Banking on KC – Gina Danner of NextPage and Entrepreneurial Exchange
Listen Now, or read the transcript below:
Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Gina Danner, the owner of Next Page and a longtime Entrepreneurial Exchange member. She's here today to talk about EE, how it's been a resource for her business and it's annual event, Meet the Masters, which is scheduled for next Thursday, May fourth. Welcome, Gina.
Gina Danner:
Thanks, Kelly.
Kelly Scanlon:
One of the things about being an entrepreneur is, especially here in Kansas City, is the access we have to so many resources, and one of those is the accessibility of what we've funnily called the masters, the Henry Blocks, the Neil Pattersons, the Jim Starers, and how they have given of their time and even, in many cases, formal mentoring opportunities that they have provided to entrepreneurs on their way up. One of those masters, the late Neil Patterson, founded Entrepreneurial Exchange, which is a network for entrepreneurs. Tell us about what inspired Neil to launch EE and his vision for doing it.
Gina Danner:
One of the things that Neil realized early on in his career was that Kansas City needed to develop new businesses, new business leaders, new entrepreneurs, and we needed to provide a structure and a mentorship program for them. One of the challenges that we saw was the coast is not going to invest in Kansas City. They call us the flyover territory. We really needed to grow our own. If we wanted to support our community, we had to figure out how to grow businesses in Kansas City.
The Entrepreneur Exchange was born specifically to provide connection for entrepreneurs because, at that time, it's been over 20 years ago, maybe over 25 years ago, that nobody really knew each other very well. There wasn't social media, there wasn't the connectivity, there wasn't the access, frankly, to those founders and influencers, the original influencers, if you will, that we could connect with. They were all very willing to talk and to help if you asked them, you just didn't know how to get to them.
EE is a group of entrepreneurs, high growth companies that are recognized for being forward-thinking, driving their businesses. I was one of the smaller companies in it at the beginning, very small, but it's been great to be a part of it for so many years.
Kelly Scanlon:
In addition to being that resource for entrepreneurs for growing their businesses, what kind of impact has it had on the community, especially when you think about what you said that we have to grow our own entrepreneurs? Has that been successful and what's the impact been on the community by doing that?
Gina Danner:
I can talk about very specific people. I don't know if... One of our masters who's going to be talking, and he's insulted that I think he's old enough to be a master, is Jason Taji of Farm Mobile, does this phenomenal technology for farming, and he's on his I think his third ownership of a company. He's grown and sold and regrown and done a ton of different things within farming and technology. He is a phenomenal person, and he can point to the first E Day that he attended, which I think was actually our second or third one. But he can point to a statement that Neil made to him that was basically, "Jason, you can't own and grow a business in your basement." He was very clear, he needed to think bigger than trying to grow steady in his basement.
Kelly Scanlon:
Jason has. He's been a serial entrepreneur. I think he started out in EE2, which is a spinoff.
Gina Danner:
He did start out with EE2, and then he, I don't know if you want to call it graduated or merged in with EE1, if you will, and that was from, I guess, the second E Day that we had, or in Meet the Masters that we had. We can also look to Brian Caton, who is the founder of Midland Marble and Granite, and he always tells the story, he was a member of EE, and he tells the story at Meet the Masters where Barnett Helzberg said, "If you're going to buy real estate for retail, you want a busy corner." That totally changed his business and made him more accessible and a household name.
Kelly Scanlon:
Location is everything, as they say.
Gina Danner:
Location, location, location. Sometimes when you're trying to look at the balance sheet and you don't see the forest for the trees, and Meet the Masters, those nuggets that they give you are so valuable that you can really just change your thought process about what you want to see in your business.
Kelly Scanlon:
A lot of times, it's not only eye-opening in terms of things you might not have thought about before, but it's validation for things you might have been considering but you were doubtful about it. You doubted yourself, and then you got the validation. Even if it was doing it slightly differently, it was still validation nonetheless.
Gina Danner:
There are so many. I remember once at Meet the Masters, I was fortunate enough to be sitting on stage. Somebody asked me the question about how you fail fast and fail cheap. Well, most entrepreneurs, that's not possible for, because by the time they've gone to market with their product, their service, their solution, their business, they have invested their entire life in an extended amount of time. They've thought about it to a point where they're not going to give up.
Kelly Scanlon:
Right.
Gina Danner:
That's just a concept. That's a business concept. That's not an entrepreneur's concept. We're going to make it work one way or the other.
Kelly Scanlon:
It's interesting you say that, because I remember hearing Neil Patterson speak one time at EE2, as a matter of fact. He said, "At some point, you've climbed so far up the mountain that the fall's going to kill you, whether you continue moving up or whether you try to go down." So you may as well keep going up.
Gina Danner:
Exactly.
Kelly Scanlon:
I know that there are caveats to that. There are times when you need to change course or say, "I've given it the good old try." What are the qualifications for membership for EE?
Gina Danner:
EE is one member per business category.
Kelly Scanlon:
So, exclusivity.
Gina Danner:
There's exclusivity. Gross revenues of about three million dollars, and you have to be the chief cook and bottle washer, the one who's making the decision, the one who's responsible for payroll, the one who's responsible for the bottom line. That is critical. Ideally, we want founders, people who've put it all in. That's really the key, is the dynamics of being that entrepreneur, of having an idea, baking it, mixing it, working that recipe out and just continuing to push forward. You have a different life and a different perspective from other business leaders.
Kelly Scanlon:
Absolutely. You want the one that's going to be waking up at night with questions about their business and not being able to go back to sleep because they're so invested in trying to find a solution to those questions they're having.
Gina Danner:
The great thing about EE, when we come together, we show our vulnerabilities. I've been in the room when people have talked about how somebody has embezzled from them or somebody else has sued them or an employee has filed some sort of claim, where we've been able to connect one another with resources that we couldn't have done any other way.
Kelly Scanlon:
So putting your worst foot forward in order to get feedback from all the other members. It's also the other members learn from the other members' issues and mistakes, too.
Gina Danner:
One of the things that I am really focused on and have been for a while was fraud protection within my business. We set up very specific controls and processes, and I was able to take that to an EE meeting because I had just said, "Hey, I want to make sure I had heard somebody else get nailed because they had a bunch of fake checks that ran through their account and they didn't catch them." So I was able to talk about positive pay, which is one of the services that the Bank Country Club offers is positive pay. So you're always learning from one another and figuring out, "Okay, how do I apply these principles to my business? How do I look at my business in a different manner?"
Kelly Scanlon:
So you bring best practices that others can learn from as well. Staying on your business, what has being associated with and being a member of Entrepreneurial Exchange done to help you grow your business?
Gina Danner:
Neil always asked me a question, and I used to get mad at him. He would ask me, wherever I saw him, he'd say, "Gina, why do you come here?" Neil Patterson was a farm boy. My family was tied to rural America and farming, and so I said, "Neil, I don't know about you, but growing up, I knew one thing, the animals had to be fed, and nothing else mattered." The way that I get fed is by pushing forward, and the way that I get fed is by attending an entrepreneurial event, an EE event, whether it's meeting with five or six other members or showing up for a Meet the Masters event. When I can talk business owner to business owner, that's what drives me forward, because I always try to learn something. I want to better understand what they're doing, how they're driving forward. How are they innovating in their world?
Kelly Scanlon:
You mentioned the animals have to be fed. That sounds like you're speaking to an entrepreneurial mindset. Elaborate on that.
Gina Danner:
I use that phraseology in a couple of ways. One is the leader of my business. I've got to make sure my people receive the nourishment and feeding that they need so they do a great job for me. But I also have to be aware that I need that replenishment myself. If I'm going to be fresh for my team, I have to be fresh for myself.
One of the challenges for entrepreneurs is our minds go 800 different directions a minute. It's okay to know that other people out there have that same problem and they can't pick and choose which way to go sometimes. It's really nice to be around a group of people that understand the weight of the decisions that we make, how they affect our teams, how they affect the community, and how we can get better focused. I think that's one of the things, is as I had the good fortune of sitting around the table with folks like Tom Lauerman from Geo Access and Neil Patterson and Cheryl Womack and tons of other great entrepreneurs, what I saw is they struggled with the same emotional connection that I struggled with. They wanted to learn as much from me as I wanted to learn from them. That just kept pushing me forward.
Some of the things that we've done at Next Page have been about that drive, have helped fuel me, that pure desire to be relevant, that pure desire to figure out what is the best mix of print in this digital age, and then, by the way, how do we do digital marketing? How do we make those connections?
Kelly Scanlon:
There's a balance of everything. Everything has its place. I think, an example, television didn't kill theater, so there's a place for everything. When you talk about that focus, that need to have a support team essentially around you, because you don't get that within your own company. During the pandemic, you heard a lot about resiliency, that entrepreneurs had to learn how resilient they could be. How did EE help during the pandemic? What role did they play?
Gina Danner:
Like everybody else, we hopped on Zoom calls more regularly. Half the time, it's like, "Oh my gosh, what are we going to do about this PPP thing, and where do we find some PPE? By the way, has anybody heard about this ERC stuff? How are you talking to your vendors? How are you talking to your customers? Do you have any customers? Right?
Kelly Scanlon:
Exactly.
Gina Danner:
How do you come up with unique ways? One of the things that I love is Robert Dunson with Best Regard. People weren't coming into his restaurant and they weren't going to work. There was nobody on the street, but yet he was a restaurant, he wasn't fully staffed up, and connected up for online ordering. What was awesome is he came up with a way that he could connect with the healthcare workers and the customers who wanted to honor them so people could buy a dozen cookies that he would then take to the hospitals. He was able to keep himself afloat and keep himself relevant and connected in the community for those first two months, a few months while he figured out, "What else am I working on? What else is next?" He came up with a drive-thru in the parking lot, and people would go get containers of soup and bread and cookies and his great gooey cinnamon rolls and lemon cakes and everything else that he does.
You see small businesses doing unique things like that just to stay alive and thrive. We were fortunate that we were considered an essential business. I went in with the mindset nobody was going to shut my team down because we did work for some hospitals.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes, absolutely.
Gina Danner:
I needed every piece of equipment in my shop because I didn't know when one of the hospitals was going to need anything that we might have, because they went to the top of the list, we got their stuff done, we got it back to them, because they were dealing with, "We need signs, we need other forms, we need this." Whatever it happened to be, we were there to do it for them.
Kelly Scanlon:
Oh yeah. Dealing with life and death issues with their patients and with so many things with their workers that the workers were having to put up with and deal with, so absolutely. One of the ways EE extends its outreach to other entrepreneurs throughout the area is through the Meet the Masters event. Tell us about how Meet the Masters was born and how the event has evolved over the last couple of decades.
Gina Danner:
Okay. We have to go back 20, 25 years ago. Kaufman Foundation was very much within itself.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes.
Gina Danner:
There wasn't a big network of business startup support in Kansas City.
Kelly Scanlon:
Right.
Gina Danner:
This was before.
Kelly Scanlon:
There was no sourcing.
Gina Danner:
Yeah, there was nothing. Except for this little group of EE. Neil, with his good fortune, was able to connect and reach out to people like Henry Block and Lamar Hunt and Bob Bernstein and Ali Gates, and we were able to get all of these people around the patio at Neil Patterson's house for a very intimate conversation. Entrepreneurs learn best from other entrepreneurs. We wanted to hear the stories from the trenches. What was it like to not be able to meet payroll or have the bank call your note or not be able to grow as fast as you needed to grow or not have the space for it or something? All of these struggles that every entrepreneur has had or has faced, to hear those great stories was phenomenal. Even to the point that Lamar Hunt sat in the front row of the event the following day, which we had an E Day, so we'd have Meet the Masters at night and we had E Day the next day. Lamar Hunt sat at front row and took immaculate notes all day long, asked phenomenal questions of the entrepreneurs that were on the various panels. Just to see that level of an individual love connecting and still learning from others, it blew my mind. It was so cool.
Kelly Scanlon:
It is incredibly phenomenal. When you talk about the Meet the Masters, that was the first event on the evening before, and then E Day was open to the entrepreneurial public, as I recall.
Gina Danner:
Right.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah.
Gina Danner:
Right.
Kelly Scanlon:
So you've been doing these now for 20, 25 years. There's a whole new generation of masters. 2023 Meet the Masters event is coming up next week. It's just around the corner, May fourth, and I know there are still some spots left. Tell us about what the attendees can expect at the event, who the masters are, and how to register. What will the experience be like if you attend?
Gina Danner:
First of all, this is a top-level event. Heavy hors d'oeuvres, cocktails, open bar, all of those pieces involved. I happen to be a bar sponsor. But the idea is to really give people the chance to connect with other entrepreneurs in Kansas City. Country Club Bank is one of the great sponsors of this event. We have the great fortune of having masters such as Jason Taji with Farm Mobile, Scott Murray with Level Five Tools, Case Doorman from Jack Stack, Thafalia Cherry from Cherry Co., Michael and Brandy Ray, Rx Saving Solutions. How cool is that? Then we also have CeCe Rojas and Oscar Monterosa with Tico Productions, which are doing some phenomenal things in the LatinX market.
As we start to look at bringing this level, these young masters is what I'm going to call them, to hear their stories, but then also be able to network and connect with others who are just like you and me. The great opportunity for our community is the growth of business. Because when we are able to grow companies in Kansas City, we are able to give jobs, we're able to help people buy homes, we're able to support the great nonprofits that Kansas City has, and we're able to really leave this unique legacy of business creation that I think is one of the most honorable things in the world.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. As the great Byron Thompson used to say, "You better leave everything better than the way you found it."
Gina Danner:
Exactly. Exactly. I get excited from this event. I've been on the committee since day one and been involved since the first one, and it's been really great. One of the cool things that Neil said to me at one point in time, he goes, "Gina, you can relax. You're at the cool kids' table." Being an entrepreneur is one of the coolest things you could ever do.
Kelly Scanlon:
Absolutely. There's no question about that. If somebody wants to come and meet these masters as well as lots of other entrepreneurs from throughout the city, enjoy good food and drink, how would they register?
Gina Danner:
If they go to kcmeetthemasters.com, simple websites, simple sign up, and we'll get you registered right away.
Kelly Scanlon:
Is there a cutoff for that?
Gina Danner:
We don't have a lot of spots left. It's a relatively intimate event, but I would say go today. Don't hesitate.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah, don't hesitate. Okay, kcmeetthemasters.com. Don't waste any time. Go on out there and get signed up. Gina, it has been so wonderful catching up with you today. Thank you for all you're doing to promote entrepreneurship, for your work on EE2, and the annual events. It's been wonderful to see the impact it's had.
Gina Danner:
Thank you so much, Kelly. It's been fun.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Gina Danner for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. Gina states that the great opportunity for our community is the growth of business, because growing companies means more jobs, more home ownership, and more opportunities to support our local nonprofits. We couldn't agree more. Country Club Bank was built on an entrepreneurial mindset. Our late chairman, Byron Thompson, believed that a bank's mission is not only to grow itself, but also to support the dreams of others as they build their lives, their homes, and their businesses.
Country Club Bank is proud to be the sponsor and the host of the Entrepreneurial Exchange's upcoming Meet the Masters event. We hope to see many of our local entrepreneurs at our One Ward Parkway location the evening of May fourth. Be sure to register soon at kcmeetthemasters.com. Tickets are going fast. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you, Kansas City. Country Club Bank. Member FDIC.