Kathleen Margolis:

There's actually a scientific method into the way you wanna think and present yourself. It's not just a feeling, it's not just a gut check. You're not good at a hundred things. You're good at maybe one or two things. If you're excellent in these areas, that halo effect works in other areas. Listen to the voice of the customer 'cause they're not lying to you.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:00:21] They have nothing to gain by lying to a consultant that's asking them, what do you think of this team?

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:00:35] From hospitals in Texas to design studios in Tokyo, Kathleen has made a career out of showing organizations how to navigate uncertainty. A lifelong startup person, she's led Rebrands merger integrations, and culture shifts on three continents, proving that when the marketplace is changing faster than your company, you better pick up the pace or get left behind.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:00:56] Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us today [00:01:00] for Rethink Change, and you've got a background that involves lots of change and so we're looking forward to your insights.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:01:07] I appreciate that, ward. This is fun.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:01:09] Yeah, we're, we're so excited to have you. So for starters, why don't you just tell us the Cliff note story of your career and how you got to the point where you are today?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:01:17] I came out of school very curious and wanted to travel, so I got into the business of architecture, engineering, and development, and it had me traveling through the world and through jobs. So, um, my work today, I am in sales, but focused on account management, which has taken my 30 plus years of management and sales and marketing oversight and all of that, and kind of put it into customer focus or customer-centric work.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:01:53] So

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:01:53] that's, tell us about specific jobs you've had that involved change, where you were having to drive the [00:02:00] change.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:02:00] My first role, professional role, I had a CEO that said, you need to decide. You are either a startup person, an administrative person that sees things through or a closed down person, and that's the way business works.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:02:15] And that was in the eighties. And so I found that the startup was more fun because you're thinking, you're planning, you're bringing people on board, getting them to think about what they're about to launch and do. And so I kind of hone my skills in startup mode. So I've always had jobs in a startup position, um, starting up a new company, like the company I started with in my career was a hospital that went through an.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:02:46] Merger. It was acquired by a very large system, and we had to go through a rebranding. And rebranding, as you well know, is not really about a logo, but about an idea. And so that [00:03:00] was my first introduction to what that took. And then as I mo, I moved to California because. I liked the coast and uh, went to work for a big architectural firm that had growth on its trajectory and needed to change up each of its locations.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:03:18] So that was regionally responsive. So they put me on different merger and acquisition teams, and so I worked in Mexico and Tokyo and Canada with them. What you learn very quickly is you adapt to a culture and then you have to change your own culture to also adapt, so, so I was always kind of on a front end, often in a management role or a senior management role.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:03:44] I think when I met Pennebaker, I was in my most senior role as a chief marketing officer for a group of architects that. Had been in business for, I think it was like 75 years at the time. They [00:04:00] just hadn't adapted to the way the market was changing the way. And, um, as I've learned from you Ward, that you know, if the rate of change on the outside is faster than the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:04:12] We took that kind of thinking and said we need to shift dramatically. And so when we hired the Pennebaker team and you introduced more than just a. Refresh of our logo and a rebranding exercise. It took a lot of work internally to get people to adjust to the work that was gonna be done. So that was a role as the CMOI had a lot of responsibility on administrative financial, beyond marketing.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:04:44] That was the role I had where I learned to be an influencer. And, um, you helped me tremendously like with that. At the time, 'cause I really thought you had to be a dictator or a CEO to make the kind of changes that were coming. And what I discovered is I [00:05:00] was more of an influencer through that process and I think I love that job the most.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:05:04] So that was kind of my introduction to what change really looks like and change just to put it out there and make it look like it's something like something's different. Wasn't what the guardrails would allow us to do. Right? It, the guardrail process kind of moved you into new ways of thinking and behaving, and it put you in check.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:05:28] And so working through that, with that particular organization, it, it was very hard to get people along that track and, and a lot of us that adopted the new ideas for the company, um, had to become great influencers to keep. Bringing people along. So it took a while.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:05:45] When you first met Ward, did you have any sense of the amount of change that needed to happen?

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:05:51] Or, and, and same with the rest of the leadership team, was it we need to change, you know, certain aspects, maybe the logo, maybe, you know, how we present ourselves [00:06:00] versus an overarching mindset. Can you talk through that a little bit?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:06:03] There was a lot of conversation around how the company was recruiting at a, a younger age.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:06:11] That we needed to learn how to adapt so we could recruit good people. So recruiting was an issue. We saw that we didn't have great specialization, but that was evolving. And so we didn't know how to be a specialist outside of being, you know, an architect for all things that our healthcare education, whatever that might be.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:06:32] We didn't know how to focus on it. There were a lot of. Those kind of internal tactics and strategies that hadn't aligned yet. So we knew we had those kind of struggles, and we knew that our clients didn't quite know how to position us. They just go, oh, if we have one of these projects, we'll just put them on the list.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:06:52] They'll be one of 10 that we talked to, kind of thing. So we knew we had issues. We didn't know Ward, or the whole [00:07:00] Pennebaker model. We had interviewed all logo people, designers, and good people too. I knew from my own, and my staff knew that if you started to represent yourself differently, you had to act differently.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:07:13] But I didn't know how you do that. You know, I, I didn't have. Point of reference for that for this particular company. So we were working with a photographer that was super cool. I'm trying to remember his name, but

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:07:25] Nick Russell,

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:07:25] thank you. He had done some really cool work with staging us in different projects and seatings and all that stuff.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:07:33] My boss was like, that's not architecture. You know, he wanted the library in the background kind of books and stuff and we're like, nah, that's not the look we want. And all we knew is that's not the look we want. And I said, we're going for a new brand. We're not there yet. We need to hire a logo.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:07:50] Development team, blah, blah, blah. And he said, have you met with Ward Ba? Pennebaker? And I went, who hadn't a clue what was coming in. And [00:08:00] we had refined it. We had, we were choosing between two other consultants. So I talked to Ward and I. Was bowled over and I went, oh shoot. We're not doing this right. I mean, it just, in a conversation, it just flipped.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:08:15] Uh, my switch flipped on and I thought, all right, I'm a leader in this organization. I gotta bring it in. I don't know if you remember word, but there was a. Two players and both of them were thinkers. And when they heard and they went, eh, let's try it. Because I said, I kept saying it's gonna be a big investment, we really should make sure we're right.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:08:36] You know, I might be wrong on this. And that's a trick when you're working with architects and engineers admitting you're wrong somewhere. Gives them license to be right. So. They came into the conversation with Word and we were all blown away that there was actually, and, and this is the part that I've thought a lot about over the years, is that there's actually a scientific method.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:08:58] There is really a way [00:09:00] of building evidence into the way you wanna think and present yourself. It's not just a feeling, it's not just a gut check. It's not just a pretty picture or a way of. Trying to twist somebody's idea about who you are as a company, that kind of stuff, that there's more thought behind it.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:09:19] We learned that actually with the, the brand, with the logo development. Oh my God, you were so smart with that. A real hallmark of working with Penn and Baker that I just love as you let us play. That's where ideas came forward. And you know, in business we don't get to play a lot. You have to be right all the time, but that was never part of the engagement.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:09:42] We ended up having to be right about a few things, but we got to play through a lot of ideas first. So the logo development was a huge playground for us, and I think it derived or drew a lot of buy-in into both the process of defining who we are and how we look, and [00:10:00] then stepping into the behavior of who we are.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:10:02] And that that was a huge game changer. So did we know all that was coming on the day that Ward came in the office to talk to us and said, here's what we're going to talk to you about. And it was so simple, so straightforward, not flashy, not, and it was kind of like your first doctor's visit with someone you like and you go.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:10:21] Yep, he's right. That's what we need.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:10:24] One of the first things that we did was the voice of customer research.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:10:28] Oh, wow. That was, and were there

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:10:29] a couple of ahas in there? You went, oh my God,

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:10:32] you redefined what voice of the customer is. For that organization. And I have to tell you, since then I've left that organization work for three others.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:10:43] Since then, my thinking has always changed. There's a funny process that happens and you taught us about this, that we always wanna validate or justify what the customer's saying, well, that's not really what they said. This is what they meant. That's a pattern in [00:11:00] business because we are so in tune to how we believe our company is and what we're out there about and what we're, oh, they just don't understand.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:11:08] There were a number of responses and it was a, a very intense process. Who are we gonna let you talk to? How, what are you gonna say? Are you going to embarrass us? I mean, there was all that internal Michigan going on, like where is this? Then you were just so calm saying, Nope, we're gonna ask these 10 questions.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:11:29] We're gonna, I think I still have the questions, and then we're gonna rate them and you're gonna see, you know, what does your customer really think about you? Because that's the thing, right? The feedback was kind of. Frightening to most of the leadership because they hadn't thought of it. They had never thought.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:11:46] We think, we talk to customers all the time. We know what they're thinking, how they're feeling about us. But when a third party talks to 'em, now you really

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:11:55] know it. One was how all architectural firms pitch.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:11:59] [00:12:00] Oh man, that that woke me up. Yeah, I remember that one.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:12:05] Can you talk about that?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:12:06] I, you know, I will.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:12:07] There we had a little fun with that. You had pointed that out to us how we all pitch and everybody was kind of surprised, like. Really? And you said, it's no wonder they have to compete you 'cause they don't know what's different. You brought forward a slide that had the logo from most of our competitors, keep competitors.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:12:30] They were all red boxes, white lettering in a red box, black lettering with a red box, some kind of red lettering in a black box, I mean. You look at it and you could not pick us out of the crowd of logos. And we went, huh? That was like startling. One of the things that we did that you had me do was go ahead and look at their websites, right?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:12:55] And so I took the first paragraph from the introduction [00:13:00] to each of those architects and I had like three, four pages of text. The cadence and language from each one lined up like they were cousins or I don't know, stepbrothers. So yeah, that one was big.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:13:17] There was one other that sticks with me to this day, and that is the clients said.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:13:23] You know, by the time you get to the last presentation, you've been vetted. And most everybody comes in and for the final presentation, they give us their capabilities presentation again. And it's like, we know you can do the work. We want to know what's it gonna be like to work with you for the next five years.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:13:42] And this will be the most important job I'll do in my career. So this is a, a big, a big decision for us as clients.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:13:49] That reset our entire engagement with clients, and I'm so glad you remember it articulately. 'cause I, I just know that we were shocked that [00:14:00] clients had put that much emphasis on, do I trust you when you come into that room and I trust you.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:14:08] What was interesting in that moment when you presented that is it was quiet. Everybody took that in. Like, oh, they never tell you that. A client doesn't say, I gotta trust you with this. You know? 'cause they're vulnerable, right? That change didn't come easy. And there was a couple of presentations we worked through with you, as you had said here, this just drop that you make one slide.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:14:32] This is who you are. Just so that the audience is oriented, and then now you've gotta start conversation differently. Getting that to across to core people around the organization was so difficult because you have to be vulnerable, you have to be transparent. But that was something that you were coaching us on too in the whole guardrails process.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:14:54] This idea of transparency, authenticity. You can't lie about who you are today, even the [00:15:00] branding model. The, the butterfly and all the offshoots of that, um, suggested that, that there's great authenticity here. And so you have to start with that in a presentation.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:15:11] Do you remember where the butterfly came from?

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:15:13] The research said, customers said You didn't build a building for us. You transformed our community. And that notion of transformation, 'cause the hospital is kind of the. The heartbeat of the city, and so that when you build a really good hospital for the community, you're changing the community. And every client talked about how important that was to them, and that's how we then became up, came up with that notion of the butterfly.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:15:39] The concept of transformation was huge. In all of that feedback. That piece of it became a, oh, yes, we knew, but what we didn't know how to do. Do was articulate it, how to own that. Own it in a way that allowed us to say that was a part of our brand, a part of who we are. We step in and things [00:16:00] change. That's when it got real it.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:16:02] That idea of how you communicate transformation, how you make it sa because people don't like change. So how you communicate that we're going to transform your business on the front end rather than let 'em kind of step into it. Over the years of a project developing was a very risky statement for us and our brand logo at, or our brand statement at the time, too.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:16:26] Transforming business by design that blew everyone's mind.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:16:31] Can you talk about the impact it had on how you communicated, what you did before all of this into or after, and what level of clarity it had and the impact it had, not only with external clients, but internally as well?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:16:45] Internally, it felt like a marketing pitch to a lot of our people, and so we had to take them through training.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:16:54] Around the brand so that people on our staff could answer questions [00:17:00] or ask questions, I mean, and then have answers for clients that were questioning them. Because one of the things that the rebranding process brought to light for us and is one of the client comments too, brought this up about we had key people that were really good and the A team was excellent, that kinda stuff.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:17:20] And we realized that all of our team. Touch clients. And so they all needed to step up into this way of communicating who we were and what, how we saw the future. People started to understand that because we had case studies, we had proven that on this project at Texas Children's or this project at MD Anderson, it actually shifted the way their business was being done, and we got involved early, early on, and so we were helping them with their master planning of.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:17:53] Their new strategies, right? So we really knew stuff and so our teams, as they were getting trained on [00:18:00] transforming business by design and on that concept, they started to build evidentiary notebooks, if you will, things that architects write and drawn that that could prove the point that we do that.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:18:12] It was authentic because like at Texas Children's, you transformed how doctors and nurses interacted with patients through the building, not just the walls and the colors and them pictures, but really how the entire flow of care worked.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:18:29] And so you're already doing it, you just weren't talking about it or thinking in those terms and didn't communicate. To your potential clients that that was what you did.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:18:39] Exactly. We didn't know how to own that space. We, and clearly because we followed everybody else, we had all the same red boxes everybody else did out there.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:18:49] Right. And you know, it led to doing some really good ground, world-changing work for Texas Children's. Externally. It was really [00:19:00] interesting. We got a lot of pushback from our claim that we transformed business by design and, uh, the pushback came from consultants, um, clients that hadn't worked with us and competitors.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:19:14] Like, eh, you're not really a business consultant. Why is the word business in there? And we're thinking, we had learned through the guardrail that, yeah, we are business consultants. It's just called architecture, but didn't know how to kind of stand for ourselves. It was sort of an interesting time. And people get nervous.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:19:31] We didn't get a lot of hits online saying nasty things. We got a lot of hits online from a great website and from a lot of video and a lot of things that weren't being done in the industry. So we were kind of first in Lion, liked it. 'cause you went back and you talked to clients and. They liked what we had done.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:19:49] They said, yeah, that makes sense. It wasn't revolutionary for clients and that's what made it authentic was they went well. Yeah, that's what they do.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:19:57] So going into it though, [00:20:00] did you realize how disruptive it would be? So not only are you talking different, you're looking different, dressing different, you know, everything is different.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:20:10] Did you really go into it thinking this would be the outcome?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:20:14] No, not in any way, shape, or form. There was a lot of work being done internally. We didn't know what clients were responding to except they knew we were working, especially our key clients, and it felt like. I use a house renovation as an I as a metaphor.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:20:31] It felt like you could see a lot of work being done on the house, but you didn't know what was changing. You didn't see, and do you ever see a neighbor's house going up and you wanna see the inside, like, what's the guts really look like there? And that's what it kind of felt like to us internally. It's like, what's this really gonna look like When we were doing a launch.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:20:49] Website, promo, logo, all of that. We had a launch party and John Crane, who would've been kind of the black hat, [00:21:00] everything was a question, everything. The investment was a question of time and money, the power it might have, the influence it would have, all of that. Why are we doing this? Well, he stood up to speak, and I'm still gonna choke up on this.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:21:13] He stood up to speak, he took his jacket off and wore. Had had him put on a logo shirt. John Crane never wore logos on anything. Maybe now and then in her May or something, but never an FKP logo and the whole audience just stood up and clapped that indicated that we were in a hundred percent. Look it, I'm starting to cry again.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:21:38] It was so, such a transformation transforming moment. Because you had one of the second in commit. I mean, he had been with the company most of its time. For him to show that I'm behind this. A hundred percent told everybody line up 'cause this is where we're going. And you had told us that would happen, that once the CEO [00:22:00] shifted, the rest of the organization would move with it.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:22:02] And it did. And we grew and we grew by 200% because clients that weren't working with us suddenly went, oh, these guys got it going on. We specialized the, the process of the guardrails. Really forces you into self-reflection, into, into a moment where you have to do an an inventory. Who are you really? And you're not good at a hundred things.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:22:27] You're good at maybe one or two things and everything else can, that was another thing we learned in the guardrail process. If you're excellent in these areas, that halo effect works in other areas, but don't ever lose your excellence in these areas. And so we defined who we were. We went deeper into. The children's care.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:22:46] So children's hospitals were us. We weren't afraid of taking that kind of ownership. We didn't wanna be myopic and just focus in one market. It was almost like a house cleaning at some point. Again, the metaphor of a house, [00:23:00] but it was almost like we could be safe in very specific sectors and not worry about being all things to all people.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:23:08] Still do exceptionally well. And that's what we did. And then we took on the big, the other boulders. I mean, getting us to authentically talk about who we were, what our brand was, representing it in a way that we felt good. You know, we're a design team. We needed to feel good about what you look like and all that.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:23:27] To your question of did you realize what you're stepping into? No, we thought we were gonna get one nice logo. What we got were four very productive, very focused businesses out of the process.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:23:41] Can you talk about the importance of rolling it out internally the way that you did? So for, for example, if you had just shot an email to the staff saying, heads up, we got a new logo.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:23:53] You'll love it. See it launch. Can you just talk about how, how rolling it out internally effectively [00:24:00] changed the trajectory of the company?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:24:02] People in organizations are accustomed to change that thrust on 'em and that that they engage in. And so. Mailing in that information is thrust upon 'em, and it's like, yeah, I'll wait for the next email to see how true this is.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:24:15] No, I'll wait for the next comment to see if I get in any trouble for not using the new logo or I, it's, it's a slow edit adaptation to something new and then. A dismissal. The way we rolled it out was first through engagement, so we would have different groups of people on the logo committee, for example, and committees are usually, in my world, they're kind of the death of an idea.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:24:42] But what the guardrails process did is it. Weaponized key participants with client-focused research. What's the market doing? Here's what we're observing. We knew what was going on in our market and with our clients, and so as we build [00:25:00] committees to look at certain pieces of the branding, we could inform.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:25:05] So all the way through the process, people were kept informed and also shared. A lot of detail was shared. A lot of good research was shared. So there was facts, figures, reality checks that people, um, were coached on. So that rollout created a lot of converts, created a few, a lot of dissenters too. I mean, we did lose people off of it.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:25:28] Not, I wouldn't say a huge drop off. But the people that didn't fit, and we worried about that. 'cause you're like, oh my God, they're gonna leave. And we got coached through the guardrail process that really, if they leave, it's 'cause they don't fit. It's not because they're bad people, it's just they don't fit.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:25:45] And so the buy-in started to accelerate as you start to clean off the dissenting voices. And that just kind of happened naturally. So communication was key all the way through. It was like we [00:26:00] wanted to keep it. In a dark room and kind kind of hidden until we could reveal and we were coached. Don't do that.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:26:06] Talk about it. Make sure people know what's going on. The most fun part was going to market in big conferences and healthcare loves big conferences, and we had some of the best. We had some beautiful work and people were awed by how we looked at a trade show. They knew who we were, but now they knew where to find us because we were clearly.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:26:30] Children's and, and women's hospital spaces. That's kind was our specialty. We weren't afraid of being specialists and then able to do other good things. So that clarity of purpose is really what came across for the team.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:26:46] What was the most valuable thing that you got out of all of it? Was it the clarity of purpose or the foundational elements, or was it the logo itself or the brand?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:26:58] The energy that was [00:27:00] released around the clarity of purpose, because we had the voice of the customer in our head changed the way the business operated. It was people were more transparent and conversational about what was being done. There was a dynamic that changed internally that teams were. Proud of the transformation of the piece of work that they had done that week, that month, that year, with a client that actually moved the client's business.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:27:34] And so our focus on the client's business completely changed the way we worked. Now in. Fairness. Um, the guardrails process is a very humbling process. It, it forces you into a real inventory of what you're good at and what you're not good at, and don't worry about what you're not good at, but you better focus on what you are good at.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:27:55] So that process opens up a lot of scenarios [00:28:00] that you may or may not wanna own. And one of the key drivers in the process that I respected tremendously and the team just felt, thank God we have an answer around, is we would build different scenarios. So it could be, all right if all this happens, it could be this.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:28:17] And so it was the scenario building that gave us options. Do you wanna land here? Do you wanna land here? Do you wanna try this? And it gave us a sense of kind of a, a sense that we could influence where we land. That process, that that humbling process forced us to deal with what ifs, what if this doesn't work?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:28:39] What if this model requires this? And in the end, we knew. One of my favorite quotes working with you Ward was, you know, either change or die, right? And so we knew that if we didn't adapt to this reality based on what the clients had told us, and you kept coaching us on, if you don't show the clients that you've [00:29:00] responded to their efforts to tell you what they think, then they're going away and you're like, uhoh, that kills business.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:29:07] Any regrets throughout the entire process? Anything that you would've done differently?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:29:11] I think what I might have done is looked at the brand effort or rebranding as more of a critical infrastructure to the business. It seemed at the time, like a nice to have and very sophisticated companies could own theirs and all that kind of good stuff.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:29:30] But today it is a piece, it's a value. And it's, it's an asset on your sheet. I mean, all brands are right, and I don't think we looked at it that way. And I wish that we had because we would've treated it differently. And we didn't build maintenance into the brand. We pushed the launch, we pushed the education, we brought people up at the time, new people coming in, kind of the next generation to own It.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:29:59] Did very well [00:30:00] with it. Third generation in did not, we did not maintain it. And so if I were kind of starting over again, I'd look at what are the contract terms for you coming back in and doing a refresh or a recheck, because the brand kind of falls off sometimes, and that's what happened on this one. I think when you invest like that, I think when you invest in a brand, you invest in a position in the market that you need some checks and balances put into it, and that that would've been, that's my biggest regret is that there was nothing that maintained it.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:30:33] If you were to build a maintenance. Strategy. What? What might that look like?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:30:38] Your brand is determined by your market. They tell you who you are and your clients tell you who you are. So the guardrail process working with Pennebaker is so client centric, so focused on who your clients are and what they need and how they perceive you.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:30:53] That that check checkpoint is just, you know, that's 99% of the [00:31:00] work in my estimation. And clients, they determine what your strategy should be, so you should listen to 'em. Right? So because of that, I think one of the things I'd build into the model is a, I know people don't like this, but six month, 12 month check-ins.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:31:17] Or interviews like are done in the client assessment early on, or quite simply, when a company onboards a new customer, a new client, put that interview right into the package. This is just part of the startup. So see where that client is in the beginning. Check back with them within that 12 month period so that.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:31:38] Voice of the customer is a constant feedback loop to your clients because it, it won't change the brand, but it'll change the way your client, your your FKP talks to their new customer.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:31:53] You've had multiple jobs with change initiatives and you've learned, here are the [00:32:00] things that will guarantee they go south and here are the things that'll gar and guarantee they'll succeed.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:32:05] What would you tell people when you're committing to change? Here's what you gotta know for it to work.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:32:12] I will tell this story. I was recently. I won a class at Rice University in their executive program on client-centric strategies. It was really interesting. It had people from all over the world in this one week course, and it was couple of CEOs, uh, one of our big competitors in, in the big EPC big engineering company.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:32:37] Sent six people from Australia, New York, and other places. So there's a lot of influencers, a lot of senior level people in this course. And I referred to the work I had done with Penn and Baker several times in some of my discussion. The, you're in small discussion groups and then big presentation group because.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:32:58] The exercise [00:33:00] there, working with your team was transformational for my, my own personal way of seeing the world. The key things I pointed out during those sessions most recently, and mind you, this is more than 10 years after I've had the experience working with you. So I smile at the Pennebaker experience because it has had a legacy in my career and I've worked with some.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:33:24] Pretty major players that I've used, my changed perspective and focus to influence them, and it's kind of this simple. In class, we were talking, and I'll go back to it in class, we were talking about there's only two reasons for business to exist. Cash and customers. If you're in business, it's to make money and you can do all the good things in the world.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:33:44] You can make all the impact you want in the world, but the reality is you gotta make money and you gotta have customers to do it. I fell on the side of customer discussion and I said it was working with Pennebaker that I came to understand what the voice of the customer really was. So I used that a lot [00:34:00] and in sharing my experience, the things that I focused on was listen to the voice of the customer.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:34:06] 'cause they're not lying to you. They have nothing to gain by lying to a consultant that's asking 'em, what do you think of this team? They're. Comments? Are there comments? Don't edit them. Don't clean 'em up. Don't make it sound good. So your CEO feels better. Just go with the voice because that's who's influencing your next hire, your next, uh, customer.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:34:30] I think that alone by itself, it has saved me in some jobs and it has. Made me work harder in others because, um, if you realize that business is only business if you have customers, and we got coached pretty heavily by that, on that reality in that exercise, then you just always defer to that benchmark as if this is what the customers are saying, they're the customers.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:34:56] I think you also taught us. The customer's always right. They may [00:35:00] not be right, but they're paying the bills, they turn on the lights, they're right. And so now you've gotta work from there. Other things that worked from that exercise is that evidence-based reality is built on research. And so how somebody feels, thinks opines on their own company has value it ha, but put it into some kind of system of.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:35:26] Thought it's not just, you know, throw it at the wall and make it, see what sticks. And a lot of business gets done that way. And I don't care what, what group you're, you know, you can be at Amazon, you can be at hp, you can be, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of stick to the wall management that goes on. And if you wanna.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:35:45] Build a business or a business model with an intelligentsia, with smart, intelligent staff that are either gonna follow the leader or not. You've gotta give them evidence. You've gotta give them a trail that's laden [00:36:00] with some reality checks that. They can buy into. And just the guardrails alone kind of puts everything in check, puts it into a process of we're gonna look at the customer, we're gonna look at your performance, we're gonna look at the things that you wanna fix.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:36:15] We're gonna look at scenarios that work, scenarios that don't, taking us through that was. Such a refreshing exercise in reality that people could buy in.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:36:27] Can you give me one example of a change initiative that you were involved in that didn't work and why?

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:36:35] I I, you notice I was avoiding this question, right.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:36:38] I couldn't help but notice.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:36:39] Yeah. And, and that's actually one of the hallmarks of working with a pen and baker. You know, no stone is left unturned, so have fun with it. I had a recent experience with a extremely large architectural firm. I was brought in to introduce healthcare as a service, a design service Internally. [00:37:00]

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:37:00] I was brought in as a consultant, but they like my proposal and asked me to come on full-time as full hire. And I thought, all right, this is gonna be easy. You know, they've got all this, we'll get all this, it'll work. And so I went about my business personally, building what I was supposed to build. And had a lot of fun with it.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:37:19] I forgot to do internal checks on where the naysayers, dissenters and others were. I, I'm pretty good at assessing things and, and missed a few key turning points that made it. Kind of a very difficult subsidiary to introduce, but my biggest mistake was not testing the position of the company, the, the brand as it were, and really trying to understand what the customer was going to tolerate.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:37:50] I when it alone. And, and you'll see that now this is a 6,000 person organization. There's. [00:38:00] Lots of ebb and flow in it, but going it alone, we just thought we'd experiment. We just thought we'd try it, and it had a big brand name. And so customers of course, knew us, but they didn't know us in this space. And so we just kind of made assumptions.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:38:16] And of course I was so smart. I knew the business, I knew the market. I got customers to agree. I, we sold a billion dollar project. I mean, I, I was flying pretty high on it. The minute, the minute that somebody not on brand, not in the same sector. I was not in the, and I'm, I'm talking about hours, not minutes, but hours later, the project got pulled from us and um, it just was the beginning of the end for the whole division that was getting up.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:38:48] And what we completely miss, what I now have assessed is I didn't get the buy-in needed. Internally nor externally, I didn't have the [00:39:00] evidence of the voice of the customer. I didn't have the evidence I needed to do what I was doing. And I tell you more times than not, that job took the best of me and the worst of me.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:39:12] It, it really killed me. I ended up leaving, not by my own choice, they just weren't gonna gimme a second chance and it just crushed me. And I thought about it and I went, I should have called Penna bigger. I should have just done the initial study. Really get some outside insight to what's going on in that market that would allow us to build on this platform.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:39:37] 'cause these billion dollar projects come along, I didn't have to have that one. So buying it alone internally, when you have an organization that isn't aligned to what your mission is, it's not an easy start. You need some outside counsel and I, I kind of look at that moment as my biggest mistake.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:39:58] Thank you so much [00:40:00] for engaging, fun discussion.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:40:03] And I wanna get you back 'cause I've got another 10 questions to ask, but we're gonna running outta time.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:40:08] Oh, you're so gracious. I'll get you back Gracious. Thank

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:40:10] you. And, and, uh, continue to explore. This is wonderful.

Kathleen Margolis:

[00:40:14] You guys are fabulous and, and thank you.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:40:16] This has been so much fun. Thanks for listening to Rethink Change.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:40:20] If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss a single episode. If you're a disruptor looking to challenge the status quo and don't know where to start or what to do next. Pennebaker can help find out more@Pennebaker.com.