692: Scott Harrison - Make a Bigger Ask, Design Everything with Excellence, Raising a Billion Dollars, Nobody Wants to Be Mid, and Why the Best Leaders Are Great Sales Professionals

**Ryan Hawk** (0:00)
My next book, The Price of Becoming, will be out in a couple of months.
In the meantime, I have sent it to a few authors who I deeply admire and look up to. One of them is Jack Carr, the incredible Navy Seal who's also written a number of New York Times bestsellers. And this is what Jack said about The Price of Becoming. Quote, The Price of Becoming is a clear-eyed look at transformation and the cost that comes with it. No hype, no shortcuts, just the truth about change and the discipline required to sustain it. This is a must read if you are serious about doing work that matters. Buy it, read it, then go forth and crush. Again, that's from Jack Carr, United States Navy Seal and number one New York Times best selling author. I would love if you would preorder The Price of Becoming right now. You can do it at learningleader.com or go straight to Amazon and order The Price of Becoming. Thank you so much.
Welcome to The Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader, Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of Charity Water, a non-profit that has raised over a billion dollars and brought clean water to over 21 million people across 29 countries. He's also the New York Times bestselling author of Thirst, and was the recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award in 2024 A few of the topics we discussed, Scott shares the few must have values that he looks for when hiring for a leadership role, really practical and helpful. Then we talked a lot about excellence and obsession, and our mutual love for those attributes and people. Then he tells a story of meeting with a Goldman Sachs partner, and how that person has made him think much, much bigger ever since.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:27)
Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Scott Harrison.

**Ryan Hawk** (2:33)
Scott, man, it's been way too long, eight years since we talked. It is awesome to have you back on The Learning Leader Show.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:39)
Welcome.

**Scott Harrison** (2:41)
I saw some clip floating around the Internet, and I definitely had less gray hair.

**Ryan Hawk** (2:45)
You look great.

**Scott Harrison** (2:46)
You haven't aged. You look amazing, man.

**Ryan Hawk** (2:50)
I'm curious though, you started with $15,000 from a birthday party. $20, yeah.

**Scott Harrison** (2:56)
It started with a $20 bill and then 15 grand.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:00)
Yeah.

**Ryan Hawk** (3:01)
Now, a billion?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:02)
Over a billion?

**Ryan Hawk** (3:03)
I mean, dude, how does it feel to even just say that out loud?

**Scott Harrison** (3:08)
I mean, listen, first of all, I love the founding story. Charity Water, over a billion dollars ago, was founded in a moment when 700 people came, and they put $20 in a box. At the end of the night, it was $15,000.
That built the very first water project in Uganda that gave people life-giving clean water, the first time they've ever had it. Twenty years later, even though the numbers have grown, two million people around the world have done something. They've said yes, and they've contributed over a billion dollars. It's really about their generosity. We're the guide in the story. They're the heroes. It feels like a whole lot less than I believed we would have done, or maybe, said another way, a whole lot less than we should have done.

**Ryan Hawk** (4:01)
Really?

**Scott Harrison** (4:01)
Two decades? Oh, Ryan, don't start. I mean, do you know how much opportunity is out there? I mean, this is the most basic need.

**Ryan Hawk** (4:10)
Well, I love, I mean, this is why you've done what you've done, but we are starting fast.

**Scott Harrison** (4:14)
Clean water for humans, and as we sit here, and we've got, what, two IPOs that are trillion dollar plus IPOs that are coming in the next couple of weeks. We've raised a billion dollars in 20 years to go help 21 million people get water, and 700 million people right now are still drinking dirty water.
Ten percent of the world is drinking dirty water while we look for water on Mars, 92 million miles away, and while we launch trillion dollar IPOs. So, yeah, I think we've done a little, very little. Hopefully, we're in the second inning.

**Ryan Hawk** (4:54)
When you were getting started and you got those donations, 20 bucks at a time, did you set goals? Did you set a, hey, I want to hit this? Or was that even too early to even think that way?