lisa wise's Blueprint for Compassionate Leadership and Adaptive Business Culture

Unlock the secrets of leadership adaptability with lisa wise, entrepreneurial powerhouse and founder of Flock DC, and Leonard Heflich, the mind behind "Balanced Leadership." This enthralling conversation peels back the layers of what makes a leader truly effective in diverse environments. We dig into the essence of leading with service, empowering your team to thrive, and the crucial role that self-leadership plays in this dynamic. With lisa's emphasis on curiosity, passion, and persistence, we explore how these traits are the bedrock of a learning and growth-oriented business culture.

Embark on an inspiring journey with lisa as she shares her climb from housing insecurity to real estate innovator, without forgetting the human element that's so often overlooked in business. Her unique blend of autonomy and support marks a leadership style that's as compassionate as it is effective, setting the tone for a company culture that's anything but ordinary. By shedding light on lisa's approach to co-living spaces and her responsive methods during the pandemic, we capture a snapshot of an industry being reshaped with care at its core.

About lisa wise:
lisa wise is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author of “Self-Elected: How to Put Justice Over Profit and Soar in Business,” which released in October of 2022 in print and in 2023 on audio. She is the founder and owner of Flock DC, a family of residential management companies tending to homes and residents in 2.5 billion dollar Washington, DC portfolio.  In 2020, lisa founded and launched birdSEED, a housing justice foundation which gives no-strings down payment grants to first-time BIPOC home buyers. In 2022, birdSEED was named a world-changing idea by Fast Company and to date, thirteen families bought homes with birdSEED support.

Connect with lisa:
Website birdseed.org
nest-dc.com
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/lisawise
Instagram instagram.com/lisawisedc
Facebook facebook.com/lisa.wise

This episode is brought to you by Family First Intervention, Change is possible, they can help.  Don’t wait for permission to ask for help, your family’s well-being is the priority.  Call 1-888-571-6248 or visit family-intervention.com and take the first step towards healing today.

Be sure to click "+ Follow" at the top of the page, new episodes every Wednesday! Thanks for listening!

Follow Marc Bernstein on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook!

And follow Ang Onorato on LinkedIn and Instagram!

Are you a visionary founder with a compelling success story that deserves to be shared with our audience? We're on the lookout for accomplished business leaders like you to be featured on the Founders' Forum Radio Show and Podcast. If you've surmounted challenges, reached significant milestones, or have an exciting vision for the future, we'd be honored to have you as a guest on our show. Your experiences and insights can inspire and enlighten others in the business world. If you're eager to share your journey and the invaluable lessons you've learned along the way, we invite you to apply here.

Transcript

Announcer: 0:03

Entrepreneur, author and financial consultant, Marc Bernstein helps high performing entrepreneurial business owners create a vision for the future and follow through on their goals and intentions. Ang Onorato is a business growth strategist to blend psychology and business together to create conscious leaders and business owners who impact the world. Founders Forum is a radio show podcast sharing the real stories behind entrepreneurship as founders discover more about themselves, while providing valuable lessons and some fun and entertainment for you. Now here's Marc and Ang.

Marc Bernstein: 0:37

Good morning America, and this is Marc and again. Ang is not here. We're recording this show. Right after the last show we did, so I've asked our guest from that show, leonard Heflich, to join me as co-host today with our guest Lisa Wise, who I will introduce in a moment. Good morning Lisa.

lisa wise: 0:59

Good morning.

Marc Bernstein: 1:01

And good morning again, leonard, good morning. And so the word you know we often start with a word or a topic, and the word that I'm thinking about today, as I think about both of you, is leadership. We talked about it in our show with Leonard. I'm certainly going through a lot of change in terms of my leadership style over the last years through coaching and through work that I've done, and you know leadership means different things to leader, different people. But, leonard, I'm going to ask you to comment first, since you have a book called Balanced Leadership, what occurs to you when I bring up the. In today's, today's climate, what occurs to you regarding leadership?

Leonard Heflich: 1:44

I made the observation years ago that often successful leaders will flounder or fail when moved to a different situation. Yet they were very successful in their prior situation. It made me wonder why. What was missing? What happened? What changed? It was they were the same person. Obviously, the situation was different, and that's what led me to to write a book about balance.

Marc Bernstein: 2:12

So that you can leadership can be consistent throughout.

Leonard Heflich: 2:16

Well, sometimes it needs to be different in different situations, and that's, I think, what need to be flung. A lot of leaders fail to recognize is that in a different situation, you have to be different and act differently and maybe even be a little bit of a different leader. You got to be careful with that, because you don't want to be wishy-washy or inconsistent or unpredictable, but at the same time you have to be authentic to yourself, authentic to your team and appreciate the situation that you find yourself in and adapt to it.

Marc Bernstein: 2:48

So I think that's great input and I what occurs to me and I would like to ask Lisa about this is that leadership starts with leadership of yourself and you have to lead yourself, and that's what I've focused a lot on and I have found that in, because I'm in a variety of situations and I felt that if I'm properly leading myself, a lot of that leadership transfers almost automatically to others. That's an observation I've had recently. Lisa, how does that occur to you?

lisa wise: 3:20

I think of leadership only in the context of service frankly and empowering other people to do their best because I'm the wind at their back as a leader.

Marc Bernstein: 3:30

Yeah.

lisa wise: 3:30

I disagree that there are different ways of leading depending on the setting and the folks, that that you are leading in a particular direction and you have to be adaptive because your audience will be constantly changing, so leadership styles have to be mutable. And to be a good leader, you have to be nimble and flexible depending on who it is that you're working with.

Marc Bernstein: 3:50

So it sounds like that's leadership from your perspective, but it also sounds like you're looking for leaders in your organizations and that comes down to selecting the right people. So we had a show last week that was very interesting to focus on that a little bit and I still haven't formally introduced you and I promise to do that. But what do you think is, if you have a secret ingredient or the top ingredient for finding the right people for your organizations, what is it you're looking for?

lisa wise: 4:21

Curiosity, passion and persistence. Everything else can be taught. Obviously, you want subject matter experts in particular roles, but opportunity to learn should be the most engaging component of anyone's job. If you're a leader, you'll do the job you want, not the job you were given, and that curiosity will drive your participation as a leader in my environment. I'm there to invest in leaders growing and all the team members growing, so trust is a key component of that, along with the curiosity that that team member and colleague needs to bring to the environment. Yeah, curiosity is queen in my world in terms of the business environment.

Marc Bernstein: 5:03

I love that we talked earlier on Leonard's show about both of us considering ourselves lifetime learners and always being willing to be open. Be open to change, adjusting, being flexible as you learn more and as you grow, so this might be a good time to introduce Lisa. So Lisa is an entrepreneur, speaker and author of her book, which is called Self-Elected how to Put Justice Over Profit and Soaring Business, which she has done, and she'll tell you about that. She's the founder and owner of Flock DC, a family of residential management companies which tends to homes and residence in $2.5 billion Washington DC portfolio.

Marc Bernstein: 5:49

In 2020, lisa founded and launched Birdseed, which is very interesting. It's a housing justice foundation which gives no strings down payment grants to first time BIPOC homeowners. In 2022, birdseed was named a world-changing idea by Fast Company and, to date, 19 families have bought homes with Birdseed's financial support. Her book was released in October of 22 and on audio in 2023. And again, it's called how to Put Just Self-Elected how to Put Justice Over Profit and Soaring Business, and it's available anywhere books and audio are sold. So Lisa tell us about your journey, how you began, how you came to Flock, to found Flock, and once that was successful, you came up with the idea of Birdseed.

lisa wise: 6:45

Yeah, I didn't know. We had a five-day conversation set up just kidding. It's a long story, I understand, and I think I confused people with my story. But very simply, I grew up with a lot of housing and security. I lived in 23 different home spaces before I made it to the college and, honestly and frankly, getting to college was kind of a miracle. It's a miracle I learned to read, let alone write, a whole book.

lisa wise: 7:09

I bounced around all kinds of Western mountains, states and towns throughout Idaho, colorado, california, all over the place, and that housing insecurity informed deeply the path I would take in life. I understood that having resources was a pathway out of that insecurity and I also understood that having a safe and secure home was not just a nice to have but a necessity and it should be a human right. And I understood that if I could overcome that barrier personally and find a way to create a safe, secure and stable home for myself, then I should and could do that for others. I didn't understand in the moment, in those early years, that it was housing and home that would ultimately define what I do and what I contribute to the world. But it's very as a look back as you tell those stories, you're like, oh, that made a lot of sense, that I would end up in a housing space. So I enjoyed, after college and living in Arizona for quite a long time, a very nice, long career in nonprofit management and running nonprofit organizations, which was great, until I realized and I apologize for my dinging I have a new computer and I realized that I could actually make a bigger difference in business.

lisa wise: 8:27

I grew up basically dreaming of my home office. I was very business oriented. I grew up wanting to, you know, side hustle anywhere I could. It was very natural to be entrepreneurial for me and so in 2008, I decided it's time for me to pursue something new and launch a robust business. That's kind of not just about side cash, but like a core company.

lisa wise: 8:51

And I had been managing property on the side for some time and I had a great formula for it Take care of people in their homes, take care of the homes they take care of communities, stronger communities, equal, more robust and thriving environments.

lisa wise: 9:04

And I could play a key role in taking care of people in those homes and taking care of that real estate which is a fabric of our community. So we used a justice lens from the very first day we opened our doors as Nest DC in 2008. And our model worked the hospitality forward, community forward, giving forward relational forward thinking in a home management space so counterintuitive to the model that we've all come to understand as consumers of residential real estate that we can deliver a totally different experience and wow people like that. So when you take a tired old industry and you do it really differently and with a value set that people identify with and want to align with, then suddenly you have opportunity, unlike those of your competitors, and you have an ability to make a difference, not just in community but with your team members, with the folks that are living in, and I don't know why that's happening in my background, but I have all kinds of very exciting starters.

Marc Bernstein: 10:02

Lisa has fireworks in the background. Just FYI, that's my artworks in the front.

lisa wise: 10:07

That's another new feature on my computer. It wasn't it?

Marc Bernstein: 10:09

Nice. I liked it. I thought that was pretty cool. She's saying something important, there's fireworks.

lisa wise: 10:14

Yeah, it was amazing. So that is a very like thumbnail sketch of how I found myself where I am and being a compulsively ambitious person. There is no way I stop. There's no stopping. There's no end, there's always. Every day is the beginning of how you continue to make a substantial and deep impact in the lives of people and community. And I can make quite a bit of difference as a business owner. In a way, I wouldn't really see that happening or unfolding in a non-profit environment and plus, I like being in charge and I do better when I'm in charge and talk about leadership Like I need to just be in charge. I like other people to be in charge of lots of things, but if I can run things in a vision or if I can inform things with my vision, then I do know that things are designed to be in everybody's best interest and that feels great. That's where the justice piece really aligns with everything that we do.

Marc Bernstein: 11:06

So you are a true entrepreneur, leader, director of business. I know you like to run things, but I also know from earlier conversation that you like to have people that can run themselves and that you use the expression you're the wind at their back, which I love that expression. Before we go on more into that and dig into that a little bit, I do want to ask you about your business model, because I'm not sure if that's clear to people. So you manage properties for pro-owners. Essentially, are these properties under your control, or you do this for developers and owners of real estate? Where you come in and take control of the properties on behalf of the tenants is the way I'm understanding it. Is that correct?

lisa wise: 11:56

They're different mixes and we have a product diversity, so we deal with individual residential rentals. That could be anything from a house to a condo in a building, and that condo is owned by our client.

lisa wise: 12:08

So, third-party management is where 95% of our work unfolds. We have other affiliate partnerships, multifamily work. We are the first and only company that's really working on building An entire reputation around co-living spaces. Co-living is a really innovative and new model in the cat and a new category in residential real estate that we are becoming expert in managing and that's a new trend. So our job and my job is really to understand strategically, where opportunities existing, that our competition, our partners or peers in the industry are not thinking about and creating diversity and income mixes that protect you from those down times and then give you the upside when things are going favorably. So that has been how we've organized the work, with about 70% of our portfolio being third party investors, individuals, what you might call an accidental landlord with the balance of our portfolio being in that multifamily space, co-living spaces, and we have in-house maintenance divisions as well.

lisa wise: 13:11

So what makes us the best property manager, honestly, is being able to maintain the properties in-house. You are a more nimble, effective company when you can be responsive and you can address things as quickly as possible so that the residents are comfortable and the owners are assured that those assets that they have and they are assets they're part of that person's retirement or their portfolio, or maybe their only home that they have and they needed to leave. We wanna make sure that we're protecting everybody as well as we can. Knowing when we can physically maintain those properties is a key component of our business design. So having in-house maintenance is a game changer. It is one of the things that I can tell you all of my industry peers struggle with, as do we. It's hard to maintain. It's on thousands of properties you can imagine. Just the driving logistics alone are a lot to work with. But I do believe that having in-house on hand hands-based talent is what gives us that edge.

Marc Bernstein: 14:12

So I mentioned to you before, my daughter is moving back to DC and if she were to call block DC, get in touch or Nest you operate on the name Nest she would. The advantage to her would be that she has somebody that knows you're gonna find her a good property. You're going to maintain it both on behalf of her as the tenant and, let's say, I were the owner of a condo there You're looking after it on my behalf as well, so you're sort of taking care of all the parties involved Interesting. I'll give you a good example. It's a very interesting model.

lisa wise: 14:49

How our partners work.

lisa wise: 14:51

When the pandemic hit, the industry trends instantly was to start reminding tenants that their rent was due Period and that if it weren't paid on time there would be ex-wayzee consequence.

lisa wise: 15:03

And what we did was say what do people need in order for us to make it work for you during this very complicated and crazy time? So we started having town halls, we started opening up an assistance program where we assigned one full-time staff person to help people with rent assistance programs so he would go out and find and broker and figure out how people were gonna help get their rent paid, to the tune of almost a half a million dollars in support that we captured for our residents. Property management companies don't do that, and that's the first thing we do, because taking care of people is what it means to take care of property and they go hand in hand. They have to knit together and we think of our work as so human. And the industry? Over the course of the history of that industry, it has become very inhuman and we have a chance to look at it very differently.

Marc Bernstein: 15:53

Very interesting.

lisa wise: 15:53

That's why I like to be in charge Because I know I'm gonna do better things.

Marc Bernstein: 15:57

Lisa's in charge. I have to take charge for one second because we need a commercial break for 60 seconds and we'll be right back on Founders Forum.

Announcer: 16:04

Are you feeling helpless watching a loved one struggle with addiction? You don't have to face it alone and you don't have to wait for rock bottom. Family First Intervention is the industry leader in intervention services and family counseling, support and recovery. They understand the impact of addiction on families. It's not just about the substance user, it's about the family too. Their team is there to help you navigate through the challenges and find resolution. At Family First Intervention, they focus on empowering the entire family system. Their expert team will guide you through the process, offering support and understanding every step of the way. No more fear or uncertainty. Take control and create positive change. Don't wait for permission to ask for help. Your family's well-being is the priority. Call 1-888-316-5950 or visit family-interventioncom and take the first step towards healing today. Change is possible. They can help.

Marc Bernstein: 17:07

We are back on Founders Forum and we're here with our guest today, lisa Wise, and our substitute co-host, leonard Heflich. Leonard's got a question for you in a minute, lisa, but we just had a slight distraction because TJ, our engineer, pointed out that it's snowing in Philadelphia today. It's not snowing in DC yet, is it, lisa?

Announcer: 17:27

It is not.

lisa wise: 17:29

It's cold, but it is not.

Marc Bernstein: 17:30

I don't think this was expected, but we have some snow. Lisa, what. Obviously it wasn't easy to do what you've built, and I'm sure you've met some challenges along the way. What can you think of a major challenge that you've had to deal with in terms of building your business and or the nonprofit bird seed?

lisa wise: 17:53

I am a self-taught entrepreneur and I have a film degree, so that and a bus ticket will get you all the way across town. I had to kind of make it up as I went and I would say that if I had a few resources to choose from early, it would have been having someone to mentor me who had a really high degree of experience in a business environment, that there were some things we could have done differently earlier. That would have set us on a better, smarter, faster path and we had to just kind of learn the hard way in some certain environments and scenarios. And that's fine. It's never too late to learn. I'm grateful for every mistake we made. We got better from those mistakes. We've largely.

lisa wise: 18:38

I look back and think I don't know that I would change anything. I think I would just intend to get better at what we're doing. Over and over. I'll say what we did very well is to look at our company often and say is there something broken or do we need to break something in order to get better at what we do?

lisa wise: 18:57

So being nimble and open to change and flexibility has always been at the heart and soul of our operational organization If there's a smarter, faster, better way of doing something. By all means, it's your responsibility to start doing it that way and then creating an organizational paradigm around that efficiency and innovation. That's very hard to do and you have to continue to remind yourselves. It's like culture. You work on culture every day. It's three-dimensional, it's not a task, it's part of the DNA, and the same is true in terms of how people think about efficiency and work. Now we could have done better in those environments, but again, I don't have any regrets about what we've done over all the years. I'd do it again exactly the same way, pretty much.

Marc Bernstein: 19:37

Many years ago, someone said to me if it's broke, fix it with a sense of urgency. If it's not broke, make it better. And it sounds like that's one of the things you do break it and make it better. And a constant theme on this show is mistakes are the best teachers. Failure is not failure. Failure leads to success, often because you need it to happen in order to get to the next step. So, Leonard, you had an observation from listening to Lisa about leadership from your context.

Leonard Heflich: 20:10

Yeah, lisa exemplifies some of the critical aspects and roles of a successful leader. One of them is she talks about that. She considers herself to be the wind at the back of her team. What that means to me is she doesn't allow them to fail. She supports them to success. A lot of leaders don't understand that role. At the same time as she's behind them, she's also way out in front. She's the cutting edge and leading people to places that they would not have gone or dared to go without her guidance and challenge. And finally, her innovative business model allows her and her team to do things that other groups are not doing. It sets them apart. I like to tell people, when you build a business, build a moat around it, and the moat is made of strategic capabilities that you have developed over the years that differentiate you from your competitor and prevent them literally from catching up.

Marc Bernstein: 21:22

And you also said to me earlier today innovate many different ways at once, because then it's really almost impossible to copy it, and it sounds to me like Lisa's model is innovative and complex enough that it would be very difficult to reproduce. How do you agree with, how do you think about those assessments, lisa? Well, well, thank you for the compliments.

lisa wise: 21:44

Certainly you are an expert on leadership, so being recognized by an expert as a good leader, then I appreciate that there is. For me, it is built in and baked in that I want people's lives to change because they've worked with me full stop. And while I think having a moat around the building would be great if it was made of money, that's good, is that the money Truly right? Because you need that in order to protect your model, and I think that's a good thing, and I think that's a good thing Is that the money Truly right? Because you need that in order to protect your model. You cannot let it bleed.

lisa wise: 22:20

And there is a lot of that reflection around. You know the sort of pejorative energy for me at least around like, oh, we have to be profitable and that has to be part of that equation. But to humanize the profitability is where you can differentiate yourself as a company. In my book I talk about the three pathways to how we found ourselves here and first and foremost is really differentiating your company from the competition is what we did all day long. I mean, there's just nothing about my company that resembles any other property management company in the country and that's acknowledged, people will say in the industry, we'll have people, conversations online or something. People will say you know, don't do XYZ with the residents and I'll weigh in with the opposite, and they're like you don't count.

lisa wise: 23:06

Everything about your business is completely different and, by design, that hasn't made us, I think, more profitable, more impactful. It's led to a lot of tenure on team members that we've had. They're quite excellent investments in them. We're investing in the company and we operate as a lean startup and sometimes we're less lean and sometimes we're more lean, but more or less like we have to test things before we invest in things and that agile environment lets us be as streamlined as possible and create as little waste as possible. And then sometimes you look around and you're like, oh my God, there's so much waste right now. We have to start over If you have to continue to look back and say is this the brand promise? Is this the operational promise? Are we where we need to be? Those things mixed together have, like, absolutely made my company more successful than I think anybody thought imaginable, with so much potential going forward. There's no secret that I'm in this business because it's a stable one and it requires humans human people to do it. It's attractive for that reason.

Marc Bernstein: 24:12

Lisa, one of the threads. You mentioned this a while back, but I just want to point it out. We have a lot of entrepreneurs on here, a lot of business leaders, and we have nonprofit leaders. You are really a true hybrid of the two and I love the idea that, because I've seen many nonprofits that have great concepts but they don't have the business side of things handled, which is obviously necessary. And you know I've mentioned to you I'm a recent member of the Satell Institute for Corporate Social Responsibility, so there's not enough social responsibility on the part of business leaders on the other hand, and your mix is and your understanding of the fact that you need money to make it all happen. So there's a very even though your ultimate motivation, I think is, is serving and helping other people. You're you understand that business needs to come first in order to make that happen. That I saw that in a very first conversation that came out early and I think that's really healthy and really admirable, and I think it's a very difficult thing to do for many people.

lisa wise: 25:18

It's tricky, it's hard, but you know, once again, I mean, in this business you have to be professional problem solvers and you have to find the shortest path between two places. So you don't see, you're just reducing noise. There's a lot of noise in this kind of industry and business.

Leonard Heflich: 25:33

No noise and nonprofits.

lisa wise: 25:34

When we decided to launch and build the Birdseed Foundation, which is my pride and joy, my heart and soul, it is my why, in terms of this business, particularly given the racist, devastating role that real estate, the real estate industry, has played in the racial wealth gap that setting that entity up, which was never intended to actually be a nonprofit. If somebody asked me how or whether to start an on profit, my answer is don't do that. There are plenty of organizations doing great things. Go volunteer for one of them and make them better, instead of trying to make your life better with another nonprofit. It's a lot of work. This organically evolved as something that needed to become a nonprofit, but it's designed to be as simple as possible. I don't need to be reviewing people's applications and paperwork and all kinds of things Like it is very simplified. It is designed like a very streamlined business so that we can get to the greatest possible impact and reduce as much noise as possible.

Marc Bernstein: 26:30

So, lisa, I don't want to stop you on that, but I do want you to talk, because we only have about two minutes left. I do want you to talk about what exactly Birdseed does, because we didn't really hit on it, yeah.

lisa wise: 26:39

Yeah, the efficient, which is the piece that I want to share here, which is we efficiently offer no strings attached down payment grants to first time black and brown home buyers in the DC and Philadelphia regions. We know that the $10,000 that we typically give gets people three years closer to the home buying finish line and helps resolve the racial wealth gaps that have been created, largely because of real estate. We know that work we do in that category makes a difference. Our metrics are outstanding. Our model is one of a kind, and that is why Fast Company generously named us the world changing idea. Thank you, fast Company. It is a very exciting thing we're doing that is very much supported by and driven by our core company values.

Marc Bernstein: 27:25

It's really amazing. That's a perfect time to ask you my last question. Tell me about your legacy. What would you like that to look like?

lisa wise: 27:34

My legacy unfolds in real time, every single day. I need to contribute to the world and I want people to think, wow, did you ever meet Lisa? Why she really did what she said she was going to do? And it wasn't about her, it's never about me. I tell people I don't capitalize my name, because the work that I'm doing is not about me or my game, it's about everybody else. So I live that every day, and so every day I feel like, well, if today was the last day, I think people will be like, yeah, she meant what she said and you can trust her.

Marc Bernstein: 28:03

So that's your byline. She meant what she said, she did what she said she was going to do. That's wonderful, it's really amazing, and I knew you would be a great guest as soon as we met and you fulfilled, and there's a lot more to talk about, and maybe we'll talk about having you back sometime.

lisa wise: 28:19

It'll be wonderful. Thank you, I'm full of things to say. You didn't get to my hobby because I told you we're not going to get to the hobby.

Marc Bernstein: 28:25

It's well, I could have, but you, I think you, you don't want it to be about you, so you're in small, small letters. So what could I do? Lisa, thanks so much for being here. Leonard, thanks for being here again, and to all of you, thanks for joining us today on Founders Forum. Have a great week and we'll see you next week.

Announcer: 28:44

Thanks very much.