I'm Rachel Horgan, join me each episode as I sit down with a guest co-host covering the latest business stories in the Seattle area. We'll read the news so you don't have to. This is The Weekly. Hey everybody, welcome back. If you missed it, there is a video on YouTube. It's the mid-year economic outlook I did with the chief economist of Zillow, Skyler Olson that is on the YouTube of The Weekly Seattle. I'll also link that on my Instagram. We do have another video that's coming up. I don't know. By the time this airs, I'm not sure if it'll be up, but it's with Emily Parker, my former boss and the founder of the new media company. So that was really fun to do the video. Today, we're not doing video, but also a little behind the scenes just for my devoted fans and listeners. I was feeling pretty good about doing that Zillow interview. I was like, you know, it was a good get and whatever, feeling great. We wrapped, I go to the bathroom and at some point, somehow, I had ripped my pants. You know, I feel like the world brings you up and brings you right back down. Yeah. Big rip in the back. Luckily, I was sitting down for that interview. So everybody has a rip their pants, right, guys? If you do, please tell me. Okay. Where we're at today, again, with no video, but audio is at the World Trade Center. No, we are not in New York. We are here in Seattle. It's a members' organization founded by the Port of Seattle and it's located across from Pier 66, the whole goal is to bring business leaders together, which we're doing because I've brought Kathy Lynch with me. Hello. Hi, Rachel. How are you doing? I'm good. I feel like you know you've made it when you don't have a title. You're just a business mogul because you're just a board member, you're a former CEO and you're just out and about just making moves. So I'm going to read a little bit more about you and bear with me because it's a lot you guys. This is a pretty impressive guest. She's the co-chair for the Women Corporate Directors Foundation of Washington State. She's a board member of the Skagit Valley Moulting. She's on the Board of Advisors for UW Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking. She's on the Transforming Age Board, which is a nonprofit improving lives of older adults. Prior to this, she was a board member for Four Front Ventures, which dealt with cannabis cultivation. She's a board member of the Pharmacy Value Alliance, CEO of Bartel Drugs, as I mentioned. From CEO of Gumps in San Francisco, president of the Nesco Gift Division, CEO of Elephant Pharmacy in California, leadership roles at Pottery Barn, World Market, and Pier 1 Imports. Are you tired? Oh my goodness. It's been fun. Yeah. Really fun. Do you miss... I know I didn't prep you for this question, but are you glad to be out of the CEO role and more into the board role? Yes and no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot of stress that comes with the CEO role. Having done it three times, I finally decided that was enough, you know, so moved on. Yeah, it makes sense. So we're getting to the top five stories and I'm so excited for today's discussion because I have a lot to talk about with Bartels and some of the other experience, but I always ask them to guess, you know, why they're passionate about what they do. And for you, you've got such a wide variety of experience. I guess what are you passionate about? What are you most passionate about? Well, since I was a little kid, I, for some reason, was very passionate about the international, the world, people around the world. I went to a birthday party when I think I must have been around five years old and there was the most beautiful little girl at this birthday party and native dress and I think she was from somewhere in Africa and I still remember her name to today, it was Yasmin. And she made such a mark on me and after that, everything I thought about for my career was international. And so, yeah, I pursued foreign languages. I studied three foreign languages. I was a foreign exchange student. I did a lot of things to try to make it that way. And then when I got out into the business world, the international piece was the most important piece for me when considering a job. And so I went with companies that were going to enable me to work in other places. I love working with other cultures. It's fabulous. Yeah. Very cool. So today's top five stories, shareholders approve Home Street and Sunflower Bank merger. We'll talk about the future of pharmacies. The electrician strike ends, Costco lawsuit and the Getty Images co-founder leaves the board. So let's just jump right in. The first one is Home Street Bank and Sunflower Bank. So this was actually already announced in January. So if you're an avid reader of the news, this is not new news to you. However, what happened last week that came out in the articles is that the shareholders approved this merger and that sounds like the next step is for regulatory approval. So basically it's more likely to happen is what they're saying. Home Street Bank is a Seattle bank and it's merging with First Sun Capital, which is a Denver company, but it's the holding group of a Dallas-based bank called Sunflower Bank. Home Street's still going to keep its name and to me from the articles it sounded like Home Street was the one kind of struggling and needed to combine with First Sun. So Kathy, you were at Bartel Drugs and you were there when Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid acquired them. So let's sort of talk about the difference between mergers and acquisitions in your own words, not in the fancy, fancy words. Yeah. I'm no attorney. Yeah. I guess like kind of what do you feel the difference is and was there ever talk of merging with Rite Aid instead of the acquisition? Right. To the consumer, there doesn't appear to be much difference between a merger and an acquisition. There's different ways it can be handled. You can merge and keep your name and they often say you don't do that in acquisition, but you can do that in acquisition. It's all about what you negotiate. And so in our case, from my perspective, it was entirely up to the family what they wanted to do and what was going to be the best for them from a tax perspective, from a net perspective, all the things that count when you're trying to sell a company. They've been around 130 years and I wanted to see them do as well as they could. So they were the ones who decided that. Yeah. And this article says the next step is regulatory approval. Yeah. Was that hard for you guys? It took forever. Really? Oh, yeah. Part of it was because we were so big in Washington State, we had the, we believe we had the largest market share. And so when you're merging with somebody else who also has, as a retailer, also has stores in the state, it makes you even bigger and they begin to worry about fair competition. So becoming like a monopoly sort of thing. Yeah. That kind of thing. So they were, you know, questioning us on different things and it just slowed it down quite a bit. But, you know, we were able to handle it. It was one of the reasons it took us as long as it did to sell the company because we worked on it for, from beginning then, for about two years. Okay. Yeah. I was curious how long it took. Okay. Yeah. So right. It acquires them in 2020 soon before you left, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I knew that when, as I knew the minute we decided to look to sell it, that I'd be out of a job the minute that, you know, after we did it and the day we signed the contract was my last day. Yeah. So right. It has filed for bankruptcy. If you guys don't know that already, so they're closing a lot of cartel locations. Did you have concerns when the deal went through? Did you feel like this could be happening? I don't know if you can speak to that. You know, Rite Aid has had its challenges for decades. And we all knew that, but they're a survivor somehow. They survived and I've watched them go through different CEOs and different strategies. I remember in the 90s when the CEO at that time came in and decided the key to success was going to be bringing all their alcohol, their liquor, their whiskey to the front of the store. Oh my God. It was horrible. Really? Yeah. They were about health and they brought all of that to the front of the store, which never made sense to me because that's a low margin business. So, so they've tried lots of different things, but they have survived. And so in our view, if they felt they could afford it and worked with us on the things that we really cared about, that's what was important to us. And we wanted to be sure we remained loyal to the community. We wanted to keep the Bartels name. We wanted them to keep as many employees as they could, things like that. And they stepped up for all that, at least initially. I was going to say, I just went to a Rite Aid recently, or not a Rite Aid, but I've also been to a lot of Bartels. And I used to love walking on Bartels because there was all this stuff that was so perfectly organized and people were so friendly. And I definitely felt a difference. I knew about this Rite Aid purchase, but I bet listeners, even if you didn't know about this Rite Aid purchase, you could figure it out. You could probably figure it out. There was a shift and there was a change. And I think sometimes you were blaming the empty shelves on supply, not being there because of COVID, but I would guess, would you agree that it has a lot more to do with Rite Aid running things? Well, I think COVID had a lot to do with it initially, and it's hard to separate those two. That then impacts all their analytics going forward. So being in their shoes, trying to understand how much they need in a store, that history has to build back up and it's very, very difficult. And then assuming they're in a cash crunch right now, I would think they wouldn't want a lot of inventory in a store. If they are stocking Bartels the way they stock a Rite Aid, they probably didn't have the same amount of customers that we used to have in a Bartels. And so we would probably have run out faster. There was a lot for them to learn. You know, now customer counts probably gone down, unfortunately. I mean myself, I don't even go in there anymore because I know that what my shampoo is not going to be there. Exactly. Yeah. I don't either. And that's a terrible thing to say, but I can't get what I need there. And downtown Seattle's, I live downtown, it's become a desert when it comes to pharmacies. Everyone's closing, and so now I'm really sticking with online ordering from my pharmacy needs. Yeah, and we're going to talk about pharmacies in a second, but one more question on this story. Um, we sort of shifted into talking about bankruptcy. I'm not saying that home street is going to bankruptcy, but since we're kind of talking about that, you've been through some companies and some boards and talked about bankruptcy. What's something that you think people don't know about a company going bankrupt is, and also is there kind of a common theme as to why, like is it always just shitty leadership that causes it or like kind of what comes to mind for you? Yeah. I mean, what causes the company to go bankrupt? Oh, there's so many variables and they can go back for years. So as an example, and it's not necessarily always leadership, it could be what investors want to do or don't want to do. There could be so many reasons, but at the end of the day, the thing from my perspective that's most important in a company is cash. We say cash is king, and what often happens in the companies that go bankrupt, isn't that they don't have cash, it's that they don't have it flowing in the door when they need it. Okay. So if you can't pay your bills, you're not going to survive ultimately. Many companies last a long time, even though they're not paying their bills through negotiations, et cetera, and some are able to get out of it. Sometimes investors will come in and give them money, sometimes there's just so many different places you can go to look for money, sometimes there's grants, it depends on what you do. Yeah. So, but at the end of the day, if you don't have enough cash, that's what kills it. I was working with a company that 10 or 12 years ago, a startup, took out a big loan, and they had a balloon payment coming up 12 years later. What's a balloon payment? A balloon payment is when you're paying, you always pay your debt back a little bit at a time, and you have a timeline on which you're expected to pay back. And depending on what kind of loan you get, you can negotiate to pay less for the first few years, and then all of a sudden you pay a whole lot at the end. And startups will do that because they believe they're going to be successful at that point, right? Well, this balloon payment was so big that there wasn't, I mean, it was more than two thirds of their top line sales. And there was no way it was going to be paid back. And so, you know, that is why I said to you earlier, it can go way back when they made decisions. It might not be the same management team, it varies. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay, so you mentioned pharmacies. Our next article, so technically this wasn't an article that came yesterday, it did come out, or this week, or last week, but it did come out in June, and you know what, I make the rules. So I decided to put it in here. But you showed me this article, it's something you have on your LinkedIn. It's a fortune article. It's a long one, but it's kind of talking about the future of pharmacies. Where do we see it going? My kind of takeaway from this was that we're seeing less pharmacists because of pay and conditions. We're seeing pharmacies closing at an increasing rate because of reimbursement rates for the medications that we'll talk about. And then I've learned about PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers, specifically three of them control 80% of how prescriptions are processed. So they're kind of controlling how much the pharmacy gets back. So do you agree with the article? Do you feel like these are the reasons why we're seeing less? Can you share about that? Yes, it was actually, from my perspective, the reason I posted it, one of the best articles I've read explaining to people in layman's language what was going on. At the end of the day, in my opinion, the biggest culprit are the PBMs, the pharmacy benefit managers. You know, when I was in pharmacy 20 years ago, we really weren't dealing with them much and it wasn't a problem. But they came around for good reason. They were going to be administrators for insurance companies between the retailer and the insurance company, and so you paid a fee for that and it made a lot of sense. But then they started building those fees and then they started hiding some fees and more and more fees. And what Mike surprised you to know is today, companies, retailers, drugstores don't often know what they're going to even be reimbursed when they sell something. So let's walk us through that. So the pharmacy is buying the medication, let's say, $500 from the big pharma. And then I go in to get this medication, I let's say I pay $50 and my insurance pays the rest. However, you're saying they're not always paying the rest. Exactly. Right? And so what price is the PBBM setting? Are they setting the $500 price or are they setting? They're not involved in what my insurance pays, but yeah, it's interesting. It's a little more complicated than that. There's like three or four big drug distributors that we buy from that negotiate to get prices from them. You know, insurance companies set their price, PBM set their fees. So there's a lot of lack of transparency by the time it gets through the PBM to the drug store. Yeah. And I bet your everyday person probably doesn't know all these people are involved and how much they're involved. Yeah. So we could sell, you know, I'll use smaller numbers than you were using. We could sell something for $10, you know, if a person comes in with insurance and they pay $10 for their drug. Yeah. And then we get reimbursed two bucks. So you're losing $8 on a transaction? Well they've paid us eight bucks. I mean, they've paid us, sorry, I didn't think this through. They've paid us 10 bucks. But let's say the drug actually cost us 12. I see. And, and then they only reimbursed us two, we lose 10. We lose more, more as much as they paid for it. We often, you can go into the, into the hole with it and, and you know, we often had discussions about this at Bartels because, you know, obviously the question would be, well, just don't sell that drug if that's what you find out after you've sold it the first time. Well, it's not quite that easy because, you know, on average, we had two and a half medications per patient. And if you eliminate that one drug, they're probably going to go somewhere else and get the other one and a half. Right. And then also buy their greeting card and their candy and all the front of the store. Yep. Exactly. And so, and I was a believer that we needed to be there for when the customer needed us. Right. You also don't want somebody having to drive to another neighborhood further. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting. So why, I think we kind of talked about, I guess, why the cost for the medication for the patient is so much? Well, it's, you know, one thing people might not realize is, you know, the research and development, the big pharma has to do to get to a drug, they're doing that and they don't know if the drug's going to work. They don't know if it's going to be successful. So imagine you've put millions of dollars into developing a particular medication and then it's not approved and you're out those millions of dollars. So what do they have to do? Well, they're developing something else and they're spending millions of dollars, and that one's successful. And then when they sell it, they have to make up for all the other losses. So, you know, it's very tough, I think, for big pharma to know when they're going to land something and when they're not. So that's part of the reason things look more expensive. Yeah. You know, and now with wear insurances, there's just these other variables that have come in, come into it. Yeah. So can you fix the America's health insurance problem? Oh my God, I would love to. One last question on this. So sort of the counter argument from the PBPM, oh my God, P-B-M's. Correct. Is they're saying, you know, it's just like small business complaining about big business. It's just like small businesses saying that they can't compete because Amazon, you know, these small pharmacies just can't compete because they're too small. Like do you think there's any validity to that argument? Do you feel like they're just being defensive? Uh, I don't think they're just being defensive. I mean, you know, buying power always comes into how much you pay for something and when they're small, they don't have a lot of buying power. Like the big guys have billions of dollars, you know, but yeah. But do you feel like the pharmacy benefit managers are ultimately more to blame than the size of the business? I, yeah, I believe that. I feel safe saying that. Yeah. I just, I think at this point, there needs to be some regulatory policies coming out when it comes to PBMs because I, you know, it just feels like it's getting worse and worse every year. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So pharmacies are closing. We're not getting our medications. What a fun time. I'm just kidding. Yeah. I feel, I feel bad for the small guys. And you know, we were regional, but we were considered small and it was very, very hard on us. Yeah. Yeah. At Bartels, right. Okay. Our third story is the electricians and strike. I didn't know they were on strike. More than 1,000 electricians went on strike in April in Seattle and now they're back to work after approving a three year contract. The international brotherhood of electrical workers, local 46, negotiated with the National Electrical Contractors Association. They were negotiating for higher pay, paid holidays, increased safety measures, and I'm sure other things. One thing I thought was interesting is that it's called the international brotherhood of electrical workers, which feels like an old school name and the lead negotiator was a woman. So. Oh, that's cool. I wonder if they're going to change that. So, you've led a lot of businesses with hourly workers. How did you decide their wages and did you have any kind of difficult situations around their wage and then wanting more, anything like that? Yeah. That often pops up. You know, being in the business I was in in retail, you have a lot of typically minimum wage workers. That's what the competition tends to pay. I fortunately always wanted, I was with companies that allowed me to pay more. We were in a position to in many cases because I believe that you get what you pay for. So we would look at what the minimum wage was as a starting point and then we'd look at what the market rate was, which is what everybody's ultimately paying and then we'd determine how much above that we wanted to be. So we did that in a lot of the companies that I worked with and what it did is, you know, we had far less attrition than other retailers did and it enabled us to get people who were the best of the best. I mean, it sounds like a simple concept, but you still have companies paying minimum wage and at least amount they can. Yeah, you still do, probably because, you know, you still have Prell Shampoo at a really cheap price that you aren't bringing in the revenues to cover it, right? So, you know, the Bartels were so smart, they believed that if they could get the right people in there that it would bring in more customers and customers would spend more and it would pay off and they were right in the long term, you know, they didn't expect everything that happened with the pandemic, none of us did, you know, and PBMs, et cetera that were painful for us at the end. Yep. So how did you handle, you said that there was some Bartel negotiations and likes because the story is about a union negotiating and was it unionized? We had, I think, if I recall correctly, about six stores out of 65 that were unionized. We typically paid, as I was mentioning, better than market rate and so they're really, you know, unions come around because employees are unhappy because they don't feel like they're being compensated well. And I wasn't around when those six stores became unionized, so I don't know why. But we typically had a pretty easy time with the unions when the contracts came up and we had to renegotiate because we already paid well, laid off and asked for a certain wage and we were already paying more than that. So, you know, at the end of the day, I didn't understand why employees really wanted to be part of the union and pay the dues they paid, what were they getting for it? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe like you said, it was something way back when. From way back when, yeah. Okay, our fourth story is Costco is being sued, Costco is is a quad based and it's being sued by a Connecticut woman for not publicly saying what they're charging online and that it was more expensive than in person. So basically she went to buy toilet paper. It was something like 35, I'm going to round it was like $35 online and then if she went to the store, it was going to be closer to like 32, right? So Costco also was, I think, already made aware of this and like, no, we'll do it. We'll be better. And so that's why she is suing them. You have a lot of experience in e-commerce. Is this common to market up online? Is it common to kind of charge more online versus in the store? You know, I don't know what's common anymore to be for, you know, when e-commerce first came on, you know, this was an eight, a question that started back then. What do we do? Do we charge? You have to pay for shipping, right? You have to pay for shipping, right? So was it better to mark up the goods and tell them, tell the customer they got free shipping or was it better to keep it at that price and pass through the shipping charge? Pass through the shipping charge. And you know, honestly, if you had bricks and mortar, to me, it made more sense to keep it at the price and then add the shipping to it, which most understood. But back then, many companies didn't know how to estimate what their shipping was going to be. They had to do it based on the price of something. And that doesn't always work. Yeah. Right. Well, you don't know where you're shipping to. You know where you're shipping to. Yeah. I mean, and then there's the other thing that's happened where companies are shipping free and they're not marking it up. It's the same price as bricks and mortar. So I mean, that's digging a deep hole into the net profit of some of these guys and you can't get out of that. So if you're trying to compete, you're stuck with having to go after that. And I think that's a sad situation to be in. People seem to be willing to pay for services today. It would seem to me that they would pay for shipping. So you said something about brick and mortar. Do you have a thought into the future as to where you see brick and mortar going? And I've worked for, you know, World Market, Pier One, all those kinds of things. We had talked about we go into the stores and we're not seeing as full of supplies. Are they going away? I wish I was a fortune teller when it comes to this. I think there's a lot working against brick and mortar. And I will hear other people from the industry say they think it's coming back. But you know, when you think about what's going on out there, people aren't consuming as much as they used to. There's a real concern about what's going into landfills or maybe I'm in my bubble in Seattle, I don't know. But you know, that's happening. And then the whole way we dress today, you don't need these, you don't need your business wardrobe and your casual wardrobe and your play wardrobe, you know, it's all the same today. So you buy less clothes. It just feels, and then, well, thinking about the younger generation, they, as you've probably read, love experiences over spending money on things. And I mean, I personally think they're right, you know, and I was, I grew up in the generation that was the big spenders. So I think that there's a large potential that these bricks and mortar stores will end up if they stay around being showrooms that so people can come in if they want to see something like sit on a sofa or, you know, so I just want a beach chair. That's why I went to like three different stores. That's why I was at writing. Just trying to find a beach chair because I wanted to sit in it to see like how high it was. I'm going to the gorge, so it needs to be less than nine inches. I wanted to be comfortable. And yeah, that's part of why I went in person. But I had to go to three different stores and for them to even have one or two chairs to find one at Dick's Sporting Goods. But you didn't have choices really, right? Not really. No. I mean, like some more choices than any other story, or I think they were like two different ones I could look at two or three, but, um, that's where online shopping has it over bricks and mortar. They can provide choices. This is a bummer because I want to do one person, but then it's like, I'm not incentivized to person, but I get that they can't have all the stuff. Well, I think the other thing that's a bummer that I loved so much about retail is retail. And retailers provided an incredible experience in past years. Yeah. I mean, you never, I mean, think about when Disney first opened and you went, it was like going and doing an amusement park when you went into the Disney store years ago. And all that I think is going to have to go away because they can't afford it. Yeah. It's really, really unfortunate. I hope somebody figures it out. My first job after college, I didn't tell you this, but my first job after college was working at World Market for, uh, it was a seasonal employee. Oh, yeah. And I also, I felt like we treated employees really well and it was really nice. Our employees and, you know, customers coming in. So yeah. Fun fact. It was a wonderful place. Um, okay. Our last article, we're going to talk about boards. So Getty Images co-founder leaves the board. So I researched Getty Images. I did not know it was a Seattle company, but it's, I'm sure most people are familiar. It's where you can get stock images and stock music and such. But in 1995, 1995, it was founded by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein in London and they were family members. And then two years later, they relocate to Seattle. They acquire some companies. They get, they get bigger. They eventually sell private equity in 2008 and four years later, that company puts it up for sale and Carlisle Group, another private equity company buys it. Then in 2018, the Getty family buys it back. I have not seen that happen. I mean, that I have. I have. Wherever you've seen it. Yes. But would you know off top your head? Uh, I can't remember off top then, but I know there's a couple in my past life that I've seen. Yeah. Well, probably because they sell the company and they see what private equity does. So they're like, wait, just kidding. Oh, I know who one of them was. It was, um, Boudin Bakery in San Francisco family came in and, you know, in their 150 year old company. Yeah. Was it because they were like not liking what they were doing? Uh, I, I think it was suffering from what I understand. It wasn't doing well and they came in and got a deal and brought it back. Nice. Yeah. Cool. So, so it's back with the Getty family. And so the Jonathan Klein, he remained as CEO throughout this time from 1995 to 2015. And after that, he stayed on the board. So the news article that came out is that he's leaving the board. The other co-founder, Mark Getty, who I mentioned, he's remaining as the chair of the board. And then there are 10 board members currently, two of which are women. So have you had an experience serving on a board with a founder and is that kind of a unique situation? I imagine they're like, this is my baby. I don't want to listen to advice, but I've had experience as a CEO and as being on a board working with a founder. Yeah. Tell me about that. You know, it depends on the founder. It can be, I mean, it can be crazy fun. It can be inspirational and energizing and, you know, be really cool to, to be working with them. It can also be incredibly challenging, you know, as the company matures. Most of these founders are amazing entrepreneurs and they have this entrepreneurial ability that isn't necessarily a good thing when as the company gets more mature. And what I've seen is they typically don't like it when boards are doing what boards do. And that's helping set strategy, making big decisions, those kinds of things. They want the entrepreneur, the founder wants to make all the decisions. And that's when the things kind of go bad. I can see that. Because I think the reason you start accompanying your entrepreneurs is because you want to make these decisions. Yeah. But people can do it. Look at Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Yeah. And then what's the common reason why you think a founder would leave this article doesn't say why he left. He said it was no negative things happening, but why do you see founders leaving? Now I think it's disagreements with the CEO or the board, mostly. Maybe they're tired, but most of these guys have unbounded energy, you know, but so and they're driven to succeed. And I think they see others making decisions as they think they can make them better. Yeah. That makes sense. How do you know when it's time for you to leave a board? Because I've mentioned so many that you're on, does it, when does it feel like the right time to leave? Well, when your term ends, obviously is one of the right times to leave. But for me personally, if I'm not adding value to the company or it's a very dysfunctional board and becomes a stress, an added stress to my life, then I start leaving thinking about leaving a board. Now, that's a very serious thing to leave a board before your term is up and you don't want to leave the board in a large. So if you decide as a board member to do that, you need to do it the right way. And the right way may be a different way depending on different way from board to board, depending on what the situation is and whether it's public or private, you know. So I left a board once, but I worked very closely with the board on replacing myself and making sure they had somebody that was better than me on board. Yeah. So when you think of, I'm kind of jumping around on our list of questions here, but what do you think about when you're thinking about joining a board? And you and I had talked to one point about the difference between for profit and nonprofit boards and your experience on which ones you've been trying to get into. Do you have a preference? Are they different experiences? Well, you know, I think when you and I talked, I was driving myself to really get on some more public boards because I'm very interested in the public side of business. It also happens to pay better, but that isn't what drives me to sit on a board at the end of the day. I can all walk away from one with high pay if I don't think it's right for me. So but I was looking for more public and ended up some for profits came up, which I was debating whether to do because I didn't want my time taken up with that if some other opportunities came through. But I found the public for profit boards more challenging to get at the end of the day. I talked to somebody recently, one gal, talked to 150 boards and ended up with three seats. Can you imagine like not a lot? Oh my God. And now three board seats is a lot for an individual, but to only, I mean, she went to 150 companies to get three seats. Do you feel like age and gender play into that? I do. Yeah. I do. Boards are trying to get past gender. They're trying to get past race. They're trying to be fairer about that. Yeah. I feel like there's age, there's no age maximum on a board or is there? Well, the SEC has pushed for age maximum just as they push for term limits. And I believe that term limits are important. You know, companies used to have and some still do people that sit on boards for 20 years. And I think you become too inside the company. It's better to have an outside view and be objective. I see, you know, to me, six years is probably the ideal because it takes you time to ramp up and then you start to apply your knowledge and learn from it. And so I think that's better. And still today, a lot of them are nine to 10 years. Wow. But, and then that impacts age where they start to look at age because, you know, the SEC has come out with in their mind age limits, different boards have different age. They decide it for themselves, but it can't be higher than a certain age, which I think it's 75. Some are 73. And so if they have, they expect you to serve three terms and your 65, 65 and nine is 74. And if your age limit is 73, boom, they don't go after you, which, you know, it's really a shame because there's a lot of people with a lot of wisdom that have done a lot in their careers that could help these folks. And just as I believe boards should have diversity from the age perspective with youth, now people need experience, but you typically see boards with all 15, 60 year olds. And I really think there should be 40 year olds on a board who are bringing some of that energy and vibe and et cetera to it. So I just think we have to get better at that. Yeah, for them to all look different in all sorts of ways. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And actually I should mention it's been proven that with women on boards, maybe you've talked about this in the past, it's been proven that boards that have women on them, those companies are more successful than boards that don't. I love that. I love that. That's right. Well, and I think that proves the conversation and the argument of, I guess some people can push back and be like, I don't want to have women on my board for diversity's sake, you know, diversity for diversity's sake. But this is a business argument is that it's actually going to be better for your business. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the point of view when you think differently, you ask questions differently, it's, you know, yeah, it's a good thing. Okay. Well, I think we're just about at time. So is there anything else that you want to plug for the audience to know, any events coming up? Let's see. Oh boy. I do all kinds of events. There's going to be an event on October 10th called 50/50 Women on Boards and it's an organization that is driving to having 50% of board, 50% of board members being female by 2050. Oh, I see. Yeah. Right. So that's, that's one thing that's happening that I'm involved with. I do a lot on in this area to try to help women get the kinds of things done that they want to get done. You know, something else I'd love to plug. It's a nonprofit board that I just joined called Refugee Artisan Initiative or RA for short RAI. Okay. They're out of Lake City. And this group is providing refugees and immigrant women with jobs that pay a fair wage and they're training them, they're helping them loan their English, they're all providing a community. A lot of these women feel very isolated. They don't know anybody and we have a workshop that they come into and they all have lunch together and make friends and so it's a wonderful thing and we've seen women do wonderful things. They'll come over here. They could have been professionals where they were before and their licenses and accepted here. So they end up doing the things we're doing. And we're mostly what we've taught them is how to sew. And then we have our own online program where we sell our products online. But even more than that, we do it with, it's all upcycled. We do it with materials that would have gone into landfill. So, you know, somebody like an Amazon might donate their sheets to us that are returns because you can't resell sheets and then we make things out of those sheets. So it's this wonderful circular economy. That's awesome. So one more time with the company, the organization called Refugee Artisan Initiative. Initiative. Okay. We'll have to take a look at that. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Kathy. And thank you to World Trade Center for hosting us. This has been really fun. And remember to check out those videos on YouTube. I'll put some links in the show notes. So thank you again. Thanks Rachel. This has been The Weekly. Make sure to check back next Sunday for the latest local business news. We love listener feedback. So if you have any story suggestions, comments or complaints, email us at theweeklyseattle@gmail.com. We'll see you next time. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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