8 Mar 2019 · 3 min
Lewis Howes talks with Josh Bezoni about building charity into business. Biotrust donates to feed hungry children, partners with Make-A-Wish and Pencils of Promise, and finds that giving actually boosts sales, culture, and hiring.
This is Five Minute Friday! Welcome, everyone. My name is Lewis Howes. Very excited about today's guest. He's a good buddy of mine. His name is Josh Bizzone. You've got eight steps, right?
Yeah.
Should we talk about, should we dive into First few?
Yeah, I'd love to. The first one for Biotrust, which was really important for us was to create a charitable mission. I hadn't done that in the past. In the past, I was just, you know, I was 20 years old and I was trying to make money and I really wasn't thinking about contributing to everyone and society as a whole. And so with Biotrust, the very first thing we did was we came up with the concept that for every order that would happen at our website, we would give, we feed a hungry child for a day. And so we've done over 1.5 million meals for kids.
Amazing.
And that really came from not only because we're a nutrition company and it ties in with hunger, but when I was a little kid we used to feed people on Christmas and go to their houses and really poor people in rural Iowa. That just stuck with me. Such a great feeling.
Sure.
And it's important for the community as well as our customers and our employees because people want to be part of a company that's doing good things in the world. Sure. So charitable mission was the first thing we did with the meals. And the second thing we did was on our order page, we put an opportunity for customers to donate to the MakE-A-Wish Foundation. And they could do $1, $5, or $10. Now the interesting thing was we just wanted to do that as goodwill. But when we added that to the order page, our sales conversions went up. Really? because I think people see that you're a giving company and they want to do business with you. So our sales went up like over 5% on the order page, the conversions. And over the years we've raised over the last three years, we've raised over a million dollars for the MakE-A-Wish.
Amazing.
So we do a match, a specific match on that amount of money. Whatever they give, the new match. Yeah, and anyone out there who's got a website, you could add that to your website to any charity you want, raise a certain amount of money, you know, one, five or $10 your customers can donate. You can do a match on that. And you can do so much good and it's so simple and it's a win-win-win. The charity wins and the MakE-A-Wish kids win. Sure. We actually increase sales and customers like feel good about giving. Yeah. So that's something simple that people could do out there. Raise your conversion rates, do something great for a charity. I like that. It's so cool. I'm gonna apply that.
It's so simple to do. We're doing that already. You know, we work with Pencil Promise, which I know you do as well, but in schools. But it's not like on the checkout page, Hey, if you wanna make a donation, we just give.
Yeah.
You know, so I really like that. I want to incorporate that.
Yeah. And we do, well, Pencils of Promise, Biotrust just built our second school, which I got introduced to them through you. Yeah. Adam, he came out here, we met by a coffee shop. Nice. At the end of it, I said, yeah, let's build a school. And he's like, that's awesome. So we do a lot of charity work, but if you start an organization and you tie in your sales goals with doing something Good for people. If you hit a $10,000 in sales, you're going to do something great for a charity. And you have those goals set out. I mean, people in your company will work hard for them. It just, they want to work for a company like that in recruiting. A lot of people have come to us and said, We read about all the charity work you do, and because of that, we wanted to come work for you. So it's a great recruiting tool as well.
Sure.
Oh, one more thing about that is you meet the coolest people. Like I was having lunch with Maria Shriver Arnold Schwarzenegger's ex-wife. Yeah, she does some amazing things a month ago I was in California and it's all because of charity work you know pencils a promise where they're at the gala and Usher's there and John Legend singing and I meet these people which I've never Would have the possibility to before right and so I'm a firm believer you get what you give in life. That's great in a big way.
