Tom Vazzo

My being, my moral being is not about these hard, firm rules. My moral being is about being in relation with others and leaning in to help others. And so like all of us in society, we have these sort of rules we have in place. I'm not hiring this type of person. Let that go. Look at the person in front of you as a person.

This may not sit well with everybody, but how I say this, God loves that person too. I learned this at home, but God loves all of us, no matter what we've done. He's too busy loving us to be judging us, right? And once you sort of, it's the obvious thing, but it's my session. Once you know that God loves that person across from me as much as God loves me, it's way easier. It's way easier.

But it's on two planes. I'm saying all that full throttle. But I'm also saying, hey, you're running a business. People have to meet the caliber of the job. They've still got to do their job. They've got to do the job, right. You've got to be clear about expectations and all those things. But just let all the other stuff that may cloud your vision about a person go.

Just treat them for the person they are today. Are they doing the job? How are they doing the job?

Yeah. I've been very fortunate to be part of lots of different types of size organizations, right? And without a doubt, the big corporations have a lot of resources and bandwidth. And look, the businesses we were in, it was uniformed businesses, food businesses, facility cleaning. So no special technologies or patents. It was just how well you led your team is how you got future business, right?

And so I was sort of taught very early on about A lot of managerial skills, leadership skills, executive coaches, really the overemphasis onto making me a better leader. Because if I was a better leader, my teams were going to do better, corporation does better, right? And so what I've tried to do is bring that aspect to Homeboy.

And I view Homeboy as a small business, as a small family-run business. It has that dynamic. It's a sort of... grassroots-based, founder. I took over for the founder, that type of thing. And then at different levels, as we went from $10 million to $20 million and $30 million, you've got to bring more skill sets in and you've got to grow the team. I'm very proud of the fact that

So as a summary of how to do this, the key lesson is, it's not any great insight, is hiring the people, getting the right people in place and developing the people. Two-thirds of our management team now are former clients. Think about that. They were in our program, coming in, out of prison, no clothes, no food, no anything.

And we've helped them heal. Mm-hmm. help them become resilient, and then they just blossom in terms of their ability to be the next generation of mentors, to be the next generation of business leaders. People who run our cafe and our bakery, they're all former gang members, right? And they all lived in that lifestyle.

They have this natural leadership skills, but they didn't have the managerial skills. Then it's bringing a lot of trainings that teach them the managerial side of this. To me, it's always been about to scale an organization, you need two things. You need funding and you need people. Will people scale with you?

A lot of times when I see other organizations that don't succeed is because they didn't put enough time on the people side. That the entrepreneur, the leader did almost everything themselves, didn't spend the time to teach the next generation and to move the next generation along and then thereby not having a shared vision.

So it's really about developing people and bringing in outside trainers to make that happen as well.

Yeah, two. One I'll do quickly and the other I'll spend more time on. I had a mentor early on in my business career. And he said, Tom, show the organization you know how to make money. So my point is, understand the finances. Take a finance course. You don't have to be a financial expert. You don't have to be an accountant. Just understand the numbers of a business. I mean, that's the entry fee.

And then the other is, to be a great leader, is listen. Just listen. You don't always have to have the answer. You don't always have to rule the room. You don't always have to sort of do it. If you want to build a culture and have people kind of take the responsibility and run with it, listen. And I'm older now. It's easy for me to say. But also the dynamic.

Homeboy is a very diverse population, right? It's a gang population, right? And so for me, when I took on the homeboy role, It was different. Like Father Greg, our founder, Jesuit priest, the mission was strong, but the organization was failing because management didn't know the strategy, didn't know people in the right positions, all that stuff. So I come in and listen.

I'm not coming in to improve how to get gang members out of gangs. I'm coming in to actually see how the organization goes along. So it's a part about listening and piecing it all together and Same thing in the for-profit world. All the great leaders I've worked under, they've listened. They don't come in and start telling. It's sort of listening and thinking, listening and thinking and probing.

Yeah. Thank you for giving me that pitch. So Homeboy Industries, we have a Facebook page. We have a website, homeboyindustries.org. We have a lot of content on there. What's amazing is how our folks have changed our life, the transformation, and they tell their story in the first person. And look, we are blessed with donors. We need more donors, so please donate.

But people donate to us because they see, because every one of us, and I think in our world, have some type of brokenness in us. And And if our folks who have massive amount of brokenness can kind of get through that and not transmit that pain, but transform that pain, move that forward, it is sort of something to learn by and to sort of invest in.

So through all that, on the business side, I wrote a book, The Homeboy Way, where I kind of take the things I've learned at Homeboy and apply that back to the business world. So please buy the book along the way. And then we have social enterprise businesses, you know, buy some cake and And if you're in Los Angeles, come for a visit. We have 8,000 people visit us each and every year.