Ep. 51 – Nate, your brand presence is in an emergency state! Guest Loreta Tarozaite.

Nate Leslie (00:01.374)
Welcome to Leading with Curiosity. Command and control leadership is dead. We interview leaders, entrepreneurs and executive coaches challenging old paradigms and fostering cutting edge leadership. Here’s your host, certified executive coach, Nate Leslie. 

Hey listeners, welcome to Leading with Curiosity. Today is really exciting. We have Loreta Terozaita, former TV journalist and news anchor from Lithuania who has taken so much of that experience into a completely new career and we were just exploring offline how we actually have a lot in common. My life as a former professional athlete now doing something completely different but bringing with us all those experiences and then both in businesses and service to other people. We’re going to use me as a case study again today which I’m very selfishly glad that we’re doing because I’m going to learn a lot but I really feel like

For the listeners, it’s gonna help you really see, hear and feel the work that Loretta does around brand and executive presence. Loretta, welcome to Leading with Curiosity. 

Thank you so much, Nathan. You pronounced my name perfectly, you know, with a rolling R, that’s how it sounds. So it’s perfect, you know. Thank you for the introduction. And just to recap, you know, my journey, yes, I was born and raised in Lithuania and we moved to the United States in 2003.

I was doing my career in Lithuania in television. I thought this is gonna be my life, you know, it’s exciting environment and the news and all of that. And then when we moved here, I had this little gap of nothingness for a while, you know, where I thought, okay, well, nobody’s gonna hire me as a news anchor here in the United States. I don’t have the roots here. I don’t have the knowledge or the history enough to be able to carry conversations, you know, on camera. And then, you know, I struggled a little bit in a while, you know.

to figure out what do I do with this knowledge? How does that translate to something else? And it was much, much later, some five years later or six years later that somebody suggested knowing my background that I should start doing YouTube videos for businesses where I thought, and YouTube was just up and coming back then. And I thought, what does this even mean, YouTube videos? And then when I started figuring it out.

Nate Leslie (02:22.67)
You know, and started, you know, I invested into the camera, invested into this mini setup. You know, in my life, I’ve always been the documenter. You know, that was just innately wherever I go, I either need a video or some sort of story or a photo, right? So it’s always behind, you know, behind the screen. But I’m never proficient. I’ve never been proficient in technological aspect of cameras. So all of that, you know, exposures, shutters, all of that was just clogging my brain. I’m not technical enough to absorb it.

But the aspect of how I’m telling the story, what is capturing the attention has always been one of my ways of communicating. So when I was given the opportunity to interview this business owner back in Silicon Valley, I come in with this gear set up and all of that stuff. And then I start coaching her on camera. And then I’m realizing, it’s like, this is noise. This camera gear that I have to think about is noise to me. I just want to actually just talk to that person, tell her how to crystal clear tell her message.

streamline her story, make sure her soundbites are crisp and clear to somebody who’s viewing. And then it dawned on me, actually, I’m good at this. That’s where that journalism background has come through, where I thought it’s forgotten, it’s not going to happen anymore. I even ventured into getting the business degree, a master’s business degree in business administration thinking I have to reshape myself somehow. But then that little moment was when I realized.

forget about cameras stuff. I just want to talk to people, interview them, get them better in telling their story. So that’s how I reshaped that sort of journalism career into business storytelling. And to me, one of the moments when we moved here that I realized was, once I started networking, once I started meeting corporate people, I realized that a lot of businesses back then, a lot of businesses and companies really…

did not put their executives forward back then. It’s always behind the scenes, like corporate, corporate. It’s like a monster, corporate, corporate. It’s like, well, who are the people in those corporates? I wanna talk to people. I wanna show the people. So now when I look back from this day and time, having been in this field for a while, I realized that it was too early with my thinking back then to humanize companies. Nobody really understood what that meant.

Nate Leslie (04:44.654)
And these past several years, it’s all about humanizing, humanizing authenticity, right? So to me, coming from, you know, a country where automated, you know, phone lines were not a thing, you know, you try to call somebody, it’s automated, automated, automated, press this button, that button. I’m like, where are the people? Where are the people in those companies? Right, bringing your, bringing your Lithuanian experience into this almost culture shock really of what, what is going on and where are the humans? I admire.

I admire and want to acknowledge that journey, which many athletes that I’ve worked with have faced that, that lull, that, that, that pause from, from being on TV and in at people’s dinner tables in Lithuania, from national celebrity to wondering what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Uh, what you’ve created is really amazing in the, in the, uh, thank you. Yeah. Really, really inspiring.

It’s a great segue here because I have filled out something that every listener can access, your presence checklist, loretta .today. We’ll make sure we link to that in the show notes. Love that website, by the way. Loretta .today with one T and Loretta. And we are going to look at one of the businesses that I’m involved in. And so I’m going to turn the mic over to you here in a few minutes and I’m going to probably…

expose myself a little bit because I didn’t score super high on your checklist and I’m aware of that. And so, so just some context here, this, the presence checklist, uncovering the strengths and weaknesses of my company’s brand and executive presence. So the business for the listener is a summer camp on the West coast of Canada on Vancouver Island. It’s a high performance overnight and day summer camp. We have 800 to a thousand athletes.

come in the course of four weeks, short time spent. So we spend all year preparing and then boom, it’s like this moment of performance. And I’m already seeing where our gaps are because we believe really, really deeply in what we do and in our core values and what we’re trying to be, what we’re doing to be different and be a gift to the hockey world. But I see some gaps here. So I’m gonna turn things over to you. For the listener,

Nate Leslie (07:08.974)
This is on YouTube under Leading with Curiosity. We’re gonna share a screen. Loretta and I are gonna try to speak knowing that the listeners are listening on audio, but there will be some visuals for those who are super interested when necessary. So take it away, Loretta. We’ll chat for like 20 minutes here, which I know is also a very abbreviated short version of what you would do with a real client, but I’m excited to dive in. Does that sound all right? Yeah, thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to get in.

for the viewers and listeners into my brain a little bit and how I operate and how I see things. So thank you. This is a very, very valuable opportunity. I really appreciate that. Great. Okay, so I just jotted also some notes. One of the questions that I actually had is how many people actually show up into your camps? And you just said around 800 to a thousand hockey players, I guess. So, oh, one of the things I should warn people.

English is not my primary language, even though I speak it quite well. Sometimes I stumble on the word that I’m looking for and it takes a while for me, for my brain to push it out. So I apologize. Real and authentic conversation for both of us. So, yeah. Okay. Awesome. So I looked at your score, you know, and, and, um, I looked at your score and you said you scored low. I think the lower part of the score was more on the brand presence than the executive presence.

So my immediate question here was when you were answering executive presence questions, and let me tell you, so company brand presence total was 24 out of 45 potential, not numbers, but points. Yes, thank you. Potential points. And what I wrote to myself is Borderline emergency stage. So it’s on the higher level of that emergency stage, but still in the emergency stage bucket.

And the executive presence, knowing your background, obviously you scored 36 out of 50. So it felt to me that maybe, and I’m not gonna put words in your mouth, actually, you tell me when you were answering the executive presence answers, were you answering more from your personal, you as an executive or within the parameters of PrepCamp? Great question. I am the executive director of the camp. So that I am.

Nate Leslie (09:28.206)
I am in charge of the vision and as an executive coach in my other business, I care really deeply about those things. So like you’ve nailed it already. Our brand and our exposure. because that’s the feeling I had. That’s the feeling I had knowing your background. I’m like, okay, I can see he understands a lot of things when it comes to executive presence, but maybe there’s a little bit of a gap in the actual brand and company, you know, presence. So that’s my assessment.

Now, I’m going to share the screen right now. And I’ll be probably looking into the notes sometimes. And maybe I’ll share the notes. I don’t know yet. But there’s some things that I want to go through right now visually, because I’m very visual. Obviously, that’s my background. So I like showing things. Ah, you probably have to enable the share for me.

Nate Leslie (10:23.31)
Okay. So I’m sharing the screen of your website right now, which is prepcamp .com. And one of the immediate things that I noticed, there’s a lot of great video content, obviously with my background. I love, I love seeing video. Whenever a video is used, I’m like, at least that exists. And with, you know, AI age up and coming, you know, I feel that the realness of the video is going to have so much more value moving forward.

So I was really happy to see a lot of video content and it’s not so much on the main site. I had to go into the more videos in your gallery section. Okay. So some of the things and opportunities that I noticed and I had questions around and I will try to correlate a little bit with my checklist here based on the answers that you gave or actually things that you didn’t mark, right? When it comes to storytelling and when it comes to video or any type of content, right? I noticed there’s a lot of,

of videos that are a little bit marketing videos, but your business is very human. It’s very human. So there were some videos that have testimonials, quick soundbites from either current participants in the camp or previous, and there’s some celebrity from what I understand, hockey players. But what I felt was really what had been cool to have is,

Just take a journey of one or two campers, right? From the beginning to the end. And almost like a reality show, capture moments of their session. You said it’s a year long program, right? Did I understand this correctly? No, it’s four weeks and it’s actually four one week camps. And I love what you’re saying already. Ah, OK, OK, OK. So you’re preparing for the camp program. OK, so you’re preparing for the camp program for the year. OK, got it, got it. OK, so I’m misunderstanding.

Okay, so that’s not a huge uplift then. You can have, I don’t know how you currently capture these videos, look high production value. So I’m assuming you invest some money into production of these. Into one of our alumni actually. A kid who grew up coming to camp is now a filmmaker. Oh, just love that. Perfect. So you can continue utilizing. Again, remember you had an interview, it was actually last episode with Gliermo, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name correctly. And his point was about,

Nate Leslie (12:46.926)
story versus narrative. Yes. Remember episode 50. So said, yeah. Yeah. So you said something that is part of your narrative of this prep camp, right? Which is a person who is now doing your videos has graduated from the camp. Yes. Right. So that’s part of your narrative. You know, he is now adding value back to you, to your, you know, program, you know, by giving time by whatever that means. Right. So anyway,

But I just wanted to kind of tie this back to what I heard Guillermo say and what you just said, how that resonated with me. So when it comes to video storytelling, I think what’s missing here is just feature stories of these people who come to you. What can they say? Why they chose you? How does that tie back to those values? How does that tie to all your mission? Let’s go back to the homepage. I scroll through. I don’t remember off top of my head, obviously.

but there were some core values that you display here. We’ll lead with respect. We inspire rewarding life experiences. We are the weather. We empower healthy connected communities. So how do these people choose your camp? What drives them? Is it the core values? Is it a recommendation? I don’t know if you have that data, when it comes to customer experience, how they find you, why they come, but it would be nice to tie it all back to what you’re expressing in words through people, stories.

That’s what I feel would be really, really nice to have. And one thing, the reason why I asked, if you were the one who filled out from executive perspective, there was one video that I noticed, I believe it was the one with Brendan. Boom, boom, boom. Brendan Morrison, yeah, world famous. Yes, this video had more people from your organization in it talking. And it started jittering my head saying, well, who are these people? Why are they not listed? What are their stories?

How can they tell their own stories? So that’s the story aspect, right? How do we connect your brand voice through the values that you display and stories that you tell, okay? So that I felt – Can I explain the evolution that we have had and you’re giving us our next evolution. It started out these kind of pump up videos, right? To get kids excited. And then one parent said to me, these are –

Nate Leslie (15:11.086)
very intimidating to my daughter who’s just simply not like that. I’m like, oh my gosh, we need to tell the story now of that experience and why people come, but we also wanted to show all aspects of camp, right? But what I’m hearing from you today is let’s, that narrative, let’s let the viewer sort of fall in love with the story of.

We have so many kids who come year after year and their families are invested in camp and they move on to work for us or they come back and work for us later, which we absolutely love, work with us, sorry. And so that’s that next evolution is really the story, a human story almost from beginning to end that we’re missing. Is that what I’m hearing? Exactly, you know, with human, human to me is always like, that’s what’s driving me.

the humanity of it, you know. Yes, marketing and pumped up videos are all great, right? But you just said yourself, some kids, when they see that, they’re like, well, how will I fit into this, right? How will I fit into this model? It’s just the bar becomes so high that then they feel like, well, I’m not going to be accepted. Then there’s doubt, right? So I don’t know. I mean, I’m not part of those programs. So I don’t know how.

Coaches are communicating. I’m sure that’s not the case. You know, that impression is different from marketing videos than on site with coaching, I would assume. You know, everybody feels welcome based on your values. But if you’re trying to recruit new people to come join your camp on a yearly basis, I think you could start telling story a little bit from those players’ perspective, you know. Give them the platform to talk. Give them the platform to tell their own story, why they chose your camp. What was so special about it? Why do they come?

come back every year if they do, you know? Okay, can I stop you again? One thing we’ve invested really heavily in through our software that handles camp is this family parent -facing app for this summer where we can put in little micro posts and we’ve been thinking about what’s gonna go in there. So it’s basically like our own social media just for here and there’s facial recognition so parents get all the videos and photos of their own kid in one album and our general in another. But what I’m hearing here is,

Nate Leslie (17:23.694)
Those are the types of things that we wanna be sharing there also, even in those little snippets is what is the experience that kids are having? Exactly, I went to your Instagram account, right? I went to your Instagram, Twitter, and I went to, I didn’t go to Facebook, but I went to your YouTube channel, right? So because YouTube is linked here, so obviously it has more views because it’s right there. Whoever lands on your website, they will watch some videos, video content to get feel. But –

Again, I went to your Instagram channel and one of my questions that I have to you, you know, where does your audience engage? Where do they find you? How do they find you? Right. Uh, and Instagram is, is a very reachable platform where the community could definitely be built around it. You had like what? Close to 2000 followers or something like that. But the content was so different from, from the website. It was more static. It was more, uh, how to say templatized.

It was not as inviting. And Instagram is very much about like community, right? Group, like you really can build on it. And I thought, well, you can take all these snippets, these, you know, Brenda Morrison, some other guy, Logan or something, there was another, you know, famous guy. The snippets from all the testimonials that, you know, are weaved into these stories here and just start posting those on the Instagram. Again,

I’m saying this based on the observation, but I don’t know where your audience hangs out. I don’t know how they find you, right? This is just my assessment based on what I’ve seen and what I normally look at. Is there a clash? Is there discrepancy? Why is so different? Why is this video rich content and why that platform is very static? And then I went to your Twitter account and I was thinking, you should just forget about Twitter altogether. Because you really, I don’t think you need it.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think you need it. Last post was in 2023. And I’m in the same mode right now. Do I really need so many platforms to be on? Because it becomes very cumbersome to manage. The consumers on the audience on all these platforms are so different how they take in the information. So we end up creating custom content pretty much for three things. So if you don’t have the resources or capacity, it becomes just too much. So…

Nate Leslie (19:42.478)
So I can resonate on that end with you because I’m in the moment myself debating, should I just close off certain platforms that focus only on LinkedIn and YouTube, you know, and that’s it. You know, that’s, that’s where I could go. So that’s my feedback. Go ahead. Here’s something that I’m discovering right now, because naturally your work is also designed for big companies. And one of the feelings I had filling it out was we have a part -time team all. So hear me out. Cause I’ve come full circle on my apprehension.

We have a part -time team. So some of these things that the checklist is sort of recommending that we do, oh, how could we ever do that with a part -time team? But what I’m hearing right now is this is a perfect example. Just if we just keep humanizing everything, it doesn’t take more time. It’s just looking at it through a different, different lens. And I do have one question. Yeah. Yeah. So just humanizing and telling people’s stories and moving from static.

to video with all this amazing content that we already have, right? It’s re -purposing all Exactly, it already is already there. You slice it up and just pick one platform. If you feel you need to grow Twitter audience, okay, you can experiment and post the same thing. But yeah, but I thought based on the type of business that it is, right? The camp, I felt that Instagram probably is more applicable platform for your Facebook. I mean, well, probably not Facebook TikTok, but TikTok is something people have just different feelings around TikTok. But I think Instagram,

with the authority of being visual that it has and being able to build those communities, I think you can start doing a little bit more video content there. And actually, that’s very similar to what we could put in the parent -facing app. And really, we really have a high retention rate. Kids come back year after year. They come from 12 years old to 17 years old. And that’s the community that we want to support the most and celebrate. So…

that would be an easy repurpose. Exactly. The whole point actually is to kind of not take back the narrative, but the narrative that parents get whose kids are at camp alone. We don’t know what the parents are hearing all week. When we started camp, there was no cell phones and now they’re getting whatever their teenager is sharing or not sharing, right? Which is either nothing or maybe not even stuff that is representative of what we’re trying to achieve. Yes. And one –

Nate Leslie (22:10.446)
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but just the thought just crossed my mind, you know, and, and because you have that internal platform, you know, one, you can experiment in your next session, you know, when the camps start running, um, just ask, um, instead of doing high value production, sometimes this organic content can really be good if it comes directly from them. So you might need to sign some disclosures, obviously with parents and the kids, but you know, say,

Hey, if you ever record a video about your experience, could we post that video on our Instagram? Could we start creating a library of these contents on the website so that it just becomes more real, more relatable to those who want to come in, right? To those who can see themselves in some other kids that maybe these marketing videos don’t really give out, you know, the feeling of. So in the spirit of time here, Loretta, this has been so valuable already. Is there?

I have a question for you, but is there one more thing that just is really standing out that the listener could benefit from? Yes. So another thing probably to think about is you can see that I get very passionate when it comes to video because that’s just how I communicate. Video is my medium, visual and words. And what I like to say is that, you know, and you use that word lens, the lens just never lies. The camera just never lies. Whatever comes across through camera lens,

is like I intuitively can say if it’s real, how it makes me feel. I don’t know, there’s just some intuition that I developed over time where I can just pick up on nuances of the camera that gives me a certain feeling and I can kind of hone in and say, okay, this is the feeling it’s giving me and that’s what I think is missing. But in general, maybe to also summarize is, sometimes people think they have to be on every single platform, right? To promote themselves, but you don’t, you really don’t. Maybe back,

way back when you know you maybe needed but with where the like human communication is heading it’s more about just finding your people in the right areas you know where do they hang out and just pick that and grow that if you see okay we’re outgrowing it let’s experiment to see if we can achieve more you know on this other platform then you just cross it over and start doing that but i picking just one is enough.

Nate Leslie (24:32.63)
When it comes to company presence, what other thing is important and we didn’t get to it, I didn’t realize running out of time already. But it’s also…

How does your message resonate all the way to the end customer? So that’s, I think I asked the question in the beginning, how do they find you? Is it only through referrals? Do you have, and I think based on your answers, yeah, it says number 13 bullet, you didn’t click on it. It says my company’s story and messaging are effectively integrated into our marketing and sales materials, ensuring seamless experience. So.

How do you communicate? How do you recruit them? I don’t know that process, so I can’t speak to it, but I’m interested to hearing like, how does that recruitment happen? Is it localized? Are people coming from all over the nation? Like, how does this happen? Yeah, so the hockey world is small. We say it’s a big planet, but we get kids from all over the world. But currently, our recruitment is very heavily on…

one person and what we’re trying to build and why the timing of this conversation is so great is we’re trying to build that community where the community is driving it. In other words, you have a daughter that comes and you’re like, oh, next year she’s going again and she’s got to bring two friends because this life experience was so rich. So we want to move to this community space. This humanizing the narrative is really important. And I think that’s…

One of the reasons I didn’t check that box is because our core values and the life experience is so important, we want to make sure that that is what’s being shared and that it’s that that drives our retention and that people are bringing friends, right? So it’s building, focusing on community. Yeah, so you have the core understanding of it, right? So you’re just now figuring out the mechanism around it. How do we do that? How do we achieve these things, right?

Nate Leslie (26:33.164)
And you’re right. I mean, when I was building this document, I was thinking more, you know, growing companies, companies in transition, you know, and more kind of corporate, how we understand. So when you suggested to go this route for your prep camp, I’m like, oh, I wonder if he’s gonna even be successful in filling this out because it’s, you know, it’s too, it could have been too corporate, but there are some elements that you can take, you know, from it, obviously. That’s a segue into the one question I want to ask you, and it is doable. And it’s that the one thing,

Like we’re leaders in our space and we have been for a long time and we’re trying to lead, not follow, even when it comes to, yeah, when it comes to so many things, what children and what teenagers need in 2024. Like we, one of my former careers as an educator, we bring an educator’s lens to the work that we do as well. And something that we’re currently not doing is getting out there into the media and there’s points in your checklist about that, right? Is being – Correct.

being that authority, I have done it in another business, getting on the radio, getting on TV, getting our voice heard. So knowing that we don’t have that full -time person, but we have really competent, capable people, what comes to mind for you as something that we could be doing more of in terms of getting out there into the mass media? Yeah, one of the questions actually, I’m glad you brought it up, this gives a different flavor of the conversation.

One question I had when I looked at that checklist, you marked only what’s three items out of however many there are. Why do you think, how long is the company, how long does this have existed, how many years? We bought it from someone else 15 years ago. So it’s been around for like three or four decades, but we’ve been leading. Oh my God, okay. Okay. So, okay. So why do you think…

you are not getting media exposure if you are the leaders in the industry or one of the leaders in that particular niche industry. I want to hear your perspective. Why do you think? Because if it’s existed for so long and it’s one of the sought after camps for hockey players, why don’t you have a little bit more presence out there with media? Why aren’t they coming and seeing, hey, are the coaches coming and trying to recruit some upcoming blah, blah, blah? Why do you think that happens? Two thoughts. One,

Nate Leslie (28:51.662)
I think we’ve been focusing so much attention on communicating with one family at a time. Ah, in terms of that recruiter, right? Rather than trying to communicate to thousands. It’s in a smaller community and the local media is great at coming by. We invite them and they come like, okay, why don’t we do that more? The other thing that we’ve stayed, we’ve tried to lead with our values and stay out of some of the politics of some things that aren’t great in our sport.

right now. In other words, we demonstrate the behaviors that are appropriate, not getting in the media when there’s buzz about all the things that are wrong with our sport, like speaking up in those moments, that just sounds scary to us. We’re trying to lead by example. So it doesn’t mean there aren’t other things that we can share. I mean, when people in the local community find out that there’s kids from 15 countries and a Stanley Cup winning NHL coach there,

you know, they’re surprised. Exactly. Exactly. That I’m listening to this. I’m like, why is nobody hearing about that? Right. And, and of course, media relationships is, is, is, is, is a separate animal. Right. There are people who specialize in PR only. That’s not my expertise. And I don’t have media relationships here in the United States, but, but you just have to find somebody.

Again, you can tap maybe into your network of the graduates who are studying journalism or communications or anything in the future and help you out, build those relationships with media. So the reason why I feel media is important is because of the reach. Now everybody has different ideas of what media is today. And in your particular case, sports media is more niche than anything else. It doesn’t really touch too much politics. But I think…

the value of the media or to be invited in different, like you’ve invited me to your podcast. So an equivalent of the podcast for hockey players or something where sports themes exist would be where you can start. It’s an easy lifting situation. Just send a picture and say, hey, I run this camp. Here are our brag points.

Nate Leslie (31:08.206)
I guarantee you, you will be invited. With all these brag points, loop in some Brendan video, Logan video, and you’re golden. So starting somewhere and building a little bit of that third party validation is important. So local media is great, but if you’re saying that, hey, we have people coming from all countries, 15 different countries come to your camp.

of the world, you know, occasionally visit your camp, you know, well, how can you extend that to those other countries, you know, where let’s say hockey is the religion, you know, Scandinavia, you know, wherever, right? Wherever these children are coming from, how can you get into the podcast, into the media outlets there, right? Or where it’s not, because we often get them from secondary hockey countries like New Zealand, like what a cool story for a small town in New Zealand to know that someone’s three people are…

being funded by their governing body to travel across the world to our camp. That’s a story worth sharing. Exactly. Exactly. And actually one thing to investigate, I don’t know the sports world very well, but in the business world, right, in different publications, they have these programs where you can contribute your content in your name, right? So if the publication has an authority,

in the industry, any sports publication, you can probably know better than I do. I haven’t investigated it. You can go to their platform, see do they have a program for contributing articles, right? And it’s a paid program usually, but those are usually very affordable. And you can say, hey, I’m gonna subscribe to this contributor program and I’m going to send six articles per year about our things. They can’t be…

How to say the trick with media, you can’t really sell your services. You just have to tell stories, you know? So what you said, somebody from Zealand, why did they come? What did they learn out of that? What’s the value? You’ll probably have to come up with certain themes. There’s a review cycle with those publications or where they look for specific things that they don’t always publish everything. They’re very picky, you can’t be selling. You can’t sell. But look into that, you know, into those platforms and see.

Nate Leslie (33:25.422)
How can you extend that knowledge outside of the perimeter of your community? Loretta, this has been one of my most enjoyable podcasts. Oh, And I have gained so much from it as I knew I would. And I can’t imagine a listener that’s still listening now at the end of the episode thinking this was real and how it can impact their business in some way. And that’s exactly what we set out to do. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Nate. Really appreciate the opportunity for inviting me and having this conversation with me. How can people find you and speak to this checklist? What a great free tool to get them started. Thank you. Yes, for sure. Like you mentioned earlier, you can find this checklist downloadable on Loretta today, www .loretta .today.

And this checklist is very elaborate as you have seen, you know, takes time and sometimes thought for people to go through it. It’s not a one pager. It’s very long. It’s 23 pages with some intros, but you have to be thoughtful and really analyze your executive or company presence status.

And then once you fill it out, you can just leave it as is if you’re not ready or reach out to me and let me know how I can help you. We never tackle everything at once. It’s just taking bits and pieces where we want to focus right away and then peeling down the layers to accomplish these many goals in case people think, oh my God, that’s a lot of work. It’s not. Yeah. And it’s long, but it was a great 20 minutes of my evening. So it’s…

absolutely doable for people.

Nate Leslie (35:06.67)
What does a typical engagement look like for you with your ideal client? I imagine it’s a journey. Yes, it is a journey. You know, everybody starts at their own level of where they want to be. It could be one -on -one coaching only, right? I really want to get better at how I communicate with media. I have no idea how to communicate with media. How do I do that? On camera through interview, published interview sound bites, right? Or, you know, on camera coaching or on stage coaching, right? So there’s one -on -one engagement. Then there’s company level engagement.

where, you know, I like working with companies in transition where they just don’t know what they’re doing, but they know they have to fix things. And I’m a fixer by nature. So I just come in and say, okay, where’s the mess here? Let’s clean it up. So, so I like that, you know, growth stage where companies are just needing to go forward, but they know they realize that they have to up level their authority and presence out there to the world and streamline certain, you know, conversations. So that’s a longer form engagement, obviously that requires more time and depth. Yeah.

You know, I love that we focused today on my company’s brand presence because that’s what my score showed. What we didn’t talk about and you’ve just alluded to now and I want to remind the listener is that executive presence and the importance of C -suite getting out in front of the world and creating human connection between large companies and their audience and their customers and their partners as well. So we didn’t even get into that today, but if that’s you listener,

It could be equally as beneficial and informative digging into this with Loretta. Yes, thank you. Exactly. So that’s why the checklist is twofold, right? Company and brand presence and then executive presence. So whoever relates to whichever part of that checklist, they can just fill out if they want only one piece of it. Yeah. Thanks for your time. Thank you so much, Nate. Thanks for listening to Leading with Curiosity.

Please share, follow, and rate the show so that other leaders can make positive change in the world. Connect with Nate at nateleslie.ca. And remember, the brain behaves very differently when encouraged to think rather than told to listen.