Episode 307: From The Bachelor to Generous Coffee, a Chat with Ben Higgins

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Our guest today is Ben Higgins, best known from season 20 of ABC's hit series The Bachelor. And you might be asking right now, Bobby, why is Ben on the SkewCast? You'll find out shortly. Ben stays connected with his loyal Bachelor following with his iHeartMedia podcast show Almost Famous. Which he co-hosts with his friend and former Bachelor contestant, Ashley Laconetti, which has over 150 million downloads. In February of 2021, Ben released his first book called Alone in Plain Sight. And in June of 2021, Ben started hosting the popular podcast called Hope Still Wins. Now to the reason why Ben is joining us today. In 2017, he co-founded Generous International, a for-purpose company dedicated to contributing profits to social issues around the world, starting with a cup of coffee. With a vision to change the way society thinks of consumer products, all Generous merchandise is designed to create and multiply good in the world. Ben and his team at Generous Coffee entered the promo industry last year, and thanks to our friend Ellie Bath— hi Ellie— he immediately wanted Generous Coffee to join the Commscue community as his first entry point into the industry. 100% of the profit made at Generous Coffee goes to support nonprofits. We talk about this, Ben's journey as an entrepreneur, including the 22 restaurants he's a part of, and how being one of the world's most eligible and loved bachelors changed his outlook on using celebrity and business as a force for good. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Common Skew. Hey, before our chat with Ben, today we open registration for Skew Camp, held September 15th through the 18th at the Virgin Hotel in Nashville. Now, if you're new to SKU Camp, think of it like a business boot camp where you deep dive into essential and timely topics for today's promo professional. It's the perfect opportunity, a couple of days to focus on your business rather than just being caught up in the whirlwind of it. So whether you're wrestling with scaling, crafting a killer sales strategy, or building an unstoppable team, SKU Camp is where we tackle the most pressing challenges and the biggest opportunities for today's modern distributors. Now, if you've been to SKU Camp before, we have a few changes for you this year. We have not one, but two new workshop leaders. One is Steven Shedletsky, otherwise known as Shed. He's the delightful and erudite author of the book Speak Up Culture, who teaches how to amplify your team's best ideas, how to be bold with vision, disagreements, feedback, and how to encourage innovation that creates outsized momentum for you and your team. Also joining us is Leah Garvin, bestselling author of Unstuck, a TEDx speaker and host of the top podcast Managing Made Simple, with experience leading team ops across amazing companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Bank of America. As the team whisperer, Leah will talk about how to build unstoppable teams resulting in high retention and high impact results. And as always, an incredible lineup of fresh leading voices from within the industry, including Andrea Kramer, president of City Apparel and Merch, Michael Wolliver, founder of Magellan Promotions. Ryan Pauls, chief swag officer at Radar Promotions. Dominique Volker, executive director enterprise sales at Whitestone Branding. Dean Caravallas, CEO and founder of Blizoo. And Benji Bearman, CEO and co-founder of Liquid Screen Design. But probably the most important change we've made is making more time for stronger connections with your peers. SKU Camp attracts some of the brightest minds in the biz, and we wanted to give you more time to tap into that community collective to help you restore, refresh, and most importantly, build toward your vision of success. Join us September 15th through the 18th in Nashville. And just a reminder, this event sells out quickly and seating is limited. So if you're thinking about it, go grab those tickets today at skewcamp.com. Today's episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonscue.com. Now here's my chat with Ben Higgins.

Ben, it's an honor to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Uh, you know, one of my, uh, one of my co-workers Ellie had mentioned many times how great, uh, your show is and how good of an influence you have over the whole industry. And so I was really pumped to come talk to you.

Well, that's an honor. Let's do something different since you've done so many interviews, you've hosted your own podcast, you've done it all. Um, let's start where you're at today and sort of go back to where you've been. I mentioned in the intro the mission of Generous Coffee, so we'll get to that in a minute. But what's the most important thing on your desk, proverbially speaking, right now as an entrepreneur? Like, what's a new initiative or something recent with Generous Coffee that you want to talk about?

Well, I think, you know, for Generous, it's really right now we just got a brand new building. That's probably the most exciting thing. It's a huge investment for us.

Yeah.

You know, we're expanding our space so that we have more opportunity to grow. I actually really like the question, what's the most important thing on my desk right now? And there's two things. There's one, a picture of my family. My whole family. And then the second is my notepad. I'm old school, man. I still take notes every meeting. It's great, you know, and, and I go back through every night and look at what I've missed. And that's probably the most important thing. But right now, when it comes to kind of the holistic view of my world, we've made a huge investment into growing a space where people can come visit, but also where we can get more work done.

And that's in Warsaw, Indiana, right?

Warsaw, Indiana, where I'm from. Small little town, central Indiana.

We're going to get to that in just a minute. I love that. And you just sold lots of hearts here because the journal and the tactical tactile part of, you know, old school, we love it. To date, you've donated over $120,000 to 20 nonprofits. That stat may even be old. In an interview, you said this: be the solution to the things that make you most upset. Try to do it in a contemplative thought-through way. Can you share, um, I mentioned the intro that Generous Coffee donates your profits to nonprofits and causes you believe in. Can you sort of share a few of who those folks are and give us a clearer picture of who we're impacting?

Yeah, definitely. Well, uh, you know, that's really why Generous exists. And so we exist to donate 100% of our profits to nonprofits. So, you know, in today's world, I think when I said that, there's a couple things that come to mind that are kind of built beneath that. This generation, that's really the generations living on Earth today, have been burned by probably a lot of for-purpose companies or nonprofits.

Right.

And so we make it clear that if you want to see our financials, you can see them. I don't make a dime on it. My business partner doesn't make a dime. We never will. This is, this is a company built to give back. And so we want to be so revolutionary on the giving side that it forces other companies to consider it. So we want to kind of be the— we want to go so far in one direction that other companies go, okay, maybe we can't give 100% of our profits away, but maybe we can give 5, 10, 2, whatever that may be. Um, and so for, for me, uh, I want to help in ways, uh, that are contemplative, that, that I've thought through, because I don't want to just start something new to start something new. There's a lot of great causes out there, yeah, that are doing great work. And sometimes if you're wanting— if you see an injustice in the world and you want to find a solution for it, sometimes it just means tagging on to something that already exists, right? Problem was nothing existed like Generous yet. Some of the causes that we give back to— so we have 4 different lanes or 4 different criteria in one lane. So all of the organizations that we support are human-focused. I always want to say we love animals. You might even hear my dog bark during this interview. We love the environment. These are things that matter a lot to us, but we had to pick a lane. And so we picked a lane, and that's humans and its injustices facing humans— anything from poverty to lack of something, lack of education, healthcare, water, resources, leadership, etc. And these organizations have to be effective in their mission. So they have to have existed for a little bit of time to prove to us that they're good at what they say they're doing. They have to be efficient with their funds. We don't care at Generous if we fund the pens and paper that go towards the office space because we know that's important, but we just want to know that that money that we're giving is being used efficiently. And then finally, it has to be sustainable mission. So if it's an organization focused on community development, we want to hear about their plans to let this community thrive on their own so that they can maybe go off and teach another community nearby how to do what they've learned to do or what they've been doing. And to date, we've done everything from working with families that maybe have somebody incarcerated to right now our 4 nonprofits. There's one in the healthcare space in Haiti. There's another one that has an orphanage in Africa. We also have, I guess, one more that's in the healthcare space, more focused on disease prevention and education. And then finally, one of the ones that matters so much to me is clean water. And so you know, clean water is such an essential piece of somebody's life that you oftentimes forget and neglect. And when somebody has clean water, their whole life changes. I have thousands of stories on that, but we rotate every quarter. And then the 4 nonprofits that we give to—

when you started, you were inspired by a little restaurant in Warsaw, Indiana, when you first thought, I want to get into the restaurant business. But what was the spark that said, I want to get in the coffee business and I want it to be 100% nonprofit? Was that a particular instance that happened?

Yeah, definitely. Well, I had gone to Central America as a teenager, and I had saw poverty with my own eyes for the first time. And I think anybody that's gone and seen true poverty, again, with the lack of stuff, their world changes. The way they see the world changes. And for me as a teenager, it really did. But we came back to the States, my buddies that had gone on this trip with me, And we started to think about ways that we could help solve poverty without just being the white people from the US that went down and told them how to do it. And so we came up with an idea that we could ask people, what do they need? What do they want? What do they dream of? And how could we help? And we let them lead us and guide us, and we could help fundraise, we could help share resources, we could help share maybe expertise, but that they would be the ones kind of driving the changes that exist in their communities. That organization thrived. It's still thriving today. And so I was on the board for, for about 8 years. I ended up going on reality television coming off of that experience. And it was a very selfish pursuit, quite frankly. The chase of relevancy and the chase of trying to stay famous was exhausting to me. And it was a very lonely island.

Yeah.

So I had to call up a buddy of mine and I kind of told him about what my heart was feeling, what my mind was thinking. And he said, hey, what if this is never meant to be about you? What if it was meant to be about something greater than you? And now I come from a faith tradition, and so faith is a big part of my life. But I think in general, that's really good advice. I think no matter what kind of belief system you have as your foundation, I think it's a really good piece of advice is to maybe try to do something greater than yourself and do something about others. And so I went on a discovery trip to Central America, happened to have dinner one night and a bottle of wine with a guy that owned a coffee farm who invited us up to visit it. I went up there and I saw the beauty of a coffee farm. I saw the injustices that coffee producers were facing. And we came back to the States and we thought we could tell a great story through coffee, which most people consume. And we thought we could give 100% of it away because at that time in my life, I did have a podcast and I do have restaurants. And so it wasn't necessarily for me, hey, I need to find a way to make more money. It's like, what if we could do something revolutionary with the right people and give all of it away, but grow a really successful business at the same time.

Is it safe to say that your brush with celebrity and what that entailed caused this pressure cooker to come out the other side with how it changed you?

Definitely. I mean, because I think most people at some point in their life wonder what it would be like to be known, right? And I'm not just saying known as in being famous, I'm saying known in general.. And so for me, I kind of got thrown into experience where 11 million people felt like they knew me. Right. And I wasn't prepared for it. And I think for me, it did, it kind of swallowed me up. It made my ego get a lot bigger at times. It also hurt at times because the criticism becomes louder too. Yeah. And then I think for me, the really tipping point was maybe a year or two after my experience on The Bachelor. Was where relevancy started to very tangibly fade. You couldn't stay in the headlines. People weren't calling you to come to red carpet events. You weren't getting paid just to show up anymore. And for me, it made me— it humbled me to ask myself the question then, what's next? What do I do with all of this, this new platform that's been handed to me? Yeah. And this experience that I've been through, and it I think— I don't know necessarily, but I don't think Generous would exist today without that pressure cooker of environment saying, okay, focusing on myself wasn't fulfilling. What else is out there? And it was, hey, can we do something to focus on others?

Yeah. How did you— to get back to the branded merch industry, since that's what this audience is all about, how did you discover the branded merch industry? When did that connection happen? And you thought, you know what, we can make an impact here too.

Yeah, definitely. Well, I think it's almost a natural fit for Generous because we are a specialty-grade coffee company, but most importantly, we're a storytelling company. And so the— you know, there's a lot of coffee companies out there. There's a lot of good coffee companies out there. Right. But I think the difference with Generous is we're focused on the impact and the story being told behind the coffee and with the coffee. And so for us, it was a natural fit because we're so used to customizing our bags. We're so used to kind of taking a backseat to maybe somebody else's brand, but allowing our coffee and our skill sets to be the ones being sold. And so we discovered it maybe accidentally based on a few different companies coming to us and saying, hey, we want to highlight this organization. Can you tell the story of this organization on your bags and provide us coffee? And they were like, wait, we have something here. That could be really unique because I think in the branded merch space, I think maybe one thing that stands out to us and there's not a lot of coffee companies maybe in the branded merch space necessarily, right? But we're really good. I won't claim we're great at everything, but we're really good at making our clients the heroes because that's what we're built on, is telling the stories already. And so I think for us it was, it was a natural fit and, and one that we've grown into over time. And gotten pretty good at.

So we could have agencies right now who listen and go, you know what, I want to be a part of this. I need to be talking with my clients about Generous Coffee. You have sold the vision of Generous Coffee multiple times over. You're talking about it all the time. How would you coach or encourage them to talk about this particular opportunity with their clients?

Well, I would say any client that's looking to make an impact, I think that's a big thing, you know, within the workspace. So maybe if it's gifting or if it's distributing, It's showing that, hey, I care about humanity, even down to the coffee that we are providing. And I think for us, the simplest, the differentiator for us goes back to the fact that if you want to be connected or if you already are connected to an organization that you care about, that you believe in and that you trust, we can help highlight that organization. And so not only are you doing incredible work with the business that you're running, you know, if you're an agency kind of selling Generous, the companies that you're talking to and the people that you're talking to are already doing incredible work, but now you can highlight something that is making the world a better place. And so you're getting great coffee, specialty grade every time, but you're also getting a really impactful story that's true and real. And for me personally, I see a world where even down to the cup of coffee that we're drinking every day, it's making an impact in some way. And that's a world that excites me. And so I think it's just finding the people that are interested in providing a gift that people are going to use and enjoy, but also providing really good impact on the back end.

You are in one of the most notoriously difficult businesses in the restaurant business side. So you have multiple restaurants that you've started and been a part of, and now you have the coffee company. Let's talk about your journey as an entrepreneur. Like what has been, if you were to sit down, no pun intended, to have coffee with one of the entrepreneurs in this audience and they would say, Ben, I really love your journey. I love what you're doing with Generous Coffee. How would you inspire that? How would you encourage them? Like what's, what's some of the advice that some others have given to you that you as an entrepreneur said, here's one thing I would share with you or two?

Well, I mean, I think over the last 10 years of doing this, The one thing that continues to stay true to me, and it sounds so simple and maybe a little bit cliché, is you got to be partnered with the right people. I think for me, I have a lot of confidence that I'm not the smartest person in the room anytime I sit in meetings with any business that I'm associated with. I also think you got to find people that are inspired for a greater cause, right? Restaurants, for example, we have 22 restaurants now. They're just crushing it. And we— but what we've done and what I think is so cool is we've built them around incredible chefs who want to create and who want to still stay inspired. And we're giving them maybe their first opportunity to do this. So they're grateful. And that spirit of gratefulness then spews out in the plates that we're serving or the hospitality that we're giving. Now, that model over time, if you're a restaurateur, says, hey, you can't probably keep that up forever, right? You can't grow to 100 restaurants., but what you can do is keep the spirit alive from the top down, and you can keep that spirit of gratefulness, that spirit of we're focused on making memories, right? One of the things we talk about is making memories for the people that sit at our restaurant. We want them to leave making a memory. And so if that's how every one of our restaurants function, if that's how, uh, not only our GMs function to our ownership group, down to then maybe the people sitting at the table, to the servers and the people cleaning the dishes in the back, like, if we're knowing that we're there to create memories, it inspires people to show up well every day. And so I think it's finding that mission behind it. It's not just starting a restaurant to make money. That isn't the point. That will come and go very fast. There's a lot of ways to try to make money, and there's been a lot of ways I've failed at trying to make money. But it's when you have kind of the mission, the ethos behind it that inspires for the long term, I think that's where, you know, you can really get fired up. I also think it's a good way to lead a team is to continue to speak the mission. Into the team all the time.

For sure. Your role as an entrepreneur has evolved for sure, given that many restaurants and the scale that you've tried to grow yourself personally. Where you find the joy in your work now— you've got— you're talking to entrepreneurs who are at various stages in their journey. Some are running $50 million businesses, some are running $150 million businesses, some are running a $2 million business. Where are you finding the joy now in the work?

Well, I want to be honest to say that if, if I felt joy 100% of the time we would be having a full different conversation. There's been moments, you know, where this has been— many moments where this has been really hard, uh, many, uh, quote-unquote failures or starts and stops in business for me. Where I find the joy right now, and it's been this way for the last couple years, are, are the people and the stories I get to be a part of. And so if it's visiting Honduras, for example, and sitting with somebody who did just get clean water for the first time, and I can hear the story of the impact of that Or if it is sitting at dinner with an entrepreneur who, you know, has grinded for 6 years and their business is booming and I get to sit and celebrate them in that. Or maybe if it's like this week where I had— I got to sit with somebody who is also really struggling with mental health and not feeling how they can take the next, next best step. And I got to mourn with them in that moment and sit beside them and listen to them in those moments. It's, it's the impact. It's the connection points for me still. It's what am I a part of, or what can I get a part of, or what am I creating, or what has been created that allows me to connect with, with people in whatever space they're at in life. And that's what excites me.

A little more about you. What brands do you follow for inspiration?

Who inspires you the most? Generous Coffee inspires me quite a bit. The team there really does. I'm also a I've really always been a wine and bourbon fan, quite honestly. And I really love when those, those brands are creating stories. So I'm a big fan of Buffalo Trace Distilleries. I think they're doing incredible work for incredible people. I've also— I also have really kind of gotten into— it's wild— the cowboy hat, a lot of following, a lot of cowboy hats. Makers. And what I love about them is when they tell the story of the places these hats are going to. I live in Denver. And so it feels like to me, it's keeping the West alive. And you get to see these ranchers. And that's, I mean, coming from Indiana, maybe it's like the John Deeres of the world. That brand always gets me excited because it's the people that maybe, quote unquote, don't have the sexiest job in the world, but are doing so much good. That allows food to be on my table or the fields to be harvested to feed the cattle, whatever that may be. I love their stories because they're sitting in a combine typically or ranching alone. And we get a lot of those out here in Colorado even. And it's just highlighting like what they've learned along the way that I've really loved.

It's really cool. I love that. Who has impacted your life the most from a leadership perspective? You have a particular mentor?

Uh, you know, I've gone through a few mentors in my life, all of them for different seasons. Like right now I'm having more of a spiritual mentor, somebody that works at the church that I attend who's kind of walking me through that stage. I've had a business mentor, uh, and, and I'll just highlight him, Tyler, who is my business partner at Generous, who, uh, was a very successful CEO, uh, all through his 30s, and at one point woke up in the morning and said, hey, um, kind of like me, like, there's something greater out there. And he's the perfect match then to come to Generous because this is his next season of life. He's inspired me and taught me a lot when it comes to business and how to operate, even down to the very, like, maybe boring things, like how to read a financial statement, how to predict on a P&L what's coming up next. Like, those things are things maybe I haven't learned. But Bob Goff is an author and he writes books that are probably good for all ages, but his hope— he is— he was an ambassador. He's an attorney. He's a professor. But he just always feels like he's finding a way to create cool story. Like, I don't— it's like one of those people that, you know, that you could sit down with. And he has 6 stories from yesterday that are cooler than any stories I've created in the last, like, 20 years of my life. Right. And his books kind of, like, exude that. And so I've always really enjoyed him and his hope and his joy. But also just his ability to sit with people. Like, he's a, he's a huge— I mean, he was a New York Times bestseller. He has his actual phone number on the back of every book, so just in case somebody's struggling, they can call him. I don't recommend that to everybody. I don't have the capacity for that, right? I, I have boundaries. But he is that type of guy that says, hey, I'm an open door. Um, so he's, he's really, uh, inspired me, I guess, when it comes to how I view my walk here on Earth.

Yeah, I know this is a typical interview question, but our community loves, loves this question. And that is, what is a recent book, movie, podcast, something that's really impacted you lately?

Yeah, you know what I've been into? I'm going to get the exact name here. I've listened to every episode because I walk my dog a couple of times a day. The Economics of Everyday Things. And it's, it's Freakonomics Radio puts, puts it out there. It's real short, 20-minute episodes, but it walks through like how do the Girl Scouts make money and how does bowling alleys make money. But the thing that I've really loved about it is it's highlighted the people that are involved in the industry. And so you've gotten to hear their struggles for maybe the last 30 years of how the industry has changed or how their lives has changed and the way they've had to adapt and what that's looked like for their everyday lives. That's been a really fun listen for me personally. I'm also reading the Anthony Bourdain book right now. And I've always loved Anthony Bourdain, uh, inspired me in a lot of ways. If you would ask me, you know, who my mentor would have been, uh, maybe a few years ago, I would have said Anthony Bourdain because he kind of has those same characteristics that I was talking about, like the ability to sit with people and bring up really great things out of them. And so I'm reading his book right now, and that's been, uh, it's been fun for me, uh, a little shocking— I'm not surprising, but shocking at times, just how he operated. But it's been good. I still have a lot of respect for the guy.

Yeah, same, same. There's an interesting connection you have between everyday ordinary objects— take coffee, cowboy hat you mentioned, even the podcast you're listening to— and a through line to mission and purpose and a deeper meaning of common ordinary things. Is that just something that you—

where does that come from? Well, I'm a 4 on the Enneagram, so I don't know if you follow the Enneagram at all, but I live in, I live in a place of like a lot of just up in my head. Um, and I've always felt like there's like a magic to this world that you can tap into or you can choose not to. And I think through my 20s and through kind of getting thrown onto television that magic almost left, uh, because it was very much a personal pursuit and it was all very surface level. And it was, how do I need to show up for this moment today to look my best and be my best? And I think one of the things that happened to me was the more I did that, the less magic there was in the world, because I felt like my soul was being gone or wasn't being shown. And so now one of the things that I have, like you said, one of the things that I find the most joy in is seeing the depth of every human experience, the depth of every business experience, the depth of the things that are being done in this world and just hearing how and why to them. I'm learning a lot too. I think I'm in a season of learning a ton about myself and about others and about just like how, just how crazy it is that we're on this earth spinning around doing all these cool things, and I just want to consume as much as I can.

Yeah, very enlarged spiritual dimension to you, man. I've heard that before. One last question. There are lots of entrepreneurs listening who might be in a place where they can't do as much as what you're doing with Generous Coffee, but their heart is there and they want to do something. They want to make an impact. They want to make a difference. Let's let our last question be how you would encourage those entrepreneurs wherever they're at in their journey, and maybe they're just struggling to make payroll, but they're like, you know what, we want to make a difference. We want to find a mission, kind of like what you found with Generous Coffee.

What would you say? Well, I would say money is by far not the most important resource we have on this earth. And I could go into more details on why I believe that the most important resource we have on this earth is time. And time can be given freely to others and it can be given freely to yourself.. And so kind of like we do, you've heard in an airplane, put your mask on first. I— the journey of trying to start something, if you're in one of those places where you feel like you can't make the right decision or nothing's going your way and you're getting kicked from all sides, take some time to put your mask on. But as soon as you get your feet underneath you, start looking left and right for those who maybe feel like outsiders. There's a lot of it. The data shows 56% of people right now in the United States feel a deep place of loneliness. So you're surrounded by those people. So look for those people and just take the next best step by giving your time, listening well, speaking less than you listen. And I think if you take the next best step, there's a ripple effect because maybe that person will go and do it for somebody else. So if you're wanting to help or want to find a way to engage to help make the world a better place, the best, the best way to start is just to step out your front door and look left and right for the people that are hurting and giving up a little bit of your time for those people.

Awesome. And thank you, my friend, for joining us today on the podcast. For, for this business is such an inspiring business.

Thanks for coming in our industry and making an impact. I really appreciate you having me.

Very excited for what's next. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.