#91: Doing Good and Being Good with Tammy Day

Lead the People

For the past twenty years, Tammy Day has helped businesses, organizations, and individuals do more good by connecting people, ideas, and community assets. As an owner of Daycos, Inc., one of a handful of Nebraska B Corps, she knows how to balance profit with purpose and use business as a force for good. A published author in Reclaiming WE: Twenty Everyday Acts to Strengthen the Common Good and Defend Democracy (April 2021) and of Philanthropy for All: A Practical Guide to Doing More Good (November 2023), Tammy continues to share her expertise as a mentor, speaker, writer, and trainer. She lives and works in Norfolk, Nebraska, with her husband Brandon.

Top 3 Takeaways

• Honor the itch. When Tammy and her husband had an inkling there was a next level for their business, they paused. After some deep reflection, they hit on a formula to do good and to be good.
• Join forces. A big benefit Tammy experienced by committing to the B Corp path was being able to connect with like-minded business owners to share ideas and inspiration. Don’t feel you’re all alone in your pursuits.
• Share the wealth. Rather than simply write checks, Tammy and team created a virtuous flywheel that allows all employees to get involved. Every act puts energy behind the flywheel and makes a positive impact.

From Our Sponsor

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From the Source

“I'm often head down, what's next, let's keep going. And we don't often take time to pause and reflect on what has been, how far we've come, what kinds of things we can celebrate. Once we did that it kind of helped us move on to the next phase.”

“When we were figuring out this new path to purpose as a company. We wanted to make sure that one of our tenants was that we put some real solid foundational frameworks around what we were doing, one to hold us accountable to help us have a peer group to learn from, and two to indicate to our stakeholders that this was more about who we are and not a program or a passing thing that we were going to try. It was going to be deeply ingrained in the business in all kinds of ways.”

“You're measured in many areas of how you operate: governance, workers, community, environment, and so then you receive a score, and you have to hit a certain threshold in that scoring to be considered a B corp and receive that certification.”

“We have 60 people that work for us. What could happen if those 60 people had true ownership?”

“To us, this is part of your real work. So we do not ask people to do this on the weekend or in the evenings. They take time out of their day and we account for that when we're resourcing our teams… that people will be spending time on these efforts.”

“We are all about this ‘rising tides raise all ships’ mentality. So we wanted to broadly share everything that we're about with the hope of inspiring others, because again I believe that's the way things get better.”

Connect with Tammy

Website: http://www.tammy-day.com

Philanthropy for All (book): https://amzn.to/3z8kBgd

Company Website: http://www.daycos.com