- Will you consider this?

So what is an entrepreneur?

It's one who creates business, bears risks, and enjoys most of the rewards.

Stay right here.

(upbeat music) This entrepreneur is using his skills and his initiative to move progress forward in a much kinder way.

Will you please help me welcome Mr. Business Forward, Matt George?

So you're in a different seat this time.

- It's different being over here.

- It is.

How do you like it?

- I don't know yet, we'll see.

- I haven't bitten anybody in all the years I've been doing this.

I consider you a dabbler.

You kind of dabble in a lot of different things.

Describe yourself, and let us know where you came from and how you got here.

- 30 years nonprofit leader.

And I've always had the approach of it's your job to take care of the community.

And I truly believe that.

I'll debate anybody.

And it doesn't matter whether it's financial or whether it's mentoring somebody or picking up trash.

It's your job to take care of the community you live in.

And I've always believed that.

In being a leader in the nonprofit space for so many years, I still believe that.

And I've decided to write about that and to take care of each other.

We need to do a better job of taking care of each other.

- Well, right now, the world, the country, big cities, even our cities has a lot of troubled individuals who really need support and encouragement.

And so that's kind of where you're going and hoping that a lot of people will join on your bandwagon.

- Well, it's one of those things, Chris, when you look at social service work as an example, and you've been on many boards, a lot of people don't understand what's right underneath your nose.

They don't understand that poverty's not going away.

They don't understand that a lot of kids in the public school systems, they don't have a place to sleep.

- [Christine] They don't have food to eat.

- They don't have food to eat.

They're not worried about if their uniform's clean.

They don't care about their uniform.

There's violence, there's illiteracy, there's so many different things that are going on.

There's abuse.

And the list keeps going on.

And it's one of those things that over the years I have just really preached about it.

And I've thought to myself, "What am I going to do in this next phase of my life?"

And I decided to think about, what impact can I have?

I don't know if I want to join a board.

I've been asked to be on boards.

I don't know if I want to run another agency.

I don't know what I want to do.

But I do know one thing for sure is I wanna make sure we're safe.

I wanna make sure my kids are taken care of and that are safe, and that our community is healthy.

And healthy is a very broad term.

- Really, really.

How do you describe healthy then?

How would you say to me and John Q.

Public, "Here's what we need to do "to get our community healthy"?

"Here's what you can do in your own simple way."

- It starts with the word collaboration and what it really means.

People, I've always thought, don't know what that means.

They think they know.

So, "I'm gonna collaborate with this agency," or, "I'm gonna do this to make things better."

And really a lot of times you're never on the same page.

So a lot of times we'll trick ourselves into thinking that we're making impact.

And are we really making impact that is substantial?

And what's going on in our communities across the United States right now, across the world.

It really, there's no debate.

There's so many tough things going on.

Whether it's race, whether it's lack of education, whether it's this person over here earns this, deserves this, and this person over here is homeless.

And if you look, from San Francisco all the way to the other side of the United States, every city has some problem.

But it all comes down to poverty, it comes down to homelessness, it comes down to so many different things.

And then you go up one more level and there's this behavioral health piece, this mental health piece that is now in the last five years, just being tended to.

- [Christine] Huge problem.

- It's huge!

- Well, they did away with some...

They, you know, just generally speaking.

Some of those services were done away with because they were expensive and there was no place to institutionalize people.

Is that what you do?

No, you work with them.

So are we coming around to being able to address these behavioral problems?

- Well, when Zeller closed 22 years ago, there was a lot of people actually that said, "This is gonna come back and bite us."

And look what it's doing.

- But we didn't know how long it would take to come back.

- And 20 years later, it's biting us.

It's sad because you have military and you have PTSD and you have all these different things that are happening within our state.

- [Christine] And need to be addressed.

- And they need to be addressed.

And it's our job to address it.

I truly feel that way.

And there's so many people, there's so many great people that want to.

I mean, think about how many volunteer hours that you've put in over the years.

You've got something today.

And so when you look at what all these community leaders can do, but if we're all speaking the same language, we might be able to make a bigger impact.

- We need to join forces.

We need to link arms.

So we'll get to your new books.

He's authored three books now.

The first book was "The Game Plan."

And that was specifically for nonprofits to know how to activate your board, get everybody on board working.

- "Nonprofit Game Plan" is basically the blueprint to say this is the innards of a nonprofit.

So you're right.

Board, board not only cultivation, but utilizing your board.

A lot of people ask me all the time, they say, "I'm on a board, but they're not using me right."

Well, it's two ways.

It's the director's job to sit here and mentor that board member.

And it's the board member's job to use his or her talents to be able to, in turn, help the agency.

It's not just checkbook.

I had so many board members over the years... And utilize those talents to be able to, "Oh, I've got an attorney over here.

"I've got somebody over here who does have a checkbook.

"I got somebody over here that knows marketing."

Whatever it may be.

It's the director's job to direct that.

And people are not doing that.

And that's... - [Christine] A big misstep.

- It's a huge misstep.

- So how do you direct them to make sure that they're cultivating all those skills?

- Well, we need good board members in hiring great leaders.

So it goes both ways.

When I was CEO at Children's Home, it was my job to sit there and teach.

"This is what the program is.

"These are the revenue streams.

"This is the HR piece of it."

Everything that goes along with a business.

Because, let's not forget, nonprofits are businesses.

And so the difference between selling tennis shoes is you don't hit your quota for the day.

The difference at a children's home or another place like that would be potentially death.

So that's the difference.

And it's the board's job.

They have not only a fiduciary responsibility, and so does the director, but they have a responsibility to tend to the governance.

They're not running the business.

The CEO is.

But they're tied to it.

And so it should be intertwined and there should be communications.

And I talk to board members all the time, and they'll sit there and say, "I'm just not being utilized."

And then I'll talk to CEOs and they'll sit here and they'll say.

- "I can't get 'em to do anything."

- "I can't get 'em to do anything."

It doesn't make sense.

- But you didn't major in, I mean, there's no such thing as majoring in nonprofits.

What did you major in?

- I majored in project management.

And so programs and program management.

And how do you sit there and put together programs?

It could be for anything.

I just happened to pick nonprofit because I early on raised money at age 16 to help a friend's family who died of cancer.

And little did I know as a 16-year-old that when I handed them a check for $3,500, it was like a million.

- An amazing, emotional donation.

- I was hooked.

And you know this, people who get into the nonprofit business and know they've made change, once they're hooked, it's very hard to pull 'em back out.

And so that's what we need more of.

We need more people getting into the space of nonprofits.

And that includes nursing and that includes special ed teaching and teachers and so on.

Child psychologists.

We need all of these positions filled.

But at the same time, too, what we also need are board members, good ones, that are committed to the cause.

And it doesn't matter what cause it is.

- Roll up your sleeves and find out how you could be used.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so this leads to, you've written two new books with some pretty amazing accolades.

So tell me about that.

- Well, it started with a mentor of mine, Kevin Harrington.

He's the original shark on "Shark Tank."

And he's the entrepreneur who, he invented the infomercial.

But one of his biggest products was the George Foreman Grill.

And so his brand is As-Seen on TV.

So when you walk into a Walmart or something.

And he pushed me and he said, "Here's what you need to do.

"You need to brand yourself to make change for good."

A lot of entrepreneurs will brand themselves to make change to make a lot of change.

Meaning cash.

- Yeah, exactly, jingle-jingle.

- My goal is to make money, but it's also to take the money and give it back.

And that's what I want to do because I've always been the one who's asked for the dollars.

I wanna be able to give back now to my community.

And so he said, "Write a book."

I wrote a book.

And he said, "This will be your business card for life."

And then what happened is COVID hit and I said, "I can't step down.

"I can't leave Children's Home."

And so I thought it was gonna be a few more months.

Ended up being two more years.

And then I met somebody named Mark Victor Hansen.

- [Christine] "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

- He's "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

- All of the different... Yeah, there's how many?

- 320 different books he was a part of.

And I had one.

And so that was kind of our joke.

And Kevin Harrington of "Shark Tank" and Mark, they know each other.

One lives in Arizona, one in Florida.

And I couldn't believe it.

And I thought that was pretty cool and it was meant to be.

And then Kevin nicknamed me The Nonprofit Prophet.

- And how did he find you?

Before we go into that, how did he find you?

- It's a fun story, I found him.

I saw him speaking and he talks about people always wanting to jump out of the closet in the hotel room or something.

And he'd say, "People are always pitching me for money and ideas."

And so I saw him speak.

My dad was speaking at the same conference.

And Kevin snuck out back.

He had a bodyguard with him.

He snuck out through the kitchen.

I happened to work with a lot of athletes who've done the same thing.

And so I knew he had to come back around.

I saw him and he said, "What do you want?"

And I said, "I need a mentor."

And he thought about it and he said, "Be at this address at this time on this date.

"And if you're there, we'll talk."

And it happened to be his home in Florida.

And I knocked on the door.

And 10 minutes later he is on the phone with someone who's a publisher and said, "That favor you owe me.

"His name's Matt George."

- [Christine] Awesome.

- [Matt] It was a cool story.

- What a great story, yeah.

Okay, so he nicknamed you or they nicknamed you.

- Kevin nicknamed me The Nonprofit Prophet.

- Prophet as in P-R-O-P-H-E-T. All right, so let's go into that and how you have woven that into a book for all of us to read.

- Yeah, I met with him last year, last summer, and he said, "Why don't we write a book "called 'The Nonprofit Prophet?'"

And I said, "This is gonna be great."

So I flew back out and we started talking about the things that I wanted to do in the book was, it's a fiction story.

It's about making change.

The character's loosely based on me.

But at the same time, it's based on a lot of people and a lot of things that I've seen over the years, the impact that people have.

Which is the most satisfying thing is to watch someone else win when they're trying to take care of someone.

It's the best feeling in the world for me.

And so this book was in process.

And back in November, I started writing it, of '22.

It got to be February of this past year in '23.

And I get a call and he said, "Mark," Victor Hansen calls me and he says, "Matt, I just had a vision.

"And here's what we're gonna do.

"You put together 25 leadership lessons "in taking care of your community.

"Let's write a children's book."

And I didn't know what he meant.

And I was like, "Mark, I'm still writing this book."

And he's like, "I know, but this is gonna be your avenue "to be able to get the word out."

- Start there.

Like, you were 16, so we'll get a little bit in that same.

- I started writing the book in February.

It's called "A Starfish Among Us."

And really what it is, is there's 25 lessons in it.

It's based toward middle school and high school kids.

And we start with the typical, bullying.

We talk about vaping and trafficking and judging and all of these things that happen in school.

- And are so prevalent right now with social media too.

- And social media.

And some of it's just pitiful.

And when you sit there and look at our kids, we have so many problems that I'm hoping that when these books are read by kids, that they'll sit here and maybe it'll change their life.

Maybe they'll sit there and have a discussion with their parents or grandparents or friends or whatever it may be.

And that will be what's worth it.

It's not really about selling a book to sit here and get proceeds from the book.

That's part of it, but that's not what drives me for it.

What drives me is if someone reads the book and then says, "Matt, will you come talk to my middle school?"

Or, "Will you come talk to my class?"

Or like I did at Children's Home a lot, "Would you come talk to this kid?

"This kid needs help."

- Specific kid.

Will you try to get it into schools?

- Yes, yes, I'm already in process of that.

- So tell me about that.

How are you gonna do that?

Because you're going on a marketing tour here pretty soon.

- So I'm going on a 50-city tour starting in October, and it's going to last until December.

And really we're just spreading the word of hope in communities.

And that's the biggest thing for me, is to each community across the United States, like I said earlier, has a lot of their own issues.

And some of 'em are the same, but there's some different issues depending on where you're at.

And we're making appearances at nonprofits along the way.

We're going to a Boys & Girls club in California.

We're going to schools in New York.

We're going down in Miami and walking the streets.

And we're going to sit there and try to make change and get all the leaders in each city to come together as we leave that city to be able to sit here and charge them with doing a better job of what they're already doing.

- [Christine] We're all pulling the same way.

- We're all pulling the same way.

Like we have a group already lined up that it's a foundation, and what they want to do is they're going to buy a thousand copies of the kids book and they're gonna put it into their middle schools.

And so there's a lot of things like that that are happening as we speak.

And it's very humbling, but I really feel like this is what I'm meant to do.

And I'm excited about it at the same time.

- Well, you have that and that is a great place to start, is with kids, get 'em while they're young.

And your motto is about change.

- Yeah, change lives and save lives.

I've said that for 30 years.

I used to sign off all my emails, "It's your job to change a life and save a life," or, "Change lives daily."

My kids at home, I say to them, "It's your job to go to school "and make it better for someone else."

You get to go home, you get to wear what you wanna wear, you get to eat what you want to eat and play sports.

- [Christine] And you have a roof over your head.

- And you better appreciate it.

And not every one of your friends has that.

- And they understand that completely?

- They totally understand it.

I've said it for so long and believed it for so long, that my oldest daughter, Carly, is a licensed therapist in a very tough area in Phoenix.

And my other daughter was working with adults with disabilities.

And my other daughter's in daycare.

And so it's like, I always used to say, I don't know if I want my kids to follow in my footsteps 'cause I don't want them to see what I've seen.

But at the same time, now that I'm older, I couldn't be more proud of all of them because they're all in the position to take care of people.

- And to change lives.

- [Matt] And to change lives.

- So when do your books come out?

- So they come out, October 12th is the launch.

And both of 'em are coming out at the same time.

We debated on whether we do that or not or stagger 'em.

But I decided let's have 'em both come out on the 12th, and let's just do everything we can to get the word out.

And I'm excited about it.

I've got two great people in my corner.

I've got Kevin Harrington on the East Coast in Florida, and I've got Mark Victor Hansen with "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

And they both are so knowledgeable in just everything.

It's like, if I'm ever having a tough day and I have a question on something, they both will pick up the phone just by a text.

And that is an honor to be able to have mentors that sit there and want you to do well.

Because they both are in different spots, but they both sit here and know that it's for community.

And I think it's actually taught each one of them something too, because they're both sitting here saying, "You know what?

"I'm gonna go all in on you."

Because I think maybe there's a piece of Kevin especially where he is like, "I'm in now.

"I was a shark."

And those guys and those ladies are tough.

Like Lori Greiner is tough.

But so was Kevin.

I think he's sitting here now going, "You know what?

"I'm 65 years old.

"And now it's time to take care of people."

And that's what he wants to do.

And I think maybe we're helping each other.

And that's what I love about it.

- Well, it's kind of come for full circle for them.

What was the "Chicken Soup Soul" book, the only one that you had back in the day?

You probably have more now, I hope.

- I had a lot of 'em.

I used to read all of 'em.

I don't even remember the specific titles, but I do remember one on divorce.

And my parents divorced at a young age.

And it affected me.

And I've become stronger.

And now it's funny because I'm a better dad now.

The older I get.

- [Christine] More attentive 'cause you learn.

- And so I remember that one.

But I also remember...

The whole theme of the books is empathy.

It's a word of love, and I love that word.

- And that's where your books are leading.

- They're all empathetic books.

- And why is it that we have to teach that?

Why is that not something that comes naturally?

Or is it natural and we just need to goose it along?

- I think we need to put it in the forefront again.

I really do feel like many years ago that we cared more.

Everything's so right now so me.

And it doesn't need to be that way.

I'll go out today and somebody will come up and say something nice to me, and it's nice to hear, but it's also my job to say something and recognize people and to use their names and to not text in their faces and to sit there and appreciate people.

And if somebody needs help with volunteering or someone needs help with a fundraiser, which I get a lot of those calls, then I take 'em.

I don't ever sit here and say no.

It's hard as a leader.

You know this.

It's hard as a leader to sit here and ever say no.

We have to all though speak that language of love and to be able to sit here and actually truly mean it and give them examples.

And that's what's the most important thing right now, I feel.

- So you'll go on this tour.

Will you get to be home with your family for Thanksgiving, I hope?

- So I'm going on the tour.

And we actually have an RV.

We figured we couldn't rely on the flights.

And so we're going into a city, and basically what it looks like is in the morning and early afternoon we do media.

And then in the afternoon we go to a nonprofit or we go to a school and speak.

And then at night there's the launch.

And so the launch could be anything from a Barnes & Noble in Portland, Oregon to New York City.

We're having someone host at the Harvard Club.

And so there's just different things.

We're excited about it.

There's so many unknowns.

- [Christine] But that's the most exciting part.

- That's the most exciting piece.

And I think the key and what I keep telling my team that I have assembled is, everyone has to stay humble.

You have to know that if we're meant to do this, we have to also show that we're meant to do this.

- And that's the empathy.

But you have an extra dose of it so it should like rise to the top like cream.

- It should rise to the top.

But it's gonna be tough.

I've actually been working out more and training my body to be able to take this.

Because we go Boston, New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, D.C., Rochester, all in six days.

And so it's back to back to back to back.

And so it's gonna be tough.

- I know, but you're up for the challenge.

Well, life is exciting.

And you're truly pitching kindness.

- That's what it's about.

I think we all should.

If we could have one takeaway from this is take care of your community and pitch kindness.

- All right.

So look into the camera and tell people that specifically.

- It's your job to not only take care of the community you live in, and I'll debate you if you think differently, but it's your job to change lives and save lives daily.

- And that's what you're gonna do.

Well, I'm very excited.

You've put me to work on some projects, boards where you've tried to channel my, whatever I have going for me.

So thank you very much for having faith in me all those years.

We have faith in you.

- And it goes the same way.

I mean, you and Patti Bash and so many great people in this community that care.

And there are a lot of people that care.

Sometimes people just don't know how to take it to the next level.

- Well, thank you, Matt, for inspiring us, and I think it'll be a huge success.

October 28th, he has a launch in town, so we'll have to stay tuned for that.

Thanks for joining us.

And if you have any ideas, get ahold of me.

Have a good evening.

(upbeat music)