Designing Learning Like a Product: Branding, Culture, and the Unseen Work of Building an LMS

It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it, Chris and KA team, for, for having me. With that said, let's get started. Welcome to the Full Circle Podcast.

Hi, welcome to the Full Circle Podcast. I'm Megan Williams, part of our marketing team here at Busco, and today I'm sitting down with Marty Smith. Marty, thank you for being here today.

Thanks, Megan. Yeah.

Do you think you could gimme a little bit of your background?

Sure. So, originally from Missouri, the Marine Corps moved me to Southern California.

All right. That's just a snippet of something I've made. That's Marty. You're going to hear more from him later and about him later. That's a conversation that happened, and it wasn't just contained within the studio. It happened inside something we built. This is ARC. This is our internet. And the Learning Circle. And this is our LMS, all built on Synthesis with knowledge architecture. And here's our lesson within the Learning Circle. We've been working with KA since 2016, so it's been a 10-year journey. And yes, this is my first time actually getting to come to KA Connect, so it's really a pleasure to be here. And really exciting for me to get to talk about this newest thing that we're building. So, um, let's kick it off. So something I want to make sure, um, to talk about is I want to unpack what you just saw at the top of this video, because it's going to take a little bit of a mindset shift when we talk about this. So most people, when they think of this LMS or they think of any kind of a system, they think of it in terms of courses, catalogs, quizzes. Tracking. And yes, it is all of those things, but I want to get you to think about this. To your employees, none of that is actually the product. And that's why I'm here to talk today. I want to get you to think of it as an experience. Is it fast?

Is it clear?

Do your employees trust it?

Full stop.

Okay.

Nobody falls in love with a storm drain. This is my little jab at engineers. I do work at a civil engineering firm, so I have to, I have to throw this in there. What we build is typically invisible. It's underground. Nobody falls in love with that stuff. It's not sexy to look at, but the reason it's important is because people fall in love with what's built on top of it. So that's really important. I just had to throw that little jab in there for my engineers who someday might watch this, who knows. So how did a conversation like this end up feeling? Like something like this. A lot of that actually starts with a decision I made a number of years ago, and I just want to, you know, tell that story briefly. It's a little bit of an instinct, which is why I titled it this slide. This is Pat Fusco. So he's our namesake founder and former CEO, retired in 2023. Him and I had a lunch together and I brought up the question about, hey, I'd like to rebrand our company. Because our logo was just tired. It was about 20 years into its life. This was done before I came to the firm in 2007. It just had a lot of moving parts. It was difficult to produce and embroider. And I'm always thinking about the products, you know, where's this thing gonna live out in the world? So he said, sure, I trust you, do whatever you want. Music to my ears. I loved it. I was so stoked and ready to get this thing going. But that trust didn't come from anywhere. Um, Pat, as you know, he's a civil engineer, but he also values beauty, values art. He's married to an artist, and it was very important for him from, uh, early onset of the company that our plans and everything that we produced didn't look subpar to that of an architect. We have some architects in the room who can appreciate how things look. He wanted that to be— he wanted our stuff to be on that level. And he had something he liked to say about that: beauty matters. It was his mantra. He would walk around the halls and say this to everybody and anybody that he could. And I appreciated that as an artist. Someday, if I ever got a tattoo, I'd probably get something like this, although I probably wouldn't put that on my body. I'm just kind of joking. But I did make that A little fun graphic for our team at, at Fusco to have some fun with and to poke a little fun at Pat. So I got to work after that conversation. I quietly started the rebrand process. I designed hundreds of logos over the course of the next couple months. I'd sketch, I'd leave things out strategically on my desk, on my whiteboard for people to get a glimpse at and to spark conversation and question. They would come up to me and say, hey, Brandon, What's that thing you're working on? I'd be like, ah, don't worry about it. It's just something, just some little side project. Nothing, nothing big. The endgame was I got a meeting with our leadership team finally after I had everything ready. Very first thing I did in that meeting was I showed them this slide and then I took it away before they could really think about what they just saw. Only during this moment did I fully explain and start unpacking the journey of how I got there, how I got to that slide. And at the end, everyone just wanted to see that one slide again, to question it, to take it in, to soak it in, because it was already burned into their minds. You see, they couldn't unsee it because they'd already seen it. And once they saw it, they knew it was something they wanted. I've used this trick on you guys. I don't really call it a trick, but I've used this strategy on you guys already today by showing you the thing and then explaining the thing with that podcast up at the top. Before I get too deep into this, I want to talk a little bit about my role with KA, with Fusco, with our journey with synthesis and the LMS. So here's my background. That's me. That's a nice headshot of me. Which is nice cuz I usually take the headshots. So it was nice to give somebody else the camera. Thanks, Koei, for taking beautiful photos of this event. I've been at Fusco for 19+ years and designing professionally. That's my background for over 25. My title, Senior Multimedia Manager, that's loaded. Talk to me about that later. I do a lot. I love designing. I'm passionate about branding. I love to teach. I love to coach in all facets. And I also love to play the guitar. It's one of my passions. I'm quite literally a one-man band, a lot of the places I go and with a lot of the things I work on. And it's a figure of speech, but as a guitar player, I do understand the importance of having a group background musicians that support you to help make the music. And somewhere along the way, that was how I was thinking about synthesis. Our version of synthesis, which we call Arc, and our LMS. I was quite literally that one-man band. Every part of it, aside from the occasional guest artist, was me. And I bet a decent chunk of you guys in this room can probably relate to that. Maybe show of hands, anybody relate to being a one-man band when it comes to synthesis or LMS?

Yeah.

You're influencing a lot of people and you don't necessarily, you know, control them or report to them or they don't report to you. So it's really the only way that this type of work ever gets done. So when it came to the LMS, when it came to Synthesis, I approached it the same way I approached that brand problem as a brand and design problem first, and then with the LMS, an LMS problem second. And that decision's something I'm gonna keep coming back to in this talk. Because you'll see, I'm not a one-man band anymore. I have a group of supporting musicians to support me. So that part of the story changes today as well. So that's our learning circle. You can't have a circle without a supporting band. So that's why I couldn't stay solo. Something I didn't really fully appreciate until I started building this was that every LMS already has a brand. Whether or not you meant it to have a brand. How does it feel? Is it clear? Is it considered? Does it feel like corporate homework? All those are brands. It's not necessarily bad. It's just those are brands that nobody necessarily chose on purpose. It was never in actually, actually in anyone's hands to decide. So the real question was never, should we brand our LMS? The real question was what brand does it already have? And is it one that we like? This is the theme for KA Connect 2026. And I thought it would be appropriate to unpack this word by word. It's kind of a method that I used to study. So let's do that together. Designing. What is designing? To me, this is an actual intentional decision, how something's going to look, how something's going to feel. Before you start. Modern. What's modern? This isn't something that's trendy. It's not attaching yourself to a new trend or a new phase. This is something that's built on something like synthesis, that's adaptable to change, that's constantly adding. Learning. This is really important. This is not— learning is not training. You can learn from training, but learning itself is not training. Learning is something that you choose to come back to. And then the kicker for me as a one-man band organization, not a single department, not a single person, the whole firm, the whole team. Uh-oh, I put because I can no longer play by myself. So what I'm saying is, is that design has to be a decision maker, not just the finish at the end, not the coat of paint on the wall. Not the lipstick on the pig, as they like to say. I don't just come in after the fact and jazz things up. It should be at the foundation when you're starting. So a few months ago, I had the pleasure of doing a webinar with the KA team, and I talked about this podcast series, our Mapping Fundamentals and Subdivision Basics, and I talked about how I designed that and put that out through these 4 lenses. Design it like a product. Build it like a brand, deliver it like a story, and structure it for scale. And some of this talk is gonna build on that. Some of you may have seen that. Thanks for those that were there and were already listening. And this may be a little repetitious, but thank you for going on the journey with me. Those 4 ideas were some of the easier part of this work. What was not so easy were some of the ownership battles and just the months of quiet work that went into doing this. Getting people to actually buy in and believe in this. Old systems and old ways may have burned trust. Trust is a really difficult thing to get back, specifically when you're trying to implement something new like this. When learning feels intentional, it earns credibility, and credibility is what drives adoption. Credibility is really all about trust. So if a brand experience is the actual product, Let's get specific about what that looks like in practice, starting with something as simple as navigation. This is Arc. This is our homepage of Arc. The navigation here is essentially 7 words, 7 phrases. Took us months to really nail this down. You think, why months for 7 simple words? Every one of those words to our users is a promise. If somebody clicks or hovers over technical resources, they expect that information to deliver. If that info, if that link, if those words don't deliver on its promise, people are going to stop trusting the brand and they're not going to come back. The same logic runs into the learning circle, our LMS itself. We called it a circle and that name's not random. Our platform is Arc. The learning platform is the learning circle. Our brand and our firm's philosophy, which you'll see later, is something called full circle thinking. It's all part of the same shape on purpose by design. A portal says system, something you pass through. A circle says something that you belong to. It's also my answer to one of the questions I was actually asked to speak on today. How do you design a learning system? That becomes part of how people work instead of something they just step away to complete. So this is our learning circle catalog thus far, still in development, still in testing, but what we've got going so far. For us, it comes down to how everything's organized. We spend real time thinking how these courses are gonna be developed and organized into learning paths and how those paths are gonna form tracks that people can actually see themselves moving through. And depending on the course, there may be a quiz at the end that people can test their aptitude, or we can track anybody who's looking at the content and get real live user feedback that's usable for us to develop additional content. So something I want to be real careful about before you get scared seeing something on this level is not everything needs to have this production level or this scale. The example that you're looking at here is just something as simple as a Teams recording that we did over lunch, or these are often done just individual to individual in our firm. But you'll see that the look and the care behind the branding of this goes into this as well as it does on something on the level of a podcast. Everything's organized, everything's colored, everything follows our brand guidelines. The principle scale scales down, but not the thoughtfulness. So not everything needs to have that like grandiose podcast level of production. We good? I didn't scare anybody yet? Okay. All right. Infrastructure. Let's talk infrastructure. So once something is usable, the next question is whether it feels intentional. That's the brand. So this is an illustration I like to use a lot when I'm educating people on what a brand is. Some people think it's just a logo. Some people think it's vision, values. It's really the whole thing. The whole iceberg is the brand. That's the actual infrastructure. So build it like a brand. It shouldn't equal just decoration. It should be your entire infrastructure. Use the tools and the colors and everything you have available to you in your brand guide, like here, inspired from nature. And then every piece of Arc, our internet, follows that same visual language. So whether that's something like a corporate announcement, A shout out, a kudo, a project win. Everything follows that same visual style. And a good brand is something that's recognizable, just like your favorite song that's playing by your favorite band. You can recognize that in the first few seconds. So when you have something like this from a brand and an infrastructure that's working for you, it's equally recognizable. Another question I was asked directly By Chris and the conference here. How do you balance brand and information without losing clarity? The brand isn't just a layer on top of information; it's something that helps organize it. And this is our learning circle again, just like with the navigation—a lot of agony, a lot of going back and forth, figuring out how to categorize these videos, how to categorize all of our lessons within the learning circle. If it's hard to find. It's, it's going to be part of your brand. That difficulty is going to be part of your brand. It's going to be difficult for our users to get to. It's going to be a hindrance for people to find the information that they're looking for. The infrastructure is clear. The branding is clear through color. The hierarchy is clear. And then there's consistency from lesson to lesson. That brand consistency creates trust, and that's really what it's all about. It doesn't just become decoration; it becomes its infrastructure. And that visual trust now becomes content trust. And like I said earlier, trust is what we're after. So you need to ask yourself: Does what I'm doing help somebody get there faster? Does it help them find the answer faster? And if not, you got a problem. Brand consistency—it requires. Somebody to constantly say no. So if you're just doing something to make things look pretty, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Sometimes you have to say no to people above you, which might be a little uncomfortable, but this is where I leverage Pat's mantra of beauty matters. If it doesn't have an aspect or an element of beauty, it doesn't belong yet, because maybe we can make it look pretty. So if you strip all this down, it's actually giving Somebody active management, the ability to say no and to be the decision maker, keeping things consistent week after week. And that's something that I like to call governance. Somebody has ownership of this platform. It's consistent, it's clear. These things are now earning credibility and trust, and that's going to help drive adoption with a system like this. Consistency earns credibility. Credibility drives adoption. And adoption and credibility lead to trust. All right. I talked about guitar. I liked music. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the band. So now that we've got something usable, none of it means much without the people behind it or the right group of people behind it, because this was not sustainable anymore. Because this is where the band stops being a metaphor. And starts being an actual answer, a solution for myself. So how did we decide with this podcast what was even needed? Well, that was all driven by my friend and colleague Samantha. Sam, her role at our firm is Manager of Technical Operations and Excellence. She's a former project manager and she moved over to the dark side of non-billable corporate team members, uh, along with myself. So. We're great. We get to go pester people all day and get information out of them. The 2 of us met and we identified a gap between our civil engineering experts and our survey and mapping experts. Neither side was communicating certain things to each other, and we needed to close that gap. And that's where our Mapping and Fundamentals series came from. After an earlier example that I'd done of a brief podcast for a mentorship program that was strictly an audio snippet. But the idea was planted. So Samantha became my drummer. So we were starting to make some music. She was helping keeping the beat. I was keeping the harmonies and we were off and flying, making music together. But once we knew that gap existed and once we knew we had something going on, what did we do about it? We looked at each other and quickly realized that we needed a singer. And it took 2 seconds for us to say Marty, which you saw at the very top of the video. Marty is a unique individual, always says yes to what we do. He's a great lead singer, and this is why. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Hello, baby.

I mean, how can you not just ask that guy to be in everything that you do, right?

Hey.

So we got to work right after that. We knew we had a singer. We built a space. This is our studio space. It's just a small office that I hijacked that I don't let anybody in because I don't want any— anyone to find out that it's available. That's my space. We built it, got some simple lighting, got some simple camera gear. We went to work writing content between myself and Sam, but we realized that we needed another bandmate to join us. So enter Megan. Megan is our bass player. She's the one actually conducting a lot of these interviews now, and that's certainly a role that I could have kept for myself, uh, just keeping myself non-billable, not pestering another person, taking them away from their job. But I strategically picked her because she's just over a year into her time at Fusco Engineering, and she's really sharp. She has a genuine curiosity about her. And sometimes a fresh voice asking the questions to one of our experts, our seasoned experts, is exactly what's needed to let the guard down and let them actually talk and be real. So we had a full band. We're making music now. The good thing is, is the lead singer can change with each song. For Marty, it wasn't a question of who we were looking for. Um, Sam and I just looked at each other and, and locked eyes and instantly said, Marty's the guy. Um, nobody had to ask that question. Other times it starts with the person, so it starts with the voice and we just need to give them a platform. So we had a strategic hire join us and he was just on board immediately, always integrating and helping, helping marketing, giving us suggestions. We knew that he was gonna be somebody that was gonna give us a yes every time we asked. We needed to give him a topic. We did. He's gonna be in our next podcast series for a 3-part video. We also have Marty's counterpart in the middle, Anthony. He's the Sammy Hagar to Marty's David Lee Roth. Another music band geek reference there. So I just wanna make it clear, some songs will start with the singer, some songs will start with the song, and you just need to know which one you need to find first. Um, but once you've found that person, respect their voice, respect their story. Don't sand it down and, and make it some polished marketing version of what you wanna say. Let it be their voice. We let them talk and go on and leave the cameras rolling. It's 2 people in a room, a real conversation, and me completely disappearing behind the camera as much as I possibly can. I don't over-AI polish anything. It's just real. Um, and keeping things human is what it makes, what makes it worth listening to. It's really important. Um, and speaking of human, You get, you get a lot more of it when you leave the camera rolling and it makes for a lot of fun too. Here's a video with Anthony.

Another thing too that a lot of people have found out is that I'm also a major, major In-N-Out, uh, enthusiast. In-N-Out, In-N-Out, In-N-Out. Big In-N-Out. In-N-Out. Double double. Double double. Double double. In-N-Out. In-N-Out. In-N-Out. In-N-Out Burger. In-N-Out Burger. In-N-Out. In-N-Out. In-N-Out. Double doubles.

As you can tell, he loves In-N-Out Burger and I left the camera rolling afterwards. We were just having some banter and he just, he must have said In-N-Out Burger 100 times. So I'm like, I gotta match that up and have some fun with him. So, so we did. Um, so Chris asked me before this presentation, um, so is the LMS the hero of the story or is it the podcast? And I thought about that for a second and realized that it was neither. It's the people. People are the hero of this story, not the platform, not the format, and it's how you design the story around them. There's one more little wrinkle here that I want to address, and that's sometimes you need the backing track. And for some of the technical content that we have that doesn't need that human voice, we're experimenting with using AI-generated voice from a transcript to just narrate something as simple as how to navigate through project folders. And again, you'll see that this has the same structure, color format hierarchy. We're not fully committed to this yet, but it's something that we're kicking around, especially as people come and go from the firm and we might not have that voice around. Um, we don't want people to be distracted with, is that person here or not? Can I still trust that voice? It might just need to be something generic. So something we're talking about. Um, But I wanna make it clear, when someone's lived the experience and they're sharing their knowledge, get their voice. It's their history, it's their real experiences in the room, unpolished. Because I mean, really, that's the whole point is to get that human element. Scale the authenticity, not the production, and make sure it's repeatable. We wanna make sure that this wasn't just a lightning in the bottle. Moment, not one-time, uh, one-time miracle. So we made it a repeatable process. We do the same pre-interview conversation. We have the same space and loose structure for our interviews. We have the same editorial care and treatment in post-production. And then we have the same review and launch structure. And that's all by design because design earns the right to be trusted. So everything so far, the navbar, The learning circle, the podcast, that's all output. But here's what it actually costs to get there. It's 3 things: ownership, leadership buy-in, and cultural trust. So first, I'll talk about ownership. And what I didn't yet say is this band that I showed earlier is more of an informal version of something I built for the learning circle called the Learning Circle Core Team. And that team covers these 5 areas. Kirsten, our HR generalist, is responsible for onboarding and career growth. Going clockwise around the circle, Nick, our CAD manager, is responsible for applications and CAD training. Samantha, you met earlier, is responsible for operations and workflow. Jared, our IT senior systems administrator, is responsible for tech support and network security. And you've got me handling marketing and branding. This is the team of owners with our content on the LMS. Before this team existed, all the information was scattered across platforms, or even worse, it was on Outlook, which I call the crutch of the firm. This actually put it on paper. It gave ownership to these 5 individuals, and ownership is a key part of this whole component. Buy-in. It's essential to get leadership buy-in. I used to believe that if we would just build it, they would come, that whole Field of Dreams mantra. If it was good enough, they would just start using it. It's a nice story, but it's also wrong at the scale of the whole firm. The real adoption comes from the top. The grassroots efforts can only take you so far. So when our leadership started using Arc themselves and started talking about it in team meetings, which took years, it stopped feeling like Brandon's project. and started feeling like something that belonged to the firm. And that shift from Brandon's platform to our platform was really like the whole ballgame. That was a milestone moment for me. Third is trust. And I've talked about trust before. This takes the longest. This is a diagram that we like to use at Fusco when we talk about trust in terms of our culture, but I'm gonna adapt it to make my point here. So do we only know about, or do we just understand the system, or do we respect and trust the system that we're building? This is something that you win slowly through repeated, almost boring— sorry, boring reliability. It's, does search actually find things that you're looking for? Does the link work every time? You gotta do that for months. But here's the problem. You break it once and you reset the clock. So the unseen work, why does it matter more? Well, experienced people are retiring. Projects are becoming more complex and more time-crunched. And AI is now changing how we deliver knowledge, whether we're ready or not. If ownership is unclear, a retiring principal, their knowledge might be leaving with them and never fully captured because no one was responsible for turning it into learning. If leadership isn't visibly bought in, the knowledge management effort gets treated like an IT initiative. It stalls. And trust is thin. None of this is going to matter because your AI search is only as good as the credibility it's built underneath it. An AI system can surface a broken process just as confidently as a good one. It doesn't know the difference. Your people decide whether to believe it, and then that's where that lies. A little bit more about AI. This is my way of thinking about this component. Back in my design days, when I was doing a lot of web work, there was a question of desktop or mobile first. Used to be desktop. It was easy. Didn't have to worry about things. But then this mobile device came along in 2007 called the iPhone and changed everything, and it became a mobile-first world. The same thing's happening today, but only with people or AI. So do we design content for people or do we design it for AI? The answer is both. So it can be understood and surfaced correctly, which then makes it accessible to people. And here's what I learned along the way. AI doesn't lower the bar on clarity, it raises it, provided that you feed it good information. This is our AI search within Arc, and I fed it a term just based on something from one of those podcast videos. It surfaces actual live results from that podcast. It's real results from a real person. So when you have the real person behind the AI, trust goes up. A lot of what I've talked here is based on this thing called the passion budget, passion projects. A lot of late nights, a lot of squeezing time in between your real work, helping those around you. But that passion budget has a ceiling. It crashes down on you. It weighs on you. It creates a lot of pressure. It turns from a fun hobby into just a monkey on your back that you can't get off. But the way to solve that problem is by inviting others to join your band. That's the actual answer to this problem. So find your collaborators and build with them. Don't wait for the permission to scale. Refuse to stay solo. Get your band behind you. So something I didn't fully realize about this approach until just recently Um, is that most firms, when talking about something like a podcast or a polished piece of marketing content, they build it, um, from outside in. I'm thinking more of an inside out approach. So we're kind of opposite in the way we think about that. We want to capture knowledge for our people, and then maybe there's a chance that that knowledge can escape the walls of our firm. It's a little bit different posture, but, um, I think it might be durable and, um, worth exploring. When producing stuff like this, you need to remember that you're not necessarily performing for an audience. You're preserving that information for your people. And the audience outward just happens to notice. So it's kind of a new pattern that we're trying to establish. Employees hearing their own leadership talk about things that nobody shared before and having that spread through the company faster than any other announcement. Or email ever could. So it's important to let that well run dry. The information flow, the old ways of delivering spoon-feeding information and announcements to people, it's important to stop that flow because people will find another way to get their news, to get a drink of water. So move essential information onto a new platform. And that inside-out approach shows up how we release content. Um, like this as well. So talking about Arc, we release our podcast episodes on Arc as posts that people can interact with and scroll through. They're broken into video chapters as well. There's a little bit of a tie into that with how it's organized on the learning circle as well. So we're, we're starting to breed that familiarity with the brand, that infrastructure. People start having conversations about it within that post. Organically. Yeah. In-N-Out Burger. It creates a little fun environment. This is part of our culture. It's on purpose. It's that water cooler moment. People can talk about what they watched with Anthony. Inside Out creates a little bit of FOMO. It's deliberate, but by the time that same content ends up on our learning circle, it's repackaged as structured lessons. It already feels familiar. It has that same infrastructure, and people recognize it. That's the same instinct I had as, as leaving those sketches out on my desk and on the whiteboard. Plan it, let the curiosity breed, let the questions develop, and then let the fuller story land on something people already half recognize. And as I mentioned earlier, this content's now fully indexed with AI search. It makes it easy to surface that essential content. And when our people are behind it, our employees know it can be trusted. What's important is this one recording, one simple conversation with our surveyor didn't just stay one single thing. We kept them billable to their other projects with 1-hour investment. This helps with that leadership buy-in. If I say, hey, I need this person for a podcast, they blow up in their mind because they know that's gonna be hours away from billable time. We don't live in Canada, so we, we value utilization at Fusco Engineering. So maybe, maybe I'll talk to my Canadian friends and maybe we can help establish some change at Fusco. I'm looking forward to those conversations later out in the— at snack time. So we keep them billable. We're mindful of that productivity and keeping them on the project. So that 1-hour podcast episode, It was really 20 minutes of their time in the studio. I say 1 hour because I build in a buffer. It became structured lessons for our LMS. It became a podcast episode. It became social media shorts that we could output on YouTube and Instagram. And through help with transcripts and AI, it became a series of LinkedIn articles that the individual, in this case Marty, could actually go post on his own personal LinkedIn account. Posturing him as the expert in his field. Now, we're also hoping that this podcast has a voice and has legs outside of our walls on platforms like YouTube, podcast apps like Apple and Spotify. All of that from 20 minutes or 1 hour in the studio. We're really milking that time for everything that it's worth. Um, and none of that was possible without the strategy. And the plan that I just walked through. So ownership, buy-in, and trust. Ownership's already settled, so we can make fast creative calls without routing them through the chain of command and getting sign-off. Leadership has already bought in, so it has real visibility instead of just quietly disappearing and getting buried. In some kind of a catalog that nobody browses. Trust already built, so people actually press play instead of just clicking past it or advancing or scrubbing through a video, assuming it was one more mandatory thing to sit through. So if you're thinking about your next big piece of content, before you spend a dollar on production, Ask these 3 questions first. Who actually owns this? Has a leader you didn't have to beg say that they'll agree to use it visibly for others? And I love that illustration that you guys just showed about having the glass wall so others can see work in progress and demonstrate what's happening. And do your people currently trust the system you're about to put inside of it? If the answer to any of those is no or not really or I don't know, that's not a reason to stop. It's just telling you where the real work needs to start before the creative work even begins. So bringing it full circle, see what I did there? Zooming all the way back out to our learning circle, every click is a promise, so build it that way. Designing learning like a product means Treating every click that way. Saying no to inconsistency. Saying yes to beauty matters. Leveraging that wherever you can. And finding the right voice means looking past titles to the people you already trust. You don't need to look at principals, project leads. Sometimes it's your senior level. Sometimes it's your new people. They might have a voice that, that needs to be shared with others. I talked about that credibility term. It's really what turns our platform into something people actually trust and want to come back to. And that's really going to drive adoption. And we want to get that adoption so we can foster trust. Full circle thinking. This is our phrase. This is our marketing. This is our brand. It's how we approach our engineering. It's how we approach everything we do from accounting to IT to marketing to technical aspects. But it's been what this is too. This is our full circle thinking wheel. This is the process put into action behind the brand. So we research, we design based on the research, we construct based on the design and the research, and then we go back and check how things are performing. So everything goes out into the real world from projects to design tasks. And it's probably not lost on you that The clip you watched is part of something called the Full Circle Podcast series. And it's not just a metaphor, it's actually part of our brand. And now we've got the Learning Circle as a part of that brand. So I started this talk saying that I was a one-man band and I was really tired doing that, but I'm not anymore. I have the full support of a supporting acting musicians behind me with a drummer, a bass player, and a singer, and someone's ready to step up to the mic every time. It could be any voice. So that's actually what happened in real time. And if you're out there doing most of this by yourself, just know that you don't have to keep doing it alone. And the next time someone asks you who's really building your LMS, it doesn't have to be a committee, a department. It's just whoever's willing to keep doing the part that never makes it into these fancy screenshots. And if you're lucky, you're going to build a good band around you. Thank you.

Nice. Big work, Brandon. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. In and out. You kind of mentioned you had to get buy-in to even just start the podcast. Like, what was your pitch?

Ooh. A lot of times I do first and ask second. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission, is something I live by. I talked about trust a lot in that presentation and me being there for over 19-plus years has helped me get a lot of trust with the leadership team and those that make some of the decisions. I do have the fortunate ability to interact with nearly everybody that works at Fusco that onboards. So everybody knew from senior— from associate engineers to leadership. So I build those relationships from day one. So, um, It was just a conversation and built up over time.

You kind of built some forgiveness into the relationship.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Did you know this when you started? I loved what you talked about with Inside Out. Did you know there was going to be an out, or was it only inside and the out piece came later?

I kind of designed it for the out. I'm always thinking about the polished product. Yeah. How things are going to look. To a big audience. And I, I design backwards a lot of times, um, because that helps gimme a bigger vision for what I need in between. Mm-hmm. Um, but shortly after I designed, uh, I started designing everything outward, I realized and recognized, oh man, this is really more important internally at the time being.

So, and so when you're— it was Megan is doing the interviews.

Megan's doing the interview.

So when she's writing questions, Is her, are her questions kind of more internally focused and you hope that there's something that's externally, or she may have a blend of questions that are kind of in, in inside and outside?

It's a little bit of both. It starts out as, um, informational because we need to bridge that knowledge gap between departments specifically with this episode. Right. Like what is surveying?

Like why is it important? Even that kind of level?

Yeah. What's it, what's the difference between a parcel and a tract map? Mm-hmm. Why do our engineers need to know about that? It's a conversation that they need to have and Now there's a piece of media that opens the channels of communication. So mostly it's internal, but then we kind of weave in knowing that we might want to send these externally for— it could be for recruiting purposes too. Like, what would a potential new hire need to know, or what would get them excited about joining our team or starting a career in this field? But also for people who are curious for technical knowledge and career growth. Topics that interest them.

How are you— you kind of mentioned this thing, sometimes you start with a topic and then work towards a singer, and sometimes you start with a person, right? And you work towards a topic. How is that identification process working and who's doing it?

It's mostly that core team that I talked about. So we have that core team of those 5 individuals, myself included. But I would say really it's me and Samantha as the 2 main drivers. She's really working tightly with operations and we're trying to develop a series of workflows for people to follow that is more the Fusco way of working instead of this is the Fusco San Diego or this is the Fusco Los Angeles way of working, a way of standardizing. So we're trying to develop our company collective voice. between the two of us. And then we work outward from a core to like, if you're thinking in terms of a diagram of like a cross-section of the earth, you know, you've got me and Samantha in the middle, then you've got that core team as that next layer. Then you've got a, a group of users and buy-in people that we know will say yes as, as that next layer.

I was hoping you were gonna use the word magma, but magma, liquid hot magma.

That's great. Yeah.

Um, Do we have questions from folks in the audience?

Hello, this is Tad from HRP Associates, Greenville, South Carolina. I guess it's more of a comment than a question. I think folks probably are going, how did you pull off putting a green room studio and who do you know and how much it costs? So maybe I will help you with that answer being a COO at our company, we also have a green, green room. It does not cost as much as you think. It's actually, you would be flabbergasted and wanted to buy 2 of them if you knew what they cost. But it also shows the dedication to the cause when you see, wow, there's a green room there and there's a place to do it professionally.

Mm-hmm.

Um, what we found out, because, uh, we, we do some similar things and we have a YouTube channel, it's also not only a benefit Internally, but it's also a great recruiting tool. We put out YouTube videos and, and some of the content which, which we talked about here today, it kind of does your recruiting for you and you automatically have people in their second week of the job sitting down for an interview. And, um, and to do that, so don't get scared off by this thought. This is a great thought and session. So thank you for the information. So it's more of a comment. And it's— so I don't know if you wanted to comment on that. It's, it's pretty affordable. It really, really is. You got to do it.

Yeah, I can elaborate on that a little bit. And I, I definitely agree with you. And, and I think to, to dispel any of the, the fears of what you just saw, that space was, was pretty inexpensive. I think the, the, the biggest cost was convincing people that I needed to occupy one of the offices in, in our Bigger office. Thankfully, you know, that one's one without windows. We did move, uh, 3 years ago from another corporate, uh, facility. So I did have a hand in designing and, and telling people where I wanted outlets and planning for that space, which was great. So I had developed that trust with, with leadership and some of the decision makers ahead of time. But yeah, it's, it, the, the gear. Um, we can talk shop if anybody wants to know what I'm using, but. DSLR camera, cheap lighting package from Amazon, a more expensive LED light, a couple of microphones, and some acoustic panels that you can buy on the web. Stole a couple of chairs from around the office, watched some YouTube clips, talked to some buddies who were in production and podcasting for some tips, and just like you were saying the other day, just put my hands in the dough. Make mistakes. Yep. Every one of them gets better than the previous one. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Yep. I saw one over here.

Um, this is kind of an easy one. Uh, how often do you do the podcast? Is it like a regular sort of, uh, rhythm to them or are they kind of whenever you need to do them?

Yeah, I think the answer, the short answer is whenever we need to do them, but that's because me and Samantha are meeting on a regular basis. Maybe not formally, maybe it's just, hey, let's go grab coffee. What's happening? Hearing concerns and grumbles of, this is an issue, how do we address it? Rather than just like wallow in it, we're like, well, how can we solve it? How can we help people in these situations get the information that they need or to share information? But what we also do, like with this podcast series, I don't know if you noticed, it was 3 videos. We did all of Marty's part in 1 hour, so we were a little more efficient. So rather than 3 separate 20-minute conversations, we did all of them in 1 shot.

Are each one of them a series when you do the— with your different people you've interviewed?

Thus far, correct. Yeah, so this one's Mapping Fundamentals, um, Subdivision Basics. The next one that's coming out with that That other strategic voice that we, we brought on, Kevin, he deals more in the public sector with like stormwater and things like that from another office. Um, his is gonna be based on public sector work and his experience and knowledge and, you know, navigating through those challenges.

Is the— it sounds like part of the driver is Sam in her new role is just seeing like disconnects between teams or between offices and like, let's try and like Fix that. But it sounded also like you were concerned about some people who are retiring. And so is it, which, how's, how, how are those kind of like figured out? You know, like how, how are you kind of like tackling the, the people that you're concerned about?

Yeah, that's good. Um, back to Sam real quick. She's kind of like the, the office therapist. Mm-hmm. For our technical staff. They, they go to her and just kind of, dump on her. So, that's how we do find a lot of the things that we need to talk about with staff. But with those retiring voices, we've lost— I mean, you saw earlier, we lost our namesake and CEO 3 years ago to retirement. So, trying to capture the things that matter to the firm from him are really important. We didn't do that. I wasn't doing this series back then, and we didn't have the the learning circle yet. Um, so we're having to backfill those channels. But a lot of what I do now is I, I go back and watch past videos of him talking, um, lunch and learns that he gave. Those are now gonna become lessons in our learning circle, broken apart. Um, that's passable knowledge. It's stuff that still pertains to our business and practices.

Mm-hmm.

And also our brand. Um, it's, it's our Fusco way and it's our feel. There are other things that don't necessarily matter or transfer or have life beyond their retirement. Those are the types of things we're trying to capture.

Yep, that sounds great. I see one up here.

So this one's a little bit maybe more technical or operational, but I'm curious how Who is kind of tasked with taking the interview topics or what comes out of the interviews and turning that into lessons in particular? Is it, are, is your team kind of shaping what you think the lessons are? Are you going back to the person that you interviewed and saying, hey, this is what we see? Are you, is that what you think are the lessons and the takeaways from this? I'm just kind of curious about that specific piece of the process.

Yeah, no, that's a good question to clarify. So, the first pass of that is me. I take the video recording, I watch it. I mean, I'm the one editing it in Premiere, so I'm very familiar with the topic. I could probably go out and do a track map and a parcel map today. Not really, but I probably could. But the way I'm working with that is also a little bit of back and forth with that team. Specifically like Samantha, and in that case, Marty, Anthony, whoever was in the, in the podcast video. Hey, when you get a chance, watch this. Also, I send them the transcript and I don't just send them the transcript. Synthesis is great because it, it does give you, give you the, the PDF download and also the, the VTT. I think it's VTT file. But I break that down. I put it into Word. I make it look nice and I pre-divide that into segments and I said, This seems like a natural break of where a lesson would end and begin. What are your suggestions? Do you have any edits to this? Obviously you can't go in and change your, your video recording, but we can change where those breaks lie and what the lesson is. I do get some help with the lesson description. You may have saw in the example, there is kind of like, what, what are the key takeaways from this lesson? We have that on each one as well. And then a what's next. We do use AI to help us with that based on feeding it the transcripts. So that's a way that that becomes a tool to help us condense the time it takes to subdivide those lessons and to just be more concise with what we're expecting people to take away to see if they're even gonna click on this lesson.

So again, I mean, I feel like this has come up in every single session is we're, we're trying to make it easy for experts.

To share, right? Yes, absolutely.

Yep. Cool. Let's see Connie over here. Yeah, we have 2 over this side.

First, excellent branding, not just for the LMS, but for your firm as well. Very impressive. So it sounds like you were leading the organization of the LMS also, in addition to being the Lead multimedia designer. If a designer is not leading the construction of the LMS, what is the best way to fold that creative person into the process?

Ooh, that's a good question.

Just say it depends and move on.

That's what I always do.

It depends. Let's move on. No, I, I think it just, who's, it starts with who's passionate about it. I talked about the passion budget and just that becomes a weight and it's crushing down on you. So reach out for help before you do start to feel that pressure, have conversations, maybe find somebody else who has a similar passion for knowledge and the way things look and the way things get communicated in your firm. And if there is a creative that you work with that isn't leading the charge with the LMS or with synthesis, They should be. I really feel like that creative person should be a part of this. Oh, did you have a follow-up?

I was just going to say, bring them into the band.

Yeah, bring them into the band. Don't feel the weight and the pressure of being a solo artist. Get your drummer, find a bass player, start making music together as soon as possible.

I'll just say something I think I've seen from our people people in the, in the beta is, you know, design isn't all visual design, right? So like kind of like the learning strategy and what's our approach and how are we gonna make this consumable? Sometimes that work needs to happen without a vis— happens without a visual designer. But then when you bring somebody with a visual lens, like, I see where you're going, but we can make this clearer. We can make this more organized. We can make this pop. Like we can build trust, like all the things you're saying, like, but it needs to be designed. Like, and design is a big word.

Yeah.

Right.

Those were some of the underlying battles I was talking about. So besides the way things look and, and are organized, that was getting the buy-in, getting the trust, establishing that infrastructure before you, you build the, the thing pretty on top of it.

Perfect. I think we have time for one lightning question.

Hi. Um, quick question. Who initially, um, identified the podcast as the right platform to collect and absorb the knowledge in your firm?

That was me.

Why?

You know, I thought it was a lightning question. Was it? We're just— no. Okay.

I'm just kidding.

Um, podcasts, I mean, although they've been around for quite a while, seem like a very hot platform. I always hear people talking about, um, what podcasts are you listening to? We did something on Arc earlier where we had people submit their favorite songs for a Fusco playlist on Spotify that we were going to share with the whole office. And somebody said, well, can I submit a podcast? Because I don't listen to music, I listen to podcasts.

Hmm.

And I'm like, okay, well, that's something I need to put in my pocket for later. We did something with a mentorship program earlier in the year, and there was a session on how do we be empathetic to staff members? So Empathy in the Workplace, and it was a great short format audio thing. I'm like, let's, let's try this podcast format. So having that already done, I wanted to expand on that and do more of a video thing. So why not here?

Was part of it, Brandon, just like, you know, an hour-long interview over Teams or Zoom or whatever could have worked, but you're taking, you're editing that down to 20 minutes. So it's part of it being concise and making it like just a more Distilled version of what they were trying to share?

It is. I feel like with teams and when you are editing and, and cutting and it's noticeable, people are asking, well, why? What did you cut? What was cut out? Hmm. I, I like to leave in the mistakes and the flubs and some of the dead space in the air because it shows people processing and, and really thinking deep about the questioning. wanting to deliver the best answer possible. So it's credibility and trust.

Yeah. Yeah. Brandon, thank you so much.

Absolutely. Thank you.

You guys.