One + July 2011 - (Page 83)

He didn’t think about wearing gloves (something he wishes he had after confronting the hairy bar) or the fact that he didn’t really need to be gathering used soap. “Right about the time I was grabbing the hairy bar, I thought to myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he said. “I hadn’t thought about the fact that I could have just used the soap from my own room instead of from other people. I was a pretty high-octane, e-commerce business executive— the type of person who jumps into an opportunity [feet ﬁrst], that’s just my personality. I’d just go for something if I had my mind set on it.” Sure, it’s kind of embarrassing, but he proudly tells the story about how what is now one of the world’s most inﬂuential social enterprises, Clean the World, got off the ground. Clean the World is a non-proﬁt organization that partners with hotels to collect used soap from them. Clean the World recycles and redistributes the used soap to areas of the world desperately in need of improved hygiene. That morning in early 2009 at the Holiday Inn was when the project took ﬂight, but the original idea for Clean the World was born a few months earlier, in November 2008, just after the election of U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama’s acceptance speech on a sunny day in Chicago’s Grant Park focused on the importance of helping others and of creating a sustainable future. On a business trip at the time, Seipler watched the speech on his hotel room’s TV and got inspired. “I did a lot of traveling. It was, you know, New York on Monday, Chicago on Tuesday, Minneapolis on Wednesday and maybe hitting Dallas on the way back to Orlando. That was a normal travel week for me,” said Seipler, who at the time was the vice president of sales and marketing for an e-commerce company. “I always took just a carryon, so I never had any room in my suitcase to bring back the soap and shampoo (a deﬁnite perk of the business traveler). [But] on that day, I started thinking about sustainability and the fact that I wanted to feel like I was making a difference. I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what happens to all the soap after we use it.’” So, like any high-octane salesperson would, he called the front desk and asked. “We throw them away,” the front desk clerk answered. So Seipler thought about what he could do. He researched ways to recycle soap, and he researched what he could do with the soap—and what he found amazed him. He learned that more than 1 million bars of soap are thrown away by U.S. hotels each day—more than 5 million worldwide. That’s a lot of soap—550 tons a year to be exact—simply being added to the world’s landﬁlls. On top of that, he found that more than 3.5 million children under age 5 die each year from diseases that could be prevented by simply improving their hygiene. A large part of hygiene? Soap. Seipler put two and two together, and the idea was born. “I started kicking the idea around to hotels and to some other people,” he said. “I wanted to do something different than what I was doing. I wanted to make a difference.” One of his sounding boards was good friend and co-worker Paul Till (who ended up being his current partner and co-founder of Clean the World). The two were on a sales trip together when Seipler pitched the rough idea to Till. Till, who also was looking for a way to make a difference in the world, loved the idea. At the time, Till was a salesperson working on Seipler’s team, but their relationship went deeper than that. Till had co-founded a software company with his brother years earlier and had actually given Seipler his ﬁrst sales job. After a few years, Seipler moved on to another company, and when Till sold his shares to his brother, Seipler hired him. “I had known Paul for 15 to 20 years,” Seipler said. “We met in Houston watching a Miami Dolphins football game at a local sports bar—just two guys cheering for the same team. We became great friends. I know that our history together is one of the reasons why we decided to do this venture together. Paul was there when the idea was born, and he was there when those doors were open at that Holiday Inn. We literally started this thing from the ground up together.” In Seipler’s garage, they cleaned the soap, ground it through a meat grinder and food processor, cooked it and pressed it. The entire process took a laborious 6 hours and only produced about 50 bars ready for distribution. mpiweb.org 83 “I started thinking about sustainability and the fact that I wanted to feel like I was making a difference. I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what happens to all the soap after we use it.’” http://www.mpiweb.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of One + July 2011

One + July 2011
Contents
Energy of Many
Impressions
Paradigm Shifts, Part II
Web Watch
Agenda
Thoughts+Leaders
Ask the Experts
Recognizing Community and Organizational Excellence
Overheard
Art of Travel
The Prism Effect
Top Spots
Connections
Irrelevant
Using New Tech for Old Purposes
So You Think You Can Dance
Don’t Use Tech You Don’t Understand
Are You In It to Win It?
Anything is Possible
Night of the Radishes
Well Played
When People Come Together, Magic Happens
Size Matters
Building a Better FAM
One Bar at a Time
MPI + CSR
Industry Insights
Your Community
Making a Difference
Until We Meet Again

One + July 2011