Young Professional Spotlight — Spud Marshall: A Serial Social Entrepreneur & Life Explorer
The YP Spotlight series breaks down rising young professionals unique approaches to life and work.
Spud Marshall // Cofounder of The Co.Space // State College, PA
Spud is the cofounder and CEO of the co.space — a living space for students and young professionals in State College, PA who are change-makers. He’s a Penn State graduate, received his master’s degree in Sweden in Strategic Sustainability Leadership, and has had number of ventures, including a bubble-ball company.
Spud is a TEDx speaker, facilitator, and self-described innovation instigator. In this YP spotlight, we explore what makes Spud tick and what lead him to where he’s at today.
For more about Spud: iamspud.com
M: How do your friends describe you?
S: I’ve heard people describe me as…a bag of cats. I’m not sure exactly what that means. But I think it refers to the fact that I tend to have a lot of sporadic, eclectic ideas that are all bound up in this thing called Spud. I go around and try to get people on board on crazy ideas, so that’s one way, but I’m sure there are different pockets of my friends that would describe me a little bit differently.
M: What did you get really excited about growing up?
I remember there was this magazine drive in Middle School and the winner got a fog-machine. All I had to do is go door-to-door and convince someone to buy something from me. I was a cute little middle school kid, so I thought-of course they would do that! That was one of the first things where I was really rapped up into something. There was nothing stopping me hahaha.
M: What advice would You give to a teenage version of yourself?
S: I Would Say Whatever you’re passionate about at any given time, to pursue 100% of that. I think there are often times where I have so many different interests and for the most part I would just pick something and run with it. But there are times where things I get overwhelming, I don’t know what direction to go in. I want to work at Disney, and I want to design a parade float, I want to go do work in Africa. How the heck do all these tie together?
So I would tell myself pick something and just run with it. Eventually you’ll realize whether this actually feels good or not what I want to do after all.
M: How would you describe someone that “gets it”?
S: I would describe “getting it” as the feeling when you wake up and you can feel whatever it is you’ll be doing that day, no matter how mundane or exciting, are all tied to a bigger sense of purpose for your life.
Thats why when I wake up every morning will tend to hit the ground running because I know I got something — I realize that the work that I do actually contributes and makes a direct impact on people’s lives. When you make that connection, everything changes.
M: What were the earliest points when you had that passion?
S: So there were always moments where I felt like I was really enjoying the work I was doing but it wasn’t really clear on how it was connected to a really significant outcome. And then there were times, other work-related moments in my life, that were directly tied to significant impact on someones life, but had nothing to do with my work. When those finally merged, that’s when it got exciting. That was when I got back to State College.
M: At what point did you know you were a social entrepreneur?
S: I don’t think the word ‘Entrepreneur’ until I finished my Masters work in Sweden. No one told me I was an entrepreneur, none of my friends ever really labeled me as that, my parents never really talked about that. And then all of a sudden I really stumbled into the social entrepreneurship space, so looking at how you use the power of business and money and capitalism to really transform pressing problems.
That is where I got really excited. I was coming at it from the angle of I really care about certain problems in the world like climate change, poverty, food insecurity, etc, and was looking for creative ways to tackle them and then all of a sudden this term ‘social entrepreneur’ stuck. I got exposed to the ‘social part’ and then went back and figured ‘oh wow I’ve been doing this entrepreneurship thing for a while’.
M: You mentioned a number of big problems like world-hunger and climate change. Do you find these problems daunting?
S: I’m not someone who gets intimidated by large problems. I’m actually kind of the opposite — I run towards them. The more I dig into it the more I see people that are deeply committed and involved with something they really care about. I think it’s a real balance about being somewhat aware and realistic because the problems are so big, but optimistic about the people that are working to solve the problems in these spaces.
M: How do you define mentorship and what do you look for out of it?
S: It’s funny that you ask that. That’s a good question. I’m actually in the process of putting together what I’m calling an ‘Elder’s Council’. I think something that’s really lacking in our society is that we no longer place elders to a certain esteem that others do in other parts of the world.
That, for me, is a really difficult thing to grasp. I’m looking for folks that see the world in a similar spectrum as I do. There’s a whole variety of things to think about. But I look for some sort of overlap. It’s not that I don’t look for diverse backgrounds, but I think there has to be a certain overlap in perspective. From there your paths could look totally different, but for me it starts there.
M: How do you go about picking one or make the transition into a mentor-mentee relationship?
S: I was shocked how easy it was to have someone be your mentor. It was daunting in the beginning, but you just have to develop the courage to go ask someone “Hey, I’m intentionally looking for someone to guide me on X, Y, and Z on this particular point of my life. Could you step in for a little bit?”. I’ve never really had someone say no to me with that question.
There are times where I’m a little unclear with what I’m looking for, which makes it more difficult. But when I have a clear understanding of where I want to go, it makes it much easier to find a mentor that can help guide me there.
M: Are there specific qualities you look for in people?
S: I look for people that are really humble. That is important quality to me because the humble people in my life tend to be the ones that speak the most wisdom. I think humility is a really important peice.
M: What do you tell people who have a hard time figuring out what they deeply care about?
S: For me, it just go back to jump-in somewhere. If you have zero clue in what you actually care about, which I’d find hard to believe. Often times when I hear people in that state it’s because they just haven’t taken the time to really do an assessment.
If you’re sitting all day and you’re hedged out on the couch and you’re watching 14 hours of Netflix, you either don’t care at all about society or you’re really interested in something about movies — directing, the music, something. I would take an assessment in how you spend the 24 hours in your day, break it down into hours chunks, and then write two things you did that each hour. And then do that for a week. If you spend two hours a day cooking, you may not obviously realize how much that means to you until you see it on paper.
Just start somewhere. Don’t get overwhelmed by the first step.
M: What was the beginning of the creation of the co.space?
S: So when I came back from Sweden, I wad just give this year where I could really try whatever I wanted. I had a family that gave me that permission too and learned to find that during my undergrad career. When I came back to State College, when I came back to the Penn State community, and I looked at the majority of students going through their experience, they were completely asleep to the possibilities around them.
That really frustrated me.
I knew how important that was for my own journey. So I wanted to do something to create experiences, to create spaces that other people could say “I’ve got these skills, I’ve got these passions I deeply care about, and I want to leverage them in a way that actually makes a difference.”
A couple of friends of mine got together, friends who I never really expected to see again or cross paths in a big way, all reconvened. I remember we all took a picture together with pools sticks all pointed at the camera like we were all taking on something together.
We were committed to it. We didn’t know exactly what — we we literally just committed to working together. We all knew we cared about the world and cared about making it a more communal, vibrant place.
It started as we wanted to create a talent agency in New York, which we did, to our full extent. We lived in New York, were traveling to Miami, LA, had some real talent under management. And then we had a disastrous explosion of our company that I had ever imagined happening.
You learn what NOT to tell your parents. There was a crazy catfish story, among other things. But we got smacked with the realization that the world is tough, but anything is possible.
M: What happened next?
S: I knew I still wanted to work with the same group of people, so we moved back to State College (I was sleeping on my ex’s couch) and started something called The New Leaf Initiative. A really key lesson that we took away from the talent agency, we were 23, 24 at that point, we had ZERO money to our name, we had no furniture of our own, we had a little bit of debt. We had no reputation, legacy, and then we realized if everything blew up once again, we’d end up in the exact same spot.
We had nothing to lose. So why not try it? We couldn’t really imagine something worse than what we just went through.
So we found some guy off of craigslist, we rented a basement closet, we renovated it, and turned it into our office.
M: So what was New Leaf?
S: New leaf was our answer to how do you help people take the first step in making a radical, positive change in the world.
Our belief was that if you could just connect the right people and give them the inspiration, the courage, and the connections they needed, people would take care of the rest and run off with it.
We started by saying let’s just get a space right in the heart of downtown. It’ll be like a giant clubhouse. It was a nonprofit. We basically told our friend and and partner Eric you’re going to get a real job to pay the bills (he did get some security) and Christian and I will spend all of our time selling and designing websites — which we had no idea how to do that at the time.
We just needed to bring food on the table. That was our game plan.
The space grew and grew and grew and sooner than later the Mayor was our neighbor. The structure has always been a little nebulous so it can survive new leadership. It’s changed a little over the years, but that’s intentional.
In stepping away from New Leaf, for The Co.Space, I really learned that I couldn’t connect my self-worth to my work. And it’s really difficult, because when you create something it’s a really close feeling to have a kid. I am by no means a mother or father, but from what my mom describes, It’s about as close as I can imagine. That was a hard pill to swallow, but luckily there were enough elders around me to smack some sense into me.
M: What is the co.space?
S: It’s like a frat house for people who give a damn in the world. We buy frat houses, and we transform them into spaces that are incredibly dynamic and vibrant. Creative brainstorming spaces. We curate people from a whole range of people and try to ask what happens when we get a whole range of disciplines and people with a range of different and reflective minds, and see what happens when we put them all under one roof. We say, “You have a year together, what good can you create in that time?”
It’s been a grand experiment in co-living and experimentation. We’re entering our fourth year of running, it took about a year and half to get things going.
We quickly woke up to the realization that working for a non-profit sucks, it’s not to say that it’s bad to work for one, but it’s tiring to create one, especially one where you’re not relying on traditional sources of incomes like grants and donors. We got into this weird spot of trying to ask ourselves how do we keep doing this work in a financially sustainable way.
Real Estate is a proven industry. There’s For-Dummies books on being a property manager, so we bought those books, and we bought a property and develop an income source while doing what we love. It’s been an evolving.
M: What does your average day look like?
S: The day-to-day changes. There were periods where the day-to-day was painting walls and jacking-up a house. Now my day looks much more in how do we systematize everything. How do we take all this knowledge we’ve acquired, compile it into a couple key manuals, and pass it off to people and empower other individuals to continue to run it. It’s a lot of running with the punches.
M: What has been one of the most surprising lesson you had to learn?
S: I think I’ve found one of the most difficult things to be to learn how to communicate what you’re doing. People, for the most part, understand things that would always been done. Like being a property manager. But with the twist that we bring to the table with the intentional-living aspect to the co.space, it’s very difficult to communicate what exactly we’re doing. We’ve really had to tailor our message to different ways over several years.
M: So what’s next for you?
S: I have lived heavily in the messy creation process and now I’m realizing there’s a lot of value in stepping away. There’s this slippery slope as an entrepreneur where everyone asks you “what’s the next thing you’re going to create?” and I can confidently say I have no idea. I don’t know if it’s going to be a venture, scaling the next co.space, or a book I’m going to write. I have hunches, but there’s really a whole range of possibilities. I’m just trying to create the canvas for that to emerge.
For more about Spud: iamspud.com
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