Season One Reflections: Holiday Message and Thank You

Chris Fredericks: Welcome to Empowered Owners, the podcast that takes you inside Empowered Ventures. I’m your host, Chris Fredericks. In each episode, I’ll have a discussion with one of our employees to discover and highlight their distinct personalities, perspectives, and skills while also keeping you in the loop with exclusive news, updates on company performance, and a glimpse into the future plans of Empowered Ventures. This is an opportunity for me to learn more about our amazing employee owners and an opportunity for you to hear regularly from me and others from within Empowered Ventures. On this EV update episode of Empowered Owners, chief of Staff Emily Bopp joins me for a brief Happy Holidays message, some thank yous and a quick preview of season two. Let’s get right to it. Hi, Emily. Welcome back to Empowered Owners.

Emily Bopp: Hello, Chris. So good to be here. Our final episode of season one and we’re heading into the holidays, and I’m excited to just recap with you where we’ve been on this season. Correct me if I’m wrong, seven months ago we launched Empowered Owners. I’m going to pull a fast one on you. What did you think then about launching and how far have we come?

Chris Fredericks: It’s awesome. This idea has been in the back of my mind for a few years. Honestly, just the idea of a podcast that’s focused on our team, the people that are part of Empowered Ventures. So it’s been just a lot of fun that it’s real now and it came to life. And it’s been a lot of fun too, to hear from people that really enjoy it. We definitely know a lot of people really look forward to this and I’m excited about the future too. I know we’ll get to that more later, but yeah, this has just been a lot of fun to do this. Really grateful to you and to the team that’s helping us, helped us get this off the ground.

Emily Bopp: Yeah, for sure. Just surreal to be seven months into a project that you’d been thinking about for three years. And we just wanted to take a second to reflect back over these past seven months and we wanted to really thank all of the EVers who have agreed to be guests. And I actually have those folks here that I can thank by name. So from Paramount Plastics, we were able to host Steve Flory, Amanda Dillard and Curtis Elliott. And from Firstar we had Michaela Simmers, Jack West, Diane Bokar and Dave Tenny. And from TVF we had Amanda Sanchez, Jim Prestipino, Shannon Hayden, Ken Siecinski, Tad Calahan did I say Ken’s last name right?

Chris Fredericks: It was very close. Seicinski.

Emily Bopp: Siecinski. But how awesome to get to feature each of those EVers, each of those employee owners within our family of businesses and to really highlight and tell their stories. And even as I read over their names, just their stories were flashing in front of my eyes. If you haven’t anyone listening, if you haven’t caught any of those episodes, go back and take a listen and just get to hear from some of your fellow employee owners. They’re so interesting and remarkable. I’m really glad that we were able to feature them. And I want to say thank you again to each of those folks for being a part of this first episode of Empowered Owners. I also wanted to say thank you to our listeners.

Emily Bopp: We are really excited about how this first season went and are grateful to all of their feedback, to all of your feedback, your ideas.

Chris Fredericks: It’s been a really awesome first season and I know I’ll echo your gratefulness to our guests and also our listeners. I’ve definitely heard from a lot of people who have shared this with other people, and also we’ve gotten a lot of suggestions and support around ideas how we can do better, which we’re always really grateful for. So, yeah, thank you to all of our guests and all of our listeners.

Emily Bopp: So in the spirit of the holidays, and when I say that, I realize that there can be a couple of different spirits. So I just want to tip my hat to the fact that sometimes the holidays can be a bittersweet time, sometimes hard things can happen around the holidays, and then when they roll around every year, folks are reminded of those. I want to be sensitive and just acknowledge that the holidays aren’t necessarily all positive and all celebratory, that some folks really are going through some grief or other really hard things at the holidays. Whichever place you find yourself in, may you have peace this holiday. But in the spirit of the holidays, Chris and I were just going to talk a little bit about some of our favorite holiday memories and would love to ask all of you to email in your favorite holiday memories. Maybe we’ll do a special release on some of those. But Chris, growing up, I got to know what was your favorite holiday memory?

Chris Fredericks: Yeah, thanks for asking and I’m super interested to hear yours. I think mine’s very typical, so I have one. I would say the strongest memory as a kid was the typical kind of Christmas morning, looking forward to what I might get. And one particular year, I’m going to guess I was eight years old, nine years old. Everyone in my neighborhood I had a lot of other boys in my neighborhood that were similar age. Everyone else had gotten a really neat BMX style bike that year. It was the year everyone gets their bike, their dirt bikes, and I hadn’t really gotten one. My dad may have actually given me a really beat up, used one that he found on the side of the road or something, thinking that would be sufficient, and I’m sure it wasn’t.

Chris Fredericks: So I was asking for a new one. And one in particular I had in mind from Target that I saw at Target, and I was really hoping it would be there that morning. And it was there in front of the tree and it was black and it was shiny and it wasn’t I’m sure it was not a very fancy bike because it was just a standard bike from Target, but to me it was everything to have that bike. I’m Gen X, my parents let me roam a bit and that bike got me all over the place with my friends. Yeah, that was a big moment for me, for sure. How about you?

Emily Bopp: Yeah, there’s two. We always did a real Christmas tree and every other year we bought one from the lot that was doing a fundraiser for the school we went to. And then on the off year we actually went out into the woods and just cut one down. You can imagine those ended up looking more like a Christmas bush Christmas tree because it hadn’t been manicured and it was some native to Indiana, something that was just real scraggly. But I loved that experience. So my favorite memory, it literally is like a scene. It burned into my head. We had been at our school’s Christmas program in an evening, it was already dark when we got home.

Emily Bopp: I grew up on a farm, so we had this really long driveway that went over a creek we’re driving up and it had snowed a ton. This was back when Indiana actually got snow and huge drifts and just when the snow’s still white everywhere and pristine and we had those little electric candles in our windows and a neighbor now this is the country but like a small town and we were on the edge of that. So we had a neighbor that was like ear shot away. A neighbor had some sort of like Christmas hymn playing in an outdoor display or something and it was just wafting over this cold dark starlit, stars glowing off the white snow that was drifted over our very long driveway. And those candles in that house just looked so warm. Literally when I think about the warmest I’ve ever felt in my heart, like inside it was that Christmas bush, knowing it was inside, because that year was one of those years and that music and the visual of it all and those candles in the window. But it was because of that when I was again probably nine or ten years old, just super impressionable and I remember thinking everything was right in the world.

Chris Fredericks: That’s beautiful. That really captures the spirit of the feeling of the holidays for sure.

Emily Bopp: So I would love to hear other people and whoever feels that they might like to share their holiday traditions, even if it’s something not Christmas. I love learning what people have experienced growing up, would love to hear that. So send those in. That would help us to get to know our evers even a little bit better. And happy holidays to all of our EV years. Here in Empowered Ventures. We’re so grateful for you and grateful to get to celebrate this time of year alongside.

Chris Fredericks: Yes, happy holidays to everybody at EV and all of our employee owners and everyone out there who supports EV and is interested in EV. Really grateful to know everybody that’s involved in supporting us and yeah, wishing you a wonderful and peaceful holiday season for sure.

Emily Bopp: Previewing into season two. Could you give us a little bit of a look ahead before we close out this season on what we can expect and where we’re headed next?

Chris Fredericks: Yeah, we’re in the middle of a brief break here for the holidays and we’re excited about season two. As I was thinking and listening to the list of guests that you shared earlier, thanking them, I was also thinking about how I was amazed how difficult it was to get to everybody that I would eventually want to talk to. And there’s so many people, I’m sure we won’t even come close to covering them all in season two. And so that’s excited to keep going, but we’ve got a great list of guests coming for season two and we’re going to continue with our every other week release for interviews with our employee, owner, guests and in between those, it’ll continue to be an update from EV. Some information, some thoughts from our perspective, any news that’s really pertinent. Yeah, excited to keep going with that format and yeah, excited for season two and so look for that. I believe probably late January would be the first episode of season two and back to a weekly release schedule at that point.

Emily Bopp: Awesome. Thank you for a great season. Honestly, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. So thanks for setting the stage and everything in season one. Yes, looking forward to coming back in season two. We’ll catch everybody then.

Chris Fredericks: Yeah. Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you for listening to this EV update edition of Empowered Owners and thank you to Emily Bopp for joining me. Remember, we want to hear from you. Please give us feedback, suggest guests and topics for future episodes and tell us how we can keep improving the show. To reach us, email [email protected]. Thanks for tuning in.