Elevate Ep 42: A Conversation with Indiana Governor Mike Braun

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
Welcome to the Elevate Podcast, Powered by Braden. This is your front row seat to the stories of local leaders, both nonprofit and for-profit, who are shaping our community.
Every episode brings you leadership insights, lessons for challenges, and practical strategies you can use today. And yes, we'll keep it real and have some fun along the way. If you're ready to elevate your leadership, hit subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn for updates and behind the scenes content. Now, let's dive in.

**Jason Ulm** (0:44)
Hey everybody, Jason Ulm here with another episode of the Elevate Powered by Braden Podcast. And as you can see, we're not sitting in our studio with Fishers today. We're in a little bit of a beautiful place, downtown Indianapolis, and I'm with a new friend, Governor Light Braun.
Governor, welcome to the show.

**Mike Braun** (1:01)
Good to be on the show.

**Jason Ulm** (1:02)
You know, this series that we do is interviewing leaders from local businesses around the state of Indiana, sharing their history and their background and talking about what they're doing today.
And researching your background, terrific story, by the way. We have a few things in common that I'm sure we'll talk about. Well, let's go back to your beginning.

**Mike Braun** (1:21)
So I grew up in a little town in the southwestern Indiana, Jasper. Very much attainable in the sense that every business started there from when German Catholic settlers came in there to start up to 30, 35 office furniture manufacturing companies.

**Jason Ulm** (1:38)
Sure.

**Mike Braun** (1:39)
And I'm talking about, it was a village. When I grew up, it was 8,000 people back in the 60s and 70s, and now it's 17,000. So that's one of the few rural counties in our state that's grown.
The county and the county seat, but very devout when it comes to faith. Yep.
Most of my education was from nuns. Okay. From first grade, at least through most of eighth grade. And that's it? High school that changed. Latin Mass, maybe the first five or six years, and it was a strange dynamic. We were a public school called the St. Joseph's Catholic Great School. Imagine all the circuits that would break in this day and age. Bishop made a deal with the local folks running the school system, and of course, they were frugal. They didn't want to pay any tuition to the diocese. That kind of place. Okay. And one where, unless you live away, which Maureen and I did for two years while I was getting a business degree in Boston, you couldn't really have much to compare to. Back then, the mantra was go west or go somewhere else.

**Jason Ulm** (2:51)
Go somewhere else.

**Mike Braun** (2:51)
Or maybe come back.

**Jason Ulm** (2:53)
Okay.

**Mike Braun** (2:54)
And that's kind of what I thought we'd end up doing, because when we put the U-Haul into the back of the Dodge Charger and drove to Massachusetts, that was our first big road trip.

**Jason Ulm** (3:06)
Right.

**Mike Braun** (3:06)
And we got married in July.
We'll celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. This July 17th is awesome. We had about three, four weeks before we went to Boston. So you're there.
It's your first dose of the world outside of kind of the confined boundaries, which just sets when everything was looking like. I was going to go to Wall Street. Yeah. We wanted to raise a family that looked a little complicated. She realized she could make her own clothes back in high school. Okay. She wanted a clothing business. Well, I think we had about seven or eight already, Jasper. So that didn't look like maybe the right business to get into. But we wanted to raise a family. We could see that the market required maybe a gift store, home candy core store. Well, she started planning that then. And she's now in her 48th year.

**Jason Ulm** (4:02)
No kidding.

**Mike Braun** (4:03)
I think I told you earlier, she's maybe coming up this afternoon.

**Jason Ulm** (4:06)
Yes.

**Mike Braun** (4:07)
And so we've been doing all that and it's been quite a journey.

**Jason Ulm** (4:12)
What a journey. So Jasper, if I remember correctly, three sport athlete, ended up the class president of Harvard by receive the class president, and then to Wabash for undergrad. I think you were a student council.

**Mike Braun** (4:25)
I was a student government there.

**Jason Ulm** (4:26)
So you got there, right?

**Mike Braun** (4:27)
Student body president a couple of times.

**Jason Ulm** (4:30)
And then going out to Harvard, when you leave Harvard, what were you thinking? Where were you going to take your career? Was it going to be Wall Street, you were thinking originally, and then how did you end up back in Jasper?