IAM1509 – Founding Partner and Branding Designer Helps Industries Redefine the Urban Landscape

Forrest T. Heath III is the founding partner of Pareto Design, a global design consultancy based in Washington, DC. Pareto works in industries that Forrest believes are building the future and redefining the urban landscape: real estate development, infrastructure, transportation, hospitality, and defense. When not working with Pareto, Forrest can be found:
—Working with veterans to protect endangered species and combat human trafficking.
—Promote the adoption of electric vehicles.
—Build public and private high-speed rail.
— Creating decentralized internet infrastructure in the developing world.

• CEO Story: Forrest started his entrepreneurial journey bow tie company while he was still 14 years old reaching a point as a global chain supplier but it was beyond his experience at that time he was still 15 years old, so he decided to pivot and found his passion and was good at designing, branding and web design. Started pitching his service and one led to another in different companies.
• Business Service: Defense side – helping retired/veterans keep them in their peak performance by combating human trafficking and poaching.
• Secret Sauce: How to tell compelling stories from complex ideas. Turning complex concepts into easily digestible stories.
• CEO Hack: Processing podcasts and audiobooks to increase their speed so you take in more content.
• CEO Nugget: Critically question why you can't do something to change your perspective about something
• CEO Defined: Being the anchor and helping beyond your organization.

Website: https://www.pareto-design.com/forrest-t-heath-iii/

Current main project: http://redmedellin.com/

Episode Link: https://iamceo.co/2018/12/20/founding-partner-branding-designer-helps-industries-redefine-the-urban-landscape/

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Transcription

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00:23 – 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 Harkness 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.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gretch from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today at Forrest Heath of Pareto Design. Forrest, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:58 – Forrest T. Heath III

Hey, thanks for being really excited to be here.

01:01 – Gresham Harkless

No problem. We're really excited to have you and what I wanted to do is read a little bit more about Forrest so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Forrest is the founding partner of Pareto Design, a global design consultancy based in Washington, DC. Pareto works in industries that Forrest believes are building the future and redefining their urban landscape. Those are real estate development, infrastructure, transportation, hospitality, and defense. When not working with Pareto, FOREST can be found working with veterans to protect endangered species and combat human trafficking, promoting the adoption of electric vehicles, building public and private high-speed rails, and creating decentralized internet infrastructures in the developing world. Forrest, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:43 – Forrest T. Heath III

I am, and excited to be here.

01:45 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So the first question I had was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and tell us what led you to start your business.

01:52 – Forrest T. Heath III

Sure thing. So I've been at this for a few years now. I had a little bit earlier start than a lot of folks. Started a bow tie company making cotton bow ties when I was about 14 years old and had a collection of local grandmas sewing in their spare time as my production line.

02:08 – Gresham Harkless

And I was growing that and growing pretty quickly.

02:08 – Forrest T. Heath III

But alas, 15-year-old Forrest eventually got to the point where he was calling factories in Shenzhen and trying to look into building global supply chains for an apparel company. And that was a little bit beyond my experience at the time. So I decided to pivot and ended up realizing after some kind of soul searching that I was really good at design, branding, and websites and started just pitching those services. And one thing led to another. And I like to say we've done everything from a small-town restaurant in North Carolina to branding work for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. So it's been a pretty, pretty broad spectrum of different work we've done over the years.

02:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I'll definitely say that. It definitely kind of sounds like that. And I always love, you know, when you hear like that entrepreneurial bug, you have it at a young age and you kind of just, you still have it, you still do it the same thing, you just probably do it on a bigger scale, but even if it's bow ties or as you said, it's, you know, doing designs for, you know, big huge companies or organizations, you can still have that bug.

02:58 – Forrest T. Heath III

Totally, totally. That's 1 of the great things about the work I've been able to do is, for example, 1 of my big projects right now, this is sort of my primary focus, is we have started a social venture down in Columbia building decentralized internet infrastructure. So Totally out of left field, wouldn't have expected to be doing this 6 months ago, but now we're working in one of the poorer neighborhoods here in Medellin, Colombia, this place that was kind of the epicenter of violence and drug wars and all sorts of other crazy stuff less than 15 years ago. And now it's sort of held up as the future of Medellin in a sense, but also kind of what Latin America can become. So we're down here building really, really good internet infrastructure and have the community itself enlisted to do that. This is kind of all come out of bow ties, as crazy as that sounds.

03:45 – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. It's what they say is not how you start is how you finish. And is definitely doing some great things. Obviously you continue to do that. So I wanted to draw down a little bit deeper in here. I guess you touched on some of the things that you're doing. Could you tell us, I guess, everything that you're doing with Pareto?

03:58 – Forrest T. Heath III

Yeah. So it's a pretty broad spectrum. Our 2 main areas that we focus on are infrastructure and defense-related stuff. Both of those are kind of loosely defined, which is sort of fun to work in. So for the defense side, we're pretty heavily involved in what we call the asymmetric operations group. And we essentially take retiring special forces veterans and we keep them at their peak performance. So usually what happens is these guys are super high-level operators. They are really used to going at a million miles an hour and then they retire from active duty and they kind of just fall off of this wagon and their health suffers, their mental state suffers, and frankly, they're just not being put to the best use.

They have this amazing skill set that's being underutilized. So what we do is we work to keep these guys at their peak performance so that they don't have this just fall-off point the second they retire from active duty. So we kind of sequentially step them down to a more manageable long-term level. And then a pretty significant portion of them, we actually end up fielding to go do anti-human trafficking, anti-poaching, sort of all these thorny problems that you see in the globe right now that NGOs and governments are trying to solve that could really use this human touch.

So we send these guys in and they go and network with the tribal leaders in a certain part of Africa to find their infiltrating networks that are kind of doing stuff like home and trafficking and poaching and figure out a way to really effectively attack those problems from the inside. So that's pretty awesome work.

05:21 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I definitely would say that. And definitely I imagine fulfilling work as well.

05:25 – Forrest T. Heath III

Totally, totally. Because it's this awesome intersection between doing a lot of good in the world under really, really tough problems and having these guys that are just heroes through and through and giving them kind of a new take on life and letting their skills be super useful. So that's an awesome thing. Kind of a total left turn for the infrastructure stuff. We have a project now in North Carolina that's trying to take sort of different models from around the world and apply them to building a privately operated high-speed rail line connecting the 2 larger metropolitan regions in North Carolina, Charlotte, and Raleigh.

And all of this would be done from the private sector side. So essentially we're building a multi-billion dollar rail line and if it works properly, the finances are coming from actual investors who are motivated. So instead of having this massive outlay for doing a government project for transit, we have found a way to sustainably fund it from the actual users themselves.

06:19 – Gresham Harkless

So that's kind of awesome. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I always believe like, you know, when you have that opportunity to find that kind of intersection where there's a win-win-win, it sounds like, you know, that's always like that sweet spot that everybody wants to be at because everybody kind of benefits from it.

06:32 – Forrest T. Heath III

Well, this is the thing I found a lot in my own work is it's how you create a situation where you're inherently different than everything else around you, right? Like a lot of circumstances, a lot of people working in entrepreneurship are trying to copy this next guy, but the true value comes out of how you find what you're uniquely really good at and double down on that and sort of find that Venn diagram spot where what you're really good at, what you like doing and what the world values all kind of come together in a super novel way. And it's just sort of doubling down on that.

07:01 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. It's like that, as they say, that Zona genius that where you can play where nobody else can play as you can play in is definitely every what everybody's looking for. And you might have touched already on it a little bit. And I want to ask you for that middle piece in that Venn diagram, what I call your secret sauce. What do you feel kind of distinguishes you and your organization?

07:19 – Forrest T. Heath III

Yeah, so for me and my organization personally, I think it's how do we tell really compelling stories around really complex ideas? So something like a massive infrastructure project or like blockchain-powered decentralized internet or helping special forces guys go do counter networking operations to thwart poachers. Those are really complex concepts, but at the end of the day, it's let's connect people so that they can have a thriving economy or let's go build a better way for people to get around the state that they call home, or let's go and find a novel solution to protect endangered species. So it's like, how do you kind of boil down complexity into a really easily digestible story?

08:01 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. And it's kind of like, to me, that's always a good sign of intelligence to be able to say what is the complex and to be able to make it simple like you said you know rather than all the kind of complexities that everybody may not necessarily understand or be able to kind of you know digest so to speak you're able to kind of make it a lot simpler so you can get people behind you behind the mission that you have.

08:20 – Forrest T. Heath III

Truthfully. Brevity is a lost art. I forget who said this quote exactly, but it was something to the extent that my letter is so long because I didn't have time to make it shorter. There's this art form and distilling down their core message and frankly your core ideals on what you really care about to a point where you can meet somebody in an elevator and they can come away with knowing what you're about and what you care about and kind of what motivates you.

08:42 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. Yeah, I agree with that 110%. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

08:55 – Forrest T. Heath III

Sure thing. Actually, I have 1 that really clearly comes to mind that I try to share with most people. I am an avid listener of audiobooks and podcasts, and that is a good starting 1, but I think you can take it a step further. So what I actually ended up doing, was I used to drive between DC and North Carolina a couple of times a week, so in the car for hours and hours. I finally got very curious about the neuroscience of how we process audio. And it turns out you process words of somewhere around 200 words per minute, which is about, or sorry, that's what normal speech is.

And your upper limit of processing is 2 to 3 times that. If you do it sequentially, you can actually end up doubling, if not tripling the playback speed of an audiobook or a podcast, and totally comprehend everything, but you are able to double, if not triple your amount of information intake. So a singular trip to DC could be reading an entire book. So it's allowed me and a very hectic schedule to be able to have time to really consistently learn and sort of sharpen the knife as I go along. So the thing I like to share with people is not only just audiobooks and podcasts when you're doing mundane stuff but really try to push yourself to sort of sequentially increase the speed so you can get the most out of it.

10:05 – Gresham Harkless

I love that, I love that. It's like a hack within a hack within a hack, it sounds like, where you're able to kind of maximize, not just listen to these audiobooks because you're on the go, because you're doing so many things, but you're able to take in more content than sometimes you might even think that you could because you're listening to it at an accelerated speed.

10:19 – Forrest T. Heath III

Totally.

10:21 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you could hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

10:31 – Forrest T. Heath III

Oh, this is a fun 1. I think in a nutshell, the thing that I've learned and refined over the years is this ability to critically question why you can't do something. I know this sounds kind of cliched and we get back to it a lot. But there are very, very few things in the world that are truly undoable or that you have to go about the exact way that everyone else does.

And if you can find a shortcut or a novel way approach to it, it's how you approach this from a different angle than everyone else so that you not only stand above the crowd, but you're also cutting through a lot of the sort of not really valuable aspects of doing a lot of things and just really getting to the heart of it. So it's like, how do you approach problems in a, for lack of a better word, asymmetric way? So you're just coming at it from such a radically different perspective and approach that almost by achieving what you're doing, just simply being on the path, you succeed.

11:22 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, yeah, I love that. And I love it, it's all about to me, like at the heart of it, when you're an entrepreneur or business owner, you're solving problems, finding a way to do that. But often, those words like impossible always come around. But if you're able to kind of change your perspective and probably even change your actions in alignment with that new perspective, you can solve some of the problems that people call quote unquote, impossible.

11:38 – Forrest T. Heath III

Totally. And it's also this concept of like, if you have a bunch of competition for what you're doing, you're probably not doing it well. You don't want to be in a situation where you are trying to pretend like you're more competitive than you are when in reality, what you kind of want is a monopoly on what you're seemingly useful and good at.

11:58 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. How have you found, I guess, the best ways to be able to do that? Is it like niching now?

12:02 – Forrest T. Heath III

So, niching is a huge 1. And then the other big 1 that's just come to me is just literally if everyone else is approaching a problem with X solution, necessarily always say you should do Y, but give Y a chance and maybe go for Z and a couple of other ones after that as well. So really critically question, quote, quote, the best practices of doing stuff or the ways that everyone else is going about it and see if there's a way that you can come at it from such a radically different approach that you just by doing that approach are there for winning.

12:29 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. It makes you a trailblazer and you're ahead of the competition. So I love that CEO nugget. And I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of being a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So for us, I want to ask you what being a CEO means to you.

12:43 – Forrest T. Heath III

You know, man, I think what it really comes down to is being the person that all of the people that rely on you can come back to and look to for guidance, support, sort of that anchor for whether it be your customers, your team, your friends and family, just being that person that can go and effectively help not only your organization, but other organizations solve problems.

13:05 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I love that definition. And it's a great reminder. Forrest, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule and doing some awesome things. And I appreciate you for taking some time out to kind of speak with us. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best people can get in touch with you.

13:21 – Forrest T. Heath III

Well, it's been a pleasure being here. I really appreciate the time. The best way to get in touch with me, it would actually just be to Google Forest Heath or Forest Heath the Third. I should come up in a couple of different places. And then if you want to check out our main project down here in Columbia, it's red as in the color medellin.com. So just give that a Google and we look forward to hearing from y'all.

13:40 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Sounds good. And what we'll do is we'll have those links in the show notes, but for us, thank you so much again. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

13:46 – Forrest T. Heath III

Thank you, Gresh.

13:47 – 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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