Tom Vazzo

Thanks, Charles. Good to be with you.

Yeah, sure. I grew up a middle-class kid. My brothers and I are first-generation college graduates. I go right into graduate school from my undergraduate, and then I land in a small company up in Boston, a family-run business. At that time, it was about a $50 million business.

In my time there, we scaled to $300 million, run by the family, had all the attributes of a family-run business, a lot of other family members in there, but also bringing in professional managers. They sold to a bigger corporation in which then launched me into my corporate career. Ended over 26 years. My last eight years, I ran a $2 billion set of businesses for the corporation.

And now what I do is I do a nonprofit. And I run Homeboy Industries, which we're a nonprofit in Los Angeles, helping gang members and felons leave gang life behind and life of crime behind and heal and mainstream back out to society.

Yeah, you know, I sort of say it this way. I had my epiphany moment back, and if I can give you a little longer story to this. Back in 2008, which is now a while back, was the Great Recession of 2008. And our corporation, we were a private corporation for a number of years, then we went public. And then public for five years, then back to being private again. So I had the

Fortunate to be there for those transactions and did well for myself and my family. But now this is the first couple of years of being a private organization. Private equity owned us. And so we had to deliver upon our numbers. So the big 2008 recession comes along. Employment levels dropped by 10%, which means the businesses were in revenue dropped by 10%.

And all of us as executive leaders, executive officer of the corporation, have to do all we can to get our businesses right sized for the recession. And so at that time, my set of businesses, again, $2 billion on the top line, about $150 million of operating profit on the bottom line. That was the budget. I thought we did a good job.

We were going to come in at $140 million, only missed by $10 million in the middle of the quote unquote, great recession. And I still remember two days before Christmas being on the phone with the chairman of the corporation. He was essentially berating me and yelling at me. It wasn't good enough. I needed to get that next $10 million. I needed to get back on plan.

I'm thinking to myself, we've been at this a long time. I know that get that next $10 million, how many more people I have to lay off. I also, smart enough, know about the business that once it's coming out of the recession, I'm going to need all those people back. It got me thinking, what's the long-term plan?

commitment we have to our employees if we're an employee-based organization how's that all play out and so something said to me shoot in this capitalist society we're in where shareholder value dominates the caring for the employees that's not so good because well-run companies have three things it does well in the marketplace of shareholder value customers want to give you money for the products or services and and you have a great place to work for for your employee base you know

And I felt like that all of a sudden things were out of whack. Now, listen, I'm a committed capitalist. Even today when I do speeches on behalf of Homeboy, which is a nonprofit, I'm in the audience. I say I'm a committed capitalist. A murmur goes across the audience about, oh, he's one of them. But again, well-run companies are good for people.

But something clicked in me saying, look, there's got to be a better way. And so, listen, I wasn't the final decision maker. So I did what I needed to do. But I knew that. So thereby, a couple of years later, when my golden handcuffs uncuffed, I wanted to do something different. Something in my mind says, how can we run businesses where we're employees?

are just as important in the long-term value as the shareholders and do that in balance. All right, so that's what was behind me. So I left the corporate world. A friend of mine invited me to come down to have lunch at the Homegirl Cafe. We're here in Los Angeles. He's my friend. We were on the board of Salvation Army in Los Angeles.

We've always thought, give back, be on boards, be a part of charities, right? So I'm having lunch at Homegirl Cafe. I'm thinking, and I'm looking around, and I'm looking at the employees, and the employees are working hard. They're smiling. They're engaging with the customers. By the way, my background, my last eight years, I bought 40 companies and sold four in my for-profit world.

You get a sense of employee base. I'm having lunch. I'm looking around, and I'm realizing I would have not hired one of those folks in my prior job because of the tattoo on their face. because of the felony, because they were gang members. And yet here's this workforce that's actually working hard and doing good. And so it challenged my notion that I'm a hot shot business guy.

I think businesses are good for society, but here at Homeboy, in the context of a business, we're helping people change their life in the most dramatic way. And so when my friend asked me to get involved, I had time on my hands. I want to know, can my business skills be used in a different way? And so I signed on as a volunteer and

And I thought I would be there for five, six months and help them out and move on. Now I'm here 12 years later and still helping out and still loving life.

Yeah. I mean, it's a multi-part answer to your good question. First of all, just sort of set the context. Businesses need people, right? They need people who are good. They need people who are loyal. They need people who are going to work hard.

And the way the work world is out there, it's hard to find enough good people along the way. And so there's this sort of on-tap amount of folks out there. So at Homeboy... Let me take a long answer to your question. At home, the folks we work with, they're all victims of complex trauma at a young age. That's why they join a gang. They think, you know, because they didn't have a family.

Their parents told them not to go to school. Their parents told them be on the corner for the drug lookout. They're second, third generation gang members. They join a gang thinking that's their true family, false hope. They do something bad. They go to prison. They come out of prison. And they don't want to go back to that situation. They want to be better.