We were lucky to catch up with Brad Szollose recently and have shared our conversation below.
Brad, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
I started my professional career in NYC as a graphic designer and production artist for large-scale corporate meetings and events. We’re talking $2 million budgets back then. Eventually I worked my way up the ladder to become a creative director, creating exemplary experiences for Fortune 500 companies while working with a team of designers, AV professionals, set designers and writers.
Through the years I started several businesses in the creative and design fields, and it was my fourth company, K2 Design, that I took public on NASDAQ. We were the first digital marketing agency to go public in an IPO, and cited in Advertising Age as one of the top 10 Web Development Agencies in the country back in the late 90s.
During that tenure as a CMO, I started to notice that a new generation had completely different needs, wants, likes and expectations from previous generations. I couldn’t get my Baby Boomer brethren to understand the shifting dynamics that would be effecting how we work, how we pay, how we romance and how we play.
So, in response to that frustration, I wrote my first book, “Liquid Leadership”…and decided that the subtitle had to express what I really wanted to say: “From Woodstock to Wikipedia: Multi-Generational Management Ideas That Are Changing The Way We Run Things” (now available in paperback for our 10th Anniversary Edition).
I really wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations that could awaken people to the ever-changing world we would be facing…the world we are facing today over 25 years later.
That frustration was the spark for my mission statement: “to ignite game changing conversations.”
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.
I was a creative kid growing up in Pennsylvania. So naturally I gravitated to the arts. I was in drum line and band, art classes and morning announcements for my high school radio station WLHS. Winning several art awards in high school, along with a few scholarships fueled my decision to go to The Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
Graduating with honors from AIP along with a job offer during my graduation ceremony, I headed to NYC and started my career in large-scale corporate events as mentioned above. It was a secret niche in the design industry that few knew about back then.
During my 10 years of creating amazing experiences, I worked with the top production companies in the country, and their clients—pharmaceutical companies, product launches, car companies, construction contractors and over the counter products. From slide production, to special effects, and print collateral, and package design, I’ve designed for just about every platform and product you can imagine.
…and yet, the entrepreneurial bug was always in me since I was 16. And as I said before, my business partners and I took K2 Design public in an IPO. Suddenly I’m a web pioneer and a dot com executive, and now it’s real. I had to learn to manage a cross-generational workforce who were some of the most diverse talent I’ve ever had the honor of working with. To lead people properly, I had to become a leader who could serve 60 employees, in 3 offices worldwide.
That thrust me into the limelight pretty quickly. I’ve appeared in Advertising Age, New York Magazine, Forbes, Inc. and Crain’s Magazines, and appeared on international television shows, podcasts and other media outlets like CBS, ASBN Small Business Network and CGTN America.
This was the inspiration behind writing “Liquid Leadership:” I was working with that first wave of Generation X and Generation Y (a.k.a. older Millennials), who were acting differently. The research and the workshops I developed, created some amazing conversations.
Today I have taken that 40+ years of creative experience, along with branding and applied it to my work in personal branding, experiential design, and my podcast Awakened Nation.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
One of the things I get frustrated with is today’s designers and creatives aren’t trained well enough in business. No one cares that you used purple, unless you were Prince.
Design, when executed properly, can increase sales. Case in point, take a look at the last car you bought. Chances are you paid for an upgrade because of the extras that were offered or the design was sexy. Industrial designers know this quite well. You must learn to tap into the emotions of your potential customers if you want to increase sales.
But what about pitching new business? That’s where a creative director comes in. Whether you are pitching new business or launching a new product, you must learn what it takes to make your target audience lean in and buy.
Let me share with you what I mean. A friend and business colleague Jay (not his real name), contacted me last year. He and his business partners had created a multi-tiered fund that would be used to create a REIT: two funds—one for accredited and another for non-accredited investors.
They were somehow stalled with getting things moving. Investors weren’t jumping in as fast as they wanted. Their numbers were solid, why weren’t people blown away by this?
Since Jay knew my track record of raising millions and taking a company public, he trusted that I could figure out why they had trouble closing with potential investors.
I sat in on a 2-hour meeting and listened to their story, the financials, and goals. All I did was take notes.
I started to realize they didn’t have a proper roadshow (a roadshow is a series of meetings or presentations in which key members of a private company, usually executives, pitch the initial public offering, or IPO, to prospective investors).
The hook that was missing was they had zero marketing in the presentation. Just pure numbers. There wasn’t any meat in the presentation that would make an investor lean forward and put their money on the table.
They sent over their Power Point document and I beat it up. Not only did I implement a redesign, I opened the presentation with their story—the “WHY?” behind why they do what they do. In addition, I added visual impact with a marketing slogan from their story, simplified their bios and brought the numbers forward in a way that had visual impact.
The next phase was to teach them how to talk about their business when pitching with the roadshow in hand. Speaking to accredited investors is different than speaking to non-accredited investors. We went over the rules set forth by the SEC, revealed my secrets to master storytelling, and insisted they end with a non-formal Q&A session.
That simple investment in me, helped them raise $150 million within 60 days.
When pitching new business, you really need to develop the soft skills that can “WOW” potential clients, investors, or your target audience. These are the soft skills that the top 1% use to win new business. That doesn’t mean you ignore the numbers side of this, it means you have to understand what will make an investor lean forward and take action.
I love helping start-ups pitch to investors.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Through the years, with everything I have accomplished, there was always something driving me. I had been on over 100 podcasts, radio shows, television shows and print media, and realized the conversation was always the same. And it was getting boring.
I yearned for deeper conversations but couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly that I was looking for.
A friend asked me to be on a podcast panel discussion on entrepreneurship. I’m sitting alongside heavy-hitters in the speaking and consulting industries and thinking to myself “why am I on this panel?”
The elder statesman among us, Ben Gay III, opened up about building a business after the death of his son. He spoke of his emotional pain and the fortitude it took for him to get up everyday and build something brand new. The second member of the panel, Jim Palmer, spoke of losing his job and being diagnosed with skin cancer all within the same week…he spent 18 months looking for work while building his business. He almost lost everything and was forced to become an entrepreneur to feed his family.
And that’s when it hit me; THIS was the conversation I was looking for.
That is how I started my podcast Awakened Nation. My job as host is to ignite game changing conversations with today’s outliers and cutting edge entrepreneurs, idea makers and disruptors—conversations that take a deep dive into the extraordinary.
I’ve interviewed NY Times Bestsellers Stephen M.R. Covey, Joe Vitale, Panache Desai, Dan Millman, celebrities like Dog The Bounty Hunter, BNI founder Ivan Misner, David Bowie promoter Tony Michaelides, MLB player Shea Hillenbrand, and many more.
It’s a chance for me to have deeper conversations outside of business. Controversial, yet Conversational. Warm. Unexpected.
I believe I’ve created a breath of fresh air in the podcasting space.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://awakenednationpodcast.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awakenednationpodcast/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AwakenedNationPodcast/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradszollose/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/awakened_nation
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AwakenedNationPodcast
- Other: https://www.bradszollose.com/
- Sizzle Reel: Welcome to Awakened Nation: https://youtu.be/
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Image Credits
Brad’s head shot: Photo Credit: © 2023 Joe Cubiotti Photography