Growing with Mike Prosserman, EPIC Leadership & Unity Charity
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Listen in for Mike Prosserman's personal journey in the nonprofit sector, his insights on succession planning, and his call for a more collaborative and sustainable approach to nonprofit work, along with covering the significance of partnerships, personal branding, storytelling, and showcasing impact in the nonprofit sector, offering insights and practical advice for nonprofit leaders.
In this podcast episode of Growth for Good, Daniel interviews Mike Prosserman, who shares his journey in the nonprofit sector — beginning in high school when he started a class project called "Hip Hop Away from Violence," using hip hop as a tool for social change. Growing up with personal struggles, he found solace and empowerment in hip-hop, which led him to create a mental health charity focused on building resilience in young people through the elements of hip-hop. Mike discusses the challenges and learning experiences he encountered while building his organization, Unity. Over 15 years, Unity evolved into a national charity with partnerships, programs, and a dedicated team. However, Mike realized the importance of letting go and creating sustainability within the organization. He emphasizes the need for nonprofit leaders to consider the bigger picture and question whether their presence is necessary for the organization's long-term success. Reflecting on his own transition out of Unity, Mike shares insights into the process of succession planning. He advises slowly disengaging oneself from the organization, empowering team members, and transferring key relationships and responsibilities. Mike believes that nonprofits should be willing to evaluate their impact, sustainability, and potential to collaborate with other organizations. He advocates for prioritizing the well-being of employees, respecting their mental health, and creating supportive work environments. Mike addresses the issue of nonprofits holding onto resources and not effectively sharing them with other organizations in the community. He encourages partnerships based on openness, collaboration, and a shared vision to maximize impact. Mike concludes by highlighting the importance of gracefully letting go when an organization's mission is no longer sustainable, allowing space for new initiatives and approaches to emerge.
Daniel and Mike speak about the power of partnerships and collaboration in the nonprofit sector. Mike emphasizes the importance of focusing on solving problems and addressing needs rather than getting caught up in ownership and assets. He shares examples of resources that were created but became inaccessible once the project funding ended, highlighting the need for better ways to collaborate and share resources among multiple organizations. They then discuss the concept of personal branding and how it has impacted Mike's career. Mike reflects on his experience of building relationships and connections during his time at Unity and how he now prioritizes authentic connections and investing in meaningful friendships. He acknowledges that he may not be as skilled in personal branding as others, but he has found value in writing his book as a way to consolidate his ideas and experiences into a tangible resource that represents his personal brand. Daniel acknowledges the significance of sharing stories and experiences, noting that many of these stories often go untold. Mike's book serves as a resource that captures his years of thinking and struggle, allowing him to share those stories with others. Transitioning to Mike's current work, he explains that Epic is focused on addressing brokenness in the nonprofit sector. One of their initiatives is creating peer support groups for nonprofit senior leaders, offering a space for them to discuss their challenges in a confidential and ongoing manner. Mike believes in the power of collective wisdom and peer-to-peer learning, and he envisions scaling the program to have a broader impact. He expresses his passion for this work and how it has drawn him back in, even during challenging times.
The episode wraps up with tips on how nonprofit leaders can better showcase their impact. Mike encourages them not to be afraid to ask for support and endorsements. He shares his personal experience of reaching out to famous authors for testimonials for his book and emphasizes the importance of making the ask, even if it feels intimidating. He believes that by asking for things they believe in and approaching them authentically, nonprofit leaders can increase their chances of receiving support and opportunities.
Michael ‘Piecez’ Prosserman is a bestselling author, professional B-Boy (“breakdancer”), university instructor, and certified coach who specializes in scaling start-ups, team culture, fundraising, and succession. In Michael’s book Building Unity: Leading a Non-Profit From Spark to Succession, he shares practical tools and stories to launching, leading and leaving a sustainable organization. He scaled a grassroots organization from the ground up as the Founder of Unity Charity, an organization using Hip-Hop to improve youth mental health. Over 15 years Michael grew Unity from a volunteer group to employing 80 staff, raising $7 million, and having an impact on 250,000 youth. By high school, Michael was accepted into Cirque Du Soleil and featured in the major motion picture “Honey”. Michael is committed to empowering leaders in the public and private sector to build more resilient and responsible organizations through his social enterprise EPIC Leadership. EPIC facilitates peer learning for a growing community of over 60 senior non-profit leaders
Episode Transcript
Daniel
Mike, you have an awesome history, similar path to me at the beginning where you started your own nonprofit, working with a lot of youth, and now you are working in the leadership space helping other nonprofit organizations and leaders. Tell us a little bit of your story, and firstly, how you actually entered the nonprofit sector.
Mike
Totally. Firstly, my own story started when I was born, as most stories begin, but in relation to the nonprofit actually started a high school class project called Hip Hop Away from Violence. At that time, I was in grade 11, I believe, and I was a B-boy breakdancer, the media might call it, I've been doing it since I've been in grade 10. So it's been 20-something years. And Hip hop has always been a big part of my life, my crew, getting to travel, compete, be a part of that community in a pretty awesome way. And in high school, I was also struggling at home with my family, my mom was, as I was growing up, struggling with some mental health issues. And for me, I grew up a little bit faster because of that. And when I found hip-hop, I realized there was something there that was powerful. As a voice for me, as a young person, who was bottling up a lot of my anger, and stress, and as a community that I felt like I was welcomed by and really embraced by, and as a platform to be bigger, a little bit larger than life, as a young person who was struggling and I would miss days of school, I breathe into plastic bags paper bags to start hyperventilating and things like that. I didn't really know at the time, that was anxiety. But so I was I was struggling as a young person, but really quiet about it and kept to myself. So when this high school entrepreneurship teacher said, “Hey, do you want to run a venture pick a charity?” And we created this idea, which was a concert to use hip hop as a tool to create social change, and which eventually, 15 years over time, evolved into a hip hop, mental health charity that was focused on building resilience and young people through the elements of hip hop. So that's kind of the early days, and then you said, nonprofit, but I didn't even know what a nonprofit was when I was in high school. I think we met around that time, actually. And fast forward a couple of years, I was in university, we actually created a student club. We were actually trustees by another charity, which I was on the board of. So we went through all the types of registration a lot of people asked me, should I register a charity? And I'm like, I don't know. There's a lot of questions. Actually, over five years, we took on six different forms of registration from a high school class project, unincorporated, to a student club at York University, to a trust deed group with a charity called lever violence to a nonprofit. Then we applied for our charitable status, which we finally got. So we've kind of went through the wringer. And that process was literally over five years. So by the time I was leaving university, I was kind of faced with a question like what am I doing with my life, graduated in business. And over that time, we were building what later was called the Unity, we changed the name from hip hop away from violence, Unity. And we were going into schools and doing outreach directly into communities that didn't have necessary access to top hip-hop artists in the city. And Unity took pride in really bringing in the best DJs graffiti artists, B-boys, B-girls, spoken word artists we even expanded to, and we're also great artists educators, and then we expanded to after-school programs and community-based programming and just kept expanding and expanding, but we didn't really have a plan to do so. And that's kind of how the genesis of all this happened. And sort of Fast Forward 15 years, I'll tell you about that later. But I did eventually decide to leave, and that was a really hard choice. Which I think we need to do better in the space of nonprofits. You know, learn to let go of the things that were maybe part of creating and create space for others to you know, carry on those missions, and if they're not meant to be You know, let them go, which is another hard thing that I think, a message to folks out there let go, if it wasn't meant to sustain, then that's okay. And you don't need to hang on to it forever, as I didn't was not on the board, not employed after in any way not consulted, fully disconnect fully disconnected. So highly encourage it. And definitely, I speak a lot to the succession piece. I mean, I fast-forwarded a lot there. But you know, if anyone's curious about that conversation, it's one that I I'm really passionate about having because I think I looked up to a lot of my mentors who were doing a horrible job of it. And unfortunately, I just really did not want to kill the very thing that I cared so much about. You know, it's like letting your kid go off to university or to school, you got to you gotta let them go. So anyways, I did fast-forward a lot there. So you know, feel free to rewind me a little bit.
Daniel
For sure. I love that you shared that story with a lesson at the end, too, because that's, that's really common and people, whether you're a founder or just a leader, you take off and take on a big burden. And you don't really look at the bigger picture, and what is there actually an option for it to exist without you there, right? And look at how that can happen. So kudos to you for doing that. I actually remember, because I did follow you closely at the time, with Unity, when you were when you were leaving, and I was like, Wow, I maybe pause for a second to I think from the perspective of you know, you're super passionate about this. This is your life's work, how do you? So I'd love if we could chat a little bit about that, like, how did you go about kind of making that decision to transition out for your organization?
Mike
Yeah, so So Unity over those 15 years, which is a long time, starting around 2004, I think I left in 2018. So maybe my math is off 2003. But over 15 years, we built the organization, we created an incredible team, we built it from a completely volunteer organization to having 15 full-time staff at artists across Canada national charity in different cities.
Daniel
I remember going to your office in Toronto,
Mike
we had an office, eventually, we ran a big festival that had some major headliners. We had programs all over and and amazing people on our team, who many of which are still there. Even five years later, since I've left Wow. Which is an amazing, I'm just really so happy to see that and so proud of what they've continued to do. But to your question my, my identity was very wrapped up in it as a hip hop practitioner, B-boy, still, to this day, I still practice and get down. I relate a lot of my philosophies in life to the creation process on the dance floor and, the way gravity is not really forgiving. And you kind of got to work with the momentum, that comes with falling, for example, and often use a metaphor like building the plane while flying it. So it's, it's something I talk about a lot in my book and just in life where no one really knows what they're doing. But you know, if you have an idea, and you see a gap in community, or it were in a specific community that maybe you're part of try something. And obviously when involves people's lives, we need to be careful, we need to be respectful, we need to listen and let's listen to the needs of people. And I feel that also just shouldn't hold us back from doing the good work and trying our ideas out in the real world. And that's exactly what we did with Unity, we try one thing, we learn based on the feedback we're getting from principals or from schools or from community centers, or from City of Toronto partnerships, or whatever we had, right, and we would just make it better. And then that idea went with our team and different people on that team. So we build that up. We built it to an organization that had all sorts of partnerships with government and corporate and, answers sponsors, corporate donors, foundations, donated in kind free pizza and free lawyers and all the things Yeah, we had all sorts of free media, we had TV commercials that were airing across Canada for free, that were created for free. So really neat stuff that we were able to leverage. We had airports on Dundas as an airport and airports and at Dundas Square, all for free. So we really tried to be resourceful, which is also a hip hop mentality do things we say to set the hip hop way, which find a way to do it if someone else's logo is up there on a billboard, why can't we get it up there and why? Why would we need to pay for it if our cause is meaningful so we really He tried to figure out the how, if we saw something, we knew we could do it. And even when we didn't see things, we're we can, we could try this, we can manifest this, we can make this a new thing. You know, there's a lot of broken systems out there. And we always ask, Can hip hop, we say if they're, if you're inspired by a move that you see. So if I see this billboard, I'm like, oh, I want to get up there, I want to be there. If you're inspired by something, you don't directly copy it, but you kind of flip it, and you make it your own. And you add your own personality, your own style, your own context, and you make it your own. And that's exactly what we did at Unity. So in terms of that build-up, when we got to the end, Unity was my life. And you know, it was a bit of an I saw two people that I really respected struggle to let their organizations go. And then it became three, then it became for them, this is weird. And as much as I respected those people, I saw them struggling, and that they centered themselves so much in the work, that it was impossible for them to remove themselves. And because of that, they felt that they were needed. So what I would suggest is, how do you dissenter yourself? How do you pass off those relationships to members of your team, bring people into those meetings don't be the speaker, if you're being interviewed for the media give that to a team member. You know, put other people at the front and slow but you can't just do that right away. It took time to, on Mikey, the organization and, push other people for because it did start a lot based on my story and some of the stories that were found at the organization, but I sort of push that away and push other people forward. And then it was sort of more ready. And that's just on every level, from funding to partnerships, the program's to board relationships, really build that in to the fabric and let people be empowered to own their own parts of that organization. So eventually, it's easier to let go. Whereas if you want to be needed, you can make yourself needed anywhere. And it takes time, you can't just like let go. I mean, I call it sort of the cliff of succession, it's like, if you set it up in a way that needs you, you're sort of falling off that. But if you sort of remove yourself slowly, like one step at a time I call that sort of like the steps to succession is like, take a step let someone else run a meeting. And you know, let someone else meet with the auditor let someone else and then these are all tiny steps that eventually lead to you not being necessary. And I got to a point where I was very not necessary. To the point I was like, I remember the moment it was that Pokemon game that was on your phone when it was a really popular one go Yeah, I was obsessed. And I remember like on the biggest day of the organization at our festival, I was like one of our staff caught me like catching a Pokemon in an alleyway. And I'm like, he's like, What are you doing? I'm like, catching a Pokemon. He's like, why aren't you inside the festival? You know, and I just knew my brain had checked out at that point. So, but it was also thankful because I wasn't needed in that moment. It was also like a double moment of like, oh, I can I can go you know, I can go play, play Pokemon and, and do my thing or do my next chapter. So yeah, there's a lot more to it, I think that the one thing I'd add to that is to successfully let go of an organization, we need to understand what our needs are, and what the organization's needs are and how they are the same. And maybe how they're different. So that we can meet our own needs as we leave, while also meeting the organization's needs. And maybe we can't support all the organization's needs. So we need to sort of separate ourselves from that. And like the last thing, I'll say, I'm just super happy with how the succession went, the recruiter, the board, the whole process and now, five years later Unity is as strong, if not stronger than it was before. And like I said, many of the same people are there, some new amazing folks have come in the door. And I just kind of watch with pride as as it continues. So. And some of those organizations, I won't name which ones but some of the ones that I looked up to that struggle to let go, are no longer around those people struggled with their own mental health in that process. You know, I'm not gonna say I didn't struggle with anxiety when I was leaving, it was really a tough thing for me. But I knew letting go was more important than hanging on so tight that I crushed the very thing that I cared about. So I know as I'm kind of rambling, but you get the vibe, of course,
Daniel
that's super, super insightful and transparent. Again, you're pairing a lot of lessons in there, which is great, because you've learned definitely along the way, I think, from people who are even just considering this, there's a lot of you know, people who listen to this show are in the nonprofit space, whether they're actually founders and executive directors or are just employees and volunteers. So I think the to even just consider the perspective that that goes into making decisions like this, like, who's going to stick it in with leadership? How are you going to be involved? How can we make it more sustainable? How can we make it so that you're not reliant on one single person? I think it's very common that you mentioned the example of just you holding key relationships, a lot of times, that doesn't even get properly disseminated to the team, right. So I think this is a good reminder for people, even if they're not planning on leaving just yet to kind of create those processes and systems that can allow your organization to be more sustainable, right?
Mike
Totally. I am a huge advocate of that. In fact, we at Epic did an anonymized brief research report, very informal, where we actually interviewed five people who were coming into ED positions for the first time after a longtime founder and or luck, longtime ed, and five people who had left a longtime role, and just the challenges, the barriers, the opportunities for doing better, because, like, I had my experience, but every experience is so different. So I really suggest that people understand, again, what they need, what the organization needs, and sort of negotiate that. And everything's important, the funding I've seen run out of funding, I've seen boards take too much space, or think they know what they're doing, when they really don't know what they're doing and actually destroy organizations. Yeah, I've seen chairs, who won't leave the boards with no term limits who inappropriately use their donation, to justify their seat where they're just causing harm in so many ways. So there's so many terrible things that can happen in nonprofits, and they happen so often, and they're not often talked about. And I think we need to really address those things. Because the system is, the nonprofit structure is pretty broken. And it's good when it's good within that structure. But when it's not good, it gets really bad. And and when an ED just hangs on tight, and says, I'm not leaving, and it's hard to get them out of that seat. So like everyone can be really mature and support the cause, which is why we're all there and supporting that mission for the community. Or everyone can you know, once you start putting that selfishness in there, which I get why I get why, like, you sacrifice all of these things, and like, I get it, but then why are you like, why are you doing this at all like, you're hurting it, you're hurting the thing and like, just ask yourself that question like, Am I hurting the thing? Am I hurting myself? Am I hurting other people, and if you're doing any of those things, like, it's better the organization doesn't exist, in my opinion, like, and I've seen organizations closed down with such grace and such, like, respect for the people and the community, even though needs were left unaddressed. You know, one that I really, I continue to look back on and say, wow it's, it's just so amazing the way it's, it's, it's tragic that this program, and this organization doesn't exist, because they were serving a very specific need. But it's so mature, and like, the way that they close the doors were because of the organization not being sustainable, and not wanting to pass the torch to the next person where it was still not sustainable. So I won't say which organization, but I'll just say that, like, I was just like, completely, like, yes, we need to like step away from things and if they can't exist, without people hurting themselves to keep them going, then they shouldn't exist. You know, after a certain point I get the hustle, like to get a thing started there's no money yet. So you kind of gotta test things out. But eventually, if you're like, 10 years deep, and you're like, we're still like, underpaying people and I don't know, everyone is burnt out and has mental health challenges as a result of their job like, something's not right there. You know, we took a lot of pride in taking care of our people. You know, I'm a big believer, people first people before impact people before profits. And ultimately you will get those things, I actually taught a course, through U of tea around mental health in the workplace. And I did a ton of research to be able to teach this because I felt like an impostor. But as I did that research, I realized that there is a very, very, very strong business case for putting people's mental well being before profits, impact, all the things that we strive to achieve as nonprofits or businesses and ultimately, you get those things. When you treat people with respect, provide benefits let them take the time they need to deal with the things they have in their lives. And you know, sometimes it doesn't work out. I'm not saying that that works out all the time. But most of the time, we don't think of the simple things right in front of us. You know, that we can just conversationally introduce like, asking people how they're doing but like when They tell you they're not doing well, maybe creating a little bit more space for them to, to deal with those issues if they need to. So like, there's simple, cheap, free, easy things you can do. But a lot of people don't do them, and they focus on the goal. And then they, they lose, they lose all of that. So yeah, I'm a big believer that more organizations need to reevaluate, like, should this exist? Should we close this, should we merge, should we just let it go to someone else and see what happens? And if it doesn't work maybe find a way to be at peace with that, because maybe it was never meant to continue. And when you let that go, hopefully, but not necessarily someone else will see that need and reemerge and, and hopefully, again, not necessarily, but try to step in and address that in a different way. So I've seen things close, in the last few years that have been around for 40 years that have been around for long time as well. And it's for the wrong reasons, to they can close lack of financials or whatever. But we need to learn to let things die, as we do in life in general. And I think it's something the nonprofit sector sucks at, we try to keep everything alive forever. And that, to me is a loss, because new things that are needed, have less space to get in because the pie is not growing I mean, sometimes it grows, because we advocate or specific groups will advocate for bigger pie or new pie, or let's bake another one. But like, generally speaking, we're fighting for the same slices here, more or less. So if a big group is dominating a big portion of that, and I don't know, if it's like 96, or some larger percentage of charitable gifts go to, like 1% of charities, we got to kind of think about, like, what space Am I taking up here? You know, and I'm not talking to the small or smaller nonprofits. I'm talking to the institutions here, like, if you're going to exist, like, How are you holding community, and I won't say who, but I went to a speaker of one of the biggest institutions in Ontario, and they said, “you know, we welcome in community partners, and we have all these community partnerships” and they just did like, a half a billion dollar campaign fundraising. And I stood up, I'm like, How do you do that? You know, like, how, because I know, we've worked in association with your organization, and from my understanding is all you do is give free passes to your space? And I'm like, and that's what they respond with free passes. And I'm like, That's not you're talking about half a billion dollars here like that free passes is not partnership like, open your doors how are you really opening your doors? Who are you hiring, like, so many levels to the brokenness of these institutions that like, hang on for dear life? Because they can the donors or their their boards, or those donors, those boards are strong. And I'm not saying that's wrong or bad, or they're not doing good work. But I think we need to learn to collaborate partner share those resources, with needed organizations in the community versus like, hanging on tight because needs are not being addressed. And community and small nonprofits have not all the answers, but some of them have some pretty unique approaches to this work. And I think we need to give them a platform. plug them into that. So we we really focus on partnerships at Unity, we were really like, deep in, like, how do we get creative with the people we partner with? So that we we're not trying to do this work alone, right mental health Kids Help Phone, CAMH you know, some of the bigger players, but we'd also partner with just local community agencies and connecting with specific youth who are living in communities that are next to these centers, or whatever, whatever the case be, or just get super creative. And we've had one partnership that's just sort of finishing off that I'm not involved with any more. But I was part of setting up which was a trauma informed dance therapy program, we were approached by Boost, which focuses on advocacy for children and youth who have experienced trauma. And they brought us into this meeting, like we're going to apply for this grant. And I don't know, like, that's not our expertise. We don't want to sort of go into a space where we don't have that experience. But they sort of encouraged us to attend these meetings. And they applied for this big grant brought in Ryerson as the evaluator, and they got this huge like federal government grant that we never would have had access to. We never even would have even been invited to apply. And we designed like our team designed this trauma informed curriculum, dance curriculum to help reduce the waitlist for young people who are waiting for to see someone who will support them through you know, whatever trauma they were exposed to or dealing with. So in the weight loss was something like six months so in the meantime, like it might be if people want to young people want to access an option of a trauma informed dance therapy program, that will be pretty neat like, and maybe even this alternative approach to therapy, or trauma work with young people could have a significant impact and then couldn't be copied share that curriculum all over the world. So like, these are the the partnerships that like I never could have dreamed of. Yeah, but it's because we approach that with an openness where like, Hey, we should talk. We're not guarding resources, we're not like, what are you giving me for what I'm giving you? Or like, what do you like have? How could we fit together in a unique way that doesn't exist that will benefit? Right community. And I still to this day, approach partners and just the vibe you're giving me in this conversation, like, we're not going to work together. And that sucks, because you have something that we can benefit from, but not us, the community that we're serving could benefit from. So if you don't see that, and you're guarding resources, everyone is losing out. So I really would I love to see when partners come to the table with like, yeah, how can we do this? I'm like, Yes, do that more often. If you don't do that, do it more often, please, if you have those resources, don't hold them, share them collaborate, and then you will be able to survive longer, because you're actually demonstrating that impact in a tangible and real way. So I'm, again, I've rambled. And I don't even know how I got there.
Daniel
You touch on a few things, and one of them is obviously the power of partnership. A second is collaboration over competition. I think that that point is really important, because it reminds you to look back at why you're actually doing this work. And you're doing this work not to grow an organization, you're doing this work to solve a problem or address a need. Exactly. And so if you can reach that goal with with partners or collaborators, whether you're taking the ownership or not in the nonprofit space, I think it's it's, it's actually a bad thing to get caught up in ownership and owning these assets. I've actually seen resources be created, and then the project funding is done. And then that resource is now no longer even available, right? Like, all this funding goes into creating a document or creating a series, and then it's just gone. So having better ways to collaborate and partner where things can live on things can be shared multiple organizations can share these resources and ultimately provide them to the stakeholders that benefit. I think that's where we need to go with partnerships. So I love your kind of approach on being so open to that. One of the things I'll mention, one of the next questions I wanted to ask you actually is around personal branding, okay. And a lot of people don't necessarily like the term personal branding, because it's not something you actively do. But by by being you having it having a network, putting out content being an expert on certain areas, you're building your personal brand. So I asked, because that's one of the things that continues, no matter which organization or company, you're with your personal brand follows you. Right. So I wanted to ask you, as someone who you know, was with your own organization for 15 years, and now has transitioned to your own your own business? And and you do other things in between? I'm sure. How has that? How is the relationships you've built and the personal brand and following you built? kind of helped your your career?
Mike
Yeah, it's a great, great question. And for me, I really take pride in the relationships that I create with people authentically it's hard I, at one point when leaving Unity realized I had more like acquaintances than I did real friends. And I did have real friends who were like, waiting for me to call them but I didn't like, spend that time. And now I spend a lot more time with people I want to invest in, like as friendships, who I care about, from high school to breakings all the communities that have been part of, but from a, from a personal brand standpoint, like I was very good at, like having acquaintances, and based on that, managing those relationships to a certain extent, and I think that that, to me is important that anyone who requested a meeting for me, over my 15 years of being at Unity, I'd always say Yes, always. And I'd always book it really quickly. This is funny, because now you're getting the new me where I like this took a long time to even book this, because I'm much more guarded. Like I don't, this is on a personal level of like wanting to take care of myself because I never did. But when I didn't, I took meetings with everyone, always all the time, no matter who they were right away. And I was like in meetings, seven or eight meetings a day, for 15 years 150 emails a day that I like, actively was responding to, it was unmanageable. And because of that, I've sort of built these connections with people who I want to align myself with some people I'm like, Cool, you exist. I know you're there. I'm gonna you know, know that you're there versus some people I'm like, Okay, who How can I bring this person into my world like, in a dream sense? Maybe one day we'll work together collaborate or just I can recommend them to someone else. So that now work is really, in my opinion, what helped really feel Unity is when people are talking about you behind closed doors, hopefully, it's in a good way. And the only way to do that is to get out there and connect with people. And for me, again, I take those meetings, my goal would be to at least have fun and make a positive link. And we're best case we'd actually work together in some way, or maybe they'd volunteer or somehow, somehow, some way we'd connect. So that's how I view the world is like you said, not competitive, but from a collaborative not from a deficit, but from like we have something here, and you have something and I have something and everyone has something to offer. And if I just try to look for that, and all humans and and I kind of have this weird inventory in my head, like if someone says, Hey, do you know something for this? And like, I kind of think back and I'm, like, it's taking sometimes will take me a few days, and like, Oh, yes, like that person from 10 years ago so, I think from a personal brand perspective, I kind of suck at it. Because like, I know, a lot of people with networks and you know, connection, similar to what I do have, they utilize it a lot better, they're more confident in their ass asks around like what you know, they want, sometimes I'm just like, I like you, I feel like we should hang out more. And like, I like what you're doing. So like, I just want to be close to it. So I'm not as good with that on a personal brand level. That's why one of the reasons why I sort of wrote my book, because it was like this way of taking all these ideas in my head, which we're talking about a lot of them here, and putting them down on paper and connecting them to real stories, not just like, I think you should do this. It's like, these are things that we interacted with, we have experiences with. And I don't consider myself an expert in anything except the only things that I've experienced in my life. So I'm by far not an expert. It's just like, I've experienced those things like, so I just actively, I'm trying to put myself into situations where I can experience things like pandemic sucked. You know, but I learned to bake a little bit terribly, but enough to like, make a good banana bread or like, I learned to make coffee and like, so anything I try, like I want to try and like learn to do that thing. Well, and nonprofits was no different. Like, I want to learn to do this. Well, sometimes well is not the way it's been done before, like coming up with creative ways to do it. So from a personal brand perspective a lot of people feel like I'm all over the place. And that sucks, because I miss the opportunity to connect with those people. And when people give me a chance like I did. I've been starting to do like different keynotes and whatnot. And when I have had the chance people like oh, like, this is really interesting. It's like, yeah, like, I'm not the flashy sales per salesperson I even struggled to sell my book because like, I sold it when it came out. I was like hyped about it. But now I'm like, Okay, I don't want to just be that guy sitting at a table 20 years from now signing the same book, but like, I really love this book, I believe, but my whole, like, from my personal story to all the things that I really believe in even it was released before the pandemic, and even after the pandemic, I still feel like this has all the juice of the things I truly believe in and I'm sure in 10 years, I'm going to look back and like, oh, I can't believe I said that. But so far that hasn't happened. And so it's been a way for me to take my personal brand. Yeah. And just be like, put it into an object. And it's in an object and like, one day, I'll be like, to my son, like, if you really want to understand me read this book you know, I know I hate reading books. I wasn't a good reader when or I didn't read well, when I was a kid, and I honestly struggled. I didn't learn to read until like grade six. So when people recommended books to me, I never read them. But yeah, I tried to make it cool. Like we got a young person from the program to design the cover. And she also sort of her name is Serena, Brenda, she's like a graphic artist. She designed these like little characters and stuff. We just tried to make it fun, like its color and things. Yeah, really. It's just that that personal brand piece that you spoke to her. Like, I knew I needed to do it better. So this helped me get my stuff together. He's not sure if I can swear, but I say stuff. Help me get my stuff together. And I'm so proud of what it's become. And I can move on with my life. You know, I can be like, cool. Unity was cool. I can stop. Like, I still talk about it as an example. But I can start creating new examples to the work I'm currently doing. And be like, if you're curious how my brain works. It's all there.
Daniel
I love that. It's a resource. It's everything you've been through. And honestly, a lot of these stories don't get told and they don't get shared. You may they may get shared in small one on one mentorship meetings. And it's a shame because there's such like there's hundreds and hundreds of hours of thinking and struggle that you went through. So you want to be able to tell those those stories. Totally. Kudos to you for putting that in writing. Definitely I'll I'll recommend the book. We'll link to it for sure. I got it didn't get through the whole thing yet, but I have actually flipped through it to look for certain sections. Cool, because I love how well it's designed. We only have a couple minutes left. So I wanted to want it to get you to explain a little bit about what you're doing now, what's the focus of epic? How do you operate? And how do you help organizations?
Mike
So similarly, it looks more organized now than when it first started. I was just like, “What am I doing in my life after leaving Unity?” but what I wanted to take on some brokenness in the nonprofit sector that I believed through my networks, and through my experience, I could have an influence on. So I made a whole long list of like, 30 things and like, this is broken and silly and ridiculous, and it could be not solved, but like, supported in like this dress, yeah, address. And I know this person, and maybe I can, so I just kept doing that. And doing that and doing that. And one of the ideas was, I wanted to create like a peer support group for nonprofits, senior leaders, mostly executive directors, pretty much create the group that I wish I had when I was in ED where I could it's just such a lonely job, and you have this weight on your shoulders that no one understands you're keeping people's jobs, you're talking to funders, and you're making these big promises, and you're like, Oh, snap, can I even do that? And like a lot of people relying on a lot of people and like, it's just I call it the impossible job. And I'll never ever, ever do it again. I almost got I actually got a job offer for an ad role in that time. And I'm like, I had a panic attack. I'm like, oh, yeah, this is why I said, I'm not going to do this. And I felt bad that I got that far in the process. But it was just like I can't. The question was,
Daniel
what is epic? Do?
Mike
What does epic do? Yes, sorry. So I tried to create the peer support group, this was one of the 10 ideas, but it's the one that sort of took life was tried to create a peer support group for nonprofit senior leaders. So we have started with one group for four and a half years ago, of 10, eds, executive directors and founders, we met frequently enough, but not too frequently that they could make time for it. And we just talked about our biggest challenges in a confidential space where we set our sort of rules on how community agreements on how we got along together, and they built those relationships. And it's not a one off program. It's not a workshop, it's not a conference, it's a forever thing. Like, if you want to be a part of this, I was part of all these fellowships in groups, which were fantastic, but they end and when they end, you're like, I really want to stay in touch with that person, or I go to a conference, but I really want to speak to the people who are invited to this,
Daniel
everyone goes off on their own ways, and you don't have everyone's contact that
Mike
thing, it's gone. And like you might get the contact list and like somehow, but it's hard to maintain those, you don't maintain those. And and those are the people who actually could help you the most, because they like, are doing it too. And like I remember in the pandemic, everyone's like, getting these experts to talk about how to manage a pandemic. And like, I want to speak to the people who are managing the pandemic, not people who are speaking to those people who aren't doing it themselves. So I'm a big believer, we call it collective wisdom at Epic, where like, the wisdom is in the geniuses in the room. So how do we tap into that, and you're learning, it's peer to peer, there's a format and how we share our challenges. So we start with that one cohort, that one cohort, two cohorts. Now I have six cohorts, I don't run only two of them, we have 60 members. And we have hopes to get that to 100. Maybe by the end of this year, we're also starting a funders cohort. So we're trying to bring in people who fund nonprofits to you know, learn how they can improve funding practices, we just see the value and like the My favorite part about all this stuff, is I'm 100% like, I'm just not needed in the long term the facility Eds are very capable to run these groups. So we we create a process that we can train and build a new group. And I don't have to necessarily do it. And I think that's more of a powerful idea where it's not like training hip hop artists to be artist educate like, it was a very specific niche back in the day with Unity, which is fine, and it's great. But this is much more scalable. And we hope to scale it. Because we're seeing that impact. And like honestly, I had my son with my wife about a year and a half ago. And at that time, I was just like struggling. We weren't sleeping. It was really tough. And I was like, I can't do this I can't do anything right now. And people kept coming back like we have people in their fourth year of this program are just like, ready to sign up for their fifth year. And I'm like, Okay, this is needed. I can't walk away from this. You know, we have amazing team Shelly and Gilad and Bijou and John, and remember, cash has been working with us I know he's on this was on the podcast. So I'm just really enthralled by this work. I'm drawn back into it. I'm like, Oh, we got to do more of this. But like, it's because that need is being providing
Daniel
You're serving a need to providing real value and obviously it's a gap this doesn't exist. As we wrap up, are there any from a storytelling marketing positioning standpoint? And how? Because we talk a lot about marketing in order to amplify your impact.I know in nonprofits, they don't always use the word marketing. But it's more about communications reporting storytelling showcasing this impact. What's really important is that the stories that are maybe being told in those groups are being told one to one or actually communicated to potential sponsors, donors, partners, right. So from your years of experience running a nonprofit, and actually consulting with them. Do you have any tips for current nonprofit or charity leaders on how they can better showcase their impact?
Mike
Yeah I would say, this is a classic one that I'm like, really bad at, but push myself to do and the result is clear, which is, don't be afraid to ask. I mean, you can be afraid, I'm actually completely afraid. But just get yourself to a point where you can make the ads and I'll give a very clear example is when I wrote the book, they're like, you gotta get like, testimonials from famous people. I'm like, I don't know any famous people. My publisher said that. So I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna message people I respect that I actually listened to and unlike, love their ideas really into it. So I wrote like, dry emails to like, 10, sort of famous authors that I do not know. I don't know. But I made the ask. And actually, on the front cover, there's a quote by Seth Godin, who I do not know, incredible guy and I wrote a single email to this individual which it further justified how much of an awesome person he is. I like the fact that he probably gets a lot of emails responded, read the book, wrote a thing that he gave me permission to put on the cover of it.
Daniel
That's an honor. Honestly, as someone who listens to his podcasts, reads his books — he even said in one of his podcasts that he he does not give blurbs for books unless he's fully read them.
Mike
Totally. What's the point of all this is like, I'm completely afraid to make the ask. But I'll always push myself to do it, right. And like nine out of 10 times I get it, no, but probably like 19 out of 20 times…. But like, I'm just relentless when it comes to like, actually me if I believe in it. And that's what drives me. For those who are like, I hate asking, it's like, ask for things that you believe in. And then it's easy. You know, like, it's not easy, but it's easier, the more you and it's convincing, it works. Like I kind of looked at that email I wrote to Seth and I'm like, wow, like, I kind of got to pick this email apart, like, because I wrote it from the heart and it was really authentic and real. And it was for him specifically. And I think that I got literally 24 nose, I same as my publisher. Every we send this to all these publishers. They were the only Yes. There were 12 no’s. And then the last one that came in at the end was a yes. So it's just like, again it looks like a success. But it's because I've just like got used to sit like hearing now. So make the ask, even if it's hard. And you know, and ask for things that you believe in and hopefully you'll get them eventually.
