Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 32 – Rose Fass

Peter Winick

How do you tell a new client the products you have to offer? Do you talk up product after product, idea after idea – or do you listen, and let them tell you what they need?

Rose Fass, Founder and CEO of fassforward, and author of “The Chocolate Conversation” is our guest on the TLL podcast this week. Rose talks with Peter about how she started out in thought leadership and gives insight into the things she wished she’d known in the beginning.

Rose also offers advice about how to approach an initial meeting with a new client, and how to make your overwhelmed employees more focused and engaged. We think everyone could use a little fassforwarding – and you will, too!

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winnick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on the podcast today, Leveraging Thought Leadership. And today my guest is Rose Fass. Rose is the founder and CEO at Fast Forward Consulting, which is a leading-edge business transformation boutique consulting firm. She works with Fortune 500 executive teams on transitioning strategy, driving change and growing leadership. She has over 35 years of corporate experience. She was the chief transformation officer at Xerox. She’s a speaker. She has been named a top 10 women in business leaders of New York. And she wrote a really cool book that I love called The Chocolate Conversation. Lead bittersweet change, transform your business. So thanks for joining us, Rose. Welcome.

Rose Fass Thank you for having me, Peter. It’s nice to talk with you.

Peter Winick Yeah, my pleasure. So, you know, our focus is always on the different things that people do with their content and their work, right? So you’ve got your consulting business, you’ve got speaking, you got your book. Why don’t you, if you would, maybe paint a picture of sort of what your world looks like as it relates to sort of the core content and the core gist of your work.

Rose Fass So we’ve actually been talking about that a lot lately with our clients, and it’s interesting how clients end up defining what you do. And there are three areas that we are really focused on in business transformation. And one of the big gaps that we hear from our clients is that we have a leadership gap. And that doesn’t mean we didn’t go out and hire enough leaders. That means… We have a lot of executives and directors and vice presidents working here, but we need to get them leading. And they’re trying to move from this sort of everyday crisis management to leaders who exhibit more agility and capable of situational thinking and more critical thinking. So that’s a whole area that we’ve been on is moving the leadership gap. from being reactive to being more agile leaders. And then in the second area that we’ve been focused on is cultural challenges. And we think part of why leaders don’t step up and lead isn’t 100% their faults. We believe that cultures sometimes design a very short order cook kind of environment where I am transactional and responsive and reactive. as opposed to being more of a thought leader and driving the change. And so we want to get people to say, if these are our cultural challenges, we may have a great culture in a lot of areas, but if these our cultural challenge, what are they? And how do we turn that from being just a group of chaotic issues in our culture to really having cultural differentiators? What are the things that people would come here for and why would you want to lead here? and what’s our differentiator. And you know, everybody admires Amazon and Google and Facebook and all that because they have these great cultures, but maybe that’s not the culture you’re gonna have. And then the last piece that we’ve been spending a lot of time on, all about these three oars toward business transformation, is what we refer to as the overwhelmed employee. And we refer it to the older world employee as overwhelmed Bob, and it could be Bobby for a girl or Bob for a boy, but it’s the overwhelmed. And how do you take that overwhelmed employee and make them somebody that’s really contributing every day, focused, directed, engaged? So those are the three areas that we’ve been focusing on and we’ve kind of streamlined our focus and with a lot of help from you and your group, Peter, early on, just saying, you can’t be all things to all people, so what do you do? And we’ve sort of evolved. These are the 3 areas that we seem to get pulled in to deal with.

Peter Winick Got it. So I want to touch on one thing that you said that I, well, there are several things that you said, that I’ve got notes on here. But one thing you said up front, which is I don’t hear it enough, but I’m an avid believer in the same theory, is that the clients define what you do. So all too often thought leaders, and I would define you as a business person first, and a thought leader is like the second bullet point. You didn’t come at this from an academic perspective. You’ve got deep experience, right? So. Oftentimes, what happens with many thought leaders, more so on the academic side, but not exclusively, is they come up in isolation with the great thing. Because they believe it’s true and they did some research and it looks good on paper and all that other sort of stuff, they grind and grind and put a lot of money and energy and resources into it. Then they take it to the market and it’s a total flop. I love what you said, that clients define what you do, because people don’t talk to their clients enough. in the development phase, right? So we always talk to our clients around what their needs are and how we can help them, et cetera. But what I have found in my work is if you go back to your clients and have open and honest and transparent conversations, say, here’s where we are, here’s what we think we’re doing well, we got a couple ideas on some new things that we’re developing, tell me what you think, right. And their opinion is more important than yours because they represent the market and the dollars and who you’re serving. So tell me, you know, how you go about doing that. and it probably ties to your chocolate conversation. But how do you actually get clients to define what you do?

Rose Fass Yeah, so this is an interesting, you talked at the very beginning about my journey. And I worked for a Fortune 100 company for many years and I was their chief transformation officer at the end. And it’s easier in a corporation in some respects to sort of just do what your business is and to kind of lead people through that and just produce, produce, reduce. And I learned a lot, and I learned the long way home. That’s the best way to call it. But the one thing that I always knew because I was client-facing through my whole career was that when the customer was talking to you, that was the point at which you either had something they were interested in or you did not. And without customers, you don’t have the basis of a business. So I learned that very early on. When I started. this business, I had no idea how hard it would be to start something from scratch and literally produce a business model and say hopefully everybody will buy into this. So what I was advised by a very old mentor was say yes to everything unless it literally goes against your grain. Initially you just need to say yes. So each and every time a client would just you know, pull on my expertise as an operator or an executive who did things in a business or a head of sales, whatever I did in my past, not unlike you, Peter, I would just say, okay, they said, can you help us build a program called planning for profit? That That was our very first gig, and I worked with a… British engineer and I said, yes, of course I can. And we went out and we did these things. And what we learned in the process was once you produce something that was of value to a client, they were willing to listen to the other things that you could bring to the party that would make it more feasible. So after we did planning for profit, we said, now we need leaders who know how to da da da. In the beginning, it was yes, yes, yes, and then we started to recognize where we really added a lot of value and it wasn’t just our personal expertise or our business expertise. And listening, I call it the power of questions. I think a lot people go in and pitch. I never pitch to clients. I always ask a lot questions. And my first question is always, tell me about the things that are going really well for you. And that gives you a purview into what they care about. Then the second thing I say is, and if you could identify some of your key challenges, what would they be? What would be the things if you can wave a magic wand you would fix? And they give you that, and that gives their desire. So one is what they about, and the other is what the desire. And those two things… bring together for me a picture of, okay, where can we best play here and how can we help? And that’s pretty much how I’ve done it. And it’s a series of questions and you just keep asking the deeper question as you keep going along. And what I’ve often heard, and I’ll close out on this here, is after we’ve gone through this kind of conversational question thing. the client will say, you know, you’re the first person that’s come in here that’s really cared about what I think, what’s going on in my business, and then tied it back.

Peter Winick I love that.

Rose Fass I think that’s important. Oftentimes we will transcribe what we’ve heard, bring it back and then use direct quotes from the client to say, here’s what you said about this and here’s I think we can do. I think it’s really important that people know they’re being listen to.

Peter Winick No, I love that. So there’s so much that you said there. So I’m going to unpack several things because I think what happens with folks is it’s easy to share your experience very quickly, but there are so many powerful moments into what you just said that I see parallels in almost all of my clients. So number one is starting from scratch. So you’re a senior level at a Fortune 100. You’ve got all the resources at your disposal, more or less, right? If you have a technical problem, there’s a whole department of people for that. There’s a marketing department, and for some reason, because of the power of the brand, I call it sort of, you can, not that you were doing this, but sort of hide behind the logo. There’s incredible power in being behind a Xerox logo and Apple logo, whatever. And then, you know, you get the great idea. I’m going to go do this on my own. And, you now, the only difference is you don’t have that logo anymore, right. Now you’re, you’re sort of naked, if you will, in the business world. And building something from scratch is incredibly difficult because you’ve got to spin all the plates. You know, business just doesn’t walk in the door, right? You have to find out what business you do. So that was the first thing that you said that I thought was awesome. The other piece that you’ve said, and I think this is where clients go through the transformation, is in the beginning, it will work for food, right. Oh, you want that? Sure, we can do that. You might roll your eyes and go, oh, God, I don’t want to do that or whatever, as long as it’s not violating any of your values, et cetera. or do you have the skill on the capabilities and can you deliver? Yes, we’ll do that because we need the work, but ultimately you get to a point and say, jeez, I don’t want to do any more of that type of stuff. That’s a commodity. We don’t really add much to that. The stuff that jazzes us, the stuff that we have the best outcomes for our clients sort of looks like this, and that’s where the courage comes in to basically go to the market and say we don’t do that. This is what we do. This is our lane. We’re better at it than anybody else. We have the gravitas and the results behind it to prove it. And, you know, happy to refer you to somebody else that does, you know, blah, blah blah. But this is the lane that we want to be in. And what I find is, even though it’s a little bit counterintuitive to say no to business, it leads to enormous growth at the personal level as well as the business level. So would you agree with that?

Rose Fass Absolutely. And you’ve articulated that really perfectly. When you start out, you know, it’s very interesting, Peter. When I was in corporate, I was charge of a bunch of interns at one point that were then going to be mentored by senior leaders. And they were all very excited. But at the same time, a little kind of full of themselves in that they were and chosen and isn’t this all good? And the mentors or the senior leaders that had to mentor them were finding it a little difficult to be bothered because they weren’t really adding any value, they were just standing at the door waiting to be taught. So I pulled them all aside and I said, and I remember this distinctly, I said you know this is not going to sound like a very pleasant analogy but you have to think of yourself as toilet paper. You are the most important tool in the bathroom. You’re not the vanity, you’re not the vanity and you’re not the mirror. All good stuff. But what’s the single most important tool? And when you see yourself like that, you will do whatever you need to do so that you get noticed by what you do and what you bring to the party, not by the fact that you’ve been named this intern. Years later, when I started the business, I remember right after 9-11, and it’s in the book, the story about my post office debacle, where we had an office in the post office and it wasn’t all that pretty. And I felt like that. I felt Gertie Schmerz, you know, I was there and I was the toilet paper. And I had this guy coming in from Estee Lauder, they had just bought Mac, which was a massive company. And the guy from was coming and I was a nervous wreck and I was thinking to myself, I have no logo. I’m all dressed up, but who cares? And I got an elevator here that doesn’t work that I’ve been cleaning all night. Next to the Allstate insurance man. This is pretty pretty glamor ball.

Peter Winick Right. Yeah.

Rose Fass Yeah. Yeah. And I remembered your toilet paper and that I was back as one of those interns. And when the man walked in the office and we had a little whiteboard and we started to talk, all of a sudden I just brought me to the conversation. And that’s when I realized it’s not the props. It’s your authentic self with that individual. And before I what we were. solving problems, creating outcomes, thinking about what was gonna be. And that was our first successful initiative. And we got our first, it was 60,000, 100,000 Canadian, which at the time was 60 thousand American. And I was just so thankful to have that first order.

Peter Winick The other thing that you said, because there’s so much good stuff from scribbling notes all over the place is, you know, there’s no pitching, right? So I couldn’t agree more that, you know, I think what happens is people get in their own head, we’re going to go to this client, here’s the pitch, and here’s the deck, and there’s the story, and whatever. And it’s like, you know, stop, stop for a moment and say, have you ever been on the other side of that? Because I have, and it’s horrible. It’s just, there is nothing worse than, you It’s like buying a car or something like You come in, nobody’s asked about you, your problems, your organization struggles, all the things that you’ve done, all they care about is, I’m going to pitch you this thing, whatever that thing is, because that’s what we want this gig and we want to this project. And I love the fact that, you know, your style is much more collaborative. Let’s ask some questions. Let’s shape some solutions together with the client. Let’s figure out what you need. And you know the other side of that is 90% of the time, whatever you thought you’re going to pick, isn’t going to be what they exactly need anyway. So, you know, shutting up and listening is a profitable strategy. I want to make sure that we touch on, because it’s one of my favorite takeaways from our time working together, just sort of the chocolate conversation story. So you wrote a book called Chocolate Conversations, which is just an amazing analogy. Would you mind telling us the original story of the Chocolate Party?

Rose Fass Yeah. So, in college, there’s always the BYOB, bring your own booze parties. And as extroverted as I often think I am, I’ve never enjoyed those. And I remember sitting in a dorm room after having gone to a few and saying to myself, the last thing in the world I want is this. And I got this unique invitation, BYOC, bring-your-own-chocolate. And it was a death by chocolate party. And I thought, this I can get my arms around, you know? I love chocolate. And you had to make something really divine and bring it along. And I was very excited. And I had my killer chocolate cake, which I thought was definitely going to be a standout. And it also gave us a common purpose, which oftentimes when you go to parties, you don’t have a common propose. So I walked in the door and I thought I’m meeting all these kindred spirits. Isn’t this gonna be good? And I saw this table that was laden with the most exquisite stuff I’d ever seen in my life. And I kind of sheepishly put down my killer chocolate cake and realized I wasn’t actually bringing the hit of the party. And then people were chatting and there was this gentleman that was standing with me and this woman was going on about percentage of cake-o Oh, I’m sorry. like you know really kind of a snobby conversation and I remember looking at her and she was pin thin and I thought to myself what is this and so this guy looked around he said look when I need chocolate I just assume to have a snicker bar you know I want chocolate I’ll just take a snickers and I said this is my kind of guy and she got very annoyed turned around and walked off I remember leaving that party and thinking, this is funny, we all had chocolate in common, but when we got down to our own personal standards, our own points of view, boy, it was quite different and we had quite a debate going on at this party. So many years later, I was in an all company meeting, sitting there as one of the regional presidents and the CEO was talking about his strategy. And we left that all company meeting and I could hear people in the halls and everyone’s interpretation of what he was saying was uniquely different. And I thought, holy shit, we’re having a chocolate conversation. And that was the impetus for my thinking about it as a chocolate conversion at the chocolate level. You can all agree, but that’s that 30,000 foot level. When you start hearing people’s interpretations, you talk past each other. So little by little, one of our first opportunities with one of the Fortune 100 companies we still work with today, we had, it was a financial institution, we had an opportunity to walk in and I used the chocolate conversation as a metaphor. for what they were doing, and I asked everyone in the room to give me their first thought when they heard the word chocolate. And it ranged from a lavatory retriever to, you know, Belgium special chocolate, all these different things, and cake and whatever. And I said, you, if we were sitting in a room like this and I were offering you a strategy around chocolate and you all agreed that you liked it. But this guy wanted Belgian chocolate and this guy said absolutely not, I thought we were getting cake. And you thought you were talking about your favorite pet, your Labrador Retriever and someone else gave me a feeling, happiness. I wouldn’t be able to please any of you and we would end up in the midst of very different points of view about what success.

Peter Winick And all with good intents and working hard, right? Oh, yeah. So we, we, That’s where that all formed. I love that. We internally will use that still when we’re having a meeting or something and it sounds like, uh-oh, and we’ll just use it because it’s a nice phrase instead of saying, you know, hey, dummy, you don’t get it, but it’s, you know, saying something like this feels like it might be a chocolate conversation as a nice forced pause out and say, ah, so when you say strategy, you mean this and I mean this, et cetera. So as we start to wrap up, a couple of things I want to ask you. out there today is, you know, you 15 years ago or 18 years ago, whatever, when you launched the firm, what would you tell that person to do and what would tell them not to do?

Rose Fass Yeah, so oddly enough, and this is going to seem a little bit unusual, but I really feel like we started the right way. I remembered meeting a woman who was in her office decorating, getting business cards together, logos, print, and we just kind of hit the ground running. And I would say the first thing you want to do is get your first client. All those other things are important, but I think 16 years ago what made me feel safe and like I could get up to live another day and fight another battle was knowing that I had actual clients, that I had a place to go. And that I would I would tell anyone yes It’s important to when you’re doing a startup to feel like you’ve got you know some office space or whatever But what’s really important is that you have a client and you can start to define your business So that I wood would say a couple of things. I would probably do differently is take a little more risk

Peter Winick More risk?

Rose Fass Yeah, I think I was very corporate when I went into the job, and to your point, Peter, I was used to the deep pockets of corporate and all of that. So I really was self-funded, and I think in some respects, although we’ve turned profit every year and we’ve had our you know great years and our okay years. I think I could have taken a little more risk. I think could have invested a little bit more sooner.

Peter Winick Let me push back on that, Rose, because there’s nothing scarier than leaving a very comfy big six-figure job going out on your own because a couple things happen. The paychecks stop coming, right? There’s nothing coming in and it’s all going out. I think that might be something to say in retrospect, but at the point in time where you just gave up that big pushy job and the lifestyle and all that, that’s not as easy to do as to take the risk. It depends where you are in your life. You know, you’re fina-

Rose Fass Yeah, and I passed up on a couple of, I passed up on some talent that I think would’ve really, the company good because I was afraid to spread. So, you know how people, when they get older and they turn around and say, I would’ve done a little bit, I’ve been a little more adventurous? I think we did a lot of things right, Peter, but I do think my tolerance for risk has always been. at a point, because obviously I am a risk taker when we started this business, but I do think that that’s always been a balance for me to figure out how much more risk should I take. And I do think you don’t want to be crazy, but those are things that I’m being honest about. I do feel…

Peter Winick So get a client and take more risks. So lastly, before we sort of wrap here, how do I find you? I know how to find you, but how do people out there listening get in touch with you?

Rose Fass Yeah, so it’s Fast Forward Consulting Group, and we are, you can look us up on Google. You can certainly go on our website. You can give us a call at our phone number, which is also listed when you Google us, and our email address, which is at fastforward.com, and we’d love to hear from you. Well, thank you.

Peter Winick Well, thank you. So much stuff here today. I’ve got tons of notes here, so I appreciate your candor and always enjoy talking with you. Thank you for spending the time with us today, Rosie.

Rose Fass Yes, great opportunity to talk with you as well.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thought leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.