The Intersection Between For-Profit and Non-Profit Organizations and Leadership, with Tom Ulbrich

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Tom Ulbrich about the intersection between for-profit and non-profit organizations and leadership. Tom Ulbrich is an entrepreneur, educator, speaker, author, social sector CEO at Goodwill of Western New York, a member of the Forbes Non-Profit Council and Executive in Residence for Entrepreneurship at the University at Buffalo School of Management. He is an entrepreneurial leader with broad-based management experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. His passion for social innovation is focused on nurturing strong relationships and building consensus across diverse groups of stakeholders in the academic, for-profit, non-profit and government sectors. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the HCI family of podcasts. We're your source for personal, professional, and organizational growth and development. We share our own original research, explore industry trends, and interview executives and thought leaders from across the globe. Join us for practitioner-oriented content around all things leadership, HR, talent management, organizational development, and change management. Maximize your personal and organizational potential with the HCI family of podcasts.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Tom Olbrich, welcome to the conversation today.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  It is a real pleasure to be with you. You're joining us from New York. I'm south of Salt Lake City in Utah. Today, we're going to be talking about leadership generally, but specifically the intersection between for-profit and nonprofit leadership within organizations, and what that can look like, and what that transition has looked like throughout your career, and how you're dealing with that currently in your current situation. As we get started, I wanted to share Tom's bio with everybody. Tom Olbrich is an entrepreneur, educator, speaker, author, and social sector CEO at Goodwill of Western New York, a member of the Forbes Nonprofit Council, and executive in residence for entrepreneurship at the University at Buffalo School of Management. He is an entrepreneurial leader with a broad-based

• 1:23Speaker 00

  management experience in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. His passion for social innovation is focused on nurturing strong relationships and building consensus across diverse groups of stakeholders in academic, for-profit, nonprofit, and government sectors. I really love everything about that. I do a lot of work in the social impact and social entrepreneurship space myself, and so I just love it anytime I have a chance to have these types of conversations, because I think we need more cross-pollinization in this area. So, pleasure to sit down with you. Anything that you would like to add by way of your own background or personal context before we dive on into the conversation?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  No, no, nothing really. Ted, maybe I would just say that I spend a lot of my time as a grandfather of six grandkids. So, I'm super excited to share that. But let's dig into the conversation.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Oh, congratulations. That is beautiful.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Thanks. That's like my most important job right now.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Wonderful. I'm not quite to that stage yet, um, though, though I'm getting there and I figure my wife and I talk about it. We're like some, you know, probably sometime in the next five years or so, we'll probably welcome our first grandchild, grandchild is my best guess. Um, and, uh, yeah, we're, we're kind of excited for, for that stage in our life. So it'll, it'll be fun when that happens. So anyways, congratulations to you and, and that's, that's awesome. Well, why don't we start off with just a little bit of, uh, more of a background about your career transition as you kind of went from entrepreneur to nonprofit CEO. Tell us a little bit more about that.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Sure. It's a, it's a bit of a eclectic and long journey, but I'll try to share it quickly with you. So, um, previously I had been a small business owner and an entrepreneur. So I'd started my work in a family business. Uh, for many years, started, uh, a company of my own that I spun off into, uh, e-commerce business. I was very, very interested in supporting small business owners and ran for public office because they've been doing a lot of advocacy for small business issues. And, um, from there I saw election, um, didn't do too great, but, uh, it was a great experience.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  And from there it led me to the University of Buffalo. They've been talking about a lot of small business needs and issues, um, back to my alma mater and at the University of Buffalo School of Management to run their Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, which was, uh, um, a part of the, the university that worked with small business owners, helping them, um, into, uh, grow their businesses, build their leadership teams. So that's how I ended in the university center. Through all this, they still kept my businesses, um, and, and had, had a businesses up until 2019. But at the University of Buffalo, my work then led into I, I did a lot more teaching and entrepreneurship. And I think that the transition for me came here.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Um, I was assistant dean and a, and also taught at the School of Management, but started working with a dean in the School of Social Work, Nancy Smith, who was very, very forward thinking and understood that the social. Sector needed to think more entrepreneurial. That's where that work started with the action of my love for it. And she really inspired that work. I went on to become assistant dean at both the School of Social Work and management was working on that cross pollinated social sector work. So that led me to social innovation and a lot of the work was at what we're going to talk about is this intersection of the for profit and nonprofit sectors.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Long story short, that eventually led me to Goodwill. I had really honestly back in 2019 was recruited and didn't really have any intention of coming here. But over time got worn down with the challenge of you talk about this all the time. Why don't you come out in the real world and do this?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  That does that. And I think the entrepreneur got excited about, okay, you challenged me. So here I come. And that's how I ended up at Goodwill. Kind of a long story, but important to see how all those pieces kind of fit together.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I think you're absolutely right. Like, we definitely need more entrepreneurial mindset and entrepreneurial spirit in the nonprofit space, in the social sector space. There's not a lack of big hearts and good purpose, right? And good intention, right? Like, that's, that's what the space is all about. So you have plenty of that. You have lots of great people with good intentions. Often people who want to donate and have money, you know, so you have the philanthropic piece. But, but that isn't enough, like good intentions and purpose and even money isn't enough, right?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  To, to make sustainable impact and to, and to actually make a dent in the big hairy problems that the, that face the world and society and communities. Right? And so that's, that's where, you know, that entrepreneurial mindset and systems thinking and design thinking and like these different approaches that, that entrepreneurs have to deal with all the time, just to, to, you know, user experience design and like all these things that like just go into having good products and services. You know, that actually translate into, you know, having a good social enterprise, having a good nonprofit. That can actually be sustainable and and and make the impact that you want to have. That goes a long, long way.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  And so, oh, go ahead.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  No, I was just gonna say sorry to to stomp on you there. Um, yeah, that's you're absolutely right. And today, the world is even more competitive. We're in this rapidly changing, exponentially changing technological world. There's a lot of pressure on nonprofits. Traditional funding is drying up. And what I learned when I was talking about working with Nancy Smith was we really spoke the same language. At first, I had come from the business school and I I wasn't thinking about entrepreneurship and social work, like social sector, how that connection is, but you nailed it. A lot of what being an entrepreneur is, being a good nonprofit leader. You you you talked about systems thinking and problem solving and customer discovery in a sense.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Those are skills of the entrepreneur. And I think another thing that I really aligns well in the nonprofit sector that you bring in from the entrepreneur is an iterative way of thinking. So there often nonprofits get stuck. We've always done it this way. And they go down this hard path of we're just going to continue down. But everything's changing. I think that ability to iterate, to gain feedback, take a couple of steps forward, one step back, is really critical. And that's something that, you know, entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship does well, as well as fundraising, talent development, all those pieces fit together. So it I kind of chuckled, but we were talking the exact same language.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  The dean of the the School of Social Work and an assistant dean and professor over in the School of Management. And that's where my passion really got, as I said earlier, got fired up is exactly what you said. The two, the two fit together. Much of them are the same, really.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, so you know, before I went on for my, I'm a professor and you know, do things like this podcast on the side, but before I went on and did my PhD, you know, I got a master's in public administration and and that was like one of the very first things, you know, that I remember uh my professors, you know, tried to hit home to us. Um, you know, as many of us would be going into, you know, some into government, um, but many would be going into the nonprofit space. And you know, they really wanted to to double down on this point, you know, that that uh they need the the the whole nonprofit sector just needs more competent.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  You know, business minded people, like people with the the the skill sets that will help them to be successful. Um, the the skills that we were getting in our master's program, right? Um, and and not because the intentions were lacking, not because the purpose and the meaning and all those other things that exist in spades in this in the sector. Um, those weren't lacking. It's just, it's just you have all these super well intentioned people that get in and and then they just don't know how to how to do it. And and so that I think is a message that can't be repeated enough because I see it happen again and again and again and again. And I don't know how it is out there in New York. I suspect it's similar, but like here in Utah, we, I haven't looked recently, but for years and years and years, Utah has been

• 10:08Speaker 00

  the highest nonprofit per capita state in the country. Um, and so lots of lots of well intentioned people, lots of charitable giving, lots of nonprofits, lots of people setting up nonprofits. And um, that's amazing. Like, that's awesome. Like, good, good for people, right? Um, but on the other hand, that's kind of crummy, like that, because there's so much replication, there's so much, um, there's, there's uh, instead of people like reinforcing the effort to to make a sustainable um approach towards solving actual problems. You know, you have all this dilution dilution of of effort and replication and and just inefficiencies and all all of these things. And it it just ends up, you know, creating a a an ecosystem.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Nonprofit ecosystem that isn't effective, right? And so ultimately, we, you know, we can do better. And, and as you said, all of these various entrepreneurial kind of skillsets and mindsets, business acumen competencies are going to, to help leaders in the nonprofit space to, to be very, very effective. And, and so I love everything about that. What, one of the things that I think is really interesting is, is, you know, as I was looking over some of your materials and preparing for the interview today is just like this idea of transformation and catalyzing transformation at the, at this intersection of social impact and business best practice.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Tell us more what you, what you mean about that.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So again, my interest here and what, what I see, and it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on it because you're in a similar space. I see this convergence happening that may be leading us to a future where the line is a bit more blurred between a for-profit and a nonprofit. I'm thinking fifty, seventy-five, maybe a hundred years from now, social entrepreneurship may be more the norm of business because nonprofits are being forced to be more entrepreneurial and think about generating revenue as grand strike off. But for-profits are being pushed by society to look at sex, success beyond just profit, right?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  So sustainability, the triple bottom line, and I'm not going to say we don't still teach students that your job as a CEO is to maximize shareholder value. But we're measuring shareholder value, I think, differently and society is, you know, pushing it's, it's a morphing thing. So I, that's, that's my interest there. And I, I really think that this is happening more and more on both sides. So I kind of, you'll see my writing, a lot of stuff I do, I still have a foot in both sides. And I, I'm trying to bridge the gap between the, the two with some, what I would call transformational leadership. So again, how can the for-profit use some of the best of a nonprofit world where we're, you know, where we're focused on not?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Just that purely bottom line, but to your point, what you just described, how do we not cannibalize each other in the in the nonprofit world by having so many people maybe doing the same thing? You know, replicating CEOs and CFOs and boards and expenses. So I think there's there's great opportunity here. And I just kind of finish up by saying it's really, if we could get people to see it, to me, it's this concept of you can do good work while you do well. Meaning you can, you can do good work in the for-profit and the social sector, purposeful work that has great meaning. But you can also do well financially. An organization can do well financially and sustain itself.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  There it it kind of bothers me a little bit. It's getting better, but there was sort of this martyr mentality if you're going to go in nonprofit sector. That you must suffer. You can't be paid well. And I we're seeing a shift there, but but it's we've got to continue to move towards this triple bottom line for both for both their sectors, in my opinion. And I may be talking about economics that when it comes to the for-profit sector, that people will say you're insane. But I'm just watching society push us this way, the younger, especially the younger generations demanding the change in the for-profit sector.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think there's there's kind of this merging to the middle. And you're absolutely right. Younger millennial and Gen Z are kind of insisting on this move towards stakeholder capitalism, triple bottom line. And obviously, there's like this movement towards B Corp and, you know, other other efforts like that, right? And ESGs and such. And obviously, there's the political pendulum kind of swings back and forth. And, you know, it can be a little bit turbulent, but I would say generally speaking, across the world, you know, we're moving more towards more social responsibility around around business, right? Certainly more than we were at 50 years ago or 100 years ago, for sure.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And and certainly, younger generations are expecting more out of us and more out of business. And and so, yeah, I see this merge. More in the middle, more of the blurring of the lines between like a for-profit and a nonprofit. And and it doesn't need to be in either or like you can have, in fact, you need to have, you need to have like a sustainable, profitable. Uh, nonprofit in order for it to meet its purpose and mission, right? Like if you have a nonprofit that can't actually uh keep its doors open, then how how is it actually serving anybody, right? You have to, I mean, and obviously it has a range of ways to bring in revenue. It can bring in donations, it can bring in grants, it can bring in, um, you know, other more traditional forms of revenue.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Like a for-profit business would, and so it it can diversify its its approach. But it has to be able to do that and it has to be able to do that sustainably. Otherwise, it's not going to keep its doors open, just like a for-profit business needs to. Uh, for-profit businesses can't exploit customers, environment, employees. Um, you know, people aren't going to put up with that. And so we have to find a way to to to just have a better model. Um, you know, I I'm I'm blanking on the name of the author, but the author of the book. That came out, I don't know, maybe a decade ago, Donut Economics is another really great. Example of of a different mindset of how we can approach this.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  The the bottom line is we don't have to feel like we're stuck in kind of the quote-unquote traditional um. Models of thinking about these dichot- you know, kind of the dichotomous approach towards uh, you know, how how the this kind of system. Uh, of this economic system uh function. Um, and we can, we can create the the system that we want. And and we can create a an effective and responsible and sustainable system that benefits people, that benefits everybody. Uh, and I believe that and and I think um, that's kind of what you're talking about too. And I think that's that's slowly what we're evolving towards, you know, as we kind of meet towards the middle.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  So it'll be interesting to see how that continues to to evolve over time. And of course, as I mentioned, you know, there's political pendulum swings and there's, you know, there's there's back and forth and two steps. Forward, one step back and you know, all of that happens. And so sometimes it feels like um you're losing, you're gaining momentum and then losing momentum and whatever. But I would say if you take the long arc of history and you look at like how things are today versus how they were 50 years ago or 100 years ago, we're light years ahead.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Today of like where things were 100 years ago.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  And and I suspect 50 years from now, we're going to be so far ahead um uh you know, then of where we are now. Uh so there definitely continues to be progress. I think we definitely continue um to to move forward in a direction that ultimately is better for consumers, for workers, for the environment, you know, so that triple bottom line that you're talking about ultimately is is benefiting. Um we we just need to continue uh to to make those efforts.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's what's really interesting um as I'm listening to you, I was just thinking about for-profit nonprofit sectors and uh not for-profits that if you if your product isn't attractive to customer, there's a mechanism that is going to end your company. That doesn't tend to be as true in the nonprofit world because often there's a series of donors or uh grants that will sometimes prop up something a little bit longer than it should because there's some passion. So I bet as I think about the future of this social sector intersection, I I agree with you. I think sometimes if we look, we have lots of small nonprofits and that's great. I'm not critical of that.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  But I think what we need are bigger visions um for solving these huge challenging problems that we have in our world today. And I think a lot about what we're what we should be thinking about is creating movements. And by a movement, I mean, you know, something that happens when people join it because they have a sense of belonging. Um and they have this profound sense of mission that they want to support, but they also build the the business around it to make it sustainable. So I think about we build a movement when we belong, but sometimes in our sector, we get it backwards. We ask people to belong um before they believe in what we're doing, before.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  They're, you know, behaving within the parameters of what we're trying to build before we often don't do all that work before we start with belonging instead of backward. So I think, I think that's the, the future of the, the sustainability of the nonprofit sector is getting these big movements that people can get behind. And we can build the infrastructure around to make them successful in the longer term.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think you're right. I, I think that's a really astute observation and, and, uh, yeah, I, I think there, there's so much good happening now. There's so much more we need to do and more that needs to be done. Um, Tom, this has been such a great conversation. I know we've only really scratched the surface here. Uh, I also know at the time, I'm probably going to need to let you go here in a few minutes. As we start to wrap things up for today, I just wanted to give you a chance to share with the audience how they can connect with you, find out more about your work, your team, and then give us the final word for today.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, thank you again very much, John, for having me on and sharing a little bit. If you're interested in this work, I, I think some really good examples I talk about and share a lot are of Goodwill of Western New York, which I'm president and CEO of. And you can find us at goodwillwny.org. We also do a lot of research to back the work that we're doing. So we publish about every four months, we publish a research paper on the work we're doing, um, in our community, um, the mission work, which people in workforce development that people certainly may be interested in. And then, um, if you ever want to chat or if you want to find out more about my thinking, you can, uh, find me on LinkedIn, um, under Thomas Albrecht.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And again, thanks so much, uh, for having me today. I appreciate it.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Wonderful. Thank you, Tom. Again, it's been a pleasure. I encourage the audience to reach out, get connected, find out more about what Tom can do for you. And as always, I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe. They can find meaning and purpose at work each and every day, and I hope you all have a great week.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Thanks for joining us for this episode of the podcast. We hope you stay healthy and safe and please join us again soon.