Reducing Waste and Eating Beer with Dan Kurzrock

Listen to our exclusive interview with Daniel Kurzrock, co-founder of Regrained.

Dan grew up on the Bay Area Peninsula, and graduated from UCLA with a degree in Economics and a Masters in Sustainable Business from Presidio Graduate School. Dan realized a passion for entrepreneurship early.

ReGrained is telling an exciting environmental story, at a time when the food industry is grappling with a mountain of food waste. That’s where Regrained steps in. They use the spent grain leftover after the beer development process and repurpose it for food products. The leftover spent grain is like an oatmeal and of course, it’s terribly wasteful to throw food out.

Grain is a key ingredient in beer. Typically barley, though sometimes rye or oats. To make beer, the grain gets cracked to expose the starches. It is then steeped in warm water, where the starches start to break down into simple sugars, which become alcohol. This process leaves brewers with huge amounts of leftover grain.

“Many of the ingredients used to brew beer do not end up in your glass. That’s not to say all brewers are wasteful. Many, especially within the craft industry, are excellent environmental stewards with a strong dedication to sustainability. However, even the most conscientious brewer can’t help but generate massive quantities of leftover spent grain. The reality is that it takes a lot of barley to produce beer, America’s favorite suds. In the United States alone, approximately 200 million barrels of beer are consumed each year, with an average of 6 billion pounds of grain used by the brewing industry.” ~Regrained

spent-brewers-grain

While often referred to as “spent” grain, beer grain is far from spent. The grain simply has already served its purpose to the brewer.

In fact, as a food, “spent” grain is healthier. The brewers extract as much sugar as they can from the grain to produce beer. The rest physical grain itself is no longer needed, but it is a source of plant protein and dietary fiber. We’re talking about an ingredient with roughly the same protein profile as almonds, and more than 3x the dietary fiber of oats. Brewer’s grain is a sustainable supergrain!

As consumers, we get to decide what matters most through what we choose to buy. Our mantra is simple: “Brew Good. Bake Good. Do Good.” We invite you to join us in refusing to settle for anything less. Have your beer…and eat it too! ~Dan Kurzock & Jordan Schwartz

Resources:

www.regrained.com

Interview with Jacquie Berglund: How This Hybrid Business Model Is Turning Beer into Food

change creator jacquie berglund

Interview with Finnegans CEO and Co-founder, Jacquie Berglund.

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Change Creator Magazine issue 4 cover story, Jacquie Berglund is The Rambunctious Social Entrepreneur, CEO, and Co-Founder of FINNEGANS, the first beer company in the world to donate 100% of profits to fund fresh produce for those in need.

Through the creation of both FINNEGANS Inc. and its nonprofit counterpart, FINNEGANS Community Fund, Berglund has championed an innovative, hybrid market-based approach to addressing and raising awareness about food security in communities across the Midwest.

Berglund has pursued her entrepreneurial spirit to make the world a better place, from being an important role in bringing together government officials through the OECD to train Baltic countries in market economy laws, to Marketing Director at the successful Cara Pubs where the spark for FINNEGANS began.

As the tenth largest Minnesota beer company, Berglund has generated over half a million in donations through FINNEGANS profits, partnerships, and successful events while raising significant awareness about local hunger issues. Driven to innovate, with astute leadership and the ability to rally people and organizations for a cause she has built the longest running social enterprise to donate 100% of profits behind Newman’s Own. She has built a team of four full- time and one part-time staff dedicated staff and engaged thousands of volunteers and supporters to move the mission forward and scale FINNEGANS’ impact.

Berglund’s trailblazing social enterprise has earned her prominent accolades over the years. In 2004, she received the B. Warren Hart Distinguished Service Award from the St. Paul Jaycees, and in 2005, Berglund received a “40 under 40” nomination from the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal, which recognizes and honors the top 40 business people in the Twin Cities under the age of 40. She is also a recipient of the Minnesota Jaycee top honor of Ten Young Outstanding Minnesotans, and in 2010 she was featured on CNN’s “Leaders with Heart” and “Small Business Success Stories” segments.

Berglund was named one of the “200 Minnesotans You Should Know” by Twin Cities Business magazine and was recently nominated as a 100 Year Centennial Award honoree by the Girl Scouts. In 2012, FINNEGANS was awarded the Small Business of the Year Award by the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and they also received the Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for Minnesota Business Magazine. Berglund has been awarded a 2014 Bush Fellowship. Most recently, Berglund was selected as one of 12 business leaders to watch in 2016 by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal and most recently Berglund was named a 2016 TrailBlazer by Growler Magazine

Priceless Startup Success Tips From John Lee Dumas

john lee dumas - startup

 

John Lee Dumas knows a lot about success. With a clean break from his 9-5 job in real estate investments, he started his own 7-days-per-week entrepreneurial podcast, EOFire, and hasn’t looked back.

He now owns a million-dollar business that continues to grow. And, of course, there’s still the podcasts. Getting to interview some of the world’s top entrepreneurs, like Tim Ferris, Barbara Corcoran, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, just to name a few, gives a guy some perspective. So we decided to sit down with John Lee Dumas, pick his brain and get some keys to entrepreneurial success.

“Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. Albert Einstein”.

For John, working in a job he wasn’t passionate about just wasn’t good enough. Day after day he got up, drove to work, and began the drudgery that was his career. He was making good money, but what value did he bring into the world? His passion for podcasting came from listening to podcasts on his long commute back and forth to work. With an idea and passion, he decided to jump in and get his business going. Today his company brings real value to the world. It’s not unusual for him to spend entire days, from sunrise to sunset in the office now, doing that thing he loves. What value are you bringing the world today? Don’t just focus on the success part. That will come when you bring true value into the world.

Don’t be afraid to make a bad decision.

John learned the importance of good decision (we didn’t say perfect) making during his 8-year stint in the military. At the tender age of 22, he had a lot of responsibility thrust upon him – instead of waiting to be better prepared or worrying about the fact that he had little military experience, or had never led anyone, John did something revolutionary. He made choices. Then he confidently followed through on those choices. In war and in business, A good decision now is better than a great decision later. Business is competitive. We don’t have time to wait for better circumstances. Don’t be afraid to make a “good decision” now – just follow-through with confidence.

Do make one great decision. Hire the right mentor.

Any entrepreneur will admit that they’ve made plenty of bad decisions, especially early on in their journeys. This is no exception for John, but he did make one really great decision that changed the trajectory of his business – he hired the right mentor. At the beginning of his business, John went out and found someone who was already where he wanted to be. (You have to hire somebody who is where you want to be, right from day one.)

This gave John the advantage right from the start, from branding to logo designs, to networking connections, to setting business goals. His knowledge of the industry was invaluable. Know where you want to go first, then find and hire somebody to help get you there. Don’t just hang out with “successful” people. Find that person who most closely resembles the kind of success in career, business, or life whom you want to emulate.

This excerpt was taken from issue 3 of Change Creator magazine. Subscribe now to read the full article and more.

Interview with Gautam Shah: Risking the Absurd to Achieve the Impossible

animal conservation

It’s easy to ignore an animal that exists in a biome you can barely create in your imagination, which may be one of the reasons endangered species are receiving so little support from the public. People are emotional, empathic creatures. To care, they need connection—the kind that only real encounters can achieve, and where better to build them than online?

“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.” –Albert Einstein

Digital and wildlife ecosystems rarely intersect beyond what software and the internet can do for NGO administration and marketing. Gautam Shah is ready to revolutionize that by disrupting the way you engage with wildlife. Gone are the days when you had to fly to the African bush to see an elephant. If you can’t travel to them, Gautam’s going to bring them into your living room using a radical collection of digital concepts gathered using a strategy that’s ground-breaking in the conservation sector.

Shah’s brainchild is called Internet of Elephants, and it’s perched on the cusp of a journey that’s likely to change the face of the environmental sector forever. He believes that, if he can make you fall in love with nature, you’ll be more inspired to protect it. He’s creating a digital planet that brings you up close and personal with species your children may never have the chance to see outside of a photograph.

“My world, my earth is a ruin.” – Ursula Le Guin

Shah began his life huddled in the lap of Mother Nature. “As kids we always had deer and raccoon [..] around us,” he explains. His extended family was heavily involved in conservation in India, and this formed a foundation that might have led him to start an NGO like any other if his career hadn’t made him want to aim for greater things. Gautam’s childhood birds and bees were substituted with ones and zeroes when he began a 20-year career in software development that ultimately came full circle, returning him to nature in Kenya, which he calls “the Silicone Valley of wildlife conservation.”

Home to one of the world’s most important environmental sectors, it had a unique approach to social entrepreneurship: eschewing donor dependence. This planted a seed in Gautam Shah’s brain that began to spout leaves in his next destination: Nairobi. Here, he learned the inner workings of social entrepreneurial strategy. “I […] started to believe that [self-sustaining enterprises were] absolutely non-existent within the wildlife conservation sector outside of eco-lodges and tourism.”

A for-profit funding model would create more possibilities than an NGO could, allowing Shah to direct his conservation efforts towards something that’s kicking up one of the decade’s most important insurrections: the internet of things (IoT).

“Only the impossible is worth doing.” – Akong Rimpoche

Shah’s funding model is as revolutionary as his business concept. The non-profit sector’s revenue doesn’t exactly paint a picture filled with rainbows and roses. NGOs are famous for their financial fuzziness and chaotic fundraising. The USA’s biggest non-profit organization, United Way, produces an average revenue of $3.87, whereas the nation’s largest for-profit corporation, Apple, churns up an annual revenue of $39.5 billion. Shah is among the first to find the obvious solution to this revenue chasm: set up a for profit company to support your causes so that he could make a real dent in the endangered species figures and the environmental mayhem surrounding them.

guatam shah wildlife conservation

“ Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” – Michael Jordan

Collective intelligence wins more battles than individual savvy, so Shah began his social entrepreneurship quest by setting up a hackathon to capitalize on the shared brainpower of individuals working in the tech industry. What was intended to gather no more than 30 people ultimately reached 20 million, and it was done using negligible investment. In 2014, programmers, mobile strategists, designers, and their friends crowded into Solstice Mobile’s building to participate in a weekend-long brainstorming session that cut away the chaff of expected, normative concepts and replaced them with trailblazing ideas.

Prizes were offered, but a competitive spirit was dissolved by allowing a pier-judging process. Many of the teams have moved forward with their ideas, and some have been applied to Internet of Elephants.

One of the highest walls conservation organizations have to bring down is figuring out how to bring real change using minuscule budgets. The hackathon brought that wall crashing down with dramatic flair by acquiring a spectacular event space and offering platform testing services to tech companies including Cisco and Esri in return for their free use for a social cause.

The concepts that arose from the weekend were stellar. Team VultuRe developed a virtual reality teaching application, and Team Awe developed an app that gave users the capacity to follow animals in real time. Other winning teams leveraged everything from gamification to interactive applications.

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” – Horace Mann

Internet of Elephants was launched with similar flair. Gautam actively engages his audience through social media like the Facebook Tech for Wildlife group so that the collaborative think-tank he created keeps moving. Many of his IoE ideas were inspired by Cecil, the lion that became a superstar in death after falling victim to canned lion hunting. The Zimbabwean incident proved that celebrating animals captures the public’s interest far more effectively than generic marketing ever could. IoE will thus be using a similar effect based on a more positive spin. “We want 20 million people to wake up in the morning and check their phones to see where their elephant is,” says Shah.

Internet of Elephants is still in its infancy, but it’s already captured the attention of the Stanford Review, Futuremag, and the Skoll Foundation.

It’s recently signed up several powerful partners from the gaming and zoological sectors. Solstice Mobile, Little Chicken, and The Chicago Zoological Society are on board. The organization is ready to start raising finances to develop a series of new prototypes, expected to be rolled out in June.

Humanity has an inherent love for animals, so all that’s needed to generate large-scale change is a way for people to develop relationships with them. Through gamification and similar tools, the organization hopes to generate a starting annual revenue of $1 million a year. Whether it will ultimately produce an income comparable to the world’s most successful for-profit corporations remains to be seen, but under the supervision of a social entrepreneur with the leadership skills and business savvy of Gautam Shah, it certainly seems possible. In 40 years, humanity has managed to obliterate 50% of its species, so the time for change has come.

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” – Carl Sagan

This article was written by Kirsten Holmes and originally published in Change Creator Magazine issue 3.

 

6 Lessons to Transform Your Habits and Find Clarity With Joel Brown

change creator Joel brown

Interview with founder of Addicted 2 Success, Joel Brown.

With a website that has received more than 50-million unique visitors, a popular podcast show, and an upcoming role in a movie, Joel Brown is by most standards, a successful man – some might even say he is addicted to success.

Indeed, Addicted2Success is the name of Joel’s thriving self-development brand. It is a name which he admits might cause a little eye-rolling in some people. But this is not the self-serving tale you might expect.

Joel Brown’s mission is to pass on the tools, habits, and mindset that make people successful. The rewards he gets are just a pleasant side effect of his always-giving mentality. He loves nothing more than sharing practical and proven steps so that others can achieve their desires.

Lesson number one: The more you give, the more you get.

It’s Okay to Change Your Passion.

Some people find their “one” passion early and spend their whole lives dedicated to fulfilling it. Joel Brown was not one of those people. He had stints in the music industry, sales, and even spent time saving wild animals in the desert in North West Australia. Except for the music industry, nothing else stirred his passion.

Passion, it seems, is a curious thing. One day you might have it, and the next day it could be gone. At age 13, Joel knew he had a passion for music. He loved beat-making, producing, and DJ’ing. He even started producing shows for local radio stations after exercising his instinctive persuasion skills.

Throughout his tender teen years, Joel showed the kind of persistence and determination that was sure to lead to a long and thriving career in the music industry. However, he gave it all up. Somewhere along the way he lost his passion for music.

Giving up on music was the first time Joel had given up on anything, and it felt strange. He knew, however, that it was the right thing to do. New life experiences and changes in the way we look at life can cause a shift in the things that once made us passionate.

That is what happened to Joel, and so he left his music career behind. But, not long after, he developed an even stronger passion.

Lesson number two: We don’t just have one passion in life: values change, experiences come, new passions surface.

The Key Ingredients of Success

Joel Brown is not the only person to have lost a passion in life. He also wasn’t the only twenty-four-year-old to find himself in a slump. That can often happen when you suddenly find yourself without a cause in life. One of the primary cures for this, it seems, is to find a new passion.

Joel found his new cause after a chance meeting with Jordan Belfort. The sales company that Joel was working for organized a workshop, and he was able to meet the Wolf of Wall Street face-to-face. That meeting changed Joel’s life. He learned the importance of having clarity, of thinking big, and of having a long-term vision.

These are key ingredients in the recipe for success. Clarity of mind allows you to stay focused on primary goals, thinking big prepares you to exceed those goals, and with the long-term vision, you can envisage and plan for potential obstacles.

After meeting Jordan, Joel became a man on a mission. He began devouring self-help books, listening to motivational speakers such as Anthony Robbins, and carefully mapping out his life plan.

It is, as Joel teaches, important to document your goals and visions. But, more importantly, you need to “write down how you’re going to get to where you want to be.” Not many people have a fair idea of where they want to be in 5, 10, or 15 years, but when pressed can usually give a broad description of how they intend to achieve their goals.

Writing it down on paper, however, forces you to get things out of your head in some detail and acts as your roadmap. Seeing is believing, as they say, and once it is written down you will have a clearer picture.

Lesson number three: Spend time on Clarity. Write down your goals and chart your roadmap to achieving those goals.

Related: What you need to know about creating new habits

Too Much Time vs. Not Enough Energy

One of the most important things that happened when Joel met Jordan was his shift in mindset. He becamehungry for self-improvement and gained a desire to make a meaningful impact on the world. He found another passion outside of music and became energized once again. The whole experience revealed another interesting thing; when you are passionate about something you become massively energetic.

Even though Joel was still working 12-hour days at his sales job, he still found the time to work on his media platform, addicted2success. Instead of asking. Like most people do, “how do I find time,” Joel asked, “how can I make time.” He was so passionate about his new project that he would complete his days at the sales job and head straight home to work on developing his new business. It wasn’t long until he was able to leave his sales job and commit full-time to the new business.

Time for Joel is important, but he also values energy above all else. Some people complain about the lack of time, but spend the bulk of it camped out on the sofa in front of the television. People who value time over energy might live to eighty but, says Joel, “I’d rather be the guy who lives to 50 years, who gets up every day, travels the world, and experiences everything that life has to offer because I had enough energy.”

Lesson number four: Do things that light you up; energize you; make you feel alive. Having lots of energy is more fulfilling than having too much time.

External Influences On the Internal Mind

They say you are the average of the five people you spend time with. That is because your network of friends has a powerful effect on your behavior, mindset, and unconscious mind. The books you read, the things you watch, and the websites you frequent all have a similar effect as your network of friends. They create habits.

Back in 2011, when Joel first discovered his new passion for helping others succeed, he began reading, watching, and listening to as much self-help material as he could get his hands on. He started tuning his mind to a new way of thinking, creating new behavioral habits. He became less motivated by money and more driven by the need for freedom and wisdom. The unconscious mind, as Joel says, is stubborn. You have to force it into a new way of thinking, and that will often require a change of external influences. When you have successfully imprinted new information on your unconscious mind, knowledge becomes wisdom. Joel says, “Wisdom is more powerful than knowledge.”

Lesson number five: Success often requires a change of mindset; a change of mindset often requires different external influences.

A Unique Way to Win the Battle for Success

Passion and motivation differ for everyone, but they can normally be identified by the energy they bring to your life. Joel gets energetic by giving and helping others succeed. He loves creating things and giving it to the world, knowing that someone, somewhere will benefit from his work.

Joel is not the first or only self-help professional out there. But he is by most standards a huge success. The reason is that he stands out from the crowd. He stands out because he knows what he is talking about, he has a genuine willingness to help people, and he is exceptional at what he does.

Uniqueness, Joel says, is the best way to win in business. You need to bring something different to the table. You need to be outstanding. And with the lessons he gives, you will have all the tools needed to become an outstanding success.

Lesson number six: You don’t have to be the first or the only, but you must be unique.