Welcome to Revenue Speaks, where communication becomes growth. I'm Sheila Johnston, founder and CEO of Luminari Partners. This show is produced in partnership with Page Design Group, where together we align strategy, brand, and digital to drive growth, Revenue Speaks explores how strategic communication aligns leadership and drives measurable revenue, because communication is an overhead; it's infrastructure, and in the end, Revenue Speaks. Jeff, welcome to the Revenue Speaks podcast.

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Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here, especially for a newer podcaster.

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Yes, I do look up to you. You have created quite the name for yourself in this region, and I'd love for our listeners to learn a little bit about who you are, how you came to Sacramento, what you do.

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You don't have enough time for all of that.

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Probably don't.

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But in in a really quick abbreviated version, Chicago native started my career in Chicago as a radio guy selling, not in the broadcast side of things, and moved from Chicago to Dallas for a promotion to take over an office in the radio stations we represented. One of them was buying stations. Said, would you like to come and run a station in Sacramento? And I said, I guess. I think it sounds like a good idea, but I don't want to get stuck in Sacramento. I'm coming from Chicago to Dallas. I mean, I want to go to a bigger market, maybe San Francisco or you know anything but Sacramento. And we took our first trip here, and it was a no-go. I was like, there's no way I'm moving here. I'm talking about 40 years ago, so it was very different than it is today. Take me straight to Gold River in the Tulipog, the miserable experience, and they show me California and my perspective, and it's all these houses that look the same. I'm like, no way. She said, "Well, we really want you there. I don't want to go there. It's too small a market. It's not what I want. And then six months later, the person that they brought in didn't work out, and so they came back. And that time they took me through a completely different process. I landed in San Francisco. They stopped in Napa, sunny day, beautiful time. It was maybe June, and I just remember, wow, I really like this place, the river, all that stuff. That'd be cool. I can spend a little time there. And they said, don't get involved. And about a year and a half in, the company goes belly up. They don't make it. They fail. This was in the late '80s, and it was really challenging to get money for broadcasting. And so I'm stuck. I'm exiled in Sacramento. And we talked about what we were going to do, and do we stay in Sacramento? Our second son was born, and the next thing you know, we like it. We love it. It's very provincial. It's got a lot of family. It's got a lot of familiarity to a midwestern city. And here we are, Sheila. 40, almost 42 years later.

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Well, I'm very glad you chose to come to Sacramento because you have been a fixture of this community. You celebrate pretty much everyone you meet by the stories that you share, and we're just really lucky to have you here.

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Thank you, I appreciate that.

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I'd like to talk to you about how communications is a part of an organization's infrastructure. You're a radio guy; you know how to tell stories, and you've done something really remarkable in this region, by way of starting the nonprofit podcast network, what was the origin story of how that came to be?

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I'm going to give you an abbreviated version on that too, because they go into great length, which I don't share all the time in the conversation. But I think it's important to get it out, especially since I just came from a Go Red for Women event at the American Heart Association, the program itself started during the pandemic. So, 2019, I got a call from an advertising agency, and she has a list of clients that are nonprofits. And she goes, "We're we're in trouble. We don't know what to do. Don't know how to do a virtual event. We're losing all our senior volunteers because they're the first ones to sequester. We don't know how to promote a virtual event, much less do it. Do you think because people might be more savvy if they're listening to podcasts, because we had a production studio, that they might be likely to support us and get the word out about our events, because the events would be coming up in May and throughout the summer and into the fourth quarter, and so I thought it was a brilliant idea. I don't know. I don't know if it'll work, but let's give it a shot. And so we did the first one, and it was kids first in Placer County. The second one was seniors first. The genesis of it was was if we could help them promote their events, then they would at least be better off than they were without it, right? And it worked. Now we weren't the panacea; we weren't everything that they needed. But at least we were another tool, another vehicle to get these virtual events out to the community and to their community via you know digital. They could email this this little podcast. It was all about the event, and so we did. Throughout the entire pandemic, and we would do you know one or two a month, just as they would come. It was pro bono, and if anybody heard about it, which they did once they heard, hey, this guy's doing free podcasts for our events to promote him. Let's get to him, and so we did that throughout the pandemic. When it ended, I said I really like doing this, and in my time in the community with broadcasting that was part of the responsibility, and since many of us had multiple radio stations, you know, at what is now the iHeart Group, we had six stations underneath that roof, and every one of those stations had a responsibility to interact with the community in public service, and so I got to meet all these nonprofit leaders of a variety of different groups, you know, every ethnic group you can imagine, chambers of commerce, and civic, social. It just was wonderful. So I had this connection into the community already. I said, "Well, what if I keep doing these things and I'll just have them tell their story? You know, again, not intentional, one or two a month, and something we'd miss and we'd make it up, but we were starting to grow this line of people that would say, "Can I get one? Can I get one? Can I get one? Sure. At the end of 2320, 23, I wasn't paying attention to it. It was just a piece of what we did. The business side was the fee for service side. This was the pro bono side. I started looking at what was happening, and some of these organizations were getting a lot of downloads, and were getting plays, and they were saying, "Hey, this is working great for us. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. I thought, "Am I onto something here? And in the beginning of 2024, I thought maybe we could put this as a vertical line of business underneath the studio, and that's what started it. That was really the genesis of it. Now, somewhere in between there, I have a congenital heart condition that I was unaware of. This you won't have in your notes because it doesn't come up very often. But I want to share it. I'm in great shape. Probably best shape in my life. I was training for a really grueling ride in the Sierras. I have a heart attack and I go down. It's like you've got to be kidding me. This can't happen. How could this happen?

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It's as vivid as I tell the story now as it was after the surgery in the hospital. I had this dream. You know, when people will tell you about their dream, it's the white lights or it's a beautiful dream and all this stuff. And now mine was to the contrary. Mine was Dante's Inferno. It was a horrible, horrific dream. And I was on the outside looking in at all the bad of humanity, and I saw substance abuse and I saw violence and just this this horrific scene that's pulling me in, and I said in the dream, if I go in, I'm done. That's I'm dying. I did everything I could to fight to get out of it, and I realized when I came out of it, it was most a spectacular sunrise. I was at Stanford; they had this beautiful room view, and I said I know why I'm here. You know my purpose is to support the people through the skill set that I've got with a podcast studio and communications all my life to do something for these people. Two things: one, for the people with this heart condition who are suffering from it, who don't know what it is, it's rarely diagnosed, and the second part was to take all this suffering through nonprofits because I had already been doing you know the non podcast network, but not intentionally. And then I said, "We're going to do this with intention.

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Thank you for sharing that story, and I'm glad you are still sitting here. So am I. Let me tell

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you, me and I think maybe my kids and wife probably too, grandkids.

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Yeah, and I remember you telling me, and you met some incredible people along the way that were very grateful for you for sharing such a relatable story. There was a story about a woman you met in a hospital. Do you remember

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that particular woman came through the program that we do? We do a podcast. Our two big programs, in terms of in studio programs, not fee for service client programs, are the nonprofit podcast network and a program called Imperfect Heart. And Imperfect Heart is what you're referencing. Yeah, she actually had called me and says, "I'm going in for surgery. I listened to the episode you did with this particular doctor as I was getting called from the doctor asking me if I wanted to attend a surgery, and I said, "Heck yeah, I want to attend. I said, "What's the date? Date's the same date as the woman who's calling. And I attended her surgery. Obviously, we since become friends, and very similar to what we do in the nonprofit space here. We're local with this program today, with the expectation that we will be able to scale it into multiple markets outside of Sacramento. Top 50 is what we're targeting, but both of those programs really serve a community that isn't served in a way that they could be, and so that's where we're trying to make that difference.

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Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because many nonprofits are small but mighty,

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yes,

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and their infrastructure is tapped, but their strategic mindset is such where they know how to leverage resources such as reaching out to you. So when you reach out to guests or guests reach out to you, I guess I'm just curious about. How you hear about nonprofits and how you choose to feature?

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And I want to make sure I address the three people that were responsible for us getting started. Western Health stepped up; they understood what we were trying to accomplish. Big philanthropic supporters in the community, CapTrust Financial, same situation. And then the third one was an agency, advertising agency, running in Salzman. So people who have been in the community will recognize it, but they've since sold, so they are no longer one of our partners. But nonetheless, they recognized it and they said, "This is a really neat idea. Let's give it a beta, try it for a year, see what happens. We had no idea. I mean, we had no idea what it was going to look like, and we were going to do intentionally one a week. Every Wednesday, we would release, and we figured, you know, the audience will come because we all knew enough people to start it and seed it, and it did, and that got it going. And of course, the next thing we realized, well, now we have to have a website. We're being pushed into. We have to get a website infrastructure.

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Yeah, and then

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well, Jeff, you need a database because you got to get a newsletter out, and we're small but mighty too, right? So it's putting together all the pieces of what it would become and what it looks like today. And what we didn't see was the expectation of use for me. You know, I sold it as hey, it's just a marketing tool. You can use it. You can leverage it and put and attach it to everything you do. It's easily distributed, and you can get to a lot of people at once

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in a different format.

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In a different format, in a format you wouldn't have the access to because we host it. And I had people calling me, "Hey Jeff, I attached it to a grant application, and we got the grant. We never got this grant, and we think the podcast made a difference. I never even thought about that. What a great idea! And then we had people call and say, "I just took a job at blah blah, whatever that organization was, because I listened to the podcast first. And then somebody says, "Hey, do you know you're in Sac State? I said, "What do you mean? There's a certificate program for Sac State for nonprofits, and one of the assignments is they have to go to the nonprofit podcast network and choose, you know, a particular nonprofit, and I'm like, who saw this coming? I remember looking at YouTube one day. I go into my producer. I said, dude, where did this come from? That's that's not ours. That's our it's our content, but that's not ours. I know we didn't do this, so I call the organization. Goes, oh no, that stuff you gave us on YouTube, we cut it up and we made like 10 different shorts on it. We're purposing it up all over the place. Like, ah, that's brilliant.

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So you've seen organizations transform just based on the way they change their communications, meaning working with you and getting their story out.

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Yeah, because they get it pro bono. It's something they wouldn't have access to otherwise, and it's it's caused us to change some things too. We started out as audio only. The next thing you know, YouTube became a real big factor for podcasting, so we had to get a camera in the studio, and you know we produce both a basic video and a highly polished audio platform piece that goes out, and we send that to the nonprofits. We give them a YouTube short that they can use, so they have quite a cadre of things. That 90% of the times we're talking with the organization, they don't have that. You know, they don't have access to it. They don't have the ability to do it. They don't have a team to put it together. So now they do.

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That's incredible. I've seen this work as a spectator of your podcast network and and listening to various shows, but top of mind right now and probably trending still is Big Day of Giving that just happened last week here in Sacramento in May. Yes, you found a really beautiful way to showcase what Big Day of Giving is, how people can contribute, and then you came on and did an after Big Day of Giving episode to really put a beautiful bow on how this community showed up.

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Yes,

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and you interviewed the chief philanthropy officer, Kelly Seafkin. Thank you. What was different about how you helped showcase Big Day of Giving this year that contributed to the region showing up? There's

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a great story to that. One of the things I realized is if we can get integrated into the community, we're asking how to you know get the nonprofits. We look at the aggregating organizations. Community Foundation Sacred Community Foundation is is the behemoth in the marketplace because they aggregate all these nonprofits. They had 915 in terms of the overall applications that were online for Big Day of Giving. I think 886 got gifts. So call it 1000, right? That get exposed to us, and then the other organization, Sacramento Venture Philanthropy (SVP) is another one that aggregates nonprofits for education. They do fast pitch, Impact 100. We started with Impact 100 the very first year before we were intentional. Evelyn Jensston was the woman that started it. She heard about me and through somebody and said, "Can you help us? And I said, "I would love to because they aggregate nonprofits. You know, this this year they have five $100,000 gifts for a nonprofit. Big day of giving, $15.4 million in one day, biggest ever by far. 13 eight was the most. And so last year we were looking. Had an opportunity to partner with Big Day of Giving, and I'm talking with Carrie and Kelly, and I said, "Look, guys, I I want to do how much can I do? How can I get involved? What more can we do to support it? And we came up with these things called news pods, and they're shorter versions of an episode. They're only 10, 1215, minutes, unless you get somebody who's long-winded. And I said, "Well, why don't we do just a couple of new spots leading up to, and then we'll do a closing one. Just a little over a year ago, they started. Now we're doing three, four, sometimes a month. And what we use them for is, let's say, there's a grant application that opens up fast pitch. We would have Brad Squires or Drew Hayes come on from Sacramento Venture Philanthropy, or Kelly or Kerry come on from community foundation to say, hey, it's time for the application window. You'll hear one coming up for philanthropy summit as we get toward the end of the summer. It's in September. We have Impact 100 announcement, other grants, and so those are the things that we use those news pods for that originated with Big Day of Giving. This year we really upped the ante. We did seven episodes. We did the opening to say, "Hey, it's time to to register for Big Day of Giving, and then we did five episodes with Kelly that led up to it about all the different ways that you can give or ways that businesses can participate. And the third part of it was the final closing, which you just heard celebrating the unbelievable gifts that Sacramento got.

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I think I was telling some of my colleagues it was like watching a reality show. I didn't know I needed to watch. Right? It was so incredible seeing that ticker just go up, wasn't it? Up and up and up. It was hard to keep up with just the celebration, community. It was a beautiful display of what Sacramento is about.

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I was up late working on something, so I'm gonna take a look at 11 o'clock, and it was like at $14 million. I texted Curious, "Oh my gosh, you you might hit 15, and and now he's 15, but 15 four.

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Yes. So at

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midnight, I was like, "Woohoo! You know, this is awesome.

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I want to shift conversation a little bit, mostly because you have access to so many mission-driven CEOs and region associations, nonprofits, and you have a front-row seat as to what these organizations are doing right and what they've changed to help their growth-not just one-time growth, but long-term growth. So, I'd love for you to generalize what these mission-driven leaders are doing right, and what we can learn from

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them. Talking to me-that's the first right thing, of

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course.

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And I pinch myself because coming from the radio days, you couldn't get to this person ever. It was a gauntlet; you would never have access. This program is amazing in that it's effusive in interest. They're like, I would love to come on. I'd love to talk to you. And I think of people like the president of Pride Industries, a half a billion dollar organization, or Chet Hewitt over at Sierra Health, or the list could go on and on and on. Real Goodwill, Brian Wagner. You just pick up the phone and say, Hey, I'm interested. Would you like to? Or they reach out. Somebody reaches out and said, We'd like to get on the program. What people think a lot of times is, oh, you help them with the stories. Not we don't. The story is theirs. We can help some organizations, and we'll guide them if it seems really rough or a little bit awkward, or they need some support there. But our objective is not to help them tell the story. That's something they have to do on their own. It's to help get the story seen and heard, because so many organizations have great stories, small, big, medium, 100% volunteer, fully, massively funded. You know, they're all, for the most part, wonderful stories, but they don't have any way to get it out, and it becomes a trickle, and then you will hear from almost everybody. Well, nobody knows who we are, right? We recognize that, and that's one of the things we're trying to support and give them that ability to hear, be seen and heard, to have people hear their stories, and they have the ability to distribute it. And if they record it properly, without too much dating in it, it's an evergreen piece. Our number one leader who came in to speak to this day is is one of the first ones we did. By far, 10 to one. Anybody else is she still uses the episode and continues to just grow her downloads and awareness through people who choose to listen to her episode. Keeping in mind, podcast is a choice. It doesn't just show up and you have to hear it. It's not like a radio station. You're choosing to listen to that. So we don't need 10s of 1000s of plays. We need hundreds.

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That's right.

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And if you think of an event that an organization might have, and you have this dynamic leader, and they have a wonderful event. They might have 500 people at the event. Half the people are the plus ones, so they have 250. And there's probably a cadre of people that really aren't really going to benefit the organization. Maybe it's 200 people, but this podcast, somebody saying, "I want to listen to it. I want to hear what your organization." All about. I want to hear your story, and it's hundreds. And if they keep using it over the course of a year or two, which we remind them, we can tell we're looking at everything all the time in terms of metrics to see what's happening. They have a really, really valuable tool. Now, now to your question of what we see from some of those leaders, they get it, they understand it, they see the value, they share it, they make sure their team understands it. We have issues with boards sometimes because the board's not digitally savvy, you know, and they're not listening. And it could be as you get older, you tend to be less aware of the technology. So we'll even come into a board meeting and say, "Here's how you do it: open that phone, that little Apple Podcast or a Spotify thing. If it's on your phone, here's what you do: you touch it, touch and share it. And nine out of 10 times, when they hear it, oh my gosh, that's great! I love that. It's using the tool properly, but the story that comes from those leaders, those significant nonprofits, and the small ones-it doesn't have to be a size. What they share nine out of 10 times is a good story.

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Well, I love that when a leader invests in telling a story or communicating value in a different way, it actually is the ripple effect that an organization sometimes needs. It shows an investment in mission and vision and value, and again, it's reaching a new audience that you might not have ever found. I've seen cultures change, I've seen hiring practices change, and it's an invigoration of your team being more happy or happier rather about the work that they're doing.

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Yeah, we encourage that everybody hears the episode. Be sure to share it with your team, as however big your team is, because there's a sense of pride that comes from it. You're on a podcast, that's cool. And usually the team is younger than the board, and the team gets it. And like, oh, that's our leader. Whomever that person happens to be, telling the story about all the good that we do, and what our purpose is, and what our mission is, and the podcast is designed to be what a donor might ask who doesn't know. So the questions in the podcast follow a pattern of sorts. If I was a donor that didn't know anything, and I'm interested in that particular, what would I ask? And that's what we ask of those leaders, which they should know pretty well. Are

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you saying that you turn the podcast around to be sort of an elevator pitch of sorts?

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Oh, absolutely, absolutely a long one.

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A long

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one. So, so we we see a lot of the fast pitch people. You're the people that can't come through the fast pitch. That's a three minute program. This is like fast pitch on steroids. You could talk for 30 minutes. You can tell your story. So for them, it's like, whoa, this is great. But the training that we've seen come from the people that have been through an Impact 100 or a Fast Pitch program, we notice them right away because they have a story. They understand the mechanics of the story, and we'll hear it coming out in the conversation, and occasionally, will depending on the nature of the organization, we'll ask them if they have a constituent beneficiary, somebody they can bring, who can also support and tell their story as the benefit of what the organization provides. They're in the studio with us as well.

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So sometimes you might run across some nonprofits or mission-driven organizations that oh our story is too small or no one wants to listen to it. You've never come across never.

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Now, and this is really important because one of the questions we ask is collaboration. Who do you work with? And we do a discovery call, so we know in advance if you're going to make it to the program. We've had people say, "No, ours is pretty exclusive. It's a niche. Nah, you have to collaborate today. It's it's a really important part of the expectation in terms of the nonprofit infrastructure ecosystem that you are collaborating, especially with money being as tight as it is this year and going forward. So it's a key component of the conversation in who you collaborate, who you work with, and the way that that question is answered sometimes gives us an indication of really the sustainability of that organization.

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Now I know you're doing this work pro bono, but what would you advise to a nonprofit or an association that hasn't quite expanded their communications infrastructure. What would be their the value proposition you would tell leaders to change the way they shift how important communications

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is? I'm assuming if they came through the studio, they see the value of it. They recognize, oh my gosh, I can do this. And we encourage them to do whatever they can do, even if it's just shorts off of an iPhone, just something to share your messaging, because it's free. Just takes a little bit of time in the infrastructure of that organization. Somebody knows how to do this stuff, and can you imagine if it's an individual who loves a cause and they realize, I can go do that for you? Yes. So we encourage. The use obviously of digital and the the use of AI, which everybody seems to be afraid of, but if you're not there, you're behind, and nonprofits are a little bit slower to move a lot of times because it's an investment, and this is one that you really don't need a lot of money, but it can take you a lot further, a lot faster, and so we're seeing movement into the space of you know digital certainly more aggressively AI usage, but even the smallest organizations, all volunteer organizations, AI could really move them a lot faster and accommodate a lot of the work that they're doing today. That takes that time that is part of the volunteers' organization, whatever it may be, that they don't have the luxury of.

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Where have you seen the biggest transformation occur as a result of storytelling and communication?

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I think people recognize today far more than before the significance humanity. You have to have a human story, and we encourage in our discovery calls when I follow up with the questions for them. Give me a human story. I don't want to hear KPIs. I don't want to hear metrics. I don't want to hear stats. I don't want to hear, boy, we did this, this, this, this. I want to hear a story of a person. I want to hear a story of a family. I want to see the impact of the organization through the eyes of somebody who is the beneficiary, that's why sometimes when they bring somebody in, it's really helpful, and and those can be the most emotional. And I mean, I've had leaders in that staunch. I mean, I never expected any softening of the message, so to speak. There's always a question in there where they're like, I'm going to get emotional, and there's been many times when we've all been in the studio crying because a beneficiary or person that has been through the program who's telling their story, and you just can't help but you relate so deeply in terms of that conversation.

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You do those conversations a lot of justice in terms of it's not just what you hear, but you then take that story and you write about it so beautifully, and you pick out what I think are your most likely key favorite moments from your interview with your nonprofit. You grab my heartstrings, and that is by the name of your podcast, the special moment that you had in one episode. I'll tee this up for you. You call it the dandelion effect, and I was

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going to say that when you said something about getting the messaging out. Yeah, we just had that on Silver Wishes.

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Silver Wishes, tell us about the dandelion effect.

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News to me, it came from the executive director of that, Stephanie Berger. Again, one of those things. You see, how do you find all these things? We go to a lot of different events. We were partnered with the Greater Sacramento Impact and Philanthropy Awards this year, first ever GSIPS. I met her there. The irony of it all was she was one of the beneficiaries. There's another gentleman there that was a beneficiary for Front Street Animal Shelter. He says, "Tell me a little bit more about your organization. My mom got one of your gifts for the benefit of silver wishes, is a make a wish for seniors, and I'm like, oh yeah, we have to talk. It was just one of those serendipitous moments, and I said, Stephanie, I've never had anything like what you do with your organization. It's all volunteer. I'm five years old. I think it started in 2019, 2020, and I said, you have to come tell the story because seniors are the fastest growing homeless population right now, and they're being priced out of everything. They're on fixed incomes. They can't pay maybe sometimes their property taxes, and so they lose their house. It's wrong. That's just not right. And she goes, "Well, here's what happens: we tell a story, and the next thing you know, somebody's reaching out to us from this organization, or somebody needs HVAC, and an HVAC company called and said, she goes, we call it the dandelion effect. We're blowing the seeds, and they just land in all these different places. And people come back to us and say, we can help with this. That episode ran recently, and I got three calls from other organizations that said we didn't know they existed. We need to talk to them, and one of them was rebuilding Sacramento. They service seniors who have home issues, meaning railings falling down, showers. They can't whatever it is. They can't afford it. Roofs. I think that's one of the most gratifying things I didn't see in this role is the connectivity between organizations. I didn't expect to be a connector like this, but there's not a week that doesn't go by where we get 234, calls about an episode that we ran where somebody else has a nonprofit and says, "Hey, we need to know them. Can you connect us with that particular executive director? Of course, and and many times it happens organically. I'll be sitting across from somebody and I said, "Do you know? You know, like no, I didn't know there was another organization like that. Well, you do now. You need to connect, and I'll send the emails and connect the dots.

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I mean, that truly is the power of communication. Yes, it is the gift that keeps telling a mission. It humanizes an organization, like you said. It's a powerful tool that every organization just needs to. To the fullest extent, Jeff. My final question: There are a lot of leaders that may remain hesitant about how far to take communications. How would you curb their hesitation?

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If you can't get your story seen, heard, told, shared, your organization is not going to succeed. You've got to get it out, whatever the means you need to get it out, and there are so many ways today, and so many that cost you nothing. I don't understand why anybody would be challenged with the significance of communications, and it doesn't cost like it used to. You used to have to pay. You have to do it in the newspaper, or you would do it on a television station or a radio station. Maybe you got into digital, and you would be paying for you know a header or banner ads or something like that. Saying, "Hey, you can originate all this stuff socially. That's communications

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organically.

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It's totally organic, and the more you push, the better for the benefit of the organization. And again, not a lot of time. It doesn't take a lot of time. So if you're one of those leaders who's questioning, "Well, we don't have a budget for it, you cannot not have a budget for it, and that budget doesn't have to be big. It may be just a time value budget, not one that you have to spend dollars on. Let's just ask around the team. People love what they do. If you are in a nonprofit, they're going to do whatever they can to support you. They want that story told. They want to get out because they're benefiting whatever that mission, cause, purpose is. I think one of the highest priorities, short of culture and leadership in an organization, is the ability to communicate what it is you do.

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That is so beautifully said, Jeff. And you're right. Communication does not have to be expensive. It just needs to happen. Organizations' futures depend on the value of communication.

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And I would suspect too, Sheila, with the consulting that you do, it's it's a big part of the conversation. Yes, communication is important. It's what is that communication going to be? Let's make sure that it's guided appropriately and it reaches the right people and the target's appropriate. It's such a significant part that there should be a strategic plan that includes

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it. I completely agree, and that's the best part of communications: is that you do get to learn so many voices and values along the way.

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The

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biggest returns on investments is that it is a way to honor the voice, the heart, and the soul of an organization. In my consultancy, learning other organizations' voices is just a way for me to give back, and I'm sure you see that as well.

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And to your point, it's a return on your investment. It can be very, very small, but it can be a very, very large return.

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Tenfold. Well, Jeff, it is such an honor again to be here with you. You have, in my opinion, really helped shape the heart of this region by sharing the stories that you share, and by highlighting the organizations that really contribute to making this region great.

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Well, thank you for that. And before we close, I have to reflect back. I remember sitting in 110 degree heat in August when you were working for the Metro Chamber, and I'm trying to pitch a podcast to I don't know who it was at the time. It

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was Amanda Blackwood. It

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was Amanda. I'm saying you need to do a podcast, and that was what five years ago, right? Yeah, but here we are having a conversation where you're hosting the podcast, and and I just love it. I just love it. So thank you so much for inviting me on.

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Well, I am so thrilled to be learning from one of the best. So thank you, Jeff.

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Thank you.

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Thanks for listening. We invite you to subscribe to this podcast and take our revenue alignment assessment, a short strategic diagnostic for mission-driven executives. You will find everything you need at revenuespeaks.com. Because communication isn't overhead; it's infrastructure, and in the end, revenue speaks.

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