Conscious Capitalism: Business Beyond Profit with Rachel Fine Wilson

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
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** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach with my co-host, Mike Liwski and our special guest today, who we'll introduce in a second. So companies built purely on profit, but often lose their edge when culture and connection and community are not prioritized. But when business serves people's purpose and place, that performance often follows. So today we're going to dive into how Conscious Capitalism can transform industries, drive meaning and build brands that matter. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:53)
Steve, I'm absolutely delighted to. With us today is Rachel Fine Wilson. She's the founder and CEO of Gigglewaters. I love the name. Now, Rachel has built a unique hospitality brand that really blends immersive experience with thoughtful community engagement, which we're really about on this show. And with that, has led to a lot of franchise growth. Now, with more than a decade of experience in business management and franchising and education sectors, she now leads Gigglewaters in redefining how brands connect, lead and scale, which we know our audience is really going to want to hear about. So, Rachel, we are so thankful to have you on the show. Welcome to our show today.

**Rachel Fine Wilson** (1:41)
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:43)
So, Rachel, you're operating kind of this intersection of hospitality and entertainment, and then now you're on this franchise development kind of journey. And I know our audience loves, we've had franchises from all different stages, so they love hearing about the challenges at different stages. So, I hope we get into that. But first, I want to ask, how do you define Conscious Capitalism in the context of a brand like Gigglewaters?

**Rachel Fine Wilson** (2:08)
I think the first time I heard the phrase Conscious Capitalism, it took my breath away because it summed up my belief in running a business. And that is that you can do well and do good at the same time. And that's my focus. So I think it doesn't matter what sector you're in. There is something that you have to contribute. For me, it's food, right? We look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and food is right there at the bottom, food and shelter. That's what people need immediately to survive. And we have that. And so I can utilize that in ways that are needed by the community. And that's my focus all the time.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:42)
Yeah, I love that. And there are times, and there have been times in the history of your business, where people are really in need of that, and even right now. Can you talk a little bit about some of those those kind of moments where...

**Rachel Fine Wilson** (2:56)
Yeah, I mean, just from the beginning, we started, when we launched, we started a program called Giggles for Good. And it was just an initiative of what can we do? How can we help in our community? And that's truly a core value that I hold, that my father really instilled in me. He not only ran restaurants, but is a mental health counselor and a first responder who is on site when there is a crisis. He was on site, he counseled 1,100 people the first week after 9-11. He was on site after her came Katrina. He is there in the trenches of people when something happens. So that's kind of the background that I come from. So when we opened this restaurant, my father and I together, along with my husband, we looked at how we could help. And so we launched the Giggles for Good program. We've got, Gigglewaters has this little movie theater in the back. I'm sure we'll get to that, but it's an immersive, fun experience. But we looked at how can we utilize this movie theater to help organizations raise money and how can we utilize this as a tool for good. So it started there.
We would let 501C3s rent out our theater for free, give them the ticket sales, give them a percentage of food, help them, they could give out collateral and run 50-50 raffles, things like that. And we ended up helping over the years, 119 individual 501C3s use the platform for them to raise money. So that was the easiest. That's where we kicked off from. And then I think it was next, it was the Australian wildfires were really in the news a few years ago. And I had some family in Australia and I thought, oh my God, how do we help them? Could we do something? And we took a weekend and we said, yeah, let's show Crap it Out Dundee and let's grill shrimp on the barbie outside and let's do cocktails. And then we spent a whole weekend and we raised thousands of dollars for Australian wildlife that had been displaced by these fires. And we thought, we're on to something. We can find a way, this is really cool. Like let's just pay attention to the news and see where people need help and help them. And it's still over in a lot of different directions. When, because we're a movie theater, that's a big part of what we do, when a celebrity, beloved celebrity passes away, we'll show their movies and we'll donate all the proceeds to wherever their family has said cancer research or wherever is relevant to their case.