Amy Parsons: Hi, I am Amy Parsons, President of Colorado State University and host of The Next 150 Podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community and this is where we’re going to hear their stories, we’re going to get their perspectives on CSU’s next 150 years and gather their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Let’s get started, Rams. Welcome back everyone to our next episode of The Next 150. I am thrilled to be in the studio today with one of my personal heroes, Kim Jordan, for a great conversation. Kim, of course, is on campus today to be speaking at our first all university-wide commencement ceremony today where she’s receiving an honorary doctorate. So by this time tomorrow we’ll be able to call you Dr. Jordan, which is very exciting.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, I think that’s funny.

Amy Parsons: I think it’s funny too. It’s going to be really fun. So you all know Kim. If you don’t know Kim, you definitely know her products and brands that she has created. She is the co-founder and former CEO of New Belgium Brewery. Of course, I think you know the iconic Fat Tire, Voodoo Ranger, Fort Collins Favorite, the Old Aggie, which is like a tradition in a can for us. Fort Collins’ favorite beer for sure. I’ve admired Kim long before I even knew her as an entrepreneur and a CEO and as a very special person and leader and it’s been a real privilege for me in my life that I’ve had the chance to really get to know Kim over these years. She built one of the most well-respected and largest craft brewing companies in the country. Really rooted in community.

They’ve created traditions in Fort Collins like the Fat Tire Bike Parade and set a new standard for sustainability, for employee ownership, for a special culture within the company that others have been really trying to replicate around the country and using Kim and New Belgium as a model. And of course, Kim’s received widespread recognition regionally and nationally for her work and what she’s created. She’s received the Governor’s Citizenship Model for Growth and Innovation, the Brewers Association Recognition Award, the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Award, and was just recently inducted into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame. I got to be there that night to see her being inducted. It was really a special night for everyone. Kim also just finished up eight years on the board of governors for CSU.

Kim Jordan: Eight fabulous. Yeah.

Amy Parsons: Eight fabulous years. So she’s been in a leadership position for CSU. She chaired the board for the last two years, and like I said, she’s back on campus today to receive another big award, the honorary doctorate. And so I feel really privileged that I get to be a part of that today, Kim, and be part of the hooding ceremony for you and to hear your words that you’re going to share with our CSU students. So congratulations on that. Thank you for being back at CSU today to receive this. How are you feeling today about everything?

Kim Jordan: Well, I wanted, as you were talking about awards I’ve received and things that we did at New Belgium, I wanted to say, “Oh, stop.” Because it’s-

Amy Parsons:And that’s just a little bit actually that I just read.

Kim Jordan: I’m really proud of all of the things we did. We really tried to be fun and innovative and really care-filled for one another, but it embarrasses me personally to get that kind of recognition. I think it’s a human trait to feel a little bit I don’t really want the focus on me so much. And yesterday I went to the Magnolia House, which is where you live close to campus, and I was really impressed with and touched by how many people were there and how excited they were about it and it just made me give myself a talking to. I say to other people, “For there to be gracious givers, there have to be gracious receivers because you have to be able to do both things to make that kind of energy work.” And so it’s my turn to be the gracious receiver.

It feels kind of crazy. And one of the things that struck me, I wanted to be sure that people at the reception who truly have PhDs and put a lot of time into both their education, but then also continuing field of study and education, I wanted them to know that I know that I did not put that kind of time into my education specifically. And their response was, “But yeah, you did that in practice. You may not have been writing a PhD dissertation, but you kind of lived one in some ways.” And that was not a perspective I’d thought about and it was touching. So I sometimes will say that I have practiced wisdom and I’ve worked to build a body of practice and I’m honored that people recognize that.

Amy Parsons: Well, we’re so proud that you’re a CSU alum and you talked about the education that you put in. Let’s talk about that time as a CSU student and how you came to CSU in the first place to study social work and how that worked out for you.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, I put myself through college, and so I went on the many year on and off plan because I would work and save money and apply for grants and student work study and different ways of making that work. I was a school bus driver for many years because I could drive the school bus in the morning, go to classes and then drive the school bus in the afternoon. And in those days, for some reason that is lost on me now, they made us wear uniforms and the uniform they picked was a forest service uniform. So it was kind of not pretty ram green but olive drab. It looked a little like maybe I was in the military and a lot of times I didn’t have time to change clothes in between one thing and the next thing. So I’d be walking around campus. I was probably 22 then with this kooky look.

Amy Parsons: Very official looking.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, yeah. It probably didn’t help my already part-time non-traditional student… So that’s sort of picture that milieu as we talk about other things. I took some classes in animal science. I had a class with Jack Avans and I also had a class with Tom Sutherland.

Amy Parsons: Oh wow.
Kim Jordan: And this was before Tom was a hostage in the Middle East. And both of them, just amazing human beings. My car broke down and I was late for Tom’s class and he said, “Bring your car over.” His brother was there from Scotland and they worked on my car in their garage.

Amy Parsons: No kidding.

Kim Jordan: And just like, “Who does that?” You think about that now and we don’t maybe have so many of those kinds of experiences anymore. And it was really thoughtful and helpful and sweet.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, that’s a great CSU story.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, yeah.

Amy Parsons: And I’d like to think that that is what makes CSU special is that care that we have for each other in that community and faculty who care about students. I like to think we have that at CSU space. It’s such a great story.

Kim Jordan: Yeah. I think that’s true. I said that I’m not sure I was kind of speaking generally globally, but I do always feel when I’m here, this feeling of care that people, whether I’m in a hotel or on campus or in a coffee shop, there’s just a lot of people who radiate you matter to me, which is really special.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, I think you’re going to see a lot of that radiating today when we’re at-

Kim Jordan: Yeah, it will be a great day.

Amy Parsons: The commencement ceremony with all of the students there on the football field. And I mean, your experience I think is really relatable to students. Not everybody goes through just on a four-year path and graduates and goes on. There’s starts and stops and jobs and things that happen and hopefully we’re a place that supports all kinds of students in their journey. And you came to study social work.

Kim Jordan: I did end up after a few classes of this and that. I also took a landscape design class that was great, and as I garden, I think about things that I learned there. But yes, almost all of the coursework that I took was in social work with a few… Some tracks in social work really lend themselves to human development. So a lot of what I did was in that college. So yeah.

Amy Parsons: Yeah. So of course you’re known for New Belgium and getting into the craft brew industry and creating that. So how did the leap happen-

Kim Jordan: How’d that happen? Yeah.
Amy Parsons: Between social work and brewing?

Kim Jordan: Well, I wouldn’t say that social work had anything to do with the leap per se, but I did realize as I started trying to figure out, “Okay, so we’re going to do this thing and we’re going to hire people and we’re going to have this relationship with people, what do I want that to feel like and what do I want it to look like to both to the people who are our co-workers, but also sort of people looking from the outside in?” And social work was really helpful with that and it’s a systems perspective and that was really helpful, being a generalist was really helpful.

So I often say that the social work degree is great preparation for CEOing because that’s not one you’re not doing, it’s not being a microbiologist where you do this thing. It’s a breadth of things. And I think that was one of the things that we were really great at at New Belgium was sort of collecting a breadth of whether it was environmental stewardship or employee ownership or open book management or just a culture that felt you could stop in the hall and chat, catch up with people about life. All of that I think was social work was a really helpful medium to build that on.

Amy Parsons: That’s so interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that perspective before about social work as a foundation for entrepreneurship.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, yeah.
Amy Parsons: And it makes sense the way that you just described it because what you created at New Belgium is so cutting-edge in terms of that community and that brand and that fun and sustainability that you all created there that it’s so powerful at New Belgium and being founded in Fort Collins, it sort of permeates our entire community.

Kim Jordan: Yeah.

Amy Parsons: It’s very CSU, it’s very Fort Collins, things like the Tour de Fat. All of that I think reflects New Belgium and New Belgium reflects that culture.

Kim Jordan: Yeah. Which was a really interesting kind of aha for me. When I first moved to Fort Collins in 1976, so I lived here for a really long time, it was still a pretty conservative town and also just that era of stores closed at 1:00 on Saturday so that people could have the rest of the weekend off, things like that. And when we started New Belgium in 1991, so fast forward all that time, I fairly early on realized that we could have an impact in Fort Collins. One of the very first ways was through bicycles. We had been in business about two years when we decided that it would be great to give our coworkers a bicycle on their one year anniversary. So pretty soon you started noticing in Fort Collins that there were more people riding bikes and then there were more people riding bikes and then people started talking about bike lanes and just a lot of things that now we think, “Oh yeah, we have bike lanes. Of course we do.”

Amy Parsons: And Fort Collins is Bike City USA and CSU is known as a bike friendly campus, all the certifications.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, yeah. So it is interesting how I think we have each influenced the other.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, definitely.

Kim Jordan: Yeah.

Amy Parsons: I mean, you talked about becoming an entrepreneur from that place of social work. Thinking about that, I mean, that’s a great lesson for our students who are thinking about being entrepreneurs is that you can do it from anywhere, from any discipline that you take here. What advice would you give to students on who are interested in being entrepreneurs, how they can use their time at CSU to help prepare them for that path?

Kim Jordan: When you think more broadly about social work being a good sort of foundation for entrepreneurship, I also think there are personality attributes that are really helpful. I think being tenacious, thinking about this is… I often talk about good leaders having both masculine and feminine qualities, and I think perhaps a masculine quality is wanting to win. And I think it’s important to want to win because I think if your idea that you’re building your entrepreneurship chops around is one that exists in a marketplace, which that’s pretty much always true. you need to figure out what it is that’s going to set you apart, how you’re going to deliver that in a really interesting and high quality kind of way, and how you’re going to push yourself enough to prevail to be at the top of the heap.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, it’s not for everyone.

Kim Jordan: No.

Amy Parsons: It’s a tough road.

Kim Jordan: Turns out that’s hard work. Yeah.

Amy Parsons: Yeah. That is a lot of hard work.

Kim Jordan: And I think that you have to prepare yourself, that’s a question to ask, do I want to work that hard?

Amy Parsons: It’s a risk as well.

Kim Jordan: It is a risk. Yeah.

Amy Parsons: I mean, that’s why it’s definitely not for everyone to go out on a limb with your own new brand, new product, new company, put yourself out there on the line.

Kim Jordan: Quit a job you might have had to do something that may not pay you. In our case, we took a second mortgage out on our house. We didn’t pay ourselves. We racked up all kinds of credit card debt. We borrowed a few thousand dollars from my parents once to make payroll. So you’re doing all of those things along the way and you’re getting up early. And we had kids, so you’re getting up early to do work and then they get up and then you do the kid thing and the work thing, and then they go to bed and you go back to work. In those days, we didn’t have computers. So if you wanted to work, you went back to work to work.

Amy Parsons: Yeah.

Kim Jordan: And that’s great and you have to be prepared for that kind of investment of your energy. And not everyone is well suited for that. And I also think that’s okay too. You also need people who want to come to work, do a very good job, people that you want to have in your organization, and they go home and they do something else. And that is an absolutely perfect way to be a part of the greater good as well.

Amy Parsons: And you especially rose through the ranks to be this nationally known leader and entrepreneur and CEO in a field where there are not very many women leading those companies as well, and so for young women especially to see you ascend to that level and to see your success is so inspiring. And so I just want to say that that I know that for me and for so many women to have followed your journey over the years, it’s really inspiring because it takes so much courage, as you say, to be the entrepreneur in the first place and then to do it as a woman in a field where there’s not very many at all.

Kim Jordan: Yeah. And I think another aspect of that for women is I finding your voice, understanding your own agency. We didn’t really use words like agency back then, but it’s a word that makes sense to me because you’re having the internal, should I say this, is it okay of me to say this, who am I to say this. Those kinds of internal struggles around from something that’s mundane through something that’s so values aligned that you feel compelled and you’re not sure everyone else is going to receive your message. So yeah, there are a lot of places where you have to kind of step out there.

Amy Parsons: And I’ve seen you, I’ve had the privilege of watching you in your role on the board of governors for the CSU system over the last eight years and seeing that courage and that agency that you’ve had around the board table to ask those questions, to challenge people where some people might not, and you do it in such a gracious and thoughtful way that I’ve really learned a lot from watching you in those spaces. And you don’t have to volunteer to do things at CSU, you don’t have to volunteer to be on the board. Talk a little bit about why that’s important to you to stay connected to CSU and to take on that volunteer leadership role for so long for the university.

Kim Jordan: Well, first I want to say I’ve learned a lot from you too. So it goes both ways. And I think good leaders both learn and sort of broadcast learning so that we are pulling one another up. And I think that’s a really important part of working with a group of people. And I think women are particularly good at that. Why do I volunteer? I really believe that maxim to whom much is given, much is expected. And I volunteered as a kid. I would be the little dork in my neighborhood who’s like, “Let’s go pick up trash on the creek. I have the bag.”

Amy Parsons: I can see that.

Kim Jordan: And my friends would be like… I think it’s important to be a part of the world in a way that is generous and encouraging. And I think the land grant mission is amazing and you hear people talk about the elite nature of higher education. And I just want to tear my hair out a little bit because, fortunately I have enough, I can spare a little bit because I think so many of us went to schools like CSU that are amazing institutions and there’s nothing elite about it. There’s science, there’s dedication to knowledge, but it’s really very much a university of the people and that’s how it was supposed to be. And I wanted to support that because it’s meaningful.

I mean, I will be giving a tiny speech as a part of the commencement ceremony. And one of the things I talk about is how impressed I am by students that I meet who most of the time they’re first gen, and they talk about how higher ed has changed their sense of themselves in the world, and that’s powerful. People who they didn’t decide to just settle for whatever, but they’ve had some experience and they know they have some options, and we don’t talk about that much when we talk about the value of higher ed. And I wanted to be able to support that.

Amy Parsons: That’s amazing. I think through this conversation, you’ve really articulated the value of higher ed and the value of CSU and that degree that you experienced and that broad-based learning and inspiration and enlightenment and being part of this culture that has served you all the way through this. And just personally thank you for serving on the board and having that leadership for our institution over the last eight years. And talk a little bit about, you’re off the board now, you’re termed out unfortunately, and I’m going to miss you on the board. What is life like for you right now? What’s your area of focus with Mighty Arrow Foundation or other areas of your life?

Kim Jordan: So let me sort of set that up a bit. All the way through New Belgium, we were selling part of the company to our coworkers through an employee stock ownership plan. And in 2019, our coworkers said, “We want to sell the company.” At first, I was sort of like, “Well, this is a legacy play though, and I was hoping it would be self-perpetuating for forever.” And I also get why if you’ve put your career into this, you want to realize some equity from that. So we sold the company. My coworkers, I’m proud to say, over the life of our ESOP, they made about twice as much money as my sons and I made, which I think is fabulous, that everybody, our rising tide truly raised all boats, and that’s amazing. And kind of back to that, to whom much is given, much is expected.

My kids and I put a fairly significant part of the proceeds of that into a family foundation. To talk about that more specifically, I have to say that our executive director, Jordana Barrack, is amazing and is really self-motivated, not just in a like, “I make sure that I do the work, but what can I do to make sure that what we are doing at Mighty Arrow?” is kind of congruent with what we did at New Belgium. How do we practice philanthropy in a way that punches above our weight? How do we sort of set an example for what might be called the best practice in philanthropy? And we have very large foundations get in touch with us to say, “I read this story that Jordana wrote,” or, “I saw her speak, and we want to know more about how you’re doing these things.” So I think she’s doing that and that’s amazing,

And that’s really, I can’t take a lot of credit for that, I think she would say I have created the kind of fertile ground for her to grow that, and I’m happy to be that person in that context with her. And then part of the proceeds, I used to buy some land in Northern California to do a land stewardship project. So we took out a bunch of grapes. In Northern California, there’s a kind of monoculture of vineyards. They’re beautiful and wine is great, and at the same time, we’re really… Coastal grassland is endangered, just like redwoods are endangered and wild places generally. So we’re working on sort of rewilding the grassland. We’re working on forest health and biome health and the ecology of that little place. So yeah.

Amy Parsons: Wow. That’s amazing.

Kim Jordan: So it’s been fun.

Amy Parsons: Yeah. It goes back to some of the classes you took at CSU all the way, putting those to good use.

Kim Jordan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amy Parsons: Well, as we wrap up, Kim, we always want to end with asking about your advice for today’s CSU students. And just thank you for this conversation of taking us from Kim Jordan, a CSU student driving a bus, wearing an outfit, studying social work through what you built at New Belgium, the leadership that you’ve shown all of us through all of your accomplishments and continue to today with what you’re doing in California and with the foundation. That’s really exciting. Our students are going to find this story really inspirational, and I know that they will love seeing you today at graduation, getting your honorary doctorate. Share with us a little bit as we close out maybe what you’re going to share with them or what you would share for today’s students or maybe just getting started at CSU.

Kim Jordan: I think that what I will tell students today, what I would tell any student is really similar to what I say to my sons, you’re building this adult life. You’re getting started on it. Make sure that it’s interesting. You go to school, you get this degree, that’s really rich, rewarding, important. And I want to encourage students to not just take the direct path to the career. Go ahead and take some jobs that are a little different than might be leading you directly in a straight line to something. Because I think all of those experiences build. I mean, so I worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service doing small mammal trapping and bird surveying all over the west. I drove a school bus. I was a caretaker for a racehorse ranch, and then I started a craft brewery in my basement.

None of that really makes any sense or has a thread that you can really kind of say, “Oh yeah, of course that’s how you would do that.” But it’s been really interesting and a lot of the things you learn along the way somehow make the totality. The totality is multifaceted and has different experiences to put together. I think another option for a lot of people is to consider living abroad for some period of time so that you have experience with a different culture to see how other people live in the world. All of those life experiences when you look back, and I think that’s one powerful tool is to say, “If I’m looking back, how will I feel about how I’ve lived my life?” And I think those kinds of experiences help people to feel happy and proud, and they can really embrace the beauty of the life that they’ve lived.

Amy Parsons: Well, that’s a perfect advice for our Rams. It’s actually great advice for all of us. So thanks for sharing your time with us this morning.

Kim Jordan: It is my pleasure.

Amy Parsons: Again, congratulations on your honorary doctorate today, and hopefully you’ll be back at CSU many, many more times.

Kim Jordan: I hope so too. Thanks, Amy.

Amy Parsons: So thank you very much. And Rams, you heard it here first from Kim Jordan. Take the interesting path. Follow her lead on that.

Kim Jordan: Yeah.

Amy Parsons: Thanks everybody. Go Rams.

Kim Jordan: Go Rams.

Amy Parsons: Thank you for listening. I’m Amy Parsons, President of Colorado State University, and you’re listening to CSU’s The Next 150 where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with change-makers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I’m gathering their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams.