Business

Concerts, V2X Live Conference, City Charter Amendment, Hotel Conversions, and more

Published

4 years ago

June 28, 2021

Rico Figliolini and Peachtree Corners City Manager Brian Johnson are back with another episode of Prime Lunchtime with the City Manager. They’ve got a ton of exciting news and information on the city of Peachtree Corners. Topics on this episode include: New Concert info, local economy updates, and information on the V2X Conference coming to the city in October.

Resources:

Info on the Concert: https://www.peachtreecornersga.gov/government/communications/city-calendar/-curm-7/-cury-2021

“We’re seeing indications that things are opening up… So you know, we’re optimistic as some of these things fill in, that our local economy will continue to get even stronger than it was. I mean, we’ve really overall been blessed. Our local economy has stayed pretty strong. And there are certainly some things that have closed that have been disappointing to see. But overall, there’s a lot of communities that are a lot worse off than we are.”
Brian Johnson

Timestamp:

[00:00:30] – Intro
[00:02:38] – “On the Border” Concert Info
[00:05:54] – Local Businesses Opening Up
[00:08:32] – Hotel Conversion Ordinance
[00:17:41] – Charter Amendment
[00:31:47] – V2X Live Coming to Peachtree Corners
[00:41:18] – Closing

Podcast Transcript

Rico: [00:00:30] Hi everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. And today with Brian Johnson, the City Manager, we are doing Prime Lunchtime with the City Manager. Before we get to Brian, I just want to tell you what the show’s about ahead. We’re going to be discussing a little bit about what’s gone on during the last week or two. Certainly the charter amendment, the city charter amendment that happened this past city council meeting. I also want to discuss a little bit the new conference that’s going to be held in October. Did you know that vehicles are the most connected devices in the world now? Almost overtaking phones. So we’re going to have the V2X Live conference here in October. Which is about cars and vehicles and the connections they make to everything. So we’ll be discussing a bit about that. And we’ll also be discussing a little bit about recent development about the hotel development to possible apartments. The ordinance changes that happen and about a company that’s looking to target maybe two purchases in the city and possibly taking advantage of that ordinance. Whether or not that happens is a different story, but we’ll be discussing a bit about that. And just to let you know, also this weekend, On the Border, the Eagles tribute band, is going to be playing Saturday at seven o’clock. If you haven’t gotten your tickets, go to the city website, if it’s still available. We are at, I think the most capacity since COVID started where the limit is 4,000 at this point. So no circles, 4,000 in that oval area. Maybe a little outside of it. We’ll get more from Brian on that. Check it out. They might be only a handful of seats left, so you really have to get to it if it’s even available at this point. But look out for other concerts later in the summer as well as they come up. So let’s bring Brian on. Hey, Brian. Thank you for joining us.

Brian: [00:02:17] Thanks for having me Rico.

Rico: [00:02:18] Appreciate it. It’s always good to be able to talk about the things that’s going on in the city and be able to get facts out there and to discuss some of this stuff. Because I always have a thousand questions. Sometimes people tell me I have a million questions, but you know, you have to ask those questions to get the answer is sometimes, right?

Brian: [00:02:37] Sure.

Rico: [00:02:38] So just so then for those that may want to attend the, On the Border. So that limit to the concerts now in the Town Green has been lifted to 4,000, right? And I think we talked about at one point it was 6,000 was the most that it might’ve held pre COVID.

Brian: [00:02:54] That’s about right. So, you know I guess year and a half, two years ago we had a Queen cover band that there was no limitations, it was first come first serve. And it certainly spilled out into some of the areas outside of what we consider the developed part of the Town Green into the wood line and, you know, things like that. But we, our cameras counted about 6,000 people. So we, you know, that was, that probably is little bit more than we’d like. The reason that there’s a limit on this is, is not for that reason. It’s for COVID. Council had to make a decision about a month out before the event. Because we’ve gotta be able, there’s some logistics involved in securing the area and how many police officers we need and everything. And so they decided on this event to increase it from, I believe it was 2,500, the concert before this I think. And they increased it to 4,000. And so other than needing to reserve space to get inside the ropes, if you will, once you’re in there, there are no, the city’s not regulating your behavior. We’re assuming everybody is going to act in a responsible way as it relates to. If you’re not vaccinated, then you know, take whatever precautions you need. If you are then you know, operate, what makes you, however you feel comfortable. But counsel will hear in about a week and a half, will tell me if they want to have a restriction at all on the total numbers for next month’s concert, or if they just want to lift it and say first come first serve.

Rico: [00:04:42] Okay. So first come first serve meaning no reservations anymore?

Brian: [00:04:46] No reservations, no sit, no roped off area. It’s just the Town Green as we normally know it. And if you want to show up you, you know, show up. And if there’s a space somewhere, you can set your, you know, blanket up and do whatever. Kind of like you remember it the first summer we had.

Rico: [00:05:07] So, you know, I guess if we get to that point, it doesn’t matter when people come because people will come sometimes at two, even for a seven o’clock concert. But as far as this concert, this weekend will the, will it be roped off, like at a particular time? Two o’clock?

Brian: [00:05:24] Yeah, I think we’re keeping it at two, that seemed to work last month. We did a better job of telling the residents when it was going to be roped off.

Rico: [00:05:33] Right.

Brian: [00:05:33] They also understood the reason why we did it at all. Which is it’s easier to keep people from going somewhere to begin with versus having to kick them out. And so I think we’ll keep it that way. Because if not, I mean, we do have to set up the area at some point, so we would have to. And so that number seemed to be fine.

Rico: [00:05:54] Good. Great. So that’s a cool concert. Everyone should try to get to it. But again, there’s limited seats, so if you find it sold out, look at other concerts coming this summer. So you should enjoy that. Town Greens getting a lot more stuff. I mean, there’s more shops I think that opened. Playa Bowl opened not too long ago, a month ago, I think a month and a half ago. So I don’t know what’s going on with the old farmer retail there, but things are moving along. There’s more coming in. Even at the forum, there’s more shops opening over there. So the economy seems to be picking up a bit. I know that when I went out recently to a couple of restaurants, no masks. So actually hard to eat with the mask on. But people, I think that have decided that it’s not even worth bothering to walk in with a mask sometimes because you’re just going to take it off when you get to the table. So it’s hit or miss when people wear it, right? People are going into retail locations and wearing the mask. But half the people or two thirds of the people aren’t, you know. I mean, are you finding anything different going on economic wise? As far as new, I mean, there’s another new restaurant taken over, Nobel Fin, that Sage restaurant is coming in. You guys just approved the liquor license for them this last council meeting I think.

Brian: [00:07:06] Yeah. No, I mean, so you said it right. We’re seeing indications that things are opening up. That companies and people, entrepreneurs are starting to like make some decisions. And, you know, and sometimes try to capitalize on opportunities. And so we’ve had some vacant space that the pandemic caused that have turned around and had somebody, you know, say, Hey, maybe now’s a good time. So you know, we’re optimistic as some of these things fill in that our local economy will continue to get even stronger than it was. I mean, we’ve really overall been blessed. Our local economy has stayed pretty strong. And, you know, there are certainly some been some things that have closed that have been disappointing to see. But overall, there’s a lot of communities that are a lot worse off than we are.

Rico: [00:08:05] And there’s a lot of jobs still needing employees. I know, you know, every time I go to pass a restaurant, I mean, almost it’s almost seems like every other restaurant has a help wanted sign. From Dunkin donuts to Salada, to other places. It’s like hard to find people willing to work. In the retail and the restaurant business, at least. So, you know, they’re opening up, but they’re also getting crunched as far as whether they have help or not.

Brian: [00:08:30] That is true.

Rico: [00:08:32] Yeah. The other thing is, economically speaking too I mean, obviously the city has 12 or 13 hotels. Including the Hilton as well as long extended stay hotels and stuff. And the city just passed an ordinance about redeveloping may be possible with criteria’s and restrictions to hotels converting to apartments. Obviously hotels are one bedroom, you know, rooms and stuff. There would be tremendous amount of renovation going on, but I think the city limited to any hotels that are either extended stay, under 50% occupancy for a period of time, or are changing you know, lost their brand like you know, whatever. Like if you were a national chain, but all of a sudden you’re not a national chain and you’re just a one-off. That there’s a possibility for that to happen. So I hear that there’s a multi-billion dollar company, a holding company, real estate holding company that is targeting a possible two hotels in the city of Peachtree Corners for possible redevelopment. So I know you may not know which hotels, but. So tell us a little bit, just refresh our memory in brief about what could happen, couldn’t happen. And just let us know about that.

Brian: [00:09:43] I mean, you did a pretty good job. So, you know, the hotel industry in general, I mean, everywhere, got significantly effected by the pandemic. And so of course there’s been some changes in that. That industry is still under some duress. But as a result of that, there have been some companies that have decided to take advantage of that. Not necessarily advantage, but use this as an opportunity to potentially create a unique product. And that is to take a hotel that is in some level of duress and convert it from hotel to apartments. And so this company that you mentioned, that’s been kicking some tires around Peachtree Corners is doing it in a lot of places. They’re doing it wholesale. Lots of different, yeah, municipalities are having the same thing. Now, in our particular case when it comes to hotels, we might be especially ripe if you will for there to be opportunities because of two reasons. One, we started, you know, pre pandemic, we have a significant amount of hotels. A lot more than people realize in the city. And so there’s a lot of hotels to look at. The second thing is our hotel industry tends to be very business traveler centric. And so, you know of all the people going into hotels, the ones that are going back right now are not really the business traveler. It’s the vacationer. And so if there was a type of you know, a hotel that, or a group that a hotel caters to. The ones that cater to the business travel might be a little bit even more under stress then the vacation right now. So that’s why we think that there might, there’s two properties here that might, you know, be in the cross hairs of this company for them to do the due diligence. Now we don’t know, the company hasn’t like laid out to us exactly which ones per se. We do know which ones are not under duress. And so we do know which ones, you know, we can say are doing fine. We have a pretty good relationship with the hoteliers in the city. And none of the branded hotels, the ones that are under a flag of a national brand, whether it’s Marriott, IHG, you know, and their sub brands like Residents Inn, Homewood Suites, that kind of stuff. None of those are the ones that are you know, at a point where they want to consider selling to this company. We do have a few that generally tend to be on the south side of the city that are no longer branded. And you know, so we suspected that it may be one of those. Now again, so one last thing to consider is on the ordinance, we knew this was coming. So there’s been, as we keep up with trends out there. We started to see that, yes, there are hotels that start going through a cycle when they are not performing well. And there were some companies that are maybe wanting to convert. And so counsel, so what I did is I presented them an ordinance and I said, here’s the deal. This phenomenon is coming, or it is here. It could certainly be here very soon. And we probably should put some thought behind what we want to do if a company comes to us and says, Hey, we want to take this hotel, buy it and convert it to an apartment. What, you know, how would you regulate that? Do you allow it? And so council considered this versus saying, no, we don’t want to have anything. And their, you know, their ultimate stance that they, a majority of them took is with the regulations, with restrictions on how it would be developed and how much capacity could have, how many bedrooms it could have, things like that. They preferred to with a high standard, at least, have this in place so that if somebody wants to do it, they can do it. They can, there’s a mechanism for them to do it versus us just categorically say no. And then the hotel owner does one of two things. He or she continues to drop the room rates until they can fill enough rooms to make some money. And that usually doesn’t end well. Or they turn it into really, really long-term. Which almost acts like an apartment anyway. Or the worst is they just shutter the doors. And you know, so the council was like, look we don’t like those options. We think the alternative is to spend some time, come up with a well-thought-out ordinance. If a company comes to us and wants to do it. We have a mechanism for them to do it, but that they have a very narrow band to do it. We don’t say, oh yeah, sure. Whatever. We look forward to your product and cross our fingers. It’s highly regulated on how it transitions from hotel to apartment. But we feel like that would be a better product than the alternative. Now, mind you our first, you know, our first option or our preferred option is for the hotels to start performing great. And to, for them to be operating the way that they originally went in. That is certainly our preferred method. But if a gun is held to our head and it’s, you know, do this, or it’s going to shutter their doors and become a vacant property or one that just allows almost anybody in or rents by the hours as the case may be those kinds of things. We don’t want that versus a, well, you know, a well-regulated conversion into apartment.

Rico: [00:16:02] I think this is what a good city does, right? Like you said, you find trends that are happening across a competitive landscape, right? And you come ahead of that curve before waiting to see what happens. I mean, a city has to be able to be proactive in a lot of what they do, not just in the economic sphere of encouraging new business coming in, but to look at redevelopment, look at all of it. So I think you guys did a good job in coming up with that and being able to address it and maybe not the deny it. Because denying it or saying no, we can’t. You know, Sandy Springs, for example, I think was entertaining the same thing. And they said, no, we’re not going to do that. Well, that just doesn’t look at the reality of life and what can happen if you don’t allow some options there, right? So having some options and actually control over your own destiny is always a good thing. So I appreciate the city looking at that. You know, I mean, you guys have done the redevelopment authority. You know, I’m sure there’ll be more stuff coming out of that soon. You know, and addressing things like, for example, just recently, I don’t recall the name of the company, but it was like a $42, $45 million purchase of the corner center, I think it was. Which is an apartment complex on Holcomb Bridge Road, I think or Peachtree Corners Circle, right. So they just purchased that and you know, these things are gonna happen. Economic purchases, REITs are going to come in real estate investment groups like PEG is a real estate investment holding company. They’re not, you know, they go in and they buy stuff cheap and or wherever they can negotiate and then build something out that can give them cash. I mean, that’s what they’re in business for.

Brian: [00:17:39] That’s what they do. Right.

Rico: [00:17:41] Yeah. So and there are companies out there that actually do that with I think it was American Federation. They go out and buy residential property. Homes. And build up that and buy that and then rent them out, sublease them. I mean, so that’s going on, certainly going on in this market, that too. And it’s hard to find a house. The I mean, there was one article that I forget which paper put out, that there’s too many real estate agents now and not enough homes to list. Got that going on. Let’s talk a little bit about the charter amendment that just happened this past city council meeting. Originally, I thought it was a great idea to do what we discussed in our last podcast to give the city more, not more time, but to give the city sort of emergency powers, if you will. To be able to address something on a quicker basis than otherwise is being handled. But obviously that got a lot of protest against that. People didn’t like that idea. So tell us what happened Tuesday night with this amendment. Because it didn’t pass or at least a portion of it didn’t pass.

Brian: [00:18:46] That’s correct. So in the course of other activity, we will sometimes review documents and we needed to review the charter. Something came up when we were looking at it one day and we uncovered essentially a Scribner’s error or a typo. And so we were like, oh you know, we need to look at it. We looked at it and found two more. And so I had been sitting on it for a while and it was just, I had an agenda that I thought was just, let’s just get this out of the way. So we put it on there, but in the course of that, you know, charter amendments are a very formal event. As it should be, the charter is the city’s constitution, if you will. So it should be a, you know, a process that’s well thought out. And so when you have the, you know, when you crack that thing open, sometimes it’s a good time to make other changes while you’re there. It’s almost like the medical community you’re going to crack somebody’s chest open and get in there and do something. Why not fix something else that’s been nagging them or whatever. So one of the things that, even when it got here, having managed other cities, I found unique and that is a requirement that there be two separate reads at two separate meetings. And that in and of itself was not odd. One of the other two cities I managed had that mechanism. That was the normal course, but there was also a mechanism that if a majority, in the case of the other city, it was just the majority. Here the proposal was unanimous consent. If there was consent to waive that requirement, you could in fact have that second read and the vote at the same meeting. And it existed for instances that were emergent, but not necessarily emergent for the entire city. Like you’ve got to drop what you’re doing and do it. I mean, you could argue that the mask ordinance requiring the wearing of masks during a pandemic was a city-wide emergency situation. And, you know, it needed to be moved in fast. And we have a mechanism in the charter now allowing for emergency ordinances, but it only is in place for 30 days. And it has a very high standard. There’s gotta be a risk to life, limb, you know, property type of thing. And if that’s not the case, then it doesn’t meet that standard. So there is a, there are instances where it doesn’t quite meet that standard, but yet it is kind of exigent circumstances, an emergent situation. So I just thought, Hey, why not put a mechanism in there on the off chance that those situations happen, that you at least could do it. And we made it to where it was a unanimous consent of all council members. It wasn’t even just the ones that are present. Literally all seven of them would have had to at the meeting where the first reading took place would have had to have said yes, Mr City Manager, what you were just presented. And you’re asking us to waive that to a meeting requirement. This situation does in fact, warrant us doing it at this meeting. And all of us are going to actually be forced to raise our hand and vote yes, that it is emergent. I’ve seen that a lot of places and let’s remember a lot of cities don’t even have a two read requirement.

Rico: [00:22:36] Right. That’s not the norm.

Brian: [00:22:37] Yeah. There’s a lot of cities that you just it’s, you have the reading and the public hearing and the vote at the same council meeting. And the argument there is people track this thing one time, you know, it’s going to be at one meeting unless there’s a formal vote to table. In which case you will already be at that meeting to hear about that. We don’t, we don’t need a two read every time. And so that’s probably more common than the other. But for cities that do have the two read there’s oftentimes again, that mechanism to do it. So I submitted it and there were a lot of people who were opposed to it. You know, and they showed up and spoke and council said, you know what? Maybe now’s not the right time or in some cases, maybe they don’t ever want to do it. I mean, look, it was good to see people you know, A, watching things. You know, sometimes you wonder how many people are even civically active and knowledgeable about what’s going on. That was good. Two, you know, it was great to see a forum for people to show up and express their, you know, their opinions. There still is some confusion about what was being asked. You know, that was the disappointing part about, you know, lack of transparency and it’s, you know, you’re kind of like. You know, we could still have a special called meeting right now under our current charter. If I needed something done fast, I could actually call for a special call meeting tomorrow night. And if the mayor himself or a majority of council wanted to have agreed that we need to have it, we could have a special called meeting. You could argue that that’s less transparent than doing it always at a council meeting because everybody can put those council meetings in their calendar. I mean, it’s always going to be at the same time of the month, same, you know. But special called meetings, they may miss. And so somebody could have missed that and say, well, you did this, you know, I’m not tracking a city council meeting on a Friday night or something. And that was the argument some people were making is, oh, you could already do a special called meeting. Well we can and I guess if it ever comes to that, we will.

Rico: [00:24:48] Because what’s the notification time for a special meeting?

Brian: [00:24:55] It’s 24 hours.

Rico: [00:24:56] Okay. So versus it being on the agenda and everyone knows the city council meeting is the fourth Tuesday of the month. And that it wouldn’t just, you know, I mean, it just doesn’t show up 24 hours ahead on the agenda.

Brian: [00:25:09] Correct. It’s also live streamed and recorded and posted on the website.

Rico: [00:25:17] Right. And the fact that you had unanimous vote to be able to even consider the subject. I thought it was awesome. Because you weren’t…

Brian: [00:25:26] If just one council member, like you say, said this isn’t emergent enough for me and I vote no. And then that’s it. Literally all seven had to. Go ahead.

Rico: [00:25:39] No, because otherwise what happens is, let’s say it’s an ordinance and the city council votes on it and it’s, you know, whatever, four to three or something. It could be that, right? On the second thing, on the second read. But on the first read, and if you wanted to move to a vote that, you know, unanimous part is important, right? All the council people have to vote on allowing a vote. And then you would think…

Brian: [00:26:04] And then you still have the public hearing and you still have to vote on the agenda item.

Rico: [00:26:10] Yes. So I’m disappointed a little bit in that some people actually don’t know what it was about. But they came out, you know, and they found out. I think the same people found out at the meeting, because it was explained. But sometimes people still don’t quite get it. And, you know, there’s an opinion on everything. Maybe they, you know, maybe that’s a good thing that for now it’s not allowed. We’ll find out in the future, if that was a bad choice.

Brian: [00:26:37] Well you know, Rico. It’s interesting that you bring that up because we technically could have even had a real world example. Would it have been determined to be emergent, but some of the people were asking, well, you know, when do you ever feel the need to move quickly, but it doesn’t apply to citywide stuff. Well, we just had an issue this last weekend, where an individual rented out through Airbnb, his pool. So the rental mentioned that it was a, it was the rental of a pool, not the rental of a dwelling as our code has. And we do not allow for rentals less than 30 days. Or actually less than 31 days, it has to be 31 days or more. And so you can’t do an Airbnb for anything less than, you know, 31 days or more. But it says to rent out a dwelling. And so an individual rented out a pool and ended up having, there was probably approaching 50 people. You’re not supposed to even have 16 on any, more than 16 through Airbnb anyway. Upwards of 50 people that showed up. And the police were called and technically speaking with the pool thing, the argument was, we’re not violating the ordinance cause it’s not a dwelling and you just get into this. So my point to that is we are going to do a text amendment of our code and amend that to ensure that it’s the dwelling and any other, you know, amenities outside of that. But that could have been considered for the neighborhood. Like if you live next to this house, you would consider this an emergent situation. You would be like, look this is a good example of change that code quickly. So that I can go ahead and feel comfortable that they can run through this loophole. And instead we’ll introduce it, it’ll be 60 plus days before it’s voted on. And again that’s fine, if the residents want that, enough of them. And that’s why council, it was good to see people that say their opinion and counsel listened. And there was certainly more people that showed up and sent emails that were against it than forward. Although that’s usually the case, but that’s fine. I mean, that’s how democracy works. That’s how the city works. Council was responsive. And we’re going to drive on and move on and, you know, that’s it. But yeah, so the only disappointing part is if there were still some people who truly still don’t understand what this was and was it’s about, and how the protective measures that were in place, where you could argue even more restricted than the current one. And I just hate people making decisions based on false information or a misunderstanding.

Rico: [00:29:43] Misinformation versus this information, I guess they just don’t, they’re not, you know, everyone has an opinion too, obviously. So, you know the fact, like you said, I mean, it always happens that the cons are always, the no’s are always the ones showing up versus the, yes. The people that don’t have a problem with it are not showing up saying, yay, good job. This is exactly what we want. It’s usually the no’s that show up and say, why is government doing this? I want them off my back. I’m a libertarian. I’m a conservative. These are things you shouldn’t be doing as a government. Oh, by the way, the city probably shouldn’t exist. To some degree, you know, and they have the right to say that and they can, you know, there’s a belief there of that, and that’s fine. But that shouldn’t drive the evolution of a city as it evolves into doing good stuff. That they, you know, that that has to be taken into account every time to the detriment of, of other people possibly. So like you said, that particular, I’m sure if I lived next door to that, it’d be like yes. I would definitely want you to change that because the police could probably say, well, we could do disturbance of the peace, there’s too many people there. But what stops it from happening again, legally, you know?

Brian: [00:30:56] And you know, again, we’re going to change this. So it’s not like we’re not, it didn’t prevent us doing it. But you know, look. Again, that’s how it’s done. It was great. Clearly the, you know, the greatest number is what council heard that night. And they, you know, or that was presented that night. They heard it and they said, you know what? Now’s not the time. Maybe it’s not ever, I don’t know. But you know, I, as a resident of the city, I’m glad to see my city council. You know, to sit there and listen and say, look, we’ll reserve judgment until the bitter end. And they did. And so I’m glad to see that as a resident. I mean, sometimes it can be frustrating as an employee of the city. But as a resident, I’m glad, you know, council does it that way.

Rico: [00:31:47] And it’s always, it’s always good people show up. I mean, I like that. I prefer at least an active citizen. Because it just makes, it does make things better. Because you have to make sure that you do things a certain way, right? Dot the I’s, cross the T’s and stuff. So, I mean, that’s not a bad thing necessarily. Right. Last thing I want to talk about is something exciting too. I mean, obviously hotels, are opening up. We had a jobs fair this past weekend for the hospitality industry here in Peachtree Corners. Because, you know, I remember at one point as the Hilton was opening up, they could only open up certain floors because they didn’t have enough employees to clean all the floors for example. Getting people back to work is a little difficult post, I don’t want to say post COVID, but emerging and opening up for business. It’s a little tough for the hospitality industry to be able to get the work they need. So I’m glad they’re able to do that. And because of that, we’re able to bring in conferences and other things. So I’m excited to hear that the V2X Live conference is coming to Peachtree Corners. I mean, you guys were involved two years ago in the Smart City Expo, but that came in to Atlanta. And you know, and the city had a good, good representation there. And people from that international, national expo come out to the city. So now we have this V2X live. Because as most people might not realize cars are becoming the most connected device in the world at this point. And electric cars are moving towards being the norm by 2050, 2035. And even sooner. I mean, a lot of these companies are coming out. Volkswagen, Ford, all coming out saying they’re going to be like almost all electric at some point. So that, you can’t have self-driving cars without electric cars, right? I mean, they go hand in hand. So tell us a little bit about the V2X Live that’s going to be coming in, in October. That’s going to be, I think that’s through a partnership or because of Curiosity Lab and stuff. So tell us what’s going on with that, Brian.

Brian: [00:33:54] Alright. So as conferences go, you know, conferences have a theme, if you will. A reason to hold it. And a lot of times conferences, new conference themes are spinoffs of emerging technology from conferences they used to be a subset of. So you could have had a automotive conference and back in the day, you at some point had this subset where they were talking about cars being able to talk to something else and people are wow. You know? And so over time, connected vehicles and all that comes with it, you know, you’ve got the vehicle itself and that whole part of that, what is it going to say? How? Who’s doing it? Then you’ve got who’s listening? Because you’ve got vehicle to infrastructure, vehicle to vehicle, and I mean, you have vehicle to all sorts of stuff. And so all of those have their own subset, and then you have the software that you’ve got to do all this. You have this large ever-growing industry around connected vehicles. And it has merged off in one of the companies that does a lot of different conferences decided to be the first to create this conference on its own. And so it went through a due diligence period. And said, we’re going to create this brand new conference we’re going to be the first one to do a connected vehicle conference called V2X Live. Vehicle to everything Live, is what V2X stands for. And they did a due diligence and they wanted to pick three locations in the world to start this series. One in Europe. They chose Frankfurt, Germany. And they wanted to do two in the states, one in the east coast and one of the west coast. They picked a city I believe is Santa Clara, but a city in Silicon valley on the west coast. And because of Curiosity Lab, Peachtree Corners was picked on the east coast. Now mind you, when I say Peachtree Corners, as opposed to Smart City Atlanta that is held in the Georgia World Congress Center. This conference will actually be held in Peachtree Corners. And so the conference will be a little bit different in that it’s not one conference under one with everything under one roof. This is a little bit more of, call it an experiential one. And of course the reason is, is we actually have a vehicle to everything environment. I mean, we have created that city street where a vehicle that is capable of doing this, could drive up our track and be talking to every light pole, every other vehicle, every pedestrian who has a phone, every traffic signal, every pedestrian crossing all the way up. We have that environment now. And they want to do a conference where you can actually talk about connected vehicle and get out and in some cases, see them in action. Like literally be standing under a light pole that has the technology to talk to the car. And have the companies that provide that be there and have a tent set up. And so it’s going to basically be a linear conference. In that the conference host hotel will be the Hilton. And there will be a significant presence though, call it a host hotel, A and B. A would be the Hilton. B will be the Marriott. Our two conference hotels here. And then there will be a lot of meeting space there. Of course, the rooms for the conference attendees, and then breakout sessions and you know, and demonstrations will be up the track. So as you go, essentially north up the track, there will be some breakout and panel discussions held at City Hall. And then there’ll be locations of the track where you may have, you may have, Watt Way who does the solar roadway have a tent. And they, people can go out there and see our solar roadway. And then we’ll have more at the innovation center where you have breakouts. And then there’ll be even more so up at Atlanta Tech Park at the other end. And so we’re looking to do this conference. The cool thing about it is its ability to pump activity into our local economy. So now you’re talking, they are projecting maybe about a thousand conference attendees in year one. Because it is a new conference. And so that’s a lot of hotel rooms and maybe it will be more, I don’t know. But that’s a lot of hotel rooms that’ll be filled. So that, you know, for two nights, at least. And then it could even be more people during the day if Metro Atlanta, you know, people who live in Metro Atlanta show up. And then what we’re looking to maybe do is. Instead of having the keynote address at the beginning of the day, which is oftentimes what you see on a conference, is we do it at the end of the day and we get everybody to go up and we hold that keynote address up at the Town Green using the stage so that when you’re done with it, you’re already at our entertainment district and you can already eat right there and maybe we have a concert afterwards. And so we’re looking to pump more activity into the Forum and the Town Center. And, you know, we’ll have a bunch of pretty cool demonstrations there. We’ll have a bunch of autonomous vehicles for it.

Rico: [00:39:36] Yeah. That would be, that would be cool. People will get a chance to take a look at those autonomous vehicles, maybe tented areas with other interactive and such things going on. That would be a great experience, I think for local residents also. Besides bringing in, like you said, possibly you know, a thousand people economically impacting hotels and restaurants and all that.

Brian: [00:39:56] But you know, it’s just an example again, where, you know, our residents have been very supportive of Curiosity Lab because we have told them of its ability to do these kinds of things. And it continues to outperform expectations and its presence in what we’ve done with it and the activity that it has generated and putting us on the map. It got these conference organizers to reach out to us. And we told them what it was about. And they sent a delegation and they looked at it. We talked through the details and they said, you know what? We’d like to do it there. We think that would be a really unique conference. And so Curiosity Lab continues to deliver in its ability to generate activity for the city.

Rico: [00:40:43] Yeah. Exciting because activity begets activity. Companies, organizations will see this V2X Live conference, be looking at the city in a different length because of that conference. So we may end up seeing much more coming out of this than just that conference certainly.

Brian: [00:41:04] I hope so. So yeah, it’s exciting. It’ll be in the middle of October. There’ll be an announcement coming out next week. A formal announcement, website for it is almost done. So yeah, it’s some exciting stuff.

Rico: [00:41:18] Excellent. So much stuff going on in this city. Things that keeps us busy, gets this podcast going every month. And being able to, and we haven’t even talked covered everything really. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of things that we could have covered. These are the top things. I hope everyone enjoyed this show. If you have any questions, post them down in the comments. I’ll see about getting those answered. If I don’t have the answers for them. Check out again, the concert this weekend, there might be some tickets left for On the Boarder, a tribute band. And check out the rest of the summer schedule and keep an eye out cause there’s a lot more new businesses opening up in Peachtree Corners. Just five or six in the last, retail businesses in the last month or two recently opened here in the Forum, Town Center and on I believe Jimmy Carter. So check it out. Brian, I appreciate you being with me. It’s always good to have you and always great to get the right answers. And good answers and solid answers. Thanks, Brian. Thanks everyone. Look out for our next issue. We’re working on it. That’ll be out the in first week of August and just hold some of these dates. There’s the Peachtree Corners festival, which is happening in September, I believe. And so that’s happening at Town Center for the first time. So that’s going to be working out there and then Light Up the Corners. I believe that’s happening in August. So check that out and we’ll be back to you with more information. Thanks everyone.

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Business

Why Patient Experience Matters: A Conversation with Dr. Aristo Shyn

Published

1 day ago

March 23, 2025

Peachtree Corners Magazine staff

On this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini sits down with Dr. Aristo Shyn, owner of Link Dental Care, to discuss his journey from corporate dentistry to running a thriving private practice. Dr. Shyn shares insights on the challenges of entrepreneurship, how he built a patient-centric practice, and how technology is transforming modern dentistry.

They also dive into Link Dental Care’s community involvement, the role of social media in business growth, and the importance of creating an exceptional patient experience. Whether you’re interested in dentistry, business ownership, or local community impact, this conversation offers valuable takeaways.

Key Takeaways & Highlights:

From Corporate to Private Practice – Why Dr. Shyn left corporate dentistry to build his own patient-focused practice.
The Power of Technology in Dentistry – How 3D imaging, digital scans, and upcoming Botox treatments improve patient care.
Growing a Business – The challenges of launching and expanding a dental office without prior business experience.
Community Involvement – Supporting local schools, charities, and offering free dental makeovers.
Navigating Insurance & Patient Care – Why transparency in billing is crucial in healthcare.
The Role of Social Media – How Link Dental Care’s Instagram skits helped grow their brand and even go viral.
Balancing Work & Family – Juggling a growing business while raising two kids.
Future Plans – Potential expansion, but always staying patient-centered under one roof.

Listen in to learn how Dr. Shyn built a thriving dental practice while prioritizing technology, patient experience, and community engagement!

Transcript:

00:00:32 – Rico Figliolini

Hey, everyone. This is Rico of Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life here in the city of Peachtree Corners, Gwinnett County, just north of Atlanta. We have a great guest here today, Dr. Aristo Shyn, who owns Link Dental Care. Thank you for allowing us to do the podcast with you today.

00:00:48 – Aristo Shyn

Thank you for having us. I’ve been calling you our very own Joe Rogan for years now, so it’s an honor.

00:00:54 – Rico Figliolini

I’ve done over 250 episodes. I feel like I could be Joe Rogan. I get the head for it. Before we get into the show, though, let me say thanks to our sponsors. We have two. EV Remodeling, Inc., and Eli, who owns it, that lives here in Peachtree Corners. Great family. They do great work. They do design to build, whole house renovation, or your bathroom, your kitchen, or an addition to the house, whatever you need. They’ve done over 260 homes throughout the metro area. I think you should check them out. EVRemodelingInc.com is where you can find that. Vox Pop Uli, our second sponsor, is also here in Peachtree Corners, also family owned. So they take your brand and they bring it to life. So think about it. You have a brand, you have a car, vehicle. They do, I think this past year, they did over 1,600 vehicle wraps alone. You go to trade shows, they’ll put up a whole setup for you. You need shirts, they’ll do that for you. You need just one or you need 1,000, they’ll do all that for you. If you have a logo and you want to imprint it on an object, bring it to them. Challenge them. It’s amazing what they’ve done. So check them out. Vox Pop Uli is the company, and we appreciate the sponsorship of these podcasts, the magazines, and our journalism. Now that we’ve done the sponsors, I appreciate the conversation we’re going to have today. Aristo’s been, Dr. Shyn has been our family dentist for quite a while for all my kids and my wife and myself. So seeing you guys grow from a very small office that was probably big enough for you when you started.

00:03:06 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah, you’ve been with us since the beginning. Yeah, very humble beginnings.

00:03:09 – Rico Figliolini

So just moving from that, I saw you know you guys were getting more and more patients. The place was getting filled and now you’re in a larger location, a very beautiful place here right on Jimmy Carter Boulevard, Holcomb Bridge Road here. So tell us a little bit about your origins, where you started.

00:03:28 – Aristo Shyn

How far back do you want me to go?

00:03:30 – Rico Figliolini

Where were you born?

00:03:33 – Aristo Shyn

So I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, next to UMKC, which is where my dad went to dental school. And then moved to Alaska afterwards. Stayed in Alaska from ages 2 to 14. And then I moved to Florida, pursued a golf career, and then naturally transitioned to dentistry after that.

00:03:57 – Rico Figliolini

Naturally.

00:03:58 – Aristo Shyn

Yes. And then I’ve been in Georgia since 2012.

00:04:01 – Rico Figliolini

That’s amazing. You went from Missouri, where I’ve never been. I’m a Brooklyn kid. Kid. No longer a kid, but from Brooklyn. So I don’t know that place. Alaska, which is, for me, you know, grizzly bears is what I think of. So you went, right? From grizzly bears, snowstorms, to Florida, alligators, rocks, and hurricanes. And now Atlanta, of which you find almost none of that, actually.

00:04:25 – Aristo Shyn

It’s nice.

00:04:27 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, it must be different, right? But you went to start with a golf career. When did that even take hold?

00:04:40 – Aristo Shyn

In Alaska, of all places. Yeah, I was pretty good at it. Again, we moved to Florida to pursue that, but I think dentistry was my true calling, and I think I made the right choice.

00:04:55 – Rico Figliolini

Well, and you were kind of young too, I think, when you got your dental degree?

00:05:00 – Aristo Shyn

Yes. I try not to talk about that too much, but I was 23 when I graduated.

00:05:07 – Rico Figliolini

I saw that. I was like, that’s amazing. And so you’ve been practicing since then, obviously.

00:05:10 – Aristo Shyn

Mm-hmm.

00:05:13 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. So you’re in Atlanta. You moved here in 2012. You decided to start your business in less than a year of moving here.

00:05:23 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah, I think my first job in Atlanta was a corporate job. It wasn’t for me, to say the least. I think I lasted about seven months before saying, I got to do this. I got to do something else. I got to do this on my own. And that’s how I came to Peachtree Corners.

00:05:45 – Rico Figliolini

So just to be clear for people to know, it’s corporate dentistry is what you were working at. So corporate environment with multiple offices and stuff is a whole different business model, I think. Isn’t it?

00:06:02 – Aristo Shyn

Yes, to say the least.

00:06:08 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. You might not want to say it, but I’ll say it. Corporate dentistry is not that great. When you don’t have an owner that owns the business and doing the work that’s passionate about his patients and his community, it’s way different than dealing with someone that’s billing out of Texas let’s say or they have multiple 20, 30, or 90 offices throughout the country. And they sound like they’re local because they sort of keep the name of the place so they sound local but they’re really not. And so they’re driven by money because they have a big nut to pay.

00:06:36 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah, you’re just trying to get me into trouble right now.

00:06:39 – No, no, I’m saying it so it’s okay.

00:06:42 – Aristo Shyn

Listen, I would, in general, and this is from my own experience and what my colleagues have experienced as well, it’s just a lot of, and I think there are good dentists there, but unfortunately they don’t have the autonomy or the control over the whole operation. So I would say a lot of corporate offices, a lot of chain offices, are profit and production driven versus being patient-centric.

00:07:02 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I can’t argue with that.

00:07:05 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah, I mean, for example, and this you’ll find often in the industry, when you have your morning huddles, a lot of times at those offices, you’re looking at the schedule for that day. And if there’s not enough production on the schedule, you have to find crowns or implants somehow. And I’ll let our audience use their own imagination for that one. But when we have our meetings, we don’t really talk about that. And we talk about how to streamline logistics and how to improve the patient experience. And these days, fortunately or unfortunately, we’ve been doing some Instagram skits. I’ve been putting my staff through a whole other level of stress.

00:07:58 – Rico Figliolini

You all have to visit the Instagram channel that he has. He comes up with all the skits himself. Some of them are really cool. They’re all pretty good. I mean, some of them are hilarious.

00:08:09 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah, we really, you would expect, you know, before and after photos or us selling something. But I think we’re just trying to have fun there. I really don’t know what we’re selling, but it’s fun. I think it still gives us exposure in a different way. We have a live follower counter there. We’re trying to get that up right now. So follow us, please.

00:08:27 – Rico Figliolini

What is the Instagram? It’s Link Dental Care.

00:08:30 – Aristo Shyn

It’s @LinkDentalCare.

00:08:32 – There you go. So follow them. They want to hit 1,000, like, you know, soon. But no, I think that’s a great team building to be able to do that. There’s a lot of pressure sometimes in doing work and such, and every day is different. I think we would talk before a little bit about how you, you know, you go from one patient speaking English, let’s say, to another patient and speaking Spanish or maybe Korean. So multiple languages here in the office, and multiple challenges, dental challenges, right?

00:09:06 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah. I mean, due to the range of services that we offer from fillings, crowns, to root canals, implant surgeries, sinus surgeries, we get quite the variety of cases here. And then there are days where in one room I’m speaking obviously English, and then next room, I’m speaking Spanish. The other room, I’m speaking Korean. And I think we did a count earlier. We speak a total of nine different languages in this office.

00:09:38 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing that you speak three languages, at least.

00:09:43 – Aristo Shyn

Two and a half. We’ll call it three.

00:09:43 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. You get by on it. That’s good. So busy, busy work. Technology, though, drives a lot of dental practices now, too. So tell us a little bit about some of the technological improvements you’ve made here. Some of the technology you’ve brought in.

00:10:01 – Aristo Shyn

Well, everything’s new here. So it’s all digital. All new x-ray units, we have our 3D cone beam imaging machine, we have a 3D scanner, we’re doing really cool stuff with digital photography not just for before and after cases but also to communicate with our lab. We’re doing botox and dermal fillers soon. Busy.

00:10:29 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that’s amazing. Botox. How does that work in dental?

00:10:34 – Aristo Shyn

I think it’s been requested quite a bit. We haven’t started it yet. We will very soon. It’s not just for, I don’t think it’s just for cosmetics, but it can do a lot with TMJ and related issues.

00:10:51 – Rico Figliolini

Now, when you started on Peachtree Park, it was just you. I think your mom was helping at the front desk.

00:10:55 – Aristo Shyn

No, she wasn’t there at the time.

00:10:57 – Rico Figliolini

She wasn’t there. She came later, maybe.

00:11:01 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah. It was, I think it was a thousand square feet. I don’t think anything was digital at the time. And I had, it was me, one and a half hygienists, one assistant, and one person in the front. Yeah, I still remember I could actually stand in the middle of the office, and if I did a 360, I could see everything. The front office, the four chairs, the lab.

00:11:23 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, I was just thinking the same thing. That’s how small this place was. How many square feet is this place?

00:11:33 – Aristo Shyn

I think it’s just over 3,000.

00:11:38 – Rico Figliolini

And you took on a new, also an additional practitioner with you as well?

00:11:41 – Aristo Shyn

Oh, yeah. New staff, front offices, expanded assistants, hygienists. Another doctor. I mean, she’s been terrific.

00:11:42 – Rico Figliolini

Dr. K?.

00:11:51 – Aristo Shyn

Yep. Dr. K.

00:11:52 – Rico Figliolini

So business has been going well. So that’s good, no?

00:11:54 – Aristo Shyn

It’s been busy. It’s been busy.

00:12:00 – Rico Figliolini

Can’t complain. And there are challenges, right? So let’s go back a little bit. Challenges of opening a business. What would you say to an entrepreneur, to another dentist that wanted to do the same thing? What challenges did you have to overcome when you did that?

00:12:16 – Aristo Shyn

When we first started everything I mean, I was still learning. I had no business experience, I had no HR experience. I mean, I was still learning dentistry at the time so you know the normal course for I’d say acquiring a dental office is, you know you’re usually out in the field for a few years and then you kind of pick up on things and you know slowly transition. But everything happened at once for me so I don’t recommend you do that because it’s quite the learning curve. But going back to everyday challenges, though, I would say half of my stress is just due to my staff, which I love very much, who I love very much. I think we have the best staff ever right now, but you’ve got to deal with staff every single day. So there’s always something. And then beyond that, it’s insurance. Insurance is an issue for, I think, everyone involved in the insurance game. And then after that, it’s just dealing with a wide range of patients and cases that we have coming in, which is also fun for me. But there’s also some focus and stress, and we’re always on our toes. So there’s that aspect to it.

00:13:35 – Rico Figliolini

I think part of that stress probably is because you’re, of your concern for your patients and stuff. I mean you’re sharing that stress with them right? Because some of them, because like you said insurance can be an issue. You know they come in they have to do certain things insurance may or may not cover it or you know, yeah. I mean so, has that changed in the state of Georgia a lot over the past decade?

00:14:01 – Aristo Shyn

I don’t know, insurance is kind of like a foreign language to me. We try our very best to be transparent with everything, I mean not just in my communication with our patients but also you know with our front desk communicating you know regarding finances and numbers. But you know, we try our best, that’s all I can say.

00:14:19 – Rico Figliolini

No that’s good. That you know, I mean that’s the toughest part I think when it comes to medical.

00:14:23 – Aristo Shyn

And our front desk goes to bat for patients if there’s any issues with insurance we don’t just give up and you know tell them that it’s on them so yeah. I know my front desk works very hard.

00:14:36 – Rico Figliolini

Okay cool. You know, the care that you show into the community as well, right? You’re involved with the community. So let’s cover that a little bit as well. What do you like doing in the community? What have you done? Where has Link Dental Care been involved in when it comes to community organizations, events and stuff?

00:14:55 – Aristo Shyn

Well, it’s very different now than when I first started. And I’m very happy and proud of where we are today. For example, I mean, even last year we were able to sponsor the Norcross High School Marching Band, local photography club. I’ve worked closely with Norcross Co-op for quite some years. And it’s, you know, when we interview for dental school, you know, one thing that we’re always saying is we want to be part of the community. We want to be involved in the community. And, you know, that wasn’t the case when we first started. Now that we’re here. Yeah, I plan on staying here and being more involved as time goes on.

00:15:37 – Rico Figliolini

That’s cool. You know, I mean, the biggest thing that we do at the magazine and stuff is that we like to be a cheerleader for businesses that are giving back to the community, doing things with the community, especially if you’re pulling from this community. You know, your patients, your customers, and all that. So being involved makes sense.

00:15:57 – Aristo Shyn

Yeah. And I think we’ve done quite a bit of charity over the years. We don’t advertise it or we don’t really post a whole lot of it on social media. But outside of working at volunteer clinics, we try to take on at least one patient a year and give them a makeover, which they wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. That’s something I’ve been doing.

00:16:21 – Rico Figliolini

That’s cool. That’s great that you’re able to do that. When the business gets to a certain point, and you’re facing these everyday challenges, right? At the end of the day, what do you do to release that stress, that pressure? I mean, what do you do outside of the office? You’re not playing golf anymore.

00:16:53 – Aristo Shyn

No, it takes too much time.

00:16:54 – Rico Figliolini

Do you get out of the office? What time do you close up?

00:16:57 – Aristo Shyn

Well, it’s a good thing I still like what I’m doing. But yeah, life’s gotten busy. So the way I see it, I mean, I do have a few hobbies, but really it’s been work and my kids right now. So when I’m working, the way I see it, it’s overtime in a football, basketball scene. And then when I’m with my kids, it’s game seven, triple overtime. So that’s where all my focus has been after work.

00:17:28 – Rico Figliolini

Sure, sure. You have two kids, I think? Two kids. Good-looking kids. So, you know, you’re expanding. You’ve done your expansion. But there’s a future, right? I know you want to stay here. You want to expand. What does the future look like for Link Dental Care? For you?

00:17:44 – Aristo Shyn

We just moved in here. We’re talking about expansion again.

00:17:47 – Rico Figliolini

Are you really? You just moved in here. How long has it been? It’s been a few years. Can’t you stop?

00:17:58 – Aristo Shyn

I mean, a few. I mean, patients and staff have asked me in the past, what do I plan to do? Do I plan on opening multiple offices or another location? And to answer one part of that question, I think when a dentist branches out to two, three, four offices, there comes a point where you’ve got to stop being a dentist and become more of a businessman. And I still like what I’m doing a lot. And I really want to keep our practice patient-centric and really emphasize that we are a people business, not a tooth-cutting business or a production business. But, you know, I definitely plan on staying in Peachtree Corners. We’re not leaving. I mean, if there ever is another expansion, you can rest assured it’ll still be under one roof. That’s been always important to me. And I mean, going forward though, I think we’re just, we’re going to continue doing what we’ve been doing. We’re going to continue to stay up with technology, continue to reinvest in the office and the community.

00:19:19 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. This is a great place. People want to take the tour. I mean, 3,000 square feet is a lot of space. I think you have plenty of space to expand in. What should people know about you maybe that they don’t know? Is there anything interesting that you want to share?

00:19:41 – Aristo Shyn

I can share what our dental practice focuses on. I think a lot of times patients and dentists alike, they emphasize, they put their emphasis a lot on good dental care. And that is absolutely important. But, you know, to us, you know, good dental care alone doesn’t really, it doesn’t always equate to a good patient experience. And I care a lot about the patient experience. So that means the patient experience starts from the first time you call into our office, from the time you walk through our doors the first time. From the way you’re greeted from the front office, from the way, you know, our assistants or hygienists take you back to the clinical area. So, you know, bedside manners and having clear communication. So, you know, when you’ve put in all those factors, you know, the receiving good dental care, although quite important, it’s not the only piece to the puzzle. So that’s been my focus.

00:20:48 – Rico Figliolini

Cool. Patient-centric, essentially. Well, we’ve been speaking to Dr. Aristo Shyn. It’s a great practice, you guys have. I’m glad that he’s my dentist also, my family dentist. He has been doing a great job. So I appreciate you giving us some time and telling us a bit about your business.

00:21:06 – Aristo Shyn

Thank you.

00:21:07 – Rico Figliolini

Thank you. Everyone, if you have any questions, you can actually check out the website, which is?

00:21:13 – Aristo Shyn

LinkDentalCare.com. There you go.

00:21:15 – Rico Figliolini

And Instagram, it’s the same handle, @LinkDentalCare, right? Anything else you want to share? Count is 455, so we need to get that up to 1,000 apparently.

00:21:25 – Aristo Shyn

It was 200 a few months ago. I’ll tell you one more thing about Instagram before we end this. Within a couple months of us actually trying on Instagram, we actually went viral on one video. We got 1.3 million views.

00:21:41 – Rico Figliolini

Damn, which video was that one?

00:21:43 – Aristo Shyn

That was last year. It was the one about our 3D scanner. So I thought I figured it out and I was almost ready not to come into work the next day. And then here I am doing a podcast with Rico.

00:21:57 – Rico Figliolini

Sorry, it’s not a YouTube content or TikTok creator yet, but he’ll get there soon. Thanks everyone. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments. Of course, we’ll have links in the show note and you can always find Dr. Aristo Shyn here at Link Dental Care. So thanks again, everyone. Take care.

Business

Burn The Ships: Alex Wright on Committing to Success & Helping Businesses Thrive

Published

3 days ago

March 21, 2025

Peachtree Corners Magazine staff

Discover how Alex Wright, a former U.S. Naval officer, founding member of the City of Peachtree corners, and corporate finance veteran, made the bold decision to “burn the ships” and launch his own fractional CFO firm. Burn the Ships Financial embodies Wright’s philosophy of unwavering dedication to success. Wright explains how fractional CFO services can help entrepreneurs navigate their financial journey, from basic accounting setup to high-level strategic guidance.

Resources:

Burn The Ships Website: https://burntheshipsfinancial.com/

Key Takeaways:

Burn the Ships Mentality – Why Alex embraced total commitment when leaving corporate America to start his own business.
Solving Business Challenges – How a fractional CFO helps entrepreneurs manage cash flow, optimize processes, and grow sustainably.
Financial Storytelling – The power of translating financial data into actionable insights for business owners.
City Leadership & Business Strategy – Lessons learned from helping launch Peachtree Corners as a smart city and how that applies to business growth.
The Role of Technology in Finance – How tools like QuickBooks and Power BI can improve financial planning—if used correctly.
Long-Term Business Planning – Why forecasting, budgeting, and understanding financial trends are crucial for sustained success.

Listen in as Alex Wright shares his journey from the military to corporate finance and now to empowering small businesses with Burn The Ships Financial!

Timestamp:

00:00:02 – Interview with Alex Wright

00:02:27 – From Naval Officer to City Leader, Alex’s Remarkable Journey

00:06:45 – Burning the Ships, Commitment to the Mission

00:10:39 – Solving Business Problems as a Fractional CFO

00:13:59 – Optimizing Business Efficiency Through Financial Analysis

00:18:14 – Guiding Entrepreneurs to Financial Clarity

00:21:30 – Providing Financial Guidance and Structuring for Growing Businesses

00:25:46 – Translating Financial Data into Actionable Insights

00:31:19 – Leveraging City Startup Experience for Business

00:37:43 – Helping Others Succeed From Military to Coaching to Entrepreneurship

00:42:14 – Expanding Startup with Passionate Partners

00:45:31 – Connecting with Burn The Ships Financial

Transcript:

00:00:34 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. I have a great guest today, this morning, Alex Wright. Hey, Alex. Thanks for joining me.

00:00:43 – Alex Wright

Hey, Rico. It’s good to see you again. Thanks for the invite.

00:00:46 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. We’re going to have exciting things to talk about. But before we get into that, I just want to say thank you to our two sponsors, EV Remodeling Inc. and Eli and his family who live here in Peachtree Corners and the company is based here. Provide a sponsorship to us for supporting our podcast and our magazines. And EV Remodeling Inc. is a company that does design to build. You need a whole house remodeled or you just need your bath remodeled or your kitchen, they’re the people to do it. They’ve done over 260 large projects over the past few years. And you should check them out. Great supporter of ours. Great people. Nice guy. EVRemodelingInc.com is where you can find them. Our second sponsor, Vox Pop Uli, is also based here on Peachtree Corners. Family owned, they are a company, if you have a brand and you want to bring that brand to life, Vox Pop Uli is the people to do it. They do, think about the truck wraps, car wraps that you see traveling around, trade show booths, signage, anything you need imprinted on any object imprinting. They’re the people to do it. You need a backdrop for you, 20 feet by 10 feet tall, they can do it. Any of those things that will bring your brand to life is what they’re doing. Challenge them, and they’ll come back and surprise you. They’re right here in Peachtree Corners and Norcross. So check them out, Vox Pop Uli, and the link will be in the show notes. But if you search them, V-O-X, P-O-P, U-L-I, you’ll find them. Thanks again for your support. So now we have Alex. So let me introduce Alex a little bit. He has a great background. He served in U.S. Naval, as a U .S. Naval officer back during the 90s. He was the founding member of the City of Peachtree Corners City Council and has been a city councilman here in leadership here since 2012 when he was first elected. He was also the guy that originated the idea of Curiosity Lab that set our path on being a smart city and on so many foundational parts that the Curiosity Lab has been involved in including autonomous vehicle, 5G technology, and all that. So without him, I don’t know where we’d be when it comes to that. Georgia Institute of Technology grad, so much more. He’s also a board member of the Peachtree Corners Veterans Monument Association, if you’re familiar with that and the monument that we have at Town Center. So now that I’ve given a really good background, I think, of you, Alex, why don’t you tell us just a little bit more about what what you’ve been up to and where where we’re going?

00:03:33 – Alex Wright

Yes, that was a great introduction. I wish my wife could have heard how great you made me sound she would’ve found that entertaining. Yeah so I, after I got out of the navy, you know I went to the graduate school and then basically the next 25 years was at various companies in corporate finance. Some big ones, Glaxo Welcome, which I guess that was GlaxoSmithKline, Home Depot, Equifax. And then the last 11 years was at a big consumer products company in a divisional CFO role. That was here in Atlanta. And about three, I guess it’s probably November, I made a decision to transition out of corporate America and with some colleagues of mine that I used to work with, formed a fractional CFO company. Some people refer to it as business advisory firm. And it’s called Burn the Ships. That’s the name of the company. And so, yeah, we’re in the process of just getting engaged in the community, you know, looking for companies that could use our services.

00:04:56 – Rico Figliolini

So tell me, I understand the burn the ships part, but really what inspired you to name burn the ships financial?

00:05:04 – Alex Wright

So, you know, when I was making the decision to leave corporate America and, you know, that’s kind of all you know, it’s, you get comfortable with that and to make that, you know, giant career change you know it’s, it can be kind of scary. And I happened to be reading a book at you know during this time when I was trying to figure out and do I want to do this and the name of the book was called actually burn the boats. And the book is about it’s written, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he’s an entrepreneur serial entrepreneur and the gist of the book is not to have a plan b. And you can apply that concept to really anything, whether it be your marriage or training for an athletic event or starting a business, that something that’s going to be challenging and require your full effort in order to succeed, you can’t have that thought of, well, if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just go back to that. It has to be a total commitment. So that phrase is a metaphor for total commitment. You know, there’s a, not to go into much of the history, but, you know, the phrase comes from, not to go into a lot of history, but of Cortes when he was exploring the coast of Mexico. He had been tasked with that. And he gets there and discovers that, you know, there’s the Aztec Empire is there and decides, hey, I want to go into the bowels of Mexico and see what’s going on there. He just had a few hundred men with him. These guys that he had with them were apprehensive, obviously, because he wants to march into the jungle, the unknown. Plus, their orders were to just explore the coast. Well, his solution to that was, I’m going to eliminate the plan B. And the way he did that was he literally burned all the ships. There was now no way to go back. It was succeed or, in their case, die. So that phrase is about total commitment to the mission. And it really, at that time, it rang, just struck a chord with me as I was trying to make this decision because that’s a big change in a lot of different ways. And so I really just loved the story, that idea of total commitment. And so that’s the brief background or as brief as I could make it, where that phrase came from, because I just loved that story about the, you know, the commitment. Those other, not to go on a lot of my other, you know, kind of pursuits that I’ve got in my life, but, you know, different, whether it be especially like athletic things or projects, some of the things we’ve done with the city where it’s only going to succeed, you know, totally buy into, you know, what we’re trying to accomplish, the total commitment. So that’s the, that’s the name. And you know another, some of the advice I got was you need to make the name evocative so when someone hears that name, I think what does that mean? You know versus opposed to a right CFO services.

00:08:27 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no I totally agree with that branding is key to to a lot of what we do and get people remembering. And I can appreciate what you’re saying too because having, I mean I have not worked in corporate environment except for a couple of years. And I’ve been on and off a business owner and then working for a company and stuff. So I’ve been on both sides of that so it’s a little different. But you’ve, your whole career has been with corporate large companies, so I can appreciate that jumping off the ship almost and not going back is really scary, I’m sure. So your experience has been as a divisional CFO at least for the past decade or so, I guess. How do you think that that’s going to, how does that shape the services that you’re offering through Burn the Ships Financial?

00:09:23 – Alex Wright

So in this role I had, when people say, I worked in corporate finance, that can mean a whole lot of different things because in larger companies, the finance department’s quite large. So the role I had, in this business, and this company had probably 15 businesses, and as a divisional CFO, you’d be embedded in the business. And what that means is you’re at the table with the decision makers actually helping run the business. From generating sales to making, say, manufacturing more efficient to how can we ship more efficiently to negotiating with vendors for better terms, you name it. You had exposure to that. So the relevance of that is you’ve seen, now granted, maybe it’s a bigger scale, bigger numbers, but the challenges of making a business successful, you’ve had exposure to a full P&L balance sheet, just like for a small company. And so that allows you, the reason that’s translatable is ultimately what, when companies hire someone. As a fractional CFO, really what they’re looking for is I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a pain point and I need someone to help alleviate that pain to make that, help take that problem away. So it’s really about problem solving. So running a business in the finance role is ultimately about solving problems as well. So I feel like the skill set is very translated because that’s what I did for 10 years, which was solve problems to make the, our business more financially successful.

00:11:13 – Rico Figliolini

In the practical way, can you give us an example, without sharing the company you worked with I guess or you know particularly, but is there an example that you can give of how that translates in an actual real life story?

00:11:30 – Alex Wright

Yes. So now you know at a larger company it’s especially when it’s publicly traded, you know, it’s all about how do we get our earnings per share up? You know, the company is normally pretty stable. And like, say, a smaller company, they might, in some cases, might be fighting for survival in some instances. So a little bit different scenario, but ultimately it’s about how do we make the company more profitable, whether it be small or big. And so an example of something we did at this larger company is, we were in a market where there wasn’t a lot of growth on the top because it was an industry that was actually kind of shrinking. So how do you grow profit if your top line is stagnant at best or maybe just growing through price increases, very low single digits? So one of the things that you could look at is, let’s look at our product, the actual composition of the product. So we are actually a manufacturer. Are there ways that we can make the product that we’re producing less costly, but hopefully in the process also make it more effective? And so in this instance, the product in this case was grass seed. You’re thinking, well, what can you possibly do to grass seed? But in today’s world, they actually take the grass seed and they put a biostimulant around it so that when the seed goes out, it has a much higher probability of germinating. So what you would look at is, what can we do with the stimulant to change the makeup of it, change the composition where it’s, maybe the germination is even higher, but we’ve substituted some type of material that costs less. So in those instances, you’re working with an R&D department, you’re marketing people. And so in this instance, we did that over a series of five years, switched all of our, you know, changed the composition of our products. And so the ultimate takeaway for that was we increased the margins for the business by about a thousand basis points. So what that means is let’s say your margin was 30%, now it’s 40%. So that’s, and that drops straight to the bottom line through that. Something is, it wasn’t simple, but you know, instead of saying, well, there’s nothing we can do because we’re not growing is to basically look at everything on the pan out. What are, you know, areas that we could look at? I mean, you could apply that to your own personal life. I’m trying to cut back on spending and you go through and look at every expense and explore it. And maybe we don’t need the 1G, you know, internet. Maybe we just need the 500 megabytes and, you know, no stone uncovered. That’s the way we had to operate and I think that’s very translatable skill for smaller businesses because most likely they’re going to be even more cost conscious than you know a bigger company that’s got you know, more resources at their disposal.

00:14:45 – Rico Figliolini

So it’s really looking closely not just at the books but at the process of what companies do, right?

00:14:52 – Alex Wright

That’s exactly right. So one of the things when I’m, and this is before I transitioned, you know people would say well you know what does finance do? It’s just kind of this broad term and I would always describe it as in three pieces and it’s very simplistic, the first the most basic part is the gathering of of information. And that could be billing AR, AP like in a big company that’s completely automated, smaller company it might not even really exist. The next level is you’re taking that information, you’re analyzing it, you’re putting it into a reporting format. At a bigger company, not completely automated, but mostly automated. At a really small company, especially like reporting, the small business owner, his financials might be his bank statement. That might be the limit of what he’s got. And the third part, and this is really where finance differs from, say, accounting, is. You are going to the decision maker and you’re saying, hey, if you pull this lever, this will happen over here. You’re giving them actionable data, advice, if you will, on how to drive the company, whatever the company’s financial goals are, giving them suggestions how to do that.

00:16:17 – Rico Figliolini

So it’s also, I guess. You know, if I look at it from what I do a little bit, from my business and stuff, every business is somewhat the same to the degree there’s peaks and valleys. You might not always have the same trend line of revenue coming in and stuff. So it’s finding how to maximize the use of the money that’s coming in and the money flowing out. Maybe it’s the manufacturing or the service side and how that’s being done. Whether that’s parts being delivered or how it’s being ordered and such. So you’re looking beyond just the numbers on the books. You’re trying to optimize the way a company’s doing business behind the scenes.

00:16:59 – Alex Wright

That’s right. And that’s the thing I was talking about being embedded in the business, being part of the decision-making is, again, looking at the full P&L. You’re not just reporting the news you’re trying to influence what’s going on. So you might be looking at in the course of a day okay how do we make our you know logistics more efficient. You might be looking at hey what’s the ROI on this marketing spend. You know any anything you can do to you know drive profitability. And that you know I guess that’s one of the upsides of a publicly traded company when you’ve got that pressure that quarterly pressure if we got to make earnings you know you’re looking at anything and everything all the time. Now there’s downsides to it because sometimes to make the numbers look a certain way things will be done that maybe aren’t super logical but you still have that relentless pressure to become more efficient to drive costs down as much as possible.

00:18:02 – Rico Figliolini

I think with certain types of business, like you said, the private business, smaller businesses, the owners tend to, the job keeps going, right? Three years will pass before you know it. Maybe they’re not optimizing their cash flow properly. Maybe they’re doing the work, if you will, and not really looking at everything because money’s coming in. Everything seems fine. They may not see even the trend of how things are going where maybe it’s going bad, but they’re not seeing it yet because maybe they have the revenue there. The cash flow is there. They might not see it for the next three months. And all of a sudden, they start realizing, whoa, this is bad. We’re beyond, why didn’t I see this before? So how does the aspect of what you do as a fractional CFO, let’s say, how will you give that foundation to these businesses? What’s the process, if you will?

00:19:01 – Alex Wright

Well, I think that obviously each company is different, right? You have to go in and see what, if any, processes they have. But I think if you make the assumption that they don’t, kind of your point, they’re just, you know, you’ve got this entrepreneur. They’re really good at making pencils. And that’s what their total focus is, selling those pencils, just growing, growing, growing. You know, they don’t really have a whole lot of time to, you know focus on the finances other than making sure they got enough money to meet payroll or buy anything. I think the key thing when you go in, in a situation like that is, you know, to talk to the owner or the founder, you know, understanding what is it that, you know, what are your, you know, try to define the goals besides just staying afloat, you know, kind of help them sit down. Okay. Let’s put this pen to paper. What is it you’re, I’m going to make something up, okay you’re doing 500,000, million in revenue and you want to get to a million and a half in two years. Again I’m just making this up. You know in the larger company it would be you know to be a budget or they’d call it a you know five-year plan it’d be some kind of structure you know a guide post if you will. I think that’s the, I mean you could apply that to your personal life. Like okay I’m trying to you know, retire at age 65 or I’m trying to lose 20 pounds or whatever it might be, whatever that you’re trying to accomplish. You’ve got the saying about if I fail to plan, I plan to fail. So I think that’s the key thing is to understand from that owner what it is you’re trying to accomplish. And then once, because ultimately it’s their business, you’re there to help them be successful. So once they’ve articulated what those goals are, then one of our jobs would be, okay, let’s lay out a plan to see if we can get to that. Because in some cases, you know, my experience has been people that are entrepreneurs, when it comes to forecasting financially, they’re not always the most realistic because they’re normally going to be really optimistic. I can conquer the world, which is you need that to be an entrepreneur. But one of the jobs of finance is to kind of poke holes in arguments, not to discourage people, but to make people think realistically, okay, can we grow from a million to a million and a half in two years? Understanding, you know, what is there a path to do that that’s realistic? And having those conversations with, you know, with these guys, because in some cases you’re bringing up things that maybe they haven’t thought about because they’re so focused on the here and now versus looking a year or two out that that’s just not really what they’re focused on because, again, they’re trying to grow the business.

00:22:08 – Rico Figliolini

So when you come into a firm, for example, you know, obviously people, you know, you want to build that foundation without the cost of a full-time CFO. I mean, that’s the idea, right? So work with me for a minute. In an ideal world, you would come in for a few hours or whatever that first month and then how would the rest of it work like is there a maintenance level that you provide? Quarterly stuff you provide? So give me in brief what that would look like to someone.

00:22:45 – Alex Wright

Right. So again, each company is going to be different but really kind of two levels, and I’m simplifying this, but really two levels of service. And you can pick one or the other or both. So let’s assume we’re talking about a company that we used an example earlier of the finances are literally the bank statement. I know how much cash I got. That’s kind of an extreme example. So we use that one as our example. So in that case, they don’t have a P&L or balance sheet. They don’t really know what’s going on other than, you know, how much cash they got in the bank and maybe in their head, they’ve got kind of a gut instinct of what’s going on. So in that instance, you know, you’re going to have to come in and create a structure that will allow you to build a P&L, which is, you know, the foundation of any type of forecasting or budgeting. You’ve got to have that initial document. And to get to that, you’ve got to go in and take basically all their transactions that, you know, are in their bank statement and create what’s called a trial balance, which is going to have a chart of accounts. Basically, all that is coding where, you know, okay, this is travel and this is, you know, sales and it’s basically, you know, accounting 101, right? And so that base level of service would be something like that plus reporting that goes with it. And that reporting you would get through programs like Microsoft power BI that can do you know anything at the like that but you’ve got to have the you know the numbers formatted. So that would be a basic level of service and the first time that initial transition that would be time consuming because you’ve got to you create something, a structure that’s not there before. But then after you’ve created a structure you know each month you’re just really just updating, you know the results putting them into a P&L format. And if we think back when I was talking about the three levels of finance that’s really like the first two levels combined. So that’d be like a fixed fee you know for that service almost like a subscription. The second level of service it’s more like what that kind of like that third level I was talking about before where you’re sitting down with the decision maker and you’re telling them hey, this is what’s going on with your business. And depending on if they wanted to have, layout objectives, then you talk about the progress each month of how are we progressing versus these objectives that we’ve laid out. And if we’re off course, what things can we change to get you back on course? And so that would be an in-person review where, the analogy I use is that movie, The Matrix, if you remember, they’ve got all the data that’s doing this, right? You can’t read it. And so if you’re not in finance, often people struggle to, you can give them 20 reports, but if they’re not a finance person, they’re often going to be like, I don’t really understand what this is telling me. That second level is, it’s really about storytelling, where you’re taking the information and you’re telling the owner a story, you know, not in a fictional way, but this is what’s going on with your business, but you’re translating it in a way that is easy for them to understand, versus if you’re just talking about debits and credits, they’re going to be lost with that.

00:26:21 – Rico Figliolini

So if they already have QuickBooks online, for example, they’re already getting reports, you’re at that stage already, but you’re able to tell them more than that, what the reports give them in numbers, because you’re looking at all of it, right? Holistically almost.

00:26:38 – Alex Wright

That’s correct. So you know a lot of companies will have you know they’ll have a controller, bookkeeper, you know maybe both of them. And so in my you know previous life I had plenty of accountants that worked for me and really what their job, and I’m simplifying and this isn’t to say anything negative about accountants, like I said I’ve worked in accounting. But their job really is to tell you okay this is the number and this number is correct. But if you ask them well okay that number is that’s a number ten, last year it was a five, why did it go from a five to a ten? That’s really not what their role is in most cases. So they’re challenged to you know explain the why part of it right? And so that’s where, that’s really where finance comes in to explain what is going on. And not just report.

00:27:36 – Rico Figliolini

And not just explain it. I would imagine if, from my point of view, you might explain why that went from a five to a ten, but you should probably be able to give me advice on, you know, where can we take that from now? You know, why is this? I know the difference is there. I knew it grew. Maybe it grew for this reason, but you might be able to tell me how we can adjust that, right? I mean, the whole idea is, for you to provide guidance. So almost like a, what do you call it? A person that, the accountability partner, if you will, in this.

00:28:15 – Alex Wright

Yeah. Well, that’s the great thing about, you know, having a budget is that you’ve, again, we were using examples earlier, but you could apply it to different parts of your, you know, personal life, but having that objective. If you don’t have that objective, then you don’t really know. It’s like driving a car. You’re trying to get somewhere, but you don’t have a map. You’re going to struggle without that map to point you in the direction you’re trying to get to.

00:28:45 – Rico Figliolini

So now we’ve got here, does technology play a part in what you do as well in financial advisory or in this type of field?

00:28:59 – Alex Wright

So the, remember when earlier I was talking about the kind of the three levels of not services but you know what finance does, and what’s occurred over the last 20 or more than 25 years is that systems like say SAP or Hyperion or for these large ERPs is they have really kind of flattened the work structure of companies because what they’ve allowed is it’s really like an early form of AI. Is they automated you know tons and tons of functions that before there would have been literally like armies of people you know just doing kind of mindless work almost and so technology, now some of these small companies you know they’re not going to have an SAP or Hyperion but when we were talking earlier about power where that’s like Quickbooks but on steroids the kind of things that can do. But the reality is, whether it be QuickBooks or Power BI, if you don’t have that basic level of the information formatted, the magic can’t happen without that. So ultimately, at the smaller companies, there is some manual aspect of, I’ve got to code this expense correctly, input it. So the technology, at a smaller company, you know, that doesn’t have an SAP or Hyperion or Oracle is really more in the, you know, the reporting phase, the things it can do once the numbers are formatted correctly. It’s almost mind boggling now that the danger there is you can have too many reports. I can produce 30, 40 reports, but it’d be too much, you know, information. And that’s the, so when people talk about, well, I got QuickBooks. or even got Power BI, if you don’t have someone there to interpret it for you, to say, well, this is actually what this is telling you, it’s a very limited value. Like we were, again, using the Matrix example of it’s great, but if I can’t take any actions based off of it, then I don’t really want to do it.

00:31:15 – Rico Figliolini

Right. And I can see that in a world where a company might have two, three, or four different credit lines using them for a variety of reasons. Well, the financial planner might come in and say, why do we have these two where your APR, your interest rate is this high, you’re actually utilizing the wrong credit line or, you know, there could be a variety of things there, right? Let’s look a little bit at experience. As a founding member of Peachtree Corners, the city of Peachtree Corners since 2012, how has the involvement in local government influenced your business perspective? Has that influenced it at all? And where does that go?

00:31:57 – Alex Wright

The thing that I, kind of a, not a comparison, but an analogy is, I was talking to someone about this the other day where we started the city. There was an election to whether to have a city, and then there was an election to elect a council. So we had seven people who, for the most part, didn’t know each other. And I mean that was the city, there was no city staff there was no anything. So the reason that’s relevant it’s almost like a startup where we’re like okay we need to find someone, it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know. You had to go find people to kind of help us get started and then there’s those growing pains of whether it be the relationships amongst the council or you know finding the right people from a staff standpoint to be part of a city startup because if you think about all the cities in the country, very few new cities. That idea of a new city, it’s not unique to Georgia but you know prior to say like 2005 that wasn’t something that was happening here. So it’s that, there’s only certain people that want to take that risk. I guess it was kind of like going from a big corporation to a startup, it’s you got to have the right you know mindset and you know kind of fire in your belly to do it so it’s being part of something and seeing it grow from you know literally the seven of us in a room one day like meeting each other to you know what there is now. It’s what I envision starting a company would would be like. And you know maybe the the comparisons aren’t you know the correlation not completely you know accurate but I would think for sure there’s some you know similarities those same kind of decisions we had to make about bringing the right people in at the right time and you know just being able to get along. Because at a smaller company I would think those relationships are, the importance of them are more pronounced because there’s fewer people. Versus at a larger corporation not that the relationships aren’t important but you know the success or the failure of say like working at the home depot headquarters is it going to be based on you know just a you know my relationship with somebody because there’s 400,000 people that work there.

00:34:17 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I think part of it too is you’re starting, you know, the city started with just, you know, with a certain amount of revenue because it took over some of that revenue being a city, franchise taxes, business licenses, but you also grew into a budget. And then as the city grew financially, I know it’s not a business, but you all treated it to some degree as a business, right? You didn’t spend money you didn’t have, or if you did there was a reason you knew where the revenue might come in from whether it was a grant or a loan or whatever it was. I’ve got to say that the city has overall done it responsibly. So has any of that informed the way you know or have you used your experience there you know working with that type of finance too?

00:35:08 – Alex Wright

So, you know the analogy I use sometimes with people is like the city council relationship, say, to the city manager is similar to in a company, a board of directors to a CEO. So that, you know, being a role, you know, because I was never on a board of directors at a company, you’ve got to be way up or probably older than me normally, you know, to be in that role of coming up with policies and then entrusting someone to execute those, you know, definitely gives you a different perspective. You know, running an organization because my career had been on the implementing people’s policy, you know, taking that directive from on high and implementing it and, you know, bringing it to some results. So to have that perspective from the other side has been, I think, good because, you know, I sit there and think about not too many people get that opportunity to be on the other side of the, you know, the table, if you will, to come up with policies. And trust other people, find the right people to enact those and make them successful.

00:36:20 – Rico Figliolini

Going from other experiences, your military service as a naval officer, has that also provided any experience that you’ve drawn on? Excuse my black cat.

00:36:34 – Alex Wright

No, you’re okay. That was a little more tricky. I think the thing that, where that part comes in, and this was really more about, you know, the why of, you know, I wanted to get into this type of work. Because when I was making the decision to leave corporate America, you know, I was in a position from a career standpoint, financial standpoint, a personal standpoint, you know, kids rolling off the payroll. There’s an opportunity here to do something different. And I did a, I don’t know if you know what a SWOT analysis is, but strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, did like a SWOT analysis of myself and thought, what is it that, you know, now in this situation where I don’t have as much responsibility as far as taking care of other people, like what really brings me, you know, satisfaction, fulfillment, besides just, you know, helping a company get that EPS each quarter. And, you know, the common theme as I looked at all these different things I’ve been involved in. I looked at my military experience, looked at serving on the city council. I looked at the 20 years I coached kids sports. All three of those things are thinking, how the heck are those three related to each other? But the common theme, because each one of those brought me satisfaction in different ways, was that you’re helping other people in each of those instances. You’re serving other people. You’re making other people either successful or in the case of, you know, the military is really about, you know, serving the nation, but it was doing stuff for other people. Again, differently. And I thought, how do I take these skills that I’ve built up over 25 years and do that in a way where I can help other people be successful? Because one of the things I would constantly hear from small business owners is, we were kind of talking about it before where they’re really good at you know that making the pencils or whatever it is but they struggle with finance because that’s not what their you know expertise is. And in a lot of instances can’t afford you know to bring somebody in or they don’t they don’t need someone full-time. And as I learned more about that industry I thought this could really fill that that impulse, if you will, you know, I’ve got about how can I help other people be successful? And in a way where you go in, you take this person’s got their whole life’s work tied up in this business. Their heart and soul in it. And to be able to go in and help them eliminate or alleviate some of their pain points that are preventing them from being successful. That really appealed to me much more than, well, I’m just going to go back into I’m going to call it the matrix of corporate america life we’re just going to you know get that EPS up three cents. You get to a certain point in life where like I’d really like to a bit of focus more on giving back. Just like with the you know city council it pays eight thousand dollars a year an occasional free t-shirt but you just have a great sense of satisfaction when you go out to the Town Center and you see like the the playgrounds and stuff we’ve built out there and you see all those people enjoying themselves you think you know I had a some small part of you know bringing that you know joy to these other people so it’s that same you know you want to do the same thing but in this different you know industry.

00:40:16 – Rico Figliolini

Now and I can see that. I mean you brought a lot, you’re passionate about the things you do. We were talking about a little bit about the industries that you’re passionate in, the areas of like CrossFit and stuff. So, you know, a person that’s driven that way and that’s sharing. I mean, you’re doing the Memorial Day Challenge for kids on Fort Payne, which is our obstacle course. That’s probably one of the best in the city, if not the best. So I can see that. I mean, giving back to the community and all that. And working with entrepreneurs, startup businesses, or even just businesses that have been around for a while, providing them with information. And you’re right. Some people, number one, either they think they can’t afford it, but they really can’t ignore it, right? Because if they’re going to grow their business, they really need to know what those numbers mean. And, you know, I mean, you’re right. Bank statement or even a QuickBook report. I mean, fine, so you can see your business is growing, you can see its profitability, but you may not see the things that are coming, which those numbers can tell you. It’s almost like being a futurist with it, right? Or being able to tell the future with numbers, if you will. And those numbers don’t lie to a degree. So giving back to the community as a business leader, as a political leader, I mean, I know that’s part of what you do. The relationships you’re building with Burn the Ships Financial, I mean, you just started out. This is your first few months in business. And you want to be able to give the feedback that you can to them. So tell me what, you know, what do you look ahead? What’s your company’s long-term goals? We’re towards the end of our interview here. So I just want to know where you think you’re going, where you want to be in a couple of years. What type of clients, what industry maybe. What do you want to be? Tell me.

00:42:24 – Alex Wright

So one of the things that I’ve done you know as I was learning about other companies that play in this space you know some of their you know limitations whether it be bandwidth or skill set. One of the things I did is I reached out to a lot of former colleagues and said hey would you be interested in going on this journey with me? Like hey, don’t quit your job but you know would you like to you know partner with me on this? And literally every person I reached out to was like, yes, I would love to do this with you. They were very excited about it. The reason that’s relevant is, it gives us a scope of skills and bandwidth that I would argue most of these other companies just don’t have because they don’t have access to these people that have worked in companies. The reason I mentioned that to your question is, some of these folks that are really you know fired up about you know doing the business initially, I was just, I’m just going to do it myself and take on four or five six customers you know that have compelling stories but as these other folks really wanted to get involved you know I’ve been rethinking that just see how things go but you know it could be that things take off and we’re able to some of these folks come on board we might you know make it a bigger plan. I just wasn’t expecting the level of response I got about how excited people wanted to do this as well. So that’s TBD, obviously. We’ll just see how that goes. But money is a very personal thing, whether it be our personal money or a business’s money. It’s really about trust. And obviously, you’ve got to build that over time. I’m anticipating, you know, it’s going to take several months where, hey, you got to inform people they have moved into this space and you’re spending a whole lot of time meeting with people and just telling them what I’m doing and, you know, getting the word out that I’m here to, you know, get involved to help people be successful. So we’re just, we’re going to have to wait and see how that goes. See what kind of growth opportunities there are. But, you know, Peachtree Corners, that’s over, I want to say about 2,500 businesses. They’re not all in the space that I’m looking to get involved in, but it’s a great location to be in, in terms of this industry.

00:44:51 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. We’re a growing city, so it’s never-ending. We’ve been speaking to Alex Wright with Burn the Ships Financial. Just started a startup of his own. A city councilman with City of Peachtree Corners here as well. Alex, I appreciate you being with us. Can you tell people where they can find more information about you, your website, your contact info?

00:45:15 – Alex Wright

Yes. So website is just like the company name, Burn the Ships Financial. We got that up a few weeks ago. And that’s probably the best place to go. It’s got my contact info and some of my partner’s contact info on there. Yeah, that’s going to have all my info. I was going to say you could go to the city website, but at this point, everything you would need would be on the company website.

00:45:46 – Rico Figliolini

In fact, on the homepage, there’s a phone number, email address, and a schedule a consultation button. So it is burntheshipsfinancial.com that you should all visit. And check out Alex Wright and his team and the services they provide. Hang with me for a second, Alex, but everyone else, thank you for joining us. Appreciate your support. Appreciate the support of evremodelinginc.com and Vox Pop Uli as well for supporting our podcast as well as the magazines and the digital work that we do, newsletters and all that, and the journalism that we produce. So thanks again to everyone. Alex, appreciate you being here. And if you all have any comments, leave it in the comment box, depending where you are. YouTube, Facebook, or just email Alex and he’ll be able to answer your questions.

Business

The Benefits of Outsourcing: How Sourced Supports Growing Businesses

Published

3 weeks ago

March 5, 2025

Peachtree Corners Magazine staff

Join UrbanEBB host Rico Figliolini for a conversation with Gabrielle Mills, co-founder and CEO of Sourced, a full-service back-office firm supporting small to mid-market businesses. She shares how she and her mother built a company that provides accounting, marketing, HR, staffing, and administrative support—all under one brand.

Learn about the challenges entrepreneurs face with business operations and how outsourcing can provide the help they need. Gabrielle also discusses:

A $12M business that never checked its financials
The importance of trust in outsourcing key business functions
The balance between people, technology, and business success
Sourced’s commitment to giving back to local charities

Resources:
Sourced Website: https://getsourced.com/
Social Media: @SourcedATLGabrielle Mills
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellejmills/

Timestamp:
00:02:20 – Sourcing Solutions for Entrepreneurs
00:07:26 – Building Trust and Expertise to Serve Clients
00:14:53 – Fixing Broken Books for Business Owners
00:18:18 – Encouraging Diversity in Talent Acquisition
00:19:57 – Embracing Mistakes and Developing Processes
00:23:12 – Giving Back to Local Charities
00:25:34 – Leveraging Technology to Enhance People-Centric Services

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb here based in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. I appreciate you joining us. We’re a little smart city just north of Atlanta. I have a great guest here, Gabrielle Mills. She’s the founder and CEO of Sourced. Hey, Gabrielle. Thanks for joining us.

00:00:20 – Gabrielle Mills

Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.

00:00:22 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, I appreciate you being here. We’re going to learn a lot from you, I’m sure, this morning. And this is one of those freezing mornings here in Georgia that really never happens, like down to 20.

00:00:32 – Gabrielle Mills

It is so cold. I’m very cranky about it.

00:00:36 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, it’s amazing. But it’ll warm up in a week. But before we get to our interview, I just want to say thank you to two sponsors we have that have been with us. Appreciate the support of our journalism, these podcasts, of the magazines as well. One of them is EV Remodeling, Inc. They’re a company that has done work from design to build. whole house renovation, as well as just redoing your kitchen, your bathrooms and such. They’ve worked with over 260 families. They’re based in Peachtree Corners. Eli, the owner of the company, is a really great guy. I think you should check out their website. You could do a virtual consultation with them as well and check out their portfolio. So go to evremodelinginc.com and find out a little bit more about them. Also, our second sponsor is Vox Pop Uli, also based here at Peachtree Corners. They’re a company that takes your brand and brings it to life, essentially. They’re a family business, father, son, other family members in there, another daughter in there handling marketing. And even members of their employees are considered part of the family. It’s just a great, well-run company. We just did a podcast with them recently. You should check that out. But they try to bring your brand awareness out there. They can do anything from truck wraps to print on any object, just come to them, give them a challenge, and they will actually step up to that challenge. You might think they can’t print on it, but God knows they’ll find a way to do what you need to bring to that trade show and to make your business stand out as a retail operation or whatever. So check them out, vox-pop-uli.com, and it’s V-O-X-P-O-P-U-L-I.com. So now that we’ve gotten our sponsorships out of the way, Gabrielle, appreciate you staying with me like that. So tell us a little bit about how you started the business, why you chose the word sourced, and what the business is.

00:02:39 – Gabrielle Mills

Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. So I can’t tell you the answer to that question without acknowledging my business partner, Chrissy Strohmeyer, who is also my mother. So we are a mom and daughter team. We have just enjoyed the heck out of building this company together, but really my stories are her stories and vice versa. We started the business because we wanted to be entrepreneurs and we wanted to help other businesses grow and be successful. We think entrepreneurs are the salt of the earth people. They’re the reason for our economy. They create jobs. They’ve got so many great ideas. And they are the last people that get a helping hand because they don’t always have enough cash, right? That’s why we started Sourced. We actually went to business owners and asked them, because we didn’t have this idea. We asked business owners what they need, where they were underserved and how, if they were to do it all over again, kind of what they would do. And we put all of their answers up on a whiteboard that’s currently in our office. In fact, you saw it when you came over to our office the other day. If that whiteboard could talk, man. And we looked at all of their problems, all of their suggestions, all of the things they were struggling with. And our services came out of that. So Sourced is a back office services company serving small to mid-market companies. And the easiest way to describe what it is that we do is we basically have five businesses under one brand name. So on the fractional side of our business, we are a full accounting firm, full service accounting firm, a full service marketing agency, outsourced HR, administrative support. And then not fractionally, we do direct hire full time placement. So all of those ideas came from entrepreneurs that we spoke to that they needed help. And we said, we’ll do it.

00:04:38 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing. All under one roof.

00:04:42 – Gabrielle Mills

Well, we didn’t mean exactly to create five businesses at the same time. That was more of God’s plan. But, you know, here we are.

00:04:51 – Rico Figliolini

No, no, I can appreciate that. I’ve come across a lot of people in different businesses doing different things. So you do look at where your services can expand into. So it makes sense for where you guys are coming from.

00:05:04 – Gabrielle Mills

So you asked me where the name comes from. And I don’t get that question a lot. And it’s actually a really funny story. When I was working my big girl corporate job at IHG, Intercontinental Hotels Group, I had a relative that worked in the company. And she was the only person that knew that I was thinking about leaving and starting my own thing. So I floated the concept to her. And she loved the concept. At this time, we didn’t have talent acquisition. We only had a fractional client or fractional services. And our name was the Atlanta Assistance Group. And we were going to go by TAAG, T-A-A-G. And she was in branding for IHG. And she goes, I have to tell you, that name isn’t scalable. It’s easily forgettable. And you also have TAG, the Technology Association.

00:05:57 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right.

00:05:58 – Gabrielle Mills

And she’s like, I really think that you need to rethink your name. This was seven days before I was going to quit my job and do this and tell them I was going out. In which case they would want to know what the company is, what our name is, all the things. And so the next seven days, Chrissy and I were just on fire trying to think of everything. The amount of hours we spent digging through the thesaurus was crazy. And one day we were, I was driving and I was playing around with the word outsourced, resource, I was trying to come up with a play on words there and Sourced just came about and I called her and I was like, what do you think of this? And she’s like, I love it. And I think we came up with it two days before I quit.

00:06:48 – Rico Figliolini

Wow. And I love the website name though, getsourced.com. I mean, it just like makes sense to be able to do that. So, you know, you’ve been dealing with a lot of businesses, helping them and stuff. Sourcing is an issue sometimes, especially if you’re doing financial fractional work like that. And small business owners, maybe the larger ones like 10 million plus different, or even let’s say 5 million plus different, right? And I’m not sure what your sweet spot is, but the trust process to get a business to trust you to do their work because they’re sourcing it out to you. You’re not in the office. How do you do that? How do you gain traction with that? How do you gain their confidence to be able to provide the services that will make their business better?

00:07:37 – Gabrielle Mills

I think there’s a lot of ways that we do that naturally. First and most importantly, we have an amazing, amazing team of people and they really do the selling for us. Most of our business comes from word of mouth and referral because the people that work with us have such a great experience with our team and our people that that trust is kind of transferred already over because the referrer has had a great experience. That helps. Chrissy and I are involved in every single sale at this point before we pass it off to our team. We obviously have been through the entrepreneurial journey. We’re in our ninth year. We’ve done all the bumps and bruises, made all the mistakes. We’ve seen a lot of other people’s mistakes. We can kind of provide a lot of guidance during the sales process. So I think that builds trust. And not to be understated, the processes and the standards that we’ve built over time, we know how to fall back to the level of our training, regardless of the situation at hand. So we really lean into that when we’re talking to clients or prospects because they want to know how things are going to go. You can have a really good person who’s really friendly, but they may not know what they’re doing. That’s where the processes and our training comes in. We don’t have to do a lot of training because our people are already very experienced. But the way that we do things, we want that to be standardized. So we train on how the Sourced way is. So the client is experiencing something consistent.

00:09:14 – Rico Figliolini

So when you’re training, obviously, that’s an internal thing that you’re doing. There’s always industry trends, right? I mean, taxes is one thing where there’s always an update every year, different things going on. God knows probably this year will be a lot of things going on, accounting and stuff. But how do you keep ahead of some of the trends then or adapting to the needs of the entrepreneurs that you’re reaching out to? Because I’m sure that changes and evolves too.

00:09:42 – Gabrielle Mills

It does. I mean, you keep up with current events. We listen to our clients. Our clients know a lot. Our clients are very, very smart and we’re industry agnostic. So we get the benefit of seeing lots of different things from lots of different people and lots of different industries. So we just kind of like by osmosis learn things. But I think any good leader, regardless of if you own the business or you’re just working in the business or you have some kind of your stakeholder somewhere, I think anybody that is worth their salt is kind of always keeping up with. What’s going on and how does the business need to adapt and how does my department need to adapt and how do we grow and how do we improve? And I think just by having a regular practice like that, where you’re always kind of investigating it and looking at ways of improving, it’s more natural than it is forced to grow and change as the world changes.

00:10:37 – Rico Figliolini

Do you find going through the things you’re going through that, I mean, obviously, The day-to-day work is never-ending, right? It’s a process. Some days, some weeks, it’ll be the same as other weeks. But every once in a while, you get a challenge. You find something that you have to overcome within a business maybe, within your own business. Do you have any success stories that you can share that relates to that?

00:11:06 – Gabrielle Mills

Yes, I’ll tell you my favorite one. And it’s one of the more recent ones too. In our nine years of business, we have seen a lot come through our doors. We always tell people, especially those coming in for accounting. Accounting and talent acquisition are our two most popular services. And we started in accounting. That’s kind of our bread and butter. And people are always very vulnerable about like, oh, my books are bad. I had a bad accountant. I don’t know what I’m doing. We always tell them we’re like doctors. We just want to, give us the real, real, we’ll fix it. Like accounting is not a human body. So like we can actually fix it because it’s just numbers. But we’ve seen a lot of horror stories. You cannot scare us. You cannot surprise us. We’ve seen a lot in nine years. Recently, I think this client came on board early last year. And it was a $12 million construction client. And they have been in business for like 20 years or something. And when we were working on, we got referred into this client and we went and we talked to them and they were having an issue with their accountant that was internal. And they wanted to let that person go, but she knew way too much in the business. So they were like, we need somebody that can fix the craziness that’s happening in the books. And you can imagine they’re large books, $12 million company. We need to create some kind of redundancy in a situation where we need to let somebody go and we can’t, we’re beholden to them. And we just don’t know anything about our books. We’ve never seen them. And the best part of that meeting was that Chrissy asked, or she was talking about the financials, the financial reports. And the client stops her and she goes, wait, why do I need to look at my financial reports? And our jaws just dropped because this is a $12 million company. They’ve been in business for like 20 years. They have done a phenomenal job building their company. They had no idea the importance of their numbers. They didn’t know what their, like how their money was transacting. They, I don’t know how they were running it. And so that was a lot to overcome. It was probably one of our longer onboarding processes, but we got that client off of QuickBooks desktop and onto QuickBooks online so they could see their numbers, right. Their books were done and I’m not blaming this person that ended up leaving. There was reasons why this was, but the books were entirely backwards. So where there were things that should have been a positive, they were showing a negative and a negative should have been a positive. So all their numbers were backwards and then nothing was set up properly. So we had to do a whole setup. We had to clean the whole thing and we just had a meeting with them yesterday just talking about our usual check-in, how things are going. We’re constantly looking at improving this account. And they were just saying they have never felt more secure in an accounting firm. They said, regardless of how our team changes, you guys are our people. You’ve taught us, you’ve changed everything, you’ve done everything. And we just, they were showering us with lovely things and it just warmed our hearts so much because this was one heck of a undertaking. But I also, give them a lot of credit too, because that one, it was not a cheap project. And two, that took a lot of trust in them too, to be like, I don’t know you guys and you have to fix all of these problems at once. And it was a lot of work that they had to do and we had to do. And so they put a lot into the relationship as well. And it was, they’re probably one of my favorite clients now. And it’s, will probably be my biggest success story for a while, just from the scale.

00:15:01 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have a friend, Karl Barham, who owns Transworld Business. He consults, he buys and sells business for people. And it’s constantly amazing how many, not just half a million dollar companies, but $10 million companies, sometimes their books are so bad that they have to like step away and say, you know what, let’s fix this up. You may have to wait a year before you can sell this business just because the books are so bad. You know, it’s just like, there’s that.

00:15:31 – Gabrielle Mills

We don’t like to see it. Obviously it breaks our hearts and we can, we can fix it. We have the, we can fix anything at this point. But it’s unfortunate because they didn’t get bad because of that person. They got bad because that person didn’t have the support that they needed. Likely that the entrepreneur was not an accountant. They shouldn’t be. They should be building their business, doing whatever it is that they’re doing. Accounting is important, but this is why we went into businesses. You need to go do your dream. We’ve got the stuff that, yes, you need to keep up with, but you don’t need to know how to do it. We can show you, but you don’t need to know how to do this. You just need to know what your numbers look like.

00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I’m surprised that when their accountant did their work at the end of the year, I can’t imagine it was the same person doing it. It had to be someone else doing it. And no one figured it out.

00:16:33 – Gabrielle Mills

Well, with this particular client, there was a couple migrations in systems that caused that reversal. So they started on one system and moved to QuickBooks Desktop. which reversed everything. And then the person that was working in the office, she would do a lot of things right. But there’s a lot of different ways to do accounting right, quote unquote. But she continued the backwardness because that’s how it had to be done. It was very complicated.

00:17:02 – Rico Figliolini

And I’m sure. And sometimes you’re down a path and you don’t want to leave that path. You just keep going and just figure it’ll work itself out at some point.

00:17:11 – Gabrielle Mills

That happens in accounting of like, we just start fresh. Like right now we’re getting a lot of clients that need cleanups and we only have to go back a month and a half because it’s the 21st today. When we’re in July, we’re like, okay, how far back do you want to go? Or not July, but more like October. They’re like, we can clean up from January or we can just hold off and start fresh in the next January.

00:17:36 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s a tough decision. You said before you’re agnostic business-wise a little bit, but are there types of businesses that may benefit most from what you all do or that you target or that you’d prefer working with? Or have strength in those industries.

00:17:53 – Gabrielle Mills

We have developed patterns of clients that tend to come to us. So on the accounting side, we do a lot of construction. That’s the example that I gave. We have a couple of YouTube clients, which is kind of neat. We do a lot of work for attorneys. Accounting for law is very specialized. So we do that. On the marketing side, they’re completely across the board. There is no consistency whatsoever. Same with administrative support. HR gets thrown into any monthly recurring service that we have. So again, there’s no consistency. On the talent acquisition side, we have quite a bit of consistency. Although there’s randomness throughout. We do a lot in, we still do a lot in law. We get a lot of financial roles. So we do anything from accountants, tax managers, tax seniors. We do a lot in IT, particularly in the cybersecurity market. A lot in finance, some in construction, not really all that much. Did I say finance? Property management in talent acquisition. Yeah, those are about the consistent ones in talent acquisition. But again, we kind of see it all. At this point in our business, we actually get really excited when we see a business or an industry that we’ve never worked in before. So for marketing, I was just pitching a client yesterday who’s opening a shooting sports facility and gun range. I have never done that before. And I was like, oh, this is different. This is unique. We’ve got research. Same with anything in our talent acquisition department. If it’s different, we’re like, okay, this is exciting. Because usually, I mean, we just see a lot of businesses come through here.

00:19:48 – Rico Figliolini

Well, that’s cool. Yeah, especially when you see a lot of different businesses like that. We talked about success stories. As a business person, I think any business person, if they’re honest with themselves, will say, yes, we make mistakes every once in a while. New situations arise that they’ve never seen before and it’s a problem that they have to overcome. Have there been any mistakes in your business journey or that you’ve seen in other businesses besides, obviously, the accounting issue? But anything that you’ve overcome as an entrepreneur, as a business person?

00:20:27 – Gabrielle Mills

No, Rico, we’re absolutely perfect. We’ve never made a mistake.

00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini

I could see that.

00:20:34 – Gabrielle Mills

Oh gosh no. I tell people, people ask me about our journey a lot. They’re just curious about our story and how we came to be. And we love telling it. I always tell people, Chrissy and I didn’t have experience in any of these things before we started. We just had a dream and wanted to be, help businesses and build a business ourselves. All of this we have learned from the ground up, having no experience with the exception of like general business acumen and general sales acumen. But we’re not accountants. We are not recruiters. I did start in marketing, but not tactically. So I always say that I went to the school of hard knocks, got a couple of degrees from there. And that’s how I got to where I’m at because we’ve made every mistake in the book. We’ve had clients that have trusted us and loved us through some mistakes that we’ve made to get us to where we are. I would say the biggest piece of advice or mistake that I made that I learned from was Chrissy came into the business from day one. And she was telling me and our director of account management, Maureen, she was like, we’ve got to focus on our processes. We’ve got to focus on our processes. Maureen and I were focused on the people and just serving the people. And in year three, which was our hardest year yet, we got so many different challenges and scenarios that were really, really difficult. And what Chrissy was telling us from day one finally got through to Maureen and I of like, oh, this is why we need processes and standards. This makes sense now. So it took a lot of heartache to really understand why those are important. But now it has been the secret sauce to our business because we know how to hire off of them. So if people aren’t already operating or have experience with that certain frame of mind, we know that they’re likely not a fit or they have to be at least willing to be coached into that direction. We’ve developed consistency because our process is our standard. We’re always making our processes better. We’re always looking to make them beefier. We never would have gotten there if we didn’t learn that lesson.

00:22:53 – Rico Figliolini

And sometimes you do. I mean, you have to learn your lesson. It’s like bringing up kids. They want to do their own mistakes. They don’t want to be told to watch out for that step. And they’ll do their own mistakes.

00:23:04 – Gabrielle Mills

She was a broken record there for a few years. And then the light bulb finally went off. And Maureen and I were like, oh, okay. Now it took us some tears to learn it. But we got there. Now we’re on there.

00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini

I’m sure. So you’re a local business. Obviously, coming out to meet with you and your mom and the rest of the team was nice to take a tour and find out what you’re doing there. You do give back. I know you’re good people. You’re giving back to the community. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about some of the local charities that you’ve given back to?

00:23:45 – Gabrielle Mills

So early in our business, we decided that we’re not in business, we’re in business for the joy of being in business. We’re not in business to make a gazillion dollars and cash out. While that would be lovely, we would totally not turn our noses up at that. We wanted to at least serve our clients and then serve people that never really came into contact with Sourced and use the business as an opportunity to give back because we believe that if we’re successful, we have been giving blessings and so we should be giving blessings out. So we committed from day one that we were going to donate 10% of our monthly profits to charity. And those charities would be selected by our team of people. So every year, in December, we put out a survey to our team. And our team can nominate a charity that is important to them. And we decided in January, up to three charities that we’re going to give to that year, and every quarter we look at each month that we’ve made profit, take that pool of money, cut it by, divide it out equally across however many charities we have that year and give them out. We have served, some of those have been large organizations, but our favorite ones are the ones that are smaller and local. We started the first couple of years working with an organization called Connections Homes, which is out of Suwanee. They help kids who are aging out of foster care really like with support to become adults, but also they’re not really adults. They’re 17, 18, 19, and they still don’t know how to do the world. That’s an organization that we’ve supported. We’ve supported an organization called Ignite Hope, which is another foster care association. We’ve done neighborhood cooperative ministries, which is a, for those who are local, you guys know that it’s a very large nominal nonprofit here in Norcross. And this year we’re partnering with an organization called Because One Matters, which ironically is another foster care organization. I just realized that there seems to be a pattern. So we tend to give to the kids.

00:26:08 – Rico Figliolini

No, I like that. I like the fact that you’re giving locally and it’s 10% of your profit each month is what you split up, which is great. It’s almost like tithing in a way.

00:26:18 – Gabrielle Mills

Yeah. And that’s how it came about. We wanted to tithe using the business. We give once a quarter based on the months because what we didn’t want to do is we would have one month go to one charity and that was a particularly good month. But then the next month maybe wasn’t that good of a month. So we wanted to balance it out. So we look at all the profits that come in from the quarter and then equally disperse it.

00:26:39 – Rico Figliolini

That is cool. Alright. We’ve gotten sort of to the end of our interview time, but I’m sure that there’s things that we could talk a lot more about. Is there anything that I’ve left out? Anything you’d like to share? Maybe services that you may be looking at expanding into the coming year or anything along those lines?

00:27:00 – Gabrielle Mills

So we’re likely not expanding into other services because we have five already and that’s enough. We are finding that there’s a lot of growth to be had in our talent acquisition department. So we’re eager to see what that ends up looking like through the year. What we really want to focus on in terms of like diversification or innovation, which I think is really where your question comes from, is how we utilize technology to make our services more streamlined and more advanced. We will never not have the support of our people. We are a people business. We will go under before computers take over our jobs. However, there’s a lot of really great technology that if you use it right and smartly, we can make profit margins better, save our clients money, be able to reach more people. So we’re going to try to figure out how we can lean into that a little bit.

00:28:02 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s a great path to go down for a quick minute, maybe. Because AI technology is something that everyone, every business is tackling and using in a variety of ways, right? ChatGPT, Grok3, there’s a bunch of them. Claude, I mean, there’s a whole bunch. DeepSeek, I mean, you could just go on and on with these things. And every business, every industry is trying to figure out how they can use that, right? And some use it badly and others use it better. Sometimes it’s used for support or for research versus making decisions. So are you finding that you have to also look at that to augment or to add a complexity to the service you provide?

00:28:52 – Gabrielle Mills

So what stands out in your question to me is the have to. I think that nobody really has to, but I’m in an industry that if I don’t look at it, my industry will die because it is based on people. And if you don’t lean into the technology, you run the risk of the world thinking they don’t need people anymore. And then you’re obsolete. So we don’t have to do anything. But if we want to stay in business, we should be looking at how to utilize it better. The beauty of our business is these are things that people are always going to need. And computers can’t replace entirely. You always need a person overseeing or creating or some version of managing what the computer does. So we always have a people element to it. What we’re looking at with technology is how do we make ourselves and our processes and how we do things better and faster using technology and use the human brain where the human brain needs to interject.

00:30:01 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Okay. Great explanation. Well, we’ve reached the end of our time together. Where can people find out more about your company? Of course, we’ll have it in the show notes as well, but how can they reach out to you?

00:30:14 – Gabrielle Mills

Yeah. So if you’re local, just come and see us. We are off of Scientific Drive in Technology Park, down by the Forum. If you want to check us out online, we are at getsourced.com. We’re on all the socials under SourcedATL, or you can always just look at my name, Gabrielle Mills. Unfortunately, very easy to find out on the web.

00:30:39 – Rico Figliolini

I’m sure. Check her out on LinkedIn. It’d be easy to find her there. I want to say thank you again to EV Remodeling and to Vox Pop Uli for supporting us. Everyone else, you have comments, leave them in the comment section below, depending where you’re watching this, whether it’s Facebook, YouTube. If you’re listening to this on Apple or any of the audio podcast places, Spotify, leave a review, like, share. We’d love if you would support us that way. Gabrielle, thank you for being with us. Appreciate it.

00:31:13 – Gabrielle Mills

Thank you for having me.