Founder's Story
From Teenage Dream to $60M Empire and Impact: How Peter Khoury’s Give Kindly is Redefining Charitable Giving | Ep. 146
Mon, 4 Nov 2024
In this inspiring episode of Founder's Story, host Daniel Robbins interviews Peter Khoury, a successful entrepreneur and founder of Give Kindly. Peter shares his journey from a young dreamer at 13 to the head of R2B Group, valued at over $60 million. This episode delves into Peter's mission-driven approach to business and how Give Kindly aims to revolutionize charitable giving by empowering consumers to give back through everyday purchases.Key Discussion Points:Founding GiveKindly: Peter reflects on his long-standing desire to impact, which began in his teens. After years of building a successful business, he returned to Give Kindly with a renewed focus on purpose-driven work.The Founder’s Dilemma & Finding Purpose Beyond Profit: Daniel and Peter discuss many entrepreneurs' challenges—finding fulfillment beyond financial success. Peter highlights the importance of purpose and how service to others drives his happiness.Give Kindly's Mission: Give Kindly is designed to let charities focus on their mission while consumers support causes through purchases. By focusing on women’s clothing and accessories, Give Kindly allows customers to choose charities they want to support with a portion of each sale.Globalization and Expansion: Peter explains how the digital age enables companies to expand globally. With Give Kindly’s US launch set for November, Peter chose the US market for its strong community spirit and desire for impact.Entrepreneurial Challenges & Lessons Learned: Peter shares insights on overcoming hurdles in his journey with R2B Group and why persistence is crucial. His candid discussion highlights the ongoing challenges in business growth and maintaining focus on impact.Navigating the Nonprofit Sector: Peter discusses charities' complexities in generating revenue and how Give Kindly seeks to alleviate this burden. By leveraging profitable, revenue-generating businesses, he believes entrepreneurs can better support causes without the financial strain typical in nonprofit models.Noteworthy Quotes:"Success isn't just about money; it's about what we do beyond ourselves.""I believe it's a founder’s duty to create impact with the resources they’ve been given.""Entrepreneurship is like building the plane as you fly—it’s challenging, but worth every lesson."Launch Announcement:Give Kindly will officially launch in the US on November 4th, with an introductory offer of 40% off all items, allowing users to experience the platform fully. Customers can find GiveKindly at givekindly.com and on the Give Kindly app, available on Android and iOS.Connect with GiveKindly:Website: givekindly.comApp: Available on Android and iOS (search for "GiveKindly")Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com
Chapter 1: What inspired Peter Khoury to launch Give Kindly?
Hey everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have Peter Khoury. I love what you're doing, Peter, because you are the founder of GiveKindly, and I am all about impact. It was like a few years ago for me where my journey was like, you need to focus on impact, and everything I do is all around that. I know you are super successful with your group holding company of R2B.
I think you're at a valuation of like 60-something million dollars, and this is... I believe you mentioned it's something from 24 years ago that was an idea that's coming to fruition now. Let's talk about that. Why did you launch GiveKindly right now and why are you so focused on impact?
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. In business in general, I've always felt it's about the why. And I believe every founder's journey kind of gets to a point where financially accrual doesn't make any more sense. There's nothing else you can buy. There's nothing else you can do. So for me, it's always been about the purpose. Why am I doing what I can do? Why am I doing what I do?
And by that, I mean, I'm striving for something every single day, but it has to be beyond myself because essentially there's nothing left to buy. It's all about how do I make a difference in this world with the gifts I've been given? The question of why now? Simply put, I've tried before.
So as you said, 24 years ago, age 13, I registered gift kindly, gave it a good shot, but obviously a 13-year-old doesn't have the tools or skills to do it. It needs to do more to have the capital. I launched it again when I was 17, 18 here in Australia. And again, didn't have the capital behind it. My budget was $4,000 and just, again, not the experience.
And now having gone off and built, you know, my own business sort of empire in Australia, I've always come back to the point of what am I doing this for? What's the purpose? And now that I've accrued what I need to accrue, I need to put all behind the mission, which is doing something beyond myself and creating a difference in this world we want to see.
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Chapter 2: How do entrepreneurs find purpose beyond profit?
I think there's this founder's dilemma. And I know there's a few different dilemmas, but the one specifically I'm thinking is happiness. It's like you go into business most of the time in the beginning because you want to make money. You want to make freedom of making unlimited money. You don't want to be held back by a job where they tell you how much to make. But then you buy what you want.
You get to travel. You get to do the things. And then you're kind of left with this dilemma of what's going to make me happy next, right? Did you ever find yourself in there? And then then what brings you happiness now?
Yes, it's a funny thing you mentioned. I remember working in the cinemas when I was a lot younger. And I'd recruit like two or three weeks for the pay packets and I had $400 in my account. And I said, I want to go buy something and I went through the shops, all by aisle, you know, department store after department store. And
At a very young age of 14, I learned that there's only so much things money can do. And then as you grow up, you get there. I've got a house. I've got a car. We live a decent lifestyle. We've got our kids in school. But again, it's not that I'm excessively wealthy. But what I've learned is that money isn't the key to it all. And it comes down to service.
Essentially what makes me happy is being impactful for what I achieve. As you probably may be aware, success is a selfish pursuit. At times you neglect a lot of responsibilities to achieve certain tasks. And I can't justify doing that. purely for the sake of more money.
So the only way I can justify the work and effort I put in is to actually have a go towards something beyond myself because then I can justify just putting that little bit extra. So I've never had that real dilemma about how to push forward because the lesson was learned before I made my first dollar that the actual monetary piece of it can only go so far.
Man, I love that. It's great when you can learn these lessons early on because I think we know entrepreneurship is like all about lessons, failures, right? It's like there's no real blueprint. I don't think you could really go to school and like learn entrepreneurship necessarily because it's like once you get into it, everything completely changes. Let's dive into the mission.
I am always fascinated with how as people grow, they really hyper-focus on this mission.
so what led you into this specific mission and how are you going to make this mission global absolutely thank you so give kindly is about letting charities do what they do best it's an online platform where people buy what they're going to buy anyway we're focusing on females clothing accessories right now when they buy a percentage goes towards a charity of their choice so we know
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Chapter 3: What is Give Kindly's mission and how does it work?
Because if I lose all my money tomorrow and not a single person will lose it to you for me, no one will care. And that's fine. That's the job of an entrepreneur. But if a charity does it, they're in strife. So we have to end this vicious cycle of raise money, spend it, raise money, spend it. Because the scrutiny they get, it's just not fair as well.
They shouldn't be asked to constantly have 50% of their proceeds going to generate more revenue. Because that's the difficult part of this whole process. Not the almsgiving that they wish to do.
Yeah, dabbling into the nonprofit space, I've come to realize it is very, very hard to run a nonprofit or charity. Like, I don't think people understand how difficult it is having to constantly, like you said, raise money and bring in funds and not do what you wanted to do, which is help people give back, like do these things.
Instead, you're focused on always, you know, where's the next money coming in? Otherwise, it'll go out of business. So I appreciate what you're doing. And I'm really interested too in the whole like globalization of things, right? Like you could start a company in Australia, but maybe your client is in New Zealand or Iceland or some other country, right? Or some other continent.
And it's very interesting now with obviously the internet and so many places have access to it that you can sell a product and service in a totally different place than 20 years ago or 30 years ago. How's the experience for you when it goes to bringing your product and service to other countries?
Yeah, so, I mean, the world is so small, right? I think we had the conversation earlier, me and you, where we were saying that the smaller the world gets, you know, the more complicated on some levels, but also the simpler on some levels. And I'm having this conversation with you live right now, and it's going out to all your supporters.
The reality is things are exactly the same in terms of technology here than they are there. In fact, America specifically has got so many different opportunities that it's just substantially easier, less barriers of entry. But one of the main things I want to share is why I'm choosing the States as opposed to launching this in Australia.
And, you know, what I'm seeing through my many visits to America is the genuine community spirit en masse in the States. It is such a huge place compared to Australia. I mean, Australia's population is 24 million. We don't even, I think our GDP is one third the size of California, just as an example. But despite its ginormous state, it's really got a community feel.
People are always there to lend a hand. I always found that that community aspect has been really embedded in to the American psyche. And I just thought, what a place to launch GiveKindly, where the people have really bought in to the idea of community and making a difference.
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Chapter 4: Why is globalization important for charitable businesses?
You hit the nail on the head, right? In any kind of business, it's always challenging, every aspect of it. So I look back at, you know, my existing journey here at R2B Group Holdings, you know, just got a significant valuation is growing, you know, a million miles an hour. every single milestone we achieved was an overcoming of a challenge.
So, I mean, just to give you some context about our business, if you've got two seconds, our company helps people buy properties in Australia with zero deposit. The property market in Australia is quite difficult to get into, and there is somewhat of a housing crisis going on right here. So our whole goal was to basically fund deposits
which is not done in Australia so that people can get into that market sooner. So to do that, we go, okay, we've got this concept. We need to fund an element of deposit. How do we do that? So the first stage was let's get them into an incubator and get them structured and organized. So we went through, got their credit sector sorted out. We made sure everything was going well.
Their budgeting was fine. And the next step was, okay, now you've got that. Let's get their loan approved. Okay, this doesn't exist now. We have to create a loan product. for the first mortgage, that is. And then now we have to fund the second mortgage. How do we do that? Okay, we have to start making revenue to do that. So we can't just charge a set.
Okay, we have to get the real estate component. We developed the real estate land. Then we have to do the build component. Then we bought a law firm. So it became nine little small companies. all the profits fading into our credit license or the bank license, as you might refer to it as, and that issues a deposit loan.
If you think about every single stage for the last six years in building this, we would sprint towards a brick wall and literally bash our head against it until it cracked open and we can go to that next stage. And to give some context about the actual kind of growth aspect of this, we'd be up very profitable the first year and then we'd make a massive loss.
And then we'd go up next year and make a massive loss because we have to keep investing. And to give scale to, you know, when that breakthrough period is, it's not a breakthrough, you know, five, six years constant sort of progress. For us, it was six years. And on July 1st this year, it was an explosion where we went from 3 million to 90 million.
And then we've just signed two other massive deals, which unfortunately I can't disclose right now, but that goes to the next level as well. And with business in general, it's exactly like you said, the challenges are just consistent. And I think the founder of NVIDIA said it best is people will never tell you how hard it is, right? And that's why you're never creating the video again, right?
He's always said it was that bloody hard. And I think that's the connection that us entrepreneurs have is we know how hard it is. So we're not asking ourselves about the successes. We're going, that was tough, right?
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Chapter 5: What challenges do nonprofits face in generating revenue?
Absolutely. So I believe by the time this airs in November, we'll be live. And by November 5th, we're going live 40% off all the items on our website. So that's 40% of everything. That makes a loss on every product. I'm funding a loss for everyone all the way through to December so people can actually experience the website all the way through to Christmas.
So 4th of November, we go live 40% off everything. You can find us on giftkindly.com. And also you can download our app on Android and Apple Store, the GiveKindly app. Again, our focus right now is female clothing and accessories. To start the ballgame, we've had some great responses so far in our soft launch.
But as of 4th of November, you can go hell for leather, choose your charities, do what it takes. We're going to basically fund a lot to make sure you can experience the GiveKindly piece. And hopefully as a supporter of a charity, you also become a supporter of us.
Well, Peter, thank you so much for all that you do to help. I can't wait till November. Great conversation today. Really inspired. I think a lot of people get some takeaways and just you're having this mission in life. I mean, from 13 years old, an idea to today.
Chapter 6: How can entrepreneurs support charitable causes effectively?
24 years later like that is incredible like most people would have given up and just said you know that idea was was dead 24 years ago but the fact that you've kept through it i mean that's incredible uh and thank you so much for joining us today on founder story a lot of pleasure thank you so much for having me really appreciate it