Transforming Financial Struggles into Success with Rabbi Steven Burg

when I got there the first day when they recruited me a couple months before they said we got a bounce budget you know thank God the first time you know when I walked in the door we were three months behind in payroll and so be able to have this like pain in your chest and like oh my gosh and you know and for the first couple years there was like every month trying to make payroll while you know I I always say it's like changing a tire and a car going 70 miles an hour you can't stop your business or you're trying to fix your business and so what you need to do is you need to triage what are the most important components that I'm going to need to move forward [Music] thank you thank you so much for joining me on the Leicester business podcast my pleasure so it's not that often that we have a rabbi on the show but I'll start with that question because I think you started as a rabbi first and then you got into the the leadership position and administrative so to speak roles give for our listeners a little bit of the background of where you started what you did till now and and what is actually Your Role at age wow that and first of all that's the greatest question I can get because you know what I what I was talking to one of the light leaders where they're interviewing him for H you know we're talking about the business structure and all different pieces and he's like he said he said look I didn't know rabbis like you existed I said I'm a CEO trapped in a rabbi's body and that's my my existence is that I definitely start out as a rabbi I got my speaker I later on got more training my original Masters was a medieval Jewish history so like you know even that wasn't really getting ready and then um I went to work for ncsy and the Orthodox Union for 22 years and all of my jobs along the way I was an assistant Regional director Regional director of ncswy a international director of ncy the managing director so every job I took was a job that no one else really wanted and I you know I realized suddenly that these are the easiest jobs to get you know because no one else wants them and there aren't really high expectations so the only way you can go is up and uh you know I came to realize that for a lot of them it was it was just a lack of structure and there was like a lot of pieces that if you could just shift you know to the right and the left you can build something up and so that's kind of you know how I kind of Built My Career you know I I tell people a little bit I'm an organizational Yak like I really believe in structure the other hand personally if you come to my desk it's messy you know so I I kind of play both roles I understand the programmatic aspects and all those pieces but I I really appreciate structure and and how when you're scaling up it's it's one of the most important things to uh to latch onto yeah so so I want to get to the H story obviously you've been now away is about eight years a little bit more than that and I want to get to how you got to age but for listeners they're not familiar with the H Empire so to speak give us like a little breakdown as far as what's going on in that organization yeah first of all I just love the name Empire people say like you know what title you want you know tell CEO I'm like well first I wanted to be the Emperor of age and that would that didn't work so well so I I became the CEO yeah look Asia's been around for 50 years with Noah Weinberg was just an absolute giant within Jewish world and he realized before anyone else did really that there were so many Jews that were not connected to Judaism and he came to the old city and they were all these Jews bang through the world that would just wind up at the Western Wall you know mayor Schuster is a famous personality that would walk up to them he famously didn't have a watch he'd say do you know what time it is and the next thing they they know he'd say oh would you like to come to a class from a rabbi and so he he just built something that didn't really exist which was a Yeshiva for people who didn't know all the face and he was wildly successful you know spread around the world in terms of that movement the movement really is about giving people the intellectual tools to get close to God really connecting them to Torah to Jewish wisdom to all those pieces that'll put them on on a good Pathway to the almighty and over the years it spread branches around the world Jerusalem and the old city you know if your back is to the Western Wall 50 of what you're looking at are the three buildings of Aisha Torah and it grew and grew and grew so tell us a little bit more about you were called in based on my understanding is the organization was in a stand in a stage of almost bankrupting you know bankruptcy so to speak what happened like what is the bigger expenses over the organization and what happened yeah look it's a very common story you know when you have the charismatic founder of an institution and the founder just disappears so you know Roanoke Was a Serial entrepreneur and there were all these kind of businesses that were kind of built out through age and with him gone they started to the tether was gone they started to float away and he was gone doing a major fundraising there's a lot of questions of who should continue and lead and and for a number of years after his passing we hit real Financial decline to the point where we were we were basically bankrupt you know in terms of the money Etc and there was a group of lay leaders about five business people who said okay we've gotta figure out a way forward and that's where they stumbled into me you know and as I said before my background had been taking things that were somewhat broken and fixing them and I think that that for a lot of folks at age they had only kind of been within the H world and hadn't seen a lot of stuff outside for me there's nothing I saw at age I hadn't seen in other places and there's nothing I saw an age that I didn't think could be fixed through various tools and ways and structure and stuff like that and so that's kind of how I got my job eight years ago and thankfully you know we had the mother I called the mothership lack of a better term in Jerusalem at that time it was an eight million dollar budget and like I said we were bankrupt massive debts and stuff we paid down over 11 million dollars in the first four years and then we continue to pay almost two million dollars a year in debt but thankfully eight years later we have a 24 million dollar budget we're raising about 17 million dollars and we're we're growing oh wow so I want to dive in a little bit more into this conversation because you know our listeners are entrepreneurs business owners and we have both sides of the spectrum we have those people that need to refocus in their own company sure and then we have companies that are going out and finding leaders to bring into the company to a save the company or grow the company and so on and so forth you coming in through such a you know Empire will use the word Empire and knowing that it's it's a sinking ship knowing the challenges that they have like what is the Playbook like let's share with us a little bit of the Playbook coming in trying to fix things where you're looking first sure I mean look the one benefit you have is it can't get worse you know so in terms of that it takes a little bit of pressure off of you you know although I will say I was very blessed and this is where a lot of Seattle a lot of help from Heaven comes into play two or three weeks after I got there we got a new controller who became my CFO his name's James fine Messer who was like you know my brother and like had I not had him on the financial piece I wouldn't be able to get there and and there was a lot of stress along the way of not being able to make pair when I got there the first day when they recruited me a couple months before they said we got a bounce budget when I walked in the door we were three months behind on payroll and so be able to have this like you know pain in your chest and like oh my gosh and you know and for the first couple years there was that every month trying to make payroll while you know I I always say it's like changing a tire and a car going 70 miles an hour you can't stop your business or you're trying to fix your business and so what you need to do is you need to triage what are the most important components that I'm going to need to move forward you know and you know I had this to someone I was talking about early on from another institution and he said you know what did you revision your dreams and I said I said well you know my top 10 priorities one through nine is cash flow and and tenth pick something you know say no vision you the dream I said look when you started your institution what were there two or three you're there I've got hundreds of people here like I can't I can't just you know stop while I do that so you know the cash flow was super important making sure we were able to do that the first four years was really total reactive mode trying to figure out how we're gonna pay this what we're gonna do this we're gonna read money for trying to structure the institution one of the biggest challenges we had in Asian I think this challenge in almost every business I know I have this joke I tell a little bit about it knock was just incredible person and he used to say you know everybody has technical Horizons responsibility is very big in age you have to take Aquarius and I used to joke you know at age everyone takes a rise no one takes responsibility right because I would say well who's in charge of the database yeah you know there was a guy three years ago who was here like every time he tried to uncover who was responsible for things and there was something else something called it's FP right SFP and SFP is a self-funded project right the way a self-funded project worked was you came through of Nyack and you said great news I can save the Jewish people it only cost fifty thousand dollars and I've got fifty thousand dollars from a donor and they would throw into the budget right really it costs 150 000 really you only had ten thousand dollars but meanwhile the budget I would call a chilling right they would throw beans in there they would throw barley they would throw potatoes right it was a big mix so when we when Jamie and I did a a flow chart an org chart it was like five pages that we had to like tape together all right no one reported to anyone right because everything was a self-funded project right and our job was to basically unravel that and create reporting structure right because that's how these things need to work someone has to be responsible to someone just because you got to know what's going on and that was also a lot of bringing these sfps back in but then when you bring them back in for example I'll give you a great example h.com right yeah sure hey we get over a million people a month you know each account was an SFP and they're terrific guys but I had to say them we want you to come back to the organization and don't worry we'll take care of the money right the whole reason but they were one of the guys raising their own money so it gets you gotta you mix credibility with your ability to execute with your ability to triage to kind of slowly you know put the toothpaste back in the tube and then to be able to move forward it reminds me I once spoke to a leader of organization he says the only difference between a non-profit and a for-profit is the 501c3 status with the IRS it has to run the same way as you would run a not a for-profit business yeah I guess my question to you is and obviously you mentioned before about passion and I think we all know you gotta have passion towards your business and what you do in particular when it comes to running and being part of an nonprofit which you have to believe in the cause you have to believe in what the you know the stance are you mentioned that Weinberg like this we all know what what he's been doing and and everybody has a h story as you call it like we heard these stories people going there finding like years like oh this is how my my connection became and so on and so forth I guess my question to you is how do you pick and choose as a leader you have to be responsible you mentioned before and you have to understand that every every type of program could make a huge difference and we're speaking about from a value perspective from a Jewish perspective each you know if you say one person you're saving a world so how do you how do you go about those type of decisions which is a little different than maybe a business owners will go with their p l directly decisions yeah look I'll explain exactly how we did it and we use the business tool to help us make those decisions I'll explain exactly what I'm talking about after four years I've been here eight years so there's like first four years of just reactive keeping the whole thing afloat and patching everything up we were able to bring in reviews of Berkowitz who is the Russia Shiva who really took from Noah's spot who is one of the most phenomenal leaders godolam in in the world really he's amazing in terms of kirov 90 to 95 percent of shyles go to Robert Berkowitz and what we did was he came in and we said okay now we have to go and even my donors that brought me in we have to go from being reactive to proactive right we we spent four years fixing now we've got to go do something and so I was at a conference about four years ago it was the Apec conference about three years ago maybe and there we had Ellie Mathias and my partner here when Rabbi Matthias brought over these two down these two people the two donors Amy Holtz and a small Divine schmullivan had brought something called EOS entrepreneurial operating system which is of course business system he had brought it to his company and sold it and he wanted nonprofits to use it and Amy was the implementer to help us do it right and both in Bali true and incredible people and so I said this is perfect this is exactly where where we are and so we started to use EOS and what I like about EOS and I think this is this is extraordinarily important what I always say is that you know Vision Without implementation is delusion right so all entrepreneurs doesn't matter if you're for profit or non-profit you have a vision but if you don't know how to get the wheels to hit the ground it's not going to happen so we started with the vision and we went through Berkowitz said what would you like us to do like what are we supposed to do and we many many many many conversations he basically said that the biggest challenge the Jewish people today have is that the majority of Jews have no relationship with the almighty the way to give them a relationship with the almighty is through Jewish wisdom through Torah so we set a 10-year goal to get three million views that's 20 of the Jewish people three million Jews who are not currently studying Jewish wisdom to study Jewish wisdom the second we locked in that 10-year goal we said okay we're gonna get busy we moved over to like how are we going to get that done and we said okay we've had ace.com for a long time we have this great website presence but the majority of the world today is not on websites they're on social media so we came to realize that every single Jew in our target market is on social media so we need to move over to social media to find those people to make you know Taurus something within their sphere so we hired Jamie Geller who was a major social media presence to be our CMO Chief media marketing officer and then we started to figure out how to do that now I'll tell you this year right now this year we're about two years in we didn't have social media presence when we started we're about two two and a half years in this year we set a goal of doing 50 million video views on social media okay for the year we hit that Target in six months not only did we hit that Target of 50 million in six months the next month July we hit 25 million video views so if you're keeping track that was 75 million video views on social media in the first seven months of the year now what we're focused on literally in real time is what does that mean I've got all these people I now have a billion how do I drop down to verticals to get those people there which is a more complex conversation but that's really how we were able to take the vision of Roberto ads and take the vision of Judaism and then kind of I don't want to call it monetize it right but like put it into business terms of how do we get from A to Z and it was going to be through social media for us so going back to the original questions which means any type of new project that comes your way you basically bounce it towards division does it fit with our vision or does it fit into to our 10-year five-year three-year goal correct and it was a it was not simple for us because we have a Yeshiva and a seminary right and if you're looking at goal of three million last year uh young men that came through our dormitories right over the course of the year in Yeshiva we had 950 men and we had over 400 women right which is for she was seminaries phenomenal but how does that play the three right it's actually a real issue that we discussed like it doesn't have the scalability factor to get to the thing correct you're never going to scale it up to make a impression with three million so we actually operate these Chief seminaries a separate business and that's uh that's now we're into like a dance physics the institution but there was it was too hard of a conversation to have together so we kind of we kind of divide and conquer type of thing so like you mentioned about EOS obviously Gina Wickman and Mike Payton both of them were on the show in the past so we had some great conversations with them yeah the interesting part is that it's the first time I'm hearing a non-profit in particular in the size of the skin and of as age running in the U.S I guess my question to you is this is something that any type of system you put in place um you know system is there to support the people the people analytics to support the system which means that it's something like just in this this short time we're speaking you mentioned like five or six or seven names that are part of your team and leadership team I guess a great CEO is all about the people that they surround themselves with what are you looking in great people when you're hiring or bringing in people in leadership for you know in order to scale age or any any other Ventures you were involved there were two things that always stood out for me in turn and I've hired many hundreds of people throughout my career but the two things that we stood out for me was number one humility and when I say humility people once I ask a question he's like let's talk about the guy that goes sits in a corner with the hilum you know like humility I'm talking about someone not a lack of self-confidence right right right humility really is the ability to learn from others and not being arrogant I don't do well with arrogant people I don't like working with arrogant people humility is I can learn something from everyone I think that's number one and therefore you can have honest conversations if you're dealing with people that are not arrogant and are humble and the other piece is relentlessness is relent they have to really like I always tell people when you come up against a brick wall you have three options you go around you can go over and go through it if you go through it there may be political con you know ramifications but but at the end of the day you can get past that you know and I find that Relentless people you know when I first started ncsy that's where I spent a lot of my early career you know I would see these really charismatic people who who the teens really liked but they didn't necessarily were able to recruit they didn't really have success then I saw people were less charismatic that were phenomenally successful and I realized they were just Relentless they were just they wouldn't take no and they would just you know they were always plugging and plugging and plugging away you need hard workers and Relentless people who will problem solve you know know I often say that like in management if someone comes to me and says look these are my options what's your advice I can give advice if someone comes with me the problem says what do you think I should do that's much tougher because then now you want me to do your job right yeah and that's not management that's like I could just do it myself and you know if you're gonna give it to me anyway and that's that's really the challenge with people you know you want people there to be able to empower them I've always said my great skill is delegating I'm a lazy guy by Nature why in the world wouldn't I want someone else to do something you know um sometimes people get very into the micromanage piece and to delegate and manage you need to realize yes they are not going to do it as well as you can do it yourself but I always give the quote from Henry Ford Henry Ford said I'd rather have one percent of 100 minutes effort than 100 of my own right meaning I'd rather have a lot of people doing this stuff than to just you know just do it myself and if you have that appreciation or management and delegation and to to quote EOS let go of the vine right that's uh yeah right then you're to be able to accomplish a lot more and as we scale up as an institution that's becoming more and more apparent yeah you know people always say what if I delegate and then the person makes a mistake I said guess what we all make mistakes at least while the person made a mistake you were focusing on something else already yeah so you can multiply yourself as long as they learn from the mistake that's the Only Rule you know how do you keep the whole team focused on the vision you know you mentioned about the vision making sure that we you know everybody is rallies around their vision you gotta keep repeating yourself you know you gotta like it's it's funny it's a lot of I think it's some of the greatest leaders if you think about like someone running for president right so running for president will give the same speech eight times a day seven days a week for months on end and then maybe people will hear what they're saying you know it's a funny thing but you know you have to be consistent and you have to be like this is what we're doing this is what we're doing the worst thing you can do is just show up the next day and be like oh now we're gonna do this you know I always tell people big institutions or big businesses and organizations they're like they're like cruise ships you could turn the wheel all the way to the right they don't turn like this they turn like this you know you can't you know send people back and forth like that there's a statistic people would rather work for a boss they don't like who makes decisions than for a boss that they like who doesn't make decisions right and I think that's a big piece of it is that if people see a certain consistency in you and every conversation you know you're drilling down and sometimes I'll be like Oh I'm sorry I'm saying this again but right but I won't stop myself because I realize people need to hear it over and over and over what's also important to go over sometimes you need to create language for your employees right you can create language for them to be able and and these catchphrases or buzzlines they're actually quite important because you have to help them with the language of explaining who and what we are and what we do so you've been been around in the in the non-profit world for a long time you've dealt with thousands of people and in the last 20 30 years of being involved in those organizations what would you say is you have seen as a pattern of people that have great businesses or great non-profits their their heart is in the right place and they're just just not grinding it but not moving the needle forwards so I think I think it depends sometimes you know for example in non-profits and this will happen in business also sometimes Jews tend to meddle like you have boards and they'll get involved and Jews God bless and they every one of us thinks we know how to do things better than other people I want to do a guy that used to work for Carnegie Hall and then he moved to work for a Jewish institution and I said well what do you find the difference he said well no one ever told me what concerto to play when I was at Carnegie Hall as opposed to curious nonprofit where Jews always think that they kind of know better and and I think to a certain extent you have to be able to kind of shake that off and move forward you know one of the things that we had in the Yeshiva for example when I got to achieve eight years ago we did not have a lot of students you know Embark Hashem now we have a lot of through a lot of chiming in of like yeah kind of stuff and I'm gonna be more like this and we're you know there's a lot of background noise and the head of the the Yeshiva Rabbi David Rossman who's one of the unbelievable CEO and the way he runs his whole part of the organization I told him like just ignore it just ignore it you know ignore the noise and once he did that he was able to fly you know and I tell people I could sum you have my management philosophy very simply right find really talented people let them do what they're good at stay out of their way and keep everyone else out of their way and so sometimes you know people have thin skin and even though they know what they should do but they're they're everyone there's like all this noise and they get distracted and they're you know they second guess themselves and he has a big mistake and I think that does prevent really good people from doing what they need to do because they they know they know what needs to happen wow that's amazing again and obviously um you know we're all familiar with like I mentioned before by the H story is there any story that comes to your mind like your age story each story in terms of of like something that you've seen as somebody you know the inspiring factor from the you know what you've seen on the other side I mean like like real like Jewish inspiration yeah yeah let's speak you know look I gotta tell you something I am the most blessed man in the world every single day I'm talking to people coming through the building or hearing these stories of people you know one of the greatest things we have and it's a story a day almost is if you go to our website we had a challenge we had a business challenge right people come to the website and they leave the website how do you know who's there how do you engage so there's a donor by name of Bob Dieter who's absolutely spectacular person he did hotels.com and he did get a room.com and he partnered with Rabbi nakami coopersmith and they came came up with this idea of instant chat where if you go to the website within 30 seconds a rap like comes out and says can I help you right and then can engage someone and we're at the point where 50 people a month are being placed in physical Jewish locations you know and it was a great story it's actually on h.com of a family from Oregon that was like kind of heard they were Jewish weren't sure got engaged speak to smoke this rabbit you connected locally and they wound up making Aliyah and came to Israel and there's so many every one of those stories of people you know people didn't opt out of the religion today right people it's not like the old days were like they came out of the Holocaust early on they rejected their Heritage they have no clue of how precious their Heritage is and so for us it's just about calling our brothers and sisters and saying this is something unbelievable and guess what it belongs to as part of your Birthright right every interaction like that every story every guy in these Shiva you know you sit there you sit there and and Yom Kippur and Yeshiva as a tattoos and earrings and all these things you know and and the prayer is so sincere that is me it's it's what God wants to know the world God wants his his troll to to be close to each other spend time with each other and if we can bring incredibly productive amazing people back to help strengthen the Jewish people there's nothing better than that beautiful beautiful this has been great for the link resource mentioned this episode check out the show notes at www.petagroup.com podcast where we'll link up to h.com.org I guess it is let's close with the four rappers either or ace.com and let's close with the four rapid fire questions are you ready sure number number one a book that changed your life five dysfunctions with a tie really but five dysfunctions of tea by Patrick lancione to me is the Bible you can't move your organization institution without either I call them the Reba he's just it is amazing but five is functions a team is his Bible number two a piece of advice you got that you'll never forget wow I'm not supposed to be rapping that I have to just think about it for a second I've been so blessed to have so many mentors over the years and so many pieces of advice I'm trying to like just crystallize what like some of the most important pieces were you know I'm trying to think I can't think of a piece of advice I just know for me and my career it was my mentors like I always had people that believed in me that would give me advice that would prop me up I I'll just tell you a quick story right by mayor May who's the executive director of the Cyber weasel Center who I think is one of the greatest claw people in the universe was mentioned to me when I ran ncsy out in in Los Angeles and I would mention to him that you know it's very hard you work with all these teams and people you know I'll tell you what's wrong no one's telling you what's right right yeah and so I ran a massive tone 700 people and everything you know I'm exhausted it's Monday morning he called me up and says oh let's go out to lunch great I run home I put on my suit you know like you know like I'm like a mensch and we sit down I don't know what's going on here you know like is he gonna you know he says I just want to take you out to say thank you oh wow it was like one of the greatest moments of my life because here was like that that one poorly got it and totally understood it and I have tried to carry that piece of advice over to to reach out to people not when they're on a high but when they're on a low when someone goes through something difficult or or just you know giving someone a Pat in the back that to me has been been a major piece of importance of who I've been able to become wow it's so important yeah and it's sometimes you know the person thinks I'm just doing a small deed but but ultimately that Pat in the back or that's a good to work thank you could go a long way number three anything you wish you could go back and do differently no my beloved friend we are cabrussas for years and one time I had done some of the ncsy and he said to me wow you should feel really good about yourself this purple chance you would change these programs you create they're still doing well and I just look at myself I couldn't care less and he was like and we got into it we just been a six year Michael Lopez right and he usually everyone we ask he usually wins but I don't believe in sleeping on that fish and and that's just for me personally I'm a very forward charging thinking person I don't look back if I made decisions I hadn't made decisions not all of them were 100 correct but I only only look forward I try not to dwell backwards I don't I don't find it's it's productive obviously if I come up with a similar situation I might deal with it differently but I don't I don't I don't have a lot of regrets in my life God has blessed me with the most unbelievable opportunities to help the Jewish people beautiful and last final question what's still in your bucket list to achieve honestly I you know and this I would tell anyone you know you talk about a mission statement Vision State all they said you know it's a builder base in English I mean to me there's no question God is incredibly clear about what what are what we're supposed to do and what we're supposed to do is you know right now we've gone back to Israel we've gone back to usually we're back in the old city you know which is only since 1967 and the kotes are just such an immuno beautiful emotional place it's still the one last wall and barrier between us and the almighty and that's the last barrier that we have to get through and to me it's it's not even a question it's the Builder base of English that's my live stream beautiful Robert I know you're busy thank you so much for joining us your time is valuable and that is why in the name of our listeners will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us today it's been a blast my pleasure thank you so much for all the work you're doing and helping lifting up people and accomplishing great things yeah keep up your great work you know close your knees the ace on the high no doubt about that no doubt about that thank you so much have a good one thank you too all the rest [Music]