Today’s podcast features Sertoma International’s Executive Director, Jason Camis. He’s leading Sertoma and the Hearing Aid Project on the next step in its 100-year+ journey to serve mankind in communities across the continent. In today’s marketing tip, it’s okay to let that email subscriber unsubscribe, as long as you’re paying attention.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Small Business Miracles podcast.
I’m Jeff Randolph.
This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising and Marketing.
We’re gonna talk about marketing and we’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs.
We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward.
This week, we’re talking with Jason Kamas from Sertoma International, but first, we’ve
got another small business marketing tip to talk about.
In today’s marketing tip, we should sit down for a counseling session and talk about why
people don’t want to hear from you anymore.
Specifically, I’m talking about email and your email unsubscribes.
If you’re using a modern email system to send your mail, and really, you really, really
should, unsubscribes are handled for you and your email system won’t allow you to keep
breaking the law and sending to people who have opted out of receiving messages from
you.
But since it’s automatic, are you paying attention to that number of unsubscribes?
We generally want that email unsubscribe rate to be well below % of your list, and if you’re
practicing good data hygiene, you’re keeping that list fresh and you’re purging people
who won’t ever open your messages so you get good deliverability and you know that you’re
providing value to your subscribers.
People will still unsubscribe from your list, and that’s fine.
You want a nice clean list at the end of the day, so we want to let them go.
But I know when you’re running those email campaigns, we tend to take some of that unsubscribe
number personally.
I’m here to counsel you and say that there are all kinds of reasons people unsubscribe,
and a lot of them don’t have anything to do with you.
Like they no longer need the product or service, or they move, or they purchased one, or they
you know, subscribe to your service, or they only subscribe to get that % discount that
you offered them that one time, and now?
That’s done.
They don’t need it anymore.
So instead, focus on what you can do to counter the other reasons people unsubscribe.
Like making sure you don’t send too many emails, or you’re not sending irrelevant content to
them, or even that you’re being too repetitive with your messaging and that’s all they ever
see from you.
We’re starting to see more people unsubscribe because they feel emails are becoming too
personal and data privacy becomes an issue.
So you want to keep an eye on that.
You can control those things.
Either way, keep working on making great email content, and don’t spend too much time being
sad to see someone go from your email list.
Keep reaching out to grow that list, and you’ll never miss the ones who leave.
And that’s today’s marketing tip.
We’re here in the featured show section of our show.
I’m here with Jason Kamas.
He’s the executive director of Sertoma International.
Jason, welcome to the show.
Good morning, Jeff.
Thanks for having me.
We’re happy to have you.
I want to make sure everybody has a good level set of what Sertoma is.
You founded in
So we’re not talking…this is a long-standing organization here that we’re talking about.
Tell us what Sertoma International is.
Sure, sure thing.
So Sertoma was founded here in Kansas City in as you mentioned.
I think we talk about ourselves as the third oldest service organization out there.
There was three guys who wanted to get in, believe it or not, to a rotary club.
Couldn’t do it.
And they decided, you know what?
We’re going to go out and form our own.
And so they formed Sertoma.
And at the time it was called the Cooperative International, or Cooperative Club.
And then it became an international group later on.
It had clubs all over the country.
And our name actually is in a concocted name.
It’s our name that we came up with in around
And Sertoma stands for service to mankind.
So hence the Sertoma.
And that was a member of ours.
And I think what happened in the early s, there was some confusion about our name along
with co-ops out in the country.
And so they said, well, we got to do this.
So they had this competition.
And that’s where the name came from.
And so it’s been Sertoma ever since.
And so we’ve always been based here in Kansas City.
We’re structured where we have service clubs all over the country in the United States,
Canada, and Mexico.
And we’ve had some other international locations in the past.
And basically, all of those clubs are independent entities.
They’re autonomous.
They can serve their community however they see fit.
However, nationally, we work in the realm of hearing health.
And we provide hearing health programs for communities and for affiliates and for our
members.
And so we have a dual membership structure.
So clubs are members of us, but then members are members of us.
And we have a small staff here that basically provides the back end support for all of their
activities across the country.
Man, spectacular.
And hearing health is the focus.
Let’s talk about, I don’t know, whether we talk about the state of hearing health these
days or really just what is Sertoma doing to combat or to help out, I guess.
We wouldn’t say combat hearing health.
That’s not the right way to say that.
Yeah.
What are we doing to help out hearing health?
How does that look?
And it’s interesting because hearing health is so broad.
Right?
I mean, we talk about there’s the protection.
Hearing earplugs when you go to a concert.
And then there’s the how do we help people who have hearing issues, whether it’s a hearing
aid, an amplifier device, or something much more advanced, such as cochlear implants and
so on.
And then even in our structure, we say hearing health, but we also have a number of clubs
that serve the deaf community.
And I have no hearing background.
I came to Sertoma two and a half years ago and it’s been eye opening to me.
And so I’ve had to learn a lot and what, you know, as an outsider with very little knowledge
and very little background, I can, I take it and I’m like, okay, I can see where the
deaf community, for instance, has an issue with how we use language here or this, you
know, and so we’re trying to serve all these different communities.
And because our clubs are autonomous, they all have, we have four clubs, for instance,
that have that have deaf camps, deaf and deaf and hard of hearing camps.
And they’re very unique and how they’re operated.
And so I go to visit them and learn a little bit more.
But we, so we span the spectrum and hearing health is kind of the umbrella that we use.
And hearing health has really just become a big, a big issue.
I suppose it’s always been an issue, but it’s really come more to the forefront.
More visible.
Yeah, the last five or years, especially, and it will continue to do so, especially
when you have things like how hearing health, poor hearing health leads to cognitive decline,
you know, dementia and Alzheimer’s and you’re seeing more of that.
But just in general, things like over the counter hearing aids have made people realize
and then coming out here soon, AirPods, you know, AirPods can double as a hearing aid,
essentially, or as an entry level hearing aid.
And so that’s going to hopefully elevate and get people like you and I who maybe we have
hearing issues and we don’t want to recognize it.
And the one thing I always tell people we can’t do is we can’t fix selective hearing.
You know, I often get I often get women like, oh, can you tell me how I can help my husband
hear me better?
I’m like, sorry, ma’am, but I cannot do.
He can hear you.
He can hear you.
He just isn’t doing a very good job at listening.
Exactly.
Because there’s also the hearing aid project that takes hearing aids that have have been
used and are no longer needed.
You refurbish those and provide those to people who need them.
A tremendous out out out growth of Sertoma.
Yeah, and that has grown astronomically.
You know, we started the hearing aid project about seven or eight years ago.
And you know, we didn’t know really where that was going to go.
But the idea a lot of our clubs over the years have they call them sharp programs.
So it’s the Sertoma hearing aid recycling project and their localized version of our
national hearing aid project.
And we still have one, for instance, in Topeka or we have them up in Nebraska.
We have one in Springfield, Illinois.
We decided to do this nationally as an opportunity to bring exposure to it.
And it we went from when I first started, you know, staff were like, well, we get three
or four thousand hearing aids.
I’m like, I looked at all the boxes.
I’m like, something tells me we get more than that.
Let’s start counting them.
And you know, we just didn’t track until now.
So now we track this last year, we took in over twenty six thousand donated hearing aids.
So we you know, we get about fifteen thousand packages a year that are shipped to us and
they come from individuals.
You know, my your your mom, your grandma passes away.
You don’t know what to do with your hearing aids.
You Google, you go online, donate hearing aids.
We’re probably going to come up in the top half of the page on Google anywhere in the
country.
So we get those.
We get them from Lions clubs because the Lions Club had oftentimes had they’ve collected
eyeglasses for years.
They also owns a lot of areas collected hearing aids.
Well, they’re moving out of that and they’re partnering more with us.
So we’re getting some of their we get a lot of hearing aids there.
We get them from clinics anywhere you can get new hearing aids.
You might have old ones you decide you want to recycle.
They’ll refer people to us.
And so they just come in and then sometimes clinics will send us a whole shipload.
And so we’ll get, you know, ten, you know, three thousand hearing aids a month.
We refurbish those that are new in our program.
So we want people to get good quality hearing aids.
We’ll take anything.
So we get hearing aids that are years old.
But in our program, we use hearing aids that are three years old or newer because we can
warranty them.
And that warranty is good for low income individuals who could not otherwise afford them.
And for those out there, many people know the cost.
I think the average cost you see different things in the media, but it’s around forty
to forty four hundred dollars for a set of hearing aids.
And that’s the expensive aspect of, you know, hearing health.
And we partner with audiologists across the country, hospitals, university based clinics,
private practices.
We have one hundred thirty, one hundred forty providers that will fit patients.
They typically do it for free.
They use our product and we provide the hearing aids and the patient.
There’s no cost to the patient.
And they just have to meet our qualifications, which is their low income.
So two hundred percent of the poverty level or below.
And we’re fitting hundreds of patients a year all across the country, as well as supporting
other programs that are doing that already.
So if you already have if you’re in Denver, Colorado, and you’ve already got a program
where you do that, but you need, say, some extra hearing aids, they can reach out to
us.
We’ll provide hearing aids to their program.
And it’s a great way to keep them out of landfills and put them into people’s ears that can use
that.
Keep them keep them in use.
I know that my my grandmother’s hearing aids were donated to Strotoma.
So spectacular.
It’s good to see them have another life and and be put to good use.
Let me switch a little bit and talk about your career because you’ve and and kind of
where you’ve come from and how you then approach Strotoma, because you you’re you’re in the
nonprofit world, but you also have this this entrepreneurial background.
You’re the been the executive director of several notable organizations, but also chambers
of commerce.
You’re entrepreneurial.
And I know the way you think about how you approach the business problem.
So now you find yourself in an organization that’s been around for plus years.
And traditionally, we’d think that’s man, that’s a that’s a pretty big ship that you’ve
got to try to navigate.
And being an entrepreneur gives you that mindset.
How do you how do you approach that?
How do you approach kind of driving where Strotoma goes?
You know, it’s interesting because and I bring that up when I go out and visit our clubs
and our partners around the country often talk about, you know, they don’t know who
I am.
I’m just this guy from Kansas, the Kansas City area.
And they’re, you know, and so I’m in Florida.
I’ll be in Florida visiting a half dozen of our clubs next week.
And I always want them to know a little bit about me and where I come from.
And, you know, I started doing service when I was in college.
I didn’t do anything really as a kid growing up, but in college and I kind of got that
bug and I learned, you know what, I can make an impact in the world and I can do good,
but I can also do good in this context where I can be I can be profitable.
I can make money and I can give back.
It’s kind of this win win across the board.
And I think our clubs think that way.
I think sometimes people just forget that that entrepreneurial side that just because
we’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean we can’t make a profit.
Right.
You know, and you hear that a lot and and we can still do good things and we have to
operate like a business because we’ve got to be responsible.
We’ve got to think about revenues and costs and expenses and where our money’s come from,
who our clientele is that we’re serving and so forth.
And so, you know, when I came to Sertoma, I said, you know, we’re going to use some
we’re going to be a little more entrepreneurial.
Now, the flip side is there are certain things I do that are completely different to Sertoma,
but also not what I would consider I would ever really do it in my entrepreneurial life.
And that’s like, you know, I tell staff all the time our job for so long, our organizations,
when you get big, you tend to say no to everything.
Sure.
If you’re a federal government, if you’re a local government, if you’re an old organization,
it’s easier to say no, this is what we do.
Yeah, here’s our lane.
This is the lane we stay in and this our forefathers have never done that.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so I tell you, you know, and I feel like, you know, in the industry of service organizations,
the Sertomas, the Lions and so forth, a lot of these organizations have declined over
the years.
Membership has declined, particularly in North America.
And it’s, you know, it’s neither here nor there, society’s changing.
And so as I tell the staff, our job is to do more say yes and figure out how to make
it work than say no and then make people jump through hoops to try and make it work.
And so we say yes.
And we say yes to a lot of things.
And maybe they’re not, maybe they’re sometimes out of our lane.
Maybe sometimes they’re like, well, this is a marginal win for us or a marginal victory.
But if we can make, if we can see how it works and it works well, maybe it’s something that
we can replicate and pass out to our clubs or to our partners around the country.
And so we’re doing a little bit more of, you know, it’s kind of the gamble.
And that’s part of being an entrepreneur is gambling and saying, now, when you’re an entrepreneur,
you tend to say, okay, these are my potential customers.
You know, you can’t go into business thinking everyone is my customer.
So we don’t do that either.
We don’t go in saying, well, we’re going to work in eyesight because one, that’s not what
we do.
Two, there’s a great organization out there that does it.
So we stay within our lane, but it’s still taking on more risks than maybe what an organization
like ours has in the past.
Yeah.
I guess that’s the benefit of having that club structure where you can have these small
incubators of different ideas, see what works and let them run with it and offer that support.
And then when you’ve got a winning formula, you know, spread that around to give that
information away.
Yeah.
And I often talk to them when I talk with the clubs and our groups out there, you know,
ultimately they’re the product.
The product happens in the community.
It doesn’t happen here in Kansas City or at a national headquarters of any organization.
The product happens in the community.
And so our job is to model things, to try things out, to pull in those best practices.
So if we see a club, we’ve got some clubs that do some amazing work.
We have a club in Chicago that worked in the s.
They started working with individuals with intellectual disabilities.
At the time, that was a new thing in that now they have an organization there that has
employees and $million budget.
I mean, it dwarfs who we are as a national organization.
It’s called Sir Thomas Star Services.
And they’re known all over Chicago and Illinois for the services they provide to that particular
community.
And that’s, and then so we can take that, learn from them, share that with other groups
as you could do this if you want to do this.
And they just have to decide what is it that we want to do in our community?
Yeah.
Just how can we best magnify our service to mankind?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Just all, it works together so well.
Tell me what’s next for Sir Thomas and the Hearing Aid Project and every everything else.
Where do you go from here?
What’s on the horizon?
So I think a big thing, you know, obviously hearing health, and I don’t want to say we’re
doubling down because we’ve always done it, but we’re doubling down in the sense that
we’re taking on some new programs and new projects that have actually done quite well
across the country.
So for instance, we partnered with a national manufacturer that provided us with hearing
amplifiers.
And so we have a program called Amplified Hearing.
And it basically, an amplifier is an entry level device to help people here who maybe
might only have mild hearing loss or maybe in our case, we find a lot of populations
either don’t want to take care of a hearing aid or they don’t have the means to.
And a good example would be a homeless population or unhoused population.
And so we’ve had clubs and groups that have reached out and said, hey, can we, we want
to donate these, we want to use these at our local homeless shelter.
And so they’ll get, whether they, they’re not really purchasing, they get them for the
cost of shipping and handling.
We provide them basically for free and they provide them and they can be given out as
a disposable device.
We have hospitals that use it, we have hospice groups.
And so we’re looking at programs like that where we can have an impact and help our clubs
have an impact in their community.
And so we have other things of that nature.
We’re working on a couple of national partnerships that will ideally if they roll out next year
and they come to fruition, we’ll be able to collect more hearing aids.
We’ll be able to partner to put more.
We’re always looking for more audiologists.
That’s the biggest challenge.
There’s always people out there who want to serve, who need the services.
We need more people who are willing to help fit those patients.
And we try to make it as easy as possible for them on the hearing side.
And so we’ll continue to grow some of that.
The hearing aid project will, I think the hearing aids are, they’re growing every week
and every day.
And so we will continue to do that.
We’ll, from the Sertoma side, that’s a little bit more challenging.
It’s partly, it’s how do we look at how we serve our communities?
And I tell clubs all the time when I meet with them, you know, we have this national
membership structure.
This is just what membership is.
And every organization or association has something like that.
But ultimately when it comes down to it, is they have to figure out how to best serve
their community.
If you can get a hundred friends of Kansas City that don’t want to join X organization,
but they just want to come out and serve, then if that’s your organization can do that,
then you should do it.
We just have to find more ways to get more people engaged in our communities.
And that’s what makes us all have a better place to live and to work and to play and
so on.
And so we’re always looking for different ideas.
How do we serve our clubs?
You know, getting club growth, like if you’re looking at club growth and stuff like that,
I think all, you know, I think it’d be a fool to think that we’re just magically going to
have all these new clubs pop up everywhere.
It’s because generations, the generation below us, they serve and the way they serve community
is different than what you or I or what our parents did.
They’re looking for a different experience.
They’re looking for a different way to give back.
They still want to give back, but it’s not quite the same as those traditional models.
Yeah.
And so figuring out how can we make that work?
How can we embed that?
Sometimes it’s easier just to start something completely from scratch than to try and change
that year old organization.
That said, we have a lot of great history and we still have a lot of great stuff happening.
So it’s, you know, when I look at one of our clubs that has a hundred members and raises
$a year to support local causes, I’m like, I can’t tell them they’re doing anything
wrong.
No.
You know, they’re doing some great work there and they’ve raised millions of dollars.
It’s the clubs that are like or and they’re like trying to figure out how do I
serve?
How do I get more people engaged?
And you know, and it’s going back to their community and saying, okay, what do you all
want us to do?
You know, cause maybe the services they provide are outdated.
Maybe they need to change.
And that will draw more people in.
So it’s, it, it, it really is that marketing opportunity of, of, Hey, find the need and
fill that need, provide that need to the organization.
Yeah.
That’s, that’s business business
Right there.
Absolutely.
Well, Hey, let’s get, let’s get out of the regular questions and into what we call the
lightning round.
Are you ready for the lightning round?
I’m ready for the lightning round.
You have no way to know what we might ask, except obviously this first question.
I mean, it’s a, it’s a softball.
It’s I can’t not talk about beer if you’re on the podcast.
Cause one of, one of your entrepreneurial ventures is, is in the, the craft brewing
industry.
You want to say, just set up a little bit and tell us what that is?
Sure.
Sure.
I’m one of the partners at transport brewing and transport.
We have two locations, Shawnee and Gardner.
And we’ve been in the Shawnee market for over five years.
Gardner for about a year and a half now.
Yeah.
It’s, it’s that entrepreneurial bug.
You can’t get it out of your system.
It has to go somewhere.
So this is just one of those areas.
I want to ask about beer specifically and kind of the role it plays for you.
Is it, is it relaxation?
Is it, I need one after, after work?
Is it great for food pairing?
Is it none of those things?
And it’s just, you know, Hey, this is a business and it could be coffee.
It could be, you know, anything else.
That’s a tough one.
I probably say, you know, it’s, it’s kind of a, it’s, I only drink water and coffee.
So you know, beer and wine are my other two choices.
And really, I mean, it’s a great way to pair work and work and pleasure, I suppose.
You know, I will say it’s funny because when I used to travel for previous jobs, I would
always go to coffee shops all day.
Right.
I work, I have my meetings.
Now I’m like, well, I could do a coffee shop in the morning and I can do a brewery in the
afternoon.
I can have a beer.
All breweries have good wifi and I can just work from a brewery in the afternoon.
It’s kind of nice because I do, I am on the road a lot, but I think, I think honestly,
like most people, it fits a different rule at different times in, at different times
in your life, frankly, at different times in the week or the day.
Or the day, yeah, for sure.
Like today I need that relaxing beer.
Yeah.
Friday night I need the celebratory beer, you know, type thing.
And then on a Monday, it’s just, I just need a beer.
Exactly.
You know, any of those things.
I, do you have like a go-to style that is your, I will always order this?
No, I, I tend to be, I know this is very disparate, but I go from an IPA, which I am an IPA guy,
and sours.
So I like, I like, I like two different ends of the spectrum.
I tend not to be a light beer fan just because I don’t feel like it has the flavor.
It’s not doing anything for you.
Yeah, it doesn’t do anything for me.
Um, but you know, it really kind of just depends, kind of like people I, you know, when I drink
wine too, and I’m a white wine drinker in the summer and a red wine drinker in the winter.
I don’t know if it’s because it’s cold and it’s not as cold or what, but beer is kind
of much like other people.
It’s kind of the same thing.
Darker, heavier beers maybe in the winter, you know, the lighter stuff.
I do love one beer that we have at Transport and many of our fans love it too.
It’s called Car Hop and it’s not typically what I drink anywhere else, but it’s tastes
like a cherry limeade.
And it is fabulous.
I mean, and we can’t keep it in stock enough.
People are like, oh, they got Car Hop back in and boom, it’s gone.
And that’s seltzer?
No, it’s, it’s an actual beer.
It’s a, it’s just a lighter beer.
Just a lighter beer with, with cherry.
Yeah.
Cherry limeade.
So it’s,
Oh, okay.
A little, just slightly sour than a normal tart.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
And so it’s perfect and nice and refreshing, but not, not refreshing.
Like I’m drinking a Mikulter.
Sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
No, you’re not, you’re not hydrating necessarily.
You’re just enjoying.
Exactly.
You also have an entrepreneurial background in coffee.
Yeah.
Do those two worlds ever meet for you?
Is there, is there such a thing as a good coffee beer?
Yeah, I think there are.
We we partner with a roaster, with ground house, for instance, ground house coffee and
Gardner we do a ground house Brown.
And, and so we’ve done that.
And I think you can find that probably anywhere in the country nowadays.
You know, a good coffee, a good coffee supporter or coffee stout.
I did, had a coffee shop years ago in Baldwin, Kansas.
It was the beginning of my entrepreneurial bug.
I was in my late twenties and it was exciting.
It was fun.
It was before coffee was popular.
Yeah.
And I think this is, this is much earlier than, than you would walk out today and go,
yeah, there should be a craft coffee shop like next door somewhere.
Yeah.
And you know, Baker university is right there.
So it was a good spot.
We bought my ex wife and I, we had bought this coffee shop from the previous owners
and you know, back then you had to have live music every Friday and Saturday night to get
people in.
We just didn’t have coffee culture.
I remember the farmers coming in at the beginning.
They’re like two dollars for a cup of coffee.
If all the, if they only knew that today I’m paying four dollars for a cup of coffee, you
know, they’re in, in stuff like that.
So it was a whole different realm and there wasn’t all these different, um, the different
drinks and cold brew and this and that every milk choice.
Yes.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if people would come in and said oat milk, I’m like, I would have been like, I
didn’t even know you could make milk out of it.
That’s right.
Do they, do they do that?
I don’t even know they do that.
So it was, it was fun.
And after a couple of years, my oldest daughter was born.
Both of us had full-time jobs.
We just couldn’t do it all.
So we sold the coffee shop.
Eventually, I think they shut it down and, um, but it was always one of those things
I had in the back of my mind for maybe, maybe the future again.
I don’t know.
I’ve kind of elevated my like from coffee.
Now I think future would be like an ice cream shop.
So, oh, well, this is, that’s a good future horizon.
I mean, something to work toward for sure.
Um, let’s leave the beer segment of the lightning round for a second and talk travel because,
um, you travel pretty extensively as well.
I’m meeting with the, the Sertoma clubs around, around the planet.
Um, do you get to the point in that travel day and hectic where you just can’t people
anymore and go, no, I can’t no more.
I can’t talk to another person.
I’m, I’m spent.
Uh, what do you get there or not?
Not too much.
I really do enjoy people.
They, I get my energy.
I’m an, I’m an extrovert naturally, you know, feed off.
Yes.
I feed off of that, you know, and I get enough because typically my travel is, you know,
if I’m going, so for instance, next week I’ll be in Florida visiting with clubs, you know,
I’ll spend, I’ll usually have a morning and afternoon or an afternoon and evening meeting.
Sometimes I’ll have individual meetings or maybe with donors, so on, but I get that time
in between where I can decompress a little bit.
And I think that’s for any of us, that’s just the important aspect of knowing yourself and
what that is.
And then there are times where I’m like, Ooh, I really do need some people.
Yeah.
You know, I need somebody around.
I’ve made, I’ve had a day, you know, two days in the office and nobody’s around.
And I’m like, wow, I’m kind of going stir crazy.
I haven’t had anybody to talk to, you know, type things.
So it’s kind of a best of both worlds.
Well, that’s, and as long as you can feed off of that, that’s the best way to go.
Let’s talk about inspiration for a second.
As you look back in, in, through history, do you have a teacher or a mentor or someone
who gave you some advice that has stuck with you like to this day?
This is, you know, I’ll always take this along.
I kind of live by that.
You know, I, I don’t, I wish I could say I had something like high school going back.
I mean, I remember having one good teacher who just kind of was there through my parents
divorce was a tough time in my life.
And I think many of us go through those various times.
It happened to be my senior year in high school, probably not an ideal time.
But I had a, you know, a teacher who helped me through that college.
I hopped around a lot and not proud to say I went to like five different colleges, you
know, it took me like eight years to get an undergraduate degree.
And then by the time I said I was going to go to grad school, I figured I should probably
settle down.
But, you know, I tried to just take bits and pieces from different people as I went, you
know, and I remember certain conversations with, you know, it usually wasn’t one individual
who said, oh, but it was like a group of individuals at different times said, Hey, you know, when
I, my first job or second job out of college, I was in my mid twenties and you know, your
ideas and your energy are great, but you can’t run, you know, run through everybody to accomplish
it.
And I was like, okay, that makes sense.
And, you know, it took me a little while to understand what that what that looked like.
And then now I’m like, oh, okay, I get it.
You know, I’ve got to temper a little bit of that.
And sometimes I look at the people around me, I look at my staff and I love my staff.
But you know, I know there’s different personalities there.
And so I’m always drawing back on individual conversations more than I’m on a particular
individual like a person.
Yeah, but that’s I mean, but but good advice across the board.
Like that’s the you know, you if you if you want to make it somewhere, you can’t just
assert your will across the board.
Exactly.
You need some buy in or it will last as long as you’re there.
Yeah.
So good, good, good advice.
Good advice.
As you look back over your career, because you’ve had all of the the entrepreneurial
things in coffee and in beer and in chambers of commerce and in the nonprofit space.
If you look back and give yourself some advice, I don’t know if it’s maybe in the the all
of the different colleges you were you were bouncing around to.
And you could time travel and give yourself some advice.
What what kind of advice would you give first year in business you from from this perspective
here?
Probably take a chance a little bit more when I was younger, I was actually less likely
to take a chance than I am today.
Maybe that’s because today I feel like you know, financially, I’m comfortable and I’ve
made good decisions to get where I’m at and you know, it just naturally makes it easier,
I think.
And that’s the thing, like when you’re comfortable, you can take a risk and be like, well, if
this fails, I’m not giving it all up.
Back then, if I had very little money and I took a risk, then I was like, I’m sleeping
on the floor where?
Yeah, he’s going to let me sleep on their floor.
That’s every, you know.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I didn’t take as many risks as a younger person, you know, and and sometimes
I was like, I think I even talked about how I was going to take the risk and all this
and then when it was all said and done, I just chickened out.
Yeah.
You know, and I talk, I share that with my daughters a lot, like, you know, my older
daughter is a freshman at K-State and I’m off and I want her to go study abroad if she
wants to.
Right.
But that was something I always, I always wanted to do.
I love, I believe you can get so much from an international experience.
Oh, for sure.
I traveled around the world and had that opportunity as I got older.
I’m like, gosh, I wish I would have done that when I was younger.
How might that have shaped other things about me?
But I was always afraid, like I was afraid I was going to miss out.
That fear of missing out, what is they, FOMO, young kids call it FOMO.
That’s right.
I actually, I think now I look back, I’m like, my gosh, I think I had that in high school
and I didn’t realize that’s what it was.
I don’t think that was a term we used back then, right?
No, it was not a term that we had.
So it’s just one of those things where I wish I would have taken a little bit more risks
back in the day and not worried so much that it wouldn’t have panned out.
Yeah.
Now, as spectacular advice, I think we’ve gotten both sides of the coin on this kind
of question in the lightning round before where a lot of entrepreneurs will say, yeah,
take more chances or don’t worry about it.
It’s going to be okay.
Go forward.
And it’s been just a few people who have been on the other side of it say, maybe we should
have saved a little bit more before we did X, whatever that was.
But for the most part, I think it’s very much a go out there and get it done kind of mentality.
Well, I’ll take you out of the lightning round.
Well done.
There’s nothing to it.
There are no problems in the lightning round.
Let me have you tell everybody where they can find more information if they want to
know more about Sertoma, if they want to get in touch with their local club or however
they’d like to help out.
Where can they find you?
Where do they go?
Sure.
So the easiest place is we have two websites actually.
We have Sertoma.org and then we also have hearingaiddonations.org, very straightforward.
We actually have a second organization I don’t usually talk about.
It’s called Hearing Charities of America.
A lot of people find us that way.
We’re in the process internally of actually doing away with it because essentially we’re
the same staff, same people, same program.
It will all be under Sertoma’s umbrella.
But that hearingaiddonations.org, you can go and you can actually learn more about how
we, the donations we take.
I failed to mention, for instance, we take all the electronics.
We partner here with a local electronic recycling.
We recycled last year over one ton of electronic recycle that comes shipped into us.
So we do things like that with some of the other programs that I mentioned.
You can go on there.
You can find a club if you want to get involved with the club.
We actually have a national membership model so you can actually join Sertoma if you just
want to support what we do.
What I tell people all the time when they’re like, well, if there’s anything, I’m like,
you know what?
The hearingaid project is an easy way to get involved.
Right.
If you know somebody who’s got hearing aids, if you could be a collection point, if you
want to learn more, if you want to get engaged, if you know an audiologist or hearing instrument
specialist that would be willing to work with us, we’re an easy organization to work with
and work for.
We love to partner with people in the community to do good things.
Spectacular.
Jason Kamas, the executive director of Sertoma International.
Thanks for being with us today.
Thanks, Jeff.
And that is our show.
Thanks to our guests from Sertoma International and thank you for listening to the Small Business
Miracles podcast.
Remember to subscribe, leave us a five star rating and review, drop us a line on the website
at E-A-G-A-D-V dot com if you have any thoughts.
Until then, we’ll be out here helping entrepreneurs with another small business miracle.