Episode 213 - Doing Good is Good for Business with Keren Pybus & Jeff Kahler
Keren Pybus is the Co-founder of Ethical Apparel Africa, an impact-driven company based in Ghana and Benin. Ethical Apparel Africa was founded based on the core belief that all manufacturing can and should be done ethically. And they work with international brands who are interested in growing a manufacturing base in Africa with a positive social and environmental impact. Keren joins us on the Faith Driven investor Podcast to discuss the importance of leading a company that is committed to more than just looking good.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. If you've listened to this before, you know that I like to say this is a very special edition and this is indeed true. This is actually the first time we've ever had an investor and two entrepreneurs on the podcast at the same time. First, a word about the investor. Jeff is a good friend of mine and we've traveled the world together, or at least we've traveled to Africa together. But Jeff has been a great encouragement. We've done a lot of co-investing together. A man really serious about his faith, committed to the movement of Faith Driven Investor and is a part of this story we're about to hear. But before we meet Paloma and Keren. Jeff, welcome to the program. It's so great to have you. This is your first time on the program. Did you sleep well last night?
Jeff Kahler: Yes, I did.
Henry Kaestner: Good, good. Okay. And we've got Keren and Paloma with us as well. And the two of you are with Ethical Apparel Africa, you co-founded together. Welcome to the program. Really glad you're here.
Keren Pybus: Thanks for having us.
Henry Kaestner: Awesome. We like to get an autobiographical flyover of all of our guest as we get started. And I'm going to go back to my friend of many words, Jeff Kahler and ask it. He do that first and then I to go back to Paloma and Keren. And I want you guys to each take a turn. Talk about who you are, where do you come from, and then bring us into the work of ethical apparel. And then we'll have a great conversation from there. So, Jeff, you start, please.
Jeff Kahler: Okay. Well, I'm an old guy who is in a business his whole life, been a believer, follower of Christ since I was in high school and I spent my career as the CFO of multiple operating businesses. My background, I'm a CPA, and over time, that business background has morphed into working for a wealthy family and helping them invest. We're Christians, and we just have a strong motivation to do good with our capital, not just be able to provide funding through foundation of money, but actually use the capital for, you know, the work in the kingdom. And, you know, we just have a strong belief that we want to be lovers in the world and care for people and be very missional with our capital.
Henry Kaestner: Indeed. Indeed. And that what is what unites you to our audience. Paloma and Keren, tell us each about your story and maybe work. Well, yeah, start at the beginning. But I do want you to talk about how you guys connected.
Keren Pybus: Right. So I'm Karen. I am English. In case you hadn't worked that one out from my accent. I was born and brought up in the UK, but I spent some of my early life living in Tanzania when I was in my gap year and that kind of ignited my love for Africa. I was there with the Mission Aviation Fellowship a long time ago and really I ended up in the textiles and fashion world through lack of being good at much else things. But I think probably now realizing that that was what God brought me to. So I studied it and I worked for a couple of very large retailers in the UK across merchandizing and sourcing, which took me eventually to Bangladesh, where I started the George clothing sourcing office for the UK supermarket retailer Asda, which was owned by Wal Mart at the time, and started looking at how we source our clothing from Bangladesh in a different way. And that got me really excited about being close to the needle point and understanding what manufacturing really was about and how you could impact workers lives. And then I think really my faith has always been a core part of the vicar's daughter. I am now married to a vicar as well, so I've kind of had that shaped all the way through my life. But for me it was a real moment of realizing that I wanted to do something that was going to shape an industry that had so many bad things about it and workers being treated in so many bad ways. And I had moved from Bangladesh to South Africa with Wal Mart as well. And when they were starting a business there and as I started there, a friend of mine called me with a prophetic word and said, But if you want to walk on the water, you've got to get out of the boats. And I thought for that, that was doing something terrifying. I was 40, I was single. I was like, I can do anything I want. I've lived in Dhaka and Bangladesh. You know what's terrifying? I didn't know what terrifying looked like. I was looking for it. And then my sister sent me the oceans Hillsong, which said the same thing basically. So I carried on looking for what the terrifying thing was and then realized that I didn't feel scared of anything. So I was looking for different jobs. And then one day I got made redundant eighteen years into working for one big company and. I just I didn't know what to do with myself, but I ended up being in Africa on gardening leave for six months. And so I was able to travel around and ended up in Ghana actually with a different company doing some consultancy work and realized this incredible opportunity there. And that was how I met Paloma, she who was also consulting for the same company in Ghana as well. And so we met in the country with this united vision about how did you take an industry that can create so many jobs and therefore create so much change in this incredible environment that had this incredible history but hadn't really turned into an industry that was growing. And then I to cut a long story short, and I'm sure you'll ask more about this, when we started, the company realized that actually being a CEO of the company was my walking on the water. It was the thing I was absolutely terrified about. I am terrified about on a daily basis. And the only way to get through being a CEO is to have God as your chairman and being able to know that you've got hope and trust in the person that created you and the person that's giving you the vision to do the good work. And that's my walking on the water.
Henry Kaestner: It's fascinating. And we talk a lot about a Faith Driven Entrepreneur that entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey and what's baked into that is an entrepreneur is their CEO, and it can be a lonely journey, but it doesn't need to be. It's kind of our tagline, a rallying cry, so to speak. And it's fascinating that against a backdrop of having tried and been in so many crazy, crazy places, that the terrifying experiences, indeed the lonely journey that it might be to be a CEO. If you don't understand that it sounds petty and cliche that God is my copilot. Right? But as it turns out, you also have a co-founder, the wonderful Paloma, who's with us as well. Paloma, who are you? Where do you come from?
Paloma Schackert: Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. We have just been so impressed and overwhelmed by the support of this community. So, yeah, wonderful to be speaking with you guys. I am originally from Seattle, born and bred, but similar to Keren had these opportunities early in life when I was 14 - 15 to spend a lot of time in emerging economies. And actually for me it was more in Latin America initially in the Dominican Republic and other countries. And those experiences really pushed me around, kind of reflecting as to the privilege and opportunity I had in my family, especially through the economic empowerment of women. And this is something that I think about a lot in terms of the generations of history where my generation has been the first that I think has grown up as girls being told, you know, you can do anything you set your mind to. And my mom's generation even didn't have that. And yet she went on to have an amazing career in sales and had, you know, 200 people reporting to her around the world and was a real outlier. And being able to do that as a woman and as a mom and her mother also was one of the first in her family to go to college, worked at a time where her husband wasn't able to work and really held up the family economically. And then on my dad's side, his mom, my grandmother there was also incredible in being the first teacher in her family and really not only becoming economically empowered herself, but then later in her life working with women in the maquiladoras and the factories in northern Mexico and helping them to create economic opportunity for themselves. And so having these experiences young around being in countries where those opportunities literally do not exist for girls and for women and those examples don't exist, just really became my kind of path and passion in life in terms of being able to create that opportunity and use my power to try to help other women and girls who wouldn't otherwise have those paths available to them to create agency in their lives and to be able to feel God's love through that. And really, my grandmother, that's kind of when I think about my faith, she's the shining beacon of that in terms of the the pragmatism of letting that come out through care for others and through letting people have dignity and possibility and hope and the economic opportunity ahead of them so differently from Keren, my background is not at all in garments or apparel. My friends and family when I first went into this industry were like, Are you? Are you kidding? You're not a fashion person. Like you couldn't care less about what you wear, which is true and remains true. But when you start to think about the economic opportunities for women in emerging economies, it's, you know, apparel manufacturing is the obvious industry. It's the answer to what can support a mother who has not had education opportunities in her life to have a career path within a couple of months. That's an incredibly powerful thing. So very serendipitously and I'm sure we'll talk about this more met Keren when I was taking a break doing that what's called an externship away from I was in management consulting at a large firm at Bain. And saw the opportunity together in Ghana to create this opportunity for women at scale and went from there.
Henry Kaestner: Okay. So I want to hear about Keren and your Bonine as well. I want to hear about how you saw while I get how you saw the opportunities it baked in both of your backgrounds, in your stories. I want to hear about how you got started on that, because there's a lot there. You've got a dream of creating thousands and thousands of manufacturing jobs. You've already made a big dent toward that bigger goal that you have. But in order to do that, you've got to bring a product to market. Paloma, by your own admission, is not a fashionista, but maybe Keren, as Jeff most assuredly is not. But what does it look like to take a product, bring it to market? And then the other parts, of course, which is how to identify the customer. But maybe the most important of these three things is how do you do what you just said, which is to encourage, inspire, equip, bring hope to, and bring training to and real skills to this population of these women that you're enabling. What does that look like? And you put out an ad and say, okay, we're we got a factory, we're going to get started. I mean, how does that even start?
Keren Pybus: That's a really good question. And honestly, and this is really it sounds cliché, but it's honestly, it was God completely because we had this vision to basically prove that ethical manufacturing should be the normal way of doing things. And the ethical manufacturing generally is very linked to high end and luxury goods. And we were like, why can't it be done at mass scale? And what is stopping it being done at a mass scale? So we started with a vision of an operating model that we still have today where we basically said, if you can create operational excellence within a factory environment, whether that's lean manufacturing, whether that's the way that you use renewable energies, however it is, and you can then create something that attracts those orders. And for us, it was export orders and not necessarily making for the African market at that point in time. There is enough money in the system to then generate profits that you can reinvest back into your workers. That, in turn will create operational efficiency by lowering absenteeism, by lowering labor turnover, by giving people a better place to work and a more valuable and sustainable job in what you do. So we created this model, and the obvious thing to do would be to then go down the consultancy route that was Paloma's background. I had the background of being in the factories to go into factories and say, okay, we're going to help you be operationally excellent, but actually without any orders. And what we had in Ghana was a whole load of factories that had had money from the government previously but didn't know how to market themselves, didn't know how to operate at an international level from a quality, efficiency perspective. If they didn't have any orders going through those factories and you could make the factory look as beautiful and great as you want, but it weren't proving a single thing. And so we needed to create a model that meant that we were bringing those orders in. But the timeline of the way that the garment industry works is that you get an order and you don't get paid for that order for at least nine months to a year after you've made it. So you've got to finance all the raw materials, you've got to do all of that stuff upfront, you've got to pay all of your workers and then the retailer might pay you when you've actually delivered the goods. So like, how do we do this? So praying about it, one day we got I got a phone call from a friend of mine who is working for US Aid in Ghana. And the US Aid had started a trade hub where they were specializing in certain industries and looking at growth in certain industries. And the apparel industry was one of those industries and I didn't know at the time that this friend of mine was suffering from cancer and he needed to subcontract his contract. Now you don't get a USA contract unless your company's been in existence for three years. We had been in existence for one week at that point and he called me and said, I need to do this you know and I need to help you with this. And literally, like a week later or something, we had $30,000 given to us by USAID and said, go off and recruit your technical experts to start training in the factories. And we have developed that relationship with U.S. aid and other donor agencies over the last seven years. That has been the reason that really we didn't need to come to face driven entrepreneur and investors until recently because we've had a lot of donor funding believing in what we were doing from a training and a development point of view that enabled us for the first two years to just train factories and develop relationships, develop relationships with brands, and not even need to bring product into the market for that time period. So complete God, just giving us the starting that we needed to be able to do that.
Henry Kaestner: Can you walk us through the life of one of the workers that you have? Just make it real personal. Help us just understand what their life is like and living in Ghana, what their job opportunities have been before you started this together and then what is their life look like now? And maybe even just maybe it's just a fictional name. You come up with. Maybe it's somebody real name, but help us to just walk in the shoes of one of your workers a bit.
Paloma Schackert: I can give kind of the overarching structure. And then maybe, Keren, if you want to share a specific person story, I'm thinking even maybe one of the mechanics and you trainees at the factory but so we recently to lay the context have acquired a majority stake in a factory that's 2 hours outside of Accra, where we first walked into this factory two years ago. There are about 40 people sitting on machines, but there was room to employ 800. And we were just floored because it was the largest industrial space we've ever seen in the country. And by the way, in situating Ghana and West Africa from an economic point of view, huge potential. So that's a big part of the driving reason why Keren and I went there as well. If you look at the duty free rates, the logistics rates, the level of cost competitiveness, where there's longevity to that cost competitiveness versus what's going on in Asia and being able to really pay a living wage and create a decent livelihood while still remaining extremely cost competitive. So all of that is kind of laying the groundwork for the opportunity here where there's heart involved. But there's also a lot of head involved in the strategy of how Keren and I ended up in Ghana. So we saw this factory a couple of hours outside the capital as a huge opportunity to not only be deliver a competitive manufacturing solution for our clients, but also make a tremendous difference in the lives of the workers and the community that we could create, because the alternative employment opportunities in this region are basically non-existent. We're now the largest employer. We have about 500 employees at this factory that we majority own. The next largest employer is between 50 and 100 people, and this is in a region of nearly a million people. So the vast majority are employed by completely informal endeavors. And this is actually, from a personal standpoint, a huge driver of and I didn't kind of tell this part of my story, but I spent time living in Ghana in 2010, working on a philanthropic program to open savings accounts for women in the northern part of the country. And I would speak to a lot of women who were informally employed in the same way that a lot of individuals in Koforidua this region, where we now own our factory are informally employed and we were offering these women savings accounts, we were saying, you know, it's great to be able to have a savings account and to put money away. And it's financial literacy and all of these important things. But in the focus groups that I was running, where I would speak to a lot of these entrepreneurs, these women would say to me, I don't want to be an entrepreneur. I'm not an entrepreneur by choice. I'm an entrepreneur because I don't have any ability to have a wage where I know that I'm going to have a steady job and be able to put food on the table and send my kids to school. That's what I would prefer. And I think there's a lot of romanticizing that happens among the development community around. You know, it's so great to support entrepreneurs and micro entrepreneurship and, you know, loans and savings and all of the financial mechanisms to help them. And I definitely think there's value in that to give more financial freedom to people. But ultimately, the vast majority of us in our developed economies want to have a paycheck. And that's the exact same motivation that I think is present in Ghana and other countries, and those opportunities just aren't there. So being able to provide that formal that ability to have a steady job and, you know, that kind of basic economic well-being is, yeah, the driver for us.
Keren Pybus: For most of all. To your point about the people, so the vast majority of our factory, 75% of it women and 80% of them are between the ages of 18 and 29. So it's a very young workforce. People come a lot directly from school. The Government's done an incredible job recently of making education free up to the age of 18. So it is generally people are leaving school and going into jobs and they will live with families or live with friends so it's a large groups of people living in one property together. You don't have. You have some, but it's not the same kind of slum environment you would find somewhere like Dhaka, where I lived in that sense of factory, particularly as rural. So we're in a a large market town relatively rather than a city in that sense, very heavily Christian country. 85% of the country is Christian and particularly in our region. So we have Muslims and Christians working with us and we have a team, an expat team and a local team that managed the factory together and an expat local team at our office in Accra of mixed faiths, mixed religions, mixed backgrounds, I think from about 13 different nationalities we employ in total. So for the average worker, their opportunities are limited, particularly where we are, they have a basic education. Most people can read and write, but they haven't had the ability to learn how to do a job that enables them to. Think outside the box or to progress. So the idea of career progression for a woman there is about you get a job, you leave and you have children and you work your way through the family kind of model in that sense. So being able to support women as they have children, if they want to come back to work as well within there has been a really important part of what we do and we've got some great examples of people. A young girl who Florence, who was an operator, obviously had something about her in terms of the way that she handled the fabric, her enthusiasm, the way she did it, the way that her mind was working. We developed her, gave her opportunities to be a sample operator, to do some things differently, and then we put her on to. So we worked very closely with GIZ, the German development organization, and we've developed a specific training program with a public institution in Ghana to do specialist training at those kind of middle management technical roles. So most people in Ghana can sew, like you're brought up with your own sewing machine. That's kind of the easy part, sewing complicated garments and then doing the next stage of things pattern cutting, mechanics, those things, all skill sets that they don't have. So we've brought this training program in with this training school to be able to do that. And we've trained around 150 people across 39 different factories in Ghana, in schools in those areas.
Henry Kaestner: So well beyond the factories that you own.
Keren Pybus: Yes. Yeah. This is not specific to that.
Henry Kaestner: Because I was going to ask the question. So you've got this highly trained workforce now. Are you finding that they're a flight risk and is that something you celebrate or is that something you try to protect against? But you are absolutely trying to just change culture in the skill sets of the populace.
Keren Pybus: Absolutely our vision with more grace, which is the factory owners. It will be a model factory that can teach at the factories. So we regularly have other factories in. We also have partner factories that we also place business in as well that we don't own. So we have five partner factories that have reached the right level of international compliance and standards that we also work with to develop. And then beyond that, we want to be a light to train the industry and to develop people and move people on. In fact, our compliance manager this week has left to go and run one of the factories and to take on the management of another factory. So we absolutely believe in that and we have a US aid grant that we want as well that is enabling us to do that as well. So the money that we have raised through this investment round, through Jeff's money has been matched, funded by US aid to effectively double up the investment that we've got there into the factory to enable us specifically to do the model factory. And we get measured by U.S. aid on how many factories we are outwardly teaching.
Henry Kaestner: Okay. Gotcha. And so 159 factories a lot. So you presumably your measurement, your grades are pretty good.
Keren Pybus: 39 factories, 139.
Henry Kaestner: So 159 is aspirational then.
Keren Pybus: hundred and 50 people.
Henry Kaestner: Maybe that's prophetic.
Keren Pybus: Fifty nine factories.
Henry Kaestner: Just go with it.
Keren Pybus: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So 159, will start 300 at least?
Henry Kaestner: Sure. So, Jeff, I want to bring you into this again. It's not every day that we have an investor and the entrepreneur together on the podcast, I guess I doubt our audience knows the back story of how you two met. How did you guys meet?
Jeff Kahler: Yeah, we just met through one of your entrepreneurial days. What do you call those?
Henry Kaestner: Demo days?
Jeff Kahler: Yeah. And these two put on a pretty impressive little demo, and then they have chat rooms afterwards, and I ended up being the only one in the chat room. So it was a great time for Keren and Paloma. And I get to know each other. And you know, as you can tell by listening to these two, they're very impressive. And we were looking for these kind of things and this just hit all the buttons for me. You know, we're ethical capitalists. So when you name your business, ethical in your name, that speaks to us. And, you know, we're looking for ways to partner with people like this. And we also found that we had a lot of interesting connections. I had actually spent a short time, 30 years ago working in West Africa, in the Ivory Coast. I worked for USAID briefly, in fact, because our coast is French speaking, almost all the employees that worked in the USAID office were Ghanaians. And so because Ghanaians largely speak English, they were most of the employees there. So we found that we had that connection. And I've always had this heart for Africa, for the kind of the poorest, the poor. And we've done some investing in other places in Africa, and we're just looking for things like this. And it was a good business model. These women were impressive. They have all this interest experienced with Keren. And so we felt like it was a good mix and a good match for us. And it's just wonderful to be able to have a connection with somebody to about how they operate and and understand what they're doing and to share our faith. And in that they care about people like we do.
Henry Kaestner: So some number of our audience want know that we have a ministry also called Faith Driven Investor. Faith Driven Investor was started because we found that a good number of faith driven entrepreneurs we came across really did appreciate the content and community we have. We have these groups. And the January, February cohort, we had 1600 entrepreneurs from 66 different countries getting together in groups and learning about the call to create and learning about each other's stories and just super encouraging. I think the average group probably has members of three or four different countries in them, but we do content, we do community, of course, we do the conference, the blog and the podcast. But we also came to understand the felt need for many entrepreneurs is to raise capital, and that really made a special impact for us, for those entrepreneurs that are in markets like Africa, where there are not a lot of angel investors. And so we started the demo day in the marketplace out of response for that for a group of Faith Driven Investor. And unfortunately, because the way the tax laws work, they tend to have to be accredited investors. We're working on expanding that through a new partnership we have with we funders. So stay tuned on that. But I actually had known that that you guys had met that way, so that's a great encouragement. I love hearing that and it's really neat when the Body of Christ comes together. Tell us a little bit more and we've obviously heard some of that through the background. You want to invest in a problem to be solved. You want invest in who's trying to solve the problem, how big of a problem is it, etc.? What are some of the other things that you've picked up on from their story that you look for in a Faith Driven Entrepreneur that you might invest in? What are the things that just they grab you? Obviously Africa is part of it because of your background, but what are some of the other things that if you're an investor listening to this podcast and saying, okay, I think I want to get involved in investing in Africa, but my goodness, you talk back about the things that Keren listed is terrifying. That sounds kind of terrifying. How did you go about doing it and make it a way that maybe some of you might be able to take action on this listening to this podcast?
Jeff Kahler: Well, it's a good question because, you know, I do believe that investing in Africa is pretty risky. We've done a number of investments, but we are continuing In fact, you probably don't know this, Henry, but we've made two more investments kind of through this Faith Driven Investor Network just in the last three months. Two things that we found on that trip to Africa we've invested in. So we're committed to it, but we're also lies wide open. You know, there's supply chain risk, there's political risk, there's exit risks, there's there's a lot of risks. But so I'm looking for business models that work. I'm a financial guy. I've been a CFO for 30 years. I eat, breathe and sleep financial statements and, you know, cost profit margin. So I have a strong belief that if a business isn't profitable, it's not sustainable. So I'm looking and we're kind of willing to take kind of an extra risk, but I'm not really willing to invest in something that doesn't look like it's going to be very profitable because I don't think it'll survive. And I do kind of believe in the triple or quadruple bottom line that a business needs to work for everybody and be good for everybody, including the owners. You know, my scene I probably told you this, Henry, but that the cost of everything is a sum of its costs. And one of those costs to some of us is the cost of capital. And so business has got to be profitable.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Do you, have a rule of thumb, then look at an investment and say, okay, is this going to be the last money they'll need to raise?
Jeff Kahler: That's unlikely. So, yeah, you do it. Typically, you need to look at it in the long run and think in terms of am I going to be able to do another round or will they need another round? And if they will, will they be able to get it elsewhere? In our case, we have a fairly large pool of capital to work with, and so our minimum investment that we like to do is too large for angel investing. So we're looking for bigger things in most cases. And you know, probably the one drawback about long current business that is pretty capital intensive. There's a lot of equipment, you know, receivables equipment. There's a lot of it's a pretty capital intensive business. So it needs a fair amount of money to get going and to sustain it and might need more money, you know, down the line. It's probably will given the kind of growth that they want. But that's why we're here. And I know it's a real cliche, the whole thing about, you know, giving up a fish to somebody that we have for a day or teaching somebody to fish they'll fish for a lifetime. But what people really need is a fishing boat. You know, a lot of people know how to fish. They need the fishing boat.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. So I want to switch it back into Faith Driven Entrepreneur lessons here and say I'm going to hand it back to Paloma and to Keren. But I do want to throw one other thing that I think as you talk about investing in Africa, that I think is good for the audience that are investors and listening to this, I love the way that you talked about profitability. I think that while many of the businesses you might invest in could take in other capital to continue to have a great growth rate. And when you listen to Keren and Paloma, you get a sense that you really want to help them to grow as quickly and as long as they can grow with quality as much as they can. And if they're just limited to profits, they might, you know, get to their goals in 20 years instead of five years. Some number of them are going to be able to be qualified for bank financing. But one of the things that I think that an investor needs to know is that the larger late round ecosystem for equity deals is not as robust in Africa as it is in America. And sometimes we'll think, well, we've invested in a company and America and it's going great. They tripled revenues and surely some other venture capital firm will come in and then continue to fund their growth. In this case, one lesson that we've learned is that it's good to have an idea about where the future funding will come from. And to a point that you made is let's have at least some visibility to where the company could go profitable, even if they have to throttle down their growth rate, lest otherwise we find a company has some success, shows some promise, maybe even has a product market fit. And yet the next round of institutional investors isn't there yet. I think in five or ten years we're seeing that developing ecosystem where more and more institutional funders are coming in. But just a word of just caution on something like that. I think that that is mitigated, though, by working with entrepreneurs like this that have these types of longer connections and have this type of a background. But I want to throw back to them, as you have work with investors, they come in to get involved in what God is doing through you. What have you looked for? What are some of the lessons that you've learned? What's maybe been different than maybe you might otherwise have expected?
Keren Pybus: I think the first thing has been the values alignment. So whether they're being Christian investors or non-Christian investors, having somebody that understands that what we are trying to do is create a profitable business. But it's more than that. This is about creating a model for the industry, but also about the creation of jobs that are sustainable, worthwhile jobs. And if that means that we reinvest money to be able to get there rather than paying back sooner or what those things are that we have got that heart. And so to find investors that have got that same heart and that passion and are as excited about receiving our impact report and wanting to come visit us and see what we're doing as they are about receiving the P&L. That's been a really key thing for us. And so a large percentage of our early round investors were friends, connected friends, people in that kind of industry. And in fact, our seed investor is the ex CFO of Microsoft, and he and his wife have a trust and they provide that perfect balance for us of he's got the CFO side of things. She doesn't care about the numbers. She is absolutely passionate about the people and that's what she wants to know about. So we have these great calls with them where you get the both side of things.
Paloma Schackert: And I think the other element of it is, just as Keren was saying, the individuals who have came on the journey with us are motivated by so many different factors, but also do bring that understanding of what the capital evolution will look like. So our seed investor, John, for example, was pushing us from the very beginning to think about, okay, what is the next round look like? What is the round after that look like? And very clear about what their involvement in that journey would be. Similarly, you know, Jeff and the foundation, absolutely the same mentality of this is not just a relationship of one investment. This is thinking about the long term and wanting that participation over and over again and everyone being excited to do that because the values are so aligned. I'll give just one other example. There's an investor we have who this is a private investment he's making as a high net worth individual. But in his day job, he runs a private equity firm that invests in emerging economies, mostly focused on India so far, but now expanding into East and West Africa. And they would be a perfect fit for our next round, where we're thinking about raising closer to four or 5 million to stand up a couple more factories. So it's laying the groundwork through the people that are committed to the journey from multiple angles, but still have that strategy of where does this go from here in terms of growth and scale?
Henry Kaestner: Well answered, great perspective. And I look forward to hearing more how you progress and how you expand and how you bring in the right type of development capital from some of the governments. You mentioned the Germans, how you bring in some of the right type of grant capital from people like USAID and then the right type of investment capital and maybe on a different podcast will get into that kind of destruction in that I can get detailed on that. But with the time we have left, I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about how your faith ends up working its way through to the bottom line worker. And I don't want to be presumptuous or prescriptive about what that might look like, but how do you see God show up every day and what does that look like in the relationships you have with folks? What are you saying?
Keren Pybus: So prayer is the most important thing because you can't ground everything in your relationship with God in prayer. Then what else do you have in that sense? And so we have various different networks of things that happen in that area. So we have a prayer group on WhatsApp that any employee of any faith can be on. That's where we share prayer requests or people or situations or things, and their friends and family can be on that group too, so that they are praying and there's people praying for that industry. We have personal prayer networks then too as well that we lean on for things that may be a little bit more confidential or things that are personal in that sense. I'm also part of the Faith and business network in the U.K. and there's also another pro network called Fashion for Christ and based in the UK as well. So those are two other networks that are very, very powerful for me. And then the factory has prayers every day. So they start the day with prayer and they start the day with what they call devotions. And we have a space in the factory for other faiths to be able to pray as well, so that we create that environment of a focus on God and a focus on prayer. And as a board of directors, we pray together in terms of the factory as well. So the later that we've acquired the factory with also very strong faith in terms of that being the driving force. And so that really has been the part and then being able to share those answers to prayer. So, you know, those parts where the miraculous has really happened and being able to share back so that even for those that maybe don't have the same faith or don't have the same level of faith, see that for us that we see those coincidences being actually a result of prayer and trying to understand where God wants us to go next with what we're doing, rather than just sort of plowing ahead into what we're doing.
Henry Kaestner: Paloma, maybe you build on that, but also maybe you take us in another direction. We don't oftentimes have partners on the podcast together. We have 12 marks of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur you might know about them, but we talk about them, of course, in the book and we talk about them in our courses, etc. And one of them is in partnership. As an investor, as an entrepreneur myself, that's been blessed three times now with incredible godly men that have encouraged me in my walk with God and I would have been lost without in terms of my business. What are some lessons that you are learning from as partners in this business?
Keren Pybus: That is so horrible when each other goes on maternity leave.
Henry Kaestner: But I've never had that problem.
Paloma Schackert: That it's so great to have somebody who understands it. Yeah, I think I was reflected on this the other day, actually coming back from maternity leave. My daughter is now six months old and Keren's is three and a half years old. My gosh, I can't believe it's been three and a half years that it's just having our partnership has been the thing that has never wavered and has always been as strong as it is now. And I don't think we've ever had any moments of doubt around it. Speaking for myself, yes, you can go again, which is incredible because we're doing something that is so, so risky, so challenging, so new, so audacious. And to have that level of strength and trust and just ability to lean on each other in every circumstance.
Keren Pybus: And I should add that we probably only see each other once a year. So Paloma is based in New York and I'm in the UK. I mean, Covid is obviously made it worse, but even pre-COVID. So the whole like online, working from home, doing everything on Skype and Zoom was completely normal to us. But we've developed that through our faith and through the things and through a level of trust of each other. Also not being in the same place or even on the same time zone.
Paloma Schackert: And I think we're also just so complementary in our skill sets. Like, as I shared at the beginning, I don't bring anything related to the apparel industry, but, you know, management consulting and strategy and finance and investment and all of that side is my bag. And then Keren brings everything in terms of the networks and the knowledge of account management and critical path and factories and manufacturing and together. It's been such a just incredible journey.
Henry Kaestner: Outstanding. Keren, where are you in the UK?
Keren Pybus: I'm currently in a little village just outside of a place called Peterborough, which is an hour north of Cambridge.
Henry Kaestner: Gotcha. Okay. I'm an Anglophile and many of our listeners are as well. I got engaged over there and I'm coming over next month. I shouldn't timestamp or time guard this so much, but I'm going to a next month. I get a great treat. I get to do a Faith Driven Entrepreneur event with Holy Trinity Brompton. We had Nicky Gumbel on the podcast recently, who's a great entrepreneur and really helped to grow the Alpha project. And I love what God is doing over there. I've taken some notes down fashion for Christ. It sounds like there's some other networks of what God has been doing for a long, long time.
Keren Pybus: Fashion for Christ came out of HTB after 24 seven prayer movement.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, wow. Okay.
Keren Pybus: Yeah. So. Okay, yeah. Let me know when you're in town. I'm always down in London as well.
Henry Kaestner: So April 27th, Tuesday night, April 27th, I think is when we're doing the event and I'd love to see you in person. That'd be great. And for any of the listeners that might listen to this before, maybe you can show up. And the odds are that most of you will listen to this after we're done. So look on the podcast for the time we spent with Nicky and Pippa Gambol at Holy Trinity Brompton and the work that they're all doing over there. I want to close out the podcat, the way we do each one of our episodes, which is to ask our guests what they're hearing from God through his word. I'm going to ask all three of you so we're not going to be able to spend maybe as much time unpacking each one. But nonetheless, I fully believe that God is answering your prayers. And Keren, thank you for that emphasis on prayer, and that is answering your prayers. And oftentimes he'll do so through his word. What are you each hearing from God through his word? Maybe it's today, maybe it's this week, but some way that you feel he's talking to you. Please.
Keren Pybus: For me, it's very clear at the moment it's about David and Goliath. And David saw that opportunity, saw how big that thing was and wasn't scared because he had God with him. And we deal with a huge amount of very large corporations. And we're a small company trying to grow, but actually it just takes. He selected five stones. He only needed one of them. And actually it's about seeing the giant and then trusting God to go after it.
Henry Kaestner: Good word, Paloma.
Paloma Schackert: I think for me I'm feeling very reinvigorated, so I share that I recently came back from maternity leave. There's been a lot of ups and downs for the business over the past six months to a year and as there have been for so many with COVID and pandemic and now what's going on in Eastern Europe and the world just feels like it's kind of moving under our feet. But a number of things have happened this week and just having this conversation as well as just rerouted me and where we're going and then the strength of the foundation. I'm very grateful for that.
Henry Kaestner: Excellent, excellent. Jeff.
Jeff Kahler: Well, I think it's just that God loves us. He love us so much. He loves people so much. And that gives me a great deal of hope and encouragement in the world that people may be lost, but they're still lost children of God in that, you know, we get to be a partner in sharing that love in the world. And I'm just more excited about doing that than ever.
Henry Kaestner: Well said. Well said. Okay. I should have probably asked this question earlier on, but if you're listening to podcasts and you're just inspired by the story, what are ways to get involved maybe as a consumer? Yes, it sounds like you may have another round that you might be talking about in the marketplace at some point in time in the future. But maybe as a consumer where we find your products, how do we support the work of your workers?
Keren Pybus: That's tough as a consumer because we sell to businesses. We don't sell directly to consumers. So, oh, we supply to brands that they obviously then sell. So the two biggest brands that we are supplying at the moment are called Refrigeuor. If you happen to work in cold storage, there are uniform specialists that working really well, just what our very.
Henry Kaestner: Small percentage of our listening audience.
Keren Pybus: Or just want the most amazingly insulated sweatshirt you'll ever wear in your life.
Henry Kaestner: I bet they're great. And coming out of where that's bizarre that it's kind of you'd think there's something like that come out of Norway's coming out of West Africa.
Keren Pybus: Yeah, yeah.
Paloma Schackert: There's a lot of value addition in that. Yeah.
Keren Pybus: We also supply a big nightwear company in the US called Pajama Graham, which is an incredible company. So nightwear like a telegram and through the post, get your family ready. So those are two businesses that you could buy from. But we have a foundation based in the states called the EAA Foundation as well. So there is opportunities if you wanted to if we have that nonprofit, we also have a nonprofit in Ghana as well that does all of our training and development of some of our compliance programs. So enabling the factories to kick start things like building a kitchen so they can feed the workers, buying a bus, so they can transport workers, that kind of thing as well. So there are opportunities there. Just get in touch via our website www.ethicalapparelafrica.com.
Henry Kaestner: Excellent. All right. God bless you all three of you. Thank you for being with us.
Keren Pybus: Thank you.
Jeff Kahler: Thank you Henry. And good to see you both too.