In this episode, we’ve hit the jackpot! Literally. The lottery is a staple for the convenience store small business owner. But did you know that our obsession with winning big with lottery tickets was also a spark that helped level the playing field as apartheid was falling in South Africa, with the help of none other than Nelson Mandela?
This is one small business case study that has an absolutely fascinating story behind it, complete with Hollywood-style, feel-good, underdogs and an ending that leads to the birth of our own small business, InspireHUB! In this week’s episode, we catch up with Mark Hutchinson, whose name you’ve probably never heard, but who was instrumental in setting up many of the world’s lotteries and paving the way to a whole lot of worthy-cause good.
Big on Small, The Official Small Business Podcast, explores the big ideas that are helping small organizations survive and thrive. Hosts Karolyn Hart and Samantha Castro interview the inspiring people who are running small businesses, agencies, towns, charities, schools and teams.
Here's why we're so excited about sharing this episode and the man who is such an important and beloved part of our own small business origin story with you!
Pepsi Cola was a family business for the Hutchinson’s. Many people within Mark’s family participated in the franchise in some way, including Mark. But in 1983, a serendipitous racquetball game between Mark's dad and one of lottery's pioneers, Owen Hickey, led to Mark leaving to teach the new Colorado lottery how to run a sales and marketing system for instant lottery tickets.
This began an adventure that had Mark travelling around the world, shaping lottery systems, and becoming one of the "founding seven" of the biggest lottery brand name in the world: Powerball, which today raises over $22 billion for worthy causes.
And there's the catch: Mark, like so many other entrepreneurs, was driven by a desire to not only grow his own bottom line but to help more good people do more good. It's the trajectory that led him to a partnership with the Goodson-Todman team -- the powerhouse behind Price is Right, Family Feud and some of t.v.'s biggest shows -- and, ultimately, on a trek to South Africa in one of its most historic times, the end of apartheid.
Tune into this week's episode to learn how the call to help overcome the red tape that stifled the South African lottery system became a mission to help end the racism endemic in not only business but in a healthcare system fraught with peril for the nation's most vulnerable: children.
Our name, InspireHUB, really did have an inspired beginning! Listen to Mark unpack that with Karolyn, with a heaping helping of takeaways that you can apply to power your own small business adventures!
Mark Hutchinson and his family with Nelson Mandela
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We've been helping InspireHUB clients not just survive during this time but THRIVE! We collected all of our advice and made it available for FREE as our great big give-back during this difficult time. Included in this FREE Guide:
At InspireHUB, we get it. We've been a 100% remote workplace for more than 7 years, and are the first to admit we were UN-InspireHUB while we learned to grow into it.
Here's how you can use it to grow YOUR small business too ...
Included in this FREE Guide: