From Floors to Dreams: Ending Child Bedlessness with Luke Mickelson

These kids that don't have beds, it represents greater than 3% of the population. You know, so if you're in a town, a hundred thousand people, you got 3,000 kids that are either sleeping on the floor, on a couch with multiple kids or their parents. They just don't have a bed of their own. And as we started building more beds, that first season, first Christmas season with my family, we built 22 beds and delivered them all before Christmas. And that was something we were just going to do every year. We're a super fun Christmas project. A lot of my friends were excited to be a part of it. And it just got bigger and bigger every year. Believe it or not, the kids have been sleeping on the floor. They've never had a bed. Teens have never slept on a bed. It just blew me away. Then the first bed delivery I went on, that was my experience. Six-year-old girl been sleeping in the backseat of her mom's car, never had a bed. And when I walked into a room, they finally came out of homelessness. They finally had some transition housing that they were living in. There's not going to be a kid sleeping on the floor in my town. And that kind of turned into our mission statement is no kid sleeps on the floor in our town. And we want our town to be everybody's town. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us Luke Mickelson. Luke is the founder and executive director of sleep in heavenly peace, a volunteer driven nonprofit dedicated to building and delivering handmade fully furnished bunk beds to needy children. Wow. They have delivered 140,000 beds. Welcome to our show, Luke. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. This is wonderful. My friend, this is completely nonprofit. You must have a heart of gold. How did this come about? Well, I don't know. There's one thing that I tell everybody. I'm just a farm kid from Idaho. You got to keep that perspective, but we started back in 2012. I grew up in a small town. So my friends, all of them had either a dairy farm or a regular farm. So I worked for their dads and enjoyed hard work. I enjoyed farm work and then growing up a small town. If you had any athletic ability in your pinky, you were playing sports. Because I graduated with 69 people in my graduating class. So you had to play out sports, which I was really grateful because it taught you how to get up in the morning. It taught you how to stay dedicated to hard times. Yeah, discipline for sure. And it also allowed me to interact with my own students, with students from other schools. I was in student body presidency through all through my high school career, which I found out that I like to talk to people. I like to interact. And I remember, well, not too long after I started my career as an outside salesman, I was at a blackjack table and now I'm not a big gambler, but I remember the dealer looked at me and says, you're a salesman, aren't you? I'm like, gave that away. I don't know. I just had this persona where I just really like to talk to people. And, you know, growing up, I served a mission for my church. So I was out banging doors, talking about a message of joy and happiness to people for two years. And one of my favorite things was to go and meet Brandy. And so I had this growing up, I had this inclination. I was a sports guy. I liked to work. I was going to be a sports medicine guy, then went to athletic training. And then after my mission, I realized, look, my, my joy in life is just talking to people and communicating with them and solving problems for them. And that's perfect for an outside sales guy. But I also enjoyed the whole process of business. I didn't get a degree in it. It wasn't my area of focus at the time, but I really enjoyed the whole building up businesses, the ideas and stuff like that, but what I didn't know is building beds for kids was going to be something I had any aspirations for if you've told me 15 years ago, or even 13 years ago, that I'd be building beds for kids for my career and my legacy or whatever you want to call it, I would have laughed. I would have said, there's, what does that look like? But that's where we're at. In 2012, I was working for a company, been working there for about 18, 19 years. Excuse me, back then it was about, about 12 or 13 years at that time. I ran across this family in my church service that had kids sleeping on the floor and I'd never heard of that before. Right. It just wasn't something that anybody has heard about. And the thought of it, I have kids of my own and the thought of them sleeping on the floor, just, I was like, that was just too much to think about. And I said, you know what, here's a great opportunity. I was a part of the young men's program at the time, which is ages 12 to 17. It was all the young men in the congregation and we did activities. Mostly Boy Scouts is what the activity was, but I took these boys and said, Hey, you know what, why don't we solve this problem for these kids? What if we actually built them a bed? It's a great opportunity to take Boy Scouts and let's get an Xbox controller out of their hands, get them out behind a screen and let's put a drill in it and teach them something. And we did that. It was such a fun experience, Shahid, that I was surprised that these 12 year old kids, they were excited about doing something other than playing video games. And that, that kind of one took me by surprise. And number two, it was actually really fun to do, to actually build it. I never built a piece of furniture before in my life. And so we did, and then we delivered it. Now I didn't get to go on the delivery. The boys did, but I heard how, what an amazing experience it was and how the kids react and how the parents reacted. And I was bummed that here, I went through this, the process of building a bed, but didn't get the joy from delivering it and being that it was around Christmas time and my kids were fairly young at the time, but old enough to learn the value of service and stuff and such, I said, you know what? Let's build another bed. I wanted them to feel the experience too. And so that's what we did. So I had some leftover wood and I said, let's go out in the garage. And we started slapping wood together and cutting and sanding and staining and doing all that. And then at the end of the day, I have this bunk bed and I had no idea what to do with it. We threw it on Facebook of someone in the, my Facebook land, if you will. Someone, if they, if you know of a child that's sleeping on the floor, let me know, I've got a bunk bed for them. And I wanted to give it to a child, but just a lot of these kids, mostly all of these kids really get put in these situations, not because of their decisions or their actions, the actions of others, right? And so I wanted to uplift their life and bring them something a little bit, a little bit more joy. That's certainly a better night's sleep for them. And that's what we did. And so what I didn't realize was a, how bad child bedlessness really is. It's probably the, one of the most unknown issues in our country today involving the growth potential and the success, quite frankly, of these kids that don't have beds. It's such a first time hearing. Yeah, sure. I bet it is. It represents greater than 3% of the population, you know? So if you're in a town, a hundred thousand, you got 3,000 kids that are used to sleep on the floor, on a couch with multiple kids or their parents. They just don't have a bed of their own. And as we started building more beds, that first season, first Christmas season with my family, we built 22 beds and delivered them all before Christmas. And that was something we were just going to do every year. We're a super fun Christmas project. A lot of my friends were excited to be a part of it. And it just got bigger and bigger every year, mostly because we found that the need was bigger. More kids would email us or more families rather said, Hey, I know a family over here, this family, believe it or not, the kids have been sleeping on the floor, they've never had a bed. Teen years, teens have never slept on the floor or never slept on a bed. It just blew me away. Then the first bed delivery I went on, that was my experience. Six-year-old girl been sleeping in the backseat of her mom's car. Never had a bed. And when I walked into a room, they finally came out of homelessness. They finally had some transition housing that they were living in. And her room was just, she slept on her clothes. It was just a nest in the corner of her clothes. And it was so overwhelming to see that. And then to see the mom who's just, just crying the last six years of trying to provide for her daughter, safety and security and things of that nature. And she can't get a bed. She can feed her, but she can't get a bed to her. It was such a neat experience. And I was raised by a single mom too. So it really hit home for me. I just remember going home after that delivery going, you know what? There's if I have anything to do with it, there's not going to be a kid sleeping on the floor in my town. And that kind of turned into our mission statement is no kids sleeps on the floor in our town. And we want our town to be everybody's town. And so here we have this major need that no one knows about and we're learning more and more about it and how big the problem really is, but no real big solution. But I only knew of one charity back in 2013, one charity across the whole country that did beds. It was actually in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is where I live now. And they were only servicing kind of the small Charlotte area, a couple of hundred beds a year. I knew what we needed to do, which is provide a platform or an avenue for people that have the same desire of getting kids off the floor, how can they do it in their own area, in their own town? And so really that's, that's the process, the program that we put together, training people how to become a chapter president in their own area. We take on, we as in the headquarters, if you will, of sleep and have the keys, we take on all the registration, all the IRS and taxes and insurance and all that administration stuff out of their hands. They just check the presence, just focusing on building, delivering and raising money for the kids in their own community. So it's worked, it's worked great. We've went from that one chapter in 2012. So now we have soon to be over 350 chapters trained nationwide. And we just passed our 150,000 bed bill. So we're super excited. Yeah. It's like franchise for a nonprofit. Yeah. Very similar. We, and some of it, to be honest with you, we just fell into a dumb luck. I didn't know what, I knew what a charity was, but I didn't know what a 5-1-C-3 was and what you had to have a board of directors. I don't know what that looks like. And it's just a rollercoaster, right? And luckily along the way, I just, I brought a lot of friends with me, a very successful business, successful friends and a combination of their business mind and mind and our entrepreneurial desires. We've put this program and this organization together, and it's now the largest bed building charity in the world. In the world. Yeah. We build now the one charity I spoke of earlier. Um, they build about 1,200, 1,300 beds a year. Sleep In Heavenly Peace, we build our goal this year, which I think we'll get pretty easily is 50,000 beds. So we built quite a few beds in our 330 plus, 350 plus chapters. So any other country, anywhere in the world could join this. That's right. So we, outside of the United States, it's a little bit of a process to, because we're in four countries. We're in, of course, the United States, Canada, Bermuda, and Bahamas. And anytime you get outside of the United States, there's obviously there's some laws and restrictions of things that take a while to get to overcome and get through. And really when we get asked all the time, can you come to Africa? Can you come to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti? We get asked all the time to come there. And we have this little criteria where look, what we'd rather do, um, is come to that location, find someone that wants to continue the process and continue the program, teach them how to do it. And then when we leave, we'll support them with marketing and education and all that. But we want them to continue the program in their country. Kind of, I'd rather go down there and set a fish for them, teach them how to fish. And so that's been a challenge, at least not in the other three countries, but in some of these other countries. In fact, I just got off a meeting about some people, an organization that wants to build beds in Guatemala. And we're trying to work out how we can put those pieces together, where we can find someone locally that can put, take on as a chapter, organize some builds, work with the local government to get registered as a nonprofit and, and then they can support themselves. So you people sending money, like charities, is that how it works? You're not self-funded, right? No. Yeah. We, a majority of our funding, probably 60, what was it? 64%, something like that of our funds come from individuals, people that support their local chapters. And then the rest is either companies, organizations that put on bills for us, or grants where we only have about 10% of our income comes from grants, but most of the time, what happens is, and the way we organize this, it's actually one of those dumb luck things we settle into is we had to look at this as a business, and if I give any nonprofit that's trying to grow advice is you got to look at this as an organization, your organization as a business, because that's exactly what it is. The only difference, you're not paying taxes. So if you're not, if you're expending more than you have income, you're going to be out of business. If you don't plan for growth, you're not going to grow. And so when we put together this program, we knew that a, we had to keep our expenses down. We don't want to operate. I think the national average right now is 32% of your dollar. When you donate to a nonprofit actually goes to administration. So only 68% actually goes to the program. SHB operates at 10% with a goal to stay around between 10 and 15%. And we do that every year. It's not easy to do, but we feel it's very important to keep our sacred dollars in the communities that, that want it there. When I started this idea, I didn't want it to be some big nonprofit. That was never the goal. It was just to try to support as many kids as I could. But when people wanted to donate, forced us in to be a nonprofit, which was great. But I knew that I had enough business sense to realize, okay, we have to put bigger, a program where we can grow, where this will, this will be sustainable. And so now we have a certain dollar figure. It's $250 for every bed that an organization may want to build. And of course that takes care of everything. Mattress sheet said delivery of the bed, the whole nine yards. And it allows the organization or rather the chapter there to be able to grow. So we, what's the minimum? The minimum is $250. So anyone can donate $250 minimum. And if it's a business, an entrepreneur that wants to be part of this, is there a minimum, any different minimum or is the same $250? Oh, no, no, no. Let me clarify. You can donate $5. It will take any donation. That's a great thing. And this wasn't easy to come about and it's pretty unheard of, but in SHP and sleeping on a piece, if you want to donate $5, you could actually pick whichever chapter in the whole organization that you want that money to go to. So let's say you live in California and your sister or friends got problems in Florida and you want to donate to that chapter, you can select that chapter and your donation goes there. All we take is of course, like an administration, because we have to pay for insurance and taxes and registration of vehicles and all that jazz. Do that on the headquarter side. And the way we do that is we try to fundraise as well, but we pull 10% of all donations. So if a chapter, if you donate a thousand dollars to a chapter, we take a hundred of that and that's it. The rest of the 900, that 10, that 90% stays in the chapter. And it's even a little bit higher than that because the chapter still has expenses. They don't pay for their own insurance. They don't pay for their own registration. They do that. That 10% covers that stuff. Correct. Yep. It also covers some of the platforms that we use to receive donations. It's like 2.7%. Yeah, exactly. So you donate a hundred bucks and $2.07 just has to be paid for that. 10% pays for that. So really it's greater than that for the chapters that retain it. Good. So Luke, if an entrepreneur wanted to start something similar and they get an idea from this episode and say, Hey, you know what I want to give back? Is there any kind of tips you can share initially? What are the first few steps that they should take? Obviously to figure out what they want to do, right? Obviously they could choose to open up a chapter with you, but if it's some other passion they have, once they know that passion, what would you recommend they should do initially with your experience? I still run several other businesses too. I just have that desire for entrepreneurship. I started an ax throwing company. I started a property management company. Oh yeah. Just some fun stuff. I just like to build it and I'll queue to sell them or whatever. Yeah. You hit the nail on the head. The first thing you got to have is passion. You got to love this. And the reason why it's because you probably won't get paid for a while, at least initially. Okay. How do you get paid? So my salary comes out of part of that. Oh, do you have a salary? Okay. No profit, but you get a salary. Got it. Correct. Yeah. We're sleeping on a piece this year will be, we anticipate about 16 million in donations. And so we run a staff of about 15 full-time members and then another 30 that are kind of like an art time here and there, 500 bucks a month. So just mostly a volunteer organization. And that's just a bit at the headquarters. All our chapter presidents, they're all 100% volunteer on their level. You can't run a that big of an organization with 300 chapters, a thousand members, if you will, without paying someone to pull back. I do this 24 seven for sure. But you're right. You got to have passion for it first. And then the second thing is, and I'll speak more towards a nonprofit is that's really my wheelhouse, right? It is just understanding that you set this up for success knowing, and I guess every business is the same way. You set your, your success up prior to knowing you got to plan for growth. You got to plan for that and understand that when you're the boss and you're the entrepreneur, that's the hardest job that's going to be in the organization. You're the first one up. You're the last one home, that kind of stuff. So that, and that's where the passion comes in. It becomes very easy when it's what you really want to do. You fall in love with that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then of course you follow the, all the registration that needs to go into either starting a business or putting pen to paper and putting the other business. And I'll tell you what, I've always felt like any business you put in front of me will, will make it successful in one way or another. Now it might not be millions of dollars. It might be hundreds of dollars, but you can make it successful. You just have to stick to it and not be afraid of making, making those decisions. It's funny. I read a book by Simon Sinek called beat leaders, eat last. And it's amazing book talking about the focus and management style of those that are successful and those are not. And then he also does a Ted talk about the success of a leader and what, where leaders are most successful. And it's really interesting. He talked about if I could plagiarize them just a little bit. He talked about how most companies work from a three, he put three circles on the board, one outside, middle, and inside circles. He said the outside of the circle is the, how the middle of the circle is the, what or excuse me, the outside of the scrolls is the, what the middle of the circle is how and inside the circles of why. And most organizations, most companies work from the outside in, they tell you this is what we do and this is how we do it. And this is why, but the successful companies. And he talked about, he gave an example of Apple. He gave an example of the Wright brothers, the Wright brothers. Everybody knows that the Wright brothers is a grandfather of airplanes, right? And aeronautics and things of that nature. There's a lot of people that were in that realm trying to solve the same thing they were. But they had all the money in the world. They had all the backing, they have all the engineering in the world, but the Wright brothers didn't have any of that. They were, they were formerly educated. They paid for this out of their bicycle shop, but why do you know their name versus someone else? It was because they worked from the inside out. They worked from the why they told everybody why first, and that was their passion. Then they came to how are we going to make this? Why work? What are we going to do to make the wall, how it works so we can get to the why. And, and that's, I can 100% agree. That's how I was sleeping in the east. That's why we're so successful is because not just me, but the people that are involved with our organization, they're there for the why they're not there for a paycheck at first, anyways, they're not there to make money. They're there for the why. And a nonprofit, that's normally how it goes, right? Only nonprofits that aren't successful either have problems with mission creep or they get away from really what the why is. And so, I don't know if that's really helpful. I just know that learning a lot that you want to start your own company, want to start something, man, start with the why, why are you there? Why do you want to buy this? And that really comes back to the passion. It resonates with me because I always feel that our business is a lot more successful when it's driven by heart. And that comes back to why, right? And when you have a heart, there's just so much energy and there's something about it when you do business from that place, not just trying to get the numbers, but you just, you're going from that place. It just seems that the success is so much more easier as well. And the work that you do doesn't feel like work. If you think about it, and I was an outside sales for almost 20 years. And I found people like confidence. They like confidence in the product and they're going to, they're only going to feel confidence in a product based on the salesman, right? You can fake confidence, but if you don't have to fake confidence, if you're passionate about what you're selling or doing this, it's natural. That's right. And people are like, oh my gosh, this guy's going to provide curbing for me for my flower beds. And he told me everything about it and he knows the ins and outs and he's got me excited. It's such an easier sale. Yeah. And that's why the passion, that's the first thing. It might be the biggest thing. Yeah. It's biggest thing, I think. Yeah, for sure. I agree with you, Luke. Oh man, it's been amazing speaking to you about what you're doing. It was a pleasure. It was an honor to have you on. I'm definitely proud to be able to promote this and get more and more people involved and help you get this message out. And also I appreciate that you agreed to help us promote your episode on your network as well. We, we make a bigger impact together. So it's really much appreciated. Thank you so much again. I appreciate your time and definitely keep in touch. Please. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. And if anybody is interested in learning more about Sleep and Emily Peace and our history, please go to our website, shpbeds.org. You can donate, you can learn about your local chapter. You can start a chapter. We, it'll change your life. Seeing these kids and what we provide for them. It's life changing. So thank you for having me on. No problem. Audience. Thanks again for joining us for another episode. Luke's information will be in the show notes as always. His website, all the information you just shared in case you didn't get a chance to write it down. Definitely just look in the notes and you'll be able to grab that information. Get in touch. See if it's something that you can add on because we all have that passion. We all have that desire to help in entrepreneurship. The most successful ones are the ones that are finding a solution for a because they care enough to help. So this is another way to do it. And you can see Luke is a great guy and definitely get in touch with them to see how he can help, or he can help you. So thanks again. And thank you, Luke. Appreciate it.