B.O.O.S.T. Podcast
B.O.O.S.T. Podcast
De-Risking Big Ideas: A Conversation with Susan Schramm | EP167
What does it really take to turn a bold idea into lasting impact? We chat with Susan Schramm, creator of the DE-RISK SYSTEM FOR IMPACT®, to unpack the hidden pitfalls leaders face when launching big ideas, especially in new markets. With decades of experience across Fortune 500s, startups, and nonprofits, Susan shares how to navigate uncertainty, build trust, and move from vision to execution with confidence.
If you’re launching something new, leading change, or simply want to de-risk your next big move, this episode is packed with insight and inspiration.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanbaileyschramm/
Website: www.gotomarketimpact.com
Book: www.fasttrackyourbigidea.com
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Even the best strategy is going to fail if people are confused or skeptical or they're not aligned to do it together. And that tends to actually stall so many initiatives.
Kelly Leonard:That was Susan Schram. After decades of successfully leading launches for Fortune 500 companies, startups, and nonprofits, Susan created the D-Risk system for impact to turn big ideas into reality. In this episode, Susan shares resources to tap into new markets. I'm Kelly Leonard, and this is the Boost Podcast.
Announcer:Welcome to the Boost Podcast, the podcast created to ignite your business and career potential. In each episode, host Kelly Leonard and her guests dive into one aspect of Kelly's signature boost framework, ensuring you get practical, actionable insights, tips, and takeaways to build your brand, optimize relationships, obtain more leads, secure thought leadership space, and tap into new markets. And now, here's Kelly Leonard.
Kelly Leonard:Hey Susan, welcome to the Boost Podcast. Thank you. What fun to be here. Absolutely. And so for folks who are hearing your name for the first time, tell them a bit about yourself.
Susan Schramm:Well, um, through a lot of different roles and titles with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses and nonprofits and associations, I spent a lot of decades launching things, whether those were products and services or programs and brands or partnerships, joint ventures, and companies. And so I decided to start my own firm. That's a consultancy called Go to Market Impact. And the focus is to help leaders from all size companies and organizations to make sure their strategies work when the stakes are high and they help them get traction faster. That's really what I'm focused on doing.
Kelly Leonard:Good deal, good deal. When the stakes are high. And so, you know, when we think about new markets and um, you know, folks entering new markets, especially now, um, I feel like we're in a season, or maybe we're never not in the season where folks are pivoting and trying to think of what's next. And so, what do you, from your perspective, what do you think are some of the most common missteps that leaders make when they're launching a big idea?
Susan Schramm:Right. And when the the funny part is I think sometimes uh whether you are an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, you know, you're you're thinking about something really big. And um, there's two things that I find are most common, whatever size organization you're working on. One is that you assume that people will take action. You've got this great strategy, this great idea, and you've asked people or told people to do it, but even the best strategy is gonna fail if people are confused or skeptical or they're not aligned to do it together. And that tends to actually stall so many initiatives. And the other second mistake is uh they tend to not like to talk about risks. One of the reasons is especially if you're the you know founder or the inspirer of the idea, you view people's discussing things that won't go right as sort of a Debbie Downer or a pushback. And in fact, it's the untested assumptions, the quiet doubts people are not voicing that can really cause things to cause anxiety in their own mind. And that results in hesitation. And that essentially can create a stall to the to your plans uh and draining cash even before you ever get traction.
Kelly Leonard:Yeah, and I'd imagine, especially for when you have an idea that you're so closely wedded to, it's like that's the the hill that you'll die, that you you'd be willing to die on. You then take it personally, even when you think about the potential risks that people may present, it's like the tendency is you you wear that risk, like you're you're saying something negative about me as opposed to the idea. And so, you know, I'd imagine like trying to decouple one's identity from the idea also um poses a challenge.
Susan Schramm:And interestingly enough, because people care about you, they'll sometimes not share some of the things they're worried about, right? So it's both ways, right? You are a little bit overinvested and can't be objective, and they who may be very interested and supportive are cautious to tell you some of the underlying concerns. Yet when we do postmort postmortems with clients, one of the most common things we find is they go, I could have told you. I knew that wasn't going well, correct? But they didn't voice it. It's just a problem.
Kelly Leonard:Yeah, yeah. And oh my gosh, that's like a conversation, a podcast episode in and of itself, too, like how you create these spaces where people feel empowered to be able to really share authentically when they see risks or gaps. Um, because yeah, a person, it's like, oh, well, I I like Kelly, so I don't want her to know that I see these sort of, you know, these big gaps in that idea. So yeah.
Susan Schramm:And it uses, despite my background in tech, it uses no acronyms. And uh the the way is just to objectively, step by step, help everybody get clarity about what it is we're doing, and then what if, what could go wrong, or what could go right. I mean, heck, you can grow into new markets and it explodes and you're not ready for the demand, and you cause customer satisfaction problems. I mean, there's both the upside risk and downside risks need to be discussed in a way that's not someone has to have one answer, but everybody gets to brainstorm and come up with ways to answer it.
Kelly Leonard:Yeah, that's good to systematize the process. So now, Susan, you've worked with, you know, you've worked across Fortune 500, nonprofits and startups. How do you see like the challenges differing and can you um and can your approach be adapted to support solopreneurs?
Susan Schramm:And the the interesting thing is a lot of people who are solopreneurs think of themselves as not being part of a team. But in fact, if you think about it, I guess unless you're playing TiddlyWinks, there's nothing you can do that doesn't need others to take action. So when you think about the challenge, uh it looks different in every setting. You know, first entrepreneurs and small business, it may mean getting your small group of contractors and employees and even customers together. Or as a solopreneur, it could be your what your spouse, right? And your kids sometimes, right? Um and if you're a business professional working in a larger company, often that's resulting in cross-functional parallel. You don't take you don't have these people as employees. They're all people across the organization you got to bring together. In all those cases, you need people to take action with you. And if you don't, your strategy will stall. So that is exactly why a systematic approach works, because it forces you. One of the principles we work on is clarify who. Who has to take action for this to be successful? Why would they? What would they see as risks? And sort of filter out, you know, think through all the dimensions. And that that happens whether you're just trying to create a cross-functional initiative or whether in a large company or whether you're launching your own, your own firm.
Kelly Leonard:And so um, you know, I know you talked about the who, um, and your work centers on you sort of the people side of strategy. But can how can AI or, or, you know, how do, and I know you have a tech background, how do the tool, how does AI, how can it be used to support that human-centered focus?
Susan Schramm:I'm going to give you two ways. And the second I just learned recently. So the first way is to help you think in the shoes of the people you're trying to encourage to take action, right? It's a it's a powerful co-pilot, right? You can use AI as a researcher that helps you get underneath the decision makers that you're trying to reach and what's gonna, what's in their mindset, what allows them, what will stumble them? What are the questions they may not ask you, but are on their minds. And that kind of sparring puts you in a much better position to actually have live conversations and go deeper because you you aren't just asking, hi, uh, what problems keep you up at night, but you are going deeper to understand really the things that they're that are really on the pulse of their concern. So that's one way to use AI really as a partner. The second way, though, is one I just came across. A friend of mine, Danny Inney, just explained that he uses AI to help you when you have trick when something triggers you. So if you're sitting here with this big idea and you have all these ideas and you just want to get it done and people aren't doing anything, right? Whether it's customers aren't buying or employees aren't acting well or whatever. Using AI as a sparring partner to process how you're feeling before you actually have a conversation with somebody. So you move from just emotionally reacting to constructively saying what is it I would want people to know or do. And so you can collapse something that might really cause you three days of angst into a few hours where your focus and mindset can shift because you vented, but you haven't wasted all those words on a even a spouse who's now all bummed out, right? Anyway, that's I just started using that, and I'm really enjoying that application.
Kelly Leonard:Wow. Okay, so you're talking about your own personal application in that same vein or similar vein. Can you share perhaps a story where a leader faced high uncertainty, they applied your system and saw, you know, saw some sort of breakthrough that they didn't expect?
Susan Schramm:Yeah, I have a lot of examples, but let's start with one that's a really tiny company. It was a it was a solopreneur, but she did have a team of contractors. And she was struggling to take her service into a new market. It was the same service, but she wanted to repurpose it for a different audience. And she was pouring tons of money and energy into reframing her positioning and her website and her pitch and everything. And truthfully, there was no traction. And she was getting frustrated with her team because they were always confused when she was asking them to work with her. They kept coming back to her for questions because they weren't clear. And so what happened is she and her strategy became the bottleneck and she was exhausted. So what we did was we simply stepped through the dearest principles and she started to realize, to get clarity over what her strategy was, and she realized that the problem wasn't the market. She was blaming sort of the market. They they just don't get it, right? Um, but it actually was that she wasn't aligned with her target audience and with her team. Misalignment was the biggest issue with her. And so what we did was we built something that I talk about in my new book. We built a strategic message playbook that clarified the strategy and gave her team confidence to take action. And then what happened was they didn't have to go back and forth asking her for information because they put all these issues in one place as like a single source of truth. And the trans, you know, the transformation was first of all, she got some energy back because she was so excited. And second of all, she entered the new market and it just sort of grew because the information that that market gave her in completely continued to improve her ability to meet that market and stay aligned with their needs. Because she was trying to be do the shortcut, take one product and serve both markets. And so she had to really tune her offering based on what she was hearing.
Kelly Leonard:Wow, that's good. That's really good. That focus, intentionality. And so you've alluded a bit to your book. Can you share perhaps of a couple of key takeaways, or maybe your favorite aspects of either your process, the system, or the book?
Susan Schramm:Well, okay, so I wrote I I had so many clients and people I worked with say, Susan, you should write this down. What I was doing with clients in custom engagements was something that was people said, This is this took me from zero to 60 in weeks. Why didn't we do this earlier? And I and then they said, You should write this down. I thought, you know what? I can reach more leaders who have big ideas if I do. And hopefully that will allow, you know, you might be at the the your idea might be just a seed of an idea. Or you may be discouraged because you haven't, you've started and it's gotten stalled. So I wrote the book. It's called Fast Track Your Big Idea. Navigate risk, move people to action, and avoid your strategy going off course. And it's a it's as one person said, you sort of put a smile on the subject of risk because it's it's a it's a simple roadmap, it's very practical to help leaders of all different kinds. I wrote it so it could be rep um relatable to different size organizations or different cultures, different backgrounds, so it's not too heavy. And what I love about the book is when I did my I was ready to launch it about a year ago, and I decided to work, share it with people and get their feedback about where the value came from. And the biggest value tends to come from a breath of stepping back and thinking strategically. And the strategy isn't heavy, it's light and enabling you to do something with it. It's not just I got this stack of PowerPoints and now I've got a strategy. It's a very actionable strategy. And so what I get a lot is people saying, I just grabbed this part and I could use it immediately. And that was so gratifying because and they they were from all different walks of life and roles and you know ages. And so I'm really delighted and excited about uh bringing it to the market and sharing it with people.
Kelly Leonard:Awesome. Well, if folks are tuning in and they want to grab your book or tap into your brilliance, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Okay.
Susan Schramm:Well, to connect with me, a very good way to connect with me is to go on LinkedIn. And my name on LinkedIn is Susan Bailey Shram. So that's one good way. Another is to go to where the book is, go to fast trackyourbigidea.com, fast trackyourbigidea.com. And there you will find um uh information about the book and the bonus resources that we're going to be providing that have lots and lots of freebies that allow you to put in practice the sections of it. And um, and then of course you can email me at susan.sham. My company is at go to marketimpact.com. Awesome.
Kelly Leonard:Well, Susan, thank you for everything that you do to just be of service to businesses of all sizes. Definitely appreciate your input and just the ways that you're serving.
Susan Schramm:Well, thank you so much. I really appreciated being here.
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