John Hope Bryant
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Operation HOPE
Courage is nothing more than your faith reaching through your fear, displaying itself as action in your life.
Summary
This week on “Leadership Matters,” Alan was joined by business leader, public servant and philanthropist John Hope Bryant, the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE, the largest nonprofit provider of financial literacy, financial inclusion and economic empowerment tools and services in the U.S. tailored for youth and young adults. John founded Operation HOPE in 1992 immediately following one of the worst periods of civil unrest in U.S., the Rodney King Riots.
On this week’s episode, Alan and John discuss his childhood in Compton and South Central L.A., the creation and growth of Operation HOPE, and the importance of financial literacy in taking control of one’s financial future. John also shares some of the leadership lessons he has learned over his three decades in the industry, including the value of aligning yourself with mission-aligned team members and the importance of nurturing the five pillars of success in one’s daily life.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
John Hope Bryant is an American entrepreneur, thought leader and philanthropic leader, referred to as the Conscience of Capitalism by the CEOs of Delta Air Lines, Walmart, First Republic Bank and countless others. Bryant is the Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Operation HOPE, Inc. the largest not-for-profit and best-in-class provider of financial literacy, financial inclusion and economic empowerment tools and services in the United States for youth and adults. He is also chairman and chief executive officer of John Hope Bryant Holdings, Bryant Group Ventures and The Promise Homes Company (Promise Homes), the largest for-profit minority-controlled owner of institutional-quality, single-family residential rental homes in the U.S.
Bryant’s founded organizations have provided more than $3.5 billion in capital for the underserved over the past 30 years, and by the end of 2022, Bryant’s 1 Million New Black Businesses Initiative (1MBB), launched in October 2020, has already created more than 150,000 new black businesses and counting, or an amount equal to 5% of all black businesses in America.
Both Operation HOPE and Promise Homes have experienced explosive growth under Bryant’s leadership, 553% from 2014-2018, and 303% from 2017-2018 to present, respectively. By 2020, Operation HOPE became the largest financial literacy organization in America and America’s financial coach, with more than 200 HOPE Inside offices in forty six states and Promise Homes, a start up in the summer of 2017, became the largest minority controlled single family home rental company in the nation by summer of 2021.
December, 2021, Bryant successfully recapitalized into a new Promise Homes Co. joint venture for more than $120 million, paying off all debts and investors. Simultaneously, in December 2021, Bryant successfully closed a 200M credit facility to grow the new housing joint venture, marking one of the largest capital raises by a Black owned company in more than a decade (according to Black Enterprise).
John Hope Bryant has been recognized as an influential leader by many including the 100 Black Men of America “Chairman’s Award for Economic Empowerment,” was listed by The Atlanta Business Chronicle’s “2022 Power 100”, named #2 among 100 inspirational leaders on the “Yahoo Finance Empower Role Model list 2022,” Georgia Trend’s “100 Most Influential Georgians” in 2022 and 2023, Atlanta Business Chronicle’s “Most Admired CEOs of 2018,” Atlanta Business Chronicle’s “The Power 100: Most Influential Atlantans in 2020,” American Banker magazine’s 2016 “Innovator of the Year,” and one of Time magazine’s “50 Leaders for the Future” in 1994. Bryant received an honorable mention in Inc. magazine’s “The World’s 10 Top CEOs” article that spotlights global servant leaders as the visionaries behind some of the most successful organizations. Additionally, Operation HOPE and Bryant are a permanent part of the Smithsonian African-American Museum in DC. On April 15, 2019, the City of Atlanta City Council and the City of Atlanta (John’s home city) named April 15th John Hope Bryant Day.
Five former U.S. presidents have recognized his work, and he has served as an advisor to three sitting U.S. presidents from both political parties. In 2008, John Hope Bryant inspired then President George W. Bush to make financial literacy the official policy of the U.S. federal government. Bryant also worked with the Bush Administration to create a new federal policy framework of emergency financial disaster preparedness, response and recovery work, following 9/11, resulting in a first ever partnership with the Department of Homeland Security/FEMA and HOPE. He has received hundreds of awards and citations for his work, including Oprah Winfrey’s Use Your Life Award, and the John Sherman Award for Excellence in Financial Education from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Bryant is the author of Up from Nothing: The Untold Story of How We (All) Succeed (Publication Date Oct 6, 2020); bestsellers; The Memo: Five Rules for Your Economic Liberation (Berrett-Koehler, September 2017), How the Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class (Berrett-Koehler, 2014), and LOVE LEADERSHIP: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (Jossey-Bass, 2009). He is one of the only bestselling authors on economics and business leadership in the world today who happens to also be Black.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
My guest today is an exemplary leader, business leader, thought leader, public servant and philanthropist who throughout his career has continued to push for social justice and economic equality in underserved communities. John Hope Bryant is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE, the largest nonprofit provider of financial literacy, financial inclusion, and economic empowerment tools and services in the United States tailored for youth and young adults. He is also the chairman and chief executive officer of John Hope Bryant Holdings, Bryant Group Ventures and The Promise Homes Company. Combined, his organizations has provided more than $3.5 billion to support those in underserved communities over the past 30 years. He has also served in three presidential administrations where he helped to lead on issues around financial literacy, access and empowerment to help Americans take greater control of their financial futures and more.
I'm thrilled to welcome John on the show today to discuss his early life, his amazing career, his philanthropy and his thoughts on how we can continue to drive economic opportunity for a new generation of Americans. John, welcome to Leadership Matters. It is such an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show.
John Hope Bryant
Honored to be here. And thanks for all that you do. You’re a great American, Alan.
Alan Fleischmann
I'm such an admirer of yours, and I’ve wanted you on the show so I'm just so thrilled. I know our listeners will be as well.
So, you were born and raised in Compton and South Central LA. Can you tell us a little bit about life at home? What did your mom and dad do when you were growing up? What was life like around the house? A little bit about the beginnings of John Hope Bryant.
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, mom and dad had a high school education from the Deep South. My mother grew up, well mom and dad grew up in Alabama and parts of Mississippi, respectively. Mom moved to East St. Louis, well, lived in St. Louis with her mother and sisters. And they met each other, moved to California where I was born and built a small little conglomerate by South Central standards, Alan. We owned a gas station, eight years running a building that they bought for $18,000, if you can believe that. An apartment building for $18,000, our own home, a cement contracting business, a nursery business. I mean, they were just industrious as heck.
Unfortunately, my dad could make it but couldn't keep it. My dad was financially illiterate, I found out later. So my dad confused cash flow with profit and didn't really understand at all that you build wealth in your sleep. So he thought that having cash coming in was, like so many people think, that that is enough to make you successful. And money as you know, Alan, has velocity. It comes in and it has to go somewhere. And it'll either go somewhere that builds or go somewhere that erodes, no different than good debt and bad debt. You know, good debt is tied to something that may appreciate — a mortgage on a home, you know, a commercial building, a business, you know, there's a lot of things that we can talk about that appreciates, but it's tied to something that appreciates. Bad debt is financing jewelry, you know, some stupid thing. And my dad had a lot of bad debt and not a lot of good business acumen around how to manage the money he was making. So they divorced. The number one cause of divorce is money. They actually had domestic abuse, and they divorced. I remember five years old watching them fight. And I mean fight. I mean, physically. And you know, why does a woman stay with an abusive man? Money.
My dad wasn't abusive, I don't want to say that, but a man should never put his hand on a woman, period. My mother had that happen twice. My brother and sister’s father, who she left, and then my father, who she left. My brother was going to go to college. And there was $4,000 saved up by my mother, he was the oldest in our family to go to college of this choice. All money is is freedom. And I love the freedom you built with your company, as an example. Freedom to even do this interview with me. I mean, this is your choice because you have freedom, economic freedom.
So my mother saved money, my dad got to the bank first or found the money, and wasted it. Mother said, okay, I'm out. Writing's on the wall. If this is my oldest child, then, you know, this is going to happen for all my children. So thanks for getting me to California. My father, she told him, “I'm out,” and she left him. And my brother had to go in the Navy to get a four year education. The Navy understands behavioral economics pretty well, behavioral sciences, and he didn’t just stay there for four years to pay back the four years of education — he stayed there 30 years. He retired from the Navy and is a contractor with the Navy. By the way, great life. He married somebody in Hawaii, lives in Hawaii, you know, but his whole life trajectory was tied to that $4,000 education — sorry, the $4,000 he didn't have to get the education of his choice and whatever it cost the Navy to give him an education.
Fast forward, we lost everything I just mentioned, Alan. The gas station, we lost the apartment building, — which is now worth millions of dollars, by the way — we lost our home for the reasons I mentioned earlier. And then to make the story really short so we can get on with it, I went to go stay with a family friend and my mother wanted to save money to buy our own home. And while I was staying there, a guy who saved my life because I was swallowing my tongue because I had fallen on his porch, he got run down in front of me and murdered by drug dealers who thought he was selling drugs in their neighborhoods to try to make extra money to take care of our family. So versus just talking about it and resolving it, the first time with my dad, we didn't, versus this gentleman talking about it not having the money to take care of his family and ours, and he went to go work a “part time job” selling marijuana around the corner.
So you have the death of family wealth, and then literally the death of this gentleman. And by the way, Alan, this happened in front of me. I watched this guy get murdered in front of me, they ran him down in a truck. He was riding a bicycle, literally I saw him die in front of me, murdered in front of me. I'm seven now. And then the third time that this happened was my best friend. George was murdered in Compton, California after my mother bought this house that she was saving for. I tried to befriend this guy who was the smartest guy on my block, but he didn't have good parents like I did. So my mom told me she loved me, my dad for whatever businessman he was, he was a businessman. And I just role modeled a can do attitude and self-esteem inside of me through my mom and my dad, that was my culture. This George didn't have a culture, so he hung around drug dealers — notably the guy who lived next to me and they got murdered together. But so by the time I was nine, Alan, I had sort of had enough.
Alan Fleischmann
You must have been exhausted.
John Hope Bryant
I’m exhausted telling the story, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
I imagine also, there's that great Nelson Mandela quote, courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. Somewhere there must have been a track, a path, that you could have been all about being frightened because you had seen destruction of all kinds, the worst kind of destruction at the earliest of ages. But somehow you got something inside of you, some fire, some force of fortitude, to kind of say I'm gonna take a path again, we're all frightened, but how do you turn that into courage?
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, I wrote in I think my book Love Leadership, to your point at the very astute comment you just made, that courage is nothing more than your faith reaching through your fear, displaying itself as action in your life. First one, your faith, reaching through your fear displaying itself as action in your life. If you leave your office, and you walk across the street and you see a little four year old kid about to get hit by a truck, if you think about it, you would do nothing. You do a risk analysis as smart as you are, you’re saying I'm going to die or whatever. But intuitively, instinctively, you jump in and push that kid and yourself out of the way of that car because that is what that's how you’re built, Alan. I know you'd do that. That's courage. And we and people do that all the time where your faith overrides your fear, but that means you got to stand for something. You got to be about something larger and more important yourself. We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience. And energy matters.
You think about what really matters most in this world, Alan, it's the intangibles. Love, charity, compassion, trust, faith, joy, vulnerability, commitment, courage… these are intangibles you know. What is banking? It's a trust business. So you have to know, what is credit in banking, credito? Well, credito is a Latin word, credibility. Capital comes from the Latin word capitas, knowledge in the head. So literally banking, which is, you know, one of the oldest businesses in the world and one of the most profitable, banking comes from the intangible of trust, the intangible of credibility, the intangible of knowledge in the head.
These are value statements, right? So what are we for, not what are we against. What are we for — it's too many of us that are against something these days and not enough of us remember what we are for. I was lucky that my mother told me she loved me every day in my life. So, you know, none of us are perfect and none of us are comfortable in our own skin. We're all a little insecure, myself included, but because of my mother telling me she loved me every day of my life, I was reasonably comfortable in my own skin. And even though my dad was financially literate, which I didn't find out until later, I saw a guy who made a payroll every Friday, who was self reliant and taught himself how to fish. So, you know, that was everything. I mean, early on, those two things gave me self-esteem and self confidence, right?
So there are five pillars of success, which I put in my last book, Up From Nothing. As much education as you can shove down your throat. Understanding financial literacy — as you know, I think that's a civil rights issue with this generation. How does wealth creation, markets and money work. Family structure and resiliency. Self-esteem and confidence — we just talked about that, self-esteem is how I esteem myself. If I don't like me, I'm not gonna like you. If I don't feel good about me, I'm not gonna feel good about you. If I don't respect me, don't expect me to respect you. If I don't love me, I don't have a clue how to love you. And here's the big one — if I don't have a purpose in my life, I'm gonna make your life a living hell. Whatever goes around, comes around. So self-esteem comes into play in everything in our lives. And it determines how we front-face into the world.
You want to test his theory, confidence comes from competence. So I'm confident because I know I'm competent about something, but you can be competent, and have low self-esteem. That’s a dangerous person — high confidence, money, power, position in the world, low self-esteem and fear — that person is very dangerous. And I won't name names, but your audience can just literally think about somebody.
And then the last piece is role models and environment. Why is that important? It goes back to the story I just told you, if you hang around nine broke people, you'll be the 10th. And the opposite is also true. If you go to Harvard…
Harvard is a great school, I've gone to a certificate program there and graduated from it. I love Harvard. But really the benefit of Harvard is not that it's 10 times smarter than the state university, it’s that the class of 2023 is going to hook each other up for the next 40 years as they go through life. It's relationship capital. The same reason you join join a country club to play golf or whatever, the same reason that you join a professional club, the same reason you join a fraternity or sorority, the same reason that we have gay communities, the same reason that we have private this and private that — we're curating an environment that nurtures a certain culture, a certain protection, yes, which is comfort zone, but most importantly, relationship capital. And you have, unfortunately, increasingly two Americas, not just politically. But not just red and blue and white and black — who's got the green and who can access the green. And that's what I'm about.
I mean, to really understand me is to understand the second part of that story. Because rainbows only follow storms, you cannot have a rainbow without a storm first. Never let a crisis go to waste. So now I've seen these two murders and whatever, and the death of my family net worth before nine. So I go to school, Alan, there's white banker who is about six-two, white shirt, blue suit and red tie, comes in my classroom and starts teaching financial literacy and home economics class. And this guy was like meeting The Martian, because the only white man I knew who had a suit on in Compton was the detectives. And it wasn't a good suit. This guy had a beautiful suit on, and he was there in the middle of the day, Alan, he had business cards that said 16th floor. Well, there's no office building in Compton, California above six stories and that's the courthouse.
So I’m like, you’re here in the middle of the day, my mother works an hourly job with two 15-minute breaks and lunch. She only comes to school if I've messed up. You're here in the middle of the day, you come here once a week whenever you like, you have a beautiful car in the parking lot with tags on it, the license plate is legal, you’re obviously doing very well in your life — what do you do for a living? And how'd you get rich legally? And man I was dead serious. And here was the answer.
“I'm a banker and I finance entrepreneurs,” he tells me. And I said I don't know what an entrepreneur is but if you finance him and it's legal I'm gonna be one. Of course I'm a financial guru today, but if you look at Operation HOPE and the other things I'm doing, which is unleashing untapped human potential at scale and being a conscious capitalist, at least I try to be in my business, different businesses and organizations that I've created. You think about that, teach a man to fish at scale, it's really the second part of the conversation.
“How many bankers are there in America?” I don't know. It's gotta be millions. “And your job? And how many banks are there?” About 10,000 back then. “And your job is to lend poor people who can qualify money?” Yeah. “And I won't get killed if I don't pay you back?”
I mean, these are foreign concepts to me. The only people I saw in my neighborhood who were wealthy were drug dealers and gangsters. And so when I realized that there was a legal system that lent money and invested money and ideas, and you just had to qualify, man, my mission was to teach the whole world that.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. So you understood that green was everything early on. You were an entrepreneur really early on too if I’m not mistaken. Tell us a little bit about that experience. I love what you said earlier, you turned it into action. You obviously had an idea with no resources, no mentors around you, and created something.
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, I've gone through life, you know, I've just gone through life cultivating smart people like you in my life and gathering up my village. I go through life collecting my people like you collect books in a library, you know, like the library behind me. I love good books and I love great people. And if you're smart, oh, that's sexy to me. I think that smart is the new sexy. I think, you know, the last 20 years we've dumbed down and celebrated, and it's time to make smart sexy again. So when I find somebody who's smart, somebody who knows what the heck they're doing — I know that God gave me two ears and one mouth for a reason. So I listen twice as much as I talk. So I've just collected mentors and role models and guideposts throughout my whole life, my entire life, and you're never too old to listen to somebody else to learn from somebody else. I'm extraordinarily nosy. Quincy Jones, how'd you get so smart? Answer to me, I'm just nosy as hell.
Alan Fleischmann
We have a thing at our firm, which is we're not coming in with all the answers right away. We come in with all the questions and my three favorite words in the English language, “I don’t know.” And like the word I can't handle in life is the word “no.” But the words “I don't know,” I love when they tell me that because if they’re smart, and they are, they're gonna figure it out and come back with “I do know now.” But let's not be so arrogant to assume we know everything going in.
John Hope Bryant
I agree with you. I take no for vitamins.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. But that entrepreneurial spirit, the fact that you started a business, you created a neighborhood candy store, I think if I'm not wrong, and that you were just 10 years old. And then you must have known that you had a physical presence and a voice early on because you attended the Hollywood Professional School…
John Hope Bryant
Oh you know about the Hollywood Professional School, you’ve done your research.
Alan Fleischmann
I'm curious, was that something that your mother instilled in loving you — and I don't want to overlook that, the fact that in the midst of all those difficulties, the trials and tribulations, the things that you witnessed that caused the destruction of the economic and social fabric in your family, you had a mother who sounds like she was a source of strength and love. And when people say the words “I love you” don't matter, just show it, they matter. I always tell people to use the words, say the words, because you don't feel it unless you hear it, not just see it, but feel it. When you hear stories about people who overcome such adversity, there's usually some person who told you that they loved you, you were enough and you matter. I don't want to lose the fact that your mother played that role.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah. And you know, you're a smart guy. You know how important that is, I mean, clearly somebody told you they love you in your life. And that's obvious when I talk to people. And I ask them, "Did your parents tell you they love you?” When that's not the case, the people who answer me in that way actually are somewhat uncomfortable in the answer. In other words, their response to me is almost defending the fact that their parents didn't say “I love you,” and compensating for that by rationalizing, well, they didn't tell me, I sort of knew. I mean, that's all good, but they really wanted to hear their parents say I love you to your point. And I mean words are, they’re not everything, but it's close. Communication is very, very, very important. This communication is very important.
Alan Fleischmann
And what you said before about authenticity, your mother obviously didn't just say “I love you” in an inauthentic way, but she said, I love you with every fiber of her being way so that you could believe in that authenticity. She wasn't just speaking it, she believed it.
John Hope Bryant
Yes, and in a neighborhood where there was not a lot of financial currency, the love currency was true wealth. And it gave me a superpower that other people, other kids, did not have. My mother also was compensating, because her mother never told her that she loved her. My grandmother was a bit of a hard ass, which maybe she thought she had to be raising all these kids in East St. Louis when there was no security and no public assistance and all that kind of stuff. And there was no man in the home, maybe she thought she had to be hard like a man. But my mother never heard I love you from her mother, and she never experienced unconditional love from her mates. So I think what she was giving me is even more extraordinary. My mother was giving me something she didn't have herself, isn’t that crazy? She was never given unconditional love. But she gave it to me. I mean, that's crazy.
Alan Fleischmann
It just shows the depth of your mother, she was so aware about what void she had in her to make sure that void wasn't something that she passed on to you.
John Hope Bryant
I mean, that's courage.
Alan Fleischmann
And real depth. You know I do believe that there are people who go through life kind of not doing a lot of self-reflection or introspective thinking. And there are those who maybe struggle too much, because they can't get out of their own self absorption. But there are those who can turn it, I love this idea of you know, turning thinking into action like you're describing and everything. I mean, that she obviously knew what she didn't have and knew what she wanted her son to have.
John Hope Bryant
Being a PhD and a Ph-do too.
Alan Fleischmann
Exactly, right? So you did go to this school though, this Hollywood Professional School. Was that her idea, your idea?
John Hope Bryant
Neither, but it was a result of her because I had the confidence to do what I'm about to tell you because she told me she loved me. And because of that, I thought I could do anything and nothing could stop me. I thought I was everything I needed because my mother told me so. And so I then went to go live with my father. So they had divorced, I went to live with my father. And now I'm in my mid-teens. And I wanted to be a businessman at that point. And so I wanted to go to a business school. And so I said to my father, who was not very formally educated but was a business owner, “Dad, I want to go to business school.”
Now this is, you know, effectively high school. And he said, “Well, that's fine. Find one.” So that was his way of saying, I have no idea what you're talking about. So I went to what was then called the Yellow Pages, all the young listeners to this, please know that that is Google search today. I went to the Yellow Pages, opened it up to private schools, and found business schools and found the one that had the biggest, most prominent ad, and it was Hollywood Professional School. And I said, well, Hollywood, if you live in South Central, Hollywood is a beacon of aspiration. Professional school, I'm thinking that professional is what I want to be. How did I know it was a school for actors?
So we go through here, and my dad's in the registration room with Mrs. Mann, who was then the 90-something year old founder. And she just kept staring at me, Alan. And I couldn't figure out why the heck she was staring at me. I figured it was because she had eye problems or you know, sight problems at 90-something years old. And she just kept staring at me. I realized later she was trying to figure out what show I was on, trying to figure out who is this kid. She didn't want to ask me because she thought it was rude. You know, I'm a “celebrity.” My dad only wanted to know how much it was.
So she's trying to figure out who I am, my dad's trying to figure out how much does it cost, and all I knew was you went to school at 8:45 to get out at 12:45. I was like, I'm sold, this is a professional school for business people and I get out if I go to school four hours a day? I'm done. Well, of course that was designed that way so you can still go to the set and finish the rest of your shooting schedule in Hollywood just down the street. So I got pulled into a whole world I knew nothing about. I mean, Tatum O'Neal was there, and Todd Bridges and all these serious actors. You know, if you had a weekly show on back then there was a chance you were at the Hollywood Professional School. So that's how I sort of became a really bad actor, or not a good one.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you want to be? Was there a moment where you're like, I really want to do this, I want to make this my career?
John Hope Bryant
Man, I just wanted to be famous. You have to learn in life at some point, do you want to be famous and you want to be dangerous? And I want to be dangerous now, I mean smart, intelligent, thoughtful, reflective, making good decisions — it's a whole other situation. But back then I wanted to be famous, like every young kid. I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be popular. I was a geek, I was not popular. But I wanted, I was like oh my god, I can be famous, you know. I mean, why do people go to Hollywood? So I can tell you I wasn't in love with acting itself. And I wasn't a very good actor.
Look, in order to be a very good actor, you have to be what I call an empty cup. The greatest actors in the world, with rare exception, are like this cup that has a hole in it. You empty yourself from the cup, and you fill yourself up, fill the cup up with a new role, or the new look. That's why Hollywood is the only place in the world where you go there and change your name, your lips, your body, your hair — you change your whole identity, your storyline, and you have a business manager, a personal manager and an agent that actually markets that new persona, and you have an audience that claps for it. So if you have low self-esteem, or you don't like yourself, or you don't like where you came from, my God, and then get paid for it well, and people basically applaud you.
Well, I liked me, here's the problem. And I didn't want to reduce me to fill up myself with a cup of another role. So I would maybe remove 20% or 30% of me, but that wasn't enough to be a great actor. So I would fill myself up with 20-30% of the cup of the new roll. As we can tell from the non-memorable roles that I've played that you can't remember, we can tell that I really was not a great actor. You know, if somebody searches really hard, they can find things that I did. I did Danny Cage’s last show before he passed on Twilight Zone. I did some stuff that was interesting. I was a dancer on American Bandstand and Soul Train. But you know, this stuff is transactional Hollywood, not legendary Hollywood. That wasn't my calling. But I did learn how to communicate.
Alan Fleischmann
I was going to say that must have been a huge part of your leadership. You are an enormous communicator. I mean, you inspire people, you speak with authenticity, your use of language opens people's minds. I gotta think that that experience of knowing your audiences, and you know, and understanding the physical, the mind, the words that you needed to use — a kind of a combination of your physical presence, as well as the language, you must have started to see that there's a path for that there.
John Hope Bryant
Oh sure. And success in life is marketing. You know, if Dr. King would have said, “I have a dream today that one day…” versus “I have a dream today… that one day, Black children and white children, Jews and Gentiles…” if he hadn't put emotion in and filled the space up with a gap, it really put texture around it. I mean, we wouldn't be remembering that speech as one of the greatest of all times, and it wouldn't have put shivers down our spines. You know, life is about framing the message, it's the narrative, you know. Wall Street, as you know, going public is about storytelling. So no matter what you're doing, you've got to be a good storyteller. Just make sure that what you're doing is not just telling a story, or you know, telling stories. You’ve got to marry authenticity with the ability to communicate, and when you get that wrong and you get the authenticity wrong, you end up with a Hitler, you end up with Osama bin Laden, you end up with Stalin, you end up with, you know, recent politicians that will go unnamed. You'll get people who are in the dividing business, in the division business and in the hurting business versus the people who use their gifts to lift people up. And I’ve always wanted to use whatever gifts I've had to lift people up. Hope is the business plan.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. And I think knowing that language matters, words matter, they can matter and they can create forms of hate, and allow it, or they can form and create love.
John Hope Bryant
Yeah. Well, you know that more than anybody else. This is your business.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah. And I love that you made that a big part of what you’ve been building, to make people feel that they have the ability to succeed, if only given the tools, the mentorship, the access — to access to capital, the access to, you know, financial literacy throughout your whole career. And yet, you also know that without it, you can't deliver it. Or you can, but if you're not authentic when you're leading, then people aren't going to see that they have a path forward.
So you graduated from high school and you went on to college. But somewhere in there, you realized college wasn't your way. As much as you've been pushing for education, and that's a big part of your leadership, and specifically with financial literacy in particular, but I imagine the young you and the restlessness and the urgency that you felt in college that made you say, “I gotta get going with my life’s purpose and my life’s business.” I'd love you to tell a little bit about that.
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, the best thing about my school experience, high school, elementary school, middle school, high school and college was I had somebody to sell stuff to. I could sell whatever my newest innovation or, you know, I did a lot of mail order this, mail order that didn't require inventory. But I would sell stuff to all my teachers and my classmates. They became my audience and my market, my test case, my research and development.
I was precocious, and I was in a hurry and I didn't think many times I was learning a lot that I found to be practically useful. I went to San Diego City College, ultimately lived with my sister. I went there for a year. And I got a couple of honorary doctorate degrees today, which is interesting. And I give commencement speeches all the time. Today I'm on the board of Clark Atlanta University. I'm a real proponent for education. And everybody who works with me has a college degree by the way, Alan. It’s just that the entrepreneur or the builder, the visionary, is sort of, you know, built with a different kind of fuel or requires a different kind of fuel in their belly. Builders and leaders are different from managers and task agents. All are necessary, they're just different roles. And a lot of people who create things, you'll find their stories are similar. Bill Gates didn't finish, Steve Jobs didn't finish. I mean, Black and white, stories of people who have a burning desire to build something and want to get on with it. And they want to hire their professors to work for them.
Alan Fleischmann
The people I know in life who dropped out to start the urgent agenda ahead of them are often the people that want to make sure they hire people that were graduates of universities. They don't hire a lot of dropouts themselves.
John Hope Bryant
I want everybody around me smarter than me, or what's the point? And an expert is somebody who knows more and more about less and less. I want the best finance person, the best IT person. I want to make sure that when I lay out my vision that I drop in execution models that are absolutely best in class. So that means you want people who are highly skilled and highly educated. I think a really important thing for listeners of your podcast to understand is you can give somebody a title that says they're a leader. But you might, in fact, have misjudged their skills because most people are not leaders, they're actually managers. Leaders take initiative. Leaders see a problem with a beginning, middle and an end. Leaders are out on point.
A builder jumps out of the plane and builds the parachute on the way down. A manager, very necessary, take something that exists already, typically by the way in a defined area with a budget and support and all that kind of stuff and systems and a business plan, or at least a manual, and they execute on that pre-existing plan. Very important. But that's a very different skill set than a leader. And a lot of failure comes from putting a wing on a pig and hoping it will fly. Giving the wrong person the wrong job, and then expecting them to do something they're completely unqualified to do and then blaming their failure on them. The reality is the failure of the leader to not recognize the skill set of those around them.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, I think the fact that you also want people around you who are visionary, you may be the most visionary of your organization and they are part of your team, but they're hungry, and they're urgent, and they feel that. You want them to be hungry, right, and I can tell that in your dynamic with your team. You know, I think that matters.
John Hope Bryant
Of course it matters. I have a special forces team that I rely on, it's that 80-20 rule. My guess is you do too. 80% of what I need to get done that is important is done by 20% of my people. The same 20%. I can call them at midnight, I can call them at two in the morning and call on Saturday, the answer is always the same: What can I do for your boss? What's going on?
If I ever call somebody who lets it go to voicemail or that sounds irritated because I'm calling them at dinnertime, I know I've got the wrong person and I won't call them again. Yeah, there's a general army and those people leave at five o'clock every day. It’s really important to have a general army. And then there's special forces, and they'll drop in any place, anywhere, anytime. And the average tenure of my senior management team is 20 years, by the way. The newbies around me have been around for five or 10 years. But my chief of staff is 31 years, my president of programs is going on 30 years. My president of partnerships is 28 years. Jena Roscoe, who left from President Clinton to come work for me, literally left the White House so whenever President Clinton left the White House, it's got to be 20 years ago. You know, I can name my team, and 12 years, again, would be somebody still considered to be a newbie.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I love that. And I guess of your top team, they’ve been with you from the beginning practically then?
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, my top leadership team without question. I used to have a lot of churn at the bottom, but that's because I wasn't managing, I was just throwing stuff over my shoulder. We were going so fast, and if you could walk straight and breathe in a mirror, we’d give you something to do. But we wouldn't give you a lot of training. With our priorities, the urgent was crowding out the important. So early on the urgent will crowd out the important, anybody who can do something and is in reach, you grab them.
But when the important has to offset and override the urgent, which is where every mature scout organization has to be, then you really need people who are best in class in those positions, because you're trying to institutionalize, you're going from persona and personality to pilot program to proof points to performance. And now you're trying to go from that to pouring into something that is institutional in nature. And institutional nature has systems and processes, and you need infrastructure, systemic infrastructure, that can wake up when you don't and do the same thing well as if you did it. Or at least nobody noticed that you didn't do it as an individual.
Alan Fleischmann
And then you know also that you can get all the dreams that you're trying to achieve by having great forces of people around you.
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, here is a quote, Alan, I love.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better be running. That's me all day.
Alan Fleischmann
With the power of energy, the power of the right mind and the right mindset, but also the power of energy.
John Hope Bryant
Don’t let the perfect become the death of the good. Just get it moving. It's hard to hit a moving target, like just get cracking.
Alan Fleischmann
So in the wake of the Rodney King riots in 1992, it's suddenly 30 years ago, 31 years ago, you created Operation HOPE. And this has become the largest organization, largest nonprofit provider for financial literacy, financial inclusion, and economic empowerment services. Which is a big part of this, you're not just advocating for something you're also delivering as well. Tell us a little bit about how that started. From the darkness out of the riots, you somehow saw light and said, “I gotta do something.”
John Hope Bryant
I said earlier, money is freedom. And we live in a country that advertises freedom as its calling card for the world. Well, you cannot have freedom without self determination, you cannot self determine yourself without understanding how free enterprise capitalism, economics, ownership and money works, because we live in a free enterprise democracy. And what did I learn as a kid? I learned how free enterprise and money work, that was a light that came on. What did I want to do? I wanted to teach people how to fish at scale. How you do that without running yourself ragged trying to be everyplace every time? You have a seminar with a speech and this and that thing, which is not sustainable and not scalable. You have to create programs and then systems and services, and get others to buy into that.
So in some ways, my business plan is the light that came on when I was in that home economics class when the banker told me that there were 10,000 banks and millions of bankers and I asked that question to him, "Is your job to lend poor people money when they can qualify?”
What are we doing now? We’re raising credit scores 54 points in six months, 120 points in 24 months. The average consumer and average American, nothing changes your life more than God or love today than moving your credit score 120 points. If your day’s not about God or love, your day’s about money. We're raising the savings rate for the average person $1,500 for the average client. We're lowering debt $3,800 while increasing credit score. So we're the only nonprofit in history ever allowed to operate inside of a bank branch.
We have 250 locations in 40 states, have hundreds of employees and the banks are adopting our Hope Inside. Not one or two, which is maybe tokenism or charity. I'm talking about banks ordering 30, 40, 50, 100, 200 locations at a time and we're integrating and slowly opening those locations. Wells Fargo ordered over 100. Bank of America, U.S. Bank, Synovus Bank, Regions Bank, First Horizon Bank — we’re at 10% of all bank branches at First Horizon Bank, the largest bank of Tennessee. Wells Fargo, Truist Bank, where we have a contract to be in half of all Truist Bank branches, where they have 1,000 branches. What are we doing? Getting the bank out of the “no” business and back into the “yes” business.
Then we went into the workplace, because I believe that financial literacy coaching is what healthcare was 40 years ago, a new normal. And what are people stressed out about today in the workplace? Money. What do 70% of all Americans do? Live from paycheck to paycheck. We can go on and on and on with this. Half of all people making $100,000 a year — paycheck to paycheck. A third of all people making $250,000 a year, paycheck to paycheck. So this is a crisis. This is a civil rights issue with this generation. And it's potentially a crisis for our country. The largest economy in the world is 70% dependent upon consumer spending, and consumers are not financially literate. So I really, literally think this is what Dr. King would be doing if he was alive today.
But my move is in the business streets, not the streets. And so I've got to make a different case, I gotta make a business case. So in corporate America, we remove the stress of the worker and replace it with confidence which allows them to then focus on providing above the line performance, not just compliance with the job. And Delta Airlines has adopted our work where the official culture, all 90,000 Delta employees, so much success there that they hit their financial well being targets for a year and three months and the CEO there is investing $1,000 savings accounts for every worker who goes to our financial coaching work. UPS has our model. Harley Davidson is using our model. The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas is using our model and several other companies that I've not mentioned.
So we're in banks, we're in corporate HR departments, we're in the public square — Atlanta’s school system and Atlanta’s police department, I'm in a city treasurer's office in St. Louis — and so on and so forth. And it goes on and goes on and goes on. So the work is measurable, it is outcome based.
We've created 330,000 Black businesses through the 1 Million Black Businesses initiative that we launched with Shopify. After the George Floyd murder, we lost him three years ago, we've created 330,000 Black businesses. Alan, there's only 3.1 million Black businesses in America, so that's 10% just about. As you mentioned earlier, a few billion dollars in capital allocated, because we got the banks to say yes. So it's inclusive capitalism with the Starbucks of financial inclusion, the Walmart of financial literacy, and our mission is the bottom half of society to rehabilitate them, make them bankable, give them a skill, give them tools, get them in the game and grow GDP.
Alan Fleischmann
And it's also amazing how you keep adapting to the times. I mean, as the challenges and demand around financial literacy have evolved and changed, you've also evolved and changed ahead of that in many ways.
John Hope Bryant
You evolve or die. Remember the gazelle and lion story.
Alan Fleischmann
It's a powerful story that one should never forget. It's a very powerful story. Everybody wakes up in the morning, they got to survive. If they don’t survive they can’t thrive.
John Hope Bryant
What happens if the iPhone never went beyond the 3?
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, that's right.
John Hope Bryant
You become Blackberry. You know, what happens if Blockbuster had purchased Netflix? They could have bought Netflix for $50 million. They were offered it and threw their nose up and said, “No, we're Blockbuster, we know better.” And they went out of business. JCPenny, same thing. Sears, same thing, Montgomery Ward, same thing. If you go far enough to the North Pole, you end up south.
Alan Fleischmann
And with Kodak and the idea of digital. I mean, there's one example of another of these iconic brands that have actually been around for so long that are not advancing. So when I think of you I also think of you as someone who has worked with the private sector, you obviously had great activity with the public sector. You're leading a nonprofit, you've been your own investor, you've been a person to put your money where your mouth is as well with capital and as a philanthropist. I mean, when you think about economic empowerment, you need to navigate between private, public and civil society. And while they are distinctly different languages, even still today, that idea of building bridges and understanding motive and leading has never been more urgent and more needed. But it's also never been more difficult I would argue. That's a little bit about that navigation, because it's a big part of who you are.
John Hope Bryant
Yeah, I've been honored to serve three presidents, U.S. presidents. Honored to work with President Clinton, President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, from both parties. Honored to be recognized by those three plus President George H.W. Bush, who I love, and Ronald Reagan, President Ronald Reagan. And I've known eight or nine presidents along the way. And they all, you know, I think I'm genuine friends with President Clinton. I love that guy. But he once had a great quote by the way. It's hard to get somebody to agree to the truth when the lie is paying their paycheck.
But the presidencies, they respect me more than they like me because I do come to these conversations with a framework. I’d rather that you respect me and learn to like me than like me and never respect me. And I'm there for the office of the presidency. I'm there for the institution. I'm there for America. I'm not there for personalities. I'm not partisan. You know, my party, if I had one would be the Get It Done party. I just want to get it done. And sometimes that means working with Republicans, and sometimes that means working with Democrats, sometimes it means hopefully working with Republicans and Democrats. And that's not very popular sometimes. People want to be, I don't know what they want to be, I don't want to speak for somebody else, but they find comfort sometimes in their comfort zones. But even the Bible says a house divided cannot stand.
Alan, I like math because it doesn't have an opinion. I mean, to me, it just doesn't make any sense to master 50% of something and reject the other 50%. Why not control the field and master 100%? And why not, you know, we're better together. If we don't figure that out, and that has been the American business plan, if we can't figure that out again, we will be speaking Mandarin in 10 years. Meaning China, in Chinese, but I think that we will continue to be the leader of the free world, we just have to get out of our own way. And that means learning to work together and figuring out, once again, are we better together? I think so. I believe so.
But that right now it is in vogue to separate us. And you really have in some ways two Americas. We got to figure out what our narrative is and we got to be down with that. It takes a lot… I don't know if it's courage, but it takes a lot of chutzpah to talk truth to power with no arrogance, no beating your chest, no raising your voice, no telling anybody off. Just saying to people who are very powerful, “no I'm not going to do that. Thank you. No, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in this. I want you to pay attention to this” when everybody else is saying do this because it's popular. I don't find it difficult. But I find myself oftentimes alone. So maybe that means it's difficult.
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, to have perseverance the way you do, and your ability to unite people has a lot to do with the fact that you're very clear about the mission vision, like what you're trying to accomplish. You know, all those folks in politics who want to distract, or they're more interested in the game than they are in the outcome, which we know many. There are people who obviously are the opposite, or more like the way we're describing you where they are trying desperately to be lined up with the people who want to get something done. So I think they do exist. But I'm curious, how much do you do to assure that you have the energy to do what you're doing? How do you shore up that energy? I mean, you're naturally a highly energized human being, one can feel your energy when they're in your presence. But are there any secrets of the trade here that you do to kind of make sure that you're not exhausted? Because I'm sure there are times where you're, and I've seen some of your crazy travel schedule, so you know, when you come back how do you prevent that from letting you be you?
John Hope Bryant
Last time I saw you was in two different cities. You know, you gotta be ruthless about your time. I'm generous with money and generous with advice. I'm generous with programs. I'm generous with our philanthropy. I try to be generous with many things, but I'm ruthless about my time. Don't waste my time.
And one of the ways that I shore up my energy, well, the time piece comes after what I'm about to say. There’s a difference between gas and fuel. Gas comes from fuel, not the other way around — and let me rephrase that. Let me go deeper because gas and fuel, they're really interchangeable. Gas or fuel comes from energy. Let me say that. And where do you get your energy from? And I realized that a lot of people are takers. They don't mean to be taking, but they're pulling from you. And they're giving you gas.
And so I walk through life, while I'm in the course of my day I walk through life consciously oblivious of most things around me. Just because I'm trying to preserve my energy for what's really important. And I don't argue over, well, I try not to argue period. But I really try to step over a mess, not in it. It's not just me being, you know, gracious or high minded, or Buddha-like, it's self-preservation. If you boil hot water, whatever is in there burns, and if your body is 70% water and you're boiling all the time, you're prematurely aging. I mean, you're cooking yourself. So I just try not to get all worked up about stuff that just doesn't matter. I try to figure out what does matter and really just focus on that. And so I just sort of, the biggest thing is I just separate myself from a lot of the drama and say, really focus on execution on things that I think are important. Again, consciously oblivious about most things around me, reasonably comfortable in my own skin. So it means I can talk without being offensive, listen without being defensive, and always leave even my adversary with their dignity. Because if I don't, they'll spend the rest of their life trying to make me miserable. Now it becomes personal. So now you want to step over a mess and not in it. So I have a lot of strategies and tactics and leadership approaches to life, but then I step off the field and just disappear. I mean twice a year, I just go away. And I have a couple places I go to, they all have water. The beach, which I think is God breathing, I go to to renew myself. That's how I refill my energy cup.
Alan Fleischmann
You obviously do a lot of reflecting and a lot of thinking about the importance of examples to inspire language to inspire your books. Your most recent, of which you’ve had many, Up From Nothing: The Untold Story of How We (All) Succeed. You have the five pillars of success which you mentioned, you know, how you actually reach your goals. And, you know, when you look at it, and you read your book, and you see what you live by not only what you preach, it does make, hopefully, many people at 10 years old, and at 20 years old, and at 30 years old, hopefully that never ends and even 50 or 70 years old, realize that they have the power. They have the power, and it's a very powerful, very, very pragmatic message to all the people that are listening right now, that success is not how much money you have in the bank even. But it's actually the ability to create that freedom that you talked about, and have that freedom that you talked about. I'd love to learn a little more about the pillars if you will, but just in general, the lessons learned in your life, the lessons you've observed in your life that should and can empower those to know that they have the opportunity.
John Hope Bryant
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. It’s resiliency. It's never giving up. You know, you don't have to be the smartest guy or lady in the room, just wear everybody else down. Never give up, over, around it and through it, you're gonna get to it. I just never give up. I never give in. I try to step over a mess, not in it. These are some concepts that I mentioned a little while ago, so I don't want to bore your audience by repeating it, they can just replay the tape. But I think my being homeless helped me become resilient. What are you gonna do to me, tell me no? I had no when I walked in the door.
I think that not having a lot of friends growing up helped me. I'm used to talking to myself, I'm used to being alone. Not being popular early on helped me, because now that I'm popular, it doesn't really matter. It wasn't a currency that I used, it wasn't a currency that got me anywhere. I couldn't go to the fancy parties, so the fact that I can go to fancy parties now doesn't define me. You know, I didn't have a trust fund so I'm not afraid to lose it. You know, my negatives became positives. And in some ways, I admire the Jewish experience in the world of leadership, because they are a minority group that was and continue to be discriminated against that actually mastered the five pillars.
And my book is really Up From Nothing. I'm writing two now, I've written five, three bestsellers in business. But the two I'm writing now, one is Financial Literacy for All, the other one is The Bridging of an Unhealed America is my tentative title. But this last book, Up From Nothing out now, it has these five pillars of success. I love breaking these down to something that’s very clear, and unambiguous. And I want to give people a formula for success. And if you look at what my Jewish brothers and sisters went through before the Holocaust, and the fact that somebody tried to exterminate them through the Holocaust and killed a third of them, there was only 18 million Jews in the world back then, they killed six and a half million. Maybe more than that. That's what we know on record. The fact that they were almost exterminated, and in such a humiliating way, but they had these five pillars before the Holocaust, and these five pillars after the Holocaust, allowed them to push right through and pull right through the Holocaust without it breaking their spirit, breaking their energy, breaking their culture. In fact, they sort of show up on the other side, whole and complete, and succeed.
And so here are the five pillars and if you have these five, you'll be uber successful. If you have four of these, you'll be, I think, very successful. If you have three of these you can make a good living. If you don't have at least three of these it's really, really hard to pull through. And think about when I say this now, Alan, of the three groups that have been left behind in America as I say this, and I mean, African Americans, Native American-Indians, and poor whites. Here you go.
As much education as you can shove down your throat — I mentioned this earlier.
Financial literacy — math, money, how the system works, free enterprise capitalism, how to fish.
Family structure and resiliency.
Self-esteem and confidence.
Role models and environment.
If you have, I don't care which of those, pick four of those, any four, you'll be successful. If you have three of those, you can still do really well. If you don't have at least three of those, it's really, really tough. And really, the business plan for oppressive capitalism was deny Blacks the right to vote, deny Blacks education, slavery, and deny blacks understanding of how capital markets and free enterprise worked. You couldn't create assets because you were one, no one ever talked to you about money, and when they created a Freedmen's Bank to teach you about money, they killed Lincoln and robbed the bank. The bank closed within a decade. So it's not like we got the memo on free enterprise capitalism and economics and screwed it up, we just never got it to begin with. They took our families and spread them across the U.S., separated the families. The children, sold them off to other places and abused your wife in front of you, which broke your spirit because you could do nothing to protect her. So there goes your self-esteem, your self-esteem now is in the toilet. Your confidence is decimated. Your role models are who? That's right.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s right.
John Hope Bryant
And there you go.
Alan Fleishmann
I mean, the fact that it's in your name, but you're, you know, John Hope Bryant. I mean, you bring hope. You are that mentor, you are that person who I know so many of these listeners are going to say I want to be like him, how do I get to be involved with him. I hope that they do. I hope that people read your books, not just the last one, but the last one I loved. I hope they read the next two books too. But I hope they join in your crusade and join the efforts that you've created.
You've been listening to leadership matters on SiriusXM nd leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischman. We've just had a pretty extraordinary hour, we need two hours, with John Hope Bryant, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE, a dedicated philanthropist, a true visionary and someone who doesn't just have ideas and ideals, but he turns each and every one of them into action. You are a crusader and I am blown away by your energy and your perseverance. And even today, got to know a little bit more about you and I’m even more inspired now. So we want to have you back. Let’s do part two, John. Let's do another one.
John Hope Bryant
All right. Well, you're a great guy and I love doing anything with you. So count me.
Alan Fleischmann
Let's do it. There's a lot more to learn and a lot more for people to be inspired by so we'll make that happen. We'll schedule that. I’m looking forward to it.