Fabian Pfortmüller on What Makes Work Meaningful

In Chapter 3 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What Makes Your Work Meaningful?"  Pfortmüller shares how he finds meaning making product experiences in his HOLSTEE work and also in hiw Sandbox Network work.  He notes why scale matters to him and how it applies differently in products versus experiences.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What makes your work meaningful?

Fabian Pfortmüller: I feel that I really have an impact when I see two things: on the one hand, how much scale have the ideas that I work on and on the other hand what is the feedback of people? What is the reaction when they use the product that we’ve made for them? And I’ll give you an example with HOLSTEE, we created the manifesto, we wrote the manifesto and at first we just wrote it for ourselves. It was truly -- there was no impact, it was just for ourselves and the scale that we’ve reached, now we have over 80 million views today of the manifesto and we get feedbacks from people all the time, how they actually changed their lives by reading this.

The combination of those two things really, really gives me a strong feeling that I create something meaningful but it doesn’t need to be a concrete product. I feel also -- In the case of Sandbox, it’s more about the type of relationships that we build. When I know that people that might not have been friends before, now are building something together, that also gives me really a feeling of creating something meaningful and there the scale is not 80 million, there might be just 2 or 3 but I think the scale can be very different. On the one hand it could be a product that spreads a lot but the other hand it can just be a relationship between 2 people. It doesn’t need to be a huge, huge number. It can just be a very deep, deep relationship.

Fabian Pfortmüller on What It Means to Be a Leader

In Chapter 5 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What Does It Mean to Be a Leader in What You Do?"  Pfortmüller shares his leadership learning journey, including taking responsibility, living values, staying focused on goals.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What does it mean to be a leader in what you do?

Fabian Pfortmüller: The honest answer is, I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I go through waves. Sometimes I believe I totally figured it out and sometimes I wake up and I realize I really don’t know what it means in the first place. There are certain parts of it that I understand more and more as I become older. One of them is for example taking responsibility for things you start.

So, if something bad happens, if we screw up, I think it’s my responsibility to deal with it. I think that’s what it means to be a leader. On the other hand, I also believe that it has a lot to do with example. It’s -- If energy is low, it’s my role to have high energy and like bring good motivation, good energy back into the team. The same goes for values.

I strongly feel that values are something that are very easily lived in good times but they’re tough in hard times and I think it makes a leader to live values and enforce values when it’s maybe not that easy to live by them and for us at HOLSTEE over the last year we were faced with -- We had very strong growth and we were asked, you know, do you wanna like use a printer that is gonna scale up much faster and maybe use this cheaper paper but, you know, in those moments we’re like, actually we should remind ourselves of what we believe in.

You wanna have like, wanna create sustainable products, wanna create products that have a positive impact for the people that make them, we don’t just wanna scale up and so in those moments, I feel like those decisions they’re about leadership, I believe.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How an Entrepreneur Uses Storytelling to Succeed

In Chapter 6 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "How Are You Learning to Tell Stories That Others Can Embrace as Their Own?"  Pfortmüller shares why storytelling has been fundamental to his marketing messaging and then shares three elements he uses to build and engage a consumer audience.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How are you learning to tell stories that others can embrace as their own?

Fabian Pfotmüller: What I learned this year is storytelling is not just something you do for fun. It’s core. Being a good storyteller I think is being a good entrepreneur because at the end of the day as an entrepreneur you’re creating something that has not been there before and you have to sell it to people and people don’t wanna hear about products. They don’t wanna hear about features, they wanna hear stories and therefore storytelling is super key.

Now, when it comes to how to tell stories, I happen to work with one of the best storytellers on the planet, Mike Radparvar. He’s an incredible storyteller. I sometimes feel like I'm sitting in a bazaar and I'm listening to like an ancient storyteller that just creates a whole world but what it comes down to is someone who’s able to leave you with an emotion and who will leave you with a certain feeling much more than just explaining you something. I think that’s the key of storytelling.

And secondly, I realized also that there are amazing storytellers out there. That working with them just takes the story to a whole new level. So, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with amazing storytellers like you and also other videographers who retake in a core message and brought it to a whole new level for their visual language, for their way of putting the story together and stories don’t just happen, they have very very clear messages at the core, that you then build around that.

And the last thing I also learned about stories that they have to be very simple that people understand them. It’s one message that then gets conveyed. It’s not a huge story that you sometimes tell for 25 minutes that they get. It’s one message.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How to Take a Vision From Theory to Practice

In Chapter 7 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "How Are You Getting Better at Selling a Vision?"  First, he shares how he has learned to "Start With Why" in how he explains why, what and how he does what he does.  Second, he shares how his visioncasting has gone from theory to reality in building out the under-30 young leader Sandbox Network.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How are you getting better at selling a vision?

Fabian Pfortmüller: I'm getting better at selling a vision by more understanding it myself and I think that’s a very normal thing as an entrepreneur, you start something, you kind of know where you’re going but you figure it out on the way and through conversations, through self-reflection, through feedback, through debrief, whatnot, you better understand what you’re doing and that definitely helps.

One thing I learned this year is I started to explain the vision in three parts and always kind of the same way. I start with why, I explain how and then I go to what. I used to do it the other way around. I used to explain what I do first, then how we do it, and why we do it but I realized that starting with the reason why is it that you’re doing this, what is really driving you makes visions much more tangible and makes it better for people to understand what is driving you there. Then you explain how you wanna get there and in the end you talk about concrete tangible things that leaves people with something that they can relate to and, you know, he’s not just flying in the clouds. He’s actually talking tangible steps.

Erik Michielsen: What is your vision for the Sandbox network and what steps are you taking to realize it?

Fabian Pfortmüller: The reason Sandbox exists is to find amazing, young doers under 30 and turn them into a global family. I use the word family very consciously. I believe it’s about not just allowing them to network but to really build an enormously trusted close-knit community of peers and how we do that is that we build communities all over the world, we connect them and we provide platforms for learning.

Learning is at the core of this family feeling and we identify those young people, we create the platforms and we encourage and push them to really go out there and build a family together. And very concretely we have by now 25 hubs across the world and those hubs are each an accelerator of young people themselves. They host tons of events, we’re expanding every single day and as we move forward we think of what are other ways of how we can turn those people into a more closer family and how we can accelerate them even more.

So, we think of things like building an investment fund, being able to provide those people with capital. We’re thinking about building very structured incubation programs and for example running a test program at the moment in New York where we picked 20 people, 10 males, 10 females, super diverse crowd of the top, top, top young achievers from anything from social entrepreneurs, tech entrepreneurs, artists, designers, musicians and we have them go for a yearlong acceleration program that they provide themselves. It’s a peer-to-peer MBA and that’s what we wanna do and replicate all over the world. Provide peer-to-peer learning and in the end of the day really allow people not just to bond but really learn from each other.

Fabian Pfortmüller on The Rewards of Project Collaboration

In Chapter 8 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What Do You Find Most Rewarding About Collaborating With Others on Projects?"  Pfortmüller shares how diverse perspectives make collaboration rewarding.  He notes how both senior executive collaboration and volunteer young professional collaboration can both be so valuable educational experiences.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What do find most rewarding about collaborating with others on projects?

Fabian Pfortmüller: I'm fascinated by every person you collaborate with has quite a different perspective on life, on your project, on your situation and being able to think yourself into that perspective and understand where they’re coming from and then kind of connect there, I think is super valuable.

I’ll give you an example, at Sandbox we work with a variety of stakeholders and every one of them is quite in a different position in life. We work with very, very senior executives on our consulting side. We have volunteer ambassadors who run our 25 hubs across the world and they’re young entrepreneurs, they’re super crazy busy and at the same time they’re as volunteers running our community. And collaborating with that kind of crowd is super different than collaborating with someone like a very senior executive.

And thinking about what is going on in their world and understanding what is it that drives them and how do they approach this problem has been an incredible experience for me to learn from them and I would say that not one of them is better than the other. I learn just as much of collaborating with a Sandboxer in Brazil than working for an executive here in the US.

Fabian Pfortmüller on Learning to Work With Coaches and Mentors

In Chapter 9 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "At This Moment in Life, Where Are You Seeking Advice and Coaching?"  Pfortmüller is learning to take advice and coaching more seriously after realizing, as an entrepreneur, he has been learning by doing when, in fact, learning from others may often be more effective.  He details how he engages his mentor and peer support networks to make the respective relationships more valuable.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: At this moment in life, where are you seeking advice and coaching?

Fabian Pfortmüller: Where I stand right now, I realize that advice and coaching actually is more and more important and I start to take it more seriously and I start to more proactively look for it. I realized over the last year that I as an entrepreneur have been very often learning by doing and very often there is no need to do it the first time yourself because so many people have done it before and I think looking to other people to learn from them, also to books or existing sources of learning has been a big change in my life.

I look for mentors on two levels, on the one hand more senior people. I've been fortunate to have a few very senior people supporting me for several years now. I usually try to interact with them and talk with them in a very informal setting. So, we meet over breakfast or we meet for dinner where I think the more open I can be the more valuable that relationship is. Also the more I can show what is not going well, the more valuable it is for me.

The other group of people that is really supportive and has been extremely helpful is a peer community like Sandbox where people are my age or even younger than I am but they are going through the same things and the more and more I start to really take advantage of that peer group. It’s working with mentors and working with coaches for me has a lot to do with being able to show weaknesses, being able to formulate what you’re not good at and being able to formulate your challenges and that’s something that I have to learn. It’s not something that I can just do by nature.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How to Break Out of a Comfort Zone

In Chapter 10 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What is Your Comfort Zone and What Do You Do to Break Free of Living in It?"  He shares how he gets into a comfort zone when doing overly repetitive tasks.  He shares how creating a risk-taking program at work has helped him to experience new things and seek out others who think big and challenge his thinking.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What is your comfort zone and what do you do to break free of living in it?

Fabian Pfortmüller: When I have too often the same task or the same objective on my plate and on my task list, I'm too much in my comfort zone and I feel that if I don’t take enough risk and if I'm not a little bit scared, I must be too much in my comfort zone. We have this tradition at HOLSTEE where we pick one risk a week, where just every week we say let’s just, you know, randomly pick one risk of something we wanna achieve. It’s kind of something we’re scared off, something that we might not do otherwise and it’s so energizing.

It’s so often we get things done like this and we did a little experiment last year where we actually created a whole role about risk taking and we called it Agent99 and Agent99 was an internship that was about 99 risks in 99 days. So, we would pick some risks of things that we thought would be good for our community, would be good for, I don’t know, the world, would have a good impact and would also help us as a brand at HOLSTEE and we then found amazing perfect person who was so willing to take risk and he just went out and achieved it. And I think that’s a great, that’s a great way of doing it.

I think for us really thinking big helps me to get kind of just out of comfort zone and one thing that I believe helps me also is being surrounded by people that really think big. I realize that when I'm surrounded by other entrepreneurs and I kind of get this chilly feeling of like, “Oh, my god, that’s kind of crazy.” That’s what I want for myself as well and that’s what I want for my own idea as well and when I'm missing it, I know something is not good.

It’s good to have a little bit of fear in it because it means you’re really going for a big idea and you’re not just executing something and in the end of the day we’re trying out something new that has not been done before. We’re building something that has not there before and that little bit of like “uh-oh”, in the back of my head is something very healthy.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How to Run Projects Using Culture and Process

In Chapter 11 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "How Do You Balance Experimentation and Commitment in the Projects You Pursue?"  Pfortmüller answers the question in the context of process and culture and how both are relevant to project planning, team building and problem solving.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How do you balance experimentation and commitment in the projects that you pursue?

Fabian Pfortmüller: I would answer that question with two buckets. On the one hand, I think it’s about process and on the other hand it’s about culture. I believe it’s all about having very clear processes when you run any project. We’re learning every day about project management, we’re learning about setting goals, we’re learning about, you know, making sure those deadlines are met and finding structures how we feel comfortable that we can really plan out projects in quite a lot detail but at the same time building the culture to be super free and how we wanna solve that problem.

Once we clearly define the problem, there should not be a required way to get there and I think culture is one of the key elements that allows people to think freely and that’s just something that we’re trying to tell ourselves but also the people we work with. No matter how you get there, it doesn’t matter. It’s just about the goal, and the crazier ideas, the better.

We at HOLSTEE for example have a 10% rule, a little bit like Google’s 20% rule but 10% where we just encourage people to work on whatever they want and something that they are passionate about, something where they believe they can have impact and I think that openness and that freedom in, you know, going no matter where as long as they’re creating something valuable is super important for any organization.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How Co-Founder Role Changes as Company Grows

In Chapter 12 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "How Are Your Responsibilities Changing as Your Company Grows?"  Pfortmüller notes how his role at Sandbox Network is evolving away from daily operational sales and marketing tasks and more toward higher level strategic responsibilities.  He also notes how he is continuing to find new hats to wear at Holstee as the company grows and brings on staff to handle jobs and tasks he has managed to date.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How are your responsibilities changing as your businesses grow?

Fabian Pfortmüller: As the company evolves so does my role and at Sandbox for example, I started out being in a very operational marketing kind of sales role and that has moved into more and more focusing on the bigger picture. It has to do on the one hand how the organization is progressing. It’s becoming more mature. We have amazing people who work there who do most of the jobs that I did in the beginning way better than I do them and on the other hand I’ve also started to learn what I do good and what I'm best at and I realized I'm good at understanding community.

I'm good at realizing in which direction we could develop it, I'm good at seeing opportunities, I'm good at connecting opportunities and maybe, you know, strategic goals and so I’ve start to spent more time on that and I would say over time I shifted to go from doing a lot of things that were urgent and needed my immediate attention to more things that are important and hopefully gonna have an impact on the bigger picture but on the other hand at HOLSTEE, you know, it’s the same thing that very, very small team and there I'm in a very operational role, it keeps changing and I also – I would say the three founders have very different skill sets where my role there was to make sure like we’re operational, like set up in a way that we can run very fast and at the beginning I did like, you know, accounting and bookkeeping and what not until we found luckily someone who is way better than I am at these things but I'm quite good at doing something for the first time not in a perfect way but in a way that it doesn’t completely fall apart and that the ship more or less keeps going until we find someone -- we can afford someone who does this much better.

Fabian Pfortmüller on What Qualities to Seek in a Business Partner

In Chapter 13 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What Makes a Good Business Partner?"  To Pfortmüller, it comes down to trust and to love.  He shares the importance of having workplace chemistry, being able to resolve conflicts meaningfully, and maintaining kindness and respect toward one another.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What makes a good business partner?

Fabian Pfortmüller: I’ve been incredibly fortunate with the people I’ve worked with and I think I put a lot of focus and attention to the people I’ve worked with. It’s so important to me. In one word I would summarize it with trust. You know, it’s people that I completely 100% trust but even more so -- I think I would even use the word love.

It’s quite an extreme thing to use I guess in the business context but I admire those people. I'm so fortunate to be working with Dave and Mike at HOLSTEE. I've been so fortunate to have founded Sandbox with Nico and the others because I can learn from them every single day. I admire their values and I completely trust them. And I think that makes really good business partners. And I don’t know if you know this but Dave, Mike and I we actually live together. We live in the same apartment. We love hanging out and it’s not hard to work together and at the same time it’s not to say that we don’t have conflicts.

We have, you know, we fight but I would say we fight in a friendly way and we fight in a way where we respect each other, where we keep each other’s interest, I think, in mind, where we try to understand what is the other person is trying to say and yeah, we try to be friendly to each other. I think that makes a huge difference. And also one thing about business partners I think we can really just take time off and we don’t have to talk about work and just be easy just hanging in California for a week -- it doesn’t matter.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How to Respect Business Partner Friendships

In Chapter 14 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What Has Been Most Challenging About Building a Business With Friends?"  He notes how working with friends brings together two worlds of decisions.  Pfortmüller notes the importance of both staying objective and being considerate that people are changing and appreciating that change is key.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What has been most challenging about building a business with friends?

Fabian Pfortmüller: Working with friends can get very challenging if you have to take tough decisions and sometimes those decisions might affect some of us personally and in those moments it’s just not easy to be very objective and to, you know, like pretend that you’re not a human being and that you don’t know each other, that you’re not like, like each other.

I found it also challenging in the way that I have to force myself to learn about the person all the time. Business partners are changing as well. Business partners are growing as well and you have to accept that and you have to keep moving with them and the Erik from last year is not the Erik from now. You can’t have one fixed picture of the other person in mind.

I would say sometimes when you’re very close with your business partners, it’s also important you just give them their freedom and their space. You know, if the other person is in a relationship, they need time for themselves and even though the business might be going crazy, that is something very important in their lives and respecting that, understanding that, and maybe not pushing them too hard at that moment is super important.

Fabian Pfortmüller on How Holstee Sets Growth Goals to Scale Business

In Chapter 15 of 15 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller answers "What New Challenges Are You Facing As You Grow Your Business?"  He finds the business has passed the "get started" phase into its position as an 8-person company.  As it looks to take the next step and expand into the 25-50 headcount range, Pfortmüller shares how the maturing company is assessing its team, its capabilities, and its market opportunity.  Pfortmüller is co-founder of the young leader accelerator, Sandbox Network, and HOLSTEE, an apparel and design firm that sells meaningful products to mindful shoppers.  Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its school of General Studies. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What new challenges are you facing as you grow your business?

Fabian Pfortmüller: With HOLSTEE we’re going definitely into phase three right now I would say. First phase was just get started phase. Phase two was building up to kind of a certain first level, for now 8 people. We have grown a lot in terms of traffic, revenue, sales, you know, how our brand and our community has grown and that keeps growing right now.

The question is: where do we take this from an 8-person company to maybe a 20 people company. How do we take this to really have an impact on a global level and those questions we never thought of in the beginning and very often people told us in the beginning, you’ll be thinking about those questions later on and we’re like, “You guys are crazy”. We’ll never have think of like inventory questions and, you know, how to optimize our books and financial planning and what not because in the beginning you just make it work.

And that’s okay, that’s how it should be, but in the phase that we are right now, we really wanna fully understand every part of our business to then be able to scale it up and scale doesn’t come by itself. Scale comes from fully understanding where you’re at and finding that niche, that really kinda has the opportunity to grow a lot. And at HOLSTEE right now, at the moment where we have an existing business that is doing very well and is growing, but at the same time it also gives us the opportunity to take a step backwards. We were a whole week in California last week just to do exactly that. Think of, you know, where do we really wanna take this in the next 3 or 5 years and almost start with a clean slate.

What Gets Easier and What Gets Harder - Michael Margolis

In Chapter 1 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, educator and entrepreneur Michael Margolis answers "What is Getting Easier and What is Getting Harder in Your Life?"  Margolis shares the challenge of battling chronic fatigue fibromyalgia and how it has affected his personal and work life.  He shares how the positive side of this experience - what has gotten easier - has been learning to delegate as he has built his team.  Michael Margolis is founder and president of Get Storied, an education and publishing platform dedicated to teaching the world how to think in narrative.  He earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University. 

How Passion Junkie Finds Meaning in Storytelling - Michael Margolis

In Chapter 3 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, educator and entrepreneur Michael Margolis answers "What Makes Your Work Meaningful?"  He shares how he is attracted to challenge, to puzzles, to riddles, and why exploring these issues in the context of story has been rewarding.  Michael Margolis is founder and president of Get Storied, an education and publishing platform dedicated to teaching the world how to think in narrative.  He earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University. 

How Michael Margolis Learns to Live and Work on His Own Terms

In Chapter 4 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, educator and entrepreneur Michael Margolis answers "What Do You Enjoy Most About What You Do?"  Michael shares what he enjoys about working on his own terms and building a company out of his New York City apartment.  He shares how advisors, collaborators, and partners have helped him build business momentum and grow his team.  Michael Margolis is founder and president of Get Storied, an education and publishing platform dedicated to teaching the world how to think in narrative.  He earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University. 

How Routines Improve Home Office Lifestyle - Michael Margolis

In Chapter 5 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, educator and entrepreneur Michael Margolis answers "What Have You Learned About Managing Expectations at Home While Building a Business?"  He shares how routines and rituals have helped him better manage work-life balance, working through an illness, and growing his business.  Michael Margolis is founder and president of Get Storied, an education and publishing platform dedicated to teaching the world how to think in narrative.  He earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University. 

Michael Margolis on How Vulnerability Creates Trusting Relationships

In Chapter 6 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, educator and entrepreneur Michael Margolis answers "How Do You Establish Trust When Building Relationships?"  Margolis uses vulnerability, which he cites as the most overlooked part of storytelling.  He notes how truth gets attention, empathy establishes connection, and vulnerability reminds people of shared values and similar interests. 

Michael Margolis is founder and president of Get Storied, an education and publishing platform dedicated to teaching the world how to think in narrative.  He earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you establish trust when building relationships?

Michael Margolis: So, it’s something that I called the V-factor and it’s actually the most overlooked element of storytelling, it’s vulnerability. So, you have to have truth. Truth is what gets people’s ears to go [make sounds], right? It’s like Scooby Doo time, oh, there’s something over here. I better pay attention. Or, wow, this looks interesting. So, truth gets people’s attention. 

Then you have to establish empathy, which lets people know that you really care about them. You care about their world and what they’re going through, right? You really give a crap and you understand what your audience is facing or struggling or challenged with and it all comes home though. 

The third principle is vulnerability. So, vulnerability is reminding people that, “you know what, I may be an expert or I may have a solution for you but we’re more similar to each other than different. Here’s what we share in common”, I have my own foibles you know, it’s why -- you know as we sat down I talked to you about, “Geez, the last six months my health has kicked my ass”, right. Very humbling process. When I'm teaching or coaching students, you know, in my programs online, I'm very open about sharing my own personal journey because this is a fallacy – This I think really, in a way it captures the paradigm shift of what we’re all going through in the world of business. It used to be we lived in this world of objective reality. Of being the brand that spoke with the voice of God, “I have all the answers for you. I am the guru”. And instead we’re now shifting into this place where it’s peer-to-peer learning, right. Where we’re all co-learners together. Part of it is things are so challenging and so complex. None of us have like all the answers. 

So, we have to be more in relationship with each other. So, it’s really important this vulnerability piece is what makes you human. And here’s the kicker on vulnerability, is if you establish vulnerability with people in an authentic way, you really share a part of yourself and where your edge or your struggle is, do you know what happens? People become more forgiving of the hiccups and the bumps in the road. It’s a really important principle for any brand especially if you're in startup mode, you have a new product, a new service, you’re doing something that’s different. If you wanna build that halo around your brand where people feel emotionally connected, vulnerability is key. 

A great case and point is look at Netflix in the last year, they’ve got an awesome product, okay, so they raised their prices from what was it $8.99 to $11.99 and everybody had a shit storm. I think the way that people reacted was actually the way that Netflix talked about it. They talked about the price increase like they were doing us a favor as a consumer and then once sort of the crisis hit they were still -- sort of they came off in a very arrogant fashion, which I think ultimately really hurt their brand. Now, are they bouncing back, are they here to stay? I think so, because ultimately they have a product that many of us want and reflects sort of the new way that we’re consuming media but that’s a really great example to keep in mind the power of the V-factor or vulnerability. And if you can build that halo of having more disclosure, of letting people in sort of behind the curtain, the places where you’re struggling -- not in a poor pity me or [make sounds], okay but in a way that’s relevant, in a way that’s relatable. 

Again, by building a brand halo that includes vulnerability, people become so much more forgiving about the bumps in the road. It’s just like being in a relationship with a significant other and let’s say your partner has certain places that are kind of their tough spots, their edge, their place of growth. You’re far more forgiving if you have a partner that’s like, “Yeah, honey you know what? That’s what I'm working on” versus if you have a partner that’s like, “What are you talking about? That’s not my problem, that’s your problem,” right. That same dynamic that shows up in relationships, same thing shows up with brands or, you know, in our own individual relationships with each other and that’s the power of vulnerability when it comes to storytelling.

Michael Margolis on Improving Online Info Product Marketing

In Chapter 8 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, educator and entrepreneur Michael Margolis answers "At This Moment in Your Life, Where Are You Seeking Advice and Coaching?"  Margolis shares how coaches and advisors have been useful as his business has marketed, launched, and grown his online info product business.  He shares how advisors have helped him grow as a leader to help his business refine its culture and value framework for future growth. 

Michael Margolis is founder and president of Get Storied, an education and publishing platform dedicated to teaching the world how to think in narrative.  He earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University. 

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: At this moment in your life where are you seeking advice and coaching?

Michael Margolis: There’s a few things I'm really focused on with growing my business right now. One is really the internet marketing playbook for product launches and info product creation and so last year we designed and rolled out a program called The New About Me, teaches people how to reinvent their personal bio into a story. Basically, how do you talk about yourself without sounding like a douche. And, it’s a really fun cool product, people love it, it’s this whole curriculum online and just learning a lot of the fundamentals of not only designing a curriculum or info product but how do you market it and how do you bring in affiliates and joint venture partners and all the various different things for doing a product launch and we’re now taking that to the next level for this Reinvention Summit that we’re doing. 

So, I've got all sorts of coaches and advisors on that that are teaching me about Autoresponder series. We just shot a free video series on storytelling as part of our product launch for this and just seeing all the little devil in the details, which I used to kinda geek out with a little bit and realizing that there’s sort of an exponential curve of where we can take things. So, I'm getting a lot of support there. The second big area is really around editorial. So, we all know the adage content is king. So, in my case, you know, the niche of storytelling is a really unique niche and one that, you could say storytelling is a really hot business trend right now. Everybody’s interested and curious about it especially how it relates to branding and marketing and innovation and social media and culture change. Those are some of the big buckets. Everybody is looking at the storytelling stuff and so I have a lot of opportunities that have come my way for not only creating content but syndicating that content or creating content series and so really getting a lot of support there as well for how we build, get storied into more of both an online destination, right. Sort of an online magazine for the business of storytelling.  And then how we also create sort of key segments or key content series for various different niche audiences whether it’s the self-publishing audience, whether it’s an entrepreneur audience, whether it’s a marketing audience and so on. So, those are the two big buckets from a business perspective. I'm getting lots of coaching and advice from -- on the personal front, it’s really been about sort of a new maturation for the business, which is about growing an organization.  

So, even though there’s an aspect to where we’re at we get story that’s still very much a startup. But now there’s a real team in place. So, I'm really conscious of we’re creating a culture whether we’re consciously thinking about it or not but the decisions that we make are shaping a culture, right? We’re instilling certain set of values. Saying this matters over this. Saying we stand for that. Some of those choices are things that I'm getting a lot of feedback from and inputs so that, you know, I can support as CEO really create the right environment to really empower the development and the performance of all the different people on my team.