April 9, 2025
Miren Oca
Connect with Miren and Ocaquatics Swim School at:
- Website – ocaquatics.com
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/ocaquatics/
- Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Ocaquatics/
- Ocaquatics LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/ocaquatics-swim-school/
- Miren’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/miren-oca-80561261/
Miren Oca: 0:01
We are different and we make a difference.
Announcer: 0:06
Welcome to Agency for Change, a podcast from KidGlov that brings you the stories of changemakers who are actively working to improve our communities. In every episode, we’ll meet with people who are making a lasting impact in the places we call home.
Lyn Wineman: 0:35
Hey everyone, Welcome back to the Agency for Change podcast. I’m Lyn Wineman, President and Chief Strategist at KidGlov, and when I think of today’s guest, I think of that movie, Finding Nemo, and the line just keep swimming, because it’s the perfect way to describe my friend and changemaker, Miren Oca. Miren is the founder and the CEO of Ocaquatic Swim School in Florida. She has built more than a successful business. She has truly built a movement. From teaching thousands of swim lessons each week to becoming the world’s first B Corp certified swim school to recently transitioning to 100% employee ownership. Miren leads with purpose, she leads with heart, and she leads with a steady forward stroke. So let’s dive in, Miren. Welcome to the podcast.
Miren Oca: 1:29
Thank you, it’s great to be here today, thank you.
Lyn Wineman: 1:32
I am so happy to talk to you, Miren. You and I know each other and we get to see each other at least virtually occasionally, but I’d love to have you tell our listeners more about this great organization you’ve created called Ocaquatics Swim School.
Miren Oca: 1:47
Well, thank you. Ocaquatics is now over 31 years old. We started in 1994. I was 22 years old and I was in college, actually and honestly. I was working my way through college. I was getting my degree in biochemistry, I was going to go to medical school, I was going to become an orthopedic surgeon and I found out I was pregnant.
Lyn Wineman: 2:12
Oh, that changes things right.
Miren Oca: 2:15
It does. So I pivoted. I did graduate and I did get my degree, but I thought you know I’ll go to medical school later. I opened this little swim school just to kind of get by until my son was older. He was a year and a half old when I started the school.
Lyn Wineman: 2:31
So you are a 22 year old new mom, single parent yes, entrepreneur like any one of the, and you were finishing your degree. Any of those things is creates a lot of stress in somebody’s life. How did you do it, Miren?
Miren Oca: 2:49
Well, I think I was young, I had extra energy maybe, but I also it was. It was kind of you know I don’t want to use this word lightly, but it was kind of survival. Yeah, I need to make a living, I needed to put food on the table, so it was one of those you just put one foot in front of the other and kept on going. And it was a great business. It was fun. I really loved what I was doing. I love teaching swimming and you know I got a lot of fuel from helping the children in the water and then starting to hire people, and so it was. It was a lot of fun too.
Lyn Wineman: 3:17
Wow, that’s fantastic. I think that’s an adage in entrepreneurship, Miren. Like it’s like you can’t have one foot on the dock and one foot on the shore, right, I think? And that’s the perfect analogy for you, because you literally just had to keep swimming, right
Miren Oca: 3:28
I had to dive into entrepreneurship and I kind of had to learn it as I went, because, as a 22-year-old, my parents were immigrants and they’d moved to this country and they became business owners. So they owned restaurants. Food was amazing and the businesses were not because, yeah, good business skills either, and so I didn’t want to go into business. I did not think that that was going to be my calling. So now I found myself in business, but I really wanted to figure out a way to do it differently. So my son and I spent a lot of time in bookstores and libraries and I read everything I possibly could. I couldn’t afford to buy the books, so we read our books together and I learned and now what you can see behind me I have a ton of books and we read books on our leadership team, but I really have learned the majority from just reading, from listening to podcasts, talking to people and really just nothing from school it’s all been from self-learning.
Lyn Wineman: 4:31
I love your story, Miren, and actually people won’t be able to see you because this is a podcast. But in addition to books, what I can see behind you is a lot of awards and accolades and things about your community and I’m curious could you just go into a little bit why the work you do at Ocaquatics is so important to the community and the families that you serve?
Miren Oca: 4:55
Sure so you know we do great work. It’s really fun and it’s rewarding, but it’s also a necessary life skill. So we teach swimming and water safety to families in South Florida, and you know it’s really important because, unfortunately, drowning is the leading cause of accidental death in children ages one to four in the United States and it’s very, very high in the state of Florida because we have water everywhere there are pools, lakes, canals, yeah, water everywhere. So we we’re, you know we really focus on the work that we do because it is so important. But the National Institutes of Health have reported that children who participate in formal swimming lessons are 88% less likely to be involved in a drowning incident. So we take our work very seriously, we take ourselves very lightly, so we sing and dance and play and have a great time. We want to make sure it’s a positive environment for the children and we have a lot of fun while we’re providing these life-saving skills, and that’s really important to us.
Lyn Wineman: 5:57
That’s amazing. So, Miren, I’m in Nebraska, you’re in South Florida. I have two grandkids. It’s unlikely I’m going to get them to one of your swim schools. What’s the perfect age to start your grandkids or kids in swimming lessons?
Miren Oca: 6:11
Well, we start them at six months.
Lyn Wineman: 6:13
Wow, six months. Okay, we’re behind a little bit, but we can catch up.
Miren Oca: 6:18
There’s a ton of access to water here, so it is really important they start early. But it is such a fun activity and the earlier you start, the better they’re going to do, so I would encourage you to look at your area and see. You can look up us.swimschools.org. That is a really great website with a lot of member type swim schools. I’ve been a part of that organization for over 30 years and you might find something in your area that that is a member, a member school.
They’ll guide you on what ages they start, but children can start young.
Lyn Wineman: 6:52
Wow, that’s great advice. Thank you for that. So, Miren, you’ve become kind of famous in the last year. I’ve seen you in lots of national articles and on podcasts and speaking engagements. But you have transitioned your business to 100% employee ownership, which I think is really a neat thing to do. But I’m curious what inspired you to do this, and what can you tell us about this arrangement?
Miren Oca: 7:18
Well, yes, it has been quite an eventful. So I, you know, when I hit about the 25 year in business, I really we just celebrated 31 years at the beginning of the year. I never, ever thought I would be here. You know, when I’m thinking back to that day I found out I was pregnant.
But around the 25 year mark in business, I started to think, okay, what, what is next? What am you know? What is the succession plan? And my son had been working in the business for about 14 years and he was amazing. He was great. He had chlorine in his blood. That’s what we used to say Chlorine in his blood. He was good at every position. He really loved the work that we do as a certified B corporation, as a member of 1%, you know all of that. But he didn’t want to run mom’s business.
So at that point, you know, we were being approached by private equity a lot and I just started thinking, okay, what is next? What are we going to do? And I really thought I wanted to get it into the hands of my employees. So I spent a couple of years researching ESOPs, employee stock ownership plans, co-ops, doing it myself, DIY, you know, phantom stock or you know stock appreciation rights. I started looking at every possible thing I could do and I was talking to a CEO of a company and he mentioned that he had just heard of an EOT and I, when I heard that and I heard all the different parts about it, I thought this sounds intriguing. So I jumped into that and I researched it.
There were only 50 in the United States when we did our transaction, but it is a perfect fit for us. It’s really, really great and I have no regrets moving forward with this model.
Lyn Wineman: 9:06
I love that you have just dropped a lot of acronyms on us too. I wrote down ESOP, co-op, diy, which we all know, EOT. So tell me more about EOT. What does that stand for? What does it mean?
Miren Oca: 9:19
The EOT is an employee ownership trust and it’s trust ownership, just like an ESOP, an employee stock ownership plan, but instead of being a retirement benefit plan, it is a profit-sharing plan. So at the end of every year after all, the debts are paid. After all of you know you save money for whatever you’ve decided in your trust. We have an account where we put money aside for reserves. We have put money aside for capital improvements. We put money aside for different things.
All the rest of the profit is shared amongst the team members that qualify, so amongst the employees that qualify and the trust is extremely flexible you can decide how employees qualify to be. So you can decide how employees qualify to be owners. You can decide, you know what happens if the company is sold down the line. You can decide all sorts of things like that. So in our trust, we put that our team members become an employee owner after they’ve hit 2,500 hours worked. So that’s about 15 months of full-time or 30 months of working 20 hours a week, part-time. So you can be part-time and be an employee owner at Ocaquatics. It’s very unique it’s very different and we actually counted hours worked when we did our transaction. So right now we have 50 co-owners wow yeah, and we have some that are part-time and I am a co-owner just like everybody else.
Lyn Wineman: 10:46
That’s awesome, Miren. One of my favorite things that I’ve seen on social media this year is Ocaquatics had a post of your employee owners opening up their profit sharing bonuses right, and they were smiling. They were definitely smiling.
Miren Oca: 11:04
Yeah, that is a fabulous post. I really love that post. The team put that together Because when we, when I originally announced, I didn’t tell anybody I was doing this, and when we announced we transacted on March 1, I announced on March 3, 2024. And when we announced, everybody was a little confused and then they kind of had some shock. And then, you know, they got pretty happy.
But I explained to them that it costs quite a bit to put this in action and it’d be a few years where they would not receive large profits. And so they asked how much? What do you think? And I told them you know, you might get $17 in your first year. And when they opened their, you know, when they got their their, what they actually were going to get their profit share at the end of the year it ended up being about 4% of their salary. It was a nice surprise. It was a really nice surprise. And the way we’ve chosen to do it is they get half of it in a check and half of it goes into their 401k. So helping with retirement benefit planning, but also money that they need right now to pay for groceries and to pay for rent and Miami is a tough town to live in right now Very expensive. So we feel like this was the best of both worlds, helping them plan for retirement while giving them extra funds right now.
Lyn Wineman: 12:27
Miren, when you said that, I was definitely thinking the social media post. I remember the people looked way happier than $17. So congratulations on being able to do that. So I’m really curious what impact have you seen since going to the employee ownership model?
Miren Oca: 12:40
Well, I think a lot of people ask me if suddenly now our team members act like owners. We had actually been working on this for years before we transitioned to employee ownership. So we have a culture of ownership. And we call it our own it culture and we really want our team members to feel to own their decisions, to own their mistakes, to own the results, own their decisions, to own their mistakes, to own their, the results of their work, and we want them to feel like they have a part in what we’re doing at Ocaquatics. So we’ve been working on this for years and we use that word own it all the time, throw that word around all the time. So when we actually did the transaction and when they found out about it, they were like, oh, now I get it.
Lyn Wineman: 13:24
This makes sense. You know one thing I know about you and I think we’ve once again only known each other for a little over a year now, if that. But you are very intentional about what you do and I can see that in this and I really, really appreciate it.
Miren Oca: 13:42
Yes, well, one of the things that I was going to back up and let you know that we actually two years, or actually three years ago now, we started. We worked a lot on personal financial literacy with our team members and helping them own their personal finances, helping them understand them, and then, once they gain confidence in their personal finances, we opened our books and so we practiced open book management for two full years before we transitioned to employee ownership. That was really good, because once now they really look at the financials in a different you know they look at them differently. It’s their money, so they help us manage expenses, they help us bring in enrollments, they’re super motivated to okay how are we doing against the forecast and they are really focused on, you know, statistics and our dashboards and everything. So that has really helped a lot.
Lyn Wineman: 14:32
I know there’s a lot of business owners and executive directors right now that are thinking oh my goodness, what does that feel like to completely open your books? I mean, what was that like, Miren?
Miren Oca: 14:45
Well, we started gradually, very, very gradually, you know, we again we started with personal finances, making sure they understood you know how to budget for their personally, and then how it related to a business and how personally you get your paycheck and the taxes are already taken out. In a business, you see all the money and ins and outs and expenses and then you pay taxes at the end. We started on basic lessons like that. First I think we did a little bit. Every week we would introduce a little lesson, a little theory, and then we would show them our income and expenses. We are somewhat seasonal, so we do have this rollercoaster In July, august, we get a lot more money, and then in December, January, february, it’s pretty quiet, you know, or not quiet.
So it’s, it’s, we have higher expenses without the amount of enrollment. So we were teaching them about restoring nuts for winter and the summer. We’re storing nuts for winter. We’re storing nuts for winterEvery week we introduced a different idea, a different concept and just gradually they built and built, and built. And I think that if you did it all at once and opened it up, they wouldn’t understand it’s, the numbers are too big to really grasp. But if you do little by little and we started with enrollments, you know what can we do to get five more enrollments a week? Or are percentages full in the classes? That was another big lesson. You know, if we operate 50% full, it’s not as profitable if we are 85% full. You know things like that. So we introduced those concepts and we don’t share salaries but we pretty transparent pay scale. We don’t have any big secrets on the, on the, in the pay scale. So, but other than that, everything else is. They get to see it now.
Lyn Wineman: 16:36
Yeah, and what I heard you say too, it’s something that you worked up towards you. You worked up to getting yourself ready, you worked up to getting the team ready. It wasn’t just one day you came in and said let’s open this up and share it out.
Miren Oca: 16:50
And that’s what people think. When you become an employee-owned company, it’s a light switch that you turn on and suddenly everybody feels like an owner. It’s not going to happen, even if you’re sharing a lot with them. It’s overwhelming. You have to do it in baby steps, At least for our team. That was our experience.
Lyn Wineman: 17:09
That was our experience and it’s gone really, really well. Well, congratulations to you. I love how you value and appreciate your team. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if you know this or not, and once again we’re on a podcast. Most people won’t be able to see this, but your eyes light up, Miren, when you talk about your team members, and I really appreciate that about you. One of the things that we referenced this this beautiful bookshelf that’s behind you and people can picture plaques and accolades but one of the things that’s over your shoulder that I’m looking at is your certified B Corp plaque, and I know that you are the world’s first B Corp certified swim school. You might even be the only one, I think, but tell me what that means to you and your organization to be B Corp certified.
Miren Oca: 17:53
Yes, I mean, it was a huge. We were so excited when we received certification. Again, we worked on it for several years. Yeah, I was first introduced to B Corp certification in 2016. And we worked on it. We took our you know, we did the B impact assessment and of course we, you know, scored like a 50 get an 80 to get certified, but it gave us some really great tools to work on. And the B impact assessment. We encourage all businesses, even if you don’t want to get certified. It just gives you so many ideas on how you can get better and how you can become more, more energy efficient and how you can be better for society and better for your community and better for your team members. So we did that. We worked on it gradually. We created a little B impact team at work where they worked on it with us and we got certified in three years ago and now we’re actually in recertification.
Lyn Wineman: 18:44
Okay, all right, we just recertified mid-year last year, so it’s good luck. It’s rigorous for anybody doing it. It’s definitely worthwhile, but it’s not just something that they hand out like candy.
Miren Oca: 19:00
It’s hard and I think it’s getting harder. Yeah, we got certified another school, another swim school in the United Kingdom, and then we also were mentors to a school in Canada that became certified.
So now it’s fantastic One in the US, one in Canada and one in the UK. But we really I talk about it all the time because I think this is just such a great, it’s such a great certification, because it really does. Again, it’s rigorous. They don’t give it to everyone. You see, the B you know it’s a good company, and so I oftentimes say everything I have on today is B, you know, because it really is. You vote with your dollars and you make it what you work with.
Lyn Wineman: 19:42
You know, Miren, hearing you say that too about the other swim schools. One thing I know, because KidGlov is also a certified B Corp and there are other advertising agencies that are certified B Corps, and when we encounter one another we often don’t think of each other as competition, we think of each other as friends. And you know there are other B Corp agencies out there where we’ve shared best practices, because you don’t want being a good company to be a competitive advantage, right like we. Really, the movement is part of creating an ecosystem where companies are really thinking about their people, their clients, their planets, their business practices in a very positive way. So you know, one of those key areas in the B Corp certification is environmental and social responsibility. I’m curious how those principles show up in your day-to-day operations at Ocaquatics.
Miren Oca: 20:45
Well, absolutely, and I agree with what you said about working with other businesses because the air I’m breathing is the same air that we’re all trying to clean up, right? So we’re working together and I think right now it’s a differentiator, because there aren’t a lot of people doing it. But I am optimistic and I think in the next 10 years we’re really seeing we’re going to see a shift towards this. So you know, in 10 years, when somebody says, oh, we’re B Corp certified, and they’re like, isn’t everybody.
Lyn Wineman: 21:12
I think consumers, with the younger generation leading, I think consumers are going to demand it. The last number I heard is that 67% of Gen Zers are familiar with the B Corp brand, whereas, you know, as you look at the older generations, it becomes less and less. But I think Gen Zers know to look for the B and I think it is just going to become a requirement to be a product that people want to buy or a service that people want to participate in.
Miren Oca: 21:48
Yep, I agree, I agree so, and we work on this every day. You know we really are you know we use energy efficiencies. That we learned when we were going through this process. Like we have swimming pools and we put pool covers on our swimming pools, even indoors. Most people do that. You do have a lot. I mean it’s like a 25% reduction in your electrical usage if you do things like that. And so there are a lot of tips and tricks we’ve learned along the way.
But in terms of you know the big project we’ve used, you know LED lighting and water saving things so smaller things that you can do today, low hanging fruit. But then we’ve also put solar panels on two of our buildings and we’ve used UV light sanitation, ultraviolet light sanitation, in some of our pools, and they’re bigger ticket items, but they actually reduce our energy usage and they reduce the amount of chemicals we use. So we do have a cost savings as well. And in terms of social, we deal with people. That is our, you know, it’s our product, it’s who we’re serving. It’s the community. So we do a ton of community events just celebrated our 31-year anniversary and we did it in a part in our one of our parking lots, huge environmental fair. We had a lot of our 1% for the planet partners, nonprofit partners. They came out and played games with the kids and we had a thousand people show up in three hours.
Lyn Wineman: 23:09
Wow, congratulations on that too. In addition to the anniversary, that’s a lot of people to come and engage with.
Miren Oca: 23:20
And that shows me the community is interested in this. We didn’t even go into the pool Like it wasn’t a pool party, it was an environmental parking lot party, and it just shows me we gave away plants and little seedlings and kids could plant in the community garden. We have a community garden on one of our sites, but that shows me that people are interested in this and so you know that was really great for the community, it was great for our swimmers. But we also do a lot of volunteer projects with our 1% for the planet partners.
We go to the beach cleanups, we do zoo projects and we have a ton of engagement with our team and they get to bring a friend and oftentimes those friends end up applying for jobs. The environment and the culture, so it’s a win-win. I mean it’s great for us because we that’s how we recruit team members. So it has been really interesting this whole journey and to see all of this environmental and social responsibility but how it pays off.
Lyn Wineman: 24:13
Yes, you know people ask me often, Miren, as I’m sure they ask you like how do you do it? Why do you do it, why do you go through the process of becoming a B Corp? But really, the principles of being a B Corp are also the principles of being a good business. Right like, you need to have good business ethics, otherwise it will catch up with you. You need to take care of your employees, because replacing employees is very expensive and they’re the ones that are delivering your product or your service. You need to take care of your community, because that builds goodwill, that drives in future employees and future customers. I think you need to take care of the planet so that you can continue to operate in the environment in which you’ve been operating. So I agree with you 100% there. And you’ve mentioned 1% for the planet a couple of times, and you and I both have a mutual friend, Kate Williams, who is the CEO of that fabulous organization. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with 1% for the planet?
Miren Oca: 25:17
Absolutely we are business members of 1% for the planet and that means that we donate 1% of our gross annual revenues to environmental causes that have been vetted by 1% for the planet. So if a nonprofit is certified by 1% for the planet, that means they’ve you know, someone has looked at them, someone has approved them, an organization that is doing real, you know good work in the community or on the planet. So we love having that organization to help us vet where we’re going to spend our dollars. We have a gifts for the planet program at work, so our team members get to help us decide how we spend the money.
And on birthdays, we donate. You know. We donate money to the environmental partner of their choice for their birthday. We do it for our anniversaries, we do it anytime we send out a survey to our team members or to our families. They get to select an organization where we’ll make donations in their honor, and we love it. We have a good time. At this party that we just had the 31-year anniversary. Every person who walked in the door got a little ticket and put the ticket in the fishbowl. We had nonprofits near the fishbowls and they got to choose. Well, I want my money to go to Dolphins Plus, a marine mammal resource center, or they got to choose where they wanted their donation to go. So we have a good time with it and we’re educating community about it too, because we want everyone to understand the good work that 1% for the planet does.
Lyn Wineman: 26:49
That’s fantastic, all right. So since you’ve mentioned nonprofits, I do want to ask, because I know that you have founded a nonprofit, Ripples of Impact. Can you tell us a bit more about the nonprofit and its mission and really how it connects with your work at Ocaquatics?
Miren Oca: 27:07
Yes, absolutely. Well, last year was kind of a busy year. You know. We did the transition to our employee ownership trust and I’ve always had this dream of doing a nonprofit and I had the name in my mind Ripples of Impact and I thought, well, let me just do this. I opened it in July, but I had heard that it usually takes a long time to get?
Lyn Wineman: 27:27
Oh, yes, it can take up to a year sometimes.
Miren Oca: 27:32
It took us about a month. And I thought, what this is too fast, you know, but what ripples of impact.
Lyn Wineman: 27:37
Ripples of impact, roi is nice, I didn’t make that connection. Roi, I love that.
Miren Oca: 27:44
It’s the return on investment of using business as a force for good and it creates ripples of impact. And so we do of course we have swimming. We have two arms, or we have three arms of the nonprofit. One is environmental, one is social and we teach swimming lessons to in underserved areas. And then one is on financial literacy, because we have seen with our own team members that when we give them the power on financial literacy and we see them paying off debt and buying homes and buying cars, it just helps them so much.
And so we are doing a lot of work with financial literacy. And then we’re also doing environmental education to underserved areas that don’t necessarily have resources or don’t have the exposure to understand the impact of the environment. So we’re having a lot of fun with it. We’re actually this officially the week that we’re recording is Miami Climate Week. Oh yeah, we have an event on Saturday where we’re doing in our parking lot again and we’re giving out seedlings and plants and we’re talking about the impact of the environment and how to prepare for hurricane season.
Lyn Wineman: 28:45
Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s fantastic. Congratulations on that and so many other things. So I’m curious, Miren, you’ve done so many things, but I’m thinking about your B Corp certification, your employee ownership. What would you, what advice would you give to other owners, business owners that are thinking about going down that path?
Miren Oca: 29:05
Sure, you know, I think it’s start small but start today. Okay, it is so many, it’s overwhelming. There’s so much. When you open the B impact assessment or when you look at doing something like that, it’s a lot, there’s so much to do. But if you just start small and start, start right away and just and then also, I used to believe the reason we failed at the beginning of getting B Corp certified is I was trying to do it alone.
Once I involved my team, it’s it helps so much because they got, they bought into it and they understood it and then they really they helped so much. So I think build a team to help you and that also is we’re stronger together is join a group of peers that are in this, you know, like-minded, mission-driven values, aligned peers, like the one that we have at Real Leaders. You know we think that that just helps. It’s a great place to go and share your experiences and talk about. You know how you have navigated certain situations because it there. It is interesting sometimes to make those choices when you are up against a hard choice in business and you can do something that would be easier. But what is the right thing to do? Sometimes it’s really it takes a lot of courage. In these peer groups, you can find the courage, you can find the support to do what’s right over what’s easy.
Lyn Wineman: 30:24
You know what, I’m glad you gave out a shout out to real leaders too, because that’s how you and I met, and our group leader, who’s now becoming the CEO, Kevin Edwards, is just fantastic. But I really look forward to our group getting together we meet virtually once a month, group 107, and really interact and give each other advice and help share from real experiences. I just think it’s one of my favorite things. I tell every entrepreneur I know find yourself a peer group that can really share some advice with you. Yes, so, Miren, you have so many exciting things going on. What exciting projects or goals are on the horizon for you?
Miren Oca: 31:11
Well, we were talking a little bit about this earlier. 2025 is my year to say yes. I said that because I have been invited on podcasts before and speaking and I’ve always found excuses not to do it, but I think it’s really important in, you know, getting the message out there about B Corp certification, about our transition to employee ownership through an employee ownership trust. I want to speak about it. I do think that these are both some of the best kept secrets in business and I think that it’ll help business owners and it’ll also help the movements for both of them. So this is my year to say yes. I’ve been saying yes to speaking, which you were with me at a conference a few weeks ago.
Lyn Wineman: 31:57
It was a great presentation at the Do More Good conference here in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Miren Oca: 32:02
Well, thank you, and my word for the year was evolve, and it’s just working on what it takes to get up on a stage or to be able to be on a podcast like this and leveling up and, and you know, getting the story that people want to hear and being able to tell it the most effectively.
Lyn Wineman: 32:22
So, that’s fantastic. Well, I’m so glad that you said yes, Miren, and one thing I want to ask you next is for our listeners who’d really like to learn more about Ocaquatics Swim School, Ripples of Impact. How can they find you?
Miren Oca: 32:37
Well, we are on Instagram Ocaquatics. It’s a really interesting name. I never would have named it after my last name had I known I would have been doing it this so long, but it’s O-C-A-Q-U-A-T-I-C-S. Yes, so we’re on LinkedIn. I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn and that’s the best place to we can connect.
Lyn Wineman: 32:58
Fantastic. We will make sure to have those links in the show notes on the KidGlov website as well. So, Miren, this whole conversation has been inspiring. But I do want to ask you my favorite question, because I am inspired by quotes from people who I enjoy talking to, and I would like a Miren Oca original quote to inspire our listeners.
Miren Oca: 33:24
Okay, so this isn’t a Miren Oca original, but it’s it’s our team member mantra. Okay, our team say this all the time it’s we are different and we make a difference. We walk into our building and say we, you, we are different. They’ll all repeat back and we make a difference and it’s. We have been different with all the things that we’ve done and we also feel that we make a great difference.
Lyn Wineman: 33:48
It’s your rallying cry as a team. It really is Fantastic, Miren. As we wrap up this time together today, I’d like to end with what is the most important thing you would like our listeners to remember about the work that you’re doing.
Miren Oca: 34:04
Well, you know, I started this when I was 22 years old and I had to learn to lead as I was maturing as a person.
Lyn Wineman: 34:15
Yeah, you were growing up. I mean, you seriously were growing up.
Miren Oca: 34:19
So I think that there’s value in knowing that we’re always learning and we’re always growing, and it’s really important for everyone to continue to read, continue to listen to podcasts, continue growing from each other and also giving yourself grace, because I had a lot of mistakes early on in my business and I you know we call them learning moments now but those learning moments helped me to see that I could trust my team, my young team members, to make their own learning mistakes, their own learning moments, and I think that this has really helped us to grow. The business is to give grace to our team members as they’re growing, but we’re always growing and learning together, so it really has been a journey of learning over the last 31 years.
Lyn Wineman: 35:05
Wow, that’s fantastic, Miren. I have loved this conversation with you. I fully believe the world needs more people like you, more organizations like Ocaquatics, and I just thank you for taking the time to be here today and for saying yes to the invitation.
Miren Oca: 35:22
Well, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you for making it easy, Lyn.
Announcer: 35:28
We hope you enjoyed today’s Agency for Change podcast. To hear all our interviews with those who are making a positive change in our communities or to nominate a changemaker you’d love to hear from. Visit kidglov.com at K-I-D-G-L-O-V.com to get in touch, as always. If you like what you’ve heard today, be sure to rate, review, subscribe and share. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.