Neil Callanan - Unlocking Purpose: Transforming Passion into Business Growth

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast where we help you climb the revenue ladder and become the preferred provider in.

The markets you serve.

Today, we're tackling a challenge every modern business leader faces.

You have a passionate purpose, but does it actually move the needle?

What if your brand could prove that activism and social impact don't just inspire.

They reliably sell, grow market share, and reduce customer churn?

Our guest is here to show you exactly how to do it.

Neil Callanan is The founder of LooseGrip and the brilliant mind behind the Grasp Impact Framework.

His work sits at the critical intersection of marketing, activism, and analytics.

He doesn't just talk about having a mission.

He equips you with the tools to measure what truly matters.

Get ready to learn how the most impactful brands are connecting their values and to tangible business growth.

Join me now for my conversation with Neal Callanan.

Well, hi, Neil.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hey, I'm excited about this one.

I've always focused on sales and marketing and in the process of Becoming preferred.

And one thing I've always not really been able to relate to is bringing purpose to what we do and aligning our brands and the work we do with purpose.

I'm excited about the angle that you attack this and niche that you've built for yourself before we get into that framework, because I want to get into one of the frameworks that you've developed that have worked with some amazing companies like Unilever, Ben and Jerry's, and we'll talk about them and what that means and how it impacted the bottom line.

And so our listeners, I know, are interested in bringing purpose to some of the work that they do, particularly the younger generations.

My generation's a little older.

It was profit first, but I kind of like where you're going with this.

We'll attack that.

But before we dive into it, how.

How did Neil become Neil?

Let's go back to high school.

You're.

Where are you living?

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Yeah, great question.

I grew up in upstate New York in a region called the Finger Lakes, which is pretty rural.

And I always wanted to be into advertising, marketing.

That was my shtick from the beginning, I think.

I.

The story that I told my daughter was basically that I had a teacher who could channel my otherwise fairly mischievous energy into business and marketing and creative.

And I.

She encouraged me at an early day to do that.

And I realized it was a place where I Could spend a lot of time.

I went to university for advertising.

So I studied, worked at a, ran the advertising department at a college newspaper for three years, did the whole thing that way.

And then post college, my first job was at a marketing agency.

I've always been into the space of communicating and creativity and over time that's evolved as I've gone off on my own and all the stories there.

But also just in terms of the market's changed and now we talk about a lot of data and a lot of numbers and a lot of insights in ways that maybe wouldn't have been so much so in the last 20 years.

I want to dive into that now.

You were a Florida Gator, I believe, and great football program, so great place to live as well.

So I know where you are.

The stadium, the swamp.

So lots of good competition.

All right, so you're in marketing, you're attracted to marketing.

It was traditional marketing at the time, I'm assuming.

And because you've seen it evolve, you've been doing this for I think 16 years now plus.

And then how have you seen it where.

When you got into the marketing world to where it's evolved to today?

Talk about the evolution of that.

Yeah, it's been, you know, I think I.

My career kind of spans a pretty interesting evolutionary time when it comes to marketing.

When I was in college, Internet marketing was starting to be a thing, but not really right.

So we were still learning kerning and letter forms and letting for your newspaper one by ones and how to do a media buy on radio.

And pretty quickly that knowledge didn't have a ton of value, not the practical skills at all, but just the.

The landscape was changing pretty rapidly.

And so the agency that I got gig with was primarily a digital shop.

A lot of branding, but they were doing kind of old school Digital, like the First Wave Web 2.0, like a brochureware website that had a little bit of interactivity to it for big enterprise companies.

And we did a fair amount of creative stuff mostly in the B2B side.

But the digital of it all was pretty straightforward, right.

Like websites built in flash and really basic Google Ads, that kind of stuff.

In that work, what always sort of appealed to me was the digital stuff.

Didn't have a whole lot of owners of it at that point in time.

Right.

So what became clear to me was, you know, if I want to advance my career, doubling down on everything digital in 2006 was the quickest path towards having a career that was slightly higher paying.

Yeah, no, it's an it was an interesting time.

And the old model changed.

You know, the old ad man model or admin, we'd watch that and it just changed.

It started to evolve.

We started to see more purpose driven marketing as well.

And I think, how did you get onto that vein in marketing?

Because it's definitely a unique part.

People talk about it, but you guys actually live it.

And a lot of your clients that you have execute it.

What started you down that path?

Yeah, I would say a little bit of intention and a little bit of luck, you know.

So I started loose grip about 17 years ago, and at the time, I would have done ads for anybody who wanted to pay US$1, and I would have run blimp ads or skywriting or driven the plane with a little, you know, ad behind it.

Yeah.

But pretty quickly what became clear to me was that there was a growing appetite for sort of insights.

And that's in an analytic sense.

Right.

Like how to figure out what's connecting with your audience.

And the interesting thing about that is that the ability to figure out what's connecting with your audience self selects into working with clients who care if their content is connecting with their audience, which starts to be a lot of mission driven, activism driven brands.

Right.

So if you're just selling widgets and your only KPI that you care about is did you sell more widgets today than you sold yesterday?

Then you probably don't really value how much time people are spending, consuming your content, spending on your website, diving deep into your video content, learning from your information.

And then our framework doesn't really work as well.

Right.

Because it's not a commoditized cost per transaction.

So I'd love to say I've always been an activist and I've been passionate from birth.

The reality is I sort of lucked into working with some of these brands.

And you know what's been great about it is we have found that it's not about doing one or the other.

Right.

It's about doing both concurrently.

And I really believe that they both can enhance each other.

Right.

And so it's not as much about picking and saying, oh, we're going to work with activism for brands.

We've done a ton of work with some nonprofits as well.

But even in that sense.

Right.

We still think about it like there is stories that need to be told, there's messages that we want to help them deliver, and we also want them to generate donations and petition signups and subscribers.

And there's a conversion that still happens, but I think the sweet spot for us has always been finding brands who really care about how people engage with their content and that often leads them to be sort of mission driven folks.

Yeah, I kind of came from the old school where it was transactional.

We didn't really link it to any particular purpose.

And you've really outlined on your website grassyourimpact.com where you talk about the ROI of purpose and now you work with the Grasp impact framework that you've created.

That's basically starts with a fundamental challenge where many leaders face connecting the company's deep mission to its day to day operations.

Can you explain the difference between having a, say, a vague mission statement and having a purpose or preferred purpose and why that distinction is the first step towards some measurable impact?

Well, if I want to be a little bit cynical about it, the difference is if you're just posting on Veterans Day, on Black History month and on the 4th of July with your token stock image of your team supporting, quote unquote, an audience, then it's unlikely that you're doing so with a ton of authenticity.

Right.

And I think the brands that do this best are really living and breathing.

It actionability all the time.

Right.

It's not something they do once as a means to get their campaign out the door once.

It's not the NFL putting their salute to service out one the year.

It's about having commitment to an idea over time.

And I think the brands who are doing it really well have that commitment and then that allows them to invest in ensuring that they are connecting with an audience that is both potentially a consumer of their product, but also potential folks who can be activated by their messaging and their mission along the way.

Yeah, we see that with the younger generations.

With the older generations, it's definitely learned the younger generations have done a great job I think of bringing that to the table.

I think the big difference is I see mission statements from CEOs and I'll even it'll be sitting on the wall behind them and I'll say, can you tell me your mission statement?

They can't even really tell me and without looking and they're embarrassed by that.

But you say you have a mission statement says, you know, we aim to make the world a better place, whatever that, what does that do?

Versus Ben and Jerry's would be a perfect example that one of your clients, their purpose isn't just to sell ice cream.

It's about using their business to advance social justice and sustainable economics.

So you've got KPIs around the actionable steps.

Can you talk about a client like that?

Because we can all relate to good ice cream and they make amazing ice cream.

Yeah.

Well, I would say the answer I task our team with when we're figuring out whether a client's a good fit for our framework is can they answer the next question?

Right.

If your mission is to change the world and you say, how are you doing that?

Yeah.

Can you point to what you are doing other than this one post on Mother's Day or on Veterans Day or on Green Energy Day, whatever it might be?

And so a lot of brands, they can't authentically answer that question because it's mostly a marketing effort more than it is an activism effort.

But I'll say, yeah, we get to work with some really cool brands.

And I would say the thing they have in common is that today more than ever, there's some sort of society wide.

I wouldn't say society of political.

Just the kind of nature of things.

There's been a kind of downward pressure on all investments in activism.

Right.

Whether that's ESG or even just di.

All the things.

Right.

There's been a downward pressure.

And so more than ever, the brands that we work with need to be able to tell the story of how their activism impacts their bottom line.

Because if they can't, they're going to have a hard time rationalizing that investment or the investment in the resources, the investment in putting messages out that aren't always going to land perfectly with 100% of the audience.

Right.

Like, it's one thing to put out a picture of a beautiful ice cream sandwich and have a pretty high satisfaction rate amongst your audience.

It's a different thing to be asking folks to vote or to advocating for refugee rights in Europe.

There's some folks who aren't going to agree with you.

And so you have to be able to point to data that says, this is how that might impact our bottom line, or this is how that did impact our bottom line.

This is how that impacted not only the activism, but the conversion that we want to sell things.

We don't work with a ton of brands who just say, nobody wants to hear about how good we do in the world.

As long as, you know, we're just doing it for the sake of doing it.

They want to say, here's what we do and here's why it makes people connected with our brand.

And when people are connected with our brand, they buy more of our stuff or invest more in, or they're more committed to our, you know, Yeah, I.

Think companies have to be a little more strategic.

I'm still seeing a lot of the same initiatives, say like esg, dei, they're just disguising it, so they're wrapping around different words and phrases because of the political downward pressure that's always on these things depending on who's running the show.

And so companies that are still committed to it, I see them still doing it, they're calling it, you know, belonging, working with groups around the country, they just disguise the phraseology of it so they get rid of those labels and the terms that people love to label with.

Let's introduce the audience to the Grass Impact framework.

This is really central to Loose Grip.

Can you walk our listeners through the core components of the framework?

It's an acronym.

And just what are the key specifically what are the key stages and where do most companies typically get stuck when trying to implement it on their own?

Sure.

So I would say most companies get stuck by not starting more than by getting stuck along the way.

Right.

So I'm a big advocate that this kind of approach can be done internally by a lot of brands, especially small to mid sized brands that can't unnecessarily bring in somebody like us all the time.

But the general idea is that we go out and we set up content objectives for every piece of content and we do that typically in a workshop format.

So we'll bring five or 50 people in a room and we try to start by getting away from computers entirely because when you start talking data and KPIs, you can really end up quickly at moving pieces around on a dashboard that don't really help you move your brand forward.

So we really like to start with we're big fans of big giant post it notes and we get everybody in a room and we start moving things around up and down.

And typically the way we will approach it is we will say let's look back at your last, you know, 50 pieces of marketing materials that might be social media content, emails, web pages, campaign efforts, commercials, whatever.

And then we start trying to put each of them into a bucket.

Right.

And typically that bucket is going to be roughly one of three things.

One is going to be what we call discover, which is like content that is designed to reach the most amount of people.

So this is like your brand content.

Give me as big a number as you can.

How many people can I reach?

Awareness, all that.

The second bucket is typically either engage or educate, depending on whether it's B2B or B2C.

But that's typically Trying to get somebody to take an action that's going to drive them a little bit deeper in their understanding of the brand, the product, the story, the industry, whatever it might be.

So in that case, we're looking at content that we actually care about the quality of the interaction more than the quantity of the interaction.

They're not exclusive, right.

They're not mutually exclusive, but we do care about the quality.

And then the third piece is typically some type of conversion, right.

So you know, some cases that's getting folks to sign up for a voting rights petition, sometimes it's selling soap, right?

It can be, it can be both.

And the conversion is still the end goal.

And when we talk about a conversion, it's a tangible, measurable, specific action.

And what's cool about the framework is it allows us to take content that seemingly on the surface feel very different.

Right?

Like get your ice cream delivered and sign this voter rights thing.

And now I can look at what content actually drives the most.

Actionability, regardless of the topic of the content.

Right?

Because there's a format style.

We know this type of content works best for convert content, this style works best for our engage content and this style works best for discover content.

And they're kind of topic agnostic.

So it works really good for mission driven brands, activism for brands, because they're creating both.

Right.

And it's otherwise really hard to say.

We did this post about our investment in renewable energy and we did this post about how many megawatts our data center provide.

They seem so different on the surface that it's really hard to weave them into a content calendar and learn from both.

But we really feel like when thought of in tandem but chosen by a specific objective in mind, it creates a framework that allows us to say this kind of content seems to connect best with our audience, regardless of if we're asking them to buy ice cream or fill out a petition or download a white paper or you know, just engage with a story from one of our thought leaders.

Well, I guess it's making them feel good when they do make their purchase.

Or if some things.

For instance, I love Apple products, recycled aluminum product.

You know, I try and look at those sustainability aspects.

Not everything, but I always make that a priority.

Footprints.

My wife and I, you know, shrunk our footprint.

We raised a big family, we had seven children and we had all the multiple things that go along with that.

We brought that down to its basic fundamentals.

Do what we can.

Let's talk about the analytics because I know you hate spreadsheets.

And you kind of pride yourself on hating spreadsheets.

So you move past the vanity metrics that most people, you know, the likes and part.

How do you identify the key data points that directly correlate to the purpose and business growth?

Well, typically what we do is, rather than by starting with all the data points, what we'll do is we'll take that framework that I talked about for in a workshop format and then we'll say, okay, what are some of the actions?

What's the number one thing we would want somebody to do right now?

Right.

And we'll kind of play out this experience of what would the perfect experience be?

And it may be they skip the content quick and go by the thing.

It may be that they actually spend 10 minutes watching this whole story about how the ingredients are sourced sustainably and then turn that into, into action.

And then they find the flavor or the product that best articulates that specific thing, and then they sign up for our newsletter and then they buy the thing.

There's journeys that can happen in a bunch of different ways, right?

And so once we determine for each bucket of content what the ideal KPIs might be, we can then start pruning them away.

And I actually generally recommend the way we do this in a workshop is we say, all right, let's Talk about the 10 best potential user journeys, and then we just start pruning them back and we say, okay, these are two are kind of the same.

Let's get rid of that.

We end up with maybe two, maybe three core measurables.

They could be referred to as metrics, but sometimes they're a combination of metrics or we're identifying a buyer journey and we try to make them as condensed as possible.

And that serves as the framework for which all the reporting is going to be built on.

So when we do quarterly reporting for a brand, we're going to do it based on the framework that basically they built more than we built.

They went through the process.

And what I'd say kind of lastly to that is that one of the things that's really important about that is that it brings a broad swath of folks to the table and gets their voice heard.

And that buy in is really important.

So, you know, people will ask what makes these successful.

And I would say in most cases, getting all the voices heard up front.

And that typically at a big brand looks like everyone from the content creators to the social media managers, right?

Like on the lower scale, all the way up to leadership who has to advocate for why they're posting about something.

You got to build some buy in and some consensus on what the action that they want to take is and or that they want their consumers to take and then get some agreement on what metrics best articulate that.

Right.

Sometimes they're very clear.

Right.

It's just a purchase.

But sometimes if you're trying to build a brand, maybe the purchase is more commoditized, but you're trying to build a brand along the way, then maybe you need to look for a more creative metric set that can help talk about that.

One of the examples I love, we had a client who they sell like outdoor gear and really high end, thousand dollar tents, you know, thousand dollars sleeping bags, that kind of thing.

But they're a relatively new brand and when looking to their purchases, they had just rolled out all this kind of branded retail, non technical stuff which is mostly about their fans going out and saying, oh no, I have this thing.

It's like the guy who's going to buy a truck but also wear the Ford T shirt or whatever.

Right.

Like the T shirt doesn't mean anything to the bottom line, but it does mean something to being indicative of the brand affinity that has been created.

Because the kind of person who's going to not only buy the vehicle but then talk about buying the vehicle, it's a very different interaction.

So then we can start to use some of those purchase behaviors as actual ties to branding rather than ties to revenue.

Even though it's a purchase at the end of the day, Ford's not going to change their bottom line by selling T shirts, but they might change their bottom line by creating more people who want to buy T shirts and wear T shirts, that kind of thing.

It's the just do it right.

You got the swoosh and what we add to it and we buy it on all our things.

I know people, I know your clients who and who use the Grouse framework.

They get clarity, they get action and they get a proof of impact which at the end of the day it's what you're looking for.

Do you ever get.

I'm sure you do.

Do you get clients that come to you, small, medium and large who go, hey, we don't have any purpose, we're just transactional at this point.

Help us find a purpose that fits our brand that we can explore that will help drive growth?

Yeah, on occasion, you know, I would say where we've done that is almost in some cases turning that messaging on the nonprofit side.

So I served on the board of I Chaired the board of a nonprofit called the I Am Able Foundation.

And one of the things we really helped them do as part of their rebranding efforts were identifying, you know, if you go back to the old, like, Ziggler sales stuff, I'm sure you're very familiar with, right?

Oh, yeah, I knew Zig.

He's long gone, but, boy, he kind of started that whole revolution on things.

Yeah.

And this idea of existed, for sure.

Talking about what buyers are buying more than talking about what you're selling.

Right.

And that can actually apply in a lot of different ways.

And so in that case, this particular nonprofit helps disabled and adaptive kids get more access to athletics.

Right.

Sometimes that's through buying gear, sometimes that's through classes, sometimes that's through adventures.

Sometimes that's through scholarships to be in the Boston Marathon, whatever it is.

Right.

And we aren't going to go in and tell them how to change their mission, but we can go in and say, hey, people really seem to relate to these stories about when you teach a class, and this person had an experience.

Right.

So kind of bringing it out of the macro sense and into a little bit more tangible example.

So I'd say, you know, what our team is really good at is sort of saying, you have a mission.

Maybe you don't know how to articulate it best, but we can help you come in and figure out how that mission is best articulated in a way that will connect with your audience, and your audience will connect with it in this particular way.

Right.

So, you know, the example in the nonprofit space is like, a lot of these nonprofits will spend a lot of time thinking of articulating their mission through stories, but not enough time thinking about what do people really want to buy, quote, unquote, buy.

And the example is people love to buy a piece of equipment because you got to put a whole lot more time into thinking about what's the value of a class, what's the value of a scholarship to do a thing, what's the value of an experience for a kid to get to go skiing for a day.

And those are much harder to put a monetary amount on.

So you have to kind of over invest in the storytelling to get people to go down that route.

And ultimately, I think you can get there and you can build through that growth by thinking about what are the KPIs that would be indicative of that storytelling being successful.

It may be that you drew more donors, but it also may just be that now people are more invested in the brand and they're willing to become repeat donors and that's a better indicator rather than a first time donor.

There's a bunch of different ways to think about how the KPIs sort of play out and all that kind of.

Thing and they start to advocate and that consumer advocacy is really what drives it.

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And now back to my conversation with Neil Callanan.

You talk about the storytelling.

You emphasize turning data into stories and then stories into metrics.

Why is storytelling the crucial bridge between, you know, boring, dry analytics and boardroom level business growth?

Because nobody wants another spreadsheet.

Nobody really wants another dashboard.

I would say they think they do, but they don't.

The analogy that I use when I'm doing workshops, kind of to an analytics community sometimes, is we love to talk about data in the form of Legos, and there's an instinct to gather as much data as possible without thinking about the story really too much.

And the way that I articulate that is think of Legos, right?

If I gave you ten, a hundred, or a hundred thousand Legos, every time I give you more Legos, it's going to be harder to figure out what it is you could build from it.

There's more possibilities for sure, there's endless possibilities.

But try to figure out how to build that one car if there's a hundred thousand Legos on your garage floor, right?

And data is that same problem.

We just get get data obsessed with let me get some more Legos and let me get some more Legos.

The value comes Back to the stories that can be told from it.

And the example being LEGO can charge a thousand dollars for, you know, a LEGO Millennium Falcon.

But I can go on ebay and buy Legos literally by the pound and they will show up for 40 cents a pound or something.

So like it can be fully commoditized if it doesn't have the story.

And there may be the pieces to build that Millennium Falcon in that hundred pounds of Legos that I just bought, right?

So I think the example is that like, like more is not always better.

And we get into this mistake where we say, okay, first thing I should do is get more data.

And then when I get a bunch, I'll start organizing it, right?

Because it feels good.

Let me sort all these Legos by colors, let me put them all into their respective bins and I'll have this very organized LEGO room.

And then now I've got all this organized stuff and then maybe I'll be able to build something amazing that can influence the people around me, right?

And it's not the case, right?

So you end up at grabbing a bunch of data, turning the spreadsheets, turning that into a pretty dashboard, which honestly, it feels really good.

When you see a pretty dashboard, you're going to see all the numbers and it feels great.

And you probably, probably never going to go look at it again, nor is anybody on your team.

These dashboards, they just don't become useful tools along the way.

But if you can turn that data into a story, I think you can connect with your audience a whole lot more.

And I mean the audience of, you know, the boardroom, but even the people doing the work, right, the content creators, the people generating your ad campaigns, the people who are putting your SEO on market, whatever it is, right?

They don't want to be given a spreadsheet to tell them what to do.

But if you build it in an engaging fashion, we really do, we set, our goal is that most of our clients, we do quarterly readouts.

So we do, you know, once we get into the day to day flow of reporting.

And our goal is for that quarterly meeting to be their best meeting of the quarter, right?

We want it to be fun.

We want it to be an engaging storytelling, narrative driven, engaging conversation rather than A Here's a PowerPoint or here's a dashboard, right?

So we try to really drive them into that story.

It's interesting, I just was reading literally an article this morning, early this morning.

Jeff Bezos in Amazon is famous for doing the narrative memo and he banned in 2024 PowerPoints from showing up in meetings and executives for the first 30 minutes have to read a six page mem.

Silence, crickets, no one's talking.

And then they work from the narrative.

What's the difference between a narrative and storytelling?

It's a great question.

For me, I would say a narrative is determining for us how the momentum is working towards your goal.

Right.

So we know that the narrative is likely established by the business, right?

Meaning we want to sell more of these things or we want to reduce the impacts of climate change by doing this or whatever the thing may be.

Right.

And so we know that's the end goal.

And so the narrative becomes what are the data points along the way to that?

Choose your own adventure.

Would we need to know that we're getting closer to having that impact?

Right.

And can we deliver those in a way that connect with folks?

So we like to think about these things just in terms of like, well, if I could know anything, what would I want to know?

Then go search for it rather than here's all the things I have, what can we do with it?

We try to take the opposite approach.

So that might be looking at saying, how do I spend my media more effectively?

How do I know which content we should do more of, should do less of which agency that we partner with is creating the best stuff?

Right.

Like there's a bunch of business level decisions and then a narrative can really help do that.

I would say storytelling for us is how we get folks to connect to that narrative and we think a lot about it, a lot and hard about it.

And I would say my favorite example of this that I would say is more about storytelling is that when we are trying to bring numbers to life, we try to recontextualize them.

And I think it's like the easiest tweak you can make, especially if you're working a data driven field is just take one data point and recontextualize it in a different format.

Right.

So we often look at these consumptive behaviors that I've talked about before, right?

Like how long do people on average spend on this particular piece of content on this video?

What's the average watch time on this video?

So a lot of times what we'll do is like in an end of year readout, I'll pull up the num.

The best, their best performing piece of content for the year and maybe it has like a 2 minute and 12 second average engage time, right?

Yeah.

That those numbers mean nothing.

They mean nothing to any of us.

Our brains can't even capture really what that means.

But if I make you sit and be silent in an awkward conference room for 2 minutes and 14 seconds, you will see how long 2 minutes and 14 seconds is.

And it will help people contextualize the difference between that and the 32nd average engage time.

Or the difference between why we don't care as much about views.

If a view can be a half a second, that's such a different brand experience than somebody who sat down and spent two minutes with your content.

And I think storytelling is what we use to bring those numbers to life in a way that then somebody can be better at their job.

Like, it's very hard to make decisions solely based on the programmatic arithmetic.

Right.

Is the conversion rate better?

Yes or no?

Sure.

If all I care about is am I selling the thing for the cheapest amount possible.

But if you're trying to build your brand up over time, you really got to understand better how people are engaging with content and how the sources change and how the platforms change and how those visitors affect the bottom line.

Or it can all be part of the narrative.

But I think bringing the story to life in a way that gets people to be like, oh, I'll stop and pay attention to this.

Everybody's got so many meetings in their.

Right.

Like, storytelling, I think for us helps us think about how to bring that performance information to life in a way that people literally just stop at least to pay attention.

Right?

So we see billboards, we get an impression, we get something that flashes.

We get an impression.

But if we can get them emotionally involved, like from a sales perspective, which is the one I'm always coming from, we try and embed these emotional triggers in our sales pitches, in our presentations and our conversations level.

Because I believe it's emotion first.

First justify with reason and logic second.

And we do that through storytelling.

So we will tell stories of a client.

We try and embed those emotional components into it.

Do you find when people are looking for their stories or developing their stories or their purpose that they're going to be aligned to that?

It comes from a lot of their experiences themselves.

And you say, you talked about aligning everybody because everybody's coming to the table with something that's important to them.

For instance, you, I believe you were Big Brother and worked with the Big Brother organization.

You know, what makes you choose that versus, say, something else are in multiples of that.

Yeah, I would say that there's two levels.

Right.

And when we go back to the sort of objective based frameworks, I Think it applies, right?

So if you think about.

All right, when the phase where Big Brother is trying to capture my attention, why did I choose Big Brother?

I have no idea.

I was exposed to the brand and it felt like a program that I was like interested in being involved with.

But the educate fashion, where they were developing content about what that would look like, helping me think about it, helping me envision myself as getting to influence a young person or to feel like I have been contributing in a new way.

That's the kind of content that they were able to educate me with, that me confident that I was ready to pull the trigger.

Right.

Like you're bringing somebody along this journey, whether you're selling ice cream or Big Brothers, big Sisters, you're bringing somebody along, right.

First you got to help them have the idea, then you got to help them picture themselves in that idea, and then you got to get them to pull the trigger on signing up for the first consultation or buying the thing or putting their credit card information in.

Right.

And I would say, you know, for me, I think a lot of the altruistic things people kind of decide, I think a lot of people are really inherently altruistic and they actually want to help other folks.

I really do believe that.

I don't think we always make it really easy for them.

And so sometimes brands an opportunity they have is to kind of be that avenue.

Right.

Like, I was just watching a local political race and a friend of mine was running for Supreme Court in New York State and just watching how many folks in the community were excited to get behind and support him and walk in the parades.

These are not people who are super active political folks, right?

But just having a thing to get excited about and feeling especially in today's world, like you can have some agency over the decisions that you make, where you spend your money, how you spend your money, where you volunteer your time.

That agency is one of the things they haven't been able to take away yet.

So I feel like it's our job as marketers to leverage that, find ways to allow people to opt in to being conscious consumers and being smart about how they impact the world at large.

A lot of our audience are entrepreneurs, business people.

They're working hard, hard.

How do you achieve as an entrepreneur?

Because you've been doing that for, like you said, about 17 years to balance work, life, balance, or how do you, you know, you've got to look after your family, you've got your children.

How do you bring all of that into.

I know it's a Struggle.

I struggled with it my early years.

I'm a way better papa than I was a dad.

You know, as far as being around, how do you balance your life?

Because when you're working with some of these brands, I know you burn the midnight oil many times, I'm sure.

Is that a challenge for you on a personal productivity or as an organizational or how do you bring that to your work and to your business, your company, in your culture, if you will?

I would say from a cultural standpoint, we all have to believe in respecting each other and each other's time and working with brands and companies who are going to respect, respect all of us.

Right.

On our team, we're a small team and so that's generally good.

But that also means if somebody is not being respectful of everybody else's time on the team or one client is not being respectful of our team, that can really impact morale, mine and theirs.

Right.

And so when I about creating a work life balance, I think about it like designing it around what I've always wanted, which is basically let me prove results and don't worry too much about how much time it took me to get there.

And I try to keep our team focused on that energy, both as working for loose script, but also for the clients that we work with.

Right.

Like, we don't do a ton of hourly billable work because I don't want to be incentivized to bill more hours.

Right.

I want to be incentivized to do better work, period.

And if they get the value out of it and we get to bring our best selves to the project, that's the win.

Not did this thing take X amount of hours?

Right.

So I think there's a little bit of just cultural buy in that you need to have internally and then you can go forward with it externally.

And I would say almost nobody pushes back on us anymore when we say no.

We don't actually report hours.

That's not who we are.

But all those things lead into trying to create a work life balance that's a little bit more sustainable.

A couple things we do for that.

I would say the last few weeks our team's been really getting their butts kicked because of the end of the year.

We do a ton of reporting.

The kind of quarterly reports I was talking about.

A lot of campaigns are wrapping, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Things will really slow down.

Right.

December 10th onward, not a whole lot going on.

It's a great time to just give everybody some time to breathe and rejuvenate Go take a day.

You know, try to take a Norwegian approach to holiday kind of thing.

Like, not the American approach is very ripe for burnout.

And I try really hard to make sure we aren't contributing to that overall.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, I. I think that's good to have that work out.

And I love that generation and your generation because, you know, I. I started with a paper route at 10 and started my own little businesses back in those days.

And it's just working.

It's finding that balance.

And then life comes in and there's marriages for people, there's divorces for people.

One of the things I noticed in your bio, and I wanted to attack it, and we were okay going there.

You talk about writing through grief and.

And writing with.

Can you.

Can you elaborate on what that was?

I'm not sure personally.

How did you come up with that?

And why is that one part of what you talk about?

Sure.

Well, my wife and I lost our son, shay.

He was four and a half, maybe 14 months ago now, 15 months ago.

And it's not a joke, but the thing I said that is you would have never got me to say previously was, I wish I had a job.

I wish I could have been useless on somebody else's dime for six months after that because I just wasn't really good at doing anything, let alone running a company.

Everything becomes meaningless.

Yeah.

And it's really hard to not let the apathy become contagious when you don't care.

It's hard to get your team to care.

It's hard to get your clients to care.

It's all really hard.

Right.

So for me, writing has always been a kind of cathartic approach.

Yeah.

For me, that has to be.

For whatever reason, I have to publish it for it to have that catharsis.

Right.

So I wrote some.

I wrote a lot about the journey.

Still do, but especially the early stages.

Some of the really tough things about losing your kid and the bureaucracy of it all and the.

Just the emotions, but also just the realities of it.

And I've been writing a lot because I think in some ways fathers are a little bit underserved when it comes to grief and grieving.

If you were to find writing about grief, it's likely written by a woman or through the context of a mother who has lost their child.

And I think that's just.

Just because dads don't emote as much, and we just operate a little bit differently.

And our instinct is to do and put our heads down and put our.

Keep trying to Take another step.

I realized pretty quickly for me that wasn't reasonable, it wasn't going to work.

And I was spending a lot of time just searching for anything I could find by dads who had experienced it.

Because you're just searching for any kind of answers you can find.

And so if I didn't find an answer to a specific thing, I tried to write about it.

I think where the things overlap is that by doing so publicly, my team could see it, they could get a vibe on where I was.

And I think for them and my clients, frankly, you know, I'm good friends with a lot of our long term clients and I think my writing just allowed people to have a window into where I really was so they could understand that not only did I want to talk about Shay, did I want to talk about my grief like I was, I'm here for it.

And I needed to publicly say it to get my team to be not trying to, you know, awkwardly sidestep around it to get the clients to, you know, I took a fair amount of time off and did nothing.

But I also along the way, I think was trying to bring people into the journey just enough to.

You're just trying to project how you want folks to feel comfortable interacting with you.

And I think when there's a loss of a child specifically, it's such a heavy thing that everybody's scared of it.

It's really scary for somebody to bring up to address.

You can see it even in podcasts and interviews and that kind of thing.

Right.

It's just a big scary animal.

It's a big owie.

It's a big owie.

Parents should never outlive their children.

You were talking about Lego and as you were talking I'm thinking of my 5 year old grandson Henry.

And you know, he loved Lego and he loves and he can build.

He's unbelievable and he just incredible builder.

He just watch him work and how fast.

Let's honor shape for a minute.

Tell us about Shay.

Tell us, give us a minute about.

Tell our audience about him.

Sure.

So Shea was.

Shay was four and a half when he passed and he was a pretty rambunctious little guy.

He was on two wheels from the.

As soon as he could walk, he was on a balance bike.

He was pedaling around a bike without any kind of training wheels, a two wheeler.

By the time he was three, he was just ripping around mountain biking, doing all this stuff and had some.

Looked like me, talked like me, had a similar mischievousness to him as a child.

And yeah, he was really great, really great kid.

He.

He and his sister were really close, but in the kind of closet close that older sisters and younger brothers could be, where he would antagonize her until she flipped out kind of deal.

And he was just a joyous, energized kid who made everybody smile.

And he still does.

We still.

We talk about Shay a lot, and I bring him to how I approach business and how I approach my team and how I approach my life and my marriage and my parenting.

And nothing's gotten easier in the last 15 months, but I do feel a little bit smarter.

Well, Neil, thanks for sharing that with us.

Hey, to bring this full circle and we're under.

Our time's up.

I could talk to you for hours.

And I appreciate the insight, insights and sharing feelings with us because these are things that are real.

We run into people.

I've been in meeting situations where people have lost somebody that day.

We need to bring that human part back to and our nature.

And I think maybe a good question of that is to maybe talk about the empathy.

We've got AI coming on, and I'd love for you to address for our audience how AI is maybe how you're using the tools, but a lot of people are worried about being replaced.

And I believe AI is great at recognizing patterns.

We.

It thinks in its own way, but it doesn't provide empathy.

It doesn't that reaction that.

That visceral feeling of it doesn't experience that.

It doesn't have those judgments and understand those values.

So I think that's what makes us human, and that's what we need to bring to the table.

How do you see it fitting in?

And how's your firm employing it?

Sure, it's a good question.

I think I agree with you in principle that today the empathy is not really part of the technology solution.

And the empathy is what makes us be able to connect with folks better, whether that's customers, prospects, clients, team members, whatever we use AI to do, I think it can be a really powerful tool to take that big giant floor full of Legos that I talked about for and just help you find some patterns in it that the human brain maybe can't yet.

And so in the past, when we launched these frameworks, one of the challenges was we would build out a framework and then we would put together this really complex tagging and tracking document, which for the data nerds, they'll very much get it.

UTM tags, all the stuff deep in the cms, everything to just make sure everything had a Tagging ID for every piece of content.

And then we have to.

Because we have to wait for all the results to come in, start to look at it today.

We can go back.

We just did a project for a client earlier in the year that was, we looked back at five years of content and we can very quickly identify what was the intent of this piece of content.

Content and AI's pretty good at identifying.

Were they trying to sell more of their stuff?

Were we trying to get people to check out a recipe?

Was this something where we, how what percentage of the product was featured in this piece of creative.

Right.

We can start to then look at these trends over time and it gives us a much more powerful tool set to still do the human analysis.

I still have to look at my brain and go, I wonder why that piece seemed to work better than this one.

Right.

One of the things that AI is really good at is just, just, it's going to get a lot of things wrong.

But if I can go in and I can say, you know those content categories we talked about before, I can retroactively go back now and I can use AI, we have a bunch of custom agents that we use it for that we'll just go back and say, seemed like this was designed to get people to sign up for activism related thing or to get folks to download the newsletter.

All right, now let's look at five years of content.

All that we're targeting the newsletter subscribers, all that were targeted towards activating an audience who was already familiar with the brand.

Not gonna look at five, five years of content.

Easily, easily get it all together and then use my human brain to figure out why one seemed to work better than the other.

You know, it's, it's sort of using the AI to sort all the Legos on the floor and put them into all the buckets that we talked about so that your brain can go, oh, it looks like there's a lot of wheels here.

Maybe we can make something with these wheels.

It looks like there's a lot of plane wings.

Looks like there's a plane to be made in here somewhere.

It's just using AI to sort through these masses of data to find the opportunity for a human brain to look at it and go, accidentally.

The insight is here the AI has not yet replaced us entirely, but I think it has gotten a lot better at doing the first 60% of the work.

Right.

Where the data engineering and you know, how that gets infused into content that's created in the future is yet to be seen.

But it changes pretty rapidly.

I think that's where the interpretation comes in.

I think it's great at iq.

I don't think it's good at eq.

It can mimic, it can write a poem and make you cry.

Right?

But it hasn't happened, had your experience, you know, you're talking about with Shay.

It hasn't had that.

It doesn't know how you really feel.

It can assume how you felt, but it just doesn't do that.

So it needs us.

It needs that human touch.

And I think going into the future, if we want to insulate ourselves and stay relevant in the age of AI, we need to focus on our EQ and develop those communication skills, interpretation and understand what's the meaning behind this.

And that's why I love what you do when it comes to perspective, purpose.

So if your organization is mission driven and you're looking to get a grip on your impact on what your brand, your activism and your bottom line, reach out to Neil.

And the websites are graspyourimpact.com and we got loosegrip.net we'll have all of that in the show notes, Neil, so people can get hold of you.

Is that the best way to find.

You there or I'm on LinkedIn as well.

You can put that in the show notes also.

But happy to hear.

Hey, we're so delighted to have you.

Thanks for sharing your insights, your personal stories, and I know our audience will get a lot of value from that.

So thanks for being here today, Neil.

Yeah, thank you.

Michael, as you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you and who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is learning that great marketing isn't just about strategy, it's about execution that drives real revenue revenue or how storytelling can resonate and convert.

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This podcast is created and associated with Summit Media, my executive producer.

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Goodbye.