The year before he found a home at The Impact Guild, Jack Pidgeon flew 150,000 miles and spent 160 nights in hotels, meeting with clients across the United States. When his daughter was born, his Pittsburgh-based company, Connors Group, offered him the option to settle down and work on the software side of the business. Now able to spend more time at home in San Antonio, The Impact Guild has become his place to land.
Growing up, Jack wanted to be an aeronautical engineer and design airplanes for Boeing, until a co-op program in college introduced him to the field of industrial engineering. He fell in love with the work and hasn’t looked back since. A self-proclaimed neat freak, he laughingly describes industrial engineering as “organization on steroids.” As a consultant for Connors Group, he helps companies optimize how their work forces operate.
“Right now, I work on implementing scheduling solutions for companies. You can take a retailer with a thousand stores that needs to know how to put the right employees in the right place at the right time, and then work around the work-life balance of those employees… I like that [these systems] allow employees to take control of their lives, while also allowing organizations to remain efficient,” he explains.
“I love to solve problems,” he says. “I just really like to get my hands dirty. That’s why I love my job, because I get to do that every day.”
Jack got a chance to apply his passion for solving problems at The Impact Guild last summer, when he took a human-centered design class with some other members. Human-centered design is a “holistic approach to design [that] takes inspiration from real people, works within market and technological constraints, and considers every product touch-point as an opportunity to surprise, delight and deliver benefits to users” (Dave Thomsen, Wanderful Media). For Jack, it gave him a new way to look at the problems he was solving in his job, while also applying a social impact lens to it.
His experience investing with Kiva microloans has also given him an opportunity to reframe his thinking around problem-solving and social impact. “Sometimes I think I start to think of the most technical way I can solve an issue, and there are so many people out there who just need to get their foot in the door with a very simple business that provides a lot of value to the community,” he reflects. “I think with Kiva, you start to think about what are the basic needs of the community, without my thought process of ‘let’s solve the most technical problem.’”
The community he’s found at The Impact Guild has also helped him think about problems and solutions in new ways. He says that his favorite part of working out of The Impact Guild is the variety of conversations he gets to witness and engage in.
“It’s hard not to overhear things, and it’s hard to not want to be involved… I just love that I’m surrounded by people who write for an LGBTQ magazine or people who work in faith-based organizations. And then there’s people who work in schools, and there’s people who work in social media. There’s just so many things going on here, and it really opens my mind to a lot of different things.”
Most recently, Jack has gotten involved in Brew the Booch, our summer learning club on brewing kombucha.
“All my coworkers are super jealous that I get to work here. They see my posts on Instagram and my posts on LinkedIn, and they all wish they had a place like this,” he says.
Learn more about how we as a community of entrepreneurs give back to the global community through Kiva Microloans here.