Brian Catania With Better Business Bureau

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one, but before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Brian Catania with the Better Business Bureau. Welcome, Brian.

Brian Catania: [00:00:42] Welcome, thanks for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, before we get too far into things for the two people out there, I’m sure everybody’s heard of the Better Business Bureau, but maybe they don’t understand exactly how you serve the community and the business community. Do you mind giving us kind of the elevator pitch?

Brian Catania: [00:00:56] I would love to. Better Business Bureau has been in metropolitan Atlanta and North Georgia for over 100 years. And one of the things we do is we want to help set standards for ethical behavior and compliance in the marketplace. We really want to be able to help consumers find businesses and charities they can trust. So a real driving force behind who and what we are is being that leader in advancing marketplace trust. I know you hear me say the word trust repeatedly. That’s really who in what we’re all about is is trying to promote that, that consumer trust in businesses and asking those businesses to abide by a set of standards that that give them that authenticity to be able to, you know, be recognized in the business community. So that’s that’s a little bit about who we are.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:45] Now, can you tell us a little bit about the history? Did the organization start out as a national organization or was it always kind of local? And then it just expanded to markets around the country?

Brian Catania: [00:01:55] It’s a little bit of the latter. It started kind of locally almost 127 years ago and without getting too boring. Samuel Dubs, the actual CEO of Coca-Cola, was the first to really get this kicked off a long time ago. And when it started 100 plus years ago, Lee, it was really focused on marketing. It was focused on truth and advertising and making sure that folks were advertising in an ethical and honest manner. And what’s happened is, over the course of the last hundred years that’s evolved and morphed into what you see today with the BBB is a broader focus than just marketing its its evaluations of charities and making sure that people who are donating their hard earned money are donating to charities that can be trusted. The same thing with our business community. It’s making sure that consumers have a place to go where they can understand that BBB is helping them evaluate those businesses to be dealing with only the best of the best. So it’s really morphed over the last hundred years, starting with just a real laser like focus on advertising to a much broader evaluation of business in general and those organizations who can really be trusted and supported in the marketplace.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:09] Now, like you mentioned earlier, you use the word trust, and that’s an important component of what you offer both your business and consumer people who use the service. Do you have a take on kind of what how the layperson perceives business? Because at the heart of what we do at Business RadioX is we try to be the voice of business, and our mission is to help tell these stories because we feel that business gets kind of a bad rap and and that they get kind of villainized and they get seen by a lot of folks as these evil exploiters who are greedy. And in my experience, the vast, vast majority of business owners aren’t that way, and I don’t want to be Pollyanna and think everybody is that way. But I know there are some bad eggs there, but by and large, business is a to me a way net positive in a community.

Brian Catania: [00:04:01] I really agree with you, Lee. I think you’ve got two two factions of consumers. You’ve got the altruistic, the folks that really are just going to trust anybody and they’re going to feel good about the business as they deal with until you give them a reason to feel bad about you. And then you’ve got the much more conservative kind of pessimistic consumer who’s probably a little bit more of what you were talking about, which is no matter what you do, they’re always going to be looking for the angle that business is taking on you. How are you looking to work me over? How are you looking to shortchange me? I agree with you haven’t spent quite a bit of time evaluating businesses and understanding who they are. I would say 95 percent of them are honest. They’re ethical. They genuinely want to do right by consumers. You pointed it perfectly. I mean, there are going to be those five percent who sometimes give us a bad name, and that’s the group that we’re really trying to not necessarily focus on. We always want to promote and recognize the champions of good, good behavior and practices. But at the same time, we do want to try and protect consumers from the dangers that lurk.

Brian Catania: [00:05:09] The scam artists, the, you know, the con, the con men that are out there trying to, you know, trying to swindle you. So I’m with you. I genuinely believe 95 percent of businesses are doing their best. They’re trying to make things right. A big part of our business is mediation. We we try to look for Win-Win Solutions, and that’s where we really get perspective on the nature of business and consumers. That mediation process tells us so much about who a business is and it also who are consumers, you know, because we really we. Strive for win win and probably again, 90 percent of the time. Both the consumer and the business who are mediating with us want the same thing. They want to get to the best outcome that they think is fair and almost always we come to positive resolution. But even during those mediation phases, we always have those consumers and businesses that just don’t play nice. And that’s where we hope that as the BBB, we can kind of help facilitate that experience to to end a little more positively.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:10] So now let’s talk a little bit about how each of your constituents kind of engages with you. Can you talk about how a business can kind of raise their hand and get accredited and become part of the Better Business Bureau?

Brian Catania: [00:06:24] Sure. Businesses have the opportunity to they can either come and self nominate so they they approach us or we we do call on businesses to ask them if they would have interest in being part of the Better Business Bureau. And if they do, we put them through a vetting process. So we have a set of eight standards that we ask all all businesses to abide by. You know, can you be trusted? Are you transparent with your behavior with consumers? A lot of different things. But we, you know, if a business shows interest in being accredited with the Better Business Bureau, we vet them on those different standards of trust. And if they meet all those standards, then they become accredited and then they can advertise that BBB seal on their website, on their truck, on their, you know, their door or their window. They, you know, in advertising, they can advertise that their BBB accredited as long as they’ve gone through that process of making sure that they meet all the standards that we ask them to meet. And then periodically, you know, once a year, once every other year, we’ll revamp them just to make sure that they continue to abide by those standards. We don’t want to let them lay dormant. All of a sudden, we find out that we’ve got accredited businesses out there who aren’t abiding by other standards or are out there scamming consumers. So it’s it sounds intimidating and almost overwhelming, but we’ve really streamlined it so that a business can be vetted in in probably, you know, two hours if they’re if they’re interested. And we’re lucky because we have a lot of businesses that want to be vetted, we probably we accredit about 200 businesses a month. We currently got about 7500 businesses in the North Georgia market accredited, so it’s a great opportunity for consumers to be able to leverage those businesses.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:10] And speaking of consumers, how does the better Business Bureau help consumers? Maybe if there is an issue or just the different services you kind of afford to the consumer?

Brian Catania: [00:08:23] Yes, the two, most obviously are. Number one, we have our website, BBB, where consumers can come and visit and they can search for businesses. You know, they can search by name or type of business. They can request quotes from businesses and they can request quotes from accredited businesses or not accredited businesses alike. But the first place where we really try to help consumers is through our website, where they can come and find businesses that they can trust. The second gets to gets to where you were going and talking about, which is, you know, if that consumer has a dispute with the business, they’ve worked with the business and they’re just they have a disagreement that they’re not able to work out between themselves. They can file a dispute with Better Business Bureau and then we get involved in trying to help facilitate that experience. And that experience can kind of take two different, two different paths with accredited businesses. They have agreed when they become accredited to work in good faith with BBB and consumers to resolve all issues. So we get back to the mediation. A lot of our better business bureau representatives are certified mediators in the state of Georgia, so they can make recommendations based on those standards of mediation set forth in the Georgia code. So when we make a recommendation, we like to believe that it takes into account everybody’s side. It’s not in favor of business and it’s not in favor of consumer. It’s a genuinely neutral mediation where we try to help both sides facilitate a solution. We also do mediations and disputes with non-accredited businesses, and while they’re not required to abide by our standards because they’re not accredited, we find that most of the time, like we talked about earlier, they want to do the right thing.

Brian Catania: [00:10:07] They want to be good businesses, so they typically work with us pretty closely. We are not an enforcement agency, so so we do not pass judgments. We do not pass penalty. We really attempt to help consumers and businesses mediate these these issues before they have to get to that phase and before they have to seek, you know, help from the FTC or from attorneys. We really try to help them avoid that because we know that can be costly and really time, you know, a massive time commitment. So those are our two main factions. But we we really. Are expanding heavily, we do a lot in educationally. We do a lot in community outreach where we try to help communities at large. We’ve really tried to take diversity, equity and inclusion as a matter of who and what we are being that we’re in the cradle of civil rights. We’ve really tried to promote small business, minority owned business diversification and helping support them with grants and with programs to help entrepreneurs of of color or female owned businesses. So we’re really trying to expand our footprint and presence in this North Georgia market where we’re more than just accreditation and disputes. We’re education where grant writing, where support for startups and entrepreneurs. So we’re really excited about what we’ve been able to do, but also what we have planned for the coming years.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:33] So now along those lines, how would a company that kind of meets those criteria get involved with some of that education or that help with grants?

Brian Catania: [00:11:43] Well, certainly they can approach us and ask for that help. But we also have a team that’s dedicated to going out into the community and reaching out to those accredited businesses and soliciting their feedback and, you know, surveying them for what they want and what they need and what they’d like to be involved with. We’ve got business profiles on all of our accredited businesses where they can they can express interest in different programs and services that we offer. So a lot of times when you know, a new grant program supported by American Express or Visa comes out focusing on African-American business owners. We, you know, we typically work with those larger partners. We can look at our business profiles and say, OK, we have businesses that have identified as minority owned businesses. We can help facilitate that experience. And really, in a lot of ways, you know, probably 75 percent of our businesses are small businesses, which means they’re 10 or fewer employees. A lot of times they just don’t have the bandwidth or resources to go out and search for all these things. So a big part of what we do is we try to facilitate that experience and take the partnerships we have with these larger organizations who want to help small businesses. And we act as almost a broker to facilitate that. And the more we know about our accredited businesses and even our non accredited businesses, we can help sort of alert them to these opportunities and position these things in front of them.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:06] So Brian, what’s your back story? How did you get involved with the Better Business Bureau?

Brian Catania: [00:13:11] Well, I’ve known about Better Business Bureau for, you know, most of my adult life. I came from AT&T, where I worked for about 20 years, and I was lucky enough to do a lot of different things with them. You know, I did a little bit of human resources, finance, technology, sales and marketing, mergers and acquisitions. And, you know, I loved AT&T. It was a great time, a wonderful, wonderful organization. But I really got to the point where, you know, I wanted to do something that was a little bit more mission focused, and I had never worked with nonprofit organizations before. So I started kind of dipping my toe into the water of what was out there and Better Business Bureau was a perfect opportunity. It allowed me to leverage my background with business and organizational effectiveness, with my, you know, with my want of being able to give back and being able to be a little bit more mission focused in the work we were doing. It was just a perfect marriage. It allowed me to use what I believe are my skills and really marry them up with an organization who I believe has such incredible, you know, incredible goodwill and interest in the community. We talk about businesses and consumers, but we do tons of work with partners and it’s just it’s such amazing work that the BBB is doing. And it really, you know, when I first had the opportunity to talk with the board about it, it just it tugged on my heartstrings immediately. So it was just something that the more I learned about it, the more I knew it was going to be situated perfectly for what I was hoping for.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:46] Well, under your leadership that the BBB for North Georgia was recognized as a best place to work, why was it important for you to, you know, go after that award?

Brian Catania: [00:14:58] You know, it’s probably the most important thing that we’ve been recognized with since I’ve been here. I just I’m a believer that that we are who we are based on the people we have. You know, and to be recognized by by the Atlanta Business Chronicle is one of the best places to work in Georgia. It’s just hopefully it’s a testimony to what our employees believe is a great place to work. I think all the reasons I came to BBB is very similar in nature to why a lot of our our team comes to work for BBB. They believe in the mission and vision, and I believe that’s a lot of the reason why, you know, when ABC came out and solicited organizations for this, I believe our employees responded in force to say, Oh yeah, we’ve got a great organization. You know, I could bore you to death with with how we’re competitive and pay and benefits, and we got flexible scheduling. We love to train and develop our team. We really. But I think if you were to ask me what’s what sets BBB apart as an employer versus, you know, lots of other, you know, the thousands of other employers in North Georgia, I would say it’s our ability to offer Work-Life Balance, you know, beyond the mission and vision.

Brian Catania: [00:16:16] I think people want and need work life balance. They need some semblance of, you know, personal. I don’t want a company to just think about me as an employee. I want them to think about me as a person and what I have outside of business, and I genuinely believe that’s what we do. We give our employees work life balance where I think it’s meaningful to them. They know that they pretty much come to work at 8:00 and they leave at 5:00. Most of the time, I don’t believe they take work home with them. When they go home, they’ve got the ability to focus on their family or friends or just their personal selves. Rarely, if ever, do we work on weekends. Occasionally, we’ll do a couple of things, but we really try to be incredibly respectful of our team in that we we make sure we prioritize their personal lives just as much as we ask them to give to our organization from a work balance.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:08] So what do you need more of? How can we help? Do you need more talent? Do you need more businesses to sign up to be accredited? You need more consumers to hit your website. What do you need?

Brian Catania: [00:17:19] Probably a little of all of that. You know, luckily, we have wonderful talent, we have great talent when we do have openings. Periodically we grow and we bring on some new heads. People who have interest, we’d love to hear from them. They can go to our website bbc.co.uk, and we’ve got a place for them to search for careers. We’ve got opportunities in marketing. We’ve got opportunities and consumer experience, you know, finance, lots of operational impact, lots of opportunities. So we always are looking for for the best and the brightest. And we love to believe that we have a great place to give them to grow and develop. But same thing with businesses. You know, one of the things we want to do is we want to we want to expand our footprint. We believe the more businesses that we can get accredited, the more we can help consumers have opportunities to find trustworthy businesses. And at the same time, we can give businesses access to consumers. You know, we often find that the consumers that come to our site are what we could call trustworthy consumers. You know, there are people that act ethically and responsibly, and they don’t try to take advantage of the system and they don’t try to play businesses. So we could use a lot of everything. We could always use more accredited businesses to expand that footprint and give more consumers opportunities. You know, Metro Atlanta is obviously one of our hotbeds, but we deal a lot in banks and Monroe County with Athens. We go up north into Dahlonega and 4Syte County, and we want to continue to expand that footprint out there.

Brian Catania: [00:18:54] A lot of our more rural partners in northeast and northwest Georgia, where we don’t have quite the impression or quite the footprint, and we need to be better about that. So certainly businesses in those areas, we would love to have them and community partnerships, you know, we want to we want to develop partnerships with with a lot more, you know, Atlanta and North Georgia businesses. We recently secured a really wonderful opportunity with Mercedes Benz Stadium and the Atlanta Falcons. We’re going to host our annual meeting of accredited businesses at the new stadium. And if you’ve never been there, what a remarkable experience. I mean, it is such a cool place. Rich McKay, the CEO and president of the Atlanta Falcons, has been cool enough to say that he’ll do our keynote, but it’s relationships like that. The more relationships we can build like that, the more we can expand our footprint and the more that we can give back to our businesses. Again, I mentioned a lot of our businesses are small businesses. They rely on BBB for marketing. So the bigger impression we can make in North Georgia, the more impact that’s going to have on those small businesses who are accredited with us. So lots and lots of opportunities for businesses, consumers, the community at large to engage with us and for us to engage with them so that we can really give back to all those that trident of engagement.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:17] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, where should they go?

Brian Catania: [00:20:21] Bwbwbwbwb, Dawg. That’s the best place we geolocation. So depending on where you where you come to us from, we’ll put you in touch with your closest BBB. So folks in North Atlantic, North Georgia, when they go to Billboard, they’ll be immediately geolocated to their BBB, which is probably going to be the better business bureau serving Metro Atlanta, Athens and Northeast Georgia. That’s always the best way for them to get in touch with us, and from there they can find lots of contact information if they want to report a dispute, if they want to seek accreditation, if they want to get a quote from a local business, they can do all that. They can learn more about our Student of Integrity program that recognizes high school seniors for their their leadership opportunities and their ethical actions and behaviors. They can learn so much on Lee that again, that’s always the first ingestion point is Göteborg spend a minute or two seeing all the things that BBB does. We like to say we’re not your grandfather’s BBB. There is so much more to us than than there was 50 years ago. And I hope people get the opportunity to take the time to go out there and see that and figure out who and what we are.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:32] Well, congratulations on all the success and thank you so much for doing what you do and sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Brian Catania: [00:21:39] Thank you, Lee, and I appreciate you having me on your program is wonderful. I love the fact that even something as simple as your open where you talk about how most businesses are, are good businesses at nature, at such a wonderful sentiment. And I love to hear guys like you that have a real positive influence being able to promote the goodness between businesses and consumers. So thank you for everything you’re doing. And again, thank you for having us on to spend a couple of minutes talking about Better Business Bureau.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:06] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll sale next time on that land that business radio.