#159: Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance)

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Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:00:00]:
I think, really, people are most motivated by wanting to do great work, wanting to create value, and wanting to be valued. Right? And so I think we found people who wanna do that, who wanna do this early stage business building and are really excited by The, you know, just the work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:22]:
Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to The Lay of the Land Northeast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Azadeh Hardiman. Azadehis the business leader of Cleveland 20. The new business incubator of Progressive, which is the one of the largest motor insurance carrier within the United States and was founded and is still headquartered here in Cleveland, Ohio. As the new business incubator, level 20 is focused on addressing the unmet needs of current progressive customers and the general population writ large by understanding the real problems people face every day deserving of real solutions.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:16]:
Azadeh and her team drive growth beyond insurance to develop new ideas, products, and services that help these very people. Azadeh joined Progressive back in 2015 as a director where she led the user experience strategy and design for several large scale digital customer initiatives, introduced product design tools and internal processes within Progressive, and grew the team to include a variety of skills that include digital product strategy, design, copywriting, and analytics. Prior to joining Progressive, Azadeh was a founding team member of mportal, a startup company that focused on a single idea, which was that people will want to use data on their phones. 7 years before the iPhone was introduced. As part of the founding team, she wore many hats including operations, product management, business development, and marketing, as she helped grow mportal into a profitable company in less than 3 years Land worked on product strategy for companies such as Verizon, Disney, ESPN, Time Warner, Comcast, Reliance, and TELUS. In addition to her work at Progressive and Level 20, Azadeh, who is based here in Shaker Heights with her husband and 3 children, has served in leadership roles on several nonprofit boards Land is currently on the board of the Diversity Center of Northeast Ohio and president of the UVA Alumni Club for Northeast Ohio. I really learned a lot from Azadeh in this conversation. We peel back the curtain on what Entreprenuership looks like, comparing and contrasting what it's like to build a traditional startup versus innovating from within a large corporate organization.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:48]:
The kinds of initiatives that Level 20 has taken on thus far Land the work still to be done from home maintenance to flexible term life insurance to financial wellness offerings, Cleveland 20 Land Progressive's presence here in Cleveland, her own reflections on leadership and growth, and really a whole lot more. This conversation again was a lot of fun Land so please enjoy my conversation with Azadeh Hardiman after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you 2 are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to I a dot Lay of the land dot f m. The link will also be in our show notes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:15]:
So I was thinking about where the the best place to start our conversation would be today. And I I kept going back to Skunk Works, which in some ways, I think because that organization became the noun, like how Coke did for soda or Kleenex for tissues or q tips for, whatever you call Q tips. I don't even know.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:04:34]:
Cotton swabs, I think?

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:35]:
I here, though, representing this idea of an Entreprenuership, small focused team within a larger larger organization Yes. That's been, in that case, Lockheed Martin, but that's been empowered to, with a high degree of autonomy, focus on innovation and company building from within. And in the context of what we'll be talking about today, I thought it would be a fun parallel because like Skunk Works to Lockheed Martin, I think everyone in Cleveland, you know, knows about Progressive, which obviously has been and continues to be a very innovative organization in and of itself, but I I don't know that anyone is is as aware of level 20 and the work that that you're doing. And so with all that said, I think it will be a lot of fun to, you know, shine a light a bit on this work and the nature of of how you get to operate within Progressive and and still do this really innovative and startup-oriented work.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:05:33]:
Yeah. I really appreciate the opportunity to share. And if I can help other people think about how something like this would work, you know, happy to do that. So

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:43]:
I have to say when I when I think about Stern ups, Progressive probably isn't the organization that would come to mind. I don't have the exact numbers, but, you know, maybe over 50,000 employees?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:05:55]:
I think we're close to 60,000 employees now, which is almost double what it was when I started in 2015, so a lot of growth in a short period of time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:04]:
Yeah. Remarkable. Yeah. So yet level 20, largely The focus is around kind of new product initiatives and and and start up building. So with with that dichotomy in mind, I'd love to understand, you know, your journey and how your background in start ups, in entrepreneurship has, you know, paved the way for you to be leading this this organization.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:06:27]:
Yeah. So, I'll tell you a little bit about my background, and then I wanna circle back to the progressive piece because I think it's of fun and interesting. There's a news article from the eighties that really made me kind of smile when I saw it. So Yeah. My background, I started my career in the nineties when, you know, the Internet was still just taking off as this new channel and vehicle for for companies. And so I started my career in consulting, which was great because I had an opportunity to work with a lot of different types of companies that were thinking about how the Internet was changing the way they did work, how they operated, how they accessed customers. And so that was my 1st taste of seeing how people are thinking about how to leverage a new technology to solve business problems. 3 years in, one of the partners at the firm I was at who had had previous success, launching and selling a business approached me.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:07:25]:
I still remember we're standing on the subway, at the subway station in New York City, and he approached me talking about, you know, have you heard of 3 g? And this whole idea that data was gonna come to phones and that we would use our phones for more than talking. And at that time, I think I still had this, like, big brick cell phone. Right. And so and even in the US, I don't think we were really even texting that often. You still had to, you know, press 3 times to get to the letter c on your phone to to send a text.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:54]:
I do recall that.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:07:56]:
So it was him and then another individual who was a partner at McKinsey. The 2 of them had gotten together and had this idea of, starting a company with the idea that data's coming to your mobile device, and they were able to secure some initial funding, and they were looking to build a build a business. And so it was not quite 2 people in a garage because they both had were very seasoned. They had a lot of connections. 1 had done a business before, but I was employee number 3, part of that founding team, and of took that leap to see what was gonna happen. And it was a really fun, really stressful, and everything in between ride, which I think most entrepreneurs are very familiar with, because it was really just saying it was a really tech forward idea. Right? We weren't we didn't have a very specific business problem to solve. We were really saying this technology is coming, and we're gonna try to solve anything

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:53]:
Right. Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:08:53]:
With it. And so we tried a lot of things. We we made a lot of different bets, Land, ultimately, we did get some good success. We built a product we built products that were used by some of the largest wireless carriers in the country, by some of the biggest cable and media companies. And through that work, I got to also work with those companies to think about how they diversify their business business lines. And so I got to see how different companies operate, how they think about what new products to bring to market, what pressures they were feeling, especially in the cable and media space where things were changing a lot. And so that was just an incredible experience where, you know, in true Stern up sense, you know, you've I was going from one day picking health plans to running products to saying I was the marketing organization, you know, wearing whatever

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:43]:
Yes, chef.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:09:44]:
Whatever hat, they needed me to wear at the time. And then over time, we became more mature of a business. And I left right before this happened, but the company ended up exiting through sale, being sold. They got they've had a couple of exits in that sense. They've been sold twice, and so it's been fun to see the journey of where it's gone. But in the meantime, I'm from Virginia, and that's where the company was based. I'd moved to Cleveland. I've been working remote here for a very long time.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:10:13]:
I actually took a little bit of a pause while I was at that Stern up to go work in nonprofit here in Cleveland. Yeah. And so happy to talk a little bit more about that because I think getting involved with nonprofits and onboards, it's also a passion area of mine.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:25]:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:10:26]:
But I worked at a nonprofit called Business Volunteers Unlimited for a few years.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:31]:
Oh, sure.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:10:32]:
His mission is to, you know, strengthen nonprofits by through engagement with the business business community.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:38]:
I I we've had Tom Terrell

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:10:40]:
on the house to talk about it. Nice. So I loved that. It was such a great way to get to know Cleveland, to get to know how different nonprofits operate. I'd always been really curious about the space and if that could be a potential path for me at some point in time. And I went back to Mportal, but I but I stayed involved in the community by serving on boards and as a volunteer. So that's been really incredible experience because I think you learn so much,

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:05]:
Oh, yeah.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:11:06]:
Through other organizations solving different kinds of challenges, different kinds of of, and you get to meet so many people throughout the community because nonprofits in the The really driving forward our community. So

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:17]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:11:18]:
But after my 2nd child, I had taken some time to figure out what I wanted to do next, and an opportunity opened up at Progressive. And I knew nothing about insurance, but I did know that everyone in Cleveland thinks very highly of Progressive. Yeah. And I would hear over and over again from different people that it's a great place to work, really great culture, really great leadership. So I went through the process. And each time I met with somebody, I just felt more and more in love with the company, and I really could see myself there. And so while I was going from tiny back into big, like, we were talking about, before with almost 60,000 employees now at that time, I think around thirty thousand. I just really could see a lot of opportunity there, and I was really I'm really glad I ended up there because, really enjoyed the work I was doing originally within our CRM organization, in our customer experience team.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:12:12]:
But then when Tricia decided to really think about how do we meet those broader needs of our customers and go beyond insurance and started our strategy organization, and then within it, a business incubator, I felt like all the stars had aligned. And now I get to do the work that I had done in my past with for a company that I really had fallen in love with. So that's the journey. I feel like if there's a bit of taking some leaps, but also a lot of luck in that. You know? Yeah. But I I couldn't be happier. It was it's been a really fun one.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:47]:
Amazing. Well, thank you for for sharing that and setting the stage.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:12:52]:
Land I, go back to

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:53]:
the other

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:12:54]:
thing that you were talking about about you don't also Stern think about Progressive as, like, early stage or Stern up?

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:00]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:13:00]:
So this article there's an article from The Plain Dealer. The headline is 2 lawyers started Progressive in 1937 with novel $25 auto policy. And what I thought was really interesting when you look at it is Progressive was literally started in a garage by 2 people in downtown Cleveland. Yeah. And so when you think about the you know, people always say start you know, 2 people in a garage, do a Stern up. It actually was the case. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:29]:
I didn't forget it. It's it's essentially the poster child for, you know, what what it can look like if done well.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:13:35]:
Now, you know, 80 some years Lay, so which I just really enjoy, seeing that. Now level 20 is not 2 people in a garage. We have a lot more infrastructure, a lot more support, but it's been really fun.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:49]:
No. That that's a that's a fun I I wanted to kinda go a bit into the the history and the evolution of Progressive to to kinda set the stage for for what you're doing. But just at the at the highest level

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:13:58]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:59]:
How would you describe level 20?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:14:01]:
I would describe us as a business incubator. So the reason we exist is we want to understand how we can meet broader needs of progressive customers with new products outside of, you know, what we're known for. Right? So vehicle insurance, property insurance, those types of things. And so our goal is to, look at different market opportunities, different product opportunities, customer needs, and see if we can define a product, bring it to market, operate it. And is it, you know, desirable from a customer perspective, and is it viable over the long haul? And if it is, then, make the case for continued investment Land growth of those businesses. So so we are really building companies, within Progressive. So that's how I would describe it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:52]:
Yeah. Amazing. So I I think you have this really I I think is a relatively unique perspective having experienced it from from both sides, where by both sides, I mean, entrepreneurship in the traditional sense and then Entreprenuership in the kinda colloquial sense, which I've always understood to me in entrepreneurship within a larger company. You know? You know? What what are the differences in the in the 2 models of creating something from scratch with that of of support and without that kind of support?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:15:30]:
It might vary because I think entrepreneurship takes many forms. Right? Sometimes you're starting with a clear problem you wanna solve. Sometimes you're starting with a technology you wanna try to use like we did in the case of Mportal. And so there are many forms of that. At Progressive, what we're trying to really look at is what markets does it make sense for us to be in that have you know, what products do our customers need? And from the outset, we do need to look at what the long term viability is. Like, we don't have to have that all solved right away, but we do have to think that this can be a big business because we're already a large business.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:11]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:16:11]:
And so I think unlike maybe a Land alone Stern up where you're trying to get users and you're trying to get customers Land sometimes you're really prioritizing that over profitability. You know, you're in the venture market, so you're really constantly chasing, money and those types of things. Your motivations or your drivers for decisions might be a little bit different. On the when you're an entrepreneur, you know that you have support from a company. Right. But you still have to be smart about how you spend your money, how quickly you wanna get to market, all The types of things. But I don't we don't have to spend our time, chasing the The. But we do have to spend our time really proving out that what we're gonna spend our time and treasure on has long term potential because we want to own these companies.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:17:00]:
We don't want to spin them out. We're not looking for an exit to sell to somebody else. So I think we have to really pay more attention to the the economic viability from the very beginning even though we're still focused on The customer need, first and Northeast. Because in the end, it doesn't matter if it's economically sound if nobody wants to buy it. So you have to, you know, still start there. So I think that's one area. Another is that, obviously, when you're a Land alone business, you can take a little bit more risk. And so there is a little bit of a different risk tolerance when you're part of a bigger business than when you're when you're on your own, which is natural, and I think most people would understand why.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:17:43]:
And so as we built out level 20, we've had to try to understand where that risk tolerance exists and how to balance that. We also have had to try to figure out where do we lean into what we're already good at as a large company versus where do we wanna, like, test and learn and experiment and do things very differently. And so we're thinking about those things while we're also building the business. And, of course, if you're an entrepreneur on your own, you're just building the business. Right? You're not thinking about those other things. So I think those would maybe be a few differences. Going into this, I was very conscious and did a lot of research around entrepreneurship at large companies. And I'd had previous experience working with some very large companies that do it all the time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:31]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:18:31]:
And so I have had some opportunity to see where I what I thought worked well and and what I thought would not be a sign that it would work. That's right. And so we can certainly get into that if you're interested. And so those are things that I've been you know, have to think about Land are weighing and trying to make sure we have it set up well at Progressive. So those are I think there's just other additional layers of things The

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:57]:
do. Yeah. I I'm certainly curious about them. If I had to maybe Stern Land or make the case for an advantage of of traditional entrepreneurship

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:19:07]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:07]:
It it reminds me of the aphorism that, you know, scarcity is the source of a lot of the innovation. And so, you know, being cognizant of that within an organization that has a lot of resources.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:19:20]:
Yes. A friend of mine actually came in to talk to our team recently, and we talked about just that because he was at a Stern up that they ended up shuttering. It was made up of a lot of folks that came from a larger company. We talked about the idea of constraint Land that sometimes you need to have that constraint to push yourself to really ruthlessly prioritize as one of the terms that, Mandy and our team uses all the The. But that helps you really drive and stay focused in a way that you might not be if you if you didn't have any constraints. And so while we do have the support of,

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:57]:
you know, we are part of

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:19:58]:
a bigger company, we do have constraints. Right? We still we still have a budget. We still have things that we wanna do. We wanna be very efficient and iterative with our learning and, you know, be very responsible with the opportunity that's been given to us. So we do we do impose our own internal constraints for that purpose.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:19]:
Right. Right. So all of this is not, you know, in the abstract. Right? Level 20 has existed for a few years now, has launched a few businesses. I'd love if you can just kinda take us through the I don't know if you call it the the founding story, if you will, but, you know, the the origins, the impetus, the motivation, and, some of the work that that you've actually done.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:20:41]:
On each of the businesses, you're saying? Sure. So I think 2 areas that we started with were, term life insurance and, home repair. And both of those were areas that we we already had some sense that we might have the right to play in and that we knew that we had some you you know, that we might have customer needs, associated with those things. And so, I'll start with the term life insurance. So we have, sold life insurance for a long time through partnerships. So we have our own products Land then we have partnerships. It's Land industry that is close to insurance. Close to the rest of that type of insurance, but life insurance operates differently than, property and casualty insurance.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:21:25]:
And so by building it ourselves, we had an opportunity to take a step back and really try to understand what people's needs are related to their financial planning Land how do they think about or when do they think about what happens if something happens to me. Because, of course, none of us want anything to happen to us or our loved ones. And so we could have just gone straight to building out a a term life product, but we really our process is really to start with understanding the market, but most of all, understanding the consumer and what's going on in their life Land what are their concerns and, what are the friction points. So we Stern a lot of time talking to people, people who have bought life insurance, people who haven't, talking to financial advisers and coaches, talking to like, going out and just getting into the community to understand how do you think about or when you know, what happens if something happens to you? And it's not exactly a topic that everybody wants to talk about.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:26]:
No. Yeah.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:22:26]:
More talk about it. Yeah. We need to. Right? So if I own a home and something happens to me, what's gonna happen? Right? Or I have a child or I have a relative that I take care of or or those types of things. These are hard conversations to have. But we wanted to go out there and really try to understand what's on people's minds, what's stressing them out, why haven't they bought life insurance, if they are stressed about it, but they haven't bought it, and really try to to get at where the friction points were. And then that helped us to develop some innovation in the space. So we developed a flexible term life policy that you can go and buy now.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:23:09]:
You might maybe you don't have a, you haven't bought your 1st house yet, but you wanna make sure that if something happens to you, some basic things are covered and, you know, help out your parents or your partner, whoever it is. But then you buy a house, and now you wanna increase the coverage amount without having to reunderwrite at now your older age, which would become more expensive.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:32]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:23:32]:
And so we basically created this flexible policy that will grow with you as you hit on key life events. And I think one of the friction points why people don't buy is that when you try to go buy, they ask you, like, what the rest of your life is gonna look like so that they can price you, and people don't know

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:46]:
Of course not.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:23:47]:
Don't know what that is. So we knew it was an interest you wanted to be in, but we wanted to really take that consumer and customer oriented approach to understanding how people think about it to try to solve problems for them. And then we also wanna solve some interesting problems on the back end too from the operational side. We're really good at Progressive. We're very well known for being a very data oriented company, and so can we take some of the strength we have on that side and apply it to this new industry? And so, you know, tackling it from multiple vectors. And so now our life insurance product is, live. It's in, several states now. We're starting to sell policies, and we're starting to you know, you as as as you should in any product, you kind of iterate and evolve and get better and better over time.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:24:38]:
So that's an example of one of the products that we have.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:41]:
Right. And I imagine that's a area specifically where having Progressive as a partner in that in a larger sense, go to market and distribution. Start ups just don't have that.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:24:54]:
Yes. Exactly. And so we wanna take advantage of the things that make sense for us to take advantage of from our from the other parts of our business, and it can be anything from advice, from our, you know, amazing technology organization. We have our own technology organization within level 20, but we still stay very close to and partner with our peers at in the rest of the business. And so we've received, you know, tons of support. And for me, that's one of the there are many, reasons to believe that, an incubator of an entrepreneurship can work at Progressive because I'm not blind to the fact that many companies have done this and not had success, but one of them is that Progressive's culture, at the heart of it, is really a people first culture, a how can we help culture. It's not a territorial type of culture. So if we need help, people are always willing to jump in and help us figure out a problem, whether it's a technical problem, a process problem, you know, distribution problem, we we have great support and partnership.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:26:02]:
But at level 20, we try to have also as many of the components as we can to, you know, again, build, run, and operate in house at level 20 because that allows us to move faster than have to get in a queue, and so it allows us to be more nimble. So we have both. Right? And I feel like it's the best of both worlds because of that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:22]:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned, this phrase, have the right to play in, which I thought was an interesting one, and I'd love to use that Land and maybe as a a segue to the the other businesses that Cleveland 20 has started, but how you even approach what problems to solve in the 1st place? Because I imagine the the, you know, the potential problem spaces is enormous, you know, from the the nature of of what progressive does. So how how do you attempt to ruthlessly prioritize, you know, the the set of things that you even wanna try and tackle?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:26:54]:
Yeah. I think well, 1, if you look at why start ups fail, one of them is that the markets are not big enough. Right? Again, we're already a pretty large company, so we need to first look at, are the markets big enough for us to explore? Does it make sense? Can we meet needs for a broader set of our customers? And we also have to keep our shareholders in mind as well. And so we look at big markets. Again, we look at what are we good at as a company, what type of competitive advantage could we bring to the table, whether, again, it's our excellence around data Land, really, excellence around operations. Progressive, as a auto insurer, for example, we have always been very good at and very focused on making an underwriting profit on our core insurance product. Not that's not the model for every insurance company. So you have to be operationally excellent and efficient.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:27:50]:
And so where are things like that going to translate over into new industries? And, again, at the forefront, the customer. Right? What do what do the customers need, and how can we provide more of a breadth of services and products to them that would make sense for them to buy from us that they wouldn't, be surprised to to buy from us. So we have to be Right. Be thinking about that as well. So we talked about life insurance. Another one another business that we have launched here in Cleveland to start is, Castle, which is a home repair business. And so you can imagine that there's, we already sell home insurance, although you don't have to be a home insurance customer to use Castle. We already process claims, and so we understand how to think about how to help a customer through identification of a problem, getting resolution, things like that.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:28:46]:
And so we knew we were interested in exploring the home ecosystem. But, again, the team really took a fresh look at it by going out and talking to homeowners in a number of different regions to understand, you know, how do they think about their home when something happens, how do they go about repairing it. Of course, there's a lot of DIYers out there. We have plenty of them at level 20 as well, and so part of that process is figuring out who your market really is. So for Castle, our market is not the DIYer. You know, you don't wanna solve we're not trying to solve for everybody. We're trying to solve for, really, in the end, the person who either maybe they are a first time homeowner, and they really don't know what they don't know. And so if something goes wrong, they really want someone they can trust to call and help them through the process.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:29:36]:
And so we have experts who will answer that call and help guide them through what really needs to be done. Do you need an electrician or do you need a handyman? Do you need or a woman. Sometimes we also have get projects that are complex. So people have tried to solve them, you know, tried to get this something resolved for a while, but people haven't been able to figure it out. So how do they who do they go to? And I think it's gotten worse since the pandemic, but there's we just heard a lot of feedback when we were doing our research around trust and quality. So how do I know I'm paying the right price? How do I know that the job is being done well? And so part of the value proposition of Castle is not only the expert who helps guide the whole process. We have software that takes you from, you know, your initial estimate all the way through payment, But we also review our people our team members review all of the pricing from the service providers in our network, and we of, warranty, on the work. And so, those are some of the different ways that we're trying to to solve the problems for homeowners.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:30:40]:
And, basically, I've created this two sided marketplace, but not like HomeAdvisor, which is really more of a marketing site and connecting, folks. And it's tough for service providers because they're getting a bunch of leads that chase down don't become anything. And it's tough for homeowners because if you don't know what to ask, then how do you even know how to use that platform?

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:00]:
Sure.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:31:01]:
Or you get a, you know, a bunch of calls Land you are kind of overwhelmed, and so we're trying to cut out all of that noise. Instead, you call us Land we're really kind of giving you that concierge service to to take you all the way through. So, so far, so good. And you might have seen our billboards around town, and, we're learning a lot with our service provider network because our in this case, our customers are both the homeowner who wants to get something repaired, but also that service provider who's building their business and, you know, wants the quality, leads as well. So I think we've been able to solve a lot of that through the product.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:38]:
Lay of the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Boulder College of Business, widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the region. As we've heard time and time again from entrepreneurs here on Lay of the Land, many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University, success in this Stern changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technologies and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen, all qualities nurtured through the track, including online, in person, hybrid, and asynchronous, all to offer the most effective options for you, including the ability to participate in an elective international study tour of unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas Land experiencing a new culture. Culture. The career impact of a Of programs, please go to business.jcu.edu. The Buller College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a college of business can have. One of the things that I'm I'm just curious about is for the the areas of operating a company that might be outside the core competency of what Progressive normally does that are are part of Castle and and the flexible term life offering. You know, how the the actual building a company within a company looks and and thinking about talent Land, you know, from the the entrepreneurship outside of a company perspective. I think one of the things that I've picked up is perhaps, you know, one of the reasons that a a Stern up will succeed or fail is the right alignment of incentives and even things as basic as compensation.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:46]:
And and so how that's Land of baked into the the business incubation process but within Progressive?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:33:53]:
So on the talent side, what I've seen some corporate incubators do or, entrepreneurship organizations do is take a bunch of folks who already work at the company and say, go be entrepreneurs. Right? And I don't think that works because I do think you do need to have very specific talent, the right competencies, and previous experiences, and things like that. So we did not do that. We didn't just go, Lay. Tap x people on the shoulder and say you're coming over to to level 20 to do this. Instead, we designed the organization from the ground up with all new roles and job families and and things like that, and we posted all of our roles, and we opened them all, for the most part, both internally and externally, right, because we wanted to make sure that the people who are coming here are excited to do The type of work. You know, it's really fun, but it's also hard to build something from from scratch. We have a nice mix of talent at level 20, both that came from Progressive and that came from outside of Progressive.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:35:00]:
Really nice mix of people with start up experience or Entreprenuership experience at other companies, as well as people who have been at Progressive for 20 years or 25 years and really wanted to bring, their skills into a new space. So we really tried to create a really diverse group of, backgrounds and experiences, to the table, within the organization. I think in the end, a lot of people think that people are motivated because of the compensation structure. But speaking from experience, it only works in very specific scenarios. Right? The payout only happens if you IPO or if you get bought.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:43]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:35:43]:
Even if you get bought, like, the payout only happens if they structure the purchase in a way that they're gonna pay out people. Right? Like, if you get options, those really only, materialize in in certain scenarios. And so I think, really, people are most motivated by wanting to do great work, wanting to create value, and wanting to be valued. Right? And so I think we found people who wanna do that, who wanna do this early stage business building and are really excited by The, you know, just the work to do the work. We don't have the same level of risk at Progressive, in at level 20 than you have when you're on your own too. I think sometimes the incentive structure for Stern ups is more based on, like, mitigating risk.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:35]:
Yep.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:36:36]:
So I think The, to me, is more tied together with the risk. But I think in the end, whether you're at the Stern up or you're at level 20, you're you're probably doing it because you like to do this kind of work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:47]:
So with all that in mind, and I I think, you know, it's helpful to to have at least, you know, those 2 examples to to reference as companies from level 20. What is the the goal ultimately? Like, how do you think about what success means for level 20?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:37:03]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:03]:
Kinda writ large, and, you know, how wide is the aperture for the the kinds of problems that you might take on going forward Land and just the the strategy and approach to what that looks like.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:37:14]:
Even though what you wanna do in early stage business building is, you know, you people will talk about feel fast, learn quickly, iterate, all The things. It still takes years to build a company.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:25]:
Yeah.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:37:25]:
It still takes years to build a business. It still takes years to build a profitable business. And that's really why we're doing it now because Progressive has, you know, a lot of opportunity ahead of it in its core Land within our core business. You know, we're not doing this out of, like, immediate pressure. And and that's one of the reasons again, one of my reasons to Cleveland to do it where I'm excited about doing it at Progressive versus what I've seen in the past is that sometimes companies don't start to do this until it's too late. And then they forget that it still takes 5, 10 years to get to a really, like, Stern, profitable business even if you're doing all these very iterative and fail fast type of things. And so we're still early in our journey, but I would say, obviously, the the success I would like to see is that, one, we're learning a lot about the different industries and product areas that we want to be in. And through the work at level 20, we're gonna learn if we were right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:38:23]:
Right? We had hypotheses around different, types of products that might make sense for us. And so can we validate whether that's in fact true, what can we learn, you know, good and bad, that will tell us to put something down or move something forward. So number 1, success is all the learning that we're doing and how we will apply that learning to the next thing that we try. Right? Because we have we have space to try

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:49]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:38:49]:
A number of different things. And then, of course, the ultimate success will be having very successful businesses where we have validated that customers want the product. We validated that we can acquire the customers in an efficient way that we can operate the business Land that it would be worth investing further into growing those businesses with them eventually, you know, becoming materially materially significant for Progressive. So the ultimate success is going to be seen over years, not tomorrow, to see how many companies we can launch, that continue to grow and provide meaningful value to our customers and our employees and our shareholders over time. Yep. But the short term success is what can we Stern, how do we reinvest that learning, how do we get more efficient, How do we get more explorations over in the most efficient way possible so that, eventually, we'll get to that longer term success?

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:50]:
Yeah. No. It it makes a lot of sense. What what came to mind was just to me kind of how how daunting the the scale of it is knowing Progressive is, you know, like a $50,000,000,000 top line plus business Land how from, you know, from the Stern up perspective, how what seemed to be real milestones of, you know, achieving $1,000,000 in ARR or $5,000,000 in ARR is is almost kind of inconsequential at that kind of scale. And so thinking really about how you drive that kind of impact over over time. We can put a pin in that if you wanna talk about it or not. But I think one of the other really cool opportunities or or things that you get to do from the perspective of level 20 that is is probably not within the scope of most Stern ups is is the learnings from other taking what you've learned from the flexible life insurance offering and applying it to The, or I'm curious if there's, like, a playbook or kinda standardization or some kind of, you know, baseline teams infrastructure tooling that that you use and think about and apply to to the whole Yeah. Process?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:41:01]:
So, of course, the opportunity when the when the group was being formed and I was applying for the job, it was a really great opportunity for me to to really think through how would I set this up. Right? To put my head in the ring, I needed to think ahead to say, what would this look like Land how can I paint this picture of how the how this could work? And so I did draw on a lot of my past experiences at Importal and with many of the companies I'd worked with in the past, talked to friends from companies that do this all the time, did a lot of reading, all the things, you know, trying to accumulate as much information and data as I could to think through what I thought might be our best foot forward to start this organization. And so as part of that process, created a outline of the what that incubation process was gonna look like at level 20, what I thought time frames might look like, costs might look like, what the team needed to look like, what's the kind of baseline team that we might need. And when I got the role, really, what we were doing was executing against all of those plans that we put in place. And then over the past few years, we've been learning what's working, what's not working, and iterating on that as well. But we do have a blueprint of what we want in a team that's doing this work. We have blueprints of how we wanna go, like, the stages of how we wanna go through the work, what types of questions we wanna ask ourselves, along the way. And, again, we keep refining it as we learn more.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:42:35]:
And so we're building level 20. We're building businesses Land, you know, like, we're refining all both at the same time. So it's definitely been, really fun, but it you know, a lot to take in and The, reprocess Yeah. And put back out there. So

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:52]:
I can imagine. Yeah. And I would also imagine that, you know, perhaps not not every endeavor or exploration, you know, works out. Right. And and how you think about, you know, when it makes sense to quit or, you know, stop.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:43:05]:
Yeah. And they're hard decisions. Right? Because you you get good signals in lots of different Lay, and and this is something that Progressive has previous experience with. So we have explored expansion in the past. Progressive tested out geographic expansion of our auto insurance product in Australia, and at some point had to decide we're not gonna move that forward. Or even within, you know and every any company does that. Right? They're testing out new ways of doing distribution or variations of The product or those types of things. And some things are going to work and some things aren't.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:43:38]:
And eventually to figure out what are those metrics or things that are going to make you pull the plug And what are you gonna reinvest from what you learned into the next thing? So we have gone through what I think the typical ideation incubation process is for a lot of things, right, where you start with, a lot of ideas that you, you know, cut in the early phases as you do a lot of test and learn with consumers in more of the a closed environment. You haven't built the product yet, but you're showing them sketches and mock ups and prototypes of products. And through that, we've cut a lot of ideas and kind of killed a lot of ideas, which is like the typical funnel. And then then once you think you have something that's worth investing the time and the money into to build and get into market so that people can experience it in their in the context of their real life, that's where we have the the 3 businesses. So we I talked about Progressive Life and Castle, but we also have a financial wellness business called, Stretch Financial Wellness that's focused on helping people. And the initial focus is helping people reduce their debt, credit card debt, and helping to really kind of democratize, Land support through stretches and and other services what you might get from a financial adviser or coach, but making it more accessible to more people, which I'm really excited about. But we haven't killed something that's been in market because we just really haven't been around long enough to do that, because it takes time to build in, and it takes time to, you know, do your iterating and Stern. But at some point, something might not continue, and that's okay.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:45:21]:
We'll have learned a lot through that process. And so we just have to take a very objective view on, can we get the economics to work? Because I think so far, all of the products people are really we are seeing that people want the products. So then it becomes a little bit more of, do do they Stern, and then can we make it operationally viable?

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:43]:
Right. But one thing I I have to ask about, especially given the the article you referenced is, you know, Progressive is obviously a a staple institution here in Cleveland. And so I would love to understand the degree to which Cleveland affects the work you're doing and how you affect what is happening here in Cleveland.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:46:00]:
I think that's a great question. Well, the number one way that Cleveland affects the work we're doing is that we're based in Cleveland, and so talent is coming from Cleveland primarily. So we are in the office 3 days a week. We do have a few folks that are not in in the area, but number 1 is talent. Right? And there's so so many talented people here. We were talking about it earlier. Just like Cleveland is this hidden gem that has amazing people who really work hard, have a lot of grit, and support each other. So similar to how I said, like, Progressive is a place that one one of the reasons to believe is that it's a place where it's how can I help Land how can I support and how can I Cleveland is that way, I feel like? It's like you meet somebody, and immediately, they wanna know, how can I help you or can I make a connection for you or whatnot? And so that's been a huge benefit for us with talent and folks always willing to help us think through a challenge, or maybe we need subject matter expertise, or we're trying to think through how to solve something, we've tapped into various networks, both internal to Progressive and outside, to to help us think through those things.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:47:12]:
And so I think that how can I help mentality is really good? The grit piece, I think, is important because entrepreneurship is hard, and you need grit. To be successful, you need to push through. And one of the traits that I often The in successful entrepreneurs are The they've gone through something difficult in their life Land they've had to overcome that. And so you see how they do that and how they move forward. Right? I think it it creates that resilience, but also helps you understand, like, what some things that are really maybe not worth spending time focusing in on, and here's the place where I really should drive and and push through. And so I I think we get a, we have a good reputation for having a lot of grit here, so that helps with the the folks that we're here. I think some of our different team members are also plugged into various elements of the Cleveland entrepreneurship ecosystem. We've got great folks on our product team who are plugged you know, known in Cleveland for being, really great at product and teach and mentor and and help others out.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:48:19]:
We've got great universities here where we've done some, really great partnership work where, you know, I think that's just an opportunity where we might be able to tap into even more over time. But, as we're growing, because we're very small in the early stages, you have to manage a lot

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:34]:
Absolutely.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:48:35]:
In terms of partnerships. But we just have so much talent that can be funneled through the universities as well. So, again, all the universities here are very willing and interested in working with people within the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial community, which I think is fantastic. So we've had lots of discussions there. Through that too, I'm also serving on the advisory board for one of the local universities for a new product management focused MBA program that they're launching, which is really exciting. And then we don't have to build everything or do everything ourselves, and so we will look at who can help us with that. And so we have leveraged some Stern ups in Cleveland as part of our ecosystem at level 20. And then it's not part of my group, but my direct group at level 20, but we have a corporate development team, which is part of our strategy organization Land that partners with us.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:49:28]:
And we've made an investment in Jumpstart Ventures, their next two fund. And so we wanted to do that not only to support local economic development in Cleveland, but it also, helps us to understand again who's here, where there might be synergies, and see where that can go. So those are some of the different ways that we've been engaging. I think we can always do more. Sometimes it's just a matter of having a big enough staff to do more, but I'm I'm very excited about what can be done over time too.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:05]:
Yeah. No. It is it is very exciting. I I think you you've touched a bit on, you know, what success looks like from the perspective of of level 20. I'm curious more Land more personally how you think about it for yourself. And I I was posed this question recently of a word or concept that you would like to be known for. Land not necessarily a legacy of sorts, but, you know, what what is success to you, and is there a concept or word that you would like to be known for?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:50:33]:
So I have always said that my superpower is really around building people Lay and trying to connect those dots. So in the context of level 20, I would say and personally, in the end, I guess, not even beyond is what you're asking is, I think I would feel really good about helping people learn how to do this work and grow their careers and be successful. Like, that's gonna be the thing that makes me the happiest. I think the natural outcome of that is that Progressive is also gonna be successful Land all those things will come, but I really, that's the thing that gets me the most excited is is the people because in the end, you can't build anything without amazing people. And so that's where, I guess, my heart is the most.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:25]:
It always comes back to people.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:51:27]:
Yeah. And I I love, like, finding the connection of, oh, somebody did this in their past life. They might have come in to do this role, but they've done this other thing in this past life that might be helpful to you over here. How do you get people to work together and pair to to solve new and challenging problems? You know, when I was at Emportal in those early stages, I was in my twenties when we first started, and I just learned so much through that process, probably more through the tears than the joy, you know, like, Land, you know, like, when you go back and you reflect about I remember I used to think, why are they doing things this Lay, or I don't really understand The. And maybe I would have let some of that go more if I used to go tell myself that, but, you know, I just learned so much from everybody I was surrounded with by and with I work got to work with. So I wanna be known as somebody who helped people along the way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:25]:
Yeah. What are are some of those salient lessons that you understand now that you would have told to your younger self?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:52:33]:
That's a yeah. I, I think I would have not gotten up so worked up so easily when I didn't understand, where the future of the company was going because I maybe didn't understand the full context of all the different things that were on their minds when they were trying to figure out where we were going. I think I would have taken it's funny. I'm not a natural risk taker, so I think I would have taken more risks. It seems weird because I went to go from, like, a cushy consulting job to go to a start up, but I I think I would have pushed myself to to take more risks. I was talking to one of our new team members recently, and he talked about, sometimes, if you know too much about something, you might just get frozen and you never will move forward. And so, you know, we're taught to kind of know everything and then take our Lay, and I think sometimes the best things come from just moving forward and taking those leaps.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:27]:
I mean, one of the most often heard patterns I I I I get from these conversations from other founders that I know is that if they knew what they know now, they wouldn't have done it in the 1st place. Right. The the whole idea of the beginner's mindset and and just not knowing Yeah. Is what allowed them to to pursue it in the 1st place.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:53:47]:
Yeah. And I I think it's very easy for us to get nervous once we know more, and so that can be really hard. The other thing that I learned through a leadership development program that I got a chance to participate in at Progressive was I didn't realize I had been doing this, but I of I think now I would have told my old self this with more intention is to build your personal board of directors. So, you know, as an entrepreneur, you have your your board typically, but whether you're the CEO or the product manager or whatever role you're in in any part of your career, I think there's so much value in who are the people that you can go to for support, your safe space, to ask questions, to push on ideas, and you kind of need a variety of people who have different experiences that can help you through that. And we had to, you know, go through the exercise of, like, who would those 8 people be, and could you actually fill that out, and why, you know, why them Land and those types of things. And I think if I could go back, I would say everybody should think about that Land, with intention, figure out who your personal board of directors is because we all need help. Like, we can't do it alone. It's okay to ask for help.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:55:06]:
And so I think I would have told myself to do that sooner. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:11]:
No. I I love that idea, the idea of a a board of directors. I maybe it's it's just the, like, frequency effect of of, but now that I've I've been made aware of it, I feel like I see it, you know, more frequently. So maybe it's it's gaining traction.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:55:27]:
Yeah. I think so. Now I I see more people looking at and being open to coaches and mentorship and and those types of things. You just wanna make sure you're surround yourself with diverse viewpoints and experiences, and people are really gonna tell you the truth. The truth. So because I think it's okay. You know, in any Stern up, whether it's the entrepreneurship or the extra of its own, the entrepreneurship, you need skeptics. You need people who are gonna tell you the truth because that's gonna help you close those gaps and poke the holes and say, well, that it's true.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:56:04]:
That might not be great, but how much does that really matter? And so you need to be able to have those hard conversations. So make sure that whoever's on your personal board is gonna tell you the truth.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:15]:
Yeah. No. I mean, that resonates deeply. If you if you can't talk about the things not going well, which in The early stages, they almost never are Yes. Then you, you know, you can't fix the problems.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:56:26]:
Yeah. And we're all like, none of us are perfect. So we all have to there's always constant growing and learning to do. We get taught that as kids or we teach our kids or, you know, we're having all The, you know, conversations with our kids about having The growth mindset. And then sometimes as adults, we forget ourselves. Right? And so The it's so you know, it's okay not to be perfect. It's okay to make mistakes. Just take it as they come and learn from it and move on.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:56:53]:
You know? Give yourself some grace along the way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:55]:
Yeah. Absolutely. What what are you most excited about looking forward?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:57:00]:
Oh, I'm really excited. Right now, I'm really, really excited because now we're we're far enough in where we're really gaining momentum and traction and learning a lot. You know, stage 1 was get this thing up and running, start hiring people, start trying to get products out the door. Some products are now further along. I just feel very excited about all of the things that we've learned so far and how we're gonna apply that to the next phase. You know? And, hopefully, some of these products will now start to get further and further into their growth phase. I'm excited to learn from what doesn't end up moving forward and why and, you know, what could we have done better or differently, and how can we apply that to, you know, the next try of of or iteration of that product potentially? So I just feel very, very excited about where all of this can go. I feel like we have a really amazing team that we've been able to build, and so it's just, you know, like, continuing to get get stuff out there and keep going with it.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:58:01]:
But I feel like we're we really gained a lot of traction, so I'm I'm excited to see it blossom.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:07]:
Yeah. I'm excited to follow along,

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:58:09]:
see how

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:09]:
see how it goes. I think we've we've covered a lot of ground here. I always like to leave a little space just for the the unspoken thing. You know, if if if you feel The there is anything particularly important about your own personal journey, about the work you're doing at level 20 The that you would like to share that that we haven't talked about yet?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:58:27]:
Well, in the beginning of the of when we first started, I I mentioned the work that I did in the nonprofit space, Surfing On Boards.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:35]:
At BVU.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:58:36]:
At BVU. And so I would say that, I'll just give another plug

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:42]:
Yeah.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:58:42]:
To consider serving on a nonprofit board, consider giving back in that way. I think it's a great way to learn and give back to the community at the same time. Cleveland is that city of 2, 3 degrees of separation. And so the more you're out there, the more you're gonna get those connections that help you in so many different ways in your life. And so why not do it while giving back to the community?

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. So what are are some of the things you think you have learned as a consequence of being involved in that kind of work

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:59:18]:
Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:18]:
The is just not something you picked up on from building companies?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [00:59:22]:
I think it's just different scenarios that have happened. So the very first board I served on was a nonprofit called Cleveland Reads, and it was a spin out from the United Way. So it had a lot of parallels to entrepreneurship because it spun out it was originally a program with the United Way. It spun out to become its own five zero one c three. So going through that process of how do you do that, how do you, you know, build this organization from a program into a a business. And then we ended up spinning it into another organization eventually. So it was interesting to go through that cycle, but in the world of nonprofit.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:00]:
Right.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:00:01]:
Right. And the differences in maybe what they had to think about through that process. Of course, each nonprofit is different. Are they you know, do they get most of their funds through foundations versus do they have a product that they're offering? Can they run a little bit more like a business or not? You know, it depends on what the organization is, how much do they rely on fundraising? So you learn a lot about the different mechanics of the nonprofit financials through the process. And I think you can apply some of those variations of ways of thinking to what you're doing in your day to day.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:37]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:00:38]:
And just the way that your fellow board members bring their context and experience into solving challenges helps you to think about your own like, opening of your own mind from that perspective as well. So that's why I always, like, really want people to get engaged in in community.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:58]:
It's important. It's

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:00:59]:
a great way to get engaged in Cleveland. So

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:02]:
That's a great plug. Yeah. So And, I think it it segues pretty well into our our traditional closing question, which is for, you know, a hidden gem in Cleveland.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:01:12]:
Oh, there's so many. We were, I think we were, saying that I think Cleveland, in Land of itself, is a hidden gem in the whole city. So I live I live in Shaker Heights, and I just feel like there's never I've never been any Lay like it, even though I've lived in different parts of the country. I really love the sidewalks and the lakes and the walkability and, you know, going to the Land Aken District or whatever, we might be doing. So I really, really enjoy that. And it's not a hidden gem because it's huge, but, I have to say that I don't take enough advantage of the lake. The. And so, there's something I feel very, calming and centering about water.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:01:58]:
I started going over to Edgewater and just sometimes just kind of Land really enjoying looking out at the water and, and kind of decompressing in a way.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:09]:
It has that effect.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:02:11]:
Yeah. So it's funny. When I moved to Cleveland from Northern Virginia right outside of DC, I said, oh, I'm gonna use all of Cleveland. Because in DC, it really takes you 30, 40 minutes to get anywhere because of traffic. And so I was used to being in the car and having to go a lot, you know, lot of a longer distance to to get to things. And I moved to Cleveland, and I said, I'm definitely gonna no. There's no east side, west side. You know? I'm gonna use it all.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:02:42]:
And I think you do very quickly get comfortable in your community. And so I've been trying we've been trying to, as a family, push ourselves to go, you know, we live in Shaker, but we'll, you know, go to Lakewood Park, go hang out at the Solstice Stern or go to the Rocky River Reservation or just use the AllTrails app and find different parks to walk around in, as a family. And so we've been trying to do a lot more of The, you know, the whole city. Yeah. No. The whole city is our gem.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:12]:
Amazing. Well, I just wanna thank you, Azadeh, for coming on and sharing your story and more about the work you're doing at level 20.

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:03:19]:
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hopefully, it was interesting and helpful.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. So Absolutely. If people had anything that they wanted to follow-up with you about, what would be the the best way for them to do so?

Azadeh Hardiman (Level20 — Progressive Insurance) [01:03:30]:
I think the easiest is just is LinkedIn, to connect on LinkedIn. I do use it quite a bit, so that might be the fastest way to connect.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:40]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey at lay of the Land dot f m, or find us on Twitter at Lay of the land or at Sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe Land leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred Northeast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word Land continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land