How Genuine Service Can Impact The World With Brett Meyer
How do you impact the world around you? By genuine service. Chad Burmeister’s guest in this episode is Brett Meyer, the CEO and Founder of Impact Upgrade. Brett shares with Chad how his company works in automating processes for nonprofits. They work in the background to allow the frontliners to focus on their job of impacting the world. Join in the conversation and discover how Brett’s introverted nature helped him live a significant life. At the end of the day, when you focus on serving the ultimate Kingdom of God, you make this world a better place to live in.
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How Genuine Service Can Impact The World With Brett Meyer
I am here with Brett Meyer who is from Impact Upgrade. He's been doing consulting with nonprofit organizations for many years. For the last couple of years, he has been launching Impact Upgrade. I'm happy to have him on the show. Brett, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.
I heard that you're from Indiana. It sounds like a cold place to me.
It was cold, although right now, it's warm but mostly humid and full of mosquitoes.
To help our audience get to know you. We like to go back and rewind the tape to when you're younger because what I've found is that when you're 6, 7 or 8 years old, you're unfiltered. The world hasn't yet pushed you down or pulled you down a path. What were you passionate about? What'd you love to do when you were 6 or 7?
I was obsessed with Legos, which fits into the engineering theme at least. Maybe two items that contradict each other, I was also into organizing things as well as taking things apart. I used to keep collections of random electronics that’s stopped working that I took apart, or organizing collections of stuff, baseball cards, rocks or whatever. It wasn't so much about the stuff. It was more about organizing it. There's something therapeutic about it. That was the most of it. Legos and organizing things.
My son loved Legos. Now, he's going into Engineering school at the Colorado School of Mines. What's unique about my son is that he also got into selling Legos when he was six at his school. He even hired people and wrote on the card manager. I think he's going to be a unique person that combines the skills of an engineer but also has sales capability.
Let me know when he's out of college. We'll hire him.
I've heard that a few times now. That's awesome. Thinking about the Legos, we've already answered that question because there's something to that organizing. My son is like, “Show me the directions. I need to understand the rules of the game so that I can play by the rules.” He likes to set the rules sometimes too. From Legos to engineering school to what you're doing now as the founder of a company, everybody faces a challenge in life that's the gut punch. For you, what was a gut punch you're comfortable sharing and how did you get through it?
I don't know if it's one big gut punch. It's probably more of a series of small punches. When I was growing up, I was bullied constantly. I was always facing that. Not so much in elementary school but middle school is awful. Everybody hates middle school but for me, it was especially bad, definitely in high school too. It was a mix of not fitting the mold, focusing on school, not going along with the crowd. It’s there and of itself, you stick out.
Because of that, I faced significant bullying my entire childhood. That forced me to put a ton of energy into myself and a smaller group of friends. It developed this attitude of, “It won't always be this way or at least I hope it won't always be this way. Something better is coming.” I developed a pretty deep sense of being introspective and very introverted, not isolated in a selfish sense but isolated in the "I don't have another choice" way. That molded my way of thinking and how I carry myself.
I remember there was a girl in my sixth grade who ended up being a six-time Olympic gold medal swimmer. The teacher pulled us aside one day and had that conversation and said, “You guys are the nerdy kids right now, and that's okay. You see those people over there who are popular in sixth grade, they're probably not going to be as popular when they're older in life.” At that time, I was like, “Huh?” Now you look back and I've been fairly successful. Amy certainly married the former punter of the Denver Broncos. She's been uber-successful. It's interesting because a lot of people live through those times in life.
I definitely missed out on the athletic space, especially growing up in a small town in Indiana. This period now that you look back and realize that being popular then had no bearing whatsoever on what reality looks like long-term. It's been an interesting journey to be on.
What about your passion now? We talked about younger, but how did you get into helping nonprofits? It's not something I would normally think about as a business. How did that happen?
We talk about those challenges and I can see how it queued up the way that I think about work, the world, and my focus areas. I've been seeing a lot about how the world is finally waking up to the fact that business owners and successful people don't have to be that stereotypical extrovert, or the people wearing a nice suit. I work at home. I’m happy I'm wearing a shirt. That concept of the extroverted, smiling people person as the epitome of the business owner or successful person.
We're finally waking up to the fact that there's a lot of awesome stuff that's being done by introverted, quiet people. What it queued up for me is that I'm as happy being heads down and working on something independently as I am necessarily being out in public. I can turn this on when I have to. Sometimes it's a little exhausting. You have to force yourself through it but I'm content being behind the scenes. It forced me to be attuned to myself and focus on emotions and things that a lot of times people are so focused on, but they miss everything internally. That certainly helped me.
Impacting The World: COVID reset all the obvious internal stuff like communication and general collaboration.
What cued me up for the nonprofit side that helped me define my value as a person is outside of myself. It's not necessarily what people think about me. It's not what I think about myself. It's my faith and my identity that's outside of myself. It's very external. That all revolves around my value and my self-worth being focused on the kingdom and serving people. It's been the sweet spot for me of being behind the scenes, focused on serving others, and being quiet behind the scenes.
I see the watch on your wall behind there and I've never noticed this. Maybe this is a special door but it looks to me like there's a cross on your door. Was that made specially or is that how it is?
I got crosses elsewhere in my office but no. Let’s say it was intentional.
It's jumping out at me and I love it. I've got my intentional one here as well.
Our house is filled with 1990s pine woodwork. That's how it is.
Thinking about everything that you're working on right now, if you snap your fingers and everything was exactly as it should be, what would you change in your business, community or anything? What would be amazing?
We are in a bit of a season of growth. We are already in a spot that I love being in. We are making the complex simple. We love being behind the scenes and serving the individuals that are on the frontline by freeing them up to focus on the important stuff. The way that we've been doing that in the last couple of years is very consulting-heavy. We do subscription services where we are the entire tech and operations team, and we'll continue doing that. That's been amazing. Where we're headed is that we get satisfaction out of making the complex simple. We have a bit of a sense of urgency right now due to some of the problems we've seen. Some of the important missions that we think are vital to the world that is being impacted by those problems.
There's a sense of scale and urgency right now, and we're very much headed more into the space of products. We've seen repetitious challenges come up over and over again. We’re using this as an opportunity to hopefully help more missions while also not increasing the size of our company infinitely, which is certainly a space we don't want to be. It's this intentional growth. With respect to revenue or anything like that, we need to be sustainable, but more about the urgency and the scale that we see that we could help the kingdom through this work and doing that more repetitiously and less one-on-one.
It does feel more urgent than ever before since the start of COVID. It’s probably when the ticker started.
It was like the great reset button in so many different respects.
You sometimes have to shake your head and think, “How was everybody asleep for so many decades?” At the same time, it also started the stopwatch on people like you and the companies you serve that maybe they wouldn't have felt that urgency. I always think like if things pulling in one direction, the yin and the yang kick in and say, “We can't let evil run away too fast.”
It's been a ground zero moment where you see so many missions suddenly becoming very investment focus. I used to always hear the phrase, “There's no such thing as a non-technical business.” I think that's true in the nonprofit realm now. Gone are the days of having a box of index cards in the back of your office, being okay and being a scrappy nonprofit. Everything is data-driven. COVID reset all the obvious stuff like communication and general collaboration internally, but also how do you impact the world around you? How do you reach the people that need your services, everything from top to bottom? It's this perfect storm or this inflection point of all the practical as well as the actual strategic things all having to shift right at the same time.
Have you done any work? I assume the answer is going to be yes because you do stop or engineering products, etc. Any cool mobile apps for companies that you've supported?
We take a different spin and we have replaced mobile apps. Prior to this company, I worked for a company called Twilio. If you've ever been picked up by a Lyft or an Uber or check-in in an Airbnb, you get a text message. That all goes through Twilio. The teams that I oversaw were in the messaging space like SMS, MMS. I oversaw WhatsApp and a lot of other non-traditional messaging platforms. We are seeing a fairly big shift and a lot of success in using messaging engagements instead of mobile apps. It used to be that everybody thought you had to have a custom mobile app to be highly interactive. We've seen a lot of that shift in messaging strategies and cool real-time experiences that you can do purely over text messaging.
That makes perfect sense. Is there an example of one of those that you're working with or have done work with?
There are a few anti-trafficking organizations that we've worked with for a long time that originally had mobile apps to do marketing experiences with respect to engaging donors in real-time because they're heavy into the storytelling as they should be. It's the most incredible redemptive story that you've ever heard. There's a cool donor engagement strategy with that where if they're in a raid in Thailand, Cambodia or wherever they're serving, pulling the donors into that, they feel like they're a part of the mission and the story as it's happening and unfolding.
Impacting The World: Statistics show that it’s unlikely for people to revisit a custom mobile app after they've downloaded it.
They were originally trying to do that with a mobile app. We've sensed peeling away at that and using more MMS-driven strategies so that you're getting text messages. You feel like you're a part of the field operations team getting updates. With that real-time nature, it's harder to miss a message on your phone. There are all these statistics that also show how very unlikely a lot of people are to revisit a custom mobile app after they've downloaded it. It's from an outreach perspective. It's been enormously valuable.
I love to hear that. We're launching an app soon and it is a mobile app, but text messaging is a key piece because every day it says, “Share this.” It's called 77Pray. It teaches people to wake up in the morning, pray, go to bed at night, pray and in between, act and read the Bible. They click a button, it pops up and it sends out, “I thought about you. I've been checking this app out.” Every single day for 365 days a year, it encourages that, then the value of the community gets better over time.
It's very much this meet people where they are concept. These days, kids are doing social media as much as they used to be. They're all on messaging platforms. That's where it seems like so much centers.
We met with a live person and we’ve been doing some work with them. They said most companies they work with, when they first go in, have not implemented WhatsApp. It's certainly so important to meet them where they are. A lot of companies still say, “Here's the 800 number call me.” Their traffic is down to 800 numbers.
There are studies that even show that Baby Boomers and older generations are online more frequently than younger generations are these days. Strategies like that are so valuable.
Someone did a talk and they talked about bricks. They said, “When they built New York versus New Jersey, New York had a better execution strategy.” They probably have a certain vision but they executed. The way they did it is they said, “One brick at a time, let's focus on bricks.” It caused me to look internally at my businesses and my nonprofit and say, “What's my brick?” What's the brick for Impact Upgrade when you work with your clients? Talked to us about the brick for you.
That influences everything that we do with our clients. We have strong opinions about certain things, where we want to see them a year from now. The end-all vision of what we try to focus on is end-to-end automation with a lot of best practices and where we ultimately want to see you end up. Where we typically step in initially is untangling a mess that's been built for the last twenty years. You have to look for those quick wins that provide value rather than disappearing for twelve months and “gloriously reappearing” when it's all finished.
We look for that brick-by-brick mentality where you try to find that this process that you're using is not 100% ideal. However, there are ways that we can help automate bits and pieces of that to at least free you up and use that as a snowball to get started. For us, it's very much a get-started mentality because otherwise, you can sit and talk for weeks and years about what is envision look like, but If you don't put one foot out and get started, nothing happens. That is the perfect analogy.
Speaking of foot, when you said one foot out, the example he gave in his talk was Footlocker. He said that their sales were flat, and then they invented the little silver thing where you measure the foot. They taught all of the sales associates all around the country to measure. That became their brick and sales went up immediately to 78%. Think about it. Salespeople tend to come in and say, “What are you looking for in a shoe?” They're like, “I'm looking to play basketball.” Instantaneously, they're going to go show you the basketball shoe that the salesperson likes, not necessarily what the person wants. I’m continually trying to say, “What's the thing ahead of the outcome that is the brick?” The building is the outcome, comers going into the building as part of the outcome, but let's focus on what are those individual bricks that go into the building of the house.
The sales part of it is an interesting point too that for us, our sales focus is consulting. We're not pushy salespeople. I've been reading a few books about the power dynamics of sales. It used to be that the salesperson had all of the power because they're the ones that had all the information. That is not the case now. If you are trying to buy a car, everybody knows probably more than the salesman at this point. For us, that's a small part of it that we're not here to push a product on you because we know all the best practices. It is service and consulting through sales. That has been huge for us because it's something we truly believe in, and it shows people what working with us would be like. It's not a pushing thing. It's an act of servitude. You’re giving away those bricks of, “Here’s something to think about. Here are some other ways of doing it.” As a part of the sales process, it has been enormous for us.
If you go back to when you're telling yourself at age twenty, what's the one thing you would tell your twenty-year-old self?
A lot of it comes back to that background of dealing with bullying when I was a kid and becoming very introverted. That is a benefit but the detriment typically becomes you isolate yourself too much. There's this mentality of, “I've been by myself before, so when a problem comes up, I'll be by myself and I'll fix it” That stifles your growth as a company because I'm actively dealing with this right now of trying to pull myself out of the critical path and instead focus on my people, not just the problems and the firefighting. It also increases your stress and anxiety. You're internalizing everything. I would have been a lot better off, especially in my twenties, if I would have sought after mentorship, allowed people to help me, and not been in this mentality of, "I will figure this out." It's still something I struggle with but in my twenties, it was even worse.
Hopefully, someone in their early twenties reading this will reach out and get a mentor. I've gone through dozens of mentors now. Years ago, I wouldn't have thought of seeking out a mentor. It's very helpful sometimes. The last question for you is, what role does faith play in your journey? We've touched on it, but I still like to ask the question about it.
It is everything. It is the very definition of who I am. I know we talked about that a little bit earlier. It's the definition of what I do currently and where I'm going. I come back to this thought of, “Without it, what's the point?” Everything about me and our company should solely glorify Christ and focus on the ultimate kingdom that we're serving. I'm a big fan of Ecclesiastes, especially these days, I've been reading it over and over again.
It’s this concept of, “Meaningless of meaningless or vanity of vanities,” which it turns out isn't a good business motto but it's a good internalization process that we are nothing without our faith. We already have everything that we need. Our role to play right now is to impact the kingdom and to point all glory back to Him and that's it. We’re at the season of life where my wife and I have been looking mostly backward to see all the different things that we've been put through in our journey that have led up to preparing us for something that is outside of ourselves. Without that, I don't know where I'd be right now.
I’m in the process of writing a kid's book and in the prep for writing the book, I have a ghostwriter that's great at it. The intent is how do you make good choices? I asked my mom and business partners who make good choices. You start to ask all these people and you realize everybody has a different mold for making a decision in life.
Impacting The World: Everything about our company should glorify Christ and focus on the ultimate kingdom we're serving.
We had Dr. Jim Wilder over who's a Neurotheologist to the firepit one day. I said, “I'm writing this book. What would you tell me?” He gave us all kinds of amazing things about God and his belief structure. It wasn't there when he was a kid. His parents were missionaries, but then he prayed 30 days in a row with him and a friend, and they compared notes every day. They said, “If God gives us the same message, then we'll believe.” It was almost word-for-word every day. It was like, “I hear you now. We’re here.” He told me that in the Old Testament, there are 613 laws about making a decision between two choices. It’s very hard. It would be infinity. I said, “What do you do?” It was two things. One is, what would Jesus do? What would God do? It's a higher-level authority than just me and my brain trying to make it.
This one might give you something to think about with you and your wife. It was, how do I optimize this decision for the end of the time? If you think about where you're putting your time, talent, efforts, money and all of it in to get the maximum yield for thousands of years from now, it causes you to think, “I've typically been optimizing for the next 50, 10 or 1 year or weeks,” but if you optimize for eternity, how does that change? It's made me think, “I'm playing in way too small of a game. God's given me 30 years of business understanding. Let's go figure that out.” You're already playing that with Impact Upgrade. You're exactly in that line. Kudos to you for where God's taken you.
Have you ever heard of Randy Alcorn? He's got this book called Heaven. It's thick but it’s talking about how biblical it is to invest in yourself for eternity not right now. A lot of people think that that sounds selfish like you're focusing on making your mansion or better in heaven or whatever. There's biblical truth in that and it's an interesting way of thinking about if you had this massive opportunity in front of you, or you could take the path of least resistance and get a small win right now, which would you choose? Not enough people think of it like that.
Cool website, cool product, amazing story that you've shared from Legos to now. There's hope for my son. If he can be on the path that you're on, that'll be a great thing, whatever God has in store for him. Amazing conversation, Brett Meyer with Impact Upgrade. It's ImpactUpgrade.com. Thanks for investing some time to share with our readers. It’s good to get to know you, Brett.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks, everybody, for joining the show. We'll catch you on the next one. Cheers.
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About Brett Meyer
Brett has a wide breadth of software engineering and management experience in multiple industries, including roles at Twilio, Disney, Red Hat, Raytheon, NBC Universal, and regional companies. He also enjoys public speaking on technical topics at both local and national conferences, as well as staying active in open source software communities.
His wife, Jenel, is an amazing and passionate ER/Trauma RN. She's so much cooler than him. However, she did choose to marry Brett, which calls her standards into question...so there's that.
Brett and Jenel play zone defense against a formidable yet adorable crew. The small humans are nice enough to let their parents feel like winners once in a while, but that's all part of the game. (It's also handy living with an ER nurse. Because reasons.)
