#76 Who gives a sheet?! Graham Ross of textile resource recovery BlockTexx does.

Hey Kia ora Shamay. Welcome back to the latest episode of the Be Better podcast. A big thank you as always to all our regular listeners. Please like share, subscribe, all that jazz on all the different platforms. It does help and maybe you can help spread the word to somebody who really needs to hear about B Corp and awesome purpose performing humans. Anyway, with all that aside, with me today, I have the man, the myth, the legend himself, Graham Ross from Blocktex. G', day, Graham.

Hey, Tim. Great to be here.

It's been a while. I'm trying to think when was the last time. I think the last time we connected was about two or three years ago maybe when you came and did a cheeky session for the MBA crew that I was co teaching at the time, talking to them about all the amazing stuff that you do. So it's been a fair while. But yeah, for people who don't know who you are, who are you and what do you do?

Yeah. Thanks. Anytime to get to spend time with you, my friend. Oh, we don't do nearly enough. So.

This is a great start and then hopefully one of us will jump across the ditch and spend some quality time together.

So my name is Graham Ross. I'm the co founder of Blocktex. We are a textile resource recovery company. We developed a technology to deal with unwanted clothing and textiles as we as we all know, as fast fashion came along and took over our wardrobes and the quality of the materials of the clothes we love and wear, they just don't last as long as they used to. And there's a large volume of them. And like most things like batteries or tires, there's a, there's an opportunity to recycle those things. And textiles didn't have that sort of opportunity. Often it would be gathered up and exported overseas to another country. And just the sheer volume of material going around the world meant that we need to come up with a better solution. So we developed a chemical separation process. And it all sounds a bit, you know, wild and crazy and excited, but really it's essentially taking your unwanted textiles and deconstructing them back to their raw materials. And so we effectively look at polyester, cotton blended materials across everywhere. So things you walk on, things you sit on, things you wear, that gives US about nearly 90% of the world's fabrics. And we put it through a process which I'm happy to delve into, but as an overview, put it through a process that we then unlock the cotton from the polyester and we turn those two materials back into, back into raw materials that can be reused into many industries, including the fashion industry.

So many questions about this. What drugs were you smoking the day you came up with this idea? Like how, how, how what? And why really are sort of the three questions that come up. So, yeah, yeah, I guess, like why? Why fast fashion? Trying to solve that problem. We'll start there.

Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I've. I was in media, but I. But I moved into textiles about nearly 10 years ago and I formed a sustainable sportswear range. That business was great. Was successful as a. Awarded B Corp over many years, but also realized I was never going to be Nike. And what I did understand by being part of the industry, that there was a huge amount of that value that we were sending to landfill because I'd physically paid to make fibers, I'd physically paid to make fabrics, that I'd physically paid to make garments. And so at the end of life, it was just getting sent to landfill just like it was a waste piece of paper or a waste plastic tub. And that didn't make any sense. And I was introduced to my business partner, Adrian Jones, and he's a. He's got a background in the textile industry from the start. So he was in Marks and Spencer's in the uk, opened up a bunch of stores across Europe, and then eventually came to Australia and ran retail brands here in Australia. And so he. He's going through a sense of atonement because he was the guy flogging all those frocks to everybody, ending up in landfills. So we had this great opportunity to get together with sort of my curiosity and my sort of lifelong entrepreneurship and his background in the fashion industry, combining those two strengths. And we've been able to kind of. We looked at the industry and said, well, if we could come up with a concept that actually diverted textiles away from landfill, but we brought them back to raw materials so they could be reused again and again and again. That would be the holy grail of fashion industry. And. And so he often tells the story that we, you know, we started to write the business plan on a napkin in a cafe over a couple of glasses of wine and sort of depending which story, the glass of wine get longer or shorter. But we actually, we moved offices and we actually found that napkin. So it's that real original entrepreneur story. Here's the business plan, and we've actually executed that. It's pretty much true. There's been a lot of left and rights and ups and downs, but it exists. And so we fundamentally knew that if we could do that, then that would open up not only a great business and a manufacturing business, but actually would be the start of an industry. And so that's, we firmly believe blocktech is the start of the future textile resource recovery industry, which doesn't exist in Australia or New Zealand or effectively anywhere in the world. And I think it's a huge opportunity. This is the inflection point. And I often talk to people, they say, why? You know, everybody kind of goes, we kind of, they think we're a Tesla. But I actually have to keep telling them that we're more like a Model T Ford, but we really are that, that crust a really important point where there's an industry to grow and that delivers economic value, it is social impact, but also delivers a really strong environment impact into the region where it's operating.

Awesome. So I mean a proper circular economy, but at.

A sector scale rather than at either an organizational scale or potentially just a product scale. And that's where I think, yeah, like you say, that's where you're a Model T Ford because you're building a whole new sandpit, a whole new industry sector, rather than making something go a bit faster or look a bit sexier and more exciting than what was previously or being more impactful rather.

Yeah, so. So when you got a million, you got a million tonnes of textiles going to landfill here in Australia. A million tonnes. Now there's some great opportunities to turn things into, reuse and turn them into blankets or repair them and send them out the market. But the bottom line is there's still year on year, a million tonnes going into landfill. And so globally we're talking about 140 million tonnes around the world that going to landfill. What we need is commercial scale solutions to deal with a problem we've created. But it's also an opportunity to get those raw materials back into the supply chains, which means you're not actually going back into the land and pulling out fossil fuels to then make the products that you could actually be recycling in the first place. And so I think it's both a combination of advanced chemistry, advanced manufacturing, advanced business models, but it's actually old fashioned thinking in regards to reuse, redesign, redistribute those kind of things. So it's kind of new meets old. And I don't think that's too hard for people to understand. It's just that you just need a couple of older gentlemen with a passion for it to drive it forward.

Yeah, you see, I got, I got called a boomer the other day. I'm 45. I resent that accusation.

I'm getting older. But.

Yeah, I just was on a call with my marketing department. I still don't get Instagram, but I was politely told that I don't need to, so I left it at that.

Reasonable. Don't. Don't get me started on TikTok. But anyway.

That'S so cool that you've still got the. You got the napkin. Yeah, this why it's interesting on the B Corp connection. Sort of similarities with the, with the beginnings and the sort of the genesis of B Corp. Where come the founding or one of the co founders, Jay Cohen Gilbert coming from the sort of fashion, sports apparel industry. Hey, you know, the business could maybe do how we were doing a bit better. Yeah, just sort of interesting, the parallels. So in that initial meeting, because I mean, like I say, you've invented this thing. Was it, was it some sort of Heath Robinson design with like, you know, we put things in a machine and magic happens. Like what, what, what was. Yeah, what was the sort of, the ideation process and that you sort of hashing out meeting?

Yeah, we talk about a lot in business and I think in all my businesses over my years, it's always been about what I call the road work. Like having a great idea is really important and then you need to validate that idea. And so you need to take your, your fabulous little idea and you've got to go out and talk to as many people as possible and you've got to find the people who believe in what you are trying to achieve. You've got to find the people who don't believe because often you learn a lot from the people who don't believe in your vision because they're kind of giving you a new perspective. And so you can take that advice and you then refine your business or ultimately you can also disagree because there's going to be people who like your idea, don't like you. That's fine, but that's part of the conversation. So what we did initially was we started really basically looked at business as usual. So if I donate my clothes to charitable shops, where do they go from there? And so we went and spoke to a lot of charitable shops. So we understand what the work, what the flow of garments were from an initial business as usual. And often it was about there was a great revenue stream of putting the material into a container and sending it to another country where it would then get on salt. But often what would happen, these companies, you would lose sight of where that, where it would go. So you may sell it to a third party, expecting it to go to country A and it goes to country B, or it goes into landfill and country circumstances. And that's obviously not the. Not the reason of sending it offsea. So that was really interesting, that point of view. So then that gave us an idea to go, well, what if we could deal with the unwanted clothing here onshore, and what would that look like? And so we looked at doing what they call mechanical recycling process, where you take a whole bunch of garments and you shred it all up, and then you turn it into large balls of fluff. And from that fluff, you can then spin a yarn which then you can weave into a fabric. So we did that work with our international scientific department, csiro, and so we turned that into a yarn. And, and that was all very successful, but there's no spinning capabilities here in this country. So it would mean that we could cradle these large containers full of fluff that we then have to send overseas, which is kind of like the business as usual we were trying to change. We then moved into an area that was called chemical separation, and that's where you use chemicals and some other conditions to be able to separate blended fabrics. Now, blended fabrics wasn't a problem up until we kind of moved into fast fashion about 20 years ago, as most of our garments were either made from a natural fiber, like cotton, or it was made from like, more like 100% polyester from the sort of 60s, 70s polyesters. Polyester can be both a goodie and a baddie, depending on which way you look at it, because it's made from fossil fuels, it is a plastic, but it does have good wear, good strength, and last, it's pretty much indestructible. And so as fast fashion started to evolve, what they needed was for garments that were low price.

And they could get some. Some longevity out of them. And so they started to blend the polyester cotton. So I'm sure we all the listeners would have sheet bed sheets or stayed in hotels that have got bed sheets that feel really quite nice. Well, they've got a higher content of cotton. And if you stay in a hotel, it's probably a little bit sort of slippery. And the sheets, that's probably got a higher content of polyester, but that means the longevity of those sheets is increased by the usage of polyester. And so the problem was you can't recycle it. There was no technology to separate those two materials. What they could do is go through that mechanical process that I described before and turn that into yarn. But every time you did it you got a poorer quality material. So it wasn't really the solution. And the volumes got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And so we looked at a bunch of opportunities both in laboratory and what was being done around the world too. And they were doing. One was either wasting the polyester to get the cotton or they're wasting the cotton to get to the polyester. And that didn't make any sense to us because you were basically trying to divert things away from landfill and then you were still creating a problem by doing your process. So we went down this route of trying to work out how do we develop a technique that retains both the children, so to speak. We initially started with a polyester and wool technology and that gave us access into how we may be able to do it from which chemicals or which conditions. And then we took that into polyester cotton because polyester cotton, as I said before, that gives us nearly 90% of the world's fibers. Polyester is about 60% of the world's fibers and cotton is only about 3. So from a commercial point of view on a, as big a food group as possible.

Once we could sexually do that in the laboratory, we then took that to a small pilot facility. Now at that stage we were working very closely with the university who had a, had a biorefining plant up in North Queensland and they were dealing with sugarcane off cuts and the gas and those kind of things. And so we had to retool that particular facility to do become a textile recycling facility. Which actually started with the first piece of equipment we ever built for this state of the art business was a commercial washing machine and a commercial dryer.

But it was really, at that stage it was really hands on. It was, we were, we were literally had buckets, we had buckets and move things between buckets and they were just learning the techniques. And so we worked with a lot of companies here in Australia. We worked with Patagonia and Apple internationally. They sent material to us and at that stage we could do five kilogram batches which was, which is remarkable. The, the, the, the experience to to written down a business plan on a napkin to find yourself in a large scale kind of pilot facility with your hard hat on or your rubber gloves and that kind of stuff and actually watching your chemistry do what you asked it to do is phenomenal. It is one of the greatest experience, is one of the most terrifying, but one of the greatest experience I've ever had in my, my working career. And so from there, knowing that we could do that technical separation, then we could start to look at.

Moving into commercial and so.

Going to pilot facility. We raised a small amount of seed money to just allow us to kind of carry on.

We had a great experience where we were named one of the world's top 50 startup companies in the climate sector. We flew over to Paris at the end of 2019 to pick up our reward and we were quite chuffed. And we were met with a lot of companies across Europe and we were pretty confident that we would have raised enough money to build our commercial scale plant. And we came back to Australia and we had those conversations continued in January and then into early February. And by the time we got to February, a thing called Covid hit the world and everybody went away. And so we basically spent 20, 20 in laboratories and just trying to, you know, keep the, keep, keep motivated and keep moving while we all, everybody dealt with that sort of stuff and then finalized our raise into sort of 20, 20, 21. And then we built our factory. But I think the most important thing as we started to look at this, we, we had to obviously invent a lot of the equipment, but also we spent time in existing industries. So we spent time in the laundry industry because they deal with a lot of wet material and moving large clothing around. And we spent time in the craft brewery industry. Part of that was because we like a nice craft beer.

How much of that was actually relevant to the business planning?

I've got some very good friends that I'm keeping friends for a very long time. No, but importantly, when you want it. We looked at this from a point of view that we wanted to make a scalable and modular business. And so craft breweries are great from that point of view. So it'd be like, and I would be going, hey, you want to brew some beer? We go, yeah, sure. Your garage or my garage. We'd make a great batch. You get your mates over, they go, this is great. All of a sudden you find yourself in a, you know, in a large factory and you've got these big vats. You go, how did we get here? Craft breweries know how to scale and, and scaling. Our business is about adding extra vats. So it's really simple process. We, we took a lot of knowledge for those two industries how to scale and also how to deal with the movement of large materials around. And so just to wrap up this, this answer, the pilot facility was five kilogram batches. We now do 1,000 kilogram batches. So that's, that's the difference in scale. And we've had to wrap a whole lot of advanced manufacturing around that. You know, when you. A thousand kilograms is the weight of a small car.

Nice.

Yeah.

I just have images of you pouring the first mix into the first five kilo bucket and like, you know, a chemistry experiment gone wrong. Are you, are we black, Black blackened faces and hair? Yeah, I think back to the drawing board, Adrian.

No, we had, we had lots of, we had lots of failures. I mean, part of, part of developing new business models and new techniques and whatever is the failure, because you learn. And one of the key catchphrases we have in our business is that we're pioneering because it allows us to push forward into the unknown. It allows us mistakes without feeling like we've failed. And it just, and it also gives that kind of, that level, keeps a level of excitement as you are failing that you're not actually failing, you're actually moving forward. And it certainly resonates for us as founders, but also as a team.

Yeah, we've been talking to quite a few sort of startup B corps just recently. And that failure piece is, you know, a common theme, but it's that whole fail forward, fail fast. You know, if you're not pushing the boundaries, if you're not being curious, then you're never going to fail. And if you're not being curious and pushing the boundaries, you're probably not going to get to where you need to get to in a startup environment. So, yeah, I think it's absolutely well to keep hearing.

Well, yeah, and that's very true. One of the things we find when you, when you're dealing with science, because science is very much part of our business, is that, and thankfully, scientists are very naturally cautious people and so are engineers because you, they deal with some very serious things. But when you're an entrepreneur and trying to move a new business forward, getting to perfection isn't always the goal. Getting to good enough or near enough gets you enough data to then move to the next stage. And I think a lot of, certainly in our space, we've seen companies not get to where they needed to because they were probably focused more on making the science perfect, when actual fact, you just got to keep evolving, evolving because you're moving many, many things forward. And you can't just say that you could have the best science, best chemistry, but no business model because the business has moved on. You've missed the boat. Right. So you've got to be thinking about it from a business point. Of view. It's always about, what does this look like from an economic success married to tying off that it works from a science and engineering point of view.

Yeah, I definitely got. I won't name them. There's a couple. One sort of entrepreneurial person that I know. Yeah, would. Would spend way too long over engineering it and it would work perfectly for them. But you put it into the hands of anyone else and it was too good. They couldn't understand the depth of the science behind it. And there's another, another company I know who've got similar to you. They've got like a groundbreaking technological idea that would revolutionize an industry, but they're seeking perfection and it's like, guys, yeah, you, you're just not going to get there. And I think, was it Reid Hoffman, who was the founder of LinkedIn, he always said, you should be so embarrassed of the first iteration when you get back on it like that. That's the key to knowing that you launched at the right time. Yeah. So 100% agree. So neither you nor Adrian have a chemistry background, so presumably you sort of. So at what point were you kind of like, actually, we might need to go and talk to someone who knows some shit here rather than us just putting more math schemes on a napkin. What glass of wine level was that or was that bottle.

We'll push the wine to the side.

We're very methodical. We're both business people. And so we came at it from a point of view of what does this look like? What would it look like for it to be economically successful? So how do you get to break even? What do the numbers look like? That's kind of separate to the science, because the science piece and the business model for us was about passion and the want to do something from an environmental point of view. So that was kind of a given. But. But the rational business part of us, and also the fact that we'd invested all our money in this business, we need to kind of go, well, if we build this, you can't go, I'm going to build this and they will come. That's a great way of going broke, especially in the recycling sake, because you can find plenty of waste. What you need to do is have customers who want to buy your recycled product and you've got to have a process that is going to be cost effective to help you achieve that goal.

But the science was always part of that, was always ticking along next to us. And so because this had never been done before, you couldn't just go to Somebody and ask the question you had to go and you had to go across both here in Australia and internationally, the right scientists or the right industry just to ask the right questions and, and just kind of find those. Often think about when you're building early stage business, you got to kind of go, you're trying to get to the top, but you're not. You can't get to the top at the first go. What you need to do is find a ledge to get to. And so it's just about getting to the next ledge, taking a pause, having understanding what you've achieved and where you want to go, then strategically trying to find where that next ledge is. And so then you get to that. And so we spent a lot of time across industry and academia, in laboratories and in workforce and on calls, just trying to understand what were the, what were the chemical successes out there? Had they got to a commercial scale, how did that marry into our feedstock, which was fashion and textiles?

And to work out.

At what stage did we need to bring those experts into our business? Because nobody had the answer. What agent I bring to us is incredible passion for what we're doing.

Enthusiasm for driving forward to actually realize this industry. But also we're both really curious. And so you don't need to have all the answers. You just need to know what, what were the questions you need to ask to kind of drive you in the right directions. And my background's in media, so I'm used to, you know, having a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things and so understanding, taking, you know, really complex things, then trying to articulate that back into where we need to go to. And Adrian's skill set, he's very analytical. He's got a great mass brain. He's got, he's got a little bit of chemistry on the side. And so joining those together allowed us to kind of formulate a strategy to navigate our way to the right people to talk about things. And then once you turn up to people and you say, hey, this is what I want to do, and you turn up with enthusiasm and respect for their, for what they do in their profession, people are really helpful. They really want to share their knowledge. They don't want to do what you do because, you know, I'm not sure whether I want to do what I do because you're kind of going to, this is a great idea, but you're crazy, right? There's so many barriers entry but so people really willing to help. And then you need to find a group of a Collection as you kind of move around so you could bounce those ideas across things. And then as we started to get more and more into a factory, you had to bring in engineering. That, that adds a whole layer of complexity because you're physically moving a small car around the plant every 90 minutes. And so if there's safety, there's, there's engineering needs, you've got to find equipment that can do that and you've got to find, you've got to, you've got to be able to pull that together in a short amount of time in a very small budget.

Nice. Yeah, I think it was. Is it Einstein who's got that quote? You know, if I had five minutes to solve a problem, I'd spend four minutes, 50, trying to think of the right question to ask. I think, yeah, I think, yeah, media. You know, I've got a sales sales background. I think, yeah, media sales. Possibly also sort of like detective police work. That innate curiosity. Like, I don't need to know the subject, I just need to work out what questions I need to ask to unlock the subject. Yeah, I think that's a, it's, it's such a powerful skill to have. I mean, it's, it can be annoying. Ask my wife.

Yeah, but why, but why, but how? Yeah, but yeah, I think that that sort of inner, inner child of curiosity is.

Particularly at a startup. Yeah, if you're, if you're wanting to get into a business or, yeah, just be, do more, more in your business. Just that constant, I kind of call it the constructive discontent as well. It's like, yeah, that, that could be better and it annoys me that it's not better. And I want to know why it's not better and I want to know what people have tried to try and make it better. And yeah, that, that whole, yeah, it's a whole, I don't know, there's probably a degree you can do in that these days.

People either have it or they don't have it to a degree.

I agree. I, I, I've been doing a lot of traveling lately and I love traveling. Not from the point of going away from home, but there's, there's all these opportunities just to then review things or think about things or catch up on a bit of reading or just go back through our, you know, our data room and go, oh, that's right. Where, where did we get to with this? And so it just opens up so many more things. And having that curiosity.

Means it's not a task, it's actually a pleasure. You really enjoy, you enjoy thinking about things and analyzing where you are. And, and we've needed this. In this business, it's been an incredibly difficult five and a half years because nothing has come easy. We've had to either knock it over, build it, repair it, go around it, it just, and that's, that's just the nature of this. And if we weren't curious, I think one of us would have, you know, would have bon on us.

So, well, curious and, and clearly that sense of mission and purpose. Because if you didn't really, really care about solving this problem, I mean, we, we were sort of just talking before we went live and, and you were kind of like, yeah, this is, it's hard. Yakka. And I feel the same with the whole trying to educate people on the B Corp journey. I said before, you know, yeah, people are kind of, they're keen to chat about it now, but eight years ago it was just a desert of purpose and meaning and do good in your business. But if doing good was easy, everyone would be doing it. And so, you know, kudos to you for taking on a super grunty problem and giving it a really good nudge. I just also imagine when you sort of knocked on the doors of these scientists then sort of going, sorry, you want to do what?

Oh yeah, we've made fun of that. And who are you?

Yeah, say that again.

Yeah, why do you want to do that? And also, I think there's, there's parts of our industry that are really keen on this and there's a lot of parts of the industry that just doesn't that care. It's like, well, my job is to sell clothes, not to recycle them. Right. And so why can't you guys go off and do that? But what you do need in this industry, you need entrepreneurs like ourselves. You need government policy to help stimulate the market to support that. You need the industry itself to start to retool itself, to look to the future because they can't keep doing business as usual. And if those all combine, then you can find a lovely layer of private investors who are looking for good businesses to invest in and increasing. Like we're saying, good businesses that do that have another purpose over and above the economic return, social impact, environment impact and economic return. And for me, they're, they're the real key structures to what a business should look like going forward.

Yeah. And increasingly that is what we're seeing. You know, I think you guys in Aussie are about to have some regulation or if not, it's There are thereabouts around mandatory disclosures on environmental impact for companies over a certain size. We're already seeing here at the big end of town in New Zealand. The same's happening in Europe.

Yeah.

You know, at the big end of town. But of course if you are a supplier into one of these big end of town companies, well they're going to want to know some stuff about you. So it's, it's going to be coming. Yeah. One way or the other.

Yeah.

Yeah. All of the above. Yeah. Supply chain pressure, customer pressure, employee pressure. I think it will be, you know what we're seeing from people who are interested in B Corp. Fmcg fast moving consumer goods. So definitely food and beverage, health and beauty and fashion to a degree. Sort of like leading the charge really because of that brand.

I guess association as well as obviously wanting to do the right thing. And we're definitely noticing that in, in a lot of those industries B Corp is now almost table stakes. And so the next, the next thing the consumer is looking for is the yes, but, but the. And what next? And I think that's where you're gonna very soon have a lot of these fashion companies going. Oh actually the differentiator now isn't just we're a B corp, it's we're a B corp plus block tax. It's a B corp plus block tax plus any virgin material we get is you know, sourced socially and environmentally and it's traceable and it's got provenance. I was talking to, I don't know. Have you come across the guys. John from track. Good. I should make an intro to you.

He's based intro.

Yeah, I'm talking to them yesterday. So they've got this tech platform, uses blockchain technology to help track the provenance of supply chain. So we're claiming that this is a fair trade supply chain or direct trade and it might not be fair trade certified so it might be like a direct trade or what have you or da da. It's like yep, we can check the provenance of that and we have you know, to a degree proven that that is the case. And I just said to him same thing. I think you're right on the cusp of this because the, the battleground for the hey prove that we're doing good at a company level is kind of all. Yeah, it's kind of feel like we're in the middle of that battle. The next one is going to be but yeah, where does your stuff actually come from and, and what's the manufacturing process.

I completely agree. And that's, I mean, I guess that to explain where blocktech's name comes from, we, when part of the other piece, when we were this is, we. We firmly knew that we would have to prove providence, that we collected the material and we'd recycled and the provenance of the raw material that was being sent, because we knew that providence was really important in those, in the items that you're buying, the provenance of the fiber, the problem of the fabric, that kind of thing. And then I'd be able to validate the economic environmental benefit going forward. So we have our own blockchain. That's been something that's been really important to integrate. But I think the other thing to kind of point out as to how we kind of. We've thought about this is that it's a business that can, we can work with the big end in town. So, you know, a lot of our customers are the large laundromats or workwear companies. So we work with any major brand you could think of. We're working with those guys. And so you can provide benefit at the top end of town, but then go right down the end to the consumer. Us every day who have got our favorite T shirt that we've loved to death, and we can't get to a charitable shop because it has no value. But our only other choice is then to put into landfill. And so we know that consumers at that base level are looking for those solutions. They expect that either the brands are sorting that out or at the very least the government sorting that out. And the other way, we also provide benefit back into societies. When you take something like a garment's different, everybody's garment is different. It's kind of designed a different way. If different materials is a blended fibers of single fiber, as I said, we focus on polyester cotton blends. We can do the 100% polyester, 100% cotton. So we can do your favorite nice shirt to hang around the house or your run shirt when you're playing footy. But when you talk about workwear.

They don't have an end of life solution because there's often security attached to that. You can't have Air New Zealand Pilot uniforms floating around the beaches of Bali. You just say about. So what would normally happen is they get burnt or buried, right? That's not a great outcome for any. And so when those companies want to report their ESG reportings, what do you do with your closing? Or we burn them or bury them. It's like well, that's not a good, a good outcome. And so, but going through block text, you know that we've, we haven't, we don't use the word destroy, that's a bad word in our language. We talk about resource recovery or processing because we're a man of manufacturing process and, and we don't talk about those clothes that we don't want. We don't think of your favorite, you know, grow good T shirt that's got a hole in it. We don't think of it as waste. We think of that as a feedstock. It's a mindset point of view. Right. So it has value to us as value to you.

Yeah.

And so when we talk about garments, they've got buttons and zippers and those sorts of things that need to be removed. We've got a, we've got third party relationships across the, what we call the NDI sector, which is our National Disability Income Scheme. So we work directly with disadvantaged and disabled people to, to help us remove those items. We're very, very clear relationship in regards to the type of work, their employment conditions. Everybody gets paid the right supporting wages. We've grown that now from 10 to more than 100. At this present moment we're also working across three correctional services in Queensland. We work directly with prisoners across those centres. That scheme was, was initially started as a small trial. It's now it's grown into three prisons. It'll probably, probably double that the next four months into more prisons. Those prisoners are not only got gainful employment and wages but also it's a way from, gain trust within the hierarchy of the prison system. And so we've had, we've had prisoners who worked in, worked with us and are now working in the welding area gaining their welding tickets so they can go out to get future jobs. And so there's a great opportunity to work through that. They are also now making the cutting room tables for us that we're now moving into our other social impact areas and we've got some, we've got some big announcement coming up.

With a very large social impact company that's got a large Australian base to work directly with women who found themselves in the margins of life. And so for us this is just a necessary part of what we need to do with business. I could have gone and bought a whole bunch of robots to do this and automated it, but having the opportunity to play in that social impact sector, provide consistent work to areas that require consistent work and to provide opportunity for future skill sets and also the Opportunity then to move on maybe into the next lot of block text employment. Because everybody who works for us, they're all new jobs. So we've kind of got this opportunity to start to create these work pathways, whether it be apprenticeships or whether it be specific skill sets that grow from the social impact into a full time employment that they're all the jobs that many people said to me, why are you employing people? It's expensive to deploy people. Why don't you just get robots? It's like, well that, that's not the purpose of the business. It's like we've got a strong environment impact, we've got a strong social impact. And those two, those two sit very closely to us. And so the onboarding of the next lot of social partners, they've got really strong social impact but they want to bring in, they want to bring environmental impact in their business. So now what we're seeing is the sharing of those different impacts. By combining in a partnership, you get to both share that, those skill sets, but also those that impact across social and environmental, which I think is actually a higher purpose than being regulated by government to meet these mandates. As a big company. I think that's the smarter way of thinking about things. And so if you talk about circular economy, we think about waste and change, but we often don't think about value exchange within that circular economy. You could have a circular economy of value exchanges that both companies can then share and release value that they've created either individually or together. And I think that is really easy to do. People think it's difficult, but it's not. You need the willingness of the companies. But also if you're working with companies like B Corpse, where you're already kind of starting from the start, same base, it's not like you're having to retool that business to make it fit within that partnership. So it's a much easier transition. And, and, but also I think the value exchange is much greater because you're both coming from the same point of purpose.

Yeah, totally. You sound very. There's another cool company just down here called MedSouth who based on Christchurch. I'll connect you with Ollie there as well, the CEO. So he, he does medical products repurposing. So yeah, products that typically a single use, center, landfill, he takes them, repurpose them and again he's got people where he's providing employment opportunities for people with intellectual disability to give them opportunities in mainstream employment. It's just interesting that you're both doing something very similar With a very similar mindset in terms of creating opportunities with people. Yeah. And I think it's interesting with the whole AI talk and oh, you know, we're all going to be out of jobs. It's like, well if we choose to put us all out of jobs, then yes, but equally we could choose not to put ourselves out of jobs. And what if we created some jobs that had some real meaning and some real purpose and provided opportunities and progression? Isn't that a nicer way to do it? It just, it just seems like the, the AI rush is for there to be one person at the top of the AI pile who runs everything, who's earning all the money from, but we're all at home doing nothing.

It. Yeah.

Not quite sure how that, how that all stacks up.

No, I agree.

We're just, society is vast. You know, there's so many different layers and everybody's trying to go, you're A, you're B, you'll see. It's not, it's not like that. And every time I go and spend time with our decommissioning partners, it's, it is some of the best time of my month. They are enthusiastic about what they're doing. They're often wanting to know what we're doing with the materials. The companies that the clients of are able to then provide longer term plans in regards to how many clients they can take on what sort of workspaces. Because we're providing a 52 week opportunity as opposed to here's four weeks to do one job and then nothing and then here's four weeks to another job and then that also, that allows I think importantly what doesn't often get realize is these people have carers and those carers can then have, they can then go and do life, go back into the workforce, go back into study. And so there's a, the secondary and third benefits that are going on and then you also have to have a conversation back into the government to show where businesses can really interact within these government supported areas and what the government needs to do to support those government supported areas so then businesses can take a greater advantage or of that opportunity to work. It's incredibly rewarding and look, it's not, it's not always perfect because life isn't perfect. But we, we've had great experiences with all our, our social impact partners to date and you know, I, I don't want that to change and I think there's opportunities now we're talking about how do we bring some of those partners or Some of those clients into our, into our facility because they've actually gained a whole bunch of knowledge about textiles and how textiles behave that we could actually utilize fully into our facility.

It was the same because, because we were talking to you when I was hanging out. I did a contract with Kilmartic Enterprises down here. We were sort of scheming because you. I think it was just. It would have been just before COVID.

Just before COVID yeah, yeah.

And you were kind of like, oh, is it maybe easy as long as this thing in New Zealand than Aussie maybe. And I was trying to tempt you over the. The ditch. And if people want to have an experience of what connecting to social impact could look like in your business, just go and ring the team at Kilmatic Enterprises. Or if you're in Auckland, there's Altus Enterprises. If there's all over the world, you know, wherever you're listening, there are these enterprises where they're trying to help people. And in many ways I think it is fair to say that people with disability, and particularly those with intellectual disability are the. At the furthest margins of society because they. The education system is just not catered for their needs whatsoever. I think something like 90% of. Of inmates have got a, an undiagnosed either intellectual disability or dyslexia or some kind of communication issue. And that is just a really interesting stat to reflect on that. You know, that's how marginalized some of these people are. But with a tiny bit of care, coaching and some love and attention, they could be fully bought into a mainstream life. And seeing that in action, I think people listen to go, oh yeah, sure, it sounds great, whatever, but actually go and go into one of these places and meet these people and see the difference that having a job makes to someone's life. I think that that's like I say, when you kind of, kind of go, everyone kind of going, oh, actually I'm quite happy for the robot to have my job. Although my theory is that the robots will take all our jobs and then after a day they'll go, hang on, these jobs are you come back and do your jobs, we're going down the pub.

No, no, I agree. I think it's, it's the other layers of like that we all get from the workforce. It's a social interaction, it's the sharing of your time with another human being and all those, those different layers that you don't get. You, you have your own relationship at home with your family and then you have your kind of your work life relationship. And they're kind of, they're kind of, they're not, you're not different people, but it's different experiences. And it's the same whether you're able bodied or non able bodied or whatever your situation is. And this is really important. But your point about.

Even if somebody's tripped or find themselves in the margins doesn't mean that that's where they should have to stay. And businesses, if you have the opportunity as a business to help one person or 10 people, 100 people, then I think that's part of the social purpose of a business. Right. And so I don't think that's, that's not a nice to have. That is just part of how you operate the business. And so it was been a really interesting, like I said, it's been a great experience for us. It hasn't always been easy. Nothing is ever perfect and we've had to work really closely with that. And there's been some social impact partners who have come and gone because we, at what our value we were offering to them didn't quite fit the value that they were trying to offer to their clients. And so that's all part of understanding where you go from there. But you know, we're getting better at delivering our value to those, to those, those partners. And we're getting better with understanding what those partners need from us. And so we just keep evolving from that point of view. But everybody, whether it's the managers or the state government or the prison, the correctional services, all of the people who are decision makers have done all they can do to open doors. They pushed through bureaucracy, got rid of red tape. It's just like how do we make this happen? And every time we want it, we want to expand capacity. Great. In fact, they're the ones saying to us we want to do more. Can you not get more? Can we want to do more? And so as we scale, we're going to have great opportunity to take over that capacity. So that, that's been a good circle. And so we have to check back in 12 months and I'll see how we're going 100%.

But I think it's just testament to the compelling vision and purpose that you have in your organization.

It's.

You know, I think I've mentioned this a few times recently. You know, it's quite, it's, it's the easy and obvious path to kind of get angry that the fact that the world isn't perfect and we should be doing things better. But People don't want to hang out with those people. But what you've done and what a bunch of our other guests are all about is, okay, yeah, we get that this can be better, but we're actually just going to roll up our sleeves and give it a bloody good nudge and create this compelling vision that's, that's almost like obvious in terms of its purpose and contribution, that people can just look at it and if it vibes with them, they're just like, actually, I want to be a part of this because this is just, this is cool. And I think that's the key to, to anyone who's like, thinking about starting an impact purpose, you know, sustainably focused businesses. Don't be angry with it. Build a. For me, I always say it's about having the best party on the street. Just be having a house party that everyone on the streets go, hang on a minute, that sounds really. Felt like everyone's laughing and they got free beers and wines and, you know, they're drinking responsibly, obviously, but, you know, they're having a great, they're having a great time. And I think that's, it's clear that that's what, what you've done. So go you.

No, thanks. You just. You've got to find people who believe in you. But you got to turn up every day. You got to turn up with the passion. You can't, I can't turn up and, and, and I can't have a, you know, an 8 out of 10 day. It's got to be 10 out of 10 every day. Now that's not always easy. But everybody else in the business who was, who was working really hard to, for this to be success are turning up. And so you've got to be in there and be the Pied Piper, you know, just gotta, you've got to be also you've got to keep, you got to be the visionary. You can't get stuck in the bits that don't work. By its very nature, manufacturing doesn't work. There's times when machines break down or it doesn't quite join together or, you know, the truck breaks down bringing the feedstock or a thousand things. I mean, as we start to scale this business, we really only turned down the taps March and April this year. So we're really starting to scale up our manufacturing. But I'm going to need 45,000 garments per day when this plant is running. 45,000, that's at our 4,000 ton per annum stage one. We're already building stage two within the factory and that will take us to 10,000 tonnes of processing per year and we'll need 115,000 garments per day.

Day on day, on day. So the logistics of that is incredible. So all the stuff that happens in regards to gathering up our garments, logistically picking them up, getting them to the decommissioning partners, getting the trading company and then getting it to our factory because I can't store all that stuff on site, I've only got limited capacity. Is a whole business in itself. We've had to build that itself with any company in the world that is handling a full end to end ecosystem where we collect from the clients, we do all the pre preparation before the processing, we process and we create our two raw materials of recycled pet pellets and cellulose clay. And so you know, I can't just ignore one part of the business at the detriment, another part of the business. So every day there's something that is not quite where we'd like it to be or we've got to work harder, we've got to think. But I've also got to be thinking about, you know, is the second factory in the New Zealand which is what we're already thinking about now what does that look like? Engaging stakeholders. We're over there in Auckland early this month. Great meetings with the government, great meetings with stakeholders across, across, across the region. Now we've got to do the road work to say well how much, how much textile waste is there in the country? What's the appetite is the people who want to support us? The government wants to support us, do industry want to support us? The consumers want to support us. And then most importantly for the raw material that we manufacture is their customers. Do people want to buy recycled material? You know I don't have them at the moment but we've got, we've got a variety of, you know, own branded products from coat hangers to sunglasses to all sorts of things that were once clothing and these are all brand new products coming to market which are incredibly exciting but you need to, you need to find customers to, to buy that. So over above all the wonderful effort we've done from a building a great business and the science point of view this is where, this is where the rest of society has to back things and say hang on, I really believe in the planet. Why am I buying something that is a virgin material when I could be buying recycled material that's the same quality. And so we as consumers have the greatest amount of power I think we undervalue that. Right. We kind of get caught by buying it from. So it's like we can make a decision. If you want a brand to change the way they behave, then tell them that. Or go and buy from the, you know, go in front. Buy from the B corp who really prioritizes environment and situation. It's a really simple process and I guarantee you industry changes so fast.

I was listening to a podcast last night and they were talking about this, like how do you create societal change? And they said fundamentally it, it comes down to changing what we value. And it is as simple as that. It's like we, if we value new, you know, un.

Tarnished, unblemished, you know, then people will seek new. So maybe you do need to get onto your Tik Tok and your twatter book and all the rest of it and get your influencers, you know, hey, look at me with my recycled sunglasses. Aren't I sexy and exciting?

I might get some of the younger team to do that.

Yeah, yeah. Have you. Do you know Paul Fresa from Sustainable Salons? I should introduce you to him.

No, I think I have met him a long time ago. Yes, yes. Yeah, he's done great work in that space.

Yeah, See he, we, he was my last interviewee. Whether it comes out sequentially to be confirmed. But a couple of things he mentioned, he, he called what you guys are doing above ground mining and I thought that was such a cool phrase. He said, you know, give me the most die hard. I just want to make as much money as possible. And he's like, look, I'm not a greenie. I'm into mining just like you are. But I'm above ground mining. I'm taking all the dirt and all the crap that people have left behind and I'm mining that to make good money and make a difference. And he said that was a real key way of shifting particularly more center right to right leaning people who weren't. Who are you recycling hair and plastic bottles and I'm a background miner. So I thought that was pretty cool. And I think, yeah, you know, very similar again, they've just launched a range of, of products from some of their recycled materials and stuff as well.

So it's all going pretty good. So like how did you even get into all this to begin with? So like the media stuff. But so you know, young Graham, growing up, were you always picking up, you know, stuff on the streets, waste and putting it in the bin and trying to, you know, did you have your own recycle Were you picking up the aluminium cans or the bottles and taking them to the bottle shop and getting the 5 cents back or whatever back in the day or. Yeah. How did you.

No, like, I can't claim any of that, any of that, you know, that, that, that good living or, you know, being the right thing. So I was, I was incredibly distracted at school. I didn't like authority, I didn't like to go to school. It was boring. And so I, I mean, I got through my education, but I, I always wanted to.

I just, There was other things to do. I wanted to be entertained. I had a strong curiosity. I just, I didn't find that at school and so I moved. We had a local television station and I wanted to go and work there. It took me nearly two years after leaving school of basically annoying them nearly every day to the point I was playing on the indoor cricket team. Right. Eventually a job came up and they said, do you want it?

It's like, yes, my plan is worse.

That was great because television gave you, like I said before, it gave me a great understanding of a whole lot of. Not only from a technology point of view, but also from understanding topics. And so I went through a period of. I did all the production so cameraman, you know, studio director, did outside broadcasts, editing. Eventually found myself moving from my country town in Queensland down into the big city in Brisbane. And I worked there in the news department. So that gave me an understanding what it looked like to work in a large, large news gathering organization. And then, you know, it's important about deadlines. You know, if you promise to do something, then the News starts at 6:00pm it doesn't start at 6:01. Right. So it had to be done by that point of view. And then I moved to Sydney where I started working on lifestyle channels and the lifestyle programs during the 90s. And. And then I think that's where my first opportunity. I mean, I kind of.

My job change between Brisbane and Sydney was. I'd mentioned to somebody, do you know anybody in Brazil? Sydney? Because I'm kind of, I want to change. And they, and they said yes. And I. And they rang somebody up and they said that was Wednesday. They said, oh, I'm. I'm only, I'm on holidays, but I'm. I'm back in the office on Friday. Can you come down? So I flew down on the Friday and did half a day's work with them and then I was back. I took a job that was back there in two weeks, which is kind of how my Life has kind of rolled. There's not a lot of deep thinking about stuff. Is this an opportunity? Let's crack on. And so, but what I said, I've choose where television was making a fundamental change from using videotape to using computers. And I saw that happening. I fundamentally saw that there was going to be an industry shift. And when I look back I can kind of see that that's kind of not necessarily a superpower, but it's certainly where I position myself in my work career. And I was able to get some training on these new computers that did that made television. And then I was able to buy the first one of the PC based into the country. And then, then that industry took off. And that's pretty much how we do it. I mean I can edit television on my phone these days, but I never, but, but, but there's always an element of risk. I mean we, we just had our second daughter. She was, you know, she's only a few months old. And I remember sitting at our kitchen and table riding at a, a loan agreement for $163,000 for a computer which is effectively a Mac, a Mac with some software and 27 gigabyte of hard drive. And I paid a thousand dollars a gigabyte.

You imagine the sales guy going, I bloody sold one.

Yeah.

You know, my wife for more than 25 years, just look at me, it's like, okay, so, but we, we actually owned more on that computer. I mean, how's this for a mine, mine mess? We had more, more for the computer than we owned on a home mortgage.

You should have bought 10 of them.

But then I think this, the other thing, when you kind of think about altruism, everybody kind of thinks, oh, you know, it's, it's, you know, you start off and away you go. I remember I had to design the suite. I'd rented a room in a, in another production facility. We painted the walls ourselves. My daughter lying on the floor, you know, kind of rolling around the mat because you could hardly lift her head up off the, off the ground. We, and for the first month I sat there and stared at those walls because I had no business until a friend of mine said she, she was a, she had a nail tech she now sell on and she said, I'd like to do a video about what I do. And so that was my first thing I did. I did a video from a friend of mine for a nail salon. And from there then, you know, we had, we bought many suites and many computers and had lots of employees and that culminated with then moving with a couple of partners. We had one of Australia's largest independent production companies with 65 full time staff making primetime TV across Australia. We work for Nat Geo, Animal Planet and Discovery internationally. It was great. And that was all going swimmingly well until my wife had the wonderful opportunity to move to, to Singapore to take up an Asia Pacific role with the international company she was working for. And so I sold out of the business and we packed up the kids and we went to Singapore for a bit over four years and during that time I dabbled in a whole bunch of things but I, I started to triathlons and marathons and kind of tried to get myself from being a, a large overweight.

Television executive who spent more time at lunches and after din drinks than he did exercising. Eventually we end up in London where my wife took an international role and I was still, I had the great opportunity to play Mr. Mum or be the support for her and, and also the kids while they were going through school and that was, that was a, that was an incredible opportunity. But I was also doing a bunch of this exercise and by the time I got to London I'd done a bunch of races. And if you ever do a race you get a free T shirt. And so they were great. You put on after the event and you'd wear it home on the planes. Everybody knew you'd done the event but any other time you wouldn't wear it because they, they didn't feel very nice when you put them on. If you wore them for a couple of hours. It smelled like it being lost in a dog box for the last month or so. And so my business had got on me and said well, I'm racing with thousands of people and so these sponsors aren't getting any more exposure than sort of after the race then and it should be ongoing system. What if I could make something that made people was better to wear and people wouldn't wear them? And so I again back into the TV mind did a lot of research and I found that the clothes that I wear and that you wear and everybody wears were actually not great from an environmental point of view. As I said, polyester is a fossil fuel based material and it doesn't degrade, not for a very long time. And, and cotton, depending on where it's grown can use an awful lot of water and an awful lot of pesticides. And so that didn't make sense to me given that you kind of thought that my clothes shouldn't feel like they're killing me or the planet.

And so especially when you're doing it in a thing that's about health and fitness and vitality and being vigorous. Yeah, it's, it's. As a good mate of mine, Dave, Canadian Dave, he always said, he always found it quite ironic that in New Zealand, probably the same in Aussie, you know, you do a marathon and at the end they have a sausage sizzle with the worst piece of meat in the worst piece of sliced bread with some ketchup on. It's like. But I suppose, well, you just run a marathon so you can have a crap sausage into bread.

That's exactly right. No, I completely agree. So we. So I did a lot of research and then I worked out that there were fibers and they're really early and people. There wasn't a lot, at least, like you're saying, people knew that they were better fiber or better for the environment, but nobody was buying them because there just wasn't the uptake or the interest. And so I made a few phone calls and you know, with no background in the fashion and textile industry, I managed to persuade a bunch of companies to provide me with some fibers. And, and then I then had to kind of go, okay, what do I do with that? And so I literally had to look up, you know, how do you make fibers, how do you make fabrics? Like, how do you, how does the industry work? And so I ended up finding a facility in spinning mill in Korea. And I called them up and I said, I've got all these fibers you've never heard of, but I want to make some fabric. And so over an 18 month period, we made four fabrics, three natural plant based and one with a kind of a new wave polyester that you could break down. Then I defined somebody who cared. So we did a Kickstarter campaign and we called it the greenest T shirt on the planet. And the blend of fibers we use meant that we used about 1% of what it would normally the water you would use to make a normal cotton T shirt. So that gave us an in for people who cared about things. And so we successfully funded the Kickstarter, which meant I could kind of go, okay, well there is people out there in the world who really care that like I care. And then, then we proceeded to make a range of sportswear tops and launched out sportswear company called Cassaga Athletic. And.

That kind of got me on the journey of really understanding the industry. And we, you know, I would, I would all, all my manufacturing in Asia, I would actually go there and sit on the floor. I'd get them to take me around the factory. I'd get them to explain to me how things would work. And everybody's really, really generous. But you kind of find these really, really bizarre experiences, right? You're going, okay, you've got this. You believe that these big industries have got it all nutted out, but they kind of have and they kind of haven't, right? And so there's points where I walked around this testing area and there was two washing machines, and one. One said Adidas and one said Nike. And I said. I said, what are they for? They said, oh, these are. They're the washing machines for Adidas and Nike. I said, why? I said, that's how we do the color fast test. So. So you know that that's the magic, right? You put in a washing machine 10 or 12 times, it's like if it comes out the right color, crack on. Yeah. So I think these. These are really interesting things that I've then taken into this, this next stage of business. But it's been an incredible experience to go from making television, and especially when I was. When I was. When we were living in Singapore, I was working for Discovery, making documentaries across the Asian region, indigenous documentaries, which is incredibly humbling when you're trying to make a program in a language you don't actually. You can't speak or understand.

But you're there to support the emerging television industry there as part of that initiative through Discovery and through the government, to find yourself sitting on a floor with a swatch pack, deciding on what shade of green or red you want for your garment. And you're kind of going. And then you're having conversations where they're talking about design and neckline. And then you come back to Australia and I was working with a designer here, and I was putting the shirts on, and I'd go for a run for 500 meters, come back, say, adjust this, adjust. Then I go for run for 5Ks, come back, adjust this, adjust that, go for a run for 20ks, come back and go, right, all those kind of layers, which is essentially what we've done here in block text. But I had to physically do that myself. And that in itself has been a great learning curve. It's exactly what most entrepreneurs do. It's the stuff that you've done, you just. You have to go out and do your own road work to really understand, understand. Do you yourself. Do you 100 yourself believe in the mission that you've set yourself on? Because if you don't stop now because it's too bloody hard. If you fundamentally, if you don't wake up every morning with your tummy aching to get to work to make this happen, don't do it because it's not the right business for you, there'll be another one. But if you don't, if it doesn't make you make you jump out of bed every day, even when you're completely exhausted and you're not being the best husband or the best father or the best business partner, don't do it because.

It'S equally wonderfully to achieve it, but it's equally really hard to live a life like this every day if you don't believe in them.

100 agree? Yeah. Yeah.

It's been an interesting. Almost eight years in business. What is that? Right. Yeah. 20, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. 20, 20. Yeah, eight years. Pretty much actually. Eight years. Yeah. It's. I wouldn't. Yeah. If I didn't believe in what I was doing, I would have given up probably seven and a half years ago.

And, and like you said before, it's like then, like you come up with these ideas, but then where does purpose. How do you get purpose into that? Where does that kind of meld itself? And one of the things, we talked about it before, one of the things I did from a business side because I knew that environmentally it was the right thing to do, but also I knew people cared, but they didn't quite understand how they could, how they could care. And I also didn't. I'd never run a business that had a. Fundamentally was based around environmental impact. And so that was when I discovered B Corp. And the opportunity to understand that there was, there was actually a framework for me to set up a business from the start that I didn't. That I could get for free for a start. But then if I chose to then certify, then I knew that I was going to belong to a community. And I was one of the early companies in Australia and Cassaga went on to be, you know, best in the world for the first four years until we kind of, kind of transitioned into working at Blocktex.

But the B Corp gave me the opportunity to, yeah. Set up that framework to have, to have some learnings for those who've gone before me, but then also that like, you know, to meet people like yourself and across the world to just hear their stories and to learn from how they may be, what they're encountering. And I think importantly, how do you articulate what you're trying to achieve on a brand level, but then also importantly back down into your staff level and then into your customer level. So all those things have been really important. And whilst blocktex is not a big corporate, this present moment, that's certainly part of this journey going forward. But we've got some, we've got some other critical pieces, namely chemistry and advanced manufacturing to get aligned first before we, we layer that, that opportunity on us. But we already got the, we already got the social impact already embedded into a business model.

Yeah.

Smart decision. I think, you know, people often ask us, oh, you know, when should we look at doing B Corp startups? Yep, definitely worth looking at it when you're a startup so long as you've got the bandwidth and don't let, and I think you're a classic example of like, yeah, if you put the focus and attention on B Corp right now, it would take you off the prize of actually getting to the next, like getting to that next ledge that you need to get to. And I think, yeah, yeah, don't, don't. It's that everything's a balancing act. There's no black and whites, it's gray.

Yeah, don't, don't let the, the certification get in the way of the long term success of the business. And there's a, I think there's a few examples of companies that I've seen where, yeah, they've really tried to prioritize the social impact or the environmental impact but they haven't actually had the sustainable business in the background to enable that and you need to have that sustainable business. So yeah, I have no qualms. Like I say, I mean from what you're doing and from what you know of the B Corp assessment, you'd be smashing a bunch of environmental impact business models and a bunch of community, sorry, worker impact business models. So yeah, you would easily be, what would you reckon? I think you'd probably be about a 110, 120B corp easy. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's a really important point. Like I said, B Corp gives you the tools for free. Whether you certify is up to you. But the most important thing is that you, you behave like a B Corp whether you're certified or not. And, and, and so if you can behave like a big cup and then when the timing is right, then do your certification. Well then that makes complete sense. You already, you already achieved so much. So many companies like I, I encountered as well, they said, oh, I've got to be a big cop and they set this time frame and they smashed into it and the whole experience was lost. And, and they, they might have become B Corps, but the, the effort to become B Corp far outweighed the journey and the, in the. And the, the reason you're doing it. And I think it should be a something that's part of your, your journey, not the ultimate end goal. And so if you don't, if you're not incorporating those foundations as you're going, a certification is not going to make you.

Operate a certain way. Right.

It's like a better business. Yeah, totally. It's got to be baked in. It's got to be. Yeah, it's got to be part of the DNA. Yeah. No 100. Yeah. So. So when did you certify as a B Corp with Kusaga?

2017, I believe.

Yeah. So pretty early in the piece. And when did you start the business?

About the same time.

Okay.

Pretty much. Yeah.

As soon as you could. You got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I knew then, you know, we knew that that that's what we needed to do. And, and it was. And like I said, the framework was there and it wasn't, it wasn't overly difficult because I didn't have very complex business. So there was only me and I, and I knew directly my supply chain. You know, I was, you know, I was in their living rooms having dinner. So that was. So I could trace all that kind of stuff and then we could validate stuff and we only had a small inventory, so that was all pretty quick. 2017 got the days. No, it must have been earlier than that.

It might be, I'm gonna say because we certified. I certified 2016 and we were number six in New Zealand. But New Zealand was. So maybe.

Yeah, maybe 20, 23. So. No. Well it has to be a. Because block Texas as my, my. I'm going to blame it on the travel. 17 days this month so far.

We certified in 20. Block text was formed in 2018, so it must be four years. So it must be more like 2012 or 13.

Yeah, that would ring a bell. Yeah. Because eagle protect be caught number one. I'm pretty sure they were 2012. They'd be got number one in New Zealand. So yeah, that. That would ring more truth. Someone can fact check it and let. Let both of us know maybe.

Time flies, man.

Yeah, exactly.

When you're trying to change the world.

Yeah. It's either. It's either jet lag or there's lots of people balls on juggling.

Lots of juggling. Yeah.

And so the crowdfunding. How did that go? Any, any top tips for, for crowdfunding? There's been quite a few B corps that have done okay with crowdfunding etique over here. They've done it twice, really successfully. Who's the other one? Well, Kickstarter themselves. I think they are still a B corp. So that the. One of the crowdfunding platforms is themselves. But yeah. Thoughts? Would you, would you do it again? Yeah. Top tips for anyone thinking about it.

It's really matured since we did the green T shirt on the planet campaign. And I think for businesses at any stage, if you've got a product that you think might have value into the community, where people are really going to get value, not only contributing to your success, your growth, but also you're able to provide things often craft breweries do very well because you know you can get a discount on your beer that's ongoing but also that's really important because you've got the continual touch point and I think that's really important for businesses. We've looked at it, we looked at it from a block text point of view. The challenge we'd face is that we've got manufacturing equipment, right? So I've got a piece of equipment that worth more than a million dollars. So you don't get a lot for your dollar for your dollars. In the advanced manufacturing point of view, it also from the. I, I think there's certain types of business they really suit for us. For Cassaga, like I said, it gave us. I'd already. We didn't do it for the money. We did it to understand whether anybody cared. But it was a great way to, to. You had to then create a whole bunch of collateral. So you had to understand what your, what your key message was. You know, how do you articulate your mission statement? How do you, how are you describing the value you might be providing the product? It made you work on who your target market is. And then it was literally, my wife's got a background in media, I got a background in media. But we worked full on for a month driving that campaign. It was hard work, right? You have that initial sort of one to four days where all your friends and family tip in and everybody's kind of getting involved and then it starts to trail off and trail off. I think what we're seeing now with the crowdfunding campaigns is they've got a, they've got a probably a six week lead into that, that launch. So it's already well established in the marketplace. But then Also, there's a whole media campaign that kind of plays out during that raise, and I think that's really smart. So the more you can preempt your launch is really important. But then you also got to make sure you've got continual stuff to keep people involved. Because somebody said to me one day, I said, we were discussing this. Well, Graham, you need to remember, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to go and fund a Kickstarter campaign today. Right? There's got to be a reason. And I've got to say, I know some of our friends who we were catching up during that month, they're saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to contribute, I'm going to contribute. I want to get a couple of shirts. And literally they're like buying in the last hour because they've got, oh, I meant to do that, right. So we're all guilty of it. And so you can't rely on your friends and families to drag you along. You have to go out and actually find that market that you think you can sell your product to. So I think these, these things can be quite. I think there's. There's two ways you can play out. It can be really well.

Directed and marketed and it can be a success. But that doesn't, that doesn't guarantee that's a successful business, because you can do that and not actually know that you've guarded the right. People are going to buy it because it might be people who go, there's kind of cool, I'm going to get under, but they may never buy another product off you. So I think the most important thing is do all that hard work, but make sure you absolutely know that the people who are coming on board that you're talking to the right market segment, that you can then sell product into that market second for years to come, because then that's how you have a sustainable business. So there's a reality to everything that we all face. And I know you faced it yourself, where you have to look in that mirror and go, you know, am I, am I, am I a success or am I not necessarily a failure? Or am I actually. Am I. What am I pretending not to know? Am I telling myself something that isn't true because I want it to be true? Because just because you want it to be true doesn't mean it's actually true. So I think that's, that's one of the real hard things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly analyzing and doubting and, and trying to Work out. Are you making the right decision? Is this the right thing for you? Should I be doing this? Does anybody care? At times my business partner often goes, just us in the world that care about this. But we know that's not true, right? There's plenty of people who care about this and I think we picked the right place because clothing is something that we all wear. It's something that allows us to identify who we are. It's something that allows us to identify into our, whether it's our ethnic, ethnic group, when our country group, whether it's our local football group. Like it's just, it's defining but also it allows us to then to, to express ourselves. And so none of us want those clothes that we love and we love to death to end up hurting the planet that we're living on. And so what we do expect as consumers, we expect that somebody is solving that problem and that pro, that those somebody is the industry that's making it and it's the government that's making sure that the industry is doing the right thing by the environment. And then hopefully there's a couple of, like I said, a couple of gray haired entrepreneurs who are going, hey, we'll have a crack at that, just, just come and support us and we'll get going. But because I know communities are going, I mean for instance here in Australia we haven't got to New Zealand, I'd love to bring it to New Zealand. We're doing a, we do a linen collection, daily collection campaign with local councils because local councils here in Australia bear the brunt of landfill. So everything that's going to land for the local councils have to manage and so they're looking to reduce landfill. Now in Australia the average, the average linen cupboard holds about 10 kg worth of linen. So I don't know what your linen cupboards like Tim, but you know, some people, they've got linen for the last 20 years they just didn't want to throw out. They've never had the opportunity. So we do a, we do effectively linen drive and we call it give it give a sheet for the planet.

Nice.

Yeah.

See what I've done there? So we've just completed our 12th or 13. The numbers are, just had the numbers before We've collected nearly 30,000 kilograms of unwanted linen which equates to an offset of nearly 900,000 CO2 equivalents. So it's a massive opportunity from that point of view. But what it also does, it gives the community an opportunity to turn up and drop that. So over the Six hour period. On our last event a week ago we had 250 cars. That's 40 cars an hour. Wow, that's so it's, it's a busy time. And so those, that engagement is continuing. Continuing. We're starting to grow that brand here in Australia and I'd like to think that that is going to become a, you know, at least a, if not a monthly event, if not a bi monthly event and then have the opportunity to start to bring that to, to New Zealand because not only is a good thing from the environment, from landfill diversion, but they're a lot of fun. You know, everybody turns up and has a good giggle.

It sounds like you have a bit of fun for that one.

Yeah, I like, yeah, like your thoughts around the crowdfunding because I guess if you do a crowdfunding and it fails, as in you don't meet the money, you've at least had possibly enough exposure to get enough customers to kind of get you going. I also like the thought of the fact that it's kind of like, hey, hey, Dave and Sally. I know you said you were gonna buy one, but I, you do know that I can actually see who has bought one.

I know there's a point where there's a point.

There'S no formalities to ring people up. I thought you'd buy a T shirt but you know, but you're right with the, so that, that database, I engage with that database and so I would call people up and say, what do you think of the shirt? Would you have like different colors, how's the size fit? What motivates you? So you have this direct. So I was doing that during the campaign just because that was just free advertising, free marketing, free design knowledge to say, you know, what made you buy this? And I wrote all that sorts down. Then you start to look at what are the consistent themes. You're getting back. So what do people like about it? What people don't like about in the areas where they told you the bits they didn't like about were better than the bits they like because you can fix it. Yeah, absolutely. So you're exactly right for that reason alone if you want to spend the time, it is such a good value. It's better than going spending money on third party consultancy is going to cost you, you know, 50 grand to tell you what you could have done for nothing.

Yeah. And it's that whole like when Richard Branson launched Virgin Airlines, he, he flew on as many British Airway flights as he could. Different routes, different classes and he just turned to the person next to him, said, what's the five things you like and don't like about this, about your trip so far? And he collated that list and said, right, when we build an airline, it has to have this and we don't do any of this.

Yeah, it's.

It's absolutely so shockingly simple sometimes, isn't it?

It's like I said before, it's got.

To be more complicated than this.

No, it's the road work. You've got to do the road work and the road works really hard because you've got to take your ego and you're going to put it so far down the pockets of your pants and you just got to accept what people are going to say to you. Right. And you're not going to judge them. You can't come with any opinions. Just go, well, what do you like? What do you don't like? Because that's always makes the world wonderful places that we're all actually different and. And if we're all the same, that would make a very boring place. But also there's times when people tell you what they think, you kind of go, I don't agree with that. But that's not for you to agree on. Disagree. Because if, then, if that's your customer. Yeah, well, you know, you've got to give them what they want. So.

Yeah. Although in my sale with my sales trading hat on, but you. We sort of say the customer's not always right, but they are the customer. So you might not believe they're right, but that's their opinion. And. Yeah, but I think it's like, I think business and launching business and particularly edgy. You know, you've clearly had like. I think you and I are quite similar in that we like edgy new things. Like to be buying a computer for some ridiculous amount of money, but it's just been launched. Like, not everyone's doing that, but I think it's, you know, business and stuff like that is. It's often like good comedy. It's all in the timing. And you know, Kusaga, you were clearly ahead of the curve in terms of socially and environmentally responsible sportswear or just clothing in general to that level. And then what you're doing now, it's kind of like, you know, you're just ahead of the curve. But I think you're probably slightly better at the curve. I was like eight years ahead of the curve with the whole B Corp thing, so what do I know? But yeah, I think it's hard to get it exactly right. And I think sometimes. Well, again, listen to a couple of other podcasts. You know, I listen to a lot of other podcasts. For me, I think fundamentally, life is about struggle. And if you didn't have the struggle, if you didn't have the tough times, like, if you just. If you and Adrian had written down on some stuff on a piece of paper, there happened to be a chemist sitting next to you, like, oh, yeah, I could whip that up this afternoon and your whole factory had been a success the next day. It wouldn't be as much. Looking back, I don't think it would be as satisfying and as much fun where you've had a lot of tribulations and trials, Covid and trying to get funding. I don't know, I just kind of feel like, for whatever reason, humanity is. Is built around the idea that there needs to be some struggle in it. Otherwise, it's. It's not worth doing.

Yeah, you got to have a little bit of suffer in there, and sometimes you don't want to admit that, but I think what I've. What I've taken out of this business is.

People.

If.

If people believe in something, then you get so much support. Right. So you've got to identify that. So understanding. How do you. How do you influence people to. To not only realize the knowledge that they have that they can share to provide that value back to you, then how do you harness them all together to kind of go and, and know that they're only on that journey for a period of time and they're happy to help us? So it's kind of like. It's like a. Like a tram moving through a city, and people get on and get off. Off, get on and get off. Right. And when they're on their part of the tram, part of the journey, and then they get off because that was their time. They didn't need to be anymore. But, but what we get from the people we've worked with is constant support or calling us out on social media, whatever. Great to see you there. And it's. And it's, you know, they're. They're all part of the DNA of our business. And then the other thing is.

The relationship Adrian I've developed as business partners is. Has been phenomenal. I've had a few business partners in my time. He, him and I have learned how to work together. We're both completely impatient, completely driven, unreasonable individuals with a lot of passion. And we've learned how to work together as equals and supporting. But Then also be able to then drive and bring on to us those really key technical pieces. And. But you bring those key technical staff onto the business. They're already here because they've got a passion for it. But then you've got to integrate their skill sets within an organization that is. That is evolving together forward. And that. I think sometimes that struggle is equally as challenging as a piece of equipment that isn't quite working the way you want it to work. But.

What I've seen my team grow from in the last 18 months, where they've actually created businesses that didn't exist, they've integrated the social impact partners, integrated logistics, where we've got product going out to customers, on top of all that is in phenomenal. Just watching them grow and really own their business units has been incredibly satisfying. And the struggles of sitting down and forcing them to write operational plans and to meet deadlines and meet milestones and be accountable, all of that's worth it. Just to watch them stand up and be able to now stand up in front of audiences and talk about what they do as a business and watch them grow as human beings has been incredibly rewarding. We've all got a lot. We've all got a lot to go and. And they help me learn about, you know, about how I am. You know, it's like it's not always my ways and the ways. Right. And that. That might be a bit hard to swallow sometimes, but I'm learning. It's.

It's tough. Well, when it's your. It's your business and you've built it from the ground up, you know, you've taken paths that you believe were the right path at the time. That might have been the right path at the time, but might have been the right way of doing it now. Yeah. And then there's the ego side of it and, oh, it's my baby. I don't want to relinquish. You know, it's kind of my little kid. And you're the. You're the new nanny or the babysitter. Yeah, all of that stuff.

And so do you and Adrian compliment each other? Have you got complementary skill sets or are you. Yeah. So you're like the visionary. Is he more of the. The doer type sort of relationship or.

I think. I think we. We fluctuate. But before, I think I. Because I've always been an entrepreneur, I guess I bring that level of. That level of kind of certainly positivity.

A drive he's got. He brings equally, you know, drive and positivity but he's also got, he's got a whole, he was a CEO of running like one of his companies with three or 400 people. So he's got that with a real corporate structure and understanding how to kind of navigate that. And, and I might be a little bit more free thinking in regards to things, but also I've spent most of the time to open the factory. I've been here pretty much every day. I'm the longest standing person that's been here since we started this. So I've gained a whole lot of technical knowledge and I guess operational execution which I think I've brought on for my other businesses. And then Adrian's got a great mind in regards to, you know, legal, you know, financial, those kind of things of that kind of. But we also, we swap backwards and forwards where we need to. What we do have is a great respect for each other. I guess because we're a little bit older, we're both, you know, we've both stubbed our toes in relationships and business relationships over the years. We've got a great respect for each other but we're also.

I guess it's like a marriage, right. There's a time where, you know, mummy and daddy have a conversation in the bedroom that is apart from the kids. And we have a lot of those conversations, really open.

Conversations. And then when the decision is made, then that's the decision made. It's never, it's never turned around outside. And I think that's really important.

In.

Front of the kids.

Absolutely. Yeah. You make, and you can, you can make a decision to, to change that, but you make that together. You don't just make that as a single person that, that would never happen in our business and that gives the team consistency because it's not easy to work for an entrepreneur and it's even harder to work with for two. Right. So yeah, yeah.

And I would hazard it's not double, it's possibly exponential.

There's a factor of 10 and I think we, we, we have different delivery styles, we present differently, we have different delivery styles within meetings and at times he may lead or at times I may lead depending on what, what is important. But equally we support each other with whatever direction we're having. And so but for the team, we're working really hard lately just to making sure that there's a real clear messaging coming from us down through the layers, as the layers grow. Now we've now got 15 full time staff which is still quite, quite a small organization. But they're 15 really critical individuals because everybody's decision every day makes an impact on the business. And so, you know, we're 15 now. We'll be 100 pretty quickly. Like it will just scale like that. Once we've got to the point where the factory is, is working the way we particularly want it to be working and we've got the right sales orders and stuff like that, then we'll get to that 100. You know that we just, it will just go pop. So we very, we have to make sure we've set up those clear responsibilities and those clear structure within the business that people get access to us. We're very flat structure. We don't call ourselves CEOs, we're co founders. That's who we are. I can spend just as much time driving. I got a forklift license, so I can go and drive a forklift if I need to or I can go and sit in the laboratory with the scientists and have those kind of conversations. And the team needs to know that. But equally they also need to know that there is a, there's a direct reports for them to work with and they don't always have to come to us. And so we also have to be, have to be really hands on and really hands off which is really, it's probably the greatest challenge of any, anybody running a business.

And I guess also over time maintaining the culture and the purpose and the meaning but also recognizing that the culture of a sort of slick startup with just two or three of you, it doesn't support a company of 100 people. And yeah, it's funny you mentioned that being able to do all things. I remember my first job in New Zealand was with a company called Synthes or Syntase, if you were feeling particularly Swiss. And I just come from the UK working for Johnson and Johnson where you know, 80,000 employees, you know, you are just a number in a cog. And John Meek shout out to Mickey, he was the general manager or country manager who hired me and he was like, do you fancy some lunch, Jonesy? And I was like sure. And so he went out and got a couple of pies from the BP station and he said, come and give us a hand in the warehouse just to pack some stuff together. He just turned around and said, I bet you never had lunch with the country manager at Johnson and Johnson in the warehouse, did you?

You're right, I didn't. And I think, I think that suited that, that kind of vibe suited my style more rather than being, you know, in this large organization where you kind of, you know, don't look at the general manager as he walks past in case you turn the stone. Yeah. So I think it's cool when, when the bosses can get their hands, get their hands steady, you know, roll the sleeves up and what have you.

Oh, well, yeah, so you've got some more exciting times coming up by the sounds of it. So. Yeah. What does the future look like? So you, you sort of mentioned New Zealand might be getting a bit of block tech X block text action in the future and then. Yeah. What, what beyond that, Global domination?

Oh, absolutely. You know, the full, full cape. Let's go. But when you got 140 million tons of textiles going to landfill each year, somebody has to come up with some solution, right. We can't just ignore that because that is a significant impact on our environment.

We've, we've never thought of Adrian and Graham being the, you know, owning 100 factories across the world. So eventually our goal is that we license this technology around the world. So, you know, it can, it can go to the places where the problem is as opposed to shipping it to Australia. There's some baby steps to go around from there. It's like, so this is the world's first commercial scale textile resource recovery facility. It's 4,000 tons, will be 10,000 tons by early next year. That's fantastic. But that's, you know, 10,000 tons, that's about a tenth that's going to landfill in Australia. Right. So we're a long way short from where we need to go. But we have got demand for our products. We're already working with 200 feeds, over 200 feedstock suppliers. There's plenty of people supporting us from that point of view. But we're not just taking it because.

They want to get rid of it. They're all those that 200 are all part of wanting to be part of this ecosystem that we're building. There's companies there who are waiting for us to be able to deliver them commercial scale volumes so they can bring that back into the supply chain. We're currently working across four industries, obviously textile and fashion, agricultural. So our cotton based product called Celtex is being used as a, as a fertilizer or as a hydro mulch, as a dust suppression. There's a whole bunch of opportunities. We're working directly with farmers, through universities and industry for that sort of product can also be brought into paints, mortars and adhesives. So it can come back in that industrial space where we replace the polymers. We're working in the building construction industry. So we've got it going into concrete to provide strength, but also allowing the weight and make it more economical. We've got some other building products that are kind of looking from that point of view from both a polymer and a cellulose point of view. So agriculture, fashion, textiles, building and construction. And then the fourth part is a thing called injection molding where you basically take out plastic pellets, melt them down and pull them into a mold. So think of anything like a tabletop or some chairs from a fashion point of view. Coat hangers, like I mentioned, sunglasses, anything that can be injection molded. There's an opportunity to bring our products. And so we're looking at that from a point of view of both raw material supply, but also looking for some opportunities to, to have some block tex branded material out there in the marketplace to start to change the way we think about things, which is what you said at the start. You've got to be, you've got to be a manufacturer, but you're also going to be a person of thought leadership to change the way people think of things. So if you're putting a product in the marketplace, they go, oh, this is as good as this, and this is recycled and what's the cost? They're the same. Well, I'll take the recycled, thanks. Right, so they're really exciting industries. We are looking at a second plant because obviously the problem is big here in Australia, but also New Zealand. You know, the New Zealand government has approached us to come over to have a visit to it, have a consideration what it would look like to build a plant. Obviously, we know that you, you know, you kiwis, you're concerned about your environment, you know, rightly so. It's a beautiful part of the world. You're also wearing a lot of clothes, you know, and you've got no option to, apart from landfill or to export it to somebody else's landfill. So. But equally, there's also, there's a demand. There's a lot of industries who are looking for our recycled products to bring into their thing to make them a better business, to make them be a more environment and to meet the customer demand. And then the next goal for us is to, like I said, license our technology to a key partner around the world. I think Asia is a huge opportunity. We're already having conversations within the age region.

That we can start to deal with at source. So a lot of people don't know from a fashion industry you can have somewhere between 8% and 25% leftovers from the cutting room. So as they cut around the patterns. So you think of that on the scale of materials that we're making. So there's all this cut scrap that at times, times can be going to waste or it's going to low value prices such as being turned into rags where you wipe up the grease off your floor and then you throw it in the landfill. So there is certainly a demand across the industries that we're working here domestically, but obviously internationally, the fashion industry are making big claims about being more recyclable year upon year. And there just isn't the product. You know, we're in, we're in a conference in, in Milan in June. There's a large textile conference and all the textile recyclers got together and the room was about six by 10 and there was 13 of us. That is the textile recycling industry in the world. So it's so nascent, but it's so needed. And so we're just in that kind of early stage. There's policy being changed in Europe, policy being changed in the US we're pushing very hard in Australia for policy change to get textile waste to be aligned with the ban in plastics, glass and the other, the other waste streams. Because if we're banning sending your plastic bottle offshore, but we're not banning sending your polyester T shirt offshore and your, your beverage bottle with Coke or Pepsi or whatever is made of the same material as your polyester run shirt, it's made up from a PT of exactly the same. But we, we seem to care more about our recycling our plastic bottle that we've used once than the favorite T shirt that we've used a hundred times. So it's a misalignment both in government policy, but us as consumers. So we as consumers should be saying, we should be demanding that our governments are making sure we're recycling our clothing because we're demanding them to recycle that plastic bottle. These things have got to move. They're, they're, they're not, they're not big picture stuff. It's like the, the laws are already there for the same plastic material. It's just in a different form. So it just doesn't make any sense.

At a sentence to the legislation, almost to that.

And Paul, I said don't make things waste. It's not waste if it can be recycled or resource recovered. It's not a waste, it's a value. And who, just, who decides to waste? Isn't somebody sitting there going, oh yeah, waste most of our Material are coming out of Laundromats. Like, it's washed. It's literally gone. This has been washed 80 times. We're taking it off the line. Right. We would normally send that off to landfill. They're going, no, it's coming to us now. So it hasn't gone anywhere near a waste management company.

Mate, lots of work to be done, but it sounds like you're doing it. So watch this space as. As block text takes over the world.

Yeah, thanks, Tim. Thanks for the support for that.

I've been. I think, yeah, I think you're. You're lined up for success. I mean, you've clearly been successful. The fact that you've. You've invented a proprietary sort of mechanism that's a success in itself. But you're getting, you know, you've got people paying you money, presumably some degree, to actually get this done. So. Yeah, I just think you're. You are a great example of the new type of business that the world needs, where you're solving, you know, more than one problem in a commercially successful manner. It can be done, you know.

Exactly. I think so. Not to label. Well, I was thinking about this the other day when we talk about the need to certify or validate your. Your ESG reporting. Right. I think of it from a different point of view. I kind of don't need to measure it because it's already baked into my business, so I don't need to go, oh, what did we do this month? How many? How many how. What was our social impact? What was our environment impact? Because those things are already happening just by doing business. It's just so you kind of. I've been thinking about this because we get asked a lot about, you know, how do you validate? How do you validate. Whatever. It's kind of. I can validate it, but it isn't the thing that makes. Means I've got. On Friday, I've got to go, I've got to do the numbers because if we hit our production process, already know what my environmental impact is and I already know what my social impact is. Don't have to calculate that stuff because it's already just in the business. And yes, of course we should report that and I understand that, but I don't have to go chasing that numbers. I don't have to say, oh, God, you know, our numbers are low on our ESG this month. We need to work a bit harder next month, so mine can only go up.

Well, that's exciting piece.

Yeah, 100%. You are a classic impact driven business where revenue and impact are just, it's not decoupled. Yeah, 100%. And I think that again, this is why I think you're such a great example. And even the same with what you had at Kasaga, it's like you're a great. Both are great examples of. Do you know Tim o'? Brien? Yes, he's. Yeah, we had him on the podcast recently. He wrote a.

He wrote a blog on LinkedIn a while back so saying, oh, I think the purposeful business is dead. It's about impactful business. And initially I, I sort of was sort of commented on it and I was like, I'm not sure, I'm not sure I agree with this. But the more, the more I understood his point of view, which we had a bit of a chat about during the podcast. No, I totally get it. What, what, what he was saying is businesses need to be like yours. Like the pure heart and intent of the business is creating positive impact. It's not so. So the purpose of the impact is strategy, not we are trying to sell as many packets of shit stuff that people don't really need. But while we're doing that, we're going to give somebody to charity or we're going to offset the bad that we do by doing some good, which I think we're slowly moving from business as usual being actually we don't really give a shit about almost anything and if we can get away with even worse behaviors, we would. But you know, we've got to place play by some rules and okay, we'll make some donations to charity to possibly even some B corps out there where they don't have an impact at the heart of what they do, that they are doing something else. But we're doing it in the best way that we can and we're trying to do social, but those are the ones who typically have to think about it versus I am now 100% aligned with Tim was saying now that I fully understand it is no, really, every business needs to have a, a clear impact at the heart of what it's doing. Otherwise why are you here? So, yeah, kudos to you man.

Thanks mate, appreciate that. But also, you know, companies like ours need cheerleaders like yourself support. I mean, we've had plenty of conversations offline about, you know, working together, what you're doing with your business. It's those sort of conversations that all form.

My way of doing business or how I think about things. So it's always really valuable even if you don't have the opportunity to run a business like ours. It's about having a conversation with people like yourself talking about this. So you kind of said. Exactly. So you spoke to Tim. You kind of got a different viewpoint. This is really important because there isn't, this still isn't the solution. You know, we have to keep evolving things. Society keeps evolving, evolve. We've got bigger, bigger problems to solve. And so the more we can all have conversations that are really open and honest and non ego driven or non agenda driven, then I think we can all learn a lot from different people's perspective. And that, that, that's, I think that's probably one of the other. From a B corp point of view. It's not written about, but that's actually one of the great impacts of B Corp is because you, you've got, you've got the opportunity to have a whole bunch of conversations with people that help to inform form your, your opinion or the way you are doing your business. And that's, that's really important.

Well, I think that that's, if I remember correctly, that's how we met. I just sent you an email. I was like, hey, I kind of like what you're doing. I'm a B corp in New Zealand. Could we have a chat? And you were like, sure. And we had a chat and now we keep having chats intermittently. So yeah.

So it started with you stalking me and then eventually we end up here, basically.

It was a long play with that. It was a long play in case I realized I was going to have a podcast and I might want to invite some, some people.

Yeah, yeah.

If we do come over there, you're the first person getting invited to get together for a drink and a strategy.

It sounds like a plan. I would love to be a part of that.

So perfect.

Yeah, man. Hey, look. Yeah. So thank you for everything you're doing. Keep up the great work and yeah, let me know when you're over. Can't wait to see where this goes. I think it's going to go big.

Yeah, thanks and good on you for doing this sort of podcast. It's very difficult for entrepreneurs at times, times to be able to have a chance to have a chat and, and you know, you're making the effort. You're obviously a pretty busy guy. You don't need to take, you know, two hours out of your day to have a chat to a bunch of us so we can tell you about how good we are. But I appreciate that for me it's a great honor we've known each other for a short amount of time, but I'm a great admirer of what you do. And. And it's. And it's. It's a nice way to spend a Friday afternoon, so. Thank you.

Too easy. Craft beers next time. All right, mate. See you later.

Cheers.

Hey, it's Tim here, that B Corp bloke from Grow Good. If you want more content on purpose, B Corp. How to do more good in the world as an individual or a business, then you know the drill. Hit the like and subscribe. Check out some of our other videos. They're probably floating around here somewhere. You know how it works. Thank you so much. See you next time.