Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism, and supporting Black businesses. This podcast will feature edited versions of Entrepreneurial Appetite’s Black book discussions, including live conversations between a virtual audience, authors, and Black entrepreneurs. In this community, we do not limit what it means to be an intellectual or entrepreneur. We recognize that the sisters and brothers who own and work in beauty salons or barbershops are intellectuals just as much as sisters and brothers who teach and research at universities. This podcast is unique because, as part of this community, you have the opportunity to participate in our monthly book discussion, suggest the book to be discussed, or even lead the conversation between the author and our community of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. For more information about participating in our monthly discussions, please follow Entrepreneurial_ Appetite on Instagram and Twitter. Please consider supporting the show as one of our Founding 55 patrons. For five dollars a month, you can access our live monthly conversations. See the link below:https://www.patreon.com/EA_BookClub
Entrepreneurial Appetite
Social Entrepreneurship: Brandon Logan on Business, Social Impact, and the Doug Williams Center
As we sit down with the visionary Brandon Logan, we uncover the potency of merging business acumen with societal impact, a quest he embodies as the founder of the Doug Williams Center for the Study of Race Politics and Sport. Logan's narrative, steeped in the experiences of his own journey as a black man, offers a blueprint for future leaders who seek to craft enterprises that serve as pillars for community development and the redress of social inequities. His insights on utilizing entrepreneurship for social good not only enlighten but also challenge us to reconceptualize how we perceive success and legacy in the business world.
The halls of Grambling State University echo with stories of growth and empowerment, a chorus to which Brandon adds his own voice. He credits his time there as formative, not just academically through his studies in entrepreneurship and sports administration, but personally, through the tapestry of honors programs, Greek life, and athletics. It's a reminder of the profound influence that diverse educational environments and broad extracurricular engagement have on cultivating the leadership and identity of Black Americans, a topic that inspires both reflection and a call to action for listeners with aspirations to lead.
Finally, Brandon takes us through the awe-inspiring legacy of Doug Williams, whose sportsmanship transcended the gridiron and tackled societal norms. The Doug Williams Center stands as a beacon in this mission, fostering young talent and elevating the voices of HBCUs in the dialogue of progress. We dissect the crucial role of social capital and the art of networking, a skill set that Logan deems essential in the playbook of any aspiring professional. This episode isn't just a conversation; it's an invitation to join a community dedicated to shaping an inclusive and prosperous future.
Hey everyone, thank you again for your support of Entrepreneurial Appetite. Beginning this season, we are inviting our listeners to support the show through our Patreon website. The founding 55 patrons will get live access to our monthly discussions for only $5 a month. Your support will help us hire an intern or freelancer to help with the production of the show. Of course, you can also support us by giving us five stars, leaving a positive comment or sharing the show with a few friends. Thank you for your continued support. What's up everybody?
Speaker 1:Once again, this is Dr Langston Clark, the founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. Today, we have a very special 2020 episode from the African Americans in Sport podcast, featuring a conversation with social entrepreneur Brandon Logan, who is the founder and executive director of the Doug Williams Center for the Study of Race Politics and Sport. Welcome everybody. My name is Langston Clark and I'm one third of the founders of the African Americans in Sport podcast Myself, dr Brandon Crooms, dr Alvin Logan, which is crazy because one of my co-founders of this podcast his first name is Brandon, the other one's last name is Logan. I want to take this opportunity to introduce you all to Brandon Logan, who is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Doug Williams Center at Brampton State University. Brandon, if you could just tell us a little bit about the work that you do with the center and then your work as a social entrepreneur, maybe the best place to start is. Can you tell us what a social entrepreneur is?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, first, Langston, thank you for having me. More importantly, thank you for creating this platform. I think it's ingenious of you and two of your colleagues to create a platform to talk intentional about being African-American in sport in some respect, so I'm grateful to be on here as an interviewee. As a social entrepreneur, to me it's maintaining the skill set of a traditional entrepreneur, but having a social bent, meaning a mindset towards improving conditions around you simultaneously. So what that looks like in practice. If an entrepreneur was just to look on their returns, on their balance sheet, to see what they net for the year, there would be an additional line item for a social component.
Speaker 2:It could be geared towards improving youth outcomes. It could be towards, you know, fighting climate change through environmental justice efforts. Whatever the case may be, what I believe this world needs more of is individuals to think more integrated, along the lines of earning money, but also reinvesting into systems, and for me, as a social entrepreneur, that's the way I integrate myself on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:You know it's interesting that you say systems. I'm going to dovetail part of the conversation because I had a thought the other day. You know, I work in academia and academics oftentimes talk about the system and they want to dismantle oppressive systems. But very rarely do I hear people talking about well, let's say, we dismantle the systems that we have in place, well, what system do we have that's going to be there to replace it? And so I think it's interesting that you talk about building systems, and I appreciate that, as a social entrepreneur, that that's something that I think a lot of black students, regardless of what university you're going into, don't get to hear about. How do you make new systems right, or how do you make systems that are beneficial and equitable? So talk about the ways that you've been able to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, I think, just the sheer understanding that we are all interconnected and interdependent on each other more than we ever want to acknowledge. And so when you talk about a system and its working parts, most people want to dismantle something they don't even understand it exists and really what happens is that they're trying to dismantle the symptoms versus the root cause of the issue. And what I look at as I explore systems, you know these are new realities of how we can interconnect inner work within our society. And for me, for an example, as you requested, back before I started leading the Doug Williams Center, I ran Urban Capital Partners, which was focused on uplifting the standard of learning and living in urban communities.
Speaker 2:Now how that worked from a system standpoint is we were investing in youth through afterschool programs, but we knew that the inner workings of a youth development outlined beyond the three hours that we had with them per day. We had to explore the nutrition value of that youth. We had to understand the family structure and the dynamics of that youth. We had to look at their education levels, let alone just looking at the individual as a whole. So when you take those concentric circles and overlap, then you have a system that is now working on a daily basis for that youth and you think about how do you create a nurturing environment to improve all sets, subsets of that individual? So you have to look beyond just the work that we were doing in the after school program and look at the other factors that affect one's ability to develop successfully. And that's what I think more individuals have to be conscious and mindful of, to be intentional, to look at the whole and not just the sum of one part.
Speaker 1:In the courses that we teach, we ultimately have some student-athletes, so can you talk about your journey as a student-athlete from starting, maybe, as a young child high school, college? How did you become someone who became interested in social entrepreneurship? Is that related to your experience as a student athlete?
Speaker 2:So not so much as a student athlete. I think it's related to being a black man in society and really my life is rooted in trying to be who I needed when I was a child.
Speaker 2:So in simplified terms, I want to fill the gaps that existed in my formative years, in my adulthood. To fill the gaps that existed in my formative years, in my adulthood. So when you talk about sport and I love sport and I love anything outside of school, extracurricular activities and I think that if we want to get to this idea of the horizon of the development of the whole individual, you have to engage in extracurricular activities. For me, and in most cases, for a lot of African Americans that look like me and you, sport happened to be one of those channels and I started playing sports at the early age of three.
Speaker 2:My first sport was soccer and eventually evolved into playing four sports in high school and I'm grateful for the experience because and I blame my parents often about this is oftentimes I get credit with being able to manage multiple things with excellence simultaneously, and I really attribute that back to my time as a student athlete because, you know, dealing in the academic space was one thing and then combine that with athletics, but making sure that you were consistent across the board helped me to be a better steward of my time and managing and understanding that I have the same amount of time that every individual does, but how I manage it is really going to prove to be how I can be successful or better prepared for success in those spaces. So sports was very beneficial on the time management side, but it was also an accelerator to what I would call soft skills and my abilities to effectively communicate, my abilities to understand the dynamics of different races right.
Speaker 2:Sports oftentimes is a unifier where all of the table, the dinner table, issues are set aside, and, regardless of race, you're there to compete, you're there to perform and, most importantly, you're there to win, and I felt like that almost became a safe haven where you could actually play or create without any torment. That didn't matter what individual race, age or socioeconomic background. We weren't measured on those bases, within the lines, regardless of the sport, and so I'm grateful for that. But sport also helped me to recognize some of the disparities that I had in my teammates life. That caused me to ask critical questions to my parents, like why were we buying shoes for my other teammates? Because their parents couldn't afford it?
Speaker 2:I started to recognize that we were in a different economic class.
Speaker 2:No means were we rich, but what my parents had was good money management practices, and for me as an entrepreneur, I started to see some of the things that I really enjoyed about my parents and their practices and some of the things that I was really disheartened by by the longer end of society, and so I wanted to figure out how do I start to fill these gaps?
Speaker 2:And so, you know, going from middle school to high school to college, I was just going through this exploratory process and, as you know but I'll say publicly you know, I went to Granville State University and so, growing up in Texas, one of the wealthiest states, transitioning to Indiana, one of the poorest states, it really helped me to understand how blessed we were in Texas and the opportunities that are afforded in states like Louisiana to build up capital and capacity, and for me, it helped me. My time in Louisiana helped me to become a social entrepreneur, had the idea of being an entrepreneur. It wasn't until I got into Louisiana that I put that social bent on my work to better understand the opportunities at hand and the needs that we need to fulfill.
Speaker 1:As a social entrepreneur. Was Urban Capital Partners non-profit or was it a for-profit social entrepreneurship endeavor?
Speaker 2:Non-profit social enterprise and so and you can, you can structure either way, but my vision was to be on the nonprofit side and to have a social impact in larger society that way.
Speaker 1:So what was the decision-making point between for-profit and nonprofit? And the reason why I ask is because just in the students not even in my classes, right, just going to student events, their conversations that they host everybody wants to go work somewhere and then they want their own nonprofit. So I'm wondering can you just break down the differences, maybe the pros and cons, between social capitalism, non-profit, but then also social capitalism for profit, if it's possible to do it for profit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think for me is. You know, one of the turning points in my life was my senior year in high school. I was involved in this program called PALS Peer Assistant Leadership Program and I had a fifth grade mentee that I was assigned to for the year and, long story short, after going through a semester long mentorship, we had a point of interaction where I wasn't coming off of my best weekend and he had encouraged me by saying thank you. And you know, my response to him is why are you telling me thanks? And he said well, I recognize that you're down and I want to say thank you for being that father figure that I don't have. And it was a light bulb moment. It was a turning point for me where I was no longer pursuing things of individual material value for myself, but I started thinking on more broader terms about how to improve societal conditions so as a collective we can move forward. So that's what some of the undergirding elements to my thought on the nonprofit shift Usually what you see on the for-profit, and I'll address that and then dive deeper into the nonprofit.
Speaker 2:On the for-profit side you have a traditional enterprise that is focused on generating a return on investment and based on their bottom line for that year.
Speaker 2:Whether it's through sales of a product or service, most companies that are in good standing will always look for a way to give back at the end for tax purposes, right?
Speaker 2:So it is a part of their business model based on success. For me, on the nonprofit side, when you integrate it, you play the percentage game. So, regardless of what your yearly outcome looks like, you have this integrated approach on a daily basis of not only generating improved outcomes, but they're rooted on the basis of the social networks. So I'd rather have good returns that are investing in outcomes of life while improving the business model simultaneously, as opposed to having success in business and then making a decision for mainly tax purposes at the end of the year if I want to invest into the life of another person. So I think it's more of an integrated dual approach on the nonprofit side from my mentality, my point of view versus end of the year contribution. Let me go do some good because it will prove to be advantageous on my taxes. So it really helped to drive a centralized way of life and how to conduct business, no longer being interested in just generating wealth for myself, but rather building up the community while improving my economic position as well.
Speaker 1:Can you talk maybe a little bit about how your experience at Grambling shaped other than just going to Louisiana, but your experience specifically at Grambling shaped your orientation towards social entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all it gave me the confidence of what I needed to explore various fields as a professional because, you know, growing up in primary and secondary schools in Texas, I was always part of the minority until I got to sports and then African-Americans constitute the majority of the sport team. So I could never see myself in my teachers. I had one teacher in my K through 12 experiences, third grade teacher, mr Moody. I'll never forget him because I actually saw myself in him when I stepped foot on the campus of Granville State University. There was an emotional feel and a connection to the work that I'd never felt before. I was finally part of the majority Again. Better prepared me after Granville State University to go connect in more concentrated markets with African-American students, which helped me to understand some of the complexities that we have. And I don't use race as a rationale for a lot of reasons for barriers to entry, but I think there is a realization that as a human we have to recognize that we always look for a mirror and a reflection in what we do. And when you're in a predominantly white space it's hard for white individuals to see what you mean, until you ask them to go to NAACP meet and they can further understand. Well, this is why you're in here for a temporary moment. This is what life is like day in and day out, why we push towards diversity, efforts to be more inclusive in our practice, so people don't feel like they're in a space of isolation. Don't feel like they're in a space of isolation. So Granville State University started to open up the door of what a new reality, I would say, to create to connect with brilliant minds inside and outside the sport, whether it's a professor or a colleague. That was something that was just an amazing adjustment for me that I fully welcome. And you know what's interesting?
Speaker 2:Langston, my senior year in high school, transitioning to college, the San Antonio Express News was doing a summer long feature on my transition and I remember it like it was yesterday and this is nearly 20 years ago now that I the express news that sent a photographer to stay up there and travel with me and all I could think about was the physical construct of the dorm room.
Speaker 2:I was, I was sleeping in and I was like man. I would hate to see, you know, cracks in the foundation and the wall on the express news front page. But then there was this moment of clarity that helped me to realize I wasn't coming to Grambling because of the exterior presence of the school, but the richness and internal history. So one of those moments that helped me to recognize why I was present and that there was a set of skills that I was looking to procure while on campus to come back and make meaningful work and now has returned me back to Grambling State University to lead the Doug Williams Center. So it was a full circle moment to understand the seeds that were being planted unknowingly and, for me, being committed to the process allowed me to now reap some of the, the, the fruits of that labor. I may be hearing two different things.
Speaker 1:did you have a strategy for success going into grammy beyond the sports? Okay, when I get here, I know I'm playing football, but I'm going to do this, this, this and this, and this is how I'm going to do it.
Speaker 2:So, absolutely. So, going into college, entrepreneurship was always top of mind. I had started a couple of business in high school, and a lot of it was neighborhood sales, but the entrepreneurial spirit was always in. It had to be refined, it had to bring some focus and grant help to do that. And so in undergraduate, you know, I focused on business management, which allowed me to further understand business in general, and then graduate school, sports administration and being able to blend both of those, those worlds, together.
Speaker 2:So, absolutely, there was an intent behind why I was going to Grandland outside of playing football. It was to better understand how to sharpen my skills and enter as a freshman and leave as a leader. That really was the motto. So those elements around how to develop the whole self was put into practice. So not only was I on the football team, but I was part of the honors college and so I was also in a fraternity and so these elements helped me to really develop into my whole self. So there was absolutely a plan. Did I know each step along the way? No, but I had courage to enter into spaces I was uncomfortable in, but I knew I wanted to grow and be a part of.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit more about this multifaceted experience that you had at Graham? So you talked about? You were in the Honors College, you were a student athlete, you were in a fraternity, and what I don't see now as much with some of the student athletes where I work is that type of broad experience that hones your identity in a different way. What did it mean for you to be in an honors college? What did it mean for you to be in a frat? And then also, what did it mean for you to be on a football team? Because Grambling has a deep, a deep history in football in terms of cultivating good men. That goes beyond just the gridiron.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there was always an interest and I bring it back to one of the original stories of playing for sports and the ability to balance. You know my life in singular focus. I don't think I can live in it. I grew accustomed to working in multiple spaces and trying to perform at the highest level every single day, and so for me, if I knew that I wanted to come back and be an agent of change in this entrepreneurial space, but more so as a Black man leading it in a large American city there was the unique set of skills that I had to procure to be successful in that. And so understanding the Honors College was about academic advancement. It was about getting connected with your peers that had high aspirations as well and were critical thinkers and were aspirational in who they want to become and how they want to contribute to society. So I love that element of that.
Speaker 2:So that was the academic nurturing right to help create a new identity in Black excellence for me, because when I was in our school, in high school, taking honors and AP classes, I was always the only one or one of two, yeah. So being able to be in a space where I was predominantly present was different, it was fun, it was enjoyable, it was engaging. And then you set aside to the fraternity side. I was always interested in the ability to thrive as a black man, so there was a single gender focus with the fraternity that I aspire to connect with and you know there's a myriad of fraternities out there but at the end of the day, regardless of what fraternity you are, we all have the common goal and purpose, which was to develop you as a human, to go out and make contributions to society. So that was always of interest to me. And then the football aspect was just the continuance of honing an athletic skill and to be amongst men that were interested in being more than just football players. So that is part of the holistic development that I was able to gain at Granville State University.
Speaker 2:And you're right, you know I see this across the current landscape is that you have so many individuals that are only focused on one thing and they lose. They become short-sighted and they lose out on opportunities to develop more holistically. And I try to use my life as a class, in a sense, where I share multiple aspects of my life, of how I'm contributing and how I'm staying balanced. More importantly, how you know what's of interest to me is integrated into my work on a daily basis. I think a lot of people lack purpose and identity and are in pursuit of anything that they see is beneficial on a short-term basis.
Speaker 2:I'm more of a long-term individual and willing to stick things out and have some level of stick-to-itiveness with my work, and so while I may not see sunshine within a year, I know that in due time, in the right season, you know, the harvest will come and I think that's part of the community work that hopefully we'll get a chance to touch on. That is important to me because, again, if I want to experience a more inclusive, more integrated world, I have to be willing to set that example, since I did not see when I was a young child. So if I'm interested in reversing course or improving the system in which we all live, I have to be willing to sacrifice some of my personal time for community gains.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Talk about that Touch on that. What was or is the work that you were doing with Urban Capital Partners, and then talk about three things Introduce Eddie Robinson, introduce Doug Williams and then talk about the Doug Williams Center.
Speaker 2:Perfect. So Eddie Robinson was a figure that I think will never be duplicated, but he left so many clues along the way that we could all be like Eddie. And Coach Robinson was someone that had retired from coaching by the time I went to play at Grand State University, but he was still living. And one of the great traditions and I was just looking at the picture with me and his wife Doris sitting on his couch was before the fall season started. We would walk from the stadium support facility to his house. He lives two blocks away from the stadium and he was battling with Alzheimer's at the time. But one of the things that his wife said he always recalled was the school song. So we would walk literally to his house. We would all stand in the front yard as a team and he would come out and we would sing the school song. And it brought so much joy to his wife, because this man invested several decades of his life into building up Grambling College into what is now Grambling State University, just to paraphrase his body of work and it doesn't do any justice for me to do it in 60 seconds, but I'm going to try anyways. He was an individual that was rooted in principle, he knew what type of man he wanted to develop to be contributors to American society, who, by chance, just happened to play football for him. So he was always interested in the man first than he was as a football player, and I think that's what proved him to be such an anchor of success, not only in black college football but college football in totality. He racked up over 400 wins still today the winningest coach, and his motto was one job, one wife. And so can you consider him spending over 50 years as a football coach, racking up over 400 wins and sending over 200 men to the National Football League. One of the many of Doug Williams. And so I'll transition to talk about Doug Williams.
Speaker 2:Doug was the many first, but most people only know him as the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl In January 31st, 1988, he set a new mark. But before 1988, I want to bring us back to a pinpoint in 1978, when he became the very first black quarterback to be drafted in the first round. Now, when you consider and he was a 17th overall, when you consider how many quarterbacks are drafted in the first round today, it's amazing that he was not only the first black quarterback. He was the only Black, he was the only quarterback drafted in 1978. Wow, so think about that.
Speaker 2:And he was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which was a team that started, I believe, in 1976. So he went on to become a franchise quarterback. He was the first quarterback to start and win a playoff game for the franchise and then they decided that they wanted to move on because he started realizing his economic value. As a rookie he started, but there were over 30 quarterbacks that made more money than him. Not only every starting quarterback, but there was tons of backup quarterbacks that were making more money than him. And here he is taking a franchise that hadn't won any games in the previous season to taking them to the playoffs and winning, and not only taking them to the playoffs but taking them to the championship, the NFC championship. And they fell short. But he started recognizing his economic worth and ultimately he got an opportunity to go to the then Washington Redskins as a backup and most people don't realize it wasn't until the quarterback before him got hurt and he stepped in and he performed.
Speaker 2:But he had that intestinal fortitude to realize that he had what it took to perform at a highest level. But he also started to recognize, getting outside of this predominantly black space at at Grand State University, that he was dealing in a world that proved to be unfavorable to black athletes at that time when it came to investing in their full worth, and so he was willing to take a stand in good faith, knowing that he could reverse some of the trends as a not only as a quarterback, but as a black quarterback. He's got a lot of material out there that really focus on. You know, when he was at the Super Bowl he didn't want to be recognized as a black quarterback. He wanted to be recognized as a quarterback that was in the Super Bowl, going against John Elway, who you know came from Stanford. Everyone thought he was the golden boy with the golden arm that he was going to win. Doug Williams still to this day has Super Bowl records.
Speaker 2:He had four touchdown passes in one quarter and they went on to win 42 to 10 against the Denver Broncos, who were highly favored to win that game, and a lot of people don't realize the time. The night before he had a tooth extraction and so he had emergency surgery right before the night before the game that ultimately put his plane in jeopardy, but he knew this was a special platform and he was going to find a way to get it done. So learning about the life of Doug is critically important to me individually and personally. But I think it's important that we recognize that there's many Doug Williams stories out there and what we're trying to do with the Doug Williams Center is to really build solutions to better society. And we're really focused on the solution side by translating those problems into opportunities, on how we can digest those problems and shift them into solutions. I think the thought process is very important. So we do a lot of individual and issue-related work through case studies. We also are working on some policy and advocacy work at the state of Louisiana and then, lastly, we are focused on the advancement piece.
Speaker 2:One of the things when we started the center on Doug's 65th birthday in 2020 was really making sure that we had an attention to developing a pipeline for young learners to get ahead.
Speaker 2:So having that mindset of how do we build a business operation that allows us to look back into the past, tell a more comprehensive story for multi-generation understanding, but then start to create programs and platforms that allow us to develop a pipeline where we can theoretically match employers, with employees, and there is a central focus with HBCUs because we want to lift that boat, but we are not eliminating the participation of students that matriculate at PWIs. So we have a layered focus on HBCUs, but it's still inclusive in our practices to make sure that individuals that have an interest in the research and the study of the center they can participate. But our goal is really about social advancement and if we can continue to use these building blocks of success and spread those out across multiple markets throughout this not only this country, but across the global marketplace and we believe that we'll be a more educated, more informed but, more importantly, more interconnected society that we can all work towards. And I think everyone recognizes the power of sport and so we situate ourselves at the intersection of race sport and politics.
Speaker 1:That's deep. It's interesting going from a student athlete. As a child, your first sport is soccer, San Antonio AP classes. Being in the Honors College at Grambling, the Doug Williams Center, and you're involved in a lot of things here in San Antonio I'm thinking about this concept that I try to impart on my students, and it's social capital. I think about social capital in two ways. Right, there's as a college student, you have horizontal social capital. Those are all the other students that are there with you, Y'all basically all on the same level. But then there's the vertical social capital, which is you're a college student. So you have professors, you have administrators, faculty, who are there to lift you up. Can you talk about how, as a student or as a student athlete, how do you take advantage of the horizontal social capital, but also the vertical social capital?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what binds one's network is your interests and your capacity, and so, for me, I believe solely on networks. I think networks ultimately define your network, and the rooms that you can get in are going to be based on how you socialize and interact with other people. So the horizontal capital and I love the way you separate that because I think that is a good, clear way to define the type of relationships that you're forming the horizontal capital is important because you don't want to lose sight of your generation, right? You want to stay in tune with your generation, your colleagues, and hope that you will grow together, and I think that looks in many different ways For me in practice. It was in the classroom, in the library, in the cafeteria. There was different points of interaction. At games, there were different points of interaction that we can socialize outside of the academic space to get to know any people, and I feel like, because of the digital infusion of our worlds, that we've lost some of the art of being able to communicate face to face and I know our interview is not a great example of that today, but the ability to interact is important but also to realize that there's only so many benefits you can gain at the horizontal level that you have to climb that ladder which goes vertical to get connected to individuals that could increase your capacity. So that's where I talk about the interests and then also your capacity.
Speaker 2:There are still professors to this day, at undergraduate and graduate level, that I stay in touch with, that took an interest in me, from a mentorship or just purely. I view them as a role model that I continue to nurture in that relationship and almost treat it like a bank account. As you continue to grow horizontally and you're working towards the vertical, I always felt like I had to justify the time that they would spend with me, so I had to bring value and I kept bringing value. I saw myself getting introduced to other individuals that were at higher levels to them than they were and I started realizing, wow, this is how the networks are established and I always believe in every individual I talk to to this day that allows me to speak into their life.
Speaker 2:I talk to them about being a mentor and being a mentee and having an upline and a downline, and the downline is someone that has aspirations to become like you or to be in a space similar to yours, and what we have to do to keep ourselves balanced and humble and really focus on development is to invest in that mentee's life. You know that's part of your downline and then the upline. You have to connect as a mentee to a mentor that allows to lift you up. And if we can continue to situate ourselves in that space between the downline and upline, we'll all continue to move forward.
Speaker 2:But what happens is you have individuals that start to advance economically and socially and then they forget their responsibility for the individual that has proven to be capable but has not had the opportunity to connect. And I believe that it's always on me as an individual to create greater access points to individuals that have proven themselves to be worthy. And that's really where I try to spend. A lot of my time is situated in the space of being a mentee as well as a mentor.
Speaker 1:So this is going to be our last question, and I'm wondering if you could frame it as advice for college students. As you are building your network both horizontally and vertically, what does it mean to be somebody, or become somebody, who is bringing value to the relationship?
Speaker 2:So think about it like a bank account, you know if you make deposits, your account naturally will improve. If all you're doing is making withdrawals, eventually your bank account is going to get to the negative. And so in a relationship it is a two-way street You're making deposits and you're also making withdrawals, and so if you're doing nothing but learning and not contributing to the teaching side, then you're in balance. And the vertical and the horizontal is important because you could be doing teaching on the horizontal side and doing nothing but listening on the vertical side, but you're still integrated and you're balanced because you're still teaching while you're learning. And so as you're gaining from the vertical side, you have to go out and teach on the horizontal side.
Speaker 2:And so for me it was about these points of opportunities where I could get access into one's life after I've gained their trust to share with them what I've learned. And that's still in practice today. My relationships just look different. And so now horizontal could be colleagues within Texas and Louisiana, where vertical could be outside of those marketplaces, individuals where I look to aspire towards but just not there yet. But they're interested in the work and me as an individual, and learning how to harness and tell your story is important, because that's what creates interest in individuals into your life, and so, for me, I started getting more vertically aligned when I recognized what my true purpose and my areas of interest were.
Speaker 2:So I'm interested in three spaces which is, youth, education and underserved, and I don't do anything outside of those spaces, so it makes it easy for me to say no, and so advice to young people is learn how to establish barriers to protect your time. That's one thing that I had to learn through experience, and if there's anything you can take from my story is decision-making. Learn who to invest your time in and learn who to take time away from, because all that's going to do is better prepare you transitioning from a student or student athlete to a working professional, and that's something that I've gotten better at. But I struggled in the front end because my mindset was always about helping everyone. I had to start figuring out what segment of the population could I actually help. It really came in alignment with my skill set, which was youth education in understated populations.
Speaker 1:Brandon, thank you for taking the time to join us, thank you for all the nuggets and thank you Appreciate your friendship. Thank you for joining this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite. If you liked the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.