We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Adrian Sasine. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Adrian below.

Adrian, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

The simple answer is “hiring.”

My experience in Corporate America was primarily in the marketing arena, but I imagine the problem is prevalent across all sectors. Managers usually hire clones instead of innovators. Clones are easy to manage because they tend to do exactly what their predecessor did. Thus, their needs and outcomes are predictable. And Predictable = Easy.

However, this is exactly where we get it wrong because it stifles innovation. I felt it firsthand when I was trying to climb the corporate ladder in a large bureaucratic organization. It was better to follow the path of others than create your own. I felt like I was always bumping up against the glass ceiling and I was a square peg stuck in a round hole job.

Since then, I’ve had many conversations with CEOs who express a desire for employees with an entrepreneurial mindset and fresh ideas. More often than not, the individual hired ends up being merely a clone. Why, because replicated the status quo is far easier than recreating something new. It’s a real problem and this paradox results in a workforce that lacks the creative juices necessary for true progress and innovation.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

By background, I’m a marketing and operations guy. I spent a decade leading marketing at a Fortune 100 company and around that same amount of time as an entrepreneur, running my own small businesses. Through all of it, networking always played a pivotal role. After I sold my last company I had started doing some small business coaching and was invited by my cofounder, Joe Mindak, to a business networking event. I was blown away by the quality of people and more so by the intentionality to help each other in The Connective. It really showed the power of a community and that’s where Nolodex was born.

Community is vital, but it’s often underutilized. Existing tools do a good job replicating a Facebook type environment, but aren’t great at actually supporting networking and business referrals. So, we created Nolodex to use on our own community and quickly started hearing from other communities like networking groups, coworking spaces, chambers of commerce, that they wanted it as well.

At its heart, that’s what Nolodex is all about. Helping communities and helping individuals from a business perspective. While we believe in the power of the digital world, truly remarkable things happen through relationships—people collaborating and working together.

Nolodex creates a Win-Win; Better engagement and a passive income source for the community, more sales and new business for its members.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Brand loyalty is 100% about value. The value your customers think they get from you, based on what they are giving up (typically money). I believe it’s really all about the “moments of truth.” The individual moments they see, hear and experience your brand. Some marketing related and others customer service and product quality. During a customer’s journey, they will have many touchpoints with a brand. If you are really trying to build loyalty, then you understand that one negative occurrence can easily erase all the positives. The most loyal customers, the true brand ambassadors, are built on an accumulation of all those positive touchpoints.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This might put me on a soapbox for a bit, but I genuinely believe that everything I learned in school about marketing and advertising was wrong…for small business at least. Both my undergraduate degree and MBA focused on marketing, and how big brands with big budgets operate. During my decade in Corporate America, I saw these large-scale tactics firsthand, supported by extensive financial and human resources.

Unfortunately, these strategies don’t translate well to the entrepreneurial or small business environment. More people enter small or family businesses every year than large corporate jobs, yet education focuses on the latter. Academic institutions need to do a better job preparing graduates to be scrappy, and innovative. Where frugality becomes the most important metric to your success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nolodex.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asasine/

Image Credits

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