Ben Higgins | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #70

Welcome everybody to on the Home Front with Jeff Duden. Have a great guest on today, Ben Higgins, who was the Bachelor and is now an entrepreneur with generous coffee and really has made an incredible splash in our social scenes and on our televisions and now really making an impact with a very purpose driven business venture. Ben, welcome to on the Home Front.

I'm pumped to be here. Thanks for having me.

Oh, right on, man, right on. So let's dig right into it. Would you mind just sharing a little bit of your background, kind of how you grew up in Indiana? Who is Ben Higgins?

Yeah, definitely. So I grew up in Indiana, northern Indiana. So in a small little town called Warsaw. It's best known really as the orthopedic capital of the world. So it's a super wildly set up town where you have five major headquarters in a town of about 10,000 people and then there's really nothing within 30 minutes outside the town. So you have this really small area of Indiana that has an incredible economy, a lot of really intelligent people, a lot of really good jobs, and then outside of it, you have nothing. And so I grew up there. It's a great town. Really love my childhood. I'm an only child, great parents. And then went to Indiana University in Bloomington for college just as a student. Athletics were huge part of my upbringing, huge part of my life. But after a knee injury, I had to kind of refocus and re identify myself, which was a wild journey. And that's what led me to Indiana to go be the biggest fan of the basketball team. Because all of the guys I played AAU with pretty much went and played basketball Indiana. And so instead of joining them, I became their biggest fan, which was a humbling experience, a really fun experience, but it definitely was a big kind of pivot point in my life and how I viewed myself.

Yeah, so I didn't realize it when I saw you on, on television, but you're like six four, right?

Yeah, yeah. Taller. It's. Yeah, it's, it is weird. People nowadays when they, when we meet in person, like you're taller than I expected. And I said, well, I don't know what you expected. Typically, you know, you go to Hollywood. If I go out to Hollywood still, I'm taller than everybody by about six inches.

Yeah, well, I mean, the Tom Cruise, like the majority of the good actors and they, they, I think it's just the way they look on. Yeah, man. And they just look good on film in that way. I don't know. I guess, you know, but. Well, also what Were you like, were you a shooting guard? Two. Were you a one, two, three? What would you do?

I was a three. So. Ok. Kind of had to learn to slash shoot a little bit. If I wanted to go play in college, you know, I can't claim I would have gone to play at iu, but.

Right.

If I wanted to play in college, it was kind of transition for me from being the biggest guy on the floor to now not being the biggest guy on the floor, but all. But, you know, being a taller three. And in Indiana, basketball is the thing. Like, you know, they say in 49 their Stacey is just basketball. That's true. Like it's. In Indiana, basketball is the thing you do. It's the thing that you, if you're good at, you're known for, people celebrate you. For and for a long period of my life, like I was pretty decent. And so to have that kind of be taken away or for me to switch from it was a. Was a big shift.

So I was like. I was sick. Basketball was everything to me until I was a junior in high school. I switched over to football because I was. I'm still. I'm about 242 right now. About 6 to 42. So that, you know that it doesn't work on the basketball. I wasn't going anywhere playing basketball and I was. Took three charges, used five fouls, averaged six points a game. We need to, you know. Yeah, you got to have. Somebody's got to do the dirty work and let you guys score.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, cool. So did you do any acting or modeling or in front of camera work growing up?

Goodness, no. Not at all. I mean I went to Indiana and I left Indiana. In fact, my buddy and I moved to South America, moved to Peru because I didn't have a job offer out of college. No. I did no acting, nothing on camera, no television. I then came out to Denver to take my first job because it was the only job offered to me. And I was working in a cubicle in the basement writing user manuals. And so my, my social scene was very limited. I knew had no friends in Denver. I moved out here really only because of the job. I had no, no experience until obviously I showed up in a. In a limo on national television.

Tell me a little bit about how that happened. Was that just an online. Let me send a picture in and see if I can get on. Did somebody. Did mom tell you this is something you should do?

Mom did not. No, it was actually the marketing director at my company.

Oh.

So like I Said, I was in this basement, I was at this company. We kind of had an outdated software. We were supporting some clients. I was writing the user manuals and test scripts. I wasn't great at my job, definitely didn't love my job, but I was working a lot. And the marketing director came down. She was very sweet, and she said, hey, I love this show, and you're the only person at our company. Because the company had a pretty old demographic that I know would even be available to be on the show.

And the Golden Bachelor was yet.

That was not a thing yet. And so she. She asked if we could go up to her office and sign up. Like go on the website, sign up. And we did. And then they called. And you kind of go through a process. You go through, obviously, the online application, then you go through a video application, and then if you pass it, that. Then they send you out to LA and you do a psych test and a blood test and, you know, more in person interviews. And then the next step is the show. And so I. I went through the whole process. It kind of took about six months. Sent from my application date, and. And then all of a sudden, I got a phone call saying, hey, can you be in LA on this date? And I said, let me check. So I went back to my company and I asked. I didn't want to get fired. So, you know, the risk is you go there, you're there two days, you get sent home, you're jobless. Now, I didn't have any money. I needed my health insurance. And so my company was nice enough at the time to say, hey, how about we just give you a sabbatical, an unpaid leave. You come back whenever you come back. And nobody knew it was going to be like two and a half, three months off for me to be on the show, but that's what happened. And then I became the Bachelor. And so there's another three months off, but I stayed at the job the whole time. Kind of would work Monday through Thursday, and then they gave me Fridays off to fly out to LA and do whatever I needed to do.

I've done reality tv. I did the Undercover Boss thing. And so when there was a moment for me where it was this go or no go. And I don't know if you had that or if you knew where you were when you had it, but it's like you're like, ah, you know, because there's always. Especially if you don't come from it and you weren't looking for it. And now all of A sudden, oh, man, they're going to put me through. I want to be on this show. Like, what could go wrong? What's. What's the upside? What's the downside? Did you have any of that hesitation? I had a family at the time. I knew that people were going to look at my kids differently because they had no idea this size of the business that we owned. Yeah, we didn't. We didn't because it was a national. It was interesting because it was a national business. There wasn't that much local presence, so people didn't really know that we had 240 locations out there. And, you know, know if this show goes through, you know, they're going to have to go to their school and kids are going to see me giving away $250,000 and all this other stuff. So that was it for me. Did you have anything that was holding you back, or was it, you know, all gas, no breaks for you?

Oh, it was very much holding me back. In fact, once they asked, I took a bunch of time, and faith is a very big part of my life. And so I kind of said a prayer at the time, because the only prayer I knew, I said, hey, if this isn't meant to be, close a door. Like, make that any important door to me. Just close it. Make it very clear that I. This is not a good step in my life. And so I said that prayer and kind of went out into the world. And then I asked my buddies, what do you think? And they said, I think you should do it. Asked my family. My family was like, this sounds wild, but, you know, let's spice life up a little bit. Let's create a new story for you that think you should do it. So then the final step was really my job. And like I said, I'd moved out to Denver. I was renting a house at the time. I wasn't making a lot of money. I didn't have much in my bank account. And I'm 25 years old, and I'm thinking, I can't leave my first job, go do this, because I don't know what I'd do next. And so I went to the CEO of the company. It was a smaller company, and I said, hey, here's this opportunity I have. I do want to do is something I think could be fun and exciting and tell a cool story in my life. But I'm not going to do it unless the company here approves it, because I can't lose my job and I can't lose my Health insurance. He said, I think this could be good for all of us. And he's like, when you come back, how about you move into sales and get out of user manual writing, being a business analyst. I said, that sounds great. That's what I want to do anyways. And so when he said, go do it, I was like, all these doors have been flown wide open. There was no hurdles. And so then it was kind of all gas. Then it was like, hey, this is meant to be. This is going to be something. Something's going to come from this. I don't know what, but something good is going to come from this. Because again, because of my faith and because of the steps I took, I felt like I had crossed all the boxes off and said, okay, you know what? I gave the opportunity for it to say, for somebody to say no, and they never did. Being you is the most beneficial financial asset you have. And then it kind of dies off. And once it started to die off for me, you kind of go one of two directions at that point. You either try to stay relevant, meaning you're trying to create new headlines, you're trying to date people, you know, your agents are setting you up on dates with more famous people and you know, they're calling upon the paparazzi to get a picture of that, or they're wanting you to cause a little chaos in life. And that can be on the front of a headline. And people are interested in that chaos, so they want to hear from you again. And that search for relevance can be a path that is very lucrative and can really last a long time. The problem is you're consistently working at keeping your name in the headlines. For me, I wasn't good at it. I wasn't good at trying to stay relevant. It was exhausting to me. It felt like it was very much soul sucking. For me, it was not. When I had a mentor of mine kind of say, hey, Ben, what did you dream of as a kid? Or what were you really good at as a kid? That like kind of set you apart from everybody else and maybe that's your dreams now. And so as a kid, it was the creation of things. It was being involved in story, it was being involved in the kind of making things happen. And so me just trying to stay relevant just felt like it was an empty pursuit that led to great financial gain. So I had to have a come, you know, come to Jesus moment for me where it was, what do I want to do with all this? And a buddy of mine recommended to me maybe this is never meant to be about you. What if this is meant to be about something greater than you? And once he said that, my life kind of switched to, okay, I have the social media following, I have the platform, I still have name recognition, but I don't want to build brands based on me. So can I build brands that could even outlast me? Could I build brands or businesses? Or could I get involved in things that are not about how famous I stay, but still allow me maybe the financial freedom, the personal freedom, but also allows me to stay very actively engaged and involved in these things? And then, hey, you know, God forbid something happens to me where I'm no longer on this earth, right? The brand still continues. Or maybe I do something super stupid, you know, wake up one morning, I say I'm going to cause a lot of chaos in life and a bad headline comes out, right? And I get pushed aside by society. Well, the brand maybe can still continue, right? They can still pick their feedback up, build up, and continue. And so that was kind of my trajectory. So, to answer your first question, it's always been a benefit to me. There's been moments where I definitely could see where it would have been a hard. But since that kind of pivot point to where it's no longer about me, I no longer feel the pressure to use the Bachelor, necessarily for my own gain. But oftentimes it's just kind of if people know about the show, if they've seen the show and I'm on a call trying to, you know, close a deal, and they're like, hey, you were on that show. Typically, I've never had a moment where it hasn't happened. They're like, that's cool. Tell us more about it builds a different relationship. They feel like they know me and. And good things come from it. So for me, I've never been resentful towards the show. I also had a pretty good ride on the show, right? The show was pretty good to me overall. And I don't necessarily even know how I can answer, like, why that was. Maybe because I didn't try to say stupid stuff and cause fights and get myself into trouble, but. But no, overall, it's been a really good experience for me, one that I'm very grateful for. And icing on the cake was that my wife responded to my direct message on Instagram because I had a blue check mark, and I know she was getting a lot hit up a lot on Instagram by people. I just stood out maybe because I'd been vetted a Little bit by social media.

Really a huge compliment to you because I'm. I'm older, I'm more senior in my career. Although I was thinking I was in the fourth quarter and I've reset back to halftime now. I actually just. I'm having so much fun now, dude. I turned 56, like in 30 in May, and. But I don't know, man. I've never last kids out of the house. I've never felt more purposeful and had more ability to be more purposeful and also having more perspective and resources to be able to be even deeper into my purpose and. But for somebody your age to say, you know what, I've got, I've got this because it's exactly what you said. I really hadn't connected the dots, but when people are. They get notoriety, next thing you know, they start showing up everywhere and all this clickbaits and they're popping up and all of a sudden it's like, I'm like, oh, wow, those famous people, they must all date each other. I didn't know that people were setting you up just, you know, to. Because everybody's furthering their career to see who's dating who and who's, you know, your brandscaping and swapping audiences and, you know, all that. Okay, well, that's all fair. That makes sense. That's we. That's the world we live in.

Yeah, I'm not saying that to say that path is bad necessarily.

No, no, it's business, just business.

It's, you know, I think for me, it just, it exhausted me at a level I couldn't continue it, you know, but some can do it. And those people are very impressive to me. But, you know, different strokes.

Yeah, well. So, like, here's the deal, man. Our will is an exhaustible resource. So you only have so much every day. And then, you know, we. And then we all have a personality profile who we are, and then there's another personality profile who we need to be at work or in public. In this case, you can, depending on the size of your battery and depending you can only be somebody you're not for so long until it just starts to wear you down. And you said it was exhausting, right, to try to keep all this stuff straight. Well, it just wasn't who you were. And you, very early in your life, came to a place where you see a lot of other celebrities do this much later in their life as they decide, you know what, I'm going to use what I've got for good. And I'm Actually going to go and you see it with clothing companies and you know, all kinds of business stuff. So. But the fact that you came to it so early and you know, is really, is really impressive. Really impressive. So at some point you decided to write a book and I heard you on a podcast as I was preparing to talk to you today, that you said it took you a couple years to get done.

Yeah.

Which means you. Which means you wrote it yourself. Yeah, I think. Yeah. I mean like we all have editors and ghost, you can dictate stuff and there's all kinds of services out there. But they would have kicked you to the curb long before two years. Yeah, they would have got you, they would have got you done in 90 days. But so what, what motivated you to write it alone in plain sight?

You know, I kind of going back to. I think I had a self fulfilling story as a kid. I felt very, for a period of my life, like as a little kid, I felt very much like the outsider looking into life. Kind of felt like nobody understood me. I didn't really understand others. You know, I'm an only child, so I spent a lot of time around adults and around my parents, went into school, had a kind of a weird time trying to make friends and, but really desired friends and really desired like that, those relationships. And so then I, you know, obviously I talked about sports a little bit, which is, you know, some people dismiss it because it was in high school, but for me, sports was such a huge part of my life. It was also a huge part of how I made friendships and how I made connections and what I was known for. So then I got hurt, tore my knee all up, had to kind of switch what I was going to be in life at that point, or at least for the next chapter of life, and got incredibly down on myself and ended up forming an addiction to opioids because I was on painkillers for prescribed painkillers for six months straight. And so then I never really got out of it for four years. Kind of came out of that and felt more lonely than ever because I felt like I had pretty much pushed aside every good relationship in my life. I really didn't know who I was as a man. I didn't know who I was to others. And that's when the book really started. And so I hadn't started writing it, but I had this like notebook that I had all these like feelings and quotes of mine in that I would sit at my little desk in college and write down like all these thoughts going through my Head. So obviously, the show happens. Bachelor happens about five years later for me and come off the show. And on the show, I had this moment where I was in the Bachelorette at the time, and one of the producers came up to me one day and he says, I don't like you. And that's, like, the one thing you could say to me that would, like, make me feel as small as possible. Because I don't like you. Because you don't let me get to know you. You say the right things in the right moments, and then you hide when moments get hard. And he goes, you've been here how many weeks and I don't know anything about you? And it was always kind of my thing, right? Like, I. I always kind of desired to know others better than maybe I even knew myself or how I would ever let them get to know me. Because my fear was that the more they got to know me, the less they would like me. And we, you know, that take. That could be five hours of us unpacking, how that kind of built up. But that was my general consensus is the more people got to know me, the less they would like me. And so I admitted this on national television. Then I said at the time, I felt unlovable. I kind of have re assessed that and said, I think I was meaning I felt more unlikable. I felt like it was really like me, which would be hard then to love me. And I say this on national television, get off the show. And the response was crazy. I've never had anything in my life, even to date, where more people have reached out and said, I feel the same way.

Wow.

And so that's when the book started. From that moment on, so I started writing it. I started telling my story, and then I started telling the stories of others. Some people in my life that I've ran into who maybe had every excuse to feel like outsiders, yet they had chosen not to, or they had. They had some good tips on how to keep grounded. And. And so, yeah, it took a long time. A lot of it took a long time because I was kind of unwilling for a while to admit and write some of the stories in the book that I thought could really be this were just. Were hard for me to vocalize or ones I had kind of forgotten because I pushed them so far down in my. In myself. And so two years later, it came out. It's about connection. It's about loneliness. My hope is that people read it and they feel less alone after reading it. The problem with all this was and it wasn't planned this way. It came out right in the heart of COVID So all the good book tour plans and all the good activities to help people get connected again, you know, weren't happening. But it, you know, but at the same time, it was kind of a good time for the book to come out because a lot of people were feeling lonely.

Yeah, that's fair. You've mentioned several times that you've got some. Somebody shared some experience with you, gave you some advice. Is there one or two people in your life, other than a family member who you would point to and say they've had a huge impact speaking into your life?

You know, a lot of people come to mind, like when you say that, but I was at a leadership summit in college and the guy that was speaking got up on stage and he said these words that really stuck with me. He said one of the best lessons he learned later in life. And anytime you say, hey, you know, as a 22 year kid and there's somebody up there who's 60 years old, they're saying, hey, this is something I wish I would have learned at 22. I'm, I'm listening. I'm in, like, all right, tell me, tell me what's going on. And he said, I wish I would have been willing to learn from anybody. And so I've taken that with me is just to be very willing to learn from anybody. I might not agree with everything I'm hearing, but if you're speaking from a place of. Your story has led you to this belief, you know, be it politically, religiously, from business, personally, family, whatever the big topics of why you hold on to your strong convictions. If you're telling me that this is where life has led you to believe, I want to hear what you're saying and I want to understand how you got there. And so maybe not, maybe people like, there's some people that I would lean on, maybe more consistently than others. But over the last, you know, 10 years of life, it's really just kind of having a listening ear and being open to hear what, you know, what others are saying.

My best advice is to don't take advice and don't give a. Give advice, but look for shared experiences. Because some of the times when I've made decisions that I tried to inform with other people, they gave me their advice, but they really didn't have experience in it. And I'm, I'm in a, what group called ypo, which is Young Presidents Organization. And I learned that my father in it oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great room. It's a great room to be in. But they. That's it. If you don't have an experience to share, whether you're in forum or whether you're in one of the meetings is like, don't say it just because it's not your job to spitball other people's problems on something that you have no experience with. Uh, so it's, it's interesting.

I.

But it's very subtle. But now when I'm. I have mentors and people that I look up to and I'm fortunate to be able to get in a lot of different rooms and I, and I, I really seek other people's. I even ask specifically, like, have you had experience or what's been your experience with that? And so for this 60 year old to, to, you know, to share his experience, I guess he, you know, it's. It's different, man. Advice and experience. Like they're, they're cousins.

Yeah.

They look. They're close.

Well, they kind of, they kind of build off of each other in a lot of ways. But I'm with you. And, and another thing that's kind of been fun for me is I look for people who've experienced kind of gone through the valley of the shadow of death. Like gone through it.

Oh yeah.

Because those people are the ones when they come out the other side, they just have a whole different world. And it's also been really. In June of three years ago, I went through a really weird, very kind of like solemn state. I re. I just noticed, hey, I'm not who I, I am. You know, I was, I was engaged to my fiance at the time. I was like, I'm not who I want to be. I just feel super down. I have a thousand questions, I have a thousand concerns about what kind of husband I can be, what this marriage thing even is, what my. Where my career is going, how I'm even going to like help support, you know, our family alongside of her. And I just kind of went through it and I, I actually kind of left Denver, went back to Indiana, where a place I was familiar with. I sat on the lake for about a month and a half and all of a sudden it kind of hit me. It was like, you know, you're going through it right now and you're gonna. This mental kind of like note in my head, like, you're gonna make it through this and you're gonna learn a lot during this season. Like, this is not you losing yourself. This is not you being less than. And here's the thing. Four years ago or four years before that, when I would have went through, I would have beat myself up so bad about how can you be this type of guy? Like, how can you have these types of questions? How can you be so down, Life's so good. Instead I was like, no, you're learning something here. Be willing to learn it. And when you come out the other side, you're going to be able to speak with and to people based on this experience and probably relate with them in a way you wouldn't have unless you had this time. And it gave me this whole new like purpose, this whole new mission. And I actually came out of the other side, I think healthier than ever. I don't know if I'll go through it again. I might. You know what? Life's weird. Who knows. But it gives me this whole new kind of like perspective on when you go through your times of trials. The benefits then of what you're gaining on the other side.

Yeah. Look man, your ability to self correct is noteworthy. So like negative progress is the greatest dissatisfactor in life. Nobody likes to be worse off than they were. That's why child actors and celebrities who you, you've been it like even my little bit on the show. You were the star. Everybody's taking care of you. They're taking you to the trailer, they're putting your makeup, they're doing all this stuff. I mean, imagine if you're a child actor for 10 years and you, you're living in this fantasy land of everybody's just taking, doing everything for you. Everybody wants to be around you, you grow up in that. And then when that goes away, like people really struggle to make that transition because it feels like negative progress. So you know, you blow up on the Bachelor, you've got all this great stuff going on. It goes on for years. They bring you back. You're one of the most popular ones at some, you know, you transition into a different life and a different, a different season in your life and there's going to be the bends. You know, it's just, it's going to happen because most people make the mistake of thinking that the trend line always goes up into the right.

Yeah.

And you know, they just keep going. And you know, why do people make a hundred million dollars and then they spend the rest of their life killing themselves trying to make 500 million? It's because they've got a, you know, they, they, you can't self. Everybody's Just got to keep climbing for that next, that next mountaintop, which is fine, but done incorrectly, it'll kill you. I mean, it'll just, it'll, it'll like, oh, I, you know, I'm going backwards now. And, and, which isn't generally true, but definitely can, you can feel that way.

Yeah.

Well, very cool, man. I'd love to spend the rest of our time on Generous Coffee. I've been on the website. It's, it's a purpose based organization where profits are. It's a for profit company that gives Prof. Your profits to nonprofits. And I don't know the percentages or anything like that, but like, that's the concept of it all. How did you first get involved with the coffee business?

Well, it's actually interesting on base on what you were just saying about, you know, the trajectory up and to the right. And like, what exactly does, does that look like? I think there's some great ways that we've tried to quantify what success looks like. And there is some very, you know, distinct ways. Right. But some of the coolest people in my life are Franciscan monks who have never, you know, really made a dime. And they're wise and they're peaceful and they're joy filled and they have a ton of time for others and they have crazy cool stories like, you know, there's a lot of markers of success is my point here.

And, and they're 100% good with it, probably better with it.

They're content with it, they're happy, they're. They're in it. So, so the story goes like this. So when I was 15 years old, I went to Central America for the first time with my local church and I saw deep seated poverty. So like, and this poverty was mostly coming from some type of corruption or injustice placed on these communities all around Central America. And so with this organization that I went with, it was me and a few of my buddies with our families, we went, we did this thing where we'd go into these communities and we passed out food boxes and we told people to come to church with us. Again, I want to say, you know, faith is a big part of my life. Church is a big part of my life. I'm very much in favor of healthy, good church relationships. So this, you know, comes with that dynamic. But we would say, here's a food box. You get this food box if you come to church night. Then they would come to church and we'd do this whole thing. And then next year we went back the following year, we Went back to the same communities, and they were still very thirsty, very hungry. They didn't have jobs, they didn't have education, they didn't have any better infrastructure. And we did this same practice, and I got pissed. I left and I was fired up. And I didn't know why. I was like 16 years old. I couldn't really conceptualize why I was so mad, but I was like, this feels. One, I feel a ton of guilt that I'm going back to my home.

Two.

I feel like what we just did was very purposeless. And I took a bunch of pictures with some poor people and came back home to tell my friends how. How cool I am. That feels very weird to me. And so I lived about three years of my life in this just, like, anger at a lot of. A lot of things. And I didn't know it was like a righteous anger at the time. I thought I was. I thought I was really, like, losing myself in this. And finally one day my buddy comes to me and he goes, hey, I know you've been mad about this for three years. I've been. You've been very outspoken about this. I got this idea, what if instead of this transactional relationship with these people who have been, you know, hurting by injustices placed on them, what if we go into these communities and we ask them, what do you need? What do you want? What do you dream of and how can we help? And we let them guide us. So we come back to the US where obviously fundraising is a little easier. We can get, you know, get some support, some rallies, some networks around us, go back in and let them lead us on. Hey, if they want jobs for women, let's figure out what jobs their women can do and let's help them build these businesses. Or if they want clean water, let's help them pay for a clean water tank, right? But they're owning this. This thing. And we started the organization and it was. It's awesome. I mean, it still exists today. It's. It's great. It's. It's not like super unfamiliar to new modern age. Like missions work like the 80s, 90s, 2000s, kind of like transactional come do this and get saved kind of idea is no longer as popular as it was back then. So this whole kind of partnership ide is now common. People aren't shocked by this, you know, anymore. But we were. It was new back then. The problem was we were all in our 20s and resources for donations were limited. We could only tap into our parents, grandparents, and friends. So often and our friends are all poor, so like.

Yeah. And you got to save them to sell them the Cutco knives.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we so went on the show, kind of fast forward, still involved in the organization, ended up joining the board of another nonprofit called Project Hope. Project Hope is one of the top 10 largest non profits right now in the US so it's huge. So I'm on this dynamic where I'm on the board of a organization fighting to stay alive and another one that's, you know, blessing endowments and doing massive, massive medical, like hospitals. And so I came back, kind of had that moment where I talked about where I was like, this thing has to be for I have to do something greater than myself, something that's not built on me. What if we started a business? Because I love business. I don't want to lose, I don't want to lose my touch on skill sets that, you know, help me stay involved in business. Because I don't know how long this bachelor thing is going to go or how long my fame is going to pay for pay for me. So what if we start a business that's for profit? The executive team and the ownerships agree to never be repaid from it, to never take a salary from it, and then we donate 100% of our profits to non profits so that we can be become a sustainable fundraising source for those organizations that are, you know, doing great work but just having a hard time figuring out where to tap into. And so I said it, you know, to kind of go on what you're just saying. One of the cool things I found when we started Genera, so today we donated close to $200,000. We're seven years in, we're trying to grow our business. We're about 70% wholesale, kind of promo corporate gifting, wholesale accounts and 30% retail. But one of the cool things we found was as I, as we launched Generous and I kind of ran it myself for two years, then all of a sudden we had these people like my co owner now, who was 30 years old, the CEO of this huge insurance crop insurance company. And he kind of goes at 40, he's like, I'm kind of done. I don't know what to do next, right? But he's financially set, perfect person, right? Comes into Generous, whole new, you know, complex business to try to figure out and run. But the benefits for him are not financial. What they are is story and impact. And the benefits of this is beautiful for him because he lived a lot of his life saying, I just need to make the next 100 million, I need to make the next hundred million. And of a sudden that wasn't working for him anymore and he didn't know where to turn. So now he turns to generous and he says, let's, let's rock and roll here. Like let's build something that is, is creates a better story. So we're able to donate anywhere between 10 and 15% of our revenue. So outside of, you know, once we pay for everything else, larger volume years, we can get to 15%, lower volume years, we haven't dipped below 10% yet. But that's our, that's the numbers, the percentages of what is actually being able to be given.

Okay. And is it mostly online sales?

Yeah, yeah, mostly online. I mean we have some boutiques and like some, some smaller box stores that sell generous. The problem with us is because of our donation model, we can't really get into the large retailers because of the margins that are already cut. But you know, those smaller, like local towns and homes and then are, you know, really here. Over the last year and a half, it has been more of the branded merch partnerships that have really helped us, you know, take the next step.

Nice. And where's the roastery and where do you get the beans?

We get the beans from all over so that we're specialty grade coffee. So we get smaller lot coffee. So this coffee will be from anywhere from Africa to Mexico, South America, Central America, all over for beans. And then we roast in Warsaw, Indiana, my hometown. In fact, in May we have a building right now that's never been open to the public. So we bought this old warehouse, put a roaster in there. We have some offices from some of our employees and we've always packaged, shipped, done everything out of there. Well, we just bought a new building that will open in May that's going to be open to the public. It's going to have a little counseling center in there. It's going to have a place where people can hang out and you know, drink coffee. Not necessarily a coffee shop, but just more of a chill area where you can work from there. And then we'll roast in the back. And it's a super cool 1890s building that we've renovated over the last six months that I hope because just becomes this kind of like really proud moment for the small community. And then also just a really good like kind of location for people to gather and connect.

My mind is going crazy with partnership opportunities for this business and I, I know I have a friend who has A pretty big addiction related charity. And I know they do lots of things and you know, fundraisers, things for people to do, things for people to sell, things for people to package. I don't know, I don't know where you are. I was on the website. I saw you had a lot of partners, partnerships and affiliations, but I really wasn't able to discern what each one did or what they meant. Have you explored that with Generous to say, hey, let's, let's partner up with another, you know, maybe a non profit and then be able to further the brand and further the agenda that way?

Yeah. So just for anybody listening out there that maybe is curious about how they could work with Generous, if you're interested, I, I would love to kind of explain how we're set up. So right now our partnerships come through a program that we call Highlight Hope. So if you get on our website, you'll see these Highlight Hope bags, which is probably what you're talking about. And every quarter we pick four, four new nonprofits. And these non profits then design their own bag. So these, these bags that you'll see are designed by the nonprofit. It tells their story on the back there's a QR code at the bottom that links to their website. And then it's our retail bag. So it's what you would buy if you got on our website and subscribe to Generous Coffee. You know, if you, if you went to a store and bought Generous Coffee, these would be the bags that Generous are selling right now that we're known for. And then when you buy a bag, you're kind of voting with your dollar. And so you can just to be, you know, conservative here, you could know that 10 of your purchase of that bag is going to go directly to the non profit that you chose so you can choose what nonprofit you want. So it's kind of, you know, if a non profit sells a hundred thousand bags of coffee in that quarter, well, that's a lot of money going their way. Right. If they only show 2500 bags of coffee that quarter, not as much money going their way, but they get to kind of use that then for their fundraising, they get to go out and buy it at wholesale and go resell it, you know, in their shops or whatever. With corporations, it's really cool. So like we just did a program with Capital One where Capital One put us in their headquarters for a month's period of time. And then one of their employees actually helped is helping run this organization out of Haiti that you would see in Our Highlight Hope campaign and they bought this coffee and then we designed kind of a storytelling around it. It was like, hey, by the purchase of capital one, this money is going to be going to this organization. And so there's some employee engagement in there and there's also some employee satisfaction where like my company cares about bringing back even down to the, you know, cup of coffee we drink. And then also finally we do co labeling and white labeling. So if like you'd see on our website right now, like Brian Peterson Realty out of Warsaw. Right. Every time somebody buys a new house, he has his own bag. Generous is even mentioned on it. We package, we ship it, he gives it to his new purchasers. But then on the back end there's still money being donated because he's buying the coffee from us. So there's a bunch of different ways that we try to give back and that we partner with nonprofits, try to highlight what they're doing. We've just found it more successful recently to do it through maybe the more for profit space where for profit businesses, you know, or churches are saying, hey, we're serving 3,000 cups of coffee a day, might as well try your coffee. Then we can get this organization.

Sustainability, packaging and all of that. When I looked on the website, stuff, stuff looked sustainable. Obviously the branding's done extremely well. Yeah, it looked, Is that, is that also part of it or is it just, I mean, is there, is there any sustainable option? So here's the reason I ask. So my daughter's got an internship with a big firm in New York, one of the biggest accounting investment, you know, consulting, whatever. And they have a Starbucks in, in their space in New York that's free to the employees. Okay, well what if that were a generous, you know, coffee thing and that's more work. It's outside the mod model. Somebody's got to pay for all that. But like companies have these sustainability goals and certainly from the optics perspective.

Yeah.

You know, so I mean I, you know, that's, that's logistics, that's all of that. I mean Starbucks does a really nice job with, you know, they've, they've, I think they're going to be very successful one day, let me just put it that way.

But one day they're going to figure it out.

One day they'll, they'll finally get it right as I, as I sit here with my, my Trenta. Yeah. That I'm pouring into my speakable future mug. But now, just because my New year's resolution was two cups of coffee A day. So that's one from where you were at. I was like 20, dude. So now I get 230 ounces.

Generous. You'd be our biggest purchaser at this point.

Well, I'm going to. As soon as I get cheese.

Yeah, yeah, we, you know, we're actually, we're doing this really cool thing right now. We're doing them in high schools. So we're launching coffee shops, cafes in high schools where, okay, the students are going to run this business. We're going to provide them obviously with the stuff they need, but then they get to kind of do this, run the shop, figure out the books, pay their teams, order, you know, all their essentials, make sure their, their quality is good. I think it's, I actually, I didn't even think about this five years ago. But like, this is one of the coolest things to me is the idea that in high school I could have been working and running my kind of my own business, you know?

Right.

And learning that whole thing. I think it's, it's such an incredible education. I think it also is going to get so many unique people really fired up about going to school. Like, oh, I got to show up to school, you know, an hour early today because I got a package, you know, this coffee because it's going out to our teachers. Coffee shops are hard. We've entered into a few of them. I would love to get back into them given the right circumstance. You asked about sustainability. There is sustainability options. So like our brown bags obviously are recyclable. Our bags right now that we sell on retail aren't. Wouldn't exactly probably I couldn't brag and be like, yes, these are the, the healthiest thing for the environment. But one of the interesting pieces to generous that, you know, we get asked and I hope more and more from other for profit businesses, kind of how did you design your give back model? Or hey, we have this ESG program in our business and these are our goals. Can generous fit in to help us meet some of those? Or how would you speak into some of these?

That's right.

I always. My only, my number one, not my only advice. My, my, my biggest advice is to pick a lane. And so our lane is humans. It's what broke my heart first. It's what breaks our team's heart. Like when humans are facing injustice, what be whatever that is. Right. If it's human trafficking, if it's poverty, if it's lack of things, that's what our team's fired up about. And so We've chosen humans as our lane. We love animals, we love the environment. My dog's laying at my feet right now. But we're solely focused on what can we do as a business right now with our capacity to give as much back to the humans who need it and then, you know, with scale, with, with kind of greater visions, with more resources. I'm excited to always look into the future, but right now we're still a small business and we're still trying to do what we can to make ourselves sustainable so that we can, you know, grow into the future.

Well, well done. Great future for Generous Coffee. Love the brand, love the name. You know, I'm a franchise guy. Like that's what I do. So you know, I'm thinking, well, how can I put a double sided driveway around a little thing? But yeah, I don't think franchise owners would give away all their profit. I think it'd be. I, you know, if I can, if I can connect that dot, man, I'll call you back. But I don't know, we, but if.

There'S anybody out there listening that you know is, has their own business or you know, wants to do this for gifting or, or to provide in their offices like it, I would be not doing my job well if I said please don't reach out to generous. I would love to figure out great ways to do it because that's what we're about and it's, it's been fun for us. So yeah, anybody's interested, let me know.

All right. Yeah. Generous Coffee dot com. Ben, last question. If you had one sentence to speak into, speak your experience into somebody else's life, what would that be?

Live every day that you give more than you take.

Perfectly said. We'll end on that. How can people get in touch with you other than generous coffee.com where would you direct them to get your attention and connect with you?

Higgins Ben on Instagram is, is where I stayed most active. And then I do have a website that updates kind of, you know, what I'm up to or speaking engagements. It's a very narcissistic website called theben higgins.com because Ben higgins.com was taken. So it's theben higgins.com and you can kind of get, get updates on business life or kind of what's going on through that too.

Yeah, I actually own Ben Higgins dot com. I spot on domains. So I'll. If you'd like it, we can talk after the show. But anyway. Hey man. Ben, it's been incredible to have you on. Really appreciate your perspective. Enjoyed the conversation very much.

Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.

All right. And this has been the home front with Jeff Duden. We've had Ben Higgins on here. And thanks, everybody, for listening.