We were lucky to catch up with Lindsay Rogers recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lindsay, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

We work with athletes and leaders on developing high-level personal brands and thought leadership that transforms how they inspire the world around them. In the world of developing credibility, most people try to prove their worth by litigating their accomplishments so others will think they’re great. We turn that on it’s head because while at first glance that might impress the impressionable, there is no sustainability in being a flash in the pan. So, we work with our clients on unpacking their personal experience and knitting messages and stories together that have 4 basic parts: what happened, how did it change you, how did it change your actions today, and who needs to hear this (essentially who do you want to impact by sharing this)? What that becomes is insight. And people want to hear your insight, not just a chronological dump of your accomplishments because ultimately they can see themselves in you when your back was up against a wall, when you failed, when you realized something—not when you were on top of the podium. When you share your experience in this way, you create impact and a legacy of real modern leadership rather than a viral moment.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Lindsay Rogers, the founder of Raw Strategy, a modern thought leadership, brand story and positioning firm dedicated to cultivating exceptional leaders and athletes. With a commitment to redefining the landscape of leadership and inspiration, our transformative programs, workshops, and compelling talks empower people to master their influence, control their narrative in the market, and revolutionize how they inspire and transform the world around them.

But it all started when I was 3—my parents took our family of 6 on a sabbatical to some of the most remote places in the world. These moments were seared into my memory and would inform how I perceived experiences from age 3, on—normalcy was the enemy; people and their stories were the gift.

Fast forward to becoming a ski racer on the development team of the U.S. Ski Team and the International Freeskiing Tour, before I began my career as an editor for Outside and Skiing Magazines. This catapulted me to becoming an international journalist for National Geographic, Outside, Skiing, Shape, MSNBC, Yahoo and many others.

During that time, I traveled the globe reporting on stories such as: the historic climb of Annapurna (8,000 m peak in Nepal) by American, Ed Viesturs alongside Oscar-winning photographer and filmmaker, Jimmy Chin; to northern Norway retracing the steps of Jan Baalsrud, a forgotten war hero for National Geographic (also with Jimmy Chin); to Utah where I was buried in a simulated avalanche to report on the physiological repercussions of oxygen deprivation and hypothermia; to Southern India to report on the growing trend in the west of the ancient practice of Ayurvedic medicine; to Canada, Chile, and numerous other locations across the world.

After years of telling other people’s stories, and intimately learning about how stories have the ability to shape and impact our lives and our future, I began working closely with large brands, companies and trade associations on how to use storytelling to engage and resonate with their audiences. That led to creating complex branded content programs in the digital space for clients such as Toyota, Twitter, NBC, Yahoo, The Olympic Games, MSNBC, National Restaurant Association, Outdoor Industry Association, Aetna, MapQuest, Competitor Group, and many more.

I combined my experience with narrative-focused marketing for brands and building digital ecosystems and joined a VC-backed tech SaaS startup in the digital publishing space as the VP of Marketing. The company was acquired, then I continued to advise several startups, founders and leaders on crafting powerful brand messaging for raising money, building meaningful partnerships, and positioning themselves as leaders in their industry.

I then relaunched Raw Strategy with two highly strategic and transformative programs, The Raw Leader and The Raw Athlete. Today, we works with The North Face’s team of global athletes, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s current and former Olympians, Women’s Tennis Association athletes, leaders within dozens of corporations such as Lockton, Shamrock Foods, and others, plus countless entrepreneurs, startup founders and leaders on how to leverage their experience and transition it into a powerful story, messaging that matters, and a premium personal brand that builds loyalty, trust, and impact.

Have you ever had to pivot?

After working as the VP of Marketing at a VC-backed tech startup, I left to start my own business as a digital and content strategy agency. I immediately landed Twitter and NBC as clients, then moved on to working with AOL, Aetna and the National Restaurant Association. On the outside, business was fantastic—working with large, nationally and internationally known brands, on developing sophisticated content strategy, hiring all of my writer friends from my journalism days, working 75% time so I could spend time with my kids. But what I slowly started to realize is that, outside of data on spreadsheets and sentiment analysis on dashboards of complicated software platforms, I had no real human touch points with the people connecting with this content. I didn’t know how they felt, really. And, I started to feel like a cog in a wheel, like quantity trumped quality across the board. I wanted to help people. I wanted to use my skills to make a real impact versus making my clients money as the sole focus.

So, in December, 2019, I let go of my remaining 3 clients, said goodbye to a reputation I had built as a corporate content strategy expert and started sketching out what this new iteration of my business would mean. It took months, a lot of thinking, scribbling on oversized post-it notes, scratching things out, reading countless books, writing endless blog posts until I finally realized the concept of what would become The Raw Leader and The Raw Athlete. These two programs were aimed at two seemingly disparate groups of people, yet who both struggled with how to leverage their experience and turn it into a powerful asset with the potential to impact the masses.

Leaders didn’t know how to dissect their story, their experience, and weave it back together into insight that would catalyze rapport, trust and belonging in their teams. They didn’t know that there was a correlation between developing messaging that’s directly tied to what their teams wanted to feel, what they hoped, what they feared, and their teams working harder, better, and feeling like they belonged to a mission they could rally behind. It turns out, this thought leadership can also raise the brand perception in the market. Win win.

Athletes, on the other hand, while they were tremendous at their given sport, top of their game, the best in the world, they have been left out to dry when it comes to leveraging their own personal journey and story to gain visibility, partnerships and impact—something they can lean on as they transition out of sport rather than fall into the deep chasm of identity-less despair like many athletes before them.

This was my pivot. And as I started to develop the two programs further, I began to work with more and higher profile individuals and groups. The North Face’s team of global athletes. Team USA’s Olympic and Paralympic teams. Women’s Tennis Association. Lockton Insurance. Gallagher Insurance. Shamrock Foods. And these athletes and leaders began to have such tremendous personal and professional breakthroughs that now, I’m sure I have found my calling.

It is such an honor to work with people invested in themselves and the impact they want to have on the world—I’m grateful for the courage I had, and the support I had to take the leap. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Here’s the honest truth: I hardly have a presence on Instagram. I have a growing presence on LinkedIn. And I have a thriving email list that I share insights with weekly. Without fail, I get between 2-4 clients per month from my email list and my LinkedIn presence.

Why? How? My lists and follower count aren’t even that large!

Two concepts:
1. I speak to the thing they’re most at odds with.
I know what they care about, what they fear, what they hope for, what they want more of, what they want less of, and what’s holding them back. I speak to that, and offer simple and tangible advice. People use it.
2. I use my language and I don’t adopt someone else’s voice.
Last week, I wrote a LinkedIn post and email newsletter with the title: The only thing I changed was my underwear. Then, I swore in it multiple times. I had 3 people reach out to me and say, finally, someone talks like me and isn’t overly stuffy. Can you help me? So, my advice: you have to figure out your voice, your story, and what you’re willing to share. And you have to show up as that over and over and over again.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rawstrategy.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rawstrategy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsayyaw/

Image Credits
If credits are needed, they are in the name of the image.