Libby Kimzey | Capital Good Fund, chief operating officer RISING STAR
As many founders know, finding someone to operate the day-to-day of your organization so that it doesn’t fall apart when you’re not there, or to deal in the details while you focus on the big picture, can be difficult. But when you do find the right person and you build the right relationship with her, it can take your organization to new heights. That’s what Capital Good Fund CEO Andy Posner found, ever since Libby Kimzey became chief operating officer two years ago.
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“I don’t worry about that which she oversees, which is the operation of the organization,” Posner said. “I don’t have to think about it. Arguably, she’s the reason we’re successful. … I come up with the ideas, and she comes up with the ways to carry them out.”
Founded in 2009, the Providence nonprofit provides equitable financial services that create pathways out of poverty for its clients. Under Kimzey’s guidance, the organization’s revenue has grown 78 percent – from $731,000 in 2014 to $1.3 million in 2016 – and expanded its product offerings and reach.
After five years with Capital Good Fund, Kimzey found the organization in a tough spot when she became COO in 2015: low on cash and overextended staff and programs. She made difficult choices to get back on track, including layoffs, ending programs and reducing work hours.
As a way forward, she created a complex, 10-year plan outlining how the organization would become fully sustained by the interest and fees of the loan portfolio and not dependent on outside philanthropy. In 2016, the plan was implemented, along with a direct public offering, which pays simple interest up to 7.5 percent to individual and institutional investors.
“The projections that she spearheaded are what allow me to go to investors and say, ‘This is how we know we’ll be able to pay you back,’ ” Posner said.
By 2016, Kimzey had created 10 new full-time positions and had done extensive market research, identifying Florida and Maryland as strategic markets for expansion.
“Our mission is to basically compete with payday lenders. We started looking at where payday lenders were most present,” she said, where people are most in need of the services, “but regulations at the state level permit some really damaging practices.”
The creation of new products has been key to growth. Posner said that after he and Kimzey attended a workshop about providing auto loans to people with low incomes and bad credit, he saw an opportunity that fit the organization’s mission and was in line with the 10-year-plan, which required doing larger loans than they had done in the past. Kimzey crunched the numbers and created a pilot program in late 2015, overseeing the first few loans herself.
“From a business model, it’s our most important,” Posner said. “And on a dollar basis, it’s about half of our loans.”
Kimzey’s planning and foresight also helped Capital Good Fund cut a deal with its landlord, Armory Management Co., to renovate office space to add 10 rooms and two restrooms that the organization will lease as new hires fill the space this year.
“They bought into the mission and they wanted to partner with us,” Kimzey said, adding that the company also made substantial furniture donations.
Not one to rest on her laurels, Kimzey is especially focused on building the immigration programs.
“Capital Good Fund’s very first loan helped a woman get U.S. citizenship,” she said. “We’re trying to build on that in a really dramatic way to do $1.5 million in immigration loans in the next couple years, with a focus on more-complicated cases that do require expensive legal work, but really impact a family’s safety and security.”
Kimzey is driven to help others by her own good fortune and the fact that not everyone is so lucky.
“I didn’t choose the opportunity I was born into, but I do think that comes with a responsibility to create opportunities where they currently don’t exist for other people.”
