We were lucky to catch up with Lauren St George recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren , thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

There are 4 things that immediately come to mind when I think about what my mother did for me as a child that had significant impact on my career.

1. She taught me how to become a creative problem solver by sharing lateral thinking puzzles with me. These puzzles taught me to ask the right questions that she would answer with a simple yes or no. When I first started it would take days to solve them but as I became a better question asker, I would solve them within hours. She instilled in me the importance of looking at things from different angels and asking the right question to get to non-linear answers. This has had huge impact on my career as I help people to solve big hairy challenges in their businesses and personal lives. Asking the wrong questions will give you the wrong answers which can be detrimental to your evolution and success.
2. She saw beyond grades. When I shared my report card with her, she would ask “do you feel this grade (whatever it was) is the best representation of the effort you put in?” In other words, are you proud of this grade? This taught me a few key lessons:
a. Do not judge yourself against others.
b. Achieve things for yourself not the people around you.
c. An F is as good as an A, if you put forward your best effort because you will learn from the experience for future endeavors.
She repositioned why I was doing things, and that trying is the most important measure of success because we are not growing if we are not failing.
3. She invited me to join her dinner parties and interact with adults from the time I was 12 years old. I was therefore never really seen or treated as “the child”, instead I engaged and listened to conversations well beyond my years. It helped me to have a much broader view of the world and learn about topics that were not being covered in school. It also taught me that titles are not nearly as important as the caliber of the human being. It has given me the confidence to walk into any business setting and not feel intimidated or less than those around me. This gave me the resolve to own my own business in my 20’s interacting frequently with the c-suite of our Fortune 500 clients.
4. She shared the ins and out of her work life with me from a young age. She talked about her projects, clients, and colleagues. This taught me about business, more specifically about the world of marketing, trends, human motivations, brand strategy and how to navigate corporate politics. All these topics provided a strong foundation for my entry into the business world. At 20 as a summer global marketing intern at Coca-Cola, I found myself working with an Italian agency providing feedback on creative for a global Diet Coke campaign. I never would have managed without her years of sharing.
I highly encourage you to do these things for your children. I know I am taking many of these lessons forward into my own children’s’ lives.

Lauren , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My journey to today started in video production where I edited, produced, and directed industrials, commercials, and documentaries. I later joined forces to form unitOne a boutique creative agency based in Atlanta. Our clients ranged from medium sized companies to Fortune 500s. We found a niche in 2 areas, helping research departments package their work in digestible, creative ways so that there was adoption across the organization and working with innovation departments to help envision their ideas for testing. UnitOne partnered with clients such as Coca-Cola, Georgia Pacific, Hershey’s, Citi, J&J, TNS, and 3M to name a few.

I later went on to start my own company that brought all of my skills together to focus on helping startups with their brand strategy, marketing and launch plans. We helped entrepreneurs go from ideas to on the shelf.
I am now a coach and a consultant. I wear my coach hat with my company, What’s Next.

What’s Next is a radically different approach to finding more fulfillment in your life. What’s Next’s process is based in brain science, social psychology and the best practices used by the top businesses to drive innovation, plan for the future and yield success and applies them to our personal lives to disrupt comfortable patterns and design true change. My approach gets people to breakthroughs and jumpstarts change quickly in a unique and engaging way.

I wear my consulting hat with Accenture helping internal teams and our top clients solve big challenges – innovate products/services, envision the future, build partnerships, create targeted messaging for specific audiences, and help win work ranging $100+ Million – $2 Billion .

I find that working in corporate keeps me connected to the changes in the workforce strategy, marketplace trends and innovation developments across industries. This ties beautifully to the coaching that I am doing with my clients in their personal lives. Many of these clients are mid to senior level professionals looking to design their next chapter both in and outside of their careers.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

There are two examples that come to mind.

My agency unitOne started in 2006. Working with large corporations was great at first. They certainly have bigger budgets to do great work. However, the process of getting paid on many occasions had us teetering on the edge of missing a payroll or two. When their 30-day process becomes a 60-day process to receive payment because someone forgot to send an email it really hurt us as a small business. We learned that keeping on top of it was an imperative and it took up a good percentage of my time as I tried to nicely but firmly remind our clients to get our invoices in to the right person. We eventually found a company that would pre-pay us 90% on open invoices. Once they received payment you would get an additional 7% back. So, for 3%, we had piece of mind that we could get the funds into our account 48 hours after submitting an invoice to certain clients. They kept our lights on and our doors open many a month.

The other story comes from the 2008 downturn. When things get tough one of the first things people will save their money on is marketing, so we were hit hard. My business partner and I both took a significant pay cut and asked our team to take a smaller one to help us keep the company going for longer. I believe that by being transparent with your team and building a strong culture is the reason we made it through the recession. The way you treat your team and the work climate you create can make or break your business.

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 my favorite sales stories goes back to my days in the creative agency. We had grown our presence at Coca-Cola from a few projects to 75+ annual projects in two years. Most of these were internal or B2B. Customer facing work was largely kept for the big agencies like Ogilvy or BBDO. They had the relationships, the size and awards to win the large campaigns. But we became the little company that could. I did this by building relationships with as many clients as I could. We knew when their special occasions were, we made sure they got memorable holiday gifts, we got access to the building and routinely walked the floors saying hi to people and staying top of mind. We always went above and beyond on every project to exceed expectations and create fans. And finally due to our consistency it worked. We won the opportunity to create a global campaign for Minute Maid Kids. We had proven our capabilities to our client, and they gave us the opportunity. The campaign included a commercial, game app, content for the actual juice boxes and online banners and marketing materials. The work was seen in 12 countries, translated into multiple languages, and its success won us another commercial for Simply Orange. We were elated to be recognized for the quality of our work on a larger stage.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.answerwhatsnext.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/answerwhatsnext/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurenstgeorgecoaching
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-stgeorge/

Image Credits
My headshot, Christy Parry Photography