Erin Shaffer - Seeing Consulting Through a Social Impact Lens

[00:00:00] Dominique: Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert.

[00:00:21] Dominique: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community, and done something pretty cool about it.

[00:00:31] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientist to a, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and new ideas.

[00:00:38] Dominique: Today, Adam and I are joined by Erin Shaffer. I am so excited to introduce Erin. She's a manager with Kalypso, which is a consulting firm that was previously acquired by Rockwell Automation. Erin supports large scale digital transformations to design, develop, and deliver better products faster and more sustainably.

The reason she was us today is because in addition to doing her client project delivery, she actually co-leads the sustainability and energy management service line where the team focuses on ways to operationalize client sustainability goals. So today we're chatting with Erin to dive into her success as a green champion and building a sustainability group within an existing consulting firm that previously didn't sell projects in that space.

So this joining us today, Erin.

[00:01:24] Erin: Absolutely. Thanks for the introduction.

[00:01:26] Dominique: I hope that covered a bit of a lot that you do. We'll get a chance in our next episode to talk more about, like, broadly what Kalypso does, but also I wanna mention that you have a previous work life where you interact with Adam. So let's start with that. What did you do in the social impact space where you and Adam work together?

[00:01:44] Erin: So that goes back to my college days at Ohio State. I studied business focused in finance, but had this desire to be more connected to social entrepreneurship, social impact. So I always had this vision of for-profit business being combined with more of my interest in like nonprofit work, service work, you know, having a positive societal impact. And so I did a lot of that throughout my college years and overlapped with Adam, especially through GiveBackHack and Star House, I think were the major points of overlap.

[00:02:17] Adam: And we were launching our Wild Tiger Tees work program at the Star House around the same time. And so Erin, you are there alongside helping us kind of develop out our work program and figure out all the pieces. That was so cool.

[00:02:28] Dominique: Just for those who are listening and are not familiar with Star House or work programs, can one of you just share what that means?

[00:02:33] Erin: So Star House is, based in Columbus, Ohio and is, essentially like a short term stay for youth experiencing homelessness. So they can go there, you know, a portion of each day for a fresh meal or access to different, basic toiletries, things that they would need while they are experiencing homelessness.

And the director of Star House was really passionate about also getting them more prepared for the workforce. Teaching them necessary skills that they would need to find employment and then be consistent and successful once they acquired employment. And so I worked with Ann Bischoff to start the social enterprise aspect of Star House, and then Adam picked up that work and ran with it when I went off to be a management consultant at Kalypso. So it's actually like a perfect handoff.

[00:03:22] Adam: It was very exciting. Erin laid the groundwork for much of what Wild Tiger Tees was doing, and it's kind of now morphed into what Amanda's doing at Petals that inspire.. So it's fun work.

[00:03:31] Erin: Mm-Hmm.

[00:03:32] Adam: We haven't spoken for a while. 

How did this transition into sustainability work? Where did that interest come in?

[00:03:38] Erin: Yeah, it's something I've always been passionate about personally. So growing up as a, a girl scout and a hiker and a camper and a rock climber, I always had this affinity for nature. And also with like a Christian background, I had this passion for stewardship. We're on this earth, we have some right to, to do the right thing with it and to steward it well. 

With that, once I started at Kalypso, I found myself really missing the social impact side of what I had done throughout college and my early twenties. And so I thought it's probably less likely that I could convince management consulting firm to start to care about people issues, but I saw that a lot of clients were dealing with environmental issues. And so that felt like the closest I could get to that feeling of societal impact being integrated into the work that I was doing. And so, I found a few peers that felt similarly and we just started having meetings and it went on from there.

So it was always in the back of my mind. And then I found it to be the easier side of social impact that I could integrate into the career path that I had chosen.

[00:04:44] Dominique: And when did you move? Well, you're not in Columbus anymore.

[00:04:47] Erin: That's right.

[00:04:48] Dominique: How did moving around come into play with that story too?

[00:04:51] Erin: Yeah. So I left Columbus sometime after I graduated from Ohio State, so sometime in like 2019, 2018. And management consulting means you're on the road a good amount. So I had an apartment in Chicago, but I found myself some months only sleeping there four nights in a whole month. So I decided I probably didn't need a lease, didn't need to like, have an established footing anywhere.

So I started this concept of working entirely remote and this digital nomad lifestyle that everyone has heard about. And then COVID19 happened. So my timing could not have been worse on when I decided to, go rogue without an apartment. So I found myself in Pittsburgh on my mom's couch and in her spare bedroom, and she had been dreaming about a move to the beach. And we had some family in Virginia Beach. So made that move and then met who is now my husband, and he's born and raised here. Now the roots are, are a lot deeper in Virginia Beach, but I do make it back to Columbus as much as I can.

[00:05:59] Dominique: So you've kind of vaguely mentioned the fact that you just started doing consulting. Like what, what actually is that? Which I will add the color that I feel silly asking 'cause we met because I was also working at Kalypso.

[00:06:13] Erin: Yeah. You have a past life in consulting,

[00:06:16] Dominique: I know people who are listening who would be like, what exactly does that mean? Like, can you maybe even share what drew you to taking the job in the first place and then like what it actually looks like day-to-day? 

[00:06:27] Erin: Sure. The most straightforward answer I can give you on consulting is we identify problems that some of the biggest corporations in the world are experiencing. And then we craft offerings that are solutions to those problems. Sometimes they are related to like enterprise wide technology that could be implemented to standardized some sort of process or challenge that's happening within a large scale organization. Sometimes it is a more like creative or innovative solution that's needed. And then we would use things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and some of these newer emerging technologies and data science. 

And then there's this whole branch of what we do that is consulting, which essentially is the like more strategic and outcome-based approach to problem solving. So what drew me into it is that your clients and the problem that you're trying to solve, the topic that you're focused on, changes any time that your project changes. So that could be every six weeks, that could be six months, it could be six years that you work with the same client on, you know, similar problem sets.

I liked the idea of starting my career in an environment that gave me so much quick change and exposure to different industries and problems.

[00:07:46] Dominique: When you're like with friends at like a dinner party and you say you're a consultant, like which, you know, everyone experiences like, "So what do you do?" What do you feel like people most often misunderstand about like you just described all that, and that sounds clear to me, but like what often are people misunderstanding when you share what you do?

[00:08:03] Erin: It's a running joke with my friends, especially when I like start to talk about the types of products that these industrial companies that we serve are producing. Because sometimes it's automobiles and sometimes it's bottled beverages. You could buy at a convenience store, and sometimes it's retail clothing that you can point at the logos that your friends are wearing. 

So I think they really, my friends really struggle to wrap their mind around like what products I work with, because the answer is kind of any and everything that an industrial company could manufacture. And then when it comes to like the solutions or what we're actually proposing or implementing, yeah, I'd keep it really simple. I try not to get into that detail.

[00:08:43] Adam: Dominique, is this a hidden question of like how you can describe what you do to your friends? 

[00:08:48] Dominique: For sure.

[00:08:48] Adam: Okay.

[00:08:49] Erin: There's a hidden motive there.

[00:08:50] Dominique: No, but I, I think it's kind of a fun way, a fun question to ask because if a listener is listening and has the confusion your friends would have, it gives us a chance to see like how you address that with them too.

[00:09:01] Erin: Yeah. I have colleagues that say they are a business doctor. Think about it, like the doctor you're going because you have a specific, you know, symptom or or problem that's flaring up and you go to the expert on said problem and ask for a consultation and explain what's going on. They probably ask you a series of questions to like narrow in on the root of what is happening and then they give you some sort of recommended solution, prescription you could say. So that's a way that I've heard it explained really well too.

[00:09:32] Dominique: I like that. And then the doctor is like, by the way, your arm also seems to have a problem.

[00:09:37] Erin: Sometimes we find things that we didn't know would be there, but that's okay. That happens too.

One thing I'm interested in is you mentioned how your interest in sustainability started to grow because you wanted to express this kind of social impact background that you had and you found different colleagues that you could speak to and actually form a group around. What did it take to actually start to get some momentum there and take that initiative?

 A lot of conference calls. Where it started was at this annual event that we to hold when we were a much, much smaller organization. And before the acquisition we would all get together annually, and it started as these conversations around single use plastic and, you know, did anyone take into account the carbon emissions that were coming from the flights?

From 300 people all traveling from around the world to be in the same US city. So we started thinking more internally about the impact that would be really cool to implement from a sustainability perspective. For ourselves, like for our own organization. And then there was this 'aha moment' that we all had as we thought about our passions for sustainability, blending them with the work that we do. We were all on different client projects, and we had this moment where we realized like, how much more of an impact could we have if we did this? In the means that we had as consultants for the clients that we serve, these massive Fortune 500 companies. 

While at the time we were a quote unquote boutique consulting firm of 400, 500 people at most. That was that moment that we all sort of bonded around was the flipping of the switch from internal to external of what we could do for ourselves and that small day-to-day impact, we could have compared to that massive global impact that was possible if we took it to be part of the offerings that we had as a firm.

[00:11:27] Adam: I love that. I think there's something very powerful in there of this point that, "Hey, you came together with people who shared a, a similar passion." And you kind of develop that further. But then there was this, almost this tipping point where it was like, "Hey, wait a minute, we could actually expand this impact in a much bigger way by applying it here."

 And I think that's really powerful for anyone who's listening who's saying, "Hey, what can I do?" That just meeting with other people who have a shared interest can lead to something bigger and a better understanding over time.

[00:11:55] Erin: Yeah, this was all maybe January of 2020 and we had no clue what we were in for. We had a. Global Pandemic, we had an acquisition by Rockwell Automation. So we ourselves became part of a Fortune 500 company. So like we were sort of entering the belly of the beast of now not only could we have this external impact on our clients, but we could also potentially impact ourselves.

But now ourselves meant a much, much bigger scale. So we really didn't know where it would go, but I was really glad that there was that camaraderie and shared passion that kept us meeting and kept us chipping away at it, even though it took quite a long time to get there.

[00:12:34] Dominique: I feel like something that I just admire about you is I think you're just so great at execution and I feel like that's been a common thread in your journey so far. Like how you met Adam was like executing on a project around like social impact. You're talking about how you. you were instrumental in creating a group that built a service arm, like actually does a thing within a larger organization. Your job itself is like being the doctor or being like the real execution behind, like making a change a larger organization needs to figure out how to do.

And if somebody is listening and is really intrigued by like the role you play in all these spaces, like how did you learn to execute so effectively? Was that a part of a major you had in school and you feel like you, you've been trained to do that? Is this like an innate Erin talent or have you practiced this in like your involvements as a student and then you just are constantly seeing it build and build? I just think execution is something that I'm seeing you have as a common thread across all of your passions. And I wanna understand how you got so good at that.

[00:13:34] Erin: That's a very good question. Don't think it comes naturally. Naturally, I'm someone very trapped in my own head and I think a lot about context and weighing pros and cons and thinking about all of the implications. And so I'm not naturally one to immediately step to action. I think the word you used 'practice' is probably the, the one I'd emphasize here. 

And I know it's a cliche, but like 'Doing it scared'. So I think starting at Ohio State, I had a lot of practice in trying to pull off really big things as a very young and inexperienced person. Things like. alleviating poverty through entrepreneurship, which is now called, Business for Good at Ohio State.

I was a part of that organization all four years and directed it while I was still more of an underclassmen and pulling off a summit for a thousand people in attendance and using tens of thousands of dollars that was certainly not our money as we were all like very broke college students, I think was my first exposure to kinda pulling off something much, much bigger than myself and having to just execute and make a ton of mistakes, but also learn quite a bit each year that I was a part of coordinating the summit. And then, yeah, jumping in to my career now when I started as an analyst in 2018. Couldn't have told you any of what I told you today. 

I didn't know anything really, if we get down to it. Just learning that repetition and experience and, trying and sometimes failing and getting really, really good feedback from people that you admire and respect, just helped me craft that each execution after that got a little bit neater and sharper. but yeah, certainly not something instinctual. It's certainly something I've had to build towards.

[00:15:24] Dominique: I am just so curious by like from the get go, you were interested in the intersection between like social impact and business. Like even in your involvements at Ohio State, that was like the student orgs you were interacting with. Why did that interest you? Like why did that feel like a good space for you and you've stuck with, you've stuck with it, which is consistent.

[00:15:41] Erin: What's crazy is it's been an interest or something I was aware of and passionate about since I was like 16 or 17 years old, someone in Dayton, Ohio came to table at my school about an organization called You Crew and it was this blend of for-profit and social impact. And so as a 12th grader I was thinking about it.

And so when I did all of my college tours. I remember being like a very naive high school student, and the only question I would ask on college was, " What programs do you have in social entrepreneurship?" So I just got really lucky. I learned that term early and I latched onto it. So I would say my living that out has certainly evolved and it's looked totally different as a high school student, a college student, and then now as a working professional. 

But I think that that root of all of that came from like a Dad that was a businessman and a mom that was a devout Christian and really involved in like day-to-day ministry work and the societal contributions and and I just saw this blend of like head and heart that just clicked with who I am as a person.

[00:16:48] Adam: It sounds like in your upbringing, like you, you had this from different angles, kind of coming into you. 

[00:16:52] Dominique: And your siblings are also entrepreneurs. 

[00:16:54] Adam: Yeah.

[00:16:55] Erin: I do have a couple of sibling entrepreneurs. So one is in the surf industry. He has his own shaping company here in Virginia Beach. So he shapes boards and then also does lessons for people to shape their own surfboards. So he took that passion and ran with it in a really entrepreneurial way.

And then my sister's like starting up a coffee and flower company And then my oldest brother too, we're always talking shop about potential business ideas and all of it. So I think all of us got the bug. I'm not totally sure where we got it from, but we definitely all have that itch towards, building business and, and building something for ourselves and our families that aligns with what we're passionate about.

[00:17:38] Adam: Yeah, I love it when somebody came in the 12th grade and planted a seed for social entrepreneurship that kind of blossomed throughout your college career.

But there's also this element of agency where repeatedly you've kind of just taken the reins and said, "Hey, here's something I wanna explore and dive in". And I think sometimes people struggle with finding that. 

And I'm curious if you have any wisdom of like how people can tap into that. 

[00:18:01] Erin: I'd say the biggest wisdom that I can offer, which I'm only in my late twenties, so I can't say there's that much wisdom to it, but like your friends and family know you really well, ideally. So if you don't know that for yourself, like literally ask your friends or ask your family like, "What is a common thread in my life that I've always been coming back to?" and even if you can't spot that, like the people around, you probably can. And we don't always realize the things that we talk about all the time. 

That's like one way to tap into that. But then as far as like, yeah, agency goes, I think for me each time it's been a decision point. I just try to really focus on like what it is that I feel like I'm made to do and what opportunities are out there for me to like most do that to the fullest.

So it's a simple equation, but I've used that several times. In, you know, starting my career, throughout my career, it's not always a different job or a different state or something. You need to like change completely. Sometimes it's a really small tweak about like what needs to change within your job for you to feel more satisfied or whole.

And so for me, it wasn't that I wanted to leave the company that I was at, I just wanted the company I was at to care more about sustainability, which is what I cared about. So I think recognizing that you can have that impact within the realm that you're already in. You don't always have to jump and and enter a new space where that's already being done.

[00:19:33] Adam: I like that. I'm excited to dive into the sustainability work that you're actually doing in our next episode.

[00:19:38] Erin: Absolutely.

[00:19:38] Dominique: I think you offered some very kind, I think that was wisdom and advice. 

But if you were to give advice to like a version of you when you were like 16, do you have any thoughts of like, what would be helpful for her to know?

[00:19:49] Erin: Interesting. I haven't thought about that. I would say. Advice to my former self, younger self would be, "It's okay to be kinda weird. It's okay to not fit in necessarily." Most people wouldn't say that at 16, one of their big passions was business. Um, so like, it's okay to not mesh with the people around you and to you know, find something that is entirely yours and to run with it unapologetically. So yeah, that's probably my biggest advice if I could go back, 'cause you know, I think there were moments where I feared that maybe I just found something like that too early and I didn't really know, and it wasn't really what I could do professionally or, you know, at, even throughout college.

I would sometimes doubt that and think I was headed in the wrong path because I found that path too early. But some people just find their path relatively early. So I think it's okay to stick with it and see it through.

[00:20:55] Adam: That's so cool,

[00:20:56] Dominique: Thanks for chatting with us.

[00:20:57] Adam: Yeah, we're so glad that you could be on today. It's been interesting kind of walking through your journey, hearing about how you got interested in sustainability through the lens of social impact, and just the work that you did, kind of between when we crossed paths and you were doing the social entrepreneurship work with the Star House to kinda where you ended up today.

Thanks so much for, for joining us.

[00:21:15] Dominique: And, it'll be fun next time to chat about how one conversation at a company party became maybe the spark for something that we get to unpack with you as a champion.

[00:21:24] Adam: How can people connect with you or help be an advocate for the work that you're doing?

[00:21:28] Erin: LinkedIN is probably the best way, so you can always find me. Erin Schaffer, S-H-A-F-F-E-R. Or Kalypso, a Rockwell automation business, and Kalypso spelled with a K.

[00:21:41] Adam: Fantastic. As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change. 

[00:21:52] Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website at thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zane Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions.

We'll dig into our sustainability success story in our next episode. 

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