How a devotion to helping people inspired Cotopaxi’s founder to start the company—and now, to step away from it

Listen to the episode or read the full transcript below. 

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Transcript

Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte, who, like me, are super focused on how CEOs can lead in the context of disruption and evolving societal expectations.

Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Alan Murray, and I’m here with my incredible co-host, Ellen McGirt. Hey, Ellen, how are you?

Ellen McGirt: Hey, Alan, I’m in a great mood. Even though it’s a Monday, it’s going to be a great show today. We are talking to the CEO of consumer company, Cotopaxi. This is when I wish we were a TV show, not a podcast, because if I could show our viewers pictures of their beautiful products, I’m sure they would recognize them right away.

Murray: You don’t have to show them to me. I have a Cotopaxi coat that I wear when it’s freezing cold like it was this weekend, and I have a backpack, a very colorful backpack, that I use when it’s convenient. Cotopaxi is smaller than most of the companies we have on the show, but I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as well, because it is very mission focused. And the way it runs its company is, frankly, different than most companies, but in line with what we discuss here on Leadership Next.

McGirt: That’s right. And its purpose and mission was baked in from the very beginning, which is exciting to learn about. And before we introduce the founder and CEO of Cotopaxi, I want to quickly say that we’re going to have a second guest. Joining us later in the show, we’re going to hear from Cecilia Chao, who is a managing director at Bain Capital’s Double Impact Fund. That fund is focused on impact investing, which, of course, is absolutely in the air these days, and is an investor in Cotopaxi. And I’m sure we’ll talk about the partnership. But I’m also really looking forward to digging into the growth of impact investing in general. The Double Impact Fund close its first funding round in 2017, so it’s been doing this work for several years now.

Murray: Yeah, a lot to talk about there, particularly given the the pushback we’ve seen in the last year or so around ESG investing. And: What’s the difference between ESG investing and impact investing? So looking forward to all of that, but Ellen, you think we should welcome Davis to the show?

McGirt: He’s been patiently waiting. Let’s welcome him.

Murray: Davis Smith founded Cotopaxi in 2014 in Salt Lake City. Welcome to Leadership Next.

Davis Smith: Thanks, Alan and Ellen. It’s great to be here with you both. This is exciting for me.

Murray: First question for you. You said from the day you founded Cotopaxi that it was going to be a different kind of company. What did you mean? What makes it different?

Smith: I’m a serial founder. I founded a few different businesses. I started my first business out of undergrad in 2004, and I knew that this one needed to be done differently. I’d spent 10 years building a couple of different businesses and had learned a lot as an entrepreneur. But I had grown up in Latin America. My family left the United States when I was four years old, and moved to the developing world. I spent all my childhood there into my teenage years. And then when I was 19, I left again, and I spent two years in Bolivia, where I was a missionary for my church. And then eventually moved back down to Latin America lived in Peru with my wife, and then later in Brazil. And I always had known from the time I was a child that I had a responsibility, a duty to find a way to help other people. And I didn’t come from a family with any kind of wealth, but it always felt like we had so much compared to those around us. And so that was what my kind of my lifelong dream was, was to find a way to help people. And when I had the idea for Cotopaxi, I, I knew we needed to do something different than I’d ever done before.

Murray: But just quickly before I hand it over to Ellen, I mean, there are different ways you could have done that. You could have remained in the mission of your church, the Mormon Church—we’ll get back to that in a little bit, because I think you’re going back there. You could have done it as a nonprofit, but you decided to do it as a for-profit business. Why?

Smith: Well, I guess it goes back a little bit to when I was an undergrad. I met an incredible man who became a mentor of mine and has continued to be a mentor. He’s around 80 years old now, Steve Gibson, and he had been a successful entrepreneur. And when he was around 60, he sold his business and became a philanthropist. He started a nonprofit that was fighting poverty in the Philippines. I tried to convince him to let me work for him. I thought I’d work in the nonprofit world. I’d done an internship in Latin America working for a nonprofit. And he’s the one that convinced me that, if I wanted to make a bigger impact, I should go into business, that I should become an entrepreneur. So when I was in Brazil and had the idea for Cotopaxi, I originally did start thinking like, “hey, what if I started a nonprofit?” But very quickly, I kind of realized the way we can scalably solve problems is by building a business. You know, I saw these amazing nonprofits around the world that I’d been involved in in different ways. I just saw that they were constantly fundraising, and some of the best nonprofits really struggled, because they weren’t great fundraisers, even though they did great work. And so I figured this is where I could actually use some of the skills I have as an entrepreneur to to find a way to sustainably fund and support these amazing nonprofits doing good around the world.

Murray: Bingo. That’s why we’re here. Leadership Next, it’s business as a platform for change, but even better.

McGirt: But Alan, well, you know, it’s interesting, as a B Corp—which is a rigorous process, you know, that is a really tough designation to get. You’re a little bit working as a hybrid. You’ve got a foundation and you give charitable grants through the foundation by delighting customers all over the world with your sustainably created products. Let’s talk about the foundation and the grants first. Who do you give to? And how do you track the impacts of your investing?

Davis Smith: I will first give some amazing credit to our team. We have an incredible chief impact and people officer named Grace Zuncic, who Alan knows very well. 

Murray: We love her. 

Smith: She’s amazing. And she was the chief people officer at Chobani. She worked there for a decade and joined our team. She’s fantastic. And then Annie Agle, who’s been with our team for quite a few years now, that’s been our director of impact. And just lives and breathes this stuff. So we have a great impact report that we release every year. But our impact work is focused on, the foundation work that we have is focused on three pillars, which are education, health care, and livelihoods. Those are three pillars which we believe are inextricably linked to poverty alleviation. And so we focus in on the developing world and some of the poorest communities in the world on these three pillars. And so a big part of our strategy of impact is around giving. We donate, we commit to 1% of our revenues. But we traditionally have given more than that. In 2020, we actually gave 2.9%. Most years we’ve given 2%. We give what we can. And for those that know business, you know, that’s a huge commitment. You know, a lot of businesses, that’s their entire profit. And frankly, for us our first five years it was, we gave away more than we ever made. We’re big believers in being generous and in sacrificing

McGirt: Manufacturing is a messy, ugly business, right? And I would point you to the forever chemicals that I know everybody is struggling with, which help us stay dry in the rain and snow but are toxic to the environment. And of course, the need for people to continually buy new gear to have a sustainable business. I know everybody struggles with this. How do you think about the products that you make? And how do you think about sustainability and manufacturing?

Smith: Yeah, it’s a really great question. You know, there are a lot of great brands in the outdoor industry that care deeply about the environment and we are certainly one of those. When we started the business, one of the things I told our founding team, I flew in from Brazil, we met in a cabin, there were five of us, this group we called the founding team, and they are people I brought together to help us go build this amazing brand. I kind of laid out to them the vision that I had for what we wanted to build. And I explained that the environment—that was table stakes—we have to do that right. I didn’t think it was going to be a competitive advantage, because that’s what everyone has to do. We had to do more than that. And that’s why a big part of our focus is on humanitarian work.

But we’re so proud of what we’ve done on the sustainability side. Ninety-seven percent of our product right now is made of what we call the three Rs—remnant recycled or responsibly-made materials. We’ve committed that to be 100% by 2025. A huge amount of our product is made of remnants. These are leftover products from other outdoor brands that use our same factories. And so the cool part of that story, if you have any of our of our bags from the Dell deal. They’re very colorful, they’re kind of funky. And the reason why is we’re using all these remnants, but we gave the sewers the ability to choose and design the product. For the first time they get to design product instead of just sewing what we all tell them to sew. So the the only rule is to make no bag alike. So they’re using, they’re choosing different materials and colors to go make this great product. But we think a lot about the impact that we have, the footprint that we have on the world and fortunately because of the remnant story and the recycled story that we have, our footprint is incredibly small compared to most outdoor brands. That said, we have to do more. Capitalism is this incredible tool. If anyone has read Tomorrow’s Capitalist, that Alan wrote, it is fantastic.

Alan Murray: I’ve read it many times. I quiz Ellen on it regularly.

McGirt: I’ve memorized it.

Smith: You know, it should be required reading for you know, for anyone that’s wanting to start a purpose-driven business. But yeah, there’s there’s more that we can do, because capitalism as powerful it as it is, it’s also destructive to the planet and we’ve left people behind and we have to do a better job.

Murray: So Davis, that gets to the question that I’ve been dying to ask you, which is you know, you have this clear mission-driven focus. You wanted to be a B Corp from the beginning. You cared about your impact on society. Why did you go into the outdoor gear business? You already have a company there that’s a B Corp and that cares about its impact on society in Patagonia. Why do we need another one? There’s so many other industries that don’t have this. Why take on Patagonia which is one of the most focused companies you could compete with?

Smith: Yeah, no, it’s a really great question and a question, as you can imagine, I’ve received many times over the years. So I will say a few things. So number one, it’s a space I’m passionate about. You know, I grew up in a family, my dad was an adventurer. So from the time I was a child, we spent time in the outdoors. We’d go survive on uninhabited islands, we made our own spears. And we’d spear fish and eat coconuts to survive. We made our own raft and floated the Amazon River fishing for piranha. I mean, my life as a kid was odd. You know, I thought this was normal behavior to go do these kinds of things. But I loved the outdoors and so I felt a special connection to it. Also, I knew that if I wanted to go do something big, if I wanted to go help eradicate extreme poverty in my lifetime, I needed to choose a category that was massive. We needed to have a huge TAM, a total addressable market. I knew the outdoor industry had many billion-dollar brands. The question was, could we break through? If we could, we could go make a huge mark. And I believed we could, because there was no other brand focused on people like we were.

Murray: Well, that was my follow-up question, if I can ask this, Ellen, which is you said earlier that the environment is not a differentiator. And I suspect that’s partly a reference to the fact you’re competing against Patagonia, which is also focused on the environment. So what is your differentiator?

Smith: Yeah, our focus is on people. And so everything that we do is about fighting poverty. And last two years ago, I guess, 2021, we haven’t quite released our 2022 numbers yet, but we assisted over 1.2 million people living in poverty. And so we always look at things from the lens of people. How do we help people? We kind of look at this younger generation and you know, a lot of them look at our brand and say, this is a brand that I resonate with, you know. It’s a younger brand, like, maybe their parents don’t even know it, but, like, they know it, they discovered it. They feel this connection to not just the protecting the planet, but they also recognize like, these two things are inextricably linked, like helping people and the planet, we can’t do one without the other. And so we need to pull people out of poverty, we need to we need to have a focus on how do we help people.

[Music]

Murray: I’m here with Joe Ucuzoglu, who is the CEO of Deloitte and had the good sense to sponsor this podcast. Thanks for being with us and thanks for your support. 

Joe Ucuzoglu: Thanks, Alan. Pleasure to be here. 

Murray: So Joe, this new wave of business technology, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, the ability to make intelligence out of data, is creating huge opportunities for companies. But a lot of the CEOs I talk to feel daunted by it, it’s like, where do they get the imagination to rethink their entire corporation? How do they deal with that?

Ucuzoglu: The opportunities are immense, particularly when you look at not just any one of these technologies individually, but the convergence of all of them collectively creating the opportunity to truly transform business models. And I know it can seem daunting, but the reality is taking a first step in actually produces huge benefits. Because what we’re finding is that many of the cutting-edge applications are not coming out of the corporate headquarters, they’re coming out of putting the technology in the hands of our people on the front lines. They find new and innovative uses, we then funnel them back up and leverage them across the entire client base. 

Murray: Yeah, it really gets to the importance of a culture of innovation at the company.

Ucuzoglu: It is essential that our people feel empowered to take the latest and greatest and to find new and innovative ways to use it for productive purposes.

Murray: Thank you, Joe.

Ucuzoglu: Alan, it’s a real pleasure.

[End music]

McGirt: Alan teed up some big news that you’re going to be transitioning into a new role, and I want to hear all about that. It’s an important one and it’s a big change for you. But that means there’s a new CEO coming in. And I’m curious how that succession planning went. Cotopaxi so completely reflects your life experience. Even the name is relevant to you. How have you thought about the incoming CEO, Damien Huang? How is he going to be able to make his mark? How have you talked about continuing what is really your spirit and sharing that spirit as the company continues to grow?

Smith: I am so passionate about the work we do, about the impact we have. But one thing that I’ve always believed is that I’m not the owner of Cotopaxi. I’m a steward. I’m a steward of this brand that’s much bigger than me. And, you know, and this is maybe a good segue into into the, you know, this Bain Capital Double Impact conversation with Cecilia. She’s been a huge proponent of helping me think about this as a steward and like what that means and, you know, as we started thinking about, you know, what, as we, you know, we’ve taken this brand from zero to over 100 million in revenue. And, you know, we’re growing, we grew 90% last year. We’re growing again, by a huge amount this year. You know, what, who’s the right person to go lead this brand going forward in the CEO role? And, you know, we identified Damien Huang as just an incredible leader. He was the CEO of Eddie Bauer when we hired him. So a much bigger brand that’s been around for over 100 years. He was there for 12 years. Before that was the head of product at Patagonia. Before that spent 10 years at The North Face as a designer. He is probably arguably the best and most talented designer in the outdoor industry. And he happens to be an incredible leader. So when we brought him on as president last year, I loved watching him lead, because I honestly I’d look at him say, wow, that’s what a CEO is supposed to do. Like this is really incredible.

I guess, you know, to your question about this next step for me, it really wasn’t something I had planned. In October, end of October, beginning of November last year, I ended up getting a phone call from—I’m a religious person, I’ve always tried to live my life in line with those values, and I had a leader of our church that called to see if my wife and I would be willing to meet. And two-and-a-half hours later, we were in his office. And he asked us if we would set aside our lives for three years to go be missionaries. And we didn’t know where we would go. But we looked at each other and we said yes. And you know, this, I will say this, it was an easy decision. At the same time, this is hard. This is really hard. It’s something this is something I love that I’m leaving behind.

Murray: I want us to come back to that. But Ellen, maybe we should bring in Cecilia Chao, since Dave has set her up for this conversation.

McGirt: We absolutely should, and I should tell the listeners we are in a video call, and Cecilia has been here beaming and smiling and nodding along with everything that we’ve been saying. And it made me realize that I don’t want to be in a room where Cecilia stops smiling and nodding. She is a powerful presence and she hasn’t even said anything. Cecilia, welcome.

Cecilia Chao: Thank you. It’s just such a joy to be on with all of you.

McGirt: From your perspective, tell us: Why Cotopaxi?

Chao: Honestly, there were so many reasons why Cotopaxi was right for us and why we were excited. I think, you know, Davis said a lot of the different aspects from a business perspective. Fundamentally, it was a fast-growing brand in a large and growing outdoor space, especially as you know, the pandemic really caused a lot of people to accelerate into the outdoor. But even beyond that, we did our own survey on consumers and it had a bunch of the attributes that we love. For example, it was a best in class 80 plus percent net promoter score, which had relatively low awareness. That’s one of the key recipes for us that we love to invest behind a huge loyal fan base, and where we can really invest behind driving that awareness and the consumers love it. In addition to that, you know, as he mentioned, it’s just a differentiated mission-driven brand, inclusive consumers, a broader demographic than historically what the outdoor consumer base had looked like. So that excited us as an Impact Fund.

And then fundamentally, you know, and critically for us, the impact angle. So part of what we loved is not just the 1% pledge, which of course is important to us, but on top of that, you know, the entire business model was intrinsic to impact. So, you know, he talks about the remnant recycled and responsible fabrics and the supply chain. You know, the, you know, commitment to fighting extreme poverty, but also on top of that the climate neutral pledges. I could honestly go on and on, including the diverse consumer demand demographic, so it was really this all-inclusive, impact-oriented, authentic business model that we loved.

Murray: At the Bain Double Impact Fund, do you ever accept a lower return as a trade-off for a greater impact?

Chao: We really strive to still have competitive financial returns. I think we believe that there is, you know, conscious capitalism that you really can have, you know, at all that, in fact that you really need to have it all in today’s world. That this conscious capitalism cannot just focus on financials, because in the long term it is not a sustainable business model. So we really focused on—and that’s what the name implies, Double Impact—is that we deliver both competitive financial returns alongside measurable social and environmental outcomes.

Murray: And a follow-up question for you Davis. Honest answer here. Cecilia is now on your board. Does she ask more often about financial returns or impact?

Smith: Well, I will say Cecilia is one of the most incredible investors I’ve ever worked with. And Bain Capital Double Impact is. I mean, we’ve, over the years through my business, I’ve worked with some incredible world class investors. And one thing that really does set them apart is their focus on impact. One of the first things they did when they invested was they actually tied our executive bonuses, and now we’re working on tying our entire teams bonuses to impact. Like it’s not just based on the financials, it’s based on are we meeting certain metrics on our giving, on having diversity within our team and our leadership team and so on? I’d never heard of any investor doing that before. And so I think it speaks a lot to the values that they have as a as an investor. 

McGirt: Cecilia, my twofold question is what have you learned over the years as the fund has grown? Because as I was checking all your sites today, I was really impressed to see how big and robust it is now. And also, what is happening in the impact investing market overall. We’re seeing a big uptick. Is that meaningful? Is that going to be real?

Chao: I think we’ve had a lot of learnings in the impact space, and it’s evolved very quickly. So I think some of the key learnings is on how we balance some of the measurement and reporting requirements, especially we’re focused predominantly on the growth and middle market space. And so our companies don’t have huge infrastructure to drive carbon accounting, DEI measurement, you know, they don’t typically always have HRIS systems for all that tracking. So I think part of it is balancing the reporting, you know, so that it’s not too much of a distraction. We want to be transparent, but also balancing the capabilities of our smaller founder, typically, founder-led companies. So that’s been a learning and evolution.

You know, in terms of the growth of the industry, it’s been tremendous. When we first launched our fund in, you know, mid-2015, 16, literally, I remember sort of launching the fund, and folks didn’t really know what impact investing was. It was like, is it a strategy? Is it a type of investment? Is it a stage of growth? And so it was yet it was a term that wasn’t yet defined. Today, everybody talks about impact investing. It has grown tremendously in terms of the number of companies that define themselves as impact as well as the investors in the space. And I think part of the benefit of that is, you know, increased guidelines. So you have SFDR, the sustainable finance disclosure regulations, as well as what now has become a little bit what I call the alphabet, soup, TCFD, EFDI. Lots of different guidelines which is great, driving better transparencies and some guidelines, but also, you know, can be more complex to navigate, especially if you’re a smaller fund. 

Murray: Yeah. So in your words, Cecilia, what is the difference between ESG investing and impact investing?

Chao: I think ESG is much more focused on risk mitigation in the, you know, environmental, social, and governance areas, whereas impact investing is very much focused on driving and promoting sustainable investments. And especially impact is dedicated to exclusively investing in and not just risk mitigation, but also positive, driving positive and measurable outcomes,

Murray: Then this is a question for both of you: There’s obviously a lot of political noise these days around woke capitalism, pushback against companies that are adapting ESG frameworks. You have the governors of Florida, the governors of Texas, others in this space, saying your job is to make money, not to focus on the problems of the world. I’d be curious how both of you respond to that political pushback.

Smith: Yeah, maybe I’ll start. So I am just a big believer that you can do it all. You know, these are not mutually exclusive, doing good and doing well as a business. And I think what we’re trying to do at Cotopaxi is show that that’s the case. And I think we’re proving that. We can be a case study in this. As we explore like a brand that’s saying, hey, we are committed to to impact before everything else. So I hired a chief impact officer before we hired a marketer. And I remember my board the early days, kind of like, wait, Davis, are you sure about this? Like, why are you hiring someone to give away your money better before you’ve made money, and like, maybe we should focus on like marketing more. And my argument was like, the only thing that really sets us apart from everyone else is that we’re going to do impact better than anyone else. And if we can do that from the very beginning, if we have this great foundation of giving, and we understand how to have the greatest impact, that’s what’s going to set us apart and create an opportunity to go build the next iconic outdoor brand. And so, you know, we’re showing that in the way that we’re operating as a business, we always put people first. We put our impact first, and we believe everything else will follow. The consumers will, we can acquire consumers at a lower cost of acquisition because there’s more word of mouth, people are spreading the word about what we’re doing, not us just having to pay for social media marketing to go drive more awareness around what we’re doing.

There’s, you know, our ability to attract and retain talent. We’ve attracted these amazing leaders on our team that have joined from much bigger companies and that, frankly, are even taking pay cuts, because they believe in what we stand for. And, you know, we had a we had 3000 applicants for one of our recent job openings. Our attrition rate as a company is incredibly low because people, when they join our team, they stay there. And so there’s these incredible advantage that there we’re seening as a business because we put our impact and mission before other things. 

Chao: I was just going to add just one aspect, which is like, I also think you, in order to be a good investor, you have to think about those things. Ellen, you mentioned earlier the forever chemicals. And so it’s not just regulations which are coming into place which want to remove the forever chemicals, but also consumers don’t want those forever chemicals. And if you just started to think about it now, you’re already too late. And so in order to be a good investor, you need to be thinking about these broader social environmental aspects, otherwise, you will be too late behind the ball and the company won’t perform well.

Murray: I want to go back to something both of you were saying just a minute ago, which is that focusing on impact and focusing on investing are not contradictory. In fact, they are complementary. And that impact investing may just be good investing. And the question for you Cecilia is, I mean, you’re, I think, a pretty small part of the Bain Capital pie at the moment, 1% or less. Over time, do you think impact investing becomes a broader game for the for the investing community?

Chao: I think absolutely. So even when we created Double Impact within the firm, we talked about Double Impact being the tip of the spear. We develop the playbook for, for example, DEI throughout board management and the rest of the organization. We’ve already handed that playbook over to our traditional, larger, large cap platform. And so they now have substantially increased all of their board diversity. And so I think, impact investing will always continue to be the tip of the spear in my mind, because we will constantly elevate the water level, if you will. But you know, but the reality is our goal is to spread conscious capitalism throughout.

Murray: And Davis, a similar but slightly different question for you. I mean, do you see yourself as elevating the approach of other businesses? And if so, this is a follow up, but if so, the opportunity is so huge. Why are you leaving?

Smith: Yeah, yeah, so I definitely do. In fact, when I had the idea for Cotopaxi, I was living in Brazil and I had a really interesting experience in the way that this idea came about. I was laying in bed. I had been thinking, honestly, for years about this idea of like, how do I make a difference in the world? And how do I, is there a way to do that through business, and I hadn’t figured it out with my first two businesses. But as I was laying in bed, I had some ideas that started coming to my mind. I got out of bed, I sat on the couch, and I spent the entire night the entire next day and the entire following night, 36 hours on this couch, where I came up with this idea for building this outdoor brand focused on fighting poverty.

And I wrote a detailed journal throughout this 36 hours about these ideas that were coming to me. And one of the things I wrote in that journal, Alan, was that I believe the way that I could have the biggest impact on fighting and eradicating poverty was by not just being focused on my own brand, but by inspiring thousands of other businesses and millions of consumers to join in this movement of doing good in the world. And so yes, I feel like a big part of my responsibility as the founder of Cotopaxi, which I am going to be forever, and currently the CEO is to evangelize this idea that business can be a force for good in the world, and that we have a responsibility to transform capitalism. We have to do capitalism much better than we have. As you talk about in your book, there’s a third way. And, you know, I hope that we can be an example to other businesses of how to do that. And we hope that over the years, in fact, including with me leaving, in some ways this is so in line with our values as a business. I’m saying, I would prefer to continue running this business as the CEO. But I believe that my job in life and as an example to my children is to sometimes put aside the things that I want to go do something for a greater cause. I believe in being part of great causes and noble ideas. And for me, this is three years for me to go make that commitment. And then I’ll come back and have the rest of my life to go focus on continuing to build this brand, and to evangelize this mission of doing capitalism better. 

McGirt: But I do want to ask you about what’s coming up for you. And I want to ask you about the evangelical impulse in a more general way. Earlier in my career, I was very lucky, I was able to spend a lot of time with people who were trying to address extreme poverty, mostly through water systems, but not entirely. I spent a lot of time in Haiti, a lot of time in India and various communities, in countries across Africa. And I saw a lot of the evangelical impulse at work and it wasn’t always effective, in some ways, with tremendous good spirit. It was counterproductive to what people on the ground actually needed. You’re nodding along here. So you’ve seen this to the sort of savior syndrome at work. How do you think about this and how do you coach other people with a similar bent to do a better job while they’re living their faith?

Smith: Yeah, no, this is a really great question, Ellen. And, frankly, this is not a question I get very often as I talk about business, right? So this is, this is a new one for me. You know, one thing I realized when starting Cotopaxi was that you can have unintended negative consequences. And we’ve seen this, as people have tried to do good. There’s many examples of businesses that had a buy one give one program, for example. They were giving away product trying to solve a problem and they realized that kind of created other problems in local markets where they were putting small businesses out of business. And so I’d say this is something that I’m aware of something that I think a lot about. I’ve also, you know, seen, I was a missionary myself when I was 19, 20, 21, in Bolivia, and I stay in touch on a weekly basis, I talk with people that have become lifelong friends. And I’ve seen the impact that you know, that this has had this message has had on their lives. And it’s something that I believe in deeply, to my very core. And, you know, one of the interesting things about where I’m going to be going in Brazil is that I’m going to be a mission leader, a mission president overseeing a few hundred young missionaries, like I was when I was 19 and 20. The Parkers were my mission leaders when I was a young man, and they’ve shaped my life. I’m still in touch with them today. I see a big part of my role as shaping the lives of these young people, not just during their two years of service, but for their entire lives, helping them understand their purpose, that they have a responsibility to do good forever, and not just for those two years. And I’m excited to do it. You know, one of the I was mentioning one of the interesting things about this place in Brazil we’re going to is that almost all the missionaries we’re working with, they’re not Americans, they’re actually Brazilians. And so, you know, I lived in Brazil previously, I spent my life my childhood anda lot of my adult life in Latin America, so I I feel a deep connection to them and I’m excited to be a part of their lives forever and to have them part of my life forever.

Murray: Well, we’ll be watching. Thank you so much, Davis, and thank you Cecilia for being with us.

Smith: Alan and Ellen, thank you. And Cecilia, thanks for joining. I love being with you. Thank you for being part of this.

Chao: I’m just going to say we’re going to be waiting too for all those impact companies that he, you know, catalyzes.

Murray: Leadership Next is edited by Alexis Haut. It’s written by me, Alan Murray, along with my amazing colleagues Ellen McGirt, Alexis Haut, and Megan Arnold. Our theme is by Jason Snell. Our executive producer is Megan Arnold. Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team.

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