May 11, 2026 – BenefitRFP Bob Nienaber and Greatest Hits Larry Wyman

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

Jim Beach 0:26
hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting school for startups, radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there making yourself a millionaire. Somehow. There are just so many great paths to doing it. All you have to do is figure one to copy and go out there and make yourself a million dollars. It’s really that simple. Anyway, I know I’m crazy. Hey, we got a great show for you today. First up, we are going to discuss an incredible business model I know nothing about. And then we’re going to talk about the ocean and revitalizing it. Actually, the second guest was one of the heroes in my book, The Real environmentalist. So big show we’re gonna go get started right now. Here we go. Very excited to introduce my first guest. He has built an amazing business in a niche that I know absolutely nothing about, in the FinTech space. Please welcome Bob Nina burr to the show he is an executive benefit tax break specialist. His company that he has been the founder of was called, it’s called benefit RFP, and he’s got 20 years there, building that company. He is very active all over serving on boards of directors and being active in the community, especially in education. Bob, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Bob Nienaber 1:50
I’m doing great. Thank you for having me.

Jim Beach 1:52
You have a whole bunch of credentials after your name on LinkedIn, MD, RT, R, i, c, p, C, H, F, C, C, l, u, is that a new sexuality that I’m supposed to know about?

Bob Nienaber 2:07
It’s just a lot of initials for for being in my industry for 35 years. So each one of those, except for MDRT, MDR, t’s a million dollar roundtable. So that’s,

Jim Beach 2:19
I know that you know that? Yeah,

Bob Nienaber 2:21
that’s a program that’s been around a long time. And then the the others are really mastery programs for different types of strategies. Our ICP is just retirement income specialist, so I have a mastery in that program. And then CLU is really a life chartered life underwriter. And then ChFC is a chartered financial consultant, and those are, you know, designations that you get from going through a couple years of their programs and testing out and getting your mastery skills. But it’s really necessary to have that, because in my line, I’ve got a lot of securities licenses and a lot of insurance licenses, because when you’re talking about corporate benefits, you’re really working with both sides of the marketplace. Almost all corporate benefits these days have some type of insurance wrap or a program in them, because there’s, there’s a lot of tax benefits that companies get when they wrap the investments with these insurance programs, and then there’s a lot of secondary benefits that are provided to their participants. So not only are they getting things like a 401, K type of plan, but it’s also going to go in and provide them with guaranteed life insurance. So there’s some tremendous benefits that come on there. And since these plans are, you know, really earmarked for the top app for the top income earners in the company, and because they come on top of what a 401, care qualified plan would do without limitations, these participants could defer up to 100% of their income pre tax and do a lot of nice designs that are really necessary to keep these people locked and loaded in the company that they’re working with. So they’re really designed as as retention, reward system, recruiting systems, and it really covers the gamut. So you can get into a lot of individual designs and really do some nice things for the company and their top folks that are running these organizations.

Jim Beach 4:17
And you sell them to the HR department through that, yeah, through the HR benefits. So the in the HR department, there’s someone who takes care of the paychecks, and someone takes care of, you know, the IRAs, and someone who takes care of hiring and firing, and then there’s someone who takes care of the benefits for all the employees, right? So do you go to that person and that fine. I I love that because it’s a defined swimming pool. I know exactly who those people are. Is that what you did?

Bob Nienaber 4:46
Well, you know, in reality, we’re a referral only type of company. So

Jim Beach 4:53
does that mean that I’m like, unreal or insane, or

Bob Nienaber 4:57
I probably forget. Involved in this business many years ago now. The what that means is, from the direction that we get cases is we’ll get some calls from HR directors. We’ll get them from the CHROs. We’ll get them from CFOs, even CEOs or the founders of the companies. Really depends on the size of the company. So if we do a lot all the way up through the fortune 100 companies and managing their benefit assets and their programs. And so I probably spend most of my time talking with a whole team of those folks kind of put together. And then I spend most of my time dealing with the CFOs, because they’re the ones that are dealing with the financials, the PnL statements, the asset liabilities, everything that’s really constructed as a result of these plans. And then I work with, you know, I’ve worked over the years, gosh, with hundreds, if not 1000s of boards. Sit on a couple of boards myself, and so you’re dealing really with the people that are managing the financials of the companies when you’re putting these together.

Jim Beach 5:58
All right, very interesting. What is the standard high end executive benefit bucket look like these days? Bob, so you know, CEO of Delta today was in the news. Ed Bastian, $27 million a year, right? So I happen to the one thing that he gets, which is the fly he and his wife could walk on a plane to fly wherever they want to

Bob Nienaber 6:33
whenever they want. Because, yeah, must be a nice part of calm.

Jim Beach 6:36
Yeah. My mother used to be best friends with the CEO of delta, wife, and that was decades ago, but they used to just fly up to New York City, go shopping or have lunch and then fly home.

Bob Nienaber 6:51
That’s

Jim Beach 6:52
awesome. So anyway, I know that’s not a standard Benny. What’s the standard bucket look like, though?

Bob Nienaber 7:00
For for executives, top executive, you’re really it depends on the size of the company, if it’s a private company, a lot of times, these plans are utilized to put together a succession plan. And for, you know, public companies, you’ll see the companies that they’re using cash and equity in these plans. So they’ll be putting in company stock as well as cash bonuses. Might have long term incentive comp plans, and then the design and construction or distribution is going to be based 100% on what their company needs are. So if they need to retain these people for three or five years, then they’ll put a retention piece on any company money that’s put into the plan. But other than that, you know, you see these set up for really to make up, in most cases, make up the difference on what a participant can’t put in a 401 k. So for example, you know, right now an executive could put away, depending on their age, $32,000 in a 401 K, and that might be good for somebody that’s earned in $100,000 or less, but a non qualified plan, if somebody wants to put away, you know, 20% of their income into the 401, K, and they’re making 300,000 or a million dollars, they can’t do it because the limitations. So you’ll see these open up those windows so those people can set aside and save enough money for their own retirement needs. On top of that, you’ll see things like disability packages put into these or long term care packages, or even life insurance arrangements where you have guaranteed death benefit that are that’s covering the people and protecting them both while they’re working, and beyond. So there’s a, you know, a lot of different packages. And one of the nice things about these is they really are an open white paper where you can design a plan specific towards whatever the company’s goals are, whatever the individuals of the company’s goals are in. And a plan can be one size fits all, or we might do something for the CE suites versus people that are, you know, maybe top sales people might have it different benefit in the plan. So you can structure them a lot of different ways. So it makes it a lot of fun and very interested.

Jim Beach 9:14
What about for an entrepreneur who’s the situation is very, very different. You know, say that I have a 15 person business, and we’re at two and a half million a year in revenue, and the board, quote, unquote, thinks that the CEO should have a contract. What would the CEO contract look like they’re, you know, considering this as an entrepreneur situation, they, they’ve proven themselves. They’re up to 2.5 but they, you know, they’re still scrapping, you know, what would you recommend a deal look like there for that CEO?

Bob Nienaber 9:57
It depends you were saying that the the CEO. O makes two and a half million dollars here, and you’re trying

Jim Beach 10:02
to do something for two and a half million dollars a

Bob Nienaber 10:04
year. Got it so if a company, generally, generally companies that come into the traditional executive benefit plans on the lower end are doing about $50 million of annual revenue, and so, you know, a smaller, smaller company like that, if you have one or two people that are really doing something, you know, outrageous. They’re knocking the the cover off the ball, that type of thing. But it’s a company that’s just too small to be in a traditional executive benefit plan. You can do one off plans for these people. You could still do a some type of deferred comp plan. You could do a phantom stock plan where you know, you’re going to base it on, on the stock appreciation, right? So let’s say the company’s doing two and a half million bucks, and the the CEO comes in and gives all these great promises, set us, I’ll get you up to five or $10 million and you want to put together a structured plan. Then you might do a, really a SARS plan, where, as the company grows, they’re going to get a portion of the payout. What you don’t want to do, if a company is too small, is give away company stock, but you can base their performance and pay on the valuation of that stock. Value growing. You can also do we see a lot of bank funding programs out there for people that have small populations, but have one or two people that are doing a lot of growth, and these have become very popular in the last decade, because the bank can put money into the plan, and anything the bank puts in completely avoids taxes coming into the participant account, into the company account, and then, if it’s structured properly, the distributions can come out tax free. And so there’s, you know, really does, and I think it’s a great question that you have, because there is a size and scope that kind of dictates where your your target audience needs to go, and that’s where really working with an expert gets them in the right direction. Because if a company is too small, all the assets on a traditional deferral plan are an asset of the company until they’re paid out, and so at the end of the day, you’re putting that that participant in a lot of risk, if the company was to fold or or have some financial hardships, that person could be without that money.

Jim Beach 12:13
Right? What’s the craziest benefit you’ve ever heard of an executive asking for

Bob Nienaber 12:22
most benefits, most executives ask for stuff that’s real these days. There’s, you know,

Jim Beach 12:31
anything from the 80s anymore, where I want my security guards to have security guards?

Bob Nienaber 12:37
No. And really the now we know we don’t see a lot of crazy stuff. We used to see a lot of crazy financial stuff that were written on opinion letters from attorneys that would come across our desk, and we’ve always been one of the leaders in executive benefits, and we would see that, and it would come across my desk, and I’d say, No, thank you. And the reason being is the IRS is brutal if they come across a plan that is not a true plan, if it’s somebody’s opinion letter, and it looks like it’s just, you know, some tax avoidance scheme. And they came out with a program that IRS versus Joe years ago, where an individual put about $100 million into a plan, and it was a it was a complete scheme. And so what happened was the IRS not only took the value of the money that would have avoided the tax impacts, but they took the whole value of what they put into the plan in total, so the IRS does not mess around. And so what we’ve always done, and we’ve never had a lawsuit or a lost audit or even a customer participant complaint, and the reason that we’ve avoided all the headaches and hassles, if you put the Department of Labor regs together with the ERISA rules and the IRS rules on these things, there’s plenty of benefits and tax leverage that really gives the company and the participants a tremendous, tremendous advantage of using these things, so we just stick with the real rules, and everybody does absolutely fine.

Jim Beach 14:06
All right, go back 20 years, 21 years in history, Bob, and tell us about the birth of benefit. RFP, how did you get the idea? Did you copy from someone else? What was the the impetus for the startup, and Where’d you get the money? Where’d you do for your first finance? What’d you do for your first marketing? Walk us through that first year.

Bob Nienaber 14:35
Well, the you know, when we when we first set up, when I first started in the executive benefit marketplace, it was the Wild Wild West, and there were no rules. There was very little rules. There’s a lot of crazy marketplaces. And there were, you know, you’d see plan documents written by attorneys that kind of would give a little direction as to what the plan could do and couldn’t do, and all this kind of stuff. Stuff. But there really were no rules. And so around 2004 they started coming out with the the regs that controlled the marketplace and put some guardrails on it. And it was very helpful. So, but we’ve always seen, at least, I’ve always seen when I was, when I was first getting into this business and then creating benefit. RFP, there’s just a tremendous need for, you know, experts in this field and a knowledge base, because clients would get into plans with expectations, thinking that it was going to be wonderful, and they really were trying to do the right things and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, they were getting bad advice, wrong advice. You know, things would blow up on in their face, and you can’t run a business or anything like so it was a it was a complete disaster. And so we built out benefit or the first thing we did was we wanted to construct a delay, a document line that when companies would come to us with specific needs, we’d show them how the the plans could be designed to take care of those needs and desires, and we put together make everything make sense. And then it comes down to funding. We built technology in the FinTech world that compares all funding mechanisms and methodologies on these programs so that a client can make their own decision on what’s the best product or or solution for their shop with full understanding. So we took a lot of the confusion out of it. We just did a very simple task. That’s why a lot of people refer to us as as the Uber of the of the corporate benefit world. And, you know, we try and do that for the last 20 years. We try and just make it very simple for clients to get in, understand what options they have, and really lay it up so that they can understand, that the participants can understand, because when clients and participants understand it, they’re going to get a lot more out of it, and the benefits are going to be tremendous. You know, plan should serve as a profit for a company if it’s funded, right, if it plans not. We have a free audit solution that goes through and compares their plan design and funding tools with better things out there, and they can make a decision.

Jim Beach 17:22
All right, how’d you get your first customer?

Bob Nienaber 17:26
God, I couldn’t even tell you, you know, I used to do the old fashioned way when I first started just go out and meet people. And you know, I’ve done a lot of speaking. I couldn’t tell you how I got my first customer. I’ve gotten most my customers just from referral and public speaking. And I’ve written seven books, and I think co authored about 10 more. You know, you just your name gets out there, and people come to you for questions, and they ask you a bunch of questions, and then you get recognized eventually that that you know what you’re talking about. So, you know, they continuously get more stuff through. And then they refer you other companies, or if they go to another company, they take you with them, that type thing. And then, you know, I also that one of the things I did, I think, in the beginning, when the regs are first coming out. You know, I was instrumental in adding information for the regs. Worked with Congress during that time very heavily. Worked with both the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. And you know that that gets your name out as well. You get to know the people that are making the rules around this stuff. And it just helps out big time.

Jim Beach 18:42
I am on your website, I thought, and I only see four books. Maybe this is just the non fiction. I’m sorry, the fictional stuff that you’ve done. So tell us about the two groups of books that you’ve done, fiction and then non fiction. Let’s start with the fiction, the American bloodline series.

Bob Nienaber 19:06
Yeah, those are, those are probably the most well known books out there. They’re, you know, they’re selling all around the world. They’re working on movie production with them and all that. And that’s a, that’s a story about a real bloodline. But you know, as the author, you have two choices. Make it a book on history, which I would have thought would have been boring, or you make it on a book that contains history, and yet you had a little spice of life on the stories to make them fun. So that’s, that’s what both of those bloodline books are about. And then blur is just a fun book about, you know, a kid growing up, that type of thing. A lot of fun stories on that. And then the retention revolution was a bestseller in the corporate benefit world. And. And then I’ve got another book that that just finished the editorial stuff getting ready to pop out any day, called parlay. It’s about understanding fear in the world and manifestation, and how to parlay successes into better sex successes as you go along, you know. And so I have a pretty broad interest and stuff. And stuff, and I, I read about six books a week, and I’m constantly, you know, into stuff and learning and all that. And so, you know, rather than park in front of the TV and do nothing, I take the time to sit down and write some books. And have been successful with that. So it’s, it’s just kind of part of who I am.

Jim Beach 20:40
What’s your process for writing a book? How does that actually physically happen?

Bob Nienaber 20:45
You know, you always for me. Anyways, you know, I come up with an idea, come up with a strategy, and then I start to write out the chapters and kind of lay it out. And then once I have the chapters, lay it out, then you just start sit down, you know, I try and do 1000 words a day, bring it together and make it make sense, and you change it as you go along, you know, you adjust it as you go. But speaking, I, you know, it’s pretty easy. And some, some of the books, you know, you can, you can knock out real quickly. It’s an easy process. Other books are a little bit more complex. The sequel to the bloodline series was the hardest book I ever did, because the second book has to stand on its own as well as it has time to the first book. So you’re constantly going back and forth and and all that stuff. But, and then my ideas come from just life in general. You know, I’ve gone behind enemy lines and dealt with some weird situations, and so I’ll put that into into the stories, and then bring out the stories so people can kind of feel that and see that and understand what that’s that’s all about. And you know, life has so much excitement that, and I really, truly do live each day at its fullest and so at the end of the day, you know, I love sharing the stories and the events that have taken place.

Jim Beach 22:07
And you say 1000 words a day. Does that mean you type them into the computer? Do you dictate? Do you do long hand on piece of paper?

Bob Nienaber 22:18
No, I’m older. I type it. I do it the old fashioned way,

Jim Beach 22:22
pipe into a computer.

Bob Nienaber 22:23
Yeah, yeah, it’s just easy. My laptop’s with me, and I travel a lot, so, you know, I throw the words in there, and it’s great. These days are so easy. My first books, of course, you didn’t have that luxury. And these days, though, with with all the the word choices that you have to deal with on a computer. It makes it so easy when you make a change or a correction or an addition or any of that stuff,

Jim Beach 22:48
all right, easier to do, fiction or nonfiction,

Bob Nienaber 22:53
you know, it, I don’t know they’re both. You know, I’ve spent 35 years in this, in this industry, and I grew up as a kid whose dad was a senior executive, and, you know, so that that was in my blood, in my system. So it comes very easy, comes very natural. You know, like I said, I sit on boards and all that, and people ask me, how that, how that, what’s that like, and all these things. And it intimidates most people when they’re thinking about it, and it really isn’t intimidating to me, because that’s just how I grew up, so that’s what I was used to. So it’s easy to write business books. It’s easy to write and put together solutions that people may have not thought about because maybe they come at it from a different direction. And then fiction, since I write about stories or situations that have actually lived through and seen, you know, it actually makes it very easy, too. So, you know, just it’s a different topic. You have more fun, I think, with fiction, when you’re writing those books and and so it really comes easy either which way. And just like anybody that writes books, I, you know, I’ll get a block on what I want to put down, or whatever the deal is, and so I’ll walk away for the day, you know, just let it come back to you. I don’t struggle and force myself to have 1000 words. And some days I’ll have 3000 words. So, you know, you kind of keep it as a target and and then eventually it comes together. And then you set it up to the editor. They take a couple whacks at it and kick it around and send it back three or 420 times until it’s right. And then then you have a book, you put it out, and you

Jim Beach 24:33
go, do you outline everything in detail in advance, or you get halfway through before you figured out who killed the king

Bob Nienaber 24:43
now, and on certain things that that you know and things that have happened, and what you’re going to put together, it’s just easier for me, anyways, to to outline it. And not that I spend a lot of time detailing it, but I’ll put the key points under it, and then I’ll build upon those stories as I’m putting it together. The Ford’s final, final touches.

Jim Beach 25:02
You know, they had no idea who killed Jr when they came back for the next season. They had, they had never considered it, you know, they hadn’t figured it out yet. So they were, they walked in the first day of the next season like so who killed him? You know,

Bob Nienaber 25:17
yeah, and sometimes they kill off the wrong character too early, right? And then they realize, Oh, my God, we shouldn’t have done that, and they try and revive them somehow. So, yeah, you see some weird things sometimes, for sure.

Jim Beach 25:31
Yes, you do screenwriting work as well.

Bob Nienaber 25:35
I don’t do the screenwriting myself. I’ve had the so the production companies, when they get interested in your books or your stories, they’ll actually do the screenwriting for you. And they’ll do the scripts, because part of the process with Hollywood is they’ll, they’ll take a book, they’ll find a book, it’ll, it’ll get referred to them through, you know, somebody, some literacy coach or guide or whatever. And they’ll track down a group of people that represents maybe, you know, five or 10 different production studios, and you know, maybe 50 different producers, and they’ll run that past those people, and then each each producer has kind of a different style, and so they’ll write the scripts based on the producers that are probably going to be most likely involved with that genre,

Jim Beach 26:25
all right? And I heard that I’m playing the first villain killed in the movie. Is that true?

Bob Nienaber 26:34
You know, it’s, that’s, that’s a fun question that, of course, you know, my family’s always wanting to be in the movie. And they always ask if I want to be in the movie, and I’m like, I am not an actor or anything. So they’re No, I won’t be involved. And

Jim Beach 26:48
I’m not concerned about you, Bob. I’m concerned

Bob Nienaber 26:50
about themselves.

Jim Beach 26:52
Me, what you

Bob Nienaber 26:53
probably, you, probably, you’re gonna have a better shot of being in the movie than I will. Let’s say that, because at the end of the day, it’s not going to be me, and if you can act, then you probably have a chance. I

Jim Beach 27:03
just want to be killed. That’s all, Bob. How do we find out more? Follow you online. Get in touch.

Bob Nienaber 27:14
You know a lot of most people, I think, track me down these days just by going to Bob Nina Bran LinkedIn, and sure, n, i e n, A, B, E R. And of course, for the company, you can go to benefit rfp.com, and you know, all kinds of literature exists on there. We have videos on there. We have a very detailed library on this stuff, and so, you know, enjoy yourself and dig through and if you have questions, you can certainly track our team down, and any number of people will pick up the phone or answer the email and help you along.

Jim Beach 27:53
Fantastic. You’ll send me the script over.

Bob Nienaber 27:57
I’ll put you in the script, and I’ll scribble your name in there for the first dead guy.

Jim Beach 28:01
Okay, great, Bob, thank you so very much, and we will be right back.

Bob Nienaber 28:06
I appreciate you.

Jim Beach 28:10
Up next we have a greatest hits. Larry Wyman, incredible scientist and one of the people I wrote real environmentalist about we are back and again. Thank you so much for being with us on this beautiful Tuesday. We’re going to make it beautiful if it’s not where you are, right? The attitude counts. Very excited to welcome my first guest. His name is Larry Wyman. He’s had an amazingly successful career, and he’s tried to redeem himself. He started off as a lawyer, Larry, what were you thinking? And he was

Jim Beach 28:42
I

Larry Wyman 28:42
had it removed. I had it removed.

Jim Beach 28:44
Good. Had it removed. And moved into the commercial real estate space. He was responsible for 12 huge projects in New York City in the 80s and 90s. He was with a company called HR Oh International. He also worked for them in Frankfurt and in London. He stepped down and became a member of their advisory board, but he does still work on other projects, and recently, he has stepped into the team of a great new company called okinos, which is a new company designed to fight the amount of plastics that are accumulating in our oceans and rivers. Larry, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Larry Wyman 29:28
I’m doing very well. Thank you for having me.

Jim Beach 29:31
Does commercial real estate ever recover from the pandemic? No one wants to go to work anymore. Employees are saying we’re not coming downtown anymore. Commercial Real Estate may have died.

Larry Wyman 29:44
Death is probably overstatement, certainly mortally wounded, could perhaps be accurate. And the best thing about what we’re doing at okiano is that it has nothing to do with real estate.

Jim Beach 29:56
I love that. All right. Let. Go ahead and talk okianos, then, how did you first find out? Well, before we involve you, let’s just talk about the problem. There’s a blob of plastics in the Pacific Ocean that’s the size of Rhode Island, or something I’ve heard. What do you

Jim Beach 30:20
know about?

Larry Wyman 30:21
It’s called a Gyre, and it’s where currents converge, and much of the plastic that’s been floating around in the ocean manages to find its way into these gyres, where it not only floats on the surface, but then deteriorates and moves further down in the ocean, where it gets into the food chain. The overarching problem is that there is 1 million tons of plastic that is made worldwide each and every single day, and 90% of it does not find its way to any kind of a second life or any kind of an adaptive reuse. It’s either burned it’s put in a landfill, or it finds its way into the open environment and moves everything that there is on earth, as if that weren’t bad enough, the amount of plastic that’s being made is scheduled to triple between now and 2050 as the oil industry seized upon the manufacturer of plastics to be a hedge against their fuels and other things going out of style as people move to more sustainable energy. And so we have a situation where we are poisoning ourselves daily with the amount of plastic that’s being made, and yet, we’re going to make more of it,

Jim Beach 31:48
all right? And the plastic ends up in our bloodstream somehow, right?

Larry Wyman 31:53
It does, because there are a bunch of different ways it can get there. Certainly, plastic is made from petrochemicals. It’s also made from other toxic additives, and those additives can leach into the product that’s contained by the plastic, in some cases, in other cases, it gets into the food chain, because, as I’ve explained with the ocean, as that plastic degrades and moves into smaller and smaller pieces. It’s ingested by the bottom of a food chain, which is ingested by the bigger animals, by the bigger fish, and that’s the whole lines up in our bloodstream, and plastic and microplastics have been detected in fetal tissue. We all are said to eat about a credit card’s worth of plastic every single week we ingest it, and the suspicion is that this is having problems with the endocrine system, creating potential for cancers and other poisons and toxins in the body that we don’t even understand yet.

Jim Beach 33:00
Credit card worth of plastic. I don’t know if this is true or not. It couldn’t be absolutely false, but I remember hearing that McDonald’s ice cream is made out of plastic,

Larry Wyman 33:13
not one that, not one that I’ve heard. There are things that we know that are made out of plastic to keep us plenty busy. And so the real issue here is plastic is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing. I mean, it extends the life of food, it lightens the weight of cars, it protects medical and pharmaceutical things. So plastic is ubiquitous because it’s a great thing in terms of what it does. What isn’t great about it is that we haven’t found a way to get rid of it, and in many cases, it will be around. You know, you may use a plastic cup for 30 seconds. That may be around for 400 years, and so we have to do better in terms of getting rid of the plastic. But since there aren’t great ways to get rid of it, yet we simply have to stop using as much, and that means we have to find something else to substitute for some portion of the plastic that we’re using. So at Okeanos, what we found is a way to substitute calcium a carbonate, which is basically pulverized stone, and pulverize it into the tiniest of all pieces once we found a way to bind that together with some amount of plastic still, but we can reduce the amount of plastic in a package or in a cup or in a box by 50% or more and lower The CO two footprint that’s involved in making it, and we can do it at the same price, so that people don’t have to pay more for sustainable product.

Jim Beach 34:50
All right, I do want to go and talk about Okeanos in just a second. But one more plastics question Larry, and then we’ll move there. The. I getting old?

Larry Wyman 35:04
No, I’m already old.

Jim Beach 35:05
Yeah. Larry, one more question about plastics, and then we’ll move on. Whose fault is this? Is this my fault? Is the consumer for not recycling well enough? Is it the recycling company for not sorting well enough. Is it the oil companies for not making a product that biodegrades? Who should I be mad at most? And I know there are a lot of people to blame, but who’s most responsible?

Larry Wyman 35:35
The people who are most responsible are the people who make it because that’s where the original sin is, to turn to a consumer and tell a consumer that we’ve made this thing that isn’t terribly good. Would you please get rid of it? For us, is not a terribly good strategy. Plus, plus the the ways that we have to get rid of it are totally ineffective right now. And so we all love to feel good about the, you know, the cup or the bottle that we put in the recycling bin. But worldwide, the amount of plastic that actually gets recycled can be as little as five or 10% and so that means that 90 or 95% of everything that you think you’re recycling doesn’t actually get recycled. And that’s because recycling is hard. When you mix different kinds of material together, you get different kinds of chemicals, you get different kinds of properties and performance properties. And so it’s very, very hard to take used plastic and reprocess it into something else. It almost never happens, just

Jim Beach 36:50
when waste management comes by every week and collects the recyclables, and I watch them throw it in the back of that green truck, and it looks to me like it’s all mushed together, all of my plastics and my cardboard that I separated. It looks to me like it goes into one big hole. And so it seems

Larry Wyman 37:13
might in transit, it might in transit, but it’s very challenging to actually get it into a segregated waste stream. They take it to facilities where they do separate it, so that the papers, cardboards are separated in one way, the glass and the aluminum go another way, and then the various different plastics can be sorted based on the kind of plastic there are. There are seven kinds of plastic. And so those little symbols that you always see on the back of packages that have chasing arrows, most people believe that that means it’s recyclable. It actually has nothing to do with it being recyclable. It’s an identical identifier for the type of plastic that’s being made. And so there’ll be a number in that little triangle of one to seven, and those numbers each correspond to a different kind of plastic. And so if you mix two or three of those together, you basically get something that’s unusable because it has different properties, different characteristics. Nobody wants it. It’s expensive to sort it, and anything else you make out of it’s generally speaking, not going to be very good. And so that’s a little bit of what we call greenwashing. We all feel like we’re doing something great when we separate things, or when we see those little chasing arrows, but factually speaking, we’re cheating very little, and that’s the biggest problem with the waste alternatives that we have had here, they sound like they’re doing something, but they don’t. And so we came to the conclusion that the way to do it was simply to use less. You had to find something else to substitute for this material in whole or in part, to start making the difference in the problem and start reducing the amount of these toxins that are in our bodies and in our environment.

Jim Beach 39:05
All right, so let’s talk about that Larry. Tell us the okeano story and how they discovered that this mineral or this stone, when it’s you know, ground down, can be useful. And tell us the story of clarencio quarterra and

Larry Wyman 39:23
Russell Petrie, the two original founders of okianos, the quarter is very large food business, and have been doing food packaging, yogurt, candies and things in Europe for Many years. And clarencia was involved in that business. Russell Petrie is actually one of the team surgeons for the LA chargers, and in connection with his orthopedic practice, was looking to improve the use of anchors and plastics in surgery and find something to replace the tox plastic that they were using for. Surgical anchors or for fake ligaments. The two of them got together with similar interests in the ocean because they’re both divers. Clarencio, it is told, once swam into one of his family’s cookie trays while swimming in the Mediterranean, and it was at that point in time that he saw a piece of plastic with his name on it, and realized that he had to do better. So the two of them got together. Russell had already been investigating calcium. What

Jim Beach 40:28
do you mean piece of plastic with his name on it? Are you being literal?

Larry Wyman 40:31
Yeah, no, literally. They make, you know,

Jim Beach 40:36
they make cookies come in trays, his company stuff,

Larry Wyman 40:39
yeah, which is his family name, right? Yes, the company is called quartera, and so his family name was polluting oceans and beaches, and so that that was a pretty good slap in the face. Russ, in the meantime, had been on to calcium carbonate as a potential solution for surgical anchors and surgical equipment, and the two of them together decided that they had mutual interest in doing something about this, and they began to start up a little enterprise designed to see if calcium carbonate couldn’t be commercialized to solve both problems at once. Calcium carbonate, which, you know, in many other forms. It’s also used as lime. If you have ever taken an acid you’ve eaten it because Tums is calcium carbonate, and calcium carbonate has very often been used as a filler in packaging and materials, the same way you would use filler in a hot dog because it’s cheaper than the petrochemicals it replaces, and so people have used it in concentrations of 10 or 15% over the years. But when they use more of it than that, either the package itself wasn’t very good or it fouled up the equipment that made the package. And so for that reason, nobody ever really looked at calcium carbonate as something that you could make the majority of the product out of. They were introduced to a woman named Mary lerder, l, e, H R, T, E R, who was a former engineer for Procter and Gamble and Mary had come up with a way to solve both of those problems, the processing problem and the performance problem, and in a patented process, she discovered a way to cause the calcium carbonate to, in essence, convince the machinery that it was really a liquid and not a stone, and figured out a way to bind it together with some of The remaining amount of plastic so that you could transform things from being a majority or almost entirely plastic, into being a majority of calcium carbonate.

Jim Beach 42:50
All right? And how did you get involved? And what exact Larry? Are you the CEO now, or the Chief Strategy Office? What? Is your exact title?

Larry Wyman 43:01
I’m the Chief Strategy Officer. I’m the Chief Strategy Officer, which means I’m the guy who sits around and thinks,

Jim Beach 43:07
right,

Larry Wyman 43:08
because I can’t do anything else. Well,

Jim Beach 43:10
don’t scratch as well. Aren’t you required to scratch while thinking?

Larry Wyman 43:15
No, you just, you just look pensively out the window.

Jim Beach 43:17
Look pensively. What about rubbing your chin, would that

Larry Wyman 43:23
qualify? It would qualify. If you had a beard, stroking your beard would also qualify.

Jim Beach 43:27
I see okay,

Larry Wyman 43:28
so I was minding my own business in Miami Beach, playing golf and walking my dog on the beach. Florencio and I actually lived in the same apartment building and struck up a relationship where we were friendly, and he said to me, you know, I’d like to have breakfast with you once or twice a week. I like to tell you something about what I’m doing. Maybe you have some advice for me, because Florencio is a systems guy. He knows how to make manufacturing supply chains, he knows how to do recalls and food safety and all that stuff. But he doesn’t have, as general, a broad business knowledge in terms of fundraising and some of the other skills that I developed in my real estate enterprise. And so gradually I began to talk to him about it, and at the time, it was just he and Russ. So as a startup, they were the most startup thing you can be. Two people self funding their interest in trying to bring this together, as we talked about it, and as they continue to investigate it, will continue to develop expertise in the area. They realized that they were onto something here that could quite possibly be commercialized. And so they had begun to assemble an organization which consisted of Mary lore, the scientist, a couple of people who would would help her, some administrative people, maybe some sales help, marketing help. And because it was all being self funded, they did it on a shoestring, starting in 2019 In Miami Beach. So when it first formed, it only had four or five people involved in it, and it began to grow additional people to the point where it really needed some financing beyond what the founders could give it. So I was brought in, in part to try to help raise some of that capital, and to try to create a more focused business plan going forward, and to help refine the message for what we were going to try to achieve.

Jim Beach 45:34
You mentioned commercialization. Can we address that a little bit more? Larry, how? How is that gone? Are you making money? Is it actually getting used and bought by plastics companies to dilute their plastic?

Larry Wyman 45:51
It is now on shelves in several places around the world. I would say just about every major consumer products company is testing it for one application or another, and we now know that we can make things as diverse as a jug for detergent or a very thin sheet of material in a wrap, a hamburger, something that looks like A substitute for cardboard, maybe some agricultural film to cover crops in the field. So we know we can do lots of things with it. And there are this month, there are 30 separate tests going on all over the world. Now, the good thing about calcium carbonate, among the good things about it, is it’s all over the world. The Earth makes more of it than we can use, and it’s in 180 locations around the world just with the supplier that we have. So we can get the same grade of it around the world, and so we don’t have to drag it all over the world. We can manufacture it locally, using local labor, using the existing plastics manufacturing equipment around the world. In essence, if you imagine baking a cake and you went from Betty Crocker to Duncan Hines, you would put it in the same oven, you would expect the same cake. And so that’s effectively what we’ve done here. People used to use 100% plastic. We give them a box that is a portion plastic and a portion calcium carbonate, and they just drop it in the same way to the other machinery. And so people are now understanding that it can be made around the world. It has no price premium in many places. It’s less expensive than the plastic it replaces and the major innovation here is that it’s an upstream solution. We’re not asking the people who are using it to get rid of it. We’re putting something better into it up at the top, and we’re turning down the faucet of virgin plastic by substituting this calcium carbonate,

Jim Beach 48:01
but it still ends up in the rivers and the oceans, unless we all do more as well, right?

Larry Wyman 48:08
It may, interestingly, calcium carbonate is used in many other things. So for example, people use calcium carbonate, you know, ground stone when they make concrete or when they make mortar or asphalt. And so it is possible that a made from stone, which is our trademark, made from stone, is really the name of the product. An object that is made from stone may possibly be able to be reprocessed so that it can have another life as a component to one of those other materials, so we could take a new path for a final life or reuse of the material, grind it up and simply drop it into another construction material, and have a useful material that actually enhances the properties of some of the concrete mortar that it gets dropped into. We’re testing it right now around the world, but that’s one potential path for degradation. We also when we make something that’s only half plastic and half stone, we obviously have half the potential to produce toxins and microplastics, so that if the stuff does degrade, it degrades as something 50% less threatening than it used to. And that’s obviously solving half the problem is a big chunk of the problem. However, it could very easily wind up in an ocean the same way another piece of plastic winds up in the ocean, and while it will do only 50% of the damage, theoretically, it’s still a problem, and we don’t want that to happen.

Jim Beach 49:52
And I guess most importantly, Larry, how does your wife respond to you being busy now when you’re supposed to be retired, you. In Florida, the apartment building.

Larry Wyman 50:02
Well, she she’s not all that pleased with it, not only because I’m busy and no longer can sort of answer her wins, but mostly because we talk about this so much. She’s sick about hearing it. I’m pushing 68 and in my career in office buildings, we built some very nice office buildings around the world, and sort of move the state of the art forward in that but we didn’t really save very much of the world. We didn’t really do anything of any great lasting benefit for me at a late career, late stage in my career, to be involved in something that has the potential to really make an impact on the world and on the situation that our kids and our grandkids are going to find and to try to raise the alarm for how bad this problem actually is right Now is really a gift coming late in life, and to the point where it’s the first time I’ve ever wanted to go into the office instead of playing golf.

Jim Beach 51:11
There’s a great line right there that is fantastic for decades. Larry

Larry Wyman 51:18
unlikely, but getting a chance to do something that could potentially be meaningful is really a new thing for me. We were actually at the UN climate conference in Egypt back in November, where the product was unveiled for the first time, and the reaction was tremendous, because no one had ever seen this as a solution before. No one had ever heard of it, and we actually had items made of it that people could pick up and handle. And the reaction when you you’re on the stage and somebody is asking you your opinion about the future of the world environment. It gets a little heady. It’s a little different than selling office space.

Jim Beach 52:09
I love it. Larry, were you involved with any buildings? We may know any of the famous buildings commercially

Larry Wyman 52:16
well. They’re famous to us. But there are buildings in New York building called financial square, which is a million footer down Wall Street. Broad Financial Center is another one we built. Did a nice renovation in Midtown called 380 in Madison, and we built about 21 or 22 separate projects around the periphery. In Paris, actually things that look like American suburban style office buildings that had higher technology and more efficiency than was previously built in that market. So if you’re a local real estate fan, you’ve heard of some of them.

Jim Beach 52:55
Well, I am, and so I will look them up, and I’m a George Costanza, architect, Larry, so obviously you’re laughing. You know what that means? You get it. Larry, great stuff, and I love what you’re doing. And thank you for saving the world. You’re doing your part second career that you should be very proud of, and your wife should be patient listening. How can we find out more and continue to hear more about the okianos story?

Larry Wyman 53:28
Well, you can find us on made from stone.com or one word, and that will give you the ability to actually participate in a monthly newsletter that we send out that will give you an idea of how we’re doing, who’s adopting it and starting to make it. We’ve also developed a QR code system for the products that we’re making, so that you can scan the product, and you’ll get a complete LCA analysis, a life cycle analysis of the environmental impact of that product compared to what it used to be. So we invite people to participate in that with us, and as there’s more and more on the shelves, we think that’ll probably become a fairly common thing to do. So made from stone.com and we’re happy to tell anybody more contact us through that website, and we’re happy to talk about this as my wife hears.

Jim Beach 54:24
Larry, thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and congratulations on being happy.

Larry Wyman 54:32
It’s the first

Jim Beach 54:33
for a lawyer. You know, what do

Larry Wyman 54:35
we have to say? As I say, I had it removed early on.

Jim Beach 54:38
We will be right back. No, that’s not right. We are out of time for today, but we are back tomorrow. Be safe, take care and go make a million dollars. Bye. Now