Podcast

Episode: 3 |
Susan Hamilton:
Brand Identity Strategy:
Episode
3

HOW TO THRIVE AS AN
INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL

Susan Hamilton

Brand Identity Strategy

Show Notes

Susan Hamilton is a brand identity strategist and a member of Umbrex. She is an alum of Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group, and her firm, sh.BRAND, is based in New York City. We talk about what a brand identity is and how Susan helps firms define their brand identity.

To learn more about Susan, check out her website at http://sh-brand.com/

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Hey there, podcast listeners, welcome to Unleashed, the podcast that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. Unleashed is sponsored by Umbrex, the world’s first global community of top-tier independent management consultants. Umbrex is short for umbrella of excellence, and the mission of Umbrex is to create opportunities for independent consultants to meet, build relationships, share lessons learned and collaborate. You can learn more at Umbrex.com, that’s be U-M-B-R-E-X. I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’d love your feedback on the show and questions you’d like to see us investigate. You can email me at unleashed@umbrex.com

Our guest today is independent consultant Susan Hamilton. She’s based in New York City, and she focuses on brand identity strategy. You can read all about Susan at her firm’s website which is SH-brand.com, she’s got some beautiful website with a bunch of case studies that talk all about her work. She’s an alum of Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group. I learned a ton from our discussion, pushes my thinking about what brand means and about brand identity strategy, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Susan, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Susan Hamilton: Thank you so much, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Will Bachman: So why don’t we start by telling us just a little bit about your background. You can introduce yourself probably better than I can in terms of how you got to where you are today.

Susan Hamilton: Sure. I started out my career as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, it was my first job out of college. It was a little bit of an unusual choice for an art history major, and it was an unusual choice for BCG to make to hire an art history major. I always really appreciated that about them, and it was sort of a hallmark of their perspective on what made a good consultant, which was a big-picture thinker no matter what discipline that thinking had engaged in in the past. They really took it upon themselves to train those right out of college folks in various ways of thinking, as well as specific skill sets. I did come out of that program with the ability to use an Excel spreadsheet, for example, but more importantly to collate, organize, analyze large amounts of information in short amounts of time, and that is a skill that I use all the time even today. I also had the opportunity in that role to encounter all different kinds of strategic issues that clients might have. So that was a very special experience.

I went on to do some other work, to go to business school after that. Then I actually returned to BCG after business school, worked in a different office, in a different set of industries, a different set of experiences, that was at a time where the internet was relatively new and a lot of strategic work for our clients had to do with moving their brand from a bricks and mortar space into an online space and what that would look like for them, not just in terms of branding, of course, but also in terms of operations, finance, et cetera. But that’s what got me interested in branding, that notion of what is it that consumers connect with? What is that kind of essence of a brand that can transcend whether it’s a store environment or a virtual environment? There’s still this meaningful essence that consumers connect with. That began my sort of 15 or so plus career in the branding space, which I continue to do now. I worked for a couple of small boutique branding firms before starting my own advisory group about six or seven years ago now.

Will Bachman: So I want to get to branding, but just kind of with that art history major and BCG, I imagine as an art history major, you developed a visual intelligence, an ability to just look deeply and thoughtfully at something in a way that other people … A typical museum goer or me might just walk by, it’s been 15 seconds, but I imagine that art history really develops that sense. Did you ever find any cases at BCG where that kind of visual ability to really just stop and look and think about something from a visual perspective abled you to get differentiated insights?

Susan Hamilton: So I think that, the way I think of it, what I call it is envisioning information, has been … Well, it’s a passion of mine, and nowadays it takes the format of how to really bring a message to life not just in words, but also in pictures, to think about how the reader’s eye moves across the page and how to help that eye move across the page in order to get your message across well. I think back in the BSG days it was more about how do you turn maybe a complicated story about growth or development of a company into a graphical representation? So chart format, what was the best way to do that that would really bring the story to life? We didn’t use so many pictures back then, but lots of charts and graphs, and that’s another very important way of envisioning information.

Later in my career in branding we did a lot of infographics, also very much an art form about how to express a piece of analysis in a way that is easily consumable. I really have a passion around that because I think that whatever work any of us does, if we can’t communicate it to other people, it’s not so effective, right? And being able to communicate with other always involves, if it’s written down, if it’s being consumed visually, involves a visual language of some kind. Even if it’s purely text, there are choices made around typeface, for example. So this is something that I think about every day in my work.

Will Bachman: Yeah, there’s so much going on now with data visualization becoming a whole field, and I mean, you mentioned envisioning information, which is the title of one of Edward Tufte’s books. There’s just so much opportunity there, especially in consulting, to make the ideas more clear. So Susan, you mentioned the term brand a couple times. Some people might think, “Oh, brand is like the logo,” but it’s obviously broader than that. How do you explain what brand is?

Susan Hamilton: It’s such a good question because that’s exactly what drew me into being interested in branding. The brand is really that essence that connects with the consumer in a compelling way. The logo, quite rightly, is the shorthand for what that brand is and what it stands for. In my work as a brand strategist, while I’m trained as a strategist not as a graphic designer, I’m always working across that whole spectrum from, what is the brand’s role in a strategic portfolio, what target market does it serve, what unmet need does it address, through to what is that brand’s story, its narrative, personality, tone of voice, and then the visual element. So what are the key visual hallmarks of that brand, including and most importantly good brand mark or the logo. So when you talk about branding as a consulting discipline it includes all of those things, strategy, messaging, design. 

Will Bachman: So it would include things like even sort of how the customer service would handle your call or what the emails you get back from customer service, [crosstalk 00:07:56]-

Susan Hamilton: Possibly. That’s a little bit more into the operational space, but a brand project might create, for example, an email template so that it would always have the same look and feel. Typically you would create a set of guidelines called a style guide that would be the kind of brand bible for everybody to share that would have set out the brand’s values, maybe have a manifesto, have some descriptors of the tone of voice and personality and have very, very specific guidelines around the visual elements and identity so that things can be kept consistent across the brand. Those things would be used to inform the types of activities that you were describing.

Will Bachman: So you mentioned projects a couple times. Can you talk about that several different types of projects that you would get involved in? And maybe what’s the catalyst where someone would say, “Oh, we need a new brand strategy.” Like what kind of projects do you do?

Susan Hamilton: So often the catalyst is either a new brand, a rebrand, or company that’s reached a point where they have a good sense of what their brand is, but they need to kind of capture it, put it down on paper, share it across the organization before it sort of gets away from them and people take it off in too many different directions that begins to dilute the brand. So they’ll typically come to me with a desire for a brand positioning, which takes the form of a statement or a set of statements about what that brand stands for, what it offers in terms of benefits and how that addresses the needs of its customer base and does that in a very succinct unified streamlined way so that everybody can be telling the same story. 

Another word for brand positioning that you’ll often hear is the brand story or the brand narrative, but those all really mean that same exercise, that same deliverable around, let’s all in this organization hold hands and tell the same story, and let’s tell that story in a way that is not just about products that we make or the technology that we use, but it’s really told from the eyes of our customers. What’s in it for them, what they get out of working with us or our products or services? That’s usually the jumping-off point. 

Then often in order to get to that place, I always recommend and almost always execute a kind of customer insight piece of work. So sometimes companies have already done that, and then that’s great and we’re able to leverage that, but often they haven’t. And often the narrative is being created internally without a real sense of what’s important to customers. So it’s often really helpful and eye-opening to speak with the range of customers to ask them what’s the most compelling, what’s the most differentiated, what drives their conversion from maybe to yes when they’re purchasing this product or service so that that perspective is captured in the brand story.

Then on the back end, what do you do with that brand story, what do you do with that brand positioning? Well, you turn it into sales tools, right? So the sales team needs whatever it is that particular sales team uses, maybe a capabilities deck, maybe a set of leave-behind one-pagers about the products, whatever tools that that group uses to communicate, sometimes it’s a brand book that they need to use with their agency partners who are doing their communication, but how do you … What are those touchpoints that they’re using with the outside world to communicate what their brand is about, what their products and their company is about, turning that story, that kind of coarse streamlined story into useful actionable tactical tools.

Will Bachman: Can you walk us through one example? And obviously you can sanitize it as necessary, but you take one example and kind of walk us through the different phases of one of those types of projects?

Susan Hamilton: Sure. So a project I’m working on, actually about to wrap up right now, follows very much this arc. It’s a space that I’ve worked in a number of times before, digital marketing on the healthcare side. So the customer are pharma marketers, folks who work in life sciences who represent various friends of therapeutics. They are looking to get their message out to doctors and other health care providers about what’s great about their … to build awareness that their therapy exist and to build excitement around why they should use it with what kind of patient in which kind of situation. This is not so easy to do in today’s healthcare world. 

One of the ways to do it is to reach out to healthcare providers where they’re consuming their news and information. There’s a number of digital platforms where this is happening. They all have a slightly different set of offerings and reasons why doctors might go to one versus the other, and some doctors use all of them. So this particular provider, we started out by reviewing all of classic foundational work. What do you already know? What have you already done? What are you using today in order to communicate your products or brand? What sales tools you have? What ones don’t you have? And conducted about a dozen stakeholder interviews. Stakeholder interviews being people internal to the company who have a stake in what the brand is about, what the message is about and have an opinion and a set of experiences that are really relevant to the project.

So at the end of that we were able to do kind of an assessment of like, here internally, here is what we know, here’s what we think about what we do, what makes it special. Here’s how we’re communicating it today. Here’s what we’re seeing in terms of the context and the background of all of that in the industry with our customers. And here’s what we really like to get out of these conversations that we’re about to have with our customers.

Then going into interviewing 10 or 12 of their customers to understand, what’s your perspective on the industry? What’s your perspective on why you’re working with services, agencies like this one? What do you get out of that relationship? What would you like to get out of that relationship in the future or on top of what you’re getting out of it today? A real sort of feedback mechanism for them, as well as great fodder for capturing what it is that makes this offering special.

Then sort of back to the lab with all of that information to create, and I think in this case we did a really great job of landing on a good metaphor for the brand, and that’s often the Holy Grail in a brand project. Can you create a phrase or a word even, an idea, that captures the role that this product or service has in the marketplace? And this project has … We were particularly successful in doing that. And that became the brand essence.

We built the positioning around it, we created a book to share internally that can be used for onboarding, that can be shared with agency partners, that expresses what the brand is about in just a few pages. So it’s a very streamlined and consistent point of view. Here’s the customer need. Here’s how we offer them the various benefits that address their need, and here’s the essence of what our brand is about. Now, the end of the project and perhaps the most important part for them is turning that into sales tools. So refreshing our capabilities deck in a way that really tells that story that everybody can leverage throughout the organization, creating it in the way that they could tailor it and make it their own but that it remains consistent and creating a set of product specific one-page marketing pieces that they can use to communicate with their customers and potential customers.

Will Bachman: And how do you involve the clients in that whole process? Have they joined in some of these external interviews or, how do you kind of keep bring them along?

Susan Hamilton: It’s different in every project. This one, the upfront piece where we did a lot of stakeholder interviews was extremely helpful, that’s not always the case. Different clients have different appetites for how involved they are and in which portion of the work. But starting out with at least some connections, it could be sometimes I do a workshop where you get everybody live in a room and we have this discussion and we do creative exercises. Sometimes it’s like this one where it was stakeholder interviews on the phone, one by one. But capturing kind of insight, resident knowledge, perspective upfront is important. 

Then I also think it’s really important to involve the team, to identify a core team and to involve that team all the way along. So I try to save the work, to think about the work in terms of chunks so that there’s natural points in which to check back in with the team. So I typically don’t have clients join on the customer interview, although I know some folks who do do that in this industry as a regular practice, there’s many good ways to do the same thing, but I generally do those and then bring back the findings. I often take video so that it’s a very lively and engaging discussion where I share out those findings so that the clients can actually really sort of see what the interactions were like without having to actually sit through all of them.

Will Bachman: How do you do that on a very practical level? I’m fascinated by the idea of kind of going beyond PowerPoint to communicate and kind of using things like video.

Susan Hamilton: Video is so powerful. There’s such an appetite for it among my clients for sure.

Will Bachman: Yeah, like do you do that in like a formal studio, or you just set up your iPhone on a little tripod thing? I mean, how would you, as a practical matter do that? 

Susan Hamilton: Yeah. Yeah, so it depends on … There’s obviously, if you have a budget where you can be in person, that’s one thing, and if you don’t, that’s another. It’s much easier to do if you’re in person, so I guess the larger budget situation would be one-on-one interviews that are conducted in person, and in those I set up a tripod and a camera and videotape the thing, and then at the back end we edit it together. I would probably not do customer interviews in the studio, but like if you’re doing a group, like a focus group or an ad board where it’s a group of folks in one room, also the same thing, you set up a video camera, maybe you have a videographer if you’re trying to get shots of different people. 

On the lower budget end, but the video quality is not the same, but the message can be equally effective, you can do FaceTime or Skype calls or Slack calls and then use a capturing tool like SnagIt, there’s probably a couple of others out there, where you capture the video of your online call.

Will Bachman: Yeah, I hadn’t thought … I’d done it before. I mean, I’ve done lots and lots of expert interviews, customer interviews, but always just on the phone and hadn’t thought about … Are the people you interview usually cool with doing that? Like just understanding that they’ll be recorded and shared?

Susan Hamilton: Surprisingly often they are. So in the healthcare space, understandably there’s a little more trepidation around this than there is in the consumer goods space, this is the other place that I tend to work. Consumers themselves are often completely comfortable with this and it’s not a problem at all sometimes. Sometimes it’s just harder if there’s company regulations. If you work for a large pharmaceutical company, you just may not be allowed to do that. But generally it’s not a problem. People are quite happy to share their point of view, and so they understand that … And we’ll offer them a written waiver to say, “This is not going to appear on YouTube. It’s not for general consumption. It’s going to only be used internally.” And that provides reassurance.

Will Bachman: Do you edit those yourself or do you have someone, kind of a freelancer or someone who will help you edit those down to the kind of juicy parts?

Susan Hamilton: I usually have somebody do the physical video editing, but I choose very specifically what clips I want. So I’ll go through either the live video or a transcript is often easier and more precise, because I know what story needs to be told, so I do a little bit micromanage the editing from the sense of I create the script. But then people more skilled at the actual editing of video than I am, can go through and make those edits.

Will Bachman: How do you get the transcripts? Do you send those off to some agency or some freelancer somewhere?

Susan Hamilton: Yeah, there’s tons of transcript agencies. There’s apps even for it. It’s pretty easy these days.

Will Bachman: Cool. I’d love to hear a little bit about how you think about raising your visibility and I mean, just broadly about how you do business development, but are you writing, are you speaking, trade associations, or is it just calling up your network and building relationship? How do you going to build up your client development and generate the work?

Susan Hamilton: My business development strategy is pretty informal, probably because I have the luxury of not having to run an agency, not having to build a giant business, so I’m able to do things on a very intimate and personal word-of-mouth scale. I do try to you, and I do this really more for the pleasure of doing it than for the business development aspect, although of course it is a business development tool, but I do try to write frequently, regularly. I write, I guess, blog like posts, just things that I think are interesting that are going on out there that are sort of relevant to my industry or expertise space. And I’ll also sometimes write up case studies of a particularly interesting project I’ve done. Then I share those out on LinkedIn, I have a MailChimp mailer.

So I try to be good about that with varying levels of success depending on how busy I am at the moment. But in terms of actually what sells work, it’s very word-of-mouth. So when I first started my own business it was often friends I’ve gone to school with who put me in touch with people who had a need for what I do, and now it’s almost always a former client either coming back to me or recommending me to another person who they think could use the same kind of work that I did for them.

Will Bachman: People ask me, and I’m always curious what do people do, do you have some kind of rigorous thing where you call people once a quarter, make sure you’re checking in with people, or is it very just ad hoc? Like how do you think about keeping in touch with your relationships from previous clients and so forth?

Susan Hamilton: Oh gosh, no. I wish that I could tell you I were that organized about it, but the way I think about it is really more from I try to kind of keep track of everybody that I work with in terms of being LinkedIn with them and having them in my MailChimp mailer list, and then those pieces of writing or case studies that I send out, that’s my way of keeping in touch with them. I don’t do, “Hey, how are you? Just let’s go have a coffee,” kind of thing. I probably should but but I don’t have a methodology for that.

Will Bachman: Yeah. I’m on your mailing list, and I’ve received those. It’s one way of just staying top of mind even if the person doesn’t necessarily even like read every word of each one, if they think about brand identity six months from now, they’re like … you’re one of the first people they probably think of because they’ve been on your mailing list.

Susan Hamilton: Sure. No, and my hope is that serves that purpose. My hope is also that when you do have time to read them or if it’s a topic that is of interest to you, that in addition to it just being a note for me that it’s also something that’s interesting or relevant or helpful that you might enjoy reading. So they have a twofold purpose. 

Will Bachman: Yeah, of course. It also has the side benefit probably of sometimes when you set pen to paper, it’s a way of actually discovery of learning what you know. Like you can-

Susan Hamilton: It’s true. The post-game on projects is actually very helpful. Every consultant for every agency, every firm I’ve ever worked for, it’s always a struggle, we always try to create case studies on the back end, make sure we write up the project. And it’s just always something everybody’s falling behind on because you get caught up in the live work that you’re doing. But there’s so much to be learned from just that exercise, as you’re saying, of looking back, reflecting. What did we do? What went well? What could we have done better? What have we learned from the project that we might share with other clients?

Will Bachman: Looking back, that’s the time when you can really capture lessons learned and think about what you got out of it and how you can improve on the next one. Susan, I know that one of the attractions for you of independent consulting is the kind of freedom it gives you to do different things in life, and I’d love to hear your thoughts around that, around how you use that freedom and some of the passions that you pursue.

Susan Hamilton: So Harvard Business School reached out about … I guess it was five years ago now. It was the anniversary of a particular thing they were doing for celebrating women at HBS. And they asked us to write a little bit about what we did for work and to create a sign to hold up in front of us and have our picture taken with this piece of paper. And the piece of paper was to say, “I do it for the blank,” and fill in the blank with whatever it was. It was so interesting because whenever you force yourself to choose one word, it’s a great exercise. People have such different sayings that was their one word motivator. As it turned out, mine was freedom. So it’s funny when you asked me about the freedom of being an independent consultant. I suspect that a lot of us also prioritized freedom, but I think people have different motivators for doing what they do. But that was definitely very high for me in terms of choosing this life, choosing this lifestyle.

I mean, choosing consultancy to begin with before I became an independent consultant and worked for myself was already about freedom. It was about the freedom to work for different clients, different companies, different industries to really continue to be a learner as much as an expert and the joy of kind of real moving from client to client and place to place, problem to problem, was appealing to me from the very beginning. I think if you add the layer on to that as an independent consultant, and just I think in general as you get older and more senior, the freedom to maintain your own schedule and decide how you’re going to prioritize your time and where you’re going to be on what date and at what time, of course you’re not always in charge of that, right? I mean, you serve clients. You’re there to make sure that their project runs well, and that means sometimes you need to be in a certain place at a certain time, but there is, in general, very much a sense of autonomy about running your own business and about being an independent consultant.

Will Bachman: Tell me a little bit about … Are there things that you pursue outside of the project work that this gives you the freedom to do?

Susan Hamilton: I do probably have a particularly large number of things I do outside of work. First of all, I’m a parent. So many people can relate to that being something that you not only have to, but want to spend a large amount of your time on outside of the work day. And sometimes children get sick or have days off from school and that’s inside of the work day, and I really wanted to be able to be there for those dance recitals and field trips and to be able to be involved even at the same time that I’m a full-time working parent. So being able to, when my own business allowed me to do that in a way where I wasn’t sort of letting down a team or signaling something. There’s no drama for me to sort of seamlessly parent and work in the way that I do that. So that’s the first and probably biggest in terms of time commitment, well, and in terms of emotion. 

But I have, even before I had kids, I always had sort of the side project parallel universe that was very important to me around creativity. I’ve always been a painter. I’ve also done writing. I make jewelry. The flavor of what I do, I guess you call it as a maker, perhaps changes over time as I develop different interests and let go of others, but that aspect of my life and of myself is very, very important to me. It’s something that I really try to hold space for, and which is not always easy to hold space for with those other two spheres that take up a lot of space and importance in my life, the work that I do and my role as a mom. But I still really try to make the time and clear the energy for that because it’s, like I said, it’s very important to me.

Will Bachman: That’s awesome. The painting, the jewelry. I wanted to ask you, in terms of … So thinking so deeply and for such a long time about brand identity and brand strategy and having that consistent story, any thoughts or advice to independent consultants about how to apply some of that thinking to our practices? Or maybe things that you see people-

Susan Hamilton: The cobbler’s children have no shoes, my friend. 

Will Bachman: Right, yeah.

Susan Hamilton: [crosstalk 00:31:28] something … Yeah. 

Will Bachman: I mean, do you see people doing things poorly, or, yeah. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Susan Hamilton: I mean, I wish that I had great advice. I wish that I could tell you, oh, those things that I do, I hope that I do so well for my clients in terms of creating a consistent story and message and tone, that I do all the things for myself. I find they’re much harder to do for myself than they’re to do for my clients. But in terms of advice, I would give a consultant the same advice that I would give any client. Right? Yeah. Know yourself. Know what your story is. Have some focus. Even as, I suspect, other folks who are in this world also share with me that desire for breadth in terms of the client base, in terms of the nature of work, I think in terms of telling your story, it’s helpful to have at least some … Is there a set of work that you like to do that’s really your focus?

Or do you have an industry focus or something else that is your special addition to this world? And be able to tell a story about that in a clear and concise way. Have a nice clean website with a limited number of words that tells that story. It has a little bit about you, a bio, a picture, just a place where people can sort of land, check in, see some of your client references, I think that’s important. I do try to do that for myself, but I think it’s harder to do for myself than it is to do for my client.

Will Bachman: It’s often the case, right? If there was a billboard and every executive was going to be driving by it and you had the rights to put your message on there or any message you wanted to for those folks that they need to see, what would you put on the billboard?

Susan Hamilton: For independent consultants or?

Will Bachman: For independent consultants or for executives, how would you distill the advice that you provide on brand strategy into a message that every executive ought to see?

Susan Hamilton: I find myself using the phrase share your story a lot. I mean, that’s very succinct, you could probably fit a few more words on a billboard, but I mean, I think I would start there. If you unpack that, here’s what’s inside of that for me and what I mean by that. The importance of kind of knowing yourself and knowing your story and all of that that I was just talking about, that’s what story means to me. So what is it about you, your history, your product or service, yourself, that’s unique and interesting? And what’s the story behind what it is that you do? 

Then the share piece is … And tell it. Think about the best ways to tell it, the most effective ways to tell it, the most interesting ways to tell it. And that’s both in terms of write it, design it and channels for communicating, what are the touch points you’re going to get out there too. It sounds maybe like it’s fairly obvious that you want to share your story, but not all of that is obvious to folks. Especially people do other things that are super interesting and important, they’re busy developing the technology behind something or they’re isolating a molecule that’s going to cure disease, they’re not thinking about their story. So the discipline of what we do in branding is supporting those people who are busy doing other things that have a really interesting story to tell and actually need to get that story out there to continue to do what they do and to make what they do as effective and productive as possible.

Will Bachman: So it would be fair to say that your point of view is that people don’t go out to buy a better mousetrap, but really what they’re doing is they’re looking for someone who can tell the best story about about their mousetrap? As a way of expressing that customers in general aren’t just looking for necessarily the best product purely on the features, but they really want to understand kind of the story of the company?

Susan Hamilton: Right. Well, I wouldn’t say that they’re not looking for the best product and the best features. I think they are looking for that but I think it’s really hard to know as a consumer. Let’s say I’m buying light bulbs. I may not really know how many lumens is what I’m looking for. Do you know what I mean?

Will Bachman: Right. Right. 

Susan Hamilton: You need to tell me the story in language I can understand and benefits that are meaningful to me. So that’s the gist. It’s not that you’re not looking for the better mousetrap, of course you are, but you’re not necessarily sure how to evaluate the better mousetrap in terms of the mousetrap makers. The mousetrap makers may have these five metrics that they use to … what they’re pushing on to try to make it better, but those might be meaningless to me as the consumer of that product. So the discipline of branding and brand communication, telling the story is telling the story in terms that a user is going to understand and that’s meaningful to them and yes, exactly about shifting story from features to benefit.

Will Bachman: Well, if I remember nothing else and I hope I do, but if I remember nothing else from today, it’ll be share your story. I know that you have some other things coming up, so we can wrap there. Susan, this was awesome. I really enjoyed our discussion.

Susan Hamilton: Me too, thanks so much, Will.

Will Bachman: Thanks for listening to this episode of Unleashed, the podcast that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I’d love to get your feedback and hear the questions that you’d like to see us answer on this show. You can email me at unleashed@umbrex.com. That’s be U-M-B-R-E-X.com. If you found anything on the show helpful, it would be a real gift if you would let a friend know about the show and take a minute to leave a review on iTunes. It really helps. Unleashed is sponsored by Umbrex, the world’s first global community of top-tier independent management consultants. Our audio engineer is Dave Nelson, and I’m your host will Bachman. Thanks for listening you.

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