Commerce Over Charity, with Bob Bush – Episode 485 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, shares the life lessons he learned on early-morning bus rides, and reflects on being allowed to fail (a little bit), talking his way onto Wall Street, getting “behind the numbers”, the head and the heart connection, helping develop Dubai, defining “social impact”, and being valuable instead of just being important.

About Bob:

Robert (Bob) Bush Jr. is a senior investment executive with experience across industries, geographies (USA, Europe, China, Middle East, and Africa), as well as asset classes (venture capital, private equity, Islamic Finance). He has engaged in various financial and operating special projects for sovereign-related entities, family businesses, family offices, investment companies, corporations, and startups. Bob has provided live television commentary and keynotes at global conferences on innovation, social impact, sustainability, global investing, and international trade. His unique experiences, love for learning and teaching, as well as an established network of relationships, fuel his interests in innovative business models, public private partnerships, and entrepreneurship. Bob’s international experiences with multinational corporations and government advisory as well as his love for learning and teaching have given him a unique perspective on solving global challenges.

Currently, Bob serves as the President, CEO, and Co-Founder, along with the late NBA Hall of Famer, Dikembe Mutombo, of Mutombo Coffee, as well as an Advisor to the European Commission, Royal Families, and Dubai Prime Minister, and a Contributing Writer to ForbesMiddleEast.com.

Mutombo Coffee is an African-American and woman-owned brand that invests in female-led coffee farms, embodying their mission as a “coffee with a cause.”

Bob’s overall business transactions have totaled more than $30 Billion, and he has co-managed assets nearing $10 Billion (USD).

Learn more at MutomboCoffee.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
It’s great to meet you Bob, and I’m excited to talk about your most recent endeavors around this. One of the things I really love is exploring the journey to the current destination. When you see someone who’s generated unique success, I feel like your resume unique is a good explanation. Really excited to dig into it, because it’s so different than a lot of the experience that people have that have been on the show in the past. So hear a little bit of the journey. Of course, we can talk about the current destination as well.

Bob Bush
Yeah, love to do that. I mean, sometimes I think the journey looks more like a vagabond, and other times it’s a little bit more purposeful. But in all cases, it’s been wonderful.

Adam Outland
I love it. So tell me, you know early days, what were some of your conceptions of what your you thought your path was going to be? What track were you on when you were at a young person, and then what changed?

Bob Bush
Thank you for that good question. And I’m not one to really do a lot of reflecting and reflection. I do a lot of introspection, but not a lot of reflecting. And I would say the first journey of any meaning that might be interesting to the listeners is a journey that I took, in fact, my first year of high school, I was born and raised in Southern Illinois, the Mississippi River bifurcates, Missouri and Illinois. So I’m on the East St Louis side, looking at the arch on the St Louis Missouri side. And for four years, I commuted by bus, often two busses, occasionally three busses to get to high school. And so I would say my most significant data point on this journey, as meandering as it’s been, is that commute. You know, I’m 1314, years old. Can’t drive yet, needed to get to. I went to a Jesuit boys school across the river, very fine School in St Louis, that commute and being and I was undersized. I was a bespectacle kid. I was a geeky kid. My book bag weighed almost as much as I did. So you know those images of these little kids with their backpacks and stuff, and so I’m kind of dragging my, my pounds of books to classes every day, just the interaction with the public, right? The lady who’s, you know, at 6:30am she’s just finished her shift, or maybe the guy who just finished his his midnight shift. And then there’s the lady who’s on her way to work, because she’s, you know, working in a as a as a baker, and all these different sort of types of people as I’m making my way to school, and I wasn’t scared and intimidated at all about it, but I’m like, How did my parents allow me to do that? Right? And they said they were scared, but I wanted to go to a good school. I enjoyed the challenge of that, and I wasn’t bothered by the two plus hour commute. I was up at 530 whatever I got done, I wasn’t sitting at my desk by eight for those four years. So that was the first journey, and I remember thinking as I would go back and forth, either going towards the arch or away from the arch. It was a tale of two cities, and I actually wrote about that for my entrance exams for college. How is it that such a short piece of river that’s less than a mile wide, the difference could be so grand and so great, and so I’m leaving what would be called the inner city of East St Louis, going into this beautiful campus with very bright kids, and it comes from the St Louis side. I’m sitting behind people whose parents own some of the biggest companies in the Midwest, certainly in St Louis sports teams and engineering companies and law firms, and that Taylor two cities was very stark, but I learned through my classmates, etc, that there was much more we had in common than not.

Adam Outland
Oh, that’s really extraordinary. And, you know, I think, you know, you get into a different environment. What I heard in your story that actually made me want to ask another question. First is it sounded like you said you You made this choice that you wanted to go to the school.

Bob Bush
Yeah. And I can tell you, it’s tough to make any young teenager or kid, you know, at a certain point do anything. It’s just almost impossible. So one of the things that my parents did is allow you to make choices, allow you to fail a little bit, but not too much. A scared me is okay. Maybe a broken arm is okay for. Some parents, but let’s not lose a limb, right? Yeah. And so yeah, it was truly a choice to go because I I had a fire and an appetite for I was very intellectually curious, and unfortunately, the programs and the schools that were sort of the easy commute were going to meet my academic interests, and so I had to there were two schools that across on the st louis side that I that were considered nationally ranked and world class. I didn’t know what the Ivy League was called and all that stuff. Then I just knew that I showed a little bit of aptitude, and I wanted to be around, you know, an intense sort of learning environment. And so it was 100% my choice that my parents supported. The tuition was quite expensive. I sometimes worked after school, and it taught me discipline and but I it was a wonderful academic setting. So it’s certainly it was my choice, and it was a choice that really put me on a very firm footing as I went to other steps in that journey.

Adam Outland
Yeah, well, you take out any any part of the rest of your story, and you already have, you know, a predictive amount of success that you know is coming out of a young teenager. Because the other thing I do know about teenagers is that they’re not typically very inspired to work extra hard.

Bob Bush
Unbelievable.

Adam Outland
So to actively make the choice for academic rigor and to get on a bus of strangers, to get down there says just a lot about the kind of character you had.

Bob Bush
Two, brother. Two busses, sometimes three. But it was fun. Learning was fun. Learning is still fun. I’m still hyper curious. So it wasn’t I didn’t consider it rigorous or challenging, it was just kind of a natural thing. So I guess I’ve been blessed in that one.

Adam Outland
So take that observation and then move that forward through college to your entry into the professional world, like the things that just occurred naturally to you. Yeah, okay, I’ll take three busses to get to a school that’s academically rigorous that I can learn from, of course. That makes sense. How did that interplay into your early career as a professional?

Bob Bush
Oh, boy, so lots and so I’ll tell you a story. I I was a philosophy major. Went to a small college, Amherst College, about 1600 kids. In fact, my college was about the same size as my high school, and I chose there because it was one of the toughest colleges to get into. I’d never been to Boston, certainly not to Amherst. And we went to looked at the big, you know, Ivy League schools, and I fell in love with the little college setting, and studied philosophy and English literature, read Latin and Greek. And so I’m I’m around looking at all what my friends are doing and classmates, and they’re going to Wall Street, they’re going to consulting firms, they’re getting their MBAs. And so wanted to learn more about that. But mind you, I hadn’t studied finance or any of that stuff, but I applied to Wall Street because that’s where my friends were going. And I heard you could make a lot of money doing it. And much to my surprise, they said, What does a philosopher have to do with making money on Wall Street? And I said, Well, I don’t know, but I did pretty well in school. If I don’t have the same answer that all the other kids give you, I bet I’ll give you an interesting one. So they said, Okay, you young whippersnapper, we’re going to put you in sales. And I said, No, I want to be in mergers and acquisitions. They’re like, You gotta be kidding. The M A guys, they’re the Masters of the Universe. Like, you gotta have a very strong economic and maybe physics are certainly math, grounding, etc, finance grounding. What do we do with you there? And I said, Well, I’ll learn it. Give me a chance. And so I talked my way into being a financial analyst at a major Wall Street firm, and they kicked my butt because I didn’t know nothing. 80 hour weeks, 90 hour weeks, some 100 hour weeks, and I was put on the largest leverage buyout in the history of finance, RJR Nabisco, and I was one of the analysts on that deal. And so I went from studying philosophy to doing high stakes, large buyouts as an analyst, and I had to make up for what I didn’t know. But I’m quite competitive, and I enjoyed learning it, and I was a geek, so I didn’t mind if I miss social activities and stuff. I was sort of single minded about learning this craft, but I had to bust my hump, and occasionally I was hazed and all of that. And that’s just part of it. There were not a lot of African Americans on Wall Street doing that kind of work at all. And so the notion of having a mentor or having the support system, they, you know, they throw you in the middle of the baton, and you swim or you don’t. And I just sort of, well, let’s just get on with it. And so I kind of Mr. Magood my way through all of these things that others would say are challenges and and because, by the grace of God, I. Always landed on my feet.

Adam Outland
Yeah, with that analyst role, you being as curious as you are, like, what were a couple of key observations that you made as an analyst that said, I can make a career out of this thing?

Bob Bush
I’m not so sure. Cuz now, looking on hindsight, I don’t want to appear to be smarter than I was then, but certainly so there’s the observations I was making real time, of course, and then there’s the looking back 40 years observations. And so I don’t want to sort of conflate them, but it’s kind of difficult to couple them, but sort of one of the things that is a thread from my experience in high school and the experience I had being in another pulled environment with financial analysts and these Wall Street bankers and stuff is that there really isn’t that much difference, a little bit of grit, a little bit of hard work, being coachable, having some discipline. It’s all the same kind of stuff. So one observation was, whatever the challenge happened to be, despite the fact I didn’t sort of walk in with the same sort of skill set, what I did have, from my liberal arts background and my philosophy background was very helpful. I got some fundamental understanding of how to approach a problem, how to solve a problem, how to think through a problem, thinking about methods and processes, etc. And so I then I realized that why I navigated the philosophy in the first place? Because I’m not particularly intimidated by chaos or mess or data that doesn’t seem to align. I have a bit of a natural ability, thank goodness, but some training to go into, whether it’s any field, I think, and through a little bit of hard work start myself out. And so I think that was one of the key observations, is that this is just another problem to solve.

Adam Outland
Beautiful. Philosophy is a lot of things, but there are a lot of rubrics for problem solving baked into philosophy. And I feel like so much of navigating business and growing business is a matter of of untying the knots and solving the problems that are both inside and inside the business and and the big problems that are the business is designed to solve for everyone else.

Bob Bush
That’s right. Well, you know the biggest knot, right? It’s the people problem, that’s the biggest knot.

Adam Outland
People are your biggest problem and your greatest asset. So, so how do you get just help us skip over to this component. You know, your your role as a senior investment executive took you to a lot of different geographies. I mean, well, outside of the US, what drove you in that direction? Or maybe it wasn’t your choice.

Bob Bush
Well, another sort of dot on this journey. We had a friend and an undergrad who sister lived in Dubai in the early 90s, and she was very cute, and he was very cool, and he says going to visit my sister, as she lives in Dubai, said, I’ll come along. Never been to Dubai. And so we went to the desert, and I hung out with Kareem and spent some time with him and his family, etc. So that I first traveled to Dubai was personal one, and just for fun. And while I was there, I was talking to a gentleman who was a Bedouin, and he was dressed in local garb, and he said, What are you doing here? And I said, I’m on vacation. And he started laughing, right? This is the early 90s, so he’s struggling. Well, what are you doing on vacation? I said, Well, I’d never been and my friend is here. So we started chatting, and he said something to me, very profound. He said, We don’t need you here. And I said, What do you mean? He says, we can send our kids all over the world to your schools. So if you ever want to come back and you want to do something here, it’s not what you know, it’s not your learning, it’s how you communicate and whether you understand my culture and you can communicate with me. And he literally took his hand and he moved it from his head to his heart. You make that the head heart connection. And I would love to have you back, but if you think you’re going to go and you’re with your fancy schools, to come back and teach us something or help us with something, don’t need you for that. And I really thought about that because I was contemplating going to business school and doing more finance, etc, and I shifted to go to study international relations, Arabic at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. So rather than getting a traditional finance degree, I went and started language skills, economics, cultural orientations in Washington, DC, that actually helped orientate me to, yeah, this is not about just the dollars and the cents. There are people behind this, right? You know, there’s the famous the famous phrase that pilots don’t fly planes, they fly people. And so if you really want to get behind the numbers, you got to understand. What those numbers represent?

Adam Outland
Yeah, it’s not just about recording the data. It’s it’s how your ability to interpret it that really makes a difference, right? And kind of makes or breaks someone’s ability, you know, career path in that area, I can see that. And I think the international component, I mean, just it must have been such a good learning experience in and of itself, to travel like you gave in that great anecdote, meet with people and break down different barriers that we all have in our own mind and perceptions of the world around us. So this brought you to your experience with, you know private equity, you know venture capital, in the experience that you had and where that led you. What were some of the bigger transactions that you were a part of that provided significant lessons for you?

Bob Bush
Right, and so the role that venture can play in capital formation and economic development, the role that PE plays, I’ve had the good fortune of I moved to Dubai in the early 2000s to to work. I was an advisor to the Prime Minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai, to talk about how to make Dubai a viable and sustainable immigrant that was world class, and what kind of services could be offered. And I was a small part of a great team that helps develop the economic development strategy of a wonderful immigrant and a wonderful country, and so using the traditional tools of M A and financial structuring and engineering and and understanding optionality and all these things to bring it into a very practical way, helping to develop a country, develop a region. Fabulous. I was head hunted for the role, and they wanted someone that had this curious admixture of of skills and experiences. So the random guy I meet in Dubai is why I study the Middle East and Africa, because I’ve done finance. I had the finance I had worked in an entrepreneur work working a couple of FinTech companies before it was called FinTech around capital formation. Because while I was in graduate school, I finally did go to graduate school, I received a fellowship to travel through Africa, and I backpacked through Africa for almost a year, visiting capital cities, and one of the the first place I landed was in Accra, Ghana, because Accra had just launched its its equity exchange and Trying to understand how capital formation could have an impact on the development of Ghana, the country, all these little bits. And I didn’t know sort of where these things were going to go, but it’s headhunted. It’s like, Well, you got the entrepreneurial bit, you got the economic development bit, you know about the region. You got financial training. You seem to be able to get acculturated pretty quickly. Would you come from New York and and work with us here in Dubai? And I remember telling some of my friends, and they were once, one funny story is one of my friends said, you know, Bob, this is money making Manhattan. What are you going to go do in the desert? And I said, you know, I don’t know, but they’re saying all this crazy stuff. If they can do half of it, this is going to be a very interesting journey, and if it doesn’t work out, I can always come back to the US Now, fortunately, not married, no kids, right? I didn’t have those tethers, so that’s how I ended up moving to Dubai in 2003 and then working on what has to be considered one of the most amazing formations, country formations and formations in the last 100 plus years of what they did in what was a desert into now a top 10 global destination.

Adam Outland
No kidding, and to be on the ground floor to experience that. So there’s a stereotype Bob that maybe isn’t completely pervasive, but that folks who choose private equity and venture and these things that you know, you know, they don’t really care about social impact. But this isn’t obviously a true stereotype. There’s many that are involved, including yourself. And so what you know, you obviously it took a slightly unconventional path to get into the path that you did through philosophy undergrad, so you already were outside the box. But what led you down the path of creating social impact, and how has business helped with that?

Bob Bush
Yeah, I think you can sort of see the dots right. So before you can criticize something, you might want to become an expert at it. Everyone’s got an opinion, but every opinion is not informed. And so just starting with, what does social impact mean? Right? That’s environmental sustainability, that’s financial sustainability, right? That’s that, you know, those elements. Have some type of capital component, and whether that capital is relational capital or social capital or financial capital, I just see PE or finance is just one of the tools that is necessary to creating impact. And that social impact is financial impact, that social impact is economic impact, that social impact is environmental impact, etc. And so getting some proper training, and then working in a in an immigrant and with other governments to sort of figure out how we can take these traditional access to capital issues, access to market issues, and create business models around them. To me, this is a culmination of all of those other things that I’ve done to see if I can take what to your point, or skills, or one type of impact shareholder, ROI, and see how you can if you have any kind of facility, right? And you know, one of the, one of the challenges that the world of Silicon Valley has and the world of Wall Street have is, what kinds of questions are you asking? You ask the kind of question about the kind of problem you want to solve, and then the money goes to that. And you can, you know, do we really need flying cars? But if that’s the question, you can you can come out a viable business model, there’ll be someone that’ll help you fund buying cars, absolutely to your point of sort of coming from the outside, whether that’s the outside, or having to commute to go to St Louis for school. I’ve always had the blessing of being able to look at something a little bit more broadly than most, and I apply that natural instinct and these traditional skills to go, can I take this totality of all these other experiences I’ve used in some perhaps traditional ways, and bring those skills into something by asking different questions and hopefully getting better output and and I remember one of the first images that I ever had that gave me a global perspective, and my father and mother still have it. There was a an African boy who was skeletal. Could not have been more than six or seven years old, eating from a bowl that had a few pieces of rice, and I remember asking them, and I still ask today, why does that have to exist in our world with so much surplus? That’s a question that I had as a little boy, and a version of that question I still ask myself, as we now are dealing much more focused on the agriculture and coffee and cocoa and these things. So it may look like it’s this sort of security, strange path, journey to get into social impact, but I think in the way we define social impact, right? We’re not a charity, commerce. Can we use the commerce over charity? My partner may rest in peace, has has a very viable foundation that has done a lot of foundational work and has given millions of dollars in education and health care. It’s a nonprofit. When we started this, he and I said, I we want this to be a social enterprise that needs to use the same metrics of of operational efficiency and capital efficiency as any other business, because that’s viability. And we’re going to use this model and the things that we’ve learned. So sir, you are the passion and I’m the purpose, and together, we’re going to see if we can ask some good questions to have some impact.

Adam Outland
I love it. I remember as a 20 something year old having a an early midlife crisis, very early midlife crisis, where I was thinking about, what’s the purpose of life, what’s the impact I want to have, you know, and that kind of led me to like, what’s the problem I want to solve? And I thought, Wow, there’s so many problems to solve, so I should probably be in politics. You know, I’d studied government and politics as a result, and there’s a point where I just shut myself in my room for a couple of days to just really write out all the things that were in my brain and to process where, where I wanted to go and, you know, looking back on my studies, you know, studying government, politics at University of Maryland actually led me to this belief that being a politician actually is quite limited in the type of impact that you can have. And that’s true and not true, probably, but I came to a personal conclusion that one of the biggest challenges were, are the people? What we started, people are the biggest problem, the greatest asset, right? And I thought to myself, you know, if we could change or impact education, and maybe even in unconventional ways, we could help young people develop a higher EQ, some of the things that are not taught in schools, but how we manage our. Emotions, so that their emotions can’t be hijacked by others. You know that they could have more self confidence and self value, that they can reverse engineer their goals? I mean, these things that had helped me have a transformative experience in my life, that maybe that was the best place of impact, and that led to a career of coaching and development and building a business that does the same. And so I hear your story, and I think I agree with you that a big part of life is making sure we’re solving the most important problems, and everybody’s got a different perspective on that, but we have some brilliant people in this world that are chasing relatively silly problems to solve, or in some cases brilliant people that choose maybe to just be important in this world instead of being of value. You know, what I hear you doing is being of value. And so what are the biggest problems that you think are worth solving?

Bob Bush
Wow, man, like, how long is this show? My goodness first. Thank you for that. You know, do your own reflection. And I love how you summed it up. You know, there are people in the world that choose to be more important instead of being more valuable. And it kind of links to the conversation that we had a little bit earlier about understanding valuation mergers and acquisitions, the valuation, the value to value an asset, and understanding the values of an asset, right? And as much as people can be a problem with regards to efficiency and getting things done that the values are have to be about, then it have to be distinguishable from the dollar value. And this is a way that, when I’m sort of approaching a problem, you know, I I’m very mindful of the, you know, what are we measuring? How do we measure it? And is this, is this going to be a values driven metric, or is this a valuation driven metric? And they’re both important when you’re talking about creating a sustainable model. And so in to get you your question about what kinds of problems to solve, every problem at some point has this tension, are we thinking short term? Are we thinking long term? Or we want to, we want to, you know whether it’s health care, there’s a cost benefit analysis. Well, if we can get the vaccine out six months earlier, it is going to have X percentage of people that can help, but Y percentage of the people are not going to be helped because we haven’t, because there’s maybe some additional things that we can do. There’s always contraindications, right? There’s always risks, there’s always the obverse side of that coin. And so to me, it’s not so much which problem is more or less important. It is. How do you tackle whatever problem you’re you’re doing right? Because I don’t want your listeners, and I certainly don’t think this way to think that. Big problems, major problems. Oh, my problem is, I’m trying to save the world from malaria. There are problems in your neighborhood, there are problems in your school. The question is the mindset around it, so let’s not think about it in terms of big problems or little problems. It is whatever problem there is before you bring it, bring an interdisciplinary, bring a diverse, bring a viable bring a perspective, a mindset, recognizing that value and values are not the same thing.

Adam Outland
Yeah, yeah, well done. I think that’s a good it’s a great perspective. You know, big problems are important to solve, but at the same time, they don’t have to be hairy and audacious and worldwide, in fact, you know, we need a lot more people solving the local problem that adds up to a big solution. And it’s really about having a problem solving mindset and how to tackle them.

Bob Bush
That’s right.