Kelvin Crosby: 0:06

Welcome to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast. We're not waiting for change, we're investing in it. Join us as we speak with entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are focused on creating a more accessible world.

Kelvin Crosby: 0:32

Hey, so good to see you, even though I can't see you. It's another beautiful day in the neighborhood and I'm so excited that you are here at Investing in Accessibility.

Kelvin Crosby: 0:42

My name is Kelvin Crosby and some people know me as the DeafBlind Potter, and you know, one of the coolest things is when we go through life, we're being molded right, and I think what we're going to realize is the opportunities for people with disability and also the opportunity from an investment standpoint today, how that is going to mold the opportunities in ways that we never realized. And I'm excited about today's guest, because what we're going to realize is that a lot of us don't know some of the data points and how, when you think about including people with disabilities as an investment opportunity, it really is going to transform the world in a whole different way. But before we get to our guest, let me introduce you to my co-host, Chris Maher. How are you doing, man?

Chris Maher: 1:35

Hey Kelvin, how are you, my friend, good to see you.

Kelvin Crosby: 1:38

I'm doing good. So I'm really excited about today's show and I'm not going to hold anybody else back. So I'm going to let you kind of gear us up, get us ready for this.

Chris Maher: 1:50

You got it. I'm super excited about today's show as well, because we, as you said, we're going to get into the numbers, and our guest, I think, has a unique perspective to share some insights as to why investing in accessibility is not just the right thing to do, but it's also good business. And so our guest today is Hale Pulsifer, who is the Vice President of Customer Insights, Inclusion and Advocacy at Fidelity Investments. Welcome, Hale.

Hale Pulsifer: 2:19

Hey, Chris Kelvin, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Chris Maher: 2:22

Oh, it's good to have you here, my friend. A quick aside, you know, I had the good fortune of meeting Hale probably in the last year. We're both members of a disability business network called Profound and had the good fortune of connecting with Hale through that and then we started some conversations outside of that and then when Kelvin and I kicked this podcast off, Hale you were someone that was towards the top of that list that we knew we wanted to have as a guest. So, really excited to have you here today and let's kick things off. And I think where we should start is a little bit about your own personal background and your journey and long career at Fidelity and your connection to disability and accessibility.

Hale Pulsifer: 3:04

Great Thanks. I'd love to do that and again, thank you so much for having me. Conversations like this are so important. There's no shortage of conversations about disability advocacy and disability social justice, but we're not having enough conversations about disability as an economic opportunity. And if you haven't had this conversation before, even calling it that might seem like what is that? Is that exploitative? What is that? And what I see is that it's all really really good news.

Hale Pulsifer: 3:36

I get very excited about it, but I have not been in the disability inclusion space my whole career. For the first 10 years, I was a drummer in a rock band that has nothing to do with any of this stuff. Then I got my master's at Babson, very entrepreneurial school, and entrepreneurship is what's going to get this momentum started in terms of investing in accessibility. Then I went to Fidelity Investments. I've been here for 23, 22, 23 years now, and for the first 16 years or so, I was a corporate finance and strategy guy, and that means budgeting, expense reporting but, best of all, business cases. How do we decide where to invest our money internally. How do you know a good idea from a bad idea? And doing that for years and years and years, I think ultimately was preparing me for something much bigger, which was the day that two things happened. Not the same day, of course, but one is I started working really closely with a guy by the name of Jeff Wissel who has retinitis pigmentosa, losing his vision at work. How can I be a world-class phone rep if I can't read the monitor that tells me my customer balances and positions? And now I'm going to get fired, I'm going to lose my livelihood, like, ah, what's going to happen? I started working closely with Jeff and I started considering disclosing my own connection to disability. But it was Jeff that was really like he was. Jeff was really the thing that got it all going, because Jeff showed me the world of disability-inspired innovation, the world of the hacks that we use when we have disabilities that the rest of the world doesn't know about. You know, with this knowledge came this inspiration. Oh, with a heavy dose of Disability: IN.

Hale Pulsifer: 5:30

I'm a huge fan of Disability: IN and not-for-profit that drives disability inclusion at the corporate level, for both customers and employees alike. All this came together to ask the question what would it be like if we transformed our business model to be disability first, to be disability inclusive, and all of that background manifested into a business case that involved profitability and risk assessments, competitive assessments, and the whole thing boiled down to one recommendation — let's create a very small department focused on making the customer experience awesome for people with disabilities. So, to be clear, you've got accessibility departments, which are critical. Those are table stakes, but there's so much more than just accessibility and that's so. That was the business case and we shopped it around and within a few months, we were co-leading this, this new department, and there's been some iterations since then, but that's basically what I've been doing ever since.

Kelvin Crosby: 6:35

Well, I think the one thing I'm taking away it's disability economics. I mean that has a ring to it that says, "what does that look like?" What can you see from that? And I mean, I guess can you explain to us a little bit more. When somebody said disability and economics, how does that create an empowerment for including everybody and really give people the opportunities to be like wow, there's actually a way to make money this way and to build, cover my bottom line, cover my overhead and make my customers have the best opportunity possible?

Hale Pulsifer: 7:22

I love the question and there's a lot of different ways to answer it. So when I think about investing in accessibility with the companies and trends that I follow like a fundamental enhancement for disability inclusion benefits a lot more people. You know it's called the curb cut effect. It's named after street corners and the little ramp that's there so wheelchairs can glide effortlessly from the street to the sidewalk and the sidewalk to the street. Oh yeah, that's right. I use that ramp too when I've got my rollerboard suitcase, or the UPS driver uses that ramp when he's got the dolly full of the heavy packages. How about push-button doors? It's the same thing. You invest in a push button door that's there by law for somebody with either in a wheelchair or someone with fine motor disabilities or upper body strength issues, but we all use it, right? There are so many examples of that. There's so many more of these disability inspired innovations that have changed the way we do things. And here's where that starts to show up in business. First, let's talk about productivity, profitability.

Hale Pulsifer: 8:31

Accenture did this study focusing on this what happens to companies that are prioritizing disability inclusion and they basically measured this based on what companies were taking the Disability Quality Index and getting a good score. So they took all those companies and they grouped them by industry and they compared them to those in the same industry that were not doing this and they right-sized it. So it was apples to apples Again, this is Accenture. This is a world-class organization known for their consulting and research. What they found is that the companies that were prioritizing disability inclusion were achieving 1.6x more revenue, 2.6x more net income and 2x more economic profit.

Kelvin Crosby: 9:17

Hale, can you say that one more time?

Hale Pulsifer: 9:20

1. 6x more revenue, 2.6x more net income and 2x more economic profit. And those numbers are significantly increased from when they measured this study back in 2018. This just came out a couple years ago, November 2023. So now we're seeing more revenue, more net income and more economic profit, and the one thing these companies have in common is that they're prioritizing disability inclusion, because everything else has been equalized for size, et cetera. And these same firms are also reporting increased problem solving, increased innovation, higher retention rates, lower turnover and 25% higher productivity or revenue per employee. We can include the link to this study in the in the show notes, but it's called The Disability Inclusion Imperative on the Accenture website, right, and like that's just the beginning.

Hale Pulsifer: 10:16

Industries, companies that are realizing we get better results when we do this. That's not why they started doing it. They start doing it because you just know, and now we've got the numbers to quantify what the benefit is. But then what happens now is like now it's a party because we have studies like this, and so other companies that are on the sidelines are looking like oh wow, I've been on the fence about really investing in disability inclusion or I didn't know what it's a thing, and now I'm really going to look into it. And this creates demand for hiring, which creates job opportunities for people with disabilities. Like there's never been a better time in history to be a young person, college educated or not, looking for work and finding some of these disability-inclusive companies.

Hale Pulsifer: 11:02

There's an organization called the Progressive Policy Institute and they did this work called Disability and Changes in the Workplace. And I was talking to the author about this report. I'm like, man, this stuff is great. Where'd you get it? And he said we actually weren't even looking for it. We were looking for something else and we found this disability trend along the way and then had to publish it. But here's what they found. In the period between 2020 and the end of 2023, so it's roughly a four-year period. Total employment during that time grew by about three and a half million jobs. That's fine. That's a typical number during that time. But what's not typical is that over half of that net job creation went to disabled people, so one quarter of the population driving over half of net job growth. That can only happen when you have a significant supply of people with disabilities looking for work and an even larger demand of companies looking for employees with disabilities.

Chris Maher: 12:03

Yeah, that's a staggering statistic that you just said. So over 50% of the net jobs over what? Was that time period? Again, 20 to 2023?.

Hale Pulsifer: 12:14

It was early 2020 to the end of 2023.

Chris Maher: 12:17

Yeah, over 50% of those net new jobs were filled with people with disabilities.

Hale Pulsifer: 12:23

Yes, how do you explain that?

Hale Pulsifer: 12:26

Yeah, and there's a couple of reasons. One is COVID's in there, which means remote work, and remote work turns out to be a lot more amenable to many disabilities than work involving a commute. So you've got that going. We also have remote work unleashing new levels of productivity, because where you have Zoom, you have captions if your employers turn it on. And where you have captions, you have more employment opportunities for people who happen to be deaf, hard of hearing or have learning disabilities, auditory processing disorders, that kind of thing.

Hale Pulsifer: 12:58

Another factor is that in the previous five, six years, whatever you want to call, it there were people who retired because of disability, because the commute and everything it was too much. And now, with COVID and everybody working remote, it created an opportunity for them to return to the workforce and many of them had a career's worth of skills and experience that are really valuable. So you take out the commute and you add this layer of assistive technology and you reintroduce people into the workforce who had to leave because of disability but don't have to anymore. That's how you get such a such a surge.

Chris Maher: 13:36

And so so Hale I mean Accenture put out this report. I mean they're a legitimate organization, right? How is this research not more pervasive across corporate America? Is it just a matter of time? And the second part of that question is the sense I get at Fidelity, when you folks were putting together this group that you run, you know what eight, 10 years ago, leader leadership saw the value. What were those key metrics that really triggered the light bulb that got senior leadership to commit to it. Because I think that's critical for senior leadership buy-in across corporate America to make this a much more pervasive commitment across the industry or across the marketplace.

Hale Pulsifer: 14:33

Yeah, so I'll do the second question first, which is what caused them to buy in? It turns out this is a special place. I love it. I love working here.

Hale Pulsifer: 14:45

The reason I chose to come here so many years ago is that, unashamedly, customer always comes first. We're obsessed with the customer. Even if you work in corporate finance and never talk to customers, we want you to spend one or two days a year going out into the field and listening to phone calls and like just being really in touch with what our customers believe. Disability is a dimension of our customers that we're not paying attention to. And if you love your customers, how useful is it to know a customer's birthday and risk tolerance and ability to pay for services and all these things that we know about our customers? What use is that if we don't also capture that they have interaction preferences that may be driven by a disability? So it doesn't. We're not in the business of tracking who has, you know, RP? But we are in the business of tracking— Do you prefer audio statements or braille statements or large print statements? Do you prefer to have an ASL interpreter? If you really care about your customers, you have to care about these things.

Chris Maher: 15:51

The most recent statistics that I've seen is that one in four adults in the US has a disability, so that's 25% of your customer base. But I think something you just said that's really important that a lot of companies neglect to think about is are the families and friends, the caregivers, the people supporting the person with the disability. When you add them in, that can then become 50 to 60% of the population, of your customer base. That's a really large group.

Hale Pulsifer: 16:22

Yeah,

Kelvin Crosby: 16:23

I think this is something that I want everybody to understand is you look at Wheel the World, if you haven't heard that podcast the go and listen to that, but if also you look at how, when you look at accessibility, and you include both the accessibility part for the person with disability, like what Chris just said, the opportunity with their family members or their friends or loved ones, and you include all of that in, that's more than half of the population, and there's your market, and I think what we're talking about, and I want people to understand this, is that when you include the disability factor, you're essentially solving the world's problems. Becuase the people who are able bodied they don't have anybody in their life at the moment because they're eventually going to have somebody that has a disability, but they still can have access and without barriers themselves, and they can leverage. I mean, just look at the echoes, you know, speak some words out of your mouth and you're set to go.

Hale Pulsifer: 17:41

You're touching on something that was also fundamental to getting this approved, which I'd forgotten about. We're a financial services company, which means retirement around here is a pretty big deal. We need to be a world-class retirement provider. So if we solve for engaging with deafness, hard of hearing and blindness no vision we are also solving for our customers who are aging into disability. So if you're a customer who retires let's say you're 65, you retire, in the next few years you start losing your hearing. What if you learned from your financial services provider about the array of technologies available to you to supplement your hearing or to supplement your vision? Hey, you ever heard of a screen reader? Oh, I mean, imagine if it's your financial services company that's showing you that. Yeah, you know your phone. It has voiceover. You can turn voiceover on and it'll read to you. That part's really cool. I get excited about that.

Kelvin Crosby: 18:33

Yeah, I mean I think this is where I think what I would like to do next is kind of get into some of the numbers here. Where are we seeing growth already? And then, where is the future kind of showing us potential in the near future?

Hale Pulsifer: 19:07

One number that I look at, it's not future looking, it's more recent past, is a study that came out by the American Institutes of Research called "hidden market, and one of the things this study did was it looked at purchasing power and discretionary income for different populations in the United States that are not typically looked at in terms of economic impact. And the study is dated at this point and I've spoken to the authors about refreshing it and maybe they will, but it has not been updated since 2018. So these are some older numbers, but as of 2018, the purchasing power for the disability community was almost $500 billion. It was $490 billion. That's purchasing power for working-age people with disabilities in the United States. And, to put that in perspective, that same number for the Black community is $500 billion and for the Hispanic Latino community is $580 billion. So Latino $580, black $500, disability $490. These are big numbers. This is a big segment and most people don't think about the disability community as a consumer segment and yet very significant after-tax disposable income. Discretionary income, which is, after you've covered all your essential expenses what do you have left over for fun stuff for working-age people? That's $21 billion and that's more than Black and Latino segments combined. Combined. So if you're looking for the non-essential stuff, the disability community is a larger potential market for you, and the reason I'm sharing all this is not because it's a competition, but I'm sharing all this because in recent years we have seen significant investment and a lot of effort in engaging with traditionally underrepresented communities in the United States.

Hale Pulsifer: 20:59

That's where change moves. Starts with corporations and disability. We're relative newcomers to this space, so disability isn't new, but a critical mass of disability in the workforce, that part's new, right, that part's new. To understand this. But if you fast forward from the passing of the ADA to an academic generation which is around 16 years give or take, that gets you to right around 2010-ish. And it was at that point that this steady supply of highly qualified, workforce-ready young people with disabilities entered the market. And most employers didn't know what to do about that just yet. So the supply built and built and built like water behind a dam, and then employers started figuring it out and then the dam kind of started breaking and that led to this flood of people with disabilities into the workforce, which I think has been happening for a while. But it's especially evident in that Progressive Policy Institute number we talked about— over half of net job creation over that four years. We now have more people with disabilities and a voice in the workplace advocating for this stuff. So that's why we're getting so much more attention now than we have in the past, even though it's not as much as I would like.

Chris Maher: 22:20

So Hale with that. Are you optimistic? Because we're coming up on, kind of that second 16-year cycle, so are you optimistic that these trends that we're seeing around the workforce in corporate America will continue to trend in that positive direction?

Hale Pulsifer: 22:54

I am. I think I am optimistic about that and I also have a feeling it's going to start slowing down a little bit. That is to say, growth will continue, but the growth cannot grow at the rate it's been growing at. Companies become awesome at disability inclusion for their employees and for their customers. Engagement with that company, expressed by the number of corporate partners and the number of companies taking the Disability Equality Index, has been growing at 25% per year over the last six years. Per year.

Hale Pulsifer: 23:22

Like, show me what grows at 25 percent per year. This is a party. There are and they have the conference every year in July. And like it's the most exciting time of year for me because you have 3 000 people that are in person, that are all deeply committed to disability inclusion and just relishing in the advances and the successes that have been experienced in recent years. And yes, there's still a long way to go, but there's still a lot to celebrate. It's a very exciting space.

Hale Pulsifer: 23:54

So recent growth trends suggest, yeah, we're going to be seeing this for a while, but you can't sustain 25% growth per year forever. It has to start slowing. And I noticed last year the growth rate dropped to 19%. Who doesn't want 19% growth? Right? So it's starting to slow, right, it's starting to slow, but it's still really impressive growth. The way you know, I think. The way you know that it's really leveling off and it's reached a balancing point, I think, is when the unemployment rate for people with disabilities starts matching the unemployment rate for people without, because that's when you'll know that the barriers to getting jobs and staying in jobs have been removed enough that we're essentially equal populations. But until then, I think disability employment will continue to outpace non-disability employment.

Kelvin Crosby: 24:50

I'd be really interested in that. I'm curious. This is the thing that keeps going on in my mind as more technology is being developed and more access is being developed and more ways are being created, is there spaces where your disability, that we're finding that disability, is just being included and you don't even know that they have a disability because they're able to do their work or they're able to work in the environment and they really don't have to disclose?

Kelvin Crosby: 25:27

I mean, I can give you a perfect example. I was able to go into a company and say, hey, I would love to work for you, and they didn't say anything. Until day four I ran into a wall and they had no idea that I was blind. But I did the job and because I had all the tools already at my fingertips and they were using a Windows computer, so I just used Narrator and do the thing that was already on their system and having that access. So I'd be curious if the flow is really still 25% because but on paper it's only 19, because we're finding new ways, because people are being included in the overall system of employment.

Hale Pulsifer: 26:22

Yeah, I heard a company at Disability: IN refer to accommodations as productivity tools, and the reason I think that's so powerful is that a productivity tool is something like a laptop or a printer. If you don't like reading things on your screen, you can have a printer and printing something on paper may improve your productivity. Well, a screen reader can also be an improvement in productivity. When these are starting to be categorized as productivity tools, they sort of cast a different light on them and they're a lot easier to talk about and easier to come by. But there's other things too happening that are evidence of rapidly evolving inclusion in the workplace and more job opportunities for people with disabilities.

Hale Pulsifer: 27:14

More and more companies these days are having something called a centralized accommodation budget, and here's what that means. If you request an accommodation, it does not hit your cost center or your budget. It's paid for centrally and the implications of that are pretty important. Let's say, if I need an ASL interpreter, every time I need one and I ask for one, it's my cost center that pays for it. Before long, our budget is shot. We can't have that end of year party and we can't hire that summer intern and there's all these things we can't do because I need an ASL interpreter and I don't want to be in that position and my manager doesn't want to be in that position. So when you have a centralized cost center to pay for this stuff, I ask for it, it's granted and it does not affect our expense base as a team at all. That's one innovation.

Hale Pulsifer: 28:07

Another awesome innovation, and Fidelity is one of the first companies to do this incidentally, is having a self-service accessibility marketplace where you can figure out what you need. You can go online and look at the options, you can request it and it's paid for by that centralized cost center and it comes right to you. You don't even need to engage your manager at all if you don't want to. So if for some reason you don't want to disclose your disability, you can go to this self-service website and get your copy of JAWS or Dragon Naturally Speaking or an ergonomic keyboard or whatever it is that you need, and your business unit doesn't pay for it.

Hale Pulsifer: 28:44

Your manager doesn't need to know. All your confidentiality is protected. That creates a layer of safety. It also removes any real or perceived barriers to hiring a person with a disability. Because if you're a manager and you don't know what's going on in this space. You'd be like, hmm, let's see, I've got Kelvin, I've got this other guy. They're equal in every respect, except Kelvin doesn't see as well. That's probably going to be a problem. I'm going to hire this other guy. You take that off the table entirely, because any productivity tool that you benefit from is going to be available to you. Now he doesn't have to wonder about that anymore.

Chris Maher: 29:23

And so, Hale, as we start to wrap things up here, it sounds like Fidelity has been a leader as it relates to accessibility in terms of large corporates, and you threw out the numbers earlier. You're seeing, with disability inclusion and accessibility, you're seeing 1.6x revenue, 2.6x net income, 2x economic profit. What would your, I guess, advice to other large corporates be around disability, inclusion and accessibility and making that commitment?

Hale Pulsifer: 30:07

That's a tough one. That's a tough one because every, every company, like every business enterprise, is at a different place on this journey, and what might be appropriate for company A could be a horrible idea for company C. So I guess, if I could bubble it up as generically as possible, I would say take the Disability Equality Index to find out where you are on the evolutionary spectrum. And engage really deeply with other companies who are serious about this. The easiest place to find them is Disability: IN. The National Organization on Disability has a similar tracker and a similar community. There's places to go, but by engaging with the community you find peers who are more than willing to be helpful on this journey. Disclaimer I don't work for Disability: IN. I don't get any kickback from Disability: IN or anything like that.

Hale Pulsifer: 31:03

They've really influenced the direction of disability inclusion strategy at the company I work for and in my life personally. That's just my experience. I'm just astonished that there hasn't been a 60 Minutes episode about this. And, Chris, you had asked earlier when is the country going to wake up and see this? And the answer is I don't know, but it's here, it's here, it's out there, it's there for people who are paying attention. It's just what's going to get people to pay attention. What's that tipping point going to be? I don't know.

Chris Maher: 31:40

Well, Hale, it has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you and thank you for sharing your insights and the numbers, and certainly shedding light on the fact that investing in accessibility, as we said at the beginning, it's not just the right thing to do, it's also really good and really smart business. So thanks so much for joining us and it's been a pleasure chatting with you and Kelvin, why don't you take us out?

Kelvin Crosby: 32:00

Well, thank you so much for being at Investing in Accessibility. I tell you, after listening to today's show, we're truly molding each company, each investment opportunity into a beautiful piece. It always started a lump of clay and you start shaping it into something beautiful, and investing in accessibility is truly that. We're shaping the world to truly invest in opportunities for people with disabilities and truly make the difference and empower all of us to have equal access to all. Well, like I always say, to wrap up, go live beyond your challenges and we'll see you in two weeks.

Kelvin Crosby: 32:45

Thank you for listening to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast, where we invest in change, for accessibility, not wait for change. If you want to follow us, you can find us on YouTube or LinkedIn at @Samaritan Partners. If you would like to invest in Samaritan Partners, email Chris at chris@samaritanpartners. com. If you'd like to learn more about us, go to www. samaritanpartners. com. You can take the first step in investing in change by giving us five stars and sharing this podcast with everybody that you know, so we can spread the word, so that we can give access to all by Investing in Accessibility.