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Episode #239
Damon Holowchak

How To Build A Superstar Consulting Brand

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Summary

If everything’s been done and everybody’s doing everything right, how can you stand out and build a superstar consulting brand? Michael Zipursky welcomes Damon Holowchak, the CEO of Super Collider Consulting Inc. The key is to identify what you stand for. Why do you do what you do? Then, you need to apply that to your brand on a functional, operational level. If you’re not taking control of your message by building a brand with true meaning, people see right through it. Do you want more practical strategies for building a superstar consulting brand? This episode’s for you.

I am very excited to welcome Damon Holowchak. Damon, welcome.

Thanks, Mike. How are you?

I am great. We were talking about kids, siblings, and all kinds of energy or lack thereof at times. I am excited, Damon, to dive in. Your company is called Super Collider, of which you are the CEO. It is an independent creative studio based in Vancouver, BC and Portland, Oregon. Your clients include very well-known organizations like Lululemon, New Balance, Air Jordan, PepsiCo, and many more. You have done a lot of work in the hospitality industry where you helped the Donnelly Group grow into one of the largest independent hospitality groups in all of Canada. It’s so cool. A big welcome. I’m glad to have you here and I am excited to dive in.

I want to explore how the community and readers can turn their consulting brands and businesses into ones that their clients love, talk about, and trust. Before we do that, let’s go back in time. You served as the director of brand and marketing for the Donnelly Group. What were some of the best practices that were used to grow this hospitality group into the largest in Canada?

We’ve got to go back in the way back machine and talk a bit about I ended up there. It is interesting to talk about Donnelly Group as the largest independent hospitality group. It is in North America or for a time, it was. There are so many big words. It sounds so grandiose and awesome because truly, what I feel about it was a bunch of us that all knew each other that were good buds. That is how it felt as it grew. Donnelly Group is just one person, Jeff Donnelly. He is one gentleman and a partner who is his friend since high school. They grew up in North Delta. They started together with Bimini’s Public House. Everybody has a story.

Most of our readers will not be familiar with the Vancouver area or BC. I have had a few people that have come on that are more local and all of a sudden, it’s like, “You should also talk to this person. This person might be good.” I am having more people that are local, but everything that you shared, I imagine that they have no idea what you are talking about.

This individual started in the early 2000s, the hottest spot in the greater Vancouver area. Everybody over 30 in the lower mainland of the major Vancouver metropolitan area has a story about Bimini’s at some point. From that success, he began to expand and then, slowly but surely, grinded out a few. I came on at the end of 2010. It was post-Olympics that happened here in Vancouver. For the hospitality industry, it was absolute gangbusters. It did not matter. You could be flipping flapjacks out of a red wagon on the side of the road and you made a ton of money. You had fantastic success up until there.

Jeff had built the foundation of this hospitality empire leading up to the Olympics. He had about 5, 6 properties at that point, all partnered in with people and then Olympics hit. It had tons of notoriety and exposure. Everybody goes out. That is when I came on. I had to look at taking it from the vacuum, the post-Olympic decompression that happened. It was slow. People were excited for a very long time. It changed how people went out and viewed Vancouver as a fun spot. It was no fun city for so long. Those Olympics were fun.

People in Vancouver and the world jumped on that reputation for a while. I came on. My expertise has in always been in the hospitality, promotions, and marketing business. I came in to help their sports marketing side of things. I have a lot of experience in the sports marketing world and said, “I will you on as a contract.” That snowballed into eventually being a partner in the business at a director level.

Dissect the big fundamentals of your brand on a functional, operational level. Click To Tweet

Can you explain what sports marketing is in the context of hospitality? What does that look like? What were you doing?

Especially people in the US will definitely relate to this. Sports integrated into pub culture in North America. The concept of Donnelly Group, what Jeff originally, was these early 2000s London-style pubs. Back then, they were not jolly old pubs that were 500 years old serving a slimy grog. In London, especially in the early 2000s, they were popping. They were clubs at night, better than bangers and mash food, and it was a lot boozier than you would think of. That was the concept that Jeff brought over here and it took off and went running. A big part of our North American culture is going to the bar and watching a football game.

We have a hockey culture here in Vancouver. Hockey is one of the top three sports in all of Vancouver. It is integrated into the DNA of any place where you are having social beers. I came in to bolster and help build that part of the business, which has a lot of competition for. Everybody is showing the game. Everybody is putting their effort into making it a fantastic experience. We can talk a lot about how different that is than it was in 2010, 2011.

Damon, what I am interested in is from the perspective of a consultant. Here, you are dealing with what might appear to be a commodity. In the sense that you have a physical location that serves alcohol, food, and nonalcoholic drinks as well, but you have a television or multiple televisions and you have cable access and whatever sport is playing at that time. What did you do at Donnell Group to say, “We are providing something that is different or better,” to get people to come to your location as opposed to another? Was there something that could be done to create that differentiation?

My philosophy going into every meeting with my team was always like, “Everything has been done and everybody is doing everything.” What ideas do you have, but know that it is being beaten to death by somebody somewhere? It was definitely a challenge. That led to the brand part of things because it was not like, “Here is a cheap beer.” In hospitality, many industries, for that matter, if you decide to be the cheapest, someone is going to chase that cheapest price down the road. You are going chase it to wherever they go. They do not like you. They like the price of your beer. That was an issue. Same with food and giving stuff away. You want to give tickets or this or that.

Cool perks, but if people are chasing the freebies, do they like you or do they like the fact that they might get a free jersey from you? We built it upon experience. There are a few fundamentals that I put in place immediately. It was like, “We will be experts at sports. We will be experts at showing the game.” What does that mean? Let’s dissect that on a functional operational level.

One of the big fundamentals of that was, as a brand, we will have the right stuff on all the TVs all the time. As a sports guy, if I roll into and into a place that touts that they show games and are good at sports, I sit down on a Tuesday afternoon. I know that the Duke-North Carolina game is on, on the East Coast at 5:00 PM.

Even though I might not be there for the game, but as a sports guy, I know that is happening. I look up at all the TVs that everybody has. I see that they don’t even have that on there. I go, “You’re probably not a very good sports bar if you do not know that game is on.” Do you have to have junior men’s Division III lacrosse game from Alabama going on? Probably not. I know what is happening in the world of sports. If you do not have everything dialed in. A lot of stations turn to guys playing poker for two and a half hours. This is not good stuff. There is always something on.

This is a big tenet that we brought in there and said, “You’ve got to know what is on everywhere.” If I see that you have the Duke game on, I am not going to call all my friends and be like, “We’ve got to come down. The Duke game is on.” I know what you are talking about. I know that you care and you put energy and effort into understanding what is out there. You are going to put it on because it is better than the person down the road.

CSP 239 | Superstar Consulting Brand

 

Maybe readers will be like, “Why are you talking about sports? This has nothing to do with consulting.” My brain is processing this. I am thinking about how there are so many similarities. Every consultant out there, to a degree, is playing in some zone or some area of commoditization where there is another consultant who also provides what you do. They say very similar things. How do you differentiate?

If you go a level deeper, if you explain things further, provide more details, and provide more value as a way to demonstrate your expertise, it could come through your articles, videos, podcasts, or speaking. However, you are doing something to put it out there to show that you understand your ideal client. In this case, your ideal client was the beer-drinking sports fan for a consultant in the AI FinTech space, it is a bank or whoever it might be. If you can demonstrate that you understand your ideal client better than your competition, that provides an advantage.

All of this crap about putting Duke on the TV and having it on at that time and the sound are functional things that were operational deliverables that we expected of the team there. What they did was what my expertise in, and that is the brand. That improved the brand. The brand is that shadow that you put out there. You cannot always talk to every person that walks down the street and say, “Come to my pub. I will show the Duke game at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday if it is on.” This is not how we can communicate properly. That is where brand comes in.

The brand works the overarching feel and notion and understanding of our brand was that, “We are going to do it good,” which equals better than everybody else. It makes your decision on where you have decided you and I to go watch the Duke game or have a long lunch when we get off work. We are going to go see Damon and Donnelly pub because we know that they nail it every single time.” Specifically, do we know all these things? No, but overall, everyone did it. Everyone did it consistently.

Over time, people understood that this was something that we were better than everyone for. It builds a very significant revenue stream outside of the regular soup, salad, beers, and nightclub stuff that we had. We were very good at it. We had a clear direction and understanding of where this brand will be positioned. It is important to articulate that those little steps led to us being awesome at it and still known very well for it.

It is so interesting because brand is one of these things that people often think is your logo or your visual identity. Two things that I have heard over the years that have resonated with me connected to a brand are what you do when nobody is watching. It is also what people say about you when you are not there. I do not know if you have any thoughts or experiences connected to those, but those resonate with me.

The brand is very different from it was years ago. It was not quite as important as it was in the same way. It was important but important for different reasons. We are dealing in 2022 with people who want to know. In fact, they will find out about you and you might have a fantastic product, but they want to know who owns the company. They google the CEO, “What are you all about? Are you a cool person? Do I relate to you? Are you doing cool stuff?” This granular level of understanding of companies now is something that has been unprecedented.

A lot of things can contribute to that. Especially during the pandemic time, we had a lot of time on our hands. People truly dug in and became experts at whatever they liked. If I am going on vacation, I am digging. I am going to go dig deep into your fishing charter company to see who you are. I am going to dig deep into 30 of them. I am going to find out what reels you are using. I am going to find out about those reels and see how much I like those things. If you can help get yourself further down that pathway with your brand as a whole, you are going to have a way easier time. You can make people more comfortable learning about you. They are not going to get bored or find something or dig deeper.

They are going to immediately gravitate to what your values are. All of this frou-frou brand stuff that we used to always throw around, now people care about. If you do not stand for something, a lot of people go like, “It is cool. Keep doing what you do. I like these folks over here because they do some different things or they care.”

If you’re not taking control of your message by building a brand with true meaning, people see right through it. Click To Tweet

It is also why it is so important, whether you are a solo independent consultant or you have a team behind you and around you, that you are telling that story that you are talking about your values and what you care about. Otherwise, people will either ignore you or are going to make up their own minds and try and create your story for you. Why not tell your story in a way that you want people to remember it? At least start the path of that narrative.

An entire industry has been built on, “Control the narrative with PR.” They use it in crisis management a lot, but it is in everything. For PR, it is like, “Control the message yourself and go.” This is the foundation of good communications planning. It has developed into a place in the age of info. They can get it immediately on their phone, on their way, not even in the washroom anymore. On the way walking to the washroom, they can find out about you and who you are. If you are not taking control of that by building a brand that has layers, a brand that has a true meaning, people see right through it.

People are experts at understanding that now. They see them all and they dig deep into them to understand them. Not only the importance of the messaging and brand but you are getting looked at now by pseudo online brand experts. That has all they have been doing. People are good at it and they figured it out real quick.

In April of 2019, you started your consulting firm, Super Collider. Why did you not go out on your own? Why not keep going out on the back of the success, working with North America’s or Canada’s largest independent hospitality group? Why not go to another one? Why did you go out on your own?

I spent a long time in hospitality. I had a kid, now I have a couple of kids. As a company, we were very scrappy. We are very nimble. You have to be in hospitality. When I started doing it, if you are in your mid-20s or early 30s, there is a lot of fun stuff. A lot of Super Bowl parties with a lot of nightlife. Not that I grew out of it, but it is a bit more challenging. Like in any business you have been to for a while, everybody can relate to this where you have your crazy zany ideas that come out where you go like, “One day, I am going to do that. I am going to make this type of shoe,” or whatever it is.

You have these. I had so much of this stuff like everybody does. At one point, I said, “I want to do all that stuff. I do love brand. I love the digital marketing space. I am very good at it. I am comfortable and confident that I could go out and get some business, but I also have all this other crazy stuff that I can do.” Being with one company, it limits your ability to do that.

When you made that decision, Damon, what did you do to get your first clients for the company? What were the steps? Did you reach out to your network? Did you knock on doors? Did you start running ads? What steps did you take to get your first few clients in the door?

There are a few things. The other point was one of my childhood friends, the godfather of my children. Steve. We are cousins. He is a creative director, designer and superstar guy. He left when we were super young. He moved to Massachusetts to go design Burton Snowboards. When we were 23, it was like, “What the hell?” He has got this amazing resumé of wicked stuff. A lot of the Super Collider portfolio of all those brands that we work with come from his massive years of experience in the design, creative direction, and visual identity world. In fact, he was the first creative director hired by Chip Wilson.

You know that name. He is the Founder of Lululemon. Some people outside of Vancouver will know this brand. He started a brand here called Westbeach, a snowboard brand. It still exists in some way, but for those of you who do not know, it was basically your uniform if you were in the 2000s. If you rode a snowboard or skateboard or knew anybody on a skateboard or snowboard, you had a Westbeach something. It was very West Coast Canadian uniform. There is where he started and then spent twenty years doing all of these amazing, crazy brands. He came to a point as well that he was like, “I have done agency life. I have done freelance life. It would be cool if I did my own thing.”

CSP 239 | Superstar Consulting Brand

 

That was the next part of it to be like, “Could we combine forces locally to build something that is going to be an agency that we want to work for or be a part of?” To get clients, I tapped into my network. Right out the gates, the first bunch was all doing some packaging and branding, full brand builds for some alcoholic beverages. We even had the opportunity to create our own gin cocktail in a can and take it from soup to nuts. This is that zany crazy ideas that we all had. We brought on a manufacturing partner who took care of all the other nasty stuff, like putting it in an actual can or ordering thousands of cans from overseas.

We helped with the product development. We built the brand platform. We built the messaging system. We designed it. We put it on a can. We did go to market. We sent it out to the world and part and parcel, that was part of our zany idea thing. We had always wanted to do something like that. We had a crazy idea to do the super weird and awesome and interesting. We took that opportunity to become our own clients and send something out to the world.

How did that work? What was that experience like? Was it successful? Did it fall flat on its face? What came of that zany idea for you?

It is not yacht money in that world unless you are talking Budweiser or Labatt. If anybody is like, “I am off to the races here,” we should have a chat. For that point, it felt good to go into some liquor stores, beer and wine stores and lay a beating on the White Claws of the world and the Nudes and Nutrls. It was quite popular and successful through the summer. It is a very summery drink. During summer, in a lot of places, it was gangbusters.

Let me ask you, Damon. What is the hardest part of working with a partner in your experience? What has been most challenging? On the flip side, most people will understand what is most rewarding. You have somebody who has your back. It is not just you by yourself. You can deal with loneliness. Two is better than one, all that stuff that people know, but more practical. What has been challenging when you have two different people that are coming together to create this into different locations?

For starters, we have to put the context of it. Steve and I have known each other for many years. We went to high school together. Communication is always the most difficult part of any of these things. We are able to communicate because we know each other so well and understand how a person does it. The next step for challenges is to define the roles of what you do. When you own something together, everybody is going to wear a lot of hats. Me, coming from hospitality where we grew from something small to something very big, those hats go with you along up the ladder. Everybody can relate to that if starting your agency. When you first start, you go like, “I am not hiring a CSS guy day one. I am going to have to find my way through there.”

It is always defining like, “At what point, though, am I not the CSS guy anymore? When does that go here?” You wear a lot of hats simultaneously together with somebody else. Defining what you do is so important. It is such a challenge to say like, “You have a meaningful contribution to this aspect of the business and this part of it, but just so we do not go crazy and have too many hats, do not play in this end. I will not play on that end.” Once you define those guidelines, it makes things a lot easier. You can focus and get a lot going because everybody knows.

Were you able define that very early on or was it as things move, you are constantly evolving and shifting what your roles and focus should be in the business?

The crux of it is understanding that you need to do that. It never ends. It is a continual process of always being clear. Especially when you are passionate about something, you want to help on this side and that side. You have a meaningful contribution to it. It would be better if you did it, but if everybody worked on everything together at the same time, nothing would get done. It is finding that balance of where you divide and conquer what you are after. Especially as we bring more people on, we all know that the waters get muddied of who talks to who and who has the expertise. You cannot do it at the same time.

If everybody worked on everything simultaneously, nothing would get done; you need to find the balance. Click To Tweet

That is the second most important thing, communication, and then understanding who is going to take what and run with it. You leave your long, drawn-out grinding conversations higher level instead of every piece of minutiae. Entrepreneurs out there, everyone wants to manage every part. You have a piece of it. You got to know that.

With your expertise and experience in branding, you look at whether it is a solo independent consultant or a small consulting firm owner. You know that there are oftentimes limited resources and they are already quite busy delivering work for clients, so time is also limited. What would you point them towards as an opportunity to potentially improve on their brand? Is it about updating their website with better copywriting, better images and a nicer logo? If you were to take your own business and break it out of the agency model, let’s say if you were going off on your own right now or even for your own agency, what is something you have done or that you would recommend that others do to think about building a more compelling brand?

It has changed in a short time of what a brand is. Brand, in the past, was just a logo, a name, and a message of what you did. Where people do not have the branding chops now is understanding one or two things. We talked with a potential client about logos, typefaces, color palettes, and iconography as visual identity. That is not brand. They paint with it and they did it for years. It is not like people are wrong, but this version of what brand is super different. It has changed drastically.

Brand is not a logo. It has nothing to do with it. The brand is everything why your logo looks the way it does. A brand is everything that goes into why we think this typeface fits the messaging. We all say stuff. You live on social. If you have advertising campaign going, you are writing copy saying stuff about your business. That is not your brand. Brand is knowing what you are going to say and why you are saying it right. A lot of work goes into that. For a lot of people who are looking to rebrand or get back into the brand, it is a bigger step. It is a step to say like, “What do we stand for? Who are we?”

Guys are like, “I sell hammers” What are you talking about? “It hits a nail. It is $8.” What do you mean brand? It is called Joe’s Hammers. 2022 of that is like, “I get it, Joe and Joe’s Hammers. You totally do that. You can do that.” That might even be your brand. “We are nothing but Joe’s Hammers and then we cost $8.” You got to know that, but also know that there is probably a Mark’s Hammers. They donate $2 to the thumb recovery fund of victims of hammer mistakes. The hammer handles are handcrafted and made from driftwood. There is something there. The consumer of 2022 likes that type of stuff. They are going to go look at the other person.

They are going to try something new. They are going find Mark’s Hammers and say, “I need to get Mark’s Hammers.” If I am looking for a hammer for $8, I am going to come to you, but that world, that sandbox now is millions of people doing their hammer research. That separates it because those brands that have a bit of substance to them appeal more to people these days. It is a feeling that they are buying as opposed to a functional logo and what we do. You’ve got to think deeper into what you do, to answer your question.

Everybody needs to spend time thinking about what do you want to stand for? What story do you want to tell? Why are you doing what you are doing? What is behind that? That will get you further down the road to better understanding or better communicating what your brand is and how you want to be known. I want to fast forward for a moment and look at your specific business at Super Collider. Have there been any changes to your services? Have you introduced anything new that you feel has worked well from an offering perspective?

The first part of the business was learning and understanding the market a little more. We knew what we were good at and what we wanted to do. There is another aspect of any type of business. It is what people are buying and what people are after out there. We understood a few things. The larger companies, the Nikes and Lululemons of the world, are brand conscious. They take it very seriously. Their brand is what they sell. There are not a ton of those out there. They are very specific and they are great agencies to work with. We looked at it as we were cruising along. A lot of people are asking the same questions that you are posing to me about brand.

They are not completely brand-focused. Brand, to them, does have far more layers than that feeling. It is easy for RedBull to be like, “We need a platform. We will go take care of this stuff next, and then we will go take care of this stuff next.” Each one has a floor in a building dedicated to it. That is not real life for a lot of people. We started to understand that brand idea needs to function more in real life for a lot of people. We began to integrate offerings that we did not have or did not come out with for people in terms of turning your brand into real-life messaging, doing some social for people. We are helping with that and understanding what their ad messaging needs to look like.

CSP 239 | Superstar Consulting Brand

 

Is this more implementation work as opposed to before? If you could give me a little more detail around before versus after in terms of offerings.

As a brand agency, this was what you will find and what a lot of people find. You say, “I need a new brand.” They go, “We will build you a platform. We will start with this process. We will get to dig deep and build all the wild stuff, your values, personality, and all your messaging.” They will pack that all up. They will be like, “Here you go.” What we found was sometimes difficult. You can talk to any branding agency about this. There is a level of translation that needs to happen. You can only do so much. It is often diminished, lost, or changed when you hand that off because of the layers.

The businesses recognize that too. They are like, “I have got to give it to my marketing team and they did not build it. You built it. How do they interpret it in the best way possible?” What we found is if you can bridge that gap, it is far more valuable. It adds such value to companies to say, “We are not going to hand this package to you. We are going to not only build it so it integrates into what you do, but we can assist. You can keep us on as consulting to help you build these assets and deploy them to the world in the way that we all agreed on when we built this.”

All this work and all this time and money, make sure it is nailed on this end. A lot of people can relate to that too, where it is like, the conversation I had with a branding team was like, “My mind was blown,” and then I look at this post or this ad. I go, “I feel like it is not saying what we all talked about saying. What happened there?” We find that bridge there.

You are providing beyond doing the interviews, the discovery, the research, and then creating the materials and the plan. You are then going beyond that. You are also saying, “We can also help you take that plan and implement it and provide ongoing advisory services to ensure that the plan is executed and implemented successfully.”

There are two versions of that. Some teams have very capable teams. They are like, “You can use us to help advise and consult.” A lot of people do it too. They go like, “This is awesome. Can you do this for us now?” We will go to markets together for people to say, “This is how you are going to deploy it. These are our recommendations on how it lives in the world.” A lot of people look back and go, “Do this.” For a time, we were like, “I do not do that currently. Why do you not go talk to these guys? We can do it. We are good at it.” This is more vertically integrated. That is what we do.

How has that changed your hiring model or your team model? If you are now providing more services than before, are you going out and hiring these people to help you deliver on these new inflation services? Are you hiring them as full-time employees? Are you using them as contractors when you need them? How are you bridging that gap to ensure that you have the talent when you need it but not necessarily taking on too much risk by bringing on a bunch of talent that you may not need right away?

The good thing about the pandemic and COVID is that that is how everybody is working these days. Nobody is hiring. It is the weirdest thing. It is funny. I looked at another agency here in Vancouver where we know them well. We were on their website. We are looking for ideas or a person. We looked at their team and we knew all of them because they all work with us. They built a massive team. It looked like they had twenty people in an office and it felt fairly traditional, but there were 4 or 5 people who would be considered full-time employees there.

It is a bit of a downside. I know that states like California are dealing with the repercussions of “You are not quite full-time enough.” It is different up here, but that model is what has come out of the pandemic. We are able to leverage people’s ability to want to be a freelancer for themselves and lend out their expertise as opposed to punching a clock every day. That is the model thus far. I do not think that is indefinite. We can scale it forever. That is going to come to a point where you have to functionally do it, but since 2019 or 2020, when we decided to pivot in this direction, it has worked very well to be able to do that.

Extracting enthusiasm out of every project you do is essential to overcoming challenges. Click To Tweet

Have your pricing model and pricing strategies shifted since you started the business? Is there anything you are doing differently from what you were doing in the past?

The pandemic hit us so quickly. We understood that you had to be extremely agile in what pricing was because it went out the window for some people and not for a lot of people. In fact, some people went the opposite direction, especially in the digital space. It changed. Not specific changes in pricing model, but we understood that you need to be very malleable as an agency to work with people to get their results for them. That is what we are after. It is funny because you want to put things in a box. It makes it easier to send out a quote.

As an entrepreneurial couple of people that Steve and I are. We are launching our own product to the world. We understand at a very acute level what it is like to put things there. It drives us to understand that the pricing model, your specific needs, where your resources need to go at that specific point in your business are different for everybody. From a market or an emerging or existing brand that pivoted or a new product, the pandemic forced us to understand that way more than we did. I feel like it fits the market better.

Three questions before we round off, Damon. When you look at your performance as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, is there anything that you do on a regular basis, a habit that you feel leads to your productivity to higher levels of performance? Especially with a young kid, you have coffee. Coffee is a go-to. There is no right or wrong to this question, but coffee is one for you. Is there anything else you do that you feel like, “This is a real essential part of my being for me to operate and perform?”

I have never been for lack of enthusiasm on anything. That attribute is something that I have kept but had to nurture and grow through a strange time that we have been at and coming out the other side of with things looking better. Being able to extract enthusiasm out of every project is super important. If you do not have some enthusiasm for it, it is going to be tough for you. Especially if things go weird, it is going to be challenging for you to feel like you are doing a good job and want to do a good job.

We all know that in the agency world, you are taking on business that you can take on. You are going to do it. This weird red thread that has come through is the best work, the best points, and the best client relationships I have. If I, at any point, understood that my enthusiasm was waning, I address that. I am a true believer that all projects and clients need to have something you can be passionate about for them. Sometimes you would have to take a moment and you have got to reassess and look from 30,000 feet down at stuff and reinvigorate yourself. If you cannot do that, it is going to be a challenge for you to get through it and be happy at the end of it.

Is there any book that you have read or listened to that you highly recommend? It can be fiction or non-fiction.

I have re-read The Lord of The Rings. My dad passed at the end of 2019. We were very close, like best buddies. 2021 has been a challenge for me, personally. It was a difficult time dealing with it. It was a big loss for me personally, but he loved The Lord of The Rings books. It was his thing. Even at his internment, we played its soundtrack as we took his ashes to the afterlife. I revisited those books at this time. They are long books. That is why it has been a year of reading these things. You forget about this because we read The Hobbit in high school. We forgot about it. There are messages in many stories in there, but they helped me in business life.

When I say passion, it is buying into resilience, but not giving up ever, caring about something and other people a lot. All of these relationships exist within this giant tome of Mordor and weird fantasy crap. I feel that I reconnected so deeply with those messages that the Tolkien talked about there, which is like friendship. We lost so many connections during this pandemic.

CSP 239 | Superstar Consulting Brand

 

It was the perseverance that that happened and then someone taking on something completely selflessly to go get it done. That was the most impactful book I have read in a long time. It has a lot to do with what happened with my pops. There was some stuff in there that I re-remembered that I am using. It is inspiring me to be awesome.

Often, we do not pay attention to those things until something happens that brings our attention back to them. It is a great reminder for all of us to focus on some of those key principles. Damon, before wrapping up, I want to make sure that the people can learn more about you, your work, and your company. Where is the best place for them to go?

Our website is ThisIsSuperCollider.cm. You can go there and check out a quick portfolio. We are on Instagram and Facebook as well, which is still @ThisIsSuperCollider. That is where they can go to check me out. I am always down for a chat about brand and how people perceive stuff these days. Feel free to reach out for a quick Zoom and a coffee. As you can tell, I enjoy talking about myself and what I do.

Sports, brand, coffee, reach out to Damon. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thanks again.

 

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About Damon Holowchak

CSP 239 | Superstar Consulting BrandFor the last 20-some-odd years, Damon has been a beacon of clever, imaginative, and original creative and marketing strategy in the Canadian hospitality industry. Some say he has enough energy to power a small city, and with it he’s cultivated a sometimes wacky, yet always insightful approach to brand building, deployment, and experience. Heck, for almost a decade he helped grow Donnelly Group into the largest independent hospitality group in Canada.

 

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