recent past
is his decision to go global. I think that is
just a whole different world. I was trying to imagine.
You know, he's built these kitchens. I'm sure they're customized,
and they're replicable, and they're fit for American rowads and
American drivers and American trucks that can pull them. You know,
he's in all these places where the infrastructure isn't the
(26:07):
same and he's having to just figure that out. He's
operating in both developed and developing nations, and I'm sure
they're very different.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
Do you find with your clients that some of them
are thinking really domestically and you've got to encourage them
to think globally. Do you see a lot of that,
you know, thirty thousand foot perspective like Ansoff Matrix, Okay,
new market penetration and another market, let's go overseas.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
It takes much more intentionality because to set up services globally,
you're typically hiring in that local market. Language barriers, regulatory changes,
legal rules, all that stuff. You're typically hiring local teams.
And that's a whole different angle on running a business.
You know, saying I make widgets and I ship them
to Germany when someone from their orders a product is
(26:52):
very different than I have three people on the ground
in Munich helping deliver my brand to that market.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
It's not for the faint of heart. It really is not.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And you have to be open to adapting to cultural, financial, regulatory,
and business model norms that are just in some cases
slightly different and in some cases radically different from the
way that things operate here in the States.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
Do you find, just to pull this back to small
business owners, that there are also small business owners who
actually should be running nonprofits that if they just reimagine
if they moved from an LLC to a five oh
one C three, they'd be in a different place, Like
I'm just thinking about girls who code in Reshma Saujani. You
know that's a thirty million dollar a year business. CEO
(27:35):
is making probably close to half a million dollars, like
you can do well.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Sometimes a business is just more of a nonprofit.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
I see that sometimes, So I'm curious as to your
take on it.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Well, I mean there's two different things. There are some
businesses that are not for profit because they don't make
any profit. That's the wrong reason to be a not
for profit. I wouldn't go as far as what you said, Kathleen.
What I would say is to the degree that your
mission is fundamentally at odds with a for profit business model,
recognizing that early is important. I think there are a
(28:10):
lot of cases where there are a ton of mission
driven companies that can be easily aggressively for profit and
those two things align perfectly well. What happens is when
you don't do hard enough thinking about whether your for
profit mission aligns with a for profit business model. That's
where you get the dynamic that you're talking about. I've
certainly seen examples of that, whereas others are sort of
(28:32):
like I care more about the mission than I do
about ever making money. And the reason it matters, Kathleen,
is because the way that not for profits become self
sustaining is so different than the way for profit companies
become self sustaining. Not for profits have to constantly feed
the fundraising furnace. And that's perfectly fine because there are
(28:52):
some things like there's not really a for profit business
model for feeding people after natural disasters. I get that,
so he's formed not for profit, but there are other
things that can happen. There are other business models that
serve a purpose, that are helping lift people out of poverty,
or that are helping people gain new skills that can
be done completely in the context of a for profit
(29:14):
business model, and that works just fine. It's when those
two things don't line up that in a bad place.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Yeah, I think this is going to be very interesting
for a lot of people, because I do think there's
sometimes some confusion about what the right formation is when
you are a very very mission led founder with a
very mission oriented business.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
And I have seen people try to force and wedge
what is fundamentally and not for profit mission into one
of these sustainable capitalism frameworks. When there really isn't a
sustainable business model behind it. So my view is, if
you want to line those two things up, you have
to say that the business could exist without the mission.
That the business could exist because there is good product
(29:56):
market fit and there is demand and you can produce
the product the service at a market return or a
reasonable return, even if not a full market return.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
That's good. The business could exist without the mission. That
is such a good litmus test.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, and so that doesn't mean that business would be
as successful without it. It doesn't mean that it's not
the motivating reason to do it. All of that is
still present, right, But for it to be truly sustainable,
the business model has to stand on its own and
therefore support the mission.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
That's really clarifying. That's great.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Well, Kathleen, I want to say thank you for all
your insights, and of course thank you for joining me
on this season of The Unshakeables.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
This was just a blast and I loved ending on
something that's so important. Being able to share this mans
work was such a treat, So thank you.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
So I want to finish Gary with a question that
I ask all of our guests, which is, if you
had one piece of advice for our listeners about how
to start, run, and grow a business. What would it be?
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Just do it? That was the call to me. Just
go feed people. Start. It's a big step or a
little step. Just get in there, be relentless, Find something
that you're passionate about, find something that you can't not do,
something that drives you and consumes you. But then at
the end of the day, just go for it.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Gary Lebanc, thank you for joining us on The Unshakeables.
It's great hearing your story.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Thank you. It's been so good to be here. I've
enjoyed it so much.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Unshakeables.
If you liked this episode, please rate and review it.
Next week, we'll be back in Texas talking to an
Air Force veteran and NASA alum who's 3D printing business
is trying to change the world one item and sometimes
one toilet at a time. I'm Ben Walter, and this
(31:49):
is The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio
from iHeartMedia. We'll see you back here soon.
As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in New Orleans,
Louisiana neared, Gary LeBlanc was planning to do what he
did best. Cook. His company, Mercy Chefs, was inspired by
that storm, and he was committed to catering several events
to mark the occasion.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I committed to doing a couple of events. They were
a little beyond where we were at the time, but
I thought we'd be able to fund them.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Funding had generally come easy to Gary, mostly because he
was funding Mercy Chefs himself out of his own pocket.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I would use my own credit cards to buy food
and gas and all the other things we had to do.
And then I'd get home and I'd raise some money,
and I'd pay my credit cards back down, and then
we'd be ready to go again.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
And the tenth anniversary was a huge deal in the Southeast.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I thought everybody was going to get excited and find
their passion in their heart again on the tenth anniversary
of Katrina.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
But it wasn't a big deal to everyone.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
We got down to it and I was short. I
was overdrawn in the bank account, and I wasn't going
to be able to make it happen and for me
and the birth of Mercy Chefs in my heart in
New Orleans, that was just crippling. And I called one
of our board members at the time and said, Bake,
I've made a huge mistake.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Welcome to the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby
Studio for iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.
On the Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring moments of small
business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories
of how they got through it. Today is a classic
tale that many small business owners face. Where is the
(01:56):
next dollar coming from? As a banker, this is a
question I think about a But for many of our
small business owners, because they're working on a product or
service they're passionate about, it's not always top of mind.
They love their businesses and sometimes the money comes second.
But as we'll see today, especially for a company like
Gary's that's a not for profit, as great as the
mission is, the money sometimes has to come first. Joining
(02:20):
me again today is Kathleen Griffith.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Hey, Ben, glad to be back. Don't we all just
love Gary?
Speaker 4 (02:25):
He's going up against natural disasters, hurricanes, and fires and
tornadoes and every calamity you can imagine, and he's this
force of nature himself.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
On today's episode Mercy Chefs from Portsmouth, Virginia. To really
understand Mercy Chefs, I think you need to understand a
few things about Gary LeBlanc himself. First, he's from New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I have two Louisiana grandmothers, one very Cajun and one
very New Orleanian.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Second, he was raised in the thick of Southern hospitality
by those grandmothers.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
It was always about food and family and friends, and
my grandmothers would cook for any occasion and it would
often go from three or four people to thirty or
forty at the drop of a hat.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Third, he hated cooking in professional kitchens, but he made
his career in hotels and hospitality anyway.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
You don't have holidays, You work a bazillion hours every week,
you rarely get a full day off.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
He got started in some of the country's finest establishments.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
The Commander's Palace, Mister Bees, and then the Mandolin. My
first year in the business, Paul Prudomme was the executive chef,
and watching his incredible passion and relentless pursuit of a flavor,
or a nuance or a remembrance. So my introduction into
hospitality was with the very best practitioners of the art.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
But by two thousand and five, Gary was too far
up in the food chain, so to speak, to have
to work in kitchens himself.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I had people that had people that did food. I
was running a Hilton hotel group in Virginia's managing director,
living very comfortably. Thought I had reached the pinnacle. I
had achieved everything I wanted to do in the industry.
And Katrina hit New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
For those who may not remember, Hurricane Katrina hit the
Gulf Coast on August twenty ninth, two thousand and five.
It destroyed New Orleans, particularly the Lower ninth Ward and
Lower Land areas where the levees didn't hold. But the
worst part of the disaster was man made. Local, state,
and federal officials failed to respond quickly or appropriately to
the disaster, leading to thousands of people displaced in one
(04:50):
hundred degree heat with no home to return to. The
entire country watched as the city struggled to survive.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
It was incredibly horrifying for me. The images from New Orleans.
The pictures on TV, those folks that were standing on
the bridges waiting to be rescued. I started recognizing people
that I used to work with. That was when I
knew I had to do something. The pictures on TV
were just too compelling for me to sit by and
(05:17):
watch and not do anything. Texting ten dollars wasn't going
to ease my soul. So I went down and did
the only thing I knew how to do that could help,
And I cooked with all these other groups and studied
what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And what Gary saw he didn't like.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
scooping green beans right out of the can and putting
them on a plate with three frozen chicken nuggets and
a slice of white bread. I mean, that kept people alive.
They called that a meal. But that didn't show love.
That didn't show respect. The food didn't reflect love or
passion or professionalism. It didn't look like what I was
used to seeing my family do. Not throwing rocks at
(05:58):
any of them. But I thought you could do high quality,
chef prepared food in the same quantities as other folks
were doing bad food, And that dissatisfaction with what I
saw in the aftermath that Katrina was the genesis you
can do better, and there was an obligation to do better.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
That thought occupied Gary's every weeking hour.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
It took nine months and I was completely consumed with ideas.
I was up in the night, and I love the sleep.
It's not like me to be awake at night. I
had legal pads that were full of recipes, kitchen designs.
I did BTU equations. I mean crazy things, things that
I had never done.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
BTU, if you happen to be wondering, is a British
thermal unit, which is a Leman's term for a unit
of heat. In this case, it would be like cooking appliances, stoves,
ovens and the like. Gary's BTU math was about how
much heat he'd need to cook at the scale that
was needed for a disaster like what had happened in
a New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It was a man on fire kind of moment.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
This really became an obsession for a period of time
while you were trying to get this thing off the ground.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I was so consumed I couldn't work. I was a madman,
and one day I was like, this is not good.
I'm distracted from my job. I have a lot of
people depending on me, and I've got to get rid
of this. I can't keep being consumed and obviously Mercy
Chefs is a faith based organization, and so I took
(07:28):
that afternoon and I went home and I said, I'm
just going to pray through this, and I'm going to
ask God to take this burden off of me and
let me get back to my real job. And in
that afternoon of prayer, it was a moment. It was
an audible moment I heard feed people, just go feed people.
It was a transient moment in my life. In that
(07:51):
moment of hearing that simple command, feed people, just go
feed people.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
This was a definitive calling to pursue Mercy Chefs. But
Gary really really didn't want to go back into the kitchen.
He didn't know if he could get out of it,
but he sure did try.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
I was drug kicking and screaming. I mean, I was Jonah,
I was trying to run away from this thing. I
sat down with one of those yellow legal pads and
I wrote down seven or eight people that I thought
could do this better than me, and I was like, God, wait,
here are the people that you should be calling. Do
you need phone numbers, emails? What do you need. I
(08:32):
don't understand why you got me on the line, wrong guy.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Unfortunately, it seemed Mercy Chefs had found exactly the right guy.
So Gary gathered up his legal pads and got in
contact with all the organizations he'd volunteered with after Katrina.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
And said, hey, I've got this concept, this business model.
And they were patient. They listened, they looked at it,
and then they shook their head and said, you're insane.
This is not sustainable. It's going to cost too much money.
It's going to take specialized equipment, it's going to take
specialized employees. You're going to have to buy groceries to
do high quality food. You can't use leftover warehouse excess.
(09:12):
We're not interested at all. And so it became obvious
to me that Mercy Chefs was going to have to
just happen independently.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Gary confided in his family and friends about the idea.
They also thought he maybe a little insane, but not
enough to stop him. They just had a warning proceed
with caution.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
There are some common threads, but one of the biggest
ones was keep your day job. Great advice, and so
I did. I kept my day job. We filed all
of our paperwork and got our five oh one c
three very informally, just trying to plot along. And I
mean I founded Mercy Chefs on legal zoom, which was
a really great idea at the time.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
You keep saying we can, I ask who we is
in those early days.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Well, in the early years, we was just me. I
was just trying to grow to what I could put
my hands around. I had no idea what Mercy Chefs
would become. I just knew the next step. I used
to drive and set up and cook and then tear
down and then come home all on my own, and
it just quickly became a lot. It began to grow.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
As it grew, word spread that Gary was trying something radical.
The first deployment for Mercy Chefs came from a friend
at the organization Feed the Children.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
They were working a flood in Conklin, New York, and
they said, we have a church up there and they're
doing really great, but they're tired and they don't have
the professional acumen that you talk about. Can you go
up and help out? So I took my wife and
my two kids they were seven and nine, and put
some cutting boards in my knives and a little hot
(10:51):
box in the back of our car. And so we
went up and just worked with them on inventory controls
and rotation, and I showed them some high volume cooking
tricks and just gave them the tools they needed to
be successful and saw a real change happen in that kitchen.
But again, those early years it was just sort of
me against the world. It was good again. We were
(11:13):
able to perfect some models. I was able to make mistakes.
I was able to learn. I was able to get better.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Once he had that flood under his belt and knew
what he was doing. The opportunities, the disasters, they just kept coming.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
after that, it was a tornado in Arkansas. Then there
was another tornado in Florida. And yeah, I think Hurricane
Ike in Beaumont, Texas was the first hurricane that we worked.
After we founded.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Well, the disasters kept happening. The money didn't always flow.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
For about the first five or six years. Our business
model was I'd use my own credit cards, and when
my credit cards got full, that's when I knew it
was time to come home. We had a bank account
but nothing in it. When I got home, I just
call family and friends and raise enough money to pay
off the debt that I had incurred, and then we'd
be ready for the next disaster.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
They'd send what they could, But in the beginning, Gary
was his own biggest donor.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
When you're the major donor, you really put some skin
in the game. It's not a good business model. But
again people started to hear about what we were doing
and came alongside.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Their belief in Gary's cause was tested when he decided
he was ready to get his own mobile kitchen.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
We needed to raise fifty thousand dollars for that first
mobile kitchen. It seemed insurmountable at the time, and there
are just some people that said, you know, we really
think this is what you need to be doing. Show
us how to help.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
So can you describe to our listeners, but also to me,
what is a mobile kitchen? Because in my head I'm
just thinking food truck, but that might not be quite right.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah. I had never seen a mobile kitchen before, Katrina,
I had never worked in one. And so it's a
commercial kitchen and they put wheels underneath it. Our kitchens
are very purpose built for what we do. We're pulling
hours now with freightliners. We have fall down sides or
full down backs on most of them. In our big ones,
(13:18):
we put in walk in refrigerators right on the trailer.
They have to be flexible, they have to be nimble.
Are we doing five hundred meals a day or are
we doing fifteen thousand meals a day? And so the
kitchens have to be able to do both very well.
It's an incredible thing. We can pull into a parking
lot and be putting out tens of thousands of meals overnight.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I am pleased to welcome Kathleen Griffith back to the Unshakeables.
I'm struck by so many things about the story. More
than all of it, I'm struck by how he just
willed that thing into existence. I mean, he literally willed
it from nothing.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
You Know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
I loved when you asked who is we and he
said we is just me, because that is the story
of every single small business owner from the dawn of time,
you know.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
All of a sudden, it was like he was telling history.
And then he said we did this, and we did this.
I'm like, who.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
Yeah, no, But you're always trying to flex bigger, and
you just get into this strange mode of speaking where
everything becomes a wee statement.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
So that was funny, and he was earnest and honest
about it.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
I mean, he's going up against natural disasters, hurricanes and
fires and tornadoes and every calamity you can imagine, and
he's this force of nature himself. But he kind of
proved to me as I was listening to him, you
don't necessarily need to be loud to do that. Like
there's this quietness, this gentleness, this calmness, this peacefulness about him,
(14:49):
but he's still able to, as you said, like will
this into the world.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, it's a good observation because so many of the
people that we meet on the show and off the
show who have created something out of nothing, they really
are sort of their own form of Tasmanian devil. Because
people who tend to be able to be that forceful
there are other things that go along with it. But
Gary's very different. I mean, he's seft spoken, he's humble.
(15:15):
He didn't make one over the top statement the whole
time we heard from him, and yet he has done
over the top things.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
Yeah, it all felt so earnest, you know. I was
just thinking about small businesses and what it takes from
a resilient standpoint, the demonstrable impact it has on small
businesses in particular, and thinking about all of these various
places where we've seen events this past year. I was
reading a report that FEMA forty percent of businesses never
(15:42):
come back from a natural disaster, and for those that
do rebound, it's short lived. A quarter of them aren't
in business a year later. Like, the rebuilding process takes
time and patience, and there's this acute need for people
to run in when everyone else is running out, But
then there's this longer term need, which I know, something
you're passionate about and thinking more about what does the
(16:03):
rebuilding process really look like over time?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Well, and you're seeing that out in your adopted hometown
right out in LA. I mean, they're really struggling with
that now.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Yeah, I mean it's been wild.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
This was my first fire season, just watching what happened
and how many small businesses were destroyed. And I love
the Arthur Ashe quote, start where you are, use what
you have, do what you can. So I'm working on
actually a physical build out of a retail location where
people can sell and come for more skill building and
(16:34):
training and bringing brands to the tables part of that,
but it's the spirit of the small business owners. I've
seen so many people rally in different ways, and everyone's
looking at what they can do.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
For Gary, the answer is not enough. The need must
just be unimaginable, limitless, essentially, So how do you decide
what to respond to and what not to respond to.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
I always feel like I'm coming up short. I always
feel like there's more to be done, and that's the driver.
As many people as I can feed, there's always going
to be somebody else, and I know I'm never going
to get to all of them. I know I'm not
going to solve world hunger, but I have an obligation
to get to as many as I possibly can.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
That impulse really began to show itself a few years
into the operation. For the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,
Gary planned to take the Mercy Chefs kitchen down to cook,
this time on his own terms, making the food New
Orleans deserved.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
We got down to it and I was short, I
was overdrawn in the bank account, and I wasn't going
to be able to make it happen for me and
the birth of Mercy Chefs and my heart in New Orleans.
That was just crippling. And I called one of our
board members at the time and said, Bake, I've made
a huge mistake.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
If you thought you heard Gary call someone Bake, you
were correct. His nickname is indeed Bake, as in baked
in the oven.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I have overrun my supply lines. I'm really out here
and I'm in trouble. Can you help me? And he said, Okay,
We're going to do two things. One, I'm going to
help you. Don't worry about that. The money's already taken
care of. But he's like, let's look at this and say,
how did you get here and how can you avoid
getting here in the future. So it was a great
(18:22):
business moment for me. Bake was just about proper planning.
Did you make an emotional decision to commit to these
events or did you make business decision? Did you make
a decision based on an assumption that people were going
to be motivated. You need to get to a place
where you have a cash reserve. You need to get
to a place where there's a ready reserve, and then
(18:43):
you can always work to the edge, but there's a
soft landing.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
What did you learn about how to finance and run
the organization. That changed after that experience.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Never promise something that you can't do and that you
have the ability to get it done before you do it.
But at the same time, I have to balance that
with the faith walk. I have to be able to say, hey,
I can take a chance, I can do what I
believe I'm supposed to do, and trust that God's going
to come through with the rest of it. So it's
this business head and the faith head, and how do
(19:12):
you balance those two against each other.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Then there was an earthquake in Haiti, and well, Gary
had learned some valuable lessons. Sometimes lessons take time to root.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
I was still using personal funds. I was using my
debit card and didn't tell my wife. I was on
the debit card and she's trying to run the household
and pay bills, and we overdrew our account. And she
told me while we were in Haiti, She's like, this
isn't going to work. I love it, I love you,
but we can't have this. You're going to have to
(19:45):
come home and float your resume and go back to work.
I agreed with her, and then a couple days later
check came in and it was substantial, and it was
an encouragement. It was a reminder that I didn't need
to worry about the money. I needed to worry about
the mission. We always say that money will follow mission,
(20:05):
but mission should never follow money.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Gary, you've used the word faith a couple of times.
Can you talk about the role that faith plays in
Mercy Chefs, in both the founding and in the guts
of the place, how it helps shape both the mission
and the way you do your work.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Well, I'm a man of deep faith, and that faith,
my relationship with the Lord, comes into play in everything
that I do. It's why we do what we do.
It's not just our belief system, but it's also that
you do what you do out of faith. And if
you believe you're doing the right thing, if you believe
you're in the right place, if you're doing everything you
can possibly do, you get to the point where it's
(20:44):
not your hands anymore, it's not your responsibility. You just
have to have faith and believe. And when it's hard,
when I have to dig deep, I start thinking about faces.
I remember faces when we do twenty thousand meals in
a day and our team debriefs at the end of
the night, ee always ask each other who is your
one today? You got to get to twenty thousand people fed.
(21:07):
But what's important is that one person that you made
a difference in their life. And it's what motivates me
because I know that for every face I've seen and fed,
there are another five out there I couldn't get to,
and so I'm constantly how do I get to some
of those other five? How do we do better? How
do we work smarter? How do we work bigger? How
(21:28):
do we do more? You can make me emotional, I'm
going to cry.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
In the last ten years, Mercy Chefs has grown substantially.
It's now a global organization.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
It's crazy. It took us ten years to serve a
million meals. We served our next million in three years,
and in the seven years since then, we've served another
twenty six million meals. Oh wow, We're almost at one
hundred employees now. And then our volunteers. We have ten
thousand volunteers on our rule book and on site, we'll
(22:03):
work with one hundred a day.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
And do you still go out to disaster areas yourself?
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah? I get to almost every one of them myself.
But our team has gotten so competent. Now I don't
have to go to every disaster, but I still want
to go. It's fun. I enjoy seeing the team work.
It's a phenomenal thing to be on site and watch
what happens.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Today. Gary has teams all over the world. How did
you take this thing international? You already run a logistics
business as it is. You run a logistics business at scale,
and now when you think about global, I mean you
can't just take your trucks and drive them over to Europe.
Doesn't work that way. So tell me how you did that.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
We launched our global division two and a half years
ago formally, and since then we work on every continent.
We build kitchens overseas. We grow kitchens. We'll find a
small kitchen, we'll make it a lot bigger. We'll put
some equipment in there, and our team stand in and
train and buy groceries until we can get these people
(23:04):
working on their own, however long it takes.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
I want to ask you a little bit if I could,
about the Defender Service Award and full disclosure for our audience,
Chases Auto Lending Group has a relationship with Jaguar Land
Rover and is a sponsor of the Defender Awards, So
we do have an affiliation just for transparency sake. But
I know Gary that you and Mercy Chefs were finalists
in twenty twenty two. Tell us how that came about.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, we got the invitation that Land Rover was doing
a giveaway, and you got the apply and then it
became a voting situation to see where the votes came
in on who was going to win the award, and
they gave away five Land Rovers that year, one in Canada,
four here in the US, and they picked organizations that
(23:47):
were doing great work in their communities. Mercy Chefs was
a finalist and we were fortunate enough to go on
and win that award and get a beautiful Defender, get
to go to Ashville and run it on the course
with the engineer. That was so much fun. It's been
a great, great vehicle for us. We were just in
(24:07):
California for the wildfires. We're working out of LA and
Land Rover was gracious enough to call us and say, hey,
we know you're on the West coast and the Defenders
on the East coast. Could you use a Defender while
you're out there? And he said, we absolutely can, and
so they came from the local dealership and loaned us
a Defender to use to do distribution out in LA
(24:28):
after those fires.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Wow, Kathleen, what a terrific conversation with Gary. I mean,
you can hear how much he cares, how deeply he's
in love with this work.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Were you trying to get me to ugly cry?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Ben?
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Don't we all just love Gary?
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah? He seems like a special guy.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I have to say,
it's the spirit of the small business owner.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I thought it was fascinating to hear it from the
perspective of a not for profit because think about the
difference mentally between "Well, I had a business opportunity that
I could have on for but I didn't, and now
I have to go figure out what I'm going to"
do versus "Well, the storm hit and people went hungry,
and I didn't show up", and so it was clear
that he was sort of betting the farm, so to speak.
(25:11):
In a couple of cases on he just had to
show up. And on the one hand, he could have
gotten in real trouble and not been bailed out and
really been in a bad place. On the other hand,
it worked out. So it's hard for me in hindsight,
to say it was a bad thing to do. On
the other hand, I don't know how often I would
encourage it. But if he hadn't done it, he might
not be where he is today. So that's an interesting dynamic,
particularly in the context of a not for profit where
(25:32):
the need is both acute and human.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
Yeah, and I think the how of using and maxing
out debit cards and feeling like you're operating on a
razor's edge. A lot of small business owners can relate
to that reality too.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
The most interesting thing I think in the recent past
is his decision to go global. I think that is
just a whole different world. I was trying to imagine.
You know, he's built these kitchens. I'm sure they're customized,
and they're replicable, and they're fit for American rowads and
American drivers and American trucks that can pull them. You know,
he's in all these places where the infrastructure isn't the
(26:07):
same and he's having to just figure that out. He's
operating in both developed and developing nations, and I'm sure
they're very different.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
Do you find with your clients that some of them
are thinking really domestically and you've got to encourage them
to think globally. Do you see a lot of that,
you know, thirty thousand foot perspective like Ansoff Matrix, Okay,
new market penetration and another market, let's go overseas.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
It takes much more intentionality because to set up services globally,
you're typically hiring in that local market. Language barriers, regulatory changes,
legal rules, all that stuff. You're typically hiring local teams.
And that's a whole different angle on running a business.
You know, saying I make widgets and I ship them
to Germany when someone from their orders a product is
(26:52):
very different than I have three people on the ground
in Munich helping deliver my brand to that market.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
It's not for the faint of heart. It really is not.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And you have to be open to adapting to cultural, financial, regulatory,
and business model norms that are just in some cases
slightly different and in some cases radically different from the
way that things operate here in the States.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
Do you find, just to pull this back to small
business owners, that there are also small business owners who
actually should be running nonprofits that if they just reimagine
if they moved from an LLC to a five oh
one C three, they'd be in a different place, Like
I'm just thinking about girls who code in Reshma Saujani. You
know that's a thirty million dollar a year business. CEO
(27:35):
is making probably close to half a million dollars, like
you can do well.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Sometimes a business is just more of a nonprofit.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
I see that sometimes, So I'm curious as to your
take on it.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Well, I mean there's two different things. There are some
businesses that are not for profit because they don't make
any profit. That's the wrong reason to be a not
for profit. I wouldn't go as far as what you said, Kathleen.
What I would say is to the degree that your
mission is fundamentally at odds with a for profit business model,
recognizing that early is important. I think there are a
(28:10):
lot of cases where there are a ton of mission
driven companies that can be easily aggressively for profit and
those two things align perfectly well. What happens is when
you don't do hard enough thinking about whether your for
profit mission aligns with a for profit business model. That's
where you get the dynamic that you're talking about. I've
certainly seen examples of that, whereas others are sort of
(28:32):
like I care more about the mission than I do
about ever making money. And the reason it matters, Kathleen,
is because the way that not for profits become self
sustaining is so different than the way for profit companies
become self sustaining. Not for profits have to constantly feed
the fundraising furnace. And that's perfectly fine because there are
(28:52):
some things like there's not really a for profit business
model for feeding people after natural disasters. I get that,
so he's formed not for profit, but there are other
things that can happen. There are other business models that
serve a purpose, that are helping lift people out of poverty,
or that are helping people gain new skills that can
be done completely in the context of a for profit
(29:14):
business model, and that works just fine. It's when those
two things don't line up that in a bad place.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Yeah, I think this is going to be very interesting
for a lot of people, because I do think there's
sometimes some confusion about what the right formation is when
you are a very very mission led founder with a
very mission oriented business.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
And I have seen people try to force and wedge
what is fundamentally and not for profit mission into one
of these sustainable capitalism frameworks. When there really isn't a
sustainable business model behind it. So my view is, if
you want to line those two things up, you have
to say that the business could exist without the mission.
That the business could exist because there is good product
(29:56):
market fit and there is demand and you can produce
the product the service at a market return or a
reasonable return, even if not a full market return.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
That's good. The business could exist without the mission. That
is such a good litmus test.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, and so that doesn't mean that business would be
as successful without it. It doesn't mean that it's not
the motivating reason to do it. All of that is
still present, right, But for it to be truly sustainable,
the business model has to stand on its own and
therefore support the mission.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
That's really clarifying. That's great.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Well, Kathleen, I want to say thank you for all
your insights, and of course thank you for joining me
on this season of The Unshakeables.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
This was just a blast and I loved ending on
something that's so important. Being able to share this mans
work was such a treat, So thank you.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
So I want to finish Gary with a question that
I ask all of our guests, which is, if you
had one piece of advice for our listeners about how
to start, run, and grow a business. What would it be?
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Just do it? That was the call to me. Just
go feed people. Start. It's a big step or a
little step. Just get in there, be relentless, Find something
that you're passionate about, find something that you can't not do,
something that drives you and consumes you. But then at
the end of the day, just go for it.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Gary Lebanc, thank you for joining us on The Unshakeables.
It's great hearing your story.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Thank you. It's been so good to be here. I've
enjoyed it so much.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Unshakeables.
If you liked this episode, please rate and review it.
Next week, we'll be back in Texas talking to an
Air Force veteran and NASA alum who's 3D printing business
is trying to change the world one item and sometimes
one toilet at a time. I'm Ben Walter, and this
(31:49):
is The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio
from iHeartMedia. We'll see you back here soon.
Hosts And Creators
Ben Walter
Kathleen Griffith
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