Msnbc your business is sponsored by American Express. Dont do business without it. Your business is sponsored by American Express. Dont do business without it. Hi, everyone. Im jj ramberg. And welcome to your business, the show dedicated to helping your growing business. There are all kinds of Ways Companies can expand from their local area to becoming a national brand. And one of those ways is through partnerships. We headed out to chicago to learn how two foodrelated companies have joined together to help them both grow. We started in new england. Were here in chicago as well with plans to move down to new york city and d. C. Baltimore over the course of the coming year. Shay cokely is cofounder of bostonbased food box, a vending machine for fresh food. Thank you for your purchase. And he has big dreams, dreams that extend way beyond his home base in boston. Our goal is to have a lean box in every state in the United States and change the way the workforce eats. We have great envisions to scale the company way past two cities. Nancy sharp is the founder of food for thought, a multimillion midwest catering company. Recently she and shea formed a partnership called lean box great lakes. Its the first step toward make leanbox a national brand. It is always a little nerveracking sort of letting your brand into the hands of somebody else. But i really cant think of anyone that i can trust more than the team that we found here in chicago. Were going to hit a home run here and then were going to take it to the next market and the next market. Together these two hope to create a template for building similar partnerships around the country. Marrying local food preparers to the lean Box Technology system. I think the way that we have done this with chicago will have to be replicated in every major city. Its more of a farthpartnership a franchise. The goal is to have midsized office. The company is too small for a full fledge cafeteria but big enough to need fresh meals delivered to their workplace. We want stuff in the fridge we would eat. So something to get at trader joes or whole foods or a Natural Grocery store. Thats why shea and his team developed their own refrigerators and Delivery Software that coordinates inventory through point of sales data, track supply and demand at each location, collect payment and control waste. Our technology is really technology ecosystem. What someone sees in their office is our tip of the spear. After several years of development and trial and error, they produced a workable system which was ready to go. The first plan for us was 25 machines, two drivers, two routes. The next plateau was the driver, up to 50 sites. Today, a year and a half after installing the first 25 machines, shea says they have nearly a thousand clients in new england and are ready to take on the country. But how . Theres no road map, no playbook. We really wanted to test out the ability to go into a new market where it basically had no connections and start from the ground up knowing everything we knew from the first two years of our experience. Then he got a call from nancy sharp. She was looking to expand her offerings into Office Food Service and the lean box caught her eye. She called up and said, i like what you have been doing, we have been following you guys. As a startup guy, that gives me the warm fuzzies. They said, this is a market we want to get into. I knew we were Kindred Souls right then. I said, i wish i was 40 years younger and would do it all over again with them. The energy, the excitement around building something. Their personal chemistry was key to opening up the dialogue, but establishing an Effective Partnership requires much more than the warm fuzzies. Lean box seemed like just the thing nancy was looking for. Because of the changes that were happening in the workplace, we were getting asked over and over again to put fresh food in the workplace. But how do you keep it refrigerated . How do you have unattended pay . All the details lean box brought to us. Its really taking a strong Business Model that exists in boston and being able to jump onto the Strong Foundation that exists in chicago. That was the Perfect Match that really helped us treat the market in a very good way. Matsu masumaro was working for her back then. Today hes managing director for the recently formed lean box lakes partnership. It would be fair to say if we started from ground zero and didnt have an infrastructure in place, it may have taken much longer. After eight months thanks to nancys understanding of the chicago market and her network of vendors and blue ribbon client least, lean box stations are now being introduced across chicago. This morning i tried the breakfast burrito, which was excellent. And yesterday afternoon i had the turkey sandwich. Dan horton is president of the horton group, a thirdgeneration owned chicago Insurance Brokerage firm. His Company Recently installed the lean box in their break room. I think as an employee having something in the office encourages people to stay here and to congregate. For us, it also allowed a lot of employees who used to never leave their desk for lunch to actually come into a common area. Michelle trueblood is like hr managers in todays shifting work environment. She finds on top of all the other duties, shes in charge of welcoming a corporate environment. Its something that we have taken great pride in at the horton group. Lean box zeroed in on hr managers like michelle as their primary customers. We really focus on the office manager, that hr manager, that now has been given this pretty broad responsibility of developing a food program. And our product is very focused on how do we make that persons life easier. With the welldefined Customer Base and a protoetype partnership with a wellestablished local food service, it now looks like lean box has identified the beginnings of the national playbook. You have to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. And i want to light this thing on fire and grow as fast as possible. This Week Starbucks closed 8,000 Stores Across the country for a few hours to conduct antibias training for their employees. The training comes on the heels of an incident where starbucks manager called the police on two africanamerican who were waiting for a friend. Bias, conscious or unconscious is indeed an issue in our society. And we should all take a hard look at how they may be showing up in our companies. Gail britton is a consultant on this issue for businesses of all sizes. So good to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here. And so im glad we are talking about this because its a complicated topic. Absolutely. And i believe as i have been reading the feedback on starbucks employees and both good and bad about the starbucks training is, how do you get the conversation started in your company . I think theres no question that we need to be having these conversations. How do you do it so it doesnt become just another Training Exercise that goes in one ear and out the other . Its different with every firm. You need to understand what the firm is talking about, but its important to start the conversation with the leadership so that its a topdown approach. And the leadership can adopt the language of the training you use with the associates. Actually, lets take this a step back. So in our audience we have company that is are one person, we have companies that are thousands of people. If you are on the smaller side, you may think, not a problem in my company. Why do i have to worry about this. Do you . Absolutely. Especially if you are consumer facing. Starbucks had someone that represented them to the world or all their employees represent them to the world. So you absolutely have to make sure they are on the same page with how youre thinking about culture, with how youre thinking about race and how youre thinking about women. Pick an ism, you want to be sure that people are clear about your values and they express the values to your customer. So whether you have one person under you or a thousand. You need to be in sync with that person and its important before you hire somebody to have a conversation about how you want to have customers treated and dont assume. Because i dare say that woman has probably exercised something similar before she put out those two men. So im the leader of a company, right, lets say i have 50 people working for me, do i need to go get a formal Training Program . Or is this something that i can do a little more informally in my company . I think if its the latter, you risk doing something wrong that is offensive when trying to be inclusive. So thats why i would suggest, its selfserving, but i suggest you get someone to help you and you make certain that you are delivering the message all the time consistently. So its like feedback. No one ever wants to give feedback, but it is so critical. So if you hear someone say something, you know, you need to pull them aside and speak to them about what they said that you dont appreciate. I remember many years ago there was a training that went on and there was some guys in the back kind of heckling. And what the manager did at the close of the training was, he said to them, can i speak to you guys after this is over . So while he didnt embarrass them, everyone knew when he spoke to them it was going to be about the heckling they did during the diversity training. So there are ways you can do subtle things, there are ways to do more implicit things, but it has to happen. And the tone comes from the person thats the leader. And what happens during diversity training, right . What happens that truly does change behavior or change aware sentence. I think one of the most important things that happens is you start to show people the history of racism. You start to show people how privilege sets in and how everybody has some level of privilege. And you get them to stop and think about what theyre doing. And if you can get people to hit the pause button in their daily life and examine the decisions theyre making in the things they say, you can make progress. So it really is creating this awareness about what happened to people, what happened to africanamericans from the moment they got here and how they have experienced racism and continue to experience racism on the daily. Microaggressions, macroaggressions. Certainly what happened to Dante Robinson and he shawn nelson, that was macro. But Little Things happen to people where they are not waited on in stores. You know, where people look around them and say, who is next . Those kinds of things, and that is what you want to disrupt with your employees so that your brand is protected. So it is the first step to understand that there are two kinds, theres conscious bias and unconscious bias, and we need to attack both of these. And if we want our companies to succeed as well as our humanity to succeed, we need to be thinking about this. Yeah, i know this is a show about business, but i think that i would reverse that and say the humanity. Because then the business follows. Well, thank you for all the work that you do. Its so important that there are people out there like you who are thinking about this and talking to people and getting it out there. Im so happy you stopped by to talk about it. Im very happy to be here. Thank you so much. Both on and off the runway, model turned actress Brooklyn Decker does not shy away from leading with her fashion sense. Now this biz star is using technology to help other women be more efficient and sustainable when putting together their outfit of the day. Shes a model, an actress, wife to tennis player andy roddick and the mother of two. For Brooklyn Decker, there are not enough hours in the day. Im all about productivity, especially as a new mom. Anything to give me time to do the things i love im a fan of. So when it comes to shopping, her priority is efficiency. I shop 99 online. Im a big online shopper, i dont have time to do it in person. I hate trying things on, i just want it in my house. So when her friend told her about creating an online receipt, create a digital inventory of your closet, brooklyn instantly got it. It looks like a shopping website. When you think of the processes you go through during the day, the wardrobe is the one thing antiquated. The closet is the one thing you cant bring with you. The concept seemed like a winner to the duo. It was a product i felt and really wanted that was missing from the space. This tech has been applied to other fields just not the wardrobe. And it took females to create it. When it came to the name, whitney looked back to her former career. Whitney is working with dan rather who has a formality about him thats very old school. And he would say to people, oh, arent you dressed in your finery today . And shes like, dan always talks about his finery and feel like thats perfect. Like, wearing your best, your sundays best and it just stuck. Finery was born. But like with so many companies, the product they launched with turned out to not exactly be the thing users wanted. For us, we thought it would come when you saw your wardrobe, to see, i purchased this ten years ago and forgot it was in my closet. But once we had the wardrobe, the users said, okay, great, now what . Style us, tell what you say to buy and what to get rid of. So we had to find ways to do that. Were using a lot of machine learning, a lot of new technology, image recognition, for example, to basically give women ideas on how to wear their stuff. This quick loop of feedback and development is something brooklyn says she was used to from acting. I think when you are acting, you have to deal with rejection really well and you have to be able to pivot quickly. Your users will give you feedback right away. Our users are incredibly vocal sending us instagram messages and emails and are chatting with us. For the two founders, nothing is precious other than what the users think and how finery is making their lives easier. For us, its all about user trust. Theres very little technology that is applied to the pinpoints of women. Very little technology out there. And to be able to make a lot of headway in that space and say, were building something to give you your time back. That to me was huge. And to be really able to invest in something and build something, that could change the way that women are interacting with their stuff. It was exciting to me. Right now finery is free as they try to build up their users, but their goal is to have the Company Become every womans perfect fashion accessory. I think if you look at the entire Business Model, we really want to own all of the space. So really closing the retail loop. If you start, you want to see what you have. Then you want to really get smart recommendations and fill your wardrobe gaps. I hope that when women are thinking about getting dressed, which we do every single day, or think about getting ready for the date night or the wedding, finery is the first place they go. We are in the middle of our Second Season of our podcast, been there, built that. And this week im talking to jessica herring, the founder of stella dot. She tells me why shes running her second business different from her first. And what a taxi driver told her in her early 20s that changes her risk. If you get a chance to listen to it, if you do, please do me a favor and give me feedback. We love to hear from you. Go listen to it now for free. Again, its called been there, built that. Find it on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Im here with this weeks elevator pitcher, designer paris gordon. So good to see you. And you brought your model, kelly powers, great to see you also. Great to be here, thank you. You both look beautiful. These are your designs, yes . Yes. Tell me the name of your company. Style and grace. And the name of the label is pg by paris gordon. And is this selffunded or have you looked for funding before . This is selffunded. Is this is the first time you pitch to potential investors . This will be the first time. How do you feel . Great. You will do great. They will give you two advice. The first one is the cofounder and ceo of zola, an online wedding company. The fastest one in the industry. And mad is the founder and president of fleet financing based in dallas. Well go see what they think. Hi. Im paris gordon. And im introducing you to every girls best friend. The pg by paris gordon. Ill hand you this so i dont strip, but i want to show you the inside to show you the line that has shapewear built inside. We smooth, lift, contour and support you with a bra. And it all stays in place with this silicone lace hem. These are all made with rayon on the outside and the spandex on the inside to comfortably support you. We dress 18 to 80yearolds. And its a 21 billion market. So i think we are really on to something right now and looking for 300,000 in funding. Im going to trade with you here, matt. I need two numbers from you guys. One to ten, the first one is what do you think of the oduct . The second is, what do you think of the pitch . Im going to start with sharon because this feels like something your audience is looking for. You talk to brides all day long. So what do you think . Product and then pitch. For the product, i scored it with an 8. I think shapewear is the secret weapon for every woman the world over. I think the product that you just showed is one that feels very high quality. And so i think as a potential business and the potential to be a huge business its got a lot of potential there. The one question i would want to ask is, more details around the traction in the business so far, as well as how is this defensible beyond the patent. And the pitch just quickly went, what were the three points missing . What could she have done better . The pitch, i would have loved to hear the Global Market opportunity as well as hear a bit more about how you think youre going to grow the market and grow your business over thed grow your business over the coming year, but overall i loved it. Matt, what did you think . For someone who has never worn spanx before, this is pretty interesting to me. Turn it around. I gave it an 8 on the product. My wife loves this ty