My guest in this episode is Jeremy Miller, brand strategist and bestselling author. Over the past decade, Jeremy and the Sticky Branding team have profiled and interviewed hundreds of companies across dozens of industries to uncover how companies grow Sticky Brands.
In this conversation, we highlight the connection between personal development and business success, emphasizing the importance of ethical stewardship and societal impact.
We also touch on the essentials of brand-building, including differentiation, exceptional customer service, and the willingness to challenge industry norms.
Jeremy's blend of humor, stories, and actionable ideas will inspire you to innovate and grow your business and brand.
Main Takeaways:
Jeremy's links:
Hi, I'm your podcast host Keita Demming: Author, Advisor, Thought Partner & Coach.
I'm an award-winning educator and coach with a PhD in Adult Education and Workplace Learning who works to transform companies into places that are idea-driven and people-centered.
At The Covenant Group, I design training programs and coach entrepreneurs and business leaders to meet their strategic goals and build their businesses.
In my book, Strategy to Action: Run Your Business Without It Running You, I introduce an effective and straightforward tool to elevate your skills as a business professional and navigate the corporate world. The book offers practical insights on transforming strategies into tangible results.
Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and subscribe to my Newsletter.
My guest in this episode is Jeremy Miller, brand strategist and bestselling author. Over the past decade, Jeremy and the Sticky Branding team have profiled and interviewed hundreds of companies across dozens of industries to uncover how companies grow Sticky Brands.
In this conversation, we highlight the connection between personal development and business success, emphasizing the importance of ethical stewardship and societal impact.
We also touch on the essentials of brand-building, including differentiation, exceptional customer service, and the willingness to challenge industry norms.
Jeremy's blend of humor, stories, and actionable ideas will inspire you to innovate and grow your business and brand.
Main Takeaways:
Jeremy's links:
Hi, I'm your podcast host Keita Demming: Author, Advisor, Thought Partner & Coach.
I'm an award-winning educator and coach with a PhD in Adult Education and Workplace Learning who works to transform companies into places that are idea-driven and people-centered.
At The Covenant Group, I design training programs and coach entrepreneurs and business leaders to meet their strategic goals and build their businesses.
In my book, Strategy to Action: Run Your Business Without It Running You, I introduce an effective and straightforward tool to elevate your skills as a business professional and navigate the corporate world. The book offers practical insights on transforming strategies into tangible results.
Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and subscribe to my Newsletter.
But the thing that I have learned is this the fundamental value of core values and systematizing them and anchoring them inside of everything you do and using them as a compass for making people decisions, business decisions. They are often treated like marketing garbage on the wall and press releases garbage on the wall and press releases and they look like the Exxon or no, the Enron, values of excellence and and that kind of just pejorative phrases. But if you actually have a set of stories and values and behaviors that you can codify into your organization I think there's a whole book on that on its own.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Keita Deming, where we explore two questions how do we become better people in business and how do we become better business people? Today, I got a great one for you. It's a conversation I had with Jeremy Miller. In this conversation, we talk about all things growth within your business, and many of the insights are the kinds of things that people look forward to or often forget about when they're thinking about their own growth. If you enjoy this episode, don't forget to like or subscribe wherever you get podcasts and if you want to support my work, check out my book Strategy to Action or join my mailing list at keytodemingcom. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and, Jerry, for people who have no idea who you are and what you do, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 1:So I run a strategy consulting firm called Sticky Branding, and so in that I speak and write books, but the core work is working with mid-market companies on how do we grow their businesses and brand to the next level and how do we get them to grow into Sticky Brands.
Speaker 2:I love everything you just said there. You and I are cut from the same cloth. So this podcast. There are two questions I'm interested in and it's why listeners are coming here how do we become better people in business and how do we become better business people? So let's double click on from your experience. How do people become better people in business?
Speaker 1:It's such a powerful question that you're asking because the reality is it's a journey, that where you are today is a journey. It's a journey of self-awareness, of skill development, of experiences, and you never stop learning. And I guess the point would be when you think you know it all is probably the moment you should hit the ripcord and get out.
Speaker 2:So let's double click on the entrepreneur's ability to change. Sure, tell us some of your observations. What you've seen work not work. Where you see people get stuck. Let me be more clear on that question. Let's start with where have you seen people get stuck and not an idea around their ability to change?
Speaker 1:It comes out in a lot and it comes in a number of places, especially in the kind of work that I do. So the strategy consulting that Sticky Branding does is predominantly with mid-sized companies and in that mid-market, anywhere from, say, 2 million in revenue to 200 million in revenue, there's three major changes that a business goes through around that 10, $15 million mark or maybe 50 employees. It's a tribal leadership culture. The business wraps around the founder, the entrepreneur, the leader. At the next stage of, say, 25 to 50 million or maybe a little bit larger, it's a management culture. Now you have someone responsible for finance, someone responsible for revenue, someone responsible for operations, in addition to the founder entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:So now we've got a set of lieutenants here and then you go through the transformation of an executive culture, something around, say, 100 million, where you have managers managing managers, and each one of those stages is a substantive shift in the business. Each one of those stages is a substantive shift in the business. So the entrepreneur that has the ability to go from a startup to $100 million or a 500 person company is a significant leadership evolution. And this is where those types of changes get really hung up, especially in those early days of learning how to delegate, learning how to hire and empower people, learning how to put in systems and operations and structure to enable the change and the growth that you want. And, at the end of the day, strategy and strategy execution is all around change management not only change management of yourself, but change management of your business, your systems, your culture and your people, and so it's a complex journey just to grow a business.
Speaker 2:What I love about what you just did is you gave people a framework, a box within which to think in. So you went tribal, management culture, executive culture right. So I'm assuming the first leap is that tribal culture. Where have you seen it work that people have been able to move from tribal to the management culture?
Speaker 1:It happens all the time. If you want to grow your business, you're going to have to do that. So if you have a $10 million, a $5 million business, and if you want to become a $25 million, a $5 million business, and if you want to become a $25 million business just by the sheer size of the company, it has to do that evolutionary step. So the entrepreneur doesn't change. That's where that quote starts from. The ability of the business to grow is dependent on the ability of the entrepreneur to change.
Speaker 1:If you decide as an entrepreneur you want to have a lifestyle business or you don't like the idea of letting control and you don't want to invest in having a CFO and a VP of sales and a VP of operations, then you might stop at wherever that size of business is. But very often the business sees the potential and the leadership team says the business sees the potential and the leadership team says, yeah, we want this, we want to invest in and we want to go there. And so if you make that commitment as a team or as an individual to grow your business, there's no way of avoiding going through those transitions. But you can fail at it too. Not everyone does it successfully, and sometimes you have to do changes or go out at a few different ways in order to get through these plateaus, which they're essentially what they are is. Each one of these stages have revenue gaps and those in-between periods, those periods of change feel like a death valley.
Speaker 2:If you don't get through them, it causes a lot of pain and grief yeah, my, my experience is that people come to us because they're in that valley right and that's why they want they're seeking out people like you and I. Um any any other observations around how people move from the management culture to that executive culture?
Speaker 1:In what sense? In terms of the things that they're looking for?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for example, in my world, the biggest challenge I see people having is not willing to invest in the short-term to get long-term gains. So they see the short-term investments as too expensive or too costly. They see the short-term investments as too expensive or too costly, ignoring the cost of the losses that they'll have in 10 years if they don't do this particular thing. So take a simple thing like investing in technology or this might cause us to go down 10% this year, but in four or five years you're probably going to see a five times return on that investment if you did not today. So things like that is what I mean by. Do you have examples where you've seen people struggle with?
Speaker 1:that work is how do you make decisions now when you're so busy and you're working in the business and trying to make these expensive bets and knowing you need to do certain things for the long term. But the tyranny of the now is getting in the way, and one of the things that I have learned in my consulting practice is you really need to separate those time horizons. So I look at strategy across three horizons. You've got that 10-year vision of what are we trying to take this business towards? What do we want to be? There's that midterm, that three to five-year investment layer. What's the infrastructure that you need in terms of people, systems, equipment, technology, locations in order to get to that vision? And then there's the near term, the in-year action plans of what are you doing right now? And so to your point, the challenge of making investments that will serve you if you don't have clarity on where you're going for the midterm and long term, and you don't.
Speaker 1:This is a branding question. It's really your positioning. Where do you play? How do you win? How do you want to be known? If you can't clarify that, it becomes really hard to make investment decisions. And so the, the, the stop thing, the thing that stops people in their tracks is they get stuck trying to do everything right now, trying to be all things to all people, versus actually looking down the horizons a little bit further to say what do we really need to affect the change that we want?
Speaker 2:So let's shift from this a little bit more. Okay, are there any other observations you have in your experience of how people really double down or jump into the notion around becoming better people in business and how that ultimately impacts their performance?
Speaker 1:how that ultimately impacts their performance. What I have typically seen is changes driven off of a catalyst of some kind, and it could be a positive catalyst or a negative catalyst. The negative catalyst might be a leadership crisis. You lost a key person, you made a poor decision, a competitor or a customer threatens to make sport of litigating you. Something happens that causes you to reflect and look inward to say I don't want that to happen. How do I need to behave differently? The other is growth, the positive side of things, where we look at the situation of I want to accomplish something, and those kind of changes can come in many different ways, from health and lifestyle to the kind of leader you want to be, the kind of business you want, but there's something around the horizon that is driving you to get towards those goals. So, whether it's the stick or the carrot, or reverse that the carrot or the stick there's going to be some form of a catalyst to affect the change, because the real problem for making these decisions is that status quo really wants to hold you down.
Speaker 1:I always think of why do we grow, and I often ask entrepreneurs and leaders to get really clear on their why. Because growth is a lot like dieting, and you can go into a diet with the best of intentions. You start it with your New Year's resolutions and then in the third weekend you're like I love ice cream and the whole thing goes to heck. It's that same kind of premise of what's the why, so that you can do the work that's necessary. Because, ultimately, what I think you're raising is all change. All growth, all improvement is driven off of effort to change, and that effort is something you have to commit to and work on. There's no way around it. It's not going to. Change could happen to you organically, it's just probably not the change you want.
Speaker 2:And there's no short-cutting of it. You have to go through the journey. You can't get shortcuts at all. Isn't that the fun part of it? Not for everybody, all right. But let's transition to the other question, which is the second question is how do we become better business people? Question is how do we become better business people? What are like two or three things that you often suggest with your people you work with on? How do you move from work done becoming a better person in business? How do I become a better business person? How?
Speaker 1:would you define that? So, when you look at being a better business person, what does that mean for you?
Speaker 2:That's an interesting one. I prefer to answer that after you answer it. So for me, how I often not doing that is that a good business person has defined a business that's right for them and they're doing all the things in the short term that help them achieve their long-term goals. So they've done the clarification out, they've done the work which you just talked about, which is the self-worth, the insight, the inner reflection, etc. And now their actions are so aligned with their vision, their mission, their values, what they're seeking, that they are the best person in business that they can be right now because their values align and mission align. So the activities that they're doing right now are very intentional, focused and move the needle in the way that they want the needle to be moved.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating the way you frame that, because you're using mission, vision and values and the effort that they are doing with intent. And that bridge between what do we want and how do I act is kind of a recurring theme of this conversation as well that to be a better person and to be better at business is almost the same thing.
Speaker 2:So that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So the person see, I see it as different, I see it as the reason I pass on those two questions is I think there's a world in which people can. First of all, I think we need to improve business. I think business needs I don't know how to say this, but we need to be better in business in terms of people, capital, the environment, society, et cetera. So there's a piece around that. But how do we become better business, people in that sense? And then there's a piece around how do I become a better person in business? So how do I become somebody who person in business? So how do I become somebody who's intentional, who does what they say they're going to do? I think they need to be passed on one. They both feed into each other. So I see it as an infinity loop, kind of like as you do one, it feeds into the other, as you do on the other, it feeds into the other.
Speaker 1:That makes sense yeah, I agree with that. I think you could also put in, uh turn it into, say, a venn diagram, and a third part of the loop, which is the business itself. That I think the one thing that many misunderstand or don't see, especially if it's your business, is that the business itself is a third entity. It is its own distinct thing. So, when you want to be better in business in terms of capital allocation, profitability, sustainability, all the things that you just said, well, that's that third entity, that's that system that you are creating. And then there's the infinity loop that you're bringing into this, which is how do I steward and nurture and develop this third entity into the thing that it should become? And where the personal side of this comes in is the thing is leadership and working with people is all very people-centric. You have to be good for yourself and you have to be good for others, and putting that complexity together, I think, is a real challenge, and this is where I think there's actually just as a tangent to this.
Speaker 1:This is where I think AI doesn't replace business. Gold rush right now, looking at all the applications of artificial intelligence, and it is going to be incredibly disruptive and transformational across every area of that system, of that business. But the thing is, business and and leadership and being good at business and good as a person are constants and they are timeless. It's not going to be necessarily changed by technology. We still need soap to power our dishwashers, and entertainment and products and services. So the business, the act of business, isn't actually going to change all that much how we do things, how do we automate things. Sure, that will. But this is where I think this question is really intriguing is the. The idea of how do I be really good at business is how do you serve others brilliantly and how do you build systems to support that third entity. So how do you nurture this thing to fulfill the its potential?
Speaker 2:like you're pulling on all these strings, which is fascinating and I and I love the, I love the idea of the business being a third entity. I I can, I definitely resonate with that. Um, you had, you had my mind going on in a bunch of different places there and I feel like you and I could just like refer from each other here. There's a conversation that we had around the role of value creation in business. So ultimately, you're taking something that had a value at this level and you're creating more value with it. So let's take the most basic thing.
Speaker 2:When I go I'm from Trinidad there's some guys who take shelves from the beach and they make jewelry out of it. That's a business, that's an entrepreneur. They've taken shelves that were on a beach and created this artwork essentially. And now I'm buying the finished product. Right, there's a piece around that, but as the entrepreneur is creating, is making a value, jump there. You have that guy who's like very manual, etc. But then you have people who are doing that on a machine level scale. They're both entrepreneurs, they're both doing it. They're just at different, different scales.
Speaker 2:But then you have somebody who some example, I have tons of art on my wall.
Speaker 2:There are people who will do artwork, sell it on the beach for like $300, $400, and then there are people who do artwork and then they sell it and it's like $300,000 for a piece of artwork, right?
Speaker 2:And all of those people, I think, fall into entrepreneurship, et cetera, which is about value creation, and I think there's into entrepreneurship, et cetera, which is about value creation, and I think there's a piece around value creation that creates value for society in a way that benefits many people, and then there's a way that it does not do that. And that's why I use the question around better people and then become better people in business, because I feel like there's a connection there and I see a gap there. Part of what I'm doing is having conversations with people who are in this space and trying to get insights on like, hey, how do we collectively solve this issue? I'm doing my piece, you're doing your piece, we're doing similar work, et cetera. But where can we find insights that address some of those complex challenges that we are facing? And business is one of the biggest forces that's going to drive that, no matter how that unfolds.
Speaker 1:So let me pull a thread on what you were just talking about in terms of value creation and business.
Speaker 1:One of the ways if we look back to those three levels of change going from a tribal leadership culture to a management culture, to an executive culture you can actually make it even more granular and look at it that a business has to change every time it triples in size. I call this the law of three and 10. So if you look at just an employee account going from the individual who's making artwork on the beach and selling it, one person at a time has a very different business than if they had, say, three people, two employees now, and they are at a different scale. Then they triple again and they go to 10, 30, 100, 300. So basically, I've taken out the nine. So I did English in university and I don't want to do the math of that. So, law of three and 10, this is my English majors math skills.
Speaker 1:But it's every time you triple in size you're going to change the whole system of the business and this is that journey that I think that we're talking about here to be a better leader, to be better at business.
Speaker 1:You're constantly trying to figure out and learn and build the skills and capabilities for the next stage of growth. That if you're going from, say, $10 million in revenue to $30 million in revenue to $100 million in revenue, those two jumps going from $10 to $30 to $ to 100 are substantive operational organizational changes. The business that you're running at 50 people versus 300 people, are comparable. You might be selling the same service, but the scale, the complexity, the geographic reach, the financial systems, the HR systems, all the regulatory sides, everything else changes. And so to be the person that creates value, that is able to get better and scale is really the fundamental question of. If you understand why you want to lead this change, then you can then start to answer how. And the beautiful part about business is we don't have to actually figure it out it. We're copying templates and systems that are almost as timeless as time itself.
Speaker 2:Business has been around forever yeah, there's a lot I love. Essentially, you're saying let's jump back to our why, let's get back to the why why we're doing this. Um, saying let's jump back to our why, let's get back to the why why we're doing this. Um, the I'm really, I'm trying to think about, I love, I love everything what you're saying and I think there's an and piece, which is why I love business and I love business models, because there's so many business models.
Speaker 2:I think about the artist who starts on the beach and he goes to the studio, paints, goes to the beach and sells art. 20 years of doing. He's now doing the same thing, but instead of selling at a beach, he's selling at studios around the world, because all the people who bought his art at that little tourist beach took it back to their countries and he's now a famous artist. His business hasn't fundamentally changed, but the value of his work has changed. The amount of experience he's had has changed, which is why I love business models, because there's that. But it's a very similar business from where he started to where he is now. Now he has to figure out how to get his art from his studio in the beach in the Caribbean to Germany, for example.
Speaker 1:Right, it's also a brand question, right, exactly. So that's 100, that's brand. So if you think of what is the fundamental value of brand is if you were to take like a four box design and you look at effort to to, to price, well, if you have no brand, you are selling for time, essentially selling for cost and time and maybe a small markup in that. But if you are an artist that can sell their print for three hundred thousand dollars, there is no connection to talent, effort, materials, there's no that has nothing to connect it to it. There is a brand there that has created value. So why can, uh, a former president charge a million dollars for a keynote whereas a consultant who's just written a book can only get 10 000? It's brand and if you don't have the book, you probably are doing it for free. That, that whole spectrum of price to value, is actually, I think, a separate value conversation than the operation leadership question.
Speaker 2:And I love that. So let's double click on that value question, like, let's talk maybe three insights on that that you find people often misunderstand. I think that's a really valuable conversation. And then I got a follow-up question.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is a complex one because this is where my world sits in sticky branding. I would say the first thing on brand and this value conversation is the biggest mistake that I see individuals take the this, the small entrepreneur painter. The biggest mistake I often see is they brand too soon, that the value of the brand and creating being Instagram famous or TikTok famous before you actually have something to sell becomes a problem, because you can grow a large following and a large reach but actually have no product or service to deliver. So brand doesn't actually come first in the value conversation. The first thing is actually having a craft, a skillset and a capability and having the ability to sustain that. Then, once you're there, you can use your positioning, who you serve brilliantly, how you differentiate yourself, how you create awareness, how you create reach, how you market yourself in order to amplify those elements of brand. So the key thing I think of value conversation is when do you start thinking about this, and it's usually not at the beginning.
Speaker 2:So my follow-up question was going to be and it's going to be closely linked to this is what are the three things that, if your clients understood this, it would make your life a lot easier?
Speaker 1:recurring theme for today is there is no substitute for effort, that you have to put the work in, no matter what. You can't short circuit it. Strategy without execution is just ideas and and so, and if you're just ideating, you're just dreaming. So what we need to do is to be able to execute in order to get to that. The second is all of these topics building a brand, growing a business, developing your leadership skills is a journey of change. You are changing your company, you are changing yourself, you are changing your products and services, you are changing your reputation and awareness that what we are fundamentally doing in choosing a path or choosing our why or choosing a strategy, is committing to a destination. But again, that effort, that strategy without execution question is around change management, that the work is in the change.
Speaker 1:And then I think the third is it is really coming down to making those choices that any business of any size can grow themselves into a sticky brand. It's a choice. It's a choice to stand out and be remarkable. It's a choice to serve your customers brilliantly. It's a choice to challenge the giants of your industry. So you have to choose, do the work and focus on the change, and so it's not just one thing that I want the client to know. I want them to recognize that we're not looking for a silver bullet. We're looking to facilitate the change. That might take one, three, ten years to get where you want to go.
Speaker 2:And I think it's that last bit. It might take one, three, ten years piece. I think that's the piece that I find most people struggle with. They want it tomorrow.
Speaker 1:It's just not going to happen. You can't grow a brand overnight. If that's where you start, then just quit. There's no point in even playing this game. If it's instant gratification and you want to take a Gen Z mindset to, I want to have a brand to be paid a million dollars tomorrow, cool, go, start playing the lottery. Nothing's going to happen. It's the same thing if you go to the gym, if you want to lose weight and build muscle and be physically fit. The beauty of it is money can't actually deliver it. You could be the richest human being in the world and a fat slob. If you want to be fit, you actually have to do the work. There is no freaking substitute to it. So this is why I think if you can't make that choice, just don't start I love your, I love how candid you're being.
Speaker 2:If you, if you can't make the choice, just just don't start, and it's. It's about that choice, it's about making a choice, committing to that, to that choice that you just made, and then seeing it through to the end. That it's.
Speaker 1:If you don't do those two, those three things, you know you're not going to see the results that you want to see and I think that's the hardest part of all of this is it takes grit and consistency and it's humbling and not everything works and you have to keep trying and learning and evolving and adapting and trying some more.
Speaker 1:Uh, there's a there's an old book called um mastery and the idea behind it was learn to love the plateau, that you spend most of your life in plateaus and then you have moments of insider or capability where you spike up and then you kind of level off a little bit but you operate at a new plateau. And so, if you think of, what the book was based on was actually learning karate but you don't just power through from white belt to black belt in six months. Sure, the school might do that for you because they're going to take your money, but to actually have the mastery to compete and have those skills and the muscle memory to support that is a whole heck of a lot of training training time, et cetera.
Speaker 2:It's, it's, yeah. So, as we, as we kind of think about closing off this conversation, which I think you and I could continue having and shoot ideas off of each other for a long time I wanted to share a little bit about what. What inspires you to do the work you're doing with Sticky Branding and the companies that you're working. Where does your why come from? I guess?
Speaker 1:I think it comes from two things. The first is I absolutely just love the process of building brands, so the way we work with our clients is on long-term relationships, and it's because I want to be part of that journey and that experience. For me, ideas are cheap. We can always have them, but to be able to see and participate and be part of the client journey, to go from through these revenue plateaus and achieve their objectives is one of the most fulfilling things in the world. The other is just this type, these topics, this work, this level of creativity and thought leadership. It just fires all my synapses on a regular basis. And it's constant learning, especially on the marketing side of things.
Speaker 1:My world gets disrupted every two years. I'm just watching everything that's happening now with ChatGPT and the AI front going holy hell. My entire world's going to break and every single marketing model that we have is probably going to be negated very quickly. Fortunately for me, strategy is a constant and brands are constant, so that gives me the anchors to navigate it. But it's a constant journey of re-looking at tactics and approaches and then working with companies to implement them, and it becomes very personal. I think the thing I'm most proud of is. We got invited to 12 of our clients' Christmas parties last year and it's because they see us as part of that team and you can't replace that kind of fulfillment and connection. It's just something very special for me.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. What's the best lesson you've learned? That is helping make you a better business person.
Speaker 1:There's a story that goes very early on. I grew up in a family business and when I wanted to join the family business, my parents put barriers to entry to my brother and I. They said we had to have a university education, we had to work in the real world for at least four years, we had to have relevant skills and there had to be a job or there had to be a space in the business for us. So four years a day from graduation, I joined the family business as the director of sales and marketing and that first year on the job was brutal. I thought I was going to come in and teach my parents a thing or two of how to run a company and how to drive sales. And I just got my ass handed to me and I remember being so bad that I had my sales team and I doing pit time, six hours of outbound cold calling a week. And I remember at the end of that first year I was completely beat up. I was depressed, I thought I was a failure, I thought I was letting my parents down and I went to both my parents. I said look, if this is what it's like to be in a family business, I can't do it. I'm going to go back to the software industry. It was way easier. I could make way more money.
Speaker 1:This is not for me, and the best advice I got and I still use it today is my dad said to me you know, it's not about the business you've built, it's about the business you're building. What are we going to build next? And that gave me permission to challenge them and allowed me to look at our business, look at our industry and facilitate the change that we needed. But I still go back to that phrase. I use it all the time. It's not about the business you've built, it's about the business you're building. What are you going to build next? And when you look forward, you can honor the past and honor everything you've learned, but you still have permission to change and do things differently and better, because that's part of the journey, that's part of the process.
Speaker 2:I've been asking you all. First of all, thank you for that. I love that story, Of course. I love that it's a lesson from your dad and all of that. I'm great and I'm a soft spot for family businesses as well. So I want to close off by asking you one of my favorite coaching questions, because I love the world of coaching. I position myself as a coach. Where are you seeking comfort when you should be seeking discomfort?
Speaker 1:It's a deep question. That's why I like it. Yeah, we are in a process right now in my business of scale and building systems and programs and content and delivering from one to one to one to many, and it's a very humbling process at times to go from the consultant and the person that has everything and that does everything, or the coach, to working through teams and working with larger groups, and so the comfort is for at least, that I find myself going towards is constantly trying to to anchor on what I know or what I've done, and that's actually the Achilles heel, and I've actually trained my team to be able to challenge me on that, because I'll start rejecting something or throwing up roadblocks or going down and pontificating on some idea and they're like well, that's what you did, and so letting go of that, it's kind of an idea of shedding the skin. Holding that skin on right now is the comfort that I'm trying to wriggle my way out of, and I feel it every single day.
Speaker 2:In systems theory we call that bounce back. So there's a whole complexity theory thing where you talk about ecosystems. When you try to change them and you put new things into the system, there's a bounce back effect that happens, which is they seek homostasis, they seek stability. So one of the things that people don't understand is when you have an intervention and you move towards a particular new point and the system is in a new place, et cetera, and starting to transform, if you don't hold that momentum, the natural thing to happen is bounce back. That happens at an individual level, it happens at a group level, it happens at a society level. It's hard. A group level, it happens at a society level, it's hard. But I love that. That's a good answer. All right, before we go, is there a message you want to give to folks who might be listening today?
Speaker 1:We've raised a lot of really intriguing and powerful questions around the idea of personal development, development in business, how to be a better leader, how to be better at business, and I think it's a really fascinating set of conversations and ideas. But the thing I would leave everyone with is it all starts with that first choice. You can be forced to change We've gone through COVID and we've gone through negative situations but if you can actually use the carrot, the positive change, and to look forward to say what are we trying to accomplish and why, and facilitate that change that you want and lead that change, it's a very different framing of things, but it gives you a purpose for everything we've talked about and hopefully it allows you to execute on many of the ideas we've talked about as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to sneak in one last question as well, sorry. Okay, is there something you either left out of your book? Or a new idea? So you have a book? Tell folks about your book. By new idea, so you have a book. Tell folks about your book. By the way, I have two books.
Speaker 1:so sticky brandy is my first book, uh, which is how do you grow a sticky brand which takes on my experiences in the mid-market. The book I launched right before uh covid was called brand new name was around brand naming and, specifically, employee co-creation how do you unlock the creative genius of teams to solve complex problems like naming? And to answer your question, is there something I've left out? Yes, I've got a third book and probably a fourth book and a fifth book in me.
Speaker 1:If I go back to Sticky Branding the book specifically, I didn't value the idea of vision and values the way I do now, so that principle and those ideas are potentially missing. We talk around purpose and those elements in the book of core values and systematizing them and anchoring them inside of everything you do and using them as a compass for making people, decisions, business decisions. They are often treated like marketing garbage on the wall and press releases and they look like the Exxon or no, the Enron, values of excellence and that kind of just pejorative phrases. But if you actually have a set of stories and values and behaviors that you can codify into your organization, I think there's a whole book on that on its own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm looking forward to reading that book. So, folks I want to thank I want to thank our guests today for coming on and being a great conversation partner with me. We talked about all kinds of things. If you enjoyed this conversation and look forward for more, join me next time where I'll be interviewing yet another guest usually a thought leader, sometimes an entrepreneur where we will explore the two questions of how do you become a better person in business and how do you become a better business person. Hope you enjoyed this episode and join me next time on Conversations with Kita Deming.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to Conversations with Kita Deming. Over the years, I've learned that few things will impact or improve your life more than improving your strategies and having better conversations with the people you wish to serve. If you like today's guest and the idea is shared, please like, follow and provide a review wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also visit my website, sign up for my newsletter and learn about the release of my upcoming book. I look forward to the next episode where we'll be in conversation with someone who will help you become a better business person and a better person in business. See you next time.