IAM1946 – Author and CEO Helps Clients Get Better in Communicating Authentically

Transcription:

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Lee Caraher Teaser 00:00

We aim to be the easiest agency to work with that brings positive value all the time. And we can do that because we have a different point of view.

Intro 00:07

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.

Gresham Harkless 00:34

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focusing on finishing it out, fighting the good fight and closing out the job. I think just as important as it is to start something, it's even more important in how you conclude it or finish it out. So if you think of the different things that you can finish out, it'd be everything from a project, it could be from a day, it could also be from a business in and of itself and it can also of course be for the year. So when you think of finishing out, I want you to really think of these episodes because what we're going to really focus on is the last question that we really ask, which is defining what it means to be a CEO.

All the creative, innovative, and I think truly insightful questions that we received from this question is really what we want to highlight during the show. But of course, we want you to enjoy the entire episode and think about how you're going to finish things out and how you're going to finish things out strongly. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

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 Lee Caraher, of Double Forte PR and Digital Marketing. Lee, it is awesome to have you on the show.

Lee Caraher 02:07

I am so looking forward to talking with you today.

Gresham Harkless 02:10

I am looking forward to it as well. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Lee so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Lee is the CEO of Double Forte PR and Digital Marketing. She's known for her practical solutions to big problems. Lee's the author of Millennials in Management based on her experience with failing and then succeeding at retaining millennials. Her second book, The Boomerang Principle, was published in April of 2017.

Lee, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Lee Caraher 02:38

I am ready.

Gresham Harkless 02:39

All right, let's do it. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Lee Caraher 02:45

So I started my business in 2002. So 16 years ago, which seems like yesterday in some ways and like eons ago in other ways. I actually wasn't intending to be an entrepreneur CEO with my own business, but basically life got in the way of that between my younger son who has special needs and requires a lot more flexibility in my calendar and my schedule than a traditional job, even in high leadership would do. And the fact that my mother was diagnosed with stage four of lung cancer in 2002 and I had decided I was going to be with my mom and my dad.

She was sick. I live in California. She lives in Wisconsin. It was very clear to me between those two things that I had to be my own boss because by taking the jobs that I was looking at to take, I would have not been able to go to Wisconsin, which was not an option. So basically, I created Double Forte out of my own need and haven't really looked back since.

Gresham Harkless 03:43

That makes perfect sense. And obviously sorry to hear that about your mom, especially. But it's always interesting how sometimes circumstances, the universe, whatever kind of pushes us in the direction, whether or not we want to go there, puts us in the right path kind of works out that way.

Lee Caraher 03:56

So true. I've had very large, high profile senior leadership positions, the two jobs before when I started my company, and I just hadn't never thought about it. And then voila, I'm the breadwinner in our house, and I had to bring home some bread. There you go.

Gresham Harkless 04:12

Part of the job, fortunately or unfortunately.

Lee Caraher 04:15

Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 04:15

Now I wanted to hear a little bit more about Double Forte and hear what you guys are doing. How are you serving the clients that you're working with?

Lee Caraher 04:21

Sure. So Double Forte, like you said, it's a public relations and digital marketing and influencer marketing firm. We're based in San Francisco. We have a big office in New York where when I say big, we're independent and we got 30 something people and we're intentionally small. We serve clients in sort of three broad categories.

One is consumer lifestyle, so food and bev, health and wellness, sports and fitness, accessories. Digital life, so video games, MR, AR, VR, apps. Then professional services, organizations and companies that serve other professionals and what we do for them is to help our clients get better through communication. So we believe that everything good comes from great communication, great leadership, great engagement. Great customer relationships comes from great communication and however we can help our clients in those spaces we will.

So sometimes it's working with internal people, with the CEO and their HR people on, are they communicating with their employees? Do they understand? Sometimes it's doing media relations and analyst relations and making sure that those people who are reporting about different categories know who our client is and what they're about and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes it's in social media making sure that how companies and people portray themselves on social media is authentic and real and that they're engaging in a very positive, authentic way.

Gresham Harkless 05:44

That makes perfect sense. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be like your differentiator, what you feel sets either you or Double Forte apart from everyone else.

Lee Caraher 05:54

I think from a differentiated point of view, there are lots of agencies in San Francisco and New York. We differentiate ourselves on a couple of things. One is that most of us have been in house, meaning I have been the client. When you've been a client served, I think you serve better because, there's a reason agencies get hired is that is to take some weight off the people who work for the company. If the agencies don't have that point of view that we're here to serve, they're here to lift weight off your shoulders, agencies can be more trouble than they're worth. So we aim to be the easiest agency to work with that brings positive value all the time and we can do that because we have a different point of view. That's number one.

Number two is that we're super pragmatic. Sometimes we lose in competitive pitches because it's not very sexy or sizzly. Probably half of the time where we lose because of that, people come back around to us later and say, Oh, we wish you hadn't spent all that money on that stuff. So we're very pragmatic because we you know, we're very focused on the business. You can be super busy in PR and communication and social media and get nowhere. We will not do those kinds of activities that just have just a flash agenda instead of a business agenda.

So I think those are the things that differentiate us between us and our competitors in the space.

Gresham Harkless 07:15

Yeah, I love that. I love the pragmatic aspect as well because it gets down to the nuts and bolts so that you're able to do what you're actually hoping to do.

Not all the smoke and mirrors. Sometimes that happens. Yeah.

Lee Caraher 07:25

I think PR in general, social media is for the people who don't do it. It seems really simple. Oh, just make a phone call or something on Instagram, and frankly, some of the smartest people I know in the world do what we do for a living and one of the dumbest people I know in the world do we do for a living? I don't know how good their living is, but in general I just I live to be frictionless.

So the more we can do things that advance our client's business goals, the more we're going to be valuable to them and how it pays off for us is, I'm really proud of the fact that most of our clients have been with us, our longest, so we're 16 years old, our longest client has been with us for 12 years.

Our shortest we just signed the plan last week, but our average client engagement is over five and a half years, which is two times the national average for agencies. So from my perspective, that means we're doing something good.

Gresham Harkless 08:19

Absolutely. Yeah. That secret sauce is working well. Now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Lee Caraher 08:31

You know, I think audible makes me more efficient. I think the most important thing for a CEO, for leaders is to listen and to read and to get new points of view. I think the best leaders I know are just voracious readers looking for and don't believe they know everything and so they're looking for other inputs.

Because I commute, sometimes I'm driving, sometimes in the train, whatever. I listen to a lot of books on audible on my iPhone and it's just as a time saver for me to make sure that I'm reading. My goal is to read a book a week and that lets me do it.

Gresham Harkless 09:07

Yeah, that makes perfect sense especially anybody that's especially go, go, go, go, go and you like you said, commuting or just bouncing from meeting to meeting to be able to listen to a chapter in between an appointment or something or while you're on your way to your work.

Whatever it is, that kind of is a phenomenal CEO hack that a lot of people take advantage of.

Lee Caraher 09:23

I think there's downtime and so I try, I usually have two books in play at a time, and I'm trying to get a mix of what's practical. My company, I have a book club and every quarter I give everybody in the company three books. In general, one is a skill that you need to learn. One is an idea about what we do for a living. Then one is a different voice that we can learn from either in fiction or a nonfiction.

So like this month, I gave everybody this quarter. I gave everybody Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. That's like a standard, but I realized, if you haven't read it, you haven't read it, you got to read it. Then a book by Jay bear and then another book. So myself, I always have something that is a different voice and something that's really work related. So when I'm in audio form, I listen to the things that are different voices, not the things where I have to take lots of notes.

Although I do find that I'm like, Oh, I want to quote that. Oh my God, that's so good. So I have to go back and I usually get the book in audible form and either in paper or in Kindle form. So I'm going back and forth between the two.

Gresham Harkless 10:32

Yeah, that's funny. I do the exact same thing because I always find it so hard to get the quote. Oh, that's an amazing gem that I just heard from the book. And now I have to find out how do I save this so that I can share it out and keep it.

Lee Caraher 10:45

Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 10:47

But that's absolutely awesome that obviously you do that, but you also do that for your team. I especially love the out-of-the-box type thing.

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO Nugget. You might have already touched on it, but do you have a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Lee Caraher 11:02

Oh my gosh. What would I tell my younger business self is trust yourself. Trust yourself more. I think a lot of us have imposter syndrome, even though now here we are, CEOs, we run companies, people work for us. I get together with CEOs, women and men who go, do you believe they follow us? So I think more around trusting ourselves, more around trusting ourselves.

If I trust it, I do trust myself and I have a lot of confidence. I think the trade off or the dichotomy is, how you have a healthy ego and listen, imposter syndrome all at the same time, I think thy name is CEO. I think I would have wasted less time charting my own course if I had trusted myself more.

Gresham Harkless 11:44

There you go. Yeah, that's definitely a good reminder. Sometimes you think that I always say if you're a trailblazer or an innovator, sometimes you're not quote and quote leading people because it might be so far aligned. But if you continue to go your path, then all of a sudden you turn around and you are leading a bunch of people.

Lee Caraher 12:00

Yeah and you never know what, I think particularly with social. I have had really huge, at my last job, I had over 700 people, the job before that, I had over 650 people and this job, I have 30 something people in this company, right? But you never know who's listening to you as a leader. You never know. You're always going to have an impact literally.

I was in the airport the other day coming home from New York. This person who had worked in my team 20 years ago, that's how old I am, oh my gosh, 20 years ago, came up to me and I recognized the face but I was like trying to place this face and he said, I'm Jack, whatever, and I worked for you at this company. And you said this thing when we had this really crappy day and you said this thing and that has stayed with me forever.

I don't have a clue what I said to this man, but it really brought home to me, reminded me that we have great responsibility when we're leaders as well, right? When we're trailing, blazing new trails or people are counting on us that our words have heavier weight and they can be used for good or for evil. The more we can use them for good, the better it is.

Gresham Harkless 13:09

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. A lot of times, like when you're authentic in alignment, when you show up that way and everything, no matter where you're at, like you said, you can have that influence that somebody 20 years later can say, I remember when you said X, Y, and Z and that changed my life or something like that.

Lee Caraher 13:22

And it was like another day. I understand how flippant that sounds, but I don't mean it to be flippant. I just mean it to be purposeful.

Gresham Harkless 13:29

Yeah no, it makes sense. So sometimes it may not be the same to you, but at the same time, it may influence everybody. So that's why it's so important to understand the platform we all have.

Lee Caraher 13:38

I think I'm going to add a hack to though. Can I add a hack?

Gresham Harkless 13:41

Yeah, absolutely.

Lee Caraher 13:42

The other hack is to know yourself. The most important thing I think for leaders is to be self-aware. Yeah, and the more self-aware we are, the more confident we can be and the better we can be at who we are. We all know that leader who think they're the greatest, the greatest ping pong player since whoever, since Forrest Gump, and they're not, or they think they're the best writers and they're terrible, being self-aware, getting real input, doing a 360 on yourself, which is so hard to do when you're the boss.

How do you get a 360? Hiring a coach so they can do it for you. Whatever it is taking up. I really like different personality tests and assessments, and some of them are for me less valuable than others. But the more I can understand myself and how people might be viewing me, the better leader I could be.

So that's my other hack.

Gresham Harkless 14:32

I love that. I love that great reminder. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition for what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Lee, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Lee Caraher 14:44

Being a CEO means that I live in a high input, low democracy framework, which means that I am paying lots and lots of attention to what's going on in the marketplace, to the people who work for me and to the customers that we have.

I'm charting a course forward for all of those constituencies based on what I'm listening to and how I'm reasoning it all out. Then I am doing in a compelling enough way that people come along with me to make it.

Gresham Harkless 15:13

Love that. Definitely a great reminder. Lee, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule. 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 our listeners know. Then of course how best people can get ahold of you and get copies of your book.

Lee Caraher 15:26

Oh best place to get hold of me is on my website leecaraher.com. You get to my agency, Double Forte, from there. You can find my books, which are also on Amazon and anywhere else you can buy a book. So, The Boomerang Principle and Millennials in Management. My blog is there too, and you can find me on Twitter and leecaraher on Instagram.

I think I would just say in closing, if communication is the key to leadership and the key to marketing and the key to relationships, the more you can understand yourself and how you communicate, if it's effective or not, the more effective and less friction you'll have in your day.

Gresham Harkless 16:04

That makes perfect sense and an absolutely great reminder. We'll make sure to have those links as well in the show notes just so that we can follow up with you Lee. But again, I truly appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Lee Caraher 16:15

Thank you so much Gresh.

Outro 16:16

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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