[00:00:01] Speaker A: Want to protect your business. The time is near. You've given it heart. Now get it in gear. It's passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Richard Gerhardt, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. Not an attorney, but I work at Gearhart Law doing the marketing, and I have my own startups.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to Passage to profit, everyone. The road to entrepreneurship, where we talk with startups, small businesses, and discuss the intellectual property that helps them flourish.
[00:00:35] Speaker C: Phil Toussaint with ecopreneur, ecopreneurmedia.com and I went to his website. This is very cool. Phil. Please tell us what you're doing.
[00:00:45] Speaker D: Absolutely. Yeah. So we are volunteer platform, and we work with students in schools across the country to help them really just get their community service hours. You know, really kind of going back to your point, Sonia, of motorizing, really just getting them outside of the classroom and getting involved and learning and doing those types of things. So it's really, really fun and it.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: Has a positive impact.
[00:01:07] Speaker D: It does.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: So what kind of projects are they getting involved in?
[00:01:10] Speaker D: So there's over 50 different categories that we have on our platform. So it really ranges from tree planting to beach cleanups to city cleanups, whatever that may be, specifically. And really just those students can get involved and really just be a part of those projects and fulfill those hours, get those kind of things done, and feel good for doing so. The cool thing about our platform, though, is that you get rewarded for doing so. We give out points to these students every time that they're volunteering for, every hour, and then they can redeem that towards a marketplace that we've built into our tech. So it's really, really interesting.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: That's great. What motivated you to start this project?
[00:01:45] Speaker D: It really kind of goes back to when I was in college. I went on an Everglades Field trip project. I never camped in my life. I had to camp for ten days down there, straight up in the middle of it, and I was like, man, this is crazy. It was just a surreal experience for me, but it opened me up to a lot of the climate change kind of effects that they were dealing with, as well as different kinds of crazy things that I saw firsthand. And it opened my mind, and I was like, I really want to get involved in this work. I want to be a part of the action that's going to be behind changing our world and making it better. And that's kind of like where it all started at that point. I kind of moved forward with it. Started it off, really as a YouTube channel we were doing at the time. And at that point, it was just educating people about sustainability, getting involved, learning about different problems and things that you really kind of removed from at the end of the day. And then at that point, it was really kind of the pandemic hit crazy time for everybody, and it forced us to kind of pivot and we wanted to really just listen to our audience, see what people wanted, and people wanted volunteering, so we gave that.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: That's really great, because everybody wants to do something right, especially young people who maybe have a little time. They're looking for a community to be a part of a positive community.
[00:03:03] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: So this is a great opportunity for them to get involved and meet other people and put something on their resume.
[00:03:11] Speaker D: Exactly, yeah. And the really cool thing about it is that it goes beyond the classroom. As I mentioned, there's service learning that comes with that. And you see an uptick with students just performing in the classroom because of the fact that they're getting that exposure and just being able to go and learn and do different things, which is really, really cool. There's also just a lot of studies behind students being able to outperform other students just based off of doing this work. Even college students that want to get involved and they're looking to get a position outside of school and really get into the real world. We've seen that just being part of these things and doing this work allows you to excel and stand out amongst your peers.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: So how does the process work? So there are two sides to your website, right? Yes. The people that want volunteers and the people that want to volunteer.
[00:03:52] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: So let's say I'm looking for somebody to clean up my town. I go to your website.
[00:03:57] Speaker D: You go to my website. So you would go on to ecoprintermedia.com. You can sign up whether you're a municipality or in an NGO, you can go on, pretty much make a profile, and it's as simple as kind of an eventbrite where you could just throw up a project. And really they're just kind of like a landing page that would be created for your project. From there, volunteers. We work with the schools directly, so high schools, colleges, universities across the US that are looking to get their students involved in things like that. They would just go ahead, make a profile, and then from there, those students can get involved and start signing up for those projects. It's as simple as that.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Great idea. Thank you, Kenya.
[00:04:32] Speaker E: How are you monetizing the platform?
[00:04:34] Speaker D: So we charge schools a flat yearly rate subscription to be a part of our platform.
[00:04:39] Speaker E: And then the other end user who's like the student, how does that work? When they come onto the platform, do they pay?
[00:04:44] Speaker D: So, no, the student doesn't pay. It's all part of the package kind of subscription that the school is paying for, essentially for their students to get access to that.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: Nice.
[00:04:52] Speaker D: So it really allows for the students to just make a profile, go ahead and get involved and get started. What's really cool is we're building also the technology. We just got an investor. So it's been really exciting for us to kind of ramp things up as we have the base platform. But now we're kind of building the school portal, essentially for the students and the schools to be a part of. What's really cool about that is it's going to allow for groups to be created and athletic directors and things like that to get involved and really be hands on with their students, and especially athletes as well, that are looking to fulfill those hours and build their resumes and things.
[00:05:24] Speaker E: Wow, that's great.
[00:05:25] Speaker D: Absolutely. It's been so exciting. We've started partnerships this year, so we've had a bunch of municipalities in Massachusetts. New Jersey is where we kind of started off, and we started to build our team over the summer. We also have the YMCA, Salvation Army. We've worked with Camden, New Jersey. It's been really exciting to have a lot of different municipalities and know starting to be a part of the platform and expanding with us. What we're doing right now at the moment is really because of the new investor that we had just gotten, we're going to be building the school portal more in depth and also just more kind of features for the municipalities, for them to be able to get the help that they need. What's really interesting down the road is we kind of see it as more the billion dollar platform kind of like goal is to involve brands, and that's where they kind of become a part of the marketplace. They can give up rewards that students can earn through the points that they get. On our platform, we have a really cool term that we coin it called incentivize activism, essentially allowing for people to do good but get incentivized for it. So it's rewarding good behavior, essentially.
[00:06:24] Speaker C: That's excellent. I'm assuming that this is going on a lot of college applications.
[00:06:29] Speaker D: Absolutely. That's the biggest thing, too. It's allowing for those kids to build essentially a service resume and allowing for them to be able to then showcase that and say, hey, this is what I've done. This is the work that I've helped in local communities, really collective local impact. The next six months for us is really just going to be to be able to not only build the platform, but make sure we get the right word out. For example, we're looking at National Honor Society as like an organization we want to work with to be able to say, we know you guys have millions of students across the US. We want to be able to service to them and give them this platform, essentially to be able to utilize it, really just making sure that the team is core and perfect as can be for us to be able to execute accordingly.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Most entrepreneurial ventures have some sort of team. What kind of positions do you have and how do you attract team members to be part of your team?
[00:07:17] Speaker D: The biggest thing that we say with Entrepreneur is you work for the mission, not the company. And that's extremely important. When you're building a company, you want to make sure that you're kind of essentially getting people on the mission and what we're trying to do and the good that we're doing. The really cool thing about that is people believe in that mission and they want to be a part of that and they want to help grow it. And that's where we've started to see that alignment overall. So when it comes to myself, my co founder, who's the COO, and we also have a design team, we have a marketing team, sales team, development team, and they're all kind of based in different areas. One cool thing is we've adapted. So in the times that we live in know there's a lot of remote teams, especially kind of hybrid and things like that. Right. So we've taken that into account and we're know, we have our developers, some of them in Lithuania, that are going to be meeting with us in a couple, have, you know, somebody down in Dallas, Texas, we have people out in California. So we're really kind of spreading out and just trying to kind of really build our team abroad and really taking that into account as we're growing.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: So one of the things that you're talking about is the website that seems to be like sort of the linchpin of the organization. How did you find somebody that you had confidence in and wanted to hire to kind of hand over the whole thing to them? Right?
[00:08:33] Speaker D: Yeah. So I went through probably three to four different developers just to find that person, and it was actually a connection through my girlfriend which was kind of funny. She was the one that introduced me to the developers that are on my team now because she was building a platform herself that was oriented around babysitting. From there, we were able to then kind of like pick their brain, do some testing, and it just worked out. When it comes to our platform, there's kind of a three sided marketplace, essentially of municipalities and NGOs, schools and students, and then as well as in the future, the brands, the brands that can come on and essentially sponsor and be a part of this, allowing for that tangible kind of impact, which is really exciting. It all intricately works because we did a lot of that research and outreach, essentially.
[00:09:14] Speaker C: Great. So where do people go to find this?
[00:09:17] Speaker D: Absolutely. So we're all over social media, Ecopreneur Media. You'll find myself ecopreneur Phil as well, on there. And then we also have our website, ecopreneurmedia.com. So if you guys have any questions or want to reach out, if you want to be a part of this in any way, shape, or form, I'm excited to chat with you.
[00:09:34] Speaker C: Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Phil Toussaint. That was excellent.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Before we go, I'd like to thank the passage to profit team, Noah Fleischmann, our producer, Alicia Morrissey, our program director. Our podcast can be found tomorrow anywhere you find your podcast. Just look for the passage to profit show. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and Instagram. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
