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Episode #267
Kindred Motes-Caso

Driving Social Change Through Your Consulting Business

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Summary

Did you know that there are a lot of ways for marketers and consultants to create massive impact and help make the world a better place? In this episode, Kindred Motes-Caso shares his journey in philanthropy and how he realized that individuals across different industries could use their skills and expertise to drive social change. He is the Founder and Managing Director of KM Strategies Group, working with global organizations like the United Nations, the White House, Netflix, and Google. Tune in to his conversation with Michael Zipursky and learn how you can provide high-quality services, design strategies, and lead inspiring advocacies that result in significant social change!

I’m very excited to have Kindred Motes-Caso joining us. Kindred, welcome.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

You are the Founder and Managing Director of KM Strategies Group, a boutique strategy, social impact management, and communications consulting firm, and you’ve worked with different organizations like the United Nations, the Obama White House, Netflix, Google, and many others. Your campaigns have helped organizations acquire more than 1 million followers, and I’d love to get our conversation started here with you sharing a little bit of your background, where you come from, and what you were doing before you got into the world of consulting and running your own consulting business.

I had always been involved in the non-profit world, both through the civil society side of things, as well as the philanthropic or foundational and nonprofit social justice organizations. As part of that work, I had always been rooted in communications and storytelling, and part of the focus was always rooted in finding ways to connect issues to new audiences and bring people onto a campaign or onto an issue and give them a pathway to engagement. As part of that work, a lot of it I refer to my generation as the Millennial Classic.

We were the first of the younger Millennials, but not quite Gen Z, and I was given the keys to the kingdom on social media because nobody else knew how to do it and they wanted immediate support. Nobody, at that point, understood the value, the importance, or even the operational risk of giving that to a junior staffer.

Now, it’s a very different world and nobody can make a joke about an intern running a digital strategy anymore because every company brand or organization realizes its value, but that’s where I got my start. I rooted my own growth and experience in communication in advocacy and development from that digital-first standpoint. As I was looking into what I could do, I very much was aware that was important in the modern world, but I didn’t want to be pigeonholed by it. I didn’t even want to be pigeonholed by communications.

I was trying to leverage everything I did for going from communications to philanthropic engagement, donor advisory, or social impact work forming partnerships and campaigns. I heard someone say once that the trajectory of our careers is something that we only make sense of after the fact and we invent this through a line that never existed to make sense of it for ourselves, and it resonates with me.

I do think that to the extent that you can, mine was rooted in trying to find new, creative, and innovative ways to engage people, even if we couldn’t be in the room with them. The Coronavirus and the broader pandemic happened and all of that became even more important. I felt like I had the rudimentary skillset and the relationships to try and go out on my own and start as an individual consultant and then try to scale into something a little closer to an agency model, even though we take a little bit of a different tack to

I want to get into that because you have a team of maybe twelve or so people that you do work with maybe an interesting model. It would be probably interesting for people to hear how you structure this. We’ll get into that but take me back to the early years when you were making the transition from working as an employee and then shifting into becoming a consultant because it’s now been several years since you’ve done that. How did you announce to the world or how did you go about getting your first few clients when you were making that transition?

This is where you are going to probably see a little bit of my coms leanings coming to the fore. I very much waited until it was ready for the public before announcing it. I wanted to put out some feelers and I’d had several people asking me to work with them on the side with some projects, and I’d said, “No. I have got a full-time job and I’m not sure that I’m ready to take that plunge.” We started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic, and part of my objection was taken away from me while nobody was in the office anymore and not getting direct contact with people. Why not try going it alone and seeing how it goes?

I reached out to a couple of people that I had said no to in the past and said, “I am ready now. If you want to work with me, I’m happy to do that.” I created a website all under the radar getting things ready. I knew that when I announced I wanted at least three anchor clients that I could say I was working with because I was overly mindful given that we didn’t exist as an organization, but I wanted to have legitimacy from the start. I found that in partnership and relationship building, it’s always easier to get 2 when you have 1. It’s easier to get 4 when you have 2.

In partnership and relationship building, it's always easier to get two anchor clients when you have one. Click To Tweet

It’s the very first relationship or client that is the hardest at least in my experience, and so I wanted to leverage that from the beginning. What I did was a little bit of a mixture. I plugged into some existing teams as a subcontractor. I worked as an individual contractor or consultant with a couple of other clients, and then I joined an internal embedded team on one of my early clients to be part of the team.

I learned one of your recent guests talk about that as a recommendation. Get stuck in and embedded in a team and have them see you as a team member. I very much lived that so I can testify that it’s valuable. It’s also a lot of time and a lot of effort and energy, but that’s how I got started. A lot of it over time was learning from what worked and what didn’t about how I wanted to go from there.

We are going to shift the conversation a little bit here to more of now as a more established consulting firm, what you are doing, how are you scaling, and how you are building thinking about growth. Take us back again and hopefully provide some benefit value to those that are at that earlier stage. Knowing what you know now and having lived through that experience of transitioning from working to being your own boss and running your own consulting business, is there anything that you wish you would have done differently? If somebody else were making that transition themselves, you would suggest, “I made this mistake. Don’t make this mistake. Here’s what you should do if you are going to be launching a new consulting business.”

There are a lot of things, but to land on one in particular. Identify what you are comfortable doing and what you are not, and find a way to outsource the things that are harder for you if you can. For me, that was administrative billing and voicing, expenses, scheduling, and all of those things. The great thing about that is I didn’t find that early on and I wish I had because I spent the first full year doing all my own admin, scheduling, billing, invoicing, and expense tracking, and still trying to be the consultant as well, while I was being my own legal team, HR team, accounting team, and marketing team.

People, at least I felt this way, are afraid of the overhead and committing things too much too quickly. I wasn’t aware that there’s an incredible ecosystem of people who are like us. They are consultants, but they focus specifically on that component of the business, who are remote or virtual executive assistants.

The person I work with is amazing and she’s based in Austin, Texas. She handles all of our administrative work and is as much a member of the team as any contractor with issue expertise because she has one area that she owns for us. It’s immensely valuable and I wish that I had the foresight to bring that on early in the process because compared to everything else, it’s incredibly inexpensive, but the peace of mind and the value of the time that you gain back from that pays for itself.

That’s one thing I would say. Figure out what you can outsource that doesn’t bring you joy. I’m not saying outsourcing for the sake of it or just to scale. There are a lot of things that you want to keep inside, especially when you are early on if it involves any degree of strategy whatsoever. I wanted to be the one doing that work. I didn’t want to give it to somebody else. I said, “What can I comfortably get rid of? What can I not? I wish I had done that from the very beginning because the benefits that I reaped after I made that decision made me wish I had done it a lot sooner.

It’s a great point because very often consultants at the early stage tend to view anything in the form of delegation, outsourcing, or an outflow of money as an expense. Especially when things are a little bit leaner and you are getting things off the ground, you tend to hesitate. It’s like, “That money could be in my pocket, so maybe I will wait until I get another client or until I get to $10,000 a month in revenue,” or whatever it is, so you keep delaying it. When you shift that focus, flip it from these things being expenses to these things being investments, meaning that they provide a positive ROI, it opens up a whole new realm of possibility. It sounds like you experienced that.

Fast forward now a little bit. You launched the business through organizations and people who knew who you were and knew the work that you did and said, “Can you help us?” Now, you have your first few clients. Take us to more recent times. What is your company doing? What are you doing right now when it comes to marketing and lead generation building your pipeline? What do you find is working best for you to bring in new clients and create conversations?

It’s something that we have started to invest in a little bit, but to be honest, it’s still word of mouth that is still the primary generator for us. It’s that familiar adage that a lot of people have, but it’s true. What we are trying to do is leverage the relationships we have with people who are providing word of mouth and trying to almost manage up in the way that we communicate things to current clients, former clients, partners, or people in our strategic advisory network, so that we are communicating to them about the business that we want.

It’s not just because we did this particular thing for a client in the past. That’s all they are going to think of us when it comes to recommendations or referrals. A lot of times people don’t think about how they need to communicate the evolution of their company or their consultancy to current and former clients. Just because they knew you 6 months ago, 1 year ago, or even 6 days ago doesn’t mean they understand inherently where you want to be years from now.

CSP Kindred Motes-Caso | Social Change

 

If we recognize that they are the most valuable relationships we have, how do we think about our marketing plan as investing in them as our critical brand ambassadors, allies, and strategists? Leveraging that in a way that pays far more dividends and returns than investing in SEO or digital marketing. That’s not to say that those things aren’t valuable, but we are starting with the approach of knowing we have existing relationships, how do we leverage those? How do we make sure that we are making the most of them?

I want to make this concept very tangible for people. Can you break down or maybe an example of what you are doing? What does that look like? I’m very interested in specifically what are you communicating to your contacts and then how you are going about doing that. Are you doing that through a CRM or what’s aiding you in ensuring that you are doing that consistently and effectively and not allowing a lot of opportunities to fall through the cracks?

I’m happy to give a concrete example here. One of them is at our one-year anniversary point, we wanted to announce that we had additional support in the form of staff, and we also wanted to talk about new services. We devised a whole one-year anniversary plan in which we announced a social impact award.

We announced that we were reorienting to think about our business model as being what we call Ten for Impact. We are giving 10% of revenue before expenses are deducted every year to a social cause, and we wanted that to be very central. We knew that was an opportunity to announce an award and ask for applications and submissions, but also talk about the work and how we were envisioning that to play a part in a broader scope of services.

What that came from was understanding that we had philanthropic and non-profit clients, both grant-making and grant-seeking, but we also worked with government organizations. We worked with multilateral institutions and multimedia campaigns. When there’s a film or a television show about a social justice issue, we have worked on advising those clients and partnering with them.

We wanted to create not just all of these one-way streets but be a conduit for multi-directional traffic across these sectors. We thought, what does it mean to say, “We will help a nonprofit fundraise or think about their digital giving strategy?” What if we also came to our philanthropic clients and said, “We understand the audiences that your grantees are going out in front of and that they are trying to market to? We also understand what it’s like to do a competitive grant-making process, and we have decided that here are the 6 to 8 learnings that we have taken from our pilot model of giving away $30,000 in an unrestricted grant in a democratized way with a community of advisors.”

We did that because we didn’t want to be consultants who consult and who operate at the 30,000 foot in the abstract, but we want to learn by doing so that we can advise based on the things that we have learned. That is the way that we have tried to communicate that to people because they understand that each piece is connected to a broader whole. It’s not a means to an end and it’s not a one-off, but it’s part of a broader strategy.

The challenge of communicating is that it is nuanced and there are a bunch of things going on. If people can understand that just because you work primarily with a nonprofit or a corporation, it doesn’t rule out that we can also be doing those things in the inverse for someone like a grant-maker. That’s been an interesting evolution to think about. If you can do one side of it, you can probably do the other. We have not seen a lot of consultants branding themselves that way in the past. It’s to the detriment of the work because partnerships get lost.

With this example you shared, you talked about the award, new services, and more capacity with the team. Is this something that you sent out in one email that listed all of that? Was this a series of emails? If so, how many and over what period of time?

The first email was an omnibus email. It was a bit of a one-year observation. We formally announced ourselves to people who had been in our informal networks as well as the existing or former clients who’d worked in with us in the first year. Since then, we have tried to follow up on those with shorter emails, and the idea right now is that we are trying to do quarterly updates, not monthly because it’s too much right now for what we are trying to do.

It’s quarterly updates that highlight client wins and things we have been able to do in collaboration, partnership, or in service of our clients, and think about how to leverage that and bring people along and be very specific about what we pull out to highlight that indicates some of the new services. People already know, for example, that we do audience growth and digital strategy, or they understand that we do a communications audit. What if we are going to spotlight a corporate social responsibility campaign, or we are going to spotlight something that we are doing in the multimedia or film sector with social justice? That’s how we are thinking of it right now.

Consultants must help team leaders understand how each piece of their work is connected to a larger structure. One aspect is not just a means to an end but a part of a broader strategy. Click To Tweet

The last piece I would say that has played a bigger role than even that is thinking about live events in multimedia. Around the award, I drafted a couple of op-eds that gave a couple of interviews to local reporters in the south because we were focused on investing in a Deep South or Appalachian organization for the first year because that’s where I grew up and where most of the social justice movements in the United States are born.

We wanted to pay that forward there because it gets something like $0.53 on the dollar from philanthropy that other regions get in this country despite being the place where those monies are most needed. We wanted to focus on that and that was something that allowed me the opportunity to get on podcasts to write editorials and to do an interview.

Unfortunately, the interview that we did was picked up by the associated press and ran on the wire, which was crazy, but that opportunity doesn’t come if you are so stretched thin or spread then that you can’t devote time to thinking about how you talk about the work. That’s where offloading some of those responsibilities comes into question because if you are focused on an 80-hour client work week, you don’t even have a second to think about how you talk about your work externally.

To summarize a bit, the majority of your business comes from word of mouth. You don’t just sit and wait for referrals and introductions to come in. You are proactively thinking about how you can add value for your current clients, past clients, and prospective clients, and you are in touch with them at least every quarter with a fairly large update that highlights client wins, might talk about the award, might talk about issues.

You are supplementing that at the same time as those things go on throughout the quarter, looking for opportunities to be on podcasts, write articles, and have some events. The connective tissue between each of your quarterly updates. Am I missing some things there or anything else you want to add to that?

The only additional piece is just leveraging the networks that we have on social media. Using things like LinkedIn to share things that maybe aren’t tied to the business itself but are tied to what I refer to as broader thought leadership, so responding to things that other people are doing. Understandably, in some cases, there’s a real zero-sum mentality that a lot of people have when they first get started in consulting.

Sharing or celebrating someone else’s win might diminish yours. I have tried to do the opposite of that and engage with others I know who work in the space. If I see them do a great case study about the work they have done, I share it or comment on it, and know that my broader network will see it as a result. That’s part of what I have always tried to do as a good neighbor strategy and hope that as things come along over time, people will do the same for me, and I have found that they have. That’s the other piece I would say is celebrating your broader community wins in the meantime.

It’s a real abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. There’s more opportunity than any one person or company can handle or manage. Why not just support each other? That’s a great way to think about it. I’d love to hear a little bit more about the award. I’m wondering how others can maybe apply a similar concept to their own businesses.

Can you break it down a little bit more? You said that you take 10% of your top-line revenue, and that goes to fund a cause. Talk through it. Is that tied into the award? Is that separate? I’m very interested in the award piece specifically thinking about somebody in construction, nonprofit, science, or whatever industry that they are in, how might they be able to do something similar?

It’s something that I hope more people will do. It’s an important one to answer. From the beginning, part of it was from my work in philanthropy. I learned as part of that work that foundations are required to pay out 5% of whatever they earn in investment income every year towards their work, social good, and causes as grants.

I started thinking to myself as part of that, if we exist for profit as a for-profit company, as someone who’s only ever worked for non-profit organizations prior to this work, it’s all going to be more than I’m used to. How do I think about it from the beginning so that it doesn’t, later on, seem like a massive adjustment to carve out money like that or to carve out a percentage?

CSP Kindred Motes-Caso | Social Change

 

If philanthropy has to get 5% and they exist to do good, what if we said businesses had a larger responsibility, not a smaller one? Given that we know that the cost of doing business and the effects on others sometimes in the worst parts of our sectors have been extracted or haven’t given to the places that made them who they are. I wanted to think about that and think about how we could create a small business in Washington DC that operated like a small business on Main Street and paid our success forward to the community.

We decided to do 10%, and the award is that 10%, at least for the first year. In our first year, we announced a $30,000 unrestricted grant, which is an important piece of it because so many philanthropic funds are already designed to require you to create a program or to launch an initiative or do a specific thing and we didn’t want to do that.

I realized that as somebody who had to apply for grants in the past, sometimes you need to keep the lights on. Sometimes you need to pay a salary or you need to think about how to invest in someone to help you with a strategic plan. You don’t necessarily need help doing the work because you are doing that every day. We wanted to think about how we could provide a channel for that.

The other piece was that we are offering $15,000 in pro bono consulting for a project like that. Let’s say, for example, somebody does need help with a strategic plan at end of the year campaign for fundraising. We wanted the money that we are giving them to be used for something else and the consulting pro bono support to be used for that so that they are not having to think, “This place wants something from us. We need to give them X percent of this money back to consult.” I wanted to remove that completely from the equation.

The other piece was that we knew that people who understand this work are the ones who are doing it. We reached out to our network of partners of former clients of people who are friends of mine who work in philanthropy or advocacy or the nonprofit world and ask them to be on the advisory committee. I’m not deciding where the money goes. I’m giving them a short list of the 140 applicants we got and asking them to use their expertise to decide where this money can do the most good and give it out.

That’s the part that is replicable. If you have a business and you don’t know where you can be doing the most good or you have a network of people who are volunteering, working at a shelter, or doing any work in a non-profit setting, they can help advise you. You can lean on your network, and so that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to democratize and decentralize our giving, and we wanted to give without strings attached so that they could do the work.

When you talk about these 140 applicants that came in or applied, who are these people? I don’t mean specifically who they are but at a high level. I’m wondering how they find out about the opportunity to even tap into a $30,000 grant or that this was available.

There’s a reason that you don’t know that because we haven’t announced who’s getting the award yet. The organizations are based in ten states across the Deep South and Appalachia, and we wanted to focus on that region because of the lack of investment. We wanted to specifically focus on some things that weren’t being funded when we did an assessment of the region.

One of the services we offer for foundations or for non-profits is a bit of a landscape analysis. We did that on our side and said, “Here’s where we need to be giving. Here’s where that giving can do the most good.” We specifically focused on smaller communities because your Atlantas and Charlottes have massive donors and very large foundations.

That’s not true in a town with 50,000 people in West Virginia. We wanted to focus on those folks. We reached out to our partners. The great thing about working in the non-profit sector, non-profit adjacent is that I wrote an op-ed in the chronicle philanthropy. We put it out through non-profit publications. We put it out on the philanthropic list serves.

The biggest challenge was that we were afraid it wasn’t going to get in front of anybody, and that’s where I think having a communication strategy that we devised because we work in communications was helpful. Doing things like multimedia interviews, editorial pieces, and that type of thing. The biggest thing to say about the organizations is that we want to fund all of them.

Thought leaders must leverage the networks they have on social media. Respond to what other people are doing and don't be afraid to celebrate someone else's wins. Click To Tweet

The thing is, it has not been an easy process. The humbling and surprising and sad part of the process has been me realizing I wish I could give this $30,000 in cash and $15,000 in pro bono support to all of them because they are doing incredible work. Our challenge to ourselves has been how do we scale this? How do we leverage our lessons learned to encourage other people to be doing this thing?

How does Ten for Impact become more than the sum of KMSG? How does it become a collaborative network of people who are doing this? That’s where we are trying to do things like write for The Chronicle of Philanthropy or Stanford Social Innovation Review and use this as a case study of what other people could be doing if they wanted to have social impact baked into their business from day one.

I want to make sure I’m understanding this correctly in terms of how you got these different organizations to find out about the opportunity. You are on the podcast, you are writing articles, and you are also tapping into your network. It could be clients, current or past team members, saying, “Here’s what we are doing. Spread the word.” Social media takes on a bit of its own life and that’s how people started then applying. Is that correct or is there anything else missing from that?

That’s correct. We did a little bit of promotional support on social media when we would have the articles come out, in terms of sponsoring or boosting them to the region where we wanted applicants from those ten states, but very low level. Maybe $100 in sponsored posts on Twitter or Instagram. It was very much word-of-mouth-driven.

I want to explore a little bit more about your team because you have now about a dozen or so people that are on your website. They are positioned as strategic advisors. What does that term mean? How are they structured inside of your organization in terms of part-time, full-time, 1099 contractors for those people outside of the US or otherwise? What does the make of the business look like and why call them strategic advisors?

I was mindful from the beginning that I wanted to build the company in a way that was sustainable but also scalable and didn’t require too much cash burn. I’m proud of the fact that from the beginning, we never had to take it on any loans or do anything to build the business. It was rooted in saving as much as I could every month after the client work and getting operational reserves in place.

That’s to your question earlier about something I would recommend to people that I didn’t do soon enough. That’s another one. One, because it allows you to scale in a way that you don’t feel like you are having to take on new work, but you are also not constantly in that scarcity mode where you are afraid that you are facing a fiscal cliff in 1 month or 2 months.

With that in mind, I was still mindful that I didn’t want to overextend, and I knew that there was too much work at that one-year point for me to be the only person doing it still. I knew I had to bring in additional support. I didn’t think that it was quite the moment to say, “I’m going to hire 2 full-time employees and base us in 1 place.”

I wanted to be nimble. I wanted to be flexible. What I came up with at the time working with some other advisors was that we wanted to do a strategic advisor model where we choose people who are excellent at their field of focus, their issue area, and their place of expertise, and embed them as part of a project. They wouldn’t be there forever. They would be there for as long as they are needed, valuable and necessary to a particular client.

We do have contractors who are more issue-specific who do stay on, work with us over a longer period of time focusing on one issue area. For example, we have someone who leads on philanthropy, development, and fundraising. That’s very much one coordinated lane and so that’s a full-time thing, but as a contractor.

Secondly, we have someone who’s full-time doing advocacy, public affairs, and government relations because there’s so much of a through line on those two issue areas with all of our clients. On something more specific like graphic design, podcasting production or partnerships and corporate social responsibility, we have people who are part of our strategic advisory network that their agreement is to be available for 6 to 12 hours a month in a given period when there’s a contracted client that is interested in that work and we can fill them in.

CSP Kindred Motes-Caso | Social Change

 

I was very much team no new consultants when I was in house in communications and partnerships because I felt that so much institutional memory was lost. There is so much expertise was being forfeited for working with a firm or an agency where they were being paid $40,000 to $60,000 a month on retainer, but the people who were doing the work for that client were associates straight out of college, and the principal would show up on 1 or 2 calls and that was it.

I felt personally offended by that because I was somebody who had been at that point in my career, maybe in the field for 6 to 8 years, but certainly more than 1 to 2. I saw the consulting agency making, at that point, in a month what was half my annual salary, and I was like, “Something’s getting lost here.” I didn’t want to be an agency as we were growing that forfeited dedicated expertise and quality time for scale. I wanted to have both.

The solution to me was this. I can’t afford to have an expert on the staff at 100% of their time, but I can have them for 20% or 10% of their time. Let’s think about how to do that and do a little bit of walking before we run and see if there’s a model there for that, and fortunately, there has been. People understand that the landscape of consulting and the workplace has shifted.

It’s not a red flag if three different firms are co-bidding on a single project under a single mass hit. That’s collaborative work in the same way that three verticals within a corporation can work together on a project. You can have communications development and operations working together on a project. Why not think about it that way for consulting?

It is such an opportunity for many consultants who are concerned and are wondering, “How do we compete against larger firms?” What you described right there is the classic situation of why consultants can have a bad name. A large firm comes in, and they get paid a lot of money, but the person at the top plays the role in winning the business.

Once they have won the business, they are essentially gone. They disappear, and then you have these people who are essentially getting paid to learn on the job. For everybody who’s reading and joining us, if you can structure your business in a way where you are more involved or you can communicate that what your clients are getting is real expertise, and that’s what they are paying for, that’s a point of differentiation between paying a lot of money to have junior people learning as they go along. That could be a real point of differentiation. It’s a sign to explore if you are communicating that enough in your proposals or conversations.

Fast forwarding a little bit now. You have your team in place. You work with a dozen or so team members and strategic advisors. Some are on a more full-time basis. You bring others when you need them. How do you manage all of that? You said you have somebody who does administration and so forth. In terms of project management and managing, how do all the pieces come together to ensure that there’s still excellence for your clients? Is that your role or do you have somebody else who’s leading that?

It’s my role. I will say that, in the spirit of full transparency, it’s something that I’m very much trying to operationalize as its own position. It’s one of the things that I have identified as part of this process. We have scaled and we are working in a more coordinated fashion across folks who feel like they are full-time team members because they are issue experts and agents. They are the people who are from time to time brought in something that feels necessary to me to have a dedicated operation, managing director, or something very rooted in the client-specific work.

As I have moved a little bit farther away from the direct day-to-day client work, I have found that a necessary part of scaling is business development. It’s relationship management. It’s going out, networking, going to conferences and events, talking to people like you, and having the opportunity to continually learn. I’m bringing those things that I’m learning back into the company.

At the same time, the work also has to get done. Otherwise, there isn’t the company. I’m working with a close friend who has done operational consulting and has internalized a lot of that into his thinking to advise me. That’s something that is going to be the next big piece of the puzzle. We have to invest in that because otherwise, it’s very difficult to keep everything running.

In the meantime, we have invested in operational planning or CMS investments. We use like Asana and we are tracking things there on a project-specific level and have divided that by clients. We communicate via Slack. We had an operation planning retreat where we spent 4 or 5 hours going through best practices and getting everybody on the same page so that we are not having somebody text and somebody else email while someone else is slacking.

Relationship management, networking building, and continuous learning are necessary for business scaling and development. Click To Tweet

That has been a big, a big adjustment when you have big unyielding network of strategic advisors. The other piece I will say to anyone who’s considering that model is 1) I highly recommend it and you should try it. 2) It’s going to take a lot of hurting from time to time because I wanted those people because they had full-time jobs. That is a value add, not a liability.

That’s how they keep learning. It’s how their connections stay sharp, but it also means that you are going to have to do a little bit of managing up and communicating when you need people because they are not going to proactively seek it out. Think about how you communicate that work and the needs ahead of time so that there’s no five-alarm fire when you sign two new clients and nobody has capacity anymore.

On that point, it’s something that I talk a lot about with clients in terms of the importance of building that bench of talent before you even need it. You are in a position of power and control, not in the negative sense, but more in the sense that, as you said, a project or opportunity comes on or even before it comes on.

You have the confidence to go out and win a bigger project because you know that you can deliver and you will have the capacity. What are you doing or what have you found most valuable or effective to make sure that you always do have enough people and bums on the bench so that there’s talent and that if you want to go after a project or something comes in, you are well-positioned to handle it?

This may not be the best business advice. I can’t say I haven’t gotten an MBA or gone to business school and am communicative with the full team. In the sense of sharing what our projections and revenue minus expenses look like, being transparent from week to week, and saying, “Things look great for the next three months. If we want things to look great for the next 6 or 9 months or year, we are going to have to go do A, B, and C by X state,” and make sure. Uncertainty is a real killer in creativity, collaboration, and trust. I wanted to bring people along and not have them wonder whether I know something that they don’t.

Even though it’s the business is 100% mine, I don’t have a partnership model at least right now. I view anyone’s time that’s being committed as part of a stakeholder investment, for lack of a better word, in the company, especially given that I work with people I have worked with in the past. I view that as an actual investment. That’s one piece.

Make sure that you are communicating so that people don’t have to wonder because, in moments of wondering, people start thinking, “Should I be waiting for the other shoe to drop? Should I be looking for what’s next?” The second piece is in investing in that pipeline. We are working with a summer fellow who was our first fellow, and we only had one. In the fall and winter terms, we are working on bringing on two fellows. The first summer fellow’s task is to build a repository of content.

Explain for those who aren’t familiar, what does a fellow mean?

A fellowship is essentially a paid internship for people who are coming out of university or are in graduate study. It’s between studies, whether it’s in the summer when they are looking for more full-time adjacent employment or during a term when they want something for 10 to 15 hours a week. It’s that academic model. We are going to pay you. We are not going to take your work and labor and pay nothing. That’s what we mean by that.

We are working with the summer fellow right now. She’s going to work in Spain afterward as part of an actual academic fellowship. We are losing her and we knew that from the beginning. We said, “Let’s build a repository pipeline. Share your lessons learned and your best practices. Document the things you are working on so that is there for the next class of fellows when they come in the fall or in the winter.”

For the price of someone who is younger and straight out of college or still in college, we are getting people who are very bright, ambitious, and committed to the work but want an opportunity to get embedded in it. We can get 20 hours a week times 2 people, and that essentially gets you to a full-time position in a way that feels scalable and sustainable.

CSP Kindred Motes-Caso | Social Change

 

You are probably sensing a pattern there. Part of it is that we are trying to pilot things before we jump straight off into them and make sure that we are learning from each piece of it and that nothing’s getting left on the table once we finish a project or stop working with someone. We want that to be a continual learning process.

That’s good advice and something that probably a lot of people could pull from. As you bring somebody in, make sure you are documenting what they are developing. Even if they don’t work out or they leave planned or unplanned, you now have that asset in place where you have that opportunity to now improve it. You then bring the next person on and they can hit the ground running a lot faster. I was talking about that in a previous episode. That’s great advice there.

Before we wrap up, a couple more questions here for you, then I want to make sure people can learn more about where to find you and the best place to go. If you look at your workday, your week, and where you feel, “I’m able to achieve my level of performance that I feel I’m effective. I’m doing great work.” You can trace it back to one or two things likely a habit, something you do every day or on a very regular basis. What are 1 or 2 things that come to mind for you that you feel are integral to the success you are creating?

I try to be very intentional about having a routine. It’s very difficult right now, given the changing work dynamics and people working from all over, and the remote nature of our work for many people. I got an office space about fifteen minutes from my apartment and I walk there every morning. I feel the distance of going from my apartment to the office and from the office back home puts me in that rhythm again.

Even if I’m there at 7:00 in the morning and even if I leave at 8:00 at night, there’s an opening and closing of the book. There’s coming into the building. There’s leaving the building. That intentionality and that routine is something that quite understandably, we all lost for a period of time if we work from home. A lot of people didn’t, but if you did, you maybe fell out of that practice. That’s one piece.

The broader answer there is that I do try and find time to be alone with my thoughts, and that’s part of what a commute is for me. It’s a way to think about what I’m going to do on my way in. It’s a way of decompressing and thinking about what I have been doing when I leave. Sometimes I will take a longer route and end up walking 2 or 3 miles on the way in or on the way home. I’m thinking about my day, “What went well? What didn’t? What do I want to accomplish out of the day, and what do I don’t?”

It’s being the person who gives yourself permission to ask those questions and hold yourself accountable. Not beating yourself up, but the great thing about having fifteen minutes for that is you can beat yourself up for fourteen. Take a minute and say, “What’s actionable from this? What are we going to learn from it?” and then you are home. You can be like, “It’s time to go cook dinner, go for a run, or watch Netflix.” Having those practices and being intentional, and for me, it’s the routine again. Getting back into that routine that’s been helpful.

That’s incredibly important. Not enough people create that time. We are all guilty of this at one point or another. Science people reference this as strategic thinking time or CEO time, which is the role that you play in your company. It’s applicable to everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are new in the organization and you are an employee or a contractor or if you are the founder and CEO.

It’s making time to think about what went well, what you are going to do, or how can you structure your time to focus on the highest priority areas where you can create the most value. This is what separates your success, my success, and the success that we are all having from those who struggle because we are prioritizing.

We are able to be thoughtful about what we are doing rather than putting our heads down, cranking the work, and hoping that things work out. It’s good advice to leave us off here. Final question, as I like to ask everybody. In the last six months or so, what’s one book that you have read or listened to? It could be fiction or nonfiction. Does anything stand out that you would give to somebody or give somebody and say, “I think you might enjoy this?”

I listened to a book. I do a lot of actual reading, but I listen to books when I’m on long walks. This was something where I was doing good practice before and listening to it. It’s called Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich, famous sociologist and journalist in the US. It’s all about the upper middle class and how the fear of falling back into the middle class or the working class drives their behavioral patterns and habits.

You need to do more managing and communication than usual if you need the help of other people. They will not proactively seek you out. Click To Tweet

A lot of those are tied to the things that have been highlighted as bad work habits that people have tried to correct for in the post-pandemic period. The reason that it’s interesting and I would recommend reading it is that it gives a glimpse into the unconscious ways in which we all do our work to perform our lives out of fear of what our work says about us and how we show up for other people. It also shows the differences in how we aren’t thinking about other people.

Even when I said something like we all were working from home, a lot of us weren’t. A lot of us were essential workers or didn’t have the luxury of being able to work from home because we weren’t office workers. That has informed a lot of my thinking about how to build a company focused on social impact, investing in the award, and trying to think about ways in which we have cross-class conversations because that’s something that we don’t talk enough about at least in the United States.

We like to pretend we don’t have a class system and that economic data for decades have been saying that we do and that we need to pay attention to that. This book came out in the ’80s originally, and there was a new foreword that came out and they’re republishing it. It’s depressing that it’s still as valid and relevant as it is, but it’s an incredible listen or read and other people should check it out.

One thing that I want to make sure to point people towards is your website or the one destination so they can learn more about you or your company. Where’s the one place they should go?

If you are interested in learning more about my company, I would encourage you to visit KMStrategiesGroup.com and also on Twitter @KindredMotes.

Thanks so much for coming on and I appreciate spending some time with us.

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

 

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