Have you Made Your Personal Brand Powerful?

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover how and then live your why. And so if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so if you've not yet discovered your why, go to whyinstitute.com take the why discovery and then come back because this will have much more impact for you when you know your why. And so today we're going to be talking about the why of challenge to Think Differently and challenge the Status quo Now people with this why always think outside the box and rebel against the typical or classical way of doing things. They aggressively seek unique solutions that no one else has considered to existing problems and challenges. They are extremely entrepreneurial and love innovation, particularly if it is a game changer. They look to create a market versus serve the market and constantly challenge the existing status quo in any area. They often have a broad variety of diverse interests. In a discussion with the person with this why, they may challenge you with comments such as why not? Or what if we looked at this from a completely different point of view. People with this why are great at being innovators, fashion designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, CEOs, rebels with or without a cause, and musicians. So today I have a great guest for you. I'm a little bit nervous about bringing her on because she has been my secret weapon and now I'm going to tell the whole world about her. But her name is Kara Parish and her company helps people who have a story to tell grow their impact and monetize their story. As a founder, she made the decision to pivot her focus to personal brands after she found success in a variety of markets, from startups and small businesses to Fortune Fives. Throughout her work with dozens of companies, she noticed that companies with C suite executives who grew their personal brand had more brand loyalty, faster growth, and found business development opportunities with much more value. She pivoted her company to help those C suite individuals become the personal brands their companies needed. Now. Since then, she's grown quite rapidly. She now has custom programs for all avenues of Personal brands, including podcasters, authors, coaches and consultants. They're a past and current client referral only company. If you'd like to work with her, you need to have one of her clients refer you. So she does this so that her success is directly linked to the success of her clients. She's not an average marketing company. She's your mentor's mentor marketing company. Kara, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. I'm so excited to finally be on. I've spent so much time listening to and growing this podcast.

But you are the reason that this podcast is so popular. Because when I look back when I started working with you, I Bet I had eight to 10 listeners, something like that. Now we have. How many. How many listeners do we have?

You are 1.3 million listeners now.

And I'll give you a little more credit. I think you were in a couple hundred whenever we started, a little more than 10. But you've come a long way.

Well, I don't know if I've come a long way. You've helped me come a long way. And so. Well, you know what, tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, Kara. How did you get into marketing in the first place?

Sure. So I'm definitely a natural entrepreneur on every scale and every personality assessment and every way that people become an entrepreneur. And I tried to go along with the system. When I was fresh out of college, I thought, you know, I could be at least a consultant and I could work with corporate clients. And I did. I worked with MTV and VH1 and Harley Davidson, General Mills, a lot of really big company names. And I should have been happy. From the perspective of everybody on the outside looking in, it looked really glamorous, especially for someone in their early 20s to be doing that kind of work and to be running with that kind of crowd. But I was really unhappy. I didn't like the system or the structure, the way that things operated inside corporate marketing. I didn't feel like I was having any real impact on the greater world. It's one thing to sell a product. It's quite another thing to change someone's life. And whenever I decided to pivot, I realized that the companies like a little bit. You were saying in the bio, the companies that had these strong personal brands at the helm, things moved faster for them and they had more opportunities, they closed deals faster. And it's because there was a human to human connection. Right. They were relatable. An audience looked at them and they saw something aspirational there, or they believed in them and wanted to support them. There was loyalty to that person. And that didn't exist in the same way in other types of industry. And I happened to be very fortunate that I was also seeing all of this happen right as there was a pivotal moment in personal branding, because this was about 10 years ago at this point. So we're talking about the emergence of influencers. This is the first time that the type of celebrity endorsements that happened weren't just athletes or pop music superstars. All of a sudden, if a major Fortune 500 CEO, if they had a big enough name, they could affect another company's outcome with a Tweet, with a MySpace post, with a YouTube video. All of a sudden these personal brands had equal power to celebrities in a way that hadn't really happened before. And it was the emergence of the Internet and the ability, not the Internet as a whole, of course, but the mostly social media, the ability for C suite executives to suddenly be more than just their job title, to become a fully rounded human being on a really broad and appealing scale. And so seeing that happen and knowing I had those connections and I had the marketing ability to make their alternate realities for the rest of the world seemed like a natural fit. And as a challenge, why it makes sense. You know, looking back, I saw the way that things were going and I said they could be a lot better. Let me innovate this, let me create this space in the market and then let me own that space so that I can create these other opportunities where my clients aren't just selling individual products. We're very particular about who we let inside our client roster. And there's gonna be a lot of salespeople who turn their nose up at that statement that I just made. But it has to be that way because what we're selling, what we're marketing is honestly mass impact. Our clients affect the lives of a lot of people and have a really strong positive ripple effect. We see that with the Y Institute. If I log into any of my clients social media accounts right now, I can find you a life changing story. It takes me five minutes to know that our work changed someone's life. Which is a really different feeling than selling like a ShamWow.

So take us to this pivot point that you had. What was that like? What was that pivot point exactly?

It was a combination of frustration and excitement being a challenge. Why? I love all sorts of understanding of personality and all sorts of understanding of self awareness and introspection. Because I believe really strongly that you have to have a really good understanding of who you are as a person before you can help anybody else. So I was feeling a combination of frustration and excitement because I do have that natural entrepreneurial personality type. It really actually wasn't anywhere near my first go around at having a company. I formed plenty of LLCs on random people's couches because it was just sort of in my blood. So to always be doing this. And my father founded multiple companies, little small businesses in my hometown. And my mother's always been an innovator inside her work in the government as well. So I also grew up with this, surrounded by this idea that everything can be made better and that the people who do make it better are people who take risks. So when I felt that frustration and that excitement, it was frustration because I knew something was broken and excitement because I knew that if something was broken, that means it's also capable of being fixed. And having the marketing understanding to see that there was a pivotal change happening inside the market. Any marketer who sees that, a really fast growing gold rush sort of market, they're going to have immediate excitement. Right. Especially if they have their own unique innovation on that market. So I felt both of those things. Frustration in the way that things were going. And it's never a good feeling when other people are saying like, congratulations, you're doing so well, or introducing you to their friends and immediately saying like, oh, she's done awesome stuff. You have to hear about what she's working on. And when they say that, if your feeling is, oh, God, I wish you wouldn't have said that, you know, I don't want to talk about what I'm working on. I'm not proud of this. You know, when you have that feeling, you know that something has to change.

So you were working on for companies and on products that you felt no connection to.

Yeah. And I think beyond that, well, I did have connection to some of the products and some of the companies. I could relate on some scale. But it was, I think it was more so the process, Right. The standard process and system of major corporate marketing, which is, okay, here's a product. We might run some focus groups. Then we bring in someone who either is a major branding strategist or a creative director and they apply their vision on top of this, and then we spend a lot of money to execute said vision and then the win is that the project is over.

Oh, okay.

Which is not. It didn't bring me joy. I'm not saying that everyone should just up and leave all of their corporate America jobs. I personally didn't feel joy in that process and being a part of that, I didn't feel like I was impacting people all that positively. There were small moments of joy where we would work with nonprofits or there would be, like, a social reform issue tied into something or something like that. But those were few and far between. They weren't the focus. I wasn't waking up every day and saying, I know that I've made someone's life better.

So you were in a position. You didn't like it, you were living it. It wasn't exactly what you wanted to do. You said, I'm going to pivot and I'm going to start my own. What was that like for you? You know, for people that are listening to this and they're thinking, you know, maybe I'm in that same kind of spot. What was it like for you to switch to your own business? How did that go for you? What was that like?

I think being a challenge. Why does make you more open to risk? Right. There's a certain level of bravado that comes with that. And I credit a lot of my ability to be where I am now because I own five companies now. My marketing agency is my favorite and the one I spend the most time in, because I love marketing strategy. But I've been through this several times now. I own five companies at the moment. Historically, I think if you add up all the companies, I've found it it's eight or nine.

Something like that. But there's a level of bravado of saying, I know that this is a risk worth taking, but at the same time having no ego, saying, if it fails, I'm fine with that. If it fails, then I know that I've tried. I did everything that I could do, and it wasn't the right choice, which I think is terrifying for a lot of people, because it's a big risk, right? There's a lot of big financial risk. There's a lot of personal risk. In terms of ego, you're telling the whole world that you believe in something and you can do something. And then if you fail at it, what does that say about you and all of those people to know that you failed? It takes a level of bravado to say, I can take that hit. And the truth is, even if a company does extremely well, there are always going to be moments of failure. Sometimes big failures, sometimes little tiny failures. And there'll always be those moments, though. So you have to be able to say, I'm confident enough in myself as an Individual in other things that I've accomplished or in this idea that I'm willing to take that leap. And like I was saying, I think with the challenge, why it's a little innate to our personality. Right. We tend to take a lot of risks. We tend to be jumpers, and that's what makes us good entrepreneurs and good founders, is that we're not as scared of the risks. But. And we don't spend as much time weighing them out, to be honest, as the average person. We tend to kind of jump in blindly. Or that old metaphor about building the plane on the way down. You know, I think challenge wise kind of work like that. You know, we push a plane out and we build it on the way down and we hope that we build the plane before we hit the ground.

So there's always that level of fear. But I think as long as you can accept those things and you can take that leap.

You know, for those of you that are listening and don't know, Kara, if you. And I don't want this to come out wrong, Kara, but you look very young, right? And so if you go to karaparish.com and you'll see Kara's picture there and you'll think, now is she old enough to be talking like this? Because when I listen to you, you know, obviously we spend time together and I know you, but you, you look young and you have so much experience. You'd be easy to, you know, not overlook, but not realize how much experience you have and how many things you do until you start talking. And then all of a sudden when I'm like, well, man, I got to listen to her.

I can imagine you get that quite often.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am still young in the scope of people who have founded the number of companies I've founded or have the number of companies I have at the moment or the experience that I have. And so. And beyond that, I'm baby faced. On top of that, I always say, I just got like the other day, well, it was. It's been a while now, but I was in a wine store, my partner's mother, and we were checking out to like get wine for dinner. And I had brought my passport with me because I just carry that at all times because it works everywhere and I travel a lot. So I showed them my passport and the woman was like, that's obviously fake. And I was like, really? I mean, I'll get my driver's license out of the car, but wow. Okay. Yeah, so I know I'm a little Baby faced on top of that. But yeah, I mean, I think this is something that also comes with probably people who have these innate personality traits. Because Dov Barron, who was on this show a while back and it was a great episode, I highly recommend everybody listen to that. He just had a young woman on his podcast who's a young founder and she is 12 years old.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So there's something to be said for people who start early, who start experiencing things at a young age in terms of business and personal development and what your, you know, understanding of things are. But I, you know, I credit that in a large way to my parents and having, you know, my mom is a better way. Why?

So I was also surrounded. My dad is a challenge. Why I was also surrounded by people who had these personality traits as well from a really young age. And so I don't think I ever could acknowledge that necessarily that my age was a factor here. Right. I just, I walked in and I knew what I was talking about and I wasn't afraid to say that I knew what I was talking about and it wasn't afraid to make those jumps. So, I mean, when I was working with a lot of corporate America, I was in my early 20s. I mean, you don't hear a lot of 21 year olds and 22 year olds running around talking about the board meeting they were just in. But that was the world that I was in.

So when did you start getting involved with personal growth? What was like the impetus for that?

It honestly goes hand in hand with founding companies. There's. When you are the founder of a company or a leader in any sort of role, your personal life so deeply impacts the work that you do and impacts the way you run a company. If you're having a bad day, your company is having a bad day. Right. Your mood is a natural ripple through your team. They feel that. And they're also looking for affirmation of their work from you. They're looking for validation. They need to feel like they matter to you and that they're doing great work for you. And they're so much emotionally tied to running a company and running a team especially, that it was easy to look at the teams that I'm a part of up to that point, and the bosses that I had had and say, I don't want to be that kind of a boss. I don't want to ever treat my team the way that that person treated me. I don't ever want to create the kind of problems that that boss created because they wouldn't communicate or they were inflexible or whatever it may be. And when you start thinking about the type of boss you want to be, it requires you to start thinking about the type of person that you want to be and the type of person that you are. So that's when I started going down that track of alright, let's start with management books, let's start with leadership books. Because I didn't know how to manage something, I didn't know how to lead humans. I always say that I really didn't see myself as a leader for a really long time. I didn't self identify that way. And again, Dove Baron that I mentioned earlier was one of the first people to make me see myself that way. He was doing a Facebook Live 24 Hour Marathon talking about leadership. And I asked a question about what if we don't self identify as a leader? And maybe it's, you know, because we don't match what we consider a stereotypical leader. We don't look like them, we don't sound like them, we're not from the kind of places they're from. Which if you think about my background in corporate, I was so used to this as a Silicon Valley leader and this is an LA type of leader and this is a New York City type of leader. And they were mostly older, wealthy white men and sometimes younger, but that was kind of the general demographic. And I am not older, wealthy man. I was very young, from the middle of nowhere, very poor area in Appalachia, young woman. And so I didn't look like any of them. And I'll never forget that he looked like right in his camera. And it was weird because I was just commenting on a post, my camera wasn't on, he couldn't see me, but he looked right in the camera and he said, cara, you are a leader. I had put it generic. I didn't even say I don't self identify. I said what about people who don't self identify identify? And he still called me out in front of thousands of people, which in retrospect I didn't appreciate at the time.

But I do know and sometimes it takes having those kind of people around you for you to start looking into that, looking into what it means when someone says you're a leader because all of a sudden there are people that are looking to you for how to behave and if you are not going down those routes of personal and professional development, then you're not going to be a great leader and you're going to set a really poor example. And what's the point of the kind of clients you have or the kind of products that you build or services you create having a positive impact if you personally are having a negative impact?

Yeah. Now, I know you and I have talked in the past that you started traveling quite a bit as well at a young age. And what was that all about? Tell everybody a little bit about places you've traveled and how you traveled and why you traveled.

Sure. I mean, I did life backwards is what my parents will tell you. I retired.

What I did was I was so used to traveling anyway for work. Right. So I was so used to having to fly in and out of places and be there for a day or two. I had been to so many cities that the best I could tell you is a good place to grab dinner. And I didn't know anything else about the city. And so when I about. I want to say three years in to having the agency, I decided that, you know, things were very stable. And I had designed a business that I loved that the rest of my life should be something that I loved. And so my partner and I opened up the front doors of our apartment and we sold everything. We literally ran Facebook yard sales for like two weeks, sold off every belonging that we had. Wow.

Where was this at?

This was in Northern Michigan in the U.P. so I'm originally from West Virginia, and before this happened, I lived in Pennsylvania, and I lived in North Carolina for a little bit, and I was bopping around all over the place. I worked a lot in Santa Monica, so I was doing the back and forth a lot. And this was. I just moved to the UP Of Michigan. I had been there for maybe six months. And then we made this decision. And so we sold off literally everything. I didn't want to be attached to anything physical. And we bought a vintage Airstream, a 1973 Argosy, and we moved into it. And then we spent three years just going from the top of the country to the bottom of the country, from the east coast to the west coast, back again, doing that east coast to west coast trip and taking a different route every time. We did that every year for three years. So we were in 48 of the 50 states. And during that time, I also was working with a couple different founders in various startups. And so I lived in India for a while during that three years as well. And then inside my own company, I worked with a lot of international companies. And so going back and forth to clients in other countries, I worked in six countries total in that time period. So I'd worked in six countries, traveled 48 of the 50 US states, and lived as much as you can say you were living anywhere as a nomad in two countries and arguably two or three states, because I was kind of back and forth between West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Wow. That can. It seems like that could just wear you out. Maybe it's the opposite, but it feels like hearing that, that sounds like a lot.

I mean, I would say that it's a thing that you should do in your 20s, but my parents always joked that I retired really early. She retired, she bought a camper and just runs around the country chasing warm weather.

I mean, I think there's a lot of snowbirds that live that lifestyle at the same time, so I can't really take a ton of credit.

And so you were able to work while you were doing all that?

Yeah, it's the joy of having fully remote work. I did used to travel sometimes to my clients for big events and things like that, but for the most part, everything's been online. So I designed a fully remote company, and that gave me the type of work that I wanted with the type of lifestyle that I wanted. And I feel really passionately about remote work. It's done so much for so many people that are from areas like I'm from where I'm from rural Appalachia in West Virginia. And there aren't a lot of job opportunities. That's a very matter of fact thing. I actually started a nonprofit in my home state, the West Virginia Hiring Group, where we connect people to jobs both in state and remote work, because remote work creates possibilities for job opportunities in places that otherwise there's nothing.

So tell us some of the good things that you saw about being a nomad and some of the not so good things about being a nomad.

There are plenty of both.

I mean, in terms of good things, I could walk out my front door and hike up Three Sisters Mountains. I could walk out my front door and be in the Segaro National Forest. Every day was a beautiful landscape. You know, I wake up in the Painted Desert, you know, every day was a different beautiful landscape. It gave you a really deep appreciation for what we have here in this country. In terms of. It's so different. The people, honestly, state to state, you find a lot of similarities, and we're a lot more alike than we are different. But the landscape is so dramatically different. You know, going even just from the Cigarro Forest to the, like, the HO National Rainforest, it's almost alien. The differences There. And so that was beautiful and amazing and just gave me a really deep appreciation. But it was also something I didn't realize until after that that journey was over. I was talking with one of my coaches, Ruby Fremont, and she was talking about this massive change in lifestyle of me not being as nomadic as before, and if I had given myself time to grieve, a massive lifestyle change. And I was like, no, Ruby, you grieve people. You grieve animals. You do not grieve.

Like, I was like, this is not a thing. People don't do this. And she's like, they do. They really do. And she was like, you know, what do you do for stress relief? And I'm like, well, I love the gym. And this is harder, though, now that I'm stable in one spot, like, if there's only like a certain number of gyms I can go to and I can't just walk out my front door and immediately be on hike up a mountainside. And she was like, okay, so it's harder for you now. It's harder for you to relieve stress. It's harder for you to find tranquility in between of calls. When you only have 30 minutes between two client calls. How do you establish that level of tranquility that you used to have walking out your front door into a beautiful forest or a mountain or a gorgeous desert? How do you have that now? And I was like, oh, no, Ruby, you were right.

And I started crying. I was so upset. And then it became about, like, building this new lifestyle that I love. But it's difficult even for people, I think, who are very innovative or like, being a challenge. Why? Or a better way? Why? When a massive. When you build a thing that you do love, it can be difficult. The hardest part can be letting go. It's so easy to take risks. It's not necessarily easy to let go when you've built this innovative, amazing thing for yourself.

So when you were out on the road and you're driving around all these different places. Well, I had a time period last year where I had a few weeks, you know, like 16 weeks off. And I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. I didn't like these. Not solitude, but not having all the stuff and the people around me and the excitement of the day around me as much as I. I thought I would like that time off more than what I actually did. Did you run into any of that?

I do. I can relate to some of that because it's really difficult to predict when you're always in a different place.

How you're going to have that most exciting moment in that place, how you're going to find the thing that is the highlight of your day, so to speak. Because it's really exploratory. Right. So sometimes you could explore all day or all week or for a month and never find the thing that you felt really passionate about in that place or your favorite thing in that place. But what I learned was it's really about you. Right? So you have to find the thing that brings you the most joy. It can't. When you're at home and you're like, this is a lifestyle again, like, I'm working in reverse. So this is. I'm now getting used to the reverse of that lifestyle where I do have an expectation every day. I had never really had that before. So now I understand what you're talking about. But when I was on the road, I didn't fully have that understanding. I have that experience now when I travel, but back then, I didn't fully have it. And one of the things that worked the best there was finding joy in these really small things. So, like, there's a place in Michigan where if I went back there right now, I would just eat the waffle fries every day. So. So if I went back to Marquette, Michigan, I would just be living off Bango's waffle fries because it was the best thing and I loved it so much. And sometimes it's about, like, finding so much joy in really tiny things like that and not necessarily needing to have that, like, greater expectation of what joy is for you. Like, in Portland, there are a couple of great arcade bars that I could kill an entire day just playing like Ms. Batman.

But you got to find that stuff, right? Yeah.

So let's change gears a little bit. Now, you. So you work with people that are personal brands. Right. And so for those people on that are listening to this, that don't even know what a personal brand is, kind of define that for us. And then what has been the secret, do you think, to your success in helping these personal brands reach the levels that you've been able to take them to? Sure.

So, I mean, how to define a personal brand is a little controversial in my opinion. What is a personal brand is someone who is selling themselves. They're selling their ideas, their own intellectual property, their own ideas and way of being or doing something or a product that represents their personal idea or concept that they brought to the market. So what's the most important part of knowing that You're a personal brand is if somebody else picked up your product right now and just tried to start a brand new company with it, if they could be just as successful as you are, you're not a good personal brand, okay? Because they need to have an attachment to you, to who you are. And that is the magnetism in a personal brand. That's what creates all that loyalty and all of that growth, is that people are attached to you, who you are, to your idea that you brought to the world or to your mission that you're bringing to the world. Because sometimes it's not as simple as to say, like my idea. Some personal brands are truly bringing mission concept of how they see entrepreneurship or how they see relationships, or how they see self awareness or whatever it may be, but their idea or their concept and it's attached to who they are, it's innate and authentic to them. And that is how I would define a personal brand in terms of how we've brought them the levels of success that we have. It's honestly, that's in my agency, that's in my team. I've pulled together 27 now people that are from literally all over the world. Like we just had a team member join from Macedonia the other day and took me a minute because I was like, I don't know where Macedonia is.

But they're literally from all over the world. And that's part of the joy of remote work is because people can come in from anywhere. We get all kinds of people that are both extremely experienced and skilled. And then we also get people that are really beautiful, natural talents that otherwise wouldn't be able to use their talents in this way. Right. They're limited by their geography. And so what we did when we created a fully remote agency is we took all of those blocks, all of those filters that keep you from having the best of the best on your team and we took them all away.

What do you mean?

So when you are location dependent, you're very limited by what's available to you at the moment, right? So either you've got to find somebody who is in the best of the best class for the thing that you're looking for. You have to convince them to come to your location or you have to go to their location and then that's the only really available option that you have. It's very expensive, it's very time consuming and it's very limiting because you have to hope people want to come to you, or you have to hope that you want to go wherever they are. And in a remote working experience, all of that falls away. It doesn't matter. There's no such barrier. It doesn't matter that, you know, a lot of our, my team members are still fully nomadic and it doesn't matter that like today they're in Portugal and next week they're going to be in France does not affect their ability to work in any way, shape or form. So it doesn't matter. They get to have those lifestyles that they love and it doesn't matter that I am here and that they're there. I'm not limited by that. So I can get world class talent because I'm not location dependent. But it also means that the way that we do continuing education is also not location dependent. So I'm not worried about people who have physically attended XYZ University. I'm worried about people that have completed digital certifications. I want to know that they're Facebook Blueprint certified. I want to know that they're Twitter flight school certified. I want to know that they're Google certified. And if they are going to do continuing education in a university setting, I care more about them having gone through EDX and Coursera style classes than I ever care about how long they sat inside of a classroom. Which also means that they're not limited to I had a certain upbringing or availability to have access to particular education. Which means all of those barriers are gone now too. So you can be from anywhere, have any socioeconomic background and as long as you're passionate about what you want to accomplish, you're passionate about that career path. You care about digital marketing deeply. You love creating strategies or you love developing, you love building online products and online websites and presence and things like that. All of those other things that hold people back from having the careers that they're really passionate about doesn't exist for you.

I remember when we talked one day about, about this same thing about how you have these people from all over and I can't remember what you said, but it was something like I don't know anything about them at all. When I look at their skill set, I don't know if they're male, female, where they live. What was that you told me? I'm trying to remember exactly what it was, but I found it fascinating.

Sure. So it's called hiring blind. And what it means is all you have is a resume. So I don't see their faces, I don't know their locations. All I have is their resume, their experience. Sometimes though, it'll be an extensive Resume, so it'll have like a portfolio attached to it. This is common for designers and developers especially to have portfolios. But when I'm hiring somebody, I'm hiring them 100% based on their work and nothing else. I have no idea if they're male or female. I don't know their ethnicity, I don't know their age. And with remote work, though, there is none of that, right?

Showing up to interview with you, then you're seeing all of that. You're seeing, you know, skin color, you're seeing their age or, you know, rough estimate, you're seeing all these things that are very physical about a person. Whereas with remote work and remote hiring and blind hiring, because none of that actually impacts anybody's ability to work, right? Being the best at something has nothing to do with your physical appearance. So I automatically don't have the bias of saying like, oh, look, you know, this person looks like me, or this person is from a particular place that I identify with or any of those things that would create a hiring bias. So I don't ever end up hiring the wrong person because of some silly physical element that would have created a bias for me. I'm just getting world class talent because I am hiring them 100% based on their talent.

So how do you make a decision? How do you make which one to hire?

Oh, definitely the best portfolio, the best resume, the best portfolio, the ones especially if they have a style that's really close to styles that I know work with existing clients. So that's something that's important to look for. With personal brands, authenticity is incredibly important. So when we're doing branding for a personal brand or creating content for our personal brand, we never create something from scratch. We're always building off of who that person is. We're building off of content that they've written or videos of them speaking or podcast recordings, because we need it to be really authentic. Because again, that loyalty is to the person. So this is a thing personal brands face a lot as they scale, which is I'm scaling to this level, let me outsource as much as I can. And then they start outsourcing a lot. They end up having big in house teams and then all of a sudden the sales start to dry up, they get less engagement, their communities start dying down because they're not there anymore. And the attraction, the loyalty, the magnetism was to them. And so when they're gone, everything else goes as well. So we have to be truly authentic to the individual. So when I'm hiring people And I'm looking at their resumes and their portfolios. I'm saying, ah, this sounds like Client X or this looks like something Client X would love. This is a site that they would be so happy about, or this is a, some, a set of designs that they would love. Something like this. And so what I'm looking for is how well can this team member skill set be implemented immediately inside of our agency.

Now how did you come up with this? You know, I hadn't heard of blind hiring before until you and I had that conversation. And how did you figure this out? Or who taught you about this? Or is this common?

I think it's not incredibly common, but it's more common in startup world. So hiring blindly is a controversial approach, but you do hear about it more and more in startups. And running around in that Silicon Valley startup scene, I was exposed to a lot of those controversial methods of hiring, controversial methods of hr, controversial methods of determining the MVP of a product, or controversial growth methods. I saw a lot of that. Because whenever you're running around in really experimental business circles, everybody's constantly trying something new, right? There's a bunch of challenges and better ways running around and we're all just mucking about. Some of it works and some of it sticks. And what works well, another person will pick up and they'll use it too. So I did learn about hiring blindly when I was working with some startups and I loved it as a concept because I thought, what a brilliant method, right? Like what a brilliant way to go about this. And then, but until I had my own company where I could do that, I didn't really get to try it out myself. And I didn't do it for the first, I want to say two years. I didn't start it till about the third year in, maybe first, the second or third year in, I started the blind hiring. But then as soon as we started it, I never, never looked back. The only thing that we've added to our hiring process since then is we do situational hiring as well. So instead of asking questions like where do you see yourself in five years? Which no one wants to answer, that's a really dumb question. Instead, what we give them is a situation. So if, let's say Client X, let's say Gary is doing back to back events, three different cities in four days. On the third day, the link that he's using for the live event, it stops working four hours before the event. What do you do?

That's the kind of questions that we.

Ask them you know, Kara, as I'm listening to you and I'm thinking about my experiences with you, something kind of comes to mind. And that really is no fear, because it just seems to me like you just don't have this fear that so many people have. And I don't know how you develop that, but I mean, the fear of selling everything, the fear of traveling, just traveling, being a nomad, the fear of trying all these different things out, you just go do it. Whereas most people want it for 20 years before they even consider it, you go do it. So where did you develop that? Or how did you develop that? Or how do others develop that? Or do you even know?

I do think that it probably is a personality trait in a lot of ways, because it's true in all aspects of my life. It's not true in only business. It's not true in only travel. I've always been a little bit of an adrenaline junkie as well. I've rode in bulls and rodeos. I'm a certified firewalk instructor. I love that kind of thing. Right. So it's in all aspects of my life. So I do think that it's personality trait. And I do see it not just in myself, but in other challenge Y's, Naisha DeWitt, who I love and adore and told all about the Y Institute. And I was like, the minute I met her, I was like, you are a challenge. Why?

That's a woman who has lived a hundred lives in one lifetime, who's done a lot of crazy things and had a lot of big adventure. And then she founded amazing nonprofit Oakland Natives Give Back. And they run on a completely unique method that I've never even heard of before, of high impact philanthropy. And that's how they're able to have this really successful nonprofit in Oakland. But she is a challenge Y. Nicole Tobiasin, who I met through a Y Institute event, she's an action coach. You know, she's lived a hundred lives. She's been a model and an opera singer, and now she's the number one action coach in New Mexico. Right. So many lives, so much risk that she took and wasn't afraid of these things that otherwise would probably terrify a lot of people. So I think that it is a personality trait, and I think that it is really synonymous with being a challenge. Why?

And again, you know, just looking at you, you would never know that in a million years. And I saw when you came out here and you helped us with one of the events that we did, you know, I could have Seen. I don't want this to come out wrong, but just physically you could have been this little person that didn't say anything. And all of a sudden you're up taking control of everything and organizing people and telling, running around and making things happen. And it was unexpected. And you were always unexpected, even in our conversations. Because I've worked with a lot of other marketing agencies and none are anything like you in any way, nor got the kind of results that you've gotten. For me, it's just fascinating to see what you've been able to do and really just go for it. I mean it just see if I could nail it down to one thing. You just decided what you're gonna do and you just went for it and nothing was going to stop you. That's not common.

I would definitely say that strategists should probably be challenge wise.

It really helps. You know, right before this call, I was talking to a college kid up at CU in Boulder who really wants to be part of what we're doing and bring the why to all of the college, you know, freshmen, junior or sophomores, juniors, seniors, to help them get clear on what they want to do with themselves. And he's, he has your why he's challenging. Same thing with this guy. I mean, he is not scared of anything. He's willing to try to try anything to where a lot of people stick to what they know. Stick to my little area and I'll do it if it's within what I know. And you're not that way at all, right?

Right. No. And I do think that it's really synonymous with challenge wise. And I love that you mentioned that he's bringing it to the universities to help people find the career paths. Because I do think that this, my career path makes 100% sense with my why. And the reason why my previous career path didn't make sense, me doing corporate consulting is it doesn't make sense with my why. So I was never going to be happy there. Right. And now that I'm in a space where my why gets to shine, I'm happy. And I think that it's really important. And if people would experience the why discovery method earlier on, they prevent themselves a lot of heartache in a lot of ways, but especially in their career path. And even now we use the why Institute when we're hiring. When we hire new roles, I send them through the why discovery. Because I need to know what their why is. Because that way I can tell the team like, hey, this is how you're going to communicate with this person. This is the expectation of what it's going to be like, what they're going to work like, what they're going to communicate like, because this is their why. And it also helps me with particular roles, even if I'm hiring someone as even just an assistant, right?

Yeah.

Our most recent hire is a virtual assistant, but I need to know where she's going from there. She's not going to be an assistant forever. That's not a permanent type of role for most people. She's going to eventually move up the ranks in my company and if I start with her why, then I have a good idea of where she might go in the future. And that way I'm not just looking at, oh, I hired a great new assistant. I'm looking at, hey, I hired a great future account manager.

Love it. Well, Kara, I know we've gone over our time, but I just so appreciate you being here. Like I said at the beginning, I'm a little bit nervous about telling the world so much about you and that you exist and how so much of our success has happened, but you've been such a big part of it and I just appreciate you and thank you for being here.

Thank you. Is there anything that you'd like me to cover on record before we go? Gosh, you know, my institute related.

It's interesting to me that every time I listen to you, I see a different side of even what I know you say it in a different way that oftentimes is even better than what I say. And I've been saying this for 10 years and I don't know how you do that, but I'm so glad that I have that person to bounce these things off of or just say, well, what do you think of this, Kara, and how you do that? I don't know. Is that a teachable trait or is that just part of your why?

I don't know. I think that might just be part of the why. Right. That innovation.

Aspect of being in challenge. Why? Just seeing things and in all different ways seeing the same thing a hundred ways. What was that as a better way too, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was it like for you, Kara, when you took the why discovery and you saw the YF challenge come up?

Oh, it made sense instantly. Right away I was like, oh, yeah, this checks out.

This makes sense. This is logical. You know, this is absolutely, you know who I am. And I, like I said, I'm no stranger to personality assessments. I've done them all. I've done human design, I've done Enneagram, I've done colby, I've done StrengthsFinder, because I do believe in being self aware and how important that is. So I've done them all. And still Y Institute does something that's fundamentally different than all the others in the way that it is the most core driving factor. So it is, in my opinion, the closest to truly what your personality is. Everything else is a little bit more about how you communicate or how you work or certain perspectives that you might have or natural ability. But the Y Institute was the root of everything. So having that, like, challenge why as the root, everything else made sense from there. It makes sense that I have the entrepreneurial Colby because I'm a challenge. Why? It makes sense that I would be quick start. It makes sense that I would being like a mid level fact finder. All of that makes sense because of my why without it, I just had all of these pieces of ways that I work and ways that I communicate things to watch out for, that kind of stuff. But there was no explanation as to why all of these results worked together or where they all came from or how I was meant to bring them all in until I took the Y.

Discovery like we've talked about. You know, it's really that essential first step, right?

Absolutely. I would even say if you've done all the other things and you're like, oh, I don't need to do another thing, you are wrong because this is going to make all the other things make sense. So knowing your strength finder, knowing your disc, knowing your Colby, you've got all these pieces to the puzzle. It's like missing the centerpiece of the puzzle.

Yeah, it's missing. Like you said, when you discover your why, it puts them all, all together so that you can see how it all fits. And you know, you're not going to build your brand, you're not going to build your message, you're going to build your marketing around your Colby or your disc or any of those, but you better build it around your why, because that is your message. That's the core of why somebody would choose you. I choose Kara because she thinks differently. She thinks outside the box. She makes me imagine things that I never thought were possible, then helps me strategize to get it there. Because she doesn't have fear that other people are scared to do it. You're going to help me see it and make me do it. And that's exactly what's happened.

Well, thank you. And I mean, I obviously I'm a big fan. And I should preface this for everybody that's listening with, I didn't know about the Y Institute before I met Gary. Gary was my introduction to the Y Institute, and so I met him. He was rambling on about this great tool, how I had to try it, and I was like, you know, I meet people all the time. Sure, you know, everybody's got something. But he was right. And as soon as I took the Y discovery, that's when I was like, okay, I'm all in. This can be my client. I can make this happen.

And you have been all in. And you've sent me a lot of amazing people to meet and. And collaborate with, and you know an amazing amount of people. I don't even know how you know so many people, but you do.

It comes with the territory.

Well, somebody who's been a nomad for three years, somehow you've been able to do it. But, Kara, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. And I don't necessarily want to get you any more clients or flooded with anyone who's taking any of my time away from you, but I definitely wanted to have you on here because I love the way you think. You're a perfect example of the why of challenge. You live it. Your life is proof of it. And what you've done for me is proof of it. So thanks for being here, and I look forward to us working together many more years.

You have got a deal, sir.

Thanks, Kara.

Bye.

Sa.