In this Business Blast podcast episode, host Tyler Wagner interviews Tyler Chisholm, CEO and founding partner of Clear Motive Marketing. Chisholm opens with a vivid motorcycle adventure in British Columbia that taught him the importance of adaptability and attitude when conditions change unexpectedly. He then explains his core industry insight: we now live in the "age of the customer," where every touchpoint is an opportunity to remove friction and deliver a superior experience, or risk losing business to competitors. Building on that, he stresses that a company’s success hinges on surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you in their respective roles and avoiding the "hero syndrome." He discusses the entrepreneurial transition from controlling every detail to influencing a high‑performing team, advising listeners to "get out of your own way." When asked what advice he would give his younger self, Chisholm highlights patience and grace with teammates as essential for long‑term growth. He shares his view on happiness as being fully immersed in the present—whether through snowboarding, motorcycling, or reading—allowing deep focus and momentum. The most impactful book he’s read recently is Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which reinforced his belief in tackling global challenges with a worldwide perspective. He also cites a personal mantra about aligning behavior with goals, a quote he keeps on his office wall. Finally, he provides his online contact points (LinkedIn and Instagram) for listeners to connect.
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All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today we got another Tyler, Tyler Chisholm. He is the CEO and founding partner at Clear Motive Marketing, a national marketing agency that designs, manages, and runs scalable marketing operations for brands across North America. So welcome to the show, man.
Good morning, Tyler. Thanks for having me. Pleasure.
Good morning. Grateful to have you on. So, Tyler, the first one we ask on this show is, what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
That's okay. That's a good one. That's juicy. How do you— first, the tough ask of identifying which one's the best. I'm going to go with probably something— I'd like to think I lived a life full of good stories, but I'll go with one that I think has a good lesson for me and maybe ties through the rest of what we're going to talk about today. It's last September. I'm on a motorcycle trip with some buddies. We're out in the interior of British Columbia up here in Canada. It's beautiful. It's 21, 22 degrees in Celsius. It's probably like high 60s, low 70s Fahrenheit. So beautiful motorcycling weather. So we get geared up, we head out in the morning, we're heading back to town, it's the end of a long weekend. And about an hour and a half later, the temperature drops probably to 0 Celsius or about 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It's snowing, it's raining, it's cold, it's windy, it's traffic, it's pretty much the worst, like the worst possible thing you could experience on a motorcycle right next to the fact that it's going to turn icy any minute and you're going to end up in the ditch. And anyways, we survived it clearly and here we chat today. I think it was just one of those things that it makes for a hell of a good story afterwards because you don't tell the story about the beautiful sunny day where everything went perfect. But no matter how much you prepare and how good your gear is and how much you prep for what could happen, sometimes you just got to live it and you just got to sit in it. And it was such a good experience and I think it's why I ride motorcycle and I'm going to touch maybe on some other elements but that need to kind of survive it. And but be prepared, but be adaptable. Don't be so concrete into this is the experience I'm going to have, or this is the way the day is going to play out— day life, business, whatever the adventure is. Be prepared to roll with the punches because sometimes it might be sunny in the morning and it might be snowing in the afternoon, and you might have no choice but to keep riding through it. And attitude makes all the difference at that point. So I think there's a few lessons rolled up in there, but it's definitely an adventure story that made me a stronger person afterwards just simply because I survived it.
Yeah, no, dude, absolutely, man. I can't, uh, I can't imagine being on a bike in that cold weather, dude.
It was just terrible. And you got good gear, and you know, they always joke there's no such thing as— in motorcycling, there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear. But I don't care how much good gear you have, when it's snowing, that's a real thing. Gotcha.
Um, so, so the next one I got for you is, what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
I think the thing that is the most prevalent for me now, or something that we talk about with clients on a regular basis, and I'm really immersed in, is the reality is that we now live in the age of the customer. Boiling that down is the customer has all the power, and they will decide accordingly. And as a service provider, no matter whether you're selling a product, whether you're selling a service, every element of your journey with your customer, whether it be the way they interact with you, the way they purchase, the way they follow up, if it's a service, the type of experience they have to work with you. Everything is up for grabs. And, you know, in a world where we work in marketing and branding and telling stories and positioning companies in a certain way, every element of your business is your brand. Every element of that experience that customer has from that first hope and dream they have before they buy your product or your service, whatever it is, to more importantly, every opportunity you have to remove friction through that journey, because they have all the power and I guarantee your competitor is waiting there to give them a better, shinier, more frictionless, more delightful experience. So if you think of everything you do as a business as it relates to the fact that your customer is one, maybe a bit fickle, more fickle than they've ever been because they have more decision and more power, more information than they've ever had, and you purposely design that out to be the best possible experience they could have, you're going to win. Otherwise, you could be in trouble.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree, and it could tie in with the next one. So my next one is, what's your best piece of overall business advice? So it would probably definitely tie in, but I'll let you answer that as well.
Well, I can— I went a couple different directions on that. I'm thinking about, thinking about these questions. Absolutely, designing, designing a business that serves the customer. But I want to go one level deeper in terms of actually in the organization itself. You're only as good as the team. And I remember your team and the people you surround yourself with. I remember back when I was an entrepreneur— I'm still an entrepreneur, but there's different phases of it— when I'm in the early days days, and you know, 2 guys and an idea versus a whole team of people and still an idea. But I heard from everybody, it's like, make sure you surround yourself with smart people, make sure you get a good lawyer and a good accountant. What they didn't say is make sure you have a good office manager, make sure you have a good, you know, in our world, graphic designers and marketers and technology people, and surrounding yourself with people that are smarter, smarter than you in every aspect of what they do, all laddering back to that experience you're trying to provide your customer. It is so crucially important. I still meet leaders today that still have a bit of the hero syndrome, and I mean hero hero in the sense that they themselves think they're the hero, where to me it's absolutely not. It's the people you surround yourself with that if you do it right, are all smarter than you at the thing they do. Your goal is to bring them together and then drive them forward in that goal of whatever customer journey or customer experience you're trying to create. I think it's so important and overlooked at small, medium, and large organizations that I run into on a weekly basis.
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think every entrepreneur when they start out, like, and this is probably a good thing, is you do it all. And that, like, to start out, and that's good because then you learn it all. But then just like, from my own experience running like a publishing company, like when I first started out, I was trying to do like the book covers, I was trying to format the books, I was trying to do the book marketing, trying to do the publishing and like the editing, like everything for the customer. And you can't scale that way. So what you got to do— yeah, not at all. So then you find people that are really good at design, really good at formatting, and then what are you yourself good at? You double down on that and you build a team around you that are good in the other elements. And that's the only way. But I do think like every entrepreneur kind of goes through that, like, um, it's kind of like a leap because like you want control of everything and then the only way to scale is to actually let go of control.
Yeah, moving from control to influence, it's, it's a very tricky divide to cross. But I think as entrepreneurs, it's kind of a rite of passage. I think we, we all go through it because At the beginning, it's just literally access to funds sometimes is your most limiting factor. Then all of a sudden you've got the funds, now you need to step out of the way. And that's pretty hard for entrepreneurs, 100%.
Yeah, now you got to get out of your own way.
Oh, I get— touché. Oh yeah, yeah, maybe that's my advice for the— get out of your own way, whatever that means on different sides.
So my next one for you is, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
I feel like I'm cheating now and just say get out of your own way. No, I would say younger Tyler was a lot less patient and a lot less maybe graceful with people around him than older Tyler is striving to become. So I think that things are going to take time. You might have gotten somewhere and the people around you haven't got there. It's such a good example. I take a lot of courses, a lot of training, and you go and you get all jazzed up about an idea and you come back and you You're a bit of a whirlwind in your organization, like, here's what I'm going to do, and everyone's like, wow, you had 8 hours of whatever got you to where you are, and you're just throwing this at me now, and you expect me to jump on this bandwagon? Being a little bit more patient, telling, giving people more of the story, letting them be part of the journey, I think, but patience is the overall thing I would definitely say. Things are going to take a little bit longer, and that's okay, and be a little bit more graceful with the people around you, and you'll go farther, going back to that team analogy.
And then, so kind of going a little bit down a different path with the next one. So, in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
For me, it's always been finding things in my life that are fully immersive. And I think that can be deemed as living in the moment and whatever your version of that is. You know, I tend to look for a lot of my hobbies, a lot of my activities are really engaging—snowboarding and longboarding and motorcycling. And so, it's a high degree of presence, holds me in the moment. But for my wife, that's reading a book. So when she's reading a book, she is— you can talk to her, but she's not going to hear you because she's fully immersed in what she does. And that can translate to work when you're in the boardroom or you're doing a presentation or you're having a meeting with your team or you're just in a closed office focusing on what it is that you need to get done. The more immersive and the more you can be tied to seeing that momentum, seeing moving things forward, but being present, I think is so critical for happiness. Certainly for me, 100%, and everyone's version of that's a bit different. Being fully engaged in the life you've created is critical. Mm-hmm.
And then, so speaking of books, what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
This is a tough one again because again, best book. I'm going to give you the best recent book that I've read because it was very impactful. And again, I'm very passionate, so when I read something, I'm super into it until I read something new and then I move on to the new topic. But 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari. The part of that we wrote Sapiens, Homo Deus, and then he wrote his most recent book. And it was a fantastic book where he really took a really global perspective. And what it left me realizing, I think, more than I did before, is some of the issues that we're dealing with globally are exactly that— they're global issues. They're not going to be— they're not going to be dealt with by isolationist thinking, nationalist approach, thinking about our own little world, and I'll make sure this is okay and the rest will just— I won't even look at it. And making sure that we always embrace the fact that we live in a global village and we're all part and parcel. We're all sharing this journey together one way or another. So some of the challenges, whether it be environmental, whether it be the impact of technology on the human race in general, these are global issues and we need to look at them that way. It was good. It just brought my head up a little bit. It got me to look a little farther down the path than maybe I was before I read it. So it was a great book. I highly recommend it. And then what is your favorite quote and why? I think for me, it's a quote— I can never find who it's attributed to, but it's something someone said to me years ago. And it was back in the— back I was working out and something wasn't— I wasn't getting the goals I wanted. And they just looked at me and said, hey, it's simple. Do your behavior— does your behavior match your goals? And I've kept that up by my computer in my office, stuck on the wall above the door over the last probably 20 years. And I think it's— it always resonates for me as that moment of going, well, if I'm not getting I'm not getting what I want, whatever that may be. The only thing I can really look at, the only thing I can certainly control, is my behavior, my inputs. So that's something that I carry around, and I think it can be applied universally across, across a broad, broad spectrum of whatever it is. We're always chasing what we want out of something, but are we really putting in or doing the things that are going to get us there? That's why I think that one is always held, held at the top of my list.
Yeah, dude, thank you so much for coming on. Very insightful episode. The last one I got for you is, where can our listeners best find you online?
You can find me on LinkedIn. That's a great place. You can type Tyler Chisholm on LinkedIn or Instagram, another one of my favorites, Tyler Chisholm, Y-Y-C. So you can hit me up there and reach out. I love to chat with people. So please have any of your listeners feel free to reach out. I'd love to chat.
Perfect. Thanks again for coming on, man.
My pleasure. Have a good one.
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