IAM890- Founder Focuses on Smart Aging

Liz Grantham is the founder of TheOptimal.me. She has more than thirty years of experience in marketing and advertising with global clients such as Visa, Shell, and Sony Mobile, working on projects including the Olympics.

• CEO Hack: Making lists
• CEO Nugget: Pay attention to details and the granular matters
• CEO Defined: Being a more thoughtful, more mindful, more open, and a better leader in living the organization's values

Website: https://theoptimal.me/

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Transcription

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[00:00:12.50] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

[00:00:40.10] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Liz Grantham of theoptimal. Me. Liz, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:50.60] – Liz Grantham

Thank you, Gresham. It's wonderful to be here. Good morning.

[00:00:53.50] – Gresham Harkless

Morning to you too, and definitely super excited to have you on. And, before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Liz so you can hear about all these awesome things that she's doing. And Liz is the founder of the Apple. Me. She has more than thirty years of experience in marketing and advertising with global clients such as Visa, Shell, and Sony Mobile working on projects including the Olympics. So, Liz, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:16.09] – Liz Grantham

I'm looking forward to it.

[00:01:17.40] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kinda kick everything off, I wanna hear a little bit more on how you got started before you're doing all these awesome things. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story? We'll let you

[00:01:28.00] – Liz Grantham

get started with your business. Sure. So my background, as you mentioned, is in marketing and advertising, and I opened my agency in nineteen ninety-eight. So we're we're twenty-two this year. And as you mentioned, we've worked on fantastic projects. I've been privileged to work for beautiful big companies that are very influential and that are involved in really big beautiful projects. I am based out of South Africa. So I've done a lot of work across music, financial literacy, entertainment, and media across Sub-Saharan Africa. So I've, you know, I've been really lucky. I've traveled a lot. I've worked on the ground a lot.

A lot of the work that we've done, you know, you can imagine nineteen ninety-eight, we were still operating in an analog world, and we were doing a lot of experiential marketing. Digital was sort of, I know, new, and I do work with someone who tells me they became interested in working in digital in nineteen ninety-five, but we were a little bit behind that curve. And, so so I've done wonderful projects that we worked, as you said, on the Olympic games, on, the football World Cup, and just really big projects that often have been educational and worked to problem solve for people, to help and uplift as opposed to, you know, just be sort of transactional marketing work.

And over the years, as digital kind of crept into our world too and I saw things were changing, I started looking for opportunities in this very interconnected global world because I think that's, you know, that is the wonder of the world we live in now is that as opposed to only reaching your local audience, which is super important, you get an opportunity to talk to people all around the world and to work with people all around the world and to be connected. And often a problem you solve for somebody local is a problem that people are experiencing all over. I had two, a creative director who was on my team and and our head of strategy. We began digging into what the opportunities might be.

And I had a life-changing experience, as a very stressed-out historical advertising executive whose life had been lived, I like to say, by the tyranny of the clock. You know, deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, every thirty-second counts, you know, really being able to meet the needs of our clients. I got physically quite ill, and I was I was very stressed.

And I was told that I had to start exercising, which was a bit of a horror story for me. But when I found the exercise and a movement program and exercise that I loved, it was life-changing. And I was sitting in Barcelona at a big mobile conference, and I suddenly thought, you know, if I had that program in my pocket, I would be so much better than I am right now after this sort of really long intercontinental flight. And I came you know, I went via, our our offices in Mauritius, and we had a bit of a brainstorm, and we discussed all kinds of things. And the idea for the optimal. I was born.

And what we're all about is we are talking to midlifers, about health and wellness and how we can really kind of live a life that is that is our where our best is yet to come. You know? It's really about it. It's very positive. It's how we take care of our health, how we start taking control, how we age in a smart way as opposed to kind of having thoughts about antiaging, and how we take care of our bodies. So that really is what the optimal me is all about. It's about your kind of pension for your body as opposed to your pension for your money. And we're having a great time, you know, with good results, and it's really exciting.

So as a CEO, it's been a massive journey and kind of quite transitional in many ways, but it's very exciting and it's and, you know, and at this time, this strange time that we're all living in right now, where we are all having to stay at home, where we are all way more sedentary than we should be or than we would be in normal life, you know, we find ourselves with a real solution that can have massive benefit to many, many people.

[00:05:39.10] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And I'm glad that you mentioned that because I was just about to say, you know, during a time like this where, you know, I think as it always probably should have been, but health and wellness and your well-being and being able to age gracefully and strongly, this is to some degree is so important right now in taking care of your health. I can imagine that, you've been able to kinda help support, you know, so many people. And I'm sorry to hear, you know, you the the the clock was that at your previous position was really, what might have driven you to that. But I think sometimes, those things happen for a reason because it allows you to not only help yourself but help out so many other people. And it sounds like you've been able to do that.

[00:06:14.69] – Liz Grantham

Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's it's very interesting. The World Health Organization a while ago, actually called physical inactivity a pandemic. Mhmm. More people are getting ill from sitting and stressed and the impacts of now are amplified by the sort of staying at home and not moving that much. And, you know, the scary thing is that we just our whole built environment is created for efficiency, right, and for convenience. So as human beings, our bodies were created to move.

You know, since time immemorial, we need to move. We need to move to keep our organs operating. We need to move to keep our systems working. And I think we've, over the last sort of 10:20, thirty, forty decades, lost sight of the fact that moving is a natural thing, and we should be doing a lot of it often. And it doesn't have to be, all about, you know, like, really massive hectic exercise or being in the gym pumping weights or, you know, pushing your body to the limits. Of course, some people love to do that. But for most of us, you know, we don't realize that things are kind of as we age, like, we're losing our ability to balance. What I didn't know and learned was that we start losing our balance as early as our mid-twenties.

[00:07:38.80] – Gresham Harkless

Oh, wow.

[00:07:39.69] – Liz Grantham

So I mean, in the US, one in four people over fifty-five end up in the emergency room because of a fall. So why do you fall? You fall because you you can't keep your balance and your, you know, your response time is not quick enough if you if you trip on a pavement or, you know, you run up a flight of stairs and, you know, you lose your footing or whatever. We don't have those same response times, and our balance is not as good anymore. Not only because physically, it's not as good, but, well, our eyes, our ears, all of those things just are natural, outcomes of of getting older. So we need to take better care of ourselves, and I find it quite fascinating.

And  I'm not sure, Gresham, the people you talk to, how we are not quite focused on prevention. You know, we wait until there's a crisis before we take care of things that we should be doing in the normal course of our day. And that's really what the optimal me is all about. It's, you know, it's about being positive. It's about if you've not done any exercise or movement because, you know, housework is movement, gardening is movement, playing with your grandchildren is movement, walking is movement. It doesn't have to be about booking a workout for an hour at a yoga studio or, you know, like, really signing up to go to the gym, but you're not comfortable going to the gym anymore or whatever it is.

We just have to move. And that is our message. Is your movement is medicine movement is essential for life, and we all need to be conscious and do it more often. And that's the soul that the optimal me brings is that you know, we believe that that movement is about moving our bodies naturally. It's about moving our bodies, in an integrated way as opposed to kind of an isolated way because that's how our bodies work. And, you know, then additionally, we get to do all the fun stuff, like looking at nutrition and how the enzymes in our bodies change as we get older, how different foods have different impacts.

You know, we also dig into health and the issues that we have as we get older. So it is, I must say, and as a CEO and a founder, it is so liberating and exciting to be working in a space where, where I'm, number one, able to, like, really engage and employ and work with teams of people that are in our target audience age group, midlifers, because, you know, they've got great experience, and they come with amazing insights, and they've been around the block. But then we also have this fantastic team of young people that understand and are just, like, digital natives. They get technology.

They are, excited about that. And and, sure, the subject matter often is something that they go, like, do we wanna be learning about this now? You know? Aging looks pretty scary. But to have an older team together with a younger team, I think that we all are learning from each other in this amazing little ecosystem. And, so as a founder and as a CEO, I mean, it is tremendously exciting to see that happening in our environment.

[00:10:48.20] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, as you said, and I love that phrase that you said earlier, you know, aging gracefully, and helping people to be able to do that because as we get older, it's so important that we incorporate the movement, that movement is medicine, as you said so well, into our regular lives and not look at it as, like, having to schedule, sixty minutes, HIIT workouts or sixty minutes, you know, marathon runs or anything like that. It's a lot of things that we can incorporate, you know, regularly. And so, I wanted to ask you and I know you touched a little bit, you know, upon what we can find on the site. Could you let us know if there's anything additional you didn't touch on also what you feel is what I call your secret sauce, which could be for you or the business, or a combination of both of what you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique.

[00:11:29.00] – Liz Grantham

So from the optimal me's perspective, we've thought about, the experience and what we as midlifers begin to experience. And, I mean, I will share it with you. I'm fifty-three. I am engaged in life. Look. This year has been quite different, but I travel a lot. I'm very active. I still run my agency business as well as this business, and I need to be sharp and physically well and on top of my game. And I don't always have time to do all of those things. But what we looked at in creating our on you know, we've got these this, amazing, online workout program, and we call them integrated movement routines.

And our secret sauce, if you go to our site and you see, our chief trainer whose name is Yani, is sixty years old and is extraordinary. And he's he's body number one is a beautiful body. It's not I mean, it is a little bit ripped, but it's not sort of in that bodybuilder space. Mhmm. And he does thirty minutes of movement today. That's his that's his secret sauce. And what we say is that what you wanna do is you wanna be priming your body to age well. You wanna make sure that you are flexible, that you have great balance, that you're strong, and that you have good mobility in your joints because that's what keeps us independent and able to kind of take care of ourselves.

And we've created a system where you can choose to do a five-minute workout. You can choose fifteen or thirty. So, you know, if you've been sitting at your desk for a long time and you just need to move, you can just do five minutes in your work clothes. You don't need to be going and kitting yourself out and working up a big sweat, but you will have absolute relief in your joints.

[00:13:06.70] – Gresham Harkless

Well, no. I appreciate that. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:13:18.20] – Liz Grantham

I do like most of us,  go I have to deal with quite a lot of of detail along the way. So whilst I have a helicopter view of everything that's going on, I often get to deal with detail in terms of our programs, and even on the, you know, the big campaigns we run for advertising clients. And making lists and speaking things out, you know, looking at things on a screen often I find quite difficult to make sure that I am responding carefully and accurately, to my team to save them time, to make sure that that I'm communicating clearly. So my hack is making lists.

[00:13:57.29] – Gresham Harkless

I wanna ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget, and this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

[00:14:06.29] – Liz Grantham

Detail matters. Paying attention to detail, to the small things, to the granular things, matters because it's what generates excellence. And now

[00:14:15.79] – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote, unquote, CEOs on this show. So, Liz, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:14:25.10] – Liz Grantham

It means that I have to be more thoughtful, more mindful, more present, and more open to be a better leader of my team and to ensure that my customers are getting the benefits of a team that is well laid, that and can deliver on our promise, that lives our values.

[00:14:47.39] – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate that definition, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out all about some things you and your team are working on.

[00:15:00.50] – Liz Grantham

So what I would love for your listeners to do is to go along to the optimal dot me, and, that is one word, the optimal dot me, and have a look at our offering. Have a look at what you can find there that can help you to, you know, really embrace smart aging and to take control of where you're gonna be and that, you know, a retirement if I can leave anyone with a nugget, you know, we need a retirement plan for our bodies as much as we do for our money. There is no point in having lots and lots of money, but your body is broken and you are living in one room and don't get to experience the beauty and wonder of the world and what it has to offer us. That's the first thing. Go and go and have a look there. The other place that, people can find me is I have a blog that is called Over Fifty, Not The Hill.

[00:15:46.10] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that, Liz. We will have the links and information in the show notes, but I appreciate that reminder as well. We treat kind of like our our bodies, like, you know, the cars. We're getting regular maintenance. We're, of course, you know, having that activity and movement regularly. It helps out so much so that we're gonna age gracefully, and I love, you know, everything that you and your team do to make sure that that happens. And I appreciate you again, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of

[00:16:09.79] – Liz Grantham

the day.

[00:16:10.29] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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