Founder's Story - How to Live a Life of Purpose | Ep. 51 with Carol Baskin of Big Cat Rescue

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Carole Baskin is an American big-cat rights activist and CEO of Big Cat Rescue, a non-profit animal sanctuary based near Tampa, Florida. She has used social media such as Facebook and YouTube and her "The Cat Chat" podcast to promote activism against private zoos. She has run this Tampa based non profit since 1992 and has garnered international attention to the plight of captive big cats on CNN, Animal Planet, Discovery, U.S. News & World Report, People Magazine, The Today Show, Sports Illustrated, and Netflix. For more info on guests and future episodes visit KateHancock.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ibhshow/supportOur 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. Hi everyone, this is Kate Hancock for the Inspired by Her podcast and today I have an amazing guest, Carol Baskin. Hi Carol. Hello you cool cats and kittens. I know, I'm so honored seeing you in person. I know we met on Clubhouse. That has been such an experience. I've really enjoyed getting to know everybody there and you are like everywhere. I know, like, right. So how are you, you're loving it so far. Did you get a lot of good from it? Tell me your experience. I really have gotten an awful lot of good from it. And what I like most about the platform is

that it's audio and I'm kind of audio centric anyway. I listen to podcasts all the time and books on tape and that sort of thing. But what I find unique about it is that you really get to know the people, I think, a lot better than you can by following their pictures or their videos on some of the other social channels because it's so much more personal. Yeah, absolutely. So I can't wait to hear your story. I know I was able to hear it in the room, what it takes to run a million dollar biz. And thank you for stopping by here and there. And thank you for being part of the marathon. And can you believe we've been running it for 31 days straight, 24 hours a day? I don't know how you do that. You must have people from all around the world to be able to keep that thing on and going

yeah it takes a lot of um team effort and so what we're doing is we have a moderator from australia and uk to kind of take over that you know while we are asleep here in in the u.s so um it is truly is the power of a team. And thank you for being part of it. Well, thank you. I'm curious how many people you have on that team in order to make that work. We do have about 200 moderators globally. Yes. And I have about 150 of them in a back channel.

So we communicate like seconds seconds every second there's like a lot of communications out there and we've had over 190 000 listeners total yes and our goal is to inspire entrepreneurs so um it's truly truly exciting that is absolutely amazing yeah yeah we do kind of the same thing with our social channels, Facebook, especially where we have close to the same number, about 200 people that are constantly answering the questions in our Facebook groups. And so I know the power of having people that are committed to a single effort, really just having them always on is just, it does so much good for whatever it is that you're trying to do. Yeah. Well, thank you. And so I'm going to go back deep tied to

you, Carol. Where did you grow up? I was born at the San Antonio Lackland Air Force Base, and we lived in San Antonio until I was about three years old and then we moved back to Tampa and we moved so many times I forget how many times now I counted once and I was like oh my gosh that was a ridiculous number of times that we moved but we moved between Tampa Florida and Charleston West Virginia and a place called Sissonville West Virginia and Panama City Florida and just all over the place until I left home at the age of 15. And then I hitchhiked and was on the road for gosh, maybe a couple of years before I finally settled down back in Tampa. Wow. So what moment, what moment from your

childhood are you most proud of? My childhood? Well, that's a good question. I think we were living in a trailer park. My father was the pilot for the governor of West Virginia, Arch Moore at the time. And I was probably about eight years old, maybe. And I had a couple of friends, Ada and her little brother, I forget his name. And their father was this raging drunk and he beat the wife and beat the kids all the time. And they would hang out at my house just to stay away from him. And they came to me one day and they told me that he had shot the cat. And he had shot the cat because it had gotten up on his garbage cans. And so I was just outraged by that being somebody who just absolutely loved cats. And so I remember just mustering every bit of strength that I had in my little eight-year-old body and storming up

the steps to the trailer and banging on that door and telling that guy that he had better watch out he had better never shoot at another cat or hurt another cat or he was gonna hear from me I'm just you know tears are streaming down my face because I'm so scared but I I just stood there staring at him through the tears and he blinked I mean he was, he didn't know what to say. And I felt like it backed down this huge bully. And I was like, and I know you're never here that you're beating on your kids or your wife again, either. I was just on a roll. And so it gave me a lot of confidence that I could take on anybody if I could take on this scary neighbor. Wow. So you're eight year old then. So tell me where did it start that, you know, your passion of taking care of cats and that's your love, your love for animals. Can you tell

me what was that behind it? Well, it was also around that same period of time when I discovered that domestic cats and kittens were being killed in shelters due to overpopulation. And I vowed to put an end to that. And so I would work as many as three jobs at a time. I was always the kid in the neighborhood who would round up all the other kids and organize them into teams to go out and mow lawns or wash cars or wash trailers or sell popcorn and lemonade on the street corners. And we would all work together and, you know, they'd spend all of their money going to buy gum and candy and soda pop and

such. But I kept stocking mine away because I felt like there was something really important that I wanted to do for domestic cats and that it was going to be very expensive. And I carried that through into my adult life. I often would work three jobs at a time, just building and building and throwing all of that money back into building whatever thing I was working on at the time to try and create an income that would be a passive income that would enable me to do this kind of work. And so I got totally sidetracked by big cats, because I just thought, how hard could that be to fix you know when I heard cats were being killed for their fur I was like well I can fix that when I heard people

had tigers as pets I was like I can fix that and I was really naive because it's been now close to 30 years trying to fix those problems but I feel like I'm getting really close now. Oh, wow. Now tell me, what kind of kid are you in high school, Carol? In high school, I was quiet. I started out in private schools. And so when, how old was I when that happened? When I was in the ninth grade, my parents went through a financial disaster, and they couldn't afford to keep both me and my little brother in private schools, and he was six years younger than me and way, way less confident, and so they decided that they'd

keep him in private school and that I would go to public school for the 10th grade. And that was a shock to me because I had been in these little, you know, religious, very protected type environments and didn't have any idea what the real world was like. And I was utterly, utterly taken by surprise at how horrible people could be to each other. And so, you know, my, my 10th grade year, I can remember being on the football team and I was really good at football because all of my friends growing up were boys. And so I always played with the guys and I was aggressive and fast and I had good coordination. And so I was on the team with girls and I played like I was playing with boys and oh my gosh, those girls did not like that. And they dragged me into the bathroom and started trying to cut my hair off. And I was just kicking and screaming with everything I had.

One of the guys that I knew in high school actually saved me from all of that. But my high school experience was not good. And so that year, I was talking to a guidance counselor. And he said, you know, with your education from private schools, you're just buying your time here. In fact, I was teaching the 10th grade English class, while the English teacher was completely missing in action. And she'd just say, you take care of them, Carol, you teach them how to read. And I was like, they're in the 10th grade and they don't know how to read yet for crying out loud. They didn't. And so it, you know, when I was told that I was just biding my time, I was like, well, I don't need this. And so when I left home, I never did go back to school. I got my GED, but never did anything with it. Gotcha. Wow. They asked you to be, to be the teacher,

to replace your English teacher. So that's, that's amazing. Now tell me, what was your journey like to get where you are? Oh, wow. Well, I left home at the age of 15. Like I said, I was working three jobs. And by the time I was 17, I was married. And my husband didn't want me to work. He was very possessive and didn't want me going out of the house. And so I was quite isolated for a while. I had my daughter when I was 19. And when I was 19, I met Don Lewis, who was at that time the love of my life. And we started investing in real estate together. And Don couldn't read or write past the first grade level. But he had heard as he was standing in the bank one day, he heard the bankers talking about a delinquent mortgage that they had.

And one of them said, you know, I'd sell this $20,000 mortgage for $2,000 just to write it off my books. Well, Don thought that sounded pretty good. So he brought it home to me and brought the paperwork home. And he said, this has got to be, there's got to be something wrong with this. You can't make that kind of money on a deal.

See what the issue is. And so I read through it and I said, you know, I think we can make some money with this because if we pay 2000 for it and we take it to the courthouse steps and sell it, then we'll make the difference between the 2000 and the 20,000, which is 18,000. Or we might be able to go to the owner and get them to pay a lower amount that they might be able to afford and have better income coming in that way. Or we could bid on the property at the courthouse steps ourselves and then maybe sell it. And so

that's what we ended up doing. The people weren't willing to make their payments on it. And we made, I think, like $40,000 on that first deal. And so he was like, well, we got to find more of these, see if you can find more banks that'll do this. And so this was in 1984, before people were flipping properties and doing all the stuff they do now. So I went around to all of the banks and I said, I want to buy your delinquent mortgages. Anything where you're ready to write it off your books, I'll go out and take a look at it and give you a cash offer. And so with that $40,000, we parlayed that into cash, probably right around $5 million by the time I was 31. And that's when we started the sanctuary because we had the passive income set up to be able to take care of our day-to-day lives. And now we wanted to give back in some way. And we didn't start out to create a sanctuary for big cats we just ended up in a situation where a bobcat was being sold to a taxidermist and I wasn't going to let that happen and then we ended up at a fur farm and there were 56 bobcats and lynx they were going to kill for

their fur and you wouldn't go let that happen so we came home with 56 bobcats and lynx and by the time you do that you've kind of got a sanctuary going so it's been a long hard slog to change the laws so people can't get their hands on these animals in the first place and to do away with the fur industry which finally is just pretty much a dead industry and we're getting this close to passing our federal bill which will ban the private possession of big cats and ban cub petting, which is the number one reason for so many of these animals ending up in abusive situations. So it's all been good, but it wasn't anything that I ever set out to do. Yeah, well, I love that story of you flipping and buying the ligament property. I remember I purchased actually a trailer for my father's so I could use it for

a warehouse for my e-commerce store. And I flipped it. I sold it after a year and I made 40 grand doing nothing. I was like, you can actually make money off it. I was shocked. Like you didn't have to do much. Just like sit there for 12 months and you make money. I was like, can I get more of this? I didn't know that's how you started. That's amazing. It came at a good time for here in the U S in the eighties, we were going through the, um, resolution trust issues. And so there were a lot of properties that were in foreclosure and we were picking up properties super cheap and we could hold onto them or the bread and butter of my business is to buy a mobile home lot and then buy a mobile home and put the mobile home on the lot, put in the well and septic and all of that, and then sell it to somebody and

hold the mortgage. So people who either can't get bank financing because they have some bankruptcy or something on their credit or they're new buyers and they don't have any credit financing because they have some bankruptcy or something on their credit, or they're new buyers and they don't have any credit, what they have to do with me is make 12 payments on time. And if they make them on time, then I deed the property over to them and hold the mortgage. And it keeps the payments the same for them, and they never have to come up with a down payment. So it's a really good situation for the buyer and for me, because as long as I've got somebody making monthly payments all the time, and I'm not having to worry about reselling the property and fixing it up and all of that, then that's the easiest kind of work for me. But as you know,

if you're in real estate, it's not all easy. There's always going to be some of those tenants that do horrible things to your properties. Yeah. I can imagine. Well, I've heard that's really a really good business to get into, but the headache and the stress that running it, it's a lot, right? Yeah. So Carol, what was the most challenging experience you've had to overcome? The most challenging? Yes. Challenging. I think the most challenging thing that i had to overcome was after 9-11 hit and at that period of time all of the tourism to well probably all the tourism in the u.s definitely to florida stopped and all of the donations to charities other than those that were involved in 9-11 pretty much were not able to raise funds because everybody was so focused on thinking this

is the end of the world that we were going to launch into having people on our shores that were attacking us all the time. And people were donating rightfully to those who were impacted by the 9-11 attacks. And big cats were not high on anybody's list then. And I actually got down to the last $20,000 in the bank. It costs us between $3.5 and $4 million every year to take care of the cats that we have here. And I was down to the last $20,000. I mean, we're talking about in a week, these cats aren't getting fed. I got to figure out something else to do that's going to

feed them. And it was at that time, I took the last bit of money that I had and I hired somebody. I'd never hired a consulting firm before, but I hired a consulting firm to do a SWOT analysis, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And for all the work that they did, the only thing that I was willing to look at was the opportunities because I didn't want to think about the threats. I didn't want to think about my weaknesses. I just focused on what are the opportunities. And the opportunity, weirdly enough, was that we were considered Florida's best kept secret. Nobody knew we existed. And so I started going out to all of the like Chamber of Commerce meetings for all of the

chambers in all of the counties surrounding here. I started meeting politicians, meeting people at city and county government level, talking at rotary clubs and getting people interested in the cats. And that is what pulled us through. And we were able to, you know, all of the cats survived. We all survived. I had to sell all of my jewelry, all of my, you know, my favorite car. I had a beautiful little roadster that, oh God, I love that car, but I had to sell it to raise money to feed the cats. But we made it through that. and so I think that was the worst challenge that I ever went through was getting to the point where I was looking at these cats and thinking because there was nowhere for them

to go and it's like the only option is to euthanize them rather than have them starve to death and that would have been horrible I could not have faced that so I had to come up with something and I think most people when you're pushed up against the wall like that, that's when you come up with some really clever ideas. Figure it out. Yes. Well, thank you for sharing that. Now, Carol, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? Wow. You know, knowing what I know now is that it's not what you know but who you know and being kind of a loner I never reached out to other people I never tried to build those relationships until 9-11 hit and I was forced to do that and if I had done that so much earlier, if I'd done that 20 years earlier, I think that it would have made my real estate business much more profitable. I think it would have made the

sanctuary much more financially stable. It took us 11 years for the sanctuary to actually become able to take care of itself. I had to fund it with my real estate business for the first 11 years. But if I had been more tapped into the power of building relationships with other people, I think I could have done it faster. Wow, that's amazing. I hope Clubhouse is helping that to you. It is. It's so fascinating that you can put into Clubhouse what your interests are, and I have such varied interests that you can put it in there. And then you have all of these rooms full of these amazing people that are able to

guide you through things that trying to struggle through it on my own. I will keep beating my head against a wall until the wee hours of morning until I figure something out. But I can go on Clubhouse and just say, how do you do this? And somebody there knows. It saves so much time. Yeah, I know. I know. That's amazing, the power of Clubhouse. Now, Carol, I know we talk about this in the room. Do you think the Netflix Tiger King helps your brand, or does it hurt or help your brand? I'd like to hear from you? I don't think it has helped my brand any. I think where it has been helpful is on two counts. One is before Tiger King, most people didn't even know that this whole industry of taking cubs away from their mothers

at birth and then pimping them out for pay-to-play props and then discarding them into backyards and basements or the illegal trade in their parts. Most people didn't even know that existed. And when I would go to Congress and say, we need a bill that bans this, they'd be like, don't we already have a bill that bans that? Surely we don't allow that. And they just wouldn't take it seriously. Now they've seen Tiger King, for good or bad, but they've seen that it really is a problem and that these are just despicable people who are abusing these animals. And so it's caused them, I think, to take stock of our current situation. And I think it will help us get our federal bill passed. As far as for me personally, it didn't hurt me any. Like,

we didn't lose any donors from it, but we didn't pick up a lot of donors from the exposure either. I was worried that we might not pick up any donors after people had seen that, but that wasn't the case. So that was good. But it's really hard to say that it hurt or helped. Thank you. And think back to the time where you felt transformed and how did you change and why? Feeling of transformation. When I first heard The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, I realized that this was what worked in my life, but I didn't know how to verbalize it. Like I knew that it was important to stay focused on what you want and be grateful for what you have and that being in a good mindset was necessary for having the opportunities that I had, but I'd never heard

anybody put it into words. And I think she and her team did such an expert job of that. And I'm thinking that was probably like what, 2005, 2006. And so, pardon? Yeah, about that time. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, hearing that when I first heard it, I bought the CD and I listened to that and watched it. I watched it on TV over and over and over again. I listened to the audio version of it. I bet you a hundred times where I felt like I could probably repeat it word for word because I felt like it was so on target and so powerful. And I wanted to incorporate every bit of that into my life. So you can imagine how excited I was when I came into a clubhouse room the other day, and John Asaroff was in there. And it was like, Oh, my God.

Yes, I do love I joined some of his class, the millionaire mindset. And he sat by once in a while in the room. I mean I mean like it is truly the power of clubhouse this guy is amazing yeah yeah wow that's that's thank you for sharing that story now um Carol what advice I I love that flipping and buying delinquent properties that you started um in the 1980s um what advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneurs? I think the most important trait that entrepreneurs have, and I'm betting this is true of you too, is persistence. It's, you know, no matter what,

just sticking with it and staying the course and always looking for ways to do better and be better and to find more people who are of like mind that you can bring into your circle who can help you with your mission. I think all of that has been just so helpful. All right, thank you. And can you pressed me to be out there selling Amway door to door as a child. And were you good at it? Oh, yeah. My seven year old shows up on your front doorstep with her little briefcase full of lipstick and dish soap. And what are you going to say? Toothpaste. I remember the toothpaste at Amway.

Yeah. A glister, glisten, something like that. So I would have said that she probably inspired me most as far as business goes, but as far as being a business leader, I think that that inspiration has actually come from my daughter. And yeah, because we both run the sanctuary together and she's been doing this work with the big cat since she was 12. But she, she gets the fact that she really gets people. She understands people. Whereas I tend to think everybody's like me, that we're all just driven

and we want to accomplish, you know, the best that we can for these animals and that we don't need to be patted on the head or encouraged to do it because we're going to do it regardless. And that's not the way people are. And my daughter realizes that people need that reassurance and that encouragement and,

you know, all of the gratefulness and showing them ways that you have noticed the hard work they put in. And she is so good at that. She's actually inspired. We have an entire committee here at the sanctuary called the Glitter Squad. And their job is to make sure that all of the volunteers, because we have over 100 volunteers, to make sure that the volunteers are always feeling appreciated for what they do. Wow. How old is your daughter? She's 40. She'll be 41 in July.

Really? About my age, you don't look like you have 41. I'll be 60 in a couple days. Really? You look actually good. Well, thank you. Yeah, no, no. In honesty, you look great. And Carol, what was one of your deepest motivation in life? My biggest motivation is a world where all wild cats live free. And that might sound like a stupid thing to dedicate your life to.

It's like, it's just cats, you know, do something important, not just cats. But for cats to live free in the wild, it means that the ecosystems have to be intact. It means that the people who live near lions and tigers and leopards have to be living in such a way that they are willing to coexist with these very dangerous predators. And so what I see for the future of big cats is if you can imagine all of the places where these cats live free, having these 360 cameras throughout their range that are constantly transmitting to the internet, everything that those cameras see.

And the people who live in those areas are the ones responsible for making sure that the cameras are working and that they're clean and that they give the viewer who is either viewing on a phone or in a headset a really good view of what's happening there. And if you think about like YouTube videos always have ads on them. So if all of the ad revenue and the subscription fees for these feeds were to go into those local economies so that they had an incentive to not cut down the forest for firewood, you know, they've got more money coming in that they can feed their families and take care of themselves without pillaging the natural resources around them, then they have a reason to protect these wild animals so that the entire world can enjoy them. That kind of a symbiotic relationship

on a global scale is what's going to protect our life support system for all of us. So for me, that's my biggest motivator. Yeah, absolutely absolutely i actually grew up in an island in the philippines and when i was a kid i would go to waterfalls i don't see monkeys everywhere and now abyssal like where are they like i want them hanging around because it's such a bring like it seems like you only see it in the movie but i was able to experience it when i was a kid and they're gone oh gosh wow i Wow. I think the Philippines is still being so wild and beautiful. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. This is the island where I grew up and we have this beautiful waterfalls and they used to be hanging there and playing around. And

it looks like in the storybook, right? You only see it because the island where I grew up, it looks like a King Kong island, but that kind of thing. But like, I'm kind of sad where the monkeys are all gone. Maybe we have so much tourists. It could be, you know, they're disappearing, but yeah, that is such a great passion of yours. And I'm so inspired. Now, Karen, how do you want to be remembered? I don't think it's necessary that anybody remember me or my name. What I hope at the end of my life is that I have left it in a better situation, that I've left the planet in a better situation than it was. I'm really hoping that by the time I'm done, that there will be these strategies in play that will protect all of these wild animals in their natural

environments for everybody to enjoy going forward. So inspiring. Thank you, Carol. It's just a pleasure getting a chance to talk to you. And where can they find you? Where can they do donations for your sanctuary? Where can they find you? They can find us at bigcatrescue.org. And we are on all of the social sites as Big Cat Rescue. Thank you for having me, Kate. Thank you. This is such a pleasure. It's so nice.

Thank you, Carol. And happy Memorial Day. Thank you. You too. Bye. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And visit katehancock.com Thank you. You too. Bye.