Balancing Profit and Social Responsibility with Robin Gagnon

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:16)
I tell you what Mike, though, we had excessive turbulence. So pro tip for excessive turbulence, put on an action movie and then you're just bouncing around and you don't notice it. But anyway, welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with my co-host, Mike Liwski. Today, we're diving into a topic many businesses wrestle with, how to strike the right balance between financial growth and social responsibility. Is it possible to scale a successful company while remaining true to a deeper mission? That's what we're searching for, people doing it. And we're joined by someone who's lived that journey firsthand, leading a fast growing franchise advisory firm while staying anchored in purpose-driven values. Mike, tell us about our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:01)
Oh, Stephen, I'd be delighted to welcome to our followers. So yeah, our guest today, Stephen, is Robin Gagnon. She is the founder or co-founder and CEO of We Sell Restaurants. And Robin is a highly decorated business leader, franchise industry leader, in fact, and a best-selling author, speaker and advocate for socially consciousness entrepreneurship, which we know we're really big on here on our show. And under her leadership, We Sell Restaurants has become one of the largest and most respected restaurant brokerage brands in the US, helping business owners buy, sell and franchise restaurants across the country. She brings with her as well, a unique blend of strategic insight and empathy, along with mission-driven leadership to her work. And we're thrilled to have her here with us today, Stephen. Robin, welcome to the show.

**Robin Gagnon** (2:00)
So excited to be here. Thank you so much, both of you, for the opportunity.

**Mike Liwski** (2:05)
Absolutely. We're really happy that you were able to make it. So maybe, Robin, just to sort of kick things off, when you think about balancing profit with social responsibility, what does that look like in your world, in your industry?

**Robin Gagnon** (2:21)
So I think I would lead off by saying that profit and purpose really can align. They can go together. If you think about our brand, we have sell in our name, and that can come off as very overbearing, potentially aggressive. And so we have to temper that with a set of core values that says we are connected and empathetic to what's going on in the business community that we serve. We wrote a book many years ago called Appetite for Acquisition, and I actually said in that book, and I truly believe that, that restaurants are the social threads of our lives. It's where we break bread and we share wine and we communicate and we tell stories. So when you're selling a restaurant, you're not selling a thing. We're selling the American dream to someone, and we're selling someone's dreams to another party. And many times that person who is in that face of their life, where they're saying, this is no longer for me, has maybe experienced a disappointment. Maybe they have served the community for many, many years. But they're connected and they're really, restaurants are a cultural phenomenon. So I think it's unlike really any other business model to service that directly. And then we have these buyers who are really living out their American dream. And so I tell people that we sell the American dream. It's just one restaurant at a time.

**Mike Liwski** (3:54)
That is such a good point because so much happens at a restaurant, right? You can maybe have a business deal or a family meeting or a celebration. So much goes on, right? So it really is woven into the fiber of our community. You make such a great point about that.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:10)
Yeah, Mike, for people on video, over Mike Shoulder is this Harbor View, but right behind him was this community restaurant that everybody loved. It was called the Harbor Grill. I felt so sad when it closed because they're doing reconstruction and stuff, but this was the community restaurant, the place where everyone gathered. I'm like, man, we as a community let them down by not fighting for this. Robin, we needed you there to help find a new owner for them as they were retiring.
Your company seems to operate in both lanes of being purpose-driven and profitable. You've touched on it a little bit. When you started, how did you build that into the foundation of your business?

**Robin Gagnon** (4:56)
Well, I would say this.
First part of my early business career was as a small business owner. So I was the person whose mortgage was, whose title to their home was on the inventory. So securing that, and then I moved into corporate America. So I kind of lived both worlds, and I came to this point where I said, I want my own business that's going to straddle both of those. I want to act like a small business and build into a bigger business community. We started with our core values, and I know a lot of companies have core values, and it's kind of an overdone thing, but we literally will not have a meeting in our office without bringing up our core values and talking about them. And I will also say this, we give ourselves a lot of grace because a set of core values, one, they don't live in a desk drawer, they're up on the walls, they're on our glass walls, they're throughout in our environment, but we really believe they're in the fiber, and they're also aspirational, and we have to give ourselves grace to know that we do know that every day is game day and we act accordingly, but some days we're just not going to get to that customer in time, or we know that we want to act with integrity and only make agreements we're willing and able to keep, but then we don't get back to that customer when we said we would, or we don't treat a co-worker with that magnitude of respect. So I think there has to be a balance between what you believe and what you put forward, and then just also knowing you have to give yourself and others around you the grace to know that you're going to fail and continue to aspire to be the best that you can be. But if you don't have that core set of values to begin with, you have no guidelines, right? You're just operating always on the fringes of what could be out there. And we take it seriously. We bring new franchisees into our system. If they can't align with our core values, that's more important than almost anything else. It's more important in their background and their experience. And all those things, because think about that business owner. You mentioned the business owner in the background. That business owner, he's facing pain, he's facing loss. He needs someone who's going to have great empathy for whatever that situation is that he's going through and help him to transfer that. And oftentimes, they just need someone to listen. So we have to be attuned to those values in order to help people through transitions in their life. Because when everything is going well and nothing's changing, life is easy. It's those transitions that trip us all up.