Clevr Support Call - The Importance of Celebration

In this Clevr Support Call we discuss the importance of celebrating your wins (big or small). It is easy to get stuck in the "doing" of things and forget to pause and celebrate, so we dialogued on the following with those who joined us live, and encourage you to ask yourself these questions too. 

✓ Do you hesitate (or don't even think about) taking a pause to celebrate your wins? 

✓ What are you doing to feel more fulfilled and celebratory? 

✓ How do you surrender to the sweetness of life?

✓ What can you do to celebrate all you have achieved (and make it feel decedent)? 

Check out the replay to hear how others responded for inspiration, and note you are not alone if finding ways to celebrate feels challenging. 

Clevr Talk - Building an Iconic Presence with Alex Kushneir

Our Clevr Talk with Alex Kushneir was a great conversation about building an iconic presence. We dug into Alex's expertise on story telling, and showing up on social media- (and how)! You can see how genuine he is sharing his journey and his love for story telling. His focus on helping others share their story if they are a personal brand or business brand is the gifting he has leveraged to help people attract their ideal clients and service their mission with ease. 

During the conversation, Alex shared the following insights to Kareen and Jeff's questions regarding the impact of producing videos that create a connect with your viewer, and stay on purpose. He answered:

✓ What is the framework behind producing video content that generates engagement?

✓ How (and why) to show up on social media if you are not comfortable being on camera?

✓ What are the different methods you have between building a personal brand and a business brand via video content?

✓ Why is the back story of a personal brand important to share?

You will see from his dialogue with Kareen and Jeff in the replay that Alex is fully transparent and always tries his best to be of service. If you are curious on how video production from Icon Media could be of service to you, we encourage you to connect with Alex and find out. 

About Alex Kushneir: 

For the past 11 years, Alex Kushneir has established himself as a powerhouse producer in digital video and television production, developing his skills at companies like Cheddar, ABC, NBC, Al Jazeera, and The Huffington Post. Co-Owner of Icon Media, Alex Kushneir, and his team are leading the way in purpose-driven content creation. Developing some of the biggest social impact videos in the world and working with fortune 500 brands, entrepreneurs, authors, and CEOs to make a positive impact on millions of lives. We are so excited to welcome Alex to the network, where he will be talking to us about Building an Iconic Presence. 

✓ LinkedIn

✓ Instagram

Clevr Support Call - Retrospective Q1'2022 with Kareen Walsh

As individuals and business owners, always heads down in the doing, we need to set aside time to pause, assess, and ensure we are stepping into aligned action. On this week's Clevr Support Call Kareen Walsh facilitated her favorite way to help you get clear on what to do next, the Retrospective Exercise! Doing this quarterly is a great way to make sure you accomplish what your set out to do this year.

If you want the prompts to do this exercise alongside Kareen, watch this video for the facilitation to walk through this exercise and gain the value you need to stay in aligned action. 

This method of assessing your progress against you goal starts with writing out the intension you had this year, or picking one of the goals you are working towards. 

✓ Write out the intension or goal you plan to assess 

✓ What are the wins or things you want to keep doing when it comes to your actions against this goal?

✓ What you need to stop doing to achieve your goal

✓ What you need to start to achieve your goal

✓ Pick one action you plan to take next from the questions you answered against this goal, and write it down with a by when date. 

You can apply this practice weekly, monthly, quarterly would be the maximum amount of time before you run through it again. We will make sure to have it scheduled the end of Q2'2022 for our support call so you can join us live for the next one. 

As you have progress against your goals, share them with us! We love to celebrate you and walk alongside your path. 

About Kareen Walsh

Clevr Talk - Tiny Business, Big Money with Elaine Pofeldt

Our Clevr Talk with Elaine Pofeldt was a great deep dive into her new book Tiny Business, Big Money. Imagine talking to over 100 entrepreneurs across different industries and pulling their lessons learned and methods to earning 7 figures together, that is the knowledge base that Elaine shares with us! If you have ever thought about an entrepreneurial journey or recently started one and you want to save time and money learning from those who have gone before you, grab her book!

Throughout the talk, Elaine dug into what it truly takes to become an entrepreneur, and how to scale your business creatively. Elaine pulled some great examples from her book to give the networks some tangible steps. 

As we opened the floor up for questions from our community, Elaine answered:

✓ What should the first step be to become an entrepreneur? 

✓ As a solopreneur, what should you think about before hiring?

✓ What are some money saving ways to do market research?

Watch the replay to listen to the full conversation. 

About Elaine Pofeldt: 

Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in small business and entrepreneurship. She is the author of Tiny Business, Big Money for W.W. Norton & Co. (February 15, 2022), a look at how seven-figure businesses with small teams are reinventing the small business landscape, and The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business (Random House), a guide to how solopreneurs are breaking $1 million in revenue in businesses with no employees except the owners. Her work has appeared in FORTUNE, Money, CNBC, Inc., Forbes, Crain’s New York Business, and many other business publications. She has contributed to the Economist Intelligence Unit. She is also a ghostwriter/collaborative editor. 

As a senior editor at FORTUNE Small Business, where she worked for eight years, Elaine was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for her features and ran the magazine’s annual business plan competition. Elaine graduated from Yale University with a BA in English. She lives in in New Jersey with her husband and their four children and in her free time enjoys taekwondo, yoga and long walks.

✓Elaine's latest book: Tiny Business, Big Money

✓ Elaine's first book: Million Dollar One Person Business

✓ Elaine's website

✓ Forbes articles

✓ LinkedIn

Clevr Talk - Scaling Your Business with Terry Rice 

Our Clevr Talk with Terry Rice was such a great conversation about Scaling Your Business. Being able to dialogue on creating a business out of leveraging your knowledge and know how is something the founders of the Clevr Network are quite familiar with.  Terry spoke about his journey with self employment, how he realized that trading his time for money was not scalable, and instead leveraging what he created through his content and POV could be a monetized business that could scale.

His success comes from his curiosity to learn, taking his lessons learned, and sharing it with others to benefit from. As an avid educator and speaker, Terry loves when he is asked new questions because it allows him to create more content.

As we opened the floor up for questions from our community, Terry answered:

✓ How to authentically create content that sells 

✓ How to tap into your community to build lasting business connections

✓ Why it is so important to properly price your offerings

✓ How to stay consistent with content creation

Terry will be launching his own podcast sharing conversations of entrepreneurship and scaling businesses in the coming months, we will be sure to share that link with you to learn more.

Watch the replay to listen to the full conversation. 

About Terry Rice:

Terry Rice is a Business Development Consultant and Staff Writer at Entrepreneur magazine. He's also the host of Launch Your Business, a podcast that helps entrepreneurs start their business, save time and make better decisions.  His primary focus is helping business professionals leverage high-performance tools, apps and routines so they can scale their business without sacrificing their health or personal life. Terry is also an instructor at New York University and General Assembly. His previous experience includes marketing consulting roles at both Adobe and Facebook.

Website: terryrice.co

Instagram/Twitter: @itsterryrice

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-rice/

Clevr Talk - Defining Your Career Mashup with Connie Steele

This Clevr Talk helped our network understand the fluid future of work. Connie breaks down what Defining Your Career Mashup really means by answering some burning questions. Some of the questions asked during the call, that you also might be wondering:

✓ How do you define the future of work? 

✓ Is having secondary and tertiary avenues of work important? 

✓ What are the traits that leaders will be stepping into in order to steer these new environments?

✓ How can we adapt to the ever evolving future of work?

Watch the recorded talk so you can get the answers to these questions, and more! 

About Connie Steele:

Clevr Talk - Retrospective with Kareen Walsh

This Clevr talk is a Retrospective on 2021 facilitated by Kareen Walsh to help you close out the year celebrating your wins and start to plan for 2022 taking aligned action. Kareen walks through her goal setting practice and prompts the group to follow along.

The method of goal setting that Kareen walks through includes:

✓ Establishing your goal

✓ Importance of celebrating wins as you work through your goal

✓ What you need to stop doing to achieve your goal

✓ What you need to start to achieve your goal

✓ Breaking down your goal into bite sized pieces 

Watch the recorded talk so that you can step into aligned action in 2022. 

About Kareen Walsh

This Clevr Talk helped our network define the DNA of their personal brand by learning the framework that Elizabeth Stephens from BrandBuilders Group uses with their mission driven client base. This method helped us understand how to build approachable and authentic personal brands that stem from our personal mission. It is so approachable!

Some of the questions asked during the call, that you also might be wondering:

✓ How do you determine what your Brand DNA is?

✓ Why is establishing your personal brand important?

✓ How do you build your personal brand that allows you to transition through different roles in business?

✓ What are some tactics for someone who is moving from executive in someone else's company, to running their own?

Watch the recorded talk so you can get the answers to these questions, and more! Elizabeth graciously offered a Free Brand Call for the members in our network to get 1:1 time with her and help assess how to enhance your personal brand going forward. Use the link above to book a direct Brand Call with her. 

About Elizabeth Stephens:

Elizabeth Stephens is a keynote speaker, personal branding expert, and the Director of Community at The Brand Builders Group.  She has worked with clients ranging from 7-figure entrepreneurs, NYT Bestselling authors, Top Ranked Podcast Hosts to Reality TV stars and everyone in between to build their influence, impact and income.

 She is a sought after personal brand strategist and community networker who leverages quick wins with the long game in mind. Elizabeth has helped craft TED talks (one with tens of thousands of views in the first few weeks of its release), written expert bios that resulted in 5X original speaking fees, aligned personal brands in a way that led to 7-figure launches, and helped to close business deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with clear and powerful personal brand messaging.

She knows that you can only expand your brand as deep and you connect with your network and is committed to helping people connect to their uniqueness and, in turn, connect it to others.

Clevr Talk - Build Your Executive Presence with Kim Kaupe

Having Kim Kaupe the founder of Bright Ideas Only , a creative agency, gave a talk to our Clevr Network in May, and it was such a highlight! Personal branding advice and support is a specialty she has helped a lot of top performers make sure they are crystal clear on how to do it in an aligned way. She is now working on building a way to educate others through her online course on how to build your executive presence in a clear and approachable way.

Click the Play button on the video to hear the whole talk! We received so many nuggets of how best to represent ourselves digitally, in person, and connect in an authentic way.

Highlights from the talk:

✓ When you sit down with a friend, what keeps coming up that they ask YOU about? Use the common questions and way you answer it as a lens to create your content. (That's your secret sauce!)

✓ Share the WHY behind the value you are adding - Answer the "Why does this matter?" question clearly in your messaging.

✓ Stay professional and aligned with across all platforms to represent all sides of you that create the attraction you want.

✓ Only 2% of users on LinkedIn are creating content - huge opportunity to get visibility in the arena you want to be see in, and known as a thought leader within.

Kim also shared her one pager for us to view to create our own in an easy way that would be a great piece of collateral to share with others you want to be interviewed by, connect with, or speak in front of. Clearer you are about what you offer, the easier it is to get the YES! Check it out!

Clevr Talk - The DECK Leadership Approach to DE&I

The discussion this month with founders of DECK Leadership, Shaun Peet and Mike Metcalf opening our network up to new thought, and understanding around what it means to create and consistently work to improve a culture based on values that demand diversity, equity, and inclusion. In this talk, Shaun and Mike share their personal journey of how they both ended up at Nascar, their individual desires of building a world class team of humans, and how it created the most diverse pit crew that Nascar has ever seen. 

They were gracious to answer our networks questions and showed us first hand what it means to have uncomfortable conversations and still move forward together. 

We could have talked for another 2 hours trying to get to everyone's question and continue to navigate ways to ensure that we are building cultures that are thoughtful of DE&I demands and learned so much in the short hour we had together. 

The whole talk is here for you to watch and grab your own takeaways. 

A question that was asked and answered offline is something we think everyone could benefit from knowing as they are building their teams and company culture:

What are some ways we can make sure that when we are recruiting for top talent, that we are using the language that attracts diverse talent to apply?

Masha Schricker, on of our Clevr Network members send us some links that she found as she researched this for her HR Consulting practice to ensure she is posting job descriptions and following recruitment procedures that are unbiased.

Here are the resources for you to reference:

✓ https://hiring.monster.com/employer-resources/workforce-management/diversity-in-the-workplace/inclusive-job-descriptions/ 

✓ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/make-job-listing-inclusive_l_5f1881a5c5b6128e681ffe25 

✓ https://joinhandshake.com/blog/employers/70-inclusive-language-principles-that-will-make-you-a-more-successful-recruiter/

Clevr Talk - Integrative Health in Business

What are you doing to ensure you are building and leading a healthy work environment? Do you struggle with figuring out ways to make sure your team is supported?

In this month's Clevr Talk, our panelists and hosts share their tactics and perspective on how business leaders need to focus on integrative measures to help your teams with their health in mind. 

Our Clevr Network members kept asking, "how can we better take care of ourselves, and our teams so that when crisis hits, we can move through it together?" We decided to host this talk about Integrative Health in Business to share our thinking around solutions to heal, strengthen, and empower yourself and your teams on how to build resilience, and enjoy the journey together as you do. We purposely use the word INTEGRATIVE because our health is not just one dimensional. Health is not just about your body, how fit you are, and what you eat, anymore. 

The Clevr Network founders definition of integrative health is a focus on your physical health AND your mental health, your financial health, your relational health, plus your career health. That is the integrative view we dialogue on with our panelists, Frank Blaney and Samantha Fitzsimons.

Our discussion with our panelists answers the following:

✓ What is your definition of integrative health? [Starts at 9:21]

✓ What are the common problems you are seeing in the workplace that you are helping find solutions for? [Starts at 17:10]

✓ What are the different conversations around integrative health happening today than what may have been happening a decade ago? [Starts at 28:00]

✓ What is the fastest, easiest way, you think a company can incorporate mental health practices across their organization? [Starts at 39:00]

✓ The impact of micro-traumas [Starts at 47:30]

As Clevr Network Co-Founder, Kareen Walsh, shared during this talk, we all have micro traumas to manage through. We all need to start focusing on ways to ensure they don't become fractures across the whole, and increase our communication around what a healthy business culture looks like, otherwise the fracture can turn into an all out melt down - no one can afford that in this market climate.

As you can see, this discussion is displaying the shift in leadership required to help build more integrative support environments and realize that you don't have to have the expertise to fix it, you can hire and incorporate the best services to assist your leaders and teams in providing the support they need. At a minimum you could do what Frank Blaney suggests and create a "Self-Care Committee", put some budget behind it, and allow the committee to research what your teams need the most, and provide solutions for your teams to feel better supported.

It is evident from this discussion that we are at the crux of how we take care of ourselves and our people for the highest level of fulfillment and success in our work. Taking the time to assess how you and your teams the type of support they need to function at their best is critical to continue to navigate through challenges and celebrate your wins.

Clevr Talk - The Future of Work

 "The Future of Work is Now!" as Elatia Abate, one of our Clevr Talk panelists loves to say!

So many take-aways from our February 2021 Clevr Talk!

The Clevr Network team is still reeling about the conversation and there are so many more questions we still need to answer! This was such a great start to bring awareness to the topics on all of our minds about the future of work. We are right in the middle of witnessing old systems crumble while innovation in the workplace is in high demand.

We want to thank our guest Panelists, Elatia Abate and Jackie Koch for sharing their insights and wisdom with us! This conversation has definitely sparked some additional questions that we plan to touch on in future talks like:

✓ How can you gracefully transition from full time employment models to a more expertise/skills based contract work?

✓ What will happen to all the vacant office spaces? How will people be coming together in the future if their business operations are constructed online?

✓ What are the mental health impacts to the new way of working? Are companies going to have to invest more in the care of their teams?

We loving getting questions like this so we can find experts to help answer them in our next Clevr Talk. (click here to join the network and get access to our next talk)

Highlights from the conversation (click on the video to watch the whole talk)

Frank Blaney shared his feedback on this talk sharing that he resonates with the panels sentiments that old paradigms of "managing people" in our new environment are archaic. He counsels his clients to delegate more authority to remote team members to get more buy-in on the overall organizational mission. 

We also discussed the impact of salaried jobs vs. contracted work? Will the gig economy become more of a trend and will antiquated systems align operationally with more contracted work. 

Marlon Bundang asked his question on the trend he is seeing with large organizations contingency workforce growing, and the impact it has to manage, operate, and measure "on demand" workforce shifts within a firm.

Kareen Walsh shared her view in response to Marlon's question by sharing the requirement for the decision matrix within a firm to be as agile as their decisions on expanding and reducing their workforce. Focus on optimizing their operations, and aligning the demand for strategic movement across the firm by knowing the actual expertise and skillset within their existing workforce to give them a chance to step into the new challenges.

Connie Steele shared her view that work has become a "position-less" sport. Being a utility player has more value than being deeply specialized. 

Michaud Garneau shared that the biggest challenges facing the future of work is how to make autonomous choices with incomplete information. 

It was such a great conversation, we are sharing the whole recording with you so you can benefit from it now!