Founder's Story - High School Dropout and Single Mom Paved Her Way to Success | Ep. 17 with Kate Morgan CEO Boston Human Capital Partners

Episode Date: May 3, 2020

Kate Morgan has an amazing and inspiring story that started with dropping out of high school, then college and becoming a single mother in her 20's. Eventually through grit and sheer will power she founded BostonHCP, that has a client portfolio. Please visit Pix11 or Fox5 San Diego for more details.  Our Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Inspired by Her, the podcast that will give you the inspiration, motivation and tips for success from some of the top executives, CEOs and influencers from around the globe. With your host, serial entrepreneur and named one of the most influential Filipina in the world, Kate Hancock. And we are live. Hi, everyone. This is Kate. It's nine o'clock in the morning and I have here today, Kate Morgan. Hi Kate. Hi Kate. Thanks so much. Yes. Kate and Kate, right? Yeah, I know. It's a strong name, right? Yes. I love that name. Kate is the CEO of Boston Human Capital Partners. Now, Kate, can you tell me more about your company? Yeah, so I, and actually I have two companies, but the one that makes me money, yes, is Boston Human Capital Partners, and it's a consulting firm that helps early through high growth stage companies with their talent acquisition. So we develop the strategies

and the actual execution. So we work as an embedded partner and help those companies grow. Wow. Now bring me back to the time. Where did you grow up, Kate? Oh, so I grew up in it. Thank God for the Boston Marathon, because otherwise no one would know about it. But 26 miles from Boston at in Hopkinton. And Hopkinton back in the day was this little cow town. And every year we'd have these, you know, strange people that would suddenly put their jogging gear on and then run a marathon. And so it was definitely a hickish kind of town until the late 80s. And then the late 80s software came in, particularly EMC. And then all of a sudden, my, my, my Bodunk little town became this thriving, very wealthy community. Wow, wow. And what kind of kid are you

in high school? I was an absolute punk. I didn't play sports. I smoked cigarettes and drank you know stolen alcohol from my parents and my friend's parents so yeah very very different upbringing um you know I'm a non-conformist from the beginning you know from the from the get-go is there anyone in your family that like run a business, any entrepreneurs? Uh, no. Um, well actually I shouldn't say that. So my, my family, uh, back in the day, actually, um, so these are my grandparents were very successful. Um, so one of my, my, uh, so my So my father's father basically had all of these companies. So he had a salt mill. He had an ice mill. He owned a huge cattle farm.

My mother's grandfather brought electricity to Wisconsin. And so there was all of this like true entrepreneurship, but for my immediate family, no, they, they, they took the academic route. So my father is a professor who was a, he's retired now, but a professor of criminology. Now my brother's a professor at Yale. I, I did the exact opposite. So again, nonconformist by nature. I actually, I dropped out of high school, dropped out of college. I am a serial dropout. So, but, you know, we have to pave our own way. Yeah. So how did you, how did your family handle that when knowing you dropped out of high school and their professor? Tell me. Not really well. Not at all. But we, so, so my, my upbringing was, was very different in a, in a positive way. It wasn't, it wasn't easy.

Um, but it was, um, it made me who I am today. Can you tell me that? Why is that not easy? Um, so, well, it, my, my parents, so my father's father, the one that had all the businesses, when my father was 11, he killed himself. I'm sorry. And so, well, it's okay. I didn't know the guy. So my father had, he didn't really have a good sense of who, what parenting should be as a father, as there was no real example. And my mother, her mother was, you know, here she was this sort of wealthy heiress. You know, her father had brought electricity, as I mentioned, to his house. So she was born in wealth.

And she had married young. And when my mom was six months old, her husband died of a heart attack. And so my grandmother was a crazy alcoholic. Really, really bad alcoholic. And so both of my parents really didn't have a lot of influence on how to parent. And so there I am sort of thrust into, you know, they wanted kids, they loved me. But it was a very, very much a school of hard knocks growing up for me. Mm hmm. Yeah. And describe a person or a situation from your childhood that had a profound effect on how the way how you look at life.

You want the good or the bad? Yeah, I mean, I think the profound thing was, I remember, I remember arguing, so I grew up on a farm. So while my father was a professor, he really loved homesteading. And so matter of fact, they even published a book on how to basically live off the land for like, you know, it'd be a gentleman's farm now. Back then it was, you know, it was really how to sustain yourself. And so I remember being really frustrated with my father after picking beans for like half the morning, and I was complaining about it. And he said, well, when you grow up, you can be rich and you can, you know, live your life the way you want it. So seeing that challenge, that actually helped pave the way for how I view life is, you know, there's a challenge, I need to go after it. And that's how I, you know, if there's one thing I struggle with is enjoying the moment because it's always about what's the next rung on the ladder. Gotcha.

Now, how did you become an entrepreneur? Tell me. What was that journey like? I was born an entrepreneur, right? So I always make this very clear distinction that I think there are business owners and there are entrepreneurs. So business owners, you understand how to run a business. Entrepreneurs see problems and they create solutions. And so my journey really was from an early age. I remember I was like in third grade and I started a newspaper because I felt there was not enough newspapers that people could really enjoy. And so I, you know, being on a farm, I loved animals.

So it was all about animals and stuff. And so that was like my first, but, you know, that, that extends into when I started Boston HCP. So my company I've had for nine years, um, I, I believe that there's really three reasons why you go into business. You do it for money. You know, you do it for ego. Right. So a lot of we see a lot of entrepreneurs that are like. Their ego is is really kind of invested into their idea. And others just have a good idea. So mine is during the recession, I was oversubscribed with work.

And so during that, I decided I couldn't refer work to people because I didn't think they operated at the same caliber. So I said, you know what, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to replicate myself. Because in a service-based organization like myself, they need to expect the same level of service as you deliver. And I felt like I could develop the training and develop employees to replicate what I do. And that's what I did. Wow. So how much was your initial investment then? Was this you? Yeah, I was very, very fortunate that I had some really good clients that felt comfortable with me sort of incubating. And so I was in a company that was in high growth and I needed more help. And I said, I'd like to bring people on.

So it was great. I had people that could actually shadow me. And I started this concept. And the important thing, if you're a service-based organization, it was never Kate and company. It was Boston Human Capital Partners. And the reason why that is so important is you have to have a playbook, a playbook that becomes replicatable as you go in from company to company. And fortunately, in the nine years that I've been

operating, I haven't had to make a single outbound sales call. Everything we've done has been based on referral. Wow. Now, tell me who was your first client do you still remember your first client oh i do and actually they they went public and they were just acquired by vmware but it was uh back in the day it was bit nine and uh then they changed their name to carbon black it's a security software firm. They do a waitlisting product. And it was, you know, this is 2011. And they just trusted me and let me build out a team to support them. And that was the, really the incubation of Boston HCP. Wow now to what you do attribute to your success? Um I think so it's it's having this you know the the hedgehog theory if you read business books, right, is never, it's very easy to sort of get conned into trying something new, maybe getting distracted, but you have to build a concept and stick with it. You can't be fickle about it. You really have to um feel very secure and then build a company that's going to be very structured on that platform because otherwise you're going to

be building a house of house of sticks and you need to have solid foundation now do you still remember that day when you reached your first million sale? No. Yeah. You know why? It's because it's, it's always, so if in life, if I was a dog, I'd be a border collie, right? It's like the job is never done. The job is never done. You can never sit back. You can never relax. And so, you know, even, even going to 2 million, it didn't really register. It's more, it's more about, it's got to be tighter. It's got to be more meaningful. We have to have, always, always be improving if we're not the best because I'm, I've run a boutique. I never wanted to have a hundred person organization.

I wanted to be, um, thought of as the best of the best. And that doesn't require hundreds of people. Wow. Now, so what do you look for in an employee? You mentioned you're a boutique, you don't want to have a big employee. So tell me, what do you? Yeah. Yeah. So we, when we talk about hiring and firing to our core values, we really do. So we developed five core values, which evolved into our culture. So we set up a rubric that would help to really suss out if they actually have all five core values. And when people are put on a plan, it's based on those core values. Because in a consulting firm, consultants can look amazing when they have a great client or an easy client. When they have a hard client, they may not look as good. But what we found is if they're always practicing those five core values, it becomes something that is very sound. And then the culture, if everybody kind of

has those attributes to themselves, we feel we have such a tight community, particularly now, because, you know, we're doing these daily huddles. I unfortunately had to let go of my practice managers. So our, you know, small firm has become smaller. And so we really have found that those values help us to have meaningful, authentic relationships. Yeah. Now, have you ever turned down a client? All the time. Very much. I'm known for enjoying firing clients. There's this whole old sort of, they say, you'll love 80% of your clients. 80% of your clients, they'll of your clients will, you know, they'll be healthy

relationship. It's a partnership. The other 20% are going to drive you nuts. Don't take them, don't work with them. And so I remember working with a company that actually is doing very well now. And we had gone in early. They only had 25 employees and a huge amount of funding, 60 million in funding. And we fired them. And six weeks later, they begged us to come back. And I said, if we're going to have this meeting, I really want to sit down with all of the key stakeholders and make sure that we're all on the same page. And so I went in and I had six executives sitting there. And I said, I am super happy to come back on board. I'll bring my team on and we're going to do really well with this.

But you have to abide by our rules. Because right now you're in the, and I explained that 80, 20% split. And I'm like, you guys are in the 20% right now. I love your boldness. I am. I am 100% Boston. Yes. Yes. I remember I used to have a boss and said, I grew up in Boston and I'm gonna tell you this so you can take it or you don't like it you can leave I actually learned so much from him it is it's funny because we actually have a client that's based in Singapore and I'm like dial it down dial it down because of course you know

yeah culture has a big impact on your communication style so being smart enough to you know accommodate other communication styles I get in trouble with that a lot in the Philippines culturally I just don't fit so I tried to like um lower tone it down I learned a lot now um Kate what have been the biggest challenge you've had to overcome oh um I think it's you know it's always interesting interesting because I think there's lots of challenges. So being a high school and college dropout in a city that is steeped in education, you know, and being able to, you know, basically I lied on my resume when I first went into the workforce. You know, I'm blessed with a big vocabulary, so, and I'm a good writer, and so that, I think, helped me able to kind of lie through it. And software was such a big industry

and was so fast growing that they weren't checking, they weren't doing background checks at that time. And I still have to deal with that on a daily basis because I always question my intellectual abilities. You know, it's always going to feel like a sense of vulnerability for me. Yeah. But now, you know, no one even look at credentials anymore, right? They just look for talent. I look for someone that just has, you know, if you have a grit, then you're on board. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in range. So there, so even with, so if for hiring my team, I, I look for range. I look for interesting people that seem comfortable in who they are and they're going to have a diverse background.

I've always been impressed with people that, you know, maybe they had a bad choice of degrees. One of our top people that works for me, he was a waiter, and I had rented this room for 10 of my closest friends, and he came in and it was like six course meal. And he came in and he would present the wine. And here he is sitting around, you know, there's 10 executives and we're laughing and drinking and everything. And he came in and he had this composure about him. And one thing I always have done is paid 100% of my employees' health care. And knowing that wait staff usually struggles with, you know, having to pay insurance, particularly in Massachusetts. So, you know, I said to him, you know, I'd love to talk to you. And by the way, I pay 100% health care.

So I'm a real company. I'm not charging, you know, commission only kind of job. And he came in and I look now for those kind of people because of the experience I came in where I have, you know, I have no pedigree. I have no pedigree. And that's okay. Because if you have a high emotional intelligence, you can go so far. Well, that's very true. You know what? I was, I can relate to you in that one because no one would hire me. I mean, I'm no one would hire me, but it only takes that one boss that will give you a chance. And are you're going to do it to your company yeah yeah and uh one of my manager my resort manager she's actually a waitress of a small bar that I own and I develop her and now she's the resort manager the highest paying um what a what a fantastic story that is you gave her an incredible break and a career path.

That, I mean, I think that's what, as entrepreneurs, we have to look at. We have to be able to give them that next step. Maybe we can't paint it out, you know, step by step, but giving them a career path is so, it's what we need to do for our own companies that's how we grow you are nothing without your human capital yes absolutely and she's my top performer and she does exactly what I do and so basically I clone her and I develop her from being

a waitress to you know everything, everything can be learned, right? You don't have to have a degree. Just give them the process and procedure and guide. And they're the top performer. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's, you know, because essentially what we do is recruiting. There's no degree in recruiting. No degree.

So, you know, but having range and high emotional intelligence helps them become super successful. Yeah. So basically my company, I hire everyone pretty much there where no one would ever hire them. So I have the best team. It's a lot of work for me, but in the long term, I have the best results and loyal. Yeah. I was going to, the loyalty, loyalty is so, so critical, particularly in these times where people are scared. They're

really scared about what the future will bring. And so if, if you have that trust, develop that, it can be super impactful. Yeah. I love, I love giving people chances because, you know, the return that you're getting, they're just, I mean, you can't buy loyalty. That just. No. And it's, it's intrinsically rewarding. Absolutely. Now, Kate, what's your typical day called day now this totally well so so my day is comprised of agility where I just have to you know be moving from place to place but I start my day um I stretch for 35 minutes I I ground myself I'm connected to the ground. I'm doing yoga-type stretches. I don't know if you have ever had anxiety, but with anxiety, they always say, if you're feeling anxious, plant your feet on the ground, squarely on the ground, because

it helps your body feel centered. So I start my day with 35 minutes doing stretching. And then I'm walking, I'm fortunate enough, I live on a golf course, and it's a private golf course. And so nobody's on there, but I walk my dogs. And for the four mile course walk, I'm out there for about an hour and 15 minutes. And that's processing. I'm listening to, I'm listening to your podcast and I'm feeling, I'm looking for my inspiration because I'm going to start my day at nine 30 and I'm going to do it with, um, uh, my team huddle. And I, we met through, uh, the entrepreneurs organization. Um, and one of the, of course, we start with the forum is asking your one word opener. And I love doing that with my team because I know where they're at.

The subtleties in their one word, and then we spend about a half an hour, and then the rest of the day is kind of frenetic. But I close the day with, if I can wrap up early, I walk the course again or I'm cooking. I love to cook. It's my creative outlet. And it also signifies an opportunity for my daughter, who's a freshman at UW, she's home, and my husband, that we say, this is it. We're stopping our day, and we're going to convene together, and that's really, really powerful for me. Wow, wow, so do you do grounding? I've heard that it's really good, too, with energy,

like you just walk barefoot. I wish I could walk in the sand. Yeah, yeah, well, in Boston, and on a golf course with a bunch of geese, I can't, I can't walk. Now, Kate, what's the highest honor or award you've ever received? So I, I've received awards. I was, for Boston, I was the Startup Advisor Award, which was given out by VC, which I appreciated't necessarily look at awards. I look at rewards. So I'm an equestrian. And so when I used to show horses, the horses that I would ride where I would do very well and get a higher level ribbon met very less to me than when I went in and rode a difficult horse. And it was a real challenge, but we got through it. And maybe we didn't get the highest award, but the reward was that I had worked with that horse. So again, not to, not to be unappreciative of the awards I have received, but I really do look at intrinsic reward over awards. I understand. Now tell me the times where you felt like you were a failure? Daily. You know, so I tend to be hypercritical.

This is, you know, so every night you have the DVR playing in your mind, and there was a conversation that maybe didn't go the way. So I constantly sort of have these nudges to always be improving myself. And I tend to be very hard on myself. So it's hard to single out one thing. I mean, my, you know, if you, if you look at it, it could be a whole timeline of failure, right? I was, you know, high school dropout, college dropout, single mother, where there wasn't even a birth father on this, my daughter's birth certificate. Like all of these things could signify a failure, but ultimately those failures, I welcome them because I wouldn't be who I am today. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Well, you are a strong female and I love talking to you.

You just, I'm just happy you're here. I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much. Now, can you name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader yes so this is a friend of mine and it will go back to

actually and it wasn't even like a she wasn't a leader herself but it has become my mantra uh so when I was a single mom my daughter was born August 26 2001 I had the ultimate nesting I bought a house before she was born because the the baby stuff was totally throwing off my feng shui. And so I said, I'm going to go buy a house. So I bought this big three bedroom house and then 9-11 hit. And I was

self-employed as a consultant. And all of a sudden I had no income. And my family had moved to New York, so I have nobody around. And I have this new baby. And I was really, really freaking out. And I called my friend and I said, I'm at my wit's end. And she said one thing to me. She said, you got this. That has become, when anything becomes hard, I say, I got this. Because I'm a thinker, I'm a problem solver, I'll figure it out. It may not be eloquent, you know what I mean?

I may be, you know, having to glue things together to try and make it work, but I got this. Wow. I love that. I can tell. Now, Kate, what scares you about the, this whole thing is, um, that people don't realize the mental, how, how, uh, mentally challenging this is because, um, so I've been held up since my daughter came home from school March 9th, her university was the first to go online. So I've been held up since March 9th because I wanted to make sure that coming from Seattle, because that's where it landed, would I be okay with her? So I self-quarantined and I know that things will never be normal for a lot of people because we're probably going to walk, you know, it there's going to be a lot of mental

things that we have to get over for things to go back to normal. So people, when they keep talking about this new normal, the new normal is going to have threads of OCD tendencies and real challenges, particularly for younger people and how that really impacts their psyche. Yeah, absolutely. Especially, you know, the millennials, they love, you know, they love life for free, and they have that much freedom, and it is a struggle. Yeah, it's changing. It's a complete paradigm shift for how millennials have lived. Millennials, yeah, the one thing millennials didn't really have was the materialistic side. You know, I think we saw Gen Xers, you know, particularly that grew up in the 80s, very materialistic, extrinsic rewards.

Millennials, you know, they didn't want for much except for going out to eat. So which really helped the, yeah, the restaurant industry, the tour and travel industry. But now we're in and they had helicopter parents that helped them cope through many things, and now they don't have the coping skills, and now we're weaving fear into their everyday life. Absolutely. Yeah, that's very true. Wow.

Is your business impacted at all yeah yeah well so and I talked about Boston HCP but I started a second company that I launched over the winter and so that company is actually it's basically sort of Tupperware parties for the can of curious. So very socially focused, educating particularly women 45 years and older about cannabis and how to use cannabis medicinally and making it very like a fun informational experience. And then we would take them to a dispensary well we can't do that because we social distancing and you can't take them to restaurants you can't take them to dispensaries so that actually that business actually had to be put on hold completely boston hcp has been impacted when this first started going down.

By mid-March, we had lost four clients, and then subsequently every week we've lost a client. Yeah. It's a difficult time. Both of my businesses are shut down. Yeah, because hospitality, anything I, how, and how do you, how do you recover from that? Even, even on an emotional level, forget the finance stuff. It's how, how do we think yourself? Yeah. At least for Boston HCP, I'm pivoting and doing things a little differently than we typically would

and that helps us get through but for your industries that you're you're gridlocked yeah yeah it's and especially here in California the rent's so high and oh my god I probably won't be able to open until next year but that's wow it's very tough yeah my heart goes out to you I'm still dealing with the landlord they still want me charged me rent I was like close yeah so it's a very difficult decision to make in the next few weeks and yeah now Kate what have been the most influential experiences in your life? Hmm. Um, so, so I am a strong person and, um, I met my husband when when i when my daughter was nine months old and i had landed a consulting gig and it was with this really early stage company and he he started kind of like flirting

with me but he's he's software engineer so he's kind of geeky, so it was very subtle, and he kept asking me out, and I kept saying no, no, I, you know, like, and finally, I said, you know what, fine, you can take me to dinner, but my daughter's coming, and so we did that, and it was a Thursday night. It wasn't really a date it was just friends that's how I was thinking about it but I was also super broke so I ordered lots of food so I could take the leftovers home and what was the most what became so influenced influential about that moment was after doing this for about two months, we were out and my daughter, you know, at this time she's 11 months old, so she's getting a lot more active and she couldn't sit still during dinner. So it was like kind of getting complicated.

And in my mind, I was thinking, this is the last time I'm going out in public with my daughter. And my husband, again, we weren't really dating, but he looks at me, he said, did you ever read A Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy? And anybody who's pregnant, if you have friends that are getting pregnant, get this book. It's sort of like Dr dr spock's manual if your girlfriend wrote it so it's it's gritty it's raw it's very real parenting for babies kind of book and i you know i looked at him i said well i did i that was that was my book while i was pregnant like it meant so much to me i said how did how did you know about that and he said said, I wanted to know what it was like when you were pregnant. I was like, here's my heart. Because at all this time for

my entire life, 28 years, I was raised to not be vulnerable, not, not, not be that person. And it like became so influential in the fact that here's a, here's a person that took the time, even with this hard shell that I have to figure out how to poke a hole in it. Yeah. Wow. That is a, that is a really good story. That is a, he's so persistent. Yeah, he was. He was, he was, and he cracked the shell and yeah. Wow. Now, Kate, if you could do it all over again, would you do the same thing? Why or why not? Ah, Oh, that's a, that's a great question. So, um, if, if I could, I mean, I would never change who I am today,

but I do, I, I've always wondered like if I was given a second life and I like thinking of it as a second life, as opposed to doing something over again, if I had a second life, um, I, I would have been, I would have pursued a medical degree. I, I really, um, I was a veterinarian technician for a while for like five years, enjoyed, um, enjoyed that immensely. And yeah. So my next life, my next life, I'll be bad. It's so open, right? We might all change career in the next and um what would be what advice would you give to any aspiring entrepreneurs um try and fix problems do it to solve a real problem. Don't ever look for money. If it's a tough enough

problem and you have a really good solution, you will be successful. Now, Kate, how do you want to be remembered um I always I always tell people like I on my epitaph you know do something funny uh I I really I really live for wit um but I guess I want people to remember me as that I helped them, that I grew them, that they're thankful for anything that maybe I did for them. Wow. Wow. Okay, where can they find you? I had so much fun talking to you. I want to do another session with you. This is wonderful. I mean, I remember meeting you in Greece, and my daughter was with me, of course. Yeah, I remember your daughter. Yes, we were in that outdoor happy hour. I think you guys were the very first person I met in that. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, yeah, no, that was wonderful. So definitely hope to see you at another Women's EO event. Absolutely. So what's your handle? Where can they find you? So obviously bostonhcp.com is our website. You can track me at Kate Morgan on LinkedIn. Always welcome Facebook, Kate Morgan, obviously.

And then also LiveLillium, if you are kind of curious about how you can use marijuana for anxiety or anything like that, it's just LiveLillium.com. Well, thank you so much, Kate. I'm so honored to have you here. This has been a pleasure for me. I really enjoyed this. I enjoyed it.

Thank you so much and hope to see you soon. Maybe in Bali next year? Yes, I would love that. All right. Yes, have a good day and tell your daughter I said hello. I will. I will. Thanks so much. Yes. Have a good day and tell your daughter I said hello. I will. I will. Thanks so much. Bye. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe and visit KateHancock.com so you don't miss out on the next episode.