Ep. 1 – Building Brands and Taking Risks, with Nick Stagge

Transcript:

Intro:

Welcome to another episode of The Elusive Consumer. Today, Ellie is talking with the one and only Nick Stagge, founder of The Grounded Company. Join us as Nick discusses starting his company with a single post, how he helps companies build their brands, and the importance of taking risks. Let’s get started on The Elusive Consumer.

Ellie Tehrani:

Hi Nick, and welcome to The Elusive Consumer. It’s really good to have you here today.

Nick Stagge:

Thanks. It’s good to be here.

Ellie Tehrani:

So my question to you was just if you could start us off by telling us a bit more about your personal and professional journey and what brought you here today.

Nick Stagge:

I mean, I certainly don’t have the, I think, the interesting story that you do about living and then experiencing different cultures and finding your home. I think my story is maybe quite the opposite. I grew up 10 minutes from where I live. I’ve traveled the whole world and realized that I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. But home is where I want to be home. Homes, it is the right place for me. So I think the beautiful thing about home is it can be a place that can make you excited to leave and even more excited to come home, come back, right?

That’s where I’ve been personally. My career has been much more, I think, in line with your kind of experience growing up. I’ve done a lot of everything. In fact, when I was 13 or 14, I got my very first job and my mom always told me, “If you don’t like where you work, be professional as you quit. Quit and do the job until your last moment, so you can leave with your head held high. But don’t stay anywhere.”

You don’t have to be loyal to a place that is not fulfilling what you need personally. And so by the time I was 19, I’d had over 60 jobs. I mean, you name it, I have done it. And then I found a job that fulfilled me at 19 years old, and I stuck around for a long time. I stuck around for a decade. And for the vast majority of that I was happy. But then the last few years, I wasn’t all that happy, but I was afraid of maybe what was next. I felt trapped.

I felt like, “Oh, after six, seven, eight years in one industry, one company, I don’t know what I’d have to offer anyone else. I let the self-doubt just take over. And truthfully, I had been a top performer. I had broken records in every level. I had been promoted up the ranks as the youngest to do A, B, and C over and over and over. And then I hit a brick wall and it was like, I’m not performing anymore. And I couldn’t figure out why until it was too late. I was let go from that company.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me because it forced me to make this change that I had been so afraid of making. And the change was a whole new career path. It was a different industry. Everything was different about it. In a lot of ways it was humbling and hard for me, at 29 years old to step in… The job I had been let go from, I was managing $30 million a year and 400 employees. And the next job I got, I took a third of the pay and I had a coordinator title.

Frankly, I was kind of like the office runt, and it was humiliating. It was really difficult for me just to make ends meet. I would leave that job and I would go work night jobs and no one knew about it because I was too embarrassed to tell them. My career has progressed since then and I’ve done many things. I’ve jumped from industries. I’ve jumped from roles and departments. And this last round I realized I think what I like the most is building something and having the autonomy to build. I’m going to try my own thing. So two years ago I made a post on LinkedIn that I was starting my own business. I’ve built it in public and here we are.

Ellie Tehrani:

Wow, there’s so many things I want to probe more on. I don’t even know where to start, including, you talked about success and what you defined as success and how you felt embarrassed during certain times. I think that’s a topic that is so important to come back to because a lot of people are constantly judging themselves on that particular topic. But before we go into that, I love the story of how you started The Grounded Company and how you set up this post. I think it’s incredibly brave and it’s very risky. It’s a risky move. Why do you think that the organizations, and maybe you can talk about those two organizations that signed up with you after that post and why you think they chose to go with you over others and trust you with their business?

Nick Stagge:

It’s such an interesting… I don’t know that I really know the answer, but I had come from a whole bunch of different things. And when I wanted to do my own, it was like, “Yeah, I want to build my own thing.” I mean, how quickly things change. I was like, “I don’t want to work for anyone and I don’t want anyone to work for me.” I don’t want to manage employees. I just want to do my own thing. So I went back to what my career had led me up to and I made this post saying, “I’m leaving this company. I’m starting my own just fractional CMO role.”

I didn’t even really know what that was going to look like. I somewhat fudged in like, I’ve got room for one more client. I had no clients. And that’s the marketer in you right there. You got to create urgency and FOMO. But the first phone call I got, ironically, was a client from the company I had just left. I had left in writing with… There was no non-compete. And so this company came to me and said, “Look, we were working with you at the last company, or we were talking about working with you at the last company. Let’s just work with you now.” And it was Breville.

I mean, they’re a billion dollar international global business, and my role was not as a fractional CMO. They were like, “We know that you have a lot of experience in retail. You have a lot of experience in advocacy. You have a lot of experience in channel marketing. We want you to help develop our channel marketing and retail education program as a consultant.”

Again, I’m like, “Well, I want to do this fractional CMO thing, but yeah, of course, I’m going to take it. I need my first client.” And then the next phone call I got was from someone who had worked with me at Zumiez, which is the company I’d worked at for 10 years from 19 to 29. And he calls me and he is like, “Hey, I saw you’re doing fractional CMO work. I have a client who does not need fractional CMO work, but they also need help in retail. I know you’ve been out of retail for a decade, but I think you could really help them.”

So I was like, “Yeah, sure. What the hell? I’ll take my second client.” I landed those two deals in the first 24 hours of my post. I guess the common thread there is I had relationships with those people already that some of which I had been nurturing for 15 years. In fact, Mikey, the guy who called me and was like, “I have this client who I think could use you.” He and I got on a call together and built my pitch deck for them. He took it to them, pitched it for me, and then called me and was like, “You got the deal.” I had never even met these guys.

So I do think it goes back to how you build your network, and not just stacking followers or connections, but how you build a reputation and a relationship with as many great people as you can.

Ellie Tehrani:

Right. I guess that goes in hand with what you do with your customers. You help them build their brand and their network and how to appeal to their customers. Right?

Nick Stagge:

I was just going to say, the interesting piece in all of this is my intention was to be an outsourced CMO.

Ellie Tehrani:

Yeah.

Nick Stagge:

My first two clients were really outsourced channel strategy advocacy. And the third phone call I got was from one of the coolest marketing agencies in Utah, if not maybe the planet called the Harmon Brothers. And these guys are making like-

Ellie Tehrani:

Oh, wow.

Nick Stagge:

… a million dollar video for clients. They’re responsible for Squatty Potty video, the purple mattress videos. They make high end videos that crush. They were the third phone call and they’re like, “Hey, we have a lot of clients who want to work with us, but they can’t afford us because they’re just smaller. So we’re spinning up this new business model where we’re bringing in outsourced fractional CMOs and we’re assigning them to these small brands, and they’re going to work with smaller agencies to grow these clients big enough so Harmon Brothers can work with them.”

And at that point, Ellie, I’m like, “Well, that’s the outsourced CMO stuff I’m talking about. That’s great.” And Theron Harmon, one of the… There’s seven brothers who run Harmon Brothers. He’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry if I misspoke. No, we already have all of our outsourced CMOs. That’s not why I’m calling you. I’m calling you because you own a creative agency. We need a creative agency to make content for all of these clients that our CMOs are working with.”

I don’t own a creative agency. I’m colorblind and I’m not a designer. And I was like, “Yeah, Theron, I absolutely own a creative agency.” And that is what Grounded has become. I mean, we have a team of talented people. You don’t have me designing. But it’s just kind of interesting how sideways my idea went so quickly. But I think because of that moment where I was let go at Zumiez, I’ve been able to throw fear to the side and just be like, “Yeah, we’ll make it work. We’ll figure it out. Sure.” And so I said yes, and here we are.

Ellie Tehrani:

That is, again, going back to the whole idea of being brave and how you’ve shaped your whole career around taking risks. It’s very refreshing and I think it will be very useful for a lot of people to hear that, particularly younger audiences who might look to shape their career and not quite sure what to do next that sometimes you just have to believe in yourself and take risks that maybe you didn’t believe that you would be doing with yourself in your career.

Nick Stagge:

Whether you take the risk or not does not mean that the risk is not there. Me sitting at Zumiez for years, not taking a chance on myself, not pushing myself to do something different was actually a bigger risk than making the move. But because I didn’t make the decision, I thought I was avoiding risk. Really all I was doing was multiplying the risk and the downside when crap hit the fan. So I’ve learned you can make the decision or not, but you might as well be in control of it. So I decided to take it.

Ellie Tehrani:

So talk to me about being part of the larger organizations and how that shaped you and how that helped your experience in approaching and setting up your own business.

Nick Stagge:

Well, I think it’s a buzzword now, but I learned at my time at Zumiez that I like building. I knew that pretty young. Even before I got to Zumiez, and I had 60 different jobs as soon as the job became mundane or, “Oh, I know exactly what I’m doing and now I’m just doing it over and over again,” I got really, really bored. I think that’s why I got bored at Zumiez is I was creating so much and then I hit a point where I really couldn’t create anymore and I just stuck it out.

So when I went to the bigger organizations, and I’ve worked for big companies. I’ve worked for Skullcandy and GoPro both pre and post IPO, kind of in their heydays. That’s just dumb luck. That had nothing to do with me. But what I learned is I really put a lot of effort into identifying gaps inside the business and then approaching those as if I was my own business owner.

So I really embraced this idea of being an entrepreneur and learning and focusing on how to build a department because I thought if I can build a department inside a company, I could probably build a company. It’s not completely apples to apples, but there’s so much that’s alike. If you’re building a brand new department, you need money. So you’ve got to go fight for budget, which is no different than a small business owner going and trying to raise capital.

You have to put a business plan together. You have to convince the CFO of a billion dollar company to siphon out $5 million on an unknown department. Because you are building something from scratch, you have to understand what your competitors are doing and really look at a market research and analysis. You have to figure out how do I get people in other departments to buy into my idea enough that they’re going to spend some of their time working on the initiatives outside of their scope.

That’s a lot like going and getting freelancers or convincing someone to join you as a co-founder. So being an entrepreneur, I think made me feel much more prepared to start my own company than had I just stepped in and been like, “What’s my exact role? I’m going to do that and then I’m going to go home.”

Ellie Tehrani:

And in terms of your organization now, again, going back to being less conventional with The Grounded Company, for instance, there’s no website at the moment. Is that a strategic move from your end?

Nick Stagge:

Oh my goodness.

Ellie Tehrani:

Or is that just you are trying to stay lean or talk to us about that?

Nick Stagge:

Yeah. There’s the answer that I’ll tell people and then there’s some of the reality behind it, and then there’s an ugly truth behind it. So what I tell clients is, “Hey, look, I could build my own thing or I could build yours. Your choice. You’re going to pay for either one. So do you want me to build mine or do you want me to build yours?” I kid you not, every potential client I talk to, they’re like, “That’s freaking awesome. I love that.”

I recently had a founder of a company go, “I want to hire you because of that reason alone, which is wild, right? Now, that’s the spin. The reality is when I got that phone call from Theron, I was not going to build a creative agency. And within three weeks of us having a handshake arrangement, I had 15 clients and it was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m one person. I’m not a designer. I got to figure this out.” So my priorities were other things. My priorities were not selling because frankly I didn’t have a revenue problem.

And then as I scaled my team up and we’ve continued to grow, the truth is I’ve never done a cold outbound message. I’ve never run a paid ad. I’ve never slipped into somebody’s DMs. I’ve never gone to an event and shaken babies and kissed hands. The only way deals come to me is through referrals, partnerships, and our organic social media.

Now, the ugly, ugly truth is if you’re a creative agency and you have a website that is not absolutely dialed, I think it does more harm than good. My team has been working on my website for six months. We have not launched it because I’m like, “It’s not ready.” And I’m a big believer in taking a risk. I tell my clients all the time, “80% today is better than a hundred percent tomorrow. Launch it. Move it. Go.”

But there is this reality that if there’s one thing that is not stunning on my website, I think it does more harm than good. In that scenario, we don’t have a website maybe because I’m a little afraid of it.

Ellie Tehrani:

Right. That’s interesting. I love the honesty to that, and I love the spin also.

Nick Stagge:

The spin has been nice.

Ellie Tehrani:

Yeah, I bet. So again, going back to how you built your business and I mean your creative agency and you’re advising clients on what to do to get a better reach to their customers, let’s talk about the consumers. The consumers of today versus the consumers of tomorrow. You talk a bit about paid marketing, traditional marketing approaches or business development approaches versus the newer models.

So you guys have started to do a little bit of TikTok and other social media campaigns. Talk to me about that and how you think today’s consumers and tomorrow’s consumers are viewing that and how they view brands that are using social media versus those who don’t.

Nick Stagge:

Yeah, I think it’s not a perfect formula, but I think most consumers, especially when you’re talking about an e-commerce D2C brand, they want a combination. Some formula of being entertained, plus feeling like it’s entertainment plus credibility, plus experience. To me, that’s a really solid formula to go, “Okay, I’m going to drop a hundred bucks on this product. I’m going to give them my money.” It is funny how each one of those three things are changing dramatically.

I mean, look at the entertainment side of it. 10 years ago, you could have one video that was highly produced. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you could run it for a year and you could clean up on it because the consumer was okay with that. Well, with social media and everything being on demand now, customers have the attention span of a moth.

It’s like bright light and they go to the next. And so they need to be entertained constantly. Well, there was a shift where it was like, “Okay, look, we just need a lot of content.” And the shift went from… And I’m speaking in big blocks. It’s a much more gradual than this, but it went from these Super Bowl-esque commercials to it’s just about quantity. Just cram the feed full of anything and quality doesn’t really matter. It’s fine. It’s just get it in front of them.

Now, all of a sudden your iPhone shoots in 4K and you have content creators that are 16 years old and they’re producing stunning, stunning storytelling and visuals. It’s swinging back towards more polished work, but it still needs to be just… You can never turn it off. Right? So I think brands are struggling with, “Well, how do I produce high quality stuff in mass quantity without spending a lot of money?” But that is being answered more and more, and more for people.

We were doing a recap for one of our clients, and in December alone, we had delivered over 300 pieces of content for them inside our monthly retainer. Some of those were social media videos. Some of those are emails or a landing page, but that customer is not spending 50 grand a month with us. Nowhere near that. So you can now create a high quality content in mass without having to go out and take a second mortgage out on your home. But that’s the new shift I think that’s happening just in the entertainment bucket of that formula alone.

Ellie Tehrani:

Right. So let me ask you about the flip side of this shift towards more accessible, I guess, for certain audiences media. How do you then target or reach out to audiences that might not be on these platforms? Say whether it’s older or less affluent or particular ethnic demographics? How do you currently build in that whole diversity aspect and in your business model? And how do you encourage your customers and your clients to do the same to ensure that you’re reaching a wider audience?

Nick Stagge:

Yeah. Well, I don’t love the answer that I’m going to share with you and that is I think people… Digital marketing has made… It has helped give marketers a larger budget and the ability to go ask the CFO to make bigger investments. It’s also made it… But that the caveat is they get the bigger budget, they get the larger investment when you can attribute the return.

If you can’t attribute the return, the CFO is like not a chance where 20 years ago you couldn’t really attribute a whole lot of anything. And so the CFO was like, “I trust if you believe that this is going to work and we’ll just look at revenue as it comes in and we’ll see what happens.” Because attribution is the real entryway into budget, most brands that are looking to broaden their range are still doing so on social media.

They’re still doing it with digital paid ads. They’re just saying like, “Well, how do we expand into this new ICP or this new value prop or these elements? But guys, we still got to see the same return.” You’re like, “Well, you’re not going to see the same return. They’re a net new audience. It’s an audience that isn’t necessarily directly connected to your brand just yet.”

So the conversation is always about broadening your audience. I mean, we tell brands all the time, Q1 and Q2 is about building your customer portfolio, your prospect lead list, because Q3 and Q4, you need to then re-market and run the hell out of them to maximize peak season and make your year. But to your point, there are people that are less likely to engage, to view, to engage or to convert in those now kind of modern day must have digital platforms.

So how you do that, it varies from brand to brand, I think. But a big part of it, I believe, is understanding how to tap into word of mouth. I’m not saying influencer, but you see neighbors buying a lot of the same things or using the same plumber when they’re refinishing their basement. It’s because they talk and people connect that way. So when you’re trying to interact with people outside of the go-to standards now, word-of-mouth marketing is huge. I think there’s still a time and a place for out of home, finding a way to capture attribution against those is the real challenge.

Ellie Tehrani:

Yeah. I guess that leads me to my other question about relevance and how to stay relevant for brands, both large organizations as well as startups. And you mentioned credibility earlier. Well first, that’s two questions really, but how do you build credibility as an unknown, as a new starter, and how do you stay relevant and compete against the new flashy items, the new flashy services?

Nick Stagge:

Yeah. I think one of the ways you do that is on the backs of others. I think that’s why influencer marketing is so big. Or you see partnerships and collabs between brands where they’re helping reach out to new audiences and also vouching for one another are really important. I think another element that can backfire frankly, but that works really well is inside your marketing budget, when you’re launching a new product, one of the very first questions I ask is, “Okay. What’s your overall budget for this product launch? What percentage of that budget is around seating?”

You have to seed product. Stance socks, I think did a wonderful job of this. They used to go to trade shows and they would say, “Hey, if you give us your old pair of socks, we’ll give you a brand new pair for free.” And they had a big, huge garbage can and they wouldn’t throw the garbage out, they just let piles of stinky socks pile up. It was a line of people and they were seeding it. And you were like, “Wow, these socks are great. These are wonderful.”

Well, then over time they get to a point where they’re like, “Well, we don’t need to just give our socks away anymore, but we still need credibility.” Clarke Miyasaki goes out and lands a partnership with the NBA and they’re the official sock brand of the NBA. There’s some credibility.

I believe one of the downsides, if you over seed like I worked at Skullcandy and we had an enormous seeding budget. I couldn’t give everything away fast enough. You wanted it, I was like, “Here’s 10 pairs of headphones. Come on.” But because they never capped it, there wasn’t a real strategy on when to give and when not to give. It became this world where frankly a lot of people were like, “I know how to get free pairs. I know how to get a free pair of headphones.” And it got to a point where it was also like, “Well, they’re giving them away because they’re kind of junky. They’re not junky. They’re good headphones. I haven’t worked there in a decade. I’m still wearing them. They’re good headphones.”

But that backfired. It’s weird how the exact same strategy can really work when it’s executed properly or how it can backfire when it’s executed poorly.

Ellie Tehrani:

Interesting. I guess I want to hear a little bit more about what you are doing now in terms of strategizing for the future for your own organization that you are also advising your clients. What does the future look like for your company?

Nick Stagge:

For Grounded specifically, it’s so neat to be a part of so many just incredible brands. We work with Harmon Brothers. We work with Dixxon Flannel. We work with Chirp. I mean, we just have incredible brand partners that we get to advise and work with, but also, Ellie, we get to learn from. We get to learn so much from these brands. So part of me is looking at, “Well, I’m learning a lot from these brands. I’m helping I’m advising.”

I have a team that is executing e-commerce strategies and we know what works and what doesn’t work. Maybe at some point, The Grounded Company needs to fund its own e-comm brand and put our own money where our mouth is and say like, “Well, if we can help our clients, we should be able to build our own.” And, “Hey, if I built my own, I can build yours as well.”

So one thing that we’re working on actively is how we would build our own brand and what that would look like. We have plans that in 2023, we will launch a brand. It would not be called The Grounded Company, but we would launch a brand and put these learnings into practice. So that that’s one side.

I will say the other vision for Grounded is there’s a lot that goes on with e-comm. There’s a lot, and it’s not just creative, it’s everything from product sourcing and fulfillment to how you operate within Amazon to… The list just goes on and on and on. Paid advertising, email distribution, yada, yada, yada. Where it makes sense, Grounded is starting to spin up sister agencies where there’s redundancy. I think about it like a Venn diagram. I don’t want to get outside of something that overlaps, but we are expanding our services via different companies.

So last year we launched a video production company because quite frankly, it is a different skillset. It is a different process. Everything is different from than that of a typical design agency. So we launched Chop Shop and Chop Shop operates as a DBA under Grounded, but it’s doing well. We’re in the process this month of launching a sister agency called The Underground that is really focused on fast and affordable creative for startup brands that can’t afford Grounded but still need that sort of work. There’s a lot that we’re thinking about and that we’re trying, some of which will work, some of which will fail and I’m totally okay with either scenario, but we’re swinging big.

Ellie Tehrani:

I’d love to talk a bit more about the whole idea of you’re all into content creative and I’d like to hear more about how you ensure that content converts, because that’s the tricky part and how to justify putting more investment into content marketing and creative when it’s so hard to show at times for businesses and brands that it has that ROI that we talked about before. How do you ensure that different campaigns do in fact convert and what have you seen in the past based on the organization that you’ve worked with, the organizations rather has been most successful?

Nick Stagge:

Yeah. I think the only way you can consistently move up into the right is through never-ending testing. I even was drawing this with my team this morning. You’re going to see peaks and valleys. I don’t care how good of an agency or a brand you are, you’re going to see peaks and valleys in terms of campaign success, marketing, efficiencies, revenue. But when you step back, you should be able to look at that and draw the trend line up into the right. That’s what’s important. You can’t live too long in the dips and you can’t expect to live too long in the valleys because then it just plateaus.

So in order to grow, you have to suffer through some crap to get there. With a lot of our clients, we recommend running a blitz where… In fact we have a new client we signed this year. It’s Naboso and they are such a cool product for feet health.

We’re like, “Look, we think that there’s a whole range of customers that you’re not touching that you could and there’s a whole range of value props that we could probably win with. Let’s pick five. Combination of five of these value props and or customer per personas. Within each one, we’re going to create five unique ads. And these ads we’re very systematically creating something that’s funny, something that’s serious, something that’s just beautifully designed, something that’s maybe third-party validation. And then the fifth one is like a miscellaneous idea.

So we systematically build five ads against each of those value props or personas and we work with the ad buyer to then run those as ad sets and we start testing. And you don’t have to put a lot of money into each ad, you really don’t. But all of a sudden you start getting the data back and you’re like, “Oh, when we talk to people about plantar fasciitis, funny doesn’t work.” Go figure.

But sometimes you’re like, “Wait, that worked?” It’s always evolving. We test not only those value props and the ads, but we test those things across multiple channels. So Odyssey bars, there are prebiotic protein bars specifically centered around gut health. When we run paid ads, we’ve identified a formula that works because we went through this blitz and we were like, “It’s really about mommy influencers who they’re dropping their kids off at school and then they’re going to the gym. They care about eating healthy, and it’s all about ingredients and feeling good and being fit.”

We’re like, “Cool, let’s try that on organic.” It tanked. It sucked. No one cared. Well, we did a blitz and we found out if we just hit the streets and we start asking people questions that you wouldn’t think about asking other people, we literally walk up and ask people like, “Hey, do you think I’ve pooped today? Have you pooped today?” Those videos kill it, absolutely crush it. And it works inside this whole ecosystem and funnel for Odyssey bars.

So I think the way that you drive consistent up into the right momentum and efficiency is by never ending testing. Once we identify the formula within a value prop or value props that work or don’t work, we just keep doing that. We just keep going over and over again. And if you find something, you replicate it until it dies. But as you’re replicating, you’re trying new things because you’re eventually that thing’s going to die. I can’t just put all the eggs in that basket.

So there’s a lot of things I think that you can do there to drive success and to keep things moving forward. But it means that you have to, one, be committed to testing a lot. Two, you have to create constantly. We put every single client through a two-week sprint. Every two weeks, we are reviewing the past two weeks performance strategizing on what we’re going to deliver in the next two weeks. And by the way, we’re delivering new content every two weeks based on that conversation.

So it’s this steady flow of just that worked, keep it. That didn’t work? Get rid of it. Why didn’t it work? Oh, we think it’s for these four reasons. Okay. Let’s address those in the next sprint and we’ll deliver something new for you. You get in this rhythm and it becomes powerful. Super, super powerful.

Ellie Tehrani:

I love when you talked about the testing aspect, because that’s speaking my language and collecting data. It’s always shocking to me when businesses mention that they don’t invest in actually collecting data on their customers. So it’s like how do you get the information? How do you build resilience? How do you even know which direction to take without that data?

Nick Stagge:

I so agree. Can I say, I think data in terms of ad performance is critical, but there’s other data that you should take into consideration. When I started with Dixxon, it was all about their showroom and their event experience. And they’re pumping so many people through this. I start looking at Google and I’m like, “They’ve got a two-star rating. The product is great, the brand is great. Everyone loves the product online. But when it comes to the face-to-face interaction, it’s a two-star rating.”

Well, you start reading some of the reviews and you’re like, “Okay, great.” The very first thing we put into place is a post-purchase survey. The minute someone buys something in the showroom, their phone dings with a survey and it’s not just one through five, but we’re asking, “Please tell us in paragraph form what you liked, what you didn’t like.”

And in six months we went from a two to a 4.9. We have tens of thousands of reviews in the last year or so and all we did was we asked, and then we would read them, and then we would make changes. We would just do what the customers wanted. It’s not that hard if you use the data.

Ellie Tehrani:

It really isn’t.

Nick Stagge:

Listen to your customers.

Ellie Tehrani:

Yes. You think that would be the first thing brands would do?

Nick Stagge:

You would hope.

Ellie Tehrani:

Yeah, right? I know we don’t have much time, and I’m really keen on hearing more about some of your other ventures and some of your passion projects. So talk to us a little bit about We Are Mind and your advocacy for mental health?

Nick Stagge:

Oh, yeah. The quick and dirty is I’ve struggled with mental health for 30 plus years. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, trauma, you name it. And for the vast majority of those years, I felt completely alone and isolated and no one would understand. I was horrified that I would be judged, marginalized, or overlooked if someone found out that that was my reality. And then for whatever reason, one day I started talking about it.

As soon as I started talking about it, I was like, “Oh yeah, she’s got some of the same experiences I do. Oh yeah, I can relate to that, dude. We share that in common.” I started to realize that it was helping. And then I met now the co-founder… He’s the co-founder of Mind, but we were working together and we got real deep in conversation about this, and we were like, “This is helping so much. We should do something. If this is working for two of us, how do we do this at scale? Or how do we do this for just one other person? Because it could save a life.”

Mind is a pretty loose organization. You’ll see a thought bubble next to my name on social media. The closest connection I could drive is if you see someone with a rainbow emoji next to their name, you know they’re an ally. Well, if you see someone with a thought bubble that they’re an ally for mental health.

We started promoting that and pushing it, and Forbes started partnering with us. We’re hosting events constantly. We sell apparel and merchandise. And through donations, through anything we sell, through any events we run, you name it. Every single dollar that comes into Mind, we turn around and we pay for therapy for people who can’t afford it.

Ellie Tehrani:

I think that’s so great.

Nick Stagge:

It feels pretty good to try to help people.

Ellie Tehrani:

Right. And I like the fact that you are in a way helping people who maybe, I wouldn’t say don’t have a voice, but have a difficulty in raising their voice in certain circumstances and feel stigmatized by that, that you’re helping them find a way through those struggles.

Nick Stagge:

I was just going to say, I think one of the most important things is oftentimes you look at the person who’s struggling with mental health and you’re open up, share. It’s okay. But it’s a two-sided street. And what we’ve learned is we have to… More than even coaching people how to open up about their own struggles with mental health, we have to coach people about how to react when someone opens up. Because when you react and you’re like, “That sucks. Man, that doesn’t feel good and that doesn’t help you want to share more.”

Or if someone goes, “Well, Ellie, are you getting enough sleep? Have you seen a therapist? Have you tried Zoloft? Have you done these things?” You’re like, “Hey, bro, I’ve struggled with this for 30 years. Yeah, I’ve tried drinking water. It’s a little pandering.” And so one of Mind’s big initiatives has been teaching people how to just listen with intent and with empathy and then turn around and say to the person, “Thank you for being brave and courageous and vulnerable in sharing that with me. I know that couldn’t have been easy. It means a lot to me. And God I’m impressed. Thank you.”

Because then you’re telling them like you are safe and you are there for them, and it feels weird at first. And then when you respond that way and you see how it completely takes the bricks out of their backpack, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is awesome.”

Ellie Tehrani:

Right. And I think that ties back to the success that we discussed earlier on. I see more and more now and you hear and all these successful people, whether they’re CEOs or founders, or starting to share more about their own struggles whether that might be mental health or physical health or whatever, and the idea of vulnerability actually being a strength. I think that is a key aspect that we need to emphasize.

I’d like to go back to that because you mentioned when you were younger and suddenly you felt stuck and you were embarrassed, talk to me about that. What is true success to you in the way that you see it today? How do you think that other people should view success that perhaps are going through a little bit of difficulty and how organizations like We Are Mind might help with that?

Nick Stagge:

It’s a good question and I think my answer has changed a lot over the years. I’ve tried to simplify my answer as much as possible. Where I’m at today is true success is being comfortable with my true self. If I am comfortable with my true self, I can die a happy man. It doesn’t mean I have to make a certain amount of money. It doesn’t mean I have to fit into a certain size T-shirt. It doesn’t mean I have to have a boat or whatever. It just means like, “Am I comfortable with myself and am I proud of the person that I am?” And if I can say yes to that, nothing else really matters.

Ellie Tehrani:

What do you do today to share that sentiment with your team, with your customers, and encourage brands and your clients to do the same with their consumers ultimately?

Nick Stagge:

So this might be a cheesy analogy, but with my team specifically, we talk a lot about being the Pando forest. And I don’t know if you know anything about the Pando forest.

Ellie Tehrani:

I do not, no.

Nick Stagge:

Oh my gosh, Ellie, I’m obsessed with the Pando forest. It’s on the border of Utah and Colorado, and it is both the largest and oldest single living organism on the planet. So you walk in and it is a forest of Quakey trees, and it is miles and miles, and miles of this forest. And what scientists have discovered is all of these trees are popping up out of the ground and they’re individually beautiful when you look at them by themself.

They’re a snowflake. They’re their own personality, being. They’re stretching for light, and they’re stretching for growth, and they’re thriving. But when you look under the surface, deep, under the surface, all of their roots are connected into one root ball. It is one living organism.

Ellie Tehrani:

Wow.

Nick Stagge:

This forest. So what they’ve found is so cool. If one tree gets sick, gets a disease, is not getting enough sunlight, all the other trees send nutrients through the root system to that tree to help it stand alone.

Ellie Tehrani:

Oh, I love that.

Nick Stagge:

When we bring someone on to the team, we’re like, “Look, we are the Pando forest. We are the root ball underneath, and you are the individual tree, and we want you to be you. Whoever you are, whatever you care about, whatever you believe, be that and be effing proud of that, and know that deep down, we got your back. We’re here to help each other and we send help when someone needs it.” And so it’s a cheesy analogy. I get it. But the idea of celebrating people for being uniquely their own and also being a part of a team that it’s kind of like the gangster quote like, “You mess with one of us. You’re going to see all of us. We’ll come get you.” I think it’s a beautiful thing.

Ellie Tehrani:

That’s a beautiful story. I think that takes us back to where we started with everyone wants to feel that sense of belonging and community, but you also need to allow for each individual to have that unique aspect. I think that goes to consumers as well, and basically celebrating their uniqueness while making them feel part of a community. If a brand can do that, I think they’ll be truly successful.

Nick Stagge:

I think so.

Ellie Tehrani:

I love that. That was a beautiful story. I thought for a moment you were going to talk about the forest bathing therapy. Have you heard about that?

Nick Stagge:

No.

Ellie Tehrani:

There’s a whole saying in therapy around it in Japan where people go and walk into forests to just heal, basically. Just walking through forests make you feel better. And I can relate to that. I grew up around forests, so I love that and I’m going to look into the Pando forest next. Thank you for sharing that.

Nick Stagge:

You should, yeah. Of course.

Ellie Tehrani:

Before we wrap up, there’s two questions I want to ask you. First of all, is there anything else that you think would be useful for companies and brands to know in terms of what to do differently and better to connect with their consumers, both in terms of today and tomorrow? And then final question, I’ll ask you after you’ve answered that one.

Nick Stagge:

Yeah. I would just become obsessed with finding ways to ask and to listen. I think the more you can do that, the better off you become. Asking and listening. Think about different ways of doing this. At The Grounded Company, we actually have something… We don’t openly talk about with our clients, but we have what we call a client health score. We look at all of the activities that happen in a month that we deem important to having a healthy relationship with the client, and we rate them.

Every single month, we rank our customers and we do it in a spreadsheet and we look at each customer individually and we’re like, “Oh, it looks like we’re dropping the ball in this area with this customer. We probably ought to fix that. Right?” But then we also look at it the other direction and we say, “This thing that’s important to us for one customer is important for all. How are we doing across the board with all of our customers?” And all of a sudden you might be surprised because you’re like, “I thought that was only an issue with one client.” But then you’re like, “No, that’s an issue with every client. That’s our issue. That’s our problem. We have to fix that immediately.

So that might be a weird way of saying it, but I think it’s an example of a way that you can ask and listen without walking up to your customer and being like, “So what do you think about us? And tell me what you think.” Right? There’s a whole bunch of ways you can do it, but the core comes down to ask and listen. It’s as complicated and as simple as that.

Ellie Tehrani:

And final question for you, which you have mentioned throughout the interview, but what would you pick. If you had to pick one word that or one quality that has led you to be the successful person that you are today, if you had to pick one quality, what would that be?

Nick Stagge:

I tell my team a lot I don’t have a lot of individual skillsets. The one thing I’ve somehow been lucky or… I don’t know if it’s talented. I don’t know. I find that I’m frequently, often most of the time surrounded by incredibly good people. I mean, they’re high integrity. They’re full of empathy. They are hardworking. They’re compassionate, they are studious. They are chock-full of integrity. And on top of that, they’re also pretty damn good at their job. They have real skills, and talents and capabilities.

I think the thing that I’ve done is rather than try to compete with those people, I try to surround myself with those people and in a lot of ways lift me up. I genuinely look back at every team I’ve worked with and I’m just beyond grateful for the people that I’ve been able to rub shoulders with in my career. I think that’s not everyone, unfortunately, is that fortunate.

Ellie Tehrani:

So I guess your strength there has been in finding the right kind of people to connect with and surround yourself with.

Nick Stagge:

Or just weaseling my way into those people, but yeah.

Ellie Tehrani:

I like that. I like that. But you’re a humble quality as well, I think is what has made you so likable with clients and your colleagues, I’m sure.

Nick Stagge:

Well, I think we just try to be ourselves. That’s the best we can do.

Ellie Tehrani:

Thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time and joining us today.

About Our Guest